low velocity

2006-10-15T17:52:00.000-07:00

brick by brick

week by week

how i spent my summer vacation

isn’t it funny how time renders our words, and the beliefs they represent, meaningless? i know you meant it when you said it. i also know that you'd like nothing more to take it back. you're ashamed of feeling this way and its understandable. its understandable to want to be isolated and alone or at least removed from the faces and the words that control your past. its understandable to want to run from the memories that make you feel like a ghost. its understandable. realistic, though? god no. every dark night that finds you alone in your car or your bedroom, it'll be there. cold steel against your neck. it cuts and digs. but in the light, you wont be able to see any marks. you know its real, and you know it hurts. but its your cross to bear, silently and alone. there used to be a solution, a remedial solvent. but you burnt that bridge long ago. it was necessary. and even though you might just end up in a tangle of metal and tears, you had to do it. remember that: you had to fucking do it.

its 2 in the morning. the sound of crickets and traffic mesh with cool air that sneaks in through your window. its beautiful and ominous and you sink into the bronze glow of your desktop reading lamp. you sum up your existence in spheres and circles. you say you want something else , but deep down, you don’t. you want to sit here, comfortably perched on the edge of disaster. the brooding sound of victorian piano plays soundtrack to this unfolding drama. and what drama it is. cast in bubbling shades of black and white, children turn into ashes. they burn and crackle and fill the air with a billowing black. its cruel but you find alluring. erotic. consuming. you want to run, to hide. but you cant manage the strength to break away. you cant even find the strength to look away. is this even real? you're numb and it breaks your heart. how did you become this? you realize that somewhere along the way, you lost something. but what?

take a shower. try wash it off. you scrub until your skin is spotted with red blotches and angry streaks of white and pearl. but its pointless, you've found. you cant get the smell out of your hair or the taste off your skin. it adheres to you with a tenacious diligence. it grabs you and refuses to let go. and after awhile, you begin to accept it. this is you and it is a part of this. its not fair. its not right. or is it? if i could, i would grab you and hold you and rip at the throats of all who meant you harm. but i'm just a pedestrian in your battle for self-actualization. this is your war and, to me, its being fought on foreign ground. i cant do anything but watch and its heartbreaking, it really is. it really is. so please, promise me one thing: promise me that no matter how it turns out, you'll, at the very least, go down with all flags flying.

how many weeks (days, hours, minutes) has it been, since that thursday when you came into my room and we talked about the vagaries of hiroshima? about seeing your home, your history, your heart replaced by a burning crater of heat and ash. when we talked about moving on without moving forward? because we (people like you and i) don’t care about radiation or living or dying. we care about surviving. and that’s the worst. survivors have the freedom to remember what it used to be like. survivors have the freedom to have their breath stolen by smiling faces on glossy photographs. survivors remember seeing the horizon inexplicably bec0me illuminated with an unforgettable splash of orange and red. and that’s just-oh-so paralyzing. so in the spirit of this symphony of regret, i can only say that i miss you.

when we were kids, did you ever think it would turn out like this? did you ever think you would be so numb? so fucking apathetic, so pathetically complacent? did you ever imagine that you'd end up smoking your teeth brown or lose the ability to sleep to a combination of coffee and grief? did you ever imagine that you'd wake up every morning just to see your own hollowed, sagging eyes stare back at you? when we were kids, did you ever think that you'd end up like this? out here, alone and freezing. i didn’t. because if i did, i'd have never let it get this far. i'd have protected you like i should have, i would have saved the both of us from the both of us. but now, we cant hide. and while its so fucking nouvelle vague to pretend that this is what we wanted, i know you. i know myself. and this isn’t what we wanted. and while it means next to nothing, i just want you to know that i'm sorry.

3 days and you're gone. to celebrate, i sit in my room and compile every sad song i've ever heard. i write your name on the cd and hand it to you. breakup or breakdown? somewhere in between. and when your driving down the interstate, hopefully it'll make you think. retrospectively. introspectively. something, anything. i know that i'm in love with a headstone and to your credit, you've never made me feel bad about it.

in this city - now your city - there are endings and sometimes beginnings. so what is it, what are you here for? to find your ending or to pray for a "new" beginning? 500 miles away from everything you've ever known, have you found yourself in that mess of romantic urbanization and cosmopolitan idealism? you work a couple jobs and you tell me that you're happy. happier than you've ever been. happier than you could ever imagine. but we both know know that those words are just a finely sharpened dart that you've fashioned and thrown at my chest. its ok, sweetheart (can i still call you that?). its ok. time hasn’t yet spoken but i've got a feeling - a gut feeling - that things are gonna be just fine for you. and really, i hope they are.

its seven twenty four am and raining. summer is over and done. The smug incalescence of june,july, and august has faded into memory. and thank god for that. because for me, it was never a matter of heat or humidity or days that loom aimlessly and long. no, it never had anything to do with the sun. truthfully, summer days have the tendency to give way to nights which produce southern ghosts – misty names steeped in history - that beg us to not forget. The past manifests itself in flashes of grey and white that briefly emerge amidst the dark and the crickets and the sound of the frogs and misamistic haze that collects in the bottom of these ageless and nameless valleys. ancient. unrelenting. a confederate cause, a union disaster. well, not exactly. not precisely. but close enough. for me, this was a summer of reproach. the pangs of regret that rose and fell in my stomach were unrelenting. i tried my best to be inhospitable, but that’s just not realistic. that’s just not feasible. someday, someday soon i am going to have to find a way out of this nostalgic penitence. because you cant keep living like this, haunted by the thought of a war hundreds of years old and hundreds of miles away.

i'm going to take it back. this plane has been on autopilot - or pilot less - for long enough. hopefully there is still enough time to pull up, time to escape the dirt and rocks and houses that are expanding in expanding in the cockpit window. i know there is. i can feel it. and while impact - explosion, disintegration, end game sexiness- holds a certain sentimental propensity, it is here i draw the line. at allure. once in awhile, its alright to spiral away from rationality, from responsibility. but be careful, amateur explorer, be careful of going too far, too fast. i wont become another de soto. i wont rush headlong into romanticism without thinking about those around me. i wont become the conquistador that never was.

10.

i've got a bottle of stolen pills and not a lot to lose. or at least it feels that way. and when i fall into the black, its feels just a little better than alright. i'm so close to where i want to be, but this isn’t reality. the night unravels into incomprehension and worse. this is disaster, this is so fucked up. i keep saying that i'm alright and, really, i am. but every once in a while, it just feels so right to sink my claws into the screen and take a real short peek inside. the house is in order, the table is set. its years of thanksgivings and christmases and birthdays encased in a ball of glass. the snow is coming down and its too picturesque to be real. that’s right, its not real. but this disaster, it is real. i wake up ashamed and sick and the odd feeling that maybe, just maybe, i've let myself down. setbacks are a part of life, but this? please god, never again.

11.

remember flying above the clouds? do you remember being high with anticipation. do you remember how great it felt, when that same anticipation was superseded by reality? on that white sand, do you remember watching that endless azure rise in front of us? thinking that nothing could ever be better than this. fast forward, one year. again, do you remember being similarly high on anticipation. do you remember being let down? thinking that nothing could ever be worse than this. when anticipation is bulldozed by reality. because, if you don’t, i do. what a difference a year can make. but each day since then, its gotten a little better, hasn’t it? you gave your speech - your excuse- with a brandenburg symbolism. i didn’t buy it at the time. i don’t know if i do now. but i do know that sometimes, just sometimes, you do need to tear down "that" wall. and i’m trying – really, i am – to salvage whatever i can. the first step to becoming a sophisticate, i suppose, is trying.

12.

for the first time in a long time. for the first time in a long time. for the first time in a long time. say it over and over. the first time in a long time. the first time in a long time. the first time in a long time. say it. it feels good, to finally say it and maybe, just maybe, believe it. for the first time in a long time. for the first time in a long time. for the first time in a long time. say it. feel it. follow the contours and depressions with your hands. think about it: four months became eight. two thirds of year. two thirds of year that largely represented everything - imaginable and not- going horribly, horribly wrong. two thirds of a year in which everyone was telling you (i) to chin up, things will get better. you (i) wanted to believe them. but you (i) just couldn’t imagine it. but now, for the first time in a long time, you (i) can. for the first time in a long time, you're (i' m) ok with how it all panned out. not happy. not distraught. just ok. and that feels better than you (i) could ever imagine.

13.

new places inspire new feelings, but in the end, its the same cold reality in the same old shell. the waters have slowly begun to recede and i gradually wish less and less for things to be the way they used to be. but is it wrong to recognize that this place used to be so much prettier? the filth, the poverty, the pain - it wasn’t that bad, was it? it’s hard to separate the aesthetic from the artificial. they say hindsight is 20/20, but honestly, retrospection cannot (will not) replace the fact that this life – this experience – is little more than cause and effect. convenience be damned. i wont beat myself up anymore because, quite frankly, i cant. I can accept that time is irrational, nonlinear, confusing, unfair. i’ll always remember that i did all the things i never thought i’d do (with you), but you can’t hold it against me if i burn all your pictures.

14.

today, i saw a man die of a heart attack. it was in the middle of the city in the fat part of the day and everyone just watched. we all just watched as this man – nondescript and alone- struggled briefly to hold onto his life. he fell to his knees and then onto his back. and then he was gone. his eyes were closed and the wind blew his tie over his face. the concrete sidewalk around him was covered with cigarette butts and fast food wrappers. i remember putting my head down and thinking about this man. i thought about how he would never get to see his daughter on her wedding day, how he would never be able to stay up late at night and remember the way his wife stole his breath twenty years ago, how he’d never get the chance to wake up on a beautiful saturday and take in the blue of the sky and the crispness of the air and the balmy taste of ephemerality. but mostly, i thought about my own death. would it be like this, with people watching helplessly and curiously and largly unaffected? would i die surrounded by the urban squalor of 21st century consumerism? and then it hits me: my future is just that- mine. you’re no longer a part of it and i don’t really care. In fact, i’m glad. because sweetheart, you fucked up – and its ok because, really, we’re still just kids. we're just kids in this huge, confusing world.

2006-10-12T22:23:00.000-07:00

“Maputo”

You gave me a name, my reluctant Portuguese father
You painted my complexion in that sun kissed brown, my reluctant Portuguese father
You mapped my destiny, my reluctant Portuguese father

Lourenço Marques, Lourenço Marques, Lourenço Marques

And in return, my reluctant Portuguese father
I chose millstones and broken teeth over you
I chose dirty orphanages and a dismembered youth over you
I chose the sweltering heat of isolation over you

Lourenço Marques, Lourenço Marques, Lourenço Marques

Because, my reluctant Portuguese father
Your odium
Your arrogance
Your gall
Left me with the cauterizing decision between abuse or nothing at all

Lourenço Marques, Lourenço Marques, Lourenço Marques

So as it goes, my reluctant Portuguese father
I take the salt that's in the air into my lungs and remember:
I tore myself open on these ancient beaches
I painted the concrete with steel and blood
I watched night after night sink into nightmares of despondency
This leviathan that became reality – my reality – is all your fault

Lourenço Marques, Lourenço Marques, Lourenço Marques

I hate you, my reluctant Portuguese father
This collage, this colloquium:
Tangled bodies and fading colonial alcazars
Faceless ghosts that dragged themselves through these streets
Is the symphony that drives my hate for you
My beaches are empty, my city is choking, my bloodline scarred
I don’t want to say your name anymore

2006-09-19T21:46:00.000-07:00

"cops"

it's a hot summer night
and the red and the blue dance in frenzy of light
two men stand like like pillars of salt in the street
they're poor and they're black and they both say they have the HIV
one's dressed like a woman but you can see he's a man
the other has been stabbed in the arm and he's mad
they both claim they're in love
and though its hard to see, maybe they are
but they seem so desperate, and covered in sweat
the cops, they just shake their heads
and wonder how two beating hearts became this

2006-09-08T00:17:00.000-07:00

30,000 feet in the air. Suspended by technology and - unthinkably - steel and plastic and impenetrable glass. Crane your neck, look down. Through the emulsified strands of wispy clouds set against a backdrop of unimaginable blue - do you see it? The contours of the earth, the microscopically nondescript rug of green and brown, the checker board patterns of agriculture and history. Dots of towns and places. Places with doctors, preachers, murderers, mechanics. Do you see it? Do you really see it? America, panoramic. Comprehensive and sweeping. Your eyes tell you that’s its unlimited. Your brain tells you its not. The world stretches out lazily before you with intimidating beauty. 30,000 feet in the air, time and sound are meaningless. A ceiling of azure that masks the black above. Do you see it? Can you feel it? Panoptic. Moving. Heartbreaking.

2006-09-03T11:08:00.000-07:00

Lucero - Rebels, Rogues, & Sworn Brothers

The great American South, a mixture of romantic cultivation and sagging despondency, is both panoramic and castigated. The south is a place of antiquated lore and warm evenings haunted by the phantasms of an oft-ugly past. It’s the geographical area where whisky nights and Baptist mornings butt heads with an uncommonly alluring ferocity. It’s a culture rich with gallantry but stained with a history of detachment, melancholia, and defeat. And so, the music that comes out of the South has always possessed, to one degree or another, an aggrieved grittiness – endearingly downtrodden and tepidly hopeful. Boom or bust, but don’t you dare let your dreams intersect with your substantiality. Such legacy has spanned and defined the careers of musicians ranging from Robert Johnson to Johnny Cash. It’s a conundrum that reaches back to the reconstruction era: a historical study of perpendicular values and heart wrenching realities that have a tendency to be voluptuously beautiful.

Today, we label this genre with a variety of ubiquitous terms: contemporary bluegrass, alt-country, southern rock, cowpunk, folk country. But this legacy – of pain and pride, torture and redemption – has set the stage for an escalating series of tensions among those vying to assume a place with the hollowed names of the past. And with good cause, it would seem. Is the future cradled in the arms of Ryan Adams and Gillian Welch’s synthetic dissymmetry or will it manifest itself in the cornbread huskiness of groups like Old Crow Medicine Show and The Drive By Truckers? Or will the “future” emerge from somewhere less contrived, and undoubtedly, less heralded?

Lucero, which means blazing star in Spanish, has been poised to grab the reins of contemporary alt/country since their 20001 self titled release. The past 6 years has seen the Memphis area band – spearheaded by singer/songwriter Ben Nichol’s fractured vocals – release an able-bodied discography of textured and non-cyclic music. Lucero has a reputation for continually deconstructing and remobilizing their sound in order to create distinctly separate albums. 2002’s Tennessee was vociferously less linear than Lucero, 2003’s That Much Further West was littered with masculine guitar riffs and Replacements-esqe antipathy, and 2004’s Nobody’s Darlings was an enigmatic self-pitying, and - ultimately – guts and blood rock and roll album. Which brings us, finally, to 2006 and the band’s upcoming release of Rebels, Rogues & Sworn Brothers.

Immediately upon Lucero’s precursory internet release of the song “I Can Get Us out Of Here Tonight,” pundits were conflagrant with the fact that – gasp - the band would dare create a song with semblances of Bruce Springsteen’s patented Asbury sound. Simply put, Southern music should be too proud to stoop to level of incorporating recognizable, East Coast nuances. Imagine, then, these same critics’ surprise when they heard the rest of the album – undeniably swollen with Boss-styled keys and Nichol’s vocal delineation leaning increasingly towards Springsteen’s oral stylings.

Before we delve into the specifics of this reemphasized Lucero, however, we should first examine the causal reality of any band or self-respecting artist who chooses to meander into the axiomatic and uncurbed musical world of the seminal Bruce Springsteen. The blunt reality of the situation is that any incorporation of the Asbury sound – whether it be bright keys, bluesy song architecture, or the “larger than life” vocal delivery – can’t be a bad thing. The Boss acquired his pseudonym by being, well, the The Boss. Nearly infallible in scope and monumental in size, Springsteen invigorated an entire generation.

With irony, then, Lucero has reinvented the southern sound by infringing upon the local sound of a place that is, both literally and figuratively, thousands of miles away. Rebels, Rogues & Sworn Brothers attacks the listener straight off the starting block with “What Else Would You Have Me Be.” Seconds into the album, guitarist Brian Venable’s muscular riffs are intersected with irradiated keys and Nichol’s torn vocals. Away we go. “I gave you everything I stole/Then you stole your heart away from me.” The song sets the stage for an epic of an album, a metaphorical barn-burner that is touchingly heartbreaking. Because, despite its east coast swagger, Rebels, Rogues & Sworn Brothers is southern rock. Lost loves, blue collar daydreams, empty bottles. The second track of the album, “I Don’t Wanna Be The One,” displays a similar operational mechanism: Drummer Roy Berry’s drumming provides a thick backbone for the band’s bulky brand of grain alcohol fueled musings.

The album steadily picks up steam. The following two tracks, “San Francisco” and the aforementioned “I Can Get Us Out Of here”, sparkle and balloon with triumphant idiosyncrasy. You start to get the feel that Rebels, Rogues & Sworn Brothers is like an 18 wheeler being ghost ridden down a mountain. Try as you might, this baby aint stopping. And then, BAM! The album comes to a screeching halt with, perhaps, the worst song Lucero has ever produced. That’s right, the unthinkable metasizes before the listeners ears with an unfortunate and long-winded buoyancy. For lack of a more incisory phrase, the track “1979” is simply awful. It’s the longest song on the album and almost painful to listen to. Venable’s guitar is completely overshadowed by the use of off-kilter keys and Nichol’s ridiculous lyrical musings. For that matter, his attempts to be nostalgic fall flat on its face. “It was 1979/Just skin and bones/Your favorite dress/motorcycle boots.” He is obviously trying to conjure images of a lovelorn boy and the former but not forgotten apple of his eye, but the final product seems to better describe a skanky whore ala Courtney Love. And then, just when the song seems that it can’t get any worse, the track is lit up with a cheese ball synth and Skynard-style ballad guitar.

The “1979” detour is, luckily, just that – a detour. The ensuing songs, “Cass” and “The Mountain” rebound quite nicely. Both tracks are quirky and addled with hickish lyricisms (specifically in “The Mountain” when the ever-humble Nichol’s promises to “Buy a mountain for me and you”) and swampy guitar/bass interplay. The eighth track, however, is the highlight of the album. “Sing Me No Hymns” is furiously gutter, uncouthly and powerfully despondent. At around the 2:30 mark, Venable, bassist John Stubblefield, and Berry work with each other to gradually build a wall of sound that falls in a sonic crescendo before giving away to a recklessly intense guitar solo. It is here, specifically within the closing solo, that that Rebels, Rogues & Sworn Brothers climaxes. But fear not, because while this is where the album peaks, it does so only in terms of song tempo, not quality.

Out of the four remaining tracks, “The Weight of Guilt,” She’s Just That Kind of Girl,” “On The Way Back Home,” and “She Wakes When She Dreams,” “On The Way Back Home” is the most memorable. Perhaps the most emotionally touching Lucero song since the self titled’s “Hold Fast,” it’s eloquent in a retrospectively gentle way. The composition of the music, coupled with Nichol’s vocals, creates a multicultural sadness that pours on the heartbreak without being melodramatic or trite. It very well could have been the send-off song of the album and, most likely, it should have been – because here, the band’s emotional side is boiled down to reveal a basal core of personal, yet less-than-unique tragedy. We all bear the burden of second-guessing our youthful decisions. Such introspection is part of getting older, part of assimilating and developing the collective retrospection known as “experience.” Ultimately, that’s what makes the song so great.

One gets the sense that for the members of Lucero this is their only chance. Their hope for future success relies on their ability to capture what drives them. The question, then, becomes: what drives Lucero? They write of hometown Memphis with equal parts disdain and affection. They speak of their travels on the road with similar sense of wariness. In many ways, Nichols seems unsure of himself and his purpose. In his songs, he constantly fights the urge to give up and wash his inabilities away in the metaphorical bottle. But throughout it all – the trials, the tribulations, long nights on the road – the band maintains its frank and simple outlook on life. Sure, Rebels, Rogues & Sworn Brothers has a couple less-than-memorable songs and one really terrible one, but at its core, its hardworking, gritty music. Music lovers around the world appreciate Cash and Johnson not so much for their individual musical output or the varying nuances they assumed throughout their careers, but rather for their ability to capture a specific reality with startling accuracy. It may have not always been the prettiest or the most congenial, but it was painted in the broad and unforgettable strokes of brazen regionalism. And that, above all else, is what made American bluegrass/country/southern rock so undeniably powerful. On Rebels, Rogues & Sworn Brothers, Lucero has recaptured that magic in a way that grabs your chest and steals your breath.

Yes, Rebels, Rogues & Sworn Brothers bears a tangible amount musical of similarities to Bruce Springsteen. Above all, Springsteen’s legacy will be his everyman honesty. And it is here, that Lucero shares the most in common with the legendary boss of Asbury Park. The search for true candor in music has become something of cliché. Every slick A&R rep trumpets the next big thing as possessing an uncommon sense of honesty. But honesty, like all humanistic virtues, cannot be forced. It can simply be created. Impossible to pinpoint with accurate description, it falls into the category of "I know it when I see it." And here, you see it. Or, rather, hear it. Throughout their career, Lucero, has earned the right to hang in the rarified air of legends past and Rebels, Rogues & Sworn Brothers is merely a reminder of such.

2006-08-30T15:20:00.000-07:00

I Wanna Be Your Friend

You’ve probably heard the saying (or a slightly altered version thereof) “The biggest difference between a conservative and a liberal is that a conservative doesn’t mind being called a conservative.” The phrase, almost always a product of a plucky GOP supporter with the bumper stickers to prove it, is usually accompanied with a toothy grin and luminous eyes. It’s almost as if the self-proclaimed and self-exalting “conservative” has found the cure to cancer or got to the bottom of the riddle known as Stonehenge. And in their minds, perhaps they have: Finally, once and for all, the great debate between conservatism and liberalism has been boiled down to its true essence! Centuries of rich ideology and humanistic thought melt away to reveal the basal core of political thought. And that truth, of course, reads is the simplest of terms: conservatives are unabashedly and righteously adroit while liberalism is bogged down in a world of self-loathing and uncertainty.

If such a phrase, however, is to be seen as truth, it must be examined as such. And this is where it gets the situation gets sticky. Because here, where catchphrase collides with empiricism, problems and inconsistencies boil and erupt. But before we delve into the trepidacious realm of dispelling myth and unmasking wishful thinking, it is important to first appraise and define the words conservative and liberal.

In its historical, American political context, a conservative is an individual who subscribes to conservatism or the political philosophy that calls for the limitation of federal government, supports fiscal responsibility, and opposes radical change to the various governmental and societal institutions. Conversely, American liberalism is generally in favor of a larger federal government, wide-reaching social mechanisms, and a cardinal belief in certain rights that are seen as unalienable.

Here, however, is where problems first arise: In the current political landscape, these lines are almost always blurred and smeared beyond recognition. This enigmatic indiscretion is especially applicable to those who fall into the conservative sect. When an individual describes themselves as a conservative, it can mean subscription to a plethora of different – and rarely overlapping- value sets. Americans pigeonhole themselves as conservatives for a variety of reasons: pro-life, in favor of staunch fiscal responsibility, belief in the intersection of Christian and political values, pro-gun, in favor of tough criminal legislation, anti-terrorist, anti-progressive, anti-immigration, pro-business, afraid of taxation, in favor of increased military spending, in favor of increased global trade and interventionist foreign policy, belief in natural law, belief in marriage between a man and a woman, disbelief in the conundrum of “situation,” anti-labor, a proponent of rural idealism…

Get the point? The list could go on forever. In fact, the Bush Administration seems to be making a conscious effort to transform the word “conservatism” into “utopian.” In the Administration’s eyes, conservatism is the great cure all: it can be evaluated and defined on an individual basis and diverse as it may be, all “conservatives” can gather under one flag. Obviously, such an outlook is preposterous: You can call a duck, a cow, and goat “barnyard animals” but that doesn’t mean that they are the same organism. Similarly, many so-called conservatives have nothing in common with either each other or the ruling party – outside of an artificially implemented hate and misunderstanding of those scandalous and un-American liberals. Simply put, the word “conservatism” little more than a convenient way to categorize a wide body of ideologies that, at least for the Bush Administration, pays tremendous political dividends.

On the other side of the coin, then, we have the liberals. While “conservatives” can be almost anything, “liberals” are distinct to the so-called conservative sect via 4 very specific characteristics: pro-choice, in favor of soft and over-indulgent social programs, their upper-crust elitism, and a generalized sense of shame for what America has become. Of course, liberalism is every bit as socially and ideologically dynamic as conservatism but, somewhere along the line, a large portion of the American public was fooled into thinking otherwise. It’s easy to dislike your political opponent when you paint them in the unfair light of conceited aloofness, baby killing, and unable to defend greater society against the evils of terrorism and domestic crime. Eventually, however, the fragmented and illusionary cohesion of the conservative voting sect will have be forced to turn onto itself and then the same slurs used an excuse to malign those on the left will be used to attack each other. It’s a short-sighted and worldview and it will end, as they say, in tears.

But there is a deeper and more disturbing problem with the current trend of fashionable pigeonholing among the American population. This is a country of doers and thinkers, people who believe that if you believe it, you can someday achieve it. We are a gigantic, diverse nation with voices that exceed standardization. We are a nation built on hard work, optimism, and – gasp - compromise. After all, the reason that both parties have such a long and storied history is because of their ability to each come up with dynamic answers to dynamic problems that are passed through the mechanisms of mutual concession and accommodation in order to produce a workable product that benefits as many citizens as possible. To lose that tradition in favor of black and white partisanship would be disastrous and politically distasteful.

Alone, the political doctrines (or in this case, the adapted political doctrines) of conservatism and liberalism will falter in their attempt to solve the myriad of problems that face the United States as it marches into an uncertain future. But together, they stand a chance. Each party has its admirable qualities and each party has gaping, Hindenburg-esqe problems. In a society that preaches majority rule with minority rights, compromise is essential. After all, how are we supposed to spread democracy around the world if we cannot secure it, in both theory and practicality, at home?

2006-08-28T00:43:00.000-07:00

Trepidation on the High Wire:
Cannibalism and Broadened Horizons

Chapter 1: “Jesus Christ”

The phone pulled me reluctantly out of bed. It was an iron-ore grey morning in October, cold, wet, unremarkable. The rain circumspectly fell from the sky and collected in shallow pools accented by the red and orange of the fallen leaves, monumentally ablaze in final throes of photosynthesis, a decaying yet historical testament to a season now fast fading into memory.

“Hello?” I said groggily into the receiver.

On the other end of the line was my mother – a veteran of five children, a failed marriage, and a lifetime of hard work. Her voice was planar and without emotion.

“Hi. Your father died this morning.”

I sat up. My mom has always had the tendency to cut to the chase. She doesn’t dawdle in pretext or salutation.

“Jesus Christ....What? How?”

“In his sleep. A heart attack. Probably never knew what hit him.”

“Poor bastard, “I said. “I’ll miss him. I guess its good he went in his sleep. He had absolutely no tolerance for any sort of discomfort.”

“I know,” she said. And then: “Things weren’t always the best between you two, but just try to remember the good things. When are you coming back?”

“I don’t know. When is the funeral?”

“Sometime soon. Just try to get a flight and come out here as soon as possible. We all miss you,” she said and hung up.

And with that, my day began. It was true that my father and I had not always had the best of relationship. I blamed him for a lot of things, a lot of really bad things. My father was selfish, insincere. He said the right things but never had the courage or intention of following through. I blamed him for my parent’s divorce, I blamed him for my mental instability and I blamed him for making five children and then deciding that fatherhood was a part time job. Most of all, however, I blamed my father for the fact that I woke up every day with a pit in my stomach, feeling worthless and deadpan and vacant.

I got out of bed, sat down at my desk, and looked out the window. It was funny that my mom commented on my oft-capricious relationship with the man I called father. Well, less funny than sad. I have never seen people fight with each other the way my parents did. I can remember being woken up at 2 in the morning to find my dad laying on the ground with his head split open. A victim of one of my mother's infamous sneak attacks, he was spluttering out a string of curses and threats that, even to my inexperienced ears, cut through the air with a mutinous, if not wholly mordant sophistication. I can also remember the night where my father stood over my mother with a bloody phone in his hand – the phone bloodied because he, of course, ripped it from her hands and smashed it on her face. Seeing my mother helplessly lying on the floor – a tangled heap of hair, and tears, and blood - should have awakened the valorous ideals of gallant protectionism. Maybe I should have burned red with anger and come to my mother’s defense; maybe I should have burst into action with a heroic yell and became a two-fisted tempest of youthfully intrepid courageousness. Instead, I prayed for God to save us, or at least, save me. After all, didn’t both my parents deserve this unhappiness, this despondent and violent sphere of life? They picked each other. They didn’t deserve to be saved or forgiven. And anyway, who was I to choose sides? Nature had done that for me: my father was stronger and to him went victory.

But what did I do to deserve this? I was merely a product of the lottery known as genetics, an innocent bystander with the sleep still in his eyes. I was a fucking kid, unable to wrap my mind around the images that played out in front of me. Looking bad, I’m glad that I was the only one of siblings old enough – or perhaps, curious enough – to witness these debacles of bulk domestic pollution.

Unable to think of a more relevant way to mourn the death of my father, I walked over to my desk and sat down. Still in my boxers, hazy and slouching under the weight of the early morning and the almost unreasonable information I had just received, I opened the bureau drawer and began splitting a Swisher Sweet. Carefully, I sliced with my fingernail and gently pushed out the tobacco inside. I licked the savorless casing, the taste of artificial cherry and low quality tobacco flat against my taste buds, and depressed the paper down onto my the face of the desk. I broke up the weed into crumbles of green and red hairs and daintily lined it across the middle of the paper. I folded it over and, using my fingernails, began horizontally creasing the cigar husk. Roll, lick to seal, roll to tighten, lick, tighten, lick. Gently burn the newly formed cylinder and render it finished. Within five minutes, I held the final product in my hand. Rolling it counterclockwise between my index finger and thumb, I lit the blunt. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. Repeat. This ones for you, pops. For better or worse, they guy was my father. And despite his faults, I loved him.

After reducing the blunt to an evil smelling stub, I rubbed it out on my desktop ashtray. The smoke grouped and formed a cloud around my ceiling light. I sat back in my office-styled swivel chair and gazed out the window. Still raining, the day was listlessly dull in a comforting sort of way. Cozily uninspired, today was the sort of day meant for mourning. It was seven thirty and the road in front of my house was thick with rush hour traffic. The people on their way to work made me think of my own job: an assistant editor for a trade publication on the flatware industry. While insignificant in scope, it paid the bills. I had long given up on the romantic ideals of importance and prominence and instead settled for the more pedestrian auspices of survival. That’s life, that’s how things work. We can’t all be heroes, right?

Today, however, I would not be going into work. If there is one good thing about your father dying, it’s that you don’t have to go into work. I called my boss, a pudgy middle-aged woman with a southern twang named Suzanne. As far as bosses go, Suzanne wasn’t too bad. She talked a lot and referred to herself in the form of third person pseudonym – she had a tendency to say things like “looks like ole Suze messed the bed on this one” or “I’ll be whipped if Suze didn’t hit the nail on the head” – but other than that, she treated me with an endearing sense of professional reassurance. The phone rang once, twice, three times.

“Hello?”

“Hey Suzanne, this is Michael,” I said in an intentionally morose voice.

Her voice instantly brightened.

“Hi, Mike. What’s up?”

“Well,” I said and let the silence hang pregnantly in the air. “My dad passed away last night. I think I’m going to need some time off work.”

And then, less than punitively:

“I’m sorry about the timing of all this. I know we were going to have to cram for the upcoming-“

Before I finished, she cut me off.

“You don’t worry about a thing. Go home, take some time, do what you need to do. These things are tough to get through. I remember when my mother died, I struggled with it for weeks. Just keep us posted in how long you’ll need and we’ll take care of the work around the office.”

Which was, really, a generous office considering I worked in a profession defined by deadlines.

“Okay, Suzanne, I probably wont need anymore than a week, but I’ll let you know anyway,” I said meekly into the phone.

“Buh bye and good luck with everything,” she said.

I hung up the phone and canvassed the room in my dope-induced stupor. I listened to the rain peal against the window. It was almost rhythmic, rurally beautiful in its subtle manner. I looked over at my bed lustfully, tiredly, and decided to sleep just a little longer. Sure, I had things to do – like make plane reservations, pack, dig out my tattered black suit – but those could wait.

As I dozed off, I could think only of sleep's dexterously majestic ability to put life on hold.

*[This is the first part on an ongoing novella.

Additional chapters will be posted intermittingly.]*

2006-08-17T00:23:00.000-07:00

I have this reoccurring dream that haunts me.

In a sense, it’s like a nightmare. But it’s not like a normal nightmare where you wake up with knotted fists, in a cold sweat with your heart trying to escape from your chest. No, instead my nightmare begins when I wake up. And so my dream haunts me because of its azure loquacity, its empathetic artistry, and its simple-yet-timeless juxtaposition of man and earth and sea. My dream haunts me because it is everything my life is not. It returns each night and leaves me jealous and discouraged, hung over from want of a reality that is not and never will be mine.

In my dream - my nightmare, my glass bowl wonderland – life is perfect. It is a snapshot of divinity, a zenith of indescribable proportions. I’m sitting on a white sand beach on an island in the expansive blue of the Pacific Ocean. Hawaii, Tahiti, the Midways. Somewhere, anywhere. A small green speck in an expanse of unyielding blue. Before me, the Pacific – that ungodly moving body of water and spirituality – lays out before me. It is massive, it is striking. It makes me want to believe in God, to believe that only an infallible and all knowing hand could have created something of such majestic proportion. The waves become surf in a tinge of white and green before gently dying in their attempt to crawl onto the earth. The sun burns high in the air, temperately baking my skin to an acroamatic brown.

The compassionate sound of the ocean slowly melds with the birds and the wind. There are no people around me. I am alone in a place that transcends Rockwell, imagination, stories of Atlantis. Slowly, I fade into a state of stupor. The wispy white of the clouds and the taste of salt in the air become one and the same. The sand comes alive beneath me, the South Pacific – the breathtaking, mythical Pacific – rises before me.

Suddenly, I am consumed. I lay at the bottom of the sea in a nest of colors and currents. Oxygen is an afterthought, a joke. The sun is shattered into a million separate fragments light that sink slowly and disappear into the watery depths. The tide, of tireless world travel, ebbs around my body with dogged determination. I remark upon this current, this veteran of time and place. Its astounding to think that at one point, this same molecule of water – a tangled speck of oxygen and hydrogen – once swam in the frigid artic. Here, though, the water is warm and thaumaturgic. It is abound with a pulse of life and health, a continuum of sophisticated well being. The water tastes of salt and beach, but it dances lightly, frailly across my palette. I am free.

And then I begin to rise. Slowly at first. Faster. Faster. My ears pop when reach the surface and I am thrown into the air. I exploded into the air with a mercurial sense of purpose. I am buoyant. I am errant. I am not in control but I’m not scared. I’m relieved and I’m excited that for once, just once, the weight of potential and possibility has been lifted from my back. And still, I rise. Through the clouds, the misty fog gives way. I break free. Below, I can see the encompassing blue of the ocean speckled with dotted green mosaics of land. Here, I see the world in its sweeping, panoptic entirety. The beauty of this place grabs me by the throat, it punches me in the gut, it steals the air from my lungs.

Then, I wake up.

I instantly remember that I live in a dilapidated turn-of-the century brick building that is too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer. That I live in a sprawling suburban metropolis in the Midwest, surrounded by people who don’t know or care my name. I remember that I stay up too late, drink too much wine, smoke too many cigarettes. I remember that I am a psychologist’s wet dream: a mess of potential and self destructive habits, destined for failure or worse. I remember that I’m unemployed, unemployable, a self-conscious animal who lives on coffee and stolen prescription drugs.

I remember that I’m turning into my old man.

And this is my reality. My fucking reality is a pity party laced with dope, skin mags, and red wine. It’s a dark room with no way out and dust that sticks to the back of your throat. See, the thing about nightmares is that they end. They stop when you wake up. Reality, however, is constant. It throbs through the past and into the future. Reality is the cold voice that laughs in your ear, that tells you that you’re breath away from turning into a drunken asshole who pisses and shits on himself without remorse or embarrassment. It is also, then, reality that tells you not to worry about it. Take another drink, roll another joint, grab a handful of pills. Do something. Finish what you started. Be a man. Accept your destiny. Because reality always intersects with destiny. And destiny is a bitch. A shrieking, bi-polar bitch that spits in your face and steps on your toes. Destiny is reality fulfilled. Destiny is cumulative, destiny is reality actualized.

So, I hate my dream because its everything my reality is not. My reality, fast turning into a concrete statue of destiny, is my nightmare. I can’t escape it. My dream haunts me with its regularity, its certainty, its vivid depiction of time and place. It’s a monument of hope that that will never be achieved. It’s a gravestone to a life unfulfilled. It leaves me jealous and sour with withdrawal. My dream, despite its beauty, laughs at me with yellowing teeth and arctic eyes.

Waking up is my nightmare and it has no end, except for one.

2006-08-15T22:11:00.000-07:00

While MySpace.com’s popularity may be primarily based on scantily clad females posting cockeyed self portraits and juicy details regarding their personal lives, it is, in fact, good for more than that.

Really. No joke.

In fact, MySpace Music might be the most important thing to happen to music in the past five years. With nearly 50 million different artists spanning more than 60 genres, users literally have the sonic globe at the fingertips. Major label groups get a free way to spread their influence while small time acts, previously without any public outlets, can now efficiently showcase their music to users worldwide. And the best part is you can listen and decide for yourself what’s worthwhile and what’s not – a steep departure from the Secret Internet Fatties (SIFs) who prowl social networks in an attempt to lure enterprising young gentlemen into profile views or worse.

Below are fifteen acts that, for one reason or another, are worth a listen. Enjoy.

Unbunny

It is, perhaps, appropriate to point out that the three songs posted are the worst three songs in the Unbunny discography. It is also, then, pertinent to note that these songs are actually quite good. Spearheaded by singer/songwriter Jarid del Deo, Unbunny is a transient group that operates under a variety of conceptualizations and guises. Musically, they combine shades of Magnetic Fields precariousness with a Sebadoah-like poignancy. Del Deo's distinct Neil Young tinge gives the band a classic rock feel that melds well with the afflicted lyrics in order to create a final production that is both dynamic and dexterously accessible.

Polar Bear Club

This Rochester, New York outfit burst onto the national scene with their May release of the EP "The Redder, The Better." With a musical architecture close to bands like Avail, Hot Water Music, and mid-90's Vagrant artists like Automatic 7, Polar Bear Club play an upright and ardent brand of rock'n roll. Vocalist Jimmy Stadt's granular voice drives the band's sound without over-riding or immobilizing it. Polar Bear Club is comprised of members from various, short-lived upstate New York bands who never could find the right ingredients to put out anything of note. Here’s to new beginnings, though, because these guys have all the makings of becoming something spectacular.

Living With Lions

It’s difficult to quantify a band on the basis of a single, un-mastered song. But this song (called Colours) is really good. Really, really good. The vocals have an edgy Trevor Keith (California's seminal Face to Face) feel and the music itself conjures up memories of a more melodic Grey Area.

The Riot Before

Perhaps the most conspicuous aspect of The Riot Before is drummer Freddy Clark's clydesdale- like beats. Its constant, beefy thump gives the band a stable backbone with which to work with. In an agglomerate sense, the band's sound varies between Lawrence Arms-styled ditch punk and record label Planet-X's brand of nouvelle folk. The lyrics are intelligently introspective without delving into the realm of masquerade or pretext and thus, take on an almost “Jacksonville Punk” like qualities. Simply put, the more you listen, the more endearing the band's blue collar sound becomes.

100 Demons

These guys are pissed. And by pissed, I mean incredibly agitated about something - or anything and everything in general. There is an undeniable desire to compare them to Hatebreed's "Satisfaction is the Death of Desire," Fury of V, or even their more recent mosh metal contemporaries, but ultimately 100 Demons just seem to be more substantial. While their sound is less than innovative, they do it better than anyone else – all the while resisting the urge to fall into the bottomless and inescapable hole known as “tough guy” hardcore.

Giant

Spaciously spatial, capaciously cavernous, mammothly expansive. Giant is, well, giant. Oceanic in size and abyssal in scope, Giant is both analeptic and cold. In many ways, these guys are a poor man's Isis - which, despite how it sounds, isn’t really a criticism of Giant. The music exhibits the rare ability to be both melodic and antagonized. While Giant has the potential to assume the “next big thing” within the stoner metal genre, they, more importantly, have the potential to create a discography comprised of vacant desolation and reclusively beautiful music.

Brother Ali

Brother Ali has been around for awhile but he started to garnish national press after his 1999 demo release on Ryhmesayers. One part old-school soul, one part funk, and one part backpack rap, Brother Ali’s astute observations are neatly packaged and delivered. While Ali's vocal mechanisms are often compared to something akin to a Baptist preacher, he readily acknowledges his Islamic beliefs – an ironic, if not dynamic, twist. The sum of his product is cautiously thoughtful and devoid of any masturbatory chest-beating - a metaphorical breath of fresh air in a hip hop world that often leans on aggressively violent lyrics in an attempt to hide its lack of any real substance.

The Good Fear

Featuring ex-members of Lucero, Fulton, and The New Amsterdams, The Good Fear have a workmanlike eloquence that is, albeit economically, quite captivating. The band shows semblances of Uncle Tupelo's southern acidity but it does so in the more agile context of progressive rock. Guitarist/Vocalist Zach Holland's voice embodies a degree of heartbreak that is free of melodrama and the band's usage of lap steel, various forms of percussion, and keyboard give them a coarse originality. Like all good southern rock, TGF doggedly confronts the melancholic ghosts of regret and irascibility that accompany the dissolution of youth. It’s music about red eyes from restless nights and futures clouded with introspection – just archaic enough to inspire nostalgia but at the same time safeguard the listener’s attention.

Baby Calendar

Indie pop with alternating, multi-sex vocal harmonization is a risky endeavor. Done poorly, it can inspire second-hand embarrassment of the worst sort - a knee jerk reaction to hackneyed and sugar sweet cutesiness that causes listeners to whither and die on the vine. But rest assured: Baby Calendar is tactfully done. While a majority of the songs are about pedomorphic subjects like lunchboxes, moving out of your parent’s house, or other varied forms of high school nostalgia, they are delivered with a tangible amount of maturity. Jackie Biver's fragilely adorable vocals fit well with the band's animate modulation and Tom Gorrio's singing. The 2006 release of "Gingerbread Dog" serves as evidence of Baby Calendar’s musical cultivation as it is a dramatic improvement over both the 2004 release "Your Move," and 2005's "Fifteen Year Old Sneakers."

Set Your Goals

Set Your Goals sounds a lot like Lifetime. Consequently, they also sound a lot like "Cant Slow Down" and "Through Being Cool" era Saves the Day, the Movielife, and a myriad of other mid to late 90's pop punk outfits. It’s no secret that catchy punk with lyrics about growing up (all of which seems to be inspired by Lifetime and Saves the Day) is about as homogenized and generic as music comes, but SYG operates above and beyond the stereotypical and oft-closed sphere of bad lyrics and power chords. "Mutiny," the band's recently released debut full length, is perhaps that catchiest album released in the first half of 2006 and it may very well end up being the most memorable fetching punk album of the year. Sure, the Set Your Goals unabated optimism is a tad irritating, but a little youthful idealism isn’t necessarily a bad thing. At the very least, it inspires that small flame of reminiscence that burns deep within all of us. Remember when you thought the world was conquerable, manageable, and fair?

The Golden Birds

In many ways, The Golden Birds are the musical personification of the adjective migratory. Musically, the band refuses to linger or stall; instead they plod along, triumphantly evolving and revolving, unfolding and ripening in cyclic pattern of subtle chords and backup vocals. The most transient aspect of the band, however, is their subject matter. Authors of a fiercely imaginative tour, members of the Golden Birds played an acoustic set on the steps of every state capital in America. On their myspace page, they list their influences as "DC, Connecticut, Chicago, Cincinnati, California": Take a listen to any of the songs on "Transamerica" (released as part of their Fifty tour) and you'll understand why. Regardless of subject matter, however, the Golden Bird's pairing of elegantly circumspect lyrics (sometimes pieced together from various 20th century literature) and conciliatory yet expressive music construction make them a more than worthwhile endeavor.

Do Make Say Think

Do Make Say Think conjures up images of faraway cities and rainy days. Its indifferently beautiful music that rises and falls in a crescendo of peripatetic tones, horns, and extrinsic sounds. Did I mention that it’s beautiful? DMST is certainly a part of the Mogwai-slash- generic ambient rock movement but their simmering jazz influences and tranquil vibe set them apart. While their contemporaries choose to chronologically build their music up to a sweltering breaking point, DMST rhythmically treads along, acquiescently wallowing in the beauty of time and place. The band's experimental aspects and clever use of percussion give them a sense of entireness and elasticity that equips them with a mountainous aura.

* - Please note that this page is NOT officially sanctioned by the band

The Distance

"From my stereo to your heart/ You can only hear the sad parts."

The above, taken from The Distance song Inspired By You (which appears on their recently released full length, "The Rise, The Fall, and Everything In Between"), pretty much sums these guys up. They write songs about broken hearts and cold-blooded women with a deft sense of musicianship and benumbed sincerity in a manner that is both believable and ingenuous. Over the past couple of years, The Distance have released a spattering of EPs and splits that fall into, more or less, the traditional hardcore category. Their debut full length, the aforementioned "The Rise, The Fall, and everything In Between", seems, however, to have deviated from this path in favor of a more accessible pop/rock style. It’s no secret that such a move will bring out the critics and "haters," but perhaps such aspersion is maligned. The band is comfortable with their sound and it shows: tightly orchestrated, they are both anthemic and sinewy. Its catchy enough to appeal to a fairly wide demographic but, at the same time, The Distance hasn’t totally given up on the edginess that defined them as a hardcore band.

Envy

Envy exists in a sort of purgatorial suspension between cultivated fluidity and ornamental geniality. Each of the band's songs plays out like something of a Homer-ian epic: moments of antipathetic violence and sobering crisis falter and fade in the face of pastoral simplicity and tranquil sanctuary. Hailing from Japan, Envy is an enigmatic mixture of seemingly opposing musical styles and perspectives. At times, they sound like Pg. 99 or Isis only to comfortably metasize into the minimalist world of acts like Brian Eno or The Equatorial Stars. While much of Envy's earlier work was decidedly biased in favor of a heavier sound, their recent LP "Insomniac Doze" triumphantly incorporates a dynamic and wide-ranging array of musical styles that pleasantly displays both the adamantine and calmative sides of the musical spectrum.

* - Please note that this page is NOT officially sanctioned by the band

Daggermouth

Daggermouth's enthusiasm accosts the listener in a direct and less-than-subtle manner. It hits you like a slap in the face: these guys really enjoy what their doing. Earlier this year, the band had their myspace account deleted after encouraging its fans to electronically heckle Nickleback's Chad Kroeger (and his 604 records) after he was arrested on the suspicion of drunk driving. The fact that Daggermouth got admonished for calling public figures for their insipid and portentous behavior indicates several things: First, society has lost its sense of humor and secondly, guys who make a lot of money get to call the shots, even when they are in the wrong and have a bleach-blonde butt-cut that’s held in place with a veritable reservoir of hair gel. But Daggermouth's questionable conceptualization of justice also defines them as a band: youthful, outgoing popish punk with a take no prisoner’s attitude. Perhaps Daggermouth’s most endearing quality is their willingness to plunge headfirst and unabatedly into their music with little thought of consequence or retrospection.

2006-07-24T23:20:00.000-07:00

Predators at War

The drama of survival is unparalleled. Staving off death presents the greatest conflict in any organic creation’s life. The struggle to maintain life is as routine as eating, drinking, and sleeping. The National Geographic Channel’s Predators At War takes this commonality and places it in a different context; during a great drought, 5 large African predators (Lions, Hyenas, Wild Dogs, Leopards, and Cheetahs) must all compete, in close quarters, for a limited amount of resources. As the disparity of the drought deepens, the inevitable arises and the animals, all of a certain distinctive lore, must re-arrange their natural hierarchy to determine who are the hunters and who are the hunted.

The film is shot mostly in an observational mode, but some elements of the expository style are present. The narrator goes to great lengths to discuss and describe the scenes depicted, but since the point of the film is to document nature gone haywire, he is forced to factually discuss how this situation, excruciating thirst and lack of prey, has caused the animals to deviate from the norm. Ellis and McClane, in “A New History of Documentary Film,” write that “If Flaherty was a storyteller, he was also a teacher. His pedagogy employed mystery and suspense to arouse our curiosity.” (Ellis & McLane, 2005 p.17) Similarly, Predators At War uses drama, mystique, and suspense – in this case, factual – to advance the story and gain viewer interest. Outside, however, of the narrator’s factual intrusion, the film is shot with an unobtrusive camera that eloquently and seamlessly (there are no “doctored” film sequences in this documentary as kill scenes, often very bloody and realistic, are captured in full without any manipulation of camera angles or shots) captures once proud predators in various states of despair.

The conceptual idea behind this film is the idea of placing animals into the context of human warfare. The narrator uses phrases like “a panzer division of Lions” or “a cavalry of wild dogs” in order to both mimic the distinct survival/defense mechanisms of each animal and draw certain parallels to human warfare. Through this primitive yet fiercely stirring supposition, we see this as a noble war, fought not over the triviality of money or the senselessness of religion, but for survival. This idea of survival was what Robert Flaherty tried to capture in his films Nanook of the North and Man of Aran. The subjects in each picture lived a life outside of the ordinary, outside the norm, and ultimately, outside of sort of cultivated comfort. Mother Nature was both their provider and their adversary. In this way, it seems to me that Predators At War shares an uncanny similarity (outside of the species of the subject, obviously) with Flaherty’s work. The pride of lions or pack of wild dogs depicted in Predators At War rely on nature to provide for them, but during the time of great drought, the relationship between physical nature and animal life is an antagonistic one. Obviously, the idea of absolute truth rings clearer (although not infallibly so) in Predators at War simply because wild animals are much harder to manipulate (in terms of dramatic exposition) than human beings.

The story in Predators at War is a simple one. The taught depiction of living (and ultimately, survival for the “lucky” ones) in nearly inhospitable conditions is never deviated from or delegated to any sort of secondary role. As the film progresses, the days without rain drag on and on, during which the animals become more desperate in their battle against nature. At one point, a scene rigidly and shockingly depicts several female lions, consumed with hunger, cannibalizing the rotting corpse of one of their compatriots who had succumbed to malnourishment and disease. It is also pertinent to note that although Bunuel’s Land Without Bread is a mocking, almost satirical look at humanity within nature, similar scenes, depicting the taboo, are present. As I watched the image of the girl, sick and abandoned, I thought of the parallels between the two films (Land Without Bread and Predators At War); in each, normal familial relationships were being broken due to the inability to cull any sort sustainability from other nature.

It is difficult to determine conclusively whether objectivity and truth are being deviated from in “Predators At War” because, like any film with a large budget and high production value, truth can bent. My guess, however, is that the realism depicted in the film corresponds to actual occurrences. I say this because certain scenes, undoubtedly some of the most powerful scenes in Predators At War, simply cannot have been tampered with. Consider the leopard that while, hunting alone, manages to do what the lions, hyenas, wild dogs, and cheetahs could not do by catching a gazelle. The sounds of death and fresh kill bring an entire pack of both lions and hyenas. To escape, the leopard climbs up the tree with the kill in its mouth (a miracle in itself – a leopard carrying more than its own body weight vertically up a tree) while the rest of the animals pace nervously below, their lustfully desperate eyes transfixed on the kill above.

While John Else criticizes the obvert use of drama to drive current documentary films, Predators At War does not appear overly dramatic. The drama depicted in the film is neither manufactured nor gluttonous. Surely, the suspense in the film permeates its entirety but the pace of the drama is dictated by the actual occurrence of events. The animals desperately need the water – their prey has left to search for greener pastures and the rivers which provide drinking water have dried to mud - and the situation grows increasingly dire each day. Unlike films which use human subjects, the animals cannot complain or whine. Instead, they simply try to adapt and develop mechanisms in order to survive. In the end, the conflict in Predators At War is solved by the onset of the rainy season. The resolution in the film is a simple one, a methodical and annual process that rejuvenates the savannah from near-death each year (although not a drought of this proportion). The lack of water has killed some of the once majestic animals, but the sense of better days ahead left me grappling with the same issues present in Flaherty’s films depicting the Eskimo’s or Aranian’s precarious relationship with nature. In many ways, it is difficult to understand a nearly full dependency on nature and in situations when the earth does not provide, as depicted in Land Without Bread, the results can be disastrous. In all the aforementioned films, however, nature methodically marches on with little concern for the happiness of its inhabitants. I believe that it is this conflict, the idea of sustainability in regards the natural earth, that creates the drama that propels the stories depicted in Predators At War, Land Without Bread, Nanook of the North, and Man of Aran.

2006-07-19T23:25:00.000-07:00

Former Sparta guitarist Paul Hinojos' defection to The Mars Volta in March of 2005 fueled a fair amount of well deserved speculation among both critics and fans. It was the latest development in the incestuous and oft-bizarre relationship between the two post-At The Drive In bands. The back story reads something like a post-hardcore soap opera: Critically acclaimed and undeniably seminal At the Drive In breaks up in 2001. From its ashes, 2 fundamentally different musical entities emerge: Sparta is comprised of former ATDI guitarist Jim Ward, Hinojos, and Drummer Tony Hajjar. The Mars Volta features ex-ATDI Vocalist Cederic Bixler-Zavala and Guitarist/Bassist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez. Bixler-Zavala, who broke up ATDI because he saw the band as being mired in genre monogamy, spearheads a Latino-influenced juxtaposition of experimentally ambient tones, Zeppelin riffs, and beatnik-esque lyricism. Ward creates Sparta, a comparatively typical rock band defined by propulsive guitars and sweeping use of a variety of ominous effects. TMV is critically acclaimed for its pliant eccentricity while Sparta's Wiretap Scars is mostly seen as a half-hearted attempt to genericize the ATDI sound. In 2003, TMV Sound Tech/Vocal Operator Jeremy Ward (and cousin to Sparta's Jim Ward) dies of heroin overdose. Ward's death, a month before TMV's full length debut De-Loused in the Comatorian, spurs Hinojos' (remember him?) departure from Sparta to TMV.

So, where does this leave us? On one hand, we have the bizarre and critically over-hyped Mars Volta with three former ATDI members and the less-heralded, semi-traditional Sparta with the two remaining ATDI band mates. Both bands' second albums were inspired, in one way or another, by the deceased Jeremy Ward: TMV based their 2005 effort, Frances the Mute, on a cryptic journal found by Ward while working as an El Paso area repo-man and Sparta's Jim Ward used the idea of personal loss as fodder for the 2004 album, Porcelain. While the transitory and intertwined lineage of both Sparta and The Mars Volta has intrigued, frustrated, and entertained listeners, it does, in fact, have a tangible link to current events. Hinojos' decampment left a sizeable hole in Sparta's lineup and effectively caused almost an entire year of inactivity. In January of 2006, however, Sparta announced that former Engine Down and Denali (both Richmond VA area all-stars) guitarist would serve as Hinojos' permanent replacement.

As a teaser for their upcoming album, Threes, Sparta recently released, via Myspace, the track "Were Taking Back Control." (Listen to it here) A rigid, hard-hitting song that mixes Ward's enterprising vocals with an undercutting vortex of pneumatically intelligent guitar interplay, the future seems to bode well for Sparta. Markedly better than anything off of Porcelain, "Were Taking Back Control" could potentially act as something of a precursor to an exhilarative new direction for Sparta. The track combines the detached creepiness of Sparta's debut, Wiretap Scars, with the plaintiveness and acuity of ATDI. Sparta also released the tracklisting for Threes (see it here), which is set to be released October 10th on Hollywood Records.

The Mars Volta has also finished recording their third album, titled Amputechture, which is set to be released on August 21^st. The track “Viscera Eyes,” a meandering, incohesive 9 minute odyssey can be heard on their Myspace page. The band also announced that they would be working with Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante. According to Bixler-Zavala, Frusciante helped track Amputechture’s guitar tracks so that full time guitarist and producer Rodriguez-Lopez could objectively evaluate and tweak the songs. Furthermore, TMV announced that they would be opening for the Red Hot Chili Peppers in fall of 2006.

2006-07-18T13:38:00.001-07:00

You eat. You sleep. You dream about drowning, redemption. You wish you were you different than the masses; you wish you weren’t a pale face standing in along line of pale faces. You wish you weren’t defined by cheap clothing and the bags under your eyes. You wish you didn’t live a life full of coffee and cigarettes.

But, you eat. You sleep. The days drag on late into the night. Eventually, albeit slowly, you lose your ability to sleep. You lose your ability to believe. In yourself, in anything. Somewhere, somehow, life became confusing. The horizon that is your future has become increasingly dark – clouded with trepidation and uncertainty. Where do you go? What do you do? People tell you to hold on, that things might not be good now but in the future, they will be. The problem is that you can’t imagine a time when things will be good, when you will feel whole or relevant. You cant even remember at what point things started to go wrong.

So, you try to eat. You try to sleep. You end up tossing and turning in your bed. You feel empty, hollow. You listen to sad music in an effort to feel better. But you don’t. You feel worse. You lose track of time, you lose track of yourself, and then you stop caring. You think about things you shouldn’t. Afterwards, you feel guilty, selfish, and insincere.

You try to eat. You try to sleep.

It’s a life.

2006-07-18T12:51:00.000-07:00

Built To Spill - You In Reverse

Built to Spill is one of those bands that seem to perpetually and blithely fly under the radar. They don’t mull within or protect their underground status, they don’t accommodate the vogue and insincere, and they certainly don’t seem to have any dreams of delving into the meretricious and corrupting world of top forty hitmaking. Instead, Built to Spill appears to be content to exist, to dutifully and magically create fragmented and durable records underlined by their sensible poignancy and singer/guitarist/songwriter Doug Martsch’s circuitous musical architecture.

The band’s newest offering, You In Reverse, comes after over five years of inactivity. It seems to be time well spent, as You In Reverse is a wide-ranging, oft-haunting collection of songs that are an entangled mixture of lugubriosity and impatience. Martsch’s lyrics, aplomb with a finicky sort of maturity, acknowledge personal fault and fracture while simultaneously retaining the musical progressiveness that has defined the band since their 1993 debut, Ultimate Alternative Waivers.

But don’t be fooled by words such as progression, new, and different: this is classic Built to Spill. Martsch’s trademark touches – purposefully roughhewn edges, distinctly high-pitched vocals, and the seamless metamorphosis of discord into glamorous symmetry – pleasantly litter the album. Songs such as Goin’ Against Your Mind and Mess with Time, are punchy, grunge-ish tunes that stand in contrast to the bands more melody driven work on albums such as Keep it Like a Secret and Ancient Melodies of the Future. But even these songs, the figurative oddballs of the record, exist within the BTS’ self-established framework. Take, for example, Mess with Time: For nearly three minutes, the song plods along in an almost Hendrix-like fashion before inexplicably and alluringly metasizing into a nouvelle vague version of reggae. While neither the stiff tones nor the reggae influences fit into the band’s traditional repertoire, the way that Martsch unobstructedly blends the two together is textbook BTS.

Perhaps the most significant track on the album is The Wait. Elastically mellow, the song is defined by its low-key catchiness and Martsch’s unusually frank lyrics. On past albums, even the ultra accessible Keep It Like a Secret, Martsch seemed content to speak in metaphors and other forms of detached language. His words had meaning; it was just less than explicit. But on The Wait, Martsch is personal, touching, important. He eloquently and simply reflects the sense of uncertainty, the metaphorical guillotine of doubt, that hangs above us all: You wait/You wait for darkness, then you wait for day…You wait/You wait for something that will make the waiting worth the wait. It’s the last song on the album and a tactful, memorable way to end.

Throughout their career, Built to Spill has steadfastly refused to become the musical equivalent of the “old dog that teaches itself new tricks.” Sure, all their albums have distinct signatures, but they refuse to reinvent themselves simply for the sake of reinvention. Despite this, Built to Spill has remained relevant, refreshing, exciting. They seem to have a knack for changing just enough to avoid becoming stale or predictable. Perhaps their reluctance to conform to the pitchforkian “flavor of the week” stylings that have consumed the indie scene over the past several has hurt their exposure in the mass market, but at least you wont hear Doug Martsch teaming up with Ben Gibbard on an electronica-emo-dance album anytime soon.

2006-07-01T23:40:00.000-07:00

The power of documentary film comes from the robustness of its subject. The vividness and texture of real people with real, albeit “unreal,” stories are inherently moving. They speak to the viewer in a deep yet almost indefinable and indescribable way. They remind us that the best stories that we, as human society, could ever imagine have actually occurred. The best documentaries are those that capture the coarseness and the beauty, the tragedy and the heartbreak, the injustice and the redemption of life. These are ideas that move us in a variety of ways. We get angry, sad, pensive, distraught. We wring our hands or dry our eyes because we can identify with these people and, more importantly, with their stories. We want to console them or bring justice to their lives. Simply, good documentary films create an emotional bond between the viewer and the subject. After all, the subjects of documentary film making are real, breathing, eating entities that speak to the viewer with a both a sense of commonality and experience. Their stories share common ground with our stories, their heartache reminds us of ours.

Errol Morris’ films, Gates of Heaven and Thin Blue Line, encapsulate the good and bad in life in a way that is both indiscernibly real and extraordinarily worthwhile. Their subject matter is very different but at its core, they both deal with the ideas of truth and purpose, life and loss. Morris engages viewers on both a personal and philosophical level; he hints at the ideas of right and wrong, true and false. He is compassionately satirical and relentlessly intriguing. His subjects are unpredictable and ridiculous and they reek of a certain luxurious outlandishness. They are also, however, easy to identify with. We see little bit of ourselves in those mourning the death of a beloved pet and the wrongfully accused. They engage us cerebrally, emotionally, hypothetically. Gates of Heaven and Thin Blue Line are both messy, complicated films that reject linear plots or director pro-activeness and while both present a sense of moral righteousness, the viewer is never explicitly accosted in terms of certainty or sensationalism.

Errol Morris has long been known as a documentary film maker who creates unarrated films that are guided by the subject and their story. His first film, Gates of Heaven, was created when Morris was 33. He had no formal training or specific outline for the movie. Rumor has it that German Director Werner Herzog told Morris that “You'll never make a film, but if you do I'll come and eat my shoe at the premiere.” (Singer 1989) At the premier of Gates of Heaven in 1981, Herzog boiled and ate his shoe. More importantly than the film’s aura, however, is its actual content. Gates of Heaven is an 85 min. film that, on the periphery, seems to be about pet cemeteries. But Gates of Heaven is more than just a quirky story with grainy production and oddball characters; it’s about pain and loss, memories and aspirations, life and death. Film Critic Roger Ebert, who lists it as one of the 10 greatest films ever made, once said that Morris’ “1978 documentary is surrounded by layer upon layer of comedy, pathos, irony, and human nature. I have seen this film perhaps 30 times, and am still not anywhere near the bottom of it: All I know is, it's about a lot more than pet cemeteries.” (Ebert 1997)

Thin Blue Line has a very different, and on some level, more socially “important” subject matter. The film is centered on a man, Randall Adams, wrongly imprisoned for the murder of a Dallas police officer. As the film begins, Adams has been in jail 11 years, his original sentence of death by electrocution commuted to life in prison. The movie clearly suggests that the murder was actually committed by David Harris, a squirrelly “problem child” in jail for an unrelated crime. As it turns out, Harris was the one who fingered Adams in the shooting. Obviously, a police officer dying in the line of fire is sensational event but Morris fights the urge to paint any aspect of the situation in an off-color or melodramatic manner. Instead, he simply allows the subjects of the film- mostly Adams and Harris but also a variety of peripheral characters such as the Judge and DA – to talk about the events. Through their frank, though often meandering and biased discourse, the viewer comes upon the realization that the accused is an innocent man. In fact, it was the Thin Blue Line that has widely been accepted as the main force behind getting its subject, Randall Adams (still in jail at the time of filming), off of death row and back into freedom.

While both films have a decidedly different subject matter, they both deal with human emotions on a very personal level. In some ways, both films are about the people recounting their stories as much as they are about the actual story. Evidence of this can be found in the fact that Morris does not, in either film, accord time to witnesses and participants solely on their role in the story. He seems, rather, to allocate time based on the personality of each interviewee. For example, in Thin Blue Line, Judge Metcalf does not provide more information than Adam’s two defense attorneys, but he receives more time because he is a mixture of interesting and strange.

It is readily apparent that both films share the common surface aspect of being wholly driven by the subjects via interview. Morris, as a rule, seems to completely avoid any real sense of director participation in both Thin Blue Line and Gates of Heaven (although he does so in his later film, Fog of War). Further, both films avoid recognizing the subject being interviewed by title box or any other configuration. It is up to the viewers to discern who, exactly, is speaking. And, it should be pointed out, why they are speaking. This is, in a sense, a classic actualization of John Grierson’s definition of documentary as being the “the creative treatment of actuality.” (Eitzen 1995) Morris forces the viewer, at least in the character’s introductory phase, to be judged at face value. The words each chracter uses, their mannerisms, and the way they present themselves dictate how each individual is to be perceived. At the same time, the backdrops and lack of any chracter identification by Morris are surely borne out of some sense of artistic creation. Morris is essentially creating a situation where the subjects are to be judged on a much more personal level than simply faces on screen. Much like day-to-day life, the interviewees are (initially at least) judged on first impressions – an especially important (although transient) concept in Thin Blue Line.

Furthermore, both films have similar sense of presentation. The camera, on a strictly visual platform, addresses the viewer in an impartial, almost plain manner. Michael Covino defines Morris’ visual stimuli as “self-conscious artificiality - as something apart from the "naturalistic" camera work of most documentaries - that intensifies the general atmosphere of artificiality to such an excruciating degree that one can no longer ignore the artificiality, one becomes conscious of it.” (1980) The subjects themselves, at times, seem to be acting out a specific persona. They are aware of the camera, and their projections of both themselves and their stories come off as akward and self-consciousness. But as the viewers build a relationship with the characters (as one invariably does in both films) such maladroitness metasizes into comfort and we begin to question whether or not these people are simply acting or, as a result of their amateurism, simply rigid because they are uncomfortable with their roles as “filmed subjects.”

There are, however, dramatic and important difference in between the style and intellectual composure of Thin Blue Line and Gates of Heaven. Gates of Heaven follows closely to the Grierson’s interpretation of documentary film making. Subjects are shot in artistic backgrounds - the opening scene with Floyd McClure comes to mind – but the testimony of the characters themselves reveals a true reflection of their perception on a real incident. Gates of Heaven does not enact any sort of artistic licensing in order to make the film more bold or understandable. The Blue Line, however, deviates from this pattern explicitly by incorporating a substantial amount of re-enactments. In a sense, the use of such methods does blur the line between reality and what the film maker wants the viewers to perceive as reality, but at the same time, Morris’ use of re-enactment allows the viewer a starker, and perhaps more meaningful, picture of what happened. (Ansen 1997) The re-enactments don’t add a sense of sensationalism or “TV Drama” – instead, they work like a map, outlining certain, crucial events in a clearly understandable manner that seems to have more in common with foreign filmmaking than documentary. In itself, the film is listed not as a documentary but as nonfiction film.

Furthermore, the re-enactments in Thin Blue Line allow Morris to surrealistically create an environment that is receptive to Adam’s innocence. Using the observational/expository method of documentary film making, Morris refuses to directly insert his conclusions. He does, however, suggest Adams’ innocence by displaying “key psychological images and sound effects such as the twirling crisis light of a police car, the ‘clicking’ sound of the ever-blinking red and blue light, and the slow-motion flying milkshake released by the partner of the cop being shot.” (Curry 1995) While, as mentioned earlier, the Thin Blue Line is not sensational, it is dramatic. The re-enactments and their juxtaposition with the music (the score is also used when a subject says something particularly “important” to the story) give the film a sort of “fantasy” feel, clearly distinguishing it from the wholly interview driven, traditional documentary form found in Gates of Heaven.

Morris, in Thin Blue Line, furthers his perspective of Adams’ innocence by “demonstrating an interplay of perspectives, both oral and visual, in order to design an overall view of the situation. In other words, Morris documents the situation through a reflexive mode of telling that focuses on the individual plight of Randall Adams while it causes the viewer to reflect upon the machinery of the social justice system operating outside the frame of the film.” (Curry 1995)

The films accost the idea of truth in dramatically different manners. Gates of Heaven is about personal truth, the concepts and thoughts that we, as humans, tell ourselves in order to make life better, worth living, or simply so we can fall asleep at night. Morris does so in a variety of ways but the most striking are the scenes of individuals confronting loss, life, and hope – a woman who tells herself that she will meet her canine companion in heaven, Floyd McClure telling the camera that he cant trust a single human on the same level he can trust his “little dog,” a man that believes that his embarrassing “inspirational speaking” will lead those around him to lead a better life. Simply, the film delves into the spiritual as opposed to the provisional approximation of truth. Thin Blue Line forms a perpendicular with this through Morris’ presentation of a sort of “whodunit” scenario in which truth is both evaluated and presented on a deeply factual basis. “Truth exists for Morris because lies exist; if lies are to be exposed, truths must be strategically deployed against them,” writes Linda Williams in her essay Mirrors Without Memories. “His strategy in the pursuit of this relative, hiearchized, and contingent truth is thus to find guilty those speakers whom he draws most deeply into the explorations of their past.” (Williams 1998, 385) Thin Blue Line must be proactive when considering truth and the stakes are very high – despite its usage of surrealistic and re-enacted scenes, several lives hang in the balance of the “truth” the film seeks to prove. Unlike Gates of Heaven, there are lies to attack and dispel and exactitude to present.

Gates of Heaven and Thin Blue Line were produced, shot, and released during the heyday of Cinema Verite. As defined by Ellis and McLane, Cinema Verite refers to a “generically non directed filmmaking” that uses naturalistic techniques in combination with the storytelling elements typical of a scripted film. (216) In both films, Morris goes against the grain and smashes Cinema Verite in preference of “slow motion and expressionistic reenactments of different witnesses’ versions of the murder (Thin Blue Line)” and elongated but neutral camera angles that feature people talking straight into the camera while standing beneath a tree or sitting on an upholstered couch (Gates of Heaven). (Williams, 382) Morris, in his depictions, seems to prescribe to Bill Nichols assertion that “the reality effect of a new mode of documentary representation tends to fade away when the conventional nature of this mode of representation becomes increasingly apparent.” (Nichols, 1998) The provocative mannerisms and ultimately ill-fated attempt of the Cinema Verite to create a climate where authentic dialogue, a certain naturalness of action, and a minimal camera arrangement present the real “truth” are rejected by Morris in favor of artistically balanced interviews in which the subject speaks directly into the screen. By rejecting Cinema Verite, Morris enables himself to create films that are both artistically and dramatically engaging (without the usage of any sort of radical or “new” film making techniques) but still have the ability to present a comparatively untempered truth.

From a strictly observational point, the Thin Blue Line is the more sensually engaging of the two movies. Part of this is due to the inclusion of re-enactments but the majority of it comes from Morris’ inclusion of an original score produced by Phillip Glass. Gates of Heaven is totally absent of any musical composition and while such a decision does not harm the movie, it creates a strict parallel with Thin Blue Line regarding how viewers interact with the film. When talking about his choice of Glass as a composer, Morris said “When I was working on The Thin Blue Line I started using various Philip Glass cd's as "scratch" music - various tracks from Mishima, In The Upper Room, Glassworks... Instantly the movie was transformed by the music, into what I had always dreamed it could be a brooding, dark meditation in chance and fate. I was worried. I needed someone to write Philip Glass music... No, I needed Philip Glass.” (Morris, 1988) In The Thin Blue Line, viewers are almost immediately confronted with both a re-enactment and the absorptive music of Glass. Contrast this to the opening scene of Gates of Heaven in which an eccentric old man with an obvious love for pets, Floyd McClure, gives a rambling lecture on why dogs and cats deserve to be memorialized. While both scenes appear to painstakingly molded, there is the sense that the scene in the Thin Blue Line is much more aware of a sort of urgent need to attract the viewer’s attention. Although both films utilize quirky personalities and strange interviewees to drive the story, it is apparent that in the Thin Blue Line, Morris is conscious of the fact that there is a central story, full of protagonists and villains, that is to be told. Gates of Heaven has no clear victim and no clear libertine. Instead, the film is relies upon by the powerful emotional testimony and aforementioned bizarre personalities to impact the viewer.

Thin Blue Line further contrasts Gates of Heaven in terms of emotional involvement. Thin Blue Line appeals to the empirical ideals of justice and right vs. wrong. Adams is innocent and, from the film’s perspective, it is wrong for him to be jailed. It is a story that can be told in terms of black and white – although without Morris directly telling up what to think. Instead, he relies on us, the viewer, to utilize our own social concepts of “justice.” Ellis and McLane, in A New History of Documentary Film, write “The film makes a strong case that prejudice and possibly tainted testimony persuaded the jury to find Adams, a drifter from the Midwest, guilty. The ‘thin blue line’ of police officers separating the public from chaos – as the judge, quoting the D.A. in the case describes them – is shown as ineffective.” (Ellis and McLane 265) Simply, there exists a sense of overall morality in the film. Gates of Heaven, however, is deeply erudite and shies away from any sort of ascertainment. Shortly into the film, an aging, lonely woman who has just buried her dog – and what appears to be her best friend – states wearily, almost pathetically; “There's your dog; your dog's dead. But where's the thing that made it move? It had to be something, didn't it?" It’s a deeply philosophical and painful question: how does the human mind conceptualize, cope, and react to death? Covino, in his 1980 Film Quarterly review of the film, wrote “The film replaces the usual tension of documentaries with a new kind of tension: there's no Marcel Ophuls holding up a microphone to French collaborators and ex-Nazis. No one's trying to evade anything. That's what's so depressing: it's the other way around. These very ordinary people are so innocent, so anxious, so eager to express themselves, to explain their "philosophies of life," A husband and a wife seem to discover in front of the camera that they have different theological notions with regards to the hereafter - the woman, at any rate, feels confident she will be reunited in heaven with her dead pet.” (1980) In Gates of Heaven, Morris creates a story out of reflective, if not overly sapient, musings by quotidian people with quotidian lives. Viewers are compelled by its emotional value, moved by flirtingly satirical yet deeply human reactions and observations made by the documented subjects. It details life between the margins, the painful but, in our approximation, unimportant. Thin Blue Line is precisely the opposite – its story drives, creates, and yearns for philosophical legal thought. It questions the “thin blue line,” the judicial system, and the idea of prejudice. Both films engage the viewer in a cognitive manner but their methodologies – the roads they take to their destination – differ greatly.

At its core, Gates of Heaven is indelicate and somewhat brusque. Viewers ask themselves “Why are these people, these fools, so sad, so depressed, so hopeless over the death of their pet.” But perhaps that’s the point. We all mourn over what others may perceive as trivialities, the trite and temporarily painful events of daily life that gradually fade into reservoir of our memory. At times, Gates of Heaven comes dangerously close to ridicule only to be rescued by a moment of unscripted and poignant monument. “The film lacks the usual shock absorbers. Despite its rigor, despite its formalism, despite its posing, despite its artificiality, despite all these things, Gates of Heaven overwhelms the viewer with the sheer, incredible horror of life as it often is in the quietest, most everyday moments,” writes Covino. “But it's affecting, vivid, and the viewer suddenly finds himself - but with much preparation - in the presence of a pain, a sorrow, so naked and so powerful that all the film's artifice drops away.” (1988) There is no pragmatism is Gates of Heaven, no problem to be solved, and (obviously) no answers provided. The viewer quickly discards the unimportance of the film’s fleeting plot and recognizes that first and foremost, Gates of Heaven provides an opportunistic window into the sense of disconsolateness that hides in the shadows of our emotional equilibriums. It’s not about pet cemeteries, old men with emigrating sagacity, or the ridiculousness of pet headstones that state “God is Dog spelled backwards.” Instead, Gates of Heaven confronts the sting of loss and the uncertainty of death and leaves us to question what, really, this movie is all about.

Perhaps the most striking difference in the films is the way that they end. Thin Blue Line’s makes an effective case for Adams innocence. “Is Randall Adams an innocent man?,” Morris asks Harris. In a cold, haunting voice, the young man replies: “I’m sure he is.” “How do you know, asks Morris. “Because I’m the one that knows,’ replies Harris. As the film fades to black, viewers are left shaken but sure of whom the real killer is. It’s a powerful and inhospitable moment and its gravity is enormous. This was not, as several Judicial and Police Officers suggest through the film, much ado about nothing. It was much ado about SOMETHING. It is at this point that Thin Blue Line is at its most human, the exact moment when the viewer realizes that this is not about a murder but instead, shattered lives and broken hope. Gates of Heaven ends in a dramatically different fashion; its last shot is an unobstructed aerial shot of the cemetery. There are no people, no pets, and no sound. Just a comfortless shot of green countryside that holds for 30 seconds before distressingly blinking out. The ending catches the viewer by surprise. It is delicate, moving, and agonizingly final. One could imagine that is what death would feel like - painlessly and silently floating above a world, our world, of grass and trees. While both endings leave the viewer rustically uncomfortable, the end of Thin Blue Line tells us what the film was about and why it was important while the ending of Gates of Heaven leaves us questioning what the film was really about. Or, what is this life really about. ending is doggedly haunting, arid of emotion and compassion. It’s evil and uncompromisingly so. It is comprised of a simple shot of a handheld voice recorder on a plain, wood-grained table. The viewer does not see anyone, they merely hear two voices engaged in an interview. It’s also the only time the viewers hear Morris’ voice in the film. Morris is questioning Harris, the man the film clearly suggests is guilty, about

Gates of Heaven and Thin Blue Line are very different films created by the same man. They both, however, engage the viewer in an importantly cognitive manner. These films are what documentary should strive to be: potent, meditative, and visually stimulating. In a phrase, these films are simply and fully exhausting. Morris has the unique ability to be both fatherly and neighborly. We, as the viewer, feel like we learned something over the course of his films but without Morris shoving anything down our throats. It’s beautifully tactful. Morris transforms a simple film into a dynamic journey - something that feels so real that we are left with tangible memories. In some ways, both films feel like a long, cross country journey without a map. Instead, there is only the hope of a destination – somewhere, anywhere – that is beautiful, invaluable, and wholly remunerative. Morris begs the viewer to not only walk into the wild but to also find his way out again. Hopefully, we’ll come out enlightened but if we don’t, it was still a hell of an expedition.

2006-06-28T09:30:00.000-07:00

The first real memory I have of manhood or otherwise occurred in a dive bar when I was 22. It happened at a point in my life in which my fledgling ideologies were lodged between the granular realities of uncertainty and fragmented mediocrity. In short, I was metaphorically adrift in a sea of alternating cerulean and choleric blues. Violent storms would give way to momentary yet manumissional bursts of sunlight. The girl who I had hoped to spend eternity with had just left me, citing my unadulterated bitterness and romantic cynicism as the cause. She left me devastated and chain smoking, holed up in the darkness of my room. I was angry, I was sad, I was fucking pathetic. I began to look at life in terms of cause and effect, a failed experiment in pragmatic utilitarianism. Like I said, fucking pathetic.

But as in all stories of youth dissolved - conquered, demoralized, browbeaten - I grew up. The fact that I grew up is not, however, the story. We all grow up, grow old, become marginalized. We find Jesus or we curse him. We smell the arresting and barbaric storm that accumulates on the horizon. In it, our fate is revealed through a show of fantastic and blinding electricity. It is brilliant and heartbreaking. It is at this point, when we shed our youthful uprightness for the comfort found in the armor of maturity, that the end exerts itself and, like a cancer, steadfastly eats away at away at the former clarity of optimism.

But my pedestrian musings on the subjects of life and death are trivial and unnecessary. They lack the brawn and the relevance of my story. So, we cut to the chase:

It is a Friday night in the middle of February. February is, perhaps, the most disturbing time of the year. Life loses its velocity, its crispness, its poignancy. The all too early abetment of daylight acts a serviceable yet poor camouflage for the doleful bleakness of winter. On this particular Friday night, I sought refuge, for a retrospectively unknown reason, in a disgraceful and ramshackle tavern then known as Swedes. It was the kind of place that kept the lights low out of necessity. The tables were stained with the sticky residue of spilled drinks, body fluids, and hopelessness. The ancient beer memorabilia that dotted the walls was not nostalgic or chimerical. Instead, it was decrepit and old and a reminder of how long this particular establishment had been serving as the catalyst of degeneration. Intoxication as an escape. Intoxication as a mechanism of achievement for a place where boundaries and realities are blurred and soothed. But above all, Swedes was nothing more than a mirage. A shit-stained cesspool of humanity and grit that gave the illusion of freedom but in reality did nothing but cement the fact that to be here is to be in the deepest and darkest place of the human psyche, the place where hope has finally, and often tortuously, been put to rest.

Halfway to disconcertion, the tangible benefit of intoxication, I sat in this insignificant bar in an insignificant small town in Middle America. With me, sat two of my friends. People whose faces and personalities have now become opaquely washed away in the polluted river of time and place. The jukebox, burrowed snugly in the darkest of the bar’s dim corners, was, fittingly, playing Merle Haggard. Haggard has always been someone whom I respected. He did not see life in terms of good or bad, merely in sequences of being drunk and being alive. He did not write songs with the borderline sense of mental retardation of his peers and he did not fuck around with attachment or reverie. I can appreciate that.

So, as my friends and I sat in this bar listening to Merle Haggard and shooting the shit about women with large breasts, women with loose vaginas, and women that had broken our hearts, the most inexplicable thing happened. It unraveled like a story out of some sort of white trash penthouse-ian fantasy, surreal and brutal, eloquent and smugly arousing. From the bar, directly across from the table where we sat, a woman rose and made her way towards us. She carried herself with a burlesque sort of crestfallen swagger. She wore her dirty blonde hair in a messy half pony tail. She looked to exist on a diet of cigarettes and small-mindedness and was dressed in the trashiest of attire – tapered blue jeans matched beautifully with a black leather vest and a Dallas Cowboys themed Looney Toons shirt. To even the most casual of observers it was readily apparent that this woman – a mess of booze and stupor – was a molten and tangible perfection of the white trash animal. She inched closer. Closer. Inside, I was wishing for nothing more than for her to abandon her foray across the bar, to break off eye contact, to leave us the fuck alone. This was like an encounter between an African and a crocodile, a dangerous juxtaposition between predator and prey that would have the most disastrous of results.

She addressed us in a cackling, enigmatic tone that reeked of trailer parks and casino parking lots.

“You boys,” she said in a drunken slur, “Seem to be pretty lonely.”

In immediate and near symbiotic unison, we replied that no lady, we weren’t lonely, we don’t need or want your company, please, lady, please get the fuck out of here and leave us alone. Go back to the bar, to your life, to your catacomb of desperation. But seemingly unimpressed by our alcohol inspired rudeness, she continued on.

“Look, I got something that might interest you guys,” she said. “I know I may not be the best looking girl you-all ever saw but…”

And then, she arrived at her destination. Here, she threw the knockout punch, the mother of all propositions, the most fucking ridiculous thing I have ever heard or ever hope to hear. She delivered it through an anxiously clenched jaw, her hot, stale breath whistling through her archeologically ignored teeth.

“I’ll suck all you boy’s dicks for twenty dollars.”

The comment cut through the night with the potency of assassination. It commanded response, demanded to be confronted, defied both plausibility and rationale. Her comment, her demeanor, and her ghastly smirk were all delivered with the finesse and sensitivity of rape. Her world invaded ours. The situation was volcanic, she erupting with a vesuevian current of scum and vice and we, the innocent and naïve townspeople below, running and begging for our lives. It was to no avail. I struggled to answer her. Her suggestion was beyond ludicrous. It was indecent, a comment of impenetrable dilapidation. In a strangled voice, heavy with a mixture of pity and acrimony, I responded that no, you fucking pig, I’d rather die than let you within spitting distance of my exposed, aroused dick. She took the comment with grace and, surprisingly, a simple sense of level headedness.

“Fuck you boys then,” she said. “You’re the ones missing out, I been doin’ this for longer than ya’ll been a-live.”

And then, as she turned to retreat to her bar stool, she was felled by a blow with a fundamentally monumental importance. A blubbery right fist, thrown with accuracy and meaning, hit her face with a meaty thump. She let out a harrowing sound, a vociferate bluster of a deep and trembling viscosity, fueled by beer and disaster and woe. She grabbed the left side of her face and feigned death. Above her stood a man, thick with brute sexuality and imbedded sourness. He wore his tattoos with a mural-like pride. This was not a man to fuck with, not a man to look, not man to acknowledge or celebrate or even consider human. He was beast, an animal, a fucking firebrand of carnality and laziness. Then, he turned. His eyes met mine.

“Sorry, boys, my wife’s a fucking whore.”

And that was it. He turned and kicked her in the ribs. His disposition was that of complacent normalcy. Like episodes such as were a regular occurrence, a simple marital disagreement that was a tolerated annoyance. He kicked again. Again, again. She looked up at him and screamed a series of unintelligible phrases laced with “fuck yous” and sobs. Pitifully, then, she picked herself up and walked across the now silent bar and sat in the barstool next to him. He ordered her a beer and told her to put it on her face. She did so under his watchful eye. And so they sat: He, the author of her welling bruises and she, the terminal skank. Good and bad, right and wrong, decency and vulgarity – these values had no place in either’s hearts or minds. These people simply existed, devoid of ideology, morality, and poignancy. They were real only because of their bones and flesh and blood and hair. Reluctantly, the bar’s patrons returned to their conversations and life, per normal, moved on. We finished our beers and disappeared into the snowy night.

Its now five years later. My broken heart mended, my life went on. I now live in a house, drive a car, have a job and a wife and a kid on the way. I’m happy. 3 years ago I found out I had cancer. 2 years ago, I beat it. I live the suburban life: I look forward to weekends and cookouts and waking up every morning wrapped around a beautiful woman. I’m at peace with who I am and who I was and I have a pretty clear idea of who I want to be. My life, finally, became what I always wanted it to be. In retrospect and revision, however, I look back on that night often. It haunts me, it makes me laugh, and it seems to have some sort of deep-rooted importance to who I once was and who I became. The night was the antithesis of rockwellian, a moment of wholesale sleaze and despondency. I’ve always wondered what drives human beings to such dark places, metaphorical battlefields that torture the mind and destroy the body. I still can’t figure it out. Deep down, I don’t think I really want to figure it out. I don’t want to know where all that pain and bitterness and unimportance comes from. Desperation of that magnitude and that ferocity must come from a place that is both bottomless and caliginous, cloudy with frailty and bereavement. It operates like a vector, greedily consuming the good in people, leaving the upright hobbled and crippled with weight. I don’t want to know that kind life.