Illinoize

Mash ups of Sufjan Steven songs?  Why not?  They're catchy.  And free.   

Go.

Moats & Boats & Waterfalls

It's been performed live on David Letterman and was an NPR song of the day in July...but somehow I've only just been made aware of this joyous anthem.  Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros' "Home" is worth listening to a few times.  Kind of weird at first, but by the fourth listen, you'll be hooked.  "Kindness and Clamor" is how NPR described it.

The band is twee in a heartbreakingly sincere way.  Alex Ebert formed it in 2007 after a major label dropped Ima Robot.   Instead of diving into some sort of existential depression, he met a gal and just formed a formed a new one - drawing inspiration from his childhood and the spirit of the Southern Californian community of the late 60s (so essentially nostalgia for an era he wasn't exactly part of...but whatever.)

Of course, Rolling Stone's Jenny Eliscu points out that "there isn't an Edward Sharpe in the group...Ebert named the band after the characters in a novel he was writing about a boy who transcended his dismal world by tapping into some sort of universal music."  Think the story will be published on some re-released liner notes?

The music video is pretty great - folkies running about, sliding down dirt hills, walking through long, dry grass, being backlit by the afternoon sun....actually, it's pretty cheesy, but somehow not obnoxiously so.  Like a Coachella full of innocents. In other words, watch, but mostly listen.


Home - Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros

EDWARD SHARPE & THE MAGNETIC ZEROS | MySpace Video

Most sites are attributing the buzz to their irresistible live performances.  There are some lower quality You Tube videos floating around, and there does seem to be a palpable enthusiasm...stomping, serenading, smiling, etc, that's not captured well in the official music video.  But, they happen to be playing at the Black Cat on November 16.  I think I'll have to go.  

 

The Paris Review Interviews

Well, isn't this pretty. 

Apparently The Elegant Variation was giving away The Paris Review Interviews, Volumes I - IV.  We all missed it.  But no need to waste money on the books (mostly because the actual issues are more impressive as intellectual clutter if you're debating on apartment adornments), the online archives are pretty comprehensive.  If you ever have a week to waste, it's worth a look.

A Plimpton vanity project it may have been, but can we protest the results?

For Princesses Only!

Style names should never be taken all that seriously.  For the most part they are used only internally - by the designers, the merchants, the in store folks and for the catalogue copy.  That's not to say that a bit of thought doesn't go into them.  Look at the difference between the Abercrombie names and the J.Crew names. (J.Crew, for example, has the "Ruffled Celosia cardigan" and the "Pleated Paulette top," where Abercrombie has the "Kaylin sweater" and the "Skyler top.")   One going for the old lady/floral combination names and the other for obnoxiously named high schoolers born in the mid-90s.   

Anyway, I came across Gryphon's "Shine Princess Coat" today and couldn't help but laugh.  With a Peter-Pan collar, precious ivory color, and a large sequin runway down the middle front, I think it might even be a bit much for Blair Waldorf.   

Common Vintage

I'm pretty sure I own Margaret Sterling's wedding earrings.

Margaret Sterling, sulking through her poorly timed wedding.
Mad Men, Season 3, Episode 12

Yay!

Episode 12

I suppose it had to happen. My love affair with Mad Men has grown tense and uncertain, riddled with annoyances. Of course I will still watch it, but as a wise friend pointed out many episodes ago, the third season hasn’t been all that good. Though I’ll leave the broader analysis for the Slate editors, I do want to touch on a few points of last night’s episode.

Storylines revolved around the John F. Kennedy assignation. Surprisingly, the greatest moments in the episode were those that were entirely real and those that were entirely fake. Unfortunately the rest - the reaction shots, the in the moment comments, the tears, and the silences – all came across as stilted, clumsy, and anything but a true representation of what those moments might have been like in real life.

Since the first episode of the show, it seemed like we were all just waiting for this moment. The third season allusions were thick and obvious – Joan in the hospital with blood all over her dress from Guy’s shredded foot, the Aqua Net ad campaign set in the convertible, etc. The viewing population seemed obsessed with the when. And finally, the moment we’d all been told to wait for happened. The Sterling Cooper employees gathered around the television (technology update from that whole Missile Crisis on the radio thing), shocked and upset about the National Tragedy. Betty cried alongside Carla. The kids were concerned. Don was inconvenienced. And, well, Duck and Peggy were otherwise occupied.


I guess I'd been wondering how this particular show would treat the event. For someone who didn't live through the moment itself, I waver from one extreme to another. A tragedy, yes, but surely not the hysterical "national loss of innocence" that we hear about so much. Maybe American changed. Maybe it just continued on the same path. Or maybe I'm just skeptical because I happened to have written an essay on said loss of innocence in the 6th grade and I really hope that the result was more complicated than my 12-year-old mind could comprehend.

In any event, as Benjamin Schwartz notes in The Atlantic, though a well done show, Mad Men can be ever so slightly heavy handed as it tries to show things as they really were, but always through the enlightened lens of modern mores. Sometimes I feel like they should end the show with some variation of the change slogan. It's a comin'!

As I said, though, the greatest moments were captured in both the fiction and the non-fiction. I could watch Walter Cronkite remove his glasses and announce the death of the President on repeat for days. There is hardly a more moving moment in all of broadcast television for me. Later on in the episode, extensive screen time is given to Lee Harvey Oswald walking with escorts down various hallways. Watching the footage first hand helped to capture the moment better than any actors or plot lines could. It was actually difficult for me to move from the real emotion of Cronkite, and the real drama of Oswald's walk, back to Betty Draper's melodramatic "what is going on?!" shriek, or the inelegantly directed "phones go silent" scene in the Sterling Cooper offices.


Beyond the news footage playing on every television in the Mad Men universe, there were some terrific fictional moments as well – Roger Sterling’s whiny bride-to-be daughter weeping in her wedding dress, Pete and Trudy watching the coverage in near silence, first in their wedding best, and then hours later in lovely casual clothes, and Burt Cooper glued to the television in the kitchen area in the middle of Roger's wedding toast. Tolerable, maybe because they all seem like appropriate reactions to the news. And all of these understandable vignettes served to make Betty's sprint to Henry Francis seem all the more like a bad soap opera.

Actually, maybe my relationship can be mended, as long as Betty drifts back into the lovely and oppressed scenery. Her absurd antics and poorly developed character are hurting the show.

In the end, the blogs seemed pleased and a bit surprised that the assassination wasn't the season finale. But I don't know if I can bear another full episode of reflection and Kennedy worship. It'll play like an issue of Vanity Fair.

Good point, Doree

Iseem to have missed this very obvious point about (500) Days of Summer.

Girls like Summer invariably serve as combination muse/object of obsession, usually allowing the guy in the equation to finally unlock his true creative impulses.

Awesome.

The Great Expectations of Summer

There are spoilers. You’ve been warned. 



(500) Days of Summer is a tale of unrequited love. A very specific kind that plagues most 20-something relationships. In its very simple way of telling such a common story, (500) Days hits something true.

The story chronicles the failed relationship of Summer (Zooey Deschanel) and Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) over the course of 500 days, skipping from the breakup to the first days of flirtation then to the aftermath, back to the middle again, and so on. I’d imagine that most people analyze their own relationships like this - remembering scenes differently with each take, alternating obsessively between the highs and the lows and hoping to arrive at some sort of truth or at least the ability to move on to a new thought. And thus the audience is taken on this tour of introspection with Tom to figure out what went wrong with Summer.


Tom’s character is developed to obsessive detail right at the outset. Sporting messy hair, skinny tie, un-tucked oxford, hoodie, skinny pants and flat sneakers, he is an aspiring architect who has been stuck writing copy for a greeting card company for four years. He’s a romantic who listens to The Smiths, reads Alain de Botton, and “completely misinterpreted The Graduate.”

Summer’s character is given less. We know that her parents were divorced, that she doesn’t believe in love and cared only (at least when she was 8) about her long, dark hair. She also wanted to move out of Michigan which brings her to a new job at a greeting card company in LA. The infrequent, deep-voiced narrator (channeling Pushing Daisies a bit) muses for a strange length of time on Summer’s beauty, her eyes, her hair, her face, her clothes and the “Summer effect” which basically means that most men tend to notice her and she knows this. For example, her yearbook Belle and Sebastian quote "color my life with the chaos of trouble" led to an "80% increase" in sales of The Boy with the Arab Strap in her hometown. 



Tom falls for her immediately (because we’re told that is what all men do). But Tom also very clearly wants a girlfriend. Summer’s new in town, Tom seems smitten and like any girl who is new in town and has a nice, intelligent guy pining after her, she goes with it, warning Tom that about aforementioned prejudices against love and that she “doesn’t want anything serious.” But Tom continues to fall. Because she quotes The Smith’s song that he happens to be listening to in the elevator "to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die,” because he misinterprets that line as meaningful and deeper than just the song that was on at the time, because of her beauty, because of her wit, because of her ability to talk about “Magritte AND Hockey,” and mainly because Tom believes that it’s right, that she’s perfect and that they will fall in love. He thinks that because they like the same things that they are destined to be together - a notoriously hipster thing to assume. 



Although Summer is nothing but forthcoming about her intentions, she also does what she wants. So after playing house in Ikea and kissing, Summer tells Tom that she doesn't want a relationship, and then, as they exit the store she takes his hand. Summer isn't evil, but beginning with the musings on her beauty, her thoughts on love and they way she toys with Tom, I thought not of Catherine in Jules et Jim, but of Estella in Great Expectations. And this is perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the story. Summer isn't given any depth for most of the movie, besides her selfishness and inability to fall in love. Only one scene gives her credit for being something other than cool, beautiful and aloof: her inconsolable crying at the end of The Graduate. But the narrator only speaks for Tom. We only see Tom's distress. Summer remains unreadable we hate her a little bit for continuing to hurt and perplex Tom.


Back to the plot. After Summer and Tom break up, they find themselves both at a co-workers wedding. They dance and flirt and smile and Summer invites him to a party at her house before falling asleep on his shoulder in the train. Which is when we arrive at THE SCENE OF THE MOVIE: a split shot of Tom going to Summer’s party. One screen is titled "Expectations" and one is titled "Reality." It’s heartbreaking, beautiful, simple and makes the movie worth seeing. I can’t even remember if there was any actual dialogue – the expressions and actions were good enough to carry the segment.



I came into this wanting to write something critical, wanting to comment more on the look of the film, the smirk inducing references to New Wave films, the use of downtown LA, and so on. But because of my 2 days of procrastination, the romantic comedy pitfalls (the unattainable wardrobe and lifestyle, the goofy best friends, the precocious little sister as therapist, the predictable transfer to the “Sympathy and Grief” department, Tom’s change to a suit at the end of the film), and all the other petty annoyances that I had with the script have somehow drifted to the back of my mind. What remains is my desire to talk to people about the film, about Summer's actions and Tom's ignorance and the sadness and the reality that sometimes one person falls and the other person doesn't.

I See

I will be posting again soon. Many ideas, but little time to write anything worth reading.

For now, though, enjoy an elegant MoMA ad.

Zooey, Part 2: Overexposed

Oh, Zooey. Didn't you read my post on the misguided glamorization of Breakfast at Tiffany's?


Besides, Holly Golightly wore Wayfarers. Not Oliver Peoples. Duh.