Americana

The other day I cleaned all the CDs out of my car and grabbed 3 new ones to put into rotation. I didn't realize until later that I had just happened to pick 3 of my personal top 10 albums. I just happened to pick out Abbey Road, A Picture of the Eighth Wonder, and Americana
Americana is the third and last in this opening "era" of Starflyer 59 albums with solid-color covers. (One last solid-color album would emerge years later with mixed results.) As I listened to this out-of-print CD in my car, I found myself thinking that more people need to hear it. In fact, "You Don't Miss Me" may very well be in my top 10 favorite songs.Jason Martin has since taken SF59 in a very 80's and perhaps more mature direction (Changing of the Guardis released today), but this album especially, from the first "trilogy" of albums could easily pass for a covers album of 50's and 60's tunes. It's all guitar, with vocals turned down to their absolute minimum and pumped full of reverb. Listening to Americana, while there is a variety of guitar sounds, there are 3 basics. The first is the rhythm guitar, which sounds like it's amplified through an industrial sawmill. Then there's the undistorted lounge/surf guitar, drenched in reverb and/or vibratto. Finally, guitar solos take advantage of that long Les Paul sustain intoned like I imagine Grace Slick would sound if she was a guitar.

But the real treat on this album ends up being Gene Eugene on Hammond B3 organ, vibraphone, and production. The organ first shows up late in the rocking opening track, seeming to underscore the final guitar solo, then to take over the solo, then continuing support as guitar goes berserk and fades out without finishing the solo. On "You Don't Miss Me", the organ is a constant background drone, adding depth and texture to Martin's guitar, which gives us another of those berserk solo fade-outs. The album goes back and forth between loud and the quiet, never very fast, but often extremely slow and laid-back ("You Think You're Radical", "Help Me When You're Gone")...cue the lounge guitars. Americana finishes up with a terrific pop-rock track that could easily pass for a Buddy Holly cover.

Yes, Starflyer's early albums just beg for comparisons to Weezer or My Bloody Valentine, but Jason Martin and Co. manage to create songs and tones unique to themselves (or himself), while providing that 90's sound we love.

Night Train to Munich

I watched the first of the DVD/BDs I bought from the Barnes & Noble Criterion 1/2-off sale. I don't really want to do a full-up review of a film that I'm sure many more qualified people have written about over the last 70 years, but there were a couple of things that jumped out at me. The first was the use of models and painted backdrops to expand the scope of the film. The model shots are fairly obvious to a modern viewer, but I was actually really impressed with the detail put into the models, and they are shot from rather close-up (though nothing like the Lord of the Rings bigatures, certainly).

Two minor characters in the film had appeared two years earlier in Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (same screenwriter, different director, similar to Michael Keaton's character in both Jackie Brown and Out of Sight). Their popularity warranted leading roles the next year in Crook's Tour, which is included with The Lady Vanishes 2-disc.

Night Train to Munich is a fast-paced, well directed, WWII, action, adventure, chase comedy made before the world knew what was happening inside German concentration camps, and as a result downplays the atrocities of that reality. Although in many ways typical of late 30's/early 40's movies of the same genre, there are plenty of twists and turns along that way to help the film warrant a spot among the classics.

Unelectric Slides

This is the first roll of slide film I've ever shot. I used my Gold Harikin (Vivitar Clone) and a roll of slightly expired Fuji Sensia 100 ISO 35mm. I don't think it's possible to take a bad picture with this camera, except perhaps to underexpose the film.

More:

http://www.lomography.com/homes/bubbacoop/albums/1626150-roll10-gold-harikin

Hitchcock in 35mm

If my memory serves, last night's screening of Psycho was the 4th Alfred Hitchcock film I'm seen from a 35mm print at the Victoria Theatre, the others being North by Northwest, Strangers on a Train, and Vertigo.

As always, there was an organ concert prior to the show, then a Loony Toons short. Psycho wasn't a new print. I'm guessing it was part of some 1980's re-release. Of course there were some scratches and wear to the print, but what was a little distracting was the difference in color between the reels. The first reel was a beautiful B&W, but the second reel had a yellow tint to it, the third a green tint, then it was pretty much good B&W to the end, but the mono sound was consistent throughout.

The first time I saw Psycho was sitting alone in a dark room watching a midnight movie on TV, so it was a much different experience seeing it with an audience, although there were no hysterics as there might have been in 1960 at the shower scene. In fact, the Arbogast murder seemed to shock people more because the music peaks so suddenly.

Psycho stands as 50-year-old example that a director can successfully manipulate the emotions of an audience through acting, editing, and scoring without resorting to nudity and gore like the three sequels.

Yet another free camera

This one was given to me by another instructor at work. I've never heard of the brand, but when I looked it up it turns out that they never actually made anything, but were a distributor for low-end cameras and lenses made in China. So here's the latest:

And what it looks like at the moment, as I try to modify it to allow for double exposures.

Gold Harikin with Kodak Ektar

This is the first roll I got back from the free Japanese camera I won. I'm really happy with the results. I tried to pick bright colors to shoot to take advantage of Kodak Ektar's faithful and vivid color reproduction. I'd call it a success.

Plenty more pictures here.

LOST

Yes, spoilers are inevitable.

I've had two weeks to process the finale that I'd been anticipating since September 22, 2004. I don't want to spend too much time defending it against the 40% or so of viewers who were dissatisfied. I'm convinced that the people watching the finale waiting for some grand revelation to put 6 years of episodes into some sort of illuminating perspective were watching for the wrong reason, regardless of whether its their fault or that of the writers themselves. The big questions had already been answered earlier in the season. For me, the last 15 minutes is easily one of the most beautiful things ever aired on television. I maintain that the series would not have been as good if not for Giacchino's score. His "voice" was the only one heard (other than Vincent) in the last 6 or 7 minutes of the entire show and had as much to do with the beauty of the ending as the actors and writers.

I never understood the "shippers" who were more interested in the characters than in the mythology. I wanted answers to the mysteries and watched weekly hoping for some minute clue to what the island was and why these people were there. But something unexpected happened during Season 4's 3-hour finale. The first hour opens with the Oceanic 6 reuniting with their loved ones. The second hour brilliant begins in the seconds after the season 3 finale. But in the last 5 minutes of the 3rd hour, we're shown one of the most emotionally satisfying scenes of the series as their raft reaches solid ground with no dialogue, under Michael Giacchino's soaring score.

Somewhere in those three hours I realized that I actually cared what happened to the characters, and while I still wanted answers about the island, I didn't need to spend each week searching for hidden clues to the show's larger meaning. I was finally just along for the ride, wherever that may lead. I'm sure that perspective is part of what allowed me to be satisfied with the finale, while others decided it failed to deliver and even negated the 6 seasons of excellent storytelling that preceded.

Regardless of how they felt about the finale, what did the show offer that 12 million people seemed to connect with so passionately? Mystery. A huge international cast. Tropical setting. Cinematic storytelling. and then there's that score, again. I'm sure 12 million people could give 12 million answers. Maybe it's the desire to discover our purpose in life, like John Locke. Or maybe a wish for the kind of relationship that defies space and time like Penny and Desmond in The Constant.

Ultimately, LOST kept the audience in confusion as much as the characters were confused, and we loved every minute of it. It subverted our expectations not only of television itself, but of what we were seeing on the screen. We thought we were seeing yet another Jack flashback, only to discover it was a flashforward. We though John was alive, only to find out it was the man in black. We thought we were seeing a parallel universe, only to discover it was an afterlife. For those who didn't learn to enjoy the journey of constantly being in the fog, the destination probably didn't satisfy, because the destination was never the point.

I'll end with this:

From all of us who made the show, we really hope that you don’t feel it was a waste of your time. We hope that you spent the entire night not just thinking about the finale on a story level, but that you were emotionally affected by it.

There are two feelings that you feel when you watch the ending of a television show. The first is the feeling that you have of just understanding that the show is over and the second is what your response is to actually what’s happening on the screen.

What I liked about the Soprano’s finale was that it changed the experience because when Chase cut to black, suddenly that feeling of “the show’s over” was replaced by “is my cable out?” – he kind of changed the conversation about it.

For us, we tried to write the last two and a half hours of the show so that those two feelings would feel like they were the same thing. So, you’re feeling of saying goodbye to the show – of the show not being around anymore – was actually literally perfectly paralleling what we were showing you on the screen.

If you had an experience anything like that, then it was mission accomplished.

If you didn’t, we blew it and I apologize.

- Damon Lindelof