Girl in a Cage

Stay Cool

Heard the Neil Young song "After the Garden"--liked it, didn't love it. Seems to be cut from the "Ragged Glory" cloth, which is fine by me. So here's the question: how did Neil Young become, and, more importantly, stay cool? I mean, most people (myself included) agree that Uncle Neil is a cool old geezer. This despite the fact that he's done rafts of uncool things. To wit:

1. "Sugar Mountain"--"With the barkers and the colored balloons".

2. The roadies in "Rust Never Sleeps" were dressed as Jawas.

3. Incoherent Johnny Rotten/Elvis comparison in "Hey Hey My My" and "My My Hey Hey" (actually the reverse titled electric/acoustic numbers might be a separate uncool entry) shows Uncle Neil befuddled by punk rock. What are they so mad about? Why don't they smoke a bowl and go live on Sugar Mountain?

4.Trans.

5. "Let's Roll"--Uncle Neil should thank God every day that a whole raft of country stars beat him out for worst song about 9/11 award.

6. The man associates with, and even records with, Steven Stills. He might be able to make a less cool move by hanging out with, I don't know, Michael Bolton or something, but I'm not sure.

And yet, for all this, Uncle Neil is cool. Cooler than me. What's his secret?

We Got 20-Foot Dinos, Bee-yotch!

So I was in the Times Square Toys R' Us today (Oh yeah, I get into all the hottest spots in NYC! VIP treatment all the way!), and down in the Hot Wheels section, they have this outfit that belonged to some motocross racer or something, and next to that, inexplicably, is a firefighter uniform, and a little plaque that says something like "Matchbox salutes the real heroes of 9/11/01" or whatever. And I have to confess, there in the gigantic Toys R Us, I had a patriotic moment.

I mean, sure, I was in the temple of the very excessive consumerism that is leading us to heat up the globe and start unnecessary wars to protect the oil supply and thereby inspire more theocratic terrorists, but I couldn't help feeling this genuine surge of pride. Because, I thought, I am standing in the city that was the site of so much horror, and I'm thinking, "Yeah, you might have pulled off a horrible attack, but just a few miles away, there is a neon-bedecked freakin' ferris wheel inside the building! You may deal us a terrible blow, but we are still the country with bigass toy store with a 20-foot animatronic t-rex! You can't break us! We got superheroes made of legos and a lifesize Barbie house and did I mention the animatronic t-rex?! No matter what you do to us, we are still gonna spend too much on plastic crap next to a lego empire state bullding, in the shadow of a gigantic roaring dino, with life-size GI Joes rapelling down the wall, because that's how we roll, bitches!"

Hot Fun in the Summertime

Well, the powers that be have apparently decided that Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" is The Official Song of Summer. (I think these things are decided some time in May in a Holiday Inn Express banquet room somewhere.) I've got no objection--love the bass line, great vocals, kind of old school soul sound--it all works for me.

I even thought of downloading it, but then I thought, what if it's like "Hey Ya", and I end up hearing it so much that I not only can't stand it, but I also can't stand any of the other songs from that record? I couldn't risk it.

So, in between airings of "Crazy", might I suggest a little something from the Eagles of Death Metal? first of all, you have to love a band with a name and an album name ("Death By Sexy") that I think must be outtakes from King Dork. I also love the fact that they sound like neither the Eagles nor death metal. It's more of a raunchy '70's rock vibe, a la Mooney Suzuki. Right now I'd suggest "I Want You So Hard," though "Don't Speak (I Came to Make a Bang)" and "Solid Gold" are really good too. I'm just saying.

Nacho Mediocre

Oh, I really wanted to love Nacho Libre. And I did like it, I mean, there's some funny stuff in it, but, overall, it was a disappointment.

I think this sums it up nicely: About halfway through the movie, daughter #1 turned to me and said, "This movie is so boring. Can we go home?" Not exactly what you expect to hear from a nine year old whilst sitting in a movie produced by Nickelodeon Films. (Daughter #2 was actually asleep, but we later found out she was running a 101 fever, so I don't think we can consider that film criticism.)

But I think the criticism of the conscious daughter was on the mark. The movie felt much longer than its hour and forty minute running time, and in some parts it was just impossibly slow. I blame the director.

Now, I didn't see Napoleon Dynamite, but I'm blaming the director anyway for mucking up a good Hollywood product with an indie aesthetic. This was a classic "Scrappy Underdog Makes Good" Hollywood comedy, the kind of thing that the professional moviemakers in Hollywood do better than anybody else in the world. So it just doesn't make sense to try and indiefy it--by which I mean, rather than hewing to the plot-and-laugh-driven Hollywood formula, going for that indie film formula--introduce quirky characters and put them into various situations and watch what happens. After two hours or so, have a nonsensical non-sequitur ending, or just kind of stop it. Because beginnings, middles, and ends are so Hollywood. To me, Ghost World exemplifies this kind of movie--good acting, no story, poor excuse for a movie. So the scrappy underdog movie demands a certain amount of bang-bang plot momentum, and this guy seems unable or possibly unwilling to provide it. And so the nine-year-olds were bored.

Whereas School of Rock knew exactly what kind of movie it was, never tried to be anything else, and ended up being the best Ragtag Band of Misfits movie ever.

Oh well. When's the Tenacious D movie come out, anyway?

No Dice Son You Gotta Work Late

Assembling a summer playlist the other day (It's June! Are you listening to the All Girl Summer Fun Band yet? Why the hell not? Oh, yeah, you're too cool for guitar pop perfection. I forgot.), and I got to thinking about how my old friend Peter told me how he listened to the classic rock station's inane countdown of the top 500 rock and roll songs of all time. These always end with some variation on "Stairway to Heaven", which is not even in the top ten Led Zep songs; (Which are Kashmir, Communication Breakdown, The Immigrant Song, Misty Mountain Hop, Hey Hey What Can I Do, D'Yer Maker, Black Dog, When The Levee Breaks, The Ocean, and Black Dog), "Satisfaction", which is not even in the top ten Stones songs (Sympathy for the Devil, Rocks Off, Out of Time, Under My Thumb, Dead Flowers, Star Star, Paint it Black, Bitch, Before They Make Me Run, um...a bunch of other candidates...maybe "Sweet Virginia"), and "Won't Get Fooled Again," which might just barely crack the top ten Who songs. Substitute is better, though.

Anyway, so I was thinking about what was the number one rock and roll song of all time, and I think it might just be "Summertime Blues". What other song has been covered so often and so successfully? Blue Cheer's bizarre psychedelic freakout version, T. Rex's weird bongo-dominated version, the Who's hard-rockin' version, the fantastic rockabilly original--I was listening to snippets of all the versions they have on itunes, and even crappy bands pretty much do a good version of this song. It might be such a good song that it's impossible to do a crappy version of it! (No, no, no, Hootie, no, Lead Singer From Fuel, please don't cover it and prove me wrong.) That's it. Summertime Blues. Best rock and roll song ever.

Woof!

I just finished Kirsten Bakis' Lives of the Monster Dogs, a really well-written book about dogs who've been modified to walk and talk and use prosthetic hands, and how they come to New York and build a castle. The tone is elegaic, which is not something I typically dig, but it's always nice to read a fantasy/science fiction book that is not written with cringe-inducing incompetence. Interestingly, probably because it's well-written, the book was clearly not marketed as the genre book it clearly is. I find this kind of interesting and strange. If you write a science fiction book that's kind of literary, you can apparently avoid being pigeonholed as a genre writer. I don't know how this book sold, but people I know who don't read science fiction/fantasy all thought the premise was too weird and horrifying for them to want to pick this book up. If it had been marketed as the science fiction book it is, it might have gotten a lot of attention. Maybe it did get a lot of attention. I must confess I don't ever know which works of literary fiction are getting all kinds of attention. I dunno.

Having said that, what the hell's up with that ending? If anybody else on earth read this book besides me, perhaps you can explain exactly what happens with Cleo and Lydia and what we're supposed to make of Ludwig's letters? I felt like she was leaving me to connect dots I couldn't connect.

Coverage

Two covers caught my ears over the last couple of days. I heard Jenny Lewis' cover of the Traveling Wilburys "Handle With Care" today, and I thought it was great. This is really the best kind of cover, because it turns out if you strip that song of all the Jeff Lynne production cheese, it's actually a pretty decent song. I mean, I always had a soft spot for it, but mostly as a novelty--"hey, listen to Petty and Dylan! Hey, Roy Orbison's dead!" stuff like that. Hearing this version, I found it strangely affecting and not as much of a goof as I had previously thought.

And then, yesterday, I heard the most wretched cover possibly of all time. I know, I tried to award that title to Hootie and the Blowfish covering Bread, but this was even worse. Some guy from Fuel (a band I had never really heard of, but according to Amazon, people who bought their record also bought Staind and Nickelback, so think pseudo-rock unaware of how much it sucks.) doing an acoustic cover of Elton John's "Daniel". Oh, where to begin? The cheesy, tinny acoustic-electric sound of the guitar was awful, but the singing was really one of the worst vocal performances I've ever heard--all over-the-top hard rock growling and over-emoting, shouting instead of singing what is a nice little song if it's actually sung. You can hear every bad rock singer's bad ideas about what constitutes singing wrapped up in this one performance--I think all aspiring lead singers should be forced to listen and take notes on how not to sing. It is, in its way, a perfectly terrible song.

Celluloid Torquemada

The world's going to hell in a handbasket, I tellya. Wacky climate change has brought what seems like weeks of cold rain to Boston, and if that's not bad enough, they've made A Prarie Home Companion movie. Directed by Robert Altman.

So, if I understand this correctly, they've made a movie of a radio program that is like a live-action version of the muppet show with no laughs, a funnier-looking host, and worse music (I mean, Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem were superior to most '70's bands, and if Robin's "Halfway Down the Stairs" doesn't break your heart, then, sir, you have no heart at all!) . Oh, I forgot, the show is peppered with allegedly humorous go-nowhere anecdotes. Apparently public radio listeners don't get enough of this from their elderly relatives. And the movie is directed by the guy who makes allegedly watchable, go-nowhere movies where a bunch of people mill around for two and a half hours.

I know, I know--if it offends you so much, don't go see it. Which is what I always say whenever some fundamentalist has his shorts bunched up about how Harry Potter is converting Christian youth to satanism or something. But I have to say, I finally understand where these people are coming from. It's not enough to not see this movie. Its very existence offends me! It is an abomination in the sight of the Lord, and it must be smote from the very face of the earth!

Or else maybe I should just forget about it and go see Nacho Libre.

I Been To The Edge

Is there a more badass song than Van Halen's "Ain't Talkin' Bout Love"? I mean, I am as far from a badass as, well, David Lee Roth, who grew up rough in his uncle Manny's deli. (The original title of the song was actuallly "Ain't Talkin' Bout Brisket", but Eddie made him change it. See? This is why they need each other.) I mean, today, I was lifting weights...while listening to Al Franken. Even when engaged in a potentially macho activity, I sabotage it.

Nevertheless, there I was in the car the other day, with "Ain't Talkin' Bout Love" booming out of my speakers (as much as anything can boom out of the factory speakers in a Toyota Matrix) shouting to the tattooed cuties on the street that if they want it, they got to plead for it, baby! Me being who I am(short, Al-Franken-listening sensitive writer guy) (though I am frequently mistaken for Michael J. Fox by people of color.) (This is actually true.) (Not sure if that's a good or bad thing) and my neighborhood being what it is (the one with the highest concentration of lesbians in the greater Boston area), it's extraordinarily unlikely that any of them would want it, and winning-powerball-ticket unlikely that they'd ever plead for it, and what with the fact that I've already hit life's powerball and married the very hottest of the tattooed hotties, even if they were pleading for it, they couldn't have it, but with that song ringing in my ears, for about three and a half minutes, I was that guy the moms warn their daughters about.

I had to go listen to Elliott Smith for a few minutes before I turned into Buddy Love. Though this led to a particularly unfortunate mash-up I like to call "Ain't Talkin' Bout Waltz #3" getting stuck in my brain.

Why I Love Pop Music

So I'm in the car yesterday, listening to the Underground Garage on my new, improved, not-yet-stolen-in-a-smash-and-grab sirius receiver, praising my deliverance from regular radio, puzzling over how to use the radio-tivo features, when I heard the Hawaii Mud Bombers' "Wolf N' the Lamb". Now, this isn't even my favorite Hawaii Mud Bombers song (That would be "Johanna Beach," though "Mr. Menage a Trois" is a close second. And probably "Suzuki Samurai" at third), but as I listened to the chorus ("Na na na na na, don't think I'm missin' you,"), it struck me that the kind of sad melody is really at odds with the lyrical content. So, probably she actually is missin' him, even if she does have boys standing in queue (hey, they're Swedish--I'd like to see the rhymes you come up with in their language), because the music tells us that whatever she's saying, she's sad. I don't know--just for a moment I was struck by how cool it is that the tension between the music and lyrics of a pop song can give you a fuller, more interesting experience than you might get from either alone.

And then I switched over to Buzzsaw and heard "Rock You Like a Hurricane," and screamed to passersby--"Dis iss Klaus Meine off de Scorpions on Dabulyou Eee Bee en Cincinnati--Rockyoulikeahurricane!" Sadly, not one person threw up the heavy metal horns and joined me in rockin' out. What the hell.