When Bands You Love Disappoint You
There is a very particular kind of melancholy you feel when a band lets you down. You know it’s nothing personal, and they probably meant well, but you hear something that makes you close your eyes, hang your head slightly, and imperceptibly slump.
I don’t mean something simple on a song, like, “Uhh… why did the producer put that glockenspiel so up front in the mix?” or “Really? Another children’s choir in the bridge?” or “Did Method Man really just rhyme cloud with style, wtf how is that even possible?”
Nor am I talking something huge, like hearing “Oh, Rog is gone, yeah, but don’t worry, we’ll still tour under the name Pink Floyd,” or Paul saying “Let It Be is cool, people, but now you can start talking about the Beatles in the past tense, thank you.” Or a band thinking the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra was necessary for it to rock harder.
I’m talking about when a band drops an LP or a song that is just… wrong, when you hear it. An album that just doesn’t fit, a direction just too out there, for you really to climb on board the way you may have with their other material. This has happened a few times to me.
Apocalypse Now
“I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That’s my dream; that’s my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor… and surviving.”
Stanley Kubrick said that all a director needed to make a good film was six to eight “non-submersible units”–that is, the core memorable sequences of a film. It is not difficult to see this philosophy in the great director’s post-Lolita output. From 2001 onwards, Kubrick filmed epic, memorable sequences without caring much how they were strung together, narratively. This disgruntled critics like Pauline Kael and Stanley Kaufmann, who seemed to see no point in this mode of filmmaking, and viewed Kubrick’s latter output as structurally tortured. If a film is only its narrative, or viewed only on such a surface level, then such a filmic construction would naturally be displeasing. But Kubrick frustrated narrative cohesiveness with architectonically perfect thematic form.
And lots of people inexplicably looking at their eyebrows.
I discuss this aspect of the great Kubrick’s filmmaking to compare with Apocalypse Now, a film with more non-submersible units than perhaps even Kubrick would have thought possible. Considering the end result, it is difficult to believe that Coppola thought his film was a mess that no amount of editing would salvage. Each sequence is a masterpiece unto itself, Willard’s fugacious encounters serving as signposts as his little boat putters into madness.
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Black Friday
I do not have cable. I do not have TV at all. I never listen to the radio, save NPR. I am fairly isolated from pop culture, and I prefer it this way, for I am shielded from the sludge of the Gagas, Twilights, and Kardashians (who, last I checked, were the sworn enemy of the Bajorans, but now seem to be some kind of white-collar whore, near as I can tell).
Caution: the above video has made some sensitive viewers vomit in a projectile manner. Aim away from your computer screen.
But sometimes something is so heinous that it slips through every defense a man can think of and hits me anyway. Such as it is with Rebecca Black’s “Friday.” It was described to me as the worst pop song that has yet been recorded. I shy from such hyperbole, usually; our current discourse is so insanely hyperbolic anymore that if it were a Kepler orbit, its eccentricity would be greater than 1. With this in mind, I had to hear “Friday” for myself.
Thoughts on the Tea Party
If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?
The Mad Hatter
The Tea Party has been a source of endless fascination for me. I have been accused in the past of referring to its members as racists, ignoramuses, nincompoops, and other rhetorically offensive but descriptively satisfying appellations.
Pejoratives, however, seem to have fallen out of fashion in todays public discourse. Rather, it would be more accurate to say that it is fashionable to behave publicly as if name-calling has fallen out of fashion, whilst still saying and doing pretty much whatever occurs to you whenever it occurs to you, and apologizing on the off-chance what you say is picked up by enough media outlets. In any case, several acquaintances inform me with alarming regularity that my negative views of the Tea Party are wholly unfounded, so I thought I would take this opportunity to see if they are correct. “They just stand for smaller government, less taxes, and freedom,” my mother says. “What is wrong with that?”
I… (name here)… a member in good standing of the He-Man Woman Haters Club… Do solemnly swear to be a he-man and hate women and not play with them or talk to them unless I have to. And especially: never fall in love, and if I do may I die slowly and painfully and suffer for hours – or until I scream bloody murder.
It started with True Lies. I rewatched James Cameron’s last pre-Titanic effort a couple days ago, and, as I do, I sought critics reviews before my viewing. I don’t do this with new films, really–films I’ve never seen before I prefer to be surprised by. But if it’s been a while since I’ve seen a film –and for True Lies 17 years have passed since my last viewing– I like to get a handle on what the critical consensus was back in the day, to understand the context in which the film was released and received, to compare it with my own feelings about how the film may have de-/appreciated in the ensuing years.
Somehow, though a series of links, I happened upon a feminist website, with a scathing feminist critique of the film. Did you flinch just then, at the word feminist? It is a word now with a strong connotation: militant, bull-headed, loud. I rolled my eyes before I started reading. I must be classified as some sort of feminist, I guess, supporting as I do women’s suffrage, reproductive rights, equal pay, and the general idea of them. But the idea of a “feminist critique” of True Lies was enough to make my eyes roll before I began reading. And during reading. Frequently.
I Hate Stupid People. (An angry rant.)
This is going to be an angry rant. A bit different from my previous posts, but any fan of Glenn Beck should feel right at home, except that my rant makes sense, is intellectually sound, is rational, and didn’t make me cry for minutes on end in front of millions of people.
This is just a brief precautionary statement, if you will, because after the jump, it might get loud. Fair warning. In fact, as a little “I’m sorry” to people who are about to be caught in my grip of vicious rhetoric, here is OK GO’s Grammy-winning video for “Here It Goes Again”:
David Fincher is a Genius: The Game
“The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that no other art form can hope to tackle.” –Stanley Kubrick.
(Caution: Spoilers herein.)
David Fincher is a genius.
I mean, I knew this before. Zodiac, Seven, Fight Club… all masterpieces of style. But it was rewatching The Game a few days ago that placed the final chip in the motherboard; something about his oeuvre clicked suddenly, and I had a eureka! moment. I hadn’t seen the film since it was released to theaters in 1997 and remembered it only as a mildly entertaining thriller. That was the critical consensus at the time; like a Kubrick film, it was too much to see all the buried meanings and intricacies of Fincher’s direction one just one viewing.
“I think that for a movie or a play to say anything really truthful about life, it has to do so very obliquely, so as to avoid all pat conclusions and neatly tied-up ideas. The point of view it is conveying has to be completely entwined with a sense of life as it is, and has to be got across through a subtle injection into the audience’s consciousness.”–SK
I’ve interpreted the above quote as meaning that Kubrick was concerned that films were only about what their plots were about. The plot of The Lost Weekend, for example, involves an alcoholic writer going on a mother of a bender. Its themes concern themselves mainly with that of alcoholism, disease, help, and recovery–that is, not much more than what its plot would indicate. This isn’t to say it is a bad film; quite the contrary, I regard it quite highly. It won four Academy Awards in 1946 including Picture, Actor, and Director. But what you see in the film is what you get, basically; it would work just as well on the stage as on the screen. The theme is not tied to the medium.
From 2001: A Space Odyssey onward, Kubrick’s themes and meanings were quite definitely tied to cinema. Barry Lyndon can only work as a film; the very point of it is the tightly-controlled image Kubrick lets you see. The slow zooms out, the painterly regard of his subjects, could not be duplicated in any other medium. Eyes Wide Shut bored people who felt it was a shallow, slow-moving story about marital issues. But he had so brilliantly coded his ideas of fidelity, jealousy, the bourgeoisie, celebrity and stardom, sex in the modern age, oneirism, his lead actor’s sexuality, and so on, that they flew over his audiences’ heads at first.
Not since Stanley Kubrick has a director so completely mastered subliminal suggestion. The trend continues throughout David Fincher’s work, but let’s examine The Game, as it is fresh in my mind.
