MOVIES

1) Meek’s Cutoff
A slow-motion picture by anybody’s estimation, with lots of long takes where nothing much happens, that is nevertheless filled with tension. Reichardt gives the audience choices. Do you care about these people enough to feel anxious about what will happen to them? Does the hubris of the whole American enterprise render them unsympathetic? Are strangers to be generally trusted or feared? The final scene offers a conundrum that is as politically relevant as anything I’ve seen this year.

2) Drive
Stylized to within an inch of its life. Every element in harmony. That the soundtrack and the costumes already have a life of their own says something about the potency of the vision here – this is one that’s going to stick around for a while, one that will instantly garner a cult.

3) Tree of Life
Saw this one in the front row of a packed movie theater. Near the end of the film I was closing my eyes frequently because it was all too much, I was overwhelmed with emotion. Staggered out of the theater 2+ hours later feeling like a veil had been put over my eyes, or maybe lifted from them – the world looked different for a good while, my perception had been altered.

4) Weekend

5) Cedar Rapids

Good not great: Melancholia, Tabloid, The Skin I Live In, Take Shelter, A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, Bridesmaids

Need to see: Margaret, The Future, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Carnage, Win Win, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, We Need To Talk About Kevin, Young Adult, Fright Night, Our Idiot Brother, Another Earth, Kaboom!, We Were Here

MUSIC
(in no particular order)

Smith Westerns, Dye It Blonde: Listened to this one maybe more than any of the others this year. Every single song is good.

Black Lips, Arabia Mountain

Dum Dum Girls, Only in Dreams

Papercuts, Fading Parade

Crystal Stilts, In Love With Oblivion

R.E.M., Collapse Into Now

Real Estate, Days: I resisted this band for as long as I could, cause every time I tried them out it sounded so bland. But I think the blandness is sort of the point. This is easy-listening music for ***sters, and it doesn’t come much lovelier (and it sounds a lot like Felt).

Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Belong: Mostly for this song.

Cults, s/t

The news of R.E.M.’s demise hit me like a shock. Why? In this day and age it’s presumed that bands never really “break up.” How likely is it that the members of R.E.M. will never play music with one another again, will never mount a reunion tour? Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if they recorded another album in the future.

So it isn’t that. I thought it could be that I was looking forward to what they’d come up with next - their most recent album is fantastic, and on par with some of the best music of their career. But I don’t think that’s what’s affecting me, either.

This evening I was going through their back catalog, reminiscing, when I hit on this song and immediately burst into tears.

It’s a great song, but moreover it’s a song that reminds me so specifically of my youth. R.E.M. were formed one year after I was born. They were the cool, weird band that my older brother listened to when I was in elementary school. Then they became huge and he disowned them (cause that’s what he always did when the bands he liked got famous).

They’ve been around ever since. Me at thirteen, listening to Automatic for the People in my best friend’s bedroom, making up stories and dreaming about the future. Me at eighteen, driving around and getting high and playing Electrolite on repeat, bored with my life and small town and waiting to escape. Me at twenty three, paying attention to the lyrics of “The Lifting” for the first time and realizing they spoke to some repressed and sickened part of my psyche that I longed to transcend – I cried then like I cried today.

Unlike any other band I’ve ever listened to, I grew up alongside these guys and their music. And unlike any other band breakup I’ve heard news of, this one feels like losing an old friend.

Nightswimming / remembering that night / September's coming soon...

I look younger than I am. I feel older than I am. I joke with my friend that I have “age dysphoria” – my bastardized version of “gender dysphoria,” a term used in transgender discussions denoting a disconnect with biological sex or birth-assigned gender.

I’ve nearly gotten into physical fights with people who say things like “You wouldn’t remember that, you’re so young” or “Just wait till you get older!” I cringe when waitresses call me “hon” or “sweetie.”  I spent most of my twenties in a state of discontent. All that energy and motion, college days amassing friends, drugs, sex, go go go and don’t forget to figure out who you are. It wasn’t for me. I was a lousy young person.

I’m still young, relatively speaking. But the older I get the more relieved I feel. There’s more time to reflect on what’s happened. Things slow down (even as time seems to pass more quickly).

The term “age dysphoria” is a bit of a bad joke – everyone starts young and gets older, while transgender people don’t have the luxury of naturally migrating from one gender to another. I realize now that when people assume I don’t know something because of my age, or call me naive, they aren’t putting me down. They just don’t understand that inside me is an 80-year-old man who wanted to learn to play bridge when he was in high school.

I’m writing this in early September. There’s a palpable chill to the air. I love summer, don’t get me wrong, and I had a good one this year with just enough dancing, swimming and hiking. But summer is youth. I remember lying in bed one summer Saturday morning when I was eleven and listening through my open window. Kids playing, dogs barking, cars whooshing past. It was all too much. I was immobilized by the bounty of it – too much life. I didn’t know where to start.

There’s a relief to fall, to the downturn. It’s rained so much in the past few days, all I’ve done is sit inside and watch movies and I’ve loved every second of it. Bad weather means I don’t have to go outside, I don’t have to take advantage of every single minute of my life and live as fully as possible. I’ve always been better at sitting back and contemplating. Nostalgia is my favorite emotion.

Sometime in July it occurred to me that I only have a limited amount of summers left. How many? Fifty? Forty? It’s sad to think of it in those terms. Still, I’m not afraid of getting older. I know my body will break down as I age (it’s already starting – just slightly), but as long as my mind is good, as long as I can think and reflect, I welcome it.

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My favorite fall album is Camper Van Beethoven’s “II & III.” Here is the first track from it, “Abundance”:

Hole – “Boys on the Radio”

Finding a great track on an album you’ve owned for over a decade – moreover, an album you’ve all but discounted (in fact I sold my CD of “Celebrity Skin” a couple years ago but uploaded it to iTunes beforehand – pretty much the only reason I listened to it, otherwise the CD would be languishing in my collection). It’s funny because this album seemed so cynical at the time with its anti-Hollywood lyrical content while Courtney Love was all dolled up in plastic body parts and revealing clothes. Set next to what women pop artists produce currently, it feels practically revolutionary – actual feminism, I almost forgot what it looked like. Besides all that it’s a perfect alt-rock studio song, on an album that happens to be filled with them – truly underrated.

I loved this Keith Schofield-directed video for the Charlotte Gainsbourg/Beck collaboration “Heaven Can Wait” as soon as I saw it.  But today I became annoyed after reading this interview with Shoefield on Pitchfork, where he states that the inspiration for it came from the images he discovered and appropriated from sites like ffffound.com and various Tumblr blogs.

The problem is that – surprise – somebody actually created the images that he appropriated, in particular these two images from an artist previously unknown to me, William Hundley:

Thing is, these two images clearly stood out to me from the rest in the video, which says something about the potency of one’s imagination or lack thereof.  But there’s another level here.  I myself have a Tumblr blog, and I follow quite a few of them.  It really is its own sort of world, a saturation of images without context or cohesion.  It’s interesting that Shofield decided to run with that concept, but the problems that resulted are one and the same with the problems I have with most Tumblr blogs that seem to have no interest in the source of an image.  So yeah, it’s an image of a skateboard on cheeseburgers – but somebody took the time to create this thing, to buy the cheeseburgers, to stack them, to plop a skateboard on top of them.  There’s real intent behind it, and to assume it just exists and belongs to the world is sort of arrogant and dismissive.

I don’t know.  I do the same thing, really, when I steal images I “find” on Google Image Search to illustrate blog posts.  Really, it’s the way things are headed.  Authorship, as far as images are concerned, is this passe thing.  It’s weird, is all I’m saying, and it makes me uncomfortable.

I still think it’s a great video, and Schofield’s other work is worth checking out, too. Here’s two more:

I recently downloaded Gwen Stefani’s “Love. Angel. Music. Baby.” (how it pained me to type that title just now) solely for the purpose of obtaining the first song for a mix I made for my friend.  I didn’t much care for “What You Waiting For” when it first came out, but now I think it might be one of the best pop songs of the past decade.  That beat is ferocious.

Anyway I’m proud of the dance/pop music mix I ended up with.  My buddy is straight but he has an interest in these sorts of things and relies on my help.  I know some of the stuff on here is old, but here goes (sorry for any latent advertisements, comes with the territory I suppose):

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Repost from old blog, 10/26/2006

I used to be a raver.

I think I went to my first party in May of 1999, at an Irish community center. The last party I went to was on February 11, 2001. I remember the date because in the wee hours of that morning, my head buzzy with acid, I witnessed the demolition of Pittsburgh’s old football stadium.

It wasn’t until another set of buildings fell to the ground, exactly seven months later, that I realized a new epoch was upon us.

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Repost from old blog, 9/26/2006

I just finished a book, The Girl in the Box by Ouida Sebestyen. I suppose it could be considered a teen novel, and from what I understand a lot of teen girls read and were freaked out by it around the time when it was published in 1988. The jacket is beautiful in its way [and the cover displayed above, though similar to the original design, is not the same. The original is an illustration, not a photograph, and is much darker and more expressionistic], perfect in its design, and it would fit comfortably on the shelf next to V.C. Andrew’s Flowers in the Attic and Morton Rue’s The Wave, though I’m not sure I could explain why (something to do with perfect cover designs, explosive subject matter, and nostalgia). It definitely runs laps around both of those books, writing-wise.

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Two great new songs from two of my favorite bands = a good day:

Deerhunter – “Helicopters”

Belle & Sebastian – Write About Love promo (ft. “I Want the World to Stop”)

And while I’m at it, this one’s pretty great too (the song and the video) – Royksopp, “The Drug”

Listening to the new Wavves album…it’s real good.