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Entry 157: 2/6/2010:  Quotes, Concert Review & Video Review

Snoopy HatesJoey Stalin

I'm exceedingly pleased stalinist douchebag Howard Zinn passed. I popped a bag of corn in anticipation of stalinist douchebag Noam Chomsky also descending into hell. Who then will be the pied piper for angry, rich white kids filled with genocidal yet nuanced and intellectual self-loathing? Who will be left to defend Pol Pot and The Ukrainian Holocaust? Not tubby Ward Churchill (aka Chief Whitey Fake-Em-Good). Maybe Sean Penn, Matt Damon or his best friend Mr. Jennifer Garner. How 'bout Oliver Stone, who called Hitler "an easy scapegoat", denied the defense marxists give to their many mass murderers - "context".

And I Quote...

Overheard on a country music station while scanning the dial: "I know if the whiskey don't get me the memories will."

John Ratzenberger (Cliff Clavin) hates hippies: "This isn't the Democratic party of our fathers and grandfathers. This is the party of Woodstock hippies.  I was at Woodstock — I built the stage. And when everything fell apart, and people were fighting for peanut-butter sandwiches, it was the National Guard who came in and saved the same people who were protesting them. So when Hillary Clinton a few years ago wanted to build a Woodstock memorial, I said it should be a statue of a National Guardsman feeding a crying hippie."

Center-left Slate.com blogger Mickey Kaus casually denigrates Generation Y political blogger Matthew Yglesias by calling him an "Authoritative Juiceboxer". (Yglesias writes about events long before he was born like he was in the middle of the action.) Do the kids still say "Snap!" these days?

The Residents: Talking Light Tour, January 30, 2010, The Henry Ford Theatre, Los Angeles, CA (concert review): It's 8:00 AM, twelve hours before tonight's show, and I already feel confident The Resident's Talking Light show will leave me bored and disappointed. Why even go then? It's The Residents, the great love-hate relationship of my musical life. I've seen all their national tours except for Bunny Boy since 1986's 13th Anniversary Show. Bunny Boy was internet ambitious but made up as they went along, with Big Rez free associating a story about something or other this guy gives a stab at recalling. Even The Residents themselves called bulls--t on themselves:

The time had come for a change. The Residents had known that for a while, even before Bunny hopped on to the scene.

2008's Bunny Boy was a combination of music that was vaguely related to an internet series that was all vaguely related to a touring version of those things combined. In some ways it could be said that it was lacking a unified vision. Others might say that the project was exactly about that, Bunny's search for his brother was nothing more than The Residents trying to ground themselves in something they cared about again.

In early 2009, The Bunny Boy was quickly swept under the rug, story truncated, final tour dumped entirely. The work that had begun on a new album was halted.

The Residents again became introspective, wondering if they were just becoming extensions of who they had been. Who are The Residents?

By their own admission still floundering for ideas and flooding the market with anything they can find in drawers and boxes in the back room, they're hitting the road again with possibly more of the same:

The story of the Talking Light piece is basically that of an older man who questions, not only decisions he made as a teenager, but also if the events he remembers from that time happened at all. "A dead infant clutching a ring with an inscription the teenager cannot read" is the stuff of dreams. The following stories in the show may or may not shed light on the inscription. Questions remain unanswered. The Residents study death, not as a horrific end, but as the ultimate question that we all ask while wondering if any of it is even real.

The Residents have always lacked a master plan but that's part of their charm. For every miss (The River of Crime, The Bunny Boy) there were five hits (Duck Stab, The King & Eye), and fans being collector geeks it was fun buying everything. Now it's kind of sad, running on fumes of creativity and reputation, making up pointless stories and recording music over it. The days of God in 3 Persons are long gone. Big Rez and his pal better be writing a book on the true story of The Residents. I'm afraid that's the only real creative accomplishment they can pull off at this point. We'll see, we'll see....

Intermission.............
Part II

The Henry Fonda Theater is a glorious dump of a venue with walls and ornate carvings that appear to be made from cotton candy-colored Styrofoam. The main hallway is a gauntlet of cheap light fixtures, maybe as a joke. The tiny men’s room had an attendant who shoved paper towels in my face. Being on Hollywood Blvd.., NY’s 42nd Street as seen in Taxi Driver, the sidewalk is spaced with stars from the Hollywood Walk Of Fame, as glamorous as can be expected from a suburb of Skid Row. Here at the intersection of Piss and Puke I felt bad for Lucille Ball, Yvonne DeCarlo, Loretta Young, Audrey Meadows and Rock Hudson. Lucille Ball’s star is tucked behind a bus bench and Rock’s is in the driveway of a parking lot. They live forever in our hearts. Ray Davies knew.

The set and costumes look great, and the show begins with the potential to be special, but unfortunately it falls short and bogs down into unintelligible, ugly droning of little distinction and stories no better than improv, revealing once again The Residents to be either out of ideas, immune to outside advice, or, as I suspect, self-destructive as a reflexive action. I reject their short attention span defense. Talking Lights tries to be many things but there’s no clearly defined unifying theme and its pieces don’t mesh into something anyone can defend as more than the sum of its parts – many themselves suspect. The Residents wanted to re-assess their priorities and this is their attempt to stick with storytelling while offering fans memories of their better days, when it was THE RESIDENTS and not just Big Rez and The Contractors. I considered Molly Harvey a real Resident, and her leaving was a kick in the band’s groin even I felt.

The set is a comfy couch with overlaid doilies, a fireplace with roaring fake flames, a 13” tv showing only static, a crystal rock lamp on a stand, a small lamp with a furry shade on the mantle, a gingerbread man and other things I couldn’t make out. I think there a cutout of The Last Supper up there too. Three large, round screens on stands are left, right and center behind. Big Rez wears a long black & white striped robe, with a long red scarf, a silk undershirt, shorts (I think, my view was obstructed) and a red fanny pack stuffed with his wireless microphone stuff. His face is covered with a bald, worried old man mask and he says his name is “Randy”. For the encore he comes out in a white pimp coat covered in white lights. “Chuck” is on keyboards and “Bob” plays guitar. They look like the offspring of The Predator and a Whoppi Goldberg robot. It’s a great look. Randy says “Carlos” retired. I assume he was the xylophone drummer from previous tours. The screens are used to project films of the characters telling their horrible tales of woe, a nice novelty that becomes boring due to long, boring stories that lead to obvious if not underwhelming conclusions.

Talking Light is heavily pre-recorded. Sonically the sensory overload of pounding rhythms is effective compensation for lack of melodic composition, but as such the more songs that sounded the same the more the piece dragged. The show involves the periodic playing of old radio ads, centered around Coke’s “I’d like to teach the world to sing, used ironically I guess. It may have something to do with the second of the three “ghost” stories, which aren’t really about ghosts, I think. The stories are about a baby in a burning sphere, the Pudding Roll-Ups serial killer and a crazy lady with an invisible sister. It’s hard to hear the stories clearly and they don’t add up to anything scary or insightful. The pudding tale telegraphs itself two counties away. Then there’s songs, most if not all from prior albums, either hinted at (“Demons Dance Alone”, “They Are The Meat”), or remade as ugly and unintelligible (“Semolina”, “Bury Me Not”).

The Residents are given a lot of cultural leeway by reputation alone. As far as venues go in Los Angeles they’ve been on a downward trajectory, not helped by their determination to create shows that cater to the anti-commercial fantasies of their most rabid fans, who as I’ve seen it consist of fat slobs with unfortunate hair, Travis Bickle types, Zappa hippies and European-type intellectuals. I’d say half the crowd were wives, girlfriends and friends-of-friends, and no way would anyone not completely open to performance art want to see this again. Between the growling and the slurring even I couldn’t make out half the lyrics of songs I knew. The music was consistently ugly and lacked distinction beyond the standard formula. The stories went on too long and dared you to keep up your interest. It wasn’t the horrible mess I feared it would be, but it came up to the line and leaned over it with arms waving backwards like mad.

Here’s my advice for The Residents: Stop telling stories. Write songs with melodies. Sing so the words can be heard. Seek outside advice from people who don’t care about your legendary status. The only show I see Big Rez having left in him is The True Stories Of The Residents, all true and his real face revealed except when performing from specific periods. Everybody with two moving brain cells knows who the Residents are. The band should play in tuxedos and eyeballs. Have all the masks on a display. Play the songs close to how they were recorded. Enunciate. That would be one great story and a great music concert too. I doubt they’ll do it. Big Rez instinctively wants to go down flailing.

Punk Rock (DVD Review): Probably the first “punk rock” movie with a plot, it’s also a 1976 XXX tear-jerker expanded a year later into R-rated softcore grindhouse fare about runaways, drugs, sex and murder in the seedy underworld of the NYC punk rock scene. Shot in and around clubs and stores from that era, it’s a quaint stroll down memory lane for me, having lived near there and making the trek into the belly of the beast many times myself. It’s better than it should have been, which isn’t saying much, but unless you have a lot of patience with semi-professional acting and pubic hair by the yard, it’s best to watch this with the director's commentary on, a treat beyond belief for fans of 1970s Times Square debauchery.

Packaged with another film, Punk Rock is a well-designed DVD from 42^nd Street Pete, the Joe Bob Briggs of vintage NY sleaze. The print is a tad bleached-out but not bad considering, and the interview/commentary with happy go lucky director/actor Carter Stevens is light, informative and highly entertaining. The punk band from the original shoot was The Stilettos, led by Elda Stiletto. Debbie Harry was scheduled to be the band lead but she left to form Blondie a few months before filming started. The expanded film contained scenes shot at Max’s Kansas City featuring The Fast, Spicy Bits and The Squirrels. Carter picked The Squirrels because they wore platform sneakers. Band fashion in general is random at best.

Cater, who never liked punk (“No one ever accused the punk bands of being good at music.”), made a movie called Punk Rock because he was dating porn actress Honey Stevens, who he describes as a hardcore punk from the earliest days of Max’s Kansas City. After the film came out punk became a small big deal, and a distributor (probably mafia) asked if he could make an R-rated film about the punk rock. Carter removed the hardcore from the original film, shot sexless for five more days in 1977, put it all together, and there you have it. The lead acting isn’t bad per say, and neither is the direction, equal to standard exploitation films from that time. Still, sets are porno-cheap and the female actors are not actors. The plot has nothing to do with punk music beyond it being a central theme in the seedy underworld the detective crawls through to solve the case. Besides full scenes in Max’s, you see shots of Bleecker Bobs, Trash and Vaudeville, and Revenge. Besides Elda there’s no punks acting like punks.

Lead actor Wade Nichols, the poor man’s Harry Reems, went on to legitimate acting but died of AIDS before it had that name. Carter says in adult films Nichols was “straight for pay”. Recalling his glory days, Carter says of NYC “Before AIDS, when sex was clean and the air was dirty.” He claims the mob didn’t get involved in filming but owned the theatres to facilitate money laundering. The New York street scenes are exactly as I remember them, with piles of garbage frozen into icy black snow piles and a stroll down 42^nd Street an experience like no other. An artifact for sure, Punk Rock is something to watch if you want to see in retrospect how unsexy the 70s really were.

Entry 156: 1/30/2010: Analog CyberPunk Third Series VI  & Video Review

I'm going to see The Residents tonight in Los Angeles. Review to follow.

  Since I know you're all about physical fitness and good clean living you'll want to visit Map My Run so you can calculate how far you run, walk, bike or crawl to your local methadone clinic.

Here's this week's edition of Analog CyberPunk Third Series VI (download zip file at Rapidshare)

VI

1984: "Tu Nie Bedzie Rewolucji"
Algebra Suicide: "Little Dead Bodies"
Alu: "Jetzt Oder Nie"
Bona Dish: "Actress"
Doppler Effect: "Four Day Romance"
Fall Of Saigon: "On The Beach At Fontana"
John Foxx: "Tidal Wave"
The Future: "Blank Clocks"
Gleaming Spires: "At Together"
Plus Instruments: "Freundschaft"
Robert Rental: "Double Heart"
Roy Finch: "Buildings"
Sammie America's Gasphetti; "Top Of The Dream"
Silvia: "Ich Bin Nicht Die"
Von Beat: "Synthetic Environment"

Iggy Pop Live: San Francisco 1981 (video review): It reads “© Joe Rees/Target Video 1986” across the bottom of the entire fifty minute set from Iggy and the Pun Crock super-group behind him. “© Joe Rees/Target Video 1986” is burned into my retinas.

Iggy Pop Live: San Francisco 1981 is not much to look at but I liked this show a lot, from my favorite period of his career. I found The Stooges to be Detroit’s industrial city answer to The Doors, raucous and influential but filled with album tracks that bleed into each other. His first two solo records from 1977 were an excellent start but also emotionally detached as a byproduct of collaborator David Bowie’s Berlin phase. 1979’s New Values was happy, peppy and a cornerstone of the great original new wave scene, so nostalgia makes it my favorite. Soldier and Party had a few good songs and then Zombie Birdhouse yielded the great “Run Like A Villain” and twelve other sonic packing peanuts. What came after was either corporate Iggy, metal Iggy, or time for another Iggy Pop album. By cosmic law you have to love and respect Iggy Pop, but in the long run all that matters is that Iggy Pop is still alive and kicking. Like Abe Vigoda and Ernest Borgnine.

Iggy’s band this night consists of Bowie guitarist Carlos Alomar, Rob Duprey of The Mumps, Mike Page, and Blondie’s Gary Valentine and Clem Burke. Clem’s strong and steady drum beats go the extra yard in keeping the songs tight (Clem was my favorite Ramone), while the two guitarists and one bass player keep it loose enough to fit both Stooge’s classics and newer material. I loved the great rendering of the underrated running guitar riffs of “Bang Bang”.

For most of the show Iggy’s dressed Cabaret Verboten in black bikini underwear, black mini-skirt, black garter belt and stockings, black leather jacket and hat, and pointy shoes. The stage lighting is dark and often only either green, magenta, purple or blue. You can barely make out Clem in the back. A few cameras are in play and the general overall quality is cheap VHS. I wouldn’t doubt the DVD was a direct transfer of an old VHS tape.

The set list is “Some Weird Sin”, “Houston Is Hot Tonight”, “TV Eye”, “1969”, Rock And Roll Party”, “Bang Bang”, Dumb Dumb Boys”, “Eggs On Plate”, “I’m A Conservative”, “I Need More”, “Lust For Life” and “Pumpin’ For Jill”.

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