Consider this mini post something of an addendum to an entry I wrote on music videos and horror earlier this year. I don’t like Pitchfork to do my work for me, but they included two clips on their Best Music Videos of 2010 list that are scary, I somehow missed them the first time around. And no, I’m not talking about Nicki Minaj’s penchance for Orienatalism, because Jenn at Reappropriate was on that tip months ago (though I do like “Girls Fall Like Dominoes”). One is a NSFW clip directed by Eric Wareheim (is there any other kind?) with some gory final girl action that should give Caitlin at Dark Room some food for thought. The other is a hotel room bloodbath. Sleep tight, kiddies.
HEALTH
“We Are Water” Lovepump United/City Slang
Directed by Eric Wareheim
How To Destroy Angels
“The Space In Between” (S/T) EP
Directed by Rupert Sanders
Last night, Tobi Vail shared wonderful news with the Typical Girls listserv: Kill Rock Stars’ acts Grass Widow and STLS were releasing new music today and playing a few gigs together. You can even listen to Grass Widow’s new album, Past Time, through Spinner. STLS’s Drumcore doesn’t officially come out until September 7th, but I’m already excited.
Past Time (KRS, 2010); image courtesy of buyolympia.com
Drumcore (KRS, 2010); image courtesy of buyolympia.com
I’ve been following Grass Widow‘s mumbled surf rock since Carrie Brownstein highlighted them on NPR’s All Songs Considered SXSW preview. STLS’s new work also comes as good news. One half of this percussive duo is Lisa Schonberg, erstwhile member of the now-defunct Explode Into Colors, who I luckily got to see once before they disbanded. In sum, the two bands abide by two tenets I’ve since added to my list of biases in a recent post decrying the work of Ke$ha and Katy Perry, whose sophomore effort Teenage Dream also comes out today.
1. Eschew conventional rock outfit line-ups. Don’t clamor for a bassist or two guitarists if the music doesn’t call for it or if you can’t find instrumentalists willing to commit or with whom you gel. If your instrument is the accordion or you and a friend both want to play drums, let it happen.
2. Women picking up guitars and playing together will always excite me, especially if they’re interested in odd tunings or angular melodies.
Unfortunately, these acts will not be making it to Austin on their dates together. Hopefully they’ll change their minds and add a few dates. But if they’re coming to a venue near you — especially if you’re a blogger named Caitlin who is relocating to Portland — I do hope you check them out.
Inception poster; image courtesy of tripwire-magazine.com
I finally saw Christopher Nolan’s Inception at the Drafthouse last weekend. I intended to view it at the IMAX where I caught a midnight screening of The Dark Knight, which preceded an ill-timed traffic jam on the upper deck of I-35. Fresh from witnessing Heath Ledger’s terrifying performance as the Joker, I feared imminent doom. Luckily, the bottleneck was caused by a minor car accident that left both parties unharmed.
But as I filed in for Friday’s 10:30 showing, I wondered if the movie would live up to its colossal hype. Nolan’s reputation looms over each of his productions, and his mastery of filmic slight of hand promised that, if Inception wasn’t in Memento‘s league, it might still keep good company with The Prestige. A month following its auspicious box office debut, I had my suspicions. The movie is about extractor Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) leading a team who implant the idea that heir Robert Michael Fischer (Cillian Murphy) cede from the empire built by his mogul father Maurice (Pete Postlethwaite). The squad is employed by businessman Saito (Ken Wantanabe), who represents its chief competitor.Dana Stevens’s tentative write-up was my first alarm, as was the Oscar buzz generated amongst fanboys that Snarky’s Machine noted in her review.
Nonetheless, I was intrigued. Caitlin at Dark Room raved about it, arguing that it bested The Matrix. Pioneer film theorists David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson cataloged many of the movie’s intriguing ideas. Capitalizing on the fervent anticipation of Mad Men‘s fourth season,Pop Watch noted that Inception is essentially telling the same story as AMC’s flagship melodrama (the post also linked to Michael Newman’s blog entry about how the series functions as an allegory for Matthew Weiner’s anxieties over the creative process).
But after all that chatter, what did I think about Inception? Eh. It was okay. The visuals were captivating and the storyline was relatively accessible. I think it’s more of an interesting movie to talk about than watch, though the 140 minutes flew by more briskly than I had anticipated.
I had reservations about Ellen Page playing an architect named Ariadne, but I bought her as a grad student whose speech never overshadows her fancy kerchiefs. Her scenes with mastermind Cobb lack air, but that’s just as much DiCaprio’s fault. Their characters display an intimate connection. Ariande feels comfortable enough with Cobb to utter the movie’s most overtly feminist line when asking of his inability to let go of his wife’s death ”Do you think you can create a prison of memories to lock her in? Do you think that’s going to contain her?” But both overuse a knit brow to connote a wellspring of emotion while conveying very little. Though I concur with Stevens on preferring DiCaprio in lighter fare over attempts at Serious Acting, a Nolan picture tends to ensure labored acting.
If only we were this fun and easy-going in our movie; image courtesy of socialitelife.celebuzz.com
Joseph Gordon Levitt has moments as point man Arthur, particularly in the breath-taking zero gravity sequence. Saito and chemist Yusef (Dileep Rao) are given little to do beyond step out of the spotlight for the all-white principal cast. The only person clearly having a good time is forger Eames, who extracts information by convincingly becoming other people, including a flirty blonde who chats up Fischer. Tom Hardy mines the role’s seductive and queer camp potential, purring like a naughty cat who licked up all the cream.
Oh, darling -- it is all about Tom Hardy; image courtesy of nydailynews.com
Caitlin believed the main plot of engineering familial and corporate breach to be predictable, but I found its B-story to be its most obvious flaw. Cobb cannot shake the spectre of his dead wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), whose name literally means “bad” in her native French. Mal isn’t so much a psychologically damaged woman whose destructive actions in Cobb’s unconscious contrast with her sweet nature in life. Rather, she plays as a manifestation of feminist film theory’s complaints against cinema’s conception of women and its applications of psychoanalytic thought via the scopophilic gaze. Cotillard does what she can with the role, but it feels like she’s representing, say, Tania Modeleski’s criticisms in The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. This may have been Nolan’s intention, but by rendering Mal as an archetypical femme fatale who Cobb must overcome, he only enforces the notion that female movie characters are not fully realized as complex people but instead mere ideations from the auteur’s mind.
That said, I do find the employment of Édith Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien” to be particularly fascinating. It remains one of Piaf’s best-known tunes. Though she reportedly dedicated her 1960 recording to the French Foreign Legion during the Algerian War, the song is now thought of as a reflection on the singer’s dramatic biography, akin to Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” It is also Inception‘s unofficial theme. Nolan continually referred to it when writing the script and hoped to put it in the movie. It serves as the squad’s alarm clock, bringing them back to consciousness following a mission and implying the emotional objectivity required in the work of hampering with other people’s dreams. Composer Hans Zimmer also threaded the song’s cadence throughout his overbearing score.
Cotillard as Piaf; image courtesy of guardian.co.uk
For me, it is also evidence that Cobb is still haunted by his wife. The song hails Mal’s French heritage, as well as her fearless break with reality. The song’s literal meaning can be read against Cobb’s feelings of regret and culpability toward the death of his wife. It also telegraphs Cotillard. In 2008, Cotillard won the Academy Award for Best Actress. She portrayed Piaf in Olivier Dahan’s La vie en rose, beating out Ellen Page in her titular performance in Juno and putting her in America’s A-list. Apparently Cotillard’s involvement in Inception was a happy accident. Initially after the actress was cast, Nolan intended to pick another song but Zimmer convinced him that the connection wouldn’t distract viewers. In doing so, however, it provided this viewer an infinite loop of interpretation.
The 5.6.7.8s (from left): Drummer Sachiko Fujiyama, bassist Yoshiko Yamaguchi, and guitarist Yoshiko "Ronnie" Fujiyama who has a tattoo on her arm that says "Teenage Queen Delinquent"; image courtesy of sushibandit.com
Today’s post is dedicated to Caitlin, a friend of mine from graduate school who runs the blog Dark Room. After living in College Station for a couple of years, she and her husband are moving back to the Pacific Northwest. Caitlin taught me quite a few things as a friend and colleague. Perhaps her largest contribution is my appreciation of horror film, which I didn’t have when we first met. Going into our master’s program, I was strongly of the mind that horror is resistant, if not entirely antithetical, toward feminism. But Caitlin, who is both a feminist and horror aficionado, taught me the power of looking and interpreting the genre from a feminist perspective. Like me, she’s a huge music fan and champions the work of independent female musicians. Thus, it seems fitting that the last time we’ll see each other for the immediate future is at the Girls Rock Camp Austin showcase (tomorrow at the HighBall — doors open at noon). In tribute, I thought I’d do a brief write-up on The 5.6.7.8s’ cameo in Kill Bill, Volume One. Grrrl rock and Quentin Tarantino? I can’t think of a better pairing to honor her.
The story goes that director Tarantino was introduced to the band while frequenting a Japanese clothing store and had to track them down. Eventually, he put them in the first installment of his two-part revenge epic about a bride (Uma Thurman) wronged by her groom (David Carradine), with whom she used to work for as a member of his crime syndicate, the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. In order to seek justice, the bride must slaughter the entire organization. While the second volume is more meditative in its focus on the couple’s final showdown, the first half depicts her picking off her former work associates, employing a myriad of genres for each vignette. It culminates in a battle between the Bride and former DIVA O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), who runs a criminal organization in Tokyo. But in order to battle O-Ren, the Bride must first take out her crew in a bar where The 5.6.7.8s are playing.
As you can tell from the band’s sound, cultural references, and performance of The Ikettes’ “I’m Blue,” the Japanese outfit is heavily influenced by 60s Americana, particularly girl groups and surf rock. As I’ve discussed in previous entries, similar interests are shared with Japanese characters in movies like Mystery Train and Linda Linda Linda. But I wonder about the feedback loop between Japan’s cultural fascination with American rock music and 20th century youth culture and Americans’ interest in some of their pop culture being appropriated and reinterpreted by members of an Eastern nation.
Obviously, this exchange can sometimes perpetuate Western assumptions of a cutesy, monolithic Japanese culture heavily rooted in American narcissism. So I feel a bit uneasy when interpreting the band’s appearance in the movie. It could easily be argued that they’re window-dressing, as well as means of authenticating an outsider’s conceptualization of what a “real” izakaya must be like. Yet I still feel that their sound is interpreting American rock music in a way analogous to Tarantino’s celebration of Japanese popular culture, particularly martial arts movies and anime. It may not be an easy pairing, but The 5.6.7.8s rock it out.
Florence Marr, played by Greta Gerwig, another woman who should not be dating Roger Greenberg; image courtesy of collider.com (click on the image for Gerwig's interview)
This weekend was unexpectedly packed. Two friends came in from out of town, another turned 29, two more went on a 100-mile bike tour to Shiner, and Karaoke Underground continued to give folks something to do in Austin on the first Saturday of each month. On Friday, Kristen at Act Your Age and I accompanied Caitlin from Dark Room to a screening of Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg.
I had many reservations going in. Despite being a fan of Kicking and Screaming, The Squid and the Whale, and Margot at the Wedding, I wasn’t sure how game I’d be for a movie about Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller), a once-promising musician who now does little beyond carpentry and a stint at a mental hospital. He turns 41 while house-sitting in Los Angeles for his more successful brother, who is on vacation with his family in Vietnam. He also meets his brother’s 25-year-old assistant, Florence Marr (Greta Gerwig), a driftless young woman with whom he shares a regrettable dalliance.
The Science of Sleep came to mind as I read about the movie around this manipulative narcissist who is too blind to realize that his supposed honesty toward others prevents him from any acknowledgement of his considerable flaws and attaining actual intimacy with anyone. In short, Roger Greenberg’s fixation on his own neuroses keep him from actually getting to know who he or anyone else is. He’s a terrible human being. To make matters worse for this feminist music geek, he uses mixes and obscure pop songs like Albert Hammond’s “It Never Rains in Southern California” as tools of seduction. He also probably wears his Steve Winwood “Back In the High Life” t-shirt with a sense of unironic irony, which further pisses me off. I wasn’t sure if I could watch a movie about him (Jessica Grose’s assessment didn’t help matters). What’s more, I don’t know if I could forgive a movie that made him likeable or redeemable.
Which is to say that I’m not sure I can forgive this movie. I did like James Murphy’s score, which sounds more like the now-fashionable hypnagogic pop of LA acts like Ariel Pink and Nite Jewel (whose members made a cameo in the climactic party scene) than anything LCD Sounsystem has done and is assuredly a way to orient the distinctly East Coast Baumbach within a West Coast context. On the one hand, the movie takes great pains to make Greenberg appear to be a monster (it is a Baumbach movie, after all). Friends (usually erstwhile) constantly voice how despicable and impossible he is.
Yet the movie centers around Greenberg’s actions and ridiculous, hateful monologues. It also suggests that comely young women, including his neice, find his misanthropy somehow attractive even as he continues to dismiss them. Furthering concern, I was disheartened that some dudes in the audience were charmed by Greenberg, especially the stocky hipster seated the row in front of us who habitually twirled his moustache.
What do you see in this guy?; image courtesy of eastbayexpress.com
In addition, the movie does suggest in its final shot that he’s capable of change — in this case, the ability to love. Kristen made an interesting comparison to Punch-Drunk Love, a movie about an angry and depressed man unexpectedly finding love with a shy woman who pursues him, which she felt Greenberg was something of an inversion. For me, I had a hard time understanding why anyone would feel this way about the protagonist, though mumblecore Gerwig does an exceptional job rendering Marr as a sad young woman with no direction, few financial prospects, and little self-confidence.
As Natasha Vargas-Cooper and Julie Klausner discussed in their conversation about the movie, Marr seems like a woman many of us know. She’s sweet and funny, but places no value in herself. She constantly apologizes for everything, starting every sentence with “I’m sorry.” Like the protagonist in Liz Phair’s “Fuck and Run,” she sleeps with guys simply because they ask her to and she’s too weak to decline. She discredits every personal project and refuses to voice an opinion on anything. She always says “okay” and “you’re right,” even when people (re: Greenberg) are clearly being mean or taking advantage. She’s the kind of girl you have to drive to get an abortion after she lets the wrong guy knock her up. Actually, the movie reveals (spoiler alert) that she’s the kind of girl who gets talked into having a different wrong guy and his college buddy escort her to the clinic. Like her friend Gina (Merritt Wever), Marr frustrates me but also gets my sympathy. Like so many women, she needs feminism.
Marr comes close to asserting herself a few times in the movie, suggesting that she could find the strength to be more than just a doormat. She also suggests, however timidly, that she has talent worth sharing with others. One such instance is her musical performance at a local bar. While she shrugs off the event to Greenberg after their first failed sexual encounter, she sings on stage to her friends, accompanied by another male friend on guitar (who Greenberg assumes she’s fucking). Her music recalls the plaintiveness of Judee Sill, and suggests briefly that perhaps — through music — she might find her voice. Just don’t accept the opportunity to get your boss’s creep brother back in the music business.
Sing it, Florence; image courtesy of jake-weird.blogspot.com
Promo for Times Square; image courtesy of theauteurs.com
A few years back, I became interested in Allan Moyle’s 1980 feature debut. Times Square stars Robin Johnson and Trini Alvarado as two teenage girls who escape from a mental institution, live on the streets, form a punk band called The Sleez Sisters, drop televisions off buildings, occasionally rule local station WJAD, and creates some underground infamy that anticipates the groundswell Corrine Burns and The Stains would cause two years later. While Moyle was fired by producer Robert Stigwood fired so he could remove explicit lesbian content and include more musical sequences in the film, the director later went on to make music geek teen pics like Pump Up the Volume and Empire Records. But his first movie was praised by Kathleen Hanna. While Hanna and I disagree on the quality of Floria Sigismondi’s The Runaways, I’m always willing to give the riot grrrl pioneer the benefit of the doubt. Plus, that soundtrack is a beast.
I saw Times Square two summers ago with a bunch of friends, including Caitlin at Dark Room and Kristen at Act Your Age. I remember a few things surprised me upon initial viewing.
1) Despite cuts, this movie is still explicitly queer. It centers on a female friendship that is romantic and liberating for both parties. And drifter Nicky Marotta, wonderfully rendered by Johnson, is assuredly a young lesbian who is starting to formulate how her sexuality shapes her identity. She often does this alone and with Patti Smith’s “Pissing in the River” rumbling in her broken heart, but sometimes with enough room to let in Pamela Pearl (Alvarado), the daughter of a politician she meets in a mental institution and creates a life with on the mean streets.
2) Girls like Johnson don’t star in movies much anymore, which is a shame. Little Darlings came out the same year. Kristy McNichol’s Angel Bright may have been looking to get laid by a boy in the movie, but she reads to me as a baby butch.
3) New York City doesn’t look like this anymore, and I’d love to read a history of how the city and mediated representations of it changed from the 1960s to the 2000s. In the 1980s, the city continued to endure escalating crime and drug rates from the decade before, as the area had not yet been gentrified and “cleaned up” to attract tourists. This is something Taxi Driver made central to Travis Bickle’s mental decline and that I hope Mad Men incorporates into the series.
By the time Sex and the City became part of the lexicon, it had. Now teenage characters in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist and New York Minute gallivant around the Big Apple. When at the time of Times Square‘s location shoot and subsequent release, the city was far from being the tween amusement park it would later seem to be. As a matter of fact, Pearl’s father is running on a platform to clean up New York City. Thus, you really get a feel for the danger, vastness, and anonymity of the big city that informs the girls’ existence.
But you also get a sense of solidarity amongst them and other street denizens. While the movie could perpetuate racist stereotypes of predatory people of color serving as crack addicts, pimps, and whores, most of the folks the girls encounter are nice. When Pearl applies for a dancing job at a dive cabaret and refuses to perform topless, the owner (who appears to be Hispanic) praises her on being classy and holding on to some mystery.
However, I don’t want to overemphasize the treatment of race in the movie. For the most part, people of color are depicted as supportive, but they are usually without names and relegated to the background. In the rare instances that they aren’t, they can sometimes be viewed as siding with the establishment. Hence how I read Anna Maria Horsford’s Rosie Washington, who is Marotta’s case worker. While Washington understands that Marotta, whose parents are M.I.A., has been failed by the system, she’s still in cahoots with Pearl’s father and writes a letter to his daughter urging her to part ways with her “unstable” new friend.
The girls also have a troubling relationship with people of color. At the beginning of the movie, Marotta rehearses guitar. She sets her amp on the hood of a night club owner’s car. When a Latina matron complains of the noise Marotta’s making, she responds by smashing in the owner’s headlights. She’s also rude to Washington. And perhaps most disconcerting, Marotta and Pearl associate Washington with voodoo and proclaim themselves to align with various homophobic and racial epithets in their song “Your Daughter Is One.” Good that they’re pushing back against the systemic oppression they’ve endured. Bad how they’re using language to express it.
I also find Tim Curry’s role as DJ Johnny LaGuardia, who documents the girls’ story and later becomes something of an ally to them. Both girls are fans of his radio program on WJAD. Pearl actually wrote to him about her unhappy home life prior to being institutionalized, signing the letter as “Zombie Girl.” Pointedly, he insinuates himself as their ally. At first, I thought I was projecting those feelings onto LaGuardia because Curry has one of the most sinister voices I’ve ever heard. But when LaGuardia shows up at the girls’ flat with a bottle of vodka for Pearl and an interest in how “wild” Marotta is, his cover’s blown.
Upon review, I’m basically of the same opinion of it as I was before. This movie is poignant, though I do wish the original footage that documented the girls’ romance was kept intact. I also wish Marotta wasn’t depicted as crazy and escorted off at the end, while Pearl watches the mob disperse with her father. But I also have no doubt Marotta will escape once more, perhaps with Pearl by her side. She may prompt dozens of other girls to follow in her path and pen their own rock anthems.
Lizzy Caplan, Hot Tub Time Machine's manic pixie dream girl; image courtesy of tv.yahoo.com
Last week, Caitlin at Dark Room sent me an e-mail about how Lizzy Caplan plays a music journalist in Hot Tub Time Machine. As the subject header referred to her as a manic pixie dream girl, I didn’t hold out much hope for any development of her character. Caitlin had earlier mentioned on her blog that she was planning on seeing Hot Tub Time Machine despite being pretty positive that it was just another dudes night out picture because Crispin Glover is in it.
I was planning on seeing it because it’s called Hot Tub Time Machine. It’s the best genius-stoopid movie title I’ve heard since Snakes on a Plane, which I also saw during it’s theatrical run. Matter of fact, I was in Raccoons on Space Shuttle,one of Mascot Wedding‘s very funny shorts. See if you can spot me. I’ll help you out: I’m wearing a wig and I’m “acting.”
As for the movie itself, it brings time travel into another jerky bro movie, with all of its anxieties about homosexuality, women, and race where a bunch of sad sacks somehow (undeservedly) come out ahead in the end. I won’t defend my viewing of it apart from it was a dumb comedy with some silly moments that was fun to watch while drinking a beer and eating a burger with my friends.
Except there is the music geek aspect of it, which I actually wasn’t aware of until Caitlin told me. And Lizzy Caplan played one of my favorite characters in Mean Girls and I wish I saw her in more things.
Lizzy Caplan as Janice Ian in Mean Girls; image courtesy of fanpop.com
Caplan plays April, a journalist for Spin Magazine, once the cooler alternative to the more established Rolling Stone, as well as an up-start by the movie’s timeline, which flashes back from the present to 1986, a year after the publication’s founding. She’s on assignment covering Poison, who are headlining a music festival at the ski lodge where the group of friends are staying. You know she’s cool because she clearly hates Poison, sneaks into unoccupied cabins, and is wearing a floppy hat with a flower cut-out.
But mainly, she’s just the wacky love interest for John Cusack’s Adam. She’s on board with this stranger’s story about being transported to the past, despite appearing at once too old for her to the audience and too young for her in the story’s timeline. She also refuses to give Adam her number in hopes that their paths will cross someday, which is basically the plot to Serendipity, a romantic comedy Cusack starred in with Kate Beckinsale.
Which brings us to Cusack’s function in the movie. While Rob Corddry steals the show as insufferable cad Lou and Craig Robinson winningly underplays Nick, it’s really Cusack’s movie. In addition to serving as one of the movie’s producers, long-time friend and co-writer Steve Pink directs what is ultimately an homage to Cusack’s Better Off Dead.
Plus, having Cusack play a character who falls in love with a music geek really only serves to bolster his own on-screen persona as a music-savvy underdog. This is an image that’s been perpetuated at least as far back as when Lloyd Dobler lifted a boombox blaring Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” to win back Diane Court in Say Anything . . .
John Cusack in Say Anything. . .; image courtesy of accesshollywood.com
While this image has carried on into movies like Grosse Pointe Blank and High Fidelity, at least his love interests in those movies were peer music geeks and interesting women. We get a female music geek in Hot Tub Time Machine. Pity we don’t actually find out anything about her.
Earlier this week, Caitlin at Dark Room posted a couple of mixes from her college radio days on Facebook and asked for her friends to contribute some of their playlists. This seemed like an interesting project with findings worthy of disclosure here, especially since I often make casual reference to my tenure as a deejay at KVRX.
I started in the fall of 2002 at the beginning of my sophomore year. A fan of Allan Moyle’s Pump Up the Volume, the urge to have my own radio show was planted during my freshman year of college. My friend Brooke had a show at KANM called “Weakdays” and knowing she could program a show inspired me to give it a go. We both liked The Dismemberment Plan, we both could read PSAs aloud, and I felt confident that I could master the switchboard too.
A few days before the semester began, I filled out an application and secured a timeslot for Saturday mornings at 9 a.m. As KVRX shares its frequency with KOOP and switched over from FM to RealAudio, I felt better knowing I had the entire first semester to iron out any kinks my show may have without being able to get picked up in someone else’s car. The Internet still felt very private at the time, even though RealAudio could get picked up in another part of the world instead of inside the condensed hub of Central Austin.
I named my show “Hang the DJ,” a reference to The Smiths’ ”Panic.” As the song was a modern rock radio staple, the program title should be an indication that I was half-hearted in my attempt at becoming a fan. A year later, I’d acknowledge that I just couldn’t get into them as I was developing my show. Come spring 2003, I changed the name of my show to “Cheesecake or Fugu,” a title that came to me in the shower when I was remembering a review I’d read in high school of Cibo Matto’s Viva! La Woman! that compared their sound to the Japanese delicacy.
Listening to tapes from that time, apart from their lo-fi charm and developing fluency with related technology, two things strike me: 1) I wasn’t yet comfortable talking into a microphone and 2) I don’t listen to a lot of that stuff anymore. Listening to a November 2002 broadcast, it’s surprising to me how many dude singer-songwriters and indie bands I played. Clem Snide, Death Cab for Cutie, and Richard Buckner? Pass. Belle and Sebastian and Okkervil River? Not against it, but wouldn’t fight someone to defend their merits. Some of these acts were indicative of the buzz they generated, as well as the mercurial nature of being of-the-moment. Remember when we were supposed to care about Ben Kweller and The Warlocks? You don’t? Me either.
Of course, that these broadcasts seem foreign to me now is largely the point. During the first six months at KVRX, I hadn’t locked into what I liked yet. I was trying to fit in, catching up to just how much music I now had at my disposal. In all candor, the first six months at KVRX were terrifying to me. The office itself was scary, as it was usually peopled with oft-bespectacled dudes huddled together and volleying well-considered, often incendiary opinions about obscure music. It was full-on High Fidelity. Several of these guys would later become my friends. But at the time I was 19 and not ready to share that I had just heard of the Mountain Goats. So I kept quiet.
Incidentally, KVRX was something of a meet market that seemed particularly inclined toward heterosexual activity. Lots of hook-ups, some of which resulted in marriages or at least amicable splits. It makes sense, as obsessive, esoteric types tend to gravitate toward one another. Young girls can be especially vulnerable and I was no exception. I dated two deejays during my first year at KVRX. Looking back on that time with a more nuanced understanding of feminist politics, I feel weird and more than a little embarrassed about the gendered power dynamics of romantic pursuit. But I also found my partner there, who I formed a relationship with on more egalitarian terms.
I’d like to think that dating fellow deejays had less to do with setting me apart than the talent I developed during my time at KVRX: writing reviews. As deejays needed to log four hours of volunteer time each month in order to keep their shows, drafting reviews for new releases was a great opportunity, especially since the station would receive hundreds of new albums each month. A review for one full-length album translated into a volunteer hour. I averaged about three reviews a week, thus gaining awareness of several artists as well as the output of the labels they were signed to. Through this, I fell in love with artists like Broadcast and Electrelane. As a journalism major, this acclimated me to a constant writing schedule. Through reviews, I developed my musical preferences and found my voice as a writer. And people started noticing my reviews, even occasionally printing them in The Call Letter, KVRX’s ’zine.
But nothing got me better acquainted with music than putting together a weekly show. And while many deejays had specialty shows where they focused on particular genres like death metal, hardcore, or the blues, my show was decidedly free-form. At KVRX, free-form shows abided by the following requirements: each hour of free-form programming had to feature artists from five genres, two Texas artists, and five selections from the new bin, where the most recent reviewed offerings were kept. In addition, KVRX maintains a strict “none of the hits” policy. During my time, that meant that any artist who received even moderate success on any mainstream music network or radio station within the past ten years could not be played. Some deejays found these sanctions to be restrictive, but having these limitations motivated me to dig deeper and listen more broadly.
I also learned how I wanted my show to be perceived conceptually. I made sure the music was continuous, even going so far as to select instrumentals to talk over while I ran through my playlist, which I’d update after a three-song set. I also tried to vary songs from genre to genre, pairing Tom Zé’s ”To” with Deerhoof’s “Milkman.”
I was also fond of layering songs into one another, overlapping the final moments of Sack and Blumm’s “Baby Bass Buss” with the intro to Le Tigre’s “Hot Topic.” I made sure that song selection went with the time of day, which once I got on FM was always in the evenings, particularly during safe harbor so I could play hip hop and Gravy Train!!!!. I also tried to bridge the content of my show with promos, tags, and the programs that bookended mine. Before I got to Raymond Williams in graduate school, I was familiar with the concept of flow.
I also became aware of my voice as an on-air talent. Though some deejays mumble or try to take focus away from themselves, hearing my voice bandy words about (often to myself) made me cognizant of articulation, elocution, and tone. There was also a performative quality to presenting an on-air persona as I intoned an idealized version of my natural speaking voice. It also skeeved me out when some dudes would call in to inform me of the supposed sexiness of my voice. I got really good at telling strangers to fuck off and hanging up on people mid-conversation. Unfortunately, these instances were fairly common amongst my female peers and some endured more serious harassment.
BTW, kudos to the dude callers who were supportive and respectful. Thanks to the nice lady callers as well.
Oddly enough, this awareness did not lead me toward doing a female-only show. I dabbled in it occasionally. I did a women’s issue news program one summer with a girl named Kelly I met when we were cast in The Vagina Monologues. I briefly took over a friend’s female-only show when she quit during her first semester in the UT American Studies master’s program. At the time, I found doing a female-only show limiting. Now I think I’d have to do a free-form female-only show. Why not pair Umm Kulthum with Dessa?
I started graduate school in fall 2006. I thought about returning to KVRX after about a year off from undergrad. But I felt like it was another group of kids’ turn. Also, I simply didn’t have the time to devote to a weekly show and its related responsibilities. When I applied to PhD programs, the schools’ radio stations were a determining factor and will continue to be when I reapply.
In the meantime, a podcast series is appealing to me, especially after I started listening to Veronica Ortuño‘s “Cease to Exist“. Rest assured that when I do start another radio program, all broadcasts will be well archived so I can dig ‘em up and tune in again.
Jean Craddock "interviewing" Bad Blake; image courtesy of filmreviewonline.com
I caught Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart earlier this week, along with the underwhelming Bright Star and heavy-handed Food Inc.. Unless I sneak in a matinée viewing of Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, I should be done with my Oscar viewing for tomorrow night’s ceremony, which I will watch with a few friends at home. Pile my plate with helpings of “A Single Manicotti,” I’m uh, serious, man.
So, back to Crazy Heart. As I mentioned in a comment I left on Caitlin at Dark Room‘s Oscar round-up, I thought this one was pretty boring. Very “for your consideration,” but with ultimately low stakes. Washed-up country singer Bad Blake has a chance at redemption, if he can just manage not to forfeit it all for another bottle of booze. Will he turn “Good”? Who cares really? It’s a victory lap for Jeff Bridges, who is predictably great as Blake. He’s a lock for Best Actor, though I really want Colin Firth to win for his devastating performance in Tom Ford’s A Single Man. If they gave Oscars to comedic performances, I’d have elected for Bridges to win for The Big Lebowski.
One actor I was pleasantly surprised about was Colin Farrell, who plays Blake’s more successful protegé Tommy Sweet. In a part that could have been one-dimensional, Farrell mines a lot of pathos for a character caught between his artistic integrity, conscience, and responsibilities as a career artist at a major label. My only complaint with Sweet is that his music is too similar to Blake’s. The lack of differentiation makes sense, as Ryan Bingham, the late Steve Bruton, and T-Bone Burnett wrote the songs for both characters. Yet if Sweet is meant to represent Nashville’s commercial sensibilities, I’d like more of a musical contrast between the two. Keith Urban is closer to how I imagine Sweet really sounds.
But my real problem is with Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Jean Craddock. It isn’t to do with her performance, which is nominated for Best Supporting Actress. It’s purely a screenwriting problem, one I sensed would be there going in. I hate when my suspicions are confirmed.
Craddock plays a music journalist who is trying to get an interview with Blake. But her occupation is of little concern, as she’s in bed with him after their second meeting. We know very little about Craddock besides her profession, her residence in Santa Fe, her status as a single mother to a young son named Buddy, and that she’s made some bad decisions about men. We never learn what led her to music journalism. We actually never learn what music she might like beyond a passing comment about Lefty Frizzell that’s meant to prove to Blake that she’s knowledgeable enough to interview this particular fallen country legend. And we never get a sense of what being a music journalist means to her, though we do discover that she moves on to another publication at the end of the movie. Basically, she’s just Blake’s love interest, regardless of how Gyllenhaal tries to spin it.
Being cast as the supporting character to the male lead is de rigueur for actresses, and Gyllenhaal is no exception (see also The Dark Knight). Quality pictures are vulnerable to this trap. Contrast Gyllenhaal’s Jean with her leading role in Laurie Collyer’s 2008 indie feature Sherrybaby, where Gyllenhaal also plays a single mother. However, there she’s the protagonist and struggling to overcome addiction and earn back the custody of her daughter. I haven’t seen Sherrybaby yet, but I wonder if it does a better job developing Gyllenhaal’s character than the rushed, sketchy Crazy Heart.
But my biggest problem is with Craddock’s lack of professional integrity. Now, I’ve never worked at a publication. Thus I can’t say for certain whether journalists have engaged intimately with interview subjects. Assuredly, some have. But my journalism degree and sense of ethics assure me that it’s a clear breach in conduct. It could have been avoided or at the very least should have been made by Craddock with more internal conflict toward her personal life and professional aspirations. This isn’t to say that Craddock doesn’t value her job. Rather, I think it’s that screenwriter/director Cooper doesn’t value Craddock’s characterization. It’s all about Blake, and that’s too bad.
For today’s entry, I consider two scenes from Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar, her second feature and an adaptation of Alan Warner’s 1995 novel of same name. I wanted to see it for these reasons.
1. My friend Kevin’s birthday was last week, and as he studies Scottish media culture and hipped me to Ramsay when we were in school together, it seemed a fitting tribute.
2. My friend Curran thinks highly enough of this film and its titular protagonist that he named his cat after her.
3. The AV Club put this one in the New Cult Canon. In fact, they regarded lead actress Samantha Morton’s work here so much that they considered it one of the last decade’s best screen performances.
4. I haven’t seen Morton in much past a few music videos (ex: U2′s “Electrical Storm“) and movies I didn’t like (Minority Report) or felt torn about (Synecdoche, New York). But I like her and thinks she possesses one of the most interesting faces.
Samantha Morton as Morvern Callar; image courtesy of daily.greencine.com
As this is Ramsay’s sophomore feature, it is also the second movie of her’s that I’ve seen. I saw Ratcatcher, a surprising and assured debut about working-class Scots trying to endure 1973′s particularly hellish summer. It’s great and I highly recommend seeing it, along with reading Caitlin at Dark Room’s entry on it. But Morvern Callar meant more to me. I had little expectation or preconception going into this movie, but was left haunted and dazzled by it. A wonderful surprise.
Without giving too much away, the movie is about a young woman who is coping with her boyfriend James’s recent suicide. Clearly shellshocked but ambivalent about his death, Callar spends much of the movie figuring out how she feels and what she should do. The caliber of Morton’s performance is evident in how successfully she conveys much of Callar’s conflicting feelings without words. Callar disposes of the body, empties his bank account, and takes her co-worker friend Lanna (Kathleen McDermott) on a trip to Spain. She uses travel as an attempt to clear her head. She’s particularly haunted by two souvenirs James left her: a novel Callar successfully passes off as her own to an interested publishing house, and a mix tape he made for her called “Music For You.”
As we never meet the deceased James Gillespie and thus never learn of his motives, I’ll give the selfish fucker this: he put together a good mix tape. The movie boasts songs by Can, Stereolab, Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, and Broadcast, musical acts that could easily be on a young person’s mix tape (mine, for example). Yet we don’t know whose taste the mix is reflecting. They seem to be songs that reminded James of his relationship with Morvern, but we never learn who influenced who. As one of the last scenes in the movie shows Callar packing a bunch of CDs into a suitcase and leaving the apartment she presumably shared with James, I like to think they shared similar musical taste.
There are several scenes in the movie that show Callar listening to his mix tape. I have selected two particularly arresting ones that work wonderfully with the visuals. It might be easy to read these scenes as James serving as narrator through popular music, but the subjectivity is solely his girlfriend’s.
The first scene is Callar reporting to work at a non-descript supermarket. The accompanying music is Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra’s “Some Velvet Morning.” Shortly after this scene, Callar and her friend leave town.
The next scene is the last one in the movie, accompanied by The Mamas and the Papas’ poignant “Dedicated to the One I Love.” Callar is alone at a rave in some unnamed part of the world. She’s away from her hometown and presumably living on the novel’s advance. She’s alone, though I’m not convinced she’s lonely. Grief is complex, and may not feel like grief at times. However she might be feeling, she can always press rewind and play and start the tape back over again.
