I Drink You Milkshake, the Food Network's latest hit

SNL returned for its first post-writers strike episode on Saturday, and they were back with a vengeance. In addition to premiering it's Obama spoof (the first for years to come, hopefully?) and host Tina Fey's flat out endorsement of Hillary, the came out with this dead-on spoof of this year's Oscar fare:



While I think the "There Will Be blank" construction is already getting played out (I'd give it another couple of months), I don't think I'll ever get tired of the "I drink your milkshake" line. Truthfully, I've never been that much of a fan of Will Forte, but his Daniel Day-Lewis voice is near perfect. Fred Armisen's Anton Chigurth is disappointing, but I burst out laughing with the "I'm sorry, are you speaking English?" line with Juno. Maybe this is a sign the show will suck a little less now.

There Will Be Justice: Why the Oscars are better now than they've been for 30 years

This year's Oscars was a satisfaction 11 years in the making. You may remember that back in 1997, the two main contenders were The English Patient and Fargo. The former was a literary, epic, tragic love story amid political chaos that is now best remembered as almost laughably pretentious and cheesy. Fargo, on the other hand, was an unprecedented, challenging work, one with an unflinchingly bleak view on human nature with a heinous villain who seemed to embody evil for no reasons other than his own personal mantra. If this sounds familiar, it should. If the current climate was the same as 1997, Atonement would have taken home the Best Picture Oscar, and we'd all be begrudging it 10 years from now. As it stands, the real Best Picture won, as No Country For Old Men, arguably even better than Fargo, got the Coen brothers the Best Picture award they've deserved for over a decade. I can think of nothing but positives in terms of what this means for our current cinema.

In my mind, the '70s were the golden age for Oscar fairness, and that's simply because the competition was so good. There's really no way you can lose when choosing between The Godfather Part II and Chinatown, or Rocky, Network and Taxi Driver. In sum, the better the overall quality of films of a given year, the less likely it is that someone will get shafted by default. It's no coincidence, then, that 2007 was one of the better years for movies in quite some time (I'd argue it's the best since 1994, maybe even longer). Not only was Atonement slightly better than The English Patient, but Juno, There Will Be Blood and Michael Clayton were all better than Jerry Maguire, Secrets & Lies and Shine. More choice means more democracy, and that's why the Coen brothers took home more hardware this time around.

More importantly for the future of the Oscars, however, I feel that the the last 5 years have been trending towards the fairer (Crash being the notable exception), and that's because of the changes in the industry. Geeks have taken over the awards coverage, as sensitive Hollywood types face an unprecedently empowered wrath of the population if they make the wrong choice. In the 90s, the Academy could get away with giving awards to Dances with Wolves and Titanic simply because no one could really stop them from doing so. In the early part of the decade, the overall quality of films were so bad that there wasn't really much to be shafted in the first place. But now, with a lot more scrutiny from empowered film geeks then ever before, the criticism of the Oscars is a lot more widespread and prominent than in the last decade. Lord of the Rings: Return of the King was not a good sign since it was one of the few recent movies to unite film geeks and Oscar voters alike. The real sign of change was a year later, when a grandiose but flawed movie in The Aviator lost to a smaller but nearly flawless film in Million Dollar Baby.

The rise of independent films in prominence has also tipped the scale, as easily the most inspiring moment of this year's Oscars was the two separate acceptance speeches for Once's Best Song win, a feat that simply wouldn't be possible 10 years ago. But if one was superstitious, you may look to the lifting of a curse of Babe Ruth-like proportions. The flaws of the last 30 years of Oscars have been symbolically linked to the year 1980, when the flaccid Ordinary People beat out what Hollywood now believes to be the fourth greatest film of all-time, Raging Bull. The Scorsese curse was finally lifted last year when The Departed, in my mind Scorsese's best film since Goodfellas (another film that got shafted), won gold. Hopefully, this means that all the problems started by the Ordinary People win will go away too.

Voices Blog Exlusive: An interview with Jared Phillips, guitarist of Times New Viking

(photo courtesy of Matador Records)

So much for setting off a doomsday device on indie rock. After my interview with Jared Phillips, I was immediately reminded of Chuck Klosterman's essay in Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs about the utter detachment of the music press from actual musicians themselves. Jared was quick to shoot down my suggestions of an indie rock revolution, but not without throwing in a few jabs at the current establishment, which still gives me hope for this band. Since the Maroon is off for suicide prevention college break day, this interview is a Voices blog exclusive. No podcast this time: trust me, you don't want to hear my awkward stumblings.

Ethan Stanislawski: You guys sound almost defiantly straight out of 1991 or 1987. What kind of effect did you think that would have on an indie music scene that has kinda strayed from that?

Jared Phillips: I don’t really know. I never really took that into account other than, y’know, I don’t listen to a whole lot of stuff that’s new. I’d actually rather it sound like 1983. I mean, there’s not much out that’s both poppy and kinda gnarly-sounding at the same time anymore, but yeah, we don’t really care.

ES: What’s the transition been like going to Matador, and with having your music stay the same production value even with the switch.

JP: Well, our music sounded pretty gnarly before, so, it’s not going to hurt us. Basically it’s stuff like now, what we’re doing. I got to talk to people all the time. If I want to tell the label something I have to tell 5 people. Y’know, shit like that. More emails, basically. I don’t see any more money, it’s just more emails. Other than that, it’s not really a tough transition.

ES: Have you noticed any more of attention with the sort of upgrade in labels?

JP: Ah yeah, obviously because more people will buy the record based on the fact that it’s Matador, but then again people will buy [former TNV label] Siltbreeze records just because they’re on Siltbreeze. So it’s not really an upgrade, it’s just that one label has a hell of a lot more money.than the other one, and Pitchfork will actually review the record. Apparently Pitchfork is some kinda huge thing. I never really read Pitchfork, and then people were coming up to me at home and telling me “wow you guys are on Pitchfork!”, and I’m like, “yeah, well, it’s just like all those other shitty sites, right?” It’s all the same thing to me, I don’t know. I guess more people pay attention to us, which is cool. I mean, I was aware of that to begin with, when we jumped ship and went with this other label to see what it’s like.

ES: Even with the switch to Matador, you kept the same home-recording production values. Were you tempted to get rid of that, or was that essential to what you guys were doing?

JP: Well, when we started out recording, we kind of wanted to sound like Live at the Witch Trials, the first Fall album, a little more of a clean, sharp sound. And once we started fooling around with a 4-track recorders, we thought we could get a lot more cool sounds because we had such a minimal setup…When we started out playing and practicing I had this shitty old Xerox machine upstairs that weighed like 200 pounds. So we’d practice, then listen to the practice, then we’d go upstairs and make 3 copies of the cassettes and make these little album. So after awhile, it just became the way we did things. But it might change. You can’t make records that sound the same forever. Nobody wants to hear that. I mean, it’s like a band that makes 15 records all pretty modern-sounding, and you just say “why don’t you just make a fucking record that is not overproduced.” But everyone’s going to be telling you that you need to do things this way and that way, so fuck it, who cares. I mean, I might like to do something a little different for the next one, so we’ll see what happens. I don’t want it to be a crutch, or something that we have to do.

ES: Your press release spends a lot of time talking about having a Sex Pistols effect, and your Myspace features aliases like harmish kilgour and brix e. smith. How much do you think of the band as a retro thing and how much do you want it to have more of a new effect?

JP: Well, when we all met, the whole thing was we were into collage art and stuff like that, so everything came from kinda somewhere, y’know? As much as I like stuff that sorta comes out of nowhere, nothing really comes out of nowhere. We’re pretty conscious of the things that we reference. When we started out we were writing songs where we’d say “why don’t we put this Nirvana chord here, for the hell of it.” We don’t want to sound like Nirvana, but we were all aware of referencing things that had one meaning a changing them around, y’know just appropriating shit. So I don’t know, it’s not meant to sound retro. I can’t stand retro stuff. If people want retro stuff there’s a whole bunch of shitty punk bands and a whole bunch of shitty garage bands, and a whole bunch of shitty psychedelic bands. But everything we do is just to make it not particularly one of those. If I used a whole lot more reverb on my guitars it would sound more psychedelic, so I don’t do that. There’s a reason for all that. I hope they don’t think it’s retro, because they’ll miss all the other references.

ES: You talked about how you don’t listen to much modern music. How much of your sound is trying to start shit up, or be rebellious.

JP: Well, I don’t listen to much of what Pitchfork reviews, that’s all I meant by that. I mean, I can’t speak for the other two band members, but personally that’s not anything I really wanted to do. I mean, all along we were outsiders to the scene of the indie world…but yeah, I don’t think that was the intent. But if people take it like that, I guess that makes us look cooler, doesn’t it? So I don’t mind. I don’t know, when we first started playing, we’d show up to the show, and we’d play, and we would be the odd people out. It’d be some noise show, and we’d be the only band with drums and has songs. We’d be the only band there who plays the same thing twice…we didn’t know if we were pissing people off, but they seemed to like it. Or it’d be the opposite situation. We’d be playing with a bunch of bar bands, and we just figured they would hate us because we weren’t playing typical bar band music, but then people still liked it. I’m amazed that we’re even on this big label, and all the good reviews we’ve gotten, it’s just ridiculous. Even if we were trying to be a pimple on the indie rock scene, I guess we’re not doing a really good job at it. So somebody will tell me about something that was said in a blog or a review, and it makes me happy. It still seems like people either love it or hate it.

Times New Viking will be playing along with Super Furry Animals and Jeffrey Lewis this Saturday at the Metro.

A return to form: Martin McDonagh Podcast

The lack of posting of late has been due to a variety of factors, mostly including me trying to do silly things like graduate, as well as getting distracted with other blogs. I sincerely apologize for such foolishness. But, in honor of the Maroon website's snazzy new redesign, I will be posting once again on the Voices blog, and I will be starting with a bang, a podcast of my interview with Martin McDonagh, which was published on Friday. Among the relics not in the article is McDonagh's take on working with Colin Farrell, his mixed cultural identity as a Londoner and an Irishman (you'll hear his accent is more towards the former), and him shooting down my comparison to Conor MacPherson.



God I'm awkward. Enjoy!