Whack Job

(original snap)

Local H - Fine and Good (mp3) (buy - you know it's a great record when Amazon can't even get the cover image right)

Been here before, heard it, blathered it, clutched its resolute denial to our chest and howled great lemony things at the heart of the world.  No better place to start than one of my favorite songs from my favorite album by my favorite band, especially with all the shit music The Internet has been telling me I should like, lately.  (O, Internet, you are nothing more than a giant glowing FAIL graphic, that you think yourself any kind of positive revolution is almost cute.)

September saw the Tenth Anniversary of Pack Up the Cats' release, and the corporation that successfully buried a record that would go on to become a fan and critical favorite celebrated by releasing a Mega Platinum Deluxe Edition with tons of extras allowing the disc to languish out-of-print.  Oh well!  I've got mine.

Anyway, thanks to the folks who have written nice things over the past few days.  Good'uns, all of you.

Moving on.

Local H - Machine Shed Wrestling (mp3) (buy)

That's from the new record, the band's in town this Saturday.  I'm not surprised that this hasn't sold out; I'm glad, actually, because a sold-out Webster Hall is a miserable fucking sty to be stuck in, and there's no way you miss a Local H show.  They're not headlining this tour, but they're playing extended opening sets, sixty minutes, a dozen tunes, so if you're in the mood it's a ripe opportunity to sample without too much commitment (though Webster Hall prices are as they are, the weekend slot means it'll be an early night; I've enjoyed Electric Six' work, too, at least up through Switzerland).  The set lists have been varied - maybe we'll even hear "Fine and Good?" - but I'm actually more interested in the new stuff.

Twelve Angry Months may not be the two-man band's very best, but it's still very good.  That automatically makes it better than most anything by anyone else.  Have said this before, am repeating myself:  "Michelle (Again)" is still this 2008's best song, just as it was 2007's; "The One with Kid" opens the thing with a blowout; most everything else on the album ranks a close third.  (You can stream the whole thing on the band's myspace; there are four complete records in the player under different playlists, including Pack Up the Cats. (Missing is their other best album, Whatever Happened to P.J. Soles?, but Jesus how much do you want?))

"Wrestling" is singer/guitarist Scott Lucas' contribution to rock's throbbing tower of great masturbation tunes, its stacks of tracks ‘bout whacks.  Months is a break-up record and all that sex has to go somewhere.  Ignore its broad strokes, admire the vocal touches around its edges, the ridiculous cuíca-ish djuh-doo-doo-doo-doos in the intro (later reprised as synth blips), the shaker-like chh-chhs under the well-lubed solo, the riotously yippy hey-heyyy!s at the end.  The chafing is unbearable!  Enjoy its choice lines ("As a lover you're just a bust/You're not a service I can trust," the Stephen Trask-y "All I am is a victim of love/I checked the box marked ‘All of the Above'"), admire how it files down phonics for smooth operation before tugging out "Wreh Sull Mah Muh Sheen."

Cyndi Lauper - She Bop (Live at Irvine Meadows, CA, 1984)(mp3) (buy)

Submitted as counterpoint and segue, the New Yawker's classic twaddle anthem is less anguished yank than victory lap.  The open, fun ‘fessings of a girl who "can't stop messing with the danger zone" made a splash on the charts in '84 and made Tipper Gore's panic list, but the lyrical beat it repeatedly hits and Lauper's brief, ecstatic squeals - tie it to Gene Vincent's rockabilly cornerstone.  "Be Bop" may not be about the same stuff as "She Bop" - except that rock and roll is about self-satisfaction (pouty ol' Mick just needed to get DIY), ain't no one gonna hit those notes but yourself.

And getting a whole arena to cheer themselves on!  This live version -one of the bonus tracks on a reissue of She's So Unusual - has an awkward edit and a muffed solo, but it's always fun hearing Lauper go from Lina Lamont to Kathy Selden.

*

"I think every citizen should be given an electric guitar on her sixteenth birthday."

Girls!  Have fun!  I don't know where I first heard about Ladies and Gentleman, The Fabulous Stains (recently released by Rhino on DVD) - FourFour, maybe - but the ‘80s cult rock and roll flick is a must-see that can be awful hard to look at.  Unconcerned with competence, its occasional greatness comes from the fact it never bothers to be a "good movie" at all.

The titular rock band, fronted by teen orphan Corinne "Third Degree" Burns, achieves a media-assisted meteoric rise that puts even today's weblings to shame.  Tacked on as an early opener for a national tour of shithole dive bars, The Stains are headlining arenas before journey's end.  The accelerated rags-to-riches-to-comeuppance route is shrugged off by the film and its heroine; Burns is the movie, all mixed messages, confusion and contradictions, honesty and lies.  She's played by a fifteen-year-old Diane Lane, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes horribly, always right-on.  Burns has a brief fling with a not-300-pound Ray Winstone (there's some iffy underage shower sex), usurps a band full of former Clash and Sex Pistols members, succeeds in her failure.  Riot Grrrl-Power goes Go-Go in a brief coda; filmed two years after all the rest - when Lane had lost her baby fat and the even younger Laura Dern became recognizable - accepts an MTV future where messy punk edge passes in favor of polished promo pop.

The band goes drummerless, throughout!  This goes without mention!

*

The first third of Synecdoche, New York is fifth-rate Woody Allen, tired hypochondria and the self-pity of willing women, and through that I was sure this was the first Charlie (Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine, Malkovich) Kaufman movie I'd never want to rewatch.  But for most of the rest of the running time I wanted the ability to rewatch right away; sometimes the film grants this ability.  The meta- games probably get played too often, and I wish the last fifteen minutes didn't exist, but there's too much good stuff to shrug it all off as indulgent.

Spike Jonze could have done this better, serving the script by hacking some out, focusing some of the performances.  (The women are all over the place.  Samantha Morton is amazing, Emily Watson and Diane Wiest are good, Michelle Williams is just sort of there, Catherine Keener (!) and Hope Davis (!!) are not good at all.)

Wiest gets the movie's best line:  "Caden, you're breaking the fourth wall."

*

Ten Things I Thought While Watching Richard Kelly's Southland Tales:

1. To include more than one B-list Saturday Night Live alumnus in your cast is to admit failure.
2. If Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, a fourth-rate comic book writer, and a paranoid pseudo-intellectual frat-tard somehow conceived a baby, it should be doused in gasoline and set aflame long before it ever gets its screenplay greenlit.  A thousand half-formed ideas do not add up to a "vision," a hundred half-formed opinions do not add up to a "point."
3. I've always liked that Killers song.
4. Mandy Moore is a giantess!
5. Wow, Drew Barrymore wouldn't even be in this.
6. I never ever want to watch Wallace Shawn kiss anything ever again ever.
7. Internal logic can be a dangerous thing.
8. I guess I really don't want to see Sarah Michelle Gellar in anything that isn't Buffy.
9. This sort of shitty movie wouldn't happen during a Barack Obama administration.
10. If you need to get your mind off something, you could do worse than subject yourself to a lousy, over-stuffed movie with no emotional agenda.

*

I am going to buy my copy of Chinese Democracy and leave it sealed.  I'll listen to it when I'm good and ready.  Take that, Axl.

*

"My point is this:  If the black guy with the Arab name can become president, there's nothing you fuckers can't do... Run for some sort of office.  It doesn't have to be president but goddamn it, there's all these state offices.  I'm always turning on the TV and always see these hillbillies who claim the Earth is 6,000 years old and they're on the fucking local school boards.  Where the fuck were you people?  There's a lot of you!  Do some shit!"  (via)

*

More of Kid B, less of Kid A.

*

I see people going gaga over this 40% off Criterion DVD Sale (through 11/24)... which is nice, but I don't think it's the best deal going.  Both DeepDiscount and its sister company DVD Planet are running deals (through 11/23) on EVERY DVD THEY CARRY that'll take an additional 25% off their already discounted prices.  The Criterions I just ordered (including Umberto D, which was probably a bad idea) came to $17.97 at Criterion (with free shipping over $50) and $15.72 at DVD Planet (with free shipping over $35). 

You don't see the final price at DD/DP until you enter a coupon code during checkout, but you can see that price before you finalize the sale.  For coupon codes and the ability to compare pre-coupon prices, go to DVD Pricesearch.

*

Yes!  Simon of the Desert!  (The feature's only 45 minutes long, but a three-hour special feature attempts to explain its ending.)

tags: local h  chinese democracy  cyndi lauper  the stains  

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