Category Archives: Entertainment

The Circle is Complete

Movies

One of my very earliest memories of childhood: I am barely five years old, and standing in my sandbox. (Actually, “mudbox” would be a more accurate description, but that was exactly the way I liked it.)

My father is kneeling down beside me with the vaguely conspiratorial air of one about to bestow a present upon a recipient who may not fully appreciate its import for some time to come. “Mañana,” he says, “te voy a llevar al cine, y veras los Jinetes Jedi, y las espadas de luz.” I nod, not realizing what a seminal moment in my young life is bearing down upon me. And it is seminal, even though I wind up hiding my face behind the seat in front of me when Obi-Wan and Darth Vader fight their final duel, and again as the Imperials whittle mercilessly away at the Rebel squadrons during the trench run.

Now, twenty-eight years later, I’m hoping that I won’t again feel the urge to conceal the sight of the screen from my own eyes — but for very different reasons.

Please, God, let this movie not be a complete disappointment.

Rolling in Doughty

Music

Hot on the heels of the Rockity Roll re-release comes Doughty’s new studio album, Haughty Melodic, which was released today, and which I’m listening to right now. Initial reaction: damn, this kicks ass. About half the album is material I’ve heard before, stuff that simmered and mellowed during the years that Doughty toured the country like an itinerant troubadour with a guitar slung across his back.

You might think that this would leave me feeling ripped off; if so, you’d be dead wrong. The arrangements on the new album are so damn rich, so simultaneously energetic and polished, that listening to them after having heard their acoustic forebears is like seeing the final lithograph after having reviewed a series of pencil sketches. The promise and vitality of the early versions carries through undimmed, but it’s bolstered by tasteful and restrained elaborations and enhancements.

Besides, now I finally know what the bridge to “Grey Ghost” sounds like when sung with real words. (And if you have no idea what that means, have someone lucky enough to own a copy of Smofe + Smang: Live in Mpls. play you that album’s “Grey Ghost”, which contains the amazing “fake-word bridge” that gave Smofe + Smang its title.)

Doughty will be in town on May 20th. Alas, advance tickets have sold out. We will have to try our luck at the will-call booth. Stand aside, puny humans! You place yourselves between me and a man who can use the word “decathecting” in a lyric at your own grave peril.

Rockity Roll

Music

At some point, while I wasn’t looking, Mike Doughty reissued Rockity Roll, which I’d missed the first time around. Not one to make the same mistake twice, I snagged it before it could get away from me again.

Okay, so it was bundled with Skittish, which I already had, but the total price was still $15, so who cares? I’ve paid more for music and enjoyed it a hell of a lot less.

The solo albums are less dissociated than Doughty’s Soul Coughing work. The latter tended, while irresistibly catchy, toward word salad. This was entirely by design, and it was damn fine word salad, to be sure, but it was word salad all the same. You couldn’t stop singing along, but you weren’t always sure just what the things you were singing meant.

Skittish and Rockity Roll are more concrete. Doughty’s immense cleverness with words is still on display, but now it’s used in the service of revelation rather than obfuscation. The newer albums are about longing and loss, missed opportunities and lessons learned. They have about them the hardened, flinty optimism of a man who has been through the darkness and survived, but has not forgotten what he saw along the way.

The best I ever did with my life
Said just three honest words to you
Three droplets in pail of lies
Three gems among the alibis

Skittish is still as good as it ever was; Rockity Roll is a nice counterpoint. Where Skittish is almost austere in its acoustic arrangements, Rockity Roll adds a little more texture. Doughty himself says it most succinctly: “It’s my acoustic thing, plus some low-fi, fake new wave drum machine and synthesizer that I played/programmed.” While no one in their right mind would describe the result as overproduced, it feels lusher, acoustically, than Skittish did. (It also contains a live version of “The Only Answer”, a song that previously appeared both on Smofe + Smang: Live in Mpls. and Skittish. The new version features some delightful counterpoint courtesy of an anonymous keyboardist. The only thing marring it is what seems to be some nasty distortion in the live recording. I’d love to hear a cleaned-up studio production of that arrangement.)

It’s good, good stuff, and money well spent.

Krid is my shepherd

Movies

Dirk was all over me last week, repeatedly urging me, in the strongest possible terms, to see Kung Fu Hustle. I finally got around to it on Saturday, and… well, he was right.

It seems, whether you look at blockbusters like Finding Nemo or more obscure films like Waking Life, that the trend is towards taking animation and making it look as realistic as possible, either in terms of texture and lighting, movement, or both.

Kung Fu Hustle turns that logic on its head — it’s a nominally live-action movie that feels like a cartoon. I realize that this might sound like damnation with faint praise, but the thing to realize is, it’s a very good cartoon, one that combines comedy and action in equal measure without ever forgetting its heart. It’s ultimately a story of redemption, if you want to look at it that way.

With ass-kickings. Lots of ass-kickings.

My charming companion for the evening was Celina; if there’s a better person to see a martial-arts movie with, I don’t know who it might be. (Getting to see her reaction to Steven Chow’s taking his shirt off was a little added bonus. She loves Jet Li, but she wishes he’d stop being so modest and bare his chest already. Maybe she’ll get her wish with the release of Unleashed, which looks promising in other ways, too. Bob Hoskins and Morgan Freeman? Yeah, I’d pay full price to see that team-up.)

Mister Sleepless

Comics

…is Warren Ellis’s sometime nom de plume, mainly when he’s blogging crazy shit that comes to him late at night, but it would also be an apt description of me at the moment, ever since an ill-advised Caramel Macchiato before Sin City on Saturday night threw my sleep schedule into disarray.

Maybe being Mister Sleepless seizes you with a powerful urge to utter the words “Choke on my fuck, Commissioner Gordon” regardless of who you normally are. That would certainly explain a lot, or at least why I was muttering that to myself, and giggling, incessantly as I stumbled around the apartment in a drowsy stupor yesterday afternoon.