Happy Thanksgiving!

HATED IT!

So, as I said in a recent post, most of the movies I rent have something to do with music. This also goes for about half of the books I read. High Fidelity is a novel about a British audiophile who also owns a record store. Unlike the movie, which kind of portrays the main character (I forget his name- that's how sucky the book is) as a street savvy indie guy who collects rare Belle and Sebastian B-sides, this British guy goes gah-gah over weird Tina Turner LPs and stuff (?????). He's also annoyingly clueless about women and does horrible things to them, but still thinks it's their fault. Immature. Kind of a weenie. It's like- get it together! You're 30, not 21!

Anyway, I quit reading it halfway through the book.

Some authors can create a character who you are supposed to hate. This wasn't one of those. Some authors can create a character who is pathetic and you start to love them because you are sympathetic to them. I think that's what Hornby tried to do, but he missed the mark. It's like when you're sitting next to somebody on the BART who is infringing on your personal space or something. Instead of sitting there and taking it, you get up and move to the next car at the next stop. So that's what I did. It's OK to just stop reading a crappy book.... or a book that just annoys you for that matter.

So I picked up a western detective novel that my friend Scott mailed me called "No Country For Old Men" by none other than Cormac McCarthy. A guy starts killing people with one of those blunt pnuematic hammers they slaughter cattle with in the first couple pages. Now that's a classic!

Headphones

These kinda headphones that come with the ipod are serious crap. Mine were always super quiet, distorted when the music was bassy, and stopped working at the drop of a hat. So I went to my local Walgreens and bought some cheapies for $9.99 and they're spectacular! They openned up a whole new world to me! Super full sound, can go way louder that the ipod ones, and they don't fall out or feel like they're half-way in your ear. I know I shouldn't crank the volume way up, but let's face it, when riding my bizz-nike to work and listening to All Songs Considered or This American Life, Bob Boilen and Ira Glass don't exactly have those razor radio voices and they can't compete with Dwight/San Pablo traffic. I even was able to play the drums along to a whole Son Volt album- something I could've never heard over the drums with the ipod headphones. I'd rather have a pair of my cheapies than ten thousand ipod ones.

Really great songs with music videos that are cartoons:

C'mon, you're not doing anything else right now.

Beulah "Gene Autry"


Of Montreal "Wraith Pinned to the Mist"


Aberfeldy "Love is an Arrow"

Love is a verb and a noun as well.
You'll find it in the dictionary under 'L'.

Movies about Music

I would say that the majority of movies I put on our Netflix queue have to do with music. It's pretty hit-or-miss with them because what looks like a festival documentary (Bonaroo 96) turns out not to have real live footage, but montages of the weird naked hippies at the festival while the music plays in the background. Or band documentaries, like the one on Beulah (one of my favorite bands) that are nothing more than cam-corder footage from inside their van. However, I had a couple big scores in the last week.

The first was the Chorus. I thouroughly enjoyed it. One of the things that popped out to me was the Math teacher. He sucked at teaching math, but I totally related to how he just couldn't stay away from the chorus. He wanted to be around music and wanted to help out. He was just frantic about being close to music, because there wasn't any other music to speak of.

Also, movies/books about boyhood really get me right here (I'm making a gesture as if being stabbed in the heart) when they tackle the theme of what I call "the dichotomy of boyhood." What I mean is that I think we, as boys, have this inate dichotomy where we want to be Superman, firemen, cops and save/help people, but we also fantasize violence and killing. Young boys adore their female cohorts, but despise them as well. We love to build things, but delight in explosions and demolition. I think this movie touched on this in a subtle but thought-provoking way and it makes me nostalgic in that way that you can get nostalgic about even the darker parts of your life.

Also, surprisingly, I really got to like the name Boniface.


I also rented a movie about the making of Nirvana's "Nevermind" album. It's from a series called "Classic albums" and it was super in-depth and technical. A lot of it was filmed at Butch Vig's (producer) sound board as he literally deconstructed each song and showed the viewer things like what this song would have sounded like had the voice not been doubled, or what it would've sounded like if the song had drums instead and why and so on.

He explained, in a way that both JIll and I understood, how one song was not working out, so Kurt went over, sat on the couch with an acoustic, and said, "It should sound like this." Butch Vig ran and brought the mics out to him and had him just play it. What Vig explained so well was how it became a problem to record the drums, bass, and cello because Cobain had not recorded the song to a click track, so the tempo is all over the place. His guitar was also not in tune, the the bass and cello had to be tuned strangely. Fantastic.

I have often blogged about wanting musical writing/journalism and movies to be more technical and this one didn't dumb it down at all. This movie will convince you why this was one of the most important pieces of art ever.