5/30/08 The Virtues of Leaving Well Enough Alone

So, the new Indiana Jones movie kind of sucks. Not terribly surprising, but still kind of deflating, in that the bell curve of youth as it applies to art was monumentally reinforced. Better no sequel at all than one so bereft of purpose and life.

It bears asking the question, though, especially in light of the new one's disposable crappiness, what makes the "original trilogy" stick where so many other summer blockbuster rollercoaster type movies disappear into the ether as soon as Oscar season rolls around? What makes a good summer blockbuster so hard to pull off?

I don't mean a successful one, because a blockbuster, by definition, should bust blocks. Financially it should do well, which Indy 4 is assuredly doing. So did Transformers, and so did Independence Day, etc. etc. for all the summers stretching back to (as far as I can figure it from critical readings) Jaws or Star Wars (the popular ones to blame). So in that measure, it's a success. But I have a hard time imagining that it will stick to the heart the way that the original set of Indiana Jones movies, or some of the other time-tested blockbusters have.

First, to tease out some critical opinion from anecdotal experience:

Critical opinion: "Raiders of the Lost Ark" is awesome, "Temple of Doom" is bad, and "Last Crusade" is passable. "Raiders" is the one that gets the essential nod, with the other two more or less dismissed as inferior reworkings.

Anecdotal experience, based on my own opinions and a bunch of friends that I've talked to: "Raiders" and "Last Crusade" are both awesome, which some favoring one and some favoring the other. "Temple" is still pretty sweet, but not as good (although one friend of mine says it's her favorite of the three. Overall vibe is that all three are of a piece - episodes varying in quality from great to greater, but still fundamentally of the same tapestry.

I think the gap between these two readings has to do with the the fact that critics are steeped in film, so the first movie gets lauded as a witty reworking of old B-movies and its cliffhanger/serial nods play off of the critical knowledge of the form. The 2nd & 3rd hit the law of diminishing returns - they don't do anything new, or new/old, like "Raiders". This reading is I think dependent on the fact that critics and cinephiles watch such a huge amount of movies that formal elements get foregrounded as the movies pile up in the brain. As an English major, I find it much easier to see narrative twists and turns coming simply because I've spent so much mental effort dissecting what various narratives are and what they attempt to accomplish. For that reason, when I'm reading I sometimes get overly caught up in the formal accomplisments/lack thereof in a book, as opposed to questions like, "is this fun to read?", or "is this compelling?". So because Indy 2 & 3 just followed the stylistic outlines of "Raiders", critics didn't find as much formal meant on the bone to chew on. For the average moviegoer (i.e. someone like me, not steeped in cinema), the appeal of the 3 are of a piece.

So the enduring appeal of these blockbusters is not, I don't think, necessarily a testament to their formal appeal, although all three are of course well-made. No "summer blockbuster" can really succeed without dynamic and memorable action scenes, and Indy has them in spades. Speilberg's facility with visual action is widely acknowledged, and since in Indy he really lets himself go for broke without regard to thematic/logical constraints, you get the setpieces only possible when a director with A-List skills goes B-List bananas.

But empty setpieces do not an enduring movie make. They're a prerequisite, but they have to be hung on the more difficult part of the equation. Enduring appeal goes back to a landing that's hard for a blockbuster to stick: tone and character.

Character first:
Indiana Jones in THE archetypal American action hero, but he is also a very specific character. In some ways, he's similar to James Bond, the aspirational ideal of British culture (or, the aspirational ideal of British culture as seen through the lens of American culture). Whether UK or US though, Bond is an urban ideal - he's the ultimate "city" hero.

Bond dresses well. He drinks expensive upscale drinks. He's constantly jetting off to places like Paris from places like London. Uniform: tuxedo. He's all about the no-strings-attached sex.
His gun is small, easily concealed, the PPK that you could carry into a tastefully appointed lobby in Manhattan (or London, or Paris, etc.). His one-liners tend to the debonaire and the double-entendre, and aspire to the tartness of prime Oscar Wilde. He is the modern, cosmopolitan city as action hero. And he has endured with incredible longevity as a character and idea. The idea, though, is more prominent - which is why it's been fleshed out by such a range of actors. Bond is very much style personified. As a person, we don't really have much of a sense of the particularities of his personality.

Indiana Jones dresses functionally. He goes to grimy, dangerous places. He's about sex, but can't help but feel the strings. Uniform: Fedora. Whip (American West nod). He gets beat up a lot, but also delivers a fair amount of beatings. He doesn't take himself too seriously, but always Gets The Job Done. These are all Bond-ian ideas, style as substance. But many things about Indiana the character are recognizably human (much credit goes to Harrison Ford's portrayal, as well). He has a tense relationship with his father. He doesn't like his name, and gave himself a nickname. He has to deal with girls in his classes that have crushes on him. His best friend is someone who complements him (Marcus Brody, the ur-academic). Many of these character traits are specific to Indiana Jones as a character, not as a style of living, but they intersect perfectly with the style as well - the rumpled, wisecracking American Hero.

The character semi-holds up in the new movie. Ford has aged well, and plays Indy well, but the screenplay is leaden. There are no memorable wisecracks a la "No Ticket", and with the plot a convoluted mess involving aliens and lacking the simple economy and visual/verbal wit of the first three, Indy the character is mostly stuck giving exposition and giving ground to the 4 other characters he spends most of the movie with. The clunkiness of the dialogue prevents Ford from deploying his natural charisma, so crucial to the character. Because, fundamentally, Indy seems like the kind of guy it would be an absolute joy to be around but for all the danger & Nazis and whatnot, and in the new movie this doesn't hold true. Not because he's old, because if anyone is made to age into Connery's crusty, hilarious old guy dynamic, Indy is, but because the screenplay leaves him absolutely high and dry.

Which speaks to the other element that the first 3 had in spades, missing in the new one: tone. The earlier ones are playful, witty, and light; with just enough shadings of gravity and danger to ensure that the events of the plot don't seem weightless. Too often summer blockbusters are so bloated by their budgets and and the amount of work it takes to pull them off that they are engulfed in a kind of destructive humorlessness, or are so silly and light that nothing sticks. The original Indy trilogy strikes the perfect sweet spot between wit/danger/excitement/fear/laughter while being liberal with the set pieces.

This tone is perfectly summed up by the tank chase in Last Crusade. An incredible chase scene, impeccably choreographed, capped by the tank plunging off the cliff. Adrenaline stimulated, audience on the thrill ride. But then: quiet wit, as Indy unwittingly joins the crowd mourning him, removing his signature fedora to honor the fallen, a joke light and witty enough to fit in with the best of Chuck Jones.

The new movie has no such moment, no such balance of light and ballast. It's all just chases for the sake of chases, or jokes for the sake of jokes, the resurrection for no good reason of a character who was last seen literally riding off into the sunset. A character synonymous with celluloid exuberance forced to go through the motions.

5/20/08 - WCF, And Then I See A Darkness

Ugh, I say, when greeted with the unholy visage of the NBA's final four teams left standing, especially the two odious titans left in the Western Conference. Here, then, is the downside of the glorious unpredictability of sports - sometimes, one is left with Goliath victorious, with David left in a crumpled heap, sling clutched in bloody hand. Surely it makes some future eventuality all the sweeter, knowing that this can be the result, but that doesn't make this any easier to stomach in the here and now.

To wit: the Spurs. Perennial playoff vanquishers of Nash and the Suns, who have, in fact, committed the death blow to the D'Antoni and his free-form offense and ensured that bland assertions of defense-wins-championships continues. Sure, they seem like "good guys" in the classic sense, Duncan=unselfishness and all that, but to have the tantalizing potential of the now-departed running Suns gradually sapped by such methodical efficiency is a multiyear tragedy. D'Antoni's warmth and self-deprecation makes the (great) Popovich seem bland, wan, and jerktastic by comparison. Bowen's voluminous fouls/elbows/dark magic foiling the offensive grace of Steve Nash is an affront to the aesthetic flow of the most telegenic basketball. Execution: the Spurs embody both meanings of that dread word. Add the evisceration of the Suns (and I do mean evisceration - they now have Shaq, don't run, and are about to bring in some defense-first knucklehead to follow D'Antoni's insanity) to the ouster at their hands of the marvel of the marvel that is Chris Paul and his young Hornets team (exciting to watch, and also endearingly young - witness Tyson Chandler's hilarious "I Wanted My Buddy But I Got Chucky" comparison) is enough to make one throw allegiance to...



The Lakers? Kobe Bryant? Not likely. Bryant hits all the signifiers of great basketball/terrible person while standing as the avatar of all that is shallow and petty about LA. Whining about a trade at the beginning of the season, playing like the worst ballhog pickup player when things aren't going his way, attempting some sort of bogus authenticity with his tattoos and bling when the guy is a cosmopolitan Italian-American - the smugness and self-regard are as wearing to me as a viewer as his trancendent abilities must be to a playoff opponent. And Vujacic? The machine? His hair net is even more egregiously annoying than the one sported by Oberto of...

The Spurs. Methodical. Slowdown. Duncan's self-abnegating brilliance. Execution, execution, execution, with the fun sucked out except by Parker's mad drives. And he raps in French! And is married to Eva Longoria? This is who I'm supposed to cheer for? Give me Lamar Odom's drives instead, any day of the week, except that leaves me with...

The Lakers. Phil Jackson and his billion titles. The crush of the celebrity crowd. Luke Walton's uncanny resemblance to every slightly-too-aggro drunk guy at every party I've ever been too. Pau Gasol's calculated scruff. But most of all Bryant, Bryant, Bryant - drinking in the MVP and the spotlight like that guy at the party that Luke Walton looks like.

So, what? The Celtics? The Pistons? Yawn and double-yawn? Stacked vs. been-there, done-that. I guess I'm for Rasheed Wallace, who I once saw throw down a stanchion rattling dunk at the Dean Dome when he played for UNC, and who seems to be the only member of any team left that embodies the slightly unhinged nature of basketball at its best, with so much of that aura departed with AI, Nash, Paul, and Deron Williams.

Go...Pistons?

5/12/08 - Mashups, Delights

The first time I heard a mashup was the Freelance Hellraiser "A Stroke of Genie-us" - I highly doubt this was the first one, but it certainly seemed to be the first to penetrate mass cultural consciousness.

Now I would consider this innovation one of my favorite in modern pop music; both for the sublime immediate pleasures of hearing a new song created from familiar elements, and also for its signifying of the collapse of the importance of genre.

Like so many things, credit for this should go to the Internet, and specifically the brief flowering of Napster and the spate of P2P file sharing. For the first time, cross-genre exploration was possible with no cost/repercussion. While terrible for the music industry as a whole, ironically this development has been fantastic for the collapsing of artificial genre fences. Chuck Klosterman has a hilarious account of these fences in "Fargo Rock City", as he expertly delineates the bands that were "acceptable" to the North Dakota metal fans that he hung out with. I spent a lot of high school listening to a lot of California punk bands, where the "Sellout" designation got a lot of play; what this meant musically was that every single band sounded like the Ramones with better production values. I can't even count the amount of times someone was asked what kind of music they liked in middle school and responded "everything but rap and country", as though entire genres could be written off.



So, when it comes to the mashup, of of the thrilling things that it does is to decouple the actual music from the dogma of classification (classification perpetrated in these cases by the bands themselves making choices about their styles which often fit within prescribed modes). So, in a mashup of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" with "Bootylicious", a whole set of normally segregated musical energies are gloriously combined (segregated being a loaded term, but apropos, in terms of the grunge/R&B demographic split in terms of artist and to a lesser extent audience)

To wit, "Smells Like Teen Spirit"'s musical ambitions - tension/release, alienation expressed through ear-splitting volume, attack, pained aggression married to inviting melody.

"Bootylicious"'s musical ambitions - tension/tightness (in the James Brown sense), sex, ecstatic release of the dancefloor, metronomic rise and fall of energy.

The brilliance in the mashup is located the shared part of the Venn diagram (tension/release, tightness of performance) and then grafting the aspects onto each song that they are simply not concerned with in their original incarnations. "Teen Spirit" is unconcerned with sex, or the dance floor. "Bootylicious" is not concerned with aggression or attack. The brilliance of the matchup is that it grafts these elements together, making the shared track richer for it. The combination produces a dance floor stomper with all the whiplash dynamics of the Nirvana original, amping up the drive and kick. Similarly, it gives the shiver of sex appeal to a dour, sexless grunge song; just add glamour and a song as titanic as "Teen Spirit"gets slinkier, more complex, more fun.



I probably listened to Girl Talk's "Night Ripper" album more than any other last year, and it's an album that's stayed with me in a visceral way - namely, I continue to hear hits sampled on that album every time I'm near a radio. The thing that I find most impressive about "Night Ripper" is that, unlike other sample-based artists, Greg Gillis ignores the obscure entirely. The entire mix is built solely off of hits, megahits, hits that are even now floating along in the pop-cultural cloud. Sure, I can respect the Dust Brothers and the Avalanches for their impeccable ears and deep crate-digging and locating of the most perfect obscure sample for the moment, but there's something incredibly and almost dangerously intoxicating about "Night Ripper's" compression of top 40 into one long Frankenstein dance party. Where, I ask, can I get more of this, and the answer is that rocket has lifted off - the explosion is all there is.

For more mashup goodness: www.bootieusa.com

5/9/08 - Jonathan Safran Foer - how precious is too precious?

I missed out on reading Everything is Illuminated when it first came out and got the full-bore hype/critical raving treatment across the media universe (NY Times - "a touching, searing, broiling, fried platter of delicious, delicious musings on the human condition!", etc.), probably because I was insanely jealous of Jonathan Safran Foer. He was in his 20s, living in Brooklyn, and a writer. I was 2 of these things, and seeing someone else achieve a dream that I've had was vexing, even more so because it just provided a counterpoint in the writerly work ethic - Safran Foer had completed a book, and I had not. How dare he?

So out of explicit or implicit protest I gave it a pass. I gave the same pass to Fortress of Solitude by the other Brooklyn Jonathan, for much the same reason.

Once I moved to San Francisco, I revisited Everything is Illuminated, and had to admit that it was great. Not flawless, but certainly great. The great strength of the book, in my opinion, is the character of Alexis, and the way that Safran Foer uses the English-as-second-language effect for humor and pathos. Alexis is a fully realized character, and his reflections on the events of the book are consistently affecting and funny. The account of the awkward dinner scene at the diner, especially, is a tour-de-force of cultural misunderstandings and the embarrasments peculiar to cultural currents crossing and swirling. Not to mention the expertly rendered hilarity of Alex's family dog, Sammy Davis Junior Jr.

An excerpt:
And I still haven't mentioned that Grandfather demanded to bring Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior along. That was another thing. "You are being a fool," Father informed him. "I need her to help me see the road," Grandfather said, pointing his finger at his eyes. "I am blind." "You are not blind, and you are not bringing the bitch." "I am blind, and the bitch is coming with us." "No," Father said. "It is not professional for the bitch to go along." I would have uttered something on the half of Grandfather, but I did not want to be stupid again. "It is either I go with the bitch or I do not go." Father was in a position. Not like the Latvian Home Stretch, but like amid a rock and a rigid place, which is, in truth, somewhat similar to the Latvian Home Stretch. There was fire amid them. I had seen this before, and nothing in the world frightened me more. Finally my father yielded, although it was agreed that Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior must don a special shirt that Father would have fabricated, which would say: OFFICIOUS SEEING-EYE BITCH OF HERITAGE TOURING. This was so she would appear professional.

Masterful. The joke, obviously, is that "Officious Seeing-Eye Bitch" is the exact opposite of "professional", and Safran Foer carries it off with panache. Aside from the comedic aspect of Alex's character, the key function that Alex provides is to remove the authorial-focused myopia that can often grip first novels with a vengeance. At its heart, after all, "Jonathan Safran Foer" looms large as a character, and the work is clearly personal in a way that can prove troublesome to writers. Put simply, an introspective writer from Brooklyn is not interesting as a character, being prone to lugubrious navel-gazing and writerly conceits that are so stale at this point that I now skip the fiction section of certain monthly magazines with regularity. By framing the "Safran Foer" character through the lens of Alex's perceptions, Safran Foer the author is able to deflate a lot of the saggy writer-as-protagonist drag that the base story/plot of the book uses (writer searches for family history, discovers Holocaust terror).


The weakness of the book is that the family history is pretty much just cut-rate Garcia Marquez, and specifically cut-rate One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Example:
THE 120 MARRIAGES OF JOSEPH AND SARAH L

The young couple first married on August 5, 1744, when Joseph was eight, and Sarah six, and first ended their marriage six days later, when Joseph refused to believe, to Sarah's frustration, that the stars were silver nails in the sky, pinning up the black nightscape. They remarried four days later, when Joseph left a note under the door of Sarah's parents' house: I have considered everything you told me, and I do believe that the stars are silver nails. They ended their marriage again a year later, when Joseph was nine and Sarah seven, over a quarrel about the nature of the bottom of the Brod. A week later, they were remarried, including this time in their vows that they should love each other until death, regardless of the existence of a bottom of the Brod, the temperature of this bottom (should it exist), and the possible existence of starfish on the possibly existing riverbed. They ended their marriage thirty-seven times in the next seven years, and each time remarried with a longer list of vows. They divorced twice when Joseph was twenty-two and Sarah twenty, four times when they were twenty-five and twenty-three, respectively, and eight times, the most for one year, when they were thirty and twenty-eight. They were sixty and fifty-eight at their last marriage, only three weeks before Sarah died of heart failure and Joseph drowned himself in the bath. Their marriage contract still hangs over the door of the house they on-and-off shared - nailed to the top post and brushing against the SHALOM welcome mat:

It is with everlasting devotion that we, Joseph and Sarah L, reunite in the indestructible union of matrimony, promising love until death, with the understanding that the stars are silver nails in the sky, regardless of the existence of a bottom of the Brod, the temperature of this bottom (should it exist), and the possible existence of starfish on the possibly existing riverbed, overlooking what may or may not have been accidental grape juice spills, agreeing to forget that Joseph played sticks and balls with his friends when he promised he would help Sarah thread the needle for the quilt she was sewing, and that Sarah was supposed to give the quilt to Joseph, not his buddy, deeming irrelevant certain details about the story of Trachim's wagon, such as whether it was Chana or Hannah who first saw the curious flotsam, ignoring the simple fact that Joseph snores like a pig, and that Sarah is no great treat to sleep with either, letting slide certain tendencies of both parties to look too long at members of the opposite sex, not making a fuss over why Joseph is such a slob, leaving his clothes wherever he feels like taking them off, expecting Sarah to pick them up, clean them, and put them in their proper place as he should have, or why Sarah has to be such a fucking pain in the ass about the smallest things, such as which way the toilet paper unrolls, or when dinner is five minutes later than she was planning, because, let's face it, it's Joseph who's putting that paper on the roll and dinner on the table, disregarding whether the beet is a better vegetable than the cabbage, putting aside the problems of being fat-headed and chronically unreasonable, trying to erase the memory of a long since expired rose bush that a certain someone was supposed to remember to water when his wife was visiting family in Rovno, accepting the compromise of the way we have been, the way we are, and the way we will likely be...may we live together in unwavering love and good health, amen.

Yeah, sure, One Hundred Years of Solitude is great. But its one of those books that can only be written once, because the formal structure matches the central theme in such an exacting 1:1 ratio. Catch-22 is a similar book - great, and stylistically resistant to replication. So the "village" portions of Everything is Illuminated, while well-written, have a grating, imitative quality that the Alex portions do not.

I started reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and found, to my dismay, that Safran Foer attempts the same trick twice and encounters that dread beast: the law of diminishing returns. He again places much of the primary narrative in the hands of a character whose perspective as expressed is slightly off; this time, it is not to create distance from the too-easy trope of writer/protagonist, but to create distance enough to look at the fallout from the destruction of the World Trade Center towers.

A lot of it is effective, as Safran Foer is able to accurately grasp a nine-year old kid's wild mood swings and emotional responses to such a traumatic event (which veer from fantasy to catastrophic sadness and back again, like a compass needle unable to find true north). But there is a limit to this version of the conceit; it's impossible to credit Oskar Schell, the protagonist, with the outsized intelligence that Safran Foer imbues him with. Oskar's peculiar and blinding intellect provides a lot of the humor, but it also continuously yanks the reader out of the narrative by calling attention to his identity as a narrative construct, not a flesh-and-blood human being.

The best of example of this is when Oskar meets an attractive older lady in his search across the city for a lock that fits his dad's key (at least that's what he thinks he's looking for). Oskar's attraction to the lady and his proposal to kiss her are kindly rebuffed, and his longing and disappointment ring true to his age. But then he hands her his business card, which reads the following:

OSKAR SCHELL
INVENTOR, JEWELRY DESIGNER, JEWELRY FABRICATOR, AMATEUR ENTOMOLOGIST, FRANCOPHILE, VEGAN, ORIGAMIST, PACIFIST, PERCUSSIONIST, AMATEUR ASTRONOMER, COMPUTER CONSULTANT, AMATEUR ARCHEOLOGIST, COLLETOR OF: rare coins, butterflies that died natural deaths, miniature cacti, Beatles memorabilia, semiprecious stones, and other things
E-MAIL: OSKAR_SCHELL@HOTMAIL.COM
HOME PHONE: PRIVATE CELL PHONE: PRIVATE
FAX MACHINE: I DON'T HAVE A FAX MACHINE YET

Funny because of the vagaries of interest, and the last 2 lines especially ring true to the 9-year old mind, but "Francophile"? "Jewelry Fabricator"? Sorry, but hell no. Those are cheap jokes by a very literary twentysomething. I don't care how gifted/peculiar Oskar is, there's no way the kid puts "Francophile" on his business card. It turns him from character to construct in an instant, which undercuts Safran Foer's very real mission to come at the tragedy from an off angle so as to better apprehend it.

What most impressive in retrospect then is that he never commits this slipup with Alex in Everything is Illuminted. He makes it seem so easy, so natural to assume that Alex is a real flesh-and-blood person inhabiting a real flesh-and-blood universe that it's a letdown when he can't repeat the trick the second time out.

5/4/08 – Weezer Broke My Heart

Weezer was the first band I really, truly loved, in that way peculiar to teenager-hood, when a band really can seem to speak as some sort of totemic signifier of everything that you feel and feel that you are about. As the strains of their new single leak out, and hope renews that maybe, just maybe, they’ve got their shit together this time, my mind again turns to the matter of how painful it is when a band breaks your heart.

A history of my discovery – back in the day of 30 second .wav file samplers, I played the one for “Buddy Holly” on loop. I loved the song. I wanted to own it. But, concerned that it would be the typical nugget-of-gold-on-a-mound-of-trash so typical of so many full albums (I’m looking at you, Better Than Ezra) that flooded music stores in the wake of the Nirvana explosion, I actually bought the single, not the album.

This led to a couple of discoveries – 1) I had made a mistake. I loved the crappily recorded live versions of “Surf Wax America” and “My Name Is Jonas” just as much as I loved the main event, and now I knew I had to own the album. 2) I experienced that perverse pleasure of music loving, the discovery of the obscure b-side, for the first time. “Jamie”, the b-side for that single, remains to this day my favorite Weezer song. It’s basically what I imagined the Jesus & Mary Chain sounded like from reading the reviews of Psychocandy – a pretty ‘50s singalong melody about a girl that sounds like it’s being played inside a tornado. I learned later that the song was recorded as part of someone’s graduate school project in sound engineering (details fuzzy), and it sounds like it. The guitars sound like a thousand amplified basses, all being played through a fuzz pedal. It’s glorious, and remains so.

I snapped up the S/T album and devoured it. Obviously, it’s great. It was then, and it remains so. The chief accomplishments of the album are sonic and lyric: sonically, it balances perfectly on the delicate fulcrum between sugar-sweet pop melodies (and delivery – Rivers Cuomo is a talented singer, a crucial component of the band’s appeal), and sledgehammer guitar fury – both the roaring 4/4 drive of the twin-guitar rhythm section and the Winger-meets-the-Pixies guitar solos. Lyrically, Rivers works a masterful variation on one of the definitive rock variations – the scorned geek. Backing those gorgeous melodies and venomous crunch is a boy/man that’s been rejected by the ladies, one that looks like Buddy Holly, one that plays a mean game of D&D, one that is holed up his garage trying to put a band together so he can tell the world just how thoroughly it’s done him wrong.

The persona is not original – Gordan Gano worked it to perfection on the Violent Femmes’ debut album, just to cite one example. But the engaging part of the Cuomo persona-in-song is that He Is Us – that is, like Elvis Costello was once purported to be, the workings of his mind seemed to mirror mine exactly. I could never relate to a Kurt Cobain; swirling down a drain of heroin and inchoate rage at modern existence. Rivers’s grievances were mine, blown up to Technicolor proportions.

Like a lot of people that liked the debut, Pinkerton left me cold at first. Both the sound and the lyrical persona are sharpened – Cuomo digs deeper into the lover-scorned persona, peppering in ever more personal details and letting some of the humor from the debut curdle into true alienation/bitterness. Sonically, the bright sheen is no longer present – the guitars hit hard and flat, feedback squalls are everywhere, and the drums sound reverb-less; the whole album has a lot of the sonic qualities of Surfer Rosa, but with a whole lot more bass on the guitars and a lot less of the Santiago surf-whine.

As a relistened, the album grew on me for these reasons – it’s a more adult album, and a messier one, and I’d put it in the top 5 of the nineties on my own personal list. It didn’t sell worth a damn, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s not cute, like the debut. It’s not really that funny, either (well, except for maybe “Pink Triangle”). The lyrical specificities make listening to it feel oddly voyeuristic; intimate in a frightening way. Watching the overanalytical superego of a nerd crushed by romantic failure bash away at the self-imposed cage with gravelly, feedback-laden storms does not immediate radio hits make.

Then, a long hiatus. Weezer was broken up, or took a break, it was hard to tell in the pre-blog saturation Dark Ages. I sought out all the b-sides I could, and discovered even more greatness. I was amazed – here was a band that had never put out a song I disliked. After 6 years, I was in college, and the rumors stirred – they were coming back. Sure, Matt Sharp was long gone, having pursued his own muse with The Rentals, but surely the bass could be replaced. This was Rivers Cuomo’s show.

And, then, the horror. The third album. Lyrics, once sharp, insightful, personal; now dull, generic, unmemorable. The sound – no guitar solos. No longer tuned down half-a-step for that gravel crunch. The songs, that most crucial of components, the songs were just terrible. Actual bad songs. Trash. Songs I would never in a million years want to hear more than once. One line, just to pluck from many: “Open your heart and let the good stuff out”. What? What the hell? Who was this Stepford Wives version of my favorite band? I had no idea that Matt Sharp was so important to the quality of Weezer’s songs, but maybe I should have been after hearing the highs of some of his Rentals material. I felt genuinely betrayed. A band that I had wanted to return I now wished had gone on permanent hiatus.

It makes me appreciate all those diehard Rolling Stones fans, the ones who must have realized at some point in the ‘80s that their heroes had peaked.a while ago, and that while Exile In Main Street will endure, the current iteration of the band is mostly going to crank out forgettable crap. The titans of the ‘60s and ‘70s already had their peaks and declines frozen into a coherent discography/narrative – Weezer was the first band in which I experienced that rollercoaster personally, viscerally, for myself. Having read about the Replacements sad decline, and the Clash, and Zeppelin, and all the rest, here was the painful lived experience.

And now they’re back, with another new single, and this one comes the closest in a long while to recapturing the feel of the original. The old hope comes flooding back, and the phantom nature of it just makes it more agonizing. Is that the old guitar churn? Those oddly personal and clunky lyric touches? Matt Sharp’s still M.I.A., but is it possible Rivers is paying attention again? I know it’s not, and I know the letdown is coming, and for that reason it would be best for my musical piece of mind if they would either become great again, or just give it up. The Stones loom like a grinning specter, and still I’ll get my hands on the new album as soon as I possibly can.

5/1/08 Hey Phoenix, Don't Fire D'Antoni

The standard disclaimer - I am a complete bandwagon NBA fan. The Charlotte Hornets were relocated, and I have not yet warmed to the Bobcats nor do I have any childhood connection to them, so for now I cast about at will, compelled by the stories that swirl around various teams/styles. So any passion that I have for the Phoenix Suns comes from their well-documented revolution and in my admiration of Nash, not from the blood-deep bonds that other sports fandom promotes.

That being said, it's ridiculous to me the amount of groundswell behind firing coach Mike D'Antoni. Sure, it was obvious that he got outcoached by Popovich in that series, but join the club. Popovich has coached his way to 4 titles in the last decade. D'Antoni's not the only one to have his neck get in the way of that particular axe.

But what about longevity, and building a program, and all of that? Every endeavor has ebbs and flows, and as the ads are so fond of telling us, "There Can Only Be One". Which means that there are going to be teams, good teams, sometimes even great teams, that don't win it all. It's the beauty and curse of sports. No one in their right mind would argue that the '07-'08 Patriots weren't a great team, even though they didn't win it all. And, sure, the temperature might be hotter on Belichick if he didn't already sleep on a pile of Super Bowl rings, but the thing is that sports are unpredictable. By nature and by glorious design.

So it can become difficult to sift out teams that were derailed by unpredictability from those that are simply incapable of winning it all. But past accomplishments should count for something, I think, especially at the coaching level. Sometimes, what seems like a long-term team-altering decision gain (like canning a coach) provides just a short term burst of false hope. And sometimes it halts the rhythm and momentum of building a program and a culture.

So, sure, you can argue that the D'Antoni culture in Phoenix is that of "almost", but if the Suns braintrust doesn't have a good idea of what they want and who they want that is NOT D'Antoni (and who fits their players, who for the most part are locked in), then they should calm the hell down and realize that Popovich outcoaches everybody, and that D'Antoni has had teams that brought the firepower to at least go up against San Antonio with a fighting chance.

Popovich & Duncan are as linked as D'Antoni and Nash, and the culture that he has been able to build in San Antonio is a key part of their accomplishments. Jackson and Jordan and the Bulls in the '90s; similar "program development". Even when the Lakers were terrible and getting bounced in the first round by the same Suns that now look so lost, no one was calling for Phil Jackson's ouster. Sure, he's got the credibility of a championship, but unless you're bringing Jackson or Popovich to Phoenix than you're taking a step down from Mike D.

The thing about the Suns is that with D'Antoni at the helm they will be good, and they could be great, and they may even win a championship one day. But give the man credit, give him stability, and let this year stand as a disappointment, sure, but let the man get back to the drawing board. You'll be getting offensive fireworks and defensive idiocy, but that's as good a weapon to train on the behemoth Spurs as anyone has figured out how to muster. The wrong thing to do is to force Mike D. out or to force him to alter who he is as a coach. The short term philosophy demands an ouster, or to turn the Suns into more of a playoff built, low-post team. That's what Kerr will want, it will probably happen.


But I wish they would take the long view. I want Kerr to say screw it, Mike, Amare Stoudemire is never going to play defense, so let's crank the O up to 130 point per game. Bring in 3 point shooters, leapers, alley-oop finishers, surround Nash with as much offensive ridiculousness money (and trade flexibility) can buy, and let the two men that brought such high style to the desert go out shooting the guns they know how to fire. Execution/lack of defense/lack of health, whatever - ignore the demands of a championship-hungry fanbase and run the hell out of every 10 second possession. It hasn't won a championship yet, but it will one day, and I know D'Antoni believes that. Let him try, or let him go.

4/24/08 Politics - Do we want what we think we want?

I try to do my best to follow politics, at least the ones that take place on the macro level. I’ve always read the newspaper, which once seemed like demographic rebellion and now is a point of quixotic pride, as how in the world can they even continue to exist in such a brutally unfair marketplace?

I’m no political junkie; couldn’t tell you what’s going on in local politics, and really only follow down to the level of congressional races when there’s a flashy story or scandal or what have you that gives off enough sparks to draw attention. The presidential race is where the meat of the story is.

And even I can’t follow it too closely because it’s just way too depressing, how bereft of content and ideas the whole thing is. To watch McCain and Clinton scratch and claw for victory is to watch two people set each and every last principle on fire in the name of their ambition. Lurking in the classic Faust narrative is Obama as the prequel; the man who claims the straight and narrow principled lane and seems like the hero of some unwritten F. Scott Fitzgerald tragedy per the famous quote.

All of which led me to wonder the titular question - why do politicians, by all accounts smart, ambitious people for the most part, reduce themselves to unpalatable gruel over the course of the presidential election season? I mean, Hillary's ridiculous assertion that she would "obliterate" Iran if need be? It's impossible to read about a comment like that and not want to throw my hands up in disgust and ignore the whole thing. This is presumably an intelligent woman, right? With a high-powered education and a whole set of beliefs and plans? So why the hell is she diving headfirst into the mud puddle of the lowest common denominator? What idiot actually believes that this thinking woman (no matter your overall opinion of her) would obliterate another country? It just makes her look ridiculous, transparent, like just another saleswoman of snake oil.

And it would be one thing if it were just Clinton, but John McCain WTF? One of the best reads about politics I've ever encountered was David Foster Wallace's essay about following John McCain around, and his impressions of the political world in general and McCain in particular. One of the things that stood out to him, as it has to so many members of the press, is the persona that McCain's still trying to sell- that of the straight-talking man of principle, the Hollywood action hero persona scaled to fit politics. But McCain's been just as ridiculous as Clinton - the man was one of the only Republicans to show half a brain when it came to the idiocy of Bush's tax cuts, and now he wants to make them permanent? I mean, I understand that you've got to appease your core consituency, but does it have to be at the expense of everything you believe?

It would be nice to see a recognizable human run for office, instead of squinting at the ridiculous platitude-constructed human simulations provided by the candidates and trying to divine some kind of personality. And maybe an actual person is too messy of a thing to fit into the news culture of today, when the slightest misstep can be cross-sectioned just so to move the Stratego pieces areound on the board just so. But I think that the short gains that are made on the tactical level are a piece of a greater tragedy, which is the loss of any semblance of the messy nature of actual people from the seekers of presidential office.

But this is not really the candidates' fault, as they just reflect optimal conditions for victory. If juggling cats were a requirement for being president, you could bet Obama's face would be scratched to pieces. So the ridiculous and cynicla exercise of selling out one's principles in the name of state-specific sound bytes must work, on some level, or else it wouldn't be done. I wonder, though, if a candidate would for once take the tactical hit and just say "screw it, this is me", they would get rewarded by an electorate that seems to be more logical and down-to-earth on the whole than the squinting analysts can conceive of it being.

4/21/08 Grunge Influences - Whither Nirvana?

For all the oceans of mythologizing ink devoted to Nirvana and their influence, a little distance – Nevermind is 17 years old now – pegs their influence as stranger and more far-reaching than the standard “musical touchstone” type influence. They were both more influential and less than they were perceived at the time.

The dominant critical meme in the immediate post-grunge climate was that Nirvana’s success had, in one fell swoop, wiped the kind high-style, low-content ‘80s metal off of the map, along with prefab pop and glossy synth/dance music. Supposedly, the watershed moment was Nevermind supplanting Thriller at the top of the charts; the Moment that marked the changing of the musical zeitgeist.

Well, sort of. Prefab pop laid dormant for a while as grunge music suffered from the usual cycles of diminishing returns (A-Listers like Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam, and Stone Temple Pilots giving way to B-Listers like Dishwalla, Collective Soul, and Live and then to C-Listers like Matchbox 20 and Third Eye Blind), but came roaring back with a vengeance when Jive records unleashed the Backstreet Boys, NSync, and Britney on the world.

Plus, oh yeah, hip hop simply blew rock out of the popular reckoning. Not a lot of critics saw that coming. You want influential? Try Biggie. Way more of an impact on the last 15 years of popular music than Kurt Cobain, and his lyrics are a lot better written. Doesn’t scream as well, though. All the disposable top of the charts lowest-common denominator stuff that Nirvana was supposed to sweep away in some kind of musical tidal wave? Say hello to Sisqo. Have you heard? He likes thongs.

Nonetheless, even if in retrospect the radio heyday of grunge looks like the last dying light of the supernova that is/was rock’s stranglehold on popular music (which doesn’t mean that rock itself is over and done – just that it is now another in a series of viable genres, with another genre holding chart primacy over it), the question of Nirvana’s actual musical influence is an interesting one.

One immediately curious thing about Nirvana’s success is that so few bands sound like actual musical descendants of the band. And, rest assured, this is not because their sound is so unique and out there and impossible to replicate. Sure, a lot of bands had success with the quietLOUDquiet formula (Better Than Ezra – "Good", Radiohead – "Creep", Stone Temple Pilots – "Big Empty", etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.), but it can be argued (and often is) that Nirvana just took that from the Pixies. “Gouge Away” and “Gigantic” are the obvious touchstones, both for the melodic nature of the bass lines and because they carry a lot less of the Santiago guitar madness that sonically distinguishes the Pixies from Nirvana – I challenge anyone to find surf rock influences anywhere in the Nirvana discography, whereas it’s all over the place for the Pixies).

Nirvana’s sonic template is the musical template of “the personal is political” – raw, extreme pain communicated in universal terms, alternatingly bludgeoning and off-putting (“Milk It”, “Stay Away”) or bruised and inviting in the manner of bird with a broken wing (“Lithium”, “All Apologies”). Foregrounded always is Cobain’s pain; sometimes specified, often not, and, by virtue of his gift for melodic phrasing and genuinely powerful vocal abilities, inviting rather than alienating. Even at its most abrasive, Nirvana’s music has a warm, tactile quality lacking in the dentists-drill vibrations found in the Pixies most abrasive concotions.

This empathy-inviting pain is communicated in simple, catchy melodies wedded to simple, punk-inspired piledriving instrumental sections, often pared down to 4 chords or so. Basically, the extreme end of power pop is the result (and why that term has been appropriated for the limp stylings of Todd Rundgren types is a mystery for another day) – tuneful melodies girded by titanic, galvanizing, and simple chord progressions/melodic bass work. On top of that, layer the sarcastic sense of humor behind lines like “It’s ok to eat fish because they don’t have any feelings” and to title a song “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter”. And scream a lot, especially at the climax of the song (see Daltrey, Roger – "Won’t Get Fooled Again")

Nobody followed this template. Instead, everybody tried to copy Pearl Jam, whose music was also labeled grunge, but whose musical template was way, way different: mushy, complex interlocking guitar parts, chunky Neil Young-style chord progressions, a lot of acoustic/electric interplay. Longer songs, with more complex instrumental parts. Vocally, the incomparable Eddie Vedder, who I have come around on but once believed to be the worst vocalist in the entire universe. Like I said, I’ve come around, but Eddie influenced way more rock vocalists than Kurt did, namely in the following ways: heartfelt singing, without the sneer. Lyrics that reach for the mystical. Deep mumbling, with a whole lot of vowels. A distinct lack of irony. And, weirdly, ballads that are much, much more tuneful than the rockers (just compare the melodies of something like “Better Man” to something like “Why Go?” it’s not even a contest).

So, while Nirvana got all of the copy; admittedly, most probably because of the suicide, Pearl Jam had the influence. Nobody banged out albums of tuneful, sarcastic, 4 chord sledgehammer expressions of anger. Or, I should say, no one did that reached the top of the charts. Everybody released songs that sounded like Pearl Jam (Staind – "It’s Been Awhile", Seven Mary Three – whatever that song is, even Hootie and the Blowfish sounded like watered down Pearl Jam half the time – listen to "Let Her Cry" and tell me that couldn’t be a PJ song. The bands that achieved success in the post-grunge, pre-Backstreet radio days did so with songs that sound like Pearl Jam rips. It wasn’t until “Get Free” from the Vines came out that I realized it, because that was the first song I heard on the radio that sounded like a Nirvana rip-off.

The only band that sounded like they were actually influenced by Nirvana to me was Local H, a band that I hold dear to this very day. Only where Kurt’s pain was inviting, Scott Lucas’s was alienating in a way that Kurt just never could pull off, mostly because of that whole wounded baby bird thing.

Lucas, the songwriter/guitarist/semi-bassist/driving force behind the band, has a regular-guy practicality in lyrics and persona that lend the aggresive drive of Local H's music a bitter bite that Nirvana often deployed. Listening to the open, ringing phrasing of a song like PJ's "Daughter" or "Evenflow", what's notable is the claustrophic economy of the song. Where Eddie Vedder often writes in generalities, painting a feeling with images that's not always clear, and where Cobain often just strings together phrases for maximum frisson/impact, Lucas keeps his lyrics sharply trained on the objects of his wrath; which run the gamut from 1)himself to 2)other people.

"One more thing/before we go/stepped over everyone I know" goes the climax to "Fritz's Corner", a 3 line cocktail of triumph, rage, alienation, and guilt wedded to a supercharged pick scrape into that familiar 4 chord bludgeon. Sure, Nirvana did it first. But who else even attempted it?

4/17/08 Nash and CP3

I was the shortest kid in the class for a long, long time - probably until midway through high school, and remain undersized. I also love playing basketball. These two things are, sadly, not the best fit. They would fine if I were quick (I am slow) or had a really solid outside shot (which I do not), but the fact remains that without that nigh-essential basketball skill, height, my abilities are always going to be on the bottom end of the average pickup league.

For that reason, I am consistently enthralled the the players that are able to dominate while being short. While I can barely conceive of what it must be like to tower over the paint, throwing down vicious dunks and sending impertinent perimeter penetrators' shot attempts into the 5th row, I can at least at the outer edges of my fantasies imagine myself weaving into the land of the giants, deftly passing or scoring. This never happens, but it is at least less ludicrous to imagine myself playing that role.

It is that reason (if not that reason along) that my coming back around to the NBA had a lot to do with Steven Nash and the Suns. Telegenic, media-hyped, surely, but I've never had NBA allegience (perhaps I was lined up with the Hornets, but I never liked the NBA growing up and then they left Charlotte and the Bobcats just don't feel like mine) so I flit about from style to style, player to player, narrative to narrative. In terms of allegiance, I am the definition of the casual, bandwagon fan, but the more I follow the league the more my fandom of the game of professional basketball itself deepens. It is the polar opposite of my NCAA fandom, in which I live and die by one team and one conference and could really care less about the rest of the CBB universe until March rolls around.

So, a short, white point guard, playing the position the way that in my wildest dreams I could very faintly imagine - this has the resonance that makes a person sit up and pay attention. I could never legitimately say that I'm a Suns fan, but a Steve Nash fan, absolutely. I could rehash all of the reasons that he's such a compelling player to watch, but that is all covered better elsewhere. And, with the the Shaq trade trimming back the Suns' wings a bit, Nash has played off the ball more this season, which from a strategy perspective is better but from a selfish perspective (mine) means there are less opportunities for him to work his particular alchemy.

And then, staying up late, watching game 1 of NO-Dallas, the Chris Paul tsunami. Now, this is a man who I should have seen play- after all, he was the PG for Wake Forest for 2 years, and is born and bred North Carolina. But these two years were among my years in the sports wilderness, so to my shame I hadn't yet seen the MVP candidate play all year. Well, except for in the All-Star game, in which his talent shone bright enough for me to declare that he was fantastic. Which he was.

But good Lord. The All-Star game is a basketball themed party. The playoff are basketball through and through. I tuned in shortly before halftime to watch Kidd (who I find repulsive more for his off-the-court domestic abuse issues than with any flaws in his game, but, like I said, when it comes to the NBA I'm a cherry picking fan) help push the Mavericks to a dozen point lead, and saw Paul not do much special.


2nd half. Paul WENT OFF. It actually felt like watching an explosion, or a series of them, like the climax of a bombastic 80s action movie. Paul with a step-back, good. Paul with a hesitation teardrop floater, good. Paul to Chandler, alley-oop. Paul with a flurry of 15 foot jump shots. Paul stealing the inbounds from what looked like Croatia. And on and on and on and on. At a certain point, I thought Kidd might actually cry. It was the sight of the future machine-gunning the past down with with extreme prejudice.

And Chris Paul is legitimately six feet tall. And a hardcore bowler. And I caught his appearence on "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" and damned if the guy isn't effortlessly charming, as well. Unlike the dry reticence tinged with humor of Nash's public demeanor (when asked who he supported in the Democratic primary, he remarked that it was no secret that he was a "liberal young gentleman"), Paul is open, engaging, and seemingly regular.

And, like Nash was before Shaq arrived, Paul is 80% of the Hornets offense. Not to take anything away from Amare Stoudemire, David West, et. al, but Paul dominates the NO team the way that Nash did in his two breakout seasons, and it's just so damn rare to see that kind of dominance from the shortest player on the court (Iverson is the only example that leaps immediately to mind, although from what I've read it seems that Isiah was similarly dominant - I just didn't watch the NBA when he was playing). Watching it is watching David and Goliath, over and over, competing in a state of aethletic grace for 45 game-minutes.

4/14/08 Preaching the Gospel of Max Martin

Like others whose radio lives during high school/middle school were dominated by grunge and then the post-grunge smorgasbord (OMC - How Bizarre, because, well, why the hell not), the teen-pop boom that achieved absolute and sustained domination until Napster and file sharing sent the music industry cratering into rubble was an awesome and terrifying force to behold, definitely, but a distant one, like an exploding supernova way off in the universe. I was busy listening to Radiohead and waiting for Weezer to reunite, and pretty much cherry-picked what I thought was the best of the teen pop boom off of the rest of America's computers (O glorious Napster, I lament thee). I didn't have to endure the onslaught directly; I'm sure there are people just slightly younger than me for whom NSYNC was their NKOTB directly, as in, inescapably dominant and perhaps transcendently irritating, but me I observed from afar.

Imagine my delight, then, when the cream of the teen pop crop of singles turned out to be such a series of blissful peaks. I became (and remain) convinced that the finest singles of the early 2000s teen pop boom stand their ground with some of the finest teen pop singles of any era. Sure, Phil Spector's a sonic saint (though hardly a real life one), but I'd hold "Baby One More Time" up against half of his peak Ronettes output. The sonic trappings are different, sure, but both are defiantly maximalist for their respective eras, rearing back and slugging with the desparate haymaker force that comes from a true reaching for the stars on the backs of kids whose every moment is an epic writ large in their own minds. A parasitical enterprise, perhaps, but a devastatingly effective one.

With a little more research, then, I was awed by the fact that just as Spector's fingerprints are all over the '60s girl-group crime scene, one man had an equal impact on the best of the 2000s version - a certain Max Martin (given name: Karl Sandberg). The genius Swede absolutely owned the peak of machine-tooled 00s teen pop, and his empire didn't just stop there. Just read over the list of songs that the man wrote or co-wrote, and marvel at the magma-temperature hot streak:

Backstreet Boys: As Long as You Love Me
Backstreet Boys: Everybody (Backstreet's Back)
Backstreet Boys: I Want It That Way
Britney Spears: "...Baby One More Time"
Britney Spears: "Crazy"
Britney Spears: "Oops I Did It Again"
Bon Jovi: "It's My Life"
Kelly Clarkson: "Since U Been Gone"



That's pop domination in 8 easy steps. My favorite part of the list is final song, a song so good that I remember an article in Spin or Entertainment Weekly or some such talking about how almost every musical notable couldn't stop talking about how good it was (I remember specifically Dave Grohl being really into it), and they are absolutely right. That song kicks ass. All of them do. I don't mean in an ironic fashion, I mean these are all great pop songs. But "Since U Been Gone" is something else entirely, and to me it really sums up the genius of Martin (and his co-writer, Dr. Luke). As they tell it, they were trying to write a Strokes song. They were frustrated that all of the Strokes songs never made the big rock move, or the big pop move, or whatever you want to call it. With a nod to Potter Stewart, you know it when you hear it; it's the "Whoa-OOOH!" part of "Livin' on a Prayer", for easy reference. So they set out to write a Strokes song with a big rock move, and that was that. They did (hint: it's the beginning of the chorus, as it should be).

And what it really shows is that this guy is on another songwriting level from all of the bands that get venerated by the rock critics, and on another level from those that produce the tasteless pop that fades away after the sugar buzz wears off, because I would never argue that all pop music is great. Sometimes, obviously, it is spectacularly awful. But Martin basically said, OK all you Strokes/Vines/Datsuns/Yeah Yeah Yeahs/insert "rock is back" band here, I see what you're trying to do here, now let me DO MY THANG! And he wrote an anthemic stunner that everyone can agree is a)catchy as hell and b)a great rock song. And, more than that, it can be be karoaked to within an inch of its life, because of the cocktail of drive and energy that he melded to the usual big shiny hook. Plus it directly steals the bridge to "Maps", which is kind of shameful, but also kind of awesome. And in so doing he wrote a better song than the Strokes ever did, while performing the valuable service of reminding anyone with ears that the best songs, and the best bands, and the best songwriters, have at one time another just closed their eyes and tried to knock it out of the whole damn ballpark.

Thursday Narrative Post - Sports & Narrative

As a Tar Heel born and bred (if not educated), it was quite painful to me to watch the boys in blue lay a giant stinkbomb in the first half against KU, especially after looking so dominant for the rest of the tournament. Hansbrough was hitting face-up 20 footers against Louisville, for God's sake. Then they, what? Forget they're one game away from the final? Watching Kansas come out and shove a live grenade down Carolina's throat to the tune of a 40-12 lead in the first half was literally the sight of a dream season ending. Unbeaten on the road? Oh, how about another easy layup following an uncontested interior pass? They couldn't have played worse at a worse time if their life depended on it.



I rationalize and say that, with the way Memphis played in a magnificent title game 2 days later, there would have been no way the Heels could have beaten them. Carolina couldn't stop Sherrod Collins from getting into the lane, Derrick Rose would have blown their minds. And so I say I'm happy for KU to put on the crown following that incredible Chalmers 3, but the truth is that every second of watching the game was haunted by the ghostly question of "how would Carolina be playing right now?" And, as with the Georgetown debacle last year, the what-if question will hang over me for a while as basketball season fades.

Still and all, it is these failures that make sports so compelling, the ways that real life, in the form of televised childhood games played by athletically freakish millionaires, sometimes lines up with the stories we tell and sometimes does not. In watching a movie, or a TV show, or reading a book, the audience member is entering a narrative compact that is rarely broken: things will end appropriately, is the promise of the writer. Not necessarily well, or happily, but in a way that satisfies the narrative drive. One of the pleasures of fictional narratives lies in seeing how the various strands that are laid out reach a satisfying conclusion. Genre often helps - for the comedy we implicity understand that things will end happily; the pleasures lie in the twists and turns along the way. In tragedy, or suspense, the Aristotelian catharsis is the implied payoff for the weight of awful events/threats/mishaps that form the narrative.

When a work of fiction does not resolve to the root chord, the audience often feels cheated, and the work itself can feel cheapened. Witness the great outcry over the Sopranos finale. Fade to black, no resolution, life goes on (depending on your preferred conspiracy theory). The series ends without resolving on anything; it is an ending in the literal sense - it ceases to be, and the narrative strands are left dangling. The question remains; does this make the vast rich middle any less compelling? A subjective answer, I'd argue - for myself I'd say yes and no.

The glory of sports is that they contain resolution every single time out on the micro level (someone always wins, someone always loses), but they do not always provide narrative resolution. The Cinderella team in the NCAA tournament does not always win. Davidson does not always hit the last second three against Kansas. Sometimes a team led by a devil incarnate (cough Christian Laettner cough) wins a championship. There's no guarantee that real life will follow any narrative drive. And when it doesn't, it feels unsatisfying, but not in the same way that it feels unsatisfying when a movie/tv show/book doesn't achieve resolution. In those cases, the lack of resolution is a deliberate choice from the part of the author, thus feeling like entitlement withdrawn. In real life, it feels true. It resonates with the thousand petty disappointments that all of us feel over the course of a lifetime.



So, when it does happen...when Davidson beats Georgtown, when Roy Williams wins the Big One (and then Kansas wins the Big One after vanquishing Roy Williams), when Memphis is tragically, Shakespearian-ly done in by missed free throws after Calipari's blithe assertion that they'll make 'em when they count, when, unbelievably, the smarmy Belichick and his Death Star Patriots fall just short of the ultimate prize (with their matinee idol QB spending a good portion of the game on his back in the grass), the pleasure is doubled, trebled, even exponentially increased because there really is no guarantee. If a satisfying ending is exquisite pleasure in the realm of fictional narrative, it is on another level when comes from real life, which so often gives no quarter and unspools with such little rhyme or reason.

Monday Music Post - The Maligned 2nd Album

The second album is a tricky thing, especially when the first is successful. The playing field tilts from the impact of expectations, which are in most cases absent for any band's debut (although there are clear exceptions to this - see Velvet Revolver). Any band's successful debut is followed by a crushing cycle of touring/adulation/backlash, and after the tornado survives the band is invariably in the position of waking up, looking around, and wondering: where the hell is my house, and why are there pieces of half of the neighborhood in my former front lawn? A debut album carries all of the pent-up energy and craft of the long series of songwriting sessions, rehearsals, bonding, arguments, etc. over the long lifespan of the band from first gathering to album unleashing. The second album is often written hastily, often on tour - ye gods how I dread to read an interview with the chief songwriter of a band with one album down talking about how they've gotten a lot of really good songs written on "the road" - and often is either directly or indirectly narcissistic: informed more by the tornado of fame than by the truths of the everyday that great music contains.



This is a well-worn narrative, and a cliche. Because so many 2nd albums follow this pattern, it's automatic to assume that all 2nd albums will follow it until the end of time. To name some albums that fall into this category: The Strokes - Room on Fire, The Breeders - Last Splash (yes, Cannonball is one of the best songs of the last 20 years; the album is not that great), Bush - Razorblade Suitcase, No Doubt - Return to Saturn, Nas - It Was Written, Guns N Roses - Use Your Illusion (10 great songs, 10 tons of filler), Kanye West - Graduation, other suggestions welcome.

Often, though, the 2nd album is where the band's vision comes through to fruition, and makes the first album look like a blueprint in retrospect, while the follow-up seems like the completed building. For a set of these albums, see: Nirvana, Nevermind vs. Bleach, Pixies Surfer Rosa vs. Doolittle, Whiskeytown, Stranger's Almanac vs. Faithless St., Wilco, Being There vs. AM. This path has just as venerable a tradition (if not more so), but because of the quick-response critical culture that has arisen with the Internet there isn't really room in the critical mass to take this wait-and-see approach. Overall critical momentum in an instant-response climate excels at hyping up a new band, but is not as great at sticking with a band's development. The known quantity is always less sexy, less interesting than the potential of the great unknown.

This does a critical disservice to those bands that get it right the second time around; like the first-time novelist, they've already gotten their shot to impress. Case in point: the Darkness. Catsuit wearing lead singer, ridiculously awesome video for "I Believe in a Thing Called Love" (seriously - they fight a killer octopus with laser guitars. Music videos reach no higher pinnacle), and a set of songs that mash castrato Queen-style vocals to Van Halen-channeling guitar rock songs. In concept: genius, and no wonder that they were hyped to the stars.



Still and all, with the exception of "I Believe in a Thing Called Love," the first Darkness album is all sound, no song. It's as if once they decided on the stylistic outlines of the band, they filled the songs in by numbers. So you get an opener like "Black Shuck", a ragin' rockin' song about a killer dog that, technically speaking, "rocks", but doesn't really have a memorable vocal melody or hummable guitar riff, and boils down to more of an overall sound than a song. It's got all of the jackhammer energy of the '80s glam rock they clearly idealize, but that's about it. Energy will only take you so far; at a certain point you need a damn hook.

The chief error, to my ear, of the Darkness's debut is that they attempted to land by the wrong guiding lights. The sonic fury of "Permission to Land" has the clinical, mechanical drive of early Van Halen - rock 'n' roll with the blues surgically removed and replaced by a kind of punk-driven abrasiveness. It's easy to hear what the band is going for, it's just as easy to hear that they don't get there, and it has to do with the frontman discrepancy. Early Van Halen works because Eddie's terrifying, mechanical guitar perfection wrestles with Roth's carnival barker vocals. DLR can't really "sing" all that well, but his flesh-and-blood carnival barker energetic imperfection meshes perfectly with Eddie's bloodless guitar mastery.

Justin Hawkins, of the Darkness's ear-slicing falsetto, has a vocal instrument that's a lot closer to Eddie's guitar in tone and temperament, so wedding it to driving punk/metal tracks just robs the album of an entrance point - listening to it is like trying to climb up a glass wall. Sometimes polished rock perfection works to, well, perfection (Def Leppard: exhibits A-Z), but in this case it results in an album that brings to mind a dentists drill.

Still and all, a successful album, a hit, and all that. So when they released "One Way Ticket to Hell and Back" there wasn't a whole lot of critical evaluation of the Darkness's musical evolution.



Listen to any of the tracks off of "One Way Ticket" though, and it's clear that with one simple philosophical frame shift, the Darkness have exponentially improved their music. Namely, they started imitating Queen. The punk abrasiveness and dentists-drill texture is all gone: what takes its place is the air quote laden glam rock whose closest kin is a song like "Fat Bottomed Girls". The harmonies are emphasized, the guitar tones are softened, and the solos are constructed out of more melodic patterns instead of amp-to-11 blooze-runs. And did I mention the harmonies? They're awesome, and Justin Hawkins has the soprano to stand toe-to-toe with Freddie M. Queen is a better fit, too, because Hawkins has a songwriting sensibility that's closer to Freddie's camp showmanship than it is to Diamond Dave's blunt carnival barker's.

Just as Freddie singing "Fat Bottomed Girls" as the most ineffectively closeted man in a band called Queen could possibly be is an act of irony, so too is the Darkness writing a sweet song about a girlfriend's new hairstyle and calling it "Knockers". Both songs dutifully hit the required caveman-stomp notes of glam rock while pointing out the reductiveness of such attitudes though the irreconcilable contrasts of context (Freddie's homosexuality, "Knockers"'s fundamental sweetness) with content (the misogyny/objectification in the lyrics/titles of each song). Both songs, meanwhile, pull off these contrasts within the 3-minute microcosm of melodic glam rock stompers whose chief musical foundation is a catchy vocal melody. And not incidentally, both songs feature incredible and incredibly cheesy harmonies in the chorus. Seriously, the vocal harmonies have to be heard to be believed.

The reward of this strategy are all over "One Way Ticket to Hell and Back", and it's a stronger and more interesting album for it. So, if you wrote the Darkness off after Permission to Land, give the 2nd album a go. It's a different beast entirely, disguised with the same skin. Also, for all the critical assumptions that the Darkness didn't "mean it", just look at what ultimately destroyed the band. Justin Hawkins's cocaine addiction, which is addressed as honestly and unapologetically as it comes on "One Way Ticket's" opening track. The Darkness meant it, all right. It's just that when you "meant it" the way that Queen "meant it", some people are going to miss the message.

Wednesday Narrative Post - Disappointments of the Dark Tower

Spoiler Warning: If you haven't read the Dark Tower series and plan to, don't read any of this. A lot of discussion of plot points throughout the first five books below.

I returned my copy of “Song of Susannah” (the 6th book in Stephen King's Dark Tower series) to the library today without even opening it. I felt a little disappointed, both in myself because I don't like to leave books or series of books unfinished, and in Stephen King, because I've felt for 2 books now that the series has been descending in quality like a leaky hot air balloon. This is frustrating, because book 2 of the series (The Drawing of the 3), was so incredibly compelling,
with book 3 matching it and raising the stakes.


I was afraid of this slow decline in quality before I even started the series, though, because of King's stated reluctance to outline his books. It's not a new observation, but this aspect of King's narrative craft tends to lead to 2 things - great setups/plot developments, and terrible, terrible endings. I respect King's belief that the spontaneous nature of writing without the net of an outline leads a narrative down exciting, interesting, paths, but if those paths just dead-end then I think it can have a detrimental effect on the work as a whole. When this work is something like "IT", and the collapsing ending takes the form of the nameless terror appearing as a giant spider and then some sort of cosmic lightbulb (not really that scary), it's kind of a bummer but doesn't completely ruin the suspense and terror of the earlier parts of the book (the haunted house, the evil bird, etc.). What's left on balance is 800 great pages of setup and development, and 200 pages to get through the whole Evil Lightbulb in the Cosmos part.

But this lack of an outline really bites King in the ass over the course of a 7 volume fantasy series. The best long-form works of fantasy are works of nigh-obsessive attention to detail, from the totemic Lord of the Rings on down. And while I don't think it's necessary to create an entire freaking language to play in the long-form fantasy sandbox, I do think that when you're dealing in a multi-volume epic there has to be some sort of long term plan. Otherwise, instead of looking at 800 pages of setup and 200 fizzle, you're looking at 4-5 solid books followed by an epic 2 book long bellyflop into a pool of cement.

The problem is even more exacerbated by the epic length of the Dark Tower. The flaws start to pile up around the halfway point, in book 4, when King steers off of the main plot to give us an extended flashback Roland's youth.

After the high-suspense jolt of the lobstrosity threat that shapes Book 2's narrative drive and the hell-in-a-handbasket ride through the diseased city of Lud in Book 3 (which similarly serves as the suspenseful fulcrum of The Wastelands), King presents a long, unwinding tale of Roland's past that is too bloated by half. Alain and Cuthbert remain shapeless archetypes, even while Roland's character is deepened through his experiences with Susan. The villains are cardboard cutouts; mean and stupid men with tattoos of coffins, a far cry from the seductive and insane Blaine, the mad beating heart of the dystopian city of Lud. Against such colorless villains and allies, the slow pace and texture of the story brings the momentum of the overall series to a halt. It's one of King's patented left turns off the main road, and though as a standalone volume it has plenty to offer, it's location in the middle of the 7-volume epic is really the point at which King's tendency to build and build and build some more when he should start the process of wrapping up starts to rear its ugly head.

Book five doesn't recover the momentum, seeing as how its narrative arc is that of a hybrid Western/mystery and the solution is incredibly dull (the Wolves are mechanical, just like Shardik the bear! OMG!). This leaves the Western, which is servicable, but not particularly interesting, especially since the Calla is another outpost-style town that resembles nothing so much as the setting of the Wizard and Glass. After going to such efforts to flesh out his post-apocalyptic Mid-World, King pulls back drastically to portray 2 books worth of the small town blues. Meanwhile, the details of Mid-World itself, instead of beginning to resolve into a greater narrative, start to just pile up into an unwieldy mess. The structure of the Beams, the cosmos existing inside a rose in Midtown Manhattan, the suggestions of a Chief Malevolent Baddie by the name of the Crimson King: all of these details rob King's imagined universe of its internal consistency as a believable place that works according to its own rules and logic. It starts to come to resemble a cosmic stew of the supernatural.


By the time that a Stephen King book shows up at the end of Book 5, I knew I was done. Sure, sure the 4th wall and all of that, but fantasy breaks enough rules as it is that it paradoxically requires a greater internal consistency and logic in its imagined worlds. The metatextual touch of Father Callahan reading about himself in 'Salem's Lot didnt' give me chill bumps. It made me angry, as it seems the ultimate example of King writing himself into a corner.

As the internal logic of King's Mid-World breaks down, the flaws of his writing start to grate more. Eddie Dean, always speaking as the hepcat cool guy, delivering the wiseass SK lines. No major characters dead. No new major characters added. Sure, they're a traveling band, but the reduction of our cast of heroes to basically the same crew from book 2 onward flattens and constricts the imaginary universe. The narrative flaws begin to illuminate the flaws in charaterization, and the whole series goes south fast.

Compare this to the exquisitely plotted His Dark Materials, for example, where upon the conclusion every action, bit of dialogue, and description, seems to expand the universe and drive the overall plot forward, or to something like Gaiman's Sandman's, in which every digression is spun off of one of the central themes, and the Dark Tower shrinks as an achievement. The fight against the Wolves of the Calla is a b-grade mystery/western that doesn't speak to King's themes of a world moving on. The "Ramadan" chapter of the Sandman, in addition to being gorgeously written and illustrated, is a direct exploration of one of the central meaning's of the word "dream", namely the cost and pain that lies in the space between desire/aspiration and reality. The caliph would rather his kingdom endure in a dream than exist in reality only to be lost to memory, and thus sacrifices the prosperity of the now for the "Arabian Nights" romance of a dreamed Baghdad. This story slots neatly and naturally into the overall arc of the King of Dreams, almost as if Gaiman had (gasp!) outlined it be thus.

King, writing out on a limb, has no such option, and thus I find myself abandoning ship before it sinks even further. I have no faith that things are now on their way to resolving; instead, I fear the Deadlights ahead again.

Monday Music Post - Guns & Roses Ritz 88

Revelation: That's the only word for these clips of Appetite era GNR absolutely destroying the Ritz in 1988.

Welcome to the Jungle:


I was too young to catch the first wave of GNR; by the time I picked up a copy of Appetite Axl had already achieved stage 5 paranoia and was beginning the long road to the top of the mountain known as Chinese Democracy (climb on, W. Axl!). It's pretty well assumed at this point that Appetite is a classic, so no need to belabor that point. It is. To a kid in high school, it's almost impossible to imagine a better, more appropriate album, unless that album is the Violent Femmes debut. Appetite is what any scrawny high school boy worth his salt wishes life is like, "Kiss Off" pretty accurately captures what life is actually like.

In any case, my conception of "live GNR" was a large void, since there was no such thing as I listened to their music. And then, later, all it meant was weird quasi-GNR shows with Fat Axl and Tommy Stinson on bass, which was weird to me, because all of the rock and roll reference materials that I greedily consumed held the Replacements up as the stylistic flag bearers of the underground. Which is totally bullshit I realized later because the Replacements made every attempt to sell out possible; it's just that no one was buying. GNR, on the other hand, succeeded spectacularly. Axl's dilemma, in some ways, is understandable. In chess, as D'Angelo observed, the king stay the king, but the top of the charts knows no loyalty to royalty. There's no way for a single off of Chinese Democracy to achieve the dizzying heights of November Rain in the hip-hop era, so why bother trying? If the game is rigged, do not play.

So to see the Gunners young and hungry, before all the accumulated sludge of crushing fame ground them to powder is a revelation. Hell, Slash doesn't even has his top hat yet! This is a transcendent rock show, and I'm slightly in disbelief that it was filmed. This is a band that anyone could fall in love with, a band playing incredible, timeless songs with the energy of 1,000 firecrackers detonating inside of a trashcan. Axl propelled by the spirit of Indiana, young, skinny, hungry, and devastating.



For all of the pleasures of this performance (and they are legion), a profound sense of melancholy suffuses them. Listening to Axl introduce Slash with the obvious pride of a driven man showing off a friend whose abilities have the power to astound, it's impossible not to be taken with the goodwill and camaraderie emanating from Rose. "I don't know what it is, but it's weird, it's pissed off, and it calls itself Slash," he intones, once and forever revealing himself as the first brick in the foundation of Slash's legend. To know that later the same man will sue to get the rights to the name "Guns 'N' Roses" and replace the entire band in this clip with ringers? To know that in the reconstituted zombie GNR the half-man, half-beast that calls itself Slash will be replaced by a man that refuses to perform without a KFC chicken bucket on his head is a tragedy.

Not to say that without all that success things would have turned out for the better. After all, the afore-mentioned Replacements were torn asunder six ways to Sunday without a top 10 hit to their name. And maybe Axl was simply destined to lose his shit at some point in his adult life. And certainly the drugs didn't help. But with Frank Black and Kim Deal able to bury the hatchet, and J. Mascis and Lou Barlow able do the same, and Paul Westerberg having stopped drinking and come to a charmingly friendly/crotchety beloved uncle status, it's both depressing and thrilling to watch GNR perform as a band, 5 guys united by an unshakable belief in an unbeatable set of songs, and to know that Axl is only 6 or 7 years away from getting fat, getting dreads, and turning his back on the people that helped make us even care about him in the first place.

But good Lord, the leather pants, and the dancing. The man was born to be a rock star, and he did it. And watching GNR at the Ritz 88, one conclusion to draw is that it couldn't have happened any other way.