Circling the Drain

Ladies and gentleman...democracy.

2008-09-09T09:43:00.003-05:00

Totally true-to-life, except this version is made of plastic, not bullshit.

Running Mate Mating

2008-08-21T18:19:00.005-05:00

As this excruciating election finally enters its middle act, the attention paid by the media to the two candidates, Wrinkles McHouses and Hopey The Bear, has palpably decreased from fever pitch to icy boredom. Discussion of poll numbers appear in danger of being displaced by debates about actual issues in news broadcasts. That sensation that was going up Chris Matthews’ leg and was surely headed to Erection World or Aneurysm Land (separated only by the inches of ego) made a right-turn and blew unexpectedly out his ass, sadly covering half of Philadelphia in shit. Even the TiVo Olympics seem like compelling viewing by comparison. And, so, it’s no surprise that following this drop in the pundit class’s (and, they tell us, our) interest in the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, they’ve turned their breathless, brainless focus onto the one question that most everyone agrees almost never makes any difference at all: the vice presidential picks. Christ. Debating who would make the best vice president is like speculating about whether the cover of the new AC/DC album is black enough. It doesn’t fucking matter. That being said…

THE RUNNING MATE DEBATE*

John McCain

Conventional wisdom, as well as actuarial science and the lackluster pace of research into the viability of cryogenic preservation, tells us that McCain’s VP decision is of great importance. Remember when we spent all that time picking out a nursing home for Grandpa? Well, now, the nursing home is going to end up running the country. Here’s the thing with McCain, and you may or may not have seen this mentioned in the media: dude’s fucking old. (He lost his virginity to Mary Pickford. His vacation home was in East Pangaea. If he were a food, he’d be coal. He’s old, I tells ya!) At least when George Bush wiped his ass with the Bill of Rights, it was metaphorical. And intentional. Now, we’re going to let a guy who looks like he drank from the wrong cup at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade have his finger on the button? Have you seen old people? Their hands – they shake. You want a guy with shaky fingers putting one of them on the Red Button? What if something startles him, like a supermarket scanner or a talking Filipino? He’ll flinch, and it’ll be curtains for all of us.

So, commentators and columnists say that McCain has to pick a young, vibrant running mate to let voters know that the country will be in safe hands. As usual, they have it 180 degrees backwards. Choosing that kind of person, like 14-year-old Louisiana Governor (and part-time exorcist) Bobby Jindal or former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney-bot, activation date 1947, will only highlight McCain’s youth deficiency. What he needs to do is both appease the base – which has long questioned his conservative credentials because of a spotty track record that once included momentary lapses of sanity – and make himself look like a viable human being that can at least live through Inauguration Day. In short, McCain should pick someone older than he is. Granted, the options here are limited, especially given the recent death of the world’s oldest man, Habib Miyan, at the too-soon-gone age of 138. McCain needs someone feisty yet fierce. My pick is a velociraptor. It would have the Hollywood fame and name recognition of Fred Thompson, and it’s love of carnage and civilian death would endear it quickly to the Republican establishment. Plus, velociraptors can open doors, which will save McCain the trouble of kicking them down in fits of rage.

The Smart Choice: A velociraptor.

Second Choice: A fetus.

The Likeliest Choice: The Romney 3000.

Barack Obama

In many ways, Obama has McCain’s problem in reverse. The newspapers tell me that I think he’s too young and inexperienced. And, I just had another thought: he’s not old enough! (The last big formal event he went to was his high school prom. His wedding ring is a Ring Pop. If the ability to grow facial hair got you electoral votes, he’d be Walter Mondale. He’s young, I tells ya!) We all know age brings experience, and taking some young black guy out of a poor neighborhood and throwing him into a giant mansion in a different city will bring us a sitcom at best and a disaster at worst. We need someone who has lived a life, an older man with the wisdom of Donald Rumsfeld, the considered intellect and leathery skin of Fred Thompson, and the raw sexual smirk of Dick Cheney.

Obama needs a vice president who fills in the gaps in his resume. He already gives us tall, black, and youthful. But, what about the people who won’t vote for a tall man? We need someone old and short, with skin that is – at its darkest – medium-white. How about Tim Conway’s character from those delightful Dorf videos? Or, maybe he could pick Joe Biden, on the condition that the Senator from Delaware cut off his own legs at the ankles. He wouldn’t even need a saw to do it if Biden could just bite down harder next time he has his foot in his mouth. (See what I did there? If that pun could be weaponized, it would empty a medium-sized city of its populace.)

But, wait! Joe Biden bores the shit out of me. And, as far former Georgia Senator Sam Nunn…who the fuck is former Georgia Senator Sam Nunn?

Perhaps Obama could tap a swing-state governor to help him pick up a few crucial electoral votes – Tim Kaine of Virginia, perhaps, or Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas. But, who needs Kansas’s approval anyway? Have you seen the presidents they voted for? Kansas has the judgment of Chevy Chase’s career counselor. Hey, Kansas, go fuck yourself. Maybe while you’re going broke you can see how far those eight years you gave to President Caddyshack 2 will go in getting health insurance.

No, what Obama really could use is someone reassuring, but not so inside-the-beltway that he cancels out the message of changehopehappinesshooray that propelled Barack through the primaries like George McGovern strapped to a cannonball. Of course, McGovern failed to notice that cannonball heading straight into a brick wall. Lesson: change is risky. The appearance of change – now there’s a winner. We need a marriage of the old and the new, but not like that creepy Richard Gere/Winona Ryder movie. If Obama is John Oates, he needs a Darryl Hall to temper his rough edges and give him the smooth harmonies and adult-contemporary sound that will vault him to victory. Better yet, get the real Darryl Hall. He’s only a little bit busier than Sam Nunn (D-Wherethefuck?).

The Smart Choice: Darryl Hall.

Second Choice: Jackson Browne in a blonde wig.

The Likeliest Choice: The love child of Sam Nunn and Joe Biden, birthed through Hillary Clinton.

*I make no guarantees as to the insight or accuracy of any of these predictions. But that’s never stopped CNN.

For George

2008-06-23T16:16:00.004-05:00

(This will appear in some form in the paper this week...)

George Carlin opened It’s Bad For Ya, his 14th and final HBO special in March, by saying, “Fuck Lance Armstrong. Fuck him and his balls and his bicycles and his steroids and his yellow shirts and the dumb, empty expression on his face…I’ll choose my own heroes, thank you very much.” Well, George Carlin was my hero. He meant to me what Picasso or Bob Dylan must’ve meant to people who didn’t swear so much at the dinner table. Except they probably never got phone calls from their heroes.

When I was just an overindulged high school student, I wrote George a letter for a project I was in way over my head on. It was supposed to be a short documentary on the dwindling amount of real choices in American politics. I sent desperate interview requests to a number of long shots, including Hunter S. Thompson and Bill Maher. Months went by, and I didn’t hear shit, but I wasn’t too upset, because by now I’d forgotten about even writing the letters. Then, one night, as I was being angsty or doing whatever it is teenagers do, the phone rang, and there was that unmistakable rasp on the other end. “Rob? George Carlin here. Got your letter. Very well-written. Good grammar. Let’s talk.”

After regaining consciousness and changing my pants, I told George a little bit about my project – he, perhaps the most important comedian since Lenny Bruce, wanted to know when it was due – and set up an interview in the coming months. In between that conversation and our phone date, I’d occasionally come home from school to find a hilarious message from him on the voicemail, confirming that the interview was still on. When we finally talked, I was a stumbling, awkward mess, but Carlin carried me through it, even inviting my friends, my dad and I to meet him after his next show in town. He was as kind and generous as he was insightful. Backstage, we asked him if he was competitive with the other Mister Conductors from Shining Time Station. He boasted he could kick Ringo Starr’s ass. Which was true. As far as comedy goes, he was our John Lennon.

Though he was often dismissed as bitter in his later years, he never lost his edge, his desire to push buttons and make people uncomfortable. But, most of all, he was funny. You came out of his best performances in pain from having laughed so hard but also with something else… a kind of crazy energy. Carlin’s gift was transferring to you the giddy fearlessness that came with his revelatory comedy. He not only proved that, as he once put it, “you can joke about anything,” but he actually convinced you of it in a way that changed your whole sensibility. He joked about Vietnam when doing so could cause a riot. And it did. He used profanities in a time when that could get him arrested. And it did. He was a tireless crusader against bullshit in all of its insidious forms; he was the funniest and most courageous artist-genius of our time. Whenever we puncture hypocrisy or skewer meaningless jargon in the media and society, as he did for decades in landmark bits like “the Planet is Fine, the People are Fucked” and “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” we honor his immeasurable contributions. It is impossible for me to imagine the comedy world or my world without him. So, let’s replace the moment of silence with a moment of celebration: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits. That’s for you, George.

You Mean, New York Gets Destroyed By A Monster? How Do They Come Up With This Stuff? A Cloverfield Review.

2008-01-17T17:47:00.001-05:00

Yeah, I saw it. And you'll see it too. To write about Cloverfield like anything –the movie, the aforementioned writing, the impact of either – matters is to ignore the skyscraper-sized alien-prune phallus in the room. The film is as impervious to criticism as it is to logic; it’s something like Godzilla for viral video, The Blair Witch Project with the anxieties of the post-9/11 world, yadda yadda yadda. Here’s what I know: if this movie makes ten million dollars for each of its roughly 75 minutes (and it probably will), it is because of a breathless marketing campaign designed to create a vague suspicion that the film does anything remotely new and to delay the discovery that, in fact, it doesn’t.

Shot entirely through the viewpoint of a single camera and its amateur operator, the story begins at a going-away party for Rob (Michael Stahl-David), a rich, white thirty-something leaving town for a corporate job, and becomes a going-away party for most of New York, including the Statue of Liberty, a couple dozen office towers and apartment buildings, and the Brooklyn Bridge. Meanwhile, Rob, His Ex-Girlfriend, His Brother, His Brother’s Ex-Girlfriend, His Best Friend and The Girl His Best Friend Has A Crush On struggle to get out of New York alive or at least get really far with the whole thing on tape. The characters may not exactly live and breathe, but there’s a reason these things aren’t called “survivor movies.” They’re there, with enough naturalistic-sounding dialogue to prevent audiences from rooting for them to die horrible deaths, and that’s what counts. Cloverfield is as exciting as it needs to be, mainly because the tricks director Matt Reeves learned from Alien and Jaws still work. Claustrophobia, confusion, and casualties will be a winning ticket no matter how a monster movie is packaged, and when it’s a lean gut punch like this one, you might as well open it at the bank.

But, the film is not without its aspirations. There are obvious, conscious echoes of September 11^th: one scene early in the film has stunned onlookers wandering around lower Manhattan covered in dust, an uncomfortably familiar image. Does that make this a commentary on paranoia? A metaphor for the damage done to American civil liberties in the name of protecting them against terrorism? Nope, it’s a summer blockbuster that forgot to come out while the heat still drove the masses to any dark, cool room, and if it happened to be a room with a movie screen in a building with dozens of movie screens in a theater that is part of a chain of thousands in a shopping mall, projecting a film combining massive destruction, old-timey flag-waving, and anonymously attractive actors, well, pass the artificial butter bucket. Megaproducer J.J. Abrams needn’t worry, though, because as Michael Bay surely whispers in his sleep, “If you knock it down, they will come."

Nearly Drowning in the Mystic: Van Morrison Live in Providence (from the Weekly Dig)

2007-12-27T23:38:00.000-05:00

When you’re going to see Van Morrison, there’s always the question of what Van Morrison is going to show up. (But not when – the tickets specify “7 pm sharp!” and it’s true.) Much like his friend Bob Dylan, Morrison spent the last forty-odd years showing us the songwriter’s version of Sherman’s March, restlessly, relentlessly plowing through genres, bands and his own songs while upending nearly everything we thought was stone-set about music along the way.

The crowd at the Providence Performing Arts Center last night was alternately dreading, expecting, hoping for…country Van, blues Van, Celtic soul Van, frustrated Van, jazz standards Van, the Van in purple tights whose breakneck performance of “Caravan” (with triumphant high kicks for punctuation) probably shamed The Band into retirement after The Last Waltz. And, they sort of got all of those – though no “Caravan.” As is also the case with Bob Dylan, you could write five or ten alternate set lists with all the great songs he didn’t play: “Into The Mystic,” “Saint Dominic’s Preview,” “All Saint’s Day,” “Here Comes The Night,” “Cyprus Avenue,” “Brown Eyed Girl” – if you consider that to be one of them. But, unlike Bobby D., whose hit-and-huge-gaping-miss shows these days consist mostly of him firing sporadically and inaudibly at his keyboard while barking lyrics into a microphone, Morrison still pulls off many of the things that inspired a young Bruce Springsteen to - let’s call it – borrow so much from him.

His voice retains most of that impossible fullness; now that he’s in his 60s, he arguably has better control of his range than ever before, swooping from scat improvisation and whispered repetition to that rare, explosive burst of power. And that was just “Moondance.” If he wanted, say, a banjo solo, a violin interlude or a piano break, he’d just emphatically point to the musician he needed, running his group like a merciless high school teacher who could pick on anyone at any time.

“This is called Brown Eyed Girl,” I heard someone who I suspect was not Lester Bangs say to his date as Van entered to the opening notes of “Domino,” his ten-piece band onstage waiting for him. Not every audience member was an idiot, but it didn’t matter – Morrison never performs for the crowd anyway. Notoriously shy, he sticks to a tiny comfort zone in the middle of the stage, surrounded by monitors and musicians, always looking like he’s just realized he had an important errand to run before the show and is now paralyzed with regret. He isn’t Mick Jagger, but then he doesn’t need to be. As always with Van, the best parts are when it looks like he doesn’t know he’s onstage, eyes closed tight, feeling his way through the moment with abbreviated arm flails and sharp, staccato head bobs.

Like Dylan, or Coltrane or any of the greats, Morrison always searches for a new entry point into his songs, a new rhythm to the vocal, something that interests him enough to stay onstage during the exactly 90 minutes for which he usually performs. (Apparently, his famous exclamation “It’s Too Late To Stop Now!” doesn’t apply after 8:45.) He switched off at random, from vocals to sax to keyboard to guitar, which led to one hilarious mishap with a roadie frantically trying to get him a six-string he was happy with. He couldn’t. But, Van was in a generous mood, throwing out some crowd-pleasers like “Bright Side of the Road,” “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You,” a Georgie Fame-inspired version of “Moondance” from the underrated How Long Has This Been Going On and the Ray Charles country version of “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” He also played some stuff that nobody in his right mind would request, like the title cut and a couple other songs from Magic Time. And, it all worked. The intimate, nearly spiritual textures of “Celtic New Year” were a dynamic contrast with the spooky urgency of “St. James Infirmary,” the blues simmer of “Help Me.”

While his band continued to play “And The Healing Has Begun,” he wandered off-stage for what passes for the finale of a Van Morrison show. Of course, he’s not interested in contrivance anymore than he is in playing “Gloria” every night (which he didn’t and doesn’t). A few minutes and one “big hand for the band” later, he reappeared for what seemed to be an unplanned second encore, shortly before deciding he was done for good. He walked off again as the band finished up, the musicians taking turns introducing the now-halfway-to-his-hotel “Mr. Vaaaaaaan Morrison.” Not that anyone needed to be reminded.

For a sample of Van Morrison at his very best: check out the above-mentioned “Caravan” from The Last Waltz and this version of “Cyprus Avenue” (recorded at the Fillmore East in 1970), which inspired the real Lester Bangs to write perhaps the definitive paragraph on the subject of Van Morrison, also below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isHjUEvfzFY

“With consummate dynamics that allow him to snap from indescribably eccentric throwaway phrasing to sheer passion in the very next breath he brings the music surging up through crescendo after crescendo, stopping and starting and stopping and starting the song again and again, imposing long maniacal silences like giant question marks between the stops and starts and ruling the room through sheer tension, building to a shout of “It's too late to stop now!,” and just when you think it's all going to surge over the top, he cuts it off stone cold dead, the hollow of a murdered explosion, throws the microphone down and stalks off the stage. It is truly one of the most perverse things I have ever seen a performer do in my life. And, of course, it's sensational: our guts are knotted up, we're crazed and clawing for more, but we damn well know we've seen and felt something.” Lester Bangs, Stranded, 1979.

Question Time with John Oliver

2007-11-18T17:16:00.000-05:00

Before John Oliver played at the Comedy Connection a few weeks ago, he agreed to an e-mail interview with me for the BU paper. It's not an ideal format for an interview, but he was very funny in his answers, as he has been in the stories about the writers' strike. Since The Daily Show is on hiatus, perhaps until next year, I thought a small helping of Oliver would help all of us cope.

18 QUESTIONS

1. The accent – is it real?

Yes.

2. Really?

Yes.

3. Really?

No, you got me. I’m from Philadelphia, but adopted a British accent for career purposes.

4. Having lived and worked in the States for a while now, what’s the worst thing about America that you didn’t even realize existed before you got here?

Ohio. I must have miscounted the stars on the flag. What a nasty surprise.

5. What surprised you (positively) about Americans?

I was particularly impressed by Dick Cheney’s ability to pixilate things at will. Surely that is a recognizable superpower? If it isn’t, it should be. He’s in X-Man territory, and should be acknowledged as the hero he is.

6. There have been some polls recently that suggested a large percentage of young Americans get most of their news from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. What do you think about that?

It just can’t be true. You need to be at least partially informed to understand what the hell we’re talking about. I think the truth is that young people are turning to the internet and other sources rather than network news, due to the fact that network news is so very, very bad.

7. What is the biggest contrast that you see in the relationship between the American people and their government and the English and theirs?

They are relatively similar. We in Britain have an innate suspicion of authority - you used to have that a lot more, especially around the time that you unceremoniously booted us out of your country. I do think that for a nation built on dissent, there is not nearly enough of it here at the moment. What is now labeled ‘un-American’ I associate with the most American way you could possibly behave.

8. This past summer, there was the incident with the failed car bomb in Piccadilly and the car running into the airport in Glasgow. If something like that happened in America, there would be a race to abolish term limits and make George Bush our supreme leader. What do the English understand about terrorism that we Yanks don’t seem to get?

I suppose we have a weary understanding of its inevitability. Throughout the 1980’s we were bombed by the IRA and are the product of countless invasions and attacks throughout history. Also, if the terrorists were trying to bring religious tension to Glasgow, they frankly got there centuries too late. There was a strange sense of national pride about the baggage handler who decided to stop the terrorist who was on fire by head-butting him. It’s a brave terrorist who takes on the Scottish – a brave, misguided terrorist.

9. You wear a number of hats on the Daily Show—Washington Correspondent, Kremlin Spokesman, Harry Potter enthusiast. Do you feel like a dilettante?

No, I feel like a world expert in all those fields.

10. Your stand-up segments on the Daily Show, with you and Jon Stewart together, do a great job of both satirizing the artifice of real news shows but also have a fun, comedic spontaneity. How tightly scripted are those segments?

Pretty tightly. It can be hard to keep a straight face at times though, so we do occasionally wander slightly off autocue. Its fun to mess around a bit if the mood takes us.

11. Have you ever had a sense that a potential joke went too far? Do you think it’s possible for a joke to be “over the line”?

It’s all about your intention. We think long and hard about any jokes we write which involve delicate areas. This means that you can deliver any line with a clean conscience. Whether something is ‘over the line’ entirely depends on where you think ‘the line’ is, which can vary wildly depending on subject matter and personal views. When you come from a stand-up background you get used to taking immediate responsibility for the words that come out of your mouth, and that helps.

12. Given that the Daily Show only runs about 15 minutes before the interview, is there a lot of competition between correspondents to get screen time? Is it very stressful?

Not at all. It’s a relaxed, fun place to work – with none of the ego clashes that you’re alluding to. We’re not Pink Floyd – we’re basic cable correspondents.

13. Most people in the States likely know you exclusively from The Daily Show. What can they expect from your stand-up?

More of the same really. My stand-up has always dealt with global issues in an infantile way – so I suppose I was a natural fit for the show.

14. When we see you on the Daily Show, you’re playing a character. Do you play the same character in your stand-up?

I am not playing a character on the Daily Show, and I resent the implication. I speak with a faux authority in everyday life.

15. Do you think that good political satire has to come from the left or at least from a place opposing the status quo?

I think the only important thing is to be doing it from outside the establishment. Whether it’s from the left or right is irrelevant. Politically partisan satire just rings hollow.

16. You play a character called Dick Pants in the new Mike Myers film. What’s that about? Have you begun campaigning for an Oscar or at least a Golden Globe yet?

Jon Stewart is presenting the Oscars next year, so I fully expect him to announce me for best actor whether I’ve been nominated or not. It’s the least he can do.

17. You’re an alum of the Footlights group from your time at Cambridge. While you were there, did you have a sense that – given its history and old members – you had a real shot at a career in comedy?

Not really. I just learnt a lot of important lessons through relentless failure. You can only really learn comedy from mistakes so it’s important to make as many of them as possible, as early as you can. That’s certainly what I found Footlights was best for.

18. With that whole Tea Party business…any bitterness towards Boston?

Huge bitterness. A permanent grudge. This is something that I will be addressing from the stage this weekend. You people owe me a cup of tea. At the very least.

L-sa L@mp@n-!!i: Censored, but only a little

2007-11-04T11:10:00.000-05:00

[An extended version of an article I wrote for the Daily Free Press.]

For anyone who says that making fun of people is easy, try turning it into a performance art. Insult comedy, a subgenre of standup that lives largely in roasts and old Don Rickles records, poses unique challenges beyond throwing sticks and stones. The trick is to remain eminently likeable while hurling verbal abuse, something that few accomplish as well as Lisa Lampanelli.

Out on the road promoting her most recent album Dirty Girl, Lampanelli, dressed like a caricature of a 1950s housewife, mocks audience members with the same cheerful viciousness she uses on B-listers like Andy Dick and Courtney Love at the Comedy Central roasts in which she is the consistent standout. “If funny is a guy thing, I’ll strap it on,” she says, scarring us with the image forever, in The Aristocrats. In fact, Lampanelli proves that she can go as far and farther than any comic, strapped on or naturally there, when it comes to edgy material. In The Aristocrats, she is the only comic to use race in telling her version of the titular dirty joke, and she is also the sole participant to perform the joke for a real audience. “Thank god it worked,” she says in a phone interview, “because otherwise I would’ve been very ashamed, I would’ve quit the business and would’ve been Xeroxing my [a word for vagina that you may be familiar with] at Kinko’s.

Quoting Lampanelli presents a little bit of a challenge for any newspaper, given how subtle (read: non-existent) the contrast is between her on-stage and off-stage language. In conversation, her broad New York accent adds an exaggerated ugliness to her tone when she calls you “a loser from a [expletive] college paper” or “a dopey, money-grubbing [not nice name for a Jewish person],” and yet, it’s hard not to be charmed by the peculiar underlying layer of sweetness. It’s what allows her to get away with what she does.

“I found out recently what that’s called,” Lampanelli says. “It’s a ‘mascot in the family structure.’ I did a workshop on dysfunctional relationships, and there’s always one kid in the family that can make the addict or dysfunctional parent laugh. I could make my mom always laugh, and I guess that’s what I sort of brought out with the comedy. I’m the one who can make a black guy laugh at a [not something a black guy would easily laugh at] joke.”

How Lampanelli does it – and her success in doing so is not without hiccups – is rooted in something more than a winking “just kidding.” It’s in her approach and in her background. Unlike most comics, she never had any interest in standup as she was growing up. “I didn’t like watching standup. I thought it was boring,” she says. What she remembers being exposed to, instead, were the old Dean Martin celebrity roasts, featuring putdowns from various drunken Rat Packers and relics of the golden age of television. “That’s what I thought comedy was,” she explains. “A bunch of people making fun of each other and not getting mad.”

As far as the “not getting mad” part goes, Lampanelli and her fans manage alright, even if others do not. A show last spring at the Rochester Institute of Technology was boycotted by those upset over jokes she made about the school’s large population of deaf and hard of hearing students, including one where she said, “Don’t you think deaf students could be maybe just retarded, and they’re trying to sneak by saying they’re deaf?”

But, Lampanelli is not Ann Coulter with a laugh track. “Obviously, my show is meant to make fun of stereotypes and to poke fun at stuff that really isn’t true but that all these retards think is true,” she says. Perhaps as a reflexive reaction against sounding too high-minded, however, she quickly adds, “But, if they only get it on the level of ‘that’s funny,’ that’s okay, too.” Even so, she admits she’ll donate “out of guilt” to “some [naughty word] charity” if “a Klan member’s laughing.”

Lampanelli’s vehicle for mocking racism and small-mindedness is to create an act built on both. With her frequent, casual use of words like “n-gger,” “ch-nc” and “Jew bastard” to call out people (un)lucky enough to be in her line of sight, she works her material to challenge the context of what makes a slur hateful, placing the emphasis on the ideas behind the words. Critics of similar approaches in rap music have said that even when black artists try out that idea, they simply make it okay for others to use the same hurtful language, but with Lampanelli, the point is in illuminating where the real racism is, or in her case, isn’t.

“Audiences can sense if you’re a good person,” she says. “It’s all about what you intend to get across, and hopefully, that usually comes off with me.” She goes on, “That underlying message that if the hate’s not in the word, it’s all about intention…because the underlying message with me and also my intention is, ‘Hey, we’re all the same.’”

Now that she’s graduated to playing theaters instead of comedy clubs, Lampanelli has increasingly larger and more adoring audiences to mock and batter. When it comes from her, it almost feels good to be put down. Not that she doesn’t know how to lift you up, too. Upon realizing that the Daily Free Press was a BU paper, she offered a rare bit of praise: “At least you’re not calling me from some retard school like Tufts.”

They Are Somewhere: Grace Potter & The Nocturnals Live

2007-09-12T11:12:00.000-05:00

In retrospect, it seems like I’m misremembering the first time I heard Grace Potter & The Nocturnals. I was trekking across the massive Bonnaroo concert grounds in 2006, in a haze or daze or some kind of state of unreality, trying to dodge a sun that I was starting to think was out to get me, when I felt fiery guitar solos and rich organ tones flying over me. “Is Crazy Horse doing an unannounced show in the middle of the day?” I wondered. “Does Crazy Horse even have an organ player?” If I’d known about Wikipedia then, I’d probably have wished I could’ve used it. I didn’t, so I instead wandered towards the source of the sound like it was a trail of breadcrumbs, and I was a character in a children’s book set in the middle of blazing hot Tennessee.

The sound, as these things turn out, was Grace Potter & The Nocturnals, a four piece outfit from Waitsfield, Vermont, a town that’s small even as far as Vermont standards go. Singer/guitarist/Hammond B-3 addict Potter and her band, guitar player Scott Tournet, bassist Bryan Dondero and drummer Matthew Burr, work out of a hippie-like compound – “Potterville,” Grace calls it - that seems like a cross between the Shire and Big Pink (“Potter has a lot of Tolkien in her blood,” Tournet jokes). The band members were all in their twenties when they released their first two records, Original Soul and Nothing But The Water, which is sort of remarkable until you listen to the albums and realize that they were recorded a few years ago and not a few decades ago. Then, it’s extremely remarkable.

They are a band unashamedly steeped in their influences, and, for a rock and roll band, they’ve got all the right ones: the Stones, the Who, Zeppelin, The Band, Neil Young – and not the shitty stuff, either. “We love Neil, but you totally have to call your heroes out,” Tournet says, an important philosophical point in the band’s approach. Potter and the Nocturnals manage to be appreciative without being reverent. This isn’t one of those new rock bands that sounds like it’s covering all the songs Led Zeppelin never get around to writing (or stealing from Willie Dixon, as it were). More interestingly, they’re changing, and in a way that might well make them better rather than weirder.

While there was a strong whiff of the musical lovechild of J.J. Cale and Bonnie Raitt in the swampy guitars and raggedly laidback vocals of Nothing But The Water, GP&TN’s newest record (and, after a long courtship, their first with a major label) is altogether trickier to pin down.

Released in August, This Is Somewhere (a play on a classic Neil Young record title) is an album that – at its best parts - sounds like the last days of summer, like wistful reflection (on tracks like “Apologies” and “Big White Gate”), like slow burn Kerouacian soul gazing through car windows (“Stop The Bus”), like jagged guitar solos and bouncing rhythm sections. And, then, there are Potter’s vocals. Warm, revealing, with seductive whispers and soaring screams and a hell of a range in between, like Norah Jones with a pulse of 160.

During their live set opening for Gov’t Mule on Friday night, she’s the obvious focal point of the band and not just because she’s the only one who isn’t wearing a hat. On the other hand, good looks – even great looks – don’t construct a groove or make a smooth song transition. To start their too brief 45 minute performance (the band members initially thought they had an hour, then hastily restructured their set when they found out they didn’t), the band strolled out on the stage to a half-filled Bank of America Pavilion and tore into “Stop The Bus” like the only people in the room were the ones onstage.

How do they psych themselves up for performances like that? “I’ve been really into voodoo lately,” Dondero cracks before the show.

While Tournet mentions influences like Roy Buchanan and Neil Young, his guitar work – the strutting riffs, lyrical lead licks and the kind of scorching solos that sound like they’re ripped rather than played – recalls the concision and versatility of Mike Campbell, ace guitar man for Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. In any case, he, Dondero and Burr crank out the kind of rhythm that would serve as a steady foundation for a house. Dondero, though not a flashy performer, knows just how to hit the sweet spot with his bass line. When they crack open (the sadly ITunes-only Somewhere track) “If I Was From Paris,” it’s a six-minute lesson in how to combine thrash, hooks and percussive ass kicking.

Burr later points out that he has a stuffed doll of Animal, one of music’s great underrated drummers, on his set, and it’s easy to see the influence. Though the band is capable of more thoughtful, atmospheric songs when they stretch out, there’s no time for that now as they move into “I’ve Been Watching You,” where the rapid fire sputter of guitar shrieks from Tournet finally betrays that Neil Young worship. As the crowd stands on its feet and Burr throws one of his cymbals (“a direct effect of watching The Kids Are Alright,” he admits), the band rides the feedback wave into a song built for set closing. “Nothing But The Water,” which starts with Potter a cappella, eventually moves into a four-way drum solo and finally concludes with the crowd and band chanting the chorus – minus any microphones – until Potter, Tournet, Dondero and Burr exit stage left, taking with them the adoration of at least a few hundred new fans.

“What do I think of Grace Potter?” a Gov’t Mule fan says, echoing my question to him during Mule’s set. “I think she’s one of the hottest singers I’ve seen onstage in a while.”

And, also: “No shit! Oh my god,” when I tell him that she’ll be out in a moment to sing Neil Young’s “Southern Man” with Warren Haynes and company. Haynes, who looks about four shades paler up close, proposed the idea backstage before the show, and Potter had to double check the words to the second verse online. When she joins The Mule onstage, she nails it, screaming with the strip-the-paint-off-the-walls urgency of a white, “Gimme Shelter”-era Merry Clayton. It’s a good thing that the song closes out the first set; Mule certainly didn’t have anything in its arsenal to top it.

…………………………………

Backstage before the show, the band is no less lively and uninhibited than they will be in front of the crowd. A short interview with Potter, Tournet and Dondero turns into a forty-five minute shit-shooting session that lasts until soundcheck and then continues after the show with drummer Burr. As they joke and swear and laughingly interrupt each others’ stories, the band’s freewheeling openness is disarming and endearing. Burr, in particular, has a kind of sincerity that’s hard to find anywhere, let alone backstage in a band’s lounge at a rock concert.

After I make my way to meet them at the labyrinthine BoA Pavilion – a process that includes (no joke) taking a quasi-secret passage - Potter greets me in the interview room and, as Dondero and Tournet enter, tries to decide where she wants to hang a scarf to enliven the drab surroundings. Pausing to belch occasionally – she’s in a band with three others guys, after all – Potter and her band mates dizzily relay the story of their appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. The highlight of their potentially career-making national television performance? It wasn’t actually being on The Tonight Show. It was meeting (Leno bandleader) Kevin Eubanks’ guitar tech – longtime Neil Young/Crazy Horse guitar player Frank “Poncho” Sampedro.

“Claire Danes was begging Bryan for his autograph, waiting outside his door, trying so hard to get his autograph, and Bryan was like, ‘Leave me alone! I’m talking to Poncho’” Potter says. “Bob Saget’s like, ‘Hey guys, I want to talk to Poncho, too.’ And we’re like, ‘No! Saget, Poncho’s all ours.’”

“We have a very cool plan,” Tournet interjects when I ask about the band’s infrequent, though consistently epic live covers of Young’s “Cortez The Killer.” “We could give you the scoop,” he teases.

“Give him the scoop!” Potter insists.

“We exchanged phone numbers [with Poncho],” Tournet goes on. “He was super cool, he was super psyched that we even knew who he was and cared and loved his music, so when we’re out in L.A., our master plan is to get Warren [Haynes] and Poncho up for [a live cover of] “‘Cortez.’”

Considering that the last time I saw the band play “Cortez,” it clocked in at a towering 21 minutes and put new cracks in the floor of the Paradise Rock Club, the potential of that collaboration is kind of scary. Still, while the love for classic rock is unyielding, This Is Somewhere sounds less out of its time than its predecessors, a sign perhaps that the band is more comfortable in its own skin. And, also, that the members discovered albums that didn’t pre-date the 8-track.

“I think we’re opening up to the idea of listening to newer music,” Potter says. Before, “it was, ‘No, we don’t listen to anything except the Rolling Stones and Neil Young and Taj Mahal. It was like we had a rulebook, and the rulebook ended in 1975.”

“Ah, it was a great time,” Tournet says, mock wistful.

“What happened?” Potter asks. “Now we’re listening to fucking Kraftwerk.”

“Hey, hey, easy!” he responds.

Even with its modern influences, This Is Somewhere has that unique Nocturnals feel, the lived-in warmth of their other albums but some more polish too. And, also, a little bit of mystery, something I can’t quite put my finger on. A quick read through the liner notes offers a clue, a credit to a shadowy organization called the Booty Call Choir.

“It’s fucking me!” Potter exclaims, laughing. “We really wanted everybody to know they can dig deep and see who played what on the record and who was contributing what little pieces and parts to each song. And, I do sing a lot of backup, but I wanted to add a little myth in there that there were these hot mamas in the room to make it sound good.”

Perhaps realizing that admitting to a hoax is no way to create a myth, she backtracks. “It’s not me. It’s three women, and they would actually track [their vocals] naked.”

The band’s success hasn’t quite gone to their heads yet, fictional naked backup singers aside. Their dreams for the future don’t involve mansions or groupies or Scarface-sized mountains of blow. At least, not yet. (Tournet wants “a tour bus,” and Dondero simply hopes the band will be able to headline a full cross-country tour.) Citing bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the White Stripes who achieved success on their own terms, Burr says the band is not looking for any easy cash-in, overnight sensation solution.

“It’s not like we’re going full-on through the pop machine, like Nickelback,” he concludes. “Like those awful corporate rock bands.”

Maybe it’s their intense touring schedule or the years they spent rejecting major label offers or maybe it’s some weird Vermont “to each according to his need” thing, but this isn’t a band that’s caught up in its own bullshit. Of course, the easiest way to avoid that is not to believe the bullshit to begin with.

“We haven’t ‘arrived,’” is the way Tournet characterizes it. “The last three years has been people telling us, ‘It’s happening.’”

“Money, we don’t make,” Potter insists. “We’re not there in any way on that level.”

“We always said from day one we didn’t want to blow up too quickly,” Tournet says.

“We didn’t take that Miller Lite commercial we were offered,” she says.

“Everyone in L.A. thinks you’re retarded for not wanting that,” he laments.

The band’s idealism – what Tournet says others have called their “naïveté” – sometimes conflicts with the desire to have their music touch as many people as possible. They try to thread that needle – they’ll do Grey’s Anatomy but probably not commercials for Exxon Mobil. But, when it comes to actually selling their stuff, it’s a bit more complicated, as Burr admits when talking about having the CD on the racks at Wal-Mart.

“One side of me thinks Wal-Mart has evildoings and evil ways,” he says. “But, there’s a part of me that realizes that is someone’s only store where they can go buy our CD. That’s their only music store.”

It’s an idea echoed by other band members. What it really comes down to is rock and roll populism of the best kind. You don’t make fans by deciding what sort of people you don’t want listening to you. After all, the music that Grace Potter & The Nocturnals are steeped in pre-dates the era of a thousand prefixes, of the indie- this and the alt- that.

“One thing that we did is we never set ourselves up to be Arcade Fire,” Potter continues. “We set ourselves up to be a good rock band that people want to see. We don’t want to be so exclusive that if a 45-year-old dude wants to bring his kids to the show, he’s going to get weird looks.”

“If he’s not wearing a scarf,” Tournet adds.

That’s not to say, though, that the band is afraid to piss people off. Far from it. The first track on the new album is the seductively deceptive “Ah Mary.” It opens with a J.J. Cale-style acoustic strum, and Potter’s breathy delivery: “She’s skilled at the art of deception and she knows it/she’s got dirty money that she plays with all the time.” The chorus contains one of the record’s killer lines, “She’ll bake you cookies/then she’ll burn your town,” immediately before the song ascends into full-on balls-out rock mode, as though Burr’s Keith Moon switch were flipped into the “on” position.

As the song draws to a close, however, Potter pulls out her first surprise in an album full of them. The shouts of “Mary Mary Mary” seamlessly turn into “America,” an emphatic condemnation of an ideology that runs much deeper than the war in Iraq. It’s the band’s first protest song. Sort of.

“I don’t like political songs,” Potter says. “I’m sick of hearing musicians pretending that they have any concept of how the world could become a better place, politically speaking. They don’t know what needs to go on to make it better.”

So then what gives with lines like “Call her a bully and she’ll blow up your whole damn playground”? There’s no mistaking the sentiment there. Potter says she prefers her route, subtler if not exactly subtle. Most sweeping, on-the-nose condemnations are neither constructive nor that interesting to listen to, she adds.

“I know plenty of Republicans and pretty conservative people who fucking love that song,” Potter explains. “I think maybe it’s slowly seeping into their sub-conscious, and they’ll play the record for their children and then their children will be destroyed forever.”

There’s the real scoop, folks. Today, it’s the Bank of America Pavilion for Grace Potter & The Nocturnals. Tomorrow? It’s the planet. World domination hasn’t rocked this hard since 1975.

Movie Previews or: My Attempt To Use My Many Half-Assed Writings On My Half-Assed Blog

2007-08-29T20:45:00.000-05:00

Well, friends, I thought I'd try to get some synergy happening here for you. And, even though you could easily read these on another website (the fabulous Weekly Dig's A&E section), I thought I'd cut you a break and post them here as well. And, in the coming weeks, I promise more of the content you've come to vaguely remember reading.

Resident Evil: Extinction

How the fuck did Resident Evil become a trilogy? It seems like only yesterday I walked out of the original with a vague taste of shit in my mouth, and now comes Resident Evil: Extinction to make me nostalgic for the subtle piquancy of its predecessors. This time, Alice (Milla Jovovich) has to fight off zombie hordes while traversing the desert. If that sounds like an R-rated Oregon Trail, relax, it's not nearly as interesting as, say, dysentery. Director Russell Mulcahy's previous credits include Highlander and the video for Billy Joel's "A Matter of Trust," which makes him either Hollywood's most versatile hack or a fucking lunatic. Once upon a time, terrible third installments were forgivable because they'd have some redeeming purpose, like prominently featuring Ewoks or making a box set possible. We've already seen Jovovich's nipples, so unless they're going to bring in ZZ Top, this series peaked too early.

The Brave One

Aside from a tiny part in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement, Jodie Foster has been in just five movies in the last decade, a list that includes Flightplan and Anna and the King, and proves that when you're picking between "quality" and "quantity," you can easily choose "none of the above." Considering its star and its director (The Crying Game's Neil Jordan), there's some hope that The Brave One will be more than what it looks like, which is an insane, feminist retelling of Death Wish with Foster in the Charles Bronson role. Here, her dark-skinned boyfriend (Naveen Andrews) is killed by some damned hoodlums, and Foster sets out for justice with a lot of guns and not so much patience. (In other words, it's Giuliani time.) After this and Panic Room, I'd like to ask Foster if she ever gets tired of kicking ass -- but not to her face, because I'm afraid she'd kill me.

Good Luck Chuck

Despite selling out the TD Banknorth Garden and having the most successful comedy CD not containing the words "Git," "R" or "Done," Dane Cook can't make it click when it comes to movies. Is it that the frantic gestures that serve him so well onstage seem overblown and superfluous on screen? Or perhaps it's that he lacks substantive insight into his characters? Oh, wait, no -- it's that his movies are fucking terrible. He seems in no danger of breaking that streak with Good Luck Chuck, where it looks like he'll mercifully take Jessica Alba down with him. Cook plays Chuck, a single thirtysomething who grapples with a rather unlikely curse: Any woman who has sex with him immediately moves on to find her true love. Cook's haters say the story has an autobiographical edge, since many who've had sex with him only subsequently realized that they actually loved another man: Louis C.K.

First Blood: Virgin Diary 2 (Wow, these double meanings are killing me)

2007-08-11T08:18:00.000-05:00

12 hours and one blood transfusion after the end of Day One, my dependable photographer/trusty attorney/unlicensed physician Chuck and I set out to conquer the Virgin Music Festival once and for all.

Sprinting into the race track about two hours late, the first thing I notice after getting over my fear that I’d suffer a stroke if my heart rate got above 40 is that it’s significantly cooler. The soles of my shoes no longer boil when they’re on blacktop. This is a good sign.

But there are bad signs.

First, Sunday has a glaring schedule problem, and it is as follows: Whoever made the schedule for Saturday did it with the intention of making festival goers run about 19 laps around the course. Whoever made the schedule for Sunday apparently did it by throwing darts at band names. Matisyahu, who stands at about 9 and a half feet tall and can be seen from across the race track, is placed on the second stage, where his exuberant, funky set draws virtually the entire crowd, minus a few precious hipsters worshipping at the altar of solo Regina Spektor at the main stage. He even holds the crowd for most of Spoon’s set. (A quick digression here: Spoon is flat-out terrific, and their live show lets their tight, disciplined sound breathe ever so slightly, and it works wonders. They’re cool without being distant, and their music blends together so many disparate sounds – the jangly guitars of indie rock, punk’s aggressive riffing, tight Motown horns – and with such success that I’m tempted to write like one of those jackasses who works in as many puns as possible in his reviews and say that they make me go Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. Anyway, pretty much no one saw their set.)

This scheduling thing is not an issue that looks like it will be resolved by putting the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on the main stage and Wu Tang Clan – who ain’t nothing to, uh, fudge with – on the second stage.

Problem the second: whenever you have a two-day (or more) festival, you are faced with one big, smelly question – what do you do with the thick layer of garbage that coats the ground at the end of the first day? You could clean it, but it seems a pointless task since every empty beer bottle will be replaced by a fresh, new empty beer bottle before you can say “giant landfill.” The option that the Virgin people opted for? To wait it out until the close of the weekend. Certainly, the cheaper option, but also the one that ensured that – by the end of the thing – portions of the race track would look like they’d be home to that unnamed garbage monster from the first Star Wars movie.

I am drowning in the deep end of this pool of worries when Panic! At The Disco hits the stage, playing like they’re planning to pack two hours of emo into a lightning-quick fifty minute set. The suburbanite teenage girls and people resting up for the Yeahs (on next) build a modest, though energetic crowd, which makes their collective “A-wuh?!” at the band’s choice to cover, of all songs, The Band’s “The Weight” that much more hilarious. It is a confusion I share. There are many things you expect to hear at a Panic! At The Disco concert. “Who here has had their hearts broken on LiveJournal?” Sure. “This one goes out to the good people at Urban Outfitters!” Maybe. But not, definitely not, “I pulled into Nazareth/was feelin’ about half past dead…”

I feel its time for a crab cake, but I’m tragically short on cash, having spent it all at the end of the previous day on sunburn treatment and physical therapy. I hit up the ATM where the surcharge is high enough to make me think about rape counseling. They don’t sell anti-depressants at the Virgin Music Festival, but in this case, hefeweizen is close enough.

I make a quick escape to Bad Brains, whose hugely influential rap/metal sound inspires the first mosh pits of the weekend. They’ve influenced bands like the Beastie Boys and Rage Against The Machine, and if that means they also share the responsibility for Limp Bizkit, well, their explosive live show warrants forgiveness (and renders earplugs practically useless).

Still, I tend to avoid concerts where the music inspires people to throw themselves into the crowd or beat the hell out of each other. It means I’ll never get to see Neil Diamond, and it also requires me to leave Bad Brains if I want to avoid bruising. By this point, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are onstage, with Karen O suggestively crawling over a sound monitor, screeching out her vocals while clad in that Lone Ranger-as-the-Phantom-of-the-Opera silver S&M get up. She is a magnetic frontwoman, in addition to being a terrifyingly weird one. Her performance makes for the best photos of the day, none of which we get because we arrive at the photo pit approximately four seconds after the cut-off for photographers to enter.

Dejected, I retreat to the press area, where MTV’s John Norris – now a less-than-believable blonde - is pacing back and forth, wearing skin-tight sky blue pants and dark sunglasses. I want to ask him if he knows where I can find some water, but he looks like he’d snap my neck like a twig if I make a false move. The festival’s publicist (I’ll call her Mary since she probably wants no part of this story) says hello, temporarily scaring the hell out of me by knowing my first name. I try to make competent small talk with her, but she seems confused by my heartache at being rejected by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and my concern that John Norris is having a mid-life crisis. She walks away in that all-too-familiar slow, frightened way that tells me I should probably never e-mail her again.

Still, there’s no time to mope, as Wu Tang Clan is going on in a matter of minutes. My photographer and I sprint over to the second stage – actually, he sprints and I hire out a rickshaw – only to discover that it is surrounded by a crowd of thousands. I curse the scheduler in my head, and then curse him again when Wu Tang comes out twenty minutes late. By this point, the crowd is way passed wired and approaching Red Sox levels of unruliness. You can only chant “Wu Tang Clan ain’t nothin’ to [uh, fudge] with” so many hundreds of times before you want to find something to punch. The band takes the stage to ecstatic squeals, or at least they sounded like squeals – by then, I was in mid-rickshaw ride to see the Crystal Method’s DJ set in the Dance tent.

The Dance tent exists in a separate, altogether sweatier world. Flashing lights and lasers cut through the smoke – not all of which is from fog machines – as people groove determinedly, eyes closed tightly as their bodies bounce to the beat. A man dancing from one end of the tent to the other offers an enthusiastic “Nice” to someone he sees lighting a joint. There’s a quiet companionship to all this swaying, and it makes me nervous, like the group could at any moment form a zombie mob and take over a village.

Frightened and bored before the start of Velvet Revolver, I retreat to the VIP section, where those about to rock can mingle with those about to enjoy $9 California rolls. Through either telepathy or an ability to read my press pass, they sense that I don’t belong there, and they eye me suspiciously, wondering to themselves what sort of fight I’d put up if they had to euthanize me. It’s a brutal divide, indicative of a class system at concerts and festivals that in many ways mirrors the feudal pyramid.

At the bottom, there are the peasants, the saps, the ones who paid for their tickets because they actually like the music. They get all the amenities of someone staying in the boiler room of a Days Inn. Above these peons are the guests – not quite important enough to be VIPs and yet not willing to sway to the music along with the unwashed masses. They’ve been comp’d in for various reasons – radio contests, low-level friends in the know, dumb luck - and they, in turn, bow at the altar of VIPs, the high-rollers of concerts. They get paraded around to various gated-off viewing areas to make sure that they don’t interact with anyone who might drive an American car. In the end, however, there’s only so much access they can buy, for they are not, and never will be, With The Band. The musicians and the promoters form a sort of landed aristocracy of concerts; they own the turf, and we pay them merely for using it. In a personal festival highlight, I watch from the rail as a group of twenty-something girls attempts to convince unwavering security guards to let them backstage for Velvet Revolver. The guards don’t budge, until the flock of blondes parts and a silver-haired man emerges, gently asking to be allowed to pass. One guard refuses, since the man doesn’t have the proper combination of colored passes and stickers. Another guard notices the situation, scurries over, and nervously whispers in his friend’s ear, “Let him go. He owns all of this,” just in time for the realization to sink in that the man being hassled is Virgin head Richard Branson. He’s a good sport about the whole thing; later in the day, a reporter writing a feature on him confirms, telling me that Branson is a billionaire of the non-megalomaniacal variety.

Velvet Revolver is a band made up mostly of the remnants of Guns ‘N Roses (guitarist Slash, bassist Duff McKagan, drummer Matt Sorum) and Stone Temple Pilots (scarily thin frontman Scott Weiland). In the studio, VR manages to sound like a bad hangover, worse than the worst songs of both GnR and STP. Live, VR feels like one of those bands that’s going to bring rock back if it personally has to drink every bottle of Jack Daniels in America to do it. There’s a certain weird fascination in watching Weiland perform, since he seems to be wasting away before your eyes; the whole thing resembles a live action Behind The Music. It’s a hypnotic kind of anorexia, but it works. Between that and Slash reminding us of the way a Les Paul ought to be played, VR is a surprisingly energetic outfit whose mediocre studio sound does nothing to hint at a rock solid live bluster.

Of course, I have a few beers, a couple crab cakes, and a pint of dust in my system by this point. Then again, maybe that’s the best way to see Velvet Revolver.

It is not, however, the best way to see the Smashing Pumpkins. Taking the stage in all white, singer/guitarist Billy Corgan looks like an angelic mental patient. Though the band starts off strong with some blistering guitar work and a screaming feedback tease of the Star Spangled Banner, their odd lack of enthusiasm makes new material like “Tarantula” sound like a nightmarish cover of one long John Carpenter movie theme. The old radio favorites, like “Today,” do bring some in the crowd and the band back to life, but by the time the rain starts coming down, the whole thing gets too melancholy even for a group that traffics in it.

Normally, rain at an outdoor festival would be a welcome shower, but it’s Baltimore, so the water falling from the sky starts eating through my clothes and burning my skin. I retreat to a guest area near the stage and find people sprawled out on straw beds watching TV broadcasts of the show. The slight broadcast delay makes it a surreal site – drunk concertgoers enjoying the very recently past part of a concert that’s going on fifty feet to their right.

I’m afraid viewing a half-assed TiVo version of an ongoing concert will create some kind of Back to the Future Part Two-like rip in the time-space continuum, so I scurry to the packed second stage for the start of 311’s set. They blow away their feverishly appreciative fans, even ending a few minutes passed their scheduled time (though it was due less to the spontaneity of live performance and more to the fact that Wu Tang’s delay screwed up everyone’s schedule). I have no idea about the quality of their set; by then, I was tripping on exhaustion, and in my sleepy hallucinations, the members of the band mostly look like sheep gently leaping over fences, while every number sounds like a gentle lullaby. The final song of their performance and the festival is, “Who’s Got The Herb?”

I run back to my car, but there’s already a traffic jam waiting for me in the parking lot. We hit the open highway around 1 am, tired, but mostly satisfied. We needed a weekend to do it, but we took on the Virgin Festival and we won. Unless you count all the money we lost and the physical pain we were in. In that case, Virgin won.

A Virgin Diary (There's gotta be a better way to phrase that) PART ONE

2007-08-08T19:48:00.001-05:00

Like all good music festivals, a day and a half at the Virgin Festival in Baltimore left me pretty well numb to music. And, also, pretty much just numb in general. With twenty-eight bands (plus fifteen DJ acts) confined to sets averaging an hour in length, each day felt like the musical equivalent of running laps while flipping through TV channels at top speed for twenty straight hours.

The first day was hot. Real hot. I fell asleep on the ground and woke up with fresh grill marks. The venue was the same race track that’s home to the Preakness, so there wasn’t much to block out the soul-melting heat. There was, however, more dust than in the first chapter of The Grapes of Wrath. And, so, it began.

Part 1: Saturday

Time: 2:50 pm

Approximate temperature: 101 degree

Heat stroke level: Pleasantly medium

Water bottles consumed: 5

Because its too early to be decently drunk, Amy Winehouse is playing a great set, which I can hear while spending thirty minutes coughing in the media tent. Media people are welcome to free water, as well as a complimentary meal that I intend to spend on the most expensive dinner possible. If I have to sit through Incubus – or, worse yet, stand through Incubus - I deserve it.

All the press people have badges that identify the organization and the person by first initial and last name. There’s more than a little bit of envy as reporters and photographers sneak glances at the nametags and try to figure out who they can feel superior to. Even so, the oppressive heat and cramped press tent means photographers from the AP and Rolling Stone have to mingle with the local newspaper folk in a microcosm of a classless utopia where everyone has all the water and internet access he could need.

With a bit of downtime before Incubus hits the main stage, I decide to go exploring. There are the usual food stands (plus several selling crabcakes), a few curiosities, and a large smattering of gleefully self-promoting organizations. A plane flying overhead carries a radio station banner that reads, “Save A Horse, Ride A Virgin.” The Guitar Hero people are a short walk from the political action groups, and in between them all, there’s mid-air performance art, Incredibly Strange Wrestling, and a large machine that regularly shoots fireballs into the air.

Before I get a chance to see if I can use the machine to make the biggest s’mores ever, Incubus takes the stage to the biggest crowd yet. The audience is an interesting mix of die-hards and those who’d rather nurse their chicken tenders. This being only its second year in Baltimore, the Virgin Festival is still struggling to figure out who its fans are and how much they’d be willing to pay for 24 ounces of Bud Light. Walking through the crowd in pursuit of a $12 crabcake, I catch the tail end of a conversation that includes the line, “I could never really get into Johnny Cash” and wonder who these people are. One thing is for sure, though: they love Incubus. There is crowd-surfing during the last song, because if you’re going to be covered in sweat, why not spread some if it around? Immediately after the end of their set, I have trouble remembering anything about Incubus. I’m hoping that’s not an early sign of mental breakdown brought on by dehydration.

Time: 4:55

Approximate temperature: 243 degrees

Heat stroke level: Dangerously high

Water bottles consumed: 9

Crabcakes enjoyed: 1

I can actually feel the sun on the inside of my chest. I wonder if enough heat will superheat my heart like a microwaved pop-tart. Will I bleed strawberry fruit filling if it explodes? Is it hotter than this inside an oven in hell? And what’s that burning smell coming from my hair?

There are no hard answers to any of these questions, but luckily, there is music. The first standout set of the day is played by Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals, in a quick highlight reel of a performance that testifies to the advantages and limitations of the festival’s tight schedule. The soul revival quality of opener “With My Own Two Hands” gradually gives way to the tight, energetic groove of Harper’s reggae/funk-focused set. A passionate, shouting take on “Better Way” with Harper on slide guitar, sounds like Hendrix backed by Booker T and the MGs and energizes the main stage crowd long enough to leave everyone feeling thoroughly depressed when Harper’s total time clocks in at an hour.

Back at the press section, the photographers are swarming around the escort who will take them into the photo pit for the Beastie Boys. As standard procedure goes, photos are only allowed during the first two songs, guaranteeing the maximum amount of fighting, pushing, and yelling among the camera jockeys. Once they get into the pit, it’s every man for himself, but right now, it’s a brotherhood of irritation as they argue with the photo escort about who has the proper credentials to get into the pit, and if Europe really has press organizations.

Dressed like the Blues Brothers, the now-graying Beasties take the stage at their appointed time, with some crowd members obviously unsure how to react as MCA and Adrock strap on guitars. Mike D still prances around like an obnoxious seventeen-year-old, and despite leaning heavily on unfamiliar new material, the band breaks the crowd out of V-Fest’s sweat-built prison.

“We’re sweating with you people,” Mike D says early on. “We’re not sweating as much. But we are sweating.”

As they go into a version of “Brass Monkey” that I would describe as “off the hook” if I could possibly use that expression believably, I remember that I had some vague desire to see TV on the Radio, playing on the second stage at the same time. Attempting to wade through the crowd at this point is like trying to run blindfolded through that snow maze at the end of The Shining. In my rush, I step on some blankets, break some fingers, spill some beers, and crush what may have been a child’s head, but it’s mostly worth it. The band manages to build on the layered experimentation of their studio albums with the kind of live show that would be mindblowing in a venue slightly smaller than a horserace track that holds 50,000. Though it’s easy to see why David Bowie loves these guys, I had to settle for guitar feedback and migraines.

At this point, the skin-searing heat has given way to infinitely more tolerable dust tornadoes. The remarkable thing is not that they can have concerts where they race the Preakness; it’s that horses can actually survive these conditions. With dust spilling out of my mouth during coughing fits, I take a seat in the chill out area, where a thin mist is sprayed out all over me, completely failing to cool me down but admirably succeeding at making me feel really icky.

And, now, it’s time for The Police.

Time: 8:35

Approximate temperature: Boiling lava hot

Heat stroke level: Hilariously delirious

Water bottles consumed: 23, including 8 dumped over head

Crabcakes enjoyed: 1

Crabcakes regretted: 1

The crowd swells in number as Stewart Copeland sprints out to his drum set and hits a giant gong to queue The Police to open up with “Message in a Bottle.” The word on the street is that Virgin head honcho Richard Branson personally lobbied the group to play the festival. Since he’s a billionaire, I’m going to assume his business sense is better than his musical taste.

For all of their first two songs, Sting and Andy Summers jump up and high kick in outfits that make them look like mummified aerobics instructors, but no one in the audience air-guitaring to “Synchronicity II” seems to notice. But, then, their eyesight has probably been failing them for years now. For those more worried about Sting’s skin tight pants than impressed by his crisp bass playing, The Police were like a hangover headache that decided to permanently move in to the side of your forehead.

Even those traveling to the second stage to catch Modest Mouse could run but they couldn’t hide from the sound bleed over of “Everything Little Thing She Does Is Magic.”

It puts everyone on edge in the way only soft rock can. Even the photographers for Modest Mouse are dangerously riled up, harassing Johnny Marr (once of The Smiths) to pose for them like a model, but Marr’s in his own world, along with the thousands in the crowd who seem like they were dropped off by their parents on the way to The Police.

I’m running laps around the track trying to take in both Modest Mouse and The Police, and I end up getting some nightmarish mix of both, a rancid stew of jangling guitars, screeching vocals, and ludicrously elaborate drum fills.

Suddenly, the music from the main stage stops amid a roar of applause that asks the question, “What band is bold enough to squeeze a gong break and two encore breaks into an hour-and-fifty minute set?” Who else but The Police, who managed not only to make the crowd wait for “Every Breath You Take” but actually enjoy it too. If it wasn’t for Copeland’s supercharged drum work, this band would be fucking unendurable.

And, then, it was all over. Well, half of it was over. Battered, broke, and in need of a dusting, fans headed to the two-hour parking lot traffic jam - waiting for them like the worst “thank you” gift in history - exhausted by the knowledge that they’d be doing all of this again in ten hours.

God help us all.

That’s all for now…stay tuned for Part 2, featuring Sunday, danger, intrigue, pumpkins, DJs, and Richard Branson himself!

First 9/11 And Now This...LiveJournal Attempts To Thwart Pedophiles. Ends Up Thwarting Discussion of Lolita. Shit Hits Fan.

2007-06-15T17:53:00.000-05:00

So, child rapists are big fans of LiveJournal. (Hang on, it gets funny.) And, the people in charge of the online discussion community were not happy. You could imagine the conversation: “Pedophiles on the internet?! Come on, that’s what MySpace is for! And, if Chris Hansen finds out, we’re fucked five ways to Toys ‘R Us.”

LiveJournal reacted (and, as fate would have it, overreacted) to the complaints by deleting all the communities and suspending the journals of any users involved in any discussion of all non-wholesome activities. Turns out, if you can’t at least talk about child fucking academically, you can’t discuss a lot of important things. Like Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. And the Stanley Kubrick film version of Lolita. And the 1997 Lolita remake with Jeremy Irons. And also twincest. What? Yes. Besides deleting a bunch of genuine child molestation interest groups, LiveJournal also purged novel discussions and fan-fiction, like sexually explicit stories about characters in the Harry Potter series. And, come on, if thousands of people aren’t allowed to make the same joke about Harry Potter’s magic wand, what the fuck is the internet for? Besides, the dude’s already riding ponies the really wrong way in Equus.

And, even though legal precedents place LiveJournal squarely in the clear in terms of liability for user-written fictional stories, the company decided the offending journals violated company policy because they could be harmful to children, who as a group are apparently and uniformly without any supervision. It’s a thorny issue that makes you nostalgic for the days when we could traumatize our children in strictly non-sexual ways, like stigmatizing the left-handed kids or teaching them to hate minority opinions.

Unhappily for LiveJournal, their web of good intentions also deleted journals for rape/incest survivor and support group members. Whoops! But, come on, taking away everyone’s civil liberties in an ill-advised and transparently ineffective attempt to get at a few bad seeds…where could they have gotten that idea?

Turns out they got it from a group called warriorsforinnocence.org that maintains a website as laden with spyware as it is with far-right batshit insane Confederate rhetoric. (Kind of like the GOP, except these people seem to have figured out that the internet isn’t all tubes.)

After massive outcry from users and a still-impressive plurality of Americans with common sense, LiveJournal reversed itself, reinstating almost all of the wrongly suspended journals. But, even if the damage can be undone, the incident will forever serve as a cautionary note. First, they came for the queer, feminist writers of child molestation tales. And, then, they’ll come for me. And, where will that leave you? That’s right, up shit creek without a paddle, your favorite serialized internet novel of Buffy the Vampire Slayer incest literature, and my ridiculously irregular posts. God help us all.