My fridge magnets, a tree and a pool outside of a house on Rosebery Avenue in West Vancouver.
posted by D @ 8:28 AM
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2.28.2006
My fridge magnets, a tree and a pool outside of a house on Rosebery Avenue in West Vancouver.
Duncan at Cox Bay (December 2005)
View from the West Vancouver seawall (January 2006)
Christian on Long Beach (December 2005)
View from the Nanaimo-Horseshoe Bay ferry (December 2005)
posted by D @ 6:15 AM
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2.26.2006
Go here for live Flaming Lips, Ryan Adams, Swervedriver, Wilco, Shins, Loose Fur, and Sufjan Stevens tracks.
BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE IN THE NEW YORK TIMES
Guided by (Many, Many) Voices
NYTimes.com
A Very Crowded House
Ten minutes before Broken Social Scene was due to go onstage, Kevin Drew, co-founder and lead singer of the Toronto band, had his hands up on the wall. He was clad, as usual, in baggy jeans, a moth-eaten black sweater and torn-up sneakers, a dime-store diamond on his pinkie. A woman in silver boots briefly massaged his shoulders. Nearby stood her boyfriend, Brendan Canning, who founded Broken Social Scene with Drew, his strawberry blond hair dangling toward the floor as he tried to touch his toes. Sliding closer to Canning, the band's soft-faced drummer, Justin Peroff, gave him an assist, as Leslie Feist, an occasional singer with BSS, brushed past. "Feist-y!" Drew squealed and hugged her. Her own chanteusey album, "Let It Die," had just gone gold in Canada and Europe.
Everyone was jammed together in the windowless, cluttered basement of an Ontario college auditorium, as band members stretched out or kneaded one another's backs or just sat drinking beers in chairs. A co-owner of the band's three-year-old label, Arts & Crafts, Jeffrey Remedios, was keeping up morale, checking in with the various musicians who make up the band and murmuring how great their individual work was. It was the first local show of Broken Social Scene's three-month world tour.
To call BSS a "band" is to simplify matters drastically. It's more like a network, or, as Emily Haines, a sometime BSS'er and lead singer of the Toronto band Metric, put it, "somewhere between a tribe and a cult." Most of the members of BSS are also members of other bands that are released by Arts & Crafts. The very name connotes what all the artists on the label have in common: they are lo-fi, heartfelt, ironic, makeshift and as tightly interlinked as the kids in a summer-camp lanyard-making session. The musicians play on one another's CD's (BSS can have between 9 and 17 musicians on a given track depending on who shows up or what's needed for a particular song), a level of cooperation and organization unusual in any popular-music scene, even one that might be summed up by the slogan above the bar code on BSS's most recent CD: "break all codes." Perhaps it helps — or maybe it hurts — that a few of them have also slept together, though the BSS'ers tend to be secretive about whom, when and why.
Musically, you could say that Toronto has become a nicer but less aesthetically coherent version of Seattle in the early days of grunge. Broken Social Scene is Toronto's Nirvana, without — so far — the troubled-rock-star antics or the anomie and with a social agenda that puts collective music making above individual success. The second album, "You Forgot It in People," is dedicated to "friends, families and loves."
"We made a lot of decisions to help ourselves be grounded," Drew explained to me. "The whole band is based on people who are closely connected, metaphysically. People with their hearts on their sleeves." If it all sounds hopelessly earnest — another emo band bent on saving one little corner of the world — it isn't, or not quite. BSS has forged what one critic called "endlessly replayable, perfect pop" out of musical sources that couldn't be more disparate. Sometimes Broken Social Scene sounds like Lawrence Welk crossed with the Replacements, with a little Brian Eno in the mix; sometimes it sounds a bit like Pavement; sometimes it sounds more like U2, but with Jane Birkin on lead vocals. In being united every way except sonically, BSS is a lot like the Toronto music scene itself, which has given birth to the florid anti-folk of the Hidden Cameras, the mock angry rock of Peaches, the alt-country of Royal City (now defunct). Musically, none of these bands resemble one another. What they do have in common is a warm emotional timbre and a stress on communality.
BSS is nothing if not the warmest, most community-oriented of them all, to a degree that makes you wonder if the band isn't pushing the family-on-Ecstasy-vibe just a little too far. Onstage, BSS welcomes all comers. When the band played in Japan, a kid in the audience showed up with drumsticks, and BSS let him play. In New York, at the beginning of the 2006 tour, BSS invited a film producer and a graduate student of French intellectual history to join them. That meant there were 25 people backstage, including two drummers and six horn players, many of whom had been in the same band class in junior high school. During the group's three shows in New York last month, there were so many "band members" backstage that there was barely enough room to move. On one of the nights I caught up with them, Haines from Metric, clad in a lubricious black T-shirt dress, her blond hair perfectly mussed, held hands backstage with two other girls, satellite members of the collective, as they talked emphatically about a Charlton Heston movie from the 1970's. Charles Spearin, a Buddhist BSS'er, stood placidly to one side — he was thinking about his idea for an indie-rock activist project tentatively called Broken Social Worker. Even the band's 43-year-old quasi-Socialist producer, Dave Newfeld, was on hand, gearing up to play with the band and eagerly sharing his extensive theories about the secret malfeasance of American corporations.
The practice of having a kind of cabinet made up of different Toronto bands all in one performance is part of the BSS credo, and it is also the credo of Toronto's independent music. Onstage at BSS shows, Drew tends to introduce the members of the collective by announcing the other Toronto bands they are part of, which produces the strange effect of watching an all-star concert that has come together for a fund-raiser — all sublimated artistic ego.
"It's about what we think is right," Drew says. "I've never made music without friends — they are my security blanket. Playing with friends is who we are."
II. Why Labels Do Matter
Toronto's alternative-rock scene is a place where the sweetly familial and weirdly collective rub up against the traditional markers of stardom. BSS is the largest and the most media-ready of the Toronto bands, but it is far from the only band committed to a Toronto-bred arty idealism, known to some as Torontopia. Jonny Dovercourt, a 32-year-old local rock musician and impresario, and his friend Steven Kado, a musician with an interest in hipsterish pursuits like urban planning, coined the term in 2002 to help give utopian ballast to the city's sprawling but idealistic music community. Dovercourt is so committed to Toronto that he adopted one of its street names, Dovercourt, as his last name; his real name is Jonathan Bunce.
I met Dovercourt for a pint at a sports bar, the Rhino. Sitting beneath the large rhino head mounted above the bar, Dovercourt explained that starting in the late 80's, there was a huge roster of local bands, but there was no single Toronto sound. "These were bands struggling in obscurity and were unique from each other," he said. From surfer to punk, they helped lay the groundwork for the Canadian wave that today has a worldwide audience.
Dovercourt has a penchant for arriving at rock clubs and bars with books by the famed urban critic Jane Jacobs, who has made Toronto her home for nearly 40 years. He is a public-space enthusiast intent on defending it from corporate forces and on keeping it open to the improvisational and the unexpected. In his effort to advance Toronto's fortunes, Dovercourt started a weekly music series called Wavelength, held at bars like Ted's Wrecking Yard and Sneaky Dee's. The indie-popular Constantines, which plays a kind of blue-eyed-soul-punk, had its breakout show at Wavelength, which is often described as the center of the Toronto scene and its incubator. In the past six years, hundreds of bands have played in the series, including BSS, Dovercourt's Republic of Safety, Ninja High School, the FemBots and the influential CCMC (Canadian Creative Music Collective), an improv music co-op featuring the filmmaker Michael Snow. On a typical night, two or three bands, almost always local and encompassing various genres, attract audiences of up to 200. This month, Wavelength had its 300th show.
Just as the L.A. punk scene circulated around the SST label and the early grunge scene sprang from and adhered to the Sub Pop label and K Records in Olympia, Wash., the Toronto scene has coalesced around a few key labels. The 25-year-old Kado, who has joined or started more than 10 different bands, started his own extremely independent music label, Blocks Recording Club, in 2003. Blocks now puts out records by local bands at a phenomenal pace — 30 CD's in two and a half years. The most acclaimed is Final Fantasy, which sold 7,000 copies of its last album, a string-heavy CD with full band arrangements, which Kado describes as "orchestral loner music." Unlike A&C, Blocks is a cooperative — CD's are packaged by hand — that divvies up profits between members and musicians. But compared with the even more D.I.Y. Toronto label Consumption Records — which dubs its new releases on recycled tapes — even Kado falls short. Kado may be aware that he doesn't achieve the recorded-on-a-boom-box-and-available-for-barter standard of Consumption — he has a distributor, after all — but he still won't call his label a label. To him, the term "recording club" means what it says. "We do what that community wants done," he explained.
Doing what the community wants done weighed on Drew's mind too, when he was first getting BSS and Arts & Crafts off the ground. But his model was another collectivist music label, Montreal's Constellation Records. Founded in 1997, Constellation is anti-corporate in both its music — it releases the work of Godspeed You!, Black Emperor and Do Make Say Think (two of whose members are in BSS) — and in its merchandising, refusing to sell to corporate chains like HMV. Constellation is also given to issuing polemics about the compromised nature of the music industry: "We have attempted to evolve one possible model for the recovery of an independent music ethic, hoping to summon some real sense of indie rock in spite of its reduction to a branded slogan through corporate co-optation."
For all their commitment to the same general principles, the members of BSS see themselves as being more about emotions than politics. For one thing, Arts & Crafts doesn't reject the major-label business model entirely. For another, says Drew, BSS isn't explicitly political. "Our politics are about human beings — we want to affect audiences' hearts and minds with honesty," he says. "But our records are at HMV and Virgin."
Like many indie labels today, Arts & Crafts both borrows from and rejects the culture of major labels. Jeffrey Remedios and Daniel Cutler, co-owners of the label with Drew, are both former EMI employees who were attracted to the collective feel of the Toronto music scene starting at the end of the 1990's. Remedios met Drew through Brendan Canning, and they became roommates. At the time, Drew was playing in the band K.C. Accidental. Soon, Canning and Drew started Broken Social Scene with the drummer Charles Spearin. They recorded a CD with Paper Bag Records.
"They'd have brand-new material for each show, and the shows became really something," said Remedios, a polished, affable man of 30, with a helmet of black hair and fashionably fraying clothes. "It was the first time I ever felt that level of art coming from the neighborhood." That was around 2000. "It was then that me and Kevin and Daniel had this idea for Arts & Crafts." Remedios continued. "I named it Arts & Crafts as I was trying to show that we mixed art and commerce, and that commerce was going to hold up its end of the promise. I had witnessed the machine," he said, referring to his years at EMI. "I wanted to rebel well."
For Michael Barclay, an author of "Have Not Been the Same: The CanRock Renaissance," the collective bent of Arts & Crafts and the Toronto music scene has less to do with North American D.I.Y. culture than with a distinctly Canadian temperament and music history. "It's textbook Canadian identity politics — the expression of individual will through community," Barclay says. Above all, Barclay delights in the Toronto music scene's willingness not to take itself too seriously. BSS, he says, is willing to be imperfect: "It's like a workshop, it's a band in progress."
III. All in the Family
Of course, Broken Social Scene didn't invent the music collective: creative collectives in general have a long history. And the last decade has seen an unusual spike in their numbers. In Italy, there is the Situationist- and Archigram-influenced Italian architecture collective Stalker (named after the Tarkovsky film), which stages events in abandoned urban spaces. In England, there's Picture Farm, a British film collective of writers, directors, producers and actors, which makes both documentaries and features. In New York, there is the performance-art fashion label threeasfour (formerly asfour), known for its early Cirque du Soleil-style fashion shows and later for its equally spectacular intrafamily brawls. New York's art galleries have also been twisting the meaning of the term "group show," with exhibitions like Scott Hug's 2003 show at John Connelly Presents, which featured 70 artists collaborating on a "teenage rebel" bedroom.
In Toronto, the collective-music scene has been motivated almost equally by the desire to engage in a cool cultural maneuver as by the practical pressures of limited funds. "The collective spirit happened as much out of necessity as ethics," Dovercourt says. "Most people in the music scene don't like to compete with each other. There never has been much money, so people just cram into the recording studio and cooperate in order to survive."
Walking around Toronto with Drew, it was easy to see what Dovercourt meant. People in Toronto tend to say hello to Drew. They also tend to let him in free at clubs. Strangers offer him unsolicited hugs. So do audience members at shows he plays. Sometimes he gets down into the crowd at a show and hugs as many people as he can manage.
One cold evening as we made our way down Queen Street, Drew seemed to delight in his role as the unofficial mayor of Toronto. He said hello to the hostess and several of the patrons at a local Italian restaurant. He clutched arms with the bartender of his favorite local bar, the Communist's Daughter. A young woman, whom Drew had met once in passing, stopped him and asked him to call her cousin, a victim of a random shooting, who had just come out of a coma. He called the cousin. In between encounters, he rang up a few musician friends to tell them how great their show was and to offer other words of alt-mayoral succor.
When we finally reached one of the city's older rock clubs, the Horseshoe, Drew made his way through the crowd, wrapping his arms around a local music critic, sundry music fans and the heavily pierced co-founder of the recently defunct Toronto indie label, Three Gut, who had a button affixed to her lapel that read, "My Other Girlfriend Is a Faggot."
Until recently, Drew lived within walking distance of the Horseshoe, in a splendidly filthy room that he calls "a nest of destruction," where Agnès B. suits and his original lyrics, scribbled on sheets of paper, lay in huge piles, tangled up with bottles of prescription drugs and a few sexually suggestive Polaroids, one of a girl lifting her wraparound skirt to reveal a thong. Drew isn't the only one of his collective to live with a lack of pretensions. Leslie Feist, who sings with BSS but whose solo career has recently taken off, has a home in Paris, a fan base of squealing teenage girls and the look of an art-house film heroine, but she has seemingly adopted few rock-star (or even upscale) habits. When I caught up with her, she was eating fried fish cakes she'd purchased at the local deli, discussing clothing swaps and how she was saving up for her next vacation.
It's not just the new crop of Toronto rock musicians who are perched between low-rent communal living and glossy stardom. To some extent it is the city as well. It was gentrification — in the form of two boutique hotels — that, paradoxically, gave the bands new places to play. In 2004 and 2005, two once-grand railroad-era hotels that had become flophouses were completely renovated; a small number of the neighborhood's truly marginal inhabitants, not the imitatively marginal hipsters, still hover around their doors. The Drake Hotel sponsors an artist in residence, hotelwide art installations and even a games night (Monopoly! Scrabble! Exquisite Corpse!). At the Gladstone, just two blocks away, Kado set up a portable recording studio in a hotel room and gave anyone — even bands newly minted on the spot — an hour to create an album free of charge.
IV. When the Collective Spirit Is Not Enough
Thanks to Arts & Crafts (and the labels that put out the work of other band members), Broken Social Scene can stay committed to the notion of being a sprawling, all-inclusive band, even when the reality is often less harmonious. Just getting 11 or more band members into a recording studio is virtually impossible. For now, musicians go in one or two at a time to record individual parts. Touring with such a large crew presents another set of problems. It is expensive and can lead to situations like guest lists that contain 200 names (recently, BSS decided to start charging guests and giving the proceeds to charity). There is also the matter of distributing royalties and fees as fairly as possible. A core group of seven BSS'ers are paid equally when touring. Additional musicians who show up irregularly, BSS satellite players, are paid less for their work. And while each songwriter on a BSS album is paid for his or her contribution to a song, the musicians are compensated according to how many songs they sang or played on. "We wouldn't survive in a major label," Drew explained to me. "We took our art-nerd vows, we took this concept. . .," he said and paused. Then he held up his arm. I could see that the tattoo on his wrist read, "Save Us," which he quickly covered with his hand, as if embarrassed.
In keeping with its "art-nerd vows," the band claims to have said no, on ethical grounds, to potential ad deals with Coca-Cola, Hummer and Hewlett-Packard. Remedios said that the band objected to the products that its music would be selling rather than to the commercialism itself.
"We weren't comfortable with endorsing a gas-guzzling postmilitary vehicle," Remedios says. "We asked ourselves whether we would do a commercial with Best Buy, and we said no. We asked ourselves whether would we sell our music at Best Buy, and we said yes."
Drew put it slightly differently: "When your lyrics are in a car commercial, they are stolen from you. But then again, we could be strapped and need orthodontia, and we could do a commercial."
Drew may continue to stick to the collective line — compromise only for the greater good — but Remedios seems willing to consider other options. According to Remedios, the band actually came close to selling its music for a mobile-phone ring tone, but there were, he says, "timing issues."
Increasingly, BSS's commercial success rubs uncomfortably against its collective ideals. According to Arts & Crafts, BSS sold 130,000 copies of its second album, "You Forgot It in People," right off the bat, and around 115,000 copies of the new CD, "Broken Social Scene." Not large numbers for a major rock group but large numbers for a group of musicians who for years had no profits to split at all. BSS's indie cachet can at times seem a little precarious. Nowadays the band plays big concert halls and clubs throughout North America and Europe. BSS just completed a tour on a bus outfitted with beds and flat-screen televisions; it also took along a masseuse. And though the band has refused to allow its music to be used as ad jingles, it has aggressively sought out television and film licensing deals. Songs have appeared on the far-from-collectivist television shows "The O.C.," "Queer as Folk" and "The L Word." It's these commercial concessions, along with the Toronto scene's internecine battles over artistic purity, that have led some Toronto critics and musicians to suggest that BSS is neither truly collective nor independent.
"A&C rotates around BSS, and the Blocks Recording Club catalog is more diverse — A&C has distribution in Canada from EMI that gives it promotional muscle, while Blocks is run as a cooperative and reflects the wider diversity of the local music scene," Dovercourt explains. Carl Wilson, a music critic for The Globe and Mail in Toronto, calls Blocks "one of the most committed D.I.Y. labels in North America." Kado tells me that what makes Blocks so different from, say, A&C, is that although A&C is an independent, there's little difference structurally between it and a major label. "A&C is just a label more in touch with the structure of contemporary capitalism than most," Kado says. "They outsource promotion. They are a slick small organization that is a response to the record industry being doomed. I wish they would own up to be being a small business, with a corporate structure. Words like 'collective' are thrown around so easily. Do you work with your friends and are co-owners with them or do you mediate between them and a corporate distribution company for your friends?" Kado was also quick to point out that since the bands are on tour most of the time, they are "not part of the social community. I never see them on the scene."
BSS'ers admit they rarely show up for Wavelength anymore. And even some of those inside BSS have their doubts about how collective an enterprise BSS really is. As the band's guitar player, Andrew Whiteman, told me over his favorite drink, "North American sangria, or orange juice and bad red wine," the new BSS record was Drew's CD. The CD captured Drew's "intimacy, his ambience, his nervous breakdown," he said, in a half-joking tone. At 38, Whiteman is the oldest member of the band, slight, with long hair and a pretty-boy face that has been complicated by a crosshatching of scars from a car accident. He is also the most intellectual and arguably the most talented member of the band — his inspirations include Ethiopian music, the poet William Blake and the San Francisco cult poet Jack Spicer (he likes to repeat Spicer's dying words, "My vocabulary did this to me"). In his sparsely furnished apartment, the attic room of a house owned by a friend, he played some new songs by his band, Apostle of Hustle, on his home-recording equipment: the music was mysterious and densely layered, the lyrics were allusive and playful and as usual, his guitar work was lush, combining numerous world-music influences. But it was also difficult fare.
For Whiteman and some other members of BSS, the music collective is a contradictory enterprise. On the one hand, BSS is true to the communitarian effort, generously sharing the spotlight with satellite bands and musician friends — as good as the last Apostle of Hustle CD "Folkloric Feel" was, without Whiteman's BSS and Arts & Crafts affiliation, it would most likely have sold fewer than the 8,500 it has sold so far. On the other hand, there are some members of the band who emerge as its stars (Drew and Feist) and others who do not (Canning and Whiteman).
It's hard to be in a band with ambiguous hierarchies, in which a singer isn't automatically assigned more value than the drummer. And on occasion I detected a certain steeliness underneath the comforting wool knit of the community. As Dave Newfeld, the producer, put it, it's "like a twisted Christian camping group."
V. With Friends Like These. . .
One night in Toronto, I saw the A&C label and by default BSS in action, in a show featuring Jason Collett, a 38-year-old folk rocker who records solo but is also in BSS; Apostle of Hustle; and Feist. It was in a gilded 19th-century theater called the Danforth Music Hall. The evening started with Apostle of Hustle. Whiteman, in the incestuous tradition of BSS, played a song by the band Metric — Metric is one of BSS's "friends and loves." Then Collett played. His solo music is pleasing, something like Ryan Adams if he worked a day job and also took Ativan. Finally, Feist played, and the crowd roared in appreciation. Leslie Feist, with her ink black hair and tight white pants and her penchant for singing in French, was very appealing — like Dido made over by François Truffaut.
Somehow though, as if by some invisible force field, these three separate acts fused and wound up becoming Broken Social Scene. Kevin Drew emerged, along with Collett and Whiteman, and with Feist they performed a fast rendition of a new BSS song, "Major Label Debut." Drew and Feist do-si-doed onstage, the very picture of Indie Rock Family Values. Teenage audience members jumped up in front of the stage. The grown-ups, mostly in their 20's and early 30's, stood and clapped. I overheard audience members explaining to one another what connected the various people onstage: that one of the musicians in BSS might or might not be going out with Feist and that the 13-year-old boy playing guitar was Collett's son. (For some reason no one seemed to notice that Drew's wife, who isn't even a musician — she's a social worker — was playing the horn with Feist.) The relationships among the musicians onstage clearly pleased the audience — it was like watching a sitcom, with the added ingredient of rock glamour. Perhaps they were pleased also by the A&C ethos on display: the band members hit tambourines and cowbells and linked arms, and the lyrics they sang sneered at the perils of stardom and untrammeled individualism, at being "all hooked up" and having the "masseuse on the guest list."
It was then that I recalled a conversation I'd had with Drew in one of his brief funks. He said he wasn't sure the band would stay together. We went to the Communist's Daughter, a bar whose main contribution to the brotherhood of man is its remarkably low-priced drinks. Drew wondered aloud if his band and his scene would last. He seemed to be quoting one of his new album's longest, messiest and most stirring songs, "It's All Going to Break," a song that starts with lyrics about pederasty and ends with horns and all sorts of suborchestral maneuvers that are more triumphant than miserable. Of course, the answer to whether a band or a subculture will explode is, usually, yes. Then again, there's strength in numbers.
BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE IN THE NEW YORK TIMES
Guided by (Many, Many) Voices
NYTimes.com
A Very Crowded House
Ten minutes before Broken Social Scene was due to go onstage, Kevin Drew, co-founder and lead singer of the Toronto band, had his hands up on the wall. He was clad, as usual, in baggy jeans, a moth-eaten black sweater and torn-up sneakers, a dime-store diamond on his pinkie. A woman in silver boots briefly massaged his shoulders. Nearby stood her boyfriend, Brendan Canning, who founded Broken Social Scene with Drew, his strawberry blond hair dangling toward the floor as he tried to touch his toes. Sliding closer to Canning, the band's soft-faced drummer, Justin Peroff, gave him an assist, as Leslie Feist, an occasional singer with BSS, brushed past. "Feist-y!" Drew squealed and hugged her. Her own chanteusey album, "Let It Die," had just gone gold in Canada and Europe.
Everyone was jammed together in the windowless, cluttered basement of an Ontario college auditorium, as band members stretched out or kneaded one another's backs or just sat drinking beers in chairs. A co-owner of the band's three-year-old label, Arts & Crafts, Jeffrey Remedios, was keeping up morale, checking in with the various musicians who make up the band and murmuring how great their individual work was. It was the first local show of Broken Social Scene's three-month world tour.
To call BSS a "band" is to simplify matters drastically. It's more like a network, or, as Emily Haines, a sometime BSS'er and lead singer of the Toronto band Metric, put it, "somewhere between a tribe and a cult." Most of the members of BSS are also members of other bands that are released by Arts & Crafts. The very name connotes what all the artists on the label have in common: they are lo-fi, heartfelt, ironic, makeshift and as tightly interlinked as the kids in a summer-camp lanyard-making session. The musicians play on one another's CD's (BSS can have between 9 and 17 musicians on a given track depending on who shows up or what's needed for a particular song), a level of cooperation and organization unusual in any popular-music scene, even one that might be summed up by the slogan above the bar code on BSS's most recent CD: "break all codes." Perhaps it helps — or maybe it hurts — that a few of them have also slept together, though the BSS'ers tend to be secretive about whom, when and why.
Musically, you could say that Toronto has become a nicer but less aesthetically coherent version of Seattle in the early days of grunge. Broken Social Scene is Toronto's Nirvana, without — so far — the troubled-rock-star antics or the anomie and with a social agenda that puts collective music making above individual success. The second album, "You Forgot It in People," is dedicated to "friends, families and loves."
"We made a lot of decisions to help ourselves be grounded," Drew explained to me. "The whole band is based on people who are closely connected, metaphysically. People with their hearts on their sleeves." If it all sounds hopelessly earnest — another emo band bent on saving one little corner of the world — it isn't, or not quite. BSS has forged what one critic called "endlessly replayable, perfect pop" out of musical sources that couldn't be more disparate. Sometimes Broken Social Scene sounds like Lawrence Welk crossed with the Replacements, with a little Brian Eno in the mix; sometimes it sounds a bit like Pavement; sometimes it sounds more like U2, but with Jane Birkin on lead vocals. In being united every way except sonically, BSS is a lot like the Toronto music scene itself, which has given birth to the florid anti-folk of the Hidden Cameras, the mock angry rock of Peaches, the alt-country of Royal City (now defunct). Musically, none of these bands resemble one another. What they do have in common is a warm emotional timbre and a stress on communality.
BSS is nothing if not the warmest, most community-oriented of them all, to a degree that makes you wonder if the band isn't pushing the family-on-Ecstasy-vibe just a little too far. Onstage, BSS welcomes all comers. When the band played in Japan, a kid in the audience showed up with drumsticks, and BSS let him play. In New York, at the beginning of the 2006 tour, BSS invited a film producer and a graduate student of French intellectual history to join them. That meant there were 25 people backstage, including two drummers and six horn players, many of whom had been in the same band class in junior high school. During the group's three shows in New York last month, there were so many "band members" backstage that there was barely enough room to move. On one of the nights I caught up with them, Haines from Metric, clad in a lubricious black T-shirt dress, her blond hair perfectly mussed, held hands backstage with two other girls, satellite members of the collective, as they talked emphatically about a Charlton Heston movie from the 1970's. Charles Spearin, a Buddhist BSS'er, stood placidly to one side — he was thinking about his idea for an indie-rock activist project tentatively called Broken Social Worker. Even the band's 43-year-old quasi-Socialist producer, Dave Newfeld, was on hand, gearing up to play with the band and eagerly sharing his extensive theories about the secret malfeasance of American corporations.
The practice of having a kind of cabinet made up of different Toronto bands all in one performance is part of the BSS credo, and it is also the credo of Toronto's independent music. Onstage at BSS shows, Drew tends to introduce the members of the collective by announcing the other Toronto bands they are part of, which produces the strange effect of watching an all-star concert that has come together for a fund-raiser — all sublimated artistic ego.
"It's about what we think is right," Drew says. "I've never made music without friends — they are my security blanket. Playing with friends is who we are."
II. Why Labels Do Matter
Toronto's alternative-rock scene is a place where the sweetly familial and weirdly collective rub up against the traditional markers of stardom. BSS is the largest and the most media-ready of the Toronto bands, but it is far from the only band committed to a Toronto-bred arty idealism, known to some as Torontopia. Jonny Dovercourt, a 32-year-old local rock musician and impresario, and his friend Steven Kado, a musician with an interest in hipsterish pursuits like urban planning, coined the term in 2002 to help give utopian ballast to the city's sprawling but idealistic music community. Dovercourt is so committed to Toronto that he adopted one of its street names, Dovercourt, as his last name; his real name is Jonathan Bunce.
I met Dovercourt for a pint at a sports bar, the Rhino. Sitting beneath the large rhino head mounted above the bar, Dovercourt explained that starting in the late 80's, there was a huge roster of local bands, but there was no single Toronto sound. "These were bands struggling in obscurity and were unique from each other," he said. From surfer to punk, they helped lay the groundwork for the Canadian wave that today has a worldwide audience.
Dovercourt has a penchant for arriving at rock clubs and bars with books by the famed urban critic Jane Jacobs, who has made Toronto her home for nearly 40 years. He is a public-space enthusiast intent on defending it from corporate forces and on keeping it open to the improvisational and the unexpected. In his effort to advance Toronto's fortunes, Dovercourt started a weekly music series called Wavelength, held at bars like Ted's Wrecking Yard and Sneaky Dee's. The indie-popular Constantines, which plays a kind of blue-eyed-soul-punk, had its breakout show at Wavelength, which is often described as the center of the Toronto scene and its incubator. In the past six years, hundreds of bands have played in the series, including BSS, Dovercourt's Republic of Safety, Ninja High School, the FemBots and the influential CCMC (Canadian Creative Music Collective), an improv music co-op featuring the filmmaker Michael Snow. On a typical night, two or three bands, almost always local and encompassing various genres, attract audiences of up to 200. This month, Wavelength had its 300th show.
Just as the L.A. punk scene circulated around the SST label and the early grunge scene sprang from and adhered to the Sub Pop label and K Records in Olympia, Wash., the Toronto scene has coalesced around a few key labels. The 25-year-old Kado, who has joined or started more than 10 different bands, started his own extremely independent music label, Blocks Recording Club, in 2003. Blocks now puts out records by local bands at a phenomenal pace — 30 CD's in two and a half years. The most acclaimed is Final Fantasy, which sold 7,000 copies of its last album, a string-heavy CD with full band arrangements, which Kado describes as "orchestral loner music." Unlike A&C, Blocks is a cooperative — CD's are packaged by hand — that divvies up profits between members and musicians. But compared with the even more D.I.Y. Toronto label Consumption Records — which dubs its new releases on recycled tapes — even Kado falls short. Kado may be aware that he doesn't achieve the recorded-on-a-boom-box-and-available-for-barter standard of Consumption — he has a distributor, after all — but he still won't call his label a label. To him, the term "recording club" means what it says. "We do what that community wants done," he explained.
Doing what the community wants done weighed on Drew's mind too, when he was first getting BSS and Arts & Crafts off the ground. But his model was another collectivist music label, Montreal's Constellation Records. Founded in 1997, Constellation is anti-corporate in both its music — it releases the work of Godspeed You!, Black Emperor and Do Make Say Think (two of whose members are in BSS) — and in its merchandising, refusing to sell to corporate chains like HMV. Constellation is also given to issuing polemics about the compromised nature of the music industry: "We have attempted to evolve one possible model for the recovery of an independent music ethic, hoping to summon some real sense of indie rock in spite of its reduction to a branded slogan through corporate co-optation."
For all their commitment to the same general principles, the members of BSS see themselves as being more about emotions than politics. For one thing, Arts & Crafts doesn't reject the major-label business model entirely. For another, says Drew, BSS isn't explicitly political. "Our politics are about human beings — we want to affect audiences' hearts and minds with honesty," he says. "But our records are at HMV and Virgin."
Like many indie labels today, Arts & Crafts both borrows from and rejects the culture of major labels. Jeffrey Remedios and Daniel Cutler, co-owners of the label with Drew, are both former EMI employees who were attracted to the collective feel of the Toronto music scene starting at the end of the 1990's. Remedios met Drew through Brendan Canning, and they became roommates. At the time, Drew was playing in the band K.C. Accidental. Soon, Canning and Drew started Broken Social Scene with the drummer Charles Spearin. They recorded a CD with Paper Bag Records.
"They'd have brand-new material for each show, and the shows became really something," said Remedios, a polished, affable man of 30, with a helmet of black hair and fashionably fraying clothes. "It was the first time I ever felt that level of art coming from the neighborhood." That was around 2000. "It was then that me and Kevin and Daniel had this idea for Arts & Crafts." Remedios continued. "I named it Arts & Crafts as I was trying to show that we mixed art and commerce, and that commerce was going to hold up its end of the promise. I had witnessed the machine," he said, referring to his years at EMI. "I wanted to rebel well."
For Michael Barclay, an author of "Have Not Been the Same: The CanRock Renaissance," the collective bent of Arts & Crafts and the Toronto music scene has less to do with North American D.I.Y. culture than with a distinctly Canadian temperament and music history. "It's textbook Canadian identity politics — the expression of individual will through community," Barclay says. Above all, Barclay delights in the Toronto music scene's willingness not to take itself too seriously. BSS, he says, is willing to be imperfect: "It's like a workshop, it's a band in progress."
III. All in the Family
Of course, Broken Social Scene didn't invent the music collective: creative collectives in general have a long history. And the last decade has seen an unusual spike in their numbers. In Italy, there is the Situationist- and Archigram-influenced Italian architecture collective Stalker (named after the Tarkovsky film), which stages events in abandoned urban spaces. In England, there's Picture Farm, a British film collective of writers, directors, producers and actors, which makes both documentaries and features. In New York, there is the performance-art fashion label threeasfour (formerly asfour), known for its early Cirque du Soleil-style fashion shows and later for its equally spectacular intrafamily brawls. New York's art galleries have also been twisting the meaning of the term "group show," with exhibitions like Scott Hug's 2003 show at John Connelly Presents, which featured 70 artists collaborating on a "teenage rebel" bedroom.
In Toronto, the collective-music scene has been motivated almost equally by the desire to engage in a cool cultural maneuver as by the practical pressures of limited funds. "The collective spirit happened as much out of necessity as ethics," Dovercourt says. "Most people in the music scene don't like to compete with each other. There never has been much money, so people just cram into the recording studio and cooperate in order to survive."
Walking around Toronto with Drew, it was easy to see what Dovercourt meant. People in Toronto tend to say hello to Drew. They also tend to let him in free at clubs. Strangers offer him unsolicited hugs. So do audience members at shows he plays. Sometimes he gets down into the crowd at a show and hugs as many people as he can manage.
One cold evening as we made our way down Queen Street, Drew seemed to delight in his role as the unofficial mayor of Toronto. He said hello to the hostess and several of the patrons at a local Italian restaurant. He clutched arms with the bartender of his favorite local bar, the Communist's Daughter. A young woman, whom Drew had met once in passing, stopped him and asked him to call her cousin, a victim of a random shooting, who had just come out of a coma. He called the cousin. In between encounters, he rang up a few musician friends to tell them how great their show was and to offer other words of alt-mayoral succor.
When we finally reached one of the city's older rock clubs, the Horseshoe, Drew made his way through the crowd, wrapping his arms around a local music critic, sundry music fans and the heavily pierced co-founder of the recently defunct Toronto indie label, Three Gut, who had a button affixed to her lapel that read, "My Other Girlfriend Is a Faggot."
Until recently, Drew lived within walking distance of the Horseshoe, in a splendidly filthy room that he calls "a nest of destruction," where Agnès B. suits and his original lyrics, scribbled on sheets of paper, lay in huge piles, tangled up with bottles of prescription drugs and a few sexually suggestive Polaroids, one of a girl lifting her wraparound skirt to reveal a thong. Drew isn't the only one of his collective to live with a lack of pretensions. Leslie Feist, who sings with BSS but whose solo career has recently taken off, has a home in Paris, a fan base of squealing teenage girls and the look of an art-house film heroine, but she has seemingly adopted few rock-star (or even upscale) habits. When I caught up with her, she was eating fried fish cakes she'd purchased at the local deli, discussing clothing swaps and how she was saving up for her next vacation.
It's not just the new crop of Toronto rock musicians who are perched between low-rent communal living and glossy stardom. To some extent it is the city as well. It was gentrification — in the form of two boutique hotels — that, paradoxically, gave the bands new places to play. In 2004 and 2005, two once-grand railroad-era hotels that had become flophouses were completely renovated; a small number of the neighborhood's truly marginal inhabitants, not the imitatively marginal hipsters, still hover around their doors. The Drake Hotel sponsors an artist in residence, hotelwide art installations and even a games night (Monopoly! Scrabble! Exquisite Corpse!). At the Gladstone, just two blocks away, Kado set up a portable recording studio in a hotel room and gave anyone — even bands newly minted on the spot — an hour to create an album free of charge.
IV. When the Collective Spirit Is Not Enough
Thanks to Arts & Crafts (and the labels that put out the work of other band members), Broken Social Scene can stay committed to the notion of being a sprawling, all-inclusive band, even when the reality is often less harmonious. Just getting 11 or more band members into a recording studio is virtually impossible. For now, musicians go in one or two at a time to record individual parts. Touring with such a large crew presents another set of problems. It is expensive and can lead to situations like guest lists that contain 200 names (recently, BSS decided to start charging guests and giving the proceeds to charity). There is also the matter of distributing royalties and fees as fairly as possible. A core group of seven BSS'ers are paid equally when touring. Additional musicians who show up irregularly, BSS satellite players, are paid less for their work. And while each songwriter on a BSS album is paid for his or her contribution to a song, the musicians are compensated according to how many songs they sang or played on. "We wouldn't survive in a major label," Drew explained to me. "We took our art-nerd vows, we took this concept. . .," he said and paused. Then he held up his arm. I could see that the tattoo on his wrist read, "Save Us," which he quickly covered with his hand, as if embarrassed.
In keeping with its "art-nerd vows," the band claims to have said no, on ethical grounds, to potential ad deals with Coca-Cola, Hummer and Hewlett-Packard. Remedios said that the band objected to the products that its music would be selling rather than to the commercialism itself.
"We weren't comfortable with endorsing a gas-guzzling postmilitary vehicle," Remedios says. "We asked ourselves whether we would do a commercial with Best Buy, and we said no. We asked ourselves whether would we sell our music at Best Buy, and we said yes."
Drew put it slightly differently: "When your lyrics are in a car commercial, they are stolen from you. But then again, we could be strapped and need orthodontia, and we could do a commercial."
Drew may continue to stick to the collective line — compromise only for the greater good — but Remedios seems willing to consider other options. According to Remedios, the band actually came close to selling its music for a mobile-phone ring tone, but there were, he says, "timing issues."
Increasingly, BSS's commercial success rubs uncomfortably against its collective ideals. According to Arts & Crafts, BSS sold 130,000 copies of its second album, "You Forgot It in People," right off the bat, and around 115,000 copies of the new CD, "Broken Social Scene." Not large numbers for a major rock group but large numbers for a group of musicians who for years had no profits to split at all. BSS's indie cachet can at times seem a little precarious. Nowadays the band plays big concert halls and clubs throughout North America and Europe. BSS just completed a tour on a bus outfitted with beds and flat-screen televisions; it also took along a masseuse. And though the band has refused to allow its music to be used as ad jingles, it has aggressively sought out television and film licensing deals. Songs have appeared on the far-from-collectivist television shows "The O.C.," "Queer as Folk" and "The L Word." It's these commercial concessions, along with the Toronto scene's internecine battles over artistic purity, that have led some Toronto critics and musicians to suggest that BSS is neither truly collective nor independent.
"A&C rotates around BSS, and the Blocks Recording Club catalog is more diverse — A&C has distribution in Canada from EMI that gives it promotional muscle, while Blocks is run as a cooperative and reflects the wider diversity of the local music scene," Dovercourt explains. Carl Wilson, a music critic for The Globe and Mail in Toronto, calls Blocks "one of the most committed D.I.Y. labels in North America." Kado tells me that what makes Blocks so different from, say, A&C, is that although A&C is an independent, there's little difference structurally between it and a major label. "A&C is just a label more in touch with the structure of contemporary capitalism than most," Kado says. "They outsource promotion. They are a slick small organization that is a response to the record industry being doomed. I wish they would own up to be being a small business, with a corporate structure. Words like 'collective' are thrown around so easily. Do you work with your friends and are co-owners with them or do you mediate between them and a corporate distribution company for your friends?" Kado was also quick to point out that since the bands are on tour most of the time, they are "not part of the social community. I never see them on the scene."
BSS'ers admit they rarely show up for Wavelength anymore. And even some of those inside BSS have their doubts about how collective an enterprise BSS really is. As the band's guitar player, Andrew Whiteman, told me over his favorite drink, "North American sangria, or orange juice and bad red wine," the new BSS record was Drew's CD. The CD captured Drew's "intimacy, his ambience, his nervous breakdown," he said, in a half-joking tone. At 38, Whiteman is the oldest member of the band, slight, with long hair and a pretty-boy face that has been complicated by a crosshatching of scars from a car accident. He is also the most intellectual and arguably the most talented member of the band — his inspirations include Ethiopian music, the poet William Blake and the San Francisco cult poet Jack Spicer (he likes to repeat Spicer's dying words, "My vocabulary did this to me"). In his sparsely furnished apartment, the attic room of a house owned by a friend, he played some new songs by his band, Apostle of Hustle, on his home-recording equipment: the music was mysterious and densely layered, the lyrics were allusive and playful and as usual, his guitar work was lush, combining numerous world-music influences. But it was also difficult fare.
For Whiteman and some other members of BSS, the music collective is a contradictory enterprise. On the one hand, BSS is true to the communitarian effort, generously sharing the spotlight with satellite bands and musician friends — as good as the last Apostle of Hustle CD "Folkloric Feel" was, without Whiteman's BSS and Arts & Crafts affiliation, it would most likely have sold fewer than the 8,500 it has sold so far. On the other hand, there are some members of the band who emerge as its stars (Drew and Feist) and others who do not (Canning and Whiteman).
It's hard to be in a band with ambiguous hierarchies, in which a singer isn't automatically assigned more value than the drummer. And on occasion I detected a certain steeliness underneath the comforting wool knit of the community. As Dave Newfeld, the producer, put it, it's "like a twisted Christian camping group."
V. With Friends Like These. . .
One night in Toronto, I saw the A&C label and by default BSS in action, in a show featuring Jason Collett, a 38-year-old folk rocker who records solo but is also in BSS; Apostle of Hustle; and Feist. It was in a gilded 19th-century theater called the Danforth Music Hall. The evening started with Apostle of Hustle. Whiteman, in the incestuous tradition of BSS, played a song by the band Metric — Metric is one of BSS's "friends and loves." Then Collett played. His solo music is pleasing, something like Ryan Adams if he worked a day job and also took Ativan. Finally, Feist played, and the crowd roared in appreciation. Leslie Feist, with her ink black hair and tight white pants and her penchant for singing in French, was very appealing — like Dido made over by François Truffaut.
Somehow though, as if by some invisible force field, these three separate acts fused and wound up becoming Broken Social Scene. Kevin Drew emerged, along with Collett and Whiteman, and with Feist they performed a fast rendition of a new BSS song, "Major Label Debut." Drew and Feist do-si-doed onstage, the very picture of Indie Rock Family Values. Teenage audience members jumped up in front of the stage. The grown-ups, mostly in their 20's and early 30's, stood and clapped. I overheard audience members explaining to one another what connected the various people onstage: that one of the musicians in BSS might or might not be going out with Feist and that the 13-year-old boy playing guitar was Collett's son. (For some reason no one seemed to notice that Drew's wife, who isn't even a musician — she's a social worker — was playing the horn with Feist.) The relationships among the musicians onstage clearly pleased the audience — it was like watching a sitcom, with the added ingredient of rock glamour. Perhaps they were pleased also by the A&C ethos on display: the band members hit tambourines and cowbells and linked arms, and the lyrics they sang sneered at the perils of stardom and untrammeled individualism, at being "all hooked up" and having the "masseuse on the guest list."
It was then that I recalled a conversation I'd had with Drew in one of his brief funks. He said he wasn't sure the band would stay together. We went to the Communist's Daughter, a bar whose main contribution to the brotherhood of man is its remarkably low-priced drinks. Drew wondered aloud if his band and his scene would last. He seemed to be quoting one of his new album's longest, messiest and most stirring songs, "It's All Going to Break," a song that starts with lyrics about pederasty and ends with horns and all sorts of suborchestral maneuvers that are more triumphant than miserable. Of course, the answer to whether a band or a subculture will explode is, usually, yes. Then again, there's strength in numbers.
posted by D @ 8:20 AM
0 comments
2.24.2006
ALTERNATIVE ENERGY INVESTING
Energy demand is growing worldwide. It is expected to increase 54% over 20 years with new demand in developing nations, in particular China and India are expected to grow 91% - IEA
As energy demand soars, alternative energy including wind, solar, hydroelectric, hybrid automotive and fuel cells have become multi-billion dollar markets
New research and unprecedented investment in alternative energy are reducing the cost which contrasts sharply with recent trends and risks associated with fossil fuels
The Combined clean energy markets of solar, wind and fuel cells was $13 billion in 2003, a 36% annual growth over the year before, when the industry was valued at $9.5 billion
Connecticut is requesting proposals for 100MW of renewable energy, much of which is fuel cells. The worldwide installed base of fuel cells today is 65-75MW (source, DOD)
LIPA (The Long Island Power Authority) recently announced a 10MW request for proposal for their territory to be installed in 2006
Mohr Davidow, a large Silicon Valley VC, recently closed on a new $400 million clean energy fund. VC investment in the United States for energy- technology startup companies reached $520 million during 2004 - 2.6% of the total of $20.4 billion in VC invetments made in the U.S. last year
The Federal budget proposal for 2006 includes $322 million for fuel cell and hydrogen development
G.E. Capital recently launched a comprehensive global effort to finance clean energy
Last year, Citigroup launched a worldwide search for alternative energy companies and projects to fund
The average efficiency, %(LHV) for US fossil fuel power plants is 33% - This is below rates of 35%-70% recently achieved by various combinations of fuel cell plants
Caterpillar, PPL, Alliance, Chevron, Enbridge and many others have fuel cell equipment or power plant designs in various stages of development and financing
The following is a short-list of alternative energy companies that are worth watching:
Distributed Generation Ballard Power Systems, Capstone Turbine, Distributed Energy Systems, Daystar, Energy Conversion Devices, Evergreen Solar, FuelCell Energy, Hydrogenics, Millennium Cell, Plug Power, Vestas Wind Energy, Gamesa
Clean Fuel & Combustion Technology Catalytica Energy Systems, Fuel Tech N.V., Headwaters, Methanex Corp., Quantum Fuel Systems Tech, Syntroleum Corp, Pacific Ethanol, International Fuel Technology, IMPCO Technologies
Energy Storage Active Power, Arotech Corp., Beacon Power Corp., C&D Tech, EnerSys, Medis Technologies, Ultralife Batteries, Valence Technologies, Maxwell Technologies, Exide
Power Electronics Artesyn Tech., Magnetek, PECO II, Power-One, SatCon Technology, UQM Technologies, Vicor Corp.
Power Quality American Power Conversion, American Superconductor, Intermagnetics
Energy Information Technology Itron, Badger Meter
OTHER ITEMS
Latest Bin Laden Tape for Completists Only
The Onion
NEW YORK—CIA analyst Douglas Biryla advised the public at large to skip the latest video tape from fugitive Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden Monday. "This latest offering doesn't have anything his post 9-11 work lacks—just the usual ominous threats of total annihilation to the West," Biryla said. "Despite some nice remastering work courtesy of Al-Sahab, it's not bin Laden's best , and certainly not mandatory viewing outside of the intelligence community or bin Laden's more hardcore fans." Biryla's monthly review column on pre-recorded Islamist screeds runs in 38 foreign-policy newsletters worldwide.
Father Doesn't Understand Son's Obsession with Classic Rock
SAN LUIS OBISPO, CA—Phil Poole, 42, said Monday that he is coming to grips with his 15-year-old son Carter's taste in music. "I thought he was playing it as a sarcastic thing, and I was like, 'Hey, kid, your mother and I dated to Boston and Journey,'" Poole said. "But after I overheard him talking about it with his friends, I realized he actually likes it. Then I got worried—I mean, his mother and I dated to Boston and Journey." Poole added that he will not give Carter $30 to buy a Hot Topic rip-off of the Asia T-shirt he bought for $10 at Spencer's Gifts in 1982.
Energy demand is growing worldwide. It is expected to increase 54% over 20 years with new demand in developing nations, in particular China and India are expected to grow 91% - IEA
As energy demand soars, alternative energy including wind, solar, hydroelectric, hybrid automotive and fuel cells have become multi-billion dollar markets
New research and unprecedented investment in alternative energy are reducing the cost which contrasts sharply with recent trends and risks associated with fossil fuels
The Combined clean energy markets of solar, wind and fuel cells was $13 billion in 2003, a 36% annual growth over the year before, when the industry was valued at $9.5 billion
Connecticut is requesting proposals for 100MW of renewable energy, much of which is fuel cells. The worldwide installed base of fuel cells today is 65-75MW (source, DOD)
LIPA (The Long Island Power Authority) recently announced a 10MW request for proposal for their territory to be installed in 2006
Mohr Davidow, a large Silicon Valley VC, recently closed on a new $400 million clean energy fund. VC investment in the United States for energy- technology startup companies reached $520 million during 2004 - 2.6% of the total of $20.4 billion in VC invetments made in the U.S. last year
The Federal budget proposal for 2006 includes $322 million for fuel cell and hydrogen development
G.E. Capital recently launched a comprehensive global effort to finance clean energy
Last year, Citigroup launched a worldwide search for alternative energy companies and projects to fund
The average efficiency, %(LHV) for US fossil fuel power plants is 33% - This is below rates of 35%-70% recently achieved by various combinations of fuel cell plants
Caterpillar, PPL, Alliance, Chevron, Enbridge and many others have fuel cell equipment or power plant designs in various stages of development and financing
The following is a short-list of alternative energy companies that are worth watching:
Distributed Generation Ballard Power Systems, Capstone Turbine, Distributed Energy Systems, Daystar, Energy Conversion Devices, Evergreen Solar, FuelCell Energy, Hydrogenics, Millennium Cell, Plug Power, Vestas Wind Energy, Gamesa
Clean Fuel & Combustion Technology Catalytica Energy Systems, Fuel Tech N.V., Headwaters, Methanex Corp., Quantum Fuel Systems Tech, Syntroleum Corp, Pacific Ethanol, International Fuel Technology, IMPCO Technologies
Energy Storage Active Power, Arotech Corp., Beacon Power Corp., C&D Tech, EnerSys, Medis Technologies, Ultralife Batteries, Valence Technologies, Maxwell Technologies, Exide
Power Electronics Artesyn Tech., Magnetek, PECO II, Power-One, SatCon Technology, UQM Technologies, Vicor Corp.
Power Quality American Power Conversion, American Superconductor, Intermagnetics
Energy Information Technology Itron, Badger Meter
OTHER ITEMS
Latest Bin Laden Tape for Completists Only
The Onion
NEW YORK—CIA analyst Douglas Biryla advised the public at large to skip the latest video tape from fugitive Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden Monday. "This latest offering doesn't have anything his post 9-11 work lacks—just the usual ominous threats of total annihilation to the West," Biryla said. "Despite some nice remastering work courtesy of Al-Sahab, it's not bin Laden's best , and certainly not mandatory viewing outside of the intelligence community or bin Laden's more hardcore fans." Biryla's monthly review column on pre-recorded Islamist screeds runs in 38 foreign-policy newsletters worldwide.
Father Doesn't Understand Son's Obsession with Classic Rock
SAN LUIS OBISPO, CA—Phil Poole, 42, said Monday that he is coming to grips with his 15-year-old son Carter's taste in music. "I thought he was playing it as a sarcastic thing, and I was like, 'Hey, kid, your mother and I dated to Boston and Journey,'" Poole said. "But after I overheard him talking about it with his friends, I realized he actually likes it. Then I got worried—I mean, his mother and I dated to Boston and Journey." Poole added that he will not give Carter $30 to buy a Hot Topic rip-off of the Asia T-shirt he bought for $10 at Spencer's Gifts in 1982.
posted by D @ 11:38 AM
0 comments
MUSIC DOWNLOADS OF THE WEEK
I Love You, Me Neither - Cat Power and Karen Elson
Folk Death 95 - Mogwai
Eye of the Volcano - Stereolab
Love Ain't Just a Four Letter Word - Jenny Wilson
Thriller - Petra Haden
Girl in the War - Josh Ritter
Woman King - Iron & Wine
Rectify - Beth Orton
Forget Her - Jeff Buckley shaking demons loose
This is not a love song - Crispin Glover
Exit Music (for a film) - The Cinematic Orchestra
Girl (gangly remix) - Beck
Like a Rolling Stone - The Wailers
B&%#$ ain't $%&* - Ben FoldsB&%#$ ain't $%&* - Dr. Dre
Jeff Harris, January 22, 2006
I Love You, Me Neither - Cat Power and Karen Elson
Folk Death 95 - Mogwai
Eye of the Volcano - Stereolab
Love Ain't Just a Four Letter Word - Jenny Wilson
Thriller - Petra Haden
Girl in the War - Josh Ritter
Woman King - Iron & Wine
Rectify - Beth Orton
Forget Her - Jeff Buckley shaking demons loose
This is not a love song - Crispin Glover
Exit Music (for a film) - The Cinematic Orchestra
Girl (gangly remix) - Beck
Like a Rolling Stone - The Wailers
B&%#$ ain't $%&* - Ben FoldsB&%#$ ain't $%&* - Dr. Dre
Jeff Harris, January 22, 2006
posted by D @ 7:18 AM
0 comments
2.23.2006
I'm really not too surprised about the Canadian Olympic hockey team's crappy result. The coaches had no plan, it seemed, and Staal/Crosby/Spezza should have been on the team. It wasn't Bertuzzi's fault they lost FTR.
I haven't seen much of the Olympics, but highlights for me include
Pavarotti's rendition of Nessun Dorma. Peter Mansbridge was crying when it was done.
The women's moguls. Jennifer Heil's incredible ability to thrive under pressure.
Crawford's cross-country sprint.
Women's hockey team dominance.
MUSIC
Feist: "Mushaboom (Postal Service remix)"
Non-shocker: In the Postal Service's clutches, Feist's dream of domesticity trades its jubilant bounce for a bubble-wrapped, stuttering glide. Dntel earns zero points for innovation here. The hyperactive pixels shuffling around the vocals sound like they were lifted wholesale from the back half of "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight", at least the superstructure if not the specifics. It's a little drowsier so as not to disturb Feist's stately vocals; otherwise, it's chunky midi biz as usual. Twee electro pulses swarm around deep bass tones; drums skitter in ornate Spirograph loops; Ben Gibbard chews scenery on the chorus in a glitchy one-man call and response. The original version's guitar line was like getting stung by bees if getting stung by bees felt really good; Postal Service swallows the prickle and pukes honey. It's formulaic, but the strength of the source material and the enduring eloquence of Dntel's increasingly rote algorithm rescue it from irrelevance.
NESSUN DORMA TRANSLATION:
The Prince
No one sleeps, no one sleeps...
Even you, o Princess,
In your cold room,
Watch the stars,
That tremble with love
And with hope.
But my secret is hidden within me;
My name no one shall know, no, no,
On your mouth I will speak it
When the light shines,
And my kiss will dissolve the silence
That makes you mine.
Chorus
No one will know his name
And we must, alas, die.
Vanish, o night!
Set, stars!
At daybreak, I shall conquer!
MOVIE REVIEW
The Intruder
Stylus
There’s a very specific sort of restlessness pervading the films of Claire Denis. In terms of subject, they’re all over the map—from cannibalistic sexual predators to Foreign Legion officers stationed in Eastern Africa to strangers connecting in the Paris night—but they’re all populated by lonely, fatally incomplete individuals attempting to make sense of the world around them. The calmness of these films’ surfaces and the lush sensuality of their images contrast hauntingly with the muted inner turmoil of Denis’s world-weary characters. “I’m not here / This isn’t happening,” sang Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. It could serve as a mantra for Denis.
The Intruder, adapted from Jean-Luc Nancy’s novel, L’Intrus, represents a bold apotheosis of this familiar theme. Denis’s relationship with conventional narrative form has long been, at best, tenuous, but here, she strays from it almost entirely. In the same interview I’ve quoted from above (conducted by Film Comment editor Gavin Smith), Denis noted, “…when you take away a scene in between two scenes that you were not sure of, suddenly, by contact, those two scenes become much better.” It’s a seemingly simple strategy, but one that few active filmmakers could pull off with any semblance of grace. Denis, with invaluable assistance from DP extraordinaire Agnes Godard and editor Nelly Quettier, makes it look downright easy. There isn’t another director in the Western Hemisphere making movies so richly fluid in their sense of possibility and wide-open spaces. A shot of a woman driving a pack of Malamutes across an Arctic landscape may follow the serene image of a ship floating on the Pacific. Watching a Claire Denis film feels less like trying to find your way out of a maze than traveling down every possible path, regardless of where it may lead.
The plot in Denis’s latest has something to do with an older gentleman (Michel Subor, who played a smaller role in Beau Travail) who lives alone with his dogs and hooks up with a local pharmacist for casual sex. Alienated from his son and daughter-in-law and troubled by physical health problems, he leaves his home near the French-Swiss border in search of a new heart and a son he may have fathered decades ago in Tahiti. He finds the former, receiving a transplant operation in Korea; the latter proves more difficult to locate.
That’s all good and well, but what The Intruder is actually “about,” above all else, is the deliberate progression of images and sounds. Even with content so obviously ripe for symbolic plundering, Denis opts for subtlety—for moments or, more specifically, the purposeful juxtaposition and carefully calculated rhythm of interwoven shots and scenes. A story such as this one would typically be played for straight, tear-jerking drama; Denis resplices it into genuine mystery. How, for instance, does Beatrice Dalle’s dog-breeder/sled-driver factor into the narrative? Don’t ask me. All I know is that IMDb credits her as “Queen of the Northern Hemisphere.”
The “intruder” of the film’s title is both Subor’s Louis invading the island paradise, and the new heart planted inside his body. In a broader sense, it may also refer to man’s relationship with the natural world. Like Terrence Malick, Denis is fascinated by the idea of sophisticated human existence penetrating the untapped harmony of nature, and after two consecutive films shot in urban locations, she’s clearly in her element here. Louis is Denis’s Odysseus (or Leopold Bloom), out to reclaim some fragment of his past. But it’s the trip, not the destination, that counts, and he never appears less than ill at ease, forced constantly to negotiate with his surroundings. As Sean Penn’s character observed in The Thin Red Line, “In this world, a man, himself, is nothing. And there ain't no world but this one.”
BASEBALL SEASON IS APPROACHING
Manny still wants out: The paper speculated that the fact Manny recently was granted a late report date, is a fairly good indication that he still wants to be traded. The last time the two clubs talked, a major roadblock presented itself in that the Red Sox asked for two of the Angels top prospects, reliever Scot Shields, and arguably the most versatile player in baseball in Chone Figgins. It wouldn't surprise us if the two team's continued to talk this spring, but the gap is wide between where they are now, and a completed deal.
I haven't seen much of the Olympics, but highlights for me include
Pavarotti's rendition of Nessun Dorma. Peter Mansbridge was crying when it was done.
The women's moguls. Jennifer Heil's incredible ability to thrive under pressure.
Crawford's cross-country sprint.
Women's hockey team dominance.
MUSIC
Feist: "Mushaboom (Postal Service remix)"
Non-shocker: In the Postal Service's clutches, Feist's dream of domesticity trades its jubilant bounce for a bubble-wrapped, stuttering glide. Dntel earns zero points for innovation here. The hyperactive pixels shuffling around the vocals sound like they were lifted wholesale from the back half of "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight", at least the superstructure if not the specifics. It's a little drowsier so as not to disturb Feist's stately vocals; otherwise, it's chunky midi biz as usual. Twee electro pulses swarm around deep bass tones; drums skitter in ornate Spirograph loops; Ben Gibbard chews scenery on the chorus in a glitchy one-man call and response. The original version's guitar line was like getting stung by bees if getting stung by bees felt really good; Postal Service swallows the prickle and pukes honey. It's formulaic, but the strength of the source material and the enduring eloquence of Dntel's increasingly rote algorithm rescue it from irrelevance.
NESSUN DORMA TRANSLATION:
The Prince
No one sleeps, no one sleeps...
Even you, o Princess,
In your cold room,
Watch the stars,
That tremble with love
And with hope.
But my secret is hidden within me;
My name no one shall know, no, no,
On your mouth I will speak it
When the light shines,
And my kiss will dissolve the silence
That makes you mine.
Chorus
No one will know his name
And we must, alas, die.
Vanish, o night!
Set, stars!
At daybreak, I shall conquer!
MOVIE REVIEW
The Intruder
Stylus
There’s a very specific sort of restlessness pervading the films of Claire Denis. In terms of subject, they’re all over the map—from cannibalistic sexual predators to Foreign Legion officers stationed in Eastern Africa to strangers connecting in the Paris night—but they’re all populated by lonely, fatally incomplete individuals attempting to make sense of the world around them. The calmness of these films’ surfaces and the lush sensuality of their images contrast hauntingly with the muted inner turmoil of Denis’s world-weary characters. “I’m not here / This isn’t happening,” sang Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. It could serve as a mantra for Denis.
The Intruder, adapted from Jean-Luc Nancy’s novel, L’Intrus, represents a bold apotheosis of this familiar theme. Denis’s relationship with conventional narrative form has long been, at best, tenuous, but here, she strays from it almost entirely. In the same interview I’ve quoted from above (conducted by Film Comment editor Gavin Smith), Denis noted, “…when you take away a scene in between two scenes that you were not sure of, suddenly, by contact, those two scenes become much better.” It’s a seemingly simple strategy, but one that few active filmmakers could pull off with any semblance of grace. Denis, with invaluable assistance from DP extraordinaire Agnes Godard and editor Nelly Quettier, makes it look downright easy. There isn’t another director in the Western Hemisphere making movies so richly fluid in their sense of possibility and wide-open spaces. A shot of a woman driving a pack of Malamutes across an Arctic landscape may follow the serene image of a ship floating on the Pacific. Watching a Claire Denis film feels less like trying to find your way out of a maze than traveling down every possible path, regardless of where it may lead.
The plot in Denis’s latest has something to do with an older gentleman (Michel Subor, who played a smaller role in Beau Travail) who lives alone with his dogs and hooks up with a local pharmacist for casual sex. Alienated from his son and daughter-in-law and troubled by physical health problems, he leaves his home near the French-Swiss border in search of a new heart and a son he may have fathered decades ago in Tahiti. He finds the former, receiving a transplant operation in Korea; the latter proves more difficult to locate.
That’s all good and well, but what The Intruder is actually “about,” above all else, is the deliberate progression of images and sounds. Even with content so obviously ripe for symbolic plundering, Denis opts for subtlety—for moments or, more specifically, the purposeful juxtaposition and carefully calculated rhythm of interwoven shots and scenes. A story such as this one would typically be played for straight, tear-jerking drama; Denis resplices it into genuine mystery. How, for instance, does Beatrice Dalle’s dog-breeder/sled-driver factor into the narrative? Don’t ask me. All I know is that IMDb credits her as “Queen of the Northern Hemisphere.”
The “intruder” of the film’s title is both Subor’s Louis invading the island paradise, and the new heart planted inside his body. In a broader sense, it may also refer to man’s relationship with the natural world. Like Terrence Malick, Denis is fascinated by the idea of sophisticated human existence penetrating the untapped harmony of nature, and after two consecutive films shot in urban locations, she’s clearly in her element here. Louis is Denis’s Odysseus (or Leopold Bloom), out to reclaim some fragment of his past. But it’s the trip, not the destination, that counts, and he never appears less than ill at ease, forced constantly to negotiate with his surroundings. As Sean Penn’s character observed in The Thin Red Line, “In this world, a man, himself, is nothing. And there ain't no world but this one.”
BASEBALL SEASON IS APPROACHING
Manny still wants out: The paper speculated that the fact Manny recently was granted a late report date, is a fairly good indication that he still wants to be traded. The last time the two clubs talked, a major roadblock presented itself in that the Red Sox asked for two of the Angels top prospects, reliever Scot Shields, and arguably the most versatile player in baseball in Chone Figgins. It wouldn't surprise us if the two team's continued to talk this spring, but the gap is wide between where they are now, and a completed deal.
posted by D @ 6:03 AM
0 comments
2.22.2006
SUITABLE FOR FRAMING: A family of experts.
by DAVID SEDARIS
New Yorker
Before it was moved out near the fairgrounds, the North Carolina Museum of Art was located in downtown Raleigh, and often, when we were young, my sister Gretchen and I would cut out of church and spend an hour looking at the paintings. The collection was not magnificent, but it was enough to give you a general overview, and to remind you that you pretty much sucked. Both Gretchen and I thought of ourselves as artists—she the kind that could actually draw and paint, and me the kind that pretended I could actually draw and paint. When my sister looked at a picture, she would stand at a distance, and then slowly, almost imperceptibly, drift forward, until her nose was right up against the canvas. She examined all of the painting, and then parts of it, her fingers dabbing in sympathy as she studied the brushstrokes.
“What are you thinking about?” I once asked.
And she said, “Oh, you know, the composition, the surfaces, the way things look realistic when you’re far away but weird when you’re up close.”
“Me, too,” I said, but what I was really thinking was how grand it would be to own a legitimate piece of art and display it in my bedroom. Even with my babysitting income, paintings were out of the question, so instead I invested in postcards, which could be bought for a quarter in the museum shop and matted with shirt cardboard. This made them look more presentable.
I was looking for framing ideas one afternoon when I wandered into a little art gallery called the Little Art Gallery. It was a relatively new place, located in the North Hills Mall and owned by a woman named Ruth, who was around my mom’s age, and introduced me to the word “fabulous,” as in: “If you’re interested, I’ve got a fabulous new Matisse that just came in yesterday.”
This was a poster rather than a painting, but still I regarded it the way I thought a connoisseur might, removing my glasses and sucking on the stem as I tilted my head. “I’m just not sure how it will fit in with the rest of my collection,” I said, meaning my Gustav Klimt calendar and the cover of the King Crimson LP tacked above my dresser.
Ruth treated me like an adult, which must have been a task, given the way I carried on. “I don’t know if you realize it,” I once told her, “but it seems that Picasso is actually Spanish.”
“Is he?” she said.
“I had a few of his postcards on my French wall, the one where my desk is, but now I’ve moved them next to my bed, beside the Miró.”
She closed her eyes, pretending to imagine this new configuration.
“Good move,” she said.
The art gallery was not far from my junior high, and I used to stop by after class and hang out. Hours later I’d return home, and when my mother asked where I had been I’d say, “Oh, at my dealer’s.”
In 1970, the only art work in my parents’ house was a family tree and an unframed charcoal portrait of my four sisters and me done by a guy at a street fair. Both hung in the dining room, and I thought they were pretty good until I started spending time with Ruth and decided that they weren’t challenging enough.
“What more do you want from a group picture of five spoiled children?” my mother asked, and rather than trying to explain I took her to see Ruth. I knew that the two of them would get along—I just didn’t think they would get along so well. At first the topic of conversation was me—Ruth doing the cheerleading and Mom just sort of agreeing. “Oh, yes,” she said, “His bedroom is lovely. Everything in its place.”
Then my mother started hanging out at the gallery as well, and began buying things. Her first purchase was an elongated statue of a man made from what looked like twisted paper but was actually metal pressed into thin sheets. He stood maybe two feet tall and held three rusted wires, each attached to a blown-glass balloon that floated above his head. “Mr. Balloon Man,” she called it.
“I’m just not certain he really needs that top hat,” I told her.
And my mother said “Oh, really?” in a way that meant: “If I want your opinion I’ll ask for it.”
It bothered me that she’d bought something without asking my advice, and so I continued to offer my thoughtful criticism, hoping it might teach her a lesson.
Her next piece was a grandfather clock with a body made of walnut and a human face pounded from what appeared to be a Chinese gong. The face wasn’t realistic, but what she called “semi-abstract,” a word she had picked up from Ruth. A word that was supposed to be mine. I didn’t know exactly how much the clock had cost, but I knew it was expensive. She called it “Mr. Creech,” in honor of the artist, and when I tried to explain that art was not a pet you gave a little name to she told me she could call it whatever the hell she wanted to.
“Should I put Mr. Creech next to Mr. Balloon Man, or does that make the dining room too busy?”
“Don’t ask me,” I told her. “You’re the expert.”
Then my father was introduced to Ruth, and he became an expert as well. Art brought my parents together in a way that nothing else had, and because their interest was new they were able to share it without being competitive. Suddenly they were a team, the Ed and Nancy Kienholz of Raleigh, North Carolina.
“Your mother’s got a real eye,” my father boasted—this in regard to “Cracked Man,” a semi-abstract face made by the same potter who had crafted our new coffee table. Dad wasn’t in the habit of throwing money around, but this, he explained, was an investment, something that, like stocks and bonds, would steadily appreciate in value, ultimately going “right through the roof.”
“And in the meantime we all get to enjoy it,” my mother said. “All of us except Mr. Crabby,” by which she meant me.
The allure of art had always been that my parents knew nothing about it. It had been a private interest, something between me and Gretchen. Now, though, everyone was in on it. Even my Greek grandmother had an opinion, that being that unless Jesus was in the picture it wasn’t worth looking at. Yiayia was not discriminating—a Giotto or a Rouault, it made no difference so long as the subject was either nailed to a cross or raising his arms before a multitude. She liked her art to tell a story, and though that particular story didn’t interest me, I liked the same thing. It’s why I preferred the museum’s “Market Scene on a Quay” to its Kenneth Noland. When it came to making art, however, I tended toward the Noland, as measuring out triangles was a lot easier than painting a realistic-looking haddock.
Before my parents started hanging out at the gallery, they thought I was a trailblazer. Now they saw me for what I was: not just a copycat but a lazy one. Looking at my square of green imposed atop a pumpkin-colored background, my father stepped back, saying, “That’s just like what’s-his-name, that guy who lives at the Outer Banks.”
“Actually, it’s more like Ellsworth Kelly,” I said.
“Well, he must have gotten his ideas from the guy at the Outer Banks.”
At the age of fifteen, I was maybe not the expert I made myself out to be, but I did own a copy of “The History of Art,” and knew that eastern North Carolina was no hotbed of artistic expression. I was also fairly certain that no serious painter would devote half the canvas to his signature, or stick an exclamation point at the end of his name.
“That shows what you know,” my mother said. “Art isn’t about following the rules—it’s about breaking them. Right, Lou?”
And my father said, “You got it.”
The next thing they bought was a portrait by a man I’ll call Bradlington. “He’s an alcoholic,” my mother announced, this as if his drinking somehow made him more authentic.
With the exception of my grandmother, everyone liked the Bradlington, especially me. It brought to mind a few of the Goyas I’d seen in my art-history book—the paintings he did toward the end, when the faces were just sort of slashed on. “It’s very moody,” I pronounced. “Very . . . invocative.”
A few months later, they bought another Bradlington, a portrait of a boy lying on his back in a ditch. “He’s stargazing,” my mother said, but to me the eyes seemed blank, like a dead person’s. I thought my parents were on a roll, and was disappointed when, instead of buying a third Bradlington, they came home with an Edna Hibel. This was a lithograph rather than a painting, and it pictured a young woman collecting flowers in a basket. The yellow of the blossoms matched the new wallpaper in the breakfast nook, and so it was hung above the table. The idea of matching art work to décor was, to me, an abomination, but anything that resulted in new stuff was just fine by my mother. She bought a sofa the salesman referred to as the Navajo, and then she bought a piece of pottery that complemented the pattern of the upholstery. It was a vase that stood four feet high, and was used to hold the dried sea oats that matched the frame of an adjacent landscape.
My mother’s sister, Joyce, saw a photo of our new living room, and explained that the American Indians were a lot more than sofa cushions. “Do you have any idea how those people live?” she asked. Joyce did charity work with the tribes in New Mexico, and, through her, my mother learned about desperate poverty and kachina dolls.
My father preferred the tribes of the Pacific Northwest, and began collecting masks, which smirked and glowered from the wall above the staircase. I’d hoped that the Indian stuff might lead them to weed out some of their earlier choices, but no such luck. “I can’t get rid of Mr. Creech,” my mother said. “He hasn’t appreciated yet.”
I was in my second year of college by then, and was just starting to realize that the names my parents so casually tossed around were not nationally known, and never would be. Mention Bradlington to your Kent State art-history teacher, and she’d take the pencil out of her mouth and say, “Who?”
“He’s an alcoholic? Lives in North Carolina?”
“I’m sorry, but the name means nothing to me.”
As for the others, the Edna Hibels and Stephen Whites, they were the sort whose work was advertised in ARTnews rather than Artforum, their paintings and lithographs “proudly shown” alongside wind chimes at places with names like the Screeching Gull, or Desert Sunsets, galleries almost always located in a vacation spot. I tried pointing this out to my parents, but they wouldn’t hear it. Maybe today my art-history teacher drew a blank on Bradlington, but after his liver gave out she’d sure as hell know who he was. “That’s the way it works sometimes,” my father said. “The artist is only appreciated after he’s dead. Look at van Gogh!”
“So will every artist be appreciated after his death?” I asked. “If I’m hit by a van tomorrow afternoon, will the painting I did last week be worth a fortune?”
“In a word, no,” my father said. “I mean, it’s not enough just to be dead—you’ve got to have some talent. Bradlington’s got it out the ass, and so does Hibel. The gal who made the coffee table is going to last for an eternity, but, as for you, I wouldn’t bank on it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
My father settled down on the Navajo. “It means that your art work doesn’t look like art.”
“And you’re the expert on that?”
“I’d say so, yes.”
“Well, you can just go to hell,” I told him.
I’d never have admitted it, but I knew exactly what my father was talking about. At its best, my art looked like homework. This was to be expected with painting and drawing—things requiring actual skill—but even my later, conceptual pieces were unconvincing. The airmail envelope full of toenail clippings, the model of the Lincoln Memorial made of fudge: in someone else’s hands, such objects might provoke discussion, but in my own they seemed only desperate and pretentious. Not just homework but bad homework.
I quit making homework when I turned thirty, and started collecting paintings some ten years later, shortly after moving to Europe. A few of my canvases are French or English, portraits mainly, dating from the eighteen-hundreds, but the ones I most care about are Dutch, and were done in the seventeenth century. “Monkey Eating Peaches,” “Man Fleeing a Burning Village,” “Peasant Woman Changing a Dirty Diaper”—how can you go wrong with such straightforward titles? The artists are minor—sons, most often, of infinitely more talented fathers—but if I say their names with a certain authority I can almost always provoke a response. (“Did you say van der Pol? Oh, right, I think I saw something of his at the Louvre.”)
People hush up when they stand before my paintings. They clasp their hands behind their backs and lean forward, wondering, most likely, how much I paid. I want to tell them that each cost less than the average pool table. I myself have no interest in pool, so why not take that money and spend it on something I like? Then, too, the paintings will appreciate, maybe not a lot, but given time I can surely get my money back, so in a way I’m just guarding them. Explaining, though, would ruin the illusion that I am wealthy and tasteful. A connoisseur. A collector.
The sham falls apart only when I’m visited by a real collector, or, even worse, by my father, who came last year and spent a week questioning my judgment. One of my paintings shows a group of cats playing musical instruments. It sounds hokey on paper—cute, even—but in real life it’s pleasantly revolting, the musicians looking more like monsters than like anything you’d keep as a pet. I have it in my living room, and, after asking the price, my father shook his head the way you might when witnessing an accident. “Boy,” he said. “They sure saw you coming.”
Whether I’m buying a painting or a bedspread, his premise is always the same—namely, that I am retarded, and people take advantage of me.
“Why would something that’s survived three hundred years not cost that much?” I asked, but he’d moved to another evident eyesore, this one Dutch, and showing a man undergoing a painful and primitive foot surgery. “I wouldn’t spend two minutes looking at this one,” he told me.
“That’s O.K.,” I said.
“Even if I were in prison, and this was the only thing on my wall, I wouldn’t waste my time with it. I’d look at my feet or at my mattress or whatever, but not at this, no way.”
I tried my best not to sound too hopeful. “Is someone sending you to prison?”
“No,” he said. “But whoever sold this to you should be there. I don’t know what you paid, but if it was more than ten dollars I think you could probably sue the guy for fraud.” He looked at it one last time, and then rubbed his eyes as if they’d been gassed. “God Almighty. What were you thinking?”
“If art is a matter of personal taste, why are you being so aggressive?” I asked.
“Because your taste stinks,” he told me. This led him to reflect upon “Cracked Man,” which still hangs in the foyer beside his living room. “It’s three slabs of clay cemented to a board, and not a day goes by when I don’t sit down and look at that thing,” he said. “I don’t mean glancing, but full-fledged staring. Contemplating, if you catch my drift.”
“I do,” I said.
He then described the piece to my boyfriend, Hugh, who had just returned from the grocery store. “It was done by a gal named Proctor. I’m sure you’ve heard of her.”
“Actually, no,” Hugh said.
My father repeated the name in his normal tone of voice. Then he began yelling it, and Hugh interrupted, saying, “Oh, right. I think I’ve read something about her.”
“You’re damn right you have,” my father said.
Before they started collecting art, my parents bought some pretty great things, the best being a concrete lawn ornament they picked up in the early nineteen-sixties. It’s a toadstool, maybe three feet tall, with a red spotted cap and a benevolent little troll relaxing at its base. My father placed it just beyond the patio in our back yard, and what struck my sisters and me then, and still does, is the troll’s expression of complete acceptance. Others might cry or get bent out of shape when their personal tastes are denounced and ridiculed, but not him. Icicles hanging off his beard, slugs cleaving to the tops of his pointed shoes: “Oh, well,” he seems to say. “These things happen.”
Even when we reached our teens, and developed a sense of irony, it never occurred to us to think of the troll as tacky. No one ever stuck a lit cigarette in his mouth, or disgraced him with sexual organs, the way we did with Mr. Balloon Man, or my mother’s Kitchen Witch. One by one, my sisters and I left home, and the back yard became a dumping ground. Snakes nested beneath broken bicycles and piles of unused building supplies, but on return visits we would each screw up our courage and step onto the patio for an audience with Mr. Toadstool. “You and that lawn ornament,” my mom would say. “Honest to God, you’d think you’d been raised in a trailer.”
Standing in her living room, surrounded by her art collection, my mother frequently warned us that death brought out the worst in people. “You kids might think you’re close, but just wait until your father and I are gone, and you’re left to divide up our property. Then you’ll see what savages you really are.”
My sisters and I had always imagined that, when the time came, we would calmly move through the house, putting our names on this or that. Lisa would get the dessert plates, Amy the mixer, and so on, without dissent. It was distressing, then, to discover that the one thing we all want is that toadstool. It’s a symbol of the people our parents used to be, and, more than anything in the house itself, it looks like art to us. When my father dies, I envision a mad dash through the front door, past the Hibel and the Bradlingtons, past “Cracked Man” and “Balloon Man” and into Indian territory, where we’ll push one another down the stairs, six connoisseurs, all with gray hair, charging toward a concrete toadstool.
Edna Hibel Art and Gifts.
Van der Pol.
by DAVID SEDARIS
New Yorker
Before it was moved out near the fairgrounds, the North Carolina Museum of Art was located in downtown Raleigh, and often, when we were young, my sister Gretchen and I would cut out of church and spend an hour looking at the paintings. The collection was not magnificent, but it was enough to give you a general overview, and to remind you that you pretty much sucked. Both Gretchen and I thought of ourselves as artists—she the kind that could actually draw and paint, and me the kind that pretended I could actually draw and paint. When my sister looked at a picture, she would stand at a distance, and then slowly, almost imperceptibly, drift forward, until her nose was right up against the canvas. She examined all of the painting, and then parts of it, her fingers dabbing in sympathy as she studied the brushstrokes.
“What are you thinking about?” I once asked.
And she said, “Oh, you know, the composition, the surfaces, the way things look realistic when you’re far away but weird when you’re up close.”
“Me, too,” I said, but what I was really thinking was how grand it would be to own a legitimate piece of art and display it in my bedroom. Even with my babysitting income, paintings were out of the question, so instead I invested in postcards, which could be bought for a quarter in the museum shop and matted with shirt cardboard. This made them look more presentable.
I was looking for framing ideas one afternoon when I wandered into a little art gallery called the Little Art Gallery. It was a relatively new place, located in the North Hills Mall and owned by a woman named Ruth, who was around my mom’s age, and introduced me to the word “fabulous,” as in: “If you’re interested, I’ve got a fabulous new Matisse that just came in yesterday.”
This was a poster rather than a painting, but still I regarded it the way I thought a connoisseur might, removing my glasses and sucking on the stem as I tilted my head. “I’m just not sure how it will fit in with the rest of my collection,” I said, meaning my Gustav Klimt calendar and the cover of the King Crimson LP tacked above my dresser.
Ruth treated me like an adult, which must have been a task, given the way I carried on. “I don’t know if you realize it,” I once told her, “but it seems that Picasso is actually Spanish.”
“Is he?” she said.
“I had a few of his postcards on my French wall, the one where my desk is, but now I’ve moved them next to my bed, beside the Miró.”
She closed her eyes, pretending to imagine this new configuration.
“Good move,” she said.
The art gallery was not far from my junior high, and I used to stop by after class and hang out. Hours later I’d return home, and when my mother asked where I had been I’d say, “Oh, at my dealer’s.”
In 1970, the only art work in my parents’ house was a family tree and an unframed charcoal portrait of my four sisters and me done by a guy at a street fair. Both hung in the dining room, and I thought they were pretty good until I started spending time with Ruth and decided that they weren’t challenging enough.
“What more do you want from a group picture of five spoiled children?” my mother asked, and rather than trying to explain I took her to see Ruth. I knew that the two of them would get along—I just didn’t think they would get along so well. At first the topic of conversation was me—Ruth doing the cheerleading and Mom just sort of agreeing. “Oh, yes,” she said, “His bedroom is lovely. Everything in its place.”
Then my mother started hanging out at the gallery as well, and began buying things. Her first purchase was an elongated statue of a man made from what looked like twisted paper but was actually metal pressed into thin sheets. He stood maybe two feet tall and held three rusted wires, each attached to a blown-glass balloon that floated above his head. “Mr. Balloon Man,” she called it.
“I’m just not certain he really needs that top hat,” I told her.
And my mother said “Oh, really?” in a way that meant: “If I want your opinion I’ll ask for it.”
It bothered me that she’d bought something without asking my advice, and so I continued to offer my thoughtful criticism, hoping it might teach her a lesson.
Her next piece was a grandfather clock with a body made of walnut and a human face pounded from what appeared to be a Chinese gong. The face wasn’t realistic, but what she called “semi-abstract,” a word she had picked up from Ruth. A word that was supposed to be mine. I didn’t know exactly how much the clock had cost, but I knew it was expensive. She called it “Mr. Creech,” in honor of the artist, and when I tried to explain that art was not a pet you gave a little name to she told me she could call it whatever the hell she wanted to.
“Should I put Mr. Creech next to Mr. Balloon Man, or does that make the dining room too busy?”
“Don’t ask me,” I told her. “You’re the expert.”
Then my father was introduced to Ruth, and he became an expert as well. Art brought my parents together in a way that nothing else had, and because their interest was new they were able to share it without being competitive. Suddenly they were a team, the Ed and Nancy Kienholz of Raleigh, North Carolina.
“Your mother’s got a real eye,” my father boasted—this in regard to “Cracked Man,” a semi-abstract face made by the same potter who had crafted our new coffee table. Dad wasn’t in the habit of throwing money around, but this, he explained, was an investment, something that, like stocks and bonds, would steadily appreciate in value, ultimately going “right through the roof.”
“And in the meantime we all get to enjoy it,” my mother said. “All of us except Mr. Crabby,” by which she meant me.
The allure of art had always been that my parents knew nothing about it. It had been a private interest, something between me and Gretchen. Now, though, everyone was in on it. Even my Greek grandmother had an opinion, that being that unless Jesus was in the picture it wasn’t worth looking at. Yiayia was not discriminating—a Giotto or a Rouault, it made no difference so long as the subject was either nailed to a cross or raising his arms before a multitude. She liked her art to tell a story, and though that particular story didn’t interest me, I liked the same thing. It’s why I preferred the museum’s “Market Scene on a Quay” to its Kenneth Noland. When it came to making art, however, I tended toward the Noland, as measuring out triangles was a lot easier than painting a realistic-looking haddock.
Before my parents started hanging out at the gallery, they thought I was a trailblazer. Now they saw me for what I was: not just a copycat but a lazy one. Looking at my square of green imposed atop a pumpkin-colored background, my father stepped back, saying, “That’s just like what’s-his-name, that guy who lives at the Outer Banks.”
“Actually, it’s more like Ellsworth Kelly,” I said.
“Well, he must have gotten his ideas from the guy at the Outer Banks.”
At the age of fifteen, I was maybe not the expert I made myself out to be, but I did own a copy of “The History of Art,” and knew that eastern North Carolina was no hotbed of artistic expression. I was also fairly certain that no serious painter would devote half the canvas to his signature, or stick an exclamation point at the end of his name.
“That shows what you know,” my mother said. “Art isn’t about following the rules—it’s about breaking them. Right, Lou?”
And my father said, “You got it.”
The next thing they bought was a portrait by a man I’ll call Bradlington. “He’s an alcoholic,” my mother announced, this as if his drinking somehow made him more authentic.
With the exception of my grandmother, everyone liked the Bradlington, especially me. It brought to mind a few of the Goyas I’d seen in my art-history book—the paintings he did toward the end, when the faces were just sort of slashed on. “It’s very moody,” I pronounced. “Very . . . invocative.”
A few months later, they bought another Bradlington, a portrait of a boy lying on his back in a ditch. “He’s stargazing,” my mother said, but to me the eyes seemed blank, like a dead person’s. I thought my parents were on a roll, and was disappointed when, instead of buying a third Bradlington, they came home with an Edna Hibel. This was a lithograph rather than a painting, and it pictured a young woman collecting flowers in a basket. The yellow of the blossoms matched the new wallpaper in the breakfast nook, and so it was hung above the table. The idea of matching art work to décor was, to me, an abomination, but anything that resulted in new stuff was just fine by my mother. She bought a sofa the salesman referred to as the Navajo, and then she bought a piece of pottery that complemented the pattern of the upholstery. It was a vase that stood four feet high, and was used to hold the dried sea oats that matched the frame of an adjacent landscape.
My mother’s sister, Joyce, saw a photo of our new living room, and explained that the American Indians were a lot more than sofa cushions. “Do you have any idea how those people live?” she asked. Joyce did charity work with the tribes in New Mexico, and, through her, my mother learned about desperate poverty and kachina dolls.
My father preferred the tribes of the Pacific Northwest, and began collecting masks, which smirked and glowered from the wall above the staircase. I’d hoped that the Indian stuff might lead them to weed out some of their earlier choices, but no such luck. “I can’t get rid of Mr. Creech,” my mother said. “He hasn’t appreciated yet.”
I was in my second year of college by then, and was just starting to realize that the names my parents so casually tossed around were not nationally known, and never would be. Mention Bradlington to your Kent State art-history teacher, and she’d take the pencil out of her mouth and say, “Who?”
“He’s an alcoholic? Lives in North Carolina?”
“I’m sorry, but the name means nothing to me.”
As for the others, the Edna Hibels and Stephen Whites, they were the sort whose work was advertised in ARTnews rather than Artforum, their paintings and lithographs “proudly shown” alongside wind chimes at places with names like the Screeching Gull, or Desert Sunsets, galleries almost always located in a vacation spot. I tried pointing this out to my parents, but they wouldn’t hear it. Maybe today my art-history teacher drew a blank on Bradlington, but after his liver gave out she’d sure as hell know who he was. “That’s the way it works sometimes,” my father said. “The artist is only appreciated after he’s dead. Look at van Gogh!”
“So will every artist be appreciated after his death?” I asked. “If I’m hit by a van tomorrow afternoon, will the painting I did last week be worth a fortune?”
“In a word, no,” my father said. “I mean, it’s not enough just to be dead—you’ve got to have some talent. Bradlington’s got it out the ass, and so does Hibel. The gal who made the coffee table is going to last for an eternity, but, as for you, I wouldn’t bank on it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
My father settled down on the Navajo. “It means that your art work doesn’t look like art.”
“And you’re the expert on that?”
“I’d say so, yes.”
“Well, you can just go to hell,” I told him.
I’d never have admitted it, but I knew exactly what my father was talking about. At its best, my art looked like homework. This was to be expected with painting and drawing—things requiring actual skill—but even my later, conceptual pieces were unconvincing. The airmail envelope full of toenail clippings, the model of the Lincoln Memorial made of fudge: in someone else’s hands, such objects might provoke discussion, but in my own they seemed only desperate and pretentious. Not just homework but bad homework.
I quit making homework when I turned thirty, and started collecting paintings some ten years later, shortly after moving to Europe. A few of my canvases are French or English, portraits mainly, dating from the eighteen-hundreds, but the ones I most care about are Dutch, and were done in the seventeenth century. “Monkey Eating Peaches,” “Man Fleeing a Burning Village,” “Peasant Woman Changing a Dirty Diaper”—how can you go wrong with such straightforward titles? The artists are minor—sons, most often, of infinitely more talented fathers—but if I say their names with a certain authority I can almost always provoke a response. (“Did you say van der Pol? Oh, right, I think I saw something of his at the Louvre.”)
People hush up when they stand before my paintings. They clasp their hands behind their backs and lean forward, wondering, most likely, how much I paid. I want to tell them that each cost less than the average pool table. I myself have no interest in pool, so why not take that money and spend it on something I like? Then, too, the paintings will appreciate, maybe not a lot, but given time I can surely get my money back, so in a way I’m just guarding them. Explaining, though, would ruin the illusion that I am wealthy and tasteful. A connoisseur. A collector.
The sham falls apart only when I’m visited by a real collector, or, even worse, by my father, who came last year and spent a week questioning my judgment. One of my paintings shows a group of cats playing musical instruments. It sounds hokey on paper—cute, even—but in real life it’s pleasantly revolting, the musicians looking more like monsters than like anything you’d keep as a pet. I have it in my living room, and, after asking the price, my father shook his head the way you might when witnessing an accident. “Boy,” he said. “They sure saw you coming.”
Whether I’m buying a painting or a bedspread, his premise is always the same—namely, that I am retarded, and people take advantage of me.
“Why would something that’s survived three hundred years not cost that much?” I asked, but he’d moved to another evident eyesore, this one Dutch, and showing a man undergoing a painful and primitive foot surgery. “I wouldn’t spend two minutes looking at this one,” he told me.
“That’s O.K.,” I said.
“Even if I were in prison, and this was the only thing on my wall, I wouldn’t waste my time with it. I’d look at my feet or at my mattress or whatever, but not at this, no way.”
I tried my best not to sound too hopeful. “Is someone sending you to prison?”
“No,” he said. “But whoever sold this to you should be there. I don’t know what you paid, but if it was more than ten dollars I think you could probably sue the guy for fraud.” He looked at it one last time, and then rubbed his eyes as if they’d been gassed. “God Almighty. What were you thinking?”
“If art is a matter of personal taste, why are you being so aggressive?” I asked.
“Because your taste stinks,” he told me. This led him to reflect upon “Cracked Man,” which still hangs in the foyer beside his living room. “It’s three slabs of clay cemented to a board, and not a day goes by when I don’t sit down and look at that thing,” he said. “I don’t mean glancing, but full-fledged staring. Contemplating, if you catch my drift.”
“I do,” I said.
He then described the piece to my boyfriend, Hugh, who had just returned from the grocery store. “It was done by a gal named Proctor. I’m sure you’ve heard of her.”
“Actually, no,” Hugh said.
My father repeated the name in his normal tone of voice. Then he began yelling it, and Hugh interrupted, saying, “Oh, right. I think I’ve read something about her.”
“You’re damn right you have,” my father said.
Before they started collecting art, my parents bought some pretty great things, the best being a concrete lawn ornament they picked up in the early nineteen-sixties. It’s a toadstool, maybe three feet tall, with a red spotted cap and a benevolent little troll relaxing at its base. My father placed it just beyond the patio in our back yard, and what struck my sisters and me then, and still does, is the troll’s expression of complete acceptance. Others might cry or get bent out of shape when their personal tastes are denounced and ridiculed, but not him. Icicles hanging off his beard, slugs cleaving to the tops of his pointed shoes: “Oh, well,” he seems to say. “These things happen.”
Even when we reached our teens, and developed a sense of irony, it never occurred to us to think of the troll as tacky. No one ever stuck a lit cigarette in his mouth, or disgraced him with sexual organs, the way we did with Mr. Balloon Man, or my mother’s Kitchen Witch. One by one, my sisters and I left home, and the back yard became a dumping ground. Snakes nested beneath broken bicycles and piles of unused building supplies, but on return visits we would each screw up our courage and step onto the patio for an audience with Mr. Toadstool. “You and that lawn ornament,” my mom would say. “Honest to God, you’d think you’d been raised in a trailer.”
Standing in her living room, surrounded by her art collection, my mother frequently warned us that death brought out the worst in people. “You kids might think you’re close, but just wait until your father and I are gone, and you’re left to divide up our property. Then you’ll see what savages you really are.”
My sisters and I had always imagined that, when the time came, we would calmly move through the house, putting our names on this or that. Lisa would get the dessert plates, Amy the mixer, and so on, without dissent. It was distressing, then, to discover that the one thing we all want is that toadstool. It’s a symbol of the people our parents used to be, and, more than anything in the house itself, it looks like art to us. When my father dies, I envision a mad dash through the front door, past the Hibel and the Bradlingtons, past “Cracked Man” and “Balloon Man” and into Indian territory, where we’ll push one another down the stairs, six connoisseurs, all with gray hair, charging toward a concrete toadstool.
Edna Hibel Art and Gifts.
Van der Pol.
posted by D @ 5:50 AM
0 comments
2.21.2006
MUSIC
Stylus Magazine muses on the Hip
Best Hip Singles:
01. Highway Girl (Self-Titled EP)
The best from their humble beginnings, before they realized how much further their ambitions could take them.
02. Blow At High Dough (Up To Here)
As good a classic rock song as the Hip can make. Also a great introduction to Downie’s enigmatic style of warbling.
03. New Orleans Is Sinking (Up To Here)
With the greatest respects to the city itself, this song will have you humming its guitar solo-esque hook for hours.
04. Little Bones (Road Apples)
There may be greater rock songs to play loudly in a Canadian pub, but I can’t think of any.
05. Courage (Fully Completely)
The song that simultaneously cemented their reputation as a great rock band and introduced us to how effective Downie’s lyrics can be when they are subtle.
06. Scared (Day For Night)
The drums are resting, and Gord takes the wheel for a while, showing his most fragile self.
07. Ahead By a Century (Trouble At The Henhouse)
As previously mentioned, this is the greatest modern rock single of the past 15 years. If you listen to nothing else by the band ever again, listen to this.
08. Poets (Phantom Power)
The lyrics are pure abstractness, but damn this is fun!
09. The Darkest One (In Violet Light)
Bonus points go to the music video, which stars the members of Canada’s most vulgar comedy, Trailer Park Boys. Gord has never wailed better than in this track.
10. Vaccination Scar (In Between Evolution)
Classic Hip structure salted with a twangy Nashville guitar that works surprisingly well.
Interesting and Intriguing Hip Songs:
01. Grace, Too (Day For Night)
As magnificent an opening opus to an album as can be found in The Hip’s archives. Sublime.
02. Boots or Hearts (Up To Here)
Not so experimental, but it serves as the band’s one true foray into becoming a roots rock band. Might not have been so bad, actually.
03. Lake Fever (Music @ Work)
Great track that lost its shot at greatness when fans turned their back on the album far too quickly.
04. Escape Is At Hand for the Traveling Man (Phantom Power)
Easily the best song title in the catalogue, and also one of the best storytelling mood pieces the band ever produced.
05. The Luxury (Live) (Live Between Us)
The original is a fine soft-spoken gem, but there is something about this song done live and the contrast between the subdued verses and the crashing chorus.
06. Bobcaygeon (Phantom Power)
Named for a small Ontario town, and probably one of the most unlikely successful singles the band cited for the spotlight. Plus, the line “I saw the constellations reveal themselves one star at a time” is an all-timer.
07. The Dire Wolf (In Violet Light)
The background two-note guitar plucks that anchor the song are the real kicker. Downie’s voice is at its compelling best.
08. Thugs (Day For Night)
Tiny drums and funky bass lines. Isn’t this all a really good song ever needs?
09. Locked in the Trunk of a Car (Fully Completely)
Lyrics are told from the perspective of a serial killer. If that isn’t enough to creep you out, Downie yelling “LET ME OOOOOUUUUUTTTT!!!” at the end of the song will.
10. Fireworks (Phantom Power)
I don’t know what distortion they put on that opening guitar, but it always leaves me begging for more. Also, contains the shocking “You said you didn’t give a fuck about hockey” line, a sacrilegious one to Canadians everywhere.
Experimental Gems:
01. Nautical Disaster (Day For Night)
For my money, the single greatest song the band has ever made. The lyrics are sung paragraphs, and the memories they drum up are so vivid in their unsettling nature. Brilliant from start to finish.
02. Thompson Girl (Phantom Power)
Gord’s almost-there falsetto in the chorus acts as a metaphor for the dizzying weather the song obviously exists within.
03. ‘It’s A Good Life If You Don’t Weaken’ (In Violet Light)
The most ambient song The Hip have made to date. Downie’s much more vulnerable here, but the slow build of things steadies the ground underneath him.
04. The Bastard (Music @ Work)
It’s the unique structuring, and not the sounds emitting from it, that lend the edge to this needle in the haystack.
05. Flamenco (Trouble At The Henhouse)
The whole song is barely there, but it still beckons to us: “Walk like a matador / Don’t be chicken shit.”
06. Toronto #4 (Music @ Work)
A song you must simply put in the stereo and listen to. Not doing anything else. If you listen close enough, you can feel yourself sitting in on a Tragically Hip jam session.
07. Butts Wigglin’ (Trouble At The Henhouse)
Maybe the biggest head scratcher in the collection, but more for the lyrics than anything else. Could it be that’s what makes it so compelling? Maybe it’s just the sheer amount of funk just laying around.
08. Don’t Wake Daddy (Trouble At The Henhouse)
To be filed under “Queer songs with crazy lyrics that are named after short-lived children’s board games.” I’m sure it’s not a large file.
09. The Last of the Unplucked Gems (Road Apples)
Closing track to Road Apples that truly hinted at what was to come from the band. Very spacey and light.
10. New Orleans Is Sinking (Killer Whale Tank Version)
Epitomizes the abstractness of their live show. If the sheer randomness of the story does not make you want to see this band perform live, we can never see eye to eye.
Stylus Magazine muses on the Hip
Best Hip Singles:
01. Highway Girl (Self-Titled EP)
The best from their humble beginnings, before they realized how much further their ambitions could take them.
02. Blow At High Dough (Up To Here)
As good a classic rock song as the Hip can make. Also a great introduction to Downie’s enigmatic style of warbling.
03. New Orleans Is Sinking (Up To Here)
With the greatest respects to the city itself, this song will have you humming its guitar solo-esque hook for hours.
04. Little Bones (Road Apples)
There may be greater rock songs to play loudly in a Canadian pub, but I can’t think of any.
05. Courage (Fully Completely)
The song that simultaneously cemented their reputation as a great rock band and introduced us to how effective Downie’s lyrics can be when they are subtle.
06. Scared (Day For Night)
The drums are resting, and Gord takes the wheel for a while, showing his most fragile self.
07. Ahead By a Century (Trouble At The Henhouse)
As previously mentioned, this is the greatest modern rock single of the past 15 years. If you listen to nothing else by the band ever again, listen to this.
08. Poets (Phantom Power)
The lyrics are pure abstractness, but damn this is fun!
09. The Darkest One (In Violet Light)
Bonus points go to the music video, which stars the members of Canada’s most vulgar comedy, Trailer Park Boys. Gord has never wailed better than in this track.
10. Vaccination Scar (In Between Evolution)
Classic Hip structure salted with a twangy Nashville guitar that works surprisingly well.
Interesting and Intriguing Hip Songs:
01. Grace, Too (Day For Night)
As magnificent an opening opus to an album as can be found in The Hip’s archives. Sublime.
02. Boots or Hearts (Up To Here)
Not so experimental, but it serves as the band’s one true foray into becoming a roots rock band. Might not have been so bad, actually.
03. Lake Fever (Music @ Work)
Great track that lost its shot at greatness when fans turned their back on the album far too quickly.
04. Escape Is At Hand for the Traveling Man (Phantom Power)
Easily the best song title in the catalogue, and also one of the best storytelling mood pieces the band ever produced.
05. The Luxury (Live) (Live Between Us)
The original is a fine soft-spoken gem, but there is something about this song done live and the contrast between the subdued verses and the crashing chorus.
06. Bobcaygeon (Phantom Power)
Named for a small Ontario town, and probably one of the most unlikely successful singles the band cited for the spotlight. Plus, the line “I saw the constellations reveal themselves one star at a time” is an all-timer.
07. The Dire Wolf (In Violet Light)
The background two-note guitar plucks that anchor the song are the real kicker. Downie’s voice is at its compelling best.
08. Thugs (Day For Night)
Tiny drums and funky bass lines. Isn’t this all a really good song ever needs?
09. Locked in the Trunk of a Car (Fully Completely)
Lyrics are told from the perspective of a serial killer. If that isn’t enough to creep you out, Downie yelling “LET ME OOOOOUUUUUTTTT!!!” at the end of the song will.
10. Fireworks (Phantom Power)
I don’t know what distortion they put on that opening guitar, but it always leaves me begging for more. Also, contains the shocking “You said you didn’t give a fuck about hockey” line, a sacrilegious one to Canadians everywhere.
Experimental Gems:
01. Nautical Disaster (Day For Night)
For my money, the single greatest song the band has ever made. The lyrics are sung paragraphs, and the memories they drum up are so vivid in their unsettling nature. Brilliant from start to finish.
02. Thompson Girl (Phantom Power)
Gord’s almost-there falsetto in the chorus acts as a metaphor for the dizzying weather the song obviously exists within.
03. ‘It’s A Good Life If You Don’t Weaken’ (In Violet Light)
The most ambient song The Hip have made to date. Downie’s much more vulnerable here, but the slow build of things steadies the ground underneath him.
04. The Bastard (Music @ Work)
It’s the unique structuring, and not the sounds emitting from it, that lend the edge to this needle in the haystack.
05. Flamenco (Trouble At The Henhouse)
The whole song is barely there, but it still beckons to us: “Walk like a matador / Don’t be chicken shit.”
06. Toronto #4 (Music @ Work)
A song you must simply put in the stereo and listen to. Not doing anything else. If you listen close enough, you can feel yourself sitting in on a Tragically Hip jam session.
07. Butts Wigglin’ (Trouble At The Henhouse)
Maybe the biggest head scratcher in the collection, but more for the lyrics than anything else. Could it be that’s what makes it so compelling? Maybe it’s just the sheer amount of funk just laying around.
08. Don’t Wake Daddy (Trouble At The Henhouse)
To be filed under “Queer songs with crazy lyrics that are named after short-lived children’s board games.” I’m sure it’s not a large file.
09. The Last of the Unplucked Gems (Road Apples)
Closing track to Road Apples that truly hinted at what was to come from the band. Very spacey and light.
10. New Orleans Is Sinking (Killer Whale Tank Version)
Epitomizes the abstractness of their live show. If the sheer randomness of the story does not make you want to see this band perform live, we can never see eye to eye.
posted by D @ 6:27 PM
0 comments
GENERALLY...
Team Canada looked tired and slow against the Czechs, especially at the end. I remain skeptical that we can do better than Bronze.
I miss February/March in Vancouver. I've decided that those are the hardest months to be away. Though it doesn't look that nice today:
My knee has been sore for two weeks now. Trying to figure out what's wrong. No luck yet but I am worried it's a torn meniscus:
MUSIC NEWS
from Pitchforkmedia.com
Sacre bleu, Francophiles! Holy mixtapes, indie kids! Your two cherished worlds are about to coalesce in a big way. The center of gravity: suave, debonair, and--admit it-- rather creepy French crooner Serge Gainsbourg.
All your quasi-indie heroes (Cat Power, Franz Ferdinand, Portishead, Jarvis Cocker, Feist, Placebo, The Kills), alongside requisite veterans (Michael Stipe, Marianne Faithfull), original Gainsbourgian chanteuses (Jane Birkin, Françoise Hardy), and Jack White's boo (Karen Elson) have teamed up to pay tribute to the perpetually unshaven songsmith on the forthcoming covers comp Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited, due out next month.
Monsieur bears numerous fruits of amour: Cat Power scores with Elson on a rendition of "Je t'aime...Moi Non Plus", while Franz makes love to aging cover-girl Jane Birkin to the tune of "Sorry Angel". Brits Jarvis Cocker, Placebo, and the Rakes all get their Serge on. And there's even a little trip-hop nostalgia, with contributions from 1995's flag-bearers Portishead (yay!) and Tricky.
Tres bien:
01 Franz Ferdinand and Jane Birkin: "A Song For Sorry Angel"
02 Cat Power and Karen Elson: "I Love You (Me Either)"
03 Jarvis Cocker and Kid Loco: "I Just Came to Tell You That I'm Going"
04 Portishead: "Requiem for Anna"
05 Faultline, Brian Molko, and Françoise Hardy: "Requiem For A Jerk"
06 Michael Stipe: "L'Hôtel"
07 Tricky: "Au Revoir Emmanuelle"
08 Marianne Faithfull and Sly and Robbie: "Lola R. For Ever"
09 Gonzales, Feist, and Dani: "Boomerang 2005"
10 Marc Almond and Trash Palace: "Boy Toy"
11 Placebo: "The Ballad of Melody Nelson"
12 The Rakes: "Just a Man With a Job"
13 The Kills: "I Call It Art"
14 Carla Bruni: "Those Little Things"
Mark Kozelek Tours America
Last time we checked in with Mark Kozelek, he was releasing a whole album's worth of Modest Mouse covers. We're not sure if he's still letting his marbles roll around in traffic or not, but given how much we dig the Red House Painters, we're inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. Fortunately for our forgiving selves, Mr. Kozelek is hitting the road. While his solo tour proper doesn't begin until May, he'll make a couple stops in Tennessee this week. (The first show, originally scheduled for tonight at Blue Cats in Knoxville, has been cancelled.) It's either that or staying home and watching the Olympics, and we know you'll take indie rock over ice dancing any day of the week.
Tiny cties made of ashes:
05-18 Atlanta, GA - Variety Playhouse
05-24 New York, NY - Bowery Ballroom
05-26 Boston, MA - Remis Auditorium at the Museum of Fine Arts
05-27 Northampton, MA - Iron House
from fittedsweats.blogspot.com:
Kid Rock Sex Tape: This kind of taints my whole theory that the Kid Rock story was nice, because, you know, here was a mentally retarded guy who for a long time was stubbornly making "his music" and struggling, and then having a whole bunch of $ucce$$. It was like barriers had been broken down. And people appreciated "his talent" without too much snickering, and they let him tour the country, and they let him "date" the woman whose posters had festooned his bedroom forever, Pam Anderson, and his success even paved the way for other differently abled crooners like Uncle Kracker. He even got to sit near the court at Pistons games and wear his special leather hat and clap and cheer. He got to sing and play his guitar at NASCAR as the fast race cars went around and around the track. And now it seems kind of skeevy, like while he was out innocently trying to do his music, someone was talking a whole lot of women, and also, according to news reports, Scott Stapp, to put Kid Rock's penis in their mouths along the way. But then, that seems kind of prejudice of me, because he is an adult and why shouldn't he enjoy oral sex with random women, and Scott Stapp? But still. Someone filmed it. I think Kid Rock has been taken advantage of. The whole thing has gone too far. The main thing that drove us all to love Kid Rock, his innocence, has been parceled away like it was yesterday's news.
Team Canada looked tired and slow against the Czechs, especially at the end. I remain skeptical that we can do better than Bronze.
I miss February/March in Vancouver. I've decided that those are the hardest months to be away. Though it doesn't look that nice today:
My knee has been sore for two weeks now. Trying to figure out what's wrong. No luck yet but I am worried it's a torn meniscus:
MUSIC NEWS
from Pitchforkmedia.com
Sacre bleu, Francophiles! Holy mixtapes, indie kids! Your two cherished worlds are about to coalesce in a big way. The center of gravity: suave, debonair, and--admit it-- rather creepy French crooner Serge Gainsbourg.
All your quasi-indie heroes (Cat Power, Franz Ferdinand, Portishead, Jarvis Cocker, Feist, Placebo, The Kills), alongside requisite veterans (Michael Stipe, Marianne Faithfull), original Gainsbourgian chanteuses (Jane Birkin, Françoise Hardy), and Jack White's boo (Karen Elson) have teamed up to pay tribute to the perpetually unshaven songsmith on the forthcoming covers comp Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited, due out next month.
Monsieur bears numerous fruits of amour: Cat Power scores with Elson on a rendition of "Je t'aime...Moi Non Plus", while Franz makes love to aging cover-girl Jane Birkin to the tune of "Sorry Angel". Brits Jarvis Cocker, Placebo, and the Rakes all get their Serge on. And there's even a little trip-hop nostalgia, with contributions from 1995's flag-bearers Portishead (yay!) and Tricky.
Tres bien:
01 Franz Ferdinand and Jane Birkin: "A Song For Sorry Angel"
02 Cat Power and Karen Elson: "I Love You (Me Either)"
03 Jarvis Cocker and Kid Loco: "I Just Came to Tell You That I'm Going"
04 Portishead: "Requiem for Anna"
05 Faultline, Brian Molko, and Françoise Hardy: "Requiem For A Jerk"
06 Michael Stipe: "L'Hôtel"
07 Tricky: "Au Revoir Emmanuelle"
08 Marianne Faithfull and Sly and Robbie: "Lola R. For Ever"
09 Gonzales, Feist, and Dani: "Boomerang 2005"
10 Marc Almond and Trash Palace: "Boy Toy"
11 Placebo: "The Ballad of Melody Nelson"
12 The Rakes: "Just a Man With a Job"
13 The Kills: "I Call It Art"
14 Carla Bruni: "Those Little Things"
Mark Kozelek Tours America
Last time we checked in with Mark Kozelek, he was releasing a whole album's worth of Modest Mouse covers. We're not sure if he's still letting his marbles roll around in traffic or not, but given how much we dig the Red House Painters, we're inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. Fortunately for our forgiving selves, Mr. Kozelek is hitting the road. While his solo tour proper doesn't begin until May, he'll make a couple stops in Tennessee this week. (The first show, originally scheduled for tonight at Blue Cats in Knoxville, has been cancelled.) It's either that or staying home and watching the Olympics, and we know you'll take indie rock over ice dancing any day of the week.
Tiny cties made of ashes:
05-18 Atlanta, GA - Variety Playhouse
05-24 New York, NY - Bowery Ballroom
05-26 Boston, MA - Remis Auditorium at the Museum of Fine Arts
05-27 Northampton, MA - Iron House
from fittedsweats.blogspot.com:
Kid Rock Sex Tape: This kind of taints my whole theory that the Kid Rock story was nice, because, you know, here was a mentally retarded guy who for a long time was stubbornly making "his music" and struggling, and then having a whole bunch of $ucce$$. It was like barriers had been broken down. And people appreciated "his talent" without too much snickering, and they let him tour the country, and they let him "date" the woman whose posters had festooned his bedroom forever, Pam Anderson, and his success even paved the way for other differently abled crooners like Uncle Kracker. He even got to sit near the court at Pistons games and wear his special leather hat and clap and cheer. He got to sing and play his guitar at NASCAR as the fast race cars went around and around the track. And now it seems kind of skeevy, like while he was out innocently trying to do his music, someone was talking a whole lot of women, and also, according to news reports, Scott Stapp, to put Kid Rock's penis in their mouths along the way. But then, that seems kind of prejudice of me, because he is an adult and why shouldn't he enjoy oral sex with random women, and Scott Stapp? But still. Someone filmed it. I think Kid Rock has been taken advantage of. The whole thing has gone too far. The main thing that drove us all to love Kid Rock, his innocence, has been parceled away like it was yesterday's news.
posted by D @ 9:54 AM
0 comments
2.20.2006
NEW YORK
Back from a long weekend in NYC. Excellent time. We stayed at a friend's apartment here. We saw an excellent play. We ate at two great restaurants for brunch and dinner on Saturday. Had some great cupcakes. Unfortunately we also witnessed the immediate aftermath of this. A macabre scene.
We bought some things here and here. We visited the Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, and saw the last day of the excellent Egon Schiele exhibit at the Neue Gallery (highly recommended for its authentic Vienna atmosphere). And we almost ran into big trouble with some suspecting people because of this. Some b-list celebrity sightings: 1, 2, 3 (on the right), 4 (no idea who she was but my 29 year-old brother knew her (!). And finally, we got bumped up to executive class on the way home -- a great cap to the weekend.
HUNTING DICK
New Yorker
Some breaches of decorum are easier to rectify than others. Perhaps you have been invited to attend a memorial ceremony at Auschwitz and you arrive in a parka and hiking boots, only to find that most of the men are wearing dark suits. Solution: Buy an overcoat and, next time, call ahead to ask about attire. Or, say, you lose your temper and tell a senior member of the United States Senate to “go fuck yourself.” Solution: Issue a statement acknowledging your frank words and let the fuss subside without attracting further attention. Vice-President Dick Cheney carried himself successfully through both of these faux pas. But his accidental shooting of the Austin lawyer Harry M. Whittington presents a more delicate question of etiquette: What is the proper way to proceed after blasting six to two hundred pieces of birdshot into the chest, neck, and face of a personal acquaintance? Mylar balloons? African violets? A casserole?
On this point of protocol, even the experts are indistinct. “Coveys and Singles: The Handbook of Quail Hunting,” for instance, focusses on such subjects as apparel. “The quail hunter’s underwear can vary. . . ,” its author, Bob Gooch, writes. “Some hunters prefer fishnet-type underwear which permits the body heat to circulate more freely.” The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s skills manual details elaborate chivalric rites with regard to everything from field manners (“Don’t be a slob or a poacher!” “Never be rude or hog shots”) to the conveyance of quarry (“Be discreet and respectful of the animal as you transport it home. Never make the carcass and head the subject of public display”), but is less exacting when it comes to how to behave if what you’ve shot is, in fact, a human being. Only the following mores can be established: The ethical hunter’s first obligation is to determine responsiveness in the injured party. After shouting, “Are you all right?” he must check for hemorrhaging. Finally, he is expected to determine, “Is there blood-soaked clothing? Are there pools of blood on the ground?”
The literature offers few clues to how an errant marksman should negotiate what Dickens calls “the delicacy of his situation.” (In Chapter 7 of “The Pickwick Papers,” Mr. Tupman, during a rook shoot, “had saved the lives of innumerable unoffending birds by receiving a portion of the charge in his left arm.”) In Jimmy Carter’s “An Outdoor Journal,” his ode to the role of fresh air in forging gentlemanly virtue, he hints at the predicament of the friend-shooter, a sort of shadowy social limbo, fraught with shame and imputations of poor couth. According to Carter, “If anyone grew careless and endangered a neighbor by shooting too low, it was a serious matter indeed, warranting an angry shout of condemnation and a damaged reputation.” Grover Cleveland, in “Fishing and Shooting Sketches,” concurs. “The careless or bungling shooter,” he writes, must not be surprised if even his dog abandons him, “leaving the chagrined and disappointed hunter to return home alone-legs weary, gameless and ashamed.”
The 1969 edition of “Vogue’s Book of Etiquette” includes a long discussion of “Hunting and Shooting” (don’t reach for shots, offer all game to your host), but makes no mention of how to behave in the case of shooting someone in the face. “Letters of Apology and Complaint” offers only this: “A short, sincere note . . . enclosed in a box of flowers, may help one’s cause.” “Debrett’s,” which acknowledges that the country weekend can be a “social minefield,” is exhaustive but severe. “Being dangerous is considered frightfully rude. . . . Shooting manners expect the guilty gun to leave the party immediately . . . and if the mishap is a tragic one . . . never to shoot again. Shooting form also expects the other guns to be deeply discreet about the incident.” The Vice-President’s instincts on this last point have been impeccable.
Notwithstanding the antics of the misfiring narrator of Tom Lehrer’s “The Hunting Song”-he taxidermies the heads of “two game wardens, seven hunters, and a pure-bred Guernsey cow”-surely it is inadvisable for the shooter to present himself, as Cheney did, at the next day’s quail lunch. So how do you make it up to the fellow you mistook for a bobwhite? In the view of Peter Post, the director of the Emily Post Institute and the author of “Essential Manners for Men,” the key is to acknowledge the misstep and then make active attempts at redress. Chocolates aren’t quite right for the occasion, but the Vice-President would be safe with flowers. “A springtime mix,” Post said. “That would bring a bit of joy to a drab hospital room.”
SONGS OF THE DAY
Dance all night - Ryan Adams
On the other side - The Strokes
Back from a long weekend in NYC. Excellent time. We stayed at a friend's apartment here. We saw an excellent play. We ate at two great restaurants for brunch and dinner on Saturday. Had some great cupcakes. Unfortunately we also witnessed the immediate aftermath of this. A macabre scene.
We bought some things here and here. We visited the Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, and saw the last day of the excellent Egon Schiele exhibit at the Neue Gallery (highly recommended for its authentic Vienna atmosphere). And we almost ran into big trouble with some suspecting people because of this. Some b-list celebrity sightings: 1, 2, 3 (on the right), 4 (no idea who she was but my 29 year-old brother knew her (!). And finally, we got bumped up to executive class on the way home -- a great cap to the weekend.
HUNTING DICK
New Yorker
Some breaches of decorum are easier to rectify than others. Perhaps you have been invited to attend a memorial ceremony at Auschwitz and you arrive in a parka and hiking boots, only to find that most of the men are wearing dark suits. Solution: Buy an overcoat and, next time, call ahead to ask about attire. Or, say, you lose your temper and tell a senior member of the United States Senate to “go fuck yourself.” Solution: Issue a statement acknowledging your frank words and let the fuss subside without attracting further attention. Vice-President Dick Cheney carried himself successfully through both of these faux pas. But his accidental shooting of the Austin lawyer Harry M. Whittington presents a more delicate question of etiquette: What is the proper way to proceed after blasting six to two hundred pieces of birdshot into the chest, neck, and face of a personal acquaintance? Mylar balloons? African violets? A casserole?
On this point of protocol, even the experts are indistinct. “Coveys and Singles: The Handbook of Quail Hunting,” for instance, focusses on such subjects as apparel. “The quail hunter’s underwear can vary. . . ,” its author, Bob Gooch, writes. “Some hunters prefer fishnet-type underwear which permits the body heat to circulate more freely.” The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s skills manual details elaborate chivalric rites with regard to everything from field manners (“Don’t be a slob or a poacher!” “Never be rude or hog shots”) to the conveyance of quarry (“Be discreet and respectful of the animal as you transport it home. Never make the carcass and head the subject of public display”), but is less exacting when it comes to how to behave if what you’ve shot is, in fact, a human being. Only the following mores can be established: The ethical hunter’s first obligation is to determine responsiveness in the injured party. After shouting, “Are you all right?” he must check for hemorrhaging. Finally, he is expected to determine, “Is there blood-soaked clothing? Are there pools of blood on the ground?”
The literature offers few clues to how an errant marksman should negotiate what Dickens calls “the delicacy of his situation.” (In Chapter 7 of “The Pickwick Papers,” Mr. Tupman, during a rook shoot, “had saved the lives of innumerable unoffending birds by receiving a portion of the charge in his left arm.”) In Jimmy Carter’s “An Outdoor Journal,” his ode to the role of fresh air in forging gentlemanly virtue, he hints at the predicament of the friend-shooter, a sort of shadowy social limbo, fraught with shame and imputations of poor couth. According to Carter, “If anyone grew careless and endangered a neighbor by shooting too low, it was a serious matter indeed, warranting an angry shout of condemnation and a damaged reputation.” Grover Cleveland, in “Fishing and Shooting Sketches,” concurs. “The careless or bungling shooter,” he writes, must not be surprised if even his dog abandons him, “leaving the chagrined and disappointed hunter to return home alone-legs weary, gameless and ashamed.”
The 1969 edition of “Vogue’s Book of Etiquette” includes a long discussion of “Hunting and Shooting” (don’t reach for shots, offer all game to your host), but makes no mention of how to behave in the case of shooting someone in the face. “Letters of Apology and Complaint” offers only this: “A short, sincere note . . . enclosed in a box of flowers, may help one’s cause.” “Debrett’s,” which acknowledges that the country weekend can be a “social minefield,” is exhaustive but severe. “Being dangerous is considered frightfully rude. . . . Shooting manners expect the guilty gun to leave the party immediately . . . and if the mishap is a tragic one . . . never to shoot again. Shooting form also expects the other guns to be deeply discreet about the incident.” The Vice-President’s instincts on this last point have been impeccable.
Notwithstanding the antics of the misfiring narrator of Tom Lehrer’s “The Hunting Song”-he taxidermies the heads of “two game wardens, seven hunters, and a pure-bred Guernsey cow”-surely it is inadvisable for the shooter to present himself, as Cheney did, at the next day’s quail lunch. So how do you make it up to the fellow you mistook for a bobwhite? In the view of Peter Post, the director of the Emily Post Institute and the author of “Essential Manners for Men,” the key is to acknowledge the misstep and then make active attempts at redress. Chocolates aren’t quite right for the occasion, but the Vice-President would be safe with flowers. “A springtime mix,” Post said. “That would bring a bit of joy to a drab hospital room.”
SONGS OF THE DAY
Dance all night - Ryan Adams
On the other side - The Strokes
posted by D @ 10:37 AM
0 comments
2.15.2006
MUSIC
One of my favourite songs by Neutral Milk Hotel is Ghost. Stylus Magazine weighs in on it.
Ghost, ghost I know you live within me
Feel as you fly
In thunderclouds above the city
Into one that I
Loved with all that was left within me
Until we tore in two
Now wings and rings and there's so many
Waiting here for you
And she was born in a bottle rocket, 1929
With wings that ring around a socket
Right between her spine
All drenched in milk and holy water
Pouring from the sky
I know that she will live for ever
She won't ever die
She goes and now she knows she'll never be afraid
To watch the morning paper blow
Into a hole where no one can escape
And one day in New York City baby
A girl fell from the sky
From the top of a burning apartment building
Fourteen stories high
And when her spirit left her body
How it split the sun
I know that she will live for ever
All goes on and on and on and
She goes and now she knows she'll never be afraid
To watch the morning paper blow
Into a hole where no one can escape
Unrelated:
The world's best ski gloves.
McSWEENEY'S RECOMMENDS:
Number 1 Single
This is the show where Lisa Loeb goes on dates looking for a husband. That someone like Lisa Loeb, who is talented, smart, beautiful, and eager for a relationship, still remains single is clearly a sign of societal breakdown. Single men of New York between the ages of 32 and 40, let's get on the ball here.
Sia, "Breathe Me"
She sang that song that played in the final moments of the finale of Six Feet Under, and though we've found that episode to be polarizing, there's no denying the song.
A decent desk chair
No particular brand is recommended, but it really does make a difference in your life.
The Lady Eve
We recommend all of Preston Sturges's films, but this one—a sexy, hilarious romantic comedy starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda—is our favorite. Pitch-perfect, smart as a whip, and immensely charming.
Red plates
Eat on them. As a backdrop, these bad boys, like red walls at a restaurant, double the excellence of your meal. Don't slight the eyes. They're right up there in terms of sensory perception, you know.
Corduroy Saturday
We're giving this one away. It's either a band name or a name for a recording label. Or that club that doesn't have a sign. It's textured and you can think of maybe a dozen possible logos.
Blue Angel by Francine Prose
We're a sucker for campus novels and this is right up there with Lucky Jim and Small World. Funny funny funny.
One of my favourite songs by Neutral Milk Hotel is Ghost. Stylus Magazine weighs in on it.
Ghost, ghost I know you live within me
Feel as you fly
In thunderclouds above the city
Into one that I
Loved with all that was left within me
Until we tore in two
Now wings and rings and there's so many
Waiting here for you
And she was born in a bottle rocket, 1929
With wings that ring around a socket
Right between her spine
All drenched in milk and holy water
Pouring from the sky
I know that she will live for ever
She won't ever die
She goes and now she knows she'll never be afraid
To watch the morning paper blow
Into a hole where no one can escape
And one day in New York City baby
A girl fell from the sky
From the top of a burning apartment building
Fourteen stories high
And when her spirit left her body
How it split the sun
I know that she will live for ever
All goes on and on and on and
She goes and now she knows she'll never be afraid
To watch the morning paper blow
Into a hole where no one can escape
Unrelated:
The world's best ski gloves.
McSWEENEY'S RECOMMENDS:
Number 1 Single
This is the show where Lisa Loeb goes on dates looking for a husband. That someone like Lisa Loeb, who is talented, smart, beautiful, and eager for a relationship, still remains single is clearly a sign of societal breakdown. Single men of New York between the ages of 32 and 40, let's get on the ball here.
Sia, "Breathe Me"
She sang that song that played in the final moments of the finale of Six Feet Under, and though we've found that episode to be polarizing, there's no denying the song.
A decent desk chair
No particular brand is recommended, but it really does make a difference in your life.
The Lady Eve
We recommend all of Preston Sturges's films, but this one—a sexy, hilarious romantic comedy starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda—is our favorite. Pitch-perfect, smart as a whip, and immensely charming.
Red plates
Eat on them. As a backdrop, these bad boys, like red walls at a restaurant, double the excellence of your meal. Don't slight the eyes. They're right up there in terms of sensory perception, you know.
Corduroy Saturday
We're giving this one away. It's either a band name or a name for a recording label. Or that club that doesn't have a sign. It's textured and you can think of maybe a dozen possible logos.
Blue Angel by Francine Prose
We're a sucker for campus novels and this is right up there with Lucky Jim and Small World. Funny funny funny.
posted by D @ 7:20 AM
0 comments
2.14.2006
HUMOUR
Late Show with David Letterman, CBS
“Good news, ladies and gentlemen, we have finally located weapons of mass destruction: It’s Dick Cheney.”
“But here is the sad part — before the trip Donald Rumsfeld had denied the guy’s request for body armor.”
“We can’t get Bin Laden, but we nailed a 78-year-old attorney.”
“The guy who got gunned down, he is a Republican lawyer and a big Republican donor and fortunately the buck shot was deflected by wads of laundered cash. So he’s fine. He took a little in the wallet.”
‘The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,’ NBC
“Although it is beautiful here in California, the weather back East has been atrocious. There was so much snow in Washington, D.C., Dick Cheney accidentally shot a fat guy thinking it was a polar bear.
“That’s the big story over the weekend. ... Dick Cheney accidentally shot a fellow hunter, a 78-year-old lawyer. In fact, when people found out he shot a lawyer, his popularity is now at 92 percent.”
“I think Cheney is starting to lose it. After he shot the guy he screamed, ‘Anyone else want to call domestic wire tapping illegal?”’
“Dick Cheney is capitalizing on this for Valentine’s Day. It’s the new Dick Cheney cologne. It’s called Duck!”
‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,’ Comedy Central
“Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a man during a quail hunt ... making 78-year-old Harry Whittington the first person shot by a sitting veep since Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton, of course, [was] shot in a duel with Aaron Burr over issues of honor, integrity and political maneuvering. Whittington? Mistaken for a bird.”
“Now, this story certainly has its humorous aspects. ... But it also raises a serious issue, one which I feel very strongly about. ... moms, dads, if you’re watching right now, I can’t emphasize this enough: Do not let your kids go on hunting trips with the vice president. I don’t care what kind of lucrative contracts they’re trying to land, or energy regulations they’re trying to get lifted — it’s just not worth it.”
N.V.N.
Anna Akhmatova
There is a sacred, secret line in loving
which attraction and even passion cannot cross,—
even if lips draw near in awful silence
and love tears at the heart.
Friendship is weak and useless here,
and years of happiness, exalted and full of fire,
because the soul is free and does not know
the slow luxuries of sensual life.
Those who try to come near it are insane
and those who reach it are shaken by grief,
So now you know exactly why
my heart beats no faster under your hand.
Unpublished by Keats, but found written on a manuscript after his death. His poem distills candidly the turbulence of love—the terrible, tender, unmitigated, needy reaching toward another:
LINES WRITTEN IN THE MS. OF THE CAP AND BELLS
John Keats
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood,
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm'd. See, here it is—
I hold it towards you.
_________________________________________________________________________
Also relevant today.
Less relevant
On Mary Magdalene
Late Show with David Letterman, CBS
“Good news, ladies and gentlemen, we have finally located weapons of mass destruction: It’s Dick Cheney.”
“But here is the sad part — before the trip Donald Rumsfeld had denied the guy’s request for body armor.”
“We can’t get Bin Laden, but we nailed a 78-year-old attorney.”
“The guy who got gunned down, he is a Republican lawyer and a big Republican donor and fortunately the buck shot was deflected by wads of laundered cash. So he’s fine. He took a little in the wallet.”
‘The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,’ NBC
“Although it is beautiful here in California, the weather back East has been atrocious. There was so much snow in Washington, D.C., Dick Cheney accidentally shot a fat guy thinking it was a polar bear.
“That’s the big story over the weekend. ... Dick Cheney accidentally shot a fellow hunter, a 78-year-old lawyer. In fact, when people found out he shot a lawyer, his popularity is now at 92 percent.”
“I think Cheney is starting to lose it. After he shot the guy he screamed, ‘Anyone else want to call domestic wire tapping illegal?”’
“Dick Cheney is capitalizing on this for Valentine’s Day. It’s the new Dick Cheney cologne. It’s called Duck!”
‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,’ Comedy Central
“Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a man during a quail hunt ... making 78-year-old Harry Whittington the first person shot by a sitting veep since Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton, of course, [was] shot in a duel with Aaron Burr over issues of honor, integrity and political maneuvering. Whittington? Mistaken for a bird.”
“Now, this story certainly has its humorous aspects. ... But it also raises a serious issue, one which I feel very strongly about. ... moms, dads, if you’re watching right now, I can’t emphasize this enough: Do not let your kids go on hunting trips with the vice president. I don’t care what kind of lucrative contracts they’re trying to land, or energy regulations they’re trying to get lifted — it’s just not worth it.”
N.V.N.
Anna Akhmatova
There is a sacred, secret line in loving
which attraction and even passion cannot cross,—
even if lips draw near in awful silence
and love tears at the heart.
Friendship is weak and useless here,
and years of happiness, exalted and full of fire,
because the soul is free and does not know
the slow luxuries of sensual life.
Those who try to come near it are insane
and those who reach it are shaken by grief,
So now you know exactly why
my heart beats no faster under your hand.
Unpublished by Keats, but found written on a manuscript after his death. His poem distills candidly the turbulence of love—the terrible, tender, unmitigated, needy reaching toward another:
LINES WRITTEN IN THE MS. OF THE CAP AND BELLS
John Keats
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood,
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm'd. See, here it is—
I hold it towards you.
_________________________________________________________________________
Also relevant today.
Less relevant
On Mary Magdalene
posted by D @ 6:04 AM
0 comments
2.10.2006
PHOTOS
My office building, with One King West reflected in its windows:
from daily dose of imagery
A Canadian won the World Press Photo of the Year (Mother and child at emergency feeding center, Tahoua, Niger, 1 August)
My office building, with One King West reflected in its windows:
from daily dose of imagery
A Canadian won the World Press Photo of the Year (Mother and child at emergency feeding center, Tahoua, Niger, 1 August)
posted by D @ 10:24 AM
0 comments
2.09.2006
VIDEO/FILM
HD trailer for Marie Antoinette.
Madonna's new video
Arcade Fire playing Boys Don't Cry in New York, on the street.
MUSIC
Pitchfork on Beth Orton's new record:
Beth Orton
Comfort of Strangers
[Astralwerks; 2006]
Rating: 7.2
Has Beth Orton ever sounded as angry as she does on "Worms", the caustic kiss-off that opens her fourth album? "I'm your apple-eatin' heathen, any ol' rib-stealin' Eve," she sings on the chorus, turning talk of original sin into empowering invective against some unnamed target. It's an odd song with an odd little shuffle to it, and even though it sounds uncannily like Fiona Apple (right down to her rushed cadence at the end of the second verse), the track reminds you how singular Orton seemed on her first two albums and how much she buffed away the rough edges on her third album, Daybreaker, an AOR makeover that aimed for but missed the same listeners who one year later made Norah Jones a sensation.
So it's nice to have the old Beth Orton back. It's also nice to have Jim O'Rourke at the helm, particularly because he puts some rhythm back into her songs. Orton needs it, too: Her voice hits your ears at an angle, as if refracted prismatically, and O'Rourke's sturdy beats don't reset that angle to perpendicular so much as make sure it hits its target with a little more force. Comfort of Strangers is strongest when O'Rourke and percussionist Tim Barnes translate Trailer Park's spacey effects into earthier rhythms, especially with the oscillating bassline and tight drum beat on "Conceived". They let loose on "Countenance" and are joined by what sounds like a full band on "Shopping Trolley". The intro to the title track sounds like "Walk on the Wild Side", but to their credit, Orton and O'Rourke undercut that seedy strut with handclaps, sparkling piano, and perhaps her most straightforward performance.
Orton's vocals-- so arced and mellifluous-- reign over all other sounds on Comfort of Strangers. On Daybreaker, her voice sounded like an empty vessel, beautiful but conveying very little; here it has a very real personality behind it, one that allows itself to be angry, cynical, hopeful, and snide-- a complex and compelling emotional mess. This attitude fits her songwriting well, giving her words added resonance. On "Heartland Truckstop" she sings, "I wanted to love, but I turned 'round and hated it," and her strong, glaring delivery of that second line-- as if she's making eye contact through her voice-- reinforces not just the wordplay, but the cheated disappointment of the sentiment.
Death of love is the constant, often oppressive theme of Comfort of Strangers, which gives these songs the feel of dark therapy, often so dour as to be claustrophobic. The sense of a lesson learned, however platitudinous, on the closer "Pieces of the Sky" finally tempers Orton's clenched emotions: "When it's over it's over/ I best get busy living/been a long time gone." But "A Place Aside" and "Safe in Your Arms" comprise the album's still-worn heart. In "A Place Aside" her concrete imagery ("Pull me close and we lay still/ Wrap my toes around your heel") risks an intimacy that suggests the heartache that ostensibly inspired the other songs, but "Safe" undercuts that sentiment as Orton wonders if the past's good memories are worth the present's bleak pain. Torn between the illusion of security and the reality of heartbreak, these songs remain complex and open-ended, her questions unanswered. That's the key to Comfort of Strangers and the source of its impact. Far from perfect-- at times even dull-- these songs balance their heavy despair with genuine, if hesitant, hope. The contrasts in the music mirror her internal struggle, even if Comfort of Strangers is destined always to mean more to its makers than to its listeners.
ACTOR
On Julianne Moore
New York Magazine
When it comes to huge movie stars, Julianne Moore both is one and isn’t. She is, insofar as she’s near the tippy-top of the female A-list—beneath, say, Julia Roberts and Angelina Jolie but right alongside the now-semi-retired Gwyneth Paltrow and Jodie Foster (when she comes down from the mountain every other year or so). Indeed, in career terms, Foster is the female actor Moore’s come to resemble the most. Both are capable of transcendent performances (The Accused and Far From Heaven, for a start), but more important, no matter what they do, both seem incapable of ever being bad.
Of late, both actresses have had their default mode set to wounded mom—compare Foster’s recent “I swear I really have a daughter” action film, Flightplan, to Moore’s “I swear I really have a son” thriller, The Forgotten. Or to Moore’s next film, Freedomland, opening February 17, in which she stumbles into a hospital, frantic after a carjacking during which her son was inadvertently kidnapped. Freedomland is a racial powder keg of a movie: Two furious blue-collar communities, one black, one white, rub up against each other, shooting sparks over an ugly crime that may or may not have occurred. (I swear I really have a son!)
“It’s a script that Scott Rudin sent me around the same time he sent me The Hours,” Moore says. “I read the script on a plane and I just cried and cried.” After she signed on, the film attracted director Joe Roth, a former studio executive with a spotty record. (America’s Sweethearts, anyone?) And Moore co-stars with Samuel L. Jackson, a talent who never met a paycheck he didn’t like. It’s a dark film in a cold season and therefore a tough sell. But then there’s Moore. See, that’s the thing about her: No matter how unpromising the film, or hackneyed the premise, or worrisome the marketing campaign, you’re intrigued—and reassured—by the fact that she’s in it.
These days, though, there’s another measure of stardom that happens entirely offscreen, and by that yardstick, Moore’s barely a celebrity at all. When’s the last time you saw her on the cover of Us Weekly? When’s the last time Star went through her trash? Moore and her husband, director and writer Bart Freundlich, may not quite be Brangelina (Julibart?), but you’d think we’d occasionally get to read about their exploits in breathless, first-name-only cover lines. Moore has a few theories on why we don’t: “When you look at it, most of the attention is focused on very young people, the Jessica Simpsons of the world. Because a lot of the interest is from young people,” she says. “So when you’re 16 years old, Jessica Simpson matters to you. The older you get, the less that stuff matters. So, number one, I’m out of the age range.” (She’s 45. Yes, really.) “Plus, I don’t think that we do anything that’s particularly interesting.” Well, neither do Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner, but that doesn’t stop us from seeing a flip book of photos every time they stop to buy a latte.
“When I go home at the end of the day, I can’t say, ‘Mommy can’t talk to you. She’s been crying all day.’ ”
And the tabloids and the paparazzi and the nonstop swirl of attention can’t be so easy to avoid as all that, right? Because all the Jessicas and Britneys and TomKats and Brangelinas and Vincefers will swear up and down that if they could just blink and make it go away, they would. “I don’t think it’s entirely an actor’s fault when these tabloids get ahold of their lives,” she says. “But some people do court it. And I don’t think it helps your career. Somebody was saying recently that this celebrity interest is spreading across the world like a bacteria. It’s people searching for some kind of stimulation. Like watching a big soap opera. It’s about stimulation; it’s not about content.”
It’s not that Moore scrambles away from celebrity—more like she sidesteps it gracefully, as though politely carrying on a conversation while avoiding someone else’s yappy little dog. And like any actress trying to shape her career, Moore is challenged by things both within her control (what movies she chooses) and beyond it (when they’re released). “You may do four movies over the course of two years. Suddenly, they all come out at the same time and everyone in the press says, ‘What’s the matter with her? Why is she working all the time? Why do we have to see four movies with her in it?’ ”
But being a stealth celebrity can do wonders for your reputation as a star. In part, Moore may be insulated, all critical goodwill aside, because she’s never had that monster, Pretty Woman hit—nor does she seem all that eager to pursue it. (Hannibal was the one exception—stepping in for, yes, Jodie Foster—but she got upstaged by Anthony Hopkins’s eating Ray Liotta’s brain.) In general, Moore would have you believe that she’s just a mom, with a family, and a house, and a job, just like you, more or less. And as she speaks from her West Village home, she sounds more or less like exactly that—until you remember that her job, unlike yours, is to be one of the greatest movie actresses in the world. As the coked-up den-mother porn star in Boogie Nights. As the allergic-to-the-world heroine of Safe. As the brittle, blossoming fifties housewife in Far From Heaven. As a similar character, with a different soul, in The Hours. In 2003, she became the ninth actor to be Oscar-nominated for two different roles in one year, The Hours and Far From Heaven. Somehow she got beat twice, in a double injustice: Best Supporting Actress went to Catherine Zeta-Jones in Chicago, and Best Actress to her Hours co-star, Nicole Kidman, who won by a nose.
Yet here she is, getting her 8-year-old son set up on the computer and apologizing for delaying the interview by an hour. “My son has strep, so we went to the doctor, then we had lunch, then we got the medication—you know, it was one of those things.” And when I ask about taking on an emotionally harrowing role like the one in Freedomland (in which she spends a lot of time crying; Julianne Moore is really good at crying), she says, “I’m just like anybody else in the world. I have a job and I have a family. When I go home at the end of the day, I can’t say, ‘Mommy can’t talk to you. She’s been crying all day.’ I’m sure you have days like that.”
Surely her job and her kids and her home life can’t be all that mundane; after all, her husband’s a writer. In fact, their latest film together is a Manhattan relationship comedy titled Trust the Man, about two couples fraying at the edges, set to come out in June. A relationship comedy? With a husband and wife? He must have mined their relationship for salacious nuggets—just the kind of stuff the tabloids would crave.
“Obviously, when you live with a writer, everything in your life is up for grabs,” she says. “And whenever I have to go on Letterman, you sort of scrounge around for funny things that have happened to you. With me, it’s always in my family. My son literally at lunch today—the one thing with 8-year-old boys is that they’re never really listening. So when they hear something, they say, ‘What did you say?’ So he wanted his father to repeat a story, and Bart said, ‘I don’t understand. Why do you want me to repeat this? Why weren’t you listening the first time?’ And he said, ‘Well, you said one thing that sounded really interesting to me: titty!’" She laughs.
And from elsewhere in her house, just within earshot, comes an embarrassed caterwaul, the kind that could be heard in almost any home, anywhere: Moooooom!
HD trailer for Marie Antoinette.
Madonna's new video
Arcade Fire playing Boys Don't Cry in New York, on the street.
MUSIC
Pitchfork on Beth Orton's new record:
Beth Orton
Comfort of Strangers
[Astralwerks; 2006]
Rating: 7.2
Has Beth Orton ever sounded as angry as she does on "Worms", the caustic kiss-off that opens her fourth album? "I'm your apple-eatin' heathen, any ol' rib-stealin' Eve," she sings on the chorus, turning talk of original sin into empowering invective against some unnamed target. It's an odd song with an odd little shuffle to it, and even though it sounds uncannily like Fiona Apple (right down to her rushed cadence at the end of the second verse), the track reminds you how singular Orton seemed on her first two albums and how much she buffed away the rough edges on her third album, Daybreaker, an AOR makeover that aimed for but missed the same listeners who one year later made Norah Jones a sensation.
So it's nice to have the old Beth Orton back. It's also nice to have Jim O'Rourke at the helm, particularly because he puts some rhythm back into her songs. Orton needs it, too: Her voice hits your ears at an angle, as if refracted prismatically, and O'Rourke's sturdy beats don't reset that angle to perpendicular so much as make sure it hits its target with a little more force. Comfort of Strangers is strongest when O'Rourke and percussionist Tim Barnes translate Trailer Park's spacey effects into earthier rhythms, especially with the oscillating bassline and tight drum beat on "Conceived". They let loose on "Countenance" and are joined by what sounds like a full band on "Shopping Trolley". The intro to the title track sounds like "Walk on the Wild Side", but to their credit, Orton and O'Rourke undercut that seedy strut with handclaps, sparkling piano, and perhaps her most straightforward performance.
Orton's vocals-- so arced and mellifluous-- reign over all other sounds on Comfort of Strangers. On Daybreaker, her voice sounded like an empty vessel, beautiful but conveying very little; here it has a very real personality behind it, one that allows itself to be angry, cynical, hopeful, and snide-- a complex and compelling emotional mess. This attitude fits her songwriting well, giving her words added resonance. On "Heartland Truckstop" she sings, "I wanted to love, but I turned 'round and hated it," and her strong, glaring delivery of that second line-- as if she's making eye contact through her voice-- reinforces not just the wordplay, but the cheated disappointment of the sentiment.
Death of love is the constant, often oppressive theme of Comfort of Strangers, which gives these songs the feel of dark therapy, often so dour as to be claustrophobic. The sense of a lesson learned, however platitudinous, on the closer "Pieces of the Sky" finally tempers Orton's clenched emotions: "When it's over it's over/ I best get busy living/been a long time gone." But "A Place Aside" and "Safe in Your Arms" comprise the album's still-worn heart. In "A Place Aside" her concrete imagery ("Pull me close and we lay still/ Wrap my toes around your heel") risks an intimacy that suggests the heartache that ostensibly inspired the other songs, but "Safe" undercuts that sentiment as Orton wonders if the past's good memories are worth the present's bleak pain. Torn between the illusion of security and the reality of heartbreak, these songs remain complex and open-ended, her questions unanswered. That's the key to Comfort of Strangers and the source of its impact. Far from perfect-- at times even dull-- these songs balance their heavy despair with genuine, if hesitant, hope. The contrasts in the music mirror her internal struggle, even if Comfort of Strangers is destined always to mean more to its makers than to its listeners.
ACTOR
On Julianne Moore
New York Magazine
When it comes to huge movie stars, Julianne Moore both is one and isn’t. She is, insofar as she’s near the tippy-top of the female A-list—beneath, say, Julia Roberts and Angelina Jolie but right alongside the now-semi-retired Gwyneth Paltrow and Jodie Foster (when she comes down from the mountain every other year or so). Indeed, in career terms, Foster is the female actor Moore’s come to resemble the most. Both are capable of transcendent performances (The Accused and Far From Heaven, for a start), but more important, no matter what they do, both seem incapable of ever being bad.
Of late, both actresses have had their default mode set to wounded mom—compare Foster’s recent “I swear I really have a daughter” action film, Flightplan, to Moore’s “I swear I really have a son” thriller, The Forgotten. Or to Moore’s next film, Freedomland, opening February 17, in which she stumbles into a hospital, frantic after a carjacking during which her son was inadvertently kidnapped. Freedomland is a racial powder keg of a movie: Two furious blue-collar communities, one black, one white, rub up against each other, shooting sparks over an ugly crime that may or may not have occurred. (I swear I really have a son!)
“It’s a script that Scott Rudin sent me around the same time he sent me The Hours,” Moore says. “I read the script on a plane and I just cried and cried.” After she signed on, the film attracted director Joe Roth, a former studio executive with a spotty record. (America’s Sweethearts, anyone?) And Moore co-stars with Samuel L. Jackson, a talent who never met a paycheck he didn’t like. It’s a dark film in a cold season and therefore a tough sell. But then there’s Moore. See, that’s the thing about her: No matter how unpromising the film, or hackneyed the premise, or worrisome the marketing campaign, you’re intrigued—and reassured—by the fact that she’s in it.
These days, though, there’s another measure of stardom that happens entirely offscreen, and by that yardstick, Moore’s barely a celebrity at all. When’s the last time you saw her on the cover of Us Weekly? When’s the last time Star went through her trash? Moore and her husband, director and writer Bart Freundlich, may not quite be Brangelina (Julibart?), but you’d think we’d occasionally get to read about their exploits in breathless, first-name-only cover lines. Moore has a few theories on why we don’t: “When you look at it, most of the attention is focused on very young people, the Jessica Simpsons of the world. Because a lot of the interest is from young people,” she says. “So when you’re 16 years old, Jessica Simpson matters to you. The older you get, the less that stuff matters. So, number one, I’m out of the age range.” (She’s 45. Yes, really.) “Plus, I don’t think that we do anything that’s particularly interesting.” Well, neither do Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner, but that doesn’t stop us from seeing a flip book of photos every time they stop to buy a latte.
“When I go home at the end of the day, I can’t say, ‘Mommy can’t talk to you. She’s been crying all day.’ ”
And the tabloids and the paparazzi and the nonstop swirl of attention can’t be so easy to avoid as all that, right? Because all the Jessicas and Britneys and TomKats and Brangelinas and Vincefers will swear up and down that if they could just blink and make it go away, they would. “I don’t think it’s entirely an actor’s fault when these tabloids get ahold of their lives,” she says. “But some people do court it. And I don’t think it helps your career. Somebody was saying recently that this celebrity interest is spreading across the world like a bacteria. It’s people searching for some kind of stimulation. Like watching a big soap opera. It’s about stimulation; it’s not about content.”
It’s not that Moore scrambles away from celebrity—more like she sidesteps it gracefully, as though politely carrying on a conversation while avoiding someone else’s yappy little dog. And like any actress trying to shape her career, Moore is challenged by things both within her control (what movies she chooses) and beyond it (when they’re released). “You may do four movies over the course of two years. Suddenly, they all come out at the same time and everyone in the press says, ‘What’s the matter with her? Why is she working all the time? Why do we have to see four movies with her in it?’ ”
But being a stealth celebrity can do wonders for your reputation as a star. In part, Moore may be insulated, all critical goodwill aside, because she’s never had that monster, Pretty Woman hit—nor does she seem all that eager to pursue it. (Hannibal was the one exception—stepping in for, yes, Jodie Foster—but she got upstaged by Anthony Hopkins’s eating Ray Liotta’s brain.) In general, Moore would have you believe that she’s just a mom, with a family, and a house, and a job, just like you, more or less. And as she speaks from her West Village home, she sounds more or less like exactly that—until you remember that her job, unlike yours, is to be one of the greatest movie actresses in the world. As the coked-up den-mother porn star in Boogie Nights. As the allergic-to-the-world heroine of Safe. As the brittle, blossoming fifties housewife in Far From Heaven. As a similar character, with a different soul, in The Hours. In 2003, she became the ninth actor to be Oscar-nominated for two different roles in one year, The Hours and Far From Heaven. Somehow she got beat twice, in a double injustice: Best Supporting Actress went to Catherine Zeta-Jones in Chicago, and Best Actress to her Hours co-star, Nicole Kidman, who won by a nose.
Yet here she is, getting her 8-year-old son set up on the computer and apologizing for delaying the interview by an hour. “My son has strep, so we went to the doctor, then we had lunch, then we got the medication—you know, it was one of those things.” And when I ask about taking on an emotionally harrowing role like the one in Freedomland (in which she spends a lot of time crying; Julianne Moore is really good at crying), she says, “I’m just like anybody else in the world. I have a job and I have a family. When I go home at the end of the day, I can’t say, ‘Mommy can’t talk to you. She’s been crying all day.’ I’m sure you have days like that.”
Surely her job and her kids and her home life can’t be all that mundane; after all, her husband’s a writer. In fact, their latest film together is a Manhattan relationship comedy titled Trust the Man, about two couples fraying at the edges, set to come out in June. A relationship comedy? With a husband and wife? He must have mined their relationship for salacious nuggets—just the kind of stuff the tabloids would crave.
“Obviously, when you live with a writer, everything in your life is up for grabs,” she says. “And whenever I have to go on Letterman, you sort of scrounge around for funny things that have happened to you. With me, it’s always in my family. My son literally at lunch today—the one thing with 8-year-old boys is that they’re never really listening. So when they hear something, they say, ‘What did you say?’ So he wanted his father to repeat a story, and Bart said, ‘I don’t understand. Why do you want me to repeat this? Why weren’t you listening the first time?’ And he said, ‘Well, you said one thing that sounded really interesting to me: titty!’" She laughs.
And from elsewhere in her house, just within earshot, comes an embarrassed caterwaul, the kind that could be heard in almost any home, anywhere: Moooooom!
posted by D @ 10:14 AM
2 comments
