I never thought I’d be rooting for the Boston Red Sox to win the World Series. I love my Texas Rangers, even though they’ve broken my heart twice now by falling apart in September. When the Rangers lost the wild card spot to the Rays, I thought I might be done with baseball for the year.
However, as I watched the World Series, the Red Sox won me over. It helped that former Ranger Mike Napoli is on the team. It also helped that they were playing the St. Louis Cardinals, a team that showed themselves to have absolutely no class when they beat the Rangers in the 2011 World Series.
The Cardinals managed to win two games but the outcome of the World Series was never in doubt. Everyone watching knew that this was Boston’s year and the Red Sox easily dominated the Cardinals. The team earned this victory by playing outstanding baseball. Even more importantly, the city of Boston earned this victory by showing everyone in America what being strong truly means.
Tonight, when Koji Uehara got that final out, we were all Boston Strong.
After having too much to drink at a party, Bob and Millie (played by Barry Nelson and Nancy Malone) wake up in a strange bed with no memory of how they got there. Hey, who hasn’t had that happen once or twice, right? However, Bob and Millie soon discover that not only is the house deserted, but so is the strange town outside.
This episode of the Twilight Zone was written by Earl Hamner, Jr. and directed by Ron Winston. It was originally broadcast on April 24th, 1964.
Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
17. Isis (1,416 plays)
Top track (255 plays): Weight, from Oceanic (2002)
Boston post-metal masterminds Isis rose to 17th place on my decade-long last.fm list thanks to one of the most captivating albums ever recorded. A lot of bands have taken inspiration from Neurosis to forge a similar sound, but I have yet to hear anything in the genre that pulls it off quite so perfectly as Oceanic. Considering that I have accumulated over 100 plays on every track and a whopping 255 listens to “Weight” (it is, according to my charts, my third most listened-to song over the past ten years), I can safely say that Oceanic never has and never will tire out. Temperance was Isis’s key to success in 2002. From its most intense moments to its most mellow, Oceanic never gives way to bombast or wilts to a bore. It plods along like the sea in which it is thematically set, crushing through impartial waves of harsh vocal and chugging guitar; it mellows with the tide, diving beneath the surface to a world of echoes and subdued pulsations that never cease their eternal drive, varying only in degrees of perpetual, unstoppable force.
My favorite track, “Weight”, begins with a calm that is nearly complete but for a faint, echoing drum. There is nothing foreboding about its growing intensity, but rather, much like Boris’s similarly themed masterpiece Flood, the song manages to increase in mass without losing touch with its sublime and eternal setting. You experience the waves and lulls in a setting apart from time, never feeling a sense of danger, even as you are slowly immersed and dissolved in a weight that encompasses all. It is something like “Jane Doe” by Converge or “Dust and Light” by Krallice without any of the desperation or finality–an experience of dissolving into the eternal totally free of temporal regrets. As the song fades away and the album moves on to “From Sinking”, the transition feels natural; “Weight” does not need to be a closing track, because it is not an obliteration of time into the void. Time was never present to begin with, and the listener experiences the modes of something eternal as a participant, not a witness. I don’t think any other album this heavy could leave me feeling so utterly mellow.
Oceanic is apparently a concept album, telling the entirely human plot of a man driven by lost love to suicide through drowning. But I for one can’t make out the lyrics without looking them up, and the feeling for me is as if the story unfolds from the utterly disinterested eyes of the water itself. I feel immersed in Isis’s oceanic beast from start to finish, lacking all ties to the human realm beyond and personifying the waves themselves, not the sentient individual taken amidst them. It is not until the closing track, “Hym”, that the listener begins to envision the witness’s perspective, sucked out the waves themselves just long enough to be re-engulfed by the drowning.
Originally, we were going to feature an Italian film called Dawn of the Mummy today. It’s the world’s only zombie/mummy hybrid and you guys would have loved it! Or maybe not. I have to admit that I don’t really love it. It’s actually a pretty bad movie but, at the same time, how many times do you get to see a movie that features both a mummy and zombies?
However, last night, the YouTube account that was hosting Dawn of the Mummy was deleted.
AGCK!
So, instead of showing you Dawn of the Mummy, we’re going to show you the original Little Shop of Horrors. It’s true that we featured Little Shop last Halloween but, oh well. It’s a fun little movie, especially when you consider that Roger Corman filmed it in 3 days. Jack Nicholson gets all the attention for playing a masochistic dental patient but I think the best performance is given by flower-eating Dick Miller.
From 1960, enjoy the original (non-musical) Little Shop of Horrors!
(However, speaking of the musical, I was in a community theater production of Little Shop of Horrors when I was 19. I so should have been cast as Audrey but instead, I was just a member of the “ensemble.” Bleh! Anyway, our director showed us the original Little Shop of Horrors and I was the only member of the cast to understand that Corman’s film was superior to the musical version. That said, I still tear up whenever I hear “Somewhere that’s green.”)
Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
18. Sigur Rós (1,358 plays)
Top track (84 plays): Ný Batterí, from Ágætis Byrjun (1999)
Featured track: Hún Jörð, from Von (1997)
I made the claim in my last entry that indie rock was the defining musical style of the past decade. If that came across as a bit of a slap in the face to post-rock, rest assured that I listen to far more of the latter than the former. I don’t feel, however, that post-rock is the sort of style or movement that can be limited to its era of origin. Sure, Mono-esque local bands were fairly abundant in the mid-2000s, but the acts that really rose to stardom under the moniker varied wildly in both sound and artistic attitude. I first heard mention of post-rock in 1999 or 2000 in dual reference to f#a#oo by Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Ágætis Byrjun by Sigur Rós. Flood by Boris, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever by Explosions in the Sky, Oceanic by Isis, and One Step More and You Die by Mono successively joined the ranks to form a label I found easy to ascribe and virtually impossible to define. Post-rock was and remains a manner of abandoning traditional song structure, sound, lyric, and aesthetic, while retaining standard instrumentation. It can be applied to musicians who predate the term, it can function as a prefix to virtually every established musical genre, and no single property need be present to make it complete. No two bands that have really forged successful careers employing it sound much alike; Sigur Rós’s sound is certainly unique among the ranks.
That being said, I want to talk about this particular feature song and its uniqueness in their discography. Most people who know anything about music have heard a little Sigur Rós by now, and they’ve probably heard the newer material. Von remains an obscurity that was seldom mentioned when Ágætis Byrjun was in its prime of popularity, let alone today. Make no mistake; Ágætis Byrjun blew my mind when I first heard it, and if my last.fm charts had begun two or three years sooner I suspect it would have a thousand more plays to its credit. But my favorite song in the world at the time was “Hún Jörð”. Forget what you know about this band, because you’ll find no peaceful resolution in these seven minutes. Beginning with a static sound that seems to simulate rain, “Hún Jörð” introduces a brief, looping melody so acutely fragile that the listener is instantly drawn to a peak, emotionally wrenched by a vision of something beautiful tottering on the brink of collapse. You want to reach out and hold the melody tight–pull it in–keep it safe–but as the song progresses, that glimmering light tips into the plunge. As the maniacal laughter mocks your helplessness and Jónsi literally screams at the top of his lungs, the song culminates with one of the most gut-wrenching experiences of loss that music is capable of conjuring.
Suffice to say, this is not standard Sigur Rós fare. I used to think the song had been inspired by “Climbing Up the Walls”, but Von was actually fully recorded well before Radiohead released Ok Computer. The vision seems to have been unique to the band, and I did not hear anything approaching it again until the advent of post-black metal a decade later. I don’t know what compelled a band so inclined towards the soft and beautiful to take this child and smash it on the rocks, but by 2013 Von is so thoroughly forgotten that I think most Sigur Rós fans will be in for a shocking surprise.
Katniss Everdeen is back! Here’s the final trailer for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and, it’s nice to say, this one is full of details that seem to have been included specifically for those of us who have read the book. The film itself will be released on November 22nd.
Here’s our first glimpse of X-Men: Days of Future Past. While there’s all sorts of things that I could say about this preview — mostly along the lines of how much I’m looking forward to seeing Michael Fassbender, Hugh Jackman, and James McAvoy all gathered together on the same screen — I think the trailer can certainly speak for itself.
Through the Shattered Lens 