State of Cinema

"Cinema is a specificity of vision. It's an approach in which everything matters. It's the polar opposite of generic or arbitrary and the result is as unique as a signature or a fingerprint. It isn't made by a committee, and it isn't made by a company, and it isn't made by the audience. It means that if this filmmaker didn't do it, it either wouldn't exist at all, or it wouldn't exist in anything like this form."

Steven Soderbergh's keynote address on the state of cinema.

Spaceland Monday Residency

Tagged along with the Silent Majority to the Satellite in Silverlake to take in the Monday residency of FMLY (Family) and Carly Ritter.
Can't say much about FMLY (except my penis crawled back inside about five songs in to the set). And Ritter is cut out in the mold of a Judy Collins-type. I'm back at Lilith Fair! (which I never got to experience to hit on chicks) Except this is 2013, so she seemed irrelevant and out of touch with anything. Harmless and benign.

The Moviegoers - Spring Breakers

Spring Break Forever!

We argue about Spring Breakers and GBlack's moral judgements.

On Piracy with Steve Albini

Record producer Steve Albini. I think the last two paragraphs of his answer is pretty spot on.

Q: What is your opinion about music piracy? Does it hurt you economically?

Albini: I reject the term "piracy." It's people listening to music and sharing it with other people, and it's good for musicians because it widens the audience for music. The record industry doesn't like trading music because they see it as lost sales, but that's nonsense. Sales have declined because physical discs are no longer the distribution medium for mass-appeal pop music, and expecting people to treat files as physical objects to be inventoried and bought individually is absurd.

The downtrend in sales has hurt the recording business, obviously, but not us specifically because we never relied on the mainstream record industry for our clientele. Bands are always going to want to record themselves, and there will always be a market among serious music fans for well-made record albums. I'll point to the success of the Chicago label Numero Group as an example.

There won't ever be a mass-market record industry again, and that's fine with me because that industry didn't operate for the benefit of the musicians or the audience, the only classes of people I care about.

Free distribution of music has created a huge growth in the audience for live music performance, where most bands spend most of their time and energy anyway. Ticket prices have risen to the point that even club-level touring bands can earn a middle-class income if they keep their shit together, and every band now has access to a world-wide audience at no cost of acquisition. That's fantastic.

Additionally, places poorly-served by the old-school record business (small or isolate towns, third-world and non-english-speaking countries) now have access to everything instead of a small sampling of music controlled by a hidebound local industry. When my band toured Eastern Europe a couple of years ago we had full houses despite having sold literally no records in most of those countries. Thank you internets.

Airplane Movies

On the airplane from Dallas to LAX got to watch This is 40. It's a movie that's watchable on an airplane.
That is all.

George Jones (1931-2013)

She thinks I still care. Listened to it on hearing the news driving I-65 from Indy to Chicago.

New York City (Day 1)

Woke up in the 5'o'clock hour after being out at the Echo for Palma Violets the night before. Flight to depart at 8:30am. Sit on the tarmac for two hours waiting to be re-directed. Nap my face off before we even take off. Wake up and don't even know how long I've been in-and-out of consciousness. Five hours maybe?
Land at JFK around 8pm. Take the AirTrain to the Jamaica station. Subway it to 23rd st. 'Thinking of a Dream I Had' rattles around my head as the soundtrack, along with some Kurt Vile. Women on the subway in NYC know to keep their eyes down to avoid the crazies and all the male gazes. A hobo goes around asking for some spare food, an Aussie responds with an orange and a half-pack of graham crackers.
Arrive in the Chelsea neighborhood. Go out to dinner at a local restaurant, Westville. Tiny. Tables stacked up right next to each other. We were next to a business couple on a first date or so. How can waiters/waitresses and such afford to live in NYC?
Finish up and crash on an air mattress.

Day 111- Palma Violets

Palma Violets at the Echo. 'Best of Friends' is the best song of the year. Young guys who have a lot of energy and have fun playing. Quite a disparity to Foxygen of a few weeks ago. Fan jumped on stage and passionately sang sharing the mic. The encore including  a Clash song had a ton of fans join on stage.
Good times.

Ain't In It For My Health: A Film About Levon Helm

A lot of very nice reviews are coming in. Here's one from the Village Voice written by Peter Gerstenzang.

One particular excerpt of note...
Finally, this unassuming little flick makes a sham out of drugs-a-go-go melodramatic crap like Walk the Line—maybe because Hatley never forgets he's making a movie about a goddamn musician.

...Amen, brother,

And later on this:
Here's a tune sung by a man, once rich, then poor, now somewhere in the middle, doing what he got into this business for—to make good, honest music. Substitute "film" for "music" and you can say the same about Hatley and his quietly remarkable cinematic achievement.

Ebert -- The Tree of Life/The Apartment

"The movie captures the unplanned unfolding of summer days, and the overheard words of people almost talking to themselves.

The film's portrait of everyday life, inspired by Malick's memories of his hometown of Waco, Texas, is bounded by two immensities, one of space and time, and the other of spirituality. The Tree of Life has awe-inspiring visuals suggesting the birth and expansion of the universe, the appearance of life on a microscopic level and the evolution of species. This process leads to the present moment, and to all of us. We were created in the Big Bang and over untold millions of years, molecules formed themselves into, well, you and me.

And what comes after? In whispered words near the beginning, 'nature' and 'grace' are heard. We have seen nature as it gives and takes away; one of the family's boys dies. We also see how it works with time, as Jack O'Brien (Hunter McCracken) grows into a middle-aged man (Sean Penn) And what then? The film's coda provides a vision of an afterlife, a desolate landscape on which quiet people solemnly recognize and greet one another, and all is understood in the fullness of time."

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"There is a melancholy gulf over the holidays between those who have someplace to go, and those who do not. The Apartment is so affecting partly because of that buried reason: It takes place on the shortest days of the year, when dusk falls swiftly and the streets are cold, when after the office party some people go home to their families and others go home to apartments where they haven't even bothered to put up a tree. On Christmas Eve, more than any other night of the year, the lonely person feels robbed of something that was there in childhood and isn't there anymore."

Roger Ebert (1943-2013)

A classic Chicagoan rivalry.