Music soothes...

Recently I've been listening to two albums almost exclusively.

One is the debut from Vampire Weekend, a band of Columbia grads.

They've apparently been described as "the whitest band" by Stuff White People Like author Christian Lander as well as "trust-fund frat rock" by other musicians.

This is probably true. It is difficult to imagine over-estimating the snobby eliteness of a band with songs named for obscure punctuation terminology (the excellent "Oxford Comma"), bizarre architectural details (the also excellent "Mansard Roof") or that uses African pop-music influences to construct a song about WASPY summertime activities (the very excellent "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa").

They've also got a song called "M79" about taking the crosstown bus to meet up with your lady. I've been lucky to always date within my side of the city but being a man-of-the-people, I've taken various crosstown buses -- including the M79 -- many, many times. (fn1)

The songs "A-Punk" and "Campus" are also very good.

The other album I've been listening to, though perhaps somewhat less than Vampire Weekend, is "Under the Blacklight" by Rilo Kiley.

Rilo Kiley is an LA band whose lead singer, Jenny Lewis, was the female lead in the childhood advertising classic The Wizard.

My favorite songs on the Rilo Kiley album are "The Moneymaker" (fn2), the jaunty "Smoke Detector"(fn3), and "15". (fn4)

The songs "Close Call" and "Breakin' Up" are also pretty decent, though you kind of have to be in the mood for them. (fn5)

Both of these albums are many months old, of course, since I am now middle-aged and thus hopelessly behind the times. Such is life.

(fn1) Note that bus-taking is not Stuff White People Like, as evidenced by a friend of mine who is the George Wallace of anti-bus-bigotry and who gets upset when I reference stuff we've talked about without referencing his name. So: WFA. There.

(fn2) The video for which features real, live pornstars! Just to keep the blog's prostitution vibe going...

(fn3) A song that sounds like a slightly dirtied-up early 60's dance tune.

(fn4) The subject matter of which is fairly wrong. And by "fairly", I mean "very". Especially considering that it was penned by a female former child-star.

(fn5) But then again, I suppose that's kind of true for all music, to some degree. Does the song exist that you appreciate hearing regardless of current mental state? I would posit that it does not. There are many songs which have tremendous power to alter mental state, but I would think that even those require certain baseline mental states to be effective. That is, you're not going to go to pieces for "Danny Boy" if you're in the middle of a murderous rage. (fn6)

(fn6) Or ever, if you're me, as I use that song mostly to humorously jibe my friend Danny. (fn7)

(fn7) Wow, I've really kind of gone nuts with the footnotes this time out, huh? Perhaps I'll join a group.

Come with me if you want to live...

"Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" has been a pleasant surprise. Here was a show that I felt sure would suck based on the very vague initial promotional spots. I would probably have never even tried it except that Fox cleverly held back the strike-shortened first season to air in the doldrums of the strike when there was literally no new scripted television on air at all.

With nothing to watch, I gave it a shot and found it was actually pretty good. I mean, here's a show that seems to be an obvious cash-in on a franchise that was looking pretty tired after the last movie. In addition, it features cast members from such notable dramatic successes as "Beverly Hills 90210" (fn1), "Judging Amy"(fn2) and "John from Cincinnati".(fn3)

To say I had low expectations would be overstating things quite a bit: I had less than no expectations. But the show does some pretty interesting things with what is, when used right, a pretty snappy premise.

At any rate, it was my pleasant surprise of the season. I actually had pretty high expectations coming into this season and thus far it has met them.

The only serious issue I'm facing is that I now have 3 overlapping shows that I enjoy on Mondays. This one, "Chuck" and "How I Met Your Mother".

I haven't yet watched the premiere of "Chuck" but I enjoyed last season so I'm hoping it's still good. "How I Met Your Mother" is one of the funniest shows ever and if you're not watching it you are cheating yourself.

The premise is a guy in the future telling his kids about his time in NYC back in the now. Theoretically it's the long story of how he met his wife, the future-kids' mother, but mostly it's just about being in your mid-20's to early 30's in NYC.

And it is awesome. I say this as someone spending his mid-20's to early 30's in NYC. It's basically me with better writers.

fn1) Brian Austin Green. Did you know the 'Austin' was made up because there was already a Brian Green in the SAG? Now you do! (fn4)

fn2) The guy who played her assistant whose name I am not going to look up. I'm also going to skate over the fact that Judging Amy was a guilty pleasure of mine for a long time.

fn3) The guy who played the doctor. Now, to be fair, he was also Jack McCall, the man who shot Wild Bill in the excellent "Deadwood", but still.

fn4) I recently read my first David Foster Wallace piece. It was an essay about a cruise he took. I enjoyed it and have been rocking the footnotes more and more since reading it.

Public Notice: Heroes is possibly the worst show on television

The show Heroes was interesting during its first season but ended kind of weakly.

The second season was almost unwatchably bad. The only reason it gets the "almost" qualifier in there was because of the interesting first season.

The third season was actually promoted prior to its start with the phrase "if you gave up on last season, you need to try it again..." which was somewhat heartening because it at least showed some recognition on the part of the producers of the show about how bad it had gotten.

But still, I was very trepidatious going into this season. No great eagerness to jump in. I finally got around to watching the special 2-hour premiere last night. The show is unwatchable. It's lost the "almost". I will be adjusting my dvr accordingly.

It's in Belgium.

So a ways back, when the sun yet shone, before the dark times, before... The Bailout, I took a trip to Florida.

We took some Netflix with us. One of those movies was a little oddball comedy that had intrigued me since I had first seen its trailer but, like most movies, I never got around to seeing in the theater or in the first few months of its DVD release.

This was In Bruges.

I am happy to report that I enjoyed it. I should start by saying that I was surprised to even be intrigued by it way back at first viewing of the trailer as Colin Farrell has a long history of making awful, awful movies. Just awful. I'm not actually sure why he's a movie star because in addition to being awful, I'm under the impression that many of his movies don't make money.

You'd think that making bad, expensive, money-losing films would be a career-ender but the ways of Hollywood are mysterious indeed. Maybe I should get a job in that industry next, work my death-touch magic on those big bags of useless.

Anyways. In Bruges.

Very odd movie. Reminded me of a play in that it had very tight dialogue and a fairly intricately woven plot that didn't actually go very far but kept circling over on itself and putting in clever little references to earlier seemingly throw-away lines so that the whole thing ended up being very enjoyable indeed.

I should point out, before everyone goes rushing out to rent it on my good say-so, that it was a very dark and fairly violent comedy. I'm not sure that most people would like it. My girl, for example, was not as taken with it as I was, though she enjoyed it as well.

She particularly liked a certain line of Ralph Fiennes that was very reminscent of a joke I use far too often. If you know me you will likely recognize the joke when you see it in the movie. (Though his character is not using the line in a joking manner, it is clearly a joke in the overall movie.)

I give it three stars. Good flick.

Speaking of violence...

I finally got around to seeing the movie Funny Games.

It was... Hmm. It was... different.

Note: there are spoilers here. Though I'm not sure this is the kind of movie that can be spoiled, per se.

For anyone who may not know, the story is basically of an amazingly wholesome and rich looking family of three (Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, some kid) who head out to their vacation house. Once there, they are visited by two amazingly-wholesome-looking young men who proceed to force them into playing a series of sadistic and torturous games that culminate with the death of the entire family.

The critical reception was interestingly mixed. The critics seemed to fall into two camps: one which felt the movie was a triumph as it is technically wonderful and they felt the writer/director Michael Haneke (Austrian fellow, in fact the American version is a shot-for-shot remake of the Austrian original) was making a statement about the rise of voyeuristic thrill-seeking in recent uber-violent cinema (Saw, Hostel, Touristas, we're looking in your direction); the other camp felt that the movie was an uber-violent, voyeuristic thrill-ride and as such was no more redeeming than the Saws, Hostels, Toursistas et al, any cinematographic excellence aside.

First off, the movie is beautifully shot. Just amazing. The things the director does with camera angles alone were quietly phenomenal. Also the acting was, I felt, v. solid. Well done all around.

The violence -- which is significant and wholly unreedeming in the sense that there is no comeuppance and absolutely no reason or explanation for it of any kind -- is largely kept off screen in the strictest sense. That is, the worst things happen out of sight of the audience, sometimes only just, but out of sight nonetheless. Not having seen any of the Saws, Hostels, etc. I don't know if they handle their extreme violence the same way, but my sense is that they do not. That is, in those movies, you watch the actual violent acts; here you mostly watch the results of the torture.

I think that makes a difference. I don't know if the director was trying to make a statement about the audience's complicity in the rise of uber-violent cinema. V. probably he was: the main antagonist repeatedly breaks the fourth wall to confer with the audience about what they'd like to see happen next. But ultimately, I'm not sure that it matters if this was his intention or not. If it works on that level, it works on that level. If it has redeeming qualities, if it is, in a word, Art, then it is Art regardless of the intent of the director, yes? Perhaps not, I've never given a tremendous amount of thought to the philosophy of art.

Anyways, I thought it worked. On whatever level. It was engrossing and not in a visceral, I-like to-watch-people-get-tortured-way. More in an intellectual, these-characters-are-tremendously-disturbing, unlike-your-average-character, and-this-difference-makes-them-interesting kind of way. Their interactions were interesting.

So, in a nutshell, I thought the movie fell much more into the "triumph" bucket than the "travesty" bucket. But I can see how others might be too disturbed or uncomfortable with the ambiguity of the message to feel the same.

On a related note, I feel there's been a rise in the nihilistic antagonist in recent years. These two were of a piece with Heath Ledger's incarnation of the Joker: they are violent, they twist and destroy societal norms and there is no reason why, they just do. It makes one wonder what the Dark Knight folks could have done if they had the freedom to stray further from the comic-book template they were working with. Clearly, the Joker was not going to win. Funny Games, by contrast, was under no such constraint.