Film/TV

Top 10

1. Joanna Newsom, Have One on Me
2. Spring training
3. Waiting for new Venture Bros., rewatching old Venture Bros.
4. Flavors.me
5. Ableton Live
6. Heater Core 365 Ableton Live Tips
7. Lost
8. The Bugle
9. Top Gear on iTunes (they have the original UK versions that are 20 min longer than the ones they show on BBC America)
10. Boards of Canada possibly, maybe, perhaps releasing something in 2010

Bottom 3

1. California’s economy
2. Earthquakes
3. Republicans

I saw this while watching the Olympics tonight.  This might be the most awesome cat food commercial ever made.  Judge for yourself.

Top 10

1. Ableton Live
2. Pitchers & catchers!!!
3. Lost final season
4. Moon Wiring Club
5. iPad
6. Heater Core: 365 Live Tips
7. Hauntology
8. Kiva
9. New Joanna Newsom
10. Caprica

Bottom 3

1. The voters of Massachusetts
2. Republicans
3. The Grammys (irrelevant since…forever)

“Everything You Do Is a Balloon” is one of the very best Boards of Canada songs, and it has been transformed into one of the best fan-made videos I’ve ever seen.  Check it out:

Top 10

1. Flavors.me
2. Burial, Untrue
3. The Mighty Boosh
4. Berklee
5. My new office (in a new building with new furniture–though same job)
6. Parks & Recreation
7. Avatar (hey, it’s good sf)
8. Novation SL MkII
9. The Bugle
10. Camacho’s Place

Bottom 3

1. Another fallen Angel: Rory Markas, RIP
2. Having a cold during vacation
3. Promos for all things reality (that’s as close as I come to watching them–and that’s just too close)

Top 25

1. Angels win 2002 World Series–At my father’s funeral in 2005, I talked about our shared love of sports, and the point I made to illustrate this love was him calling me after the Angels won the Series for the first time.  That’s how much this meant to me (and to him).
2. The Wire: When a postmortem is written about the American experiment, this show will be singled out as a perfect illustration of how the country fell.  The detailed way in which the show demonstrated corruption, complacency, and stagnation at all levels of bureaucracy and business, mixed with the systematic defeat of anyone and everyone trying to make things better, says more about the last decade than a million hours of campaign commercials and governmental panels ever could.  It’s the most essential work of art of this century, and it will be one of the lasting gifts of our generation to generations to come.
3. William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops and The River–I helped to generate interest in William Basinski’s work when I worked at the now-defunct Stylus Magazine.  All of his work is wonderful, but these two works shine above all other music from the last decade (even though they both are really over 30 years old now).
4. Children of Men: The best film of the decade is also the most amazing science fiction films ever conceived.  Clive Owen’s acting, Alfonso Cuarón’s directing, and Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography are the three pillars in this film, which takes us on a journey through a world without children and all the chaos and confusion that this fact produces.  It’s a spellbinding, amazing work of art.
5. Barak Obama–2nd best night of the decade (behind the night the Angels won the series) was the night that Obama won the Presidency.  And while he’s been attacked left and right for the past year, he’s still standing and he’s moving slowly but surely toward change.  I still believe.
6. Apple’s iPod and iPhone–When I used to carry around a portable CD player and 50 CDs, I would dream of a device that could store my music in my pocket.  And then I got an iPod.  And then I got another iPod.  And then I got an iPhone.  And then I gave my first iPhone to my friend and got a new one and we both started using ours together.  And it was good.
7. Tivo–Oh hell yes.
8. Idiocracy–Funniest movie of the decade, and the most accurate.  We don’t have to wait 500 years for this world to come into existence; I see this kind of stupid every single day.
9. Sigur Rós’s Agaetis Byrjun, ( ), Takk…, and Hvarf – Heim–Band of the decade?  I think so.  Their music has defined much of the genre that is usually known as “post rock,” even as their emerging popularity has alienated the band from the critics, most of whom see the band as sell-outs because they are successful.  And yes their last album wasn’t as good as their previous work; but it’s still way better than 99.99% of all music ever, so I’ll give them some slack.  Oh, and Amiina is awesome too!
10. Joanna Newsom’s Ys–I put this CD in my car shortly after I bought it in 2007 and it’s still in there.  It’s one of the only examples of high-quality poetry brought to life through music.
11. The Venture Brothers–Poetry of an entirely different stripe, this series is the vanguard of Adult Swim, itself the vanguard of popular entertainment for quite some time.  It’s part Hardy Boys, part Superfriends, part Six Million Dollar Man, part dada, part I Saved Hitler’s Brain, and part…well, part everything else I can come up with.  Oh my flipping zombie Jesus is this show good.
12. Tod Dockstander’s Aerial–Decades in the making, this is a magnum-opus from an electronic music pioneer who never really had much of a chance to practice his art back in the 60s because he lacked the credentials to use the very rare and very expensive technologies found in some high-level universities and few other places.  This is an exceptional trilogy of albums that puts Dockstander front and center in the modern world of experimental music.
13. Netflix–It took me a while to get into this (their initial catalogue was rather minimal), but now it’s practically a religion, even for people like my mom who know next to nothing about computers.  She checks her email and her Netflix queue.  Oh, and they forced Americans to use the word “queue,” too.  That’s awesome.
14. The Caretaker: The Complete Digital Collection–Unbelievably important music from the guy who was originally known as V/VM.  The entire catalogue is worth owning; more than that, it’s affordable.  This guy pioneered the online distribution of music.  Most of his catalogue was originally available for free download.  But I felt that I owed it to him to buy the collection and support this wonderful artist’s work into another decade (which has begun in earnest with Leyland Kirby’s latest release).
15. World of Warcraft–This is #1 on my wife’s “Bottom 10″ list for the decade.  I play it too much–and have for several years.  I got hooked when I saw that I could create a druid alchemist.  How cool is that?  Not that alchemy or druidism in WoW have anything to do with actual druids or alchemy, but it’s still fun to imagine living within a mythological world.
16. Boards of Canada’s Geogaddi and The Campfire Headphase–Boards of Canada’s contribution to the music world in the last decade consists of two fascinating albums and some EPs.  These are exceptional works, and they extend the ideas from Music Has the Right to Children in interesting ways.  I still check BoC’s website every day to see if there’s news of their latest release.  I bet I’m not the only one.
17. Amazon Prime–I grew up in Riverside, about 60 miles from Los Angeles at a time when I had to go into LA to find any decent music or bookstores.  I dreamed of a day when I would live in a decent town where I could buy any of the weird stuff that I read about in magazines.  And then the Internet showed up and with it came Amazon, the first and still best stop for online shopping.  I now live in a town that is over 100 miles from the nearest pocket of civilization, and the only reason a place like this is even partially tolerable is Amazon Prime, which allows me to buy whatever I want and not pay for shipping (well, I pay $75 a year, but you have no idea how much stuff my wife and I get on Amazon).
18. Neal Stephenson’s Anathem–Read it recently and loved it.  I’ve loved all of his novels (though the Baroque Cycle is a tough haul).  I love the fact that the kernel of this novel’s story is taken from the Long Now project.
19. Tim Hecker’s Radio Amor, Harmony in Ultraviolet, and An Imaginary Country–I first got into Hecker because Amour was based around shortwave radio signals he recorded in Central America (shortwave being one of my fascinations).  But everything this artist has created in the past few years is truly beautiful and challenging (a difficult combination, indeed).  Highly recommended.
20. Stow, Scotland–My wife and I took our parents to the UK in 2006.  We spent a week at a small farmhouse in this town.  It was wonderful.
21. Ableton Live–This is the past, present, and future of electronic music composition.  This German company will dominate the next decade because of their wise decision to merge their software with Cycling ’74’s epochal Max/MSP.  Max for Live debuted in November 2009 and will be the basis for more music in the coming decade than the vocoder was in the Noughts.
22. Top Gear–I care very little about cars, but I love this show.  It proves that adult men can make fun of each other intelligently and with style.  Plus it’s one of the few things my wife and I enjoy watching together.
23. Lord of the Rings–The movies were fantastic, but what I love even more is the fact that these films spearheaded the interest in fantasy and mythology.  It’s partly because of this film that I’m able to teach a class on mythology at my college.
    
24. Patton Oswalt–I’ve been a fan since his 1996 HBO special (which I taped and watched over and over).  He’s more popular than ever now, and his comedy just keeps getting stronger.
25. Longplayer–A wonderful idea.  Here’s hoping it lasts!

Bottom 10

1. George W. Bush
2. Dick Cheney
3. Donald Rumsfeld (really, it’s a three-way tie for first)
4. Rush Limbaugh/Glenn Beck/Fox News
5. People who don’t understand the difference between “were” and “where”
6. Terrorists of all stripes (from the 9/11 attackers to the Wall Street thugs to Republican fearmongers)
7. Boston
8. Reality television
9. 99.99% of all entertainment
10. Summers in El Centro, CA

Top 10

1. Max for Live
2. Theodore Levin, Where Rivers and Mountains Sing: Sound, Music, and Nomadism in Tuva and Beyond
3. Leyland Kirby, Sadly, the Future is No Longer What it Was
4. Venture Brothers
5. The Mighty Boosh
6. Huun Huur Tu
7. Dropbox
8. Dudeism.com
9. Kraftwerk, The Catalogue
10. Engrade

Bottom 3

1. Opponents of health care reform
2. Sarah Palin
3. UCLA basketball (wow, pretty sad, guys)

When The Commitments came out in 1991, I was a 23 year old English grad student obsessed with both James Joyce and soul music (especially Otis Redding and Bobby “Blue” Bland), so you know that Alan Parker’s film (based on Roddy Doyle’s wonderful novel) would be a big hit for me.  I saw it twice in the theater, I believe, and each time I had to pinch myself.  How did they know?  I asked myself.  How did they manage to create a movie just for me?

The thing that struck me at the time about the film (I’m talking the film’s narrative now) was the fact that, at the end, all the characters seemed successful (singing in bands, having girlfriends, so on) except for the two guys who started the band in the first place–the guitarist and bassist.  In the final montage, we see them singing for loose change on the streets of Dublin (they call those guys “buskers” in Ireland).  No fair, I thought then and now.  Those guys deserved better than that.

Well, turns out the happy ending would come for at least one of those two buskers, played by real-life musician Glen Hansard.  He had already started his own band, The Frames, at that point, and after the film that band went on to dominate Irish music for over a decade.  They had some popularity in Europe and America, but it wasn’t until 2007’s film Once that Glen Hansard became known to a truly wide audience when his little film won him an Oscar for Best Song.  He and his co-star in the film, Marketa Irglova, developed the songs for Once (which was directed by former Frames bassist John Carney) and began touring as a duo, calling their collaboration The Swell Season.

I should say, first off, that I absolutely loved Once.  Yes, it’s Irish, so that’s no surprise.  In fact, I’m probably more interested in Ireland now than I was back in the early 1990s when I only had a vague understanding of Joyce and why I liked Joyce.  Now that I have a strong grasp of Joyce and the larger picture of Irish literature and history, and now that I have actually visited Ireland on several occasions and seen Dublin for myself, I can say that my enthusiasm for the country is richer than it ever was back in 1991.  Seeing Glen Hansard walking along O’Connell Street just brings back a ton of wonderful memories.  On top of all that, however, I thought the film was an enormous artistic success, as it’s one of the few musicals to actually take the music part seriously enough to dispense with the stupid dancing and simply show the role that music plays in the lives of musicians who would rather perform for each other than talk.  It’s a film about the development of a close, musical friendship, with the focus on the creative process first and foremost. It’s a great film.  I’ve seen it a dozen times, and I never get tired of it.  It doesn’t help that the music in the film is phenomenal.

Well, a lot of other people liked Once, too, and a lot of people bought the soundtrack and became interested in the duo, especially after it was revealed that they were romantically linked.  So the follow-up was bound to be a big deal, and it certainly is.  It’s called Strict Joy, and it comes in a regular version (just the one disk) or a deluxe edition (with the album, a companion concert CD, and a live concert DVD).  I’ve been listening to the album and concert CDs for the past few days, and I have to say…I like the new album, but I really love the concert CD, and its worth getting the deluxe version just to get that CD.

I always felt The Frames had their moments (“Revelate,” “Lay Me Down,” to name a few), but their albums as a whole seemed weighed down with too many mediocre songs.  The Once soundtrack contained mostly wonderful material, but even that work had its clunkers, too.  I’d say Strict Joy is similar.  There are some incredibly strong songs, such as the opener “Low Rising” (in which Hansard channels his inner Van Morrison better than Van Morrison himself), “In These Arms,” and Irglova’s standout track “I Have Loved You Wrong,” among others.  And while there are no real clunkers here, there are also a number of songs that really don’t grab me for one reason or another.  So I like it, but I’m not overwhelmed by the experience of listening to the music.

But the concert CD is an entirely different story.  True, a lot of the songs in the concert are from Once, along with some standout Frames songs like “Lay Me Down” and “Fitzcarraldo,” so the material itself stands on its own.  But the content here, I think, is less important than the presentation.  Glen Hansard is an incredible singer, and I think this comes through live in a way that really can’t be captured in a studio.  There’s a dynamism, a force, behind his voice when he’s in front of an audience that transforms decent songs like “Say It To Me Know” into epics.  He sings like the world is on fire and only his voice can put out the blaze–it’s a fierce, strong, barely-in-control megaphone that only works when it’s a bit out of tune.  That sort of chaos just doesn’t fit on a conventional studio take, where the tunes are modified and the cracks and grit of a real voice is limited and compressed to better fit to a perfectly-designed score.  And the audience knows it, too; listen to the roar of love that bursts out when the crowd cheers after the opening number; that’s an audience that understands exactly what it has heard.

But his singing voice is only part of it. Hansard is also a storyteller, like a lot of musicians.  And like a lot of musicians, he is very comfortable telling little stories before the songs.  Some of the stories are funny (like the one about the kid buying the grave for his girlfriend), and some are truly bizarre (about the “ghostbuster” couple who talk to the souls of 500-year-old children), but the stories all lead to a brief explanation of what each song is about emotionally and the messages that he, as the songwriter, sought to convey when composing it.  That’s different.  Musicians are generally fearful of prose; they want their music to speak for itself.  They’ll tell a story about the song’s origin, but they won’t usually follow it up by stating “this song means x” because that declarative statement limits the power of the song.

Rather than cheapening the songs (by telling us how to listen to them), however, Hansard provides an emotional framework that helps direct our understanding of the songs.  Think of Sister Wendy describing a painting at the Louvre; we can see the painting without her, but she draws attention to details we might overlook, allowing us to seen and appreciate the work in a whole new light.  Hansard does the same thing; we can enjoy his songs without the introductions, but those introductions draw our ears and our minds to ideas and to emotions that make the experience of listening to these songs that much more meaningful.

Here’s an example.  Before the song “That Low,” he tells a funny story about his last visit to Milwaukee (where the concert took place) and then says,

This song is about an idea that you’re in a rut, maybe in a relationship, and you’ve got each other but it’s not great.  The song is about the idea that this one person has to go and walk a new road, and this song was written from the perspective of the person who realizes that they’re about to be left.  It’s for a good reason.  It’s like a double-edged sword.  It ups the ante for you and makes you go, “Okay, what am I doing?”  So this is about the whole idea that a rising tide lifts all boats, and if somebody has to go walk their way then it kind of forces you to think about yourself.  The whole idea of this song is “thread the light, walk the light, speak the light, seek the light, crave the light, brave the light.” The whole idea is “be in the light” because if you’re in the dark, then it’s no use to you.

Songs, like poems, often need a frame of reference before they can be fully understood.  Before I heard his introduction, I thought “This Low” was a sad song about a couple breaking up.  Of course, I didn’t really pay too much attention to the song when I first heard it on The Swell Season’s debut (which came out before Once).  Once I heard Hansard’s introduction to this song, however, I was forced to consider the “light” part and what it meant in the context of the breakup, and I realized that, yes, it’s a sad song about a breakup, but it’s more than that.  The idea he’s conveying here (which is conveyed musically better than it is conveyed lyrically) is the sudden realization that a part of a person’s life has just ended but that this is as much a moment of possibility as it is a moment of despair.  That is, she’s gone, which means that what happens next has yet to be written.  The “shine a light” part is the speaker’s mind opening up to explore the possibilities that have suddenly emerged (rather than retreating into the darkness of despair and sadness).  It’s a beautiful song and a beautiful idea, and Hasnard’s introduction allowed me to better understand and appreciate it.

He does something similar to this with many of the songs, but he’s not alone.  Irglova also introduces several songs, providing her own take on those she has penned.  Sorry I haven’t mentioned her much here, but her role in this group is definitely a secondary one to Hansard; she performs a few songs here, and she shines whenever she sings, but he seems to be the focus of the group, and he’s the one directing things and arranging things and singing most things.  But when she shines, she shines brightly–and in a similar way to Hansard.  Her voice warbles and hems around just like his.  It’s not a powerful voice, but it’s an equally passionate one.  Heck, there’s enough grain in those two voices to fill several beaches.

In all, Strict Joy is good, but the concert CD is a wonderful document of the true power of this musical duo.  So if you’re going to get this, get the deluxe edition.

Update (10/2): The CD version of the deluxe edition doesn’t contain the entire concert, so if you want to hear all the cool stories and stuff from that concert, buy the deluxe edition on iTunes.

Top 10

1. Angels playoff dreams
2. The Guild
3. New Venture Bros episodes
4. Flying Lotus
5. The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard
6. Rewatching The Wire (the best thing created this decade)
7. Dr. Strangeloop, Are We Lost Mammals of an Approaching Transcendental Epoch?
8. John Scalzi, Old Man’s War
9. Longplayer Live
10. Solace of the Defeated

Bottom 3

1. Politico.com for using the phrase “ideas piece”
2. Extract (Sorry, Mike, but it sucked)
3. Portsmouth FC

Sub-Bottom 1 (even worse than the Bottom 3 above)

1. Anyone who thinks National Socialism has ANYTHING to do with Socialism.  These people are stupid and dangerous and should be called out as such.

Top 10

1. Public option for health care
2. Socialism
3. Robert Wyatt’s new boxed set
4. My birthday (Sept 1)
5. Longplayer Live
6. Cataclysm
7. The Guild
8. District 9
9. Tod Dockstander’s Aerial #1-3 (going on my top 10 of 2000s list)
10. Patton Oswalt

Bottom 3

1. Idiots who think Socialism is something bad
2. Idiots who think public health care is evil
3. Idiots who protest against their own self interest because someone on the radio told them to