In the Clearing

It seems like it's a given—at least in music reviewer circles—that a band doing the same thing over and over is bad. I guess I can agree. Hearing a band do the same thing all of the time can be frustrating, and hearing an artist try something new is (at least for me) one of the reasons I love listening to music. (And yes, there are plenty of people who want their favorite bands to essentially release the same album over and over.) 

But sometimes....sometimes...I'm that guy. There are a few bands who are doing something that I love and keep doing that. More importantly, this seems to be something the artists love too. Power pop often gets dismissed by critics because of its samey-ness, but most power pop bands seem to thrive when they're — at most — taking micro steps toward evolution. I'm totally OK with this. 

Another example: Mojave 3. The band was formed when British shoegaze act Slowdive — probably the purest example of a band who radically evolved in a short period of time — split. The core members teamed up to form a wispy, dream-like country-folk-rock act. All of their songs sound the same and I don't care because they're all exactly what I want. 

The AV Club ran this nice article on the dreaded word "pretentious," and how it relates (or doesn't relate) to music. 

Surprise. 

On Westerns in general and John Ford’s in particular, the non-malleable nature of the past, and why Quentin Tarantino shouldn’t teach film history

Kickstarter has become a pretty popular way to fund creative projects. As a gaming nerd, I've watched with fascination as the crowd-funding service has become the go-to place to get tabletop games made. (I wrote an article about this in The Curator last year.) As I said last year, a lot of people were curious to see what happens when the honeymoon is over.

I wonder if we're seeing reality sinking in. The hit-to-miss ratio was so in favor of the hits (like this - look at that total!) that people — including some publishers — began treating Kickstarter like, well, an elaborate pre-order system. And that really skewed expectations; the misses that people forgot about or ignored are now becoming more frequent or just high-profile to tune out. And the patrons — because isn't that what pledgers are — are getting mad.