…the love song is never simply happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain. Those songs that speak of love, without having within their lines an ache or a sigh, are not love songs at all, but rather hate songs disguised as love songs, and are not to be trusted. These songs deny us our human-ness and our God-given right to be sad, and the airwaves are littered with them. The love song must resonate with the whispers of sorrow and the echoes of grief. The writer who refuses to explore the darker reaches of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, magic and joy of love, for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil, so within the fabric of the love song, within its melody, its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for suffering.

I have been asked many times why I find the most beauty and wonder in songs and stories that have sad and dark elements, and I Cave does a better job of articulating it than I ever have.

I saw Nels at the Triple Door earlier this year, where he played a couple of songs with Glenn Kotche as a duo. Thirty seconds into the first one I recognized the song and broke into laugher. It was an instrumental cover of the Sonic Youth’s ‘Karen Koltrane’. This was a great choice, because generally when people cover Sonic Youth songs, they pick ones that were released between 1987 and 1995 and do not pick anything sung by the fearsome Lee Ranaldo. This is probably (and reasonably) because it is easier to simulate and interpret the pieces of the Sonic Youth catalogue that resemble pop songs than it is to take on their distinctive style of musicianship. But Nels plays the guitar lead in a way that both sounds authentically like the original and makes it his own, and Glenn was able to turn the vocal line into a xylophone riff.

After ‘Karen Koltrane’, they played another song, which also sounded familiar, but I could not place it. I saw Glenn after the show and asked him where I knew it from, and he assured me that I didn’t. It was a new song of Nels’s called ‘Caved-In Heart Blues’. Since then the song was released as the first track on Draw Breath, the latest Nels Cline Singers album. I tried to listen to the album on a plane ride, but I ended up listening to ‘Caved-In Heart Blues’ on repeat for the entire flight.

Now I know why this song seemed so familiar. The song has a melody that is so pretty and elegant it seems like it feels familiar. I have listened to it at least 20 times in the past week, and I still don’t know exactly why I like it so much.

Anyway, the song is available as a free download, so feel free to listen: Caved-In Heart Blues.

When people come up to you and say, “Hey, I don’t understand noise rock,” what is your response?
That’s not the way to approach any kind of music, to say you don’t understand it. There’s nothing to understand. Any kind of music, it already kind of transcends understanding. It’s a sensual art form. You obviously don’t understand life because noise music, for me, is the noise of life, in a way. It’s so much more akin to the human condition. The human condition is not a song, it’s not an organized composition. This is more the natural music of our lives.

(From Rolling Stone)

Our first draft centered almost exclusively on the kids. That draft represented the emotional heart of the movie. Much of its structure stayed, but when it came time to do the second draft, we realized we needed to bolster it with the disaster-movie paradigm, following a couple other stories and showing that the Transformers arriving is a global phenomenon. The second draft was much more about the action.

What kind of pie do you like David?

DAVID LYNCH: I like cherry pie, I like blueberry pie, I like banana cream pie, I like Dutch apple pie. Those I guess are the top four. Dutch apple pie has a real crumbly top, it’s a killer pie. It’s beautiful. I don’t think I’d be real wild about rhubarb pie.
ifMagazine.com

You know he isn’t going to tell you the hidden meaning of the movie, so why not ask something direct? I am going to see him next week; I can’t wait.

But in 2006, it seems like almost every movie I saw sabotaged itself with crappy writing. The highly rated one’s were often the worst. I don’t know if I am getting pickier, or if the writing is getting worse.

The Queen (91 on Metacritic)
This is a great idea for a film, and it was artfully acted and edited. It is too bad that the script skimps on any insight on the characters or, their history or their future in favor of lengthy discussions of English flag-flying protocol and endless CNN clips. The great performances make it worth watching, but they don’t make it enjoyable.

The Departed (85 on Metacritic)
This one did better than most. The film was well shot and acted, and the script had moments of brilliance. I just wish it all would have been as good as the best parts. Most of the scenes with Vera Farmiga were stilted and cliched.

Casino Royale (80 on Metacritic)
The theory was to recreate the James Bond franchise with a more modern and sensitive hero, and to simultaneously return the series to its Ian Fleming roots by basing it closely on one of his books. The star was great and the directing was thrilling. But most of the scenes were predictable build-ups to predictable conclusions (I don’t have much doubt that Bond is going to win at poker and not leave the film married). And the script’s inability to decide whether this Bond was naive or suave made it difficult for the audience to know how to invest in the character. Because the script had to do so much work to accomplish these things, it was filled with needless and unbelievable interchanges between Bond and various women.

Children of Men (84 on Metacritic)
I saw this one last night, and it kicked off this train of thought. I am an Alfonso Cuarón fan, and he made this movie quite a spectacle to watch. The world was completely immersive, and many of the scenes were staggeringly beautiful or disturbing. But you lose a lot by having paint-by-numbers characters like ‘reluctant hero’, ’somewhat helpless heroine’, ‘quirky old guy’, ‘arrogant rich guy’ and ‘red shirt’. And it doesn’t help to spend the whole time putting characters I am not that interested in into predictable jeopardy, while saying nothing insightful about who they are and the time they live in. And to top it off, it took five writers to complete this thing (maybe there were even more uncredited ones).

I don’t regret seeing any of these, but they all could have been much more memorable with believable and surprising stories and dialog. I hope to see Volver, Old Joy and Pan’s Labyrinth soon; hopefully one of them will be better. Or else I’ll have to start doing my own screenwriting, and learn how hard it really is.

I was feeling slightly nostalgic today, so I typed the name of my college into Flickr. On the top page was the following photo of a woman protesting the homophobic design of the new gym. Now, in many places these sorts of protests would come from bigoted football players harassing their peers or hateful graffiti. But I have never known Macalester to suffer from those. This protest was about a gym design that enforces separate-gender bathrooms:

Buck called the planned athletic facility “a homophobic, heteronormative space” due to the absence of gender-blind bathrooms in the building plans.

Along with confusion surrounding the college’s new Institute for Global Citizenship, Buck said that the athletic facility construction “shows Macalester is moving in a racist, heteronormative direction.”

http://www.themacweekly.com/articles/20061006/news/10735

The funny thing is that of all the design choices to criticize a building for, this is one of the easiest to remedy after it has been built. All you need to do is put a ‘Unisex’ sign outside the bathroom. We de-gendered the bathrooms on our own in my dorm.

At least the school hasn’t changed too much.

I’d see little kids with their pets and start weeping. I’d see news clips of Lou Gehrig and Ronald Reagan and lose it. I could not cut myself off from the world. All my compartments were sieves.

In Seattle we have a public library that is famous both for doing a great job at serving people’s needs and being headquartered in an architecturally stimulating spaceship-like building (go through the whole slideshow if you have the time). I have passed the building hundreds of times, and always admired it and meant to go in. Today I finally made it inside and got a library card. And it is a fantastic library in ever sense. You can borrow everything from books on continental philosophy to copies of Fight Club. The building design is inventive but also very usable. There is a lot of space for people to read and scores of computers. The stacks are an endless spiral of books that you can walk through forever. I want to go back one day when I have more time to wander.

But I don’t need to go back any time soon. The reason that I was in a sudden rush to get my card is that I discover that the library does digital lending of books, music and are about to start providing movies. (Maybe everyone else knew that libraries did this, I didn’t.) In particular, you can access the Safari technical bookshelf, which includes scores of O’Reilly books which make great reference material but tend to be hard to search and become obsolete if you own the print editions (the online version also had books which haven’t been released yet).

The notion that a library can loan materials and not be limited by the lender’s physical proximity to them is interesting, and makes on wonder whether libraries need buildings and books at all. This library could be more like a credit union, acting as a collective to obtain goods and share them effectively among a group of members with some common interest, but not being restricted to a town or neighborhood. Then again, I believe that credit unions stay in business much more due to regulation than due their ability to do a better job at serving customers’ needs. Maybe without a physical community we won’t need libraries at all, and it will be more efficient just to rent books from their publishers, and we can convert the buildings into more general public spaces.

That is one of the most depressing thoughts I have ever had about a world of perfect access to information. Hopefully by the time that happens we’ll have a good virtual reality simulation of wandering through the stacks and smelling old books.