Movies 2008

Photo by Matthew Nistor

I really hate the idea of making lists of things I like. It seems a little petty and like a symptom of cultural gluttony. But I also know that I read the lists others make at this time every year and that it works as a filter for me so that I can get a sense of what to go look for. I'm at a conflicted point in my life about culture - feeling both that there's just too much of everything but that, on the flipside, I'm seeing popular culture - including hit movies and records - that are great humanist works of art.

I'll start out with film and move onto other things later in the week. Though nothing struck me as strong this year as my favorite movies of 2007, there was a lot that excited me. But rather than try to organize and rate it, let me do a little celebrating and a little bit of advocacy.

There were three films in 2007 that I got worked up over - The Fountain, Sunshine and No Country For Old Men. The great news this year was that all three of those directors put out new movies: respectively Darren Aronofsky, The Wrestler; Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire; and The Coen Bros., Burn After Reading. I haven't had a chance to see The Wrestler yet (which is getting great reviews), but the other two did not dissapoint. Burn After Reading is very funny, and very dark. It's a twin to Fargo in the sense that it portrays a world where everybody is an idiot, and blind to their own idiocy, and in which that idiocy often results in cruelty and brutality. But it's funny as shit. Boyle can do no wrong by me (28 Days Later, A Life Less Ordinary) and Slumdog has his trademark vibrancy and energy, only it's far more sentimental than his previoius movies, in a good way. The lovestory that comes out of the story is epic.

Moving quickly through the rest: If There Will Be Blood was the best thing I saw all year (I was sick with a fever but sat riveted through it's heavy running time without feeling a thing - I would pay money just to watch Daniel Day Lewis read the phone book) Step Brothers was the funniest. I haven't gotten bored yet with Will Ferrell or John C. Riley the way some of my friends seem to have, and I think this movie might be the one they were both born to make. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly might be as good as There Will Be Blood if it had Daniel Day Lewis in it and Johnny Greenwood's score. WALL-E is astounding - the fact that the year's most hyped summer animation blockbuster was essentially a silent film for the first half is hard to believe. And yet, that wordless first movement was my favorite part. So gorgeous and also very nostalgic for me in an '80s way in its Speilbergian romance of space and robots. Having said that, Kung Fu Panda is just as good, if not better, in its own way. It's a perfect movie, really funny and with the same exquisite pacing and direction as any Pixar film - actually the first non-Pixar animation that I've seen to hit at those levels. Elegy and The Savages were sharp, elegant independents that I'd see again. Iron Man was a better film than The Dark Night, and possibly the best superhero movie yet. I had no idea John Favreu had it in him. Quantum of Solace carried on the rehibilitation of the franchise by delivering a sequel to Casino Royale that has all of that film's rage without any of its respite or romance. Like the Dark Night, it's just endlessly grim. But unlike Dark Night, it's lithe and gorgeous to look at, and doesn't have silly bat cowls and batvoices to take your attention out of your movie-trance. I heard the budget for this film was astronomical, and when I saw it I could see every penny translated.

Advocy-wise, I already made my case for Religulous here on my personal blog. But I don't get tired of pointing one thing out: it's less about religion than the way religion is practiced. Some people have criticized Maher for taking on easy targets: the feeble and easily persuaded everydaymen, rather than professional apologists. But that's a smarter angle, because the true dangers inherent in religion come from those little and numerous lowest-common-denominator moments of minds closing. Maher exposes not just how quick people are to apply a lax set of standards to a particular belief system, but how that standard is incongruous with what they'd apply to anything else - all because they've been conditioned to do so. And Maher captures hundreds of those moments and uses them to support a persuasive thesis. Religion touches everybody in this world, no matter what you believe. So I really feel that everyone should spend the two hours it takes to engage this movie. And it's not like it's homework - it's hilarious.

Rent The Promotion. It's the most overlooked film of the year. A really sweet, unassuming comedy featuring John C. Riley and Sean William Scott and directed by Steven Conrad (The Pursuit of Happyness) that manages to avoid a lot of message-cliches while delivering tons of laughs. I quote this movie all the time. Think Groundhog Day.

You Can Have Me, Julie

This is my all-time favorite Christmas track. It's sex in a can. Julie London just kills it.

Julie London - "I'd Like You For Christmas"

Fennesz's Full Blast

Followers of the Hebrew g-d believe that h-s name is so holy it can't be spoken, only referred to. Muslims believe it's a sin to make an image of their prophet, and aboriginal Australians won't let you take their photograph lest you capture their soul. I'm a shitty mystic, but there is something about the music of Christian Fennesz that makes me want to avert my descriptive gaze - to shuffle in backwards, eyes downcast, to the sacred temple of his sound when trying to write about it. It would seem crude to do anything like talk about process, or actual instrumentation, or, g-d forbid, his software. Because in the end it all ends up dumped in a sea. The black fathoms of hot crackling blast. The liquid void. The holy drone of his music.

This time last year I was compiling a year-end best-of list of sorts and a sentence kept popping up in my mind that I never posted: the best album of 2007 was the one Fennesz never released. By that I didn't mean that I had gotten my hands on a leaked draft of a new work by the Austrian sound sorcerer; I meant that 2007 was both the year of my discovery of Fennesz and the period of my life most suited to resonate with the disembodied beauty of his work. It was a year of psychic house cleaning during which I destroyed more fixtures of false belief than ever before. I spent a lot of hours staring at candles, cross-legged on wood floors in dark rooms, fighting with silence. Hours of peeling away the layers of mental dust and paint that had caked onto the walls of my thought. It was subtractive work - taking my mind down to its most minimal, looking for the Still, Small Voice underneath it all. I don't know what, if anything, I found in all that subtraction, but what stayed with me was a better sense of my environment and a certainty that the great spiritual battle of our time is to make war with clutter - the full blast of stimulation and information gushing at us on a daily basis. (Sadly, I'm barely fighting it. I spend more time on my computer than ever. If this blog goes dark, feel free to hope that I left to care for my soul.)

The more I allowed myself to melt the more Fennesz I played. On thick summer nights I'd find the room with the best cross breeze, throw a mattress down and smoke out to Venice. As I listened with chemically widened ears, I knew that Fennesz was making the true music of our age. An ambient requiem for an entire generation of souls sizzling in a digital frying pan - cell phones, microwave ovens and power lines, piping us full of disease and bathing us in a black sea of anxiety. Fennesz, it seemed to me, was the only artist making any music of spiritual concern. It was wordless, wide stuff. Our own voices, bouncing back to us off canyon-like walls of city buildings in reflections of distortion and smeared melodies.

That summer I also took Salvia, the diviner's sage, a few times. I loved and respected it as a leafy portal to lucid dreaming as well as a dangerously powerful magnifier. With Salvia environment is key because it will take the slighest sights and sounds in the room with you and project them up on a massive wall like flickering puppet shadows cast ghoulishly by candles. Idiots cocktail the stuff like a party drug and get sucked screaming out windows and have their souls steam-rolled like doomed 'toons in a Warner Bros. cartoon. I only did it alone, in silence and in the dark. But this one night I was careless and took too big a hit. I came to on all fours, sweating the shapes of my forearms and shins onto my yoga mat, without memory. The fan of my macbook's hard drive eight feet away, a barely perceptible hum under normal circumstances, became a deafening helicopter blade chopping the air just above my head and descending upon my bedroom like the whirling, flaming sword of an archangel.

That Salvia trip taught me something about our true natures and how we weaken them. That we humans are engines of power and dream who muffle the godlike boom of our souls by smothering them in paper-mache nests that we build our whole lives, strip by flimsy strip, until they are as hard and containing as a bomb shield. A piece of information here, some empty stimulation there. NPR, cable, radio, magazines, blogs, records, movies. We're caked over in false security like the shivering homeless - passed out on winter benches, swaddled in makeshift newspaper blankets.

That is what Fennesz's music sounds like - the quiet beneath the debris. It's a vital hum that never competes, never tries to rise above our filters. We can only go diving for it, and once submerged we are given over to dream. Sitting down for the first time to listen to Fennesz's new recordings, Black Sea, immersed in headphones and staring out the window at a heavy snowfall, I saw things. I saw a lumbering dark giant carrying a black Santa sack over his shoulder in which he carried light. I saw him sidle up to the side of a house at night and peek down into its chimney. I saw the giant dump the contents of his bag down the chimney like an electric Pentecost which poured through the home, blanketing every sleeping person in it in currents of white-hot healing.

Fennesz - "Glide" [From Black Sea]



Fennesz - "Rivers of Sand" [From Venice]



Fennesz - "The Point of it All" [From Venice]

Kanye.2

Love him or hate him, Kanye West is simply the most interesting thing happening in pop music right now and before his style-shifting new album 808s and Heartbreaks could even drop it's been something to both anticipate and argue about. Not to add to the glut, but let me add to the glut.

I guess at some point I started looking to Kanye to become what Bjork was in the mid to late '90s, the avant garde Manchurian Candidate - an artist sneaking into the mainstream to thwart it from within with bombs of futurism and audacity. It's not an even comparison; Kanye is much more of a high-stakes player and his worst record sales probably dwarf Bjork's best. And Bjork was far more perplexing at her MTV-friendly peek. There was little to no context for her clothes, haircuts, artwork, videos and mannerisms, to say nothing of her sounds: a strangely workable mix of the machine-hollow cold and blood-pumping warm. Post matched left-of-center dance production with pop songs in a pre-Timbaland world and Homogenic was practically just string quartets and beats under Bjork's techno hippy couplets and elf scatting. She seemed like somebody from an alternate version of our world, whereas Kanye is so nostalgic and given to fad that he is more a lucid reflection of our past and present. Almost everything he is about right now - auto-tune r'n'b, Tron retro, tribal minimalism - has a reference point somewhere else nearby in the modern conciousness.

So what makes Kanye so fascinating to me? Why do I believe he is a key to the what-next? The answer is the way he has brought immediacy back to pop star-ing. Like a hip hop John Lennon, Kanye, for all his musical genius, is a communicator first and a musician second. He's got that Beatle's impatience with the way things are done in the limelight, as well as his excess of energy. He might lack Lennon's reflective nature - there is an inane quality to a lot of Kanye's public statements - but he is a bona fide game-changer. In culture the snake tends to eat the tail and Kanye is the Internet, which used to follow the art, coming full circle to birth new thinking about what music can be used for. He's the first artist of his profile to be truly operating at the speed of blog. There was no better example of this than the success story behind "Love Lockdown." In one of my more psyched blogs, I documented this new trajectory for pop singles: Kanye peformed the song for all the world to see at the VMAs, only weeks after writing and recording it for his forthcoming album. Days after the performance he streamed his unmastered version on his blog, caught some negative feedback from fans, went back into the studio to retool the recording, then dropped the thing on iTunes, where it went to number one within 48 hours. Back in more golden days, an artist like Al Green could have rushed a new single out to radio immediately after cutting it. But they could never have been this interactive - the mediums for it didn't exist.

While I have hope that Kanye can one day take music into some second territories, for now I'm happy to enjoy 808s and Heartbreaks for what it is, a pop experiment about real-time. To put it in context you don't have to look any further than the man's blog, a never-ending stream of cold-surfaced furniture, Bladerunner couture, James Bond gadgets and poached web culture. Kanye's mother dying this year seems to have erupted a torrent of nostalgia in him that goes beyond simple irony to the level of psychic comfort food. Listening to 808s you can practically see him wrapping himself in a memory blanket of the day glo '80s. Knight Rider cars, Akira colors, low-res midi keyboard patches, all sung through an android's vocal box and punctuated with bleeps and laser blasts. Again, seen it, but Kanye has taken the personal loss of his mother and the breakup with his fiance and used them to power these retro elements with a sincerity and emotionalism that's been missing in their re-use.


If Kanye's blog is a real-time document of creative inspiration, 808s is the logical result of that. He's stayed true to his turn-ons. The structures of these new arrangements are as spare and function-first as any of the modernist architecture he's been geeking out on. "Say You Will" has more movement than it should - pick apart the beat programming and you'll see that there's nothing in there subdiving the crushed tom tom groove the way a high hat usually would, and yet it bounces along, buoyed more by the space he leaves for your mind to connect the dots. That's Kanye giving a masters class on minimalism. And so it goes for most of the record, with that restraint paying off more than not. (Although less is not always more - there is still something uncooked about the studio version of "Love Lockdown" and I'm not sure even the gorgeous "Say You Will" deserves it's 6:18 running time.)

Let's talk about the auto-tune. There are good reason to hate on it. 1) it takes Kanye out of the role of trendsetter and puts him in the company of some real tacky shit. But we shouldn't hold Kanye responsible for T-Pain's sins. Pop robot vocals have a distinguished lineage that includes Daft Punk, Air and Kraftwerk. Kanye might not be the first person to bring it to black music but he might be the first person to do it with any class. 2) it's fair to say you probably shouldn't base an entire record on a single vocal effect. I thought the Strokes made that point once and for all when their singer used the same filtered mic sound for three straight albums - it freed Casablancas to be a more energetic vocalist, but it made every song start to sound the same.

Is auto-tune a crutch for Kanye? Of course. But I prefer to think of it as a boost, a way that Kanye can play against his limitations to expand what he's capable of. It would be a shame if the auto-tune abuse obscured the bigger picture here, which is that Kanye, not content to be a restlessly inventive rapper and producer, has set his sights on soulsinging. If an auto-tune plugin gave him the cover fire he needed to get from hook-crafter to songwriter and crooner, I'm glad for it. Kanye's melodies have the deepness and he sings them like he owns them. We're not talking played-out Top 40 tunes, but old-world soulful dirges. "Street Lights" and "Bad News" feel like Pharrell producing Gershwin and "Love Lockdown" and "Coldest Winter" have the swamp and sweat of old slave spirituals that Nina Simone used to reinvent. "Welcome to Heartbreak," "Amazing" and "RoboCop" are just insanely catchy. I'm not saying he should abandon rapping, he's one of the few who can hold my attention. I'm just saying, maybe his feelings ran out of room in the rap form. Or maybe there are things that can only be said in song.

Kanye West - "Welcome to Heartbreak (Ft. Kid Cudi)"




Kanye West - "RoboCob"




Kanye West - "Say You Will"




Kanye West - "Street Lights"



Kanye West - "Bad News"

Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship

(L-R, Trevor Naud and LTD)

Back in June I leaked some early mixes of Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship, a new project of my good friend Trevor Naud in collaboration with Pas/Cal drummer LTD. (I hesitate to mention that Trevor is kin because I don't want to imply that my fascination with his music is in some way pro-rated by my affection for him as a person. The majesty of Trevor's gift is wide and timeless and I just happen to know him.) And now, I have the final album in my hands and I need to talk about it.

Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship is like some rare exotic flower that flourishes in the secret dark and contains double helices of hallucinogenic gunpowder entwined deep in its stems if you know how to unleash it. Trevor told me he made it in a period of extreme personal blockage. No doubt, part of that frustration was with his own band, Zoos of Berlin, who, with over four years of stunning gigs and avant-garde alchemy under their belts have yet to produce a full-length album (there is every indication that dawning of the Zoos long player is finally nigh). So Trevor set up some mics and a computer in his kitchen and made this in a season. His impatience emerges in the ADD'ness of it all, the quick-acting brevity and the conjuring of swift, but complete, worlds of sound. They are less songs than glints of melodic hooks strung together like Christmas lights to form a shimmering path. The best way to listen is to avoid grasping - just let the vignettes fly by fully formed in their warbled and buttery baroque shapes.

HGBS came out more gentle than early mixes suggested. The first mp3 Trevor slipped me last summer was "A Head For Gabriel Dove," two and a half minutes of compression-crushed jazz drumming and reverb-soaked baritone that was as carnivorous as it was surging. But a listen to the finished record shows something much more haunted than hunting. It is a quiet anxiety slowed into sadness, more in keeping with the winter around me and things falling into sleep and death. It's a pop requiem for emotional shut-ins and the spiritually claustrophobic.

Fans of Scott Walker, David Bowie, Arthur Russell and Eric Matthews - in other words, artists trying to repossess dead rock forms with the jagged spirits of 20th century classical and avant garde - will come pre-primed for going deep with these tracks. But it doesn't require some kind of exclusive, arty membership to respond to something this gorgeous and immediate. It's very tuneful, very lucid stuff.

As far as I know he's currently figuring out the terms of the record's release. Go bug him about it.

NOTE: For some reason my audio player is being weird about these files. You might have to hit play, then pause, then play.

Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship - "Glass Case"



Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship - "Jonaccce"



Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship - "Nineteenth Usher"



Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship - "A Head for Gabriel Dove"



Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship - "Once Outside"

Beyonce, Another Race

For "Single Ladies" and its accompanying video alone, Beyonce had my jaw-dropped awe. But her performance of it this past weekend on SNL only furthered underscored my deepening suspicion that angels once walked the earth mating freely with humans, and that their progeny are gorgeous big-bootied divas with digitally-perfect banshee voices, special-action swivel hips and complexions as golden and creamy as a smear of stars. I mean, let's be honest here - it's Beyonce's world and we're just swimming in it. Goddamn I love the "ring finger"dance. I love it good!







Beyond the first couple singles, "If I Were a Boy" (meh), and "Single Ladies" I've seen some love given out for "Halo" on the blogs, and rightly so. But my heart belongs to "Sweet Dreams."

Beyonce - "Sweet Dreams" [From I Am... Sasha Fierce]


Beyonce - "Halo" [From I Am... Sasha Fierce]

On the Tip

Q-tip has returned, but I have a confession: I'm only just discovering his solo work and his old band A Tribe Called Quest, both at the same time. I'm not a devotee yet, but I adore his flow and I'm always up for rhymes this thoughtful. This is from his new record The Renaissance. Can I just say that it's so good to hear D'Angelo's voice again:

Q-Tip - "Believe (feat. D'Angelo)"



This is what piqued my interest in Tip, a track from Tribe's The Low End Theory. When I heard this I finally understood what Tribe's legendary status was all about. This is easily one of the best tracks I discovered all year.

A Tribe Called Quest - "Vibes and Stuff"

The Mynah Byrds

True or false: Rick James and Neil Young used to be in a band together, called the Mynah Byrds.

From Wiki:

James and [bassist] Palmer soon formed a new Mynah Birds lineup with guitarists Tom Morgan and Xavier Taylor, and drummer Rick Mason. In early 1966, the Mynah Birds auditioned for the Motown label in Detroit. Morgan was unhappy with the label's attitude towards the musicians and left, with Neil Young taking his place. With Young on board, the Mynah Birds returned to Motown to record an album, but their manager pocketed the advance money the label had given the band. The band fired their manager, who in turn told the label that James was AWOL [from the Naval Reserves]. Motown told him to give himself up to the FBI, and the Mynah Birds' album was shelved. James spent a year in the Brooklyn Brig, after which he briefly returned to Toronto. During the summer of 1967, Rick James formed a new version of The Mynah Birds (sometimes spelled "Myna Byrds") with Neil Merryweather. The band returned to Motown and Detroit and recorded a new version of James and Neil Young's "It's My Time", but the band broke up soon afterwards.

The Mynah Byrds - "It's My Time"

The Mynah Byrds - "Go On And Cry"

Eccentric Soul Picks

No archival music project that I know of has unearthed more quality forgotten music than Buda Music's Ethiopiques series, which restored and re-presented a wealth of Ethiopian jazz from the '60s and '70s. I spent a good year picking through those audio mines - for every gold nugget there are mounds of granite - and it was worth it to get ahold of something that sounded so harmonically and rhythmically bizarre, but with a recognizable soulfulness.

Now I've got a new obsession to rival my Ethiopiques craze: Numero Group's Eccentric Soul series. It's a similar concept, collect works of unrecognized genius, the kind of music that might have had a fighting chance at a legacy in the electronic age - in this case a whole bunch of American soul labels that never rose to the status of Motown, Stax or Hi Records - and package them together for new consideration.

I first became aware of the series during the release of Volume 3, which featured Miami's Deep City Label. I'm still wading through it all, but so far that volume seems the best place to start because it has some of the series' strongest work.

It takes some digging and sifting to get past the mediocre stuff, but the same could be said of the recently reissued Complete Motown series. And besides, in my experience having to do a little work for your music only brings it closer.

Check out some of my favorites so far:

Them Two - "Am I a Good Man" - Eccentric Soul Vol. 3: The Deep City Label

Moovers - "Someone to Fulfill My Needs" - Eccentric Soul Vol. 3: The Deep City Label

The Rising Sun - "One Night Affair" - Eccentric Soul: The Outskirts of Deep City

Tokay Lewis - "What Can the Matter Be" - Eccentric Soul: The Tragar & Note Labels

Eula Cooper - "Heavenly Father" - Eccentric Soul: The Tragar & Note Labels

Obams Away