09.26.08

43_SoundByte: Anberlin – “New Surrender”

Posted in SoundByte tagged , , at 6:05 pm by kidbrother

_Anberlin’s latest CD, New Surrender, is up for stream on their Myspace today. From the first time I ever heard “Paperthin Hymn” (the first song I heard by them), I have not been let down by this band, so I had high hopes.

_I was a little cautious about this album. How many scene bands make it to four albums? Let’s face it, how many scene bands should make it to four albums? But, in respect to their brilliant past, I had to give these guys another chance.

_At first I was completely disappointed. It didn’t start off with some blaring, catchy riff that draws you instantly in like Cities did with “Godspeed”. It didn’t grab me. At first. But then, something must have clicked because I went back and listened to the first track, “The Resistance” again and the maturity hit me square in the face like a ton of bricks. Cities made me want to jump around my apartment and sing along into anything remotely microphone shaped. This CD…it made me want to sit here and reminisce. That’s maturity, folks.

_Sure, you might wonder why they felt the need to re-record “Feel Good Drag” (the heaviness of it feels oddly out of place) and sure, “Younglife” kinda feels cheesy compared to the rest of the CD, but damn if this isn’t an album I won’t enjoy for a long time to come.

_So give it a chance, kiddies. It isn’t the sort of album that grabs you right away. It’s the sort of album that you’re like “Eh, whatever” and then realize you’ve been listening to for three weeks straight.

- Kid

09.23.08

42_The Dark Kandidate, Part II: Take that, Andrew Klavan

Posted in Static tagged , , , at 10:22 pm by kidbrother

_Something about a sequel to a post about a movie seems oddly fitting. NOTE: The original has been updated to fix some minor factual and spelling errors.

_Since posting my post, The Dark Kandidate, it has come to my attention that a few other writers have exposed on the political nature of the film.

_In the New York Times, Jonathan Letham wrote this article about the moral quagmire that the film presents. He makes no assumption as to who Batman is to represent, but says, to end, “the Joker is us.” His view of the film was that it showed how blurred our society has become morally. There isn’t much wrong with Letham’s view, because there isn’t much to it at all. He states his one point and then gets out of the debate. To that extent, he has a point, that we the people, it seems, have lost sight of the true North on our moral compasses.

_Andrew Klavan wrote this much more Conservative and much more flawed analysis.

_He ends with this quote, which is a good summary of what he’s trying to say:

And when our artistic community is ready to show that sometimes men must kill in order to preserve life; that sometimes they must violate their values in order to maintain those values; and that while movie stars may strut in the bright light of our adulation for pretending to be heroes, true heroes often must slink in the shadows, slump-shouldered and despised — then and only then will we be able to pay President Bush his due and make good and true films about the war on terror.

_Conservative paradoxes aside, it seems that Mr. Klavan has missed a lot of what made the movie so good, and, much more liberal than what he thinks.

_First, if we are to consider that Batman is any political figure, we must assume that the original movie, Batman Begins, must also be taken into account. That movie depicted the struggle between the budding Batman and his mentor-turned-enemy Ra’s al Ghul. On one side was Ra’s al Ghul, who wanted to destroy Gotham as a way of saving the rest of the world. On the other side was Batman who understood that the problem could only be solved by attacking the real issues: government corruption, a poor economy, a disempowered populace. This being the case, we can only assume that were Bush to fit into the moral structure of Batman Begins, he would have to be Ra’s al Ghul.

_What Batman understood was that Ra’s was trying to use ancient, outdated methods to attack fluid, modern problems. Ra’s wanted to make it a military matter, forcing the fighting to the streets and using the destruction of Gotham as a sort of “Shock and Awe” campaign to frighten the rest of the world into submission. In some ways, this is what the Bush administration has tried to do in Iraq. By aggressively attacking that country and aggressively removing from power a dictator that had nothing to do with the September 11th attacks, the administration was, whether they admit it or not, trying to assert themselves on the world stage. And so too the League of Shadows, trying to reassert their power to use fear as a weapon of justice. Were the League a political administration, it would be easy to assume that they would back warantless wiretaps, prison camps like Guantanamo Bay and torture as means of bringing about “justice.”

_Batman, on the other hand, understood what justice really meant in the context of the story. By attacking the corruption that was strangling the streets of Gotham, he was trying to both remove the cancer of organized crime and empower the citizens of Gotham to stand up to crime for themselves and bring justice back, not only to the administrations that ran the city, but to their own streets and neighborhoods. This, in many ways, mirrors the message of Barack’s campaign, that the power ultimately rests in the people.

_This negates the idea that Batman in The Dark Knight would be any one of the major Conservative players in the campaign. Being a typical Conservative, Mr. Klavan found his few ambiguous talking points and jumped on them. (The Bat symbol as a “W”? Are you blind? Maybe in the Adam West series, but nowadays it looks more like those little American Airlines pins you got as a kid from the flight attendant.) Read the rest of this entry »

09.22.08

41_Blindness, The Movie

Posted in Static tagged , , at 10:55 pm by kidbrother

_Apparently, they are making a movie version of Jose Saramago’s bestseller Blindness. I, personally, am not convinced that that book is filmable, but now that I’ve seen the trailer, I think it is. And I’m excited.

- Kid

09.12.08

40_The Dark Kandidate

Posted in Static tagged , , at 3:15 pm by kidbrother

_I don’t generally get political online, but the comparison between Barack Obama’s campaign and the two most recent Batman movies is actually staggering. Bear with me.

_Let’s call the first part of our narrative Barack Begins. It begins with a nobody. Having achieved some celebrity with his victory into the US Senate, much the same way Bruce Wayne is famous for his dead parents, Barack is now beginning to fall into obscurity. But then, Bam! Pow! Slam! Biff! Barack delivers his groundbreaking speech to the Democratic National Convention in July of 2004. In the same way that Batman strapped Carmine Falcone to a spotlight and first threw his symbol into the air, Barack smashes his way to the front of people’s minds.

_Things begin to escalate. The country enters an election year and Barack’s name comes up with increasing frequency. Still, he must stop his first Supervillian. One time peer and now bitter opponent, Hillary Clinton, the Rhaz Al’ghul of our narrative steps up to oppose Barack. Although they both stand for the same thing, the rifts between them begin to appear, and appear fiercely. Spreading a poison gas attack of a campaign across the country, Hillary stands poised to oust Barack and wreak her own brand of vengeance on the villains of the country.

_But our hero prevails! He stops Clinton in the primaries and ascends to the top of the Democratic ticket. Now he has an official symbol to cast over the streets of the country: Change and Hope.

_The plot thickens. Enter the GOP. Like Gotham’s Mob, the GOP is a collective that stands between Barack and his ultimate goal: a reformed country. Their supreme leader Bush (Falcone) having been beaten soundly by years of falling approval ratings and the public’s optimism towards Barack, the GOP needs a new strategy. However, their ranks have weakened. The most charismatic of their candidates, Huckabee, is too conservative for anyone to elect, Romney doesn’t seem to be drawing much attention and their leading candidate, McCain doesn’t seem strong enough to pull the country away from Barack.

_As the election nears and the stakes become higher and higher, we begin our summer blockbuster sequel: The Dark Kandidate. We begin with the battle against the GOP. Leading the fight is Barack, a candidate that for all his good qualities and abilities, is criticized and decried at almost every turn by the media, almost like Batman being called a mere vigilante. His campaign, the Harvey Dent of our narrative, still sparkles, though and with the help of Joe Biden (Gordon in the movie) as a capable, senior running mate, they are gaining ground on the GOP.

_McCain can’t possibly stop Barack. He does not have the energy, charisma or platform, and so the GOP plays their trump card. They bring their Joker: Sarah Palin. (Here I could pause and make a comparison between Heath Ledger’s frightening makeup in the movie to Barack’s “Lipstick on a pig” comment, but I’ll leave that to you). It seems an odd choice at first. A very odd choice. An obscure, completely inexperienced and unorthodox choice that, as we who have been to the movies this summer know, will turn out to be the most volatile choice of them all.

_Palin comes out swinging, and suddenly the GOP is a background issue. The unhinged, but certainly dangerous, policies of Sarah Palin quickly overshadow McCain and begin to loom in the public’s eyes. As the Joker threatened to send Gotham into anarchy, Palin, in her attacks on both Barack’s campaign and Barack himself, threatens to send this country into ruin.

_Here is how. It would begin with an explosive event, mirroring the way the Joker blew up Gotham Central Hospital. It would begin with Palin’s push for the admission of The Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. Should that happen, we would find ourselves in the same position as Batman finds himself at the end of the movie. Two ferries full of passengers end up stranded in the harbor with the detonators to the massive bomb on the other ferry. However, instead of two ferries, we have two of the largest, most militaristic countries in the world: The United States and Russia. The SWAT team of NATO assembles on the other side of the Joker’s building, ready to begin a bloody fight with the Russian army. China watches and waits to get their hands in the mix, along with Iran, North Korea and any other country with global interests or aspirations.

_However, realistically, how could The United States take on Russia? NATO would be reluctant, at best, to join the fight and The US alone wouldn’t have the man power to take on all of Russia. Russia, with its outdated military and weak infrastructure, wouldn’t have the ability to make the advances they would need to make to win. The Doomsday clock would start to tick towards midnight, when the Joker’s game is up and he hits the switch and blows up both ferries.

_So before we get there, can Barack do it? Can he keep his Harvey Dent of a campaign from falling into the Joker’s trap and becoming a vicious slug fest of meaningless character attacks? Can he accept that the conservative media will lambaste his every move and rise above their pettiness? Can he bring about the right change, attacking the situation at its center to keep the bombs on the ferries from going off? Can he become more than a heroic campaign slogan of hope? Can he become our Dark Knight?

_We can only hope.

- Kid

09.05.08

39_SoundByte: United Nations

Posted in SoundByte tagged , , at 8:34 pm by kidbrother

_The idea of a “supergroup” is always a scary thought for us music listeners. There’s something about taking four or five excellent songwriters and having them try and all write the same excellent song that never works out. It’s probably the fact that excellent songwriters have developed their own style separately from all those other excellent songwriters that, when put together, they have to give up what made them great in the first place, for the sake of being able to match what the other person is doing.

_The original supergroup, the Traveling Willbury’s, was alright at best, and not nearly as good as any of its component songwriters were at their prime. That seemed to cast a shadow over the idea of a supergroup, because there wasn’t much buzz about them until Scott Weiland of the Stone Temple Pilots took Axl Rose’s place and started Velvet Revolver. Whatever made Stone Temple Pilots interesting and Guns ‘n Roses awesome somehow got lost along the way and the band ended up sounding like every other bad L.A. rock band. The downward spiral of supergroups was continued by Audioslave, who had a few decent tracks at the start, but then took a nosedive into the same circle of Hell that Velvet Revolver was becoming king of. Luckily Chris Cornell left Audioslave to put out a solo album, which was unspeakably bad, and saved the old Rage Against the Machine guys some face.

_All that being said, there is something comforting about the lack of supergroupness of Eyeball Records supergroup United Nations. The biggest thing separating them from their shitty companions is their almost complete anonymity. As singer/guitarist Geoff Rickley of Thursday told AP Magazine in an interview, “The rest of the band are in contracts, so they’re anonymous.” Rickley is the only one that can be named, as he is out of contract. That anonymity, though, can only help the band. Instead of expecting the separate band members to somehow meld all the elements of their former bands together into some monstrosity that’s supposed to be good, we can sit back and listen to these guys rock out without the shadow of our expectations looming large.

_And rock out they do. The entire album is up for stream on their Myspace, and it is excellent. Any fan of the old school thrash and hardcore bands, like Glassjaw (whose Daryl Palumbo is rumored to be the screamer), will find this CD more than satisfying. However, it isn’t just a throwback CD. There are modern, melodic touches that bring it above and beyond. I mean, the CD ends with a minutes-long jazz saxophone part that, somehow, fits with the thrash. Pretty good, considering the band, whoever they are, recorded it more or less from start to finish whenever they could find time to all get together.

_CD drops September 9th.

- Kid