Suffer for fashion

Pants filed the following fashion report from the Mpls of Montreal show at First Ave., 3/16/07:

[Kevin Barnes] had two outfit changes during the show. I've never been to a show where someone takes time out to change clothes. His second outfit was a pair of purple tie-dyed hot pants, thigh-high fishnet stockings, slouchy blue boots, a green long-sleeved shirt with a large white collar, and a gold necklace with a large peace-sign hanging from it. That was my favorite one. He wasn't how I thought he would be. I always imagined him as being rather chubby and pasty, and balding, but he is very skinny, and not balding, and very dramatic, even campy. He's 'cool' looking, not geeky. His first outfit was a pair of really tight orange bell bottoms, a very tight t-shirt with a large picture of a lion on it, a red glitter cummerbund, and a loose cream colored buttoned shirt that he took off early on, to reveal the lion t-shirt. The second keyboardist/drummer also had an outfit change, but his wasn't as exciting. He started out wearing a brown sash over his camel colored blazer, which made me think that no one wears sashes anymore. Tis a pity. Maybe he'll single-handedly bring them back, in the way that Beth Ditto is bringing back spandex body suits.

The most fabulous that there is

I think I've figured out why "The Magic Position" is so sunny and shiny and satisfying: it's essentially a Motown song. It's the Four Tops; it's the Temptations. It's got the sweetness of "I Can't Help Myself," the ascending octave figure from "My Girl" (albeit sped up and compacted) and the full string section hooks of both. Which altogether makes for just about the most gloriously joyful four minutes since "Pillar of Salt." How Patrick Wolf got here from Lycanthropy or even Wind in the Wires I have no idea. What happened to "sorrow by name/ and sorrow by nature"? It's nice to see him holding on to the flamboyance and the vamping, and morphing it into a completely different genre.



We need more flamboyant boy vamps in the tradition of Bolan and Bowie and Freddie Mercury et al.--not just eyelinered emo-goth fusion teases like Gerard Way. Can Gerard Way really be said to vamp? Aesthetically he doesn't seem to recall anybody so much as Adore-era Billy Corgan at this point--with hair, of course. There's something about him that's just too naff, too humorlessly self-serious and too fundamentally emo to project real go-for-broke flamboyance. Emo, after all, is all about conservatism--disturb the paradigm of the wronged straight white boy raging against the cruel world/girl that ignores him and it falls apart.

Now Like Cenotaphs

Pants has gotten me into an all-instrumental show on Radio K called Now Like Photographs. If you like Minus the Bear and Trans Am, you will like this show. It's a lot of quiet post-rock but they also do drone and ambient. Their tag is "epic instrumental music," and as far as I can tell the rule is no vocals with lyrics, but wordless singing gets a pass. So Sigur Rós is sometimes okay. Pants's favorite NLP band and mine is Explosions in the Sky. They just started a huge tour that begins tonight at the Langerado Music Festival with Cat Power and Stephen Malkmus in Sunrise, Florida--not a bad town to begin a cross-country jog in, I'm thinkin'--so now when they come to yr town you will know to go see them and be moved and awed.

The plan is to go to DC to hang out/ go see girls/ rock

Happy International Women's Day! The Pogo beat being what it is, I'm observing said day by posting clips of rock-inclined women doing what they do best, where they do it best--tearing up axes and kits and Casios, live. They are/were real and fearless and grade A inspiration. They are not meant to represent all kinds of ladies and musics, just what's in my head today.

Also, in time for IWD the Gossip announced they're signing to Sony's up-and-coming gay ghetto project--oops, I mean exploitation niche...ah, that is, LABEL--Music With a Twist. Because that's what queerness is, a twist. Like a glass of Pepsi with a lemon wedge in it, or BBQ Doritos. Wilderness Media & Entertainment president Matt Farber said of the label back in January, "It's a home that says to artists, 'We not only are OK with who you are, but we embrace that as part of your identity.'" To which I respond, thanks, Matt! Your embrace is so essential to my happiness and self-worth. If you didn't approve I just don't know what I'd do!

[Addendum posted 3/10: as noted by Bexx, the Gossip originally announced their move to MWaT in November '06.]

Softball


Electrelane


The Organ


The Capricorns

Breathless to explain

Found recording unsolved mystery mailbag bonanza.

Dear Lizzie,

An idle googling of some of my own personal life's random keywords/people on a slow morning in the office (you know, as one does)--in this fateful case "Tweed Penguin"--turned up a single, lonely, two-year old link to your blog. I'm breathless to explain the treasure you've unearthed:

"Tweed Penguin" was the basement recording label of my high school friends and bandmates Jeremy and Nathaniel Braddock from Midland, Michigan around the turn of the '90s. The particular sampler you found was apparently compiled by guitarist/bassist Nathaniel, presumably for some friend who (like myself in '92) had gone off to college in Ann Arbor. The majority of the songs were written by these two brothers--often with myself drumming/complaining in an outfit called first The Smalls (Nathaniel was just bein' cool), later Quality Zoom Slide. They're really all quite the chestnuts, and deeply nostalgic reminders for me of days spent discovering music and weed with a Tascam 4-track in our rehearsal space above Timm's Appliance on Main Street in Midland.

Last I heard, Nathaniel (always the best and purest musician among us) was still making music in Chicago. His big brother Jeremy (and skull-clutchingly good lyricist) is now an English professor at U-Penn, and still keeps a small wierd band on the side which I try and catch whenever they come to play somethere here in NYC, where I live and work as a museum exhibit designer. Sadly, there's no room here for my treasured 1967 Ludwig "Black Oyster Pearl" drums.

Thanks for taking the time to notice those careful little liner notes. It may take a little time, but if you're interested, I'd love to send you a CD of those songs you've been wondering about. Once upon a time they were the best thing we'd ever done!

And yes--"Surfin' Vicar" remains unchallenged as the best song ever.

Yours,

Andrew Yamato

PS: "Myxz" refers to Myxzlplk--a short lived power-trio (named after the "Superfriends" nemisis) featuring Nathaniel, Chris "The Sweet One" Sugar, and myself, chronologically intersticed between The Smalls and Quality Zoom Slide. Joe is fellow Midland son Mighty Joe Wessling, who's still by far the tallest of us. Ted Nugent did not in fact play the solos on "Biker Larry" (an junior-year-abroad ode to one of Jeremy's Oxonian pals), although his bassist Mike Lutz did almost produce one of my later college bands.

It's Pete Burns, but he's not pixelated

I'm on vacation with Pants all this week. Please poke around in the archives if you'd like while I'm gone. And if you're a music geek, watch this.

Physiology from top to toe

STEPHEN PETRONIO COMPANY
Bud Suite/BLOOM/The Rite Part
Friday, February 16
Power Center

Stephen Petronio really likes his développés. Not that this is a bad thing--his dancers can reel off perfect ones like they're like falling off a Balanchine-shaped log--but the choreography in general was much more ballet-focused than I was expecting. I spotted something that looked suspiciously like a brisé volé and a bunch of near-grand jetés. The opening duet of Bud Suite was gorgeous and so savvily, wittily exploitative of the unmined diamond deposit that is male-male partnering I was surprised Matthew Bourne wasn't somehow involved.

Watching any kind of live dance done to Rite of Spring is always nifty, but I liked the first half of the program best, content-wise as well as costume-wise. The white dress shirts in BLOOM were lovely on everyone, men and women both, even if the long sleeves had the unfortunate effect of making the port de bras all but invisible. And somehow, Subkoff made the deconstructed black dinner jacket/red hot pants combo work.

As well-integrated as the Rufus Wainwright songs were into each piece, I wonder whether it's generally a good idea to soundtrack choreography this articulate, this dramatically vocal, to pop songs or songs with lyrics. It creates too much of an opportunity for the lyrics to overpower the language of the dancers' bodies. Things get even trickier when you try to shoehorn in, as Wainwright does in BLOOM, the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. He succeeds, I think, but it all feels rather busy and redundant, since the creative movement broadcasts so much poetry already. How appropriate that Dickinson's "Hope Is The Thing With Feathers" should show up here; it's not hope that "sings the tune without the words," but dance.

[Cheers to whoever decided to shoot the entire company mid-pogo for the Bud Suite etc. promo package. And to MAKING SWEET POTATOES.]

I don't want to claim that I'm special. But I'm a bit special.

I need someone to help me parse the Robbie Williams "She's Madonna" video. I've been throwing theories at it and nothing's sticking. Is it slagging off Guy Ritchie? Is it a meta-parodic in-joke? Aren't R-Wills and Madge friends? And is this just him being a big queer tease again?

[Addendum added 2/19: K-Punk's already on it]

Kaltes klares Rainer

HA! I knew that Emily Haines' "Doctor Blind" video looked familiar. Cf. this scene from Liebe Ist Kälter Als Der Tod:





There is a lot of Fassbinder on YouTube, though not as much as one would hope--a month or so ago I watched Deutschland Im Herbst but it's been taken down since then. Who knows, maybe it was never there and I dreamed it. It seems like the kind of dream I would have. No context, just angsty Fassbinder arguing with his mother about democracy intercut with even angstier Fassbinder slumping around his dank and unlit apartment, screaming at his boyfriend to make coffee. Constant screaming, in fact. Casual full frontal nudity and cocaine pick-me-ups. I do remember subtitles--can one dream subtitles?

Part of Querelle is still up. I have not seen the whole film but I am liking the aesthetic--very Todd Haynes/West Side Story/Pet Shop Boys video fantasia. Way more Italian than German, surely. Those are so cast-offs from the set of Satyricon it is not even funny. I'd have a go at parsing ye olde mise en scene but a particularly smart commenter has already nailed it: To truly understand this film one must have an appreciation for Fassbinder and also an understanding of Jean Genet. The movie is fucking amazing and is meant to be diffused, disjointed, jaundiced and lurid. Jaundiced and lurid! Yes! If there are two more precise adjectives for that 3 minutes 41 seconds I don't know them. Jaundiced in the sense of envious, spiteful and prejudicial but also quite literally manifest in the sickly yellow set and lighting design.

Having the last naff

Picking over the critical response to Bloc Party's A Weekend in the City (listen to most of the album here), I'm struck by the number of people who've linked their disappointment with the record to its B-side and lyrics, which they dismiss together as, in the words of one online commenter, "atrocious juvenile angsty bullshit." This is partly due to a certain amount of anti-sentimental rockist snobbery (how can the Bloc really jam when they're talking about, like, their feelings?), and partly, and far more interestingly, a result of a wholesale failure to understand or even consider what Okereke is singing about. Stereogum reported last November,

Too much of the second half sounds like "I Still Remember." Totally inoffensive, dropping lyrics like "I would go with you anywhere, I should have kissed you ..." Whaaa? We knew you guys were sensitive, but c'mon! Release that track directly to the soundtrack of whatever hipster teen soap for which it was written. "I still remember," says Kele. We do, too! "I'll love you in the morning," he says on the next track, "Sunday." Guess we will, too – but this is thin fucking ice, Bloc Party.

The ostensibly trite, vanilla lyrics in question include the following:

You said "it's just like a full moon".
Blood beats faster in our veins
We left our trousers by the canal
And our fingers, they almost touched

You should have asked me for it
I would have been brave
You should have asked me for it
How could I say no?

And our love could have soared
Over playgrounds and rooftops
Every park bench screams your name
I kept your tie

Unless Ryan and Seth have started making out on The O.C. recently, I'm not exactly sure which hipster teen soap this is ready for. Do saccharine lyrics deserve a pass because they document one of the richest and most neglected subjects in pop music--unconsummated, explicit queer desire? I'm saying yes. In the past, queer pop/rock songwriters have been expected either to turn out chirpy "we're just plain folks" pride anthems or to bury everything under six feet of subtext so as not to offend the naffs.* On the B-side of Weekend, Bloc Party have done the impossible. They've produced a half-dozen painful, perfect, lust-glazed love songs that sidestep mainstream gay pieties without selling out the radical queerness that makes them so precious in the first place. It'd be a shame if people didn't listen hard enough to notice.

*Morrissey might constitute a third route. Or possibly a route to the moon. It's no wonder Okereke's returning the signal, in the chorus of "I Still Remember" but also passim.

What would Chris Martin be doing visiting a factory in Wigan?

Can we get on with this? I’ve gotta do AIDS and Alzheimer’s and land mines this afternoon, and I wanna get back for Deal or No Deal. Plus, Gwyneth’s making drumsticks.

The NYT's already hyped it, but Chris Martin on Extras is--well--almost as good as David Bowie on Extras. Oh, Northern English factory-working sitcom characters. Your vowels make me weak-kneed.

Double fantasy

See, all you rumor-mongers--how can Le Tigre be broken up when they're collaborating with Yoko Ono? "Sisters O Sisters" sounds swept together from the remains of "New Kicks" and "Dyke March 2001," but the second wave-third wave coalition element is inspiring nonetheless.

Dialectical sprechstimme

Listening to Pulsallama's "The Devil Lives in My Husband's Body" tonight I realized that there is an entire genre of punk songs built around, or out of, a spoken narrative. Songs that seem to have excerpts of This American Life slipped into them. I wanted to include "Rock Lobster" and "Jilted John," but those only toe the line of sprechstimme, not hop over it. Rex Harrison, speak-sing yr heart out:

Pulsallama, "The Devil Lives in My Husband's Body"
'Donald, Donald honey, what are you doing down there in the basement?' That's what I said to my husband Donald when he came home from work last night. He said, "Honey. I gotta fix something downstairs.' Well, as I was pulling out the casserole I heard this weird barking noise coming from the basement, and you know, we don't have a dog. So this went on for two weeks. Every night he'd go down to the basement and I'd hear this barking. So finally I called up Hilda, the next door neighbor. Well, everybody in town thinks she's a witch. But just because she has seventeen cats doesn't make her a witch...does it?

Cold Cold Hearts, "Maybe Scabies"
So you know how last summer everyone thought that Jerry Garcia was dead? Well me and my sister, we have this theory that really he's not dead, that really he was abducted by aliens. So these aliens came down from one of those planets like Pluto, Jupiter, or Mars, and took him back up to their spaceship and then they conducted all these tests and experiments on him, you know, like on The X-Files, and they gave him scabies, and they set him back down on the planet Earth, and that's how all the hippies in America got scabies!

Gang of Four, "Anthrax"
These groups and singers think that they appeal to everyone by singing about love because apparently everyone has or can love--or so they would have you believe anyway. But these groups seem to go along with what, the belief that love is deep in everyone's personality. I don't think we're saying there's anything wrong with love, we just dont think that what goes on between two people should be shrouded with mystery.

Sleater-Kinney, "Surf Song"
Dear Corin-you're the only student in the whole school who can keep an open mind about music, and accept a little wild loudness. Keep listening to those crazy new wave bands and keep an eye out for Sheena, 'cause she's a punk rocker. Keep the faith and new bands will appear...we've got to start a band this summer, but we've got to find a better name than "Sleater-Kinney."

Also noteworthy:
Splodgenessabounds, "Two Pints of Lager and a Packet Of Crisps Please"
Bikini Kill, "Thurston Hearts the Who"
The Gymslips, "Take Away"

Previously on All My French Poststructuralist Children...

Aw, shoot! Daytime TV goes Baudrillard!

No being is assigned by nature to a sex. Sexual ambivalence (activity-passivity) is at the heart of each subject, sexual differentiation is registered as a difference in the body of each subject and not as an absolute term linked to a particular sexual organ. The question is not "having one or not." But this ambivalence, this profound sexual valence must be reduced, for as such it escapes genital organization and the social order...[The masculine-feminine structure] leans on the alibi of biological organs (the reduction of sex as a difference to the difference of the sexual organs); and, above all, it is pegged to the grandiose cultural models whose function it is to separate the sexes in order to establish the absolute privilege of one over the other. If everyone is led, by this controlled structuration, to confuse himself with his own sexual status, it is only to resign his sex the more easily (that is, the erogenous differentiation of his own body) to the sexual segregation that is one of the political and ideological foundations of the social order.

-For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign



Pants made an interesting observation about this clip, saying that one of the reasons Zarf/Zoe is so screamingly awkward and synthetic (and therefore also irresistible and somehow authentically queer) is that nobody's had time to figure out how to write trans characters for television yet. Today's situation resembles the period when (straight) writers started trying to write gay characters in the 1970s--they had no idea what they were doing, and had to make things up as they went along.

That All My Children decided to go the whole rainbow hog and make Zarf/Zoe an M to F lesbian isn't really so surprising, since this reprieves them from having to show what viewers will see as a man in drag coming on to another man. Nor is it an accident that Z/Z (ooh, so close to S/Z!) is "British" and "a rock star"; trannies still only make sense to the American mainstream at this point as exotic, eccentric foreigners. Still, a couple of scenes feel almost revolutionary in their issues-never-before- legitimated-on-daytime-TV-ness. One hopes they've got Kate Bornstein's phone number.

Notes on Notes on a Scandal

-The Anglo-Irish are to native white Londoners what Mexican Americans are to white Los Angelesians--pure signifiers of otherness, border invasion, working class struggle, Catholicism, emotionality, hysteria, passion, "feeling," sexual availability, et cet. et cet. Little Steven Connolly (why not just go all the way and call him Patrick Mickey O'Pattypat?) could not do the work he does as a character if he were not Anglo-Irish.

-The spectral lesbian predator of the golden age of Hollywood is alive and well! Judith Anderson reborn in Dame Judi. Overspill from crisis of faith in security of the nation-state puddles into crisis of faith in security of the heterosexual matrix.

-Resurgent culture of anxiety/paranoia over wisdom of the old woman; the crone accretes too much knowledge, becomes dangerous, cannot be trusted--what happens when the world's old women aren't bridled by grandmotherly nurturing activities? What secret powers can they hold over us? Vaguely Puritan witch hunt cadences.

-Rarity of women in Hollywood films admitting their erotic needs, sexual agency, subjectivity and power with this kind of directness--Richard: "Why did you do it?" Sheba: "Because I wanted him." Sheba as clear subject, Steven object. Equally rare display of inverse of quasi-accepted Lolita scenario. How much preserved from original?

-Painfully obvious symbolic nomenclature--Barbara Covet(t), Bathsheba

-Philip Glass's anvil-dropped-on-head score; every scene upstaged by thundering chimes and roiling arpeggios. Forget humans, give the score Best Actor.

-Paging Mary Kay Letourneau.

More meta-notes

-out-of-nowhere Siouxsie reference; Kaleidoscope as relic of youthful rebellion; what was the logic behind choosing Siouxsie? Was this a carryover from the book, or did somebody throw a dart at a board with her and, like, X, Bauhaus, Birthday Party, Nina Hagen and Lene Lovich tacked to it?

-Speaking of Philip Glass, Muse's "Take a Bow" is so chock full of frantic arpeggios it's hard to believe he wasn't involved. The symphonic arrangement lags not far behind in terms of raw Glassiness (Pants, thanks for the tip!).

Brace yrself

Mark Simpson has a blog. I may never get any work done again.

One of these things is just like the other

I somehow never noticed this before. Excuse 17 s/t came first, so...accident? Homage? Sly insider reference? Personally, I think it's a reoriented Azerbaijani national flag, but then you know me--I'm an Azerbaijan booster from way back.

Silent alarmist

New Bloc Party album brewing. Kele Okereke is so fantastic I don't even know what to say. Although it's funny, these issues seem familiar somehow...

In the Shoreditch pub, Okereke gulps at his glass of wine. He is, justifiably, nervous about all this. A Weekend in the City is his unflinchingly honest depiction of a world of drugs, racism, religion, suicide, gay sex, violence, youth in hoodies and white vigilantes. This is London, it says, and this is now. The record doesn't presume to have all the answers; it is as confused and confusing as life is for young people. It also sounds terrifically exciting, a crunching mix of guitars, electronic beeps and multilayered vocals; a great leap forward for British music.

Here is London--giddy London
Is it home of the free or what?

'I just feel that every non-white teenager will know what I'm talking about when I say that certain avenues in this country are closed to you. Whenever I walk into a pub in London I feel frightened. There are certain activities that are still more predominantly white.' He and his flatmate, a white Austrian girl, have been abused by bigots who thought they were a mixed-race couple. The multicultural melting pot, Okereke concludes, is unworkable.

The lyric 'the buses have become cruel' in 'For England' was a reference to his memories of catching buses to and from school in Essex, and the terror unleashed by his fellow pupils on the top deck. The song then moves on to the horrible fate of David Morley, the gay barman kicked to death on London's South Bank - his teenage killers capturing his death on their mobile phones. The lyric 'England is mine, I'll take what I want' pinpoints a feral youth underclass for whom normal rules of civil society don't apply.

I decree today that life is simply taking and not giving
England is mine and it owes me a living

Also, as part of his stated intent to create a 'warts-and-all account of where my mind is right now', there are the songs about sexuality. Is 'I Still Remember' autobiographical?

'Not really,' he replies, before adding: 'I guess, partially.' Can we call it a gay love story? 'Yeah, but is it a love story? It's one person longing for somebody they can't really have. But it's not consummated. It's not a mutual thing. It's weird - a lot of straight women that I know have confided that they've got it on with other girls. It seems quite a healthy part of their sexuality. Whereas it seems that the same impulse is apparent in heterosexual men but there's no ...' He stops again. 'I can't tell you how many times I've been propositioned by straight boys.'

Really?

'Yeah, yeah. It happened a lot before all this [the band] started happening. This is probably a contentious issue, but I swear that I could always see it in people, in the way that guys would need to be touching other guys. You could see there was something they couldn't say aloud. And I saw it when I was at school. And I guess 'I Still Remember' is an attempt at trying to confront that. I don't think that my sexual impulse is that bizarre or foreign. [But] the way that it's supposedly discussed in mainstream culture is [that] it's a crazy thing. But I know from my own experiences a lot of heterosexual boys had feelings or experiences when they were younger. And that's not really ever spoken about, that un-spoken desire.

He'd love to touch
he's afraid that he might self-combust
I could say more
but you get the general idea

'Not two gay boys,' he continues, 'but the idea of two straight boys having an attraction, or there being an attraction that's unspeakable - that was the idea of that song. When was the last time you heard an interesting pop song that actually tried to give you a different perspective on desire?'

All the streets are crammed with things
eager to be held
I know what hands are for
and I'd like to help myself
you ask me the time
but I sense something more
and I would like to give you
what I think you're asking for
you handsome devil

'One of the things I was most disappointed about with Silent Alarm was I was hiding behind abstraction,' Okereke concedes. 'Then I really got into the Smiths. The lyrics were amazing, so focused. There's no worse sin as an artist than hiding behind cliches and abstraction. If you have something to say, it should be able to be understood by everyone.

Love's Not the Answer

The news came this evening like a bolt from my YahooMail: The Gymslips are now on MySpace. I feel like I have arrived somehow, now that I receive unsolicited e-mails from strangers in the UK with news about my favorite bands. I do not worship at the church of MySpace, so I am sadly unable to do as the mystery e-mailer urged and "come say hi." I can, however, exhort YOU to comment up a grrrl band fanstorm in my eager stead. I had not heard any Gymslips post-1983, round about Rockin' With the Renees and the Silly Egg EP, but apparently they soldiered on to eke out a gloriously trashy mid-80s spew romantic existence in the manner of Hyaena-era Siouxsie and Duran Duran. Gone is the Oi! bristle of Rockin', synth-bombed by hand claps, fingerless gloves and bass drum rolls. Says the official (not the old) M'Space case:

The second incarnation of the all girl punk/pop band The Gymslips. the new line up did a Radio One John Peel session to include the tracks, Evil Eye, and Lead Me On. The girls also played several gigs including The Marquee in Wardour Street, London and supported Aswad at Leicester Square, and also supported New Model Army, Fields of the Nephilim. They used to rehearse in the same studios as Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Paula Richards now lives in Cornwall Karen Kay lives in Cornwall and sings with the Daughters of Gaia see www.daughtersofgaia.com

Honestly, anybody Frankie told to relax is ten times worthy of yr fandom, but if that's not enough incentive, consider that the Gymslips list among their followers one Alex Bowie, a MySpacer so excessively musically knowledgeable he finds it necessary to list his picks alphabetically. He likes all yr favorite bands AND the Nipple Erectors! Personally, I think he's dreamy--almost as dreamy as Pants. Resemblance to Shane of The L Word not a drawback.

Oh, and in case you couldn't tell, I'm back from Minneapolis. I brought some records with me kindly donated by ex-coworker Don of Midway Books. One is from Pants' parents, though--guess which.

The Raincoats - s/t
The Raincoats - Looking in the Shadows
Bush Tetras - Beauty Lies
Emily's Sassy Lime - Desperate, Scared but Social
Erase Errata - At Crystal Palace
Ear Candy - Chante Le Femme...JUST LISTEN NOW
The Third Sex - Back to Go
The Softies - Winter Pageant
The Dials - Flex Time
Heavenly - Heavenly vs. Satan
Infinite X's - s/t
Free to be You and Me - Marlo Thomas And Friends

And lastly--for Pazz & Jop's sake, people, my year-end list was fake. It's heartening to know that you think there really is a band out there called The Near-Sighted Nepalese Stock Brokers, but you won't find them in an old Elephant 6 mailorder catalog no matter how hard you look.

Pogo Pazz & Jop / Jackin' Pop

Kudos this year to Idolator for challenging the Voice. Until their poll results come in, acquaint yrself with the Pogo equivalent. This year's ballot, like last year's, aims to showcase those artists and records so groundbreaking, so inventive, so unfairly overlooked and ignored that they don't technically exist. Because as everyone knows, the quality of a song is inversely proportional to the number of people who know about it. And according to this law of music crit, the following releases truly are

THE BEST MUSIC OF 2006

Albums
1. Mr. Fistopheles, Bend Over Backwards
2. The Oliver Cromwells, No Irony Here
3. Lil' Tiny, Serendickity
4. The Pallbearers, It's Your Funeral
5. Socratease, Maybe I'd Rather Just Go Home After All
6. Stupider Every Year, Stupider Every Year
7. Lionel Bennett-Jones, Not Bloody Likely
8. Pamplemousse!?, A Little Death (Goes a Long Way)
9. Linzeylee Carter, Linzeylee Doesn't Pole Dance Here Anymore
10. Black Wolf, Swan Parade Mother and the Hot-Eyed Dice Chip Snakes, Critical Acclaim

Singles
1. The Oliver Cromwells, "All Our STDs"
2. Dirrtee Duchess feat. Vanity Fairy, "Emancideclapatriation"
3. Gross Domestic Product, "Eat My Economix"
4. The Near-Sighted Nepalese Stock Brokers, "Hanging In There (The Sherpa Song)"
5. Mourning Becomes Electro, "If Only We Were Actually From A Slum in Rio" (DJ Dirigible Remix)
6. Jim Henson Folk Catastrophe, "Me & Miss Piggy"
7. The Sad Sacks, "Screamotional Is A State of Mind"
8. Lil' Tiny, "In My Pants" (Radio Edit)
9. Kittens Not Cadavers, "Tell Me a Bedtime Story Without Bacon In It"
10. The Perverted Soccer Referees, "Halftime in the Equipment Shed"

I will be in Minneapolis with Pants for the next two weeks; reports may ebb. Don't forget to keep pogoing while I'm gone.

Looking in the shadows

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 12
LIVE @ PJ's (102 S. First, Ann Arbor MI)

URGH! A MUSIC WAR (96 mins, dir. Derek Burbidge)
With peformances by: Police, Wall of Voodoo, Toyah Willcox, OMD, Oingo Boingo, Echo & the Bunnymen, Jools Holland, XTC, Klaus Nomi, Go Go's, Dead Kennedys, Steel Pulse, Gary Numan, Joan Jett, Surf Punks, Au Pairs, Cramps, Devo, Alley Cast, Gang of Four, 999, Fleshtones, X, UB40

The movie is heavily male, but the female singers -- Willcox, Carlisle, Jett -- distinguish themselves by their clarity. Joan Jett screams as fiercely as anyone, but you can understand everything she's saying, whereas many of the male singers rant unintelligibly (which can be its own kind of hostile fuck-you lyricism). The viewer/listener comes away thinking that Jett and the other women -- remember, this was 1980 and 1981, long before Courtney and Alanis -- have fought too hard to be on that stage to waste the opportunity to be heard; the men, accustomed to being heard, let their words clatter and fall every which way.

Rob Gonsalves

B-side of my heart

The week in review, pogo-style.

On Tuesday, rockism was back with a vengeance. Synthetic! the critics cried. Sampled, catchy, shallow! Illegitimate, dishonest, disingenuous! I was appalled, prepared an extensive and eloquent feminist defense of G-Stef, remembered the whole contractual enslavement of Japanese girltoys thing and shelved said defense pending further analysis.

On Wednesday I found the first Bis album and a Nina Hagen EP at Encore. They also have two copies of Chicks on Speed Will Save Us All. I left all four (Pogo treasury not what it used to be), so they're totes yrs if you beat me back to them.

On Thursday the Organ broke up, three songs into recording their second album. A noticeably pained Jenny Smyth told CBC Radio 3, "Basically, we're going to keep it all private. It's kind of a sensitive subject...and I think I'd leave it at that."

On Friday I got off work, hopped into the elevator and started singing at the top of my lungs. I do all of my best singing in elevators. But only on the condition that I'm riding alone. I had just ripped into the chorus of "Sheila Take a Bow" and was really letting loose when the doors opened on the fourth floor and a woman came in, catching me mid-bellow. This never happens--I always get to go down all five floors by myself. I immediately shut my mouth, stared at the floor and enjoyed one of the more awkward and embarrassing 20-second silences of my life.

We rode to the ground floor together and when the woman got off I finally looked up, noticing she had short dyed hair and glasses and a peacoat and a purse with a clear plastic sleeve. The sleeve had a 12" record inside with IS IT REALLY SO STRANGE? across the middle. Oh, for heaven's bloody sake, I gawped. You have got to be kidding me. I ran outside until I caught up with her and blurted, Excuse me, er, your purse, blah blah blah, kind of rare single in this country blah, where did you get it, blah blah? She smiled, said re: the purse, Oh yeah, it's nice, isn't it? My friend made it for me. It originally had Donny Osmond but I switched him out.

I agreed that this was indeed an inspired idea and let her go on her way, setting off purposefully in the opposite direction so as not to seem stalkerish.

I then tripped on a pine cone and fell on my face.

"Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva--whateva."

Just in time for the balls-to-the-wall commercialization of [insert yr preferred religious winter holiday here], Criterion has released a fancy-pants repackaging of G.W. Pabst's 1929 silent stunner Pandora's Box. Don't be fooled by the "silent" tag; this movie practically wails a 2000s sensibility, as the creator of the video below seems to realize. I do not in any way condone the Killers or exonerate them from past crimes of wankery; still, the fact that their song syncs up so effortlessly with the spirit of the film gives an indication of just how ahead of her time Louise Brooks truly was. There are multiple opportunities for feminist reclamation--though perhaps not quite as many as in Diary of a Lost Girl. Watch! Marvel!



In fact, the only thing on YouTube that can compete in terms of inspired visual-musical synchronicity is this little wonder. It's my entire Jem concept condensed into 3-minute video form. Thanks to Tali for the original tip, and to Mairead for reminding me again later:



Also magically, gloriously and newly available on YouTube: the entireties of Aimee & Jaguar, Fucking Amal/Show Me Love (without English subtitles) and High Art, the film that does for gutsy New York photography magazine editors what Newsies did for paperboys (best line: Greta, Fassbinder's DEAD, okay?). Seriously though, it's a pre-L Word-writing Lisa Cholodenko at her sharpest and best, and the mood of this movie is so heady and meditative and palpable and thick it makes To Kill A Mockingbird look like a Warner Bros. cartoon. The strung-out-as-all-hell Shudder to Think soundtrack helps, too.

And finally, before I forget, I've just been reading Edmund White on Genet:

Whereas the narrator in Proust's novel is heterosexual and Gide published anonymously and Cocteau never fully acknowledged his authorship of Le Livre Blanc and Montherlant and Mauriac were closeted, Genet wrote novels in the 1940's in which the homosexual narrator is called "Jean Genet" - what's more startling, he's a passive homosexual (for if anyone were to admit to being gay it was naturally to strut about as a top man, whereas it's well known almost all writers are bottoms).*

Hmmm. And hmmm. And HMMM again. I like the idea that writers are people who are, erm, receptive to the world's inspirational stimuli, and that a writerly temperament harnesses that receptive spirit and uses it to create art. But what about people who like to get all Foucauldian and switch things up according to how they're feeling on a given day? Does that mean that if you're a bottom Monday through Wednesday, and a top Thursday through Saturday (Sunday being yr day off, natch), you're only a writer for half the week? What if you like to switch in medias res? And can't we apply this to the ladies as well, please? I know it's a throwaway line and purposefully glib, but there are eerie resonances at work here.

*Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review (3:1), Winter 1996

We didn't start the fire

A house on my street caught on fire this morning. My bus had to take a detour around all of the fire trucks and police cars, but the three people sitting next to me didn't seem surprised. In fact, they were strangely jolly and talkative. "I saw plumes of smoke coming out the back door of the yellow house when I got up," one woman reported gleefully. "A lot of it, and dark black, too. I won't...I won't say they deserved it." "No," agreed her friend, her eyes gleaming. "No one deserves this, not three weeks before Christmas." They sat in quiet smugness. "I won't say anyone deserves this."

Who lives in the yellow house? What did they do to so clearly (not) deserve to have their house burn down? What kind of second Sodom did they create inside, and why wasn't I invited?