Girl in a Cage

Virtual Class Visit!

I was having a lovely class visit with some 8th graders in Georgia via Skype when we were rudely interrupted by a network failure that shockingly was not on my end.  They had great questions about Donorboy and writing, and so, after receiving them via email, I answered questions from students who didn't get to ask their questions.  And so, here are their questions and my answers!

Some Thoughts on Michael Jackson's Music

On the occasion of the release of This is It, some brief thoughts about Michael Jackson's music and not his personal freakishness and alleged pervitude.

1.Certainly he was a genius performer and singer.  Not a genius songwriter, though.  Why do all his most beloved solo songs come from the albums produced by Quincy Jones?   Possibly because after 1987 was when he really went off the rails on a crazy train.  Or possibly because there was a musical genius at work on Off The Wall, Thriller, and Bad, and his name was Quincy Jones. Post Q= mostly unlistenable crap.

2. Only a handful of former children will ever really know for sure whether MJ's incredible self-hatred was justified, but here's something I haven't seen anybody else say:  the surgeries showed such a reckless disregard for his gift that they could be seen as trying to destroy it. 

I learned a couple of things about singing when I took lessons with the most excellent Pam Wolfe, and here's one:  your voice resonates in your nose.  This is why Barbra Streisand maintained her famous honker despite the fact that a nose job might have led to more movie roles.  And this is why Michael Jackson's voice, one of the best in modern popular music, was nearly destroyed by his desire to erase all traces of his blackness. 

Don't believe me?  Listen to the vocal tone in these two hits, only four years, but at least one rhinoplasty apart.  Michael's voice in "She's Out of My Life" is incredibly rich, and his singing is unadorned--except for the fake crying, there aren't a lot of gimmicks--the beauty of his voice sells the beauty of the song.

And now, from Thriller, "Human Nature"--notice how he's already relying on the whispering, the grunting, and all the other vocal gimmicks that would make his singing a parody of itself in the 90's and beyond.  He comes up with all these tricks to sell songs because his best trick--that amazing voice--is gone by 1983. 

It's really striking to listen to these songs back to back and compare the thin, reedy 1983 voice with the rich, buttery 1979 voice.  Especially considering these are studio recordings, so we have to assume that the best studio trickery of the day was used to make his voice sound better.

I think you know my thoughts on what kind of human being Michael Jackson was, but as this movie causes people to lament yet again what a great talent we've lost, let's remember that he destroyed it ages ago.

Best Albums of the Oughts, Part 3!

The Mooney Suzuki-- Alive and Amplified, Have Mercy

Alive and Amplified--an awesome garage band goes into the studio with the guys who produced Avril Lavigne's album and Liz Phair's big sellout.  Recipe for disaster, or recipe for complete balls-out hard rockin' awesomeness?  The latter! The title track alone has not one, not two, but three fake endings!  The subject matter varies from sex to the awesome power of rock and back to sex.  Subtlety is not the order of the day--"Loose and Juicy," "Messin' in the Dressin' Room" and "Naked Lady" are three of the songs--but it's all tremendous fun.

The Mooney Suzuki - Loose N' Juicy

Have Mercy is also a great record-- a little quieter, a lot more musically diverse, and packed with great songs from start to finish.

10 - Down But Not Out

The Raveonettes--Pretty In Black

The mutant offspring of Phil Spector, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and The Everly Brothers, the Raveonettes here produce a bunch of gorgeous, slightly twisted, and somewhat haunting pop songs.

The Strokes--First Impressions of Earth--The album where the Strokes really came into their own.  That Casablancas guy stopped hiding behind annoying vocal effects, and the lyrics, especially in "On the Other Side," turned out to be really good.

Ted Leo & The Pharmacists-- Shake the Sheets-- If Billy Bragg were American and fronted The Minutemen, it might sound something like Ted Leo's music.  There's a lot to love here, but here's what I love best--Ted Leo sounds like he's doing this not because he wants to, but because he has to.  Like if he didn't get to perform this music, it might just kill him.  That's a prety rare kind of passion...

11 Walking To Do

U2--All That You Can't Leave Behind.  Hipsters love to hate on U2.  I understand the logic.  It goes like this: most people are idiots with horrible taste.  Therefore, if a band is popular, it proves that they suck.    Like I said, I get the logic, but I don't agree with it. Not everything that's popular is crap, and this band is still a viable, interesting band after 30 years. Compare that to any other band--Most flame out before 10 years have elapsed, while others, like the Stones and Van Halen, stagger on for years or even decades after they've lost their mojo.

People also hate on Bono because he thinks about stuff and has the temerity to talk about stuff, and we like our rock stars brain dead, drug-addled, and dead.

Well, the hell with all that, I say.  This is an album for adults that happens to rock, and Bono's lyrics have just gotten better and more interesting as the years have gone by.

Joey Ramone was listening to "In a Little While" when he died.  You think you're cooler than Joey Ramone?  Well I don't.

The White Stripes-- Elephant.  The White Stripes put out 4 great records in the oughts.  Jack White does his best work with Meg, and his songs are smart, funny, and often rock your socks off.  I give the nod to Elephant because I think it's the most consistently good, but you could make the argument for Red Blood Cells, Get Behind Me Satan or Icky Thump too.

Wilco--Yankee Hotel Foxtrot--Yeah, the radio transmissions and noise interludes are self indulgent and incredibly annoying, but this album is every bit the masterpiece people say it is. (My theory--Jeff Tweedy makes fantastic music as long as there's a guy named Jay in the band.) 

Seamus Blogs!

My freeloading misanthrope friend, Seamus Cooper, author of The Mall of Cthulhu, now has a blog of his very own. Well, sort of.  He doesn't have his own Typepad account or domain name yet, so he's sponging off of me.  What are friends for? You can find his horror-related musings here, in the Food Court of Fear!

Given the fact that he's freeloading on my domain and Typepad account, I may using Seamus for cheap labor and outsourcing my horror posts to him, so make sure to bookmark him.  You can follow him on twitter, too:  twitter.com/seamuscooper.

And, of course, you should buy his book, The Mall of Cthulhu.

Best Albums of the Oughts, Part Two!

Nada Surf--Lucky-- Here's what I wrote about this record after I first got it.  Can't much disagree now: it's rare that a record is as beautiful as this one. We value a lot of things in popular music: "catchy," "rockin'" "funky" "danceable"; but "beautiful" seldom makes the list. The sound is lush and complex, and the album is crammed to the edges with beauty: melodies, harmonies, backing vocals, cello parts - many tracks are so pretty it almost hurts to listen to them. Even now, as I make swoony goo-goo eyes at my computer while I type this and "See These Bones" plays, I'm getting some very strange looks from my fellow coffee shop patrons. But this is what love does: it makes you ridiculous. (When I reread this in six months, I'm sure I'll be cringing at my earnestness; but, for now, I'm going irony free.)Of course, the music is only half the story; the lyrics hit me where I live--in that strange bittersweet zone where joy and sadness meet. The album is packed with images of death, loss, and sadness: "just like we are, you'll be dust," "ice is growing on the wings," "everyone's got to leave their love sometime." But this is no mopefest; it's catchy, it rocks, and it proves, in an unassuming, unpretentious way that popular art and great art can be the same thing.

01 See These Bones

Frank Black and the Catholics:  Black Letter Days/Devil's Workshop

Everybody went crazy when the Pixies reunited, and well they might, but what most folks missed is that Frank Black has been busy growing as both a musician and a songwriter.  I mean, look, I love "Wave of Mutilation" as much as the next guy, if not more, but Frank on his own is writing songs that are more personal, less gnomic, and still pretty rockin'.  He put these two out simultaneously, and except for one horrific dud on "Black Letter Days", they are both top-notch.  Devil's Workshop has a more Pixies-ish sound, so that's probably a good place for folks unfamiliar with Frank's solo work to start.  Here's my favorite from that one:  a dark, spooky tale of a visit to Graceland.

03 His Kingly Cave

Hank Williams III-- Lovesick, Broke, and Drifting. If you like country music even the slightest bit, you need this record. Period.  This is old school country music about booze and heartbreak, and Hank has been gifted with his grandfather's voice. It's actually kinda eerie in places.  Sadly, Hank seems to have gone off the rails a bit after this--while there's one song ("Trashville" featuring ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons on guitar) on this one about how commercial country music sucks, that's become a bit of an obsession with him, to the point where there's an anti-Kid Rock song on his latest album.  Which just seems kinda like shooting fish in a barrel to me.  But this album is fantastic from start to finish, and the highlight for me is "Five Shots of Whiskey" which I believe is one of the finest country songs ever recorded.  Have a listen:

10 5 Shots of Whiskey

Len Price 3-- Rentacrowd  Yes, it sounds like it should be an accounting firm.  But really it's a British band rocking that early Who, early Kinks sound in a quite authoritative fashion.  This is a bigger achievement than it might initially sound when you figure that nobody else is really doing it, and even Pete Townsend forgot how to write a good Who song around 1969.  (Yeah, I said it--best garage band in the world became bloated arena rockers.  Feh.)  A fantastic album start to finish, and that sound just makes me smile.

Download 01 Rentacrowd

Lordi-- The Arockalypse--I've written about this band a lot over the last few years, but let me just say this bunch of Finns in latex monster suits makes fantastically awesome and melodic 80's-style metal, and this album is their most consistently awesome.  I really like "The Kids Who Want To Play With The Dead" as well as "The Deadite Girls Gone Wild," though the Eurovision-winning "Hard Rock Hallelujah" is probably the standout, and the video conveys the spirit of the band perfectly.  The dark humor!  The costumes!  The pyro!  The zombie cheerleaders!  Throw up those horns and rock out.

Best Albums of the Oughts, Part One!

We've got only a few months left before 2010, and so I think it's probably not too premature to compile my "Best of the Oughts" album list. I was gonna do this as one big post, but it's taking me forever, and I know my legions of fans are anxious for my next post, so I'm splittin' this into two three parts.

Of course, these are just the albums I liked best.  There may be others that are better that I haven't heard.  But these are the best ones I bought. In alphabetical order:

Apples in Stereo--Velocity of Sound

Just about thirty minutes of loud, fast, melodic guitar pop perfection.  

The Apples in Stereo - Rainfall

Belle & Sebastian--Dear Catastrophe Waitress, Push Barman to Open Old Wounds

Okay, Push Barman doesn't really count, since it's a compilation of singles and b-sides that were mostly originally released before the oughts, but it's still a hell of a record with a bunch of their best songs on it.  It kinda killed the thrill of finding the singles that weren't included on any album, though.  And Dear Catastrophe Waitress, the album that got me into this band in the first place, is Belle and Sebastian's most wide-ranging album.  I'd rank "Piazza New York Catcher," "I'm a Cuckoo", "Books" and "Stay Loose" among their best. 

Belle And Sebastian - I'm A Cuckoo

Dimmu Borgir-- Death Cult Armageddon

What's that you say?  Norwegian Satanic Symphonic Black Metal isn't your thing?  Well, that's what I thought, till I heard this record, which features the symphonic stylings of the Prague Symphony Orchestra over Dimmu Borgir's black metal growlings and guitar pummelings.  It sounds like the soundtrack of the apocalypse, and it's cool as hell.  Lyrics are incomprehensible, delivered in that self-parodying cookie monster style common to most metal bands, but they're all about Satan and stuff, which is a bunch of hooey as far as I'm concerned, but if that bugs you, avoid this record.

02 - Progenies of the great apocalypse

Hawaii Mud Bombers--Mondo Primo

People of the United States!  The Swedes are eating our lunch, garage-pop wise.  This is a high-energy guitar pop record such as we haven't heard here in...well, a long time.  Maybe since the Go-Go's.  A bunch of songs about girls, cars, and the beach, it's kinda hard to believe this was produced by Swedes.  Not that they don't have girls, cars and beaches in Sweden, but my image of Sweden is Let the Right One In, and the image of this record is more Beach Blanket Bingo.  Every song is a catchy, infectious delight.

The Hold Steady--Boys and Girls in America

Singer, uh, Neil Finn?  Nah, that's the Crowded House guy. Or his brother, the Split Enz guy.  Or were they both in Split Enz?  Well, whatever the hell his name is decided singing his lyrics was preferable to declaiming them.  Good call resulting in an amazing album, one of those once in a decade masterpieces that they'll probably be living up to for the rest of their careers.  You know how people think Springsteen is some kind of bard of Americana whose songs provide keen insights into American life?  Well, I like Bruce, but I never quite bought that--but I buy it about this album.  It's a window into a stylized world of drug-addled losers that manages to feel both artful and authentic.  Oh yeah, and it rocks.

When He's On The Scene

Captain Lou Albano died yesterday.  What can you say about a guy who wore a rubber band in his beard?  Who fearlessly showed his colossal gut and man boobs on TV for years?  Who appeared in the "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" video?  Who turned against Cyndi Lauper, managing The Fabulous Moolah in her career-ending attempt to unseat Wendy Richter?  And who was, on national TV, said by Cyndi Lauper to have "a calcium deposit in the medulla of his oblongata"?  And who, let's not forget, is both the subject of and guest vocalist on one of NRBQ's greatest songs?

All I can say is this:  Captain Lou was larger than life in every sense of the word, and life seems smaller without him.

I will be wearing a black rubber band in my beard all day in memory of the great man, but if you're female, beardless, or sporting one of those horrible chinstrap beards, you can listen to NRBQ sing his praises right now:

I think my favorite part is the way Lou just gets completely unhinged at the end, babbling incoherently about his achievements.

And if you're feeling particularly adventurous, check out 90's cult classic Complex World. Captain Lou plays a small role, but it's a really good movie about hapless terrorists trying to blow up a club full of hapless employees and a Beatles clone band. Pretty much nobody has any hap in the movie. And it's funny as hell. Here's the title sequence, featuring the title song performed by the inappropriately-named The Young Adults. This has never been released on DVD, so you'll have to hunt down a VHS copy. Or, if anything good can come out of Captain Lou's jumping off the top rope of life and body slamming eternity, maybe it's that his appearance in this movie will lead to a DVD release.

Laurie Strode's Blues

I finally caught Rob Zombie's Halloween the other night.

It did nothing to disabuse me of my idea that he's an incredibly talented director and a crap screenwriter. 

The guy simply has an amazing visual sense that few directors have--visually speaking, his movies are works of art.  I know I'm a smartass, but I'm actually being totally serious here.  I would stack the title sequence of The Devil's Rejects against just about any sequence in any movie.

I also like the fact that he makes great use of music in his movies.  This means he does not use any of his own crappy music.  I respect that.

I also like the fact that you can pretty much count on seeing Bill Mosely, Ken Foree, and Sid Haig in every one of his movies.

But this movie...it's impossible not to compare it to the original and find it wanting in pretty much every respect.

The original Halloween, written and directed by John Carpenter, clocks in at 91 minutes.  Rob Zombies version is 109 minutes.   So while the original is a tight scare machine, this one's a bloated bore with nearly an hour of backstory.

Worse, though, while the original is a movie about Laurie Strode and how her pluckiness pulls her through when she's beset by inexplicable evil.  What's really horrifying about the movie is that Michael Myers is an evil relentless killing machine, and there's just no reason for it. 

Rob Zombie's Halloween, though, is a movie about Michael Myers and how a poor abused lad becomes a psycho killer and then snaps when abandoned by his therapist (Malcolm Macdowell, chewing far less scenery than I expected, and, frankly, hoped).  Because the evil in this movie is completely explicable and probably avoidable, it's not scary.  And this cuddly Michael Myers doesn't even want to kill Laurie!  What the hell?

Rob Zombie has a great movie in him.  I hope he makes it some day.

Polanski and Evil Triumphant

As this great post reminds us, Roman Polanski raped a child.

I have no sympathy for him at all.  This was not some quasi-consensual affair with an underage groupie--he drugged a 13-year-old and forced her to have sex with him against her will.  He fled the country because he was afraid he'd have to do jail time.  He should do jail time.

As the father of three children, I wonder how anyone can have sympathy for a child rapist.  I have to wonder also about Harrison Ford (4 children) , Johnny Depp (2 children) , Peter Coyote (2 Children),Kristin Scott Thomas (3 childen)  and pretty much everyone who's appeared in one of Polanski's movies since he raped a child.  Wonder if they would have been so eager to work with a child rapist an thereby help rehabilitate his image if it had been one of their children he'd raped?  Do actors have any conscience at all about who they work with and the implications of the work they do, or are they all just straight up whores?

Idiots are prattling on about how Polanski's genius somehow makes him above the law, but the guy hasn't made a decent movie since 1974.  Frantic was an okay Hitchcock pastiche until it veered into self parody in the last third, and otherwise, the guy lost his mojo when he lost his ability to return to the USA.

But still, he made three of the best movies ever.  The discussion that follows is about the ending of all three, so if you're planning a big child rapist film fest (cue up some of child-porn fan Jeffrey Jones' movies while you're at it), you may want to stop reading here.

The Fearless Vampire Killers.  This is the best horror comedy of all time, and it manages to be both funny and scary, something few horror comedies ever manage.  And, at the end of this movie, after many laughs and almost unbearable suspense, evil triumphs.  We think our hero (Polanski in his pre-rapist days) (As far as we know) has gotten away clean with the lovely girl, but she's got a fanged surprise for him.  Evil is triumphant.

Rosemary's Baby.  Again, almost unbearable suspense as Mia Farrow is pimped out by her husband, raped by Satan,and bears the child.  She's got the chance to kill it at the end and save the world, but she chooses to nurture it instead.  Evil once again wins the day.

Chinatown.  Some private eye MacGuffin thing I don't remember except it has something to do with water rights an everything to do with evil John Huston having molested his daughter Faye Dunaway. And of course, at the end, evil triumphs and Jack Nicholson (who would later host a child rape in his house) finds that there is no justice, that this repulsive evil act will remain forever unpunished.

So in Polanski's three great films (no, I'm not counting Repulsion, which is a piece of crap, though evil is pretty well triumphant in that one too), evil triumphs,and in two, (and arguably all three, since what's a vampire but a metaphor for sexual danger) the evil in question involves rape. 

The endings of these movies are, for me, sobering and depressing, but it seems that for Polanski,they were inspiring.   Who knows what the hell he was thinking, if anything, but it does seem fairly weird that he, the confessed child rapist, went on the lam and lived the high life for thirty years after making three masterpieces in which evil rapists win and their victims and everyone on the side of good suffers.  Maybe all the horror that Polanski saw in his real life convinced him that the only way to thrive in this world was to become a creature of unrepentant evil. 

And what's sobering and depressing for me is that for thirty years, he was right.

I hope he dies in jail.

Urgent! Please Retweet!

It's the American Library Association's annual Banned Books Week, and, once again, I've been screwed by the conspiracy of silence among religious fanatics.

Let's face it--there's no better ad for your work, especially if you write YA fiction, than having some bluenose say your work is not appropriate for teens to read. This is obviously catnip to rebellious teens, but it also causes your entire fan base to rise up and spread the word about how your book is being unfairly banned.  You get to post urgent messages on Twitter about your plight as a champion of free expression, and everyone retweets them to show that they, too, support free expression, thus guaranteeing lots of free advertising for your work.

There are several YA authors currently having the kind of awesome publicity storm that only accrues from a book challenge, but I would like to point out that I am not one of them. 

Clearly my books are so dangerous, so transgressive, so incredibly subversive, that the outraged parents and school superintendents of America have gotten together and agreed that the best way to suppress my work is to keep it relatively obscure by refusing to challenge it.

So I ask you, my fans and supporters, to rise up against this terrible injustice! Call and write your local nutjobs and demand that they demand that local schools and libraries remove my gay-friendly, sex-positive, teen-drinking-doesn't-actually-kill-most-people, secular-humanist, profanity-ridden fiction immediately!