February 2012
19 posts
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Netflixed: Blossom of snow, may you bloom and grow
Beginners (Mike Mills, 2010): Christopher Plummer just got his Oscar for revealing that Captain Von Trapp was gay all along, which retrospectively provides the depth The Sound of Music previously lacked. Moreover, for a dying gay-dad movie Beginners is shockingly good, thanks to Mills making like his wife Miranda July covering Chris Marker, and Ewan McGregor giving the man-child protagonist enough...
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Poetry: Guest/Notley
1960s and 1970s poems from The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest
You recall I was telling you how genius “Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher” was. The rest of her early work is typically less fanciful, concerning itself with scenes of New York and elsewhere. As the title The Location of Things hints, she’s interested in the meanings that objects acquire from their...
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Jambalaya
*Batsumi (1974/2011): Wide-armed Soweto fusion: “Lishonile” transitions from sax-led jazz to drums and drone to flute soul, while “Itumeleng” interpolates “Fur Elise”. Holding the album together is a groove, propelled by both African and Western percussion as well as agile acoustic bassist Zulu Bidi, you could build a culture around. Contending with Cohen for my...
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Netflixed: Same as the old gaze
The Saga of Gosta Berling (Mauritz Stiller, 1924): This adaptation of a Romantic-throwback novel of love-polygons is thematically regressive (like just about every other movie ever made), but it’s notable as Garbo’s first major vehicle. In her first scene, she eats salumi, advancing the radical notion that women can feel, like, pleasure. Garbo would become the champ of using naturalism...
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Having not watched TV drama since Veronica Mars...
The first half of the first episode of Mad Men: The initial minutes get over Draper’s slick douchiness while demonstrating the fact of sexism and racism in 1960. The next bunch of minutes do this over and over. All that’s missing is a Family Guy-style wink at the fourth wall. It gets better, I take it.
The first three episodes of Breaking Bad: Now that’s in media res. This leans...
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Woolf/Miller/Herriman/King
Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse (1927): For the first hundred pages I was worried that this would be a high-achieving precursor to the relations-between-the-sexes novels that litter bourgie lit. It wouldn’t be horrible to read that way — Woolf is the rare author who can write convincingly from both female and male perspectives. Soon, though, the modernism steps up a gear with one of...
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Early 20th century project: Some composers
Stravinsky: The Great Ballets: Firebird, Petroshka, Rite of Spring (Haitink/London Philharmonic), Apollo (Markevitch/London Symphony)
The riot was Nijinsky’s fault. Stravinsky’s work is continuous with the classical tradition — no less a populist than Disney knew this. What’s worth celebrating about Stravinsky is the way he uses rhythm. We populists are down with the beat...
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Free game of the moment: Viriax
Chris Sims on Skyrim: “I just don’t understand why they made the vastness of it the selling point when it a smaller, but deeper game would’ve been better.” Shallowness can be effective too. Viriax is a climbing game: you press up to make your germ jump, expending a little energy; it floats back down until you find a ledge to rest on. Meanwhile you have to dodge white blood cells and...
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Netflixed: Just like it was on Talok
Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh, 1996): Don’t know whether it’s better or worse than the Olivier or Almereyda adaptations. It’s less efficient, but it wasn’t my millions Branagh was burning through. Half the play is shouted, which reflects the tone of the filmmaking. This is occasionally hilarious, as when Branagh and the score turn the “my thoughts be bloody” soliloquy...
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Ashez of Thyme
*Leonard Cohen: Old Ideas: You know how in The Princess Bride Humperdink is unafraid to fight to the death, but balks at fighting to the pain? Me, I get more neurotic about getting old than dying. Fear of dementia, mainly, which can be rational but not the way I do it. I worried about Cohen after Dear Heather, but in retrospect, that wasn’t a sign of irreversible decline, just a weak album....
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Netflixed: Funny ha ha
The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau, 1924): Murnau makes this about the sets and the lighting, to the point that the best actor in this is Emil Jannings’s shadow, which stays a step ahead. But the uneven social critique is vital; the gynophobic gossip sequence shows something is rotten in the state of Weimar even if Murnau and scenarist Carl Mayer don’t know what it is. And the coda, dissed or...
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Political songs
Himanshu: Nehru Jackets: More diversity in the music writing biz would help it better deal with the role of politics in music, the criticism of which has become superficial. At Pitchfork, Zach Kelly wrote “Nehru Jackets is not an overtly political record.” That “overtly” leaves wiggle room, but not enough to stop Jawnita from asking: “How you gonna call a record that...