It's Ricardo Montalban's birthday! The man who made Star Trek more than camp, who taught us all about the satisfaction of having your needs fulfilled while reclining on soft Corinthian leather, and who made the fantasies of millions come true, apparently at $50k a pop (somehow I missed that fine point as a child).
I wish he had better roles than he's been getting lately, mostly in kids' fare, as I've always experienced a strange kind of calm wash over me at the sound of his rich Spanish accent. Hmm. I wonder if Fantasy Island is out on DVD yet...
Anyways, in honour of Ricardo's birthday, I give you... the Chihuahua Choo Choo.
And if that only whetted your appetite, here's a couple more famous Choo Choos. First, Glenn Miller, Dorothy Dandridge and the Nicholas Brothers take a ride to Chatanooga:
And who can forget old Louis Jordan's Boogie-Woogie train?
And to finish off in keeping with the hispanic theme, here's Carmen Miranda's take on the Chatanooga train:
More is sure to follow...
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Monday, November 17, 2008
Gordon Lightfoot is going on tour!
And as a perfect example of the joys and pain of having, shall we say, offbeat tastes, even though I waited four days to buy my tickets, I still got Row 9 on the floor. What upsets me, of course, is that Gordon Lightfoot (Gordon Lightfoot, people!) has only sold nine rows in four days. Even in this jaded, pop-obsessed world of today, I still expected to be relegated, if not to the nosebleeds, at least to the bleachers.
Honestly, I remembered a couple of times over the last few days that I hadn't bought my tickets yet, and nonetheless didn't run to the computer to buy em up. I have this damnable inertia that, even when I know that I have an opportunity to witness something historic, or to do something that I will remember until I die, a lot of the time I just go "meh" and go back to my crossword puzzle.
But occasionally, I overcome that lethargy and find myself heading out to a play or a show or a French movie, and I sit in the venue, surrounded by people of like mind, digging the art that I'm seeing, and really, profoundly, enjoying my life for a few hours - something that I honestly don't do very often. And I have this sense that "out there" in the world, even in a backwater like Winnipeg, there's this whole other awesome existence that's mine for the taking, if I would just get off my lazy ass and go do stuff. It's my "real" life, I think, the life that I truly want to live, as opposed to the insular, lazy and sedated life that I seem to choose by default.
I'm not talking about some kind of jet-set world travelling fantasy, though I do want to see more of the world - right now, for instance, I'm trying to figure out how I can get to New York City to catch one of Les Paul's monday night shows before he, like so many other musical heroes of mine that I never got to see in life, is gone. It's not even expensive, really - I suspect that there's at least three little places in town, even as I write this, featuring some music or play or movie that I would just be soaking up like a drug if I were there. Instead, I sit here and lament same, probably to little or no audience whatsoever. But at least I'm writing instead of rewatching South Park or something...
But anyways, here's what I wanted to talk about: Six finalists from Canadian Idol, collaborating on a surprisingly fantastic version of Mr. Lightfoot's Canadian Railroad Trilogy.
It's puzzled me, since the first time I heard this song, that I never encountered it in a school room as a kid - it was the first history lesson I ever had (on a road trip, appropriately enough (in a car, inappropriately enough), from Vancouver to Winnipeg) that I repeated over and over and over again, looking through my windshield at the Canadian Rockies* and feeling profoundly connected to all the history, glorious and shameful and otherwise, of my home and native land.
Indeed, it was through Gordon Lightfoot that I really learned the meaning of the word Patriotism, because up until that day I had never really felt love, never even understood how someone could feel love, for a place, or the idea of that place. I didn't suddenly forget what European colonization has always meant to indigenous people, mind you, but we're all born into an imperfect world, and we should love that world no less than we love our friends and families, for all their imperfections. The alternative is madness.
But anyways, on to Canadian Idol. I don't watch it. Much less do I watch American Idol, Britain's Got Talent, or any other such show. To me it seems... ok, well, I've watched bits of American Idol on Youtube, and this is a personal favorite:
Too hardcore for you, indeed. The thing about these death metal idol guys (I think at least one of them is actually Black Metal, but the multitude of metal categories they've got nowadays is as unintelligible to me as death metal lyrics) is that they aren't really seriously trying out - they're basically there to say a big rock'n'roll Fuck You to the whole Idol concept, and for that, I at least applaud them.
When I first heard about American Idol, I decried it as illegitimate. And it is, really - a person getting into making music should really not be doing so in order to become an "idol," and nobody can possibly deny that there is something just *wrong* about a musician skirting the traditional process of performing, touring, recording, shopping demos and basically sweating to make it, and being adored on national television for doing so.
But sure, stardom sounds great, and believe me, I'm not saying that ironically - after all, isn't it a fairly universal desire of people everywhere to want to be doing something that matters? But at the same time, what actually matters should probably not be determined by the call-in votes of people watching a reality show - I like to think that we ought to rely on some kind of objective standards, both in terms of just how important a pop star is in the grand scheme of things, as well as what criteria we should use to determine who becomes a pop star. American Idol takes pop stardom, something that's supposed to have a patina of magic to it, a romantic story of struggle and victory behind every great artist, and turns it into a job interview.
But when I gave it further thought, I realized that American Idol is not, as the narrow selection of music and arbitrary selection system would suggest, a corruption of pop music, but in fact is the American pop music star system given a more perfect form. After all, actual musical talent has, since the advent of MTV, taken a distant back seat to photogenicity in terms of importance for pop stars - witness the sad case of Christopher Cross, whose oh-so-smooth compositions (which included collaborations with the inimitable Burt Bacharach) were nonetheless not smooth enough to overcome his fundamental lack of stage charisma once MTV made visual presentation an essential component in a successful pop music career... and would, over the next 20 years, bring us to the point at which we now find ourselves, where musical talent is optional. The truth is that American pop music has been a reanimated corpse, shuffling around and growing more and more putrid in it stench since long before Vanilligate.
So now we get a tv show, remarkably similar in form to the Gong Show, where America gets to Have Its Say in who becomes the next big star. Of course, as with all American democratic mechanisms, the deck is stacked: contestants, as the death metal auditioners demonstrate, are limited to a narrow range of musical selections and styles - the same constricted musical range, interestingly enough, that you will find on modern, ClearChanneled (and what an unintentionally appropriate name that corporation bears...) FM radio. All the finalists are MTV-ready (Aesthetically pleasing. In other words, fly...), practically begging to be processed and shrinkwrapped, anticipating their artistic asphyxiation with great joy.
I'd like to say that if the American Idol people gave Americans a real choice, that they would choose something new and interesting over the same old recycled pretties they've been fed for these last couple of decades. But I wonder, at this point, whether the Clearchannelization of America has had enough time to take root, and in true Orwellian fashion, managed to make Americans forget that there once was a choice to be had. Could American Idol voters get over the exotic nature of, say, Manu Chao for long enough to appreciate his funky latin reggae grooves and dance in their seats like their parents once did to Perez Prado? Is Middle America still that open-minded?
And that's the tragedy of it: For much of the last century, America had a thriving music scene, fecund with inspiration, innovation and creativity. What happened to the America that birthed jazz?
Chao himself, a true world citizen, has an interesting observation at 1:45 of this video: when he tours in Europe and looks at the television, he gets programs and news from all over - France, Italy, England, etc. Whereas in America, you turn on the TV, you get programming from America only. Derrida would probably point out that Chao only mentioned other European locales in his speech, but I think he's got a point nonetheless - where other nations seem to see themselves as part of an international exchange of ideas, America seems to always view itself as the possessor and exporter of all relevant ideas, with no need of input from the old or developing worlds.
But we all know that it's exchange that brings innovation and new ideas - cities which are big shipping centres, for example, have always traditionally been where you find such things. This is no accident - the traders and sailors who came and went brought more than goods with them. They brought music, books, news of the world, and enabled the people there to synthesize all this input into fresh output, which they sent back out.
America has long since ceased to engage in this kind of meaningful exchange. True, there's a lot of import and export, more than ever before, but there is no trade - the goods are put in containers and loaded on and off the ships by cranes, with no conversation between transient sailors and stationary dockers, no strange and exotic fiddle music carried on the air from dockside taverns, no news of strange and wondrous events in distant lands pass from mouth to ear around town.
Even the goods themselves cannot be seen as objects of real exchange - Americans design what they want, send the plan to China, and receive back what they ordered a few months later. Even with the entire world available with a google search, America looks ever inward, and dies slowly.
*Here's a link to a google image search, but really, as if a grouping of pixels on a computer screen could possibly convey what it's like to stand at the bottom, or drive through a pass at the top - you need to go there, honestly.
Honestly, I remembered a couple of times over the last few days that I hadn't bought my tickets yet, and nonetheless didn't run to the computer to buy em up. I have this damnable inertia that, even when I know that I have an opportunity to witness something historic, or to do something that I will remember until I die, a lot of the time I just go "meh" and go back to my crossword puzzle.
But occasionally, I overcome that lethargy and find myself heading out to a play or a show or a French movie, and I sit in the venue, surrounded by people of like mind, digging the art that I'm seeing, and really, profoundly, enjoying my life for a few hours - something that I honestly don't do very often. And I have this sense that "out there" in the world, even in a backwater like Winnipeg, there's this whole other awesome existence that's mine for the taking, if I would just get off my lazy ass and go do stuff. It's my "real" life, I think, the life that I truly want to live, as opposed to the insular, lazy and sedated life that I seem to choose by default.
I'm not talking about some kind of jet-set world travelling fantasy, though I do want to see more of the world - right now, for instance, I'm trying to figure out how I can get to New York City to catch one of Les Paul's monday night shows before he, like so many other musical heroes of mine that I never got to see in life, is gone. It's not even expensive, really - I suspect that there's at least three little places in town, even as I write this, featuring some music or play or movie that I would just be soaking up like a drug if I were there. Instead, I sit here and lament same, probably to little or no audience whatsoever. But at least I'm writing instead of rewatching South Park or something...
But anyways, here's what I wanted to talk about: Six finalists from Canadian Idol, collaborating on a surprisingly fantastic version of Mr. Lightfoot's Canadian Railroad Trilogy.
It's puzzled me, since the first time I heard this song, that I never encountered it in a school room as a kid - it was the first history lesson I ever had (on a road trip, appropriately enough (in a car, inappropriately enough), from Vancouver to Winnipeg) that I repeated over and over and over again, looking through my windshield at the Canadian Rockies* and feeling profoundly connected to all the history, glorious and shameful and otherwise, of my home and native land.
Indeed, it was through Gordon Lightfoot that I really learned the meaning of the word Patriotism, because up until that day I had never really felt love, never even understood how someone could feel love, for a place, or the idea of that place. I didn't suddenly forget what European colonization has always meant to indigenous people, mind you, but we're all born into an imperfect world, and we should love that world no less than we love our friends and families, for all their imperfections. The alternative is madness.
But anyways, on to Canadian Idol. I don't watch it. Much less do I watch American Idol, Britain's Got Talent, or any other such show. To me it seems... ok, well, I've watched bits of American Idol on Youtube, and this is a personal favorite:
Too hardcore for you, indeed. The thing about these death metal idol guys (I think at least one of them is actually Black Metal, but the multitude of metal categories they've got nowadays is as unintelligible to me as death metal lyrics) is that they aren't really seriously trying out - they're basically there to say a big rock'n'roll Fuck You to the whole Idol concept, and for that, I at least applaud them.
When I first heard about American Idol, I decried it as illegitimate. And it is, really - a person getting into making music should really not be doing so in order to become an "idol," and nobody can possibly deny that there is something just *wrong* about a musician skirting the traditional process of performing, touring, recording, shopping demos and basically sweating to make it, and being adored on national television for doing so.
But sure, stardom sounds great, and believe me, I'm not saying that ironically - after all, isn't it a fairly universal desire of people everywhere to want to be doing something that matters? But at the same time, what actually matters should probably not be determined by the call-in votes of people watching a reality show - I like to think that we ought to rely on some kind of objective standards, both in terms of just how important a pop star is in the grand scheme of things, as well as what criteria we should use to determine who becomes a pop star. American Idol takes pop stardom, something that's supposed to have a patina of magic to it, a romantic story of struggle and victory behind every great artist, and turns it into a job interview.
But when I gave it further thought, I realized that American Idol is not, as the narrow selection of music and arbitrary selection system would suggest, a corruption of pop music, but in fact is the American pop music star system given a more perfect form. After all, actual musical talent has, since the advent of MTV, taken a distant back seat to photogenicity in terms of importance for pop stars - witness the sad case of Christopher Cross, whose oh-so-smooth compositions (which included collaborations with the inimitable Burt Bacharach) were nonetheless not smooth enough to overcome his fundamental lack of stage charisma once MTV made visual presentation an essential component in a successful pop music career... and would, over the next 20 years, bring us to the point at which we now find ourselves, where musical talent is optional. The truth is that American pop music has been a reanimated corpse, shuffling around and growing more and more putrid in it stench since long before Vanilligate.
So now we get a tv show, remarkably similar in form to the Gong Show, where America gets to Have Its Say in who becomes the next big star. Of course, as with all American democratic mechanisms, the deck is stacked: contestants, as the death metal auditioners demonstrate, are limited to a narrow range of musical selections and styles - the same constricted musical range, interestingly enough, that you will find on modern, ClearChanneled (and what an unintentionally appropriate name that corporation bears...) FM radio. All the finalists are MTV-ready (Aesthetically pleasing. In other words, fly...), practically begging to be processed and shrinkwrapped, anticipating their artistic asphyxiation with great joy.
I'd like to say that if the American Idol people gave Americans a real choice, that they would choose something new and interesting over the same old recycled pretties they've been fed for these last couple of decades. But I wonder, at this point, whether the Clearchannelization of America has had enough time to take root, and in true Orwellian fashion, managed to make Americans forget that there once was a choice to be had. Could American Idol voters get over the exotic nature of, say, Manu Chao for long enough to appreciate his funky latin reggae grooves and dance in their seats like their parents once did to Perez Prado? Is Middle America still that open-minded?
And that's the tragedy of it: For much of the last century, America had a thriving music scene, fecund with inspiration, innovation and creativity. What happened to the America that birthed jazz?
Chao himself, a true world citizen, has an interesting observation at 1:45 of this video: when he tours in Europe and looks at the television, he gets programs and news from all over - France, Italy, England, etc. Whereas in America, you turn on the TV, you get programming from America only. Derrida would probably point out that Chao only mentioned other European locales in his speech, but I think he's got a point nonetheless - where other nations seem to see themselves as part of an international exchange of ideas, America seems to always view itself as the possessor and exporter of all relevant ideas, with no need of input from the old or developing worlds.
But we all know that it's exchange that brings innovation and new ideas - cities which are big shipping centres, for example, have always traditionally been where you find such things. This is no accident - the traders and sailors who came and went brought more than goods with them. They brought music, books, news of the world, and enabled the people there to synthesize all this input into fresh output, which they sent back out.
America has long since ceased to engage in this kind of meaningful exchange. True, there's a lot of import and export, more than ever before, but there is no trade - the goods are put in containers and loaded on and off the ships by cranes, with no conversation between transient sailors and stationary dockers, no strange and exotic fiddle music carried on the air from dockside taverns, no news of strange and wondrous events in distant lands pass from mouth to ear around town.
Even the goods themselves cannot be seen as objects of real exchange - Americans design what they want, send the plan to China, and receive back what they ordered a few months later. Even with the entire world available with a google search, America looks ever inward, and dies slowly.
*Here's a link to a google image search, but really, as if a grouping of pixels on a computer screen could possibly convey what it's like to stand at the bottom, or drive through a pass at the top - you need to go there, honestly.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
I don't care about Beck
...but I am completely in love lust with Chloe Sevigny, so via Boing Boing, I give you the new Beck video:
And you know, the tune ain't bad either. Really, most of his stuff is actually quite good, but I kind of lost interest when he made the jump from DIY Genius to Postmodern Phantasm.
I kind of pulled those two phrases out of the air, but think about it: On his early releases, up to and including Mellow Gold, you could verily smell the bongwater he spilled on the 4-track cassette tapes. Tracks like Truckdrivin Neighbours Downstairs verily placed you on the sunken, worn-out couch in Beck's living room, listening to the drunken bearfight (shades of Pete and Ray*) coming up through the floor. And while I loved the lo-fi Loser (and low production value, found-footage vibe of the video), it was tracks like Pay No Mind and Soul Sucking Jerk that really spoke to me in those lethargic and aimless days of my (supposedly) GenX heyday. My local pool hall made the mistake of putting Mellow Gold in their CD jukebox, and when I was flush (not very often) I also used to terrorize people by playing Motherfucker several times in a row.
I was also impressed by Beck's behavior at Lollapalooza 95 in Toronto. I had no interest in watching Hole - even then, I knew exactly what Courtney Love was, and I was way too far back to enjoy the playing of ogle Melissa Auf Der Mar, the second-hottest bass player in the world - so I wandered over to the second stage, and discovered that Beck was playing an impromptu, and very long, acoustic set, taking requests from the audience and just generally enjoying himself. This, I thought, was why I came: here is a consummate musician successfully and passionately plying his craft.
Move ahead to 2006, and Odelay comes out. My first exposure was the Where It's At video, which starts off with a mellow Hammond organ line... just like Paul's Boutique. From there, it was pleasant, but uninspired, very much unlike Paul's Boutique. And while we're on the topic of Beastie Boys songs with Hammond organs, here's a link to So Whatcha Want, which is the best of these - even at Youtube quality, it rocks the house.
But I digress. Where It's At was really not representative of Beck's new direction at all. What followed it was Devil's Haircut and The New Pollution, and here's where he lost me. At the time, I didn't have even a small inkling of what the word Postmodern meant - twelve years and one English degree later, I still don't know what it means**, but like a moral crusader at a Mapplethorpe exhibit, I know it when I see it.
The 90s were a decade in which irony grew from a subtlety to an affliction. It was no coincidence that Ben Stiller and Helen Childress made Ethan Hawke define it out loud in Reality Bites - they were subtly giving us the tools of self-analysis for when we grew up enough to start wondering why we did and didn't do what we did and didn't do. Detachment was our touchstone, and where Kurt Cobain chose death over the job of generational spokesman, Beck, with his Odelay material, came as close as anyone did to taking on the job of generational poster boy.
Of course, being this generation's poster boy meant that the last thing he could do was deliberately seem to be trying to consciously identify with this generation. Leave that to the vicious hordes of Pearl Jam/Alice in Chains tribute bands that were and are still running roughshod over the musical landscape, slowly murdering the soul of radio with an endless tsunami of mediocrity that comes in wave after homogenous wave, leaving a bleak and featureless landscape populated by pale refugees who are barely even aware that there was a time when ideals like originality and creativity were valued...
There I go again. Seriously, this is why I do like love Beck: he always, always does his very best to keep it weird (here's a Tom Waits Song of the same name from the related videos, just because he rules the universe), and for that I can never hate him, especially after I remember what else is out there. Still, it seemed to me at the time (and still does) that Devil's Haircut and (especially) The New Pollution were and are, in their own unique way, just as creatively barren as the Creeds and Silverchairs of the world. In both cases, the artist is mining the work and style of others and repackaging it in a new configuration - the key difference with Beck is that while Nickelback are earnestly trying to duplicate the style, sound and success of Pearl Jam, Beck was serving up a less specific pastiche of various eras and styles, with a thick layer of that tasty, comforting irony sitting on top like shellac - not a reference to Steve Albini, but since you mention him, anyone who still hasn't read this should really take this opportunity to do so.
*Pete and Ray will get their own entry soon, particularly in light of the fact that someone has apparently made a movie based on the tapes, and the preview looks pretty good...
**and I mean, can anyone really *know* what it means? And what does it mean to mean anyways? It's a mean world, after all, and frequently paradoxically devoid of meaning, and what meaning can we derive from such mean means as that?
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Sunday, November 2, 2008
But seriously, folks...
I think it was Churchill who said that Americans can always be relied upon to do the right thing, after they've exhausted all the other options. Through the years, I've held onto that notion, that in some difficult-to-elucidate way, we can count on America when the chips are down, and that while they may lead us to the very edge of the abyss, it won't be America that pushes (or drags) us all down. I do, in other words, believe in America, though not entirely without conditions.
To put it simply, if Sarah Palin becomes the vice-president, it will seriously damage that belief. Even Bush II had his moments, rare as they might have been, and I believe that he comes from a clan whose predominant self-interest is informed, albeit not at all enlightened.
However, in the relatively brief time we've had to learn who Sarah Palin is, she's revealed herself to be an almost perfect personification of the worst side of America - Smug in her abject ignorance, insulting in her presumption that a sugary wink will make her audience swallow poisonous rhetoric, reckless in her unthinking indulgence of the moblike quality of her rallies, and most recently, her abusive invocation of the first amendment was so frighteningly ignorant that her very candidacy could arguably be construed as an act of terrorism.
The time has come to do the right thing, America. Believe me, you've definitely exhausted all the other options.
To put it simply, if Sarah Palin becomes the vice-president, it will seriously damage that belief. Even Bush II had his moments, rare as they might have been, and I believe that he comes from a clan whose predominant self-interest is informed, albeit not at all enlightened.
However, in the relatively brief time we've had to learn who Sarah Palin is, she's revealed herself to be an almost perfect personification of the worst side of America - Smug in her abject ignorance, insulting in her presumption that a sugary wink will make her audience swallow poisonous rhetoric, reckless in her unthinking indulgence of the moblike quality of her rallies, and most recently, her abusive invocation of the first amendment was so frighteningly ignorant that her very candidacy could arguably be construed as an act of terrorism.
The time has come to do the right thing, America. Believe me, you've definitely exhausted all the other options.
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