Songs 2007

Here are some songs released in 2007 that I played to death.

Spring and Summer By Fall - Blonde Redhead. I couldn't have been happier that Blonde Redhead hired Alan Moulder to produce their new record 23. As a producer Moulder, more than any band, soundtracked the '90s for me with his work with groups like My Bloody Valentine and Swervedriver. With Moulder's help Blonde Redhead's unholy transmogrification into a one-band shoegaze revival is now complete and I think it's the best work they've ever done.

Why Should I Be Sad - Britney Spears. More Prince than Prince. With Pharell Williams behind the curtain.

Indoor Swimming At The Space Station - Eluvium. 10 minutes of piano, synth and seagulls stirred up into an ambient build without resolution. Completely gorgeous.

Irene - Caribou. Starts out as Sesame Street slow jam, but reveals a sublime pop tune buried under all the '70s PBS warble. Like Boards of Canada producing the Beach Boys.

The Ghost of You Lingers - Spoon. In all the best Spoon tracks, the band arrangements are kept to their most spare, so that when a disembodied effect like a crackle or a shower of reverb gusts by for a few bars, it actually means something. "The Ghost of You Lingers" leaves the band out entirely and makes its point with just a piano, SFX and Brit Daniels' cocky croon.

On Large Amusements - Zoos of Berlin. The EP that this showed up on was a long time coming. (Zoos of Berlin played their first show in 2005, if that gives you any idea of the depths of their perfectionism.) And yet... the EP almost justifies the wait, it's that marvelous. And even more incredible, a really well-realized demo version of this beautiful song has been floating around for over a year, long enough for me to build a severe attachment to it. For the official version, they gutted the thing and changed it all around. It's a much different animal and if you loved the demo like me, odds were against loving the changes. And yet... [insert Italian expression of enthuisasm here]!

My Swag - T.I. "Swag" is short for "swagger" here, but who needs two syllables when one will do? Not T.I. "This is impeccable pimping."

Scream - Timbaland (featuring Keri Hilson). I spent a lot of wasted energy trying to convince friends that some of the tracks on Timbaland's new album Shock Value were the next level. It seemed all the songs I was hot for were the ones written and including guest vocals by Keri Hilson. But my friends couldn't look past the record's atrocities. And there is much to hate on Shock Value, most of which has to do with the really inane lyrics and pseudo-thuggery. Still, Timbaland managed to cram a lot of goodness in between the pandering reaches for crossover success while adding a layer of epic to his already classic sound. He's left Pharell and his protoge, Danja, the post-apocalyptic, empty crunch if his previous productions and moved on to a kind of Phil Spector-goes-third-world smear. I feel that.

Through My Sails - Soulsavers. This track consists of Mark Lanegan (he of indescribable voice) and Will Oldham duetting on a cover of a classic Neil Young tune. I will stop writing now.

Reckoner - Radiohead. Radiohead finally made a song in the shape of my skin. Or at least it feels that way, that's how much I identify with this track. I devoted a rambling blog to it and how much it reminded me of Talk Talk's "New Grass."

Into the Hollow - Queens of the Stone Age. QOTSA are the perpetual heavy. They make a mean brand of metrosexual metal. But walking the metrosexual tightrope is to hover between douchebaggery and emasculation. And, like the over-groomed asshole with too much product in his hair, their records have in the past tended to sound a little too sculpted. Era Vulgaris fixed all that. It sounds pummeled rather than mixed, with all the shades smearing into the color of death by sexy.

Stronger - Kanye West. He didn't sample Daft Punk as much as he appropriated their track, making it seem almost obsolete in the process, like the original had been pre-production for Kanye all along. The balls! Then he made a ridiculous-good video for the thing that was an homage to Akira, the post-nuclear Japanese manga masterpiece and '80s milestone, with Kanye as the psycho-kinetic title character. Clearly, the world is Kanye's for the taking. I'm glad to see him get away from that '70s retro soul sprinkle, even if it means coming to the electro revival a few years late. Dig the way he stutters the chorus lyric: "Nah-nah that-that which don't kill me, can only make me stronger." It's totally next-level in a really effortless and natural way.

I Am Always Waiting - Mobius Band. When I drooled over this song in a blog, I wrote, "Emotionally, it's breakup-song big, the kind of cut you want to listen to when your life feels like plates of massive, tectonic shift. But even in breakups, the tearing is sometimes balanced with adrenaline, and "I Am Always Waiting" strikes that kind of balance."

Pioneer To The Falls - Interpol. I'm not going to lie, I've lost the love for this band. Maybe it was never true love in the first place, only a lusty haze of nostalgia and well-appropriated new wave goth influences. But I swear, if they made more tracks like this, where Ennio Morricone is conjured rather than Joy Division, I could love them for reals. And the bridge is just a goddamn amazing wonder of structural engineering.

Work It Out - RJD2. This is how the learning process went for me: "Hey, that video is pretty cool, the way that guy's making a new dance form using crutches and skater moves... hey, I like that song, too. Is that a Beatles cover? Say what? That's RJD2? But I thought he produced destroyed-sounding hip hop. Where'd he learn to write like that, and who's the guest vocalist then? Say double what?? RJD2 himself?! Man, where was I when this record dropped. For shame. Ima have to check this out.... let's see here.... MOTHERFUCKERS! What is all this tepid internet buzz. Haters! Oh, well, maybe the rest of it doesn't live up to the single.... oh, shit, but oh, how it does. Oh, shit, this record is totally soothing my summer soul." Then I tried to do something about it.


Nature Springs - The Good, The Bad and The Queen. Few songs on this uneven record managed to live up the promise of the band's premise: namebrand britpop frontman (Damon Alburn) turned creator of things next-level (side project Gorillaz's Demon Days is probably producer Danger Mouse's finest hour) hires bass player (Paul Simonon) from The Clash (one of only two white bands to ever play reggae rhythms and still keep their self respect) to anchor the jerky drum brilliance of afrobeat revolutionary (Tony Allen). But "Nature Springs" was actually better than even the idea of all that. It's its own genre; a wistful disembodied sound that reminds you how seasons always seem to be changing in the right direction. When Simonon drops in with his sub rumble, he makes you think the word "bass" was created by smashing "bad" and "ass" together. And Allen? ALLEN! I once lost a whole weekend trying to put his seasick sound into words.

Movies 2007

It's nuts how many great movies were made this year. I'm going back over it to write about my favorites now and my mind is blown all over the walls. (It's very lasagna-y. I want to take a picture of it but I can't summon the motor skills to make it happen. Since my BRAIN IS SPLATTERED ON THE WALL.)

The two closest to my heart were the ones that were brutally philosophical – Sunshine and No Country For Old Men. Each of these seemed to mirror one of my two favorite films in 2006: Sunshine, like The Fountain, was metaphysical, extreme and Eastern; poetry about transcendence hiding out in a mainstream science fiction piece. No Country For Old Men was Eastern too, only instead of using the vacuum of outer space to talk about emptiness, they used the wide, desert vistas of a western. In this way, it was a lot like Australian film The Proposition, based on a genius first script by musician Nick Cave. Between the two, I'm not sure which was more ruthless, but they both had a lot of soul.

I never wrote about The Proposition, though I should have. But here are three posts about the other three, probably the most fun I had writing this year:

Cowboy Taoism: No Country For Old Men

The New Holy: The Fountain

Poetry of Disintegration: Sunshine

So those are the movies that sent me into philospho-geek overdrive. But when I'm not being such an egg head (and when I say egg, think dinosaur egg. My head is... large-ish), I also like to laugh, and I lost my ass in the process of watching Knocked Up and Superbad. I have a pretty filthy sense of humor and so these movies made me feel validated. That is, I am, as a result of their high box office scores and the cultural acceptance this implies, more at peace with my filthy self. Also The Simpsons movie was like a 2-hour episode from one of their more inspired seasons. So, awesome.

The Bourne Ultimatum was, as expected, a great ride. Although it was probably my least favorite of the trilogy. The editing was a little too ADD, which doesn't make for a good view and can blur the effect of the action, a lot of which is hand-to-hand combat. But, as the story tied up the three-film arc of the franchise, it did so while making a really strong, resonant statement about the war, dealing with the folly of loyalty as blind faith. I didn't go in expecting a political message and was surprised at how much I didn't mind, and even admired, it.

Speaking of hyperactive editing, The Departed is one of the most entertaining things ever and owes much of its energy to the way it's cut, high-speed and without fat. I highly recommend listening to this interview with Scorses's long-time, oscar-winning film editor Thelma Shoonmaker.

Tony Gilroy is the writer of the Bourne movies. And this year he also found time to write and direct the somewhat overlooked but unassumingly brilliant George Clooney vehicle Michael Clayton. The opening monologue is delivered in a frantic voice-over by Tom Wilkinson and is such a phenomenal synergy of writing and acting that it was basically worth the price of admission alone. I think Clooney is a serviceable actor and does a fine job, but what sells Michael Clayton is its brainpower. It's two hours of smart. I can't remember a single character on either side of a black and white morality divide in this movie. It's all nuance and ensemble power, rounded out by Wilkinson and Tilda Swinton. If anything, Clooney does a disservice to the material if only by the fact that his immaculately groomed face on the posters suggests a layer of slick that really doesn't exist.

In the world of cartoons, there was Ratatouille and 300. I took my daughter to see Ratatouille, a movie about a rat with fancy airs who rises to the top of the Parisian culinary elite. And, though she claimed to enjoy it, I don't exactly see how. It was pretty talk-y. The Pixar flicks have been going this direction for years but, whereas they used to be movies for kids that can also entertain adults, this was the first one that felt more like a movie for adults that can also entertain kids. It was the most refined thing Pixar has done. Just really immaculate and well-conceived, if a little slow in the pacing department. I think what I liked most, and why I would like to buy it for my daughter, is the way the resolution handles the villain. Without giving anything away, it's with a lot of empathy. To me, the further our children's entertainment material gets away from "us vs. them" ethics and closer to the acceptance of ambiguity that you see in the Japanese animations by Hayao Miyazaki, the better.

300 is basically mythology for professional wrestling fans. I called it a cartoon not because it's soaking in CGI but because of its over-the-top gestures and Rambo-in-a-loincloth aesthetic. And yet... I'm a sucker for Frank Miller's graphic novels and like to think that, in my own way, I live a fairly spartan existence (subsisting only on tortilla chips and V8, NUMEROUS push-ups and stomach crunches, the occasional vanquishing of foes...). So I cheered.

There were movies I liked maybe more for personal reasons. The Darjeeling Limited was probably Wes Anderson's most affecting movie yet. I've always felt that I liked Anderson movies in spite of Anderson and his overly twee art direction. Because of the soul and truly out humor underneath his little hipster dollhouses. But though I couldn't have loved Rushmore or The Royal Tenenbaums more, I had to jump ship with The Life Aquatic. So I was glad to see him put out something so funny and searching again. Although it's hard to tell if I liked it for its own sake, or because I grew up one of three brothers who regularly pounded the shit out of each other and grew slightly estranged over time.

Same goes for The Pursuit of Happyness. It's possible that this movie was overly sentimental or at least, for other reasons, not as good as I thought it was. But the whole single dad thing was too much for my critical faculties to bear and I had no problem loving this movie unconditionally.

And last, but not least, the Latino Invasion. Or, "The Three Amigos," as the press has been calling them. Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo del Toro. Of this spicy trilogy, Iñárritu's Babel was the black sheep; the one with imperfections. I spent the first half of it hating its creator and squirming in my seat. And then an odd thing happened and the film blossomed for me into a colorful, vast thing that I didn't want to end. A lot of that appeal was visual. Iñárritu's pictures have the humidity of Michael Mann but with twice the amount of color. I've seen Iñárritu's last two films, Amores Perros and 21 Grams, which had a lot going for them in the way of guts and energy but, particularly in the case of 21 Grams, were weakened by one-note melodrama. I think that Babel took a lot of steps to avoid that and Iñárritu's by-now cliche technique of colliding disparate storylines into a giant narrative about connectivity survived the transplant to a global scale just fine. Basically, the film talked me into loving it. I'm anxious to see it again.

Cuarón's Children of Men was dystopian perfection. It's set in our near-future, but all of the essential elements of modern life haven't changed. He's saying, the way things are is a recipe for disaster. That the ingredients already exist for a total meltdown; all that remains is for someone to add a little heat and stir the pot. So Cuarón shows us one way that might happen and it's too believable. It's gloomy science fiction based more on plausibility than wishful thinking. Completely unnerving.

And then Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth. A genre unto itself. Half horror, half wistful fairy tale. This is Del Toro's second film to be set during the Spanish Civil War and the resistance to Francisco Franco. It's brutal and vivid and sees the world as both lit with enchantment and caked in a sad mud. A strange half-light emotion that, thinking back on it now a year later, I can't decide if it was more grisly or magical. I think neither.

Cowboy Taoism: No Country For Old Men

[Warning: pretty much non-stop spoilers]

I was telling a friend recently that I'm in this phase where everything seems to be by the same author. By everything, I mean the usual diet of books, music and movies that I stuff my head with (and then meditate to purge). I’ve been a glutton for inspiration my whole life. But whereas I used to dive in blind to the stimulation pool and see what sticks, lately I’ve settled down a bit with it. Gotten more selective. Now more often than not it feels like the art I need comes to me, or like I find what I was meant to find. So maybe I'm just getting better at picking what to spend my time with and the overlap effect I’ve been noticing is just true works confirming other true works. For instance, I'll catch ideas from the Tibetan Book of the Dead in a Bjork song; or a Christmas card I get might resemble a Murakami story I read last year. This has never been more the case than when I watched No Country For Old Men. A spare, violent western, it seemed brimming not with the expected Americana, but the ancient Chinese wisdom of the Tao and the Mexican mysticism of Don Miguel Ruiz, both of which have not left my nightstand this year.

I loved No Country For Old Men, which was directed and adapted for the screen by the Cohen brothers. It’s a ponderous, haunted little movie that chooses what it says carefully, like the drawling Texans that people its story. It has one of the weirdest shapes of any movie I've seen. It's like an hourglass – the beginning and end are meditative, abstract and still, photographed in gorgeous width; but they bookend a violent middle shot in a gruffer, uglier style and told in the familiar film vocabulary of a suspense thriller.

In the exterior sections, we're in the head of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). He’s been a small-town West Texas lawman for most of his life. Now approaching retirement age he finds himself stuck on the idea of violence. How not all crimes are created equal. He remembers the man he sent to the chair for killing a fourteen-year-old-girl and how that man had said there was no passion or reason behind the murder. He had just done it to do it. As Bell looks closer at the horrors he's seen, violence begins to look like a separate entity. More like a force in nature than the actions of free-willed men. He wonders, is the world going to hell like it feels, or is it all a matter of his perception changing? In an opening voiceover:

I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. You can say it's my job to fight it but I don't know what it is anymore. More than that, I don't want to know. Why, a man would have to put his soul at hazard. He would have to say, okay, I'll be part of this world.

Sheriff Bell is facing the classic Problem of Evil. His own Garden of Eden. He’s tempted with the kind of knowledge that changes you. As in, sometimes there are things you can learn that you'll wish you could unlearn. This is the precipice he hovers over. He’s experienced enough life to understand what’s happening to his views and that, if he chooses to see evil, evil will then exist for him. He spends most of the movie choosing not to see – when he’s invited to revisit crime scenes in his county that have become the focus of federal investigations, he declines. But No Country For Old Men is the story of Bell’s wearing down in the face of brutality and by the end of the film, when El Paso’s Sheriff Roscoe tries to describe the acts of the killer they’ve been tracking in psychological terms, Bell has given up trying to think of it as a knowable thing.

Roscoe: He is just a goddamn homicidal lunatic, Ed Tom.
Bell: I’m not sure he’s a lunatic.
Roscoe: Well what would you call him?
Bell: I don’t know. Sometimes I think he’s pretty much a ghost.

This brought to mind things I’ve been reading by Don Miguel Ruiz, the strange Mexican mystic whose brilliant esoteric writings on everything from self esteem to human domestication have poured acid on the world view I spent 31 years constructing. Ruiz was an ambitious and successful surgeon born into a long lineage of faith healers and shamans. A combination of a near-death experience and years of reflection led him to abandon his medical career and begin exploring the spiritual teachings of his family. Of all Ruiz’s insights, the one that spoke to me the most was his view of knowledge. I was raised to believe that integrity was an adherence to your beliefs. But Ruiz comes from a completely different perspective: that your beliefs are the problem. Ruiz thinks that we’re all dreaming little personal dreams that combine into one big “dream of the planet.” He says that most of what we believe – our complex bags of concepts and judgment – is wrong. Is a lie. As a way back to truth he suggests, “don’t believe yourself.” And then adds, “and don’t believe me either.” (That last part especially endears him to me.) He compares knowledge to a parasite, sucking on our power and manipulating us to do things that will produce fear in our minds.

The belief system is a Parasite in our mind. The Parasite is a living being made from ethereal energy. To survive, the Parasite feeds on emotions that are created by the human brain. These are emotions that come from fear, anger, sadness, depression, jealousy and victimhood. The Parasite controls the dream. It creates a dream of fear, a nightmare, in order to control the brain which is the factory of emotions. The Parasite controls the production of those human emotions which are necessary for its survival. At the same time, the brain stops producing the emotions it needs for the growth of the soul, which are the emotions that come from love.

When I picture the parasite, I picture Chigurh.

It's impossible to think about No Country For Old Men without conjuring its psychopathic, walking bloodbath Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). The grim image of the pale face and raw-red eyes beneath his sissy pegboy haircut will always be the soul and symbol of the film’s bleak story. Chigurh is a professional hunter of men who is sicked on the trail of a wayward bag of cash and the unlucky hayseed who found it, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin). Though technically Chigurh is a professional because gets paid for his dirty work, professional concerns are beside the point. Chigurh is murder. His assignment provides a kind of excuse and opportunity for his rage as it pours unchecked over the practical concerns of the mission. When Chigurh kills, as he does frequently and unstoppably, he does it in an unblinking, steely manner. Like a flesh-and-blood Terminator. But what’s most unsettling is that Chigurh’s machine-like efficiency is offset by watery eyes, which allude to some kind of human frailty. He doesn’t seem heartless as much as unwell.

The Cohen Brothers never bother to explain Anton Chigurh. He is a terrible thing without context. He enters the story from out of nowhere and departs the same way he came in, leaving a trail of carnage along the way. Because the storytellers frame this against Bell’s crisis of perception, it has the effect of making Chigurh seem conjured. A figment of Bell’s fear, a shadow self. (It’s interesting that Bell is called Ed Tom by his friends, which, when spoken in a Texas accent sounds nearly identical to Anton.) Many reviewers of the film described Chigurh as a kind of Angel of Death, a fatal incarnation that is beyond good and evil. But the film goes to great lengths to show Chigurh's humanity – we see him sewing himself up after a gun fight, or picking a petty argument with a gas station attendant. I see Chigurh as being closer to Ruiz's parasite of knowledge. Chigurh is not amoral. He has his reasons for what he does, a code. Only, he can't see that his logic is infected. And like all sick logic, his has a measure of self awareness that never goes anywhere. Sartre said that we actually hate our free will because it's an enormous burden. And Chigurh hates his. He's always trying to get around it, using coin tosses to decide the fate of his victims or making speeches about the nature of chance. Just before he executes Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), they have this exchange:

Chigurh: Let me ask you something. If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
Wells: Do you have any idea how goddamn crazy you are?
Chigurh: You mean the nature of this conversation?
Wells: I mean the nature of you.

Wells can see through the holes in Chigurh's system, which is belief posing as anti-belief. He calls Chigurh crazy, but he doesn't mean that Chigurh is acting without reason. He means that Chigurh's knowledge is so sick that it's now completely devouring Chigurh the organism and everything he touches. Something which is immediately obvious to anybody Chigurh comes across. Lewellyn's wife, Carla Jean, who gets the Chigurh "treatment" at the end of the film, says, "I knowed you was crazy when I saw you settin' there." Carla Jean stands up to Chigurh by refusing to play his coin toss game. She sees that he is only trying to avoid taking responsibility for his actions by pretending that none of us has free will. But Carla Jean thinks, what is the point of pretending that the coin toss has any power when Chigurh created the game in the first place?

I have only one spiritual friend. I think of him this way because he’s the only one who, like me, seems to believe in everything and nothing. Last year he left me his copy of the Tao Teh Ching, a very old book of spiritual Chinese poetry and madness. This friend swears by the Tao and I'm starting to come around myself. As far as I can tell it works on a couple of levels, one as a practical guide to leadership, with lots of mentions of what a Sage would and wouldn't do. But then it goes deeper, riffing on things like Emptiness and Essence in a nearly incomprehensible prose style that hovers on the edges of rationality. It says things like, “Between Heaven and Earth there seems to be a bellows.” The Tao wants us to give up striving, and to be more like nature. One of its best points is about not creating problems where they didn't exist before. You could apply this to the rot and ruin of knowledge. But the Tao comes at it from a more tangible angle.

By not exalting the talented you will cause the people to cease from rivalry and contention.
By not prizing goods hard to get, you will cause the people to cease from robbing and stealing.
By not displaying what is desirable, you will cause the people's hearts to remain undisturbed.

I think the Tao is talking about the creation of false needs. It’s saying that it is possible to create a problem out of thin air.

More Ruiz:

In the mind, we create a whole picture in this bubble of illusion. The mind thinks it has the need for food, water, shelter, clothing, sex. But the mind has no needs at all. No physical needs. The mind doesn’t need food, doesn’t need oxygen, doesn’t need water, doesn’t need sex at all. How do we know this is true? When your mind says, “I need food,” you eat and the body is completely satisfied. But your mind still thinks it needs food. You keep eating and eating and you cannot satisfy your mind with food because that need is not real. The need to cover your body is another example. Yes, your body needs to be covered because the wind is too cold or the sun is too hot. But it’s your body that has the need, and it’s so easy to satisfy the need. When your need is in the mind you can open the closet and it’s full of clothes, but your mind isn’t satisfied. What does it say? “I have nothing to wear.”

No Country For Old Men is saying something about the problems of knowledge, both in the abstract, as Bell wrestles with perception, and in the physical temptations of the senses. I can think of at least three instances in the film where characters are presented with the sudden possibility of money and in all three situations there is instant corruption; a need is created that, seconds before, didn’t even exist:

Lewellyn is out hunting and comes across the site of a drug deal turned massacre. It leads him to a suitcase of money and he takes it, though he knows better and that whoever owns that money is certainly going to come looking for it. Still, the possibility of becoming an instant millionaire is now a “need” for him that trumps all common sense and leads him to put his life at risk. Later, he stumbles, bloody and desperate after his battle with Chigurh, into three teenagers coming back across the bridge from Mexico. He offers one of them money for their shirt, so he can sneak past the border without drawing attention to himself. It’s far more money than the shirt is worth but then, when Lewellyn also asks for one of their half-finished beers to use as a prop, the guy holding the beer tries to milk Lewellyn for more money. And finally, near the film’s finale, when Chigurh emerges in a daze from his car wreck, a bone sticking out of his arm, he mirrors Lewellyn by offering one of two boys who approach him on bikes a hundred dollar bill for his shirt so he can make a sling. Once Chigurh is out of sight, the boys instantly begin fighting about the money, though neither of them had started out on their bike ride expecting it.

The cat and mouse game that Lewellyn and Chigurh play, trying to blast each other to bits across the towns of West Texas, is extremely gripping. But I don't think it is so just for entertainment purposes. We are supposed to take Lewellyn’s side, watching him run for his life as he struggles to keep a bag of money that just happened to come across his path, to satisfy a false need. Lewellyn’s drama, in this sense, was conjured out of thin air. But we all do this and so we identify. The thing about false needs is that they consume our attention and, as the film builds to a violent climax we nearly forget about Sheriff Bell and his ruminations on evil. They seem beside the point. We just want to see if Lewellyn wins. And this is the setup for the most jarring and confusing aspect of the movie. The narrative is suddenly ripped out from underneath us. Lewellyn is killed in a shootout with Mexican bounty hunters. Not only does it have nothing to do with Chigurh, we don’t even get to see it. We only catch a few glimpses of the aftermath through Bell’s eyes. To the viewer, who is by now completely invested, as well as trusting in the conventions of film enough to believe a more linear resolution was coming, it’s extremely frustrating. It’s as if the Cohen brothers are saying, it was never real anyway. Lewellyn’s plight, like knowledge, had a power over us that we allowed.

And then we’re back in Bell’s head as he visits his brother-in-law Ellis, an invalid living in a desert cabin. Ellis used to be a Sheriff’s deputy and lost the use of his legs from a gunshot wound. Bell mentions that the man who shot him just died in prison and asks what he would have done if the man had gotten out.

Ellis: I don't know. Nothin'. Wouldn't be no point to it.
Bell: I'm kindly surprised to hear you say that.
Ellis: All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin’ out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.

What Ellis is acknowledging is that vengeance is a problem of knowledge. It won’t change what happened. It can only satisfy a mental need, not a real one. Being a lawman goes far back in Bell and Ellis’s family and, in Ellis’s mind, the violence that to Bell seems to be getting more real every day is nothing new.

Ellis: Your daddy ever tell you how Uncle Mac came to his reward?
Sheriff Bell shrugs.
Ellis: Shot down on his own porch there in Hudspeth County. There was seven or eight of 'em come to the house. Wantin’ this and wantin’ that. Mac went in and got his shotgun but they was way ahead of him. Shot him down in his own doorway. Aunt Ella run out and tried to stop the bleedin. Him tryin’ to get hold of the shotgun again. They just set there on their horses watchin’ him die. Finally one of 'em says somethin in Injun and they all turned and left out. Well Mac knew the score even if Aunt Ella didn't. Shot through the left lung and that was that. As they say.

Then Ellis drives his point home.

Ellis: What you got ain't nothin’ new. This country is hard on people. Hard and crazy. Got the devil in it yet folks never seem to hold it to account.
Bell: Most don't.
Ellis: You're discouraged.
Bell: I'm... discouraged.
Ellis: You can't stop what's comin’. Ain't all waitin’ on you. [The two men look at each other. Ellis shakes his head.] That's vanity.

Beneath the folksy style and cowboy twang of what Ellis is saying are very Eastern ideas. Bell's problems are an illusion in a way. They have more to do with him and the changes in his temperament than any objective assessment of the world. Ellis is saying that the universe is in a state of equilibrium, a great sloshing pan of yin and yang. What he calls "vanity" is a mindstate of egocentric grasping. Buddhists believe that the self is like a mist over water. We make it real by believing in it. If we don't, it evaporates back into the sea of oneness. Violence is a part of the world in flux, but it's no more real at any given moment. Existence is a question of perception. In one scene in the film, Chigurh has just shot the face off a crooked businessman who betrayed him. As the shot man twitches to death on the floor his accountant stands next to Chigurh, quivering from what he just saw, and says, "Are you going to kill me?" Chigurh replies, "That depends. Do you see me?"

The Tao:

Two gave birth to One
One gave birth to Two
Two gave birth to Three
Three gave birth to all the myriad things.

All the myriad things carry Yin on their backs and hold the Yang in their embrace,
Deriving their vital harmony from the proper blending of the two vital Breaths.
Truly, one may gain by losing;
And one may lose by gaining.

What another has taught me let me repeat:
"A man of violence will come to a violent end."
Whoever said this can be my teacher and father.

"New Grass": Floral Music

Because we separate like ripples on a blank shore

This lyric from Radiohead's "Reckoner" is as elliptical as it is intimate. And, since Thom Yorke's singing it, it also sounds dripping with beautiful meaning. But I have no idea what it's about. Likewise, there's something about the rest of "Reckoner" that is impossible for me to get my head around, and so I feel like I can never love it enough. Everything about it – the jumbled chord progressions, the haphazard arrangement that gradually fumbles into self-awareness – seems intended to mirror nature's asymmetrical sprawl. The way that home decorators or architects try to be visually unpredictable by avoiding rigid shapes and too many straight lines. It's as if Radiohead have taken that design principle and applied it to a song. Most music comes in boxes of verses and choruses, but "Reckoner" is floral.

Because it has no real beginning or end, it seems impermanent too. The track starts abruptly with a crude edit, chopping in on a loose, wide-open drum pattern already in progress. The sound of the kit is harsh and roomy and is almost swallowed by bright, rattling percussion. The playing is almost juvenile – the way good musicians who are non-drummers can usually bang their way through a beat and still sound respectable, if not fluid. A guitar starts to noodle under it, without confidence. Yorke begins moaning words in falsetto and because you can't make out what he's saying it gives the impression of somebody trying to improvise lines for a melody they've been workshopping. It all feels unplanned, but before too long a bass, and then a rhodes piano, drop in and plenty of structure begins to arrive in the form of medieval chord changes, plumes of incandescent strings, and the muffled harmonies of what sounds like a barbershop quartet singing underwater. Then, as abruptly as it appeared, the song fades into the ether, taking its jostling, tambourine-cluttered melancholy with it.

Because it's so untidy, the effect that "Reckoner" has on me is of being on the verge of a listening catharsis that never arrives. I'm moved but I can never quite capture a sense of release, and so the pleasure is inexhaustible. Tantric.

"Reckoner" is one-of-a-kind, but it's not the first time a song has given me this feeling. With its floral shape, and a compositional style that hovers at a musical melting point – going in and out of crystallization – it seems like a sister to Talk Talk's "New Grass," from their final album Laughing Stock.




Laughing Stock, and its predecessor Spirit of Eden (released in '91 and '88 respectively) came as the band was facing burnout with their successful synth-pop sound and decided to scrap everything to reinvent themselves. They are perfect, astounding albums and are generally considered to be among the first explosions of post-rock.

In a sense, Talk Talk were trying to reverse-engineer their music. They wanted to compose the sound of spontaneity, and make recordings that were fully-realized while also having the sense of disorder and discovery captured on their home demos. Easier said than done. According to co-producer and engineer Phil Brown, who wrote about the sessions for Tape Op Magazine, the band recorded for months straight, in near total darkness, experimenting with repetition and disjointedness. Rather than try to hammer out an arrangement as a band and then nail it to tape, they built their tracks in pieces of this, scraps of that, always looking for a way out of traditional form. There were stretches when all they tracked were the same two-chords of guitar, strummed over and over, or the same drum bar, looped endlessly, for days at a time, while the rest of the band sat in the control room listening attentively for the right kind of happy accidents. This brought complaints from other recording suites in the same complex and, worse, drummer Lee Harris developed a nervous disorder and had to leave for a few months in the middle of the Laughing Stock sessions, suffering from exhaustion.

Even though that sounds like pure torture, Talk Talk finally got that rare mix of improv and collage they were after and left a conceptual blueprint for everyone from Fugazi to Bark Psychosis to Radiohead (lead singer Mark Hollis was incomprehensible long before Thom Yorke made mumbling famous). And there's no better example of what they discovered than the perfectly named "New Grass." Over a bed of crooked jazz drumming and hollow organ swells, tufts of reverberated guitar and plump clusters of piano chords sprout out of cracks in the mix. It sounds random yet preordained, like the examined life. It's gorgeousness without end, the sound of something growing.

Radiohead "Reckoner" [From In Rainbows]

Talk Talk "New Grass" [From Laughing Stock]

The Man Behind the Flow Curtain

The best thing I can say about this track from the new Britney Spears album is anecdotal: I was in a record store, heard it, and thought it was the new Prince.

Britney Spears "Why Should I Be Sad" [From Blackout]

I wasn't surprised to find later that it was produced by Pharrell Williams:



Pharrell's work is pure poetry – excuse me, flow-etry. For further proof, try anything off Clipse's Hell Hath No Fury, which he co-produced as well:

Clipse "Hello New World" [From Hell Hath No Fury]

Tell Me You Love Me

Last Sunday was the season finale of the new HBO series Tell Me You Love Me and it was a brilliant end to a solid ten-episode run. I have to admit, I was seriously hooked on this show, and it surprises me a little. On the surface, it has all the things I hate about dramatic television: mopey vignettes about pretty people with too much time and money on their hands, completely overwhelmed with unfulfillment and suburban woe – the Sophia Copolla effect. But Tell Me You Love Me is not a pouty show, and beneath its slick surface it has all the things I love about dramatic television, specifically the space that serialized storytelling has to really develop a character - or tell a story - which a two-hour movie does not. And this show has a sharp focus, a small-scale thesis about intimacy by a team of creators that really took the time to think its characters through. Executive producer Cynthia Mort, who developed the project, has genuine insight about relationships and Tell Me You Love Me's scripts are full of believable moments rather than flashy, pithy one-liners designed to sound like new urban wisdom, but which then don't really ring true.

Tell Me You Love Me worked up a lather of sweaty buzz about its graphic sexual content, which includes generous helpings of testicles, breasts, butts, penises, vaginas and barnyard animal sounds. But honestly the show needed that suggestion of color to offset its very low-key tone and the stricly un-sensational and narrowly-defined scope of the little story it wants to tell. It follows four couples of varying ages and status as they work through unique intimacy issues: Jamie and Hugo are young and rash, they screw a lot, and they struggle with jealousy and commitment. Carolyn and Palek are in their thirties, moderately successful and are trying with no luck to conceive their first child. They screw a lot too, but eventually all the attempted baby making begins to take its toll. Dave and Katie are the most traditional couple (for example, they don't swear). They've been married forever, are in their fourties with two kids, and don't ever screw anymore. As it turns out, there is some really deep-seated stuff that turned off the sex faucet in their bedroom. And finally there's May and Arthur. They're pushing 70 and they screw a lot too (I hate to say it, but you might be at least a little horrified at those scenes. Nothing can prepare you for the shock of seeing a senior citizen giving head.). May's a therapist and at one point or another, all of the other couples eventually make it into her office. That is presumably what unites the four storylines, although all of the relationships are meant to symbolize a single relationship at different stages of development, with May and Arthur representing the finished product – the couple that made it by sticking out everything from infidelity to "bed dread," and are now reaping the rewards of all that struggle and persistence. It's a pretty ingenious concept and it totally works.

The show is pro fidelity and pro self-truth. It wants its troubled couples to face their problems and work through them, rather than seek solace in distraction or repression. As Mort points out, beneath all that soft core porn is really a fairly conservative sensibility. It reminds me of Stanley Kubrik's Eyes Wide Shut, which was a very old-fashioned meditation on fidelity that was unfairly eclipsed by the rating scandal about its macabre orgy scene.

To me, cable television has become the new best place for narrative form. And of its endless channels, HBO is still setting the standard. They have the cash and, by now, a creative mandate to greenlight quality; and when you combine that with good taste in projects and talent, as HBO does, genius ensues. Personally, I prefer at least an attempt at realism in my novels, movies and television shows – whether drama or comedy; it just heightens the effect. So I was never a fan of HBO staples like Six Feet Under or Deadwood, which seemed art-directed to within an inch of their lives and didn't crystallize into believability. But I thought The Sopranos was as good as the hype and The Wire is probably the most relevant and consistently affecting work of art in the last 10 years. And then there's Entourage, Extras and Curb Your Enthusiasm, which aren't "serious" shows but are as smart as they are feel-good. So I guess I qualify as an HBO fan of some sort.

I think Tell Me You Love Me already ranks with any of those shows in quality. Right out of the gate, it knew what it wanted to be and it went about it flawlessly. The casting is perfect, you can't imagine anybody else playing these characters, and all the couples have believable chemistry and the actors plenty of depth. It's probably not for everybody - most people watch TV to give their brains a rest and, like The Wire, this is the kind of show that you have to engage with for it to work. But you can tell that the creators really love the characters and I can't think of another show that actually seems to want to benefit its viewers rather than just entertain them. Even The Wire, which is so full of social concern, is more nihilistic about its complaints than proactive.

I don't really have anything to link to. I think the DVDs come out in January. However, if you are able to catch the reruns on HBO, make sure to watch the promotional podcasts they created where they ask real couples to watch the series and talk about it. In their own way, they're just as entertaining as the actual show. [Those promos are also available as a free download in iTunes.]

Sean Madigan Hoen – "We Two Are"

Sean Hoen's presence has loomed large in Southeast Michigan for years. By the time I met him and became acquainted with his bands The Holy Fire and Leaving Rouge, he was already a slightly cleaned-up version of his former bloodshot-eyed, manic persona. Before I moved back to Detroit, Sean had already made his mark fronting the hardcore band Thoughts of Ionesco and was a minor legend for his apeshit antics. It's like this: everybody who came up indie in the '90s has a David Yow (Jesus Lizard) story, and if you came up in Detroit, you have a Sean Hoen story too. In his own words, people didn't go to his shows to hear the music, they went to see Sean lose his shit.

But that kind of self-destructive theater has its limits. And given the choice between keeping up a faked version of the catharsis or moving on to less abrasive forms of expression, Sean chose the latter while keeping it just as articulate and lucid. It's interesting to watch an artist like that not losing the edge, but sublimating it. Like a volcano that teaches itself more subtle forms of eruption. It puts Sean in the great company of ex-hardcore band leaders like Henry Rollins and Ian MacKeye, who I think of as human tuning forks that maintain their tremulous appearance through even the most presentable of aesthetic haircuts.

I love the sound of Sean's voice. It seems like two octaves at once. It has the reedy bite of a tenor, but somehow still seems baritone deep. Maybe it's that whole devils vs. angels thing in his rock'n'roll-as-demonology lyrics. Two versions of the same person – one higher, one lower – meeting in a voice. "We Two Are" is my favorite moment on The Liquor Witch, his first solo album, and has all the requisite qualities of a Sean Hoen song as well as a great title that frames moral schizophrenia in a three-word Zen kohn. It takes its time getting to beautiful places but gradually inflates with reverb, like a giant hot air balloon, before Sean punctures everything with a spectacularly ugly moan.

Sean Madigan Hoen - "We Two Are" [From The Liquor Witch]

Sean on MySpace

Mobius Band - I Am Always Waiting

I can't figure out the difference between
Your love and your company

After about the fourth or fifth listen, this song revealed its myriad mysteries to me. It's a grower, but as the hooks sink in, so do the details. Like those diving seagull sounds that dart in and out of the chorus explosion. And the fuzzed-out kazoo sound Ben Sterling gets out of his guitar during the denouement seems more appropriate every pass. For pop music, the arrangement finds ways to sneak in pockets of invention, but subtly - it still feels like an unadorned serving of catchy.

I love the tone, and the modest way Sterling sings. I love the contrast of his light drawl with the urbanity of Mobius Band's droid-aided rock. Emotionally, it's breakup-song big, the kind of cut you want to listen to when your life feels like plates of massive, tectonic shift. But even in breakups, the tearing is sometimes balanced with adrenaline, and "I Am Always Waiting" strikes that kind of balance.

Mobius Band "I Am Always Waiting" [From Heaven]

Bob Marley & The Wailers "Trouble Dub"

All reggae recordings should sound this way: like a bootleg of a Bob Marley & The Wailers rehearsal if the Wailers practiced in a bomb shelter. And Marley should have made more animal sounds. Three quarters of the way into the track, mere singing fails him – fails to express his troubles in fullness – and he resorts to soul-screeched cat calls and sharp grunts.


Bob Marley & The Wailers - "Trouble Dub" [From Satisfy My Soul]

Drinking with Cass McCombs

What did Cass McCombs just say? You've been drinking with the man for the better part of an hour (he came with the friend of a friend) and the conversation's been strictly on the lighter side – you just moved back to Detroit, he just moved to Chicago; you just quit your job, he just signed to Domino Records. That kind of thing. And though, with all the noise, it's hard to hear anything clearly in this bar, you're pretty sure he just said, "Stick a needle in my eye. I'm middle class 'till the day I die."

"I'm sorry," you say, "it sounded like you said–" He starts to get up.

"Be right back," he mumbles. "I'm going to put something on the jukebox." He says it so casually. Actually, Cass McCombs says everything casually. You've only just met, but already this guy has to be one of the most laid-back people you've ever come across. He moves and speaks without urgency, confidently but lazily. Yet, there's an intellectual aggressiveness behind his sleepy manner, like an intensity he's keeping in check. And now you're pretty sure he just spoke to you in couplet.

Cass is walking back from the jukebox and over the speakers you hear what could be the new Midlake – warm-bottomed, tissue-soft indie rock. The vocals are tissue-soft, too, but with added aloe. Swells of rich harmonies come and go. The singer's got a good tenor, without drama.

"This is nice," you say as he slides back into his seat. "What is it?"

"My new album," he replies, cleaning his teeth with a car key. "Dropping the Writ."

"But I thought–" He cuts you off shaking his head.

"I know. It hasn't come out yet. But old playthings are all laid to waste. Thrown out to make a better space," he says by way of explanation, then notices you blinking your eyes and adds, "Well, you know what I mean."

"Cass, I don't think I–" you start, but before you can continue your waitress has arrived and is taking a new round of orders. Cass's eyes are half closed as he scans the menu absentmindedly. His record is still playing in the background and has gotten softer. Cass is singing The world is so vain and uncertain/A death in the family and I'm in love again over dark fairytale folk. "I'll have the porter," he decides and then, as if remembering something, takes you by the writst. "Do you ever get the feeling," he asks, eyes wider, "that you're being followed by a van? Yesterdays yet to come?"

"Dude," you say, "how much have you had to drink?"

He thinks about it for a second. "Not much. But, you know, as one memory eludes me another consumes me." You look around the table. Nobody – not your friends, not the waitress – seems to have noticed the strange things coming out of Cass McComb's mouth tonight and you start to wonder if it's you who needs to slow down, maybe order a soda. Cass is staring at you.

"Nothing is impossible," he says, smiling. "A double negative is a positive, is it not?"

Near squirming, you try to change the subject. Try to get the conversation back onto a superficial course. "Hey Cass," you say, "you were telling me about your new apartment in Chicago."

"Yeah," he says, fond distance in his eyes. "I miss my old place in California though. In my small room without a window I was grateful enough just to be alone." You nod, pretending to understand, pretending things have gone back to normal. Cass is listening to his record now. It's rocking again, a low-rolling echo of full-band thunder over which Cass sings lyrics that are nothing less than his life story, beginning with his freaking birth. "This one's called Lionkiller," he says. "I think I'm going to start the album with it."

"That sounds like a good idea. I was just going to–" But Cass is on his feet.

"Excuse me," he says. "But I should go. I don't know what's come over me – the full moon or infinity." Then before you can react he slips a bar napkin into your hand and he's gone. You look around, embarrassed, sure everybody's watching. But nobody's watching. You open the napkin and see some messy chicken scratch. You make out the words Buzz across the universe to the mind's hive. Beyond a shadow of a doubt you're lucky to be alive. It's beautiful and you are, in fact, buzzed so you just lean back and stop fighting it. Cass is still whispering lullabies over the loud speakers and you close your eyes, listening as a harmonica drifts in and out and Cass sings something about ex-lovers and pregnant pauses.

Cass McCombs - Petrified Forest [From Dropping the Writ - Domino Records]

Cass McCombs - Petrified Forest [From Dropping the Writ - Domino Records]

Joan As Policewoman "The Ride"

This song is more Sade than Sade. I refuse to say more.

Joan As Policewoman - "The Ride" [From Real Life]

Fujiya & Miyagi @ The Pike Room Oct. 4

Reviewed Fujiya & Miyagi's show at the Pike Room last night for Detour-Mag.com.

It’s called motorik. When the beat is driving and buyuoant; when the soft-focus synths cruise out from the horizon straight at you like an Autobahn breeze through your windswept hair; when the pulse is so steady it fills you with equal parts wander and lust, it’s called motorik. And last night, Fujiya & Miyagi brought plenty of motorik to one of the intimate music rooms inside a new suburban Detroit club called the Crofoot.

Read the rest of the review.

Exodus to Pontiac (for Detroiters)

Salvation may have arrived for live Detroit music, only we'll have to go to Pontiac to get it. Without naming names, let's just say I've been burned out on downtown Detroit venues for a while. Mostly because of the simple fact that they sound bad. (They smell like vomit too, but a little scent of bile never hurt anybody.) Sure, if you go higher-tier, like St. Andrews and The State Theater you're more likely to get a better mixed show, but step below that and you're in for some real midrange abuse. Like cat screeches and baby wails recorded by a $5 Radioshack special and magnified at weapons-grade levels straight into your eardrum kind of abuse.

I don't have anything against the D. I grew up 313 and, while I can't exactly say "the city's been good to me," I can say that it has its charms and I want the best for it. But the little bit of out-of-state touring I've done in bands only showed me that it doesn't have to be this way – that the United States indie rock trail is littered with plenty of establishments that take pride in what they're doing enough to offer bands the chance to communicate their musical ideas legibly in a relatively filth-free setting. There are places like the Doug Fir Lounge in Portland, OR and Rubbergloves in Denton, TX that not only sound phenomenal but have style and self-respect to match. To my crew, who cut their teeth playing Detroit's hardest dive bars, these places seemed like something out of a commercial for toilet paper and coming home to reality was a drag. Detroit has needed a competing venue on that circuit for years.

I've never felt that independent music belonged sandwiched in bars. Not exclusively. I guess if the music is designed to be listened to while drunk then, by all means, stick with the blown speakers, passive aggressive soundmen and park-at-your-own-risk location – and we'll all work ourselves up into a state of intoxicated agitation. But so much of the rest of music is a statement of some kind – art of some kind, actually – and at least deserves a decent frame to be considered in. Yeah, serve booze, but let it be secondary. We need music venues that happen to serve alcohol, as much as we need alcohol venues that happen to serve music.

I think I found one. I covered the Fujiya & Miyagi show for Detour last night and hiked it out to Pontiac, to a new venue called the Crofoot. (I say "hiked it," but it took me about the same amount of time it would take me to get to, say, The Majestic.) The Crofoot is a three-in-one musical complex in the vein of New York's Bowery Ballroom or The Knitting Factory, with rooms ranging in size from intimate (Pike Room) to cavernous (Eagle Theater). The place was crisp. It smelled like new (not a tinge of vomit, but give them time); all freshly cut wood paneling and shit. But more importantly, the sound was SOUND. I could have used a little more bottom end, but in general all the details were in the right place. I could tell who was playing what. I could hear vocals. I didn't even need a catch rag to dab a bleeding ear.

Fujiya & Miyagi were great, too. I've been discovering the really good Krautrock like Neu! and Cluster this year so I was definitely prepared to appreciate it. I had never heard them before and because the sound was clear, I got to experience them the way they intended to be experienced. When I got the album later, it sounded just like the set I had just seen. [Bonus: I had no problem finding a parking spot on the same street (there are lots for cheap all over the place anyway) and I wasn't confronted by aggressive strangers asking for my money with their faces inches from mine.]

This isn't an anti-Detroit rant, anti-street person, or anti-anything. It's pro music. I like live music and it's good to know there's a decent place to see it again.

Tangerine Dream - Phaedra

Short review of Tangerine Dream's Phaedra up at Detour-Mag.com. Make sure to listen to the mp3. It's essential.

When Edgar Froese first created Tangerine Dream in 1967, the seeds of deconstruction that would dissolve the band’s initial acid rock strains had already been sewn. Well, in Froese’s mind, at least. He had always imagined the group as a canvas for the Dadaist notions he’d developed while studying under Salvador Dali and hanging out in Berlin’s avant-garde scene. It just took the Dream a few releases to get there – to “un-band” in a sense, and drop the rock instruments entirely. Their new toys? The first generation of synthesizer technology, hefty analog synths and mellotrons that weighed as much as a refrigerator but were also the source of hot, largely unheard of cosmic sounds. It was space age voodoo at the press of a key.

Read the rest of the review.

Ticklah vs. Axelrod

Reviewed the new album by the Antibalis afrobeat collective member Victor Axelrod for Detour-Mag.com. Axelrod responded to the review and had some interesting things to say.

Excerpt:

Who are Ticklah and Axelrod and what’s their beef? As it happens, they’re the same person, Victor Axelrod, member of Antibalis, the Brooklyn-based afrobeat collective and (as Ticklah) co-producer of the novel 2003 Pink Floyd redux Dub Side of the Moon. So, the conflict? It’s all in his head. And considering that Axelrod has drenched these 12 reggae blends in the ech-ech-echo of space-aged dub, it’s clear that the clash he has in mind is one of style – a sound battle between the genre’s two primordial innovators, King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry. Is it a question of the Beatles vs the Stones? Is dub similarly irreconcilable? Is Axelrod taking sides between Perry’s thin and trebly but brilliantly demon-possessed productions and the higher fidelity of Tubby’s more austere, bass-bullying cuts? Can he even do that?

Read the full review here.

New Reviews

Many new reviews up at Detour-Mag.com this week.

Ben Harper - Lifeline

RJD2 - The Third Hand

The Dark Crystal

Caribou - Andorra

Sunshine

The New Holy

I've written about the Fountain before – in another blog and in my review for Detour. But it's such an important movie to me that I've bothered to edit some of that material into a separate review:

In Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, Hugh Jackman plays three versions of the same soul. The first is Tomas, a 16th century conquistador on a mission to find the Tree of Life and, with it, save his country and queen. His relentless loyalty and refusal to accept any defeat, even imminent death, are themes he will stubbornly carry with him for more than a thousand years of rebirth. Of these we see Tommy, an oncologist obsessively trying to cure his wife’s cancer through experimental research; and Tom, an astronaut hurtling solo through space toward the golden nebula where he believes the soul of his dead wife can be reborn. The superficial differences between their times and circumstances create a relief by which we see their sameness. It's not a story about eternal love as much as eternal persistence; a devotion to illusion so strong it distorts the truth and stunts acceptance.

Owing to a seismic performance by Jackson and an ornate, breathtaking special effects approach that uses manipulated macro photography in lieu of CGI, The Fountain will likely be to film what Siddhartha was to literature – the definitive western poetry for eastern mysticism. But outside of its spiritual overtones, it works simply as a piece of fantasy eye candy because its gilded visuals are an end in themselves.

Hugh Jackman's performance is the next-level. It goes so far beyond the standard of the craft that it's not even fair to call it acting. It's more like becoming. He should win the Oscar for best becomer. It caused me to rethink the value of his profession and the possibilities of people at his wealth and status level. I am skeptical of actors–and millionaire artists in general–but then I watch The Fountain and I think, what do I want from art? And the answer is, I want this. Here is a celebrity working in an industry that's superficiality must be stifling to any kind of personal or artistic growth and yet, somehow, Jackman has access to the power and focus to enact the essential human drama. What could be more important art? It is simply beyond me how someone can pull that from themselves even once, let alone repeatedly, under the monotonous microscope of film production.

Though The Fountain is enjoying an after-the-fact buzz of web adoration, it was critically misunderstood and virtually ignored in its theatrical release. It's easy to see why the studio would have trouble promoting something so esoteric since the essence of movie promotion is the promise of something you've seen before (there is no marketing template for sci-fi Buddhist meditations that lure audiences with brand-name actors, and then confuse the shit out of them). So it’s ironic that a film about rebirth now seems certain to have a second life. (For evidence of the shift see metacritic.com where its composite score of critic reviews was 51, in contrast to its user reviews, which, buoyed by the DVD release, are up around 80.)

For all its abstractions, and a plot that ping-pongs seemingly carelessly through time, it has a linear story once you get your head around it. But these few plot strands are almost beside the point once the main character is revealed to be an abstraction of the self.

I've come to think of The Fountain as a new genre. It's not sci-fi, not surrealism–terms which only describe its style–but a mystical, symbolic work of such singularity and compressed articulation that it transcends the whims of popular culture and rises to the level of spiritual edification. I might be getting carried away here, but I want to say that it is a holy film. Maybe not to everybody, but to me. Popular culture is probably not the best place to put something holy–and it has been a failure by those standards–but I think it will have its day when people quit expecting from it what they get from other movies.

The Indescribable Voice of Mark Lanegan

Mark Lanegan’s voice cannot be described. In fact, until recently, Mark Lanegan’s voice couldn’t even be recorded. At least not properly. It took more than 30 engineers over the course of 20 plus records in as many years just to crack the code of his baritone – a rumbling throttle so coarse you could strike a match on it. This long-overdue feat was accomplished on his 2005 album Bubblegum, on which his voice has so much low end it practically gives the bass guitar the bitch seat. 20 years is a long time for a musician to go without having their instrument accurately captured, especially a world-famous singer like Lanegan who’s fronted bands as big as The Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age. But you can’t really fault the recording engineers. After all, Lanegan’s voice is a bit of a physical anomaly and was once even the subject of scientific research:

In the mid ’90s he volunteered for a series of experiments in Phoenix that were involved with the weaponization of sound. The so-called “brown frequency” produces extremely intense resonance at very low frequencies, causing a person in its path to spontaneously shit their pants. But scientists believed that lower-midrange frequencies, like the ones in Lanegan’s baritone, had the potential to do even more damage to the human body, including shattering bones and bursting blood vessels, if wielded with enough severity. So Lanegan spent a bizarre week being the government’s guinea pig, a pretty strange move for a rebel’s rebel who’s been at odds with the law his whole life. But Lanegan is not the kind of person you want to try and understand. Like God, you’re just supposed to listen to him, not fathom him.

As weird as the Phoenix experiment story is, it’s not the weirdest anecdote about Mark Lanegan. Not by far. His biography is a litany of rock’n’roll hyperbole. In his defense, he got off to a bad start. He was raised by a northern California chapter of the Hells Angels, a radical anti-authoritarian biker gang at its most notorious and violent in the ’60s. (It has been alleged that this same chapter of the Angels was responsible for the murder of Lanegan’s parents in a drug-related incident.) Reared by professional hellions, Lanegan learned the art of trouble-making from the best. But somehow he managed to absorb the culture’s rootless and drunken lifestyle while still remaining a man apart and, until the age of 17, Lanegan had serious ambitions to become a priest. His attempts to convert his fellow bikers to Christ fell flat when it was discovered he was sleeping with not one, but three, of the Angels' "old ladies." I would imagine this is about as unforgivable an offense as exists in the world of outlaw biker gangs and Lanegan was ordered to be taken out. Lanegan claims he fled on foot and escaped in a blinding dust storm that blew through at the last possible minute (his old friend and former Screaming Trees member Van Conner contradicts this account, saying that Lanegan just bribed one of the hitmen with money he had stolen from the Angels’ treasury).

After this, Lanegan went through a period of urban vagrancy in northern Seattle and began meeting many of the musicians that would eventually be part of the grunge explosion. During this time, he stole a copy of Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums from a coffee shop. In the book, Kerouac takes a job as a fire lookout for the United States Fire Service on Washington state’s Desolation Mountain, using the experience for Buddhist epiphanies. Lanegan was so enamored with the story and its ideas that he mimicked Kerouac by securing a similar position on Vancouver’s Ash Peak. He lasted less than a week. The Fire Service removed him after lightening struck his camp three times in five days – nearly starting a forest fire – in a particularly dry week in which there were no storms. (Lanegan claims that lightening has followed him his whole life, one example of which burned down his apartment complex in ’92.)

But even that isn’t the weirdest story about Mark Lanegan. The weirdest story might be the time Lanegan was broadsided by an “off-duty” ice cream truck doing close to thirty miles per hour and walked away with only scratches while the truck had over eight grand in damage, including a caved-in engine. Doctors credited his miraculous survival to adrenaline but at the time of the incident (which was a nightly news phenomenon for days) Lanegan insisted he had seen himself surrounded by a cold, blue light, which he believed was an angel of God wrapping him in its protective embrace. (In the news video from the incident, Lanegan is covered in what looks like several vats of blue Superman-flavored ice cream. I can’t help but wonder what relation, if any, this has to his “cold, blue light.”)

So that’s pretty weird. But actually, the weirdest story might be the one where a group of renegade priests from an L.A. archdiocese tried to use Lanegan’s voice for ritual exorcisms – in one case asking him to sing Ave Maria repeatedly for over three hours – because they believed that his growling, sandpaper croon was imbued with a special power over devils. Lanegan, probably tired of having his voice treated as a commodity of control, first by the government and now the Catholic church, cut his exorcist career short almost immediately, claiming he had only agreed to try it so he could “see who was eviler.”

And then there's the other time he made the nightly news, this time twice in one week. First when he single-handedly stopped the robbery of a late-night Mexican fast-food restaurant. And second when, six days later, he tried to hold the same place up and was arrested in the process.

Come to think of it, the weirdest story by far has to be that the first thing he did with his cash advance when the Screaming Trees signed to Epic Records was to have two stumps of bone and cartilage surgically removed from his back that had been there since birth. They were, oddly, in the exact spot a pair of wings might grow – if a man could grow wings. (Van Conner says that, in high school, Lanegan would sneak into the woodshop at night and try to file them down with a belt sander.)

And the stories never stop. He sold the publishing to “I Nearly Lost You,” the Trees’ biggest-selling single, for a pack of cigarettes and a dirty magazine. His favorite delicacy is to put Maker’s Mark in his Cap’n Crunch cereal. He sleeps in his truck and only eats on the toilet. He can only writes songs in the month of May and, since the early ’90s, has annually spent those four weeks locked in his bedroom with a guitar and a pad of paper, stricken with a mysterious fever. He has over 50 tattoos, all of which he did himself, all of the same picture – a busty, 50-ish San Francisco bartender named Lane that Lanegan met and fell in love with in his early teens and hasn't seen since.

All of these experiences, as heartbreaking and extreme as they are, have made Lanegan’s voice what it is: unknowable. Music writers inevitably use descriptives like “whiskey soaked,” or “cigarette stained,” or some other cliché that implies its weathered sonority is the product of hard living. Because it sounds charred, like a smokestack smells; like a barn looks after it has burned. But it’s really his phrasing, which is Billie-Holiday tattered, that rattles the listener. It’s hard feelings, not hard living, that make his sung sentences waft heavenward like smoke ring prayers (only to die unanswered at the ceiling). It’s the brusque but meticulous delivery, the careful performances carved out of some kind of sad surgery, that make Lanegan’s singing its own kind of holy.

It would be cute to say that Lanegan can only sing that way because he’s done time. Or because he’s learned about time, watching so many of the other addicts from the Seattle rock boom die or lose their muse while he has survived, still and tall like a tree, his voice hardened over with bark, his songs ever-widening, wind-blown blooms. It would be cute, and it might be true. But that would be trying to describe Mark Lanegan’s voice. And Mark Lanegan’s voice cannot be described.

Mark Lanegan Band – When Your Number Isn't Up [From Bubblegum]


Mark Lanegan Band – One Hundred Days [From Bubblegum]


Soulsavers – No Expectations
[From It's Not How Far You Fall, It's the Way you Land]

Soulsavers – Through My Sails (feat. Will Oldham)
[From It's Not How Far You Fall, It's the Way you Land]

Queens of the Stone Age – In The Fade [From Rated R]

Tony Allen's Seasick Sound

I’ve gotten addicted to Tony Allen’s seasick drumming; but I had to go back in time first, to Tony Allen’s Version of Time, which is outside of time; an idea about rhythm that sloshes back and forth between swing and straight, perpetually adrift and uncontainable.

It’s a rebellious feel and Tony Allen did rebellious things with it. When I say rebellious, I don’t mean he wore a controversial t-shirt on Saturday Night Live, or wouldn’t let HUMMER use one of his tracks in a commercial. I mean that the Nigerian percussion master was out of his mind with independence. First he helped let loose a whole new kind of music (a militant witchdoctor funk called Afrobeat designed to put your ass into a trance of dance and tap you into the communal ecstasy and out of the communal psychosis). And then, after sicking his groove on the Dark Continent, his band, Africa ’70, made its own compound and declared independence from the state.

I haven’t mentioned Fela Kuti yet, on purpose. Fela started Africa ’70 with Allen. Allen was musical director, but Fela wrote the tunes and gave the sound a face. Kuti’s name became the brand name forever stapled onto “Afrobeat” in the histories, while Allen’s became a footnote. But Afrobeat was nothing if not politics through rhythm and if Fela supplied the polemic, Allen’s eternal groove gave it its conduit.



Madness is a reoccurring theme in African legends and Fela’s pan-African fervor definitely blossomed into something approaching mania. When he tried to use concert proceeds to fund his presidential campaign, a lot of his band bolted, feeling he had crossed the line from muso-political to just political. Allen knew the difference, and which one he was qualified in, and left as well, moving to Europe. After all, if he wasn’t going to let the Nigerian army push him around, why should he let Kuti?

Afrobeat has been pulling me into its tractor beam for years but Tony Allen himself didn’t enter my radar until I heard Damon Albarn’s latest project, The Good, The Bad, and the Queen. Albarn started going off the deep end of low end with his band Blur’s Think Tank, and (side project) Gorillaz’s Demon Days was even dub-heavier, drowned in fathoms of sub bass black. The fact that bassist Paul Simonon from The Clash was involved in the new scheme (The Clash are the only respectable example of whites playing reggae I know of), and was going to be anchoring possibly the greatest drummer of all time (according to Brian Eno), promised untold wonders of perverted pocket. Not only did it not deliver, (it’s a beautiful record, but with very English/white rhythms, staccato pianos and folk guitar; and only half of it even has a rhythm section) at first I thought the drumming was a joke. But that’s because I didn’t understand it. I wasn’t prepared to see what is so clear now: that Tony Allen is the fulfillment of the prophecy of pocket. Accepting his sound meant surrendering to it. Because it had revolution in it, not cordiality.

To get why Allen’s feel is the end game, it has to be seen in the bigger picture of drumming itself, starting with the present. Computers have by now altered every form of expression – music in particular. But if musicianship has gotten a shot of Botox (pert, plastic), drumming has had drastic reconstructive surgery. Drums, in their most primitive form of stretched skin over wood have been around who-knows-how-long. It wasn’t even until the 1600s that they started to show up in musical scores and another 300 years after that before the concept of a drum “kit” appeared in American jazz. Jazz was like battery acid on percussion’s musical heritage. It put it through a sort of devolution, undoing centuries of practiced and rigid symmetry by making exploratory drumming foundational to jazz’s unshackling agenda. Jazz was off the grid before there was a grid. That is, before the drum machine came along and confined the place of a beat into a very narrow compartment, there were years of anal white men perfecting gross systems of musical organization-through-notation intended to wield masses of individuals (orchestras) collectively like military institutions (armies). Jazz made those traditions seem obsolete, if not wrong-headed, not only rethinking scale and harmony, but treating the measure itself – the basic unit of musical division – as a kind of colonial prison to be broken out of.

Even if nobody knew it, this started a fight. Or it became a place to take the fight. White/black, straight/swing could have meant oppressive/progressive. The matter was never really solved and the two have continued to rub up against each over the years, sometimes making some beautiful children in the process (e.g., James Brown’s air-tight, uglified pocket). And it’s not as if the black approach was anti-beat – a tribal rhythm is about achieving a state of mind through repetition – and I’m not saying the free-jazz deconstructions of Art Blakey were the promised land. Only that drumming needed to get out of the head for a second and get down to the hip, so the hip could shake up the body and loosen the mind.

Then drum machines fucked the whole thing up. It’s one thing when it’s Kraftwerk – essentially Bach in a Star Trek suit – and the stiff stuff works as a relief for the simple beauty of melody, harmony, counterpoint. It’s another when people start to think that good drumming is about precision – and I don’t mean about being precisely badass, but about turning rhythm into a math equation to be solved on paper. About gated snares, and drummers practicing to metronomes, and human beings trying to copy the cadence of a machine that was just a weak substitute for four limbs, two ears and a soul in the first place. Our musical innocence was lost from too much knowledge and there was no going back. The people got attached to that feel, and took comfort in its consistency.

Two things eventually happened which restored some sanity to the proceedings: sample culture and ?uestlove. By the time the DJs appeared drummers were already adept at mimicking the modules by playing as fluctuation-free as possible. But when the new school started to build their tracks from small fragments of other people’s music – sampling, for its energy, the pre-technology drummers, the jazz and funk guys – they were butting those different sources right up against each other, which meant that as the track passed between this sample and that one, the feel was changing all the time, sometimes in the same song, sometimes from bar to bar. The most extreme example is Amon Tobin, who began by creating massive collages of breakbeat that used absolutely no original parts, only what raw ore he could carve out of his vinyl collection with an equalizer and Cubase. And that’s an itchy sound because your brain is a computer, but that computer is a sponge soaking in juice, not a mainframe humming in a temperature-controlled room. It knows when something’s off the grid and even though it knows it’s wrong, it knows it’s right. It wants to itch and it wants to be scratched. It wants friction, imprecision, loose ends, lubrication, slop, soil and trees. So now, through cutting and pasting, we again created a drum feel that a real person could never reproduce – only now it’s flipped. It’s unattainable levels of imprecise. Jerky in a way that no real drummer could ever be (on purpose). But then somebody was, a jovial, dark-skinned pocket prophet calling himself ?uestlove.



As the drummer and producer for Philadelphia hip-hop band The Roots, he taught himself to emulate the push and pull of hip-hop’s sampled foundations and tuned his drums to replicate its metallic, over-processed clang. I don’t know how much of it was instinct, and how much philosophy, but that kind of metatextuality is po-mo to the core.

Maybe that explains why, when I first found Tony Allen, I thought it was a mistake. Because the amount of junk he was putting on his groove, of speeding up and slowing down within each measure, of losing and finding the swing, made ?uestlove sound robotic in comparison. I’ve done a small amount of producing and recording, which sometimes requires “fixing” drummers’ takes, and I guess I’ve grown hyper-sensitive to waver. I've worked with a few drummers who are so clumsy that by the time you’ve repaired their performance, which involved lining up kicks and snares on a measure-by-measure basis, you end up with a kind of slinky effect where they’re always expanding off course, only to find their way back at the top of each bar. When it’s not intentional, this is not a good thing. And first listening to Allen, I thought I was hearing this type of stitched up, band-aided performance, another sad statement on the abuse-through-overuse of recording software. It wasn’t until I went back to the original Afrobeat tracks that I realized he’s been playing this way all along, toying with the boundaries of feel, sounding out of control but always in control.

The mark of a great musician is that they have their own sound, a style of phrasing that is instantly recognizable, like Miles Davis, James Jamerson, or Mark Knopfler. But the drums, with little tonal variety or dynamic range, are difficult to trademark. Several drummers have been said to have done it – Tony Williams, Matt Chamberlain, Larry Mullen Jr., etc. – though I could never pick them out in a blind taste test. But months after catching the Allen bug, I picked up Pocket Symphony, the new record by french electronic duo Air, and instantly recognized his playing on the track “Once Upon a Time” while driving to work. As soon as I got home I looked for confirmation on allmusic.com and got it.

Allen’s sound was an acquired taste for me, and its genius is subtle, maybe too subtle for most people, who haven’t spent as many hours as I have obsessing over something like rhythmic feel. But almost anybody can appreciate its rebelliousness, which is so gentle. It’s a soft-spoken fuck-you to all forms of oppression, political, musical or otherwise. In it, I hear wisdom, power, chronic innovation and a deep intent to never be held down.

The Good, The Bad, and the Queen – Nature Springs [From The Good, the Bad, and The Queen]

Air – Once Upon a Time [From Pocket Symphony]

Tony Allen – The Same Blood [From Afrobeat... No Go Die!]

Tony Allen – No Discrimination [From No Accommodation for Lagos/No Discrimination]

Fela Kuti and Africa '70 – Mistake [From Zombie]