Saturday Songs - July 30

1. Ryan Adams – “Shine Through The Dark”

A track from Live From Nowhere Near You Vol. 2, a benefit album for the homeless, Adams finds himself by stripping everything away. Adams’s output for the past decade has been notable but lackluster. He will always have trouble topping the spare brilliance of his solo debut Heartbreaker, but this careful number is about as close as he can get.

~

2. Ari Hest – “Ride The Brake”

Not one of Hest’s better-known songs, this was a composition resulting from his 2008 “52” project in which the singer-songwriter wrote a song every week for a year. Fans paid a onetime fee to receive the songs, which Hest sent to them by email every week.

While I haven’t had the chance to go through every song from his 2008 catalog, “Ride The Brake” was the one that really jumped out at me. It struck me as a very true to itself. It’s a song about the road and it feels that way. Leading with a breezy acoustic guitar, Hest’s lyrics sound are like bullet points on a list that might have been scrawled on notepad paper with one hand on the steering wheel:

“She reminds you,

you are young;

eager chicken

not yet sprung.

She reminds you

of the reasons

for the big retreat.”

~

*3.

Jill Andrews – “The Mirror”

Something I would love to do every week during Saturday Songs is showcase a free single that I’ve found somewhere on the web. There are hundreds and hundreds of unknown musicians out there, some of them willing to share their music for free to get the word out about them. The hunt may be hard, but it’s often worth it.

This week I invite you to check out this song from Jill Andrews, formerly a member of the Tennessee country duo the Everybodyfields. It’s got a nice country shuffle to it—but Andrews is clearly not frightened to shoot for Sara Bareilles territory.

4. Justin Townes Earle – “Can’t Hardly Wait”

Named after one great songwriter and the son of another, fate seems to have blessed Earle. But this track off his third album Midnight At The Movies is not Earle’s song; it belongs, in fact, to Paul Westerberg.

Written for post-Let It Be Replacements, the song finally indicated not a tamer incarnation of the band, but one with more nuance and more flair. If you think the pauses on Earle’s back-porch version sound fantastic, then you ought to listen to the original.

But this cover holds its own. The best part? Replacing the lead guitar line with a banjo. The weirdest part? How much Earle sounds like a less-angsty, wiser version of Westerberg…

5. Aaron Thompson – “Solitude”

I know very little about Thompson; I picked his album out of the WHCL CD rack at random. Easily the brightest spot on the album, “Solitude” highlights Thompson’s breathy vocals and affinity for fun keyboard licks.

The understanding I’ve garnered from a brief foray into the wilds of the Internet’s music blogs (I am, I acknowledge, part of those wilds) is that Thompson produced the album himself. If so, major kudos to the guy. The wacky keyboard solo that begins at 3:35 to end the song is out of this world. Sometimes I listen to it on repeat.

Hemingway's Leopard And My Mountain Lion

For those who have missed the big Connecticut news story of the summer (overlooking the theft of that $17,500 scarf), a mountain lion was spotted more than a month in backcountry Greenwich and killed by and SUV up in Milford. Recently, thanks to some fancy noodling in a lab, scientists have matched that mountain lion’s DNA to the DNA of a group of mountain lions living in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

That means that this mountain lion traveled something like 1,500 miles over the past year or so—from South Dakota to Connecticut. The scientists, for a change, are just as baffled as the laypeople. The longest previously recorded wandering of a dispersing (“mate-searching”) male mountain lion was 750 miles. Our lion friend remarkably doubled that.

A mountain lion prowls Yellowstone National Park; via Wikimedia Commons

All his searching, however, was apparently for naught. Mountain lions, after all, are not so frequently found in Connecticut. The last wild sighting was…well…120 years ago. What was the silly guy doing? seems to be the question national media have been asking in regards to this far-wandering feline. And as far as we know, there’s no answer. Given that, I could not help but recall a certain famous epigraph to a certain famous story:

“Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and it is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai “Nghe Nghe”, the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.”

~

The literarily-inclined will have recognized the opening to Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” (If you did not, have no fear, there’s culture to be had here! [ too snobbish? did the rhyme dull the blow?].) Perhaps even more than the story, I’ve loved that simple epigraph. There are gobs and gobs of literary criticism out there analyzing what the leopard means—some connect it to the Bible, others to Hemingway’s life, some even claim that it is true and that there are other books out there that site the same fanciful leopard. Personally, I just love the notion of that leopard up there on the mountain, (seemingly) searching for meaning.

Mt. Kilimanjaro; via Wikimedia Commons

The search for meaning or God—after all, he is near the “House of God”—is what life is about. I can’t help but think that the implied author, writing “no one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude” totally misses the point. Everyone should know what the leopard was seeking (assuming we’re all engaged to read metaphors into everyday life…but whatever…). The leopard’s looking for meaning and life like the rest of us! What are people doing up at the top of Kilimanjaro? Looking for the meaning! They’re looking for life! (Exclamation points!!!)

~

My insane musings aside, it’s a curious exercise to look at our Milford lion with a status similar to Hemingway’s leopard. What was he seeking here? If anything, I’m sort of tempted to peg this mountain lion as antithetical to the leopard. The leopard seeks everything—while the lion seeks nothing. The lion, slinking through the backyards of wealthy suburbanites, is like an image out of Cheever, another reminder to all us suburbanites that we are living cold, emotionless lives. (Okay, so that’s not totally fair to Cheever’s work, I know.)

Again, these are just ramblings. But all of this aside, I’d love to think that the mountain lion might have been a reminder to all of us to keep seeking the meaning, whether in an office in Greenwich or at the top of a mountain. How’s that for some totally ridiculous inspiration?

Cheering On (And Sometimes Fearing) The Screen

Personally, I like a quiet movie-going experience. When I’m sitting in the theater and that asshole’s phone goes off, I usually would like nothing more than to sock him in the eye. Or at least wreck his phone. Or when that chatty pair of women in the corner keep intruding with their whispers and giggles. I enjoy—somewhat alarmingly—the introductions that most theaters take care to play before films: Don’t talk, turn off your cell phones, keep your life to yourself. “That will teach them,” I think, imagining the philistines quaking with confusion at the message. “How could my life be less important than the film?” I hear them cry (in my head).

So, as you already know, I can be somewhat of a somewhat of a snob. I turn my nose up at those who would deign to spoil my silent film atmosphere. The crowds at classical music concerts? I like those people…polite, quiet, respectful. Of course, you have that undercurrent of fear—evinced in those moments when someone accidently claps between movements—causing swift and terrible judgment: hundreds of eyes turning around to glare at you. Ah! How wonderful…

~

Given this, you can imagine that my experience at the final Harry Potter film last weekend was less than comfortable. While it was not a midnight showing (I did that last year—capes and wands and magic incantations in the audience were a little too much for me), it was still filled with Potter aficionados—an audience who (pun intended) lived and died with Harry through the final film.

As the film progressed, the ahs and oohs became louder and louder until the climactic battle scene when the skirmishes with rudeness became fully-fledged assaults on the theater’s opening plea for silence and respect. People shouted encouragement to the characters on the screen; applause was called for when villains were killed; loud sobs were wept when favorite characters suffered. And…well…about halfway through I gave into it. I didn’t yell at anything at the screen, but I did clap when Neville sliced the head off Nagini. Maybe not so loud and long as others in the theater, but I made the genuine motion of hand against hand, and not, as you might think, in a conforming or mocking way. I found myself genuinely moved to react to the events on the screen.

This was, contrary to your first thoughts, not something entirely new to me.

~

After all, everyone laughs in the theater. Films make people—including me—laugh out loud. I’ve never met someone who has not laughed at least once watching a film. And horror films? Don’t even get me started there. I’ve reacted alone in a room to some horror films, especially the stupid ones where the girl never seems to know where the damned monster is when—DAMN YOU, YOU MORON—IT’S BEHIND YOU!

You know what I mean.

But what is rare is that we take part in a film to the extent that it does not play off our own notions of what is frightening or what is funny, but rather off what we think is beautiful or heroic. The final Potter installment managed to play off that latter emotion and triggered it even in this too-often hard-hearted critic. Whether that’s because Potter et al have had a nearly unparalleled cinematic run (at least to my knowledge, few characters have had full reign over eight continuous films, excluding horror monsters [Jason] and superheroes who…well…change a lot? [Batman, Superman]).

~

Not that I was alive during the early years of cinema, but I have this somewhat inexplicable pining for an older generation when people got drunk and went out to see a film and cheered the hero from beginning to end. I can imagine watching Buster Keaton’s The General with some ragtime music for a soundtrack, yelling advice at the screen and hoping for the best for Keaton’s hapless Johnny Gray.

I vividly remember watching the film Cinema Paradiso, which, for those of you who have not had the pleasure, is an Italian film about the youth of a famous director. It begins with a child’s fascination with the local small town theater and the audience that goes there. It looks like rollicking, wild fun to be in that audience.

What I’m saying—in a rather roundabout way, as is my style—is that I wouldn’t mind a little more of that attitude. I wouldn’t mind throwing a cheer or two at the screen—Potter this week, maybe Captain America the next. 

~

Scrabbling For A Game In Old Greenwich, Conn.

When players picked their tiles, they averted their eyes and held the bag above their heads in order to discount any accusations of cheating. And they jingled. The only sound in the entire room—besides the whisper of conversation—was the constant jingling of the tiles. I later learned that players jingle partly in order to avoid overdrawing; taking one too many tiles is a severe Scrabble penalty. Don’t ask how severe; one of the players tried to explain it to me, but I lost him after a few words. Tournament Scrabble can be like that: the outsider can only follow so far…

Scrabble letters; via kidsurf.net

I walked around the room glancing at the games in progress. Many of the words were familiar to me, but some were pretty darn obscure: “manumit” (one of those words I look at and know that I’ve seen before, but can’t quite call to mind: it means to release from slavery) or “waul” (to give a loud cry similar to a cat). Other words, however, were terrifyingly beyond me. Lez? Vext? Dace? Kex? Are we sure these are words? The players seem to be.

(Indeed…they are words: lez—variant spelling of ‘les’, a shortened, disparaging term for lesbian; vext—variant spelling of ‘vexed’; dace—a small freshwater fish; kex—cow parsley or similar plant)

Some of the participants gave me cold glares as I looked over their boards. I was prepared for this.

“The one thing about spectating is that it’s a privilege,” the tournament organizer told me in a phone interview beforehand when I asked about watching the games.  

“Sometimes the players will shoo you away,” she said. “It bothers them.”

~

When I arrived at the Old Greenwich Tournament on Saturday morning, she was manning the Newcomers tournament. She waved me inside the room and pulled me into a corner. Facing the corner, she whispered to me.

“There are 10 people here,” she said. “We had a few drop out.”

We looked around the room—there were 5 Scrabble games going on, nothing like the games I’ve played all my life. At one table, a young Asian-American boy played a thirty-something blonde woman. It didn’t look like a friendly match. The woman’s expression was not fit for a board game; she looked as if she were going over her checkbook—and maybe finding figures that didn’t add up. She soon called the organizer over for a technical question.

She listened patiently to the woman's whispers before turning to the boy.

“Sorry,” she said to him. “You can’t do that.”

Glumly, the boy looked back to the game and the woman, assured, proceeded with her next play.

~

But the Newcomers tournament barely held a candle to the severity of the aforementioned Main Event. Added to the aura of silence and concentration of the Newcomers tournament was a curious gravitas. There were things at stake in this room: tournament money, player rankings, possibly other things that I could not understand or hope to uncover in my short three hour visit—possibly friendships, possibly even love.

Love, silly as it might sound, was not out of the question.

“I met my husband at a tournament 25 years ago,” said Verna Richards Berg, arm in arm with her husband, whose name I did not catch. It might seem an odd sort of story to have to tell in most circles (“Well…we met…believe it or not…at a Scrabble tournament! How crazy is that?!”), I could not help but think that this is the sort of circle they travel in. The Scrabble world, however, is just that. It’s a world unto itself.

People travel for Scrabble tournaments. And I’m not talking from just a few hours away. I expected Old Greenwich tournament to perhaps have the luck to draw people in from the city (New York City is an hour away by Metro-North), but I didn’t expect to draw people from any further than that. I imagined a triangle between New Haven, New York City, and White Plains. After that? Well…that just seemed too far to me.

But I was wrong. People traveled. People came from Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, upstate New York, and one player even journeyed from Texas. These people are serious about Scrabble.

I asked a high-school age player who ended up winning in the Division C of the tournament on Sunday, how far he travels for tournaments.

“For multi-day tournaments, I’ve been as far as Ohio,” he said. But he has also been to Dallas, TX for the NSC—the pinnacle of achievement for players in the United States—the National Scrabble Championship. Last year, he finished first in Division 5.

Word-frequency chart created by Alfred Butts, inventor of Scrabble; via tumblr.com

But he doesn’t travel simply to play; he travels with friends. When I spoke with him, he was paling around with two other young players also in the tournament. Two of them are from the Philadelphia area and have known each other through Scrabble for years. The pair met the third player from New Haven, Conn., only the day before, but they act like a trio of old friends. It seemed like as long as you were good enough or dedicated enough, you had yourself a guaranteed Scrabble family.

~

But not everyone there was part of that family. While many of the tournament’s players were regulars, not everyone in the Main Event was a hardcore Scrabble player.

Like me, Elena Abrahams, of Old Greenwich, is a newcomer to competitive tournaments. She explained to me that she has been playing for many years with a group of friends, so she didn’t feel entirely out of her league.

But while this tournament was her first venture into competitive Scrabble, she has already participated in crossword tournaments. Two days into her Scrabble experiment, she admits her experience with crosswords as “a lot more interesting” than that of Scrabble.

Abrahams enjoys a good game of Scrabble just as much as the next person, but she has no desire to become an expert. At this point, she knows she’s had enough practice with the game; it’s now a matter of study.

“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in my basement memorizing words,” said Abrahams.

Being perhaps not the best of reporters, I quickly engaged her in a conversation about the fascinating linguistic problems that arise when language becomes fertile ground for memorization rather than meaning. After all, we discussed, a facet of the expert Scrabble game is the knowledge of words, meaning be damned.

“I like to know the meaning of the word,” she said, of unknown words she encounters in her Scrabble matches. When she plays with friends, they keep a dictionary at hand for reference.

“We like to look things up.”

But Scrabble players, on the other hand, could not care less about meaning.

“More than half the words I play I don’t know,” said one player.

“The only advantage to knowing what a word means is what endings it can take,” said another. She related a game in which her opponent played “puliks,” ostensibly the plural of “pulik.” She, however, recognized “puli” as the actual singular and “pulik” as the plural form; she challenged the play and gained an extra turn. (A “puli,” by the way, is a Hungarian herding dog—not that Scrabble players would much care.) So once you go far enough in Scrabble, only its grammatical function matters, whether it’s a noun, verb, or adjective.

~

Joe Edley, like most players, doesn’t care about the meanings. As the only three-time National Scrabble champion, I don’t take his advice lightly (at least in terms of Scrabble).

When I asked him if he has ever really bothered with the meanings of words, he was careful to answer.

Joe Edley runs a tournament; via tumblr.com

 “In general, they’re relevant,” he stated. “You need to know how they’re declined. But,” he continued, “it really is irrelevant.”

“And I don’t want to clutter my brain,” he added.

Saturday Songs - July 23

1. “Gotta Have You” – The Weepies

What a cute song. People struggle to write love songs—thinking they need to be up front about their passions and ending up with these hand-wringingly obvious affairs with clear storyboards and he-said/she-said dynamics. But “Gotta Have You” is understated and on tiptoes where those other songs are all bombast.

And how about those harmonies?

2. “Dance Yrself Clean” – LCD Soundsystem

This is a song I didn’t warm to until actually seeing James Murphy belt it out on stage. Some songs are like that. They sound kind of dead on the album, but once the artist fleshes them out in concert, they never sound the same again. Listening to this on Thursday as I drove through the 90+ degree weather along Route 1 interviewing men and women working out in the heat, this song captured an epic grandeur to my quest that I would not have stumbled upon on my own.

One of my favorite pieces of musical commentary comes from Bruce Springsteen, who, during Dylan’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, commented on the first time he heard “Like A Rolling Stone,” calling the drum hit at the start of the song “the snare shot that sounded like somebody’d kicked open the door to your mind.”

The rapid fire snare at 3:05 into the song is not so much kicking open the door to my mind…but certainly kicking down some kind of door...

3. “Holocene” – Bon Iver



Something in me cringes a little in catering so much to this Bon Iver album; last week, I called out “Towers,” also on Justin Vernon’s most recent album, as the song that “refused for three straight days to leave my head.” But here I am one week later still clinging to this fantastic album.

“Holocene”—the third track on Bon Iver—with a more complex sound than the following track. I cannot stress enough how lost I am as to the significance of the song. With lines like “we smoked the screen to make it was it was to be / now to know it in my memory” it’s too incoherent to make heads or tails of. But one thing—“jagged vacance, thick with ice”—makes me tremble. Maybe that’s just me yearning for winter? (Your own comments below are appreciated.)

4. “Life Is Life” – Noah and the Whale



Especially after Bon Iver, this song provides some welcome relief. I don’t remember the last time I’ve heard such an exuberantly hopeful song; its cheerful, pick-me-up attitude is entirely infectious.

“Well you used to be somebody, but now you’re someone else,

took apart his old life, left it on the shelf.

Sick of being someone he did no admire,

took apart his old things, set them all on fire.”

5. “Think Twice Before You Go” – John Lee Hooker



Some good old-fashioned blues from the master John Lee Hooker, “Think Twice” is a veritable slice of Americana.

Folk Music As A (Literal) Sell-Out

Checking the Newport Folk Festival website just the other week, I was dismayed to discover that the festival’s Saturday tickets had already sold out and that only a small number remained for Sunday. According to the Boston Globe, this year marks the first time in its history that the festival has sold out all tickets in advance. The organizers claim that their online presence helped draw this larger audience. A tad overlooked, however, is the growing popularity of folk music in the United States.

Folk music has never been unpopular in the United States. I grant, of course, that folk rubs shoulders with bluegrass and bluegrass, of course, rubs shoulders with country, which has literally never not been popular in the past century or so. So what would it mean anyway if folk gained a few points in the charts or a few more fans in the stands? If it’s related to country, then it’s basically popular already, right?

The Avett Brothers in concert; via Wikimedia Commons

In this discussion, we make the all-important assumption that we can define folk music in the first place—in other words, it assumes that folk has a nice neat boundary, that certain things are folk and others are not. Take Springsteen—there’s some folk mixed into his music—but I’d just as soon call him a blues musician as a folk musician and neither, in my mind, is quite right.

~

We need to realize that any discussion of genre refers to something that cannot be fixed. No genre is a stable descriptor. Everything changes with time, folk music included. In looking at folk’s somewhat curious rise in popularity, we need to understand the differences between what the genre “folk” means now and what it meant ten years ago. (I won’t even bother with the question of forty or fifty years ago—Pete Seeger unplugging Dylan, anyone?)

Mumford & Sons' Marcus Mumford on percussion; via Wikimedia Commons

This query covers a lot of ground and there are certainly no easy answers. The cookie-cutter response is that the folky bands today—the Avett Brothers, Mumford & Sons, and the Decemberists—simply have more mainstream appeal than folk acts like…well…who were the popular folk acts of 2000 – 2005? Ryan Adams? Gillian Welch? mid-career Bright Eyes? Perhaps their music was not enough to inspire the kind of folk crusade happening today?

~

The questions still remain: who would have thought that a folk (all right…folk-rock) album like the Decemberists’ The King Is Dead could have hit #1 on the Billboard 200 chart even a few years ago? Who would have guessed that Mumford & Sons’ debut album Sigh No More would reach #2 on that same chart? Even Iron & Wine’s bizarre Kiss Each Other Clean hit #2! And Bon Iver hit #2 a few weeks ago!

Time may tell the reason that Americans have returned to their folksy roots. Maybe they have tired of Autotuned vacuity, maybe they’d only like some good old-fashioned, foot-stomping music. All I know is that this sudden trend has stolen those damn concert tickets from me. Then again, I wasn’t exactly checking the festival website for those tickets last summer…if you know what I mean…

~

(The video’s been flipped if you’re wondering why they’re all playing left-handed.)

Wishing Fake Laughter Would Kick The Can

I should start by admitting that I don’t watch a whole lot of television. In fact, the majority of time I spend with my hand on the remote is watching films, not news programs, primetime television, or late night. I watch the Super Bowl and the Oscars, but these hardly put me in the company of hardcore TV junkies. But that won’t stop me from proposing that laugh tracks are the worst thing going in television.

The laugh track, or canned laughter, as it’s sometimes called, was invented by Charles Douglass more than six decades ago. Working with a collection of recorded laughter, Douglass would ease the edits between scenes by adding the prerecorded laughter over the actual live studio sounds. But even when studios largely ditched live sitcom shows, the laughter stayed with them. And we could never get away.

From left to right, Charlie Sheen, Jon Cryer, and Angus T. Jones in the show Two and a Half Men; via google.com

Waiting for Wilfred to begin last Thursday night, my brother Manning and I were greeted by Charlie Sheen’s loudmouth “Charlie Harper” from Two and a Half Men, which is, by many accounts, one of the most successful TV comedies of the decade. And thundering after every one-liner is a swarm of feverish canned laughter. Sometimes it’s more like a single woman with a case of the giggles or a guffawing family. There are degrees of canned laughter, for sure—but there is never no laughter.

~

While we can concentrate on how annoying that laughter is, I would rather consider how Douglass has us all trained to sense a television’s humor à la Pavlov. But my complaint is not merely that we have been trained to sense the humor; I object to our seeming satisfaction with the mere observation of humor. I cannot recall a time that I was moved to laughter by television show employing canned laughter. My experience with these shows is that the fake laughter forces me to recognize the humor of the show rather than laugh at it.

The cast of Modern Family; via unrealitymag.com

 My preference, as you’ve doubtless already guessed, is for shows like Wilfred, that have abandoned canned laughter entirely. Even more so than a show like Wilfred, I’m a fan of the mockumentary-style show like The Office or Modern Family.

Perhaps it all has to due with me rejecting the seemingly boilerplate attitude of a sitcom like Two and a Half Men, but I think the root of my love for these “track-less” shows arises out of the show’s willingness to treat me as a real audience. Watching The Office, I am no longer waiting on Mr. Douglass’s well-meaning invention to tell me when I should think something is funny or not—or even when I should think it’s merely funny and not hysterical. Shows lacking canned laughter do not have the ease of these simple judgments. In leaving decisions of humor up to the audience, a show makes a distinct move away from indifference towards something like respect for those watching.

~

The Office, I think it’s fair to say, respects me as a viewer. It does not toy with my emotions; it presents me a situation and allows me to read it for myself. Humor is not merely humor in The Office; humor is supplanted, at some level, by the reality of the characters. Jim’s pranks on Dwight are not funny because they are pranks, but because they are pranks on Dwight. Perhaps Jim is cruel to Dwight, but Dwight is never exactly cordial to Jim either. The show asks us (whether intentionally or not) to analyze these scenarios and respond with a laugh, or not.

One-liners in Two and a Half Men, I think (I have not watched more than half an episode), are excisable scraps that may be thoughtlessly recycled among one’s friends. When I see Charlie Harper with a broken nose in the hospital, the show seems only to care about the clever things he spouts before the laugh track swells the audio channel. When Andy punches through the wall in The Office, I laugh at the absurdity—but I also worry about his hand.

~

Crowdsourcing: Lazy Writing Or Lame Idea?

What kind of knucklehead thinks he can crowdsource a film?

Film—art for that matter—is not often the product of multiple minds. The movie business likes to contradict my little piece of wisdom—hundreds and hundreds of people, of course, work on any given Hollywood film. But at the end of the day, I would tentatively posit, it’s still a Hitchcock film or a Spielberg film (or even a Michael Bay film). And if it’s not a single person, it’s a group of people…but you wouldn’t make the case for more than a handful. The Wrestler? Let’s say equal parts Mickey Rourke and Darren Aronofsky.

But turning a film over to the masses? As I recently read in a Slate article by Christina Gossman, the latest venture of director D.J. Caruso (I Am Number Four, Taking Lives) is exactly that. Starting out with a plot—attractive girl trapped in room with a computer (*gasp* a Toshiba computer with an Intel processor!)—Caruso is mining the murky online world for ways to solve his plot problem…and, frankly, ways to sell laptop computers.

The hook of the project is that its Hollywood’s first “social film experience.” Starting on July 25, Facebook users will be able to post escape suggestions on the main character’s wall and Twitter users will be able to tweet advice at her. Not only that, Caruso et al has also sent out a casting call for one “talented and well-connected person” who will receive a cameo appearance in the final cut of the film. (How sad to see “talented” so bluntly bound to “well-connected”.)

~

What’s so dismal about this whole project is not the overt, despicable product placement going on, but the seeming lack of creativity. Perhaps Caruso has good intentions in his attempt to conjure a “social film experience,” but I doubt that he will truly manage anything of the sort. I would not be shocked to see the film become a blockbuster in horror circles (it doubtless will be), but am, if I may say so, disappointed in Caruso.

It seems as if Caruso has abandoned storytelling mode. Whether it be laziness or his lackluster social networking dreams, he has fashioned the first ten minutes of a screenplay and tossed it off into the horror chatrooms that certainly abound online. A writer myself, I have a twisted respect for him being able to toss his story to the wolves. (For wolves I’m sure they are; websites with names like “mortalgore.com” have snapped up and reposted the press release.)

But will he really be leaving the story up to the horror fandom out there?

From the press release:

“…viewers will be invited to activate their social channels and help decode Christina's dilemma by posting tips, insights, ideas and clues. The editing team, led by Emmy-winning editor Josh Bodnar, will incorporate posts that best fit the storyline into the episodes.” (emphasis mine)

~

So perhaps there’s a plot out there after all. Maybe they'll disregard the posts and tweets and quietly cough into they're hands that it's...well...just a sad, silly gimmick. It's mostly a fantasy, after all, to imagine that the audience could have much of a role in creating a film. Note that I’m being literal here; I would not dare to discount the theoretical wrangling that must go on between the finished product of a film and the audience—I would not ever dream of offering film (or art) as a purely passive exercise…of course there’s a role for the audience. But not a role in the way that Caruso’s dreaming it.

~

Caruso's Casting Call

Inside Trailer / Behind the Scenes:

Saturday Songs - July 16

Happy Saturday! (Should it still be Saturday and you are perusing this…)

“Saturday Songs” is a feature I’d like to begin this week—Saturday, July 16. I aim to provide you with five songs that I’ve run into this week. I say run into because they won’t always be new songs…or old ones, for that matter…or even ones that I’ve heard many times before. Sometimes, I dare to say, they’ll be songs that I’ll just toss out there because they’ve been on my mind.

I can’t promise full biographical backgrounds on artists, nor can I promise any kind of fully informed review of the album or even of the song. I can only promise to share with you some of the interesting tunes that I’ve crossed paths with during the week.

1. “Towers” – Bon Iver

This song is relentless. The fourth track off Bon Iver’s recent eponymous album Bon Iver, Bon Iver, it has refused for three straight days to leave my head. It’s an “earworm” of the worst kind: a meditatively repetitive lick with the careful motion of a wave on a shoreline, the same gentle, washing rhythm over and over. My immediate comparison tends towards Mark Kozelek’s equally meditative soundscapes—if you like “Towers,” check out Kozelek’s album Songs for a Blue Guitar (recorded under his moniker Red House Painters), especially the track “Have You Forgotten.”

But Vernon’s music is a tad sharper than that of Kozelek. Where Kozelek sounds wounded and desperate with only his voice and an acoustic guitar, Vernon is a chorus of voices and sounds, not all of them easily definable. With his voice triple (quadruple-? quintuple-?)-tracked, he captures an orchestral grandeur not really mustered in any of Kozelek’s music, save the delicately layered “Si Paloma”)

The worst part about this song? I can’t sing it…not even close. Then again, Vernon’s aching falsetto travels into territory most people can’t properly muster.

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2. “Late Bloomer” – Allie Moss

(Unfortunately, the studio version is not available on YouTube, but bear with me - you can find it on Grooveshark as well here for the free download!) 

Probably better known as Ingrid Michaelson’s guitarist, Moss is a singer-songwriters in her own right. Not the strongest songwriting effort, the song is more interesting for its dynamic structure. Usually, I’m not a fan of the songs that value construction over composition…but for Moss I make an exception.

When the shuffling drum pattern of the first half of the song gives way to that louder, more vivid rock pattern—I forgive her the simply subject and trite lyrics. Then again, maybe the “late bloomer” is the song itself? How about that one?

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3. “The Dying Soldier” – Buell Kazee



I’ll go out on a limb and guess that this is probably one you all haven’t heard of before. I found this one foraging through a collection of old Kentucky Appalachian folk music. Along with musicians like the Carter Family, Kazee was one of the first famous country musicians in the 1920s and 30s. He found moderate success with the folk revival in the 1960s.

Kazee is known for his lonesome tenor voice, something showcased in this song. The tale (obviously) of a dying soldier, this one hit me from the first time I heard it. Something in Kazee’s voice rings true to the story he tells; it’s an awfully sad tune…

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4. “Love at the Five and Dime” – Nanci Griffith




It’s hard for me to imagine that someone could truly dislike this song. As one commenter on another YouTube clip of this song rhetorically asks: “Could she be more adorable?” Eh…probably not. Part of the reason I include a live performance and not the original studio track is that watching Griffith talk about the song before playing it is part of the magic (unfortunately I have not seen her in concert…). Playing the song, she has all these tiny facial expressions that, it seems to me, only add further nuance.

The song itself, I find, is a soothing story-song. Sometimes these doomed romance tales end up sounding too epic or overwrought for their own good (“Jack and Diane”; “I Don’t Want to Wait”), but Griffith evokes a neat pathos that never crosses that fine line.

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5. “As Flat As The Earth / Automatic” – Chris Whitley

(No "As Flat As The Earth"...my apologies...)



Something about listening to Whitley makes me imagine a very haunted man—sort of like a countrified Kurt Cobain. He never managed to maintain a consistent audience album to album. He was the kind of musician who resisted attempts at categorization and understanding. Was his music more blues, more rock, more country, or more alternative?

One really need only point at “To Joy (Revolution of the Innocent),” the lead track to his 2000 album Rocket House, which features banjo-picking, DJ scratching, electronic backbeats, and a swarm of voices and guitars that confuse as much as they delight, to see that he’s not an easy man to pin down.

These two tracks (sorry…I know they’re two…but one’s so short!), the first tracks on his album Terra Incognita, set two Whitleys side by side: the bluesy-country with the alternative rock. The slim opening track “As Flat As The Earth” features only Whitley and his guitar for just over a minute. It also includes the chilly call-and-answer line: “How deep is the ground? / As flat as the earth.” What does it mean? Beats me…but it sure sounds frightening.

“Automatic” picks up right where “As Flat” leaves off, blasting off from the trim acoustic playing of the first track into soaring electric riffing.

“Automatic love is all I want,

the end of the day.

Automatic love is all I got

to get away.”