A few photos I've taken over the last year

MDIA 1020 I Hate This Album Review

I Hate This Album – The Hunter by Mastodon

            Mastodon is easily my favorite progressive metal outfit by far, which is why their most recent release, 2011’s The Hunter, crushes me on a deeply personal level. This is not to say the album is so heavy that it reverberates through my being with resonance and meaning. Instead it does the opposite. While there are a handful of pleasantly heavy, riff-centric tracks–The Hunter, Spectrelight, Stargasm–the album enthusiastically falls flat for the most part. It seems Mastodon has opted for a lighter aesthetic almost, and while I’m hesitant to label this album as commercial or easily consumable (it isn’t), it is, by Mastodon’s standards, significantly less defiant and loud. As a metal fan, that latter descriptor is the essential component for any successful, engaging metal record. The riffs should be bold, crunchy, alarming. The drums should be pounding and resonant, and while I find The Hunter technically up to par, it doesn’t rise above that mark. Though there are a few tracks that truly satiate my appetite for headbanging, they are greatly outnumbered by songs you could encounter getting rotation on your local hard rock radio station. The album’s first single Curl of the Burl exemplifies this better than any other cut off the album. The vocals are wholly clean, and worse yet, they’re silly. The opening line “I killed a man ‘cause he killed my goat” sets the tone for a song that quickly overstays its welcome, as it does nothing to delineate from the verse/chorus/verse/chorus structure Mastodon has generally abstained from in the past. This structure can be found throughout the album on cuts such as Dry Bone Valley, Bedazzled Fingernails and Blasteroid, and it is depressing each time. While there is plenty of riffage, and an ample amount of screaming too, The Hunter is without question Mastodon’s weakest release record to date, both aesthetically and authentically.

MDIA 1020 Rolling Stone Album Review

Rolling Stone Album Review – Blood Mountain by Mastodon

            With Blood Mountain, progressive sludge metal quartet Mastodon has ascended to the highest ranks of heavy while simultaneously bridging the gap between the authentic and the accessible. Usually when someone who approaches music seriously hears the term ‘accessible’ they tend to assume an artist or band has chosen to create within a more commercially accepting format. Never has this assumption been less true than with Blood Mountain, a rich, dizzying, and altogether exhausting record that only grows richer the more it is listened to. Melodies abound and coalesce with some of the most intricate fretwork to date coming from Brent Hinds and Bill Kelliher as drummer Brann Dailor continues to astound with unrelenting percussive bravado.

            It is Dailor who opens the album with a furious introduction on “The Wolf Is Loose” that sets the pace for every sonic component within the album. Brent Hinds and bassist Troy Sanders switch off on singing duties, with Brent handling most of the screaming and Troy doing a good deal of crooning and chorus work with lyrics pertaining to the fantastical, specifically the titular Blood Mountain, on top of which rests the crystal skull, a magical object capable of removing man’s reptilian brain in an effort to achieve the next step in human evolution. Fans of Mastodon shouldn’t be surprised to see this narrative quality on full display with Blood Mountain, given 2004’s Leviathan was essentially a sonic reinterpretation of Herman Melville’s magnum opus Moby Dick (1851), going so far as to name one track “I Am Ahab”.

            This time around, Mastodon uses no source text to create a densely layered epic. More interested with theme instead of folklore, Blood Mountain sounds just as menacing as the creatures it depicts. “Sleeping Giant” takes its time with a bellowing opening riff, soon giving way to more ethereal tones while the album’s math-iest cut “Capillarian Crest” gives the listener literally no time to breathe as Hinds and Kelliher play in sync with each other at dizzying speeds. The album’s only instrumental “Bladecatcher” features even more relentless pick work while cultivating a hallucinogenic aesthetic similar to eating strange berries deep in a tangled forest. “Colony of Birchmen” continues with this hallucinatory motif, starting with its first line, shouted by Hinds: “This forest is growing faster than I can tell.” Queens of The Stone Age singer and guitarist Josh Homme provides backing vocals for the track, lending it even more psychedelic cred.

            The record slightly falters with “Hand of Stone” and that’s only because it can’t match the intricacy present on the rest of the album, offering a heavy but rather standard cut that doesn’t really deviate from a verse/chorus/verse structure. “This Mortal Soil” and “Siberian Divide” (featuring guest vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala, formerly of The Mars Volta) serve as a climactic two-parter detailing our protagonist succumbing to nature, unable to endure any more frostbite or psychedelia. Blood Mountain’s final cut “Pendulous Skin” finds Mastodon at its most soulful and melancholy. The song’s title is yet another reference to the Elephant Man, a staple in Mastodon’s catalogue fans of the band have come to expect. With Blood Mountain, Mastodon has firmly established itself as the rulers of sludge and the trailblazers of modern metal. We should all take note.

Mastodon

Blood Mountain 9/10

Reprise Records, 2006

MDIA 1020 Review Mania

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/user/id/877217939/

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0175880/reviews-1542

http://www.avclub.com/review/punch-drunk-love-12330

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/there-will-be-blood-2008 -- towards the bottom of the comments section

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/14/movies/review-the-master-from-paul-thomas-anderson.html?_r=1&


These are reviews of Paul Thomas Anderson's five most recent films.

My Time To Shine MDIA 1020 Project

For this story, I didn’t really want to tinker with something entirely based in the tangible. I wanted more so to write a story about a moment, and all the things that that moment can contain. So in that sense, I think this story adheres–if not at least resembles–to Aristotle’s Dramatic Theory. The narrator gives us an introduction to an established world, or setting: this character’s bedroom and simultaneously his mind. He’s with a girl. They’re cuddling. Then he remembers something, which is that this relationship will likely end sometime. This is the inciting incident and it gives way to a flurry of thoughts that act as the rising action and the conflict: the narrator considers his past and future and the significance of these things. Therefore, his thoughts become the action of the story. This is the plot. The story reaches its climax when the male character asks the girl where she wants to be in five years. With this, the character brings all the action that’s gone on so far out of the imaginary and into the physical realm, that is to say his thoughts have gone from interior to exterior. I think it’s a dramatic transition. From there, the two talk and the girl ultimately leaves the boy feeling a little better and he’s able to go off to sleep. Falling action and dénouement. I know the story isn’t conventional in terms of plotting, but I think mediums allow all sorts of experimentation, and it’s interesting and fun to identify plot mechanics in a story that may not initially appear to adhere to conventional plotting. Anyway, enjoy.

Jack

Right Now

            He watched shadows move across the ceiling, their trajectories swift and fleeting. They were less than immaterial, existing, to his mind, in absent crevices and pockets where things only were and the ability to distinguish left from right, up from down and good from evil was wholly unnecessary. He didn’t exactly yearn for this state of being, but there was a simplicity to it he found, at times, preferable. Her head rose and fell atop his chest. She breathed through her nose mostly, the sensation of which he found calming, encompassing, almost so much so at times he felt capable of disintegrating. More realistically, he thought he was experiencing sustained happiness, unperturbed contentedness, and the closer he came to that feeling, the harder it was for him to speak. Indelibly, this would conclude. He wouldn’t see her for a day, a week, months. Their connection would be diluted, lessened by the magnitude of life and its endless production of seemingly new stimuli. He wondered if his perspective was the result of an involuntary emotional hypochondriasis, or if he had prematurely discovered the ephemeral essence of mostly all human connection. He prayed for the former.

            “I don’t wanna move,” she whispered. He continued to stare at the ceiling, attempting through sheer force of will to preserve this moment, to excavate it from the linear progression of time and have it, unadulterated, to himself. He wanted the edges pointed and the image sharp, so he could return to right now, retrieve it from his pocket and know that he was happy once, that he would be again. He thought of his mother faltering in front of him, weeping on the staircase, he and his brother both tongue-tied. He remembered his father correcting him, saying the affair had lasted five years, not seven, and that it was what it was. The unwinding of such densely layered emotional quilting astounded him. To see the volatility of the human temperament so exposed, with unmitigated sincerity, sent him receding far beyond forged mental fences, barriers created to neutralize what he was beginning to see as life: a sprawling, disjointed narrative, simultaneously senseless and completely true. A collection of experiences and things, all these fucking things, an agglomeration of happenings and words and people and thoughts and memories and feelings funneled through a lens with no duplicate.

            He remembered jumping from the top of a slide in the park, screaming and running to his mother, red lights disregarded, his favorite T-shirt cut apart by scissors. He remembered his first kiss tasting like blueberry ice cream, and the erection he had to walk with all the way back to the parking lot. He thought of fishing in his backyard, sobbing outside of a Walmart, talking on the phone for hours. He thought of leaving his prom date stranded, he on the highway speeding home, her student ID placed beneath the steak they’d been served for dinner. He wondered if she remembered him leaving her like that, if she’d remember it in a year, in a decade. Ultimately, it wouldn’t matter. The narrative would remain the same either way. The totality of the past renders speculation useless because the story will always conclude in the same manner. He thought of catching grasshoppers in kindergarten.

            “Are you sleeping?” she asked.

            “No.”

            “What are you thinking about?”

            “You, mostly.”

            “What about me?”

            “Everything. I think you’re gorgeous. I don’t want to be anywhere else.”

            She smiled into his shoulder. “I could lie here forever.”

            In an effort to preserve, he tried to accumulate every knowable detail he deemed pertinent. It was a Tuesday night, November 19^th, and the heater wasn’t working. They compensated for this by cradling each other like makeshift jigsaw pieces. The smell of her hair reminded him of morning in spring and he weaved his fingers through it. Light continued to dance and reverberate all over the ceiling as songs by Kurt Vile perforated the space they shared, an ambience akin to meditation washing over them. He wanted to document this mentally, with footnotes and points of reference that would grant him access to further details and shadings. Suddenly, he realized that this too likely didn’t matter. Time corrodes. Forever changes. 

            He saw himself in the future, ten years removed from right now. He pictured his image, the expressions he’d make, his posture, and wondered what would lead him to that, if he was picturing someone in the midst of ascension or someone flooded with despair, indifference, experience. He thought about the children he’d have, or wouldn’t have: his daughter Lisa, sons Thomas and Phil, or maybe a barren wife who painted hands and feet and saw the same eventual, maddening cyclicality he did when she walked through large crowds. He thought of directing actors and members of his crew, speaking to journalists about the execution of his vision, budget constraints and what it was like to work with Natalie Portman and Paul Dano. He thought of holding his father’s hand, tubes protruding from his wrist, saying there was nothing to forgive, that it is what it is. He thought about himself in the driver’s seat, red lights disregarded, his son wailing in agony. He thought about his own death, where he’d be, who he’d be with, what he would have to say. It hurt to know the girl by his side, whose embrace elicited a reverence within him beyond tangible expression, would eventually recede to the outer banks of his memory, likely sooner than he imagined. He thought about his children’s children. They’re already here, he told himself.

            “Where do you want to be in five years?” he asked her. She tilted her head upwards and looked him in the eye. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t want to know.”

            “What do you mean?” he asked.

            She paused for a moment. “I’ll be speaking entirely out of ignorance if I try to place myself within a certain confinement, or image. I can only hope for . . . happiness, excitement . . . meaning. What form those things will take I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I don’t care about five years from now.”

            He turned his gaze back to the ceiling. He could feel his eyes welling up and was thankful the only tear that fell down his face was on the other side of her. He wished he could exist like the moment he occupied did, within a single frame, all questions answered. He felt her exhaling against his chest and watched the ceiling’s definitions blur. I get it, he thought. This is it. The rhythmic consistency of her breathing soothed his racing mind and soon his eyes grew heavy. In his sleep he dreamed of coolers filled with cicadas and ledges just out of reach.

MDIA 1020 Nature by Nature Project

I took this picture a few months ago as I was walking through some woods close to my neighborhood. For some reason I was struck by the hay. This is film photograph, so the color does translate as much as I'd like it to, but the hay was really quite bright in comparison to everything around it. It was just there amongst all this snow and gray and rain. Everything was so quiet. There was definitely a tranquility to the scene. For some reason I was reminded of the flashbacks to Joel's childhood in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That quiet, with only the birds chirping and the hum of cars passing by a little ways away was all I could hear. It was calming. I hope that's what comes across here. I just went out to South Green by the river and recorded some birds chirping. I think it comes across.

Six Second Film Competition MDIA 1020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WpAxMVU2CE&feature=youtu.be