Leave it to Wes Anderson to turn classic Roald Dahl characters into quirky claymation renditions of his normative actors like Bill Murray or Jason Schwartzman.  In Fantastic Mr. Fox, Anderson proves that he’s got a much firmer grip on American nostalgia than, oh say, Spike Jonze, whose Where the Wild Things Are provoked a hip response to a genuinely bad rendition of a children’s book.  There’s nothing new about Fantastic Mr. Fox.  The stop-motion is tendentious, the voice-overs are unremarkable, and it’s clear that Anderson is trying not to break new ground except in medium.  But you know what?  It works.

I’ll be the first to say it: I like Wes Anderson movies.  For some reason there’s a stigma against liking his movies which lends a totally unwarranted superiority complex to those who don’t.  I don’t care how pretentious they are or how a representation of the mediocrity of life can’t be done more than once, they’re entertaining, they’re funny. Fantastic Mr. Fox is really no different, except that the transference from human banality to that of foxes (or the animal world in general) also necessitates a transfer from real life to imaginary, from three-dimensional to the perception of three-dimensions.  The stop-motion of Fantastic Mr. Fox is exceptionally well-suited to the warmth of the film.  The quiet, gentle voices of George Clooney (Mr. Fox) and Meryl Streep (Mrs. Fox) bring the film-screen closer to the audience.  We empathize because we can relate to these……foxes…

Like I said, other than the claymation Fantastic Mr. Fox offers little more than any other Wes Anderson movie, which is saying something, although perhaps this one’s not quite as good because of its basis on Roald Dahl’s children’s novella of the same title.  That’s where Anderson throws in foxes riding motorcycles, a rival collegiate rat with an aggrandizing alcohol problem, and a bureaucratic animal world reminiscent of something like The Secret of Nihm.  None of that’s in the book, but we can expect a director as talented as Anderson to create a world within a world of our expectations of the film, something which (not to harp on a bad movie) Where the Wild Things Are couldn’t do.

I know this hasn’t been much of a critique of Fantastic Mr. Fox, more so a critique of Wes Anderson and his superiority to other very disappointing children’s book-movies (Where the Wild Things Are, just in case you’ve been skimming).  This is the first movie this year that I’ve gone to with brimming expectation and it’s the only one I’ve left feeling truly satisfied.

A good show took place Saturday evening in Dalton.

The specters of jazz greats Duke Ellington and Oliver Nelson were definitely present in last night’s Jazz Band concert season opener, Stolen Moments.

Under the direction of Dr. Tom Evans, last season’s jazz band sported a tight group of senior members. This quarter’s jazz band was young, of the fourteen members in the ensemble eight are first years, and this concert would prove to be the make or break moment for the Band’s season.

The set began with an upbeat number called Got Rhythm by Doug Beach.  Throughout the evening, Dr. Evans engaged the audience with his anecdotes on the personnel and the music. He posed Got Rhythm as a challenge to the ensemble, who play the head and shout chorus unsupported by the rhythm section. All three soloists, one of the three being Dr. Evans, himself, proved they did indeed have rhythm.

Towards the middle of the set they performed Michael Mossman’s mambo flavored arrangement of the Duke Ellington standard, C-Jam Blues. Standing all of 4’11” without the additional podium and heels, Margaux Reckard, First year First Trumpet, led the section skillfully. Her chops are yet another reminder that size doesn’t matter. The piece featured a great portion of the line-up, including the masterful cowbell player, Ian Miller, and as the audience tapped their feet and bobbed their heads, it made one wish for a dance floor and a willing partner.

They followed up C-Jam Blues with the surprising addition of third trumpet turned vocalist, Amanda Patton, for How about You? It was a standard 1940s pop hit, but under Evans direction and Patton’s brassy vocals it still struck a chord and highlighted the versatility of the group.

The concerts title piece, Stolen Moments, was set off by the band’s desire for “mood lighting.” With the lights down low and the cool jazz wafting overhead, the obvious temptation was to be lulled to sleep, but the hot line of soloists prevented the possibility. Aaron Parach on alto sax headed off the piece that ended with a drum solo by Mike “Iggy” Ignagni.

Evans ended the concert with a piece called Back Burner that featured the sax section in a new light. First year Tenor sax, Joe Barth, played into the credenza and left me wondering what that kind of young talent was doing outside of the conservatory.

Having proven themselves worthy by occasionally channeling a few jazz greats, the band capped off the night with an encore of an apparent band favorite, Buffalo Wings.  As the audience exited into the chilly November air, they expressed their awe and favor to one another, looking forward to a spring concert which would surely yield a more tempered and tight-knit group. The predominant question: how much better could these very talented individuals get?

Kalamazoo College First Year, Shafer Oudeh

Around a quarter of the way through my second beer of the evening my excellent time at the Fillimore Detroit seeing Converge, Mastodon, and Dethklok was starting to grow uneasy. Perhaps it was the extreme proximity of people—the show was extremely crowded—but that’s not unusual at a show with two popular headliners. The thing that was beginning to string me out was overstimulation: the stage during all three bands was dominated by something concertgoers had better start expecting more and more—a video screen. The concert’s multimedia approach made for a unique and cohesive experience—it was the only thing connecting the three bands I saw in any logical way.

Converge has been getting interdisciplinary with their bad selves for years. While the band is most well known as the world’s premier mathcore outfit (sorry, Dillinger Escape Plan) Vocalist Jacob Bannon is a celebrated visual artist whom FIGHT! Magazine credited with creating the skulls-with-wings motif the mainstream public (especially Affliction tee shirts) has so lovingly adopted. Bannon has been in control of the band’s now-iconographic imagery and art work for years—as they played, the video screen kept a static image of his excellent artwork on their new album Axe To Fall.

Still, they felt like the odd band out to me. Their abrasive and technical hardcore had most people besides myself standing about aimlessly, despite the boys playing their guts out; Bannon raced around the stage at terminal velocity shrieking his damndest, and guitarist Kurt Ballou did not so much play his guitar as domestically abuse it into creating sounds no manmade thing should be able to make. Even though Axe To Fall is by far their most accessible record, the material’s light years away from the power hooks touted by the rest of the bill. I’ll be seeing Converge again in a more intimate setting on their next tour to see how the sound translates to people who want to hear it.

Mastodon kicked the affair into high gear for their set by playing their 2009 opus Crack the Skye (currently frontrunner in my best album of 2009 list which I have written about before) in its entirety.  From my position near the front and center the sound was excellent, but due to sound issues—the drums, kick especially, were far too loud over the PA system—much of the nuance of that album was rendered moot to most of the audience, even though they sang nearly every lyric with guts and fury befitting Mastodon. The concert was accompanied by a film heavily inspired by German expressionist films (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari natch) which illuminated the obscure narrative behind the music. The images, often psychedelic and symbolic, pulled the album out of the realm of pure music and into an experience. This was the closest thing to seeing Pink Floyd’s seminal tour of The Wall that I may ever take part in—an experience I deeply cherish.

It occurred to me that in the age of downloading replacing the physical product, the music itself has become a promotional tool for the actual product. We here at The Kosmo are trying to bring Journalism into this abstract cloudform possibility that some people call “The New Media.” But before then, I hadn’t considered that the media I critique may be further along than I am. The question plaguing the ill music industry has become, to the progressive-minded: what is the product now? Mastodon’s answer is the live experience.

Dethklok’s answer, however, is not just the live experience, nor the Metalokalypse cartoon, nor the album, but Dethklok in and of itself. People, hear me out, Dethklok is the future.

Dethklok wants YOU to be a 'Gear'

Musically speaking, Dethklok isn’t anything too special—their particular brand of melodic death metal neatly bridges Queen and Cannibal Corpse neatly but predictably (they still write better songs than most similar ‘serious’ bands, though). Their live performance in terms of musicians was likewise straightforward, minus of course their drummer, the legendary Gene Hoglan. Dethlkok’s greatest asset is their songs—unlike predecessors Spinal Tap, Dethlkok know how to write a song that is at once brutal, catchy, melodic and funny, with healthy doses of blackened social criticism in most of their tunes.

It did not occur to me until seeing the song live with visual component that “Into the Water” was as much a warning about global warming as a song about the world being conquered by fish. The best laughs probably went to “Dethsupport,” both a rollicking barnburner about euthanasia as well as a tribute to the classic Death song “Pull the Plug”… until the song turns its barbs on the healthcare system, making small’s “It’s costing too much/ pull the plug,” frighteningly relevant. Dethlkok’s performance was all about the visual component, showing synchronized music videos matching their setlist in the style of the Metalokalypse cartoon featuring the show’s characters.

The experience impressed upon me that Dethklok is pure product, taking Spinal Tap to its logical extreme in the modern era. The TV show, videos, live concert, and album all function as one to convey Dethklok as a cohesive whole, in efforts to make frontman/voice actor Brendan Small’s semi-fictional band an actual cultural force aimed directly at both metalheads and non-heshers.

Small is aware of the cartoon’s appeal to non-metalheads: one cartoon interlude as the band re-tuned their guitars humorously explained the rules of the mosh pit to those new to the experience. As the cartoon explained “knocking someone down and not picking them up is what we scientifically refer to as a dick move.” Even I laughed out loud at that one. The concert even followed a bizarre and nonsensical plot; bringing performance back into the realm of musical theater… does that make the ‘Klok Rent for Slayer fans? Dethklok’s crowd more than any other was full of young people and women, both rarities in extreme metal, probably drawn in by the theatriciality and polish of the presentation as a whole.  Only a group of performers as in-tune with their audience could get away with calling their fans brainless mutants and be greeted with rousing cheers—a testament to how well formulated and thought out the Dethklok brand is, and how effective Small’s pitch black humor connects with the modern media age.