Is £ 4.45 enough?

I have yet to read an actual review of Radiohead's latest. It seems like all the buzz revolves around this "pay as you wish" concept. I still don't quite get it.

I sat, staring at the rainbow webpage, the cursor blinking at me. How much is enough? I wavered between 8 pounds (16 + dollars) and 2 (4+ dollars). They're giving me the choice, and I'm a poor student, I thought. As I entered in 2 pounds (and 0 pence - that was a crucial step to the purchasing process) I suddenly felt guilty. I don't exactly know why, but I did. Finally after much agonizing I settled on 4 pounds. 4.45 including a credit surcharge. I'm getting a .98 cent bargain over iTunes' 9.99 album rate. Should I feel guilty for *slightly* ripping off already wealthy artists?

Now, on to the album. "In Rainbows" has all the characteristics of the Radiohead that I know and love, yet I feel like it will become one of their more commercial releases, especially after the buzz around its release.

Right now I'm listening to "Nude" and its taking me on an ethereal voyage with Yorke's mellow voice floating mid-air. The next track, "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi" is fabulous as well. They all are.

As I'm listening to the album for the second time through, I'm feeling an inverse buyer's remorse. I should have paid more.

"Fascist Aesthetics in the Films of Wes Anderson"

A friend of mine called me a relativist, among other names, because I didn't think Darjeeling Limited was as he put it "a piece of shit". So I went back to read more about it. At the House Next Door I stumbled upon this essay by David Nordstrom, "The Life Fascistic" (ha ha) a quest to uncover Anderson’s dark side (“within these lyrical motifs lurk elements of an ethos far more bitter than sweet”).
True, nothing is innocuous (not even, especially not Amelie which carries a more rancid ideology than Wes Anderson in my opinion) and many would agree that the "lifeless" Life Aquatic is Anderson's worst movie.
Nordstrom goes on to argue, quoting Sontag, that Wes Anderson's work shares the qualities of fascist aesthetics. [I wonder what Sontag herself would have thought about this.] "Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums offset or subvert their fascist aesthetic through irony. The lack of ironic counterbalance in The Life Aquatic allows Anderson’s fascist aesthetics to mutiny, to take over the film and run it aground".
"The elements of fascist aesthetics more or less latent in the first three films become patent in the fourth. Among them is a preoccupation with martial order, a system of rank and classification, expressed through themise en scéne , particularly through the uniforms and tokens that litter every frame. Sontag speaks directly to this characteristic: “There is a general fantasy about uniforms." Could the same thing be said of Darjeeling Limited's tyranical main character? Or does Sontag's argument resist displacement?
"Central to each of Anderson’s films is a self-elected, charismatic leader. This leader controls his followers by virtue of their blind devotion to his cult of personality." There is something totalizing about Anderson's fluffy world but the “leader” roles in his films mainly embody a simulacrum of power (contrary to Riefenstahl) -not actual power.
Nordstrom's semiology is a bit simplistic (what is the meaning behind those signs?). This is more convincing : "objects are exalted into fascinating characters and characters are reduced to boring objects. Again we encounter a propensity of fascist aesthetics: “The turning of people into things.” "Idealized eroticism, or sexual denial, is plain in at least two of the earlier films, Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums".

And going back to quirk: "Sontag warns that the fascist aesthetic cannot be fully divorced from its ideological content, its anti-humanist implications. The danger lies in the fact that for some audiences the fascist aesthetic is “no more than a variant of camp.”

The Facebook Skit

I know this is not of cultural or artistic pertinence, however in this facebook era, I thought you would all be amused.

Casting call

Last week, this NYTimes article on the release of The Kite Runner kind of blew me away. If you're unfamiliar with the story, and not inclined to link to the article, here's a quick synopsis: The movie's director, Marc Forster (Finding Neverland) didn't "connect" with any of the child actors he auditioned from Afghan communities in California, Toronto, and The Hague. So, he went to Kabul and cast a couple kids from there to star in the film, which deals with ethnic tension, a childhood friendship between two boys -- one Pashtun and one Hazara -- and the rise of the Taliban. It also features a scenes in which one of the boys, a Hazara, is raped by a Pashtun bully. The families of the two boys who star in the film are now saying that were lied to and mistreated by the filmmakers, and they fear the release of the film, with its rape scene, may put their sons in danger.

Reading the article, the filmmakers come across as incredibly naive. While I'm sure they meant well enough, perhaps they should have thought a bit more about casting children from a politically unstable nation in a movie that deals explicitly with ethnic tensions. A few quotes from the article where the film peeps sound especially idiotic:

Finally, when Ms. Dowd [casting director] went to Kabul in May 2006, she discovered her stars. “There was such innocence to them, despite all they’d lived through,” she said.

and this

Mr. Forster emphasized that casting Afghan boys did not seem risky at the time; local filmmakers even encouraged him, he said: “You really felt it was safe there, a democratic process was happening, and stability, and a new beginning.”

Now, this being May of 2006, you would think the filmmakers would have at least thought about the protests and the 16 people killed in February of 2006 as a result of the controversy surrounding the Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. A different situation for sure, but one that perhaps should have been at least taken into consideration before casting two boys from a country that is 99% muslim in a movie that has a rape scene between two boys from rival ethnic groups.

Still, it sounds like the movie peeps are now doing their best to deal with this "tricky situation." They're arranging for the boys and their families to relocate to the U.A.E., where they can get refugee status:

Those involved say that the studio doesn’t want to be taken advantage of, but that it could accept responsibility for the boys’ living expenses until they reach adulthood, a cost some estimated at up to $500,000. The families, of course, must first agree to the plan.

Wow, $500,000 x 2 could really cut into those opening weekend grosses, she blogged cynically.

Cynicism aside, I think this piece is worth taking a look at as a really interesting piece of arts reporting, dealing with a situation that raises some very complex issues.

Lesson: If you're a filmmaker casting a potentially politically charged film set in an unstable country, and you just have to cast children native to that unstable country because they have an amazing "innocence" despite having their living in a war-torn country, you may have to pay for them and their families to uproot their lives before you can release your movie.

Battle of the Glamour Girls

Since our last class I’ve been to two concerts, one of which I ended up leaving about a quarter of the way through. Had I actually paid for it I can’t say I wouldn’t have been equally tempted to get out of there. The musician in question? Patrick Wolf, ersatz Bowie heir and U.K. phenom. His sound is invariably described as “dark,” “melodic” and my personal fave, “haunting.” The music itself wasn’t actually bad—apparently Wolf expertly plays something like 10 instruments. Well, he had help I guess. In any case, vocally, the guy did absolutely nothing for me. Not sexy, not soulful, not even haunting like they promised!

And really, if you’re going to ever merit comparisons to Bowie, you need to up your sartorial game. Wolf gets on stage wearing white cutoffs that only enhance his pasty pallor and some kind of sleeveless American Apparel hoodie/cape hybrid. After a minute or so of playing “hide the hipster” under there, the tease, he lowers the hood, sans maquillage and nary a trace of glitter. And he’s wearing a crusty, misshapen broom-bristle wig. Awful. Just awful.

Thankfully I also got to see Natasha Khan and co., aka Bat For Lashes earlier in the week. All of the accolades erroneously heaped upon that weakling Wolf? Well, hackneyed as they may be, they apply to Bat For Lashes. Natasha sounds like a cross between Bjork, P.J. Harvey and Siouxsie Sioux. Her outfit veered toward Sonny-era Cher, but she was absolutely fetching as a boho Indian. Laugh if you will, I loved it. No attitude either. Just gorgeous, lush electro-pop. Natasha even played the triangle and shook(?) a rain stick! I will now buy their debut album and wear a feather in my hair, unironically of course. If you haven't already, check out the video for "What's A Girl To Do." Very Donnie Darko.

Words and Guitar

On Tuesday, Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney spoke at the New School, as part of their series with non-fiction writers. She started off by reading the introduction she wrote to a forthcoming book about the Rock and Roll Camp for Girls. It was good, though not unexpected, her descriptions of the camp’s greatness and necessity more valuable because of their source, but also just the kind of thing you’d expect from a member of one of the greatest bands of the last decade.

One of the greatest bands? Yeah. Greil Marcus introduced her, noting that for ten years Sleater-Kinney played some of the loudest, most surprising and all around best music there was. It’s great to hear a critic of Marcus’s stature (and generation) say this, though in the small, overheated room packed mostly with riot grrrls and their younger sisters, it was also kinda strange.

Next, Brownstein read a longer essay that started off being about the Portland neighborhood where she lives, an apparently un-hip place called Hollywood (named after an old local vaudeville-turned-movie theater). It began as a meditation about the authenticity of places like these, and the quirky specifics of this one in particular. Then it shifted to a discussion of Mark Lindsay, Portland native and former member of 60’s band Paul Revere and the Raiders (who have a MySpace page!). Not long ago, Lindsay opened up a shiny palace of neon lights called Mark Lindsay’s Rock n’ Roll Café, right in Brownstein’s understated, old-fashioned neighborhood. With photos of Lindsay in his prime projected on a screen behind her, Brownstein described her process of coming to terms with the gleaming establishment – from rage and embarrassment, to curiosity, to a deep and supposedly unironic love (due mostly to the place’s bizarrely sincere authenticity, and menu items like the Yaws Top Notch Hamburger and The Cornfurter).

She had a lot of insightful things to say about the weirdness of fame, and her own ideas about how to safeguard one’s legacy and the items that embody it (hint – she’s not so into the display of Lindsay’s guitars of a wall of his restaurant, nor his silly Raiders-era outfits encased in Plexi glass in the dining area). When the Experience Music Project opened in Seattle in 2000, the museum bought Brownstein’s first guitar to put on display. Seeing it there afterwards, she said, made her realize that the guitar is an object that’s meaningless out of context and without a voice.

Carrie Brownstein’s going to be doing a lot more writing, including an essay for a forthcoming anthology on Bob Dylan. She’s also collaborating with Fred Armisen on some video shorts, which you can check out here. She was adamant about never being “just” a musician. After her reading and some innocuous questions from Marcus, someone in the audience just came out and asked the question everyone was wondering: Why Did Sleater-Kinney Break Up?

“We were done,” she shrugged. And it made total sense.

Two guys and a crash helmet - now that's Punk Rock

I've spent the last couple of weekends covering hipsters out in Brooklyn, and I'm going to be honest: I've heard some pretty awful music. I mean, it doesn't take much to string a band together, if you really think about it. Surely, you don't need to prove you can play an instrument in order to buy it, or plug it into an amp, or play it in front of a group of people for that matter. A little over twenty minutes of last Saturday made all the wading into all of those middle-of-nowhere venues, listening to all those crappy sibling/best friend-based garage and basement bands worth while though. What might this be you ask? Why, two kids from Seattle playing in a sweaty basement on Wycoff Avenue, of course. The band is called Pillow Fight, and basically it consists of a guitar, a drum set, and a whole lot of undecipherable yelling. In other words, punk rock. The Sex Pistols used to unplug their bassist' amp, and Pillow Fight's gone one step further by getting rid of the son of a bitch all together. To top it all off, the drummer has wired a microphone into a crash helmet, which he then wears while drumming and screaming his balls off. Utterly fantastic. Check out the myspace page. Yeah, yeah I know... "No one uses Myspace anymore."