One of Zach’s favorite sub-genre descriptions – butt rock – gets some exposure in Paste, from Barry Blasengame’s review of the Midlake album, The Courage of Others:

“The disappointing thing about most Molly Hatchet albums – beside the fact that they’re horrible – is the blatant deception of their covers.  During the band’s heyday, Hatchet albums featured a hulking, wide-eyed barbarian swinging a massive battleaxe as sinew and bits of bone fell about him like crimson snow.  It was, in a word, badass.  But when you dropped the needle, out came a sickening bilge of chuggin’ boogie blues and butt rock.  The only thing hemorrhaging was your ears.”

The Fire Escape dug some spare change out of its figurative beer-soaked coach and took out an ad in the current issue of the Sacramento News and Review.  Welcome back, boys!

*****

12/31 : New Year’s Eve with

THE PINE BOX BOYS

COLONEL JIMMY & THE BLACKFISH [sounds like a cross between rockabilly and a basting sauce]

DIAMOND DOLLS 916 [916 = greater Sacramento area, homes]

1/1: 3 FINGER JACK [clumsy sexual double entendre, check; see also Three Bad Jacks, playing the Blue Lamp on New Year's Eve]

1/2: CONTAGIOUS [the Fire Escape's interest in disease continues...]

DAYTES [possibly the least necessary case of intentional misspelling in all of banddom?]

1/3: FINAL SUMMATION [math...badass!]

MAD JURY [whoa...watch out]

SNOT COCKS [not unexpected, and oddly reassuring that at least one totally offensive band name made the list]

TENDER RED

ELECTRIC ADDICT

Other upcoming bands playing the ‘Scape include Noise Attack (winner of this edition’s “truth in advertising” award), Viva Hate (Morrissey!), Trial by Combat (arm thyself!), Stepchild, and of course…Sexciety.  Not to be outdone, other area clubs are featuring How Dare the Dawn competitors For Us the Living, Nightmare in the Twilight, and Dressed in White, as well as Never Shout Never (NEVER!!!), Secretions, and, um, The English Beat.

Sometimes when I’m digging around doing research I come across things that have absolutely nothing to do with my project, are generally unimportant, but nonetheless satisfy my interest in obscure anecdotes and juvenile humor.  So if you’ve ever wondered, “were the Red Hot Chili Peppers the first people to turn ‘California’ into a dirty word – i.e. californication?” you can rest assured that the answer is no.  

In 1924, Alfonso Reyes (1889-1959), Mexican writer, essayist, and guest star in my book project, wrote the following dirty poem about a friend who had recently gone to California:

Partió a California un día:

            Dizque iba a examinar.

            Según otra teoría

            se fue a cali-forni-car.” 

So there you go: Alfonso Reyes 1, Red Hot Chili Peppers 0.

Some thoughts on The Reader:  I went into this movie with high expectations.  The incredibly attractive Kate Winslet sans clothing plus extensive discussion of literature?  What could possibly go wrong?  Turns out the film is quite uneven, though it gains some depth after an initial focus on a rather inexplicable cradle-robbing affair between Winslet’s middle-aged municipal worker and a fifteen-year-old kid happy to be along for the sex-fueled ride.  

Literary snob objections: There is a lot of reading and recitation in this movie, but the books the allegedly “German” characters read and discuss are all in English, which is ridiculous, particularly in the case of German authors.  Why not show the German text and just read it in English?  I understand the director or whoever not wanting to mix the two languages, but it’s far less jarring to see written German in the film’s background even as the characters speak in English than it is to encounter “German” characters reading their own national literature in English in a film about Germany.  Having a copy of a Schiller play with an English title printed on its cover in a movie that takes place in Heidelberg and then Berlin is just silly.  

Also, the edition of The Odyssey used is the recent Fagles translation (you can tell based on the font), disguised behind an antiquated hard cover.  Amateur, anachronistic move…

The Reader picks up in its second half, where the WWII-era activities of Winslet’s character are explored, and her trial for alleged SS collaboration brings up some interesting questions of law vs. justice, of Germany’s attempts to come to terms with its Nazi past, of the moral failures of the WWII generation, and so forth.  Bruno Ganz, known to most American movie snobs for Wings of Desire and maybe Downfall, elevates the film in the closing stretch with a nice performance as a law professor  - though it’s weird to see the German-speaking Ganz give all of his lines in English in a movie that takes place in West Germany.  Obviously this linguistic inconsistency annoys me.  

Regardless, the protagonist’s confrontation with the Holocaust and with ethical questions in general serves as a sobering counterpoint to the weirdly aimless, lust-fueled first half, and retroactively explains some – but not all – of the behavior of Winslet’s character.  While we understand why Winslet was so intent on having a teenage student read to her, I for one didn’t figure out any logical connection between her participation in the Holocaust and her proclivity for much younger men.  Perhaps there isn’t supposed to be one.  

All in all, not the  blissful Winslet/Goethe & Co. masterwork I was hoping for, but not bad.

The Modern Language Association (MLA) convention is basically an enormous annual academic meeting, drawing what always seems like millions of English and foreign language professors and graduate students, as well as aspiring job-seekers, to one major city or another two or so days after Christmas (Yes, if you attend the MLA regularly, your holiday break is basically shot year after year). A lot has been said about the MLA: that it’s a den of lefty elitists and Palestine sympathizers, that it’s a meat market for otherwise awkward single academics, that it’s a bureaucratic nightmare defined by byzantine political struggles. I’ve heard all of these, and frankly the MLA just seems like an average conference to me – only much, much bigger, and with various cash bars to choose from.

While attending this year’s conference in San Francisco resulted in me missing what might have been the mother of all movie nights, I did get the pleasure of reading through the conference’s enormous convention program, which is chock full of academic paper titles – some intriguing, some sleep-inducing, and some thankfully funny. It’s a rare academic who injects a little levity into an MLA paper via pun or pop culture reference, and despite the potential for cheese, I always appreciate the attempt. Anyhow, here are some of my favorites from this year:

– “Is Fighting with Your Girlfriend Like Fighting the Germans?” (this one was given in a panel on “D.H. Lawrence and Violence”)

- “Rule, Britannia! Confound the Pirates! Victorian Nautical Dramas and the Royal Navy’s Anti-slavery Crusade on the High Seas” (from the “Rule, Britannia!” panel, obviously)

- “Vampires, Aliens, and Sex, Oh My: Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Wild Seed” (from “Octavia Butler and Her Legacies” panel)

- “Manuring the World: Satan and the Ends of Paradise Lost” (hands down the best paper title in the “John Milton: A General Session” panel. I’m thinking about adding the verb “manure” into my vocabulary, as in, “man, I really manured that class.”)

- “Tartan Noir; or, Hard-Boiled Heidegger.” This one, which I like because of the mental image of Heidegger wearing a kilt, deserves special mention since it was featured in a panel on Scottish detective fiction whose title, “Watching the (Scottish) Detectives” referenced the Elvis Costello classic! Yes!

- “Project Runway and Top Chef: The Everyday Extreme Value of Clothing and Eating” (from the “Reality TV and the Economics of Entertainment” panel)

- “Sunshine and Oranges, Fire, Earthquakes and Riots: A Natural History of Los Angeles” (from the “Modernism and Californian Literatures of the Environment” panel)

- “Covered with Blood: Modern Modes of Memory at the United States Sanitary Fairs” (from the “Objects of Terror and War” panel. I might have gone for a Slayer reference and titled the paper “Raining Blood,” but it wasn’t my call.)

- “America (the Conference Paper): The Onion Unpeeled, The Daily Show Untimed” (from the pun-tastic “‘Fun’ de Siècle’ Twenty-First-Century Humor” panel)

- “‘Bring Out Your Dead!’: Reviving Old Critics (this was the name of an actual panel…sadly none of the paper titles included in the panel referenced Monty Python)

My personal, AC/DC-quoting favorite…

- “Back in Black: Theorizing the Sequel in Marlowe’s Tamburlaines (from the “Marlowe’s Hearers and Readers” panel)

And in the unintentionally funny, post-conference drinking category…

“Cash Bar Arranged by the Marxist Literary Group.”

While driving to a doctor’s appointment yesterday at Clinton Crossings, I was jamming to some Calexico. I bought “Feast of Wire” while in Indiana this summer to provide some respite from the all-Coldplay-all-the-time playlist my dad had working. I’d listened to it a bunch when I got home, but for whatever reason most of the songs never really worked their way into memory. I was really giving it a listen this time around since I was in the car alone with nothing else to do. This song, in particular, “Not Even Stevie Nicks…” got me thinking:

The main lyric I was keying in on was when he goes: “Not even the priestess / with her wrenches / and secret powers / could save him” I’m not really a Calexico expert or anything, but, in conjunction with a lyric in the opening song, “Sunken Waltz,” “Tossed a Susan B. over my shoulder / and prayed it would rain and rain / submerge the whole Western states” there seems to be a sort of rural apocalypse thing going on thematically in the album. Like Beyond the Thunderdome or something, except with horses and ponchos instead of cars and metal.

Initially that got me thinking the probably intensely unoriginal thought that Westerns may as well be post-apocalyptic movies (The Postman is a sort of explicit realization of this), in that they exist in a dystopic realm where pockets of half-civilization (each town typically brutal or degraded in its own unique way) are surrounded by vast seas of lawlessness. A fascistic order is inevitably enforced by some kind of strongarm tactic, and the hero represents the sole island of sanity, isolated by his refusal to give in.

But even beyond that, I was thinking about what sort of society would exist if somehow the world did undergo some rural apocalypse. Music would be pared down to folk compositions that could be played on old acoustic instruments or else new acoustic instruments. Art as a whole would probably take on a recycled, use-what-you-got folk aesthetic as well. Maybe an emphasis on carving or metalwork or something that doesn’t require you to know how to create and mix pigments. Even dance and martial art would probably evolve along similar prototypical folk lines. Additionally, what would come of intellectual thought and philosophy? Leaving aside the question of who’s got time to rhapsodize about Marshall McLuhan or Derrida when you’ve got to hunt dinner and find someplace safe from the radioactive raiding parties, what’s left to deconstruct when all of history has essentially been deconstructed and erased? Would our whole modes of thought, patterns of reasoning, our entire worldview be changed? People either born or living in this post-apocalyptic reality would have to develop a wholly different “folk thought” divorced from the mediterranean-middle-eastern worldview that dominates Western culture today after having been left without access to the past 3000 years of classical and modern thought.

Anyway I guess it’s a banal insight on its own, unless you sat down and tried to invent such a possible thought system. But just tossing it out there to see if any of you guys know about any related ideas. I tried Googling “folk thought” but didn’t really come up with any killer hits, so I’m sure if the topic is discussed elsewhere it must have different terminology.

Ross and I were talking last night during a particularly unpopulated movie night about concept albums and more generally just lyrical content of songs. Ross is really into this band Bal-Sagoth, who have a whole intergalactic cast of supreme manifestations of evil (including the silver surfer) who get woven into a rich tapestry of lyrical content for their albums.  From what i understand their albums are exclusively concept albums, or maybe their entire discography is one giant concept-oeuvre. Meanwhile, somewhat less interestingly perhaps, I’ve gotten hooked on the internet samples of a concept-rock group The Protomen, who have a cycle about the Mega Man story (my favorite being Protoman’s monologue to Mega-Man in the song “The Stand (Man or Machine)“).

Talking about these two groups got us onto the subject of what constitutes good lyric writing, or what is it about concept albums that tend to make them so much more lyrically interesting than a typical studio album? I think the obvious answer is simply that they are exploring avenues and directions that aren’t typically explored by lyric writers. There are a billion songs (give or take) about love or the singer’s girlfriend or whatever, but how many songs are there about the birth of a malefic demon on Mars? But it’s something more than that, too. For example, there are a lot of Rush songs that aren’t about the typical pop music subject matter, but they still don’t really resonate. Is it poor songwriting, or simply Ayn Rand’s polluting influence or what? Meanwhile there’s Everything But the Girl who trod probably some of the most lyrically well-trodden paths, and yet are still able to pen meaningful and interesting songs like Two Star.

I’m not sure that Ross and I really concluded anything on the subject, probably because I got distracted by something, but it did keep me thinking last night and again this morning and I thought it would be a good jumping off point for a blog discussion. I’m sure it’s something that varies from person to person in terms of what seems great or what doesn’t, but for me at least I think I’m lyrically drawn to extremes of really epic concepts (like the Stand lyrics linked above), and those that perfectly capture the intenseness of the everyday, such as momentary or solitary emotions.

I feel compelled to put it out there that Trans Am has the hands-down best album and song titles in the music world. I’ve never listened to these guys before. I think they’re some kind of post-rock band, but their titles read like perverse plays on cock rock nomenclature – imagine the verbal intersection between Night Ranger’s “Dawn Patrol,” Loverboy’s “Working for the Weekend” and some cheesy sci-fi imagery from Rush. Anyway, here’s a sampling of Trans Am’s song/album title wizardry:

“Illegal Ass,” “Love Commander,” “Security Breach,” “Man-Machine,” “Casual Friday,” “The Dark Gift,” “Infinite Wavelength,” “Total Information Awareness,” “Obscene Strategies” and my personal favorite, “Surrender to the Night.”