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I had assumed that I knew a fair amount of people excited to see Fantastic Mr. Fox because of the magic combination of Roald Dahl and Wes Anderson (I assumed the Noah Baumbach component was pretty much just an enticement to me, at least statistically speaking). But after Marisa and I went to see the movie with Chris & Shannon (in town from Boston), Maggie & Kyle (on their way out of town I guess for the Boston exchange program), and Marie, we found out that only three of the seven of us had read it. So I guess the draw was the magical combination of Wes Anderson and stop-motion animation, or maybe just Wes Anderson and celluloid? I'm pretty easy as far as Wes Anderson goes. I'd actually go so far as to call Fantastic Mr. Fox the least outright hilarious of his movies; that thing that some people say he does, where his movies aren't really laugh-out-loud funny but rather dry-and-droll funny, I don't usually subscribe to that, but here it's kind of true. Anderson has a rep in some corners as a glassed-in, airless filmmaker who stifles spontaneity with his immaculate compositions, but this take underestimates what the actors can bring to his roles, even if it's subtle -- how delivery and reactions can really enhance his comedy. In Fantastic Mr. Fox, taking out the onscreen actors makes everything seem even more deadpan and bizarre. Did I mention delightful? It's also delightful. The movie is a joy to look at, and if it's not as hilarious -- or moving, really -- as Royal Tenenbaums or Life Aquatic, it has the extra zip of retro but gorgeously crafted stop-motion animation. Anderson and Baumbach alter the Dahl story more through addition, but it gets the spirit of the story right while filtering it through Anderson's sensibility. The movie's tension between civilization and wildness would make this an amusing and thematically fitting dessert following Where the Wild Things Are.
On Saturday, we split off with Chris and Shannon; they went to a museum and BAM while we had a brunch with a bunch of Wes '03 kids, saw the barely-released new Joseph Gordon-Levitt drama Uncertainty at IFC in our downtime (review coming), and then met up with Nathaniel and Katie for 2012. I think it's safe to say that there are few people on this earth who were more excited for 2012 than Katie, not even the dude at my office whose favorite movie is Independence Day. So not only was I excited for 2012 because of how much I like movies where stuff gets destroyed, I was excited for how excited Katie was to see 2012. And on those levels, it did not disappoint, and on all other possible levels, what am I, stupid? Of course they do a lousy job of characterizing a cross-section of humanity, of course there are cornball jokes and a scene where thank god a fucking dog survives the fucking global apocalypse, and there's always a mean government operative and a scientist who warned us all. Of course Roland Emmerich is a giant hack. But even when he shoots his movie digitally and it kinda looks video-y in between the mostly fantastic (and occasionally greenscreeny) scenes of mass destruction, he does a pretty good of delivering the cornball/secretly horribly cynical goods. Sometimes, anyway. He did do that Godzilla movie where no one died on screen. But he makes up for it here, even if the actual body carnage is limited by the PG-13 rating.
I do have a beef with the way Emmerich can't help but reduce his collateral damage by the end of the movie. Even when he parcels out the sweet, sweet mayhem, as he does to some degree in this movie, he always winds up with some low-grade climax involving people like, swimming underwater or getting chased by the wind or something. If your movie has a scene where people fly an airplane out of Las Vegas while the entire city falls into the fiery bowels of the earth around them, including an entire train plummeting to, essentially, hell, then it should not end with people trying to fix the doors on a boat. Also, I was promised spaceships. Granted, I was the one who made that promise by willfully misunderstanding the trailer for this movie, but still, I want to see some fucking spaceships filled with giraffes, and speaking of wild animals, I want to see them running rampant through the fiery ruins of humanity, but Fantastic Mr. Fox comes a lot closer in that department. See what this movie does to people?
Today we had brunch with Chris and Shannon at River Barrel, and while it's not quite Brooklyn Label level quality, it's a lot easier to get a table, and they had a special where you get a waffle *and* a pancake *and* a scrambled egg. That is a menu Roland Emmerich could be proud of. Wait, are we still talking about 2012? I liked when they drove the car through the building, that was fucking awesome.
Have I mentioned how poorly I ate this weekend? Cheeseburger, pizza, brownies, waffle+pancake. I need to get back to yogurt this week.
This afternoon Tim called me because he was down the street at his friend Nicole's place. I went over and played Scrabble and got fucking trounced. Actually, the whole game was one of those Scrabble clusterfucks where for the first half of the game we couldn't get out of the lower left-hand corner of the board, so Tim kept pulling out stuff where he'd put down two letters, make four words, and get thirty points, and the rest of us were left scrapping to stay out of last place for most of the game. Also, I had all vowels. For several turns, I literally had all vowels.
I didn't take any pictures this weekend even though I saw an amazing variety of friends. However, when I saw Marie on Friday she confessed that she was hoping I'd bring my camera and take pictures because she hasn't figured into my Facebook albums where it tallies up who's in how many pictures. I found that pretty endearing and let's say I neglected to take any pictures on Saturday or Sunday out of respect.
I'm going to bed now and try really hard not to eat any more leftover Twizzlers. Did I mention I also had Twizzlers? It's OK, the world is ending in 2012.Current Music: The Mountain Goats - From TG&Y |
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Nov. 15th, 2009 @ 05:09 pm
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 Current Music: la casa azul "c'est fini" |
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cards!
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Nov. 15th, 2009 @ 09:07 am
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Dudes, these Santa Cards I made are available at Topatoco! He is in the festive spirit wink wink. |
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Boxed
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Nov. 13th, 2009 @ 08:31 am
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Generally, I have to say, I'm pretty good about shopping, which should maybe not be considered so much of an accomplishment for a 29-year-old boy. So let me rephrase: I am pretty good about not buying useless crap. I spend a fair amount of money on movie tickets and concert tickets, but I don't count that as useless crap, not even when I see Saw VI, and between press screenings, frequent moviegoer cards, and sneaking, I see a fair number of movies for free, too. Marisa and I don't eat at a lot of expensive restaurants (or even at any restaurants during the week) and obviously I don't spend much of anything at bars unless I'm buying my lady a drink (and even then, her tastes are not posh). I keep the typical nerd indulgences in useless crap, namely toys and comic books, in check by rarely buying toys that cost over five bucks and loving many comic books that come out infrequently or erratically (though, admittedly, the most efficient way to save money on comics is to only buy trades from Amazon).
Even with the stuff I do accumulate, I try to be thrifty. If I'm not buying an album right when it comes out, I'm probably getting it used (cheaper than iTunes!), and I don't usually buy a DVD unless it's under ten dollars for some reason. However: there are a few instances where my pricing standards backfire on me and wind up with me actually kinda sorta almost buying my version of useless crap. Most of them involve DVD box sets. Not just whatever box set, mind you, because there are tons of box sets (boxed sets? I don't know which usage is correct) involving just about any combination of movies and TV shows, logical and not, complete or not, available to the foolish consumer. Generally, I am fine with buying movies one at a time for very little money. But Amazon, cruel cruel Amazon, sometimes has really awesome deals, such as every James Bond movie for like ninety dollars.
I did not, in fact, go through with buying every James Bond movie for ninety dollars (even though that's less than five dollars per movie!) because when that deal was going on, it was almost Christmas, and how many times would I watch a James Bond movie, anyway? I'm pretty sure the only one I've seen twice straight through was, yes, You Only Live Twice, because who am I to contradict the title? (Also, Roald Dahl wrote the screenplay. True!) But if someone points out a really (technically) good deal on Amazon, like, say, a box set of fourteen Alfred Hitchcock movies for what works out to a mere four dollars per movie, sometimes I will bite.
And bite I did; the "Alfred Hitchock Masterpiece Collection" is now on our DVD shelf, where Marisa moved it after I placed it on our mantle (it's very classy-looking, probably moreso than other box sets we own such as the "Alien Quadrilogy" set prominently featuring a made-up word; it's also classier-looking than any number of box sets I may buy in the future if the price is right, or just assemble from DVDs I already have individually, such as the "Anna Faris Masterpiece Collection" or the "Jason Statham Fucking Awesomeness Collection"). I have not seen all of the movies in this set, though I have seen most of the ones that are actually considered masterpieces or even very good movies: Psycho, Vertigo, Shadow of a Doubt, The Man Who Knew Too Much (J-Stew version, natch), The Birds, and Rear Window. Plus also Saboteur and Rope which I doubt anyone considers masterpieces are both pretty cool. The set also includes a bunch of late-period Hitchcock movies like Frenzy and Topaz that I've long assumed are more like Brian De Palma movies, with some amazing set pieces that don't really hold together. The unseen movies are actually one of the most attractive things about this set; it's like buying a season set of an awesome TV show that somehow includes lost episodes, even though these movies aren't lost by any stretch of the imagination.
If you're a fan of meaningless statistics, maybe you'll be interested in the one that this purchase created: in one silly Amazon purchase, Alfred Hitchcock went from being one of many directors with zero representation on our DVD shelf to the one with the absolute most. He stole the title from Martin Scorsese, who was in turn holding it primarily because my last impulsive DVD box set purchase was a set of five Warner Brothers Scorsese movies for the retail price of the Goodfellas special edition included therein (you see what I mean, about death by a thousand good deals that nonetheless still cost money?).
This led to a quick analysis of what directors are best-represented on the Jesse-Marisa DVD alliance shelves:
1. Alfred Hitchcock: 14
2. Martin Scorsese: 10
3. Steven Spielberg: 9
4. Quentin Tarantino: 6
5. Tim Burton: 5.5
6. Wes Anderson: 5
7. Robert Rodriguez: 5
8. George Lucas: 4
And then there's a four-way tie between Steven Soderbergh, the Coen Brothers, and Christopher Nolan, also with four apiece.
Burton gets the point-five because he didn't actually direct Nightmare Before Christmas but come on; and Anderson goes above Rodriguez because that five represents 100% of his movies except that one coming out on Friday and because we have two copies of The Royal Tenenbaums. Lucas squeaks ahead of the other four-timers because Empire and Jedi may not have been directed by him but, again, come on. I couldn't think of suitable tiebreakers after that.
Perhaps the weirdest thing about this inventory is what it doesn't include. For example, Spielberg movies I don't have include Jaws, E.T., Close Encounters, and Jurassic Park (in a telling peek into my psychology, the one I've come closest to buying is Jurassic Park because you can get all three Jurassic Park movies together for like fifteen bucks sometimes). I have a bunch of Robert Rodriguez movies but not Desperado. Regarding Tim Burton, somehow neither Marisa nor I own Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, or Ed Wood. Given my love of Soderbergh semi-ephemera, it's not surprising that I don't have Traffic or even Ocean's 11, but maybe a little weird that I didn't find a three-dollar copy of Full Frontal at some point (or rather, two copies: one for me, one for Rob, unless he already owns it, which he might).
But then it kind of makes sense, because if went out and bought all of those movies, it would probably be several years, if not more, before we actually sat down and rewatched them again. So the point turns out to be, Marisa and I are suspending our Netflix account after we watch The Stepfather (the original starring Locke from Lost, not the Gossip Boy remake out in theaters right now). And, also: come over and watch Hitchcock and Scorsese movies anytime.
In current-release news, I saw Women in Trouble, a sort of faux-Almodovar movie, as well as Broken Embraces, a genuine Almodovar movie. I was OK with both of them. My review of Women in Trouble is online at the L Magazine website; I still have to figure out how to write my Broken Embraces review for next Friday given that I neither know very much nor, honestly, care very much about Almodovar (though I did mostly enjoy this movie, which I've since read is considered sort of treading-water disappointment for him).
Next week's project is to go to bed before 12:30AM every single night from Sunday through Thursday. |
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Remember, Montreal! I'm going to be at Expozine this weekend! You should come.
I realized today that the comic I was working on was going to take longer than I thought, so I made these up real quick before I take off for Montreal! You go to one of these things, and it's four days gone like a flash. Not that anyone checks the internet on the weekend, but still. In any case, I like the Kiss elves.
Store! |
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http://www.mlsfinder.com/wa_nwmls/theresabastian/index.cfm?action=email_listing_detail&property_id=29143997&domain=bastianteam.yourkwagent.com
The only picture there that is ca. My Time At That House (so, roughly 1980-2002) is the overhead one, which was taken by one of those businesses who fly over your house and take pictures and then try to sell them to you later. I think. There is a giant green turtle sandbox on the deck there. That thing ate some of my G.I. Joes—I'm convinced of it.
The interior shots don't look too much like the house did when we lived there—the rooms are too clean and spare, for one, and the furniture is all too fancy. They've done some work on the inside, it looks like—new carpeting and paint in the living room. Hardwood floors in what was our den/family room, which just makes the room seem cold (which is odd, since that room opens up off the kitchen/dining nook—you'd want a warmer room for that. They've also redone the master bathroom to such an extent that I can only barely guess at the orientation of everything (just based on the placement of the windows in the picture).
I'm halfway tempted to make a fake appointment to go visit and see what they've done to the rest of the place. I'm already angry at them for taking out that large shrubby thing out in front as well as the front lawn. The front of the house used to have a driveway that curved in to a defunct garage door (it got relocated on the wall 90 degrees clockwise from it with another driveway feeding into that new door) and which led to the front door—it's where we stowed the tent-trailer and boat (when we had them) and was where I parked my old Ford Taurus in high school/college. The drive way snaked between a this nice big bushy thing (which you can see in the aerial shot) and a small front lawn with a planter (which you can see in this picture of ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) archaeologydork and me, as we make a lovely sculpture out of snow [three guesses as to what we of all people would make out of snow]). But Stupid New Owners tore out everything that was green in front of the house (including some nice rhododendron bushes) and paved everything, so now the front of the house is just one giant driveway. Ugly.
They also made the walk up to the front door this weird pseudo-Asian thing, which I don't like. It was a cool walk up. The first story of the house was U-shaped and to get to the front door, you walked into that U. There was a pond made out of concrete with a walkway over it, and on the side, there were ferns and things. We would sometimes even have fish in the little pond (when neighborhood cats weren't eating them). And there was this big mossy rock out in front of it that had engraved on it "You must cross land and water to get to our house" or something like that. I think it was there when we got there.
It was such a strange old house (and older than the realtor is letting on—it was built in the 1950s, not 1976). There was a period of time when I was young where the area under the midway landing for the stairs (which were a very weird, open staircase where each step was anchored to the ceiling as well as the one under it by these long metal rods and it was just the flat part of the stairs too, not the vertical parts, so if you were standing under the landing, you could grab somebody's feet as they walked down) was a large planter. It also had more rooms than we knew what to do with because it was initially a one-story house with 3 bedrooms, after which the second family built a second story on top of it, where they put three more bedrooms and a rec room (one of which is the largest master bedroom I've ever seen). After we moved in, the old master became a guest room, the two old bedrooms got the wall knocked out between them and became a seldom-used playroom, the two small new bedrooms go the wall knocked out between them and became my room (that's the one with the moon on the wall) and the rec room became archaeologydork's room (the one with the girly bike). His room had this wonderfully bad, dark wood paneling in it and a really cool martini glass in the wall that was made out of bits of broken glass, mosaic style. Looks like they got rid of the paneling, and I'm sure they took out the glass too. Stupid new owners.
One of the things I liked about the house was that even when my parents did things like putting in new carpet or wallpaper, they kept some element of the awful 70s decorating that they inherited with the place, like the wonderfully bad mottled red shag carpet that they kept in my dad's study or the weird red paisley wallpaper that used to be in one of the old bedrooms, which they kept on the back wall in a closet in that room. An homage to both the horrid choices made by the former owners as well as to their own modest interior decorating sense.
The house used to look homey. Now from those pictures, it looks like an after picture from a Queer Eye episode. Overly stylized. Blech.
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Kosmo
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Nov. 11th, 2009 @ 04:16 pm
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 Current Music: nina simone "eretz zavat chalav u'dvash" |
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I got a comment about my last comic saying that it condoned smoking, but I don't, that is nonsense! You should also not lasso cats out of trees, if that doesn't go without saying. Historical smoking is another matter, go ahead and have a smoke in the trench, but I advise against lighting three cigarettes at night.
Remembrance Day always makes me ruminative about the place of history in our current consciences, because it is one of the few holidays where we are explicitly told listen you have to remember this thing that happened ok and, one, people pay attention, two, there is nothing jamming the line like bbq's or parties or football games or chocolate eggs or presents. History: You should give a shit, who knew.
Just so we are clear though, I don't really care about Queen Victoria's birthday either so go ahead and slam it back on May 24 weekend, fireworks and the whole bit. Honestly we should all get free corgis on Victoria Day. |
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Every time Weezer releases an album, I find myself not just listening to it, but reading a lot about it. Not because they require a lot of Radiohead-style musical dissection or Hold Steady-style lyrical studies, but because Weezer, for a mainstream power-pop band, sure pisses a lot of people off. When they returned to making records in 2001 following a five-year break, elation among older fans seemed to turn to malaise which later curdled into outright hostility -- not just among the usual internet nerds who hate just about everything, but (at least in my experience) more rational fans dealing with honest disappointment, and even some rock critics. Hence, when Pitchfork awarded their self-titled 2001 album a 4.0 upon its release, it seemed vaguely sour and cranky (and also fanboyish, as the review was for some reason written by a seventeen-year-old), while their recent 4.5 for Raditude seemed downright even-handed and charitable. In 2009, you could find plenty of people (just check the AV Club comment boards) who would consider that entirely too gracious.
Hardcore fans of anything -- movies, bands, writers, whatever -- can be some of the worst people in the world, at least from a critical thought perspective. Hardcore fans forged in youth can be even worse, because they are the embittered internet nerds of tomorrow. Weezer is an especially pure case study in the power of love, expectations, and disappointment because their music, at its best, worst, and even most bizarre, is usually also pretty simple. When Rob Sheffield reviewed Raditude in Rolling Stone, he made a fascinating point that while for a certain section of Weezer fans, everything they've released in the past decade or so has been a horrible betrayal of everything "El Scorcho" stood for ("which was what again?" he asks, completely reasonably) even though, for the casual listener, most Weezer records will in fact sound more or less the same. Of course, Sheffield, a fine writer, seems to nonetheless love pretty much everything (it was weird and off-putting reading him twist his words around a few weeks back, trying to find a new and original way to call Glee interesting and worthwhile), especially any kind of music, and a three-and-a-half star review from Rolling Stone is pretty meaningless.
But: yes, it's a good point, and that (as well as Raditude itself), and all of these reviews and comments, and my wealth of personal experience with this band, made me want to go and listen to all of the Weezer albums in a row, in order. So I loaded up my ipod and did this. Their wealth of half-hour albums (at least three of their seven albums clock in under 35 minutes) made it especially easy.
The Blue Album is often cited as a record that sounded especially refreshing and immediate because it came out in the midst of grunge; Kurt Cobain had just died, and alterna-rock bands trying their damndest to imitate Nirvana and Pearl Jam were legion. The Blue Album has a fuzzy-guitar grunge edge to it, but its unabashed power-poppiness, the theory goes, set it apart. Some despairing reviewers and/or fans, wallowing in their disappointment with post-nineties Weezer, or sometimes even defending the band in a roundabout sort of way, have further theorized that maybe the album just sounded especially good in the context of its time, and wasn't all that great to begin with.
But having re-listened again recently (and, indeed, having stopped my constant shuffle-skipping for any number of Blue Album songs on my ipod over the past few weeks), I can say that this record does hold up. Strangely, it's not because every single song on it is a straight perfect classic: I like "No One Else" and "Surf Wax America" because they're on the Blue Album more than I like the Blue Album because they're there. Rather, the record works because the band seems to know exactly what they want and accomplish it with so much fun yet not too much fuss.
It's such a concise musical statement that even an attempt to rephrase and re-polish it with the even-shorter Green Album when returning from a long break in 2001 didn't really come off (though Green has its own merits, which I'll get into shortly). I think a lot of people would say part of the problem is that Rivers Cuomo got (or willed himself to get) a lot suckier at writing lyrics, and while that may be true, the supposed quality of lyrics to Weezer songs seem subject to the moods of the listeners. The Blue Album puts people in a warm, nostalgic mood, and so the lyrics are fine. Raditude makes people roll their eyes, so the lyrics are stupid. (That said, there are terrible lyrics all over Make Believe.) Discussion of Weezer lyrics will, more often than not, miss the point to some degree.
What sets the Blue Album apart is less then lyrics the quiet-loud dynamic. Their post-nineties albums, including Green, would focus more on the loud part, without, say, the tiny riff on which "Say It Ain't So" layers a couple of iconically chunky guitar kick-ins. The closest they get to sweet quiet-loud on Green is the chugging verse riff to "Hash Pipe" that goes all-out for the chorus, or the bigger guitars on the bridge of "Island in the Sun." The Blue Album, though, scarcely misses an opportunity -- "Undone," "Say It Ain't So," "Surf Wax America," "Holiday," that fantastic intro to "My Name is Jonas" -- to go super-quiet and then slam into a big, big chorus. Again, this is done simply, in the customary post-Pixies style, but with maximum effectiveness.
There's quiet-loud dynamics on Pinkerton, too, but they come off more like mood swings, as Cuomo sometimes sounds like he's coming apart. In the context of the other records, it's much more ragged and sloppy-sounding, in a great way. While it's true that Weezer's basic sound has largely stayed constant over the years, little they're recorded before or since has the rawness of, say, the screams on "Tired of Sex," "No Other One," or "Why Bother?"
This singularity has been pointed out countless times as Pinkerton, a flop upon its initial release, has become the gold standard for Weezer records: catchy, but also moodier and more personal than Blue. Though I became more familiar with the front-to-back workings of Pinkerton before Blue, it's easy to see how if you were a nerdy thirteen or fourteen when you heard the first album, Pinkerton would be the absolutely perfect thing to hear a couple of years later, when you're a little older but not necessarily much more mature or happier yet. Appropriately enough, I listened to this record endlessly on cassette while riding the bus to eleventh grade (I don't know if I realized it at the time, but Jeff giving me a ride to school senior year probably cut down my Pinkerton listening by about sixty percent -- and that's riding with a fellow Weezer fan).
Supposedly the reaction to this record, and his subsequent sometime-embarrassment, led Cuomo to shy away from more personal statements on later work. I'm not in a camp that wants them to find a way to make a new Pinkerton, though, because forcing this kind of song to come out can sound affected at best, completely obnoxious at worst. It follows, then, that punishing Cuomo for not being in the headspace that would result in another Pinkerton seems perverse at best, and stupidly, regressively dedicated to the idea of the tortured artist at worst. It's funny that Pinkerton supposedly inspired a generation of awful emo and mall-punk bands; I certainly understand how the sexual frustrations and heart-on-sleeve moments were so influential, but the actual sound -- pounded guitars, some slightly mumbled lyrics, and Cuomo's more declarative, not especially whiny voice -- doesn't much resemble any of those shite bands that popped up in the early-to-mid-aughts. There's none of that processed sheen to the guitars or those ultra-nasal vocals; I guess we can blame Blink-182 for those.
Also, further to the lyrics thing, if Rivers wrote a song like "The Good Life" today, the lyrics, with their references to "shaking booty and makin' sweet love all the night" would be called terrible and embarrassing. I'm pretty sure a 2009 "Pink Triangle" would get some of the same reactions. For whatever reason, the passage of time has made me a little cooler toward "Pink Triangle" but warmer to "The Good Life." It's a measure of the album's strength, though, that I don't feel grown out of it even though no longer particularly identify with the lovelorn, dysfunctional sentiment expressed throughout. It's a more flexible and durable record than "perfect for nerdy, angsty teenagers" might describe.
Some fans would tell you that the difference between Weezer then and now doesn't lie with their own age or point-of-view, but Matt Sharp's departure from the band; Pinkerton would be his last record with the band. Sharp is certainly a decent songwriter and musician in his own right, and perhaps the band did lose something when he left during those tumultuous post-Pinkerton years. But I can't give much credence to the theory that it was all downhill post-Sharp (not least because Cuomo has written some excellent songs since then). I just can't hear that much Sharp in the earlier stuff. The songs on Pinkerton are, as so often pointed out, ridiculously personal, and rarely betray the kind of sound Sharp developed on his own with the Rentals (though I guess the best parts of the Rentals album Seven More Minutes have an early Weezer-ish sound). That's not to say Sharp's songwriting or aesthetic input would be impossible, or that collaborations have never resulted in personal music; just that the Sharp Theory seems entirely too easy and reductive.
Regardless, it's a hell of a transition from the acoustic lament of "Butterfly" at the end of Pinkerton to the opening blast of "Don't Let Go" on the Green Album -- but that's five years of time travel for you. I remember very clearly going down to the record store in Middletown, CT, to buy the Green Album along with R.E.M.'s Reveal and yeah, at the time, it was a little disappointing. I liked it, but I didn't like how it starts with "Don't Let Go," a song I adore, and then basically each song on the record is slightly worse than the one before it, until it bottoms out with the negligible "O Girlfriend" (this slide would've been reversed if overseas bonus track "I Do" had made it to the domestic version of the record; Erin, pal that she is, brought me the version with "I Do" back from the U.K.).
If anything, though, my appreciation of the Green Album has only grown, not just because the best songs hold up well nor because they went on to release far worse albums (though both of those statements are true), but because just as I associate Pinkerton with my cassette walkman on the bus to high school, I associate the Green Album with end of my junior year of college, and hanging out with Marisa, and that whole summer between junior and senior year. That is to say, an album doesn't have to have come out while I was in high school to benefit from the sheen of nostalgia. So maybe all of the people who hate the Green Album just have crummy lives.
I'm sort of kidding, but I do think it's fair to say that a lot of people heard the first two Weezer records at a time of great emotional intensity, and were primed for catharsis when the Green Album finally came along. It's not a cathartic record, but it is a pretty suitable summer record. Also, I feel like even the staunchest anti-aughts-Weezer partisans admit that "Island in the Sun" is pretty great. Again, I'm not sure if this is because it holds up really well or because they went on to release some truly awful songs that made "Island" look even better, but I wonder if all of their post-nineties singles are just working on a slight time-delay, better heard when they can remind the listener of something.
Like the Green Album, the year-later Maladroit (and one of only two Weezer albums with more than ten songs!) starts stronger than it finishes; unlike Green, I've had a hard time understanding the sense of disappointment surrounding it, then and now. I guess it comes off as a little mindless and pop-metal, but the big riffs are pretty irresistible; "Dope Nose" and "Keep Fishin" might both make my top ten Weezer songs ever list. In fact, Maladroit has just about everything anyone has ever asked for in a Weezer record: upbeat pop songs ("Keep Fishin'"), yearning ("Slave"), catchy rock ("Dope Nose"), self-loathing ("Slob"), fast-paced power-pop ("Possibilities), and a down-tempo closer ("December"). It just doesn't have any of this stuff in as massive quantities as Blue or Pinkerton. It has two great songs, three or four very good songs, and no terrible songs. Last I checked, this qualifies an album as good. Maladroit, to me, is a clear example of how undervalued an artist can become for making something that's "only" good.
Another favorite hobby of Weezer fans and enthusiasts, professional and non, has been psychoanalyzing Rivers Cuomo and his creative decisions: this album was made as a response to the reaction of this or the failure of that or when the fans did this. I try not to think too much about that stuff, because you're never going to come to a firm conclusion, short of Rivers writing a detailed autodiscography, and even then, I'm not sure if I'd believe him (though I like to believe him when he says, or rather tweets: "FYI, Weezer doesn't do anything with the purpose of pissing off its audience. That would be stupid.").
But I do wonder what happened to derail Weezer's post-comeback plans to churn out album after album. Maladroit came in May 2002, just a year after Green, and at the time they were discussing tentative plans to have another record ready for February 2003. But months turned into years, and Make Believe didn't show up until 2005. By that point, it was described by the band as hard-won, almost a labor of love. Given all of that, Make Believe invites primarily questioning about what they tinkered with on and off for those three years, and, as has been the case for Weezer fans more or less since a Pinkerton follow-up failed to materialize, wondering if superior discarded songs were piling up somewhere in Cuomo's proverbial basement. Regardless, Make Believe is a lesson in true disappointment; if your let-down over Green or Maladroit felt like a betrayal, this record serves as a reminder that hey, maybe you were being kinda silly. Of course, a lot of fans don't read it that way; instead, it's considered a nadir (for some, temporary, as other albums were to follow) of a fallow period. But truly, this is another league from the first two aughts Weezer records -- a league of low, low quality.
The crappiness of Make Believe actually sort of sneaks up on you, or at least it did on me. Even years later, if listen to the first minute or so of "Perfect Situation," it sounds like it's revving up into a classic Weezer song. Then it launches into a series of vague and really dopily rhymed lyrics, and gives up for a wordless chorus -- and this is still one of the better tracks on the record. Apart from the tolerability of "Perfect Situation," the two Make Believe tracks I like most are "This is Such a Pity," a Cars-y bit with Rentals-esque lady backing vocals, and "Freak Me Out," a gentle song (apparently) about Cuomo being scared of a spider. I find that endearing.
The most striking aspect of Make Believe, after hearing it all the way through for the first time in years and readjusting to its failure, is how dull it is. Even if you tune out the simple-minded words, most of the music is just incredibly drab and forgettable, the worst kind of rock-musician proficiency. Though the Green Album has a certain mechanical and formulaic sound to it, the ostensibly more dynamic Make Believe (different solos, more varied instrumentation) sounds even more like it was written with a Weezer song generator with a limited vocabulary output and the "catchy single" setting turned off. They really polished up their laziness here.
The critical reaction to Make Believe wasn't particularly negative, in the sense that the critical reaction to most name-brand rock albums isn't particularly negative at the time of release, though it did take a substantial (and understandable) Metacritic dive from Green and Maladroit. But as often happens in the ultra-delayed world of music crit, the lousiness of Make Believe wrote rock critics a permission slip to trash Weezer at a later date, which is the only way I can explain any review calling the Red Album or Raditude the band's worst record ever. Please, listen to Make Believe again. Can you, even?
While the Red Album is, granted, easily the weakest and most ramshackle of their self-titled "color" records (which had previously been a pretty clear sign of stylistic uniformity), it does have some strengths that went semi-unrecognized at the time of its release. Another three years had passed, and I wonder if that exacerbated the crappiness of Make Believe, because it gave fans plenty of time to realize they were not only not listening to it very much, but outright avoiding it if they reached for a Weezer record (Make Believe: vastly increasing my listening of Maladroit for half a decade now!).
What I like about Red -- indeed, what I cling to when I remember how bad some of the songs are -- is how weird and experimental it is. It has three songs that run over five minutes, easily a Weezer album record; it has three songs written by non-Cuomo members of the band for the first time ever; it veers from syrupy but personal ballads ("Heart Songs") to classic Weezer power-pop apparently added at the last minute ("Pork and Beans") to Queen-like multi-part epics ("The Greatest Man That Ever Lived").
Cuomo is still stuck on some terrible rhyme schemes, but the sound of Weezer trying on longer-form, less formulaic structure is surprisingly thrilling for a band whose longtime strength has been mastery of the three-point-five-minute pop-rock gem. I mean no offense to the other members of the band, but if not for the truly awful "Thought I Knew" and "Cold Dark World," the Red Album might've signaled an interesting new direction for the band, rather than three or four terrible new directions and one or two intriguing directions. It's in no danger of becoming great, mind you: "Everybody Get Dangerous" is all Rivers (though if you listen to the lyrics, there are several pretty funny lines buried by the dopey melody and cries of "boo-ya"). As is, it's a true grab bag, especially with those non-Cuomo songs clustered together towards the end of the record. I'd love to see a Weezer record that fully explores the more sprawling (but not bloated) sound of "Greatest Man" and "Dreamin'" but then, I'd love to hear a final version of that space rock opera Cuomo was writing after Blue came out, too (sketches are available on his series of Alone demo records).
The Red Album also seems to have introduced the pattern of a "deluxe edition" album with additional songs to the Weezer way of doing things, as this was imitated for the recent release of Raditude. This has been common practice for bands since the advent of iTunes; essentially, it offers B-sides up in advance, with the album, rather than gradually released with singles and imports. The Weezer bonus tracks have revealed an appropriate kinship between Weezer and fellow nineties mainstays Oasis, in that you listen to them in conjunction with the album and wonder how on earth some of the album tracks made the final cut while, say, "Miss Sweeney," the best of the Red bonus tracks, languishes in the margins, and further wonder if the band is just tracklisting songs in the order they write them without any more thought than that. "Miss Sweeney" is, in fact, one of the better Weezer songs of the past ten years, with weird, slightly affected character-song verses sliding into an anthemic classic-Weezer chorus. Of course, as with Oasis, brilliant B-sides are accompanied by lousy ones, mixed just as indiscriminately as the albums themselves.
Take the four bonus tracks on the deluxe CD version of Raditude: there's a full-band version of the much-loved bootleg/demo "The Prettiest Girl in the Whole Wide World" that would've made a perfect addition to the youthful exuberance of the actual album, and an interesting, vaguely old-timey-sounding experiment called "Run Over by a Truck." There's also a truly awful, almost mookish cut called "Get Me Some" that brings to life the nightmares people probably had when they saw this album's song titles; and a terribly sentimental on-the-nose-yet-punishingly-vague drum-machine-y ballad "The Underdogs."
Perhaps surprisingly, the album itself is not nearly so uneven, and its almost immediate rep as Weezer "doing" teenpop is overstated. It's definitely pop but, again, when has Weezer ever really been outside of that realm? The difference here is only the extra polish, and this stuff doesn't sound much slicker than any number of their past songs. There's admittedly less emotion in the crunchy pop of "The Girl Got Hot" or "I'm Your Daddy" and maybe I wouldn't be so forgiving of these songs' silliness if I didn't know the source, but they're a lot of fun, and I'm pretty sure that regardless of source, "(If You're Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To" would be one of my favorite singles of the year. The worst thing I've read about this song is some writer saying it sounds like the Jonas Brothers. I've only heard a few Jonas Brothers songs, mostly in the backgrounds of stuff, but I can think of a lot of stuff "Want You To" sounds like, namely Cheap Trick and the Jam. Maybe it sounds like Weezer is ripping off a lot of the same stuff that the Jonas boys rip off, but saying it "sounds like" the Jonas Brothers "sounds like" needless snark and/or provocation to me.
Those first three tracks -- "Want," "Daddy," and "Girl" -- are the most immediate, and though much of the rest of the record continues in a catchy/fun mode, it does play a bit like a more polished version of the grab-baggy Red Album. There's some experimentation with a synth-y take on "Can't Stop Partying" (available as an acoustic demo on Alone II) which itself is a melancholy, minor-key take on what, lyrically speaking, could be a dopey celebration of excess. The song is a bit too droning and thin to really work as well as you might hope, but it's an interesting and sincere try, not the cash grab or joke you might assume -- essentially, Rivers has pre-emptively made the dorky-white-guy cover of this song before the original version had a chance to exist, which, again, sounds like something I would hate, but it's an earnest experiment.
Elsewhere, some angst, albeit lighter than some fans probably need, creeps into "Put Me Back Together" and "Trippin' Down the Freeway" (which sounded so much like a sequel to "Everybody Get Dangerous" that I pretty much wrote it off before I heard it). The cries of "I'm not getting better!" on "Put Me Back Together" wouldn't sound out of place on an early Weezer record, and "Trippin' Down the Freeway" turns out to be a power-pop refusal-to-break-up tune; it sounds almost kindasorta like Weezer writing a Mountain Goats song (that's probably giving it too much credit, but I like it a lot).
As with the Red Album, the album's peaks are pretty much done once you read the two-thirds mark, which kicks off with the fairly ridiculous Eastern-tinged "Love is the Answer." More shades of Oasis: I don't know what it is about more traditionally-minded rock bands that they feel like they can cure writer's block or whatever by writing stupid, quasi-universal shit about how we all have to learn to love each other. From there, it's pretty much a reversion to the Red anti-style, albeit with somewhat better craft: the stupid "Let It All Hang Out" is at least occasionally funny (as when Rivers boasts about drinking "180-proof vitamin water, energy flavor" -- come on, dude does the dorky-white-hangout thing pretty well); the dopey "In the Mall," the sole non-Cuomo contribution, is better than almost every other-band-member track on Red (save maybe "Automatic," also not very good but, like "In the Mall," written by drummer Pat Wilson, who is at least a bit more of a practiced hand at songwriting); and the return of the some kind of drum programming with the okay, forgettable "I Don't Want to Let You Go." The patchiness, jokiness, and catchiness recalls Fountains of Wayne on their last, uneven album; this power-pop stuff is, I think, a lot more difficult than it sounds at its best.
Raditude comes just sixteen months after the Red Album, which is promising even if it doesn't represent their best work, or even their best work of this decade. Cuomo is, by all accounts, a prodigious songwriter, and some of these horrible failed experiments would feel like much less of a waste if he actually had an album output to match that productivity. As I've mentioned before, I forgive a lot more when famous artists can beat the industry-standard every-three-years record release.
Still, an album as good as the Red Album every year wouldn't be much to reclaim former glory, and as much as I enjoy Raditude, there's a reason there's only half an hour of it. The boys could use a little direction before they embark on album eight. As it happens, I bought Jemina Pearl's solo record Break It Up on the same day as Raditude, and noticed that it was produced by John Agnello, the guy who produced Boys and Girls in America and Stay Positive for the Hold Steady. Weezer should seek him out. His producing/mastering resume leans heavily on the classic-rock and grunge sides of indie, which is approximately where you could classify Weezer, in a broad sense.
Agnello wouldn't necessarily have the say to nix lyrics when Cuomo turns in something half-assed, but he could make a great-sounding and accessible record with a little bit less of the gloss that they shellac onto their weaker recent songs lately. Cuomo seems to be in a collaborative mood, with shared songwriting on many of Raditude's songs, and other projects teaming him with Adam Lambert or Katy Perry. I honestly don't think there's any problem with him working with Top 40-style artists, even those I think totally suck, on his records or theirs. It's always been a little puzzling to me that the indie crowd covers and then gets disgusted with Weezer, as if they were ever an indie band. Dudes have been at Geffen and played on mainstream radio since Album One.
In fact, if Weezer was an indie band in 1994, many of their most disgruntled fans wouldn't've discovered them until 1998 or so, at which point they would've been permanently broken up and moved on to inferior bands. In a perverse way, I think a lot of Weezer-watchers would've preferred that entire narrative. But I like that there's a long-standing mainstream rock band I'm interested in besides just Green Day and sometimes Pearl Jam. This whole "jump the shark" idea that things get fucked up and can never be as good ever again and that's that and it sucks but it is what it is or whatever the fuck... it's pretty much counter to how we live our lives, isn't it? Or at least how we try to.
Anyway, I support Cuomo trying stuff out with other songwriting peers; the only problem is that not many of them will have much in the way of long-haul, album-making, career-sustaining strategies. I feel like Angello would bring out their strengths if they want to go in a more rock-and-roll direction at some point.
So that's my ridiculously long shpiel on a band too complicated to be called one of my favorites anymore. For sake of clarity, I would grade the albums thus: Blue and Pinkerton are clear A's; Green and Maladroit are in the B/B+ range; Make Believe is a solid D+; Red is more of a C+, and Raditude rates roughly a B-. It should only really, truly sadden you if you're disappointed to learn that 2009 is not 1994. |
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Requests aren't done, they will be popping up as we go, but honestly I do not need annnyymooreee! I was looking at the Wonder Women that I drew last year and started drawing her again, because she's pretty fun to draw, and surly Wonder Woman here came out. Don't settle for being a tits and tits heroine ladies, be yourself! Poor Nibbles.
Hey Montreal! I'm going to be at Expozine this weekend! You should come.
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