Bonde do Role and shit

So I haven’t written in awhile, in part, because I was mugged this past weekend. Yeah, a total bummer. But an isolated incident here in Charlottesville. So, basically, I’m over it. A bit.

But yeah, I’m getting back on the high horse. Tonight, I indulged and went to see Bonde do Role at the Satellite Ballroom on the Corner here in C-ville. Was pretty blown that the band played here. Looking at their schedule, it doesn’t look as if they’re playing any other town of comparable minisculity, so it was bone. And the kids took it. And ran.

They started off with a bundle of songs that I recognized from this SXSW set, and then took off from there. The band got the crowd to do a corny hip-hop-hooray-type handwaving thing at one point, but nevertheless, it stuck, and the band gave back what the audience put in. By the end, on the track “James Bonde,” half the crowd was on the stage and one third of the band was in the crowd. It was definitely one of the most democratic moments that I’ve ever seen at a show and it was only improved by the fact that the front man and woman didn’t have any pesky instruments in the way. The records kept spinning, they kept rapping, the crowd kept dancing.

Bonde is a band to get excited about. Sure, I’d heard echoes on pitchfork and blogs, etc., and although I don’t know if they’re the fucking “real deal,” they’re totally entertaining and fun in a way that doesn’t transcend authenticity, but just ignores it. During the first three songs, the phrase “this is the new punk rock” was running through my head, and I didn’t put it there. It was just happening.

The band ran out of a little bit of steam mid-way through the set, which is surprising since they’re from a tropical country, and they rightfully seemed pretty annoyed by the jackass who got on-stage and started popping and locking, but they miraculously managed to bring it all back home. Whatever the band put out, the crowd gave back and vice versa.

This is one of the things I like about C-Ville — crowds here can put together a really bitchin’ night like this every once in awhile. See my Brazilian Girls review. Or a Falsies show. Etc. Or if you live in Philadelphia or Brooklyn this weekend, go and see Bonde do Role.

Slunk Juice

* I know that some of my regular readers will get a kick out of this: http://gofugyourself.typepad.com/go_fug_yourself/2007/03/well_played_win.html

* I’ve been obsessively listening to the Eagles’ Their Greatest Hits album these past couple days.  It’s the blue one with the eagle on the cover that sold 25 million copies and that all of our parents owned.  I still have mixed emotions.  Based on my love for Fleetwood Mac from the same era, I should be sympathetic to this stuff, and admittedly the musicianship and workmanlike songcraft on tracks like “Take It Easy,” “Take It to the Limit,” and “Lying Eyes” really impresses me.  But I do feel that old Dude-like hatred as an irrepressible something in my stomach.  See this great essay by Robert Christgau for more.

*And while we’re on the topic, I’m ambivalent about Christgau too.  Some of his writing, I think, is the best rockwrite in the business, but his ‘dean’ persona infuriates me.  I generally agree with his opinions, but not always.  One thing that I was thinking about yesterday as I pondered my mixed emotions, though, is this: his seems to be one of the most programmatic, consistent, and well reasoned rock aesthetics among the rockwriters, but whether this really allows him to say anything or not, or describe anything accurately is another question.

 *I’ve resolved to write a song a day for the rest of my life.

Drawing Restraint 9

Spoiler Alert!

I went to UVA’s student run cinematheque Off-Screen to see Matthew Barney’s latest Drawing Restraint 9 tonight. I’d never actually seen a Barney joint in the theatre before so this was a rare pleasure. I have seen plenty of images in books, though, and the DVD of excerpts from Cremaster 3, and I’d read a lot of reviews, so I basically knew what to expect. I was impressed, in a fashion, but perhaps not blown away in the way that one imagines his first Matthew Barney film blowing him away. It is fantastic to see a filmmaker with the sensibilities of a video artist, sculptor, or painter harness the whole apparatus of big-budget Hollywood filmmaking, but to what ends? There were definitely ‘messages’ being bandied about in these images of Barney’s, but the whole thing was fairly sober for such a massive undertaking, and not exactly sobering either. Which is to say, that, yes, I was slightly underwhelmed. I had mixed feelings about a lot of the movie. It’s Japanese setting, for one, but also the film’s penultimate scene in which Barney and Bjork (his co-star) butcher themselves, literally, as in, they take knives and cut off slices of each others’ flesh. The scene was obviously grotesque, to some extent, but it wasn’t exactly gory. In one way, I appreciated this. The scene didn’t need to be gory. But then again, it didn’t really need to be there at all. And that was the problem. It certainly seemed as though Bjork and Barney, a couple, were just getting each other off. And that’s fine too, but didn’t exactly make for either great art or great entertainment. With Barney’s making strides outside the art gallery, one has to wonder what he’s going for. Still, five dollars well spent.

1000 hits/Greatest artists

My blog just reached 1000 hits. Kudos for me. I think that’s pretty miniscule in the internet scheme of things, but it’s quite an attractive number, so I’m happy . . .

Today when I was eating brunch at the Blue Moon Diner here in Charlottesville, I sat next to two guys who I overheard talking about the following things: their incapability to see the Big Dipper in Washington, D.C. last weekend; the fact that when the Nazis made the yellow star mandatory for all Jews in Norway, the king of Norway commanded that everyone wear the yellow star (unconfirmed); some obscure references to habeus corpus law; extended discourse on Roman musical notation and its contemporary legibility; brief reference to the musicological accomplishments of Pythagoras. And the best thing about all these comments was that they were disconnected by long periods of silence before another comment would suddenly bubble to the surface, and there seemed to be no overarching logic holding the conversation together. It was like overhearing a Beckett play.

But my real point in writing . . . In my review of the new Bright Eyes EP this past week, I mentioned my view that Dylan was “the second or third greatest American artist in the 20th-century,” and ferdogg took me ever so lightly to task in a comment. Well, first of all, I think I misspoke. I would have preferred to have written “at least the second or third greatest American artist of the 20th-century” so as to leave things slightly more ambiguous. I didn’t want to overspeak and cause just such a protest on the part of my readership by leaving myself some wiggle room. I’m totally confident that I could argue successfully for Dylan’s top-three status, but arguing that he was somehow “the best” I think would be hard (but maybe worthwhile nonetheless).

Still, the basic logic behind what I wrote was that, for me, the “best American artist of the 20th-century” would probably have to be a popular musician or filmmaker because those are two forms with the greatest cultural impact and highest level of aesthetic development during that century. Yet I think it would be hard to argue for an individual filmmaker. Kubrick, Hitchcock, Ford, Hawks, Scorsese, Coppola, Altman, and others created amazingly varied, complex, and aesthetically adventurous bodies of work over long periods of time. Welles, Chaplin, Peckinpah, Keaton, and others made startling accomplishments in a limited range of films. But it would be hard to argue that any of these filmmakers defined the form or stood out from the pack in the way that someone like Joyce or Beckett or DaVinci or Melville or Newton stood head and shoulders over their peers in terms of quality, accomplishment, or originality. If I did include a filmmaker in my top three it would probably actually be an avant-garde filmmaker like Stan Brakhage or Hollis Frampton. In other words, if I could figure out the best American avant-garde filmmaker of the 20th-century, I might put him or her in the top three, but more so for aesthetic/theoretical reasons than preference. Arguing from my own preferences, I actually think I could make a strong argument that David Lynch is the greatest filmmaker of the 20th-century, but here I would get hung up on the fact that he’s still working and may still create even better work in the future (thus becoming more thoroughly associated with the 21st-century). I think that the mainstream, canonical filmmaker that you could make the best argument for would be Hitchcock, but he is really only ‘American’ by default since 1) he was British by birth, and 2) his films don’t reflect on classical American themes in the way that some of these other filmmakers do. These two latter examples prove the basic futility in exercises such as this as well.

In the popular music realm, the strongest candidates, for me, would be Bob Dylan, Robert Johnson, Elvis Presley, John Coltrane, or Duke Ellington. The reason I would give Dylan a slight edge over the last two artists is that his accomplishment was slightly less singular than theirs, i.e. it fit into an American tradition that was already well established and that still continues today. If the American idiom has a Shakespeare, it is no doubt Dylan, and even though Coltrane and Ellington both achieved aesthetic brilliance on par with Shakespeare, their brilliance is nearly impossible to imitate without sounding like empty ventriloquism. In the case of Dylan, a performer can create a fair to middling effort in the Dylanesque, American folk tradition and still be saying something somewhat worthwhile and lasting. Every American songwriter, poet, or literary artist toot court must respond in some way, in their art, to Dylan’s accomplishments and innovations.

Robert Johnson, on the other hand, is just without peer. To my mind, the brilliance in his music is nearly incommunicable, although not unintelligible. Listening to him is much like studying quantum physics. At this level of artistic accomplishment different rules of possibility reign. In some way, Johnson cannot even be discussed as a sort of best artist, because he is more like a god-man or something. We need to discuss, rather, his position in the pantheon or in the heavens. St. Robert.

And a similar argument goes for the King. When the archaelogists excavate the ruins of Las Vegas and see the temples built to this figure Elvis, he will appear to them in much the same way that figures like Zeus, Athena, and Apollo appear to us today — real but unreal figures of a hallowed yet unapproachable past. In the same way that we read of the Greek pantheon and don’t quite understand how these figures were gods, the archaeologists of the future will not quite understand how we considered Elvis a ’star’ — what that meant, how that happened, etc.

OK, there is a lot more that I could write on this, but I need to do schoolwork so I’m stopping. Next post I’ll address the literary and plastic arts.

Too Much TV

When I had written that last post, I had actually sat down to write about tonight’s LOST episode, but then I read about the Shaikh and it made me mad.

So with no further ado, LOST. I never offered my thoughts on the last couple episodes. The Hurley episode of a couple weeks ago was clearly subpar. I can’t really remember all the details right now, but I guess Sawyer and Kate finally made it back to their homebase, a development that I had been waiting for for some time. The Others’ side of the island (i.e. Ben, Juliet, etc.) was getting boring for me. Other than that, though, I can’t remember anything being resolved in that episode. The flashback was OK. It’s always fun to learn more about Hurley, but it wasn’t particularly insightful or well written, only slightly better than the Jack flashback in Thailand, which has to rank as one of the all-time worst (mainly for its stereotyping).

Last week, obviously, was much better, up there with the best of this season along with the Desmond flashback, and in fact, probably better since it 1) made more sense, and 2) actually seemed to answer some long standing questions about the eyepatch man, Klugh, where the LOSTies were heading, Dharma, etc. Also, it was probably the most well made episode in awhile, really getting back to the suspense, creepiness, and fast-pace that hooked us all on the show in the first place.

But that episode, alas, is now old news . . . doubly so since it seems like almost everything that came up there — eyepatch man, the map — has been resolved. This week’s episode was good too, but not as good, but then again, they can’t all be great. I really dug how they seemed to carry over the knowing glances between Locke, Bakunin, and Rousseau (funny that they’re all named after political philosophers) as though what went on at the Flame and what has continued to go on this episode were staged, scripted out, planned. The preview for next week assures us that we will find out how Locke became paralyzed and regained his ability to walk, and it also suggested that there’s going to be a major development in his character. This and the knowing glances suggest to me that more has been going on than has met the eye in the last couple episodes. (Also, there was the issue of Locke stealing the C4, lying to Sayyid, killing Bakunin, and Sayyid’s suspicion of Locke’s ulterior motives for coming on this expedition). So long story short . . . I’m totally willing to buy the fact that Locke has been communicating with the Others and planning something bigger all along, if that’s where this goes.

I also had a premonition during Bakunin’s big speech where he almost mentioned Locke’s paralysis that “He” (Jacob?), the Others apparent “leader,” could actually be one of the people that we have come to know as a survivor — Desmond? Jack? Locke? etc. Or at least someone we have seen before. Very creepy, very intriguing stuff.

One part of the episode that I thought was awful was the fucking pylons. If it was that easy to avoid the system, then why even set it up in the first place? Really stupid, and from a visual design point of view, it’s not even like they looked cool or something. Bakunin’s death was insanely and gratuitously violent and grotesque, but the writers could have accomplished that effect in any number of visually more clever ways . . .

Anyway . . . the flashback was also good. I liked goth Claire, though not as much as I dig her (and Sun’s) new bangs. Hubba hubba! Christian Shepherd being Claire’s dad is fine by me. It makes sense, doesn’t really open up any new mysteries, and in fact, solves some. (Like what Christian was up to with Lucia on that rainy night in Australia, why he went there in the first place, etc.) I can only imagine that over time, Claire’s relationship with Jack will bear narrative and psychological fruit, which is great (and cool that it makes Jack Aaron’s uncle . . . interesting).

So yeah, I think LOST has been pretty good these last couple weeks. Always could be better, but I’m satisfied. Right now, I don’t think that we’re going to get any gigantic questions solved this season, but with some luck, we’ll be left with some mysteries solved, good character development, and hopes for the future. Who’s with me?

Also, American Idol was pretty awful this week. Even the great singers weren’t great (Lakisha, Melinda), and I think that this is largely because Diana Ross is not a great singer. She’s a great performer and a classic personality, but she never had the chops of Gladys, Aretha, Marvin, Levi, etc., etc. I wouldn’t have wanted anyone else singing “You Can’t Hurry Love” or any other Supremes hits, but that’s largely a matter of history, not aesthetics. I’ve grown used to the voice and love the songs. Ross fit them perfectly, but maybe only because that was the only option we had. (Just look at the plot of Dreamgirls and the success of Jennifer Hudson over Beyonce for proof of this.) The best performance on Tuesday, for me, went to Lakisha, and of course, she wasn’t really singing a Diana Ross song, but a Billie Holiday one. She didn’t sing it that well, to my mind, mainly because it doesn’t really fit Lakisha, but that’s fine. It’s good to show some range. I still can’t buy into the whole Melinda thing, and won’t. I’m fine with Lakisha. Melinda reminds me of an adult contemporary singer or something, which is fine, but not to my taste. Lakisha is all soul for me, pure talent out of the Gospel tradition. I think she’s the real deal. Melinda’s good too, but she can’t match Lakisha’s charisma. Jordin Sparks annoys me. Young girls, i.e. teenagers, on Idol always do. The men are laughable. Brandon was a fine elimination. Now to lesson plans . . .

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s confession

How can we trust anything that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed “confesses” to? After four years in what I can only imagine were hellish conditions; tortured, unfree, and deprived; almost certain that I would be found guilty for whatever crime that the U.S. government chose to accuse me of, I too would admit to anything my torturer, my captor threw at me, accused me of. Even the linked article mentions that Mohammed admitted to crimes the planning of which the U.S. government was unaware of. Perhaps it was because they were never planned? If I was assured by a jailor that I would be found guilty of planning the deadliest terrorist attack against history’s greatest superpower, and then was questioned about planned assassinations on U.S. president’s while having my toenails pulled out, I would probably make up some bullshit too. And confess to any other of high crimes and treasons while I was at it, just to make the pain stop (as Mohammed did). If you need any greater proof of how delusional our government might be, look no farther than the fact that they might accept this man’s tall tales.

This is why laws are passed to outlaw torture and guarantee the civil rights of even the most apparently despicable of human beings: because once you start to solicit “truth” through pain and deprivation, you come up with untruth — a world in which appearances must be assumed deceptive. Enlightened civil society is a sort of contract we all enter into in order to guarantee, to some extent, that waking life is not an illusion. As a Marxist, I certainly feel that we can improve on that contract, but I also see its brilliance and its necessary adoption such that we may avoid regression to an earlier state of human development or total annihilation of the human species — the American system’s chosen path.

Arcade Fire, “The Neon Bible”

The new Arcade Fire album is predictable, pretentious, and overwrought (pretty much everything I accused the last four songs on the new Bright Eyes EP of yesterday), but it is also, for me, irresistible, a lot like their last album.   Four songs in and I’m willing to forgive ‘em the John Peter Toole references (if they’re even there — the jury’s still out — ‘the neon bible’ is a pretty easy image to come up with), the ‘viral marketing campaign,’ the knowingness, the over-ambition, the bad lyrics, because it is good music.

And that’s really all that it is — music — and sometimes background music, but really good background, about as close as  song-based emo/indie can get to pure ambience.  You can also dance to it.  I remember vividly a couple years ago, when Funeral was the hot new thing, being able to multi-task with the album on, and I can do the same thing with this piece, but I’m also already returning to songs obsessively.  In this case, it’s “Intervention,” subject of the infamous video that I posted on here a couple weeks back.  For me, the church organ intro really works.  This is like the week of good intros — first the good Bright Eyes yesterday, then this tune today.  Again, the lyrics are still underwhelming, but I’m over it by this point.  I’m glad that the band sings in French twenty-five percent of the time.  (And again, as on Funeral, the Frenchie songs have a good, classic pop, chanson-y feel.)

The Neon Bible is predictable, but it is not what I expected.  I expected to be let down.  I’m not.  I’m lifted up, but with the sickly feeling of nausea at transcendence very nearly attained but not quite.  “Intervention” is a loop, a lap, not a journey, a ski-ramp.  But maybe me ski-ramp is on here somewhere.  I’ll keep you posted.

Bright Eyes, “Four Winds EP”

This is the new Bright Eyes EP that I guess is supposed to get us psyched up for his album release on April 10. Either that, or it’s just a ploy to sell more records by making you buy the same thing twice. I lean ever so slightly towards the latter.

The disc starts out with two cool songs, “Four Winds” and “Reinvent the Wheel,” which are followed by four expendable lesser efforts. I don’t really get why this wasn’t just released as a killer double A-side single, but the folks at Saddle Creek have never been very good at self-editing, subtlety, modesty, or restraint, so there you go . . .

“Winds” is lyrically overwrought but it has a bitchin’ instrumental intro that really straps you in and keeps you there. The whole thing is fiddle driven folk-pop in the Desire-era/Rolling Thunder Revue style of Dylan in the seventies, but it’s more poppy than that and less world weary. (More on this Dylan reference later . . .) The second tune, “Reinvent,” is high pop style, which really only becomes folkier through its arrangement. Strangely, this number sounds way more radio-ready to me than “Four Winds,” which is yet another reason why this EP would have worked much better as a simple single. The lyrics make me think of Elliott Smith, but I really don’t know what they’re about.

And then things degenerate from there. Tracks 3 and 6, “Smoke Without Fire” and “Tourist Trap,” are typical Bright Eyes-ballads-that-go-nowhere. For me, Connor Oberst still isn’t a great lyricist. He’s an OK songwriter with a lot of charisma who thinks he’s a great lyricist, and when he indulges these thoughts he really loses me (although I doubt he’ll learn to hold back anytime soon). The other two cuts, “Stray Dog Freedom” and “Cartoon Blues,” chug along inoccuously enough, but for me really don’t go anywhere. When the latter song shifts into studio-weirdness territory with some funky vocoderish/glitchy effects, I know that even the Bright Eyes guys know that this is weaker material in need of a makeover, which they needlessly give it. Slapping “blues” in the title itself seems almost like a pre-emptive admission of defeat.

So yeah, long story short: Continue looking forward to the new Bright Eyes if you already were, and download the first couple songs on the EP if you need a fix.

(And by the way, my Dylan reference here was self-conscious so that I could strategically rail on the fact that the similarities between Dylan and Bright Eyes stop right about here. For some reason, people in the music press have started making this comparison pretty wildly and widely and I not only don’t see it, but actively resent it. Connor Oberst should too. Why he needs to be compared to a 60 year old man in order to prove his credibility is utterly beyond me. I’m not a huge Bright Eyes fan. I thought their last album was good, which is why I’m interested in this one, but I don’t need some fatuous link to the past to get me interested in these guys. Dylan was the second or third greatest American artist in the 20th-Century. Connor Oberst is a pleasant flavor-of-the-month. The two should not be confused, to do so is a disservice to all parties involved — musicians and listeners.)

Trip to Los Angeles

I haven’t posted here for a week in part because I was away in Los Angeles this week visiting friends and taking in the sites. I’d never been to LA before, so I was very excited. Had actually kind of avoided going there until this point as I perceived it as some sort of “anti-East Coast,” which I guess it basically and obviously is, but it’s also obviously much more than that so I was happy to go. Generally, I loved LA and the rest of southern California. Look forward to getting back there some time soon, and maybe even living there for a time some day, although the smog and traffic really did bum me out. It’s not just an overhyped cliche that the air out there is poison and you spend most of your time in your car. In fact, to my mind, the sheer volume of traffic and the fact that so many people drive alone — you can usually move quickly in the car pool lane even if the rest of the freeway is bumper to bumper — was intimidating and sublime in its own frightening way. For the rest of the week, I’ll probably update the blog with scattered reflections on the week that was and some of the things that I saw in la-la-land. For right now, I need to eat dinner and do some schoolwork.