PopMatters: Disappears, KONE EP; Bibio, SILVER WILKINSON

This quarter is annihilating me in ways I've never experienced.  To break the monotony, here's a couple of reviews.  The first is a short one, tossed off-the-cuff and, to be quite frank, mangled by my editor beyond comprehension - not to mention attached to a lower score than I intended (a right the powers-that-be at PopMatters reserve, but still).  The whole thing:

These Chicago indie rockers cut three LPs doing PIL the way Interpol did Joy Division: all the gloom but none of the snarl, with mopey persistence taking its place. On Kone, they go full krautrock and subsequently come into their own. The 15-minute title track takes its time summoning creaking U-boats and air raid sirens from guitar squall as cymbals swell and crash overhead.  A down-tuned riff and vocals drowned in delay circuits and angst, together introduce something resembling a melody around the 6:30 mark, but it isn’t until the surf rock of “Kontakt” that Kone offers anything resembling a song, though even that doesn’t last. Disappears is far more interested in whipping up the most suffocating, resonant, prickly post-punk tempest anyone can manage 36 years after “Frankie Teardrop”  and judging by these bearings, they’re well on their way.

The second is a long one, written in the charitable auteurist spirit of knowing I like this guy's work and thus giving him the benefit of the doubt.  An excerpt:

With Silver Wilkinson, [Bibio] seems to be reeling in his widely cast net and reversing his metronome to demonstrate in the exposed details his well-honed mastery over diverse styles.  What that mastery yields, though, is a strangely detached listen. The sound is rich with the carefully patterned interplay of organic and digital, human and inhuman, melodic and moody, and it sometimes produces an assertive splendor, as it does towards the middle, at which album singles “À tout à l’heure” and “You’ are conjoined by the lilting “Sycamore Silhouette”. But it’s just as often kind of listless. If Ambivalence Avenue and Mind Bokeh were scatterbrained stylistically, they also compensated by cohering tonally. Mind Bokeh especially sustained a consistent and stimulating sense of melancholy as it veered jarringly between laptop pop, arch soul, and psychedelic folk, as if conveying a story—or, at least, the intimations of one—through studied genre collage. Silver Wilkinson is a slicker effort, and yet plays similarly to Bibio’s earlier ambient efforts: almost willfully failing to grab our attention, it recedes happily and wispily into the background.

On the other hand, one of the album's better cuts, set to scraps of 8mm (natch):

PopMatters: Junip, JUNIP

This quarter is pitilessly handing my ass to me and hence the infrequency of my posts, but that didn't stop me recently from investing some time arguing with assholes on the Internet.  It's not that I usually resist the temptation.  There's not usually a temptation to resist.  Sometimes, though, in the kind of venue of arts discourse where readers and writers mingle with mutual intellectual respect, something approaching an honest-to-goodness public sphere emerges, and the Internet redeems itself for all its many broken promises.  When a compulsive naysayer enters these spaces, engaging him (or her, although I'm convinced trolling is generally the domain of bored and emasculated men) can be a valuable opportunity to exercise my critical faculties and indulge some bitter wit for the entertainment of my imagined peers, at the expense of either A) a casual sociopath or B) someone much, much too attached to the cultural object in question.  Having experienced this experience's modest rewards before, I thought I might give it another go on my colleague's review of Iron & Wine's latest soft-rock crowdpleaser.  No such luck; it didn't seem I had much of an audience, besides the author and one other likeminded interlocutor.

Anyway.  From my latest review, an uncontroversial take on a thoroughly uncontroversial  band, an excerpt:

Junip is José González’s band because the band is more than happy to let González – as singer and songwriter and, to a lesser extent, guitarist – take the fore. It’s not that he does the heavy lifting, it’s that there’s no heavy lifting to do: on their several EPs, Fields, and now Junip, Junip commits to a kind of coffee-shop psychedelia, in which students of Nuggets buy minivans and behave themselves. Whatever heady flourishes drummer Elias Araya and organist Tobias Winterkorn do work up never divert González’s MOR navigation. His singing splits the difference between Stevie Nicks and Nick Drake, and the band’s sound follows suit; if Junip leans in the direction of Fleetwood Mac’s slick pop affect, like Pink Moon, it’s still quiet no matter how loud you crank the volume.

As in the review I wrote just prior, the best thing about this album is the music video that preempted its release:

PopMatters: Bonobo, THE NORTH BORDERS

"You're waiting for the what to drop?"

To break one hiatus by breaking another: my first blog post in a month, linking to my first music review in three-and-a-half.  An excerpt:

If anything, Bonobo continues on his latest to forgo the kind of fashionable displeasure that might attract readier critical favor. But ifThe North Borders sustains attention with deceptive simplicity, that deception is itself deceptive. Green’s intricate arrangements—melodic but never quite melodies—cue ears to listen closely, but rewards are scant; as evasive as they can be, these tracks aren’t for chinstrokers. Perhaps the album will prove to have long-term potential, but for now, The North Borders might be too modest for its own good.

Although this album didn't exactly knock my socks off, I will vouch wholeheartedly for some tracks, such as "Cirrus," especially the cool-as-shit orphan media psychedelia commissioned for it:

Note: the producer of the record I reviewed is not, in fact, a dwarf chimpanzee.

KILLER JOE

William Friedkin may be the only working filmmaker still capable of giving me the heebie-jeebies.  I’m told his mid-80s-to-early-00s output has been spotty, but it seems he’s found a muse in the Steppenwolf Theatre’s Tracy Letts.  They first joined forces on 2007’s Bug, a pressure-cooker by virtue of its central folie à deux alone, to say nothing of its single-room setting and breathlessly manic monologuing.  With Killer Joe, they recapture much of the same visceral, unrelenting energy for a story that wouldn’t necessarily promise it, of life insurance fraud gone horribly, unavoidably awry .  Like Bug, Killer Joe is Southern-fried noir structured by a series of verbal standoffs alternately seething and shrill but always enthralling.  The Dallas trailer-trash cast’s attempts to outsmart one another proceed on the shaky premise that there’s any intelligence present to thwart.  The lone exception is the eponymous avocational hitman, played with such easy menace by Matthew McConaughey that you wonder if the role, written when he was only just thinking it'd be a lot cooler if you did have a joint, was somehow conceived with him in mind.  Thomas Hayden Church also stands out as the slack-jawed patriarch whose deadpan delivery gets the lion’s share of the film’s laughs.   But here I am talking about performances when all you want to know is whether and how it earns its NC-17, that great slayer of box office prospects.  The answer to the first part is both yes and no.  Yes, it is a nasty, violent piece of work, but not significantly more so than anything else Friedkin has done – certainly not Bug, with its tooth extractions and graphic Foley art thereof.  Sex was clearly the tipping point: Gina Gershon is preceded by her merkin in her first scene, and forced to perform fellatio on fried chicken with a broken nose in her last.  I’m all for according sexual violence the most restrictive of ratings, and besides, I’m certainly no Puritan, but I must echo Roger Ebert’s thoughts from his (positive) review of the film: if anything can earn this dubious honor, shouldn’t violence alone?  Absent a sufficiently coherent Other against which to classify itself, as pornography provides film vis-à-vis lusty bodies, it likely never will.  All the squirmy moralist deep inside me is left to do is throw his hands high, resigned, sigh, and surrender to Friedkin's resolutely amoral, skin-crawling thrills.  I can think of worse fates.

SKYFALL and the Pleasure of Pedigreed Sexism

Do we ever need a caveat emptor for a Bond film’s mean-spirited sexism?  Mais non, fans of the latest cry, it’s just a bloody Bond film!  And so it is, meeting its duties with the canny panache of a first-rate ad agency.  The timeworn brand iconography is present and accounted for: the man, the music, the martini; exotic locales, improbable stunts, nefarious villainy.  But of course they are.  What really gives 007’s 23^rd (in year 50) the market advantage is director Sam Mendes’ art film polish.  Or rather, cinematographer Roger Deakin’s, a Coen brothers favorite: from a birds-eye-view of a train in Turkey to the depths of a frozen lake in Scotland, this is one good-looking movie, owing no small due to the countless, nameless set designers, costumers and lighting technicians at hand (although the shadowcast fisticuffs in Shanghai I’m willing to credit entirely to the cameraman’s genius).  It is also about as middlebrow as they come, which is to say, as lower-middle aspiring to high.  Consider how M reads Tennyson during a cross-cut crosstown chase.  Or how megalomaniac Silva’s interrogation room shamelessly apes Hannibal Lecter’s.  Or how Silva, Bond, and M are triangulated into a Freudian standoff for Mommy’s love.  (Is it an accident that when pronouncing M’s name, Bond stretches it to sound like ‘mum’?  You tell me.)  Openly gay screenwriter John Logan has curried much favor for writing Silva as a complex gay villain, meaning that a preening homo scarred by maternal neglect is ‘complex’; who knew? 

This is not to say Skyfall isn’t all admirably well-played, -written, -delivered, and so on and so forth: it’s as tailored to prevalent concepts of quality as Tom Ford’s suit is to Daniel Craig’s sinewy body.  But what are we supposed to do with the fate of Berenice Marlohe’s bodacious Severine, righteously called out by London Times critic Giles Coren in a banned editorial?  Her cavalier treatment would cast a pall over any film, but in the context of a PG-13 prestige blockbuster peddling a nostalgia that culminates in men’s restoration to their rightful sovereignty – Ralph Fiennes takes Dame Judi Dench’s place when M expires; Naomi Harris’s Moneypenny relinquishes her rifle and happily takes a desk job after Bond suggests “field work isn’t for everyone” – Severine’s victimization is the nasty apex of a thoroughly reactionary two-and-a-half hours at the movies.

What seems cause for concern, I think, is how little concern this has caused.  Many hands have wrung this week in the wake of Seth MacFarlane’s boorish hatchet job hosting the Oscars, and rightly so, but a curious blind spot persists in the riled blogosphere, epitomized by the New Yorker’s Amy Davidson: “it’s notable that two of the better moments in the show involved Bond films.”  It is notable.  Davidson refers to Shirley Bassey’s performance of “Goldfinger” and Adele’s of “Skyfall,” which partitioned a midshow retrospective of the Bond franchise, and she’s right: here are instances of abundant dignity for women onstage, neither of them conforming to the standards of beauty snidely upheld by the host, the red carpet, and the culture industry writ large.  But how do we cope with this dignity’s enlistment in honoring cinema’s most evergreen icon of alpha masculinity? 

We don’t, fans of the series reply, it’s just a bloody fantasy.  And so it is, but that fantasy doesn’t consist only in Bond’s amply bestrewn gentility.  It consists also in the social relations that gentility preserves.  There’s the Eurocentrism, of course, and there’s the upper-snuff pedigree; he never reads but we must assume he's an Oxonian.  And then there’s the sexism.  The Bond girls - all fully grown women, I seem to recall - and their habitual undress; his burning through them; his occasional corporal discipline when they get out of line.  The slapping has generally ceased by now, but Bond’s rough way with Séverine in Skyfall is one (uncomfortable) nod to Bond’s legacy (From Russia With Love in particular, winked at also by that aforementioned Turkish train) in a film that boasts many.  I would buy the disavowal - that we know it's all imaginary, thank you very much - if the legions who saw it seemed to value some kind of critical distance, but that’s clearly not the case.  On the contrary, the positive critical consensus has overwhelmingly valued the poetic realism, the unmannered acting, and the thematic nuance of Mendes’ film: in short, the capacity to get swept up in it in spite of it all.  (I am not innocent of this: although I resisted Skyfall, I remain a fan of Casino Royale, the first Bond with Craig - playing a much more sympathetic 007, I might add.)  It's the magic of the movies, if you will.  Precisely the mass-market enchantment the Oscars exist to legitimate.  Precisely the enchantment from which we must waylay the world’s MacFarlanes with severe prejudice.  But the only way the two ultimately differ, in the near-infinite access their antediluvian worldviews have to us - the one in PG-13 wide release, the other in primetime broadcast - is that we take pleasure in one, and most certainly not the other.

LIFE OF PI/DJANGO UNCHAINED

The 85^th Academy Awards Ceremony is an hour away from airtime well underway so I guess that means it’s time to offer my thoughts on the final two Best Picture contenders I’ve seen, Ang Lee’s Life of Pi and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained.  These films are lumped together only incidentally but they do share a handful of prominent features.  Both are the latest event movies (if any movie can really be called that anymore) from modern auteurs who have managed the increasingly rare feat of both popular and critical acclaim.  Both fantasize an alternative history, of sorts: the one, an encounter with nature on its own turf in the midst of a modernizing world; the other, revenge for the abject racial subordination that continues to assert itself a century and a half hence.  And both are basically good but way too damn long, nearly compromised by excesses unique to their helmsmen – which is where they are, like Lee and Tarantino, very different.

Life of Pi is 100 minutes of eye-popping wonder augmented by 20 going over what we learned today.  Even Yann Martel, scribe of the original novel, has qualified his gushing approval by bemoaning Lee’s unambiguous ending.   And indeed it, like the rest, is Lee’s: the maritime exploits of Pi the human and Richard Parker the tiger are absorbing in that just-shy-of-genteel way I’m assured those of his I haven’t seen share with those I have.  Even an admirable attempt to épater with a POV piss-take (in both senses of the term) seems well within the well-established PG family film lingua franca.  (The funniest parts – involving where the protags got their names – belong entirely to the source material.)  That being said, even if a bit sterile, the passages at sea are just about the best evidence yet for the specious argument that digital 3D is truly the next ontological frontier for cinema – or some tunnel-vision idea of it, anyway.  (Fittingly, the shipwreck scenes recall another technological milestone in the medium’s history, Carroll Ballard’s The Black Stallion.)  But then Lee has to go and bookend these passages with present-day narration that pulls a reverse Big Fish on us and passes it off as metaphysical critique, reconstituting the whole squeaky-clean war-horse as a big steaming pile of horseshit.

Django Unchained deserves a post of its own, especially in light of Grey’s Anatomy star Jesse Williams’ impassioned recent broadside against Tarantino’s neo-grindhouse genre mashup.  I hope to address the piece at length at a later date, but in brief, Williams pounces on the Weinstein’s cherished wunderkind’s lamentable talent for embarrassing public speech, and questions whether he really deserves so much credit for returning slavery to the American cultural conversation.  No, he doesn’t; no argument there.  But Williams rehearses the shopworn assumption that portraying atrocity in the context of pleasure is always already complicit in evil.  He goes on to juxtapose Inglourious Basterds with Django and ask why the former wasn’t as stoked on pain and epithets.  That assumes black slavery and the Holocaust are somehow historically commensurate, which I’d argue they mostly aren’t.  (Also, has Williams seen Inglourious’s opening farmhouse massacre?)

But more on that later.  My beef with Django is that, even more than Death Proof, it sometimes scans as a fully-funded spoof of Tarantino rather than the man himself.  The breathless carriage of Christoph Waltz’s overstuffed lines is one instance, Herr Waltz’s otherwise excellent work notwithstanding.  The Mel Brooks-cribbing proto-Klan sequence is another.  And I wonder how many minutes of exploding squibs could have gotten nixed without anyone really noticing?  (I protest it’s not bloody violence I'm losing my taste for, just the boring kind.)  On the ideological side of things, I also wonder if Tarantino couldn’t have cut white trash a tiny bit of slack.  Don Johnson’s line about treating Django “like Jerry” is the only reference made to the underspoken fact that hillbillies had only a little more to gain from antebellum society than their black, enchained counterparts.  But I guess asking Quentin Tarantino to flatter my Marxist biases is a little like asking Ang Lee to scandalize me: in short, an exercise in futility.

ARGO/SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK

These All-American crowd-pleasers don’t have much in common except for their utterly shameless crowdpleasing.  Not that I begrudge said pleasing, mind you, but the highest cinematic honor in the land merits at least a little of the kind of cruel scrutiny that ingratiation doesn't often quite bear.  So, let us consider one scene from each.  In Ben Affleck’s Argo, the last minute discovery of our heroes’ covert escape leads to a chase down the tarmac and cross-cuts between the airline cabin and hysterical guards with potboiler music shaking the subs as the Iranian convoy gets closer and closer until the nose tips, the wheels fold, and finally ah!  Sweet, sweet international airspace, and US foreign meddling lives to see another day.  But D.W. Griffithizing a civilian extraction is A/V club stuff compared to a scene late in David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, in which every single character in the cast gathers in one room to work out as methodically as any script doctor can humanly manage how the resolution of each and every plot thread in the film will come to rest on the outcome of an amateur dance competition.  This sequence works overtime covering its tracks with seriocomic bluster; about three minutes of sparring Philly accents made me want to cut my fucking ears off.  Yet of the two films, I preferred Russell’s, probably due to screwball humor soundly outranking patriotism among my viewing priorities (but possibly due to the delectable Jennifer Lawrence).  That's not to say I loved or even particularly liked it, but protagonist Pat's violent response to A Farewell to Arms' feel-bad ending absolves many sins, not least of all the hilarious concept of a man with a heavy Hindi accent observing that "DeSean Jackson is the man."  Affleck, for his part - as director and as dashing leading man - plays a farce premise straight, presumably to honor its origins in truth, which begs the question: is a formula thriller’s litany of contrivances really more dignified than satire?  All the operative tastefulness leaves over for the funnymen on hand – John Goodman and Alan Arkin, of whom the world is enjoying a welcome resurgence as of late – are hollow laughs flattering received wisdom on what makes Hollywood tick.  My colleague Zach Campbell pegs their banter as not so much witty as “witty” (echoes of Richard Jameson’s screed against “style”), and that's really the last of anything that ever needs to be said about it.  Its politics meanwhile leave me cold, which is to say neutral, but Kevin B. Lee lays down the law on that eloquently enough.  Incidentally, he also thinks Silver Linings deserves Best Picture, "because it's a revealing reflection of the world we live in," which is about as simultaneous a naive fantasy and harrowing omen you're likely to get this Oscars season.