Category Archives: Reviews

Jay-Z: The Blueprint

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

September 26, Chicago: When you talk about the best rappers of all time, my mind (and my heart) always goes to Biggie. For a long time, I wrote Jay-Z off because I didn’t really care about the radio hits. Don’t get me wrong, I knew all the words to “Big Pimpin'” and could never pass up a chance to dance to “Crazy in Love”, but it wasn’t canonical. It was getting into this album that changed my opinion on Jay-Z forever.

My favorite song continues to be “Heart of the City”. I love that beat and the hook is so infectious. This song, like so many on this album is filled with memorable zingers like “Sensitive thugs y’all all need hugs”. So great.

There is of course “Takeover”, which despite disciples of Nas who might claim it was bested in the rejoinder, is still my favorite battle rap song of all time. That beat snipped out of the Doors, that whole verse for Nas with its absolutely specific detail about the business of the game (“I know who I paid, dog / Searchlight Publishing”), and that super hot final line in “half a bar”. And then “Girls, Girls, Girls” which despite its casual racism and expected overt sexism, remains a fun-as-hell song. (The jam, of course, is the second version over that Pretenders sample; Young Kanye you really were a genius.) And “Renegade”, which as Nas notes, is really Eminem’s song. And how. So. Many. Hot. Tracks. On. This. Album.

Really dedicate yourself to some Jay-Z and listen to this album.

Style Wars

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

September 24, Flying from LGA to ORD: The scene is 1982 New York City, and this super-sincere film crew is out by the subway tracks shooting shot after shot of amazingly painted trains on 16mm film. That film becomes Style Wars and it is the most awesome portrait of early graffiti, breaking, and rapping you’ve ever seen. Oh sure, you might have seen Beat Street or Wild Style (or, forgivably, Crush Groove), but this, my friend, this is the source text.

They’re all there: From Seen to Skeme. Crazy Legs and the Rock Steady Crew. White kids, black kids, Latino kids— it’s a real all-city movement. And the cops are there too (including the guy who states flatly: “Is it art? I don’t know, I’m not an art critic. But I can sure as hell tell you, that’s a crime.”) The great soundbite that begins the Black Star song “Respiration” is here in all its filmed glory: a super young and skinny Skeme talking about bombing a train. And the art on that train is amazing. What geniuses, these kids!

It’s a lot of fun to re-watch this movie. There’s just so much great stuff here. This was the first time I’d watched Style Wars as a New York resident and the part that newly resonated with me was the brief series of soundbites from New Yorkers complaining about the graffiti in the trains. And frankly, I agree. It looks disgusting in there! It’s easy to imagine not ever understanding this movement as a New Yorker— when would you ever see whole cars if you lived in Manhattan? All you’d really see would be tags upon tags upon tags in the hot metal tube you had to cram into on your way to work.

Dig into the hip hop creation story with a little Style Wars. Available from your friendly neighborhood Internet superstore.

Black Star: Mos Def & Tali Kweli are Black Star

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

September 23, New York: As the first track began (“The mighty Mos Def is a real life documentarian. / Talib Kweli, real life documentary”) I immediately wrote in my notes: “This might be the best album of all time?” It just might be. Talib Kweli and Mos Def are truly incredible behind their respective microphones. The guests across the album are all fantastic; I could listen to Jane Doe rap for hours. The beats are stellar, the message is important but the album is still fun. It’s a masterwork.

But let’s say you disagree. Let’s say there’s some other album out there that has your heart by the tail. Well let me at least make a case for “Respiration” to live in the all-time-greats canon of hip hop. Holy crap this song is incredible. The Spanish-language hook? The Style Wars sample at the intro? That line “blasting holes in the night til she bled sunshine”. Wow. Not too mention— this song has Common!

I spent my entire early twenties praying to the lords of rhyme that we might have a hip hop supergroup of Kweli, Mos, and Common. Pretty please? I remember hearing a rumor about a Rawkus Records supergroup: Mos Def, Common, Talib Kweli, Pharaohe Monch, Hi-Tek, maybe more. I believed that rumor a little bit too hard. In the end it was probably just the wishful thinking of other Rawkus fans.

But looking back now at the full discography of Rawkus, it’s incredible. So many of my favorite hip hop albums. Mos Def and Kweli, of course. But Beatminerz, Big L, Soundbombing, High & Mighty. All such fantastic stuff. Thank you, Rawkus Records. But most of all, thank you for Mos Def and Talib Kweli are Black Star.

You should own this album. It’s important both to you and to humanity that you are listening to “Respiration” on a regular basis.

Mos Def: Black on Both Sides

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

September 22, New York: I’ve been too busy to stick to my strict consumption schedule. Work got hectic, the weekend was well-booked, and so I dragged my feet on posting about this album and I missed my goal of seven for last week. Also, honestly, it was because I wasn’t done listening to Black on Both Sides yet. It is just too good.

When I first discovered Mos Def it was when I was realizing there was more to hip hop than the radio and here was this voice that was honest, sincere, compassionate, and holy crap could he rhyme. A track like “Mathematics”? Stop it. Just stop. “Ms. Fat Booty”? “Got”? Gawd. Mos Def (now Yasiin Bey) is a god among men. There’s not a single track on here that doesn’t impress.

Mos Def – Ms Fat Booty (1999) from Golden Era Videos on Vimeo.

And this is one of the first self-aware hip-hop albums I’d heard. An album with a point (or a few). I’d missed Public Enemy, safely ensconced in the dirty south. But here was an absolutely invaluable lesson in race and identity. Here was a complex and challenging use of the word-that-began-with-n-that-I-should-never-use, not just as a generous sprinkling to emphasize the choruses. Here was a whole song about the political power of clean water. Here was a song arguing for a black history of rock and roll that ended with a bad-ass punk rock bit.

Listening to this album today is such a treat. I probably listened for four days straight, every time I put my headphones to my ears. Music is lucky to have the occasional album like Black on Both Sides, and America is lucky to have a voice like Mos Def.

If you’ve never heard Black on Both Sides, you must amend that and do so now with your One-Click-Purchase.

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

September 21, New York: When I was 19, I went to Europe. It had been a bad year, maybe a bad couple, and the summer rolled around and my high school friends and I had scraped together and borrowed enough money to take a six week trip to Europe. We had plane tickets, Eurail passes, big backpacks, and wild ambitions. Our great inspiration was The Sun Also Rises, so we had to go to Spain and we had to bring some Hemingway. This was the book we chose.

Our itinerary, loosely recalled: Joey and I flew into Madrid; took a bus to Pamplona where we walked the medieval walls and drank far too much red wine; took a bus to San Sebastian and the TGV to Paris then a train to Cherbourg and a ferry to Portsmouth and a bus/ferry combo to Dublin; in Dublin we picked up Jonathan and kissed a girl or two and then we flew to Amsterdam; we did the thing 19 year old Americans did in Amsterdam at that time and we left; in Paris I moved in with a French girl for a week (this is not a lie) and Chris joined us and then things didn’t really work out with the French girl and I fled; by train we went to Prague, which was amazing, and two spots in the Czech countryside; then a whirlwind through Vienna, Florence, and Rome, where we were ripped off by a hotel but took baths, glorious hot baths, and drank ice cold red wine on a hot summer night; then back to Madrid after a brief French Riveria stop and Joey and I had one final night together in the Spanish capital and we got shitty drunk and relieved ourselves on some government property while guards yelled and gave chase and we ran away as quickly as we could to America.

It was a hell of a trip.

One of the most important packing decisions we made was what media to consume, what books to bring with. A Moveable Feast was on the top of our list. It was one of maybe a dozen books we shared between us and all read by the end of the trip. And it was exactly the magic of what we wanted from a trip to Europe. Seeing Paris and reading about Hemingway’s Paris, together, is magical. (It is also, to my adult eyes, the very definition of cliché, but we forgive our younger selves some things.)

I half blame this book for nearly not coming home from that trip. The French girl I met, fell in love with, and moved in with— she was going to support me while I wrote books in Paris. In her top floor apartment in Montmartre. I mean, come on. Ripped from these pages. I wrote my mother a beautiful letter explaining that I wasn’t coming home and my wise friends forbade me sending it until it had been at least, I don’t know, a week. And it turned out to be unsurprisingly tempestuous and that was all a part of it until it ended. (On her side, she was on the rebound from a multi-year relationship; we were both playing out narratives on one another.)

Reading A Moveable Feast today still has the same power, the same impact, to make me want to move to Paris or to move to any place in exile and live there in the truest possible way. I’ve never known exactly what that means— “truest”— other than I hope I’d know it when I felt it, sort of like Hemingway did. The great lesson I took from the book and from the trip on which I first read it was how powerful a change of scenery can be. To be in a new place, in a foreign place, is inspiring in so many ways. And reading this book again, today, I want it again. I want that right now. For real.

Buy, own, cherish this book.

Ghostface Killah: Supreme Clientele

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

September 17, New York: Honestly, I don’t know why it’s this album. There are so many Wu-Tang solo albums and so many of them that are so great. There’s Method Man, there’s the GZA’s Liquid Swords, there is (and there will always be) the ODB, whose “Baby, I Got Your Money” will never, ever fail to move me in a dancefloor direction. But Supreme Clientele, for some reason, is totally my jam.

Maybe it’s the whole Ghostface canon, though this is by far my favorite. I am completely a sucker for Ghost’s nonsense rhymes (“Yo, this rap is like ziti / facing me real tv / crash at high speed / strawberry kiwi”) and his great story-telling raps (or the ones that are just stream of consciousness reminiscences). The beats on the album are slick, even when they’re sometimes a little obtuse and weird. Ghost pulls that shit off.

Ghostface Killah – Apollo Kids (feat. Raekwon) from Tarik Azzougarh on Vimeo.

I also love about Ghostface that he has so many identities. Where other rappers (so many) have adopted Tony Montana as their second/third nickname, Ghostface chose Tony Stark. Which actually gives him two additional identities: Tony Stark AND Iron Man. Then he waves clips from the old Iron Man cartoon throughout the album.

Rappers are totally superheroes. They have alter egos and costumes and super powers and fantastic wealth and crazy origin stories. Ghostface pulls it off the best. That’s why it’s this album.

Go listen to Supreme Clientele and try to come back and tell me Method Man and Redman are better.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

September 16, New York: Oh Lolita, Lola, Lo. This clever little book that so many have loved and hated. I read it in college, like so many others, and instantly fell into ironic love with its premise and actual love with its prose. It’s a perfect book for cocky nineteen year old pseudo-intellectuals to whom “banned book” is about the funniest phrase in North America. How sweet it was to offend. My college class was called “Deviance” and in it we discussed “the monster” in various forms, scattered across a steady drumbeat of books, discussed by the class weekly. Lolita was supposed to occupy two or three weeks of class time. We easily spent six dissecting it. We spent one entire class period debating, as a group, whether or not Humbert Humbert achieves orgasm in the scene when Lolita first sits upon his lap.

Reading this as a full adult the answer is clearly yes. It’s obvious that he, stealthily concealed behind flowery language, does indeed climax and then hide it from the child. And it is terribly uncomfortable to read. Which ended up being much of my experience of reading Lolita this time around. It started off so clever (and so well-written!) and then it became an absolute horror. Exceptionally disturbing.

This is a part of Nabokov’s genius— and I think he does so very consciously— to draw the reader in with such beautifully gilded prose and then from time to time remind with a brutal, physical detail. Paragraphs of love showered upon Lolita with a quick sentence or two that hints at awful rape, almost so slight a mention as to be missed. The beautiful American scenery marred by the horror of the nights spent in motels; the pastoral time spent at Beardsley College blackened by the monetary exchange for child sex.

Yes, it was still worth reading and yes, it’s an incredible book. But I no longer felt titillated. I was no longer gleefully in on the secret that was Lolita; there’s a big difference between the ironic indifference of 19 and the sympathies I’ve developed at 33. Mercifully, Nabokov gives us a scene toward the end where Humbert himself recognizes the monster in himself, and that makes it a bit better. But man oh man, this was a hard book to read.

And yes, how did they ever make a movie out of Lolita, which was this movie’s tagline?

Buy Lolita. If you’re reading it again, know it will have changed on you. If you’re reading it for the first time… well, I warned you.

Conquer Club

September 14, New York: Conquer Club is based on Risk: an online, multiplayer community of Risk-players. But it’s also a community of map designers, constantly creating new maps upon which to play out global conquest. Imagine playing Risk, but on the city of San Francisco, the continent of Africa, the island of Iceland. I love Conquer Club, have loved it for some years now.

Here’s a current game I have going on the Eastern Front of World War II

The best way to describe Conquer Club is as an addiction. Like cigarettes. There have been multiple times in my life that I have been debilitatingly addicted to this game. The pattern goes like this (note the similarities, reformed smokers): A friend invites you to join a game and you think oh what could one hurt. Shortly thereafter you join four, that’s the limit for a free membership. Then late one night you’re clicking refresh on all your four games and none of them are updating and you’re like AUGH ALL I WANT IS TO CONQUER so you set up the monthly free and suddenly you can play unlimited games. From then on you basically do play unlimited games. You play them from your phone, on your computer during meetings, at home after your spouse has gone to sleep.

I belonged to a few communities through which this addiction raged. At work one year, there was a group of us on a project that was being decommissioned. We had a lot of downtime and we played it like crazy. We would jump up and run over to a colleague’s desk and yell “Take your move, damnit!” Another: a large group of my friends that also included my wife. Bitter rivalries ensued, people earned reputations as untrustworthy allies. Angry text messages were exchanged over hundreds of miles.

Here’s a current game that’s nearly to stalemate in Brazil.

This time I was determined to not get addicted again. Play for one month (beginning August 17th) and then put it aside. I almost immediately filled up my free four game slots. And then I quickly lost three games in succession. See, the thing is, I’m only pretty average at Conquer Club (current rank: “Corporal”). When I put my mind to it, when I obsess over a single game, I’m good. But if I have a ton of games going I just make whatever move and then I very quickly whatever lose. I was determined to win this time. I kept joining new games. I kept bumping up against the four game limit and was desperate to pay for membership.

Here’s a game I’m about to lose spread across Eurasia.

But I’ve held firm. I still haven’t paid. Nor have I won a game. But I’ve got another three games going, and a few more days I’ve allotted myself to play. We’ll see how my luck fares!

Join Conquer Club at your own risk. Probably best if you didn’t invite me to any games.

Beastie Boys

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

September 14, New York: “Sabotage” was my original entry point into the Beastie Boys library. There was that incredible music video and it was all over my MTV and it was loud, fast, and awesome.

I never bought Ill Communication as a teenager. It wasn’t until I had been in college for a bit that I really discovered the Beastie Boys, amidst what was for me a hip hop renaissance. A glorious period of a year or two in which I kept discovering incredible music that was so different than what I’d grown up with. There is a veritable gulf between the 69 Boyz and Black Star and I spent this time of my life happily rowing across it.

For the Beastie Boys, that re-discovery most likely began with Paul’s Boutique and that’s where I started this time. Listening to Paul’s Boutique now, as at any time, the first thing that washes over you are the samples. So many samples! The ones you know and the ones you don’t; they are so deeply layered into this album. And the music is so funky: “Egg Man” is incredible (“when I say dozen, you know what I’m talking about boyeeee”); “Sounds of Science” with its wildly long build-up and utterly satisfying breakdown; and of course all that “Boullaibaisse” including rapping over the Isley’s Brothers most delicious riff.

If I had to pick a favorite Beastie Boys song, it would probably be “Sounds of Science”.

From Paul’s Boutique on to Check Your Head, which experiments more widely with instrumentation. Then I went into Hello Nasty, with even stranger, further experiments in instrumentation. And yet so many classic lines: “Dogs love me cause I’m CRAZY sniffable.” “I’m the king of Boggle / There is none higher / I gets eleven points / off the word quagmire.”

Back to Ill Communication. If I had to name a favorite Beastie Boys album it might be this one. It’s so widely varied, yet feels to me like the most sonically consistent. Its experiments capture the same energy as songs like “Sure Shot” and “Root Down”. The punk rock of “Heart Attack Man” sort of makes sense with “Sabotage”. And of course: “Get It Together” with Q-Tip (“Phone is ringin’/ Oh my god.”)

What’s I found fascinating about the Beastie Boys is that no matter how widely they experimented on each album, the core was always the same: three dudes rapping in that late-eighties group rhyme pattern. They finish each other’s verses, they all chime in to punctuate a syllable. While hip hop changed around them, they stuck to that, and frankly, kept it pretty fun.

I’ve been listening to the Beastie Boys for the whole week, waking up with their songs stuck in my head and every day digging deeper into the library. But it was crushing to remember as I was working my through these albums that this is a finite canon. Absolutely heartbreaking. #RIPMCA

If for some reason you’re just getting started, probably your best bet is to buy the Beastie Boys Anthology.

The Immoralist by Andre Gide

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

September 13, SFO-JFK: Andre Gide begins his book with an author’s note that apologizes for his main character. Or perhaps, preemptively defends. He pleads with the reader that the character and the author’s purpose have been misconstrued. Not hard to imagine. The Immoralist spins a tale of Michel, a disaffected young man who is unimpressed by the norms of society at the start and has no desire to get close to God. As the book unfolds, he descends into immorality in a first person narrative that brings you through it with him.

The trick of it all, of course, is that Gide writes beautifully. That Michel’s narrative is easy to internalize because of the beauty of his description. And of course, through our modern lens (in which so many of us have an unfamiliarity with God) Michel’s ‘descent’ can also be seen as a ‘journey’ of self-discovery.

Oddly, the narrative of the monster is not what I took from this book. That place in my canon is held by Lolita. This was my “tuberculosis is romantic” book. Both Michel’s illness and then his wife Marceline’s, both so beautifully rendered in prose, were the first I’d read of the romance of illness. A ridiculous sentiment. In reading this book now, the biology of their suffering is so crisply detailed and thus frightening.

Buy The Immoralist from the Internet.

Ken Burns’ Civil War

September 13, SFO-JFK: What do I remember about Ken Burns’ Civil War? I watched it young, probably bit by bit on PBS. Eventually I convinced my parents to buy the VHS set— that bread box brick of a dozen cassettes. It was not the best investment; I watched it through once. But it was so visually impressive, sitting their in the tape library! It’s the number of VHS cassettes that sticks out most prominently in my memory. Christ, it was long. You kept feeding those things into the VCR one after another in a never-ending cycle.

How delighted I was to find the whole thing on Netflix and moreso to find it was only nine episodes. Perhaps my memory of its length had been distorted by time? Nope. That was correct. Each episode was longer than an hour, the first the length of a feature film. I dove right in.

I love the way the series begins: with an anecdote of a Virginia home-owner who claims “the war began in my front yard and ended in my front parlor”. It’s one of countless ways in which sprawling over so many hours Ken Burns brings the details of the Civil War to the forefront to make it more accessible and human.

As a documentary filmmaker, I felt there was always a smirking joke in the style of this series. That you could always slow pan across a couple of still shots and, with a wink, call it your Ken Burns sequence. But I’d originally watched this series long before I ever produced a frame of documentary, and today, with a professional’s eye, I found myself bowled over and impressed. The challenge of telling a story of epic length about long-ago history is the scant visual materials you have to work with. Burns essentially has a pile of photographs, a half dozen backbone interviews, and a handful of contemporary shots that affected the mood of long ago. There was no Zapruder film of the Battle of Gettysburg and impressively, Burns didn’t stoop to reenactments.

Ken Burns’ Civil War is unique in that it doesn’t present itself like a film. It’s actually more akin to a book. A big hefty doorstop of a tome. It uses the same techniques of detail and anecdote and the pace moves slowly, each beat breathing. After a battle, when the sun has set, Burns will give you a solid thirty second soundtrack of campfire and crickets over the moon in the dark night sky. (Ironically, this shot feels almost identical to the one used so frequently in Sherman’s March.) Burns tells the story about the great men, Lincoln and Lee and Grant and Davis, and meanwhile he builds narratives around on-the-ground characters like a Maine private who fought through the whole of the war.

I’m happy as hell I rewatched this series. It’s the sort of thing that feels unnecessary to repeat a viewing of— yeah, yeah, I know all about the civil war and I know what a Ken Burns movie looks like. But I’d never fully appreciated what a masterpiece this is.

Thankfully, modern technology now means you don’t need to buy a dozen VHS cassettes. Netflix will do you just right in your search for Ken Burns’ Civil War.

Jeff Buckley: Live from Bataclan & Live at Sin-é

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

September 10, San Francisco: There is only one Jeff Buckley CD for me. I burned it myself, combining two EPs: Live from Bataclan and Live at Sin-é. Multiple times have I thrown myself into Grace or Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, but once I’d tasted the sweet fruit of Jeff Buckley live, I could never brook Buckley in the studio.

This disc, which I have thanks to my friend Dominic’s two EPs, has seven songs. It begins and ends with the “Je N’en Connais Pas La Fin”, such a lovely little song (about such a lovely little fair). It includes, of course, “Hallelujah”, which Buckley singing live is one of the most haunting musical experiences imaginable. It also has “Mojo Pin” and “Eternal Life”, both wonderful. But man, Jeff Buckley doing live covers is something spectacular. Van Morrison’s “The Way Young Lovers Do” is completely transformed by Buckley’s adept hands and voice.

This disc found me in the midst of a long way down. I listened to it repeatedly with my headphones on and my self-pity wrapped around me like a shroud. It’s a great album for that, if that’s what you want from it. Just Buckley’s beautiful voice, his guitar, and maybe a little other instrumentation thrown in from time to time. But listening today I felt like that experience has clouded my appreciation for how beautiful these songs are.

Buy these two EPs and then slap them together in a single playlist and BOOM there’s all the Jeff Buckley you’ll ever need.

Magnolia

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

September 9, San Francisco: I arrived to film school with every ambition of being the next great writer-director. It seemed we all wanted that and this was around the time that that sort of filmmaking was back in fashion. Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, and yes, P.T. Anderson were all crowned the new auteurs, just as we film students were learning the meaning of the word. After Hard Eight and Boogie Nights, some studio gave P.T. a seemingly endless budget (unlike Hard Eight) and creative control (unlike Boogie Nights) and he set forth to make a masterpiece. That film is Magnolia.

Magnolia weaves together an ensemble of interconnected characters through a pattern of chance and coincidence. It’s beautifully filmed— sumptuous symmetrical shots and long, complicated Steadicam follows. And this cast, oh these actors: Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, Tom Cruise, and more. But man oh man, Tom Cruise as Frank T.J. Mackey, the self-help guru who leads the “Seduce and Destroy” seminar about “taming the cunt”? He’s incredible.

The movie gives these actors a chance to really show off. In fact, it delights in the extremes of their performances. There is much screaming, much weeping; there would be gnashing of teeth if that sort of thing had been de rigeur in the San Fernando Valley of the 1990s. Magnolia revels in weaving profanity throughout the dialogue almost with the glee of an HBO series shaking its fist at traditional TV. More casual ‘fucks’ and ‘fuckings’ and ‘cocksuckers’ and ‘cocks’ and ‘cunts’ than you can be bothered to count.

I loved this movie when I saw it. Loved it. It was a triumph of the craft and here was P.T. Anderson showing himself as a master. And I, as a film student, couldn’t help telling anyone and everyone how much I loved this film and thought P.T. Anderson was a genius. Now that was a man to aspire to be. (Did I mention he was dating Fiona Apple at the time?)

Watching Magnolia today, it feels rather overwrought. The whole movie is about showing off. Anderson is showing off. The actors are showing off. The script is showing off. The whole Aimee Mann soundtrack is showing off. You are so aware this is a film and that these are actors angling for awards and when Philip Seymour Hoffman says, “I know I sound ridiculous, like this is the scene in the movie where the guy is trying to get in touch with the long lost son. but this is that scene…” well, it does sound kind of ridiculous and definitely sounds like just a scene in a movie.

This is the thing about the film that is so odd to me, watching it now. Anderson bookends the narrative with these anecdotes about one in a million coincidences, and then the narrator (Ricky Jay, who is awesome, by the way) argues at the tail end of the film that though these stories may seem too hard to believe, like they were just convenient for the sake of a movie, they in fact happen all the time. It is essentially an exhortation to believe the film you’ve just watched, to believe that such a quilt of chance could be woven in real life, in the real lives of these characters. Yet this does a better job of reminding the viewer they are watching a film than of suspending disbelief. Maybe this is Anderson’s point. Maybe he doesn’t want you to forget, once you hit rewind on your Oscar screening tape, that this was a film— with a cast and a script and well, a director.

Magnolia is a good film. I wouldn’t walk around calling it my favorite film anymore, but it is a damn fine piece of filmmaking and the performances are really quite impressive. Worth a watch, but with the caveat that sometimes Icarus flies too high.

No, really. Watch Magnolia.

Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

September 8, JFK-SFO: Didion writes an exquisite exploration of deep, deep sadness and depression. Maria (“Mar-eye-ah”) Wyeth is a beautiful film actress with a director husband and a house in 1970s Beverly Hills. She is also in the midst of a slow, slow slide into absolute catatonic depression. Her daughter is very sick, her marriage and friendships offer no succor, her career is at a standstill, and she has already made a habit out of spending each day just driving the freeways of Los Angeles before she has the abortion that then begins to plague her mentally.

I identified with this book when I read it. This was the sort of absolute rock bottom I thought I was aspiring to. Another of the badges of sadness I wanted to hang on my lapel. This is a dangerous book. Weaponized in the hands of the lonely and depressed. Do not lend this book to your friends who you think will identify with it. They will.

It’s also a fantastic book. Such a sharply illustrated picture of the emotional emptiness of the sex-and-drugs Hollywood glamor lifestyle. Of course Maria Wyeth is depressed: her family is a wreck, her friends are all terrible people, their libertine lifestyle is completely empty and destructive.

There was a beat at the very end that I missed in my reading until this time. In the final pages, as BZ readies to off himself, he explains to Maria that the two of them know something special: what it is like to feel nothing. At the end, Maris explains to the reader that BZ saw nothing and wanted to quit. But she learned, while learning craps from her father, to play it where it lays. And so she’ll keep playing, staring that nothing in the face. The strangest of up-notes to end this book on.

Play it as It Lays is available for purchase at your local internet superstore.

Neil Young: Harvest

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

September 7, New York: Harvest is such a beautiful album. “Old Man”, “Heart of Gold”, “The Needle and the Damage Done” are such incredible songs. They weren’t what initially attracted me to this album. My first obsession with this album came through the discovery of “A Man Needs a Maid”.

“My life is changing / in so many ways. / I don’t know who / to trust anymore. / There’s a shadow running / through my days / like a beggar going / from door to door.”

Symphonic and self-absorbed, “A Man Needs a Maid” soars with sadness. It glorifies the self-pity of a man alone. I think Young intended a slight bit of irony in that; indeed I heard it ironically as a thirty-three year old. But at eighteen I was in a real low spot and Neil Young was putting my misery on a pedestal and I loved it.

“I was thinking that / maybe I’d get a maid. / Find a place nearby / for her to stay. / Just someone / to keep my house clean / fix my meals and go away.”

There is a way to hear this whole album through this lens, particularly the first couple of tracks. Tracks 1 – 4 are basically all melancholy post-break-up songs if you want them to be. And I did. I dove headfirst deep into sadness at nineteen, and I cultivated it. I hesitate to call it depression because it seems today so much like an affectation, though an affectation that was sometimes nasty and difficult to break. I flaunted the albums and books that reflected my downcast emotions back to me. Through which I would continually resonate and intensify the feeling. This beautiful album was an unfortunate victim.

“A while ago somewhere / I don’t know when / I was watching / a movie with a friend. / I fell in love with the actress. / She was playing a part / that I could understand.”

Harvest is still beautiful and I still love to listen to it. It’s the only Neil Young album I know by heart. And though the next couple of Thirty-Three Project entries will trace other sadnesses, I’m glad to still have this one, whole and healthy in adulthood.

Don’t get a maid. Get this album.

Neon Genesis Evangelion

This post is in the theme “A Long Waltz Through Nerddom”. Read the first.

September 7, New York: Neon Genesis Evangelion is my absolute favorite piece of anime and one of my all-time favorite works across all media. I find it in the same genre as The Invisibles— a masterwork sourced from a million different inputs to create a dense universe that the audience must pry apart. In this case it is giant robots and gnosticism. Yes, please. Evangelion is that rare work (like, perhaps Mulholland Drive) that has eluded my clear comprehnsion and explanation.

Okay, so for the first time in my life, I am going to try to explain what is happening in Evangelion. (Note: I’m not going to look up anyone else’s explanations.) Be wary, reader, below yon spoilers are rife.

Let’s start with the basics: Shinji is a whiny teenager who gets recruited to pilot a giant robot that is protecting the earth from mysterious giant invaders called The Angels. The robot he pilots, the Evangelion, is the size of a building and humanoid in shape. One of our first clues is the early revelation that the Evangelion is not a robot at all, but a biological creature of some kind that can ‘go berserker’ even when it runs out of reserve power.

The organization that built the Evas, and is run by Shinji’s father Gendo Ikari, is called NERV. Its motto is “God’s in his heaven. All’s right with his world.” Some real ‘as above, so below’ shit here, in case you’re looking for gnosticism. Ikari’s office has a map of the sephirot on his ceiling. NERV answers to a shadowy world government organization called SEELE, which in turn claims to take its direction from prophecies laid out in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Mmmhmm?

The World
So there’s SEELE, but officially there is the UN, which in this world has some teeth. See, at the turn of the millennium 15 years prior, there was a massive explosion in the Antarctic which melted all the ice and caused sea levels to rise cataclysmically across the Earth. Much of Japan is submerged, including Tokyo. They built a second one as the new capital. And now they’ve built a third one as a fortress to protect against The Angels. Tokyo-3.

The Angels
Why protect Tokyo-3? Well because the Dead Sea Scrolls have predicted a series of tests against humanity. These take the form of the Angels, beings with the molecular structure of light (both waveform and particle matter) and 99.98% DNA match to humans. They come in a dizzying array of body types and are protected by what is called an AT Field. The opening credits tell us this stands for “Absolute Terror Field”, but basically the AT Field is the soul, outwardly projected. Where the boundary of a human soul exists roughly at the line of the skin, the angels (and the Evas) have a soul that surrounds them like a force field.

The very first Angel was Adam. He’s the one who destroyed Antarctica. But that’s a state secret. Also a secret? Adam is locked up under Tokyo-3*. That’s why the angels keep attacking— to get to Adam.

*- But wait, it’s not Adam that’s locked up under Tokyo-3, it’s Lilith! She is the being from which all humanity is derived. The final angel, who comes in human form, discovers this just before he’s killed in one of the most incredible scenes of filmmaking I have ever seen. This angel becomes Shinji’s only true friend (and perhaps lover) then turns angel and has to be battled. After a 12 minute fight sequence, he demands Shinji kill him. And we watch a still frame of the giant robot holding the tiny angel while Ode to Joy plays in the background… for over a minute. It’s incredible.

Augh, okay, back to the explaining.

The Human Instrumentality Project
But what is Lilith all about? It’s rooted in the Human Instrumentaility Project, which is mentioned from time to time as another secret NERV project. First, there’s Rei. She’s a quiet girl, Shinji’s age. We learn over the course of the series that Rei is a clone. That they’ve engineered her like gods. That’s step one. The next step is engender the final evolution of the human species. What does that even mean?

Well that brings us back to Evangelion Unit One. Unit One is special— while the Evas are dependent on external power sources, Unit One activates on its own without power all the time. It also, once, took Shinji into itself. His whole body just disappeared into it and his consciousness began to dissolve. In that episode the Eva is saying to him “Don’t you want to become one with me? Of one mind and one body?” This is what Human Instrumentality is all about. See, Unit One already has a soul: Shinji’s mother was taken into the Eva the same exact way. Now she *is* the Eva. But the next step is for humankind to join with the Eva. The Evangelion beings are vessels for a human collective consciousness. They are described as “an ark.”

The final episode
And then you have the final episode. In a piece of television that angered nearly half of Japan (so I’ve heard), Hideaki Anno presents this existentialist cross-examination of Shinji in the most abstract of ways. Single repeated shots. Blurry live action shots of crowds on streets. Meandering, soul-searching voice over. The American voiceover actors admitted they totally didn’t get it.

Fans hated it. So they went back and made a few movies, movies that Anno begins with the text: “This is the way Evangelion was supposed to end.” There is some epic robot on robot fighting, some heart-wrenching moments as your favorite B-characters are snuffed from life, some gorgeous cello-driven classical music. And then some positively Salvador Dali-esque planetary imagery over the strangest little pop song you’ve ever heard.

And this is what I think happens: The fate of the world rests on a decision Shinji has to make— to release his ego into oneness with all other beings or to maintain his individual identity. As best I can tell, he chooses individual life. And somehow that is saving the world. Despite all the efforts of his father to the contrary, to evolve humanity into collective consciousness.

“Man is the eighteenth angel,” claims someone late in the series. “All the other angels were other possibilities.” Adam, the model for Eva, was the first angel. So perhaps Shinji’s saving of the species is rejecting a return to that early possibility and maintaining the human being, however messy, hurtful, and hateful it might be.

Buy the damn whole series.

History of Sexuality, vol. 1 by Michel Foucault

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

September 7, New York: This is one of those books that has hung around in my collection since the first reading. And a good one for it, because my copy is full of notes. Notes of a young mind! Sadly, this book feel victim to a rainstorm. I read it in this condition but I’m afraid this will be its final read.

If only this had happened to my copy of Paper Machine, I could have written a whole thing about it.

I love this book and Michel Foucault in two separate ways. First, let’s be honest: I love this book as a nineteen year old pseudo-intellectual who felt so proud of himself reading lines like: “An entire medico-sexual regime took hold of the family milieu.” Yeah! And perhaps most importantly, who loved telling the ladies he was into Foucault. It was, in this sense, a sort of shibboleth of pseudo-intellectual hooking-it-up.

But I also love Foucault as a reader. The first book of his I read was Discipline and Punish, which for once presented a thesis that was built upon an multiplicity of sources, few of which were academic. He wove works of art and poetry into a contemplative tome about prisons. This was the way I’d always aspired to write academically. By the time I finished college, my best papers were a pastiche of source texts from pop culture to history to tarot cards. But I first read Foucault before I had a professor that would let me write that way. So he represented a great hope for me.

With History of Sexuality, I had another totally different experience. As I struggled to maintain focus enough to follow the polysyllabic logic from page to page, I suddenly realized I completely grokked the theory of power Foucault was presenting. And better yet, I’d seen it elsewhere: the final chapter of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I felt like the smartest little motherfucker on campus. (It was then that I was introduced to The Hedgehog and the Fox.)

To be honest, the first way of loving Foucault persisted long after the second. I would read a book on occasion for pleasure (actually finding pleasure in it) but more and more Foucault, like Baudrillard and Debord and Zizek— I wanted to be a man who identified with these authors. And I was always a sucker for the women whose bookshelves they adorned.

Married now and reading this book, I was content to enjoy just the prose. And you know what? I did immensely.

Buy yourself a beret, an espresso machine, and a copy of The History of Sexuality, volume 1.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

September 5, New York: For much of my teens and twenties all I wanted from romance was a Holly Golightly: a beautiful, brilliant, tortured girl who liked a taste of the sauce. Or, given that a romance with a Holly Golightly could never last, I’d settle for a series of these. This had predictably terrible consequences. But, man, I loved this movie and I loved the women who identified with it, dark blues and mean reds and all. Despite the constant jarring realization that Paul Varjack was also Hannibal from the A-Team (“I love it when a plan comes together.”) I thought this movie was one of the best of all time. I’ve probably watched it dozens of times. The young writer, struggling in New York. The beautiful, young tortured girl he loves. The dizzying ups and downs of spending an entire day drunk together. These were themes I was busy cultivating in my own life.

The book, more dark and ending with them apart, I found endlessly more believable. Of course they wouldn’t end up together and of course no one ever gets to deliver that heartfelt “I’m so indignantly correct.” speech he gives her in the cab at the end of the movie. But the book’s reality also added to the story’s danger; realism made it seem more attainable.

In this viewing I realized the only true hero in this tale is poor Cat. Holly and Paul hurt each other constantly, none of them is without blame. Holly cuts a memorable figure but seems exhausting. Paul Varjack is himself pretty terrible: judging, uneven of temperament and unclear in his intentions. Oh, how shocked he is to find that the second he comes on strong, Holly pushes him away. Duh, buddy, you’ve been watching this pattern for weeks now. And oof, how unwatchable is that terribly racist Mickey Rooney performance. But Cat? Lovable, party-loving Cat is the real hero of this film.

Relive your own tortured twenties relationships with a Breakfast at Tiffany’s viewing party.

Radiohead: OK Computer

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

September 4, New York: I don’t need to remind you that OK Computer is an amazing album. You know. You listened to it on repeat in your bedroom on your headphones just like I did. You might have even had the “Fitter. Happier. More productive.” poster on your wall in college. I did not, but I always enjoyed seeing it around.

For me, this album is an end of an era. Perhaps multiple eras. It was the last of the really great alt-rock albums. We kicked it off with Nirvana and wrapped it up with Radiohead. And who could try to top this? It was on every single critic’s top ten list at the end of the century. Even Radiohead themselves introduced a wholly different sound with the release of Kid A.

It was also the end of a personal era: This was the last rock album for a long time that I loved that was also popular with the kids. That’s perhaps because this was the end of my being one of the kids. My strongest memories of listening to this album are in my freshman year of college, and it was in college that my taste in music began to expand, began to reach backwards in time past the radio hits (or the anti-radio hits) of the present. I’d already begun to broaden past the radio in the present, with artists like Ani DiFranco, but it was in college that I began to discover all the wonderful things I’d missed from way back when.

OK Computer is still great to listen to. It certainly doesn’t feel defined (or confined) by its era. There is a fully enjoyable cognitive dissonance between the alienated, insecure, often nasally-intoned lyrics and then the sudden all-out, head-banging, body-thrashing rock. The singer is still the same guy who brought us “Creep”, yet this album will induce uncontrollable reactions to bang one’s head or slap one’s hand down on the table in time with the beat. God, it’s great.

If for whatever reason you lost this album, let’s say you lent it to a girlfriend/boyfriend and she/he dumped you and you never did that return-to-me-the-things-that-are-mine thing, buy it again.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

September 3, New York: A good book is like a drug, it alters your perception for the time in which you read it, becomes a new lens through which you see the world. I’ve had this realization a few times during this project, with different analogies— with The Invisibles, for example: a good book is like a spell cast over you. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Trip

As a youth, reading this book was the first time I understood that there were people who took drugs to experiment with reality, not just because they were burnouts or addicts. School had taught me the Nancy Reagan doctrine (we had a DARE program, of course) and the kids at my high school who were publicly into acid were kind of the worst. Yet, here’s this moment in history where a different thing was happening.

As an adult, it was interesting to read this book immediately after On the Road; that was a “synchronicity” I’d not experienced the first time around. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is almost a cultural sequel. Kerouac launches the beat generation, Kesey and a bunch of beats launch the hippie generation. You see the changes to San Francisco: North Beach gets hip post Kerouac and the priced-out beatniks head out to the Haight. And so many of the characters overlap. Kerouac himself drops into a scene as the now-famous novelist. Allen Ginsberg shows up to a few parties, including to the famous one with the Hell’s Angels. Hunter S. Thompson is around and working, and oh, hello very young and still very enterprising Stewart Brand!

And who should be painted all across the pages but Neal Cassady, Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty? He is an early Prankster and with them through the end, he is the God-touched driver of the psychedelic bus who is the only human who can live his life at the limit of 1/30th of a second delay from reality to perception of reality. He cuts as memorable of a performance across these pages as well as Kerouac’s. Reading these two books back to back made it seem like I was reading Cassady’s biography across time. From his intellectual awakening through to his role as a hammer-tossing semi-divinity in his own right.

Blow your own mind and buy a copy of The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.