Holiday Soul, Bobby Timmons — This instrumental album holds its own beyond Christmas. Bobby Timmons is an amazing pianist, obscured due to his early death. For non-Christmas fare check out Chicken & Dumplin’s and Chun-King on youtube.
A Charlie Brown Christmas, Vince Guaraldi Trio — This album kicked off our jazz kick at home and is still great. Actually, I wonder if this album is why my current personal jazz preferences leans towards trios.
I watched Rivers and Tides multiple times in a theater in Berkeley before it was demolished for a new apartment complex.
It blew my mind. The pacing was deliberate and the images were gorgeous. I was entranced by the musings of Andy Goldsworthy.
When I gushed about it to a professor, she pushed back, “Don’t you think it mythologizes the artist too much?”
That dampened my enthusiasm for two decades. Last year, we rewatched the movie with the kids.
I see where my prof was coming from. So what! She’s wrong.
Yes, the movie glamorizes the artist and his work. But it’s about failure as part of the artist’s process. It takes a metric shitton of boring-ass effort. If this is mythology, then we need more myth to do the work.
It’s a great film, equally matched by the avante-garde music of Fred Frith.
The entire soundtrack is great, but my favorite moment in the movie is at the start of this clip, where Goldsworthy discusses the effect of sheep on the land while the music builds towards a muted climax when the camera pans around a huge stone sculpture.
Two years ago, I wrote these sentences to start my notes:
Awesome psychological thriller anime by the legendary director. Highly recommended, available for free (with ads) on Funimation.
All that I remember now:
That was a fucking crazy show.
~
Paranoia Agent hit my key checkboxes at the time.
Genera fiction: Detective, Fantasy, Slice of Life, Horror. A collage with everything.
Auteur: Narrative told in a quirky way with an open ended resolution.
Weird: A crazy story that toys with artistic effects and taps my favorite gimmick — busting the fourth wall.
~
If you haven’t seen anything by Satoshi Kon before, here is a 1 minute short to whet your appetite.
~
Since this was the last piece of Satoshi Kon’s catalog, I should rank his major. It happens to follow the path of heartwarming at the top to darkness at the bottom. But Perfect Blue is still better than almost any other anime film you could watch, it’s a classic like Jin-Roh and competes with the best in Ghibli’s catalog. All are highly recommended.
Tokyo Godfathers
Millennium Actress
Paranoia Agent
Paprika
Perfect Blue
Here is an hour long retrospective of his catalog.
~
Paranoia Agent is a wacky piece, but after watching a couple reviews of the series on YouTube, I agree that it falls in in line with the rest of Satoshi Kon’s catalog.
It’s a mind bending animation that explores the intersection of delusion and media. Kon explores the idea that our brains and our realities exist on different planes which are mediated by mass media. As one review said, it’s an “animated fever dream”.
However, I heard two critiques that are worth countering.
Someone wondered on a podcast if Satoshi Kon lost control along the way. I agree that Kon plays a high wire act where everything spins all over the place. Midway through the series you’re praying that it all comes back together. But he never lost command of the story. The trajectory could have ended badly but he pulled it off.
Also another reviewer thought that a couple of the tangents felt like filler. At a macro level, any narrative could be boiled down to a simple sentence, but the reviewer didn’t mention which episodes could be cut. Since nothing felt like filler to me, I’d say that the show hit its 13 episode length perfectly. This was an expansive, twisted universe that didn’t overstay its welcome.
~
Here is the my ranking of the anime series I had watched:
Mindbending favorites: Space Dandy, Paranoia Agent
Fun Classics: Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo, Hilda
Almost Classic: Arcane, Cyberpunk Edgerunners
Decent with weaknesses: Kids on the Slope, Kipo and the Wonderbeasts, Terror in Resonance
WTF, but still worth watching: Neo Genesis Evangelion
Flawed with a few great moments: Carole and Tuesday
Honorable Mention (no storyline): Love Death + Robots
Will I watch rewatch Paranoia Agent anytime soon? I doubt it. I moved on after spending a couple of days scrolling through YouTube commentaries. It takes a lot for me to commit to longform media — my protestant work ethic doesn’t allow me to do regularly indulge in such unproductive activities, even if I already know I’ll love it.
If I were to rewatch anything on that list, it would be Space Dandy. That show hits all the wild stuff with a comedic edge, which my wimpy self prefers over the light horror of Paranoia Agent.
Ultimately, both Paranoia Agent and Space Dandy are great works that routinely surprised me. More often than not, I’d end an episode with my jaw agape, OMG what did I just see?! That wuz fucking Brilliant!?!!
What more can you ask for at 22 minutes a pop?
~
If all this didn’t do it for you, then at least check out the opening and ending credits that was played for each of the shows, with music by the incomparable Susumu Hirasawa (who also composed the excellent Paprika soundtrack)
Congratulations to Loreen for winning this year’s Eurovision Contest with “Tattoo“. But power ballads aren’t my thing.
So let’s celebrate this most flamboyant of contests with last year’s ridiculous winner. “Stefania” is exactly what I want from a Eurovision winner — an over the top, earnest mix of pop and ethnic sounds, and a little (or lot) trashy. As a cis hetero male, I don’t mind a little titallation, but this sausage party checked every other box as well as being a geopolitical sentimental favorite.
I first heard about the song contest on an early No Agenda podcast (before I tired of its conspiracy theory schtick) and followed it with the rise of Youtube. One of my favorite memories in Houston was watching all three broadcasts of the 2011 contest as the computer overheated in our small apartment.
Then two little humans got in the way of this time-wasting pleasure.
We live in an artificial world where the seasons are blunted by technology. It’s helpful to overlay texture onto the year. It’s one of the appeals of sport and Eurovision does the same with it’s process of submissions, national, preliminary, and final contests.
Not as nourishing as a CSA box, but a lot more outlandish.
Between the kids’ school calendar and work’s legislative cycle I’ve got all the artificial seasonal markers that I can handle at the moment. Maybe I’ll return to Eurovision after I retire….it might be more fun than adopting a liturgical calendar.
I hope we will meet many more Tara’s online and IRL — accomplished, funny, thoughtful, enthusiastic advocates for everyone to share their art.
When I first joined Post.news, I was overwhelmed by comparing my own stuff against best of the world. I considered clamming up. Her encouragement nudged me to keep sharing — which naturally led to more making.
And of course the album’s great! You think she’d release anything less?
Congrats!
If something is holding you back from sharing, let me help you shove your self-doubt down the stairs Nomi Malone-style.
The things you make are enough. Putting them into the world can feel risky. It’s also powerful.
You never know when a piece will resonate with someone, or help you form a community, or catapult you into something totally unexpected.
Given our fears of the incoming pandemic, I skipped his wake, though I left some offerings outside his studio before the world shut down.
I met Alex in his studio during a First Friday art walk soon after moving to Vegas ten years ago. He was working on a series of collages with old black and white magazine images on a black scratchboard background.
As an architect, I was struck with the sparseness of the series with its urban perspectives. I lent him an exhibition monograph of black and white collages by Romare Bearden.
Over the years, I’d deliver old architectural sets to his studio. I was excited to see his work exhibited at the library — some of my drawings had been incorporated into his collages! We enjoyed the occasional chat, where I learned that he used to valet cars at a casino, but taught himself how to paint, rescuing himself from alcoholism with the brush.
These chats didn’t happen nearly enough, because of the arrivals of my daughter and then her brother. One day, I planned on introducing him to my kids, when they were old enough to understand what it meant, “Here’s a real artist!”
Then again, the kids see him every day, in two small paintings I picked up from our time together. The best money I’ve spent in Vegas.
February 2020 was a long month, processing the loss and watching the pandemic inexorably work its way towards our shores.
During that time, I listened to this song on repeat. I was lucky to find something that meshed perfectly with my emotional turmoil.
In America, Joe Hisaishi is known for his collaborations with Studio Ghibli, but this song isn’t from one of those films. Maybe that’s why it touched my soul. I could imprint this music with my own memories.
Even though those personal and global tragedies came in winter, I always think of this song when it gets hot.
The air conditioning kicked on for the first time yesterday.
Welcome to “Summer”.
I never reclaimed that book, I should replace my old copy.
When the deadline is threatening, I’ll be jamming to the heavy beat.
When a deadline isn’t threatening, I enjoy the candy of the lighter stuff filling the background.
My tastes vary wildly with no depth. To be honest, I don’t follow Infected Mushroom, but I did listen to Converting Vegetarians on repeat in the mid 00’s when my wife (then girlfriend) gave me a copy that a studio-mate had shared with her. Almost two decades later, that album might have been our only successful cross-pollination in our wildly divergent musical tastes.
For Monday Night MusicI’m sharing a recent song that I’ve been running on repeat. Here is an interesting reaction/analysis video of Guitarmass.
A few months ago, I started sharing a song on youtube every Monday on Post.News
I just transferred the archives back here onto Grizzly Pear under its own WordPress Category.
I’m also tracking it on Youtube as its own playlist.
At the start of the year, I also culled my subscriptions. Youtube is an amazing platform … and incredible timesuck. I also blocked channels from the recommendation algorithm, especially the ones with entertaining videos.
In making Youtube boring, the algorithm was freed to unearth richer content. The latest random viral video pales against all the musical output that’s being shared at scale.
Youtube may be the best music provider on the internet, you just have to get rid of all the other videos.
Once in a blue moon, diving into an internet rabbit hole pays off.
This video by Genie Deez tells the story of the song, tying 1960’s Pete Seeger to a Sicilian mariner’s hymn from the 1790’s.
That lead to a flurry of searches, my favorite being this lively congregational call and response from South Carolina.
To go deeper, here is the published hymn by Charles Albert Tindley, a teacher’s guide about the song, and a lovely rendition by Caroline Disnew and Annastasia Victory.
