Writers, Please Stop Striking! Don't Let This Election Go Unmocked!

Hear that?

Me neither.

But it's the sound of no criticism of the 2008 campaign. No Daily Show, no Conan, no SNL. Will this election year go un-mocked?

Juno is to movies what Splenda is to sugar

Wow. Fox Searchlight really knows how to pick 'em. First Little Miss Sunshine, now Juno.

I just got home from the free, screening taste-test of the new movie Juno from the director of Thank You For Smoking, Jason Reitman, and boy am I unimpressed. Talk about an annoying film... The main titular character, Juno, spoke in the most annoying way possible throughout the entire movie: a smart-ass language built entirely out of references to things. For example, rather than saying something like "I am pregnant and I'm 16." she would say "I'm totally preggo on the sixteen candles, fuh shizzle." Now multiply that by the number of lines the average main-character in a full length movie has and, by the end of the film, I felt like Ellen Page's character Juno had exhaused all possible references to every single piece of pop culture from 1970 to the present and used every single word in MTV's Faddish Slang Dictionary.

Furthermore, there seemed to be a creepilly positive message that made the movie seem annoyingly didactic. (Spoilers) The hideously portrayed abortion clinic followed by Juno's disgust with it and her subsequent decision to keep the baby, seemed like a coincidence at first, but when, throughout the film, Juno is lauded for her decision like it was some heroic act and the realism surrounding teen pregnancy is suspended so that she ends up happily ever after with the boy who knocked her up, the glorification of teen pregnancy turned the movie into a quirky, contemporary take on the after school special. This movie is like Knocked Up without all the great jokes and verisimilitude.

The screening we attended was full of like some sort of Youth Group that took up the entire first few rows of the Pleasure Island AMC theater. On the way out, I heard a few of the adult chaperones of the group talking about how much they loved the movie's wonderful message for the kids.

To put it simply, I only recommend Juno to people who like being beaten over the head with morals and fluffy pseudo-witty dialogue to "pad" scenes and appeal to a broad range of demographics. Say hello to the independent film with focus-group approval.

Live Review #1 Jens Lekman, Live at Club Downunder in Tallahassee

Jens Lekman, Live at Club Downunder in Tallahassee, Nov 15, 2007.
a quasi-journalistic review by Omar DeLaRosa

"Isn't that the guitarist from For Ex Lovers Only over there?" I asked my girlfriend as we walked in. Turns out it was. And he wasn't the only Orlando musician who drove four hours to Tallahassee on a weeknight to see what would be Jens Lekman's first-ever Florida performance. Not including the two who rode in my car, I counted at least three other Orlando-area musicians that I recognized from the coffee-house circuit among the early-birds there when the doors opened. By the time Jens introduced himself and started playing his first song, "Sipping on The Sweet Nectar", the small Club Downunder in the middle of FSU campus had flooded with what seemed like every proud owner of a retro-sweater on campus. Jens, on the other hand, wore a ridiculous orange sweater with a large picture of a parakeet on it. After the acoustic, post-Barry Manilow balladry of Jens's first song, the packed house of at least a couple-hundred gave him rockstar-worthy applause, even if that song was possibly his least impressive and most straight-forward of the night.

Before he started playing, I thought it funny that the sound technicians had left a second microphone on the stage. I'd wondered if maybe he'd be accompanied by one of the members of his infamous six-girl band that he brought to the Pitchfork Music Festival in 2006 and on a few other dates of his current tour. By the second song, though, the purpose of Jens' second microphone became obvious. With his guitar still in hand he began to "ooh" into the second microphone while stepping on an effect pedal at his feet. After he stopped "oohing" into the microphone, and the last "ooh" kept playing on a loop, the purpose of the second microphone (and the effect pedal at his feet) was clear. As he went on to "Ooh" over his last "ooh" and stack "oohs" on top of "oohs," the overall loop began to take form and I recognized it as the vocal harmony sample from the song "Postcard to Nina" on his latest album, Night Falls Over Kortedala. After he miraculously recreated the album's vocal sample, he began to play the guitar chords over them on his small acoustic guitar. Returning to the first microphone, he began to tell us the story about this girl from Berlin named "Nina", to whom the song is presumably written, and how he took a 20-hour train from his native Sweden to visit her since it was $5 cheaper than the two-hour flight. Keep in mind, his comments came while the gorgeous vocal sample that he recreated live only moments ago still looped in the background like some sort of invisible, robotic Temptations.

He went on to play a few other songs, using the vocal loops on some and not on others. Still, the vocal loop virtuosity stood out the most. His other most notable vocal loop song came when he played another highlight from his latest album, "Kanske Ar Jag Kar I Dig," whose title, meaning "Maybe I'm In Love With You", is one of the only traces of the Swedish language on his otherwise entirely English-language catalog--besides his obvious accent. Yet what is most interesting about this other highlight is not the use of the Swedish language on what is essentially a Detroit-style soul-song. It's that, on the Kortedala album, "Kanske" uses the exact same vocal sample as "Postcard To Nina" (perhaps another moment of ironic self-reference, for which he's almost as well-known for as his incredible voice). Once again, turning to the second microphone, Jens recreated the stack of "oohs", only this time adding the "bomps" and "bahs" to the stack that differentiate the loops of the two songs. And, once again, Jens proved his mastery of his own voice to the audience by doing alone what it took five Beach Boys and Four Freshmen to do.

Shortly after those miracles, Jens Lekman pulled off another miracle. Rather than filling the stage with the drum-machines and pianos and synthesizers and sampled Motown bands that were all present on the album, Jens finished his otherwise acoustic set with two iPod-accompanied songs (which, by the way, were the songs "I'm Leaving You Because I Don't Love You" and "The Opposite of Hallelujah" from Kortedala). The miracle? Well, the partially prerecorded, iPod-accompanied performances didn't suck! In fact, he remained as animated and as vocally adept as ever. And to make matters even better, he gave the audience a musical wink by allowing the rest of the mystery sample on "Opposite of Hallelujah" to be revealed at the end of the song. This doesn't happen on the album. Turns out that the loop in "Opposite of Hallelujah" comes from a piece of the song "Give Me Just A Little More Time" by Chairmen of the Board. Jens Lekman's pre-encore set closed with that blaring "Give Me Just A Little More Time" loop taken from its chorus and Jens, having just put down his guitar, lip syncing to the 1970s Detroit-soul hit and doing a ridiculous Macarena-like dance at the same time.

After his four-song, acoustic encore, he promised to hang out with the audience and play more songs off stage, face to face. Although our long drive back to Orlando stopped us from finding out how well he lived up to the second half of his promise, he followed-through with the first half and stuck around to meet, greet, and take pictures with just about every one of the audience members, including all of the musicians and fans who drove there from Orlando. It struck me during this meet and greet that, even though his latest album topped the charts in Sweden for a few days in September and his status there may be like that of a Justin Timberlake here, Jens Lekman's idiosyncrasies (like his orange, parakeet sweater and Swedish accent) will most likely keep him from ever topping the charts in the United States. Even so, Lekman accomplishes what Timberlake--with all his popularity in this country--can only dream of: bringing the most cynical of American hipster-listeners out to see a live, pop singer.

My E-mail To Junot Diaz Thanking him for Writing His Latest Novel

Mr. Diaz,

I'm just writing this e-mail to thank you for writing the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I spent the entire day of Thanksgiving reading your new novel and enjoyed it even more than the turkey.

As an aspiring writer of Latin-American (Venezuelan-American, actually) descent I had often racked my brain wondering how to write a novel that was both Latin-American and just Great American. Before your novel, it seemed to me (perhaps out of cynicism) that a novel about the experience of being Latin-American would always be kind of stereotyped or like pushed into the "multicultural novel" niche and I wondered how I (or anyone, for that matter) could ever write anything about the Latin-American experience without falling into that pitfall. But then Oscar Wao came along.

Not only does your novel set the new standard for great writing by Latin-American authors, but it sets a standard for all great american writing. It's both an authentic novel that rings true to the Latin-American experience (having grown up as an over-weight, hispanic geek, I could really relate to and sympathize with Oscar) and also a well written novel that blurs the line between the populist, entertaining writing everyone loves and loves to hate on and that damn literariness that my University trained me to look for--4 years of college-level Creative Writing classes will do that.

Whether you realize it or not, this novel will turn you into a hero for young writers--especially 22-year old, aspiring Latin-American writers such as this one. Someday your overweight, nerdy Latin-American, and classic character will, in this guy's opinion, be taught to students in U.S. writing and literature classes everywhere--the way that Yunior and Ysrael already are. And, weird as that may sound, that is a great thing.

Thanks again.


-Omar de la Rosa,
An aspiring writer who attended your reading at University of Central Florida a couple years ago and thought, "Wow, maybe there is room for good Latin-American writers in this country..." and decided to go through with his (perhaps risky) decision to major in Creative Writing instead of something easier and more profitable like Business or Engineering.

The Audacity to Analyze the Audacity of Hope

So Slate.com has brought together "critic-at-large Stephen Metcalf, culture editor Julia Turner, and chief political correspondent John Dickerson" to have an LIT4100-style discussion about Barack Obama's book, The Audacity of Hope. First of all, the idea of bringing together a politico, a lit-critico, & a generalist critico and recording it all is like any English-major's wet dream. Kudos Slate.

Anyway, I'm still listening to this discussion as I write this, but it's amazing. Check it out.

(P.S. -- I may've seemed like I was leaning toward Hillary in the past few weeks, but let's just say that, after reading about Obama's plans to open source the white house a few days ago, I'm making my "Go-bama" T-shirt as we speak.)

iPop - Nov 16th @ Stardust

So yeah, to recap:

On Friday November 16, Magnet Club, Surfin Serf, Sterling Schroeder, & Chelsea LaBate shall rock the dust off of Stardust Coffee & Video's stars. Things shall go down at around 9pm. 'Twill be an awesome show. ...and a FREE show.

Me and Britt Daniel Down by the Spoon-yard

So at last night, Caeley and me finally made it out to some Anti-Pop shows (Julius Airwaves, The Stills, and Spoon @ Firestone, and then Black Moth Super Rainbow and Aesop Rock @ The stage in the alley behind the Social). But on the way to our car after seeing the first few Aesop Rock songs, we saw Britt Daniel walking with his lady-friend down Orange Avenue. Naturally, we stopped him for a picture. As his lady-friend prepped Caeley's camera for the picture, I asked Britt about what kind of Delay Pedal he used at the show. Turns out, he used the Electro Harmonix Memory Man:



I can't blame Britt for going with the Electro-Harmonix delay. Good ol' Sam Metro, who also plays with me and Jordan in Magnet Club, puts the Electro-Harmonix Big Muff to good use on a lot of our recordings and shows. Them Electro-Harmonix folks sure know how to deliver the effects goods.

Music Critic Quote of the Day

The new Britney Spears album, “Blackout,” is good the way the Yankees are good. If you have enough money, you can buy more talent than the other guys. If all that talent doesn’t exactly hold together, it doesn’t entirely matter—alone or together, the stars have a tendency to deliver the hits.

Well put, Sasha! Although, in all fairness, I have not yet heard the album.

Michael Cera ... the next Jason Schwartzman?

So it turns out that Michael Cera is in a band. This strikes me as massively ironic, considering that in the Village Voice review of Beirut in Brooklyn a few weeks ago, they likened Zach Condon's "charm offensive" to Michael Cera's "Hey I'm Young and (Somewhat) Talented" charm-based celebrity machine.

But what does this mean?

It means that if Michael Cera has a band, one called something as pretentiously loaded as The Long Goodbye, the "Indie-wood stars turned indie-rockers" phenomenon, which may or may not've begun with Jason Schwartzman's little Phantom Planet membership a few years back, is catching on and we could very well see things like:

The Wilson Brothers Texas, Indie Emo-Blooze Trio - Featuring Luke Wilson on Drums, Andrew Wilson on Bass, and Owen Wilson on guitar and [emo/screaming] vocals.

or maybe gigs like:

DJ Zach Braff Spinning Your Favorite Simon and Garfunkel and Shins tunes at Club Booty Shakez on Avenue B. The whole shiznat begins at midnight. Ladies drink free as long as they're naked.

Dent May's Ukelele is indeed Magnificent (His Voice and Lyrics aren't Bad Either)

Also... one of my MySpace "Friends" (in other words a guy I recieved a random add request from) calling himself Dent May & His Magnificent Ukelele, who caught my ear with a beautiful & brilliantly witty track called "College Town Boy" about, you guessed it, a college town boy, has just released a free, five-song EP downloable on his MySpace (and has included "College Town Boy" among its tracks).

Let's just say that since I loaded this little Golden EP into my iPod last night, I've listened to it over and over again, and, when I briefly switched over the Jens' Kortedala album, I got bored of it and had to switch back to Dent May's "A Brush With Velvet" (that's the name of the new EP). It's scary because he seems to combine the singing voice of Elvis Costello (to which he bears a more than striking resemblance to, vocally speaking) with the sparse, yet warmly cheerful production of Magnetic Fields' songs like "Absolutely Cuckoo" or "Book of Love." He also seems to decorate it all with nice little back-up vocal harmonies (maybe of his own voice overdubbed?) and a few, un-intrusive synth-leads that pop up a few times in the course of the 5 songs.

Get it while it's free, you never know when "College Town Boy" and "I'm An Alcoholic" (my two favs) will end up on iTunes and listening to these little pop gems will run you 99 cents. And if you can make it, he'll be opening up for Jens Lekman on Nov. 15th in Tallahasse, FL. ...plus, I'll be there.

So there is hope for future music, but...

...not so much hope for the future music critic. After reading the rest of the discussion on Slate's awesome discussion between two disagreeing musical authorities, I've come to the aforementioned conclusions. However, I guess that's okay. Even though I obviously have this blog here and talk mostly about music in it, I feel that I cannot strictly identify myself as "a music critic" because before I was writing about music (which started maybe a year or two ago, tops) I was just playing guitar in my room or in crappy garage bands with my friends. In other words, way before I ever wrote/typed a single word about The Clash or Jens Lekman or whatever, I was a musical performer/composer/all-around-noise-maker since I got my first guitar back in... 2000? (Wow. Has it really been that long? Anyway, I know it was the same week I got my learners permit to drive.)

That being said, it's probably important to the longevity of musical discussion as a whole (and maybe longevity of "art music" itself) that music-makers (such as this one) also create little Blogger.com music-thought-buckets (such as this one). Why? Because otherwise nobody will be discussion the recordings and performances sparking what Alex Ross expressed concern about when he pointed out:

"...opening the mail or surfing the Internet often sends me into a spiral of despair, because there is far more music pouring in by the day than I can possibly hear and make sense of..."

He is un-doubtably not alone here. Even I get that feeling. But that's why grassroots, "generalist critics" (in his words) have the responsibility of witnessing the minutia in the musical world in the blind spots of traditional music critics such as him (and Ben Ratliff). While blogs like this stand no chance of being comprehensive music guides for all music (I believe such a thing is today impossible outside of a constantly-updating, ever-evolving guide such as that like Wikipedia--or maybe "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy"), only blogs like this one, bby outsiders living in Outsideville and listening to the music of Outsideville's outside artists, can save great outsider music from ceasing to exist.

To me, it seems like the internet is creating the only comprehensive record of "reality" or "existence" of just about all things of this, still unnamed decade (the 2000s?) and maybe the tail end of the last one (the 1990s). As the technology to safeguard the internet itself from ceasing to exist improves itself (cuz let's face it, the entire internet, as it exists today, rests on the pretty volatile little hard drives and ram-chips of servers) society as a whole's dependency on the internet will probably increase. We already know my personal dependence on the internet increases exponentially by the day.

Anyway, that's it for now. I've had this long break at work leaving me time to install a portable version of FireFox, read a little Slate and NYTimes in the comfort of tabbed browsing, and write up this post my little Blogger dashboard. Thankfully, I've been moved to a new office for today in a building across down and I don't think anyone knows I'm here except a handful of people. I hope it stays that way. Still, I'm not sure how much more time I'm going to have to write so it's best I stop here.

Leave Me To My Wineglass

So it's safe to say that Slate is full of incredibly interesting articles and story ideas. But they're really outdone themselves with what they put up a few days ago: a two way discussion between a jazz connosieur and a classical one on the present state of music and both of their genres.

This is like the music-critical equivalent of a soap-opera! It's full of drama and pure, music-lover catharsis. I've even gone and participated on the Fray discussion postings on this. Try to guess which one I posted?

Anyway, since it seems to still be developing I'll post more once the little talk between Mr. Ross and Mr. Ratliff finishes up.

I've Lost My Appetite

As much as I love a good meal, for some reason I've lost my appetite. But it's almost lunchtime.

I Fought The Law and The Law Won

I can stop listening to this song. I just never get sick of The Clash. I hope I don't accidentally sing along to the "I Fought The Law And The Law Won" chant too loudly here at work.

Clap. Clap-Clap. Clap. Clap-Clap.
I Fought The Law And The... LAW WON.

Two Posts Retracted.

I've just retracted all my posts from Yesterday. Why? I dunno. Oh well. If you want to read them, ask me and I'll e-mail the text to you.

On a lighter note, can anyone help me find a different job?

How do you say "Terrible YouTube Covers" In Swedish?

If you scroll down about 3/4th of the way down what I'm guessing is a Swedish kid's live journal, you'll find that they linked to my terrible cover of Jens Lekman's "Black Cab" in Spanish that's on YouTube. Apparently, they said:

"ALLTSÅ HAHAHAHA JAG KLARAR INTE AV DET HÄR. VARFÖR ÄR SÅ MÅNGA MÄNNISKOR SÅ JÄVLA SJUKA I HUVUDET? VARFÖR LÄGGER MAN UPP SÅNT HÄR? VARFÖR FINNS HAN? JAG FATTAR INTE!!! ... jag menar när jag söker efter jens lekman på youtube vill jag inte få upp sån där skit hahaha fyfan. vill slakta."

I have no idea what that means. But according to one of the only two free Swedish to English translators online, it means something along the lines of this:

"THEREFORE HAHAHAHA I DO NOT COPE WITH OF THIS. WHY IS SO
MANY PEOPLE SO DAMN ILLNESS in THE HEAD? WHY does ONE
PUT UP THINGS LIKE THAT HERE? WHY IS HE? I DO NOT TAKE!!! ... I
mean when I look for jens game mane on youtube wants to I
not to get up like that where crappy having having to have fyfan. wants to weak to take. "

Basically, I think the user "indulgence" (real name: Felicia according to the little profile) is wondering why so many people are mentally ill and why they put up things like this online. Apparently, she thinks that when one looks for jens lekman online one shouldn't find crappy fan-covers of his songs--who woulda thunk?

Anyway, my response to Felicia and my reasons for posting videos like this one on YouTube:

Felicia/indulgence,

I posted it because because 95% of YouTube videos are crappy covers of popular songs, so I might as well start doing crappy covers of what I think are good songs to show support for the good songs. It beats covering overplayed 80s songs or like acoustic versions of lame nu-rock songs.

Or in Swedish:

Felicia/indulgence,

JAG postat den emedan emedan 95% av Ungdom video de/vi/du/ni är crappy täcken av populär sång , så JAG makt likaledes börja gör crappy täcken om vad JAG tänka de/vi/du/ni är god sång till utställning stöd för den sång. Den taktslagen tänkandet 80s sång eller lik akustiken versionen av klaga nu - klippa sång.

The Web Hype Machine and Its Problems

So after cluttering the comments section of Marc Hogan's Offnotes response to Sasha-Frere's now notorious article for New Yorker, the hype behind bands like Black Kids (which was only obliquely related to this post because Black Kids have two black members and because Marc Hogan seemed to impact their mega-hyping with his Pitchfork review of their MySpace page), here're my final thoughts on web-hype and why Black Kids are huge now and why other, little bands that are even better ain't:

It seems like the internet has changed the dynamics of fame--or the popularity of a single cultural idea or work. This goes for bands, but it also seems to apply across all aspects of culture. I'm going to use my own experiences as example (since I'm the person whose life and habits I'm the most familiar with) and say that TV has been (or soon will be) replaced by the Web. If only because me, and many of the people I know, spend way more time typing posts like this or reading pages such as this, than they spend flipping channels. And I for one, hardly even watch TV. I've become completely out of touch with what's on TV and what's happening in ongoing television series, when, as a kid, I could practically recite Simpsons and Seinfeld episodes verbatim. I don't think this is a personal choice or personality trait, since I once loved TV and I guess work, school, and hobbies just started to take up more time and the web just seemed more convenient after a while.

Anyway, because the internet is the new dominant medium of the mass media, it has given search engines the role TV Guides and channel listings once had. And the web's also shown the limitations of traditional mediums like television (take for instance, how much longer it takes CNN to report a story or the NYTimes to print it in the following day's paper, than it takes CNN.com's bloggers to post it or NYTimes' website to blare it on the front page). Without getting too far into analyzing the dynamics of media as they exist today--this is way too complicated really, and I'm not going to even pretend like I can go about making any progress on that on this post--it's safe to say that the internet's content is generated and updated more easily (and by greater numbers of people) than TV and functions more like the break-room's bulletin board at work or like a billboard than anything else that came before. However, there is also a huge dependence on language over images.

Although I'm only through the second chapter of Stephen Pinker's latest book, "The Stuff of Thought," even he seems to bring up this issue. Word tags and SEO (i.e. Search Engine Optimized) writing seem to be what communicates to word-based, search engine crawlers such as Google's or Yahoo's what the particular piece of media to which it's attached (be it a video, a picture, a song, or some sort of non-text-based media-fragment). That being said, when songs, such as those of Black Kids' or Peter Bjorn & John or Shakira are posted on the internet (legally or illegally) the ones more likely to be found by casual browsers starting their internet-using experience on search engine portals (as most people still do) are the ones surrounded by linguistic "tags" or SEO word clusters incorporating words most likely to be typed into search engines. (If you're curious about these, check out what the world's most googled words are.) Thus, rather than "fame" being generated by graphic images (as the faces of Elvis & Marilyn Monroe were in the not-so-distant media past of Andy Warhol), today, the media surrounded by the most searched for words (that, I suppose actually up the expectations of what the searcher was hoping to find when he/she typed those words in in the first place) will be the media most "known" by the greatest numbers of casual, e-consumers.

But that brings up a question (in my mind at least), how much should the web cost? Some of the web already costs something, thought usually, the pay-per-use media online is media brought over from the old media world (i.e. pop songs, movies, newspaper content that all existed before the internet).

But what does it mean if, as in the case of Marc Hogan's positive Pitchfork review of Black Kids 4-song, MySpace-page released EP, causes the internet notoriety chain reaction that has a real-world impact on their career as musicians (did they have a Wikipedia page or a Quest Management deal before the Pitchfork article?)? On the same note, what does it mean when a critic like Sasha-Frere Jones writes his provocative piece about race and indie rock and Tom Breihan, Marc Hogan, and many others come to write immediate, public, linguistic responses (or articles or blog posts) to it that suddenly gives a single theme to the usually unrelated output of various internet sources? Actually, why and how does all that happen? It seemed like that week before last was kind of a big week for the web, because a lot of the usually un-interrelated content that I read seemed to be on the same page.

I can't answer any of these questions, but I still can't help thinking that the only lesson in this is that Black Kids' have a name that works great for e-print, a brilliant marketing tactic for their music (free! online! listen!), but make otherwise earnest, yet forgettable music. They're great, though, for today's e-consumer more eager to "discover" music than to actually listen to it.

Even though I may disagree with myself on the future, that's pretty much all I have to say on this issue for now.