words

It's not that I don't have things to say, or the words to say them. Increasingly, I prefer expressing myself with pictures instead of words. And after an extended period of relishing a raw, open, cynical vulnerability, I find that I once again prefer to keep things to myself -- to build a little wall between you and me, to protect myself from the subtle pains and regrets. I do, in theory, want to be wide open for you. The problem is that I don't trust myself or my perceived honesty. From one day to the next, I see things differently. Monday's truths are Tuesday's blatant fallacies. The best I can hope is to latch on to those things that show a pattern of falling on one side or another. But of the things that are so changeable as to make my head spin, well, for now I suppose it's best to just keep them to myself.

I'm coming to a comfortable middle-ground with my existential unknowns. It is not answers, nor is it solace or relief. It is not faith, exactly, and it is not nihilism. It is just an ability to ponder and explore without debilitating pain and anxiety. I take this as the most convincing sign I've had that I am becoming, finally, adult. Not abandoning the playful curiosity of childhood, but shedding, finally, the insecurities and compulsions and anxieties and the pure madness of youth. Accepting, finally, the inevitabilities -- not embracing them, not excited about them, but accepting them. Which is infinitely better than fighting against something it is utterly impossible to alter.

So, I've been watching a bit of Bergman lately, especially the later stuff. Fanny and Alexander, the full 5 hour miniseries version, is fantastic, absolutely worth the time, totally recommended to everyone.

Union Station, Sacremento

The urban cowboy wears a cowboy hat, shiny red snakeskin boots, a big gold watch, and a black leather coat -- mid thigh length, unless he's a serious hustler, in which case he might sport a duster. He has an expertly manicured goatee and small, piercing eyes. The painted-on wranglers, crisp unfaded black. Silver bolo to match a silver belt buckle. He walks tall with his shoulders thrown back, and when he stands to contemplate something, he cocks one hip out and places the curled pointy toe of his right boot at a fourty-five degree angle from his elbows, which stand out from the hips on which his hands are placed.

Tucson this year

Everything is so big, and so American. There are cactus and palm trees everywhere. The streets are so wide, and the sidewalks are made of gravel. There are beautiful blue mountains surrounding the city, which is a little shock of emerald green laying peacefully in the valley of five mountain ranges.

Quails run across the road. A dead javelina slowly bloats on the shoulder of Sunrise Drive near Skyline, and coyotes wait patiently in the hills for nightfall to drag it away.

The sky is clear and blindingly blue, and everyone wears scarves when the temperature dips below sixty degrees Fahrenheit. Everyone smiles and says 'hello,' and if you buy something, they wish you a nice day.

It takes nearly an hour to drive from one end of town to the other, but in the same amount of time you can find yourself in the middle of a saguaro desert or on the top of a pine-covered mountain, or in Mexico.

In town on a Friday night, the low buzz of the ghetto bird can sometimes be ignored, but its spotlight illuminating the darkness around you surely cannot. In the bars, local celebrities belt out rockabilly originals with contorted faces.

It is sunny more than 300 days a year. The trees are green all year long, and the bougainvillea in my mother's back yard is still blooming on Christmas day.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

is a really, really, really good movie. It is mesmerizing, meditative, beautiful, captivating... There is a scene early in the film where the James gang robs a train, and the cinematography is so strikingly, brilliantly fantastic that it actually, no hyperbole sent shivers down my spine. I said to myself, "Holy shit, this movie just sent shivers down my spine."

I have not ever seen a movie like this one. Actually. I can think of movies that can compare in terms of the pacing (deliberate, methodical, slow) or subject matter ('existential' as Mark Kermode describes it) or even the way it's shot (painterly, favoring aesthetics over anything else), but there is something more to this -- it's this combination of foreign (ie not American, my apologies for not having a better word for it than that) aesthetics and something uniquely American, both in style and subject.

It is long, but my only quibble is a five minute interlude near the end of the film that I find unnecessary and a bit distracting. The rest of the length is necessary, for the slow, steady build, the full immersion into the atmosphere created, and the increasing tension, which only finds relief as the credits roll -- I didn't realize how tense my entire body had become until "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" came onto the screen, in solid white block letters, signaling the end of the movie. I took a breath, and suddenly felt like it was the first breath I'd taken in two and a half hours. The movie has no opening credits, no titles whatsoever. It simply begins, slow and steady (like the tortoise...) and does not look back until the whole thing is over and done with.

Certain things stuck with me more than others. The way Jesse's wife reacts when he is shot -- horrified, to be sure, but also somehow rehearsed, and not at all surprised. You get the impression she's gone over the moment countless times, preparing for its inevitable consummation. The moment on the ice when Jesse asks Charles Ford if he ever contemplated suicide, and his motives for every decision thus far and to follow become suddenly clear.

Superb acting (especially by Casey Affleck), fantastically melodramatic score by Nick Cave, and every element of film making expertly executed.

I want to say something about the way movies make us feel, and about how I love that I often feel I can't trust my first impressions of a movie, because they are so often based on emotion, and if a movie makes me feel anything I generally think very highly of it and have trouble immediately recognizing its faults. I love this. I love that I enjoy watching movies so much that even a halfway shitty movie can make me feel like I love it. This movie, by the way, is not halfway shitty, but it is such an emotional, visceral thing that it made me think about what it is that I love so much about movies in general -- which is their amazing, incomparable ability to make us Feel, feel amazing, powerful things, feel love or hate or anger or jealousy or elation or relief or suspense or sorrow. And I love the fact that there are people doing this utterly commercial thing (due to production costs, it simply can't be helped) with no commercial motives whatsoever -- people who can keep their purity of vision and create these amazing masterpieces. And I love any movie that feels like this, like somebody loved it, somebody put everything they have into it, into making it say this perfect, lovely thing better than anybody else has said it. The truth is, I like most movies I see, and the reasons I dislike the movies I dislike almost always come down to either profit vs vision or filmmaking that doesn't challenge the viewer or the filmmakers. I simply will not accept compromise -- life is too short to ever compromise your vision for a few bucks, and the true, the brilliant artists figure this out early, and will fight to the death (figurative death.. death of the piece of art, I mean) to preserve their vision. I will quibble technically about any film, because I enjoy being the critic, but technical complaints do not supersede the love I have for movies that are made with love and with passion.

I love movies, and I love the movie I saw tonight.

Scratch that, reverse it

Ok, last post about Wes Anderson. I promise. I think. I take back what I said about his female characters -- I've just been rewatching Rushmore, and I don't think I was right. The fact is that Anderson tells stories about immature man-children (man-childs?). All his movies center around male characters suffering from acute arrested development. The female characters are treated the way they are because that is how the male characters view them -- they are immature characters, so naturally they will have an immature understanding of women, not as autonomous beings, but as these sort of savior/object of desire/object of frustration individuals. Also, the absence of or failure of the father figures naturally compels the males to seek comfort in a maternal ideal.

Now I sound like all the media texts that used to drive me crazy in college. My point is that I changed my mind. I don't think Wes Anderson is immature or sexist. His characters are.

Magnificent Anderson...

After internal turmoil over Darjeeling Limited, I went back and rewatched Life Aquatic and Bottle Rocket, the two Wes Anderson films I have negative feelings about. I'd only watched each of them once before. I still don't care for Bottle Rocket, but it has a nice, "this guy is gonna do great things" quality about it which is fun to see. The plot is weak, but the characters are developed in a really appealing, quirky, touching but not quite realistic way. It's also nice to see something so stripped down, considering how ornate and flamboyant Anderson's films have become. I liked The Life Aquatic a lot more than I remember, and unlike Darjeeling Limited, which I thought was strong in the beginning and got weaker toward the end, I felt Life Aquatic did the opposite -- it starts off real fluffy, all style and no substance, and grows into a very touching, emotional comedy-drama. This progression actually makes sense, given the subject matter. It's a really, really good film. Not as good as Tenenbaums and Rushmore, but still very good. All this rewatching has made me very curious to watch Darjeeling again. I can understand the critics more -- I see distinct plot elements swiped from all the early films in order to make the new one, and I wonder if I like it for what it is, or for what I want to believe it could have been. It is the first time I've come out of a Wes Anderson film with a clear idea of specific things that could have been done better.

The revisitation did reaffirm what a strong and nuanced actor Owen Wilson is -- I had forgotten the incredibly downplayed performance he pulled in Life Aquatic. It's really touching, especially contrasted against the irritating half-mad character he plays in Bottle Rocket, and (the same, only less mad and more just neurotic) in Darjeeling Limited.

There's something else I want to say about the lack of meaty female characters. Apart from Royal Tenenbaums, which had Anjelica Huston as a strong, fully fleshed-out character, none of the other films feature females as anything other than props for the male stars to react to or against. I have the same problem with Scorsese, who has never in a long, long catalog, written or directed a film with a decent female character. It doesn't make him a bad writer or director, it only makes him a bit immature and sexist. The same, of course, goes for Anderson. I don't think these directors should make movies about women, only that the female characters that do show up in their stories should be a bit more rounded, developed, believable. A bit more autonomous. But I digress.

Hey, I really like this HBO show called "The Wire." I just got the 3rd season, I'm gonna go watch it now. Also, I've got tonsillitis. So, you know, no making out for a little while.

Darjeeling Limited

I like The Darjeeling Limited. The more I think about it, the more I like it. I want to see it again. I like Wes Anderson, but I think he's a bit hit or miss. I didn't care for Bottle Rocket all that much, and I thought Life Aquatic was really good fun, but sort of forgettable and emotionally vacant. I think The Royal Tennenbaums is close to perfection, and I feel the same way about Rushmore.

The Darjeeling Limited is not perfect. There are some awkward moments, a few times when I whispered to myself, "er, that was a misstep," and the story seems to lose its way for a little while in the third act. But it is a warm, beautiful movie, with characters both flawed and familiar, a first act so brilliantly hilarious that I belly laughed throughout it, and a story arc that works, I think, incredibly well. Mark Kermode, who's opinion I agree with more often than not, said that the movie is flawed because it ends up falling in love with what it starts out lampooning -- Americans as "philosophical tourists" searching for a packaged spiritual experience. But I think Kermode is missing the point here, entirely. Westerners going to the east are always, in my opinion and limited experience, very hard-pressed to not look like completely ridiculous sore-thumb privileged outsiders. The fact is that the cultures are strikingly different, and fitting a western perspective into an eastern environment is always awkward, especially at first. Anderson beautifully captures this awkwardness, as well as showing how eventually, if the travelers can open themselves up, the awkwardness can give way to something like spiritual growth, no matter how ridiculous it looks from the outside.

Some little things bothered me -- the boys coming out of the tent before the funeral in slow motion to the Kink's tune . . . it seemed like a total misstep to me, bad timing, wrong music, too quirky. Also, the third act false ending and subsequent visit to the mother -- the whole thing seemed a bit jerky and contrived, even though in the end I think Anderson brought it all back together in a touching, sentimental way that just skirted being too sentimental, and I really liked that. When it comes down to it, I love Wes Anderson's films, because I love the way he sees the world, and I love (LOVE) the fact that through cinema, I can see the world through his eyes. His mis-en-scene is like a fantastic journey to a world that is just utterly gorgeous, and no matter my little quibbles, I love watching his films for the meticulous style alone. Even better, this film actually came with quite a bit of substance as well.

John Waters ain't got nothin' on us

Aunt Toby with the racing schedule, and aunt Teddy behind her looking so-fist-i-cated.


Completely unrelated, I've been watching "The Power of Myth," the PBS series with Joseph Campbell from 1988 or thereabouts. It's about the history of mythology, and spirituality, and the line between the knowable and the unknowable. Campbell says that artists are the mythmakers, and of course as a lifelong student of mythology, he asserts that mythologies are our roadmaps, without which we are utterly lost. This is a nice counterpart to the moment I had on Friday, looking around my shared studio at college at what I was up to and what everybody else was up to, thinking 'what the hell are we doing here, thinking this work is so important?' Just making objects and pictures and feeling so serious and important about all of it, working so hard to make utterly useless things . . . I like Campbell's take, with all its historical ramifications -- this romantic notion that we have some sort of gift, we are called to the highest post, and that artists are, maybe, making the only things that actually are useful.





Which brings me to the last point, vaguely connected. I went to a concert on Saturday night that a friend invited me to. It was this singer/songwriter called Joseph Arthur, and it absolutely made my lips curl. I've been trying to understand what it is about this particular music, and music like it, that makes me feel so uncomfortable and displeased that I want to crawl out of my skin. I hate to be one of those people who harps endlessly about 'selling out' and 'keeping it real,' but when I boil it right down, that's where I end up. This guy -- he's got the hipster mullet, he's got this super attractive backing band of incredibly competent session musicians, he's got a voice that alternates between gravelly fullness and coked-out falsetto, he never misses a note, the band never misses a beat, the songs all progress in a predictable, familiar way. Have I, have I heard this before? It's so familiar, so comfortable . . . This bothers me because it doesn't feel like art, it feels like profit. It's like when a movie has been test-screened, and you can FEEL that it's been test-screened, that 1,000 imbecile's opinions have been taken into account in creating the final piece -- it is entertainment appealing to the lowest common denominator, with no heart or soul or purity of vision or intention, no honesty and no sincerity. But the thing is -- if I were going to a, say, Britney Spears concert (you know, if we lived in an alternate universe or something) I would have no doubt of the intentions of the artist and promoters, and would have no doubt that the majority of the audience was also aware of these un-artistic motivations. Nobody is being fooled, in part because nobody is trying to fool -- nobody is pretending it's anything other than what it is. The thing that got under my skin about this particular show, this Joseph Arthur, was that it was being packaged as something honest and pure, something with totally artistic intentions. It felt like a sort of malicious dishonesty . . . Now, I might be being totally unfair -- it could just be a lack of vision or a problem of fame causing one to lose perspective. I know nothing about this guy's back catalog. I just know that the show I saw made me feel a little bit like Mr. Arthur was telling me he loved me just to get me into bed.

Beirut

Do you remember the 5th of November? Vulpes Homosexual, aka Guy Fawkes day, took place amongst much explosive merriment last weekend. I watched fireworks from my friend Brian's pad, while enjoying a wee dram of Laphroaig Whisky and freezing my tuchus off (try to guess how long it took me googling to figure out how to correctly spell 'tuchus'... during my search I learned that the literal definition of 'bubkes' is goat droppings. Thank god for wikipedia). In the words of Allan Jardine, the tech-extraordinaire at my college who spends his days wiling away the hours in his wardrobe-lair, you will know it is November 5th because it "sounds like Beirut out there."







(watch closely for awesome transition)
Speaking of Beirut, I really like the band, Beirut. They just put out a new album last month, and it is really, really good. They are all very good -- a nice assortment of eastern european and jazz instrumentation (+ukulele!), a delightful handful of incredibly competent musicians, a lovely lady violinist, and a spectacularly talented, adorable, charismatic lead singer/songwriter. The music is a very accessible mix of gypsy traditional and indy-pop and I find it quite addictive. They've got a nice website too.

Therefore, you can imagine my disappointment when I traveled all the way to Glasgow (alone, and with a raging head-cold) to see this promising young band in concert, and they totally, totally blew. The show was held in a venue called "The Arches" which is housed in a series of connected abandoned railway tunnels across the street from Glasgow's Central Station. Merge the obvious acoustic nightmare of trying to amplify and mix a 6 piece mainly acoustic band in a tunnel with the fact that the band is young and new to touring, they are not yet to the point where they can bring their own sound guy on tour (I HOPE they weren't using their own sound guy...), and whoever was doing sound at this event was obviously both deaf and slightly retarded (fetal alcohol syndrome, maybe?), and you have the makings for a miserable, cacophonous nightmare.



Here is my advice:
1. Hire a sound guy (or girl) who understands acoustics, mixing, amplification, has an ear for music, knows how to kill feedback...
2. Turn down the fucking horns and teach the horn players to pull their punches (for example, place the bell of the horn farther away from the mic when you want the sound to be softer...)
3. This lead singer/songwriter, Zach Condon, has a totally beautiful singing voice, but seeing the lot in concert made me realize how amateur his use of it is. He's using the same vocal style on every song, sort of giving it all he's got so that what he's got becomes a lot less impressive than if he sort of sang it straight, and then broke out with the awesomeness in a more controlled fashion. In other words, Zach's vocalizations need to mature.
4. Ok, I know the concert has turned out to be a total fucking disaster, but at least 'pretend' to be having a good time up there. You've got a sold-out crowd of adorable Glaswegian teenagers singing along to your shit. You're like, barely out of high school and you're touring Europe. That's AWESOME. Act like it. Geez.

As you can see, in addition to thinking I know something about film criticism, I also am apparently beginning to think I know something about music criticism. For shame. I'm going to go make some art now, to wash the critic-stink off of me. But yeah, if you're thinking of seeing Beirut in concert, my advice is to, I dunno, wait a year or two, unless they're playing a really small, well-run club with excellent sound techs and a good community vibe (for example, I'm sure they'd be great if they were playing The Vera Project in Seattle).

No, I take that back. Go see them if you want to. Support the band. They're super-promising, and I don't regret forking out for the concert. I just wish it hadn't sucked. I'll probably go see them again next time. And hopefully write an awesome blog about how much their live show has improved.

Arcade Fire

Today marks the end of British Summer Time for another year. The sun now sets at around 4:30 in the afternoon. Next month, it will be getting dark around 3.

I saw Arcade Fire in Glasgow on Friday. It was a good show -- the performance not quite as spirited and energetic as the Vancouver show I saw two years ago, but they were still very good. The new music is a whole lot darker than the first album, which might explain the feeling of lower energy. Anyway, it was a huge arena show, don't know if it was sold out but it felt that way. The band, especially Win Butler seemed very happy to be in Glasgow, and completely infatuated with its very special brand of Scottish enthusiasm.


The best thing about the show was the visual element. It is not a new thing for bands to project videos behind them, nor is it new for a band to project a live feed of the show, so the people in the cheap seats can get a good view too. But Arcade Fire have recently been playing around quite a bit with low-end video aesthetics -- the kind you find in amateur porn or cable access tv, or especially in surveillance and cctv. For the stage set-up, they've strategically placed lipstick video cameras on mic stands, drums, the floor and hanging from above.









The grainy, high contrast and fish-eye image is then projected on various large circular screens set up around the stage, as well as on the backdrop. The result is a fantastically creepy, voyeuristic peek into what it might feel like to be onstage, inside Regine's drum, or staring directly into Win's face as he sings about how his body is a cage.


I know the band has become very successful, deservedly so, and it may be less 'cool' to pledge allegiance to them now than it was, say, two or three years ago. But frankly, I don't care. The music is interesting and thickly layered, soulful and sincere. Despite their success they are absolutely not rock stars, nor do I imagine they ever will be. When I saw them in Vancouver, only a few months after they blew up, the sense that they couldn't figure how they went from playing tiny art galleries to sold-out hockey stadiums in a matter of months was palpable. I'm happy to report that this sort of wild disbelief of the level of success attained was still quite apparent on Friday.

Also, please check out the website for their latest album, www.neonbible.com. Even if you don't like the music, you must check out what they're doing with interactive web-based animation. Really awesome, inventive stuff. The band website is very good as well.

Speaking of websites, I'm currently in the process of uploading a complete interim artist website at www.culturedcuttlefish.co.uk. Unfortunately, as I don't really know what I'm doing, it is taking a very LOOOOONG time and has been fraught with technical difficulties. Hopefully it'll be up and running by the end of the night.

Ok, good for now.