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

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”:

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:

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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1. Goldfrapp – Ooh La La (Maybe this doesn’t fit? Not exactly pop music but it sounds good for a beginning song.)

2. Robyn – Dancing on my Own (One of the songs said buddy specifically requested. I liked a Robyn song I’d heard last year but hadn’t kept up with her. I definitely dig this song, though.)

3. Janelle Monae – Tightrope (THE track of 2010 for me.  I just can’t get enough.)

4. Shakira – She Wolf (I’m a sucker for disco beats and goofy lyrics.)

5. Annie – I Don’t Like Your Band

6. La Roux – Bulletproof (The other song my buddy requested. Isn’t it cool when a random, out-of-left-field song like this comes along and gets tons of radio play for the sole reason that it’s great?)

7. Amanda Lepore – Cotton Candy (He’ll probably hate this but fuck it.)

8. Robyn – Cobrastyle (This is the Robyn song I heard last year.)

9. Gwen Stefani – What You Waiting For? (This video is endless, fast forward to about a minute and a half in.)

10. Lady Gaga – The Fame (My favorite Gaga track. Her music doesn’t do a whole lot for me but I love that everyone’s obsessed with her.)

11. Royksopp – Happy Up Here (Definitely stretching the definition of pop music here. Royksopp got compared a lot to Air back in their early days and I suppose I had high expectations, and that’s why I never got into them. But I like them now.)

12. Annie – I Know UR Girlfriend Hates Me (I’ve gone into my love of Annie before on this blog. The producer here, Richard X, is pretty incredible.)

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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Even as I was going to raves I was aware of what I was doing, and what I wasn’t doing. These parties weren’t going to change or save the world, despite what the flyer purported – they never brought everybody together as one, they weren’t utopian by a long shot. They cost an assload of money to get into, for one thing, and that’s not even factoring in the drugs. There was an unspoken classism present in the rave scene, with the wealthier, “yuppie raver” types always lamenting those who only came for the drugs, those who didn’t understand that it was all about “the music.”

I took my fair share of the drugs and I enjoyed the music, even if I never seemed to know which DJ was spinning at any given time. Hell, that evening’s superstar DJ could’ve never shown up and I would’ve been none the wiser.

But the rave scene spoke to me at that time of my life, a time when I was young (21) and free and coming out of the closet. There were times when I felt like I was on the cusp of some brave new world, the Ecstasy breaking down – or at least giving the illusion of breaking down – emotional barriers, as I let go, dancing with abandon, getting lost in the music. Strangers would meet easily one minute, and the next minute they’d be massaging each other without embarrassment or anxiety. I went to parties in random fields, to one in an old stock exchange building smack in the middle of Downtown Pittsburgh, and one at an enormous expo center – a venue that probably never saw the likes of over a thousand tripping kids before or since.

So it was overwhelming at times, and easy, maybe, to overlook the more unsavory effects: my roommate who was rolling at least five nights a week, the night that everybody took bad pills that made them spontaneously vomit, the ridiculous fashions and conspicuous consumption (peppermint-scented UFO pants, anyone?).

I was always acknowledging these things, aware that the drugs were providing the catalyst for this sense of unity and emotional release; that sooner or later reality was bound to come knocking. That couple’s e-fueled romance wouldn’t last; even if they took ecstasy on each wedding anniversary. At raves, there were people who would give you the shirt off their back, and people who wouldn’t give you the time of day. And it was just like anywhere else, really.

And so these parties gradually tapered off (though I know they are still going on somewhere, just on a smaller scale) – probably because law enforcement started cracking down on them.

And now here we are, living with the constant warning of terrorism, mired in a war that gets worse every day, witnessing the worldwide nuclear proliferation that will slowly, surely bring about an end to all of this.

I yearn for those days in 1999 and 2000, when I was young, sure, but also when America was a little more innocent, more naive, when we had more hope, even if it was just a fantasy. The late 60s are the late 90s – it’s a facile but unavoidable connection. Nostalgia is so seductive, so insidious.

Best just to pull out my old Chemical Brothers CDs and forget the whole thing.

Photos are from some random Pgh raver page that hasn’t been updated since 2001 and still, inexplicably, exists.

Also, here is one of my favorite sites from this time: a collection of trip reports called “Diary of a Psychonaut”.

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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It is written from the point of view of the titular character, who has been kidnapped for reasons and motives she cannot understand, and finds herself in a completely dark, small underground room with a typerwriter and a ream of paper. Thus what we are reading are ostensibly the notes she has written – it’s even done in a typewriter-ish font. I love books like this – books that 1) are told in the first person and 2) are presented as artifacts, or with a guise of realism that plays with the idea of whether it is fictional or not (there’s a word for this that escapes me, though I’m sure I came across the idea while reading about the whole lonelygirl15 saga).

Plus I really like trashy teen novels.

But this is not trashy, not at all, and that’s one of the first things that surprised me about it. Another thing that surprised me was how realistically it dealt with her situation of being held captive and alone in a small room – eating, drinking, shitting, hallucinating, the fear of being sexually violated (basically all the things you wouldn’t expect to find in a teen novel) – are all explored. I should probably quit calling it a teen novel, because even though it is written in a simple and straightforward manner, it could be enjoyed by anybody.

Another thing that surprised me – and this is a minor thing in relation to the novel, but a significant thing to me – was this sentence (she is describing her situation in a “letter” to her best friend and referencing her favorite English teacher):

Didn’t Miss Flannery say someone thought “cellar-door” was the most beautiful word in the English language, or something like that?

Now if you’ve seen Richard Kelly’s film “Donnie Darko” this should be immediately recognizable. In a classroom scene, Drew Barrymore’s teacher writes “cellar door” on the chalkboard and says more or less the same thing. It was one of the more intriguing scenes for me in that movie, mostly because of the mysteriousness of it. “Cellar door” is a very evocative phrase and it worked well in that really evocative movie – it seemed like this random touch of strangeness and beauty, something that really couldn’t be explained, could only be felt.

Adding to this, The Girl in the Box wouldn’t seem out of place in the world of “Donnie Darko,” firstly because the movie is set during the time when The Girl in the Box was written (one of my other favorite details in the film is during the first music tracking shot, when we see Donnie’s mother reading Stephen King’s IT, a perfect period detail that sets a dark, nostalgic mood).

But the themes of The Girl in the Box also fit with “Darko” – both are dark tales about characters who come to terms with the realization that their fate is completely out of their control.

Basically, they’re both coming-of-age stories.

That’s where The Girl in the Box saved its biggest surprised for me – this is a coming-of-age story, a story of enlightenment even, about a girl trapped in an underground cellar. I wasn’t expecting that – just like I wasn’t expecting Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank to be so incredibly life-affirming and beautiful.

The Girl in the Box presents a lot of great philosophy and ideas, and I’m kind of struggling to keep hold of them all, but one thing in particular came up for me tonight when I was sitting at the bus stop park and ride, which is where I go to watch the sunset sometime. I had just been listening to Galaxie 500′s album “On Fire,” which I’ve been doing a lot of lately. I’m listening to it right now in fact.

The album has become something of my autumn soundtrack, there’s a definite autumnal sound to the thing (even though I understand it was recorded in the summer, which is fine fine fine and if I listened to it more in the summer I’m sure it would have always seemed summer-y to me, but whatever). The cover of the album, in fact, looks like just the color of the autumn sunset I was looking at when I was sitting at the bus stop.

I was listening to the music in my head, thinking how much I was enjoying re-creating it in my mind, not like when a song gets stuck in your head, the hook hooking its claws into your skull and driving you crazy.

Now I love pop music, and I love a good hook maybe more than anything. But the fact of the matter is, when I listen to The Killers’s album “Hot Fuss,” I’m stuck with that fucking album in my head for the next two days, until I’m ready to drive a knive thru my skull. Another example: there is this guy Justin Roberts who my boyfriend’s five-year-old daughter enjoys. We just bought a copy of his album, and there’s a song on it that I really dug the first time I heard it, but later in the day I was feeling nauseous, and that song would just not quit – all of us were singing it uncontrollably, and it was driving us nucking futs. It was literally making me ill, when just an hour ago I’d been loving it.

Galaxie 500, on the other hand, took me some time to warm up to. I wondered if I was forcing myself to like it because it was considered good, rather then just liking it immediately as I do with some other, easier music.

But there is a need for music that you don’t immediately “get,” just as there is a need for movies that don’t immediately make sense (and I’m thinking of “Donnie Darko” here, but also of Paul Verhoeven’s “Showgirls,” but that’s a mental riff for another day), just as there is a need for anything mysterious or in need of exploring. It keeps us going, keeps us interested, keeps us questioning, keeps us alive.

From The Girl in the Box:

All my life, I guess, I’ve been afraid of changes and what they’d take from me. I wanted everything safe and permanent and explained. I tried not to think about things that didn’t have answers. Like dying or anything deep like that. But actually when you look right at it, dying’s not all that earth-shaking. It happens every second, to grass and people and insects and sounds and everything lucky enough to have lived.
So I’m trying not to be scared anymore. I know changes are how we grow. I accept that there are things that can’t be explained by facts and figures. Maybe aren’t even supposed to be.

This, from what I thought was going to be a trashy teen novel! The end took my breath away with its audacity, the whole thing bowled me over with its insight. Highly recommended.

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”