Black Dogs Review

Black Dogs: The Possibly True Story of Classic Rock’s Greatest Robbery. While the book’s full title may not be concise, it’ll send you into its pages with a pretty clear idea of what to expect. Even the most straight-laced of us have probably at least once or twice pondered the idea of flirting with danger. We love the antihero, the guy who’s facing insurmountable odds and risking his life as he knows it (and possibly his life, period), but for the wrong reasons. And no matter how much we know, deep down, that those reasons are “wrong”, we really really hope that he gets away with it. It’s why we love movies like Bonnie and Clyde, Heat, or The Usual Suspects. It’s why we love fictional TV shows like Breaking Bad or Weeds, not to mention nonfictional TV reenactments of newsworthy crimes: usually either a string of high risk heists from a 21st century Dillinger, or a one-in-a-million Perfect Crime masterminded by a quiet, unassuming everyman. And though it’s not always as easy for a book to capture your full attention as a movie or a TV show, Jason Buhrmester’s Black Dogs plows forward, just as tense and compelling as any of those movies or shows, if not more.

The title claims that the story is “possibly true”. Truthfully, it probably isn’t. At least, not the overall plot. Does the author really know what happened to that $203,000 that went missing from Led Zeppelin in New York? Probably not. Did a decent amount of the specific events and conversations within the story probably happen to the author and/or his friends at some point, under different circumstances? Certainly not! (Wink wink). It’s up to you to decide what is and isn’t true. If any of this stuff really happened, the names and places have been changed to protect the guilty. Really, it doesn’t matter how that money got stolen, or if Jason Buhrmester didn’t even hear out about it until years after it happened. Whatever the truth is, Black Dogs is probably better.

The story centers around four people: Patrick, the first-person narrator who seems to enjoy hating music more than he enjoys enjoying it. Pete, who despises the old nickname that Patrick refuses to stop calling him by: “Frenchy”. Keith, a remarkably adept car stereo thief who sells radios to the very people he later rips them off of, and who seems to be the most impoverished of the four. And Alex, who at the beginning of the story is just coming off an eight-month prison stretch that Patrick is partially at fault for. However, more at fault than Patrick is Alex’s uncle Danny, a sleazy, fast-talking, slow-thinking screw-up that Patrick loves to hate. You will too.

The four of them have spent most of their lives perfecting their various thievery techniques, when they’re not getting stoned or drunk and talking about music. They’ve been pretty successful through most of their escapades, but still, Ocean’s Eleven they ain’t. While working backstage catering at a Led Zeppelin concert, Patrick is struck with the idea for the score of a lifetime: an opportunity to steal the thousands and thousands of dollars that the biggest band in the world rakes in from a show. To pull it off, however, they’ll need an in to talk to Jimmy Page and keep Richard Cole, Zeppelin’s tour manager, distracted. On top of that, they’ll need to avoid Peter Grant, Zeppelin’s hardened, humorless, terrifying gorilla of a manager. The four think they’ve struck gold when they get the idea to approach Cole under the pretense of selling Page a guitar. But when Page doesn’t want what they have to offer, Frenchy panics and throws a desperate bargaining chip: he claims to have a 1958 Gibson Les Paul. This gets Jimmy’s attention, and he offers to buy it from them if they can bring it to him in New York. Trouble is, there’s only one ’58 Les Paul in town, and they’ll need to steal it from a pawn shop owned by the leader of the Holy Ghosts, a thinly veiled doppelgänger of the Hell’s Angels that somehow sound twice as terrifying as their real-life counterpart. On top of that, they’ll need extra help to break into the shop, and the only person with the skills they need just happens to be the infamous uncle Danny.

But all this doesn’t even begin to sum up the endless twists and turns of the story, which soon spirals out of control in a series of Catch 22s that would make the Coen Brothers cream their pants. It’s got action. It’s got suspense. It’s got betrayal. It’s got parties. It’s got fights. It’s even got a little obligatory romance, though somehow it only takes up as much of the story as it needs to. But most of all, it’s got music, and plenty of it. There are times when you won’t be sure if you’re reading a heist story or a Lester Bangs article. And Zeppelin fans be warned: the narrator loves to hate on them just as much as uncle Danny, and relishes every chance he gets to tear them a new one. But again, no one can tell you you’re supposed to like these guys. Hell, the reason Alex went to jail in the first place was for breaking into his own girlfriend’s house. Once again, Ocean’s Eleven they ain’t. But good storytellers they are, and if you’re willing to put aside those pesky notions of “right” and “wrong”, you’ll hang fast to the words of this book like the notes of your favorite rock and roll album.

Beware the Gonzo (2010) - Review

Beware the Gonzo seems all too familiar at times. That’s not to say that it’s a bad movie. It may even be a really good movie. But it’s not a great movie. If you’re a fan of Hunter S. Thompson, the title of the movie might catch your eye. After that, the plot might seem intriguing: An aspiring high school journalist gets kicked out of his school paper by its impossibly popular student editor, and rebels by forming his own underground paper. As you begin the movie, you may or may not be disappointed by the apparent lack of drug use by any of the characters... assuming you’re still a Hunter S. Thompson fan. And if you’re not a Hunter S. Thompson fan, you might realize even faster that the movie is gradually beginning to resemble a run-of-the-mill, raunchy, American Pie-like teen comedy. And then you’ll realize that it’s actually just another boy-meets-girl story.

It’s really hard to make an overall statement about this movie. It’s not a big-budget Hollywood movie, but it sure tries to come off as one. It is, in fact, an indie movie, but our only indication is the Tribeca Festival logo in the opening, and the fact that the only remotely recognizable cast member is Amy Sedaris of Strangers With Candy fame (she does a pretty good job as the main character’s success-obsessed mom). The main character in question is Eddie “Gonzo” Gilman, played by Ezra Miller, the first on a long list of unknown names. He seems a little like Joseph Gordon-Levitt, which could be intentional on the part of the director. In the beginning of the film, he’s an outcast and a loser, even though as per usual to these kinds of movies, he’s actually way too outgoing and charismatic for that to be conceivable in real life. He starts out unable to get a story published to save his life. The primary antagonist of the the film, editor Gavin Reilly, promises him a “front page story”, only to cut out 90% of the story that Gonzo writes, save for one inspirational-sounding paragraph that was actually intended to be sarcasm. Meanwhile, he has no better luck on his own; his technique of approaching completely random people with a tape recorder and demanding their opinions on returning to school is met with insults and evasion tactics. This is obviously because he is a rebel and an outcast, and totally not because it’s a really bad, obnoxious journalistic technique. His friends are a color wheel of indie loser quirks: A scrawny kid with glasses who specializes in seducing particularly unattractive ladies, an even scrawnier kid with glasses who is the perpetual victim of the nameless, voiceless gang of jock bullies, and a quiet, unsettling Asian girl who seems to have a more deep-seated hatred of the popular cliques than any of the others. Fed up with their school having no outlet for “the voice of the little guy”, they decide to start their own revolution of journalism by creating a more unorthodox paper known as “The Gonzo Files”.

At this point, we have the obligatory montage of the gang “recruiting” new staff members, most of which are even more hopeless misfits than they are... how does that even fit in to the greater message of the movie? At the end of it, the cast is joined by the obligatorily hot love interest for Gonzo, Evie (Zoë Kravitz), who, according to rumor, may or may not be a whore (so obviously she’s not). It’s during this part that she gives the solution for every problem in the film, that no character ever seems to mention. She tells them that they have to create the paper as a website, not just a printed paper, because otherwise it would be a joke in today’s digital age. Not only do most of the paper’s strongest moments come from the videos posted to the website and the user input therein, but the main conflicts throughout the movie stem from the principal punishing (or threatening to punish) Gonzo, due only to the fact that he is actually printing the paper and distributing it during school hours without permission. When he does it the first time, he gets off easy, with the principal giving him a choice between merging with the school paper (and therefore surrendering to their rules) or releasing the paper on his own again, which would get him suspended. He chooses the latter, but the question remains: why was there even a choice? Why doesn’t he just cut his losses on the printed version and keep the paper going as a website? Not only could it not be policed by the school, they could break news the second that it happens, without even having to fill up a whole new issue.

That seems to be the prevalent theme throughout the movie: imaginary conflicts. It’s hard to identify with a main character who “lusts for freedom” when he goes to an expensive private school and lives in a nice suburban house with a smart lawyer dad who encourages him and a mom who protests his brashness but ultimately does nothing to stand in his way. And because he goes to such a fancy private school, it’s then hard to believe that the Gonzo’s biggest scoop (an admittedly major story in any capacity) is the health code violations of his school’s cafeteria. Everyone makes jokes about how much they hated school lunches growing up. It doesn’t mean that it’s realistic for an elite prep school to have actual live rats running around in the kitchen at night, while the security guard just shrugs it off as a regular thing. By the way, notice the part that said “at night?” Yeah, they broke into the cafeteria after dark and recorded themselves doing it, and this is somehow never brought up as a legal issue. Oh, and also, another of their pieces of evidence in the case against the cafeteria is a video of a popular girl throwing up after school, which in the previous issue they had claimed to be evidence that she was bulimic. When the cafeteria scandal issue comes out, she proudly points right at the story and says “See? I told you!” Apparently, libel is okay if your target can sometimes be a real bitch.

Again, this part and many other parts of the movie seem all too familiar. Instead of trying to change the school’s way of thinking about journalism, the heroes really only succeed in “investigating” the popular kids’ social lives to take them down a notch, because apparently gossip never existed. It was a better movie when it was Animal House, and then again when it was Revenge of the Nerds, and then again when it was Heathers, and then again when it was Mean Girls. Even the beginning of the movie seems familiar: it starts with a cold open of Gonzo addressing a camera with a broken nose, after most of the movie's events have already taken place, apologizing for the incidents that we are about to see unfold. It’s similar to Fight Club or American Beauty, but unlike either of those movies, there is no twist that puts the opening under a different light. The final message of the movie really is that the main character screwed up, and needs to beg for forgiveness. And then, as it turns out, he doesn’t even really seem to care about the forgiveness of his peers, or of his friends, or even about the overall integrity of the paper he’s created (which lives on in website form). He only cares about the girl.

Ironically, one of the strongest points of the movie is the primary (and, with the minor example of the principal, only) antagonist, Gavin (Jesse McCartney). Apart from him, none of the jock goons or rich preppy jerks seem to get more than two lines. But Gavin isn’t impossibly cruel, like the bullies in Animal House or Karate Kid, and he’s also not impossibly theatrical, like Heathers or Mean Girls. He’s just a genuinely flawed, arrogant guy: the kind of guy we could all imagine being popular in whatever high school we went to, the kind of guy we would love to hate in real life. But then again, maybe this isn’t a strong point. Movies that try to replicate real life with 100% accuracy aren’t always entertaining: look at Gerry. Fortunately, at least this movie isn’t boring. It’s just predictable. If you’re looking for another fun teen movie with some heart, hit it up on Netflix (it’s available to watch instantly, at least at the time of this review). However, if you’re looking for a truly unique, thought-provoking movie, save your time.

"The Wall", by Pink Floyd - Negative Review

“The Rock Star Experience” is a much-told cautionary tale that usually ends with the same message: Be careful what you wish for, you might get it. And ironically, being such a basic story of man’s struggle against himself, it lends itself endlessly to the very medium that it essentially condemns. You can draw a parallel between being a rock star and being a religious/spiritual guru, like The Who’s Tommy. You can show how even through fame, the experience of life is still nothing more than a day-to-day thought process no different from anyone else’s, like the Beatles’ A Day in the Life. Or, you can just whine about the California lifestyle and suck at everything, like the Eagles’ Hotel California. And then, there’s Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

If you believe the hype, The Wall is the seminal rock opera that paints one of the most vivid and poetic pictures of the isolation and insanity that close in when a rock star finally realizes that nothing he’s accomplished will really fill the void inside him. The artist is never satisfied, because the only fans he has are the people who would already have always agreed with his message, and he knows he may never actually change the world. The Stones summed it up in one song, and Roger Waters tries to sum it up in an epic double-disc autobiography (and make no mistake, the struggle of The Wall’s protagonist is entirely Rogers’ own). In his later solo works, Rogers tries to express these feelings through songs with much more obvious political charges. In The Wall, he tries to express it through the eyes of a drugged and delirious singer who thinks he’s a Nazi.

That’s a pretty bold statement to make. “All of you fans are so damn stupid that I could be up here starting a genocide and you’d just keep cheering.” Unfortunately, this is as deep into it as he really goes. This is the great weakness of the entire album: it observes all the disturbing characteristics of insanity without ever really coming to a further understanding. “In The Flesh” has the lead character spouting things like “That one looks Jewish, that one’s a coon! Who let all this riffraff into the room?”. Okay. We get it. He’s yelling like a psycho. So... what’s the point?

Unfortunately, the point is that there is no point. The album ends with a Möbius Strip, with the end of the final song segueing into the opening notes of the first. The final song offers no closure, except something like “don’t forget that it’s not easy for the people who care about you to put up with you when you’re down”. The easy answer is that there is no answer, and of course it’s ultimately wise to say “The only thing I know is that I know nothing”. But still, it seems like kind of a cop out. If the only thing that Waters can say after all this is, “Well, that’s life”, then why do we care about it? Why do we want to listen to this guy whine about being famous? And he is pretty whiny, if songs like “Don’t Leave Me Now”, “Another Brick in the Wall Part 3”, “Vera” and “Stop” are any indication. He’s whiny enough to be the Luke Skywalker of rock and roll. And it’s certainly not his fault that songs like “Comfortably Numb” and “Another Brick in the Wall Part 2” have become overplayed, but it is his fault that these are two of the only songs on the album that anyone who isn’t famous can identify with (about drug addiction and totalitarian school systems, respectively). Even the albums most powerful songs about ideas that we can all understand even if we can’t relate to them exactly (Mother, Goodbye Blue Sky, Hey You) are not enough to save this massive orgy of depression that, ironically, shuts itself off from the listener by doing a good job at the exact thing it was created to do (express alienation). Not all of us lost a dad in a war or have issues with beating up our girlfriends, Roger.