I just got a Sunshine Company CD at a little shop in San Francisco called Aquarius Records. I had the vinyl at home of “Happy Is the Sunshine Company,” but figured maybe there were some more tunes I’d want to hear on the roadtrip back to L.A.
Really, after buying this collection, I still miss the song most that they didn’t include, “Four In the Mornin’.” It’s a psychedelic tune with full harmony vocals on every verse, about being awake after a breakup because some girl “Wouldn’t stop lying,” as cockroaches race across the floor and dirty dishes pile up in the sink. And there are no choruses, just pauses to let the guitar (that sounds like a sitar!) do its thing against groovy handclaps and sad-sounding echoey percussion.
At their best, these guys were like the BBC sessions of Fairport Convention–in fact, they tried to get Sandy Denny to sell ‘em some songs, but she laughed them off. They had the misfortune of getting into the sunshine pop game a little too late. The songs they wanted to cover got stolen by the 5th Dimension and The Blades of Grass, and their cheerful name didn’t really fit with the edgin’-towards-Woodstock sounds that were blooming in the late sixties. But I recommend them, especially if you can pick up the vinyl. Just make sure that you get something with “Four In the Mornin’” on it!
I finally finished reading Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman, Candace Falk‘s biography of the great anarchist and pioneering feminist. Based not so much on Goldman’s works (which speak for themselves, in my opinion, including the photographs you always see of her where she looks so strong and lucid) but on her personal life, it tells her life’s story using her ten year relationship with “king of the hobos” Ben Reitman at its crux and fulcrum, the man whose personality enabled her tours and book sales and pamphleteering, yet caused her endless sorrow and loneliness that haunted her almost until her death.
There are so many lessons to learn from Emma Goldman, and it’s easy, especially after reading this book, to focus on the sad things. The fact is, Goldman died with little fanfare, her gravestone not even accurately depicting her age, and all her utopian visions drowned in a sea of Stalinism in Russia, Franco fascism in Spain, and indifference in the United States. And her greatest love affair made her feel a failure not only because Ben could not fulfill her, but because it made her question her beliefs in the free love that she advocated.
Yet what fills me with hope for myself is that her supposed “failures” in her personal life, which in many ways she sacrificed so that she could devote herself to the greater good of her causes, have in time shown themselves to perhaps be her greatest legacy. After all, she is the anarchist who decided that the personal WAS political, her greatest quote perhaps being “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution!” She was a great enthusiast for the arts, for music, and for poetry, buddy buddied with Stanislavsky and bohemian types in Chicago and New York, and encouraged the sexual expression of love without risk of guilt or pregnancy. She made a best friend out of a former lover (Alexander Berkman), and showed men and women everywhere that love could be expressed outside of marriage, and that sex could be expressed outside of commitment (though perhaps commitments were preferable to random shacking up) and outside of the need for God. Even family took on a new connotation, as Emma found herself in many different living arrangements in her life, including living with former lovers and their current beaus, quite difficult even for people in this day and age.
She was also able to make lemons out of lemonade in so many circumstances. One classic example from this book is that during her deportation alongside Berkman from the U.S. to Russia, she and he were able to organize a strike amongst the passengers to enable better bread-baking during the voyage! When the least adversity strikes me, I tend to wallow in the solace of my girlfriend, booze, and an episode of Mystery Science Theater, but she was at her most productive and inspired when things were at their bleakest in her personal life.
I guess it’s good to know that one’s heroes had doubts and loneliness and failures as well (that’s perhaps why Thomas Pynchon published Slow Learner). I’m still a bit bummed out after reading this, but Goldman continues to be a hero and inspiration to me, and the fact that she had loneliness and doubts only makes her achievements that more compelling.
I was in San Francisco for Christmas, away from a well-stocked Christmas kitchen, and had to make do with some family at a Chinese restaurant. It reminded me a bit of one of the least P.C. scenes in one of my favorite movies:
Has there ever been a better Christmas movie than this? This even beats out the Grinch (original, of course), the Rankin-Bass films, or Emmet Otter’s Jugband Christmas.
Released in 1983, this film portrays the youth of a young kid named Ralphie growing up in the immediately post-WWII era, a place that most parents of Ralphie-aged kids in the 80′s would recognize. Somehow the film’s era and pacing and warmth and humor was just right, hitting a hot button of nostalgia in every generation who saw it–those who grew up then, those who were still growing up, and those who lived through the forties and fifties as adults. I mean, my grandmother loved this film! Yet with its bits about cursing and flagpole licking, and its acknowledgment of the literally painful travails of childhood, it was hip enough that it still resonates now.
Anyway, the last thing I need to do in the dwindling hours of Christmas is to blog, so I’ll leave you with the image that this movie put into my head for all those years I watched it on Christmases in the 80′s:
Filed under: Albums,Bands — orangehairboy @ 10:37 am
They may not admit it to themselves, because they’re just a few soldiers fighting against a wave of hardcore and indifference, but the band camp punkers in Tulsa are having a musical renaissance yet again. Several small renaissances have sprung up in Tulsa since punk emerged to wipe away the Eric Clapton and Leon Russell days, but this new one is made up of guitar-based bands who also really love keyboards, and find no hypocricy in switching back and forth from live drums to drum machines, from banjo to electro, for whatever suits the song or suits their fancy.
Elliott the Letter Ostrich have been doing it in Tulsa for at least half a decade or so, and in fact, this CD I’m about to review is itself two years old. But I doubt most folks outside of T-Town and maaaaaybe Norman and OKC have heard of them, and I like this CD a bunch more than their older stuff, so I’m going to start here.
Though I’ve never read of them mentioning it as an influence, the first thing that comes to mind when spinning these tunes is Elf Power’s first album. There’s a similar stripped-down, acoustic guitar sound, similar reverence for 80′s pop culture, and that voice–a male voice that’s sweet and mellow and on the high-pitched side, even when singing about murder and the undead.
That’s the theme of this album–bloodletting, vampirism, and murderers from popular culture. It’s a theme carried over from their previous albums and EP’s, but here it’s a little less hokey and aspires to something more than, say, the name-dropping crap that some bands in the 90′s were so fond of (Hey, Nerf Herder!).
When it comes to pulp horror imagery, there’s only a short list of folks who’ve been able to use in their songs and make it poignant. But it’s a good short list: Roky Erickson, the Misfits, Bauhaus, and the Damned, when they were at their best, all really peeled back the fake widows-peak wigs and polyester capes from shlock horror and exposed something dark and raw wriggling beneath. Whether it be the grim specter of death that manifests itself in gristly comedic ways (even Baba Yaga’s hut had chicken legs, and the Manson girls couldn’t spell the words they wrote in the blood of their victims), or the dystopian nightmares partially exposed by science fiction vampires and molemen, rock musicians have often been able to cry “Hammer Time” and arrest our attentions in ways often far more thrilling (because they’re so fucking crazy) than the source material they reference. Hasil Adkins, Bo Diddley, Nick Cave, Screaming Jay Hawkins, Screaming Lord Sutch, and Alice Cooper all understood this in a more broad way too.
Elliott the Letter Ostrich understand it in a very narrow 80′s nostalgia way, but this doesn’t halt the power of their musical charms when the tone is just right. “Ballad of Vorhees” is a moody, minimal love confession, with perfectly relaxed tempo, soothing vocals, and, oh shit, it’s written from the perspective of Jason from the Friday the 13th movies! “My Baroness” fits in with the vampire/Transylvania theme to the album, but actually it’s a fifth-grade love roleplay about Cobra’s Destro and his main squeeze, from G.I. Joe. “Knife Fight Baby Get Stabbed – Get Stabbed” has the most memorable and catchy chorus here, evocative of the kind of rockabilly and lyricism that Hasil Adkins or maybe Billy Lee Riley might have done if they were young Tulsa kids now.
Interestingly for an album written primarily with drum machines, here’s some rockabilly vamping on a couple tracks. They’re taking the piss a bit (reminding me of “Girl After Girl” from Like Flies on Sherbet by Alex Chilton) but they’re also fucking Tulsa kids and they really mean it, so it also kind of comes off like Alan Vega (or possibly, once again, the Damned). There’s also banjo, lots of acoustic geetars, interesting recording choices (I love it when they use lo-fi recorded drums to back up their “Intermission” song). And then they totally pull it back to fully electro Castlevania-esque tunes, including the oddly not-thematic “Power Glove” which is exactly what you’d think it is (it’s sugary cute, but without being precious or corny).
While I thoroughly enjoy the disc, my only wish for the band is to take things up a notch lyrically. True, dudes my age and younger grew into adolescence with the very pop-cultural detritus mined here. We did play Nintendo and we did sneak peeks at scary slasher films and we did think vampires were kick-ass and we did wonder each full moon if maybe we’d turn into werewolves. But while I agree that it’s relevant to talk about this stuff, the references need a little more wit and a little more emotional investment. Haven’t these guys ever had their hearts smashed, or felt a loneliness in the pits of their souls they couldn’t drink away, or had a friend die, or been angry at the city government for kicking the shit out of any non-corporate culture that threatens almost to make things kind of cool for everybody? Roky Erickson sings about walking with zombies because he’s been there, fighting demons in his own head, and that shit is coming straight from his soul. I don’t doubt that these guys have an amazing fondness for the cool shit they know, but if they could just craft it into something that pushes me to have an emotion, I think they could take it to the next level.
Ah well. I’m being mean, because I do get an emotion or two from this album. One is a haunting hope for love, and one is just flat out awesomeness! And with such tenderly delivered living room editing craftsmanship, who needs Shakespeare when the sounds are so great?
I wanted to put something on from this album, but I can’t resist parting with a clip from a previous tune, about Mummies of course. Enjoy.
It’s got all the traditional songs such as “Frosty the Snowman” and “White Christmas,” and the usual rock carols such as “Blue Christmas.” But it does it in a damned clever way–three decades ahead of the mash-up craze, each of these songs uses the riffs from one song while using the melody of another. So “Woolly Bully” becomes “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” the Beatles’ “I Feel Fine” becomes “Jingle Bell Rock,” etc.
There’s not a stinker in the bunch, except maybe for the oddly-placed original “Scrooge” which, while aptly titled for Christmas, sonically doesn’t belong in the mix. But whatever. This album will rock your holiday party like none other. I give it three mistletoe kisses and a gallon of soy nog.
The only clip I could find of a Ventures Christmas song on YouTube was some guy’s kick-ass version of it on Guitar Hero! I guess you can play the carols as well as hear them this year.
P.S. Runners up include the Beach Boys Christmas album, the Phil Spector Christmas album, and of course, Elvis! That man is still the King, and I don’t know why my music-loving friends haven’t rediscovered this fantastic vocalist and icon.
In researching this piece, I found an amazing bit of drugged-up Elvis holiday fare. Enjoy!
I know that this is not a political blog (I leave that up to the morequalifiedbloggers out there who know what they’re talking about) but this really bothers me (from the Pasadena Star-News):
Citing security concerns, Police Chief Bernard Melekian on Tuesday rejected a proposal by critics of China to precede the Tournament of Roses parade with a human-rights march down Colorado Boulevard.
The decision was made during a morning meeting of Tournament officials, the chief and John Li, head of Caltech’s Falun Gong club, which has opposed a float linked to the People’s Republic of China’s in the internationally televised Rose Parade.
Li and other critics of China’s human-rights record proposed allowing a 100-person marching band and a Human Rights Torch Relay about two hours before the parade.
More significantly, they said, they won the Tournament’s support for what could have been the first such procession before the tradition-steeped parade.
“Everything was settled until Bill Flynn presented the timesheet to the Police Department,” Li said of their detailed proposal.
Accommodating a band, a double-decker bus and other vehicles inside the security zone on Jan. 1 was unworkable, Melekian said.
So, a city such as Pasadena that’s bristling with cops and has no crime can’t handle baby-sitting a bus and a band at seven in the morning on New Year’s Day? All the criminals and roustabouts will be sleeping off their booze! What’s to protect against? And the protestors themselves are not young yippie radicals–they’re concerned citizens, with an average age (I’m guessing) of about 50. They probably could have gotten Polident to sponsor the event!
And, most importantly, the parade organization already approved the plans, a first in the history of the Rose Bowl parade. This is just the police chief being a jerk.
If anything needs a protest, it’s China’s float in our goddam Rose Bowl parade. As a child, I was visiting Beijing on the very first day of the Tiananmen Square protest (way before the crackdown that came a week later). I remember first hand the horror and brutality we saw on TV, as China proved itself in no uncertain terms an enemy of the people, a regime as savage and intolerant as Franco’s or Mussolini’s. And though diplomacy with a nation as powerful and populous as China has to be delicate, I do wonder why we kiss their government’s ass so much without condemning their continued human rights abuses. That goes double for corporations such as Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google, who are openly complicit in crushing freedom of speech over there. Even their government’s plans for the 2008 Olympics are causing people in China to be displaced and trampled upon, and no one is talking about this. And now, the one organization that is talking about it is being silenced for no good reason.
This displacement of protest from the common forum, of freedom-of-speech zones and off-site marginalization (not to mention the complicity of the press in not covering protests) has got to stop. I wasn’t even going to use the Rose Bowl as a vehicle for self-expression (I was going, but only to take my folks, because parades are good ol’ family fun!) but now I am definitely going to bring a picket sign!
Update: Apparently there are LOTS of people talking about China and the Olympics, and the situation’s worse than I thought:
In December, Human Rights Watch wrote a letter to the Beijing Olympic committee calling for an end to mass arrests and increased speech restrictions. “Human rights violations have taken place even in direct relation to the organization of the games,” it reads, alleging that some 300,000 Beijing residents have been evicted from their homes during redevelopment efforts.
I couldn’t sleep last night (I was stressing about deadlines at work, and I couldn’t stop thinking about poor Stubby), so I got up and read the graphic novel I’m giving my niece for Christmas.
I’m really glad I did, and I’m really glad that I bought this for her. The Plain Janes, written by Cecil Castellucci with art by Jim Rugg, is just the book for a young girl on the cusp of entering high school (at least, I assume so, since I’ve never been one myself). It’s about four girls who band together to make art in the face of adversity, and unlike the typical Babysitter’s Club teen fare, this is written from a very grown-up perspective. There are real dangers, and mixed-up emotions, and make-out sessions, and gay dudes at school. Plus there are moments of magic and beauty that ring so true to anyone who was awake and alert during their high school years.
The protagonist is a girl whose parents move her away from the big city to a suburb, after an urban terrorist attack knocks her flat outside a cafe. While face down on the ground, tears streaming from her eyes as people rush past her to escape the carnage, she notices a dandelion in the sidewalk and realizes that beauty can be found even in the most terrible of circumstances (and no, not in a hackneyed “American Beauty” plastic bag way), and that it can be a motivating factor for change. The struggle for art’s ideal purpose (is it to inspire? to rile? to enliven? to beautify? to terrorize?) then goes on to permeate the rest of the novel and Jane’s life, as she uses her involvement with this struggle to make friends and win over hearts in what becomes an increasingly interesting suburban life for them all.
Some critics have chided Castellucci for the wooden archetypes assigned to some of her characters: the sporty jock, the science club geek, the draconian cop-dad who equates performance art with terrorism. But you remember when you were that age? You didn’t see the side of teachers that worked hard for little pay! You only saw the strict task-master who gave you homework and sent you to the principal’s office. The world of the young person is one of a quest for freedom that’s constantly impeded by a fiendish alliance of adult disciplinarians, who won’t let you stay out at night, kiss people behind the bleachers, or go to the big city with your friends. And aside from your bestest best friends, you probably do dismiss other kids as band geeks, jocks, nerds, metal-geeks, gangsta wanna-bes, stoners, goths… the list goes on. If anything, Castellucci gives her heroine (and us) more insight into the nuances of others than a typical self-absorbed teen would have.
And if the characters are not fully fleshed out in the writing, Jim Rugg’s artwork goes a long way to enlivening them and giving them a vibrancy. This is damned good art! Every panel is clean pen-and-ink, with great perspectives and close-ups and character. It reminds me a lot of the Hernandez brothers.
My only regret in this book really, is that the one gay kid in their school is so… gay. I know that having a gay kid who hates traditional gay culture and listens only to Slipknot or something would in itself be a construct, but I really don’t want my niece (who lives in Oklahoma and is surrounded by right-wing homophobes and religious bigots) to read this and think all gay kids want to throw glitter around and be fey. Nonetheless, having a gay character who’s brave enough to risk suspension from school and even arrest to help these girls hopefully will be a positive lesson for her, perhaps in the same way that seeing Herge’s caricatures of Incans when I was a kid nonetheless made me fascinated and respectful of Incan culture.
I dunno… this world is full of crap culture forcing, nay, demanding that kids listen to fucking Hilary Duff and go shopping. I want to show my niece that there’s an alternative, and that being creative and choosing to sit with the nerdy kids instead of the cool kids can be a wonderful, transformative experience. I think this book can be one little tug in the right direction for her.
P.S. This comic does one more thing that all teen-friendly art should do, which is give them some leads to pursue on their own. Fer example, there’s a part of the book where the sciency Jane tells them a long list of all the famous Janes in history, from Jane Austen to Jeanne D’Arc to Jane’s Addiction to Jane Wiedlin! If my niece is a good teenager, she’ll go rushing to google or the library to check out just who the hell all these references are, and then, boom, my plans to convert her will be too late for her mother to stop!
I just learned that an old friend, an amazing young guy who had a lust for life and a rapacious love for music, died a few days ago, brutally. I haven’t seen him in years and never got to know him better, but it’s quite a shock. He was such a wonderful soul, I can’t imagine what those who were closest to him are feeling now. Fuck death, and fuck the bony fingers he uses to take away the shining, glorious people among us, who cast such a love light on the rest of us in our dour ways.
I don’t know what Stubby would want played at his funeral, but for my own solace, for some reason I’m feeling that he’d like this tune. It’s mournful but also transcendant.
I really feel that the spirits of the departed live on when people get together and make merry and dance to music. I’m pretty much an atheist, but I don’t think that our feelings of connection with the dead are just a bunch of phantom limbs tickling the nerve endings of our lost love. There are glimmers of their personalities, and perhaps even a connection to the celestial, in art and in music especially. And I think that the reason I love ambient noise music is that somewhere in the hiss and hum of amps being plugged in or feeding back, of loose wiring humming, of John Cale’s viola shreeking, there is a strong connection to that other world. Anyway, I’m feeling that connection in Clara Rockmore’s theremin playing tonight.
Disclaimer–as my homie Vera points out, I should say that this is NOT the obituary of DJ Lance Rock, who has been hosting episodes of an amazing kids’ program for over six months now! That guy has been on the L.A. scene for a while, deserves all the acclaim he’s getting, and deserves his own blog from me at some point in the near future.
Michael Blodgett died today of a heart attack. He was only in a couple movies, but some of them were my favorites–he played the phantom lover that Peter Fonda imagines to be seducing his ex-wife (Susan Strasberg) in The Trip, and he had a role in Catalina Caper, ridiculed in one of my favorite episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
But more than anything (amongst my friends, anyway), he will be remembered for his role as Lance Rock, aka “Jungle Lad” in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. He’s got the “bedroom eyes” that seduce the singer of the Carrie Nations, but ends up getting “a head” of himself in the end. I couldn’t find the “blade goes snicker snack” scene on YouTube, but here’s one of the most memorable quotes in a film full of memorable quotes:
Seriously, this movie has better one-liners than Groucho Marx!
Anyway, besides putting in some awesome appearances in groovy films, apparently the dude hosted a teen beach/dance party show in 1967 called “Groovy” that had local bands on (as told by newsfromme.com):
The show went through several versions but its first and most notable period was when it was done from the beach and hosted by [this gent]… His name was Michael Blodgett and he had a nice little acting career, which included the unforgettable Beyond the Valley of the Dolls before he moved on to considerable success as a novelist. He was a pretty good host on the Groovy show but I suspect even he would admit that he wasn’t the main appeal of the show. The main appeal was young ladies in very tiny bikinis — and by “young,” I mean sometimes fifteen or sixteen years of age, if that old.
Much of the show was, of course, teens dancing to records. There was one real musical act each day…usually a group that would come on to pantomime/lip sync to their current record, which made for an odd sight. There would be these musicians acting like they were playing on the beach…with their amps and electric guitars plugged into absolutely nothing. Most records of that era ended with the track fading out and I guess the acoustics out there weren’t great insofar as hearing the playback was concerned. As a song drew to its close, you could see the performers become unsure if it was through so they’d keep “playing” and then one guy would stop and maybe another. And then you could tell someone had yelled, “It’s not over! Keep playing!” And they’d scurry back into mime mode. Very odd stuff.
I’d love to see some clips of this show–it sounds very “Back to the Beach!” No wonder he was seen as a suitable addition to Catalina Caper.
You gotta give it up for a man with this much pivotal sixties and seventies film stuff under his belt (he was even in an episode of Night Gallery!). Suffice to say that this dude is the American Nicky Henson, and this fan mourns his passing.
P.S. Thanks to my girlfriend for the heads-up on this! I’m still so stunned by Ike Turner’s death, I haven’t been checking the obituary columns with my normal ghoulish zeal.
P.P.S. For some reason, today I’m loving! the! exclamation! points!!!
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