Tuesday, April 29, 2008
“Some say she’s from Mars or one of the seven stars”
I saw The B-52′s last Saturday night at their sold out 930 Club concert. They’re doing a small tour to promote their first album of new material in 16 years, Funplex. It’s actually pretty good. “Juliet of the Spirits” is my favorite and an apt title, since, very early on, the band briefly billed themselves as Fellini’s Children. They drew as much sartorial inspiration from the famous Italian director as they did from Southern secondhand culture.
Like many folks my age, I first heard the B-52′s nearly two decades ago through their massive commercial breakout single which was completely inescapable in late 1989 and at any subsequent gathering of 10 or more Caucasians, particularly at a wedding. The band, while set for life financially in no small part because of this pervasive song, has subsequently apologized (sincerely, I believe) for its frequent overplaying. Hey, it was legitimately a lot of fun the first, oh, 59 or so times I heard it.
Despite or because of this ubiquitous hit, I explored their early catalog. The summer of 1990 is when I first discovered their still best material – their strange, tacky, and irresistible eponymous debut from 1979. Few albums make me smile as spontaneously and genuinely as this one does. Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson’s angelic harmonies take flight without wings, without wheels…
I’ve been to many, many concerts in different kinds of venues over the years, but nothing I’ve ever experienced at a show prepared me for the awesomely goofy and, yes, even cathartic power of “Rock Lobster” performed live. (This is the giddy song that John Lennon famously said made him want to make music again.)
They also performed “Private Idaho”. (I’m pretty sure my grandmother and an aunt or two, distinguished Dixie ladies, all of them, had wigs just like Kate Pierson is wearing.)
At the concert, it was a thrill to be directly in front of the lovely Ms. Pierson, whom I’ve crushed on since that same summer 18 years ago. Maybe it actually was a rainy afternoon in 1990 when I first heard Iggy Pop’s “Candy”…
It was a little less than a year later when I heard Kate guesting with some fellow Athens, GA residents here.
“Planet Claire” has always been one of my favorite songs. Sci-fi theme music serrated by surf guitar. Genius. Weird and wonderful, it’s inspired nerdish grad students to noodle around online when they should be writing comparative papers and wigging out simultaneously.
On the eve of her improbable 60th birthday, right in front of her, I was completely enraptured as she sang sirenlike in otherworldly stage lights. Wow. Thank you, Kate. I’ll take you to my leader now…
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
“My God, it’s full of stars….”
Arthur C. Clarke and I share a couple of things in common. We both stayed in the Chelsea Hotel and we both dreamed of other worlds…
RIP
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Jigsaw Falling Into Place
Not sure how I did this, but, despite the best efforts of Ticketbastard crashing my web browser, I still somehow got a great ticket this past Saturday morning for Radiohead at the Nissan Pavilion on May 11th. (Now the show is sold out.)
I’m in section 101, behind “the Pit”, a general admission, SRO mass huddle for the youthfully disaffected. Normally, I’d stand, but, since I’m in my mid-thirties now, I’ll take a nearby seat with a great view if it’s available. (Plus I can still bang my head up and down during “Planet Telex” or “The Bends”, should the guys roar through those now 13 year-old riffs.)
I last saw Radiohead in 2003 on the Hail to the Thief tour. That concert was at Merriweather Post Pavilion, and I was on the lawn. I decided this time to go for broke and get a better seat, which I did. Better still is I didn’t remotely go broke – top tier tickets were only $61. Quite reasonable in this day of egregiou$ re$ale$ on $tubhub.com or wherever else people go to get raped by the concert industry.
I definitely want to hear “Fake Plastic Trees” live, since they didn’t play it the other time I saw them. Though I’ve never tried to quantify them, that may be my single favorite song from the 90s:
Or maybe it’s just top ten. The point is, if I don’t they don’t perform it in concert this spring, knives out, Jonny Greenwood. There Will Be Blood!
“Nothin’s Gonna Change My World”
I wonder if Paul is jealous it’s one of John’s songs that’s going across the universe and so he’s secretly pleased that this particular composition is being hurled out of our galaxy.
ATU is probably my favorite song off of Let It Be. Fiona Apple and Rufus Wainwright do notable covers, as well. This video below was directed by former Fiona Apple boyfriend and current Oscar nominee P.T. Anderson:
Coincidentally, Gwen and I just got the two-disc version of Julie Taymor’s “Across the Universe” movie out of the library. It could be interesting, I don’t know. The Beatles’ images and music have saturated pop culture for nearly half a century now and are consequently quite malleable. I’m eager to see what they did. However, I tread with caution as I loathed Taymor’s 1999 version Titus Andronicus. My God, is that a pretentiously unwatchable film. It’s Shakespeare’s most vulgar and vile play, admittedly, but there is such a thing as overdressing a pig, apparently.
Chad Vader: The Complete First Season
I used to really like Star Wars. I used to work in a grocery store. What happens if there’s some kind of time rift where both are combined???
Making fun of George Lucas is frankly justified and yet, I’ll concede, often can be mean-spirited (I’ve engaged in my share of the hate over the past nine years). These parodies are not only clever and hilarious but refreshing and reverent in tone. They’re accessible to casual folks who enjoyed the movies as well as the hardcore geeks. Lucas is a big fan, and the guy who does Vader, Matt Sloan, actually went on to provide the voice (I guess he was cheaper than James Earl Jones) for LucasArts ‘ game Empire At War.
Darth Vader had a younger, somewhat less ambitious brother named Chad. This is his story….
Episode I
Episode II
Episode III
Episode IV
Episode V (the infamous holiday special)
Episode VI
Episode VII
Episode VIII (the last one I think)
“We call it Voight-Kampff for short”
Dear Santa,
Thank you for the five disc limited edition suitcase of Blade Runner! I can’t wait to check out the nine hours or so of supplemental features. (No, really!) And thank you for In-laws cool enough and genuinely interested enough to sit through all of the special edition DVD of Metropolis with me this past weekend! Seriously, did you build them in your workshop or what? They rock!
“Oh, what a world…what a world!”
I used to manage a science museum back in college. We had a planetarium that featured laser light shows. Consequently, I have some genuine affection and admiration for Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. I spent many weekends in the early 90s in a projection booth watching rays of red and blue dance through an inevitable rising cloud of pot smoke with that music featured.
…Dorothy walks out into Oz and the next, most famous track on the album is perfectly sequenced to introduce the color of money:
“Us and Them” is probably my favorite Pink Floyd song of all, so let’s go out with that as Dorothy eases on down the road:
It’s funny because it’s true
Walking Sports Database Scorns Walking Sci-Fi Database
We’re all three music geeks to such an extent that we can instantly incapacitate casual, normal fans with no mere mortal minutiae. Still, I thought of one of my favorite Onion articles when I sensed Dave’s wordlessly damning Keith’s and my mutual enthusiasm for fanboy ephemera (that shall remain unnamed) in a Suncoast store. We were killing time in a Maryland mall across the street from Merriweather Post Pavilion a couple of hours before the Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello concert back in September.
On a somewhat related note, turns out one of my graphic designer colleagues at the Academy used to work for Mego in the seventies. She even painted the heads of the actual prototype 1970s KISS toys that were shipped to China for mass production. “Which guy had the star on his face?” she asked me. “He was my favorite.” I think it’s pretty cool. I even forwarded her that Mego Museum link and she got in touch with them. They want to interview her for a newsletter and invited her to speak at a convention, I swear. Everybody’s a celebrity in somebody’s world, I suppose.
MST3K memories
ock and Roll Creation
The creative folks promoting Christopher Nolan’s upcoming The Dark Knight are having a fun viral marketing campaign for Halloween. The Joker sent out his clowns all over the country on a scavenger hunt. “The Only Sensible Way to Live in this World is Without Rules.” The film is out next summer, but the teaser trailer is here.
I was going to dress as Vincent Van Gogh today at work, but, complicated back story, I ended up going as a hippie. Ugh. My colleagues weren’t that into it. (One of them I dubbed “The Ghost of Ann Taylor Loft”.) There was a creative girl, our new customer service coordinator, who dressed as a zombie prom queen. I admired her pluck (if not her smell).
Tamburlaine last night at the Shakespeare Theater Company was incredible. Avery Brooks, Commander Sisko himself, was a visceral force on stage. Hilariously, the director came on near the end of the second act to inform us that a stage chariot wasn’t working. “The noises you’re hearing are it stuck in the ceiling,” he mealymouthed. Every production now has an obligatory Spinal Tap moment:
Anyway, so we waited until the cast thundered out of a huge door lead by three chained guys on their hands and knees. I thought to myself…why didn’t they just do this in the first place? That looks pretty wild.
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…”
It famously bombed when it premiered in the summer of 1982, my 11th year on this planet, no doubt because it ran up against this little guy. Ouch.