Quote of the Day - John Doe of X

After all the years and frustrations, how do you keep yourself from getting discouraged?

"A short memory and... It’s what I do. Drive. Drive to express something and search for a new subject and a new way, or to express a familiar subject in a different way."

--- John Doe, taken from an interview in The Weekly Dig.

Vulvapalooza!

It's not often I come across an event with such a great name as Vulvapalooza. Apparently a benefit concert to raise money for local domestic violence shelters this evening of music features Rose Polenzani, The Grey Sky Girls, Kevin Allred, Matt Meyer and Michelle Cummings (get it? - oy vey). Anyway, I know almost none of the performers performing, but I have to heartily endorse it just because of the name.

Friday, March 23rd: Vulvapalooza Benefit Concert
Location: Spontaneous Celebrations (45 Danforth St, Jamaica Plain, MA)
Time: 8:00pm-10:30pm (doors at 7:30)
Admission: Sliding Scale $7-15

Want more vulva (I'm so excited I get to write that)? Come back Sunday for what the press release describes as "A day of vagina-friendly carnival-style fun" The Vagina Fair! No, I'm not making this up! An afternoon which will include face painting, balloon twisting, raffles, music, performances, rummage sale, auctions, Vagina Monologues merchandise, and lots of games. And if you can explain to me how even half of those are vagina friendly, or not vagina friendly, well... oh just forget it.

Location: Spontaneous Celebrations (45 Danforth St, Jamaica Plain, MA)
Time: 12:00 noon - 4PM
Admission: FREE

The Captain of what?

So there I was, waiting for some friends to join me for dinner, and just as I'm deciding between the squash risotto and the coffee-rubbed tenderloin on the in house sound system comes "Love Will Keep Us Together" by Captain and Tennille. I know the following is something I find surprising to say, but this song actually isn't half bad. In fact, it's really quite a winner. Penned by Neil Sedaka - the man who authored plenty of other kicky little hits like "Calendar Girl" and "Stupid Cupid" - it has a jaunty little hook, a sassy strut of a piano line, and a booty shaking bridge where Tennille wails "Young and beautiful, Some day your looks will be gone. When the others turn you off, who'll be turning you on? I will! I will! I will!"

I certainly can't recommend Muskrat Love (ick) or anything else the Captain and Tennille produced, save their son Dennis Dragon who went on to form The Surf Punks (go ahead look it up, I am not shitting you). But "Love Will Keep Us Together", well, you are admittedly worth a second look.

"That Debbie Gibson sure can take a punch!"

Again, forgive me for being a girl, I’ve just gone to see the new Hugh Grant/Drew Barrymore film “Music and Lyrics” and it was admittedly fun.

In it, Grant plays a washed up 80’s popstar whose musical output is not far from that of Wham, and Barrymore plays his irrepressibly cute houseplant-waterer nee aspiring pop song lyricist. Without even telling you anything more than that, you know where the story is going and where it will end before it ever gets there, so the reason to watch is not for plot but for the washed up popstar theme which is nicely explored.

The film opens with the video from Grant’s 80’s band Pop and their hit single “Pop Goes My Heart” which is complete with every 80’s stereotype all in one place: black and white checkerboard outfits; uninspired synchronized dance steps; an appalling narrative and Grant with an awesomely floppy early 80’s hairdo. From there we get to see Grant perform at a number of embarrassing venues, high school reunions and amusement parks and get offered a spot on a very VH1 looking show where has-been popstars box each other for the right to sing a new song at the end of the show. Grant’s fabulous lines about said show include: “I’m pretty sure I can take A Flock of Seagulls because we once toured with them and we beat them then and they cried like a bunch of babies” and “Did anyone see battle of the has-beens last night? That Debbie Gibson sure can take a punch.” Oh if only.

It’s light fare, and you’ll want to plan your bathroom breaks to coincide with most of the musical numbers which are mostly terrible and sung quite poorly by Grant, who should stick to being English and chappish and aging rather sexily rather than attempting to croon in any place other than his shower ever again.

Again, I may be a girl, but so is 52% of the population you know.

Rememberances of Shins Past

It was a night at the visibly crumbling Orpheum Theatre to see The Shins with Viva Voce. I haven’t been to the Orpheum in quite a while and I’d like to assure you there have been no improvements to the place since I first went there in 1983 to see The Cure. The stained and torn chairs are hardly connected to the floor, and the balcony seems hardly connected to anything. Our seats were excellent and strange, just parallel to the stage in the far left box, a place that I feared if I jumped up and down in would fall crashing to the floor below.

Entering in the middle of Viva Voce’s set I found myself with a problem. I was trying so hard to like them, but found myself repeatedly stymied in my efforts. The most outstanding problems with Viva Voce are:

• The band’s love of overlong cock-rocking guitar solos that devolve into masturbatory noodling. Now granted, the key difference between the usual cock-rocking and this rocking is these noodles are cooked up by pretty girl guitarist Anita Robinson. So for a while I considered the idea of a woman laying down these licks as joyfully breaking the mold, but after the umpteenth guitar solo I realized that even feminism can’t justify how tedious this is.

• The attire drummer Kevin Robinson wore on stage, which included a bicentennial colored headband with his ears poking out between his greasy locks. Hey, I dressed up to come out tonight, since I’m paying money to sit in this chair, do you think you could bother to do something too?

Partway through the set I found if I positioned myself so the large stack of monitors were blocking my view of drummer Robinson I was able to enjoy Viva Voce much more, but even this couldn’t fix the band’s herky jerky songwriting structure which would start in one direction, then veer off to not only somewhere different, but somewhere I had no interest in going. I guess this is why they say you can take the hippies out on tour, but this still doesn’t make them hip. Congratulations Viva Voce, you are the first boy/girl drum/guitar combo I have ever actively disliked.

Thankfully headliner The Shins were perfectly lovely in nearly every way. The band opened by ripping through the first 4 tracks on their new album “Wincing The Night Away” and kept the fevered pitch going the rest of the night. Singer James Russell Mercer’s voice was sweet and high and the band were tight, grabbing their hooks as if to wring every bit of sunshine they could from each song.

The interesting thing about The Shins at present, is they seem caught between where they once were (indie rocking small clubs) and where they are now (debuting at #2 on Billboard), and their show hasn’t quite evolved to the new space they’re in. So there was a backdrop behind the stage, but nothing happened with it, there were lights, but nothing really happened with them either, the band put on a fine show, but one lacking the kind of frills you often see in a room of this size.

Fortunately, this didn’t seem to matter to the devoted group of thick necked guys wearing baseball hats who had come out to see the band - you know, the kind of guys who would have beat The Shins up in high school? So when they launched into a blasting cover of The Modern Lovers’ “Someone I Care About" for their encore - thinking it would surely connect with a Boston audience - instead, for the first time all night, there was no dancing or singing along, just a group of 3000 standing stock still with question marks floating over their collected heads. Oh, to be young (and thick necked, and be wearing a baseball cap).

It’ll be interesting to see where The Shins are in another year or so, if their own heads will be fitted for baseball caps as well, or if they’ll be playing for an entirely different team by then.

A reason to love Justin Timberlake

I know it's old but I've just seen it for the first time this weekend. Genius.

Like the most wonderful dream I could imagine

There I was, flipping around the stations just before going to bed and what did I come across but an episode of House starring Dave Matthews. According to the blurb on my cable info box Matthews was portraying a pianist who comes down with some malady House has to find the cure for. During the 3 or so minutes I watched, the handsome blonde English doctor on the show attempted to give Matthews a gigantic hypodermic needle in the tongue. Matthews screamed and yelled and was eventually subdued and injected. Seeing this purveyor of musical horribleness shriek, wail, and be injured just tickled me pink. Knowing that the show couldn't get much better than this (House usually does save the lives of those he's charged with, no point in staying tuned for that), I turned off the TV and whisked myself away to bed and a night of peaceful slumbers.

One Hit Wonder

First off, I won’t pretend that “One Hit Wonder” by Lisa Jewell is not chick-lit, because it is. That said, it’s damn fine chick-lit. Predicting your next question, which would be “What could possibly be defined as good chick lit?” Well, if the premise doesn’t involve the main character desperately and pathetically casting about as she attempts to procure a wedding ring, a baby, or exceptionally expensive shoes, that’s a fine place to start.

The main character of One Hit Wonder, Ana, is thankfully not pursuing any of the items above. What she’s after is finding out what prompted her sister Bee – a fictionalized one-hit-wonder from the eighties – to a lonely suicide in a grotty London apartment. By the end, she finds out, in a tale that is actually some nicely crafted storytelling with colorful characters and a few surprises along the way. Admittedly the details of Bee’s life are hardly the focal point of the story, but this book gets big points for not only describing our failed pop star as looking exactly like another one hit wonder of the time, Corinne Drewery of Swing Out Sister (whose hit “Breakout” can consistently be heard in grocery stores all over America), but also chalking up her professional demise to a problem that has legendarily plagued next big things; mistakenly believing that you are as competent as your producers to pen a hit song. Although certainly not identical, the premise pleasingly recalls that of Nick Hornby's "About A Boy" in which the main character lives off the proceeds of an appalling Christmas novelty single. It makes one wonder if all the UK is stuffed full of people who are one hit wonders. After all, it’s not a big country (no pun intended) and they do seem to export an inordinate number of pop stars. Regardless, Jewell certainly gets a thumbs up for this book. When reading, it doesn’t hurt to be a girl, but should that not be the case already it’s certainly not necessary.

In other advertising news...

Wendy's bacon double cheeseburger is now advertised to the tune of "Blister in the Sun" by the Violent Femmes. Advertising your foodstuff to the tune of a song about masturbation. Ewwwww!

"Body and beats I stain my sheets I don't even know why
my girlfriend she's at the end she is starting to cry
let me go on like a blister in the sun
let me go on big hands I know you're the one..."

It's A Sign

So here I was, posting away and found myself grooving out to "Feed It" by The Candyskins. There I was singing along at the top of my lungs to the refrain "You don't know what it is until it's gone gone gone..." when I realized I wasn't listening to the radio or the CD player. What I was listening to was an ad for Lay's potato chips trailing in from the TV in the next room. First EMF, now this. Why are all these britgazers being tapped for American snack food ads? And more importantly, can we all wonder for a moment if the Candyskins made more money from this chip ad or from the release of their sparkly "Death of a Minor TV Celebrity" CD 9 years ago?

The intersection of oral hygiene and rock and roll x2

About 1 second after espying the “Tooth Tunes Toothbrush” by Tiger at my local CVS I had 3 in my hand and was headed for the cash register. Who could deny the snappy packaging, promising the item inside will “Rock your teeth clean” to the songs of Kiss, Queen, Kelly Clarkson, and The Black Eyed Peas among others? At last someone was able to marry two things close to my heart – rock and fresh breath. Well this had to be investigated.

A few hours later, toothbrush in mouth, I began to find out that the Tooth Tunes toothbrush is even odder than I expected. First off, the toothbrush has no speaker system to speak of, so oddly the music (which thankfully is original recordings) is transmitted via vibrations from the bristles into your teeth. Brush harder, the music is louder, brush softer, the music gets softer. You could effectively remix a song in this manner. But perhaps the most important question for me to answer here is “What is it like to receive music in your head via a toothbrush?” The answer is “Entirely uncomfortable, thank you very much.”

I often dream of getting to work at a company that makes strange niche-market items with incredibly limited appeal like this one (I mean, haven’t the folks at Tiger noticed that brushing after meals and rocking out are hardly compatible?). I'm already having visions of the collectability of this item. After the first lot sell out, I can’t imagine them making a lot more, so get yourself to the drugstore and get one now. If you do, I hope the folks at Tiger will be lead to believe there is a market for a Cheap Trick toothbrush, and I personally can hardly wait to hear “Dream Police” vibrating through the bones in my head.

In a nearly related story, Mark Matthews, former bass player of British jangle-pop pioneers The Dentists is bringing his new band The Echo Heights on a mini-tour of the Northeast US next week and everyone should go.The Echo Heights are a deeply pleasing psychedelic pop delight toned with hints of ennui in all the right places.I suppose this kind of thoughtful strum is less popular with the kids now than it once was, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth adoring.Dates in Boston, Worchester, NYC, DC, and Nashville are on tap. Pop on down, won’t you?

Book Report

My new year’s resolution this year was to actually read all of these lovely books I amass here in the house yet never read. The first of these books was a cheapie I picked up just because of the great title and back jacket description. “Dreaming of Gwen Stefani” by Evan Mandrey has a great premise, Mortimer is an obsessive-compulsive hot dog maker at one of those places in New York City with the word “Papaya” in the name where the hot dogs are perfect and sold for 75 cents. When flipping around TV stations late one night, he stumbles across a video of Gwen Stefani and falls in love with her. This fervor increases when, after pathetically researching the minutiae of Gwen’s life, he finds out her favorite food is (wait for it) hot dogs at the very place he works. The rest of the story follows Mortimer as he crazily readies himself for the day which he knows will come soon, when Gwen will come to the Papaya place, get a hot dog and (of course) fall in love with him. With a premise this good it’s surprising how horribly wrong this book can go. Endless uninteresting chapters about the building blocks of biology are thrown in, along with a heavy handed and clumsily executed moral that is so entirely self-congratulatory and immature were I the author, I would be embarrassed that anyone might think this was ‘the deep statement I wanted to make with my book’. By the end I was left with was a strong desire for a Papaya Plus hotdog, though sadly I found myself about 200 miles away from one.

Much better was a book I bought a year ago, in hardcover, lent to my boyfriend at the time, and then never read myself “Killing Yourself to Live” by Spin writer Chuck Klosterman. I first encountered Klosterman a few years back when a friend bought me his crazily brilliant love letter to a youth loving heavy metal “Fargo Rock City”, a book that I have now bought for at least 5 other people. “Killing Yourself” follows Klosterman on a Spin-funded expedition across the US, visiting the sights of various rock celebrities deaths, obsessing all the while on every girl he has ever had (or hoped to have) sex with. The resulting treatise is painfully honest, embarrassingly geeky and pathetically rock-dorky, but damn good reading. As proof I hold up the fact that at one point the author actually goes to the trouble of letting us know which member of Kiss each of his past loves would be. This includes members who were in temporary lineups, managers, the kind of thing an in-depth and perhaps dismayingly over the top knowledge of Kiss is required to fully grasp. It is brilliant. It is pathetic. Go read it now.