The wife and I (rolls off the tongue) will be working our way north through Brazil for a while. Thanks again for all the warm wishes, and we’ll see you in October.
On Saturday morning we decided by democratic process to skip Kevin Devine’s morning set (sorry) and make the barbecue pilgrimage to Lockhart to eat at Kreuz Market. Our host, among other skills a barbecue scholar, told us that Kreuz used to have its own herd but now gets its meat from Sysco. And most of the tinier Texas barbecue restaurants get their meat from Walmart. This broke a bit from the romantic narratives surrounding Local Eateries of America as I understood them, but indignation would have been disingenuous this weekend, as I had flown all the way to Texas to see a bunch of bands from Brooklyn. We all have faith in economies of scale.
Here is my rank of the top ten sets, evaluated by the standard formula
(great set = dAwesome/dSurprise + C).
1. Andrew Bird 8.4
2. Arcade Fire 8.3
3. The National 8.0
4. LCD Soundsystem 7.6
5. Preservation Hall Jazz Band 7.5 (kicker: the kids from New Orleans Bingo! Show in Kiss white-face throwing ice cream out into the crowd—definitive absurdist comment on the post-Katrina voluntourism industry?)
6. Wilco 7.3 (enjoyed the emphasis on pre-Yankee favorites, but we could hear My Morning Jacket over them and the two stages were not close)
7. Mighty Clouds of Joy 7.1
8. Bob Dylan and his Band 6.9 (like Van Morrison last year, I’m not totally convinced he was aware he was on stage the whole time; great arrangements of It Ain’t Me Babe and I Shall Be Released; horrible arrangement of Tangled Up in Blue; the magic lanterns; check mark next to ‘saw Like a Rolling Stone live’)
9. Peter Bjorn & John 6.6
10. Yo La Tengo 6.4
Wired has written a post pointing out the irony of the WNYC feature on the Atlantic Monthly article written by the VH1 executive about the crap that’s still being called Quirk. Why are we still fighting this battle? Didn’t we bury quirk years ago? Handsful of dirt were tossed all the way back when Zissou came out. The spell has been broken. The shit is dead.
Yes, Garden State took down a few lazy viewers in sort of the same way that nobody realized American Beauty sucked until it came out on video. But we learned, and we learned a long time ago. “Zach Braff: Why is this guy the voice of my generation?” came out an entire year ago.
But I don’t know anybody who ever fell for Napoleon Dynamite, which was so blatantly an un-thought-out trail mix (a colloidal suspension, a bubble tea) of hoary, tired clichés and gimmicks that it knew to go directly to MTV, which duly awarded it best movie 2005. Napoleon Dynamite was, at best, a 98 Degrees to Rushmore’s Backstreet Boys. To even lump them together without distinguishing the second as the blurry, smudged mimeograph of the original reveals a critical sloppiness befitting an author who doesn’t think Flavor of Love is a far more insidious threat to our nation’s delicate psyche than this twee, small audience, auteurist haute-bourgeois crap.
I can come back to the content and economics of Quirk as an American-centered cultural movement, but I really gotta lay into Michael Hirschhorn’s (finger-quotes) solution to the problem of Quirk not dealing with real issues: “Judd Apatow’s almost 100 percent quirk-free summer comedy, Knocked Up.”
I’d been waiting for someone else to say this first, but here goes: Judd Apatow is cinema’s turd blossom. He actively talks up the conservative messages in his films when promoting them, so successfully that for Knocked Up many critics mentioned the film’s lack of an abortion discussion with such nonchalance that it in effect became one of the film’s quirks—yes, quirks—and an emblem of the warm, family-values movie consumers are hungry for (as if this were 1985, and it was Back to the Future all over again). This, when the fact that so many boys laugh at the topic of “smashmortion” is specifically the problem.
Don’t let the eye-dropper’s worth of character development he gave the women in Knocked Up fool you, Judd Apatow treats objects like women, man. His female characters are at best goalposts, there to measure your male narrative arc against—motherly when you are ready to lose your virginity; pregnant and employed when you finally outgrow the stoner act; drunk and waiting to give you a blow job when you finally show up at the high school party, even though you’ve only talked to her once. The joyous parade of penises at the end of Superbad is exactly the point—this is the world we live in. Apatow’s male character (really, there’s just one) shows that it’s painful growing into his role as penis bearer in the planet’s last surviving empire. But guess what, tough guy, you still get to wear the penis in the world.
Wes Anderson’s movies, and the Quirk in general, might skew toward the whitebread, but its epiphanies are for the most part tolerant ones, its women are rounded characters, and they sure don’t do this:
Gloss 