A few little things

As far as music is concerned, BS is based around a fairly singular aesthetic (undiscovered quality music from years past, with the occasional exception). If you're ever in the market to discover some newer tunes, my good friend Ryan Ellis runs a gracefully written blog of his own centered around undiscovered quality music of the present, Weekly Tape Deck. His 2011 year end list had some amazing things I hadn't even heard of before, so give it a check.

Also, I've been meaning to post some cold weather albums I've had sitting around for a few months now, but considering it's still 60 degrees here in North Texas, I'm gonna hold off until we at least get some sleet. In the meantime I have some more mixes coming later this month. If anyone has any requests, feel free to email me and I'll happily oblige.

-Matt

MIX - From Auschwitz to the Ritz

Genre: Post-punk-meets-pop-punk

01) Erstaz - Smile in Shadow
02) Strutz - We are so Fine
03) I'm so Hollow - Distraction
04) The Mudhutters - Page 41
05) Shiny Two Shiny - Through the Glass
06) Mariah - Shinzo no Tobira
07) Silicon Teens - T.V. Playtime
08) Tone Set - Living in Another Land
09) Groovies - Boys Ride Bikes Girls Want to Dance
10) The Freshies - Fasten Your Seatbelts
11) Honey Bane - Baby Love
12) Mark Beer - Pretty
13) The Digital Dinosaurs - Amy Turtle
14) The Cubs - A Dance to Forget
15) The Scrotum Poles - Pick the Cat's Eyes Out
16) Cleaners From Venus - I Can't Stop (Holding On)
17) R. Stevie Moore - Too Old (To Fall in Love)
18) Television Personalities - The Crying Room
19) Greg Vandike - Final Scene
20) Rexy - Perfect Day
21) Max Splodge - Bicycle Seat

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When we dead awaken

we find that we have never lived

YMO - Wild Ambitions

Pedro Almodóvar - The Skin I Live In (2011)

It's a shame I'm just now getting around to this, because it would have ended up in my top 5 of 2011 had I seen it sooner. By far, Almodovar's most bizarre and beautiful film yet. Whether or not he is a better writer or director remains unknown, the only thing certain is that he is excels at both. His latest features some of the finest cinematography I've seen all year alongside a wickedly genius plot that if I was feeling bold, would describe as 'Shakespearean' (maybe even more intricate and original than Talk to Her, which was previously my favorite story of his). Last but not least, 100% guaranteed to sexually confuse many straight men.

The Tyde Discography

Once, Twice, and Three's Co. (appropriate, unassuming titles for such a trifecta), are three of the finest modern pop albums you will ever hear (and will never hear on the radio). I stumbled across these gems last summer and I knew from the moment I heard the opening chords to "All my Bastard Children" that these guys would be all I was listening to for months to come, and I was right. Shimmery production, catchy riffs with Felty-sounding guitars, and sun-and-marijuana baked rhythms, blend together to create some old-fashioned good vibrations. Unmistakably Californian, this is the kind of music you want blasting full volume in your beat up convertible when taking a trip up or down highway 1 to go surfing in Malibu or Orange County with some good friends and a big bag of pot. A modern soundtrack for tan-lines, bleached blonde hair, the smell of surf wax, sandy toes, and heavy eyes, but also the exhaustion and interpersonal disruptions that arise from this kind of bohemian lifestyle, as seen in some of their slower, more sincere songs such as "Best Intentions," "Separate Cars," and "Breaking Up the Band." It's what you'd get if Lawrence, Comet Gain, and Mojave 3 collaborated at the end of a blurred, sun-washed summer in Southern California. I'm totally posting this band at the wrong time of year, but as they say, summer's always just around the corner.

Apparently, Darren and co. are in the process of writing the fourth Tyde album, and there's no doubt that it will be one of my favorite albums of 2012. Be on the lookout for it later this year.

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Jens Lekman at Skybar, Mondrian Sessions

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE

Low - Try to Sleep

New year's resolution:

The Wild Swans - The Worst Year of My Life

For me, 2011 in a song:



Good riddance.

MIX - Old Wave New Year

We all know that NYE, like Halloween, is just a pretense for dressing fancy, get fucked up, and having sex with strangers. This is music for that, more or less.



Genre: New-wave, italo, synth-pop, disco, rug-cutters, nose candy for your ears

01) Chemise - She Can't Love You
02) Madonna - Don't you Know
03) Rebbie Jackson - Centipede
04) Moderne - Sans Signalment
05) Ivan - Fotonovela (chapter 1)
06) Desireless - Voyage Voyage
07) Pete Shelley - Telephone Operator
08) Silicon Teens - Sun Flight
09) Ultima Emocion - Maquinas Romanticas
10) Patrizia Pellegrino - Automatic Amore
11) Lilli Berlin - Midnight Lady
12) Telex - L'Amour Toujours
13) Fake - Brick
14) Colourbox - Tarantula
15) Trees - 11AM
16) Tirez Tirez - Set the Timer
17) Love Tractor - Neon Lights
18) Aviador Dro - Programa en Espiral

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Bone Thugs-N-Harmony - Tha Crossroads

E. 1999 Eternal : Is there anything more representative of the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy in all of hip hop and more importantly, is there any more appropriate music to listen to while getting the bond for your theft case reinstated?

Gary Oldman - Nil by Mouth (1997)

Two of the more PROgressive things I heard this year.

Gang Gang Dance - Eye Contact



Remember that scene in Party Monster where Natasha Lyonne grinds up various pharmaceuticals in her 'drug salad?' Eye Contact is a lot like that. It's drug-induced melodies sound bizarrely alien and futuristic. Mellifluous chanting over textures and textures of some of the most pristine synthetic sounds you will ever hear. The opening track, "Glass Jar," is over 11 minutes in length and it's meanderings are fluid like ripples of water. This is not the type of album where the creators sat down armed with influences like many 21st century releases, but rather one where you get the impression that they made this from scratch, with only human creativity and mind expanding substances for inspiration. A very remarkable album.

Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica



Daniel Lopatin's Replica is a psychedelic ambient album and to be frank, it sounds like what I would imagine music sounds like a century from now. This is a truly progressive work, and it's obvious why I saw it on so many people's year end lists. All coherency is abandoned, preconceptions of structure and timing disregarded. Replica's composition is unpredictable from moment to moment, but it is far from 'random' - you get the idea that complex concepts are behind every transition, every loop, every alternation from harmony to dissonance, and it's all composed together in a cleverly woven tessellation of tonal adjustments and noise. It is in its very unpredictable nature that it's intensity arises. It is no doubt a beautiful set of music. However, it's beauty is a strange and dark one, like the radiation afterglow lingering in the atmosphere after an atomic explosion, the dichotomy of beauty and death. Much like The KLF's Chill Out, or Loveless, this is an album, not a collection of individual songs. Also contains my favorite cover art of the year.

Gaston Bussière - Yseult la Blonde (1900)

Try to think back on what the word 'awesome' meant before it was dragged through the dirt of 90s pop culture.

The Rolling Stones - Paint it Black

MIX - Fuck the Holidaze

A 38 track punk rock holiday mix

Tracklist:

01) The Incestors - Something Better Change
02) Country Teasers - Good Pair of Hands
03) Continental Co-ets - I Don't Love you No More
04) J.C. Satan - Morning After Love
05) GG Allin - Carmelita
06) Sonny & The Sunsets - Bad Vibes and Evil Thoughts
07) The Beets - Your Name is on my Bones
08) Hunx and his Punx - He's Coming Back
09) Dead Boys - Sonic Reducer
10) Undertones - Teenage Kicks
11) Special Forces - Rollercoaster
12) Magic Michael - Millionaire
13) Pentagram - Starlady
14) Electric Frankenstein - All's Moving Faster
15) 88 Fingers Louie - Try it Again
16) The Birdhouse - Sick Boy
17) The Moonhearts - Eat my Shorts
18) The Misfits - Where Eages Dare
19) Fetchin' Bones - You're so Much
20) SS Decontrol - How Much Art
21) Negative Approach - Nothing
22) Nausea - Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing
23) Funeral Oration - Never Die
24) Sorry - Listen
25) Generation of Vipers - Ritual
26) Last Rites - No Right to Take
27) Bevis Frond - High in A Flat
28) Reversal of Man - Obsession
29) Endtables - Trick or Treat
30) Long Hind Legs - Open Wide
31) Sneaky Feelings - Throwing Stones
32) World of Pooh - Cake Flotiulla
33) Primitons - All my Friends
34) The Trilobites - Venus in Leather
35) Ned's Atomic Dustbin - Happy
36) The Fumes - Poploaded
37) The Flatmates - Happy all the Time
38) Little Murders - 100 Drugs

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Some thoughts on Lars Von Trier's Antichrist

There are few things more frustrating to me than having to state the obvious. Antichrist is a film that I feel has been largely misunderstood more so than any other film of the past decade. I could offer countless "essays" written about it that don't even focus on what it is really about for more than a sentence or two. I have a lot to say about this movie, but I'll try to condense/summarize it as best as possible.

Antichrist is about mental illness and 'neuroticism' (which is a state caused by our society's anal-retentive avoidance of the natural order: death, decay, chaos, 'creatureliness', meaninglessness, and ephemera to name a few) It is about how these states come to arise, how they are contagious, and how they can spiral out of control very easily. It is an extreme chronicle of such a downward spiral and how even the people society deifies - the so-called infallible ones - (in this case, a psychologist) are susceptible. It is the most uncomfortable and confrontational film I've ever seen.

If you browse over the (masturbatory) article I posted above, you'll see that the author is fixated on guilt and grief, but those are the catalysts, the precursors, not the central focus. Aside from maybe a tangential sentence or two, the article does not mention my above observations. The tragic and horrifying loss of her child, and the grief which followed, are what caused her to become mentally ill. My guess is she would have had some dormant issues beforehand which this triggered, given the topic of her thesis she was writing. The isolation and her phobia of the woods exacerbated these things.

Many feel that Antichrist is a very cryptic and ambiguous movie, but I strongly disagree. It's themes are fairly evident, unlike, say Lynch's Inland Empire. One of the reasons I claim to 'get' Antichrist is because it deals with a lot of issues I've experienced personally and have dedicated several years to researching. They are not very popular, and hard to understand from a distance. You really have to have to dig around in the psychiatric text of the last half century because the ideas are considered misanthropic/threatening by the majority of the psychiatric community who would rather sugar coat and speak in euphemisms. The gist is that civilization is one complex and ridiculous defense mechanism against finitude, meaninglessness, chaos, death, etc. etc. and when our own internal defense mechanisms fail, so do our hero systems, thus creating all mental illness (anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, and so on). In essence our self-consciousness would drive us insane if it were not for culture, distractions, and the meaning we assign to things. When we are removed from these things we are more vulnerable to the threats the we try to avoid and from there it really becomes a slippery slope (which is the focus of Antichrist). Lars Von Trier who is one of, if not perhaps the most neurotic, phobic, manic depressed filmmakers alive has been doing what all artists strive to do, and that is to express and in turn, purge internal conflict, suffering, etc. So while many critics tend to argue that his intentions are vague, I feel that a neurotic, phobic, manic depressed filmmaker most likely made a neurotic, depressing film about phobias. But hey, it could also be a total coincidence and I may be the one projecting here.

I was having a discussion with a stubborn friend who claimed that guilt was a far more prevalent theme than insanity and even that the insanity in Antichrist is a fictional one (whatever that means). Dafoe sees a dead fox in the woods and it says fucking "chaos reigns" to him. That is unquestionably a hallucination which is an acute symptom of schizophrenia. That is purely objective and is not up for discussion. It could not be more blatant if he looked directly into the camera and proclaimed "My character is losing his shit." If Dafoe's character was of a sound mind, it would just be a dead animal, and hardly a big deal. This is just one example. I don't even need to explain how Gainsbourg's character is nuts. It is obviously a film about insanity, or more appropriately 'mental illness.' However, it is such a brilliantly accurate and intimate portrayal of mental illness, because it's written and directed by a man who has experienced it first hand, allowing him to capture the tiny details often overlooked by most cliche-ridden films on the subject (A Beautiful Mind, for example)

Then of course there is the sex guilt attributed to an overly moral and repressed society, the 'Adam and Eve' metaphor, the assumed misogyny, and She's paper are all symbolic on their own, but unrelated (well, yes, but not directly) and add even more depth to an already complex study. It also ridicules the notion that the psychologist is any different from the rest of us, which I feel is an important point that hasn't been properly made in a film. If I were to get into all of these things, I'd be merely restating what many people have already said before me, so I'll spare us both. I'll conclude by saying what I've told many people before: Antichrist is a work of genius. If you have watched this movie, and didn't like it for whatever reason, watch it again with what I've said in mind. I guarantee you will appreciate it more.

David Cronenberg - A Dangerous Method (2011)

As a preface I'd like to admit that as far as film critics go, I'm kind of a slacker. Unless a movie is just an atrocious mess and I must entertain myself by dissecting it in a humorous manner (recently, Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale comes to mind, although I'm still unsure if that was just hilariously bad or a brilliantly subtle Michael Bay parody), I generally like to get lost in the fictional boundaries and not analyze it until afterwards, where the sum is often more apparent to me than the parts. I also tend to not re-watch movies very often, so unless I'm already infatuated with a movie (in which case my impressions will most likely be wildly hyperbolic anyways), its rare that I'll study a movie with several revisits. My point is that I like watching movies far more than I like writing or talking about them (both of which I do enjoy), so my film write-ups are far more casual than my music ones, and can typically be reduced to me either hating, being impartial to, liking, or loving, as opposed to getting really in depth. The only movie I can think of off the top of my head that I've felt an urge to truly analyze was Antichrist, and I may one day get around to posting my lengthy thoughts about it on here.

Moving on, there are a lot of arguments to be made against Keira Knightley. If you've ever seen her speak in interviews, you know she is a naturally obnoxious person. She's the type of girl who brings to mind a spoiled English princess ("But fother, I wont a poooooe-ny!"). That being said, I thought her portrayal of Sabina Spielrein in A Dangerous Method was one of the best performances of the year. Many will disagree, and say she overacted but I feel she played her character exceptionally well. Fassbender, Mortensen, Cassel, the girl who played Jung's wife, and hell, even the minor characters and extras were all very believable as well. Knightley especially though - not only was she a convincing schizoid, which is one of the most difficult parts an actor/actress can play, but she also had to forge a Russian accent on top of it, which makes the role even more difficult.

The film is a drama, and although there are some very intense erotic scenes, it is largely dialogue based and will likely bore some. Had it not been for the subject matter and the historical people/events it was focused on, which I find very interesting, I would have probably been bored as well. Although heavy, the dialogue was nearly impeccable throughout. In classic Cronenberg fashion, there are a few lines that are hilarious and a few that will linger in your memory for some time after ("I'll gently rip you to shreds"). Howard Shore's Wagner-inspired theme (featured in the trailer) is wonderfully suiting - I'd even say one of the better main themes for a film in the past several years. The cinematography was some of Cronenberg's finest as well. This was just a really well-made film, all around. Saying that it's Cronenberg's best would be difficult because its vastly different from his 80s work such as Videodrome and his 90s work such as Naked Lunch and Crash and it's hard to offer comparison with such different styles. He has transcended his reputation for being a gimmicky 'body violence' master and has showed with his recent films that he is capable of much more. To call him competent, would be a discredit to his talent - he is much more than that and his latest is my third favorite film I've seen this year.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM BS