Random: What's Wrong With This Photo?

One of the nicer/better/funnier parts of the trip was the fact that, slightly inexplicably, MD and I ended up with a Toyota Prius -- yup, the famed hybrid -- as our rental car. MD will wax poetic and weird about the drive, but I'll just mention here that on the drive back, we decided to listen to the radio; to our amusement, we appeared to have one of those satellite radio things that displayed the names of the songs as they played, as well as the type of radio station (rock, r&b, easy listening, info, miscellaneous, and i think classical). Now that you have some context, can anyone explain this to us?

Thriller, or: I Don't Know What To File This Under

We're not a filter blog, but I feel a strong need to pass along this video to our readers. It features the inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center in the Philippines reenacting the video for Michael Jackson's Thriller. I want to write something really meaningful here about Foucault and the nature of surveillance and governmentality, and possibly something about the discourse of the body as it moves through confined spaces, and maybe also something about how I've recently been reading stuff about mass parades in the Stalin-era Soviet Union and present day North Korea, and how that seems to inform a particularly strange reading of the video at hand. But really, when it comes down to it, the intersection of amusement and horror in my nervous laughter as I watched the video pretty much sums it up. update: These guys do this sort of thing quite a bit. Hmmm. [thanks to Boing Boing for the link.]

The Quirk: Slowing Building A Media Empire

Yesterday while I was home sick, nursing a case of exhaustion and general malaise, I thought to myself: I haven't heard a peep from Miranda or Zooey. I wonder what they're up to. And then I got mired in rental car hell, and promptly forgot about the quirk incarnates. And later, after fulfilling my scenester quota for the year by attending what turned out to be a sold-out show for the Next Big Swedish Sensation*, I saw someone dip (yes, tobacco) for the first time (my first time seeing; definitely not his first time dipping). Pretty easy for the quirk to get obscured, what with general sensory overload and confusion. And it was only Tuesday, no less. Wednesday is a new day, and with it comes a whole new set of things to check out via my wonderful and time-sucking Google Reader. And it was through the wonders of said Reader that I came across news that there will be a six-hour miniseries this fall on the SciFi Channel, updating The Wizard of Oz. Entitled Tin Man, the show features Alan Cumming as the Scarecrow, Ricahrd Dreyfuss (?!) as the Wizard-esque "Mystic Man," and none other than our own Zooey Deschanel as Dorothy. Sigh. I mean, I guess if you've got a character who's sort of cute, innocent, wide-eyed, gently feisty, but speaks in simple sentences, and is just an all-around darling, you'd pick this person: [That's our Zooey, at the press conference thingy promoting the show. Isn't she adorable?!] And then embedded in the article about Tin Man was a link that led me to this slightly unnerving bit of news: There's some new movie coming out, The Go-Getter, starring our dear Zooey, with original songs by M.Ward. And -- AND -- there's a duet! Zooey and M.Ward! I can barely contain my ire! You can click on the link to the movie's myspace page to check out the song -- which I'll freely admit to not having heard yet, since the myspace player doesn't seem to want to work for me right now. Could somebody please tell us what it sounds like? [Update: You can also find it here. (Thanks, MD.) And .... yeah. That's all I'm going to say about it: yeaaaaaaaah.] To be sure, the song might be really wonderful. [update: it's not.] It's M.Ward, after all. He does nice things with sounds. [update: not here. sorry! only just now discovered that it's a cover of a Linda and Richard Thompson song. still, not good sounds coming out of the quirk/ward.] But between this miniseries and the song, I feel like there are fewer spaces I can retreat to, to escape the quirk. I used to be able to avoid its cultural ubiquity by staying in, not walking around the streets of New York, and just watching television. Now I'm going to start seeing commercials for this blasted Tin Man, and I bet that the trailers for The Go-Getter are going to feature that duet. I mean, it's like the phenomenon is actually taking over all media, slowly but surely. It's making every effort to never be obscured. And it's working. Having incurred the wide-eyed charmingly-inarticulatable wrath of the quirk, I expect to hear about some new Miranda July Old Tyme radio hour any day now. * To be discussed in our upcoming Music Week. Suffice it to say, it was a little terrifying.

Monday Morning Rhapsodic: Veronica

This weekend's NY Times Sunday Styles' "A Night Out With" column featured a profile of the band Spoon, a band I'll readily admit to knowing next to nothing about, except that I'm supposed to like them a lot, and that a lot of people I know love them. I am, however, familiar with frontman Britt Daniel's winning good looks, and even though I've heard very little of their music, every picture of Daniels causes me to rethink that indie rock lacuna in my life. He is an attractive man, I'll give you that -- a welcome addition to the Army of the Weak-Chinned.* Reading the profile reminded me of Daniel's cameo on Veronica Mars in season two. In it, he does a very charming karaoke version of Elvis Costello's sort-of hit, Veronica, from his 1989 album Spike. [You can watch a clip of that cameo here.] And that got me thinking about the original song and its accompanying video, which I hadn't heard nor seen in quite some time. Thanks to iTunes and youtube, both the audio and video are back in my life, and for that I am eternally grateful: Veronica is a tremendous little song,** and the video is really something else. Co-written with Paul McCartney, the song is about Costello's ailing grandmother as she was slipping further into Alzheimer's disease. It's a sweet, poignant song about memory and time, and a little bit about love, and maybe also just a wee bit elegiac. It's also incredibly catchy, with great harmonies, which I think says a lot about Costello's genius*** -- you're singing along to a pretty bittersweet song about senility. The video adds another dimension to this: on the one hand, it's a fairly literal interpretation of the song itself, a straightforward glimpse into memory, and the effects of Alzheimer's on how we remember the past. But then you've got Costello sitting in an empty room, talking about his grandmother, and as the song plays you can hear his voice quietly singing along, over the tape playback. And there's something about the whole thing that ... I dunno. It's really touching without being schmaltzy. I'll confess to getting a little teary when I saw the video again. That's all I got for you. No funny, quippy ending. Just watch the video, I guess. It's good stuff. * Crack open a nice bottle of Greco di Tufo with me and I'll explain. ** Possibly even better is the demo version of the song, which is available on the deluxe edition of Spike. Stripped down to guitar, piano, and vocals, Veronica becomes that much more sparse and elegant, without losing any of its poppiness. I can't seem to locate any version readily available online, except ... erm ... here. (The visuals are a little distracting, no matter how cute you think Kristin Bell is.) *** There are lots of folks out there who think of themselves as true and proper Elvis Costello fans, and who insist that he's done nothing good since 1979's Armed Forces. To be sure, it's a spectacular album, but I'm a bit more generous about the Costello oeuvre, and think that his genius started to slip around the time that he and Diana Krall got together, when he started getting super-sentimental, and not in a nuanced, Veronica-esque way. I am not the only one who thinks this.

We Trash It Before We Try It: Summer 2007 Edition

This was supposed to be a team post about how we were deeply unenthusiastic about the new Transformers movie: based on the trailers, it looks visually messy (it's a Michael Bay film after all) and more importantly, for a film that's supposed to hearken back to this great animated series and those action figures from our childhood -- there's absolutely nothing iconic about these reimagined Transformers. Nothing. I can't even get excited about new It boy (and the film's 'human' lead) Shia LaBeouf, and he's supposed to be the friggin shiznit. But then we realized that there are so many things we enjoy dissing without even deigning to try the goods beforehand. And that seemed like an infinitely more entertaining post to write. So for you, now -- an ongoing list of that which we cannot be bothered to bother with. * Transformers 2007 * Leggings * Any of the films for which trailers were shown before the July 4th screening of Live Free or Die Hard, minus the one for the full-length Simpsons movie. Also, that Stardust movie (with DeNiro?!!) looks terrible. * the iPhone (md: i can't have it, therefore i refuse to believe it could be good) * Amy Winehouse (ht: you can't make me like her! md: she grows on you!) * The resurgence of 70s hair and 80s fashion (md: tie-dye? seriously, tie-dye?) * Fette Sau * Pinkberry (ht: I'm just bitching about the lines, really. I hate lines. And people. God, I bet Miranda July goes there. It's called Pinkberry.) * Anything going on at the McCarren Pool this summer (cf. Pinkberry. md: except the renegade craft fair, which we arguably did try. ht: and look how well that turned out.) * Men with handkerchiefs around their necks * Feist (md: you can't make me like her! ht: she and i have mutual friends! my loyalties are divided!) * Pirate Master (ht: huh?? people actually auditioned for this?) * artificial scarcity (ht, to md: wait. haven't you tried it? weren't you victim of it recently? md: oh. these are things we HAVEN'T tried. i forgot!) [image via transformers wiki page.]

Whiskey Night: Now With Audience Participation!

After gorging ourselves silly at New Yeah Shanghai Deluxe last night, RL and I retired to my new favorite not-quite-local, where we gloriously reinstated a once-longstanding Monday night tradition: Whiskey Night. Back in 1999, he and I and another fellow, RW, became fast friends when we all found ourselves in the same incomprehensible Tuesday morning graduate seminar on Gilles Deleuze. We decided to meet up on Mondays, the evening before class, to try to work through the readings together. These evenings quickly devolved into an excuse to drink (how else to get through a Deleuze text?), and Whiskey Night™ was born. Even after the seminar ended that semester, RL and I kept up Whiskey Night, as an excuse to catch up, and also to listen to (and eventually play) music. The nights ended only after he moved out of Ithaca several years later, but now that we're both back in the same town, we've been trying to bring back the Monday night tradition. One of the great things about Whiskey Night besides 1. its name; 2. its occurrence on Monday nights; and 3. the whiskey, is the conversation. For inexplicable reasons, we end up having ridiculous talks about just about everything imaginable. And the thing is -- it's not just the alcohol creating the mayhem; RL and I drink together, elsewhere, on other nights, and the conversation is never quite so completely inane and wonderful, all at once. We've discussed the gastronomic provenance of the Meximelt, how movies aren't about moving images (the images don't move! there are just a lot of images displayed in rapid succession!), and well... you get the idea. There's something -- dare I say -- magical about Whiskey Night. Last night was no different. The main topic of conversation, a two-parter: When did U2 go so horribly awry, and is it the case that everything the band (especially Bono) has touched since that moment has also gone awry? After quickly agreeing that 1991's Achtung, Baby was the band's last great album and also their point of no return, there emerged myriad answers to part two: Wim Wenders, the Pixies (who toured with the band during the Achtung Baby tour -- in fact, check out this link), Arcade Fire, Public Enemy, the Sugarcubes (to be sure, Bjork is doing just fine ... but the rest of the band...?), Rage Against the Machine, Al Gore, uh...Forbes, the iPod, Paul Wolfowitz (though he most likely was already on the path to oblivion before touring/touting Africa with Bono), Africa itself .... dear readers, are we missing anything? It's a veritable curse they've got on their hands! Three rounds of very generous pours of bourbon later, we called it a night. But the curse rages on. Watch out! Bono might be lurking around that corner up ahead.

My Finger, Not on the Pulse

I've long maintained to folks who somehow think that I go to a lot of shows that, in fact, with the exception of annual sojourns to Irving Plaza to see Built to Spill for 20-odd dollars, I pretty much make a point of seeing two bands exclusively. No, seriously. I really don't go to shows. I don't know a thing about music these days. If you don't believe me, you can take a look at my purchases on iTunes and see how much they've been played. (This might also tell you something about my relationship to music of late -- I love a proper music store, but I'm incredibly lazy and just end up downloading stuff from the comfort of my bed. I'm a terrible person.) One of the first things I purchased when I got this laptop 18 months ago was Bloc Party. My most recent download was "Freedom," the great Wham song from their first album, Make it Big; I was walking through Burbank Airport a few weeks ago, heard it on the soundsystem (no joke!) and had to buy it on the spot. I've listened to "Freedom" 17 times in the past two weeks. I still don't know what Bloc Party sound like. I'm not trying to claim some weird nostalgia-cred here, or to say that I'm some sort of post-scenester who's beyond all music trends or something. To be sure, part of it has to do with the fact that I'm more willing to devote more of my curiosity, time, and energy on food. I mean, I already have a lot of music -- but I'm always going to need more food. But I think most of it is sheer exhaustion: I seriously can't keep up with what the kids are listening to. I get most of my current-music-updates via late-night viewings of MTV2's Subterranean, and beyond being deeply baffled by the state of music videos, I spend much of that viewing hour with a furrowed brow, trying to keep all the names straight. What's more, half the time I can't seem to tell the bands apart, musically-speaking. I mean, they already look the same (4 or 5 scruffy-haired fellas, one or two usually bespectacled, all wearing ironic t-shirts with an occasional sweater vest), and then on top of that they all just converge as a sonic blur in my head. (Don't get me started on the ridiculousness/sameness of their names; it took me a couple of minutes during tonight's Subterranean viewing to remember that Cold War Kids was not the same as Fall Out Boy.) Even the bands I once quite enjoyed, and kept up with, are now popping up on Subterranean hawking their wares with such a strangely low level of actual creativity. (I'm talking to you, Modest Mouse. I don't care if Johnny Marr is playing in the band now. What happened to you?) I'm not producing any grand new theory of culture in suggesting that there seems to be such an emphasis on the next new thing that newness overshadows the thing that should matter: the music itself. I'm not naive enough to suggest that good bands are free of image or shtick; I understand that even only marginally 'popular' music requires a certain degree of packaging. But newness seems to amount to sameness, when it comes right down to it. And these days, what with these crazy internets and all, there seems to be such an emphasis on being the blog to first discover some new, unknown upstart band, in order to get bragging rights -- to the detriment of, well ... actually enjoying the music? I'm also not suggesting that there aren't some lovely bands out there, making interesting music that is, in fact, unique, challenging, and still accessible. But it feels like it's getting harder and harder to separate wheat from the chaff. This is probably why I'm comforted every Sunday afternoon, when I watch the DVRed episode of 120 Minutes that airs at some ungodly hour on VH1 Classics the night before. It's not like music from 20 years ago was any more or less original or shticky; but it's music with which I feel an actual connection. Part of it is nostalgia, sure. But part of it is also a very palpable sense of pleasure. Actual enjoyment. Have you listened recently to Alphaville's "Forever Young"? It's an amazing song, full of earnest keyboarded energy and heartfelt, emote-y vocals. (And hell, there are synthesized trumpets in the outro!) Lead singer Marian Gold (real name: Hartwig Schierbaum) sings it like he means it. My god, he really wants to be forever young. After listening to the song, I want to be forever young. Indie rock is so goddamn self-aware and self-referential these days that all of that smartness seems to have drained the music of a certain human quality. I'm not going to go so far as to suggest that it's lacking heart, but I will say that it might want to reconsider that layer of affect it puts on every morning. Such a move might do wonders for its creative output, and its ability to stand out in an otherwise pretty unremarkable, nondescript crowd; you know, wheat, chaff, that whole thing. Hell, maybe then I'd be able to keep up.

Tuesday Evening Rhapsodic: The Clientele

This was supposed to be a weekly column, Friday Morning Rhapsodic, to demonstrate to our readers the depths of my otherwise-hidden sentimentality; I had planned to post just one ditty a week, on Fridays, so as to not overwhelm our dear readers with the sort of sap I normally reserve for my repeated viewings of The English Patient. (Yeah, I don't get me either.) But then last night I was having some wine with my old bartender friend IB (whom I lovingly refer to as my sixth favorite Welshman), and several glasses of wine into the evening, the conversation turned to music -- and how easily the right song can turn one's day around. And that got me thinking about the Clientele, whom I recently had the chance to see at the Bowery Ballroom, in a set that was just about as perfect as could be. I think I'm still riding a high from that show. And so now, dear readers, you get my sap a couple of days early. I remember the first time I heard the Clientele. I was living here in the city the summer after my first year in Ithaca, and over on Eldridge Street there used to be a little record store that I go to every now and then, Sound and Fury (alas, it no longer exists). One afternoon I wandered in there, and this absolutely lovely song was playing. Whispery vocals, shimmering guitars, and just a strangely comforting feeling of not-quite-thereness. Just a wonderful, hushed sense of longing. I bought their EP, A Fading Summer, on the spot. It's been love ever since. That I've since spent some time with Alasdair Maclean, the frontman for the band, only confirms what their music suggests: they're a bunch of really great individuals who love making some of the saddest, most elegiacally big-hearted music I've ever heard. "Saturday," the song I first heard at Sound and Fury, remains my favorite; despite its bittersweet convergence of memory, hope, and longing, there's still something wonderfully un-bitter and very sweet about it. And heck, it's a much more age- and culturally- appropriate vehicle on which to float my sentimentality than, say, Ralph Fiennes.

Random: I, Too, Bless the Rains Down in Africa

I had originally planned to write about how my Tuesday evening seemed to arc from the sublime* to the bittersweet to the surreal, but I’ll spare you the details and cut to the chase: After cutting short my sojourn to Williamsburg so that I could go home and recuperate from my week of travel and family, I ended up back in my neighborhood and received a text from JK: Barrio Chino, 10:30? Me, I don’t say no to these sorts of things. So JK and I traipsed down to Broome and Orchard, where Barrio Chino was decently, but not prohibitively, crowded, and took our seats at the bar. About 10 minutes into our mojito (JK) and wine (HT), I noticed that they were playing “Time After Time,” the 1985 Cyndi Lauper classic. A slightly odd choice for a place like Barrio Chino, but I wasn’t going to complain – I do love that song. I started humming along. And then conversation ensued, such that JK and I didn’t notice what the next song was until the song was already 1/3 of the way in. Africa. Yup, Africa. The Toto song. I’m not going to try to jog your memories because I know you know what song I’m talking about. And I know you know because everyone knows that song. JK and I found ourselves singing along. Loudly. And then we noticed that everyone else at the bar was singing along, too. Loudly. There was head-bobbing. There was faux-bongo-playing. It was amazing. In 2002, I celebrated my 28th birthday by throwing a 'Guilty Pleasures' party, whereby all guests were asked to bring a CD that they loved, but would normally never admit to enjoying. And we played parts of all the CDs that ended up in a stack by the stereo. It was a great time. Everyone found out about my love of Genesis' Invisible Touch album. I outed an ex's secret enjoyment of Counting Crows. (It's just that one song!, he kept insisting.) It was like that episode of Beverly Hills: 90210 where all the girls have a pajama party and share their deepest darkest secrets, and it's discovered that one girl is addicted to pills and another girl loves Brandon. Only at my party it was sans addiction or Jason Priestley -- just musical skeletons in the closet. It was great. My point? Toto would not have made an appearance at that party. There is no guilt with Toto. Only pleasure. I think we all proved that last night at Barrio Chino.
* BP, over at Soundbites, can wax (and photo) much more rhapsodic about this than I can.