Falling Short

The following is a roundup of the past week's media, a disparate group that found unity in the common theme of letting me down:

• Literature : Albert Camus: The Stranger : I liked the narrative style and tone of this book, they serve the ideas well. But when you fundamentally disagree and fail to identify with the thesis, there's only so much enjoyment to be had. However I will always remember this book fondly because I finished it in a matter of hours. For those of you that know it only spans 150 small pages with large print, please keep quiet and let me enjoy this. The last book I read this quickly was Bubbles, Bubbles, which had a much more agreeable ending.
  
  
• Film : The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou : I am sad to report that I thought this was merely ok. I think Wes Anderson's brand of dry, somber drama only works when you can feel the emotions and history teeming beneath the surface. With The Royal Tenenbaums, I felt the complicated family dynamic and the yearning for acceptance or love in every melancholy glance. In Life Aquatic, I saw the same method without the depth to support it. Maybe I just didn't identify with the film's themes in the same way that I did with the others, but in any case it didn't really affect me.
  
  
• Music : Common: Be : This is one of the better albums I've heard lately. Com has been one of my favorite MCs since I first heard Resurrection, so the anticipation was high for the new effort despite my reservations about Kanye West's extensive involvement. I am happy to admit that I was wrong about Kanye (on this album only, I reserve the right to criticize his other work). He provides a coherent collection of beats that support Common's lyrical style well without taking him off the commercial deep end. However I was most impressed with Common's lyrical perspective on the album, presenting a different piece of his neighborhood's history with each track and speaking from a collective point of view (notice how he says "we" a lot more than "I" here). Altogether the album provides an intimate portrait of Chicago's South Side, neither glorified nor villainized, and a mature, uplifting assessment of its future.
  
  Two problems, though: 1) I can't shake the feeling that this is an EP that was stretched into (and promoted as) a full album. At eleven tracks and forty-two minutes, it's just over half the length of Like Water for Chocolate, including four minutes of the latest "Pop's Rap" and a live track that, while quite good, smacks of desperation for content. Jay Dee's two tracks are decent but the ratio to Kanye's nine makes them seem like add-ons. I'm all for keeping an album trim and tight, but I think that either Kanye should've put up another six tracks to make this a full album or a couple of tracks should've been cut and the effort released as The Stony Island EP or something. 2) Speaking of tracks that should be cut, let me nominate the single, "Go." This track has no business being on the album, no matter how many units it helps to sell. The transition from "The Corner," arguably the best track on the album, to "Go" is rough at best and destroys the atmosphere that the first two songs built so effectively. The beat is radio all the way, with none of the authenticity of the rest of the album. And above all, this is just a sex song dressed up in conscious clothes with no sophistication or depth.
  
  
• TV : Guns, Germs and Steel : I had high hopes for this PBS series, but it's slow, repetitive and presents surprisingly little information for being based on such a large book. I follow my man Com's advice: "I turn the TV down, we can take it higher than that."