How we're spending the New Year

...Yeah, I know, we're rubbing it in. But I have to admit being able to go to the beach in late December is rather nice.

Yes, I have been working out!

Movies: The Darjeeling Limited

Jack: "I wonder if the three of us would've been friends in real life. Not as brothers, but as people."

Brotherhood is the focus of Wes Anderson's beautiful fifth film, The Darjeeling Limited. I'm a gigantic fan of the works of Wes Anderson, and I'm glad I saw this one five days before the end of 2007 so I could confidently declare it one of my favorites of the year. It's the tale of three brothers who come together a year after their father's funeral for a "spiritual quest" led by the quixotic Francis (Owen Wilson) on a train ride in India. Lothario Jack (Jason Schwartzman) and nervous Peter (Adrien Brody) join Francis for a wild ride through their own hopes and fears in India's hinterlands.

The Darjeeling Limited is like Anderson's other movies -- you'll either find it a bit fussy and mannered, or you'll fall for its whimsy whole-heartedly. I think it's up there with his best work (although I pretty much consider all his work near his best, especially the underrated The Life Aquatic). Every one of Anderson's major films -- Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic -- focus on the notion of family and grief being intertwining vines, of the bubbling traumas that link in family interactions. This is an utterly inexhaustible subject, of course, and Anderson has mined it well. But he also adds his kind of precious and finicky storybook sensibility to it all, investing a ton of energy in the environments, stylizing every gesture and moment. Judging from The Royal Tenenbaums DVD, Anderson spends a lot of time thinking about things like the wallpaper on sets. The Darjeeling Limited is his first movie to take place entirely in another country, and visually, it's a colorful dazzle.

First off, you simply have to watch Darjeeling in tandem with the short film Hotel Chevalier, a prologue to the events of the film. (Apparently in the US Darjeeling actually played in theaters without Hotel Chevalier, kind of like lopping off the first 10 minutes of the movie.) Chevalier is a very European, brooding and enigmatic opening act that focuses on Jack Whitman and his estranged girlfriend (a luminous and battered Natalie Portman). It's a brief scene but it kind of sets up the themes of the film – trying to leave the past behind, but trapped in its waves.

Francis: "I want us to become brothers again -- and to become enlightened."

Watching Darjeeling on the big screen, I kept catching the loving details Anderson added to the setting. His movies are about setting as much as they are about character, a meticulousness you don't tend to see often in modern movies. I've never been to India and don't know how much of Darjeeling's kitschy design is merely Anderson's fantasy verison of India, but either way it's a beautiful evocation of a place. The Darjeeling Limited train, with its endless filigrees, religious icons and colorful characters (an angry manager, a sexy stewardess), is one of the great film train settings.

Owen Wilson is an actor who often cruises along amiably playing the same indignant, good-natured clown but Anderson's movies bring out his best instincts. He's great here, a control freak who's impotent, battered in a mysterious accident and covered with bandages for most of the movie (it's a shame the real-life problems in Wilson's life have overshadowed what I'd call one of his best roles). Schwartzman returns to the Anderson fold for the first time since Rushmore with a great turn as Jack, a would-be writer, barefoot and mustached, a ladies' man despite his short, vaguely porn-star appearance. Oscar winner Brody is perhaps the most mysterious of the brothers, Peter, who's run away from fatherhood to India. In cameos you'll find familiar Anderson repertory players like Bill Murray and Angelica Huston, but the three brothers carry most of the movie and their jocular surly bonding propels it. I'd say this is the funniest of Anderson's films despite the undercurrent of tragedy which swims to the fore in the final acts.

There's a warmth to The Darjeeling Limited and its battling brothers that is nearly the equal of The Royal Tenenbaums, and in some ways it feels like Anderson's trying to wrap up his big themes of screwed-up relationships and forgiveness. He's at the point in his career where he could either begin repeating himself with diminishing results or start heading off on new paths. There's a lot of old Anderson in here, but enough hints of a new perspective that I feel like this train ride is a step forward. Either way, I get enough pleasure out of his flicks that I'm along for whatever journey Wes heads out on.

Peter: "I love the way this country smells. I'll never forget it. It's kind of spicy."

Year in Review: My Top 10 CDs of 2007

I know, CDs, how old-fashioned am I? But while I do download music, I can't quite give up the tactile pleasures of owning an actual CD. Auckland's awesome Real Groovy Records is one of my favorite haunts, a place a record-store geek can while away hours digging through the bargain bins. Here's the tunes that perked me up this year nearly gone by:

1. LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver - Irony turns into something a bit deeper in James Murphy's fantastic second album as "dance-punk" act LCD Soundsystem. Catchy electronic beats marry to smooth, dry songwriting. The goofy satire of his earlier work is here with "North American Scum," but an elegant wistful beauty comes to light too with the superb "All My Friends." An aging hipster's lament that it can't all stay the same as it ever was, and the disc from 2007 I played more times this year than any other. (Full review here.)

2. Ryan Adams, Easy Tiger - Ryan Adams is so prolific that it's often hard to appreciate his output, but even his throwaways will stick in your brain. But with "Easy Tiger" he's put out his most polished disc since "Gold." The soulful country troubadour crossed with a burned-out junkie's passion matures into a fine crafter of songs with gentle gems like "Two" and "Goodnight Rose." He's like watching a young Neil Young and marveling at all the songs that might come out in the future.

3. Neil Young, Chrome Dreams II - Speaking of Neil, here's a surprisingly lovely and eclectic set by one of the greats, considering it's a "grab bag" of miscellany including one epic that dates back nearly 20 years, the sprawling 18-minute "Ordinary People," one of the best songs of this or any year. It's packed in with a varied but overall very good set of Neil songs that try out everything from garage-rock to sentimental ballads, like a greatest hits that never was.

4. Of Montreal, Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? - Early Bowie and T Rex in an electronica blender, with a dash of Pavement. A strangely fey and dazzling disco-pop album about the rise and fall of one man's soul, with the smashingly intense, 11-minute long "The Past Is A Grotesque Animal," the beating heart at the middle of it all. Like the sound of a nervous breakdown with a beat you can dance to. (Full review here.)

5. Arcade Fire, Neon Bible - Their 2004 debut "Funeral" got a lot of ink, but this dense and melodramatic follow-up is just as good I think. Few bands can pull off the over-the-top rock 'n' roll savior thing they're going for, but tracks like "Black Mirror" and "No Cars Go" make it happen. A towering noise that casts a glittering spell. I get to see them live next month at Auckland's Big Day Out, can't wait!

6. I'm Not There original soundtrack - Tribute albums never quite work, but somehow, this two-disc ode to Bob Dylan is a marvel, with artists from Cat Power to Wilco to Antony and the Johnsons putting their spin on Dylan's legacy – props to them not going for the obvious songs and pulling some rarities out for a go. More than 30 songs and most of them put a fine spin on Dylan's world. Bonus points for the mesmerizing 1967 Dylan and the Band tune "I'm Not There," finally getting an official release from the Basement Tapes. (Full review here.)

7. White Stripes, Icky Thump - The most consistently eccentric band that sells top 10 albums, and another gem-packed ramble through Jack and Meg's closets. The Mexican wrestling theme "Conquest," the fuzzed-out "Icky Thump," the charming ditty "Rag and Bone" - it's all kinda sloppy and silly, and that's its charm. Keep on doing what you're doing, guys. Maybe less bagpipes less time, though.

8. The National, The Boxer - This one snuck up on me, a dour, moody suite of rock anthems that reveal themselves on repeated listens to be miniature masterpieces of tone and longing. Brooding bartione voice, fantastic drumming and songs that build in power. Perfect for a 3 a.m. post-nightlife chill-out. Or spiral into despair, whatever floats your boat. (Full review here.)

9. The Stooges, The Weirdness - Men in their sixties trying to pretend they're still punk, this comeback should've bombed (and a lot of people did hate it), but heck, I found this pure dumb rock fun at its clearest – music that's disorderly, inelegant and crude, with a slight wink to it. Not The Stooges of 1969, and really, how could it be, but an amusing revival. (Full review here.)

10. Wilco, Sky Blue Sky - A retreat from the dazed psychedelia of their last discs into mellow country pop, it's a "taking stock" album but still a welcome back porch singalong, Jeff Tweedy sounding relaxed and at peace and he can't help but spread that vibe a little bit. Better than I thought on the first few listens.

Honorable mention: The latest by New Pornographers, Björk, Foo Fighters, The Shins, and Iron and Wine are all good stuff.

Best live shows: The New York Dolls were terrific fun and so loud I think they broke my ears, and Bob Dylan was a living legend in fine form, but despite my qualms about the staging, I have to admit my trip to see Ryan Adams in August is the show I remember the best of 2007 – outstanding solos, riveting vocals and a passion that while occasionally misguided (really, couldn't they turn up the lights a bit?), it worked in the end and the songs certainly stuck with me.

Merry Christmas, everyone! Enjoy the holidays!

Oh, my back hurts

...A quick post to verify that we have indeed moved and we are alive. The shortest move we've done in years (across town, as opposed to 6,000 miles, 500 miles and 2,000 miles among moves I've done in the last decade) but still hard work and sweaty. Moving would be so much easier if I was illiterate (less books to move).

And yet here we are in our very own house that we actually really own for the first time ever and it's pretty darn cool. Peter even got to put our (borrowed) Christmas tree up! We still need about a million things from a coffee table to dish soap but it'll come. Our garage stinks of elderly Newfoundland from the last tenants and it's suddenly turned extremely hot as NZ cascades into summer. But we are well.

Thanks kindly for everyone chipping in on the last post to say they like the blogging. I'm looking a bit of a tweak and rethink in the coming weeks to better fit the blog into the "life" so to speak and allow me to post more frequently and with more to say. In any event, thanks for reading and now I have to go hammer something into a wall somewhere.

Is anyone there? Anyone?

...Egad, I know, it's been almost a month. An utterly insane month -- packed with a wonderful, very busy 2 1/2-week visit by my parents, and a lot of stressing about the new house -- which we're moving into this weekend! Ackthpp! We're settling earlier than we thought (at first it looked like early January), and so there's been an orgy of packing, furniture-buying to replace all the stuff we sold in Oregon over a year-and-a-half ago now, and learning about utilities, home repairs, etc. Oh, and working a very busy job.

Anyway. I've been mulling over the future of this here blog a lot too in the past few weeks, trying to decide if I want to continue it in 2008. It's been a tremendous amount of fun for me for nearly four years now, but lately it's felt harder and harder to find the time and inspiration. I've been wavering between "call it a day" and "take a break" and "dive into it with new inspiration". One of my problems is that my posts always turn out longer than I think, so maybe I need to just do shorter, more frequent posts. Or maybe I should step back and concentrate on paying writing efforts in my so-called free time.

I've also kind of become "that guy" who looks a lot at his hit statistics and comments and wonders who he's writing for and so forth, if anyone's reading, etc., which isn't any way to really run a blog if you're just doing it for fun. So perhaps I'll just throw this rambling ramble open to the floor and ask – should I keep the Spatula Forum going in 2008? What say you, humble readers?

...So by the way, we bought a house last week. We've been reluctant to publicize it all too much until everything is settled with the contracts and such ("we almost bought a house"), but now we're 99% set (just waiting for a final lawyer sign-off on a quibble about a few repairs). We are homeowners! Or rather, I should say,

We are homeowners!

Yeah, it all turned out fairly easy in the end – incredibly stressful of course, and spending far more money than I've probably spent the rest of my life put together, but in a month or two we will be the proud residents of our own 3-bedroom home with 2-car garage.

It turned out this was a house we actually looked at in the early days of our real estate hunting, a month or two ago. In the meantime the market in Auckland has continued to stagnate, a bit like the US is right now but not quite as dramatic. We kept it on our list of "maybes" and returned to look at it last week now that we had a better idea of what we wanted. It had even had a nice little price drop in the meantime, and on a second look we really liked it. Fenced yard, quiet neighborhood, a bit of land which is a rarity in Auckland central, and in very nice shape with a good deal of space. And just 3km (a little less than two miles) from where I work!

Once you make a decision – "I want that" – the process suddenly gets mighty fast. We looked at the house Wednesday morning, and by Thursday afternoon the owners had accepted our offer after a bit of batting back and forth. Egad! The last week has been filled with zipping around (mostly by lovely wife) to make the final deals, get the place inspected, et cetera. We should go "unconditional" by Monday and be able to sit back and wait until we move into our own house for the first time since August 2006, and the first place we've owned, well... ever!

Now that we decided to buy a place, we've realized how we basically have no furniture to our names (having sold our Wal-Mart vintage fare in the US before we left). So we get to start shopping so we actually have something to put in our house! After saving a lot of money this past year, it's suddenly going to start going away real soon, ain't it?

Now that I've dropped our big news, I'm going to take a little blog break right now. My parents are visiting from the US for a few weeks so there's much time spent with them, my day job is absolutely full-out crazy busy, and there's much to do before we move into our future home in early January. See you soon!

Birthday greetings from ... Michael Palin!

Well, not really, except that for my birthday outing last night Avril and I did get a chance to go out and enjoy a very fun talk by Michael Palin, my favorite ex-Monty Python and a fantastic documentary travel filmmaker. Palin was out promoting his new BBC series, "New Europe" and spoke over on Auckland's North Shore. We had great seats, just 5 rows from the stage.

Palin has done an excellent job re-imagining himself post-Python and "A Fish Called Wanda" with his travel docs and accompanying books – "Around The World In 80 Days," "Pole To Pole," "Full Circle," "Sahara" and "Himalaya." His latest, "New Europe," takes a spin around the former eastern bloc countries and how they've changed in the past 20 years. Palin gave a great off-the-cuff 45-minute talk about his travels, digressing all over the place from his Python days to visits to the South and North Poles. We heard about nudist Albanian chefs, leeches in Estonia, falling off mountains in Italy, mines in Bosnia and his favorite movie role (the reluctant centurion in "Life Of Brian," curiously enough). As you might expect, it was all pretty hilarious, with Palin doing some excellent impressions of the people he's met in his travels. He also was interviewed and took some audience questions. I can't imagine too many other second acts in public life quite as cool as what Palin's been doing these last 20 years.

Great talk, great fun, and left with a head full of amazing journeys. Missed out on getting Palin to sign a just-purchased paperback of his "Diaries 1969-1979" which I've been wanting to read, as the line was a couple hundred people long, but I've never been huge on signed books anyway. The talk itself was great, and can't wait to see "New Europe" when it starts screening here next month.

Thirty-six

...It's been a really crazy couple of weeks down under (more details on that forthcoming), so when I woke up this morning it took me like an hour to remember I'm another year older today. 36, egad, which has a weirdly lop-sided feel to it, leaning heavily toward 40 and beyond. In my head a good two-thirds of the time I still feel rather like a clueless 18-year-old still trying to figure out the way the world works, the sudden understanding and authority I expected to be here by now not quite in play.

Anyway. 36. An age I actually remember my parents being, which seemed incredibly god-like at that time. And as you can see, in 1973, fashion was at its height. 36. Whoa.

Walking through Winnipeg with the Weakerthans

The winds of Canada blow wild and cold. At least, that's what I hear – I've never been to the depths of Manitoba, but after listening to the last few albums by the Weakerthans, I have a firm sense of place built up in my head. They make me feel like I've been there.

The Winnipeg band was forged in the fire of punk rock, with singer/lyricist John K. Samson coming from the band Propaghandi. He created The Weakerthans after looking for a less rigid form for his intricate songwriting. The Weakerthans combine a kind of country-tinged post-punk with sweeping storytelling that's like hearing a Raymond Carver story set to music.

Their fourth and latest album, Reunion Tour, doesn't break huge ground from their stunning last disc, 2003's Reconstruction Site. Instead it's merely lovely, warm and dense, another gem-filled tour of hooks and wry lyrics and better than 90 percent of the bands out there. It's full of telling details that evoke some of their fellow Winnipeg singer, Neil Young, but it's got a kind of humble awe all its own.

Samson's subject matter reveals his eye for the downtrodden and worn-out folk of life. The power-chord guitar rock of "Tournament of Hearts" is actually about the terminally uncool Canadian sport of curling – as the narrator at a curling match thinks of his lost love: "I slide right through the day, I'm always throwing hack weight." The gorgeous "Civil Twilight" pays ode to a worn-out bus driver lost in his thoughts: "My confusion-cornered commuters are cursing the cold away," goes another note-perfect couplet of lyrics.

The songs skirt the edge of pretentiousness – for instance, one song on both this album and the last are narrated by a cat named Virtute – but the nonchalant air of Samson's voice pulls this off, like a combination of Robyn Hitchcock, Wilco and an Elvis Costello who grew up on the Canadian prairies. Samson's work is intricately married to the Winnipeg surroundings, with local characters and legends all mythologized in his work.

Even that mysterious denizen of the north woods gets his own tune in "Bigfoot!," which features a sasquatch believer holding faith despite the mockery of his small town neighbors:
"I'll go through it all again
watch their doubtful smiles begin
When the visions that I see believe in me."

Perhaps my favorite song on Reunion Tour is the wistful "Sun In An Empty Room," a delicately drawn portrait of leaving a home behind that's inspired by an Edward Hopper painting:
"The black on our fingers smeared the ink on every door pulled shut /
Now that the last month's rent is scheming with the damage deposit."

Samson's lyrics offer rewards on repeated listens – it's worth the somewhat lengthy wait between Weakerthans albums (four discs in a decade; they haven't broken up, so I guess the Reunion Tour title is a bit of an in-joke). The Weakerthans provide surpassingly intelligent, yet hook-filled and accessible rock. They're a Canadian treasure worth searching for.

Big bang boom

...One of the odder New Zealand institutions I've seen is that of Guy Fawkes Day, which, as "V For Vendetta" taught us all, "remember, remember, the fifth of November," commemorates a failed plot by a crazed Catholic activist to blow up the Houses of Parliament and kill the King of England back in 1605. Which somehow turned into a holiday where people blow up lots of fireworks, a kind of British version of July 4. Although considering the origins, it's kind of like having an Osama Bin Laden Day, when you think about it.

Fireworks, you say? Not that different from the ol' US of A's tradition every July 4 and New Year's, eh? Well, not quite. The fireworks they sell here are major caliber, the kind that shoot up in the air 50 feet and explode or make huge thudding booms. They're far larger than any fireworks I've seen for sale to civilians in the US in the several states I've lived in. And they are LOUD, ye god – the prime minister (who lives in our neighbourhood) was quoted as saying it "sounded like Afghanistan" which isn't too far-fetched, minus the bombings and death and what-not. It's all a bit over the top.

Worse still, people seem to hoard their fireworks so you don't just have one or two nights of fireworks, but local Beavis and Butthead-types will regularly blow a few off from now until February.

And of course you get accidents like this one. Or this one.

Yeah, I like the idea of Guy Fawkes, and the sight of all those fireworks from the top of Mt. Eden last year was truly an amazing canvas, but I have to fall on the side of those who say it's a little too extreme a celebration here for its own good. Particularly when you consider we're thousands of miles from Britain and well on the way to being a true republic one day anyway. I'd love to see 'em ban the fireworks sales and just put on a few public spectacular shows.