Matt Marks Music

This came up when I was trying to listen to someones music:

I think it’s kinda funny, if inevitable, that people are rushing to Christian Bale’s defense after the release of the tape of him verbally abusing another coworker (if you haven’t heard it yet, get yourself an internet). They all seem to be along the lines of this: ‘It was a very important scene, which requires an intense amount of concentration, and the director of photography stepped on the scene for the second time, actors need to be in a special emotional place for scenes, etc.’

Really? Look, I’m all about being accommodating to performing artists. People often do not understand the emotion and concentration it takes to do successfully pull off a performance. But you know what is just as important as emotion and concentration? The ability to pull it back together when something goes wrong. Maybe I’m a little more familiar with this since I’m a horn player, and the deftness with which we recover from unexpected shit is one of our primary skills. But still, can you imagine De Niro losing it like this? Hell no, because he’s a fucking professional. The most I’ve seen him lose it is when he directly defies the clown-ass director in this awesome video, and it’s still classy.

No matter how integral the scene, how egregious the DOP’s mistake was, how bad of a week Bale was having, whatever. It was an unprofessional Kinski-esque temper tantrum, and a more mature actor and person would have let it go after maybe a sharp word or two, rather than a four-minute pity party.

Or maybe I’m just bitter because Mell has a crush on him…

UPDATE:

This is unbelievably funny (and the best thing Steve Martin’s done in like a decade):

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Here is my latest toy, a birthday present. The Korg nanoKontrol:

Isn’t it just teh adorable??

Here’s how tiny it is:

As you can see, it comes in three distinct manifestations. A wittle keybawd, a wittle set of dwum padz, and the wittle set of knobs and pots I gots.

A-goochie goochie goo! I wuv oo my cute wittle nanoKontrol! You’re a naughty little MIDI controller aren’t you? You’re naughty!

Ahem. Thanks Melly. :)

I was wanting to post something about the Michael Phelps pot scandal, but Radley Balko articulates it better than I ever could, in his version of what Michael Phelps should have said, rather than apologizing:

Here’s a crazy thought: If I can smoke a little dope and go on to win 14 Olympic gold medals, maybe pot smokers aren’t doomed to lives of couch surfing and video games, as our moronic government would have us believe. In fact, the list of successful pot smokers includes not just world class athletes like me, Howard, Williams, and others, it includes Nobel Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, the last three U.S. presidents, several Supreme Court justices, and luminaries and success stories from all sectors of business and the arts, sciences, and humanities.

So go ahead. Ban me from the next Olympics. Yank my endorsement deals. Stick your collective noses in the air and get all indignant on me. While you’re at it, keep arresting cancer and AIDS patients who dare to smoke the stuff because it deadens their pain, or enables them to eat. Keep sending in goon squads to kick down doors and shoot little old ladies, maim innocent toddlers, handcuff elderly post-polio patients to their beds at gunpoint, and slaughter the family pet.

Freakin word.

I really, really want one of these.

I’m sorry but the attempts to frame this horrific family murder/suicide as an economic issue is simply ridiculous. It takes much more than tough external forces to cause people to commit such acts of atrocity – it takes a massively twisted fucking psyche:

It was described as one of the most grisly scenes Los Angeles police had ever encountered: the bodies of five small children and their parents, all shot to death, in two upstairs rooms of the family’s home.

But even more incomprehensible to some was the story that emerged after the bodies were found Tuesday: A father who, after he and his wife were fired from their jobs, killed all six family members before turning the gun on himself.

In a letter faxed to Los Angeles television station KABC before his suicide, Ervin Antonio Lupoe blamed his former employer for the deaths, detailing his grievance against Kaiser Permanente’s West Los Angeles Medical Center, where he and his wife Ana had worked as technicians.

I’m sure times were tough, and his lost job was the excuse, but you don’t go from loving your family to deciding they should die because you have some financial problems, I don’t care how serious they are. I guarantee there are thousands, if not millions, of Americans in a tougher spot than this douchebag, suck it up.

Also annoying is the media’s attempt to make this about the recession, as though mass murderers can be created in a matter of months because of hard economic conditions. These things tend to happen more in times of crises, but not because these psychotic individuals aren’t out there, but because these situations unearth them, giving them excuses for their terror.

Please don’t encourage the psychos CNN.

A friend showed me this kinda-funny Slate article about Billy Joel called The Worst Pop Singer Ever. It’s cheeky, cute. Here’s a bit:

I’m reluctant to pick on Billy Joel. He’s been subject to withering contempt from hipster types for so long that it no longer seems worth the time. Still, the mystery persists: How can he be so bad and yet so popular for so long? He’s still there. You can’t defend yourself with anti-B.J. shields around your brain. He still takes up the space, takes up A&R advances that would otherwise support a score of unrecognized but genuinely talented artists, singers, and songwriters, with his loathsomely insipid simulacrum of rock.

Heh.

I’m no great Billy Joel-lover, though I’ll admit to having a few of his songs on my iPod, but here is what bugs me about the article. It contains zero insight on the musical merit of his songs; it is solely about the lyrics in his songs. Yeah, Billy’s songs are kinda douchey. Yeah, his lyrics aren’t always the best. But if you are going to devote an entire article, even if it is purposefully silly, on why an artist is good or bad, you have to criticize their art. The author, Ron Rosenbaum, even qualifies the critique by describing his attempts at finding “absolute standards” of art. Well, I would assume that almost everyone would consider the craft involved in ones art to be one of those “absolute standards”, but the author is obviously completely unqualified to judge Billy Joel’s art in a musical context.

Billy Joel is a pretty good musician. He’s definitely a good singer (or was) and wrote several well-crafted – if rather trite – songs. It’s good 80s pop, not much more. His lyrics can be pretentious, in the case of And So It Goes (although I kinda love it), or dreadful, in the case of Pressure. Usually they are ok. Obviously, the author finds BJ to be annoying. Alright. I can see that. But that is not a valid criticism in and of itself. Here are a couple examples of his justifications:

First let’s take “Piano Man.” You can hear Joel’s contempt, both for the losers at the bar he’s left behind in his stellar schlock stardom and for the “entertainer-loser” (the proto-B.J.) who plays for them. Even the self-contempt he imputes to the “piano man” rings false.

“Captain Jack”: Loser dresses up in poseur clothes and masturbates and shoots up heroin and is an all-around phony in the eyes of the songwriter who is so, so superior to him.

“The Entertainer”: Entertainers are phonies! Except exquisitely self-aware entertainers like B.J., who let you in on this secret.

K, got it, you don’t dig the lyrics. But that does not make you a music critic, anymore than it would make me an art critic be if I decided I didn’t like a painting because I thought it was ugly. It may be fair for me to form that opinion, but it doesn’t make me an authority. And I sure as hell would not be conceited enough to write an article for a major online publication decrying that work of art for being ugly, while being completely ignorant of the technique involved in creating it.

Seriously, they don’t put up with this shit in the art world, why do musicians find it acceptable that utter laymen are the primary commentators on their work?

This is how I felt this morning when I woke up to find my apartment void of my favorite caffeine-laden hot liquid.

Can they pledge to not make any more of these sappy freaking videos?

Yo, catch my sis Suzanne tonight at 9pm on the premiere episode of Fox’s new drama, Lie To Me, starring the legendary Tim Roth. She plays a newcaster. Awesome.