Rife with complex sexuality and searing ultraviolence, 1967's Bonnie and Clyde drew a bright, bleeding line between the studio-centric assembly line ethos of Old Hollywood and the auteur-driven personal filmmaking of New Hollywood. The vision of its star and producer Warren Beatty (otherwise known as George Clooney Mark I), the picture was among the first major American movies to reflect the influence of the French New Wave, wherein enterprising filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Melville had taken the pulpy atmospherics of 1940's cheapie Hollywood noir and reflected them back through a kaleidoscope of wit, glamour, and impeccable stylishness. Nowhere was this transatlantic conversation more evident than in Faye Dunaway's megawatt portrayal of Bonnie Parker: she opens the film standing nude at her window, hollering at Beatty's Clyde Barrow, then a recently-paroled two-bit ex-con, to keep away from her mother's car; after a few moments of sexually-charged back-and-forth, she goads him into the spontaneous robbery that sets the pair on their fateful trajectory across the Depression-era landscape. By herself, Dunaway would elevate the film into the realm of the iconic, but it is director Arthur Penn's masterful depiction of the pair's gruesome finale that cemented Bonnie and Clyde in the upper stratosphere of our cinema, rejecting genteel precedent in favor of founding a new vocabulary grounded firmly in the tumult of its age.
Muxtape. Yet another way for our generation to substitute taste for creativity. Mine's here. Please ignore the list of albums, books, movies and other websites to your right. And yes, The Rest is Noise is outstanding; I highly recommend you obtain a copy, regardless of your present level of interest in classical music.
The same democratizing Internet that leveled the playing field for the label-free TrentCo may be the same one that disassembles him: It's only a matter of time before his fans find out how easy it is to discover more interesting electronic music. In the mid-'90s, Reznor alone was the way your average Hackers fan connected with the cutting edge, jacking in via his collaborations (Aphex Twin, Luke Vibert) and the signees to his Interscope imprint, Nothing (Autechre, Squarepusher). But now, just like Trent himself, everyone is one MySpace friend away from Ricardo Villalobos or Keith Fullerton Whitman or Richard Devine or Burial or Carlos Giffoni or Fuck Buttons or whomever. Not to mention it's easier than ever to make your own electronic music. There's photos of Reznor and collaborator Atticus Ross looming over mountains of gear—impossible tangles of wires, museum-ready rows of pedals, monolithic switchboards that might as well be manned by Lily Tomlin. But with some time and the right plug-ins, your friend might make a similar record on ProTools (if your friend could invite Adrian Belew to play a few ripping solos) that could escape a blind taste-test and grow to the heights of being one of the many records on Mush or Asphodel or Plug Research that don't get written about.
I don't disagree with Weingarten's assessment of Trent Reznor's internet a la carte experiment, music-wise: it is "basically a minimalist record that coasts on one's predilection for NINoise." But suggesting that by putting out a mediocre ambient album, Reznor is imperiling himself by placing his work in direct competition with "betters" like Aphex Twin, Autechre, Keith Fullerton Whitman, and Burial is faintly ridiculous. First off, it assumes that by potentially referring his listenership to these "more interesting" artists, Reznor is engaging in a zero-sum game that he can only lose; perhaps upon first listen to Multiples or Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2 the unwashed hordes will experience a Damascene conversion and abandon Nine Inch Nails, but I sincerely doubt it. Secondly, NIN's traditional metier of goth-grunge-industrial topped with adenoidal vocals will always outsell the Warp catalogue about a billion to one, even if Reznor's art project/market experiment exposes him as a middling presence in "serious" electronic music at best. Finally, Weingarten's argument presupposes that if the cloth-ears willing to swear fealty to the NIN "brand" ever figure out that they can get their hands on the means of production, the ensuing democratization would expose Reznor as...well, I'm not sure. In fact, Weingarten never really states why NIN fans making their own records would be a bad thing for Trent. I guess that the threat is implied, the same way that punk destroyed its bloated corporate rock antecedents, and if you believe that, I have two $300 floor seats to the Eagles reunion tour to sell you.
I agree, I suppose, with Weingarten's gripe that there's more ink on the hundred-dollar bills in Reznor's wallet than many worthwhile electronic albums ever earn in press. But that's not Trent's fault; in fact, as Weingarten himself notes, Reznor was, circa 1995, the sole conduit to the "cutting edge" of electronic music, collaborating with Aphex Twin and Luke Vibert, and signing Autechre and Squarepusher to his Nothing imprint. While MySpace and mp3 blogs and BitTorrent have ensured that these worthwhile artists are now only a click away, it would seem that Trent has long been sowing the seeds of his putative destruction, though I doubt that's how he'd see it. And sure, by flipping off Jimmy Iovine, Reznor's simply discovered a way to pocket all of the loot from future Nine Inch Nails releases; but how cynical do you have to be to see an artist controlling the distribution of his own work and reaping the fruit of his labors as, well, cynical? Yeah, the rich get richer; by selling out all 2,500 copies of the $300 super-luxe limited edition boxed set of Ghosts (oooh FLAC master tracks on Blu-Ray DVD!), Trent's already hauled in $750,000 before costs. But at least he's earning it.
For a more in-depth perspective on the business-side of Ghosts, I recommend reading Bob Lefsetz's take in its entirety, but I'll excerpt the most relevant bit, which catches a bit of what Weingarten doesn't address:
Many people can’t even LISTEN to Nine Inch Nails. It gives them a headache. They believe it’s akin to camping on the factory floor. Who gives a shit about these people. Hell, it adds to NIN’s cachet. Trent’s not owned by MTV, not "Rolling Stone", not Volkswagen or "Grey’s Anatomy" or all the sponsors/advertisers the mainstream says you must be in bed with. Trent is owned by his FANS! And what they like about him is he’s only about the art, he lives in their generation, not the twentieth century. He’s willing to try new things, the way the Beatles did, the way all the classic acts did.
Look at those teeth and tell me that's not an actual vampire
The war in Iraq grinds on. The economy is circling the drain. Your NCAA tournament bracket is shot to pieces. Hillary Clinton continues to inflict serious damage on the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Barack Obama's pastor continues to inflict serious damage on the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Low's Alan Sparhawk sounds like "Low's Alan Sparhawk" to such an extent that perhaps anything he would involve himself with would bear the taint of his main gig; Retribution Gospel Choir, his side project with bassist Matt Livingston (also of Low, of late) and drummer Eric Pollard, sounds like Low with more guitars. This mightn't be so problematic were it not for the fact that Retribution Gospel Choir also share Low's main aesthetic attribute - their adherence to funereal tempos - and that Low themselves made the "Low with more guitars" album in 2005's bafflingly maligned The Great Destroyer. (It also doesn't help that RGC cover, however ably, two recent Low tracks: "Breaker" and "Take Your Time" from last year's terrific Drums and Guns.) Neil Young's work with Crazy Horse is invoked here, perhaps inevitably; I hear that impulse behind Sparhawk's noodling, but none of the workouts on debut full-length Retribution Gospel Choir are as languid or magisterial as a "Cortez the Killer" or "Powderfinger". In fact, despite Sparhawk's evident devotion to stately pacing, the album's tracks are quite economical, with most topping out under three minutes, and the two longest tied at 4:06.
A confession: the first, and only time I have seen Low live, they were pretty much as boring as watching paint dry. It was at the Ethical Society of Philadelphia, a stately 19th century meeting hall just off of Rittenhouse Square which was woefully ill-suited as a musical venue, primarily because the stage was so low to the ground (in fact, I don't even know if there was an elevated stage or they just played on the floor - in which case, fuck off Dan Deacon) that everybody had to sit on the floor the entire time. This might not have been so bad, were it not for the fact that opener Mark Eitzel (who I subsequently learned was kind of a big deal as singer-songwriting for the now-resurgent American Music Club) was god-awful and Low themselves were so incredibly late, for reasons I cannot recall. So after slogging through in minor discomfort for two hours, Low played a sonorous acoustic set heavy on cuts from their worst album, 2002's Trust; the twin highlights were the phone call Mimi Parker (Low's drummer and Sparhawk's wife) took on stage from their baby sitter, and the fact that their set was foreshortened by the Ethical Society's policy of closing up shop by 10:00 pm, which might have been another item of complaint had the trio (Zak Sally was the bassist at the time, but has since departed the group) gathered even a modicum of momentum. So, with that caveat, and judging from the YouTube clip above, the best way to view RGC would be, probably to Sparhawk's chagrin, as Low in an awesome, electrified touring configuration. Which is nothing to sneeze at.
P.S. Worth checking out is Low's outstanding 2001 effort, Things We Lost in the Fire, which on its own makes the case for the dramatic possibilities of the so-called "slowcore" movement. On this record, Nietzsche's famous formulation about women applies to the band as well: "They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent."
If George W. Bush's America vomited, it might look like Southland Tales, an incomprehensible piece of political satire that doesn't bother with pretension, instead throwing C and D-list actors, conceits, and signifiers at the screen as furiously as possible, hoping, perhaps, that something sticks. As cinema it's an act of vandalism, rejecting limousine liberal politesse in favor of what I would term direct action: if you want to say "fuck the Republicans" just say fuck the Republicans, I guess. That's not to say that Southland Tales is writer-director Richard Kelly's Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore's infamous anti-Bush "documentary" polemic; in that film, you could tell what the hell was going on. Kelly, whose previous feature, Donnie Darko, abandoned logic in favor of an intuitive emotional authenticity, here just abandons logic in favor of taking out as many targets as humanly possible. Perhaps the culture is simply too large to be so simply indicted, but I imagine that someone like Kelly must have figured that the powers that be would get wise to his shit eventually and deny him the means of production, so why not try for the big brass ring all in one fell swoop?
Julius Caesar, as we all know, had his shit jacked on the Ides of March, and got the month of July named after him. Kind of like the Notorious B.I.G. Leonard Lopate gets to the bottom of things with Conversations in Tusculum playwright Richard Nelson and actor David Strathairn:
I don't give a flying fuck about college basketball for the most part, but I, like most of the betesticled population of the U.S.A. love March Madness. Why? Well, as it happens, I have a theory about this: it's a two parter.
First, it's like one of those cheeseball '80s and '90s mixed marshal arts movies where they invite all these super badass ninja types (and one American, i.e. the Good Guy, i.e. Jean Claude Van Dam or Dolph Lundgren - don't worry, the irony will roundhouse kick you in the face in about a second) to fight it out to the death in a single elimination tournament. If you get sonned by the fat sumo dude or the hot gymnast assassin chick, then you end up in a pit of spikes or having your spine ripped out. The NCAA tournament is much like this, except the losers squirt a few tears and then tear up the hotel bar. The drama, especially in the later rounds, is fantastic, especially as the Cinderellas, those low seeded squads that inevitably squeeze their way at least into the Sweet Sixteen, grapple to the death with a Duke or a UConn; truly there are few greater David and Goliath stories that the no-name liberal arts college with a gym (literally, a gym) that houses 5,000 fans going head-to-head with a basketball factory that is basically an NBA farm team.
Second, along with the vaunted (and far stupider) Super Bowl pool, the NCAA tournament pool is the premier layman's gambling event of the year. The permutations in a field of 64 teams are virtually limitless (well, obviously there are finite number of outcomes), and fate is so capricious that the seasoned fan is often on equal footing with the mom who chips in five bucks because everyone else in the office is playing and then picks winners based on where her friends went to college or what state she would like to live in. It allows you a rooting interest regardless of your legitimate collegiate affiliation, and opens the door for vicarious triumph by sheer luck plus the winning of a significant chunk of money.
Also, during the first two rounds anyway, it's the most bewildering event to watch drunk, as they're constantly flipping back and forth between games and you can't possibly follow what the hell is going on.
From "Exposure" by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, The New Yorker, 3/24/2008:
The image of Gilligan achieves its power from the fact that it does not show the human form laid bare and reduced to raw matter but creates instead an original image of inhumanity that admits no immediately self-evident reading. Its fascination resides, in large part, in its mystery and inscrutability—in all that is concealed by all that it reveals. It is an image of carnival weirdness: this upright body shrouded from head to foot; those wires; that pose; and the peaked hood that carries so many vague and ghoulish associations. The pose is obviously contrived and theatrical, a deliberate invention that appears to belong to some dark ritual, a primal scene of martyrdom. The picture transfixes us because it looks like the truth, but, looking at it, we can only imagine what that truth is: torture, execution, a scene staged for the camera? So we seize on the figure of Gilligan as a symbol that stands for all that we know was wrong at Abu Ghraib and all that we cannot—or do not want to—understand about how it came to this.
The first hour of I Am Legend is an awesome story about Will Smith and his dog Sam tooling around an abandoned Manhattan in rad cars, hunting antelope and trapping vampires for medical experiments. The remainder is sub-28 Days Later "last best hope for humanity" melodramatic pap. Smith is the main attraction here, giving what is perhaps his best performance as a man constantly fending off the terror of being utterly alone in the world by thrusting himself into the futile labor of trying to find a cure for the disease that has turned the scintilla of humanity who didn't expire straight away into a horde of rabid zombie/vampires that prey on the even smaller scintilla who were entirely immune. Unfortunately the filmmakers, who invest a great deal of time building an engrossing atmosphere of isolation coupled with desperation, decide to sabotage their story with a particularly glaring deus ex machina, turning I Am Legend's climax into Panic Room: The Cliffs Notes. I suppose that insofar as Will Smith-starring adaptations of 1950s classic sci-fi novels, it's far better than the atrocious I, Robot.
Cut Copy's long awaited follow-up to 2004's slept-on Bright Like Neon Love is slated to drop in the United States on April 8th courtesy of Modular. Knowing that you can't (or shouldn't want to) wait that long, and seeking to deny leakers the moral high ground, the band have posted In Ghost Colours for streaming in its entirety over at their MySpace. It's sort of a shamelessly brilliant/brilliantly shameless rip of New Order at their most rock-centric, and it's destined to be one of the most nakedly pleasurable pop albums of 2008.
Addendum: Cut Copy have also posted an mp3 of their So Cosmic mix, which I suppose serves as a kind of prologue for the upcoming album. Download it from their blog, complete with annotated tracklisting.
