Blue Men Group, Ripley-is-not-Amused, and The Subjugation of the Natives: The Game: The Movie

Ended up seeing Avatar (due to familial obligations, I swear!).

I can see why some people liked it, though I was far too annoyed by the middle to be able to stomach the guns-and-dragons-for-forty-five-minutes climax. This is what white people do, they eradicate populations then overidealize them afterwards in order to make themselves feel better. This movie, like some reviewer said, is entirely Ferngully meets Dances With Wolves — and Dances With Wolves is probably the most demeaning two-and-a-half hours ever set to cinema. District 9, though not a great movie (it couldn't decide where allegory ended and action movie began) at least treated culture clash more realistically than Avatar, which ends up being your basic white male fantasy.

In terms of biology the movie was fascinating and detailed, though they don't even make an effort to make Pandora seem like an actual alien world. The template is an oversized, primordial earth. Notice how the dragon-things all have four wings — just like the first flying lizards on earth.

Anthropologically it was less than interesting. The Na'vi both facially and phonetically resemble indigenous post-slave-trade Caribbean Indians, so Pandora is basically Hispanola with flying mountains. Like in all white-man-goes-native movies, the male tribesmen are stubborn, strong and ugly (though easily bested by the hero in combat) and the women are fierce, oversexualized and all for a little miscegenation.

Movies like this tend to forget that native americans didn't have horses until Europeans brought them over, and the supposed natural connection between man and beast that Native Americans exemplify depended entirely on beasts being previously domesticated. People forget that a successfully culture must reshape the landscape around it, must subjugate the beasts of the field and the plants of the earth, this is how a species escapes extinction. It's the whole reason we have things like language and culture and bad movies. Humans are the dominant species in their ecosystem, the fantasy would be a humanoid society that is not the dominant species, in a society that exists symbiotically with other large creatures. Which sounds almost romantic if it weren't so unrealistic. In nature, you're on the top or you're food. And if you're food you're not going to be concerned with luxuries like love or morality. But human society, or at least the human society that makes movies like this, has been on the top so long I bet it just longs to be submissive to something. This is part of the reason why man is never the master of his own fate, we long to be controlled by something, be it god or nature or in this case some weird tree-based melding of the two.

Sigourney Weaver seemed like she was having a good time but became less and less interesting as the story got more and more predictable (though she was still given the best lines). The temple scenes were laughable reminders of the hilarious Zion rave party. And the climactic fight, for all its ecological ballyhoo, was all machismo and patriotism, designed to inspire way more recruitments for the marines corps than for Green Peace.

The 3d was fantastic though.

Depp, Mann, and Boys



Public Enemies. I will say, Mann is becoming a master of shooting in near-total darkness, you really felt the muzzle flare in all the night shots and it was deafeningly loud at times, which is all good. But it's true, his Dillinger is a complete blank. And I wonder about this, most of Mann's early movies were all fronted by big personalities: James Caan, deNiro, Tom Cruise, Will Smith, which sort of hid or ameliorated the fact that those characters were essentially the same blank. But the last few movies have been almost a deconstruction of that hero (the hero boiled down to mere competence, as grashupfer had been talking about). Has Colin Farrel ever been less interesting than in Miami Vice? His hair did most of his acting. And Johnny Depp, a master of mannerisms, here plays someone with no discernible personality. But Depp's been deconstructing himself as well, look at how deeply he inhabited the character of Ed Wood versus what he's been playing the last few years: he's consistently creating characters who are hollow shells. Shells of mannerisms.

I hope they come together to make Action Movie: where our hero Troubled Hero faces Cool Bad Guy to save Idealized Woman and succeeds or doesn't.

(or did I just describe Sin City and all its future iterations)

(actually the movie should be titled Adolescent Confusions About Masculinity)

Train Robbers, Brad Pitt, and Reticence in the American West



Finally saw The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Not a great movie but parts are worth it. I especially like the portrayal of James himself, a man alternately coarse and troubled -- the coarse parts being more convincing than the troubled parts since Brad Pitt's default expression seems to be one of troubled blankness. But when he's coarse and rude and jovial we get a real glimpse of the anger and sadness there, more deeply than when Pitt goes all puppy-eyes on us. I also liked how very little was spoken that meant what was said, speaking one's mind being a faux pas in this sort of manly universe. But almost nothing was said in the whole movie that was not an outright lie, an elision, a change of the subject, chit-chatty bullshit, etc. (An almost sole exception being Jesse's line about how when the soul peeks over the mountain it will be as loath to reenter the body as you would be to suck up your own puke.) I enjoy when movies show how little meaning corresponds to text, maybe because it seems so difficult from a screenwriter's perspective (I can only imagine how many notes the script must have contained.) Our culture is built on words, always has been, even our visual art needs to have paragraphs of explanation attached to it. It's nice to be reminded how small a part words play in the dance of meaning.

The character of James gradually morphed into your basic american movie tragic-hero: paranoid, moody, self-destructive. But there was something in the character (and in the story itself) that didn't quite lend itself to this pigeonholing, which made that section a little difficult to stomach. And once he's offscreen the movie sort of peters out. But it makes its point, which is the same question of imaginary fathers that McCarthy deals with. (Also notice how Jesse only starts to go south when his older brother, his authority figure, takes off.)

The narration was sub-par and seemed tacked on but what it was trying to do was frame the movie into the right genre: this is a historical essay, told in retrospect, with all the phrases and cadences of a documentary. A short story of a movie.

The visuals are more surreal than documentary though, and I kept noticing how in the framing of the outdoor shots the land seems to dominate the sky, grain and weeds and browns and dull greens pushing out the blue and clouds. It made me realize how much the camera cuts a hole out of reality, a hole where we are. I wouldn't be noticing these things in a movie that demanded I believe in it (cf: Kubrick's "not shooting reality but the photograph of reality"), another reason why this is more of an essay.

Covers Mash-Up vol4

The Desperate Ones

OSCARS ROUND-UP '08

Wherein I try to watch as many Oscar-nominated movies in as short a time as possible.



#1 is The Wrestler, which is hard to like or dislike, though thankfully Aronofsky has (at least temporarily) shed most of the the annoying tendencies of his last two movies. You could take the movie as the failure of the american dream (not the rags-to-riches one, the find-what-you-love-and-do-it-and-everyone-will-love-you-and-youll-make-oodles-of-cash one), but really it's more about its success -- this is what you actually want when wanting stuff. For ambition to be more important than family, health, etc. In characteristic movie fashion, professional ambition is put against family and love and stuff: movie-success, since movies all want to tell us that family and love and stuff are more important than anything. The scenes with his daughter feel phoned-in, the scenes with the stripper would have felt it too if not for the natural vivacity of the characters, old but still frisky. What is hard to stomach is his speech at the end, about the audience being his family -- we know it's a lie, he knows it's a lie, and yet there's supposed to be something triumphant about the ensuing battle. Up to that point he'd been at least trying, but then he gives up — and giving-up is essential to the American Dream, the stubborn, stupid, self-destructive American Dream. Aronofsky understands this, re: Requiem, but here it seems that he has to sell the dream back to us.

#2 was Frost/Nixon which does a lot to be obviously about what most plays are about anyway. Language as competition. As such it's the most thrilling movie about a conversation I can remember to have seen. Where it fails for me is in the character of Frost, who is portrayed far more weak/lucky than you think he should be -- I didn't feel at all the scenes where we're supposed to feel the mirrored connection between the two combatants, in fact Frost seemed to be everything that Nixon railed sympathetically against, which tips the scales way too far toward Nixon in the identification department. This seems to be more a failing of the directing than the portrayal, since Howard seems to be trying to squeeze every bit of capital-e Entertainment out of this script as possible. Hence Frost is weaker and less charming than we know he should be so it becomes more of a struggle for him to succeed. Which leaves you feeling at the end that Frost is simply lucky.

#3: In Bruges — very entertaining while not extremely good. The writing was fresh and jumpy (another playwright) but most of the scenes had pacing problems, abnormal pauses, the signs of a young/shaky director. And yet, very much worth watching, if only for the Colin Farel's character. You can't keep your eyes of him, he's so twitchy and excitable and juvenile and fun, one of those characters bigger than the story he's in. Also, best eyebrow acting since David Tennant. He picked up a Golden Globe for it too, but no Oscar nods. And as good as Heath Ledger's performance was, his Joker was still very much contained in his story. Curiously though, if the Best Supporting goes to Ledger this will be two years in a row of villains. But Chigurh will always be much more frightening.

#4: Milk, the best of the lot so far. It's a biopic, doesn't pretend to be more than a biopic, but hits everything evenly and well. Very balanced — entertaining without being sensational. And it avoids the big pitfalls of biopic: First it skips right over the rise/fall that makes most of them get weighty and predictable in the third act, since its main character dies right at the top (nothing to be thankful for but hey, makes for good cinema). Second, it skips the backstory, the inner life, the secret woes etc. Milk is portrayed as a public figure, there's nothing to him that isn't right there up front, which is part if not all of his charm. And the performances were all pitch-perfect, down to the smallest roles, each with his/her own fascination about them. Another benefit of biopics, even the bit parts are real people.

#5: Happy Go Lucky plays like a love letter to the social, so strange in a medium full of rugged individualists and tortured loners. I got bored by the middle of the movie while it started to be About Things; thankfully it didn't end up being about much. Poppy is unconcerned with the things the neurotic people around her are: ambition, career, procreation, pensions, adulthood, etc, which the movie portrays as things we use to stave off loneliness. Poppy staves off loneliness by being social, and so tries to help people. And thankfully the movie doesn't gloss over the fact that this is the result of number of neuroses of her own, but at the same time doesn't dwell on them. Some people like to help people. And we all can't be social (if we were we wouldn't be on the internet) but it's nice finally give a bit of thanks to those who are, 'cause where would we be without them really. This doesn't mean that we're gonna make eye contact on the street or anything.


#6: doubt was. alright? It was too long for its content and too short for its subject. Meryl Streep was better than I expected but worse and worse as it went on. Hoffman was capable. Viola Davis was the standout of course. Her scene kinda reminded me of the scene with William Holden's wife in Network — both small, almost throwaway scenes that do little to further the plot but add so much, taking you outside the little squabbles we're concerned with on screen and reminding us that maybe there are real people out there being affected.

Matt Smith, Dreams, and My Bid for Sci-Fi Immortality

Odd dream - I went to audition for a community theater-esque production of Tartuffe. Had to take a schoolbus to get there. I think it's been all this hemming and hawing about the new Doctor Who, which makes me think, hey, I'm older than that guy. I should play Doctor Who.


NOT MY DOCTOR




THE DOCTOR IS IN

Covers Mash-up vol3

Sprout & the Bean

I Voted, This Is My Voted Face, Random Pictures and History



I voted, this is my voted face





McCain/Palin: Funny hats + burgers



Careful last-minute deliberations



At play in the fields of McCord



Moneychangers in the temple



Dowlin the the Plumber & Heater



For a signier future, vote Pro Signs



Metaphor-in-chief

Something so strange and surreal at seeing Obama's name on the ballot, after all that waiting, after all these months of watching cable news, playing with the big map on cnn.com — this is real, this has an impact on my life, I am a part of this even if I don't want to be. It didn't hit me until I saw him on the ballot. The remoteness of it all parted just for a second, and things were important. I added my number to the little number on the tally machine, now it's all free to be remote again, and I can go back to work with my coffee and hope hope hope.

Covers Mash-Up vol2





This one's harder to mesh since John's keyboard is out of tune, but still better than the silly version the other beatles released.

Regina Spektor has one of the nicest vibratos. And I'm not usually a fan of vibratto, it usually sounds so showing-off. Her's is delicate, soft, it wraps around you. Like Beth Gibbons'.

On the other end of the spectrum there's Diamanda Galas. Wooo.

Positive Female Role-Models in Science Fiction, part1

Because a recent discussion on this execrable list of "hot sci fi women" got me thinking about the few interesting female characters in a genre generally played to slobbering manchilds. Which brings me to my personal favorite female character in sci-fi:

Alia Atreides, St. Alia-of-the-Knife, "The Accursed One," "The female death spirit that walks without feet"





She can read your mind, she can kill you with her finger, she talked down the Emperor of the Galaxy, she murdered her own grandfather, she has excellent taste in hats. How's that for a role model kids of today can look up to? Every young girl should strive to be this bad ass by age 4. If they aren't by then, they probably never will.

Here she is going around the battlefield and finishing the dying or wounded, like any good fremen child:



Of course she grows up to be a royal bitch, and looks like a low-rent Elvish-American-princess in the tv-movie:



But we can forgive her for that, and try to remember how she was at her best: all potential. Older Alia isn't terribly interesting, mostly because between a certain age-range most female characters in sci fi fall into a small set of sexualized stereotypes. Hers being the overbearing and unstable unmarried figure just waiting for a strong man to come around and beat some sense into her. You have more luck at not being a flimsy male fantasy if you're under 16 or over 40.

Gorillaz, Insomnia, Electronics, and the God of the Internet

I can't read The Sleepers enough, here, 6am, and I wonder if it's more of a sin against the night to not sleep through the night than it is to sleep through the night. and I wonder if failure is the only thing I write poetry about. And I wonder when that came to be, since I remember a time when I wasn't writing about failure. And failing at it. But night, and headphones, are good for music. Quiet, sad music, for not sleeping.

Mini-mix-tape time. I've been far too long in the lo-fi post-folk, let's get some electronics and high production values.


Gorillaz - Hong Kong
His Name Is Alive - Go to Hell Mountain
Momus - Nervous Heartbeat


"Hong Kong" is the prettiest thing I've heard off the indie wire in ages. Damon Albarn sounds old and tired, there's emptiness and claustrophobia and East Asia, it's long and sparse and sad. The chinese harp playing for the whole seven minutes -- quiet, arrhythmic, harsh attack with no sustain -- almost sounds electronic. The aesthetic, that is. Guess everything digital has an organic basis. Also says something how Gorillaz, which isn't even a band at all you know, nevertheless has a sound. This could be an old Blur song, and yet, and yet, there's still that Demon Days feel, over the guitars mostly.

Which plays nicely into the new His Name Is Alive album. Halfway through, "Go to Hell Mountain" breaks into a solo, a strange, fuzzy, processed-to-hell solo. and yet it works so nicely in the song, testament to how good Warren Defever is in making uncomfortable mixes of organics and inorganics. The song, like a lot of Xmmer, goes right to the edge of plausibility, being almost too cute and happy to be a song about heartbreak. But irony has always been a part of the HNIA mix -- not irony like sarcasm, more like going "Oh my god nothing goes right ever" while smiling, looking straight up, closing your eyes and spinning in circles.

And let's end with the lord of irony himself, with the "big ballad" off last years's Ocky Milk -- an operatic and sweet little love song that might be the first use of the Cher-autotuned-vocals that doesn't sound like Cher. How'd he do it? By fucking with it. Momus is fairly much all electronic by this stage in his career, both in terms of music and himself -- a fast-blogging globe-trotter zipping from cultural center to cultural center faster than you can say "gentrification". If there is a god of the internet, I bet it at least looks like him.

Poet's House Farewell Toast, Lotsa Wine, Jean Valentine

I was a little too sick to be drinking, and yet, free wine @ Poet's House farewell celebration


philip levine




Jean Valentine is so old her face is curly.

Hiro Ballroom, Mr Flash, Passing Out on the Floor, Good Times

Last night was free Lucky Beer 10-11 at Hiro Ballroom, with some DJs or something behind the beer -- whatever, I wasn't paying attention. The stage has been replaced by a small faux-Japanese altar with a single mac laying upon it, bright white apple shining for all to see and worship, some tattooed dude administering to it like a high priest.



Open Bars, of course, are a science. One beer per person at a time for an hour isn't all that much beer, especially when they don't let you in for a half an hour. However, after downing two beers in frenetic desperation I come upon the formula: one beer per person at a time, spread out over four bartenders is like, a beer every three minutes, without drawing too much attention. So I clear out some table space for my stash and muster about seven beers, and figure I'll be good for the night.





I did manage to drink all the beers I hunter-gathered for myself and still managed to leave early. The only one I didn't drink was the one given to me by the other dudes at the table, a set of three older fellows in their 30s, one asian, one a large man who could have been hispanic or greek, the last one white. They were literally smoking cigarettes under the table, flirting with the URB magazine intern taking photos. All the while I'm thinking, shit, I'm totally hanging with the dirtiest dudes in town.

Meanwhile I'm snapping photos of random shit just in case anything cool happens. Well, nothing cool happens.





Mind you, I get pretty friggin' drunk and stumble all the way to the 6 with the help of a few well-placed phone calls, two crunchy tacos, and a spacious inner jacket pocket for the remaining beer (which, I find, made it all the way home and is still on my bookshelf, half-full, in the morning).



What I didn't do is make it to work in the morning, since I woke up on the floor of my room at 9 and realized I couldn't move without assistance. So: single remaining steady source of income finally blown off, and we are once again floating in the breeze

Misanthropy, Porno Mags, and the Battle of the Crazy Foreign Guys

One thing that Serj Tankian (of System Of A Down) got, besides a cool name, millions of fans, and interesting facial hair, is a really weird voice. Which is only thing that gets me to listen to System every so often, as a guilty pleasure. But he's even better when singing for other people, like his guest spot on the Deftones, or this song: a duet with, of all things, Les Rita Mitsouko, one of France's most important bands (so I hear). In a song about, get this, reading skin mags at a drug store.

In moments of pure misanthropy (misogyny?), which are happening more frequently these days, I can listen to "Terminal Beauty" on repeat, waiting for his weird little "la la la la la na na na" towards the end, which is about as maniacally misanthropic you can get without saying anything. Serj should be cast as the bad dude in some crazy action movie, as a sort of anti-300-Gerard-Butler.

In fact, the movie should just be Serj and Gogol Bordello's Eugene Hütz screaming and hitting each other with sticks. I'd sit through two hours of that. Hell, I'd buy popcorn.


Les Rita Mitsouko - Terminal Beauty (yousendit)


vs.

Okkervil River, Webster Hall, 9/28/07

If you had asked me what are my favorite artists making music right now, Okkervil River, Midlake and Shapes And Sizes would top the list. Now I've been able to see all three within the space of a few weeks, and damn does it make me happy. If I never see a show again -- well, I'd be really pissed off so let's hope that doesn't happen, but at least I'm happy now.


For more pictures, check out Impose magazine coverage.

Shapes and Sizes, Cake Shop 9/27/07

This must be the first show I've paid for in at least eight months, what with a summer of freebies and hitching rides with three publications. I wrote such a glowing preview for them in the Onion for this week (last thing I did before my term ended), I hope they're proud. Plus Cake Shop is $7 for four bands. And I only stuck around for two.

Though, I thought the benefit of actually paying for a show would be that I wouldn't have to write about it. Well, here I am, writing about it.







Though my love for Caila knows no bounds, what's best about S&S live is how they all seem to move together. Makes sense: three out of the four of them write the songs (poor, lonely drummer), three out of four sing (though Mr. Bass Player usually just provides harmonies). When the three of them scream together it's a thing of beauty.





The other amazing thing is Caila's dancing. Maybe the more intimate setting brought out more of the little kicks and shimmys than when I saw her last year at Irving (they and The Blow opened for Architecture in Helsinki at CMJ, perhaps the most fun night of music I've ever experienced.) or maybe she's grown as a performer. Or maybe she was drunk. But it was dang cute.



Also played: The Forms. Quite rockin'.



Flickr stream

Twilight Sad, Radiohead, and Farming Nostalgia

The indie/rock playlists have led me back to The Twilight Sad, a Scottish through-and-through band that realizes you don't have to be quiet to be depressed. The enveloping loudness reminds me oddly of the Rosebuds, whose Birds Make Good Neighbors also has that sort of nostalgia that you can feel palpably on the Sad's debut Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters. But the Rosebuds occasioned into electronics, Twilight Sad is all instruments and intensity, occasionally screaming, lead singer James Graham sounding eerily like an out-of-control Craig Ferguson

"Watching that chair painted yellow", a b-side off the first single, has now become one of those songs, along with the Rosebuds' "Boxcar", that I can leave on repeat for a day and a night.


Watching That Chair Painted Yellow (yousendit)
That summer, at home, I had become the invisible boy (eachnotesecure)
Talking with fireworks / here it never snowed (musicforants)







Also: Looking for tracks lead me to Stereogum's compilation OKX: A tribute to OK Computer, a compilation of covers for the 10th anniversary of the greatest album of the '90s. Not only do the Twilight Sad do a utterly claustrophobic version of "climbing up the walls", check out John Vanderslice on "Karma Police", a very spooky "Exit Music" by Vampire Weekend, and the Cold War Kids on "Electioneering". Among others. Hell, they're all brilliant.

The Lamentations of the Women

The quality of the female voice at its most subversive -- what do I mean by subversive? Well, I guess a particular form of irony. A non-funny kind. I think currently the best male voices are doing irony, a funny irony, in a faux-honest way -- Art Brut, Stage Names Will Sheff with his phony autobiographies, the ghost of The Unicorns haunting the latest Strokes-clones (Vampire Weekend, Tokyo Police Club, etc). But with females, my personal favorite trend is the simple, ironically "weak" subversion of a voice like St. Vincent ("What me worry? I never do, I'm always amused, and amusing you..."), or my two current favorite voices:


Caila Thompson-Hannant of Shapes and Sizes



Not only can she squeak like a seagull, when she sweeps from a talky-low to an uncomfortable, almost nasally sustained high it sets my teeth on edge like a deliciously dissonant string harmony. Live, there's a quizzical disparity between her voice and her physical presense -- a slightly frumpy, boyishly charming girl with short hair and an endearing, lopsided grin. Is she really belting out this stuff? And yet there's something ever so sexy about her chuckling "Ho ho ho, my little cauliflower, I got plans for you..." on the just-released b-side Annihilator.

Shapes and Sizes - Anhilitator

Perennial favorite "Alone/Alive", along with the seaguls, has two great choruses: the band repeating "tonight I learn that I'm alone" or "tonight I feel that I'm alive" while Caila lamenting or celebrating in cute little couplets then sweeping up into lilting, wordless vowels, mimicing the guitar's plaintive bends. But it's the lyrics that keep me coming back, no matter the mood.

Tonight I learn that I'm alone.
The cat don't love me, he told me so...
Tonight I learn that I'm alone.
A homeless man won't even come to my home...

Shapes and Sizes - Alone/Alive


Emma Louise "Scout" Niblett



The new Scout Niblett album (This Fool Can Die Now) is due the beginning of October and boasts, among other surprises, four duets with many-named Will Oldham. The first released is "Kiss", which, though the guitar is dangerously similar to her also brilliant "Just What I Needed" cover, is gorgeously sad, and their seemingly incompatible voices play with each other like a dog and a cat in the rain. The track feels much more produced than her usually slap-dash albums, even with a bit of strings at the end (A Scout album, with instruments not actually played live by Scout herself? Preposterous!)

Scout Niblett - The kiss

My favorite track off Kidnapped By Neptune is "Lullaby For Scout In Ten Years", a song dedicated to her future self. I love her transitions, how she goes from soft to screaming -- which is what I'd probably be doing if I got to have a conversation with myself.

Are you still a chauffeur,
driving your body around?
Are you still a hunter for your sound?
Cause Honey, if you're still around...

Scout Niblett - Lullaby For Scout In Ten Years

Boredoms, Dave Longstreth, Momus as King of the Ghosts

77BOADRUMs There was still two blocks worth of packed people trying to get into Brooklyn Bridge Park when they shut the gates at the full capacity of 4,000. Many gave up, some went to the neighboring park, but a large number of enterprising souls walked up Brooklyn bridge and stood on the tower decks, getting a bird’s-eye view of this once-in-a-lifetime installation/event/concert: 77 drum sets arranged in a spiral, all playing at once, for one day only, 07/07/07.


This Week:
Dave Longstreth and his Dirty Projectors will be playing for free at the Whitney on Friday. I, honestly, have never been to the Whitney (American art? what's that?). The show is part of a series curated with the "Summer of Love" exhibit, bringing in musicians "inspired by the radical spirit of the 1960s... a tapestry of new work that is intrinsically connected to the sounds and visions of the psychedelic era." Yeah, right. The Dirty Projectors last LP was a cut-and-paste mashup of Don Henley lyrics and unfindable Longstreth juvenalia (I wrote about the amazing short videos made of it previously). The newest album Rise Above, which won't be out until the Fall, is, I shit you not, Dave's attempt to rewrite the entire 1981 album Damaged by Black Flag -- from memory. The press release says he was helping his parents move out of his childhood home and found the old Damaged cassette case sans cassette and proceeded to recreate it on a four track. It compares this endeavor to Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", the guy who tried to rewrite Cervantes from memory.

1) When the arena of music journalism starts referring to borges... well I don't know what exactly it means but it's sure weird. 2) What the monkey does this have to do with psychedelia and the "spirit of the '60s"? A show like this might make sense at the Whitney, since the pastiche, the utter lack of connection between word and music, is terribly, uh, post-post-modern, and Longstreth seems more likely to get support from the art world than the music world, though the music world is remarkably into subtext these days. Or maybe they'll just put up with anything. He's no Momus though, and it's doubtful he'll disappear into pink clothes, white noise and Japanese girlfriends anytime soon.

It's important to note just how different Rise Above is from Black Flag. It's not merely the gap between original and cover. They really have nothing at all to do with each other, and the knowledge that one came from the other is only like an extra intellectual layer of listening.

Mind you I had no idea he was covering Black Flag when I saw the Dirty Projectors open for Deerhoof a couple months back. I just thought he'd gone crazy. The first time I saw Longstreth it was in a shitty Greenpoint bar that I had trekked to in order to see Ramona Cordova (who was so much fun to hang around with, I'm sad I didn't get to run into him again before he left for the West Coast). Longstreth was alone, unknown (most of us were there to see Ramon), unfamiliar with his acoustic guitar (said he hadn't picked it up in months) and generally unkempt. He did play the first bit of the Getty Address, which floored me, but otherwise he was just another dude, one of us. Which is why the Deerhoof date was so eyebrow-raising. There he was again, decked out like Prince in a shiny suit and sleek lacquered electric, bookended by harmony-singing girls and backed by an actual drummer and not a laptop. Playing these, weird, fast, ear-bending songs that made no lyrical, musical or harmonic sense. Has he simultaneously gone glam and deaf? What's with the rockstar getup?

Now I hear "Six Pack" and "What I See" and it's brilliant. Peppy and tricky songs with weird guitar riffs (certainly no one would play something like that on purpose, oh he's playing it over again!), then you realize the words are "I wanna live! I wish I was dead!" or "I'll get a six pack in me and be all right." My favorite right now is "Police Story", which is, in the Dirty Projectors version anyway, a sad, slow song with gentle guitars floating around flute orchestrations, and is about flipping off the cops, getting beat with a billy club and being thrown in jail.

Longstreth also screams a bit in that song. Now, there are many kinds of screams a male can use. You can scream, like Rollins, out of 'roid rage. Or like Kurt Cobain, because it's the only way your voice can get out of your nasal cavities. You can scream like Will Sheff, because you're a New Englander trapped in Austin, or like Rock Plaza Central, merely because you're Canadian. But when Longstreth screams it's far more primordial. When he screams it's exactly like he were being pinched, or given a purple nurple. Or stabbed with a pencil right in the middle of a phrase. Like, "IiiOOOOWWWWwwaa walk down the street..."

The Album Recommendation of the Indeterminate Time Period

is...

Anathallo
Floating World

Easiest way to describe Illinois-based collective Anathallo is as a less-jokey Sufjan Stevens, just instead of midwestern iconography and the New Testament, Anathallo uses Japanese folklore as its theme. Apparently, Floating World tells a japanese fairy tale complete with poems over its 14 tracks, but it'll take me a few more runs through with or without lyric sheets to extract the actual storyline. In the meantime, the music only gets more interesting with each repeat. All sorts of instruments are tossed in, from bells to flugelhorns, but they're not afraid to step back and let it all melt into claps and footstomps and whispers. The album captures that sense of playful mystery and wonder that make folk tales worth repeating.

Recommended tracks: "By Number"; "Hoodwink", which starts with an Adolph Eichman quote; "Hanasakajijii Four: A Great Wind, More Ash", the most Sufjan of the bunch; "Hanasakajijii Three: The Man Who Made Dead Trees Bloom"

Listen:

YouSendIt - Hanasakajijii 3: The Man Who Made Dead Trees Bloom
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