Have I mentioned lately how much I hate David Brooks?
[L]et me describe what moderation is not. It is not just finding the midpoint between two opposing poles and opportunistically planting yourself there. Only people who know nothing about moderation think it means that.
Certainly no-one who watched Brooks snipe at Mitt Romney for months before he became the Republican candidate and suddenly all cuddly and centrist and wonderful could think the man opportunistic. But what then is moderation?
For a certain sort of conservative, tax cuts and smaller government are always the answer, no matter what the situation. For a certain sort of liberal, tax increases for the rich and more government programs are always the answer.
The moderate does not believe that there are policies that are permanently right. Situations matter most. Tax cuts might be right one decade but wrong the next. Tighter regulations might be right one decade, but if sclerosis sets in then deregulation might be in order.
Got that? Only fools think moderates just kick around in the gap between two endpoints. But if we just replace those poles with ludicrous caricatures of those poles, then that bisection is exactly what the moderates are gonna get up to. How moderate!
Also, has any liberal anywhere, ever, gotten to the end of demanding all circumstances call for more taxes and more government programs without someone cutting their microphone and laughing them out of the building? There's a pretty massive tell here, and its that Brooks definition of a moderate requires him to slam a brand of liberal that doesn't exist in any important sense, and slam a brand of conservative that includes damn near the entire heirarchy of one political party and the vice presidential candidate of the guy he's currently supporting.
C'mon, Davey. You might as well hitch your wagon to a gaggle of unrepentant misogynists because although you don't like all that women-hating, it's not like the Wicked Witch of the West was any better.
Of course, you know what's coming: Brooks has hitched his wagon to a gaggle of unrepentant misogynists. Not, one presumes out of a fear of witchcraft, but just because he's an asshole.
Shorter Dylan Byers: Nate Silver offers multiple predictions with appropriate caveats and explanation of uncertainty. The only comment on the only prediction I was able to concentrate on doesn't agree with my gut. Now a word from people with no statistical training who agree with me.
Shorter Byers next week: why do liberals always think they're smarter than me?
All this talk of music has made me realise it's been a while since our last music quiz here: almost six months in fact. And since my ridiculous riff on a tired formula somehow became one of the most read posts I ever produced, I figure we may as well try it again. I'll put the rest of the answers up to the previous post in exactly one week, in case anyone wants one last try.
So, as last time: 25 songs. The first word of the song, and the first letters of the first line are given, though I've been kind and included "wooah"s, "yeah!"s, and "1-2-3!"s. "The" and pronouns (plus derivatives) get you another word, too. Also given are the initials of the song title, the band, and the album, in that order. One point for the complete first line, the song title, the band, or the album. As usual, there is no artist who appears more than once. Good luck.
1. "We live and dream about the future" - Me, Marlon Brando, Marlon Brando And I - R.E.M. - Collapse Into Now. (Jamie) 2. "Another turning point, a fork stuck in the road" - Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life) - Green Day - Nimrod. (Tim) 3. "Woa-hoah! They must pay the rent!" - Destiny - Tenacious D - The Pick Of Destiny. 4. "Once I knew a girl in the hard hard times" - Best For The Best - Josh Ritter - The Animal Years. (The Other Half) 5. "Don't stop, isn't it funny how you shine?" - Don't Stop - The Stone Roses - The Stone Roses. (Jamie) 6. "Amphetamine Annie Dog" - Annie Dog - Smashing Pumpkins - Adore. 7. "Put your hand inside this dream."- Skindiving - James - Laid. (Jamie) 8. "I love you through stars and shining dragons, I do" - Made Up Love Song #43 - Guillemots - Through The Window Pane. 9. "Yeah! Lover I'm on the street" - Desire - U2 - Rattle And Hum. 10. "I'd rather be some nameless fisherman" - I'd Rather Be - Abbie Gardner and Anthony da Costa - Bad Nights/Better Days. 11. "Mirrors in the room go black and blue" - Cold Roses - Ryan Adams & The Cardinals - Cold Roses. 12. "Follow you around 'til it's time" - Evidence - Jimmy Eat Word - Invented. 13. "Come WM" - CWM -Zwan -MSOTS. (Jamie) 14. "1-2-3 Woo! You gotta LE" - LE - Presidents Of The USA - LE. (Jamie) 15. "We'll be fighting in the streets" - Won't Get Fooled Again - The Who - Who's Next? (BigHead) 16. "So you don't want to hear about my good day" Good Day - The Dresden Dolls - Dresden Dolls. 17. "I get ahead on my motorbike" - The Living End - Jesus & Mary Chain - Psychocandy. 18. "The sirens are screaming and the fires are howling" - Bat Out Of Hell - Meat Loaf - Bat Out Of Hell. (Tim) 19. "I went down to the place where I knew she lay waiting" - Night Comes On - Leonard Cohen - Various Positions. 20. "She grew up in an Indiana town" - Mary Jane's Last Dance - Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - Greatest Hits. 21. "These mist-covored mountains" - Brothers In Arms - Dire Straits - Brothers In Arms. (Tim) 22. "I found a mountain on my own" - A Little Discourage - Idlewild - One Hundred Broken Windows. 23. "Everyone want to be a showman" - Genius - Kings Of Leon - Youth And Young Manhood. 24. "You know I don't like you but you wanna be my friend" - When I Dream Of Michaelangelo - Counting Crows - Saturday Nights, Sunday Mornings. (Jamie) 25. "He's a pistol grip" - Killboy Powerhead - Offspring - Smash.
Hints 'n' tips: I've had to replace five ampersands above, along with three sets of letters, either in song titles or band names; as well as pretending one band name was a single word, rather than a delineated acronym. At least one song here has been recently posted on this blog as a video. There's nineteen definite bands here (or at least duos), though one vocalist appears with two different bands. There's also three solo artists in there, along with two solo artists who arguably should be considered as having bands at the time. Eight artists come from this side of the pond.
Oh, and "GH" is exactly as obvious as you think it is.
There is no clearer demonstration of the fact that I don't go to the cinema enough these days than me missing The Cabin in the Woods when it first came out. Mercifully, thanks to visiting Kudos and Breyah (as well as Kuyah Junyah) this weekend, this fault has been corrected.
Of course, just because I didn't see it doesn't mean I didn't have any idea of the general internet opinion about it. And since it was co-written by Joss Whedon along with Buffy/Angel alumni Drew Goddard (who also directed), it should come as no surprise that the internet gave the film as many thumbs up as time and physiology would allow.
(I don't mean to sound dismissive with that, by the way, I've loved the vast majority of Whedon products I've seen, and even those that don't quite gel (e.g. Dollhouse) are far from without merit or interesting ideas. That said, Whedon is one of those few people who I consider simultaneously exceptionally talented and entertaining and significantly overrated.)
That's my way of saying I went into this film with hopes, but little in the way of expectations, other than assuming that Bradley Whitford would be awesome which, of course, he was. As was much of the rest of the film, actually; the set-up is funny to anyone who's ever watched pretty much any horror film ever, and the pay-off is absolutely brilliant, at least for the most part. If I were intending this as a review, I'd give the film eight or nine tentacles and call it a day.
I want to go in a slightly different direction, though, and unpack the two problems that mar the film; one of which has definitely been commonlynoted, and one of which might have been commonly noted, but involves the very end of the film and so would have been safely hidden behind spoiler notices before now.
The two articles I link to above are interesting because they both identify the right problem - Cabin in the Woods is a horror film which is rarely scary - and totally misdiagnose the root cause. Their common argument is that Cabin... undercuts itself by being too clever by half; that's it's impossible to giggle at obvious genre cliches and still be scared as those cliches turn ugly.
This, obviously, is complete nonsense. To believe this one would have to argue with a straight face that films which stick to horror cliches invoke fear more readily than those that deconstruct them, which is a position I find utterly baffling. I suppose I could understand the logic behind an argument that says genre cliches are no longer scary, and you can't make them scary by putting a twist on them, but whilst that's less stupid, it's no more correct. The best possible argument to be made here is that avoiding tropes works better than playing with them, and whilst that's a position with more than a little weight, it still strikes me as overly restrictive.
Take Scream, for example. That took great pleasure in deconstructing the genre, and still managed in places to be generally unsettling. The horrific final moments of Drew Barrymore's character in the opening segment still make me shiver whenever I think about them. OK, that precedes almost all the deconstruction that takes place later in the film, but it's far from the only scare to be had.
But if it isn't the knowing nods and winks to the audience that keeps the scares to a minimum in Cabin..., what else is going on? Actually, the answer is very simple: Goddard's direction just isn't quite good enough.
It's nothing major, nothing that wrecks the movie. It's just a little too uninspired; a little too overlit; a little too... TV. Almost every scare and shock from the first two thirds of the movie looks like it could have come from the first season of Supernatural. I'm not pointing to the first season because it's the oldest, by the way, but because it was back then that the aim of the show was to scare people rather than make them want to cry alongside Jensen Ackles, but the fact remains that Supernatural is a TV show, and when a movie reminds you of a TV show, something has, generally speaking, gone wrong.
Indeed, if there's a problem here regarding genre knowledge, it's in exactly the opposite direction to the one supposed. It's not that the references to the genre cause trouble, it's that when the film tries to be straight up scary, it falls back on the most cliched shots and jolts imaginable. The most original "pure horror" - for want of a better word - shot in the entire film is remarkably similar to a sequence from 2008's The Strangers, and quite possibly other films before that. The only surprising death (in terms of when it happens, not that it will happen) is presumably a homage to the original Friday The 13th, but hews so closely to the source material that it's impossible to view it as anything other than tired. In other words, this is a film that needed more thinking outside the box, not less.
All that said, this is an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise excellent film. It's hardly a major problem; though of course one would have hoped someone would point out that a film with comedy designed to appeal to horror aficionados might want to ensure the horror would appeal to people other than total or near neophytes. The part that really pisses me off is the ending.
Since the majority of this post exists above this sentence, I'm not going to put what remains after the jump. Be aware, however, PLEASE BE AWARE, that the next few paragraphs discuss the very end of the film, which for a film as reliant on the third act reveal as this one is will likely do even more damage than you'd expect from such comments.
So, seriously, this is your last chance. Pass not the Harbinger.
"I'm still on speakerphone, aren't I?"
OK, they've gone. Probably. Or if not, fuck 'em. They were warned. They had a choice.
Everyone who's left knows probably knows what I disliked about the ending of the film - i.e. the entirety of humanity is condemned to an agonising death at the hands of the Ancient Ones - but it's important to explain why. I tend to get bummed out whenever "and then the world is destroyed" endings at the best of times (and they don't get any better than, say, Dr Strangelove), because it's tough to come up with any narrative reason powerful enough to justify it.
The justification in Cabin... is particularly weak. Two college students - one a dope addict, the other naive enough to have let herself get into a romance with one of her professors - decide that the painful deaths of four people and the terrifying (and likely painful death) of a fifth is too high a price to pay to save seven billion people from being massacred in the most torturous manner imaginable. That because stopping the wholesale bloody and horrific slaughter of the entirety of humanity requires the wholesale bloody and horrific slaughter of four or five people who were quite nice and often looked good topless, it's better to go for option A.
Maybe it's because I've read to many screeds from Glenn Greenwald about how voting for Obama is unacceptable because supporting a unaccountable killer is less preferable than allowing a much worse unaccountable killer to get their hands on the drones, but this shit won't wash. The idea that the future of humanity can be fairly decided by two people who's only knowledge of the gravity of the situation is that it's claimed the life of their three friends is ridiculous. Even that I could live with, if the film didn't seem to be tacitly agreeing with their position. Much is made of the fact that the people running the show are bloodthirsty voyeurs, as they bet on the specific horrors that will claim the lives of their innocent victims, or drink tequila as their screens depict a young woman being beaten to death by a vicious zombie. A film that spends the first two-thirds of its run-time suggesting it's monstrous to see these five youngsters as a vehicle for entertainment through monster attack spends the final third gleefully chewing through dozens of unnamed mooks.
And that's where the film falls apart. We're supposed to care so much about the three people who died and the two that are badly injured that we forget the guys in helmets and facemasks have feelings too. Those poor schmucks got out of bed, kissed their wives and children goodbye, threw some quickly assembled sandwiches into a lunch-box, and drove into work. A few hours later they were ripped in two, or had their face melted, or were sucked dry. The film gives every impression of finding this very amusing.
But we can go further than the mooks populating Sigourney Weaver's Menagerie of Myriad Murderousness. What about those Japanese schoolgirls? The nine-year-old children who achieved the impossible. The youngsters who, when faced with the horrific sight of the dead rising within their classroom, fought back, rallying themselves with almost unimaginable courage and banishing the creature intended to kill them all.
That's a triumph of human will. That's proof that we cannot be reduced to bit part characters in a horror movie - the exact same point this film seems to be making until it decides it'd be more fun to just hack its way through a couple of infantry platoons. And they're going to die. Our "heroes" just decided they weren't worth saving, because the only way to save them now was to kill the guy who drives so stoned it's a miracle he didn't end up killing more kids than the malevolent Nipponese spirit did.
In short, this is a film that spends the vast majority of its run-time arguing there is something fundamentally wrong with treating the pain of others like entertainment, but ends up in a place where not only is it suggesting pain as entertainment is actually fine so long as you don't know the people involved, but can assume "deserve it", but that if you've been badly done too by someone, there is no amount of the pain of others that's too great to ensure if you make sure the people you don't like don't get what they wanted.
It's Mitt Romney's campaign message, basically. I sure hope that Joss Whedon doesn't run into this guy!
Number 496 on Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest..." list, and hot damn, now we're talking. Sure, we already discussed the virtues of the Stone Rose's debut album, but this is the first time in this admittedly still-young series that I've come across something both new and exceptional.
I'll be the first to admit that I'm still very much a beginner when it comes to music of this kind. I don't know when soul moves into R&B, and how R&B is distilled into pure blues. It's clear country & western is somewhere nearby all of that, too, but I have no idea how to assemble the jigsaw.
So when the internets tell me this is soul, I'm just taking its word for it - after all, when has that ever gone wrong (it also tells me soul is R&B plus funkiness and an air of testifying, which, OK, that sounds right here). What I don't want to dodge around is the fact that I enjoyed this disc noticeably more than B.B. King's "Live From Cook County Jail" - which of course is not to say the latter record isn't good; it most certainly is. The fact that Rolling Stone agrees in the context of this list's rankings notwithstanding, a post in which a white guy discusses how he prefers a white guy's approach to traditionally black music over a black musician's can't just pretend there isn't something here to address.
So, what's here that isn't in King's live album? I can think of three things to point to, all of which kind of feed back into each other.
First of all, there's a welcome degree of variety across these nine tracks. The one-two punch of "I'm Easy" and "I'll Be Long Gone" that opens the album. The former is a filthy uptempo stomp, the latter a slice of keyboard-driven melancholy defiance. All that ties them together, really, is the quality of the playing on display. The backing singers, bass player and horn sections are particularly worthy of praise, but really, no-one here sounds anywhere other than at the top of their game.
This is the second strength of the album, the fact that it strays into so many different areas and yet is entirely cohesive, keeping itself together purely by the force of its individual elements. One real problem with "Live From..." was the distinct impression that King was a far better player than he was a writer (this may be very unfair in general, but at present I can only go by what's served up on that particular platter); the switch to his back catalogue halfway through does the album no favours.
In contrast, the swap in "Boz Scaggs" is both in the other direction (from original material to covers and collaborations), and impossible to detect without either reading the liner notes or recognising the songs being covered. Under other circumstances, it might be possible to construct an argument suggesting this is a flaw; that this is indicative of an album so all over the map that a twelve-minute nose-harp solo would be less surprising than consecutive songs in the same key, but I refer you to the previous point: if you can hold everything together by sheer presence and talent, then more power to you.
Scaggs and Co. hold it together very well, bringing us to point three, overlapping heavily as it does with points one and two. Each song has a standout among its constituent parts (the bass groove of "I'm Easy", the keyboards in "Finding Her", which sounds like it could've been Zepplin's inspiration for "Stairway to Heaven" except it finishes in four minutes, rather than taking six to get to the fucking point), but it's clearly the work of an immensely talented and confident ensemble. King's band are never less than competent, and have a great deal to recommend them, but "Boz Scaggs" feels like a group effort in a way that "Live From..." just can't match.
Anyway, that's my argument as to why one album works pretty well, and the other blows me away. "Boz Scaggs" isn't perfect, admittedly; "Another Letter" isn't particularly interesting, nor is its cover of Fenton Robinson's "Loan Me A Dime" - which is a particular problem when it clocks in at twelve and a half minutes - and the problem with short albums like this is that any dropping of the ball seems like a big deal.
But really, it's not. This is a disc that starts with two phenomenal songs, ends with another killer (the heavenly "Sweet Release" co-written by Scaggs), and offers several gems - and motherfucking yodelling - along the way. If there is in fact only 22 minutes of solid gold here, I've seen much worse, and what's good here is very, very good indeed.
No miniatures this week; I did actually finish something last thing yesterday, but on its own it's not really worthy of a post.
So instead, let's chill out to something from Boz Scaggs' eponymous second album, which I'm listening to a great deal right now, both because I'm writing a post on it and because it's really rather nifty. The horns in this really get me.
I'm off visiting friends this weekend. Everyone have a good one.
I know you've all been wondering about the state of my bathroom ceiling, so I'll put you out of your misery. The peeps who failed to predict my ceiling would collapse in the first place or discover the source of the leak after the cataclysm were supposed to come round last Friday. This was then altered the day before to this morning.
I have thus dutifully stayed in this morning armed with sufficient reading material to justify my absence from the office, at least until I have to head in for a 12:30 seminar and an afternoon meeting. Ten minutes ago I got another phone call from my letting agents. My guys had showed up there instead of here, having entirely forgotten the previous phone conversations, and wanted to know if they could borrow keys from the letters so they could show up some time after lunch.
Meanwhile:
Two and a half more weeks, and I'm outta here. Two and a half more weeks.
