jane dark's sugarhigh!

louder than luv

Here's a nifty article by sugarhigh! special friend Joe Gross, on some material issues in popular music.

Disclaimer: though this has no bearing on Joe Gross's general excellence nor the importance of this field of inquiry, we feel compelled to note that when we attended a discussion on this topic a few years ago at EMP, we discovered that, contrary to the refined and well-corseted majority, we preferred the highly-compressed reissue of Led Zeppelin II to the original.

sherrybaby

D's for never dirty,
MC for mostly Clean.

the long tail

When sugarhigh! considers the white male artists of the post-WWII era whom we find most thrilling and exemplary, three stand clear: Jean-Luc Godard, John Ashbery and Bob Dylan, artists we sometimes have great dfficulty confronting because the certainty and power of their stuff theatens a kind of despair at one's own efforts.

The casual isomorphism of this troika's aesthetic narratives in evident: despite working in media and places with distinctly different relations to pop, each has been starkly prolific (albeit with celebrated pauses in their individual output), remaking their fields in the period from 1955-65; each has responded to the inevitable fading of their mass-critical star with continued and sometimes accelerated production, clear into their current advanced ages.

Of course, the differences are just as notable (and more media-specific): the way Ashbery's critical ascendence didn't come for two decades, while Dylan and Godard took each less than a handful of years to reach the apex of their fields. Or Godard's almost invisible prolixity; in the United States, how many of the 49 titles he's directed since Letter to Jane have we had a fair chance to see, especially if we don't inhabit a town with a film festival? Or Dylan's late pause, after his serial religious conversions and Eighties dreck, to ponder over ancient ballads and return as a resecularized Tiresias, "momentarily returned to life and warmth and allowed once more to speak, and to deliver its long-forgottten message in surroundings utterly alien to it"?

Alright, that was an extremity; we enjoyed it. Still, it's the kind of extremity Dylan has demanded and received in spades, these last nine years and three original albums. So the least we can do is note how the singing is a lot better on this one than the last two.

The previous pair were defined by Dylan's croak; not quite tuneless, but impelled to let us know that he was a figure beyond the mere conventions of hitting notes, or trying to hit notes. These activities were for strivers, not immortals; the very measure of hiss historical greatness became the simple fact that he could miss, avoid, ignore the niceties of notes, and still win the Voice critics' poll. It would be pleasant to suggest that this gesture was somehow a throwback to his early years, when he was often written off as a hopeless, tuneless vocalist — something we now understand to be exactly false. He was, rather, singing differently, inventing a counter-style, and "Highway 61," much less "Visions of Johanna," now sounds deeply tuneful. We do not suspect anyone will make that case about "Million Miles."

So we must be appreciative that he's dropped the And You Shall Know My Importance By My Indifference schtick, and returned to a more sanguine vocal style, riding the melodies of old Western swing forms with a pleasing laissez-faire. Alas, that's the only pleasing thing about this album which is otherwise remarkable only for its boredom-induction: what a freakin' yawn. Nothing — nothing — of Dylan's greatness remains, and why should we expect it to? Or, more pressingly, why are we so compelled to pretend that it does? This can no longer even be compared to Bob Dylan; it would be dull and slight for a Lucinda Williams albm, and she hasn't been interesting in more than a decade. It's looking up at Ryan Adams, and sugarhigh! doesn't care for Ryan Adams. There are no especially bad songs (though the inevitable way-too-long last song is a bit of a groaner) but, far more substantively, there is nothing close to a good song, even a throwaway on the order of that burlesque he tossed to Sheryl Crow before desperately repo-ing for a lesser take, lo this last millennium.

Nothing here is worthy of invective, alas. At some point, in twent of 50 years, it might be productive to explore what conjuncture of forces allowed smart, serious people to hear this as pleasing, good, even great music. This is not to suggest that valuing this album is any more or less aribtrary and subjective than enjoying Bjork or Cam'ron; it is, rather, the particularities of this case have more to say about something like cultural momentum, and historical attachments — ideas which read interestingly against the suppositional temporariness of popular culture.

the black dahlia

Cinema note: Replacement of story with plot found to be the same historical motion as replacement of motive with psychopathology.

Movie review: "Mere psychology."

can't argue with that

light breaking open with rock

Charité hospital: how the name creates the seeming that Germans must borrow a word for charity. Passed a parade in the street there? No, a manifestation: Ver.di, marching in solidarity with a strike (streik) at Charité Hospital. At the front, policement clearing the street. Behind them, the march leaders casting a martial tune through the PA: AC/DC, “Jailbreak.”

too much too little

boys' books

And because distance, when it snows, leads no longer out into the world but within, so Baghdad and Babylon, Acre and Alaska, Tromsö and Transvaal were places within me.

Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood Around 1900

crank

A queerly macho fellow, loved by the ladies and the gays, cruises around heavenlit LA, sometimes on a motorcycle, visiting absurdly luxurious locations where white powder and the hidden schemes of power flow, trying to get out of the life, puzzling through a spiritual crisis, having a little public sex — an adequate remake of Shampoo.

the protector

Tom yum goong is not the first foreign-based film to take the English title The Protector, but it is the most recent, seemingly unrelated to the Indian silent Ajit Yoddho (1934), the French thriller Le Protecteur (1974).

Most reviews of the present film mention the torch-passing joke when Tony Jaa's character, arriving at Sydney's airport, exchanges a double-take with Jackie Chan, in turn exiting the country. It's a bit of an allegory, you see, about martial arts heroes breaking into the anglophone market. What these reviews don't manage to mention is that Jackie Chan's second effort at an EngLang incursion (after box-office bomb The Big Brawl) was Wei long meng tan, or as it was called in most markets, The Protector (1985). In that film, Chan's partner is killed and there's a kidnapped girl to recover; for Jaa, two decades later, his father is killed and the kidnapees are pachyderms. Didn't Karl Marx in fact say that everything happens twice: the first time as tragedy, the second time as elephants?

It's hard to say what this film is up to, investing so heavily in that lineage — but it's not misplaced, really. Jaa's kung fu style ("Muay Thai"), though ballyhooed per the rules of discourse as new and different, is deeply indebted to Chan's. This is not so much true in close combat (where the movie seems more interested in a parade of styles, from capoeira to "ultimate fighting") but in the movements of multiple combatants within enclosed, complex spaces. If the bravura sequence is a four-minute following shot where Jaa fights his way up the various levels of the familiar restaurant/club/thunderdome/kingpin's lair (getting noticeably exhausted and sloppy as he nears the top, which is a nice touch), the more eloquent choreography happens in some ludicrous crypto-warehouse containing, among other things, some strangely oriented chain-link fences and, oh yeah, a disemboweled bus. In these scenes, Jaa's particular kinesis, alternately highlit and obscured by the camera's deep desire to look at things from below, is plenty thrilling.

Jaa himself is peculiarly impassive — "peculiar" because it's not really the familiarly Orientalist imperturbability intent on suggesting an interiority that is at once absolute and inhuman, the subject without subjectivity. Jaa offers something like a negatve impassivity: while elaborating Chan's goofball ballet of violence, he seems intent on refusing Chan's comedic charisma. Physical comedy is Chan's gift to martial arts; Jaa returns seriousness to it , a comic seriousness of which the little elephant is the emblem. Indeed, Jaa is the little elephant; his character has, it seems, never aged beyond the opening scenes, when we see him as a child, bonding with his charges. Over the full course of the film, Jaa hasn't the slightest flirtation, nor moment of self-awareness. He is a serious boy, with all the implacable destruction that implies.

Or maybe Jaa the actor is just another Keanu, constitutionally unable to express anything at all beyond a vexed wonderment that people will still fight him, given his manifest physical superiority. Hollywood, too, suffers from that puzzlement, and is gruesomely acrobatic as a matter of course in going about its business. This just might work out.

half nelson

After Shareeka Epps finds Ryan Gosling, her high-school teacher, collapsed in the bathroom with a crack pipe, he eventually asks her to help him up, at which point the film has a choice. If it doesn't show her helping him, it abandons the moment to the purely metaphorical; if it shows the 13-year old girl reaching out and taking his hand or shoulder, it abandons itself to sentimentality. The film navigates this deftly, with a little jump-cut so that her hand is just suddenly there and then he's wincingly upright; it's a small choice but the right one, and indicative of the film's attention to its own risks. Indeed, in many ways the film is about navigating the tepid and silted waters of its own set-up, which it does with parallel care at almost every juncture. Other best thing about movie: even as it manages to get a name act to contribute a budget sondtrack, it stages Broken Social Scene as nothing but numbing sentiment for self-pitying hipsters.

accepted

Movies in many ways inherit their genres and their genremes (as we have come to call the minimal units that establish and fulfill genre expectations) from earlier forms, theater and literature most obviously. They have in turn modified old and developed new genre codes, with all the inevitability of medium specificity: the soundtrack accompaniment to episodes of horror, romance, or suspense, e.g., or the plot horizons required to manage the absurd beauty of Hollywood actors in "real" roles.

But once a genreme is in place, it can no more be abandoned than it could in the Russian folktale; to jettison such a thing would be to jettison the genre itself. And so it is occasionally amusing to watch a film wrestle with a genreme to which it is utterly indifferent, even if — perhaps especially if — this wrestling takes the form of cheerful laziness.

And so it goes in Accepted. Ostensibly the story of how the Mac guy starts an open, student-run university organized by elective affinities, literally a former insane asylum, now run by the inmates — and thus in distinction to the high-class, top-down bureaucracy up the road (is this still the Mac/PC parable? Or is it about the Sorbonne 1968? Who can tell anymore?) — the film still remains compelled to include a subnarrative about the hot girl after whom Mac guy longs, but who is of course dating blandly totalitarian PC guy. And of course, as these things go, she eventually sees that her alpha guy is actually a jerk, and that the sweet boy who used to mow her lawn is in fact a quirky charmer with a true heart blah blah blah.

What's actually charming is how this pro forma narrative is played out in a haphazardly pro forma way: no drama, no tension, not much time wasted. Presented with the choice, she makes the right one in fairly short order and that's pretty much that, excepting one later pro forma reversal which is itself reversed pro forma in about twelve seconds of screen time. Max.

The film doesn't have the desire to flout openly or mock genre conventions (itself a genre, natch); it just can't be bothered to treat them as requiring much investment at all, and dispatches them with cheerful laziness. It's just getting by, fulfilling the minimum requirements without ever pretending they have any value, not letting them interfere with the fun — doing just enough to avoid getting kicked out and sent home. In that regard, the film is a perfectly realist account of the college experience for any reasonable student, after all.

little miss sunshine

Little Miss Sunshine finally can't escape its fate as the feelgood movie of the summer. As the story of a clutch of struggling and troubled individuals coming together as a family — an elliptical circling of the wagon around the usual twin poles of the death of the elder and the defense of the kid's innocence, ending with the rebuilt nuclear family sacrificing pride for mutual dependence and dancing their defiance of the external world — it's exactly as limited as such a movie must be.

It must be said that it does as well within those horizons as it possibly could; it may be close to the best such feelgood flick. Its struggle not to subvert genre clichés (which itself is so often a yawn, anyway) but to make the most of them is pulled off sort of superbly; irascible grandpa's death, though played for pathos (again, rather effectively: "GO HUG MOM") turns out to be essential to the finale's unfolding. He's taught young Olive a dance, see, for her big finale in the Little Miss Sunshine competition — one which, though it's frequently rehearsed, we don't see until its actually performed.

The dance turns out to make a mockery of the pageant, and all children's beauty pageants. Here we must note that the film — which presents such pageants in all their vacuous horror, parading super-sexualized grade-schoolers who may or may not be in on the grotesquerie, and parents who clearly are — had the incredibly strange fortune to have its late-summer opening in parallel with the return of the national JonBenet Ramsey obsession, and the return of all her pageant images to the nation's television screens. In this movie, there's no doubt that the parents — any parents, at any pageant — did it; the only question is what "it" is.

The mockery of such pageants presents little challenge; the movie's stroke is to leave its status unknown and unknowable, exactly because grandpa's dead. Was that his plan, in teaching her the routine? Did he senilely believe it was a potential winner? Or was it simply the only "dance" he knew, as a crass, uneducated veteran? Any of these answers would be unsatisfying; the execution of all the possibilities to the exclusion of none is close on perfect.

The movie has that level of care at almost every level. One of its running sight gags is the famiily's need to push-start their VW microbus, done each time with much huffing and puffing and varying levels of exuberance; within the physical comedy, the film stages the family dynamics with choreographic ease in the order that each member hops into the accelerating vehicle. Again, it's an image with a limit, in that it must imagine familes as mechanisms, the separate parts working best when working together; the film's capacity to be eloquent despite such banal ideas is its nature and appeal.

Except for Steve Carrell, that is, who is appealing in and of himself; he's most engaging early in the film, when he's frozen and morose. In a very different way, he's as good with a squint as DeNiro. As his character's mobility and humor return over the course of the narrative, Carrell starts drawing from his general bag of comedy tricks, and the character loses some definition; one hopes he'll have the intelligence to take on a substantially serious role in the near future, just to see what he can do with it.

back to basics

Back to Basics forms a sort of complement to the White Stripes. Battening on to African-American musical traditions from the pre-rock era, they proceed as if that could make post-rock music good again. The difference is that the Stripes see the pop miscegenation as the problem, to the solved via purification: a staggering, hypocritical misreading both of musical history and their own role in it. Christina Aguilera is more interested in looking back through the miscegenation to choose her parents from a rattle-bag of race music, and then let the process of pop impurity run its course accordingly from those reimagined beginnings, to see what it can do. To say that this demonstrates that Christina Aguilera is eleven times smarter than Jack White — not canny, not "pop-savvy," but actual-synthetic-reasoning smart — will surprise only the few remaining humans who haven't yet understood that the talented lad Jack White is, alas, a moron.

None of this is to say that Xtina's retro-soul-chanteuserie is news, even for her. As the Village Voice review for her last album noted four years ago:

For 10 songs, Christina Aguilera's record is aggressively boring, unless you're fascinated by her half-repressed yen to remake "I Put a Spell on You" as it might be done by the Velveteen Rabbit.

There's something faintly amazing about taking the weakest idea on a record (none of the hits, you'll recall — "Dirrty," "Beautiful," "Fighter," "Can't Hold Us Down" — partook of this investigation) and deciding it must become the full-blown conceit for the next album. This is a bit like De La deciding after their debut that the follow-up should be all skits. It's just not likely to work; having a concept is not the same as having a good concept, or understanding your own strengths. The best that can be said is that the conceit is largely irrelevant: the album has three good songs, which is about what one would hope and expect from your basic Aguilera product (though the last had five or six; in a decade, we'll see that as a wild exception).

Buried beneath all that jazz and discourse, however, is an interesting drama: there seem to be two discs exactly so that they can confront each other face to face. Disc Two is the Linda Perry disc; she co-wrote every song on it, and this has been widely noted. Considerably less-remarked-upon (though Sasha touches on it here), Disc One is the Kara DioGuardi disc; she co-wrote every song but one, though the's often credited lower down the list. But don't let that fool you; this is because the producer is credited second after Xtina in each case — then, on all three of the disc's excellent songs ("Aint No Other Man," "Slow Down Baby," "Without You") comes Ms. DioGuardi. One can hear her willing the project's conceit to work, even if it means rewriting "I'm Free" and Welsh one-hitter Donna Lewis.

By now you will have done the math. If the album has three good songs total and the first disc also has three...the second disc is left with zippo. It's deeply awful. This brings us no pleasure, as Linda Perry is one of the facts that has made popular music great over the last half-decade. But in this staged but unstated confrontation between the two popstar whisperers (a perfect phrase stolen from Garrett Kamps) who have underwritten much of the Top 40 since, roughly, 9/11 and the end of the High Teenpop Era — in this competition conducted through the medium of Ms. Aguilera and contrived historical style, DioGuardi turns out to be the girl with the most cake.

how often will we get to say 'end of an era'...

...and really mean it?