How the Lion Lost Its Pride

There are new comics reviews up at Pop Matters including my review of Paul Hornschemeier's Mother Come Home.

My goal was to reflect on the central symbol of the comic, hopefully broadening the possibility of its meaning for the reader.

The Pop Matters style is interesting because at a root level it is searching for the same type of criticism that we have been with Robots Fighting, yet its large readership also looks to the site for clear opinions. It is taking me a few reviews to be able to balance things in a way I feel is appropriate without seeming too constructed or too vague. I feel like I'm getting there with the Mother Come Home review, although my attempt to move beyond the symbolism to actually rate the book is a tad weak.

These Are the Vistas

These Are the Vistas

Any two things moving with different rhythms will at some point for some time reach a synchronicity. If you've ever ridden a swing next to another person you've seen the effect in practice, when without effort you swing with someone you had been swinging opposite of. But the synchronous rhythm does not last perpetually and soon your swings are disjointed again.

Enter the joy and the frustration and the joy in frustration of post-bop jazzers The Bad Plus. Their compositions soar over jagged and scattered beats until they rise over a particular peak and reveal some perfect, hidden vista. But just as you begin to acquiant yourself with the surroundings maybe even settling in, the music's wings are taking you away to some other secret majesty. That said, their contemporary rock covers have warmed to the populous, giving the listener a thread of familiarity with which to trevail the rocky and glorious heights of The Bad Plus' breed of jazz. These tracks are like Sound Picassos, breaking their sources apart and reforming them so you can hear every angle at once...

But despite the brilliance of these moments, does The Bad Plus risk becoming a novelty act because of them? It's a question the band must be aware of and an awareness that can only heighten the danger. As their repertoire of covers builds, will anyone care to listen to their original compositions? It's true there are a number of pieces that reach places more beautiful than anything in The Bad Plus' explorations of common locales, but for average listeners the trails to get to those places are foreboding.

"Iron Man" is possibly the cover least coy about its inspiration and as a result the least graceful, yet this is what the audience of last week's show at Martyr's demanded to hear. I don't think it was because of a particular contempt for the original compositions - the crowd grooved to all of them - but because, given the choice we'd rather discover an antique pocketwatch in the floor boards than to face hunger and cold as we traverse the Andes to find the clock the world spins by.

Fox Brings All the Boys to the Yard

Fox Brings All the Boys to the Yard

I try not to say this too often but, whoa-zay.

Volume 2

Volume 2

If Kill Bill vol. 1 had been what Kill Bill vol.2 is, I probably would have been apathetic to the entire series.

For certain, I didn't want talking. I told Kristi back in the day, "If there is no talking in the entire movie, I will be happy." And in the end (or middle?), I was impressed with Quentin Tarrantino's ability to embed complex themes into the two hour fight sequence with as little talking as possible and to still keep it constantly fresh with an amalgam of international action movie styles. (Was just thinking, incidentally, about Cottonmouth's board room scene being Tarrantino's way of suggestively defending his creation as a legitimate fight movie.)

That said, at the cliffhanger conclusion of Volume 1 what I wanted for Volume 2 was not non-stop action, I wanted talking. I didn't have any desire to see the Bride storm through dojos for another 2 hours. Yeah, some swordplay was going to be necessary, but I understood the world the characters lived in and wanted to, obviously, the plot to reach a full-fledged fruition but also to be given a deeper look into the mythology of the characters. And it's what we get.

What seems clear to me is that Tarrantino is one of the best character developers in cinema. Kill Bill (and arguably the entire filmography) is a handful of interesting characters tossed together in a basic framework. They invent their own story and Quentin just tweaks the knobs and dials... "What happens if we have Uma Thurman, Darryl Hannah, and David Carradine all get their training from the same guy?" "Let's set it so that David and Uma and Michael Madesn have the same one-of-a-kind sword." Most of the intricacy of the character's relationships to one another stays in the subtext but feels nevertheless more true because of it. The story is controlled by the characters, and as such allows the actors to dazzle. So, how Tarrantino approaches some scenes is, in some sense, dependent upon how the actors control their characters. In other cases, Tarrantino adjusts the controls... camera angles, lighting / color design, exposure, whatever... and the characters play through. There's a symbiosis to the whole thing.

A few years ago, I winced at the idea of Tarrantino doing a Dirty Dozen style World War II flick; I couldn't see him being able to make the transition from Resevoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction into that... But, here in Kill Bill, he proves his proficiency at character design and his intent to let that design drive the story.

iRecycle

If you've got free iTunes songs from Pepsi's big promotion and have no real interest in using them (I'm in the boat, where unless I have a full cd, I have no interest in having an ugly file format on my comp), check out Tune Recycler from the folks at Downhill Battle. Send them your codes and they will use them to repetitively purchase the albums of various independent artists (including Pretty Girls Make Graves). Pepsi only expects 10-20% of all codes to be redeemed by the April 30 deadline, so this is a way to get the codes that you never intended to use active and make some indie artists a little bit happier.

Creative Use of iTunes #2:

I was on iTunes looking for something to spend my songs on (I ended up donating them via TuneRecycler but may end up buying an album or two in the future from Apple) and discovered that the service has high quality, quickly streaming samples for every song in the database... What's more is that the clips seem to be smartly produced, picking highlight moments of the songs. It's exploitable for anyone who would rather buy a physical copy.

Weird iTunes iTem

I signed on looking for tracks from the Guster-covers-Femmes show and was disappointed at the limited number of songs from the event (five altogether, with one being a Guster original)... But I did find the Meow Mix of Guster's Keep It Together, which in the spirit of the Goldfly bonus track replaces all the lyrics for the entire album with meowing.

If the sugar-coated lyrics of Keep It Together weren't your thing but you loved the music, the Meow Mix album is $2 less than the actual album. Save money! Love Guster!

Musical Chairs : Your Weekly Challenge

I've decided to post a weekly challenge (every Saturday) for the writers and readers of this blog; no prizes aside from the satisfaction of beating your peers in competition. Entries must be received by the following Friday, in the form of comment, e-mail or blog post/link. All very simple.

This weeks challenge is "Musical Chairs" and here is your task. The new Broadway cash-in is to take a washed-up artist's discography and reenvision it as a heart-warming story with ubiquitous singing and dancing. Abba, Billy Joel, Boy George... They all have their own musicals and people other than themselves are making money off of them!!! I would like to make money too. So, you are challenged to take any non-concept album (no Yoshimi, no Sgt. Pepper) from any artist (including the relentless V.A.) and come up with a plot synopsis with song cues. Entries should include a list of characters and should utilize no fewer than 5 songs from the given album. Several independent judges will be pitched each of the musicals, and their opinions will triangulate the winner. Degree of difficulty, creativity, and marketability will factor into the final decision.

Now is your chance to give Jon Bon Jovi (or the like) immortality!

It's Winter Time for Spring!

A co-worker and I were walking home from work and turned onto a street that I had seen blocked off with a squad car and police officers several times during the course of the day. As we walked down the street, and I related my curiousity over the blocking, we realized we were walking through snow. Not a lot, just along the edges of the sidewalk. Still it's been warm in Chicago the past week, so any snow that might still be lingering in the shade would certainly be gone by now. We soon discovered that the snow was not snow but actually suds, like the lather of a bikini car wash. Fumigating? Street washing? We listed through the possibilites unable to accept any of them... soon noticing white plastic sheeting bolted over any grass along the street. And as we returned to our surprise at finding "snow" we suddenly came across real snow, and more extensive sheathing of the ground around us.

We were baffled.

Suddenly, it all clicked in my mind. El tracks, brown stones, low traffic side street, manned road block, real snow on one side, fake snow on the other... It must have been a movie shoot.

Sure enough, The Weather Man had been filming scenes that day.

Soundtrack of Our Lives

One of the things I miss most about living in a dorm is the free exchange of new music. Hearing a song wafting in from the other room and walking in to find out who and what it is. If I were still living in the dorms, the song you'd be hearing more than any other right now is a great pop piece called "Artists Are Boring" by the Kingdom Flying Club.

Seemingly owing equal debts to the low-fi sound of Guided By Voices and Pavement and the polished power pop of bands like Material Issue and Weezer, Kingdom Flying Club comes to us from Columbia, MO. For you Chicago area kiddies out there, the band actually reminds me a lot of Kleenex Girl Wonder. Great pop sensibilities, but not afraid to get down and dirty (and fuzzy with their guitar sound).

"Artists Are Boring" is a fun slice of the band at their most polished. Think Kinks circa "Village Green Preservation Society." The song starts with an irresistable piano intro and holds on to your ears 'til the very end. The band even writes a great bridge, a lost art these days, with what I believe to be mandolin carrying the melody. "Hate Shirt," the first track of the album, goes the other direction with crunching guitar riffs and a thundering bass line. Production is fairly clean and complements the band's sound nicely -- kind of like Ric Ocasek if he didn't suck.

If you order the album, Emergency Umbrella will even throw in free buttons and stickers. Can't beat a deal like that.

Taking Seasame Back to the Streets

Taking Seasame Back to the Streets

Thanks to the rise of audience specific cable channels and direct market videos, children's television has gone from a doe-eyed attempt to enlighten our kids to a brittle, plastic effort to sell Yu-Gi-Oh! cards.

Fortunately, all is not lost. In an effort to rekindle the spirit of the Children's Television Workshop and, uhm, Rumpus Room, a group of DC artsy-types have created a kids show that tries something different. Pancake Mountain applies a rough around the edges punk rock aesthetic to the puppets and songs approach to children's television. The web only pilot featured appearances from a host of indie celebrities including Bob Mould (as an evil executive) Vic Chesnut (singing a classic kids number) and Thievery Corporation (showing the kids how to get down). Best of all, Fugazi's Ian MacKaye performs as the Evens in the more clever than it sounds Vowel Movement. Chances are Pancake Mountain's unique take on getting through to the kids will never make it over to the small screen, but if it does, it might just be a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

More like "Mr. Suck!"

More like "Mr. Suck!"

If you're like me, you've probably been tempted to check out the Mr. Show inspired Run Ronnie Run but always decide against it at the last minute, afraid that it might not live up to Bob and David's other work. Your instincts were right. Here's why.

Apparently, the parents of song parody emperor Weird Al Yankovic were found dead in their home from carbon monoxide poisoning.

I've always felt Weird Al has lived in a sort of comedy dream world where the most horrible thing to happen to him was the surreal event of Coolio threatening to throw down over Amish Paradies; so, it couldl be interesting to see where he goes from here with his music. Will he retreat further into his wacky novelty world or will we, perhaps, see a darker era of his music? Or will he make none at all?

Whatever the case, it's a stunning loss for anyone and a reminder that our bodies are fragile to the most unexpected things.

Dreams Do Come True...

WXRT now is (finally) steaming over the internet. Trust me, no matter how long and hard people in Chicago complain XRT is not what is used to be, it's still at least 10 times better than almost anything else around the country, and especcially here in Rockford. Is it what is used to be? No, of course not. But the strength of the station is the music and the DJs. People listeners have known for more than a decade. I would have paid to hear Bobby Skafish and Lin Brehmer and Tom Marker again. Now I get to hear them for free.

In the first of a series, I present songs I probably would not have known about if not for XRT Streaming on the net:

Jack Johnson -- Taylor: I liked Flake, and I do think Johnson is more than Dave Matthews lite. The songs I've heard from him do a great job of creating mood and feeling. Taylor does this perfectly and is a great acoustic guitar workout too. At the very least it beats hearing Britney Spears for the 100th time on the Top 40 station out here or more Jackson Browne on the classic rock station.

Forget You

Forget You

Then you see a movie like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and everything gets put into perspective.

A perfect piece of humanistic science fiction. Aside from Charlie Kaufman's fairly regular brilliance, you also must remove your hat and then hand it over with a family heirloom to Michel Gondry for being able to pull this off so eloquently.

I could say more, but it is probably best that you don't know anything about the movie going in... Yeah, it's one of those. But like I said, it's eloquent about it.

Red Right Hand

Hellboy Movie is bad. Even if Guillermo Del Toro and company were able to fight off requests for a Blue Hellboy or an Incredible Hulkboy, they seem to have let the soul of the character slip through their red, stoney hand. On the outside, Hellboy is a bulky, crimson demon with shaved down horn and a collossal rock of a right hand, which as far as he has figured out is good for smashing things. Movie Hellboy is very insecure with this form, having been raised by humans. All Movie Hellboy really wants is to be a real boy, to freely associate with people. He is driven by this desire. In an effort to close the gap between him and the social life of man, he raises cats, watches cartoons, falls in love and, in general, becomes the quintessential, stereotypical, run-of-the-mill freak. On the other hand, comics Hellboy (the real Hellboy) doesn't really care. He sees himself as being part of humanity, even if a giant, abnormal part. In fact, humanity sees him as part of humanity (the United Nations gave him Honorary Human status in 1952). The central conflict for the source material Hellboy is his stuggle to eradicate his relation with demons/evil despite his Nazi-funded inception as the key to armageddon (something which plays out quite literally in the film). While the difference between the two is subtle, it's integral to the identity and actions of Hellboy.

You see, Hellboy's superpower is not shooting flames out of his eyes or eating your soul; he can't lift objects with his mind, he can't fly, he doesn't command the weather and he certainly has no psychic ability. What Hellboy does do is get the crap beat out of him. As he hunts down what are essentially his own kind, Hellboy is pummelled to the edge of death, his strength and durability lasting him just long enough for heaven and fate to sign an agreement on how to get him out of the mess. And the movie captures this (and, off the subject, the color pallette) fairly well. But again, the movie misses the essence of his beatings. Hellboy is humanity's scapegoat, taking the brunt of Hell's active attempts to seize the world, buying time for providence to patiently reveal itself. He isn't Clifford the Big, Red Dog, he's the friggin' hinge of of the apocalypse. He has to fight to prevent it, but his encounters put him closer to the thing he is really meant to be by Hell.

If the spirit is gone, the shell is empty.

The plot that the movie is based on, "Seed of Destruction", certainly needed some filling in order to make a quality, full-length feature film. But instead of adding additional plot or remixing the Hellboy series (like what we saw with X-Men 2), Hellboy Movie's creators made scattered tweaks that are more destructive to the essence of the story than removing Hellboy's horns would have been. For instance. The frogmen of the comics have become hellhounds... who lay frog eggs, are amphibious and have long tongues for grabbing prey. Why!? Why!? It's a classic and pointless Hollywood tweak that helps to wipe away the myth and lore Hellboy stories are drawn from. Another glaring alteration not directly related to the Hellboy character is Kroenen. In the comics, the guy is a masked, laboratory-dwelling rogue among the Nazi collective that summons Hellboy; in Hellboy Movie he's a particularly noisy and particularly showy (in Star Wars Kid fashion) assassin. While it adds a mini-boss to the film, it does nothing to build upon the source story in any meaningful way. Again, we have a ineffectual, standard Hollywood "solution". The gilled assistant to Hellboy, Abe Sapien has also been altered, this time into a nerdy jester, the intended comic relief. I always felt like Abe played the straight man to Hellboy's smarmy attitude in the comics; it may just be the rebel in me, but I have a hard time believing that a comic relief character was necessary especially when he gets written out of the story in Act 2. Also an ill-advised move since in the book Abe kills the Rasputin "head boss" (see the paragraph on Hellboy in action above for an understanding of why it works this way). The film's creators sell-out minor elements left-and-right, while defending their ability to create Hellboy exactly as he appeared in the comics.

There are moments in Hellboy that work extremely well, the fight scenes, a scene where Hellboy spies on his love interest and another agent out on a friendly date, the general adherence to the source. But the movie takes a slightly problematic adaptation and makes it more scatter-brained and incoherent while attempting the exact opposite.

The bar for action comic book movies is pretty low, though, and I really feel the movie is no worse than most of that crop. Spiderman was maybe a tad better, and X2 and the early Batman movies look down from the tops of Gotham City skyscrapers at Hellboy. But for the most part, it's on par for the course.

The larger issue is that the filmmaking community still has no idea how to adapt a comic book, an absolutely ridiculous point since the storyboards are basically laid out for them ahead of time. These aren't 400-page novels with internal narrative; they're very simple projects... Few lessons have been learned from the exceptions (the action movies above plus Ghost World and American Splendor). This saddens me because the Watchmen movie is going to get made some day, and I'm afraid one of the great pinnacles of comics is going to be merely satisfactory.