Super Jumper (Abba vs Van Halen)

Mad Geniuses at work here both in the music mashup and in the video edit. It makes me so happy! Unutterably brilliant.

Winners' History and Whiners' Whining

Steven Hyden's thoughtful and provocative seven-part series of articles, "The Winners' History of Rock And Roll", posits that:

In the late '60s, Led Zeppelin represented a new choice between.. "a clearly defined mass taste and a clearly defined elitist taste." This dichotomy would define the rock discourse for the next several decades, until elitist taste finally eclipsed mass taste due to audience attrition. Today, the best rock bands, almost without exception, make records with no chance of reaching the "mass taste" audience. You can blame that on changes in mass tastes — as much as "mass tastes" still exist, anyway — as well as revolutions in media and the record industry. You can also blame the bands, many of whom (intentionally or not) have sequestered themselves from the very people who used to be rock's core constituency.

This has led me to think about exactly how far I've internalized the elite-taste/indie/NYC-centered vision of rock's possibilities over the last decade or so. Here, I guess, are some of the artsists I've definitely dug over the period that may fit Hyden's model of "sells out midsize theaters in large cities and elicits blank stares every place else... a group that appears to have little or no concept of what a beer-chugging, Middle American audience might want out of a rock record":

• Dirty Projectors
• LCD Soundsystem
• Bon Iver
• The National
• Sleigh Bells
• Beach House
• Passion Pit
• Arcade Fire
• The Rapture
• The Strokes
• The Shins
• The Decemberists
• Bat For Lashes
• St Vincent
• Broken Social Scene
• Joanna Newsom
• Panda Bear
• Metronomy
• M83
• Anna Calvi
• Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti
• Jens Lekman
• Fleet Foxes
• Life Without Buildings
• Interpol
• Swans

My off-the-top-of-my-head/itunes list feels, on average, more open to broader success than Hyden's totems of indie isolation and impotence: Grizzly Bear. I suppose that Hyden would say that a lot of the stuff on my list isn't Rock and/or macho enough to count for his purposes. It's fair to say, for example, that Dirty Projectors never thought they'd be or wished they'd be as big or as slamming as Led Zep. But what of LCD and M83 and Arcade Fire and The Rapture and The Strokes? I think they met the great unwashed, Middle American audience at least half way, and all attracted or attract a solid female audience not just "the same pasty, 35-to-44ish, predominantly dude-y bunch" that Hyden fears Rock has dwindled down to.

Betty Davis

A recent Sound Opinions episode has switched me on to Betty Davis's eponymous 1973 album. Filthily rocking, funked out, with great visuals (see above; I guess that that's who Beyoncé was channeling in her Austin Powers role), it's fantastic.

Check out its brilliant lead track, 'If I’m in Luck I Might Get Picked Up' - a title/hook-line every songwriter in the world wishes they'd concocted - here.

Life Without Buildings (my new favorites)

'Don't leave the visual world!' Who writes lyrics like that? I am digging this band.

Amazingly, the released live version of Love Trinity may be even better:

The live confirms that although Sue Tompkins is an unorthodox vocalist (and an acquired taste) she's incredibly precise, and technically quite accomplished.

Foals' Holy Fire to take over world?

Filter meets Mansun meets Dave Gahan's 'Kingdom' meets TV On The Radio meets Passion Pit meets Talking Heads meets Vampire Weekend. What's not to love?

A Chronological Edit of Two For The Road (1967)

Stanley Donen's (dir.) and Frederic Raphael's (wr.) Two For The Road (1967), the grand-daddy of Eternal Sunshine, Memento, and Eyes Wide Shut, is a marvel of time-shifting and match-cutting. My video edits the film chronologically. The edit loses a lot from Donen's ingenious original, but it may be useful to scholars and critics, and in my experience does help certain points and patterns emerge more clearly (much as seeing Memento reordered chronologically does).

My edit 'follows the visuals' and does not attempt to correct any trailing or overlapping audio as we engineer our cut. This is the complete film but it's not polished up the way an actually released 'A Chronological TFTR'; would be (which Donen has always insisted would be deadly dull). That is, this is a 'dvd extra'/scholars' aid not a film in its own right (again along the lines of Memento's dvd bonus of chronological play). While we wait for TFTR to appear on blu-ray, perhaps my video will inspire the inclusion of such an extra on that projected disc.

The only exceptions to my 'follow the visuals' policy occur near the end of the film - a couple of quick flashbacks during David's and Joanna's final conversation are left in that conversational sequence, and the Pirandellesque sequence of shots (including the famous, Simpsons-approved(!) roundabout shot) that immediately precedes Joanna's and Mark's hopeful/resigned border-crossing denouement in the white Mercedes are also left in sequence.

The Go-Between's Twin Layers Of Lightning

I think I'd trade everything Pulp ever did for this one track. Forster and McClennan were that good.