Acidemic - Mediated

Stuff I Liked in the 1970s. - Part 1

2011-11-30T08:08:00.000-08:00

My earliest recollection of getting really into a toy was my Dr. Zauis doll, which was about 3/4 of the GI Joe size, but we in the Knapp Elementary ape society wouldn't play with ordinary Joes, and one kid tried to infiltrate with his pint-sized Six Million Dollar Man. Apes kicked his ass! Then Zaius lost a leg, but my wily babysitter tied a shoelace lasso to his little ape hand so he could lasso things and swing around. Those were some crazy adventures, climbing the stairs like it was Everest. Eventually he disappeared... at least I can't remember losing him or throwing him out or outgrowing him. And of course we had viewmasters (above), with which to see dinosaurs, Alice in Wonderland, the Planet of the Apes, and various geographical excursions in exciting 3-D!

The arrival of Aurora monster models changed everything. Dracula was always my favorite, so I got him first, and shunned Dr. Jekyll and Quasimodo, who looked to much like Bruce Glickis a kid I fought with a lot because I couldn't stand his fat dumb face. It wasn't bullying because he was actually bigger than me, and all our fights were bloody nose draws. Fuck Bruce Glickis!

Charlie's Angels was my first big introduction to the appeal of girls. I couldn't stay up to see the show, but I clipped pics from magazines, TV Guide and Time especially, then later Teen Beat and all that crap. Eventually I made a big scrapbook of it all and then sold the scrapbook to a kid down the street for $40, a fortune at the time. And I'd moved on by then.

And then - well, WW2, you can guess the rest. I was a boy! I joined forces in 6th grade with a kid named Alan Pyle -we started drawing and selling our own line of comics, and of course playing a lot of WW2 HO scale campaigns. Later we moved onto designing TI-994A computer games and D&D modules. I left my girl obsession in the dust until the Playboy years began. Next stop: punk rock, real girls, and the dawn of the VCR!

Wrap Your (Girl) Troubles in Drinks - a vidmix.

2011-11-11T12:16:00.000-08:00

The divine Mary

Ah the 1990s - the last gasp for mopey depression- if you were in your 20s during this era, as I was then you know that it was a good time for music. Nirvana's explosion in 1992-93 had opened MTV up to all things even remotely grunge, so weird college acts that would normally never see the light of day got a chance to become fleeting stars. If you were a mopey feminist who liked to cry all night in his bourbon, it was your time to shine. It all ended with Napster killing small labels and Elliot Smith stabbing himself in the chest. Now. all we have are dusty CDs hidden far away in case books, and memories. Even the depression that spawned this music and made it listenable is largely gone thanks to SSRIs, and of course Britney Spears and MTV changing its tunes. But the music never dies!

Helium - "Wanna be a Vampire Too, Baby" - love the scrolling effect. Elegant.

Cat Power - "Bathysphere" (cool found footage video by AnititonyA)

L7 - "Pretend We're Dead" - Lesbian feminism in a grunge-angst setting..."Wake up and smell the coff-fee!"

Jennifer Trynin "Better than Nothing" - one of my favorites, since it mentions doing shots of whiskey!

Kittywinder - "Crazy Weed" - 1997 - a Boston / New Hampshire / NYC band that broke up only months before I started dating the bassist... crazy weed is right?

PJ Harvey - "Legs" - (live in 95) its host album "Dry" was released in 1993, but it's as forward leaning as ever. I love her more than a word could say, though her last few albums have left me... well, not dry, but not soaking like Dry or Stories from the Sea.

The unforgettable Space Team Electra - "Luminous Crush"

The awesome Pixies -"Gigantic" in '88! BN (Before Nirvana)

Even farther before, one of my all-time favorite songs ever, "The English Roses" by my first rock crush, one that's shaped my destiny, Chrissie Hynde and her Pretenders. Half the band would be dead soon, and 30 years later, she's still rocking. I love you, CH!

The Despair of Total Harmony: A Short Mix

2011-10-11T16:45:00.000-07:00

Lee Hazlewood - "The Night Before"
(Aka "I see those empty whiskey bottles.")

Evie Sands - "Anyway that you Want Me"

Fontella Bass - "To be Free"

Heart - "Magic Man"

Howlin' Wolf - "How Many More Years"

Kimberly Linn - "The Sparks" - for Bela

"Into Dust" - The Gears of War 3 commercial

2011-09-17T14:53:00.000-07:00

There's an ingenious TV commercial for some video game coming out Sept. 20 called GEARS OF WAR 3. It uses one of my favorite songs, "Into Dust" by Mazzy Star and the juxtaposition of this magnificently still and existentially melancholy song with these apocalyptic visions of war and sci fi machinery is so beyond the usual for this sort of thing that it becomes art. It's not a video game commercial anymore, it's a quick, devastating reading of America's post-apocalyptic pulse. Acidemic salutes the advertising team of Twofifteen McCann!

There's a vibe in the "Brothers to the End" tag line which makes us see that this dismal cityscape, with all the black rainy clouds and robot monsters, isn't going to rise again, not for a hundred million years, and the hopeful little blue lights on the backpack straps of the warriors backing up on their hillside defense position, are going to go out, very soon. It's an Altamont moment, the Stones carrying on under their little stage lights as the best ideas of humanity are crushed under the heel of bad drugs and idolatry right before their eyes. And there's no more fallback position, no backstage safe area, no green room, no supply depot. Just brothers. Street-fighting men. I have no idea what kind of backstory to past Gears of War commercials or game plots this may allude to. I'm just reading the commercial as it's own thing. On that level, it's just a shout away from devastating.

I always thought that Mazzy Star would have saved Zack Snyder's SUCKER PUNCH from sucking as bad as it did, and it turned out I was right. There needed to be a counterpoint to the soulless CGI mayhem of PUNCH's 'fantasy' scenes, which instead were all set to obvious strip club remixes of hits like "Sweet Dreams" and Bjork's "Army of Me." There's more mood and emotion in this damned Gears of War 3 commercial than in Snyder's last two films (by which I mean PUNCH and WATCHMEN) combined. The last time a song worked this well in a violent montage was "When The Man Comes Around" in the credit sequence of 2004's DAWN OF THE DEAD remake, directed by who else? Zack Snyder. When's that man going to come around, again, Mama? 15 months and counting...

Rooftop in Brooklyn: The Post-PJ Ipod

2011-09-09T09:11:00.000-07:00

Holly Miranda - you are truly the holy miracle your name resembles.

Mopey girl rockers - I love them, provided they don't 'over-sing' or get all slick and professional and hollow and sound like everyone else. Keep it neither too raw and lo fi nor too AOR slick and oversung and you have me at hello - it all started with PJ Harvey's 1992 classic, "Dry" - which changed my life, and let's face it, great as PJ Harvey's new album "Let England Shake" is in principle, there's only two songs that I'd ever want to hear over and over as the soundtrack to my anguished obsession du autumne, the rest is just way too serious, continuing a downer trend Harvey's been cultivating since her alleged big romantic crash following the jubilant "Stories from the City, stories from the Sea." Will we ever have a song as awesome as "You Said Something?" Look at how happy she was, rolling her eyes and being goofy:

Now she may smile and stuff, but her songs are devoid of romance and humor, and more just glum and haunted. Still, I love White Chalk and these basement videos she made (below). I wish she'd give Bob Dylan a harmonica lesson:

Luckily, my ipod soars with new and recent girls who nail that moody emotional swamp I walk home in, opening doors to past loves and doomed romances, and making my feet leave the ground in cathartic movement.

SMOOSH - "The World's Not Bad"
From their awesome album of the same name - these girls are too young for me to ever see play live (shouldn't they have curfews?) but there's no denying, for me anyway, the genius simplicity and power of this album, and this song in particular - love that simple, almost percussive piano and the whispery harmony - this is the kind of stuff that girls tend to grow out of as they start dating guys who try to get them to be more slick and professional and let their boyfriends add long elaborate dobro solos. It's what ruined Azure Ray! Smoosh sisters, don't ever change!

EMA - "California"
Love this song, with its apocalyptic organ/drone chords and EMA's rattled off anguished lyrics about the alienation of L.A.: "Now you've corrupted us all with your sexuality / tried to tell us love was free / tried to tell us love was free." And it's not long before she's carrying a gun like Lou Reed in The Blue Mask - I love walking home from work with this song on my ipod, "I'm just 22 / I'm just 22 / I don't mind dyin'" Video's kind of dull though...

JEALOUS GIRLFRIENDS - "Secret Identity"
There was a year where I listened to this song and this album every day on the way to and from work, so now I can't help but think of my East village walk-up, my gorgeous long lost ex, and the grotty subway whenever I hear it. I thought Holly Miranda was kind of busted for some reason, as I never saw waht the band looked like - how could she be as gorgeous as her voice? But she AM! The below video is cute but you can't hear the bass which is one of the best aspects. Still love her rock and roll arms.

ELECTRELANE - "Oh Sombra!"
I love these girls! We were myspace buddies for awhile, maybe still are. This video is perfect at recreating that ipod and Q Train commute vibe, and the slowly mounting beauty/anguish of the song and Spanish lyrics perfectly match the sinking feeling of returning to Brooklyn after a rainy day of city errands.

LANA DEL REY - "Video Games"
This girl reminds me of at least two of my long lost loves, and the sweet pain of remembering her and how I lost her and the tragic tender sadness that memory creates is all tied into Lana's husky, Los Angeles voice; the inclusion of the drunken stumbling audio is genius, as is the found footage ensemble around her, conjuring a Hollywood of ghosts, roadside attractions, and sun-drenched graveyards where 'happiness is never experiences, only remembered.'

BARDO POND - "Tommy Gun Angel"
Loved this song all through my divorce, so expressive, druggy, and deranged! Read my Bardo Pond appreciation here. I kind of dig Matt the Mad Hat's found footage edit for it too.

To be continued with my own mash-up for Kimberly Linn's "The Sparks" plus: Ida, Ida Maria, Rainer Maria, Mount Rainier, and Rainier Wolfcastle!

Return of X

2011-05-25T10:23:00.000-07:00

I was scared of 'rap' as a 20-something negotiating my way through the end of the Bush years but my friend Max was insistent I learn Public Enemy, NWA, the Geto Boys.. damn that stuff scared the shit out of me. But there was also cool shit, hip-hop: Young MC, Brand Nubian, De La Soul, and--my favorite--KMD.

While many of the albums linked major tracks with little in-between skits, KMD took it to a meta level with an old 'learn to speak a foreign language' record, the narrator's patient white male voice coming off clueless and arrogant to the KMD brothers, as when the narrator says "your mother likes to visit the old churches," and you hear in the back "oooh, I know he didn't just dis your mama". Hilarious! But best of all, was the feeling that the KMD crew weren't just scaring white kids and preaching local block unity, they were letting the white kids come home and see their bedrooms--finding they all could agree those old stereotypes were history - as in time to dust off "Little Black Sambo" and see what may be sampled.

Now Little Black Sambo was an album I actually had on 78's as a kid--inherited from god knows what dead relative along with Peter and the Wolf. Both albums took up about 8 double sided, inch thick 78s. Sambo depressed me, even then as a kid in the early 70s, only dimly aware of how godawful racist it was (I think I smashed the discs after ROOTS premiered). I hated it because the were just too many pancakes and tigers, too much eating and running.. it made me nauseous. So hearing the sample brought me back, but Zev Love X wasn't about to come down on me or my white brethren. He brought us along with bemused disbelief, half blaming the accusers of racism as much as the racists "you mean that coon is me?" in the joyously inclusive "Who Me?" While in "Banana Peel Blues" he waxed off about racism like he'd just gotten the textbooks at some Strong Island college class and was seeing what still applied and what didn't. You could imagine him reading passages out loud to his pals in the dorm, half mocking the text. There was something so direct and sweet about it because X refused the us vs. them of so much rhetoric on either side. Rather than try to bury Sambo in the ditches of culture's verboten junkyard--where, as Freud taught us, nothing stays buried for long without an eventual rise up zombie-style from the repressed--he dressed him up in a big parade costume, as below:

(I never actually saw any of their videos, til now, writing this, by the way - 1991 was looong before the internet and MTV was strictly commercial) Anyway, we loved the album. It sounded great high on acid.

Then, as all good things do, the summer of love ended-- groups like "Reality Used to be a Friend of Mine" and ("G'head Mr. Wendell") took new age tolerance to an almost icky new age level. And in the established acts, humorless rhetoric and druggy aggression took over. Cube left NWA and their follow-up album was just sensationalist parent outrage-courting misogyny. Brand Nubian got sucked in the undertow that followed rap's commercial success in the mid 90s, and thinking man's hip-hop got steamrolled (in the waterless horizontal bong sinse) by blunt acts like Cypress Hill and Dr. Dre.

I could not get into Dre, so rap, hip hop and I parted. I still listen to Brand Nubian and KMD, and Ice Cube, but little else. Years later while on a trip to San Francisco I found KMD's abandoned sophomore album at the famous Amoeba Records. With it's picture of a lynched Sambo on the cover. I didn't know of course that their label had dropped them over the cover, which is a classic example of the way literalism and overbearing PC ninny-itis was clouding issues in the early 90s, and that Zev's brother Sub Roc had died around the same time in a car crash, and KMD was history... and X had disappeared without a blip on my radar.

That's why another ten years later, discovering MF Doom was such a thrill, a veritable Phantom of the Opera unmasking, with a new identity, or lack thereof. Zev Love X had returned, once again quietly and under my radar, I recognized his voice in an MF Doom track playing at the old Kim's Video. It's done my OG heart a good turn to see him still out there, blazing his own unique trail, proving that straightforward examination of stereotypes causes them to melt away in the sun.

I only hope I have the balls to wear the mask one day if I should fall from grace, and thence seek to return anew, reborn, and if you need help taking down that fucking arrogant dickhead Johnny the Human Torch, let me know. And if you want to switch up, switch up!!

Kitty Kali: Julie Newmar as Catwoman (BATMAN)

2011-04-04T09:32:00.000-07:00

There's been other Cat Women: Michelle Pfeiffer (good); Eartha Kitt (fine), Halle Berry (my review here), but there's only one true Catwoman, only one gal who truly rocks the ears, tail, whip, and sparkly black bodysuit as if she was born in it: Julie Newmar. I grew up watching her in BATMAN after school with friends and then going outside and fighting, fakely but always dynamic "Pow!" "Biff!" And the gorgeous Newmar seemed most able to pull off the hat trick of being super slinky sexy yet kid-friendly; a good villain while being mostly harmless and totally polarizing on my polymorphous sexuality; lithe, sensual but never serious... at times her face has a GILDA-era Rita Hayworth quality, where a gentle line of baby fat adds youth and exuberance and makes every facial gesture into a celebration of non-sleazy sexuality. I love--and still do love--the way she get's excited over every aspect of her fabulous crimes, her uninhibited come-ons to both Robin and Batman, her handling of her minions; the comfort and delight in her own body; the way she playfully straddles pipes, or twists into weird poses rather than ever lying still...she seemed to both be incredibly hip and practically a golden age comic book drawing come to life. No wonder I grew up fantasizing about my first grade classmates as my slaves in bizarre S/M pre-orgasmic fantasias that kept me up many a night in delirious nightmares of ecstasy! (1)

I'd forgotten about the tug she had on my prepubescent hormones until I started watching the show again recently on cable (it's on the Hub! If you get TCM you probably get the Hub, so check for it!) and the supervillains make the show (though both Adam West and Burt Ward as Dick Grayson aka Robin are better than you remember): Frank Gorshin is a hysteric, cackling, Ed Harris-on-acid delight as the Riddler (Harris would make an awesome Riddler!); Burgess Meredith relishes every cackle as the penguin; Talulah Bankhead is glad to be working as the elderly Black Widow; and coming in a close second to Catwoman's marvelousness, Ceaser Romero as the Kid show clown-gone-amok Joker.

Like Newmar, Romero finds a way to tap into the deadpan comic hysteria of his character that puts the fractured lack of genuine menace into a bearable perspective. What do I mean? Take an average Batman fight. A supervillain only rarely pulls out a gun, and if they do, rarely shoots them. There's an unspoken rule between superheroes and supervillains: as long as you don't use guns, you'll be out of jail by the show's next season, even before. Jail in "Gotham's liberal prison system" is like jail in a kid's game, merely a place to rest for a two-week stretch or two, so another villain has a chance. Rather than go to jail though, Catwoman likes to die by falling great distances. In one tense two-parter, she ends up almost falling in love with the caped crusader, and he even takes out a batkerchief to shed a tear after she tumbles down a well. The dynamic duo's reaction is never the same for her as it is for other villains' 'deaths.' In a way, she's like Robin's illegitimate mother - she's the queen of the night to Batman's Sarastro in the MAGIC FLUTE. She's Irina Derevko in TV's ALIAS.

Catwoman is great too because, like the male villains, she is all inclusive, and she whips her underlings, who flinch only out of politeness to the viewer, for were they to writhe in masochistic ecstasy, much disgust would ensue all around (1). She's powerful yet playful, sexual yet beyond sex. Watching her interact with her dimwitted henchmen, you long long to be one of them. Thank the stars she doesn't have a pint-sized sidekick, like 'kitten boy' to compete with in your child's mind scenario.

The idea of the underlings in the lair is very meta if you were bad at sports like me, and liked to be the ringleader for younger kids so you could be the strongest. The supervillain persona reflects this as one who has deliberately situated themselves outside of the realm of 'the good people of Gotham City," but at the same time operate a kind of 'home for misfit toys' with plenty of low-rent riff-raff of the "aw, gee, boss" variety hanging on your every word. The vibe at the villain's lair or underground hideout is always one of giddy joviality, not so much greed as displays of greed, while the world of Bruce Wayne and his ward, Dick Grayson, is one of sober learning. Dick always has to study the piano or memorize elemental tables, etc., while the Aunt looks on, bewildered by any sort of out the ordinary behavior. Is there any doubt where the average 1970s kid would prefer to situate himself?

Lastly, a sexy supervillainess makes the Batman mythos operate at a far more evolved level, for instead of just goody two-shoes caped crusaders vs. the bad guys, ala an all-boy group of kids pretend fighting in the backyard, there's the female element, the yin-yang dichotomy, in place. She becomes the queen of the night, the chthonic enemy of normal patriarchal civilization and its inescapable shadow at the same time. How easily she gets our dynamic duo in tied-up situations, yet always leaves them room to escape! She likes the chase and the drama and the last minute rescues and like the other villains, there's a clear idea that without the dynamic duo a life of crime would be profitable but dull - no one your own age to play with.. and of course she takes the homosexual associations of the boy wonder and Batman's coded relationship and blows it out of the water by her curdling hotness. Both Batman and Robin kind of have a thing for Catwoman when she's played by Julie Newmar, and so do the rest of us red-blooded American ten year-olds.

On some strange Wagnerian level, Batman and Catwomen are our unholy true parents.

NOTES

1. the masochist thrives by his very unsightliness. Only the dominatrix, the sole witness, sees him and punishes him for being visible, thus she restores order to the universe of viewer perception and unconscious interaction. A lack of psychological acumen is apparent in the whole idea of Robin and all sidekicks for superheroes: kids don't identify with Robin but rather see him as competition. With his infantilizing green shorts he too is better left unseen, redeemed only by his fiery fearlessness and fabulous fighting flair. Burt Ward--who did all his own stunts and was a karate champ--made Robin cool despite all the best attempt of Bob Kane and company to the contrary.

Eat the light!- GHOST ADVENTURES (Travel Channel)

2011-03-19T10:13:00.000-07:00

I don't like most investigative ghost teams, but Nick, Aaron and Zak are pretty cool. I can imagine partying with them. I love how they get scared but excited, forgetting instantly they just asked the ghost to make a noise. They're right on the fence of being obnoxious, but it eventually tumbles over into callow vigor and innate showmanship. The funniest guy, the anchor to Zak's boisterous leadership, is Aaron, who deals with the haunted house hunting stress by filming himself with mouth agape and eyes popped open.

Aaron, in a rare not-spooked moment.

These guys are serious bros. "If they want us out, they're going to have throw us over that damned wall," boasts Zak. I believe them. They're not as charismatically-challenged as most ghost hunters and the lame MUFON guys over on Planet Green who think that by somehow separating truth from fiction they'll be any closer to understanding. Aaron knows best! He knows this stuff will never be understood. The whole thing is a dog chasing its own tail, but so what, the tail is ours.

Nik. He's kind of the alpha bimbro, a bit too eager to show off his perfect abs. He leaves in footage of a girl on a school bus telling him he's hot, but feels the need to explain he's taking his shirt off to show his tattoos to the ghosts of intolerant ghost nuns. There's cutaway subliminal images of a guy eating a light bulb, and old weird dolls stop motioning with their eyes. Weird sound effects and liberal interpretations of the AVP ghost whispers, "oooh! I just heard a whisper. . Oh my god! I felt that guys, that was arrrffl!" They're steadfast in their willingness to be scared but their refusal to be scared for long. "Dude that was, like, footsteps!"

Zak gets all indignant "is that what you did? You chained them up to this wall... Are you trying to communicate?" "Did my taunts just anger the spirit of a Spanish soldier?" He's about a third Clyde Beatty, a third Ben Affleck and a third Michael Moore, though he's much more transparent, it helps him be believable; he's earnest and just a little forced, and that's what TV is all about! Zak actually reminds me of me when I'm filming and bullshitting my way around as a narrator without a script, making it up as I go and barely staying on the right side of the coherence border, feeling I have to belittle my comrades onscreen when I get nervous.

I keep being afraid these guys are going to show up in my apartment and shout taunts at me, and I'd have to scream into their AVP microphones just to get a faint whisper. They'd freak out when I rose from the couch to go refill my beverage. How else do you ever really know you're dead?

Favorite TV Women Part 2

2011-03-01T08:55:00.000-08:00

Carrie Brownstein
Portlandia

I saw the first five episodes in this hilarious IFC series before putting two and two together and realizing this is the Carrie Brownstein, from that awesome post-grunge Olympia yodeling band, Sleater-Kinney. It was the biggest Sleater-Kinney moment I'd had since a 1997 road trip, passing the Sleater-Kinney highway sign driving through Washington State and going 'Hey!' That's twice Sleater-Kinney's caught me nappin'.

Brownstein herself is a two/two pinnacle: as ballsy and swaggering as any man (look at her primal stare above) and yet hot and sweet when she wants. Brownstein is some kind of amazing non-diva talent that she can match Fred Armisen scene for scene and bring all sorts of minute, letter-perfect comedic inflection in an array of hilariously skewed characters, then go kick ass as a guitarist and singer for one of the best all-girl rock bands in the history of the Pacific Northwest: "Oh - you've got the dark / est eyeyeyeeyeyeyeyeyeys..."

Jackie Barrett
America's Psychic Challenge

Speaking of darkness. When the psychic who won said she represented the light and Barrett was 'evil', or used 'dark energy', I smelt a rat. A truly 'light' person isn't going to rain on the parade of darkness, because to rain is to become darkness. Dig? Jackie is an expert crime scene analyst, a serial killer profiler, and if you don't have a good balance of light/dark that stuff can kill your soul. You can tell Jackie is made for the job because she doesn't prioritize one polarity over the other, and that is the path of the truly enlightened who see 'death is great as life' (to quote Walt Whitman). When Jackie circles a subject, feeling their aura and telling them "you know who I am? They call me the white serpent," you get a chill in your soul but also a sense of relief, she's using spookiness as a tool, not a crutch. She's balanced - she knows when you repress the darkness you give it strength, so she lets the illusion go. Seek not to destroy darkness altogether lest you become darkness, this I say to you. And Heaven only knows the amount of pain and misery she's prevented in her work. In staying true to her quirky self, and using dark power to combat darkness, Jackie is a true agent of karma, and a living example that psychics--the real ones--are true treasures to be revered. Read her awesome web page here.

Lizzy Caplan
Party Down

I'm always wary of the perennially single cute smart girl in the ensemble sitcom, as they're clearly meant for male audience members like myself to crush over, without having to factor in some boyfriend, but Lizzy's character is an exception. She's cute, fun, a genius comedienne, and adorable beyond description. Here's what she said about landing the gig on this STARS comedy (avail. on Netflix streaming):

It was starting like three days after I found out about it and I just gunned for it, because it's ten episodes and it's hilarious people with a whole lot of freedom. You're definitely not pandering for huge ratings or anything, so it's the sweetest kind of gig.

Sweetest gig, for the sweetest girl!

Rashida Jones

Parks and Recreation

With Amy Poehler embracing her post-baby weight gain and dolling herself up in unflattering knits, it's up to Rashida Jones to carry the hotness weight on the sporadically amusing Parks and Recreation. The problems with the show seem to hinge around its attempt to be 'nice' -- and those of us who know comedy know niceness has no place in it (see Jackie Barrett, above). We look to comedy to channel our aggression - the comedian acts out and says the things we want to say and does the things we want to do, but wouldn't dare, and we're purged. It's like when you're really upset and pissed off and you meet someone who is acting even more pissed than you feel and suddenly you're calm and telling them to relax. Ever notice that happen? Comedy is like that, but Parks is not like that because it misunderstands and tries to be nice in itself, leaving you to deal with your accumulated venom some other way.

Rashida Jones is awesome though, dusky beauty with a sexy voice and impeccable pedigree (Quincy Jones is her father, Peggy Lipton [TWIN PEAKS] her mom). With all that star wattage you'd think she wouldn't be as grounded and intelligent as she is, but she makes a great gal pal for Amy and brings a smudgy, accessible hotness to the show that no one, including her roster of handsome but bland boyfriends, can match.

Ms. J. Alexander, Runway Diva Coach Extraordinaire

America's Next Top Model

While not a woman per se, Ms. Jay certainly qualifies as a queen of wit, sharpness and knowledge - his/her eye for fashion and proper model runway walking makes him a permanent panel member on America's Next Top Model. Nothing makes me fall on the floor laughing more than when he gets his voice all deep and breathy to discuss girls who look to 'dragalicious.' He's adorable and next to Tyra, makes the show the awesome paragon of reality TV and simulacra self-reflexivity it is. Go Miss J.!

Favorite Women of Television - Part 1

2011-01-13T08:16:00.000-08:00

1. Tyra Banks - America's Next Top Model:
The modern Kali of reality TV, this host and creator of America's Next Top Model can be super nurturing one minute then cold as ice the next as she sends another chick off the show, but not before a good luck hug. Even if you're not a fashionista the show is amazing as it's so meta-textual. Think about it: a reality show about young girls who choke up when they get in front of a camera for a photo shoot, but meanwhile they're on camera constantly for the actual show. Together with the judges you get to do modeling crits, judging the success of photographs - so you're watching a show about looking at photographs. The result is a weird hybrid of commercial-within-a-show (I know lots about Cover Girl designer lip gloss now) and meta-within-meta Russian doll boxing, and over it all Tyra stands like a beacon of always-on-point dynamic brilliance, demonstrating in every head tilt and enunciation exactly what she's trying to instill in this cross section of our great land.

2. Tina Fey - 30 Rock: Her repartee with Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock is one of the more inspiring things on TV, with the whole 'will they or won't they' element scuttled for a more progressive mentor-mentee relationship. As someone who's sponsored and mentored lesbians over the years, I salute! The stuff about eating your feelings and the Cathy-esque spazzola stuff seems forced though, Tina. You're so much more than an everywoman!

3. Maya Rudolph - SNL 2000-2007:
Perhaps she's just too confident to demand top billing or seek a film career, and that's why her name doesn't strike a chord the way her SNL top-shelf alums like Fey and Amy Poehler do, but Maya is the bomb! Her seven-year spin in early 00's SNL included the Donatella Versace holiday parties, her tragically hilarious rendition of Whitney Houston on her way up, down, and semi-up again, and Vinnie Verdecci's daughter reciting her English class days of the week... and man can she sing! Tru-baller SNL fans ask: When is she going to get he own Best Of? In the meantime, every last season of SNL is finally on Netflix streaming, so you can hunt down most of her stuff (though why some of them are so incomplete you want to shake SNL grand master Lorne Michaels by the scruff of his neck!)

4. Candace DeLong - Deadly Women:
For those of us too squeamish to watch serial killer dudes abduct and torture innocent girls, the Deadly Women show on Investigative Discovery is a godsend, recreating three factual scenarios each episode with actors playing an array of poisoners, shooters, manglers and matricidal maniacs, all of whom are women. It's narrated by a woman with a great if predictable sense of pausing and dramatic enunciation, and presided over by the regal Candace.

I keep waiting for them to do one on Brenda Wiley, my Central NJ champion of incarcerated girls who killed their mom and nosy brother at age 15: who knows if DeLong gets my letters? What's important is that she was the first female FBI criminal profiler and the inspiration for Clarice Starling. And she's still hot! I love the slightly bitchy way she lays out the behavioral underpinnings of the girl killers, saying things like "She needed to buy things to feel better about herself, and if she had to kill someone to pay the bills, that was... fine... with her!"

5. Jan Hooks (SNL 1986-1991, recurring guest appearances on 30 Rock)
Now most recognizable as Jenna's greedy meth head nympho-alcoholic stage mom in 30 Rock, who'd have guessed Hooks was once super hot and sultry and a regular on SNL? I admire how she now acts as if she's been kind of white trash Liz Taylor brazen and busty all her life as said mom, while her foxiness at SNL tells a whole other story.
****

Yeah, I know, some of these chicks is from yay far away in the past, but so what? I really only watched SNL reruns on Netflix streaming, and discovered Deadly Women, 30 Rock, marathons of America's Next Top Model, and lots of WW2 documentaries. I'm turning into a vegetable, but that's what 2011 is all about.

New PJ Harvey Song / Beautiful Video

2010-12-20T10:53:00.000-08:00

My god, she looks so relaxed. I love this girl, I feel like we've grown up together. From me blasting "Dry" in my old Plymouth Maverick going to and from work in NJ in 1991, to tripping on delerium tremens and a broken heart through scorching summer 1993 in 1993 to "Rid of Me" in my cassette walkman, shuddering on the bring of O.D.s and hollow e fabulousness for the overrated but still cool "To Bring you My Love," sobering up in the emotional release tearful flood of "Is this Desire?," then the super hip release and moving to Brooklyn and happiness with Stories of the City, the break-up fuck you of "Uh Huh Her" - I was never really happy following that, and then the mellow hammer-hitting shorty (and last CD I've ever bought) "White Chalk" which saw me through my early divorce, And now, god bless her, she seems very happy, her hair looks good, the video is in Hi def, gorgeous and not pretentious.... her skin looks clear, she looks relaxed. I'm so proud of her for maintaining her integrity and brilliance for all these decades.... she's a survivor and never sold out or bought into the bourgeoisie or downtown snobbery. She's her own being, and has given me a soundtrack for my emotional life, I know she belongs to the world, but her music seems created just for me and that's the mark of a great artist.

She got pinned down at the party pit

2010-10-20T11:40:00.000-07:00

I love the first three albums of the Hold Steady! Right? Until they got straight and realized you gotta stay positive.

Ask someone who was in the fast lane for awhile and got out: it's amusing to listen to Craig Finn's detailed stories of drug use among the Minneapolis youth and be able to connect deep, even though I've never done heroin - and taking years to realize that my initial translation of the lyric "she got pinned down at the party pit" (from the song "Party Pit") was that she met a nice clean cut boy and started going steady. I figured there might be some hidden sexual assault meaning in the idea of 'being pinned down..."

For shame! It shows you how a lifetime of hearing bad lyrics to pop songs make you presume the worst about even druggy troubadours like Craig Finn. Is Finn so desperate for a rhyme that he would just through 'pinned' in there as a shortcut that's not been used since "Bye Bye Birdie?" -- I was in the chorus for that in high school and one of our lines went: "I heard she got pinned" / yeah yeah, I was hopin' she would / now we're livin' at last / goin' steady for good."

Am I such a square as that? Should that be my initial thought, rather than presuming it's about heroin, the only drug I never got to try before my personal 9/11, the year and month of 11/98? That's the breaks... sounds pretty awesome, until it tightens up its tentacles. But hey, I got other things to slide in there, like ecstasy, love, headlining rock shows lost in the glitter and the gold.

"First Night" taps more beautifully into the sorrows of ecstasy than any song I know -- the melancholy warm glow remembering of remembering the first time you really got off with just the right friends around and everything fell magically into place and it's all warm fuzzy and you feel like yourself and loved by people who's love you actually want, and free for the first time--extroverted!--and even into the morning until you say goodbye to people who are now far more than friends because your open souls bled into each other's.

Then you have to wake up alone the next afternoon, hung over, a puffy gray stranger in the mirror. You sit around and realize that even if you do more than you did last night, with the same people, you'll never feel that good again... it's just a tortured memory. Every time I hear the sweet juicy opening chords of "Hummer" by Smashing Pumpkins I get the chills of that lost rush. And aside from AA, you just don't get the emotional support to realize hindsight is golden and not 20/20 and maybe you grow out of it and let go of the burning needle of forward momentum and youth, but then what happens?

I guess the heavy stuff aint quite at its heaviest
by the time it gets out to suburban Minneopolis.

"Heaven is Whenever" is a pretty good album, but it's no "Boys and Girls of America" which captures that giddy "first night" feeling so well it never fails to make me cry, get chills and or rock out. "Separation Sunday," the album before that was pretty great, too, with that instant favorite song "Your Little Hoodrat Friend" which is like you're 16 and trying to seem cool to the older kids and love all the obnoxious punk rock they like, and then you hear the first Violent Femmes album and you know it's all going to be okay and two minutes later your very first alcohol buzz kicks in and finally black and white Kansas fades away and everything glows in technicolor and you can talk to girls without blushing and stammering. The "Boys and Girls of America" reminds me of that.

Some reviews say Finn's characters are 'low-lifes' but I don't think that's true, aside from that when you hang out with heroin people the scene naturally gonna get a little gnarly. That's why i stopped going to NYC parties, because cocaine came back, circa 1998, and as far as I know it's still there... I couldn't deal with coke, too ego-ish and too hard on my nostrils, which would swell shut and bubble out hot liquid snot all day which turns off all the models. I did drugs not to get laid or be cool anyway, but to see God and ask him to make me a better writer and painter and less depressed, not to sit with beautiful models too ritzy and stuck up to talk to me and watch themfall over themselves coming onto skeevy hoodrats who follow in the wake of the coke dealer's cell phone call ("yo! they got hot bitches here! Get yo ass over!"). Sometimes just to annoy them I'd act all high, sniffle a lot and act suspicious and moist-eyed after exiting the bathroom; they'd be all on my tip after that until they realized I was faking them out, but then again getting into bathroom was impossible, so if you weren't drunk enough to pee in a bucket in the back of the kitchen, you had to go home early, and fast.

Like listening to she got pinned down at the party pit, it was so funny to realize that I'd just assumed--and subsequently never liked the song as much as the others--that getting "pinned down at the party pit" means, you know, the de regeur of the life- the going steady for good - instead skipping off the bathroom with her girlfriends to pop some H, some horse, a first timer! Some white lightning!!

A pin, it turns out, is a needle full of heroin, or a pop, what else do you pop the skin with? I presume it means you don't do a whole mainlain into the vain but just pop some into the skin. I in my blithe laziness had assumed it meant the old-fashioned phrase of going steady. What? It made me realize that while that kind of lazy thesaurus rhyming (I need a one syllable word for going steady!) might do for a normal singer, Craig Finn is a real writer, a man of few words where every word counts, and every other word is about the scene.

God! How many other lyrics have I misinterpreted!? "Shooting Star" by Lou Reed? "Hit me with your best shot?" by Pat Benetar? "Monkey Man" by the Stones? "Shot of Love" by Bob Dylan? Who knows, maybe every single rock song worth a damn is about getting pinned down.... and I'm pretty sure we kissed.

The Tao of Cash

2010-09-04T23:29:00.000-07:00

I’d been reading Sogyal Rinpoche’s THE TIBETAN BOOK OF LIVING AND DYING and had a panic attack when I read Rinpoche’s response to a student who said (referring to a talk Rinpoche had just given on impermanence: “All this seems obvious, tell me something new.”

Rinpoche replies

” Have you actually realized the truth of impermanence? Have you so integrated it with your every thought, breath and movement that your life has been transformed? Ask yourself these two questions: Do I remember at every moment I am dying and that everyone and everything else is, and so treat all beings at all times with compassion? Has my understanding of death and impermanence becomes so keen and so urgent that I am devoting every second to the purpose of enlightenment? If you can answer yes to both of these then you have really understood impermanence.” (p. 27)

Dude! I totally understood that-lived that, had that recognition, on a mindbender of a trip… once, ling ago, when I had been touched by the electric hand of God, and had the boundaries and walls between my consciousness and unconsciousness clean wipes away so that all was illuminated and perrfect and in this moment.

But what about music video? Is there a video that brings this urgency to light, strips away our petty samsara blindness from us and makes us feel and embrace impermanence as opposed to the endless “gimme more bling” parade of gangstas, dorks and superheros who all firmly deny death?

I can only think of one and it’s rather short. That’s right…. the video for Johnny Cash’s cover of “Hurt.”

Johnny Cash - (HURT) - The best bloopers are here

I wrote the above in 2008. Tonight I was listening to the Cash album, or at least to "I Hung My Head," which turned up on ipod shuffle, and once again I shivered with the power and humility in Cash's cracked voice. Like all his fans, I hear a little bit of God and a little bit of Jesus and a little bit of Pontious Pilot and a frightened child mixed together in an old man's voice as he stares unblinking into the void, and sings a Trent Reznor song. And it came to me that all Cash's career and life was leading up to this one album, this one perfect expression of all he was and all that was left, every song every live in prison album was leading him to this one moment of pure grace that was for all of us. It makes other music videos seem so surface shallow as to be invisible in the rapidly flipping pages of time that Cash is privying us to. Even the Jesus crucifixion stuff peppered along the way of the video is deserved.

Shots of him all through his career mesh beautifully with old Cash at a table of the damned, and the nails going in the hands. Reznor's lyrics aimed here right at God and Jesus, a little touch of hate towards the utterly simple funnel design by which they eventually get to roast all of us on the spit of heaven and eat our flesh, gesturing out the lyrics like he's an ancient Native American chief telling the tale of the crazy man in black who once strode the land, his guitar and attitude (the one speaking clip insert is a young punk Cash in some film, shouting "Stay the hell away from me!")

Towards the end June Carter comes downstairs and just looks at him sadly, the Cash museum is clearly real, with all the memorabilia and empty shelves caked with dust. The young Cash seems to be trying to find a way into the house where old Cash is living, a kind of 2001 Bowman time collapse meltdown.

A soul this brave and wise and humble, beautiful, and true deserves not to have to come back to this sorrowful space-time dimension if he doesn't want to, but I hope he does, the star child in black, and if we can find him in his next life before the world has a chance to crush him down, maybe this time our love will be enough to save him. I don't want you to die, dad. I don't want you to die. If I am still right here.

"See this top? Flop!" RAINBOW BRIDGE, a Hendrix Paradise

2010-07-02T23:47:00.000-07:00

I have fond non-memories of RAINBOW BRIDGE (1970), a weird cult-hippie flowers on Maui documentary that got marketed as a Hendrix concert film, though he only shows up at the end, like a lost weird traveler. Dude is totally high, and everyone's slurring, and viewers got a rare chance to feel what it's like to hang out with super-high Hendrix in the closest thing we have to a Albert Maysles/Gray Gardens-style fly-on-the-wall eavesdrop. Dude, these people up there in that clip above? They're wasted! Now that I'm decades later and not wasted, I can't understand a word they're saying. It sounds like pretentious hippie twaddle, and I think Hendrix agrees. He sounds like he's got a cold.

Sadly, Hendrix would be dead a mere two months later. And thanks to legal issues, the film itself has been but spottily available. Purists cite bad winds on the day of the concert as to why sound is bad and unworthy of close study, but I disagree. Jimi plays "Hey Baby (Land of the New Rising Sun)" and it's the first and only time he plays it on film, as far as I know.

Not to mention it's the closest thing to a "perfect" audience you'll ever see for a major psychedelic rock star film, as they're all "beautiful" hippies and Maui surfers. Remote location and pure word-of-mouth short notice ensured a total absence of the usual suffocating crowd of wallies, murfs, tourists, freeloaders, dullards, normies, breadheads and buzkillers. In short, it's like one of those beautiful concerts where there's just enough people to make it fun, but not enough that you can't get as close as you want to the stage and lay down a tapestry right at the feet of the performer, spark a joint and watch the clouds as the music sends you flying... and that's what it's all about man.

One day we'll all cross that magic rainbow bridge to that land of the new rising sun, and I hope Jimi's waiting at the other end when I go, and I'll answer yes, Jimi, I'd like to go along...

Oh, those drunken Replacements.

2010-02-05T10:57:00.000-08:00

In "Treatment Bound," singer Paul Westerberg explains the Replacement's touring strategy as follows: "The first thing we do when we finally show up / Get shit-faced drunk / Try to sober up." For legions of impressionable punk rock youth, these were words to live by. The Replacements were like the male equivalent of Courtney Love, one went to their show in guilty hopes of seeing a train wreck, and more than half the time they delivered, being too drunk to remember their own songs and having to revert to out of tune covers to which Westerberg would make up the words. If they did manage the "sobering up" part they might deliver a searing, moving, furious set of rock songs that fell somewhere between hardcore punk and what would eventually be known as alternative rock (Nirvana's Kurt Cobain originally drew Westerberg comparisons with his anguished vocal style and major label-defying antics. I wasn't alone in my first thought on hearing Cobain's voice being "Hey, this guy sounds just like Paul Westerberg!")

The story of the 'mats (as their fans dubbed them) begins in the punk scene of 1979 Minneapolis. Bob Stinson was lead guitarist and the heaviest drinker. His 14-year old brother Tommy was on bass and their friend Chris Mars played drums. They were a hardcore punk band when Westerberg joined them but he brought in gallons of emotion-wracked songwriting talent and they split the difference. They got signed to Twin Tone, and proceeded to release a series of furious, somewhat sloppy albums, the straight up (but amusing) thrash of Sorry Ma (Forgot to Take out the Trash) followed by an EP and then the delightfully ramshackle Hootenanny.

Their big breakthrough came with 1984's Let it Be, the album that invented modern alternative rock six years too soon. They went over to a major label (Sire) for Tim. But then the elder Stinson was kicked out for drug and alcohol problems (which was, as Martin Sheen put it in Apocalypse Now, "like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.") Pleased to Meet Me and Don't Tell a Soul followed, without Stinson and with production values slick enough to make their small but loyal fan base accuse them of selling out. Their final album, All Shook Down, was a step forward to Westerberg's solo career, with sparse acoustic arrangements and anguished confessional lyrics, it still didn't sell and the band split up. Westerberg idled until Cameron Crowe exhumed him for the soundtrack to his film Singles. Though they've long since gone their separate ways, the status of the 'mats as the alcoholic stepfathers of alternative rock remains forever assured, and if I wasn't in rehab at the moment, I'd drink to that.

SORRY MA FORGOT TO TAKE OUT THE TRASH (1981)

The debut album from the Replacements is a typically ferocious and witty entry in the low budget indie LP pressings of the early 80s. Though untrained ears may be unable to differentiate it from other thrash-punk albums of the period, Westerberg's songwriting gifts show through after a couple of listens. Traditional "slam dancing" favorites would be the hilarious "Shut Up," and "I Hate Music," but there's also some real rock and roll heart in the wrenching "Shiftless When Idle" and "Kick Your Door Down." Looking forward to their future rock balladry there's "Johnny's Gonna Die," an ode to downward spiraling junkie guitar legend Johnny Thunders (obviously an inspiration to their own booze-addled stage antics, people would go see Johnny Thunders shows just to see whether or not he'd be too messed up to play.) "Raised in the City" manages to be both a satire of and a homage to Kiss-style rock, an avenue they'd travel down further in subsequent albums.

HOOTENANNY (1983)

You can hear the merry slurs in the vocals here, such as the barely standing up messiness of the title track. The forward-looking track is "Die Within Your Reach," a somewhat sappy ballad whose click-drum track makes one suspect Westerberg did it on his own without the support of his punk rock bandmates. Nonetheless the germs of their future alt rock sound is here, with the ramshackle folksiness of "Treatment Bound" and the vividly realized punk of "Color Me Impressed" and "Fuck our School."

LET IT BE (1984)

This classic 1984 life-changer ignited the soul of every alienated teen who bought it and marked a turning point in punk rock and has been celebrated on stage and screen and even has an entire book written about it by that weird guy from the Decemberists. Though there are still several punk tracks on the record ("We're Coming Out," "Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out") the key element here is the aching emotionally tormented rock of "Unsatisfied," "Answering Machine" and "Sixteen Blue" in which songwriter/vocalist Paul Westerberg made the band drop all their drunken punk pretensions and expose the tormented anger, hope and longing he, and everyone else, was really feeling. The cathartic end result of all that soul searching is the jangly "I Will Dare," the piano-driven, daring (for the time) "Androgynous" and a Kiss cover; "Black Diamond." Most prescient is "Seen Your Video," in which Westerberg rants about the evils of the then-new music station, MTV, little knowing how it would soon co-opt the genre of music he and his contemporaries were at that very moment creating. I could tell you how cool you are if you bought this record when it first came out, but I'd be tooting my own horn. And my friends and I met Bob Stinson in front of an all-ages show in City Gardens, Trenton, in the summer of '85, and and tried unsuccessfully to get him to give us some of his crappy beers.

TIM (1985)

The follow-up to the Replacement's groundbreaking LET IT BE marks a significant turning point not just in their career but in the history of alternative music. LET IT BE still had a few traditional punk songs under its sleeve, but by Tim time, lead songwriter Westerberg had come fully into his own, and the album is a mix of gut-wrenching ballads, gut-wrenching love songs, and gut-wrenching anthems of angst and alienation. "Bastards of Young," "A Little Mascara" and "Hold My Life," howl with beautiful rage. "Left of the Dial" refers to bands whose only airplay comes from college radio stations (typically at the extreme left of the FM radio dial) and became an instant catchphrase for indie-hood that survives today, as does Westerberg's succinct description of his generation: "Innocence wont claim us / We got no wars to name us." The freewheeling grungy romance of "On the Bus" and the clap-along "Waitress in the Sky" looked forward to the even more innocuous Westerberg solo career but are here catchy, soulful and worthwhile. The final song, "Here Comes a Regular" is a heartbreaking ballad of one slob's failure to escape the dreary all-consuming solace of the local tavern. The band with a reputation for being boozy and unprofessional onstage was realizing the cold, scary future awaiting them if they couldn't stop their downward spirals. This was their first record for a major label and subsequent releases would find them attempting to be more commercial in a bid for crossover success. They didn't make it, but in the passing years, TIM has become a towering milestone whose lyrics are sacred texts to many of today's alternative rock titans.

PLEASED TO MEET ME (1987)

The first album to be released after the firing of guitarist Bob Stinson, this album put off a lot of fans with its unapologetically commercial new direction. Stinson was obviously the force holding Westerberg's more radio-friendly urges in check. Nonetheless, it has stood the test of time to be considered a classic and was an obvious precursor Nirvana's Nevermind album. In fact, the cover of that album--the baby swimming after a dollar bill on a fishing hook--is clearly inspired by the cynicism of the cover here, of a grungy torn up sleeve shaking hands with a rolexed corporate suit. Westerberg was a big Alex Chilton fan and the album was scheduled to be produced by the same guy who did THIRD and SISTER/LOVERS for Chilton, but things fell through. You can here Westerberg's Chilton-esque aspirations running full force on tracks like "Alex Chilton" (!), and the acoustic ballad, "Skyway." The rest of the band shows they can still rock hard with "Red Red Wine" and "Shooting Dirty Pool."

DON'T TELL A SOUL (1989)

In a last ditch effort to break into mainstream radio play, the Replacements made their most commercial album, slathering on the slick production and alienating many of their hardcore fans in the process. Sales still didn't meet expectations, yet time has been kind to this album; if it had come out around three or four years later it may have been a grunge classic. Anthems of youth alienation abound, including the classic "We'll Inherit the Earth" and "I'll Be You". "Rock and Roll Ghost" is one Westerberg's gut-wrenchingly honest ballads, this one an intensely personal autobiography about a life possibly wasted as a rock and roll also-ran. "Darlin' One" stings with the ache of unfulfilled romantic yearning. There is no doubting that the band was reaching for mainstream success with the desperation of a repentant sinner, but they didn't reach it, and for that this album's prescient songs are all the more tragic.

ALL SHOOK DOWN (1990)

This stripped down affair is a big step forward from the slick AOR-bid, Don't Tell a Soul. Recorded with an array of session musicians while the band was in mid-disintegration, this is was originally to be vocalist Paul Westerberg's debut solo album, in the tradition of his longtime hero, Alex Chilton. The title track is my favorite, a lonesome blues with an earthy, almost Tom Waits-y vibe. If the Mats had been a breakthrough success who knows what these songs would have been about? As it is, their unflinching honesty towards a life misspent and opportunities squandered makes for great wallowing in your-lack-of-fame listening. This was Westerberg giving up on mainstream success, and turning his back on the hard rock limitations of his band. From now on they wouldn't have old Mr. Westerberg to kick around anymore, and with that he was off on his path of introspective soul-tearing angst, honing the mope rock he helped invent right up to the closing track, presciently titled, "The Last."

(originally written for Amp Camp.com, 2001, now long gone)

Liz Phair: Siren, Sinner, Sister, Sell-Out

2010-02-01T10:03:00.000-08:00

Holy Shit, i forgot how hot Liz Phair is, or was, or looks in heavily retouched photos in sexy teenager clothing with her chin way up and mouth all pouty.

(From my discography entry in the now defunct Amp Camp, c. 2001)
Liz Phair: Miss Popular, the queen of the indie prom, the cute Chicago girl who can actually play guitar and write and sing good songs, who lives alone in the dorm room down the hall and only the coolest kids aren't afraid to talk to, the girl that all the other girls hate, who spends her nights alone with a four track and a bong, composing songs about how promiscuous she was in high school and would like to be now. Talking dirty and driving the boys crazy, she's a mix of droll songwriting talent and sex addiction all wrapped up in a cute-as-a-button package. My friends who have friends who know her from school say she's simultaneously using the nymph boy-eater posing as a gimmick and at the same time is far more voracious and crazy than she pretends to be, while also being a closet "normal" -- in other words, they don't know anything about her either.

A brilliant lyricist and notoriously self-conscious performer, Liz Phair was a package no sulky indie boy or shopworn punkette with an ear for outsider genius could resist. Her debut album, Exile in Guyville landed her the top spot on the 1994 Village Voice Pazz and Jop Critic's poll, but the studio-produced follow up, Whip Smart, was accused of being too mainstream. Word was, she let the producers and studio musicians boss her around, and then--to make matters worse--she went and got married and had a baby.

Hearts lay broken everywhere.

But she surprised many a few years later with whitechocolatepsacegg, wherein she looked upon motherhood with a mix of horror and good-natured sarcasm, much to our relief. BUT, then she decided to "sell out" after all, and signed with a major label, slutted-up her costumes and brought in airbrush artists and make-up technicians to remould her in a Britney-cum-MILF mode. 30something fans dropped off by the droves, to be replaced by teenybopper girls (or so she and her new label hoped). But hey, she's on a journey, and maturity has been very kind to her, replacing her precocious cuteness with a sexuality that could drop a rhino at 30 paces. Don't hate her 'cuz she's beautiful or because she sold out, hate her because she writes brilliant songs without even trying, and suddenly wants to spend more time with her stupid son than with us.

EXILE IN GUYVILLE (1994)

Supposedly a feminist "answer" to the macho swagger of the Rolling Stones' 1972 Exile on Main Street, this sprawling masterpiece showed how one girl and her pet four-track could do more musical damage than your mama and all her biker friends after a case of tequila and an eightball of crank. She potty-mouths off to the older boys that may have once taken advantage of her in tracks like "Fuck and Run," and "Help Me, Mary," while occasionally getting all effortlessly catchy, as in "Never Said" wherein her nasal voice makes it sound like she's been (gasp) SMOKING! Then in "Canary" and "Flower" she twists the knife all the way in, revealing the pig's blood-soaked telekenetic Carrie underneath the coy homecoming queen veneer. Raw and unhinged, the low-fi trappings here may alienate new listeners, but this album is the one that knocked the rock-and-roll boys club forever and completely on its ass. Miss it at your own risk. Oh hey, it's been re-issued... what... ever. A

WHIP SMART (1996)

The critical adulation Phair received for her 4-track masterpiece, Exile in Guyville, led to the studio-recorded follow-up getting some major label distribution and even an MTV-friendly video for the single, "Supernova." Despite cries of sell-out (even then!) from some of the hardcore indie mopers, this is a fine collection of songs, much more coherent and resonant than many of the lesser tracks on Guyville. "Jealousy" benefits from an addictive, propulsive rhythm as its narrator goes snooping through her lovers draw of ex-girlfriend photos, echoing the co-dependent yowling of Alannis Morrisette's Jagged Little Pill released the same year. Other stand-out tracks are "May Queen" and the "Crater Lake" with its classic line of "Well Look at me / I'm frightening my friends." If the sexually frank opening track, "Chopsticks," seems as if she's talking dirty just to show she can still shock prurient ears, that "Crater Lake" sentiment gets to the real truth underlying our socially conditioned reactions to such behavior: It's "cute" for girls to talk dirty, but if they start telling the real truth about things, they make people nervous. Thank God that Phair still isn't afraid to do exactly that, no matter who she frightens. B

WHITECHOCOLATESPACEEGG (1998)

Recorded post-child, Phair's third album received some great notices as a mature, edgy, even experimental departure for the indie princess of profanity. Sardonic power chords and spooky prog keyboards count among the many inspired flourishes, showing the whole child thing gave the lass some time to think and expand her sound. The album kicks off with three instant back to back classics, culminating with the single, "Polyester Bride," a Beck-like send-up of 1970's AOR radio that confused a lot of critics who "didn't get the joke" (or maybe I'm just so in love with her I gave it the benefit of the doubt.) Then there was the infectious electro-bounce of "Headache" and her use of different narrative voices to reconfigure herself as a Randy Newman-style storyteller ("Shitloads of Money" comes off as a somehow less ironic sequel to Newman's "It's Money that Matters"). The sheer exuberant catchiness of the optimistic "What Makes You Happy" and the folky lilt of "Uncle Alvarez" show Phair as an artist spreading her wings in a way that makes the alleged "sell out" of her following album less shocking in hindsigh, but nonetheless...A-

LIZ PHAIR (2003)

Shocking! The queen of low fi (who hadn't really been lo-fi since her debut) drops all her pretensions and makes a distinctly unlady-like grab for the big gold ring of Top 40 girlpop. Slick production team the Matrix, who helped Avril Lavaigne make it over, here work the same mojo on several tracks, including Phair's first chart-breaker, the irresistible "Why Can't I." The many-bridged psychosexual boasting of "Extraordinary" is a definite shocker with production so slick it is beyond slick. But then the smoke clears and all the fuss turns out to be a little unfounded and we start revisiting all the old Phair neighborhoods, exploring her favorite topics such as oral sex ("H.W.C.") and the seduction of impressionable babysitters (this time from the POV of the mother, "Rock Me"). In the heartbreaking "Little Digger" which explains to her 5-year old son why mommy keeps waking up with all these strange men in her bed. In a way she could be addressing her whole dejected indie boy fan base who she knew in advance were going to receive this album with angry, tear-stained dejection; from now on, we would have to share mommy with the whole wide world. C-

SOMEBODY'S MIRACLE (2005)

Much as I hate to admit it, this cute cover makes me weak at the knees every time I see it, but Phair and I are through, finito, so there's no more listening and trying to like stuff and then getting my feeling's hurt as I realize she's not singing to my demographic anymore... she's singing for the suits, the 'tweeners and the void. Alas, a lot of people agreed with me and the last I knew they weren't even able to give Somebody's Miracle away... probably that helped prompt the career decision to do a bells-and-whistles re-release of GUYVILLE, to see if all her dorky fans will now accept her as a mid-90s nostalgia act instead of the Guyville's Mata Hari. For me, the paint still drying on the cement floor where my heart once lay, it's gonna take another 8 years.

BUT, damn can she sizzle with a good photographer and sultry poutfit, let's take a little pictorial walkthrough and see how one talented, my age indie rocker goes from 80s high school girl to bitingly witty alt-rock princess to just another airbrushed Maxim boytoy:

I'm not debating her third-wave feminist right to sell out and get paid, the right way, in full... but... sheesh, there's a line between the Madonna "use it cause you got it but also deconstruct it" and the merely "use it because the publicity agents flatter your vanity." Funny that in posting all this, mainly because I found my old Liz Phair discography work from 2001, I'm now back in swooning love with this edgy MILF icon, and all the accompanying jealous pique that love entails.

X: See How They War

2010-01-28T06:15:00.000-08:00

X stood onstage somewhere between a ferocious L.A. punk combo and a Sam Shepherd play. Bassist/vocalist John Doe was the wayward cowboy, poet/singer Exene Cervenka his boozy, brilliant, trailer-park dwelling ex-wife, spewing at each other oaths of love and hate, harmonizing like wounded cats over topics like class discrimination, alcoholism, jealousy, lust, and lousy presidents. Pompadour-sporting guitarist Billy Zoom stood off to the side, legs firmly planted in a wide stance as if waiting for a horse to land under him any minute, ripping out rockabilly solos with the fury of an angry kid upstairs in his bedroom listening to his parents fight. DJ Bonebrake in the back on the drums set the pace like the ghost of an abusive stepfather, driving everyone's emotions forward into a sonic cliff dive at the next sharp turn on the highway. They were edgy and in the moment, yet plugged in deep to the roots of their locale; for them Los Angeles was still unsettled desert country and the lonesome folk music of that bygone era was audible beneath their sonic din. This link, and their steady gigs around the Sunset Strip won them the attention of former Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek who produced and played on their first four albums.

Unfortunately their major label, Elektra, expected bigger sales, and when their fifth release AINT LOVE GRAND didn't break through, Billy Zoom finally moved out of the house (if I may return to the analogy in the previous paragraph) and they replaced him with first former Blasters-member Dave Alvin, then Tony Glykson. , When their next album SEE HOW WE ARE still didn't take off, the band began to dissolve, doing other projects, such as the alt-folksy formation The Knitters, and for Doe, the lure of movies and solo projects. They still get back together, and in 2004 even re-formed with Zoom for a tour captured on DVD and CD: LIVE IN LOS ANGELES.

I saw them live only once, when they played at City Gardens in Trenton in 1985. I was 18. I got stuck trapped against the front of the stage as the whole club erupted into a mosh pit (we called it "slam dancing" in them days) I was about to get creamed by this out of control kid in a mohawk when a giant skinhead yanked me out of the way of his oncoming fist, belting the mohawk kid right in the nose with his other hand, showering me and several other people in a spray of blood. When I looked back up on the stage, I saw Exene smiling down at me like a warm and hungry vampire, then turned over to Jon Doe, both still singing and playing, beaming with pride at each other and the whole chaotic scene. It was an all-ages show, but for the encore they passed out a bunch of cold beers to us, urging us to pass them around and get ready for some country Knitters songs. Jon and Exene were divorced by that point, but I saw the love still in their eyes when he playfully duked her chin. In that moment we were all one big happy dysfunctional family; twenty years later and I still miss them.

DISCOGRAPHY:

Wild Gift (1981)
The second album from punk rock darlings X is actually a mix of tracks recorded from around the time of the first album, 1980's "Los Angeles," with some new material which shows the band already progressing at a fascinating pace. Produced by Ray Manzarek (the Doors), this album finds the band realizing they have an almost mature and poetically distinct style that separates them from their early 1980's punk peers, then trying to upset the apple cart and either make it or break it loose with Doe and Cervenka's searing anthems of romantic disillusionment, "White Girl," "When Our Love Passed Out on the Couch," and "Adult Books," all career highlights. Billy Zoom's hopped up surf-abilly guitar gets its chance to rock out on the rip-roaring "We're Desperate," probably the album's most definitively "punk" tune, followed by the choogling rage-a-thon, "In this House that I call Home." The 2001 re-mastered version features several worthwhile demos and B-sides including the amazing demo of "Blue Spark," a track heard on the their following album, the definitive "Under the Big Black Sun."

Under the Big Black Sun (1982)
Considered by many to be the band's artistic peak, this is a dark, feverish, disillusioned piece of acidic beauty, with deeply personal lyrics including such topics as the death of co-vocalist Exene Cervenka's sister Mary in a hit and run auto accident ("Riding with Mary"). You can practically smell the grief, the drug-laced sweat of dank hotel rooms, the mountains of cigarettes in ashtrays, the day-old sex, the simmering disillusionment, and the blood drying on the bathroom floor. Cervenka and her lover/songwriting partner/co-vocalist John Doe generously share every excruciatingly personal detail of ther disintegrating romantic life on the punk rock tour road to hell, kicking ass every mile of the way. Guitarist Billy Zoom, a rockabilly powerhouse who cut his teeth playing with country legend Gene Vincent, brings some salve and salt to the wounds with some of the most furious playing of this career. "Dancing With Tears in My Eyes" is a cover that offers a welcome respite from the angry gloom, while songs like "Real Child of Hell" and the slowly simmering "Blue Spark" show how to mix rooted musical maturity and unhinged ferocity for maximum results.

More Fun in the New World (1983, Elektra)
After almost killing themselves with a series of critically acclaimed but poorly selling albums, the X family decided they needed to break out of their furious punk rock rut (after Under the Big Black Sun there was probably nowhere else to go but back from the edge of the cliff, or over, Thelma and Louise-style) and achieve the breakthrough AOR radio-play success that was the measure of one's artistic cred back in Reagan-era Hollywood. Checking a significant chunk of their punk rock fury at the recording studio door, they went and developed a whooping good time call-and-response style song cycle about political apathy and their own music industry frustrations, presaging west coast rap in the process, as in the litany of metonyms shouted out in "True Love" Parts one and Two. My own personal favorite is "Drunk in My Past" which seems to prefigure the post punk introspection of emo by twenty years. There's also a great cover of Jerry Lee Lewis' "Breathless" with Exene Cervenka on vocals so rough and sexy you may feel like you're violating some law just by listening. The 2001 re-master includes several worthwhile demo tracks.

Ain't Love Grand? (1985)
When their previous album, More Fun In the New World, didn't cross them over to the mainstream as they hoped, punk rock icons X took another step closer to traditional rock respectability with this album. Ray Manzarek, the former Doors member who produced the band's first four records was replaced, and in came the 1980's studio gloss.

Okay, stop for a second, you neo punk rocker reading this: Before you turn away with the words "sell out" on your lips, remember that in 1985 (long before the advent of CDs) being on a major label involved serious pressure from the suits and unless you sold at least a zillion albums you were losing money, something your White Stripes never had to worry about. Understand this, and forgive X their high gloss trespasses, because the album is worth it. This was my first X album, which I bought in 1985 when it came out due to pressure from my punk rock high school buddy. It took me a few listens to get into it but then when I did my whole life started to change. In comparison with its predecessors it spits its venom in fewer places but with better aim, and there's a great lovesick sense of nicotine-stained compassion floating through, even during their angry litany of towns they don't like playing in ("Well downtown NYC, people there F--k with me / Downtown Paris, France / they never give us half a chance" -- "What's Wrong with Me.") What was wrong nobody still knows, but X was proving they were capable of crafting accessible but hard edged songs of loss, failure, acceptance and hope better than anyone else. When in "Watch the Sun Go Down," Exene sings "I Wish I'd never grown up / So I could cry myself to sleep," she sounds both genuinely grown-up and genuinely wishing she could cry, but she can't anymore. You can't get much more genuinely human in a pre-alternative alternative rock record than that, gloss be damned. There's also a glimpse of the X to come with the ex-Blaster Dave Alvin producing the track "Little Honey" (he would later replace Zoom albeit briefly). There's also some great demos and B-sides including the only released as a single "Wild Thing (Long Version)" and a great demo of John Doe solo, playing bass and singing the Replacements song "I Will Dare."

See How We Are (1987)
First generation punk rock icons X recorded SEE HOW WE ARE during a period of personal and professional disappointment: Their guitarist Billy Zoom left the band, discouraged by their inability to break out of the punk rock ghetto. Their harder edges had been burned off in an effort to court AOR repsectability and the marriage of lead singers and songwriters John Doe and Exene Cervenka was over. Getting played on mainstream radio had became something of a white whale for the band, but somewhere among all the changes and compromises something amazing happened; the rural Americana country rock sounds they had been dabbling in all along began to fill the empty spaces. Soon they were bringing their maturity, edge and rawness into the heartland symbolized on MTV by the white t-shirt of John Cougar Mellencamp; alternative-Americana was being born. Fans were baffled, but no one could deny they were onto something, despite the studio gloss. The title track is a stand out and became something of an anthem in thier subsequent years and the straight-up confessional oomph of "I'm Lost" let's you know right out of the gate this band is looking for direction even as they find it. There are also some great rockers, like "Fourth of July" and powerful near-ballads like "When it Rains." Replacing the departed Zoom were two guitarists Dave Alvin (The Blasters) and Tony Gilkyson each bringing a distinctly "other" country vibe. The 2002 re-mastered CD includes several bonus tracks.

Live at the Whiskey A-Go-Go (1988)
This double live album captures X at around the period of their final Elektra release SEE HOW WE ARE, and is an excellent swan song for that period of their career. Tony Gilkyson is on guitar, substituting pretty adequately for the absence of the legendary Billy Zoom, but though the punk classics of the earlier part of the decade are all there ("Blue Spark," "Los Angeles," and "This House that I Call Home"), it's clear the band is headed in a more twangy-folksy direction as they turn down the heat on the rockabilly boil for a spell late in the evening to perform some acoustic songs in their alternate incarnation, the Knitters, sich as: "Skin Deep Town" and "Call of the Wreckin' Ball." All in all this is a fine place to start for casual listeners, especially if they are wondering what all the fuss is about, or coming to band via the roundabout route of John Doe's solo work or the Knitters albums. There's also some great audience interaction between the songs, capturing Exene and John's rare ability to make an entire audience feel like they're cherished guests at a drunken, dysfunctional family gathering. (originally published Ampcamp 2000)

The Lost Art of Japanese Loungecore

2010-01-09T12:51:00.000-08:00

In the mid 1970s the future bassist for the Yellow Magic Orchestra, Harumi Hosono, was a minor star as a lounge revivalist, a Japanese version of Leon Redbone perhaps, creating a great post-modern frisson by doing Japanified versions of American orient-inspired exotica like "Hong Kong Blues" and "Salt Peanuts." Hilarious stuff! And also great, why can't Japanese impersonate Americans impersonating Japanese? They have great organ and about eight marimba and xylophone players. And Hosono's voice is as rich and lovely as Redbone's even on the worst of days. At times as on the heavenly "Exotic Lullabye" he provokes hilarity through "Americanese" ranting.

Bardo Pond and synaptical misfires at Louise Point

2009-05-18T15:11:00.000-07:00

Bardo Pond is the best and only ones who do what they do - which is create panic attack at the club music... the drugs kick in and everything gets slow and weird and you're surrounded by freakily beautiful loving people, but the guitar, slowed to an alien crawl by your push into timelessness--slowness, blanking - wha? The guitars of the Gibbons brothers cut in and out of tempo, the way a brain stuttering its dehydration S.O.S. might cut in out of your aural perception. Is not hearing just illusions of coherence the way the eye fills in blind spots and the memory remembers what it wants and buries the rest under thick layers of carpet and yet can still hear the hideous beating of its miserable twin? This is music for when you're in love with someone and it's like a druggy sickness. You smoke cigarettes to fill that void the way a kid tosses a rock in the ocean but love makes that cigarette a surfboard but then Bardo Pond reaches up with one jangly hand to pull you off your board like a lifeguard in reverse. Blacking in and out of consciousness downstairs at the dance shouldn't be so easily condemned as a bad thing. In the end they're all just experiences. As Isobel Sollenberger puts it in "Sunrise" (off of Dilate): "Watching it happen / watching /
it / happen
And then this chunky distorted fuzz guitar so tasty you can feel it in your saliva comes spiraling out of the yellow distance and when Isobel suddenly starts singing again "When words turn / to breath / and silence reigns / golden / the sky is falling / ... watching it happen."

The bass and drums just keep kicking over the same can and almost catching themselves from falling into the basement foyeur of the nearby apartment house. It's music to swoon too, and while Isobel and the brothers swoon, the rhythm section keeps grabbing your arm and pulling it upwards, right before your head smacks the concrete.

Rock and roll is ultimately, the devil's music, and its appalling when acts like U2 and Green Day profess to have ties with punk and the devil crowd. People like that don't even KNOW what they're missing when they just say no all the time. How could they? People who want drugs illegal have never tried them - it's just that simple. Uh here comes a rant, and one more thing, let's talk about peace and Buddhism and shit and who the real posers are now: the new generation of hippie gurus are coming! Beware the carpetbaggers that would be the mouthpiece to "your generation" every time you make a collective swing towards the light.

Beware the prophesizing and brazen attempts to be cool and religious at the same time. Be a leader of yourself and you no longer need to put yourself in a superior position to others. When the object is humility, this is even more important, which is why a book title like HARDCORE ZEN smacks of "More Humble than thou" histrionics. A true Buddhist hardcore path would be to make your book as intentionally mauve and tacky as possible "Love Affirmations for Mom" or something like that. What about writing something about how to understand and embrace the hobbies of one's unenlightened parents, such as golfing, drinking, going to church, sewing, and television watching? Warner's book should be called "If I'm enlightened why can't I finally can't let go of wanting to be a badass" That would be hardcore if for no other reason than all the hardcore kids are afraid to do it. I know I am.

Even in being "open" there's pitfalls, so don't think I blame the coming wave of plastic fantastic shamen. Emotional openness and a posture of universal love and acceptance of all things are inherently good, but judging not by any pair of opposites or dualities, this stance is the most fearsome of all. Kids will jump off cliffs or empty out their wrists just to avoid being loved; tattoos and piercings and fight clubs are just extreme forms of distraction from the whirling hole of raw forgiveness that is the full you, the you who blows parent's minds with your raw positive acceptance and create room for dialogue so heartfelt it would make Hallmark Cards writers sick in the hallway. Hardcore kids can't even make eye contact half the time, let alone say I love you with eyes moist like black velvet puppy dogs. Plus, the minute you're noticing other people not living with their whirling raw hole open as wide as yours, then man you may as well admit it's closed again. Mine's closed again. Can you tell? My book would be "It Closed Again, but I can still get off to BArDo PoNd.

#1 Greatest Rock Moment: Joe Cocker, "With a Little Help From My Friends," at Woodstock 1969

2009-04-06T16:50:00.000-07:00

"All we gotta do is love now," he starts croaking, the bass starts sliding away then comes back with a spine-tingling acceleration, every cycling piano thirds, pounding drums, Cocker just roaring along like a big Welsh punter on his first acid trip. The charge of "getting together with all my friends" was huge at Woodstock. The recording levels are amazing, and that's part of why Woodstock is so remembered, it's a glimmer into a time when being on acid and being a moron weren't one and the same. Alcohol-free super competence reins. These are the kids who already knew stuff before they dropped their first hits. They already knew guitar, or sound mixing, or bass frets, and then the acid came and blew them to the next level, and beyond, wafting them to the pinnacle of their crafts the way a wind might blow leaves up the steps. I forgot that myself, when I was in a band. As Coppola sez to Dennnis: you learn the words first and then forget them... in fact I forgot the cords to the songs, where I was, all that jazz.

Whoa, flashback just thinking that. In fact I get one everytime I see or hear Cocker's amazing anthemic freak-out. To me it's like watching Jesus appear, the perfect blend of high, help and friends is all surging through his soul. One can't imagine a better moment in a rock singer's life - a big crazy stage, fans into infinity, the dawning of the age of aquarius; everything was going to be okay. There was no longer any doubt of it in anyone's mind. We, the freaks, had won. Cocker comes on with a little glass of beer or water or something, a little drunk, tripping, mystical, massive beautiful side burns, a colorful t-shirt completely soaked through with rain and sweat, hair wet. He howls like a deep banshee and all it's in the name of love, an electric feedback squall of pure transformative selfless but sexual, fratenral, familial, audiencial and balls out rock. Look at the picture up there, with his tie-dye exploding outwards like he just took a love bullet in the ribs, his wild English face is the mirror to the explosion on the shirt, from the depths of his diaphragm and soul, all 8 chakras blazing, out through the diaphragm to Woodstock, to and through the people, the past, the future, and to and through the endless masks of God.

The performance would be nothing without the Beatles original though, from the influential Sgt. Pepper's. Ringo's pleasant modesty in answering the spiritual questions: "Yes. I'm certain it happens all the time," it was all too much genuine open-hearted non-gender specific communal love for the unprepared ego to handle. Sgt. Pepper's lit the minds of anyone who heard it on fire, you didn't even have to lick the buttons on their tacky uniforms to get way high, it was in the wind, a wind which had fanned a big flame that was now a raging Woodstock bonfire sea. The words are like Poe's (and Zizek's) Purloined Letter finally and inevitably arriving at its full expression. Just one simple message in that letter: Love Everyone, Right Now. It's okay. We all love you. That was all we needed, and in that one moment, Cocker was its undeniable messenger, and his message was heard and embraced by all. *

Everyone, man, they spend so much time worrying about who loves them and if they are loved. Dig, it only works the other way around man. That's what the Professor was trying to tell Dorothy. Note in that final scene how ole Wizard turns the meaning to suit the status quo's banking agenda: "It's not how much you love, but how much you are loved by others." In other words, "don't look behind the curtain! keep doing what you're doing, coveting and over-spending, harvest more love, harvest it like grain, like blood from the Tom Cruise-splattered lawn.

Whoa, get back on track, man! Before that big 1980s sell-out there was one more echo of this great performance, John Belushi's hilarious, dead-on impersonation on the then-cool Saturday Night Live. Obviously loving and heartfelt, Belushi could clown it to the top with air guitar and staggering and still honor the greatness of Cocker's moment in time, a moment we all can still feel in our blood every time we watch it, especially loud. -

And there you have it, the decline.. into the raging rock manhood of today, the little boy losts with their therapy and their prescriptions. From the empathic outward feel good angelic possession of Joe Cocker at that one particular moment in time, to the narcissistic nightmare miasma of today, with Cruise our fetishistic icon, soon to be dipped in the volcano like a wick, and Bono still prancing around going "Take me instead, I'm ever-so mythic!"

Om Dada! The natives are unusually jobless tonight, my dear. Prepare the evacuation vehicles and toss the Christians to the wolves like Jesus paid us to. The only law is the Golden Rule, all is is phony and empty as late night Cinemax.

Joni Mitchell's "He Comes For Conversation" (From Ladies of the Canyon)

2009-03-09T15:05:00.000-07:00

This song, from Ladies of the Canyon (1970) is a song about a love triangle, of which Joni is the unloved part. It discusses "he" who comes to her little Laurel Canyon kitchen to undoubtedly sponge coffee, wine and snacks off her--lady that she is, perhaps tea--while bitching about his girlfriend ("Why can't I leave her?")

He comes for conversation
I comfort him sometimes

Patiently she relates to us, the listener/s, what he says about his girlfriend-- the one Joni hopes to replace:

She speaks in sorry sentences
miraculous repentences
I don't believe her.

Mitchell's delivery of the last line is kurt, almost an aside.
It's a powerful song, she is a genius, I tremble to think of it. I used to listen to Ladies of the Canyon and Blue all the time while driving around Seattle, all lonesome and addled and lovestruck for whomever I wasn't dating at the time. I loved a girl named Flora (not her real name), she had long blonde hair like Joni, and on a big billboard along my courier route in downtown Seattle there was a Virginia Slims ad, the same girl, the Alice in Wonderland girl but is she chasing me or am I chasing her? Am I the Mad Hatter like I hope or just a thugged-out caterpillar? It was never a sex sort of love,but more chivalrous and ancient. The muse is seldom the same as the lover; the muse should always be far away, on the other coast. Flora was back east, still in school. I could let my heart melt in gushing Lancelot-esque tears for my queen back on the other shore with old King Arthur, my old guitarist. Ah the vaniglorious associative-depressive miracle of youth.

So I would listen to Joni while driving and thinking of Flora, and suddenly the tears would start. "All I really really want or love to do / is to bring out the best in me too," she sings the very first song. "I want to shampoo you / I want to renew you again and again." I wanted her to do that, the sunshine was her shampoo as it flooded through my windshield on my route.

1977, my mom was working in a runaway shelter, and brought home for Xmas weekend one of the runaways, Toots was her name, because "everybody calls me Toots." She was Joni Mitchell in mood, and Venus-like in pristine 16-year old beauty, and denim. Nothing much happened between us. It didn't need to. I remember my mom gave her two packs Marlboros wrapped up for Xmas, and it took me like five minutes to croak "Hey Toots, do you want to do Doodle Art?" All this came rushing back to me with joni's witty but genuinely heartfelt declaration of wanting to shampoo me. The tears came flooding out, I almost couldn't believe it. I hadn't cried for years, and even then only in violent spasms. This was genuine emotional release. It was a private discovery, reminding me instantly of other sorts of releases. It got me really high and relaxed, crying did, and I became a junky for it. Now I know it's called "depression!" In my case, alcohol-related, bro. Pills took care of that, and then other pills took care of those pills.

And that brings me as well to "He Comes for Conversation" and our place as the listener in the little love qudrangle we share with Joni. That's the zinger of course: he comes to her to talk about his abusive girlfriend, completely oblivious to her affection for him and that is just what she's doing to us with the song. The confessing to us of her attraction for another implicates us in this schemata of confession. That's fancy talk, but what it means in simple terms is... she's punking us out.

If anyone ever does a rap version of "He Comes for Conversation" I hope they will bear this in mind. Joni never mentions any particular reltaionship she has with the intended listener of her song; and as we know, even the most private diary is really a letter, but to whom? For me it's always a girl like Joni, my beautiful Other, and yet while it is a letter of longing and needing it is not a case of actually "wanting." When the beloved is alone in the room with you, the love snuffs out, it is only when they are far away that love burns Joni-size.

APPLE

2009-03-05T11:07:00.001-08:00

(The following was originally written for Amp Camp, a hipster-esque sub-division of neighborhoodies.com):

Sullen, pouty 19-year old piano prodigy Fiona Apple seemed to fall from the skies with her first album, "Tidal" a preternaturally assured collection of songs that slunk languidly between smoky jazz and Alanis Morissette alterna-angst. Assuring her success was a series of videos demonstrating her waifish sex appeal, particularly "Criminal", where she appears as a strung-out, underwear clad Alice lost in a tawdry lime-green carpeted wonderland of implied sexual misuse, drugs and wood paneling. Her erratic behavior at shows drew some flak from the press, eventually presaging a brief nervous breakdown, and we knew she was trouble when her sophomore album came out with such a long name that no one could say it all the way through. But youth, beauty and genius is a rough combination, and we have no choice but to forgive her. Extraordinary Machine was thought to be in limbo due to record executive nervousness, but when it finally came out it showed the brazen Apple had matured without losing a shred of her gorgeous sorrow. Her jazz-standard crooning sister Maude Maggart is pretty cool, too.

TIDAL
The first thing you hear is a voice that's so deep compared to your expectations of what a 19 year old ingénue should sound like that you think you put the record on the wrong speed. But it's a CD, and so the sound is so clear you can hear her every soft breath in between hitting these great deep notes that slowly evaporate at the end of stanzas (check out the 3:29 mark in "Slow Like Honey"). So yeah she's popular, she's the poster girl for the self-cutting crowd, but she's also as disciplined and regal as Nina Simone and twice as well recorded. If there is any flaw at all it's just that at 19 she doesn't have the sensory gravity, the "soul" that Nina or Sinatra could bring to a lyric. Her style is seductive for the sake of destruction, or as she puts it on one of the albums chart-topping hits, she's a girl who "can break a boy / Just because she can." She's that beautiful anorexic girl who lures you into her bed just long enough to break up your marriage, just long enough for you both to realize there is no "there" there outside of taboo-busting. It's her gift for expressing the bottomless melancholy of a 19 year-old beautiful loner grown way-too old before her time due to the evils of older men. She still finds an inner wealth of maternal comfort for whoever of her listeners are in need, filtered through the slow motion duck and jab of "Shadow Boxer" or bathed in the Joni Mitchell-style piano and whispered solace of "Never is a Promise."

EXTRAORDINARY MACHINE
The spookily talented Ms. Apple's third album came with a lot of strange mythologizing behind it. Was the label not releasing it, or was the demo just floating around the internet before it was finally mixed down to the artist's exacting specifications? Whether it was all just ingenious hype or something else, it hardly matters, as the album is encompasses everything that was great about her first two works, and then expands from there, managing to be even more quietly assured than "Tidal," and more pumping and assertive than "When the Pawn…"