Category: Culture Page 1 of 5

I finished The Leftovers

I first encountered The Leftovers while watching other HBO shows, both live and on demand. The network added spoiler-riffic promos for its second season at the beginning of every show for months. Despite my admittedly irrational irritation with knowing more about how Season 1 must have ended than I would like (which is anywhere north of zero), I was still intrigued, and I watched the whole show from the beginning.

I was able to binge season 1 and most of season 2. Season 1 was certainly fascinating if a bit uneven. Still, I was hooked on the acting, the characters, the science fiction scenario, and (after reading the book and finding Season 1 to be very faithful to it) I was excited for what Damon Lindelof would do with it going forward. I was a fan of ABC’s LOST and, though I found its final season conceptually disappointing, I still regard LOST as one of the best network TV shows ever.

Flash forward nearly a decade to The Leftovers. Season 1 was very faithful to the book, which was both good and bad. The story was definitely better as a TV show than as a novel. The fact that Season 1 ended where the novel did, however, created the possibility that the show would become a collaboration between Perrota, Lindelof, Mimi Leder (whom Lindelof cited as key to the show), and other writers and directors, designed specifically for TV. Seasons 2 and 3 were absolutely brilliant and I applaud the show’s creators for finding imaginative ways to work together to transcend the source material. I can only imagine the process of coming up with what to keep and what to get rid of—and how do you get to the point where someone says, “what if we moved it to a small town in Texas and leave most of the rest of the characters behind?”

This show was a huge opportunity for Lindelof to do what he does, with the latitude afforded by being on HBO, and wrap it up in a more satisfying fashion. (“We have to go back” indeed.) As far as I can tell, The Leftovers was free of the baggage that LOST carried as a pop culture phenomenon with superlatives and high pressure expectations attached. That and the fact that this really was a whole new thing (despite the obvious echoes of LOST’s themes and mysteries and manner of storytelling) I think freed them up to make something great.

[Perhaps redundant spoiler alert.] Like LOST, The Leftovers suggests to me an obvious spinoff from an obscure plot point. It would feature J-Lo and Shaq, and it would co-star Gary Busey and Bronson Pinchot. These celebrities, who disappeared in the original show, would of course play themselves in an otherwise fictional and sparsely populated world. This would in no way rival, however, what ABC should have spun off from the “Jack’s death” half of LOST’s sixth season. Sawyer and Miles, as played by Josh Holloway and Ken Leung, were a hilarious unlikely duo reimagined as detectives. This buddy cop show would have been top notch.

[This is the third installment in my ongoing series “Previously Unfinished Thoughts: long-abandoned draft blog posts edited and posted years later.” I wrote it in June 2017 and finished it in January 2021.]

An Evening with Sloan

One Chord to Another 20th Anniversary tour promo image (small) I am very excited for An Evening with SLOAN: the One Chord to Another 20th Anniversary Tour, coming up April 26th at the Rickshaw Stop here in San Francisco. [This was AWESOME, by the way. – JLG, 5/9/16] Most of my past Sloan concert experiences, with a couple notable exceptions, have been solo affairs; this time, happily, I will share it with my friend Chris (to whom I introduced the music of Sloan about 8 years ago by now). Tickets are on sale now for all you Canucks and Canuckophiles out there.

According to Exclaim.ca, your best source for the Canadian music news you crave, “Sloan will play two sets a night, with a full-album performance of One Chord to Another preceding a more general set of ‘hits and fan favourites.'” They played two sets behind their latest album, Commonwealth (a double album), at Rickshaw Stop a little over a year ago, and it was amazing.

As for One Chord to Another (a.k.a. “OCTA”), it has a special place in my heart for many reasons. It was my first Sloan CD, acquired at a record store on St. Mark’s Place over spring break 1997, visiting my childhood best friend Will during his sweet gig as an RA at NYU. I remember listening to it on my Discman on the Gray Line bus on the way back from NYC to Ithaca. In a classic college thing, I’d gotten a ride from Madison to Ithaca and back with a friend I knew from Model UN and a couple of her friends, and the bus from Ithaca was super cheap.

Discmans, the Gray Line from NYC to Ithaca, record stores on St. Mark’s — they are all gone, but Sloan is still together, and at that moment that was unthinkable. Sloan had reportedly recorded OCTA separately and broken up. That was it. Sloan, 1991-1996. Then in 1998 I saw Navy Blues on the shelf at Best Buy or something and I was floored, happy, excited. Thus began an obsession.

In 2001 I made a long-weekend pilgrimage to, well, the other side of the Midwest to see Sloan with Will in both Detroit and Cleveland, the aforementioned notable exceptions. (I made a subdomain for it, for goodness sake.) For that walk down memory lane, read my review.

Ever since, as Dawn and others know quite well, I have followed them faithfully. (If it feels good, do it. So far, so good.) I have seen them in five states, at the Metro in Chicago, the 500 Bar in Minneapolis, Peabody’s Down Under in Cleveland, the then-called State Theater in Detroit, and the Independent, Cafe du Nord, Slim’s, and the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco. I have missed a show here and there in the Bay Area, but I think that can be excused.

The Dismemberment Plan play a concert at the Fillmore in San Francisco December 10, 2013

I’m no longer that kind of concertgoer

Or “What is it about concerts? (Part II)”

(Previously, on Gohlkus Maximus.)

When I came up with the idea for writing this blog post, I never dreamed it would take nearly a decade to whip into shape. I also didn’t think I would go nuts at the Fillmore one spring Wednesday in 2008.

I don’t even slightly recall the incident (because why not block it out?), but here’s what I wrote back then: “There I was, minding my own business, rocking out to Death Cab for Cutie, at least 20 minutes into the show. The sound was amazing, I was pretty much able to see the band, and I knew every word to every song except for the new ones. Then some guy, a scant foot taller than me at about 6’4″, shoved past me and stopped right in front of me. I said something to him. He responded noncommittally. And then, I raged.”

That was where I left off in my description. I have no recollection of that incident, nor much else of that night, other than buying the T-shirt I still have. I’m guessing I blocked it out, as I did with much of that difficult time period. (My friend Chris almost certainly remembers, because he was there for that and other delightful interactions I’ve had with strangers. However, for some reason, I lack enthusiasm for hearing another “potentially dangerous things that depressed Jason did” story, and thus have not asked him about it in the five weeks since I rediscovered this draft blog entry.)

I do, however, remember the original idea pretty clearly.

Basically I had conceived of two or three main categories of concertgoers. If you’ve ever been to a concert, you probably can guess what I’m talking about.

You’ve got the enthusiastic early birds who line up before the doors open and camp out immediately in the closest possible spot to the stage (where you can see the musicians much better than you can hear them). One thing to note about standing somewhere for several hours, with the same people around you who got there essentially the same way you did, is that you feel a little comfortable. You may even feel a little entitled. Anyway, there is enough variation within this population that they form a few rows.

Those people who are evidently a bit less driven to absolutely maximize their visual enjoyment of a mostly auditory event (which is fine), well, they file in slowly (usually while the opening band is playing, which is also fine) to sort of loosely fill up the floor. They find a spot, drink their beverages, perhaps create occasional tendrils of smoke, and enjoy the show. Let it not go unsaid: They are cool. They are all right. They may be the ones to aspire to be.

And then. Then there is the other group of people who used to drive me crazy (though it’s fine if you want to argue that I was already crazy). Whenever these big jerks actually arrive at the venue, they use this gambit about two to four songs into the headliner’s set, when people have let down their guard and are focused on the show. (I have always assumed that these people arrive late, but now it occurs to me they may even be more diabolical than I’d suspected.) Perhaps they have never in their lives shown up to a concert early, and maybe they were taught early in life that it’s a dog-eat-dog world, and thus they assume everyone got their spot the way they do it. This is what they do: They push and shove their way to the front, physically displacing likely dozens of people on their way to those first few key rows, thus placing them directly in front of one or more of those people who had staked out a spot for, generally, hours.

To a certain very sensitive kind of person, that kind of behavior is very, very upsetting.

Naturally, I was curious tonight if anyone else had taken on this topic in the years since I came up with it, so I searched and found a few pages that (rather superficially, in my opinion) discuss “types of concertgoers” (and by “discuss” I mean make a list with at most a sentence or two per bullet). A couple of them lightly acknowledge and dismiss the kind of jerk I’m talking about here. (“I mean I only stood here for two hours to be in the front, but you, you definitely can go in front of me.”) Yet none of them really focus on what I used to allow to stoke my rage.

That’s the thing: As long as we have people, and concerts, there will always be assholes who push their way to the front of concerts. Most people, when faced with that situation, shrug and say, “glad they’re not in front of me,” or “it’s not worth getting mad.” But I have always had a strong tendency to want to right perceived injustices. (Especially when I’m the one who’s been wronged, admittedly.)

Even if I liked to imagine one in those old, naïve, idealistic days, there is nowhere near a sufficient enough sense of community among the people near the front of the show (especially after the lights go down) for it to matter too much to them when an aggressive jerk, usually tall, rarely female, shoves in front of someone else. It’s too temporary an arrangement to get involved with someone else’s problem. The initial aggressive behavior goes unpunished, and it’s the response in kind that ends up getting negative attention. Probably understandably. People came there to see a show, not to right a wrong (even if it happens to be getting in the way of someone else enjoying a show), and definitely not to see a lunatic yell at someone. (“Chill.” “Don’t trip.” Definitely good west coast advice.)

But in this situation and in general, the main reason not to allow anger to flame up into a full, active rage is that it simply does not pay. It is nowhere near worth it. It’s bad for your health in so many different ways (detailed elsewhere). It might also result in a fight (and I know I have friends who can’t believe I never got into one, because I can see how for a while it seemed like I was looking for one). I’m not saying I was always like that. But I was like that far more than was healthy for a relatively brief period of time.

The kind of concertgoer I have become is a different kind of enthusiastic early bird. Now I get there early enough to get a seat on the balcony (assuming the venue is large enough to have one) or a comfortable standing or sitting position in the rear of the room. Ideally, say at the Fillmore, if you get a balcony seat directly above the stage, you’re golden. If you’re in the back, sure, the performers are too far away to see, but the sound tends to be good, you can move around enough to see okay [and even so there will be a million photos of the show online afterwards], and (most importantly) no one will step directly in front of you enough to enrage you.

This all matters because my now most frequent fellow concertgoer is my wife. She has communicated quite clearly that she is in this for the long run — as long a run as possible. That matters to me. Like her, I want us both to be happy and healthy as long as possible. That matters enough for me to really have examined, and changed, my behavior.

We still like going to shows. We’re just the people who sit in the balcony or the back. And I am having more fun than ever.

Jason’s “Brainwash” era is no more

Today marks the joyful end of my run of seven years of involvement in the Brainwash Movie Festival.

I’m proud of the work I’ve done to improve, enhance, and run the festival for all of these years.

I started helping Dave out in 2004 with one very simple goal: to add a couple of pieces to my print design portfolio (a flier and a program). Somehow that grew into maintaining and redesigning the website, as another portfolio piece, and a way to help out a friend. Then, a couple judges moved on, so I started helping judge the movies. And every year I did more to promote and run the thing. At that point, a couple years ago, I reasoned that I was so involved that I might as well get some kind of minimal material benefit (a tax break, and it didn’t amount to much, monetarily) from participating in the festival, which led to my having become a partner in the business.

I have to admit that during that act I was ambivalent and had a fair amount of trepidation. I knew that Dave wanted to ultimately develop a fictitious, episodic tv series (now webisode series) about the film festival, and make money by doing so. I wasn’t convinced that I could really help pull it off, nor did I particularly want to. I did help, though, and spent many grueling, frequently middle-of-the-night hours in 2010 working on the series.

It certainly wasn’t all bad. We had meetings, wrote story ideas, figured out which shots we wanted, and spent hours putting some stuff on video. (We also had nights that lasted until dawn, and grueling physical labor, and arguments, and tedium.) What ultimately came out of 2010’s effort was a mostly incomprehensible 23-minute curiosity (of which only 4 or 5 minutes ended up being our own footage — the rest consisted of a couple of the best movies from 2010’s festival). The few that watched it reportedly said that it accurately captured the feel of the drive-in festival. However, apparently none of them understood the underlying plotline, which (of course) was that aliens on a distant planet who survived by consuming stimulating intellectual content intercepted from other planets were literally being bored to death due to a lack of such content — and that Hollywood was aware of this and was keeping the quality of their movies deliberately low in order to (I guess) commit genocide. Therefore, one intrepid alien sent his hench… alien… to earth to harvest independent film content so that their race could survive.

Silly? Yes. Clever? I’d say so. Doable? Absolutely not, 100% no way. Not with the team we have (or, rather, had). But we actually created something, which was something. And now, I move on. No hard feelings — it’s just time for a new chapter in my life. In the meantime, check out Brainwash when it comes around again!

The art of getting bumped

Neat (via the New York Times):

[A]irlines continue to cut capacity in an effort to keep up with rising fuel prices, leaving fewer seats for passengers…. [T]here are some travelers who see the flight crunch as a lucrative opportunity. Among them is Ben Schlappig. The 20-year-old senior at the University of Florida said he earned “well over $10,000” in flight vouchers in the last three years by strategically booking flights that were likely to be oversold in the hopes of being bumped.

If you subscribe to the credo that there’s “nothing new under the sun,” then this is exactly the kind of pursuit you’d expect from young Americans who possess entrepreneurial spirit. There are many worse ways one could devise to maximize one’s benefit by exploiting some aspect of a system.

It’s refreshing to me to see a reversal in the trend of corporations destroying our society, even such an insignificant one. So, thank you, Mr. Schlappig, for doing the legwork. Perhaps others will gain from your pioneering ways.

One guy’s initial thoughts: What conditions precipitate the shooting of Congresspeople?

I started to post this as my status on Facebook, but it was getting long.

I hardly need to say that I’m sad and angry that people are shooting at Congressional representatives and judges and children. I’m certain that our country’s culture of violence and cavalier attitude towards human life has something to do with it. The media, which have conflated news and entertainment, and politicians (and by extension political parties), who are increasingly disconnected from reality, bear much responsibility for where we are today.

I’m not sure how we as a country and as a society are ever going to grow up. I’m not quite naïve enough to believe that violence can ever fully be eradicated, because it’s been with us for all of history. I am still idealistic enough, however, to think that working to stop it is worthwhile. I think that starts with thinking of the people around us not as enemies or competitors, but as our brothers and sisters, people who are in the same struggle to survive and thrive as we are.

It continues by recognizing that the people who set us against one another, who have created this climate, do it because they have something to gain at our expense. (From kumbaya to overly abstract, I know, I know.)

In these times, I can’t help but think of George Washington’s warning against political parties (emphasis mine, of course):

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.

“Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind, (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight,) the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.

(Relevant portions are excerpted and explained in this only slightly dated column from Harper’s Magazine, and the full text is here).

I have to say that I favor the actions and tenets of one party over another. And I’m not saying they’re equally responsible for what happened yesterday — using obvious violent metaphors in political rhetoric is inexcusable. Both parties have to be part of the solution, though.

And I know there are good people in the media, and in politics (like this guy); I really don’t know what happens to them on the way to the top. Maybe most of the ones that make it to the top are the ones who are willing to do anything to get there.

Regardless, this is a point at which I would like to see our country’s “leaders” take some responsibility, admit their errors, and call for people to be calm. Unfortunately, I expect to be waiting for a while.

The main thing I’d like them to say, and the impression I want this essay to leave, is timeless: Let’s treat those around us the way we want to be treated. Not as enemies.

A blog entry and an EP that are all over the place

It frequently occurs to me to react to something I read online. That is not that interesting.

The interesting thing (at least to me) is that I almost always choose to submit a comment on the site that I’m reading, rather than linking to and reacting to the content on this blog. It might behoove me to reverse that. (I also tackled this topic two and a half years ago, to no avail.) Why should I add value to someone else’s site with my cogent, incisive, entertaining analysis? Why not promote myself right here? Why not express my thoughts here?

Speaking of which, it’s pretty obvious that I’m just thinking out loud here, so to speak (so to speak).

I was listening to “All Delighted People” from the EP of the same name by Sufjan Stevens, and I recognized the lyric he used: “…and the people bowed and prayed / to the neon gods they’d made.” I couldn’t immediately place it. Instead of making an attempt to recall what it was from, I took the lazy way out via the oracle Google. Of course, it’s from The Sound of Silence. When I looked up the song titles together, I found (on some random site) someone’s review of the EP, which was not all that complimentary but was at least (I thought) fair. Basically he said he wasn’t a huge fan and that he couldn’t really find a “through line” on the album.

My insight into the EP is this: When Sufjan played Oakland a month or two ago, he gave a really long monologue about what was going on in his head. The sense I got was that he was in a pretty bad place for a while, and these were songs he needed to record and be done with in order to move on to his next thing (The Age of Adz, a sprawling and ambitious project).

Music is an aesthetic pursuit and, as they say, “there’s no accounting for taste.” I used to think that that statement implied that the subject had bad taste. But now I realize it means that there’s no right or wrong when it comes to this stuff. A beancounter can’t quantify how good an album is. There are no audits in art. So we are all free to have our own opinions, and I like that we can talk about it.

As far as the EP itself, yes, it’s all over the place (much like this blog entry), but I love the way he’s defying conventions. As someone else said in the comments on the review, that’s the way new and original work is created. I am happy to be along for the ride.

Brainwash Movie festival THIS Saturday (& next weekend)

Yes, the 16th Annual Brainwash Drive-in Bike-in Walk-in Movie Festival is almost upon us!

I’ll bet you didn’t know that the New York Times says the Brainwash Movie Festival is “pirating a piece of that old Hollywood magic and challenging conventions on the role of public space in the process.”

Funny, because Brainwash organizers say, “We project movies onto a tarp in a parking lot in Oakland.”

Brainwash features a great mix of new movies from the Bay Area and all over the world, featuring dark humor, animation, mockumentaries, and much more. See http://www.brainwashm.com/festival/2010-festival/ for this year’s full program.

What’s a Drive-in Bike-in Walk-in Movie Festival? It’s set up like a traditional drive-in with FM sound as well as two big amps. Arrive however you choose: drive, bike, or walk in, perhaps with your favorite chair or blanket. West Oakland BART is one block away.

The festival will be held Saturday, August 7th, Friday, August 13th, and Saturday, August 14th (9:00 p.m. each night) at the Mandela Village Arts Center at 1357 5th St in Oakland.

Admission is just $10, or a $40 Festival Pass gets two people into all three nights of the festival. Tickets are available at http://www.ticketweb.com/snl/EventListings.action?orgId=16986 or at the gate. More about Brainwash.

Also, I’d be glad if you wanted to post one of these lovely banner ads (below and in the sidebar) on your own site. Somehow that seems unlikely, but you never know.

brainwash 2010 program
Brainwash Movie Festival

“The Great Car Reset”

Richard Florida writes in The Atlantic about “The Great Car Reset,” based largely on some good data from Nate Silver (which needs an update) and an Advertising Age article. From the Atlantic post:

“Lasting prosperity requires investment in a new and more efficient economic system. We’ll never get there if we continue to spend every last penny on houses, cars, and energy.”

In dense urban areas like where I live, a car is a burden, not a convenience. Yes, there are a lot of places where it’d be very hard to live without one, but this is an interesting trend nevertheless… and the conclusions seem sound.

Certain things just cost more as a percentage of income than they did in previous generations, so (in the absence of some kind of income reform) people are slowly changing their behavior.

LOST: See you in another life, brotha (contains spoilers)

Even though I haven’t really discussed it in this space, I watched LOST. I saw every episode through season 5 at least twice, and watched all of Season 6 exactly once.

So if you don’t know or care about LOST — or don’t want to be spoiled on the ending! — DO NOT read any further! Again, SPOILER ALERT! (You have been warned.)

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