‘07 spaces: ain’t no hypocrite, ‘cept mostly every day

January 2, 2008 at 9:58 pm | In Music, Space Awards | Leave a Comment
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What does it profit a man if he gains hundreds of hits a day but loses his haughty feel of academic elitism? I have come to wonder if I really care about the faceless masses trafficking this blog if they only do so for certain methodologically-invalid, pointless lists. (Pointless lists absent of complex methodologies, however, are totally sticking around!) I suppose it is fun to see hits from places like Poland and Honduras, but it goes against my general policy of deleting old entries no longer relevant to me. I must contemplate. Tomorrow: Iowa Caucus thoughts/predictions! Today: the Space Awards finale!

2007 Space Awards ~ Albums of The Year: Part III

4. John Mellencamp – Freedom’s Road: I know I should hate any song as overexposed as “Our Country,” but THIS IS A GREAT ALBUM. Even the song that was reduced to a simplistic anthem of nationalism for truck commercials has strong lyrical sentiments of idealism and desire for change. Yet the real strength of Freedom’s Road is not the patriotic rock songs, but the darker tracks, including the folky “Rural Route” and the Joan Baez collaboration “Jim Crow” (an inferior song to, but a better musical fit than, some of Mellencamp’s prior racial commentary on Cuttin’ Heads) which add enough variety to the album to move it from “good” to “great.” Somehow, this variety helps Freedom’s Road coalesce as an album greater than the sum of its parts.
3. The Nightwatchman – One Man Revolution: To give some perspective, Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello’s solo effort is good enough to make me almost hope the band doesn’t get back together. While it has too many weak tracks to reach the top of the list – guitar strumming with next to no melody may be fine in a coffeehouse, but it makes for a dull track on an album – even these mellower numbers showcase Morello’s powerful voice and lyrics. Still, it is the more upbeat tracks that make One Man Revolution one of the most memorable albums of the year. Morello more than proves himself as a lyricist who needs no raucous band to be great (as he declares in “Maximum Firepower,” “You don’t gotta be loud to be heavy as shit”), and while the Rage comparisons are unavoidable, The Nightwatchman is closer to Bob Dylan than to anything Morello did previously.
T1. John Fogerty – Revival: 2007 was the best year in terms of music that I can recall, and Revival is one of the top albums of the decade; it is shocking that I must place it at #2 here. The bad: Fogerty delving into psychedelic rock with “Summer of Love,” a track that is okay but bad simply because it stands out so much from the rest of the album, and the rather uninspired “Broken Down Cowboy.”

The good: every other track, including even the mellow, calm country sound of “River Is Waiting.” Fogerty offers his best solo studio album by a wide margin, with a combination of his country sound from Blue Moon Swamp and his classic swamp-rock Creedence era. While “Long Dark Night” and “I Can’t Take It No More” name names, “Gunslinger” is the boldest political statement, openly radical and seditious, and the equally pleasing “Longshot” seems like an apolitical “Fortunate Son.” Revival is every bit as great as classic CCR, and because of the unfair advantage that the final entry held, I simply could not give Fogerty anything less than a tie for the #1 spot.
T1. Warren Zevon – Preludes: In general, I exclude compilations from album lists, and that technicality forced me to allow a tie here. Yet the posthumous collection is not a “greatest hits” album; there is no inclusion of “Lawyers, Guns, and Money,” but instead stripped-down versions of more obscure works such as “The French Inhaler” and six previously unreleased songs (three of which would be in competition for my top hour of Zevon songs, a list that may be impossible to compile). Preludes takes Zevon to a new level of greatness; all but one of the unreleased demo versions of the songs are superior to the album versions that already helped make him my favorite songwriter. The exception, “Werewolves of London,” is simply incomparable in its different forms; what became one of the greatest rock songs ever recorded started off as a disco-influenced, offbeat song that probably wasn’t meant to be a great rock song.

Zevon’s more mellow work was always well within my range of acceptable lyrical sentiment; he sung of being strung-out and hopeless against the cold city of Los Angeles, but never sounded whiny, insincere, or like something I had heard hundreds of times before. The raw emotion in his lyrics comes through best with the minimal production values, and it would be as good as a new album to hear another 50 minutes of tracks like these.

‘07 spaces: when you’ve heard all the answers but the questions remain

December 19, 2007 at 6:09 pm | In Quotes, Space Awards | 2 Comments
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Texans! Hermits! Dead people! Finding Eastern philosophy in pop culture figures! This one’s got it all!

2007 Space Awards ~ People of The Year: Part III

15. J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was a more-than-satisfying end for the series, and Rowling must first and foremost be commended for bringing the series to a close instead of dragging it out. I also tip my cap to her for outing Albus Dumbledore, the year’s Best Gay Wizard.
14. Steve Earle: It would have been all too easy for Earle to go to New York, become blinded by the idea of broad commercial success, and completely ruin his style. Instead, he has kept his exploration of the mainstream (as well as playing on Letterman, he handily won the title of Best Law & Order: SVU Guest Star, even if the appearance wasn’t very hyped) out of his music; “Washington Square Serenade” is more quiet and restrained than much of Earle’s work, but maintains the quality and unique style I had come to expect.
13. Mary Elizabeth Winstead: In a year when I became increasingly frustrated both with entertainers becoming too self-important and with stars putting celebrity before acting (in both instances, demonstrating unrestrained avarice for publicity), Winstead’s comments (“I aspired to be ‘the smart, young actress;’ it didn’t really work out for me.”) in an interview with Craig Ferguson notably stood out. Self-deprecating humor about her action- and horror-dominated resume, balanced by having enough dignity not to seek the tabloid spotlight, seems to be a commendable middle path – enough to earn the title for Best Televised Buddhist-y Virtue (for whatever it’s worth, “House” would claim a similar Taoism honor had I the occasion to write such a paean.).
12. Robert Sean Leonard: It is just beautiful coincidence that a “House” segue presented itself with the way the list turned out. The fact that Leonard’s Dr. Wilson is narrowing the titular doctor’s lead as my favorite character on the show only accounts for a small part of this ranking. More important was his interview with TV Guide, in which he explained, “If I don’t work for a few days, I don’t even change out of my pajamas, let alone deal with other people,” and revealed that he was set up with his current girlfriend by someone telling him, “I only know one person who leaves her house less than you do…” For these wonderfully relatable traits, Leonard has earned my respect and the title of 2007’s Best Celebrity Hermit.
11. Warren Zevon: Clearly, Zevon is the Best Posthumous Honoree I’m ever going to have. While they were recorded long ago, the demo versions and unreleased songs on this year’s “Preludes” release were quite brilliant; with Zevon’s powerful lyrics, the stripped-down sound proved to be a huge improvement over the cleaner production values of prior albums, and forced me to appreciate his brilliance even more. Continuing the “virtues I hold dear” theme of the last few honorees, one of the interviews on the album featured Zevon describing “Fistful of Rain” as “a Buddhist gospel song… the harder you try to hold onto things, the more they slip through your fingers sometimes, and the more they flow, the more they stay with you.”

if you make a pilgrimage, i hope you’ll find your grail

September 11, 2007 at 11:27 pm | In Lists, Music | 7 Comments
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After much thought, I’m officially at an existential crossroads.

I have learned to live without excessive spreadsheeting or quantification, even to the point that I’ve stopped SeinSheeting. I no longer have a zealous devotion to statistics – though I surely have forgotten more about Z-scores than most Americans will ever know. This is all reasonable to me; I can still integrate numbers and logic and spreadsheets as analytical tools, for my thoughtful nature is far more central to my being than is any one hobby or approach.

But now I have begun to question my use of lists. Similarly to my conclusion that I need not a unidimensional hierarchy, but an unordered group of diversely-gifted entities, to comprise my “favorite actresses” list, I can no longer abide by a system that names Warren Zevon “second best” to Creedence Clearwater Revival. Comparing a lyrically brilliant singer-songwriter to the catchy swamp rock of CCR is folly; it assumes that “music is music” and that all entities therein may be compared. Intuitively, I knew all along that “music” is the end product of different artistic elements… yet I persisted in listing.

But if we cannot compare artists (because each has a unique mix of melody, lyrics, and vocals; and a poet cannot be compared to a composer) can we even compare songs within a single artist’s catalog? I took the easy way out when I started my songs-by-artist lists with AC/DC; while it’s all quite catchy, there’s no real range to the band’s work. But when we start to look at artists who are – to put it bluntly – better, we should see different thematic content over a career, and quite possibly encounter a variety of musical styles.

I could make a list of Warren Zevon’s best mellow songs/love ballads in a “desired Yamagata coverage” context – and very well may. But could I then combine this list with a ranking of Zevon’s rock songs in order to have a comprehensive list? Could I universally rank the love songs and sociopolitical observations of, respectively, Young, Springsteen, Cockburn, or even Dylan?

These questions are not easy to answer; there is a question of whether I am, perhaps, simply equivocating and avoiding difficult choices. But if I’m not – if it is indeed madness to treat a great singer-songwriter’s whole career as something that may be put on a single ranked list – it suddenly makes my listing hobby much more challenging. Do I stick to the “one artist, one hour” system, or allow an hour for each list? If I shorten my lists, can I just split the artist’s allotted hour equally among his different facets, with no regard for proportional representation?

“One artist, one list, one hour” is a simple system that avoids these tricky questions, and it is tempting to delete this reflection, go to bed, and hope to forget my thoughts. Yet the system’s simplicity may render it as inaccurate and pointless as other lists appear to be in hindsight; future overanalysis could very well determine that my overanalytical listing compulsion was done haphazardly.

don’t think twice, it’s all right

September 6, 2007 at 11:46 pm | In Dementia, Lists, Movies | 2 Comments
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Top Four Sources of Ambivalence This Week

Yes, my list titles are getting much more specific.

4. Rachael Yamagata: Technically, I found it last week, but her cover of “Jesus Was A Cross Maker” only entered heavy rotation on my iPod since Monday. I knew it as a Warren Zevon song, which made Yamagata’s cover of particular interest (of course, she could cover something by Fall Out Boy and I’d still be excited because it would be new stuff from my favorite female vocalist). I guess “ambivalence” may be the wrong term here, but my excitement is at least mitigated by the discovery that the song was actually written by an obscure singer-songwriter named Judee Sill. Thus, I must cope with the reality that Rachael Yamagata hasn’t actually covered anything written by Warren Zevon, and thus, the world is 5% less awesome than I believed it to be. I may try to sublimate this letdown/longing into a “Top 5 [or 10] Warren Zevon Songs Rachael Yamagata Should Cover” post sometime.
3. Vanessa Hudgens: If MSNBC reports it, it must be newsworthy! As anyone who follows entertainment news knows, the 18-year-old “High School Musical” star has quite possibly ended her Disney career by taking a tamer version of the Paris Hilton route to fame. I really don’t care what an actress who hasn’t been in anything relevant to me does with her life or career, but it’s sort of pathetic that our society makes this kind of thing profitable (a cynic with aspirations in marketing, I don’t buy the “accidental” angle for a minute).

As I mentioned in a recent discussion of attraction preferences, I’ve found myself to be much more of an aestheticist than a sexualist; nudity has limited intrinsic appeal, and I find myself unmoved by this story. I am, however, very happy with one outcome of this: the already-recently-surging traffic to this blog has included more Hudgens-related hits in the last 6 hours than the total hits I used to get in a whole day. I am much more honored by the visit of whoever searched for “Jennifer Morrison’s favorite baseball team” earlier this week (and I’d love to know the result of that person’s quest for knowledge!), but hits are hits. It’s nice to know that someone else’s publicity stunt is helping bring my dementia to new audiences.
2. My heel: Since squatting down to check out some low-shelved books Sunday night, my Achilles (or something thereabouts) has plagued me. I can walk around for a little while at a time (probably good to keep it from tightening up too much), but then I end up a grimacing, pronouncedly-limping mess. So why am I ambivalent about shooting pain that makes me fear I’m going to pull a Gabe Kapler if I walk too much? Simple: with said pronounced limp, I feel like House. Any time I have a legitimate reason to emulate one of television’s best characters, I can’t be entirely unhappy.
1. “Halloween”: It’s okay when a bloodless 1978 “horror” film fails to scare a modern audience. But in the intervening 29 years, one would have expected that filmmaking would have evolved enough that the new version would be a bit more chilling. Rob Zombie’s version doesn’t build on the brilliant-in-its-simplicity (guy in spooky mask kills people mercilessly; never utters a word or shows his face) premise that made the original interesting to me. The first half of the movie tries to show Michael Myers’ childhood and the evolution of a psychopath, but instead I kept thinking of Kramer’s assessment of “The Omen”’s Damien: “just a mischievous, rambunctious kid.” The second half attempts to be a less-cliched version of the typical “slasher flick,” but fails to build suspense and only startles on one occasion.

So why am I ambivalent? The final seconds of the film succeed brilliantly where the rest failed more often than not: they defy expectation and leave the viewer wanting more (vague spoilers ahead). Scout Taylor-Compton’s portrayal of Laurie Strode moves from forgettable to chillingly iconic when Zombie tosses convention out the window. No comforting resolution to the horror, no winding down from the action, not even a surprising-but-clear-cut ending (a la “Halloween 4.”) Just a lot of blood and a lot of screaming… and then the credits, leaving one to postulate on what it all means. It is beyond confusing how the ending could be so right (I generally love open, uncertain endings; I think I’m in a minority), but the preceding hours so unremarkable.

crash and burn, all the stars explode tonight

July 10, 2007 at 4:18 pm | In Lists, Music | Leave a Comment
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I’ve been back in town for a while, but do I need a reason to do a list? My top hour of songs about/related to California:

14. Guns N’ Roses – Welcome To The Jungle (4:31)
13. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Under The Bridge (4:33)
12. Dead Kennedys – California Über Alles (4:29) I prefer the live version about Ronald Reagan to the original about Jerry Brown, but it’s all good. For what it’s worth, the Kennedys DID perform my all-time favorite song about Cambodia.
11. Rob Zombie – Go To California (3:23) At worst, this is more of the poetry-put-to-experimental-metal-with-dance-grooves that Zombie does so very well. But it also seems to be his most lyrically meaningful work and a deliberate critique of cultural hypocrisy and conformity.
10. Everclear – Santa Monica (3:11)
9. Neil Young – Revolution Blues (4:05)
8. Bob Seger – Hollywood Nights (5:04) Tom Petty’s “Into The Great Wide Open” feels like a depressing ripoff of this a-simple-man-goes-to-California-and-falls-in-love story. (This will be my first of three Petty mentions, only one of which pertains to a song he actually performed. I have no idea what that’s about.)
7. Counting Crows – A Long December (4:58)
6. Warren Zevon – Studebaker (2:26) It’s no “Werewolves” or “Lawyers,” but it really deserved to be one of Zevon’s bigger hits (if we can call them that).
5. The Nightwatchman – California’s Dark (3:59) It’s a bit recent to make it this high on a list, but One Man Revolution is in contention for my Album Of The Year. If Rage Against the Machine reunites, I will celebrate… but if not, I’ll be perfectly happy with a few more albums of Tom Morello’s incendiary folk-rock.
4. Nina Gordon – Straight Outta Compton (1:50) The NWA original might have made the list, but the song is taken to a new level with a sweet, angelic voice threatening that her AK-47 is a tool. I have to think that Gordon was laughing too hard to ever record a full version of the song.
3. Tom Petty – Free Fallin’ (4:18) It’s hard to really say why I love this song… which sort of makes it a microcosm of Petty’s career. It’s a love song. There’s nothing special or original about it (except a gratuitous mention of vampires), but it executes a simple concept unbelievably well.
2. Hole – Malibu (3:50) Before Courtney Love was a high-profile case study of why drugs are bad, she wrote a few great songs about rehab and the tragedy of troubled rock stars. Very, very close to the #1 spot, the song fell here only due to tenure issues. Side note: I’ve always believed this song would be great cover material for Tom Petty. California-themed melancholy seems to work well for him.
1. The Doors – LA Woman (7:51) Upbeat organs, slow psychedelic rambling, and Jim Morrison’s inimitable vocals for almost eight minutes? It may be The Doors at their very finest.

Note: After a very valid “why was ‘Hotel California’ excluded?” question and iTunes happenstance, I reconsidered my decision. While the song is overplayed and has lost much of its potency for that reason, it’s still at least as enjoyable as the lower quartile of this list (which features a few more played-to-death tunes). But upon further reflection, is the song really about California? Every song on this list is either set in or refers to the state. The Eagles refer to a hotel that may be a metaphor for the dangers of Californian decadence. This distinction may be miniscule, but I have a great passion for overanalyzing and splitting hairs.

“i feel more confused and betrayed than those people that worked with tootsie”

April 5, 2007 at 9:36 pm | In Quotes | Leave a Comment
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I have a headache and don’t feel like writing up the rant I had planned for today. Instead, I give you this week’s TV Quote Of The Week, from the returned 30 Rock:

Jack: Those jokes you wrote for my Mitt Romney fundraiser, they were top-notch.
Liz: Those weren’t jokes. That was an appeal for a return to common sense and decency.
Jack: Well, it got big laughs.

I %^#@ing love that show. If it lasts long enough, it is on pace to pass Arrested Development on the all-time list. And that’s pretty damn good. (Note to self: update official TV hierarchy one of these days.)

I’m having a day rather smattered with obscure Warren Zevon song ties. First, I mentioned perestroika on my International Mass Communication test, and then I channel-surfed into an old boxing match featuring, yes, Boom Boom Mancini (hey, better than ESPN resorting to billiards coverage). Alas, no headless Thompson gunners or angels dressed in black.

While Wikiing Zevon, I learned: Well, for one thing, I learned that I’m not many albums away from having the entire Zevon catalog in my iTunes library. But moreover: on May 1, 2007, Ammal Records… will release Preludes – Rare and Unreleased Recordings, a two-disc anthology of Zevon demos and alternate versions culled from 126 pre-1976 recordings found inside an old road case after Zevon’s death. The album contains five previously unreleased songs: “Empty Hearted Town,” “Going All the Way,” “Steady Rain,” “Stop Rainin` Lord” and “The Rosarita Beach Cafe,” along with Zevon’s original demo for “Studebaker,” the song performed by Jordan Zevon on the Enjoy Every Sandwich tribute record. Selections from an interview between Zevon and Austin-based radio personality Jody Denberg are blended with about 40 minutes of music on the collection’s second disc.
No word on my other requests from yesterday’s post, but I’ll be checking Homeland Security developments, campaign donations, crime blotters, and Dylan cover news eagerly after this weird, awesome turn of events. In retrospect, one wonders if I should have asked for more from the gods of LiveJournal there…

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