Saturday Songs - Aug. 6

1. “Great Big Plans” – Jenny Owen Youngs

Oh. My. God. This song is fantastic. Youngs—who would seem only another Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter—has released this whale of a single off her sort-of-upcoming album. Produced by Greg Laswell, who also provides backing vocals, it reaches far beyond any kind of coffeehouse setting. Huge-sounding guitars and a lilting, wordless chorus, Youngs seems set for a world outside of the anti-folk and confessional songwriter scene.

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2. “Casimir Pulaski Day” – Sufjan Stevens

Long touted by myself as one of the saddest songs ever, Stevens pulls off a miraculously tragic story into a spare six minutes, starkly rendering a series of situations with ghostly details. But the deft songwriting here does more than confront the death of a friend; it confronts the bluntness and discomfort of a God who “takes and takes and takes.”

The trauma and doubt here are universal pleas for understanding—and even for a respite, a break for all the wonderful things in the song to happen fully and openly, instead of in fractured moments: “I remember at Michael’s house / in the living room when you kissed my neck / and I almost touched your blouse.” It’s the single happy verse in the entire song; the key here, however, is that the moment is openly a remembrance, not in the present compared to the rest of the lyrics.

That is the other fascinating aspect to the song—its placement in the present tense. This particular phrasing allows Stevens to construct a world in which the sickness and death of his friend is an ongoing process, relived every time the song plays. That probably explains why it’s so sad…

“All the glory that the Lord has made

and the complications when I see His face

in the morning in the window.

All the glory when He took our place,

but He took my shoulders and He shook my face

and He takes and He takes and He takes.”

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3. “Permanent” – Kenneth Pattengale & Joey Ryan (now the Milkcarton Kids)

Joey Ryan has long been a favorite of mine who writes some fantastic folk songs. As a live performer he is exceptional—even (though it seems strange to say this) sounding better in concert than on CD. As it so happens, this song is recorded from a live performance with friend Kenneth Pattengale. But coupling the song with Pattengale’s careful harmonies and his strong lead guitar makes for an even better song than simply Ryan playing solo.

Free

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4. “The Outdoor Type” – The Lemonheads

From The Lemonheads’ underrated album Car Button Cloth, this song is typical Evan Dando fare: a prickly narrator who would sooner be left in what I’d term “comfortable solitude” than commit to some real human interaction. Granted, my reading of this song suffers a little in light of my commit to being at least somewhat of an outdoor type. The song is centered on the lie told by Dando’s narrator, telling his outdoorsy girlfriend that he is an outdoor person to please her when he is actually not.

The question raised by this dilemma, however, is not whether that the narrator’s lie is worth the relationship, but whether it’s worth compromising the self in order to please a loved one (or potential loved one). Is the narrator endorsing a tactic of self-unfulfillment by lying about this?

Either way—unhelpful as this is from a critical perspective—I’m on the girlfriend’s side.

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5. “Junebug” – Robert Francis

You know it’s an ugly crowd when the applause for opener Robert Francis is lukewarm compared to the roars generated by Jason Mraz’s fedora’d presence. A personal favorite of mine.

Can You Put A Kindle On A Shelf?

As some of you already know (or could guess), the infringement of the e-book particularly troubles me. When I see Kindles and Nooks being whipped out of bags on the subway or on the sidewalk, the warm, nostalgic core in me trembles with fear. My only comfort is to know that I am not alone; there are others out there who would be willing to fight tooth and nail to keep our dusty, old volumes instead of replacing them with newfangled gadgets. (God…that phrase makes me sound like I don’t even know what the Internet is…)

I have struggled with how to express my discomfort with the flock of Kindles, Nooks, iPads, and other like devices quickly eating up their share of the book market. After all, there’s so much ease associated with these machines: easy annotation (that you can erase, if you choose), a quick and easy download process (so long, library?), and features like text search that make scholarly research, among other things, much easier. It would be unjust if I did not admit to using, even endorsing, that feature, via the text of books that can be accessed via Google Books. Finding a single John Stuart Mill passage from of a 250-page treatise has, frankly, never been easier.

That said, I’m not quite ready to dismiss that hulking political theory textbook that I so lovingly inked up with my Pilot pens, if you know what I mean. Or maybe you don’t. The thing is, I’m not even clear myself why it matters to have this thing physically with me—why should it be any different to have the text on a Kindle where I can neatly whip it up off of a hard drive and still make my own brusque little comments on it and save them/erase them at my leisure?

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A recent article I read on the Guardian website by William Skidelsky investigated the debate regarding the cost of e-books. If there’s no physical book there—if it’s just a text file neatly jostled into, let’s say, a Kindle format—then why the (sometimes) steep prices? The reality, as Skidelsky points out, is that while readers sometimes like to imagine that the price of books ought to be chocked up solely to their physical value (the printing and distribution costs are often as low as $3.50 in the United States), there are still the entire branches of editing and marketing to factor into that final cost.

The debate, which has largely been between Amazon.com and larger publishers, centers on whether or not the relatively high costs of print media should carry over into the digital domain. What's so interesting about this dilemma is that the physicality of the book is really what’s at stake. My final stance in this argument, regardless of how simplistic it sounds, is that I like books as objects, not just as texts. The text, overwhelmingly, is what remains important, but there’s something alluring about actually possessing it.

When compared the music industry, the issue becomes even more revealing. Music, unlike books, is a medium that does not necessarily have a natural physical form; sound must be captured—either to tape, vinyl, or digital file. But now, with the advent of digital music “clouds” and services like Spotify, music seems to also be headed (again) for an “a-physical” presence in most of our lives. We, apparently, no longer want to actually own anything; we want everything embedded into a tiny, easily managed computer file that can be tucked away at a moment’s notice.

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But I don’t want possession in this limited sense. I want books and I want CDs and I want DVDs (if it were at all feasible, I would love a film projector and reels…). Having an iPod to shuffle through different artists at a moment’s notice is pleasant enough, but more pleasant are the mixtapes that I have slaved over for hours (literally).

So there is something, hard though it may be to quantify and acknowledge, to owning a copy of a book, not simply some digital file of it. I like finishing a book and tucking it away neatly into a big set of shelves. There is not, I think, a digital substitute for that.

Death Cab And Frightened Rabbit Concert*

Because I am a total moron, I forgot to bring a camera with me Tuesday night. Yes—shame on me.

With the venue situated directly on the East River in Brooklyn, a camera would have been more than welcome. With the sun setting on the Manhattan skyline and two of my favorite bands (Death Cab For Cutie and Frightened Rabbit) playing out at the river, I would have loved just one photo.

Imagine: the Manhattan skyline—the top of the Empire State building ringed with light, a huge, crescent moon serenely on the rise, and Ben Gibbard singing this:

“I could open my arms

and span the length of the isle of Manhattan

and bring it to where you are,

leaving a lake of the East River and Hudson.”

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It goes without saying that the concert on both ends was excellent. In fact, if I could offer up any piece of criticism up to Gibbard et al, it would be that the show seemed very nearly too meticulous. Not perfect—there were stray notes here and there and a careful amount of grit to the performance—but everything went so swimmingly. Take, for instance, the double drum set outro tacked onto “We Looked Like Giants”…Ben Gibbard trading snare hits with Jason McGerr?

Death Cab For Cutie (clearly NOT at Williamsburg Waterfront...; via Wikimedia Commons

My first question was not why Gibbard knows how to play drums, but rather how are they pulling it off this well? Where’s the edge? I always like a little anxiety when band members stray from their roles—but Ben seemed born to play those drums. Not that I can fault him for being a good drummer or a confident musician…but there you have it. Death Cab is the s***?

*UPDATE

Kayla has contributed pictures from the concert (she is the best!)!

The Manhattan skyline at sunset from Williamsburg Waterfront; photo by Kayla Safran

Death Cab playing at Williamsburg Waterfront; photo by Kayla Safran

Why 3-D? Why? Why? Why?

I saw Captain America two weeks ago and the question has been rattling around my mind ever since. Why does Hollywood feel the need to brutalize their films this way? Caught at the movie theater with my brother and sister with the option of a 7 p.m. 3-D showing and an 8 p.m. 2-D showing at 6:45, we chose the closer of the two.

It was a bad idea and I knew it going on—from the moment the ticket-checker-man handed me the silly 3-D glasses (that actually sort of look like Ray-Bans). That facet of the experience might have been enough to discourage me.

But on top of that the film…well…it just looked bad.

That sounds simplistic and unfair, but I don’t think I’m wrong. Besides the screen itself being so dark and muddy-looking, the glasses also contributed to a heightened sense of darkness and discoloration. Given its 1940s setting, I could see the clear attempt to give some of the scenes a honeyed, amber color—a kind of sepia-toned nostalgia.

It had all the urges of a return to simpler filmmaking; even Peggy Carter, the British love interest, feels homey and uncomplicated—played by actress Hayley Atwell with undercurrents of sexual suggestion, but nothing provocative or steamy. Even the film’s bad guys are uncomplicated—Nazis—who likes Nazis?

There’s never a question of sympathy or underlying character there that is so pervasive in most superhero films nowadays. Ivan Vanko in Iron Man 2…the Joker in The Dark Knight…the Green Goblin in Spiderman. Going back to Nazis yields such pleasant simplicity.

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My question then is why the film must be in 3-D—why does Hollywood feel the need to confound a simple, pleasing plot by coupling it with an awkward, showy screen dynamic.

I must admit that 3-D can (read: might) work on two different levels in a movie theater.

Either a) someone like James Cameron makes use of it to produce an interesting, visionary set piece with lots of cool-looking stuff (how debonair did that sound?) or b) someone like Michael Bay produces a piece of crapola with no redeeming value beyond its capacity to fill seats and sell popcorn. Not that I have anything against either formula; both have their uses—one is interesting to look at, the other (mostly) harmless fun—but Hollywood needs to recognize that the 3-D playground ought to end right about there.

Hollywood insiders tout 3-D as the future of film. But can you really imagine watching a romantic comedy in 3-D? What would be the point of that? I can imagine a “gross-out” film in 3-D—just for some extra mileage out of the audience during those icky moments—but no one watches Love Actually or The Proposal so that things can jump off the screen at you or so that you can clearly see the back wall of that restaurant is a differentiated background from the lead couple in the foreground.

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The truth is that we don’t watch films for the technology. If that were the truth, then no one would read books or comic strips or look at paintings; everyone would be glued to the big screen and indulge in nothing else. But, obviously, that’s far from the truth.

In remembering the chatter surrounding Avatar, I recall reading quotes about how this advancement in 3-D is comparable to the introduction of sound film with The Jazz Singer in 1927.

But did that mean that sound films were dead? People today still watch silent films. Silent films are regularly included on critics’ polls of the greatest films. Chaplin, Keaton, and Dreyer are regularly cited as three of the all-time great directors.

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My own devil’s advocate points out to me that, despite this critical and commercial success across time, nobody makes blockbuster silent films anymore. My answer to that line of questioning is not perfect, but I believe it has some merit.

If, for instance, I argue that through the inclusion sound in film, Hollywood sought to implement a more realistic vision of the world in their art (which would not, I fear, be entirely accurate), then I could turn to 3-D and accuse it of stretching beyond the world of realism. What does 3-D represent anyway? After all, no one actually sees in 3-D; just like any single unadulterated camera lines, our eyes focus on a single plane of space in front of us, not several.

Perhaps a somewhat appropriate metaphor is struck with music. Say that a record producer wants to make a song with frequencies beyond the range of human hearing—instead of phrasing those ideas into the normal range, he asks listeners to wear an “extra” set of ear buds intended to translate that noise down a few frequencies into a human range. You can argue with me to the ends of the earth about whether or not that’s a fair comparison (it’s probably not), but it still holds some ground and even I grant that, if anything else, it would be a pretty cool experiment.

The caveat, however, is exactly that. It would remain no more than a pretty cool experiment. That, I think, is what 3-D films remains and will continue to be, despite the best efforts of Hollywood’s deep pockets.