Entries tagged with “Music” from World Wide Wang

Dear Ben Gibbard,

I, like many of the late comers to the indie music scene all treat Death Cab for Cutie as some sort of gateway drug into the world of not-so pop music. Your band was pretty much the quintessential Indie Pop of the aughts. Then u dropped us with the wonderment of Postal Service; sucking me into another genre of music where i normally dont tread. I'm must confess my jealousy of u working with indie greats like Jenny Lewis and Feist. And was rather a fan boy of the Postal Service gems like "Such Great Heights" and "This Place is a Prison".

But after years of silence on the Postal Service front and the fading quality on the Death Cab front, Now u decided to take steal the girl of dreams?

I say to u sir, "It is on, like Donkey Kong." I will end u.

Sincerely, ur luving fan,
The Wang

P.S. U should get off ur fraking ass and release another Postal Service Album before i find u.

So this past weekend was the end of the big GDC event which blurred right into WonderCon, the tiny sister of ComicCon. The Wang wasn't really involved with the GDC, cept by proxy of a visiting WoW friend. But the WonderCon did lure the Wang with some panels, that were minorly related to the Wang's work. Which turned out to be completely unrelated. But the whole potential lead the Wang to learn about professional free pass for WonderCon. So free cons = good cons.

We're not really going into a WonderCon review, but the Wang will note that he sat in a J. Michael Straczynski panel. JMS is most well known for Babylon 5, which is a legendary TV show. It had some of the best television seasonal arcs. But unfortunately due to crappy art design and dated special effects, it might be really hard for anyone to pick up the DVD sets and start watching it these days. JMS now is doing a lot of comic work and might be involved with a lot of future movie scripts. Specially with all the new comic to movies that are coming out, all these famous comic/TV writers are getting great exposures.

Now back to the main topic of today's post, the Oscars. Yes, here at WWW we're looking at the Oscars. Normally we flee from this type of direct media coverage reserved for The Daily 10, Defamer, or any of Perez Hilton's blogs. But this last year was actually a pretty good year for film. So in old school style, we jump right in to the paw listings.


Mahalo Daily's Monday post: Oscar in 60 sec. A great list but they miss a few important gems, one of which is the win by Glen Hansard & Markéta Irglová's for their great song "Falling Slowly". Here is their Oscar live performance, which the Wang thinks that Glen toned down his usual vein popping performance during the high climax of the song. This of course lead to the best moment in Oscar history where John Stewart brought back Markéta Irglová to let her finish her cut-off-ed speech. She proceed to give one of the evening's most memorable speech about how hope unites us all. Here are the texts to the full speech for both Glen and Markéta, from Firstshowing. And if all this coolness isn't enough to convince you to go see this gem of a indie film then you are dead to me and might as well take you RSS feed for this blog off you readers. So go watch Once, or prepare for the burning wrath of the Wang.

Here's the FirstShowing, Full List.


I hate transformers, but really Visual Award? At least thanks to the Onion, Michael Bay gets his Oscar @ the cost of a $120m digital production. He did make that "AWESOME!" commercial. how the frak did Golden Compass win this? Really? I mean the Wang digged the airships, but it was clearly no match for the 10,000 pieces of moving metal fighting another 10,000 pieces of moving metal that is Transformers. And Bourne ran off with 3 technical awards. Great movie, but it felt like they gave it to Bourne for the trilogy, not Ultimatum.


I was rooting for Ellen Page for Juno. But since every prediction and their mother's prediction was for Julie Christie and the fact that the movie, Away From Her, was directed by Sarah Polley, The Wang was swayed... But I guess it is good that Tilda Swinton got it in the end, which shocked everyone. And ended the Wang's internal struggles. Because there's enough Wang for both Ellen Page and Sarah Polley. Email me. (makes phone gesture.)


Sure I like Johnny Depp in his myriad of characters, but really? How did that Sweeney Todd clip even fit with the others?!


Great Speech Quotes: Joel Coens: "...letting us continue to play in our corner of the sandbox"


Plus who knew, Clooney was the man. He predicated most of the acting nods. He's truly as they say, "old Hollywood". He's got it all, class, style and devilish smile. The Wang aint gay, but if George showed up an bought us diner, hey u never know... I'm just saying, not gay.


Ebb and Flow of Movies:
 

NYT gives us this wave-like visualization of movie grosses in the last few years.


On Monday night, the weekend ended in a really fun concert with Missy Higgins @ The Independent. She was rather funny with a few Aussie/American jokes, some humor about how her Target bought Bra kept falling of her shoulders (ZING!!), how she finally got her song into Grey's Anatomy and the overall comments on the American accent, which she demo-ed for the audience. Fun times were had and the Wang probably had the fun-est time at a "Pop" concert. There was something about the happy upbeat energy that Missy Higgins was going off on.


And in the end all this seemed make a really fun music weekend for the Wang. And in the recent artistic posting line, we end the day on a grammy winning music short dedicated to Johnny Cash:



THANKYOUs:
My Extra Life, Firstshowing.net, Vulture

So the Wang usually does drop album reviews. Specially since the Wang enter the music scene rather late in life and is still sending half of his time catching up on the old rock legends and classics. So seeing stuff about the upcoming movie about Bob Dylan, "I'm Not There", the Wang was naturally happy to see the story of another musical icon via some indie film introduction. Since the late arrival on the English music scene, the Wang had to had most of his musical experiences with the icons like the Beatles via movies like Across the Universe and with Walk the Line for Johnny Cash. And for a new generation, the Wang included, these things may be an insult to some of the older hardcores, but there r a great way to get the new folks a slice of these icon's greatness. Covers songs re surge a interest about the original singers. Though the Wang have this weird theory that the first version of a song u listen to, tends to be the one u like more. But that's just personal opinion. Since "I'm Not There" isn't released in the US till Nov. 21, the Wang has very little to say about it except links to the Wikipedia entry and a Youtube trailer. The movie does have some strong actors/actress portraying Bob Dylan at different personalities. Amongst those are Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, and Heath Ledger.

So the topic of this post is mainly about the Original Soundtrack of the said movie. Never having much encounter with bob's music cept maybe the closest would be The Wang has heard some Wallflower songs... (yes, I said Wallflowers) Which of course is no where close to Bob Dylan's music, cept being from the same gene pool. So there Wang was, a collector of sound tracks and random music. The "I'm Not There" soundtrack pops out with names like Karen O, Sufjan Stevens, Iron & Wine, Jeff Tweedy, Yo La Tango and even the duo from the Swell season, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova. Amongst many more. U might as well just check out the Wikipedia entry for the full list. Not to mention the super guitar group called the The Million Dollar bashers, which includes the guitarist from Sonic youth and Wilco. Some of the guitar in the songs smack of old school rock classics and brings a modern twang to some of these songs. Not the Wang has much to compare to with the old, original Dylan stuff. But he's definitely going to be on the lookout for some old tracks just to get a mix and feel for things. If one thing he's learned in his old age is that, any experiences is perceived differently, at different ages. So a song u heard when u were 12 probably means something completely different to u at age 30. So the Wang recommend all u old Dylan purist to give the album a try also. Why not, some of it can be good. I mean Karen O, Iron and wine really brings their own flavor to some of these really good songs. Even Mark Lanegan of Queens of the Stone Age brings a Johnney Cash esque cover of The Man in the Long Black Coat.

There r just too many good tracks, so the Wang will post the first one that came up in the random shuffle which caught the Wang's attention:

Sufjan Stevens Covering Ring of Bells (MP3)


P.S. Rabbit! Rabbit!