M&M #14

Grandaddy – Just Like The Fambly Cat (2006)

In the beginning...of this decade I came across the album 'Software Slump' by these guys and it quickly became the defining soundtrack for that time in my life. That's how it works for me. A band enters my life and communicates with my energy for a period of three or four years. Like when I first heard Echo & the Bunnymen in high school when I dreamt of sugar lips and the ballyhoo of teenage sexual liberation consumed my every thought. Or when I discovered Pavement in college and their raw energy helped me rattle the rush of human existence. Or when I came across...Grandaddy hit me during a transitional period in my life. I just turned thirty, was recently married and found myself really evaluating my purpose in a profound new way. Grandaddy's spacey, tender sound was the perfect background music for all of these wonderful new discoveries. 'Just Like The Fambly Cat' being their last album, I'm definitely going to miss their combined creative spirit that elevated them into beautiful territory. But all eras eventually come to an end. Godspeed gentlemen and good hunting.


Volver – Pedro Almodovar (2006)

Surprisingly, Volver turned out to be one of Almodovar's more accessible films. It isn't filled with many of the seedy elements that most of his movies spill upon the audience's collective conscious. Although I'm not so sure that a man trying to rape his daughter or a mother burying said man's body to protect her daughter or that it turns out the daughter wasn't actually the man's child in the first place but her own grandfather's daughter instead are normal story lines that we see today in big budget movies. For Almodovar this film was bit more subdued, especially following his last movie 'Bad Education'. The presence of familial responsibility and the way that life repeats itself is in full effect in this movie, which makes the title 'Volver' (to return) rather appropriate. I guess that women everywhere around the world must deal with the heavy burden of male oppression in some form or another and quite often they can only rely on each other to get them through the madness.