Tati’s sense of mod­ernistic detach­ment remind­ed me the like­ly apoc­ryphal tale that John Ford shot The Grapes of Wrath in Arkansas because it looked more like Okla­homa. As a kid, I remem­ber see­ing La Défense from a bus and maybe we stopped there, but if we did I took no pic­tures of it. It felt like Cen­ter City Philadel­phia after 6 p.m. or the Finan­cial Dis­trict or any down­town busi­ness dis­trict for that mat­ter, a place­less place, anony­mous by design, built on an imper­son­al scale, utter­ly unin­hab­it­ed and “cen­tral” to noth­ing in particular.

Lis­ten: Arcade Fire — “Black Mirror”

With­out bela­bor­ing the point, the new Arcade Fire record came as a com­plete sur­prise. There’s nary a trace of the Bright Eyes des­per­a­tion to be found, which to me was the ruin of Funer­al. Neon Bible is dark­er and mood­i­er with­out as much effort. Some­times it’s Ocean Rain, oth­ers it’s Born to Run. For what it’s worth, “Black Waves/Bad Vibrations“is their most “Thun­der Road” yet.

Play­time is to film what Exer­cis­es in Style is to lit­er­a­ture. Tati’s hero­ic buf­foon Hulot returns as Every­man, some­times quite lit­er­al­ly, in this Chap­linesque ballet.

I think it’s because they’re not try­ing so hard to be Spring­steen that Neon Bible real­ly works for me. They just hap­pened to arrive there and then real­ized it was­n’t so bad. And since they sound like Echo & the Bun­ny­men some­times, just as acci­den­tal­ly, it’s a nice change of pace.

Twen­ty years from now, I would­n’t be sur­prised if this SNL per­for­mance does­n’t seem as unlike­ly as many of those from twen­ty years ago. I can’t tell if that’s good or bad yet.