An Album I Love: Wildflowers

Posted on August 19, 2013 by fromabrooklynbasement

There were two big problems with picking ten records for my Desert Island Albums series: 1) Only ten records! 2) Those posts were really time-consuming to write, as they often approached two-thousand words.

There are so many more albums I want to write about, but I know people didn’t get to the end of those posts unless they were as attached to the particular album as I was. So I’m going to continue with a series of “Albums I Love,” which are great records that didn’t make the Desert Island cut but still deserve to be highlighted. These posts will be a lot shorter, and not as strictly formatted as the Desert Island pieces. First up is the last album I cut from my top 10: Tom Petty’s Wildflowers.

Wildflowers

Wildflowers was released in November 1994 as a Tom Petty solo album. Petty worked with super-producer Rick Rubin on the record, and while it’s officially a solo album, the vast majority of the sessions were played by Petty’s longtime band, the Heartbreakers (the same is true of Petty’s previous, equally excellent solo record, Full Moon Fever).

I’ll get right to the reason I love Wildflowers: It’s an incredibly sad and beautiful breakup album. The songs are infused with a deep sense of melancholy. Just look at the first three tracks:

1. The title track, with its imagery of a girl “among the wildflowers” or “in a boat out at sea,” destined to travel anywhere that she feels free. The narrator of the song tells the girl to “run away, go find a lover,” to “let your heart be your guide,” with a clear implication that he wishes he could be that lover, but that he’s either let her down, or just isn’t capable of being the one who can make her happy. But the music, rather than being sad, is jangly, pretty, even hopeful for her.

2. The album’s hit single, You Don’t Know How It Feels, with the chorus: “Let’s get to the point/Let’s roll another joint/And turn the radio loud/I’m too alone to be proud/And you don’t know how it feels … To be me.” It’s perfect because everyone knows exactly how this feels, but when we’re busted and heartbroken, we all want to believe that no one else will understand. Alanis Morissette may have misunderstood the concept of irony, but Tom Petty gets it. Also, the video is great.

3. The soft breakup song Time To Move On, which features both the deeply affecting verse “Sometime later, getting the words wrong/Wasting the meaning and losing the rhyme/Nauseous adrenaline/Like breakin’ up a dogfight/Like a deer in the headlights/Frozen in real time/I’m losing my mind,” but then follows it with a chorus that’s forward-looking and affirming: “Time to move on, time to get going/What lies ahead, I have no way of knowing/But under my feet, baby, grass is growing/It’s time to move on, it’s time to get going.” Don’t overlook the wah-wah pedaled guitar solo on this tune.

Of course, not all the songs are soft: You Wreck Me is an uptempo rocker, and It’s Good To Be King, while a slow jam, has become a Heartbreakers concert-staple, one they often stretch to nine- and ten-minutes in length to showcase lead guitarist Mike Campbell.

But in the end, my favorite moments on Wildflowers have always been those quiet, sweetly melancholy ones. The plaintive line “don’t fade on me,” less sung than spoken; the chorus of Hard To Find a Friend, “The days went by like paper in the wind/Everything changed, then changed again/It’s hard to find a friend”; and maybe my favorite, the last verse of Crawling Back to You, “I’m so tired of being tired/Sure as night will follow day/Most things I worry about/Never happen anyway,” giving way to the lovely harmony of the chorus: “Oooh ooh, I keep crawling back to you.”

Wildflowers is an album you listen to when you feel broken and lonely, but you know being around other people won’t help you feel better. It’s a wise album, recorded by a 44-year old artist looking back across a life full of success but also dotted with mistakes and regrets–as even the most successful lives inevitably are. An artist who named his band the Heartbreakers, and who definitely knows how that feels.

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An Event I’m REALLY Bummed to Be Missing: The Russian River Beer Revival

Posted on August 15, 2013 by fromabrooklynbasement

Guerneville is a small, homey resort town nestled in the redwood forests of Sonoma County, just a few miles from the ocean. The town is known for its laid back, hippie-ish vibe and for being a getaway spot for gay couples, but one day a year it is overtaken by an event dedicated to sheer gluttony, a veritable bacchanalia on the banks of the Russian River. Officially, it’s called the Russian River Beer Revival, but those in the know refer to it only as “Stumptown.”

You walk along the shoulder of River Road through town, past river rafting supply shops, kitschy home goods stores, and the many many cars of Stumptown revelers parked there. The first sign that you’re getting close, other than those parked cars, is the smell of grilling meat wafting to you on the breeze. You can smell it from hundreds of yards away. Finally, you reach the long line of people waiting for the entrance, in front of the Stumptown Brewery, the host of the event and the reason for its shorthand moniker.

At noon the gates open, and you are herded slowly past the brewery and down an incline, tickets in hand, to a clearing slightly smaller than a football field on the bank of the river. Your ticket, which cost $50 the first time I went, four years ago, but now runs $75, gets you one small tasting glass and entry to that field, where you find 30 different barbeque stands grilling meat and 30 different breweries (mostly from Northern California, including some of the best breweries in the country–Anderson Valley, Lost Coast, Russian River, Bear Republic, and on and on and on) pouring beer. You have until six o’clock to eat and drink as much as you can.

The descent into madness

The descent into madness

The most important thing about Stumptown is to pace yourself. The first year I attended, I was WAY too excited about all that delicious microbrewed beer; I drank about 20 beers in the first hour of the festival, blacked out, and made an unspeakable jackass of myself.

The following year, I swore I’d do better, so I adopted a strategy to combat my natural tendency toward alcoholic dissolution: I spend the first hour of the festival methodically hitting every barbeque stand I can, drinking only a beer or two along the way to wash down the ribs. You’ve got a long time to drink, and you need as much foundation for all that beer as you can get. The predominant form of meat is ribs, though you will find some stands grilling chicken wings as well, and there are stray sides available here and there, the best being the jalapenos one of the stands (I don’t remember which) fires up. It’s really all about the ribs, though, the best of which are always produced by the Mad Scientist stand (second best is probably the Black Hole BBQ stand, who I will forgive for being Raiders fans because of the quality of their meat).

MEAT

MEAT

My stomach swollen with charred animal flesh, I usually take a short break, stealing a patch of shade and listening to one of the bluegrass bands the organizers bring into play. After the brief respite I hit the beer stands. While the BBQ stands have an official contest, its more informal among the breweries: some are satisfied to bring two kegs of beer and pour until those run out; others engage in an arms race of one-upsmanship, rolling out special brews as the afternoon goes along, ensuring the destruction of all festival-goers. Bear Republic, in particular, has made a habit of bringing out the big guns for Stumptown.

A few bits of advice: It’s usually hot and sunny, and there’s only a little bit of shade, so you need sun block and a hat, especially if you’re a pale-face like me. On the flipside, you’re right next to the river, so if you wear a bathing suit or board shorts, you can jump right in to cool off.

Roll, river, roll

Roll, river, roll

A couple more tidbits: First, cell phones mostly don’t work in the area, so if you’re meeting people, make plans beforehand, because you won’t be able to coordinate during the festival (not that it matters all that much–you’ll just end up getting drunk and losing each other anyway). Second, the bathroom situation is about as rough as you’d expect: just a few porta-potties for a few hundred people drinking beer and eating meat. A friend of mine, who will remain nameless, had to drop a deuce at the festival one year, and by the time he got into the commode, it was totally out of both toilet paper and seat covers. He cleaned himself using cardboard strips torn from the empty seat cover box. Personally, I take a large dose of Immodium before heading down.

Another bit of advice, which I guarantee you’ll ignore: At the end of the festival, people march back up the incline to the road, taking them right by the Stumptown Brewery. The brewery has an awesome deck, which will quickly become packed with people keeping the party going. Going to the brewery is an incredibly bad idea; you’re probably already on the verge of a blackout, and the brewery serves hard alcohol, which guarantees you’re going down hard. But you’ll be drunk, and there will be a lot of people there, and probably an Elvis impersonator, so even though it’s a terrible idea, I’m telling you right now, you’re going to end up at the brewery.

Seriously: Elvis impersonator

Seriously: an Elvis impersonator

The result of all of this is that, by the time you make it back to your campsite (and please, please, reserve a campsite in town, do not try to drive anywhere after Stumptown), you will be intensely fucked up. I have all sorts of stories of immensely retarded things my friends have done after the festival. (I’m banned for life from one local campsite; I am not telling the story of how that happened.) My favorite story is when one of my friends and I inadvertently swapped tents, and he couldn’t figure out how to put up my tent, so he just slept in his SUV. During the night he opened the door and leaned out and puked onto his running board. The puke solidified so that, at the end of his trip home the next day, a hour-and-a-half drive on the freeway, his regurgitation was still stuck there. I have a picture of it, but I’ll spare you.

On the bright side, our morning tradition is to hit the Russian River Pub for breakfast the next day. Just south of town, this unassuming spot makes great Bloody Marys and surprisingly excellent food. (Get the Crab Cake Eggs Benedict. Trust me.)

Now for the bad news: You’re not going to Stumptown, which takes place tomorrow. That’s because the event, in its eleventh year, which used to be fairly easy to get tickets to, now sells out within minutes.

And the even worse news: I’m not going either, for the first time in four years. I’m mostly happy here in the Brooklyn Basement, but missing out on Stumptown is surely one of the biggest downsides of being here on the East Coast.

So, to my friends back in California who are going to Stumptown this year: I hate you guys. Have a great time.

Posted in Drinks, Food | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

I’ve Eaten the Best Meat In America Twice and Never Gotten To Enjoy It

Posted on August 15, 2013 by fromabrooklynbasement

I’m generally pretty conscientious as far as my consumption of meat goes. I’m very conscious of the amount of resources that go into a hamburger, the damage utilizing those resources does to the environment, and the large number of people that could be fed if we all decided to forego that beef. I’m way too weak-willed to totally give up meat (it tastes too good, goddammit), but I have a few rules about it: I only eat meat at one meal a day (at most), I generally try to limit those portion sizes, and I often order a vegetarian option when I can (I’ve eaten a lot of vegetarian burritos and hummus and avocado sandwiches over the years).

With that said, I make exceptions to those rules. When I get the burrito mojado at Taqueria Cancun (my absolute favorite meal), I get it with al pastor. And for a big celebration dinner, there’s nothing like a nice juicy steak. What can I say–I’m a dude, and something about eating a hunk of meat appeals to the caveman living somewhere deep inside me. I’ve eaten at great steakhouses in the Bay Area, Chicago, Las Vegas, and New York, but nothing tops Brooklyn’s Peter Luger Steakhouse.

Peter Luger sits just across the East River from Manhattan, in the shadows of the Williamsburg Bridge. The dining room feels like the interior of an old Bavarian tavern, and it looks like it hasn’t changed that much in the more than 125 years the restaurant has been serving steaks. The menu probably hasn’t changed all that much, either: At Peter Luger, you don’t order a ribeye or filet mignon or a New York strip. You order “Steak for Two” (or Three or Four, as the case may be), and the waiters bring you an appropriately sized Porterhouse. For its efforts, the restaurant has been awarded a Michelin star, and it is on every single “Best Steakhouse” list you can find on the internet.

Last week, I got a group of five together (be warned, Peter Luger starts taking reservations a month in advance, and you should heed that lead time), and we got an order of Steak for Two and an order of Steak for Three. This is what we got:

The waiter started serving us immediately, but you get the idea

The waiter started serving us immediately, but you get the idea

Looks amazing, right? Now here’s the sad part of the story: I’ve been to Peter Luger twice, and never fully enjoyed it. The first time I went was last summer, on a blowout bash with three gluttony-minded friends. We ordered Steak for Four, but I had been drinking bourbon all day (after getting completely trashed the night before), and had a good share of a bottle of wine at the table, so by the time our steak arrived, I was basically blacked out. I remember that the steak tasted really good, but I didn’t remember the details of how and why it was so good–a bitter pill when you drop $150 on a meal.

I was determined not to make the same mistake this time, but on Tuesday of last week, the day before our scheduled steak dinner, I came down with a horrible cold. I had a headache and I was sore and my sinuses were so clogged I went through most of a large box of tissues last week. But I wasn’t missing steak at Peter Luger.

And you know what? The title of this post is a goddamn lie. Because even though I felt like shit, I enjoyed every bite of that steak. The steaks were enormous and were cooked a perfect medium rare, with a light char on the outside and a chewy pink center. I basically had a meat-gasm with every bite. There were some desserts and sides and stuff as well, but I won’t even bother talking about any of them (well, except for the thick-cut bacon, which is the thickness of a hangar steak at some restaurants), because this place is all about the beef.

There are a lot of contenders for best hunk of meat in America. I can’t pretend I’ve had anywhere close to all of them. But I’ve eaten at Peter Luger, and I have a hard time believing there’s anything that can top that.

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Movie Review: Blue Jasmine

Posted on August 13, 2013 by fromabrooklynbasement

Note: I can’t really write about this movie the way I want to without including plot spoilers. If you’re really worried about that, you might want to hold off from reading until after you see the movie.

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As anyone who knows me or who regularly reads this blog knows, my heart is pretty evenly split between New York and San Francisco. I’ve spent the vast majority of my life living in one city or the other, and I’ve spent the last five years or so bouncing back and forth semi-annually between the two. So, when I heard that Woody Allen, arguably the most “New York” (at least Jewish New York) of filmmakers, had set his latest movie in San Francisco, it was a no-brainer that I was going to see it.

I’m generally a fan of Allen’s work, though he’s made so many movies at this point that I can’t even pretend to have kept up with them. I love Annie Hall and Manhattan as much as everybody, and I’ve enjoyed most of his recent non-New York movies, especially Midnight in Paris, which felt like it was written especially for me. I wouldn’t say that Blue Jasmine quite matches up to those early films, but it’s almost certainly my favorite of his late-period films, including Midnight in Paris.

In Blue Jasmine, Cate Blanchett plays the title character, who has fallen from the grace of Park Avenue high society in the wake of her husband Hal’s conviction for running a Madoff-style investment scam. (Alec Baldwin plays the husband, in a perfect piece of casting; does anyone look more like a Wall Street asshole than Alec Baldwin?) Jasmine lands at her sister Ginger’s modest apartment in San Francisco’s Mission District, where she clashes with both her sister (Sally Hawkins) and her sister’s blue collar boyfriend Chili (Bobby Cannavale).

If that sounds a bit like the set up of A Streetcar Named Desire, it’s not an accident. The movie echoes the classic Tennessee Williams/Elia Kazan play/film in innumerable ways: Jasmine hears music, specifically the song Blue Moon, every time she recalls her idyllic past life; she meets a suitor who promises to take her away from what she perceives to be her sister’s squalid surroundings, only to relent when the inconvenient truths of her past arise; Cannavale subtly evokes the classic “Stella!” scene in one moment when he confronts Ginger, and he even wears wife beaters in most of his scenes, as Marlon Brando did when he played Stanley Kowalski in the 1951 film.

I found the most interesting echo of Streetcar to be the fate of Jasmine’s husband, who hangs himself in prison after he is convicted. In the Williams play, Blanche DuBois’s husband shoots himself after she discovers that he’s gay. In Blue Jasmine, Hal hangs himself in prison after his financial crimes are revealed. I find that to be an interesting commentary on how our society has changed. In 1947, when Williams, who was gay, wrote Streetcar, there could be no greater sin than homosexuality. Today, there’s no greater reason for shame and ostracism than being one of the Wall Street assholes who ruined the global economy.

There’s a bunch of other interesting stuff in the film, including small parts for both Andrew Dice Clay and Louis C.K. (who I pretty much worship as a god at this point), but I’ll skip those to devote my time to Blanchett. She is the center of the film, an obnoxious, delusional, holier-than-thou, stuck-up, alcoholic mess who has already had one nervous breakdown and is working on another. It’s an absolute powerhouse of a performance. The film constantly shuffles back and forth in time, alternating between Jasmine’s glory days, when she appears as a regal beauty, to her present day dissolution. In particular, there’s an astonishing scene in which she’s at a restaurant with her sister’s two sons when she vents to them about her downfall, her face becoming more and more twisted and haggard, to the point she doesn’t even look like the same person. And the final scene, in which she’s left sitting alone on a park bench, broken and talking to herself, is just devastating. These are just a couple of the best examples, because Blanchett is basically perfect in every scene; I’d go so far as to say that I think she’s a better Blanche DuBois than Vivien Leigh, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her iconic performance in the 1951 film. I’ve long been of the opinion that the Oscars are dumb, but if Blanchett doesn’t at least get a Best Actress nomination, I’ll eat my goddamn shoe.

I do have one bone to pick with the film: It’s lovely to look at because it uses the scenery of San Francisco, the world’s most beautiful city, really well, but it doesn’t feel like a San Francisco movie. Frankly, all of the characters feel like New Yorkers. In particular, the blue collar characters played by Cannavale and Dice Clay really feel like the kind of dudes you’d meet in New York or Jersey, not San Francisco. And don’t say that a character works in a music store in Oakland and then use the instantly recognizable Real Guitars, which any musician in the Bay will tell you is the best secondhand guitar shop in San Francisco, as your location. It’s not that hard to get a detail like that right.

But that’s a fairly minor quibble. Otherwise, I thought the film was great, and I highly recommend it.

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Concert Review: The Elliott Smith Tribute at the Bowery Ballroom

Posted on August 12, 2013 by fromabrooklynbasement

Music is probably the topic I write about the most on this blog. I can’t help it; I’m a music geek. I spend a ton of time writing those posts, even though I know they typically get fewer page views than a lot of my other subjects. But there are exceptions to the low-traffic rule, and one of those is Elliott Smith.

Photo taken by Elliott's close friend, photographer Autumn De Wilde

This photo of Elliott was taken by his close friend, photographer Autumn de Wilde

October 21 of this year will mark the ten-year anniversary of Elliott’s untimely, controversial death. Despite the passing of those ten years, there are few artists who maintain as loving and devoted a following as Elliott. Out of all my write ups of my Desert Island Albums, the post about Elliott Smith has gotten by far the most hits. Elliott’s combination of intense creative musicality and deeply personal, melancholy lyrics puts a hold on his fans that we can’t shake loose.

Elliott’s forty-fourth birthday would have been last Tuesday. In a celebration of his life and music, Elliott’s sister put together four tribute shows, one each in Portland, Los Angeles, Austin, and New York, with the proceeds going to New Alternatives, a charity that helps homeless LGBT youth. With there being so few shows, I know there are a lot of Elliott fans out there who didn’t get to see one (like my buddy Brian, who gave me my first Elliott Smith CD, a mix that contained Roman Candle, Elliott Smith (with The Biggest Lie accidentally included twice), and Some Song, and my sister, who had a mix of live performances, covers, and bootlegs that I pretty much wore out), so I thought I’d do a recap of the New York show, the final of the four performances, which I attended on Saturday.

The show was at the Bowery Ballroom, a small theater that was packed to the gills with fans. I try to avoid being too hyperbolic, but the word that keeps coming to mind to describe the night is “magical.” The show opened with a screening of Lucky 3, a short film Jem Cohen made about Elliott in 1996, before he became famous.

The crowd applauded loudly after each of the songs in Lucky 3, and once the film was over, host Rhett Miller began to bring out the musicians. Miller, the frontman of the Old 97s, is one of those people who’s so talented and good-looking that it makes you kind of sick to be in the same room with him; on the flipside, it’s kinda nice to know that people like that can relate to Elliott’s music in the same way that normal human beings do.

Anyway, Miller opened with a cover of Baby Britain, and then introduced a band called Meat Industry, which was a collection of women from Girls Rock Campaign Boston fronted by JJ Gonson (thanks to the reader who gave me her name), the onetime manager of Elliott’s original Portland band, Heatmiser (the band also featured her twelve year old son, who was hilarious in all the ways that you’d expect a twelve year old who’s playing guitar on the stage of the fucking Bowery Ballroom to be). She told stories about some of Elliott’s early songs, including the germination of No Name #1 and Half Right, both of which the band played.

The musicians came out in flurries after that, with the lineups changing quickly and fluidly over the course of the thirty songs, so I won’t go through every single one. But here are the highlights:

  • Mary Lou Lord, a friend of Elliott’s from the early days who was best known as a popular busker on the T in Boston, brought her fourteen year old daughter on stage for her set. They played Thirteen, the Big Star song Elliott covered so beautifully, I Figured You Out, and St. Ides Heaven. That last one has always been my favorite Elliott song, and it got one of the loudest responses of the evening, especially because Lord’s daughter was the one singing (I haven’t seen many things that amused me as much as a fourteen year old girl singing “Everything is exactly right/When I walk around here drunk every night/With an open container from 7-11/In St. Ides heaven). The performance was a little rough around the edges, as Lord clearly hadn’t played in a while, and her daughter occasionally forgot the words to the songs, but it was very sweet. I heard a couple of guys after the show bitching about how a few of the early acts weren’t professional enough, and all I have to say is that those guys missed the point of the whole thing.
Mary Lou Lord and her daughter

Mary Lou Lord and her daughter

  • Chris Thile, who is on the very short list of best mandolin players in the world (seriously, last year he got a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant) bounded in and out of different performances kind of whenever he felt like it. The version of Southern Belle he did with Austin songwriter David Garza (who much like Thile was all over the stage all night) was seriously impressive, as was the Easy Way Out he did with Jerry Fuentes. But the best Thile moment came when he described how he discovered Elliott’s music by accident, listening to Figure 8 on a listening station at Tower Records. (For the kids out there, that was a record store. Back in the stone age, you used to have to pay for music, and you had to go to a store to do so.) He then played a solo version of that album’s opening track, Son of Sam. Now, understand, Son of Sam is one of Elliott’s more complex arrangements, and Thile played it solo on a mandolin. At one point, while he was picking the intro, Thile smiled almost narcotically and whispered, “Oh, it’s so good,” and he played an instrumental break that was so mind-blowing I really don’t even know how I’d begin to describe it. One cool aspect of this show was seeing that the musicians (who all played for free) hold Elliot in the same esteem that us regular folks do.
  • Christina Courtin, a young singer and violinist I’d never heard of, played a set with Thile and guitarist Ryan Scott that included Speed Trials, Angeles, and Rose Parade. She had a wonderful voice, but my favorite part was probably the melodic, slightly distorted violin intro she played on Angeles.
    Courtin, Scott, and Thile. (Sorry the image quality isn't great; the light wasn't so good for taking photos on an iPhone)

    Courtin, Scott, and Thile. (Sorry the image quality isn’t great; the light wasn’t so good for taking photos on an iPhone)

    • In an amusing interlude, Bob Dorough, a jazz musician who wrote the original songs for Schoolhouse Rock, played his song Figure 8 as an Elliott tribute.
    • The gorgeous Katarina Guerra, who wore a sparkly gilded skirt and bright red lipstick, sang a chanteuse sort of version of Between the Bars.
    • Young Hines, who apparently drove all night from Nashville to make the gig, played an impressive, high octane Needle in the Hay.
    • Pat Sansone of Wilco played Waltz #2 solo on guitar, although to call it solo doesn’t really do it justice, because the crowd sang along with every word. He then led another sing-along tune, Say Yes. One of the great things about this show was the musical aptitude of the crowd. Everyone knew all the words to all the songs, and what’s more, most of the audience could actually sing them in key–which never happens–including the harmony part on Thile’s rendition of Son of Sam.
    • A non-musical moment: They were raffling off a large, framed print of an Autumn de Wilde portrait of Elliott. The raffle tickets were five bucks, and some guy bought sixty of them. Of course, he didn’t win.
    • All of the musicians came back out on the stage for the grand finale, with Miller leading them, and the crowd, through Happiness (a song I wrote about in depth here). I can’t think of a better way to end a tribute to Elliott Smith than with hundreds of people singing, “What I used to be/Will pass away/And then you’ll see/That all I want now/Is happiness for you and me.”
    The grand finale

    The grand finale

    What a magical night. I’m so glad I got to be a part of it, and I hope this gives those of you who couldn’t be there a sense of how great it was.

Posted in Music | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 15 Comments

Movie Review: The Canyons

Posted on August 8, 2013 by fromabrooklynbasement

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I normally don’t go in for celebrity gossip stuff. Not even a little bit. But a few months back, when I saw a Sunday New York Times Magazine cover story with the headline, Here Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan In Your Movie, well, I couldn’t resist. Lohan is such a famous train wreck, and having a Times-caliber writer and reporter, as opposed to somebody from, say, Us Weekly, writing about her promised an interesting and in-depth look at the way her dysfunctionality actually plays out on a working movie set.

The story didn’t disappoint, either, offering an honest, sad, sometimes hilarious portrayal of how Lohan, regarded by everyone from the story’s writer to the film’s director as an incredibly talented actress, is just as difficult to work with as you’d imagine. She was chronically late, sometimes didn’t show up to work at all (threatening the film’s very existence), and was a tremendous pain in the ass to work with throughout the process, even though the role seemed to be a sort of last chance for her. However, the film’s director, Paul Schrader (who wrote my favorite Scorsese film, Taxi Driver), decided that her talent made it worth the trouble (in part because her notorious reputation made her the only actress of her caliber they could get at the tiny salary they had for the micro-budgeted film). He’s even been quoted as saying he would work with her again.

The magazine story piqued my interest in the film, partly because of the watching-a-plane-crash-into-the-side-of-a-mountain Lohan effect, but also for several other reasons: the Taxi Driver connection; the script being written by Bret Easton Ellis, a talented writer and famous asshole; and the mainstream film debut of porn star James Deen (come on, everyone’s curious when a porn star tries to act for real). So, when the film became available on iTunes (it was simultaneously released in theaters and on view-on-demand), I downloaded it.

Sadly, it’s not much of a movie, which I probably should have expected. Its milieu is the film business, and the shots of crumbled theaters that open the movie and are sprinkled between scenes seem to augur the decay and dissolution of that business. But the movie itself doesn’t really address that topic, except to say that with the movie business in the hands of characters like these, it’s no surprise that the film industry has turned into a shit show.

The plot takes the shape of a neo-noir thriller, in which Christian (Deen), a trust fund baby who produces movies so he can tell his father (who we never meet) that he’s doing something with his time, obsessively tracks his girlfriend (Lohan), while she has an affair with Ryan (Nolan Funk), the lead actor in the low budget slasher film Christian is producing. The bulk of the film consists of two kinds of scenes: explicit, orgiastic sexual encounters between Lohan and Deen and whoever they happen to find on the internet to join them; and stilted conversations between two characters who have set up those conversations as ways to draw out the intentions of the other characters. And then of course, ***SPOILER*** somebody goes psycho and cuts somebody else to pieces, because Bret Easton Ellis.

These machinations are, frankly, pretty juvenile, and the screenplay is both written and acted in a clunky, unbelievable fashion. Deen doesn’t really do anything special, but he’s acceptable, and that’s the best you can say about any of the actors. Most of the reviews I’ve read for the film have touted Lohan’s performance as the best thing about the movie, but I think they’ve let her personal narrative influence them too much. I felt like she looked like she was acting–which to me is the opposite of what a good performance does. And Funk as Ryan is totally wooden.

You know what The Canyons reminded me of a little bit? Remember Cruel Intentions, the remake of Les Liasons dangereuses that was done up for the teen set and starred young Ryan Phillippe, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Reese Witherspoon? It had the same sort of conniving characters and erotic overtones, though nowhere near the same explicitness, as The Canyons. I liked Cruel Intentions when it came out–I was in high school at the time, a part of the target audience and not a very smart film viewer–but recently came across it on cable TV and after about ten minutes concluded that the writing and acting were actually both awful.

The Canyons isn’t quite that bad, but it’s in the ballpark. To put it another way: I recently read a book about country rock pioneer Gram Parsons in which he called the music of the Eagles “plastic dry fuck,” and I think that term describes this film. It didn’t offend me in any way, it just seemed vapid and pointless, like it had been lying out in the sun too long and had its brain baked away. Kind of like Hollywood in general–which I guess was the point of the film all along.

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Book Review: Taipei by Tao Lin

Posted on August 7, 2013 by fromabrooklynbasement

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I can’t remember a work of fiction in the last couple of years that’s been greeted with a more deeply divided response than Tao Lin’s newest novel, Taipei. The novel received a rave review in the Times, but also was subjected to an epic panning from The Millions reviewer Lydia Kiesling–which prompted author Jay Caspian Kang to post a takedown of Kiesling’s takedown on his blog. I think that makes sense.

Since I’m a writer, and since this blog occasionally covers my bookish interests, I figured that Taipei was something I should probably have an opinion about. So I headed over to The Strand and picked up a copy, and I guess now I have some thoughts on it.

In brief, the novel follows Paul, a moderately successful Asian-American writer, through a book tour, a spur-of-the-moment marriage, and two visits to his repatriated parents’ apartment in Taipei. In each of these settings, Paul and his friends pass the time by taking as much and as many drugs as they can get their hands on–everything from LSD to MDMA to Adderall to prescription pankillers to heroin. Lin writes these scenes in a voice that is the very essence of emotionally flat–the characters tell each other how they’re feeling, but the narrator offers almost no interiority and not a lot of elucidating action–in a way it’s an inverse of the classic “show don’t tell” writers workshop dictum.

I probably just gave away that I didn’t like the book very much. I’m not a reader who needs my characters to be confessional and emotive–I mean, my favorite writers are Hemingway, Carver, and Cormac McCarthy. But those writers at least create an environment in which the reader can feel the emotion of events, even if it’s not explicitly stated. The writer Lin seems to hew closest to is Samuel Beckett, and while Beckett has never been my cup of tea (I think the idea that you can recreate the meaninglessness of modern life through stark prose and stories in which nothing happens is kind of brilliant, but it also makes for a style I find unreadable), his work still has greater emotional resonance than Lin’s.

Maybe the whole point for Lin is that removal of sentiment. If so, fine. As a portrayal of an individual flattening himself out emotionally with drugs, Taipei works. Stylistically, it’s not for me, but it works.

But I think Taipei raises a broader issue. The prose style, combined with the fact that the characters are constantly self-medicating, and are also constantly e-mailing and g-chatting and filming themselves on computers and smart phones, seems to be forming a staement, if not an indictment, of Lin’s generation. I am just two years older than Lin, so this is also my generation we’re talking about. And if Taipei is supposed to be a broad critique of our generation, I’m calling bullshit.

Technology, the internet and social media in particular, have had an enormous impact on the way we interact with the world. Something I’ve always thought that’s interesting about the internet and social media is that they can be used to open up the world to you, to greatly broaden your horizons, but depending on how you use them, they can also be used to foster self-absorption and shortsightedness. (As an example, you can use Twitter to follow minute-by-minute updates of social protests in the Middle East, or you can use it to track your experience, minute-by-minute, of getting stoned and going to see X-Men, as the characters in Taipei do.) Lin’s characters definitely seem to do the latter more than the former, and as I said, this is a seductive element of the technology that we have that people often fall victim do.

But as I also said, I’m a part of this generation too, and I don’t believe that such shallowness  is nearly as pervasive as the news media, and this novel, make it seem. When I take stock of my friends, I see people who are engaged in the world, people who feel things. Maybe we didn’t all go to the rallies at Zuccotti Park or Taksim Square, but we’re aware of these things and have opinions on them. And in my personal relationships I see none of the emotional stunting of Lin’s characters. When a dear friend of mine died a couple of years ago, 200 people come to the funeral, and many of them cried their eyes out, including many people who didn’t even know her well. Taipei may present a vision of a world that’s flat, but that vision is no truer now than it was before Columbus set sail more than 500 years ago

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On the Kindness and Compassion of New Yorkers

Posted on August 6, 2013 by fromabrooklynbasement

That is not a sarcastic title.

Here’s the thing: New York City is an incredibly difficult place to live. The pace is fast, everyone is competitive, everything is expensive. This City will never hesitate to kick you, whether you’re up or down.

We all find ourselves saying this sometimes

We all find ourselves saying this sometimes

But here’s the other thing: People who live here understand just how fucking tough it is, and there’s a sense of community and compassion that often comes out between us, in the form of small moments of kindness. We’re thick-skinned, and we’re not perfect: I don’t even notice homeless people anymore (though that started for me in San Francisco), much less give them money. But there are a bunch of little things people in New York do to ease the load on each other.

Take the subway: It can be a pretty grungy place, insanely crowded at rush hour, but it’s also a place where you see a bunch of different small kindnesses that have become part of the social contract. People carry baby strollers upstairs for mothers. People give up their seats for pregnant women and the elderly. (One of my favorite subway memories happened a couple of years ago when I was riding the train with my dad and my uncle, and a woman offered her seat to my dad–who is four years younger than my uncle, and was in his late fifties at that point. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Dad, who still takes pride in doing obscenely difficult hikes, ever look so horrified in his entire life.) Earlier this week, I was on the train when a man slipped and fell stepping onto the platform, hitting his head. It was rush hour, our train had been overcrowded even by the usual subway standards, and we were at Jay Street, a busy transfer station, but most (not all, but most) of the other passengers embarking or disembarking immediately stopped to see if the man was okay. A young woman pushed her way through five onlookers to get to the call button to alert the MTA and the police that someone was hurt. It’s contrary to this city’s reputation, but people were concerned.

Here’s another small example: the buy-back at the bar. At bars in New York City, it’s standard practice that if you’ve ordered two or three rounds from a bartender, he or she will buy you back one. You don’t necessarily have to be a regular, either–you mostly just have to tip well and not be a douchebag. I’ve been to a lot of bars in a lot of cities, and that is definitely not customary in most places. But bartenders know how stupidly expensive drinks are in this town, so they lighten the load for their good customers.

Finally, New York was the city in which John Lennon made his home for most of the last decade of his life. He loved it here, so much that he fought for the right to live here when the government was trying to have him deported. Everyone loves the Beatles, but New Yorkers really love John Lennon, a person who shared our affection for this place, where it’s so impossible yet also so wonderful to live. After John was killed, Yoko Ono created Strawberry Fields, a memorial to him in Central Park, across the street from the Dakota, the building in which they lived.

Let me take you down/Cause I'm going to/Strawberry Fields

Let me take you down/Cause I’m going to/Strawberry Fields

And every year, on John’s birthday and the anniversary of his death, people gather at Strawberry Fields and spend hours singing John’s songs, deep into the night, until the police send us home. If you ever doubt the shared kindness and compassion of the people who live here, go to Strawberry Fields for John’s birthday, because few things are more beautiful than dozens of people singing Imagine, a song about accepting other people, to celebrate a man who they accepted as their own–and as a New Yorker.

john-lennon-t-shirt

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The Top 5 Versions of The Weight on YouTube

Posted on August 5, 2013 by fromabrooklynbasement

The Weight is one of the most instantly recognizable songs in all of rock and folk music. Every part of it is distinctive–the acoustic guitar intro, the opening “I pulled into Nazareth” lyric, the descending chord pattern on the chorus, the piano fills, the vocal harmony on “And … and … and … you put the load right on me”–and those fantastic individual parts come together to form a whole that’s somehow eclipses their individual awesomeness.

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The song was recorded in 1968 by The Band, who of course provided the sonic backdrop for Bob Dylan’s masterpiece, Blonde on Blonde, before recording their own classic album, Music From Big Pink. Perhaps the best indication of how well the song has aged over the past 45 years is how often it is covered by other artists in concert. Type “The Weight” into the search bar on YouTube and you’ll get more than five million results to navigate. For fun, and because, as everyone knows, I love lists, I thought I’d dig around for a while and pick my five favorites.

5. The Lumineers

I’m sure some of you are asking, The Lumineers? Really? Allow me to explain. There are literally hundreds of better versions of The Weight on YouTube, but I chose this one for a specific reason: They invite a girl from the audience up on the stage to sing with them, and before the band starts playing, you hear frontman Wesley Schultz ask her if she knows the words. She says yes, and they begin. He sings the first verse and turns it over her to sing the second–and she starts singing the first verse again. This is hilarious, because The Weight is actually a long song, five verses, with a lot of lyrics, but most people only know the first verse and the chorus. Hell, I’m pretty sure Robbie Robertson doesn’t remember all five verses, and he wrote the song. Everyone loves to play this tune, but take it from someone who goes to a lot of jams: It’s a secret jam-buster.

4. Bruce Springsteen

This clip is taken from a Springsteen concert at the Prudential Center in New Jersey in May 2012. People don’t pay hundreds of dollars to see the Boss play covers–they want to hear Born to Run and Thunder Road, especially in New Jersey. But the crowd goes nuts when they realize what Bruce is playing, and it seems like every single member of that audience joins in for the chorus. There’s nothing quite like hearing twenty thousand people all singing the same song together.

3. Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, Old Crow Medicine Show, Steve Earle, Robert Earl Keen, Buddy Miller, and some other people I don’t recognize.

Just look at those names! This was the closing number from the Warren Hellman Tribute show at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach in February 2012. For the uninitiated, Hellman was the billionaire who founded and funded San Francisco’s amazing annual free music festival, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. He passed away after the 2011 festival, and these artists came together for a one day memorial, sort of a mini-Hardy Strictly. You don’t get a lot of chances to see that many amazing musicians on one stage at once, and while I went to the Hellman Tribute, I left the show before this finale. I’ve hated myself for it ever since.

2. Wilco, Nick Lowe, and Mavis Staples

This video was taken backstage before a show at Chicago’s Civic Opera House. The intimate access to the musicians is really cool, but by far the best part of this video is listening to Mavis Staples, who performed The Weight with The Band for The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese’s documentary about The Band’s 1976 farewell concert at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom. Mavis Staples is fucking awesome.

1. The Band, with the Staple Sisters

Could anything be number one besides the clip from The Last Waltz? You just can’t beat the original–not when it’s performed by one of the greatest bands in rock history and filmed by one of the greatest directors who ever lived. And it bears repeating: Mavis Staples is fucking awesome.

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On A-Rod and REAL New York Yankees

Posted on August 2, 2013 by fromabrooklynbasement

If you don’t care about baseball or sports, you can probably skip this one–unless you like rants. If you enjoy a good rant, no matter what the topic is, this might be for you.

As Major League Baseball begins to negotiate and hand out suspensions for the players involved in the Biogenesis scandal, the loudest of the media’s and fans’ screeching has been reserved for the one and only Alex Rodriguez. There are plenty of other writers out there who have outlined the many, many ways in which A-Rod has fumbled his way to career suicide, so I’m not going to bother with that (although, you should do yourself a favor and Google “A-Rod centaur”).

To be fair, if I had a gazillion dollars, I'd totally commission a centaur portrait of myself

To be fair, if I had a gazillion dollars, I’d totally commission a portrait of myself in centaur form.

There was, rather, something else that bothered me. Yesterday, The Daily Beast ran a story for which the headline read: “Alex Rodriguez Is Facing a Lifetime Ban From Baseball, But He Was Never a Yankee.” First of all, that sentence doesn’t even make sense: a) The second clause doesn’t logically follow from the first; and b) Yes, actually, he was a Yankee, for nine seasons (ten including this one), and at the moment he still is.

But no, you say, all that misbehavior (of which the article gives a Cliff’s Notes rundown) shows that A-Rod was never a REAL Yankee. You know, the high-character players who have embodied the Bronx Bombers’ many championship teams, like Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, and Mariano Rivera; the graceful and classy Joe DiMaggio; Babe Ruth, who was celebrated for swatting home runs and for being a philandering drunkard (wait); Mickey Mantle, one of the greatest players of all time, but also a world class alcoholic who was notorious for being an asshole to fans (umm…); Reggie Jackson, “Mr. October,” a famously self-centered jerk who once got in a fight with his own manager (Billy Martin, who is probably baseball’s most famous drunk after Mantle and Ruth); and some of A-Rod’s contemporary Yankees teammates, Jason Giambi, Gary Sheffield, Andy Pettitte, Roger Clemens (hold on … those guys all have something in common with A-Rod … that’s right! Suspected PED use!)

I’ll be honest: I personally don’t give a shit about PED use, especially by guys who used steroids et al. before baseball outlawed them. I can’t speak for everyone, but if I were a borderline Major Leaguer who thought I could possibly add a couple of miles per hour to my fastball or twenty feet to my fly balls to keep me in the Big Leagues, you better fucking believe I’d do it. You know how much money is at stake for these guys? I don’t even blame Barry Bonds for going on the juice: He turned himself into the greatest player of all time! Can you honestly say, if you were in his shoes, that you wouldn’t do that? Wouldn’t even think about it? And how do you call it “cheating” when it wasn’t against the rules at the time? Are Hank Aaron and Willie Mays cheaters because they took amphetamines to get up before games? (Both players have admitted to using “greenies”–a common practice in baseball for decades before it was outlawed a couple of years ago.)

The self-righteousness people have over this just pisses me off–and Yankees fans are the worst. When Melky Cabrera got suspended last year, it created a bunch of weirdness for the eventual World Series champs, but San Francisco fans didn’t say, “He’s not a REAL Giant” (hold the Bonds jokes); when Bartolo Colon got suspended last year, Oakland fans didn’t say, “He’s not a REAL Athletic” (hold the Giambi jokes); when Jay Gibbons got suspended, Baltimore fans didn’t say, “He’s not a REAL Oriole” (hold the Rafael Palmeiro jokes).

Every team had guys who took PEDs. Every team in the history of sports has employed irredeemable assholes at some point. There’s no such thing as a REAL Yankee, unless by “real” you mean, “a flawed human being who just happens to be good at baseball.” So get off your high horse, Yankees fans. You’re not special, and neither is A-Rod. To me, the worst part of this situation is that baseball might suspend A-Rod and bail you out of his ridiculous contract, because you and A-Rod deserve each other.

-end rant-

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