The Piercing

by Christine Garren.

Louisiana State University Press, 2006. $16.95

 By Jennifer Whitaker

In The Piercing, Christine Garren’s stunning third book, we find ourselves encountering the shocks of everyday life—the neighbor who dies, the suddenness of autumn’s first falling leaves, the dead fish in the pond—in a way that is neither heavy-handed nor melodramatic. This is a book of ordinary events meted out through extraordinary vision. These poems reach toward Emily Dickinson and Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris, and like both these poets, Garren crafts poems with an interiority that makes them feel like they are ours. But unlike Dickinson and Glück, Garren rarely calls on abstract concepts (e.g., love, hate, death) explicitly, rather finding power in allowing the reader to hone in on a subject through her concision, laying new vision and meaning over our expectations. To say these poems are quiet is inexact; they are controlled to the point that they can feel hushed, but it’s the hush of a burning fire—filled with continual and constantly changing crackles, flashes and sparks.

Indeed, it isn’t the events of the poems that are startling. Rather, the tension she builds makes the poems feel, at once, relatable and rare. This is a collection full of seemingly opposing forces—specificity and universality, reasoning and instinct, trauma and survival—which form the scaffolding of tension for the book.

Tension is most immediately created in The Piercing through Garren’s specificity—particularly in the repeated choice of the definite article (26 of the 50 poems in this collection are titled simply with a definite noun). As in Among the Monarchs and, to a lesser extent, Afterworld, the use of the specific and particular noun signaled through the use of the contributes to the poems’ immediacy; the titles walk us right up to the speaker and demand our unwavering attention for the controlled moment of the poem. Tension, then, is created between the specificity (this tree, this mother, this yard) and the subjects’ seeming universality—we all have experience with trees, mothers, yards. And precisely because of this—because we can’t keep ourselves from relating to the subjects in these poems—we are positioned to be affected by and vulnerable to the peculiarity of her imagery and language. The poet uses expectation to her advantage, counting on us to bring narrative associations to the poem, then using those associations as a departure point to amaze with her startling vision. For instance, in “Safe,” the poet unravels our expectations of what “safe” means line by line through description:

 
These things too—that we had put with the jewelry and will

 the sound of night rushing past us

the damp scent of darkness

the cocaine powders, the thoughts

not beautiful

with recognizable shocks and forays, and the way the light fell openly

across the wood, about thirty years ago— (lines 1-7)
 

Within these brief seven lines, Garren creates tension by dismantling the associations of security and comfort readers bring with the adjectival form of the word through her description of the rushing of night, the darkness, the light falling “openly,” the “shocks and forays.” Then, in the poem’s last three lines, the expectations are fully exploded with the realization that “these things, as well // blasted // open into rubble” (8-10). By the close of the poem, all of our assumptions of safety from harm, damage or injury have been set aside, and it’s through this yoking together of our expectations of a subject and a disparate view of that subject—in the small space of each poem—that Garren increases the collection’s tension. We are drawn again and again to her view of these seemingly ordinary subjects because through her poems, we realize that nothing is mundane, nothing can be taken for granted.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the control of these poems, the poet is able to create something akin to a startle response in the reader. Certainly these poems aren’t frightening, but as readers we experience a similar reaction as being disconcerted or scared. At times we are startled into almost involuntary action, as the reader’s mind follows the leaps and thrills of the poem. In “Love Poem,” we move from relative calm to the poem’s staggering conclusion: “Now and then / a wave threw down another wish // and he would lift it to show me / how easy our dreaming was— // the dying being told they are not ill, // the abandoned being shown / how the world exists for them” (6-12). The turn there between lines 9 and 10, moving us from an almost idyllic scene to the reality of the speaker’s dreaming, surprises and pushes the reader into uncounted-on territory. Garren’s acutely tuned pacing works to further this tension, as she knows exactly how long to keep us in the language we expect from a “Love Poem” before narrowing the scene with unsettling imagery.

Coupled with this startle response is Garren’s attention to the possibilities of enjambment and speed to create tension. In “The Carriage,” she writes, “It was after your mother’s death—the birds were // red-headed woodpeckers, ballroom feathered, in bunches in the trees // so long ago exactness has been lost” (3-5). This quick, repeated flipping of the image or impression—first, the pervading feeling of loss with the mother’s death, the past tense verbs, and the line break making the birds seem already gone; then the vibrancy and opulence of the birds and trees, which quickly returns to the loss of detail that comes with the passage of time—announces to us that things here are not as they seem, and with each breath, what we think we know changes. Here, as so often in Garren’s poems, we aren’t sure where we’re headed until we’ve already arrived, trying to catch our breath, slightly disoriented. The collection’s tension builds and we exhale and inhale in tandem with each brief, intensely ordered poem. This effect is repeated throughout the collection so that the book itself seems to be a breathing thing.

The ratcheting up of seemingly daily experience could creep into melodrama, but in Garren’s vision, it is perfectly pitched and enacts the transition from crisis to recovery with the concision we rely on in her work. There is an instinctual movement to these poems—the very human instinct to work always toward understanding and meaning making. The speaker’s assertion in “The Well” that “We understand the crisis between us / is permanent. And then see ourselves / on the water’s bare lens, our portrait, perfectly detailed / and miniscule. / The exhilarating life is finished. We must accept it / this late afternoon and move / back into the rational world” (5-11) foregrounds this movement from the startling realization of loss toward understanding, or at least acceptance. This mimics the recursive experience of readers, as in these poems we are confronted by shockingly peculiar images and a controlled amount of space in which to understand them. We are called to re-read these poems, to try fully to comprehend, because we know there is truth to be found there.

Spending time with these poems, and encountering through them these very real shocks, reminds us that it is ordinary, daily life—the laundry, the paying of bills, the dishes and mail—that keeps us sane in the wake of trauma, big or small. These poems are distilled, daring, real: they return us to an enriched everyday life that takes care of us.

Jennifer Whitaker is a lecturer in English and assistant director of the University Writing Center at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Mid-American Review, New England Review and Pebble Lake Review. She has won an Academy of American Poets prize and two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prizes, and serves as an assistant poetry editor for storySouth.

 

 

The Bindlestiff Family Cirkus! (They performed at the Flying Anvil Wednesday, June 28, 2006. See the "Interviews" tab for a great interview with Kinko the Clown, A.K.A. Keith Nelson, Cirkus founder.)

The Bindlestiff Family Cirkus

The Flying Anvil, Greensboro, NC

June 28, 2006

A Clowning Achievement

Before the show officially starts, a bedraggled, hobo-style clown stands in front of the stage and drinks a bottle of imaginary booze from a brown bag, eventually turning it all the way upside down over his head. A haunted look on his face, a noose around his neck, he wanders the cavernous Flying Anvil, gesturing for someone to give him a cigarette. Soon, someone obliges and he smokes as he moves ghostlike through the crowd. Meanwhile, a tall man in sparkly, cobalt spandex and large rabbit ears competes in Hula Hoop matches with anyone who dares.

“Not fair, not fair!” he chirps each time he loses.

Thunderous, dissonant merry-go-round-like music rises up from the side of the stage, where Skip Shirey plays a variety of keyboards and makeshift instruments into a microphone. The spandex man, otherwise known as the Big Blue Bunny, comes forward to announce the “rules” of the show. Among other things he explains that the removing of clothing will be both allowed and encouraged. Up on the stage Kinko, the clown, extinguishes the cigarette on his tongue, and the show begins.

Accompanied by Shirey’s percussion Kinko unrolls a cardboard sign that reads, “Will clown for Food.” He further unrolls it to reveal, “Cash,” then “Sex,” “Health ins,” “Peace,” “Scotch,” “Joint,” and finally, “Applause,” which he gets. He begins a balloon sculpture session, giving his finished pieces, mostly flowers and head-ware, to people in the audience. The Big Blue Bunny, who had been juggling impatiently at the back of the stage, comes forward to release his stage jealousy; he grabs a balloon from Kinko, inflates it, and, with lots of noise, molds it into a penis which he gives to a male in the audience. That frustrated gesture calls an end to the battle and the Bunny and Kinko announce the other performers. The perky, stripe-wearing Dizzy Lizzy gallops onto the stage, as well as tightrope walker David Didd and finally, with much fanfare, the foxy and forward Ringmistress Philomena struts into view and takes charge. She shouts welcomes to the audience, and, in classically exuberant ringmaster (or -mistress) style, promises the greatest and most dangerous show on earth.

The two founders of this Neo-Vaudeville company, Stephanie Monseu, or Ringmistress Philomena, and Keith Nelson, who is both the Sword Swallowing Mr. Pennygaff and Kinko the Drunken Clown, met waiting tables in the East Village in 1992. Nelson had been an Anarchist Studies major at Hampshire College, which he said left him with few job options--but in college he had learned to juggle and eat fire. Monseu was a jewelry artist who wanted to do something more exciting. Behind the restaurant, in the falling snow, Nelson taught Monseu how to eat fire, and the two joined in a mission to expose the world to salacious and death defying variety shows, the first of which was an act called "Fireplay." Three years later, in 1995, the Cirkus was born.

When they weren't touring the country, the troupe performed in small and late-night venues all around Manhattan, and for several years they gave a weekly performance at the Brooklyn Brewery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. By 2002 the Bindlestiffs had established the first regular vaudeville show in Times Square in 70 years, at the Palace of Variety on West 42nd St, which has since been demolished. The show goes on though, almost anywhere it is allowed – from Lincoln Center, to the annual Burning Man Festival to fancy opera houses to small punk rock venues to children's birthday parties. They perform with as few as 5 and as many as 20 performers. Before their bookmobile was destroyed by Katrina, the Cirkus traveled with Autonomedia Books, which sold of a variety of subversive and anarchist literature, comic books, and zines. Now they travel under the wing of the Magic Hat Brewing Company.

All Bindlestiff performers have been classically trained in circus arts and some of them also perform with Cirque du Soleil and Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. A Bindlestiff contortionist has appeared on Guinness World Records Primetime and Ripley's Believe It Or Not. The Bindlestiff show has included a miniature Circus of Performing Fleas, a Yo-Yo Master, an Airborne Striptease, a Whip Act, a Ukulele Duo, glass-walking, fire-eating and juggling, knife throwing and of course the World’s One and Only Brother and Sister Bed of Nails Act.

Between dangerous, enviable and sometimes nauseating feats the Bindlestiffs perform frequent and frighteningly strong changes in attitude that would be impossible to notice in a larger, less intimate circus. Kinko’s eerie depression is suddenly interrupted by the Blue Bunny’s sharp clamoring for attention. Lizzy Dizzy’s proud gleefulness gives way to mimed rage if she drops a juggling pin. Philomena aggressively rules the stage with her wicked sarcasm. All the performers interrupt one another and alter the course of events, apparently spontaneously. It is impossible not to be struck into intellectual submission by the Pirandelloesque changes. The show’s frantic schizophrenia is a spectacle in itself, and a theatrical device that feels as though could be the heart of the variety show experience.

The company does not allow unauthorized taping of a show, and the ban exists just as much for the audience’s enjoyment as for the company’s protection. The performers aim to transport the audience, they say, to at time when there were no such things as video cameras and the live variety show was the best entertainment available for regular people.

“This is really happening,” says the Bunny during his rendition of a song called, “Inky-Dink.” “What is happening?” he demands of the audience as he bounces up and down between verses. The Bunny’s glib questions reveal what separates the Bindlestiffs from other circuses and ties their already unique performance into high-intensity theatrical ritual--the immediate acknowledgement of the present moment and its danger.

Despite that the Bindlestiff Family Circus is a fun show, filled with tantalizing feats such as sword swallowing and fire-eating, and a masterful trapeze act, the Bindlestiffs pursue their calling for reasons that are most serious. The Bindlestiffs have dedicated themselves to entertaining, but also, it seems, to a rare form of theatrical provocation. Their early website promises, “We have traveled the globe in order to bring you your DEEPEST FANTASIES, DARKEST DREAMS, & UNEXPECTED ODDITIES!!!” This promise gains significance in that it turns the attention onto the potential audience members – they will face their fantasies, darkest dreams and unexpected oddities, not merely gawk at those of another. The Bindlestiffs have given themselves license to express circus’ darker, sultry, sexy, violent and libidinous sides. As positively Freudian as they can get, the circus draws from traditions that came even before Freud, the risqué 19th century variety show, and, as Monseu has said in an ArtPass.com interview, “the original bloody battle that the Romans enjoyed in the circus.”

The Bindlestiff’s presentation of circus arts also comes from an understanding of vaudeville and circus history, and a reverence for clowning that is admittedly Fellinian. When I spoke with Keith Nelson a day before the show he told me, “Clowns historically have been very tied in with a spiritual world and religion. If you look at the Hopi clowns in the American Indian tradition, they were considered right up there and treated the way we treat ministers and priests. They were able to walk the line between this world and whatever the other world is and you would find that tradition going back to ancient times; clowns would walk that thin line.” Nelson’s assertion calls to mind the bridge between ritual and performance, such as that of the Whirling Dervishes or the theatrical productions of the ancient Greeks. Nelson believes that clowns, particularly clowns of the Great Depression, notably Emmett Kelly and Otto Griebling, performed in such a way as to produce a serious cathartic experience for an audience dealing with destitution. “Clowns are there to help you realize what’s out there and they operate as a breath of fresh air…. Clowns take you on an emotional rollercoaster,” Nelson told me. “It’s not all just ‘laugh, laugh, laugh.”’ Monseu evidently shares Nelson’s take on the role of the clown; at one point during the show she tells an audience participant, “You are right to bow to the [clown] nose. It is your free pass to poetic license. It will elevate you to a mystical, magical responsibility.” For 11 years Nelson, Monseu and company have been, as Monseu has said, “dancing on the fine line between life and death, between skill and chance,” and, I will add, between spectacle and ritual; the Bindlestiffs, rare saviors of vaudeville and the variety show, obviously take their responsibility very seriously.

GYPSY JAZZ! 

This picture came into existence on a Wednesday evening around 7 or 8 at Amnesia in the Mission District of San Francisco. That's Dave Ricketts facing us with the guitar, Rob Reich on the accordian, Craig on guitar, and then Mike Groh, also on guitar. Ari Munkres was playing bass at this time but is not in this picture.These men are Gaucho!

The band draws influence from Biréli Lagrène, Stochelo Rosenberg, Robin Nolan, Django Reinhardt, Stephen Grapelli and “jazz manouche,” which means "traveler jazz," a blend of traditional Romany music and jazz that was very popular in the 1920s.

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Faith Healer

Booth Theater, NYC

July 13, 2006

FAITH IS ALIVE FOR FEW MORE WEEKS

 

     Sartre’s famous play No Exit hypothesized that “hell is other people.” Brian Friel’s haunting Faith Healer, which plays for three more weeks at the Booth Theater, presents a similar notion but the mantra could be changed to, “hell is being alone and remembering other people. Imported in May from the Dublin Gate Theater and now nominated for a Tony award, the production continues with the dynamic strength and virtuosity noted in early reviews.

Obviously it has been faring better than the 1979 Broadway production that was pulled after only 20 performances. Ralph Fiennes, who starred in the films The English Patient, The Constant Gardener and many London stage productions, including Hamlet, plays the lead, the faith healer Frank Hardy. Star War’s Ian McDiarmid, in his first appearance on the American stage, plays his manager, Teddy. Both men have been with the show since it opened in Dublin in January and for the Broadway run have been joined by Doubt’s Cherry Jones, who plays Gracie Hardy, Frank’s wife. The play consists of four monologues—it is a Ulysses-like switching between the characters’ wandering impressions, and there is no direct interaction between the characters. Friel’s mesmerizing text, Jonathan Kent’s directing and the actors’ stunning performances demonstrate how on that particular fictional Irish landscape isolation, strangeness and obstinacy lead to the growth of a twisted but revered artistic style.

       Friel grew up in the economically depressed Northern Ireland community of Londonderry and his work is well known to express the Irish tradition of exile, the struggle between provincialism and cosmopolitanism and political chaos within a community. The three characters in Faith Healer are not, their story reveals, realistically tied to any community but visitors who descend upon British Isles communities with the healer’s act, dragging along with them drink-fueled bouts of domestic chaos that almost seem to become performances themselves.

      Fiennes, as the faith healer, wills a double suspension of disbelief. The lines are so, well, frank, and Fiennes delivers them so frankly the healing abilities seem possible, even probable. Fiennes’ characteristically commanding presence makes it plausible that the mistreated Gracie and Teddy would have persisted with such devotion toward him. He describes them both fondly and critically, revealing particularly the emotional imbalance between himself and his wife—he persisting as the eccentric artist and she as the abused and neglected caretaker. He reveals the reason for his cruelty early on as he despairs of his “craft without an apprenticeship,” “ministry without responsibility,” “vocation without a ministry.” His anomalous state leaves him removed from tradition and history, an exile. His spooky recitation of names of towns the act visited seems a type of meditative attempt to call himself back into reality. He tells of various healings, his mother’s and father’s deaths, and, with exquisitely maintained stoicism, “A Dionysian Night, a Bacchanalian night. A frenzied, excessive Irish night when ritual was consciously and relentlessly debauched.” Jonathan Fensom’s minimal set design particularly underscores Fiennes’ stripped-down performance.

   We meet Gracie Hardy, smoking, drinking hard liquor, and appearing to be trapped in her chair, as though crippled. Cherry Jones’ portrays Gracie with devastating angst, particularly in the assertion that Frank always “obliterated” her before performances. She speaks about how she measures her health in amounts of drink and sleep and cigarettes. These methodical measurements seem almost the antithesis of the healer’s abstract art. It is as though she has reaped no benefits from supporting the healer’s art. Also antithetical is the painful dependency Frank seems to have produced in his wife, or mistress, as he would have you believe.

    McDiarmid as Teddy, Frank’s convivial manager, tells tales of exceptional animals and sings “The Way You Look Tonight” to us, as well as narrating the darker parts of Frank and Gracie’s relationship. As McDiarmid, speaking in cockney, drinks six or so beers he cheerfully and sometimes wistfully retells the stories of the road. His charismatic performance expresses both joy and a bit of sorrow in the act of remembering. He, too, seems isolated and slightly scarred in the aftermath of the touring show.

    The three character’s incongruent stories create a play that operates almost as an essay that weighs different sides of an argument. Each character has been cast into his or her own universe and free to omit or invent details as a device for coping with the past. Constructing “the real story” is not easy. The circumstances of Frank and Gracie’s marriage are fuzzy, as are the dates of the deaths of various relatives. Gracie is supposed to have died, which makes one wonder from where she is supposed to be speaking and when, giving the play its Sartre feel.  It also has the elegiac quality of one of Joyce’s short stories. The characters feel reasonably debilitated or stunted by history and the truth remains unrevealed, or clouded by impressions. The director, Jonathan Kent, has affirmed that the play is about the demands of an artist and the damage he causes. Fiennes’ portrayal of Frank’s cold selfishness delivers Kent’s intended message clearly. His fortitude when joined with Jones’ convincing grief and McDiarmid’s reminiscing narration expresses the irony of the life of the faith healer: in undertaking a mission to heal the public he has unremorsefully wounded those who supported him. Frank’s last dreamy monologue, in which he describes entering a church and “renouncing chance,” it seems that he, alone, the genius “healer,” has reached a state of grace and salvation.

I just finished reading New Orleans, Mon Amour, Andrei Codrescu's  series of charming vignettes about New Orleans. The chapters, most of them no more than a page and a half long, feel like individualized private glimpses into the life that Codrescu has found in and around New Orleans.

"Small Change" - "L'Argent de Poche"

La Femme Existentialiste

    The Mandarins explores the social and political milieus of French bohemian-intellectual people after the end of the Second World War. Lives have been have been marred by loss and grief and some have more or less abandoned themselves and their principles. The novel closely follows the paths of Paula, the disintegrating singer, Henri, the successful writer, and Anne Debrouillah, the psychoanalyst. Beauvoir seems to have written a lot of herself into the sensitive yet strong and intelletually cogent Anne. The other women seem to display what might be called "The Hysterical Tradition" of female characters.

Many things are learned, many things are lost as we follow their paths, as well as the paths of the men, especially Henri, who finally gives himself over to domesticity.

The novel goes through French and European politics of the time in a rigorous manner - I felt undereducated as I read many of the newspaper-related scenes, which centered around issues of the Resistance, Socialism and France's response to Soviet and American powers. In short, the book made me want to learn more about these topics.

Lost Photograph by Rob Burger

My new favorite song on this new favorite album is the last one, "The Cantor & His Grandson." It's just lovely. The album was commissioned by John Zorn. One of the songs is about moving a couch through Manhattan on a hot day.

Rob Burger has played with Bill Frissell, Norah Jones, Tom Waits, Carla Kihlstedt and other members of the Tin Hat Trio, of which he is a member.  He is very, very talented and magical. His music sounds like compositions by fairies, gypsies and wise little elves. 

Here's something interesting he says about this album:

"I see Lost Photograph as a series of short stories, small portraits or miniatures. Though the record has a common thread running through it, intending to take the listener on a little journey, each song in my opinion, takes on a small life of its own. But that said, ultimately the stories are up to the listener to interpret."

That is from a great interview that can be found here.

This is the cover of a book about the origination and the success of the Pixies.  If you don't know who the Pixies are then I'm not going to tell you - you should have covered that after school in 9th grade and if you didn't get to it that's your own fault. If you were much older than 9th grade during the Pixies' heyday and afterwards, a 9th grader should have informed you of them. Or any high schooler for that matter.

Anyway, the book - it's a compliation of interviews with people inolved with the band in some way. Reading this book,  I learned a lot about the Deal sisters and about many people I had no idea were involved with the Pixies, down to a would-be Harvard student and Magnetic Fields' member who auditioned for the band in its early stages. Caryn Ganz and Josh Frank weave the story together almost as though it is a play and all of these people are sitting in a room together, talking and comparing details. Actually, though, the pieces of dialogue are taken from interviews that happened at various places and times.

Well done, folks.

I saw Hedda Gabler on Tuesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Let me tell you, Miss Blanchett was ridiculous good, despite what that Charles Isherwood said. She added this quick wit about Hedda that I always suspected but never came through for me when I read the play myself. The character in my head did not trot around making perfect little aggressive gestures mixed with coyness. That, probably, was the difference and the thing missing from my version of Hedda all these years. Psychotic as she is, or sadistic anyway, Hedda is also really quite funny. The pulling of Thea's hair went better than I ever could have imagined. Blanchett's portrayal of Hedda was truly clever, making the play into a comedy of (violent) manners as well as the dramatic story of a trapped and sick woman and her trapped and somewhat sick friends.

While we're talking about something that happened at BAM, I just want to wonder if they are going to completely restore the theater or leave it as is. The rust and chipping, worn paint are endearing but could perhaps use some contrasting newness somewhere.

I've been Braffed. by "The Last Kiss"

     To be honest, the end made me cry but if you tell me that you are a heterosexual female and Zach Braff sitting on a porch for two weeks in the rain to win back his love doesn't make you cry,  I will say, "You lie." Even if it was just because he was so cute in Garden State or so funny on Arrested Development or so doctorly on Scrubs and you liked seeing him sit in the rain under a wet blanket. That's why I cried. The rest of the movie really had nothing to do with it. It entertained but at certain points the drama doesn't progress forward at all, just moves back and forth until you want to slap the people. Unfortunately also, in this script Paul Haggis displays gender politics that are even less sophisticated than the class politics of his 2004 "Million Dollar Baby," which is sad. "Last Kiss" is all about the angst the young man feels when he is confronted with the possibility that he may have to be responsible to the fruit of his loins and the oven -- I mean-- woman that baked it. How life-shattering! How distracting! Will we not be able to any longer do what really matters, the thrilling practice of picking up random people at weddings? That remains to be seen. Michael (ZB) and Jenna (Jacinda Barrett) together plan to be unmarried together forever and bring up the child they will soon have in a happy non-marriage family. But that doesn't all go as planned. Because what about Michael's wild oats? They're not all the way sown. Something must be done! Quick, quick! The naive young college girl he soon picks up (Rachel Bilson, who seems to vaguely mimic Anna Paquin from "The Squid and the Whale") is amusing, her character being one of the exageratedly hysterical females, expressed in her case by twitchiness, unexpected emotional demands and sudden and unwanted mix tape-making. What were the other female characters like-- were they any good? Let's see, there was his alpha-male friend's new squeeze, the sex-kitten who for weeks needs nothing more than intense lovemaking until, like an evil chess queen she duplicitiously tricks her chosen mate into meeting her parents. Hm. There was Jenna's mother who has frequent, inexplicable Maggie-the-Cat-ish breakdowns, screams, lies, cheats and throws perfume bottles at her patient, inoffensive therapist husband. That wasn't very positive. Wait, though. There must be a good female in here somewhere. There was Michael's friend's wife, the shrieking young mother, red-faced and cruel. No, that doesn't work. Oh, I know! Duh. Jenna! Michael's buddy describes her as being "like a guy." Whew. Glad there's one good one left. Wait, no. She goes crazy too. It was one of those movies that seemed determined to "lay it all out" for how life and relationships really are, but specifically stressing, "Men are sad and confused; feel sorry for them, forgive them. Women, stop being crazy! God, your gender is so crazy! Love your man, stand by him, etc. Don't be crazy. Things are tough for men - especially attractive men. do you even know what they go through?"  Please, find it within your hearts to mourn for Michael's "last chance at happiness" with the dorm-room vixen who, adorably, sexily and then provocatively has not the sense to wear a jacket or carry an umbrella in the pouring rain.

Although I enjoyed being Braffed, I'm afraid my once playfully seductive but now entrapping and hysterical female thumbs point mostly down for this one.

 

Jews and Catholics

Alanna Meltzer- upright bass Eddie Garcia- guitar, vocals, electronics

This is  my new favorite band, Jews and Catholics, comprised of a classically-trained double bass player and a guitarist/drum machinist/sequencist. Some of their tunes sounded quite Zorny. (Avant-Garde composer John Zorn) Others hit me as being of a Zorned up New Order ilk. Please, people - go play at The Stone in New York. It just seems right. Well, for that matter play anywhere at any time. Mr Garcia, for the record, is not stoned but I knew that anyway. Despite the duo's venture into long slightly meditational improvisations they always came pounding back into hard and well-timed conclusions.

AIR PEOPLE

Air to the Throne, Ladies and Gentlemen performing "Eye of the Tiger" and simultaneously Rob Reich also peforming the visual piece, "The Journey of the Face"at a bar called Amnesia on Valencia Street in the Mission. Rembering the crowd and the performance of the singers and air guitarists just brought tears to my eyes. I have not seen people that happy in a long time. When Air to the Throne started up with "Eye of the Tiger," you could literally feel the happiness boil up inside everyone and escape into the air like churning, hot cloud.  In a world in which sincerity and true joy seem to have little value, the fifty or so people singing along and dancing to to "Like a Prayer" unconventionally shared their joy. Along with the air bands, the audience members communicated to themselves and to one another their sincere and deep appreciation for musical parody and the whole event provided a tremendous release for everyone's intense, bottled-up reverence and love for 80's music, obligable irony cast aside.

There were even people in nun costumes performing the background vocals and the air players brandished their cardboard instruments with all the passion of anyone breaking free of 80's pop music denial. I think it was the best thing I saw during my nine days in San Francisco. Air to the Throne, who did "Like a Prayer," stole the show, took the contest by storm, whatever cliche of "won" you want to throw in there. They also performed "Eye of the Tiger" and a costumed rendition of "Bohemian Rhapsody." All the air bands were great however. Another did that song from Mannequin. As a romantic duet. In jazzercise clothes.

Another group peformed "Whole Lotta Love" with that section, you know the one I mean, going on for about 15 minutes, I think. Quite amusing.

I especially thank Rob for the complex and wholly appropriate facial expressions,

I would also like to include a cameo face performance appearance by our friend, Wally Scharold:

This is the cover of my favorite album ever. "The Aeroplane Over the Sea," by Neutral Milk Hotel.

Ah.

Ah.

Ah.

I will say though that Rob Reich's "Thirteen Short Songs About You" is a close second.

Sunday, February 12, 2006

I'm convinced that if Andy Warhol were still alive he would be the master-blogger. This guy loves to talk about nothing in an almost Seinfeldian manner. I'm wondering if Larry David has read this book. Is our entire culture of humor really Warholian? Is Warholian a word? I don't know, but this book is great, compiled and edited and finely tuned by excellent friends no doubt. Warhol was, for a long time, on my "do not bother" list (meaning that I do not bother with him) but this book has changed all that. This man was wry, clever, witty and humble as well as imaginative. He's like a non-gay David Sedaris with more art.

ahem, some little tidbits:

From "Love (Senility)"

"Love can be bought and sold. One of the older superstars used to cry every time somebody she loved kicked her out of his loft and I used to tell her, 'Don't worry. You're going to be very famous someday and you'll be able tobuy him.' It worked out just that way and she's very happy now."

From "Fame"

"I've always thought that the President could do so much here to help change images. If the President would go into a public bathroom in the Capitol, and have the TV cameras film him cleaning the toilets and saying, 'Why not? Somebody's got to do it!' then that would do so much for the morale of the people who do the wonderful job of keeping the toilets clean. I mean, it is a wonderful thing that they're doing. The President has so much good publicity potential that hasn't been exploited. He should just sit down one day and make a list of all the things that people are embarassed to do thatthey shouldn't be embarassed to do, and then do them all on television."

Capitol Hill goes on Jerry Springer or Jackass? Genius!