All our faithful followers may be giving up hope on the Lunch Box. But don’t worry, we on the content-creation end have been here all along.
The new and excellent job at The Nature Conservancy has kept me from blogging much in recent months. But a work trip to China was going to be ripe fodder for the blogosphere, right?
Well, that was until I landed in Beijing and quickly realized I would have no access to my own Communist-government-blocked site throughout the duration of my travels. My Facebook app completely disappeared from my iPhone when I tried to update it from behind the Great Firewall. Gasp! Of course, no one cares that they don’t have Facebook access in China. It saves them from wasting time and they have their own pretty nifty social-media sites anyway.
But the whole point of this particular post is: I’ve been writing the whole time I’ve been in China and will be posting way much more material than you should really be required to read about my trip here in the coming days. But please try anyway.
China is wonderful, but it’s still good to be back home.
One of the good things about a long, 14-hour flight around the North Pole from DC to Beijing, China is that I got the chance to catch-up on some movies that are pretty high in my Netflix queue. Cyrus first, then Dinner With Schmucks (and looking very forward to Grown Ups on my return home in 10 days).
Surprisingly, Steve Carell is the weakness of Dinner With Schmucks. His Rain Man-like character grows tiresome (the movie drags a little painfully), his backstory is close to non-existent (how in the world does someone become such a clueless, unlovable idiot?), and Carell is amazingly unfunny, sleepwalking through the role. Maybe that’s what becoming a big star and performing in a barrage of movies lately does to comedic geniuses, like with Chevy Chase for example.
Anyway, despite Carell, this movie has a good heart and some fine and funny performances. The movie starts off wonderfully as Paul Rudd is his usual easygoing and captivating self as a “stock broker” who wants to marry his girlfriend. When Carell enters the picture (Rudd’s car plows into him while he’s picking up a dead rat in the road to use in one of his historical recreations of human history with dead taxidermied rats), the movie goes a little south.
Jemaine Clement from The Flight of the Concords undeniably turns in the movie’s highlight performance as a self-obsessed artist who also happens to be obsessed with goats, in a very existential way. David Walliams, who plays the silly Swiss billionaire being wooed to save the company where Rudd works, is also very funny.
I could think of worse ways to spend a flight to Beijing. Like constantly being woken up and bumped by the crazy lady next to me who claimed her foot was hurt and tried to cajole me into switching seats with her. I held strong and kept the aisle instead of the middle.
Cyrus is a sweet little indie drama with strong acting. However, it moves at an uneven pace, especially through its second half, when a good new romance between John C. Reilly and Marisa Tomei is complicated. The troubles come from Tomei's son, played in an aptly creepy manner by Jonah Hill.
The film seems to be some sort of statement against single-parent childrearing. While early-20s Cyrus has serious growth issues, Tomei's character clearly has had a role in shaping him the way he is, such as singing in the bathroom while she showers. Awkward.
There is also distracting camerawork throughout, with the quick zoom and pans used frequently these days in TV shows like Arrested Development and The Office. this seems to work better in those short formats, but it is tiring and neurotic over 90 minutes.
The acting ultimately saves Cyrus, but I was not nearly as enamored as many of the critics.
Seeing as I attended this show with DCist photographer and writer Francis Chung and discussed many of these elements with him at the bar afterward, there's not much sense in writing my own review. Fran has done it exceptionally well, so the following is his version of a show by a band I haven't seen live since their show with the Afghan Whigs in St. Louis that was so long ago I can't find any reference to it at all on the Internet.
****1/2 out of ***** stars
Hot on the heels of Pavement's retrospective set at the Virgin Mobile FreeFest, local concert-goers were treated to another dose of indie-rock nostalgia on Saturday night, as the 9:30 Club hosted an all-Scottish twin bill featuring Teenage Fanclub (pictured left) and The Vaselines (pictured below).
The Vaselines' Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee released two relatively obscure EPs and one LP in the 1980s, and broke up (as a couple and as a band) before Nirvana gave them a measure of fame by covering three of their songs, including a remarkable unplugged rendition of "Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam." On Saturday night, the Glaswegians dutifully delivered all three of the Cobain-interpreted songs for which they still best known. "Son of a Gun" sounded as charmingly catchy as ever, with Kelly and McKee trading boy-girl vocals over a steady backbeat and jangly guitars, and Teenage Fanclub's Norman Blake joined them onstage for a slightly slowed-down version of "Molly's Lips," tooting a bike horn during McKee's falsetto chorus.
Aided by a laudably crystal-clear sound mix, the band sounded exceptionally tight both on older classics, like the audience-requested "Dying for It," and newer songs like "I Hate the 80s" and "Sex with an X," the title track from their recently-released second LP. As befits a band whose songs are replete with sexual innuendos and naughty double-entendres ("Monsterpussy," "Rory Rides Me Raw"), The Vaselines sprinkled their set with plenty of hilariously lewd banter. McKee was in a particularly bawdy mood, inviting fans who came for Teenage Fanclub to retire to the loo "to have a wank" during her band's set, and later giving an excursus on the dermatological benefits of semen and...well, things reached arguably unpublishable levels from there, so perhaps it's best to leave the rest to the imagination.
Kelly and McKee's antics were a tough act to follow, but Teenage Fanclub was more than up to the task. Indeed, the Glaswegian quintet -- which features not one, but three talented songwriters -- is one of those bands that's so accessibly good that it's genuinely surprising that the've never achieved more than moderate commercial success, though both the band and its fans seem comfortable with their underdog status. Their superb 19-song set showcased the outstanding musicianship and pop songcraft that has earned them extensive critical acclaim and a devoted cult following. Opening with "Sometimes I Don't Need to Believe in Anything" and "The Past" from its latest album, Shadows, the band kicked the energy level up a notch when bassist Gerard Love led them through "Star Sign" from Bandwagonesque, famously ranked by Spin Magazine as the best album of 1991 (ahead of Nirvana's Nevermind and My Bloody Valentine's Loveless).
Primary frontman Norman Blake resumed vocal duties on "Alcoholiday," another standout track from Bandwagonesque, while guitarist Raymond McGinley took his turn on "About You" from 1995's Grand Prix. The band played flawlessly throughout its set, displaying gorgeous vocal harmonies and dynamically mellifluous guitar work worthy of their heroes, Big Star -- although the sound engineering was unfortunately not quite as good as it was during The Vaselines' performance. Nonetheless, fans were ecstatic to hear classics like the irresistible "Sparky's Dream," and, at the end of the main set, almost everyone in the club seemed to be singing along to the indelible melodies of "The Concept." Teenage Fanclub returned for a four-song encore, playing "Can't Feel My Soul," "Sweet Days Waiting," and "Did I Say," before concluding the evening on an appropriately nostalgic note with its first single, "Everything Flows."
Thirteen months after buying our concert tickets, the night finally arrived. Late Tuesday afternoon, we arrived in Manhattan on the Amtrak and proceeded to make our way to Central Park's Summer Stage for the indie-rock concert event of the year.
Rachel and I dropped our bags off at a friend of a friend's house. Then we grabbed Mexican food and margaritas with the friend of a friend (Dan) and his buddies Alex and Eric. Two of the three were from St. Louis, so I had lots to discuss with them.
Then we met fellow DCites Fran and Morgan at the show. Oh yeah, who was playing, you ask? Pavement, who routinely land in my top three bands of all-time (along with The Beatles and Guided by Voices).
They were in every bit as good a form as the handful of times I saw them before their breakup in 1999. Leader Steve Malkmus exuded confidence in his unusually quirky vocal stylings and played guitar behind his back and hit chops that were like a cooler and looser version of a college-rock Jimi Hendrix.
Several of the traditionally tight and concise Pavement classics were stretched into jammy territory, clearly influenced by Malkmus' post-Pavement band The Jicks. Where this probably worked best was with set closer "Stop Breathin'," which actually pulsated and sent waves of guitar dueling through the city reminiscent of the Pink Floyd concert I saw in 1987.
Pavement can do no wrong, because even when they ventured into psychedelic jams, you knew it was never long before pop perfection would return. Particular highlights of the first of four nights at the Central park venue included "Gold Soundz," recently deemed by Pitchfork as the best song of the 1990s, "Box Elder," Stereo," Silent Kit," "Shady Lane, "Rattled by the Rush," "We Dance," "Perfume-V," "Debris Slide," "Trigger Cut," "Range Life,"and "Cut Your Hair."
The only thing that could have been better would have been if the band played longer. For instance, the next night, they played several tunes that I would have loved to hear, including "Summer Babe," "Zurich is Stained," "Two States," "Lions (Linden)," Here," and "Father to a Sister of Thought."
Pavement is one of life's grand pleasures. It's good to have them back again.
One of the many interesting tidbits left out of the mildly stinky new rockumentary The Runaways is the fact that lead singer Cherie Currie (the blond at the bottom left) was briefly married in the 1990s to actor Robert Hays, the legendary lead in Airplane!
Lack of detail seems to be a specialty for this slow-paced movie, which tries to give us lots of rock 'n roll debauchery. And that's usually a good thing in a rock movie, but if there is no strong character development or back story, it's not enough.
People can learn as much about The Runaways by reading their Wikipedia entry and listening to their few great tunes here.
It's a shame. I was excited to see this. And I still like rhythm guitarist Joan Jett's later work, so it was good to at least get a little bit of that story at the end of the movie. And I should add that Kristen Stewart does an impressive job of looking and singing like Jett.
Climate science is filled with great metaphors, anecdotes, and characters. After all, what issue wouldn’t kill to have a day like Earth Day or an icon like the polar bear serving as brand managers?
The problem is that journalists, climate scientists, and others need to tell these stories better, especially in a rapidly shifting media landscape. These were some of the highlights of a panel today hosted by the American Meteorological Society on “Media and Climate Change” at the U.S. House of Representatives’ Rayburn Building in D.C.
Bud Ward (pictured) of the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media recommended that scientists adopt some of the best practices of communications and that journalists, in turn, will fare better if they are allowed to specialize in topic areas such as environmental sciences.
He said universities and science academies fail to prepare their students to know how to communicate the important science they undertake, which is extremely pointless if the public and politicians don’t know about the science, can’t understand it, or fail to avoid the pitfalls of a highly politicized topic like global warming.
One of Ward’s great tips falls in line with a blog I’m helping redesign and relaunch this month for The Nature Conservancy (more about that soon). He said when someone starts a conversation with, “I don’t believe in global warming,” ask them what their interests are. If they say, “I love my Hummer,” engage them on military and national security issues. Stop framing these kinds of discussions in terms of global warming. This is so important because climate relates to just about everything we care about.
Most people just don’t make the connections, and why would they? Climate is something way up in the atmosphere (unlike our daily weather) and seemingly generations away (even though it's already very much here). As co-panelist Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism added, “It’s harder to know what to think than what to believe.”
Ward also touched on the poor framing used by environmentalists and journalists. They don’t know whether to call it global warming or climate change. They don’t know whether to call them climate skeptics or deniers. No wonder so many people are left struggling with what to believe or think.
Vampire Weekend put on an exuberant late-summer pop show at Merriweather Post Pavilion on Saturday night. For the uninitiated, they are indie rock's answer to Paul Simon's worldbeat Graceland. They also reconfirmed their place as one of my favorite bands of the 2010s, right up there with Wilco and a reunited Pavement.
Baltimore's Beach House opened and was enjoyable, despite their songs being mellow and samey (and their lead-singing chick looking like one of The Really Rottens from Hanna-Barbera's Laff-A-Lympics).
"Thousands screamed along to the infectiously rudimentary chorus of 'A-Punk,' and at the end of the main set, [Vampire Weekend lead singer Ezra] Koenig’s diction did not drip with disdain during the vibrant 'Oxford Comma.' The three-song encore began somewhat dubiously with 'Horchata,' before Rostam Batmanglij’s keyboards signaled the start of 'Mansard Roof,' an almost absurdly catchy song highlighted by Chris Tomson’s propulsive drumming. The evening concluded with a rousing rendition of 'Walcott,' as the audience collectively thrust its hands skyward in a euphoric response even Bruce Springsteen would probably be proud to get."
The great thing about period pieces is that you usually get to educate yourself about an interesting part of human history.
The problem with The Young Victoria is that there is hardly any learning curve. Sure, before seeing the movie, we already knew that she took the throne in the 1830s when she was still a young woman. And we knew there was some sort of minor power struggle to work through in the early days of Victoria's marriage to Prince Albert. And we knew that there was an assassination attempt on the queen, but that she was unharmed and ruled until ripe old age.
Emily Blunt and Rupert Friend are both likable and steady in the lead roles, but the story seems to breeze along before it's suddenly gone and done. The movie simply leaves you wanting more, but not in a good way. It's more like it leaves you wanting.
The art design, makeup, and costumes were each nominated for 2010 Academy Awards and truly go a long way towards making the movie better than the sum of the script.
Getman plays Fish, a miscreant boxer who can't get anything right other than beating other people senseless. Tangled amidst the sparse setting of ropes hanging from the ceiling, he does a pretty good job of abusing the minds of those closest to him as well.
Cherry is played with Huck Finn-like goodness by Julia Procter. A country tomboy, she loves Fish with all her heart, waits for months at a time for him to return from his frequent stints in lockup, and seems to turn to smoke without the hot breath and embrace of her soulmate.
Fish's little brother, Duffy (Cliff Williams III), and Duffy's wife Bug (Jjana Valentiner, a veteran of one staged reading of Wiener Sausage), help move Fish's story along. As Duffy narrates, he and his wife's ultimate normalness is an excellent contrast to Fish and Cherry's more passionate, but ultimately less sustainable, relationship.
The performances are top-notch and Burgess has done a lot with a fairly minimalist script. The story is eventually tragic, and by the end, the audience cares greatly about and sympathizes with four characters whom urban theatergoers likely have little in the way of commonalities.
All our faithful followers may be giving up hope on the Lunch Box. But don’t worry, we on the content-creation end have been here all along.
