SportsAlcohol.com co-founder Nathaniel has been invited to be a panelist at the September installment of Kevin Geeks Out, everyone’s favorite movie-clip-laden comedy/variety show. The theme of the evening is the apocalypse, so you might want to brush up on what Nathaniel has said about the apocalyptic poetry of Paul Dehn. Quoth host Kevin: “The two-hour multi-media event will include presentations on renowned visions of a dark future and obscure examples of wasteland stories.”
Sound good? Of course it does. The info:
Kevin Geeks Out About the Apocalypse September 17 9:30 pm Nitehawk Cinema 136 Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn, NY (718) 782-8370 nitehawkcinema.com
They Might Be Giants is playing a show on the last Sunday of every month of 2015 at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, New York. Marisa and Jesse have been going to these shows and reporting on each one. Here is the sixth installment of our TMBG musical biography, which was a kids show. We usually don’t go to the kids’ shows, but the fact that Marisa is pregnant a) means that they’re trying to pack in every live concert they can before the baby makes them cut back on these kinds of outings, and b) makes them look like they’re less likely to be kidnappers.
Kid shows are a whole different jam. They’re more chaotic than punk shows, with an audience that truly does not give a fuck about how attendees are supposed to behave at a concert. If they’re bored, they will let you know about it. Here, the babies react to the TMBG set.
They Might Be Giants at the Music Hall of Williamsburg: 6/26/15
At a recent double-feature at the IFC Center, Greta Gerwig, who was there to present her new film Mistress America, mentioned the idea of the “dangerous woman” in cinema as one of the inspirations for the script, co-written with director Noah Baumbach. I was intrigued, not least because the two ’80s films she highlighted, Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (which she screened alongside Mistress America) and Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, happen to be personal favorites of mine – though I’d never thought to put them together in that way. In the weeks following I kept turning the phrase over in my mind, trying to think of modern examples of the trope outside the action and horror genres and coming up blank. Was the dangerous woman a relic of its time? Or has our idea of a feminine threat shifted to something a little less overt but more idiosyncratic? In these third wave, MRA-plagued days, it seems worth dissecting. Continue reading “You’re a Funny Girl”: Greta Gerwig, Mistress America, and Dangerous Women→
They Might Be Giants is playing a show on the last Sunday of (almost) every month of 2015 at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, New York. Marisa and I have been attending them, and we will be reporting on each show. Here is the fifth installment of our TMBG musical biography, arriving more than a little late.
They Might Be Giants at the Music Hall of Williamsburg: 5/31/15
1. Climbing the Walls
This was a show spotlighting TMBG’s 2007 album The Else, an interesting conceit because their album-spotlight shows tend to revolve around the first three releases: the Pink Album, Lincoln, and Flood. There have been occasional Apollo 18 and Factory Showroom shows in the last decade, but none that I’ve been to, and anyway, that still doesn’t include any of their post-90s albums. In a recent SPIN piece I’ve already read several times (and no one is more surprised than I am to read that clause), Linnell mentions that he really likes The Else and how that record “in particular made [him] very concerned and worried subsequently about trying to match the quality of that recording,” especially interesting to me because it seemed like, at the time, the sparer and weirder Join Us was talked up as a corrective to the heavier, more rock-and-roll vibe of The Else, and a lot of TMBG fans (who do sometimes fetishize the band’s weirdness, experimental work, and/or lack of guitar solos) seemed to agree. So I’m pleased that the band was interested enough in revisiting a relatively recent album to plan a show around it. A song like “Climbing the Walls” probably won’t make many best-of-TMBG lists but, like a lot of these songs, it is a perfect example of what it sounds like to listen to They Might Be Giants. Continue reading They Might Be Giants: Biography and Bibliography in Brooklyn (May Edition)→
Straight Outta Compton doesn’t exactly qualify as a nontraditional biopic; in terms of structure, it mostly adheres to the rise/fall narrative with the option for an additional rise. Earlier this summer, the Brian Wilson movie Love and Mercy toyed with those boundaries with far more innovation. But even set half in the ’80s, Love and Mercy, like so many movies about popular music, was rooted in baby boomer music of the ’60s; Straight Outta Compton, in telling the mostly sanctioned story of N.W.A., actually starts in the 1986, which still counts as a novelty. True to its title, the movie roots itself in the streets of Los Angeles and surrounding environs; an early scene catching Eazy E (Jason Mitchell) in a drug raid looks positively apocalyptic. But the imagery doesn’t just come from gang violence; it’s the police battering ram tearing apart a house that makes the scene look so untenable.
As the movie skips from Eazy to a young Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins) and Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Jr., playing his dad), police harassment is a common theme, along with the recurring image of black men being slammed against car hoods for no reason. Cube and Dre are more interested in lyric-writing and DJing, respectively, than the drug trade, and E wants out, too. But even when they’ve signed up with a manager (Paul Giamatti) who looks shadier as the movie progresses but downright friendly in the context of Compton, the cops won’t leave them alone: putting them on the ground, asking what they’re doing outside a recording studio, daring them to fight back. Some of this is broad (“rap is not an art!” one cop – a middle-aged black man – spits contemptuously); it’s also feels undeniably and depressingly relevant. Pop biopics often traffic in simplistic song origins, but when Straight Outta Compton cuts hard from N.W.A. getting harassed on the streets into them performing “Fuck Tha Police,” it’s not just a pat explanation of a famous and controversial song. It makes audiences (some of whom will not have experienced racism firsthand) feel the song’s righteous frustration. To put it in my dorky white terms: it feels fucking punk rock. Continue reading East Coast vs. West Coast: On Straight Outta Compton and Fort Tilden→
Well, the long national nightmare that was True Detective Season 2 is now over. But some of your friends at SportsAlcohol.com didn’t really consider it a nightmare. Actually, we have some pretty positive things to say, as well as some constructive criticism. So investigate one of the internet’s hottest takes as we do an uncharacteristically quick post-mortem on the second season of the show people love to hate for some reason. Marisa, Jesse, and Nathaniel are on hand to discuss the high fashions, low morals, confusing storytelling, and Strong Female Characters of True Detective Season 2. Spoilers abound, for the finale and the rest of the season!
How To Listen
We are now up to five different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast:
You can subscribe to our podcast using the rss feed.
I’m not sure why they allowed it, but we are on iTunes! If you enjoy what you hear, a positive comment and a rating would be great.
That is an exchange from the first X-Men movie, which came out just over fifteen years ago. It’s a succinct example of why Bryan Singer’s film works so well, despite many superficial limitations. The question is posed by Rogue, a young mutant who has just met one of her own kind, the taciturn Wolverine. She’s asking about the metal claws that pop out through his skin, and Wolverine’s response, as played by Hugh Jackman, isn’t an emo lament. It’s plainspoken: sad but not whiny, and a little funny in its ruefulness. It conveys character through dialogue without exposition. Those handful of words (and the actors bringing them to life) say: Wolverine is a badass with metal claws, and every time he brandishes them, he feels a twinge of pain. Continue reading Fantastic Four Achieves Peak Fox Marvel→
Tom Cruise has managed to maintain a career for over three decades while appearing in just one set of sequels (so far): the Mission: Impossible series, which began in 1996 and have become, against odds including but not limited to Mission: Impossible II, his signature movie-star films. In the latest installment of the SportsAlcohol.com podcast, Marisa, Jesse, Nathaniel, and Sara (making her podcast debut!) got together after a viewing of the new Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nationn to discuss the film, as well as the overall career of Tom Cruise. We discuss:
How Rogue Nation stacks up to its predecessors and how it brings to mind series nadir Mission: Impossible II
How Sara, not an action movie fan, reacted to Rogue Nation
Favorite Tom Cruise movies
Cruise’s early “being the best at pointless skills” trilogy
Far and Away, The Color of Money, Knight and Day, and other moments in Cruise history!
Whether Cruise’s offscreen antics inform how we watch his films
AND MORE!
So listen carefully and with great intensity! Just know that this podcast is full of spoilers for every Tom Cruise movie possible! Or impossible!
How To Listen
We are now up to five different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast:
You can subscribe to our podcast using the rss feed.
I’m not sure why they allowed it, but we are on iTunes! If you enjoy what you hear, a positive comment and a rating would be great.
Having your song used in commercials is a double-edged sword for artists. For many indie bands, I’m sure the royalties are welcome and hard to turn down, but it’s also the sort of thing that can follow an artist around for life (exhibits A, B, C, infinity: just about anyone who’s been featured in an Apple spot). A good pairing, though, can elevate something potentially mechanical and soulless to memorable, even transcendent. It helps, of course, if the song itself reaches those heights already. Such is the case with the New Pornographers’ anthem “The Bleeding Heart Show,” whose spangly hey-la hey-la chorus is best known for being prominently featured in a commercial for the for-profit educational center University of Phoenix, of all things. It’s also one of the most perfectly constructed pop songs of the past decade.
The album it comes from, Twin Cinema, was released a decade ago, and though the band has released many ear-wormy delights since then, “The Bleeding Heart Show” has become one of their signature songs. The New Pornographers are something of an indie supergroup, spearheaded by A.C. Newman trading vocals with Dan Bejar of Destroyer and the volcanically talented Neko Case, backed up by other journeymen and women. They’ve put out six records since first forming in 2003, and each one harnesses the alchemical joy of a group of good friends getting back together again. It’s like The Big Chill, except without the Boomer moping and everyone’s singing songs they wrote together instead of Motown classics.
As a band, The New Pornographers seem incapable of making something without a hook. On paper “The Bleeding Heart Show” has a classic three-part structure, but that’s liberating for the song rather than limiting. It begins quietly with the plaintive chords of a lone piano. The drums kick in with Newman’s vocals, the lyrics somewhat nonsensical but seeming to detail the hazy morning after a rager, an impression reflected in the music, which sounds like it’s fumbling toward what it wants to be. But it moves swiftly after two verses into the bridge, the drums escalating as Newman and Case build in urgency and solidarity, joined by a melodica, the harmonica’s carnival cousin. Then Newman drops out and a chorus of “oohs” takes over, carrying us as the instruments begin locking together and surging forward, exploding into the “hey-la” finale. It’s a fist-pumping, chest-swelling blast of emotion, and for the next sixty seconds it seems the band may go on forever, backing up each epic moment in your life.
The New Pornographers play Prospect Park on Saturday, July 10th, for free, if you’re in the area.
