Entries tagged with “Audio”

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Philip Dickey had a burning question about the pizza place that his band, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, would be playing in January.

It was not about the size of the room, or the setup, or the acoustics.

"Is it really good pizza?" he asked.

I recommended the calzones, but the odd thing was that Dickey seemed genuinely interested in my answer. The question was offered with eager enthusiasm, and the songwriter/drummer/singer/guitarist sounded like he was trying to establish a rapport. As we ended our interview, he not only invited me to the show but suggested that we keep in touch.

The guy wanted me to like him. More than that, I think, he wanted to be my friend.

And how could I not like Dickey? In conversation, there isn't much that can't be described as "confusing," and his band makes charming, lovely, and lively pop music without sacrificing its soul, hitting earnest and honest notes somewhere between the Shins and Weezer, well-suited to the soundtrack of a Wes Anderson movie. Conviction gives the music life, and keeps it from feeling the least bit derivative.

When Spoon was finishing its 2001 album Girls Can Tell, the band didn't know what to do with "Chicago at Night," which would close the record.

In an interview last week, drummer and co-founder Jim Eno told this story about what he and guitarist, singer, and chief songwriter Britt Daniel decided to do: "I never would have tried this, but Britt and I were so young, and we were just like, 'Oh yeah, let's do it.' We had to turn all the mixes in for mastering. ... We have these two versions, and we like different things about each version ... . So Britt says, 'Why don't we use the left side of this mix and the right side of this mix?'"

So Eno broke out Pro Tools, put the left channel of one mix with the right channel of the other, and time-compressed one so they were the same length.

It was a moronic idea — a simple-minded, jokey cop-out.

And you can hear the strangely spectacular results on the record.

A foolish person doesn't recognize that one can learn much from opponents. So liberals have begun to understand that they need God on their side as much as the Christian Right does.

The lesson from conservatives, said Rabbi Michael Lerner, is that it's okay to base policy on faith and spiritual values, and it's important to stand up for what you believe in. "When they come to a decision about what they believe in, they fight for it," he said of the Christian Right in a recent interview. "And they're willing to lose an election for the sake of what they believe in."

This is what customer service is all about.

Seven hours after voting closed, we've published the Drunken Commentary Track for Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia — and the movie's three hours long.

In reality, the gestation period of this commentary track was seven years. The movie has been digested slowly, primarily with "Magnolia and Meaning" and then through an eight-hour class I led.

Further exploration took place with the essays "Why Are There Frogs Falling from the Sky?" and "The Blossom: Jim Kurring."

Magnolia continues to surprise me, and my feelings and thoughts on it are still evolving. It's not done with me yet.

Near the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, spiritual-documentary filmmaker Martin Doblmeier conducted a survey on his Web site. He asked whether people supported constructing a "garden of forgiveness" at Ground Zero in New York City.

Thousands of votes later, the results were overwhelming: Roughly 95 percent of respondents said "no."

Although he wrote and directed The Power of Forgiveness, Doblmeier offered this anecdote in a recent phone interview without judgment. His point was that forgiveness is something that spiritual people tend to embrace as an abstract concept, but putting it into practice is shockingly difficult. For many, he said, forgiveness is the equivalent of a spare tire, something you "keep ... in the back of the trunk and hope to God you never need it."

On "Puttin' People on the Moon," the Driver-By Truckers' Patterson Hood sings a litany of tragedies personal and regional: "Mary Alice got cancer just like everybody here / Seems everyone I know is gettin' cancer every year / And we can't afford no insurance, I been 10 years unemployed / So she didn't get no chemo so our lives was destroyed / And nothin' ever changes, the cemetery gets more full / And now over there in Huntsville, even NASA's shut down too."

The song is typical Drive-By Truckers: bleak, detailed, populist, Southern, and with enough twangy muscle that you can play it loud and ignore the skill of its songwriting and the loving attention it pays to the downtrodden, heard in the indignant desperation of Hood's damaged falsetto on the chorus.

And therein lies the tension of Drive-By Truckers: This is a band that writes great songs and then drowns them out with three blaring guitars.

There is nobody like Andrew Bird in the world, a songwriter and a performer who makes his whistling, his glockenspiel, and his violin at home with guitars, drums, and vocals in detailed, pitch-perfect pop songs that never seem precious or forced, as eccentric as they are.

But when you're as idiosyncratic as Bird is, that means there aren't many people whose vision matches your own.

With Rob Zombie's remake in theaters this weekend, I thought it would be a good opportunity to explore why Michael Myers (or "The Shape") worked so well in John Carpenter's 1978 movie Halloween.

In this commentary track, part of Culture Snob's Five Minutes series, I use the movie's ending to discuss the transformation of Michael Myers from troubled child into bogeyman — from human to supernatural.

The deaths last week of movie writers and directors Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni have incited all sorts of commentary about the "art" films of yesteryear and the people who made them.

Tied up in these discussions is one key assumption: that everyday people think these movies are boring, whether they've actually seen them or not. "Boring" is a reaction separate from claiming something is "good" or "bad," of course, but it's almost more important. If something bores a viewer, it becomes irredeemably irrelevant. So people arguing for the importance of Bergman and Antonioni must first make their movies sexy.

I'll keep this brief: If you've seen it, chances are excellent that you either love or loathe Moulin Rouge. But have you ever spent the time to really figure out why?

In this Drunken Commentary Track, Culture Snob and River Cities' Reader film critic Mike Schulz argue about Baz Luhrmann's paean to love.

The contradictions of director/co-writer/composer Tom Tykwer's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer start in the title, with the onomatopoeic softness and ether of a single word paired with a morbid, blunt descriptive subtitle.

Both components are drawn from the novel by Patrick Süskind, but the associations that pile up and pull at each other during the movie's opening scenes are equally Tykwer's, cinematic and lovingly ambiguous. The main character is introduced by his nose emerging from the darkness, deeply but measuredly drawing in all that the air carries. There's something refined in the control of the gesture, yet it recalls vermin assessing its surroundings. Normal humans treat smell as a secondary sense.

Some things are too embarrassing for public consumption, so the man born Garrett Dutton and known as G. Love exercised some control over the content of his new documentary and concert DVD, A Year & a Night with G. Love & Special Sauce.

When the director showed him his initial cut of the documentary portion of the DVD, coming it at roughly two hours, G. Love demanded that some material come out.

The running time was one concern, but image was another, G. Love admitted in a recent interview. "You've got to take this shit out," he told the director. "I don't want to come off like this."

But don't expect a scrubbed and polished portrayal of the shambling, Philadelphia-based bluesy hip-hop artist on the DVD, or in a conversation with him. If you want to be considered authentic, it's important to let people see your flaws. As G. Love said of the DVD, "You can't just paint your shit so it smells like roses. You've got to leave a little poop in there."

In an interview, pedal-steel guitarist Robert Randolph once suggested that somebody would come along and be the instrument's Jeff Beck or Jimi Hendrix.

When I asked him recently where that put him in the pedal steel's development, the singer/songwriter/guitarist appeared to backtrack a little. "Somebody has to put me there," he said of the class of guitar revolutionaries that includes Hendrix. "I wouldn't put myself there."

But based on his own criteria, that class is probably where Randolph belongs.

Have you calmed down yet?

Are you over the orgasmic delight you felt at the way David Chase defied all predictions about the end of his beloved series, The Sopranos? Have you recovered from your rage about ambiguity, a lack of closure, and Journey?

Good.

Now let's clear a few things up. Tony Soprano did not die. That last scene was not at all a cinematic expression of Tony's anxiety, and therefore David Chase did jab his middle fingers into your eyes. Yet there was nothing wrong with the way it ended, even if it was manipulative.

In this "Five Minutes" audio commentary, Culture Snob will explain all that and more, without abruptly cutting to silence mid-sentence.

In honor of the final episode of The Sopranos, Culture Snob takes a look at five minutes from The Wire — a show that probably wouldn't exist were it not for that crime family from Jersey.

This brief audio commentary — part of the "Five Minutes" series — looks at one scene from The Wire's first season. In these five minutes, the only dialogue that passes between Baltimore Police detectives Bunk and McNulty are variations on the word "fuck" and one utterance of "pow," but the audience pieces together how this particular murder went down through visual storytelling and acting devoid of meaningful words.

One reviewer has called Wilco's Sky Blue Sky the best Eagles record the Eagles didn't make, and it's impossible to shake the timeless soft-rock vibe in the sound, the vocals, and the easy pace.

"A Ghost Is Born was to me really jagged ... abrasive," bassist John Stirratt said of his band's last studio album. "And this record has a certain warmth."

The lyrics that open Low's Drums and Guns are as forceful as singer/guitarist Alan Sparhawk is tentative.

"Pretty People," over a stark wave of fuzz, sets the tone for the record: "All the soldiers / They're all gonna die / All the little babies / They're all gonna die / All the poets / And all the liars / And all you pretty people / You're all gonna die."

It's a grim assessment, and the mood doesn't abate for the Minnesota band, known for its minimalist, slow songs and the often-haunting vocal interplay between Sparhawk and drummer Mimi Parker.

In a previous entry, I noted the disconnect between Guillermo del Toro's assertion that Pan's Labyrinth is "not about sexual identity" and the movie's marketing materials and design.

In this short audio commentary (part of Culture Snob's Five Minutes series), we look at the toad scene in the movie to undercut the writer-director's claim even more. Pan's Labyrinth is very much about sexual identity, particularly a woman's reproductive power over a man.

When we say that a movie is more style than substance, we typically mean it derisively. Oliver Stone's JFK has a ton of stuff — with the director's cut running nearly three and a half hours — that was mistaken for its substance. But the meat of the movie is its style, because it's the fuel that made the film so combustible.

The movie was greeted with contentious debate upon its release in 1991, but Stone's critics and supporters completely missed the boat by arguing about facts, theories, and cover-ups. JFK works not as an argument but as a style of argument — sly and forceful in equal measure — and an exemplar of contemporary propaganda.

There's a maxim that says a movie teaches you how to watch it, but Peter Weir's The Truman Show teaches you how to watch it the wrong way. And in its brazen audience cues, it hints that you should question your reaction to the film. This is a movie that was made for misunderstanding.

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