Grantland is catching up to Cracked in terms of quality coverage of The Giant beat.
it's like watching a classics professor try to pick up a chicken
None of the senses of the phrase "pick up" manage to make this analogy sound accurate to me.
Greatest drinker in the history of time, friend of Samuel Beckett from childhood, effortlessly the strongest man wherever he was, multi-lingual, internationally famous yet humble, tragic death -- there should be a monument to Andre the Giant in every city in the world, and no the "has a posse" stickers don't suffice.
there should be a monument to Andre the Giant in every city in the world
Who else goes on the list of "should be a monument in every city"? Is it just Andre The Giant?
I did enjoy the Andre The Giant article (and the picture that the article describes of Wilt Chamberlain, Arnold, and Andre the Giant is fabulous).
Brian Phillips wrote a really nice,thoughtful, article about ANdre the Giant, with well-done links. I thoroughly enjoyed the video of the fight with the boxer which I would never have seen otherwise.
AT the risk of threadjacking: The posted link made me look up other stuff he has written. I also really liked his crtique of Franzen. Nuanced, not driven by objection to JF's public bloviation, but addresses both the strengths and the weaknesses of JF's books.
Jonathan Franzen has an astonishing gift for depicting situations. But his natural instincts run strongly counter to strangeness. Given a strange situation, his impulse is to begin explaining it, organizing it, shepherding it into an idea.
That is to say, thanks for sharing, HG, I liked this a lot and wouldn't have found it on my own.
Furthermore, to add a pro-wrestling comment, the Mountain Goats' thematically unified successful newest album is pro-wrestling oriented. Check it out-- grab all the songs and listen to them together as much as you can manage to in your atomizzed and distracted lives, the songs work together well, are weakened IMO if just shuffled with other stuff. The other unified album I liked recently-ish (OK, within the last dacade, thios is what happens as people age), is PJ Harvey's Let England Shake.
Do others know of thematically unified records like either of these that have been recently released? Hard to pull off, but it's something I really enjoy when it works.
Just wait, Flip is going to show up to dump on Brian Phillips.
The Mountain Goats have been getting better and better at doing that with "their"* albums. I mean, almost every one of their albums has a unified theme, but with a lot of them it just means that the songs are all related to each other in some thematic way. I think the last two are weakened even if you just listen to the albums shuffled - even without anything mixed in.
Also Beat the Champ really is a great album, and it turns out one of Darnielle's favorite wrestling stories is actually about Andre the Giant - so it's relevant!
*Though I suppose at this point Wurster and Hughes are on every song they record and clearly influencing the music so maybe that's more accurate than it used to be.
Do others know of thematically unified records like either of these that have been recently released?
Alec Redfearn's The Blind Spot.
16. Thanks, interesting. I liked Slo-mo off of the earlier album also.
Do others know of thematically unified records like either of these that have been recently released?
There's this project which looks promising.
Re:13
The last two P.J. Harvey albums disappointed me. I get that they are a success conceptually and that she has pulled off what she wanted to do, but it seems a waste. She has such a great voice, and is a great guitar player, who rocks harder than almost anyone, so the slightly strangled 'treble' voice and style is a willful triumph of concept but not one I really enjoy listening to.
9 is of course true. A genius above his more lauded peers. Sabbath over the Stones, Zeppelin and all the rest, any day.
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In Andre Techine's >i>Les Temoins 2007, it feels a little crude to notice that the five major characters do in fact and occupation/avocation represent Literature, Law, Music, Science and in the center, to the extent there is a center, the young gay aids afflicted cruiser, Beauty/Cooking/Lust/Body. With minor characters an International Traveler and a Baby. And in fact, Law & Literature, or Science and Lust, do interact in allegorical ways. If we say Techine has nothing to teach us about the ways Science and Music interact, why should we say he has something to show us about how people interact?
With such a schematic, are we supposed to ponder history and fiction?
In any case, not necessary to enjoy the human movie.
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Commenter, published writer, last night at reddit complained that a new anime series didn't work because the writer had not made/let his characters express, just a little, opinions. It was all visual, action, movement, surface. Give them depth, show them enunciating, pull them into language and the Symbolic. ...make them human. Even though they don't have noses.
When we lost realism with the abandonment of the Cartesian cogito, everything became allegory. Animation/anime has you accept that as the start, and you don't get as confused about Law interacting with Music just because the media is images of human bodies.
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