newpageone.com

I recently started playing guitar again.  It’s always been an on-again, off-again thing for me.

One of the major reasons I pick the instrument back up is hearing someone new and thinking, “What the heck is this guy/gal doing?”  After enough listening, you end up looking up guitar tabs, and before you know it, you’re getting yourself in tune and playing along.  The last guitarist who managed to do this to me was Jamie Hince of The Kills, who I first heard about a year ago.  Googling him will probably bring up more pictures of girlfriend Kate Moss than anything else.

Hince with Ms. Mosshart

The Kills are a duo made up of himself and the smoldering Alison Mosshart, and the dynamic between them seems to be one of one-upmanship.  The obvious contrasts/comparisons to the White Stripes aside, it’s dingy and dirty garage blues with restrained augmentation.  The heart of their sound is shared, snarling vocals and Hince’s furious attack on the guitar.  Over the course of their three-album (so far) career, the use of drum machines and synths have made their way into some furious tunes, but always as an accompaniment and never a distraction.

Jamie doesn’t do much of anything new per se, but his execution is what piques my interest.  What makes him appealing to me is that he seems to be screwing around with his guitar from time to time, looking for what sounds right and plugging away at it, whether it sounds perfect or not.  Healthy doses of distortion fill it out, but like the synthesized instruments they use, even the fuzz box is only an accessory to the instrument.  He’s also fond of drop-tuning, which gives the sound some extra balls.  This is all evidence of a guy who knows how to get what he wants out of his instrument, and I always admire that.

As a result of listening to The Kills, I have been spending more time with my old bootleg Stratocaster.  Sometimes it’s not just what you’re playing, but the way you’re playing it.  Jamie Hince is one guitarist who exemplifies this concept.

Here’s the video for “Last Day of Magic,” which is pretty cool if you ask me.

It’s been three years since the release of Our Love To Admire, the majestic third album by New York’s coolest band, Interpol.  Since the conclusion of that tour (which I attended in Boston that September), the band took time off to chase other projects and the future of their collective work was uncertain.  There were doubters, but those with true faith, such as myself, knew that they still had plenty of work to do.  Tonight, I am happy to learn that the wait is coming to an end.

These gentlemen have something to show you.

If you click on Carlos, Dan, Paul, and Sam, you’ll be taken to their sparse website, and after a rather spooky new logo animation, you’ll be treated to a download link to their new song, “Lights.”  I just gave it a listen and I’m very happy with the results.  It’s very much an Interpol song; dark, brooding, and somewhat dreamy.  At nearly six minutes, it builds up over time and swells up into a beautiful denouement before fading out.  Paul is still singing about unconventional romance and traveling by waterway.  Basically, it sounds like “The Lighthouse” with a real guitar riff and a little extra muscle.  If you’ve been listening since Turn on the Bright Lights, you could see sounds like this coming.  Can’t wait to hear what the rest of these latest sessions have brought.

This gives me a good opportunity to discuss Paul Banks’ solo album, which he released last summer.  Julian Plenti Is… Skyscraper was a good album, but it’s kind of like when Dave Matthews takes a vacation from the band to record something by himself.  You sit there thinking, “This is pretty good… but I wonder what it would have sounded like if…”  In this case, you get a couple of songs that could have really used some support from the rest of the group, and other tracks that work fine on their own.  For instance, check out the video for the lead single, “Games for Days”:

The song is great.  In fact, this track actually sounds 90% like it was an Interpol song to begin with.  Meanwhile, the video is kind of like the whole Garth Brooks/Chris Gaines thing.  “Julian Plenti” is a pseudonym that Banks has used for years, and the scenario here has me thinking that Black Shirt Paul is his Interpol persona, while Hat and Glasses Paul is more like his sensitive-artist persona.  Chuck Klosterman talked about Chris Gaines in his new book (I’ll get to that some other time), but I thought of this first.

So, there you have it.  Once the new album comes out, I’m sure to pick it up and review it post-haste.  Till then, keep an eye on the wire.

My friend Neal seemingly does nothing but consume the Internet all day.  Every day, he adds peculiar links on his Facebook page, be they strange articles, photos, or YouTube videos.  The other day he managed to introduce me to a YouTube channel that consists of mostly casting videos from a studio in Chicago.  I initially thought that the videos were all a part of some elaborate joke.  Then again, that’s what we all thought about After Last Season.

None of these brief “video headshots” features good acting.  And of course, this is something that I hate to be critical of.  Acting is something I’ve loved to do for years, so I’d hate to say something disparaging when they believe themselves to be good at it.  Then again, I have rarely worked with anyone this bad, even at my community theater level.  I don’t know if these people have enrolled in these classes because they want to have a career in acting or if they just want to feel more comfortable interacting with people.  What’s more, I don’t know what type of instruction these people were given.  Still, you’re always bound to find a diamond in the rough.  Take, for example, the great Bill Dollear:

I absolutely love how the guy can’t keep from laughing when his partner tells him she’s pregnant.  Whether that scene was supposed to be funny or full of tension, that’s likely the one reaction that he wasn’t supposed to come up with.  He also does a killer Scottish accent.

This channel is full of other little nuggets, such as a guy who robotically delivers Rutger Hauer’s classic death scene from Blade Runner, or some bozo who drains a Simpsons reference of humor.

With sites like Awkward Family Photos and sexypeople popping up so much these days, videos like this seem like a logical progression to me.  What is with our fascination with odd people?  I think it kind of plays into the voyeuristic tendencies we all have.  We want to see people in their natural state;  sites like this satisfy that desire, and it’s all in the presentation.  These glimpses of people are submitted and they never expected anyone to do so.  I think that’s why we love it.

I could go on and on about that, I guess.  Maybe another time.

Can’t get it out of my head.

Just remember, comrades, he’s laughing with you.

I love bad movies.  In order to enjoy a good movie, you have to know how to enjoy a bad one.  In fact, I think that any film appreciation class you take in college should not focus so much on Eisenstein and Welles as they should on Wood and Corman.  It doesn’t hurt to have had Mystery Science Theater 3000 on television when you’re a teenager, either.  But tonight, on the eve of my 27th birthday, I do believe that I have now seen the best bad movie ever.

Thrill at the empty stare of Tommy Wiseau!

If you know a thing or two about bad movies and the Internet, then you may have heard about The Room.  If you haven’t, then it honors me to inform you.  Long story short, the film was released in Los Angeles in 2003 and quickly became one of those LA inside jokes that fascinate me.  I just don’t understand what makes Los Angelenos tick.  Anyway, it was written, produced, directed, and starred in by a strange, foreign man named Tommy Wiseau.  Wiseau is most likely French, but like all great eccentrics, his true origin is unknown.  And that’s just the beginning.  There are plenty of mysteries to be found in The Room.

The story is like something Tennessee Williams would have written in junior high.  Wiseau plays Johnny, a San Francisco resident who seemingly has it all: a fiance, some kind of a bank job, a parade of friends who may or may not have names, an apartment with a rooftop to hang out on, and a lot of hair.  Things seem to be going very well for Johnny, until one day his fiance, Lisa, decides she no longer loves him and decides to start an affair with his best friend, Mark.  All of this while lying to everyone she knows, saying that Johnny hit her.  Mark seems to constantly want to call off the affair, but he is written badly enough that he goes ahead with it anyway.  The story essentially follows Johnny’s downward spiral as Lisa’s antics continue.

This of course, is only the main storyline, and is really the only one that is followed through to its completion.  Several subplots are created and then never revisited, such as Johnny’s “adopted” “son” Denny, who lives in the building and owes a drug dealer some money.  After an encounter on the roof with this dealer, we never hear about it again.  Or Lisa’s mother’s breast cancer.  And in a later house party scene, we are left scratching our heads as to why an as-yet-unseen (and unnamed) character should have the moral compass to tell Lisa to come clean to Johnny about her infidelities.

The best part of it is, The Room takes itself entirely seriously about 90% of the time.  Wiseau has gone on to say that the film was always intended to be a “black comedy” as it took on cult status as a midnight favorite in LA and New York.  The cast and crew said otherwise, but you have to wonder if indeed, Wiseau was pulling a fast one on everyone involved.  There are moments in which the film switches gear from super-serious to improvised hilarity in seconds flat.  Watch it and you’ll probably agree.  Sometimes true genius can be unassuming.

So why do I love The Room so much?  There’s plenty of reasons.  For one, it suffers from an identity crisis: is it a melodrama or a so-called comedy?  Or maybe it’s a San Francisco travelogue, thanks to all of the lingering shots of the skyline and the Golden Gate Bridge.  Another key to success is quotability.  Any movie that has a line like “You can keep your stupid comments in your pocket,” or an impassioned “YOU’RE TEARING ME APART” is a surefire classic.  And don’t forget to watch it with someone you love, because you’re in for not one, not two, but FOUR of the creepiest, most awkward, and unsexiest love scenes ever committed to film (or HD video, whichever Wiseau felt better about).

If midnight showings of The Room do not make their way to Boston, I’m going to have to raise the funds to bring it to Worcester myself.  I have to see this with a roomful of people.  You probably should, too.

So you make a one minute video for a friend and upload it to YouTube.  As soon as it finishes, it gets muted because Warner Music Group knows that you played the beginning of “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash over it.  I understand the importance of copyright infringement, but if you’ve got the ability to know that your video of kids trying to breakdance contains sixty seconds of a song, and then block it, it seems… disturbing?  Frustrating?  A little of both?  Of course,  I don’t want to sound whiny.  But it’s just a little scary that your own content can be instantly removed because a song that you think fits well should be included in it.

However, I hear that there’s a new deal in place to bring Warner’s material back to YouTube, but they’ve been saying so since September, with a scheduled date of  “by the end of the year.”  Week and a half to go…  I wonder if it’ll be worth the trouble.

Yet somehow, this classic managed to slip through the cracks…  I’m bringing back a couple of old NP1 Films and putting them up on the Tube, because that’s the only way people are going to watch them these days, anyway.  If you still think this is funny, then God bless you.