The Last of the Last Man

Okay, so this is ostensibly a music blog, but you can't listen to music all the time. Sometimes you need to read something while you're listening to music. And sometimes it's nice if the thing you're reading has pictures. So since everyone else on the internet wants to talk about Vampire Weekend and I don't, I'd like to devote a little space to a non-musical item dropping this week, the last issue of Brian K. Vaughn's ˆY: The Last Manˆ.

First of all, it should be mentioned that I'm a huge comic book geek. In the past couple years I've been a little more "out" about it, but I've been a pretty regular comic book reader for about fifteen years, since roughly the same time I started avidly listening to music.

It was also around the time that DC Comics started allowing creators, particularly writers, the freedom to do long-form stories that stretched over a number of years and ended when and how the creators chose to end them (assuming the titles sold enough copies to be viable) instead of the standard model wherein a writer would pick up an established character, write the title for ahile and then hand it off to someone else. Within the new model, creators also retained the rights to their characters, which is a whole other issue I'm not about to address here. The shelves are full of failed attempts, series that never caught on and had to be ended earlier than the creator intended due to low sales. In fact, only a handful of series have made it to their natural end (thinking here of Neil Gaiman's ˆSandmanˆ, Warren Ellis's ˆTransmetropolitanˆ, Garth Ennis's ˆPreacherˆand James Robinson's ˆStarmanˆ, a list which leaves out a number of amazing self-published works) and this week, ˆY:The Last Manˆjoins their ranks.

Brian K. Vaughn is one of very few mainstream comics writers who didn't earn their chops writing the capes. In fact, BKV's superhero work before ˆYˆwas pretty unsucessful: Vaughn claims he single-handedly ruined the ˆSwamp Thingˆfranchise, although to be fair, no one's really had much sucess with Swampy since Alan Moore. ˆYˆcemented Vaughn's reputation as a writer, earned him a spot on the writing staff of ˆLostˆand, he recently admitted, paid for his house.

The story follows a young amateur escape artist named Yorick Brown (his father was was an English professor who named Yorick and his sister, Hero, after minor characters in Shakespeare) who is the last male survivor of a plague that has wiped out every animal on the planet with a Y chromosome except for Yorick and his pet monkey, Ampersand. The two are joined by a government agent named 355 and a geneticist named Dr. Mann and travel across the country and later the world trying to...well, that's less clear. Yorick's trying to find his girlfriend, who was in Australia when the plague hit. Dr. Mann is trying to figure out what caused the plague and save the human race and stuff. 355 is being pretty bad-ass and knitting a scarf.

Over its five year run, ˆYˆhas slowly and delicately developed its central characters while examining the results of eradicating every male on the planet. The characters run afowl of the Israeli army and the Australian navy, the dominant military powers in a post-male world (the Australian navy is one of the only navies in the world that allows women to serve on submarines). They encounter a community of escapees from an all-female prison, most of whome had been serving sentences well beyond those issued to men who had committed similar crimes. There's even a power struggle between the female Democrats in Congress and the widows of Republican Congressmen who believe they are entitled to their husband's seats (only five of the sixteen women currently in the Senate are Republicans). The series addresses gender imbalances built into existing systems of economics, ideas of beauty (although under the pencils of series co-creator Pia Guerra, there's not a bad-looking character in the series. Guerra, incidentally, is one of the very few prominent female pencillers in mainstream comics) and systems of government. Sex, particularly the sexual availability and responsibility of the last man on earth, features heavily in the series, but is dealt with carefully and in a manner that stays true to the characters. It's that finest type of speculative fiction: the kind that's intended as a mirror held up to the present, a medium for exploring ideas by shifting them and positing the ultimate question of whether the elimination of every dude on the planet is necessarily a bad thing.

I'm going into the final issue with a bit of trepidation. The last year of the series has been a little shaky, with the disappointing explanation of the plague's cause and a couple issues that felt like filler, returning to play "where are they now?" with minor characters from earlier in the series, but the last storyline has been nothing short of heartwrenching. BKV has opened the "it was all a dream" door and the last issue's cover (pictured) suggests he's not afraid to use it, but these are his toys after all and he can do what he wants with them.

Anyway, here's a link to the entire first issue (scroll down to the bottom) in PDF. It's like "The Stand" crossed with Three's Company, plus a monkey. The paperback collections are fairly cheap and totally worthwhile. Hell, I'll lend them to you if you'd like.

Secret Origin of Mack the Knife, Part One

I'm questioning my own wisdom on this, but my head's a mess, I want to post something and I just don't feel that my critical facilities are at their strongest. So this is a fiction piece I've started working on, which is about music, so it counts. I want to write about the Piano Creeps and the next dance party, but for now, here's this. It's completely unedited and rough. The rest will show up as it gets finished. Hope you can stomach it.

*******

Eddie stared over the turkey and across the small table in the Zirkowitz's kitchen at his grandmother and silently catalogued the things that were going wrong with his body. His teeth would barely pull apart wide enough to chew, the molars locked together staunchly. Even when he managed to get something chewed, his throat was attempting to refuse entry. His parents were talking like a tennis match on either side of him but his eyes stayed fixed on his grandmother, her head down as she picked at peas, carrots, mashed potatoes.

This, thought Eddie, whose emotions normally ranged from enthusiasm to mild embarassment, is what it feels like to hate someone. Remembering almost as a footnote the violent throngs of kids his age he'd seen crashing into one another at the feet of concert stages on teevee, he thought, this is what music can do. Music can prepare you to hate.

The first song Eddie really listened to was the last song the Zirkowitzes ever listened to at the dinner table. The classic rock station was a constant in their tiny split-level, at least when the teevee wasn't on. Of course, the content varied, but only within a certain range and Eddie, when he thought about it at all, considererd the radio his father's influence on the house, the echo and complement to his mother's obsession with lamps. Not a week went by that the lighting situation in the cramped living room didn't undergo some change, since Eddie's mother couldn't drive past a Salvation Army or thrift store without stopping in to peruse the lamp selection. Finding one or two she liked, usually for less than ten dollars a pair, she'd cycle some currently in use into the basement, which had once been his father's workspace but was now nearly overrun with lamps past. Even the most unloved was never actually discarded since in proper combination it might complete some ideal form of a living room that existed purely in Eddie's mother's mind. Lamps would be redeployed after exile in the basement, just as some would arrive in the house and be immediately relegated there. Eddie accepted this flux as standard operating procedure, just as he accepted that coming home from school he would be greeted by the sound of electric guitars before hellos. But just as he'd never taken the time to evaluate any of his mother's individual lamp choices, he never paid attention to the individual songs that filled the house in four minute spans.

The dinner in question, eaten as usual before Eddie had begun to feel remotely hungry, was porkchops and the drive time show. The deejay, deep and buttery voice, talked more than Eddie or either of his parents, although his mother ran he and his father through the usual catechism of how was your day questions. Eddie, scrawny, sat between his heavyset parents, thinking primarily of schoolwork and how he should have picked up that copy of the next Stephen King book at the library that afternoon, since he'd more than likely finish his current one before he went to bed. During an unusually long pause in this ritual, Eddie looked up to see his mother glowering at his father, chewing with a slow determination. His father, as was usually the case, seemed oblivious. Swallowing a bit of green beans down, Eddie ventured,

"Mom, what's wrong?"

"Ask your father," his mother snapped. Eddie turned to his father, who fit a hunk of porkchop between his expansive beard and walrusine mustache and shrugged almost imperceptably. Eddie turned back to his mother, who was apparently not feeling as reticent as she had a second before.

"Your father," she declared, holding her fork in the air officiously, "once wrote some ˆchoiceˆlyrics from this song in a letter to me." And with that, she hoisted herself from her chair, stalked across the room and shut off the radio, as she would do the moment she started cooking dinner from that night on. The three of them ate the rest of the meal in silence.

After dinner, his father took up his usual post on the recliner six feet in front of the teevee. His mother retreated upstairs complaining of a vague unwellness while Eddie washed the dishes. Running down the list of his friends and evaluating each of them on the basis of how much help they'd be in this particular situation, Eddie decided on Owen and called his apartment after the last dish was set in the drying rack. He worried momentarily that Owen's roommate Julie might answer; she had a way of looking at Eddie that made him uneasy, like she knew something about him he didn't know about himself. Luckily, it was Owen who picked up.

"Eds!" exclaimed Owen. "To what do I owe?"

"I had a question," said Eddie.

"Fire away, Eds."

"Do you know this song, it's like a classic rock song? Something about a rose in the thrift store gloves?"

There was a pause on the other end of the line and Eddie imagined he could hear Owen running his hand thoughtfully over his stubble.

"Wait," Owen asked, "was it 'fisted'?"

"Was what?"

"The glove. A rose in the fisted glove?"

"Could be."

"And the eagle flies with the dove?"

"I think."

"Yeah, that's Manassas. Kind of a shitty song, to be honest. Why do you ask?"

"Do you have it?"

"Naw, Stills is pretty much dead to me after the Springfield." Owen might as well have been speaking Greek.

"Um. Okay. Well, I sort of need it. That song."

"Huh. Shouldn't be a problem. Can probly pick it up on the cheap downtown. What're you up to tomorrow?"

The next day, Owen picked Eddie up after school, his baby blue Dodge Dart idling loudly out front waitinf for Eddie to jump in. Past a row of yellow buses, the Dart eased and sputtered itself away from the school towards downtown with Owen prattling about the collapse of the LA music scene at the end of the sixties. Eddie listened attentively, unsure what any of it had to do with the rose, the glove and the eagle, not to mention his parents' argument at dinner.

Nimbly piloting the boatlike car, Owen parallel parked right out front of Transmission Records, on the lower level of an Fredtown house on Stephen Street. The store's logo, a charcoal sketched mock up of the RKO Pictures radio tower hung above the door and between the windows of the upstairs windows like a nose, giving the housefront the vaguely anthropomorphic look of three prong outlets and clocks at certain hours of the day. A step behind Owen, Eddie walked into the store's mouth.

"My good man," proclaimed Owen broadly to the room as the door shut behind Eddie. A handful of the shop's patrons looked up from their browsing, but for the most part, the click-click-click or CDs being flipped didn't stop. Tom the clerk simply rolled his eyes a little, having dealt with this particular eighteen-year-old before.

"My friend here," Owen announced, clapping Eddie on the shoulder," would like to purchase a Manassas album."

Tom arched his eyebrows, someone nearby snickered and Eddie realized a shibboleth had been spoken and had marked him an outsider. He felt the need to loudly explain about the fight at dinner, about the fisted glove, and he wished Owen had not made this announcement.

"Dollar bin," said Tom, motioning with his eyes before returning to the magazine he'd been thumbing through. Owen made a little bow and led Eddie to the dollar bin.

"Last refuge of the damned," Owen explained. "Castoffs and cutouts. These ones were so small, the culture at large threw them back."

"So the album we're looking for isn't any good?" asked Eddie, still eying his fellow patrons as if they might turn on him at any moment.

"No, Eds, I'm afraid it isn't. One last attempt to catch a spark on wet kindling. The problem with a musician who's been well-fed," Owen said, pulling the Manassas album out of the dollar bin and pointing at the paunched image of the man on the cover, "is they can no longer sound hungry."

Ed had no idea what the advantage of sounding hungry was, but as Owen flipped the album over to scan the song titles, his confusion deepened. Why had the song been worth arguing over if it wasn't even any good?

"Wait a minute," said Owen. "Hey Tom, what the fuck?"

"What's the trouble?" Tom asked.

"This album," Owen said, brandishing it in the air, "doesn't have the love the one you're with song."

"Love the One You're With's not Manassas," explained Tom. "It's on Stephen Stills Stephen Stills."

"What the hell right does Stephen Stills have putting out an album doesn't have Love the One You're With on it?" Owen asked incredulously. "That's like Big Country putting out an album without In a Big Country."

"Actually, the second Big Country album is pretty good," offered a smartly dressed patron in the Brit Pop section.

"What're you, Scottish or something?" interrogated Owen, turning on the patron, who jumped back from Pulp to Blur.

"Hey relax," said Tom. "I guarantee there's a Stephen Stills Stephen Stills in the dollar bin." Owen pointed a threatening finger at the boy in Brit Pop, who quickly looked back down at the Charlatans UK. Owen returned to the dollar bin and quickly extracted the album with a little "aHA!" With a flourish and another little bow, he placed the album on the counter and stepped aside so Eddie could pay. Feeling smaller than he could remember ever having felt, Eddie paid quickly and greatfully accepted a bag to hide the album in.

More to come...

Such Deadly Wolves Round the Town Tonight

If the State Theater’s new managing director, Dan Smalls never brought in another concert, I’d be indebted to him for two shows. The first would be last year’s Solomon Burke show, and the second would be the upcoming Neko Case show. I might write something about Mr. Burke at another time, but for now, I’ve got Neko Case on the brain.

From my understanding, Case made her mark on the Canadian music scene pretty quickly, first with the punk outfit Maow and then on her own. With almost clockwork regularity, Case’s solo shows, backed by high octane cowpunkers like the Sadies or the Blacks, would include the performer draping her panties on the mic stand, which is certainly a way to make an impression.

The Virginian, her first album with the loose collective of musicians known as Her Boyfriends was an outing in the country, a deep homage to the likes of Loretta Lynn and Kitty Wells. The Boyfriends in question have included Carl Newman, Ron Sexsmith and members of Calexico, along with girlfriends Kelly Hogan and Carolyn Mark. The Virginian included covers from Scott Walker and Ernest Tubbs and was impressive if not innovative. The album’s cover presented Case as a chanteuse, a skilled interpreter of other people’s songs. It wasn’t until Furnace Room Lullaby that Case’s songwriting moved to the front, with amped up odes to her burned out Tacoma home and lightning fast husky come-ons like “Whip the Blankets” that had only been hinted at on the previous album’s “Misfire”. Her ballad work was sparse and heartbreaking, carrying entire compositions on her stolid alto.

Case made a leap forward on the next album, Blacklisted, which no longer bore any reference to Her Boyfriends. Comprised mostly of originals with a pair of well-chosen covers, the album is dark country soul, a constant threat of a knife wrapped in silk. It also sees Case experimenting with composition and production tricks, as songs rise eerily out of radio static and fade back into a buzzing of bees. Her rendition of “Running Out of Fools”, I hate to admit, tops Aretha Franklin’s original in its breathy vitriol and her plea of “pretty girls, you’re too good for this” sounds like the final shaking off of her country chanteuse persona.

I’m leaving plenty out here, including her work with indie supergroup the New Pornographers, collaborations with the Pine Valley Cosmonauts (better known to the world at large as the Mekons) and the Sadies as well as two fairly brilliant live albums (particularly Tigers Have Spoken, which includes a couple knock down Loretta Lynn covers and a heartbreaking rendition of “Wayfaring Stranger” backed by a chorus of one hundred and fifty panel discussion participants), but only because I’m rushing to get to her most recent studio effort, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. Dark and lyrically strange in ways one would have been unable to predict, the album drops brilliant lyrics into compositions that range from Bacharach pop syncopation to twisted gospel call and response. With this album, Case moved a step ahead of the rest of the singer songwriter crop. While contemporaries like Gillian Welch and Cat Power have found their voices largely by adopting genres, country in Welch’s case and, most recently, blues in the case of Cat Power, Case moves effortlessly in and out of genres even within single songs, blurring them into something uniquely her own. Tinged with dark lyrics that seem at once obscure and transparent, Case’s work creates its own terms, inviting the listener into a lyrical mythology shot through with musical aspects that seem simultaneously familiar and strange.

The Ithaca Business Apocalypse

I've been listening to a load of new music this weekend, including the new Cat Power, Devastations and Destroyer albums, but this seemed like the thing to post this evening.

It nearly broke my heart to walk into Ithaca Books looking like it had been looted. This is probably due largely to my affection for bookstore s in general, I’m sure some people had the same reaction when they saw the Going Out Of Business Sale sign on the bead store.

Tis the season for the GOOBS in Ithaca, it seems to happen in six month cycles that a number of operations shut their door s for good. This time out, we’re losing the bead store, the book store and the deli (although rumor has it Juna’s is itching to get out as well), and maybe it’s only that all of these business are located on the Commons that this seems like a portend of the Ithaca Business Apocalypse.

I feel I’m in something of a position to prophesize doom for business owners in Ithaca, being one of them myself. And there are any number of reasons that a business goes under. The deli, for instance, kept sporadic hours, used less-than-fresh ingredients and was overall sketch. The bead store, well, there’s a lot I don’t know about the economics of beads. But there is one unifying feature of these stores, which is their location on the Commons, which means they all share (or shared) absurd rates of rent.

Rents on the Commons run in the range of $2 per square foot. This varies from location to location, of course, but any spot on the Commons will run you a pretty penny. How many beads do you have to sell to come up with $1000 a month rent? A truckload, give or take.

So what’s to be done? Ithaca is seeing growth, but the growth seems to be occurring in more outlying areas of town, be it the Miracle Mile of big box stores, where a lot of smaller businesses are choosing to carve out niches, or the West End, separated from downtown by a couple blocks. Rents are a little more reasonable out those ways (or, say, just off the Commons on the wrong side of a one way street) and some people are looking at the West End as undergoing the same sort of gentrification seen in outlying areas of larger cities. But the cities in question have already established their central downtowns, whereas our Commons have been struggling economically for at least as long as I’ve been in town.

As it stands, the Commons is pockmarked with vacancies, and this is the first issue that needs to be address, as it is closely paired with the rent issue mentioned earlier. A small start up business can scarcely afford the level of rent demanded by Commons landlords and chain operations have either shown no interest or been discouraged by the city (the exceptions being the Subway and Jimmy John’s, whose operations scarcely helped out the homegrown Lou’s Deli. Or Sadie D’s deli, which closed its doors earlier this year). So the spaces sit open, and when they sit open for long enough, they become tax write-offs for their landlords, many of whom live out of town. Every time you see a yellow –on-black FOR RENT sign, you should hear the sound of blood being sucked out of the economic jugular of Ithaca. And while it doesn’t currently bear such a sign, the most egregious example of this is the stunning and beautiful Masonic Temple that sits vacant waiting from someone to stumble into the money pit Jason Fain has left there.

The city could staunch this bleeding by enacting tax penalties for downtown commercial spaces that sit vacant for more than six months. This would create an incentive, albeit a negative one, for downtown commercial landlords to set rent rates commensurate with the amount of business someone could conceivably do on the Commons. At lower rent rates, these spaces might reinvigorate the Commons with new business rather than serving as a comfortable write-off for absentee landlords.

There are other things. Watch, for instance, the positive effect that an active State Theater has on downtown. Now imagine that the Masonic Temple, which could easily house two music venues, a cultural center or any number of public spaces, was actually in use. Not too long ago, someone tried to provide Ithaca with just that, but was prevented from doing so due to the violations that remain on the liquor license attached to the site. Without a change of ownership, no one will be able to sell booze in that location because of the sheer idiocy of the last renter. Had the city intervene, had the mayor or members of city council written to the liquor board and said that this business would be a cultural and economic boon to the city and that violations seven years in the past by individuals unconnected with the current business should be overlooked in view of the benefits the business would afford the city. I can only hope that if another business owner is brave enough to attempt the same, someone in municipal government has the good sense to vocally support them.

An anchor store needs to be actively recruited, and I know this is going on, so I’m only saying this to support current efforts. Personally, I’ve got little use for an Urban Outfitters on the Commons, but I know a couple universities full of students that might take more of an interest in a UO or an Anthropologie than they did in a bead store. The same kind of sweetheart deals brokered with big box stores should be instituted on a smaller scale to get a national upscale retail store to open up on the Commons.

But before that happens, the Commons themselves need to be cleaned up, and that starts with removing some trees. I know this is Ithaca and we all love us some trees, but folks, we are surrounded by trees. This city has more public park space per block than anyplace I’ve ever been. Stand in a park and throw a rock, you know where it’s going to land? On some kid throwing a Frisbee in another park. Look in any direction, you’re going to see trees. But the Commons is overrun by aesthetically unpleasing trees that block sightlines, filter our the already limited sunlight and house hundreds of starlings, twittering little crap-machines that leave the brickwork filthy. Not to mention the fact that because these are trees unsuited for the middle of a city street, their overlarge root structures buck up bricks and concrete alike. With smaller, manageable foliage, the Commons would look like a city block (which is what the Commons in Boulder and Burlington look like). Paired with the storefront cleanup grant, this would make the entire area more pleasing too look at, brighter and cleaner and more appealing out outside business.

Right now, the trees and the landlords are winning. As young business owners look to outlying neighborhoods without even considering the Commons, Ithaca runs the risk of having a gaping hole in its heart and becoming a loosely strung together collection of satellite enclaves, each struggling to avoid their own business apocalypse.

We got the Magnetic Fields back!

The Magnetic Fields' 1999 triple disc album "69 Love Songs" is nothing short of a monolith. It's a treasure trove of mixtape fodder, a survey course in American music and contains some of the smartest sentiments on being sentimental ever put on a disc. It's not even an album you can debate much. I challenge anyone to hate the whole thing, to find nothing lovable among its bounty. But try positing a "best song" on the album and you're likely to be mobbed, not only by your friends, but by your own past testimonials. Some days, "Grand Canyon"'s echoing drum beat is going to resonate in your chest cavity, other days "Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side" is going to make the perfect driving song. But if someone has whispered "Love is Like a Bottle of Gin" across a pillow in the wee hours, you're never going to dislodge it from a place of primacy in their heart.

But if you happen to be Stephin Merritt (which you are unfortunately not), how in the hell do you follow it up? The Fields had been largely a synth-driven band before "69LS", recognizable in equal parts for their pop hooks, lush synths and Merritt's brilliantly flat baritone. With "69LS", he didn't just show off a few new tricks, he sawed the lady in half while wearing a straitjacket and found your card imbedded in her heart. Nearly abandoning synths altogether, Merritt ranged from Holland-Dozier-Holland hooks to Gilbert and Sullivan indulgences and perfectly delivered arch-country ("Papa Was A Rodeo" being a more accurate rendition of the genre than any of the attempts on "Charm of the Highway Strip"). When Merritt returned to the Fields a few years ago with "i", it seemed clear that the synth had been thrown in the trunk and Merritt had become enamored of all the new toys he'd played with on "69LS". The Magnetic Fields now included a banjo, and there was nothing you could do about it, except to put on "Get Lost" and pine.

With “Distortion”, out this week on Nonesuch, the Magnetic Fields have found their way back to the synth sound through a circuitous route. Merritt has claimed he wanted this album to outdo the Jesus and Mary Chain at their own game (it doesn’t. No one can out-JAMC JAMC. Go back and listen to the tragically out of print “Psychocandy” or “Stoned and Dethroned” if you don’t believe me). Pop songs drenched in feedback, almost to the point of drowning their brilliant hooks. While the vocals on “Distortion” are never as buried in the mix as they are on early JAMC albums, they are moved far enough back that listeners can appreciate the cleverness of Merritt’s lyrics without being overwhelmed by them. Before even pressing play, this is apparent in the title. While “i” advertised an album unified by the first letter in the song titles, putting the stress immediately on the lyrics, which veered from too clever to too maudlin while hitting some brilliant moments in between, “Distortion”’s title fronts the sound and production, although distortion is equally a theme within the lyrics. “Distortion” opens with the nearly lyric-less “Three-Way”, announcing the album as more of a team effort than “i” which kicked off with Merritt crooning “I Die” over a barely-there string arrangement cribbed directly from “69LS”’s Gilbert and Sullivan numbers.

From there, the vocals are taken by Claudia Gonson, singer for Merritt's Future Bible Heroes featured on several "69LS" tracks and sadly absent from “i” (thank you CW for the correction. She and Merritt take turns on lead throughout the album, including the duet, “Please Stop Dancing”. Merritt’s cleverness and sense of play are allowed back into his pop songs rather than being encased in light opera arrangements, with funny but compelling songs like “Zombie Boy” and “The Nun’s Litany”, which manages to avoid coming off like a period piece. Listening to “Distortion” is like running into an old friend who’s made it big and discovering they still tell the same jokes, order the same drinks and try to impress you with that same silly card trick they did back in the old days.

(at some point I'm going to start putting pictures and music on here, I promise. But while Gimme Coffee downstairs is being gutted, internet access upstairs is no longer working, so we're sort of on austerity budget.)

The theater's empty during the day

So over at the aforementioned terribly smart and pretty Probably Awkward, owned and operated by the terribly smart and pretty HT (who, contrary to popular opinion, is not two depressed upstate NY lesbians), has been nice enough to pretty up and post some stuff I wrote about Julie Taymor's "Across the Universe", which is the current title holder for Worst Movie I Saw Last Year and didn't manage to block out. You can read about it here.

And for over here, a brief bit on “Juno”, if only to dispel LB’s belief that I love it.

Yes, I like the soundtrack. Kimya Dawson does the cute thing for me better than a whole lot of folks and her presence here almost helped me glaze over a lot of the problems I had with this movie.

First off, something LB pointed out, there’s the standard trope of “character equals quirk”. Both of the central characters are introduced by their odd consumption habits, complete with quirky brand choices: Juno drinks Sunny D (later blue Big Gulps, although we never see a 7-11), George Michael (sorry, he’s always going to be George Michael to me) eats orange Tic-Tacs. Through the coolness of their “uncool” consumption, we know that these kids are outsiders, which is good because the movie never gives us enough of a wide-view of the social structure in town to establish this in any way organic to the story. Better film makers have used a quirk as a jumping off point for character development, but “Juno” uses quirks as a substitute for personality and, eventually, a plot device to reconcile the movie’s two central characters.

The problem of coolness persists. Everyone is just so nonchalant and the only character who shows any kind of emotion reaction to the pregnancy, the skeletal Jennifer Garner, is ridiculed throughout the film for her feelings, although she’s ultimately necessary to save everyone involved from the burden this baby would become. The baby, it seems, lucks out by seamlessly exiting the film’s world of low class, bad home decorating and emotional numbness by entering the caring and well-painted world of Garner’s single parent home. In short, everyone will be fine as long as there are still a few barren female up and comers with ticking biological clocks and inherent maternal instincts. Or at least a few books on the subject.

What bothers me even more is that this type of film is now what constitutes an “indie hit”. Just like last year’s “Little Miss Sunshine”, “Juno” seems to have won a place in people’s hearts. Some people anyway. This despite the fact the film is largely derivative, coming off like Wes Anderson-lite, as well as the fact it provides not just a tacit but an explicit endorsement of anti-abortion sentiments. The physical realities of the young girl’s pregnancy are never addressed. The pregnancy is little more than an inconvenience, and even that is due more to issues of appearance than anything else, but the fact the fetus has fingernails is compelling enough to override all other pragmatic concerns.

Weren’t the major studios supposed to have us covered in the feel-good department? Weren’t independent films supposed to be a little less…safe? While I wait for “There Will Be Blood” and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” to show up at Ithaca’s independent theaters, wait for the more adventurous programming at Cornell Cinema to start up again and wonder why “Juno” needs to be showing on two out of five screens (a third one is showing “Across the Universe”) , I’ll be thinking not about why the indie theaters feel the need to keep this on screens, but why movies of this type seem to draw the biggest audiences. Of course, I paid my eight fifty, so what the hell do I know?

Blasphemous Rumors...

So here's what I've heard, and I make no promises. I've heard Akron/Family at Castaways in March or April. I've heard the New Pornographers and Okkervil River (separately) at the State Theater. I've heard Super Furry Animals at Cornell and Yo La Tengo doing "Sounds of Science" at Cornell Cinema. That's what I've heard.

Any other music related Ithaca rumors floating around? Can anyone confirm or deny any of these?

Realizations in the New Year

You know, all this time I thought I was avoiding the Cult of Gmail and today I realized I actually have not one but two gmail accounts? How do these things happen? In coming to this realization, I also realized that two dozen-some bands have written to me at an email address I never use to get me to post their tracks. If any of those bands are reading, I'm really sorry.

Other things I've realized: certain people seem to be ashamed to admit how much they like the new Radiohead album. So let's talk about that for a minute. I understand the indie impulse to be wary of praising a juggernaut like Radiohead. We've all been hurt before. We've all bought one REM album too many or worse, championed an album, let's call it "New Adventures in Hi-Fi" as their best work since "Green", only to have "Up" come along and tear one leg out from under our arguments, followed by "Reveal", which made the whole REM project indefensible. U2 put people in a similar situation, putting out a series of post-"Achtung" albums that were simultaneously defensible or reprehensible, depending on the company you kept.

And for many of us, we'd watched Radiohead being born, in a strangely lit "120 Minutes" concert-style video of screeching falsetto and alienation that would put Morrissey to shame. We'd seen the brash adolescence of "The Bends" grow into the confident concept album swagger of "OK Computer", and the strange creeping growth of "Kid A" and "Amnesiac". We'd watched a band constantly pushing...something. I mean, let's face it, they were never really experimental, they were just brilliant at incorporating fringe elements into essentially pop songs and crafting albums that sustained a narrative for forty-plus minutes. They didn't reinvent the wheel, they just strapped four of them together with a stronger engine and smoother transmission than most bands could muster.

Arriving at "In Rainbows", we're finding out that Radiohead was building a luxury car all along (I'm stealing this analogy from 33 1/3's David Barker) and is inviting us for a ride. Down the road, the threat of a fully adult contemporary album looms and the desire to be first among the haters, the avant garde of dislike, has its draws. But rather than distributing faint praise in hushed tones, I think it's time to salve the old wounds and appreciate that every now and then, talent and commercial success are completely coincident. "In Rainbows" has everything in its right place, Thom Yorke exhibits scalpel sharp control of both his voice and his lyrics and Jonny Greenwood, who is the Hardest Working Man in Things That Aren't Rock and Roll (check out his score for "There Will Be Blood" or last year's "Jonny Greenwood is the Controller" on Trojan Recs if you don't follow me) builds out beautiful playgrounds for Yorke's vocals to slide through. This album makes me want to smoke pot or drink wine or make out or nod off or rock out or write blog entries again.

Tomorrow, some notes on the new Magnetic Fields. Later in the week, a review of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol comics, which have been keeping me away from "Anna Karenina" all week, dammit. And at some point, a post originally intended for the much smarter blog Probably Awkward on Julie Taymor's compelling awful "Across the Universe", which was both the perfect Beatles movie and the worst film I saw in 2007.