Revenge of the Thirty-Day Song Challenge - Day 3

Day 3 – A Song from a Favorite Album

Though less than I have been earlier in life, I am an Album Person when it comes to music. I love the way a good album comes together, how all of the tracks complement each other and work in tandem to create a complete sonic package. Heck, I even construct mix CDs like I would an album; things like sequencing and pacing make a difference, doggonnit! I haven’t had the opportunity to dive into new album discovery since I was a sophomore in college, but I still enjoy listening to a CD for the whole experience, especially when on the road.

The Roots – “Web 20/20”

The Roots are my absolute favorite hip hop group, bar none. It’s been a long journey (it was a good six months before I “got” my first album by them, The Tipping Point), but I love their blend of live instrumentation, thoughtful lyrics, and often non-traditional song structure. There’s a very good chance you won’t ever hear them in The Club, but their albums are so good when taken as a whole, I really don’t mind at all.

“Web 20/20” is a track from The Root’s newest disc, How I Got Over, which is probably my second-favorite Roots album after Things Fall Apart. How I Got Over is sonically similar to Things Fall Apart, with an emphasis on jazz-influenced hip hop (more so than any other album they’ve released in ten years) and a vibe that is much more chilled out than either of their past two discs. How I Got Over stands unique in my mind, though, as the only album I can think of with an emotional arc. How I Got Over starts in the doldrums, sounding downtrodden and world-weary (“I Walk Alone,” “Dear God 2.0”) before leveling out and becoming determined (“Radio Daze,” “Now or Never”), and finally rising up, stronger and more optimistic than ever (“Doin’ It Again,” “The Fire”). The whole album progresses from depressed to triumphant, and listening to the whole package is rather rewarding.

After the exultant tones of “The Fire” come the last two songs of the disc, which have absolutely nothing to do with the previous paragraph. The first of these, “Web 20/20” is a callback to The Root’s rhyme-a-thon tracks from several of their previous albums, where emcee Black Thought starts freestyling and doesn’t stop for like three or so minutes. After a rewarding but exhausting trip through emotional uplifting, I rather enjoy the tension-relieving nature that comes from “Web 20/20;” it’s playful, fun, and has an exceptional beat along with Black Thought’s razor-sharp technique. It’s the perfect closer to an already great album.

Revenge of the Thirty-Day Song Challenge - Day 2

Day 2 – A Song from a Favorite Artist

During the initial Thirty-Day Challenge, I was asked to name off my favorite track by my favorite artist. This post is on a similar train of thought, but with much less pressure—do you have a favorite artist? Do you have a song you like from them? Bada bing. I didn’t get to talk about these guys last time, either, so here’s a good chance to bring up another one of my absolute favorite artists.

Goodnight Sunrise – “Sideshow Entertainment”

NOTE: This is seriously the only video I could find of this song. I'm half-considering uploading a video of it myself, when I have time.

Friends of mine know that I’m all up in these guys’ business. Strangers are about to find out.

Goodnight Sunrise is a power-pop band from the Helena area (several members graduated high school with my friend Meg), for whom my fandom is appalling. I first caught them at a literal basement show back in 2006, during my first visit home from college, and I’ve been crushing on them since basically the second song into their set. They’ve since moved to Los Angeles, but I still carry high the torch for my favorite Boulder-based pop-rockers whenever I can.

Today’s entry is a track from Close and Counting, the first EP released under their new name; for the first four years of the band’s existence, they went by the moniker Driven Under, and had a much heavier sound. With Close and Counting, Goodnight Sunrise shows a slicker, more accessible sound that nevertheless still boasts an infectious level of energy. The five tracks (and a remix) that make up this EP basically made me a fan for life; they could seriously never release a single lick of new material again, and I would be more than happy to count them among the ranks of my top-tier favorite groups.

“Sideshow Entertainment” is probably my favorite song from Close and Counting—it’s not necessarily the catchiest, but it simply makes me the happiest. The track plays more like a quality album-cut or a b-side, rather than a lead single, and its easy, unforced melody is enjoyable to simple let wash over me. I generally prefer lyrics in my emo songs to err on the side of opacity over beat-you-over-the-head-obviousness that lots of bands practice, and “Sideshow Entertainment” falls comfortably into the former camp; I’m not sure if I can tell you exactly what this particular track about, but I feel like the themes are well-enough represented that I can take the song in broad strokes.

Aside from any given number of sonic reasons, I think a good chunk of this song’s appeal is simply where I was in relation to it. Close and Counting came out during the summer of 2007, which was an especially manic and enjoyable time for one Andrew Testerman. “Sideshow Entertainment” was also featured prominently in a local Helena-based show on Carroll College athletics, where it was the theme song for the program, and damn me if I’m not nostalgic for either of those years. Lastly, I had the honor of attending the show where they retired this and several other songs from Close and Counting in favor of their new material, making it something of a sentimental favorite.

Bottom line: Andrew likes local music, especially local good music, and he urges you to hop on iTunes and purchase Close and Counting, along with the rest of their discography if you’re feeling generous.

Revenge of the Thirty-Day Song Challenge - Day 1

And we're back! Coming off of thirty days of film-related love, Diversion 2.0 is kicking it with another challenge. This time, it's a sequel to a challenge spurred on by Popped Density (and subsequently copied by me) over two months ago, the Thirty-Day Song Challenge. What new content will be brought to the table? What sort of interplay, or at least, inside jokes, will crop up over the course of the challenge? For criminy's sake, will I ever sit down and finally watch Tangled for Our Feature Presentation?! Only time will tell, so sit back and strap yourselves in--the Thirty-Day Song Challenge is back, and it's out for revenge.



Day 1 — A Song You Like Right Now

Golden Earring - "Radar Love"



Boy, I sure do like classic rock, amiright?

That seems to be the moral of this post, and damn-near half of the entries on Diversion 2.0 that are music-related. Suits me fine, though; as long as the lost classics keep coming, I have no shame that I get a good chunk of my "new" music from our local classic rock station. "Radar Love" is yet another instance of "Welcome, Andrew, to 197X."

I discovered "Radar Love" after a particularly harrowing night at work, and the song's driving bass line, appealing minor key, and quasi-hilarious call-and-response between the vocals and guitar soothed me into a better mood. The song puts me into a sort of hypnosis, where the rhythms and melodies propel me forward, no matter what; perfect for when I'm feeling fed-up and generally worn-down, and need to zone out something fierce.

Imagine my general delight when I found out that it was already a part of Rock Band.

It's been about a months since my first experience with this thing that's called radar love (by the way, this song doesn't do anything for me lyrically, but it's me, so that hardly matters at all), but I still fiend after it every once in a while, especially when I need a good track for driving around (which, thematically, is about the most appropriate thing that I could possibly do).



*On a side-note, thank you, dear followers, whomever you are, for your patience. I've worked an incredible amount lately, and haven't had a whole lot of time to write, outside of my lunch break. Fortunately, I should be regulating my schedule a bit better, and the OFPs should be coming more frequently than once a month. Thanks again for your support!

Diversion 2.0 Thirty Day Movie Challenge -- Day 30

Day 30 – Another Favorite that’s not your Favorite Movie

It’s been a long time coming (about a week longer than it should have, by my count), but we’ve finally arrived at the end of the Diversion 2.0 Thirty-Day Movie Challenge. We’ve covered great films, and we’ve covered crap films, and today we’re leaving off with another one of the goodies. Stay tuned, though, for I have a feeling we just might have another series in the works (foreshadowing!). In the meantime, enjoy the final entry in the Diversion 2.0 Thirty-Day Movie Challenge.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is my favorite of the Potter movies, which makes sense, because it’s based on my favorite of the Potter books. It’s also (for my money) the best per-capita adaptation of any of the books; the most essentials moments of the book have been transferred over (with extra, redundant moments cut for running time), and the movie (get this) actually works well as a film and not just as an adaptation of a quadrillion-selling book series.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is the sixth installment of the popular book/film franchise, and tells of Harry’s sixth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Harry (Daniel Radcliff) starts to learn more about his mortal enemy, Voldermort (Ralph Fiennes), under the tutelage of headmaster Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon). In addition, Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) has been sneaking about the castle in a more unpleasant and suspicious way than usual. Harry must discover all he can about Lord Voldermort, and find out about Malfoy’s plan before it’s too late.

Unlike the previous film, Half-Blood Prince retains several of the book's more light-hearted moments.

Half-Blood Prince continues what worked well for the previous five Potter films: coherent, beautiful art direction and production design, imaginative and, at times, wow-bagging special effects, and excellent casting from a stable of triple-A British talent (Maggie Smith, Alan Rickman, Robbie Coltraine, Jim Broadbent, Warwick Davis, and on, and on, and on…). Radcliff, Grint, Watson, and Felton have grown into their roles splendidly, and the film gives them all ample opportunities to stretch out and explore their characters. The Potter films really started to visually take off around the third movie, Prisoner of Azkaban, and Half-Blood Prince retains its lovely aesthetic, while adding a heaping helping of colors whenever the mood is appropriate.

What Half-Blood Prince adds, especially in comparison to Order of the Phoenix, is a coherent script. A script that not only shuttles the movie from set-piece to set-piece with minimal effort, but is alarmingly funny; characters share more banter moments, quotable lines, and buggering words in this movie than perhaps the previous three put together. The result is that Half-Blood Prince feels more like a regular movie than almost any other in the franchise, which, to me, felt like a series of connected images and moments than anything coherent; they seemed pretty bloody difficult for me to follow, at least.

Exciting, funny, and incredibly imaginative, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is what all special effects-driven tentpoles should aspire to be, and one of my absolute favorite movies.

Diversion 2.0 Thirty Day Movie Challenge -- Day 29

Day 29 – The Last Movie You Watched

We’ve covered a good deal of movies over the last twenty-eight days, with numerous genres and associated memories. Those entries were selective, but this one is not: what was the most recent movie that you (read “I”) watched, no faking allowed? The last movie I saw in theaters was Captain America: The First Avenger, but I’ve watched a few Blu-rays since then, so I’ll opt for one of those instead.

Inception (2010)

Like many nerdy folk last year, I was interested in checking out the hype surrounding Christopher Nolan’s post-Dark Knight Big Deal Project. Inception was supposed to turn the world upside-down, and tweak your brain from hell to breakfast with its deep treatise on dream philosophy and oodles of mind-bending visual effects. What we got instead was a really damn good caper movie, akin to Ocean’s Eleven, but with The Mirage swapped out for The Animus. It wasn’t, contrary to what was promised on teh interwebz, cinema’s second-coming of Christ, but that didn’t bug me too much, because I first saw it on Blu-ray, at a comfortable distance from all of the promises and expectations surrounding it. I love heist movies, and Inception is one hell of a heist movie.

The plot is surprisingly straight-forward: in order to get home to his estranged family, Dominic Cobb (Leonardo DeCaprio) must pull One Last Job for businessman Mr. Saito (Ken Watanabe). Cobb wastes no time in assembling a team for the job, including pointman and researcher Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), grifter Eames (Tom Hardy), driver Yusef (Dileep Rao), and audience-proxy Ariadne (Ellen Paige).

Or, at least, these would be their roles in a traditional caper picture. Cobb specializes in a very unique sort of breaking and entering: he enters peoples’ dreams while they sleep and steal their corporate secrets. Mr. Saito’s job is for Cobb to break into the thoughts of one of his business rivals and plant a thought, rather than filch one. Desperately tricky, but not impossible, and the rest of the film is spent planning the job and then pulling it off.

For all out its touted mind-screwery, Inception is a straight, if well-executed, heist pic.

Most of what I love about Inception comes from what I love about heist pictures in general. First, we are introduced to whatever it is we’re supposed to rob, which is invariably a behemoth of impenetrable security. Then, we’re introduced to the players, one at a time, so as to show off their individual prowess at whatever they’re skilled with. Last, we’re given the job itself, where our team of misfits work together in concert to pull off the caper. Inception takes this structure and sets it against a richly-imagined sci-fi backdrop, but most of the classic heist elements are here, and I’m ever-so-grateful for them.

Where Inception gets its own unique flavor is in its imagination of how dreams work. Nolan does a great job of introducing rules, explaining them, and then altering them in short succession, and it’s fun to hear about the fiction and watch it being bent before our eyes. It’s not as philosophical or deep as the hype may have lead on, but it is well-realized, and I appreciate how Nolan pushes the boundaries of his own concepts.

But, yeah, definitely still some mind-screwery going on here.

A few more things. Nolan has been criticized in some circles for his scripts’ ham-handed usage of irony and foreshadowing, but perhaps he doesn’t do it as smugly as he could, because I like the pulpy, “obvious call-back” nature that some of the lines possess (“You’re waiting for a train…”; “An old man, filled with bitterness and regret;” or, my most recent favorite from The Dark Knight: “You’ve known Rachael her whole life?” “Oh, not yet, sir.” GUESS WHAT YOU BLOODY WILL HAVE BY THE END OF ACT II!!!). Also, I’ve gone quite a ways without discussing Cobb’s struggle with his personal demons, which is a major plot point and affects the film in no small way. The simple truth is that I don’t really care that much for it, or at least as much as I like watching him and his team execute their plan as a well-oiled machine. Lastly, I do enjoy Hans Zimmer’s Oscar-nominated score, even if it does largely consist of BRRAAAAHHHHHMMMM. BRRAAAAHHHHHMMMM, or variations of that motif.

My favorite part about Inception? I got it for a steal! The Blu-ray was like $14 on Amazon a couple months ago, and I plundered the s@$# out of it, along with a copy of Top Gun that I bought with it, as an excuse to use Super Saver Shipping. Inception is a fine, imaginative heist movie, and its solid performances, robust imagination, and stellar execution make it one of my favorite films of last year.

Diversion 2.0 Thirty Day Movie Challenge -- Day 28

Day 28 – A Movie With a Celebrity Crush

Until recently, I didn’t play the Celebrity Crush game. In middle and high school, my dude friends had many-a poster of Carmen Electra or Demi Moore on their walls, while my chick friends adorned their lockers with pictures of Josh Hartnett and Justin Timberlake; in both cases, I substituted for fold-out posters I received in issues of Nintendo Power. Now, I’ve decided to indulge myself a little, and pay slightly more attention to projects from certain actresses. Today’s entry is one such film.

Juno (2007)

During Day 15, I went into a mini-rant about the modern Indie Film, and how I don’t care for the cleverer-than-thou, pretentious tones hanging in so many of them. So why the hell did I see Juno?! This film is exactly what I’m talking about when I point at what twerks me off about the whole genre: “different” (but not that different) story structure; sensitive, shy guy acting performances; “hip” and “clever” dialogue vernacular; SHIT soundtrack made up entirely of Neko Case-soundalikes. Yet I went and saw it anyway, and went to a good deal of trouble, too; my dad and I timed it so that we could theater-hop into National Treasure: Book of Dreams to see the Goofy short in front of that movie, then make our way to see Juno immediately after. Why, oh why, did I make such an effort to see a movie that, conceptually, should cause me to hurl myself off of the balcony, if only to end the smugness?

The first reason was Roger Ebert. The second was Ellen Paige.

Juno is the story of our eponymous character, a sixteen-year-old with a hamburger phone and a penchant for Sunny D. Juno wants to try sex, because, well, why not, and ends up getting pregnant in the process. She considers going to an abortion clinic, but decides against it, and makes plans with her parents (Allison Janney and J.K. Simmons) and her baby-daddy (Michael Cera) to keep it. The plot takes her to Mark and Vanessa Loring (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner), a married couple looking to adopt, and the movie is a character study about how they all interact together.

Contrary to my diatribe-filled first paragraph, I actually didn’t mind Juno so much. Granted, the soundtrack had me casting around to see what sort of theater-floor refuse I could jam into my ears, and I did eventually tire of Juno’s notoriously clever-for-clever’s-sake quips, but the acting was solid across the board (Garner and Simmons in particular), and I thought the story was sweet and likeable. But if Roger Ebert’s four-star review didn’t carry me through the movie, Paige certainly did.

Though very, very "indie," I liked Juno, at least enough to be disappointed when it lost to No Country For Old Men in the 2007 Oscars.

Paige’s Juno is the Kind Of Girl that Boys Like Me tend to gravitate towards: independent, strong women who probably don’t ultimately need male companionship, but like it all-the-same. Paige herself has a kind of offbeat cool about her, and she seems like someone I would want to chill out and listen to music with (but not Neko Case!). Rather than a pie-in-the-sky hottie like Megan Fox or Jessica Alba, Ellen Paige is a down-to-earth, regular girl, and I find that rather attractive.

There are other starlets who are more physically attractive, but Ellen Paige has the most appealing personality out of my celebrity crushes, an attraction point that runs much deeper for me. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to comb my bangs into my eyes and play some Fall Out Boy on Rock Band.