February 2013
3 posts
6 tags
Hold Your Applause: How the Academy Rewards Cheap...
Congratulations, everyone: we now live in a world where North Korea detonates atom bombs underground for the fun of it — if that isn’t apocalyptic as all hell, I don’t know what is. It’s not like we haven’t seen this coming. If you’ve sat down with a bag of Cheetos and a video game controller anytime in these past few years, you were probably fighting ugly Ruskies or angry flavor-of-the-month...
4 tags
“It’s starting to seem that in GoDaddy’s world, men are smart, have ideas, and do...”
– GoDaddy: Smart and Sexist A Verge forum piece that I wrote earlier this month. Do these ads really sell domains?
5 tags
“Without realizing it, we’ve allowed ourselves to exist in an Impressionistic...”
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48 FPS: how we accidentally invented Impressionist filmmaking | The Verge Forums
A fascinating read from The Verge’s Jacob Kastrenakes.
(via thisistheverge)
A Verge forum post that I wrote back in December. The proposed change in medium that Peter Jackson asserts in The Hobbit is far more...
November 2012
4 posts
4 tags
Album: About to Die EP - Dirty Projectors
Dirty Projectors released the follow up to their (debatably) breakout LP, Bitte Orca, in July. Bitte Orca was their seventh album, and naturally, it’s more than meaningful for a band to turn around a name the way that Dirty Projectors did when it hadn’t faired well for years. In spite of their success, Dirty Projectors have always been changing, and July’s release, Swing Lo...
3 tags
Album: 2 - Mac DeMarco
The album art of Mac DeMarco’s 2 reeks of something a little bit Nascar, maybe a little high and dirty. It’s grungy and unappealing, but of course, the type of music that would normally be aimed at such a demographic would look nothing of the sort. Rather, DeMarco seems to exist among these things, and through 2, effortlessly details them to us. We get the impression that the...
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Album: Matricidal Sons of Bitches - Matthew...
Matthew Friedberger is best known as half of The Fiery Furnaces, a band composed of him and his sister Eleanor. They alternatingly make approachable and fun indie rock with bluesy influences and confoundingly experimental rock that dips in and out of that same sound. The Fiery Furnaces last released an album in 2009, and since then both siblings have released material on their own. Where...
3 tags
Album: Ocean Roar - Mount Eerie
Mount Eerie has set out to release three albums this year, which I guess makes him 2012’s Robyn. His first effort, Clear Moon, was something of a surprise hit. It’s a subdued album released among the fanfare of this forest/log cabin/rustic fad, but Eerie’s take was something much more specific and haunting. I missed his second effort of the year when it debuted in September,...
October 2012
14 posts
2 tags
Film: House of Tolerance (2011)
There are striking similarities between House of Tolerance and Sleeping Beauty, both films that debuted at last year’s Cannes. It’s something of an oddity. There aren’t quite clear, modern human interests that may be informing these films’ creations. They take place one hundred years apart: Sleeping Beauty in the present, House of Tolerance in 1900. The similarities,...
4 tags
Film: Cloud Atlas
I gave up reading Cloud Atlas after beginning the second section. The novel is written in first person with thick dialect appropriate to the time of the character writing. This makes comprehension difficult. The reader must also slog through this to come to understand the time and world and place of the character, all while the character remains frustratingly obtuse. It’s rather...
3 tags
Novel: Telegraph Avenue - Michael Chabon
The other huge release on September 11 this year was Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue, clocking in around two hundred pages longer than Junot Díaz’s collection of stories, This is How You Lose Her. It’s pretty special to get a release from either of these smart, Pulitzer winning authors. For them to come on the same day is more than one reader can handle, not to mention the...
5 tags
Album: Banks - Paul Banks
As Interpol’s lead singer, Paul Banks was known for casually cryptic lyrics, “We can cap the old times make playing only logical harm. We can top the old lines clay-making that nothing else will change.” Within them though were physical sentiments that managed to speak directly to us in spite of the would-be confusion. This sentiment has created some veil over Banks himself,...
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Album: The Haunted Man - Bat for Lashes
Natasha Kahn makes sparse baroque pop under the moniker Bat For Lashes, though that shouldn’t be news to most. Kahn’s pieces alternatingly hit either side of the line between singer-songwriter and dreamy pop. Though she may be most famous for that one music video from her last LP, the mix of the near-spooky atmosphere of Kahn’s tracks and her traditionally strong vocals make...
3 tags
Album: Local Business - Titus Andronicus
Over the past several months, I’ve run into more than a handful of bands whose sounds failed to match my impression of them. For some it was a matter of the style that surrounded them, but for others, it was the result of a mistaken first impression. If I’ve learned one thing here, it’s that I need to distinguish when that impression was made. For a select few, that impression...
3 tags
Film: 2 Days in Paris (2007)
By all means, 2 Days in Paris is a film that appeals to me. A condensed frame of time, two lovers, relationships, Paris, Julie Delpy. It’s been streaming on Netflix pretty much forever, but what had always held me back was the awful, awful cover art that made it appear to have the sensibilities of a cheesy and lame romantic comedy. Finally, after hearing from others what I had always...
2 tags
Film: Argo
I suspect that I wasn’t the only person surprised to hear that Ben Affleck has not only moved into directing but is actually reported to be quite good. This is not to say anything negative of his prior performances, but rather that nothing about the films that he starred in suggested an interest in the type of smart dramas and thrillers that he’s been making. It’s all made me curious about his...
2 tags
Film: Indie Game: The Movie
An incredible shift is happening in video game production. Like with film after the advent of cheap video cameras, production of the medium is now accessible to outsiders. No longer does one need the increasingly larger crews of coders and artists. Now, a handful of skilled (or even not so skilled) programmers can create something that’s equally or more compelling than a title from a...
3 tags
Film: Samsara
Samsara is the latest of a series of nonfiction collages of the world: pseudo-sequel to Baraka, tangential to Chronos and Koyaanisqatsi. It doesn’t differ all that much from the type, though that says nothing negative of it. Samsara’s primary creators, Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson, served the same roles on Baraka, the film best known of the type and nearest in style to Samsara. ...
3 tags
Album: Lonerism - Tame Impala
Tame Impala’s debut may have presented something with a grungy, garage rock edge, but here in their sophomore release, Lonerism, the band has gone deeper into the psych sounds that were present, even if not the focus, of that first LP. Their debut was well received, and now an appropriate just over two years later, they’re back. Unlike many other bands with successful debuts,...
4 tags
Album: Shut Down the Streets - A.C. Newman
How many fantasy authors must have individual novels that spin off characters from their more famous parent property? I can only imagine (I mean, I’m not going to go about reading that) that it’s a common enough practice. One epic property and a dozen smaller pieces of canon to build it all up. In some ways, this is how A.C. Newman, the white knight of a leading man, relates to The New...
3 tags
Album: End of Daze - Dum Dum Girls
Remember the Beach House performance that I described while discussing Bloom? No? That’s fine, I’ve seen the Google Analytics numbers. That night, Beach House was the opening act. They were riding off of the success of Teenage Dream, but of course, it’s hard to stand beside the massive success of Vampire Weekend, who headlined the night. The show was at Radio City Music...
3 tags
Film: Looper
Rian Johnson’s first two films, Brick and The Brother’s Bloom, take a genre and escape from it. He treats the genre with respect, indulging its finer aspects and crafting creative ways to explore its interests, but from there, the films manage to angle toward something else, something more personal and interesting. Brick and The Brother’s Bloom tend to widely receive respect...
September 2012
16 posts
3 tags
Album: Total Loss - How to Dress Well
Though I never gave How to Dress Well’s debut LP a listen (in spite of it being a fairly acclaimed effort) the act’s name stuck with me. Often enough, outside of any associations that we may have, we can place a band’s stylings through their name, but How to Dress Well always caught me off guard. One can glean little there. Perhaps this is pessimism or the dread of listening...
6 tags
Stories: This is How You Lose Her - Junot Díaz
It’s been a long time since Junot Díaz’s stories were collected. His first collection, Drown, was published in 1996, and though you’d stumble across one of Díaz’s stories in Best Of collections every so often, it was clear that he had only published so many in the time being. Still, with those stories floating out there, it was hard not to want to see them in some easily...
3 tags
Album: Battle Born - The Killers
There was never any chance that it would be the best album released last week, but it was always going to be the one most exciting for me. I suspect that not everyone else has the same attachments that I do to The Killers, but perhaps it’s more than are willing to admit it. It stems from a certain High School obsession, a musical introduction. For all the hate they get, there’s...
4 tags
iOS 6 & the Slow Growing OS
What stands out the most about Apple’s yearly release cycle for iOS (and now, it seems, OS X as well), is the manner in which it removes the holiness of the OS upgrade. A decade ago, upgrading to a new operating system was a big deal. Outside of simply a monetary investment, that OS was the product of several years of work. It was a company saying that this is your new playground and...
4 tags
Album: Shields - Grizzly Bear
There’s something I have to own up to: when Grizzly Bear’s previous album, Veckatimest, hit with much acclaim, I passed over it without a listen. Through some stubbornness and an inappropriate association with Panda Bear and Animal Collective (you can see my mistake), I never gave the album a chance. You’ll notice no discussion of Centipede Hz around here. That’s not for...
3 tags
Film: The Master
Paul Thomas Anderson is a masterful director. He draws incredible performances, even from unlikely dramatic actors like Adam Sandler, and plays with such taught tension that it would almost be unbearable to watch were it not all so compelling. Anderson’s last film, There Will Be Blood, is perhaps the most similar piece of his filmography to The Master. We watch a clash between one man...
5 tags
Album: Kill My Blues - Corin Tucker Band
If you’re somehow just tuning in to these names, first thing is first: you should get a few Sleater-Kinney albums under your belt. Corin Tucker and bandmates Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss formed the 90s riot grrrl act Sleater-Kinney, which morphed over eight albums into something a bit more along the indie-rock or garage-rock lines. Tucker was the band’s voice, and for good reason. She and...
3 tags
Film: Side by Side
I was terribly excited to first hear of Side by Side, a documentary profiling the rise of digital and the consequent fall of film cameras. As something of a cinephile, I’ve become increasingly curious about the divide between these two formats. Without doubt, there is a difference in look between film and digital photography, and as Hollywood moves increasingly quickly into producing films...
5 tags
Stories: The Love of a Good Woman - Alice Munro...
The title The Love of a Good Woman seems to imply that these stories are about the receipt of that love. Perhaps that implication comes from a male approach. It’s hard to see if this is its obvious implication. I what other context could one consider that love? More accurately, however, this collection is about a woman’s love. These stories all revolve around female leads (as...
7 tags
Album: Love This Giant - David Byrne & St. Vincent
It’s hard not to pay attention to a project surrounding Annie Clark, an artist who released her debut and an additional two explosive albums under the stage name of St. Vincent over the past five years, or a release surrounding David Byrne, frontman of Talking Heads, let alone a collaboration between the two. It’s an exciting prospect, and its certainly been eagerly anticipated since...
3 tags
Album: Coexist - The xx
When The xx’s debut came out in 2009, very nearly three years and one month ago today, I gave the album’s front a handful of chances, but it never did do anything for me. The self-titled album was received to significant acclaim, but their slow, soft coolness couldn’t sell me. It’s an album that I’m yet to revisit, and I have no doubt that I would approach it...
2 tags
TV: Breaking Bad (Season 5, Part 1 Finale)
We were left with next to nothing. Breaking Bad, after the events of season four, gave itself no apparent direction for its fifth and final season. It would be split up, we knew that. Eight episodes this summer, and a final eight episodes next year. Even going into this final, half-season finale, there was no clear direction, no obvious action or tension, but of course, there must be a...
3 tags
Film: Manhattan (1979)
Two years after Annie Hall, Woody Allen returned to comedy with Manhattan, a film with many of the same interests but played out in different ways. Of course, Allen’s films tend to have similar, well vocalized interests. What they explore or discuss is never hard to place, and Manhattan, perhaps better than any other Allen film that I’ve seen, is thick with coherent threads...
3 tags
Album: I Know What Love Isn't - Jens Lekman
I never did tune into Jens Lekman when his sophomore LP, Night Falls Over Kortedala, hit, even in spite of its general acclaim. Something about the foppish, airy, prettiness of the album art always turned me off. To be fair, Lekman is a singer-songwriter, at least of sorts. He’s a story teller, working it through something akin to soft and flowery indie pop from the days of Belle &...
3 tags
Album: The North - Stars
The last time that I checked in with Stars their latest release was Set Yourself on Fire, an LP out in 2004. They’ve had two LPs between then and The North, but it seemed all too clear how Stars’ sound would evolve. Set Yourself on Fire was a wonderful indie pop rock out, perfect for the budding indie music listener. It was melancholic and guitar studded, thick with dramatic notions...
3 tags
Album: Sun - Cat Power
This is my first Cat Power album, a fact that seems unlikely. This isn’t to say that Cat Power is strictly up my alley, but as an artist she was established going into the new millennium and received plenty of attention across the types of blogs and publications that shaped a generation’s music tastes. Perhaps this is a bad album to go into carrying the baggage of Cat Power’s...
August 2012
23 posts
2 tags
Film: Crash (2005)
An ensemble cast, interweaving stories, slow aimless narratives, and all happening in the span of less than two days. Crash is ambitious and sounds like a great film, something along the lines of Magnolia or Babel. Crash, perhaps daringly, attempts to take on heated race relations in Los Angeles in the mid-2000s. It tries to be comprehensive too in its display of races, it’s got just...
3 tags
Album: Beams - Matthew Dear
Maybe I haven’t been paying attention, but suddenly everything that is coming out is electronic or mixed with electronic elements or electro-blended, etc, etc, and I think it all has something to do with Radiohead back in the 90s. It’s another week and so of course we have another electro thing, or as Wikipedia is currently putting it, avant-pop. This is not a bad descriptor. ...
3 tags
TV: The Newsroom (Season 1 Finale)
More than anything, The Newsroom proved every week how unbearably long a two minute intro can feel. This is the good news: the worst, absolutely worst part of this show is the long and boring title sequence. Outside of this, The Newsroom, without falter, has been an exciting series. The pilot seemed to set up a drama within the fictional newsroom, but the show took it elsewhere. The characters...
3 tags
Album: Nocturne - Wild Nothing
There are more than enough bands right now with the label dream pop, with star speckled synthesized night skies and wispy ethereal vocals. While Wild Nothing certainly falls within the type, there’s a much stronger physicality than we tend to see elsewhere. The songs on Nocturne are rooted physically, and while vocals may seem to be hanging off the edge of some unseen cliff, we have...
6 tags
Album: A Thing Called Divine Fits - Divine Fits
Divine Fits first album comes off of the buzz of being concocted by something of a casual supergroup. The band is only a three man operation, but of those people two are notable in the scene. Dan Boeckner comes from Wolf Parade, and most distinctly, singer Britt Daniel comes from Spoon. There has always been a seriously cool edge to his vocals, and that’s all present here. The band only...
3 tags
Film: Never Let Me Go (2010)
Director Mark Romanek is another filmmaker whose vetting seems to have come through creating music videos. It’s a common thing these days, and its produced great filmmakers like Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze. Never Let Me Go is Romanek’s third film. His debut feature came in 1985, making his feature career a slow progression. Never Let Me Go is based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005...
4 tags
Album: Mature Themes - Ariel Pink's Haunted...
Mature Themes is the second album to the name of Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, but it’s the ninth LP from Pink himself, although that hardly scratches the surface of his discography. Pink has dozens of smaller, more casual releases, most coming from his earlier days as an artist. Since breaking out on Animal Collective’s label in the mid-2000s, his output has been a bit more...
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Novel: Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides (2002)
One of the novel’s greatest strengths is its ability to span massive, massive, lengths of time. Nearly every novel that I have passionately responded to was a generational story, one that, to tell its specific narrative, required the telling of the stories of all those around them. Middlesex seems to idealize these same aspects. It has a story, and it aims to tell every corner of it that...
3 tags
Instagram's Photo Maps, Careful Iteration, & the...
For all of the praise and TechCrunch posts telling developers to iterate, iterate, iterate, Instagram, easily the face for mobile startup success stories, has largely stayed away from this philosophy. To constantly iterate is certainly good advice in our current culture. Tech moves fast - if something doesn’t stick, it’s better to find something that does than to keep refining a...
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Album: Devotion - Jessie Ware
Apparently all of our singers with huge, soaring voices come from Britain nowadays. Be it Florence Welch or Adele, the voice is what listeners come for - the music behind it is just a necessity. Jessie Ware is the next big female singer out of the U.K., but her strengths lay in both her vocals and the music behind her. This is not to say that Florence or Adele are lacking in this area - it’s...
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Album: Tracer - Teengirl Fantasy
Teengirl Fantasy certainly isn’t the first odd set of musicians to come out of Oberlin College. As far as things go, they aren’t all that out there on any spectrum, let alone Oberlin’s. The band’s first LP came out nearly two years ago - it had a bit of buzz, but nothing spectacular came of it (or the album, I suspect). Tracer doesn’t seem to be much of a...
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Film: 127 Hours (2010)
It may not be for everyone, but films like 127 Hours deeply appeal to me. The style is almost antithetical to film’s strengths. We stay in one location for the duration of the film (or at least, the majority of it) rather than jumping through space and time the way that film so naturally can. 127 Hours finds James Franco as Aron Ralston, the real life climber famous for finding his hand...
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Album: Fragrant World - Yeasayer
Yeasayer have always been partial to layered, skittered tracks. It’s been the requisite two years, and now they’re back with Fragrant World, an album deeply interested in the meshing of electronic sounds into traditionally physical stylings. It’s the musical equivalent of a fusion restaurant. The electronic wisps, whirls, and thumps all serve to replace or work alongside of a...
