Hotel a Morel

bang



'nother frame comic..
no real good way to scan it...
best attempt at reproducing it...
click for a closer look...
enjoy

MYTH:


FACT:

Grizzly Bear - Yellow House

I brought Grizzly Bear's Yellow house home from the library after a particualrly dreary day at work, layed my head back agaist the couch cushion, and prepared to give it a first listen.  I had stumbled upon a video of them performing a cover of the old Crystals doo-wop hit "he hit me (and it felt like a kiss)" and subsequntly a couple a cappella tracks a la the brilliant french video series "Blogotheque" aka "The Take Away Shows".   Duly impressed, I decided to give the full length a try.

Lying there in the semi-dark, I let the flighty a cappella swoons wash over me. Slowly and softly the ghostly vocals and dreamy instrumentation seeped in, and I was able to forget for some significant bit of time that I was lying there in the dark defeated by a shitty day at work.

I suppose that escapism was a feeling I hadn't felt in some time, and I was thankful to GB for weaving this dreamscape so that I might loose myself in it like  a dorthy being pulled up and away from a black and white Kansas below.  Later, nearing the release of thier follow-up  Veckatamist, I read an article which sited one of them stating that they hoped someone might listen to one of their albums and be able to forget where they were.  This, from a band who is particularly cafeful about stepping on the toes of interpreters with mission/artistic statements.  Needless to say I was all the more impressed.

What makes Yellow House so exceptional is how it's found a way to seem both timeless and progressive.  The way it seems to be invoking some lost art by incorporating traditional folk instruments and instrumentations into impossibly expansive layers, sometimes building to angelic crescendo, other times breaking out into a stomping and driving rhythmic force. 

 At times it feels as if you recognise their harmonies from the soundtrack of some golden era epic the titles softly disolving as the camera pans across a forgotten american landscape.  A tall and simple church stands out boldy agaist the prairie, wandering through its halls, the echo of the choir envelopes you in an unsettling hymn for the missing.

The Knife,  a song which has emmerged as the albums siren call, seems completely at home among the remainder of the album. Dispite its catchy motown aesthetic, it depicts a dark dirge of a story about a girl who just can't see her boy(the narrator) is a liar.  Many of the songs bear the impression of being perhaps in that yellow house where the album was recorded: kicking up dust into the sun coming through the curtains, going to the window looking out at big blue sky,  lyrics floating by like clouds, where you might impose some familiar form on them or just let them float in enriching the scene as a whole.

Like many of my favorite albums, its a carefully crafted experience.  The band has an hour or so to tour you around and show you what they've found, and in Yellow House Grizzly Bear has collected some wonderful things.

Double Your Entendre

Careful now...each pic is doubly punishing

Mother Fucker Never Told a Lie

Several months ago I came upon a poorly screen printed t-shirt at my local Good-Will thrift/retail/whatever store with what looked like a comic on it. The print consisted of about a hundred tiny panels, many of them indecipherable, which seemed to be telling a story about George Washington. I've kicked myself in the ass for months for not snatching it up only because it would have been too big for me to wear. The comic depicted our founding father reeking havoc and handing out asses wherever he went. Since that day I've been struggling to figure out exactly what I saw.

Today I happened upon someone's avatar in the A.V. Club comment threads and immediately recognized it as a drawing from the fabled t-shirt. I inquired as to its origin, and in little time was informed that it came from a comic/video created by Brad Neely a little googling and my months of anticipation were generously rewarded...



whites of your eyes, BITCH!

Irreversible

Dan gave me a copy of Irreversible and asked me to watch it and let him know what I thought. He said "if you can make it though the first 15 minutes, then you should be able to make it through the rest." He also said that I would probably hate myself for watching it, but that I might want to watch it again.

So here I am having just watched it, and for the most part he was right. I do have a desire to watch it again(mostly to catch a few things I missed the first time) but don't know if I'm ever going to. It would be hard to overstate the violent nature of Irreversible and aside from being hard to stomach emotionally the films merry-go-round aesthetic will have you running for the dramamine before you get past the title menu.

I'm generally pretty thick skinned when it comes to movie violence, I don't get offended too easily in fact I don't see much of a point to. Most movie violence can be chalked up to bad decision making on the part of the director, where graphic violence is a stand-in for content and craft, where the ability to make people squirm turns a b-movie hack into a member of the avant garde, this movie might easily be thrown into that pile were it not for a few saving graces.

Its not the first movie to play its scenes in reverse order. Everyone going into this movie will be familiar with Memento and its effectiveness in toying with the narrative to achieve something greater than the sum (or difference) of its parts. Irreversible plays a similar game but goes much darker than Memento's small town noir and sinks you right out of the gates into the filthiest pits of city's bowels(at a gay night club called "rectum" no less) the camera swirling around as if hung by a chain.

There will be spoilers ahead so, if you plan on watching it and you can find it, stop reading here, and make sure no women, children, small animals, or the elderly are around.

Irreversible's achievement is not in that it shows some sort of brutal uncensored violence, a man getting his head smashed in by a fire extinguisher, or a rape scene which lasts a good 8-10 minutes. Though these scenes work toward the movie's overall effect which is a sort of inverted tragic levity that makes it's subjects senslessly violent story all the more tragic for it's sequencing. It does this I think by offering the story in a way which forces the viewer to consider the plot a little harder, where we might more easily block ourselves from the violence were it edited more traditionally or chronologically, here the bath water is drained deliberately to reveal the drowned baby if you will.

With each scene the colors get brighter, the contrast is softened, and most importantly the camera gets more grounded and steady. Indeed those first 15-30 are pretty hard to watch in fact all we really get to see are colors and textures of a gritty euro-trash red light district the camera occasionally panning to reveal a harshly lit glimpse of violent sex as the character searches the corridors of "rectum" to find the man responsible for putting his girlfriend in a coma.

The first half unvenges? us back to the the rape/beating and it is this scene where we see the victim for the first time aside from a bloody mess we see being hoisted into an ambulance a scene or 2 earlier. Nothing that might take place in the second half could redeem what happens to her. There are moments in this scene where I found myself covering my mouth in disgust/shock one especially heart breaking moment when we see a figure enter the underpass where she is being raped and surveys the scene from a distance and promptly decides to ignore it and go back the way he came unnoticed.

Now that we got all that messy business out of the way we can get down to meeting our characters which are a young couple and their good friend who has come to visit them. The friend is the woman's ex-lover which might make for a some touchy dialogue were this not a story set in modern France where people are above getting upset by all that. The dialogue in this second half is another gem which redeems the film from just being shock fodder.

The story winds itself back up until we're in the room of the 2 lovers naked, gratified, just waking up, exchanging playful affections all is fuzy, warm, safe, and diffused, the characters are likable enough that you really don't need what seems like a tacked on bit about the girl potentially being pregnant. The camera pans out the windows and it's blue skies and infinite possibilities. A final shot shows our girl reading a book on blanket in the park as sunbathers and children enjoy the beautiful day, save for one last bit where the screen flickers and buzzes a bit to evoke the films violent beginning.

Played in chronological order it wouldn't be the same movie at all, and while the story isn't quite as nuanced as Memento, i think it deserves its own special place into the world of non-traditional narratives. While its reverse approach might originally be merely stylistic in nature it does achieve something original and thought provoking.

Once the senseless violence of the world swallows you up there's little left but to be shot out the other side bearing hardly a resemblance to the ripe fruit you may have been going in. A process which is Irreversible.

Summer comes before the Fall

I rarely read any novel more than once,

The Fall is the one of a few exceptions, and I've read it more than any other.

I've been working on this puppy since last fall,

enjoy