"One More Episode"

Neither the ScatterKat nor I have cable. I think that's probably a good thing--you go without TV for a few years, only catching up on shows that seem really significant by way of DVD or the Internet, but every now and again it inevitably feels like you might be missing out on something. IFC's Portlandia, for instance.

Actually, it's kind of funny, but I actually had a bit of that with Battlestar Galactica. I watched the miniseries when it aired on SciFi, and then I watched most of the first season in real time, but it was at some point in the middle of the show's run that I moved and dropped cable in the process, and so I ultimately ended up waiting for seasons to arrive on DVD. Of course, all my friends were watching in real time, pretty much, so there would be lots of conversations I'd have to wander away from or try to ignore, because, dammit, people, I didn't see that, I'm waiting for the DVDs.

The other funny thing was, BSG, as many of you know, went off the rails in its last season-and-a-half (roughly). If there's a moment in the Portlandia clip above that doesn't ring true--and it's the only moment, frankly--it's the couple watching the last episode and going nuts for one more; most people, practically everybody, I think, watched the last episode and did some variation of "What the fuck?!" There are apologists who have made excuses for the finale--e.g. claiming that nerds don't like religion and philosophy in their science fiction, which is horseshit--but the sad fact is the finale was simply stupid and anticlimactic, not to mention the fact that the writers decided the series' major plot twist, revealed at the end of the finale, would be something that is considered one of the hoariest clichés in science fiction, stale back when pulps were published on papyrus; that's hyperbole, of course, but it's not hyperbole to point out, I kid you not, that BSG's big reveal is one with a long and ignoble history of being singled out in various present and past SF magazines' submissions for automatic, summary rejection no matter how well-written it is.

BSG spent a great deal of time towards its end running around in circles, backtracking on character development, introducing random-seeming twists that were clearly intended to resolve hanging plot threads (threads that in some cases should have never even started), and committing other sundry sins against the audience. Much of the show's eventual problem can actually be traced back, however, to an early bit of all-too-cleverness introduced early in the show, when the writers decided to add the tagline "And they have a plan" to the end of the pre-credits introduction, implying the antagonistic Cylons knew what they were doing when the show's writers clearly had no idea what that might be, exactly. Those five words probably ruined the show, since it led audiences (naturally) to pore over every scene and line of dialogue and mannerism for clues as to what the big plan might be (when, again, there actually wasn't one), which made the show addicting as hell but (since there wasn't actually a plan) meant there was no way the writers could ever deliver on the promise being made (the plan, when the writers finally got around to making one up to tie the billowing spidersilk strands of plot they'd loosed upon the breeze, turned out to be completely--and by that point, predictably--incoherent).

The obvious lesson for writers is: don't tell your audience that your characters are clever and conniving and know what they're doing when you have no idea what those people are doing; it's one thing to say "And they have a plan" when there really is a (hopefully clever as all get-out) plan, but suicide when you say you're building up to something when really you're just making it all up as you go along (gods help George R.R. Martin). A lesson for audiences is to be careful what you wish for: all the fans who rend their garments for the lost, never-to-be-seen later seasons of Joss Whedon's Firefly probably ought to brace themselves by soberly reminding themselves they could have ended up with the fourth season of Galactica, and find solace in never getting the chance to be really and truly disappointed like they might have been if Whedon had been allowed to make a mediocre and depressing movie to tie up some of his loose ends (fortunately this never happened, never).

The Portlandia clip is hysterical throughout, but the absolute best part for BSG fans starts around the six-minute mark. I don't want to spoil it if you haven't seen it yet--scroll up and watch the thing, dammit! It's a brilliant little coup for the show and some people are just too awesome for belief. I'd say more, but I shouldn't. Watch the damn clip.

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Vangelis, "One More Kiss, Dear"

Oh, what the hell. Earlier this week, Steve pointed out in the comments that I'd somehow mentioned Blade Runner in three different posts. Well, fuck it, we'll go for four. The end titles or "Blade Runner Blues" would be obvious choices, so we'll skip them for the oddest and least Vangelis-ey of Vangelis' compositions for the film, "One More Kiss, Dear". I'll be damned if I can ever remember what scene it actually appears in. I do like the song, though it's an odd one, at least in context.

I feel like you put me up to this, Steve.

Have a good weekend, everybody!

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Bruce Springsteen, "The River"

I kinda hate it when this happens: I actually got ahead on the blog, only to realize as I'm finishing up at the office that I'm not actually ahead because I don't have an entry for today. What to do? I could move up the posts I have queued, but that may mean running around Sunday to get something posted when I'm distracted by other things. I could look and see what's happening in the news, but nothing inspires me enough to write about it; in fact, some of the things in the news triggering the strongest reactions are things that annoy me too much to bother thinking about them.

Hey, what's that on the shuffle play in the background? Bruce Springsteen? "The River"? Hello.

This has long been one of my favorite Boss songs. You have, I think, one of his best melodies, suitably somber and hopeful at the same time. And the payoff line, "Is a dream a lie if it don't come true / Or is it something worse?" just slays me every time I hear it. The image I get in my head every time I hear the song is just so damn vivid, and perhaps ironically, it isn't the image of a river or a couple of kids beside it, but the image of this guy, the character in the song, sitting at a card table in the kitchen with one light on overhead, next to a failing refrigerator and surrounded by linoleum tile and scratched chrome, he's in his undershirt and he's wondering what the hell he's going to do with himself and how everything in his life has led to this dark moment.

The performance at the top of the clip caught my eye because it's obvious from the freeze frame preview that it's an early performance, and then when the clip starts, you have Jackson Browne and, if I'm not mistaken, Bonnie Raitt sitting at a table talking about MUSE: if you know your seventies pop history, your history of liberalism and/or you history of rock music, it isn't too hard to figure out the obvious: this is a clip from No Nukes.

My parents had the album, though an odd thing is that while I remember them playing lots and lots of Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen, and I think a fair bit of Bonnie Raitt, I don't actually remember them playing this album all that much, if ever. I'm not sure if that's a reflection of my shoddy memory thirty years after the fact or whether this was a record that just didn't hit their turntable too often for whatever reason.

Before getting on to the other interesting (I think) thing about the above performance, I feel like I need to offer a kind of preemptive disclaimer/brush off: I'm one of these technocratic pro nuclear liberals you occasionally hear about. I mean, I totally get how fucked up the nuclear industry appears and especially how fucked up it appeared in the wake of TMI, and I think anti-nukers have their hearts absolutely in the right place, along with legitimate health and environmental concerns. It's just that I'm also willing to consider the idea that there could be relatively safe, heavily regulated reactors that are, all-in-all, far less politically, medically and environmentally dangerous--not to mention more sustainable--than fossil fuels; which may not be saying much, I also realize. I also need to point out that I don't see this as being either-or: I mean, all things being equal in terms of generation, if it's a choice between uranium and oil, pick uranium, and its a choice between uranium and solar, gods know you go with solar. What I expect we're stuck with is some kind of mix of sources while we figure out how to transition into something safer and cleaner, and I don't think fission should be off the table.

That's a lot more than I really wanted to say about the topic, actually. Because what I'd prefer pointing out in a Friday afternoon post is that whether you agree with MUSE's goals or not, a concert that features Gil Scott-Heron, Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Chaka Khan, Carly Simon and Ry Cooder is so full-of-win right there that it makes up for the fact that James Fucking Taylor (ugh!) is involved. The MUSE concerts featured awesome, awesome lineups, just sayin'.

Now, finally, for the other interesting (to me) thing I alluded to above. The original MUSE concerts were held at Madison Square Garden in September, 1979. The studio version of "The River" was recorded in July or August of 1979. This studio version made its first official appearance in October, 1980 (on an album called, The River--of course you knew that, right?).

So here's Bruce Springsteen, and he's making one of his first appearances in front of a really big, festival-sized, arena crowd, having mostly been playing clubs and auditoriums for the past decade, and he's performing a song which he isn't going to release for another thirteen months and which he only just recorded last month (though, as with much of his material in those days, I'm sure he'd been demoing earlier, alternate versions and/or bits and pieces of the song in front of his usual crowds even prior to that). I mean, how cool is that? I think it kind of goes back to one of the things raised in (and subsequently discussed under) the They Might Be Giants piece the other day, though, I guess, Springsteen didn't exactly have that many quote-unquote "hits" to trot out that night; well--he did have Born To Run, which had done very well, and while Darkness On The Edge Of Town hadn't produced any singles the album itself spent a good bit of time on the charts. Springsteen could have gone out there and done "Born To Run" or "Thunder Road" or "Jungleland", or even "Badlands" or "The Promised Land"; instead, he goes out and blows the crowd away with a song his band may barely know.

That, friends, is showmanship. And balls. Balls and showmanship, absolutely. And that's why he's The Boss.

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Pink Floyd, "Seamus"

I have to be honest and say I kind of have a headache right now and can't think of anything to write. So let's set you fine folks up today with a nice little tune and a dedication: this one goes out, naturally, to Governor Mitt Romney, a loyal friend of four-legged buddies everywhere.

The best part of being snarky about Romney is that I know he won't comment here. And the reason I know he won't comment here is that Google has started captioning their CAPTCHAs, "Please prove you're not a robot".

Which is sure to stump him.

On a related note, I was listening to NPR this morning, and they were talking about the upcoming Republican primaries in Michigan, and they spoke to this one woman who was waiting at a Romney event and said she had a question for him. And I immediately wondered if what she wanted to ask was:

You're in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise; you reach down and you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that?

I mean, that's totally what I'd ask him if I had the chance.

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They Might Be Giants, McGlohon Theater, February 14, 2011

My sister gave us the tickets. It was actually--I hate to admit I recently had a birthday--a really awesome birthday present sent via e-mail a month ago. Awesome because, (a) I've liked They Might Be Giants since Flood, admittedly late to the party (it was their third album and there were several already-classic tunes on the first two) and (b) because it was my first Valentine's Day with the ScatterKat, another TMBG fan from way-back-when (is there a nerd of my generation who isn't or wasn't a TMBG fan?) and spending the evening at such a concert with one's amour was the best gift a sister could have given her unworthy bro.

So this is hardly an objective evaluation. I would like to think any observations I might have on last night's show can be objectively verified (possibly with the help of expensive lasers, because that would be very exciting), but I admit I was in an excited state, very attuned and receptive to fun.

I'm trying to remember the last time I'd been to a show at the McGlohon, which is a tiny venue built inside an old converted church, complete with stained glass windows and everything. It isn't necessarily as sexy as a show in an actual unconverted church, though the acoustics have been tweaked. (Although this is where we have to acknowledge, deal with and move past the fact that they had bass problems--too much of it--throughout much of the show last night.) But it's still a damn fine place to see a concert.

Jonathan Coulton opened. Coulton's a former computer programmer turned nerd icon, probably best known for penning the really funny end credits theme from the video game Portal and the nerd-zombie-anthem "Re: Your Brains". But then I suspect you either knew that already or still don't care. Anyway, it was a fun time, and, yes, there was an audience singalong for "Re: Your Brains".

As for TMBG, even after seeing countless live clips (this was my first actual TMBG show), I'm still surprised at just how hard these guys actually rock which seems like a strange thing even writing it. TMBG's loopy, smart, surreal lyrics and poppy hooks have always made them a band one associates (in a good way) with children's songs, and kid-aimed/friendly records like NO! and Here Comes Science seemed like inevitable and appropriate steps. So much so, it's easy to forget that the Johns (Flansburgh and Linnell, the core and founding members of the band, which started as a duet and eventually has expanded to a quintet of regulars) really began their career in the early 1980s in Brooklyn as a branch off the art school scene Talking Heads and similarly-flavored New Wave acts had established in New York nearly ten years earlier. It's funny: I think to some degree, TMBG's affection for stage props, nerdy oddball lyrics about science and history, outré instrumentation, old songbook selections (e.g. "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)", "Why Does The Sun Shine (The Sun Is a Mass of Incandescent Gas)"), and unusual arrangements can be confused with childishness (in a good way, I mean), when really it's childlike, not in an innocent way, but in a surrealist way; I'm not sure I'm getting the idea across, actually--this seems like the kind of thing where there's probably some really apt French word or phrase to describe what I'm trying to poke at, "naïve," in a very specific sense, comes to mind but still doesn't seem quite right, and "surreal" is a word that has become degraded.

Whatever. TMBG's show, promoting a new album, Join Us, that the band rightly considers a back-to-roots record, was very much a raucous rock show by an arthouse band with obvious punk and new wave influences. Even the puppet show parts, or possibly especially the puppet show parts, since one of the puppet show interludes that was sort of musically a break from TMBG's expected métier involved the Johns' sock-puppet avatars performing an extremely deadpan and by-the-book faithful cover of Black Sabbath's "Paranoid".

It was "Birdhouse In Your Soul", three songs into the set, that brought the crowd to their feet and they stayed there. I'm ambivalent about how much that's a good thing, to be honest: after all, it is very possibly my favorite TMBG song, at the same time, there's always something, I dunno how to put it except to say, something about a band getting more of a reaction off a twenty-year-old classic than out of the new stuff they might be leading off with.

This was something the ScatterKat and I actually had sort of an argument about on the way over to the show, actually. The ScatterKat takes the view that performers ought to give the people what they want and paid for, and that someone like David Bowie who pretty much says he's never playing a thirty-or-forty-year-old song ever again is, while she understands where he's coming from, sort of cheating his fans. I take the view that there's usually something sad about someone like the Violent Femmes doing a show where, even though they have a new record out and maybe it's pretty darn good, almost their entire setlist is made up of songs from their first album and Why Do Birds Sing? The ScatterKat would settle for a compromise, something around fifty/fifty old-stuff-everybody-loves/material-nobody's-ever-heard. I'm stubborn and feel like if a band wants to do a setlist of completely unreleased material, the audience ought to feel privileged just to be there and if they don't, fuck 'em. You don't have to agree with me, I totally get where ScatterKat is coming from even if she's wrong. (Written, do I even need to say, lovingly, teasingly, tongue-planted-in-cheek.)

TMBG went the ScatterKat-preferred route, and I don't blame them; indeed, they did a fine job mixing-and-matching thirty-something years worth of material, going back at least as far as Lincoln and hitting material from most of their albums over the course of a vivacious set. Most importantly, and this is really what I hope to see from an act, whatever they're playing, they seemed to have a pretty good time up there, and I hope we were a satisfactory audience. They gave us two encores, which I hope was a sign of approval and not obligation.

ScatterKat and I danced some, and kissed, and held hands, and did other ridiculously schmoopy things. This has nothing to do with the show, other than the fact that my evaluation of the good time to be had may have been colored a little by circumstances. You'll probably find it more useful to know that They Might Be Giants played fast, and loud, and they brought out the stylophones and puppets and played a long, full set covering the breadth of their career. Get out there if they swing by you, and, if you can, take someone you can kiss.

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Valentine's Day, 2012

This is unfortunate. This is doubly unfortunate.

There are several things I'm in the habit of doing on February 14^th. One is, I like to ignore it and do nothing at all. Another is, I like to be one of those assholes The Oatmeal complained about who goes around bitching about how Valentine's is a greeting-card-company holiday (in my dubious defense, I don't do this spontaneously, just when asked about Valentine's Day).

But the biggest thing I like to do is crack stale jokes about how this is the day we all get to celebrate a bunch of mobsters getting lined up against a wall and gunned down by their professional colleagues. Which, by the way, I still think would be an awesome holiday: people would celebrate by wearing fedoras and calling everyone they met "a doity rat" and mispronouncing "th"s and mid-word "r"s generally, and punctuating their sentences with "see?"; e.g. "Good moining, you doity rat, I need dat repoit by lunchtime, see?"

It would totally liven up de woikday, see?

Now, the primary problem with that this year, is suddenly I'm in love and have been seeing someone nearly a year, now. Which means I suddenly have to take Valentine's Day a little bit more seriously and be a little schmoopy about it. Love is awesome, love is real, the feeling of nausea you might be feeling is probably jealousy! It's true that the ScatterKat and I aren't doing flowers or candy today for assorted reasons (he wrote to stave off the inevitable question), but we are in wuv so it's a nice day and you should stop wasting time trying out that ludicrously fake gangster accent you learned from Bugs Bunny and plant a big, sloppy kiss on your lover.

What the ScatterKat and I are doing for Valentine's Day is: my sister recently gave me They Might Be Giants tickets for my birthday and the show is tonight. So we are doing something special, albeit something we might also do on, I dunno, Columbus Day, f'r'instance, if that was when the show was. The ScatterKat is taking today off while I'm stuck at work, and will be various places that would be hard for a florist to track down unless I hired one of those bounty florists you read about (that's totally a thing, right, and not something I'm totally making up? there's a reality show, isn't there?); when I get home, we go, we see the show, then we have a dinner contingent on how long the set is. I expect there will probably be some adoring looks and handholding and sloppy kisses you don't want to know about, but to hell with you, you're hearing about it anyway, see?

This isn't anything I would have expected this time last year, I gotta tell you. I mean, last year, my February 14^th post was a Tolkien pastiche. The year before that, I acknowledge the holiday--by posting a squicky song about domestic violence. Funny how things work out.

I should wrap this up before this post can be tapped for syrup, if it's not too late for that. I hope you're having a happy Valentine's Day, or an acceptable February 14^th, whatever floats your boat. Me, I'm going to hold my baby's hand and hope they play "Birdhouse In Your Soul".

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Sharon Van Etten, "Serpents"

Well I don't even think I realized Van Etten had a new album out last week. Guess that's one more for the wishlist. Looks like it's an indie-all-star affair, with contributions from Julianna Barwick and members of The National, Walkmen, Wye Oak, and Beiruit. Which I think it's safe to say is either really cool or completely meaningless depending on what radio station and/or streaming Internet feed you listen to.

It was a real joy to see Van Etten play at SXSW last year. I'm still a little bummed about not getting out to Austin this year, but there's just no doubt in my mind that 2013 is going to be a repeat year for me. It's just the greatest thing ever if you have a really hardcore love of music--it's not just the concentration of acts, but that there are days full of seminars and panels and the gear tradeshows and everything else; it's like a sausage festival for people who actually do want to know how the sausage gets made, not to mention possessing an interest in the history of sausage, what innovations can be expected in the grinding and stuffing of sausages, etc. And, okay, maybe that metaphor just went off the rails because of the particular cliché that seemed apt when I started writing it. Who knew it would inadvertently stumble into some kind of unfortunate Freudian territory within a mere few words of the starting point? Aside from the seventh graders in the back row who started snickering at the words "sausage festival," I mean?

Anyway.

SXSW 2012 is next month, which pretty much means it's probably too late for you to get a hotel room. Not sure what your chances would be of getting a badge, if you thought you needed one; it's often easy enough to get in to see an act if the place isn't already full. The beauty of the badge is being able to waltz past everybody who's trying to get in without one and getting waved in as a VIP, basically. I guess what I'm getting at is, it's probably not too late for you to crash on someone's couch if you have friends in Austin. (Me? I've been spoiled.)

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