January 2024 Overview
Writer's Check-in
It feels strange that I even write here that I have not regularly written here in 7 months. I mean, does anyone need a monthly overview from me if nothing has been done? Is making something like this too egotistical on my part? Maybe it is, but I enjoy writing these, so I won't stop doing them anytime soon. To be fair, with trying to recover my love of music (which has been going quite well, though we are not fully back to it), it has been hard to get the motivation to get back into writing, but I think this month I'm going to try to at least try to write any rough thoughts that I have on here. Anyways, it's not like this is serious writing: if it sucks, nobody will truly care, and if it is good, my friends will at least get a kick out of it. So, that's what is new.
In other news, music listening has been a bit of a rocky road this month. For the first half of the month, I enjoyed listening to Nico, Etta James, Echo & The Bunnymen, Slayer, Feelies, and many others. Yet, in the middle of the month, I felt I was forcing myself to listen to music when I wasn't really enjoying it, so I decided to take a break for a week and not listen to music, which meant forcing myself to not listen to it even if I felt like it. Seems like a rather psychotic exercise (but hey, a third of the things I do seem psychotic to outsiders, so it's not like it matters), but in the end, it worked out nicely. It gave me a nice period to explore more of my burgeoning hobbies of film and TV, and coming back, I feel I am enjoying it more. I am sure by the end of February and early March, I'll be back writing more ramblings about music and maybe even adding more about movies and TV in the process. So, for any of you still reading these, more stuff will be coming soon!
Best/Surprise/Disappointment
A bit of a new format for these overviews: instead of discussing statistics (which are soulless numbers anyway), I'll talk about, for music and movies, the best album/movie I consumed this month, the biggest (positive) surprise, and the most disappointing one. I'll also talk about whatever show I've been watching the most this month.
Music
I didn't find them that interesting upon first listen, but after enough patience, I absolutely love these guys. Even with their rigid guitar style, they were masters of build-ups, pop hooks, and sustaining tension and excitement while being an ultra-tight and colorful group. You can hear how this album is the roots of so much college rock in the 80s and beyond, and yet, it is absolutely timeless. It's strange to me that a band with songs are perfect as "Crazy Rhythms", "Fa La Cela", and "Forces at Work" are not hugely popular: yes, this is an artistic exercise, but with their love for Beatlesque pop and the rock n roll spirit, the entertainment value is quite high. A reviewer once said this band stumbled into the "cosmic Rosetta stone", and that was exactly right. Definitely one of the greatest guitar albums of the era.
I didn't find this album all that impressive when I first heard it, but now, I can really understand the power of the transcendental state it can induce. The songs blend into each into one dark, disturbing, but hypnotic drone that manages to push this sort of chamber folk in the rawest, most intense direction possible. "Frozen Warnings" alone is one of the most mind-boggling tracks with those icy, choppy piano patterns. Highly recommend this album (along with Chelsea Girls, Desertshore, and The End) to anybody interested in 60s music at all: you simply CANNOT get this type of vibe and spirit from anyone else.
I thought listening to this landmark album would deepen my appreciation, but instead, I found that I enjoy this even less than before. Joan's voice is gorgeous, no doubt, but to perform each song with such stiffness and pretentiousness is almost insulting to the rough, dirty spiritual perfection of the folk sources it pulls from. No wonder it didn't take much for Dylan to wipe her out in the public consciousness.
Movies
A movie I think gets closest to being what Arthur was to rock music, it manages to take a sort of stiff old-school morality and make us not only empathize with it but weep for its demise. Gorgeous sets and color, charming story and characters, and many powerful scenes. It sprawls for nearly three hours, and you just want to bask in its grandness and beauty. Even Candy himself is just a loveable fool and idealist that, when you really feel his heart in some scenes, it can make you tear up. One reviewer on RYM put it best when he said that the two storylines by themselves, the need for uncompromising brutality to win WWII and the life of a British military man and aristocrat, are not very interesting, but putting them together, it become one of the greatest statements of the old vs. new world ever made. And the movie is pretty funny too!
Most people seem to regard this as a weak effort after No Country For Old Men, but for the life of me, I cannot understand why. It has a beautifully intricate plot, hilarious dialog, a great cast, and a sharp message that conveys a lot of bad people just unfortunately happen to be bad people who do bad things (though that doesn't mean we should try to understand their motivations anyways). I understand that, compared to the world-weary and bleakness of No Country For Old Men, this one feels a little less deep, and this movie fails to be a masterpiece because, unlike Miller's Crossing or The Big Lebowski, they fail to put a central figure within the chaos to help the viewer make sense of what happened. Yet, it is still an excellent movie that I think anyone can enjoy, and it is absolutely essential for fans of the Coens.
The real tragedy of this film is that the first 30 minutes are actually excellent, and if you made those first 30 minutes a standalone movie, it would have worked a lot better. Yes, it is your typical Fincher, but that first quarter was filled with some interesting psychology and philosophy about life, beautiful camera shots, and a great lead actor, set, and script to build up to a climax you wouldn't have expected to occur. The rest of the movie, however, just wasn't all that great with your typical revenge plot: a bit better than your average movie of that type due to Fincher's unrelentless cynicism and dark mental explorations, but it was all too predictable that sort of fizzled out. It will be a better watch than most of the crap you'll find on Netflix, but I would pretty much recommend this to people who love Fincher's style.
TV Show
Curb Your Enthusiasm - Larry David
Anybody who knows me knows I'm a very big Seinfeld fan, and I've been recently doing a proper overview of Larry's career, starting with Seinfeld all the way to Curb, and it's incredible how many great ideas he had in him. I will say that while Larry didn't deliver a single season less than great starting with Season 3 of Seinfeld all the way to Season 7 of Curb, featuring his gifts in dark comedic psychologisms, plot weaving, sharp cynical worldviews, minutiae analysis, memorable characters, and personal writing in all of its hilarious glory (and pretty innovative too, since pretty much most sitcom comedies these days are either derived from the Seinfeld formula or Curb formula). He managed to, at times in these seasons, transcend comedy and almost make it into something much more tense and revealing explorations of his inner hatreds and fears, which is why his strange forms of humanism penetrate so deeply into our hearts.
I think around Season 8 of Curb you can feel he started to finally exit his initial peak, sort of like what Nashville Skyline was to Bob Dylan or Goat Head Soup was to the Stones, which was still quite excellently written and done but lacked a strong sense of purpose and sharpness. To his genius, he corrected it with the next two seasons with wackier plots that helped the show feel fresh and new again (the strong writing helped to counterbalance the waning of the show's improvisational genius). Season 111, however, was the season that really made me lose faith that Larry really had more greatness inside him. Curb's form of cringe comedy only really works if the actual substance and writing behind it is strong, but without it, it just ends up being cringy and unwatchable. I'll admit there was one truly great episode in the mix ("The Watermelon"), but the rest of the season felt forced, overproduced, and tiresome in a way that left a very bad taste in my mouth.
However, today Larry is coming out with the first episode of his final season of Curb. I think Larry himself realized how weak the last season was, and decided to leave before it was too late. I am a bit worried about how this will turn out. If anything, I would like him to depart from his usual formula and go for something more reflective or at least something we wouldn't expect. Even if it is a failure, an intriguing failure is a more interesting way to end off than with a generic boredom. We'll see tonight when it ends up being.
Monthly Playlist
Here is the link to this month's playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4v5NejORehxgI1LXsBbEHe?si=521947c9d49742cb&pt=ab7e9ae4b67c5bd1ba10550a0df29bb5
I'm pretty happy with this one overall, even if it is slightly skewed toward Echo & The Bunnymen and Randy Newman over everyone else. Still, I think this playlist captures my state of mind throughout the month quite well, and I think the apocalyptic cynicism of stuff like PiL's "Swan Lake" and Iggy Pop's "Neighborhood Threat" will complement nicely with the optimistic spiritual glow of Randy's "Birmingham" and Hackett's "Every Day". Moreover, the playlist has an unusual tilt for me towards the '80s and '90s, which should hopefully make it a bit more interesting than what you regularly expect from my playlists. As for the playlist's title (I'll Make A Change Into Something The Same), you'll have to listen to the thing to find the reference. Good luck hunting for it!
Here is the tracklist:
- "Anywhere I Lay My Head" - Tom Waits
- "A Promise" - Echo & The Bunnymen
- "The Game" - Echo & The Bunnymen
- "Cissy Strut" - The Meters
- "I'd Rather Go Blind" - Etta James
- "Stone To The Bone" - James Brown
- "She Smiled Sweetly" - The Rolling Stones
- "Proud Mary" - Ike & Tina Turner
- "Frozen Warnings" - Nico
- "Lament" - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
- "Neighborhood Threat" - Iggy Pop
- "The Shape I'm In" (The Last Waltz version) - the Band
- "Midlife Crisis" - Faith No More
- "Marie" - Randy Newman
- "Milk Cow Blues" - Sleepy John Estes
- "Bring On The Dancing Horses" - Echo & The Bunnymen
- "John Riley" - The Byrds
- "Raised Eyebrows" - The Feelies
- "Crazy Rhythms" - The Feelies
- "Pleasant Street" - Tim Buckley
- "Hounds of Love" - Kate Bush
- "Baltimore" - Randy Newman
- "Every Day" - Steve Hackett
- "Bastards of Young" - The Replacements
- "Swan Lake" - Public Image Ltd.
- "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" - Bruce Springsteen
- "Birmingham" - Randy Newman
- "Alameda" - Elliott Smith
- "She's Not There" - The Zombies
- "How Could I Be Wrong" - The Auteurs
- "What You're Doing" - The Beatles
That's all for now. Thanks to anybody who still reads these, and stay tuned for more ramblings and musings on this blog!
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