Exactly 11 years ago, Miles Zuniga was jetting off to Amsterdam with his Austin-based alt-rock outfit Fastball to try to put some touring muscle behind its latest release, The Harsh Light Of Day. Expectations were high, given the surprising mainstream success of 1998’s All The Pain Money Can Buy, which the band milked for almost two years. Fast-forward to today, and Zuniga has humbler aspirations for his first solo effort, These Ghosts Have Bones (33 1/3), a wrenchingly personal, fitfully melodic ode to the breakup of his 10-year marriage. Though Fastball is still very much a working entity, Ghosts’ quirky centerpiece, “Marfa Moonlight,” would’ve undoubtedly been a much different animal with bandmates Tony Scalzo and Joey Shuffield involved. The same goes for the rest of this inward-looking song cycle. Zuniga will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.
Zuniga: The Five Obstructions is a 2003 Danish film by Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth. Von Trier’s favorite movie is The Perfect Human (1967), a film by Mr. Leth. Trier throws down the gauntlet and challenges his mentor to remake his own movie five times, each time with a different “obstruction” devised by von Trier. Pretentious, cerebral and entertaining, this is one of my favorite movies. Leth cranks out five amazing variations of his own movie, and it reminds me of how Bob Dylan could change his own work so radically. Maybe the best example is his two versions of “I Threw It All Away” from the Nashville Skyline and Hard Rain albums.
Video after the jump.
