Because of the Times. Kings of Leon are a really good, really Southern-y, really garage-y band, they're huge in England to boot, and, most importantly, they inspired what is probably the one post I made this year that I'm in any way a little proud of.
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. Spoon makes songs that are the very definition of austere: strict, unornamented, terse even. Much as I enjoy jammier endeavors, there's beauty to be found in disciplined minimalism as well, and Ga(x5) has five or six songs that I'm pretty sure could graduate from West Point. Britt Daniel is a national treasure. And a supremely weird dude. Good on him, and good for us. (And Paul, let's get me those older albums in the new year, eh?)
8 Diagrams. Of all the things I expected from the Wu Tang Clan's first album after ODB's death--cash grab? retread? do-over? overdone?--to be, I would have never guessed it to be a mature, borderline sedate meditation on both urban grime and existential dread, often told in tone poems by some of the last surviving, thriving actual storytellers hip hop has left. In this infuriating world of Crank That bullshit ringtone rap, I can't begin to tell you how much I appreciate the RZA's lush beats, Method Man's endearingly esoteric sensibilities, and Ghostface and Raekwon's chopsocky weirdness. I hope to write about songs later on, but if I don't, please know that "The Heart Gently Weeps," (with guitar by John Frusciante, drums by Dhani Harrison) is probably the best song I've heard this decade. Or any other.
Sky Blue Sky. How's 'bout I not repeat or contradict myself?
Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?. As you may have noticed, I am not necessarily a man with the personal architecture necessary to love Of Montreal, and when I got this album from a student, as I saw it uploading to iTunes, I thought I'd never listen to it. Then I did, somewhat accidentally, and what I found therein was the most oddly poppy, thoughfully oversynthesized pseudokrautrocking ode to everything from pangs of lovelorn guilt to creative inertia this side of Autobahn. Kevin Barnes is another weirdo I'm happy to have in my life (though you're both weird and awesome too!), and when I die, I kinda want "The Past is a Grotesque Animal" playing on a loop in my canoe. I want a Viking funeral, but you already knew that.
Special Mentions:
Wild Mountain Nation. Blitzen Trapper made the best album the Dead never managed to. Highly listenable, highly replayable, utterly enjoyable. A record that demands your attention.
All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone. Explosions in the Sky's songs don't have words, but my goodness, they tell good stories. Now men, I don't have to tell you that when we lost our quarterback and team leader at the beginning of the season, everybody wrote you off. Well, men, look at where you are. You're playing for the state championship, and you're showing everyone what you're capable of. It's not important whether we win or lose today, because you have a town that loves you, that you keep alive by believing in yourselves. And men, I believe in you. Now let's go out there for the second half, and let's show everyone that clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose! Go Panthers!
Myth Takes. !!!'s some funky mafuckas, and if you ain't listening to Heart of Hearts when you gotta make that last mile count on the treadmill, you ain't living. Sure I'm too old for them, but sure, I don't give a shit.
Easy Tiger. Ryan Adams takes enough Adderall to focus on quality instead of quantity, and the result of his digestive compunctions is a very lovely alt-country record. A talented musician and an ever-improving songwriter.
A Weekend in the City. I don't talk much about Bloc Party, and that's a shame, because they're really interesting and committed to evolving, sonically. I know I'm a sucker for a concept album, but I really get a lot out of Kele Whathisname's thick descriptions of a random dude's...well...his weekend in London. There's a real dearth of novelistically detailed songwriting (in my life, anyway), so while I don't follow them all the way down the rabbit hole on every song, I like that BP creates the dang holes in the first place.
Other Shit I Liked Immensely But There's Been Enough Ink Spilled On Them So I'm Not Bothering:
Sound of Silver.
The Reminder.
Neon Bible.
As Cruel as School Children.
Icky Thump.
That One Besnard Lakes Album Whose Title Escapes Me
I've got a very fun (for once!) trip to the hospital today, and given that Miss Lily will probably take up a lot of my time in the near future--and given that I haven't had an idea for a post that isn't annoyingly self-centered, hopelessly self-referential and/or whatever the polar opposite of cloying is--I'm giving the blog some breathing room from...me.
Trust me, you'll get by just fine.
I may post some baby updates, but you're better off calling or texting me.
I'm very excited to be an uncle, and I hope I'm as good at it as I want to be.
Meantime, please to enjoy some Christmas cheer from the adorable sheepdog puppy Daisy, who was so happy to see me yesterday when I walked into Mom and Dad's that she pissed all over the foyer and bit me in my privates.
Let's just face facts, why don't we? Christmastime is, for some, a time to let the dark side out. To feed the alligators, as Stephen King once put it. Whereas most of us see the holidays as time to enjoy friends and family, kith and kin (as it were), there's a population out there that see this time of year as a chance to not only gaze into those less pleasant places that reside inside us all, but to act on that vacuous emotional area that so often gets held back in more polite situations.
If you're the sort of someone to not exactly stare into that abyss for hours on end but instead to open that door for a moment and give whatever lies there in the dark always waiting for you a little time in the sun, then Bad Santa is a Christmas movie you can appreciate more than most.
Written by the estimable Terry Zwigoff--anyone who doesn't adore and kinda wished they were/dated the girls in Ghost World is also an anyone who might kick a puppy--Bad Santa offers the inappropriate laughs and graphic language most of us have to abandon during the holiday season, so in some ways, it's the most cathartic Christmas movie out there.
Sure it's a heist caper, and sure it features spot-on performances by Bernie Mac and Tony Cox and Billy Bob and the hilariously understated John Ritter, and sure it's got Lauren Graham in a bra moaning "Fuck me Santa!" and sure it's got a poetically profane screenplay written by the writers of the vastly-underrated Cats & Dogs and punched up by the Coen brothers. Sure, it's all these things. But it's also so much more, for me, anyway.
Bad Santa came along at a strange point in my life. If you're like me, you spend more time than you should looking back on your life, trying to find therein the sort of smooth cohesion and thematic neatness that real life renders impossible . As you/I look back on your/my life, I/you try to identify those moments that serve as crossroads, turning points, deus ex machinas that not only situate my/your choices in a way that makes me/you more at ease with my/yourself, but also help identify emotional tributaries that now rage like the Colorado.
Favorite Quotes:
That's right. I forgot to take my pill.
You got some lip on you, midget.
I heard ya, shit, Fragglestick car, fine.
Is Granny spry?
I'm an eating, drinking, shitting, fucking Santy Claus.
Why don't you wish in one hand, and shit in the other. See which one fills up first.
You've seen this David Bowie/Bing Crosby "Little Drummer Boy" performance on that one Bob Hope Xmas special before. Yes, you have. But you haven't seen it lately.
Y'Ever be watching Amazing Race, and the teams are in a shanty town in some rundown country, and wonder to yourself, "What's this impoverished place like when there aren't reality show cameramen and old dudes bitching about their hernias and goth kids hurtling though it"?
Y'Ever been curious about gang warfare as it's actually lived, and not how romantically it can be portrayed by Hollywood?
Y'Ever want to revel in the abstract beauty of a real, living, spoken, authentic creole, the speakers nimbly bouncing from French to English to Portuguese to a hybrid of them all so wonderfully seamlessly that you think you're hearing the Beatles for the first time?*
Y'Ever listen to gangsta rap and wonder about its effects not just on pimply gated-community kids on XBOX Live, but in real, destitute countries where guns and machismo are the only currency?
Y'Ever think about young men (and women) trapped in lives that are actually impossible boxes, where death at a young age is a certainty, and wonder what their eyes would tell you about the nature of fate and life and station and the world if you looked into them long enough?
Y'Ever remember back to Ought-Four, when Haiti's President Aristide was forced down and all hell broke loose throughout the country and think, "My God, what must that turmoil'd been like?"?
Y'Ever reminisce about City of God and, knowing it's a true story, wonder what a documentary about a similar culture might look like?
Y'Ever think you'd see just such a documentary and struggle to believe you're watching actual shit go down because casual violence/gunplay, a complete lack of health care and education and governmental corruption has left an entire population of a country that's a 2 hour flight from Miami without options except to serve as hitmen for political regimes that, once deposed, marks them for certain death?
Y'Ever want to see a truly moving, compellingly harrowing, utterly depressing portrait of a modern-day Haitian Hell run by two brother-gangsters (named 2Pac and Bily) who know how the story of their lives end before that last page has been turned to, and know only that there's no changing that ending?
Then, for Pete's sake, Ghosts of Cite Soleil is the documentary you need to see as soon as you can**. Not in a long time has a documentary gripped me so fiercely and forcefully and made me confront human ugliness and hopelessness so effectively. Completely worth your time.
*Not me, mind you. I'm not smart enough to adore the Beatles, a fact that I'm reminded of pretty constantly. **And no, this isn't one of my Xmas movies. FYI.
Coming in at #2 on my list of nearest and dearest holiday movies is the 1988 Richard Donner opus Scrooged. As with Christmas Vacation, this is a movie from my youth-slash-young-adulthood, and just as Patton Oswalt says that you'll eternally love the music you were listening to when you first started getting laid, I suppose I look back on this Dickensian update with rose colored, round-like-the-kind-Gerardo-wore-in-Rico-Suave-type glasses. (Sure, part of that prepubescent uniform includes a moustache, acne and a mullet, but we best not mention such vulgarities in the harsh light of today.)
Sure, there are lots of versions of A Christmas Carol out there (the next best being Mickey's Christmas Carol, of course), but given the modern setting, the uniquely drawn characters and the somewhat-heavy-handed but effective-nonetheless critique of contemporary media culture, anointing this particular permutation is an eggnoggin no brainer.
A word about Bill Murray: brilliant. Has any actor been able to pull off cool, smug, heartless indifference to anyone besides himself to better effect (on film and in not real life, anyway)? He wallows in his role as Frank Cross, a man so hardened by corporate circumstances and white collar greed that his insistence that everything that gets televised should be louder, violent-er, sexier and envelope-pushing-er is downright prescient. His eyebrows and his hairline alone make me giggle in this movie, though maybe for different reasons. And he also makes evil just so damn funny.
To wit, the scene where he fires Bobcat Goldthwait. Tell me you're not both repulsed by the firing but also kinda rooting for Frank to fire Eliot within his alloted timeframe:
Murray turns that smirk on, sets about his amoral business, and by god, I'm cheering for him to fire the poor (/well-intentioned) sap. This is either good filmmaking and acting, or I'm a wicked, wicked man. And I choose to believe the former.
Today, anyway.
There's bunches I'm not mentioning--Karen Allen in her second best performance, David Johansen as a hilarious Ghost/cabbie , cameos by Miles Davis(!) and Jamie Farr, a heartfelt/cheesy televised speech and some legitimately terrifying, claustrophobic scenes--but suffice it to say I look back on Scrooged with more than a little love in my heart.
Best quotes:
You're a hallucination, brought on by Russian vodka poisoned by Chernobyl!
A towel AND a facecloth.
I know what you came for. Come and get it, you pussy.
I've never liked a girl enough to give her 12 sharp knives.
In fact, he just said that you were a flatulating butthead.
For a couple of hours out of the whole year we are the people that we always hoped we would be.
National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is my favorite holiday movie, bar none, hands down, bar hands. It's got everything I need in a Christmas movie: snappy dialogue, a folksy Midwestern setting, some degree of sappy sentimentality, and enough vulgarity to make me feel all warm and fuzzy and shit.
In high school, our senior class president Margaret--who was, at the time, exercising questionable taste in men, seeing as how we were going out and all--aired Christmas Vacation as our Everybody in the Auditorium for a Christmas Movie The Day Before Break, and when this choice scene came up
all the hyperreligious kids in our school (read: 98% of them) screeched at the foul language, went home and complained to their parents, and come New Year's, Margaret had to step down as president in the wake of the "scandal."
Actually, 'twas I who pushed her to screen CV in the first place, so when we stopped going out shortly after her "resignation," I told myself it was because of all that uncontrollable Christmas swearing and not, in fact, my uncontrollable Christmas sweating. Which was just as vulgar, believe.
Anyfuckingwho.
It's got Juliette Lewis at a moderate level of hotness, Julia-Louis Dreyfuss as the Yuppie neighbor (remember when Yuppies characters were all over movies and TV? Me either.), Randy Quaid doing what he do best, Chevy's last funny role, really, and scene after scene of scenes you've seen so many times and love oh so much. It's got this nice class-struggle undercurrent to it, which I appreciate, and when the little advent doors open to start each "chapter," I can't can't help but smile. I've owned the tape, I've owned the DVD, and I'll own the download-directly-to-you-brain format too, once it becomes available.
It really is my number one holiday movie, though I'll be fleshing out that list over the next few weeks, I hope...
Do you love this movie too? Or do you have a favorite-r eternally optimistic, slightly lecherous, tirade-at-the-ready-if-shit-goes-awry cereal additive engineer who for the holidays hosts the larger part of his extended family whilst foraging for the perfect tree, planning to use his bonus to get the kids a pool and hanging some kickass house lights, all as Beverly D'Angelo's rack just constantly announces itself in those blouses, mocking you?
Best quotes:
Eat my rubber!
Shitter's full
Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, kiss my ass. Kiss his ass. Kiss your ass. Happy Hanukkah.
The most enjoying traditions of the season are best enjoyed in the warm embrace of kith and kin.
Tis the season to be merry. My name's Mary. No shit.
I'm gonna catch it with the coat and smack it with the hammer!
Later, dudes.
I piss my pants and forget who I was for half an hour.
Montreal, and when I got this album from a student, as I saw it uploading to iTunes, I thought I'd never listen to it. Then I did, somewhat accidentally, and what I found therein was the most oddly poppy, thoughfully oversynthesized pseudokrautrocking ode to everything from pangs of lovelorn guilt to creative inertia this side of Autobahn. Kevin Barnes is another weirdo I'm happy to have in my life (though you're both weird and awesome too!), and when I die, I kinda want "The Past is a Grotesque Animal" playing on a loop in my canoe. I want a Viking funeral, but you already knew that.
there in the dark always waiting for you a little time in the sun, then Bad Santa is a Christmas movie you can appreciate more than most.
(the next best being Mickey's Christmas Carol, of course), but given the modern setting, the uniquely drawn characters and the somewhat-heavy-handed but effective-nonetheless critique of contemporary media culture, anointing this particular permutation is an eggnoggin no brainer.
It's got Juliette Lewis at a moderate level of hotness, Julia-Louis Dreyfuss as the Yuppie neighbor (remember when Yuppies characters were all over movies and TV? Me either.), Randy Quaid doing what he do best, Chevy's last funny role, really, and scene after scene of scenes you've seen so many times and love oh so much. It's got this nice class-struggle undercurrent to it, which I appreciate, and when the little advent doors open to start each "chapter," I can't can't help but smile. I've owned the tape, I've owned the DVD, and I'll own the download-directly-to-you-brain format too, once it becomes available.
