Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (dir. by Sam Wrench)

Posted on October 16, 2023 by Leonard Wilson

I know how it feels to get caught up in someone’s music. Two short stories, and then I’ll get into it. My apologies for rambling here.

Way back in the early 2000s, my best friend and I got into The Foo Fighters something huge. Anyone who’s followed me for a while knows of my adoration of Prince, Underworld and Nine Inch Nails, but this was something different. We knew all the band members names, watched all their concerts and even bought guitars to learn how to play them. I still have the songbook for the In Your Honor album back home, with the guitar. I didn’t learn it as well as I liked, though I’ll admit that the game Rocksmith helped me more than anything I tried beforehand. Eventually, all of the Foo Fandom reached a head when my friend suggested that maybe we should go to a concert. We caught the Foos in East Rutherford, New Jersey, in the former stadium of the New Jersey Devils, where Weezer opened for them. In the mosh pit area, we had a fantastic time. All of the band members were in screaming distance from us, and we enjoyed it so much that we caught them again at Madison Square Garden. Serj Tankian (lead vocalist for System of a Down) opened for them that night. We were once again in the mosh pit area and almost got in a shoving match. The energy in the stadium was amazing.

Over the years, though, the world changed. With the lockdown, pandemic and shifting ideologies, my friend no longer enjoyed the Foos the way I did. They went against what he believed in. Despite this, I look back at the shared concert experiences with joy, happy to be able to say “We did that, it was the best.”

Earlier in the year, my sister was able to score tickets for Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour. She drove out from North Carolina to Kentucky with her kids to see it, which amazed me. If you ever have the chance to take a good long road trip, don’t hesitate. Trust me. Pack up your favorite ride with snacks and friends and just head out. It’s truly the best.

Anyway, she told me about the concert and how much her family enjoyed it. She kind of went off tangent (much like I do, we are family after all) and mentioned that Swift likes to leave clues around for different projects she works on. I’ll admit that I was jealous. I don’t usually do jealousy when it comes to people. Everyone comes from a different walk of life. Some have advantages, others have great mindsets and approaches, all of which we can aspire to. With my siblings, however, we all had the same starting point. While I won’t say I have to take the lead in any race I have with them – I was more than happy for and proud of my sis and her family – there was a part of me that truly felt that fear of missing out with it all. So finding out that The Eras Tour was coming out in theatres was a chance to maybe capture that same sense of euphoria my sister did.

If you’ve ever found yourself unable to stop humming “Shake it Off”, “Delicate” or “Wildest Dreams” or perhaps suffered through all of Cats just to see and hear “Macavity” – yeah, you just might be a Swiftie. To get a feeling of what The Eras Tour is like, you could even watch the Retribution Stadium Tour on Netflix. Even if you haven’t, it’s easy to appreciate Swift’s work in The Eras Tour. There isn’t much one can say about a concert. It’s either music and a performance you appreciate, or you don’t.

“Wait,” you may ask. “Why throw a concert using songs from ages ago instead of just focusing on her latest album?” Good question. It’s a long story, but Swift had most of her music collection bought out by a third party and held under lock and key. Since she couldn’t buy back the Masters of her recordings, she went ahead and start re-recording them as “Taylor’s Version”. The Eras tour covers music from Lover, Red, Evermore, Folklore, 1989, Reputation, Speak Now, and Midnights. That is a lot of music to cover. With a runtime of 3 hours, there’s a lot of music, and it’s edited well enough to keep everything moving along at a nice pace.

It’s not perfect, though. To be able to keep the runtime low, five songs were removed from the playlist:

The Archer
No Body, No Crime (with Haim)
Long Live
cardigan
Wildest Dreams

Additionally, I would have liked to have seen more of the behind the scenes that went into the show. The staging for the show is pretty elaborate, with an LED dance floor that’s used just like a screen. Although this doesn’t have the floating stages of the Reputation tour, it still packs a visual punch. One of the best sequences had Swift diving down beneath the stage and appearing to swim through it, only to show up somewhere else. Christopher Nolan would be proud, I’d imagine.

Despite not having the ones listed above, I had a great time with the concert. I listened and noted the songs I was unfamiliar with and belted out the ones I did from my seat in the front row. Thankfully, my showing was so early in the evening that it wasn’t really packed. I’d say there were probably maybe 10 people total in my showing. A pair of women approached me at the start, and I told them about my sister’s trip. They laughed and also remarked on how empty it was. They were as shocked as I was. We didn’t have anyone dancing in front of the screen (which I can imagine probably happened at the Lincoln Center IMAX), but there was much joy to be had. At the end of the day, the whole thing put a smile on my face and I walked out the theatre humming songs.

I still don’t know about the importance of the number 13 (which seems to be a big thing), but I guess that’s something to figure out later down the road.

Anime You Should Be Watching: Wolf Children Ame and Yuki

Posted on May 27, 2013 by Arleigh

In late summer of 2010 the anime and film community lost one of its brightest stars with the passing of Satoshi Kon. With Miyazaki getting up there in age there was now a clamor to see who would take on the mantle that Kon had left behind with his passing. It didn’t take long for many fans of anime to finally look at Mamori Hosoda as the heir apparent. While Hosoda’s body of work as a feature-length animation film director hasn’t been as extensive as Kon’s or Miyazaki’s what he has done has garnered a near universal acclaim for their excellent storytelling, fully-conceived characters and lush, humanistic animation style.

In 2009’s most people were finally made aware of Hosoda’s skill as a director with the worldwide success of Summer Wars and this success made people look forward to what his next film would be. It took three years, but in 2012 Hosoda and anime fans were finally given his next film with the animated film Wolf Children Ame and Yuki (Ōkami Kodomo no Ame to Yuki). It would be a departure from the scifi themes which has been Hosoda’s go to themes for his first two films.

Wolf Children explores the themes of the unconventional family unit of a single mother of two children born of her love and relationship with an Okami (a sort of spirit-animal who can turn from human to wolf). It’s these two young children, Ame and Yuki (who have inherited their father’s gift for turning into wolves themselves), who become the focus of the film. The two children must navigate their childhood and teenage years knowing that they’re different from the rest of the kids in school and both must make the life-altering decisions to follow their own paths whether it be as a human or as a wolf.

To say that the film skews more towards the naturalistic and humanistic themes of the Hayao Miyazaki films would be an understatement. Hosoda doesn’t steal from the master, but instead takes what made the Miyazaki films such timeless and global classics to spin his own tale on the role of a mother’s love for her children even after suffering through a terrible loss and right up to the exploration of nature. So much of the wonder in this film comes from the two children exploring the wild nature around them. It’s a joy to see and at times will even bring tears to some.

It’s no wonder that Hosoda has become the latest name to be seen as Miyazaki’s next heir apparent. While it’s unfair to put so much on Hosoda to accomplish he seems to be more than willing to take on the task and have done so with surprising success.

Wolf Children Ame and Yuki might be a slight departure from Hosoda’s two previous works, but it just goes to show that he’s a director who is willing to branch out thematically and stylistically. This latest film might not be on the same level as his two previous, but it’s definitely one that should help build his reputation as one of the best director’s in the anime and film community.

October Music Series: Townes Van Zandt

Posted on October 31, 2012 by necromoonyeti

Townes Van Zandt lived a troubled life, characterized by constant alcoholism, drug abuse, and failed relationships. He finally passed away of heart failure in a state of delirium tremens on January 1, 1997, at the age of 52, cryptically 44 years to the day after the death of perhaps his greatest influence, Hank Williams, under similar circumstances. As a song writer his music was inconsistent, but at his finest moments he tapped into his inner demons with an acute awareness that he was living more in dream than reality. He created his own folklore both in life and in song. The latter was quite deliberate, emerging sometimes from scratch and sometimes with attention to older legends. Narrated in the first person, always at night, bridging a gap between sleep and consciousness, he painted strikingly vivid images of personal confrontations with foul spirits and terrifying monsters physically imbued with emotional states which could never take on material form outside of a dream, or a song.

To call Spider Song a metaphor would do it a disservice. Of course it is about overcoming some inner demon, whatever that may be, and yes, through the battle against the spider we gain some insight into Van Zandt’s personal struggles, but that’s trivial. He’s not just beating that old dead horse again. The spider begins “in his dreams”, and at no point does it definitively leave them, yet the song is structured in such a way that Van Zandt’s dreams come to characterize more and more a real, physical monster encountered collectively by the narrator and the audience. What you get is a subtle transition from a nearly explicit metaphor (it’s in his dreams) to, by the end, momentary belief that a real, heroic, pitched battle against a giant spider is about to ensue. You don’t fully forget that the spider originated as a sort of representation of emotional states of fear, depression, or whatever you read into the first few stanzas of the song, but nevertheless here it stands, a menacing physical object. No, this song should not be regarded as a metaphor. Rather, our recognition of metaphor is employed to, over time, trick the senses into visualizing something supernatural.

Our Mother The Mountain is laden with hints at the supernatural from the outset: The woman’s esoteric claim to have come from her mother the mountain, her mysterious medallion, the refrain “singing tu-a-lu-ra-lai-o” with an emphasis on “lu-ra-lai”… “Lorelei”… The music feels like a dream, and the lyrics too, until the narrator stops observing the dream and tries to interact, reaching for her hand. The woman’s response is a manifest nightmare–a completely nonsensical appeal to pure foreboding terror captured in her physical actions. The narrator never sees her again, but he swears that it wasn’t just a dream, and as the listener you can’t help but believe him.

Spider Song

There is a spider in my dreams
Long and silent is his name
Cold as lightning is his smile
Final is his sting

His curse is deep as seven skies
Boys, I wouldn’t tell you lies
The legends say he never sleeps
and he’s never hungry long

He’s got us boys, I believe it’s true
But I’m fighting til he lays me down
Run his foul black body through
Cleave him all asunder

Think of your women, won’t you boys
Think of your mother growing old
Think about your darling son
Spit in the spider’s eye

Up at ease, against him ride
We’ll not take him by surprise
Give a scream down in your dreams
Let him know we’re coming

There is a spider in my dreams
Long and silent is his name
Cold as lightning is his smile
Final is his sting

Our Mother The Mountain

My lover comes to me with a rose on her bosom
The moon’s dancing purple all through her black hair
And her lady’s-in-waiting, she’ll stand ‘neath my window
And the sun will rise soon on the false and the fair
Singing tu-a-lu-ra-lai-o

She tells me she comes from My Mother The Mountain
And her skin fits her tightly, and her lips do not lie
She silently slips from her throat a medallion
Slowly she twirls it in front of my eyes
Singing tu-a-lu-ra-lai-o

I watch her, I love her, and I long for to touch her
The satin she’s wearing is shimmering blue
And outside my window her ladies are sleeping
My dogs are gone hunting; their howling is through
Singing tu-a-lu-ra-lai-o

So I reach for her hand, and her eyes turn to poison
And her hair turns to splinters, and her flesh turns to brine
She leaps ‘cross the room. She stands in the window
and screams that my first-born will surely be blind.
Singing tu-a-lu-ra-lai-o

Then she throws herself out to the black of the nightfall
She’s parted her lips, but she makes not a sound
I fly down the stairway and I run to the garden
No trace of my true love is there to be found
Singing tu-a-lu-ra-lai-o

So walk these hills lightly, and watch who you’re loving
By Mother The Mountain I swear that it’s true
And love not a woman with hair black as midnight
and a dress made of satin all shimmering blue
Singing tu-a-lu-ra-lai-o