2010 Oscar Preview

Here are reviews that were written by Vman about a majority of the Oscar nominees:

An Education

The Hurt Locker

A Serious Man

The White Ribbon

The Last Station

The Blind Side

As for the winners, The Hurt Locker deserved every ounce of praise as did Crazy Heart. Precious did not but that is for another day when I want to read millions of angry comments. Up In the Air's lack of success proves that the old model for winning the Academy Awards is simply no longer relevant. I enjoy Sandra Bullock as a person but her gun toting, Taco Bell owning, red state savior of large African American males while it may be based in reality, has contributed nothing at all to the art of acting.

- Vman

AYPGTC feat. Esti Frischling (DBK Sexpert) Show 12 Season 2

WMUC HQ DL:

(1 Week Only)
http://wmucradio.com/stream_ripper/wed/A_Young_Person_s_Guide_To_Corruption_0_200.mp3

MEDIAFIRE DL:

(Permanent)
http://www.mediafire.com/file/iozzfzgxigd/A Young Person's Gudie to Corruption feat. Esti Frischling (DBK Sexpert) Show 12 Season 2.mp3

Began our magnum opus of the Fall semester with DJ Boss Player revealing the contents of his wallet. A chance for the inner boys in R. and I to see what men are wrapped up in. Various songs were played. Lady of the night Esti Frischling, acclaimed DBK sexpert responded to a now infamous Dr.Oz without her knowledge. Provided insight into hook-up culture, America and our future as mature, fully realized sexual beings. Tried to move away from the nation's puritan DNA and the wishes of Governor Winthrop. Wondered how to insinuate ourselves into hook up scene, how to survive in an animalistic universe and how to get through these four years with our ticket to heaven intact.

-Vman


Playlist:

1		The Afghan Whigs	I'm Her Slave	Congregation
2		The Brian Jonestown Massacre	I Dare You	Dead Bees Label Sampler #3
3		Holiday Shores	Edge Of Our Lives	Columbus'd The Whim
4		Morrissey	Driving Your Girlfriend Home	Kill Uncle
5		City High	What Would You Do?	City High
6	*	jj	let go	let go / my way
7		Deerhoof	Rainbow Silhouette of the Milky Rain	Milk Man

Turn and Face the Strange Corruption Boys

As you all may know due to our grass roots poster campaign at the The Thirsty Turtle est. 1893, A Young Person's Guide to Corruption Inc. is expanding and maturing in new, unexpectedly Mormon ways. Market research conducted by the UMD-Easter Shore department of Radio Communications shows that bullets allow our dear readers to form an emotional attachment to the blog:

• Humor - In our misguided quest to remain relevant and employable to mainstream America, the Corruption Boys (R. and Vman) have used satire to deconstruct and reconstruct the Palin-ification of America only on the FCC regulated WMUC 88.1 FM. No more. This blog will fully realize its ambitions and live up to the heady standard established by the buzzband Excuse Me, May I Urinate On You (exclusively found on xanga.com).
• Links - Our Kinsey consultant says we must link and link abundantly to other work we do. For work by our extended family working at the New Yorker and Billboard Publications, our Facebook (New Media) Presence is still the optimal way to follow us. 
• A New, More Urban Season - We are still following DJ Boss Player every Tuesday night/Wednesday morning and hope to continue making our audience a few shades darker and a few shades lighter at the same time. Our permanent archive will attest to this. The live stream is gorgeous as well. 
• The New Minimalism/Criticism - Some of you all surely enjoyed the successfully unsuccinct explorations of movies by old Caucasians which formed the crux of this post-ironic exercise. Our new posts may be shorter but they will pack all of the commercial red state appeal and blue state sex drive, you have come to appreciate. 
• Video - Our original feature film Inglorious Annals of a Revolution was not bought by the Sundance Channel and will not be tweeted about by Zach Braff. However, we will plow on with a new, original, accented Tele/Internet Vision project from A Young Person's Guide to Corruption Inc., the one place to serve all of your branding needs. 
• Love - we do not endorse this but our advertisers (Amazon.com, Google.com) have insisted that we give it at least 2.5 out of five stars. An ongoing legal battle is in the works.

- Vman

Bringing Back Chillwave via The New Criticism

As y'all know, R. and I have chosen to loosen the reigns of this blog a little [via hipsterrunoff.com] and as our brand evolves, we will be writing in more authentic styles. From now on, R. and I will use the #chillwave tag to signify writing of ours that is truly relevant.

Here's an informed piece of award-show core criticism I wrote for a chill blog:

Shout Fire Film Society

via [UMD "Film" Society]:

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association could have catered to the socially conscious-inspiration fiends and chosen Precious — if only to see how many tears M'o'nique had left. The shadowy organization full of bros this reporter has never heard of could have also pretended it was 2k7 all over again and chosen the darkest film of the lot, The Hurt Locker. Finally, the foreign bros could have given maltstream Hollywood (formerly known as middle-brow or Spielberg/Hanks-ville) what it wanted and rewarded quality, personal filmmaking via Up In the Air or Inglorious Basterds. Instead, they "chose" everyone's favorite blue-alien-billion-and-a-half-dollar behemoth, Avatar as the best movie of the year. Make no mistake, award shows exist to value "relevance" over "authenticity" and "positive" films over "meaningful" ones.

- Vman

A Young Person's Guide to the Best Television Programs of the Decade

                                                                                    










This list is much more serious and meaningful as it involves the golden age of TV. Whether it was drama or comedy, the one filmed art form closest to literature finally realized its potential thanks to a a chubby little fat man with a pug nosed face and a convicted wife beater at HBO who happened to nurture the three Davids I spent nearly days with.

1. The Wire - David Simon is a genius who chronicles the seismic changes of our lives through small people and small moments carefully pieced together over years. His DVDs are as likely to be bootlegged on the streets of Baltimore as bought by earnest sociology majors. Something truly revolutionary happened here and a host of incredible crime novelists (Pelecanos, Price, etc.) helped create a new standard for realism that successive generations will struggle to equal.

2. Deadwood - The rare instance in which HBO did not do the right thing this decade. Still, a premature cancellation did not erase the hours of breathtaking theater which came before it. An odd, inspired mix of gritty, neo-Western blood and Shakespearian grandeur, David Milch's masterpiece left us with hundreds of absolutely perfect lines.

3. The Office (UK) - Comedy about a sad man's desperate attempt to use comedy to connect. He fails.

4. Mad Men - It is truly gorgeous not for its set design but the sheer level of talent it takes to achieve cultural relevance without sacrificing artistic vitality. For a generation or generations rather struggling to understand their rapidly changing history, Don Draper was a way to see what allowed America to ascend and ultimately what we sacrificed on the way up.

5. Battlestar Galactica - For everyone who shudders whenever the word science is put before fiction, Ronald D. Moore's series proved that the story of humanity could be artfully evoked with battleships and inordinately sexy robots.

6. The Sopranos - A cultural firestorm that made dream analysis just as fascinating as murder.

7. Arrested Development - The best American comedy series. Perfect for analrapists everywhere.

8. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart - Kept me sane in the Bush era. For that I remain forever grateful.

9.  Breaking Bad - Bryan Cranston's performance in the darkest series of the decade was and is near perfect.

10. Chapelle's Show - It lived and breathed and gave us all something hilarious to talk about and quote for three short seasons before Dave Chapelle showed the world what true artistic integrity was.

- Vman

More Corruption

A new season of Corruption Radio on WMUC 88.1 FM is set to kick off but that's not why I'm wasting the precious e-ink on your kindle. As y'all know, R. and I, Vman do occasional freelance work when we are not providing relevant quality artistic criticism and analysis for the AYPGTC blog.

Here are some links to get you started:

My Work at The Diamondback. 


There will also be a few more changes to the blog as I slowly and tentatively attempt to shed if not abandon the myth of objective criticism. To everyone who despises curating the best works of the decade, I understand but making these lists is a small, insignificant and excessively egotistical way to enshrine our experiences and try and express what those hours spent tripping to David Lynch actually meant or did not mean.

- Vman

A Young Person's Guide to Best Movies of the Decade

This is yet another half-serious, half-deathly subversive, half-bi-sexual exploration of the decade in which independent cinema took over the game.

1. There Will Be Blood - P.T. Anderson is one of our finest modern auteurs and this is the film that first wrote his name firmly into the canon of American Cinema. Before the bailouts, there was blood.

2. Synecdoche, New York - Like Samuel Beckett on the screen, it is still hard to comprehend exactly what this film was and what it means. Wrapped inside this movie are philosophy and ideas truly magnificent in scale.

3. Almost Famous - Out of the many beautiful things that the now far gone rock 'n' roll culture produced, Cameron Crowe's masterpiece has to be among the best of them. Everyone has their own Penny Lane and knows that one song they can sing with a bus full of feuding narcissists.

4. The 25th Hour - As brutal and moving a tale as Spike Lee has ever told, there is something about the narrative of the film, sparse and loaded with ambiguity that perfectly captures what i t means to live in New York after the towers fell.

5. Old Boy - The Virginia Tech gunman, Cho Seung Hi might be its most famous fan but the movie holds lasting value for the non-sociopathic too as a stylish, deeply considered parable of violence and revenge.

6. The Dark Knight - Christopher Nolan's reinvention of the Batman saga was bleaker than ever and the sheer craftsmanship in every sequence and the power of Heath Ledger's performance was evident to even the millions of idiots who would go on to quote it.

7. The Prestige - A Bale-Nolan-Jackman collaboration that was unfairly overlooked even though its narrative wizardry and mind-wrecking contortions were breath taking to watch.

8. Children of Men - As we inch closer and closer towards oblivion, this film feels ever more prescient. At the height of the Bush years, Alfonso Cuoran condensed all the malaise we felt into one superbly made classic.

9. Punch Drunk Love - Before Funny People, Adam Sandler pushed himself to the brink and created genuine love in P.T. Anderson's only small work.

10. Wall-E - The infantilization of the American public told through a kids story with a cockroach carrying loads of pathos — genius.

11. The Curious Case for Benjamin Button - Not since the heyday of Spielberg has popular art been done so well. Every minute of its length was justified by the bravura performances and remarkable style.

12. No Country for Old Men - At first glance it appears to be simply fatalism but eventually a tortured morality begins to appear which makes the blood all the more justified.

13. Into the Wild - It contains all the beauty of Romantic poetry with the grim punch of modernism as it evokes and then fractures.

14. Syriana - This is the war on terror, in all its messy, confusing and deadly vortex.

15. Half Nelson - The premise is as gimmicky as any, a crack addicted inner city white guy teaching black kids but the execution is infinitely memorable

16. The 40 Year Old Virgin - Changed the face of modern comedy one Kelly Clarkson scream at a time.

17. The Hurt Locker - This is Iraq.

18. Donnie Darko - Richard Kelly's masterpiece just had that certain something to give it permanent cult status.

19. Gomorrah - Neo-realism lives on, fittingly in the country that helped start. A bleak, mordant panorama which has the added benefit of being true to life.

20. Waltz With Bashir - Animation taken to rhapsodic new heights, the beauty and fatality inherent in war done to a near unbelievable degree of achievement.

A Young Person's Guide to the Best Albums of the Decade

This is a half-deathly serious, half deathly-subversive, half-hormonally influenced list of the best music of the decade. Debate away folks over made the noughties special for you.


1.Radiohead - Kid A - Modern paranoia mixed with post-everything beauty. OK Computer was much more cohesive, but Kid A was much more considered in its fragmentation. If the future is digital then Kid A was the best possible way to begin it.

2. Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot - Cash machines and what it all means. Jeff Tweedy, before he hit rock bottom, looked around at the world and created a stunning work of art, one that revives faith in the album as a format.

3. Jay-Z, Dangermouse - The Grey Album - Illegal art at its finest. The first meta-rap album if there ever was one. Jay-Z had no idea what insane, brilliant things Dangermouse was doing with his best flows of the decade on The Black Album but it resulted in this nearly career defining work.

4. The Strokes - Is This It - The hype proved true and while The Strokes never turned into our generation's Stones, it was more because we don't really have a generation than lack of trying on the part of Julian and co.. For better or worse, this album was the pulse of rock 'n' roll or whatever remained of it.

5. The National - Alligator - Sad music made with an Ohio-born lust and sorrow infected songwriter teaming up with budding composer twins to make New York music. This album proved that evocative writing could be placed within a perfect universe of sound.

6. Kanye West - 808s and Heartbreak - As rap moves into a brave new post-gangster, post-lyricist era Kanye stepped in front of a laptop and proved that whatever rap can be, he will definitely have a say.

7. Madvillain - Madvillainy - MF Doom finally found the perfect form to complement his bursts of pop culture eclecticism and furiously inventive wordplay. Will go down as his best album by far.

8. Eminem - The Marshall Mathers LP - It's almost hard to believe this was made during this decade. But this diamond selling masterpiece is the definitive middle finger to the 90s.

9. The Twilight Sad - 14 Autumns and 15 Winters - There's no heartbreak like Scottish heartbreak.

10. Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - Master and Everyone - The more and more albums the good Prince releases, it becomes ever more clear that the songs on this album endure much longer. Even on Is It The Sea, bleak little vignettes like "Wolf Among Wolves" and "Ain't You Wealthy, Ain't You Wise" held the most attention.

11. Beck - Sea Change - This was a turning point in his career and what fan of Beck in the 90s could've known he was about to make something majestic.

12. Thom Yorke - The Eraser - There is something infinitely listenable about this album. Thom has the digital decade in his pulse.

13. Lupe Fiasco - Food and Liquor - The blueprint for every rapper with talent who can't tell an ounce from a kilo.

14. The Hold Steady - Boys and Girls in America - Beat dialogues against music straight from E-Street. The Hold Steady's influences: The Boss, The Band and Kerouac, never subsume what the band truly is.

15. Smog - Dongs of Sevotion - The title says it all.

16. Andrew Bird - The Mysterious Production of Eggs - In a decade which saw the slow dissolving of genres, it's interesting to hear Andrew Bird, a classically trained maestro who saw something yet to be made in pop music.

17. Tom Waits - Alice - The lost, great Tom Waits: the weirdness, the storytelling, the romance and the grim weeping all tied into one spell-casting odyssey.

18. The Good, The Bad and the Queen - Pulp never was this good.

19. Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago - By now its sounds stale but at some point it literally did feel like a welcome drift of snow.

20. Phosphorescent - Pride - Mama there's Matt Houck on this list and they won't let him out.

-Vman

A Young Person's Guide to Corruption Production World Premiere

Inglorious Annals of a Revolution from Vaman Tyrone X on Vimeo.

A Young Person's Guide to Corruption Productions Presents:



The Inglorious Annals of a Revolution



The story of what happens when a British film crew sets out to document America and things get real. A Birthday party with an attractive clown turns into an ambiguous assault on the senses. Children run away from home, lovers quarrel and die, the protagonist is as uncharismatic as possible and things get real.

Album Review: Heavy Ghost - DM Stith

At first listen, DM Stith’s first full length album Heavy Ghost is quite an intimidating production. Having mastery over a variety of instruments including piano, acoustic guitar, violin and some percussion instruments that are simply far too foreign to modern ears. His arrangements are dense and clustered. In fact, all of the tracks stacked end to end could simply serve as a schizophrenic alternative to an avant modern composer such as Nico Muhly. Of course, Stith is also capable of achieving intricacy with a spare selection of instruments as well "Thanksgiving Moon," features a simple acoustic guitar fingerpicked line that manages to stand out against the background just enough to carry the song forth and lead excellently into the swells of the horn section and backing vocal overdubs to come later, all while Stith simply sings "Is that a start? / Oh shallow victory." The line, like the song, treads that fine line between unsettling and gorgeous.


Though the lyrics are essentially an after thought, their delivery is an instrument in and of itself as Stith varies expertly between a reaching falsetto and a distorted drone. The intro to "Spirit Parade" consists of little but Stith's multi tracked voice, overdubbed at different speeds and sung at various pitches. Like Bon Iver, Stith successfully creates a one man choir and with sparse verse manages to perfectly convey the aura of specters passing through the song. Of course, Stith does occasionally drains some of the menace underneath and just shows off his ability to stitch together his sounds on tracks such as "Fire of Birds," still the rejoinder "We dance / We dance like we're / all on fire" joyfully reminds the listener that the heavy ghost still hangs overhead.

To put it succinctly, Stith almost serves as a one man Radiohead, putting his own polyphonic, technically marvelous stamp on whatever genre or song structure he wishes to tackle. It will be fascinating to see his progression as an artist. To cite just one peer, Andrew Bird has quickly been able to balance his baroque abilities with tight pop structures. Stith largely escapes this need with 5 minutes being just enough for him to conjure what he requires but his ambitions and skills seem a bit too large for such a limited format.


RATING:

-Vman



Buy It!