The new TV season (in 441 words)

New goodness:

Community is hilarious. It’s like 30 Rock, but smarter and less pretentious. Joel McHale takes his likeably-unlikable shtick and adapts it perfectly to what could be a mundane “situation.” Plus it has Chevy Chase playing the role of his lifetime: A crazy, unlikable asshole. That’s like making a movie about Eminem and getting Marshall Mathers to play the lead!

FlashForward isn’t great, but it could be. I’m going to keep watching—I love the concept and the cast—I didn’t love the pilot.

Glee is actually kind of funny. It’s just should be a 30-minute show and not an hour. And it’s really nice to have a show that teaches that gay teenagers are just like us, only dramatic, flamboyant and big fans of Beyoncé.

Modern Family is kinda funny too. And it’s really nice to have a show that teaches us that gay men are just like us, only dramatic, flamboyant and exaggerated in all of their interactions.

Returning goodness:

The quick and dirty on Castle: Take all the cliché TV detective shows, barely change anything, add Nathan Fillion and create awesome.

Dollhouse season two opened well. I think that Whedon and Co have finally figured out how to make the show work. It’s a tough concept to build a show around, but it’s better than I could have imagined. And I say that as a Whedon otaku.

Mad Men and The Office are, as always, great. If I haven’t sold you on these shows yet, there is no hope for you. And I’m not going to pull your head out of the oven next time. (You know who you are.)

Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men and How I Met Your Mother are a tongue-twister and a bunch of quality comedies. Big Bang is the best. It’s funny, has likable characters and makes me feel cool. HIMYM (as the cool net kids say) is still an all around good show. But Ted, the main character, still brings things down. He has always been outmatched but his costars, who fortunately get a lot more screen time now. 2.5 Men (as no one says) is the same as always. I can’t watch it all the time, but I laugh when I do.

I’ve sworn off Heroes more times than I dare count. But I’m still watching it. Fortunately, it’s much improved this season. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean much. It was really, really bad for a while. I’m three episodes into the season now, so I probably won’t give up on it this year either.

Please die:

Dear acronym cop shows and prime-time talk shows. Please die. Thank you.

The man in the sky.

A word of warning to you Gervais fans out there: The Invention of Lying is terrible. About the only pulse the movie has is the endless cavalcade of cameos which generate knowing smirks but little laughter. Severely disappointing.

Criterion Collection 036: Wages of Fear

Wages of Fear, Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953
Time magazine called Wages of Fear "one of the most evil" movies ever made. They sure don't make them like they used to. The premise is elegantly simple: four men with nothing to lose must transport two truckloads of nitroglycerine over a treacherous three hundred mile stretch of Latin American mountain road to extinguish a raging oil field fire. The movie opens with a shot of a child playing with a cockroach marionette: certainly a foreshadowing symbol of the Southern Oil Company's callous exploitation of the four vagabonds, but also (I would like to think, at least) of Clouzot's masterful puppeteering of his audience's nerves. Not for the faint of heart.

Highly Recommended

LOGANMIX2002: There Goes The Fear

2002 in a nutshell: Everybody will finger 2002 as the year the iPod crossed the PC rubicon and ushered in the beginning of the end for music labels, but I would just like to point out that Nickelback's atrocious #1 single "How You Remind Me" was far more symptomatic of the malignancy the industry refused to acknowledge.


10. Boards of Canada - Geogaddi

9. The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots

8. DJ Shadow - The Private Press

In 2002, six years after the release of his landmark album Endtroducing…, DJ Shadow seemingly had been all but lapped by his prolific instrumental hip-hop peers. Stifled by unreasonable expectations, The Private Press got widely dismissed with a "Good, but not quite Endtroducing…" Honorable Mention ribbon by critics. Only Philip Sherburne (who else?) rightfully appreciated The Private Press as "a record full of unheimlich collisions that serve as temporary, sonic dwellings — the most personal form of shelter you can find." "Six Days" perhaps best exemplifies the rich connotations that emerge from such uncanny juxtapositions. In the song, DJ Shadow layers the haunting vocal track from the almost a capella "Six Day War" over what I can only describe as Kokomo muzak. The tension from such incongruent collocation magnifies the lyric's diffuse feeling of foreboding and provides an eerie parallel in light of the nation's weary acquiescence to the looming war in Iraq.


7. Enon - High Society

6. Coldplay - A Rush Of Blood To The Head

Haters going to hate, so why bother to defend this album: you probably already have an opinion even if you have never listened beyond the 4 massive singles. Instead, I will just further stir the hornet's nest: prior to the release of A Rush Of Blood To The Head, Chris Martin declared to NME, "We’ll only do another album if we think it’ll be better. I don’t really care about the whole 15 album thing. I like the whole Joy Division approach, two albums then…well, not hang yourself!”

5. Doves - The Last Broadcast

Pros and cons on emigrating to the U.K.:

(Pro) "There Goes The Fear" - quite possibly the greatest song of the decade - actually charted at #3 in Britian.
(Con) Robbie Williams


4. Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

3. Spoon - Kill the Moonlight

2. Interpol - Turn On The Bright Lights

1. The Notwist - Neon Golden

Import Price. Two words I am glad I will never have to hear again. In the age of internet distribution it might be easy to mythologize the days when you had to financially devote yourself to music exploration. Future generations, let me dispel the myth: it kind of sucked. The process in 2002 worked something like this: based on internet hearsay, I would blindly spend ludicrous import tariffs (think double the domestic sticker price) on eBay to acquire music that wouldn't be available stateside for another year. It was essentially Russian Roulette. Sometimes I would get burned (Shalabi Effect's The Trial of St. Orange comes to mind). Other times I would be rewarded with glorious little treasures like The Notwist's Neon Golden. It is hard to parse one's personal evolution of musical taste, but I don't think it would be unreasonable for me to say that The Notwist's blend of organic electronics (ever noticed cross-over electronic with real instruments is always qualified as "organic") helped acclimatize me to IDM and other forms of melodic laptronica.

Fail with consequence, lose with eloquence and smile:

LOGANMIX2002: There Goes The Fear

1. Small Stakes - Spoon [Kill The Moonlight]
2. Fight Test - The Flaming Lips [Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots]
3. Native Numb - Enon [High Society]
4. Attack of the Ghost Riders - The Raveonettes [Whip It On]
5. I'm The Man Who Loves You - Wilco [Yankee Hotel Foxtrot]
6. House Of Jealous Lovers (12'' Original Version) - The Rapture [House of Jealous Lovers 12'' Single]
7. Talk To Me, Dance With Me - Hot Hot Heat [Make Up The Breakdown]
8. Say Hello To The Angels - Interpol [Turn On The Bright Lights]
9. Six Days - DJ Shadow [The Private Press]
10. Shower Scene - Saint Etienne [Finisterre]
11. Evil (Ewan Pearson Radio Edit) - Ladytron [Evil Single]
12. Forever Not Yours - a-ha [Forever Not Yours Single]
13. Paper Tiger - Beck [Sea Change]
14. There Goes The Fear - Doves [The Last Broadcast]
15. Relative Ways - … And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead [Source Tags & Codes]
16. Amsterdam - Coldplay [A Rush Of Blood To The Head]
17. It's In Our Hands - Björk - [It's In Our Hands Single]
18. Consequence - The Notwist [Neon Golden]

A Brief Tour of Obscure Literary Terms: Lesson 1

Hypozeugma (hi-po-zoog'-ma)

A predicate that falls at the end of a sentence, governing the parallel clauses that precede it.

"Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears." - William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

Frightened Rabbit @ Urban Lounge (9-14-09)

Do yourself a favor. If Frightened Rabbit are coming to your town, see them. (I imagine you can check their myspace page.) EDIT- For you Portlanders it's Dante's on Thursday night (September 17), 8 o'clock.

Though the official start time for the SLC show was 9:00, but being Urban Lounge savvy Eric and I rolled in at around 10:30 in the middle of the first song from the first opening act, We Were Promised Jetpacks, who hail from Scotland, as do all three of the bands we saw. WWPJ (if you will) were quite good, I was excited to see them and they didn't disappoint. Their urgent and emotional brand of indie rock was well suited to the venue and really warmed up the crowd, and it didn't hurt at all that they were very loud. After their set they grabbed some beers (although they didn't look much over 21) and joined the rest of us to watch The Twilight Sad.

I have always hated The Twilight Sad. After seeing them live I still hate the Twilight Sad, probably even more. Eric and I discovered the patio in the back of Urban Lounge and a drunk and friendly flight attendant posted up next to us as we waited them out. After The Twilight Sad left the stage to sparse clapping and one or two "woos" Eric and I made our way back into the club and found a pretty good spot to enjoy the main event only a couple rows away from the stage.

I had no idea what Frightened Rabbit's band members looked like and they weren't really what I was expecting, but it seemed right after they finished the first song when Scott Hutchison, the lead singer, said, "Anyone who wants to buy me a whiskey. . . well, that's an option." Several audience members quickly fulfilled his request and soon we were all drinking whiskey together enjoying the show. Highlights were the Grant Hutchison's almost spastic energy on the drums, Scott's charismatic banter between songs and breezy intensity during them. The unique intimacy and energy of the show was represented well by the encore, Scott returned to the stage plus an acoustic guitar and minus all three band-mates. He plugged in and stepped toward the front of the stage where he sang "Poke" with no microphone, the audience chiming in for the "oooh oooh ooohs." As he finished "Poke" the rest of the band joined him onstage and they kicked our asses with "Keep Yourself Warm" my favorite track from their 2008 Album Midnight Organ Fight which took the top spot on my list of favorite albums of the year.

The album is still highly recommended and please check 'em out if you have a chance, it'll probably be cheap - 10 bucks or 12 at the door in SLC.

Biohazard

Resident Evil 5
There is a certain train wreck quality in watching Capcom destroy one of its vaunted franchises. Resident Evil 5 is an inharmonious marriage of Resident Evil's methodical and deliberate horror mechanics and Gears of War's run and gun stupidity -- meaning that you can run and gun, just not at the same time. I don't understand how Capcom could have suffered such a crisis of confidence; Resident Evil 4 was perhaps the best game released on the GameCube. But just about every new detrimental addition feels like it was pilfered from the Gears series, right down to Chris Redfield's ludicrous roided biceps. The icing on the cake: Resident Evil 5 crops split screen play, making co-op all but unplayable. At least we still have the movie franchise...

Grade: C

Socks with sandals, or sandals with socks

I'll tell you a secret: You can wear socks with sandals if you want to.

Thing is, no one seems to know where the "rule" came from. And sure, it's "ugly" and looks "stupid." But that really shouldn't matter. There are plenty of stupid, ugly fashions out there that some people find perfectly acceptable.

The other thing, you will never hear a man complain about sandals with socks unless he is actively ripping on another man and can't come up with an adequate insult of his mental acuity or sexual orientation.

Fortunately, I'm not alone in my incredulity about this "fashion" "rule."

A symphony in B flat.

For everyone who enjoyed Bloom, and for those of you who don't have iPhones but appreciate generative ambient music: check out the amazing in B flat.

A perfect soundtrack to a Saturday morning. Especially after listening to the NPR segment, Have You Heard About B Flat?

What hath God wrough

A few years ago I made a post excoriating Utah for choosing the Golden Spike as its representation in the 50 State Quarters Series.

Since then a few facts have come to my attention that have caused me to soften my position. I blame my Earl Grossen U.S. History Education. And the fact that Golden Spike is quite possibly the most boring Historic Site in the nation.

America in the mid-nineteenth century was less a unified country then an archipelago of loosely connected territories. The new state of California was so geographically distant it might as well have been on another continent.

A couple reference points: pioneers who embarked westward in the great migration of 1843 had to travel for 5 months along the Oregon trail just to reach the Pacific Ocean. Even the Pony Express, the fastest mail service at the time, could only relay a message between the two coasts in 10 days.

On May 10, 1869, the final spike was driven into the ground uniting the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads at Promontory Summit, Utah. In just 25 years since the first wave of westward migration, the travel time had dramatically decreased to just 6 days (and for only $65). Simply an astonishing feat.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the first transcontinental railroad would come to serve as a technological and metaphorical force binding together a disparate and divided country.

A monumental moment in U.S. History? Yes.

A perfect distillation of the traditions and symbols of the state of Utah? I still don't think so.