A place to bury memories

Remember A Place to Bury Strangers? The (nigh-unlistenable) Brooklyn noise-rock/JAMC-tribute/guitar-pedal-marketing group that got incredibly fawning coverage from Pitchfork all summer and fall (to the point of being covered an incredible fifteen times for one single and the LP it's on)? The album that Nick Sylvester memorably called a "songless one-trick turd"?

Well, the results are in - the Pitchfork year-end lists are, that is - and the band is nowhere to be found. They didn't place anywhere - not in the singles, not in the albums, and not even in Ryan Schreiber's or Marc Hogan's individual lists, despite the fact that Schreiber and Hogan were the band's main boosters at the site. The record got an 8.4 from Hogan and didn't place in his top 25 for the year? Seriously?

WTF?

Some of that old pharmaceutical majesty

Do we need the Wu-Tang Clan? In August, Clan sensei RZA begged the question with a self-justifying statement promising that the Wu's fifth studio album, 8 Diagrams, would "revive the spirit and the economics and bring in a wave of energy that has lately disappeared," thus saving hip-hop. Provocatively, he also asked a question that gave 8 Diagrams a heavy burden to bear: "How could hip-hop be dead if Wu Tang is forever?"

You can find the rest of my review of Wu-Tang Clan's 8 Diagrams at Slant Magazine.

Touched

At last, the Times reports on the real problem that defines today's GOP. What voter doesn't love a good grope?

UPDATE: You know when you think of the necessary comeback six hours later?

Anyway, this is the reason why Arnold Schwarzenegger really needs to get into this race.

DJ Dave Huge is Large & In Charge

In honor of my gig tonight at The Pull Out Method, here's a Simon Reynolds-esque post about my feelings:

Feeling:
Zoot Woman - "Gem"
Feist - 1234 (Vanshe Technologic Mix)
Chromeo - "Tenderoni" (MSTRKRFT RMX)
The Sounds - "Much Too Long"
Bloc Party - "Flux"

Really Feeling:
Calvin Harris - "Acceptable in the 80s" and "The Girls"
Matt Pond PA - "Emblems"
Phil Collins - "Invisible Touch"

Really Really Feeling:
Daft Punk - "Television Rules the Nation/Crescendolls (Live)," and Alive 2007 generally. Obviously.
Muscles - "Sweaty"
Gui Boratto - "Matroyshka"

Not Feeling:
Kylie - X

Hurting My Feelings:
Supermayer
The Bush Administration. (Obviously).

Oooooh, Shiny

Pitchfork kicks off its year-end coverage with a gallery of photos of all their favorites. Even though photos like this one of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs would look a lot nicer in a big glossy print magazine, they're still pretty, so go look.

Grammys = Death

And so the silly season is once again upon us. Unfortunately, though unsurprisingly, the Grammys have not decided to stop being monumentally idiotic in honor of their 50th Awards program.

It's really a struggle to determine the one thing that most drives me up the wall about the Grammys. There's so much wrong with them that it boggles the mind, while at the same time confirming the fact that the music industry is dying a self-imposed, long-deserved death. Is it their inability to accurately define and enforce their regimented genre definitions, as exemplified this year by Beck's nomination in the "Solo Rock Vocal" category, instead of the "Alternative" category in which he would seemingly clearly belong, as well as by (reggae/hip-hop/Pop-with-a-capital-P artist's) Lily Allen's inclusion in the "Best Alternative Music Album"?

Is it their ever-predictable nomination of musicians who released their best work decades and decades ago to a deafening orchestra of awards-show crickets, as in the case of Herbie Hancock, nominated for Album of the Year for his album of Joni Mitchell covers? (One imagines the voters positively slavering over the opportunity for a twofer on that one).

Is it the show's basic inability to understand that musicians who have only recently established a mass-market public identity, such as Feist and Amy Winehouse, are not necessarily "New Artists?" (Both are nominated in the category this year.)

After much deliberation and hand-wringing, I think that the worst thing about the Grammys is the fact that albums and songs that are generally critically accepted to be awful, or at best mediocre, get nominated for what seems like no reason save that the artist's name won't make television viewers go "Huh?" See: Daughtry's "It's Not Over" being nominated for Best Rock Performance and Best Rock Song. The Chemical Brothers' "We Are the Night" being nominated for Best Dance Album. The Shins' "Wincing the Night Away" being nominated for best Alternative Album. For this reason, the Grammys are what the Oscars would be like if Spider-Man 3 were to be nominated for Best Picture. Every year. It's enough to make you wish to be deaf.

The boy with the dulcet foghorn

Many gay men of the Stonewall generation worshiped the ground Judy Garland walked on, fully aware of the fact that it was littered with empty prescription bottles. Garland—perhaps the very first human being to transmogrify into pure camp before an adoring and judgmental public, though clearly not the last—became an icon through her indomitableness, her boozy courage in decline, and her occasional grace under duress. The queens who took note of this quality, and who nourished it through ritual and oral tradition, are the people we have to thank for the canonization of Garland's superb 1964 document Judy at Carnegie Hall. Who else could have kept it on the pop charts for 95 weeks even while its star self-destructed?

It's also fair to credit these fore-fairies with inspiring the winkingly reverent, every-note-in-place, song-for-song celebration of Garland's original that Rufus Wainwright—himself no stranger to the tempests and temptations of celebrity—presented to sold-out madhouses of gay glitterati at Carnegie Hall this summer...

You can find the rest of my review of Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall at Slant Magazine.

My Daemon's a tiger. Grrr.

So The Golden Compass is pretty disappointing. I have been reading the books in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials saga recently (I still haven't started Amber Spyglass, so don't spoil nothin), and have quite enjoyed them. Frankly, anything William Donohue hates, I love. However, the film is a (nice to look at) trainwreck. While the casting is mostly awesome (Nicole Kidman is perfect as Mrs. Coulter, and the girl who plays the main character Lyra is full of spunk and verve, as she should be) and the look of the movie is really densely imagined and faithful to the books, the script is a piece of horrible dreck. The dialogue goes mostly like this:

"Exposition exposition exposition."
"But no! Exposition exposition!"
"Fine. Exposition exposition exposition exposition. Clunky stupid platitude. Our target demographic is retarded."

One of the best things about the book is how densely plotted it is, as well as how the incidents all flow together in a logical and forward-rushing way. The movie scraps all of that, so that major events that actually make sense in the book are completely unexplained coincidences. It's really too bad - although given the relative unlikelihood of the film being a business success, I guess it's nice that the filmmakers won't have the opportunity to muck up the other ones.

In any case, my Daemon (in the world of the books, peoples' souls are embodied as animal companions) is a friggin Tiger. Take that!