This Ain't No Bank Robbery

The Changing Back of Michael Jordan

ChristopherBowes@gmail.com (Christopher Bowes) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 03:37:00 +0000

I help to coach a high school basketball team, and last week we passed out this season's jerseys for the first time. The jerseys were hung up in numerical order, and I braced myself when number 23 came around.

Anyone who has played organized sports can tell you that, as silly as it is, a lot of significance and inspiration is wrapped within the folds of whichever number you wear. I usually asked for 34 because I modeled my undersized but aggressive play after Charles Barkley. Most kids, however, fought over 23, looking to share a small piece of Michael Jordan's leadership, competition, and clutch performance. Based solely on my own experience, I expected all of my players--mostly fourteen and fifteen year-olds--to jump for Jordan's number. If anything, it's LeBron James' number too, so there's an added incentive to share in the tradition of the jersey.

Much to my surprise, the jersey is still hanging in the closet. Things have changed. For the first time, boys that age experienced more of Jordan as this:

than as this:

I've written about the changing legacy of Michael Jordan in this space before, but this experience showed a different side of him than either the negative anecdotes circling about his reputation or his delusionally petty Hall of Fame speech. In judging the futures of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, William Goldman once wrote, "The greatest struggle an athlete undergoes is the battle for our memories...it begins before you're aware that it's begun, and it ends with a terrible fall from grace."* Since I'm thinking about it, that struggle has begun for Michael Jordan. The difference between his fall and Magic and Larry's falls is that he brought it upon himself.

Many contemporary celebrities speak of "building their brand," and the example set for them is Michael Jordan's infiltration of our culture. As the face of an expanding sport in a westernizing world, with countless endorsements to his name, Jordan became more famous than any other athlete before or since. What those other celebrities are talking about is having their name be synonymous with an idea or a logo, and MJ did it first. He was so successful, in fact, that the Jumpman--legs outstretched, arm reaching high above his head--has survived without him.

See, these kids spurning the 2-3, many of them were even wearing Air Jordans. However, instead of wearing them because they're hoping that the air in them will help them to jump from the free throw line, or that the aerodynamic sole will help them cross over Byron Russell, they're wearing them because Chris Paul and Dwyane Wade do. Jordan still gets their money, but it's no different from Phil Knight getting their money. The symmetrical dunking symbol might as well be Adidas' three stripes. To paraphrase as big a Jordan acolyte as any: "He's not a business man; he's a business, man."

Another thing that has gone out of style? The hoop earring. Come on, Mike. You can't afford a makeover?

Because teenagers didn't experience Jordan's greatness first-hand, they don't have a connection to it. That's no surprise. I didn't grow up with, say, George Mikan and only know about his dominance from other people's memories. The difference here is that Jordan gets the short end of his own legend. All the expectations of his own myth are there, but none of the acclaim.

For example, all of my players have done time in AAU or summer leagues, and they have played with or against the kid wearing 23, and that kid is always a dickhead. He's delusional and petty enough to fight for the number. Then he has lent himself expectations that he never lives up to. (Because who can?) This has gone on for a generation until the guy who originally wore it has been marginalized as much as any billionaire demi-god can be.

Wearing 23 is a cliche. It's derivative. It's the wrong type of brand: a knockoff. And LeBron? He's just another dickhead whose downfall we're presaging. There's a lot more to be made of a number than there is to be made of a man.

* Bill Simmons quotes this in his Book of Basketball. That's where I saw it.

#16 Album of the Decade and #40 Song of the Decade- Death Cab for Cutie

ChristopherBowes@gmail.com (Christopher Bowes) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 02:10:00 +0000

#16 Album of the Decade- Death Cab for Cutie- Transatlanticism
Death Cab for Cutie- "Title and Registration"

#40 Song of the Decade- Death Cab for Cutie- "Transatlanticism"

I work at a Catholic school whose religion department employs several dudes who dropped out of the seminary. Apparently, this is more common than I ever knew. Men devote their lives to modest, poor, celibate lives serving the Lord until they meet a woman who shows them that teaching high school religion is a compromise they can live with. They always word this decision the same way though: "God brought X into my life to show me that He has a different plan for me. I can serve Him just as well by being a good Christian husband and father." It's impossible that their love for a woman could be an obstacle to God's true plan, a temptation and impediment to the goal toward which they're still supposed to be striving. They assume that they're supposed to give into it. It's God's new will.

Love and Christianity actually have a lot in common. You know those crackpots on Facebook who list their religion as "love"? They believe that the world would be a better place if everyone loved everyone else, just as Christians sometimes believe that the world would be a better place if everyone else were Christian. Love makes everything possible. Everyone would be better off with a little TLC. But honestly, TLC can't change the world; TLC doesn't even advocate the chasing of waterfalls.

Look, I'm not making fun of either of these groups. It's human nature to believe that love is a freeing blessing instead of an obstacle. But sometimes it is. We've all known people who have made terrible decisions and ruined their lives for love, who have ignored time, distance, and good-old-fashioned reasoning for a fleeting, pie-eyed ideal of amore. Looking at love as an irresistibly destructive force isn't natural. But Death Cab for Cutie's Transatlanticism is about this exact notion, and that's what makes it so unique.

Of course, I realize there are parts of the record that are mawkish--"emo" for those who write love as their religion on Facebook. When Ben Gibbard's songwriting isn't being melodramatic, it's being too-clever-for-its-own-good. Sometimes, however, a work of art comes along poised for maximum personal impact, and Transatlanticism arrived at just the right time for me to consume it. I screamed along with this album headed east on a road no one ever heads east on, one time when love became too destructive in my own hands. I would give you more details, but I don't want this to become that type of blog.

Death Cab for Cutie has confessional lyrics like, "I should have given you a reason to stay...this is fact not fiction/For the first time in years." Luckily, they don't care that they're that type of band. In fact, this album, obsessed over love that was and could have been, made them a pretty girly band. Usually, that designation is handed to bands that are cloying and cute. This album is something else entirely.

I never said they were immune to photographic cliches.

Sydney Pollack once said that filmmakers "can show people falling in love for an hour or can show people breaking up for an hour, but you can only show people in love for ten minutes." That's exactly what Gibbard's lyrics do: chronicle the spaces bookending love. They suggest love as a fulfilling salvation, but it's always "a love that could have been if I'd only thought of something charming to say." There are details that make it seem real, ("With every Thursday I'd brave those mountain passes/And you'd skip your early classes/And we'd learn how our bodies worked") but they're always in the past tense. The lyrics and the sometimes martial, assiduous rhythm section lend an elusive quality to the album that is always present, no matter what tempo the band is working in.

Across the album, there's a motif of tangible distance representing the emotional distance of lost love. The opener, backed by chords as major and windmilled as Chris Walla's lead guitar gets, laments: "I wish the world was flat like the old days/Then I could travel just by folding a map/No more airplanes or speed trains or freeways/There'd be no distance that could hold us back." But the nearly eight-minute centerpiece of the album, the title track, takes that wish fulfillment one step further.

Structured around searching piano chords, "Transatlanticism" begins as a pity party for that well-worn distance territory. It continues with slides and more resolved guitar, as if taking tentative steps, and it builds with resolve until the understated refrain of "I need you so much closer" takes the song into a trot. By the halfway point, the song has transitioned into a gallop, and by the time the rest of the band joins in with a harmonic "so come on," the distance does indeed "feel quite temporary."

The usually astute Stephen Thomas Erlweine once called this marathon "long for length's sake," and he was more correct than he realized. Often used as the closer to live shows, the song is as much of a solution as Gibbard can find to the problem of an uneasy memory of love. The distance is the song itself, and listening and understanding is its bridge. Like the seminary dropouts, we have to accept a new path for ourselves, and "Transatlanticism" is Gibbard's way of assessing that.

Two albums removed from Transatlanticism, Death Cab for Cutie has become something like the new R.E.M.: stalwart, literate, rainy day adult contempo for all the thirtysomethings who let people assume they're twentysomethings. They can open for Springsteen and get referenced on teen soap operas. "I Will Follow You into the Dark" off Plans is practically a standard by now. It would seem as if they're conquering the world as we speak.

Recently, however, news came out that Gibbard has become engaged to resident manic pixie dream girl Zooey Deschanel. (Apparently, my hair needs to be set further on the Gram Parsons side of the dial for her to take notice.) For a guy who used to capitalize on the futility of a divergent love, this might be a challenge. Instead of singing, "It seems by the time that I have figured what it's worth/The squeaking of our skin against the steel has gotten worse," he might have to switch to, "My girl has great skin and a naturally colorful complexion/She also has a really cute laugh." She might be the death of one of our great songwriters.

But what can I say? Love can be destructive.

#26 Song of the Decade- "Soul Survivor"

ChristopherBowes@gmail.com (Christopher Bowes) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 02:38:00 +0000

#26 Song of the Decade- Young Jeezy feat. Akon- "Soul Survivor"

In any metal retrospective you'll ever see, each interviewed party rhapsodizes over Black Sabbath. You'll have to wait an entire commercial break before any other musician is mentioned, and there's never enough hyperbole to go around. "It was like I had never heard music before blah blah blah," some bald guy with creative facial hair gushes. There were a lot of hard rock bands who seemed dark but were really mama's boys, but Black Sabbath was clearly something different from the rest of the dirge-like English rockers in the way they fully embodied their own witchy mystique. They were a lone dissenting voice with a sound more discordant and uncompromising than anyone else. We could be talking the same way about Young Jeezy's verisimilitude, if only he stood out as much. He's just as much of a master of reality, but that reality is so unrelentingly dark that he's become the mainstream. His Machiavellian solipsism is not a shock to the system, it's representative of it. Black Sabbath changed the world; the world changed Young Jeezy.

If he and Akon hooked up on a song today, it would be an event; but in 2005, neither was particularly well-known. The unique tone of Akon's tongue-depressant warble is what first got the song on the radio, but it will be remembered as our entree into the hopeless outlook of Jeezy. Rarely has a rapper condensed his entire ethos into one verse the way the man born Jay Jenkins does here, particularly in one couplet:

"A hundred grand on my wrist, yeah life sucks
Fuck the club, dog, I'd rather count a million bucks"

At the time, musicians were first feeling the squeeze of the record industry's collapse and doing whatever they could to branch out and become more palatable to the mainstream, whether that was starring in Budweiser commericals or making entire albums for the ladies. Here, Jeezy at once glorifies the hustle and casts it as meaningless. He's not interested in anything else like, you know, socializing with people in public, but his only pastime of money chasing is just as hollow, just as much of a reminder that life sucks. In his debut single, Young Jeezy seems to be saying that even ambition itself is hopeless. And the really disturbing thing? In one of his patented ad-libs, he even laughs at the notion.

That's the black cherry on top of the rest of Jeezy's performance, in which he prays against/for his own inequity, conflates dreams with nightmares, and threatens an anonymous spoken-to with clenched teeth. Akon's weary spritualizing and foreboding beat, matching claustrophobic string stabs with wandering twinkles, do their best to match Jeezy's hoarse futility, and in neither the music nor the lyrics is there any celebration to rival the dread and paranoia.

Here's the real significance of the song though: it sounds as if I'm exaggerating. Rather than reading those lyrics for their inhumane cynicism, the majority of critics heard this track and found it not irredeemable, but rather typical. We are immune to the landscape Jeezy's describing and the persona he's reporting from. As far as hip-hop gloom goes, he's not the minority. He became a star, and the song became an anthem for the faceless grind because we live in a society that he blends into when he isn't holding a mirror. He's bellowing that "we're livin' in hell," and we "just keep on movin' now."

20 Best Movie Trailers of the Decade

ChristopherBowes@gmail.com (Christopher Bowes) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 02:49:00 +0000

The criteria for these decisions is hazy in my own mind, but it usually just comes down to how much the trailer made me want to see the movie it was promoting. I had different reasons for choosing each of these previews, and the videos vary in quality and are so wide in some cases that they mess up the rest of this page. I did my best. Also, this ranking has nothing to do with the quality of the final film: I'm only judging the trailers. Allow me to explain each:

20. Finding Forrester

Throughout high school, my friends and I went to the same movie theater every Friday. For about six months, the trailers before every screening were the Pearl Harbor teaser (a great trailer in its own right) and Finding Forrester. This is a pretty standard trailer, but it is responsible for the Sean Connery lines "Punch the keys," "Bolt the door...if you're coming in," and "You're the man now, dog." I have ruined friendships by over-quoting those lines. Hell, they inspired an entire website. Which is just silly. Who names a website after an innocuous line from the trailer of a forgettable mainstream movie?

19. Kill Bill, Vol. 1

With the Kill Bill diptych, Quentin Tarantino sought to prove that he could direct action, and the trailer for the first installment promises nothing but that. In fact, there's barely any dialogue, which was a pretty daring way to promote a Tarantino film. You can't beat that song either.

18. (500) Days of Summer

Bouncy music, quirky narration, cool clothes, pretty people. Teasing of some artsy, innovative visuals. Works for me.

17. 300

I didn't like the final product, but the powerful, atmospheric, otherworldly visuals of this trailer definitely made it a hit.

16. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (teaser)

Hauntingly spare and quiet, this trailer nails down the premise of the film without giving too much away. Fincher's trailers are always top-notch, and this one is no exception.

15. The Dark Knight

I watched this so many times that I was able to time it so that I clapped my hands at the same time the Joker does. It's hard for an ad to hint at the complex themes of a movie without ruining the plot, but this one does that while also showing off some great visuals. Furthermore, it's rare that a score is completed in time to match with the trailer, but this trailer gets a lot of extra mileage from the main theme of the movie. Extra points for the "Jokerized" version of the trailer that was only sent out to a handful of theaters.

14. Marie Antoinette (teaser)

Honestly, you could put "Age of Consent" over anything, and it would get me excited. This trailer presents a daring, sumptuous final product that was never really delivered to us.

13. The Hangover

This is another case of a movie's success being inextricably tied to the strength of its promotional materials. Not since There's Something about Mary had I been able to sit with an audience and guarantee from their reactions that a movie would be a hit in four or five months.

12. Little Children

As a promotional tool for the film, this trailer is kind of unsuccessful. As an art object unto itself, it's pretty beautiful. Seeking to capture the tone of the film rather than summarize any of its content, this is one of a kind.

11. Femme Fatale

Speaking of one of a kind, this Brian De Palma vehicle shows us the entire movie in super fast forward, stopping it to give us the sexier parts out-of-context. Then it kind of dares us to see it in the end. The entire movie is not as good as this trailer.

10. Red Eye

This ended up being a pretty solid movie, and what's remarkable about the trailer is how long they wait to tell us what it's actually about. This is a classic rope-a-dope. I'm sure there are a lot of first drafts of trailers like this that get focus-grouped to death. This one actually follows through.

9. The Man Who Wasn't There

The smoky, contrast-heavy cinematography of this movie is its greatest strength, so it's the focus of an elegant, assured trailer that takes advantage of heady dialogue and smooth editing.

8. Cast Away (teaser)

The full-length version of this trailer would be on my worst trailers of the decade list for giving everything away. (No really. Everything. The last shot of the trailer is the last shot of the movie.) But this one is a perfect setup, giving us everything we need to know and then leaving us at the exact spot when things get intriguing.

7. Borat (full-length)

Probably the funniest trailer I've ever seen. Again, where would this movie be without this preview?

6. Watchmen (trailer 1)

This is another one I watched over and over again. With a portentous Smashing Pumpkins song, it delivered exactly what anyone wanted from the film. It's expository enough for newcomers, but it also teases all of the things fans were wondering about. It builds and builds until it can't anymore. This is a splashy, mature trailer for a film that wasn't nearly as successful.

5. Comedian

It features absolutely no footage from the film, but this sardonic, inventive trailer still manages to get us excited about it. I wish I could go back and see an audience's reaction to this.

4. Cloverfield (teaser)

Talk about mysterious. While we're on the subject of how much or little is revealed in a trailer, this one doesn't even give you the title. Beat that. It does, however, establish the look that guides the entire film, and it ends with as provocative an image as possible. I've never been as intrigued by a trailer as I have been by this masterpiece.

3. Jarhead

Great trailers can promise a subtext and thoughtfulness and thematic heaviness that the actual film does not necessarily have, and that's the case with Jarhead. By featuring the unimpeachable stars, revealing dreamy, ironic shot selection, and using a contemporary song for once, this trailer stresses that this is not your father's war film. It gathers a whole lot of momentum in just over two minutes.

2. Garden State

There's no dialogue or explanation of a plot here. Everything about the tone is communicated through ironic, eye-popping visuals and the hipper-than-thou Frou Frou song. Unlike something like Jarhead though, this trailer actually does approximate the viewing of the film. Sometimes it's too clever for its own good, but you enjoy spending time with it and sharing in its exuberance.

1. Where the Wild Things Are (teaser)

Considering that writing online about your reaction to this trailer is now seen as a cliche, I'd say this is a pretty powerful piece of work. Spike Jonze and the Arcade Fire can make you cry in...two minutes. The word "melancholgia" was invented for this.

Let me know what I forgot in the comments.

#14 Album of the Decade and #31 Song of the Decade- Ben Kweller

ChristopherBowes@gmail.com (Christopher Bowes) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 21:53:00 +0000

#14- Album of the Decade- Ben Kweller- Sha Sha
Ben Kweller- "Commerce, TX"

#31 Song of the Decade- Ben Kweller- "Wasted & Ready"

John Seabrook's smug 2001 book of culture criticism, Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture, devotes an entire chapter to the precocity of a then-unknown Ben Kweller. Seabrook follows a teenaged Kweller and his band Radish as he's courted by major labels. At one point Kweller's at Jimmy Iovine's house freestyling with Tom Petty, and there are about ten times when an expert calls him "the next Kurt Cobain." Kweller was a songwriting prodigy mining Cobain's quiet-loud dynamics, and he could play almost any instrument you gave him. Seabrook spells out the seeming randomness of the buzz surrounding this kid from Greenville, Texas, and Seabrook captures the herd mentality of record executives flying out there without knowing anything about him. By the time the chapter ends, a lot of money and attention has been invested in Kweller, and he seems oblivious to how much is actually riding on his nascent career. Seabrook has asked "why him?" and we don't have much of an answer.

We still don't. Nine years after the events of the book, Kweller's career has stalled. He's trying to cross over to a country audience. He's known primarily as a girly type of act because of earlier bills he shared with Guster and Evan Dando. He's trapped on Dave Matthews' label, which is doing nothing to promote his talent. Worst of all, he has neutered his songwriting's more unique flourishes to fit into some idea he has of what a traveling bluesy roots-rock working man's hero should be. What made him great the only time he actually had to prove all of his promise, his debut Sha Sha, was that he was so oblivious to all of these outside factors. Perhaps a voice like his was never meant to hit it big. After all, Cobain probably wasn't supposed to either.

Sha Sha is an album a great songwriter makes when he's twenty, before he gets political, before he gets stream-of-consciousness, before he's trying to be Dylan, before he knows that what he's doing is called approximate rhyme. The lyrics here are rough around the edges. They reach for connections that aren't always there, like calling butterflies "passive-aggressive." They leave blanks for us to fill in with non sequiturs like, "Sex reminds her of eating spaghetti." "Maxed out like a credit card" isn't exactly Rimbaud, but it's better than what I was writing at twenty.

Sha Sha is a perfect storm of these eccentricities. Most rappers' first album is their best because it's their entire autobiography and manifesto delivered in one fell swoop. They say everything that has been building up inside of them for their entire lives and capitalize on the now-or-never urgency of a debut. They are able to channel their message and worldview into one album, and they aren't jaded enough to compromise that point of view. Ben Kweller, a guy who used to cover Vanilla Ice live, presents the same naive but breathless weltershaung as someone like The Game. It's all-or-nothing, and he delivers summery, indelible power-pop with an equal facility for fist-pumpers and honest, heartfelt ballads. Yes, it's a little girly, but other than maybe Is This It?, it's hard to find a record this decade that is as top-to-bottom fun to listen to. Kweller finds a way to overcome a limited, straining voice with his gift for melody, and nowhere is his exuberance and dusted-off brilliance more evident than on "Wasted & Ready."

With its wandering slides leading up to deafening power chords, "Wasted & Ready" sounds like something Alex Chilton would have written if he had been raised eating barbecue and watching Cowboys games. When I saw Kweller live in Philadelphia two years ago, it seemed as if everyone was waiting for him to wrap up the love songs and hit them with what was buried deep in their collective drunk playlists. It's a playing-dumb classic, a hit that never became a hit. Kweller's guitar playing has never sounded more muscular, and his reedy intonation has a way of making platitudes sound immediate and cathartic. Especially when he multi-tracks his own voice on the song's last fourth, we're reminded of just how far a little obliviousness can go. Kurt Cobain would be proud.

LSU-Florida: Diary of a Letdown

ChristopherBowes@gmail.com (Christopher Bowes) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:14:00 +0000

Lately I've been feeling as if I'm a sixty-year-old man living in a twenty-five-year-old man's body. Even though I'm back in my home state among friends in Tiger football, I've been content to grouse around my apartment complaining about LSU via supercilious tweets. But when my brother-in-law came through with a ticket to #4 LSU against #1 Florida, and P.T. flew in for the game from Massachusetts, I knew I had to play the young man's game with an all-day tailgate. I took these terrible pictures.

To give you an idea of how crowded Baton Rouge gets on a gameday, this is about two miles away from the stadium on Highland, where I parked. Six hours before kickoff.

I made sure to wear my walking shoes. Speaking of being sixty years old, I have designated walking shoes.

Considering that I've never lived in Baton Rouge, I have a lot of memories of the city. During the post-Katrina semester when many of my friends were making do at disparate Louisiana campuses, PT and I visited our friend Karl in the 225. I snuck a fifth of Jack Daniel's into this diner under my jacket, and it slipped out, smashing into a million pieces. The funny part of the story, however, is when we walked to Karl's temporary apartment to crash. We got home before him or his roommates, whom we had never met. Figuring that these roommates wouldn't react too well to weird, unindentified drunk dudes sleeping on their floor, we wrote "Karl's Friends" in Sharpie on sheets of looseleaf and taped the signs to our chests before we passed out. College.

If you ask the proprietor of this restaurant, Roul, how juicy his burgers are, he'll say, "Juicy like a pussy." It's charming.

Beware that none of these pictures are composed. I don't even bother to get a shot of anyone's face. Anyway, P.T.'s buddy hooked us up with this tailgate party, sponsored by an organization called S.H.A.R.T., which stands for something stupid. If you want to know the difference between SEC football tailgating and any other inferior gathering that calls itself tailgating, all you have to know is that this party had satellite TV, thirteen kegs, all manners of roasted pork, and its own monogrammed coozies.

And this punch, which was gone before we got there, much like any hint of LSU offense.

What has a longer corny t-shirt shelf-life: the Got Blah-Blah-Blah? construction or the Price of Blah-Blah-Blah? Priceless... arrangement? Both of them have been going ten years easily.

This was delicious until it gave me food poisoning.

About two hours before game time, the LSU players march down Stadium Drive with the Golden Band from Tigerland. I'm waiting for them and looking for my brother-in-law, who is one of these 90,000 people. Miraculously, I found him and my ticket.

Les Miles and his poo-eating grin are somewhere down there.

About forty-five minutes before kickoff. This was the last time I would see LSU in the end zone that night.

I don't think I've heard more virulent language than the cursing directed at Tebow on Saturday. Between that and the dude who punched a Gator fan in the face for no reason, I reminded myself to wait a while to bring any kid to a game. This photo was taken on Florida's touchdown drive, the only lapse in what was a pretty tight defensive game from the Tigers. I would have taken some pictures of JoJeff airing it out or Russell Shepard being used in creative packages or Charles Scott stretching the defense with plays other than off-tackle dives. Unfortunately, none of those things happened.

By the fourth quarter, when it was clear that LSU just could not measure up to the #1 team in the nation, my entertainment came from the old boozer sitting next to me, reaching down for his flask in this picture. He was the type of drunk who just says the same two things over and over. If it wasn't "that facemask penalty really hurt us," it was the more emphatic: "How do they all know to look over at the sideline at the same time like that? I'll be goddamned! How do they do that? You figure that out you call me. I'mma give you my card." Most people, my brother-in-law included, would ignore the dude, but I just goaded him. "You know how they all look at the same time? The coach probably grabs their facemasks and pulls them over during practice." I was sobering up by this point, but I should've asked him for some of whatever was helping him cope with this game.

Congratulations to the Florida Gators, who took advantage of the tentative nature of our offense and controlled the clock with their own conservative offensive attack. Their touchdown should have been called back, and the center kept turning his head before the snap, only to get called for a false start once. But good game nonetheless. LSU is ranked #10 in both polls after the loss, which, honestly, is probably where we belong right now.

I love attending conference games in the heart of the season, but I'm 0-2 at Florida contests and might have to return to my couch for the team's own good. I'll do my fair share of grousing from there against Auburn. LSU football is shaving so many years off my life that I just might be sixty by now.

Film of the Decade #46- 28 Days Later and Album of the Decade #17- Lift Your Fists...

ChristopherBowes@gmail.com (Christopher Bowes) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 02:02:00 +0000

#46- 28 Days Later- Danny Boyle (2001) [watch the whole movie here]

#17- Godspeed You Black Emperor!- Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven (2000) [all songs too long to link to]

The best films of this past decade usually took long-accepted tropes or themes and synthesized them in new ways that spoke to the concerns and fears of our age. There is probably no more appropriate genre to do that in than horror, which is what makes 28 Days Later the best horror film of the decade. (Though pardon me if I haven't seen Saws II-V. I might be wrong, you know?)

Anyone would agree that 28 Days Later is a visceral horror entry, but calling it a zombie movie is both factual and insulting. It is true that the plot begins with animal rights activists releasing chimps who are part of a scientific experiment. It is true that those chimps attack their liberators with a contagious disease and escape, spreading this disease among the entire population of England and turning them into rage-fueled zombies. But calling it a zombie movie is denying how antithetical Danny Boyle's genre exercise is to what we acknowledge about such films. It's not that Boyle and his screenwriter Alex Garland use "the rage" as a symbol--that would actually make it sort of retro. No, this stands out because it takes someone turning into a monster, one of the more inviting and guilty pleasures of such films, and makes that prospect the most terrifying and present danger imaginable.

From Invasion of the Body Snatchers on, zombies have been used as filmic symbols for what we are denying of our human nature. In the first crack at that property, those who famously "go to sleep" are the ones who give up questioning the world around them. The sheep who blindly obey 1950s authority become metaphorical and literal zombies relegated to feeding on the flesh of those still kicking and screaming. George Romero expanded similar ideas from his Night of the Living Dead to address consumerism in Dawn of the Dead and class in Land of the Dead. They Live is also expressly political. These stories remind us of our own independence, the agency that makes us human, and they presuppose that we should avoid anything that would turn us into zombies. 28 Days Later has no such context. Whereas those other films obsessively delineate living, breathing humans from The Other, in 28 Days Later the zombie is our friends and family. And we still have to kill it.

Instead of denying human nature, Garland's characters are faced with the question of what humanity is in the first place. The ubiquitous threat of a person no longer being a person is what makes watching the film such a draining, harrowing experience. Other horror films have set-ups that build excitement and then end, giving us a breather to prepare for the next one. Up until its admittedly crappy ending, 28 Days Later is non-stop running from a continuous endangerment and insecurity.

Brains.

Those thematic concerns would not matter much if we didn't connect to any of it though. Thankfully, we do. For instance, Garland and Boyle balance those questions of humanity with something that marks us as humans: the mundane. If the apocalypse happened, what would you eat? How would you get water to shave? Where would you get gasoline? The characters have to figure this out, and they almost feel guilty for needing these things, no matter how much they are reminded of their necessity. That imperfection is helped by Boyle's decision to shoot the film on HD video, which was still a daring choice in 2001. The medium's imperfections underscore the spontaneity and immediacy of what is happening on screen.

No discussion of the film would be complete without mention of the Piccadilly Square centerpiece, in which our protagonist Jim wanders around a completely deserted version of the most populous, touristy spots of London without any idea of why the locations are so empty. It's one of the most eerie scenes I've ever watched, and it's impossible not to marvel at the scale of it all. It establishes an unrivaled sense of foreboding and loneliness. It just so happens to be scored by a Godspeed You Black Emperor! song that establishes an unrivaled sense of foreboding and loneliness.

GYBE! were Canadian eight-piece progenitors of post-rock, a nineties subgenre characterized by interminable, hypnotic instrumentals that built through several movements and usually ended with a thrilling crescendo. Sometimes accompanied by multi-media presentations, post-rock sought to re-examine the structure of what rock music typically was and present a more cerebral, experimental version of it.

GYBE! took the mantle of early post-rock bands like Mogwai, Spiderland, or Sterolab and created something more textured and haunting and timeless. When the four suites of Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven take off, they push the music past weird time signatures to something heavier and more substantial. Although they're considered experimental, they're actually presenting a piece striking in its unified sense of purpose, that purpose being one of absorbing, centered dread for something lost or hopeless. They took the sound of a type of music criticized as clinical and infused it with genuine, earned emotion. While that sounds kind of navel-gazing, as post-rock usually is, there is a selfless quality to the music that keeps its eye on the prize. (This is definitely part of their m.o. They only conducted interviews through one member of the group and never had the band name or track titles on the album packaging.) By splicing in clips of French children singing or an old man yammering about Coney Island, there are even times when an instrumental band's music does not take center stage, as if to say that the world around us continues even as we're creating a soundtrack for it. That aspect of the album makes it undeniably present and cathartic, a memorial for something still dying.

In that way, I would agree with Danny Boyle that it's perfect music for a sort of hopeful apocalypse. You get the sense that album closer "Antennas to Heaven" isn't the real end, and someone will still be twitching long after the droning aftermath of its strings and guitars.

Sometimes a Funny Team Name Is Just a Funny Team Name

ChristopherBowes@gmail.com (Christopher Bowes) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:53:00 +0000

Fantasy football is a waste of time and money. Fantasy football is inconsequential and kind of sad. Fantasy football is a game for middle class White guys who don't have real problems. Your fantasy football team, to anyone else, is uninteresting. It's like describing your dreams. And worst of all, it doesn't even have an accurate name. If this were really a fantasy, I think Mila Kunis would be involved, not a Robert Meachem spot-start.

But tell that to my brain. I actually didn't give work my full attention yesterday because I was too conflicted about a possible Slaton-Palmer-Benson for Turner-Sproles-Carlson-Washington trade. For something that is, in the long run, pretty negligible, the game within a game occupies a lot of this particular man's time and consideration. So fantasy football is a function of culture, sure, but I didn't realize until recently how much it taps into the male psyche, how it converges with and fulfills our brute instincts.

First page of search results. Gorgeous.

Because I'm ahead of the curve when it comes to time-wasting, I've been playing since high school, but the fantasy football tipping point was about five years ago for culture at-large, coincidentally about the same time the early-aughts poker explosion was leveling off. Not coincidentally, the games have similar clientele. Poker became popular because men in their twenties--a generation raised with over-protective parents and participation trophies--realized that the professional world they had just entered wasn't going to hand them anything. Rather than, you know, working hard to achieve things, they found an outlet that would reward them for the decision-making, judgment, and balls so often ignored by their bosses. Finally, they could take these skills and get what they really deserved with very little effort. They could experience tangible rewards for something as patently intangible as intellect.

Fantasy football, which doubles these goals while also being an excuse to watch more sports, requires the same mixture of skill and chance. Whereas the most important parts of poker are solitary though, fantasy football thrives on group interaction while still glorifying the self.

Since fantasy football is a game of prediction and conjecture, no one, including ESPN's Matthew Berry, is an expert. He's just a guy who has more time and spreadsheets to study this stuff, and even then, he's rarely right about it. Or at least that's what we tell ourselves. The reason why he can keep his job is two-fold. If we acknowledge that even an expert is throwing darts, it makes the amount of time we spend on this seem pointless, and the whole enterprise seems more silly, which we don't want. So we allow that his help is useless but seek it out anyway. Also, and here's the part that ties into being a man, it makes us feel smarter if the expert is this fallible. It taps into the "I could do that" arrogance surrounding every man ever. We hate Matthew Berry not because he doesn't do his job well, but because we believe we could do it better.

Would you trust this man with anything other than fantasy sports?

We don't worry too much about this because fantasy football has refreshingly low stakes. Instead of agony, it forces us to deal with the discomfort of defeat. Traditionally, because you only have one opponent per week in fantasy, you always have tantalizing odds of winning and feel as if you've come very close even when you lose. It's like heads-up poker, except you don't need a pokerface.

Finally, what is brilliance if we aren't recognized for it? And what is brilliance if we are secure in that brilliance? We have to second-guess ourselves with systems or matchups, with sleepers and clever replacements for injured stars. We have now upped the ante for what separates those in the know from those in Yahoo public leagues, and that standard isn't even winning. For example, every fantasy player has said something like this in conversation: "I'm in third place right now. The dude in first has Adrian Peterson so..." Of course he's in first; he has the best player. Is that not enough? A female mind would just take the best player and be done with it. A male mind almost has to apologize for not being counter-intuitive. Another example of this nay-saying is the fact that every league has had an argument about its scoring, ignoring the fact that those values are as arbitrary as anything else in the game. As long as everyone is playing by the same rules, even if those rules are "one hundred and eleven point bonus for any first down play," your league is fair.

When I started playing in high school, the more research you did before your draft, the better your team was. Now that almost hurts you because you key into players and second-guess the obvious value picks. In one of my leagues the guys in the number one and number two spots on the leaderboard used auto-draft. Like everything else with guys and fantasy football, I don't think that's a coincidence.

At once, fantasy football presents man at his best and his worst. Always striving, never achieving. Always independent, never alone. Always strong but crippled by self-doubt. And even though the NFL is experiencing a golden age, something tells me this isn't the last of the games we'll play to express ourselves.

#45 and #39 Songs of the Decade- "You Are the Generation..." and "Postcards from Italy"

ChristopherBowes@gmail.com (Christopher Bowes) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:45:00 +0000

#45- Johnny Boy- "You Are the Generation That Bought More Shoes and You Get What You Deserve"

#39- Beirut- "Postcards from Italy"

Let's fast-forward eight years. You're my guest at an ironic 2009 party, because that's something I would invite you to. We're friends like that I guess. On the wall I have posters for something period but forgettable--Imagine That or Confessions of a Shopaholic maybe. I'm wearing skinny jeans and a bright hoodie. Maybe I even thought to tape cotton balls onto the door in the shape of a cloud with a tasteful picture of Michael Jackson on top. We share a laugh and maybe I say something inappropriately flirty because I'm already drunk.

The most defining part of such a future-retro party would be the music, right? Before you even get to my delicious seven-layer dip no homo, you would notice the music I chose, and whether or not it correlated with your idea of what the '00s were. Perhaps I picked the unabashedly repetitive pop of "Pokerface" or "Boom Boom Pow." Maybe I'll just soundtrack the entire night with auto-tune, since, for better or worse, it'll be recognizable.

But we all know being recognizable is not the same as being memorable. That's the problem with art that follows trends. People can tell whether or not your heart is in it. When Harry Potter blew up earlier this decade, batches of fiction writers threw together a children's fantasy thinking it would sell. But it was easy to distinguish between the writers who had an affection and comfort for the material and the ones who were looking for a buck. We sustain trends; they don't sustain us.

Some of the music I'll remember the most from this fading decade sounds nothing like our idea of the aughts. These songs I'm profiling, for instance, sound downright old. Johnny Boy's "You Are the Generation..." is an anti-consumerist message in the form of a vociferous mock doo-wop with close-mics, reverbed tambourines, and no brakes. You start by questioning whether or not they ripped off the intro to "Be My Baby" (they did), but you finish stomping along with them and responding "yeah-yeah" to their call of "aww baby." And if I didn't know better, I'd think they play bottle rockets throughout that second verse. It sounds too pure and innocent to be made in 2004.

The same goes for Beirut's "Postcards from Italy," which begins like every other Beirut song: a lonely melody repeats on a dusty peasant-like instrument--in this case a ukelele--until it expands into a wedding march of Eastern European rhythms, swirling away with old world charm until Zach Condon's wistful nasality reminds it where its bread is buttered. At times the formula works so well that it feels calculating. Here it's perfect.

Here's what you have to understand though: these songs don't stick with me just because they have a vintage sound. They last because I experienced the songs in a way I rarely do anymore. In both cases, the tracks were recommended to me by another DJ while I was working at a radio station, and I thought the album covers looked cool. That's it. That throwback word-of-mouth began a relationship with two songs that I'll take along with me for the rest of my life. Not algorithms that predict what I'll like based on other recommendations. Not a streaming radio station tailored to my specifications.

I know nothing about Johnny Boy, and I've kept it that way on purpose. I don't own any of their other music. I don't know who they are or where they're from. Maybe I'm afraid none of their other work lives up to this single and don't want to find out. In my own way, I kind of feel as if I'm keeping pure that experience that people had in the time the band is replicating. Information travels fast in our culture, and it's easy to know so much about an artist that you can't even listen to their music with any objectivity. That experience is automatically tainted with hype and expectations. With Johnny Boy, a friend of mine liked it, and the cover looked cool.

I feel as if I already know too much about Zach Condon, the sixteen-year-old who made Gulag Orkestar in his bedroom and found an audience for his 19th century gypsy music, ironically, through the most modern of means. I could write a whole postmodern essay on that dynamic, but I think I'd like to stick with this future-retro stance.

Future-retro. I like that. Remind me of it in eight years while you're trying the dip.

Reggie Bush and the Saints Tradition: Big Hopes, Big Dreams, Big Butts

ChristopherBowes@gmail.com (Christopher Bowes) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 01:27:00 +0000

I'm not sure if I can still pull off the jersey look. But if I were to buy a Saints jersey, it would be a Reggie Bush. Not because I like the number 25 or even because I like Reggie Bush. (I'm not so sure that I do.) I want that jersey because I'm a true Saints fan, and Reggie Bush is more symbolic of the franchise's identity than any other player it has ever employed.*

In 1967, the first play in New Orleans Saints history was a kickoff returned for a touchdown. Ever since then, the team has fallen short of that promise:

- Despite a mediocre season, the Saints were still playoff-bound in 1979, until Oakland humiliated them by coming back from 24 points down on "Monday Night Football."
- Fans began calling the team the Ain'ts during the 1980 season, during which the team went 1-15. Legendary radio announcer Buddy Diliberto suggested fans wear paper bags on their heads so that none of their friends recognized them at the game. They did. We invented that.
- Amazingly, it took until 1987 for the Saints to have their first winning season. They were embarrassed 44-10 by Minnesota in the playoffs.
- It would take until 1991 for the Saints to win an NFC Western Division title. In the playoff game, they seemed poised for victory until the Atlanta Falcons improvised a lateral-pitching miracle on the final play of the game to send the game into overtime and send me to the bathroom to throw up. (Seriously, I was eight. It was too much to take.)
- In 1992 another memorable season was flushed away with a first-round playoff loss to the Eagles. Again, we gave up 29 unanswered points in the fourth quarter. It was the first time I heard my dad say "fuck."
- At the time, in 1999, I supported Mike Ditka's decision to trade an entire draft's worth of picks for Ricky Williams. But a hall-of-fame coach and a Heisman winner (two actually, if you count Danny Wuerffel) still only equaled a 3-13 season. Plus, we didn't have any draft picks for a while.

Ditka after the then-winless Browns connected on a 56-yard Hail Mary pass with no time left on the clock.

- Barely, despite giving up 24 points, the Saints finally won a wild-card playoff game in 2000 under the spry legs of Aaron Brooks (whom I would curse out for the next five years as he threw balls into the stands and smiled after interceptions). They then got blown out by Minnesota in the next round.

Along the way, there were many more heartbreaking losses, so many that "leavin' the fourth quarter in the French Quarter" has become an unofficial motto that follows the team around. For instance, remember when the Saints improvised a lateral-pitching miracle against the Jags, only to miss the extra point that would have sent the game into overtime?

Yep.

So pardon us if we had some baggage when we drafted Reggie Bush in 2006. It's not as if it was fair to him. We seemed cursed, not even with failure like the Clippers, but with a more frustrating mediocrity. At least half of the seasons of my lifetime have seen records of 8-8.

But this guy, one of the most electrifying college players ever, was going to change that. He was going to change the game itself, and he fell into our laps. He could catch passes as a wideout. He had the agility and durability to run the ball. He had the vision to return kicks and punts. It was too good to be true.

At the eve of Bush's fourth season, it's still too good to be true. On the morning of January 12, 2006, when an entire fanbase hugged each other and cried onto each other's shoulders, clinging to the only hope some of them had, Tom Jackson compared Bush to Gayle Sayers. Mel Kiper went on to say, tongue-in-cheek, that if Reggie Bush wasn't a Pro Bowler, something was wrong with football.

Something is wrong with football. Instead of changing the NFL game, he changed his own game for the NFL. He petitioned the league to let him have his coveted number 5 and was denied, the first small disappointment in a career of them. He tried to bulk up to fit the NFL mold of an every-down back, but it ended up slowing him down. The Saints, realizing this, set him off in the slot and threw to him over 100 times his rookie season. Even with 88 receptions though, he still had less than 1000 yards. We tried trick plays with him in a league in which trick plays famously don't work.

I don't want to demean Bush, who has headed up countless charity endeavors for the city and seems like a wonderful person. There have been some great moments. His go-ahead punt return TD as a rookie (on which we totally got away with a hold). Hell, he was leading the league in touchdowns until he got hurt in the tenth game of last season.

But even he must be ashamed to have nearly as many fumbles (15) as he has touchdowns (24) in his career. Even he must be surprised to have had so many nagging injuries. Even he must be shocked that his callipygian girlfriend is more famous than he is. It's not a good sign when the marquee player for your favorite team gets picked in your fantasy draft, and you're kind of relieved that you didn't have to pick him. On the plus side, he's great in video games.

Look it up.

It's not as if he wants to squander his potential, but that's what happens when you play for the Saints. He's a man before or past his prime, playing with a team that lives in a tradition of that incongruity. Bum Phillips kept the starters in during preseason games and built up ticket sales, only to go 3-13 when things were even. Archie Manning threw for thousands of yards only to watch an immature defense give up his points. The Dome Patrol's run-blockers played during an era with wide-open passing attacks. We had Mike Ditka when he no longer had a clue, and we drafted Ricky Williams when he didn't even want to play football. Why did we expect Reggie Bush to be anything other than a shifty, butterfingered letdown? He isn't even bad. He's just mediocre.

Even though the team was often winning by double-digits, my stepdad and I cursed up a storm watching the Saints game this past Sunday. Even when up by two touchdowns, we have been conditioned to never let up, to never take down our guard of skepticism, to expect the worst. A lifetime of watching this team has done that. Reggie Bush scored a touchdown in the fourth quarter, but neither of us cheered because we knew there must have been a flag, and, sure enough, there was. The touchdown was called back, and we weren't surprised. That's what happens to the Saints, and Reggie Bush embodies everything the Saints are. Hopefully, he isn't everything the Saints will ever be.

* With the possible exception of Michael Lewis, who was a hometown beer truck driver floating around semi-pro leagues until some scout for the Saints went, "Hey, that dude's fast!" and made him a Pro Bowl return specialist. If that doesn't speak to the Saints' rag-tag history, I don't know what does.

#3 and #27 Albums of the Decade- Jay-Z

ChristopherBowes@gmail.com (Christopher Bowes) — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 17:23:00 +0000

#3 Album of the Decade- Jay-Z- The Blueprint (2001)
Jay-Z- "U Don't Know"

#27 Album of the Decade- Jay-Z- The Black Album (2003)
Jay-Z- "Public Service Announcement"

Except for maybe Frank Sinatra, no musician seizes greatness without having that greatness brought out by collaborators.

Mick Jagger, who wrote all of the Rolling Stones' lyrics, depended upon Keith Richards to write the music, and the two are still butting heads and playing mind games with each other over their interdependence. During the Exile on Main Street recordings, which were done at Richards' French villa, he would shoot up until three in the morning, and everyone else had to wait on hand-and-foot because he would eventually come downstairs with something like "Tumbling Dice." At the same time, it's clear who the star of the group is.

Michael Jackson was a kid with a good resume until he met Quincy Jones, the man responsible for extracting everything mysterious and captivating and grown-up about him, crafting the universal sum of mismatched parts.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote some of the best pop songs ever because they combined such contradictory focuses. McCartney, as a bass player, was obsessed with rhythm, while Lennon always kept the melodies paramount. Lennon was always writing lyrics from a personal standpoint while McCartney was trying to communicate the universal. And sometimes that cocktail would show up in the same song: [Lennon-sounding] "Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been/Lives in a dream/Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door/Who is it for?/[McCartney-sounding] All the lonely people/Where do they all come from?/All the lonely people/Where do they all belong?"

By the late '90s mainstream hip-hop had forgotten this, if it was ever aware of it in the first place. There were solo acts who stayed in their own regressive lane, never expanding beyond their comfort zone (DMX). And there were rappers who used collaboration as a lazy crutch, blending into a group and shuffling off the heavy lifting (Master P). What Jay-Z seemed to realize with The Blueprint (and then forget again with The Blueprint 2) and exhibit again with The Black Album, was that he was only as good as the people working with him. For the first time, instead of putting on negligible friends as favors ([cough-cough] all of The Dynasty: Roc La Familia), he challenged himself to reach new heights, and those heights were stoked by the bright talents of hungry newcomers Kanye West, Bink, Just Blaze, the Neptunes, and Eminem. The Blueprint and The Black Album are seen as triumphs of the arrogant chest-bump when their real secret is humility.

But there's something else at work here. Most traditionally White music is a continued exploration of who the artist was and will be. For example, Madonna is only relevant because of the contrast between who she is in her current state of reinvention versus who she used to be. The immediacy of Black music comes from the assertion of who the artist is, and no other rapper has ever known that better than Jay. That's what makes him unique. Collaborators who can rival his larger-than-life presence don't bring out unexpected sides of him. They just shine a brighter light on who he is.

He never does this anymore. The "I'm disgusted with you" face is one of my favorites. "Don't be the next contestant on that Summer Jam screen."

On The Blueprint Jay and his producers realized that this was his moment. Embracing a moment makes an album great; intuiting that the man had not already reached his peak, despite staying at the top for fifteen years and selling millions of albums, is what makes an album special. The Blueprint is commonly referred to as a cigar-chomping, indolent victory lap. That's partly true, but it discounts a lot of the circumstances under which it was released. Yes, it came out on September 11, 2001, but more important to the text itself is the fact that Jay had a third-degree assault rap hanging over his head the whole time he was recording. Yes, the middle-aged dude who has Barry Obama on his speed-dial (or whatever Jay uses that's more expensive than speed-dial) also probably stabbed a guy less than a decade ago. Anyway, rather than creating a portentuous, grave collection of meditative songs, Jay instead boasted stuff like, "Cops wanna knock me, D.A. wanna box me in/But somehow, I beat them charges like Rocky." Or maybe "charges don't stick to dude/He's like Teflon." Rather than seeming vulnerable, Jay just made himself bigger, more dangerous, more untouchable. Bragging about beating assault charges before you actually beat them is one of the more hip-hop things ever. He has nothing to lose even though he has everything to lose. Again, Jay knows himself well enough to see that the cocky, assured guy who doesn't seem to care always comes off as more powerful than the guy who obviously does care. (See Bush, George W. versus Gore, Al, 2o00.)

It's a bit unfair to compare Jay's records to anyone else's during this period in rap because he was simply working with a bigger canvas. Just as Spielberg makes great films because he can have any script he wants and get any financing he wants, Jay's all-encompassing fame and charisma draw the resources that separate him from the rest of the pack. "Yeah, Guru, throw in that Gladiator sample." Why not? The fact that no one else can even afford to clear samples anymore, let alone have great ones, gives him a leg up no homo. (Or "pause," as he pretty much invented on "Never Change.")

"This column's all over the place, nephew. And yeah, I do endorse HP. Don't give a fuck. You just finished writing about that."

That production, ranging from the menacing throb of The Doors on "Takeover" to the irrefutable poise of Bobby Bland on "Heart of the City," is the hallmark of the album, and it kind of threw hip-hop into a repetitive hole for the next few years. With the trend it started though, you forget how powerful the samples are in this context. While they are supposed to recall the records playing in the ether of Jay's childhood--literally, the blueprint of his musical taste--they're updated with an unmistakably contemporary vitality. That sound's immediacy, as well as some of the samples' almost purposeful imperfection, reminds you that the bulk of the record was written and recorded in two days.

But if The Blueprint is powered by the threat that Jay will never stop, The Black Album is powered by the uneasy promise that he will. It's there that he takes his time and money and crafts what amounts to way more of a competent personal statement than we could have expected.

Rather than mixing the hard-core with the commercial as he did on The Blueprint, Jay trades the personal with the universal on his fourth masterpiece. (It's no coincidence that he compares himself to The Beatles on it.) For example, Rick Rubin's kinetic monster of a beat on "99 Problems" is bombastic enough to open Tony Scott flicks, but if you examine the lyrics, it's just a sarcastic retelling of something that happened to Jay in his twenties. This is an intimate and sometimes bitter reflection hidden inside of candy wrappers. (Again, he couldn't have reached this balance without a stable of musicians just as talented as he is.) It's so autumnal, in fact, that I can remember walking around my mom's neighborhood for an hour, listening to this over the crunch of my heavy feet on leaves. I ignored my phone because I didn't want to interrupt the man, and I circled the same blocks watching my own breath until he was finished.

Clearly, this is grown man's music, but it's rarely stodgy. (Only on "Change Clothes," which still sucks.) Jay isn't content to water down the lyrics just because he can get by on the rich content of the songs. On the contrary, some of these verses present lyrics as twisty and clever as anything on Reasonable Doubt. An offering like, "I was conceived by Gloria Carter and Adnes Reeves, who made love under the sycamore tree/Which makes me a more sicker MC, and my mama would claim/At ten pounds when I was born I didn't give her no pain" isn't a return to form: it's a reinvention of form. The internal rhyme and caesura are technically perfect, but this whole image of a baby being conceived among nature and then born under atypical circumstances is myth-making of the classical variety. If it didn't happen in Brooklyn, it could have happened in Ancient Greece. Other rappers say they're special; Jay-Z makes you believe it.

Jay's contributions to hip-hop haven't been completely positive. For example, his insistence that he doesn't write rhymes down in advance has reinforced the belief that rap music is one of only spontaneity and born-that-way genius. Ironically then, his best work is reflective and emblematic of hard work. On these albums he takes a step back and evaluates his own place in history, which makes them historically great. The Blueprint is an epic proclamation of its own importance. The Black Album stands as a polished, penetrating threat that he can take it all away. But the element tying them together is that he and his collaborators pulled out all the stops, and, unlike the workman-like quality of hip-hop at the time, they treated the work as an opportunity they might never have again.

The Indispensable Tyler Hansbrough

ChristopherBowes@gmail.com (Christopher Bowes) — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 14:26:00 +0000

Tyler Hansbrough couldn't believe Righteous Kill wasn't good. I mean, it had DeNiro and Pacino, right?

When Tyler Hansbrough calls in to a radio show, the host has to tell him to turn his radio down.

If you say something on the obvious side, Tyler Hansbrough will reply, "Gee, ya think?"

Tyler Hansbrough makes jokes about Al Gore inventing the Internet.

Tyler Hansbrough's final pick in his fantasy draft was Ahman Green.

Tyler Hansbrough wears vests.

Tyler Hansbrough plays a lot of Trivial Pursuit with friends. He always wins because, one card at at time, he memorizes all of the answers when no one else is around.

Tyler Hansbrough's second favorite album is Third Eye Blind's self-titled debut.

Tyler Hansbrough pretends to not know what Twitter is. Tw--what is it, tweets?

#15 Film of the Decade- Sideways

ChristopherBowes@gmail.com (Christopher Bowes) — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 01:42:00 +0000

15. Sideways- Alexander Payne (2004)

This post isn't really about Sideways. I re-watched it this weekend and found it just as bittersweet and honest and unassumingly profound as I remembered it. While it follows the same unscrupulous, pig-headed, broken characters as Payne's other work, there's an intimacy to this film that makes it heartbreaking. Mostly because Payne and his co-writer Jim Taylor allow us to get closer to the characters than ever before. These are dynamic characters, whereas their previous pictures, no matter how biting they were, were always populated by types in service of a theme. It's their most grown-up film, not because it's about wine and mid-life crisis romantic fight-or-flight, but because it's roomy with lived-in charm and rich with characterization. If it's not a fortysomething, erudite Fight Club, with its own second-guessing protagonist and Dionysian sidekick, it's at least a post-grad Swingers.

This is not about that.

No, something else occurred to me as I watched the film in a twenty-four hour period that included activities such as:
1. a fantasy football draft
2. a "Mad Men" viewing
3. playing Super Columbine Massacre RPG for sociological reasons
4. listening to a story of my wife's that involved a group of Black teachers talking for forty-five minutes about TV shows she had never heard of.

Not that there aren't any brothers out there into oenophilic cinema, but I'm really White.

I think about race a lot, so I've confronted my own White privilege before. An understanding of your own relationship with race is an ongoing process that I don't think we ever conclude. A mature adult doesn't just wake up and "overcome" all of his prejudices and experiences; the best you can do is acknowledge that it's a complicated issue you need to be honest and educated about. Even though I try to do that, I've slowly socialized myself as White in pretty much everything I do. And subconsciously, I probably stay clued in to rap and basketball to overcompensate for this.

One of the products of this decade has been an ever-broadening diversity of entertainment (as well as diversity of consumption of entertainment). When my parents were my age, there was--just by pure volume--less entertainment. No Internet, no cable TV, no independent films, and fewer outlets for independent music. Therefore, everyone across all demographics watched Star Wars. Everyone listened to the Doobie Brothers (word to "What's Happening!"). Of course there were racial preferences in art and entertainment, but there was a lot more common ground. Art and popular culture used to unite people; now I'm afraid it's driving us apart. Because all of these avenues have become more specialized, our own experiences with culture are narrowing.

For example, imagine there's a man who writes, produces, directs, and stars in his own films each year. And those films open to at least $20 million every time. How obsessed would I be with his independent spirit, his control over his own projects, his knowledge of what his audience wants? How much would I write about him and analyze his work?

But hey. Obviously.

This isn't theoretical. The man's name is Tyler Perry. And though I consider myself a part-time film expert, I haven't seen a single one of his movies. Most mainstream (White) critics have criticized his work for being "all over the place" and comedically exploitative, and fans of the movies (Black) don't have taste similar enough to mine. They're movies made by and for Black people, so I wouldn't understand, right? If I watched one just so that I could engage in dialogue with Black people about it, wouldn't that be kind of pandering and pathetic? (And by using the word "pandering" there, am I assuming an air of superiority over those films' viewers?) Certainly being Black is more than watching Tyler Perry movies, and it's even racist to believe watching one could somehow illuminate the African-American Experience for me. There's more to it to say the least.

But do you notice the difference in curiosity? I'm willing to log hours of research for an imaginary football league, hunt down a self-released role-playing PC game for its cultural significance, and put up with a show that, honestly, has been frustratingly slow this season. But I can't try Madea Goes to Jail? I certainly have the means to do so, whether it's through Netflix (White) or Redbox (Black). I guess in my old age I'm getting settled in. Like Paul Giamatti's sad-sack character in Sideways, I'm growing more narrow-minded by the day (White/Black).

"Forever": The Rap State of the Union

ChristopherBowes@gmail.com (Christopher Bowes) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 02:19:00 +0000

"Forever"- Drake feat. Kanye West, Lil' Wayne, and Eminem [image exclusive to Nah Right]

Hopefully, even after the disappointment of "Swagger Like Us," we can have one of these epic posse cuts a year. They seem to reinvigorate the hip-hop world overnight. Although the song isn't perfect, I know I'm excited. A few points:

1. So Far Gone is probably my favorite record of the year so far, even though I'll fully admit that Drake's flow is limited. His secret, which he really taps into on "Forever," is that he says the same exact shit as everyone else, except he does it in a wistful tone. He laments "shuttin' shit down in the mall" instead of celebrating it. Add in the interesting angle that he sings whenever that seems like the more logical thing to do, kind of like an ugly Lauryn Hill, and he's carved a great niche for himself. By now we know exactly what to expect from a Drake verse, and he delivers it every time with effortless punch-lines and the occasional charmingly middle-class reference. In the same flow every time. But really, I like the guy. He's consistent as long as the song isn't over 100 beats per minute, and that's fine. It worked for Snoop Dogg in '92, and we've probably cycled back to that.

Less ugly Lauryn Hill. More Vincent Chase and Johnny Drama mixed together.

2. Were the sirens necessary?

3. People are glossing over the fact that this is the lead single for the LeBron James documentary More Than a Game. Bron Bron is secretly at the center of all of this. It's like all those Lost Generation stories where something crazy happens, like Evelyn Waugh gives Fitzgerald the idea for the title of Tender Is the Night or something, and then the footnote casually mentions, "Oh yeah, they were having drinks on Ernest Hemingway's boat." Really? It's all happening? LeBron is Hemingway's boat. And stuff.

4. The best thing to happen to Kanye's rapping was taking some time off. He's done a million guest spots in the past six months, and almost every one can stand next to his best work. I kind of like his "you can have the game back" threats as long as he doesn't actually take us up on them. How could he have never used the "He ain't even go to class...Bueller" line before this? It's almost as good as his McLovin line is bad. His verse is probably my favorite, but I'll move on in the interest of not stepping on my Best of the Decade column for him.

5. This is almost a parody of a Lil' Wayne verse. Reference to martianism? Check. '80s baby nod? Check--Space Jam Jordans. Rhyming things that don't rhyme? Check--garden, harvest, Orleans. Untethered 504 shout-out? Check. Really obvious simile that adds nothing? Check--"like Nevada in the summer." You mean we don't get a mention of how pink his Sprite is? He even sounds bored stringing this stuff together. He never shows up for big moments like this.

6. In Eminem's verse, which is satisfying but a bit overrated by commenters--humorless and empty but technically sound--he spits, "I'm Hannibal Lecter so just in case you're thinking of saving face/You ain't gonna have no face to save by the time I'm through with this place so Drake..." At first, I heard that as "I'm Hannibal Lecter so just in case you're thinking of "Saving Grace". I assumed Em thought Jodie Foster and Holly Hunter were the same person, which I found hilarious because I've always thought they have the exact same (goofy) voice.

"Missshhhhhtaahhhh Lecterrrrr."

It's no coincidence that she won an Oscar for the movie she doesn't talk in.

That't not what he said though. Making connections like that is pretty much why I love rap music. I'd say it's alive and well.

#37 Song of the Decade- "Distortions"

ChristopherBowes@gmail.com (Christopher Bowes) — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 23:38:00 +0000

#37- Clinic- "Distortions"

Internal Wrangler, the 2000 debut of Liverpool four-piece Clinic, is an accomplished album, but it lacks identity as a whole. The band shifts between moods like a petulant child, and songs are over before they really even make an impression. The songwriting tends to hide behind characters like Evil Bill and C.Q., even though those characters don't have much organic payoff. Originally, Clinic's gimmick was that all four members wore surgical masks on stage; sometimes it sounds as if they follow suit in their music. It's a bit antiseptic and anonymous.

So it comes as that much more of a surprise when a song as emotionally bare as "Distortions" shows up buried as track nine. On a pretty polyphonic album, it's the first time things scale back, the only accompaniment being a drum machine and a Philips Philicorda, one of the '60s transistor keyboards the band experimented with. While the reverb on the keys' sustained chords is haunting, they're nothing when compared with Ade Blackburn's delicate vocal.

The song's speaker is at the crossroads of a relationship. He explains: "It's eerie and so scary/I don't know who to marry/Your sister came to bait me." Most singers wouldn't get away with selling those lines as anything other than treacly emo pablum. Blackburn--partly because he sounds as if the mic is really far away from him--performs them with a willowy, disaffected whisper. This is a song about the need for resolution, but he purrs every line as if he's afraid of answers he might get.

Every guy has said of women: "You can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em," and it's a cliche for a reason. Loving someone isn't easy. It's parasitic. A part of you is gone when you commit yourself to someone else, and it's an idea that's never adequately expressed in pop music. This song comes close because it creates a space in which the line "I've pictured you in coffins" still sounds romantic. That conflicted set of emotions is basically what the song is about, and it's achieved almost completely through the understated vocals.

However, no discussion of "Distortions" would be complete without mentioning "I love it when you blink your eyes," which is the best line this side of Lil' Wayne. On the surface, it expresses the speaker's happiness that his lover is alive, that she's blinking her eyes at all. But it's simultaneously the most specific and general detail possible. Blinking your eyes is something we all do, so it stands in for every little quirk you could like about someone. At the same time though, if you remember the way someone blinks her eyes--an action we see hundreds of times a day but normally disregard--that's a very personal detail. It's the most meaningful songwriting shrug I've ever heard. (Well, maybe not. I listen to a lot of Bob Dylan.)

By the last third, the song's tempo builds, but it doesn't matter much. If we're anything like the speaker of the song, we still have our backs firmly against the wall.

Brett Favre Finally Meets Tavaris Jackson, as Told by JD Salinger

ChristopherBowes@gmail.com (Christopher Bowes) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 02:14:00 +0000

It's an honor for TANBR to present JD Salinger's account of today's events:

"A monk asked Dongshan Shouchu, 'What is Buddha?' Dongshan said, 'Three pounds of flax.'"
- a Zen Koan

It was a little after three o'clock on an Indian summer afternoon in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. For three straight Tuesdays, Tavaris Jackson, a tawny, humorless man of twenty-six, had been pacing up and down the picaresque field with fifty-three other bulky footballers, all of whom he considered drips. He lit a cigarette as he approached one of the more distinguishable drips, Sage Rosenfels of the Iowa Rosenfels, lately of the Houston Texans and Miami Dolphins.

"Goddamn it," he said. "Where is he? Didn't they say he would be here by now?"

Rosenfels said that he didn't know, although he had heard similar information about their expectant guest the night before. He had sat by the phone all day, even stretching the cord underneath the bathroom door for his evening soak. He told Tavaris to take it easy, that, after all, they had waited this long. "Jesus," he told Tavaris. "Look--he's probably in a cab by now on his way down here. The thing is--what do you care anyway? All it means is that you're out of a job, for chrissakes."

"Forget it. Forget it, now. Pretend I didn't say it." Tavaris stomped his cigarette out on the fifty-yard line.

"Oh, now you want me to forget it. Why did you ask in the first place then?"

It was then that Favre, the man they were expecting, made his appearance. He was clutching a football in his rough (but slender) hands with a certain esprit de corps, and he was followed by Seymour Glass of New York's Glass family, who had recently become his advisor in what Favre called "all issues related to spiritual advancement."

Tavaris began to compose a letter to his own analyst in his head. He--without noticing--shot Favre a desultory glance. "Nice to finally meet you guys. Real nice," Favre said in a tone that returned Tavaris's cold, but not ice-cold, attitude. He took a gulp from his highball and turned up the collar on his camel's-hair coat. (He had bought it the previous winter at Lord & Taylor's on sale.)

Ladies and gentlemen, the most Brett Favre picture of all time. I would do the whole thing in which I act as if this is the picture for the word in a dictionary, but I'm not sure what part of speech "Brett Favre" is. For a lot of people, it's become an interjection.

With no wherewithal for such niceties, and with sizable resentment for the fact that Favre was earning a salary of twelve million a year, Tavaris said, "Hey--I'm not saying that I'm mad at you exactly. I'm not exactly mad. But I want to be upfront--can I be upfront with you?"

Favre said yes. He looked at Seymour and then at his watch, mindful that he was running late for his theatre date.

"I was told," Tavaris said with his arms akimbo, "That I could compete for the starting job. Now granted, this was months ago, but still. That's what I was told. And now you come in here and I'll be lucky if I get a damned snap."

Favre ran his hands through his hair. "Jesus, don't be such a snob. You're acting like a snob, Tavaris. Honestly. You sound terrible, really terrible." He turned his back to the wind. "It's not like I gave your girl the time. I'm just here to do my job for God's sake. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not the most gregarious person in the city, but you're being downright standoffish."

Tavaris tucked in his T shirt and extended his hand to the competition reluctantly. "My apologies," he said. "I'm being silly. I wish--you know what? Best of luck to you. Welcome aboard as they say. Now if you don't mind, I really need to make some phone calls."

Then Tavaris went over and sat down on the unoccupied bench, looked at Favre, aimed his pistol, and fired a bullet through his right temple.

Thanks again, Mr. Salinger.

Who Decides the Hot 100?

ChristopherBowes@gmail.com (Christopher Bowes) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 02:56:00 +0000

The Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling" is the number one song in the country, according to Billboard's Hot 100 chart. Before that single climbed to the top of the charts, their hyper-literate treatise "Boom Boom Pow" occupied the spot. With the songs combined, the group has been at number one for seventeen weeks, which is the longest since Boyz II Men was king of the hill in the mid-'90s.

This post isn't Black Eyed Peas snark. There's enough of that to go around. Instead, I think it's worth analyzing what this chart means in the 21st century, if anything. Certainly top 40 popular music is as important a part of our zeitgeist as anything else, even in a period of such diverging musical options.

Still though, I think the cachet of having "the number one song in the country," as touted by Casey Kasem or yelled as you're being chased down the street by screaming girls, is pretty much gone. For one thing, with the current setup of the music industy, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're making any money. And with the generation gap widening every day--trust me, I work with conservative people in their fifties--it doesn't have the cultural recognition it used to have either. Hell, Drake has the number two song in the country, and he isn't even signed to a major label.

At least there's an attempt for the chart to accurately represent things like popularity though. At its earliest, this same chart was tabulated by, literally, how many times songs were played on jukeboxes across the country. You don't think any of those numbers were rigged? Even in the '90s, before the advent of SoundScan, this stuff was largely a guessing game.

So how are the Hot 100 decided? On their website Billboard explains that the chart is: "The week's most popular songs across all genres, ranked by radio airplay audience impressions as measured by Nielsen BDS, sales data as compiled by Nielsen SoundScan and streaming actitvity data provided by online music sources."

Has Nielsen ever called you and asked you if you like particular songs on the radio? How do they decide who to call? If it were a random sampling of listeners, something tells me we might have acts more interesting than Black Eyed Peas, or at least something more interesting further down the list. Furthermore, what if the person called just says, "Yeah, I like all of those songs." How does the company arrive at a ranking from this?

Or does "radio airplay audience impressions" mean on-air requests? If that's the case, when is the last time you ever called a radio station on the telephone to request something? It was fifth grade for me, and even then it was a prank call. I called B97 as a stoned hippie and requested Jimi Hendrix. This system is only slightly less antiquated than that joke.

Billboard's top music of 2008 by genre. Good thing there's no overlap in any of those categories. Plus, I examine stuff like this all day and have no idea what "post-grunge" is. Any rock music that has come out since Nirvana?

Note that "sales data" is not digital download sales. Thankfully, a year-and-a-half ago, Billboard finally came up with a separate ranking for that, but they had ignored it until then. So sales of what? CD singles, which don't even exist anymore? MiniDiscs? ZipDisks and Jazz Drives?

The data from streaming sites might be the most helpful because it is the truest representation of which songs people want to hear if all other factors are equal. Still, this is a weird mixture of people. People who use streaming sites are--and I'm generalizing but not really--a) computer-illiterate or honest enough to not illegally download, b) too poor to buy music, or c) bored at an unimportant job that requires a public/community computer. This is the sub-set of people who direct the music industry? No wonder it's going under. The only group it seems to benefit is the Black Eyed Peas, which means the world is losing.

The Hot 100 might be ageist, because older people don't call into top 40 radio stations or even listen to them. It's probably outdated because no one buys physical singles anymore. And it's definitely inaccurate because of the confusing audience that ranks the songs. Maybe the Hot 100 isn't important anymore for a reason.

#32 Film of the Decade- The Barbarian Invasions

ChristopherBowes@gmail.com (Christopher Bowes) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 02:49:00 +0000

#32- The Barbarian Invasions- Denys Arcand (2003)

Netflix's pithy description of The Barbarian Invasions reads: "In this Oscar-winning drama, fifty-ish Remy (Remy Girard) is divorced and hospitalized in Montreal. His ex-wife, Louise, asks their estranged son, Sebastien, to come home from London (where he now lives) as a show of support for his father. As soon as he arrives, Sebastien makes the impossible happen, using his contacts and disrupting the health care system in every way possible."

While it's technically accurate, that summary--especially the wacky "makes the impossible happen...in every way possible" cliche--is superficial. And for once, almost accidentally, that superficial stance is an interesting way to approach this film. In many ways Denys Arcand's sequel to his Decline of the American Empire is about the surface level of our lives. Sebastien, played with oleaginous aplomb by Stephane Rousseau, begins using his contacts out of resentment. What's a few Canadian bucks for a private hospital floor if it means he can stick it to his absent philandering pop? That bribe is a bigger favor than Remy has ever done for his son.

At a certain point though, Sebastien's arrangements take on a different air. Finding a heroin dealer because the hospital only dispenses morphine seems dangerous for someone so uncaring. What begins as a game of bravado becomes devotion. Arcand seems to ask, "What is the difference between the superficial and the heartfelt?" And, more importantly, "Does that division matter?"

For example, Remy, a history professor, is upset by his students' cold non-reaction to his health problems. He is surprised when, months later, they visit him at the hospital and explain how much they miss him. It's a heartwarming moment; we learn that people care more about us than they sometimes let on. Then, in the next scene, we find out that Sebastien paid them to be there. Does that reveal make the emotions of the preceding moment more false? Sebastien's tactics still touched Remy, even if they were under-handed. Does it matter how directly sincere intentions are if they still get the desired effect?

Arcand layers a motif of boundaries throughout the movie to externalize this idea. Girard performs a thoughtful monologue about the many women he's been with, both "real" and--as clips of celebrities play over his narration--imaginary. The characters move back and forth between the U.S. and Canada, and sometimes the characters slip between English and French, playing with boundaries of language as well. (It's worth mentioning that this is Arcand's return to the French language after a ten-year absence. The choice of language is completely intentional.) The film's title refers to the 9/11 attacks, the first time terrorists--barbarians--attacked the U.S. on its own soil, a time when many people were sorting out some of these complex divisions of what is important and what is real for the first time.

In Arcand's script, which won Best Screenplay honors at Cannes, he ends up extending this idea to forgiveness. How long should you hold grudges, if at all? When does the past no longer matter? The characters don't change suddenly in this movie, and the way they convincingly let superficial boundaries disintegrate into more meaningful connections is handled in a way I've never seen before.

The Barbarian Invasions is a film about death, but it ends up being inspirational, joyous, life-affirming--anything but superficial.

TANBR Turns Three

ChristopherBowes@gmail.com (Christopher Bowes) — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 20:09:00 +0000

Explosions in the Sky- "The Birth and Death of the Day"

Today, August 8, is the third anniversary of This Ain't No Bank Robbery. Last year P.T., Jelly, and I celebrated throughout the course of the day. This year we're a little more busy, and I'm not in the mood anyway. I've been working through a little depression lately, and dwelling on the time I've spent on my unsuccessful blog does not feel like the solution.

Thank all of you for reading. I work hard on this and make no money from it, so any feedback I get keeps me going. I know I over-write, but I think I've improved over time, and I appreciate having an outlet to muse about all of this stuff.

I'm going to continue with the lists until the end of the year and/or until I finish them. After that, we'll see where this goes. Here are some greatest hits from the past year. Thanks again.

"#19 and #22 and #40 Albums of the Decade- Animal Collective"
"R.I.P. Michael Jackson"
"TANBR NBA Draft Liveblog"
"#6 Song of the Decade- 'John Wayne Gacy, Jr.'"
"If NFL Front Offices Were Fourth Graders Trading Football Cards at Lunch"
"The Lil' Wayne Book Proposal"
"P.T. and Chris Attend the Basketball Hall of Fame"
"Why Do We Hate Tim Tebow?"
"Why I'm a Republican"
"Welcome to Heartbreak"
"Quarterback Controversies of the Future"

Better Pacing through Chemistry

ChristopherBowes@gmail.com (Christopher Bowes) — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 20:08:00 +0000

This decade, as I've chronicled in running features, has seen lots of memorable films, sporting events, music, etc. But what I haven't done enough is interpret the wholesale effects that media has had on society. One reason is that a lot of those attitudes can't be calculated yet. And how far does the arm of media reach? By only using entertainment to make sense of people, I'm being hopelessly limited. It might be helpful to look at cause-and-effect in the past ten years, to work backwards. I asked myself, "What's a difference in the way people act today versus how they acted ten years ago?" One thing that jumped out was that people seem more honest with each other, and one reason I thought for that was drugs.

The miracle anti-depressants Prozac and Zoloft became more readily available in the '90s, but it wasn't until the '00s that they and other pharmaceuticals like Paxil became widely accepted. And it wasn't until this decade that erectile dysfunction drugs, such as Viagra and Cialis, were approved for use. In an age of instant gratification, there seemed to be a treatment for any problem, even those that seemed most natural.

Because of the widespread avilability of these drugs, as well as the ubiquitous ads for them (every one of which is a government tax write-off), we as a culture are more open with each other about our deficiencies. Some people, like the parents who have to explain what an erection is to an eight-year-old, are nervous about this development. For that matter, patients are misdiagnosed and over-served with these drugs. But don't the ends justify the means?

For example, imagine a man admitting to another that he has E.D. ten years ago. It didn't happen. It was an emasculating condition. Now such confessions are a joke: "Better pop a few extra Viagra tonight."

The downside? Listening to hundreds of "if it lasts four hours..." jokes.

Since there are apparent treatments for every malady, we speak up about our own frailties. You hear people say, "Everybody's on something" or "everybody's got something wrong with him." Instead of something like clinical depression being the taboo it was in the 1960s, we now see it as the slight weakness of a healthier whole. The drug boom of the aughts has not made us perfect--it might not have even cured us--but it has made us more realistic. I mean, nobody's perfect, right?

#43 Song of the Decade- "International Players Anthem (I Choose You)"

ChristopherBowes@gmail.com (Christopher Bowes) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 02:55:00 +0000

43. UGK feat. Outkast- "International Players Anthem (I Choose You)"

Q: What is the appropriate sum of money to "fuck with" in the club?

A:
a) a couple stacks
b) $328.65
c) forty dollars
d) n/a- Carrying cash is foolish in our wintry economic climate. Start a tab with a credit card, preferably one that offers reward points and high-yield interest.

According to Port Arthur poet laureate Pimp C, if you chose (c), you're trash. It doesn't matter what type of club it is, what your circumstances are, or whether or not you drink. Unconditionally, you're trash, and/or "you gets no love." I have my problems with UGK, but this line sticks with me more than any other one in the song.

This is a track that opens with a jaunty, enjambed verse from a really smart rapper, but it doesn't take off until Pimp C explains something completely inane and superficial with more conviction than I've ever explained anything in my life. In a way, that one quality is what made UGK vital.

I smile whenever I hear the sunshine of the Willie Hutch sample, I relate to Andre 3000's fear of commitment, and I relish Big Boi's honesty when he tells me to "ask Paul McCartney" about women's scorn. But none of that makes me want to visit the ATM before I go out.

Rap's critics worry about the influence the music has on our nation's youth, and rap critics insist that the music's audience is above that influence. Surely, I insist, we're not easily persuaded by such silliness.

And every time I do that, I'm checking the forty-five dollars in my pocket and lying through my teeth.

Jay Cutler Talks Fantasy Football...Kind of

ChristopherBowes@gmail.com (Christopher Bowes) — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 18:14:00 +0000

What's the story, nerds? It's Cutty-buddy here, talkin' fantasy football. Here's who your first pick should be:

1. Jay Motherfucking Cutler

Harper Lee up in this bitch, 'cuz that's all she wrote. (What? I'm white. I went to college.) You can just box up your chicken strips and peace out that bitch. Auto-draft the rest of your picks 'cuz you don't need 'em anyways. Oh, you don't have first pick? No prob, Bob. Just cut up a bunch of pieces of paper, write "Jay Cutler" on all of 'em, throw 'em in a visor, and pull any of 'em out. Bam, like Emeril Lagasse. First pick. Don't worry. It works.

In the time I've saved not doing fantasy football research, I've been doing some other shit. I hired Devin Hester, who's totes my numero one wingman--we got bracelets--to create a bunch of fake leagues online and fake draft me number one in all of 'em. To pull up the overall numbers.

And to make sure my arm can cash all the checks my ass is writin' out, I been slingin' that shit all day long. Gotta keep that gun polished. I used to just pump irons with my right hand no fag to make it stronger. But Matt Cassell's probably even doing that. I gotta take it to the next echelon.

Here's what I did. I know a lot of young moms, and they always joke about how the arm they hold their baby in gets a bunch stronger than the other one. I can't get pregnant even if that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie is awesome, so nine months ago I knocked up a bunch of bitches. Right about now them ovens are about to ding, and I'm gonna be curling babies 'til the Devin Hesters come home. I hope babies can be on sailboats.

Speaking of the great outdoors, see that Cutler-made lake in the picture at the top? I froze it so that I could make my pad more like Chicago. Then I drilled a hole into it and swam down into that shit. I've been slingin' that pigskin underwater to make my arm stronger. It works. Don't worry. Only thing that sucks about it is that I can't hear my Jimmy Buffett CDs no matter how loud I play 'em.

I have to go barbecue some steaks. But don't worry. I'm only flippin' with my right hand. Cutler out.

#19 and #22 and #40 Albums of the Decade- Animal Collective

ChristopherBowes@gmail.com (Christopher Bowes) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 05:04:00 +0000

#19- Animal Collective- Sung Tongs (2004)

Animal Collective- "Leaf House"

#22- Animal Collective- Strawberry Jam (2007)

Animal Collective- "Peacebone"

#40- Animal Collective- Merriweather Post Pavillion (2009)

In the fall of 2004 I lost everything on my computer's hard drive, including thousands of mp3s, many of which were even acquired legally. I was left with the few programs and documents I had the foresight to back up and Animal Collective's Sung Tongs on CD. In a literal and figurative sense, at least until I could get to my physical collection at my parents' house, my identity as a music listener was rebuilt by the band.

It was weird music to listen to for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It's weird music for any time. But as a sophomore in college, it made sense, especially because I was taking Postmodern Literary Theory, and the quartet of Avey Tare, Panda Bear, Geologist, and Deakin lined up with one of the discipline's central tenets: that which is most profound is often that which is indescribable. Words can't do us justice.

Jacques Lacan is probably the most important contributor to postmodern thought, and I read a lot of his wackiness. Jacques Derrida is important, but even his biggest fans can't explain some of his stuff. (Dude obfuscated his writing on purpose. It was part of the point.) Roland Barthes is important, but I haven't read his work and choose to ignore his influence.

Anyway, Lacan frequently returned to the concept of "erasing with a pen." What he means is that ideas are never as pure and clear when we speak them as they were in our heads. Words are certainly the best we've got to communicate with, but they're a necessary evil, a fecund compromise. The minute you condense your thoughts into speech or writing, you corrupt them to a certain degree. Sure, you need to voice your ideas so that other people can share them, but will those people ever experience them in the same way you did? No. We're trapped in the silent island of our mind, and even the best writer isn't telepathic. (It's no coincidence that Lacan didn't write any of his teachings down. They're translated from lectures.)

Because of this harsh reality, Lacan believed we are at our most intellectually advanced and untainted when we are infants, before we acquire language to contradict ourselves but after we are sentient. This period of time is referred to as the Mirror Stage, the time when we achieve self-awareness--literally the instant when you realize that the person looking at you in a mirror is, oddly enough, you. If people understood this stuff, the Kathleen Turner-Christopher Lloyd vehicle Baby Geniuses would have been a much bigger hit.

Lacan actually created an algebraic equation for our understanding of the phallus: something like (objet petit a - fear of castration)/--I think this is when I started drinking. No homo on devising a phallus equation.

Animal Collective, especially when I was writing papers about this stuff in my dorm room, sounded pre-verbal. Lacan would have loved them. No matter how rock writers attempt to describe them, any capsule review of an A.C. record feels inadequate. They're the fucking hipster jouissance.

Yes, their music obviously has influences, but it's impossible to pin those down. Because of the experimental components, The Incredible String Band gets name-checked. And the cut-and-paste aesthetic owes a bit to Mercury Rev. Because they've worked with Vashti Bunyan, people affix the ghastly "freak-folk" tag to them. A lot of that freak-folk stuff dovetails with psychedlia and they broke in early-aughts Brooklyn so there're some noise-rock elements and they're from Baltimore so we can add a bit of that region's dance traditions.

As a whole though, does "Peacebone" sound like anything else in the world? Their music is informed by the spaces in between each of those styles. It's a translation of the best parts of each into a dizzying mix of campfire tribalism. They sound like they can't see anyone else in the mirror, let alone themselves. This fatherless style is either a completely un-conscious happy accident, or Animal Collective is the most manipulative, self-aware group in the world. And maybe they're both. I warned you this would get postmodern.

I wouldn't deny that A.C. is an experimental outfit. They are ignoring trends and tradition in a stab at transcendence. But most people associate "experimentalism" with cold tactitians, and the music is also unavoidably emotional. Ambient drones and broken guitars and the more strident shouty parts of Strawberry Jam would suggest otherwise, but there's a lot about these records that is as warm and cozy as it is cathartic. The lyrics, especially when Panda Bear's writing matures on the latter albums, always focus on a return to innocence, a desire for simplicity. For instance, the refrain of Merriweather Post Pavillion's "My Girls" goes:

"I don't mean
To seem like I care about material things
Like your social status
I just want
Four walls and adobe slats for my girls"

You wouldn't guess that such reactionary and distinctly paternal lyrics would be represented by a bank of claustrophobic loops. And that's their most accessible song. Their unique qualities spring from this uneasy marriage of idea and execution. Animal Collective is enamored of the past, but they sound like the future.

They're still laughing about the phallus equation. I have a note here that says "Panda Bear and Avey Tare are Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood if both of those guys were Jonny Greenwood." I can't fit it in anywhere, so I'm sticking it here. No one is still reading by this point anyway.

That thesis is what grants them their transcendence and makes them one of the only truly transporting acts we have. As intimate as some of their lyrics are, A.C.'s music is grand and explorative, having no problem with expanding to twelve- or thirteen-minute suites or jamming all of the movements of such suites into a shorter song like "For Reverend Green." The music has no borders, and they transfer their own tangible rootlessness to the listener's figurative rootlessness.

Finally, since I'm assessing three albums at the same time here, it's worth discussing the evolution of the band. While that other A.C., accelerated culture, has changed music distribution fundamentally, not enough people ask how it changes music creation. In the six years these records cover (including Feels, a sensational 2005 effort that just missed the cut) a development from rambunctious duo perfecting their acoustic cackling and silky harmonies to a four-piece in complete control of a variety of electronic accoutrements and refined melodies. They've evolved the way all great bands have, but they've done it in a fraction of the time. In this decade, bands go through their artistic movements and periods at an accelerated rate too.

Animal Collective is of this time, but they aren't from it. And that sentence doesn't sound as good as it did in my head.

Media Roundup on That Recently-Leaked Controversial Video

ChristopherBowes@gmail.com (Christopher Bowes) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:50:00 +0000

"[LeBron] has been grievously wronged here. Our people and resources are in full support of [him] as [he] deals with this abhorrent act."

“[He’s] shaken and kind of paranoid,” the source said. “Everyone is very nurturing to [him]- which [he] appreciates- but you can tell the whole thing has devastated [him]. It’s all so reprehensible.”

"No, the reason the video has gained such traction, and the reason everyone is so upset — and I can assure you, I've yet to talk to a single person, blogger, blog reader, ESPN employee, sideline reporter, upright walking normal human being, who wasn't profoundly disturbed by this — is because we all felt somewhat complicit with [James]. Everyone felt like they knew [him]. They didn't, of course. But everyone with an interest in the world of sports was present for [his] rise."

"[He] was the victim of a crime and is taking action to protect [himself] and help ensure that others are not similarly violated in the future. Although the perpetrator or perpetrators of this criminal act have not yet been identified, when they are identified [he] intends to bring both civil and criminal charges against them and against anyone who has published the material. We request respect of [LeBron's] privacy at this time, while [he] and [his] representatives are working with the authorities."

"But. I have never met [LeBron James]. If I ran into [him] on the street today ... I'm not sure I could look [him] in the eye. I'm not sure anybody could."

#5 Film of the Decade- Traffic

ChristopherBowes@gmail.com (Christopher Bowes) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 04:59:00 +0000

5. Traffic- Steven Soderbergh (2000)

Most successful filmmakers have a through-line, a theme--an obsession even--that appears again and again in their work. Woody Allen is obsessed with New York obviously. Werner Herzog is preoccupied with nature. Off the top of my head, I can name ten Steven Spielberg films featuring divorced parents. That's just what artists do. They have interests and attractions that inform and underline their experiments. That theme for Steven Soderbergh--pretty much the only thing linking his films--is experimentation itself. He seems addicted to taking risks, and Traffic was no exception.

After he, you know, pretty much created the '90s independent film movement with sex, lies, and videotape at twenty-six, Soderbergh could have gotten hundreds of millions of dollars for any studio movie he wanted. Instead he eschewed studios altogether for a black-and-white movie about Franz Kafka. And after a few more indies, he could have stayed that course as the guy who never messed up his big shot by never taking it. Instead he branched out Orson Welles-style with a one-for-me, one-for-them track: Schizopolis for me, Out of Sight for them, The Limey for me, Erin Brockovich for them. This brings us to Traffic in 2000, which is his signature film because it combines all of these outlooks. Everyone wins.

The movie was a hit but, looking back on it, it's a bit of a tough sell. Under the murky, no-easy-answers umbrella of the war on drugs, the film covers three plot-lines and perspectives that take place in nine cities, each story with its own visual palette. There are one hundred thirty-five speaking parts. It's sprawling and complex, but it's always in control. I know I'm only talking about Soderbergh when writer Stephen Gaghan won an Oscar for his screenplay, but the fact is: one guy has replicated this greatness, and one has not.

Not Jesus, despite the way I'm talking about him.

Likewise, directors usually get too much credit for the film's visual style, but Soderbergh acted, for the first of many times, as his own director of photography here under his psuedonym Peter Andrews. He even operated the camera. He was solely responsible for the look of the film, the grain and exposure of which would be copied or built upon for the remainder of the decade. (By the way, he also used non-professional actors, handheld camera, and digital video before anyone else and better than anyone else this decade too.) To hear him tell it:

"The issue of how to distinguish the three stories visually arose about and I decided for the East Coast stuff, tungsten film with no filter on it so that we get that really cold, monochrome blue feel. For San Diego, diffusion filters, flashing the film, overexposure for a warmer, blossomy feel. And for Mexico, tobacco filters, 45-degree shutter angle whenever possible to give it a strobelike sharp feel. Hopefully those distinctions would be enough to bring you back into each story line after you cut to somewhere else and come back. Then we took the entire film through an Ektachrome step, which increases the contrast and the grain enormously. I'm going through a phase where I'm in love with degraded grainy contrasty imagery, stuff that I think you'd have difficulty talking some cameraman into doing. When the film reaches its release print stage, it will have gone through seven generations."

What he doesn't mention is that Ektachrome is a still photography development treatment that, especially at the time, was unpredictable. He took $48 million worth of footage and took a pass through chemicals that could have completely ruined everything he shot. Again, risks.

Still, none of this sumptuous visual language would matter if this wasn't a completely gripping film, which it is. This is probably the quickest two-and-a-half hour film you'll ever see. As thoughtful and uncompromising as it is, it's also damned entertaining. Years after the fact, that's what you forget. And while most films of its type--multiple plots that weave in and out of each other--sometimes have a weak or inconsistent thread, this does not. The viewer is never disappointed to cut back to the Ohio story or away to the Mexico story. They're all engrossing.

Just as each cut serves a purpose, each tiny performance in Traffic contributes to the whole. People like Salma Hayek and Albert Finney seem happy with glorified cameos, and Soderbergh coaxes powerful work from people who had never proven themselves before or since (Erika Christensen, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Topher Grace). But Benicio Del Toro is still the most affecting. He plays against type as a paunchy, monosyllabic cop who is caught in the middle of everyone else's agenda. Most of his dialogue is in Spanish, and it adds to the transformative aspect of his performance. It's as if he's a different actor than the one we're familiar with. He's more tender, more wounded. The movie proves that there are no quick answers to drug abuse and the resultant violence of it, and by the end of the film, Del Toro's character is the one who understands that the most. He is the squinty eyes through which we see everything.

In both approach and execution, Traffic never takes the easy way out. We've already felt the ripple effects of what it achieved. But more important than how influential it became is how enjoyable it was.