The Golden Age of Deconstruction

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"Must we not then renounce the object altogether, throw it to the winds and instead lay bear the purely abstract?" - Vasily Kandinsky (1911)

"All electronic music is sampled. The synthesizers are all coming from some source." - Gregg Gillis (2012)

This week, I'll be discussing the following (none of which really lend themselves to "spoilers" by their nature, but be forewarned all the same):

•  The Clock, a 24 film directed and edited by Christian Marclay and showing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through January 21, 2013;
• Girl Walk // All Day, which can be seen online in chapter installments; and
• Holy Motors, which is currently in limited release nation-wide.

As always here, what follows is less a review than a ramble, in this case inspired by what I think is a Golden Age of contemporary culture that is catching up with the deep and wide potential of the Remix.  This may be the Golden Age of Deconstruction, by which I mean that we are seeing the first generation that grew up with unlimited access to recorded video and music learn to take apart and reassemble those clips with abandon until their core essence has risen to the surface.

Well, what Batman were YOU watching?

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This is a post I've been meaning to write since I first walked out of Dark Knight Rises for the first time.  Work obligations mostly got in the way, but I hope the finished product has benefited from the passage of time, from repeat viewings of the movies, and from watching some of the "making of" materials on the blu-ray release.  This is not a "review" per se, something I generally don't do here (at least not for my longer posts), but it is in large part a critique of and response to many of the reviews I've read since the film's release.  Needless to say, my perspective of and appreciation for this film (and the "Dark Knight Trilogy" as a whole) will come through in this post.  But beyond the fact that I greatly enjoyed each one of these films, I'm inspired to write about what these films say and how they say it.

Inside the Wall, Vol. 4 (2012 Wrap-Up)

I'm writing one last post to wrap up 2012, as well as to announce my intention to post at least once a week going forward  -- including, to kick things off, an epic rant on Nolan's "Dark Knight Trilogy" next Monday.

This isn't a "best [blank] of the year" list, really, though I am a big fan of those if only to help me discover the gems out there that I missed.  Here are some of my favorites and what they turned me onto (call it my "Best of the 'Best [blank] of the Year Lists' List"):

• A.V. Club's "The best films of 2012" (which, along with many other "best of" lists, has convinced me to make seeing Holy Motors a priority) and "The best podcasts of 2012" (which reminds me, again, that I really need to catch up with The Nerdist)
• Flavorwire's "The 10 Best Dark and Weird Electronic Albums of 2012" (which introduces me to the hypnotic and beautiful Holy Other's album Held)
  
  
  and "The 15 Most Underrated Albums of 2012" (from which I picked up the latest from Lower Dens, Kishi Bashi, Nu Sensae, Burial and Woods
• Mike Rengel's "Top Ten Albums of 2012" (which may just force me to finally pick up Frank Ocean's album, given that the praise seems to be all but universal) -- my thanks to Tom Lampe for pointing me in Rengel's direction

The rest of my thoughts on 2012's highs and lows after the jump ...

Post-9/11 on the Big Screen

After years of hearing the buzz from nearly ever film website and podcast on my daily rotation, I decided to watch Margaret during the week of the latest 9/11 anniversary.  The film was actually shot years ago (so long ago that they almost - almost - get away with casting Anna Paquin as a high school student ... but honestly, when I saw the first shot of her in the classroom, all I could think of was the running joke in the recent 21 Jump Street reboot that 20-something guys look nothing like teenagers).  Yet, after a series of post-production lawsuits spurred by studio meddling with the final cut, the release date shifted from somewhere in 2006 to 2011.  The battle over editing calls to mind Terry Gilliam's epic struggle with his studio over Brazil, and while it's too early to tell if Margaret deserves that top shelf level of comparison, I will say it's among the best films I've seen over the past few years, easily.

I'm going to pass on posting a trailer to encourage going in blind.  Any clip you might see in advance is likely to give you the wrong impression of what this film is.  On that note, what follows is mostly spoiler-free except in the vaguest of terms.

Inside the Wall, Vol. 3 (9.23.12)

The back half of my summer involved a lot more time in the office than I'd prefer, hence the lack of any posts since early July (aside from a short thought experiment proposing concept albums that ought to be made into feature-length films).  So now I have a few months worth of culture to summarize.  This post comes back-to-back with a longer write-up of the stunning, red-headed stepchild of a film called Margaret and other "Post-9/11" films I highly recommend, so I'll be brief:

Starting with music, a new collaboration between David Byrne and St. Vincent called Love This Giant is reliably solid and underlines nicely the direct influence that Talking Heads had on the latter.  I will be seeing the two perform together next weekend, so the real question will be whether the Brooklyn newbie can match the legend's considerable stage presence (or, like the time I saw David Bowie tour with Nine Inch Nails, whether all the glam rock trappings that Trent Reznor adopted from the master will look flimsy by comparison). 

  

"So ya' thought ya' might like to go to the show ..."

I'm a big fan of the concept album. Maybe it has to do with the fact that my parents subjected me to a  constant rotating loop of movie soundtracks growing up -- Jesus Christ Superstar, Saturday Night Fever and (for the holidays), Star Wars - Christmas In The Stars: Star Wars Christmas Album ... which does exist:

Anyways, because of (maybe in spite of) that exposure, it makes a lot of sense to me to consider an album as (essentially) a novel with a beat -- and I mean "a novel" and not "a thematically unified short story collection."  Plenty of great albums fit into the latter category, but my richest musical experiences tend to come from the former.  Discovering The Wall during high school was a real benchmark in my early musical explorations (and not just because The Wall speaks directly to disaffected youth seeking their identity in the face of soul-crushing adulthood).  In fact, I can probably say that my list of favorite albums from any given time of my life has at least a couple concept albums in the top 5 (if not at the #1 slot).

Inside the Wall, Vol. 2 (7.1.12)

Here at the half-point for 2012, I'm ready to add Passion Pit's performance of "Sleepyhead" at the Governor's Ball to the short list of "best live performances of the year."  It doesn't hurt that their visually arresting but often lackluster performance up to that point in the show had drained much of the energy of their studio cuts.  It's hard to blame front man Michael Angelakos for cutting much of the falsetto intensity from his vocals; that kind of mania has to be impossible to maintain over an entire show.  Still, it's the most striking feature on Passion Pit's otherwise standard-fair synth pop style that put them above tepidly enjoyable bands like Chromeo, who took the stage shortly before Passion Pit but generated barely half of their audience enthusiasm.