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Chicago Reader: A formal introduction
Hi, I’m Tal Rosenberg, the digital content editor of the Chicago Reader. I used to tumbl here, and also run this; I twitter here. I love Tumblr: Its functionality, the often appealing design templates, and the ability to communicate with and respond to people all over the web. However,… I’ll be writing over here for the foreseeable future. I’m going to keep this blog around, but I’ll rarely be posting anything. Everything I would otherwise post on Flashes of Quincy will now be appearing on the Reader tumblr. Follow along!
"Everybody is outnumbered, because everything in your wallet represents all these contentious relationships with these huge companies. If you want to watch one of my specials on Netflix, they start marketing to you, and you start getting Jeff Dunham ads. You try to read an article about Rwanda and a pop-up comes up for Larry the Cable Guy. ‘Hey, I heard you enjoyed Louie’s special – now we know who you are.’"
"On the first single of his posthumous career, Pac poses a question that he would rework throughout his entire career. Our answer: yes. There is a ghetto heaven. It’s where Biggie, Pun, Aaliyah, Scott LaRock, Big L, Jam Master Jay, and Left Eye reside. But it’s not the same anymore now that all the fuckin’ hipsters are moving in."
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The tents had been raised in the northeast quadrant of the park but, according to people I talked to, when the police came they swept in through the southeast, their path going through a whole bunch of demonstrators who had nothing to do with the tents. I don’t understand why the police would do that if they didn’t want a confrontation. Of course I’ve not heard the police version of events.
But my point is this: Whether the police should or should not have been deployed, whether they acted well or poorly, the police are not the story. The police did not explode the financial system, the police did not create collateralized debt obligations or talk people into taking out home loans they didn’t understand at interest rates they couldn’t pay, and the police are not the campaign donors who are in effect paying politicians to roll back attempts to regulate such behavior. And pitching tents, which is what triggered the police action, not only did not result in any discussion of investment banks and mortgage lenders and unemployment, it didn’t result in any discussion of the homeless, either: the discussion, among the protesters and in the press, is about skirmishes between police and demonstrators. Police conduct/misconduct does bring some attention and energy to the movement — there were more protesters milling about today than I expected — but that hardly helps to get the message out.
(Source: tackorama, via thereal1990s)
"Anonymous,” a costume spectacle directed by Roland Emmerich, from a script by John Orloff, is a vulgar prank on the English literary tradition, a travesty of British history and a brutal insult to the human imagination. Apart from that, it’s not bad."
Bridesmaids
What struck me about Bridesmaids was that it was very sad. Based on everything I’d read or been told about the movie, I was expecting a ribald, sentimental film about female camaraderie, like an estrogen-infused version of The Hangover. There were moments when I laughed, like the competitive speech tradeoff pictured above, but I laughed a lot less than I thought, and at times I felt downright despair. I think that’s because Bridesmaids isn’t really about weddings or friendship, although it is somewhat about the latter. To me at least, Bridesmaids is really about money, and how wealth and status determine who your friends are, as well as whom you want your friends to be. The movie tries valiantly to end on a message of “friendship will always supersede finance.” But there’s a tacit acknowledgment that Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph’s friendship has faded, and that they depart on divergent courses: Wiig to a quaint, lower-middle class future with a cop, and Rudolph to a limo with her fat, six-figure-pulling frat boy.
The movie’s success doesn’t mystify me: There’s a scene with a bunch of women vomiting and shitting in a rarefied bridal gown shop, a scene that says as much about America’s inexorable fondness for toilet humor as it does about what the film’s creators think about fashion and money. And the press pitch is a great hook, a frat-guy comedy for the sorority set, though such gender binaries shouldn’t have any part of it in the first place. But the fact that most people told me Bridesmaids was a funny, feel-good movie says as much about the audience as the film itself, seemingly unaware of money’s ultimately destructive impact on everything ego.
NB: The film’s portrayal of Chicago’s yuppieish, cultureless fraternity set was brutally accurate, especially when a group of boring bigmouths loudly toast to “rockin’ sushi” on Saturday nights, the type of gluttonous idiocy that is, regrettably, all too common around here.
CORRECTION: Thanks to Jonathan Bogart for pointing out an error. I wrote “Kristen Schaal and Rachel Dratch” when I meant to say “Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph.” Not sure how that happened, except that I might not have had enough coffee this morning.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Oneohtrix Point Never, Power of Persuasion
(Replica 2011)“So I left the TV sound off and I sat down at my mood organ and I experimented. And I finally found a setting for despair. So I put it on my schedule for twice a month; I think that’s a reasonable amount of time to feel hopeless about everything.”
Buy Replica. More Philip K Dick. Oneohtrix Point Never, previously.
"The most difficult challenge in writing about the Iranian Terror Plot unveiled yesterday is to take it seriously enough to analyze it. Iranian Muslims in the Quds forces sending maurading bands of Mexican drug cartel assassins onto sacred American soil to commit Terrorism — against Saudi Arabia and possibly Israel — is what Bill Kristol and John Bolton would feverishly dream up while dropping acid and madly cackling at the possibility that they could get someone to believe it."
Glenn Greenwald. Gambits!
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From scene to scene—Carlos preening naked in front of a mirror, the takeover of the OPEC conference, the shooting of a military policeman at a Swiss checkpoint, a weapons delivery, a breakdown in communications—the movie is less scored to than invaded by postpunk songs so romantic and tough they create empathy for situations even as the film withholds it from its characters. We hear, almost see, numbers by the Feelies and New Order, the Dead Boys’ “Sonic Reducer,” and, most viscerally, Wire’s “Dot Dash,” a song that seems to terrorize itself. Not in any way keyed to the scenes with chronological, soundtrack-of-our-lives banality, the songs raise the question of whether the best and most adventurous music of the late 1970s and early 1980s was itself as animated by international terrorism, by the specter of a world where, at times, it could seem that only a few armed gnostics were in control, as by anything else.
The use of this music is an interesting choice, but even more interesting is what Assayas didn’t use—what didn’t work, and why. “I had absolutely no notion when I was making this film of the kind of music I would be using,” he said. “I never use scores; I use songs that I like. In the case of Carlos, I didn’t have a clue. I tried a lot of stuff, and the film did not want it. I thought that this movie needed classic movie music, which is something I never do, I never use—still, maybe the length of the film, the epic pace, maybe I could use some kind of orchestral movie music. The film laughed in my face when I tried it. It rejected a lot of stuff. At one point, I was just desperate. I thought, Maybe no music at all—why not? I started trying stuff—I was just shooting in the dark. And then—I had this Feelies track. It was perfect. All of a sudden, it gave me the right note.” Then, he said, “I knew what the film wanted.”
What Assayas is talking about is the imperative, the momentum, of a film itself thinking. If you are open to the world you are attempting to depict and the means by which you might do so, once you begin the enterprise of filmmaking, the thing you are making will tell you what is and what is not possible, what will violate its personality and what will light it up.
"Making digital music social: Spotify and Turntable.fm try to turn the cloud into a listening lounge
The ubiquitous combination of iPod and iTunes (and other similar pairings of MP3 player and software) has made solo listening a bigger chunk of people’s overall listening time, and cuts them off from any music they might overhear. There are exceptions, of course—if you’re the type of person to share a set of earbuds with your bestie, for instance, or to play your tunes full blast off your cell phone on the bus—but more likely than not your listening is largely asynchronous with everyone else’s. The half dozen people wearing iPods on any given train car might share not a single song in their iTunes libraries. And quite a few of us perceive this isolation as an absence, at least judging by the number of products and services that have arisen over the past few years to attempt to introduce an explicitly social element to the consumption of digital music. —Miles Raymer Speaking of the Reader, here’s a really clear, comprehensive, typically smart piece by Miles Raymer. (Source: chicago-reader)
Thinking the Unthinkable About Steve Jobs
My first post for the Reader is about my conflicted feelings surrounding Steve Jobs’s death.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Vangelis, Rachael’s Song
(Blade Runner Soundtrack, 1982)“Remember when you were six? You and your brother snuck into an empty building through a basement window. You were going to play doctor. He showed you his, but when it got to be your turn you chickened and ran; you remember that? You ever tell anybody that? Remember the spider that lived outside your window? Orange body, green legs. Watched her build a web all summer, then one day there’s a big egg in it. The egg hatched…”
The egg hatched.
“Yeah…”
And a hundred baby spiders came out. And they ate her.
