Obviously I’ve had a lot of strange observations since being back in the States for the first time in a year. I guess I’ll start with boobs.

The boobs here are huge, and they’re falling all over the place. It makes me wonder how many of them are real. Women take great care in presenting them perfectly, in a way that borders on the obsessive. They seem to be a great source of pride. They might also be an effective source of power. On the one hand, perfect breasts effectively mesmerize the heterosexual male population, giving the bearer a slight edge in any possible negotiation or confrontation. They may also provide an advantage in relating to other females, as an effort to establish position within an unstated social hierarchy. My boobs are bigger, can you not see that? So I am a more valued breed of female species. You must respect me.

I don’t know where I’m going with this. Just that it’s the subject that, um, stands out most in my mind.

I’m very sleep deprived. So this post might not make any sense. The flight was uneventful, except for some significant turbulence. I like turbulence. There’s that briefest instant of freefall and then the “thud.” I was half asleep when one hit — I never did become fully asleep — and I imagined what might happen if the wings ripped apart. Would the plane start spiraling, or would it nosedive? I envisioned a kind of nosedive and then I thought that if I survived the impact, the cabin would probably be shred to shit and I’d have to think fast to grab my life vest. I like to think that I’d look around to see if there were any children who had forgotten to put a vest on and maybe I’d try to save one. Then we’d float in the icy water and he/she would scream and I’d have to say kin-chan-ay-yo, kin-chan-ay-yo, or however you say that. Then the sun would rise a little and I’d die from the cold but the child would survive and get rescued. Anyway, that was my story. In truth I’d probably panic and swallow a bunch of water before I could take off my seatbelt.

I watched an episode of Friends. It’s been a year since I’ve seen American situation comedies. I’d forgotten about the laugh-track. What a silly, stupid thing. Every two seconds the crowd did this loud, canned laughter. I kept wishing they would shut the hell up.

I read the International Herald Tribune and there was something about US customs officials seizing people’s laptops and copying their hard drives. I thought that if they did that to me when I landed I’d tell them to fuck off. Then I’d wind up in jail and that would be fine with me.

I’m reading an amazingly brilliant, brilliantly amazing book called Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, which is probably why I’m writing like this. Or maybe it’s the no sleep thing.

America is weird. Everyone is so polite to complete strangers. Things are so clean and average. Everyone looks different from everyone else. And I can hear conversations again. Most of the time I wish I didn’t. But it’s nice to be back.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Wilco lately. Four months ago or so I didn’t have a single album. But so many of my friends praised them up and down that I had to give them another shot.

I tried once before, somewhere around 2002. That’s when everyone was talking about them. Their Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album was the cause de celebré for the independent minded youth of the digital age. It was a triumph of art over commerce. They were the band that stuck it to The MAN. Of course, that was all I heard about. Nobody seemed to mention the music. I hate that kind of media-generated buzz, so I had no interest in getting to know them.

But one day I was driving around Palo Alto with my girlfriend at the time. She was more curious than I was so she bought the album. OK, sure, let’s give it a shot. So she put the CD in the car stereo. Thirty seconds into it, I knew I hated it. Once I heard that sad-sack voice I thought “God no, not another self-emasculaed, indie whiner please.” Two minutes into it I couldn’t take it anymore. I begged her to turn it the hell off. My preconceptions were confirmed: Of course the critics loved them, I thought. These guys hate themselves. They fit perfectly into that drab, post-punk attitude where you have to sound like you don’t care. Critics love that shit. I can’t fucking stand it.

Fast-forward some five or six years into the future, to March 2008. I went with a group of friends to the Korean countryside for some fresh air and to climb a mountain. It had been raining the whole drive up and that night. When we woke up the next morning I opened the curtains and looked outside. The trees were dripping with last night’s rain, the hotel pavement was soaked. But it looked like the weather was going to break and we could climb that mountain.

And then someone put on some music. I heard this really nice, mellow guitar, and then the singer sang the first lines: “Maybe the sun will shine today. The clouds will blow away. Maybe I won’t feel so afraid…” Wait a minute, who’s this? Wilco. First song off their most recent album, Sky Blue Sky. I loved it. It was pretty, it was mellow, the singer was really singing, the mix was beautiful, and it was a great song. In short, it was everything my first experience was not.

And that’s Wilco. There’s a reason every website’s favorite adjective for them is “interesting.” As evidence of this, everyone I know who is a fan has a different preferred phase, a different favorite album. My friend in Pittsburgh thought nothing was ever quite the same after A.M. The bass player in my band prefers Being There. One of the guitarists in my band likes Summerteeth best. The other guitarist swears by A Ghost Is Born. His girlfriend digs Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. I, to this day, still prefer Sky Blue Sky by a mile.

Before I dig into my praise of them, and of that album in particular, I gotta get something off my chest.
Wilco’s musical catalog is stocked full of what I find to be utter bullshit. This makes me want to hate them. First, my initial impressions of Yankee haven’t changed. I hate that album. It’s overproduced, and by that I mean it’s intentionally under-produced. I think Jeff Tweedy had a collection of decent songs and they decided that maybe they were a little too soft, a little too vulnerable, a little too… serious. So I think they got in the studio and intentionally decided to fuck them up to make them sound more hip and cool.

This was pretty much confirmed in the documentary about the making of the album — I Am Trying To Break Your Heart. Even though I don’t like the record, I loved the documentary. It was really interesting to see them fret and stress and argue in the studio about what to do with these songs. And I think that worry carries over to the end result. It’s a record that doesn’t know what it is.

In that documentary, they interviewed David Fricke of Rolling Stone magazine. Now, I really like David Fricke. He’s a smart guy who understands music and music history and the guy makes great observations about music and culture. But he lifted that album to a much higher pedestal than was necessary. He railed against the corporate robots who have no appreciation for art and said, basically, that the record company didn’t recognize that a work of genius had just been made.

What Fricke didn’t acknowledge was his own hypocrisy. He’s the product of his own power structure, and that is Rolling Stone magazine. Rolling Stone has an ideology, and that is to speak to the ever-evolving youth culture. So long as he does that, RS continues to present an appearance of relevance. If it accomplishes that, it makes money for The Gap and BMW and Calvin Klein so that he and the rest of the editorial board can enjoy a fat salary. I have a real beef with Rolling Stone because they’re disingenuous and false. They present an impression of antiestablishment and individuality because that speaks to youth culture. Rolling Stone knows that the Sex Pistols and The Clash gave them their current identity, so everything has to be derivative of that mindset. That’s why every once in a while they’ll do a review of a Yes album just so they can slam it as “self-indulgence.”

So Rolling Stone to me are a bunch of bullshitters. But their influence, and MTV’s et al, is huge. Bands would never admit it, but the media — whether it’s magazines, websites, or cable TV shows — affect the music that’s being made today. If a band tries too hard, they’re self-indulgent, so they’re not cool. This is why you have the “indie” phenomenon. I don’t really know what that is actually, but when I hear “indie,” I think of mopey hipsters. I hear musical apathy. I hear a generation of musicians who have been force-fed the Rolling Stones of the world and their output is a reflection of that. So let’s all ridicule prog rock. Let’s all ridicule singer-songwriters. Let’s ridicule anything emotional, anything that tries to be expressive.

I think this is Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. And I also think it’s much of Wilco’s early career. Here are a couple other examples of this kind of attitude that bug me about them:
1. “The Lonely 1” from Being There. This is a nice song. But it’s too sensitive, so let’s indie it up a little. We’ll record a take where he fumbles the guitar a little bit at the beginning. Sing like you don’t give a shit; mumble your way through it rather than try to give the melody some flight, which it certainly has potential for. Oh, and at the end, talk about how you fucked it up. Look, if you fucked it up, do it again.
2. “Kingpin” also off of Being There. The drummer is intentionally dropping the time to make it sound, I don’t know, drunk? A little more stupid? A little less good? A little more… cool?

Sure, I’m being anal about all this. But when I listen to music, I don’t like to be manipulated. I believe that buried under all the bullshit are some really good songs that, because of the post-punk attitude, come out less than they could be. I guess it all comes down to intention. What are you intending to do? Do you really not care about your craft? If so why are you doing it and why are you subjecting me to it? If, on the other hand, you really do care, then what are you so afraid of? Compare this with something like Iron & Wine’s The Creek Drank the Cradle, which actually is independent because he made it by himself in a tiny home studio. It’s real because the intention is genuine.

This brings me to what I think is the good in Wilco’s career. Jeff got rid of Jay Bennett, which needed to happen, the band stripped away all that crap, and they started to concentrate on making good music. A Ghost Is Born is fantastic. Every song – with the possible exception of “Spiders” – is bullshit-free. You can really hear it in songs like “Muzzle of Bees” and “Hummingbird.” Wow, we’re actually getting a song! All this stuff is well-written, well-recorded, played with some passion, and sang with a little more courage. It also has the right kind of experimentation – musical experimentation. After this, we have Kicking Television, maybe one of the best live albums ever made. All the songs have new life. I can’t believe how phenomenal “Ashes of American Flags” is. It was completely transformed from droll to energetic and profound, the way the song should have always been.

And then we get Sky Blue Sky. I don’t know how much of that album is attributed to Nels Cline joining the band. But it feels like Wilco’s whole career was leading up to this moment. Every song is a gem, the sequencing is perfect, and it sounds gorgeous. There’s so much great melody throughout that record, with piano, organ, and layers of guitars intertwining with each other so beautifully. Jeff sings his ass off and isn’t afraid of his lyrics anymore. This album has, in fact, become a minor obsession of mine. I don’t want to over-aggrandize it, but when I listen to that, I imagine what might have happened if the Beatles had gotten together in the mid-70s to make one last album — and if John wrote the bulk of the material. That’s what it sounds like to me. It’s that good. And it bears no resemblance to The Clash whatsoever.

And there you have it, my overly long critique of the “interesting” and “curious” band that is Wilco.

There’s a new book out about the life of Jean-Luc Godard called Everything Is Cinema. Richard Schickel wrote a review of it, but it’s as much a criticism of Godard’s style of filmmaking as it is a critique of the book.

Godard shook up the bland, traditional film industry as part of the French new wave movement starting in the late 1950s. He gave us the jump cut and tore up the idea of continuity. He helped to change the idea of what we can accept aesthetically when we watch a movie, and that enabled the art to take chances with how a story can be constructed.

I’ll get back to that in a minute, but first — I especially liked this part of Schickel’s article:

I‘m not arguing that traditional melodrama is the only worthwhile model for moviemaking. Rather the opposite. The current bankruptcy of the medium — the American craze for special effects, the rest of the world’s reversion to, yes, “the tradition of quality” — is a direct result of caution and uninteresting calculation. But good movies, movies that leave a permanent mark on our imaginations, are not made in the Godard mode. They are made by obsessives, by directors who shut out the distractions of the outside world and fret endlessly over every aspect of their films. The best of these directors eventually achieve thematic and stylistic coherence — whether they are Hitchcock or Bergman, Hawks or Kubrick — and, for better or worse, auteur status. They are aesthetic conservatives, people who find their ground and work it until it is overgrazed: Then, they sit back to watch others imitating them. Unlike Godard, they show almost no interest in advancing the cause of cinema in general, of finding new topics for it to take up, new methods of expressing themselves on the screen. Implicit in their work is the notion that everything is not cinema, that there are matters better suited to other forms — essays, painting, music, even pulp fiction.

This hits squarely on something I think about a lot when it comes to art, but I would extend the idea to all art forms. The “obsessives” are the ones I most appreciate in any art. When I think of my favorite writers, filmmakers and musicians, they’re usually those who have crafted something that I find exquisite. This isn’t a very popular perspective to have these days because we’re flooded with the idea that lo-fi rendering is somehow more real. If I remember back to my grad school readings, I think it has something to do with economics and issues of power. It’s seen as more valuable to break from lofty pursuits of aesthetic “quality” because those notions have been defined by those who supply the paychecks.

I can accept this to a certain degree. We do need to occasionally shake off the cobwebs. We need to find new perspectives and new ways of stretching things. Creativity should be available to everyone. I understand this intellectually. But I also find that such efforts are too often more clever than they are compelling, and rarely if ever move me emotionally. As Martin Scorsese once said about Godard: “He’s too hip for me.” And with some of these movements in post-WWII modernism/postmodernism, there is a hipster code at work that pulls things into their own kind of exclusive cliques. When music and film becomes like fashion something’s gone wrong. You have to ask yourself which is worse, aloof conservativism or snooty antiestablishmentarianism?

I’ll take neither, thank you. I appreciate what Schickel seems to be advocating — those who exist outside of all of that. This unnamable place is where you find those who find their own voice, who have the courage to try and to care, and who aren’t afraid to chase something beautiful.

It is July 4, which is not only the birthday of the United States of America, it is also the one-year anniversary of this here blog. Let’s see, in that time there have been…

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Looking at blog stats feels wrong, but I do it anyway. I had a huge peak in January, when I was posting a lot about my Europe trip. I guess naming all those places got the search bots buzzing. Now it’s like a ghost town, probably because I don’t post very much. When life is most interesting, there’s less documentation of it: fewer photos snapped, less writing, less blogging. Interesting.

I’m celebrating America’s birthday tonight by playing my final gig with my band. The guitarist and keyboardist are moving on to other parts of the world. I’ve played with a lot of musicians in my life and been in a lot of bands, but this is probably the most talented collection of folks I’ve ever had the privilege of playing with. So it’s sad, but we’ll have fun.

It’s the end of an era. I feel a kind of fall hibernation coming on. But I’ve learned that nothing happens according to plan in Korea, so we’ll see how things go.

It’s been a strange past 20 or 30 days and now I feel a strong urge to get the hell out of here for a while. So finally, I’m actually looking forward to my trip. Not just wanting to go but needing to go. I’ve probably said this before, but this place shifts and turns in such strange ways for me. One week I feel like I have a sense of my reality and another I’m not sure. It’s not so much a matter of objective reality, but my perception of myself within it. Who the hell am I here? It’s different than who I am there, that’s for sure. So it’s time to go back, get some perspective, remember things I’ve forgotten, and try to forget some other things for a while.

I’ve got a rough plan, and I’m excited about all of it:

July 11: Arrive
July 12: Welcome home party/BBQ
July 13: San Francisco with mom & dad
July 15-19: Yosemite cabin
July 20: Busan reunion. Me and three friends who used to live in Busan are serendipitously meeting up in San Francisco. This should be a hoot.
July 21-31: Rent a car. Float. Enjoy. Eat burritos. Hang with friends in San Ho and SF. A Stern Grove festival? A trip to Santa Cruz, a trip to Sacramento… not quite sure.
Aug 1-4: Nevada desert. Road trip with college friends. I think the plan is to shoot guns and blow things up.
Aug 5-7: Come down. Gear up.
Aug 8: Back across the ocean to welcome the rest of my life.

Liberals may not admit it now, but we are so going to miss this guy when he’s gone. Obama will be too intelligent, McCain dry as a bone. But Bush, oh the laughs we’ve had over the years…

“And I reminded the President that I am reminded of the great talent of the — of our Philippine-Americans when I eat dinner at the White House.”
- President George W. Bush (From the Huffington Post.)

I’m glad he cancelled his trip to South Korea. In the current political-social climate, we really don’t need him fucking things up more than they already are.

Don’t trust western foreigners teaching in Japan.

We only get the major blockbuster US movies here in Busan, which means we get a lot of crap. But it also means we get all the big animated films, which are most definitely not crap. Kung-fu Panda, for example, was not only a laugh-out-loud riot, it was also beautifully made.

The new Pixar movie, Wall-E, sounds really interesting. In particular, I was intrigued by this little bit about the approach to dialogue:

Throughout the film, the lead characters, and most of the robots they encounter, utter not a single word of traditional dialogue. (There is ooooing, eeeping and beeping.) It’s yet another variation from previous Pixar films in which toys, rats, fish and bugs all have talked - and talked smart.

Still, Stanton says, “there’s dialogue from Frame One. It’s just unconventional dialogue.

“I knew this was a big bite to chew, and it had been a long, long time since someone tried to do a film with this unconventional dialogue in it. I kept saying, ‘It’s like I’m trying to do R2-D2 the Movie.’ I kept using that phrase so many times that one of my producers said, ‘Why don’t you just call Ben Burtt,’ ” the legendary audio and sound man who was the “voice” of R2-D2.

“So I called him and asked him if he could sign on early and help me with dialogue for these characters and grammar for each of the characters,” Stanton says.

“Now that I’m on the back end of working with him for two years, I realize that was the smartest move I ever made. I got 25 years of knowledge of how to do this stuff. He’s just the master of it, and I don’t think I could solved [sic] it without him.”

I’ve been waiting for something like this. Movies tend to “talk” very fast and too much, but I’m always fascinated by those that strip away the need to explain everything. A film like The New World, for example, is a great love story even though the main characters barely speak to each other. Another is Triplets of Belleville. What little language it has is unnecessary. This requires a filmmaker to be more creative in storytelling.

And of course, the other reason I like films without little or no dialogue is that I have more examples I can show in class.

Edit (June 24): Here’s the trailer… looks and sounds great!

I want to marry this woman. But me in Korea… her in Iraq… It probably wouldn’t work out.