Up In The Air

Having finally seen "Up In The Air," I've now caught a whopping two out of the 10 films most likely to be nominated for Best Picture of 2009 ("The Hurt Locker" was the other). If I go to see "Avatar" as planned at the end of next week, I'll actually be at 30% of the presumptive nominees - not that great, but still miles ahead of last year.

But anyway. I did finally see "Up In The Air," starring George Clooney and Vera Farmiga and directed by Jason Reitman. It's gotten quite a bit of awards buzz, although that seems to have cooled a bit in recent weeks. Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, whose job is to travel the country and fire people. We see a lot of scenes of him doing this: sitting in conference rooms with the corporately downsized, telling them about opportunity and wake-up calls and severance packages. He has a favorite line, some claptrap about building empires, and it sounds like he's trying to motivate his victims to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but really he's just trying to get them out of the room before they start throwing furniture. He's pretty good at his job, and he likes it. And he loves the rootless life that the job allows him. When we meet him, he's used to traveling some 300 days out of a year; when we see his "home" in Omaha, Nebraska, it's as sterile and anonymous as a hospital room, devoid of even a single personal touch, which makes perfect sense because he's never there.

Since the movie's less than two hours long, a lot of things don't really get explained, so we don't know what came first with Ryan Bingham: did he get the job because he likes to travel so much and doesn't like being tied down, or did he have the job first and discover that he likes being up in the air all the time? No way to tell--maybe that's covered in the source novel by Walter Kirn, but I'll probably never read it, because I've got no itch to revisit these characters.

Which is not to say it's a bad movie. Far from it. It's actually pretty good. The script is decent, quite well above average for a big Hollywood movie, and the direction is confident, even if Reitman clearly adores "The Graduate" way too much and throws in a few too many scenes scored to hip acoustic music. The acting is never less than solid. Clooney is a bona-fide movie star because, even though he basically plays the same character over and over (with the exception, possibly, of "Syriana"), he exudes an effortless charm and affability that makes for an acceptable audience surrogate in a lot of cases--his performances work not because they're stellar displays of acting technique, but rather because we want to be like him.

On one of his many trips, Ryan meets Vera Farmiga's Alex, another frequent traveler (her exact job is ambiguous, probably on purpose), and they bond over comparing travel-club memberships and frequent flier miles and the like, kind of like the way the guys in "Jaws" bonded over their various scars. Alex and Ryan indulge in some casual sex and then try to arrange their travel schedules to see each other again*. For a time, everything's cool in the world of Ryan Bingham--he's on the road as much as he wants, racking up his miles in the pursuit of the magical ten million goal, and he has a nice no-strings relationship going, and he looks like George Clooney.

Of course, a complication must arise to perforate all this perfection, and it does in the form of Anna Kendrick's young go-getter Natalie Keener, a hotshot recent college grad who just joined Clooney's firm and pitches the concept of going "glocal"--that is, basically, cutting the road trips and having the layoffs happen by teleconference from a single location. Immediately sniffing out the threat to his peripatetic existence, Bingham does into attack mode on Keener's initative, even taking her on the road himself to show her the advantages of axing someone in person.

I think the movie's single best touch was the way Reitman filmed Bingham's preparations for travel and movement through airports: like a soldier performing a drill, he knows exactly what to pack and how, and while seldom-flying yahoos like me are fumbling with belts and shoes and grumbling about security, Bingham knows exactly what to do at each step of the process and floats right through it all with ease and an enviable economy of movement, on his way to the next Medallion-or-whatever-level lounge and a nice glass of preflight Scotch.

When the Academy Award nominations are announced in just under a month, I'm pretty sure "Up In the Air" will get a nice handful of nods, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Clooney, director for Reitman, and probably Best Adapted Screenplay. I think it's going to lose to "Avatar" for Best Picture, but I was all but sure that "Saving Private Ryan" was going to win the top prize back in 1998 or whenever, so what do I know? Clooney is probably in the top two for Actor, although Jeff Bridges (pretty much considered the only other horse in the race) should win because he's never won in four previous nominations even though he's been around a lot longer than Clooney, and Clooney already won once (albeit for a supporting role). If Reitman wins director over Kathryn Bigelow for "The Hurt Locker," I'm gonna lose it -- but that'll wait until another day. As for adapted screenplay, who cares, except the guys that win it.

This movie shouldn't win Best Picture because, even though it's pretty well made, when it's all said and done, there isn't anything very cinematic about it--it's a quality television production writ large, and it really just comes down to people talking in rooms. It doesn't have the heft that a Best Picture winner ought to have. It doesn't do anything to push the limits of film and show us something we've never really seen before. Now, I'm not saying that every movie needs to do those things, and even though the Best Picture award has been squandered on plenty of smaller movies in the past, this one just doesn't feel right. It's missing something, some key ingredient for a truly lasting impression. It's kind of like Ryan Bingham himself--the kind of guy you'd find yourself forgetting an hour after meeting him.

And so, it'll probably win.

A lot of hay has been made about the movie's topicality because it shows people getting laid off while the country is experiencing a generational high in unemployment. But I've been in corporate America for more than twelve years now myself, and layoffs have been a near-constant threat for at least nine of those years. There's not really any such thing as job security in America anymore. Things may be statistically worse now than in recent years, but don't believe the hype: "Up In the Air" is not really any more topical in 2009-10 than it might've been at the end of the last decade, or the decade before that.

Final verdict: a good if ultimately lightweight movie. Solid, but unspectacular. There's really nothing significant to dislike about "Up In The Air," but there's not really that much to love, either.

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* I'm on the fence about the resolution of the Ryan-Alex arc because even though I was almost certain that she was hiding something (I'm not gonna say what, but it's not that hard to guess) pretty early on, I still had a fraction of a doubt right up until that something is revealed. I guess that's actually a tribute to the quality of Clooney's acting, because even in the face of almost certain disappointment, I was still kind of rooting for him to find happiness.

Current Cultural Diet - December 2009

Wow, there sure is a lot of dust around here. Let me clear some of this off and have a seat.

OK, then. Where was I? Somewhere in the middle of my favorite rock albums countdown, which I will get back to at some point. Movie awards season is in full swing, and I want to watch some of the nominated movies before the Oscars this year, plus there are some other film-related things I want to get to. I was going to post something about Tiger Woods and actually got it half-written, but I junked that because I realized I didn't have anything new or interesting to say about the whole sordid story - suffice it to say, the guy has crashed and burned more spectacularly than any outsize celebrity has in, well, perhaps forever.

To get myself back in the blogging swing, I'm going to spend a few minutes on the music, TV, and literature that's currently occupying my limited attention span.

Music - Hunky Dory, by David Bowie. I've never been that big of a David Bowie fan, although my brother gave me a bootlegged live recording a few years back that I really enjoyed.

I picked up Hunky Dory, really, because of Rolling Stone magazine - it was #107 in their top 500 albums list a few years back, and then they recently did a piece devoted entirely to the album itself. Since I've been trying to work more classic rock albums into my ongoing musical education, I nabbed it from the used record store (yes, they still have those) and immediately won the store manager's respect--"cool!" he said. I don't know the guy but he listens to a lot of music, so that made me even more inclined to give it a shot.

Before Hunky Dory, I actually thought that "Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow" was an original lyric by the 90's Nirvana-aping band Bush. Now I know that Bush lifted it from David Bowie and "Life on Mars?" and that Gavin Rossdale is even more of a thieving hack than I thought he was.

Ahem. So anyway, my reaction to Hunky Dory? At least a half dozen end-to-end spins since I picked it up a few weeks ago, and I can see this as a staple of my audio diet for quite awhile to come. It's ambitious, a bit reckless at times, but also fearless. "Changes" and "Life on Mars?" and "Andy Warhol" and "Queen Bitch"--great, great album. Now I want to get around to Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Aladdin Sane.

Book - The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson. Got this in paperback, well after the groundswell of popularity that attended its hardback release. Not sure why I picked it up exactly, as I'd been offered a copy for free before and had passed on it. I'd heard it was good, engaging, exotic mystery, but I'd also heard it was a bit dull in the beginning.

I may have been persuaded by the press surrounding the second novel in the late author's so-called "Millenium Trilogy," The Girl Who Played With Fire, published in English earlier this year. (Larsson died of a heart attack at 50 years old in 2004).

At any rate, I'm just over 100 pages in and can report that, yes, while it is a bit dry in the early going, it evolves into pretty nimble little thriller that I'm looking forward to finishing. The translation is a bit stiff and certain parts come across rather clinically, but the Swedish locales are interesting and the central mystery has real promise. Look for a follow-up later...

Television - Californication, starring David Duchovny. This show just wrapped up its third season on Showtime (and will be back for a fourth sometime next year). I've seen every episode to date, although I'd hardly call it great TV --some of the plot mechanations are so stupid that they leave me beating my skull against the headboard. Some of it is so patently contrived that you want to choke. And the actress playing Duchovny's daughter acts like a robot. At times I wonder why I even bother to watch, but then I remember that I like Duchovny--even as a loser, he's a winning presence, a perfectly deadpan mix of dry wit and moral rot who can be a drunk and a serial philanderer and still somehow likeable. He carries the show.

And the third season finale was a winner. Hank Moody (Duchovny's character) had to fess up to one of his more egregious sins, committed way back in the show's first-ever episode. I liked the way that karmic boomerang worked--it makes it seem like the writers have control of the show, even if they don't--and that turned out to be a very well-done scene. At first I was irritated that the show copped out on letting us actually hear the dialogue between Hank and Karen (Natasha McElhone), opting instead for playing Elton John's "Rocket Man" over the scene, but as it went on and the situation obviously escalated, the emotion on the actors' faces did the lifting, and what do you know, it actually worked. The dialogue wasn't necessary, and maybe would have been overwrought. The music, scoring what looks to be the final disintegration of an already fragile relationship, made it more memorable.

And it all left things in what could be a really interesting, game-changing spot for the fourth season, if the writers don't wuss out. I've been hard on the show in the past, so it's time to give it kudos for a job well done.

Slumdog Millionaire, Belatedly

As much as any aspect of parenthood, I've struggled with the sudden lack of time. Once you've got a completely dependent human being on your hands, your time is no longer your own. Books gather dust on your nighttable. The TV stays off longer than it used to. Scheduling becomes much more difficult, even with only one child. That's just how it is. As Hunter S. Thompson used to say, buy the ticket, take the ride.

So it took me a year - and eight months after its Best Picture victory at the 2009 Academy Awards - to finally watch "Slumdog Millionaire." I was curious, I wanted to watch it sooner, but I just didn't get to it.


I've had other opportunities. It was on DirecTV Pay-Per-View for awhile, and then I almost picked it up a couple of times in Blockbuster, but it just never felt right. I can't say why. I'd heard parts of it were kind of depressing but that it was really uplifting in the end, but I picked up both "The Wrestler" and "Milk" before ever seeing "Slumdog," and both of those movies are pretty depressing too. So the darkness of it shouldn't have scared me away, especially since I knew it ended pretty happily.


Again, something inside me was just lukewarm about the film, despite all of the accolades and awards.


It wasn't because of any dislike for any of the actors, because there aren't really any names in the picture.


It wasn't because I don't like director Danny Boyle - I personally own "Trainspotting" (talk about depressing) and liked "Sunshine" a good bit, along with "28 Days Later"--neither is a world-beater, but they're both pretty solid entertainment, and come to think of it I have a copy of "28 Days Later" around here somewhere, too. And I maintain that "The Beach" is a lot better than most people give it credit for being - it would've been much better if the movie had retained the book's ending, and there was some stuff that just didn't work, but also a lot of pretty cool ideas.


It's not the only Best Picture winner I hadn't seen, not by a longshot. There's a lot of stuff that has won the top Academy Award that I'm just not interested in, which I suppose makes me not that much of a cineaste. But even if every now and then I think I ought to try to be a little more well-rounded, I just can't force myself to sit through something that I have a really good feeling is not going to work for me, no matter how many awards it's won, in the same way that I can't force myself to try to read David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest" or Thomas Pynchon. I'm too old for homework. When I get free time, I want to spend it on something I actually think I might enjoy on some level.


So anyway, "Slumdog Millionaire." It's a small thing, but I always kind of like it when a movie doesn't hit you with its title right away. I think it shows confidence on the part of the filmmakers to not start off by broadcasting the title of the thing (although plenty of good movies have done exactly that, like "The Godfather" and "Star Wars" and "Jaws" and "The Matrix" to name a few), and I love confident filmmaking. Let's say you didn't know anything about "Slumdog Millionaire" and didn't have any kind of Guide button on your remote control or didn't have a newspaper or TV Guide, you wouldn't know what the movie is called until you were quite a few minutes in.


And Danny Boyle is an interesting director because he's always trying something different. Like Ang Lee and Paul Thomas Anderson, he's got a checkered resume. "Trainspotting" (heroin addicts) isn't like "The Beach" (rebel backpackers on an island paradise), or "28 Days Later" (zombies) or "Sunshine" (straight-up SF). That's not his complete resume, either. I find any artist that challenges him or herself to be interesting, so there's another point in the movie's favor.


It's got a good look, too. It's well shot. The cinematography really lets you feel the stink and grime of Bombay or Mumbai or whatever it's called now.


And Frieda Pinto, the girl who plays the mature Lathika - she had to be amazing to inspire this years-long quest, and she is, absolutely. What a beauty, even with a knife scar on her face. I mean, just flat-out stunning. You can see a guy going to great lengths for a girl like that.


So, why didn't I like the movie more?


I'm still trying to figure it out a week later. It wasn't bad, not at all. I didn't hate it. But something about it just left me kind of cool. I sensed something a bit glib about parts of it, a little bit facile. Part of that, I think, is because it's such a large tonal leap between comedy and stark human drama, and it's very difficult to stick that landing, especially if you're doing it multiple times over the course of two hours or so. In the end, a movie that tries can feel like it's just dabbling between the two without fully committing to either.


And there's also what I call the Catcher in the Rye syndrome. You know The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger's iconic novel, even if you don't really know it. It's assumed an almost mythical status in American fiction, is perptually cited as an influence both good and horrible (Mark David Champman, for instance), and only gains stature from its creator's impenetrable mystique.


All of the hype that has accrued to The Catcher in the Rye since its publication may well make you think that you're going to read something staggering, something immense, something that pushes the boundaries of prose with every single line, something that's going to change your perception of the world, but it really isn't so. It's really a pretty straightforward and not very hard-to-grasp story.


It wasn't bad, I kind of liked it, but that's all.


I think that happens quite a lot in our culture. Books, movies, and music all get digested by the mainstream and ribboned with this outsize applause. But if you miss the initial wave, and all you get is the hype for months or years, you can't separate it from the work itself.


So if a movie wins awards and gets great reviews, and months go by before you see it, you're probably going to be expecting something immense, profound, life-changing. Just being good isn't going to be good enough.


It's not fair to the work itself. Everything deserves to be judged on its own merits.


There's a larger point to be made about prejudice and the power of suggestion, but I think I want to leave that for another day. For now, it's enough to say that "Slumdog Millionaire" was all right. I doubt I'll ever see it again, and I don't really think it's going to leave much of a lasting mark on cinema, but that's OK.

Top Albums #6: Dave Matthews Band, Before These Crowded Streets

Year released: 1998

Tracklist: Pantala Naga Pampa, Rapunzel, The Last Stop, Don't Drink the Water, Stay (Wasting Time), Halloween, The Stone, Crush, The Dreaming Tree, Pig, Spoon

Dave Matthews Band?!?!? Ewww! Didn't they sell out? Don't they do, like, love songs and stuff? Aren't all of their fans fratboys and underage girls?

I'm not even really sure what "selling out" means. Yes, they do do love songs. And I'm neither a fratboy (never was) or an underage girl.

I'll admit, DMB sticks out amongst my favorite bands somewhat like a sore thumb -- they aren't like any other band that I follow, for the simple reason that they aren't like any other band. And this album makes my top ten because, while I knew of DMB several years before this came out, this album specifically is the one that made me pay attention to them.

Specifically, it was the dark crazy-quilt lead single "Don't Drink the Water" that grabbed and pulled me in, with its banjo and wind and vocal flourishes. It exploded in 1998, immediately distinguishing itself as different from anything else on the radio-scape, and hooked me on first listen.

Now, not every Dave Matthews Band sounds like that. But that song was the hook, and pretty soon I was openly devouring their music and going to their concerts. I estimate that I've now seen the Dave Matthews Band in concert something like 30 or 35 times. They don't always wow me, but I usually enjoy them. The thing about DMB live that most people who've written them off as pop opportunists don't understand is this: in its own way, when properly motivated, this is a band that can rock as hard as any other out there.

I actually wrestled with including this album over Crash, which immediately precedes it in the DMB discography. I love a lot of Crash, played it a ton when my DMB appreciation was in its heyday, and still probably hear it once or twice a year. But Crash's debits, in the end, proved too much for me: sure, it has "Lie in Our Graves" and "#41," but it also has the drippy single "Crash Into Me," my alltime least favorite DMB tune (which they played on both nights of two-night Atlanta stand earlier this year, to my chagrin, and which the crowd lapped up both times), along with "Let You Down."

Before These Crowded Streets isn't perfect, either - "Stay (Wasting Time)" does exactly that, well past its welcome, and my ability to tolerate "Crush" comes and goes. In fact, the highlights of Crash and BTCS could make one hell of a record put together, but thematically they don't really fit (maybe a double album??). Crash, overall, has more bounce, and a lighter touch. Before These Crowded Streets is generally darker, but is also a more ambitious, confident record on the whole, full of texture and color, bursting at the seams with ideas.

It's still the best studio album that the Dave Matthews Band has made, more than a decade after its release (they flirted with surpassing it with their last release, Big Whiskey and the Groogrux King, but ultimately fell short).

What's best about Before These Crowded Streets is how much the band seems determined to use their opportunity. Remember, back in 1998, the Dave Matthews Band was still on the rise, still ascending in popularity, and this album was the third stage in their rocket to stardom. A couple paragraphs up I said that BTCS is bursting at the seams, and it really is, strikingly so--I can imagine the band in the studio, listening to the record as a work in progress, looking for new colors to use and new places to add a detail or two. That kind of effort can easily lead to something schizophrenic and overwrought, or just ponderous and joyless and dry. Happily, while BTCS definitely flirts with being overwrought, it avoids those pitfalls and still feels fresh today.

It's fitting that the word "crowded" makes up part of the album's title, because in many ways, it's like a crowded street fair with something interesting going on literally everywhere you look. It juggles genres from jazz to bluegrass to world beat to straight-out rock in a way that shouldn't work but somehow does. The band even includes a number of transitional interludes between songs, snippets of conversation or throwaway melodies that make the album feel like a unified, almost thematic work.

In fact, for quite awhile, I thought of Before These Crowded Streets as a concept album, like something Pink Floyd might've done, even though there isn't a readily discernible unifying concept to the songs -- there's a love song ("Rapunzel") and a hate song (the legendary "Halloween"), songs about religious fanatcism ("The Last Stop") and the evils of colonialism ("Don't Drink the Water"), loss ("The Dreaming Tree"), regret ("The Stone"), and getting the last laugh on a former lover ("Spoon").

Thematically, it's all over the place, but that's completely fitting for DMB, a band with influences as diverse as their instrumentation and cultural makeup. Relentlessly, almost exhaustively entertaining, even through some serious darkness, Before These Crowded Streets comes as close as any record can to clearly defining the polymorphous, continually evolving collective known as the Dave Matthews Band. And since I love the band, even after all of these years, I love the record. Still.

This Just in: Yes, Rush Limbaugh is a Jackass

So his Rushness was on the Today show earlier this week. I watch sometimes in the morning while I'm getting my breakfast or getting my kid ready for daycare. Hey, I like Matt Lauer and Meredith Viera. What can I say?

I knew Rush was coming on and I should've shut it off (or at least muted the TV) because it's never good to get one's blood pressure too high, especially not that early in the morning. But I couldn't quite get my finger to reach the remote in time, it was one of those car-crash impulses where you can see the flashing lights and a bit of the twisted wreckage coming up ahead and you know you should look away but you just can't help yourself.

So during Rush's segment--there he was, wearing some kind of Viet Cong black-pajama getup, or maybe he's just finished practicing some Kung Fu on liberals -- spouting off on this and that, and then the reporter asked him to play some word association. She gives a name, and Rush is supposed to give his first reaction.

I'm gonna paraphrase some because I don't remember the exact words:

Barack Obama: Disaster. OK, no surprise there.

Michelle Obama: Rush gets all cute and belittling and says "garden." Because, yuk yuk, she planted a garden at the White House. You card.

So far, so good. I mean, I certainly wouldn't expect him to say anything positive about Barack Obama.

George W. Bush: something like, the most decent, real person you'd ever want to meet.

Screw you, Rush. Screw you and whatever brain the OxyContin binges left you with, you preening, bloviating, smug, overpaid windbag.

There was your chance, your chance to show some small glint of objectivity, and you just passed on it. Because that's the right-wing way: never, ever admit, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that you were even the slightest bit wrong.

Say nothing about the sad state of the economy after W's watch. Nothing about the garbage like line-item vetos, maniacal expansion of executive privilege, and disregard for Consitutional rights. Nothing about the federal inepitude typified by the response to Hurricane Katrina. Nothing about the absurdly ballooning deficit. And certainly nothing about not one but two wars that are both ill-conceived and very possibly unwinnable.

Are we still looking for WMD's in Iraq? No? What's Rush's response to that? Wasn't that why we invaded in the first place? What's that? Saddam Hussein didn't have any, you say? There was no clear and present danger to the United States? He wasn't in league with Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda after all? Hmmm...well, it doesn't matter. Because George W. Bush is real, dammit! And he's nice! And down-to-earth! And...

Oh, I can feel myself slipping...I didn't want to, but here I am, falling down the rabbit hole.

Why do I hate Rush Limbaugh and his ilk? Because they're stupid. Because they're blind. Because they just want to sit there and beat their tin drums all day long and even though they're stupid and blind, a lot of people still seem to pay attention.

Look, I voted for Barack Obama (and John Kerry before him, and Al Gore before him, and Bill Clinton, too, twice).

What grade would I give Barack Obama as president so far? A low B. But because of the curve created by the plateful of shit the previous adminstration left with their hawkishness and greed and cronyism and inepitude and myopia, he might really only be around a C-average President so far. He's gotten some stuff right. He's gotten other stuff wrong. He isn't perfect. I look at him and I see some strengths, but I also see some real weaknesses that he should--and hopefully will--address.

But I don't see George W. Bush. I don't see a stupefying lack of curiosity and bull-headed stubborness. I don't see klutzy mush-mouthed, malpropism-riddled speeches.

Let's play word association:

Barack Obama: decent, but still has much unrealized potential.

George W. Bush: fool.

Rush Limbaugh: asshole of the first degree.

I feel a little bit better.

I'd Be Too Afraid That the Coffin-Shaped Light Rigs Were Gonna Fall On Me To Play, a.k.a:

Is It Possible To Get a Hangover Just From Music?, a.k.a:

James Hetfield Looks Like Gregg Allman Now (Well, Kinda)

You've gotta love Metallica, and if you don't, you've gotta respect their steadfastness: with the exception of a strange dalliance with eye makeup* back in the 1990s and the fallow period of St. Anger while they were weathering a personnel change and James Hetfield was getting sober, they've pretty much stuck with the same recipe for over twenty-five years.**

I saw 'em last night on the second leg of their Death Magnetic tour, and ten hours after the last double-barrelled shotgun guitar blast I'm still a little confused and stiff about the head and shoulders. But that's what you sign up for when you go to see Metallica.

They're older now, sure - Hetfield does bear a certain resemblance to Gregg Allman, at least from a distance, all gray-bearded now and everything, and Lars Ulrich is almost bald (I think but am not sure that Robert Trujillo, the bassist who replaced Jason Newsted, is somewhat younger than the core group, and Kirk Hammett appears basically ageless, which may or may not be due to some sort of Satanic pact), but my fourth full-frontal Metallica show was pretty much the same as the other three, maybe even a little more intense than the last couple. They were flat-out awesome as recently as 2000, still with Newsted, absolutely one of the best & most intense concerts I've ever seen. The Summer Sanitarium tour a couple of years later has to be graded on a curve because a) it was a stadium, and stadium shows almost always suck, and b) it was their first tour with Trujillo, and the lineup hadn't really meshed yet. The St. Anger tour was OK, but kind of uninspired because the band didn't even like the album they'd just put out. But you can tell they're happy with Death Magnetic - a lot of ink has been spilled about how it harkens back to the classic Metallica sound from albums like Kill 'Em All and Ride the Lightning, etc.--and they've even got giant coffin-shaped light rigs on the stage setup (plus some very Pink Floydy lasers, which were interesting) to prove it.

In all honesty, it's kind of odd for me to be seeing Metallica. I wouldn't call myself a huge fan of theirs, or even of metal music in general. The only Metallica albums that I own are the so-called "Black Album" and Load, both fairly latter-day in terms of the band's ouevre, and I hardly ever listen to either. Great chunks of output from their early trail-blazing days sort of bleeds together sonically for me, but that's because I've never really tried to make it stand apart - sure, I know "One" and "Seek and Destroy" and "Master of Puppets" and "For Whom the Bell Tolls," and maybe one or two more, but I don't own any of the albums they're on and probably never will. I just don't feel the need to put 'em on for recreational listening.

But live is another story. There's a certain genius in what they do, and last night's bill made it obvious. I got inside the venue right as the second opening act, a buncha long-haired yahoos called Lamb of God (oh, the irony), were thrashing out their opening set (the first warm-up was some outfit called Gojira, which I missed completely), and every single song sounded exactly the same. Exactly. Loud, fast, unintelligible lyrics, completely free of anything resembling a hook or melody, and absolutely as boring as shit. It's the exact kind of unsubtle stuff Metallica would do if they were about fifty percent dumber, and it's probably a lot like how Metallica first started out. But all of the guys in Metallica, depsite being complete drunkards, were too smart to stick with that for long, which is why they're in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and why bands like Lamb of God will just grunt their way along the regional club circuit until one band member gets brought up on child molestation charges and another dies in a puddle of his own vomit.

Dig it, metalheads: melody isn't just for wussy shit. Melody doesn't have to be pretty; it can be bruising, but it's gotta be there. And if you go back and listen to early Metallica, you can hear some surprisingly complex rhythmic and melodic ideas at work in there, and some real ambition, too.

Fame and riches may have dulled a great deal of Metallica's ambition by now (let's be honest, it's a litle silly for forty- and fifty-something dads to be putting out albums called Death Magnetic with song titles like "My Apocalypse" and "Cyanide"). But the fact that they ever had ambition in the first place is the reason we're still talking about them today.

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*To be completely fair, the Load era did yield at least a few good songs, like "King Nothing," "Hero of the Day," and the Mission Impossible II contribution "I Disappear," which by itself was better than the movie.

**After I wrote this part I realized I forgot the DVD they did with the symphony, the LA Philharmonic I believe it was, but that was really more of a one-off, "what the fuck, we're superstars and millionaires so we might as well try this" kind of thing, and it actually worked. Which is more proof that there's more to Metallica's music than just straight ahead power-chord fastballing.

Top Albums #7 - The Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground + Nico

Year released: 1967

Tracklist: Sunday Morning, I'm Waiting for the Man, Femme Fatale, Venus in Furs, Run Run Run, All Tomorrow's Parties, Heroin, There She Goes Again, I'll Be Your Mirror, Black Angel's Death Song, European Son

There's an old joke about The Velvet Underground + Nico that goes something like this: "only a hundred people bought it, but ninety-nine of them started bands." The joke is meant to both tweak the album's lack of commercial success and laud its influence simultaneously. More than one hundred people bought it back in 1967 and the years since, but not millions more; ninety-nine percent of them didn't start bands, of course, but the weight of this record's influence on subsequent generations of musicians is obvious on almost every track. There's a reason that Rolling Stone magazine called it "the most prophetic album of all time."

Never mind not getting it: I didn't even hear VU + Nico until earlier this year. One day, I started to fully realize the generally sorry state of my rock n' roll classics resume - plenty of Pink Floyd, sure, and I know great chunks of discography from Zeppelin and the Beatles, the Stones and Who, but it's all piecemeal: I hadn't really heard the albums. I'd never really sat down with some of the true classics of rock and listened to them end to end, I'd just taken what radio was giving me. And there's a lot out there that's untouched, untapped, preserved, just waiting to be discovered - whole worlds of music, really, and a lot of them can be heard on this album.

In a lot of ways, it's album about masks, about deceptive appearances. It also may be the most New York rock album ever made. Some of The Velvet Underground + Nico is pretty straightforward stuff--the Berryesque blues stomp of "Run Run Run," for instance--but throughout most of the album's other tracks, lyrics hide under cover of rhythms and melodies that suggest something completely different. "There She Goes" could be any up-tempo 1960's pop-rocker about a girl, but it could also be about a hooker with a drug problem.

Off the bat, the lulling, idyllic "Sunday Morning" seems to promise an album of calm, sunny pop--after all, what's more peaceful and inviting and calm than a Sunday morning? But there's already something underneath, the restless feeling described upfront in the lyrics, the hints of wasted opportunity, the feeling of suspicion and paranoia ("Watch out, the world's behind you"). It may be the most gorgeous despair on record.

That prettiness gives way the surging urban grit of "I'm Waiting for the Man," the first of two songs to directly address heroin addiction, a vividly seedy ballad of a junkie going for his score, bedecked with gallows humor. I don't know where 125 Lexington is, but after hearing this song, I felt like I did--and it's not a nice place at all.

The campy, vampy Nico makes her first appearance on the third track, making the word clown sound like clan on "Femme Fatale," a beautifully strange little ditty that hints at some of Lou Reed's doo-wop influences in its chorus. Nico is a bit sunnier later on in "I'll Be Your Mirror" and "All Tomorrow's Parties," but there's still a cold imperiousness to her delivery that's really fascinating--it sounds more like she's giving orders to subordinates than actually singing. It's just another example of the record's genius--in context, you can see how inspired Andy Warhol's pairing of the singer with the band actually was.

Song four, "Venus in Furs" is a groundbreaking paean to S&M that's so truly unsettling in its suggestive lyrics and off-kilter instrumentation that I was originally hesitant to listen to it twice. But now it feels just like a bad habit, something that you know you shouldn't enjoy but that you can't stop loving anyway. Almost as unnerving is the perilous psychofolk of "Black Angel's Death Song," in which Lou Reed's delivery may be parody or tribute or both, accented with screaming viola and instrumental flourishes that sound like a hospital respirator, suggesting a life in crisis, on medical support.

The crown jewel of The Velvet Underground + Nico is "Heroin," the epic, seven-minute ode that's the greatest drug song of all time. Reed is said to have patterned the song, with its crests and breaks, after the ups and downs of a heroin rush. Many have tried, but no song before or since has so eloquently portrayed the junkie's plight, so evocatively painted the abandon and surrender, the self-loathing and self-delusion, the push-pull of addiction.

The Velvet Underground. They were weird, hip art-pop operators that foresaw punk and grunge and noise rock, that forefathered all manner of alternative avenues, many of which are still being explored today. Most of the ninety-nine bands that were first spawned by this album never made it out of the garage, and those that may have are long defunct. But the record's still there, waiting to shine its black light in the corners that rock radio doesn't often show you. There's dirt in there, and some scary stuff, but there's also some incredible possibilities, as big as the city that spawned the album. The Velvet Underground + Nico will change your perception, if you let it.