Horned women, bats that fly through walls, science and stuff

So it looks like I’ll be sharing some of the cool art i find with you. This here is a duzi, as canoeists in South Africa say. As with most things that open with an accordion, this is really rather weird.

What: Museum of Jurassic Technology — radio feature from  Soundportraits.org

What’s it about: very strange little museum in America

What’s it like: wonderful

Beautifully made piece of radio, originally broadcast on All Things Considered, about a little museum, where fact and fiction become a bit blurry. Perfectly excuted radio feature format. An audio tour through the museum’s physical halls and spiritual/psychological weirdness. Makes you glad such places exist.

Click here to go to a page that will let you listen.

“Up against the wall, motherfucker!”

What: Radio feature from ABC Radio National (Radio Eye)
Called: My 68
Who: David Zane Mairowitz

This would be great if only for the story the narrator tells about explaining to his Marxist mom what NY City cops shouted at protestors, “Up against the wall, motherfucker!” and her subsequent use of the phrase. Beautifully paced, wonderfully edited piece of radio genius about the student uprisings in Paris, San Francisco, New York and London in 1968. With The Grateful Dead in the background.

I don’t want to sound like an old man, but kids today do not know how to rebel.

Turn off the tv, put this on and just listen. truly wonderful audio.

To listen or download, click here.

Skellington is an anorexic lady-boy. Infants are cool.

Show: The Terrible Infants
Showing: all over the UK
When: April to August 2008

Tim Burton is one of my heroes. Tim Burton is, of course, over-hyped shit, as a rule. Dark in the same way that burnt marshmallows are dark, and just about as satisfying about thirty seconds after consumption (I mean consumption in the ‘eating’ sense, rather than in the ‘disease which apparently improves one’s poetry’ sense).

So when a show is described by critics as being ‘Tim Burton meets…’ It’s never that promising. Children, too, are over-hyped, and also generally shit (though not to their parents and yes, of course they are the future, teach them well and let them lead the way blah blah), so when the supposed Burton-fest is a show for kids one may be tempted to give it a skip.

Turns out you should ignore critics. The Terrible Infants, currently on tour, is a play for kids that you might describe as ‘dark’ if the idea of ‘dark’ children’s entertainment didn’t throw up just the two options of either hopelessly middle-class attempts at being ‘edgy’ without frightening the little darlings, or paedophiles in greasepaint. The second option is obviously preferable, but neither option is true of The Terrible Infants.

That rarest of phenomena, it’s a show that adults can enjoy as much as children. Inventive as only small-budget theatre can be, and with set and costume design that is as delightful and stylish as it is clever, fans of the abysmal mister Burton will love it (grotesque masks and hyperthyroid-eyed puppets share a stage with actresses in babydoll dresses and stripey leggings; the live music features accordions) but so will most sentient beings.

The play consists of several fairy-tales that are not, as some reviewers might suggest, twisted. They are, true to fairy-tale convention, vastly original, fantastic, comic stories meant to teach children a moral lesson. So there’s a tale about not being greedy (or you will end up eating mummy), Not telling lies (or you will grow a homicidal tail), not talking about yourself too much (or you will be pursued by bees) and not being too sneering about major filmmakers’ art (or you will be destined to only ever be ‘published’ in an obscure blog under a stolen name).

The highlight is certainly the tale of Thingy-ma-boy, the boy who was so shy he disappeared. The mix of over-egged tragedy and comedy in this piece actually made one poor bugger cry out in pain in the performance I watched, followed by uncontrollable giggles from the audience, as thingymaboy’s plight gets sadder and sadder.

The five actors and musicians who multitask their way through Infants are supremely talented, with great comic timing for both the hammy and understated sides of comedy, the musicians play a bewildering array of instruments, and the sub-plot (super-plot? meta-plot? aero-plot?) of cast rivalry and in-fighting is, surprisingly, just as funny.

I have no idea whether children will like this or find it too different from drooling at a tv screen for hours on end, but the parents will laugh their asses off.

The Terrible Infants is a good reason to get your ass off the couch if you’re in the UK and it’s showing here:

Tour dates

stop whining, you bunch of girls (an interview with Anberlin)

Walk with me… Let’s talk about whiny bitches in music. Obviously there’s Billy Corgan, a thousand emo bands, the dregs of grunge and about an equal number of heartbroken soul singers suffering from hummer-bummer and country cowboys whose horse done left town. What connects them all? Their pain.

Check out the song titles: “Take the pain away” as a phrase appears in bejillions of songs. The Ramones, Lil’ Romeo, Shifty and The Eurythmics all use it in titles. Frankie wants to “kill the pain”, Jon ‘my hair’s so beautiful it hurts’ Bon Jovi just wants “soemthing for the pain” and Jimmy Eat World and Three Days Grace have songs rather bleakly titled: “pain”. It must suck to be a rock-star.

Please don’t get me wrong. I have no objection to pain in art. It can and has produced great music, painting and literature. I can even accept that having a Porche does not make you immune to real and horrible tragedy.

But how refreshing, in a recent interview with the lead singer of Emo wonder-kids Anberlin, Stephen Christian (who is, I warn you, Christian by name, Christian by nature), hearing what he has to say on the subject. I include an excerpt from the interview for your edification:

EEH: What’s the core-concept of the new album (Cities)?

SC: The whole concept of the album can be found in a line from a song called The Unwinding Cable Car where it says: ‘I want to lead you in and out of the dark.’ ‘Into the the dark’ meaning: I want you to question everything that you believe, everything that you hold as dear, but then out of the dark because I want to show the listeners that there is hope.

EEH (not at all pretentiously): A sort of Dark Night of the Soul, as St John of the Cross would have put it? Do you think we can learn from that?

SC: Absolutely. I think we all need those places of solitude. In those moments of reclusion and depression or loneliness such as Elijah in the Old Testament. After he had won this mighty victory and God had come down and consumed his altar. He has been a conqueror of these pagan priests, and instead of being victorious and telling all the people about God he hid away, just him and God. And even Jesus spent 40 days out in the wilderness just him and God just fighting it out. And I think all of us need to go through those wilderness experiences no matter who we are.

EEH: Do you think it’s important to express that pain in art?

SC: Absolutely. I think pain is easier to express than joy. I mean just look at the whole genre of blues and jazz that comes out of a slavery movement. It comes out of a movement where humans owned other humans and the hardships that that obviously caused. But out of that came the most beautiful expressions of blues and jazz. Poetry comes out of pain.

EEH: Do you think we as Evangelical Protestants, as opposed to our Catholic brothers and sisters, have a tendency to try to avoid pain?

SC: I think we as human beings want to avoid any type of pain or suffering whatsoever.

But in the Bible it talks about how pain is like a purification process for gold. It’s hot, a melting, a burning away of what doesn’t belong there. And I think as Christians we plug our ears and hum our way through problems, and that’s not it. I think sometimes God allows us to be like David, where he’s backed into a cave running away from Saul, and there his enemies are outside and he’s screaming out to God: ‘God, God, in my time of need where are you? ‘ And I think we as Christians never want to experience that. We don’t wanna fully rely on God. We’d rather just go through our lives jut humming and whistling and pretending everything is okay. But I think it is in those hard times that we are purified, that we are made into gold.

So what I’m saying is not that my man Steve rules and that the rest of popular music is made up of what we in psychology call ‘pussies’. I just reckon we could probably do with taking our cues from the ‘learning from pain’ approach, rather than the ‘mummy, mummy make it stop!’ school of thought.

I will now go and slam my fingers in a door. You watch this fairly amusing video by a band called Pain:

Yeah, I know. Lyrically it’s not quite as high-minded as the interview. But the bit with the milk kinda makes it worth it. Here, have an Anberlin video from the new album.

 

you were in Nirvana, man

You talk about emo kids, their look-at-me hair and boundless self-love, clearly crying out to be punched in the face. I hear you. But, my cock-rocking friend, can we talk about the giant, bearded man-poodle that is Dave Grohl?

I’ll be honest with you, I have been prejudiced against the Foo Fighters since their inception. Watching them on a rebroadcast of V-festival has not helped. The ashes of the infinitely talented (if overhyped and cursed with malingering moron fans) Nirvana should have produced either a phoenix or sweet fuck-all, out of pure respect. What they produced was a preening peacock, clearly the least essential of the trio (and yes, I mean less than Krist Whatever Happened To Him Novoselic) becoming pretty much everything from which his former band almost freed us.

It’s not that they’ve never done anything good. All My Life is a work of genius, Everlong is very pretty, Best of You doesn’t suck and there are others. But Dave Grohl is like the average kid with the over-achieving brother called Kurt. Dave is successful, wealthy and almost universally liked. Kurt was a self-destructive drug-addict. But in some families that doesn’t make any difference. Mommy and daddy still love him more. Because while Nirvana’s raw, angry, challenging, catchy, genuinely nihilistic art deserved the adoration, cultural iconography and fame it brought them, Foo Fighters are only as big as they are because Dave Grohl once played drums in a better band.

And that’s the thing. As Nirvana struggled with and railed ineffectually against their adoption by the music industry and induction into the champagne and flashbulb-soaked country club of rock-stardom, Dave has just popped on a pair of Ray-Bans and started waving. While Nirvana made music about nihilism, Foo Fighters make music about nothing.

‘Sell-out’ is a stupid term, used all too often in the glory days of grunge to denote a band that had been successful with an album released after the one you liked, as if being successful was in itself a shame. So I’m not going to use it. It’s just sad (though understandable for a nice guy who’s lost a friend to a suicide motivated by a desire to remain authentic) that this is what he has to settle for. Idiot fans crying when they see you, vacuous interviews and hairstyle-driven makeover consultations. And knowing, despite how talented you are, that it’s all contrived. That none of it is really deserved.

On second thoughts, support him. It’s got to suck to be Dave.

Dave says it best when he says nothing at all:

The Purgatory Banjo

You’re wrong, obviously. About a lot of things. There is no shame in this — you’ve never really made much effort to be right, just shuffled along picking up opinions like girls, venereal diseases and accents, rarely stopping to examine any of them for inherent worth. I understand. Life is short, like a hot teenage girl. You’ve got to take advantage of it while you can and not worry too much.

The upside is a back-catalogue of entertaining stories, the downside is being so very wrong about things. Like the banjo.

For too long the banjo has been the suspected-paedophile uncle of the music world. An instrument that’s good for a laugh or an aesthetic morality tale, but let’s face it: it’s never going to get invited to dinner, is it? I personally blame Deliverance.

You remember the film. Even if you haven’t seen it, you remember it. And what is it you remember? “Squeal, piggy! Eeee!” and duelling banjos. I’m no expert on branding, but I reckon that, whatever status the banjo had before that film, the mental association with brutal sodomite rape has probably not helped the banjo. Think of other brands associated, rightly or wrongly, with forced buggery: Prison. Jeffery Dahmer. Catholic priests.

It seems a mite unjust. At best, the banjo is, to the vast majority of people, a novelty instrument, a George Formby or cartoon hillbilly symbol for the backward, the comic, the quaintly archaic. At worst, it’s about incest and anal violation. The banjo deserves better than this.

Why do I say that? because it’s a beautiful instrument. You heard me. Beautiful. Not just funky, as when used by Basement Jaxx, not just elitist and rootsy as when used by any of the army of Americana practitioners who have respectably and respectfully played it. Beautiful. In the sense that normal people with no desire to look clever can understand.

The evidence I point to is a wonderful song called For the Widows in Paradise, For the Fatherless in Ypsilanti by Sufjan Stevens. It is, simply put, exquisite. It is gentle, unselfconscious Grace, distilled into music. It is a hymn to God and love and truth that the godless could worship along to; it is played primarily on the banjo and I defy any person of taste, any man or woman who claims to love music, to deny that it is beautiful.

Even in the stripped-down, fairly unproduced setting of this video, you can hear it.

On the original album version (Greetings from Michigan!), every picked-out note feels like it is being played in the peaceful dark by a blind holy man, a final act of indulgence before shuffling off this mortal coil. You think it is hyperbole, but it really isn’t.

Humming the duelling banjos melody is obviously important in cases where you have to subtly suggest that a town is up for lynchin’ or that a friend is sleeping with his sister. Banjo-abuse in these cases is an inalienable right. But if the banjo can be used as Sufjan has used it, it is time to welcome it back into the fold. The chemical castration has worked. Yes, terrible things have been done in the past, but damn it all, we’re family. You may not let it spend time alone with the kids, but it’s time to put the banjo back on the Christmas list.

To those who deny the genius of Sufjan: I will deal with you later. For now, please refer again to the opening paragraph of this post.

Shock Pumpkins-Hogwarts Connection Revealed

Holy shit! Their lead-vocalist is he-who-must-not-be-named!

Dig if you will, as the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince once said, a picture:

Now look at this one:

Eerie, isn’t it? Now I’m not saying that I don’t occasionally want to slap young Harry around a bit. But I draw the line at letting Voldemort into the band. Call me a Hypocrite. I don’t care.

And while the crowd at The Carling Weekend Carling Reading Carling Festival were certainly bored by The Pumpkins’ approximately 75 minute bombastic instrumental intro, nobody actually shouted “expectero petronem!”, which I thought was a pity. Neither did anyone seem to see the resemblance between the Corgster and a limp 90s movie hero, shouting: “Oi, Powder! Get off the stage!”

Nobody even shouted “Get a haircut!”, so I think we missed a trick. In our defense we were just so bored by the show it seemed impossible to shout anything; just stand, hopeless as an abattoir sheep, waiting to die. Because despite the presence of hotties on bass and keys, the ‘Kins (that’s what real rock folk call ‘em) were dull dull dull.

The fact that you were once a shoegazer-grunge god does not mean you will be revered as one forever. You are not, no matter how often in your career you’ve donned a robe, the Pope. I used to be a fan of our Billy. When he was a slightly effeminate depressive who always smiled when he whined and seemed well aware that his floppy fringe and man-blouse floral shirts put the relative heaviness of his band’s wall of sound guitars into don’t-take-me-too-seriously context.

But then he cut his hair. Now I’m not saying his hair was the source of his power à la our aggressive friend Samson. But it makes sense. Look at Metallica. Did everything they touched not turn to shit after Hetfield and co decided to hide their creeping baldness among a forest of permed/gelled spikes? Anyway, the point is that at around the same time that Smashing Pumpkins started running out of ideas (probably about half-way through Melon Collie, which is an excellent single album but an average double), they stopped meaning it. They started to become a parody of themselves. Maybe it was the success. It’s hard to bitch about how lonely, alienating and unfair life is when you’re stuffing caviar and heroin sandwiches into your face.

So, after penning some abysmal crowd-pleasers (“despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage”? Seriously? “God is empty, just like me”? Pass the man a tissue) Corgan shaved off his hair, made an in-depth study of some Manson music videos and started wearing black robes and releasing about two good songs per new album. And mercifully disappeared.

Until the Carling Lager Drink Yourself Retarded, Set Fire To Tents But Just Don’t Call It ‘Reading’ Festival (I think that’s its official title), that is. Following an unspeakably brilliant Nine Inch Nails show, Smashing Pumpkins had the headline slot and wasted it. The lighting rig was like a well-hung castrato’s member: impressive in scale but utterly pointless. The band all wore white and drag-raced ( I mean that in the literal, chronological sense of dragging, then racing rather than the exciting redneck sport sense) through their boring new songs and their likeable old songs, which, as if by magic, were also made very very boring. The dark force is definitely strong with this one. If anyone tells you that Smashing Pumpkins are still a good band, never trust them again. They do not have your best interests at heart and they probably don’t love you.

I hate the Polyphonic Spree

It’s not because they advertise Sainsburys. Or that those adverts feature Jamie Oliver. It’s not even because their brand of brass-noodling wankry makes Lemon Jelly sound strong, purposeful and focused. I don’t even hate the Polyphonic Spree, but I resent them deeply. Because they have stolen their sound, their look and their success from a better band.

That band is Danielson. You may have seen them at All Tomorrow’s Parties a few years ago when legendary producer Steve Albini invited them to play. They’re the band made up of an unfeasibly large number of people, making sugar-crazy non-traditional pop music and wearing white choral-style robes. They were so uncool they were electric. Sound familiar?
They were also quite well known for wearing nurses’ uniforms on stage, complete with red medical crosses and a logo that consisted of a slightly altered heart-shape. Is this ringing any bells? Blowing any whimsical trumpets?

Danielson Famile would admittedly never be suitable to promote a supermarket’s sales (and all the relentless evil that entails). Laurie Anderson would probably call much of their stuff difficult listening, and she’d be right. But dammit, man, not every Blues needs an Elvis. And even if it would want one, would it really like one in blackface?

The Polyphonic Spree is a minstrel show. A travesty. A huge-money-spinning behemouth whose success is an insult to the man to whom they owe it.

That is not to say that just because Danielson languishes in relative obscurity all related success is bad. Danielson gave us Sufjan Stevens. Literally. Suf was in his band then on his record label then the biggest baddest balladeer in 50 states. And more power to him. He does not steal, he has made music that can be light and airy at the same time as sincere and meaningful. He can pick at a guitar and sing soulfully without having to resort to a David Gray/Damien Rice/James Blunt?Polyphonic Spree cliche or nick his friend’s costume ideas.

The Polyphonic Spree gives us Jamie Oliver in adverts, profits for organisations that are almost singlehandedly the root of global economic injustice and climate change, and cramp. Danielson gives us comedy, spirituality, art, family, community, Steve Albini, singing trees, quilt animation, a prayer for every hour and Sufjan Stevens. The choice is not hard.

The Danileson story, along with that of Sufjan Stevens can be found in the charming film : Danielson– a Family Movie (Danielson Movie)