Muxtape / edfladung
Archive for the music + movies category
A Triumvirate of Circus/Freak Culture
Marcia and I have been on a circus vibe lately, that’s kinda how our minds work. Get on a theme and learn/discover/investigate. A few weeks ago, we got into the circus thing starting with Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen which marks a perfect jumping off point for historically accurate circus mythology dripping with Great Depression era magic and tragedy. If this book were ever made in to a movie, I’m sure the Coen Brothers would be directing.
Next, at the urging of everyone in my family, we read Geek Love. This book has been floating around my parents’ extensive book collection since it was published in ‘89. Geek Love’s emergency orange cover is burned into my memory. Never knowing quite what it was about, I was delighted to find a heart-breaking story about a traveling family of circus freaks and their eventual demise. I’d love to see Geek Love as a movie, although to be honest I spent most of the book wanted to choke the shit of the narrator, an albino hunchback dwarf with an obsessive, psychotically misplaced loyalty. In short, I loved it. A quick check at Wikipedia tells me that Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam and Johnny Depp have all expressed interest in making Geek Love into a film. good crowd.
Making it a triumvirate of circus/freak culture, I introduced Marcia to Tod Browning’s Freaks. This movie is practically in my family canon, first showed to me when I was a kid by my uncle Tim, who managed to get a pirate copy on VHS. It was never officially released on VHS and didn’t make it to DVD until 2005 so for years Freaks enjoyed a cult-classic mythology surrounding it’s bombed release and subsequent burial by MGM. If you saw Freaks, you were privileged or at the very least, had a family member obsessed enough to seek out an elicit copy, long before the holy trinity of ebay, youtube and bit torrent. Unfortunately the versions floating around bt don’t have spanish subtitles and there are some spoken parts, not even I can understand. So my advice is get the DVD. It’s worth it. The signature line from the family of circus freaks shown in the film is “gooble gobble, one of us, one of us”, usually done in chanting style. This is sort of like an unconscious running line in our family that silently unifies us and always gets a smile from all, around the dinner table. I could be wrong, but I think that my entire family were circus freaks, in our last lives.
End of an Era
On our way through Los Angeles, I had to sort out a storage locker full of crap from my pre-mexico life. Including but not limited to years of collecting graphic design books, magazines, art, interior decorations, my entire artistic career - every last thing I ever drew/painted/designed/photographed and last but not least 1500+ records. 10+ years of daily crate digging. Countless trips to the Pasadena City College swap meet and many long nights after work, digging through dusty crates in run down record stores across L.A. Every genre you could possibly think of, equal parts early-mid 90’s hip-hop, early reggae/ska/dub and funk/jazz/soul records.
My vinyl weighed a ton and after years of figuring out how to get the bulk of it to mexico, I came to the conclusion that this dream would never pass. So with weary eyes pointed to the ground, I trucked my 15 boxes of records down to Amoeba Records and said my goodbyes. Back whence they came, to light up other people’s faces. Better then a most certain death, south of the border, to heat, humidity and no second-hand market.
The upside? Ya see, the rub is this: I didn’t own the records, they owned me. I was their guardian and once I found them a new, good home. I was free. I did end up saving about 150 of them. The really good ones. The ones that will never make it to CD or even MP3, ever. Plus the ones that are really good on record. One Technique 1200, a Griffin iMic 2 and WireTap Studio Pro and I’m all set up to listen to my surviving collection directly from my computer. Ahh, techmology.
Gamelan
Gamelan is technically a musical ensemble made up of metallophones, xylophones, drums, and gongs; bamboo flutes, bowed and plucked strings. But what it really sounds like is a highly orchestrated junkyard symphony of oddly melodic mix of banging and clanging. and I love it. It usually accompanies the Legong, Berong and Mahabarata dance performances. Back in the CalArts days, I’d sit in my design crit room, zoning out during a critique to the sounds of the clanging instruments floating in from the Gamelan classroom down the hall. I will always associate graphic design with Gamelan.
Here are a few of my favorite Gamelan tunes, right-click to save: one, two, three
5 Second movie review
Well, I was gonna say this entry til the middle of our trip to Bali, but I got to thinkin’ that it didn’t have too much to do with Bali (well, nothing to do with) and I was trying to keep a theme to the entries that are auto-posted during our trip. Plus, these movies are pretty old anyway, so it doesn’t make much sense to wait. So, I’m publishing this now, a shortnsweet list of the films I saw in the past week or so. Here goes…
- Deathproof - why is the first half of the movie in this jacked up, grindhouse style and the second half not a dust scratch in sight? schizophrenic and lopsided.
- Ratatouille - absolutely wonderful.
- Ken Park - horrible video cinematography. wandering, boring plot. a must for anyone whose not exactly sure what male anatomy looks like.
- Ocean’s 13 - I’ll never get tired of Soderberg’s formula for these movies, I hope he never stops making them. but Ellen Arkin’s cougar-under-love-potion-spell scenes? horrible.
- The Heartbreak kid - dumb. some funny parts. but over all, dumb. Michelle Monaghan can do no wrong.
- Curse of the Golden Flower - gorgeous cinematography, sets, costumes etc… meandering plot.
- 3:10 to Yuma - bad guys as the new good guys? eh. over it.
- Lions For Lambs - 10x better then the reviews said it’d be. I actually liked it. Tom Cruise is a scary mofo. Despite what ignorant sock puppets are saying, the politics in this movie are spot on. go see it.
- Bonus: Bionic Woman (2007 tv show) - the producers wanted this show to look and feel like the new Battlestar Galactica series so much they even took two of its main actors. plots are formulaic and syrupy.
Unfortunately, here in mexico, we get crap movies in the theaters and even crappier movies on dvd. So in essence, this list is an approximation of the better movies that pass through our two horse town. We won’t be getting The Darjeeling Limited, There Will Be Blood, Control, No Country For Old Men anytime soon and we most certainly won’t get Juno.
I am the sound of Ed’s inner film buff, crying tears of shame.
The Whitest Boy Alive, part 2
Live, super grainy, shaky, bad audio, unedited concert footage taken on a little Canon point-n-shoot, from The Whitest Boy Alive playing “Don’t Give Up” at F.Bolke (bar / art gallery / concert venue) in Guadalajara on Nov.10th, 2007. back story here.
The WGA Strike
Battlestar Galactica (2004) writer/producer/creator Ron Moore speaks out about the WGA strike and why you should care:
I had a situation last year on Battlestar Galactica where we were asked by Universal to do webisodes [Note: Moore is referring to The Resistance webisodes which ran before Season 3 premiered], which at that point were very new and ‘Oooh, webisodes! What does that mean?’ It was all very new stuff. And it was very eye opening, because the studio’s position was ‘Oh, we’re not going to pay anybody to do this. You have to do this, because you work on the show. And we’re not going to pay you to write it. We’re not going to pay the director, and we’re not going to pay the actors.’ At which point we said ‘No thanks, we won’t do it.
We got in this long, protracted thing and eventually they agreed to pay everybody involved. But then, as we got deeper into it, they said ‘But we’re not going to put any credits on it. You’re not going to be credited for this work. And we can use it later, in any fashion that we want.’ At which point I said ‘Well, then we’re done and I’m not going to deliver the webisodes to you.’ And they came and they took them out of the editing room anyway — which they have every right to do. They own the material — But it was that experience that really showed me that that’s what this is all about. If there’s not an agreement with the studios about the internet, that specifically says ‘This is covered material, you have to pay us a formula - whatever that formula turns out to be - for use of the material and how it’s all done,’ the studios will simply rape and pillage.
pretty f*cking good argument. Let’s hope the studios take their collective heads out of their asses and give the writers a decent shake. On a darker note, if the strike keeps up Battlestar Galactica and Lost won’t have new episodes in the spring.
Oooooh fuuuudge. (but it wasn’t ‘fudge’ it was the mother of all curse words…)
[via crooksnliars via FireDogLake]
The Whitest Boy Alive, part 1
On Friday, in between visits to the orthodontist and dentist, we stopped off at my favorite pizza joint, Funicula. We has just ordered and were enjoying our sangria when guess who happens to wonder in the door, none other then Mr. Erlend Øye (Kings of Convenience, The Whitest Boy Alive). We flip our shit and as he walked past me I tap him on the shoulder and said hi. We’d met him back in the late spring when Kings of Convenience, Leslie Feist, Broken Social Scene and Rubies were all staying in Punta Burros and happened to come in to Roots for a little dinner and impromptu sing-along (i wrote about this here). Erlend asked me if he knew me and I mentioned Roots and he said “Oh, yes” and related a story of having stopped by Roots again to see everyone, but that Roots was closed, so it was a pleasant surprise for him to run in to us. After taking a seat we talked for a little while. Turns out that he and the band (The Whitest Boy Alive) are staying in Punta Burros for a while, recording a new album and enjoying the pacific mexican coast. They were in Guadalajara for a show on Friday night. We promised to check out the show (which we did, post coming soon), I gave him my card and a smile and Erlend was back to the band and some good pizza. It was great seeing him again and I hope he gives us a call, it’d be great to hang with them again.
5 Sec. Movie Review
Through default, we saw “Fantastic 4 Rise of Silver Surfer” today. lose the 4 and just get with the silver surfer guy. if they make another fantastic 4 movie, it’s gonna stop super hero movies dead in their tracks or at least relegate them to the post-new years holiday movie schedule when studios dump their bad stock. The surfer guy was pretty cool though. I can get with that. oh and jessica alba’s big, fake blue eyes were just too weird, again.
Lost at Sea (almost)
The correct title of this post is: Lost at Sea or How I got to hang out with Kings Of Convenience, Feist and Broken Social Scene at Roots in Bucerias.
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This post is rediculously too long. there are two parts to it: Part 1 (the surfing/Lost at Sea part) and Part 2 (the getting to hang out with two of your most favorite musicians part). Somehow, they both tie into each other in a nice little way, but reading long pieces of text on the internet sucks, so you can use the following links to jump to whatever part is more your flavor: Part 1 & Part 2
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My good buddy Michael was down visiting us from Laguna Beach, last weekend. We spent a few days surfing. On Saturday, we went up to Punta Mita to grab a boat and get dropped off at the Cove (La Bahia). The Cove is a great surf break, just around the bend from Anclote in Punta Mita and just outside the large Bay of Banderas, in open sea. Normally I go with Action Sports when I show up with Pato, they charge us 150 pesos each (about 15 bucks). On this day, since we were two gringos, they wanted 250 pesos each (better known as “highway robbery”). I told dude that’s the gringo rate, that I live in Bucerias and I’d be willing to pay 300 pesos total. Dude said no way. A few minutes minutes later dude came back with 400. I didn’t budge and dude wouldn’t either, so we went down the road to some guy named Oscar, another one of the boat operators. Oscar tried to give me the gringo rate as well and we settled on 350 pesos. Still too much, but better than nothing. Oscar’s boat driver dropped us off at the Cove and I asked him to pick us up in two hours.
The Cove was empty, we had the break to ourselves. Solid three and four footers with a high tide, but as the tide lowered, the waves lowered as well. By an hour and a half or so they were tiny. We were ready to go home. Michael is an avid surfer, a close family friend and works in the surfing/clothing industry so we just chatted non-stop about life, work, surfing etc… while waiting to be picked up by our boat. Two hours passed, three hours passed. At about the 3 1/2 hour mark, we both started to get a little suspicious. Michael was smart and wore a hat, I was dumb and did not. By this time, my face was fried and my body was cold from the water. We tried to keep it positive, every time a boat would come out of the bay, we’d assume that it was our guy and each time, we’d be wrong. At the 4 hour mark, we decided that the boat driver had forgotten us and we decided to do something about it. We had three choices:
- Swim to shore and walk along the rocks, back to Anclote, barefoot (dangerous)
- Swim to shore and try to get picked up by one of the Four Seasons security guards (trespassing)
- Swim 2 kilometers out to sea and flag down an incoming boat (boats entering the bay follow a few channels) and hope there are no strong currents that suck us out to sea
We choose swimming to shore. As we got closer to shoreline, we could see the sharp, barnacle-encrusted rocks rising above the water line, the sea urchins below the water and 50 feet of 6 inch water to walk through to make it to the rocky shore. Small waves were threatening to wash us into the rocks. We conferred and chose the 3rd option: paddling out to the channel. It took us about 30 minutes or so to get out towards the channel, missing two boats and finally flagging down the 3rd. A guy from Guadalajara and his two fishing guides, they laughed and handed us cold Pacificos after hearing our story and then radioed in to the port control to let them know what had happened.
After we got back to Anclote and profusely thanked the guys for picking us up, I walked by Oscar, the guy who owned the boat that forgot about us. He immediately launched into some bullshit story about how they had been out to pick us up twice and that we weren’t there. I felt like throttling the jerk-off in the mouth. This is Mexico though and people here have cousins, so my cooler instincts prevailed and so I told him he was full of shit and struck off to file an official complaint with the port captain. My efforts were futile though, as I couldn’t find the captain and I wasn’t about to ask around. As I was walking back to the car, Oscar said that he felt worse about it then I did and I figured that was about as close to an apology as I would get. Oscar is very glad that he didn’t ask me for half the money and I’m glad I didn’t pay up front.
As Michael and I discussed the day’s events, it became clear that we were about as lucky as could be. If we had gone into shore and stepped on an urchin, walking back would have been impossible. If we had swam out to open ocean and the currents had taken us out to sea, we’d be in big trouble. Besides the hour of insecurity of being left out there, the only real damage was a nasty case of sunburn. My face was fried, my nose was literally purple. Jessica hooked me with some aloe and now my face is more tan then red. I can’t complain.
What’s the best way to slough off a potentially bad situation? How bout an impromptu acoustic concert from two of your favorite musicians? Andrew called us at about 8:30pm to tell us that Feist, Kings of Convenience and Broken Social Scene were all down at Roots, eating and that Erlend Oye had brought his guitar and would play if we came down. Andrew was calling everyone he knows to come down and represent our small little “pueblito tipico”. It turns out that they were on a ten day vacation staying in Punta Burros.
Most of the crew conversed amongst themselves, as Erlend grabbed his acoustic guitar and joined our band of onlookers. We ended up being treated to several hushed acoustic songs. The night culminated when I asked Erlend to play “The Build Up” or “know How”, full-well knowing that both are duets with Leslie Feist (who is Marcia’s favorite musician of all time). Erlend started The Build Up and when it came time for Leslie’s verse, we could hear her sweet muffled voice carrying over from the table behind us. Most of the band joined in and we were treated to impromptu versions of several Kings and Feist songs, culminating in a round-the-table over-the-top rendition of “I’d Rather Dance with You” with Leslie Feist on the spoons and glasses. I got most of it down with a little audio grabber thing I have and I’ve been trying to get the tracks off of it for days now (love them Sony products). When I finally figure it out, I’ll post em (I hope they don’t mind). Everyone was taking pictures with their little point-n-shoots and of course I brought along my camera. I did manage to grab a few shots, but honestly I felt really awful sticking this huge camera in their faces when all they were trying to do was grab a bite to eat, so I sat in the background. I get a little weird around people who I perceive to be even slightly celebratory. Must be my time spent in Los Angeles, where going to breakfast involves seeing various levels of celebrity types at any given joint.
It was a great night, the perfect end to a terrible day and even though there wasn’t that much interaction between us, it was great, being in the presence of all these really talented musicians. Especially Kings of Convenience and Feist who are literally the most listened to artists in my iTunes library and have been for years.
Lily Allen
Currently digging on Lily Allen’s album “Alright Still”. Especially ‘Smile’ and ‘LDN’. Yes, guilty pleasure for sure. I’m just a sucker for anyone that has that sing-songy vibe over ska sampled beats with a good dose of cursing. I hear strains of all kinds of Trojan artists like the Skatalites and Tommy McCook. Some of her album is so so, but your girl will definitely have this album on rewind, it’s addictive. hat tip to Melvin for hooking it up.
The Information
I’m currently digging everything about Beck’s new album The Information. Everything from the instrumentation to the vocals and the production techniques, even the art work. It’s all so sick. sick. sick. Gives me warm feelings inside. Thank you Nigel Goodrich.
Old Timey Folk Music
I’ve always had a thing for old timey appalachian folk music, I think it was the square dances at Camp Sloane. Slim, the dj, playing a bunch of old time 78rpm records out of his big blue van, songs like “The Wabash Cannonball” and “Montego Bay”. And then on to Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? T-Bone Burnett’s homage to early country, folk, blues, bluegrass and gospel. I listened to that soundtrack for a year straight. Recently, through Johnny Cash, I got into The Carter Family and then on to a recent group The Be Good Tanyas, whose first album Blue Horse is very early-folk tinged, with a side helping of hobo-culture romanticism. They perform an old creole folk song called The Lakes of Ponchartrain. I can’t stop listening to it. It has some psychic connection, in my mind, to the hobo culture flavored paintings of Margaret Kilgallen. Bent on getting other versions of this song, I remembered the Internet Archive, an open source collection of live performances and older un-copyrighted music. No luck, but I did a search for old-time music and came up with a ton of really interesting songs from people such as Eck Robertson, Dock Boggs, Ernest Stoneman and Charlie Poole. Very cool. On from here it’s a just a tumblelog of various google searches, wikipedia pages and more, in the pursuit of online pools of early country, folk, blues, bluegrass and gospel mp3s. is this what they call “amateur musicology”?
Lady In The Water review
Shortly before we left for GDL/Puerto Aventuras, we went to see M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water (yes it finally showed up in theaters, here in Mexico). After reading the scores of bad reviews the movie received, we were prepared for the worst, but seeing a movie this universally hated by movie critics is almost a must. I’ve generally liked Shyamalan’s movies in the past, albeit with a slight nod towards his cliched twist endings. But even his last, The Village, I dug the ending, however patiently I waited for it’s twist ending to reveal itself.
Lady in the Water wasn’t without it’s flaws for sure, but cliche was not one of it’s missteps. Marcia and I, both, really liked the film. It had very honest aspirations and that to me, is worth the price of admission alone. The movie is essentially a children’s fairy-tale book retold as an adult’s fairy tale movie. It requires a suspension of disbelief that most movie critics just don’t have in them. Not so much the “level” of suspension of disbelief but the “kind” of suspension of disbelief. In order to enjoy the movie, you must be prepared to except the rules of Shyamalan’s fairy tale and the themes he addresses, mainly: destiny, tyranny, faith, self-doubt, interconnectedness and interdependency. These are topics that are found in tons of other films, but Shyamalan wraps them up in a wholly original fairy tale with certain eccentricities* baked into it that act as trip wires for movie critics. It’s these eccentricities that make the movie hard to swallow for those that don’t like it but for most people these kinds of things will fly right over their heads. It’s as if he was giving the movie critics a big middle finger and they surely took him to town for it.
Further, fairy tales were never really just for kids until Disney stepped in and disney-ified the art of fairy tale story-telling, bleaching it into a mainly child-based experience (it’s especially ironic, considering his first four movies were released by Disney and this one was released by Warner Bros). Fairy Tales have contained adult themes since the beginning and are found in every culture on earth, acting mainly as a way to deliver in story form the beliefs, faiths and mores of the culture. Marie-Louise von Franz is famous for her research with fairy tales and how they reflect the collective subconscious of a society through archetypes.
In american culture, we are missing fairy tales. We’ve relegated them to the toy box and replaced them with schlocky movies and tv shows that rehash versions of the same 20 stories over and over. If nothing else, I admire Shyamalan’s noble intentions and I give a thumbs up to Lady in the Water for bringing back the notion that it’s ok for adults to dig fairy tales.
*The movie critic character and the “cookbook” character were a little over the top, but I liked them anyway.
BSG Season 1 review
A couple of weeks ago I finished watching season one of the new Battlestar Galactica. It’s an interesting series, for sure. Some great plots and characters but I just want to choke the frak out of that little grunt doctor what’s his face, Baltar? My suspension of disbelief just doesn’t go that far, that i’d believe a central character to the series would be that much of a frakkin’ schmuck. it’s just not logical. and using the word frak as a replacement for the mother of all curse words, is a great little invention (the FCC must have their panties in a bunch over that one - which is great, in my books), but by the second or third episode characters were saying ‘frak’ at least once a scene. it’s a cute invention, don’t over-do it. I look forward to spending the next week or so, watching the second season (i wouldn’t dream of touching the third until it’s over).
Summer Movie Roundup
Vallarta is one of those provincial towns, where the powers that be have decided that certain movies will show well and others won’t. To make a comparison, I’d say, vallarta probably most resembles the skeening of Barstow California, on the “what-movies-to-show” decision list. There are primarily two kinds of movies shown here: if movies were split into levels A, B, C and D, with A being the good movies. I’d say that Vallarta gets maybe half of the A level movies. Unfortunately, those where the intended audience is anywhere under 25, the movie is dubbed in spanish (Nacho Libre), this does not happen in larger markets like Guadalajara and Mexico City. The second kind is all the C rated films. Those films that the studio liked and have A level stars, but just didn’t turn out right and so they sold the rights to the foreign territories for less then expected. This second set of films, make up the largest percentage of films shown where we are, although I’d say that 90% of the tickets are sold for the one or two A level films that comes out every week, i.e. the D films are just filler. Once in awhile the theater will throw us something cool like a Woody Allen pic or a Lars Von Trier pic. But for the most part, we get piles and piles of crap. Hence you’ll notice that 80% of the films on this list are crap. That’s ok, beggers can’t be choosers. In a place where the night time temperature clocks 95 degrees and the humidity doesn’t drop below 90 all summer long, we’ll take what we can get. So without further ado, here’s my summer movie roundup. I probably missed a bunch, but here ya go, enjoy.
- Poseidon - crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap
- Melinda & Melinda - eh, alright. Radha Mitchell is intriguing.
- X-Men III - dumb. no redeeming qualities.
- My Super Ex-Girlfrind - dumb but slightly entertaining
- Match Point - actually, pretty good. Scarlet, nuff said.
- Mission Impossible III - dumb
- Miami Vice - i liked it! one of the best cop movies.
- The Lake House - funny for a romantic film if your suspension of disbelief is strong
- Half Light - slightly entertaining, but mostly crap
- The Great Raid - crap, although Ben Bratt had a cool hat.
- A Good Woman - pure crap
- Shop Girl - Steve Martin gets slightly Sofia Coppola-ish, but I actually liked it. go steve!
- Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest - children liked it, i didn’t.
- Thumbsucker* - loved it. Mike Mills rulez! if you don’t know who Mike Mills is, your too old.
- Superman - entertaining, but more plot holes then swiss cheese
- An Inconvenient Truth* - loved it. love al gore. love the environment, will miss it when it’s gone
- Me, You and Everyone We Know* - incredibly original and painfully sincere. freaking loved it
- The Sentinel - eh, mildly entertaining. wish the main character was actually the bad guy.
*movies that we didn’t see in the theater. but for some reason, i had to include, to make us look at least slightly cool.
ONe
Steve Isaacs and I go back years. We were flash/design buddies at a little web/graphic design shop in LA. Steve is the man. Funny, witty, charming and freaking smart. Although he was always good at the flash crap, his real talents were with music. I think he was slumming it with us in the web design trade as he took a couple years break from being batted around the hollywood music industry a few too many times.
Steve was always a rock star. Not only is he a good musician, performing is in his blood.
After we closed down the shop, he went on to a few other shops around town and I always kept track of his pursuits through his blog. Somewhere along the way he started to write about this new band he’d joined with Dave Navarro, Stephan Perkins and Chris Chaney. They called it The Panic Channel. Good freakin’ name!
His posts were full of flavor at first and then took a cryptic turn. And for a year or two now, I’ve waited to see what Steve has come up with. Instead of rushing an album, they decided to brew and develop their own sound. Creating something wholly and entirely new. Well, I was checking my email and what do I see, but an Apple iTunes email newsletter with Panic Channel’s new album, ONe. After listening to the tracks, it seems that they have become a pretty freaking good band. Leaving old ideas behind and Steve is doing exactly what he was born to do: fronting a very capable, very hard rock band.
It’s great seeing an old friend really do what it is he was meant to do. Go Steve!
The Shins + Belle & Sebastian
What’s better then seeing your favorite band play? Seeing your two favorite bands playing together, at the Hollywood Bowl. July 6th.
The Shins were awesome. Mercer looked like he was having a lot of trouble coming to grips with such a big audience, he had a little trouble connecting. Most of the in-between song banter was done by the keyboardist. They rocked it. We sang along to all the songs, the people in front us were very annoyed.
Belle & Sebastian put on a hell of a show. For some reason, they didn’t play my favorite songs off of “The Life Pursuit”. Amazing show, none-the-less and seeing them perform with the LA Philharmonic was nice, they seemed to integrate the songs very seemlessly. Marcia gained a new found love for the silly/honesty of B&S.
Marcia couldn’t even grasp the idea of going to a concert and sitting down the whole time in a box, being able to bring a picnic dinner and your own beer and wine. so civilized. naturally, she was hooked. And our seats were amazing, about 20th row, dead center. Thank You, Craigslist!
No Direction Home
Marcia and I sat down last night to watch the first part of No Direction Home a biopic about Bob Dylan, directed by Martin Scorsese. I grew up with my dad’s Bob Dylan records playing in the background, a soundtrack to my childhood, along with The Grateful Dead, Jackson Browne, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley and Gregory Isaacs (among many others). The specter of Bob Dylan always hung around my childhood, like a long lost uncle. One that had done amazing things in his time, things I could never quite grasp beyond the music and his raspy voice, his words laid out on the horizon just past my comprehension. In this realm of mine, Dylan stayed for many years, tucked away in an album cover in my dad’s record collection and then eventually in a handful of tracks stashed away in my itunes library somewhere.
Last night, my child-like recollection of Bob Dylan was pried open and shucked off like a corn husk. As I watched the movie, all those old songs that I’ve heard a thousand times - a thousand Saturday afternoons, playing on the livingroom rug, star wars and legos and dad in his comfy chair with a Dylan album jacket or a good book, with Dylan on the stereo, that friendly old uncle talking gibberish - changed shape right before my eyes. When put into context and given a language to decipher his songs, they all started to reverberate with new meaning and importance. It was like hearing each one, again, for the first time. The music was the same, scratch that, not even the music was the same. As the movie wound it’s way through Dylan’s late-teens and early 20’s as he shape-shifted from genre to genre, I started to understand where he was coming from, where his sound (and eventually his poetry) where coming from and what informed them.
What struck me the most was how Dylan literally became his heroes, like Woody Gutherie. Acting like him, talking like him, playing his songs on stage. And doing it in a very open and honest way. He was like a sponge, a “Musical Expeditioner” taking all these different aspects of musical styles and combining them into something very attached to tradition but also leaping past tradition into something entirely new and fresh. And then as he began to write his own lyrics, it was as if he started to channel human consciousness. What he began writing was in a language that was very old and plain, yet hyper-new. The concepts he put forward were radical when attached to politics, but the language had been used again and again for centuries. As Dave Von Ronk says, Dylan’s song could have been written two hundred years ago.
This movie was literally a rebirth of Bob Dylan, for me. I understood his genius, for the first time in a clear and concise way. Mom walked in just as I was finishing this journal text and we discussed Dylan, a little bit. She says that my father and her (and I suppose most people in her age group and social outlook) feel that Dylan was a modern bard. As in, The Bard, that Dylan was on Shakespeare’s level. I agree with her, whole-heartedly.
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In a related note, Dylan’s early career and records would not have been possible if current copyright laws existed back then. Dylan’s tapping of songs from the public domain was essential for his artistic growth. Without such a strong collection of songs without copyright, Dylan might never have existed. The same could be said for most folk artists, The Beatles and literally all music made in the last twenty years.
Walk The Line
I’ve had some Johnny Cash songs floating around inside my computer for years, several with my 5-star seal of approval. About two or three months ago we started listening to the man in black on repeat. We eventually got around to seeing the film WALK THE LINE, which we both really liked. We were amazed at how well Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon performed the songs, not to mention the acting, story, direction, etc… Marcia has been practicing her June Carter-Cash (via Reese Witherspoon) singing impersonation since we stepped out of the theatre and I bought several more songs. Johnny Cash started to become the defacto go-to artist on the iPod. Our favorites: Walk The Line, Ring Of Fire, Jackson, Fulsom Prison Blues, I Still Miss Someone, A Boy Named Sue, Man In Black.
Today I downloaded the WALK THE LINE soundtack, the songs from the film as performed by the actors. As I listen to them, it amazes me how rich and full the songs are (compared to Johnny Cash’s original versions), no doubt enhanced by bleeding-edge recording technology. Joaquin’s voice is as dead-on as can be, it’s like listening to a slightly updated version of a Johnny Cash impersonator who lives, sleeps and bleeds in Johnny Cash’s throw-away clothes. Joaquin does a pretty damn good job. Reese Witherspoon actually has a better singing voice then June Carter-Cash and in a song like Jackson, you can really see the difference (in this man’s opinion). But there’s just nothing quite like the original Johnny Cash songs, they’re like a slice of recorded history, oozing with soul, grit, tragedy and redemption. Cash’s songs are beautifully all over the place. Joaquin’s have the “steady feeling of a freight train” helped along by regularized timing of digitally edited drums, bass and guitar. Where as Cash’s songs are the main course, Joaquin’s are a very interesting, complementary side-dish.
In the voice of June: Y’all Can’t Walk No Line.
Steve Jobs is Wrong
There, I said it. and I mean it. Now let me explain:
Steve had a good thing with iTunes Music Store. He understood, intuitively, how people like their music and how people use their music. He knew that people would pay a buck a song, with an average album costing 10 bucks. He knew that people liked to carry their music collection with them everywhere. and that they would listen to their music over and over again. The iPod isn’t just about having a glorified walkman, it’s about not having to lug around a bunch of cd jewel cases. To be able to have well organized music at your fingertips, so that you can be sitting out on a rock-jetty somewhere, feeling the salt spray of crashing ocean waves, against your face, as you’re listening to the Postal Service’s glitch-pop remake of Phil Collin’s “Against All Odds” (ok, maybe i’m projecting a bit here).
Steve proposes the same is true for movies. That people will pay to download movies, on a per download basis. That people love to collect their movies and want to have them on their computer, in perpetuity. Steve is throwing his weight behind the download-own model he pioneered with iTunes Music Store, but Steve Jobs is wrong.
Your average Joe/Josie, does not want to download and collect movies to keep on their hard-drive with compressed movies taking up over 350 megs per. Neither do they want to burn movies to DVDs (then you’re stuck with the pile of badly organized jewel cases scenario). Most people don’t even watch a movie more than once. Yes, there are those one or two movies a year that you love to watch two or even three times, but the majority of movies get watched once and returned back to Netflix or whatever video store it was rented from, and promptly forgotten. The repeat viewers are DVD territory.
Movies are different from music.
Music is listened to, over and over again. Albums get a lot of play and that 10 dollars goes a long way. Music is usually a secondary activity. We listen to our music while driving, or riding the bus or a skateboard or while in front of a computer “working”, but rarely do we ever sit in a darkened room, eating popcorn, listening to music. Music is rarely digested in one sitting. It often takes dozens of listens to your favorite pop song before you start to know the words (nevermind comprehending their subversive meanings) ala Belle & Sebastian’s “Dear Catastrophe Waitress” (I’ve listened to that song 76 times). On the contrary, movies are a one shot experience, that’s why Netflix is so freakin’ cool. The subscription service model doesn’t work for music, I think (although that’s debatable). But the subscription model does work for movies and Netflix is a shining example of this. I’d rather pay 10, 15, or even 20 bucks a month to download a la carte from iTunes Movie Store. But what I will not do is pay 30 bucks for a DRM encrypted movie from MovieLink. And neither will Average Joe/Josie. BTW - MovieLink’s service is only available to computer connections inside the US, so I am out of luck anyway (central pacific mexico).
Back to my point, to download movies I’d pay no more than 3 to 5 dollars per movie. Maybe 6 to 8 dollars if the movie was great and I know I’d watch it again and 10 dollars max for a movie I wanted to keep forever. Paying 20-30 dollars for a movie, as MovieLink’s rates are reported to be (that means you are paying 1 buck for every 3 minutes of movie - what are they thinking?!). It’s almost as if they’re saying, “yes we’ll give you downloads on demand, but we’ll make it so cost prohibitive that you’ll want to go to the store and buy the DVD instead, and hey! that’s where we want you anyway!” I’m not even gonna get into simultaneous theater/download releases issue*
Steve Jobs is taking a different approach. He wants to get rid of the ridiculous DRM measures instituted by MovieLink and follow the precedence he set with iTunes (softer, gentler DRM). But at the root of the argument is still the download-own vs. subscription model and Steve is on the wrong side of the fence. What people are really looking for is an internet based subscription service. They want to have movies on demand, that they can download and watch and then (9/10s of the time) erase from their hard drive to allow for more movie downloading. They don’t care about collecting DVDs, that in turn collect dust. They want to have that same iPod experience they had with music, with movies. Being anywhere, watching a movie, on a bus, on a snowboard, at the gym or in bed at home with the lights off and popcorn. If People do hoard movie download files, it’s so they can trade them with their friends. These are the BitTorrent types and represent a small sliver of the actual population, as Steve has said in the past, if presented with a legal option, most people would rather not be doing something illegal, obviously I’m paraphrasing.
What’s the winning formula? Subscription. Do it like Netflix, they have a winning formula, borrow there’s. The only difference is that you are not stuck sending and receiving envelopes. Effectively, it’s easier then Netflix so implement different levels of subscription depending on usage: 5$/month gets you 5 downloads, 10$/month gets you 15 downloads and $20 gets you 30 downloads. My numbers may not be exact but they’re in the right ballpark. The user can then have the same rights that Apple’s fairplay gives your music, with the one added rule that says something like, once you stop your subscription, you can no longer play the movies you have on your hard-drive. Movie studios could even use this “feature” as a marketing incentive “Pay 5 bucks more for this particular movie and get a DRM-free copy”. If you did some polling with a good cross section of people, you’d find that it would fit the consumption of at least 90% of the people polled. Not convinced? Ask the least technologically inclined person in your family about their home movie viewing habits and you’ll see what I mean. They want two things: cheap and easy. Ownership isn’t one of those two things. Your average Joe/Josie doesn’t give two shits about owning a film, they’d just as soon as go to the movies or rent from the local video store. What a subscription download service is offering is the ‘easy’ part of the solution (as Netflix is doing also). Essentially, you are creating permanent customers, ones who keep paying the subscription fees not because they want any-time access to a million movies at once (as with the music subscription model), but that it’s a cheap and extremely easy way to view movies. Unfortunately, Hollywood movie studios over-value their product so much that they’d rather charge exorbitant rates and limit their product’s exposure. What movie studios (and Steve Jobs to a lesser extent) need to get into their heads is that 90% of the movie viewing public don’t care about owning movies as things to collect. Neither in digital form nor in physical form. Sure there are a lot of people out there that collect movies and those people will always buy the DVD versions, from brick and mortar stores, to have as collectors items, box art, dvd menus, extras etc…
It would be great to see Steve Jobs overcome the hurdles of signing up Hollywood for the iTMS, and I’d even start downloading movies on a download-to-own basis, but to get the iTMS really flying, a subscription model is the only way. Even if Steve can get the movie studios down to that sacred 10 dollar price point, he’ll still sell far fewer films then he’d sell with a subscription based model. This view is even heightened considerably when you take the international market into account, so rather then continue on, I’ll stop the conversation there.
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*For the record, I’d say that once we reach a comfortable downloading status quo, simultaneous release will be impossible to argue against - the movie studios will make far more money off of an iTunes Movie Store download then they will on DVDs and theater tickets, just as the music companies are doing now).
Belle & Sebastian
Inadvertently or not, Belle & Sebastian make at least one song on every record that is the perfect soundtrack for surf videos. For example: Act of the Apostle, Part I. file this one under: songs for an as-yet-un-filmed surf movie.
oh, and here’s another bonus modern surf soundtrack classic: Kings of Convenience Know How
Back to Back
We went to see JAR HEAD today, sunday matinee. It was a pretty good film, much better then the reviews I had read. Sam Mendez is a killer filmmaker, the script was tight and the cinematography was eggcelent. On the way home from the theater we were listening to Radio Universidad de Guadalajara, the local Puerto Vallarta alternative radio station. Whoever was djing played Peter Murphy, The Cocteau Twins, Morrissey and The Pixies back to back. Dude is on my wavelength. It’s not quite Kcrw, but Radio Universidad will do any day of the week.
Lost
We just finished watching Lost - Season 1. Was the finale a let down or what? 24 freakin’ episodes and we’re no closer to finding out anything about this dumb island.
I loved Lost, or maybe I’m just missing tv so much I’m willing to put up with Lost’s dangling thread mania. Miguel put it best when he said that Lost is essentially a tv show that introduces a ton of dangling threads, never resolves them and goes nowhere. I’m paraphrasing of course, but he’s so right.
Lost is like Seinfeld, it’s a show about nothing. nothing ever happens. all these little side stories happen and we see all these flashbacks, but nothing concerning the general set-up of the show, happens. ever. There is no follow-up. No pay-off. No resolution. and the finale is a big fat screaming example of this.
With that said, bring on Season 2! I can’t freakin’ wait.
Bleep
Marcia and I headed up to Guadalajara for the weekend, again, so she could see her family and grab some warm closes for our pending trip to Los Angeles (Dec. 8th-12th).
We got in last night and had dinner with her always lovely mom, Martha, at the best pizza joint in the world, Funicula. I know I talk a lot about this place but I´ll be damned if it ain´t the best freakin´pizza evah.
After a great little dinner, Martha has the movie What the %$& Do We Know on dvd, pirata-style, so we watched it. What a great flick. If you haven´t seen it, stop what yer doing and go see it, now. It´s a documentary hybrid film. It has a filmed story mixed with documentary style interviews and computer aided animation. Some parts of the film are a bit silly, but the subject matter kicks so much ass that I´d say it´s one of the best movies I´ve seen this year. It´s that good. The subject matter is all about Quantum Physics, sounds boring but it effects everything we do, think and feel. The movie explores our personal experience, relationships, religous beliefs, how you relate to the world, how you see yourself, basically, everythign having to do with who we are and what we are. It will blow your mind, if you let it. It´s not saying anything new, that quantum scientists haven´t been saying for years, but it conveys some seriously hard concepts to grasp in easy and understandable ways. Try reading this stuff in books, zzzzz. But the story telling devices mixed with very interesting interviews and you get mind warping concepts in easily digestible nuggets.
I especially enjoyed the religious and spiritual implications brought up in the movie: Quantum Physics is completely in line with several religious philosophies including Buddhism (which I am partial to). It is a science of the experience and the farther you delve into it the more mysterious it becomes. I never understood why people latched on to ¨Intelligent Design¨ as a way to ¨prove¨ that God exists, while Quantum Physics brings an end to a thousand years of science without God. But the God of the past two centuries, a physical manifestation, is replaced by a truer God that exists within everyone and everything. It blows my mind, but I´ve felt these things for years, long before I had even heard of Quantum Physics.
Go see it, please. thank you!
Vallarta Film Festival
Tonight we’re going to the Vallarta Film Festival. They’re playing The Squid And The Whale and if we’re up for it, after that, we’re going to stay for The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, which is supposed to be an amazing film, just by reading the synopsis I hope to convince Marcia to stay.
On Monday, we went to the first night of the festival to see Elizabethtown and as I just checked the festival website, I could swear I saw Alfonso Cuarón in the lobby on monday.
Roots live music
For the past two friday nights Andrew has been having live music at Roots. The band is called “Frijoleros” and they are a boyfriend/girlfriend (husband/wife?) duo. They are like one part traditional mexican duo, one part manu chao inspired world travelers. Very modern mexican folk music. 2 voices, a guitar and a stand-up bass. All soul. I recorded a little audio:
New Elliott Smith.
Apparently, 22 unreleased Elliott Smith tracks were posted online recently. They’re calling the album “From A Basement On The Hill II” and from what I’m reading, the tracks are incredible. This guy has a link to a 90mb “YouSendIt” file. Happy Sunday!
UPDATE: I’ve just listened to the album once through and I gotta say this, when “From A Basement On The Hill” was originally released it didn’t grab me like his other albums. It missed the intimateness of his previous records. The album grew on me for sure and some of the tracks especially “Let’s Get Lost” and “Twilight” are two of my favorite Elliott tracks, but the album still didn’t have that special thing that made me like it from the very first second I heard it. It seemed muddled, like an album half finished and then picked up by someone else, with their own intentions. And that’s essentially what is was. And now comes these new songs. From what I’ve read so far, “From A Basement On The Hill” was to be a double album, of which some 50 recordings were done. And these new songs, are some of the songs that didn’t make it on to the final single album.
But as I listen to these new songs, they grabbed me from the very first listen. It’s like Elliott Smith singing and playing into a microphone, right next to me. Very immediate, accessible and very much in your face, in the way that Elliott Smith is. It’s good to have an old friend back.
Go download it now, before it’s gone!
oh and I just found this: archive.org has tons of Elliott Smith live shows. I feel like I’m a little late to the party!
iTunes 5
I’m in love with the new iTunes 5. It looks 10x better, i love all the little improvements and to top it off: it’s rock solid and fast as all hell. I never see the beach ball anymore as I scroll my 13,000 + song library. thank you, Apple. now if you could put the same team on iPhoto, I’d give you my first born child, oh hi Marcia, just kidding.
yay Apple.
Also, we bought Marcia a cute little green ipod mini, the day before Steve announced the ipod nano. dang! how’s that for bad timing? i’m holding out for the 100 gig ipod nano. one of these days…
the 5 sec. movie review
The Final Cut
eh, coulda missed this one. although having a large video editing system made out of wood was pretty interesting. the scifi-noir mix was nice but the plot was a bit weak. It kinda reminded me of Gattaca, a good thing. Tak Fujimoto on the lens, cinematography was great.
Slam
great film. Saul Williams is a genius. the incarceration statistics, alone, make this worth downloading, er, um, renting. Beautifully shot but gritty and unrefined. Like watching the dancing soul of a Jonathan Kozol book.
We Don’t Live Here Anymore
A better version of Closer without all the apathetic characters. Rufalo was great and Naomi Watts is usually great, but i wasn’t feeling her so much. A welcomed breather from the typical summer action flicks, but I coulda rented this one. 5 minutes into it, Marcia realized she had seen it a year and a half ago, in Canada. I asked her if she wanted to go see Bewitched instead, she declined. good choice.
Stealth
Don’t ask. we were bored and we both have a new popcorn fetish. Josh Lucas makes a good action hero, Jessica Biel doesn’t, but damn does she look good (what?! i’m just sayin’…). Why does the guy who won the best oscar last year have to play the buddy wingman who gets killed off 1/2 through the film?
The Island
I love scifi pics. this one had a bit too much predictable action in it, but overall I kinda liked it. There was a plot hole here or there, but all the techie stuff was just great. why did this movie bomb in the US? gotta love Scarlet Johansson, not exactly a good action chick but man is she cute.
