Monthly Archives: February 2012

by | February 27, 2012 · 8:30 am

New Music Mondays – Since We Parted Ways

In lieu of Official Album Reviews like we usually do around here, I thought it might be fun to present, instead, wholly unformed thoughts on some things that I happen to be listening to each week. So this week, here’s a few records that I’m slightly ashamed to admit I’m into because of how middle-of-the-road they are.

The Craig Finn thing is kind of easy to understand given that for much of my college career, no band was as important to me as The Hold Steady. However, their graph has been trending downward, unmistakably so in light of the uneven and bloated Heaven is Whenever, and a Finn solo record held the potential of a palate cleanser or perhaps a bold new step. But Finn isn’t one for boldness and Clear Heart Full Eyes sounds like The Hold Steady drained of its scope. It is an intimate album and its best songs, specifically “Jackson,” sound more personal than Finn has sounded in years. But they also sound like acoustic performances of Hold Steady songs, Finn’s storytelling remains idiosyncratic but a touch underealized and that sin was easier to ignore when it was covered up by the band’s boozy festival field scope. Clear Hearts Full Eyes has none of the Springsteen scope or Replacements rambunctiousness of Finn’s best work, its subdued, singer-songwriter vibe may be more mature but is far less satisfying.

Listeners looking for some of that old Hold Steady swagger, but with more than a touch of Clear Heart’s lilting Southern drawl would do well to turn to the newest record from Heartless Bastards. On Arrow, Heartless Bastards do little to change their heady, classic rock direction nor do they need to. This is the genre of music that Erika Wennerstrom’s voice was basically created to sing and she doesn’t let it down. Arrow cuts between heavy riffs and introspective slow cuts with ease and while the album struggles to match the highs of “Parted Ways,” that song is more than enough to fuel your Dazed and Confused reminiscing.

Tennis is probably the most embarrassing of these three records, after all it is the follow-up to a breeze-pop record about buying a sailboat and sailing along the Atlantic coast. It is indie at its Vampire Weekend bougiest and, to top it all off, this album is produced by one of the Black Keys guys and man do I fucking hate the Black Keys. And yet I can’t stop listening to Young and Old, even when I should be giving my attention to the perhaps too thought-out new Sleigh Bells album or the more complex Grimes record. Part of that is Young and Old simply makes itself so easy to listen to. I’m not even sure which song is the single because they’re all so brisk and joyous. The band added a light folk touch to their first record’s traditionalist pop bent and the result is a kind of generic brand Grizzly Bear (albeit lacking in the dense, exacting production, lush instrumentation, or intricate songwriting that we’d need for such a comparison to make any sense at all) that would fit almost as snuggly in the 1930s as it does on Spotify.

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by | February 8, 2012 · 11:30 am

How Much Time Do You Give A New Show to “Get Good”

Over at Gawker, Brian Moylan has had enough of waiting for TV shows to become good:

That’s the problem with these slow burn shows, especially ones with fancy pedigrees backed by highbrow channels like HBO or AMC. We can’t imagine how they could not be good, so we keep watching, episode after boring episode, all the while waiting for some amazing payoff. And sometimes, like a skilled horse coming from behind, it pays off. But remember: For every The Wire there is a Treme, and for every Mad Men there is a The Killing

…

Sometimes slow isn’t good. Sometimes slow is just drab.

This is an interesting point and one I’ve thought about from time to time. Are you getting tired of “prestige” shows that promise payoff down the line but ask you to invest a lot upfront?

However, for me, I’m not sure that Moylan is looking for the same things out of TV that I am. Is all TV inherently about some sort of “payoff?” To put it another way, I think its damaging to look at TV shows in terms of a cost-benefit analysis and assume that the time you’re putting in should be rewarded down the line.

That is not to say that shows shouldn’t continue to get better the deeper and more intricate they become. TV has the luxury of time, a luxury that no other visual medium really has, and that allows it to set up more intricate ideas and play with different modes of storytelling. Take Treme, which, according to Moylan, is an utter failure because it did not adequately reward his time. But Treme is not a show about plotting and payoff, it is more of a low-key, character based drama about people living their lives. The stakes are much lower and the payoffs will be much smaller than on The Wire.

But Treme never pretended like that wasn’t the case. From the first episode, it was clear that we weren’t dealing with the life-or-death, all-in-the-game world of The Wire. Treme has gotten deeper and more involving, its characters more complex, but it is the same show that it was in the first episode. On the other hand, The Killing isn’t a bad show because it never told us who killed Rosie Larsen; it is a bad show because it took a bunch of hollow, uninteresting characters and drowned them in a sea of red herrings without ever giving us a reason to care. It didn’t take 13 episodes to realize that show wasn’t going to be good.

Of course, shows change and improve over time and there are programs that you have to invest some time in at first to be truly rewarded by them. But they also have moments, even early on, that make you want to invest in them. The Wire was puzzling at first, but it still had the chess scene and the “fuck” scene in the first four hours. Mad Men was gripping from its first moments. Shows may be paced slowly, but that doesn’t mean they’re uninvolving. Moylan brings up Boardwalk Empire as an example of this problem but BE just finished its season with about as big of a payoff as it could have possibly done.

It is important that the shows that are usually held up as an example of this form, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, are shows that people usually caught up on after they aired. If an episode was disappointing or somewhat unsatisfying, you didn’t have a week to stew about it and increase the pressure on the next week. All of which is to say that if you are watching a show because you need it to vindicate itself for making you watch it, then it is probably time to cut the cord. Whether that takes two episodes or two hundred, it is up to you. But it isn’t a TV show’s job to turn itself into what you want it to be so that you don’t have to feel like you’ve wasted your time.

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by | February 6, 2012 · 11:03 am

Person Seeks Publicity Through Controversy

Somehow, we have reached a point where M.I.A. can play the Super Bowl Halftime show, where she made an appearance along side Madonna, LMFAO, and Cee-Lo. Somewhere, in 2005, 18-year-old me just had his head explode. Anyway, M.I.A., as she is wont to do, gave us all the finger, predictable people responded predictably, and it turns out that anyone who would be inclined to listen to M.I.A. probably didn’t care too much about this whole thing to begin with. Now let’s watch the hilarious, hilarious Bradshaw touchdown and never speak of this again.

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by | February 2, 2012 · 12:15 pm

Some Thoughts on Homeland

Like everyone else, my favorite new show of the season has been Showtime’s Homeland. Homeland is kind of like 24 for adults, a counter-terrorism thriller with strong characters and more of an emphasis on realism. The show is about Carrie (Claire Danes), a CIA analyst who believes that a POW (Damien Lewis) who was recently recovered in Iraq is actually a double agent. Here’s a few thoughts/ideas I had about the show, while mainlining its first season a few weeks ago (spoiler alert for the whole season, so maybe don’t read this until after you’ve watched the show?)

Terrorism:

For a show about terrorists and the people who fight them, Homeland is actually at its least interesting when engaged with issues of national security. While I don’t agree with Pamela Aucoin, whose article suggesting that Homeland validates and slyly supports the excesses and abuses of the War on Terror, I do sense an ambivalence towards the War on Terror in the show. It balances between different notions of how to fight terrorists before, in the end, pretty clearly endorsing the empathic mode used by Mandy Patankin’s Saul and, eventually, Carrie. Saul gets important information, not through torture or illegal surveillance, but by just spending time getting to know the suspect and understand her reasons. Similarly, Carrie saves the day in the season finale because she knows Brody and his family well enough to know how to reach out to him.

But this all can’t help but feel a little tired. In the ten years that we’ve had the war on terror, there’s been plenty of entertainment raising questions about the exchange of liberty for security. Homeland doesn’t have much to add to the conversation, but it also doesn’t seem too interested in that, either. I appreciate the matter -of-fact way that it deals with all of the tactics its characters use to fight terrorists, whether its Carrie’s illegal wiretap or the illegal airstrike that ignites much of the plot. It presents these as things that happen and generally trusts the audience to make its own decisions about whether it is right or not.

Gaslighting

Gaslighting is a clinical term that refers to when a person tries to manipulate another person into thinking they are crazy, like in the film Gas Light where a husband tries to gain possession of his wife’s jewelry by convincing her that she is crazy and having her committed. As depicted in this essay, gaslighting is something that happens to women a lot, and this same problem forms the spine of Homeland.

Carrie’s illness is not imaginary; she is bipolar and, towards the end of the season, has a manic episode that gets her fired. However, despite her illness, she is the only person who recognizes that Brody is a terrorist from the beginning. She figures out a large part of the case and even saves the day in the end. But as a reward, she is fired from her job at the CIA, everyone dismisses her as crazy, and she ends up having electroshock therapy to try and fix her illness.

Carrie is the only woman we really see involved in the CIA but her voice is marginalized and dismissed as crazy. This seems important. Would she have to go to such great lengths to hide her disease if she were male? Would her colleagues dismiss her as much? Homeland’s approach to Carrie’s gender is interesting and makes the show much deeper.

Television

In the end, however, I wonder if Homeland’s primary concern isn’t the medium of television itself and the relationship between it and its viewers. After all, Carrie spends most of the first four episodes watching TV: her surveillance footage of Brody and his family. She wears her pajamas and sits on the couch and eats snacks, just like a lot of the audience watching Homeland is doing, I imagine. However, as the season goes on, the walls between Carrie and her TV go down. She meets Brody in the real world and they end up hooking up. Carrie, in many ways, is living out the dreams of every television viewer: she gets to become a part of the action.

Several studies have shown that watching television has the same affect on the brain as forming friendships. Homeland, in some ways, is about the peculiar mix of voyeurism and loneliness that seems to cause that effect. It implicates its audience by making Carrie’s surveillance, so similar to our own, illegal and intrusive. It also questions what we’re getting out of it; Carrie isn’t able to stop the terror attack until she steps out of her living room and actually gets to know Brody as a person. And it shows the psychological cost of this surveillance, by ending with Carrie getting electroshock treatment. In the end, Homeland asks some interesting questions about television as a medium and what viewers get out of it.

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by | · 11:06 am

Kanye West Is Making a Movie in the Middle East Because Of Course He Is

Musician, mogul, throne-watcher, and Donda CEO Kanye West is finally returning to his roots as a filmmaker. According to the New York Observer, Ye is in the Middle East to shoot a follow-up short to “Runaway,” which, of course, was so good that it cured world hunger. This time, Yeezy has his sights set even higher, according to his reps:

“His reps seemed genuinely enthusiastic about creating a piece which highlights the culture accurately,” our source explained. “There’s a lot of preconceived notions and stereotypes about Emiratis and Qataris, which Westerners often play up. They discussed how Kanye is looking to bridge the cultural divide and break misconceptions.”

Yup, the film will indeed finally create peace between the West and the Middle East, so we have that to look forward to, along with Ye’s eventual Nobel Peace Prize (and subsequently shoving Philip Roth off the stage to demand the Nobel Prize for Literature should go to Haruki Murakami instead). Of course, its always possible that this is just a ruse to cover up the fact that Kanye is finally beginning work on The Jetsons movie, so more on this story as it develops.

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