In Diegesis

Is This It? by The Srokes / Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots by The Flaming Lips

These two albums don’t need much more cyber-ink than they’ve already got going for ‘em. I’ll be quick. They don’t share in aesthetic like Immer and Madvillainy do. Rather, they give me a very specific sort of joy. It’s a joy which is achieved through the eschewing of all the world’s bullshit. It’s the joy in a girl named Yoshimi who has the task of saving the entire world. She doesn’t take soma; she takes vitamins. She doesn’t ask “Is this it?” She just kicks ass. She doesn’t have the time to trip on her ego. Julian Cassablancas couldn’t seduce her (she’s focussed!!!!!). You see, there’s something out there worth fighting for. For the Strokes, there’s something out there amidst all that inanity worth singing for. We realize it. We’re all going to die, but we’ll fight and sing anyhow. Shit like this gives me joy.

Thunder, Lightning, Strike! by The Go! Team / Vampire Weekend (self-titled)

If I’m already more than halfway along on the road to joy, this is what I listen to. Have you heard “Bottle Rocket”? Seriously, if you’re out and about, and the sun is out and you’re thinking “man, I’m in a dang good mood”, throw on “Bottle Rocket” on the ol’ iPod or Zune or whatever you’ve got. I will damn near promise you that your heart will leap about fifty feet into the air; you’ll all of a sudden know kung fu; by the time she starts singing “Two! Four! Six! Eight! Ten!” you’ll be asking people who address you when they stopped calling you “Mister President.” Then “friendship update” comes on, you forget all that ego-joy, and you just give whoever’s addressing you a great big hug.

Same goes for Vampire Weekend. When I was a senior in high school, I wanted the whole damn world to know about this album. I might as well have been walking down the halls, asking random people, “Hey, have you heard of this drug, VW? It makes you really happy. Lasts about a half hour. You got to try it, man. Here, put these in your ears!” The bad part of Vampire Weekend is that it’s really only good for high school. At lunchtime, you can listen to “Campus” all you want, and all of a sudden, that’s what college is going to be like. Then you get to college. So here, I’m going to speak for everyone else who’s thought it: fuck you, Vampire Weekend, for giving me joy which the world can’t.

(Oh, right, yeah, the point of art! Art imbues the heart, the imbued heart imbues the world. Man, let’s get some VW campus beautifying campaigns going on!)

Sound of Silver by LCD Soundsystem

Whew…I don’t know where to begin with this one. This album almost single-handedly taught me how to dance. To anyone who knows me now, it may be difficult to imagine a time before I was comfortable dancing, but that time has consumed the majority of my life up to this point. Sound of Silver came into my life at a point in time when I was extremely stolid, after I had cut myself off emotionally from the world. This time I like to refer to as “senior year of high school.” I had embraced the fact that I was living in a windowless room underneath my father in a house which he shared lovelessly with his girlfriend. The thought of ever moving to Alaska had been finally squashed as I left my mom’s village in a seven-seater plane and made my way back to Erie for my last year. To survive, I created a horcrux in Erica Stewart. From there, I embarked on a long, convoluted journey back to my soul. It began in Nietzsche-esque whoredom, living by the will to cum, the will to college, the will to money.

Cue: Sound of Silver. After I had cut off access to the depression which dominated my teenage years, James Murphy said, “Sound of Silver talk to me. Makes you want to feel like a teenager until you remember the feelings of a real live emotional teenager. Then you think again.” People, it doesn’t get more spiritually perfect. Yeah, I thought again; I didn’t want to go back to depression. Yet, I couldn’t go on much longer (I’m a sensitive soul! I’m a -), so I danced. I danced and danced and danced my dancing ass off. I danced because I wasn’t depressed. I danced because I wasn’t a brick. I danced because. That’s it. I danced in the self-aware emotionally stolid numbers like “Get Innocuous!” and “Time to Get Away” and, especially, “Us V Them.” I danced in the so-earnestly-detached-it-hurts numbers like “Someone Great” and “All My Friends”.

And that was the real beauty of the album. The best songs – Someone Great and All My Friends – are both from the point of view of someone who absolutely UNDERSTANDS emotions and love and hurt, but doesn’t necessarily FEEL them (like a depressed teenager would). James Murphy gets that something has happened that is so incredible, he’s not going to be the same again. But he’s not depressed. Life is. He gets it. He helped me get it. And growing with his album was an experience, for me, that was so incredible, I will never be the same again.

Madvillainy by Madvillain / Immer by Michael Mayer

Possibly my two absolute favorite albums to listen to while stoned, Madvillainy and Immer share a fuzzy, cracked aesthetic. While Madvillainy posits this aesthetic as a dancing partner to DOOM, Michael Mayer indulges in it, carves layers out of it, finds a place to nurture a beat amidst the blips and cracks and fuzzy “you drive me crazy”s. While I could nearly easily replace either album – Madvillainy for Los Angeles by Flying Lotus or other DOOM projects like King Geedorah or Viktor Vaughn, and Immer for other Mayer-repped gems like his wonderful Fabric mix or Kompakt’s Total 3 mix – the beauty of both of these albums is that they manage to stand out as watershed peaks for both the artists and the aesthetic they’re working in. Flying Lotus’s work is too original; hence, he’s working in a post-Madvillain world like 70s directors were living in a post-Citizen Kane world. Nor does DOOM’s other stuff truly compare; my favorite Vik Vaughn tune, “Let Me Watch”, is, in many ways, a reiteration of songs like “Fancy Clown” on Madvillainy. Of course, Vik Vaughn came first, but that’s what’s so incredible about Madvillainy; its perfection eschews time. It, along with Immer, lives in its own self-contained bubble of musical goodness. These aren’t albums that change your life; this is the stuff you listen to once your life is changed, and you’re exhausted from all that spiritual work you’ve done. Enjoy the aesthetic. Groove beautiful. Tomorrow you’ll be a perfect lover; tonight you just listen to the “unperfect love mix”.

Ys by Joanna Newsom

Is it the way her harp playing builds suspense in “Sawdust and Diamonds”? Is it the line in Monkey and Bear that goes, “The hills have grown in excess like a table ceaselessly being set”? Is it the way she sings in Emily, “I’ve seen your bravery, and I will follow you there”, in that voice steeped in earnestly tranquil sincerity? I don’t know what makes this album relatable. To some, it comes off completely and utterly foreign, but for some reason, Miss Newsom found a way for me to make it to her foreign land. And once you get there, I promise, you don’t ever want to leave. In the land of Ys, magic is possible; in the land of Ys, we might have a world-wide spiritual revolution tomorrow. We might get rid of money, we might be sensitive to emotions, we might be good to other people, we might never feel existential dread again. We might live perfectly.

The stories in Ys don’t express anything like that. In fact, they’re sometimes emotionally devastating tales. But Newsom’s sensitivity to that devastation suggests a spiritual understanding so inspiring that the best of my own sensitivity comes out. What more could we ever ask of art?

Hercules and Love Affair (self-titled)

The album opens with the line, “Don’t lie to me” and ends with a song called “True False / Fake Real.” In between, we feel blind, travel by rainbow, heed the advice to “stay with [our] family” because “there is nowhere to get to,” open our voices and say “this is [our] love”. It’s all we have. So don’t be false, don’t be fake, because the stars will only get brighter. Being straight or gay only distorts our vision of the brightness of individuality. The human spirit knows no boundaries, and sexuality, as one of the more intimate venues for spiritual expression, ought know none either. To belong to anyone is its own sort of imprisonment. You are yourself. The most you can ever do is say “this is my love.” Be content. Turn on “Hercules Theme,” which by my standards is one of the most ridiculously raucous disco-dance anthems ever crafted by man, woman or man-woman.

The Glow, Pt. 2 by The Microphones

“I took my shirt off in the yard.

No one saw that the skin on my shoulders was golden.

Now it’s not.

My shirt’s back on.

I forgot my songs.

The glow is gone.

My lakjdflj body stopped.

I could not get through september without a battle.

I face death.

I went in with my arms swinging.

But I heard my own breath.

I had to face that I’m still living.

I’m still flesh.

I hold on to awful feelings.

I’m not dead.

There’s no end.

My face is red.

My blood flows harshly.

My heart beats loudly

My chest still draws breath; I hold it.

I’m buoyant.

There’s no end.”

And to think, the most riveting part of the song is the way he sings “blood.” Sends chills up my spine.

Untrue by Burial

This album is too long, for me anyhow. Tones get repeated. A lot. But listen to any one song by itself, and I can’t imagine how the rest of the album could be anything but perfect. This, like all my ranked favorite albums, has a feel to it which is absolutely individual. It sounds like your loneliness, even though you’ve never felt the way you do when you listen to it. It is at once immediately foreign and at home in the soul. It burrows into the familiar (in my case, lonely individualism) and quickly branches out into emotional frontiers. In the daytime, I feel the anxiety of a useless street lamp. At night, I wish the lamp were off, because the music is too much mine, ought not be illuminated for anyone else. I don’t know if I’m the street lamp or if Untrue is, nor do I care. That’s only a single metaphor that comes to mind when I listen to this incredible album.

Person Pitch by Panda Bear

This album is perfectly named; it’s the sound of humanness. Like Merriweather Post-Pavillion, there is an obsession in this album between inspired beauty which makes the individual feel his or her humanity completely and the realm of the absolutely regular physical. In “Ponytail”, Panda Bear sings “When my soul starts growing, I get so hungry, and I wish it never would stop growing.” Beauty of the soul can be just as transient as hunger, yet so much more difficult to achieve. However, in this album, Panda Bear manages to make the hunger for beauty as regular as the hunger for food or for any normal, every-few-hours need. We wish we could get to that beauty any time we wanted, but we can’t, so we take pills. We wish we could feel our selfs at constant, but our brothers affect us too much. We say, “Come and give me the space I need.” Our perceptions are paradoxes between what we want and what we need, between our soul and our body. My common fix? Smoke a bowl (recognize that you’d be stronger if you didn’t need to), listen to Person Pitch, and let the munchies have free reign.

Merriweather Post-Pavilion by Animal Collective

The most obvious precursor to Merriweather was their (awesome) 2008 EP, Water Curses. Musically, the bubbly underwater effect is definitely precluded in Water Curses, but spiritually, I think the more appropriate starting point to Merriweather isn’t Water Curses, or Strawberry Jam, for that matter. Rather, Panda Bear’s Person Pitch gives a great introduction to Merriweather. Where Person Pitch’s “Good Girl/Carrots” explores the point of making music to begin with, Merriweather Post just assumes that music is a pretty good thing. Having the presumption under their belt, they explore what their music ought to be about. Cue: “My Girls”. Music is good. Family is good. Music about family is even better.

In my search for my own solid soul (the blood I bleed was already taken care of), there were few albums more integral to me than this one. Even the albums which I rank above this one are not as earnest, spiritually, and appeal to me more on an emotive or aesthetic level. But this album has a message, and that message is so simple, it hits home on every song. Yes, I wish I could lose my body for a night. Yes, I’m also frightened. Yes, my lion of a libido needs to be exercised every now and again. Yes, I’m tired of running, and when I listen to this album, for about fifty-five minutes, I’m not running; I’m dancing.

Microcastle by Deerhunter

Listening to this album is (for me) kind of like taking mushrooms. It transports the listener to a place where all decisions, or acts of behavior, begin to ring false, effectively wrapping the listener in a cocoon of comfortable perception. You perceive the album. That’s it. You could bob your head. Or not. “Nothing Ever Happened” gives you the opportunity to dance, though often I don’t. Where does the self, or individuality, come from? Empirically speaking, it must be what the person does that makes the person unique, but where does behavior come from? For me (and in different ways, for Bradford Cox too), it comes from this album – hearing it, feeling it, and then going about my day.

Note: Maybe someday I should listen to this ON mushrooms? I might just dissolve into nothingness completely.

“We just met
And I know I’m a bit too intimate
But something huge is coming up
And we’re both included.

It takes courage to enjoy it
The hardcore and the gentle
Big time sensuality.”

-Bjork, “Big Time Sensuality”

When you’re the first to do something, it’s nigh impossible not to establish precedents. Like George Washington and term limits. Ideally, the precedents are established due to the integrity of their existence, yet it is inescapable that there should also be a level of that Emerson-loathed notion of consistency for consistency’s sake. The latter instance, fortunately, is not entirely the case with the influence of the first animated film, Walt Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Disney’s riskiest venture proved, ultimately, to be his most artistically fruitful; all of its art – animation techniques, yes, but also (and much more interestingly) its fundamental spirit – is still being mimicked and expanded upon in the entire realm of contemporary world animation.

(more…)

I believe in a connotative language in this world. A language beyond the dialectic. A language of symbols, of feelings, of emanating spiritual energies. A language of non-words, non-science. A language of art.

It’s not a very hard language to speak; in difficulty, it pales to learning English or Chinese. If you’ve ever cried, you’ve spoken a paragraph. If you’ve ever marveled at beauty in nature, you’ve muttered some syllables. If you’ve ever noted in your life a strange coincidence and shrugged it off as meaningless chance, you’ve dismissed a word, perhaps a sentence.

There are people in this world, I have found, who can speak this language fluently. These people speak emotive truth through art. Their dialogues are always more than the sum of their parts. “Five Easy Pieces” director, Bob Rafelson, is one of these people. (more…)

“We were just standin there mindin our own
And it went on and on
We all smile we all sing
The weak become heroes then the stars align
We all sing we all sing all sing”

-’The Weak Become Heroes’, The Streets

Human Beings, beware the foreign section of the video store. Only a person may watch “Lola Rennt.” And though ya’ll might disagree, all you human beings are not necessarily people.

To define what comprises the status of being a person, ask the wisest person you know. Meanwhile, I’ll try to define what comprises the status of being able to experience “Lola Rennt.” (more…)

Charlie Chaplin was one of the cinema’s most spiritually sensitive storytellers. He always saw the humanity amid the inhumanity, whether it was in war-times, in frigid gold-digging times, or in modern times. (ehh? Modern Times?? Get it? Ugh…) With the Tramp, Chaplin was able to channel his earnest spirituality into a waif half-wit. “Monsieur Verdoux,” Chaplin’s second talkie after “The Great Dictator”, is no different theoretically. The film is a champion of love and humanity, like all his other films. The main difference here is that Chaplin, having abandoned the Tramp (and Hitler impressions), plays a (somewhat) regular guy. Without any limitations on character development, Chaplin goes deeper and darker than he has ever before and procures mostly stellar results.

Based on an idea by Orson Welles, it’s easy to see by the film’s end why Chaplin was attracted to Welles’ mind. Both storytellers are obsessed with approaching their characters with spiritual pragmatism (one might argue that spiritual pragmatism is the entire theme of “Citizen Kane”). Chaplin, of course considering his history with the Tramp, is much more earnest about it. At the end of the film, he pulls a Richard Wright or Upton Sinclair and has his character openly articulate the themes. After being sentenced to death for murder, Henri Verdoux says in his defense, “As for being a mass killer, does not the world encourage it? Is it not building weapons of destruction for the sole purpose of mass killing?” My mind begs to wonder what the story might have looked like had it been in Welles’ more subtle hands (my mind likes it some subtlety. Oh, Kubrick, had you directed “A.I”!) If the film has one fault, it is only that: its childish earnestness. But how deeply can a person fault a piece of art for being earnest? So long as it is earnest in truth (and it is), what appropriate grievance can be given aside from, perhaps, not being as emotionally invested as you might have been.

What’s really remarkable here is just how truthful it is. Sixty years later, and the plot still exists in things like AMC’s “Breaking Bad” and Showtime’s “Weeds.” Artists are still approaching their financially-strapped-but-loving subjects with spiritual pragmatism. The only difference is not really a thematic one, but a stylistic one. Henri Verdoux does some fairly awful things, things that Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and Walter White might squint their eyes at, but Chaplin directs implicitly. In regard to content, then, “Monsieur Verdoux” is incredibly ahead of its time. It deserves to be mentioned alongside other classics of the 40s like “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and “Lola Montes.”