[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Espinoza Paz, “Lo Intentamos”

I said Duke Ellington, but the more I listen to this song, the more the harmonic colors of the winds sound like Mingus instead. Which makes sense; Mingus was inspired by mariachi, which is (I’m presuming) the original genre out of which this perfectly lovely Latin pop song came to be — in kind of the same way that Taylor Swift is connected to bluegrass.

These are not the kinds of horns (and reeds) I’m used to hearing on pop radio: they’re not flattened together playing funk/soul riffs, but loosely organized, playing jazzy variations over and under and around the singing. Which is not jazz singing: Paz is definitely a mariachi singer even if he plays his emotions a little closer to the vest than is traditional. But I can’t get over the fact that these kinds of instrumental, even orchestral colors are being played to a happily receptive audience in 2009. It’s like at least one of my most secret pop wishes has been granted.

This is the second gorgeously-shot, magnificently-acted movie about an English girl who falls in love with a mysterious, charming man but ends up spending most of the last half weeping that I’ve seen in a month. But if Bright Star is a more clearly idiosyncratic film, following its own weird muse down odd pathways — does Jane Campion do any other kind? — An Education seemed to me, despite the occasional descent into glib Hornbyishness, more truthful about the world. Probably this is because it’s impossible in the twenty-first century to take the conventions and postures of a Romantic poet entirely seriously; too much water has flowed under too many well-trod bridges for Keats to ever be anything but luminous and fey and kind of a pill. In order to break through the stagy familiarity of underexposed BBC productions and rote biopics, Campion has to create an entirely different world, one with only passing resemblance to our own or any other that’s ever been on screen. It’s a wonderful vision, but it doesn’t engage with a lot of recognizable emotion. An Education engages in a more knowing kind of distancing: its world is firmly the world of movies, no unbeautiful people allowed, and its repeated visual references to 60s film and a London just on the trembling edge of Swinging (you feel like Please Please Me will be released just after the credits roll) only encourage the idea that this is the kind of thing we’ve seen before, only thanks to the exemplary performances and a lot of terrific between-beats business, it’s this story and not another. It’s a world we know — we are far more comfortable interpreting people who smoke and read Camus and think of jazz as impossibly sophisticated than people who explain themselves through lyrical verse and catch cold by sitting on top of carriages — which means that the movie has to work much less hard to convince us. (By us I of course mean me.) Even if it’s a patently false world, it’s one we partially inhabit; half the world we live in and learn from (at least) is similarly contrived. And as an English student and probable future teacher, I can’t not love a movie which contains a Rockyesque inspirational montage of someone reading a lot of books. Seriously. Anyway, if you’re going to see An Education, I cannot recommend enough listening to Nina Simone’s album I Put A Spell On You on the drive home. So fucking good.

This is the second gorgeously-shot, magnificently-acted movie about an English girl who falls in love with a mysterious, charming man but ends up spending most of the last half weeping that I’ve seen in a month.

But if Bright Star is a more clearly idiosyncratic film, following its own weird muse down odd pathways — does Jane Campion do any other kind? — An Education seemed to me, despite the occasional descent into glib Hornbyishness, more truthful about the world. Probably this is because it’s impossible in the twenty-first century to take the conventions and postures of a Romantic poet entirely seriously; too much water has flowed under too many well-trod bridges for Keats to ever be anything but luminous and fey and kind of a pill. In order to break through the stagy familiarity of underexposed BBC productions and rote biopics, Campion has to create an entirely different world, one with only passing resemblance to our own or any other that’s ever been on screen. It’s a wonderful vision, but it doesn’t engage with a lot of recognizable emotion.

An Education engages in a more knowing kind of distancing: its world is firmly the world of movies, no unbeautiful people allowed, and its repeated visual references to 60s film and a London just on the trembling edge of Swinging (you feel like Please Please Me will be released just after the credits roll) only encourage the idea that this is the kind of thing we’ve seen before, only thanks to the exemplary performances and a lot of terrific between-beats business, it’s this story and not another. It’s a world we know — we are far more comfortable interpreting people who smoke and read Camus and think of jazz as impossibly sophisticated than people who explain themselves through lyrical verse and catch cold by sitting on top of carriages — which means that the movie has to work much less hard to convince us. (By us I of course mean me.) Even if it’s a patently false world, it’s one we partially inhabit; half the world we live in and learn from (at least) is similarly contrived.

And as an English student and probable future teacher, I can’t not love a movie which contains a Rockyesque inspirational montage of someone reading a lot of books. Seriously.

Anyway, if you’re going to see An Education, I cannot recommend enough listening to Nina Simone’s album I Put A Spell On You on the drive home. So fucking good.

(via nickholmes)

(via nickholmes)

Reblogged from nickholmes

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Fanny Lu, “Celos”

The Spanish-language song I’m finding it most difficult to get out of my head at the moment.

There’s a faux-naive winsomeness to this track that can grate — if you don’t like Altered Images or early Cyndi Lauper, for heaven’s sake stay away — but it’s a hell of an earworm, even if you don’t know the language. (The refrain “tengo celos” literally means “I have jealousy” and would be better translated as “I’m jealous.” Work out the rest yourself; it’s simple enough that Babelfish can hack it.)

Next up: when did Duke Ellington start being a major influence on Latin pop?

(via hndrk)

(via hndrk)

Reblogged from hndrk

tomewing:

“If you imitate a person you admire, the best you can possibly hope for is to become a bad imitation of the person you admire. What you need to do instead is to locate the same level of inventiveness as the person you admire, and apply it to a new domain.”

Nice quote from Donald Judd via the Jonathan Harris lecture that’s floating around.

Jonathan Harris . World Building in a Crazy World . Imitation

(via heyitsnoah)

And what’s the best way of “locating the inventiveness”? - almost certainly through the trial and error of imitation. There’s a reason guitarists, say, mostly learn by playing other people’s songs or playing along to records.

(I love Harris’ web work, as a creator he’s magnificent, but as a thinker this whole lecture was disappointingly weak: that whole tangle of contradiction around simplicity, homogenity, ‘special effects’ etc. Of course he put the obligatory “boo sucks to cynicism” bit at the end too.)

Artists (in the generic sense of “creative people”) are so frequently the worst-informed people about any creative process other than their own that I automatically ignore any general principles they draw, correctly or not, from their individual experience.

Reblogged from heyitsnoah

screwrocknroll: Yes, book. The Golden Age of Television was the 1950s. As opposed to today, when we have “Gossip Girl.”[1] Book? 1950s? Did you read the description you quoted? The only thing worse than dewey-eyed nostalgia is knee-jerk dismissals of the past based on hasty, unreflective assumptions.

screwrocknroll:

Yes, book. The Golden Age of Television was the 1950s. As opposed to today, when we have “Gossip Girl.”[1]

Book? 1950s? Did you read the description you quoted?

The only thing worse than dewey-eyed nostalgia is knee-jerk dismissals of the past based on hasty, unreflective assumptions.

Reblogged from brokedownpalace

ryandoescomedy: Why yes, that IS Glenn Howerton. You know, from that long running uber-success that was “That 80s Show” I remember they joked about mobile phones. THEY USED TO BE SO BIG! Oh, Lord. I watched every episode of that show (I think I probably still have the .avi files around here somewhere), and even got emotionally invested in the will-they-won’t-they plot between the shaggy-haired Springsteen-alike and the punk-rock chick. (In the last episode, they do, and it’s awesome. Shut up.) The best character, though, was the Lauper-alike on the far right there. I keep waiting for Tinsley Grimes to do anything else that will take full advantage of her cute-as-a-button comic gifts, but no luck yet.

ryandoescomedy:

Why yes, that IS Glenn Howerton.

You know, from that long running uber-success that was “That 80s Show”

I remember they joked about mobile phones. THEY USED TO BE SO BIG!

Oh, Lord.

I watched every episode of that show (I think I probably still have the .avi files around here somewhere), and even got emotionally invested in the will-they-won’t-they plot between the shaggy-haired Springsteen-alike and the punk-rock chick. (In the last episode, they do, and it’s awesome. Shut up.)

The best character, though, was the Lauper-alike on the far right there. I keep waiting for Tinsley Grimes to do anything else that will take full advantage of her cute-as-a-button comic gifts, but no luck yet.

Reblogged from ryandoescomedy

There’s also a substantial literature on “depressive realism” indicating that people suffering from depression have more accurate perceptions about many things.

— 

(via Matt Yglesias)

I fucking knew it!

(via hndrk) Oh God yes.

(via hndrk)

Oh God yes.

Reblogged from hndrk