Sad Black-and-White Eyes: Episode One

The saddest man in the world could not be consoled by the hands resting on his shoulder, though they were the young hands of a woman who smelled vaguely of cinnamon. Behind him he could hear voices shouting, things being thrown, the volume of the sound somewhat dampened by the office door. He waited for the door to open, for the calm after the storm to ensue. But it raged on and on, the voices only holding for a second while a lamp was knocked over to mark a climax in the movement.

And John could not look into the face of the woman who smelled like cinnamon, could not say to her face what he wanted, because in someways he was happy for the fight. He was frightened, but he liked the feeling. The uncertainty seemed to lock time in tension-filled moments. The release would only heighten the experience, because it would remind him of feelings he had long become used to.

And in the spare seconds before the battle was won, he returned to doing something that he had not done for years: he said a prayer to the Old Man he envisioned in his head, the spiritual papa that rested in some alternative dimension, some strange incarnation of Christianity that had formed through watching episodes of Star Trek while doing Bible study.

Nina Simone doing Leonard Cohen

This is the most unexpected find: Nina Simone doing an amazingly uplifting, completely overhauled version of Cohen's "Suzanne." It sounds like an unplugged Clash were backing her up, this really reggae, high tempo beat that makes the folk classic sound like a gospel traditional.

New Portishead Album Makes Rob Almost Shit Pants; Meanwhile, Parents Scramble for Pottytraining Alibi

So I finally got around to picking up the new Portishead album this week. I was actually going into Sound Scape to get the new Bonny Prince Billy; well, no. I was actually going in because I was in the Blue Tusk (Syracuse's Armory Square) and they started playing Vampire Weekend, a band that's like fun as shit to drink to. Well, I get these urges when I haven't bought an album in a while, it's like an urge for a cigarette. Yeah, I don't really need it, but hey, my life sucks so what the hell does it matter. Okay, a bit of an exaggeration, but I mean, unless you're in love with every chromosome in your body or every penny in your pocket, than what's the big deal to take a drag or fish out a few dimes for a new record to spin. (not literally a record, because I left my Technic in New Jersey.)

Anyway, let's take it from the top: the new Portishead album "Third" deserves to be heard in its entirety with the same devotion that people give certain tv shows. They sit, maybe turn the lights out, pay deep attention, and curse distraction. Better, with music you can get in bed, pull the covers over your head, and get freaked out by the possessed deathly nuclear-aftermath that defines Portishead's new album. This stuff sounds like the back-up band for Cormac McCarthy's the Road. Shit, what happened to these people to make them freak out enough to pursue such devestation. Everything on the album is about death, the confusion, the disorentation brought on by lack of air. Things crumble, seeming to want to revert to normal song structures, but things just eventually end, as though the band had lost hope in making something more stable.

Please forgive me if I sound excited, but I actually had a strange experience the other night in bed. The song Horses was playing, which contains this three string guitar, what sounds like a ukulele in fact. Anyway, there was a point where I realized what the lyrics were saying and how she was saying it, like with this bleak strength that had grown out of such murk and ashes to grow into this benign hope - fantastical, absurd - yet it lives on, and the song follows it into this strange lift that runs its course and then doesn't have anywhere else to go, and expires as naturally as milk gone bad.

What happened at this moment was I got that tingle in my spine, goosebumps, but it didn't just end, it grew into something that swept through my whole body, up my to my brain, like those little balls in the movie Twister that get swept up into the tornado. I could visualize it in my body. And it was the music, and it was my submission to that power with no self-conscious attitude or restraint. I want only something new to be born inside me, I guess an openness to new experience, to people, places, no divisions. To accept things, and quietly accept the thing that I can't accept.

Late blogging has left me sleepy.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

How much life is wasted in wait?

I don't know if the makers of the new Indiana Jones movie intended this remark to be a sly sucker punch to fans who've waited fifteen years for a new Indy film, but it really is an appropriate question. Considering the hype and anticipation behind something like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the countless hours of web browsing, trying to find some new information on whether it's just a rumor, and those people who watch and rewatch the trailers to catch details of the film - well, how much life is wasted in those moments?

Depending on how you feel after seeing the new Indiana Jones, the answer could go either way. My reaction is inline with most of the critics I read prior to seeing it: certainly the film has moments missing from the vast majority of action/adventure films the studio's are unleashing on bored thirteen-year-olds this summers (I mean, compared to Speed Racer, Indian Jones is like historical fiction), but at the same time, it seems like Spielberg and Lucas are revisiting territory that they have either outgrown, or that they have completely lost touch with what makes modern movie audiences tick.

Spielberg's been trying to reinvent himself since getting pegged as a fantasy director with films like Raiders and E.T., and of late he's been trying more and more to reflect his dead friend and idol: Stanley Kubrick (there's a moment in this Indy film that has the same eerie atonal choir that scarred me shit-less in 2001.) Spielberg isn't the little kid he was in the seventies and eighties; he probably doesn't play with many toys anymore. And look no further to the deity himself, Lucas, to see someone who so easily perverted what originally was brainless fun. The Star Wars pre-sequels were an embarrassment because they forgot rule number one: if the details and characters are interesting, the overall story doesn't really matter. I could give a rats ass how Anakin became Darth, if you're going to bore me with long codas of dialogue involving things that don't exist.

This franchise doesn't have the luxury of going backwards like the Star Wars series. But that's a good thing, because it leaves more room for play. Harrison Ford, still alive, returns and takes on the persona of Sean Connery, with an aged elegance; but what's lost is the James Bond charisma of the first three swashbucklers. Sure, he can do stunts, but never has Indy seemed more alone and grumpy than in these films. Even with a sidekick and an old flame (Karen Allen doesn't get much screen time to make a case for her return) even Harrison Ford's iconic fedora figure seems to sit backseat to an outlandish plot that attempts to make the move a series of the fifties milieu in-jokes, with enough nostalgic references to confuse a whole bus load of college-prep teens laying down their Alexander Hamiltons.

(Then again, how strange would it have been to have more sexual interplay between an old Harrison Ford and a sly sexual comrade like Cate Blanchett. But at least it would have been strange: Indy's just way too nice in this film, like a nurtured Humphrey Bogart that no longer gets it up when Hepburn enters the room.)

Spielberg never sparks the Rin Tin Tin assembly of kindling he's working with into anything other than a CGI heavy Indiana Jones picture. The best, most clever moments come early on, as the film brings the series into the nuclear age. What's interesting about the opening scene, set in a military test sight for an atomic explosion, is how it makes the Indiana Jones character irrelevant. All he can do is attempt to survive in the unsettling facade of Pleasantville, circa an I Like Ike reference, as it's destroyed. (NY Times made me laugh when I saw the film and remembered her review: Nuclear family indeed.) Indiana Jones movies always provide the message that the world we know is hardly the world that exists beyond the books, and it could be taken as a subversive flip-off to the fan boy crowd that the script is sprinkled with allusions to dangers far more relevant today than the Nazis were to a nineteen-eighties audiences.

Once these moments passed, I was worried. I realized that the film hadn't even begun, and yet at the same time, the best part of it had probably ended. Spielberg gives the audience it's dessert before the veggies, and it tastes gross. I don't even want to get into some of the terrible sequences, that of course would never exist without CGI technology, and that's one reason to wish for days of yore. But, I digress because this is getting too long. No, the new Indiana Jones film is nothing compared to the painful experience of dashed expectations that met views of Phantom Menace. Indiana Jones has enough spirit to make it worth seeing, but it's not streamlined enough to completely work. The real hero, I suppose, ain't Indiana Jones, but the wizards at Lucas Arts who have made an Indy film like no other.

Just don't expect me to thank them for it.

I'm Already in Hollywood Baby

No, I'm still in Syracuse. That was in an e-mail from the class president, at the end. The final message. Say hi to Satan, honey.

If going to Syracuse has taught me anything, it's that this generation, for a large part, is made of success obsessed, culture-void maniacs who are chasing their dreams through the same channels of conglomerate ruled media rather than using new technology to bypass the corporate control. I mean, if you really got something to say, you probably shouldn't need a 40,000 dollar degree to prove it, especially in this day and age. Use that money to buy some good equipment, start your own production company. Drinks lots of coffee, spend hours at the brainstorming stage, put off getting to the machines. The minds a dangerous thing when it gets motivated. Sometimes I feel it's power flowing, and it's a good feeling. But I too had to get a degree. If I hadn't been so frightened, if I had been motivated by my own powers of creativity and said screw school, perhaps I would have saved a little dough.

Yeah. I was suckered too. Can I get my money back now?


But it's okay. People make mistakes. Just look at all the time and money they put into making that awful Speed Racer, when they could have fed the famines.

Street Trash

I'm always thrilled to learn about really trashy movies from the eighties. To me, dirty filthy disgusting movies really hit their time in the eighties. They don't quite have that slickness of the ninties, when the Tarantinos started making junk art films and today, there are very few trashy movies that get distribution in the theaters ("Postal" being a rare exception I suppose, but barely, considering Regal's not even showing it.)

So the movie is Street Trash and here's the poster:


Now, with the magic of You Tube, I was able to see the best scenes, and the final hilarious bit with the mobsters. It was like a history lesson, it somehow clearly is associated with a different time. The New York Times is really hard on it (I'm curious as to what they would say about it today, though it would still be panned) - I think the critics for NY Times have a pretty good sense of humor. I really enjoyed their review on Bad Santa, and went to see it when it came out because of it. They convinced me that it was a decent flick, even though comedies with midgets usually give me a fucking headache.

I probably won't rent Street Trash, just because seeing it as a film might be a little too much to be fun. But hey, the quote on the cover does namedrop Eraserhead. Still, the clip show off of You Tube is a blast and will hold me over if I get really curious; I also did this with Howard the Duck the other day, another terrible film to watch, but one with enough good, or at least memorable moments, like seeing your favorite eighties stars or watching the music video with that terrible song and a long opening sequence to tie in with the film. George Lucas gave us Willow and Howard the Duck, two series that probably never will get a sequel (though Willow was always a favorite around my house when I was kid. I never really associated Val Kilmer with it till I was much older and hadn't seen it in a few years. He's actually pretty charismatic considering he was such a douche in Top Gun.

But here's a final theory: that really bad movies get better when they get smaller. Really mediocre films like The Principal and Dick Tracy get better in tinier formats, and even commercials help. I love a tape from 1989 with the commercials still on it. It's a total trip back in time, to see what the masses were eating up. It's even more reflective of that time because the television was really the only constant stream of info: look at how punk bands utilized Access Television (check out a you tube clip of Flipper, or the Melvins from freakin' 1984 when they still had the bassist from Mudhoney.)

An image contest

I want you to imagine there is a line of cars called the Goblin. Make that imagine an image.

Shameless Self-Promotion

Somewhere in my busy lists of identities (right between sleeper and television watcher) you might want to add songwriter. That's right kids, your old pal Rob plays a mean G-chord, like no other. Anyway, my thoughts on the guitar are simple : destructive noise maker that can potentially cut people's minds in half. I mean that metaphorically; most people find my blend of song irritating, distracting, a mindless form of repetition that does little to bring world peace for the human race. I digress, defeated.

Not that I haven't met people that were entertained. But mothers are never a great source of feedback, so you'll have to decide for yourself. Today I added a song to my music myspace, entitled Too Much Reverb. It's a folky sad thing I guess, with a bit too much reverb, but I like the fact that I have a little collection of songs on my iTunes by Robert Ferguson, the songwriter that only my mom really appreciates.