The Short List

Musical Wednesdays: We Are Sex Bob-Omb!

2010-08-25T10:00:00.000-04:00

The bands that populate Brian Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim books, like all great fictional bands, are so well realized that you can hear them through their lyrics, through the way the sound is drawn coming out of their instruments, through the way the other characters react to the music. Sex Bob-Omb is a noisy garage rock band, Crash and the Boys are an even noisier, surlier band (their songs are only seconds long). Every band has its own personality, and the music is essential to the story.

For a film adaptation, translating the experience of "reading the band" into hearing it can be a tough trick to pull off. The worst reaction, I would imagine, would be for the fans to say "that doesn't sound like Sex Bob-Omb." Luckily, Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs. the World sounds exactly like Scott Pilgrim, with the help of Beck and Broken Social Scene. The soundtrack is pretty exuberant (much like the movie--full review coming Friday), and the songs written specifically for the movie are the strongest parts. I particularly love Sex Bob-Omb's Garbage Truck.

If there's one criticism I have, it's that the soundtrack is missing some songs, like a few Legend of Zelda themes that are only in the movie (at one point, when Scott sees Ramona in the subspace highway inside his head, the Zelda "Great Fairy" music plays. There, that's the geekiest sentence you will ever see on this blog. At least until Friday). But the songs that are on here more than make up for what's not. This is one of those soundtracks that is much, much more than a collection of songs featured in the movie: it's a stand-alone album, like Karen O's soundtrack for Where the Wild Things Are, or one of Wes Anderson's.

The one song I really wish they had included (and this is true for both the movie and the soundtrack) is one of my favorite jokes in the first comic book, when Crash and the Boys introduce a song: "This song is called 'Last Song Kills Audience,' and it'll be our last song tonight." But as a whole, this album is so carefully put-together, and so much fun to listen to, that it's hard to dwell on any complaints.

Fiction Mondays: Middlesex

2010-08-23T10:06:00.001-04:00

Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex was one of those books I started to read while I was in college, only to be interrupted when the school year started up. I enjoyed the two-thirds of it (approximately) I read several years ago, so this summer I reread it. I actually think I liked it more than I did on my first attempt. Maybe approaching it with more experience as a reader and a writer added to the enjoyment. The voice of the narrator and the presentation of the story unfolding across several generations was a tough trick to pull off, and Eugenides definitely accomplished this feat.

The story is narrated by Cal Stephanides (born Calliope), a Greek-American raised in Detroit in the 1960s and 70s. Cal begins the story by explaining that he was born twice, first as a girl and then, fifteen years later, as a boy. The opening is half David Copperfield and half Tristam Shandy; We get hints of Cal's conception and birth, but before that story begins, the novel's action leaps backward and forward in time. Forward to the adult Cal, living as a man in Berlin, and backward to the war between Greece and Turkey in 1919, where Cal's story began in his grandparents' genes.

I don't think it spoils anything too much to reveal that Cal's grandmother, Desdemona, and his grandfather, "Lefty" are siblings who marry one another (acting like strangers) while they flee their war-torn village. On a boat to America, Lefty pretends to court Desdemona, and they are married by the ship's captain. When they get to America, they move to Detroit, where they live with a cousin who keeps their secret. Lefty begins to work at Ford's factory, and Desdemona eventually finds work with the Nation of Islam. They have a son, Milton, who joins the army to impress the girl he goes on to marry, and the family witnesses the rise and fall of Detroit in the 20th Century. They get into the restaurant business, starting franchises of "Hercules Hot Dogs" across the country (the hot dogs are sliced so that they "flex" when they're cooked). They make enough to move to the suburbs and join the upper middle class, and the parts of the story that take place in Grosse Point are about maintaining one's identity through shifting situations (a recurring theme through the book).

For the first third of the book, Cal is more of a presence than a character. We see him as an adult, explaining his life in Berlin, working for the State Department, and he explains the genetic anomaly that made him a hermaphrodite. As the family's backstory unfolds, Cal interrupts, omniscient and wry, throwing in allusions to Greek myth and previews of what occurs later in the book. I loved the narrative voice in the story, and having read both this novel and The Virgin Suicides, I think it's a voice the author is getting better with. It's really engaging, and there's a warmth and intelligence behind it that draws you in and compels you to follow the story.

This is a very ambitious novel, as much about a transgendered character as it is about the experiences of American immigrants in the first half of the 20th Century. It's about putting down roots in a place, transforming to become a citizen, and the idea of transformation echoes between each narrative unfolding over the course of the story. Even outside the story of Cal's own transformation, the changes in Detroit (most notably the 1967 riots) affect the direction of the story. Eugenides attempts to draw lines between past and present, personal and national history, and on the whole he succeeds.

The last scene, which turned out to be my favorite in the book, reflects on Cal's place in his family after he starts to live as a male. The story comes back to a Greek funeral tradition, mentioned early in the book, in which a man stands guard at the house. It was a resonant way to end the story, and I'm glad that I finally finished reading this book, even if it did take a few years to get back to it.

Friday Films: "In Bruges," or, The Importance of Knowing What Kind of Movie You're Making

2010-08-20T10:00:00.001-04:00

This week, I watched In Bruges, a movie that failed because it didn't know what kind of movie it wanted to be. It begins as a kind of crime-comedy, but at some point turns into a tragic bloodbath that finds each of the major characters dead (well, one is unclear, but still). And it doesn't fuse these halves together well enough to work.

I enjoy dark comedy, and I think crime comedy is a great niche that hasn't been done to death. Big Deal on Madonna Street, Pulp Fiction, even Guy Richie's first two movies, Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. These are movies that manage to have the criminal elements and the comedic elements at somewhat of a balance: the trick is that they are primarily comedies, I think. The violence and the crime are played for laughs. Half of the Coen Brothers' movies run on this concept.

In Bruges focuses on Ray and Ken, two hit men sent to Belgium to wait for further instructions after a botched job. They're supposed to act like tourists and try not to draw attention, but Ray is impulsive and bored and quickly finds himself mixed up with a drug dealer, her boyfriend, and a dwarf named Jimmy. There's a great scene where Jimmy goes on a racist rant, leading Ray to karate chop his neck. Ken drags Ray around the city, sightseeing, and finally, their boss Harry calls Ken and orders him to shoot Ray.

In alternating scenes, Ken and Ray get philosophical about heaven and hell, and in a brutal flashback, the job that went wrong is revealed: Ray was assassinating a priest and shot an altar boy in the head on accident. He is consumed by guilt, which Ken tries to assuage by telling him that he too has accidentally killed an innocent bystander. Ray has increasing thoughts of suicide, eventually stealing a gun to kill himself. It's almost like getting a glimpse into another, more dramatic movie.

Up until this point, the movie maintains something of a balance, although the flashback to Ray killing a child is so jarring that the movie loses its comedic momentum. When Ken decides he can't kill Ray, he sends him away on a train and the movie really falls apart. Ray gets sent back to Bruges by a credibility-destroying deus ex machina, just as Harry arrives to dispatch Ken. From there, the movie gets a lot louder and bloodier, and the characters are kind of thrown aside in favor of a gunfight. Harry even says "This is the gunfight," which felt so inorganic and outside of the movie itself that it almost didn't register in my mind as being an actual line of dialogue. Everybody--minor characters included--get swept up, and some meet violent and pointless ends.

The fact that the end of the movie is pretty much an action movie bloodbath isn't my big complaint, though. There are many movies that end with (or contain) a huge bloodbath that I really enjoy. Almost anything by Tarantino, for example. Shakespearean tragedies. Fargo. But these movies seem to arrive at it more organically, and I think that's why they work. And they know what they are. Kill Bill is a revenge-action-comedy, where things are so over-the-top that the director's intentions are very clear. Same thing with Fargo, which is a dark and violent comedy all along. But In Bruges just didn't work, because it didn't pick a side in any clear enough way.

I think a better movie would have focused more on Ken and Ray, without ever showing Harry. As a voice over the phone, or a profanity-laced note left with the hotel owner, he was a much stronger presence than he was as a character. It could have been a kind of criminal Waiting for Godot, instead of an uneven, patched together mess. Or it could have gone the opposite direction and been a violent action movie all the way through. But I never got the sense that anyone knew which movie they wanted it to be.

Musical Wednesdays: New Albums?

2010-08-18T10:00:00.000-04:00

It's late in the summer, which seems to be a slow time for new music. I've been listening to the Scott Pilgrim soundtrack today, but not enough to have anything coherent to say about it. Believe me, I tried. Come back next week for a review of that one.

So no review this week, just a really funny piece from the Onion:

Desperate Pandora Employees Scrambling To Find Song Area Man Likes

Are there any albums out this week I should know about? Or are things staying quiet until the weather cools off?

Fiction Mondays: Year of the Flood

2010-08-16T10:00:00.017-04:00

Margaret Atwood's Year of the Flood, the second book in her dystopian "MaddAdam" trilogy, is almost more terrifying than the first because it's more familiar. While the first book, Oryx and Crake, documented a not-so-distant future destroyed by environmental catastrophe and genetic experimentation, the sequel reaches a little further into the past, bringing the story uncomfortably close to our own time. There are characters in this book who remember the old ways, who know the actions that have led to the destruction, and who may have the best shot to put it back together.

While the plague documented in Oryx and Crake raged through the world, a religious group known as the God's Gardeners were hidden away from society, convinced that the mysterious illness was the "waterless flood" promised by God in the book of Genesis. This book explores the group's history and way of life, and the reasons they survived while so many others perished. The two protagonists are Toby, a longtime Gardener holed up in a high-end spa, and Ren, a young woman who grew up as a Gardener and is quarantined in a sex club called "Scales 'n' Tails." Atwood shifts between past and present in both characters' stories, overlapping until their paths intersect in the post-plague world.

In Toby's story, we get some glimpses into familiarity: she grew up in a house with a white picket fence, in an idyllic country setting, before the growing suburbs, her mother's death, and her father's suicide due to financial troubles forced her to go into hiding with the Gardeners. When she joins the group, she spends years convinced that she doesn't believe their teachings, even as she becomes one of their leaders. When a dangerous man from her past learns she is a member of the group, she's forced to go into hiding, where she continues to act according to Gardener beliefs even in her new life.

Ren, meanwhile, gets taken to "the Compounds" (where the giant, evil corporations are based) as a teenager, where the Gardeners' beliefs are pushed out and she finds herself at odds with her mother as she grows up. Through her backstory, we start to see familiar characters from Oryx and Crake, getting glimpses of the plot from another angle. Her section is filled with sudden moments of recognition, where the events that led to the plague are witnessed by a character who is much less involved than the characters of the first novel. In the same way that Toby and Ren's plots intersect and weave together (and apart) in the course of the novel, the way the Year of the Flood plot gets mixed in with Oryx and Crake's is really well-done and believable.

The novel departs stylistically from the first novel, which gives Atwood a chance to draw in her other interests (like poetry and religion) as she writes about the God's Gardeners and their leader, Adam One. They're a (mostly) vegetarian group, mixing science and theology to arrive at a kind of theory of existence. A lot of their beliefs make perfect sense, and I think Atwood's intention was to make the group a believable entity, a belief system that could easily take root. They're mostly harmless, and their survival rate is much higher than that of the regular population. I get the sense that in the final book, it will fall to their surviving members to decide how to handle the new species roaming the earth after the "waterless flood." Each section in this book is named for a Saint's Day or a Feast Day, with named saints drawing in famous figures from religion and ecology in equal amounts. There is a sermon by Adam One and a song, "from the God's Gardener Oral Hymn Book" before returning to Toby and Ren. I can see how Atwood's hymns were inspired by William Blake, and her take on theology echoes his in certain ways.

I am really looking forward to seeing how she ends the trilogy. At the risk of spoiling anything, I will say that the end of this book, which overlaps and expands upon the ending of Oryx and Cake, leaves the characters on the precipice of a new kind of world, one which they can remake or ultimately destroy. Read Oryx and Crake first, and then check this one out.

Friday Films: The Kids Are All Right

2010-08-13T10:00:00.000-04:00

Last Friday, I saw The Kids Are All Right, the breakout hit of the Sundance Film Festival. It's about a lesbian couple whose kids decide they would like to meet the sperm donor responsible for their existence. The donor is Paul (Mark Ruffalo), who owns an organic restaurant and rides a motorcycle, two facts that cause Nic (Annette Bening), the more practical of the moms, a lot of worry. The characters slowly let Paul into their lives, where his presence starts to widen cracks in the family's foundation even as he becomes closer to individual members.

At first I was worried that the movie was painting its characters and its situations a little too broadly: Ruffalo's character seems at times like a caricature, and Jules (Julianne Moore) is a hippie type without steady employment, starting up a few businesses without any success. Nic is a physician and uptight. But as the movie went along, I realized that it was probably the director's intention to set things up in familiar patterns in order to destabilize them down the line. But more on that later.

The kids are Joni, who is preparing to go to college, and Laser, her younger brother. While Laser initially wants to meet Paul, Joni has an easier time befriending him. When they tell their moms that they met their biological father, Nic and Jules decide to have him over for dinner. He hires Jules to landscape his yard. And then things get weird when Paul and Jules start sleeping together. And there's the moment where the director, Lisa Cholodenko, starts derailing things.

There are a lot of touches in the movie that I really enjoyed, and a lot of messiness-as-directorial-choice that I loved. Every time someone hooked up in the movie, there was this awkwardness about it that felt so authentic, and I thought the fact that there was a sense of unstaged awkwardness was a strong point of the movie. It's not contained to characters getting together, either: the fights, the break-ups, even the dialogue: they seem completely authentic. I've said before that I prefer the messy and honest, and that's why I liked this movie. There were some things that could have been better-developed (Laser is under-utilized, maybe--he has a subplot that doesn't do much other than establish the fact that he kind of gets along with Paul, but most of the time he just delivers moody teenager one-liners), but as a whole I think it's an accessible, appealing film.

I think this movie comes along at an interesting point, politically, because it's about gay couples raising kids, and it takes place in California, and it's being released into a polarized climate. And it's making a political statement through comedy, in a way that almost distracts you from the fact that it's making a political point. The characters aren't just mouthpieces for an opinion. I'm glad to see it's doing so well ($15 million in ticket sales so far), and I think we'll hear much more about it during Oscar season (I'm thinking Best Original Screenplay).

What stuck with me the most, though, was the fact that so many pivotal scenes took place around the dinner table. The first scene with all of the major characters together, the scene where Nic learns of Jules' affair, the scene leading up to a conflict between Nic and Paul: these are all around the table. Even the poster is an image of the characters having dinner together. I think it's the director's statement on her family values: the kids are all right, like the title says, because they have a functional family and support and they, you know, eat dinner together like a family, and I think she's saying that these things are more important than the gender or sexual orientation of the parents.

Musical Wednesdays: Broken Hearts and Dirty Windows

2010-08-11T09:00:00.008-04:00

I will preface today's post by saying this: John Prine is awesome. His songs are so good that Kris Kristofferson said they (other country and folk songwriters) would have to break his thumbs. He co-wrote the "perfect country and western song" ("perfect" because it contains mama, trucks, prison, getting drunk, and trains). He's a country singer who the other country singers look up to; the same goes for folk singers. He has a hell of a sense of humor and an equally sharp sense of storytelling, which comes out in songs like In Spite of Ourselves and Spanish Pipedream.

This summer, a John Prine tribute album, Broken Hearts and Dirty Windows, came out, and it's outstanding. It has tracks by the Avett Brothers, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, Old Crow Medicine Show, and many others. There's such a strong feeling of admiration on every track, not only for the man who wrote the songs, but for the songs themselves. The artists all interpret the songs only as far as bending them to their sound, and I think the album is better because of it: to diverge too much would take away from the song, while trying too hard to adhere to the originals would make the covers seem pale and boring. So by my criteria, there are some perfect covers on this album.

Really, I don't have much more of a review than that. I've had this album on repeat for a few days now, and I intend to keep it in heavy rotation--in all of its twangy, tongue-in-cheek glory--for the foreseeable future. Even the weaker tracks are saved because the songs themselves are so good. And the good tracks are incredible. So for today I'll leave the deep thoughts on John Prine to Bob Dylan, who said this (please read this next part in a Bob Dylan voice):

"Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mindtrips to the nth degree. And he writes beautiful songs. I remember when Kris Kristofferson first brought him on the scene. All that stuff about “Sam Stone” the soldier junky daddy and “Donald and Lydia,” where people make love from ten miles away. Nobody but Prine could write like that."

One last thought on the tribute album: if you switched the adjectives in the title, it probably would be just as true to Prine's work.

Fiction Mondays: The Lacuna

2010-08-09T10:00:00.006-04:00

I'd never read Barbara Kingsolver before (even though The Poisonwood Bible is supposed to be excellent), but when I heard about her most recent novel The Lacuna, it sounded like something I had to check out. I originally bought it as a Christmas present for my girlfriend, who is a big fan of Frida Kahlo, a major character in the book, and she raved about it.

The story moves from Mexico after the first World War to Washington, DC during the Bonus Army era, back to Mexico for Frida's rise to fame and visit from Trotsky, and finally back to America in the wake of his murder, where the protagonist comes under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee. It's a whirlwind plot, all centered around a character named Harrison Shepherd, a writer who began as a cook in Mexico and came to work for the U.S. State Department, transporting paintings during World War II. Kingsolver doesn't tell the story in the usual way, though: the story is presented through journal entries, letters, newspaper clippings, and archival notes that record Harrison's journey around the continent. Through this method, she presents a character whose internal world is constantly hidden away from his public life.

The title of the book describes this disconnect, and the word "lacuna" is used throughout the novel in a variety of ways. The first is simply a cave in a cliff: a missing piece that Harrison follows as a child to discover a tucked-away Aztec ruin. But it also means a missing piece of a manuscript, and in the case of Harrison, it's a missing notebook that documents Harrison's expulsion from school (for "improper acts" with another boy). Throughout the book, the idea of the lacuna appears in a variety of ways: letters between characters where the reader only sees one half of the conversation, or a statement made over and over that the most important piece of a story might be the piece that's left out. In trying to reconstruct his life through his letters and diaries, Harrison's stenographer, Violet Brown, hopes to fill in that piece.

This is an unabashedly political novel, as much about Communism and World War II as it is about art and fiction. In fact, the driving force is how these things become intertwined. It's Harrison's association with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera that initially exposes him to Communist ideas, and the same association that brings him to work for the State Department, moving artwork from Washington, DC to Asheville to keep it from being destroyed during the war. And it is in part the same association that brings him under scrutiny during the Communist "witch hunt": When Harrison becomes a well-known novelist, his history in Mexico is discovered, as is his association with Trotsky and Rivera. By the time his trial is underway, it doesn't matter that Trotsky opposed Stalin. All Soviet Communists (in the eyes of the committee) are the same. The politics in the novel aren't contained to history, though, and there was a great line about how the radio made it so that the loudest talkers, and not the most knowledgeable, ended up finding the widest audience. If this isn't Kingsolver calling out pundits, I don't know what is.

The format, telling the story in a less direct way, is risky, and for this book, it pays off. Considering how important the public portrayal of Harrison becomes as the novel goes on, approaching from the viewpoint of his diaries, intermingled with real newspaper clippings, embedded the story in the real world as well as his emotions. And getting a lot of the story told in Harrison's voice makes for a really engaging read. I think it's a challenging feat to pull off, and there's a chance your readers will lose the plot between journal entries, but I think Kingsolver is a talented enough writer to give you the story that lives in those gaps, and I think that's what this book is really about.

Friday Films: The Casablanca Effect

2010-08-06T11:30:00.001-04:00

This week, a pair of interesting columns popped up in the New York Times and the Washington Post talking about the current cinematic landscape, particularly in terms of romantic comedies. Over at the NYT, Maureen Dowd has a conversation with author Sam Wasson, wondering how romantic comedies went from Bringing up Baby to The Bounty Hunter. A valid concern, I'd say. In the past ten years, romantic comedies tend to be the same old thing, reheated and reconstituted to pretend they're not the same old thing.

In the Post, Jen Chaney argues that there have been a few romantic comedies in the past that break the mold and end up changing the genre enough to be interesting and enjoyable. She cites (500) Days of Summer and Up in the Air, both of which I really enjoyed. To that list I would add one of my favorite movies, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I don't know if that really counts as a romantic comedy, but it's a movie about two people falling in love, told in reverse. But what don't these movies have?

Happy endings.

Spoilers ahead, if you haven't seen these movies.

In "(500) Days of Summer," we are warned right up front: "this is not a love story." It's about a relationship, about the course of falling in and out of love. Sure, the ending has Joseph Gordon Levitt meeting a girl and the possibility of another story (visualized by resetting the "day count" back to "1"), but the real plot is about getting together and falling apart. "Up in the Air" is about a closed-off man opening up and getting hurt by a woman he falls for. And even though the two characters get together at the end of "Eternal Sunshine," we all know it could be a very turbulent path. I believe an alternate ending had them erasing each other and meeting, over and over.

What does it mean that the better romantic comedies have a streak of cynicism, of admitting that things just don't work out like they do (for lack of a better phrase) in the movies? Maybe they're a reflection of their time, or maybe it's just a way of going against the crop of lame and boring romantic comedies that keep on popping up, year after year. I really don't know for sure. But I know it's not the first time there have been a lot of romantic comedies where people don't get together: the 1960s had a ton. Sam Wasson even talks about Annie Hall, a movie that works so well because they don't end up together.

I'm not trying to figure out why these movies tend to be better--I guess I'll just sum it up as "The Casablanca Effect," where there's something more honest and more identifiable without that happy ending. The idea is that the story continues offscreen, which somehow becomes more romantic.

Musical Wednesdays: The Suburbs

2010-08-04T13:30:00.002-04:00

For the past few weeks, I've been hearing individual tracks from the Arcade Fire's new album, The Suburbs, on the radio. To be honest, I wasn't overly impressed. The songs were okay, and some of them were great a few minutes in, but there was no single that completely wowed me. I was worried, because the band's earlier albums, Funeral and Neon Bible, are some of my favorites. I stopped worrying when I heard the whole album, though.

I've read a lot of music critics who talk about the album as a dead object, an artifact of the pre-iTunes world. "People put their music on shuffle," they say. I am paraphrasing. But the new Arcade Fire album disagrees. Like the Decemberists' Hazards of Love, "The Suburbs" is a long-player, an album designed to go together as a whole. And when I finally listened to it as that, I felt like I understood what they were doing.

The first track, the title track, is like a statement of the album's themes:

"Kids wanna be so hard
But in my dreams we're still screamin' and runnin' through the yard
And all of the walls that they built in the seventies finally fall
And all of the houses they build in the seventies finally fall
Meant nothin' at all"

The spread of the suburbs vs. the fear of the bomb is, I think, the driving idea of the album. A landscape of poorly-built houses that keeps on expanding, but toward what? And what happens to the people who keep on building and expanding these suburbs? I know these aren't exactly new themes, but I think this is the first record that does real justice to these ideas.

My current favorite track on the album, "City With No Children," touches on something that was present in the opening tracks of "Funeral," the idea of a neighborhood after the adults have gone. In this song, the kids from that album have grown up, and the neighborhood is a wreck. There's an allusion to the Sermon on the Mount, with the idea that the meek shall inherit the earth and the mourners will be comforted. The narrator of the song, and the whole album, seems to look around for that comfort, distraught over the suburban sprawl he has inherited.

I don't think any band uses setting in their songs quite like the Arcade Fire, and the new album really expands on that, asking what happens when the landscape becomes too much to bear, when it takes on a life of its own. The album is huge, its themes and images spreading out as it goes on to encompass the regrets and nostalgia of its narrator. It ends with a look back and the statement that "If I could have it back, all the time that we wasted, I'd only waste it again." Sure, there are allusions to natural disasters, atomic cataclysm, and abandoned neighborhoods scattered throughout the album, but the resounding point of the album is that the most destructive force, the element that obliterates the memories and forces the narrator out into a more terrifying world, is time.

Fiction Mondays: Work in Progress

2010-08-02T12:04:00.000-04:00

As promised last week, today I've got parts of a new story, fresh out of editing. I think I'm becoming a better editor, and as a result my stories are getting leaner and (I think, at least) better. Here's the opening of a story, currently titled "The Wolf," about two men who hear from their long-absent mother only on holidays, and what happens the day they don't. The title is only temporary, until I think of a better one.

Sam stood by the kitchen counter, slicing a loaf of Italian bread into half-inch cubes when Dave came in holding the blue three-ring binder. Sam kept cutting, as though this task required his complete concentration, and didn’t look up at his brother until he had chopped most of the loaf and swept the cubes into a glass bowl. He carried the two ends, which he had not diced, to the table. He sat down and handed one to Dave.

“This is good bread,” Dave said, sinking his incisors into the round piece and tearing it like it was a piece of meat. “It’s really crusty and chewy.”

“It’s from the bakery in town. Need any butter, or olive oil?”

“No, that’s all right. Plain is fine.” Sam looked across the table, not yet starting on his bread. He had a habit, carried over from childhood, of watching Dave eat first, at least for a minute or two. It was strange, like seeing himself eat. Once, when he was very small, Sam even managed to convince himself that by watching his twin, he could fill his own stomach.

Dave had let his hair grow long and his beard had filled in, so they didn’t look like each other as much as they once had; for Sam, it was like seeing what he would look like if he lived outside for half the year, without regular access to hot water or a barber. It wasn’t that Dave looked dirty—the Park Service expected him to be presentable and professional—but Sam could see his discomfort in dress shoes, his glances into the backyard like he could not wait to get back out. Sam took a bite of his bread and looked at the tabs sticking out of the binder, each of them labeled. He wondered if it had gotten much thicker than the year before, or if it was just his imagination: considering the information inside, he wouldn’t be surprised if he dreamt it into a larger, more mythical collection.

“Do we have to break out the binder already? That can’t wait for dessert tomorrow?”

The binder is Dave's record of everything they know about their mother, from the phone calls to photographs of strangers who might be her. This next scene is Sam's last memory of her before she left, and is one of my favorite scenes.

Rhea sat them both on the kitchen counter, the spot where she always placed her sons when she prepared them to leave the house; every morning she would have them sit there, Sam on the left and Dave on the right, to inspect their faces and fingernails. It was the same counter where she gave them haircuts, looking from Dave to Sam to ensure her work was even. Tonight, she sewed their shirts together, a seam that began two inches above the waist.

“Don’t move,” she said. “If you wiggle around, the stitches might come undone.” She took an ashtray from the kitchen table and examined the cigarette she had left there a few minutes earlier. Satisfied that it was still lit, she took a long drag and regarded her sons. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner,” she said.

She finished sewing and tugged at the seam a few times before standing up straight, pleased with her work. “Get your pillowcases,” she said. “And hop down together, would you? I don’t want to have to sew you up again.” The twins shuffled off of the countertop and shambled, conjoined, down the hallway. When they returned, Rhea told them they were going with the neighbors, that she would see them when they came back later that night. She kissed each of them on the forehead and said she loved them, shepherding them outside.

Three hours later, after an evening of wandering the neighborhood with Margaret, the woman next door, and her children, the boys returned home to find their father sitting on the porch, drinking whiskey from an empty jam jar printed with Tom and Jerry cartoons. The porch light cast sharp shadows across the lawn, the only illumination on the dirt road. Sam knew almost instantly, before Margaret even put her hands on their shoulders, that he would remember this moment for the rest of his life, the exact instant he and his brother, fused at the waist, transformed into pair of motherless freaks.

So that's about the first half. I'm really happy with it so far, but like I said, the title is giving me some problems. I am open to suggestions.

Friday Films: Some Thoughts on "Repulsion"

2010-07-30T11:52:00.000-04:00

This week, I watched Roman Polanski's Repulsion, a horror movie about a young woman left alone who loses her mind. I would never argue that Polanski isn't a great director, and I think he excels at horror. Whether it's Repulsion or Rosemary's Baby or Knife in the Water, he is able to isolate his characters and create a slow-building sense of paranoia that overwhelms and causes them to see monsters. Sometimes they're there, and sometimes they're not.

In this film, an unstable young woman named Carol, who is terrified of men for a reason that is never explicitly explained (more on this later) finds herself alone in her apartment when her older sister goes on vacation. She starts to have delusions of break-ins and sexual assaults, which jumble together with reality, causing her to attack a suitor and barricade herself in the apartment. Her grasp on reality deteriorates, and she begins to see hands coming through the walls to grab her and phantom-men who assault her in her bed. It is suggested, at least how I read it, that she was sexually assaulted as a child and had never confronted this fact.

While I was watching the film, though, I have to admit I had a hard time separating the film from its director. Isolation, madness, and horror: these have some resonance in Polanski's life. There's also his recurring theme of the young, innocent woman with sexual demons following her. If you know about Polanski's life (and I think most everyone knows something about it), this might strike you as a little uncomfortable.

But regardless, Repulsion is an excellent art house horror film. The cinematography is really impressive, as are the special effects (creepy hands coming out of the walls in particular) The depiction of the descent into madness is really believable and terrifying. For the first half, things move slowly and methodically, subtly ratcheting up the tension, until finally there is a moment where everything comes unhinged.

Musical Wednesdays: A White House Tribute to Paul McCartney

2010-07-28T09:00:00.001-04:00

Tonight, PBS will air a new In Performance at the White House, a concert celebrating Paul McCartney as he's awarded the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song (he's the third person to ever receive it). The ceremony actually took place about a month ago, and included performances by Emmylou Harris, Stevie Wonder, and many others.

I love that these performances are occurring at the White House, because let's face it, they didn't happen there for eight years. Even the first Gershwin Prize concert, honoring Paul Simon, took place at the Warner Theater, a few blocks from the White House. So I like that they're bringing them inside, because it makes it less like the administration sees itself as above the popular culture of the country.

So by way of a preview, here is a video of Jack White at the concert, performing McCartney's "Mother Nature's Son." Enjoy, and tune in tonight. I hear Obama joins in for a big "Hey Jude" sing-along.

Fiction Mondays: Arkansas and an Update

2010-07-26T09:00:00.001-04:00

Last week's book was John Brandon's Arkansas, a novel that exists somewhere between literary fiction and neo-noir. Or maybe it doesn't exist between them at all: it's a blend of the two. The book follows Kyle, Swin, and Frog, three characters involved with the drug trade in the South whose stories run towards each other and intersect violently.

Swin Ruiz is a college dropout who still considers himself something of an intellectual. When he runs out of money, he finds himself working with Kyle, who isn't the brightest, but is more suited to a life of crime. The two become drug runners for Frog, who installs them at a state park where the ranger is his employee. They never meet Frog, but he's an important character, with a significant portion of the book allotted to his backstory. Every other chapter is written in the second person, forcing you to identify with Frog, whether you'd like to or not.

Swin and Kyle spend their days at the park, working for the ranger, Bright, between runs. He's a strange character, with a collection of half-empty whiskey bottles and a box full of burnt bones in his house. They have to do random work around the park between visits from Bright's other boss, a woman who dresses only in pink and gets a cut of the drug money. While they're kind of idling around, Swin meets Johnna, a nurse who he begins dating. The narrative, which is kind of loose and episodic, threatens to slow down at a few points early on, but the sections with Frog drive things forward leading to the moment things go wrong for Kyle and Swin.

You could say the idea behind the second half of the novel is that a criminal can be undone either by his stupidity, by emotions, or by chance. When Bright is killed by a runaway, Swin and Kyle do their best to carry on without him, but neither one knows enough about the situation to really lead. Everything they do leads Frog to suspect their motives, and as his backstory races toward its intersection with their plotline, you just know things are going to end poorly for them. I guess the big surprise is what becomes of Frog at the end of the novel--if Kyle and Swin are destroyed by their own stupidity, Frog is nearly killed by his emotional investments in his employees.

But maybe the idea isn't just about what destroys the characters, because it's also about what saves them. Kyle and Swin, Frog and his closest employees: they are family, in a strange sense. Kyle and Swin realize this late in the novel and know they are the only ones they can depend on, to carry on their stories and to protect one another. Frog is almost driven to madness when he realizes this about his own story. If there's any redemption for the characters, it's through the people they have randomly wound up with.

Brandon's writing is really engaging because it is so spare. He seems to only want to give you enough to have a complete image of these characters, and his description of their actions and their internal monologues is at times off-putting because it is so clear and to the point. Putting Frog's sections in second-person was a really wise decision--he would be a really difficult character to identify with in third-, or even first-person. Brandon has a new book, out this summer, called Citrus County. Based on the strengths of Arkansas, it is definitely one to check out.

Now, the update: I am going to post sections of a new story here next week! It's one I've been editing for the past week, attacking with red pen. And I'm really excited about it. Check back here next Monday for at least part of it.

Friday Films: Inception

2010-07-23T09:03:00.006-04:00

Last Friday, as the heat index crept upward, I went to a matinee of Christopher Nolan's new film, Inception. It seemed like the perfect way to beat the heat for a few hours, to duck into an air-conditioned theater and watch an action movie. I expected a good movie, a summer action movie, but I had no idea I would emerge from the theater, two-and-a-half hours later, with my mind completely blown. I couldn't stop talking about the movie all weekend, telling anyone who would listen that they had to see it. Like The Dark Knight, Nolan takes the idea of "summer action movie" and turns it to his purposes, producing one of the smartest action movies I have ever seen.

The plot revolves around Dominic Cobb, a dream-thief who is able to steal information from his subjects' subconscious. He has been exiled from his home and kept away from his children, and he's offered a chance to go home if he can accomplish "inception": planting an idea in a subject's mind. He assembles his team, which includes a chemist, a forger, and an architect, to go into the mind of a corporate heir and convince him to break up his father's company. Their plan involves a dream within a dream within a dream, which will allow them to plant the idea deep in the subconscious. It also allows Nolan to toggle between several layers of reality, each with their own rules of physics and time.

This aspect of the movie was one of my favorite parts: Nolan made the rules, and then he told his story within them, and I love when a science fiction movie does this. He explains, enough that no one should be lost, how time works within a dream, and how going deeper into the dream-world (another "level" down) affects the movement of time. Physical effects are also felt at deeper levels. So in the first level of the dream, as a van falls off of a bridge, the gravity in the second level kicks off. And this fall, which takes only a few seconds in real-time, takes significantly longer to get to the next levels, allowing the characters to do what they need to at the lower levels.

Through the film, Cobb's dead wife, Mal, keeps showing up in the dreams. She operates as something of a wild card through the film, with Cobb's guilt over her death making her into a vengeful specter throughout the dreams. She arrives just in time to cause chaos during Cobb's missions, and the movie lets us know, through Ellen Page's character Ariadne, that the success of the inception mission depends on Cobb confronting Mal in the lower levels of the subconscious. I love that I just got to write that sentence in a review of a summer blockbuster.

This is a movie that could have very easily been a confusing, sloppy mess. When you're dealing with dreams and actions that take place largely in the imagination, and a plot that warps notions of time and space, it's pretty simple to let the fact that it is all a dream allow you to dismiss logic and order and have some sloppy writing. Instead, Nolan set the rules, and he played within them. The movie made perfect sense according to its own logic, and that's really what I want out of a science fiction film like this one. I've heard there are some critics who think that the dreams in the films were too orderly, but I think that was a choice Nolan made to have a really cohesive film, and I prefer it to the latter, something that could have turned out really navel-gazing and dull.

I believe Inception will be a movie worth watching again, because the director's other movies become more layered and complex the more you watch them. Once you know the twist in The Prestige, you notice all of the clues scattered throughout the movie. I'm interested to see what kinds of surprises the director tucked into the dreams onscreen here, and what other layers we'll see on the next viewing. Maybe he intends it to work like a recurring dream, where you remember just a little more each time. I wouldn't put it past him.

Musical Wednesdays: Summer Music Edition

2010-07-21T09:00:00.001-04:00

I'm just going to say it: I don't really have a topic for today's post. I thought about opening with a joke about not being at the Pitchfork festival and decided against it, and I thought about listing what I've been listening to this summer, but I came up a bit short. But it's my first week back, and I can't really be out of musical topics, can I? So here we go.

One of my favorite newer records right now is American Slang, by the Gaslight Anthem. They are a band from the New Jersey shore, and they really embody the idea of that (and I mean the old idea, the broken-down splendor of Asbury Park and the shadiness of Atlantic City). They're channeling Springsteen, and their first song I heard, "Old White Lincoln" throws out references to Tom Waits and sailor tattoos. There's something not quite nostalgic about the lyrics, as though they were already trying to hold onto a time that passed. The new album's title track has some amazing lyrics ("They cut me to ribbons and taught me drive/I've got your name tattooed inside of my arm) and to me, it feels like summer. The band is touring with the Hold Steady later this year, but nowhere convenient for me to see them.

The other album I'm really loving this summer is Brothers by the Black Keys. It's more Motown-influenced than their earlier records, and I love that they're moving in this direction. I still can't believe sometimes that there are only two people in this band, because they have such a full sound and their songs have a wider range than some much larger acts. Plus, I like the fact that they're geeks who play incredibly bluesy, soulful music. Standout tracks on the new album include "Ten-Cent Pistol" and "Tighten Up." And "Next Girl." And "Sinister Kid." The whole album is worth listening to, and then worth listening to on repeat. There's also a deluxe vinyl edition.

So that's it for today. Hopefully, now that I'm living in a city, I'll be able to go to more shows and report back. The lead singer of Dr. Dog is playing a solo show at the end of August, and the Avett Brothers are playing up in Bethlehem around my birthday. Either show would be a great end-of-summer show, I think.

Bonus Tuesday: Arts!

2010-07-20T09:00:00.002-04:00

That's right, I'm not only back, but I'm throwing in a bonus Tuesday post this week. It's more of an announcement, but still: Tuesday Post!

I know I announced the website when it was launched, but head over to Allison Mosher's website to see the new design and a bunch of new paintings. And while you're there, you can check out her new blog, Her Digital Memory (or you can click that link). On the blog, she'll be posting works in progress and announcing upcoming shows.

That's all for today. Go look at some paintings!

Fiction Mondays: Carter Beats the Devil

2010-07-19T09:00:00.001-04:00

Despite being a little busy with moving, I found time in the past few weeks to read, from start to finish, Glen David Gold's Carter Beats the Devil, a book that has been on my radar for several years. It's one of those books that I would look at every time I was in the bookstore, read the back cover of, and tell myself I had to read it eventually. Finally, I decided it was going on my summer reading list, and I am so glad I made that decision.

The book is pretty big, somewhere around 650 pages, all of them bursting. There are reprints of posters from magic's heyday around the turn of the century, and a playbill in the beginning of the book that turns out to be something of a table of contents. The story revolves around Charles Carter, a real-life illusionist who was a contemporary of Houdini and Thurston, diving back into his life story and the events surrounding the death of President Harding in 1923. As he begins his career, Carter meets the Marx Brothers (back when they were still Julius, Adolph, and Leonard on the vaudeville stage), as well as "Borax" Smith, a real-life business magnate; he makes a nemesis, Mysterioso, and is promoted by Houdini, leading him to worldwide fame and success.

Much of the book revolves around the aftermath of President Harding's death, with a large section delving into the hapless Secret Service agent who is investigating Charles Carter. The agent, Jack Griffin, is desperately trying to regain his reputation after failing to prevent the assassination of McKinley. While Griffin is kind of a moron, he does manage to make one great discovery, and toward the end of the novel, Carter calls him "the greatest audience member I ever had." I don't want to spoil anything, because there are so many great twists and turns, but the last third of the book is extremely exciting, and revolves around a technology invented by a young man named Philo Farnsworth.

I really loved this book, and it made me think of two others: Water for Elephants and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I love when a work of fiction creates a world that's so large and encompassing that it surpasses the idea of historical fiction--I don't know what you'd call it, really, but some books just have this way of pulling in people and events from history and making you believe they really interacted with these fictional characters. It almost seems more real than history, in its way. Whether it's Kavalier and Clay at a party with Salvador Dali or Carter the Great receiving a motorcycle from BMW's co-founder Max Friz, I really enjoy when a story jumps off of the page and wanders into the real world. What is interesting about this book's connection to Kavalier and Clay is that the two novels were published around the same time, are both enormous, and were both written by authors who graduated from the MFA program at the University of California at Irvine. Must have been something in the water.

I could not stop reading this book once I picked it up. It has mystery, suspense, and perhaps most importantly, wonder. That's kind of the theme of the novel, I guess, this idea of a loss of wonder and how it is regained. For a long time in the middle, Carter is depressed and detached, so much so that he often feels he is looking down on his life happening. What saves him is his ability surprise and to be surprised, his ability to elicit wonder. I think this makes him a really admirable character, and is a characteristic that comes through in the writing: through the book, there are some incredible feats of misdirection and surprise, the work of a writer who is something of a magician himself.

Not Quite Back, But Getting There

2010-07-14T12:00:00.001-04:00

I haven't updated in a few weeks, but I should soon be back to my regular schedule (that is, Monday-Wednesday-Friday) starting next week. We just moved down to Philadelphia, so we're still getting settled in.

Two new developments here on the Short List: you can now "follow" the blog (and have your picture in the new box to the right) and share the links on Twitter, Facebook, or whichever social networking site you prefer.

Come back next week for a review of Glen David Gold's Carter Beats the Devil, music to get you through the heat wave, and (hopefully) a review of Inception, the new movie by the director of The Dark Knight and The Prestige. Or a review of the new Toy Story, which I saw last weekend.

So that's it for now, but I'll be back soon.

Fiction Mondays: American Gods

2010-06-21T11:00:00.000-04:00

I recently finished the first book on my summer reading list, Neil Gaiman's epic American Gods. And when I say "epic," I mean it: the story involves a man tangling with gods, going to the afterlife, and making a long journey to several "sacred" places in America. I loved this book for its story, its characters and the weird sense of humor Gaiman brings to creating characters out of larger-than-life beings. He's an author who really creates a universe with his writing, and it's a universe I like to visit.

The novel revolves around Shadow, who is recruited by a man named Wednesday to protect him while he's on a mysterious mission. That mission turns out to be recruiting other gods, from every imaginable pantheon, to take a stand against the "new gods" who are taking root in America. There's a war coming, Wednesday tells Shadow, between the gods the immigrants brought over and the new gods, like the Internet and Media. They travel to recruit Easter, Anansi, Czernobog and a large contingent of obscure and half-forgotten gods and legends. There's a brief meeting with Wisakedjac, the Algonquin trickster-god, and Johnny Appleseed. With every god introduced, I was more and more impressed with the breadth of research that must have gone into this novel, the amount of knowledge just barely hinted at throughout the story.

One of my favorite moments in the book seems like something of an easter egg, there specifically for readers of Gaiman's Sandman series. Shadow walks by a seemingly-homeless woman with multi-colored hair and a dog, and he gives her a dollar. She looks confused by the money. She's Delirium, one of Gaiman's "Endless," and the dog is the guardian she inherited from her brother, Destruction. I love a book where an author's other stories can wander in without fanfare or distraction from the plot, and Delirium's presence almost seemed like a reminder that the story of the Endless went on, even if the comics ended.

Gaiman also handles his plots really well in this novel: there's an extended subplot involving an idyllic town and disappearing children, and it reminded me very much of Stephen King. I won't spoil anything by talking about it, but the way it wraps up was one of my favorite twists in this very twisty book. And it of course has everything to do with the story of the gods that makes up the main story.

There is a theme, repeated through the book, that "this is a bad land for gods," and I think one of the ideas behind this book is that it's not necessarily true. For the gods that populate the novel, the greatest fear is being forgotten, and I think this book is an exercise in reminding readers that they still exist somewhere, and there is a wealth of information out there keeping them alive. Maybe they're not actively worshiped anymore, but they are not forgotten. America might be fickle, and might not know where to put our faith at times, but there is a curiosity and an imagination that might mean these gods can continue to live among us.

Friday Films: City Island

2010-06-18T11:34:00.000-04:00

The theater I work for recently started showing City Island, a new comedy starring Andy Garcia, Julianna Margulies, and Emily Mortimer (also Alan Arkin). It's a hit, as far as small, limited-release independent films go, and despite the very small ad campaign--I've seen one commercial and one print ad--people are coming from miles away to see it based on recommendations from friends and family. I saw it a few weeks ago, and I enjoyed it; it's a short, light comedy with a lot of exaggerated yelling between family members and Andy Garcia playing a type that I don't think he gets to play much, the working-class family man. In its first weekend here, it made more money on Saturday night than "Sex and the City 2."

The plot revolves around a corrections officer who is secretly taking an acting class; he tells his wife that he goes to a poker game every week, and she thinks he's having an affair. He brings home a prisoner for a month as part of an acting exercise, to tell your deepest secret. The prisoner is his son, who he has never met. Things start to escalate towards the ridiculous as the film progresses, and the end of the movie culminates in all of the plot points coming together right as Garcia's character lands his first acting gig, in a Scorcese film.

It's just over an hour and a half long, and I think the script is incredibly efficient at fitting a lot into this running time. At times it borders on too much, and I think I could have done without the character of Andy Garcia's youngest son (not the prisoner) and it would not have changed the movie all that much. The kid himself is really annoying, and his plot has no relation to the rest of the narrative. It's almost like the director realized this, too, because during the climactic scene he is set apart from the action and doesn't participate. The rest of the plots wrap up in a scene that occurs in the family's house on City Island and just outside of it, which is the funniest point in the movie.

Because it's a small movie, it's going to be on DVD in August, and for some reason I find that a little disappointing. It just seems too soon, and I think that this could have been one of those small movies that continues to grow its audience over a longer run. If a theater near you has it, go check it out while it's still there.

Musical Wednesdays: Sufjan and the National!

2010-06-16T10:53:00.001-04:00

After reading this interview, I was a little worried about Sufjan Stevens' future. It seems like he was going through a bit of a crisis, in which expectations are so high after you've released a masterpiece that it scares you out of doing anything else (see also: Harper Lee and J.D. Salinger). I thought maybe he'd vanish, Jeff Mangum style, and become one of those legends who plays at someone else's show every six years or so. Maybe his BQE project was the equivalent of Mangum's field recordings of a Romanian circus.

For me, Illinois was one of those records that I wanted to live inside of, with songs that haunted me long after I'd heard them. The song Chicago was so definitive, so descriptive of my understanding of faith in America, that it was almost a hymn. It stirs me the way Leaves of Grass does, or the way the Band's music does. And music that has that effect on a lot of people can terrify its creator--so I can understand why Sufjan has acted like something of a hermit for the past few years. But that interview, like I said, made me worry that he was going to go away.

But there's hope yet! Sufjan is recording a new album, and he's working with the National! There's not much more to say yet, but the fact that it's being recorded makes me happy. And maybe since the National started out in Ohio, that state will be Sufjan's next subject. Even if it's not an album inspired by one of the states, I am excited to see what Stevens will produce next.

(Non) Fiction Mondays: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

2010-06-14T10:00:00.001-04:00

I don't know about runners; long-distance runners, I mean. I know there's a British "kitchen sink" movie called the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, and I've known the occasional marathoner, but as a group, I have to admit that I'm wary of them. Maybe it's because the ones in my neighborhood are so unpleasant, acting like the sidewalk was specifically made for them and they're just temporarily allowing you to walk there (and god forbid you walk a dog there). So it was with this bias that I started reading Haruki Murakami's memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

I guess the book is almost more of an essay collection, Murakami's thoughts as he trained for the New York City Marathon. But I can see where calling it a memoir is accurate: Murakami's life as a runner began with his life as a writer, and so this book acts as an examination of where and how those aspects of his life intertwine and affect one another. It contains my favorite Murakami legend, the one about how he became a writer: he saw a batter hit a home run and suddenly knew he could write a novel, so he did.

For a writer who tends to keep his history and personal life kind of guarded, these glimpses into Murakami becoming a writer were really interesting for me. I mean, there is the Murakami I know from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore, but on a level of where he comes from and what aspects of his life led to his becoming a writer, he can be kind of a mystery. Here, he talks about owning a jazz club, the way his life was before he became a novelist. In his non-fiction, you can kind of see which parts of him have entered into characters and how his mind works.

I liked this book for the thoughts on writing much more than the thoughts on running, and I can see why Murakami chose to use one as a metaphor for the other. Writing is a solitary activity that requires more endurance than talent: it's a frustrating occupation, and you need to practice every day if you don't want to burn out quickly. I agree with him when he says there are writing muscles, that you can work to strengthen these day after day.

I'm still on the fence about runners; after all, I didn't expect Murakami to change my mind about the entire sport. But I do feel that this book gave me a deeper look at Murakami the runner, and Murakami the writer, who were the same person all along. And it made me want to start an exercise regimen, because I could use that kind of structure and working out daily would be good for my overall health.

But it won't be running.

Friday Films: RIP Dennis Hopper

2010-06-11T10:00:00.002-04:00

I meant to post this last week, so it's not exactly timely, but this video, from the DVD quarterly Wholphin, is how I'd like to remember Dennis Hopper. Sure, Easy Rider is an American classic and Apocalypse Now is a work of art...but this video, filmed in 1983, is Dennis Hopper strapping himself to the "Russian Suicide Chair" and igniting it. Here's a description by Hopper himself.

"You sit inside a circle of 20 sticks of dynamite. The explosion creates a vacuum, like the eye of a hurricane, inside. Dynamite won't blow in on itself. But if three in a row don't go off, you'll be sucked out and killed. Also, you can't raise your head above a certain level or it will be blown off. I asked a stunt daredevil named Ollie Anderson to set up my experience. I got into the middle and hoped like hell it worked. I had to hold my ears. I felt a little disoriented afterwards, but besides that I felt fine. I was alive."

Musical Wednesdays: Ugly Casanova

2010-06-09T10:00:00.001-04:00

Today I'm sending you over to Oh Young Lions, where Corey Beasley has a review of the new Ugly Casanova song. You can also hear the song there; if you haven't heard Ugly Casanova, they're a side-project of Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock, and to borrow from Mr. Beasley:

"This is Brock living his toothless woodsman dream, something from which he usually restrains himself in Modest Mouse, at least slightly."

If that doesn't get you over there to hear the song, I just don't know what will.

Fiction Mondays: Summer Reading

2010-06-07T10:00:00.000-04:00

I'm about two hundred pages into Neil Gaiman's American Gods, which is kind of an ideal summer book: epic, but not too heavy, it's a road trip into an America where the old gods are just trying to scrape by in the face of new forms of worship.

I spent last week trying to figure out what I'm reading this summer, and this book has sort of kicked off the season for me. So today, I present my summer reading list (constantly under construction). One quick note: a lot of these are paperbacks, because sometimes a hardcover is just too much to lug around in the summer.

1. Neil Gaiman, American Gods
2. Glen David Gold, Carter Beats the Devil
3. A.M. Holmes, This Book will Save Your Life
4. Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City
5. Edward P. Jones, All Aunt Hagar's Children
6. Margaret Atwood, Year of the Flood

So that's a pretty good list, I think. What else should be on there? Leave recommendations if you'd like!

Friday Films: Why Not a Black Spider-Man?

2010-06-04T10:00:00.000-04:00

I saw something on Twitter this week about the campaign for Donald Glover (Troy on NBC's "Community") to play Spider-Man, and I have to say: I really hope he gets to audition. The whole discussion started out with this post on io9, and ignoring the Twitter and Facebook campaign for a minute, I think the article raises some great points about adaptation and long-running characters shifting to reflect their eras and cultural values.

I mean, the last forty years in comic books is a story of reinvention and revision to remain relevant about society, from the X-Men commenting on racial prejudice to the movie The Dark Knight being, at its core, about terrorism and the potential for a "protector" to overstep boundaries in pursuit of justice. There have been plot lines in comics dealing with AIDS, with civil liberties. And those are just the superhero comics.

The version of the Green Lantern on the television show "Justice League of America" is black; the part of Kingpin, depicted in the comics as a fat white guy, was played by Michael Clarke Duncan in the movie Daredevil. And then there's Nick Fury, a character played by Samuel L. Jackson in the recent Iron Man movies. He isn't an African-American character in the comic books, but he is a badass, and that's Samuel L. Jackson's brand. The casting is determined by what would best represent the character's personality, rather than hewing too close to what's on the page.

So what I'm saying is, this switch would not be unprecedented, and it might actually be a way to enliven the franchise. And honestly, I think Donald Glover would emphasize the characteristics that make the Peter Parker of the comics so memorable: funny, self-depreciating, trying to navigate both real life and the powers that he has been given. And more than anything, I think these aspects of the character (yes, along with the spider powers) are what make him an enduring and popular hero several decades after his creation, and they define him much more than his race.

Musical Wednesdays: High Violet

2010-06-02T12:38:00.006-04:00

If you haven't heard the National's new album, High Violet, yet, you need to find it and listen to it. I would tell you exactly why, but it's hard to say exactly. It's just a beautiful album, with some of the smartest songs the band has ever recorded.

It's kind of melancholy, with song titles like "Sorrow" and "Afraid of Everyone," but at the same time it's an album you can listen to over and over without getting sick of. I think it might be because of lead singer Matt Berninger's voice--it's this really sonorous bass that takes lyrics like "I gave my heart to the Army, the only sentimental thing I could think of," and seems to stretch out every vowel even as the line clips past. And the emotions they're expressing seem real, and the band seems like a serious rock band rather than a trendy pop act that will disappear within a few months.

"I still owe money to the money, to the money I owe," is one of my favorite lyrics on the album, from one of my favorite songs, "Bloodbuzz Ohio." There's a recurring use of water imagery on the album, and in lines like this one, it seems that the whole record is about trying not to sink. From the first track, "Terrible Love," there's water as a barrier, as a comfort, as a threat, and I love that thematic line that goes through most of the songs.

This is easily one of my favorite albums of the year, and it's really interesting to see the band mature with each album. I hope they keep improving with every record. "High Violet" is available as an mp3 on Amazon for only $5.99, and on vinyl.

Fiction Mondays: The Manual of Detection

2010-05-31T09:00:00.001-04:00

Hello everyone! Sorry for the unannounced week off--I had several story deadlines the Friday before last, and my brain melted for an entire week after. Plus, I'm getting ready to move, so that's keeping me pretty busy. Finding an apartment is HARD.

So I'm back, and this week, I want to talk about a mystery novel which is really more of a fable (in the Calvino sense), Jedediah Berry's debut, The Manual of Detection. This book caught my eye when it was out in hardcover, and I finally picked it up when it came out in paperback, and I really loved it. It's a magical realist take on the noir genre, which doesn't make much sense when I say it like that, but really works in the world the author creates.

The plot revolves around a clerk in a large detective agency (clearly modeled on the Pinkerton Agency, complete with a large eye and the slogan "Never Sleep"), George Unwin, who is forced to act as a detective when the agency's superstar, Travis Sivart, goes missing. I can't really discuss much of the plot without giving too much away, but the mystery leads him to discover that some of the most famous cases, including "The Oldest Murdered Man" and "The Man Who Stole November Twelfth," were solved incorrectly. His efforts to correct them lead him to a dream-world and a vast conspiracy.

Berry takes the tropes of film noir and hard-boiled mystery and bends them to create a setting that is both alien and familiar. The action occurs in a city that is perpetually dim and rainy, where the old ways of criminals have been replaced by an element that is more devious and dangerous. All of the old elements are present--each detective is assigned a Girl-Friday type assistant, there's a femme fatale, the detectives are loners who frequent dive bars and carry revolvers--but once the plot gets rolling, these things turn out to be much more complicated than they appear. Travis Sivart, the missing detective, just wanted somewhere he could retire, out in the country, and Unwin's new assistant is a narcoleptic whose involvement in the agency is much deeper than it initially appears to be.

The book is divided up into chapters from the Manual of Detection, the book within the book that each detective is issued. There are chapters on interrogation, on nemeses, and a chapter that was cut from later editions, on a technique to enter dreams to solve a mystery. This book-within-a-book structure is where I really noticed the Calvino references, mostly If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, a book about trying to read a book. The book becomes very important to the plot of the novel, and, fittingly, the story ends in the eighteenth chapter, "On Dream Detection." It can be tough to pull off a dream sequence in a story, let alone several, and I think that making the plot revolve around the dreams of the protagonist and the entire city is a very bold move that pays off for Berry in this novel.

That's all I've got for today. Enjoy the long weekend.

Friday Films: "Maybe We're All Here for a Reason"

2010-05-21T13:30:00.000-04:00

This Sunday, after a six year run that brought its characters from Australia to an island, to Los Angeles and the 1970s, pulling in science fiction, big philosophical and religious themes, and more literary allusions than one can accurately count, the show LOST will come to an end. Since I started watching, about halfway through the second season, the show has been my absolute favorite thing on television, a constant source of debate, theorizing, confusion, frustration, and moments that made me stand up from my chair, pulled into the story and the characters in a way I have never before experienced in network television.

The end of LOST is kind of bittersweet for the viewers--I know I would love to see more, but at the same time, the ability of the creators to say when they will end the show has tightened the writing and given the story a lot of dramatic momentum (we all remember what happened in the third season, when they had to fill time). Ever since the end of the third season, the story has been hurtling toward this ending, and this weekend, we get to see if our faith in these writers, actors, directors and producers paid off. Which is appropriate for a show that has faith as one of its ultimate themes.

I think it's more than just the end of a story, though. It's the last of its kind in more ways than one. For starters, it doesn't look like anything else on television; it's filmed on Panavision 35mm film, which is why it looks so cinematic. The score, by Michael Giacchino, is always incredible (including the sounds at the beginning and end of the episodes, a high-pitched crescendo and a sudden bass drum note, respectively). But maybe the biggest difference between LOST and the sci-fi shows that try to piggyback on its success is the literary nature of the story, in two different senses of that word.

The first is the way the writers utilize many literary concepts: effectively embroidering the themes into the episodes, the structure of real-time and flashback, the use of foreshadowing and using lines more than once in different contexts (this was done to great effect this season, but to talk about that would spoil it). The other use of the word literary, though, is why it found such a devoted audience while other shows (The Nine, Flashforward) failed: the characters drive the story. We're interested in the mystery, yes, but what's carrying the plot along is ultimately the characters and the choices they make. And that's what makes the show so rewarding, in spite of the frustration and the cliffhangers and the occasional leap past believability: I care about these characters and I'm invested in them.

Will I be sad to see LOST end? Hell yes, I will. It'll be the end of an era of television. But I also think it's time to go. I hope this finale ends up being one of the great ones in television history, but more than that, I hope it serves these characters and their story well. I could make a lot of predictions and theorize a few more times before the last episode airs, but I think I would rather see where the episode goes. It seems that a big idea of this final season has been getting the characters to "let go," and I wonder if that's telling the audience to see how the season unfolds and trust the writers. They've never failed in a season finale before, and I don't think they're going to do so with the end of the series.

So to end this with my all-time favorite line from the show, "WAAAAALT!!"

No, wait, that's not right.

"See you in another life, brother."

Musical Wednesdays: Sing Sing Sing Every Song We Know

2010-05-19T09:17:00.000-04:00

I will admit that when I first listened to the Hold Steady's new album, Heaven is Whenever, I wasn't overly-impressed. There were some stand-out songs, of course, but nothing that matched the moment in "Stuck Between Stations" when the piano filled in that little break before Craig Finn started singing "We drink and we dry up." Or the break in "Stevie Nix" before the "17 forever/33 forever" section. I started to wonder if the loss of Franz Nicolay meant something essential had left the band. The whole thing seemed a little bit older, and a little bit sadder, and I wondered if they still had the power of their first three albums.

It's an album that I needed to hear a few times, and now I'm finding that I like it a lot more than I first thought I would. Sure, the piano is gone, but I don't think that's the biggest change. Craig Finn's lyrics have shifted slightly, and this album takes on the voice of someone who has walked away from the scenes of his youth and is torn between nostalgia and imparting the hard lessons he learned there. The opening song, "The Sweet Part of the City," is one of my favorites, a look back at the events and themes of Separation Sunday that acts as kind of a memoir of where the band came from. The last few lines, "We were bored so we started a band. We like to play for you, we like to pray for you," are almost a manifesto of what the band is about: a rock and roll band obsessed with the big Catholic themes.

Another of the great tracks on the album, "The Weekenders," is a song about the couple in the earlier song "Chips Ahoy," and it has the feeling of something that has ended. The narrator is remembering, and wishing they could do it again, but he doesn't delude himself. What's really interesting is that the characters who recur in the earlier albums don't turn up, at least in name, in this album. Hallelujah, Gideon, and Charlemagne vanished into the Midwest, and the band telling their story seems to have moved on. It feels like a book where you really loved the characters has ended, and the author has moved on to different stories.

I read a review that called this a transitional record, and I think that's accurate. The band is shifting their focus, both lyrically and musically, and I think they address the dangers of this in one of the tracks, "Soft in the Center." The song is filled with advice, one line of which is, "You can't tell people what the want to hear if you also want to tell the truth." Another one is simply, "the center is a dangerous place." He's referring to frozen lakes, but he might also be talking about these middle albums, when a band is slowly shifting toward a newer sound.

The more I listen to this record, the more I wonder if it's the band's last album about the Twin Cities; and why shouldn't it be? They've moved to Brooklyn and developed a much larger fan base--maybe it's time to tell a different set of stories, about a different cast of characters. If this is how they end that chapter of the Hold Steady, I think it's a fitting end. It will be interesting to see how the next one begins.

Fiction Mondays: Check out My Story!

2010-05-17T08:22:00.002-04:00

Today's post is a short one--book reviews will continue next week, when I'll be writing about Jedediah Berry's excellent The Manual of Detection. Today, though, I have news: in case you missed it over the weekend, I have a story up on Opium Magazine's website! Go check it out!

Musical Wednesdays: Nerdy Links

2010-05-12T10:16:00.000-04:00

My friends Kevin Mead and Travis Helwig have a mixtape!

The Mountain Goats finally take a stand against Justin Beiber. I should probably note that I'm not entirely sure what a Justin Beiber is, but I think I'm going to agree with the creator of this website.

I really love the "Book Notes" feature over on Largehearted Boy. Music is such an important part of how I work, and I like to see what other writers put on the playlists for their work.

And finally...not nerdy, but completely awesome: Oh Boy Records is putting out a John Prine cover album featuring the Avett Brothers, Justin Vernon, Conor Oberst and many other great artists. It'll be available June 22nd.

Fiction Mondays: First Drafts

2010-05-10T08:49:00.002-04:00

It's kind of strange how stories come together at different speeds: even when you have two stories of the same word count, one may take months and another get knocked out in a matter of weeks. I have one in a notebook that I keep adding too, trying to see the shape of the story I'm telling; I mostly write it while I'm on breaks at work, and it's a slow process of discovery. The idea was initially built around two scenes, but the further into it I get, the more story there is between those scenes.

Last week, I wrote the entire first draft of a short story. I started it on Monday and finished it yesterday. The story is about twins whose mother ran off when they were kids and now calls only on holidays. I jumped into it with a few images and a small line of description, and the story came together incredibly quickly. For a first draft, I'm really proud of it. It was one of the fastest drafts of a story I've ever written, and when I re-read it, I was surprised to find that I really liked the shape of the story. Of course, it needs a lot of work, but I feel like I got the framing done now I can go in and start to work on the smaller details.

The other story feels more like I'm drawing the blueprint as I go, and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. It's a first draft, right? So what if it ends up with no doors and four chimneys?

Friday Films: Roger Ebert Hates 3-D

2010-05-07T10:00:00.001-04:00

Working at a movie theater, I've had a few customers ask when we're installing 3-D projectors. The answer is "probably never." When they ask why not, I tell them that it's a fad, which I truly believe. It's just the current iteration of Hollywood trying to give you a reason to go to the theater, and right now it's working. But it's not going to last. It never has before. At the advent of television, they brought out Smell-O-Vision, the Thriller and...3-D. And then in the 70s, as home video rental emerged, they brought out...3-D. Now that the home theater is so popular, and movie rentals are so cheap (not at Blockbuster, but that's another dying breed), they're feeling a little bit pinched and desperate. Save us, James Cameron!

Roger Ebert has a well-reasoned, intelligent rant over at Newsweek on the current version of 3-D. Definitely check it out. Here's a preview:

"3-D is a waste of a perfectly good dimension. Hollywood's current crazy stampede toward it is suicidal. It adds nothing essential to the moviegoing experience. For some, it is an annoying distraction. For others, it creates nausea and headaches. It is driven largely to sell expensive projection equipment and add a $5 to $7.50 surcharge on already expensive movie tickets. Its image is noticeably darker than standard 2-D. It is unsuitable for grown-up films of any seriousness. It limits the freedom of directors to make films as they choose. For moviegoers in the PG-13 and R ranges, it only rarely provides an experience worth paying a premium for."

Musical Wednesdays: Song of the Week

2010-05-05T10:00:00.000-04:00

The lead singer of Art Brut, has a new side project called "Everybody Was in the French Resistance...Now!" and although their album got a pretty terrible review, this song, "G.I.R.L.F.R.E.N." is really fun. I heard this song on the radio Sunday night, and it is an unabashedly ridiculous, catchy song. It should also be noted that the song is a call-back to the Modern Lovers' "Girlfriend," where Jonathan Richman misspells the word.

Fiction Mondays: Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

2010-05-03T11:00:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite ideas about writing fiction is from Flannery O'Connor. It's the idea that a moment of grace is often preceded by a moment of violence. Not only that, but it makes the action of grace possible. Now, "grace" can be interpreted in a number of ways—maybe it's the redemptive moment, or even the revelation that sometimes happens at the end of short stories. But sometimes it's less than that: it's the moment the character is ready to accept that revelation or redemption. I kept thinking of the violence/grace equation as I was reading Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, a collection of short stories full of violence and humor and vivid characters.

The majority of the characters are lower middle-class (with two notable exceptions: a wealthy real-estate developer and a viking, but more on that later) and they're all experiencing disappointment, whether it takes the form of divorce, failed inventions, or reaching old age and finding themselves too reliant on their children. There's an underlying sense of melancholy through the whole book, but Tower's ability to draw a kind of black humor from his characters and situations makes it so that the stories don't get bogged down in despair or melodrama.

The first story, "The Brown Coast," was probably my favorite in the book: a laid-off carpenter finds himself in a kind of exile on a Gulf Coast island, repairing a house for his uncle. His wife threw him out after she found another woman's footprint on the inside of his windshield. The carpenter, Bob, starts collecting fish he finds near a rocky outcropping, assembling a full aquarium, until a well-meaning neighbor gives him a sea cucumber that poisons the rest of the fish. Bob regards the sea cucumber with something like pity: he figures that if he was born a sea creature, he would be this ugly, poison-belching thing, rather than a beautiful, graceful fish. He flings it out into the water, nearly hitting a glamorous young couple on a sailboat. The story is just full of incredible imagery and language, and Tower can describe a broken porch in such a vivid way that you can see the cracked and rotted wood. But the moment where the violence and grace concept really came into play was when Bob sees what happened to his aquarium and decides to feel sorry for the sea cucumber—even though the creature has destroyed so much, it can't help its nature any more than Bob can.

There are a few stories in the book that aren't as strong—"Leopard" is written in the second person and it comes off a little forced. I feel like the story could have easily been one of my favorites if it had been told differently, because the plot is reminiscent of a Mountain Goats song: a boy home sick from school hates his stepfather and learns that someone's pet leopard is loose in the neighborhood, and the story ends with a (possibly imagined) rustling from the woods as the stepfather argues with a police officer. The second-person just didn't work for me. And "On the Show" experimented with an omniscient narrator but it could have been better-developed. On the whole, though, these were the kinds of short stories that made me want to write more short fiction.

The title story was probably one of the strangest, most surprising stories I've read in some time: it's about a viking who is recruited to go pillage an island that his crew recently returned from, when all he wants to do is stay home and spend some time with his wife. The viking and his crew get dragged along on a raid, but once they get there and realize that the island has been over-pillaged and the whole trip is worthless, they go meet some of the villagers and the narrator's friend Gnut falls in love with a local woman. The story is interesting in the way it's told: except for the fact that it revolves around vikings, the story and its characters could exist in any of Tower's stories. I guess the author was thinking about how the same troubles exist in any kind of setting or time period; the last few lines are about worrying what the world can do to the people you love, lying in bed listening for the sound of oars rowing toward your home. And it's strange how relevant that feels.

Musical Wednesdays: Links!

2010-04-28T09:21:00.000-04:00

I don't know what to write about today, so here are a few music-related links:

If you haven't yet, check out Huntronik, a frequent commenter on this blog and someone who writes about and performs music.

MIA's new video is getting a lot of attention. I haven't watched it yet, but you can find a link to her website in that article.

And if you do watch the video, head over here afterward (Explanation).

And finally, the New York Times has an excellent article about the National, and they're streaming their new album, High Violet.

Enjoy!

Fiction Mondays: Her Fearful Symmetry

2010-04-26T10:10:00.001-04:00

Last week, I read Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry, the long-awaited follow-up to The Time Traveler's Wife. What impresses me about Niffenegger's stories is their ability to successfully fuse genre and literary fiction; The Time Traveler's Wife was a love story wrapped in science fiction, and the new book is unabashedly a ghost story. It's true to what I think is a fundamental rule in good genre works: establish your rules and then see how your characters operate within them, but what brings the book into literary territory is how well her characters are developed, even the one who passes away in the first chapter to later return as a ghost.

Niffenegger widens her scope in this book, pulling a lot of characters and plots together really successfully. The bulk of the story follows Valentina and Julia Poole, who inherit an apartment in London from their Aunt Elspeth. The two are "mirror twins," seemingly identical but actually opposite--Valentina's heart is on the wrong side, for example. When they move to London, they eventually meet their upstairs neighbor, Martin, a crossword-puzzle maker suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder; and their downstairs neighbor, Robert, a PhD student writing his thesis on the nearby Highgate Cemetery. He was Elspeth's lover, and spends the first half of the book in a deep depression over losing her. Eventually, they realize that their apartment is haunted by Elspeth, who eventually manages to communicate with the twins and Robert.

The book, now that I think about it, is about being trapped. Each of these characters finds themselves stuck. Martin's disorder makes him unable to leave his apartment, even though he wants to go to Amsterdam to reconcile with his wife. Robert wants to move on and finish his thesis, but he is mixed up with the twins and Elspeth. Elspeth herself is stuck in the apartment as a ghost (there are other ways she is trapped, but one of those is a big twist at one point in the book.) Valentina wants to get away from Julia but can't.

It's also about twins, and what can sever the closeness between twins. The title is kind of a puzzle--it's borrowed from William Blake, and is a line from "The Tiger"--but I'm not sure who it refers to. Elspeth the ghost? She's a twin, but for most of the book she is not very fearful. But later, she is. And then there's the preceding line, "What immortal hand or eye," which leads me to think it does refer to Elspeth.

I'm not sure this novel had the emotional depth of The Time Traveler's Wife, but I did like to see what the author did with a wider cast of characters. I also enjoyed the geography of this book, where the apartment building was its own character, as was Highgate Cemetery. The characters' tours through the graveyard made me really want to visit, and the last scene in the graveyard (I won't spoil anything) inverted the ghost story formula really well, making the graveyard a place of tragic beauty. This might be Niffenegger's greatest strength as a writer, her ability to make a very tragic moment really beautiful. It's probably best exemplified by a scene early in the novel, when Martin's wife decides to leave him: she doesn't want to ruin any spot in the apartment by leaving a note there, so she suspends it from the ceiling, so that it will appear to be floating in the air when he finds it.

Musical Wednesdays: Songs for Bees

2010-04-21T09:56:00.000-04:00

I wasn't sure what I was going to post today--I actually thought about making up a playlist of songs about volcanoes to tie into what's going on over in Iceland, but my list came up short. And by "short," I mean I thought of two songs: Mount Eerie's "Get the Hell Out of the Way of the Volcano" and "Volcanoes" by Islands. But this morning, I woke up thinking about bees, and songs about bees, and since I was already in a playlist kind of mindset, I started thinking of songs about bees. Plus, there's that new song by the National, "Bloodbuzz Ohio," which has the lyric "I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees."

I'm including songs about hornets and wasps in this list, too, but mostly because "The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades" by Sufjan Stevens is too good to keep off of here. So here are the tracks I've come up with so far:

1. Hornets! Hornets! by the Hold Steady
2. Muzzle of Bees by Wilco
3. Birds and the Bees by the Bird and the Bee
4. The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades by Sufjan Stevens
5. Pollen by Mirah
6. Honey Bee by Tom Petty
7. Another Set of Bees in the Museum by Olivia Tremor Control
8. Honey, Honey by Feist
9. Bloodbuzz Ohio by the National
10. Evil Bee by Menomena

Anything else? Send them along! And if you haven't done so yet, check out that National Song. It's the first single off of their new album "High Violet," due out May 11th. And while we're on that subject, check out the first song from that album, premiered on Jimmy Fallon's show:

Fiction Mondays: It's That Time Again

2010-04-19T07:51:00.004-04:00

I mentioned a few months ago that I was getting back to writing short stories, and last week I realized that even though I have a few polished stories sitting here at home, I don't have any out there, making the rounds to literary magazines. This is a problem--finished stories, or stories I feel are finished, aren't doing anything just hanging around the house. So this week, it's time to start mailing (or e-mailing) them out again. Any suggestions for new and interesting venues to send these stories out to?

I know I was trying to get a book review a week up, but this week the only thing I read was Ghosts by Paul Auster, which was pretty interesting, but was really more of a long short story. It's about a detective watching a man who might be watching him back, and the confusing situation they find themselves in. It had a lot of elements of City of Glass, in which a detective gets so deep into a case that he starts to lose his own identity and question his reality. It's written in a really odd way, as though it's someone years later who only heard about what happened, and it has a lot of nods to itself as a story, which is a big theme in Auster's work.

I have some books at home I'm really excited to read and talk about, including Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned and Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry. With any luck these will be reviewed here next week and the week after. And then there's my ongoing reading of Ulysses, which I really like, but probably won't get done by mid-June (unless I quit sleeping and working and just spend hours of every day with it). But who knows? Maybe I'll read two hundred pages of it next week.

For now, I'm off to work on other stories. I just got through the first edits of one called "Hey Mercury," which I first had an idea for a long time ago and has finally come together, and I'm working on a first draft (handwritten!) of another one that doesn't have a title just yet.

Friday Films: An Education

2010-04-16T10:35:00.000-04:00

My biggest problem with the film An Education was that there just wasn’t enough there. It was only an hour and a half long, which is fine if there seems to be a complete story told in those 90 minutes, but I felt like the movie was…I don’t know, inconsequential? I didn’t feel particularly invested in the characters, even though the film was well acted, and when it ended I found myself asking, “that’s it?” And it was a different kind of “that’s it?” than I experienced watching A Serious Man, which at least had some narrative shape.

The film follows Jenny, a young suburban British girl who begins a relationship with an older man who turns out to be a con artist. And then she finds out he’s married, but not before she quits school and gets engaged to him. That’s it. The film ends with a cheesy voice-over about how she moved on with her life and started acting her age. There didn't seem to be anything at stake, really, so I didn't feel at all engaged with the story or characters.

The screenplay was written by Nick Hornby, a writer I really admire, and I found myself wondering if there just wasn’t enough source material. The movie was adapted from an essay that appeared in Granta, and it seems to me there wasn’t enough to fill an entire movie. Maybe it would have made a great short film. Or it’s possible that Nick Hornby would have been better-utilized if the movie was taken in a different direction. What if the protagonist was the older, restless and philandering married man? That’s a Nick Hornby character, isn’t it?

Like I said earlier, the acting was very solid throughout. Carey Mulligan, as Jenny, really embodied that feeling of being young and afraid you’re missing out on everything fun going on elsewhere (even if she became a less sympathetic character as the movie went on), and Peter Sarsgaard was surprising as David, the man Jenny dates; it looked like he put on some weight to play this part, and he looked like a pale, doughy British man. And Alfred Molina was excellent as always, playing Jenny’s father. He had some of the best lines in the movie, even though the fact that his character would stand back and let his daughter go around with a man twice her age without any real protest seemed to strain believability for me.

Oh, and Olivia Williams, also known as Rosemary Cross from Rushmore, appeared in the movie as Jenny’s teacher. Which only served to remind me that I liked Rushmore a lot more than An Education.

Musical Wednesday: Craig Finn Preaches to the Converted

2010-04-14T10:30:00.001-04:00

Last Friday, I went to a Hold Steady show in Jermyn, PA. They’re touring all summer to promote their new album, Heaven is Whenever, which comes out in a few weeks, but for this show, they mostly stuck to older songs because you can’t have a big sing-along when no one knows the new album’s songs yet. They did probably five or six songs off of the new record in their hour-and-a-half set, including the first single, “Hurricane J” and “We Can Get Together,” which I posted the live video of a few weeks ago; they also premiered a new one, “The Sweet Part of the City,” which was in the vein of “Certain Songs” and “Lord, I’m Discouraged.”

I was really surprised by the crowd at this show. I only know three or four Hold Steady fans, and they’re all, well, geeks. English majors who go crazy over the literary allusions and overarching themes of redemption and temptation and all of the biblical insanity in Craig Finn’s lyrics. But the fans at this show were…different. They seemed to be a bunch of bro-dudes who severely missed the point of the songs. All they hear are the whoa’s and the guitar solos, and while those are things I also love about the Hold Steady, the real heart of the band for me are the lyrics and the stories. I actually overheard two of them talking about drinking a lot of whiskey and getting all fucked up, “just like Craig Finn would,” and I had to fight the urge to turn around and berate them for completely missing the point. These songs aren’t glorifying what the characters are doing—they’re about these characters hitting bottom and slowly crawling their way back.

Craig Finn performs like a Pentecostal preacher; he moves around the stage, eyes wide like he’s delivering the gospel or predictions of damnation. He gets the audience clapping, raising their hands like they’re testifying, chanting back at him. I love it; what other working band (other than the E Street Band) gets onstage and delivers anything close to a tent revival?

The only problem with this, though, is that it felt a lot like preaching to the converted. If the goal of constant tours is partially to drum up new listeners, then how does a band that puts on a show that is really for the die-hard fans draw in new people? Maybe a newcomer to the band sees the fervor and the familiarity and can’t help but dive in; but maybe some other newcomers feel that the fan base is a closed system because the conversation between the performers and the audience is so intimate. Just something to wonder about; I mean, I am already firmly in the camp of Hold Steady fans.

There were some songs they didn’t do that I really would have liked to hear, and a few they played that aren’t among my favorites. Even though Separation Sunday is one of my favorite albums, the song “Hornets! Hornets!” just doesn’t do it for me, and that was the second-to-last song. I still haven’t heard “How a Resurrection Really Feels” live, but I bet if I keep going to their shows, they’ll eventually play it. And where’s the fun in a resurrection if you don’t have to wait for it?

And as promised, I want to let everyone know that Record Store Day is this Saturday! Go support your local record store! The Hold Steady (see, this is related) will have an extremely limited edition of the new record available at some stores. Hope I get one.

Fiction Mondays: How "Catching Fire" is like "The Empire Strikes Back"

2010-04-12T09:53:00.004-04:00

First off, an announcement: I have a bunch of really exciting posts lined up this week, including a review of a Hold Steady concert (and a bit about Record Store Day) on Wednesday and a belated review of “An Education” on Friday. Be sure to check in to read these upcoming posts.

Today is also exciting, mostly because I get to really stretch out my geek brain while I talk about Catching Fire, the second book in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy. The book is slower-paced than the first, with less emphasis on the games themselves, but I think it accomplishes what middle books in trilogies should really excel at: it continues the themes and ideas started in the first, action-packed book, and sets up the excitement to come at the end of the series.

Don’t read on if you don’t want the book spoiled. Instead, go read the first two books and come back to see if you agree with me.

While I was reading Catching Fire, I had a sudden moment of realization: the book worked so well as the middle of a trilogy because it seemed full of references to and themes from the mother of all second chapters in trilogies: The Empire Strikes Back. So instead of a full review, I’m going to look at some of the similarities.

Rebel Defeat: In Empire, the rebels get slaughtered. From the battle of Hoth through the end of the movie, it is clear that the Empire is better-funded, better-informed, and more dangerous than the rebels had originally thought. In Catching Fire, the protagonist Katniss Everdeen realizes very early in the book that the Capitol’s leaders know more than she does and are capable of destroying anyone who might stand up to them.

Training: In Empire, Luke goes to Dagobah, meets Yoda, and starts training to become the hero he needs to be. Katniss begins training once she realizes she must take part in the Hunger Games for a second time, but the training is for more than just the games: it’s to make her into the leader the revolution needs. Her trainer isn’t quite the sage figure that Yoda is; he’s a surly drunk named Haymitch who is the only prior champion from her District. But like Yoda, he knows more than he lets on.

The Reversal: When Luke leaves Dagobah, he races off to Cloud City to rescue his friends, only to find a mess that finds some very strange Allies. Not a direct parallel, but when Katniss gets to the games, she finds that the situation is more complex than she knew, and survival will require her to cooperate with someone she isn’t sure she can trust (Lando Calrissian?). But there’s an even bigger twist at the end that sets up the next book.

The Ending: Catching Fire ends with one of the two heroes, Peeta, kidnapped by the Capitol, and Katniss having her left arm tended to in the sick bay of a large vessel. Which is pretty much exactly how Empire ends: Han Solo missing, Luke being repaired, the hope of a rebel resurgence on the horizon. It’s not quite hopeful: there’s a lot in both of these stories that still needs to be done, and you can’t help but wonder at the end of Catching Fire how the residents of District 13 will react to the arrival of the rebels.

So if Catching Fire is The Empire Strikes Back, then will Mockingjay, the third book, share DNA with Return of the Jedi? I’ll bet on it, but a slightly modified sequence of events. The rebels will work with the natives of District 13 (Ewoks), Katniss will travel to the Capitol to rescue Peeta before the rebels destroy the city (Luke goes to the Death Star), and at the end, everyone will dance the yub-nub. That’s just my prediction, anyway.

Friday Films: When the Truth is Found to Be Lies

2010-04-09T09:42:00.002-04:00

I finally saw the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, and I have to say: right after I watched it, I hated the ending. If you haven’t seen it, don’t read ahead—I can’t talk about the movie without spoiling the ending. As disappointed as I initially was with how the movie ended, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and the more I did, the more I understood what they were trying to accomplish with it; but more on that later.

The movie follows Larry Gopnik, a college physics professor going through a “rough patch,” which I would say is an understatement. His wife wants a divorce, someone has written letters that threaten to keep him from receiving tenure, his kids are awful, and people around him keep dying. Larry is facing a crisis, so he begins to visit with his rabbis to try to get some kind of explanation.

The first rabbi, actually a junior rabbi, suggests that Larry has forgotten the presence of God in everything around him. “Look at the parking lot,” he says, “as if you’ve never seen it before.” The second rabbi relates the story of a Jewish dentist who saw words written in Hebrew on the back of a goyim patient’s teeth and almost drove himself crazy trying to understand the meaning. The third rabbi won’t even see Larry—he’s busy contemplating the lyrics to Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love.”

The movie ends abruptly, with Larry’s doctor calling him about something they found in an x-ray early in the movie and a looming tornado. That’s it. Like I said, at first I hated it, and then the entire next day, I was thinking about how the whole movie seemed like a riff on the book of Job. And then I realized: it’s not just based on the book of Job, it’s adapted from it. The three rabbis are Job’s friends, the kids being awful and out-of-touch stand in for Job’s kids being taken from him, denying Larry tenure is the equivalent of taking away his livestock. The Coens took the book and transplanted it to the Midwest in the 1960s, and by looking at it this way the ending makes perfect sense. Toward the end of Job, God appears as a whirlwind and pretty much chastises everyone for thinking they can actually understand his reasons. Only here, we don't see the ending in which Job gets everything back.

On the whole, this was a much better movie than No Country for Old Men, which I didn't even care for after a full day of puzzling over it. The Coen brothers are really talented filmmakers, and their attention to detail in recreating a suburb in the 1960s was really impressive. I had never considered the idea of Job being a black comedy, but I think it worked. My only question--and I guess the part that I'm kind of unsatisfied about--is the opening of the movie. Does anyone have an explanation for the part with the old man and the dybbuk?

Musical Wednesdays: Baseball Edition

2010-04-07T09:52:00.000-04:00

"I ain't ever had a job, I just always played baseball."
-Satchel Paige

Well, it's that time of year again. The weather is getting warmer, the afternoons longer, the Bruce Springsteen songs more relevant. That's right, my friends: baseball season. So today's post is two of my favorite songs about the sport. One of them is a classic performed by the Hold Steady, and the other is a love song for baseball sung by a Scottish band.

First up: "Piazza, New York Catcher" by Belle & Sebastian

And "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," as performed by the Hold Steady. There used to be a video of the band recording this one, but it appears to have disappeared, which is a shame because there's a great moment after the song ends when Craig Finn takes a swig of beer. It's like his way of saying, "Play Ball." Since the video is gone, I think it falls to all of us here to have a cold beer to kick off the season.

Fiction Mondays: Short Novels

2010-04-05T14:03:00.003-04:00

Even though I’m reading Ulysses, I want to keep up with my book-a-week schedule, so my solution? Short novels! Maybe even novellas, eventually. It’s a real change of pace for me, but I am really interested to see how these shorter books work. Who knows? It might even inspire me to someday write a shorter novel of my own.

Last week, I read Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, which is about the murder of a young, idealistic man in Vietnam in the 1950s and the potential for a supposed innocent to cause untold destruction and suffering. The story follows Fowler, a jaded and cynical reporter, as he deals with the fallout of the murder of Pyle, the American of the novel’s title. But things are not so simple: Pyle stole Fowler’s girlfriend. And before he died, he had started to channel money to a “Third Force,” which he believed would defeat the communists and secure American allies in the region.

What really surprised me in this book is the certainty that Greene had, even in 1955, that America could not win in Vietnam. Over and over, he dismisses (through Fowler) the notion that the United States could come to the region and spread democracy. He believes that Pyle is foolish for believing this will be the outcome, for thinking that channeling money to a rebel force will cause anything but more bloodshed. It’s strange to read it after the war was fought, and in the middle of another war to spread democracy. I wonder what people thought of his predictions in the 1950s.

I thought the book was structured really well; it jumps really smoothly between Fowler’s memories of Pyle and the aftermath of his death, leading to the moment of overlap that you know will occur at the end. I don’t know if the characters were strong enough for me—at times they seemed more like archetypes than actual people. You had Fowler, the old man who was a little world-weary and seemed to have just given up, and the Pyle, the enthusiastic but ultimately naïve young man who thinks he’s going to save the world but ends up causing more trouble than he anticipated. They seemed to embody ideas about containment versus isolation during the Cold War era, and at times I found that this really detracted from the story.

This is the second Graham Greene novel I’ve read, and I definitely preferred the other one, Brighton Rock, to this one. I think the biggest difference for me was that the character in that book, while deranged and evil, was so compelling that you couldn’t help but be dragged along on his criminal escapades, and The Quiet American was the complete opposite. Without a really interesting plot, these characters would have been unbearable stand-ins for different philosophies. The plot alone moves you along, which I think is fine for certain genre novels, but there has to be something more. I mean, Greene also wrote The Third Man, which has a really engaging plot as well, but what makes that movie memorable is the mysterious character of Harry Lime and the way he is presented to the audience. He’s a compelling character within a strong genre plot, which is more memorable.

Meanwhile, back in Pennsylvania....

Just a small update on my own writing: a few short stories are coming along really well, and it's looking like I'm going to be heading off to graduate school in the fall. More details to follow when I've made a final decision.

Musical Wednesdays: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

2010-03-31T10:00:00.000-04:00

"Now, the making of a good mixtape is a very subtle art. Many do's and don'ts. First of all, you're using someone else's poetry to express how you feel. This is a delicate thing."
-High Fidelity

Talking about Crazy Heart last week really set me thinking about soundtracks, and what makes one really memorable or perfect for a movie. Like a mixtape, there's an art to it, and it goes beyond just picking good songs. Anyone can pick twelve good songs (okay, not anyone, but most people) and put them all into their movie, but at its best, the soundtrack should convey a time and a place, a mood, the mental state of the characters involved. It can be used ironically, playing a happy song as everything goes wrong, or to underscore what's happening inside of a character. A soundtrack has the power to take a song that isn't great and transform it (I'm thinking of the jukebox scene in Say Anything) or to take a song that's already great and give you an entirely new association with it ("Tiny Dancer" in Almost Famous).

For me, Almost Famous has the ultimate soundtrack. You can probably say that about any of Cameron Crowe’s movies, which use forty years of pop music in every scene, but this one is the best pairing of music to image. From that scene with “Tiny Dancer” on the bus to the clip of “Misty Mountain Hop” as the car rolls into New York City, the music choices work on every level. There’s a sense of time, a sense of the shifting musical scene in the early 70s, and the feeling of an impending crash. At times, the soundtrack almost seems to be in conversation with the movie: there’s a part early on where two characters discuss Lou Reed sounding like David Bowie, and much later in the movie, a Bowie cover of “Waiting for the Man” plays over the action of the story. It’s just this little moment that shows how much care went into connecting the soundtrack to the plot.

I could probably go on for 2000 words about what makes a good soundtrack and what completely ruins it for me (but I won’t). Sometimes what works in one movie is horrible in another. An example: I love the way the soundtrack of 500 Days of Summer works, and the way the characters interact with the songs. The repeated use of the Smiths that initially connects the characters works really well, and the point where “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want” moves from Joseph-Gordon Leavitt’s computer speakers to being played over the action is a well-crafted moment. They call attention to the music in the soundtrack, but it’s in such a character-defining and relevant way that it seems natural to do so. Contrast this with the moment in the movie Garden State when the characters call attention to the Shins’ “New Slang,” a moment that I think completely takes the audience out of the narrative.

What are your favorite soundtracks? I’m a personal fan of Wes Anderson’s because I think in addition to using great songs he utilizes them really well. Cameron Crowe always has really great music in his movies as well—I would argue that the soundtrack in Elizabethtown is its own character. What are the best? What are the worst?

Fiction Mondays: Drown

2010-03-29T10:28:00.000-04:00

Junot Díaz’s “Drown” was on my to-read list for a really long time, so I finally bought it and got around to reading it. I loved “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” and the short stories I had read, like “How to Date a Whitegirl, Blackgirl, Browngirl, Halfie,” were so intelligent and engaging and funny that I knew I had to read the whole collection. The book didn’t disappoint.

Junot Díaz’s greatest strength, I think, is his voice. The stories are often in the first-person and feel so natural, like you’re hearing them told rather than reading them. This is a tough trick to pull off, I think. It requires a really delicate balance of details to remain realistic, and I think Díaz excels at providing enough information to really flesh out his characters without making it seem like they’re noticing things that no real person would notice. Not that the details are scant in any way: there are small things in all of the stories that the characters notice because of how he develops them, whether it’s the pool table deliveryman who notes the details on all of the models because he’s trying to save enough money to buy one for himself, or a guy going through a breakup at the same time as the woman in the apartment underneath his, who knows her route around the apartment because it mirrors his own.

There’s also an excellent sense of place in these stories. The ones that take place in New Jersey travel on the New Jersey Turnpike or the Garden State Parkway, or they take the bus to Paramus, while the ones in the Dominican Republic evoke the place so well that I can see it even though I’ve never been there. Díaz has a real talent when it comes to setting; the story “Boyfriend,” about the breakups on separate floors, was one of my favorites. It used the layout of the apartment so well, and gave the story a geography that made it incredibly concrete and visual.

I don’t know if I’d call it a collection of linked stories, exactly; while many have the same characters and background, there is a lot of variation and a number of stories that involve separate characters altogether. The connections between the stories are really interesting, though. There are themes of missing fathers (or fathers who vanish and then return), and a recurring question of what it means to be financially stable. While the stories that take place in the Dominican Republic often touch on how the poorer characters scrape by, the New Jersey stories find them a little wealthier, but there is always a price. There’s a character who supports his mother by selling pot, but he worries that she might find out where the money comes from, and he has higher aspirations; the pool table deliveryman has a stable income, but used to steal money from the register to buy presents for his girlfriend.

Díaz is a really powerful writer, and his ability to develop characters makes these stories resonate long after you’ve finished the book. Even in the most broken characters, he has such a huge amount of empathy toward them that you can’t help but hope things will turn out for them. The second-to-last story in the book, which revisits a character seen in the first story, takes a deformed man and makes him into an odd kind of hero, running around his town and trying to perform good deeds. It kind of acts as an explanation for the rest of the characters in the stories: yes, they can seem like monsters at times, but their intentions are not necessarily malevolent. It just takes a different way of looking at them to understand what they’re trying to do.

Friday Films: Crazy Heart

2010-03-26T10:00:00.000-04:00

This week, I went to see “Crazy Heart,” which is pretty late in its run, but only came to East Stroudsburg about two weeks ago. It’s a really excellent movie, and Jeff Bridges is as great in it as they say he is. I feel like a lot has already been said about it, but I still want to toss some of my thoughts out there.

I was especially impressed with Jeff Bridges’ singing voice and his complete embodiment of the character. I guess you can make comparisons between Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler and Jeff Bridges in this film—they’re both characters past their prime, weary from living too hard and trying to survive on their earlier success. But Mickey Rourke as “Randy the Ram” was (even though he was great in the role) still Mickey Rourke: he brought a lot of his own story into the character so much that you couldn’t see it just as a story about a wrestler. It was instead about the actor playing him, also out of chances, also weary, looking for a comeback. Jeff Bridges, though, took on the role of a broken old country singer so well that you kind of forgot he was Jeff Bridges; instead, he was this Kristofferson kind of character, trying to find one more hit song before slipping into obscurity.

Of course, the music is the highlight of the movie. The songs, particularly the Oscar-winning “The Weary Kind,” are more than just good songs from movies. They’re great songs. There’s a scene about halfway through the movie where Bad Blake is lying in bed, writing the song, and he asks Maggie Gyllenhal’s character if she knows that one. When she tells him she can’t remember who first sang it, he replies, “That’s how you know it’s a good one. It feels like you already know it.” It was a really interesting window into the songwriting process, which was kind of a theme that carried through the whole movie.

There’s a discussion early in the movie about who is “real country.” Bad Blake talks about his protégé, now a huge country star, and about how he has to try to hide it, “to compete with what’s coming out of Nashville.” Later on, the two men have a show together and Tommy Sweet, played by Colin Farrell, is living the life of one of those overblown country stars, with three tour buses and a big-shot tour manager and a full staff. The song “Hank Didn’t Do it Like This” is playing as Bad Blake pulls in next to the buses and walks backstage, and I think it would have been really easy at this point for the movie to make Tommy Sweet into a parody, a punching bag for all of the Brad Paisleys currently making millions of dollars, but they didn’t, and I think that ended up being much more powerful. Instead, he was this minor character trying to navigate superstardom without abandoning his roots, and it made him really sympathetic. He’s also the character who gives Bad Blake a chance to write new material, to break out of playing the same old songs over and over.

It’s not a perfect movie—it feels a little long at parts, and the montage of Bad Blake trying to get himself together seemed a little too familiar—but on the whole, it's worth seeing. I’ve heard a lot of comparisons to "Tender Mercies," a Robert Duvall movie about a touring country singer, which I haven’t seen yet. I think the producers of the movie wanted to pay tribute to where their movie came from: Duvall has a small part in the movie, as Bad Blake’s friend and bartender, a man who seems to have gone through this before. Like the country singers in the film, they acknowledge their roots while moving forward, and this struck me as a really admirable way to make a movie.

Musical Wednesdays: RIP Alex Chilton, 1950-2010

2010-03-24T10:00:00.000-04:00

"Did you know that 'The Letter' by the Box Tops is a minute and fifty eight seconds long? It means nothing. But it takes them less than two minutes to accomplish what it takes Jethro Tull hours to not accomplish!" – Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs, “Almost Famous”

You have probably heard by now that Alex Chilton, legendary musician from the Box Tops and Big Star, passed away last week. “The Letter” remains one of my favorite pop songs ever, and it launched the incredible career of an artist who never seemed to slow down. Chilton embodied the idea of the “working musician,” the guy who would stop between tours long enough to record an album, or to appear on someone else’s.

He never became a rock star, at least not to most people, but he was much more than that: he was a presence. Through shifts in style, often within the space of an album, he played whatever influenced him, whatever moved him. He went from teen pop star to pioneering rocker to guest on the Replacements’ Alex Chilton to covering jazz standards on an acoustic guitar. He encompassed the music that came before him and five decades of shifting musical tastes in the second half of the 20th century.

Chilton was supposed to play at this year’s South by Southwest festival, a show that instead became a tribute featuring M. Ward, Mike Mills, and Sondre Lerche. Here are a few videos from that tribute, a fitting goodbye to such an influential artist.

Fiction Mondays: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

2010-03-22T10:00:00.000-04:00

I mentioned last Wednesday that I was reading Murakami, and I have now finished “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World”. My head hurts a bit, because there’s a lot to wrap my mind around, but I think I liked it. It’s not as great as “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” or “Kafka on the Shore,” and it’s very much a science fiction novel, which I honestly was not expecting going into it. I never really think of Murakami as a sci-fi writer; he’s more of a magical realist to me, someone who writes about normal people who stumble into a weird, sinister other world. That’s all in “Hard-Boiled Wonderland,” but the protagonist is not at all “normal,” and the setting is a futuristic version of Tokyo where two kinds of computer specialists are warring over information. There are hints of advanced technology and a large portion of the story involves altering humans with a module that is implanted into the brain to run a computer program.

I guess what it seems like is a Murakami story set a few years later than most of his other work. While many of the familiar elements of his books are there (including a well-like structure that leads to a bizarre netherworld), they are warped and transported. The detail in the book that made me think of this was that the unnamed protagonist explains that he used to have a wife and a cat (another recurring Murakami element), but that they left him. First the wife, then the cat, exactly like in “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.” It could be the same character, ten years later. In that time, the world has gotten a little stranger, the weird parts of the earlier story becoming prevalent parts of society.

What I did really like was the structure of the book; it’s split into two sections, reality and myth. The chapters alternate, with the connection between them becoming more and more apparent. Strangely enough, I found myself thinking of the current season of LOST, with the narrative divided between an on-island timeline and a “flash-sideways” timeline. The writers of the show haven’t yet revealed how these two plotlines link to each other, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it worked out to be a lot like Murakami’s book, where the character has to decide whether to escape to his “real life,” or to keep living in the myth. Only on LOST, it isn’t so clear which is which.

Haruki Murakami is one of my favorite writers, and it’s been a while since I’ve read one of his books. His fictional world has become so familiar, and I was glad to be back in it, to see where he would take the story. There were a lot of unexpected things in this novel (and I don’t just mean all of the crazy sci-fi stuff; that kind of stuff is almost expected in a Murakami novel) and I loved the forays into old movies, Russian novels, and Bob Dylan songs throughout the book. I think I’m going to check out his nonfiction book, “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.” I’d be interested to see if he sheds some light on his own themes, the way Chabon did in “Manhood for Amateurs.”

I also started a new project last week: reading "Ulysses." I'm trying to space it out so that I finish it on Bloomsday, June 16th. That's the day the novel takes place, and it will require me to read about 50 pages a week. So far, so good. But don't worry: I'll be reading other books along the way. If you want to join me in this big reading project, let me know. I just finished the first section (The "Telemachiad") and now I'm onto the second part. And yes, I know it's another book with connections to LOST. But they've thrown so many literary references in there that it's hard to find a book that doesn't somehow connect.

Friday Films: Inglourious Basterds

2010-03-18T10:00:00.000-04:00

I’ve been a Tarantino fan for a long time, ever since I saw “Reservoir Dogs” when I was probably way too young to watch it. “Pulp Fiction” came next, and then “Jackie Brown” and “Kill Bill” when I got to college. There has always been something so appealing about his style, the aesthetic of grabbing disparate parts from a lifelong immersion in popular culture and shaping them into something coherent and over-the-top and referential that they become so much greater than the sum of their parts. The combination in “Kill Bill” of kung fu, samurai, and western films produces something completely unrecognizable because it is such a loving and meticulous pastiche. So I was pretty intrigued to watch “Inglourious Basterds,” Tarantino’s World War II epic, to see how his style translated.

The movie is, like all of Tarantino’s films on some level, about the movies it draws from. But where Tarantino’s interests in film are more obliquely referenced in his other movies, here the film is used very literally as a weapon against fascists. There’s a moment relatively early in the movie where Brad Pitt, as the leader of the “Basterds,” tells a Nazi officer that “watching the Bear Jew beat Nazis to death is the closest these boys get to going to the movies,” and this link between violent entertainment and movies just grows throughout the film.

“Inglourious Basterds,” like a lot of Tarantino’s movies, is told in chapters; it opens in the French countryside, with a Nazi known as “the Jew Hunter” (nicknames are big in this movie) seeking a family that has gone into hiding. The opening minutes of the movie are so tense, with such a sense of mounting dread, that it’s completely engrossing. It was like the first few minutes of “Kill Bill,” where you knew exactly what was going to happen, and that makes it worse. You’re waiting for the gunshot. Christophe Waltz, who won the Academy Award for his portrayal of “the Jew Hunter,” earned it based on this scene alone: he plays it so sane, so methodical, but with this undercurrent of psychosis that is completely convincing. At the end of the opening chapter, the family’s daughter escapes to Paris, where she opens a cinema.

Meanwhile, the Basterds, an all-Jewish squadron led by a redneck named Aldo Raine, work their way across occupied France, killing and scalping Nazis. Their ultimate goal? Well, Hitler of course. But along the way, they inspire fear and become legends; there’s the “Bear Jew,” who beats Nazis to death with a baseball bat, and a German who enlisted in the Nazi army solely to kill his commanding officers. They eventually become involved in “Operation Kino,” a plot to destroy the Nazi leaders during a film screening, and work their way to Paris. They don’t know, however, that the cinema’s owner, hell-bent on revenge, is planning to do the same thing during the high-profile premiere of “The Nation’s Pride,” a film celebrating a Nazi sniper who killed two hundred enemy soldiers.

I won’t spoil anything of the film’s climax in case you haven’t seen it, but this write-up would be incomplete if I didn’t mention the last lines. Brad Pitt’s character, after carving a swastika into a Nazi character’s head (a way to make sure his past will always stay with him), looks down and says, “I think this may be my masterpiece.” It’s difficult to not hear Tarantino in that line, commenting on this movie. It’s the culmination of years of movies about violence and revenge and movies, and I can see how the director would consider this his finest work. And you know, I just might agree with him.

Musical Wednesdays: Dancing About Architecture

2010-03-17T09:00:00.000-04:00

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."
-Anonymous

I was thinking this week about the uses of music in fiction, because I’m currently reading Haruki Murakami and he uses jazz in his books like Woody Allen does in his movies. It makes sense—if I remember correctly, Murakami owned a jazz club before he became a writer. Maybe he still owns a jazz club. But he’s a writer who seems to always have a soundtrack going. There’s the classical music in the beginning of “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” and the acoustic guitar in “Norwegian Wood.” These aren’t just briefly touched upon; these are essential to the novels. And more than that, I think there's an expectation that the readers have at least a basic knowledge of the bands or the songs involved.

So I was wondering what readers think of using music in books: is there a time factor involved, or a level of cultural saturation that needs to be reached before music should be included in fiction? Is it okay to use the Beatles but not Pavement? Where is the threshold? To me, it would seem that the key is how ingrained into the culture the music is--the Kinks are a band that most people know, while a reference to MC5, a band formed at the same time, might not register with as many readers because they never got to the same level of popularity outside of Detroit.

My thought on it is a lot like Stephen King’s thought about the use of brand names in his books: “Do you look in the medicine cabinet and see blank bottles?” Similarly, do you turn on the radio and just hear music? No, you hear the classic rock station, or George Clinton, or Neko Case. To ignore that seems inorganic to me. I use music a lot in my writing because it's an important part of my day--to forget to include music would be taking some truth from the stories I'm trying to tell.

But running counter to this is the possibility of becoming dated. If you write a story featuring some band that briefly flared up only to become a minor pop culture touchstone, your story is going to suffer from being a story of that moment. It might distract a reader from the flow of that story if they have to wonder who the hell you're talking about, or what genre the music is in.

So my questions for today: what are the best uses of music in fiction that you've read? And what are the worst?

(Non)Fiction Mondays: Manhood for Amateurs

2010-03-15T14:58:00.002-04:00

Last week, I read Michael Chabon’s “Manhood for Amateurs,” a collection of personal essays about the author’s experiences as a father and as a man in general. I was kind of wary about reading it—sometimes learning too much about an author’s personal life is detrimental to how much you like their writing—but after the first few essays, that feeling dissipated. At some points, I think reading these essays even shed some light on some aspects of Chabon’s novels.

The book is broken down into thematic sections, each sticking to the format of a “handbook” of sorts for being a modern man. The section titles include “Techniques of Betrayal,” "Patterns of Early Enchantment, and “Tactics of Wonder and Loss”, which I thought was a clever way to tie essays together. The essays themselves cover a lot of ground, touching on everything from memories of Chabon’s grandfather’s basement workshop to the merits of raising children who are, well, geeks.

But not just geeks: that same essay is where Chabon gets the book’s title. He says he is raising a family of “amateurs,” kids who are extremely interested in things like Dr. Who and Star Wars, who really love diving into these things with abandon. It’s a use of the word “amateurs” I hadn’t ever thought of, but it makes sense in its way. An amateur, whether it’s in sports or arts, is someone who is only there because of passion. I devour comic books and LOST and such because they get me excited and I like to talk about them and think about them.

While some of the essays are better than others (there's one about the author's "murse," or man-purse, that I'm still on the fence about), the absolute best essay was called “The Story of Our Story” and it’s about Chabon’s younger brother. As an older brother myself, the essay, which was about the stories we always return to, the ones we know by heart and still tell one another, reminded me a lot of the worlds my brother and I liked to create when we were younger, and about how we have these shared memories that we each remember differently. “My life story really began when I had someone to tell it to,” Chabon says.

This is a quick read; the essays are each only a few pages, but they’re mostly really interesting, and Chabon has an engaging voice and eye for detail that are common to his fiction and nonfiction. This is the second book of his nonfiction I have read, and I think it’s even more enjoyable than “Maps and Legends,” which I read last year. If you’re a fan of “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,” “Wonder Boys,” and Chabon’s other novels, this book serves as a kind of companion piece, where you can see the same themes and concerns visited in a different format. And if you haven’t read those novels, go read them.

Fiction Mondays: Autograph Man

2010-03-08T12:01:00.000-05:00

This week's book (yes, I'm trying to read a book every week) was Zadie Smith's "Autograph Man," her follow-up to "White Teeth," and a book that seemed to suffer from ridiculously high expectations. It seems to be a pretty common occurrence for second novels when the author's debut was insanely great (see: the reviews of Joshua Ferris' "The Unnamed"), but I tried not to let the critical reaction influence my reading at all. Here's a confession: I love second novels like this. They're like second albums, the long-awaited follow-ups that everyone agrees will never be as great as the first one. So I tried to go into this novel without expectations, so I could take it for what it was.

The story follows Alex-Li Tandem, a Chinese-Jewish-British collector of Autographs, in the week leading up to the anniversary of his father's death, when he is expected to perform kaddish in front of his friends and family. Along the way, he tries to obtain an autograph of Kitty Alexander, a 1950s film star, and to make up with his girlfriend, who has a broken finger because Alex wrecked his car while she was his passenger.

The story is about a character who is looking for redemption, but it's a take on that type of story where the character actively rejects redemption or tries to avoid it. He's drunk or stoned for a large portion of the book; he alienates the people around him; when his girlfriend has to go in for surgery, Alex leaves for New York. Every time you think he's going to have a relevatory moment, he screws up (my personal favorite is a time when he decides to go to the bar and drink alphabetically instead of going home). He's like the protagonist of Flannery O'Connor's "Wise Blood" in that he knows exactly what he should do to be a better person and actively does the opposite thing. It's an odd character type, and one that could have been really alienating from another author, but Zadie Smith moves the story forward with such momentum and surrounds Alex with such a great cast that it makes it more exciting--while you read it, you wonder if she will pull it off, and how it will be done.

It's difficult to discuss too much of the plot without revealing too much, but I will talk about the structure and the religious aspects of the book. The novel is divided into two sections (well, three if you count the long prologue and four if you count the epilogue), each corresponding to a different religious idea. The first section is called "The Kabbalah of Alex-Li Tandem," divided into ten chapters that correspond to the ten "sefirot," which I took to understand from the novel's forays into discussions of mysticism as ten aspects of God in humans. They're the steps a person has to take to achieve mystic enlightenment. The second section is called "The Zen of Alex-Li Tandem," and is based on a story involving a bull. It's not really elaborated on, but if I can guess (based on my own reading of Zen Buddhist books), I would say it's a metaphor for enlightenment--going out and seeking the bull, taming the bull, and carrying it forth into the world seems to correspond to achieving enlightenment and going through life in that manner. Maybe I am wrong, though.

The real meaning of this religious structure and the mysticism doesn't become clear until the last few pages of the book, when Alex's personal history and his friend Adam's forays into mysticism finally converge in a really beautiful moment where Alex shows some hope that he's not completely irredeemable. The ending is really interesting, and again I won't spoil it, but it's a scene that ties all of the characters together (and this is something Zadie Smith tends to do, isn't it? There's that scene at the reveal of the supermouse in "White Teeth," and that scene of the character's reading at the end of "On Beauty"...) while also exploring the religious themes and the nature of the past and present.

It's a quick read, a really interesting book. I can see why it didn't fare so well with critics; I mean, it's not as fantastic as "White Teeth," and it doesn't have that complexity or the giant cast, and at times it seems like some of the supporting characters aren't as fleshed out as they could be. But at the same time, it's a novel that, despite its flaws, has a lot of passion, a lot of belief in why the character's story needs to be told. It kind of ties into this thought I had recently about which sticks with you more, the story that is technically perfect and polished to the point of austerity, or a story that's a little messy but obviously cared-about by its writer and with genuine passion? I think I'd rather have the mess than a hermetically-sealed perfect story anytime.

Friday Films: Shutter Island

2010-03-05T09:41:00.000-05:00

Last Monday, I went to see "Shutter Island," the new Scorcese movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo. I was a little wary, because some of the reviews were less than stellar, but everyone I personally know (the opinions that matter a lot more to me) said it was fantastic, so I went into the movie cautiously optimistic. I was not disappointed.

From the first scene, with the two US Marshalls on a ferry to the titular island, the aesthetic of the movie is unlike most modern movies. There's a fantastic use of rear-projection that gives the movie--set in 1954--the look and feel of a movie of that time. There's a little bit of backstory, where we learn DiCaprio's wife died in a fire and that he's never worked with his partner before, and then they arrive at the island, which houses the mental institution where the protagonists are going to investigate a missing person. The music at this point gets a little overwhelming, which might be my only complaint. I think I understand what he was doing, though--with the music blaring, it's easier for the movie to disorient the audience.

There's a lot going on in the movie, with DiCaprio's character flashing back frequently to the liberation of Dachau, as well as imagining his deceased wife, who was killed in a fire, giving him instructions. Scorcese seems to want to fully explore every possibility for the movie to take before revealing the ending, so there are many diversions and discussions into the possibility that the mental hospital is serving as a site for medical experimentation, that the arsonist who killed DiCaprio's wife is a secret prisoner on the island, and that the hospital's administrators have brought DiCaprio onto the island because they know he's on to them. There's a storm, the power cuts out, and DiCaprio starts to question reality. I won't spoil anything of the ending, but I will say that Scorcese's ability to constantly increase the tension until the film reaches a breaking point is really incredible. By the time the Marshals find themselves in "Ward C," home of the most dangerous criminals, the tension and unease makes the slightest movement onscreen shocking.

I love watching a movie by a director clearly knows a lot about film history and is not afraid to show their love of classic movies in a new work. This movie, while definitely a Scorcese film, has the feel of many Hitchcock movies, and seems to drop little references to many of them. There's a scene that reminded me a lot of "Vertigo," while another reminded me of "Spellbound," and I like that Scorcese can pull of those references without using them as a crutch. I will give you one word of advice if you're going into the movie: pay careful attention to the editing, and watch the scene where they're interviewing patients very closely.

Musical Wednesdays: I Should Have Gone to Bonnaroo Last Year

2010-03-03T09:00:00.000-05:00

Last summer, a few of us tossed around the idea of going to Bonnaroo, the four-day music festival held in Manchester, TN. The line-up was incredible, with Bruce Springsteen, Neko Case, Wilco, David Byrne, the Decemberists...so many bands I love, more than enough to make up for the inclusion of acts I don't really care for (Phish, Animal Collective). But last year, we couldn't afford the trip and the tickets, so we decided not to go. I remember thinking, "Well, maybe next year."

Now that it's March, I've started thinking about the summer, and about the festivals that occur during the summer. So today, I went on the the Bonnaroo website and the first thing I saw was "The Dave Matthews Band." And a bit further down that same row, Weezer (not 1997 Weezer, mind you, but current unrecognizable Weezer). And Kings of Leon. And a half-dozen bands that I've heard exactly once, only to change the station. I will not name names.

It seems like the line-up is the exact opposite of last year's. There are some good bands buried in this list, ranging from Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeroes to Jimmy Cliff to Steve Martin (I'm sorry. Mr. Steve Martin.), but I just don't see how they're enough to overcome some of the other more dubious choices. I am looking at the list, but I am failing to be at all interested. I'd rather see the bands individually, I think. I can't see taking the time or spending the money when I'm less than enthused about most of the acts. I'm sure they'll announce more artists soon, and I'll see if I change my mind.

Until then, I'll say (again) "Maybe next year."

Fiction Mondays: the Lazarus Project

2010-03-01T08:44:00.002-05:00

Last week, I finished reading Aleksandar Hemon's "The Lazarus Project," and it was one of those books that took a few days to really assemble my thoughts about. I really liked it, and the ending was much different than I expected. It was different in a good way, though--anything else might have seemed forced, an attempt to get the two storylines to resolve in a way that wouldn't have felt so organic.

The novel is a story of two immigrants who move from Eastern Europe to Chicago, one at the turn of the 20th century and one almost a century later. Lazarus, who came to America after the pogroms in Eastern Europe in the late 1800s, is killed by the chief of the Chicago police, and the event sets off an anti-anarchist wave through the city (and possibly through the country). While there is no evidence that Lazarus was carrying out an assassination attempt on behalf of the anarchist cause, police statements and a newspaper writer named Miller escalate the fear of foreigners, while the later disappearance of Lazarus' body leaves many Christians convinced that the second coming of Christ will soon occur. In the middle of this cultural and religious upheaval, Lazarus' sister Olga tries to navigate her grief and the political factions trying to use Lazarus' death for their own gain.

100 years later, Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian writer, begins to research for a book about Lazarus. He and his friend Rora, a war photographer who escaped Sarajevo during the seige, return to Eastern Europe and begin to follow the trail that they hope will lead to Lazarus' origins. There are odd connections along the way--a corrupt journalist that Rora knew during the war has the same last name as the journalist writing about Lazarus--but more important are the connections between Lazarus and Brik. Although their stories are far different, they have both experienced the disappointment of immigrants who find themselves working miserable jobs to get by. They feel cheated by the promise of America. Even though Brik has married an American woman and settled (somewhat) into his American life, he still feels a deep connection to his roots. This feeling only grows the further he and Rora get into their journey. In a cemetery where several of Lazarus' relatives are buried, Brik has a full panic attack as he realizes his similarities to Lazarus.

In a book with simultaneous plotlines, sometimes you expect that miraculous connection--someone from Lazarus' story in connection to an ancestor of Brik's, or a moment that cannot just be coincidence. But Hemon resists this kind of easy out, and it makes the book even better. The connections are somehow deeper because they resonate thematically rather than literally. Like I said before, it's a book that took me a few days to really puzzle through, to collect my impressions of it and to write this post, and I love when a book does that.

It's kind of amazing that Hemon has only been writing in English for about 15 years, and there's something in the language of the book that suggests it isn't his first language. Some of the sentences seem like he's looking at the words through new eyes, and I guess this is even more thematic connection to Brik and Lazarus. Brik even teaches English as a second language. Here is my favorite sentence of the book: "Whereupon a gigantic Toyota Cherokee, or Toyota Apache, or Toyota Some Other Exterminated People, drove up on the pavement, the tinted windows throbbing with concussive fuck-music." I think I re-read that sentence three times in a row. It just struck me as a great bit of observation that somehow tied to the pogroms and cheap criminals through the book. This book definitely made me want to read more of Hemon's work, and I highly recommend it.

Musical Wednesdays: May 4th

2010-02-24T08:56:00.002-05:00

It seems like every year, there's one Tuesday where a ton of albums I really want are released. I think last year, it was early in March. This year, it's May 4th.

The first album coming out that day is the new record by the New Pornographers, "Together." They released the first single, which you can download here. It's a little different from their other stuff--the beginning in particular has a strange staccato feel--but I'm really excited to hear the rest of the album when it comes out.

And the second album? The Hold Steady's new "Heaven is Whenever," an album Craig Finn says is about "embracing suffering and finding reward in our everyday lives." The title of the album reminds me of a line in Colum McCann's "Let the Great World Spin," where a character whose brother thinks he's on heroin says, "All respects to heaven, I like it here."

I've only heard one song (in this video), and the sound quality isn't great, but the clip starts with "She said, 'Heaven isn't happening,' she played 'Heaven is a Truck." I'm really looking forward to seeing them tour for this album. They're coming to Pennsylvania twice!

So those are my two big albums that day (although I wouldn't be surprised if the new Arcade Fire album was coming out the same day.) Who wants to drive to Jermyn, PA to see the Hold Steady show in April?

Musical Wednesdays: The Times They Are A-Changin'

2010-02-17T10:21:00.000-05:00

On February 9th, the White House held a concert, "A Celebration of Music From the Civil Rights Era," to celebrate Black History Month and the music, across lines of race and genre, that called for social justice and equality in the 1960s. I unfortunately missed the broadcast of the concert on PBS and NPR, but I have tracked down some clips and I wanted to share them. The concert featured a large number of artists singing the songs of the Civil Rights movement, from Smokey Robinson to Joan Baez, The Blind Boys of Alabama to Bob Dylan.

Obama opened the concert with a short speech about the power of song and its importance during the most difficult of times: “It’s hard to sing in times like that, but times like that are precisely when the power of song is most potent. Above the din of hatred; amidst the deafening silence of inaction; the hymns of the civil rights movement helped carry the cause of a people and advance the ideals of a nation.”

So here are a few clips. The first one is Bob Dylan singing "The Times They Are A-Changin'":

And the second is Smokey Robinson singing "People Get Ready" with Jennifer Hudson:

That's all I've got for today. If anyone has a link to a full video of the concert, please let me know.

Also, if you're interested, there's a really great essay over on The Root about why Bob Dylan is so important to the civil rights movement. It's a great read, whether you're a Bob Dylan fan or not.

Fiction Mondays: The Truth in Fiction

2010-02-15T12:00:00.000-05:00

When I'm writing, I sometimes think about the kinds of stories people wrote in undergraduate creative writing classes, the kinds that were autobiography so thinly veiled that it was difficult to think of them as "fiction." And I started thinking about what elements from real-life work their way into my stories, and I figured out something important about how I work: I am a thief and an arranger. I imagine that all of the anecdotes, all of the little bits of dialogue I pick up, end up on some shelf in my brain (or, if I'm being very organized about it, in my notebook). And all of these pieces, all of these discrete parts taken from friends, from family, from coworkers, from strangers, are each true in their own way. Even if I forget the details, or intentionally alter them later, each of them has some intentionally true piece in it.

An example: one of my favorite stories I've written featured an arson at a comic book shop. Now, my town has had a lot of arson, but never a comic book shop. So writing about it is a combination of memory and imagination, taking the meaningful images I've actually witnessed and trying to figure out what that street would look like as a comic shop smoldered (the half-burnt comic pages, the broken windows). But the reasons for the arson, the desperation that leads to someone destroying their business for the insurance money, are the truth. The story of the guy who lights the match because he thinks he'll improve his life is essentially true, even if it's made up. Or, for another story, the process may involve taking a story someone told me and changing the facts to fit a narrative shape and structure. The inspiration might be someone else's story, but I'm not interested in transcribing it. I want to find what's essential in that story, what it means and why they're telling it. I want the story underneath the story, even if it's wholly imagined after I've heard their version.

So when I say I'm a thief, I don't mean I literally steal. I'm not that German 17-year-old author who claims she's "mixing" instead of plagiarizing. I grab at things from real life, from newspaper articles, from overheard conversations. This is something all writers do, I think. The arranging, though, that's my favorite part. Finding strange overlaps and seeing if two disparate inspirations are really trying to tell a cohesive story. Working from something that happened years ago and utilizing a more recent real-life find to tie the story together. I love when several different inspirations influence the direction of a story, when a number of truths come together to form a really engaging and narratively cohesive lie. Or the details you pick up from day-to-day life become symbols in an entirely different story.

I'm really just rambling, here, because I'm working on a short story, and it's kind of strange how an idea comes back to life after it's been dormant for a very long time. Sometimes an event isn't clear, or the story you want to pull from the event is murky, until years after you've had that first idea. It can be such a long process, and I'm glad to be back in the middle of it.

Friday Films: Filling in the Blanks

2010-02-12T10:00:00.001-05:00

Since I got Netflix, I've been trying to fill in the blanks in my film education by watching classic movies, both foreign and American, that I have somehow managed to miss up until now. So far, there have been some misses ("Le Samourai" in particular), but on the whole, it's been a great project.

Last weekend, I watched Jean-Luc Godard's "Band of Outsiders," a movie that lends its name to a clothing company, Quentin Tarantino's production company, and an album by Nouvelle Vague. It's Godard at (I think) his best, a movie about would-be criminals undone by betrayal, featuring some romantic tension and a little bit of dancing. I really love "Breathless," and the movies seem to share the same DNA. The criminals are not very tough; in fact, they seem to be more inspired by movie gangsters than anything based in reality. It makes sense, considering the French New Wave's fascination with American film noir, that the characters who populate these movies would be similarly inspired.

The film revolves around two small-time crooks, Arthur and Franz, who decide to rob a man who lives in the same house as Odile (Anna Karina), who they meet in their English class. They plan the robbery, but of course everything goes wrong. The best scenes, though, have little to do with the heist itself. There's the run through the Louvre to break a record set by an American tourist, a "minute of silence," where Godard cuts the sound for a half a minute, and my favorite (which I mentioned earlier) the dance scene. I will not lie: I tried to learn the choreography in my living room. This scene was apparently a huge influence on the Travolta-Thurman dance scene in "Pulp Fiction":

One of the strangest things about "Band of Outsiders," for me at least, was the striking similarity between one of the characters, Arthur, and the lead singer of the Magnetic Fields, Stephin Merritt. They look like they could be related. It's kind of eerie.

Well, I will keep posting about my ongoing project to fill in the gaps, but for now, I want to share a really awesome project my friend Darren is trying to get together: over on his blog, he is asking everyone and anyone to send him birthday wishes for his grandmother, turning 80 this Valentine's Day. Send him a message for her!

Musical Wednesdays: A Giant Collection of Decemberists Covers

2010-02-10T09:03:00.000-05:00

I really love seeing the Decemberists perform live. Every time they play a show, you just know going into it that you're going to see something memorable, musically exciting, and more than a little weird. They're also a band that features a lot of covers in their live shows. Whether it's a Colin Meloy solo show, where he plays songs from his "Colin Meloy Sings..." albums (Morrisey, Sam Cooke) or the two-hour extravaganza on the "Hazards of Love" tour (when the band, along with their guest singers, did an over-the-top, belting-contest version of Heart's "Crazy on You"), they're incredibly talented at taking unexpected songs and making them their own. And now, you can hear all of them. Music blog You Ain't No Picasso has compiled a complete list, from "Wuthering Heights" to "The Sickbed of Cuchulainn" to "Go Your Own Way." So head over, check them out. You will not be disappointed.

And in non-music news: if you're in downtown Stroudsburg, head over to Starbucks to check out Allison Mosher's art show, which will be up through the end of the month. And if you're not in downtown Stroudsburg, get there. Check out the flier below for details!

Friday Films: I Really Hope "Avatar" Doesn't Sweep the Oscars

2010-02-05T10:00:00.000-05:00

This week, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announced the nominees for this year's Oscars. There were a few surprises, and one big twist: ten nominees in the "Best Picture" category. Now, before I share my opinions on this wide category (and the resulting four-hour ceremony), I want to say: I really hope "Avatar" does not sweep the nine categories it's nominated in.

I don't begrudge James Cameron for making his epic and his two billion dollars, not at all. I think technological innovation in movies provides a lot of space for directors to try new techniques, etc. But I don't want a future of bloated 3-D space epics. I don't want to see a rash of 3-D movies, where acting and story and characters are less important than rendering. Let those movies win visual effects, let them win every technical award. But don't let them win Best Picture.

As you may know, I read a book a few months ago called "Pictures at a Revolution," about the 1968 Academy Awards. What happened in the 60s was this: "The Sound of Music" made a lot of money and all of the studios rushed bloated musicals to theaters. "Paint Your Wagon." "Doctor Doolittle." And you know what these movies did? They bombed. They nearly bankrupted the studios. They broke the studio system, in place since the dawn of the film industry. And I don't think they learned a damned thing. If "Avatar" wins, we're going to see half a decade of utter shit, cranked out with the newest technologies and completely lacking anything resembling a soul. We're going to see young, educated viewers flocking away from Hollywood.

That said, some of the nominees do give me hope. "Up in the Air" was a really great movie about characters who I felt invested in, completely lacking in tech-wizardry (actually, a major theme was the danger of machines replacing human interaction) and with a great deal of relevance to the current economic crisis. "Up," nominated in both Best Animated Feature and Best Picture, was incredibly moving and engaging--a bold departure from the celebrity-voiced animated films that we've been seeing so much lately. But ten nominees is just too many. "The Blind Side"? I will quote author Colson Whitehead: "Is that one of those movies where a white person teaches a black person how to use a fork?"

Finally, I'm glad to see Kathryn Bigelow nominated for Best Director. In a year where all of the major book awards seemed to snub women, it's good to see a female nominated in such a typically male-dominated category. I haven't seen "The Hurt Locker" yet, but I've heard great things and it would be interesting to see her win some Oscars for it.

I'll be watching the ceremony, however long it stretches into the next day. The theme this year seems to be bloat: two hosts, twice the Best Picture nominees...If that's the narrative they've chosen to present (and let's not kid ourselves: what wins is determined by what kind of story Hollywood wants to tell about itself, whether it's "We Care About Poor People," "We Don't Support Proposition 8," or "We Feel Really Guilty About Never Giving an Award to Scorcese"), "Avatar" should have a great night.

Musical Wednesdays: Some New Bands You Might Like

2010-02-03T11:00:00.000-05:00

Sometimes when I listen to the radio, I feel a lot like a crotchety old man. I change the station whenever Passion Pit comes on, I don't really enjoy Beach House, and I pretty much swear at the radio when Vampire Weekend plays (Seriously, three different stations playing songs from their new record? Egregious!).

But I don't want to give the impression that I'm somehow opposed to new music. I love new music. There's nothing I like more than when a band I've never heard really impresses me on the radio, and I'd like to share some new bands that I have been liking lately.

1. Surfer Blood: Surf rock by way of Pavement? Yes, please. Definitely check out "Swim to Reach the End."

2. The XX: Not at all a typical pick for me, but "Heart Skipped a Beat" is really great. There's this great drum effect in the beginning that sounds like an irregular heartbeat and the rest of the song lives up to it.

3. The Antlers: I heard a song off of their album, "Hospice," called "Kettering" a few months back and was really struck by it. Of course, the first thing I thought of was Sloan-Kettering hospital, and it turns out the album is about losing a loved one to cancer. It's really powerful and I recommend checking them out.

That's all for today, but if there's anything else you think I should check out, feel free to leave a comment!

Fiction Mondays: Getting Back to Short Stories

2010-01-31T11:01:00.003-05:00

The past few months, I haven't worked on short stories at all. I've been working on everything else, and the whole time I've missed the format and the challenge of short stories. I haven't sent much out, haven't revisited anything I worked on and set aside. That's all over now.

Maybe I just wasn't feeling inspired--not that I didn't have ideas, just didn't have to focus or energy to execute them. But last night, I remembered a story I began writing a long time ago, about a guy who meets a girl who spends her time dumpster-diving. They meet a guy sleeping in a dumpster who believes the guy is some incarnation of Mercury. I liked the idea, but I just didn't know what to do with it. I now have a clearer idea, and I'm really excited to tackle it.

So this is just an announcement that my short-story mindset, dormant for several months, is kicking back on. Expect announcements on the process.

Finally: I am thinking about getting another tattoo, of the dove pierced by an arrow from the cover of Flannery O'Connor's "Everything that Rises Must Converge." Here's the image:

I'll need to tinker with the image and see if I can find a full version without the clipped-off wing, but I think it's going to go near the rib I broke a few years ago and the arrow will be red. It's a symbol for O'Connor's idea that violence precedes Grace (the dove is the Holy Spirit), which is an idea that really influences my writing.

Friday Films: Getting Lost

2010-01-29T11:12:00.003-05:00

This Tuesday, ABC's "LOST" returns for its final season. I will be sad to see it end. What show has provided more discussion, more speculation, in its lifetime (okay, maybe the X-Files, but I didn't watch that)? The big mystery is: which questions will be answered? Which ones will be left at the end of the season? And most pressing: how will the season open? Usually the season premieres begin with someone going through their morning while a catchy pop song plays--who will it be this year, and what will the big twist be leading up to the title card?

I do have a big unified theory of LOST, but I'm not going to share it right now (and not because I'm afraid typing it out will somehow make me realize all of the holes in it). I will save that for geekier venues than this blog (they exist, I swear). But I will make a big prediction: the final episode will have a flashback, but it will be the Island's flashback--centuries of strife and war leading to the final confrontation. Whether this will be a big apocalyptic "The Stand"-like confrontation or a smaller one, I don't know.

So is everyone excited? I am. The show is like a big puzzle, and it's going to be interesting to see how the solution unfolds.

I'm going to wrap things up with two videos. One is the Thermals' song, "Now We Can See," which I think is about the show ("We were born on an island," "We still take the pills," "Our history was damaged"). And the other is a clip from LOST, of a brainwashing room called "Room 23." Note the similarities.

Spooky, right?

Friday Films: Man on Wire

2010-01-22T10:00:00.000-05:00

Like I mentioned on Monday, I recently watched the documentary "Man on Wire," about Phillippe Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. I didn't realize until later this week that it won the Oscar for Best Documentary, but now that I know that, I'm almost even more impressed. Not because it won the Oscar, but because as far as documentaries go, it's different from most that I've seen. What distinguishes it from other documentaries is its format: it's presented like a caper film.

The film opens with a shot of a calendar showing the date of "Le Coup," followed by a reenactment of Petit and his crew loading their vehicles, setting out toward the towers. It's all very fast-moving, the reenactments filmed like French New Wave films, cutting quickly to interviews with the participants looking back on the event. As soon as the filmmakers set up the central event, they jump back to its conception, Philippe Petit reading about the towers in a doctor's office in 1968, and then to his first major walk, between the towers of the Notre Dame cathedral.

It's really interesting to see the participants, now in their 50s or 60s, look back at their youths. They talk about how they knew what they were doing was illegal, but it wasn't mean, wasn't hurting anyone or doing any damage. It's all extremely innocent, and I think that's what the filmmakers intended. There's never a mention of the 9/11 attacks, but they're kind of in the subtext during the whole movie. From the moment they show the crew get into their vans to sneak into the building, your mind can't help but contrast it with the months of preparation and falsifying documents and training that would go into perpetuating a terror attack. It's strange that it makes you think about that, but I don't believe for a minute that it's accidental.

In the interviews with the participants, they talk about how Petit, when he saw the towers, knew that they were meant for him. They were built for him to walk between. So in their memories of the event, there's this undercurrent of sadness, which I took as some combination of nostalgia and a sense of loss for the towers themselves. The walk between was accomplished just once, and can never be done again. One of the co-conspirators actually begins to cry as he talks about it, and the effect is really moving and sets a tone for the rest of the fim.

The movie ends with a shot of Petit practicing walking in his backyard in Woodstock, NY. He's older now, but still incredibly talented. The rope across the yard is a long walk only a few feet off of the ground, and the final image is a kind of mix of memories: it's simultaneously the meadow Petit practiced in through his youth and the wire between the towers. The image of his feet on that wire lingers for a long time after the film ends.

Musical Wednesdays: Two Announcements

2010-01-20T11:08:00.003-05:00

I thought about doing something to tie in with Monday's post and my upcoming post about "Man on Wire," but the more I think about it, the thinner that hypothetical post would be. So I'm going to veer away (someday I'll manage to complete a week-long theme, I swear) and instead I will use today's post to say two quick things and then get out of the way.

1. There's a new Spoon album out this week, "Transference," and it's available on vinyl and as an mp3 download over at Amazon (or at your local record store). Spoon is consistently great, and I definitely recommend checking out this album.

2. This week, legendary singer Kate McGarrigle passed away. In addition to being an incredible folk singer, she was also the ex-wife of Loudon Wainwright III and the mother of Rufus and Martha Wainwright (probably the most musical family currently in existence). So here's a video to remember her by:

Fiction Mondays: Let the Great World Spin

2010-01-18T09:00:00.000-05:00

This week, I've been reading Colum McCann's "Let the Great World Spin," which is not a story about Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. That event is central to the book--the story opens with a large crowd watching his walk on an August morning in 1974--but the novel itself is about a large cast of characters who witness the event. I'm not very far into it at this point, but it's beautiful. I think it's supposed to be read slowly, because the language in every sentence is so well-chosen, so perfectly constructed, that you want to make sure you take every word in.

Since I'm not very far in, I'm not going to talk much about the plot other than to say the opening section, about a religious man named Corrigan struggling for his soul when he moves to New York, is one of the most interesting character studies I've read in a long time. It's narrated by Corrigan's brother, who finds himself in a Bronx tenement, surrounded by prostitutes, thugs, and addicts, and is incredibly compelling. There's something I've noticed about Irish authors, though: instead of quotation marks, they use dashes to denote speech. Not in the first section (I think because it's a flashback), but later on. This is something I noticed when I read Roddy Doyle, and seeing it again made me wonder where it started. I cracked open "Ulysses" and saw that Joyce uses dashes as well, but was he the first? Did Irish authors pick this up as a kind of tribute to Joyce? This was how he did it, so this is how Irish writers do it? I'd be interested to know.

I picked up two books after Christmas, this one and Aleksandar Hemon's "The Lazarus Project," both of which I've been meaning to check out for some time. Oddly enough, these two writers have an excellent conversation in the new issue of the Believer. Check it out here. They talk about art, about the role of literature, and about something I've been wondering about: what happened to literary feuds? I mean the real, fisticuffs kind of feud. Like Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. It reminded me of my favorite part of "The Savage Detectives," when Arturo Belano challenges a critic to a duel on the beach--where is that passion anymore?

Related to this book, I also watched "Man on Wire," the documentary about that same walk, Saturday night. I think this week's "Friday Films" will be about it, which makes this something of a theme week. The only question is: is there a song about this event? Maybe Wednesday will be a mini-essay on the Decemberists' "The Gymnast, High Above the Ground."

Friday Films: Up in the Air

2010-01-15T09:52:00.002-05:00

Last weekend, I finally got to see Up in the Air, the new movie by Jason Reitman, director of "Juno" and "Thank You for Smoking." It stars George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a man who flies from city to city firing people. He spends the vast majority of every year in transit, working toward his ultimate goal: 10 million frequent flier miles. When his company decides to switch to an online-only firing system developed by a new employee, he decides to show her how he does his job, and why her system doesn't work. Along the way, he falls for another traveler and goes to his sister's wedding.

The timing of this movie, released in the middle of a horrible recession and double-digit unemployment, has gotten a lot of attention. Reviews have talked about how it takes a lot of nerve (in a good way) to release a movie about a moment that is still occurring, and I have to say I agree. When the vast majority of new releases are escapist, whether it's onto another planet or into a light romantic comedy, this is a movie that instead tells a story that is contemporary, rooted to right now. It's a different angle on the situation, though, and it's a challenge to make an unsympathetic figure like a layoff specialist into a likable protagonist. Of course, having Clooney never hurts. The man brings acting with his eyebrows to previously unimaginable levels.

It's also really interesting to see Reitman come into his own as a director. There are already habits that he has in his films that mark them as his own--the opening credit sequences in all three of his movies are excellent, and the way he divides to movies into chapters (in "Juno" it was seasons, in "Up in the Air," cities and their airports. He also uses a lot of excellent character actors (Simmons and Jason Bateman) to great effect. I would be interested to see if he could write a character for Bateman where he's not a terrible guy. I think they could pull it off. I've started to think there are two kinds of directors, the ones who are technically brilliant (Orson Welles) and the ones that get the best performances out of actors (Mike Nichols). There are some that are clearly both, like Scorcese, but for the most part I'd say there is a division. I started thinking about where Reitman falls, and I think it's the Nichols school: I didn't come out of the theater dazzled by technical achievement, but instead by the acting, from the lead characters and even from the supporting cast. Even Danny McBride, who has made his career so far in being insane and over the top, had a really restrained performance, and it was clear that he had thought a lot about what made his character work, how not to make him a caricature.

One of the most affecting parts of the movie was the use of non-actors in some of the firing sequences, as well as in the beginning and ending of the film--the director apparently placed ads where they were filming, asking recently laid-off people to talk about their experience on camera. The anger and frustration they captured was more interesting, and more compelling, than anything they could have accomplished using only actors. I was thinking about this after I left the movie theater, and I started wondering if this was the case because the stakes were higher for non-actors. There were actors as well, including Zach Galifianakis and J.K. Simmons, but for the people who were answering the ad, this wasn't just another day of work, but a chance to tell their stories, to be heard.

I definitely understand all of the buzz around this movie--it would be great to see it win the Oscar because of its relevance, its timeliness, but most of all, because it's a really good movie. It got me thinking about character arcs, about dramatic structure. It's not about redemption, I don't think (a character can't be redeemed unless they realize they've fallen), but it is about characters changing. The ending leaves a lot up to interpretation regarding Clooney's character, but I think the rest of the movie builds up to the moment and lets you decide his path.

Musical Wednesdays: The Flaming Lips do Pink Floyd!

2010-01-13T09:00:00.000-05:00

I will admit that Pink Floyd is kind of a guilty pleasure band for me--I don't know why, but there are some songs I just really enjoy when no one is watching (this is different from AC/DC, which I can't call a guilty pleasure because I feel NO GUILT about loving "Back in Black."). I had an English teacher in 10th grade who showed us the "Dark Side of the Moon"/"Wizard of Oz" combination on our last day before summer vacation (which now strikes me as really, profoundly strange, but then was just a free morning). And I was raised listening to a lot of classic rock of this era. So when I heard the Flaming Lips' cover of "Any Colour You Like" (featuring Henry Rollins), I had to listen all the way through. And I can confirm at this time: it's weird.

Not bad weird, not by a long shot. In fact, it seems that the Flaming Lips, who made something of a rock opera/concept album with "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots," are uniquely suited to cover this album. They take the strange dreaminess of the original record and amplify it. I don't know how they decided to feature both Henry Rollins and Peaches on this album, but these choices only add to how weird the album is. It's definitely worth checking out if you're a Flaming Lips fan, or a Pink Floyd fan. Even if it's nothing more than a novelty, it's a surprising experiment and tribute to an influential act.

Now, the only remaining question is whether it matches up to "The Wizard of Oz." That sounds like a weekend plan to me.

Fiction Mondays: Oryx and Crake

2010-01-11T09:00:00.001-05:00

This week, I've been reading Margaret Atwood's excellent "Oryx and Crake." It's a post-apocalyptic story, which means it touches upon a lot of the points of future-dystopian novels like "The Hunger Games," but in her hands it seems completely original, like she took the formula and decided to reinvent it. Sure, we have a solitary individual in a wasteland, but the human threats that usually plague these characters are absent. Instead, the character becomes a kind of prophet. Okay, I'm getting ahead of myself, so I'll rewind.

"Oryx and Crake" is a story about Snowman, who was known as Jimmy before humanity was completely wiped out by some kind of plague (I haven't gotten to the revelation of the nature and scope of the plague, but I'm sure it's coming.) The world before the plague was already dystopian, with giant genetic engineering companies existing on compounds while the rest of the country lived in the "pleeblands," and the most terrifying part of the whole thing is that it doesn't seem like a far-off future. They still use computers and the internet, and some of the research taking place within the corporations is already happening (isolating the glowing gene from jellyfish, for example). Snowman finds himself as possibly the last living human, left to care for a new race known as the "Children of Crake." These post-humans were invented by Snowman's best friend, Crake, who apparently was attempting to create a more peaceful, perfect race through genetic engineering.

Snowman has become something of an oracle for them, telling them the myths of Crake and of Snowman's lost love, Oryx. Oryx is the mother of the animals, according to Snowman, although genetic experimentation created these, too--it is a world populated by "rakunks," raccoon-skunk hybrids, and "wolvogs," dangerous wolf-dogs. I'm just about halfway through the novel now, but it's incredibly interesting. In addition to the problems of being (possibly) the last human on earth, including a dwindling food supply and madness brought on by isolation, Snowman finds himself trying to explain concepts of the "Dark Ages" to the Children of Crake: there's a particularly great moment where he's trying to imagine an explanation for toast. It's incredibly bleak, but the way the world before the plague is presented is somehow worse. It's almost as though someone pressed a reset button when things got to their most depraved and desperate.

This novel is the first in a trilogy, the second being the new "Year of the Flood," and I think that title gives a big hint toward the purpose of the plague. In the biblical flood, God decides that humans are getting too evil and decides to wipe them out. In this world, it seems that someone, possibly Crake, decided the same thing. But unlike God, Crake didn't want to risk humanity destroying things again, so he made his Noah (or Noahs) a race of peaceful, vegetarian "Crakers."

I highly recommend this book, especially if you're into the genre of post-apocalyptic science fiction, but even if you're not. The novel, more than being science fiction, is a really terrifying and brilliant look at science going too far, and a great story about a character trying to live in a difficult situation. I'm really looking forward to seeing where Atwood is going with this--I can't believe how different this book is from the last one of hers I read, "Moral Disorder." Her ability to write so many different kinds of fiction is just incredible, but more impressive is her ability to present compelling characters in any type of story.

Musical Wednesdays: The Great Indie Rock Schism

2010-01-06T08:43:00.002-05:00

Today I visited Pitchfork and found their reader poll, summing up what the site's readers thought were the top albums of 2009. I was really disappointed to see that the number-one album was Animal Collective's "Merriweather Post Pavilion." I don't know, I just don't really like Animal Collective. Most of the top ten, excluding Grizzly Bear's "Veckatimest," are some of the most overplayed independent records of the year, including Fever Ray and Girls, two bands that usually make me change the station when their songs come on. Right at number 11 is probably my least favorite album of the year, Passion Pit's "Manners," and number 17 is Dan Deacon's "Bromst." Again, these are change-the-channel albums for me. My favorite albums of the year? Didn't even crack the top twenty.

So I started thinking about something that occurred to me a few months ago: there is going to be an indie rock schism this year. A few years ago, when you said "Indie Rock," there were a few bands that were understood to fall under this catch-all name. While they were all very different, they were all rock, whether in the form of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or the Shins. Some of it was more folksy, some of it was a little harder-edged, but it all could be called rock. But the rise of what are essentially dance bands in the later part of the last decade makes me think that a new genre is needed. Because dance music is not generally called "rock." This decade, there will be indie rock, with the same spectrum of folksy to hard, but independent dance music will emerge as its own genre, with its own stations. That's my big prediction for 2010.

I think this has to happen because of the sense of dissonance in indie rock stations--in general, I get the sense that the people who like the rock-influenced music are not great fans of dance-type music, and I don't know if that goes both ways, but I'd be much more likely to keep a station on if I didn't know that the latest Passion Pit single was just around the corner, or if I didn't have to wait through Fever Ray's "When I Grow Up" before I hear the new acts I'm really excited about, like Thao with the Get Down Stay Down.

Okay, cranky old man rant over. Let's go, indie rock stations. Split it up. I'll even take Animal Collective, if that's what it takes.

Fiction Mondays: What to Read in 2010?

2010-01-04T09:00:00.000-05:00

Well, now that the holidays are over, it's time to get back on schedule on this blog. Which makes today the first "Fiction Monday" of 2010! Instead of reviewing favorite books or stories of the past year, or even decade, I'm going to cover some books I'm really looking forward to this year. I'm right in the middle of "Gilead," but I think my next project after this is going to be either "Let the Great World Spin" or maybe "Catching Fire," the sequel to "The Hunger Games." Which brings me to the first book I'm excited about in 2010: the final book in the "Hunger Games" trilogy, due out this August.

I will be the first to admit I'm a geek (I got a lot of Star Wars, comic book, and Venture Brothers related gifts for Christmas.), and this series is like a combination of "Battle Royale" and about a half-dozen great dystopian novels. Despite its clear influences, though, it seems fresh and new and entirely its own world.

The second book I'm really looking forward to this year is the new book by Joshua Ferris, the author of "Then We Came to the End." It's called "The Unnamed," and it's about a lawyer who has an affliction where he just can't stop walking. It sounds a lot more serious than Ferris' first book (not that "Then We Came to the End" did not have its serious points--it's just that the novel as a whole is kind of a black comedy), and I'm hoping he doesn't have a sophomore slump.

The third book I'm looking forward to picking up this year is actually the paperback version of one that came out in 2009: Jonathan Lethem's "Chronic City." I'd really love to read it, but I couldn't see spending hardcover money on it. It was just a bit out of my price range. But I've read a lot of reviews naming it as one of the best of the year, so I intend to check it out.

What else should I read this year? I am always looking for suggestions. Is there anything you can't wait to get your hands on? How about books that you received or gave for holiday gifts?

Musical Wednesdays: Ten Years, Ten Albums

2009-12-30T09:06:00.002-05:00

Well, the decade ends tomorrow, and I have to say, it's been a great decade for music. It was the decade of Napster, and of the iTunes store, and of the return of the working band, the kind that tours extensively between recording albums. The big labels have seen a decline, and the independent bands have figured out a way to thrive as the idea of the album declines. I thought I'd share my top album of each year of this decade, one per year, as a way of looking at the music that I've loved as my musical tastes have evolved and the industry has shifted. So, without further introduction...

2000: Modest Mouse, "The Moon and Antarctica." This record might still be my favorite Modest Mouse album. It has some of the band's strongest work, including "3rd Planet" and "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes," as well as the band's biggest hit before "Float On," "Gravity Rides Everything." More than any other album of 2000, I feel that this record set the band's agenda for the decade. There is a lot of unhappiness and dire imagery through the lyrics, but there is also something strangely hopeful about the scenes the songs paint.

Runner-up: "Mass Romantic" by the New Pornographers

2001: Wilco, "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot." Remember what I said about the shifts in the industry and the return of the working band? Well, if there's any one record that marks the moment this all began, it's this one. Wilco left their label and released this album themselves, encouraged illegal downloads, and have pretty much been touring ever since. They sell out every show they play, and it works for them. The album itself is fantastic, with some of the strongest songs Wilco have ever performed, and the use of "assassin" as a verb in "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" is incredible. Also, while this album wasn't technically released until 2002, I'm going to put it in this slot because that's when it was completed.

Runner-up: "Is This It" by the Strokes

2002: The Mountain Goats, "Tallahassee." This was a tough choice, as there were two classic Mountain Goats albums released in 2002, this one and "All Hail West Texas." While the latter has "The Best Ever Death Metal Band out of Denton," this one has a bunch of songs that edge it over the top, most notably "No Children," a song that never fails to simultaneously excite and depress everyone. Plus, I love an album that tells a story, and this one--about a couple that moves to Florida to escape their demons only to find that they never can--is one the band did a lot with.

Runner-up: "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" by the Flaming Lips.

2003: The Decemberists, "Her Majesty." Turns out 2003 was a pretty incredible year for music, with everyone from the White Stripes to the Shins to Outkast releasing great records. But "Her Majesty" is the one that influenced my taste most, so it gets the spot on this list. "Red Right Ankle" remains one of my favorite songs, and the stories Colin Meloy tells with the band are excellent and atmospheric and literary. It's a nerdy choice, but...well, I'm a nerd.

Runner-up: Outkast, "The Love Below."

2004: Arcade Fire, "Funeral." One of the biggest albums of the decade, and also one of the boldest. The first five tracks are kind of a mini-concept album, a post-apocalyptic look at a neighborhood buried under the snow. It took me a few listens to understand what the album is really about, but it's all about grief and loss (the title is a big hint), and growing older. The band immediately exploded, and for good reason: the tracks on this album are just incredible. "Wake Up," in particular, is amazing, and this album remains a perpetual favorite.

Runner-up: Elliott Smith, "From a Basement on the Hill."

2005: The Hold Steady, "Separation Sunday." There are albums, and then there are complete revelations, and when I first heard this album, it completely knocked me out. Another kind-of concept album about a hoodrat named Hallelujah who gets lost in the Twin Cities' party scene and ultimately redeemed. It's a very Catholic album, all about resurrection and the unexpected presence of Grace at the last possible moment. The last track, "How a Resurrection Really Feels," has become an Easter tradition for me, and every few months I listen to this album just to be reminded of how it's put together, how it works.

Runner-up: Sufjan Stevens, "Illinois"

2006: Sufjan Stevens, "The Avalanche." For a record of b-sides and extra tracks that didn't make "Illinois," this collection is fantastic. The title track, as well as "The Mistress Witch..." and "The Henney Buggy Blues Band" are all excellent songs, and there are a few that probably should have made the cut on "Illinois." I really like Sufjan's ability to make a great album out of what are essentially extra songs, and this collection really demonstrates his range as a songwriter and composer.

Runner-up: The Hold Steady, "Boys and Girls in America."

2007: Okkervil River, "The Stage Names." The opening track of this album, "Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe," is probably one of my favorite songs of the decade, and the album continues at the same pace to the end. The album is like a series of high points, with "Unless it's Kicks," "Plus Ones," and one of the two best songs about John Berryman's death, "John Allyn Smith Sails." (The other one is on "Boys and Girls in America"). Okkervil River's previous albums are all great, but I think this one is the most cohesive, most grown-up record they've put out.

Runner-up: Iron and Wine, "The Shepherd's Dog."

2008: Fleet Foxes, "Fleet Foxes." The first song I heard off of this album, "White Winter Hymn," is a beautiful, haunting round, and those adjectives describe the rest of this album really well. Fleet Foxes are probably one of my favorite newer bands, and this album is them at their best. "He Doesn't Know Why" and "Blue Ridge Mountains" are great starting points, and the music--this is strange for a band from Seattle--really reminds me of Appalachia and the woods I grew up in, mysterious and teeming with life.

Runner-up: The Silver Jews, "Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea."

2009: Neko Case, "Middle Cyclone." Was there a better song this year than "This Tornado Loves You"? Well, maybe "People Got A Lot of Nerve." Neko Case has become like a legend, a force of nature like the ones she sings about in both of these songs. And the best part is that she knows it--over and over, this album returns to the theme of violent forces of nature and their inability to be understood, from "I'm an Animal" to "Magpie to the Morning." I felt that this year and this decade were both turbulent times, and I can't think of an album that does a better job of both encompassing and transcending that.

Runner-up: The Avett Brothers, "I and Love and You."

So that's my list. What's yours? Where are my glaring omissions? The albums that mattered more than these? Well, to me, these are the ones that were the most influential, the most formative. But I want to know what else everyone else listened to in the past ten years. What did your decade sound like?

Surprise Tuesday: Outside, Two Million Drunk Bostonians are Getting Ready to Sing "Auld Lang Syne."

2009-12-29T11:23:00.005-05:00

I'm back! Well, not today, but tomorrow. I just wanted to let everyone know. The holidays and deadlines knocked me out of my blogging schedule leading up to Christmas, so I didn't get to write the posts I wanted to, about "Fairytale of New York," or how cranky George Bailey is in "It's a Wonderful Life," or anything else holiday-themed. Well, there's always next year.

But tomorrow: Musical Wednesdays returns! I was thinking about doing my top 10 albums of the year, but it's the end of a decade, and it seems appropriate to do something a bit wider-ranging--I'm thinking "My 10 Favorite Songs of the Decade." God, that sounds difficult just thinking about it. Maybe 10 favorite albums? Of the year?

Well, you'll have to check in tomorrow to see where I go with it. But for now, in anticipation of New Year's Eve, here is a video of the best song ever about New Year's eve. Get up on the stage and feel nostalgic, would you?

Musical Wednesdays: Ten Christmas Songs I Don't Completely Dread Hearing

2009-12-09T11:27:00.000-05:00

There are some Christmas songs that I avoid more than any other music, songs that make me cringe and desperately change the station. If I can get through the Christmas season without hearing "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" or "Wonderful Christmastime," I'm really glad. But there are some songs that I actually look forward to hearing...the ones that I actually like.

1. "Blue Christmas." This one is kind of a weird choice for me, as I'm not that big of an Elvis fan, but for some reason I like it. There's a great cover version by Bright Eyes that really amps up the sadness of the lyrics, and a lot of times the original gets suddenly, inexplicably stuck in my head.

2. "Baby, It's Cold Outside." This isn't really a Christmas song, I guess, but it's a song for Christmastime, so it's on here. I love the version featured in the movie "Elf," but there are a lot of versions that are pretty good. Others--there's a Ricardo Montalban version--not so much.

3. "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)." This wouldn't be a list of my favorite Christmas songs without Darlene Love, and this is my absolute favorite. This is another one that's been extensively covered, but the original is still the best.

4. "Happy Christmas (War is Over)." Well, at least the first half. The more you hear of Yoko, the worse this song gets, but the beginning is fantastic, the perfect combination of bitter and hopeful. The way Lennon sings, "So this is Christmas" is just fantastic.

5. "The Little Drummer Boy/Peace on Earth," David Bowie and Bing Crosby. This song has one of the strangest set-ups in the world, with these two chatting about Christmas before starting the song. It's from a Christmas special, the kind where celebrity guests just stopping by to chat was completely normal. The weirdest part of the whole thing? The song works.

6. "River" by Joni Mitchell. Is this a Christmas song? It takes place at Christmas, and I always look forward to hearing it around now. It's...well, it's another sad Christmastime song, but I like it anyway.

7. "It's Christmas! Let's be glad!" by Sufjan Stevens. This one is on my iPod, so it's not one of those songs that suddenly comes on the radio--actually, I can't imagine this suddenly coming on the radio--but it's a song about being glad at Christmas, no matter how bad the year has been, and I think that's a notion I can get behind.

8. "Linus and Lucy," Vince Guaraldi Trio. Really, you can extend this to all of the songs in "Charlie Brown Christmas," but this is the one that instantly brings me to Christmas, to Snoopy dancing, to the kids waving their hands around a tree and magically saving it.

9. "Sleigh Ride." The Ronettes version is probably my favorite, with its "ring-a-lings" in the background and quick tempo, but the song in general really deserves its status as a classic. This is another one with a related "Saturday Night Live" sketch, featuring Molly Shannon.

10. "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town," Bruce Springsteen. I didn't like this one much as a kid, but now I really do. I think having seen him play live, I feel like his banter in the song's introduction is really natural, and the way he throws all of his normal Springsteen swagger into such an upbeat pop song is really outstanding.

Well, those are mine. There's one more, but that's getting its own post on a different Wednesday coming up. What about you? What Christmas songs do you look forward to hearing?

(Non) Fiction Mondays: Zeitoun and Pictures at a Revolution

2009-12-07T08:55:00.004-05:00

I've been on a nonfiction kick the past few weeks. Since I finished "Gravity's Rainbow," I've read two great nonfiction books, a genre that for some reason, I don't read much of. I'm not much of a memoir or biography fan, preferring to learn about people through the lens of fiction (even if they're historical figures, like Tesla in "The Invention of Everything Else").

The two books I've read are Mark Harris' "Pictures at a Revolution" and Dave Eggers' "Zeitoun." They're both excellent, if extremely different, works of nonfiction, the former a big book about the 1968 Academy Awards and the five films nominated for Best Picture, and the latter a story about a man in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina who begins rescuing people in his canoe, only to be arrested and put into several prisons.

"Pictures at a Revolution" is definitely a film nerd book, about the end of the old studio system and the birth of the "second golden age," where filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorcese took the reins of the studios and made some of their most incredible movies. These filmmakers, often called the "film school brats" completely reinvented the movie business, bringing a European sensibility that they had picked up in college (for a great look at the era after this book, rent the movie "A Decade Under the Influence"). In my undergraduate film classes, we covered this era pretty briefly, but the main thing I remember is that the big musicals, trying to jump on the success of "The Sound of Music," really destroyed the studios: "Paint Your Wagon," "Camelot," and the one featured in this book, "Doctor Doolittle." These were movies with huge budgets that were completely out of touch with the realities of moviegoers, and they were completely destroyed by movies like "Bonnie and Clyde" and "The Graduate," both nominated for Best Picture. The stories of each individual movie (including the eventual winner, "In the Heat of the Night," and "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner") are incredibly researched and detailed, and the overall story, about the movie business blinding itself to the changing realities of their viewers, is really interesting.

"Zeitoun," about a contractor who stayed in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, is completely harrowing. Zeitoun gets arrested in a building he owns, and without due process, a phone call, or a hearing, he is sent to "Camp Greyhound," a prison set up outside of the city's bus terminal. Before his arrest, he sets out in a secondhand canoe to rescue anyone who needs help in the city, including animals and elderly neighbors. He is arrested on suspicion of looting, without being questioned or formally charged. The story is insane, mostly because you do not want to believe this happened in America. The fact that a major American city can come under martial law, the rights of citizens left in the care of hired mercenaries like Blackwater, is just unbelieveable. And all of this happening as people are dying without help from the government agencies they depend on. It's really shocking and frustrating, but the book somehow manages, at the end, to be really hopeful, a story about unshakeable faith in the promise of the country.

I really recommend both of these books. Like I said, I'm not really a nonfiction reader, but these stories were incredible. I think I'm going to jump back to fiction now, but I'm not sure what book I'm going to read. Any suggestions?

Friday Films: "That Was Some Pure Wild Animal Craziness"

2009-12-04T10:40:00.002-05:00

This week, I went to see "Fantastic Mr. Fox," Wes Anderson's adaptation of Roald Dahl's classic book, and I am very glad to say it did not disappoint. My faith in Wes Anderson was shaken after "The Darjeeling Limited," and I was worried that the director would continue to make movies that amounted to little more than a collection of incredible details without the plot or character development to support the overall design (I'm talking to you, luggage in "Darjeeling Limited.") But this movie was, if I'm allowed to say it this way, a return to form. It was a reminder of why I loved Anderson's movies in the first place. There was still an obsession over the minute detail, but the characters and story that the details were nestled among (and not the other way around) were extremely likeable and actually fun.

The movie combined the best parts of "Bottle Rocket," "Rushmore," and "The Royal Tenenbaums," along with a few choices pieces of "The Life Aquatic" (There was one point where I couldn't help but think, "Let me tell you about my boat.") It's a caper, a family comedy-drama, and a movie about a flawed but endearing big dreamer all at once, and it works. Everyone in the cast, from Clooney as the title character to Bill Murray as Badger, his lawyer, was completely suited to the characters they were playing, and the puppets, with fur that always seemed to be in motion and impeccable suits, were really incredible bits of Anderson's detail that somehow came to life. I left the theater with a huge smile on my face, so glad that the director had returned to the kinds of characters and stories that I really loved. Jason Schwartzman's character, Ash, is especially hilarious, with a few lines that completely steal the scene with their understated humor. When his lab partner, a female fox, stares at his cousin, he says, "You're supposed to be my lab partner. You're disloyal," in a way that I don't think is present in any other director's work. It's a strange coupling of over-the-top design and understated voice acting that completely works.

Of course, since this is a Wes Anderson movie, there are countless quotable moments, references to other films, and, yes, a shot of a group of characters underwater. Mr. Fox, arriving at home, calls his family, "my darlings," a bit of Royal Tenenbaum that made me unbelievably glad. Toward the end of the movie, there's a great moment with a silhouette of a wolf: Mr. Fox, spying it in the distance, calls out, "Mr. Wolf! Canis Lupis!" and then asks, in French, if the wolf thinks it will be a rough winter. The wolf doesn't answer, but instead wanders off into the forest--it's a strange, weirdly funny moment, and it really stuck with me. Throughout the movie, the characters, animals in suits, talk about their wildness, with Mr. Fox complimenting his son by saying, "That was some pure wild animal craziness," but this wolf is different. It's truly wild, without any of the human influences of the rest of the animals, and it's clear, even in the puppets, that Mr. Fox views it with equal parts terror and deep respect.

I love it when an adaptation manages to both capture the spirit of the original material and the vision of the director, and I feel like "Fantastic Mr. Fox" does this incredibly well. I'm sure Dahl never imagined a sequence of Mr. Fox vs. the farmers to be set to the Rolling Stones' "Street Fightin' Man," but after seeing the movie, I can't imagine it being any other way.

Musical Wednesdays: It's a Marshmallow World

2009-12-02T11:15:00.003-05:00

Well, now that it's December, I'm going to kick off this edition of Musical Wednesdays with a song somewhat related to the time period of my NaNoWriMo project: Darlene Love's version of "Marshmallow World." Even though the song was recorded in 1950 by Bing Crosby, the Darlene Love version is probably the best-known. It appeared on the 1963 album "A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector" (Holiday Tip: don't open any box that says "from: Phil Spector." It's probably dangerous.) along with the Ronette's "Sleigh Ride," the Crystal's "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," as well as many others that you'll hear if you're listening to the right radio stations this season (I'd suggest the Sirius/XM station "Little Stephen's Underground Garage).

The song itself is kind of...strange. It begins, "It's a marshmallow world in the winter, when the snow falls to cover the ground," and then completely loses its mind around the second verse: "And the sun is red like a pumpkin head"...I'm sorry, what? There are a lot of things that are, you know, actually red and actually associated with Christmas, rather than Halloween or the Headless Horseman. But still: it's a Phil Spector production, so it somehow works.

But the strange, amazingly produced song isn't the only reason I wanted to post about Darlene Love and holiday music. I also wanted to share one of my all-time favorite SNL Christmas moments (related: does anyone know if they're showing the "Christmas Past" episode this year? I really hope so.). This sketch was part of "TV Funhouse," which has done a bunch of great Christmas sketches, but this one cracks me up every time. It's "Christmas Time for the Jews," a Darlene Love-sounding songs about the one night of the year that Jewish people can play for the Lakers, see movies without waiting in line, and beat up Quakers without any Gentiles bothering them:

What better way to kick off the season?

Fiction Mondays: NaNoWriMo Is Done!

2009-11-30T11:35:00.002-05:00

Well, today is the last day of National Novel Writing Month, and I'm DONE! Well, by "done," I mean I have 50,000 words, and the beginning (probably the first half or so) of a novel draft. It might be closer to 2/3 of the novel, depending on how quickly the ending happens, but we'll see. I'm going to keep working on this draft, because I really feel like I've gotten to know the characters, and I'm excited to see how it pans out. Massive rewrites will happen eventually, but today I'm going to just bask in the accomplishment of getting so much done in a month. November has been long and difficult. I'm looking forward to December.

I'm currently reading "Pictures at a Revolution," which I will write more about soon. But for now: go read this book. If you're into film history, it's an essential read, full of stories about classic Hollywood and the changes that brought the "Film School Brats" to such prominence in the 1970s. Think of it as a kind of prequel to "A Decade Under the Influence."

And now, I'm off to Christmas shop for Cyber Monday!

Musical Wednesdays: Home for the Holiday

2009-11-25T11:18:00.003-05:00

Thanks to Dan Lehr, another Rainy September participant I follow on Twitter, I found out about the band Home, an early 90s band that I would probably classify as lo-fi if I was trying to say what they sound like. Their first eight albums, released on cassette tapes and not widely distributed, have now been released as the Home Box Set (also available on iTunes and Amazon), and you should definitely go out and buy it. It's only 15.95, and contains 95 songs, so it's a great value and a really excellent collection.

The first time I heard their songs, my main thought was that it was really familiar, for a band I had never even heard of, and I think it's because a lot of my favorite bands adopted a similar sound, as well as the incorporation of random clips of other sounds into their music (I'm thinking of Neutral Milk Hotel and the Mountain Goats specifically). I think that the band's name is really apt, because listening to the collected tapes is a really welcoming experience, songs you can put on and kind of disappear into.

The tapes also feature some awesome and unexpected covers--Blondie's "Heart of Glass" and AC/DC's "Thunderstruck"--that show a really fun side of the band, and to me they seem like songs that might have just been run through in rehearsals to such success that they made the album. The lo-fi version of "Thunderstruck" is especially strange (and I mean that in a good way), because I have to confess I really love AC/DC, and it's awesome to see them get some attention from indie rock.

And, unlike some other early 1990s lo-fi bands, Home is still around. Still playing shows, in fact. No ten-year hiatus for them. Over on Dan's blog, he has a lot of clips of live shows that I really recommend checking out. They have a ton of albums in addition to the Box Set, and they maintain a very funny blog. So check them out. And if you've got a long drive or flight ahead of you for Thanksgiving, the Box Set will make a great soundtrack for that trip.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! No post on Friday, but I'll see you all again on Monday.

Fiction Mondays: Full-Circle

2009-11-23T17:37:00.002-05:00

Well, I've done it. I got through Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow," my sanity intact. The ending was crazy, very fast paced (but he still had time for allusions to Isaac and Abraham and the Tarot, as well as Kabbala) and it ended in a very similar way to how it started, with a screaming coming across the sky. I still haven't one-hundred percent cycled through my thoughts about it, but I am glad I read it and I'm glad to move on. In comparison to reading Pynchon, anything else is easy. Well, almost anything else. I'm reading "Pictures at a Revolution," which I'm getting through really quickly. Expect a post on that soon, but not too soon (December will be focused on holidays, I'm thinking).

In writing news: the onslaught that is November will be over soon. My big projects are coming to a close (both NaNoWriMo and real-world projects), and I'm looking forward to the clearing out that will occur on December 2nd. It feels strange to have so many things wrapping up at once--graduate school applications included--and it will be a very welcome break. What will I do with my time, besides returning to a sane daily pace and blogging before 6pm every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday? Well, like I mentioned earlier, Chanterelles will not be done, not in my opinion, by the end of the month, so I'll probably wrap up a draft of that. Everything has its trajectory set (I need to get out of rocket-thinking soon. I blame Pynchon.) and the ending will be interesting. But in a short amount of time, I've grown attached to these characters. I'll be sad to see this draft end. But it's never over, is it?

What else? Editing my previous manuscript, maybe returning to work on my Zeppelin story. I'm trying to decide on a title for that one. How about "To Be a Rock, and Not to Roll"? Or "Houses of the Holy"? I also got a very strange idea for a story--I don't know how I'd categorize it, because right now it's literally a sentence and a line of dialogue in my notebook, but maybe I'd call it a fable. Or it might be some kind of horror story. I really don't know. I won't reveal too much, but the idea is really calling out to me and I'm excited to see where it goes.

Well, I'll see you all on Wednesday. I think the post might be about the band Home, who I started listening to recently.

Friday, but not Films

2009-11-20T11:38:00.003-05:00

Just a quick post today.

If you're looking to see some great art, head over to the brand new website of Allison Mosher and check out her work! The painting above is a quick preview, a work called "Gemini" that hangs above my bed. Head on over, take a look!

Fiction Mondays: Halfway?

2009-11-16T09:00:00.000-05:00

Well, November is halfway over, which means that so is National Novel Writing Month. I'm right at my word count goal, over 25,000 with half of the month left to go, and I can come to a conclusion I arrived at before this thing even started: 50,000 words is nowhere near long enough to constitute a fully-formed novel, at least the way I write. Now, that is not to say I think the month (so far) has been a bust in any way--the opposite, in fact--it tells me that my idea, "Chanterelles," needs more room to breathe than 50,000 will allow. Here's the thing: the story is about forming a band, recording and album, and heading out on tour. That's the first part, and the second part is the unraveling of that band (not in the usual ways bands tend to fall apart, bickering and bloated, in that kind of story, just so you know).

But here's the problem: in the first 25,000 words, a band has formed. It took a lot of people figuring out how this was going to work, making deals and poaching members of other bands, to form the thing in the first place. And while that's coming along, the protagonist has his own things going on, plus there needs to be enough that the lead singer is not just the lead singer, but a three-dimensional character. She needs to write a song (she has), but she also needs to understand the nature of the business--and of the current trends in music that she's up against (see my earlier post, re: the schizophrenia of pop music in 1966). So this is all happening before they step into the studio.

So here is what I'm saying: unless I gloss over huge sections, there is no way this thing is going to fit into 50,000 words. When I'm working on a longer piece, I am a hybrid of the type of writer who plans things and the type who wings it. I love setting up a lot of pieces in the beginning to see how they are going to play out in the second half. That discovery, that moment where I understand how things from that first half are going to fit together or come apart in the end, is one of my favorite parts of writing. I know roughly what happens in the second half--very roughly--but it's the discovery of why that might happen, or the way it does, that excites me.

Here is how I see the rest of the month playing out: I'm going to get to 50,000 words, but I do not expect the last two to be "The End." I will just keep writing, keep on setting things up so that at the moment things turn, I know exactly how the characters are going to react. There is a very good chance that the 50,000 word mark will be right in the middle of that section, where everything makes sense and I can begin to see the final parts, but no, my 50,000 words will not be anything but a beginning. And I think that's okay: if the goal of this enterprise is to force you to just get that draft out, I will be on the path to doing that, and too wrapped up in it to slow down. To me, that will mean it's been a successful month.

Friday Films: I Want to See "Up in the Air"

2009-11-13T16:28:00.003-05:00

George Clooney is a very busy guy this fall--between "The Men Who Stare at Goats," "The Fantastic Mr. Fox," and "Up in the Air," he is possibly the most-employed person in Hollywood right now. I want to see "Fantastic Mr. Fox"--I can see the stop-motion model, which requires excessive attention to detail, being a really good fit for Wes Anderson, whose attention to detail is sometimes detracts from the rest of the movie ("Darjeeling Limited"? Great design and a terrible script.), but last weekend, during the "Mad Men" season finale, they showed the preview for "Up in the Air," and that one has moved to the top of my list.

It's a new movie by Jason Reitman, who directed "Juno" and "Thank You For Smoking," and it seems to be in the same spirit as the latter: a miserable bastard of a character finding redemption. Or not. The movie is about Clooney's character, who flies around the country firing people. And Zach Galifianakis is in it. And Jason Bateman. Here's the long preview:

I have a good feeling about this movie. It's a great concept with a really strong writer and director, lead actor, and supporting actors. I like everyone involved with it. Both previews I've seen so far use a bit of a speech Clooney delivers about the weight of a life, and it struck me as a really interesting idea (some research tells me that the movie is based on a novel by Walter Kirn, who I have not read. Should I?). I hope this plays in East Stroudsburg (I'm talking to you, Pocono Community Theater) soon.

Musical Wednesdays: Dewey Decimal and the System

2009-11-11T13:07:00.003-05:00

I'm taking this Musical Wednesday as an opportunity to plug a friend's band: Dewey Decimal and the System. A few reasons you should check this band out:

1. Their name. Go libraries!

2. Their album name: "O Pioneers!" is a Walt Whitman reference.

3. Their sound: when I heard them for the first time, I was reminded of the Band--they have a really great sound that I can't quite categorize, but they identify themselves as "Americana/Rockabilly/Country." I'd say that's a good start. They cover a great old Hank Williams song, "I Saw the Light," on their album, and the rest are really solid originals.

4. Their album design: the full Whitman quote ("Follow well in order, get your weapons ready/Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?/Pioneers! O pioneers!") is hidden behind the CD, which has the image of a pistol printed on it. It's extremely cool, and I just love the way it all works together, along with the photos of the whole band.

5. And finally, a little story:
A few weeks ago, the Pocono Community Theater, run by a member of the band, hosted an event called "Silent Films Set to Loud Music." The band played last, standing in front of the film "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." Since it was Halloween, a group of very drunk, very slutty girls showed up. Two of them wandered onstage and proceeded to stay, for the entire set. Now, I have been drunk before, but I have never been wander-onto-the-stage-uninvited drunk. One, dressed as a slutty cop, tried to frisk every band member. It was embarrassing and uncomfortable for the audience, but the band just played their music. Two of them, the keyboardist and bass player, avoided these girls like they were plague-bearing (or, more likely, herpes-bearing) rats. I think if you can play "I Saw the Light" while morons invade your stage, it's a testament to your band.

So check them out.

Fiction Mondays: Button Classic

2009-11-09T11:43:00.004-05:00

How is everyone doing? I’m very busy today, just a lot of things in the air. But the increasingly-misnamed Rainy September is winding down, and NaNoWriMo is chugging along (15,000-ish words. And some good ones in there!), and most importantly, graduate applications are coming together. So I’m going to go ahead and apologize for this post being short, but…well, it’s a busy day. They’re all busy days until Thanksgiving, I think. But stay tuned, because December will be appropriately holiday-themed. That's right, you can expect Musical Wednesdays about "Fairytale of New York" and Fiction Mondays about--well, that's a tough one. What are some great books that take place around the holidays?

But that doesn’t mean a reduction in posts (ignore the one I missed on Friday—I hadn’t seen any movies recently), it just means that the Short List is going to be right-sizing. Sorry, I had to use that one…my favorite corporate neologism of the day.

The article that links to seems like a joke from 30 Rock--not the article itself, just the way the CEO talks: "reduce our overall rent expense and lease-adjusted leverage and generate cash flow through sales and working capital reductions" sounds an awful lot like "Consuming Lunch and Simple Socializing" from the "Retreat to Move Forward."

"I don't know, I liked the old button."

Musical Wednesdays: Soundtrack for a Novel, Take Two

2009-11-04T09:00:00.000-05:00

Okay, day four of NaNoWriMo and I am going strong. I am writing about pop music in the 1960s, and since starting, I've learned that pop music in that decade was, more than anything else, totally schizophrenic. You'd go from the Supremes to "Good Vibrations" to Johnny Rivers (of "Secret Agent Man" fame) in just over a month. The longest time anything spent at the top of the charts in 1966 was a four-week period where Frank and Nancy Sinatra had a duet in the number-one slot. So history gives one of my main characters, a record executive, a crisis. How do you sign the next big act if you have no idea what people are going to want in a week?

So in the spirit of the insane music of the 1960s, I'm expanding my playlist:

1. The Ronettes - Be My Baby
2. The Supremes - You Keep Me Hanging On
3. The Marvelettes - Twistin' Postman
4. The Crystals - He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)

5. 13th Floor Elevators - You're Gonna Miss Me

6. The Animals - Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood

7. The Beatles - Penny Lane

8. Beach Boys - Good Vibrations

9. Otis Redding - Sittin' On the Dock of the Bay

10. Janis Joplin - Piece of My Heart

11. Nancy Sinatra - These Boots Are Made For Walking

12. Bob Dylan - Like a Rolling Stone

13. Pete Seeger - We Shall Overcome

This playlist will be expanded and revised as I go, but right now, this is the music that is acting as the soundtrack to writing right at this moment. I'm sure there are a million songs that capture the tumult and the sea changes going on in popular music and culture at the moment, so feel free to leave any suggestions!

Fiction Mondays: NaNoWriMo

2009-11-02T09:00:00.000-05:00

If you're a regular here, you may have noticed the new picture to the right. That's right: "Participant." This month, I'm really doing it. I am going to tackle the one-month novel. I've thought about doing it before, but this month I'm not chickening out. I've written a first draft of a first novel, and I am not afraid of writing another. I have an idea that I really love--the 60s girl group I mentioned a few months ago--and a really vague idea of where it's heading. I know my two main characters and (kind of) the plot trajectory--a band that disappears into America. A desperate attempt to beat Motown in the Billboard Charts. The idealism of the Monterey Pop festival and the impending doom of the end of the decade. I can do this.

Now, I know I have enough on my plate, with work and graduate school applications, and if I was to pick a month to force myself to write 50,000 words, I would probably not pick this one. But I think I need it. Other than the short story I've been working on, my writing output has not been great the past few weeks. It's time for an emergency injection of month-long writing insanity. To quote Buster Bluth, "This might be just the shot in the arm our relationship needs!" And to further quote Buster, "Unlimited juice? This party is going to be off the hook!" I just threw that one in there because it amuses me.

So here we go. When this posts, I will have been working for one day, and will hopefully have some messy, ill-thought-out words on the page. But for now, I'm assembling a writing soundtrack. More on this Wednesday, but it contains:

1. The Ronettes - Be My Baby
2. The Supremes - You Keep Me Hanging On
3. The Marvelettes - Twistin' Postman
4. Paul McCartney & Wings - Band on the Run (yes, Wings. I know. But I like the story of a vanishing band, and it has ties to my plot.)

More on Wednesday. Happy Writing!

Friday Films: Where the Wild Things Are

2009-10-30T12:05:00.000-04:00

After waiting for a really long time for it to come out--there was some delay because apparently the monsters were testing as too scary for little kids--I was really excited to finally see Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze's adaptation of Maurice Sendak's classic book. I actually started getting really impatient a week or two before it was released, because the commercials would get me so excited that I wanted to go out and see it immediately. I'm happy to say that I was not disappointed. I absolutely loved it. It was dark, and complex, and everything seemed real, especially the danger. When Max was being chased (it happens twice in the movie, but I won't spoil any more), I actually felt my heart beating. It was a movie that was going for real emotional connection, and I loved that about it.

It was also a beautiful movie--it looks surreal because it uses a lot of natural light to convey a strange world. It looks like either the beginning or the end of the day for a lot of it, with the sun a certain kind of orange-yellow coming in through the trees. The scene changes from forest to desert to mountains without any kind of transition, exactly the way a young kid would imagine his own world. And then there were, of course, the monsters.

They looked like nothing else I've seen, some perfect combination of the monsters from the book and Henson Creature Shop productions (which they were). At first it was distracting to have one with Tony Soprano's voice, but for some reason it fit. I think because Tony Soprano was a complex monster anyway.

I don't want to go on and on, but I will say this--it isn't a kids' movie. It's dark, and has some scary parts, (little kids in the theater were terrified), and it doesn't fit into anything remotely resembling a neat package or moral. Instead, it's a movie about being a kid--about imagination and the loneliness of being young and misunderstood--and it really resonated with me because of that.

Most movies aimed at kids are pandering (honestly, the previews were terrible, and not only because The Rock is trying to become Dwayne Johnson) and rely on making jokes about pop culture, instead of actually being a movie, and the fact that Where the Wild Things Are did not do this at all was what really made it, for me, not a kids' movie. But it's a bold statement of what a kids' movie can be, and what a young audience can handle.

Musical Wednesdays: Pavement, Ten Years Later

2009-10-28T09:25:00.000-04:00

I was driving home the other night, and Pavement's "Range Life" came on the radio. It's a great song, one of my favorites, but then the line, "Stone Temple Pilots are elegant bachelors" came on, and I thought, "Wow, this song just really dated itself." The Stone Temple Pilots broke up in 2003, which was four years after Pavement's last album. There's also a reference to a Walkman in that same song, which is of course, a device that played cassette tapes, which were...oh, you get where I'm going with this. Pavement has some reunion shows coming up, and what I'm wondering is: will they still be relevant?

I'd love them to be (although I didn't manage to get tickets to any of the four shows in Central Park), but still, I have to wonder: what generation will Malkmus, at 43 years old, be fighting? And is a leisure suit still nothing to be proud of in this early century? I don't mean to make fun of these songs--I really love "Harness Your Hopes" and "Cut Your Hair" and "Summer Babe"--but it is weird to think of a reunion after a ten-year hiatus.

But it's been done before, and it's not like the members of the band have been silent since Pavement broke up. Reissues, Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, the Silver Jews--they've still been in the music business. I'm interested to hear how this reunion is, and whether they'll change any of the very-90s references in some of the song.

On the other hand, the Stone Temple Pilots apparently had a reunion tour this summer. I wonder if they're still elegant bachelors..

Fiction Mondays: I Don't Want an E-Book Reader

2009-10-25T14:15:00.003-04:00

So last week, Barnes and Noble released the Nook, their new e-reader, to compete with Amazon's Kindle, the Que, and the Alex. I have to say that despite some good ideas (particularly the ability to "lend" an e-book to someone else's e-reader), I'm still not sold on these things. Not in the slightest. Of course, some publishing people think that these are the hope of the industry, but I'm not really clear on who wants these. Students? That would make sense, to keep all of your textbooks on one...But what about book people? You know, like constant readers (and book buyers)?

I love the feel of a book, and the design that goes into it, and the discovery of something from the shelf. But none of that matters on an e-book reader. The user experience is limited--no matter what book you're reading, it looks like a PDF. I also have some problems with the bells and whistles on these things. Do you need two screens on a dedicated e-reader? Doesn't that make it even less of a book than it already was?

Maybe I'm just becoming a cranky old man, but I'd much rather see someone do something really interesting or innovative or high-quality with print. Something like...this, maybe?

Of course, the man behind the San Francisco Panorama is also the man who said this:

"Nothing has changed! The written word—the love of it and the power of the written word—it hasn’t changed. It’s a matter of fostering it, fertilizing it, not giving up on it, and having faith. Don’t get down. If you ever have any doubt, e-mail me, and I will buck you up and prove to you that you’re wrong."

And that's the corner I'm standing in.

Musical Wednesdays: To Be a Rock, and Not to Roll

2009-10-21T09:00:00.001-04:00

I guess this week's Monday and Wednesday posts are kind of interchangeable, as they both revolve around the story I mentioned Monday. I've gotten back into the story, and I feel like there's a lot of crisis in this disc jockey's life--the fear of being replaced by Clear Channel's machines, wondering whether a station format change will make him obsolete--and I think the real trick is going to be why being forced to play Led Zeppelin becomes the crisis that embodies all of this.

But here's the thing: to make it work, I need to find a Led Zeppelin song (or songs) that a guy whose taste tends toward the Modern Lovers and Velvet Underground would actually like. Nothing too well-known, I don't think--I mean, I'm running through songs in my head, and I might go with the ones I kind of like, "Misty Mountain Hop" and "Houses of the Holy." Maybe "Going to California"? What I'm saying is this: my knowledge of Zeppelin is pretty limited, and I would love to hear some suggestions.

Some quick Wikipedia-ing has turned up some interesting facts about Led Zeppelin, and I feel like my character in this story would love the fact that they wanted their fourth album to stand alone, without any indication that it's a Zeppelin album. This kind of belief in the strength of the music is something that the DJ character in this story would find really admirable. Maybe my answer is in there. I also decided, as I started writing this story, that the character is 32 years old, only to find out later that John Bonham was 32 when he died. Not something I'm planning on using in the story, but an interesting side-note.

Fiction Mondays: I'm in Love With the Radio On

2009-10-19T09:30:00.005-04:00

Remember last week, when I said I wasn't spending enough time with my fiction because of graduate applications and work? Well, I kept thinking about it, and I realized that I didn't have any new ideas for short stories. I had old ideas that never really took off--they're all over my hard drive, a collection of titles that I have to remember what they were supposed to be. But there was nothing rattling around half-formed, waiting for me to put it down on paper. And then, since it's almost Halloween, one of those stories lying dead on my computer suddenly came back to life.

Here is what happened: I was driving yesterday, listening to Bob Dylan's "Theme Time Radio Hour," and the theme was radio. I don't know if you listen to that program, but it's pretty much an hour of Bob Dylan playing whatever he wants, loosely assembled around a theme. The themes can range from gambling to colors to musical instruments. And Bob Dylan has a hell of a record collection. So last night, one of the songs Bob Dylan played was Jonathan Richman's Roadrunner. And I remembered a story idea I had a long time ago, about a radio DJ who hates Led Zeppelin.

It was strange, but while that song was playing, I started imagining a disc jockey starting his set with that--it would be appropriate, wouldn't it? With lyrics like, "I'm in love with the radio," it would be a great anthem to start the set. And I imagined all of the people the song would go out to, the people starting their cars to go to work, the people listening in the kitchen while they're eating their breakfast, the people in the office turning it up (or down) as this new DJ starts his show. And then I started thinking about how that form of DJ is dying out (except on satellite and online), the guy who, as Tom Petty says, "plays whatever he wants to play." Now it's all Clear Channel and preprogrammed stuff. And I'd imagine if you got into radio because you really loved music, that would be a terrible, tragic thing, and you'd be really worried about what your future looks like. So now I'm ready to return to that story, because I think I can now do it right.

I wasn't looking for inspiration (I mean, I was, but not in an active kind of way), but suddenly seeing the story outside of the story, what's at stake, really pushed me to want to write. By not looking for inspiration, but always leaving myself open to it, I've discovered the heart of a story that I thought I'd never touch again.

Friday Films: Now You, Too, Can Ruin Classic Movies

2009-10-16T09:00:00.001-04:00

Tired of Directv's stupid ads having the monopoly on ruining classic movie scenes?

Well, have I got a product for you.

Thanks to Yoostar, anyone with $170 dollars to spend on absolutely useless shit can ruin classic scenes from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Sabrina, and the Blues Brothers. Just hook it up, film yourself, and insert yourself into any of these movies (and more!). Just like the directors intended, I'm sure, when they made these films. Haven't you thought, so many times, "Well, Oscar-winner Tom Hanks was pretty good in Forrest Gump, but I could do better"? Now is your chance to prove it.

I actually came across an ad for this product at the Onion, so I really hoped it was a joke. I still really hope it's a joke. I hope it's some elaborate, misguided anti-piracy campaign. Like those commercials you sometimes see before a movie with a cell phone ruining a scene. Anything but this being a real product, aimed at some target audience that ostensibly likes movies (enough to buy a product that will let them be an a movie scene).

My biggest question is this: who the hell is responsible for this? I mean the whole thing, soup-to-nuts. Who is accountable? I want to know who the investors were who thought this was a product the market needs, the studio execs who signed off on the clips...everyone who had a hand in this. I know there's a ton of completely useless garbage out there, but come on...this one does terrible things to movies. Is nothing sacred?*

Now, if you're still holding that $170 dollars, wondering what you can do with it, here's a suggestion: send it to me. Believe me, you'll feel a lot better about feeding a writer for a month than you will about wasting it on Yoostar. And you won't be hurting movies. Hey, you know what? For $170, I'll even quote all of these scenes with you!**

*"Is nothing sacred" is a line from a scene in "Rushmore" that you will be able to insert yourself into using Yoostar. No, I'm just kidding. I think Wes Anderson has more integrity than that.

**Some restrictions may apply.

Musical Wednesdays: New Daniel Johnston!

2009-10-14T09:00:00.000-04:00

I don't know how I missed this, but...

New Daniel Johnston!

But that's not all: it's a new, polished and produced Daniel Johnston--an album where the production values match the grandeur in his mind. And speaking of his mind: one of my favorite old Daniel Johnston songs gets a new life on this album--"I Had Lost My Mind"!

I've only heard one track so far, "Freedom," and I'm happy to report that Daniel Johnston doesn't lose any of his best qualities by recording a clean, well-produced album. The song is still catchy, there's still a hint of mania in the voice, and I can't imagine that anything has been autotuned.

Hm, has anyone tried autotuning Daniel Johnston? That would be terrible.

But to return to my previous point: if anything, Daniel Johnston recording an album with an actual producer makes his music sound like it can finally match his ambitions. It's kind of strange to wonder what his earlier albums, recorded on cassette tape, would have sounded like. It's equally strange, given Johnston's life story and subject matter, to see that on the various music blogs reporting the new album, he's regarded as something of an elder statesman in independent music, a singer-songwriter who has passed through shifts in popular taste with his sound mostly unchanged.

Fiction Monday: Application Conundrum

2009-10-12T09:04:00.006-04:00

As you may know, I'm currently applying for graduate school. I want to go for my MFA in Creative Writing, but I've noticed something strange about working on applications. I notice it every year, but this year I want to post about it. I was going to feature it as a line graph, but instead I'll just say it:

Between statements of purpose, online applications, and "biographical sketches," my time spent working on actual pieces of fiction has disappeared.

I'm sure this isn't a revelation, but it is frustrating. The way forward, toward a degree in writing fiction, is keeping me from doing any writing.

I think there's only one way to end this post, and here it is:

"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
'That's some catch, that catch-22,' he observed.
'It's the best there is,' Doc Daneeka agreed."