We’re Only Blood On Light On Life

Sonic Youth “Wish Fulfillment (Rehearsal Tapes Version)” – In the context of the Sonic Youth catalog, “Wish Fulfillment” has always been a bit of an oddity in the sense that it’s actually a pretty straightforward love song with a dynamic verse-chorus-verse structure that would have made a lot more sense on alt-rock radio than the actual singles released in support of Dirty. It’s not much of a surprise that the song is a popular favorite among Sonic Youth fans, particularly the ones who got into the band as a teenager in the ’90s. Though the lyrics heavily imply that the song is sung from the perspective of someone stalking a celebrity, it works just as well as a more generalized song about unrequited love. After all, being obsessed with a celebrity isn’t all that different from having an intense teenage crush on someone that you barely know. In both cases, it’s all about creating an elaborate fantasy to justify a superficial interest. It’s just a matter of degree, really. (Click here to buy it from Insound.)

String Quartet Tribute To Sonic Youth “Wish Fulfillment” – As with many many of the best string quartet recordings of contemporary pop songs released on the Vitamin label, this version of “Wish Fulfillment” shows the song in a new light rather than simply coming off as an intriguing but inessential adaptation. (This is more or less the case for the rest of the album, though it is mostly quite lovely.) All of the melancholy and hopeless yearning in the original is amped up to nearly unbearable levels, resulting in a grand, dramatic tearjerker just begging to be used as the love theme of some incredibly depressing movie. (Click here to buy it from Vitamin Records.)

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Most of the lukewarm or negative reviews that I have read about this movie thus far seem to be from devoted fans who feel as though they’ve been wronged by the adaptation, but since my geekiness has never taken the form of Hitchhiker’s fandom, I believe that I benefited greatly from coming to this film with only a tentative grasp on the concept. Basically, it’s just a very fun movie. It’s about as twee as a post-Star Wars space adventure is likely to get, with or without the brief scene in which the lead characters are rendered in yarn animation. The core cast is adorable but never cloying, and the jokes mostly hit the mark. (I especially enjoyed Sam Rockwell as the vapid charmer Zaphod Beeblebrox.) I admire the brisk pacing of the plot, though I must admit that at a few points in the story I was vaguely confused. Hopefully this film will do well enough to warrant the production of its sequels, as this movie was more of a set up for a series than a fully contained narrative. For me, this is no different from how I relate to the Harry Potter franchise – I am fairly indifferent to the source material, but I’m willing to have a couple hours of noncommital fun with the film version every other year or so.