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."

CBS's CSI: Doin' one for the Kids

I understand that cop dramas like Law and Order need to have convoluted plots. Nobody wants to watch an hour of television just to find out that the butler actually did do it. Hell, half of Criminal Intent's stories end up involving the NSA or some other such government agency. CBS' CSI has really pushed the cop drama to a new level though, with a plot involving Gary Sinise going into the virtual world Second Life to catch a computer program. The New York Times has already had a fun time going after the creators of CSI. I want to point out, specifically though, how funny it is that CBS is doing this to attract younger audiences, as if our attention spans are so cheaply bought. "Oh man, Murder She Wrote's got an IPhone featured in the next episode..."

Let's be honest, when we say constructive criticism we mean "ass-kissing"

Damn, it sucks that you can't see this whole strip. But click on it to enter a world of magic.

Shines

The fragility of life and our innate survival instincts never juxtapose more than in the aftermath of unexpected tragedy. And when they collide, nothing is the same. Such is Sin-ae’s heartbreaking fate; Secret Sunshine, the new film by South Korean director Lee Chang-dong, is her story.

Secret Sunshine screened at the Time Warner Center on Monday and Tuesday this week as a part of the New York Film Festival (Sept. 28-Oct. 14). The film stars actress Jeon Do-yeon as the endearing and deeply troubled Shin-ae, a recently widowed woman who decides to move herself and her five-year-old son, Jun, from Seoul to Milyang, her dead husband’s hometown. There, she opens a piano school and enrolls Jun in school, and life is almost normal.

But tragedy finds Shin-ae in Milyang too, and her life once again becomes unrecognizable. She continues on, fumbling and absorbed, unaware of the secret sunshine (the literal translation of the name of the town) that Lee weaves adeptly through the film. Gentle humor, well-intentioned friends and neighbors, and a bit of fun poking at the institution of Christianity—it’s life, unstoppable.

Jeon deservingly took home the Best Actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival this year for her incredible performance, but Secret Sunshine’s success is the net effect of countless deserving performances both on and off the screen. I could not conclude this review without mentioning Song Kang-ho, who plays a jovial, kind-of-nerdy auto mechanic madly in love with Shin-ae—he stands by her patiently, an unfaltering friend—to perfection.

The Misanthrope at the NY Theatre Workshop

Alceste, furiously mixing the spaghettis and the chocolate*.

At one point in the play, in a (post-modern?) emphatic gesture Alceste, the excessive and constantly irritated main character climbs on the lunch table and pours the entire meal over his head (spaghettis, ketchup, chocolate and whatever he comes across) before inserting a sausage in his pants. This moment qualifies as one of “the many arguably freakish, undeniably stimulating liberties put forth by Ivo Van Hove in his provocative gloss on The Misanthrope [Eric Grode in the NY Sun]. The characters make frequent use of their cell phones, play Second Life on their laptop and are being filmed at the same time –so far, nothing unacceptable.
What is interesting is how a 17th century play can still make perfect sense right now, in a different context. The problem is that The Misanthrope is built upon a fairly complex argument (which made as much sense when it was written as it does now) supported by equally complex characters. And the NY Sun article rightly quotes the following (from 1965) : "Molière's comedy, because it is so thoroughly ‘written,' resists the overextension of any thesis".
The NY Theatre Workshop is showing a new, modern translation (by Tony Harrison). There is nothing wrong with desacrilizing a text or an author, as long at its meaning is somewhat retained: but Harrison’s text strikes me as a bad modern translation (combined with Van Hove’s direction, it is even worse). “Mr. Van Hove's gut renovations of the classics” (like Hedda Gabler) doesn’t really work this time because the mise en scene doesn’t work with a text that is already weaker than the original. However exciting it may be (a modern Misanthrope!), the whole experience turns out to be pretty frustrating. The fact that the actors are trapped in a transparent loft, all wearing the same suits and all seemingly alienated by corporate culture grossly simplifies the meaning of the text. “Where’s the friction between substance and surface?” asks Ben Brantley in the Times. The argument of the play seems reduced to a stupid debate between silly people (should one always speak his mind / or should one compromise and lie for the sake of social peace?). Moliere’s play isn’t prescriptive, whether you should hate everybody or not is not the point. But except for Alceste (Bill Kamp), everyone else in Van Hove’s play is equally superficial and self-centered and indeed it makes you want to pour ketchup on yourself. It also makes you wonder why you should care for this play if it’s nothing else than empty –poorly written- chatting ("bavardage").

*He's the misanthrope.

Radiohead Releases New Album - Music Industry Vomits in its Mouth

Only Radiohead could have done this. The Oxford quintet had fans “WTF?!"ing across the planet when they announced today that their seventh LP, In Rainbows, would be available for download in ten short days. An album folks barely knew existed can be on their iPods in less than two weeks. You can pre-order the fool thing today and pay whatever amount you can afford! Fans can also pre-order something called a “discbox”(available to ship on or after December 3rd) that contains the full album plus a bunch of extra tracks on LP, a code allowing purchasers to download the album digitally, and Radiohead’s infamously cryptic album art. With the discbox running upwards of £40 ($81), it might make more sense to hold out for the basic CD which should be available early next year.

This is truly unprecedented behavior – particularly for one of the most commercially and critically successful rock acts in the Western world. Suddenly Britain’s consummate musical innovators are now certified marketing innovators. Radiohead’s provocative sales plan has everything to do with the fact that the boys have managed to extricate themselves form the major label grind. Their contract with EMI/Capitol ended after the release of 2003’s Hail to the Thief. Throughout the recording of In Rainbows, bets were laid on the band’s next move. Would they go major, indie, or go it alone? Thom and co. refused much comment (though the release of Thom’s solo effort, The Eraser, on indie stalwarts XL, at least suggested their minds were open to change.)

Now we know. Radiohead are the taking the piss out of the music industry and releasing one of the most anticipated records in years on their own. The details of their marketing plan – what amounts to an officially-sanctioned leak of the album combined with a premium/super-deluxe/balls-out LP, before the release of the regular CD – points to deep fissures developing in the music industry. The split here is between content (the actual music) and packaging (the value-adds, the artwork, the stuff you can hold in your hands). Content is ubiquitous. Everyone, including Radiohead, assumes access to the music. If the band didn’t “leak” the album themselves, someone else would. But people will still pay for packaging – particularly rabid Radiohead fans hungry for Stanley Donwood’s album art. Hence the $81 double LP – an LP that crucially doesn’t prohibit access to mp3s and the convenience of iPod portability.

Finally, it’s no coincidence that the CD is hitting shelves last and that it isn’t even available for pre-order. If you can download the album digitally for nearly nothing or pay a few bucks and get the album on digital and analog formats along with your weight in add-ons, why pay $18 for a piece of plastic?