This Ain't No Bank Robbery

The New Site

2010-03-07T11:37:00.000-06:00

I'm at A House of Lies now: www.ahouseoflies.tumblr.com.

Please go there instead of here and, if you have a tumblr account, follow me. I would tell you to "reset your bookmarks," but I don't think anyone uses those anymore.

The Final Post

2010-02-19T01:46:00.000-06:00

In Now I Can Die in Peace, one of the two hundred and six books about Boston winning the World Series, Bill Simmons wrote modestly about the legacy of the Red Sox. Rather than describing how this win would change baseball history forever, how Boston would be a powerhouse for years to come, he focused on the fans. Above all, this championship made them normal. They didn't feel cursed; they didn't feel snakebitten; they felt the same "wait'll next year" optimism that every other team's fans did. After the 2004 title, the Red Sox became just another team.

I've written at length about how snakebitten New Orleans Saints fans have felt over the years. In fact, I first learned what the word "snakebit" meant when my father used it during a playoff loss to the Eagles. In the two weeks following Super Bowl XLIV, I've tried to process the Saints' win, and I've thought a lot about Simmons' thesis and how it might apply to New Orleans. Then I remembered: the New Orleans Saints have never been and will never be "just another team."

There is something in the air here that has kept the franchise alive through so many terrible seasons. Hope kept us afloat during the Aaron Brooks/Jeff Blake/Billy Joe Tolliver/Kerry Collins/Danny Wuerffel/Heath Shuler/Jim Everett/Wade Wilson years. Hope kept us afloat during a year without any real home games. Hope kept me afloat during all of those Sundays growing up when my mom told me I was wasting my time watching a team of losers. Back then, I told her, "It'll all be worth it when they win the Super Bowl." As usual, I was wise beyond my years. This is a spiritual city, and its loyalty to its longest-tenured sports team is rooted within that type of faith. Despite the bags on our heads or the squirrels calling in to Buddy D's radio show, this is a city that cares a bit too much about a silly team. In New Orleans, you can tell from people's attitudes whether or not we won on Sunday. It's always been that way. For the past two weeks, as my hand has healed from high-fiving random strangers, you can tell that we won the big one.

When the Red Sox won the World Series, bandwagon fans came out of the woodwork, but that hasn't happened with the Saints yet. Everyone here shares a love for this team, and no one begrudges anyone else for a championship t-shirt. Everyone has suffered in his own way, so everyone can celebrate in his own way. Black and gold were as popular over Mardi Gras as purple, green, and gold, and that trend shows no sign of stopping. As I've taken in the celebration over the past couple of days, I've wondered: doesn't anyone have a job? In fact, as a teacher, I'm waiting for the excuses to end. We were off the day after the Super Bowl, but then kids slept through school because of the parade. How long can this continue? "Coach, my Sports Illustrated subscription came in yesterday. I was reading the hardcover commemorative book." "Mr. B, I was up all night re-watching the game on the Super Bowl DVD." And the proud surprises keep coming. I was reminded today that we'll get the last pick in the first round of the next NFL Draft, and I couldn't be more delighted. I have nothing to compare this pride to, but I'm just as thankful as I thought I would be. Part of me says that it's always like this when a team wins the Super Bowl; the other part of me knows that can't be true. I feel the same way as everyone else, yet it's still difficult to describe those feelings.

This site was originally intended as an outlet for explaining unique thoughts on subjects that are often glossed over. To that end, a Saints Super Bowl win for which I have nothing original to say seems like a logical stopping point. All "hell has frozen over" jokes aside, this feels like a bookend. For a while now, This Ain't No Bank Robbery hasn't challenged me as a writer or culture critic. I've been frustrated by the Blogger layout, and I've watched as the Deleted Scenes link dump has gotten more traffic than the original site. From the beginning, the problem with This Ain't No Bank Robbery--but also the reason why people like it--is that it's unfocused. One post might be about sports, the next might be about music, and so on. The Saints' epic win has proven to me that, as important as sports are to me, they aren't something that fulfills me as a writer. I need to go in a different direction. While the site and its hefty archive will remain open, this is my last post for TANBR.

I plan to combine my work here and at Deleted Scenes into one tumblr site that will be completely entertainment-based--still offering longer essay pieces but constantly updating. Once it's ready to go, I'll link to it here. Until then, consider me on hiatus. It's been a rewarding, educational three-and-a-half-years. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your loyalty and support.

The Best Films of 2009, Part II

2010-02-08T22:11:00.004-06:00

Sorry about the jacked-up formatting on both of these posts. I hate Blogger. Anyway,

GOOD MOVIES

33. Sunshine Cleaning- Christine Jeffs

Megan Holley's script has some charming character development moments, and the chemistry between Emily Blunt and Amy Adams is convincingly sisterly. I didn't always buy the motivations of Adams' character, but this is one of those films you can recommend confidently to almost anyone.

32. Tyson- James Toback
Tyson is a simple picture in which the title subject serves as the only voice in the film, speaking directly--sometimes defiantly--to the camera as the events he's describing are played over his voice. But what a voice that is. We learn way more about Tyson's complex mindset from spending eighty minutes with him than we do from all of history's treatment of him. His explanation of how fear contributed to his fighting style is particularly illuminating.
31. The Carter- Adam Bahla Lough
The biggest thing this documentary--hailed as a rap version of D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back--has going for it is timing. It catches Lil' Wayne at the height of his fame and influence and, without even trying to, captures him as a selfish, shallow, drug-addicted dilletante. While it also showcases his capricious genius, the more personal portrait of Wayne is refreshingly unforgiving.
30. Extract- Mike Judge
I'll admit that the entire second half of this film goes nowhere, and the ending is anti-climactic at best. But when Extract works, it's genuinely funny, and the character details are spot-on.
29. Star Trek- JJ Abrams
This is how a franchise should be reinvented. The film has a staggering sense of energy and wonder surrounding it, along with a structure that both keeps us moving and fills us in on a fascinating backstory. Think about how difficult Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto's jobs were here. Kirk and Spock are two of the most beloved and defined characters around, and both of them manage to pay them homage while also doing something completely new. Both men have unbelievable presence onscreen, and I'm looking forward to seeing where they go from here.
28. Taken- Pierre Morel

I like a deep, well-crafted, personal story as much as anyone. But sometimes it's enough to be badass. There are few movies as badass as Taken.

27. Public Enemies- Michael Mann

I didn't respond to the stilted reverence with which Mann's camera glides around Johnny Depp's Dillinger, but Mann's dedication to shooting this story digitally is what separates it from any other period gangster picture. The realistic colors and hand-held imperfection he gets from HD lend an immediacy I've never felt from something set in the '20s. There isn't much for him to do on the page, but Depp delivers here with a smokey gravitas all his own.

26. Goodbye Solo- Ramin Bahrani
As understated as Goodbye Solo can be throughout, its ending is sweeping and powerful. The relationship between the two principal characters grows realistically throughout the film, and it's depicted with a loving tone by neo-neo-realist Bahrani.
25. Funny People- Judd Apatow

Unlike Goodbye Solo, this is a film in which the protagonist does not change as much as we expect him to, and that's what I liked most about it. Sandler's George Simmons changes halfway, but we get the sense that he's not going to make it as far as we'd like. Seth Rogen does some strong work as the moral center, straying a bit from what we're used to from him, and he provides some of the bittersweet notes the movie excels at hitting.

24. Big Fan- Robert D. Siegel
It's not as funny as most people would expect--Patton Oswalt's expressive face is much more concerned with creating pathos than chuckles--but Big Fan presents an interesting premise, and it doesn't really do anything wrong the whole movie. All the way through its knowing conclusion, it doesn't hit any false notes.
23. A Single Man- Tom Ford
This movie is kind of in love with its own desperate dourness, but I was impressed by Ford as a craftsman. Every frame looks as if it was obsessed over, and every visual detail works. Colin Firth's lead performance is staggering.
22. Brothers- Jim Sheridan
I was surprised this film didn't get better reviews because it hooked me. The performances were all spot-on, and the stakes of the film escalated quickly. This was a tough movie to pull off and, though I wasn't satisfied by the ending, I think Jim Sheridan delivered one of his best.
21. The Hurt Locker- Kathryn Bigelow

The Hurt Locker is explosive and filled with tension. I was especially attracted to the confusion all of the action scenes are cloaked in. As claustrophobic as they are, they're made more dangerous by the fact that we don't always know who's shooting or where they're shooting from. This is a movie in which anything can happen, and that mystery is on full display. I did think that the movie spelled out a few too many of its themes. The script has a penchant for explaining exactly what the characters are thinking and sort of babying us, especially at the end. Still pretty great though.

20. An Education- Lone Scherfig

If the last ten minutes of this film didn't exist, it would be perfect. Through a few scenes that take away the stakes of what has been built and a dreadful voiceover that wraps everything up with a bow, An Education keeps itself from being the glorious, ebullient film it had established itself as up to that point. It's unfortunate that the movie, despite crowd-pleasing performances from everyone involved, steps on itself in the final stretch.

19. The Girlfriend Experience- Steven Soderbergh
With its non-performance by Sasha Grey and its challenging structure, The Girlfriend Experience defies description. Warts and all, the latest Steven Soderbergh experiment has more to say about relationships and intimacy than almost anything.
18. Crazy Heart- Scott Cooper
Jeff Bridges' wounded performance is as advertised. This is the exact same movie as The Wrestler, but he fills every frame with a worn authenticity that makes the whole thing work. I doubted some of the decisions Maggie Gyllenhaal made, but this is a piercing, life-affirming character study.
17. The Messenger- Oren Moverman
The Messenger is the best film ever made about the guilt that often comes with grief. Its performances are honest, and Moverman's decision to shoot everything in long takes serves the movie's raw emotional power well.
16. Food Inc.- Robert Kenner
This is another movie I pre-judged and was completely wrong about. It's persuasive and entertaining and makes its argument by focusing on the victims of the food industry, rather than demonizing Big Food itself.
15. Two Lovers- James Gray

This is a sparse, intimate film that moves with a deliberate, heart-breaking pace. People have justifiably written about Joaquin Phoenix's performance, but Gwyneth Paltrow is the secret weapon here. She spent her entire career trying not to play dumb bitches; when she finally does play one here, we realize it's something she does very well.

GREAT MOVIES

14. A Serious Man- Joel and Ethan Coen
This is a dream-like film that has its own rhythms and darkly comedic worldview. Even when it doesn't work (the many imaginary sequences), you have to reward a movie that is concerned with asking (and sort of answering) questions about the very nature of existence. From the poetic yiddish prologue to its game-changing final shot, this is a masterful piece of work.
13. Humpday- Lynn Shelton
This is the film that bridges the gap between mumblecore and something completely exciting and new. The dialogue here is so telling and steeped in character that it's hard to believe it was all improvised. Because it tries to be so definitive in its treatment of art, narcissism, and 21st century men, it's easy to forget how wryly funny the movie is. I'd bet a lot of people aren't familiar with Humpday, and it's one you won't forget once you see it.
12. Fantastic Mr. Fox- Wes Anderson
I don't usually do this but uh...nothing I say could explain this movie better than Will Leitch's capsule review:
"The problem with Anderson’s recent movies is that they have all felt like chamber pieces: The actors stand here, often receding into the background of the sets, reciting their dialogue like they’re in a Wes Anderson movie and this is how they figure they’re expected to act. Nothing ever feels particularly life-like in Anderson’s movies — they’re more like product shoots for Anderson’s meticulous, fussy and cool adolescent mind. Thus, a stop-animation adaptation of a children’s novel is the logical conclusion of Anderson’s career, where he was going all along. We accept the artifice this time around by the very nature of the project; in the absence of flesh-and-blood, we provide our own, filling in the gaps for Anderson. It’s entertaining and tolerable in a way that I fear isn’t ultimately good for Anderson, but works here. If every movie Anderson makes from now on involves him physically picking up the actors and changing their facial expressions to convey exactly what exists in his brain, he’ll fulfill the promise we had for him. He can’t, though. Real people are too messy. Fortunately, foxes aren’t." There you go. Perfect.
11. Zombieland- Ruben Fleischer
It's not as literate and deep as some of the other stuff on this part of the list, but Zombieland is hilarious, entertaining, and well-made. This is a fully-realized universe and a ride that I didn't want to end. All of the actors play variations of the characters they play best, and they nailed it here. Films this fun (or, secretly, structured so well) don't come around often.

10. Up in the Air- Jason Reitman
George Clooney is at his confident best in this Old Hollywood-style charmer. The more I think about it, the less I like it; but there are a few powerhouse scenes here that I'll remember long after anything else this year. All of the supporting performances are studied, and there's very little fat here. Each moment serves a greater purpose.
9. The Hangover- Scott Phillips
This is already in the comedy canon. You can't ignore how consistently, irreverently funny The Hangover is, and how star-making every single one of its performances is. Think about how filthy this movie is at times. For Phillips to create something universal enough for grandmas to be buying Hangover DVDs as stocking stuffers is special. We only get a comedy that is this wide-reaching and impacting every few years.
8. The Brothers Bloom- Rian Johnson

Despite its Wes Anderson swagger-jacking, every detail of The Brothers Bloom is lovingly imagined. The title relationship is one of the more convincing portraits of brothers around, and Nathan Johnson's meditative but whimsical score is one of the film's best assets. The many disparate pieces of The Brothers Bloom add up to a joyous, yearning experience.

7. District 9- Neill Blomkamp

There's a line early on in District 9 that goes something like, "People were surprised that the aliens landed in Johannesburg instead of somewhere like New York." Upon further reflection, it makes a lot of sense because the setting is, like the film itself, worlds apart from what we would expect and specific in a way that few other films would bother with. The aliens are designed well, the effects are awe-inspiring, and the satire works; but none of that would matter if the character foundation wasn't there. Sharlto Copley is poignant and affecting as Wikus Van de Merwe, and he goes a harrowing journey in the course of the film. Even if I explained it all to you, you wouldn't believe how the character goes from a nerdy point A to a desperate, gun-toting point B. It has to be seen to be believed.

6. Summer Hours- Olivier Assayas
In Summer Hours an art collecting matriarch dies, and her children have to decide how to divvy up her possessions--which pieces should be in a museum, which pieces have sentimental value, etc. And yes, the film is poetic in its views on what art is and how we all respond to it. But the most underrated aspect of the writing and performances is that none of these characters seems wrong. Each character has a completely different opinion about his or her mother's legacy, but we understand and love each point of view. That type of narrative empathy and precision is almost impossible to pull off. Seek this out.
5. (500) Days of Summer- Marc Webb

This is a movie that is drunk on its own inventiveness and style. As sort of an Annie Hall update, it's as exhilarating and dynamic as it is relatable and rousing. The screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber get a lot of mileage out of flipping the expected rom-com convention: Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the clingy romantic, and it's the gorgeous Zooey Deschanel who is the selfish commitment-phobe. You'd be surprised how well this works, and a lot of the credit has to go to Deschanel, who isn't afraid to, without judgment or equivocation, play a character who is unquestionably the problem in the story. At the very least, (500) Days of Summer is a nice twist on a worn-out genre; at its best, it's a devastating, touchingly personal treatment of the most intriguing theme there is.

4. Anvil! The Story of Anvil- Sacha Gervasi
Anvil is an influential, but largely forgotten, metal band whose heyday was twenty years ago. What Anvil! The Story of Anvil captures is what that band is up to now, which is somehow both pathetic and inspiring. We have this agreement as a civilization that you're not allowed to make fun of people's dreams, but Gervasi makes us face two men--one specifically--with a ridiculous, unrealistic dream. The same qualities that made him psuedo-successful are the ones that make him sort of pathetic now. We're taken inside this world that is cruel and petty, but our guides are these dedicated men who depend upon each other and are so unique that you couldn't make them up.

INSTANT CLASSICS

3. Up- Pete Docter
You've heard it before, but that doesn't make it any less true: the first ten minutes of Up are as emotionally devastating as anything this year. Even when it gets broad and turns into an episode of Duck-Tales in the final act, the emotional core of Up is so honest and touching that it doesn't matter. Think about how cliched the characters of a crotchety old man and an eager, know-it-all boy scout could be. Then think about how fresh the characters of Carl and Russell are. Like most Pixar features, this is a towering achievement visually, but it's even more of a storytelling triumph.
2. Adventureland- Greg Mottola

Like the best autobiographical movies, Adventureland is a painfully nostalgic, nostalgically painful memory that is also wise and downright bemused about the world as it's viewed through an artist's awkward phase. One thing that kept standing out to me as I watched the characters negotiate themselves around bars and house parties and a job they hate to love was: "These kids don't seem old enough to be drinking. This feels like a high school movie, even though they're doing adult things. They seem awkward in this bar." Then it occurred to me that that's exactly how your early twenties feel. Everyone is pretending. Most films cast high schoolers are twentysomethings, but Greg Mottola does it the other way around. This film is transcendent for many other reasons: Martin Starr's rehearsed self-loathing, the use of music, the crackly dialogue. But everything boils down to that notion that none of the characters can ignore: it's not supposed to be like this. Except that we all know it is.

1. Inglourious Basterds- Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino has made some of my favorite movies, but even Pulp Fiction, his de facto masterpiece, doesn't have anything to offer emotionally. Up to this point, he had been a stylist; he knew how to be cool. In Inglouious Basterds, he tries out suspense and does it better than anyone in a prologue that will be used in acting classes for decades. He tries to establish a period and stretch out scenes to make us feel alternately familiar and uncomfortable, and he does it better than anyone. He tries to get us to feel understanding for a monster, and we do (because he's cool). He tries to get us to feel, and he pulls it off. This is easily Tarantino's most mature work, and, luckily for him, he has Christoph Waltz to help him with the more difficult parts. Inglourious Basterds boldly creates its own history, and it shows, quite literally, the power of cinema. If we're only watching one film from 2009 in 2029, this is it.

The Best Films of 2009, Part I

2010-02-07T11:19:00.004-06:00

It's mid-February in New Orleans, which means I've finally been able to catch up with all the movies I'm interested in. This is, ranked, all of the 2009 films I saw (sorry Blind Side). I didn't see everything I wanted to catch--I don't feel as if I ever will--but I feel comfortable with these seventy-one, and I've divided them into categories that provide a bit of insight on how I regard them.
I've provided my judgments, and I've included pictures from the sublime site Movies in Frames when available. Let's just say I worked a lot harder on this than the Best Albums of the Year list.

GARBAGE

71. Bride Wars- Gary Winnick

These characters are so hateful and catty that it's impossible to feel anything but contempt for them. The attitude of Bride Wars could set women back forty years. Thankfully, it's way too insignificant and contrived to do that kind of damage.

70. Gigantic- Matt Aselton-
Quirk doesn't replace character and story, and even Zooey can't save a film that, frankly, doesn't make sense at times.
69. Year One- Harold Ramis-
Crass and poorly-written, with no continuity or respect for the audience.
68. My Bloody Valentine 3-D- Patrick Lussier-
Props to the explicit 3-D nude scene, but otherwise this is a predictable, tedious, bloody affair.
67. Of Time and the City- Terence Davies-
I don't mind pretension, but I do mind boring pretension. I appreciate the staggering amount of archival footage, but Davies' filmic essay could not end soon enough for me.
66. Fast & Furious- Justin Lin-
Lin strips away all of the cheekiness that made the first and third installments fun and replaces it with bloated, anchorless posturing.
65. The Cove- Louie Psyhoyis-
The documentary fave of Sundance 2008 is irrational in its one-sided fervor. It's one of those non-fiction films in which you go, "So...the director realizes his subject is insane, right? No? He's still admiring him? Hmph."
64. Bruno- Larry Charles-
It's unclear whom the satire of Bruno is directed toward. The fashion industry? The media? Homosexuals? Homophobes? The lack of focus and the complete disregard for a narrative make me afraid to watch Borat again.
63. Paper Heart- Nick Jasonevic-
Again, a movie that has no idea what it wants to be. The film attempts to be both a non-fictional analysis of love and a fictional account of Yi's love affair with Michael Cera, who has very little to do here. It fails to inspect either with any of the depth or inventiveness it thinks it does.
62. Medicine for Melancholy- Barry Jenkins-
This movie has a ten minute detour about gentrification that involves neither of the main characters and exists solely to develop a theme that was delivered too lazily in the first place. Movies don't work that way.
61. I Love You, Beth Cooper- Chris Columbus-
Everything that was charming and knowing about Larry Doyle's novel is ruined by stereotypes, ignorance, and slapstick.
60. Notorious- George Tillman, Jr.-
I guess I'm getting old when I can look at historical biopics and go, "Wait, that's not accurate. That's not how it happened or felt at the time." Then again, take this with a grain of salt. I saw this because I was so drunk I walked into the wrong theater.
59. Management- Stephen Belber

It's only 94 minutes, but Management's interminable episodes feel much longer than that, and it's protagonist is an unlikeable nut.

ADMIRABLE FAILURES

58. The Lovely Bones- Peter Jackson-
There are two skillfully directed scenes here--if you've seen it, you immediately know the two I'm talking about--but there are about five different tones at work here, and none of them congeal into something that moves me. Jackson gets so much credit for visual prowess, but the In-Between World here is about as impressive as a Windows background, and--this is all you need to know--there's a scene in which the Crazy Grandma (TM) puts too much detergent in the washer and BUBBLES GO EVERYWHERE, Y'ALL!
57. Antichrist- Lars von Trier

The slow motion prologue is gorgeous, and the first half of Antichrist overall is a harrowing portrait of grief. Then it descends into shock tactics that purposefully alienate the audience. If you want to see Willem Dafoe ejacluate blood, this is the film for you. Oh, spoilers. Sorry.

56.Whatever Works- Woody Allen
I wouldn't say there's anything terrible about this, but it's slight and not particularly funny. Another entry in the Minor Allen canon.
55. Sin Nombre- Cary Fukunaga

Visually, Sin Nombre is pretty stunning, but the motivations and decisions of the characters are incoherent.

54. Precious- Lee Daniels
This is a film that, impressive performances aside, earns none of the empathy that it shoots for and attains none of the profundity it assumes it already possesses. It's a film made by Black people for White Liberal Intellectuals.
53. The Informant!- Steven Soderbergh
There's no denying that this is an interesting film, especially in the quickly unraveling third act, but it seeks a dryly humorous tone that it never really can grasp a hold of. And it runs a bit long.
52. Coraline- Henry Selick

The problem with this film is that it has no idea who its audience is. It's a simple story about imagination and wish-fulfillment that any kid could latch onto, but it's also kind of scary and specific in a way that only adults could appreciate. I was caught somewhere in the middle and felt kind of detached the whole time.

51. Invictus- Clint Eastwood
This isn't a bad movie in any way (except for the CGI crowds and plane, which are of sub-standard early '90s quality), but it also dumbed things down embarrassingly. For instance, there's a scene in which a charity attempts to give a South African rugby jersey to an indigent kid, and he refuses to take it. Based on the context, we understand why. But then the Black lady tells the White lady, "he feels embarrassed by the team and doesn't feel as if they represent him" or something like that. Thanks, Clint. Bang-up job overall.

FLAWED BUT STILL LIKABLE

50. He's Just Not That Into You- Ken Kwapis
I'm a sucker for ensemble films, and the cast is eager to please here. It's too long and ambitious though.
49. Sugar- Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden
I loved the tiny notes of characterization here, but I felt as if the film kind of lost its way with some of the subplots. So much of it depends upon the lead performance, and I didn't find Algenis Perez Soto convincing in it.
48. The Proposal- Anne Fletcher

There's some crazy shit going on in this movie--Betty White paganism?--but it mostly succeeds at what it's trying to do and features winning performances from Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds.

47. Avatar- James Cameron
I saw this in IMAX 3D with a buddy of mine. When we walked out of the theater, he saw someone he knew who informed us of where you need to sit in the theater to best enjoy this sumptuous visual feast. "Where do you have to sit for the characters and dialogue to be any good?" I asked. Fuck this movie.
46. The Taking of Pelham 123- Tony Scott

If you like the hammy John Travolta as much as I do, this is the movie for you. The Taking of Pelham 123 is way better than it needs to be, developing all of its characters believably--even James Gandolfini's cowardly mayor--and throwing in some extraneous action. This was worth seeing, if only for Travolta's line reading of "Lick my bunghole, motherfucker!"

45. Observe and Report- Jody Hill
Even if it falls a bit short of what it's trying to achieve, this movie really went out on a limb tonally. There are few characters as complex as Seth Rogen's Ronnie Barnhardt in any comedy, and the film forces us to follow him in an admirably uncompromising way.
44. Away We Go- Sam Mendes
I really liked this until it crashed and burned in the last twenty minutes. There's actually a speech in the last scene that boils down all of the subtext and themes that had been elegantly unspoken up to that point.
43. World's Greatest Dad- Bobcat Goldthwait
The poor production values were a bit distracting, but I loved the pacing and performances here. Here's what separates this from any other dark comedy though: there's a teenaged character in this who is despicable, and Goldthwait doesn't pull any punches. Instead of being misunderstood, the kid is just a terrible human being, and that's kind of refreshing.
42. Watchmen- Zack Snyder

There are moments here that are electric and inspired, but some of the directorial decisions--music cues, the casting of Malin Akerman--overshadow any of those moments. Jackie Earle Haley was awesome though.

41. Valentino: The Last Emperor- Matt Trynauer
There are five or so films going on here--a portrait of a loving relationship between two men, a character study of a perfectionist, an assessment of the changing fashion scene--but Trynauer can't balance any of those well. On the plus side, there's a lot of nudity in this, even though it's rated PG-13. Always a nice surprise.
40. In the Loop- Armando Iannucci
In the Loop is hilarious, but it's little more than strung-together jokes. It's supposed to be this biting satire, but I didn't find it particularly poignant or creative in its send-up of the war.
39. Where the Wild Things Are- Spike Jonze
The real-world book-ends were tragic and moving, and I love the look of the movie. The middle part on the island sort of bored me though. I understand what Jonze and his co-writer Dave Eggers were trying to do, but I wasn't on the same page.
38. I Love You, Man- John Hamburg
The leads are charming, and I like how pleasant and good-natured the whole thing feels. But considering the talent involved, shouldn't this have been a whole lot funnier?
37. Drag Me to Hell- Sam Raimi
A completely average thriller that is saved by a ballsy ending.
36. Moon- Duncan Jones

Sam Rockwell gives one (or two or three) of the performances of the year in this claustrophobic old school sci-fi slow burn. Unfortunately, I don't really like claustrophobic old school sci-fi slow burns.

35. Lymelife- Derick Martini
Martini does a good job of capturing a specific time and place, even if he kind of shoves it down your throat sometimes. Emma Roberts was impressive, and Alec Baldwin played himself admirably.
34. The Road- John Hillcoat
In a common theme for this section of the list, the performances were pitch-perfect here. The film is intense and, for most of it, as bleak as anything you've seen (that is, if you haven't seen Antichrist). Honestly, it's difficult to watch.

Best Albums of 2009

2010-01-23T10:20:00.001-06:00

Top ten lists are arbitrary. So are top twenty-five. So is the notion that unique experiences listening to music should be ranked at all. The only way to make sense of all of this subjectivity is to dispense with it. I was a bad music fan this year and didn't listen to much. I liked very little of what I listened to. So why reach for ten or fifteen when there are only eight quality albums that I would recommend to everyone? It's almost February, and I want to move on. Here are the top eight (no MySpace [no outdated jokes]), which are not surprising or interesting at all.

Keep in mind that I'll go the opposite direction for films next week and rank about seventy of those. Can you tell it's been a tough week?

8. Discovery- LP

7. Lil' Wayne- No Ceilings

6. Phoenix- Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

5. Japandroids- Post-Nothing

4. Girls- Album

3. Grizzly Bear- Veckatimest

2. Drake- So Far Gone

1. Animal Collective- Merriweather Post Pavillion

Leslie Frazier's Post-Interview Phone Call to His Mom

2010-01-10T14:19:00.002-06:00

When the Seattle Seahawks fired coach Jim Mora this week, all signs pointed to USC egomaniac Pete Carroll being hired as his replacement. In fact, ESPN spread rumors that Seattle may have had a five year deal of up to $35 million drawn up before the announcement about Mora had even been made. Carroll had a down year at USC and had been testing the waters of the pros, and this is a case of a team having no second choice for a position.

The problem with this is that the Seahawks may have circumvented the Rooney Rule, which requires all NFL teams to interview a minority candidate for a head coaching position before making a hire. In theory, the affirmative action measure has been effective. Before the rule, only 6% of NFL head coaches were minorities. Now they make up 24%. The Rooney Rule should get some of the credit for the current diversity of the league. As Chuck Klosterman wrote in his essay "Football":

"This is football's interesting contradiction: It feels like a conservative game. It appeals to a conservative mind-set and a reactionary media and it promotes conservative values. But in tangible practicality, football is the most progressive game we have--it constantly innovates, it immediately embraces every new technology, and almost all the important thinking abotu the game is liberal."

And progressives never know when to pull back the reins. Black coaches--but, it should be noted, no other minorities--coach many of the NFL's franchises. The Rooney Rule, once necessary, may now be one of the more insidious forms of tokenism at work in popular culture. For example, the Seahawks clearly had a replacement in mind. Why pretend that Vikings defensive coordinator Leslie Frazier, the man they met with briefly this weekend to satisfy the rule and avoid getting fined $200,000, has any chance of getting the job? Isn't that more demeaning than just saying it was Pete Carroll's job? Doesn't that hurt the cause? Think about the position Leslie Frazier's in now.

To show you how awkward this could be, let's pretend Leslie Frazier's mom doesn't know about the Rooney Rule.

Leslie Frazier: Hello?
Mrs. Frazier: Baby? You said you would call right after to tell me how things went.
Leslie Frazier: I did. You're right. I'm--I'm sorry, mom. I--I guess I forgot.
Mrs. Frazier: Are you crying?
Leslie Frazier: Huh? No, mom. I'm (deep breath) I'm at a Quizno's--I stopped here after the interview--and I got something in my eye. I'm okay.
Mrs. Frazier: Well how'd everything go?
Leslie Frazier: Pretty well I guess. Exactly what I expected. We just kind of walked through what the job would be like, looked at my resume.
Mrs. Frazier: Did you give them the resume with Phi Beta Kappa on it? That makes a huge difference. If they see that you were in an honors' fraternity--
Leslie Frazier: I don't think that was on it. Look, mom, don't get your hopes up about this. They're interviewing Pete Carroll, and I'm pretty sure he's going to get it. He's won national championships and stuff.
Mrs. Frazier: I don't care what he's won. He's not my special little man. Now what kind of questions did they ask? Did they ask you about your strengths and weaknesses? 'Cuz I told you the best thing you can say for a weakness is that you're a perfectionist.
Leslie Frazier: Uh-huh.
Mrs. Frazier: Because, you see, it's not really a weakness. They would want a person who was a perfectionist.
Leslie Frazier: Mom, it really wasn't that kind of interview. It was, like, they asked me what kind of system I would want to run, whether I would want to bring in my own personnel.
Mrs. Frazier: I hope you said 'yes, sir' and 'no,sir.'
Leslie Frazier: Of course I did--look, I told you. I'm not going to get this job. They're hiring Pete Carroll. The only reason they interviewed me was--
Mrs. Frazier: You're definitely not going to get the job if you're acting all negative like that, baby. You have to believe in yourself. Didn't I get you that book? What was it called...Seven Habits of Highly Effective People?
Leslie Frazier: Yeah, I read it. You're right.
Mrs. Frazier: There you go, baby. Just believe in yourself. Good things will happen.
Leslie Frazier: I'm not even sure I want the job to be honest. You know, it rains a lot in Seattle.And it's far away. You might have trouble visiting.
Mrs. Frazier: How were you dressed? I hope you shined your shoes.

Top 25 Songs of 2009

2010-01-03T03:58:00.000-06:00

For any music lover, it's that list-making time of year again. In the past I've taken the list way too seriously, to the point of getting stressed out because I hadn't heard one thing or another or because my list wasn't interesting enough. Recently--like, maybe this year--I've reminded myself of how much fun this process is. Rather than worrying about being derivative or bandwagony, I've used other lists to discover albums or songs that I missed, and I easily doubled my pool of 2009 songs with a newfound openness and excitement. I encourage you to do the same with my list. Chop it up, re-order it, love it, or throw it away. Just have fun with it.

I have a tendency to over-write, so I'm limiting myself to one or two sentences for each capsule. I might throw in a semi-colon though. Unlike in past years, I'm ranking any song from 2009, not just singles. It's hard to define what a single is anymore. Below, I've linked to a completely illegal zip file of all the songs for you to put into any order you wish.

Top 25 Songs of 2009.zip

25. Atlas Sound feat. Noah Lennox- "Walkabout"
24. Phoenix- "1901"
23. Animal Collective- "What Would I Want? Sky"
22. Rihanna feat. The-Dream- "Hatin' on the Club"
21. The-Dream- "Rockin' That Shit"
20. Washed Out- "Feel It All Around"- I was listening to the Sirius XM U station in a van with a guy in his forties last week (don't ask), and he commented, "This sounds like music you would come down from drugs to." I guess I can't argue with that.
19. Soulja Boy- "Turn My Swag On"- I listen to a lot of music, but it's hard to tell if this is the most melodic or the most anti-melodic song of the year. Soulja Boy does things here--like asking a question and then answering it without pausing for any punctuation--that I couldn't do no matter how long I tried. I guess I'm still calling him an idiot savant, but it's getting harder and harder to discuss him with back-handed compliments.
18. Neon Indian- "Deadbeat Summer"- Glo-fi, glo-fi glo-fi--glo-fi, glo-fi? We're in January, but summer still hasn't ended.
17. Keri Hilson feat. Kanye West, Ne-Yo- "Knock You Down"- The sentiment of this song is nothing new, but Danja's unorthodox beat and Kanye's most heartfelt verse of the year buoy a modest but powerful vocal performance from Hilson.
16. Wavves- "So Bored"- More than any other song, this lo-fi gem reminds me of how much can change in one year. It was my theme song during a really low point in my life, and I feel as if I've come out the other end still loving the song, as a trophy as much as anything else.
15. Julian Casablancas- "11th Dimension"- On his genre-hopping solo debut single, Casablancas sounds exuberant and carefree, but there's an added focus to his vocals that we've never heard before.
14. The Very Best feat. Ezra Koenig- "Warm Heart of Africa"- Since Vampire Weekend was accused of pilfering African culture for their debut, it only makes sense that those repping Afro-pop would bring its singer in for a soaringly jubilant chorus.
13. Joker & Ginz- "Purple City"- Critics write on and on about dubstep's off-time rhythms, but no one mentions the melodies. Once the main synth taunt wiggles in, this track goes from catchy to irresistible.
12. OJ Da Juiceman feat. Gucci Mane, Cam'ron- "Make Da Trap Say Ay (Remix)"- I knew there would eventually be a rapper so southern that I couldn't understand him. OJ Da Juiceman is that rapper. This song is worth hearing if only for Cam's line "Bricks, hammers, and shovels/Yeah, I'm the Home Depot!"
11. Smith Westerns- "Be My Girl"- These guys sound like Big Star if Big Star grew up with XBoxes and dollar menus. Deliberate and controlled but still inspired.

10. Big Boi feat. Gucci Mane- "Shine Blockas"- Riding a Bobby "Blue" Bland sample that Jay-Z had already made legendary, one of rap's elder statesmen hooks up with one of its young guns for some sunglasses-at-night steez. Big Boi's flow is slippery and deceptively fast, and he has the foresight to leave us wanting more by the song's end.

9. Dirty Projectors- "Stillness Is the Move"- Dirty Projectors are at their best when the women of the band are at the foreground, and this single is the showcase that matches them up against a slinky, ever-changing melody. As angular as the guitar line is, there's still something sexy about all of this.

8. Passion Pit- "Moth's Wings"- Michael Angelakos and his falsetto won me over last year, but he came back this year with a full band behind him. I would say that the chorus is especially cathartic and moving here, but I think the whole thing is chorus. I'm waiting to hear this on the end credits of a hipper-than-thou movie any day now.

7. Phoenix- "Lisztomania"- "Lisztomania" unfolds as a blueprint for how to write pop songs and eventually become as big of a rockstar as Franz Liszt, which is to say that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Behind the same driving, loopy guitars and tight songwriting that got them here, Phoenix creates something more ambitious and satisfying and rowdy than we ever could have expected.

6. Grizzly Bear- "Two Weeks"- Grizzly Bear negotiates a delicate balance here between airy harmonies and the thump of rubbery bass, each of which punctuates dreamy keyboard plinks. Ed Droste, the de facto lead singer, lets his words hang and drip in the air along the starts and stops of this Veckatimest centerpiece.

5. Japandroids- "Young Hearts Spark Fire"- "Young Hearts Spark Fire" is, judging from the refrain "We used to dream/Now we worry about dying," about lost time, but nothing the boys say communicates this sense of lost time as much as their furious, breathless playing. The charging immediacy of this song is as good of an example as you'll get of execution meeting theory.

4. Drake- "Best I Ever Had"- 2009 hip-hop definitely belonged to Drake, who delivered as perfect a rap love song as anything since "I Need Love." The sweetest song to ever promise to make your pussy whistle.

3. The Big Pink- "Dominos"- The duo behind the ambitious shoegaze project The Big Pink creates such a gigantic sound that it's easy to forget how simple this song is. A five-word hook, thunderous drums, and an arching, swirling guitar are enough to keep you singing along for days.

2. Girls- "Hellhole Ratrace"- Shakespeare's themes are often described as "universal truths"--things we all know but need validated anyway. Christopher Owens is not Shakespeare, but as his fragile warble repeats a refrain I won't spoil here, he carries that torch of universal truths for a full seven minutes.

1. Animal Collective- "My Girls"- It's possible that "My Girls" is the most accessible song Animal Collective has ever made. Although it does feature one of those loops they're so fond of, even a forty-year-old in a van can't deny that those harmonies are gorgeous. As it opens up with its bass drum knocks, "My Girls" sounds like a corner being turned, an expansion within but without the band's established comfort zone. The lyrics are more mature than anything the group has recorded, but the band isn't done taking chances.

Ashton Kutcher: Important Public Figure or Most Important Public Figure?

2009-12-22T09:30:00.006-06:00

Get a load of this asshole, flaunting his rakishness, mugging for Nikon and its misguided attempt to convince you that this camera is versatile and state-of-the-art. Like all of Kutcher's work, the ad is slight, derivative, and puzzling. But it is significant. What if I were to tell you that Ashton Kutcher and, by extension, this commerical could be the key to understanding fame in the 21st century? His career during this decade, more than anyone else's, reaches down and defines our changing nature of celebrity.

Beginning in 1998, Kutcher transitioned from modeling and starred as hunky goofball Kelso in That '70s Show, a teenaged stoner strain of that most American of forms, the sitcom. As the most physically comedic component of the show, he got many of the more memorable laughs. He was younger then, but still way too old to be a believable high schooler, which is yet another part of the formula.

In 2000, he parlayed his role on the show to a role as a hunky gooball in the teenaged stoner comedy Dude, Where's My Car?, which turned out to be a commercial success, earning $46 million against its $13 million production cost. At this point, he was fulfilling our exact expectations for him and his identity, which was the early part of the decade's recipe for success. We knew who Ashton Kutcher was, and he did nothing to complicate that. As they always do though, things got more complex.

What or who Ashton Kutcher was had been confirmed to us, but he spent the middle part of the aughts attempting to play against that type. His audience met that experimentation with indifference. From 2003 to 2006, he acted in more subtle and mature versions of his persona. My Boss's Daughter (2003) was a slapstick farce, but this time Kutcher's character--shockingly--had a job. Just Married (2003) saw him and the late Brittany Murphy as real-life married grown-ups. The former flopped, but the latter, boosted by a powerful Valentine's Day opening, earned $56 million against its $18 million investment. Audiences vote with their pocketbooks, and the Ashton Kutcher business was still good. He wasn't the most reliable movie star, but he was a fine option on the B+ list.

Part two of this can be about how many years he set us back with the trucker hat.

So what do you do if you're in Kutcher's enviable position in 2004: handsome, rich, and powerful for being dumb, young, and immature? You test your audience by doing the opposite of what you're so famous for. Like Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, and Jim Carrey before him, Kutcher went serious in 2004's The Butterfly Effect. You can tell how serious it is because he has a beard in it. A comedic actor performing in a drama is kind of like a basketball player's heat check. If it doesn't work, it isn't disastrous; but if it does work, you've reached a whole new level of success. The Butterfly Effect worked even better than we remembered. It had a relatively small budget and grossed almost the exact same amount of money as Just Married, without the built-in audience of Valentine's Day or a marketable second-lead. What's more, even though it isn't regarded as a good movie, many critics singled out Kutcher's performance as not terrible.

So if an actor's commercial success in the first half of this decade is predicated upon filling a role, and Kutcher played against type successfully, doesn't that negate what I've written so far? No. The movie was a success not because Kutcher was doing something new. It was a success because he was, paradoxically, doing exactly what he was supposed to do at this stage of his career. He was still--even by subverting expectations--fulfilling expectations. And his audience, at the media-savvy mid-point of the decade, knew this, even subconsciously.

It helped that Kutcher mitigated the risk of that movie by creating and producing MTV's Punk'd. There, he shouted and guffawed his way through elaborately staged pranks on his unsuspecting celebrity friends. He's a prankster, folks. Just in case you were wondering whether or not he was the damaged, conflicted brooder seen in New Line's The Butterfly Effect, here he is showing you he's the fun-loving enfant terrible in real life that he always pretended to be on the silver screen. Watch him make this driving test impossible for Hilary Duff! Kutcher's audience was ready to move on with his acting as long as it was clear who he really was. Importantly, this was also the first instance of Kutcher being famous for something other than acting.

By 2006, Kutcher was choosing projects to include his loud-mouthed buffoonery within a structure that extended it, as seen in the romance A Lot Like Love (a disaster), the prestigious remake Guess Who, or the actioner The Guardian. In each of these, he played the Lewis to bigger and bigger Martins: Amanda Peet, then Bernie Mac, then Kevin Costner. Guess Who and The Guardian weren't hits--no Ashton Kutcher-driven vehicle has been--but they made money. The perception, however, which is all that is important when it comes to fame, was that Kutcher had become desperate. This was the time to anchor his own pictures, and he was hitching his wagon to another star.

Hijinx. You can tell how generic these movies are by the titles. How can you name your film The Guardian with a straight face?

So what do you do if you're a little older, a little less dumb, and a little more mature? If you're Ashton Kutcher, you have no idea. You try some voice work (Open Season), producing (Miss Guided, Beauty and the Geek), and small roles in independent films (Bobby), none of which works. You pick another role aside a more established, bankable star in a madcap, broad-faced comedy (What Happens in Vegas), and it becomes one of the bigger hits of the summer. Every time he plays an idiot alongside other idiots, people flock to movie theaters. Cast him as a retarded person alongside Adam Sandler, and the screen might spontaneously combust. You confirm what you already know: how people approve of your existence.

Here's what I've been getting at though: If you asked someone to summarize things Ashton Kutcher did to continue being famous in 2008-2009, he might say, "Starred with Cameron Diaz in What Happens in Vegas, which was one of the worst movies of last year." But it's much more likely that he would say, "Amassed a poo-ton of twitter followers, strangely stayed married to Demi Moore, and shilled for Nikon." None of these things have to do with what originally made him famous, but they somehow make him more famous, whatever that word means now.

In all of the examples leading up to the present day, I've used box office figures--all from imdb--to prove whether or not people accepted the different incarnations of what Ashton Kutcher was doing. By the end of the decade, that proves useless. We no longer have any data to support a celebrity's influence. Because he's presently known for things other than acting, he exemplifies the changes in the way we view celebrities. We started this decade knowing what we want from a star and promoting that image with our wallets. By the middle of it, we're second-guessing ourselves because of over-exposure and a more complicated understanding of media. Today, your guess is as good as mine. We've seen what he has to offer as an actor, and we've chosen the real Ashton Kutcher instead. Whereas we used to support cultural developments by paying for them, now they just kind of happen to us.

Kutcher's most recent film is 2009's Spread, which was such an enormous misfire you might not have even heard of it. Domestically, it made $250,000. He probably owns cars that are worth more than the receipts for Spread. In it, he plays a kept-man inching toward thirty, who takes advantage of wealthy cougars. Is this autobiographical or pure acting? Is this a validation of what audiences want or a rejection of it? Is Ashton Kutcher one of the most famous people in the world, or is he past his prime? We have no way of knowing this anymore, and Spread is the best shrug Ashton Kutcher can give.

The Kanye West Post

2009-12-14T19:44:00.007-06:00

#6 Album of the Decade- Kanye West- The College Dropout (2004) Kanye West feat. Mos Def, Freeway- "Two Words"

#1 Song of the Decade- Kanye West- "Jesus Walks"

#35 Album of the Decade- Kanye West- Late Registration (2005)

Secretly, as I read other writers' fin-de-decade retrospectives, I grow bristly when I see something patently obscure. Although I'll admit that I deal in the same cultural capital they do, and that I have elitist choices sprinkled throughout, there's a nagging part of the critic in me that shudders to admit: art doesn't really matter if it isn't popular.

Combing through alternate takes of b-sides or fighting sleep to finish a Taiwanese chamber piece is alienating, even when it's fun. Most critics, even the self-appointed and undistinguished ones like me, are lonely and anti-social. They articulate things that are ineffable, and they practically beg a reader they will never meet to feel the same emotions that fuel them to write. By becoming better at this process, they only grow apart from the needs of their original audience. That's where that critical-commercial divide comes from. While most people wonder why critics like movies and albums they've never heard of, I wonder why the two groups have anything in common at all.

Elitism, however, is not satisfying. Information has no power if it can't be shared. Music, more than any other type of art, is transcendent in its ability not only to transport, but to unite. Good music doesn't endure because it's unique or influential or even moving. It stands the test of time because it's universal. Not too long ago--the seventies--the most critically-acclaimed art was also the most commercially successful. There's a reason Led Zeppelin is still on the radio and The Godfather is still on TV. In an age of stratified choices for entertainment, it's high time someone united us again.

Not very secretly, Kanye West knows all of this.

That understanding is the reason he does things like, you know, interrupt a teenage girl to rectify the oversights of a banal and inconsequential awards show. It's because he profoundly cares about his legacy. In five years he has shaped a genre of music as much as anyone ever has. Imagine what he might look and sound like in ten more. It's because of that impact that he can just as easily burn out in a year or change music for another forty. Neither of those options would surprise me, which only adds to his immediacy and mystique and ownership of this moment. So forgive him if he thought ol' squinty shouldn't have taken home the Moonman.

Ownership of this moment.

In discussing the best of his work, it is helpful to view West through these two guidelines:
1. Kanye West is historically great because of the breadth of his vision.
2. Kanye West's vision is historically great because of his exactitude in achieving it.

1. Despite its cultural influence, hip-hop is a niche genre in that there are some people who will never consciously listen to it, regardless of how good it is. But a lot of those people end up listening to Kanye West.

His first trick was cross-pollinating an already divided hip-hop audience. The College Dropout's focused songwriting, sense of humor, conscious rap tag-teaming, and boom-bap Tribe throwback beats endeared traditionalist heads, while its underdog spirit, big name co-signs, superficial trappings, and glossy production value convinced the unwashed rap masses. The College Dropout is, as the title suggests, both smart and stupid at the same time. Although it's structured as a conflicted bildingsroman steeped in the dusty soul platters of a misspent youth, Kanye is still trolling Black Planet for bubble-butted chicks at 3:00 AM.

If you want it in elitist shorthand, Kanye West is basically Ralph Waldo Emerson. Both are obsessed with spiritual growth learned through experience, even if that growth has to be filtered through self-reliance. "Whosoever be a man must be a non-conformist" and "that that that that don't kill me can only make me stronger."

It got weirder though. "Gold Digger's" punch-lines and serendipitously topical Ray Charles scratch-up hooked fifteen-year-olds and my mom, and 808s and Heartbreaks (which I was completely wrong about) is being played in a more upscale-than-thou clothing store right now. With each album, West has collected a wider, more divided audience. Not since Michael Jackson has a musician amassed a more diverse and demanding set of fans to please, and the miraculous thing is that he seems to satisfy all of those fans every time.

2. Of West's Big Gulp-sized Graduation, I wrote: "The songs sound like they were made by someone staying up all night by himself, and that's something that can't be faked." While rap has had many Mozarts and Rimbauds and Basquiats, it didn't really have a Stanley Kubrick until Kanye West. The College Dropout is not the tossed-off improvisation, the flash of genius standard that most of hip-hop has set; it's the imperfect work of a perfectionist. On it, West's vocals are curiously high in the mix, there are numerous punch-ins to disguise his poor breath control, the skits are mean-spirited and momentum-sapping, and the puzzling sequencing buries the epochal "Through the Wire" into the final third of the album. Likewise, Late Registration is over-ambitious, uneven bombast.

But you cannot deny that, warts and all, these are the exact records West sought out to make. Each hard snare and bongo roll is hand-crafted, and the intensity of his voice overpowers you, even when it's clumsy and undeveloped on the debut record. On The College Dropout, he's not yet a great rapper. But he's trying so hard, and he cares. He is trying to articulate the ineffable, and he's practically begging the listener to feel the emotions that fueled him to write. He thinks like a critic and embraces contradiction when most of his contemporaries are scared of it.

It should be mentioned that there's a whole other column I could write about my personal response to the music, since I've connected with maybe two or three other musicians in the way I have with West. I know every word of every album, I've written as many words about him as I have about any other pop culture figure, I quit a job in the summer of '04 to catch a show of his in Atlanta, etc. Some other time.

Combine all of these elements, and you have the recipe for why "Jesus Walks" is the defining moment of a career that defined the decade. Constructed around a sample of "Walk with Me" by the ARC Choir, the song's maximalism knows no bounds. It is reported that West layered over 100 overdubs of violins onto the bridge, and one of the track's biggest strengths is how centered it is while still dipping into flourishes, building and receding with the tension that mirrors the entire album.

As overpowering as the lush, militaristic sonic atmosphere is though, the lyrics stand out even more. This is the most assured West sounds on the entire album. It's poignant but not overbearing, and the most telling lines are:

"So here go my single, dog, radio needs this
They say you can rap about anything except for Jesus
That means guns, sex, lies, videotape
But if I talk about God, my record won't get played, huh?
Well if this take away from my spins
Which'll probably take away from my ends
I hope it take away from my sins and bring the day that I'm dreamin' 'bout
Next time I'm in the club everybody screamin' out (Jesus walks)"

It's not enough to make a bold declaration of faith in a mainstream single. He has to make it clear that the vision, as calculated as it is, is not complete until it is embraced by an audience. He's going to be iconoclastic, and you're going to love it. Information that can't be shared is useless. A personal statement will be converted to a public acceptance. He thinks like a critic but acts like the audience. He's conflicted but confident. He's lonely but not alienated. He's elitist and universal.

It was Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson's boy, who wrote:
"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

To which Kanye would have replied, "Best poet of all time! All time!"

#31 Film of the Decade- 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

2009-12-03T23:02:00.005-06:00

31. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days- Cristian Mungiu (2007)

Imagine you're a young Romanian woman. You had a rough day at school, and you spent the afternoon trying to arrange transportation for your bestie to get an illegal abortion. Once you have lied your way past a suspicious desk clerk at the hotel you've scrounged up money for, you have to haggle with a shady, free-lance abortionist, whore yourself out to him, then--OMG--make it across town to the family dinner you promised your boyfriend earlier. Then you have to endure their unrelatably bourgeois conversation, fend off your boyfriend's advances (not in the mood?), and make it back to the hotel in case ol' girl bled herself to death. Why wasn't there an XBox game adapted from this?

So yeah. This is the way Netflix makes money. This disc will be on top of your DVD player for a few weeks before you psych yourself up to watch it. Otilia's day in this film makes Michael Douglas' day in Falling Down seem like Christmas Eve. But once you watch 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, you'll be thankful--relieved maybe--to have experienced something so wrenching, gritty, and eventually beautiful.

The intelligentsia decides every few years which culture to follow, and--on the heels of the Iranian cinema craze of a decade ago--Romania has become the country to watch. With The Death of Mr. Lazarescu; The Way I Spent the End of the World; Police, Adjective; and, most importantly, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, the filmmakers of that nation have done something no other tradition has been able to: They have made film the medium essential to analyzing (and revising) their own history. Funded by juries and grants, Romanian artists are finding new ways to reflect upon the fall of Ceausescu's Communist rule, and each stab at doing so seems more vital and energetic. While we've known for a long time that film is the most democratic form of entertainment and artistic expression, Romania is finding a way to prove it and revel in that democracy. They're putting their leu where their mouth is.

"I really meant to watch it. It was just a busy week. I had planned to finally get to it on Friday, but I got drunk and watched basketball since I wasn't in the mood to read subtitles. I switched to two discs at-a-time, thinking that would be a solution to the problem, but now I just have two discs sitting on the machine, and I'm paying twice as much..."

Since the film takes place in the late '80s, the fall of Communism is, tragically, not yet realized for Cristian Mungiu's protagonists. Instead its compromises are ever-present. Otila, played naturalistically by Anamaria Marinca, guides Gabita around the entire movie, seemingly wise and sneaky and controlling in the way she uses the black market or navigates the town. But we easily see--through the practices of the hotel, through the humiliation she faces at dinner, through bartering for something as inconsequential as American toothpaste--that she's a tool of Communism. If such a strong woman is powerless in this political system, what hope do any of us have? If this were just a treatise on the economic and spiritual results of the collapse of Communism, it wouldn't be affecting. The viewer engages with it because the characters are not accents on some grand thesis statement; they're complicated and validated by this backdrop.

Despite its political intensity, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days exemplifies the power of minimalism like few other films of recent memory. It's half-lit and soured by drab, pre-rain atmosphere. Mungiu rarely moves the camera, and the story unfolds in interminable episodes. Much like the sublime Inglorious Basterds from earlier this year, most of the suspense is mined from the paucity of actual scenes. If there are only about ten scenes in your entire movie, they're all going to count. In some of these interactions, the negotiation with the creepy doctor for instance, we want to cut away desperately. But realizing that we can't cut away, that this is real and necessarily painful, is kind of what the movie is about.

If you only see one Romanian baby-killing buddy thriller this decade, make it this one.

Bring Me the Head of Les Miles!

2009-11-25T12:22:00.004-06:00

Today was the most embarrassing finish to an LSU game since I've been a fan. The coaching problems have come to a head.

prior to working at LSU, Miles was Heath Ledger's lifecoach

Today has not been a good day! LSU lost cause Les Miles is an idiot and should be fired

wtf les miles.

LOLOLOLOL, how does Les Miles still have a job?

WHAT THE F*** WAS THAT?!? FIRE LESS MILES IMMEDIATELY!!!

Fuck Les miles. WTF

I think anyone who has been a fan of LSU would agree, this is a new low. The team plays hard but when you have coaching that apparently is at the same level as WW Lewis middle school, it makes it kinda hard to win any game against real teams. DOWN WITH MILES.

These are Facebook status updates and tweets (@cbowes) that I collected after LSU's controversial game on Saturday. This week I've heard both casual fans and die-hards alike insist that Les Miles, because of but not limited to his mistakes on Saturday, should be fired. While Miles' clock management was inexcusable--and while his team's weaknesses are symptomatic of his own weaknesses--firing him would be the most counter-productive measure possible for the program. All of these statements--especially the one about Les Miles being Heath Ledger's life-coach--are ridiculous. Because we all know Mary-Kate Olsen was Heath Ledger's life-coach.

Anyone who objectively looked at LSU's schedule before the season began would have predicted three losses for such a young team in such a competitive conference. The Florida and Alabama games never seemed winnable to me, and I figured that we would fall to either Auburn in a trap-game or Ole Miss on the road, a team who, let's remember, began the year ranked in the top five. That is exactly what happened; LSU has lost three games. With a new defensive coordinator, a bulls-eye on their backs, and a nineteen-year-old quarterback who frankly isn't good, they have met expectations. That is, unless your expectations were a National Championship, and you forgot that only one team can win that per year.

Yes, LSU should have won that game. I'll admit that Miles' poor play-calling and clock management down the stretch cost them the victory. His team is undisciplined and over-matched. And even if you want to blame Jordan Jefferson for the loss, he makes bad decisions because of the relaxed environment his coach has created for him. Jefferson hasn't grown because Les Miles hasn't made him. Much like that other successful "players' coach," Pete Carroll of USC, Miles is starting to see the fallout of his laid-back, reckless style. But when that laid-back, restless style won all of those games LSU had no business winning, my tweets were much different.

"Say hello to the bad guy." I would encourage you to google-search "anyone associated with college football + photoshop." It's a good way to spend an afternoon.

At no point this year was LSU better than Florida or Alabama, so it's a moot point that we won't play for an SEC title. Should the loss against Ole Miss matter? Certainly. You might be saying that we should still hold our heads high. You might be saying that you "refuse to let the program gravitate into mediocrity," which is exactly what Nebraska athletic director Steve Pederson said when he canned Frank Solich after he went a disappointing 9-3.* Two coaches later, now under LSU familiar face Bo Pelini, the Cornhuskers haven't come close to 9-3.

Or look at Michigan, who pink-slipped the "mediocre" Lloyd Carr--this time a guy with a National Championship to his credit--after one too many disappointing seasons. The Wolverines then spent millions of dollars on Rich Rodgriguez, who has an 8-16 record since taking over. Notre Dame made the same mistake by pulling up shop on Tyrone Willingham, and they're making the mistake once again by firing Charlie Weis.

Despite what Urban Meyer would have you believe, after winning a title in his second season with Florida (and we'll see how he does once he no longer has the most dominant player in the country on his side), continuity is the most important factor for a college football program's success. Most LSU fans would admit that the team's biggest weakness is its immaturity and inexperience. So the answer for that is...get a less experienced coach to take over?

Because who would take over the reigns for the helpless and unprepared Les Miles, overreacting Tiger fans? Boise State head coach Chris Petersen in the best case scenario? It that such an upgrade? Maybe we could promote Gary Crowton, the other guy you're demonizing?

If you're assuming that LSU is a prestigious enough program to attract an NFL coach, what precedents are there for success in that arena? Lane Kiffin and Bill Callahan haven't lit up any scoreboards. And you're counting on either a guy who is getting fired this season or a guy who has sat out a few. Let's say Bill Cowher, Mike Shanahan, or Joe Gibbs is interested in taking $3 million to coach the Tigers. Cowher would want to install a new staff and probably knows as much about Louisiana recruiting as I do about his zone blitzes. (Can you imagine Harry Coleman on one of those? I'm nervous enough, thanks.) This would, once again, destroy continuity. Right now at least, there is no one who can do this job better than Les Miles, whether that angers you or not.

I'm not complaining, but LSU is a team that was given too much too soon. Its fans have understandably followed suit. Pete Carroll is in the same situation as Miles, but is anyone in California calling for his head? LSU is a team two years removed from being the best in the country, and it just had another top five recruiting class. Whenever his back is against the wall and he needs to get wins, Les Miles finds a way--witness his undefeated bowl record. I expect nothing but his best against Ar-Kansas and our bowl opponent.

So I'm sorry if you had a bad day or were embarrassed, but you can't win them all and firing your coach is not the right move. If you've reached the end of this column, you're undoubtedly patient. Show that same patience with your football team. Or at least go watch the Saints and shut up for a few months.

*- qtd. in Stewart Mandel's Bowls, Polls, and Tattered Souls: Tackling the Chaos and Controversy That Reign Over College Football.

Top Fifteen Babes of the Decade

2009-11-18T19:47:00.016-06:00

I need a post for this week, so I started on a Bill Belichick column. Four paragraphs, two funny pictures, and some variation on "Bill Belichick is America" later, I realized I wasn't saying anything concrete or original, and I trashed it. You can ask P.T. or Jelly--there are a bunch of half-finished columns lingering on the TANBR profile, and I have a lot of half-baked theses that I never return to. (One of these includes the lines: "Don't you see, man? Electronic picture frames! We are in the future.")

Toiling on the best of lists, I found myself pretty naturally ranking babes of the decade as well--not girls or hotties or anything like that. Babes. Every age has its own babes: women/objects who reach down and define what is desirable or captivating, whether those babes were Raquel, Marilyn, Farrah, or Pam. Is this shallow? Yes, of course it's shallow, and of course it's subjective. There are girls who have fallen off the map dramatically as of late but probably still belong on a decade list (Heidi Klum), and there are chicks I have become obsessed with for a week and then forgotten about. And of course this is going to be cheesy and fratty. And of course I'm worried that this post with minimal commentary reveals more about me than anything else I've written. And of course I've probably spent too much effort on trying to justify this. Here are the top fifteen babes of the decade.

15. Keeley Hazell- She was neck-and-neck with Yvonne Strahovski and Eva Green for the last spot. Although, to be fair, I've never really looked above her neck. (What did I tell you about cheesy frattiness?)
14. Charlize Theron- She's finally starting to show her age, and her body type is a bit more athletic than what I normally like, but few this decade could match her mixture of raw sexuality and elegance.
13. Jessica Biel- We're beginning a run on really predictable entries, but what can I say? The point of this is summing up the zeitgeist. I'm sorry to admit that as far as thickness goes, she's pretty much the Blackest chick on this list. There were some in the honorable mention, I swear.
12. Adriana Lima- I kind of hate myself for being so attracted to her over-the-top sultriness. One commonality among a lot of these broads? I like belly-button rings. Or, to be more accurate, the long torso that would accentuate a belly-button ring. The belly-button ring itself is sort of incidental.
11. Alexis Bledel- Finally, one that women can't argue about. It's been said before that there are two types of attractive: the modest, classically beautiful type that other women have to accept (see number seven) and the fake, wanton sex objects that get something thrown at you. (Number 12 is a sore subject with my wife.) Bledel is definitely in that first camp with eyes that would look fake if they weren't so unique. I'll also admit that part of my fascination with her has to do with the indie cindy she played on eight seasons of Gilmore Girls. (I told you this would be revealing.)
10. Christina Hendricks

I promise that the list is not completely populated with zaftig bombshells. But number 10 is another one.

9. Rachel Bilson

We don't see much of her anymore, and she doesn't have the best smile. She does, however, have the best smirky fake-frown.

8. Mila Kunis

This might be a bit high for her, but, again, this is a girl we've spent the better part of the decade with, and she's gotten 7% hotter each year as she's grown into herself. No ceilings.

7. Anne Hathaway

First off, I like pale chicks. Moreover--and I've used this corollary before--if you ran into Anne Hathaway at an Ikea and invited her to a party you were throwing, there's a small chance she might show up. There's just something approachable about her, as beautiful she is. I've got to be down to ride for a woman like that.

6. Angelina Jolie

Fading fast due to increasingly skinny arms (and kids), you can't deny how powerful her sexy has been this decade. Consistent and one-of-a-kind.

5. Laetitia Casta

For about a year, she seemed poised to become the biggest supermodel in the world. Now only French people know who she is. I have no idea why this is.

4. Zooey Deschanel

Terrabull.

3. Diora Baird

Diora Baird actually belongs on the top fifteen babes of next decade list. You'll hear from her; she's like Catherine Deneuve with bigger hooters. Good twitter follow also. By the way I got this picture on chickipedia.com. I'll stop now.

2. Bar Refaeli

She's taking over.

1. Scarlett Johansson

Never any doubt. You can start making fun of me in the comments now.

The Essential Tyler Hansbrough: Air Quotes Edition

2009-11-12T20:58:00.001-06:00

Tyler Hansbrough makes jokes about the food quality of cafeterias. The term "mystery meat" is usually involved.

The only verb Tyler Hansbrough associates with computers is "download."

According to Tyler Hansbrough, "what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas."

Tyler Hansbrough is a woman who describes herself as "expensive."

Tyler Hansbrough defines "denial" as a river in Africa.

When his phone rings, Tyler Hansbrough claims that he's "blowing up."

Tyler Hansbrough spells "breakfast of champions" K-I-N-G V-I-T-A-M-I-N.

The Changing Back of Michael Jordan

2009-11-09T21:37:00.005-06:00

I help to coach a high school basketball team, and last week we passed out this season's jerseys for the first time. The jerseys were hung up in numerical order, and I braced myself when number 23 came around.

Anyone who has played organized sports can tell you that, as silly as it is, a lot of significance and inspiration is wrapped within the folds of whichever number you wear. I usually asked for 34 because I modeled my undersized but aggressive play after Charles Barkley. Most kids, however, fought over 23, looking to share a small piece of Michael Jordan's leadership, competition, and clutch performance. Based solely on my own experience, I expected all of my players--mostly fourteen and fifteen year-olds--to jump for Jordan's number. If anything, it's LeBron James' number too, so there's an added incentive to share in the tradition of the jersey.

Much to my surprise, the jersey is still hanging in the closet. Things have changed. For the first time, boys that age experienced more of Jordan as this:

than as this:

I've written about the changing legacy of Michael Jordan in this space before, but this experience showed a different side of him than either the negative anecdotes circling about his reputation or his delusionally petty Hall of Fame speech. In judging the futures of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, William Goldman once wrote, "The greatest struggle an athlete undergoes is the battle for our memories...it begins before you're aware that it's begun, and it ends with a terrible fall from grace."* Since I'm thinking about it, that struggle has begun for Michael Jordan. The difference between his fall and Magic and Larry's falls is that he brought it upon himself.

Many contemporary celebrities speak of "building their brand," and the example set for them is Michael Jordan's infiltration of our culture. As the face of an expanding sport in a westernizing world, with countless endorsements to his name, Jordan became more famous than any other athlete before or since. What those other celebrities are talking about is having their name be synonymous with an idea or a logo, and MJ did it first. He was so successful, in fact, that the Jumpman--legs outstretched, arm reaching high above his head--has survived without him.

See, these kids spurning the 2-3, many of them were even wearing Air Jordans. However, instead of wearing them because they're hoping that the air in them will help them to jump from the free throw line, or that the aerodynamic sole will help them cross over Byron Russell, they're wearing them because Chris Paul and Dwyane Wade do. Jordan still gets their money, but it's no different from Phil Knight getting their money. The symmetrical dunking symbol might as well be Adidas' three stripes. To paraphrase as big a Jordan acolyte as any: "He's not a business man; he's a business, man."

Another thing that has gone out of style? The hoop earring. Come on, Mike. You can't afford a makeover?

Because teenagers didn't experience Jordan's greatness first-hand, they don't have a connection to it. That's no surprise. I didn't grow up with, say, George Mikan and only know about his dominance from other people's memories. The difference here is that Jordan gets the short end of his own legend. All the expectations of his own myth are there, but none of the acclaim.

For example, all of my players have done time in AAU or summer leagues, and they have played with or against the kid wearing 23, and that kid is always a dickhead. He's delusional and petty enough to fight for the number. Then he has lent himself expectations that he never lives up to. (Because who can?) This has gone on for a generation until the guy who originally wore it has been marginalized as much as any billionaire demi-god can be.

Wearing 23 is a cliche. It's derivative. It's the wrong type of brand: a knockoff. And LeBron? He's just another dickhead whose downfall we're presaging. There's a lot more to be made of a number than there is to be made of a man.

* Bill Simmons quotes this in his Book of Basketball. That's where I saw it.

#16 Album of the Decade and #40 Song of the Decade- Death Cab for Cutie

2009-11-03T20:10:00.004-06:00

#16 Album of the Decade- Death Cab for Cutie- Transatlanticism
Death Cab for Cutie- "Title and Registration"

#40 Song of the Decade- Death Cab for Cutie- "Transatlanticism"

I work at a Catholic school whose religion department employs several dudes who dropped out of the seminary. Apparently, this is more common than I ever knew. Men devote their lives to modest, poor, celibate lives serving the Lord until they meet a woman who shows them that teaching high school religion is a compromise they can live with. They always word this decision the same way though: "God brought X into my life to show me that He has a different plan for me. I can serve Him just as well by being a good Christian husband and father." It's impossible that their love for a woman could be an obstacle to God's true plan, a temptation and impediment to the goal toward which they're still supposed to be striving. They assume that they're supposed to give into it. It's God's new will.

Love and Christianity actually have a lot in common. You know those crackpots on Facebook who list their religion as "love"? They believe that the world would be a better place if everyone loved everyone else, just as Christians sometimes believe that the world would be a better place if everyone else were Christian. Love makes everything possible. Everyone would be better off with a little TLC. But honestly, TLC can't change the world; TLC doesn't even advocate the chasing of waterfalls.

Look, I'm not making fun of either of these groups. It's human nature to believe that love is a freeing blessing instead of an obstacle. But sometimes it is. We've all known people who have made terrible decisions and ruined their lives for love, who have ignored time, distance, and good-old-fashioned reasoning for a fleeting, pie-eyed ideal of amore. Looking at love as an irresistibly destructive force isn't natural. But Death Cab for Cutie's Transatlanticism is about this exact notion, and that's what makes it so unique.

Of course, I realize there are parts of the record that are mawkish--"emo" for those who write love as their religion on Facebook. When Ben Gibbard's songwriting isn't being melodramatic, it's being too-clever-for-its-own-good. Sometimes, however, a work of art comes along poised for maximum personal impact, and Transatlanticism arrived at just the right time for me to consume it. I screamed along with this album headed east on a road no one ever heads east on, one time when love became too destructive in my own hands. I would give you more details, but I don't want this to become that type of blog.

Death Cab for Cutie has confessional lyrics like, "I should have given you a reason to stay...this is fact not fiction/For the first time in years." Luckily, they don't care that they're that type of band. In fact, this album, obsessed over love that was and could have been, made them a pretty girly band. Usually, that designation is handed to bands that are cloying and cute. This album is something else entirely.

I never said they were immune to photographic cliches.

Sydney Pollack once said that filmmakers "can show people falling in love for an hour or can show people breaking up for an hour, but you can only show people in love for ten minutes." That's exactly what Gibbard's lyrics do: chronicle the spaces bookending love. They suggest love as a fulfilling salvation, but it's always "a love that could have been if I'd only thought of something charming to say." There are details that make it seem real, ("With every Thursday I'd brave those mountain passes/And you'd skip your early classes/And we'd learn how our bodies worked") but they're always in the past tense. The lyrics and the sometimes martial, assiduous rhythm section lend an elusive quality to the album that is always present, no matter what tempo the band is working in.

Across the album, there's a motif of tangible distance representing the emotional distance of lost love. The opener, backed by chords as major and windmilled as Chris Walla's lead guitar gets, laments: "I wish the world was flat like the old days/Then I could travel just by folding a map/No more airplanes or speed trains or freeways/There'd be no distance that could hold us back." But the nearly eight-minute centerpiece of the album, the title track, takes that wish fulfillment one step further.

Structured around searching piano chords, "Transatlanticism" begins as a pity party for that well-worn distance territory. It continues with slides and more resolved guitar, as if taking tentative steps, and it builds with resolve until the understated refrain of "I need you so much closer" takes the song into a trot. By the halfway point, the song has transitioned into a gallop, and by the time the rest of the band joins in with a harmonic "so come on," the distance does indeed "feel quite temporary."

The usually astute Stephen Thomas Erlweine once called this marathon "long for length's sake," and he was more correct than he realized. Often used as the closer to live shows, the song is as much of a solution as Gibbard can find to the problem of an uneasy memory of love. The distance is the song itself, and listening and understanding is its bridge. Like the seminary dropouts, we have to accept a new path for ourselves, and "Transatlanticism" is Gibbard's way of assessing that.

Two albums removed from Transatlanticism, Death Cab for Cutie has become something like the new R.E.M.: stalwart, literate, rainy day adult contempo for all the thirtysomethings who let people assume they're twentysomethings. They can open for Springsteen and get referenced on teen soap operas. "I Will Follow You into the Dark" off Plans is practically a standard by now. It would seem as if they're conquering the world as we speak.

Recently, however, news came out that Gibbard has become engaged to resident manic pixie dream girl Zooey Deschanel. (Apparently, my hair needs to be set further on the Gram Parsons side of the dial for her to take notice.) For a guy who used to capitalize on the futility of a divergent love, this might be a challenge. Instead of singing, "It seems by the time that I have figured what it's worth/The squeaking of our skin against the steel has gotten worse," he might have to switch to, "My girl has great skin and a naturally colorful complexion/She also has a really cute laugh." She might be the death of one of our great songwriters.

But what can I say? Love can be destructive.

#26 Song of the Decade- "Soul Survivor"

2009-10-26T21:38:00.000-05:00

#26 Song of the Decade- Young Jeezy feat. Akon- "Soul Survivor"

In any metal retrospective you'll ever see, each interviewed party rhapsodizes over Black Sabbath. You'll have to wait an entire commercial break before any other musician is mentioned, and there's never enough hyperbole to go around. "It was like I had never heard music before blah blah blah," some bald guy with creative facial hair gushes. There were a lot of hard rock bands who seemed dark but were really mama's boys, but Black Sabbath was clearly something different from the rest of the dirge-like English rockers in the way they fully embodied their own witchy mystique. They were a lone dissenting voice with a sound more discordant and uncompromising than anyone else. We could be talking the same way about Young Jeezy's verisimilitude, if only he stood out as much. He's just as much of a master of reality, but that reality is so unrelentingly dark that he's become the mainstream. His Machiavellian solipsism is not a shock to the system, it's representative of it. Black Sabbath changed the world; the world changed Young Jeezy.

If he and Akon hooked up on a song today, it would be an event; but in 2005, neither was particularly well-known. The unique tone of Akon's tongue-depressant warble is what first got the song on the radio, but it will be remembered as our entree into the hopeless outlook of Jeezy. Rarely has a rapper condensed his entire ethos into one verse the way the man born Jay Jenkins does here, particularly in one couplet:

"A hundred grand on my wrist, yeah life sucks
Fuck the club, dog, I'd rather count a million bucks"

At the time, musicians were first feeling the squeeze of the record industry's collapse and doing whatever they could to branch out and become more palatable to the mainstream, whether that was starring in Budweiser commericals or making entire albums for the ladies. Here, Jeezy at once glorifies the hustle and casts it as meaningless. He's not interested in anything else like, you know, socializing with people in public, but his only pastime of money chasing is just as hollow, just as much of a reminder that life sucks. In his debut single, Young Jeezy seems to be saying that even ambition itself is hopeless. And the really disturbing thing? In one of his patented ad-libs, he even laughs at the notion.

That's the black cherry on top of the rest of Jeezy's performance, in which he prays against/for his own inequity, conflates dreams with nightmares, and threatens an anonymous spoken-to with clenched teeth. Akon's weary spritualizing and foreboding beat, matching claustrophobic string stabs with wandering twinkles, do their best to match Jeezy's hoarse futility, and in neither the music nor the lyrics is there any celebration to rival the dread and paranoia.

Here's the real significance of the song though: it sounds as if I'm exaggerating. Rather than reading those lyrics for their inhumane cynicism, the majority of critics heard this track and found it not irredeemable, but rather typical. We are immune to the landscape Jeezy's describing and the persona he's reporting from. As far as hip-hop gloom goes, he's not the minority. He became a star, and the song became an anthem for the faceless grind because we live in a society that he blends into when he isn't holding a mirror. He's bellowing that "we're livin' in hell," and we "just keep on movin' now."

20 Best Movie Trailers of the Decade

2009-10-22T21:49:00.004-05:00

The criteria for these decisions is hazy in my own mind, but it usually just comes down to how much the trailer made me want to see the movie it was promoting. I had different reasons for choosing each of these previews, and the videos vary in quality and are so wide in some cases that they mess up the rest of this page. I did my best. Also, this ranking has nothing to do with the quality of the final film: I'm only judging the trailers. Allow me to explain each:

20. Finding Forrester

Throughout high school, my friends and I went to the same movie theater every Friday. For about six months, the trailers before every screening were the Pearl Harbor teaser (a great trailer in its own right) and Finding Forrester. This is a pretty standard trailer, but it is responsible for the Sean Connery lines "Punch the keys," "Bolt the door...if you're coming in," and "You're the man now, dog." I have ruined friendships by over-quoting those lines. Hell, they inspired an entire website. Which is just silly. Who names a website after an innocuous line from the trailer of a forgettable mainstream movie?

19. Kill Bill, Vol. 1

With the Kill Bill diptych, Quentin Tarantino sought to prove that he could direct action, and the trailer for the first installment promises nothing but that. In fact, there's barely any dialogue, which was a pretty daring way to promote a Tarantino film. You can't beat that song either.

18. (500) Days of Summer

Bouncy music, quirky narration, cool clothes, pretty people. Teasing of some artsy, innovative visuals. Works for me.

17. 300

I didn't like the final product, but the powerful, atmospheric, otherworldly visuals of this trailer definitely made it a hit.

16. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (teaser)

Hauntingly spare and quiet, this trailer nails down the premise of the film without giving too much away. Fincher's trailers are always top-notch, and this one is no exception.

15. The Dark Knight

I watched this so many times that I was able to time it so that I clapped my hands at the same time the Joker does. It's hard for an ad to hint at the complex themes of a movie without ruining the plot, but this one does that while also showing off some great visuals. Furthermore, it's rare that a score is completed in time to match with the trailer, but this trailer gets a lot of extra mileage from the main theme of the movie. Extra points for the "Jokerized" version of the trailer that was only sent out to a handful of theaters.

14. Marie Antoinette (teaser)

Honestly, you could put "Age of Consent" over anything, and it would get me excited. This trailer presents a daring, sumptuous final product that was never really delivered to us.

13. The Hangover

This is another case of a movie's success being inextricably tied to the strength of its promotional materials. Not since There's Something about Mary had I been able to sit with an audience and guarantee from their reactions that a movie would be a hit in four or five months.

12. Little Children

As a promotional tool for the film, this trailer is kind of unsuccessful. As an art object unto itself, it's pretty beautiful. Seeking to capture the tone of the film rather than summarize any of its content, this is one of a kind.

11. Femme Fatale

Speaking of one of a kind, this Brian De Palma vehicle shows us the entire movie in super fast forward, stopping it to give us the sexier parts out-of-context. Then it kind of dares us to see it in the end. The entire movie is not as good as this trailer.

10. Red Eye

This ended up being a pretty solid movie, and what's remarkable about the trailer is how long they wait to tell us what it's actually about. This is a classic rope-a-dope. I'm sure there are a lot of first drafts of trailers like this that get focus-grouped to death. This one actually follows through.

9. The Man Who Wasn't There

The smoky, contrast-heavy cinematography of this movie is its greatest strength, so it's the focus of an elegant, assured trailer that takes advantage of heady dialogue and smooth editing.

8. Cast Away (teaser)

The full-length version of this trailer would be on my worst trailers of the decade list for giving everything away. (No really. Everything. The last shot of the trailer is the last shot of the movie.) But this one is a perfect setup, giving us everything we need to know and then leaving us at the exact spot when things get intriguing.

7. Borat (full-length)

Probably the funniest trailer I've ever seen. Again, where would this movie be without this preview?

6. Watchmen (trailer 1)

This is another one I watched over and over again. With a portentous Smashing Pumpkins song, it delivered exactly what anyone wanted from the film. It's expository enough for newcomers, but it also teases all of the things fans were wondering about. It builds and builds until it can't anymore. This is a splashy, mature trailer for a film that wasn't nearly as successful.

5. Comedian

It features absolutely no footage from the film, but this sardonic, inventive trailer still manages to get us excited about it. I wish I could go back and see an audience's reaction to this.

4. Cloverfield (teaser)

Talk about mysterious. While we're on the subject of how much or little is revealed in a trailer, this one doesn't even give you the title. Beat that. It does, however, establish the look that guides the entire film, and it ends with as provocative an image as possible. I've never been as intrigued by a trailer as I have been by this masterpiece.

3. Jarhead

Great trailers can promise a subtext and thoughtfulness and thematic heaviness that the actual film does not necessarily have, and that's the case with Jarhead. By featuring the unimpeachable stars, revealing dreamy, ironic shot selection, and using a contemporary song for once, this trailer stresses that this is not your father's war film. It gathers a whole lot of momentum in just over two minutes.

2. Garden State

There's no dialogue or explanation of a plot here. Everything about the tone is communicated through ironic, eye-popping visuals and the hipper-than-thou Frou Frou song. Unlike something like Jarhead though, this trailer actually does approximate the viewing of the film. Sometimes it's too clever for its own good, but you enjoy spending time with it and sharing in its exuberance.

1. Where the Wild Things Are (teaser)

Considering that writing online about your reaction to this trailer is now seen as a cliche, I'd say this is a pretty powerful piece of work. Spike Jonze and the Arcade Fire can make you cry in...two minutes. The word "melancholgia" was invented for this.

Let me know what I forgot in the comments.

#14 Album of the Decade and #31 Song of the Decade- Ben Kweller

2009-10-17T16:53:00.005-05:00

#14- Album of the Decade- Ben Kweller- Sha Sha
Ben Kweller- "Commerce, TX"

#31 Song of the Decade- Ben Kweller- "Wasted & Ready"

John Seabrook's smug 2001 book of culture criticism, Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture, devotes an entire chapter to the precocity of a then-unknown Ben Kweller. Seabrook follows a teenaged Kweller and his band Radish as he's courted by major labels. At one point Kweller's at Jimmy Iovine's house freestyling with Tom Petty, and there are about ten times when an expert calls him "the next Kurt Cobain." Kweller was a songwriting prodigy mining Cobain's quiet-loud dynamics, and he could play almost any instrument you gave him. Seabrook spells out the seeming randomness of the buzz surrounding this kid from Greenville, Texas, and Seabrook captures the herd mentality of record executives flying out there without knowing anything about him. By the time the chapter ends, a lot of money and attention has been invested in Kweller, and he seems oblivious to how much is actually riding on his nascent career. Seabrook has asked "why him?" and we don't have much of an answer.

We still don't. Nine years after the events of the book, Kweller's career has stalled. He's trying to cross over to a country audience. He's known primarily as a girly type of act because of earlier bills he shared with Guster and Evan Dando. He's trapped on Dave Matthews' label, which is doing nothing to promote his talent. Worst of all, he has neutered his songwriting's more unique flourishes to fit into some idea he has of what a traveling bluesy roots-rock working man's hero should be. What made him great the only time he actually had to prove all of his promise, his debut Sha Sha, was that he was so oblivious to all of these outside factors. Perhaps a voice like his was never meant to hit it big. After all, Cobain probably wasn't supposed to either.

Sha Sha is an album a great songwriter makes when he's twenty, before he gets political, before he gets stream-of-consciousness, before he's trying to be Dylan, before he knows that what he's doing is called approximate rhyme. The lyrics here are rough around the edges. They reach for connections that aren't always there, like calling butterflies "passive-aggressive." They leave blanks for us to fill in with non sequiturs like, "Sex reminds her of eating spaghetti." "Maxed out like a credit card" isn't exactly Rimbaud, but it's better than what I was writing at twenty.

Sha Sha is a perfect storm of these eccentricities. Most rappers' first album is their best because it's their entire autobiography and manifesto delivered in one fell swoop. They say everything that has been building up inside of them for their entire lives and capitalize on the now-or-never urgency of a debut. They are able to channel their message and worldview into one album, and they aren't jaded enough to compromise that point of view. Ben Kweller, a guy who used to cover Vanilla Ice live, presents the same naive but breathless weltershaung as someone like The Game. It's all-or-nothing, and he delivers summery, indelible power-pop with an equal facility for fist-pumpers and honest, heartfelt ballads. Yes, it's a little girly, but other than maybe Is This It?, it's hard to find a record this decade that is as top-to-bottom fun to listen to. Kweller finds a way to overcome a limited, straining voice with his gift for melody, and nowhere is his exuberance and dusted-off brilliance more evident than on "Wasted & Ready."

With its wandering slides leading up to deafening power chords, "Wasted & Ready" sounds like something Alex Chilton would have written if he had been raised eating barbecue and watching Cowboys games. When I saw Kweller live in Philadelphia two years ago, it seemed as if everyone was waiting for him to wrap up the love songs and hit them with what was buried deep in their collective drunk playlists. It's a playing-dumb classic, a hit that never became a hit. Kweller's guitar playing has never sounded more muscular, and his reedy intonation has a way of making platitudes sound immediate and cathartic. Especially when he multi-tracks his own voice on the song's last fourth, we're reminded of just how far a little obliviousness can go. Kurt Cobain would be proud.

LSU-Florida: Diary of a Letdown

2009-10-12T19:14:00.016-05:00

Lately I've been feeling as if I'm a sixty-year-old man living in a twenty-five-year-old man's body. Even though I'm back in my home state among friends in Tiger football, I've been content to grouse around my apartment complaining about LSU via supercilious tweets. But when my brother-in-law came through with a ticket to #4 LSU against #1 Florida, and P.T. flew in for the game from Massachusetts, I knew I had to play the young man's game with an all-day tailgate. I took these terrible pictures.

To give you an idea of how crowded Baton Rouge gets on a gameday, this is about two miles away from the stadium on Highland, where I parked. Six hours before kickoff.

I made sure to wear my walking shoes. Speaking of being sixty years old, I have designated walking shoes.

Considering that I've never lived in Baton Rouge, I have a lot of memories of the city. During the post-Katrina semester when many of my friends were making do at disparate Louisiana campuses, PT and I visited our friend Karl in the 225. I snuck a fifth of Jack Daniel's into this diner under my jacket, and it slipped out, smashing into a million pieces. The funny part of the story, however, is when we walked to Karl's temporary apartment to crash. We got home before him or his roommates, whom we had never met. Figuring that these roommates wouldn't react too well to weird, unindentified drunk dudes sleeping on their floor, we wrote "Karl's Friends" in Sharpie on sheets of looseleaf and taped the signs to our chests before we passed out. College.

If you ask the proprietor of this restaurant, Roul, how juicy his burgers are, he'll say, "Juicy like a pussy." It's charming.

Beware that none of these pictures are composed. I don't even bother to get a shot of anyone's face. Anyway, P.T.'s buddy hooked us up with this tailgate party, sponsored by an organization called S.H.A.R.T., which stands for something stupid. If you want to know the difference between SEC football tailgating and any other inferior gathering that calls itself tailgating, all you have to know is that this party had satellite TV, thirteen kegs, all manners of roasted pork, and its own monogrammed coozies.

And this punch, which was gone before we got there, much like any hint of LSU offense.

What has a longer corny t-shirt shelf-life: the Got Blah-Blah-Blah? construction or the Price of Blah-Blah-Blah? Priceless... arrangement? Both of them have been going ten years easily.

This was delicious until it gave me food poisoning.

About two hours before game time, the LSU players march down Stadium Drive with the Golden Band from Tigerland. I'm waiting for them and looking for my brother-in-law, who is one of these 90,000 people. Miraculously, I found him and my ticket.

Les Miles and his poo-eating grin are somewhere down there.

About forty-five minutes before kickoff. This was the last time I would see LSU in the end zone that night.

I don't think I've heard more virulent language than the cursing directed at Tebow on Saturday. Between that and the dude who punched a Gator fan in the face for no reason, I reminded myself to wait a while to bring any kid to a game. This photo was taken on Florida's touchdown drive, the only lapse in what was a pretty tight defensive game from the Tigers. I would have taken some pictures of JoJeff airing it out or Russell Shepard being used in creative packages or Charles Scott stretching the defense with plays other than off-tackle dives. Unfortunately, none of those things happened.

By the fourth quarter, when it was clear that LSU just could not measure up to the #1 team in the nation, my entertainment came from the old boozer sitting next to me, reaching down for his flask in this picture. He was the type of drunk who just says the same two things over and over. If it wasn't "that facemask penalty really hurt us," it was the more emphatic: "How do they all know to look over at the sideline at the same time like that? I'll be goddamned! How do they do that? You figure that out you call me. I'mma give you my card." Most people, my brother-in-law included, would ignore the dude, but I just goaded him. "You know how they all look at the same time? The coach probably grabs their facemasks and pulls them over during practice." I was sobering up by this point, but I should've asked him for some of whatever was helping him cope with this game.

Congratulations to the Florida Gators, who took advantage of the tentative nature of our offense and controlled the clock with their own conservative offensive attack. Their touchdown should have been called back, and the center kept turning his head before the snap, only to get called for a false start once. But good game nonetheless. LSU is ranked #10 in both polls after the loss, which, honestly, is probably where we belong right now.

I love attending conference games in the heart of the season, but I'm 0-2 at Florida contests and might have to return to my couch for the team's own good. I'll do my fair share of grousing from there against Auburn. LSU football is shaving so many years off my life that I just might be sixty by now.

Film of the Decade #46- 28 Days Later and Album of the Decade #17- Lift Your Fists...

2009-10-01T21:02:00.007-05:00

#46- 28 Days Later- Danny Boyle (2001) [watch the whole movie here]

#17- Godspeed You Black Emperor!- Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven (2000) [all songs too long to link to]

The best films of this past decade usually took long-accepted tropes or themes and synthesized them in new ways that spoke to the concerns and fears of our age. There is probably no more appropriate genre to do that in than horror, which is what makes 28 Days Later the best horror film of the decade. (Though pardon me if I haven't seen Saws II-V. I might be wrong, you know?)

Anyone would agree that 28 Days Later is a visceral horror entry, but calling it a zombie movie is both factual and insulting. It is true that the plot begins with animal rights activists releasing chimps who are part of a scientific experiment. It is true that those chimps attack their liberators with a contagious disease and escape, spreading this disease among the entire population of England and turning them into rage-fueled zombies. But calling it a zombie movie is denying how antithetical Danny Boyle's genre exercise is to what we acknowledge about such films. It's not that Boyle and his screenwriter Alex Garland use "the rage" as a symbol--that would actually make it sort of retro. No, this stands out because it takes someone turning into a monster, one of the more inviting and guilty pleasures of such films, and makes that prospect the most terrifying and present danger imaginable.

From Invasion of the Body Snatchers on, zombies have been used as filmic symbols for what we are denying of our human nature. In the first crack at that property, those who famously "go to sleep" are the ones who give up questioning the world around them. The sheep who blindly obey 1950s authority become metaphorical and literal zombies relegated to feeding on the flesh of those still kicking and screaming. George Romero expanded similar ideas from his Night of the Living Dead to address consumerism in Dawn of the Dead and class in Land of the Dead. They Live is also expressly political. These stories remind us of our own independence, the agency that makes us human, and they presuppose that we should avoid anything that would turn us into zombies. 28 Days Later has no such context. Whereas those other films obsessively delineate living, breathing humans from The Other, in 28 Days Later the zombie is our friends and family. And we still have to kill it.

Instead of denying human nature, Garland's characters are faced with the question of what humanity is in the first place. The ubiquitous threat of a person no longer being a person is what makes watching the film such a draining, harrowing experience. Other horror films have set-ups that build excitement and then end, giving us a breather to prepare for the next one. Up until its admittedly crappy ending, 28 Days Later is non-stop running from a continuous endangerment and insecurity.

Brains.

Those thematic concerns would not matter much if we didn't connect to any of it though. Thankfully, we do. For instance, Garland and Boyle balance those questions of humanity with something that marks us as humans: the mundane. If the apocalypse happened, what would you eat? How would you get water to shave? Where would you get gasoline? The characters have to figure this out, and they almost feel guilty for needing these things, no matter how much they are reminded of their necessity. That imperfection is helped by Boyle's decision to shoot the film on HD video, which was still a daring choice in 2001. The medium's imperfections underscore the spontaneity and immediacy of what is happening on screen.

No discussion of the film would be complete without mention of the Piccadilly Square centerpiece, in which our protagonist Jim wanders around a completely deserted version of the most populous, touristy spots of London without any idea of why the locations are so empty. It's one of the most eerie scenes I've ever watched, and it's impossible not to marvel at the scale of it all. It establishes an unrivaled sense of foreboding and loneliness. It just so happens to be scored by a Godspeed You Black Emperor! song that establishes an unrivaled sense of foreboding and loneliness.

GYBE! were Canadian eight-piece progenitors of post-rock, a nineties subgenre characterized by interminable, hypnotic instrumentals that built through several movements and usually ended with a thrilling crescendo. Sometimes accompanied by multi-media presentations, post-rock sought to re-examine the structure of what rock music typically was and present a more cerebral, experimental version of it.

GYBE! took the mantle of early post-rock bands like Mogwai, Spiderland, or Sterolab and created something more textured and haunting and timeless. When the four suites of Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven take off, they push the music past weird time signatures to something heavier and more substantial. Although they're considered experimental, they're actually presenting a piece striking in its unified sense of purpose, that purpose being one of absorbing, centered dread for something lost or hopeless. They took the sound of a type of music criticized as clinical and infused it with genuine, earned emotion. While that sounds kind of navel-gazing, as post-rock usually is, there is a selfless quality to the music that keeps its eye on the prize. (This is definitely part of their m.o. They only conducted interviews through one member of the group and never had the band name or track titles on the album packaging.) By splicing in clips of French children singing or an old man yammering about Coney Island, there are even times when an instrumental band's music does not take center stage, as if to say that the world around us continues even as we're creating a soundtrack for it. That aspect of the album makes it undeniably present and cathartic, a memorial for something still dying.

In that way, I would agree with Danny Boyle that it's perfect music for a sort of hopeful apocalypse. You get the sense that album closer "Antennas to Heaven" isn't the real end, and someone will still be twitching long after the droning aftermath of its strings and guitars.

Sometimes a Funny Team Name Is Just a Funny Team Name

2009-09-24T19:53:00.001-05:00

Fantasy football is a waste of time and money. Fantasy football is inconsequential and kind of sad. Fantasy football is a game for middle class White guys who don't have real problems. Your fantasy football team, to anyone else, is uninteresting. It's like describing your dreams. And worst of all, it doesn't even have an accurate name. If this were really a fantasy, I think Mila Kunis would be involved, not a Robert Meachem spot-start.

But tell that to my brain. I actually didn't give work my full attention yesterday because I was too conflicted about a possible Slaton-Palmer-Benson for Turner-Sproles-Carlson-Washington trade. For something that is, in the long run, pretty negligible, the game within a game occupies a lot of this particular man's time and consideration. So fantasy football is a function of culture, sure, but I didn't realize until recently how much it taps into the male psyche, how it converges with and fulfills our brute instincts.

First page of search results. Gorgeous.

Because I'm ahead of the curve when it comes to time-wasting, I've been playing since high school, but the fantasy football tipping point was about five years ago for culture at-large, coincidentally about the same time the early-aughts poker explosion was leveling off. Not coincidentally, the games have similar clientele. Poker became popular because men in their twenties--a generation raised with over-protective parents and participation trophies--realized that the professional world they had just entered wasn't going to hand them anything. Rather than, you know, working hard to achieve things, they found an outlet that would reward them for the decision-making, judgment, and balls so often ignored by their bosses. Finally, they could take these skills and get what they really deserved with very little effort. They could experience tangible rewards for something as patently intangible as intellect.

Fantasy football, which doubles these goals while also being an excuse to watch more sports, requires the same mixture of skill and chance. Whereas the most important parts of poker are solitary though, fantasy football thrives on group interaction while still glorifying the self.

Since fantasy football is a game of prediction and conjecture, no one, including ESPN's Matthew Berry, is an expert. He's just a guy who has more time and spreadsheets to study this stuff, and even then, he's rarely right about it. Or at least that's what we tell ourselves. The reason why he can keep his job is two-fold. If we acknowledge that even an expert is throwing darts, it makes the amount of time we spend on this seem pointless, and the whole enterprise seems more silly, which we don't want. So we allow that his help is useless but seek it out anyway. Also, and here's the part that ties into being a man, it makes us feel smarter if the expert is this fallible. It taps into the "I could do that" arrogance surrounding every man ever. We hate Matthew Berry not because he doesn't do his job well, but because we believe we could do it better.

Would you trust this man with anything other than fantasy sports?

We don't worry too much about this because fantasy football has refreshingly low stakes. Instead of agony, it forces us to deal with the discomfort of defeat. Traditionally, because you only have one opponent per week in fantasy, you always have tantalizing odds of winning and feel as if you've come very close even when you lose. It's like heads-up poker, except you don't need a pokerface.

Finally, what is brilliance if we aren't recognized for it? And what is brilliance if we are secure in that brilliance? We have to second-guess ourselves with systems or matchups, with sleepers and clever replacements for injured stars. We have now upped the ante for what separates those in the know from those in Yahoo public leagues, and that standard isn't even winning. For example, every fantasy player has said something like this in conversation: "I'm in third place right now. The dude in first has Adrian Peterson so..." Of course he's in first; he has the best player. Is that not enough? A female mind would just take the best player and be done with it. A male mind almost has to apologize for not being counter-intuitive. Another example of this nay-saying is the fact that every league has had an argument about its scoring, ignoring the fact that those values are as arbitrary as anything else in the game. As long as everyone is playing by the same rules, even if those rules are "one hundred and eleven point bonus for any first down play," your league is fair.

When I started playing in high school, the more research you did before your draft, the better your team was. Now that almost hurts you because you key into players and second-guess the obvious value picks. In one of my leagues the guys in the number one and number two spots on the leaderboard used auto-draft. Like everything else with guys and fantasy football, I don't think that's a coincidence.

At once, fantasy football presents man at his best and his worst. Always striving, never achieving. Always independent, never alone. Always strong but crippled by self-doubt. And even though the NFL is experiencing a golden age, something tells me this isn't the last of the games we'll play to express ourselves.

#45 and #39 Songs of the Decade- "You Are the Generation..." and "Postcards from Italy"

2009-09-21T19:45:00.007-05:00

#45- Johnny Boy- "You Are the Generation That Bought More Shoes and You Get What You Deserve"

#39- Beirut- "Postcards from Italy"

Let's fast-forward eight years. You're my guest at an ironic 2009 party, because that's something I would invite you to. We're friends like that I guess. On the wall I have posters for something period but forgettable--Imagine That or Confessions of a Shopaholic maybe. I'm wearing skinny jeans and a bright hoodie. Maybe I even thought to tape cotton balls onto the door in the shape of a cloud with a tasteful picture of Michael Jackson on top. We share a laugh and maybe I say something inappropriately flirty because I'm already drunk.

The most defining part of such a future-retro party would be the music, right? Before you even get to my delicious seven-layer dip no homo, you would notice the music I chose, and whether or not it correlated with your idea of what the '00s were. Perhaps I picked the unabashedly repetitive pop of "Pokerface" or "Boom Boom Pow." Maybe I'll just soundtrack the entire night with auto-tune, since, for better or worse, it'll be recognizable.

But we all know being recognizable is not the same as being memorable. That's the problem with art that follows trends. People can tell whether or not your heart is in it. When Harry Potter blew up earlier this decade, batches of fiction writers threw together a children's fantasy thinking it would sell. But it was easy to distinguish between the writers who had an affection and comfort for the material and the ones who were looking for a buck. We sustain trends; they don't sustain us.

Some of the music I'll remember the most from this fading decade sounds nothing like our idea of the aughts. These songs I'm profiling, for instance, sound downright old. Johnny Boy's "You Are the Generation..." is an anti-consumerist message in the form of a vociferous mock doo-wop with close-mics, reverbed tambourines, and no brakes. You start by questioning whether or not they ripped off the intro to "Be My Baby" (they did), but you finish stomping along with them and responding "yeah-yeah" to their call of "aww baby." And if I didn't know better, I'd think they play bottle rockets throughout that second verse. It sounds too pure and innocent to be made in 2004.

The same goes for Beirut's "Postcards from Italy," which begins like every other Beirut song: a lonely melody repeats on a dusty peasant-like instrument--in this case a ukelele--until it expands into a wedding march of Eastern European rhythms, swirling away with old world charm until Zach Condon's wistful nasality reminds it where its bread is buttered. At times the formula works so well that it feels calculating. Here it's perfect.

Here's what you have to understand though: these songs don't stick with me just because they have a vintage sound. They last because I experienced the songs in a way I rarely do anymore. In both cases, the tracks were recommended to me by another DJ while I was working at a radio station, and I thought the album covers looked cool. That's it. That throwback word-of-mouth began a relationship with two songs that I'll take along with me for the rest of my life. Not algorithms that predict what I'll like based on other recommendations. Not a streaming radio station tailored to my specifications.

I know nothing about Johnny Boy, and I've kept it that way on purpose. I don't own any of their other music. I don't know who they are or where they're from. Maybe I'm afraid none of their other work lives up to this single and don't want to find out. In my own way, I kind of feel as if I'm keeping pure that experience that people had in the time the band is replicating. Information travels fast in our culture, and it's easy to know so much about an artist that you can't even listen to their music with any objectivity. That experience is automatically tainted with hype and expectations. With Johnny Boy, a friend of mine liked it, and the cover looked cool.

I feel as if I already know too much about Zach Condon, the sixteen-year-old who made Gulag Orkestar in his bedroom and found an audience for his 19th century gypsy music, ironically, through the most modern of means. I could write a whole postmodern essay on that dynamic, but I think I'd like to stick with this future-retro stance.

Future-retro. I like that. Remind me of it in eight years while you're trying the dip.

Reggie Bush and the Saints Tradition: Big Hopes, Big Dreams, Big Butts

2009-09-15T20:27:00.004-05:00

I'm not sure if I can still pull off the jersey look. But if I were to buy a Saints jersey, it would be a Reggie Bush. Not because I like the number 25 or even because I like Reggie Bush. (I'm not so sure that I do.) I want that jersey because I'm a true Saints fan, and Reggie Bush is more symbolic of the franchise's identity than any other player it has ever employed.*

In 1967, the first play in New Orleans Saints history was a kickoff returned for a touchdown. Ever since then, the team has fallen short of that promise:

- Despite a mediocre season, the Saints were still playoff-bound in 1979, until Oakland humiliated them by coming back from 24 points down on "Monday Night Football."
- Fans began calling the team the Ain'ts during the 1980 season, during which the team went 1-15. Legendary radio announcer Buddy Diliberto suggested fans wear paper bags on their heads so that none of their friends recognized them at the game. They did. We invented that.
- Amazingly, it took until 1987 for the Saints to have their first winning season. They were embarrassed 44-10 by Minnesota in the playoffs.
- It would take until 1991 for the Saints to win an NFC Western Division title. In the playoff game, they seemed poised for victory until the Atlanta Falcons improvised a lateral-pitching miracle on the final play of the game to send the game into overtime and send me to the bathroom to throw up. (Seriously, I was eight. It was too much to take.)
- In 1992 another memorable season was flushed away with a first-round playoff loss to the Eagles. Again, we gave up 29 unanswered points in the fourth quarter. It was the first time I heard my dad say "fuck."
- At the time, in 1999, I supported Mike Ditka's decision to trade an entire draft's worth of picks for Ricky Williams. But a hall-of-fame coach and a Heisman winner (two actually, if you count Danny Wuerffel) still only equaled a 3-13 season. Plus, we didn't have any draft picks for a while.

Ditka after the then-winless Browns connected on a 56-yard Hail Mary pass with no time left on the clock.

- Barely, despite giving up 24 points, the Saints finally won a wild-card playoff game in 2000 under the spry legs of Aaron Brooks (whom I would curse out for the next five years as he threw balls into the stands and smiled after interceptions). They then got blown out by Minnesota in the next round.

Along the way, there were many more heartbreaking losses, so many that "leavin' the fourth quarter in the French Quarter" has become an unofficial motto that follows the team around. For instance, remember when the Saints improvised a lateral-pitching miracle against the Jags, only to miss the extra point that would have sent the game into overtime?

Yep.

So pardon us if we had some baggage when we drafted Reggie Bush in 2006. It's not as if it was fair to him. We seemed cursed, not even with failure like the Clippers, but with a more frustrating mediocrity. At least half of the seasons of my lifetime have seen records of 8-8.

But this guy, one of the most electrifying college players ever, was going to change that. He was going to change the game itself, and he fell into our laps. He could catch passes as a wideout. He had the agility and durability to run the ball. He had the vision to return kicks and punts. It was too good to be true.

At the eve of Bush's fourth season, it's still too good to be true. On the morning of January 12, 2006, when an entire fanbase hugged each other and cried onto each other's shoulders, clinging to the only hope some of them had, Tom Jackson compared Bush to Gayle Sayers. Mel Kiper went on to say, tongue-in-cheek, that if Reggie Bush wasn't a Pro Bowler, something was wrong with football.

Something is wrong with football. Instead of changing the NFL game, he changed his own game for the NFL. He petitioned the league to let him have his coveted number 5 and was denied, the first small disappointment in a career of them. He tried to bulk up to fit the NFL mold of an every-down back, but it ended up slowing him down. The Saints, realizing this, set him off in the slot and threw to him over 100 times his rookie season. Even with 88 receptions though, he still had less than 1000 yards. We tried trick plays with him in a league in which trick plays famously don't work.

I don't want to demean Bush, who has headed up countless charity endeavors for the city and seems like a wonderful person. There have been some great moments. His go-ahead punt return TD as a rookie (on which we totally got away with a hold). Hell, he was leading the league in touchdowns until he got hurt in the tenth game of last season.

But even he must be ashamed to have nearly as many fumbles (15) as he has touchdowns (24) in his career. Even he must be surprised to have had so many nagging injuries. Even he must be shocked that his callipygian girlfriend is more famous than he is. It's not a good sign when the marquee player for your favorite team gets picked in your fantasy draft, and you're kind of relieved that you didn't have to pick him. On the plus side, he's great in video games.

Look it up.

It's not as if he wants to squander his potential, but that's what happens when you play for the Saints. He's a man before or past his prime, playing with a team that lives in a tradition of that incongruity. Bum Phillips kept the starters in during preseason games and built up ticket sales, only to go 3-13 when things were even. Archie Manning threw for thousands of yards only to watch an immature defense give up his points. The Dome Patrol's run-blockers played during an era with wide-open passing attacks. We had Mike Ditka when he no longer had a clue, and we drafted Ricky Williams when he didn't even want to play football. Why did we expect Reggie Bush to be anything other than a shifty, butterfingered letdown? He isn't even bad. He's just mediocre.

Even though the team was often winning by double-digits, my stepdad and I cursed up a storm watching the Saints game this past Sunday. Even when up by two touchdowns, we have been conditioned to never let up, to never take down our guard of skepticism, to expect the worst. A lifetime of watching this team has done that. Reggie Bush scored a touchdown in the fourth quarter, but neither of us cheered because we knew there must have been a flag, and, sure enough, there was. The touchdown was called back, and we weren't surprised. That's what happens to the Saints, and Reggie Bush embodies everything the Saints are. Hopefully, he isn't everything the Saints will ever be.

* With the possible exception of Michael Lewis, who was a hometown beer truck driver floating around semi-pro leagues until some scout for the Saints went, "Hey, that dude's fast!" and made him a Pro Bowl return specialist. If that doesn't speak to the Saints' rag-tag history, I don't know what does.

#3 and #27 Albums of the Decade- Jay-Z

2009-09-12T12:23:00.001-05:00

#3 Album of the Decade- Jay-Z- The Blueprint (2001)
Jay-Z- "U Don't Know"

#27 Album of the Decade- Jay-Z- The Black Album (2003)
Jay-Z- "Public Service Announcement"

Except for maybe Frank Sinatra, no musician seizes greatness without having that greatness brought out by collaborators.

Mick Jagger, who wrote all of the Rolling Stones' lyrics, depended upon Keith Richards to write the music, and the two are still butting heads and playing mind games with each other over their interdependence. During the Exile on Main Street recordings, which were done at Richards' French villa, he would shoot up until three in the morning, and everyone else had to wait on hand-and-foot because he would eventually come downstairs with something like "Tumbling Dice." At the same time, it's clear who the star of the group is.

Michael Jackson was a kid with a good resume until he met Quincy Jones, the man responsible for extracting everything mysterious and captivating and grown-up about him, crafting the universal sum of mismatched parts.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote some of the best pop songs ever because they combined such contradictory focuses. McCartney, as a bass player, was obsessed with rhythm, while Lennon always kept the melodies paramount. Lennon was always writing lyrics from a personal standpoint while McCartney was trying to communicate the universal. And sometimes that cocktail would show up in the same song: [Lennon-sounding] "Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been/Lives in a dream/Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door/Who is it for?/[McCartney-sounding] All the lonely people/Where do they all come from?/All the lonely people/Where do they all belong?"

By the late '90s mainstream hip-hop had forgotten this, if it was ever aware of it in the first place. There were solo acts who stayed in their own regressive lane, never expanding beyond their comfort zone (DMX). And there were rappers who used collaboration as a lazy crutch, blending into a group and shuffling off the heavy lifting (Master P). What Jay-Z seemed to realize with The Blueprint (and then forget again with The Blueprint 2) and exhibit again with The Black Album, was that he was only as good as the people working with him. For the first time, instead of putting on negligible friends as favors ([cough-cough] all of The Dynasty: Roc La Familia), he challenged himself to reach new heights, and those heights were stoked by the bright talents of hungry newcomers Kanye West, Bink, Just Blaze, the Neptunes, and Eminem. The Blueprint and The Black Album are seen as triumphs of the arrogant chest-bump when their real secret is humility.

But there's something else at work here. Most traditionally White music is a continued exploration of who the artist was and will be. For example, Madonna is only relevant because of the contrast between who she is in her current state of reinvention versus who she used to be. The immediacy of Black music comes from the assertion of who the artist is, and no other rapper has ever known that better than Jay. That's what makes him unique. Collaborators who can rival his larger-than-life presence don't bring out unexpected sides of him. They just shine a brighter light on who he is.

He never does this anymore. The "I'm disgusted with you" face is one of my favorites. "Don't be the next contestant on that Summer Jam screen."

On The Blueprint Jay and his producers realized that this was his moment. Embracing a moment makes an album great; intuiting that the man had not already reached his peak, despite staying at the top for fifteen years and selling millions of albums, is what makes an album special. The Blueprint is commonly referred to as a cigar-chomping, indolent victory lap. That's partly true, but it discounts a lot of the circumstances under which it was released. Yes, it came out on September 11, 2001, but more important to the text itself is the fact that Jay had a third-degree assault rap hanging over his head the whole time he was recording. Yes, the middle-aged dude who has Barry Obama on his speed-dial (or whatever Jay uses that's more expensive than speed-dial) also probably stabbed a guy less than a decade ago. Anyway, rather than creating a portentuous, grave collection of meditative songs, Jay instead boasted stuff like, "Cops wanna knock me, D.A. wanna box me in/But somehow, I beat them charges like Rocky." Or maybe "charges don't stick to dude/He's like Teflon." Rather than seeming vulnerable, Jay just made himself bigger, more dangerous, more untouchable. Bragging about beating assault charges before you actually beat them is one of the more hip-hop things ever. He has nothing to lose even though he has everything to lose. Again, Jay knows himself well enough to see that the cocky, assured guy who doesn't seem to care always comes off as more powerful than the guy who obviously does care. (See Bush, George W. versus Gore, Al, 2o00.)

It's a bit unfair to compare Jay's records to anyone else's during this period in rap because he was simply working with a bigger canvas. Just as Spielberg makes great films because he can have any script he wants and get any financing he wants, Jay's all-encompassing fame and charisma draw the resources that separate him from the rest of the pack. "Yeah, Guru, throw in that Gladiator sample." Why not? The fact that no one else can even afford to clear samples anymore, let alone have great ones, gives him a leg up no homo. (Or "pause," as he pretty much invented on "Never Change.")

"This column's all over the place, nephew. And yeah, I do endorse HP. Don't give a fuck. You just finished writing about that."

That production, ranging from the menacing throb of The Doors on "Takeover" to the irrefutable poise of Bobby Bland on "Heart of the City," is the hallmark of the album, and it kind of threw hip-hop into a repetitive hole for the next few years. With the trend it started though, you forget how powerful the samples are in this context. While they are supposed to recall the records playing in the ether of Jay's childhood--literally, the blueprint of his musical taste--they're updated with an unmistakably contemporary vitality. That sound's immediacy, as well as some of the samples' almost purposeful imperfection, reminds you that the bulk of the record was written and recorded in two days.

But if The Blueprint is powered by the threat that Jay will never stop, The Black Album is powered by the uneasy promise that he will. It's there that he takes his time and money and crafts what amounts to way more of a competent personal statement than we could have expected.

Rather than mixing the hard-core with the commercial as he did on The Blueprint, Jay trades the personal with the universal on his fourth masterpiece. (It's no coincidence that he compares himself to The Beatles on it.) For example, Rick Rubin's kinetic monster of a beat on "99 Problems" is bombastic enough to open Tony Scott flicks, but if you examine the lyrics, it's just a sarcastic retelling of something that happened to Jay in his twenties. This is an intimate and sometimes bitter reflection hidden inside of candy wrappers. (Again, he couldn't have reached this balance without a stable of musicians just as talented as he is.) It's so autumnal, in fact, that I can remember walking around my mom's neighborhood for an hour, listening to this over the crunch of my heavy feet on leaves. I ignored my phone because I didn't want to interrupt the man, and I circled the same blocks watching my own breath until he was finished.

Clearly, this is grown man's music, but it's rarely stodgy. (Only on "Change Clothes," which still sucks.) Jay isn't content to water down the lyrics just because he can get by on the rich content of the songs. On the contrary, some of these verses present lyrics as twisty and clever as anything on Reasonable Doubt. An offering like, "I was conceived by Gloria Carter and Adnes Reeves, who made love under the sycamore tree/Which makes me a more sicker MC, and my mama would claim/At ten pounds when I was born I didn't give her no pain" isn't a return to form: it's a reinvention of form. The internal rhyme and caesura are technically perfect, but this whole image of a baby being conceived among nature and then born under atypical circumstances is myth-making of the classical variety. If it didn't happen in Brooklyn, it could have happened in Ancient Greece. Other rappers say they're special; Jay-Z makes you believe it.

Jay's contributions to hip-hop haven't been completely positive. For example, his insistence that he doesn't write rhymes down in advance has reinforced the belief that rap music is one of only spontaneity and born-that-way genius. Ironically then, his best work is reflective and emblematic of hard work. On these albums he takes a step back and evaluates his own place in history, which makes them historically great. The Blueprint is an epic proclamation of its own importance. The Black Album stands as a polished, penetrating threat that he can take it all away. But the element tying them together is that he and his collaborators pulled out all the stops, and, unlike the workman-like quality of hip-hop at the time, they treated the work as an opportunity they might never have again.

The Indispensable Tyler Hansbrough

2009-09-05T09:26:00.002-05:00

Tyler Hansbrough couldn't believe Righteous Kill wasn't good. I mean, it had DeNiro and Pacino, right?

When Tyler Hansbrough calls in to a radio show, the host has to tell him to turn his radio down.

If you say something on the obvious side, Tyler Hansbrough will reply, "Gee, ya think?"

Tyler Hansbrough makes jokes about Al Gore inventing the Internet.

Tyler Hansbrough's final pick in his fantasy draft was Ahman Green.

Tyler Hansbrough wears vests.

Tyler Hansbrough plays a lot of Trivial Pursuit with friends. He always wins because, one card at at time, he memorizes all of the answers when no one else is around.

Tyler Hansbrough's second favorite album is Third Eye Blind's self-titled debut.

Tyler Hansbrough pretends to not know what Twitter is. Tw--what is it, tweets?

#15 Film of the Decade- Sideways

2009-08-31T20:42:00.006-05:00

15. Sideways- Alexander Payne (2004)

This post isn't really about Sideways. I re-watched it this weekend and found it just as bittersweet and honest and unassumingly profound as I remembered it. While it follows the same unscrupulous, pig-headed, broken characters as Payne's other work, there's an intimacy to this film that makes it heartbreaking. Mostly because Payne and his co-writer Jim Taylor allow us to get closer to the characters than ever before. These are dynamic characters, whereas their previous pictures, no matter how biting they were, were always populated by types in service of a theme. It's their most grown-up film, not because it's about wine and mid-life crisis romantic fight-or-flight, but because it's roomy with lived-in charm and rich with characterization. If it's not a fortysomething, erudite Fight Club, with its own second-guessing protagonist and Dionysian sidekick, it's at least a post-grad Swingers.

This is not about that.

No, something else occurred to me as I watched the film in a twenty-four hour period that included activities such as:
1. a fantasy football draft
2. a "Mad Men" viewing
3. playing Super Columbine Massacre RPG for sociological reasons
4. listening to a story of my wife's that involved a group of Black teachers talking for forty-five minutes about TV shows she had never heard of.

Not that there aren't any brothers out there into oenophilic cinema, but I'm really White.

I think about race a lot, so I've confronted my own White privilege before. An understanding of your own relationship with race is an ongoing process that I don't think we ever conclude. A mature adult doesn't just wake up and "overcome" all of his prejudices and experiences; the best you can do is acknowledge that it's a complicated issue you need to be honest and educated about. Even though I try to do that, I've slowly socialized myself as White in pretty much everything I do. And subconsciously, I probably stay clued in to rap and basketball to overcompensate for this.

One of the products of this decade has been an ever-broadening diversity of entertainment (as well as diversity of consumption of entertainment). When my parents were my age, there was--just by pure volume--less entertainment. No Internet, no cable TV, no independent films, and fewer outlets for independent music. Therefore, everyone across all demographics watched Star Wars. Everyone listened to the Doobie Brothers (word to "What's Happening!"). Of course there were racial preferences in art and entertainment, but there was a lot more common ground. Art and popular culture used to unite people; now I'm afraid it's driving us apart. Because all of these avenues have become more specialized, our own experiences with culture are narrowing.

For example, imagine there's a man who writes, produces, directs, and stars in his own films each year. And those films open to at least $20 million every time. How obsessed would I be with his independent spirit, his control over his own projects, his knowledge of what his audience wants? How much would I write about him and analyze his work?

But hey. Obviously.

This isn't theoretical. The man's name is Tyler Perry. And though I consider myself a part-time film expert, I haven't seen a single one of his movies. Most mainstream (White) critics have criticized his work for being "all over the place" and comedically exploitative, and fans of the movies (Black) don't have taste similar enough to mine. They're movies made by and for Black people, so I wouldn't understand, right? If I watched one just so that I could engage in dialogue with Black people about it, wouldn't that be kind of pandering and pathetic? (And by using the word "pandering" there, am I assuming an air of superiority over those films' viewers?) Certainly being Black is more than watching Tyler Perry movies, and it's even racist to believe watching one could somehow illuminate the African-American Experience for me. There's more to it to say the least.

But do you notice the difference in curiosity? I'm willing to log hours of research for an imaginary football league, hunt down a self-released role-playing PC game for its cultural significance, and put up with a show that, honestly, has been frustratingly slow this season. But I can't try Madea Goes to Jail? I certainly have the means to do so, whether it's through Netflix (White) or Redbox (Black). I guess in my old age I'm getting settled in. Like Paul Giamatti's sad-sack character in Sideways, I'm growing more narrow-minded by the day (White/Black).

"Forever": The Rap State of the Union

2009-08-27T21:19:00.005-05:00

"Forever"- Drake feat. Kanye West, Lil' Wayne, and Eminem [image exclusive to Nah Right]

Hopefully, even after the disappointment of "Swagger Like Us," we can have one of these epic posse cuts a year. They seem to reinvigorate the hip-hop world overnight. Although the song isn't perfect, I know I'm excited. A few points:

1. So Far Gone is probably my favorite record of the year so far, even though I'll fully admit that Drake's flow is limited. His secret, which he really taps into on "Forever," is that he says the same exact shit as everyone else, except he does it in a wistful tone. He laments "shuttin' shit down in the mall" instead of celebrating it. Add in the interesting angle that he sings whenever that seems like the more logical thing to do, kind of like an ugly Lauryn Hill, and he's carved a great niche for himself. By now we know exactly what to expect from a Drake verse, and he delivers it every time with effortless punch-lines and the occasional charmingly middle-class reference. In the same flow every time. But really, I like the guy. He's consistent as long as the song isn't over 100 beats per minute, and that's fine. It worked for Snoop Dogg in '92, and we've probably cycled back to that.

Less ugly Lauryn Hill. More Vincent Chase and Johnny Drama mixed together.

2. Were the sirens necessary?

3. People are glossing over the fact that this is the lead single for the LeBron James documentary More Than a Game. Bron Bron is secretly at the center of all of this. It's like all those Lost Generation stories where something crazy happens, like Evelyn Waugh gives Fitzgerald the idea for the title of Tender Is the Night or something, and then the footnote casually mentions, "Oh yeah, they were having drinks on Ernest Hemingway's boat." Really? It's all happening? LeBron is Hemingway's boat. And stuff.

4. The best thing to happen to Kanye's rapping was taking some time off. He's done a million guest spots in the past six months, and almost every one can stand next to his best work. I kind of like his "you can have the game back" threats as long as he doesn't actually take us up on them. How could he have never used the "He ain't even go to class...Bueller" line before this? It's almost as good as his McLovin line is bad. His verse is probably my favorite, but I'll move on in the interest of not stepping on my Best of the Decade column for him.

5. This is almost a parody of a Lil' Wayne verse. Reference to martianism? Check. '80s baby nod? Check--Space Jam Jordans. Rhyming things that don't rhyme? Check--garden, harvest, Orleans. Untethered 504 shout-out? Check. Really obvious simile that adds nothing? Check--"like Nevada in the summer." You mean we don't get a mention of how pink his Sprite is? He even sounds bored stringing this stuff together. He never shows up for big moments like this.

6. In Eminem's verse, which is satisfying but a bit overrated by commenters--humorless and empty but technically sound--he spits, "I'm Hannibal Lecter so just in case you're thinking of saving face/You ain't gonna have no face to save by the time I'm through with this place so Drake..." At first, I heard that as "I'm Hannibal Lecter so just in case you're thinking of "Saving Grace". I assumed Em thought Jodie Foster and Holly Hunter were the same person, which I found hilarious because I've always thought they have the exact same (goofy) voice.

"Missshhhhhtaahhhh Lecterrrrr."

It's no coincidence that she won an Oscar for the movie she doesn't talk in.

That't not what he said though. Making connections like that is pretty much why I love rap music. I'd say it's alive and well.

#37 Song of the Decade- "Distortions"

2009-08-22T18:38:00.005-05:00

#37- Clinic- "Distortions"

Internal Wrangler, the 2000 debut of Liverpool four-piece Clinic, is an accomplished album, but it lacks identity as a whole. The band shifts between moods like a petulant child, and songs are over before they really even make an impression. The songwriting tends to hide behind characters like Evil Bill and C.Q., even though those characters don't have much organic payoff. Originally, Clinic's gimmick was that all four members wore surgical masks on stage; sometimes it sounds as if they follow suit in their music. It's a bit antiseptic and anonymous.

So it comes as that much more of a surprise when a song as emotionally bare as "Distortions" shows up buried as track nine. On a pretty polyphonic album, it's the first time things scale back, the only accompaniment being a drum machine and a Philips Philicorda, one of the '60s transistor keyboards the band experimented with. While the reverb on the keys' sustained chords is haunting, they're nothing when compared with Ade Blackburn's delicate vocal.

The song's speaker is at the crossroads of a relationship. He explains: "It's eerie and so scary/I don't know who to marry/Your sister came to bait me." Most singers wouldn't get away with selling those lines as anything other than treacly emo pablum. Blackburn--partly because he sounds as if the mic is really far away from him--performs them with a willowy, disaffected whisper. This is a song about the need for resolution, but he purrs every line as if he's afraid of answers he might get.

Every guy has said of women: "You can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em," and it's a cliche for a reason. Loving someone isn't easy. It's parasitic. A part of you is gone when you commit yourself to someone else, and it's an idea that's never adequately expressed in pop music. This song comes close because it creates a space in which the line "I've pictured you in coffins" still sounds romantic. That conflicted set of emotions is basically what the song is about, and it's achieved almost completely through the understated vocals.

However, no discussion of "Distortions" would be complete without mentioning "I love it when you blink your eyes," which is the best line this side of Lil' Wayne. On the surface, it expresses the speaker's happiness that his lover is alive, that she's blinking her eyes at all. But it's simultaneously the most specific and general detail possible. Blinking your eyes is something we all do, so it stands in for every little quirk you could like about someone. At the same time though, if you remember the way someone blinks her eyes--an action we see hundreds of times a day but normally disregard--that's a very personal detail. It's the most meaningful songwriting shrug I've ever heard. (Well, maybe not. I listen to a lot of Bob Dylan.)

By the last third, the song's tempo builds, but it doesn't matter much. If we're anything like the speaker of the song, we still have our backs firmly against the wall.

Brett Favre Finally Meets Tavaris Jackson, as Told by JD Salinger

2009-08-18T21:14:00.006-05:00

It's an honor for TANBR to present JD Salinger's account of today's events:

"A monk asked Dongshan Shouchu, 'What is Buddha?' Dongshan said, 'Three pounds of flax.'"
- a Zen Koan

It was a little after three o'clock on an Indian summer afternoon in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. For three straight Tuesdays, Tavaris Jackson, a tawny, humorless man of twenty-six, had been pacing up and down the picaresque field with fifty-three other bulky footballers, all of whom he considered drips. He lit a cigarette as he approached one of the more distinguishable drips, Sage Rosenfels of the Iowa Rosenfels, lately of the Houston Texans and Miami Dolphins.

"Goddamn it," he said. "Where is he? Didn't they say he would be here by now?"

Rosenfels said that he didn't know, although he had heard similar information about their expectant guest the night before. He had sat by the phone all day, even stretching the cord underneath the bathroom door for his evening soak. He told Tavaris to take it easy, that, after all, they had waited this long. "Jesus," he told Tavaris. "Look--he's probably in a cab by now on his way down here. The thing is--what do you care anyway? All it means is that you're out of a job, for chrissakes."

"Forget it. Forget it, now. Pretend I didn't say it." Tavaris stomped his cigarette out on the fifty-yard line.

"Oh, now you want me to forget it. Why did you ask in the first place then?"

It was then that Favre, the man they were expecting, made his appearance. He was clutching a football in his rough (but slender) hands with a certain esprit de corps, and he was followed by Seymour Glass of New York's Glass family, who had recently become his advisor in what Favre called "all issues related to spiritual advancement."

Tavaris began to compose a letter to his own analyst in his head. He--without noticing--shot Favre a desultory glance. "Nice to finally meet you guys. Real nice," Favre said in a tone that returned Tavaris's cold, but not ice-cold, attitude. He took a gulp from his highball and turned up the collar on his camel's-hair coat. (He had bought it the previous winter at Lord & Taylor's on sale.)

Ladies and gentlemen, the most Brett Favre picture of all time. I would do the whole thing in which I act as if this is the picture for the word in a dictionary, but I'm not sure what part of speech "Brett Favre" is. For a lot of people, it's become an interjection.

With no wherewithal for such niceties, and with sizable resentment for the fact that Favre was earning a salary of twelve million a year, Tavaris said, "Hey--I'm not saying that I'm mad at you exactly. I'm not exactly mad. But I want to be upfront--can I be upfront with you?"

Favre said yes. He looked at Seymour and then at his watch, mindful that he was running late for his theatre date.

"I was told," Tavaris said with his arms akimbo, "That I could compete for the starting job. Now granted, this was months ago, but still. That's what I was told. And now you come in here and I'll be lucky if I get a damned snap."

Favre ran his hands through his hair. "Jesus, don't be such a snob. You're acting like a snob, Tavaris. Honestly. You sound terrible, really terrible." He turned his back to the wind. "It's not like I gave your girl the time. I'm just here to do my job for God's sake. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not the most gregarious person in the city, but you're being downright standoffish."

Tavaris tucked in his T shirt and extended his hand to the competition reluctantly. "My apologies," he said. "I'm being silly. I wish--you know what? Best of luck to you. Welcome aboard as they say. Now if you don't mind, I really need to make some phone calls."

Then Tavaris went over and sat down on the unoccupied bench, looked at Favre, aimed his pistol, and fired a bullet through his right temple.

Thanks again, Mr. Salinger.

Who Decides the Hot 100?

2009-08-12T21:56:00.005-05:00

The Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling" is the number one song in the country, according to Billboard's Hot 100 chart. Before that single climbed to the top of the charts, their hyper-literate treatise "Boom Boom Pow" occupied the spot. With the songs combined, the group has been at number one for seventeen weeks, which is the longest since Boyz II Men was king of the hill in the mid-'90s.

This post isn't Black Eyed Peas snark. There's enough of that to go around. Instead, I think it's worth analyzing what this chart means in the 21st century, if anything. Certainly top 40 popular music is as important a part of our zeitgeist as anything else, even in a period of such diverging musical options.

Still though, I think the cachet of having "the number one song in the country," as touted by Casey Kasem or yelled as you're being chased down the street by screaming girls, is pretty much gone. For one thing, with the current setup of the music industy, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're making any money. And with the generation gap widening every day--trust me, I work with conservative people in their fifties--it doesn't have the cultural recognition it used to have either. Hell, Drake has the number two song in the country, and he isn't even signed to a major label.

At least there's an attempt for the chart to accurately represent things like popularity though. At its earliest, this same chart was tabulated by, literally, how many times songs were played on jukeboxes across the country. You don't think any of those numbers were rigged? Even in the '90s, before the advent of SoundScan, this stuff was largely a guessing game.

So how are the Hot 100 decided? On their website Billboard explains that the chart is: "The week's most popular songs across all genres, ranked by radio airplay audience impressions as measured by Nielsen BDS, sales data as compiled by Nielsen SoundScan and streaming actitvity data provided by online music sources."

Has Nielsen ever called you and asked you if you like particular songs on the radio? How do they decide who to call? If it were a random sampling of listeners, something tells me we might have acts more interesting than Black Eyed Peas, or at least something more interesting further down the list. Furthermore, what if the person called just says, "Yeah, I like all of those songs." How does the company arrive at a ranking from this?

Or does "radio airplay audience impressions" mean on-air requests? If that's the case, when is the last time you ever called a radio station on the telephone to request something? It was fifth grade for me, and even then it was a prank call. I called B97 as a stoned hippie and requested Jimi Hendrix. This system is only slightly less antiquated than that joke.

Billboard's top music of 2008 by genre. Good thing there's no overlap in any of those categories. Plus, I examine stuff like this all day and have no idea what "post-grunge" is. Any rock music that has come out since Nirvana?

Note that "sales data" is not digital download sales. Thankfully, a year-and-a-half ago, Billboard finally came up with a separate ranking for that, but they had ignored it until then. So sales of what? CD singles, which don't even exist anymore? MiniDiscs? ZipDisks and Jazz Drives?

The data from streaming sites might be the most helpful because it is the truest representation of which songs people want to hear if all other factors are equal. Still, this is a weird mixture of people. People who use streaming sites are--and I'm generalizing but not really--a) computer-illiterate or honest enough to not illegally download, b) too poor to buy music, or c) bored at an unimportant job that requires a public/community computer. This is the sub-set of people who direct the music industry? No wonder it's going under. The only group it seems to benefit is the Black Eyed Peas, which means the world is losing.

The Hot 100 might be ageist, because older people don't call into top 40 radio stations or even listen to them. It's probably outdated because no one buys physical singles anymore. And it's definitely inaccurate because of the confusing audience that ranks the songs. Maybe the Hot 100 isn't important anymore for a reason.

#32 Film of the Decade- The Barbarian Invasions

2009-08-10T21:49:00.002-05:00

#32- The Barbarian Invasions- Denys Arcand (2003)

Netflix's pithy description of The Barbarian Invasions reads: "In this Oscar-winning drama, fifty-ish Remy (Remy Girard) is divorced and hospitalized in Montreal. His ex-wife, Louise, asks their estranged son, Sebastien, to come home from London (where he now lives) as a show of support for his father. As soon as he arrives, Sebastien makes the impossible happen, using his contacts and disrupting the health care system in every way possible."

While it's technically accurate, that summary--especially the wacky "makes the impossible happen...in every way possible" cliche--is superficial. And for once, almost accidentally, that superficial stance is an interesting way to approach this film. In many ways Denys Arcand's sequel to his Decline of the American Empire is about the surface level of our lives. Sebastien, played with oleaginous aplomb by Stephane Rousseau, begins using his contacts out of resentment. What's a few Canadian bucks for a private hospital floor if it means he can stick it to his absent philandering pop? That bribe is a bigger favor than Remy has ever done for his son.

At a certain point though, Sebastien's arrangements take on a different air. Finding a heroin dealer because the hospital only dispenses morphine seems dangerous for someone so uncaring. What begins as a game of bravado becomes devotion. Arcand seems to ask, "What is the difference between the superficial and the heartfelt?" And, more importantly, "Does that division matter?"

For example, Remy, a history professor, is upset by his students' cold non-reaction to his health problems. He is surprised when, months later, they visit him at the hospital and explain how much they miss him. It's a heartwarming moment; we learn that people care more about us than they sometimes let on. Then, in the next scene, we find out that Sebastien paid them to be there. Does that reveal make the emotions of the preceding moment more false? Sebastien's tactics still touched Remy, even if they were under-handed. Does it matter how directly sincere intentions are if they still get the desired effect?

Arcand layers a motif of boundaries throughout the movie to externalize this idea. Girard performs a thoughtful monologue about the many women he's been with, both "real" and--as clips of celebrities play over his narration--imaginary. The characters move back and forth between the U.S. and Canada, and sometimes the characters slip between English and French, playing with boundaries of language as well. (It's worth mentioning that this is Arcand's return to the French language after a ten-year absence. The choice of language is completely intentional.) The film's title refers to the 9/11 attacks, the first time terrorists--barbarians--attacked the U.S. on its own soil, a time when many people were sorting out some of these complex divisions of what is important and what is real for the first time.

In Arcand's script, which won Best Screenplay honors at Cannes, he ends up extending this idea to forgiveness. How long should you hold grudges, if at all? When does the past no longer matter? The characters don't change suddenly in this movie, and the way they convincingly let superficial boundaries disintegrate into more meaningful connections is handled in a way I've never seen before.

The Barbarian Invasions is a film about death, but it ends up being inspirational, joyous, life-affirming--anything but superficial.

TANBR Turns Three

2009-08-08T15:09:00.004-05:00

Explosions in the Sky- "The Birth and Death of the Day"

Today, August 8, is the third anniversary of This Ain't No Bank Robbery. Last year P.T., Jelly, and I celebrated throughout the course of the day. This year we're a little more busy, and I'm not in the mood anyway. I've been working through a little depression lately, and dwelling on the time I've spent on my unsuccessful blog does not feel like the solution.

Thank all of you for reading. I work hard on this and make no money from it, so any feedback I get keeps me going. I know I over-write, but I think I've improved over time, and I appreciate having an outlet to muse about all of this stuff.

I'm going to continue with the lists until the end of the year and/or until I finish them. After that, we'll see where this goes. Here are some greatest hits from the past year. Thanks again.

"#19 and #22 and #40 Albums of the Decade- Animal Collective"
"R.I.P. Michael Jackson"
"TANBR NBA Draft Liveblog"
"#6 Song of the Decade- 'John Wayne Gacy, Jr.'"
"If NFL Front Offices Were Fourth Graders Trading Football Cards at Lunch"
"The Lil' Wayne Book Proposal"
"P.T. and Chris Attend the Basketball Hall of Fame"
"Why Do We Hate Tim Tebow?"
"Why I'm a Republican"
"Welcome to Heartbreak"
"Quarterback Controversies of the Future"

Better Pacing through Chemistry

2009-08-06T15:08:00.005-05:00

This decade, as I've chronicled in running features, has seen lots of memorable films, sporting events, music, etc. But what I haven't done enough is interpret the wholesale effects that media has had on society. One reason is that a lot of those attitudes can't be calculated yet. And how far does the arm of media reach? By only using entertainment to make sense of people, I'm being hopelessly limited. It might be helpful to look at cause-and-effect in the past ten years, to work backwards. I asked myself, "What's a difference in the way people act today versus how they acted ten years ago?" One thing that jumped out was that people seem more honest with each other, and one reason I thought for that was drugs.

The miracle anti-depressants Prozac and Zoloft became more readily available in the '90s, but it wasn't until the '00s that they and other pharmaceuticals like Paxil became widely accepted. And it wasn't until this decade that erectile dysfunction drugs, such as Viagra and Cialis, were approved for use. In an age of instant gratification, there seemed to be a treatment for any problem, even those that seemed most natural.

Because of the widespread avilability of these drugs, as well as the ubiquitous ads for them (every one of which is a government tax write-off), we as a culture are more open with each other about our deficiencies. Some people, like the parents who have to explain what an erection is to an eight-year-old, are nervous about this development. For that matter, patients are misdiagnosed and over-served with these drugs. But don't the ends justify the means?

For example, imagine a man admitting to another that he has E.D. ten years ago. It didn't happen. It was an emasculating condition. Now such confessions are a joke: "Better pop a few extra Viagra tonight."

The downside? Listening to hundreds of "if it lasts four hours..." jokes.

Since there are apparent treatments for every malady, we speak up about our own frailties. You hear people say, "Everybody's on something" or "everybody's got something wrong with him." Instead of something like clinical depression being the taboo it was in the 1960s, we now see it as the slight weakness of a healthier whole. The drug boom of the aughts has not made us perfect--it might not have even cured us--but it has made us more realistic. I mean, nobody's perfect, right?

#43 Song of the Decade- "International Players Anthem (I Choose You)"

2009-08-04T21:55:00.009-05:00

43. UGK feat. Outkast- "International Players Anthem (I Choose You)"

Q: What is the appropriate sum of money to "fuck with" in the club?

A:
a) a couple stacks
b) $328.65
c) forty dollars
d) n/a- Carrying cash is foolish in our wintry economic climate. Start a tab with a credit card, preferably one that offers reward points and high-yield interest.

According to Port Arthur poet laureate Pimp C, if you chose (c), you're trash. It doesn't matter what type of club it is, what your circumstances are, or whether or not you drink. Unconditionally, you're trash, and/or "you gets no love." I have my problems with UGK, but this line sticks with me more than any other one in the song.

This is a track that opens with a jaunty, enjambed verse from a really smart rapper, but it doesn't take off until Pimp C explains something completely inane and superficial with more conviction than I've ever explained anything in my life. In a way, that one quality is what made UGK vital.

I smile whenever I hear the sunshine of the Willie Hutch sample, I relate to Andre 3000's fear of commitment, and I relish Big Boi's honesty when he tells me to "ask Paul McCartney" about women's scorn. But none of that makes me want to visit the ATM before I go out.

Rap's critics worry about the influence the music has on our nation's youth, and rap critics insist that the music's audience is above that influence. Surely, I insist, we're not easily persuaded by such silliness.

And every time I do that, I'm checking the forty-five dollars in my pocket and lying through my teeth.

Jay Cutler Talks Fantasy Football...Kind of

2009-08-01T13:14:00.003-05:00

What's the story, nerds? It's Cutty-buddy here, talkin' fantasy football. Here's who your first pick should be:

1. Jay Motherfucking Cutler

Harper Lee up in this bitch, 'cuz that's all she wrote. (What? I'm white. I went to college.) You can just box up your chicken strips and peace out that bitch. Auto-draft the rest of your picks 'cuz you don't need 'em anyways. Oh, you don't have first pick? No prob, Bob. Just cut up a bunch of pieces of paper, write "Jay Cutler" on all of 'em, throw 'em in a visor, and pull any of 'em out. Bam, like Emeril Lagasse. First pick. Don't worry. It works.

In the time I've saved not doing fantasy football research, I've been doing some other shit. I hired Devin Hester, who's totes my numero one wingman--we got bracelets--to create a bunch of fake leagues online and fake draft me number one in all of 'em. To pull up the overall numbers.

And to make sure my arm can cash all the checks my ass is writin' out, I been slingin' that shit all day long. Gotta keep that gun polished. I used to just pump irons with my right hand no fag to make it stronger. But Matt Cassell's probably even doing that. I gotta take it to the next echelon.

Here's what I did. I know a lot of young moms, and they always joke about how the arm they hold their baby in gets a bunch stronger than the other one. I can't get pregnant even if that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie is awesome, so nine months ago I knocked up a bunch of bitches. Right about now them ovens are about to ding, and I'm gonna be curling babies 'til the Devin Hesters come home. I hope babies can be on sailboats.

Speaking of the great outdoors, see that Cutler-made lake in the picture at the top? I froze it so that I could make my pad more like Chicago. Then I drilled a hole into it and swam down into that shit. I've been slingin' that pigskin underwater to make my arm stronger. It works. Don't worry. Only thing that sucks about it is that I can't hear my Jimmy Buffett CDs no matter how loud I play 'em.

I have to go barbecue some steaks. But don't worry. I'm only flippin' with my right hand. Cutler out.

#19 and #22 and #40 Albums of the Decade- Animal Collective

2009-07-29T00:04:00.013-05:00

#19- Animal Collective- Sung Tongs (2004)

Animal Collective- "Leaf House"

#22- Animal Collective- Strawberry Jam (2007)

Animal Collective- "Peacebone"

#40- Animal Collective- Merriweather Post Pavillion (2009)

In the fall of 2004 I lost everything on my computer's hard drive, including thousands of mp3s, many of which were even acquired legally. I was left with the few programs and documents I had the foresight to back up and Animal Collective's Sung Tongs on CD. In a literal and figurative sense, at least until I could get to my physical collection at my parents' house, my identity as a music listener was rebuilt by the band.

It was weird music to listen to for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It's weird music for any time. But as a sophomore in college, it made sense, especially because I was taking Postmodern Literary Theory, and the quartet of Avey Tare, Panda Bear, Geologist, and Deakin lined up with one of the discipline's central tenets: that which is most profound is often that which is indescribable. Words can't do us justice.

Jacques Lacan is probably the most important contributor to postmodern thought, and I read a lot of his wackiness. Jacques Derrida is important, but even his biggest fans can't explain some of his stuff. (Dude obfuscated his writing on purpose. It was part of the point.) Roland Barthes is important, but I haven't read his work and choose to ignore his influence.

Anyway, Lacan frequently returned to the concept of "erasing with a pen." What he means is that ideas are never as pure and clear when we speak them as they were in our heads. Words are certainly the best we've got to communicate with, but they're a necessary evil, a fecund compromise. The minute you condense your thoughts into speech or writing, you corrupt them to a certain degree. Sure, you need to voice your ideas so that other people can share them, but will those people ever experience them in the same way you did? No. We're trapped in the silent island of our mind, and even the best writer isn't telepathic. (It's no coincidence that Lacan didn't write any of his teachings down. They're translated from lectures.)

Because of this harsh reality, Lacan believed we are at our most intellectually advanced and untainted when we are infants, before we acquire language to contradict ourselves but after we are sentient. This period of time is referred to as the Mirror Stage, the time when we achieve self-awareness--literally the instant when you realize that the person looking at you in a mirror is, oddly enough, you. If people understood this stuff, the Kathleen Turner-Christopher Lloyd vehicle Baby Geniuses would have been a much bigger hit.

Lacan actually created an algebraic equation for our understanding of the phallus: something like (objet petit a - fear of castration)/--I think this is when I started drinking. No homo on devising a phallus equation.

Animal Collective, especially when I was writing papers about this stuff in my dorm room, sounded pre-verbal. Lacan would have loved them. No matter how rock writers attempt to describe them, any capsule review of an A.C. record feels inadequate. They're the fucking hipster jouissance.

Yes, their music obviously has influences, but it's impossible to pin those down. Because of the experimental components, The Incredible String Band gets name-checked. And the cut-and-paste aesthetic owes a bit to Mercury Rev. Because they've worked with Vashti Bunyan, people affix the ghastly "freak-folk" tag to them. A lot of that freak-folk stuff dovetails with psychedlia and they broke in early-aughts Brooklyn so there're some noise-rock elements and they're from Baltimore so we can add a bit of that region's dance traditions.

As a whole though, does "Peacebone" sound like anything else in the world? Their music is informed by the spaces in between each of those styles. It's a translation of the best parts of each into a dizzying mix of campfire tribalism. They sound like they can't see anyone else in the mirror, let alone themselves. This fatherless style is either a completely un-conscious happy accident, or Animal Collective is the most manipulative, self-aware group in the world. And maybe they're both. I warned you this would get postmodern.

I wouldn't deny that A.C. is an experimental outfit. They are ignoring trends and tradition in a stab at transcendence. But most people associate "experimentalism" with cold tactitians, and the music is also unavoidably emotional. Ambient drones and broken guitars and the more strident shouty parts of Strawberry Jam would suggest otherwise, but there's a lot about these records that is as warm and cozy as it is cathartic. The lyrics, especially when Panda Bear's writing matures on the latter albums, always focus on a return to innocence, a desire for simplicity. For instance, the refrain of Merriweather Post Pavillion's "My Girls" goes:

"I don't mean
To seem like I care about material things
Like your social status
I just want
Four walls and adobe slats for my girls"

You wouldn't guess that such reactionary and distinctly paternal lyrics would be represented by a bank of claustrophobic loops. And that's their most accessible song. Their unique qualities spring from this uneasy marriage of idea and execution. Animal Collective is enamored of the past, but they sound like the future.

They're still laughing about the phallus equation. I have a note here that says "Panda Bear and Avey Tare are Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood if both of those guys were Jonny Greenwood." I can't fit it in anywhere, so I'm sticking it here. No one is still reading by this point anyway.

That thesis is what grants them their transcendence and makes them one of the only truly transporting acts we have. As intimate as some of their lyrics are, A.C.'s music is grand and explorative, having no problem with expanding to twelve- or thirteen-minute suites or jamming all of the movements of such suites into a shorter song like "For Reverend Green." The music has no borders, and they transfer their own tangible rootlessness to the listener's figurative rootlessness.

Finally, since I'm assessing three albums at the same time here, it's worth discussing the evolution of the band. While that other A.C., accelerated culture, has changed music distribution fundamentally, not enough people ask how it changes music creation. In the six years these records cover (including Feels, a sensational 2005 effort that just missed the cut) a development from rambunctious duo perfecting their acoustic cackling and silky harmonies to a four-piece in complete control of a variety of electronic accoutrements and refined melodies. They've evolved the way all great bands have, but they've done it in a fraction of the time. In this decade, bands go through their artistic movements and periods at an accelerated rate too.

Animal Collective is of this time, but they aren't from it. And that sentence doesn't sound as good as it did in my head.

Media Roundup on That Recently-Leaked Controversial Video

2009-07-25T19:50:00.008-05:00

"[LeBron] has been grievously wronged here. Our people and resources are in full support of [him] as [he] deals with this abhorrent act."

“[He’s] shaken and kind of paranoid,” the source said. “Everyone is very nurturing to [him]- which [he] appreciates- but you can tell the whole thing has devastated [him]. It’s all so reprehensible.”

"No, the reason the video has gained such traction, and the reason everyone is so upset — and I can assure you, I've yet to talk to a single person, blogger, blog reader, ESPN employee, sideline reporter, upright walking normal human being, who wasn't profoundly disturbed by this — is because we all felt somewhat complicit with [James]. Everyone felt like they knew [him]. They didn't, of course. But everyone with an interest in the world of sports was present for [his] rise."

"[He] was the victim of a crime and is taking action to protect [himself] and help ensure that others are not similarly violated in the future. Although the perpetrator or perpetrators of this criminal act have not yet been identified, when they are identified [he] intends to bring both civil and criminal charges against them and against anyone who has published the material. We request respect of [LeBron's] privacy at this time, while [he] and [his] representatives are working with the authorities."

"But. I have never met [LeBron James]. If I ran into [him] on the street today ... I'm not sure I could look [him] in the eye. I'm not sure anybody could."

#5 Film of the Decade- Traffic

2009-07-22T23:59:00.005-05:00

5. Traffic- Steven Soderbergh (2000)

Most successful filmmakers have a through-line, a theme--an obsession even--that appears again and again in their work. Woody Allen is obsessed with New York obviously. Werner Herzog is preoccupied with nature. Off the top of my head, I can name ten Steven Spielberg films featuring divorced parents. That's just what artists do. They have interests and attractions that inform and underline their experiments. That theme for Steven Soderbergh--pretty much the only thing linking his films--is experimentation itself. He seems addicted to taking risks, and Traffic was no exception.

After he, you know, pretty much created the '90s independent film movement with sex, lies, and videotape at twenty-six, Soderbergh could have gotten hundreds of millions of dollars for any studio movie he wanted. Instead he eschewed studios altogether for a black-and-white movie about Franz Kafka. And after a few more indies, he could have stayed that course as the guy who never messed up his big shot by never taking it. Instead he branched out Orson Welles-style with a one-for-me, one-for-them track: Schizopolis for me, Out of Sight for them, The Limey for me, Erin Brockovich for them. This brings us to Traffic in 2000, which is his signature film because it combines all of these outlooks. Everyone wins.

The movie was a hit but, looking back on it, it's a bit of a tough sell. Under the murky, no-easy-answers umbrella of the war on drugs, the film covers three plot-lines and perspectives that take place in nine cities, each story with its own visual palette. There are one hundred thirty-five speaking parts. It's sprawling and complex, but it's always in control. I know I'm only talking about Soderbergh when writer Stephen Gaghan won an Oscar for his screenplay, but the fact is: one guy has replicated this greatness, and one has not.

Not Jesus, despite the way I'm talking about him.

Likewise, directors usually get too much credit for the film's visual style, but Soderbergh acted, for the first of many times, as his own director of photography here under his psuedonym Peter Andrews. He even operated the camera. He was solely responsible for the look of the film, the grain and exposure of which would be copied or built upon for the remainder of the decade. (By the way, he also used non-professional actors, handheld camera, and digital video before anyone else and better than anyone else this decade too.) To hear him tell it:

"The issue of how to distinguish the three stories visually arose about and I decided for the East Coast stuff, tungsten film with no filter on it so that we get that really cold, monochrome blue feel. For San Diego, diffusion filters, flashing the film, overexposure for a warmer, blossomy feel. And for Mexico, tobacco filters, 45-degree shutter angle whenever possible to give it a strobelike sharp feel. Hopefully those distinctions would be enough to bring you back into each story line after you cut to somewhere else and come back. Then we took the entire film through an Ektachrome step, which increases the contrast and the grain enormously. I'm going through a phase where I'm in love with degraded grainy contrasty imagery, stuff that I think you'd have difficulty talking some cameraman into doing. When the film reaches its release print stage, it will have gone through seven generations."

What he doesn't mention is that Ektachrome is a still photography development treatment that, especially at the time, was unpredictable. He took $48 million worth of footage and took a pass through chemicals that could have completely ruined everything he shot. Again, risks.

Still, none of this sumptuous visual language would matter if this wasn't a completely gripping film, which it is. This is probably the quickest two-and-a-half hour film you'll ever see. As thoughtful and uncompromising as it is, it's also damned entertaining. Years after the fact, that's what you forget. And while most films of its type--multiple plots that weave in and out of each other--sometimes have a weak or inconsistent thread, this does not. The viewer is never disappointed to cut back to the Ohio story or away to the Mexico story. They're all engrossing.

Just as each cut serves a purpose, each tiny performance in Traffic contributes to the whole. People like Salma Hayek and Albert Finney seem happy with glorified cameos, and Soderbergh coaxes powerful work from people who had never proven themselves before or since (Erika Christensen, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Topher Grace). But Benicio Del Toro is still the most affecting. He plays against type as a paunchy, monosyllabic cop who is caught in the middle of everyone else's agenda. Most of his dialogue is in Spanish, and it adds to the transformative aspect of his performance. It's as if he's a different actor than the one we're familiar with. He's more tender, more wounded. The movie proves that there are no quick answers to drug abuse and the resultant violence of it, and by the end of the film, Del Toro's character is the one who understands that the most. He is the squinty eyes through which we see everything.

In both approach and execution, Traffic never takes the easy way out. We've already felt the ripple effects of what it achieved. But more important than how influential it became is how enjoyable it was.

Chris Attends the Pro Football Hall of Fame

2009-07-20T10:46:00.010-05:00

A few weeks ago, on my trip from Philadelphia to New Orleans, I stopped in Canton, Ohio to take in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. It was the wrong time to go because an entire wing was closed for construction, to the point that the Hall gave me a voucher to come back another day. The improvements are needed, however, because I found the whole museum outdated and poorly arranged. You'll see what I mean as I show you the photographic (and video) evidence.

The first floor is dedicated to the early history of the game, so there's a lot of boring no homo stuff like this. I'm not saying that I don't care about Yale's 7-0 victory over Princeton in 1923, but...well, I guess I don't. The gist of the first floor is: Yale, Red Grange, George Halas, Jim Thorpe, Lombardi, AFL-NFL merger. I just saved you twenty bucks.

Here I am learning about Tom Dempsey's record 63-yard field goal, with the use of the Hall's state-of-the-art facilities.

The best part about the museum is that you get to run into real-life celebrities.

Mandatory.

We'll have more fun with nicknames further down.

Once you're out of that early history section, there's this afterthought of a room that was installed once they realized, "We don't have anything for fans of Team X Founded after 1975." The Saints one was already out of date though. I don't expect them to have the all-time win-loss record correct all the time, but it's kind of a big deal that we won the division three years ago. We're not the Patriots or anything, but it would be nice to list that next to the other stuff.

Lest we forget the contributions of Alfonso "Chino" Portillo. Yeah, his nickname was "Chinese."

Now we're getting to the Hall of Fame itself, with the busts of all the inductees. Naturally, this room is the most impressive in the building. The busts line the walls, and in the middle of the room there are banks of monitors, where you can watch video highlights of each of the players. The only problem is that the room itself is dark while the busts are individually lit, which makes photography difficult.

LT. Unfortunately, this is not realistic because there wasn't a huge lightning bolt/cross/LT earring dangling down. On the plus side, I did get to show Wifey some video highlights. She looked suitably impressed/intimidated by his ferocity.

Wifey took pictures of every funny nickname, so there are about thirty of them that I'm not posting.

Real Art Shell or statue? I was there, and I couldn't tell.

Jim Brown, Best Player Ever 1a. The lighting presented problems. This was actually the best one we took.

Otto Graham, Best Player Ever 1b.

It's funny because he murdered two people.

These guys were watching highlights on those aforementioned monitors. After every play, they would exclaim, "Peace!" It was simultaneously endearing and annoying. They reminded me of myself.

The top floor highlights the contemporary game with things like Jamal Lewis jerseys or Peyton Manning shoes. It's supposed to compliment and reinforce what was downstairs, but the two aren't compatible at all. For instance, downstairs they haven't bothered to change most of the passing records from Marino to Favre. Again, it seems inconsistent and cheap for a national museum. Mixed in with that are actually interesting artifacts though, like this draft card that secured Reggie Bush.

This is my stab at being part of the national media. I'm grateful for the modesty provided by the shadow. I'm waiting for a Brett Favre floor.

The museum touches on other aspects of pro football. There are little features on Arena Football, World League, and games played internationally. This was so good that it had to be my first uploaded YouTube video.

Shattered windows in front of each broken rushing record from Brown to Payton to Smith. This was legitimately cool.

Best Player Ever 3.

Jim Kelly was a recent inductee, so there were entire lockers of his memorabilia, and he got mentioned in almost every feature. It was weird that there was barely anything on, say, Joe Montana, but Jim Kelly was everywhere you turned. Cool shoes though.

Look how interactive Canton is. You can throw a ball into a hole, man. This is next level.

The trivia was ridiculous. It asked me what Deacon Jones' birthday was at one point. About ten years out of date as well.

All in all, a disappointing trip. But I checked it off my list.

#46 Song of the Decade- "Hot in Herre"

2009-07-13T23:59:00.006-05:00

#46 Nelly- "Hot in Herre"

On 2002's "Excuse Me Miss," Jay-Z rapped, "Only dudes sellin' units? Em, Pimp Juice, and us." Pimp Juice refers, of course, to Nelly, and, though he was just as popular for most of the decade, he will not be remembered in the same fond breaths as those other two. And in some ways, that makes him more interesting than either one.

See, Nelly is a pop-rapper, and his career is pretty much over by now because of the weird space pop-rap occupies in music. One problem is that there can be only one King of Pop-Rap at a time. Nelly can't get onto the radio because Flo-Rida's on every station. (Or maybe because he posed with a belly ring for an album cover.) Before Nelly was the king of pop-rap, it was Will Smith and before him it was Puff Daddy and before him it was Coolio. And you can go back until you get to Will Smith the first time around.

Rap's relationship with popularity is as fraught with contradictions as its relationship with wealth. It is supposedly a music created by and for the disenfranchised, giving voice to those without one, but most mainstream hip-hop songs decry poverty. We've gone from a more innocent "If it doesn't make dollars, then it doesn't make sense" to the ungrateful and spiteful "If you're not getting money, you physically make me sick, and I have no interest in being around you." Why this doesn't alienate more listeners I have no idea. I've kind of stopped questioning Black America.

But I understand White America a bit better, and that's what's in play when discussing Nelly. The other contradictory element of hip-hop culture is that most of its energy is focused on the hunger to blow up and become rich, famous, etc. But when an artist actually does that, his credibility is almost always questioned. Though he didn't exactly scream integrity, he was, for whatever reason, embraced by everyone.

"I'm really hoping no one misinterprets this shirt, Jermaine."

Part of the reason for this embrace, besides an irresistible sing-songy flow and a general playfulness, (Witness the ridiculous Sherman Helmsley-assisted video for "Batter Up." [Did Ali just bunt a home run?]) is his tie to St. Louis. When Nelly burst onto the scene, a renaissance of west coast rap had just ended, the Dirty South was at its apex, and New York had never really left the party. Although he was closest to the Cash Money sound, Nelly's special brand of regionalism was an antidote to it all. He wasn't sponsored by any already prominent rapper, and he was quite literally from Middle America--and proud of it. St. Louis hip-hop had no history or style, so he invented it. He was an approachable alternative to everything else out there. He wore a band-aid for solidarity with his brothers in jail, but he also was in a video with Joe Perry. He made a song about Air Force Ones but also dueted with Tim McGraw. This ability to be everything to everyone (Notice a theme for what worked in this decade?) made him a bit of a huckster, which he's paying for now, but it also created some great singles.

Even if hip-hop heads hide their Nelly CDs now, "Hot in Herre" will still be played at weddings in twenty years. It's one of the few rap songs that my mom is aware of. From the first three recognizable notes, people are ready to dance, which is pretty much the only reason the song exists. If you have a six-pack of Smirnoff Ice and a CD with "Hot in Herre" and "Back That Azz Up," you can get a White girl pregnant. Just saying. Don't keep those two things in the same place if you don't know what you're doing.

That lush production, beginning with that unforgettable intro, stands as one of the more memorable beats during the Neptunes' unbelievable run. Their electric piano reins in a lot of gravitas for what is, in essence, a pretty superficial idea. Suggesting that girls should disrobe to alleviate their discomfort with heat would be less classy if each verse wasn't capped with such a glossy, less-is-more bass fill. The held chords of the electric piano trade with really skittery cowbell and hi-hat, which create a weird tempo that keeps feet moving but still sounds sexy.

The lyrics are dumb, of course. For instance, Nelly claims in the second verse: "I'm just kiddin' like Jason." For about a year after the song came out, I was puzzled by the line because I didn't know who this heretofore-unreferenced Jason was. He's not a character in the song or anything. Is Nelly talking about Friday the 13th Jason? He kills people; he doesn't seem to kid about anything. At some point it clicked that Nelly was punning on the name of Jason Kidd, except it's not really a pun because it doesn't make sense. Jason Kidd doesn't have the reputation of a prankster, so we're to assume he goes around personifying himself, which is pretty much what every person ever can't help but do. And if someone else is "Kidd-ing," he's acting like Jason Kidd, which is--yeah--the most literal comparison one could possibly make. The line might as well have been, "I'm just Wodehousing like P.G." or "I'm just Dennehying like Brian."

I know. You're not supposed to think about it that much. It's just pop-rap.

First Semester Report Card

2009-07-12T02:46:00.003-05:00

Last year I had a lot of fun writing about the Best Music of the Year So Far. The problem was that after writing such thorough reviews of each album, I kind of ran out of ideas for the more important year-end list. Consequently, I'm providing an incomplete playlist of music I've really liked from the year's first half and not commenting on it at all. There are a lot of big records I've yet to hear--I've been busy--but I enjoyed re-listening to these. Hopefully you do too.

Other stuff I loved but that Grooveshark doesn't have up yet:
Nathan Johnson & The Cinematic Underground- The Brothers Bloom Original Score
Wale- Back to the Feature Mixtape
Peter Bjorn & John- "Nothing to Worry About"
Night Control- "Star 131"
YACHT- "Psychic City"
OJ Da Juiceman feat. Gucci Mane, Cam'ron- "Make Da Trap Say Aye (Remix)"

Death of a Legend

2009-07-05T12:43:00.002-05:00

Steve McNair was not a first-ballot hall-of-famer. He was not a Broadway Joe or Brett Favre type of media darling. He did not have Dan Marino or Warren Moon-like passing numbers. He didn't rack up victories like Elway or Montana, but to me, he was the most important man in football. The qualities that Steve McNair possessed were that of the every-man: playing through injuries and pain, sacrificing his body for the greater good of the team, and trying to prove people wrong at every turn.

I first started to really follow football after my Dad passed away in 1996 and Steve was the first player that I really latched on to because he shared many of the same qualities and traits as my dad. When I was younger there were countless time I would wake up to go to school and my dad would be sleeping off a night shift from a construction or welding job, and you knew the only reason he did that grueling work that kept him in pain was to provide for his family. McNair did the same, playing through numerous injuries and continuing to lead his team to victory. What made him stand out on the field to me was that he played QB like a linebacker and was not afraid of contact. Much like my Dad, Steve came from a small town (Addis, La and Mount Olive, MS respectively) and many had doubts that they would ever amount to anything professionally. Just as my Dad had proved his doubters wrong and got his degree from Technical School in his mid 30's, McNair had proved his doubters wrong and led the Titans to a Super Bowl appearance along with winning a co-MVP with Peyton Manning in 2003. And like my father, he also got into troubles along the way but that just made him more human to me. Like my father, Steve McNair possessed a smile that could brighten up a room in an instant, as countless teammates and coaches have noted following his death. Sadly though, he now shares another trait with my Dad, passing away in his 30’s.

In memoriam, I just want to say that Steve McNair was more than a football player to me. He proved that it doesn’t matter where or how you started, but if you continue to try your hardest and put yourself out there you will succeed not only in changing the game, but changing everybody you’ve been around as well. Thank you Steve “Air” McNair, for being an inspiration to me.

Thank you for the memories, Mr. McNair

#12 Album of the Decade- The Moon & Antarctica

2009-07-03T23:29:00.004-05:00

#12- Modest Mouse- The Moon & Antarctica (2000)

Modest Mouse- "Paper Thin Walls"

My dad can't stand boxing. He sees no art in such a barbaric pastime and, in fact, assumes that any boxing fan is a violent fetishist. Conversely, my brother has little interest in the sweet science, but only because he doesn't find it violent enough. He prefers ultimate fighting, which seems to guarantee the bursts of decisive physical domination that boxing no longer does. The technique of boxing is lost on him.

I like boxing. Not only because I appreciate its historical legacy, but because it seems like a logical bridge between those two extreme points of view. It threatens horrific violence but exists in an environment controlled enough to prevent it. For anyone who has seen the way a real fight explodes into chaos, the tacit agreements made between two boxers are downright civilized. Boxing could easily devolve into anarchy, but it never does because of the rules the two men observe, even when engaged in a primeval element of confrontation. The beauty of boxing comes not from the ubiquity of its violence, but from the relative absence of it--from how concentrated the violence that occurs actually is. The patience, agility, and--especially--endurance required of a boxer seem to contradict the barbarism my father resents. Not wanting to see people get punched in the face is understandable, but it's safe to say that anyone who simplifies the sport the way he does just doesn't know enough about it.

When a song from Modest Mouse's third full-length appeared on my Pandora streaming radio station way back when, the service's reasons for recommending it to me were: "a) You like soaring choruses, b) you like guitars in minor chord progressions, and c) you like quirky lyrics," whatever that means. That's all accurate, but it could have just as easily said: "You like boxing." Modest Mouse, a trio at the time, specialize in music that sounds raucous yet delicate. It's polished--especially on this album thanks to new producer Brian Deck--but, even during something like the gorgeous solo on "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes," there's always a threat that the music will go completely off the rails. They remind me of The Libertines or Guns 'N Roses in that their collective volatility is so palpable that it becomes part of the musical style.

I attribute most of that danger to Isaac Brock's inimitable voice, in both the literal and figurative sense. His songwriting has always had a unique perspective, but it wasn't until this second movement of the band's career that he went from telling hungover salty dog tales to a more earnest, albeit pessimistic, introspection. Especially on "3rd Planet" and its sort-of reprise "The Stars Are Projectors," he communicates in the most un-pretentious and brooding way how small he feels in the universe. That's a lot of growth, but it's expressed with the most adolescent howl you'll find anywhere. That side-of-the-mouth vocal is able to punch through the angular, tight music and add an elastic immediacy. Again, it's like boxing: inward and outward, absorb and release, bottle up and explode. Even if you hate his voice, you have to admit that no one else in rock sounds like Isaac Brock.

While Modest Mouse conveys edge and exuberance to me, they're also impressively consistent on this record. Unlike their later efforts, there is not a weak song on the whole album. There is no "Dancehall" to skip past. This is the sound of a band finding its limits and walking as close to that line as they can. They shoot for the titular moon and get pretty close. They float like a moth and sting like a wasp. Whatever that means.

R.I.P. Michael Jackson

2009-06-27T23:20:00.004-05:00

1958-2009

"Human Nature"

On Thursday Michael Jackson died at 50, and we all began to realize how much we took for granted one of the best singers, songwriters, and dancers ever. I don't enjoy writing obituaries for anyone, but I do enjoy examining a culture in flux, and, as you look at every newspaper cover and listen to every radio station in the country, you can tell that's what we are. The event of Michael Jackson's passing is era-defining in a way Princess Di's or Frank Sinatra's never were.

No entertainer will ever be as big as Michael Jackson again. He crossed barriers between pop, R&B, rock, videos, film, art, and entertainment that, frankly, are kind of inconsequential now because of his work. I can't imagine anyone selling 30 million albums again, and it has nothing to do with illegal downloading. In a post-MJ entertainment climate, music has become so stratified and specialized that even the biggest acts are too niche for everyone to hear or like. There are actually too many options for finding new music and too much diversity, conditions Jackson would have welcomed when embarking on his solo career and conditions he helped to create with his legacy.

Over the years, however, he became a punchline for his own shortcomings and a culture's preconceptions about who he was. On one hand, he channeled his paranoia and discomfort with his own celebrity into music that was accessible but also intensely personal. As universal as the melodies and approaches of his songs were, they were anchored in an intimate, often frustrated point of view. At the same time, he thrived on that popularity, and it often overshadowed the music. Increasingly in the past decade, he focused so much on creating an event that his ability was lost in all of that showmanship. How great would it have been had he tossed off a stripped-down album with one hungry, dedicated producer instead of a bloated and over-produced vehicle for Chris Tucker and Marlon Brando collaborations?

So it took losing him to see how much he meant to us. Every average person echoes that sentiment. People are surprised by how upset they were by the news of his death. For people my age, this is someone who has been around their whole lives; it's not someone else's celebrity. Today the King of Pop has ten albums on Amazon.com's top twenty. He has thirteen out of the top twenty on iTunes. He is in death as he was in life: a superstar.

Because of what I wrote above, that he was with people in their mid-twenties their entire lives, always in the air, it's been interesting for me to hear friends' favorite memories of Jackson. If you want to celebrate his life with a memory of yours in the comments, that would be great. Here are mine in order:

1984- I have bad cowlick as a baby and never sleep. The nascent MTV is one of the only stations that doesn't shut off at midnight, so my mom watches videos while trying to rock me back to sleep. "Thriller" comes on every hour on the hour, and she swears it's the only thing that does the trick.

1989- I ruin a day at Disney World by being so terrified of the villain in Captain Eo.

1990- During a car trip, I'm reading a Muppet Babies comic in which Kermit is dressed like the King of Pop for a joke in one panel--the kneepads, the hat, the strands of hair in the face. I get the reference and show it to my dad all excited, who says, "Doesn't that hair look fruity?" I don't know what fruity means, but I realize this may be the beginning of my love for allusion and intertextuality.

The Tilt arcade in the Riverwalk has the Moonwalker arcade game, which I am too young to be any good at. I will later buy a Genesis almost entirely because I want their version of the game. (And Mutant League Football.)

1991- Fox airs the controversial, eleven-minute "Black or White" video in prime-time. The epilogue that is later cut, in which MJ smashes cars and grabs his junk and turns into a panther, leaves me confused. Even then, I ask my mom: "I don't know any adults that have kids as friends. Why does he hang out with Macaulay Culkin so much?"

1993- My parents get drunk at a school auction and buy all kinds of stuff. (I still have a baseball autographed by the entire World Series champion Minnesota Twins.) One of their bids is a joint purchase with a few of my friends' parents to spend a weekend with my principal at his summer home. (No pedo. But really, it's a testament to him that this was seen as something fun to do. I did have a great time. I mean, we saw The Sandlot. What more could you ask for?) Anyway, we listen to cassettes in the van on the way up and, though he has some words for my parents about Kriss-Kross, even he enjoys Dangerous. By the end of the trip, we are all in this van passing over the Mississippi border belting our lungs out to "Black or White." Ten-year-old kids and a fifty-year-old man singing along joyfully to the same song.

Later that same year, Jackson performs at the Rose Bowl for the halftime show of Super Bowl XXVII. My dad makes fun of him doing the same dance moves over and over, but in a way that shows just how iconic the moves were. If someone told you he did a "Michael Jackson dance routine," you could picture it perfectly. There's no other dancer for which the average person can envision an entire routine in his style.

1996- The "Scream" video, the most expensive one ever at the time, is another summer event. This summer consists of riding my bike to get sunflower seeds and baseball cards, collecting Red Hot Summer Coke caps, and watching MTV.

2003- When DJing a party, I confuse college kids by playing "Rock with You," almost to prove a point. Despite what people will say now out of nostalgia, he doesn't age well this decade.

A huge group of people convenes in my dorm room to watch "Living with Michael Jackson," the scathing Martin Bashir documentary that exploits him as a freak show. No matter what people think of him, even at a point of relative cultural irrelevance, he is still a huge draw. Everyone wants to see this documentary.

2005- For most of college I am a Jackson apologist, even wearing a button with his face on my messenger bag. I maintain his innocence throughout his child molestation trial, and I have a memorable E-Mail exchange with another friend of mine who is a huge fan (and who was so upset on Thursday that he couldn't even drive). I would include some of that exchange here if this weren't already way too long.

Again, if you want to write something about Michael down here in the comments, I would encourage it. Our memories and his unforgettable music will live on.

TANBR NBA Draft Liveblog

2009-06-25T17:31:00.002-05:00

Its time for me to truly shine and discuss draft picks, as Tank can attest to I called the drafting of Joel Freeland and Sergio Rodriguez in the 2006 draft. So without further ado here we go.
NBA Draft 2009

Even More Tyler Hansbrough

2009-06-25T15:49:00.003-05:00

Unless Jelly comes through in the next two hours, we won't have a draft column. This is all I've got. I'm trying to pack for a huge move back to Louisiana and will be lucky if I even get to watch the draft.

If Tyler Hansbrough were on "The Price Is Right," he would always bid one dollar.

Tyler Hansbrough has an extensive collection of I [Heart] NY shirts.

Tyler Hansbrough has a poster of assorted beer bottles with the caption "What I Really Learned in College."

At red lights, Tyler Hansbrough puts his car into park and gets out to root around for something in the trunk.

When he goes to sporting events, Tyler Hansbrough brings signs upon which he has written witty acrostics involving the call signals of the network covering the game.

When Tyler Hansbrough sees people fighting, he chants, "Jer-ry! Jer-ry!"

Tyler Hansbrough uses the abbreviation "T.M.I."

Tyler Hansbrough is pretty sure Barack Obama is a Muslim, but he's downright positive that the guy's going to take all your guns. He's sending an E-Mail about it right now.

Even though he's way too old to do power hours, Tyler Hansbrough made a power hour playlist of his sixty favorite songs. Oh wait, that was me.

#47 Film of the Decade- 24 Hour Party People and #50 Song of the Decade- "Intro-Inspection"

2009-06-21T13:49:00.000-05:00

24 Hour Party People- Michael Winterbottom (2002)

There's a scene in the first half of 24 Hour Party People in which our protagonist Tony Wilson, founder of the fabled Factory Records label, as played by Steven Coogan, visits the bathroom of a club. In the previous scene Wilson has been caught cheating on his wife, and he knows she is here exacting some sort of revenge with musician Howard Devoto of the Buzzcocks. Wilson cracks a joke and calmly asks his compromised wife for the car keys. In most movies, that would be the end of an admittedly clever scene. In Michael Winterbottom's unorthodox chronicle of the Madchester music scene, it's only the beginning. Keys in hand, Wilson then approaches a man washing his hands and, breaking the fourth wall, explains that his is the real Howard Devoto who, for legal reasons, wanted to make it clear that this is a fabrication. The real Devoto looks directly into the camera and deadpans, "I definitely don't remember this happening."

So many films have used similar devices before. Woody Allen did it thirty years ago in my favorite film of all-time. Technically, The Great Train Robbery does it in 1903. Ancient Greek playwrights did it before we had even established what the fourth wall was. Here's the difference: While most movies don't even rupture narrative conventions well anymore (High Fidelity, for example, is not the film I thought it was when I was fifteen), let alone have an excuse for it, Winterbottom makes it an essential component of 24 Hour Party People's thesis. To present a portrait of a man who is "a minor character in his own story," the truth needs to be played with: the fiction is more important than the fact. Wilson was so unconventional that all of his bands' contracts--Joy Division, New Order, The Happy Mondays--were verbal agreements. It only makes sense that an account of his life and the scene would be just as avant-garde.

Skip to fifty-three seconds in for another great example of what the movie does so well. This clip also reminds me that you might not like this if you aren't a huge music dork.

Through these devices, most notably the incorporation of real-life footage, Winterbottom is able to present the music as a historical document; but, at the same time, he never makes it self-serious. Sometimes he goes too far with this. the Ian Curtis suicide scene, for instance, is soundtracked by cartoons playing on his TV. His dangling feat recall The Wizard of Oz more than a heartfelt farewell.

24 Hour Party People, buoyed by Coogan's winning performance, is constantly reminding you that it's a movie, and that quality, besides just being damned fun, is the perfect note to support its story.

#50- Osymyso- "Intro-Inspection" (Part 2)

Although it has nothing to do with Manchester rock of the '80s and '90s, "Intro-Inspection" might as well be 24 Hour Party People's brother in postmodernity. Mash-ups, or bastard pop as it was known across the pond, were a product of, but also a response to, the wanton consumption of music in the file-sharing age. For example, Freelance Hellraiser's "Flash of Genius," a hallmark of the fad, lays the "Genie in a Bottle" lyrics over the "Hard to Explain" music to show that, despite the increasing stratification of genres, hipsters and their sisters' music was more similar than they thought.

British DJ Osymyso's idea is clear but ambitious: string together the intros of 101 (super-recognizable) samples into a cohesive whole. The logical progression of mash-ups dictated for someone to blow everyone else out of the water with sheer volume, and Osymyso jumped at the chance. Sometimes the pastiche works surprisingly well; sometimes it's forced. But it always sticks to its own weird ethos. The first ten seconds or so of a song are malleable enough to stitch it together with anything else and use it to sustain a mood. Before any sample sets in for too long, he manipulates that mood for an impressive twelve minutes and change (long enough that tumblr won't let me upload it for a link). "Osymyso" is constantly reminding you that it's a fabrication, and that exposing of pop music's arbitrary nature is kind of the point.

After their heyday at the beginning of the decade, mash-ups jumped the shark when labels offered official, artist-approved versions as singles and copyrighters cracked down on GYBO, the online mash-up sharing community. But that slow death began when DJs stopped pushing things forward. All vocals sound good over "Hollaback Girl," but that doesn't mean anything without a context. Like 24 Hour Party People, the tricks and gimmicks themselves aren't what makes the work memorable, the thesis behind using them is.

Basically, both works would be perfect deconstructions if they weren't so busy being constructions.

Now That We're Turning Our Attention toward the Draft...

2009-06-17T11:12:00.002-05:00

Please please please let this happen.

Black Mamba's Championship: What Should We Tell the Children?

2009-06-15T15:04:00.005-05:00

Monday morning, after the Lakers clinched their fifteenth NBA title (they count all of those ones from the Minneapolis years, huh?) in anti-climactic fashion, all manner of basketball writers were anointing Kobe Bryant with hyperbole. Mark Jackson even said, "He has no flaws as a basketball player." Over and over we had to hear how driven Kobe was, how he had bent his more selfish impulses to fit into the team concept. He was deified for...playing the game the way it is supposed to be played.

Part of the myth Kobe cashed in on was, of course, that he had become older and wiser. He was the alpha-dog on this team--this was his first title as the guy--but he had learned from things like not even making the playoffs in 2005 that this was a team game in the end.

Sure, he had won three championships early in his career, but those were really Shaq's teams. If anything, Kobe and Shaq were the co-captains. Those teams don't count because he...passed the ball and deferred to Shaq, playing the game the way it is supposed to be played?

If you were to believe what you're told, to validate himself as a historically great player--his destiny all along--he had to win a title as the team's unquestionable star. And it was impossible to win a title the way he became a star.

Hiding a boner.

You know all of this, but has anyone questioned what a mixed message that is? When he won championships as a team player, Kobe wasn't ready for prime time. Then, because of the selfish way he played in the middle part of the decade, Kobe became a superstar, arguably the best in the game. But until he won a championship in that role, he wouldn't be considered great enough. So he reverts back to being a team player and wins a championship. Where are we now? I'm bad with syllogisms.

Is basketball a team game or not? Apparently, Kobe has "solved the mystery" and "figured it out" and "gotten it" that he can't drive to the basket on a one-on-four break. (Oh wait, he did that in game three.) As a result, he won a championship. But, based on the biggest storyline of the NBA Finals, was that championship the realization of his greatness or was it a compromise that made him less than great? In authenticating the legitimacy of his new title, have we made less of the other championships he won as part of a real, well-rounded team?

Like most propositions that Mark Jackson can't condense into a ten-second sound bite, it's a bit of both. If one player could win a championship by himself, LeBron would have been hoisting the Larry O'Brien on Sunday. And there is a difference between Kobe's Finals team last year and Kobe's Finals team this year. (No one talks about how heroic and selfless his teammates are.) I don't mean to demean Mamba at all though. Winning a championship as the go-to guy definitely puts him into a different historical context. If he had lost again this year, his legacy never would have recovered.

So for now, Kobe actually can have the best of both worlds: he gets all the individual accolades while winning a ring as a team player. He can bask in this dichotomous glow until this summer, when he has the opportunity to exercise a player option and sign with another team. Then we'll finally know who the real Kobe Bryant is. Or maybe what makes him so compelling is that we'll never know.

#50 Film of the Decade- The Fog of War

2009-06-09T22:12:00.006-05:00

The Fog of War: 11 Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara- Errol Morris (2003)

Watching the playoffs a few weeks ago, I complained that Cavaliers coach Mike Brown should be fired. My wife tried to stand up for him by asking: "Do you have all the answers? Could you do his job?" It's a common and rather facile defense, that we have no right to criticize people with more ability or expertise or responsibilities than us. No, I couldn't do his job, and he might not be able to do mine either. That shouldn't change the fact that there are expectations set forth for his job that he is not meeting, and if we look at those failures or lapses in judgment with objectivity, we are much better off.

Errol Morris' documentary The Fog of War interprets this idea through the prism of Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense for John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. With steely resolve, at the meditative age of eighty-five, he looks back on his life, as well as the controversial decisions that informed it. The film is structured into eleven lessons that the scrutiny and pressure of his job taught him. Early on, McNamara tells an anecdote about his hesitance to accept Kennedy's nomination, a hesitance Kennedy calmed by saying, "I don't believe there's a handbook on how to be president either." The lessons McNamara narrates here are as close as we're going to get. With humility and honesty, he is always able to explain the rationality of one of his moves, often striking a chord between complex utilitarianism and "hell, somebody's gotta do it."

His objectivity is a perfect match for Errol Morris, one of the two most successful documentarians of the past twenty years (whatever "successful" means when discussing an area of art that is so tied to public service). The other gentleman I'm referring to is Michael Moore, but whereas Moore is biased and loud, placing himself into the presentation's center stage, Morris is measured and detached, fading into the background. In fact, he wants the focus on his interview partner so much that he invented the Interrotron, a device that allows for his subject to directly face the lens of the camera and look him in the eye at the same time. He captures some unforgettable moments with this machine, and it's devastating for McNamara to seemingly stare into our eyes as he talks about the towns he was responsible for firebombing.

In fact, that equality, the intellectual give-and-take between Morris and McNamara, is what makes The Fog of War a more affecting portrait than some of his earlier work. At times in the past (Mr. Death, Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control), it has seemed as if the people Morris is interviewing are not in on the joke, or that he is one step ahead of them, able to bend their words to fit his thesis. This is not the case with McNamara, who always stays in control and has an answer prepared for any point Morris wants to bring up. The readiness with which he does this makes him even more compelling.

Technically, there's a lot to like here. Long-time collaborator Phillip Glass provides a plaintive score that gives the film the gravity it needs, and Morris edits some effective sequences of jump-cuts to match visually what McNamara is narrating. But in the end this is a pretty simple film with an intimate focus on one man. He's an open book--so open that an hour in he divulges the bombshell that JFK planned to pull troops from Vietnam completely after the '64 election, which was previously unknown--but that doesn't mean he's blithe or unmoved by what he's been through. His decisions follow him, sagging and drooping like the overcoat he wears near the end of the film. The one thing everyone can agree on by the end? No one would want his job.

Loving My Hatred of Dwight Howard

2009-06-08T21:47:00.009-05:00

As a rule, athletes are not articulate. I’m not promoting the stereotype that they’re dumb; they’re actually geniuses. But it’s a genius of what an educator would call a bodily-kinesthetic intelligence. The balance and grace and dexterity that allow an NBA player to dunk a basketball are so off-the-charts that he cannot adequately explain them. A mathematician with a surplus of logical intelligence might have trouble explaining how he solves equations in his head, but we don’t begrudge him that.

We see examples of what I’m talking about all the time. For instance, Joe Montana has been asked countless times to analyze The Catch. He’ll take us through how the play was called, how he felt about it at the line of scrimmage, how the play developed as it happened, and his reaction; but it never feels satisfying. Perhaps we know his truthful answer would be: “It was ninety percent instinct. I noticed Dwight Clark didn’t have a white jersey and slung the ball to him. I’m glad he jumped so high.” The minute Montana can explain how he can throw a football so well is the minute he can’t do it anymore. It’s the reason sportswriters still have jobs. Because athletes can’t interpret their own performances in a satisfying way, we have to read into the execution and consequences of their movements for ourselves.

"I'm John Wayne."

With that in mind, it might be fun to analyze why Dwight Howard is the most infuriating player in the NBA, because he certainly can’t do it for himself. And if he could control the piss-poor body language that makes me hate him so much, he would.

I remember decrying the Orlando Magic’s decision to draft him first overall because I had not been impressed with the footage I had seen of him. Every highlight of his career at Southwest Atlanta Christian Academy was a dunk. There was no way, I thought, he would be able to position himself for the same plays against grown men. I hadn’t seen any development of a game beyond getting in close and overpowering everyone else. “He’s not going to be able to do that in the NBA,” I protested.

Turns out, he can. He has no trouble backing defenders down and, despite not being able to threaten them with any other move, dunk on them seven or eight times a game. I wasn't wrong to suspect that he wouldn't be able to hold his own. The reason he was picked number one is because only one other person in our era has been unbelievably strong enough to do this. And he was picked first overall too.

You know that 1996 Michael Keaton comedy Multiplicity? This construction worker starts getting clones made of himself to make balancing his professional and family life easier because, you know, that's what you do in a 1996 comedy. At first, this works great, but then the clones start to want to screw his wife and not work and stuff, plus each copy of himself is a little dumber than the one before it. The third Michael Keaton is pretty much retarded and is always messing up the whole plan, accidentally derailing the whole operation. My point? Dwight Howard is like the third copy of Shaquille O'Neal who doesn't want to work construction.

He has the same style and, at this point, an even better body, (How does he find shirts to fit those shoulders no GGM?) but, whereas O'Neal is one of my favorite players ever, I hate Dwight Howard.

He tries to do the big goofball routine that O'Neal has perfected, but he doesn't get it. Perhaps it's because, with his strict upbringing and squeaky clean image, he has no edge. Take this Vitamin Water commercial that has been running during the finals, a spot that looks low-budget enough for Harmony Korine to have shot it.

Compare that with the non sequiturs of Diesel. There seems to be a cheekiness in his delivery that is absent in the Vitamin Water commercial. Dwight Howard isn't in on the joke; he is the joke. You can picture Shaq telling dirty stories with his teammates at a strip club, while Dwight Howard is spending that time coming up with more contrived dunks. Even his Superman gimmick is a rip-off.

Okay, so he isn't as charismatic as Shaquille O'Neal. Few people are. I realize I'm biased. Howard's team just completed a fair-and-square beatdown of my son LeBron James and his Cleveland Cavaliers, who were my playoff horse. In a way it shows just how big a LeBron fan I am that I can start hating another player just because he made King's team look silly. But the way Dwight Howard played in that series didn't do him any favors. While his name has been growing more prominent, and he's supposedly at superstar status, he still disappears from games for long stretches and is a liability for his team near the ends of games because of foul trouble. For the Lakers to win in this series, Kobe has to have a good game; for the Magic to win, Dwight Howard just can't have a terrible one. That's not a superstar.

It's his body language that really bothers me though. When he gets called for one of those fouls that I mentioned, he storms off with that huge smile on his face, as if he can't believe that he has been blamed for anything. People who smile when they're angry are sociopaths. It's science. Think about it: can you think of anyone who is actually less likeable because of his huge smile? The worst heels are the ones who think they're good guys.

This article isn't really going anywhere, especially the place I thought it would go at the beginning, back when I was writing about types of intelligence instead of Michael Keaton. You win some, you lose some I guess. I'm jumping ship.

NBA Finals, Game One Liveblog

2009-06-04T18:28:00.000-05:00

TANBR Finals- Game One

Terrabull Notice

2009-06-01T21:57:00.003-05:00

It's the final (real, non-waste of taxpayer money) week of school, so I'm really busy. I'm in the middle of this column I started writing on Dwight Howard, but it'll have to wait until parents stop telling me, "You need to give me a makeup packet to my kid you haven't seen in three weeks so that he can pass." Even this weekend should be busy with grading, but after that, I'll hit you with the content you've come to expect. I'm thinking there might even be another liveblog for game one of the NBA Finals if you're interested.

And in the mean-time, you can head over to P.T.'s Hodson to Fuller blog, which is exhaustively ranking the top thirty-two LSU football moments of the past decade.

#3 Song of the Decade- "Come Pick Me Up"

2009-05-26T19:55:00.003-05:00

#3- Ryan Adams- "Come Pick Me Up"

I'm a high school English teacher by day, and this is not the time of year to be one. Philadelphia kids are still in school--will be for another few weeks--but there isn't much quality instruction going on. I'm as worn out as they are, and I'm constantly trying to entertain and distract them for one more day until we're both taken out of our misery. It doesn't help that my school has no air conditioning.

It's in this environment that I tried to teach the concept of archetypes last week, and no matter how much time and dedication I put in, my students just couldn't get it. I defined the term as "an ideal example, a model that is copied over and over until it becomes universal." What I meant was that if I tell you I'm writing a story about, say, a cowboy, your mind automatically creates expectations based on the countless cowboys you've encountered in storytelling. A cowboy has certain character traits, objects, and settings associated with him. You might picture a slim, laconic loner in boots and a ten-gallon hat roping broncs on the edge of a forgotten West. If I then subverted this expectation by making the cowboy talkative or something, it would only be more powerful, which is why authors use archetypes instead of creating wholly original characters.

I explained this many times and devised activities illustrating this point, but the compromised idea that came across was "an archetype is anything with character traits." Most kids claimed their favorite archetype as "myself." It went way over their heads. What I realize is that I should have just played them some Ryan Adams.

See, "Come Pick Me Up" isn't a breakup song; it's the breakup song. The elongated roll of drums and the wheeze of Adams' harmonica on the intro flashes us back to every expectation we have, and he blows them all away. The first line might as well be, "I gave her my heart, and she gave me a pen."

At times it sounds as if Adams is trying to construct the perfect dusty, country-western, tears-in-your-beer lament. All of those tropes are here: sloppy banjo fingerpicks, cavernous snare hits, a crack-ready snarl, and the aforementioned harmonica. He's dunking from an assist by the warm backup vocals of Emmylou Harris, whose presence hangs over the whole affair like a ghost in a cornflower blue apron. "Construct" is the proper word though, because Adams' ability to imitate is his ultimate blessing and curse. If it had to be a Grateful Dead song or a Husker Du song or a song by The Band, it would have been. He's done those songs before. "Come Pick Me Up" is mostly George Jones, but, as evidenced by the conversation that opens Heartbreaker, it's also equal parts Morrissey. Hell, there's even a little bit of genuine Ryan Adams here. Working within these forms isn't necessarily organic, but it's damned effective. He's a cowboy; on a cool big brother's record collection he rides.

The song, buried as the ninth track of the album, is bold, even at its most cowardly and solitary. Anyone who has heard the chorus can remember it, not because it's foul-mouthed, but because it's hard to recall anything so needy becoming so powerfully shoutable:

"Come pick me up

Take me out

Fuck me up

Steal my records

Screw all my friends

They're all full of shit

With a smile on your face

And then do it again

I wish you would"

The speaker dreams of any interaction at all with his ex, even if it's negative. Make no mistake: this song is sad. But it's almost encouraging in its quest for meaning in the face of personal tragedy that we can't explain. If she comes to destroy him, then at least he won't be alone. His undoing can be another thing to blame her for, even if he initiated it. He casts himself as a parasite, but he's also perversely endearing in his futile need for companionship. The beauty of the song is how it insinuates that this attitude might have been the force that unraveled the relationship in the first place.

Instead of dying out, the song builds around its harmonica line and jangly keys to match that notion. It rises in intensity, mirroring the way something like this gets worse before it gets better, signaling to us that this isn't just a guy feeling sorry for himself. This isn't just mixtape fodder. It's a lifetime of regret. It's being set in your ways. It's a legend inside of a myth. It's the best song on the best album by an enigmatic, over-prolific troubadour who never quite reached these heights again, and it is in that rolling, transient sense that it will continue to touch every cowboy-type who hears it.

He's Not Human

2009-05-23T12:10:00.002-05:00

Eminem's Relapse: The Bad Man Is Back

2009-05-20T17:44:00.004-05:00

Eminem- "Deja Vu"

Eminem's Relapse is his first proper album in four years, and our expectations for an Eminem record have changed way more than he has in that time. After two-and-a-half perfect hip-hop albums--just enough self-meditation to chew on, huge hooks to hum to, technical proficiency to burn--he left us with the sour taste of Encore, as sophomoric and pointless an album as possible. While Relapse certainly doesn't reach the highs of his early output, it's a return to form that's a huge step-up.

Re-listening to Encore reveals that it's five skits; a misguided, dated lead single; three maudlin ballads; and a sprinkling of disgusting, half-baked doodles. Relapse is...five skits; a misguided, dated lead single; three maudlin ballads; and a sprinkling of disgusting, half-baked doodles. So what's the difference?

The main thing that has changed, besides our expectations and a middling rap climate, is the way he uses Slim Shady. Romanticizing The Slim Shady LP and The Marshall Mathers LP, it's easy to forget that Slim Shady was always a device. As the horror-core alter-ego for the more austere, modest Marshall of the first two Eminem albums, he attracted widespread attention and fin de siecle paranoia. On Relapse, he is a manifestation of paranoia itself--screams are singing, fighting is dancing. He is id-gobbling exaggeration that places the album in a skewed, inward-turning light. It's not a symbiotic relationship anymore; Slim ate Em. There's a subtle intimation that, in the 21st century junk culture Eminem is skewering and the drug-addled world he is relapsing back into, Slim Shady is more at home than ever. Slim Shady is purposeful extremism, and he's back with a vengeance. He used to be funny; now he's too busy being terrifying.

It's also easy to forget that Eminem's technique never fell off in the first place. Even when he was rhyming about inflating Jessica Simpson's boobs, he was the best rapper alive from a technical standpoint, and he still is. If you don't believe that, then rhyme sixteen different words with "month," which he does on "Same Song & Dance." Flick a compound sentence off your tongue as if it's one word, something like "Picasso with a pick-axe, a sick asshole/Tic-tac-toe with a six-pack of X-acto...knives." Perhaps you'll want to contrast that with some couplets that, while maintaining a preternatural understanding of approximate rhyme and consonance, cut with refreshing honesty, maybe something like: "See, you and me almost had the same outcome, Heath/'Cuz that Christmas, you know the whole pneumonia thing?/It was bologna--was it the methadone ya think?/Or the hydrocordone you hide inside your pornos/Your VCR tape cases with your Ambien CR--great places/To hide 'em, ain't it?" He can do all of this with his endless toolbox, and we've somehow forgotten it.

Most critical attention lent to other rappers concentrates on their flow. Eminem's weaker songs garner so much criticism because people skip that first step and go straight to the content. The messages and themes of Eminem's rhymes have been analyzed more than nearly any other MC because he is technically unimpeachable.

In the leaks leading up to Relapse, bloggers decried Eminem's frequent use of affectations, such as holding his nose while rapping a chorus, performing a verse as Christopher Reeve, rolling his tongue through a bizarre Arabian accent. Indeed, we don't hear his natural voice until about halfway through Relapse, and that gamble comes off mostly as a challenge to himself. He knows people don't like it, but he does it anyway, as if he's possessed, which sounds quite possible at times. That thing people say about, "He could rap the phone book, and I would still blah blah blah..." is really being tested.

For the most part, he comes through. Even the biggest opponents of the album can't deny that it's intensely focused around this theme of literal and figurative relapse, so much so that even the bad songs kind of work in context.

Nearly every song is backed by Dr. Dre's beats, which sound like Blade Runner looks in that their handclaps and left-handed piano chords are perenially state-of-the-art but still dingy and cold even at their crispest. They are lumbering but strenuous, stark but echoing, antiseptic but sort of used. (How many pitches for "temple bell" settings can there be?) Dre doesn't really challenge himself, and he doesn't need to. He's not the star of this show.

Eminem, or more accurately, Slim Shady is, and he's quite the villain. Anchored by his violent, disturbing persona, Relapse is not an easy album to listen to, especially at its outset. You might want to take a shower after it. There's rape, homophobia, misogyny, murder, drug abuse, child abuse. And then the fourth song starts. I remember making that same joke when explaining Eminem albums to people in high school, so perhaps we've come full circle. Even if it isn't the most graceful return to form, I, for one, am grateful for that.

TANBR's NBA Draft Lottery / West Finals Liveblog

2009-05-19T19:05:00.002-05:00

Trying out some new technology tonight and lets see how it works!

&amp;lt;a href="http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php?option=com_mobile&amp;amp;amp;task=viewaltcast&amp;amp;amp;altcast_code=85414eb9ae"&amp;gt;TANBR NBA Draft Lottery/ Western Conference Finals&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;

#12 Film of the Decade- Anchorman

2009-05-17T18:37:00.005-05:00

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy- Adam McKay (2004)

Most comedies that have a long shelf-life--Caddyshack, Trading Places, Stripes--boast capsule reviews that look something like this: "While the premise of the film is thin, the rich structure and deceptively complex characters are what keep it from being one-note. It stands on its own feet not only as a great comedy, but a great film overall."

Anchorman is not one of those movies. Its plot is superfluous and silly. It really is a bunch of jokes strung together, but its lack of any sort of apology for that fact is what sets it apart. In writing it (and allowing what must have been considerable improvisation), McKay and Ferrell placed the value of the gag over anything else. I know many people might believe that calling it the number twelve movie of the decade is being too generous, but think back to how many memorable sequences there are, how many hilarious lines get quoted every day, and how many movies have taken the lessons Anchorman applied and run with them.

The first of those lessons is to place the joke above anything else. The second one, which was just as important, is collecting funny people and letting them be funny. The late '90s/early aughts model of the studio comedy was to get a funny--or even just likable--star and insert him into some mannered, screwball situation that provided enough witty claptrap to cut into a trailer. I saw a bunch of these in high school. Making sure all of the supporting players are funny doesn't sound like rocket science, but it wasn't until Old School became such a big hit that it became commonplace.* Acting be damned. If the lead actor feels comfortable working with and bouncing bits off his best friends, who are mostly comedians, then let him do it and have some trust in the people making the movie. Every single person in Anchorman's cast--even the bit parts--is funny. Chris Parnell has two or three lines in it. Seth Rogen doesn't have any, and you probably forgot he was Eager Cameraman.

"Little bit of ham and eggs..."

That being said, as impressive as the cast is overall, this is Will Ferrell's movie. His best characters are delusional men whose false confidence leads them to believe they're one step ahead of everyone else, when they're really a step behind. Mastering that persona is the reason he looks and sounds nothing like George Bush but can imitate him better than anyone else. In that regard Ron Burgundy is his masterpiece. Most of the comedy comes from, depending on the character, the undeserved reverence or repulsion with which anyone reacts to him, and he imbues the character with enough pompous swagger to pull that dynamic off.

What makes you laugh is subjective, so I understand if this is not your kind of movie. I can't deny that it's weird. But the absurdity of Anchorman contributes to its ballsy, anything-goes tone. It's that spirit that ends up being its legacy. All parties involved seem so giddy to be realizing this bizarre vision that it wears off on the audience. It's obvious that everyone is cracking up as soon as "cut" is called. It's that fun translated to us that keeps us ignoring the panda sub-plot, and it's the reason the whole of the movie towers above any petty summary of its parts.

*- By the way, Old School just missed the top fifty cut. I love it. There was one end-of-summer week when I watched it every day. I did, however, pass out during the birthday party sequence almost every time. So I don't know how to score that.

Rumblings- May 11

2009-05-09T15:10:00.004-05:00

Sorry if this is outdated. I've been working on it on-and-off. And, no, I have no idea what's wrong with the formatting.

The readers have spoken. My buddy Greg wrote the following:

"Chris. You gotta write something about this Celtics-Bulls series. You've been watching these games right?"

I did watch, and it was as legendary as everyone says. I haven't written about it because I don't know quite what to say other than "it was awesome" over and over. The story of how Rose, Rondo, Pierce, Gordon, and Allen all stepped up at key moments has been covered. The statistical angle--seven overtime periods--has been covered. What more can I say? Ben Gordon looks like a billygoat? Which he does.

What the Bulls-Celtics series proved was that every playoff game is either amazing or terrible, with absolutely nothing in between. Every game we've seen has been either a blowout or a tense, see-saw battle. What it largely shows is that the regular season is a bit pointless. Either these teams can hang with each other, or they're completely outmatched. In the regular season, a game starts out even until one squad slowly pulls away. Since teams are playing at their highest intensity in the post-season, this almost never happens. In fact, it wouldn't have happened in the Bulls-Celtics series if Kevin Garnett were healthy. Then again, just as he said, anything is possible, including knocking the shit out of fans.

The fact that some of the games are not interesting gets me thinking about other things. For example, I think Stan Van Gundy and George Karl shop at the same Men's Warehouse.

"Dude, there's a sale on summer sweaters! We could get enough for all of next season!"

"Do they have taupe? I like taupe. I'm kind of concerned. Is the really stretchy kind on sale?"

"Yeah, George. This ain't no bank robbery. We're talking ninety percent cotton, five percent polyester, five percent spandex. These aren't t-shirts. They're definitely classy enough to wear under a suit. Some of them are even mock turtlenecks."

"I'm excited! This is a great look! Classy! I'm not sure if this is funny anymore!"

"I'm not sure it ever was."

While we're on basketball, it's comforting that we have a completely uncontroversial NBA MVP. Even Lebron's biggest enemy (if he has any enemies) would have given the award to him. To put him into a historical context, he's the second youngest MVP since the merger, and the first to lead his team in points, rebounds, assists, blocks, and steals. If you took him off his team, they might have won thirty games. On Saturday he had a 47-12-8. It really feels as if he can do anything he wants on the court, which I've never seen before, even with Jordan. But if the Cavs don't win a championship, it means nothing.

Let me tell you a quick story: I attended a tony montessori preschool that was so stressful to me that I eventually convinced my parents to pull me out. They agreed with me that their four-year-old should be more concerned with completing the second level of Kung Fu than some phonics test. Part of my anxiety was brought on by a special project required at the school. Each day, a different child was called up to complete a huge puzzle of the United States. Until it was completed, he was not allowed to go to recess. No one ever modeled this for you or even supervised its completion; you were just expected to know how to do it, and I had no idea. For a week, I sweated getting called, as if this were the Vietnam draft or something. They finally did pick me, and I tried my best to piece it together. I knew the easy ones: Florida, California, my home state of Louisiana. But then it got intimidating. If you don't know the difference between a dime and a nickel, you probably don't know the difference between Rhode Island and Connecticut. So I jammed pieces in a haphazard fashion, more or less breaking the puzzle in the process, and ran outside to play before anyone could check my shoddy work. Once some detective-work was done by the directress, she called my name over the loudspeaker, even noting to everyone in the school that I was "in big trouble." She grabbed my arm and led me to the map, which was an uneven mess. She pointed out that each region was color-coded, so I was pretty stupid to mix in the pinks with the oranges and so on. I protested that I tried but didn't know all of the states, and her only answer to it was that I would have to start over. She watched me for a half-hour until everything was in its right place, but I still couldn't get my first attempt out of my mind. (Obviously. This was twenty-one years ago.) The map had been a jumbled mess--amber waves of grain drowning in fecund swampland, Rocky Mountains blunted by vast deserts, pieces jutting out as crooked as a jack-o-lantern's smile. To my teacher, I hadn't just shown inadequate progress; I had destroyed the country. I'm telling you this because that map reminds me of the "Kenny's Court" segment on TNT. Make it stop.

Another friend wrote on Twitter:
"I'd be interested to hear what you think about all this Favre stuff."

I don't care.

1. We've been sold this view of Favre as an unassuming, earnest bumpkin, but what if he's the most calculating football player ever? What if he understands his Q rating and Nielsens and can read market research? He basically has ESPN wrapped around his finger. It's completely possible that he's a taller version of Ari Gold.

2. Speaking of ESPN, despite their stationing of Rachel Nichols in Hattiesberg, they have produced nothing news-worthy of this "story" yet. Last Monday they reported that Favre texted "no" to the question of whether he was coming back. (Because this is apparently what quality reporters do: indiscriminately text retired athletes about whether or not they plan to lace 'em up again. They're texting Mark Rypien right now.) By Thursday they reported that Brad Childress had contacted Favre and that they might meet. Over the weekend, ESPN revealed that the meeting never took place. Now they're promising that the meeting really might occur, after the Vikings inspect Favre's x-rays to see if a surgery required on his bicep would keep him from throwing. They'll be dicking us around with this through June. Expect updates from dudes in Kiln bars by next week.

3. Many experts claim that a reason why Favre might not show his hand quite this early is that he wants to skip voluntary work-outs and mini-camps, because a true gunslinger/riverboat gambler/field general needs not these things. Here's my question: if a guy is so old and uncommitted to a team that he's avoiding rigorous practice, is he really the guy you want at quarterback? Why bother?

4. I hate Brett Favre.

A Quick Thought on the 3-D Craze

2009-05-06T20:23:00.006-05:00

(This has been a really busy week, so I'm not giving you the mid-week update you're used to. Expect a weekend Sports Rumblings column and a film entry to the best of the decade list in the future.)

If you follow upcoming film productions at all, you would know that every studio is jumping on the 3-D bandwagon. About seventeen major productions will be released in 2009 alone. This is not a fad. In fact, with the rolling out of 3-D televisions within the next decade, and with truly visionary filmmakers experimenting with the format--James Cameron's upcoming Avatar is by all accounts a game-changer--this is probably the future of going to the movies.

"Over there is the spot where I burn piles of money." (I encourage you to read some of the buzz on Avatar. Very credible people are saying things like, "I couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't.")

There are three main reasons cited for the craze. Part one is, as it was in 3-D's 1950s heyday, gimmick designed to keep people coming to theaters when it actually seems less necessary than ever. (I know that, between my shrinking wallet and the kids in front of me texting, I've become more selective.)

The second component of the trend to third dimensionify everything has to do with technological advances made by the digital projection of Real D. Basically every limitation 3-D filmmaking used to have--the need for dual projectors, the tinting of everything from the anaglyph blue-and-red glasses, the inability to tilt your head while watching--are gone. By digitally projecting the image several times on top of itself, the machines and your polarized glasses are able to do most of the illusionary work your eye used to, and we're left with a much stronger, more versatile, more imaginative image. Watching anything in Digital Linear Projection is better than 35mm, but watching digital 3-D is no comparison.

Finally, studios and theater owners are pushing 3-D films because they can charge whatever they want for them. Originally used to justify the fact that a 3-D movie is roughtly $15 million more in production costs than a traditional feature, studios started rolling out surcharges for the glasses. They and the theater owners haven't really set a cap on this yet, but I've seen charges as high as $4 for "glasses" that are recycled at the end anyway.

So far the Real D location closest to New Orleans is Baton Rouge. Road trip for the Toy Story re-release? Who's with me?

So I intended for this to be a quick little note, and I've now given you four paragraphs of exposition. Let me get to the point. I suspect the real reason studios are so gung ho about 3-D is fighting piracy. Since the advent of HD video cameras and torrents, pirates have had a field day with cutting into Hollywood's profits. We saw with the leak of Wolverine last month how completely panicked they and the MPAA were about the potential losses from illegal downloads.

As anyone who has tried to tape a Disney World ride knows, 3-D looks really goofy on a home video camera. Even if you could get your hands on an Academy screener, which is where all the best burned copies of a movie come from (so I'm told), you wouldn't get the effect of Real D in your living room, and it would probably give you a headache to watch.

No one seems to be talking about this, but the inability for people to pirate Real D films is perhaps the biggest reason so many of them are being green-lit. The fact that Jonas Brothers: Burning Up in 3-D will not be sold from a garbage bag on my subway ride home probably seems comforting to the Disney studio.

#13 Song of the Decade- "I'll Believe in Anything"

2009-05-02T20:22:00.003-05:00

#13- Wolf Parade- "I'll Believe in Anything"

People tend to place too much importance on music. I cringe whenever I hear someone say "punk saved my life," for example. I'm guilty of this hyperbole myself, of course, presenting my opinions on the timelessness or profundity or brilliance of pop music, even trying to make a career out of it. All too often, the truth is that I fish for that meaning in whatever's playing in the background. Increasingly, my own effort is incongruous with the amount of effort put into the music I'm analyzing. More than I'd like to admit, I feel silly for how committed I am to this stuff.

Still, there's a transmutative quality to music that touches everyone. I have this conversation with my dad a lot, how the perfect song at the perfect moment can magically take you back to another time of your life. It's the reason twenty-five-year-old Journey songs are still the most popular soundtrack of a bar, as well as the reason I can overlook the more troublesome aspects of rap music. That's what was playing the first time I kissed a girl; sorry if it has the f-word in it.

Songs may have come and gone without changing my life, but they can have a knack for transporting me to another more interesting and exciting time in my life.

One such song is by the Montreal quartet Wolf Parade, who were born in that strange indie rock period of the mid-aughts, when there were as many bands with "Wolf" in their name as there are swine flu stories on the news tonight. As I've mentioned before, I hosted a radio show in college, and I became very attached to their debut full-length Apologies to the Queen Mary, putting three of its songs into the station's heavy rotation. (Those canucks probably owe me some money.) Over time, however, I signed off every show with the first single, "I'll Believe in Anything," without even knowing why at first.

That's another thing music can do: tap into your subconscious. At the time I was graduating college with as little an idea of what I wanted to do as when I started, and I was simultaneously clinging to and rejecting any sense of routine. I felt suffocated by my long-term girlfriend and acted on that by flirting with a freshman at the station. In addition to that, I was getting my first batch of rejection letters from M.F.A. writing programs. I craved adventure, even though I wasn't doing anything to exact that desire, and that's a big part of what the song is about--wanting, even deserving, but not working for whatever you want. Insisting "Give me your eyes/I need sunshine," the song's speaker is needy, but at every turn--"I could take away the shaking knees/And I could give you all the olive trees"--he presents only empty promises. The more I played the song, the more I associated with its deceptively simple style--the backbeat of the verses is just a kickdrum--and the almost whiny tone yelped by the beautifully ugly voice of Spencer Krug.

For the second half of the song, the rhythm really catches hold over a few different key changes. It's a rollicking sort of feel, as if the band is in over its own head, trying to catch up to itself. Week after week, I played the song for my Friday afternoon listenership, and it was a great way to close my own pithy, canned dialogue, as I promised what I couldn't deliver. There's a quality of the song that is redemptive despite itself. Without a doubt, it's the most uplifting song to inform you, "Nobody knows you/And nobody gives a damn." There's something freeing in that line, that same mixture of anxiety and energy accompanying a big change in your life. In a way, the song said what I couldn't, and I used it to find a way to make peace with the ghosts of college and the challenges of my future. I played this song because it broadcasted all the self-deprecating and the grandstanding and the romantic whimsy for me. It purged me of whatever I wanted to say but probably shouldn't have, of what I wanted to do but probably shouldn't have.

A song might not have saved my life, but it may have stopped me from ruining it.