You think you know, but you have no idea

By Tom Zimpleman / June 5, 2003

When I was editing Voices, I had to present the section at the first newspaper meeting of the year. A large group of students showed up-most of them wanting to write for Viewpoints-but a few people made their way over to my part of the room, where I stood backed up against the water cooler....

On a stiff Texas breeze, art rock fragility rolls into hard rock rage on Metro stage

By Tom Zimpleman / May 1, 2003

“Shit, man, I feel like Cat Power.” –Conrad Keely, April 24, 2003 While that epigram made me laugh, heartily and loudly, as Conrad Keely struggled to bring his guitar out of an obscure tuning in order to play their set’s first song, “It Was There That I Saw You,” I could not help but wonder...

Scottish blokes expand musical horizons, have a beer

By Tom Zimpleman / April 28, 2003

The news: a band from Glasgow has released an album with a dozen similar songs mostly of the same high quality. The assumptions: either Belle & Sebastian have re-released The Boy with the Arab Strap, or Mogwai have finally gotten their formula down (and I am inflating the number of tracks on the album). Both...

New twist on familiar sounds makes for a great album

By Tom Zimpleman / April 24, 2003

I believe it was William James who said “the line between what is me and mine is very hard to draw.” I presume that this holds true for the things we inherit just as it does for the things that we voluntarily acquire. If such is the case, then Holopaw are as much a part...

Pop signed, sealed, delivered by The Postal Service

By Tom Zimpleman / April 21, 2003

I’ve always been a big fan of pop music in general,” Benjamin Gibbard told me in the middle of our interview. The singer-songwriter, whose main gig is with Death Cab for Cutie, probably the most prominent contemporary indie-pop band, was responding to a specific question about musical influences on the Postal Service—his collaboration with Jimmy...

Buzzcocks fall in love with someone they shouldn’t have

By Tom Zimpleman / March 11, 2003

Are we all angrier when we’re younger? I think that we probably are, and I’ve reached this conclusion from historical precedents. British playwrights in the early 1960s created an entire genre of Angry Young Man plays that consisted of two-hour rants about the economic collapse of the Midlands. Elvis Costello was once given the epithetical...

It’s coming together in relative ways

By Tom Zimpleman / March 7, 2003

Things are finally starting to fall together in the University’s intramural league, although they’re not falling together as anyone might have expected. The last week saw its fair share of major upsets–particularly in the men’s undergraduate independent league and in the graduate league. This, of course, is because in a league with a five- or...

In Russian Ark, technical wonders outshine plot blunders

By Tom Zimpleman / March 4, 2003

Short takes and quick cuts are a film school trick, useful for fledgling directors and recently promoted music video hacks who want to underline their ability to visualize a scene from every conceivable angle in their mind’s eye. (Plus, they think that audiences get bored if they go too long without seeing an edit.) Long...

IM Insider

By Tom Zimpleman / February 28, 2003

This article goes to press at an odd time; by the time it’s published on Friday morning, the first round of playoffs in the men’s undergraduate residence league will be finished. Presumably many exciting things will have happened, but, due to a series of common ontological and epistemological commitments that I do not feel the...

IM Playoff dreams ripen

By Tom Zimpleman / February 21, 2003

It’s playoff season, and it’s time for everyone to elevate his or her game. This means, in some cases, establishing games in the first place. It’s no secret that some teams, in genuine Orlando Magic style, will sleepwalk through the regular season and then be surprised to find themselves on the outside looking in. Or...

Aberdeen’s California sun

By Tom Zimpleman / February 18, 2003

Tom Zimpleman Voices Representing Iowa Aberdeen really likes the Jesus & Mary Chain. I know this because the promotional material mentions that the band’s founding couple, John and Beth (no last names provided), moved to Los Angeles in the hopes of someday seeing the band in concert. I also know this because I’ve heard the...

New Loose Fur lacks luster

By Tom Zimpleman / February 7, 2003

In a cavern somewhere near the center of the Earth, the barons of the Chicago music scene congregated to record an album. Jeff Tweedy and Jim O’Rourke played guitar and bass, and sang, Glenn Kotche played the drums, and, word has it, Jesus Christ himself showed up to sit in on keyboards for a few...

IM Insider

By Tom Zimpleman / February 7, 2003

Early February is the worst time of the year for basketball. College teams are in the middle of their conference schedules, meaning that fans are condemned to wonder whether their favorite team has in fact been playing the same team for three weeks in a row. The NBA nears its All-Star Game, which I defy...

Shortcuts

By Tom Zimpleman / January 24, 2003

Matt Pond PA The Nature of Maps Polyvinyl Records Genres are a constant problem for those who write about music. The problem isn’t necessarily with those bands that try to straddle several different genres–“we’re a little alt-country, a little no-wave, and with a dub reggae-influenced rhythm section”–so much as it’s a problem for those bands...

“You think it’s easy, but you’re wrong…”

By Tom Zimpleman / January 24, 2003

Ah, winter quarter at the old U of C–the quarter that they warn you about. If my predecessor Mike Czaplicki was indeed correct to name fall the season of whining, winter can only be the season of melodrama. Hundreds of first-years, recent émigrés from warmer and more fashionable climates, walk around as though the occurrence...

Morvern Callar: Taciturn actress continues silent streak

By Tom Zimpleman / January 14, 2003

The title character of Morvern Callar (yes, that’s her name) wakes up on Christmas day to find that her writer boyfriend has killed himself. An apparently unmotivated suicide, he leaves behind only a brief note explaining that “it seemed like the right thing to do.” His girlfriend doesn’t reveal the suicide; she goes to a...

Solaris returns, Hollywood suits rework the metaphysics

By Tom Zimpleman / December 3, 2002

Solaris Directed by Steven Soderbergh 20th Century Fox, 99 minutes Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris raises metaphysical problems that may not, on reflection, actually be problems. To be sure, there are instances of consciousness and existence that fall outside our traditional conceptions, but whether a reader of the book-or a viewer of one of the two movie...

Mission of Burma: The benefits of rocking over time

By Tom Zimpleman / November 26, 2002

In one of his introductions to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee described the book as a work of fury, not a work of art. Art, in fact, was a mark of acceptance – a sign that a work had been drained of its ability to excite and disrupt its audience; he hoped...

This place will eat you up

By Tom Zimpleman / November 26, 2002

By Tom Zimpleman Maroon Viewpoints Staff I would like to extend a cautious word of congratulations to the members of the Class of 2006: thus far you have not fallen prey to the temptation that has bedeviled so many of your fellow students. I am speaking, of course, of the temptation to complain about the...

The Dismemberment Plan has that indefinable quality

By Tom Zimpleman / November 19, 2002

Traditional descriptions fail a lot of bands, but they are especially faulty in regard to Washington D.C.’s Dismemberment Plan. I’ve seen them described as emo, as latter-day torch-bearers for the early- and mid-’90s D.C. punk scene, as a frat-rock jam band, and as a jazz outfit. It doesn’t take an indie rock aficionado to realize...

Tully: The past rears its ugly head, once more, in Nebraska

By Tom Zimpleman / November 19, 2002

Tully Directed by Hilary Birmingham Tell Tale Films, 102 Minutes A great part of the appeal of Tully – a film set on a family farm in Nebraska – is that it documents a dying way of life. While attention to the problems of rural America has largely dissipated since the end of the farm...

What’s the Matter with Arts and Entertainment?

By Tom Zimpleman / November 8, 2002

Snobbery, like bacteria, is found everywhere.” That’s a sweeping judgment, to be sure, but one that’s entirely defensible. Gather more than three people in the room, get them started talking about anything, and almost assuredly, one person will be a snob. I’m a snob, and you’re a snob too, and the author of the sentence...

The Man From Elysian Fields: Oh, if I were intelligent

By Tom Zimpleman / November 5, 2002

While I fear I’m just grasping at something specious, I think it’s worth making a distinction between work that’s profound and work that’s intelligent. A work of profundity is ultimately a work about ideas, and those ideas are themselves particularly original and insightful. A work of intelligence is more difficult to define. A label like...

I hate Oklahoma’s Mike Stoops

By Tom Zimpleman / November 5, 2002

I hate Oklahoma defensive coordinator Mike Stoops for being good at his job and thus ruining the Big 12 conference championship hopes of Iowa State and the Heisman campaign of its quarterback, Seneca Wallace. You will of course be wondering why I give a damn about a college football game involving two schools that I...

Abbey Pub hosts Destroyer

By Tom Zimpleman / November 5, 2002

Occasionally, performances don’t go as well as they could and no one really seems to be at fault. Such performances are usually known as “the opening act.” Granted, some opening acts are just terrible—up-and-coming bands from the same hometown as the headlining act are the paradigm case of awful opening bands—and have only themselves to...

Adam Sisman on Boswell, success, and the next book

By Tom Zimpleman / October 29, 2002

Although “writers on writing” is a popular theme for articles, lectures, and conferences, the writers in question are nearly always talking about themselves or the topic of writing in great abstraction. While interesting, such discussions tend to be carefully guarded and, more often than not, unavailing. What’s more, the interpretation of literature seems to place...

What’s The Matter With Arts And Entertainment?

By Tom Zimpleman / October 24, 2002

Trendspotters would do well to note that some of the best rock music released in America today comes from artists who may not call themselves rock musicians. There’s currently something of a renaissance in pop music. My use of “pop” in the context of this erstwhile renaissance doesn’t include the Avril Lavignes and Vanessa Carltons...

A meaningless movement, and a movie script ending

By Tom Zimpleman / October 21, 2002

Heaven Directed by Tom Tykwer Miramax Films, 96 minutes Turin is famous for being the site of Nietzsche’s nervous breakdown. It was in the central piazza of that part of Italy that the philosopher threw himself on a horse being viciously beaten by its owner, pleading for mercy on behalf of the animal. The irony...

Musician goes to Europe…

By Tom Zimpleman / October 14, 2002

I’ll wager that more than a few Squirrel Bait cultists walked through this hallowed institution during the 90s without realizing that a member of that band was laboring as a graduate student in the English department. I’ll further wager that more than a few Gastr del Sol fans were unaware of the same fact. Finally,...

Full Frontal: No, it’s not what you think

By Tom Zimpleman / August 8, 2002

Full Frontal Stephen Soderbergh Miramax The connection between the movies and reality preoccupies Steven Soderbergh’s Full Frontal. Questions about the topic abound: What constitutes a movie? What happens to the real-life elements of directors, actors, and screenwriters that seep into their work? How do we make sense of the difference between an actor’s personality and...

Aloha: They’re not Hawaiian

By Tom Zimpleman / August 1, 2002

Sugar Aloha Polyvinyl Records I don’t know if Cleveland, Ohio experimentalists Aloha have stumbled onto anything that might become the future of rock music on their sophomore album, Sugar. I do know that the album likely will not lift the band into the stratosphere of popularity, nor will it even give them the luxury of...

Shortcuts

By Tom Zimpleman / July 18, 2002

The Californian Sunday’s Best Polyvinyl Records Any listeners unable to tell from the title of this LP that Sunday’s Best are from Los Angeles will quickly be clued in by the heavy ’70s West Coast influences. While it may be trendy to claim that your band follows the lead of groups like Television or the...

Time and tragedy explored in Angel Rock

By Tom Zimpleman / July 11, 2002

A few references to the Apollo 11 mission in Darren Williams’s Angel Rock establish that the book is set in the winter of 1969-1970, or properly the summer of 1969-1970, since the book takes place in its author’s native Australia. The moon landing has no significance for the events described here, and Williams references it...

Prom still painful

By Tom Zimpleman / July 11, 2002

The Prom Under the Same Stars Barsuk Records James Mendenhall, lead singer and songwriter of the Prom, was not a happy man when the group recorded their second LP, Under the Same Stars. Of the ten songs on the album with lyrical content, all ten describe romance gone wrong. There are several sub-genres of the...

Ben Folds coming dangerously close to irrelevance

By Tom Zimpleman / July 7, 2002

Not popular enough to be a bona fide star, yet too popular to be a cult figure, Ben Folds has always been something of a conundrum. He’s plainly uninterested in Top-40 success: he hasn’t disowned his one modest hit—”Brick,” a single from his days fronting Ben Folds Five—but he buries it at the end of...

Once again, animation outshines humanity

By Tom Zimpleman / June 27, 2002

This movie capitalizes on three developments in American culture. First, it takes place in a quiet suburb during the 1970s, à la cult favorite The Virgin Suicides. Second, it gives comic books literary and artistic credibility, à la Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Third, its title recalls the publicity surrounding certain...

The Bourne Identity: Talent assembles to kill time

By Tom Zimpleman / June 27, 2002

A few years ago, someone writing in American Heritage’s “Overrated/Underrated” issue called Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity the most underrated spy thriller of all time. Judgments like “most underrated” are tricky because by the time one gets around to noticing the single most underrated whatever—a band, a spy thriller, a baseball front office—it’s no longer...