the man who used to be in guided by voices

Robert Pollard writes too many songs and releases too many albums. But that's why his fans love him. Even though Guided by Voices has disbanded, Pollard keeps rolling right along. Normal Happiness is his latest and, his admirers will be happy to know, it's more of the same.

badly drawn boy

It's been six long years since The Hour of Bewilderbeast. Badly Drawn Boy's latest record, Born in the U.K., is as cozy and lush as you would expect. But he seems to have lost his ability to wow us.

saw iii

The third installment in the horror franchise is more of the same, except less so.

the decemberists

Colin Meloy's indie-rock group has never done much for me. Then I heard their new record, The Crane Wife. This is the warmest, most moving collection of stories he's assembled, backed up by hooks that recall the timeless pull of ancient ballads.

little children

Todd Field's second movie is pretty terrific, although it could have been ever better. Also in Consumables, reviews of Deliver Us from Evil, the Pernice Brothers, Irving, 30 Rock, and that new John Mellencamp song you've undoubtedly heard if you've watched any of the ads during the baseball playoffs.

writing pad, lesson two: reviewing as storytelling

Greil Marcus is brilliant at taking an album and turning its songs, lyrics, and themes into a narrative -- he reviews the work by presenting it as a story. The tricky thing about this process is that to fully appreciate his review, you may need to be familiar with the album already.

Of all his pieces, this may be my favorite: his glowing review of Bob Dylan's magnificent Love and Theft. He writes the piece as the story of an old man (Dylan) who lives in town who no one really knows. Along the way, Marcus references the songs as clues to the old man's secret passions and sorrows. Anyone who loves the album will find that Marcus has recreated the experience of hearing it for the first time, unraveling its many pleasures.

writing pad, lesson one: the review as social observation

I mentioned before that I'll be teaching a class this weekend at the Writing Pad on the art of criticism, so I've been looking for good samples for a few weeks in preparation. This review by Ann Powers of the Britney Spears compilation, My Prerogative, does a great job of both dissecting the pop star's fame as well as examining how her celebrity seems perfectly timed for an era when young women are being sexualized more and more. And all the while, Powers smartly reviews the actual songs, too.

zerophilia

Good news: My review of Zerophilia is my first in The Village Voice.

Bad news: I had to watch Zerophilia.

marmaduke explained

Is this commentary? Should it be in this blog? I dunno -- but it makes me laugh. A lot.

jesus camp

Jesus Camp, the new documentary about the religious right's desire to indoctrinate its children into the cause, is both disturbing and heavy-handed. Elsewhere, in Consumables, reviews of The U.S. vs. John Lennon, Fergie, and the terrific Todd Snider.

j dilla, r.i.p.

Dilla, the talented hip-hop producer, died at the age of 32 earlier this year. The Shining was the album he was working on near the end, and now it's out. It's no landmark record, but it's a fine swan song.

crumb

Crumb, Terry Zwigoff's great documentary about his friend Robert Crumb, will be playing at the Aero on Sunday, October 1 as part of a retrospective of the director's work. I pay homage here.

And for a great, in-depth interview with Zwigoff about the making of Crumb, I highly recommend this site, which includes these bits:

There was certainly times when I was following him around with a camera where he would get to the point where he was running out of patience for it. He would turn to me and say, “If you were not my best friend, I would be so out of here.”

Robert always thought [Crumb] would just be shown on my living room wall. And when it wasn’t and when it sort of caught on and started being released to theaters theatrically and getting all these favorable reviews in all the magazines and newspapers, it really had an alarming effect on his life where he would start to get recognized on the street and journalists were showing up on his doorstep to interview him. And his life as he knew it was changing.

studio 60 on the sunset strip

Aaron Sorkin's new NBC drama, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, is the sort of sophisticated, flashy character piece you'd expect from the West Wing auteur. That's a good and a bad thing.

how have we changed since 9/11? don't ask us.

John Powers has a fine essay in the LA Weekly about the incessant desire in the media and within both political parties to use the anniversary of 9/11 for their own purposes. The GOP gets whacked around, but so do newspapers and artists in general:

[I]t's worth remembering that, in the rush to pontificate about that awful September morning, five years is no time at all. Events may be fast, but meaning is slow.

lambchop

The Kurt Wagner-led Nashville alt-country band return with a new album, Damaged. I think it's one of their best.

zach braff gets serious

The Last Kiss plays like a somber version of Zach Braff's Garden State, but despite this new film's ambitions to be significant and meaningful, it's loads less profound about twenty-somethings than Braff's quirky, heartfelt offering from two years ago.

keep your 9/11 away from my 9/11

The anniversary of 9/11 always depresses me, but it goes beyond the memory of what happened five years ago. Nowadays, it's the way certain people -- and certain people in power -- try to use 9/11 for their own benefits, trying to bully the rest of us into thinking that they care more about what happened or that they are the only ones who haven't forgotten. That attitude makes me so angry I just wanted to hide in a ball on Monday, and I pretty much did.

Tuesday morning brought some happiness, though, thanks to Keith Olbermann. His 9/11 commentary speaks eloquently to the anger that many of us feel. The Bush administration keeps reminding us that we can't forget what happened five years ago. Olbermann suggests that not only haven't we forgotten, we've also remembered all the foolish decisions and cynical manipulation that have transpired since then:

History teaches us that nearly unanimous support of a government cannot be taken away from that government by its critics. It can only be squandered by those who use it not to heal a nation's wounds, but to take political advantage.

bob dylan

Modern Times isn't up to the level of Dylan's other recent albums. Sorry, it's true. Elsewhere in Consumables, I go nuts for Neko Case's latest record and have nice things to say about Ben Affleck's performance in Hollywoodland.

the album leaf

Jimmy LaValle, the electronica musician who is the Album Leaf, is an unassuming nice guy. I know because I interviewed him about two years ago. Well, he's back with a new record, Into the Blue Again. He makes good records -- I just wish he would resist the urge to sing.

talking to patricia foulkrod

Patricia Foulkrod is the director of The Ground Truth, a new documentary about the horrors that befall our troops once they return home from combat. Anybody who has been following B.D.'s ordeal on Doonesbury since he lost part of a leg in Iraq knows that the mental scars can be as harrowing as the physical ones, and The Ground Truth brings these realities similarly to life without political grandstanding.

I spoke with Foulkrod recently for the LA Weekly:

"The biggest mythology in American culture about war is that if you sign up for the military, you'll be taken care of. And I think many soldiers believe that. Even as they're watching someone they know -- a brother or a father who was in Vietnam who came back messed up and never spoke about it and never got help -- they think that somehow they will be different."

The rest of the interview appears here.