Top 10 Albums of 2006

I haven't listened to a lot of albums I should have this year, so any objections to this list are probably correct. However, this list does accurately reflect the soundtrack of my life in 2006, which is all any year-end top 10 list is good for, anyway.

10. Straight Outta Lynwood ("Weird Al" Yankovic)
9. Modern Times (Bob Dylan)
8. LOVE (The Beatles)
7. Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not (Arctic Monkeys)
6. At War with the Mystics (The Flaming Lips)
5. The Crane Wife (The Decemberists)
4. Destroyer's Rubies (Destroyer)
3. Everything All the Time (Band of Horses)
2. We are the Pipettes (The Pipettes)
1. The Life Pursuit (Belle & Sebastian)

And, uh, also the Top 2 Concerts of 2006:

2. The Raconteurs/Bob Dylan
1. The New Pornographers/Belle & Sebastian

And, uh, also the Top 1 Festival of 2006:

1. Pitchfork - Union Park, Chicago

2006 was a pretty good year for music!

Crash

I just watched the movie Crash (Haggis, not Cronenberg), and it was a very amazing, well-done film. There are a lot of things to mention that are wonderful about it, from the acting to the editing, but since I'm an aspiring screenwriter, I'll focus only on the script. The one thing about it that I can't get over is how everything that happens and every line that is spoken rings true. There wasn't a bad or cheesy moment or anything that felt false, fabricated, or out of place. That is truly a difficult thing to do, to create something like that that captures and reflects life -- from scratch. Everytime I sit down to write something, the only things that seem to fly through my mind are other movies and other things I've already seen before, and unfortunately, if I write those things in, little by little, it builds itself up into giant cliche eventually. And when I say this movie feels real or true or a reflection of real life, I don't mean to call it gritty. Because these days, even gritty is cliched. Originality, creativity... so elusive. Right now, I can only aspire.

"It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something."

The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

I finished this book last night. It was wonderful, truly wonderful. Much more spiritual than On the Road, in such a zestful and contagious way that I could not help being ever-so-slightly convinced of the "truth" -- if not in fact, then in spirit -- of every passage.

Built To Spill

I have just discovered Built To Spill, and I really, really like them right now. Their album There's Nothing Wrong With Love sounds like what would happen if Pavement's Slanted & Enchanted had a baby with the Flaming Lips' Transmissions From a Satellite Heart. Awesome.

Charlie's Eternal Sunshine

I just read the screenplay for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and I must say, Kaufman's version is much darker and more pessimistic than what finally made it to film. The meat of the movie is mostly the same, but the parts that got excluded really throw a completely different spin on the whole story. I wonder, now, since the Academy gave the film the Best Screenplay Oscar, if they give out that award based on reading actual scripts, or based on watching the film, which, obviously, is very different. I hope they actually read screenplays, but for some reason, I doubt this very much. Anyone have a clue?

The Half-Blood Prince

I just finished reading the 6th Harry Potter book, took me about 3 days, what with taking classes and stuff, too, and...

I am at a loss for words.

I feel like crying.

Best book yet.

What a ride.

That's all I can say.

I also saw Layer Cake tonight. Intense. I don't know how many surprise endings like that I can take in one night, man.

The Rushmore Script

I liked the Rushmore script very, very much. I think Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson write great stories that pay very acute attention to quirky little details. Little touches like Max and Herman Blume eating sandwiches as they survey the land from a helicopter are humorously endearing. Anderson/Wilson have a way of making normally darker subjects seem at worst slightly melancholy or bittersweet. For example, Max cuts Mr. Blume's brakes at one point, basically trying to kill him. But when it happens in the movie, it isn't dark, evil, threatening, or menacing; it's just kind of juvenile and funny. All the feelings that are hurt in the movie feel real, even when the actual plot or action is ludicrous; the movie is very human in the way it deals with relationships between characters. I especially enjoyed the smaller, less-obvious ones outside of the Max/Miss Cross/Mr. Blume love triangle. Max and his father. Max and Dirk. Even one-scene moments like Max with Mrs. Blume or Dirk confronting Mr. Blume are realistic and touching. I love how age really doesn't matter in this movie when it comes to dialogue. It's funny how mature and serious Dirk is, for example, even though he's 9 years old, and the little detail of the way he writes so articulately, but in blue crayon make his character come alive. Other details include Magnus giving Max shit throughout the whole movie only to reveal that he always wanted to be in one of his plays as well... Miss Cross telling Max she started smoking his age, and then seeing Max smoking occasionally through the rest of the movie... It's the accumulation of small details like that that make each and every character come alive, and the entire story come alive.

There was also an obvious water/aquatic theme. I don't know if that's just an Anderson/Wilson thing in light of The Life Aquatic, or if the water has a deeper thematic meaning.

The Badlands Script

I didn't like the Badlands script, as far as story. I just didn't find it that interesting. However, the style is very good, because it's very lean, and fits a lot of description into few words. A lot happens in only 70 pages, which is impressive. I just didn't enjoy reading the story very much. I didn't really think Kit was all that charming of a guy, even if he looks like James Dean. He just seemed like a bum with too many screws loose. Holly's a little weird too, I didn't think it was realistic at all when Kit shoots her father and she barely even winces. Of course, maybe I'm missing something. That's always a possibility.

Dr. Strangelove and Chinatown

I love how Dr. Strangelove plays on these hilarious stereotypes. The American general is an untrusting war-mongering militarist; the American president is a weak individual who tries/pretends to act strong; the British officer is polite but dry; the rogue American officer is just plain scary; the German scientist is a Nazi; the Russian prime minister is drunk.

The American pilots flying the bomber struck me as extremely dutiful and patriotic. I think Kubrick doesn't want to incriminate the men who actually fly the plane, push the button, and drop the bomb. They are likable, almost heroic. On the other end, Jack Ripper is the obvious villain, going Kurtz-like and taking matters into his own hands about the "bodily fluids" conspiracy. But is the true villain really that obvious and simple? It seems like the real villain is actually more intangible: it's the system, it's the paranoia, the mistrust that truly lead to this catastrophe. It's the way the system was designed so that lower level officers could actually drop bombs - a provision added for paranoid reasons. The way things could never be reversed once set in motion - another paranoid move. The way the Russian Doomsday device is automatically triggered and not overridable, supposedly the ultimate deterrent, but insanely dangerous nonetheless. The bickering and mistrust in the war room that delays any possible action.

The eponymous Dr. Strangelove is perplexing. He clearly struggles to suppress his adoration for "Mein Fuhrer," perhaps a poke at the way America is wont to short-sightedly change sides so quickly even if our new allies aren't exactly the greatest people, a perfectly relevent criticism today. Osama bin Laden was C.I.A. trained, after all. Saddam Hussein was also backed by America at one point. So clearly when Strangelove gets all excited about his plan for repopulating the earth, he is supposed to sound like a new Hitler designing a master race. But why is he so important to be the actual title of the film? What could it mean?

I have seen Chinatown before, in a class in which we studied a lot of film noirs. The second time around, the pure nihilism of the film is really striking. Jake has a past in Chinatown that he clearly has been trying to escape by employing himself as a private investigator. Yet, the more he tries to do the right thing, the more he tries to uncover the truth, the closer his plotline devolves and regresses back to Chinatown, at the final scene, which is one of the greatest final scenes I've ever seen. The dialogue is so full of futility and hopelessness. "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown." He can not help but relive and recreate his past, and so the film suggest an ultimate kind of impotence. Truly nihilistic. In fact, when he gets his nose sliced in the middle of the film, it is like a moment of near-castration - thinking of the nose as a phallic symbol. Jake's snooping around becomes so dangerous for him that the harshness of the world comes up to him and takes a piece of his manhood, his power, threatening to cut the whole thing off next time. Castration. Impotence. Powerlessness. Meaninglessness. Nihilism.

It's very dark.

Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

At first, I didn't like this book at all. I found all the rich, pretentious, beautiful people lounging away on the French Riviera extremely annoying. Only with about fifty pages or so left does Fitzgerald begin to reveal that the character of Dick Diver is just as tragic as the great Gatsby. Moreover, Nicole is treated well, also - she is not the shadow-thin shallow ghost of a green light that Daisy was. She is also easy to sympathize with. Of course, I will always have to fall on the side of the Jay Gatsbys and Dick Divers, if my loyalties must be tested. With the possible exception of Nicole, Fitzgerald's women seem to only be downfall-bringing sirens, strident birds that chirp too loudly, or flat cardboard cutouts of actual human beings.

Tolstoy still did adulterous relationships among unstable adults best in Anna Karenina. It's hard not to sympathize with everyone in that book.

A post in which the author drops much elitist indie-knowledge cred:

I like the new Stephen Malkmus CD Face the Truth a lot. So much so that I'm going to the TLA to see his concert this Sunday. I also like the new Belle & Sebastian compilation Push Barman to Open Old Wounds, although Dear Catastrophe Waitress is still my favorite album. Clouds Taste Metallic is also a good album by the Flaming Lips, and I do plan on purchasing Zaireeka in the near future, their four-disc album that is meant to be played on four separate speakers simultaneously. (How intense is that!) The new Gorillaz album Demon Days was a little bit disappointing; I actually liked their self-titled debut a lot more. Other than that, I'm pissed off that my copy of Pavement's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain: L.A.'s Desert Origins sucks so badly. Anyway, I still have about... mmm... a ton, let's say, of music to listen to, still. I'm backed up with Spoon, Talking Heads, and Yo La Tengo albums to listen to before I even get to the new British Sea Power, TV on the Radio, and Ben Kweller releases. What I don't understand is why the Album Leaf is classified as Experimental Rock and not Ambient Pop like Sigur Ros is. Should I correct the folks at AMG? [This space reserved for mandatory Pitchfork-hateration.]

A Post About Music

Wow. Gorillaz, Stephen Malkmus, and Belle & Sebastian all released CDs today. I want to spend money on music again. (And to a lesser extent, Audioslave and The Wallflowers.)

The new Mars Volta album Frances the Mute is I.N.T.E.N.S.E. and just a little bit schizo. Imagine if the Fiery Furnaces stopped making happy-but-ADD pop and all of a sudden got really screaming angry, and also learned some Spanish - that's what the Mars Volta sound like. Angry and ADD.

Here's something else:

Autumn = Emo
Winter = Goth
Spring = Indie Pop
Summer = Dance-Pop

And the observation: "Hmm... true, you were listening to Madonna and I was listening to Bright Eyes."

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

Everyone must watch this documentary. Especially people in Wharton.

I feel very angry and conflicted right now, about a lot of things. I can't even begin to explain. Money. Corporate power. American culture. Wharton. Selfishness. Bush. Enron. Texas. Business. Greed. Oi. I'm so afraid I will fall into the trap like so many. What a dangerous path, to gain the world and lose one's soul.

The Shawshank Redemption

Finally saw it. Moving. Powerful. Other generic words film reviewers like to throw around. One thing missing: a scene with Red busting it out on the harmonica.

The Flaming Lips

I just bought a semi-obscure Flaming Lips CD from 1993, Transmissions from the Satellite Heart, and it is really, really awesome. It has the single "She Don't Use Jelly" on it, made famous on an episode of Beverly Hills: 90210, apparently. For those that only know of The Flaming Lips from Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, old school Lips is like that, minus the electronic beeps plus electronic buzzing and other assorted noises that grate, but in a really enjoyable way. The sound is truly a fusion of the two words that describe their style: NOISE POP.

The Colossus of New York

is a wonderful book. Colson Whitehead has quite a way with fragments, clauses, and other assorted incomplete sentences. Ultimately, New York is an incomprehensible city.

In other news, as I am on vacation, this blog will also be on a vacation of sorts. Oh, sure, there will be updates, perhaps even frequently, but the point is, I'm not really going to try anymore. Yeah; hence, short, pointless updates about nothing (i.e., my life) instead of, you know, something more meaningful. [Shrugs with sheepish resolve] That's the way it is. Sorry.

In more other news, I can apparently eat a whole Wendy's Triple Decker cheeseburger (that's 3 hamburger patties, a 50% bonus from the traditional Big Mac) and an order of Biggie fries in less than 10 minutes. I can feel a massive food coma slowly creeping up my torso and hitting my braiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

(That was me pretending to fall asleep on my keyboard.)

Kung Fu Hustle

I loved it. Like Kill Bill Vol. 1 mixed with Looney Tunes. Very entertaining.

The Transcendent Beauty of Rocking Out

I like the oldie pop sound of the Beatles. I like the sweeping, introspective sonicscape of Radiohead. I like the folky whimsy of Bob Dylan. I like the nervous, paranoid distortion of the Walkmen. I like the smoky, jazzy voice of Norah Jones (I'd have sex with that voice if such a thing were possible).

But today, I rediscovered something I had forgotten about since, mmm, 8th grade: ROCKING OUT. I listened to Tyrannosaurus Hives by the Hives today, and it was an intense half-hour of songs that all rocked my face. The first track comes in with the momentum of a fifty bullet firestorm, and never lets up, the drums and the bassline and the guitar and the vocals all coming together in an electrifying, energetic, dynamic, and fun powerhouse, with songs clocking in at a breakneck two-minute clip. This music makes you want to jump up and down, headbang, tap your feet, DO SOMETHING. It moves you in a more literal way than the first artists I mentioned above. But it moves you. I highly recommend.

Rear Window, Psychosexual Deviance, And The Computer Age

Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window is about a voyeuristic action photographer who suffers a leg injury and is forced to stare out of his window all day and night for recreation; he begins to assume details of his neighbors' lives, and concocts a conspiracy theory that one of them has murdered his wife and buried her body parts. On a metaphorical level, this film is about the character's fetishistic, psychosexually morbid scopophilia, in which he derives a sick, diseased pleasure from his voyeurism, and is aroused by his own psychotic imagination when he tries to solve this self-invented murder mystery. His desires also represent his inability to settle down and be married, instead always on the look-out from his window for new encounters. The large, long telephoto lens Jimmy Stewart attaches to his camera to better view his neighbors is a phallic symbol, an optical erection signifying the pleasure he derives from viewing people from his distant window. As he sits in his wheelchair, powerless to move, impotent really, his spying activities with the telephoto lens become almost masturbatory. When the supposed murderer finds out he's been watching him, and breaks the safety of space and distance, coming into the photographer's apartment and therefore his reality, the film reaches its climax, as does Jimmy Stewart's psychotic morbid fantasy; he blinds his approaching attacker with flashbulb after flashbulb from his camera, representing white flashes of orgasmic fulfillment, ejaculations derived from the physical materialization and realization of his fetishistic obsession which he previously could only view at a distance, as if through a movie screen. It is only after this last psychosexual encounter that he's willing to settle down and abandon his deviant and perverse desires for the relatively "normal" institution of marriage.

Further explorations can be made about the sexually deviant nature of metacinematic desires addressed in Rear Window; it seems every moment a character "breaks through the screen" and invades another spatiotemporal paradigm, it is a moment of climactic excitement for Stewart's character, who can do nothing but watch with morbid fascination from his masturbatory audience-seat. Thus, the question may be raised: do we as viewers of cinema share the same voyeuristic sexual deviance, especially when we desire metacinematic breakage and invasion of the hymen/movie screen to invade the reality of the film?

SO, I am now forced to comment on today's modern society. "We've become a race of peeping toms" is a comment, I believe, even more applicable today than in Hitchcock's time. With the arrival of the information age has come things like blogs, Xangas, LiveJournals, Facebook profiles, online photo albums, Geocities personal webpages, and hiding behind the "Invisible" feature on AOL Instant Messenger, and it has become increasingly easier to satiate one's psychosexual voyeurism digitally. I do believe that the computer screen has become the new "rear window," the channel through which people can fulfill their cyber-scopophilia. So what does that make this blog? What does that make you right now? I'm breaking the computer screen right now to address you and this problem in general, an act of meta-blogging, if you will. How does that make you feel?

Generic Spring Break Post #7

I just watched The Pianist. It was slightly more understated than Schindler's List, I suppose, but that's not saying much. There were definitely moments were I could have used a little more subtlety. Then again, some of the shots were extremely poignant. One nerdy technical effect I appreciated very much was when a shell blasts Adrien Brody's room, Polanski immediately muffles all sounds, and puts a high-pitched ringing in the background, to imitate his sudden loss of hearing from the explosion. That little trick was extremely realistic and put me right into the frenetic energy of the moment. Props to the sound editing crew! Or is it sound mixing? I never know.

In other news, I like my parents. They bought me beer today.