I REALLY SHOULD BE WATCHING MORE INDIE VIDEOS ON YOUTUBE

Or poring through more issues of Magnet. I have to admit I had a pretty hazy conception of what the dudes in The Rapture looked like before I saw ‘em in the flesh last night. Basically, I knew Luke Jenner had a curly-floppy ‘do and that’s about it.

Suffice to say, the group that ambled onstage at the Cat’s Cradle looked absolutely nothing like the image I held in my head of the band that wrought the dance-punk fuckery of Echoes and the slick cock-rock of Pieces of the People We Love. That incongruity may not have been the overriding problem with the show itself, but it was certainly a symptom.

Simply put, The Rapture just didn’t have the stage presence to pull off the music they make in the studio, at least on this night. On wax they come off all street-scuzzy and invitingly lecherous, Pistols fans who’ve just discovered Zeppelin or club kids who’ve just discovered both. In person the band is standard-issue indie, fronted by a shaggy-headed cutie-pie when only a leering bozo showing off his cock bulge will do.

See, it wasn’t just physical features either. Musically, the Rapture was suitably tight, but only in rare instances did anyone in the band exude even a rudimentary degree of showmanship (Jenner stage-diving at show’s end, mainly). If they sounded like The Shins or Pavement the band’s visual presentation would be perfectly peachy, but music that thrives on sex and ugliness demands complementary panache. Imagine if Roxy had performed wearing oversized football jerseys and sweatpants and you’ll get some idea of the touching awkwardness I felt when Jenner tamely unleashed his best Bob Plant impression on “The Devil.” Perhaps the lack of ocular stimulation on stage explains why a ridiculous little mosh pit repeatedly broke out amidst the first few rows of the crowd.

(penned by Josh Love, the victim of log-in problems and his crack addiction).

Beware of Al Green

Any fan of Al Green's big hits must needs explore the studio albums which, despite intelligent defenses, are still underrated. Livin' For You's great "Beware" is a song very much worthy of your attention.

"There is even a new word for black fans of indie rock: `blipster'"

BLACK PEOPLE CAN ROCK!

Yes. In its latest study of gobsmacked irrelevance, The New York Times has uncovered evidence that "people of color" actually listen to music played by white people on electric guitar. The article, an expertly paced piece of hysterics, makes errors early and glaringly with an enthusiasm that's almost contagious. The histrionic opening:

WHEN Douglas Martin first saw the video for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as a teenager in High Point, N.C., “it blew my mind,” he said. Like many young people who soothe their angst with the balm of alternative rock, Mr. Martin was happy to discover music he enjoyed and a subculture where he belonged.

Except, as it turned out, he didn’t really belong, because he is black.

The generalizations:

But 40 years after black musicians laid down the foundations of rock, then largely left the genre to white artists and fans, some blacks are again looking to reconnect with the rock music scene.

The un-parseable:

The next few decades saw several successful and influential black musicians who crossed genres or were distinctly rock, such as Prince, Living Colour and Lenny Kravitz, and rock melodies and lyrics have been liberally sampled by hip-hop artists.

Restricting its evidence to the contemporaneous and obvious:

At the same time, the hip-hop industry’s demand for new samples has increased the number of rock songs appearing on hip-hop tracks: Jay-Z’s latest album features contributions from Chris Martin of Coldplay and R & B artist Rihanna’s current single samples the New Wave band Soft Cell.

Finally, the omissions. How the fuck can you write this kind of thing and not mention James Brown? Otis Redding? The Temptations? Bad Brains? What about ska and two-tone bands like The English Beat and Specials? If I linger too long over Jessica Pressler's silence on Parliament-Funkadelic, I might get very upset (you'd think that the totemic Talking Heads' use of Bernie Worrell would warrant a mention).

Besides, it's obvious that it's white audiences who've traditionally had a problem with blacks encroaching on their domain (of which this article is but the latest example). Recall the treatment Prince got when he opened for the Stones in 1981 (he was booed, spit on, and had to dodge bottles; you think Keith and Ronnie offered Kleenex?), or the colonialist subtext to the coverage of (the utterly dull) Living Colour; they were given a pass by the likes of Rolling Stone because they essayed "issues" like cults of personality and their leader Vernon Reid was an eloquent provocateur before he started a rock band. Speaking of critics, where are Armond White? Cary Darling?

At most times I scoff at the notion of a liberal media elite; but parochialism, as this article demonstrates, knows no political allegiance.

Carolinacation

Caught the still-limber Red Hot Chili Peppers in concert Monday night for purposes of review in my local daily (I'm not linking to the review cuz I wrote it too long and subsequently it got hacked up into barely-recognizable pieces). It was my first time seeing the Chili Peppers, and by far the biggest surprise was finding out just how fucking insane people are over John Frusciante. I guess if you read Guitar World or whatever you're probably already aware of his exalted stature, but I'm like the majority of my fellow critics in being completely cut off from that demographic of "real rock" holdouts.

Standing in front of a dude who spent the entire show repeatedly screaming "fuck 'em up Johnny!" I started thinking that it's strangely dissociative how guitar-hero rock is virtually moribund as a commercially viable genre (hardly any emo bands flash technical prowess, and even butt-rock outliers like Nickelback aren't known for their shredding) while at the same time there are clearly A LOT of people who are hungry for larger-than-life axe masters, to the point where people unabashedly worship a (now) unassuming dude like Frusciante, who's plenty talented but never struck me as some kind of Claptonesque deity.

Looking at the way thousands of people utterly lost their shit over Frusicante, it's hard to understand how guitar-driven rock isn't still a commercial force. Over the long haul I'm sure MTV's played a significant role in the phasing-out of the unkempt, self-indulgent shredder (who has the time for solos anymore?), and it's equally clear that the mainstream rise of hip-hop and country means fewer kids are being weaned on hoary rock epics.

Still, if there are things left to be done with a guitar, it would seem like the time is ripe for another six-string icon. Guys my age are just now having kids they can brainwash into liking grunge, and judging from the number of 50-ish dudes at the Chili Peppers show I'd say even boomers are amenable to crossing the generation gap in fealty to the almighty axe.

Good day Sunshine

James Wolcott's recent review of Little Miss Sunshine (which should be retitled Little Miss Sundance in honor of the film labs in which this inexplicable mini-phenomenon was rehearsed and schooled as thoroughly as Abigail Breslin's character) is close enough to mine to make me wonder if he gets his daily dose of AGI, but it's worth posting because the film's recent Oscar benediction reminds me that there are plenty of people who think it's the shit. During a movie discussion in class last week one girl admitted that although she'd missed it in the theater she owned a DVD copy; she's seen it three times. "The grandfather is so much like my abuelo!" she giggled. She was dressed conservatively.

Stepin Fetchit, eat your heart out

I am relieved that the Oscars, for parity's sake, honored three black stereotypes: the Savage (Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland), the Noble Savage (Djimon Hounsou, Blood Diamond), the Minstrel (Eddie Murphy, Dreamgirls), and Mama (Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls). And Eddie Murphy played them all in The Nutty Professor.

Bohemian Parody

"Bohemian Rhapsody"'s middle section, a tricky studio concoction, was not exactly a match for a rock show. On the other hand, a Queen concert that didn't include it would have ended with Freddie's lynching, so the band usually circumvented the problem by playing the record when the mock-opera started and abandoning the stage. The audience did the rest of the singing.



My Chemical Romance's chemopera "The Black Parade" often feels just like that: the band walked out and left other people's records playing. There's "A Night at the Opera," yes, and "The Wall", but it doesn't end there. "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness"? Yup. A little Ziggy Stardust? Check. The Doors' cover of "Alabama Song"? Indeed. Could "Cancer" possibly be a nod to Rufus Wainwright? Is that Green Day I hear? Heck, is that Blink-182? Yes, "Teenagers" is a great song, but it was pretty great when it was called "Bang-a-Gong" too.

But in spite of the way they jam their influences down your ear canal, "The Black Parade" is the first great screamo record, the first you don't have to be a part-time employee at Hot Topic to truly get into. It still has the bleak, black eye-shadow worldview of MCR's previous two, but it has ambition, which is more than I could ever say for Thursday or Fall-Out Boy.

And the songs are there all the way through. "Welcome to the Black Parade" may be the one to haunt modern rock radio for the next few years, but "I Don't Love You" and "Disenchanted" are wonderful ballads, "Dead!" "House of Wolves", and "This is How I Disappear" are propulsive enough to make you forget how silly the lyrics can get in their attempt to be nasty, and a tossed line like "I'm just soggy from the chemo" from "Cancer" has just the right amount of creepiness in it. Only the unnecessary Liza Minelli cameo in "Mama" threw me a little off.

But for all their histrionic "it takes the young to TRULY understand death and the meaninglesness of existence," it sometimes sounds like MCR has gotten their info on illness and death from ER reruns. Of course, if I was ten years younger I wouldn't even have noticed: there's so much here to lap up if you're of a certain age, and something tells me a lot of kids are going to remember this one very fondly a decade from now.

At my grand old age of 25, I can't take the teenager anthems as seriously as I would like. As it turns out, parents DO understand: they're just too busy working their asses off so you can get your damned Wii for Christmas.

David Bowie essaying a straightforward love song is usually cause to head for the hills (rather like learning that Paul McCartney will record one of those I'm-gonna-play-all-the-instruments-cuz-I'm-a-pop-genius albums he does from time to time). Generally the poseur is most moving when he reminds us that he is one, albeit one blessed with a preternatural gift for wicked guitarists, and versatile rhythm sections that can top or bottom as the occasion demands. Think of "Word on a Wing," "Be My Wife," or "Soul Love," in which love and narcissism are inseparable. Or the obscure "Win" from Young Americans: he learns the Bryan Ferry trick of digging so deeply into parody that he achieves an addled kind of pathos (if background vocalist Luther Vandross had recorded it himself the lyric's ironies would have exposed his questionable sexuality). Something similar occurs in 1995's "Strangers When We Meet," featuring one of Bowie's very best vocal performances, imbuing lyrical decoupage with palpable lust.

"Absolute Beginners" has never held sway; in my Bowie canon it would probably rank in the upper thirties (somewhere between "African Nite Flight" on the high end and [yes] "Too Dizzy" on the low end). This big British hit from the film of the same name (it peaked in the high fifties here) has a predictable chord structure, a pinched Bowie vocal as an unwelcome reminder of his deficiencies, and lyrics whose rather hamhanded insertion of the film title (like "Against All Odds," right?) adduced the song's boilerplate nature. Take a look at the single sleeve. Note the wide grin. When Bowie attempts "normality" he's truly frightening -- even scarier than the emaciated splendor he displayed here.

So why is it a minor triumph? Producers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley -- responsible for nearly killing Elvis Costello's career with Punch the Clock and Goodbye Cruel World -- surround Bowie with a yearning string section (as expressive as Bowie is blank), a non-cliched saxophone solo that may or may not be played by Bowie himself, and a glorious percussion breakdown at the 6:30 mark in which congas, timbales, cowbells herald the recapitulation of the song's vocal and musical hook. It's the only post-Let's Dance moment Bowie in which sympathetic production reminds the poseur of his limitations so that he can transcend them.

Two Weirdoes

I've just emerged from under Thomas Pynchon's "Against the Day".

It feels like a library shelf crashed down on me and I've slowly eaten my way out to daylight through the musty pages of ancient boys adventures with titles like "The Troublesome Three and the Yellow Menace." But what begins like a not-exactly-timely parody of Tom Swift adventures becomes truly Pynchonian (i.e: a novel about pretty much everything), and if the mere size seems intimidating, I can testify it's worth it: 1000+ pages, and nary an indigestion. Pynchon has a reputation for difficulty, but that eludes me: behind the large casts and errant narrative he's positively EASY to read, and he's a prankster first and foremost. Often he's even sophomoric: He may be discussing the fourth dimension, but he interrupts himself, entranced with a fart joke.

But it's a funny one.

Another Thomas, Thomas Harris, has returned to the thing he does best. Or the thing he used to do very well. Or the only thing he can do, in fact: provide something for Anthony Hopkins to do when he's not throwing his gravitas around the screen in increasingly samey characters.


"Hannibal Rising" charts Hannibal Lecter's childhood youth in spastic, screenplay-ready episodes that made me forget that Harris was once a really gripping writer of thrillers. This time even the gorier moments are sort of bloddless. Worse of all, the book explains away Hannibal's seductive brand of evil by using a comic book trope fans of the X-Men (and Magneto) will recognize.

Yes, you guessed it: The Nazis did it.

In case you doubt my meaning, the first Thomas' book is the one to go with.

Mum's the word

Curse of the Golden Flower: Miles removed from Hero and House of Flying Daggers, as the focus isn't on the lives and loves of outsiders cruelly twisted by the hand of empire but rather the royal players themselves behaving badly, causing the deaths of faceless thousands in the process. So, really more histrionically tragic than nobly so. The first two-thirds is a slowly-revealing palace intrigue that manufactures plenty of compelling drama even without much hand-to-hand combat, but the run-up to the denouement is numbingly vast in a bloodletting that offers neither emotional sustenance or real visceral thrills. I'm guessing Gong Li won't get any Oscar love, but it's hard not to juxtapose her performance against Mirren's in The Queen, one literally poisoned into hysterical madness, the other culturally poisoned into disconcerting calm.

Most delicious irony - given the film's subject matter, that the only genuine bond of self-sacrificing love occurs between a mother and her son.

Bad Ad?

Threading at the farther edge of Illusionate concerns, but since we do take on random pop culture bits... I have a tiff with slang. Has anyone seen that after-Christmas cellphone commercial? The one where the father (a Carl Winslow-type) meets his offspring at the breakfast table, recaps on their gifts,(AWESOME cellphones, we are to believe), and then asks the kids: "What did Daddy get." "Aftershave?" says the daughter, (with a guilty lilt that conveys: "We didn't put you in a home, so be grateful"). Then Daddy provides the punchline. At first I was completely shocked by what I took to be the father's response. I thought, almost simultaneously: a) WHAT?! b) Why has this affable pater familias resorted to prostitution? c) Why is he telling the kids? d) Is he complaining? e) Bragging?

I'm relating this because I just saw the ad again, and I heard better. Daddy's reply is actually:

"No, Daddy got hosed,"

Instead of: "No, Daddy got hoes!" (Which was my first assumption.)

This commercial is badly phrased. It puritanically skews what we all know Daddy was trying to say: "No, Daddy got SHAFTED." But in the bowdlerizing process, something got lost and confusion emerged. I get that getting hosed is the same as getting shafted, being buggered, or generally being forced to copulate, (all sorts of feminist and gay diatribes could be hung on exactly why we assume that getting the shaft is supposed to be a less than pleasant experience on the subservient end) but I guess hosed has a milder connotation- you might be accidentally garden-hosed by your suburban neighbor as he/she tends to the lawn. Still phallic.
Still the punchline does not work.

I'm not quite sure why this ad's phrasing just bothers me. I think Flaubert might have understood.

2006: Pity and terror

Like Children of Men, Pan's Labyrinth re-imagines war as absurd and wanton. "Sides" are irrelevant: the winner is the one who has a temporary monopoly on violence. Pauline Kael's description of Vivian Leigh's performance in A Streetcar Named Desire -- it evokes "pity and terror" -- comes closest to capturing what Guillermo del Toro has accomplished in Pan's Labyrinth. A few dissenters have chastised the film for failing to give the Spanish Civil War its proper dramatic heft, but in the performances of Sergi Lopez and Maribel Verdu, the almost bovine servility of the women, and the numbed infliction of cruelty, I was reminded of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, Picasso's Guernica and some of Hemingway's fiction from the period. The matter-of-fact manner in which Del Toro stages the sadism of Lopez's Capitan Vidal is matched by Ofelia's confrontations with assorted monsters (the one in the picture above may be the scariest goblin I've ever seen filmed).

*************

Here are my favorite films of 2006:

Pan's Labyrinth
Children of Men
Marie Antoinette
Clean
The Death of Mister Lazarescu
Inside Man
L'Enfant
Volver
Neil Young: Heart of Gold
Changing Times

Political compass

Take this quiz and chart your results. According to the chart, I'm a social libertarian with rather centrist economic principles (no surprises there).

And, according to this chart by speakout.com, I'm a "moderate liberal."

Romeo in black jeans

Maybe I decided to write about Michael Penn's "No Myth" because March was the first album I ever bought on CD (the first CD single I bought: The Cure's "Lovesong"). Listening to it years later, it's an uneven, frustrating collection; Penn's smart, as you'd expect, but not smart enough to hire a rhythm section when he thinks drum programs will do. He's enamoured with leaden extended metaphors that crumble upon scrutiny ("Cupid's Got a Brand New Gun," "Battle Room"). "Subterranean Homesick Blues" is a personal touchstone ("Brave New World"). But "Invisble," the dusky "Innocent One," and "No Myth" are original takes on sexual politics undergirded by a delectable surliness. Surely Aimee Mann is capable of less.

Here's my essay on "No Myth."

It's a hard rain, alright...

As I feared, Bryan Ferry is recording an album of predictable Dylan covers. We remarked here that Ferry may pull off a miracle as wondrous as his 2002 cover of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue; and I'm not unopposed to Ferry contributing piano, harmonica, and those wizened pipes to the loosey-goosey arrangements of his longtime backing band. Still...

The track listing:

Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
Simple Twist Of Fate
Make You Feel My Love
The Times They Are A-Changin'
All I Really Want To Do
Knockin' On Heaven's Door
Positively 4th Street
If Not For You
Baby, Let me Follow You Down
Gates Of Eden
All Along The Watchtower

Say, say, say: it's a state of shock!

December-January is the period in which I listen to the least new music; I usually replay favorites. This week it's been Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Alexander O'Neal's first album, The Beatles' White Album (which I now own for the first time on CD), Dusty in Memphis, and Paul McCartney's All The Best, which has since been supplanted by 2001's Wingspan but is still the best single disc Macca comp extant, not least because it's the only place you'll find "Say, Say, Say," the gynormous Michael Jackson collaboration that still sounds opulent and state of the art.

Since there were hits roughtly six months from one another a comparison between "Say, Say, Say" and the Jackson's "State of Shock" is instructive. Here you have the world's biggest star expanding his popularity (how high can he go??) by hitching himself to the two biggest acts of the sixties. On the McCartney single Jackson feels like an appendage; it's like Macca left Jackson's part blank until he knew which token black singer had signed the contract. The track is fulsomely sexless, like lots of McCartney songs; usually when a singer struggles to keep his distance as assiduously as McCartney does here he instead creates some welcome homoerotic tension. There's none of that on "Say, Say, Say." Nothing's at stake: the words and music exist to sell a McCartney record (Jackson could be singing the "Sister Susan" part in "Let'Em In)." Expert kids' music recorded by two children who'll never grow up, suitable for "Sesame Street."

"State of Shock," on the other hand, exists to sell a reified Stones track, complete with "grungy" guitar lick and grunts. Since Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson are an even more ludicrous pairing than Jackson and Macca there's no point wasting time on who's doing whom a favor (although I should point that Mick was so desperate for any kind of solo name recognition that he let The Jacksons have a big chunk of his dearly beloved money to get it). "Beat It" is a better rock song than "State of Shock" or, for that matter, almost anything on Undercover. The version Jagger sang with Tina Turner at Live Aid is interesting in a pneumatic sort of way.

With liberty and justice for all...white people

When it came time for the always-disparate Stylus staff to select the year's best albums, there seemed to be a higher-than-normal degree of consensus surrounding a few records in particular. They weren't necessarily #1s or even top 5s on everyone's lists, but a surprisingly robust number of staffers (especially given our oft-divergent tastes) found places for the likes of Ghostface, TV on the Radio, Hot Chip and the Knife (I voted for all four).

Still, in arguably our hivemindin'-est year of all (particularly when it came to Ghostface), we've got nothing on film critics. I'm fully aware of course that their options are significantly more limited than ours in terms of material, but in scanning the Metacritic compilation of critic top-10 lists in order to jog my own memory of films I'd seen in '06, I was startled at the numbing uniformity. Some might argue the pickin's were slim, but this lockstep granting of laurels came at the expense of several great, and greatly overlooked films.

Now, I'll be honest: I don't even remotely resemble a film critic, and the list of noteworthy films I haven't seen (mostly due to a similar lack of access as Alfred recently alluded) would arguably outshine the ones I have. So it's quite possible "Pan's Labyrinth" and "Old Joy" and "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" are all better than the crap I liked; I'm just surprised such a paucity of critics ventured outside a relatively small cluster of widely-heralded flicks.

01 Half Nelson - maybe the only time this year I walked out of a theatre feeling truly affected.

02 The Proposition - showed up on only a handful of the dozens of Metacritic lists; I think Ray Winstone may have given the performance of the year.

03 Inside Man - impeccable mainstream stuff.

04 The Queen - Mirren was fabulous regardless of what Alf says; I actually got a bit misty when the little girls hands her the flowers, and that almost never happens to me with movies.

05 CSA: Confederate States of America - wickedly funny and criminally underrated; on par with the best of the Chappelle Show (p.s. - it's also the source of the title of this post, in case it wasn't obvious).

06 Borat - brutally, probably unfairly, mocked the region of the country I've lovingly called home since birth, and still I howled.

07 The Matador - technically released in December of '05, but I don't think it was reviewed until early '06 by most critics and I only caught it this summer on DVD.

08 Thank You For Smoking - Katie Holmes' duplicitous reporter is transparently silly, but the father-son stuff redeems it.

09 Scoop - of course Scarlett Johansson impersonating Woody Allen while acting alongside Woody Allen is ridiculous, but it never tries to be more than a lightweight trifle and surprisingly satisfies because of it, much like another of Scarlett's underrated pics, In Good Company; lord knows she's still miles better here than in The Black Dahlia.

10 Little Miss Sunshine - undoubtedly the year's most critically divisive film - some saw charmingly skewered brilliance, others witnessed put-upon eccentricity; I'll lean towards the former mostly because I thought the ending was irreverently liberating rather than exploitative and cheap.

Honorable Mention:
V for Vendetta
Over the Hedge
Dave Chappelle's Block Party
An Inconvenient Truth
Down in the Valley

Better than Expected:
The Night Listener
Scoop
A Scanner Darkly

Disappointing:
The Departed
For Your Consideration
A Prairie Home Companion

Just Plain Sucked:
Miami Vice
Hard Candy
The Black Dahlia
Lady in the Water

Neither a Ford, nor a Lincoln -- just a lemon

I feel for those star reporters recalled from European vacations to cover the deaths of Saddam The Terrible, Chevy Chase's most immortal impersonation, and black America's greatest avatar. Flipping through the main cable channels this afternoon was an exercise in vertigo. Were Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Michael Jackson at Saddam's funeral? Why was Henry Kissinger bowing before James Brown's coffin?

Happily, I provoked only one argument with my parents this holiday weekend: I maintained that Gerard Ford, while an avuncular sort who looked splendid sporting a pipe, performed an act of unimaginable condescension to the American public in pardoning Richard Nixon. It's insulting that we had to be spared the horror of Watergate, as if we were nine year old children again, prevented by our moms from catching Children from the Corn. Timothy Noah delineates how Ford unwittingly created a situation in which later conflagrations of justice were allowed to flare, only to be dowsed by a properly administered presidential pardon -- like the one George H.W. Bush issued to Caspar Weinberger right before the 1992 elections. Besides, Noah argues, we're so enamoured of our former prez's (witness the Princess Di-esque outpouring of grief for a commander in chief every commentator has been at pains to point out was "one of the commen men") that Nixon would very likely have escaped prosecution anyway. Ask Teflon Will and Slick Ronnie. Or whatever their names are.

If you're feeling extra churlish, the catalogue of shame that Hitchens itemizes is enough to render Ford positively ghoulish. I knew about the Warren Commission, East Timor, and the Mayaguez, but was horrified to learn about the Kurdish rebellion against Saddamn in part funded by the U.S. that was abandoned at the last minute, thanks to the expediency of petrodollars -- only the first time the U.S. would betray the Kurds.

An unusually torpid South Florida movie season has prevented me from posting a top ten, not when Children of Men, Pan's Labyrinth, Little Children, Venus, and The Painted Veil have yet to open. I did see The History Boys: Richard Griffiths reprises his corpulent gay lech from Withnail & I; the boys are clever, if not very pretty, least of all the object of so much lust.

Gerald Ford, dead today at the age of 93

Merry Christmas

As Andy remarked in his last post, it doesn't often snow in Florida for Christmas. Which is why this live Pet Shop Boys performance of a written-to-order holiday number neatly sums up the yuletide spirit. Notwithstanding its other pleasures, this clip also represents a golden opportunity to soak up Chris Lowe in Father Christmas drag.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

Well, no. On my run to Pace Park this morning I passed a couple of out-of-towners--probably Canadians--chain-smoking and videotaping each other, pointing to the background as if to say "can you believe this weather in Christmas time?" I think that's why the holidays sneak up on me every year; there's just no way to tell. (Though a Sirius channel has been playing Christmas music for over a month now.) The only indicator that it might be winter somewhere in the world right now is my brother, who just got back from a semester in London, constantly calling me to complain about how hot it is down here.

Anyway, I'll likely won't be able to post again till next year. I'll be getting my share of winter weather slumming around Budapest and Prague for New Year's. I'm calling it a fact-finding trip into the Post-Soviet, civil law system, and integration into the EU, but, really, I'm just going to get drunk and ogle Eastern European blondes.

Happy holidays, everyone.

really, how much alliteration can one man take?

I think it's because South Florida newspapers love alliteration that I hate it so. When I was working for the Herald and the Sentinel, I quickly figured out that any headline or story with alliteration would always make it to print. (Look at today's Herald, I guarantee there are like five headlines with alliteration, and I haven't even read it.) Newspaper people just happen to think it's clever. To me, it's slightly less unimaginative than simple rhyme schemes. And it's bleeding into the blogosphere. Look at some of the names of Herald blogs: Dolphins in Depth, Dre's Dish on Dade--triple alliteration!--Sunflower Seeds, Cuban Connection, Miami Music, Changing Channels, Crazy for Critters. For the love of God, somebody make it stop.

Terminus

At last: Stylus' year-end album list. I've got blurbs on the Yeah Yeah Yeah's and Scritti Politti. Also: a reminiscence of a year spent loving Ne-Yo and Justin Timberlake more than available men.

1. V/A - Journey Into Paradise: The Larry Levan Story
2. Scritti Politti - White Bread, Black Beer
3. Ghostface - Fishscale
4. Bob Dylan - Modern Times
5. Sonic Youth - Rather Ripped
6. Yeah Yeah Yeah's - Show Yr Bones
7. Basement Jaxx - Crazy Itch Radio
8. Tom Ze - Estudando on Pagode
9. Pet Shop Boys - Fundamental
10. The Rapture - Pieces of the People We Know
11. Justin Timberlake - FutureSex/LoveSound
12. Thomas Mapfumo - Rise Up
13. R.E.M. - And I Feel Fine: The Best of the I.R.S. Years 1982-1987
14. Jenny Lewis & The Watson Twins - Rabbit Fur Coat
15. Hot Chip - The Warning
16. TV on the Radio - Return to Cookie Mountain
17. Pearl Jam - s/t
18. Prince - 3121
19. Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
20. Ne-Yo - In My Own Words

An Obligatory, Preliminary Best (And Worst) of Film

In eager anticipation of a more thorough list by Alfred ;-) I humbly submit my 10 favorite flicks of the year. No fear of the lowbrow here (I did watch "Talladega Nights" twice.)

There's no rank or research here- if it was good enough to stick in my mind, it's below:

TOP TEN
1- "Borat"- A comedy of almost unprecedented vulgarity, "Borat" was a Roscharch test: Cruel punishment of the unwitting? Brilliant political satire? Balls on your face (literally) laughathon? You take your pick, but nothing else this dumb, offensive, endearing, revealing, and fucking hilarious had come my way in ages.

2- "A Scanner Darkly"- An anti-drug thriller screened through a tripping camera, more people needed to see Richard Linklater's adaptation of the Philip K. Dick novella. Maybe it was the anti-adult-animation bias, maybe the anti-smart-sci-fi bias. God knows that, unfortunately, it wasn't an anti-Keanu bias. (See "The Lake House" below.)

3- "L'Enfant"- This uncomfortably affecting Belgian drama about youth, poverty, and the weight of children on the unweary it's, like eavesdropping on teenagers, disheartening, scary, and necessary.

4- "Volver"- Almodovar's late streak continues. Yes, in my eyes, it IS a streak, and "Bad Education" was great. If it disappointed sligtly, it only goes to show how much we've come to expect from Pedrito. "Volver" is even better. No other film maker is as adept at tip-toeing the line between hysteria and catharsis.

5- "The Departed"- Scorcese does no wrong. Nicholson does wrong more entertainingly than anyone else. Leo convinced me he could kick someone's ass, and if that isn't movie magic...

6- "Cars"- The old-fashioned Disney animated musical has been gnawed to death by
hateful direct-to-video sequels, (Jesus, did anyone need "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame 3: Little Hunchy's Adventures"?). But Pixar keeps upping the visual ante. "Cars" wasn't as emotional as "Finding Nemo", or as exciting as "The Invincibles", but the glint of the virtual sun on virtual chrome left reality in the dust. You won't find racing this thrilling in "Talladega Nights..."

7- "Talladega Nights"- ... which incidentally, was pretty damned funny. The "baby Jesus" rant? Sasha Baron Cohen in his second greatest role of the year? Shake And Bake? Gary Cole? The cougar? Come on, you laughed. At two hours, it was longer than any stupid joke deserves to be, and it was almost avant garde in its disregard for plot, but, for a clean dumb time, it sure beat "American Pie 5: Eugene Levy's Gambling Problem."

8- "Leonard Cohen:I'm Your Man", "Dave Chapelle's Block Party", "Neil Young's Heart of Gold": Three documentary/ concert/ tributes that have little in common except that they are all testimonies to how underserved music on the big screen is. Yeah, I know, "Dreamgirls," "Idlewild,' blah blah... Haven't seen those.

9- "Pusher 3": The last (maybe) installment in the great Danish trilogy finds likable Serbian drug dealer Milo trying to drop his own habit, orchestrating a huge party for his ball-busting daughter, unloading an unexpected shipment of ecstasy, cooking for 45 guests, and then matter of factly descending into murder and dismemberment. Like "The Sopranos" with subtitles. Except better than that makes it sound.

10- "Fearless"- Jet Li's retirement party has more ass-kicking than any other retirement party since my grandpa's.

Underrated:
"Lady in the Water": It's easy to hate M. Night Shyamalan. His name is hard to pronounce, he has an ego the size of Alfed Hitchcock, his movies are so preciously constructed that one feels tempted to bully them down, and his dialogue can be sheer torture. A Shyamalan scene goes something like this:


A: (looks stoic) "I wanted to say hello. (pause.) To you."
B: (looks stoic and about to cry) "Is that what you meant to say? I will answer equally, with a similar greeting."
A:"Very well. I will accept that. If that is what you desire to convey."
(Pause. Characters stare at some oddly colored wallpaper for two minutes)
A:"Is that all that will be said between us?"
(Now the camera is only capturing B's armpit and A's crotch.)
B:"Yes. Except perhaps that..."
(B looks away. He's about to show some emotion. Restrain.)
A:"Do not to be afraid to speak. Fear is the killer of all that mankind has produced. The killer of goodness." (Mystical strings are heard.)
B:"I only fear... that we may not make contact with each other before..."
A:"Before..."
(Three minute static shot of B narrowing his eyes.)
B:"Before the darkness."
(Audience snores.)


BUT he does have ambition and imagination, and those are extremely rare in Hollywood.
Also, this movie stars Paul Giamatti. So come on. Worth a watch.

"Clerks 2": It was funny, allright? And a damn sight better than anything Kevin Smith's done since "Chasing Amy." But fans of "Clerks" have since moved out of their parent's basements, so this went a little under the radar. The geek jokes were true, (if tried), and... "Pillow pants"? I know you laughed.

"Lucky Number Slevin": Lucy Liu and Josh Hartnett not sucking should be enough to earn this a rental. The plot was too damned pretzely, and the gangsta dialogue so sharp it cut right through most people's suspension of disbelief. This one was easy to dismiss as bad Tarantino, but it's actually more like "not as good as usual" Tarantino. It might surprise you by not sucking nearly as much as you think it does.

The batch of computer animated cartoon comedies: "Cars," "Open Season," "Barnyard," "Over the Hedge", "The Ant Bully," "The Ice Age 2," "Happy Feet," "Monsterhouse,": It really was more than any post-pubescent person could keep up with, but the surprise is that all of these movies had sharper dialogue, better characters, and just LOOKED better than the large majority of their live action counterparts. My theory: it's harder to shoot a bad scene when you're literally creating it from scratch. The camera can't quite be accidentally off-centered, can it?

Overrated:
"Little Miss Sunshine." Actually, I must have gotten my version of "Little Miss Sunshine" mixed in with something else, because all the critics claimed it was "riotously funny", and what I saw had maybe three ok chuckles. I liked the movie fine at first as a family drama, but the more I thought about it the more unlikely its family seemed. And a second viewing on DVD reveals so many absurdities: Yeah, it's funny when the cop sees the porn, but I cannot believe he wouldn't investigate the GLARING CORPSE-SHAPED SHROUD in the van. And how exactly did Greg Kinnear talk those strangers into lending him their motorcycle? And are we to believe that Toni Collette's caring mom had not for a moment looked at her daughter's rehearsals, or outfit, or song choice? What about the fact that Alan Arkin's vulgar-but-good-and-NOT-creepy grandpa had for months being teaching his grand-daughter how to strip? That goes unaddressed. And how is it that the Nietzche-reading son would scorn his father's Nietzchean "winner takes all" mentality? Or that anyone would logically expect to maintain a strict vow of silence until AFTER becoming a pilot? After all, not many anti-social non-talking weirdoes are accepted into flight school. In fact, the more thought one gives to the movie, the more contrived its cliches appear.
Er, after writing all that, I'm not even sure I liked it after all! ;-)

Hideous:

"The Fountain": Darren Aronofsky's "Requiem for a Dream" is one of my all time favorites. I went into "The Fountain" hoping to adore it, ignored all the negative press, opened my mind wider than (insert slutty starlet)'s legs. I have seldom thrown more good will in a movie screen's direction. But I failed. This movie just sucked in every possible way, from the ridiculous, and unparseable, New Age plot, to the unmemorable dialogue, to the yucky color palette. Worse, it was embarrassing. Hugh Jackman was serviceable, as he was in "Scoop," another of the year's sucky ones. The difference between those movies: While Woody Allen has obviously sleepwalked through most of his latter oeuvre, and I doubt he himself thinks greatly of them, Darren Aronofsky LOVES his material and you can tell in every frame. It's like having a friend who's blindly in love with the Elephant Man, and you're trying to be nice and not puke during your double dates.

"The Da Vinci Code": "The Passion" crowd sure needed a counterpoint. This should have been a big blockbuster about the Church's murderous legacy, organized religion's absurdities, and Jesus' sexuality, (yeah, the J-Man probably liked to get it on with that sexy Magdalene ho.) So how exactly did "The Da Vinci Code" end up being so damn polite and sleepy? Tom Hanks looked more life-like in "The Polar Express."

"The Lake House": Keanu Reeves. Sandra Bullock. So it was just like "Speed," except very very slow.

"Pulse": The PG-13, J-Horror-rethread trend, as exemplified in "Pulse," needs to go away. I thought I could watch Kirsten Bell quietly wash dishes for hours, but I was wrong.

I might as well throw in a really REALLY hideous movie called "Feast" in here: it was this year's Greenlight Project. Only reason I don't really add it it's because I feel dishonest about reviewing a movie I couldn't bring myself to finish watching. Thirty minutes in, I walked away in contempt.
(Note to "horror" film-makers: The green/red filters to signify techno/moldy/dusty/rusty/gory have to stop. The scratched celluloid technique too.
Exception to the rule: Rob Zombie. I am NOT kidding. "House of a 1000 Corpses" and "The Devil's Rejects" are true horror greats, and will earn a cult in time.

"Material Girls": Hilary and Haylie Duff star in... Actually this one is self-explanatory, and a perfect nadir. Yes, I watched the whole thing, but the circumstances were tragic.

Does anyone remember laughter?

It’s been a year of redemption for me and the musics, as several bands and artists I’d written off as overrated or underwhelming delivered finely transformative statements that forced me to relocate into their camps. Junior Boys, TV on the Radio, Jenny Lewis (the last Rilo Kiley record was a minor letdown), Hot Chip and even to a lesser extent Joanna Newsom, all made good on overeager coronations that had thus far proved mostly undeserved in their careers.

LCD Soundsystem belongs in that category as well. The debut showed signs that James Murphy’s flagship act was already capable of mastery (“Daft Punk is Playing at My House,” “Tribulations”), but much of the rekkid reeked of stale scenester snark and lazy classic-rock appropriations.

Well, the jaded quips and bald rips remain, only this time the jokes are less self-serving and the mimicry’s much more fun. Going from scamming Pink Floyd to biting Bowie is trading up in my book, though there are also exquisitely explicit nods to gooey New Wave (“Someone Great”) and lockstep post-punk (the title track) as well. The aforementioned “Someone Great” is indeed absolutely dazzling, positively heartbreaking in its willful absentmindedness. I can understand why everyone’s loving this song right now, though I’m not quite as crystal on why its immediate successor, “All My Friends,” is garnering equal raves. We’re all aware it sounds exactly like Secret Machines, right?

As I’ve suggested, Murphy’s hyper-aware banter is a little more bearable on The Sound of Silver, and he even made me chuckle once with that line in “North American Scum” about Europe being the place where “the buildings are old/and you might have lots of mimes.” Still, the fact remains that Murph’s not nearly as comical as he thinks he is. Toby Keith and Trace Adkins are still way funnier.

In fact, it got me thinking about how rare it is that a piece of music actually (intentionally) makes me laugh out loud. I get plenty of ROFFLES from TV, movies and reading (well, mostly from the internets). Certainly I recognize the limitations of the medium, but it’s hard for me to recall the last time a song (intentionally) inspired any healthy guffawing. Possibly System of a Down’s “Vicinity of Obsencity,” though I’m not entire convinced that belongs in the “intentional” category. Or maybe it was the answering machine skits on The Mind of Mannie Fresh. I know, I’m a 14 year-old. Either way, I had a tough time coming up with anything from 2006.

The Queen: on the dole

As my enmity towards this season's awards wheelbarrow The Queen grows, with Helen Mirren pulling it through the predicted furrows, I'm looking for any chance to read a disparaging review. Jane Dark nails the film's overdeliberate quality (without any of the fun and malice of director Stephen Frears' other tightly scripted ensemble The Grifters). While it's true that Frears got his start in TV, he has never succumbed to TV-movie values so helplessly:

That's what "well-made" means, most often, and it's exactly the problem; it's as if the film were trying to make the case for "the art film" being every bit as rigid and determined a genre as anything Hollywood could come up with. At least Hollywood films have the courage of their lack of conviction, and the capacity thus to be excessive, muddled, absurd. There is no moment nor gesture in The Queen that escapes its fate as crudely telegraphic (at the beginning when he's just an uncertain commoner, the quite short person playing Tony Blair wears football jerseys; you can tell he's come into his own because from that moment on, he wears suits!); as a mechanistic part of the parallel plot structure (which guy in the PM's camp is like which guy in the royal retinue? We'll never figure it out!); or as broadly symbolic (the noble old stag being harried in its solitude across the vast spaces of Balmoral, a stag eventually slain not by an aristocrat but a mere businessman hunter up from the City — this noble old stag with which the Queen is obsessed — stands for...the Queen!)

As for Helen Mirren, she did the tight-lipped thing far better in PBS' "Prime Suspect"; and if you want to see her at her uninhibited best, re-screen The Long Good Friday, Excalibur (her Morgan Le Fey was not, unhappily, studied by Cate Blanchett's pixie in Lord of the Rings), and even the underrated The Mosquito Coast, in which she transformed the tiresome part of the long-suffering wife into a cauldron of simmering resentment and repressed sensuality. It's a testament to Frears' dull good taste that we register Mirren's intelligence as Queen Elizabeth, but there's a sizable coterie which chooses not to separate intelligence from charm and sex. How frustrating that this is the role for which Mirren will be forever known.

Boobies!

The wet smack of kisses on cheeks. Breast and ass shots that would get a straight director booed. An acceptance of telenovela melodrama as a domestic inevitability. Thanks to an excellent cast, Volver exerts a stronger tug on the memory, especially in its rather chilling delineation of our familial responsibilities. While it's obvious that Irene (Carmen Maura) loves daughter Sole (Lola Dueñas), it's somewhat monstrous for Americans of a certain age to accept the phlegmatic manner in which Sole takes care of her mother as if she had no life of her own except as the proprietor of a clandestine beauty parlor. Despite the ease with which this sixty-year-old woman slips under the bed or gets off on the smell of her own farts, Maura's Irene is far from likable, a pre-Franco anachronism casually indifferent to how she upsets her daughters' lives, and unwilling to confront caretaker Agustina (Blanca Portillo)'s sexual ambiguity (Portillo, shot and lit like Falconetti's Joan of Arc, gives a finely shaded performance as a woman made insufferable by charity).

Singles!

It's that time of year. Stylus has published its 50 best singles of the year. My ballot:

01. Ne-Yo - Sexy Love
02. The Killers - When You Were Young
03. Gnarls Barkley - Crazy
04. Escort - Starlight
05. Justin Timberlake feat. T.I. - My Love
06. Mary J. Blige - Be Without You
07. Nelly Furtado - Promiscuous
08. Madonna - Sorry
09. The Fray - Over My Head (Cable Car)
10. Beyonce - Irreplaceable

(Naturally I'd keep fiddling with the list if left to my own devices)

Shameless Plug

One of my stories is being featured on an Amazon.com competition... along with a hundred others, so veeeery much doubt it will win. Still, why not vote for moi? In the Christmas spirit.

VOTE

It might be a diversion from the AGI Pinochet storm of a few days ago, which...COME ON! Some people are just blatantly evil, no matter what political pap you're being fed. Pinochet was one of those. Right-wing apologetics suck.