#16 Album of the Decade and #40 Song of the Decade- Death Cab for Cutie

#16 Album of the Decade- Death Cab for Cutie- Transatlanticism
Death Cab for Cutie- "Title and Registration"

#40 Song of the Decade- Death Cab for Cutie- "Transatlanticism"

I work at a Catholic school whose religion department employs several dudes who dropped out of the seminary. Apparently, this is more common than I ever knew. Men devote their lives to modest, poor, celibate lives serving the Lord until they meet a woman who shows them that teaching high school religion is a compromise they can live with. They always word this decision the same way though: "God brought X into my life to show me that He has a different plan for me. I can serve Him just as well by being a good Christian husband and father." It's impossible that their love for a woman could be an obstacle to God's true plan, a temptation and impediment to the goal toward which they're still supposed to be striving. They assume that they're supposed to give into it. It's God's new will.

Love and Christianity actually have a lot in common. You know those crackpots on Facebook who list their religion as "love"? They believe that the world would be a better place if everyone loved everyone else, just as Christians sometimes believe that the world would be a better place if everyone else were Christian. Love makes everything possible. Everyone would be better off with a little TLC. But honestly, TLC can't change the world; TLC doesn't even advocate the chasing of waterfalls.

Look, I'm not making fun of either of these groups. It's human nature to believe that love is a freeing blessing instead of an obstacle. But sometimes it is. We've all known people who have made terrible decisions and ruined their lives for love, who have ignored time, distance, and good-old-fashioned reasoning for a fleeting, pie-eyed ideal of amore. Looking at love as an irresistibly destructive force isn't natural. But Death Cab for Cutie's Transatlanticism is about this exact notion, and that's what makes it so unique.

Of course, I realize there are parts of the record that are mawkish--"emo" for those who write love as their religion on Facebook. When Ben Gibbard's songwriting isn't being melodramatic, it's being too-clever-for-its-own-good. Sometimes, however, a work of art comes along poised for maximum personal impact, and Transatlanticism arrived at just the right time for me to consume it. I screamed along with this album headed east on a road no one ever heads east on, one time when love became too destructive in my own hands. I would give you more details, but I don't want this to become that type of blog.

Death Cab for Cutie has confessional lyrics like, "I should have given you a reason to stay...this is fact not fiction/For the first time in years." Luckily, they don't care that they're that type of band. In fact, this album, obsessed over love that was and could have been, made them a pretty girly band. Usually, that designation is handed to bands that are cloying and cute. This album is something else entirely.


I never said they were immune to photographic cliches.

Sydney Pollack once said that filmmakers "can show people falling in love for an hour or can show people breaking up for an hour, but you can only show people in love for ten minutes." That's exactly what Gibbard's lyrics do: chronicle the spaces bookending love. They suggest love as a fulfilling salvation, but it's always "a love that could have been if I'd only thought of something charming to say." There are details that make it seem real, ("With every Thursday I'd brave those mountain passes/And you'd skip your early classes/And we'd learn how our bodies worked") but they're always in the past tense. The lyrics and the sometimes martial, assiduous rhythm section lend an elusive quality to the album that is always present, no matter what tempo the band is working in.

Across the album, there's a motif of tangible distance representing the emotional distance of lost love. The opener, backed by chords as major and windmilled as Chris Walla's lead guitar gets, laments: "I wish the world was flat like the old days/Then I could travel just by folding a map/No more airplanes or speed trains or freeways/There'd be no distance that could hold us back." But the nearly eight-minute centerpiece of the album, the title track, takes that wish fulfillment one step further.

Structured around searching piano chords, "Transatlanticism" begins as a pity party for that well-worn distance territory. It continues with slides and more resolved guitar, as if taking tentative steps, and it builds with resolve until the understated refrain of "I need you so much closer" takes the song into a trot. By the halfway point, the song has transitioned into a gallop, and by the time the rest of the band joins in with a harmonic "so come on," the distance does indeed "feel quite temporary."

The usually astute Stephen Thomas Erlweine once called this marathon "long for length's sake," and he was more correct than he realized. Often used as the closer to live shows, the song is as much of a solution as Gibbard can find to the problem of an uneasy memory of love. The distance is the song itself, and listening and understanding is its bridge. Like the seminary dropouts, we have to accept a new path for ourselves, and "Transatlanticism" is Gibbard's way of assessing that.

Two albums removed from Transatlanticism, Death Cab for Cutie has become something like the new R.E.M.: stalwart, literate, rainy day adult contempo for all the thirtysomethings who let people assume they're twentysomethings. They can open for Springsteen and get referenced on teen soap operas. "I Will Follow You into the Dark" off Plans is practically a standard by now. It would seem as if they're conquering the world as we speak.

Recently, however, news came out that Gibbard has become engaged to resident manic pixie dream girl Zooey Deschanel. (Apparently, my hair needs to be set further on the Gram Parsons side of the dial for her to take notice.) For a guy who used to capitalize on the futility of a divergent love, this might be a challenge. Instead of singing, "It seems by the time that I have figured what it's worth/The squeaking of our skin against the steel has gotten worse," he might have to switch to, "My girl has great skin and a naturally colorful complexion/She also has a really cute laugh." She might be the death of one of our great songwriters.

But what can I say? Love can be destructive.

#26 Song of the Decade- "Soul Survivor"

#26 Song of the Decade- Young Jeezy feat. Akon- "Soul Survivor"

In any metal retrospective you'll ever see, each interviewed party rhapsodizes over Black Sabbath. You'll have to wait an entire commercial break before any other musician is mentioned, and there's never enough hyperbole to go around. "It was like I had never heard music before blah blah blah," some bald guy with creative facial hair gushes. There were a lot of hard rock bands who seemed dark but were really mama's boys, but Black Sabbath was clearly something different from the rest of the dirge-like English rockers in the way they fully embodied their own witchy mystique. They were a lone dissenting voice with a sound more discordant and uncompromising than anyone else. We could be talking the same way about Young Jeezy's verisimilitude, if only he stood out as much. He's just as much of a master of reality, but that reality is so unrelentingly dark that he's become the mainstream. His Machiavellian solipsism is not a shock to the system, it's representative of it. Black Sabbath changed the world; the world changed Young Jeezy.

If he and Akon hooked up on a song today, it would be an event; but in 2005, neither was particularly well-known. The unique tone of Akon's tongue-depressant warble is what first got the song on the radio, but it will be remembered as our entree into the hopeless outlook of Jeezy. Rarely has a rapper condensed his entire ethos into one verse the way the man born Jay Jenkins does here, particularly in one couplet:

"A hundred grand on my wrist, yeah life sucks
Fuck the club, dog, I'd rather count a million bucks"

At the time, musicians were first feeling the squeeze of the record industry's collapse and doing whatever they could to branch out and become more palatable to the mainstream, whether that was starring in Budweiser commericals or making entire albums for the ladies. Here, Jeezy at once glorifies the hustle and casts it as meaningless. He's not interested in anything else like, you know, socializing with people in public, but his only pastime of money chasing is just as hollow, just as much of a reminder that life sucks. In his debut single, Young Jeezy seems to be saying that even ambition itself is hopeless. And the really disturbing thing? In one of his patented ad-libs, he even laughs at the notion.

That's the black cherry on top of the rest of Jeezy's performance, in which he prays against/for his own inequity, conflates dreams with nightmares, and threatens an anonymous spoken-to with clenched teeth. Akon's weary spritualizing and foreboding beat, matching claustrophobic string stabs with wandering twinkles, do their best to match Jeezy's hoarse futility, and in neither the music nor the lyrics is there any celebration to rival the dread and paranoia.

Here's the real significance of the song though: it sounds as if I'm exaggerating. Rather than reading those lyrics for their inhumane cynicism, the majority of critics heard this track and found it not irredeemable, but rather typical. We are immune to the landscape Jeezy's describing and the persona he's reporting from. As far as hip-hop gloom goes, he's not the minority. He became a star, and the song became an anthem for the faceless grind because we live in a society that he blends into when he isn't holding a mirror. He's bellowing that "we're livin' in hell," and we "just keep on movin' now."

20 Best Movie Trailers of the Decade

The criteria for these decisions is hazy in my own mind, but it usually just comes down to how much the trailer made me want to see the movie it was promoting. I had different reasons for choosing each of these previews, and the videos vary in quality and are so wide in some cases that they mess up the rest of this page. I did my best. Also, this ranking has nothing to do with the quality of the final film: I'm only judging the trailers. Allow me to explain each:

20. Finding Forrester

Throughout high school, my friends and I went to the same movie theater every Friday. For about six months, the trailers before every screening were the Pearl Harbor teaser (a great trailer in its own right) and Finding Forrester. This is a pretty standard trailer, but it is responsible for the Sean Connery lines "Punch the keys," "Bolt the door...if you're coming in," and "You're the man now, dog." I have ruined friendships by over-quoting those lines. Hell, they inspired an entire website. Which is just silly. Who names a website after an innocuous line from the trailer of a forgettable mainstream movie?

19. Kill Bill, Vol. 1

With the Kill Bill diptych, Quentin Tarantino sought to prove that he could direct action, and the trailer for the first installment promises nothing but that. In fact, there's barely any dialogue, which was a pretty daring way to promote a Tarantino film. You can't beat that song either.

18. (500) Days of Summer

Bouncy music, quirky narration, cool clothes, pretty people. Teasing of some artsy, innovative visuals. Works for me.

17. 300

I didn't like the final product, but the powerful, atmospheric, otherworldly visuals of this trailer definitely made it a hit.

16. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (teaser)

Hauntingly spare and quiet, this trailer nails down the premise of the film without giving too much away. Fincher's trailers are always top-notch, and this one is no exception.

15. The Dark Knight

I watched this so many times that I was able to time it so that I clapped my hands at the same time the Joker does. It's hard for an ad to hint at the complex themes of a movie without ruining the plot, but this one does that while also showing off some great visuals. Furthermore, it's rare that a score is completed in time to match with the trailer, but this trailer gets a lot of extra mileage from the main theme of the movie. Extra points for the "Jokerized" version of the trailer that was only sent out to a handful of theaters.

14. Marie Antoinette (teaser)

Honestly, you could put "Age of Consent" over anything, and it would get me excited. This trailer presents a daring, sumptuous final product that was never really delivered to us.

13. The Hangover

This is another case of a movie's success being inextricably tied to the strength of its promotional materials. Not since There's Something about Mary had I been able to sit with an audience and guarantee from their reactions that a movie would be a hit in four or five months.

12. Little Children

As a promotional tool for the film, this trailer is kind of unsuccessful. As an art object unto itself, it's pretty beautiful. Seeking to capture the tone of the film rather than summarize any of its content, this is one of a kind.

11. Femme Fatale

Speaking of one of a kind, this Brian De Palma vehicle shows us the entire movie in super fast forward, stopping it to give us the sexier parts out-of-context. Then it kind of dares us to see it in the end. The entire movie is not as good as this trailer.

10. Red Eye

This ended up being a pretty solid movie, and what's remarkable about the trailer is how long they wait to tell us what it's actually about. This is a classic rope-a-dope. I'm sure there are a lot of first drafts of trailers like this that get focus-grouped to death. This one actually follows through.

9. The Man Who Wasn't There

The smoky, contrast-heavy cinematography of this movie is its greatest strength, so it's the focus of an elegant, assured trailer that takes advantage of heady dialogue and smooth editing.

8. Cast Away (teaser)

The full-length version of this trailer would be on my worst trailers of the decade list for giving everything away. (No really. Everything. The last shot of the trailer is the last shot of the movie.) But this one is a perfect setup, giving us everything we need to know and then leaving us at the exact spot when things get intriguing.

7. Borat (full-length)

Probably the funniest trailer I've ever seen. Again, where would this movie be without this preview?

6. Watchmen (trailer 1)

This is another one I watched over and over again. With a portentous Smashing Pumpkins song, it delivered exactly what anyone wanted from the film. It's expository enough for newcomers, but it also teases all of the things fans were wondering about. It builds and builds until it can't anymore. This is a splashy, mature trailer for a film that wasn't nearly as successful.

5. Comedian

It features absolutely no footage from the film, but this sardonic, inventive trailer still manages to get us excited about it. I wish I could go back and see an audience's reaction to this.

4. Cloverfield (teaser)

Talk about mysterious. While we're on the subject of how much or little is revealed in a trailer, this one doesn't even give you the title. Beat that. It does, however, establish the look that guides the entire film, and it ends with as provocative an image as possible. I've never been as intrigued by a trailer as I have been by this masterpiece.

3. Jarhead

Great trailers can promise a subtext and thoughtfulness and thematic heaviness that the actual film does not necessarily have, and that's the case with Jarhead. By featuring the unimpeachable stars, revealing dreamy, ironic shot selection, and using a contemporary song for once, this trailer stresses that this is not your father's war film. It gathers a whole lot of momentum in just over two minutes.

2. Garden State

There's no dialogue or explanation of a plot here. Everything about the tone is communicated through ironic, eye-popping visuals and the hipper-than-thou Frou Frou song. Unlike something like Jarhead though, this trailer actually does approximate the viewing of the film. Sometimes it's too clever for its own good, but you enjoy spending time with it and sharing in its exuberance.

1. Where the Wild Things Are (teaser)

Considering that writing online about your reaction to this trailer is now seen as a cliche, I'd say this is a pretty powerful piece of work. Spike Jonze and the Arcade Fire can make you cry in...two minutes. The word "melancholgia" was invented for this.

Let me know what I forgot in the comments.

#14 Album of the Decade and #31 Song of the Decade- Ben Kweller

#14- Album of the Decade- Ben Kweller- Sha Sha
Ben Kweller- "Commerce, TX"

#31 Song of the Decade- Ben Kweller- "Wasted & Ready"

John Seabrook's smug 2001 book of culture criticism, Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture, devotes an entire chapter to the precocity of a then-unknown Ben Kweller. Seabrook follows a teenaged Kweller and his band Radish as he's courted by major labels. At one point Kweller's at Jimmy Iovine's house freestyling with Tom Petty, and there are about ten times when an expert calls him "the next Kurt Cobain." Kweller was a songwriting prodigy mining Cobain's quiet-loud dynamics, and he could play almost any instrument you gave him. Seabrook spells out the seeming randomness of the buzz surrounding this kid from Greenville, Texas, and Seabrook captures the herd mentality of record executives flying out there without knowing anything about him. By the time the chapter ends, a lot of money and attention has been invested in Kweller, and he seems oblivious to how much is actually riding on his nascent career. Seabrook has asked "why him?" and we don't have much of an answer.

We still don't. Nine years after the events of the book, Kweller's career has stalled. He's trying to cross over to a country audience. He's known primarily as a girly type of act because of earlier bills he shared with Guster and Evan Dando. He's trapped on Dave Matthews' label, which is doing nothing to promote his talent. Worst of all, he has neutered his songwriting's more unique flourishes to fit into some idea he has of what a traveling bluesy roots-rock working man's hero should be. What made him great the only time he actually had to prove all of his promise, his debut Sha Sha, was that he was so oblivious to all of these outside factors. Perhaps a voice like his was never meant to hit it big. After all, Cobain probably wasn't supposed to either.

Sha Sha is an album a great songwriter makes when he's twenty, before he gets political, before he gets stream-of-consciousness, before he's trying to be Dylan, before he knows that what he's doing is called approximate rhyme. The lyrics here are rough around the edges. They reach for connections that aren't always there, like calling butterflies "passive-aggressive." They leave blanks for us to fill in with non sequiturs like, "Sex reminds her of eating spaghetti." "Maxed out like a credit card" isn't exactly Rimbaud, but it's better than what I was writing at twenty.

Sha Sha is a perfect storm of these eccentricities. Most rappers' first album is their best because it's their entire autobiography and manifesto delivered in one fell swoop. They say everything that has been building up inside of them for their entire lives and capitalize on the now-or-never urgency of a debut. They are able to channel their message and worldview into one album, and they aren't jaded enough to compromise that point of view. Ben Kweller, a guy who used to cover Vanilla Ice live, presents the same naive but breathless weltershaung as someone like The Game. It's all-or-nothing, and he delivers summery, indelible power-pop with an equal facility for fist-pumpers and honest, heartfelt ballads. Yes, it's a little girly, but other than maybe Is This It?, it's hard to find a record this decade that is as top-to-bottom fun to listen to. Kweller finds a way to overcome a limited, straining voice with his gift for melody, and nowhere is his exuberance and dusted-off brilliance more evident than on "Wasted & Ready."

With its wandering slides leading up to deafening power chords, "Wasted & Ready" sounds like something Alex Chilton would have written if he had been raised eating barbecue and watching Cowboys games. When I saw Kweller live in Philadelphia two years ago, it seemed as if everyone was waiting for him to wrap up the love songs and hit them with what was buried deep in their collective drunk playlists. It's a playing-dumb classic, a hit that never became a hit. Kweller's guitar playing has never sounded more muscular, and his reedy intonation has a way of making platitudes sound immediate and cathartic. Especially when he multi-tracks his own voice on the song's last fourth, we're reminded of just how far a little obliviousness can go. Kurt Cobain would be proud.

LSU-Florida: Diary of a Letdown

Lately I've been feeling as if I'm a sixty-year-old man living in a twenty-five-year-old man's body. Even though I'm back in my home state among friends in Tiger football, I've been content to grouse around my apartment complaining about LSU via supercilious tweets. But when my brother-in-law came through with a ticket to #4 LSU against #1 Florida, and P.T. flew in for the game from Massachusetts, I knew I had to play the young man's game with an all-day tailgate. I took these terrible pictures.


To give you an idea of how crowded Baton Rouge gets on a gameday, this is about two miles away from the stadium on Highland, where I parked. Six hours before kickoff.


I made sure to wear my walking shoes. Speaking of being sixty years old, I have designated walking shoes.


Considering that I've never lived in Baton Rouge, I have a lot of memories of the city. During the post-Katrina semester when many of my friends were making do at disparate Louisiana campuses, PT and I visited our friend Karl in the 225. I snuck a fifth of Jack Daniel's into this diner under my jacket, and it slipped out, smashing into a million pieces. The funny part of the story, however, is when we walked to Karl's temporary apartment to crash. We got home before him or his roommates, whom we had never met. Figuring that these roommates wouldn't react too well to weird, unindentified drunk dudes sleeping on their floor, we wrote "Karl's Friends" in Sharpie on sheets of looseleaf and taped the signs to our chests before we passed out. College.


If you ask the proprietor of this restaurant, Roul, how juicy his burgers are, he'll say, "Juicy like a pussy." It's charming.


Beware that none of these pictures are composed. I don't even bother to get a shot of anyone's face. Anyway, P.T.'s buddy hooked us up with this tailgate party, sponsored by an organization called S.H.A.R.T., which stands for something stupid. If you want to know the difference between SEC football tailgating and any other inferior gathering that calls itself tailgating, all you have to know is that this party had satellite TV, thirteen kegs, all manners of roasted pork, and its own monogrammed coozies.


And this punch, which was gone before we got there, much like any hint of LSU offense.


What has a longer corny t-shirt shelf-life: the Got Blah-Blah-Blah? construction or the Price of Blah-Blah-Blah? Priceless... arrangement? Both of them have been going ten years easily.


This was delicious until it gave me food poisoning.


About two hours before game time, the LSU players march down Stadium Drive with the Golden Band from Tigerland. I'm waiting for them and looking for my brother-in-law, who is one of these 90,000 people. Miraculously, I found him and my ticket.


Les Miles and his poo-eating grin are somewhere down there.


About forty-five minutes before kickoff. This was the last time I would see LSU in the end zone that night.


I don't think I've heard more virulent language than the cursing directed at Tebow on Saturday. Between that and the dude who punched a Gator fan in the face for no reason, I reminded myself to wait a while to bring any kid to a game. This photo was taken on Florida's touchdown drive, the only lapse in what was a pretty tight defensive game from the Tigers. I would have taken some pictures of JoJeff airing it out or Russell Shepard being used in creative packages or Charles Scott stretching the defense with plays other than off-tackle dives. Unfortunately, none of those things happened.


By the fourth quarter, when it was clear that LSU just could not measure up to the #1 team in the nation, my entertainment came from the old boozer sitting next to me, reaching down for his flask in this picture. He was the type of drunk who just says the same two things over and over. If it wasn't "that facemask penalty really hurt us," it was the more emphatic: "How do they all know to look over at the sideline at the same time like that? I'll be goddamned! How do they do that? You figure that out you call me. I'mma give you my card." Most people, my brother-in-law included, would ignore the dude, but I just goaded him. "You know how they all look at the same time? The coach probably grabs their facemasks and pulls them over during practice." I was sobering up by this point, but I should've asked him for some of whatever was helping him cope with this game.

Congratulations to the Florida Gators, who took advantage of the tentative nature of our offense and controlled the clock with their own conservative offensive attack. Their touchdown should have been called back, and the center kept turning his head before the snap, only to get called for a false start once. But good game nonetheless. LSU is ranked #10 in both polls after the loss, which, honestly, is probably where we belong right now.

I love attending conference games in the heart of the season, but I'm 0-2 at Florida contests and might have to return to my couch for the team's own good. I'll do my fair share of grousing from there against Auburn. LSU football is shaving so many years off my life that I just might be sixty by now.

Film of the Decade #46- 28 Days Later and Album of the Decade #17- Lift Your Fists...

#46- 28 Days Later- Danny Boyle (2001) [watch the whole movie here]


#17- Godspeed You Black Emperor!- Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven (2000) [all songs too long to link to]

The best films of this past decade usually took long-accepted tropes or themes and synthesized them in new ways that spoke to the concerns and fears of our age. There is probably no more appropriate genre to do that in than horror, which is what makes 28 Days Later the best horror film of the decade. (Though pardon me if I haven't seen Saws II-V. I might be wrong, you know?)

Anyone would agree that 28 Days Later is a visceral horror entry, but calling it a zombie movie is both factual and insulting. It is true that the plot begins with animal rights activists releasing chimps who are part of a scientific experiment. It is true that those chimps attack their liberators with a contagious disease and escape, spreading this disease among the entire population of England and turning them into rage-fueled zombies. But calling it a zombie movie is denying how antithetical Danny Boyle's genre exercise is to what we acknowledge about such films. It's not that Boyle and his screenwriter Alex Garland use "the rage" as a symbol--that would actually make it sort of retro. No, this stands out because it takes someone turning into a monster, one of the more inviting and guilty pleasures of such films, and makes that prospect the most terrifying and present danger imaginable.

From Invasion of the Body Snatchers on, zombies have been used as filmic symbols for what we are denying of our human nature. In the first crack at that property, those who famously "go to sleep" are the ones who give up questioning the world around them. The sheep who blindly obey 1950s authority become metaphorical and literal zombies relegated to feeding on the flesh of those still kicking and screaming. George Romero expanded similar ideas from his Night of the Living Dead to address consumerism in Dawn of the Dead and class in Land of the Dead. They Live is also expressly political. These stories remind us of our own independence, the agency that makes us human, and they presuppose that we should avoid anything that would turn us into zombies. 28 Days Later has no such context. Whereas those other films obsessively delineate living, breathing humans from The Other, in 28 Days Later the zombie is our friends and family. And we still have to kill it.

Instead of denying human nature, Garland's characters are faced with the question of what humanity is in the first place. The ubiquitous threat of a person no longer being a person is what makes watching the film such a draining, harrowing experience. Other horror films have set-ups that build excitement and then end, giving us a breather to prepare for the next one. Up until its admittedly crappy ending, 28 Days Later is non-stop running from a continuous endangerment and insecurity.


Brains.

Those thematic concerns would not matter much if we didn't connect to any of it though. Thankfully, we do. For instance, Garland and Boyle balance those questions of humanity with something that marks us as humans: the mundane. If the apocalypse happened, what would you eat? How would you get water to shave? Where would you get gasoline? The characters have to figure this out, and they almost feel guilty for needing these things, no matter how much they are reminded of their necessity. That imperfection is helped by Boyle's decision to shoot the film on HD video, which was still a daring choice in 2001. The medium's imperfections underscore the spontaneity and immediacy of what is happening on screen.

No discussion of the film would be complete without mention of the Piccadilly Square centerpiece, in which our protagonist Jim wanders around a completely deserted version of the most populous, touristy spots of London without any idea of why the locations are so empty. It's one of the most eerie scenes I've ever watched, and it's impossible not to marvel at the scale of it all. It establishes an unrivaled sense of foreboding and loneliness. It just so happens to be scored by a Godspeed You Black Emperor! song that establishes an unrivaled sense of foreboding and loneliness.

GYBE! were Canadian eight-piece progenitors of post-rock, a nineties subgenre characterized by interminable, hypnotic instrumentals that built through several movements and usually ended with a thrilling crescendo. Sometimes accompanied by multi-media presentations, post-rock sought to re-examine the structure of what rock music typically was and present a more cerebral, experimental version of it.

GYBE! took the mantle of early post-rock bands like Mogwai, Spiderland, or Sterolab and created something more textured and haunting and timeless. When the four suites of Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven take off, they push the music past weird time signatures to something heavier and more substantial. Although they're considered experimental, they're actually presenting a piece striking in its unified sense of purpose, that purpose being one of absorbing, centered dread for something lost or hopeless. They took the sound of a type of music criticized as clinical and infused it with genuine, earned emotion. While that sounds kind of navel-gazing, as post-rock usually is, there is a selfless quality to the music that keeps its eye on the prize. (This is definitely part of their m.o. They only conducted interviews through one member of the group and never had the band name or track titles on the album packaging.) By splicing in clips of French children singing or an old man yammering about Coney Island, there are even times when an instrumental band's music does not take center stage, as if to say that the world around us continues even as we're creating a soundtrack for it. That aspect of the album makes it undeniably present and cathartic, a memorial for something still dying.

In that way, I would agree with Danny Boyle that it's perfect music for a sort of hopeful apocalypse. You get the sense that album closer "Antennas to Heaven" isn't the real end, and someone will still be twitching long after the droning aftermath of its strings and guitars.

Sometimes a Funny Team Name Is Just a Funny Team Name

Fantasy football is a waste of time and money. Fantasy football is inconsequential and kind of sad. Fantasy football is a game for middle class White guys who don't have real problems. Your fantasy football team, to anyone else, is uninteresting. It's like describing your dreams. And worst of all, it doesn't even have an accurate name. If this were really a fantasy, I think Mila Kunis would be involved, not a Robert Meachem spot-start.

But tell that to my brain. I actually didn't give work my full attention yesterday because I was too conflicted about a possible Slaton-Palmer-Benson for Turner-Sproles-Carlson-Washington trade. For something that is, in the long run, pretty negligible, the game within a game occupies a lot of this particular man's time and consideration. So fantasy football is a function of culture, sure, but I didn't realize until recently how much it taps into the male psyche, how it converges with and fulfills our brute instincts.


First page of search results. Gorgeous.

Because I'm ahead of the curve when it comes to time-wasting, I've been playing since high school, but the fantasy football tipping point was about five years ago for culture at-large, coincidentally about the same time the early-aughts poker explosion was leveling off. Not coincidentally, the games have similar clientele. Poker became popular because men in their twenties--a generation raised with over-protective parents and participation trophies--realized that the professional world they had just entered wasn't going to hand them anything. Rather than, you know, working hard to achieve things, they found an outlet that would reward them for the decision-making, judgment, and balls so often ignored by their bosses. Finally, they could take these skills and get what they really deserved with very little effort. They could experience tangible rewards for something as patently intangible as intellect.

Fantasy football, which doubles these goals while also being an excuse to watch more sports, requires the same mixture of skill and chance. Whereas the most important parts of poker are solitary though, fantasy football thrives on group interaction while still glorifying the self.

Since fantasy football is a game of prediction and conjecture, no one, including ESPN's Matthew Berry, is an expert. He's just a guy who has more time and spreadsheets to study this stuff, and even then, he's rarely right about it. Or at least that's what we tell ourselves. The reason why he can keep his job is two-fold. If we acknowledge that even an expert is throwing darts, it makes the amount of time we spend on this seem pointless, and the whole enterprise seems more silly, which we don't want. So we allow that his help is useless but seek it out anyway. Also, and here's the part that ties into being a man, it makes us feel smarter if the expert is this fallible. It taps into the "I could do that" arrogance surrounding every man ever. We hate Matthew Berry not because he doesn't do his job well, but because we believe we could do it better.


Would you trust this man with anything other than fantasy sports?

We don't worry too much about this because fantasy football has refreshingly low stakes. Instead of agony, it forces us to deal with the discomfort of defeat. Traditionally, because you only have one opponent per week in fantasy, you always have tantalizing odds of winning and feel as if you've come very close even when you lose. It's like heads-up poker, except you don't need a pokerface.

Finally, what is brilliance if we aren't recognized for it? And what is brilliance if we are secure in that brilliance? We have to second-guess ourselves with systems or matchups, with sleepers and clever replacements for injured stars. We have now upped the ante for what separates those in the know from those in Yahoo public leagues, and that standard isn't even winning. For example, every fantasy player has said something like this in conversation: "I'm in third place right now. The dude in first has Adrian Peterson so..." Of course he's in first; he has the best player. Is that not enough? A female mind would just take the best player and be done with it. A male mind almost has to apologize for not being counter-intuitive. Another example of this nay-saying is the fact that every league has had an argument about its scoring, ignoring the fact that those values are as arbitrary as anything else in the game. As long as everyone is playing by the same rules, even if those rules are "one hundred and eleven point bonus for any first down play," your league is fair.

When I started playing in high school, the more research you did before your draft, the better your team was. Now that almost hurts you because you key into players and second-guess the obvious value picks. In one of my leagues the guys in the number one and number two spots on the leaderboard used auto-draft. Like everything else with guys and fantasy football, I don't think that's a coincidence.

At once, fantasy football presents man at his best and his worst. Always striving, never achieving. Always independent, never alone. Always strong but crippled by self-doubt. And even though the NFL is experiencing a golden age, something tells me this isn't the last of the games we'll play to express ourselves.