Dave's rough logo sketch

Dave shot me over this funny logo a while ago, but I just got around to posting it since the dust in our new house is just beginning to settle. I'm thinking I may replace Mao with someone, but I think Kim looks hilarious. Any suggestions welcome. I was thinking Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell.

I'm also going to get him to try one out in the more realistic sketchy style he has on his website (link to the right under "People We Like").

Anyways, thanks Dave. Much props and good work. I'll send you something fun in the mail.

Big River Man

John Maringouin's film "Big River Man" is my kind of documentary, for it manages to treat a totally ridiculous subject with the humor and bizarre emotion it deserves. It is the story of Martin Strel, 53 year old Slovenian alcoholic and four-time world record holder for distance swimming. After swimming the Yangtze and Mississippi rivers, "Big River Man" follows Martin's training and execution of his most dangerous feat yet: swimming the Amazon. Lest you think the two sides of Strel's personality are separate -- he drinks on his off season and trains to get into shape -- think again. He swims sixty kilometers a day, then gets blitzed all night. Or, even better, he refuses water and tells his crew to give him some whiskey while he's in the river.

By day 9 of the 60+ day swim, Strel has second degree burns on his face from the sun and dehydration. He drinks all night, every night. By about day 30 he starts vanishing from the boat while others are sleeping and swimming on his own. This is incredibly dangerous, and leaves his son and small crew to go searching for him more than once. The whole ordeal gets weirder as Martin's health continues to degrade, and if you've ever wanted to hear a Slovenian man hallucinate the words "I'm entering the fourth dimension" while wearing an underwear mask on his face, you finally have somewhere to look.

All of this is strung together by narration delivered by Martin's son, and at the heart of the movie is their strained and doleful relationship. This is a weird, hilarious movie with a hopeful sadness at the middle of it, and I love it.


(check out the opening clip of the movie at the "pilot" section of their website)

What's so interesting about "Big River Man," beyond all of the antics and father-son relationship, is the fact that it's so funny. It makes me wonder if the events themselves were funny when they occurred, or if Maringouin's personality comes through in the editing and he was able to make it funny. The movie is infused with the energy of a guy filming a range of emotional moments, all the while chuckling behind his camera, not because he is ironically distancing himself from the people, but because from their sincerity emerges a lovely kind of personal humor. It's a balance Maringouin holds well, and I can't wait to watch it all again.

Food, Inc.

"Food, Inc." is not my type of documentary, but I'm having a hard time figuring out why that matters. It fashions itself as an expose of the huge, mostly hidden mess that is the American food industry, and offers up an intelligent, if somewhat sprawling and incohesive argument that things need to change. It is basically a book on film: chapter breaks and talking head interviews of major food journalists (primarily Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan) weave through a hoard of topics -- the elimination of the individual farmer, the genetically altered food we regularly ingest, the toothless and self-serving USDA and FDA, and the government policies that have helped shape this factory-over-farm environment.



This book format makes sense, considering not only the range of information but also the fact that they released a companion piece to the film -- a book by the same name. After a relentless 94 minutes (really? it feels like 120) the film gives a brief run down of what you can do to change the system, and ends by directing you to its website, takepart.com/foodinc.

Call me old fashioned, but I'm skeptical of any film that needs both a website and a book to get its whole point across. I'm not even sure if sections of the film would have entirely made sense if I had not already read 100 pages into Michael Pollan's own book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. The viewing experience is something like being dropped into a vast essay with no introductory paragraph, then having it speed-read to you, then being told that if you want to know exactly what to do about all of the awful things you just learned, you should look elsewhere.

Yet, despite my complaints, there is a certain charm held by a movie that can barely contain its own scope. I felt a slight glow of illumination as I explored my local independent markets yesterday morning, and instead of feeling helpless to change this vast network of mechanization and regulations, I instead feel as if I am slowly acruing the tools to defend myself and make the right choices. "Food, Inc." has left a strange kind of tanbility in my life, and I can't really ask for much more from a film. It feels like just the beginning of a greater education that I have only recently embarked on; one in which I can plant my own garden, buy locally, and cultivate my own little corner of a moderate revolt.

If one photo could explain how I feel about No Age

It would be this one.

The new Silk Flowers CD is out, and I'm currently searching around for a place to download it at. August 30 No Age are playing at the Silent Movie Theater. How convenient.

Beck does Velvet Underground

Record Club: Velvet Underground & Nico "Femme Fatale" from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.

This is my favorite cover yet (of the three so far). Beck's covering entire albums over at his website, and he's starting with Velvet Underground and Nico. Way to aim low, buddy. Also, looks like Nigel's on the funny drums.

What a photo.

Wow. Via Byrne's blog.

Also, on the same link, a nice verbalization of something I think about literally every day:

"We scoff at religions clearly “made up” by men just like ourselves within the last couple of centuries. Peeping stones? Xenu? But what makes the more established religions any less preposterous? Weren’t they also mostly “made up” by men like ourselves? Yes, some have been augmented by other men — additional rules and imagery added over the millennia — but isn’t it just time that gives them more credence or respect? If we’re going to roll our eyes at only the new religions then we are, in my opinion, being very unfair."

The Brothers Bloom

To get it out of the way quickly, Rian Johnson's "The Brothers Bloom" is essentially a shallow formal rip off of Wes and P.T. Anderson's combined tools. With a ham hand the director mixes in a little Ashby, a little Nichols. Melville's spirit and Joyce's characters are conjured only by name, and Welles only via caricature -- a fat man, caped, wandering a boat. You can parce every shot, or at least every sequence and find its origin immediately, and this sucks, not only because I root for Rian Johnson as a hometown filmmaker (he's from San Clemente), but also because I'd like to think that the director's voice hasn't entirely been consumed by flat, boring theft.

"Brick," Johnson's first feature, had Johnson's flair all over it. The characters spoke in fast-talking jive and the cinematography was tricky and broad, but it was all reigned in on a low budget function-over-form kind of mentality. They did everything they could with a dearth of resources, so the fact that the characters were a bit incohesive or that the jive was a bit forced is overshadowed by the fact that, hey, they did it.

This isn't to give "Brick" a pass. I think it stands up as a quality first feature, and a nice stone of a filmmaker stepping into his voice. The last thing I expected, though, was to give him a budget only to have him poorly imitate someone else. It makes me hope that he got all of this faux-homage out of his system in one fell movie, but it also makes me wonder if he had his own voice in the first place. The latter is the true bummer of "Bloom."

So, here's the dilema: A filmmaker releases a solid neo-noir movie, albeit one wrought with romanticized homage for its own genre. Then, later, the filmmaker releases a con-man movie that is the flipside of the coin: homage becomes theft, genre becomes trope, flair becomes bordom. Which one do I believe? I can't help but view "Bloom" through the expectations of "Brick," and, without a third movie to relate them both to, I can't quite tell where "Brick" falls into Johnson's career. Will "Bloom" be the misfire, or will "Brick" emerge as the most idiosyncratic outlier? I just don't know, but "Bloom" makes me nervous about the answer.

I got excited just watching it.

Best part is when Paul very graciously tosses the spotlight over to Neil, and then Neil approaches the microphone looking like this guy. Happens at about 5:30.

Also funny that Paul somehow got infected with Neil's white guy dance.

Up

It is appropriate that Carl, the square-faced and cantankerous protagonist of "Up," met his true love Ellie when he was just a child. Pixar do what they do based on this simple, beautiful premise -- they treat children with the emotional and intellectual capacity of adults. And, on top of this, they respect that capacity. So we are given a deep love between Carl and Ellie, their life goals, the subsequent inability to accomplish those life goals, pregnancy (depending on how you interpret the images), loss of their child, and Ellie's death all in the first twenty minutes.

"Up" is the most emotionally complex film in the current box office top ten not because it is falsely labeled as a kids movie, but because it treats kids as all audience should be treated -- as people capable of coping with love, tragedy, and everything in between.

Pixar is able to get away with all of this precisely because they are assumed to be making kids movies. Which, in a way, they are. In the same breath, though, they are using the 'kids movie' moniker as a way to slip under the radar and avoid the practically required stupidity of an 'adult' movie, or the nearly barren territory of 'adult cartoons.' Rather than embracing this irony with an exasperating wink as Dreamworks so often does, Pixar instead balances combinations of emotions that require only character, comedy and design.



From what I can tell, Pixar is the only company consistently doing this, and with phenomenal results. I see "Up" and I realize that animation is the forefront of experimentation not just in form but in emotion. I watch it and love every minute. I come out of the theater and want to find a pencil, learn to draw, and create great works of comic and animated art. There are few movies that make me feel like this, let alone animated ones, and I am so happy to have seen one this year. And my God, how well they do it.

As Carl's roof bursts with balloons and his house ascends past the windows of the adjacent building, we cut inside a windowed apartment where a little girl plays with her toys. She watches in awe as her walls and carpet glow with a kalaeidescope of colors. Her room is illuminated, and for a moment she's inside of a moving rainbow. She turns around and throws herself up against the window to watch Carl's house float by. I cannot think of a better scene to illustrate what Pixar does to its audience. To say that they only have this effect on children is disingenuous. I am in that room, too.


(art courtesy of the Up Color Script via Lou Romano's blog)

House, Not a Home

Dear 415 1/2,

When I first moved into you some three years ago, I made it a point to change the name of my parents' phone number in my cell from "Home" to "House." I played this small psychological trick on myself for those first exciting months. As a child, I didn't live in LA long enough to actually feel any connection to it, and the vast blandness that Orange County offered held no appeal throughout my teenage years. I came to this apartment with the hope of making it a home not only for myself, but a haven for work, writers and artists around me. To some degree, I succeeded. Nearly every Moderate Revolt contributor has lived with me, or at least slept on my couch for a period of time. At its best, the apartment was a physical equivalent to this space. At its worst, it was a depressing shithole. (Reflective of my college experience, now that I think about it). And somewhere in between, when everything balanced itself out, I fashioned a kind of home out of you.

For the past couple of months, any hint of home that had invaded 415 has dwindled into stress and disappointment. Our lease is up in ten days and I still do not have a new place to live. I sleep there maybe one out of every four nights. My room smells like a stranger. The apartment is so dirty that I can't get any work done there, and any real momentum on Stanley Bigot or Alplerman fundraising or anything else is made totally impossible by the impending deadline of July 1. I feel like I am searching for a new home, and every apartment I look in is somehow inadequate to house the four disparate personalities who will live there. It is depressing, to say the least.

On Halloween night, I walked in the door after a long night of work. This was at the beginning of my career as a narc for the UCLA Police Department, and I my annoyance with the job had not descended into a three month patch of one of the worst depressions I have ever had. I did not know if we were going to do anything for Halloween, and inside the floor was entirely cleared. Decorations were hung from the ceiling, and music was playing loudly. In the kitchen, Ryan stood alone, baking, dressed as a ninja preparing for a party with no guests. I called everyone I knew, and I dressed as Michael Stipe.

When Raul was living on our couch / in our closet, I walked in and Mika Miko were all hanging out in our living room. They took a band-y photo in our bath tub, which had not yet been converted into a dark room. We had a moustache party, and I let Michelle borrow a bunch of comic books.

My favorite apartment gift ever is Stephanie's David Lynch Pillow. I need to figure out how to wash it, and repair its bursting sides we use it so much. In ten days, Shawn and Stephanie also move, and all of the stress at the apartment has kept me from hanging out with them. Maybe, along with the stress, I don't really want to see them go, so instead I just don't see them at all. This is not the best way to deal with their moving.

It is strange to see our home here come to a close because I very tangibly have to start something new. The stress is not just because I am looking for a new apartment -- this is just the space. The real worry is that I won't be able to make this place my home. What happens if Ryan and I don't live together? How can I imagine an LA without Shawn? How can we do anything here when he is so important to me both as a friend and as an inspiration? I hope that by living within walking distance to my favorite theaters -- Cinefamily, New Beverly -- I can create a surrogate Shawn at least in quantity of films watched, even if mere movie houses can never subsitute the quality.