Spanish Prisoners‘ first album, Songs to Forget, starts and ends sparsely, but definitely not forgettably.
The album begins with a nice guitar and strange vocals, and ends with a kind of combination medieval folk and Live In Chicago-era Joan of Arc. On the second track, lead man Leonid Maymind sings that there’s “No solace from the sunrise,” amid synth drums and loud guitars. The album continues along that vein for a while, then relaxes a bit in the middle (the swelling instrumental “This is Not That”). After this point, Spanish Prisoners seem to really get their footing. The tracks that follow, “Mantequilla,” “Dear Just Curious,” and “How the Fallen Fell,”–especially with “Fallen”‘s Neil Young harmonica–are the album’s highlights.
2007, Sony Picture Classics
Written/Directed by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud
Starring: Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Danielle Darrieux, Danielle Darrieux, Simon Abkarian
I have a bit of a thing for French/Iranian far-left cartoon women, so this movie was kind of my territory. If you don’t know, Persepolis is a beautifully hand-drawn film based on an autobiographic graphic novel of the same name by Marjane Satrapi. It has a few flaws, but it’s very entertaining–assuming you can get past its blatant socialist message.
Grizzly Bear and the LA Philharmonic split a bill at the impressively designed Walt Disney Concert Hall. You must see this monstrosity designed by Frank Gehry. I swear there is not a single right angle inside or outside, and I’m willing to wager that it was constructed with stealth technology.The LA Philharmonic played the first set, and the clarity delivered by the venue is phenomenal. It’s easy to realize that no medium (be it vinyl, CD, or reel-to-reel) really does a symphony justice. Selections of their performance were pieces chosen as influences by Grizzly Bear.
Super Bowl Sunday 2008 has come to a close, and football fans everywhere are feeling the comedown of having no reason to live for the next six months. Seriously, though, who cares about the game? To bloggers, the important thing wasn’t the major upset for the winningest team in 36 years (I still don’t know why the entire New England region gets its own team), but the suckiness of the commercials and Tom Petty. Patriots fans must really be feeling like shit right now—even the commercials let them down.
I am struck by this. We’re talking about a) Commercials and b) Tom Petty. Our society has truly come to a strange crossroads when we expect anything other than passive, low-level enjoyment from either of these enterprises.
