major storm!

storm

no exit

On Friday we exited the Bemis to this sight.



Here is the other intersecting street.



Yeah, we were stranded.

Performance

Performance exceeded my expectations. It was extremely bizarre, provocative, and thoroughly entertaining. Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg were their magnetic selves. The hedonistic den that they inhabited in the film seemed a mirror image to the description Marianne Faithfull gives in her autobiography of Anita and Brian Jones' flat. A place for their crowd to drop in and a place where Anita and Brian passed their time engaging in black magic, drug use, dress-up, physical abuse, sex, music, and hanging out with friends (this was before Anita was with Keith Richards). These activities are featured prominently in the film as well. It's unbelievable to me that the film was released by Warner Brothers. The studio tried their best to bury it, but it found a way out somehow (two years later than it was supposed to be released and after an attempt at burning the negative).

Here's a really good quote (featured on the Film Streams notes) from co-director Donald Cammell:

"One of the reasons I think Warners hated the film so much is because it forces an audience to consider the construction of their own fragmented selves, the various aspects of sexuality, which is something people never question. Nick [Roeg, co-director] loves to tell the story of one Warner executive who observed, 'Even the bath water is dirty in this,' referring to the menage a trois in Turner's bath. Nick could only say, 'Well the water looks that way because they just took a bath!"

My sisters and I managed to keep a fairly straight face through all the absurdity, non-sequiturs, and random cut-up style (at times making it seem that the film was edited by a blind person), until a young girl appeared with a turban and mustache in silk pajamas serving tea to the bohemians and speaking in a munchkin voice. At that point we lost it. I can't remember the last time that I've been struck with uncontrollable laughter (I think it's only happened about 5 times total in my life), but this was a bad case of it. It took so much self-control to contain it. I forced myself to disengage, I looked around me, I tried to get angry, I put a sweatshirt over my face, I took a drink of water. I was literally shaking and sweating trying to contain my laughter and not totally disrupt the whole theater.

This self-control was tested each time the child (or possible midget?) appeared onscreen. The second time she showed up, Erin exploded with laughter (the kind that you can tell the person attempted to muffle unsuccessfully) and we were gone again. Miraculously, I was able to keep things under control for the next scene and a half she appeared, until she blurted "I'm sick of beans" in her old man/baby/nasal drawl as she angrily through a can of beans in the trash. That flipped the switch again. Luckily that was her last line. If her screen time totaled any more than about 6 minutes, we would have been kicked out of the theater.

Algiers and Oslo

Last Friday I had a Film Streams double feature day: The Battle of Algiers (1966) and Reprise (2008). It is really crazy and eerie how relevant The Battle of Algiers is with regards to our current state of affairs in Iraq and the Middle East. Different place, same exact story. Too bad governments don't seem to learn much from history (or art for that matter). The Defense Department actually screened the film in the Pentagon in 2004. That's one discussion I would've loved to have sit in on.

Apparently the flyer promoting the screening read:

"How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film."

It's a visceral and haunting film that still has great relevance today, and it achieves a rare level of feeling very real (hence the disclaimer before the film stating that no newsreel or documentary footage was used in the film).

Reprise is a Norwegian film made by a young director and former skateboarding champion, Joachim Trier. I really, really liked the movie. It is about a lot of things: art, ambition, confusion, friendship, the transition into adulthood (and avoiding that transition), love, sanity, self-invention, the public vs. private self, the fine lines between inspiration/genius and madness, identity, popular culture (and its intersection with identity - how books, movies, and music can help shape and define your identity or how you both judge and relate to others), time, aging (and fear of it, and conversely, youthfulness), commitment (and fear of it), selfishness and selflessness, and other issues that humans have been dealing with for a long time. It's also a simple but engaging story about a group of friends at a particular time in their life.

The two main characters were subtle and engaging and played off each other really well, which was important since their friendship is the crux of the film. The movie is stylish and inventive, but I felt that its form didn't get in the way of the story or emotion. There were times where I became pretty aware of the style, but it never crossed that line of feeling pretentious (though it was close at times), cheesy or that it was trying to hard. Basically, it's a really interesting film that I would highly recommend seeing if you have the chance.

I'm heading back down to Film Streams tonight with my sisters to see Performance. I've wanted to see this film for awhile, so I'm really excited to be seeing it projected in a theatre.

Wolf Parade review

My review of Wolf Parade's new album At Mount Zoomer is up at Venus Zine's website. You can check it out here.

reading in the capital

I'm backtracking here, but last Wednesday Cody and I went to Lincoln to some free panels offered by the Lincoln Writer's Conference. The first panel was on getting the inspiration to write, the second one was on pop culture and viral epidemics (or something). At night some talented writers gave readings (featured below): Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep), Sean Wilsey (Oh the Glory of it All and McSweeneys editor-at-large) and Meghan Daum (My Misspent Youth and Saturday columns in the L.A. Times).

It was really good to hear a bunch of people talk about writing. It got me re-inspired and re-energized to write.

We also visited some historical Lincoln sites.

CWS 2008

The College World Series is back. I went with the family to see Fresno State beat North Carolina, which is exactly the outcome we were all hoping for. To add to the whole experience, we sat in front of a group of Southerners, which had its pros and cons. Main pro: sounding like the characters on Friday Night Lights. The guy behind me even said "Aw raht" (all right) like Eric Taylor and they had a kid named Gracie Lee (the Taylors sometime call their daughter Gracie Belle on FNL). If only Riggins played baseball. The main con: when the Michigan fight song came on (as a trivia question) the guy screamed at the top of his lungs "We don't want to hear no Michigan fight song!".

amy's birthday

Saturday's activities included celebrating Amy's (aka Plaiderpillar) birthday. We went to OJ's for some Mexican food and then to her family's cabin. It was a beautiful day. And I played shuffleboard for the first time. And took to the trails with Cody. Fun, fun!

bike art

Here are some photos from a poster art event for charity that Cody and I went to on Saturday.


That's Micah standing next to the awesome poster he designed.


I'm displaying some invisible art.


Behind Cody are some of Tony Bonacci's photographs, also on display at Nomad - they're really good. Also I just realized that a sideways mustache kind of looks like a sea monkey.

8 seconds of Times New Viking in Omaha

how do you spell storm in hopelandic?

Sigur Ros played at the Orpheum last night. Once again, storms and tornados hit Omaha. Cody and I drove downtown to the wonderful soundtrack of tornado sirens. Then we proceeded to get out of the car when the torrential downpour was in full effect. We were armed with an umbrella, but it didn't help much. The wind was too much for its brittle bones and it broke.

There were a lot of people down in the basement of the Orpheum, where apparently the band came through playing. That would've been pretty awesome to see. Instead we hung out in a parking garage for a little while and then under a building's overhang. But it was cool to watch the storm from outside. We were pretty much soaked by the time we were actually let into the delayed show.

Despite sitting in wet jeans and having soggy, freezing feet, the show was pretty amazing. My favorite part was in about the third song (?), when the horn section made their entrance from offstage in a serpentine march across the stage. That was really cool. It's so impressive when a band like that, that has such a specific sound - layered, ethereal and almost other-worldly - can sound as good, if not better, live as they can on record.






That's Cody throwing his socks out.





The end.

photo of the day.

southeast london., originally uploaded by NotoriousLBT.

This was taken in Southeast London in 2000.

The Fiery Furnaces

This is a gravely inadequate post, but I just want to say that I saw The Fiery Furnaces the other night and they were amazing and now I can't stop listening to them. They are an extremely talented and intriguing band live. I saw Mates of State on Saturday and they were pretty awesome too. Their new album Re-Arrange Us is really good and poppy and the songs and bits of lyrics are guaranteed to stay in head for days. The past couple of days I've woken up with pieces of their songs in my head...like the moment I woke up. That's how catchy it is.

In downer news, Little Couch had a less than impressive showing at pub quiz tonight. In fact, we were so embarrassed that we used a pseudonym. We'll bounce back next week with a best ever score!

Jeff King review

Above are photos from the Jeff King show "Better On My Off Day" at Pulp. Here is my review of the show, published this week in The Reader.

Spring Gun interview

Here's my "Meeting the Band" with Spring Gun, published in this week's City Weekly (my scanner's not quite big enough, sorry).




To read it more legibly, here's the online version.

Red Wings Win!

The Red Wings have won the Stanley Cup! Henrik Zetterberg, one of my two favorite players (Pavel Datsyuk being my other), won the Conn Smythe Trophy as the Playoff MVP.

In addition to being one of the greatest young players in the NHL, he is also easy on the eyes. I've often referred to him as the Jared Leto of hockey. Here's a comparison.

Jules et Jim

Jamie, Erin, Kyle, Cody, Melissa, Brandon, and I went to see Jules and Jim (Truffaut, 1962) at Film Streams yesterday. Our group alone doubled the attendance.

Much is to be said about the film's innovative camera work, fresh and revolutionary for its time. I love the brief freeze frames they use a handful of times - especially when Catherine is revealing the way she looks now and before. The sequence on the bridge (see above) is still exciting and breathtaking even after a few times of seeing it referenced.

However, what is most striking is the complexity of the triangular relationship at the core of the film. Friendships and romantic entanglements are shown with all of the messiness, depth, confusion, manipulation, sincerity and love that often characterize them. Every character shows strength and vulnerability at some point in the film, and throughout you get glimpses of the layers beneath each character's exterior. The scenes between the three of them (four including the child, Sabine) crackle with both warmth and more intensely, tension. Within this threesome, the characters vacillate between their public and private selves, often slipping back into a skin that they thought they had shed.

Rilo in Omaha

(a week and a half ago)

mr. robot

Without thinking, I randomly drew this on a piece of scrap paper as I was procrastinating from writing an article. Then I thought the guy was pretty cute and since it will end up in recycling, I thought I would give him his day in the sun here. I also like it when your subconscious does something that kind of surprises you in a way.