Predator 2

Predator 2 (3/5)

A sequel should do at least two things: 1) respect the established world of the previous installment(s) and 2) contribute to the mythology. Aliens is the obvious example of a film that accomplished both these requirements. The film manages to expand the scope of the original by introducing the space marines and giving us a glimpse of the alien hierarchy while simultaneously exploring themes from the first film, including an interrogation of feminism, rape and the military industrial complex. Predator 2 is no Aliens. However, I am happy to say that for a film that has a bad reputation, this sequel to the Schwarzenegger classic holds up surprisingly well. At the very least, the movie does respect the rules honed in the first film, even if it never manages to truly justify its own existence.

Predator 2’s simple twist on the formula of the first film is that the predator is now in the city. In a clever opening shot, the camera pans along tropical looking flora until we see the skyline of Los Angeles. Supposedly, it was this new setting that turned Schwarzenegger off the project. Normally, when a principal actor turns down a role for the sequel (think Batman Forever and Batman and Robin) this indicates a deeply flawed shift in the series, but in this case Schwarzenegger isn’t missed. The strength of the first movie was the ensemble nature of the cast, not just the central protagonist, and the writers would have been forced to come up with something pretty outlandish in order to keep all the characters from the Predator in the sequel. (Although, Voodoo does play a key part of Predator 2, which likely means we were extremely close to a Predator versus Zombies movie. Hollywood, if you’re listening, I would love to see Predator tangle with a Zombie Blain).

This time, instead of the Governator, Danny Glover steps up as the man who must hunt the hunter. And while he may not have the ‘roided up muscles of Schwarzenegger, he brings an everyman quality to his character that grounds the more ostentatious sci-fi moments of the film. Glover plays Mike Harrigan, a police officer caught in the middle of the sweltering urban heat and an escalating gang war between Columbians and Voodoo practicing Jamaicans (Voodoo is mostly practiced among Haitians, but okay, I’ll bite). We are first introduced to Harrigan when he storms into a firefight between the police and a Columbian gang in order to save two downed officers. Draping two bullet proof vests over a car window, he places himself between the gang members and the wounded police and then manages to outflank several of the whooping and hollering Columbians. The rest of the gang take refuge in a high rise, but when Harrigan and his team attempt to flush them out, instead of entering into another firefight, he finds almost the entire gang slaughtered with their blood and body parts strewn across walls and floors.

Not only must Harrigan deal with a mysterious newcomer on the streets of LA, but he also must struggle with an unknown federal agency that wants to hobble Harrigan’s freewheeling attitude. Shortly after his heroics with the Columbian gang, Harrigan finds himself dressed down by Agent Keyes (Gary Busey) who tells him to play start playing by the rules. In a subplot borrowed from the Alien films, it turns out Keyes belongs to a government agency (that is eerily similar to the same organization shown in the film Repo Man) entrusted with capturing the predator and, more importantly, his technology. Oh, and Harrigan’s team been assigned a new, unproven member, Jerry, played to an obnoxious hilt by Bill Paxton. The film devotes most of its time to Harrigan and his team’s investigation into the predator and how their attempts to piece together who it is that has the gall to murder the most vicious of L.A.’s gangs, as well as more than a few cops.

Predator 2 keenly follows the formula and rules established in the first film. Fans of the original film will likely remember the female prisoner’s monologue about the predator’s predilection for extreme tropical climates, specifically stating that the creature would appear only during the hottest of summers (this is a part of the film that the makers of Alien Vs. Predator apparently forgot). In the sequel, the director has several characters make note of the asphalt melting heat and their uniforms are blotted with sweat stains, a nice allusion to the first film that respects the audience enough to let them make the connection. While the look of the predator stays true to the delineation of the first film, Stan Winston has tweaked the predator design for this film, providing this creature with crowded dreadlocks, an elongated skull and the reptilian designs of a copperhead snake. Towards the end of the film, we are treated with half a dozen or so different predators that both conform to the outlines of the alien from the first film and present a unique take on what a predator can look like.

Furthermore, the predator’s modus operandi isn’t much different, which turns out to be both a strength and a weakness. Once again, he searches for warriors, kills them and smuggles some trophies. This time, however, the predator eschews subtly for wholesale slaughter. Instead of picking enemies off one by one, he prefers to jump into the middle of a group and takes them out en mass. The brash tactics are never explained. Perhaps he’s a much younger predator, used to eating everything in the cookie jar rather than savoring them one by one. Age has a way of making you appreciate a kill. Unfortunately, this tactic makes the predator far less interesting. The first film formed a battle of wits between the predator and the mercenaries, but here the gangs and cops are completely outclassed. If he came to Earth to hunt game, then it hardly seems like a sport—kind of like Dick Cheney driving around in an SUV in order to shoot quails and his friend’s face. If there’s no effort then it’s no fun.

The director does manage to add his own stylized take on the urban predator. There is one particular scene that provides a glimpse of what the film could have been. The predator follows Harrigan to his meeting with King Willie, the leader of the Jamaican Voodoo gang. After Harrigan leaves, the predator plunges from the rooftops and into the alleyway. In a close shot we follow the invisible footsteps of the predator as he approaches King Willie who then brandishes two knives. We cut to an image of his face screaming, which, as the visage moves farther away, is revealed to be a decapitated head in the grasp of the predator. The filmmaker makes use of the indeterminate temporal nature of the cut—that we are never certain how much time has passed when a cut occurs—and what we expect to be an image from the middle of an intense brawl reveals itself as an easy kill for the predator.

It’s the filmmaker’s attempts to broaden the mythology where the film ultimately fails. This time around the predator has some new toys, including a boomerang death discus, a piano wire net and a double sided harpoon, and while the weaponry is fun, it adds little to the overall predator mythos. The filmmakers make another attempt at expanding the universe at the end of the film when Harrigan stumbles into the predator ship and notices a trophy display, containing, most famously, the head of an alien from that other franchise. When he finally kills the predator, one of the creature’s brethren hands Harrigan an 18^th century pistol, suggesting that humans have served as game for the predators for centuries. But the fact that the predators have returned to Earth again and again was already established in the first film. We do discover more about the predator’s ethos when he refuses to kill Harrigan’s female companion because she’s with child, revealing that the predators are pro-life. This, of course, begs the question as to whether or not the predator has a Jesus fish on the back of his spaceship.

Perhaps the most mystifying change to the formula of the first film was the decision to make it take place in the future (or the past depending on whether you start from when I’m writing or when the film was made). Predator 2 takes place in 1997, a whole seven years from when it was made. Of course, it is a 1997 that looks strangely like 1990, but with weirder looking guns and police cars that look like hybrid mini-vans. The futuristic setting only serves to make the movie look older than it really is.

If the film only relied on momentum from the first film with a few new details, then I think it would have a much stronger reputation, but there are unfortunate performances throughout the movie. Bill Paxton, who has turned in strong roles before, is at his guffawing worst. The gangs are mostly cartoonish and are one step removed from Looney Tunes characters. That is, if Bugs Bunny often left mounds of coke lying around and, instead of replacing Rabbit Season signs with Duck Season signs, decided to ritualistically murder Daffy Duck. Shockingly, Gary Busey, who has transformed into a living breathing cartoon character himself, gives a nuanced performance by the standards of the film.

Predator 2 is a mixed bag of some old standbys and half formed ideas. It may not deserve the awful reputation it has garnered over the years, but it is far from the classic of the first. If you haven’t seen the film in a long time, I would recommend a second visit. You might be surprised at how entertaining the film still is.

Predator

Predator (5/5)

With the impending resurrection of the true Predator series, I have decided to revisit the franchise from the beginning. I do not promise to make it all the way to the Alien v. Predator films (Predators in Antarctica? Did they not see the first two movies?), but I figured that with the soon to be released third film in the series, Predators, I should make the effort to re-familiarize myself with one of film’s great monsters. Besides, how will I know what’s going on in Predators if I don’t see the first two movies?

The director, John McTiernan, made Predator shortly before his creative and economic peak. He would soon go on to direct Die Hard, a film that would not only create an entirely new sub-genre of action films (the trapped on a boat/train/bus/space station movie) but also enter into the pop-culture consciousness as the essence of what an action film can and should do. But at this point in his career he was just some guy that made a movie where Pierce Brosnan wore an intimidating beard.

The plot of Predator is relatively straight forward. Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger) leads an elite team of mercenaries who are called on by an old friend at the CIA, Dillon (Carl Weathers), to rescue two CIA field operatives who have gone missing in South America. Despite Dutch’s policy that his team works alone (he also stipulates that the team only works rescue missions), Dillon forces himself onto the operation as a liaison between the mercenaries and the government. Naturally, tensions mount since just about everyone on the team considers Dillon an out of practice pencil pusher. Whenever a film like this creates a dichotomy between those who are shot at and those who sit behind desks, you can guarantee that the desk jockeys are not on the level. Sure enough, when Dutch and his team discover the hidden encampment of the rebel guerillas and destroy it with the usual 1980s level of orgiastic violence, they realize that the actual mission was to destroy the guerillas and not to rescue the CIA officers. This goes against Dutch’s mercenary ethics (oxymoron?) and he is furious with Dillon.

You’ll notice that I have yet to mention the predator, and that’s because up until this point in the film he has made little more than small cameo appearances. We see his ship drop into the Earth’s atmosphere in the beginning of the film and during the team’s trek to find the enemy camp, snippets of the film are shown in Pred-o-vision as the alien studies his prey and records some of their conversations. In fact, the screenplay has a bit of a dual personality. It acts like a modern day man on a mission movie with a little bit government backstabbing thrown in for good measure, but all of a sudden aliens show up and it becomes an entirely different story. In lesser hands this would have torn the film in two, but the man on the mission movie serves to heighten the tension. Like the films Jaws and Alien, McTiernan is smart enough to leave the big reveal until about halfway through the film (and even then the predator is still wearing a mask so we don’t get to see his face until the final moments of the movie). The entire time the audience is left wondering what exactly this alien looks like and when it will strike.

Once the team heads back to the rendezvous point, they soon discover that they are being hunted by something that is near invisible and interested in picking them off one at a time. By the end of the film Dutch is the only man left. Through complete luck he discovers that covering himself with mud prevents the creature, who sees through heat, from seeing him. Dutch uses this tactical knowledge in order to even the odds for the final confrontation. In a common film motif, Dutch must discard all of his modern weaponry and face the predator with only weapons he can fashion out of the forest. Scenes like this, when the hero must rely on only the most primitive tools, evoke a realization that living on this planet is not too far from the living on that island those British school children landed on in Lord of the Flies. Tellingly, Dutch lets out a primordial scream in order to call the predator to battle.

When so many modern blockbusters are trying to be novels, stretching their running time long beyond the 120 minute mark, there is something refreshing when a film like Predator aims to be the perfect short story. The structure of the film is as streamlined as a fighter plan, giving the audience all the information it really needs shortly after the opening credits. We see the alien ship drop to Earth and are informed by Dillon that they need to rescue some prisoners. Then we’re off. That’s not to say the film doesn’t make use of some great tension before the predator is introduced, but that the simplicity of the film becomes a strength and not a detriment. A consequence of this terse plotting is that several subplots are never really resolved. We never know what happens when Dutch returns to civilization after realizing he had been duped, and the real world cynic versus mercenary with a heart of gold standoff between Dutch and Dillon is never truly resolved. But McTiernan realizes that these conflicts are more important for the tension they create rather than their resolution. We all know the CIA is corrupt, but the last thing this movie needs is a denouement where Dutch stands before a congressional hearing.

The condensed nature of the film extends to the cast of characters as well. The filmmakers use the Huey copter ride to give us all the information we need on who these mercenaries are, and, with the precision and grace of a silent kill, they do so with nothing more than a few lines of dialogue. We get Blain (Jesse Ventura) chewing on tobacco and offering some to his fellow soldiers. When they refuse he claims the tobacco would make each one into a “sexual tyrannosaurus rex” like him, naturally (I’m obviously editing out some of this dialogue). He’s the kind of guy who would get on your nerves just because he could. Hawkins (Shane Black) is first seen reading a comic book and apparently is the gang’s source of scatological humor. Throughout the film he attempts to make Billy (Sonny Landham as the unfortunately stereotypically stoic American Indian) to laugh by telling him absurdly misogynistic jokes. While this gag relies on easy stereotypes (yes, Billy is also an excellent tracker), it also creates a sense of camaraderie between the soldiers. Mac (Bill Duke) is first seen sharpening a knife, and throughout the film he plays his character as on the edge. He first threatens to murder Dillon in the middle of the jungle if he gives away their position (“I’ll bleed you. Real quiet like”), and later he goes full PTSD when his best friend Blain dies, at one point he giving a soliloquy to the moon about how the two of them were the only men to survive out of their entire platoon. Of course, given Mac’s mental state, he is an unreliable narrator of his own history. Like most of the relations in this film, and in the best short stories, whole histories are implied but not fully illuminated. (Note to McTiernan: please never make a prequel to this film. I don’t need to know that Blain became a mercenary because his father was decapitated by a Jedi).

But the heart of the film is really the predator. A lot of credit must go to the over seven foot tall actor, Kevin Peter Hall. Hall manages to infuse the predator with a lot of personality, a difficult task when you are hidden underneath a heavy suit. His movements are simultaneously graceful and unearthly, avoiding the usual clumsiness that accompanies a performance underneath a monster suit. Certain stretches of the film focus solely on the predator’s ritualistic trophy making, using the skulls of his dispatched enemies, and without a capable actor these moments would be, at best, un-engaging and, at worst, laughable. However, Hall plays the creature as someone who is deliberate and smart. He plans and he also has a code of ethics (he won’t kill those who are incapable of defending themselves).

Of course the predator wouldn’t be such an iconic creature if he didn’t also have a great design. Like the performance by Hall, Stan Winston’s design manages to be both otherworldly and grounded in terrestrial cultures. The most striking aspects to the predator are his dreadlocked hair and reptilian skin. Not only is this an unusual combination, but it makes a kind of dream sense. After all, what else would you utilize in order to represent an alien creature that apparently lives in the most extreme tropical climates?

Perhaps the most amazing thing about Predator is that its premise seems so flimsy and yet the film succeeds despite itself. Just try to explain the premise of the film to someone who hasn’t seen it: “A band of mercenaries are hunted down by an extraterrestrial from beyond the stars.” A description of the film makes it sound like direct to video material. But the filmmakers took the premise seriously. Even Schwarzenegger limits himself to one bad pun. What’s more, the movie is endlessly quotable (“If it bleeds, we can kill it;” “I ain’t got time to bleed”), which usually means the film was in careful hands from the screenplay stage. The ability of the filmmakers to turn what could have been the plot to an Ed Wood film and turn it into a minor classic not only speaks to the quality of work for those involved, but also to the power of film. There is a reason many of the earliest filmmakers, like Melies, were also magicians, because given enough film magic, a movie can make the audience believe anything.

Ted Leo & The Pharmacists - Brutalist Bricks

Ted Leo & The Pharmacists – Brutalist Bricks (5/5)

In his anthemic, chorus crushing song, “Waiting for the Great Leap Forward,” Billy Bragg sings, “Mixing Pop and Politics he asks me what the use is/I offer him embarrassment and my usual excuses.” Within the narrative of the song, the question is posed to Billy during the last call moments at a pub, and it carries a sense of drunk cynicism. It is also the question that Ted Leo, a musician deeply influenced by Billy Braggs punk and politics, has been posing to himself, both in song and interviews, for most of his career. Can an artist deliver the complications of politics through the streamlined joys of a pop melody? It’s a question that every artist who trades in choruses and hooks that go straight for the mainline must ask. After all, if politics, as the philosopher once said, are an ideology that separates the individual from his or her real condition, then can the pop music, with its inherent brevity and disposability, perform the work of impacting a listener’s consciousness enough to make these conditions known?

At times Ted Leo has suggested in interviews that pop music can’t accomplish this kind of consciousness shifting, but, rather, all it can hope to do is preach to the converted. This tension between wanting to craft a political anthem within the confines of pop music shifts to the forefront of his latest album, The Brutalist Bricks, and is perhaps best exemplified by the song “Ativan Eyes.” The song begins with a call to action, sprinkled with a little Karl Marx, but, before even the first chorus, abruptly shifts into the idioms of a love song: “The industry’s out of touch / The means of production are now in the hands of the worker / But I just want to be touched by your expert hands.” Here the metaphorical hands of labor are transformed into the hands of that oldest of rock and roll traditions, a woman to pine for. The mash up between politics and pop is jarring. The split roles of “Ativan Eyes” mirror the forked expectations for popular rock and roll: those who are listening for tidbits of lyrics to live their lives to and those who want something to that will move their feet.

Fittingly, Ted Leo name checks the stridently leftist hardcore band Flux of Pink Indians part way through “Ativan Eyes,” and longtime fans of Leo will notice the influence of hardcore music on Brutalist Bricks. Both “The Stick” and “Where Was My Brain?” are more aggressive than anything Ted Leo has previously put to disc, even the consciously stripped down Shake the Sheets. Both songs play at one point or another to the nostalgia for music that, like Flux of Pink Indians, could impact how one sees the world during the most vulnerable time in our life, our teenage years. On “The Stick,” a song that moves along with some clipped chords but on more than one occasion threatens to devolve into feedback and noise, Ted Leo intones, “Play an ancient mixtape, try to break from your routine,” suggesting the power inherent in returning to the same music that once shifted how we saw the world. And on “Where Was My Brain?,” he sings “We had the best of an imperfect world” in one of Leo’s perfectly placed anthems.

Ted Leo’s interest in hardcore careens across the album and finds its way into songs that aren’t as readily impacted by the genre as “The Stick” and “Where Was My Brain?” The entire album bursts with the type of energy that most bands manage to infuse on their first or second album, but can rarely muster on their sixth release. The album opener, “The Mighty Sparrow,” begins, as if mid-sentence, with the statement, “When the café doors exploded, I reacted too / Reacted to you” and doesn’t let up over the course of two and a half minutes, which includes two false endings and an instrumental outro. The song “Mourning in America” not only references that all time favorite target of hardcore punk bands, Ronald Reagan, but also backs the verses with frenetic guitar play. The song is a testament to Ted Leo’s ability to craft political songs that speak to the moment while referencing the past. Similarly, Living with the Living, often took aim at the Iraq War by circumventing it altogether and choosing instead to recall America’s forays into reshaping South American politics (a move that hasn’t borne out all that well since several of our American backed “candidates,” including Augusto Pinochet, have found themselves in front of war crimes tribunals).

Even though Brutalist Bricks shares a more cohesive sonic thesis than the stylistically diverse Living with the Living, Ted Leo hasn’t lost the ability to change genres with the same ease as changing a radio station. Leo has transformed “One Polaroid a Day” from the radio ready tune fans recognized at his live show into a slow burn funk number. For many fans this seems like a perplexing decision. Why, after all, might Ted Leo weaken one of his catchiest songs with an, arguably, unnecessary genre shift? We might explain this move by pointing towards Leo’s anxiety that pop music’s slickness is at odds with any potential message. That, or maybe he was listening to a lot of Curtis Mayfield when it came time to record the song. “Tuberculoids Arrive in Hops,” a meditation on the importation of disease to the New World from Europe, is a quiet moment of lo-fi folk that would sound at home on a Sebadoh album.

Perhaps all a musician can really do provide a message to those who are already ready to hear it. A song, after all, is unlikely to change your life. That doesn’t mean Leo doesn’t try, and there are plenty of rousing numbers we have come to expect from Ted Leo. Chief among these is “Bottled in Cork,” a song that narrates Leo’s excursion abroad, and, although it begins discussing the United Nations, the story moves quickly from the political to the personal. In a sense it is the diametric opposite of Heart of Oak’s “Ballad of the Sin Eater,” whose chorus was “You didn’t think they could hate you.” “Ballad of the Sin Eater” told of expatriate adventures following America’s reaction to 9/11, but unlike that earlier song, “Bottled in Cork tells of growing older and befriending the locals. The song is a reminder that, if nothing else, the converted need to be reminded now and then that the conditions of the world are not stagnant and with a little faith and a lot of work things can change. Whatever side you fall on the pop and politics debate, we might ask ourselves what our outlook on politics and life might be if we had not discovered X band at Y moment in our life.

Nirvana - Bleach (20th Anniversary Edition)

Nirvana - Bleach (20th Anniversary Edition)

I never held Bleach in much esteem. Without the subsequent triumphs of later albums, my thinking went, Nirvana's first studio effort would have most likely drifted out of the public consciousness, and its importance mostly lies as an artifact for die hard Nirvana fans only. Sub-Pop's reissue of Nirvana's first album, then, provides an excellent opportunity, not just to bask in the new high fi sheen of the album, but also to reassess Bleach's place within Nirvana's catalogue and within the rock and roll canon.

Of course, what you'll notice first is the tremendous clean up job Sup-Pop managed on this recording. From the initial intro of "Blew's" rising and falling bass line to Cobain's growl on album closer, "Downer," the entire album sounds much deeper and more compelling. Noveselic's bass and Channing's drums are given the their appropriate place alongside Cobain's lyrics and guitar, a reminder that Nirvana was always more than just a charismatic front man.

The jump in sound quality allowed me to really appreciate some of the slower numbers on the album. Before the reissue, I always considered it hopelessly front loaded-some great tracks in the first half ("Blew," "About a Girl," and "School") but tended to lose itself towards the end. The remastered sound helped me appreciate the way that Nirvana was playing around with texture on the album. "Paper Cuts," for instance, begins with the gnarled sounds of stiffled guitar and feedback while Cobain does a sing-scream call and response. These moments of aggression are offset by twin verses that break into shimmering guitars and a classic Nevermind-like melody, which, of course, are distorted once again into the "ugly" moments. It took the reissue to really show me how much Nirvana could accomplish on a song like this with only three members.

In fact, the reissue brings out much of the metallic psychedelia that pervades the album. Tracks that once seemed like misfits, "About a Girl" and "Love Buzz," now sound like an extension of the 60s psychedelia that clearly influenced the album. "About a Girl" now sounds like one of the pretty songs the Beatles might insert on their later more drug influence (or drug enhanced if you like) work, much like how "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," precedes "Happiness is a Warm Gun" on the White Album. "About a Girl's" twisted use of a love song melody to sing about a prostitute speaks to the death of a sixties, and the album's discontinuity between faux-naivete and pounding metal might be viewed as a continuation of that theme.

Cobain spoke of and wrote about the missed opportunities of the 1960s cultural revolution that appeared to die an ugly death a decade later. And one cannot help but imagine a burnt out hippie when Cobain sings "They make their living with arts and crafts / The kinds with seashells, driftwood and burlap" on "Swap Meet." "Sifting," with its hypnotizingly slow progression and intonation of what "teacher said" and "preacher said," could have been written by Jefferson Airplane in an alternate universe where they were somehow heavily influence by the Melvins. Breaking the five minute mark, "Sifting" is the longest cut on the album and its bridge is augmented by notes bent into ghostly moans and echoes, suggesting the kind of bad trip Peter Fonda experienced in Easy Rider.

Revisiting Bleach after all these years proved to be much more beneficial than I would have thought. The reissue has allowed me to come to terms, unexpected ways, with an album I never truly knew what to do with in. In a sense Bleach provides not only evidence of where Nirvana came from, but also perhaps where the band might return to if only given enough time. I can no longer see Bleach as merely a peripheral album from a band who could go on to do bigger and better things, but can now confidently assert that even without the chart topping sequels, overfilled arenas and countless magazine covers, to this day Bleach would be treated as the diamond in the rough that it truly is.

Dinosaur Jr. - Farm

Dinosaur Jr. - Farm (5/5)

The first decade of the new millennia, often characterized by an extreme sense of nostalgia, saw the resurrection of many 80s and 90s era rock bands. While each band who came back from the bargain bin engendered reactions ranging from “I should have known” (The Smashing Pumpkins) to “I never would have thought” (The Pixies), there were a couple of groups who truly did the unthinkable and released new indie rock albums that were just as good as their old alternative rock albums. One such band, Dinosaur Jr., shocked everyone when they came together to record a new album not only because of their vitriolic breakup, but because the album in question, Beyond, wound up as one of the best albums of the year. In a turn of events that should have surprised no one, but probably shocked many, Dinosaur Jr.’s follow up, Farm, is even better than their last album.

Farm’s cover art, consisting of two Ents carrying naked children in the palms of their hands, provides a psychedelic connection from J. Mascis to the guitar rock gods of yore (c. 1970s). Some of the longer set pieces twist and turn until they invert themselves to reveal expansive guitar solos. The penultimate song, the almost nine-minute “I Don’t Want to Go There,” begins with a tempo that chugs along like an old car, but as it makes its way across different landscapes, the soaring song finally ends with a monster solo that bites off the entire second half of the running time. Mascis’s proficiency with guitar solos so sharp they could skin cats is a singular gift to be sure, but his talents can be traced back to his acknowledged inspiration, Neil Young. I must admit that, aside from Mascis’s voice, I never gave much thought to the comparison, but on Farm you can see the band growing into the profile of Young, much as a man’s bones stretch in later years to reveal his grandfather’s hidden genetic mark. In some ways Farm sounds as if Neil Young had continued to follow the punk rock inspiration he found when recording the album Rust Never Sleeps.

That’s not to say the album is devoid of the great pop songs the band has always delivered. Both “I Want You to Know” and “See You” skip along with such ease that the band makes them look easy, even if few bands write songs this enjoyable two decades into their career. “Over It” is notable for not only being one of the most radio ready songs off the album, but because the song title easily plugs into narratives about the reunion of once avowed enemies, J. Mascis and Lou Barlow. For his part, this time around Barlow’s harmonies float higher and his songs are tighter. It is this ability to balance guitar solo freak outs and pop songwriting that makes such a long album seem epic but not overblown (Arcade Fire, take note).

Like a circus daredevil who moves on to higher, more dangerous, heights, many are waiting to see when Dinosaur Jr. will fall. After two outstanding comeback albums how does a band keep on creating excitement? At this point it is probably safe to no longer see Dinosaur Jr. as a reunion band because these albums fit so well within their canon of work. There will be other great albums (and probably some not as great albums) but it is safe to say that watching this band follow its muse into the new millennium will be as rewarding and unpredictable one of Mascis’s searing solos.

Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon

Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon (4/5)

Central to each essay that makes up Michael Chabon’s collected work of non-fiction, Maps and Legends, is the notion that genre fiction—including gothic horror, noir mystery, dystopic sci-fi, sword and sorcery, etc.—has been regulated to the ghettos of literature and abandoned by writers with any pretense to literary seriousness. Instead of learning to enjoy the sensation of goose bumps on our skin while reading a ghost story or the heart palpitating shock found at the end of a Victorian mystery, readers and writers alike have learned to ignore the joys of these visceral sensations for what is considered the more cerebral pursuits of the Joycian short story, replete with inner musings and epiphany inducing endings. Chabon believes this distrust of genre as serious literature is tied to the negative connotations associated with “entertainment,” which he describes as a word that “wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights.” We have learned to distrust anything whose primary purpose appears to entertain us.

Of course, despite being tied to images of ivy covered brick buildings, stagnant classrooms and tweed jackets, even James Joyce’s short stories have immense propensity for entertainment. Chabon understands that entertainment is found not only in the unseemly pages of genre fiction but in all works of literature, despite how esoteric they may at first seem, and he proposes “expanding our definition of entertainment to encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature.” He is attempting to expand the definition of entertainment, so that it may appropriately describe both reading Poe under a blanket with a flashlight and reading T.S. Eliot in one of those ivory towers while sipping on a pipe, while simultaneously refusing to dilute the definition. It is equally subversive to describe Neil Gaiman as entertaining as Herman Melville as it is to describe Herman Melville as entertaining as Neil Gaiman.

Chabon makes this argument in the book’s first essay, “Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story,” and it is from this essay that all others in the book spawn. Because he refuses to define genre in pejorative terms, Chabon is given the authority to write an elegiac rumination on the comic book pioneer Will Eisner’s death or discuss Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in terms of its relation to other novels of apocalyptic science fiction. The following fifteen essays serve to reinforce Chabon’s literary worldview, and it becomes apparent how arbitrary it is to regulate one genre outside the realm of serious literature while keeping other genres within the confines of literary good taste. After all, the epiphany ending short stories of Joyce and Hemingway are a genre in themselves. In the essay “The Other James,” about the ghost stories of M. R. James, Chabon points out that Balzac, Poe, de Maupassant and Kipling—no minor figures within the literary canon—all wrote ghost stories, a genre that has been shuffled, under point of gun, to the confines of the genre ghetto. While maintaining one’s literary credentials, a graduate students can analyze The House of the Seven Gables through a New Historicist framework, but don’t you dare get caught reading the latest Steven King novel on the subway.

The collection is not without its faults. And while Chabon is a consummate novelist, I feel he has always struggled in more constrained mediums like the short story or essay. Many of the works in the second half of the book feel slight, as if there was some unifying concept that was lopped off the end. Or, to use a genre metaphor, these essays feel as if the two plots of a detective noir story never converge into one by the end of the novel. The slight frame of his lesser essays seem incapable of holding up Chabon’s thickly woven prose. However, when he is at his best, Chabon’s thoughts reshape how genre is viewed by everyone from the casual reader to the acolytes of literary critics like Bloom and Frye. At the very least Maps and Legends will give many the courage to keep the book jacket on that collection of post-apocalyptic-mystery-ghost-stories when they are reading in the park.

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich (5/5)

Love Medicine tells a multigenerational story that spans many decades, lives, marriages, loves, and deaths. It is an ambitious novel that both attempts to provide a widescreen view of life as it interconnects across blood and generations while simultaneously reserving the right to zoom into quiet moments that, while they may seem insignificant at the time, blossom in import as author Louise Erdrich scales back her view to reveal the intricate nature of her story. The novel centers around the two poles of the Kapshaws and the Larmartines, two families who live on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. These families are not made up of traditional nuclear units, and Erdrich must provide an intricate and looping family tree just so the reader understands who is related to whom.

Each chapter of Love Medicine presents itself as a short story, a common technique for a first novel. However, what separates Love Medicine from other novels who have taken the same approach is the way Erdrich utilizes the shifting point of view to provide a multifaceted view of characters and events. Most chapters are written from the first person and provide an opportunity for Erdrich to play with tone and voice that depends on the character. For example, Lipsha Morrissey, a teenager growing up in the eighties, utilizes videogames for metaphors. The death of a veteran returning from Vietnam is treated as an accident or a suicide depending on the author. The technique, if a bit less experimental even if simultaneously more grand, is similar to Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.

By revisiting events, and even placing some events in non-chronological order, Erdrich’s stories accumulate momentum and power as the novel progresses. As readers, we are aware that we are privy to only moments in a larger story that takes place off screen. In ways Love Medicine is like a collection of close photographs of a single skyscraper – a bird’s nest on a ledge, an American flag, the sun reflecting off a window – without ever revealing the whole object. We recognize the whole from the aggregate because of our familiarity with both, and in the case of Love Medicine the whole is life from family.

Perhaps the single most impressive aspect of Love Medicine is Erdrich’s prose. Her writing is just this side of magical realism, and while certain characters may believe in magic, Lipsha Morrissey believes he has a healing touch, because these very same characters are telling the story we are welcomed to doubt their powers. However, Erdrich’s writing is often imbued with an effervescent mysticism. In the chapter “The Island” narrated by Lulu Nanapush, Lulu leaves her home to live in a cave on an island with Moses Pillager, perhaps a more surrealist chapter than the rest of the novel. Upon consummating her romance with Moses, Lulu, who would go on to father many children with many fathers, informs the reader: “I want to grind men’s bones to drink in my night tea…I want to be their food, their harmful drink, to taste men like stilled jam at the back of my tongue.” These moments of surrealism are equally matched by a prose that seems permeable and effervescent, as if the words can barely capture the events before us.

Erdrich is responsible for populating her novel with a myriad of characters whose lives bend and bounce off one another, and while we may not condone the actions of every one of them, there is a clear understanding that their actions rise from a shared pain. Because these characters are connected through a webwork of relations, their loneliness seems that much tragic.

The Black Lips - 200 Million Thousand

The Black Lips – 200 Million Thousand (3.5/5)

The Black Lips are not for looking over the rainbow or beyond the horizon or over the next hill; the Black Lips are for looking back. This is true enough for their latest release, 200 Million Thousand, and if you are cursorily familiar with their older work then you know what to expect here: flower punk (their term) played with sloppy abandon and lyrics about cruising around in cluttered cars, taking drugs, drinking, and other miscellaneous fun. A strain of nostalgia runs throughout the album. For the Black Lips nostalgia is most easily distilled in the time of their late teens, when the novelty of owning a car hasn’t worn off and the appropriate response to screwing up is to “drink some more beers.”

The Black Lips’s sense of nostalgia has never been a drawback for the band, and if anything it has been their reason for existing. Everything from their easily recognizable influences to flat mono sounding production values help transport the listener back a few decades. Some of the songs do this beautifully, such as the bluntly titled “Drugs,” about picking up women and driving around aimlessly while, you guessed it, on drugs. Many decry the Black Lips’s snot nosed brat personas, but with lyrics that begin with the line, “my nose is a-runny” the Lips have little qualms over this guise. And why should they, it’s worked well so far? “Starting Over” melds the easy sentiments of beginning anew sung over the jangly guitars of the Byrds. Like many of the high points on this album, and there are quite a few, these songs give the appearance of an old classic, now forgotten, that has serendipitously made its way onto the radio DJs mix.

However, what do you do when a band whose rason de’etre is to shuffle through used tunes, like most of us peruse Good Will stores, starts looking to “mature”? The results are not pretty. “The Drop I Hold,” a song that drags its belly from beginning to end, is an embarrassing attempt to rap/sing over a vaguely hip hop beat. I’m all for mixing of genres and actually believe that since the nineties too many musicians have been hold up in their own musical corner, but here the song not only sounds out of place but the rhymes sound like they’re delivered through a bad cold. Missing is any sense of storytelling found in the best hip hop, or even on other, superior Black Lips songs. The closer, “I Saw God,” begins with a lengthy found sound of a kid ruminating on “God” that manages to be both pretentious and childish. Childishness is expected from the Black Lips, but I can’t think of anyone who goes into a Black Lips album looking forward to half assed ruminations on God.

In their attempt to recover sounds of old, the Black Lips have brought back something that should have stayed in the sixties: the front loaded album. It has been my unfortunate observation that too many sixties rock and rollers stuffed all the goods on side A in what I assume is the belief that when it comes time to flip the record the listener will be too stoned to stumble over to the record player. Similarly, the Black Lips may be hoping that you rip the songs you need and forget about the filler. For those of us who still listen to full albums this isn’t an option, and by the time the Lips start rapping you will probably wish they would start singing about snotty noses some more.