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Combustible Edison Gets Serious:
Life After Lounge?
CD review for The Stranger, 10/8/98
COMBUSTIBLE EDISON The Impossible World (Sub Pop) ***
The Cocktail Revolution is dead; OD’d on bad self-parody acts.
So how do neo-lounge pioneers Combustible Edison try to stay relevant? By dropping the rhinestone-tiara kitsch and reinventing themselves as a somewhat more serious ambient-progressive combo, suitable for indie-film soundtracks, KMTT airplay, and wedding showers.
On several tracks (“Hot and Bothered,” the closing “Scanner’s Reprise”), the band strives for admittance onto the hip-love-rock trail blazed by the likes of Pigeonhed. On others (“Tickled to Death,” “Pink Victim”), Lily Banquette works hard to gain your respect as a legitimate pop-jazz vocalist.
The Impossible World is more ambitiously composed, arranged, and produced than any previous CE disc. It’s also not as much fun as CE’s old stuff (though you might find it to be fine makeout music).
Cowboys and Heats Redux:
Memories of Fake ID
THE HEATS Smoke (Chuckie-Boy) **
THE COWBOYS Jet City Rockers (Chuckie-Boy) *
Chuckie-Boy mogul Mike Stein continues to reissue Seattle’s forgotten musical past. Stein’s previous subjects, The Lewd, were acknowledged precursors to the local dirt-punk bands of the late ’80s. These two acts might be considered precursors to the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies and Hit Explosion. The Cowboys and the Heats (nee Heaters) were big regional club bands in their early-’80s heyday (filling suburban bars that had previously only hosted Led Zep cover bands), but never got recording careers off the ground in those days before home DAT tapes and CD burners.
They were also derided among the local punker-than-thou elitists who loathed the swaggering cock-rock attitudes of their respective frontmen, Ian Fisher and Steve Pearson. (Imagine–a guy in miserable little Seattle who thinks he can become an actual rock star!)
Stein’s team has done a good job at restoring and remastering; the bands sound better here than on their few, self-issued vinyl releases. For oldsters who saw these bands live, the CDs will bring back memories of that first fake-ID drunken spree.
But should anybody else buy ’em? The Cowboys’ blend of Mellencampy balladeering and Clashesque white reggae feels like a thrift-store relic; but the Heats’ Knack/Romantics power pop holds up fairly well, exemplifying both its period and timeless rules of song construction. And in this cigar-bar age, the title track of Smoke, extolling the joys of underage cigarette sneaking, can seem strangely decadent in ways not originally intended.
CONFIDENTIAL TO THE ICON GRILL: Sorry, but I just can’t eat in a place that’s got all that glass art on display. Though your huge back-entrance archway reading “NONE OF US” is intiguing in a mysterious/incomprehensible sorta way.
IN PORT: If the local daily papers were as interested in servicing the mass of their readers as much as in kissing up to big advertisers, they’d have hyped the Old Navy opening just like they hyped the Nordstrom opening. They could’ve run a gushing editorial like this: “There have been many milestones in the transformation of downtown Seattle into one of the country’s most vibrant city centers, and there will be more before the year is out. But no one event embodies local history, business success, and civic accomplishment as does the opening of the new downtown Old Navy. The former I. Magnin building on Pine between Sixth and Seventh has been remodeled into an elegant, easy-to-shop Old Navy. The exterior art deco facade, which dates back to 1926, has been restored and lends a familiar grace to the the city’s now-bustling retail core. On this eve of the opening of Old Navy’s fourth-largest store in the country, we offer congratulations to an out-of-state chain that has prospered for nearly half a decade.”
BUT SERIOUSLY FOLKS, this moderately-priced Son-Of-Gap chain has gone from zero to 400 stores in four years as part of an aggressive corporate strategy to become, as Gap’s annual report states, “not a retailer but a portfolio of global brands.” Its heavy emphasis on brand-logo T-shirts and sweatshirts means its customers pay to be the chain’s chief ad vehicle. And its relatively understated retro-chic look not only appeals to all ages, it might prevent or delay customers from aging beyond the place. This ain’t no plunder-and-split Viking contingent; it’s a well-equipped invasion fleet out to establish permanent colonial settlements. On the other side of the brow scale…
NOTES OF WORSHIP: The old multipurpose Opera House, with its acres of steak-house red wallpaper, symbolized a peripheral town trying (too hard?) to prove it had come of age. The new symphony hall, by contrast, symbolizes a civic establishment of Nordics and WASPs out to prove they’re so already-there they don’t need to shout their world-classness, just sit and bask in their own solemn collective presence; not unlike church ladies & gents. Indeed, from the organ pipes at the back of the stage to the dark paneling on the main hall’s relentlessly-angled walls to the seat-back brass plaques each honoring a different well-heeled donor (indeed, just about everything in the place except the toilets honors some rich person or company), the joint looks a lot like a tasteful mid-’60s Protestant church such as Plymouth Congregational or University Unitarian–only built to the scale of a suburban evangelical megachurch.
I was in the joint three times during its opening month. Two of those times, I stood in line in front of middle-aged boomers saying they hoped this prominent heart-O-downtown hall would help promote symphonic music to Those Kids Today. Both these overheard parties spoke under the unquestioned assumption that all Americans born after them were, virtually by definition, headbangin’ ingorami desperately needing conversion to the secular religion of high culture. As if these oldsters’ parents hadn’t said the exact same thing when the boomers were kids. As if there weren’t orchestral scores in every old movie and lots of recent movies (a few of which were recorded by the Seattle Symphony). As if the new leading-edge music here in town weren’t neo-improv and contemporary-composer stuff heavily based on hibrow and pre-rock traditions. As if such a huge cut of our dwindling public arts funding weren’t already going to arts-education programs (aside, that is, from the money going to auditorium-construction projects). No, most kids’ musical souls don’t need saving. But it’s nice to know some oldsters at least care.
(Next week: Goodbye to the Stranger edition of Misc.)
> iMPRESSIONS: The Stranger office just got a couple of them new iMac computers. They’re gorgeous; they’re screamingly fast; they’re just plain fun. The iMac’s the first “home” computer designed as a piece of home decor, like old “cathedral” radios used to be (one old radio name, Motorola, makes the CPU chip in the iMac). Just as importantly, it expresses the MacOS’s superior visual aesthetic into tangible, physical form. This has the practical effect of reducing the dissonance, the trance effect a computer user may have while really concentrating on the “mindspace” of working or running software. On plain beige-box computers, an advanced user can become almost unaware of his/her physical presence (unless, of course, something goes wrong with the hardware). The iMac’s more noticable, yet pleasant, presence might help hardcore gamers and Net-skimmers keep at least partly aware of the tangible world surrounding them. That, in turn, might help relieve or prevent the loneliness and depression cited among hardcore computer jockeys by some Carnegie Mellon U. sociologists.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Usually for weird potato-chip flavors you’ve gotta go to Canada. But Benson’s T-Bone Steak Crisps are imported directly from England to local spots like the Old Pequliar tav in Ballard. They don’t taste like steak, but have an oddly smoky flavor without being overly spicy. The slow frieght, tho’, can leave ’em a little less fresh-tasting than domestic chips.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Swaank (no relation to the porn mag Swank) is a rip-rollickin’, stylish-as-all-get-out chronicle of local swing-revival happennings. Besides musician and dancer interviews, it’s got a valuable jazz-history lesson and retro-fashion tips that thankfully go beyond the semiannual “Return to Elegance” nonsense in larger publications. There’s even a cartoon demonstrating how a neo-bopper can revise an outdated death-rock tattoo! (Free at clubs with swing nights, or $12 for four issues from 12437 110th Lane NE, #P101, Kirkland 98034.)
ANOTHER YEAR OLDER: Who’da thunk The Stranger (originally a li’l 12-page sheet of coupon ads, movie listings, sex advice, and cartoons) would become such a robust force in alterna-media, reaching some 150,000 readers and revered nationwide? The growth of the paper has parallelled the growth of its “virtual community” of readers and advertisers. While a lot of beloved stores, bands, clubs, eateries, performance troupes, galleries, etc. have left us since late Sept. ’91, a lot of others have joined us. And while the corporate-rock biz has largely left Seattle alone lately (local bands no longer even feel they have to insist on how “not grunge” they are), there are more pro musicians doing more different kinds of things here now than maybe ever. (How many of them are really good at it is another question.)
But what’s in store? Wasn’t too long ago when the stock market was supposedly on a never-to-end rise, when Wired magazine predicted a “long boom,” when the only question anybody asked about the economy was how to keep up with (or survive) the megagrowth. Nowadays, things seem a bit more uncertain, particularly among anyone with direct or indirect dependencies upon Canada, Mexico, Russia, east Asia, or the U.S. stock market (as you might guess, that’s a lot of dependents). Can’t say what’ll happen next, but it might not be all on the upswing.
If there really is a recession later this year or early next, how will it affect our community? Seattle ain’t the same place it was when we lived on the trickle-down from Boeing and its subcontractors. But now the $$ coming into Seattle isn’t merely trickling down from overall national business conditions. It’s coming from whole consumer-economy sectors (software, chain coffeeshops) centered here, shipping cash into head offices that directly employ many art-worlders and art-biz customers. Of course, an overall slowdown will slow down these companies as well; just perhaps more moderately and slowly than Boeing slumps used to be. For whatever it’s worth, the nothing-ever-happens pre-Stranger Seattle ain’t coming back.
UPDATE: A loyal reader called to report some longer Greyhound routes already do offer in-bus movies, having had to endure Parenthood on the way to Vancouver.
THE SILVERY SKIN: Didn’t see as much of Bumbershoot as in prior years (either the crowds have finally gotten to me or my ongoing diet left me too carbo-depleted to stand in hot lines). But I did find out that the Squirrel Nut Zippers’ stadium show really could produce Lindy hopping in the moshpit.
I also saw a few dozen wholesome grownups watch an hour of ’30s-’40s stripper movies (projected in an outdoor courtyard) without turning into rampaging degenerates. On a beautiful night, in a beautiful setting (right by the atomic neon art near the North Court meeting rooms), a mixed-gender audience got to witness beautiful B&W footage of beautiful women (including burlesque legend Sally Rand and someone billed on the re-release print as Marilyn Monroe, though I have my doubts) making beautiful moves in beautiful costumes of various small sizes.
After the dance shorts, the projector was stopped while various bigwigs conferred whether to show an encore segment. When they finally gave their OK, the crowd saw 10 minutes of naughty-funny XXX animations from the early ’30s (gags involved beastiality, oversized and detachable penises, and copyright-violating renditions of Krazy Kat and Bosko). As the audience strolled happily into the night, I realized the end-of-porn essay in this paper last month was right when it proclaimed a truly vital city needs a healthy element of public vice. There’s nothing like a little good clean sex to bring people together. These exhibitions like these also help prove the apparently little-known fact that people have been having sex since before you were born.
COMING HOME TO ROOST: Seattle’s affordable-housing crisis can be interpreted as a counterpart to the International Monetary Fund’s prescription for third-world economies: Enforce “austerity measures” on the masses, so a caste of financiers and speculators can have unfettered opportunities. Just as IMF shock-treatments are officially justified as being for everybody’s ultimate trickle-down benefit, Mayor Paul Schell’s proposed tax-and-zoning breaks for big condo developers are being touted as help for the thousands of citizens being priced out by the very developments Schell wants to further encourage.
Another intrepretation: When Schell became mayor, he inherited a municipal establishment that for over a decade had actively pursued a system of policies intended to prevent Seattle from becoming one of those islands of urban poverty surrounded by suburban affluence. We’ve had a government/ business elite devoted almost exclusively toward making Seattle’s population as upscale as possible–not by improving the lot of those already here, but by encouraging the upscale to move and stay here (and by almost criminalizing the underclass, when and where that was deemed necessary). You could see it in Rice’s caving in to Nordstrom’s every demand; in the school district’s use of busing to prop up enrollment in affluent-neighborhood schools; in the developer-friendly Urban Village and Seattle Commons schemes; and in city attorney Mark Sidran’s crackdowns against anyone too publicly black, young, or unmellow. If the pursuit of demographic purity meant other populations were discouraged (actively or passively), even when it made a joke of our professed love of “diversity,” it was considered a necessary cost.
But now, it’s gone far enough to price middle- and upper-middle-class folk out of Seattle–the core voter base of Seattle’s pro-corporate Democrat machine. So the insiders are reconsidering their policy of demographic cleansing, at least on the PR level. They’re talking about providing special incentives to make homes affordable to the merely well-off instead of just the really-really rich.
It’s way too little, and for the politicians it might be too late. If the “single-family neighborhood” populists who stopped the Commons and the Urban Villages spread the idea that Schell’s scheme will help only developers by encouraging more replacement of existing affordable housing by new “market rate” units, we could witness a movement that could eventually topple the municipal regime like, well, a house of cards.
The Best of Anime
Record review for The Stranger, 9/15/98
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Best of Anime
(Rhino)
Most people I know who come across Japanese animation, or anime, first see it as an alternative to American formula fantasy entertainment. It doesn’t take long before they realize anime’s just a different set of formulae. Those who stick with it do so because they happen to like those formulae, including those of the music.
Rhino’s assembled not the all-time best Japanese-animation music, but a sample of fully-competent commercial pop anthems from such films and series as Megazone 23, Gunbuster, Silent Mobius, Macross Plus, and Devil Hunter Yohko (all with female “idol singer” vocals).
Amid the action themes, two gentle, haunting ballads stand out as the disc’s best: “Beautiful Planet” (from the film Windaria) and “Voices” (from the TV series Macross Plus).
A handful of English-dubbed TV themes (Gigantor, Speed Racer, Astroboy, Sailor Moon) are tacked onto the disc’s start and end, almost as afterthoughts.
IN STORE: Borders Books held an Ally McBeal fan party and trivia competition on 8/20. Seeing this tribute to gushily pathetic “vulnerability” next to the diet and fashion books brought me a revelation: Ally isn’t a sex-object fantasy, it’s a target-marketing fantasy. An attempt at female-oriented counterprogramming opposite the male-targeted Monday Night Football and cable pro-wrestling shows, built around the most exploitive stereotypes from modern women’s-magazine articles. Of course, that’s just as antithetical to feminist precepts as any sex-object fantasy would be.
(The same store is now selling official “Windows 98 Roast” brand coffee. Sometimes it’s hard to keep my vow to never write a coffee joke in the column.)
LOOSENING UP: The week of the Clinton quasi-confession (an attempt to defuse the “family-values” demagogues’ attacks) was the same week Rupert Murdoch took over Pat Robertson’s Family Channel, turning it into Fox Family (a repository for former Fox Kids Network cartoons, plus such non-700 Club material as Pee-wee’s Playhouse reruns and a Spice Girls special). The ol’ squeaky-cleanness just didn’t produce Murdoch’s desired profit rate. A potential omen to PaxNet, the UHF broadcast network to launch this week with a format even squeakier than Family used to have.
THE VIEW FROM THE ROAD: The Oldsmobile Sihlouette Premiere, a forthcoming minivan, will offer a built-in VCR and an LED video screen (out of the driver’s view). Besides wondering if the GM-installed machine will try to scramble any attempted viewing of Roger and Me, imagine the possibilities:
Some Amtrak trains, and some European intercity bus lines, already have ground-level “in-flight movies;” no reason Greyhound couldn’t do the same (or for that matter, the Green Tortoise would be the perfect venue for watching Half Baked!).
FILLING THE BILL: I’d fantasized about doing it for years, but now it’s been done: A Vancouver band has taken my all-time wannabe band name, the Special Guests. They never headline a gig, but they’ve opened for everybody! (Until this happened, I appeared to be the only person whose favorite wannabe band name wasn’t “Free Beer.”)
TAKING UP THE SLACK: I don’t read the Wall St. Journal every day, so it took an attentive reader to let me know I’d missed its 8/6/98 front-page story on the last of the slackers congregating in Seattle, where supposedly “Good Times Are Bad” for goateed Caucasians wishing to identify themselves as victims of a no-future society.
Writer Christina Duff took a rather snide attitude toward young-adult males who dared refuse to join in the WSJ-proclaimed great boom economy: “Their ranks thinning everywhere, many aging slackers are congregating in Seattle, as if circling the grunge wagons…. The slackers’ last refuge here is the Capitol Hill area, where tattooed 20-somethings walk the streets giving hugs and high-fives…. Faced with the depressing news that things aren’t as depressing anymore, some are shamed into shedding their angst.”
Of particular scorn was one D.J. Thompson, belittled for choosing to only work part-time pouring coffee while his girlfriend pursued a Real Career.
Duff’s kinder to “ex-slacker Joanne Hernon,” now “a computer consultant for law firms” with unkind words for her former fellow Linda’s barflies: “They feel they need to be on the outskirts. Keep themselves in a poor position. Blame everyone but themselves. It’s easy to make money these days.”
Duff and Hernon don’t say how it’s easier for some (such as, admittedly, pale-skinned young-adult college grads) to make money than others; or how relative prosperity can more folks the option to choose not to devote their whole lives to material pursuits or the kissing of boss-butt. (Besides, Seattle’s currently up-‘n’-coming Boho-hood isn’t the maturing Capitol Hill but Georgetown.)
MISC. CAN’T BELIEVE nobody else (to our knowledge) has noted how the new logo for Safeco Insurance (and, hence, for Safeco Field) looks a lot like a rightward-slanting dollar sign…. Speaking of stadia, turns out the Kingdome can’t be imploded on New Year’s 2000 without canceling a Christian convention tentatively scheduled for that night. Darn.
(SUB)URBAN RENEWAL: With the opening of the 3rd Ave. Deli in the ex-Bon Tire Center on 3rd, downtown has its own mobile, curb-based readerboard sign with arrow-pattern chase lights. Strip-mall flavor in the heart of the city!
AFTERWORD: Crown Books is closing all its Washington stores, as part of a nationwide retrenchment. The book superstore chains’ chief victims aren’t the specialty independents, but the smaller general bookstores of both indie and chain ownership.The stores that discounted the bestsellers, prominently displayed the most heavily advertised books, and offered very little else.
BUT DO THEY COME IN LONG-SLEEVES?: Viagra that male-potency pill endorsed by everybody from Bob Dole to Hugh Hefner, isn’t available yet in some countries, including India. That hasn’t stopped a Bangalore, India company from marketing Viagra-logo T-shirts with the slogan “What the World Wants Today.” A co-owner explained to Reuters, “Today, Viagra is not just a pill… it is a positive attitude bringing hope to people.”
JUST IN TIME FOR XMAS: Mattel’s debuting a Barbie-sized Erica Kane doll. Imagine all the wedding gowns you could get for it! Or maybe you could play where she grittingly grins while your Marlena Evans and Vicky Lord dolls show off their tiny Emmys.
REVOLTIN’ DEVELOPMENTS: A couple months back Misc. wrote about the possibilities (for good or ill) of a new American revolution. Seems the topic’s becoming popular; at least as a selling tool. Both Taco Bell and Dos Equis invoke bizarre takes on Poncho Villa to sell consumer consumables. A golf ball called the Maxfli Revolution advertises it’ll help you “Seize Power and Take Control.” Closer to home, the highly institutional-looking ARO.Space sez its initials stand for “Art and Revolution Organization” (its ads even say “Viva le Revolution!”). If this keeps up, Baffler editor Tom Frank will have enough “advertisers co-opting the language of dissent” rant topics to keep going for years.
PASSING THE TORCH: British Petroleum (which bought Standard Oil of Ohio in the ’80s) will buy Amoco (formerly Standard Oil of Indiana); so the former Mobil (nee Standard of New York), Exxon (nee Standard of New Jersey), and assorted other gas stations in Washington now bearing the BP brand will eventually change. (Alas, no more “Petrol for the lorry” lines, and no more jokes about where bees go to the bathroom.) But it’s not known yet whether they’ll assume Amoco’s torch logo or whether Tosco the Connecticut-based company that bought BP’s Northwest operations in the mid-’90s and kept regional rights to the BP name, will instead change them to the 76 brand, which Tosco now owns outright. (After the print edition of this column went to press, Tosco announced it would keep the BP brand on its stations for the time being.) In other energy-related matters…
A BURNING ISSUE: It’s hard right now to think about heating equipment, unless it’s everybody’s favorite gas-powered industrial space heater. I speak, of course, of the mighty Reznor. When a rock singer using that surname showed up, some fans wondered whether he was related to the brand name bearing down from near the ceilings of stores, warehouses, artists’ studios, garages, nightclubs, etc. Turns out ol’ Trent is indeed a descendent of the company’s founder George Reznor (who entered the furnace trade in 1888, in the same central Penna. town where Trent grew up).
But the Reznor family’s had little to do in decades with the company, which has changed owners several times. Current owners gave 120 or so employees an “offer” last year: Take pay cuts of up to 28 percent, or else. The workers stood their ground. The owners shipped the jobs off to Mexico. Northeast politicians are now invoking the ex-Reznor workers as poster children for the injustices of NAFTA and the Global Economy.
So next time you hear Trent’s moans about frustration and helplessness amid a decaying industrial landscape, look up. If you see a Reznor heater above you, it’s a reminder that, for some, such feelings aren’t just an act.
AS PROMISED three weeks ago, here’s the official Misc. list of the 64 arts and sciences a modern person should learn; as inspired by one of the nonsexual parts of the Kama Sutra. (Here’s the original passage; here’s how to get the whole book.)
I’m not claiming to be an expert on all of these, or any. They’re just things I, and some of you, feel folks oughta know a little better, in no particular order:
street hockey, et al.).
cinematography, videography, Photoshop).
———————–
Subject: 64 Arts for the Modern Person Sent: 7/27/98 9:20 AM Received: 7/27/98 12:45 PM From: erinn kauer, eakamouse@webtv.net To: clark@speakeasy.org
Interesting topic. All modern persons should bone up (no pun intended) on the various methods of BIRTH CONTROL. To include: proper condom etiquette, taking the pill on time, abstinence, getting off without actually having intercouse, and covering one’s butt by always having a supply of the newly available emergency contraceptive pills (actually just the regular pill, taken within 72 hours of unprotected intercourse, it reduces the chance of actual conception by about 75%… this is not RU486, and does not abort anything, it just does not allow the conception to take place). PLEASE include this particular item in your list, there would be far less unwanted pregnancies occuring, either resulting in having the child because the misguided fool believes so strongly that abortion in wrong (like having a child unprepared and setting them up in this world on a shaky base is right) or in having the costly and scary and stigmatizing abortion and suffering needless guilt because of it. However, abortion is not the end of the world, and should be seriously considered if all other options are not viable at that point. Please call the FDA at 301/827-4260 and ask for Lisa D. Rarick for more info on the 72 hour emergency contraception pill, or 1-800-NOT2LATE, or your local pharmacy. Do not let the pharmacy give you any bullshit about having to get it through your doctor, it is available WITHOUT a prescription and is perfectly legal, etc, etc, etc. I found that my pharmacy balked at the notion, but this has only recently been approved and they are simply not used to it yet. They need to be shaken though, they are needlessly telling people to go through their doctor, but you DO NOT HAVE TO, this should be available OVER THE COUNTER.
Besides contraception, folks of the modern age should study organic gardening, meditation (stress-buster, dream fulfiller, life lengthener), keep an eye on politics and actually know something about the world and the U.S. of A., and how to make a good latte…
I am sure there is much more, and my list is pretty lame, but the CONTRACEPTION/ FAMILY PLANNING is extremely important.
Thanks for hearing me out!
Erinn Kauer / eakamouse
P.S. Concert ettiquette, Gourmet Camping, and the fine art of bodybuilding (look good now AND later!). Whatever. Bye.
Ross Shafer Goes Inside the First Family
Record review for The Stranger, 8/6/98
Ross Shafer Goes Inside the First Family (Jerden/SoundWorks): Shafer’s becoming one of those sadly “inspirational” figures who never gives up in the face of repeated failures. The original host of KING’s Almost Live (which became a local institution after he left) continues to attempt different areas of comic entertainment, hoping for that big break. Here, he attempts to clone Vaughn Meader’s classic JFK-themed comedy LP The First Family, only with the Clintons as characters–and with the meanness and luridity required for airplay on Clinton-bashing talk-radio shows. The cast (including local voice-over vet Ken Boynton as Bill C.) tries its darnedest to bring Shafer’s mediocre scripts to life (the final big gag is Teresa Ganzel’s faux-fellatio sound FX). Even sadder: It’s produced and released by Seattle recording legend Jerry Dennon, who masterminded the Sonics and Wailers and Kingsmen back in what they call “the day.”
AFTER YEARS OF SEEING favorite radio stations die from low ratings, what should happen but I get my very own one-week Arbitron diary. For $2 cash, I was to faithfully record every station I heard, whether at home, in car, at work, or blaring out the neighbors’ apt. at 2 a.m.
To carefully choose which stations deserved my temporarily-important endorsement, I kept the dial moving all week. Herewith, selected results:
It’s also an opportunity for those who’ve been yearning for a real progressive community station. There’s several low-rated, probably unprofitable conserva-talk stations in the 1200-1600 AM neighborhood (plus new frequencies now being allocated in the 1600-1700 range). The progs should get together, hit up some friendly moneybags in the music and tech bizzes, and buy one of these.
One Disaster Movie
and
One Disastrous Movie
Film feature for The Stranger, 6/28/98
ON THE BEACH
(dir. Stanley Kramer, 1959)
Local oldtimers remember when Stanley Kramer lived here in the ’80s and hosted KCPQ’s Sunday-night movies. He was always trying to make a statement, but usually took every commercial break to try to meander back to his original point, usually unsuccessfully. Here, though, he makes his point early and blatantly. In Aussie novelist Nevil Shute’s story, the Yanks and Russkies have fired their nukes in 1964, destroying most of civilization. Australia wasn’t hit, but the radiation clouds are on the way; so, as Ava Gardner’s character sighs, “There isn’t time. No time to love. Nothing to remember. Nothing worth remembering.” Well, actually there’s time for Gardner to fall for U.S. submarine captain Gregory Peck, for Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins to try to keep up the townspeople’s spirits somehow, for a brass band to play one last round of “Waltzing Matilda,” and for one lingering B&W shot of Melbourne’s eventually-lifeless streets. The spookiest antinuke flick of them all (including the ’80s TV ones), precisely becuase of its lack of onscreen gore.
RENALDO AND CLARA
(dir. Bob Dylan, 1978)
After Dylan mumbled through his role in Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), the Voice of a Generation apparently thought he could act–and even direct! So when he made a filmed record of his 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revue tour, he padded it out to five hours with fictionalized backstage antics, incoherent pontifications, and sub-dinner-theater acting. Dylan plays the “ambiguous” Renaldo (as described by the All-Movie Guide). His then-wife Sara plays Clara. Ronnie Hawkins and Ronee Blakely play Bob and Sara Dylan. Joan Baez plays The Woman In White. Bob Neuwirth plays The Masked Tortilla. Sam Shepard (his on-screen debut) and Harry Dean Stanton attempt to add professionalism. Dylan and Shepard share the writing credit/blame. After its box-office failure, Dylan issued a two-hour cut of just the music (including Arlo Guthrie, Joni Mitchell, Roger McGuinn, and an out-of-place Roberta Flack). Neither version’s easy to find.
Pere Ubu’s Lost Landscapes:
On the Road Again
Music feature for The Stranger, 6/25/98
For those who came in late, including over-21ers who weren’t born when Pere Ubu first formed, some things to know:
They’re not punk, nor are they `new wave.’ They were originally part of a tiny proto-scene in Cleveland during those Doobie/ Ronstadt dark ages of the early ’70s. The band’s founders, David Thomas and the late Peter Laughner, believed rock should mean something other than stadiums and cocaine. But they also didn’t settle for the AM-pop revivalism of the Ramones and Blondie.
Freed from career considerations (even “alternative” career considerations), Pere Ubu could produce perfect gems of energetic rock ‘n’ roll (the ’76 45Â “Final Solution”), totally-listenable experiments in joyous dissonance (the ’80 track “Not Happy”), and LPs of noisesome rambles that never degenerated into self-important noodling (The Modern Dance); all kept together by Thomas’s high yet forceful voice. They knew the rules of rock-song construction, and precisely where and when to break them.
They haven’t been continuously together these 23 years; yet this tour isn’t a formal “reunion.” Eleven people played in various versions of the original Pere Ubu from 1975 to 1982. When Thomas officially went solo, he continued to record and tour with some of his erstwhile bandmates. Four of those old Ubu musicians were in the band’s 1987 re-formation; Thomas and original guitarist Tom Herman remain in the five-piece group now touring.
Today Thomas makes both “David Thomas” records and “Pere Ubu” records. The essential distinction: The Thomas solo records go into whichever musical directions Thomas chooses to pursue; the Ubu records build on the band’s guitar/ synth/ vocal heritage. Players for both groups are signed to one-album contracts (Thomas calls them “project-years”).
They’re an indie band, but not religiously so. They started with self-released 45s at a time when nobody was doing that. They’ve bounced around various major, major-distributed, and full-indie labels on two continents ever since. Currently, the old stuff’s being reissued on Geffen (including the box-set retrospective Datapanik in the Year Zero); their two newest albums (plus old and new Thomas solo affairs) are on Portland’s Tim/Kerr Records and U.K. indie Cooking Vinyl.
They have the technology. Instrumentation on the new Ubu CDÂ Pennsylvania includes several organs, digital and analog synthesizers, tack piano (sounds like a grade schooler’s toy piano, only in tune), theremin, and computer-generated voices, along with the expected guitars and percussions (often used in unexpected ways). But as Thomas insists in the album’s press kit, “We aren’t experimental…. We know what we’re doing. We don’t need to experiment.”
The new album isn’t quite like the last one. The ’95 Ubu release, Raygun Suitcase, edged toward the rock half of the band’s art/ rock equation. Pennsylvania strays closer to the art half.
Pennsylvania can be interpreted as a meditation on a lost American landscape (or being lost on said landscape), as observed from repeated tour-van treks separated by long stints away. (While the band’s still officially based in Cleveland, Thomas now spends most of his non-touring days in England, where his biggest audience has always been.) It should be listened to from start to end, preferably on a car stereo while on a lonely stretch of Interstate in the wee hours. Track after long track of the most hypnotic driving music since Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” (with Thomas growling or drawling instead of his more familiar chirping) are interrupted at the 42-minute mark by a pair of quirk-pop arousal tunes, followed by one uptempo rocker (“Wheelhouse”), representing the band finally arriving and playing its gig. Then, three minutes of silence; then, 15 minutes of bonus tracks put you on the road again with avant-jazz-like variations on the album’s prior instrumental themes.
The words are as eerie as the music, if not more so. From the opening track “Woolie Bullie” (no relation to the oldie of the same name): “Culture is a swampland of superstition, ignorance, and abuse. Geography is a language they can’t screw up. The land and what we add to it cannot lie.”
The band’s name is now just a name. It was originally taken in honor of dada playwright Alfred Jarry’s antihero. But now, Thomas says “Dada and surrealism are an historical curiosity with no relevance as a living art. Dada and surrealism is what you do when you’re 17, a thing of youth that should be put away with maturity.”
Fortunately, Pere Ubu’s music just keeps getting stronger with the years. Having dropped punk’s angry machismo long ago, Thomas finds himself still growing into his art: “Why do you think after more than 40 years that juvenile social posturing has any relevance to rock music?”
Online Extra: A brief email interview with David Thomas
1. Do you now see yourself viewing the American landscape from the point-o-view of an emigrant? How have your long stays outside the country affected how you see it when you get back?
No. They don’t.
2. Is rock n’ roll any worthwhile pursuit for people near or beyond the age of 40?
Yes.
3. I’ve known bands whose members all live in different states. How do you logistically organize a band while living on a different continent from the other members?
There’s nothing to organize that can’t be done by phone. The only difference is cost of transport.
4. What’s it like to be called an Influence by musicians who don’t sound a thing like one another (or you)?
It’s not anything.
5. Have you any advice to all the would-be indie musicians out there?
Quit.
Tipton Bio Never Drags
Book feature for The Stranger, 6/25/98
Suits Me:
The Double Life of Billy Tipton
Diane Wood Middlebrook
(Houghton Mifflin) $25
You know the basic story. Billy Tipton, a nostalgic pop-jazz pianist and fixture of Spokane society for over three decades, died in 1989 and was revealed by doctors to have been a woman all along. Now here’s the long version.
Who was Billy Tipton really? At several points, Middlebrook (a onetime Spokanian herself) accepts the argument that Billy (born Dorothy Tipton in 1914) was a closeted lesbian who only dressed as a man to make it in the jazz business and/or because nobody in her world would accept A Strong Woman. Yet the details of Tipton’s life, which Middlebrook clearly spent much time and effort collecting, suggest otherwise. Instead of heading to NY or LA or Vegas, where lesbians and jazzy women would get as much acceptance as they would anywhere in those less enlightened decades, Tipton stayed in the Midwest and later the inland Northwest, where the potential career rewards were smaller but where the competition was also smaller. (Tipton only recorded two LPs, both of retro trad-jazz standards released in the ’50s on supermarket budget labels; his work, as described by Middlebrook, seems to have settled quickly into covers and, later, Lawrence Welkish nostalgia.)
I used “his” above for a reason. Despite Middlebrook’s psychoanalyses, her tale is clearly one of someone who saw himself as a man born with the wrong equipment, who wanted to be known exclusively as a man. There were plenty of strong women in Tipton’s dust-bowl Oklahoma upbringing; but their strength was in holding households and careers together, not in the letting-loose demimonde of jazz. By the ’40s, when female instrumentalists had started to emerge in jazz and pop (and young men not in the armed forces were often derided as unpatriotic), Tipton never took the opportunity to end his offstage “act.” Even when dying of untreated ulcers, Tipton refused the medical attention that might have revealed his secret.
No, the Tipton story isn’t a tale of tragedy but of triumph. Tipton wasn’t a jazz great and probably knew he’d never be one, but he died a success at becoming something, and someone, he wanted against all odds to become–and without benefit of surgeries, shots, or hormone pills.
Fun things in the book: The elegant design, the cover, the shadow-clef frontspiece logo, the descriptions of ’50s Spokane, some of Tipton’s creakily “naughty” onstage jokes about women and gays, the descriptions of Tipton’s cross-dressing details (strap-ons, chest-binding, elevator shoes, claims that sanitary pads were great for sopping up car-oil leaks).
•
The Crisis of Criticism
Edited by Maurice Berger
(New Press paperback) $17.95
Yes, there are readers who actually take arts reviews seriously. At least other reviewers do. When New Yorker writer Arlene Croce complained about the concept of “victim art” she accused a Bill T. Jones AIDS dance work of abetting (without Croce actually seeing the show), several members of the NYC-centric art-crit and lit-crit spheres fell into a tizzy.
This brief book compiles Croce’s un-review with eight other critics’ responses and ruminations on the value of criticism in today’s everybody’s-a-critic era. Granted, a lot of these pro critics and authors (especially bell hooks) are just sticking long words onto a desire for a world in which people such as themselves get more respect. But others argue, with varying degrees of success, for a new or reasserted role for their profession.
Some of the better pieces don’t address Croce’s beef at all, but instead explore other criticism-related matters. Particularly notable is Richard Martin’s “Addressing the Dress,” arguing for more serious and less hype-laden fashion journalism. With so much art, entertainment, etc. being churned out by the intellectual-property industries and their highbrow counterparts, the best of these essayists assert the importance of trying to make sense of it all, to sift the aesthetic diamonds from the aesthetic zirconia.
MAKING THE SQUARE SQUARER: From approximately 1971 to 1991, the official live music genre of Seattle was white-boomer “blooze,” as played at Pioneer Square bars. The “blooze” bars of 1st Ave. S. play on today, virtually unchanged. Yet P-I writer Roberta Penn recently claimed Seattle didn’t have a blues club. She probably meant we lacked a club that treated blues as a serious art form, instead of formulaic macho “party” tuneage. It’s worth noting that the only national star to emerge from this scene, Robert Cray, split for Calif. as soon as he hit big (and bad-mouthed the Square bars promptly after he left).
Now, the forces of development want to rechristen the Square as luxury-condo territory. Some developers say they’d like to rid it of such elements as nightly noisemakers (even if they’re sport-utility-drivin’ caucasisn noisemakers). I wouldn’t personally miss the “blooze” bars (though there’s something quaint about standing outside the 1st & Yesler bus stop on a Sat. night, hearing three bands from three bars playing three cacophanous variations on the same theme). But I wouldn’t want the clubs to be forced out by demographic cleansing, especially since the area’s handful of prog-rock and electronic-dance clubs would likely get the boot at the same time, if not first.
PHASES OF THE MOON: With the warm weather’s come an odd masculine fashion statement: dorsal pseudo-cleavage. It involves wearing jeans with a belt, but hanked down to show the tall waistband of designer boxer shorts. I know it originally came from tuff-guy street wear, which in turn was based upon prison garb (oversize trousers with no belts allowed). But in this incarnation, it’s like a male version of that “sex-positive” women’s book Exhibitionism for the Shy. And in case you wondered why there weren’t “sex-positive” books for men?)…
VIAGRA-MANIA: After 10 to 20 years of the magazines and the TV talk shows defining sexual issues almost exclusively from a (demographically upscale) woman’s point of view, now Time and its ilk are scrambling to out-hype one another on the concept of masculine performance, as a problem now chemically solveable. It comes amid a new wave of skin-free men’s magazines like Maxim, trying to attract male readers without that pictorial element proven to attract men but to scare off advertisers. So instead, all the sex in these mags is verbal, not visual, and it’s often in the how-to format so familiar to women’s-mag followers.
Viagra-hoopla might also mean we’re finally over the late-’70s orthodox “feminism” in which the erection was depicted as the root of all evil. In the Viagra era, an erection is seen as something all men and 90 percent of women crave and wish would occur promptly, predictably, and on cue.
Then there’s a scary story in Business Week depicting that pillow-shaped erection pill as a harbinger of a new generation of prescription lifestyle drugs, for people who wouldn’t die without ’em but would just like to “feel better.” In 1990, when the Lifetime cable channel ran programs all Sunday “for physicians only” (complete with slick ads selling prescription drugs to doctors), there was a panel discussion show in which a doctor predicted everybody in America would be hooked on at least one prescription drug (including remedies for common conditions not at the time considered “problems”) by decade’s end. Looks like he might’ve been close to right.
Another question could be posed from the hype: Is the legal “feel-good” drug industry morally distinguishable from the illegal “feel-good” drug industry? In the past, I’ve dissed both those who seek all the answers to life thru pharmaceuticals and those who piously seek to punitively condemn such seekers. Both camps, I wrote, were on ego trips more potentially dangerous than any drug trip. But with ordinary citizens going more or less permanently on chemicals for little more or less than self-confidence, perhaps that dichotomy will transform into something different.
