Album of the Week: Duke Nukem

Welcome back to Record Club! If you wanna check out this week's offering, then continue to scroll down. If you are new and wanna check out what we have to offer, there are the playlist and the archives to peruse. Enjoy!

 

WEEK 113 — March 28-April 3, 2021

 

What we're listening to this week (Joe's pick):

ALBUM: Duke Nukem

ARTIST: Duke Deuce

RELEASED: February 26, 2021

WHAT GENRE IS THIS: "Crunk revival"

WHY JOE PICKED IT: Martha was recently diagnosed with a nut allergy, which got me thinking about George Washington Carver, who obviously did a lot of studies on the peanut. You might not know that he also researched the sweet potato as well. There is a classic Thanksgiving episode of Married... with Children in which Al spends the holiday searching for his Aunt Maddie's sweet potato pie recipe. Katey Sagal starred in that show. She also starred in Sons of Anarchy, and sang a little bit on the soundtrack. One of the songs she covered was "Ruby Tuesday," which as you well know was written by the Rolling Stones. In fact, "Ruby Tuesday" was ranked as the #310 best song of all time, according to Rolling Stone magazine. Right above it at #309 was Willie Nelson's "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain." This song was covered by Olivia Newton-John on her album Come On Over (no, not that Come On Over). She also covered "The Long and Winding Road" on that album, one of the worst Beatles songs. The songwriting is credited to Paul McCartney and John Lennon, but Lennon didn't really write it. Lennon did, though, write "Imagine," which was famously covered by Corey Feldman on Former Child Actor. Corey Feldman was in Pauly Shore Is Dead with Clint Howard, who was in Apollo 13 with Kevin Bacon, giving Corey Feldman a Bacon Number of 2. On August 1, 2018, at the Keswick Theater in Jenkintown, PA, my parents saw the Bacon Brothers perform an original song called "Tom Petty T-Shirt." Tom Petty (whose Bacon Number is also 2, from being in The Postman with James Russo, who was in Black Mass with Bacon) called his backing band the Wildflowers. There is a street in Far NEast Philadelphia called "Wildflower Way" (I've never ventured that far). It's right around the corner from a pizza joint called Mamma Mia's. Of course, "Mamma Mia!" is one of Super Mario's catchphrases. Mario was portrayed by Bob Hoskins in the flop movie Super Mario Bros. (and Hoskins has a Bacon Number of 1, since he was in Balto with Bacon). Hoskins was also in 2009's A Christmas Carol, which was Disney's third adaptation of Dickens' classic tale. Their second adaptation was The Muppet Christmas Carol. Of course, Michael Caine starred as Scrooge in that one. Not only does Caine have a Bacon Number of 2 (he was in California Suite with Walter Matthau, who was in JFK with Kevin Bacon), but he was also in Sleuth (both of them, actually). Laurence Olivier was in the original Sleuth as Caine's rival. Oliver (Bacon Number of 2: A Bridge Too Far -> Maximillian Schell -> Telling Lies in America -> Bacon) was in Spartacus with Nina Foch (BN2: How to Deal -> Dylan Baker -> Planes, Trains and Automobiles -> Bacon), who was in Mahogany with Diana Ross (BN2: 54 -> Mark Ruffalo -> In the Cut -> Bacon). We know from our diana reviews that Diana Ross worked with Chic member Nile Rodgers on that album, but you may not have known that Rodgers wrote the fake Soul Glo jingle in Coming to America. (Rodgers has a BN of 2 and it involves a SpongeBob documentary; Eddie Murphy has a BN of 2 and it obviously involves Shrek 3... okay, okay, I'll chill with the Bacon Number thing). I guess I didn't realize that Lizzo was parodying Soul Glo in her "Juice" video until I saw Coming to America. Lizzo was in a pretty terrible children's movie recently called Ugly Dolls (Willow liked it though). Blake Shelton also voices a character (at least Lizzo was actually competent at voice acting). Shelton has a terrible song called "Honey Bee," which features the lyric "You be my little Loretta / I'll be your Conway Twitty." He is referring to Loretta Lynn (remember that album she did with our Jack White?). Totally got her mixed up with singer Loretta Lee while researching all this. Lee studied at the Peabody Institute, which is part of the John Hopkins University system. Woodrow Wilson, as we all know, earned his PhD at John Hopkins. Our 28th president was portrayed by the actor Josef Sommer in the TV show The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Sommer was also in The Mighty Ducks, which starred Emilio Estevez. I just recently watched Estevez ham it up in St. Elmo's Fire. John Parr wrote the theme song for that movie (it's really good!). That's on the album Running the Endless Mile, on which session musician Randy Kerber plays the keys (Neither Kerber nor Parr have Bacon Numbers, but Estevez has a BN of 2 through many, many links). Kerber played keys on the Three Degrees album Out of the Past into the Future. The Three Degrees also provide the vocals to the Billboard #1 hit song "TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia)," which you would recognize if you heard it. I recognized it because they play it on 94.1 WIP sometimes on Phillies broadcasts right before an inning is about to start. Bryce Harper is a Phillie. He's had a bunch of walk-up music in his career, but bizarrely one of them was a Michael Bublé song. We all remember Bublé from his obligatory Christmas appearance on Dolly Parton's A Holly Dolly Christmas. That album featured Miley Cyrus, who once starred as Hannah Montana on Hannah Montana. Sheryl Crow once made a cameo appearance on that show, playing herself. I just discovered the Sheryl Crow song "Leaving Las Vegas" this year, and it's fucking great. Remember when Pauly D would DJ at the club in Las Vegas? The Jersey Shore star also starred in the MTV dating show Double Shot of Love, with the Keto Guido himself, Vinny. Vinny ended up choosing a woman named Alysse Joyner on the finale of that show. I checked out Joyner's Instagram, and a bunch of the (NSFW) photos toward the top were tagged at the Joshua Tree. Of course, U2's most critically acclaimed album is called The Joshua Tree. It featured the Billboard #1 hit song "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." (Bono has a BN of 2.) The Catholic saint of lost belongings is Saint Anthony. Pam went to a Kings of Convenience concert with her ex-boyfriend Anthony when we first started dating (I was cool with it). The KoC album Quiet Is the New Loud turned 20 years old a few weeks ago. That same week, Kurt Vile's Smoke Rings for My Halo turned ten years old. Smoke Rings was released on March 8, 2011. On March 8, 2009, I published the infamous Usual Crowd Power Hour on Puke on Your Birthday (and, by the way, I do not officially have a Bacon Number, regardless of what I have published on Puke on Your Birthday in the past). The 61st shot of that Power Hour is a very sloppy Watchmen reference. I guess I had just read the graphic novel, but I was only told to read it because the movie had just come out (the person who told me to read it was later chased away when I started referencing another movie, Say Anything). I did not know until today that, in the Watchmen movie, My Chemical Romance covered Dylan's "Desolation Row." Yes, that My Chemical Romance, fronted by Gerard Way, the love interest of the Mary Sue in the best Harry Potter fanfiction ever written (but not that one). Why does it seem like every single British actor was a part of the Harry Potter movie series at one point? Same with Game of Thrones (imagine my mind being blown when I found out Ted Lasso's Rebecca was the "Shame!" nun on GoT)? Oh shit, remember when the Hold Steady did a song for Game of Thrones? That was cool/weird. I just saw recently that the Hold Steady also appeared as themselves on the TV show Billions at one point. I don't watch it, but I know it stars the dude from Homeland's first few seasons. Damian Lewis—had to look that up. I remember that he beat Walter White and Don Draper for Best Lead Actor in a Drama at that first year's Emmys. The only other actor to beat both Walter White and Don Draper? Jeff Daniels, who did it the very next year. We remember him from Dumb and Dumber, and I especially remember the duet he does with Jim Carrey, when they sing "Mockingbird," which is a song by Carly Simon and James Taylor (they were married at the time... Simon and Taylor I mean, not Daniels and Carrey). Simon would a few years later do a James Bond song, called "Nobody Does It Better," for The Spy Who Loved Me (Carly Simon, James Taylor, and Roger Moore all have Bacon Numbers of 2). Billie Eilish did the most recent Bond theme, called "No Time to Die," for the (COVID-delayed) movie of the same name. Billie Eilish remains the only artist to ever win a Grammy for Best Album of the Year for an album that features clips from The Office. That TV show takes place in Scranton, PA. That's where the Menzingers are from too. The Menzingers were never mentioned in The Office, but Feist was, during that one fucked up episode in which Andy tries to use his Feist knowledge to trick Stanley's client into sleeping with him (#CancelAndyBernard). Feist is part of Broken Social Scene. During the summer of 2007, I attended Senior Week, and we played Broken Social Scene's "It's All Gonna Break" a lot, weirdly (there was a lot of drama that week—hey, I was living with my theater friends, that's kinda how it goes). Senior Week was in Ocean City for my high school pals, unlike all my hometown pals, who stayed in Wildwood. Steve Gunn has a pretty cool video in which he's walking around Wildwood's boardwalk during the winter (the song is called "Wildwood"). Steve Gunn was once part of the Violators, Kurt Vile's backing band (yes, Kurt Vile gets mentioned twice! Actually, let's see Vile's Bacon Number... nope, he doesn't have one). Kurt Vile has a song called "Air Bud." Air Bud featured character actor Michael Jeter, who was also in Patch Adams (with Josef Sommer!!!). I saw that movie a while ago. Robin Williams wears a clown nose, right? Sufjan Stevens has a song about a clown. A serial killer clown. "John Wayne Gacy." The character of John Wayne Gacy never appeared on Mindhunter (and probably never will, since it was cancelled, boooooo!!). Johnathan Groff stars in that show and in Frozen. In Frozen II, Groff's big showcase song is covered by Weezer in during the credits. Weezer had a song from Red Album I think, and the video took place on the backstage set of the old Muppet Show. We just started watching that with Willow, is the only reason I made that connection. We watched an episode guest starring Joel Gray, who won an Oscar for his role in Cabaret. Liza Minelli stars in that film too, and she's in Arrested Development. The TV show, not the musical group. Though the musical group Arrested Development did have a band member who neither sang nor played any instruments—Baba Oje, the band's "Spiritual Elder." Another band that had a member who neither sang nor played any instrument was the Mighty Mighty Bosstones (Benn Carr was the band's "skanker"). This band killed it in Clueless, which featured Paul Rudd. I just found out that Paul Rudd owns an ice cream shop in Rhinebeck, NY. The most recent Blur album has a neon-lit ice cream cone on the cover. Frontman Damon Albarn also fronts Gorillaz. There used to be a bunch of memes about Hirmabe the gorilla. I used to get pissed off at them. Imagine being a zookeeper and seeing your dead friend pop up in memes all over the internet. I give this meme one thumb down... which is also a meme. A meme from Gladiator. This was Lamson's favorite movie. (Lamson does not have a Bacon Number. But at least two Your Favorite Movie interviewees have Bacon Numbers verified through IMDB credited movie roles, and I'm going to figure them out now. Frank B. was in Not Yet with Steve Zettler, who was in Crooked & Narrow with Brian Anthony Wilson, who was in The Good Student with Tim Daly, who was in Diner with Kevin Bacon, giving him a BN of 4; Catherine Z. was in The Glory Years with Emily Lynne, who was in Influencer with Dan Chamberlain, who was in Dirty 30 with Anna Akana, who was in Kids vs. Monsters with my boy Keith David, who was in Novocaine with Kevin Bacon, giving her a BN of 5.) Anyway, Lamson bears a strong resemblance to Slamson, the Sacramento Kings' lion mascot. According to Google, the Kings' power forward is Harrison Barnes. The Barnes Museum is currently featuring an exhibition showcasing art from the Dutch expressionist Willem de Kooning. The gloomy Manic Street Preachers have a song called "Interiors (Song for Willem de Kooning)" on their album Everything Must Go. I'm not familiar with that one, but I am familiar with their album prior to that, 1994's The Holy Bible. I remember reading that after The Holy Bible was released, rhythm guitarist and main lyricist Richey Edwards just straight up disappeared. Strong Connie Converse vibes from that story. Converse had a song called "Father Neptune." One half of the Neptunes, Pharrell Williams (champion of Maggie Rogers) was featured on the Billboard #1 song "Blurred Lines" by Robin Thicke, whose father Alan was in the How I Met Your Mother music video for "Sandcastles in the Sand," which also featured Tiffany, who, like Robin Thicke, also hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 with her Tommy James and the Shondells cover "I Think We're Alone Now" (BN of 2: both Thickes, Cobie Smulders, Pharrell Williams; BN of 3: Maggie Rogers, Tiffany). Another great Tommy James song is "Crystal Blue Persuasion," which was featured in the Season 5 finale of Breaking Bad, which stars Bryan Cranston as Walter White. If you'll recall, Jeff Daniels and Damian Lewis both beat Cranston for Best Lead Actor at one point. Cranston won the award four times, don't worry. Sterling K. Brown won the award in 2017 for This Is Us. He was also in Frozen II—wait, we already mentioned that. Backing up... This Is Us... how about Randall's father (portrayed by Ron Cephas Jones (BN of 2)) grew up in Memphis, which we learn in an early-series tearjerker episode that guest stars Brian Tyree Henry, who is best known for his role as Paper Boi in Atlanta. Possibly the most famous hip hop group out of Atlanta is Outkast. One half of that duo is André 3000 (who, by the way, starred in a TV series that Frank B. was working on during our interview), who created an animated series called Class of 3000. Lil Jon did voice work on that series. Lil Jon works within the subgenre of "crunk." So when I found out that Martha had a nut allergy, I figured it was time that we choose a crunk album for Record Club.

TRACKLIST:

1. INTRO: COMING OUT HARD
2. SOLDIERS STEPPIN
3. FELL UP IN THE CLUB
4. ARMY
5. GANGSTA PARTY
6. TOOT TOOT
7. SPIN
8. DUKE SKYWALKER
9. BACK 2 BACK
10. BUSY
11. KIRK
12. MOVE
13. GRRR
14. OUTRO: GO 2 HELL

LENGTH: 45:52

WHERE TO LISTEN FOR FREE: YouTube

READING SOME SHIT: I can't believe I'm about to do this, but here is the Wikipedia article about Crunk music.

Happy listening, fam! Have a great week!

A Year of Blind Spots: Aladdin Sane

Have I ever written about how I first came to own an iPod? Probably, but it's tangentially relevant to David Bowie, so here it is again. It was late in my seventeenth year. My pops, a mailman, happened to find an iPod classic in great condition just chilling under a tree, so he took it home, and the next day left a sign on the tree, saying "Found iPod" or whatever. No one ever contacted him. The day when "enough time had passed" also happened to be my eighteenth birthday, so that was my gift. I explored the music that was already on there on my way to school that morning (stopping to buy a pack of Black and Milds, because I now could).

We will never know who the owner of that iPod was. According to my computer's iTunes, the iPod was named "Izzy the iPod," but that's the only clue I have. Otherwise, the only thing I know about the owner is that s/he was a basic classic rock bitch. If there were 500 songs on the iPod already, then at least 400 of them were Greatest Hits compilations. I'm may not sure if I've written about my first iPod's origins before but I am absolutely certain that I've written on multiple occasions about my feelings regarding Greatest Hits, Best Ofs, and etc.

The Best of David Bowie was on there. This was before I knew pretty much anything about the dude, and certainly well before I had formed any sort of opinion about him, positive or negative. So that particular compilation stayed in my music collection for years. I hated a lot of it, and eventually, this compilation finally got the ax.

"The Jean Genie" was absolutely part of that collection, and I specifically remember having a particular strong ire toward this one. It was just so goddamn lame. It felt like a xerox of some blues rock shtick that didn't really appeal to me as a teenager. So it's been like a decade since I've heard this song.

I finally came back to it in exploring Aladdin Sane this week, and I'm happy to report that I now consider it a pretty great song. I think we can chalk this up to the context of the album providing a more fitting home for the song. It might sound stupid next to other stupid singles that Bowie released in his lifetime, but on Aladdin Sane, you can understand its purpose and role in creating this additional persona for David Bowie.

Last we left off talking about Bowie (not including a Your Favorite Movie interview that I spent this week transcribing, and which will be published in like a week and a half), I was talking about how I just don't get Bowie. Not yet, anyway. There was an acknowledgment that there could be plenty of albums of Bowie's that I will love when I finally get around to them. But without a particular motivation to wade in deep waters with this dude, I'm stuck with a base expectation of just finding something, anything, that is just fucking listenable.

Not only is Aladdin Sane listenable, it is downright good. There is no doubt that it achieves what it was originally meant to do: follow up on Bowie's breakthrough (and the other of the only two Bowie records I ever liked until this week), Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, both continuing the acclaimed glam rock stylings while also bringing something new to the table.

New: Bowie has another person, the titular "Aladdin Sane" (or, "a lad insane"), whom Bowie has described as "Ziggy in America." I guess Bowie was doing a lot of touring in America when writing the music, and—like we all do from time to time—considering the rich history and conflicting horrors of American Life.

So that's where the sound of "The Jean Genie" comes in, this sort of retro-sounding rock 'n' roll. There's a lot of it on Aladdin Sane—the faux doo-wop of "Drive-In Saturday," the bah-bah clap shuffle of "The Prettiest Star," the Rolling Stones cover "Let's Spend the Night Together," even the Bo Diddley beat underneath "Panic in Detroit." It all totally tracks with the ostensibly theme of an alien life form coming to the U.S. and finding what our music has to offer.

Aladdin Sane manages to pull back into this "classic" rock 'n' roll sound, while also simultaneously sounding more experimental than anything Ziggy Stardust featured. Check out that wild piano part on the title track if you wanna hear what I mean. With some of this stuff, you can practically see the line being drawn all the way from here to Blackstar 43 years later. And it's a wonder that Bowie is able to place these disparate tonal ideas side-by-side, sounds from the 1950s and sounds from the 2050s, and create a seamless piece of art. Good stuff.

This isn't enough for me to call David Bowie a "genius," but it's definitely enough to inspire me to keep moving and check out some other LPs in his discography and see what else I can uncover. It's a shame, really, that I have to work somewhat backwards here. Like, it would've been easier if I had started my life loving David Bowie, instead of being greatly disappointed and slogging through his work to find any gems I can. I.e. I wonder what my music life would be like right now if, instead of some goddamn Greatest Hits comp, Izzy the iPod had played Aladdin Sane for me.

Long Season, Sunny

Things start pretty slow in Long Season. At around two minutes, one of the key themes comes in, an ascending three-note bit, which leads into another key theme, the descending four-note B-G-E-C scale which consistently runs in the background, like a walking stick for your journey. BGEC BGEC...

Supporting bass and treble start to fill out the measures. Vocals, a small surprise, thinking this would be an all-instrumental piece. In Japanese, she goes through both a smoky, somber quality as well as a brighter, melodic one. The lyrics are the sort of wistful thought that fits the ambiance ("We ran from one end of Tokyo to the other / Halfway dreaming / Watching the sunset in the rearview mirror / Feeling kinda happy, feeling kinda lonely"). She's supported by various horns, strings, an upbeat snare, and of course, b-g-e-c.

The season(s) progress, taking us up to brighter places, down to deeper places. Somewhere in season 3 they break away, gradually enough you may not even notice until you're in it. There are highlights of the vocals, more invigorated bass playing, and more of what I'd just describe as sounds. You know. Maybe a water droplet in a echo-y cave? Sirens/wails? Some kind of spring thing? Laser guns? Windchimes? Wind?

Part 3 ends abruptly, leaving things oddly empty after the last long stretch. But part 4 and 5 are where this thing really comes to life. In 4, we're back to smoky vocals and repeating melodies with some twists. Oh wait, what happened to BGEC? It's back! The three-note theme is back too. Remember when you were up in space? (Was that where I was?) Well, it's back too. In part 5, they stitch together the quilt of everything they've shown you and give you something deeply cathartic with those last few minutes.

I don't know what the fuck "dream pop" means, and yet, much like a dream, things both feel very real and un-real, often at the same time. Long Season is delightful.

p.s. There is a quality here I noticed with the Feelies as well (though this probably applies for any good art)—the more you listen, the more you hear, and there's a certain unique joy in the discovery

p.p.s Why do we divide into four seasons anyway? It's arbitrary, yes? Maybe we also are "not four seasons."

Long Season, Brian

Hm okay so I'm sorry I made everyone listen to this bad mushroom trip of an album that appears to be recorded in the bathroom of a public pool, but also it was pretty funny and I laughed a lot. Part Broken Social Scene, part Super Mario Sunshine, fully meant for a playlist titled "BONG SEASON," I thought adding the sounds of taking a shit after pulling off your bathing suit was an interesting touch. Fishmans are undoubtedly best consumed after four beers at 6:30 PM at what you were told was a local music festival but what is really just "some guy's barn," or through a hazy 2 PM backseat bowl rip in your friend's car when you're nineteen with all the windows down so it doesn't smell when he goes to work later. There's something sweaty yet soothing about all of this either way, it's kinda silly at first but still familiar to me and there are always worse ways to spend a half hr with your friends. 3ish pukes off 5ish beers.

Long Season, Joe

Long Season is an album that feels much bigger and grander and more important than it actually is. I'll say up front that it's this quality that makes me enjoy it so much. I may not actually remember it in a few months' time, but right now, listening to its 35-minute sprawl, I feel like this an album that is impossible to forget.

Not every moment of Long Season is essential. Some of it felt akin to watching a Netflix original comedy in which every episode is 35 minutes—it's like, yo, there's a reason why sitcom episodes have traditionally been a tight 22. There's always some chaff. Part 3 dissolves into some noise where you can lose the thread. Part 2 sounds at times like a Broken Social Scene deep cut, where the band is content to jam instead of even pretending to maintain structure.

That's probably dumb, putting all my criticism right there in the second paragraph, so let's try something else. There's an intersection that I cross every day on my way from the train station to my office, and it's big enough that the traffic coming from the left and the traffic coming from the right have completely different green lights. So every morning, at like 7:52 AM, I find myself waiting on the sidewalk as, first, the traffic comes from the left, and then after that, from the right. Because of this pattern, people feel emboldened to walk halfway across the street, shave a few seconds off their wait, confident that no car could ever come from the left as they stand suicidally in the middle of a four-lane Center City street. I don't do it. I wait on the sidewalk because, one, I'm not a fucking moron, but, two, I'm not in a rush to get to work. It's not that I've never been in a rush my entire life, but I'm trying harder as I grow older to pick and choose when to rush and when to just fucking relax. There is absolutely no need for anyone to risk life and limb in the middle of the street just so that we can all collectively get to the jobs we hate faster.

This doesn't really have anything to do with Fishmans, except that I feel like, emotionally, the thing I need in my life, the thing that is going to help me to slow down in life, to appreciate stillness over constant and occasionally agitating movement, I can find pretty easily in Long Season. The Fishmans are pulling up in a Chevrolet Chevelle SS and offering me a toke, and I'm protesting because like I've like never done dub-dream-pop before, man, and Fishmans are all like "It'd be a lot cooler if you did."

Kinda like what I said last week about "beauty in repetition," there's plenty of beauty to be found here. Mostly, I find beauty and calmness and transcendence in that repeating piano riff, the one with four notes going down the scale, that just repeats over and over at the beginning and end of this epic. Everything works in and around and through these notes—shuffling drums, a goddamn accordion, pretty J-pop vocals. It all weaves in and out and relaxes me in the exact same way that crocheting relaxes Pam.

I recognize Long Season as a piece of art that is going to seem less exciting under any sort of microscope, so I'm going to stop while I'm behind, and just appreciate its general existence. Why does a sunset turn pink in the evening sky? Why do birds form a majestic V in winter's brisk infancy? How did we come to enjoy a week of 1996 Japanese ambient psychedelic rock by a niche band 22 years after their frontman died? All questions better accepted than explained.

GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5

Album of the Week: Long Season

Record Club albums had a big night at the Grammys last week! Dua Lipa and Post Malone were both nominated for Best Album, and both performed (one better than the other!)! Dua Lipa won Best Pop Album! Fiona Apple won Best Rock Performance and Best Alternative Album! Michael Kiwanuka was nominated for Best Rock Album! Tame Impala was nominated for Best Alternative Album! BTS was nominated for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance, and performed! Jay Electronica was nominated for Best Rap Album! The Highwomen won for Best Country Song! Andrew Watt, who produced songs on three Record Club albums, won Producer of the Year, Non-Classical! The Jagged Little Pill musical won Best Musical Album! Kaytranada won Best Dance/Electronic Album and Best Dance Recording (which is interesting, because Kaytranada's Bubba was the last album that Brian picked for Record Club before today!)!

 

So don't tell me that you don't have opinions about the Grammys! Record Club members know half the music nominated!

 

We have a new album below for you to enjoy, and to root for when it is nominated for a Grammy next year (jk). Otherwise, you can check out the archives and the playlist. Enjoy!

 

WEEK 112 — March 21-27, 2021

 

What we're listening to this week (Brian's pick):

ALBUM: Long Season

ARTIST: Fishmans

RELEASED: October 25, 1996

WHAT GENRE IS THIS: (per Wikipedia) dream pop / dub / neo-psychedelia / progressive pop / ambient pop / minimalism

WHY BRIAN PICKED IT: "honestly i had like an entire spotify mix of this stuff and i have no idea what i listened to first that tossed it in my algorithm, but it worked, skynet is real and it's smarter than me."

TRACKLIST:

1. Long Season (Part 1)
2. Long Season (Part 2)
3. Long Season (Part 3)
4. Long Season (Part 4)
5. Long Season (Part 5)

LENGTH: 35:16

 

WHERE TO LISTEN FOR FREE: YouTube

 

READING SOME SHIT: Confession time—I rarely read these articles that I link to. I have not read this one, but here it is.

 

Happy listening, fam! Have a great week!

A Year of Blind Spots: Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake

I guess it's worth explaining how we ended up here. A couple years ago, I was rooting through the Wikipedia pages for all the bands featured on the great non-American garage rock compilation Nuggets II. One of those bands was Small Faces, with their minor U.K. hit "My Mind's Eye." Going down the rabbit hole meant learning that after 1969, frontman Steve Marriott quit, and was replaced by a young Rod Stewart (who will be appearing in a few weeks on a Top Five Least Favorite Classic Rock Artists list) and Ronnie Wood (future and now-still member of the Rolling Stones). They called themselves Faces. Not being a fan of Rod Stewart, I was content with pouring over Small Faces only, and saw that their most critically acclaimed album had the rather preposterous name of "Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake." For a while, this album existed on a list of ideas for Record Club, really only because I thought the name was funny. But most of that list was migrated over to A Year of Blind Spots at the end of last year, since I only pick like a dozen albums a year for Record Club, and I probably shouldn't burn one of those picks on a goofy '60s album with a stupid name.

Is Small Faces a "blind spot" for me? I guess it depends on how you define the term. I might argue over whether Small Faces is an "essential" band to know (they are in the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, but I don't subscribe to the theory that that institution has any say in the upkeep of the canon). Just based on what I hear on Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake, these guys were a competent band that, like their peers, were able to combine psychedelia and garage rock into a pretty potent mix.

I will say that it's been a hot minute since I've digested any hippy-dippy bullshit like this, and it sat well with me. Side A of the album was an especially fun trip, with songs ranging from hard psych to lighthearted Kinks-esque pub singalongs. I couldn't live in this space, but it was nice visiting after what seems like a long time.

Side B is definitely worse but definitely more interesting to discuss. The back half comprises an early prototype of a "rock opera." It doesn't approach Tommy-levels of drama or musical showmanship or ubiquity (though it was released almost exactly one year before Tommy, and I'm sure had its influence on the concept). It's really quite a silly affair. It's about a simple man who thinks a half moon in the sky means that a piece of the moon was stolen, and he goes on a quest on the back of a giant fly to find it. 

 

Adding to the silliness is the fact that British comedian Stanley Unwin is featured on all the tracks, telling pieces of the fairy tale at the beginning of each track. Not only does Unwin have a terribly thick British accent (which is something I've always struggled with, in movies and TV and music), but also he speaks his own language. Like, this dude made up a language. He called it "Unwinese." It's mostly gobbledygook. So even if you wanted to follow along with this asinine fairy tale, the narrator makes it almost impossible. At bare minimum, it's more difficult than A Clockwork Orange.

Example: "Stan realized, now, which it struck him like a smacker o' blueidy, which coming out ffst turn you never thoucus before. As the sun rise in the early morny, so the recall of the moon in the eve, ah, and he thought..."

Not that Unwin's narration takes up more than like four minutes total on the album, but those four minutes are pretty unbearable. Worse, they're unskippable, since they are at the beginning of every single track on Side B.

But besides all that, I quite enjoyed Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake, probably just because it was something novel. I don't know how Record Club would have responded if this ended up as an Album of the Week. Probably would've gotten two reviews maximum, with Sunny getting more of a kick out of the Unwinese than I did, and Nate writing a casually dismissive one-paragraph review ending in "It's fine."

Crazy Rhythms, Sara

I only listened to four songs on Crazy Rhythm by the Feelies. I stopped partially because I was meh about it, but also because I have had a ridiculous week at work. While I half assed this week on PoYB music club, I am outing myself as a failure to say HAPPY BIRTHDAY PAMMY!!! I love her and I love the donation idea. So, here is my entry, I won't even call it a review. It's the track listing and how every song can relate to Pam:

1. "The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness" — this is possibly her husband
2. "Fa Cé-La" — reminds me of the sound of music and Pam loves musicals
3. "Loveless Love" — COULDN'T BE HER!!! 
4. "Forces at Work" — she is an amazing nurse, mother, and friend 
5. "Original Love" — probably the OG love is with her Dad, Butch, who is a damn good time 
6. "Everybody's Got Something to Hide (Except Me and My Monkey)" — idk Pam, you tell us 
7. "Moscow Nights" — moscow mules, she loves a cocktail! 
8. "Raised Eyebrows" — I have seen many from Pammy, mainly to Joe, but I have gotten a few too!
9. "Crazy Rhythms" — the girl can DANCE!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY PAM!!!

Crazy Rhythms, Pam

As someone who is just beginning to skim the surface of the New Wave/Post-Punk genres, the Feelies made embarking on this musical journey a little less intimidating. Crazy Rhythms was enormously easy to listen to. Write-ups for the album cite R.E.M. as a band who has derived a lot of influence from the Feelies. I’d go further to say that I hear pieces of Crazy Rhythms in a great number of the bands that I enjoy—bands slightly after the era of the Feelies, and current-day music as well.

The layering and build-up in even the first minute of "The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness" (the first minute of the entire album!) creates a really fantastic sense of excitement. The Feelies create a great introduction, which leaves them with the task of continuing that momentum throughout the album. And I think they did. Their layering is pretty masterful throughout, with fluctuations that held my attention. The Feelies left me feeling energized and a bit kooky... what I needed to kick off what is hopefully the beginning of the end of this year of weirdness.

Crazy Rhythms, Sunny

The summary for this album is found right there in the opening and closing tracks. The lyrics and delivery carry enough water to set up their David Byrne-y wacky dream world feel, centered around that odd gestalt of living in a NJ/mid-Atlantic suburb. Certainly relatable. The Feelies get it ("the boy next door is me, yeah"), but they don't linger in that mode. The fa-la-la feel of "Fa Cé-La" melts into the build-up of "Loveless Love," and then you find yourself into back-to-back multi-minute jams featuring wild drums, frenetic scales, and crazy rhythms.

They come up for air, a bit, between the foreign twang of "Moscow Nights" or the silly yet fitting tangent of "Everybody's Got Something to Hide" to avoid over-fatigue. "Raised Eyebrows" has a catchy hook/progression, though a bit half-baked; the album all but cuts it off rushing to close with the fantastic "Crazy Rhythms." It opens with more of the David Byrne "whoa whoa what's all this" lyrical stylings before diving into bass riff drum riff maracas bass riff drum riff odd scream car crash? cowbell horse hooves bass riff...

A barrel of perpetual nervousness gets channeled into form bringing forth an idea of chaos turned pathos. The whole album has a feel of familiar components put together into something surprisingly fresh. I am reminded of us reviewing Hookworm's Microshift—while there's no clear aesthetic connection between the two, I can't shake the similarity of impression I get upon their albums' respective closing. Credit to the Feelies, they’ve got something their own earning that cult following.

Crazy Rhythms, Joe

Sometimes it's relaxing to just write my way through the album in a song-by-song sort of way. I did that for the last Charity Week album we did (diana), so I figured I'd do that again this week, and save you from having to read fake psychiatric notes or drunken spiels about weddings.

"The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness" — There's pressure on this song, being the band's first song on their first album, to present a sort of thesis statement on what the Feelies are all about. It succeeds. There's the slow build that a few other songs on Crazy Rhythms employs (it's better here since it's the start of the album). There's the immediate establishment of the tom-filled drum beats, which will drive the entire album. And there are the lyrics, which feature a twist that I quite enjoy—substitute the "boy" for the band, and the Feelies are saying that there's music out there and it can be done well and oh by the way we're talking about US.

"Fa Cé-La" — This is a giddy song, and somewhat more lighthearted than the rest of the album. I'm not sure I can necessarily pinpoint why, though. Maybe it's the siren synths or the off-kilter snare hits at the end. In any case, it's the side of post-punk that kind of reminds me of Violent Femmes. I couldn't find a translation for the phrase "fa cé-la" online, not knowing what language it's supposed to be. It is probable that it's not supposed to be translated at all, instead functioning as a sort of ecstatic speaking-in-tongues sort of thing. The message is clear, even if its meaning isn't.

"Loveless Love" — Again we have the quiet and slow start, which annoys me a little more on the third song than it did the first. But I think I just lack patience; I want to start at the fireworks factory, ya know? But we get there eventually in "Loveless Love." In fact, I think the slow start is worth it, if only so we can hear the dueling guitars slowly increase the tempo over time. That gets the blood pumping. And the cascading guitar scales at the climax seem like a worthy release, and frankly tell the story better than the lyrics do (something about the ins and outs of love).

"Forces at Work" — This feels like a centerpiece of the album to me. Maybe it's the length, clocking in at over seven minutes. But it doesn't feel like seven minutes to me (after the quiet drone intro, of course). Wikipedia indicates that the Feelies were "influenced by Lou Reed," and "Forces at Work" is the only song on which I hear the influence—the guitar theatrics remind me strongly of "European Son." Which is not something I ever thought about, really, that connection between VU and post-punk, but it kind of makes sense? At least when I'm listening to "Forces at Work." I just find it really interesting that something like this is able to hold my attention for so long (raptly, I might add). But I'll pontificate more about post-punk in general down below.

"Original Love" — R.E.M. has famously indicated that Crazy Rhythms was a big influence on their sound, but "Original Love" is really the only song on here on which I could see that making even a little bit of sense (but maybe that's because of my rather significant R.E.M.-sized blind spots). Like, if this sounds like R.E.M. at all, then it's a supercharged R.E.M., with about double the average BPM. But still, there's a resemblance. I also wanna give another shout out to the drumming on Crazy Rhythms. Drummer Anton Fier is on-point throughout. The little snare fills at the end of each measure during this song's chorus tickle me just so.

"Everybody's Got Something to Hide (Except Me and My Monkey)" — I've long claimed that this is my favorite Beatles song, and I still think that. Which means I'm a little protective of it, right? So I'll consider it ballsy that the Feelies took a swing at it. And I'm not going to say anything ridiculous like "the Feelies do it better," but I would definitely consider this a wildly successful cover song anyway. It's successful because it manages to find another dimension to an already great fucking song. I love the Beatles' version because John Lennon manages to make nonsense sound celebratory. The Feelies, on the other hand, make the nonsense sound absolutely desperate. I love it.

"Moscow Nights" — I could see someone claiming that Crazy Rhythms sounds "samey" by the time they get to "Moscow Nights," and I would consider that claim a reasonable one. If you like this type of sound (an uptempo post-punk race), then enjoy getting beat over the head by it for 40 minutes. But if you don't, you don't. I dunno, I'd rather be optimistic and say that a song like "Moscow Nights," while slightly samey, also employs a few different tones—slightly darker, but with that same pulse. The lyrics speak to the idea of feeling out of place, and in this context, I would consider that ironic—by the time they get to "Moscow Nights," the Feelies clearly know exactly where they ought to be.

"Raised Eyebrows" — This song always comes off as an instrumental at first. It just has that particular feel of an instruments-only jam. But the vocals do eventually come in, albeit briefly. I'll also say that, along with the instrumental-type feeling, there's also a feeling of this being somewhat tossed-off, like a minor deep cut. However, that feeling completely dissipates with a minute left. When the whole band clicks in at that moment, the song takes off, and it's one of the best moments on the album.

"Crazy Rhythms" — Like "Forces at Work," the title track's length indicates that it is a statement piece. Like the first song, "Crazy Rhythms"'s spot as the final song means that there is pressure to go out on a high note. And like all of the songs on Crazy Rhythms, it more than succeeds. "Crazy Rhythms" almost seems like a flex to me, in that the Feelies are telling us that they do what they do well. They even save a few tricks for the finale (there's a fucking cowbell solo!). The bulk of this song consists of the band breaking it down and slowly building it back up, so that when it does reach a climax, it's cathartic. I'm picturing "Crazy Rhythms" working wonders on Hoboken crowds in the '80s, and I'm not surprised they used this title as the album title as well. Great note to end on.

OVERALL IMPRESSIONS: There was a time when I didn't (or couldn't) appreciate the genre of post-punk. It's a genre built on repetition—the same beat for minutes at a time, the same guitar riff pounded over and over, the same phrase shouted ad infinitum until it morphs into something else completely. It took me a while to understand that there is a sort of beauty in repetition. It can be almost hypnotic, in a way. The Feelies take that formula and finesse a large amount of joy into the proceedings as well, which I appreciated. But I don't think I would've been able to appreciate that joy if I didn't understand the post-punk foundation first. If you are the type of person who "gets it," then you're already most of the way there in enjoying Crazy Rhythms. Great fucking album.

GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5

Never Seen It, #42 of 200: Dan in Real Life

We are watching all kinds of movies, alphabetically, through a list of 200 movies, picked for various reasons, watched for my enjoyment, written about for your enjoyment(?), and so on.

Dan in Real Life

2007

"Are we just watching this so you can make fun of it?" It was a fair question. There are all types of reasons why a movie could have ended up on my Never Seen It list, and this one was pretty obscure—erstwhile AVClub Newswire editor Sean O'Neal had an ongoing bit about a faux script to Dan in Real Life 2: Back 2 the Life (more on this later, I think). Also, my asking whether Pam wanted to watch Dan in Real Life tonight was couched in a discussion about the newly released Oscar nominees, and I facetiously referred to Dan in Real Life as "Best Picture winner Dan in Real Life." So the concern is legitimate.

It's also something that I should make clear now, again—I am approaching all of these movies with a completely open mind. There is no hate-watching here. Even movies that I know I'm going to hate—say, Bee Movie, or the upcoming Despicable Me (ugh)—are at least approached from an additional perspective other than a miserly one. Let's call it anthropological. I want to understand these movies, more so than I want to like, or dislike, them. (That most of these blog posts end up being all about whether I like or dislike a movie is more an indictment of my shitty blogging than my intentions throughout this project.)

So! Dan in Real Life! A quirky 2007 romantic comedy starring the Michael Scott and a stack of pancakes! Let's dig in! In short, I can tell you this up front: this movie wasn't good.

I don't hate romantic comedies. Not at all. I'm not "above" such endeavors, nor do I find them "unmanly" or whatever sexist bullshit you can come up with. Maybe you made one or all of these assumptions about me, but let me put them all to rest. Give me a good romantic comedy, and I'll sing its praises. Promise.

 

But there is something I particularly hate about romantic comedies, and it's when, in order to generate conflict, a central character becomes a miserable asshole, to an almost unbelievable degree—"unbelievable" in that the other characters would tolerate the behavior at all, I mean. I actually discussed this fairly recently in a dashed-off review of an already forgettable Netflix romantic comedy Happiest Season. The problem was that one of the two leads, Harper, was such a dick to her girlfriend Abby throughout the film that it was hard to believe that Abby would ever stay with someone, let alone love them.

Well, now picture a similar scenario—internal conflict causes main character to act out in increasingly callous and ugly ways—but this time, it's the eccentric actor from that network TV comedy that you loved so much, loved for his buffoonish but ultimately lovable ways. Now he's the asshole, and the movie doesn't really seem to want to really dig into that, his asshole-ish behavior waved off half as "comedy" and half as "true love." The motivations of the main character are selfish and outlandish and it's just really hard to stomach sometimes.

Put it this way: when Dane Cook's character punches Dan in the face, I was overjoyed and relieved. This is not an opinion I ever thought I'd have about any character Dane Cook would ever portray in film history, but here we are.

I guess I should explain what led up to that punch—I dunno, either to add substance to my claim that I was rooting for a Dane Cook character, or just to pad the word length maybe. And if you need a spoiler warning for a fourteen-year-old romantic comedy about Steve Carell eating burnt pancakes, then here ya go: SPOILER WARNING.

Dan is an advice columnist whose wife died four years ago, leaving him to raise three daughters. He seems to need to "take his own advice," as it were, and get back out there to find happiness for himself. At the start of a vacation at the family cabin with the whole extended family, he has a meet-cute with a woman at a bookstore, where they bond over Everyone Poops. The woman tells him that she is in a relationship, but wouldn't mind if Dan called her sometime anyway. Dan drives back to the cabin and tells everyone that he met a woman, only to find out that that woman is there, because she is Dan's brother's girlfriend. The brother is Dane Cook. Dan and Marie decide to keep this coincidence to themselves. "Hilarity ensues."

For the sake of being true to my "open-mindedness" that I've committed to, then I will say that there is some legitimate "hilarity" in this movie. It wasn't a complete slog in the comedy department. Some of the child/teen actors brought the laughs, like Cara's non-father-approved foibles with her boyfriend. Emily Blunt was delightfully unhinged as a tertiary character. I wasn't completely miserable watching this, is what I'm trying to say.

I will also say that the family vacation, which took up 95% of the film, had a nice lived-in quality. The whole thing came off like a real family vacation. Everyone was comfortable with each other and had good rapport. There existed traditions that you could tell were yearly traditions without that having to be explained. I dunno, I guess it just reminded me of some of my own family/friend vacations, and it was a pleasant reminder, especially since, in the last year, I can't say in good faith that I have grown closer to any family or friends, for obvious reasons.

But all the successful jokes and comfortable familial atmosphere in the world wouldn't be enough to lift Dan in Real Life over that central obstacle: how do you allow the audience to provide empathy for the central character, who spends the entire movie being miserable because his brother's girlfriend isn't his girlfriend? The answer is: you cannot. Any normal person would realize that the girl you liked is dating your brother and immediately cease and desist with all romantic inclinations. It shouldn't be hard at all. But Dan spends the whole movie hemming and hawing and kissing in a bowling alley, and it's just tough to watch.

Usually I get to this part of any review and say something like "this is a Joe K*** problem, so maybe it won't be a problem for you." But for this criticism, I sincerely have no idea if this bothers anyone else. Do other people enjoy romantic comedies even if the protagonist is a selfish prick who does nothing throughout the first 95% of the movie to earn his happy ending? I am having a hard time imagining anyone could. But for real, maybe that's just me.

 

Watching Dan in Real Life was about as fun as taking a hot shower with your clothes on while your brother's girlfriend gets naked. It might be a funny story down the line, but right now, it's uncomfortable, and you just wanna get out. But I swear I wanted to like it! I did!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Who's Who

 

Well, we haven't done the "Who's Who" section in any of these Never Seen It blog entries for a while now, so why the fuck not bring it back for goddamn Dan in Real Life?

Steve Carell, obviously, plays Dan. This was right around the beginning of The Office (that series started in 2005, and this movie was released in 2007), so I don't think Carell is at the point in his career where he is actively trying to push away the persona of Michael Scott (see: something like Foxcatcher). So some Scottisms come out here, especially the dancing scene at the bar. But in general, Dan was more competent and less lovable than Scott, and that made for a much worse character.

Dane Cook, as mentioned, plays Dan's brother Mitch. Dane Cook is a terrible and obnoxious comedian, but I cannot speak to much of his filmography. (He did have a bit part in Waiting..., which is such a goddamn good movie.) I dunno, maybe he was playing against type in Dan in Real Life. The character was nice if a little bit obnoxious I guess. But he was loving and loyal, and those are two qualities I didn't think Dane Cook could play.

 

Juliette Binochet is the female lead, and has the unenviable task of maintaining audience affection while brother hopping. She does the best she can, I guess. She is definitely one of those faces that I thought I recognized, and she has a pretty extensive filmography, but I combed through it and didn't see anything I knew. She did win an Oscar for her role in The English Patient, which we'll be getting to sooner than later (oh damn, I didn't realize the dude who plays Voldemort also plays the titular patient?! sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself).

 

Dan has three daughters. The oldest is played by Allison Pill, who has apparently been in a handful of movies I've seen (Vice, Goon, Milk), but I don't remember her in any of them. Maybe I'll remember her when we see her again in Snowpiercer. The middle child is Britt Robertson. Didn't recognize her, and she acted in a Christian film last year, so that's not a good sign. The youngest, Marlene Lawson, doesn't have a Wikipedia page, and hasn't acted since 2010, so maybe she's living a normal life now. If she is, I'm happy for her.

Plenty of bit parts all around here. Amy Ryan plays Dan's sister-in-law, which is only notable because Amy Ryan would soon be playing Michael Scott's love interest on The Office. Frank Wood plays his brother-in-law, and also a doctor in Joker (booooo). Dan's dad is John Mahoney, who most know as Frasier's dad, but I will always remember as Diane Court's dad. (Interesting sidenote from wiki: he had a one-episode role on Cheers before being casted as the dad on Frasier.) Dan's dad is Dianne Wiest. Could've sworn I recognized her from something—Pam told me she was in The Birdcage, and I guess that's the answer? Nothing else really pops out on her filmography. We'll see her again in Edward Scissorhands (which is right before The English Patient, hold up let me make sure Dane Cook isn't in Erin Brokovich or something).

Not much for Norbert Leo Butz, Dan's other brother, but I did think it was interesting that Butz and Dane Cook got musical credit for creating the in-movie song "Pigface," which is a pretty mean-spirited joke that I didn't find all that funny and also which ended very obviously (Emily Blunt is, as you may or may not know, definitively not a pigface).

And now, the cameo-level parts. Mr. Schuester was the policeman. Amy Landecker from Transparent was the newspaper editor. Jessica Hecht is Dan's sister, and also Gretchen from Breaking Bad. CJ Adams is a nephew, and played Timothy Green in what I assume is the absolute shitfest of a children's movie, The Odd Life of Timothy Green. Lucas Hedges is random kid #1 at the end-credits wedding.

Either of those last two could be a segue into talking about writer/director Peter Hedges, since Hedges also directed The Odd Life of Timothy Green, and is also Lucas Hedges' father (damn, remember when Lucas Hedges was in two Oscar-nominated films in 2017? That was weird). Hedges seems to have followed his success in writing 1993's What's Eating Gilbert Grape? with almost two decades of mediocrity.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Music

 

I'm mentioning the music here because I want to wash out the taste of a Dane Cook-created song on the soundtrack, and also because Pam had good things to say about the Dan in Real Life soundtrack, which, besides "Pigface," is entirely curated and performed by Sondre Lerche (and one song a duet between Lerche and Regina Spektor, naturally). Pam said he sounds like Jens Lekman. I thought he sounded like Rufus Wainwright one Kinks cover short of a Wes Anderson gig. In any case, I listened to the soundtrack while I wrote this, and it's what you would expect—quirky, cutesy, twee.

I should also mention that Pete Townsend is a child pornographer, which gives the sad-sack version of "My Love Opened the Door" performed in the movie at least one added layer.

 

~~~~~~~~~~

 

Awards

 

No Oscars for Dan in Real Life (should Dane Cook have supplanted Daniel Day-Lewis as Best Actor winner? Dranders says yes!).

 

No Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards either, but let's play three truths and a lie (spot the lie, please): Steve Carell presented the award for Favorite Movie, which must've stung; this was the year that Bee Movie was nominated and Chris Brown won an award (yikes and yikes); the show featured a "Rocktopus," which was "the eight-legged octopus of rock 'n' roll who haunts Jack Black in his dreams"; the Rocktopus activated the slime machine on Steve Carell while he was wearing clothes and while Juliette Binochet started to undress.

~~~~~~~~~~

That AVClub Thing

Going back and reading those old Sean O'Neal bits on AVClub (the most recent one features links to all the previous episodes in the series) made me realize a couple things: 1) The bit was as accurate as it was funny, featuring a lot of references to the movie that I actually understood now (on top of all the non-movie references to alien lizard lifeforms, of course), and 2) I've been reading AVClub for a long-ass time (the bit's first appearance was in 2011!). 

And it also made me realize why I don't really read AVClub all that much anymore. After it was acquired by a large nameless corporation and homogenized, there isn't really any room for wacko newswire stories about fictional sequels to Dan in Real Life (also e.g.: does anyone remember the weekly pictures of Peter Dinklage hoola-hooping?). It's all empty snark over there, and I rue the day that Sean O'Neal was so distraught over the micro-monetization of the internet that he left his post, thus depriving us of more of the intergalactic adventures of Dan and his brother's ex-lizard-queen-girlfriend.

Anyways, all that to say that my familiarity with O'Neal's dumb Dan in Real Life bit did no favors to the actual movie when I finally sat down and watched it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

FINAL WORDS

 

I have no idea why I chose to write this much for Dan in Real Life.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

GRADE: 2 pukes out of 5

NEXT TIME: We violently shift gears and watch Dances with Wolves (though who knows when, since Pam and I are getting into Oscar Mode, starting now).

Never Seen It, #41 of 200: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

I'm watching 200 movies I've never seen before, all in alphabetical order. This is the next one.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

2000

Whenever I think about Dunkirk, the 2017 Oscar-nominated war film, I think about when I first saw it, in theaters, drunkenly, at a 10:30 PM showing. The details of that viewing would typically result in almost assured sleep for yours truly—better to be a sleepy drunk than a violent drunk or a lecherous drunk, I always tell Pam—but with Dunkirk, I was wide awake the whole time. To me, that spoke to the film's level of excitement—it was so exciting that it was impossible to fall asleep, no matter how many beers under my belt.

But the reverse is not necessarily true. Falling asleep during a movie is not necessarily an indication of the film's lack of worth, or lack or thrills, or whatever. Case in point: I think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a swell movie, and I unequivocally fell asleep right in the middle of it.

Who knows, if I didn't have to write about it, then I might've been tempted to just not finish it at all after I had fallen asleep. I'm thankful, however, that my hand was forced to start again. In fact, this time I started from the beginning and rewatched the first hour before finally remaining conscious for the second hour. This time it clicked. (Also glad I didn't listen to Pam, who didn't fall asleep but did find it quite boring, and declined to join me for the rewatch.)

The most interesting idea to consider, here in the aftermath of viewing this film, is the idea that this was a movie rooted in traditions of the East, but specifically tailored to a Western audience. Which is the reverse of how it usually goes, right? Or, at the very least, the pipeline usually doesn't exist at all. 

Specifically, Crouching Tiger is a wuxia film, which is a term meaning "martial heroes." Martial arts, in other words. You can tell that director Ang Lee (who did Brokeback too) is consciously crafting a love letter to old martial arts films he grew up watching, because the template is lovingly applied to this film. Most notably, there's the fact that the physics of gravity don't seem to apply to fighters. Chases over rooftops, poisonous needles caught with chopsticks, a sword fight famously sequenced atop tall bamboo forest.

I'm not afraid to say that this is all fairly ridiculous. I'd perhaps even call it "silly." I think there's a way to say that respectfully, right? Like, I'm not saying that martial arts movies are "stupid" or "bad" because of what they contain. Silly can be good sometimes. Silly can be great if it's done well. In Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, it's fucking done well. The scene with Jen Yu beating up all the random dudes at the restaurant, I mean, there's no way you can call it anything but SILLY, and it was one of the best movie sequences I've seen this year.

This is just pure, giddy fun. And this isn't a new insight into Joe K***, the fact that something like this would appeal to me. Pam and I had a classic argument about Game of Thrones in this vein—my enjoyment of that prestige drama was always derived almost solely from the explosive action sequences. While there was nothing like Game of Thrones on TV in that regard, this also kind of what made Game of Thrones a subpar show in general—the moments in between firefights, the bickering and politicking, eventually lost their luster, and a show comprised of only battle sequences is barely a show at all.

Which begs the question: What's in between the (insane) fight sequences of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? Well, there's a lot, and either some or most of it works, depending on how you're feeling today.

What absolutely works: the big focus on societal pressures to conform, and the characters' desires to buck those norms. Young fighter Jen Yu is being forced to marry but has decided instead to train in secret and become the ultimate fighting champion. More experienced Yu Shu Lien has experienced those same pressures herself, and has succumbed to them, and now finds conflict in Jen's belief that she can overcome them. Even the villain Jade Fox expresses frustration at society's expectations of her as a woman (although her reaction is insidious as opposed to noble or heroic). So most of what I'm talking about has to do with women specifically, and how they are pushing back against traditional norms throughout the film (kind of like The Color Purple in that way). Like, let's not forget that the best fight sequence, technically-speaking at least, is between the two main women characters. That's a big deal!

What didn't really work: any focus doled out to romantic endeavors. I was far less invested in the Yu/Li unfulfilled romance then the movie seemed to be. Like, it didn't bring anything new to the idea, either thematically or even cinematically. I suppose this is one of the plotlines that was focused on specifically for Western audiences. If that's true, then I find myself more comfortable in the Eastern-influenced swordplay than Western-influenced lovey-dovey shit. Same goes with the incredibly long flashback sequence with Jen and Dark Cloud in the desert. I guess it was fun at moments (fighting on horseback), but overall I question its necessity. (Plus, imagine my confusion when I woke up and saw Crouching Tiger had turned into a western.)

Those concerns aren't really important ones, though. So what if I wasn't all that invested in Yu's love life? I was sure as shit invested in her fight life, and was blown away at all the kicks and punches and machete chopping. Pam was right on the money when she told me that The Matrix was out around the same time. In fact, the same choreographer did both movies—the legendary Yuen Woo-ping. (He also did Kill Bill, which is incredibly not on my NSI list, huge oversight.) The fighting is barely even violent; it's more like a dance. Fast-paced, fluid, visually stunning. 

I mean, look, if Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a two-hour fight sequence, I would've watched the shit out of it. I probably wouldn't have fallen asleep the first time around. But I rallied, I rewatched, and I came to appreciate this film as a whole. Not everything worked, but everything that did work worked so well that I can't help but consider it one of the better films I've seen in this project. I should really just stop trying to watch movies after 8 PM.

GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5

NEXT TIME: Dan in Real Life seems like a pretty bad movie, but all those AVClub bits about it back in the day were hilarious, so let's see where it falls.

Album of the Week: Crazy Rhythms

To celebrate Pam's birthday, I am forcing her to participate in Record Club this week and have the reviews published on her actual birthday. But to HONOR her birthday, I am offering to donate $25 to a charity of Pam's choice for every single review that we receive. Pam chose Philly's own Project SAFE. You can read about it HERE. Project SAFE’s mission is "to promote human rights-based public health and harm reduction among women, GNC, and trans people working in the sex and drug trades on the street in Philadelphia."

So check out this week's album below, and write about it by Friday morning. Or check out the archives or the playlist. Write anything, really—reviews about other albums will count toward the donation total, as long as they are in on time. Let's try to empty my wallet.

Thanks everybody!

WEEK 111 — March 14-20, 2021

What we're listening to (Pam's pick):

ALBUM: Crazy Rhythms

ARTIST: The Feelies

RELEASED: April 1, 1980

WHAT GENRE IS THIS: post-punk / jangle pop

WHY PAM PICKED IT: "I looked up a list of 'best new wave albums' and picked one that I never heard of."

TRACKLIST:

1. The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness
2. Fa Cé-La
3. Loveless Love
4. Forces at Work
5. Original Love
6. Everybody's Got Something to Hide (Except Me and My Monkey)
7. Moscow Nights
8. Raised Eyebrows
9. Crazy Rhythms

LENGTH: 43:04

WHERE TO LISTEN FOR FREE: Bandcamp

READING SOME SHIT: The Quietus interviewed them about a year ago for the album's 40th anniversary.

Happy listening, fam! Happy birthday, Pam! Have a great week everybody!