Faith, unknown pleasures, and one imaginary girl

(This is one of my favorite of my old Epinions.com music writings. It's a concert review from late 2003, so it's not remotely practical, but Facebook's been abuzz with here's-some-cool-concerts-I've-seen nostalgia, and re-reading this, I figured this can be my entry.)
 
In logical terms, I suppose there’s two reasons why you should want to hear about the Mary Timony concert I saw Wednesday night.  First of all, you might be a fan of the type of music she and bassist Jeff Goddard were playing.  Do you like the starkness of the Faith/ Pornography-era Cure and their drum machines, the weird but disciplined guitar howl of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, the fierce if muddy monolith that was Black Sabbath?  Then never mind, this was written 13 years ago, ha ha ha ha. Or, secondly, do you simply like Mary Timony: for Helium’s dissonant multi-guitar blur, or for the mediaevalized indie-rock of her solo career?  Then obviously you’d be curious to see how her songs transfer to other settings.

Neither of these, however, has much to do with why I found her concert so revelatory, or why I’m telling you about it.

#409: Modest Mouse, "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes" (2000)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EA5b3FNI4w

My Mom wouldn't have liked Modest Mouse, I feel sure. I don't mean the music, necessarily; once I introduced her to rock music, she developed some pretty interesting taste. Most of it was gushingly melodic, to be sure -- XTC and They Might Be Giants and Barenaked Ladies; sugar-rush bands like the Primitives and Stretch Princess; modern folkies like Dar Williams and Christine Lavin and Kate Jacobs; some punk-pop (she enjoyed her little moments as the white-haired woman in glasses carrying used Bad Religion and Vandals cd's to the puzzled young men at the counter). But she loved the jangle and the textural haze of the Church, and the sultry bass and sinister dance pulse of Shriekback, and you can triangulate to "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes" from that. That lithe exercise-friendly bass line, the Ennio Morricone guitar and violin stabs, the alarmed-rattlesnake-racing-through-cookware percussion, and the way Isaac Brock doubles every word he sings by simultaneously speaking it as close to the lowest audible frequency as he can manage: she might have found it perversely sexy, as she did Shriekback's Barry Andrews. It's conceivable.

Chicken vs. egg

Taking the "chicken or the egg" conundrum on its own intended terms, I've long thought it was an easy one: the egg came first. All chickens come from eggs, but at some point, historically, something we'd marginally class as a chicken was birthed by something we wouldn't. The real question is why I chose to accept the intended meaning at all, when my sons this morning found better ones.

For example: the egg came first. By hundreds of millions of years. Some tiny sea creature hatched.

Or: the chicken came first, because c comes before e. (I'll add that if someone starts selling the iChicken, it will also have come first:

#410: James McMurtry, "How'm I Gonna Find You Now?" (2015)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bE3DVMwjfw

Sometimes picking the searchable musical tags for these countdown posts is easy. "Indie pop" ropes in Los Campesinos! and Dowling Poole and Gentleman Auction House; "alternative rock" has both recognizable sonic characteristics and MTV certification for the Pixies and Mary Timony; "heavy metal" clearly fits Queensryche and Savatage. Joni Mitchell's "the Jungle Line" was tricky, but once I thought of "experimental pop" I immediately recognized several occasions I'll have to re-use it later in the countdown. James McMurtry ought to be straightforward: he's a country music songwriter, albeit a culturally rebellious one, so certainly here's the first use of the "folk/ country" tag I'd intended all along. But ideally you've clicked the link to play the song, in which case you can also sense the incompleteness of that label.

Shilling in the name

1. Now that it may no longer matter, it suddenly strikes me as weird that I don't think anyone, including me, ever renamed the longtime Fox News host as Bile O'Really.

2. Although since they didn't, I'll co-endorse Sean Thomason's quip: "Probably the most humiliating thing about being Bill O'Reilly is that most people think his name is 'Teenage Wasteland'".

3. Both Stephen Colbert and my friend Jeffrey-with-2-fs Norman independently joked that O'Reilly, the "nonfiction" author of "Killing Lincoln", "Killing Jesus", and "Killing Reagan", will have to make his next book "Killing My Career". Which is fine, as long as we understand that all of O'Reilly's "Killing Books" are about heroic figures torn down by pure evil. This pattern will continue.

One chatty dwarf and 2200 avid faces

Notes on last night’s Ben Folds solo-with-piano concert at Carolina Theater of Greensboro:

1. I had no idea he’s 50 years old. Dude looks real good for 50. Similarly, it’s snuck up on me how truly impressive I find his catalog. My blog’s countdown of my favorite songs has a one-per-artist limit that’s often easy to enforce, but he’s got fully ten songs that would qualify for me to write about — some funny and aggressive, some incredibly sweet, some thoughtful and a bit neurotic, one that helped anticipate and explain Trump’s presidency by six years. Even only playing five of those, he had no problem filling a 100-minute-plus-encore concert with excellent songs.

#411: Queensryche, "Revolution Calling" (1988)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNdOsL4Xe7Q

In high school, tales of dystopia are oddly thrilling. We're shown a dictatorial world in which teens are forced to memorize official fictions and have few choices over the content of their lives, and we get to pretend this is escapist fiction, full of heroic resistance, instead of our daily routine. (I suspect dystopia becomes a more and more attractive theme the more assigned homework a given student completes.) These days dystopias dominate Young Adult novels (the Hunger Games and Divergent and the Giver and Chaos Walking and Maze Runner series, and on, and on), and get turned into hit movies as often as not. In 1988, we mostly just had Aldous Huxley and George Orwell -- winning us over through sheer persuasive brilliance in the absence of targeted marketing. Joined, occasionally, by a rock band taking inspiration from them.

Cooked fish: the quiet tyranny

At Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump's favorite of the private clubs he owns, government safety inspectors discovered that fish intended to be served raw wasn't being inspected for parasites; that chicken, duck, beef, and ham were being dangerously stored at temperatures of 49 to 57 degrees F; and that the kitchen staff weren't washing their hands in a way that would sterilize germs. They learned this days before he was going to host Japan's Prime Minister there.

Trump, like any of the other Republican candidates would have (and like the Republican congress has repeatedly voted to do), is dramatically slashing the number of government safety inspectors, and attempting to repeal many safety regulations altogether.

Black and Armond White and named all over

Had a pleasant walk last night around nearby Bennett College, and couldn't help enjoying the fact that this (historically black, high-quality) college features Race Administration Building (named for John H Race), Black Residence Hall (named for Ethel F Black), and B Player Hall.

Which reminds to wonder if my kids have figured out yet that the Brown Building, on Market Street, probably isn't named after its crayola-perfect color. (Probably isn't, I say -- I should check.)

It also put me in the mood for the movie I saw after, "CB4", a fun hip-hop mockumentary which claims, diagetically, to be "a rapumentary by A. White". The character A. White is, of course, a cluelessly enthusiastic white frat-bro sort. On the other hand, one of our leading real-life film critics is also named A. White. He's black.

#412: Savatage, "the Wake of Magellan" (1998)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7k1TMhUxEgY

Switching from Joan Armatrading's unpredictable piano rhythms and soft washes of guitar to Jon Oliva's unpredictable piano rhythms and Chris Caffery's soft washes of guitar, we transition smoothly from jazz-pop to heavy metal.

I sometimes explain my musical tastes to myself (rightly or wrongly) as a logical consequence of my growing-up environment.

#413: Joan Armatrading, "Tell Me" (2013)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m33icE2L0tQ


Joan Armatrading, like Joni Mitchell, began her recording career before my birth as a folk and folk-pop artist -- distinguished at first in Armatrading's case by her soulful contralto voice -- and then stretched out. Joan's career progression was an unpredictable one, experimenting on different albums with Elton John-style rockers, disco, reggae, collaborations with Springsteen’s E Street Band, perky New Wave synth-pop, and — as her voice got deeper and richer — roots-rock and blues, although those rootsy explorations were made unconventional by her increasingly novel chord sequences.


The style-hopping meant that it was easy to enjoy one of her albums and be put off by the next,

Now keep the terrible truth to yourself: on the movie "Sausage Party"

1. For me, watching TV or movies is a social experience: half the fun is discussing/ joking about/ expanding on what I've seen after, so it's not something I do by myself. This means, of course, that I do not always pick what to watch. So sometimes the Decline of Western Civilization is the title of a documentary I watch, and sometimes it's just the phenomenon I'm experiencing. 

2. Sausage Party is beautifully animated. The food items, rendered as living talking beings, have the usual googly eyes, and gloved hands, and strikingly unusual limbs the thickness of popsicle sticks, but everything colorful, expressive, and as almost-convincingly 3-dimensional as any computer art I've run across yet. An exceptional amount of loving care has been put into bringing jars of mustard that yell "Holy shit, I've been chosen. Booyah, bitches!" to life.

#414: Joni Mitchell, "the Jungle Line" (1975)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF2_1Jfgo4I

For most of the 20th century, songwriting innovation in the Western world was an extremely male enterprise. This is, of course, a way of saying that there was only half as much musical innovation as a saner society would have allowed. Or at least, judging by *my* studies, the modern history of pop music, through the end of the 1960s, featured women largely in roles as singers, and as mainstream or genre songwriters (Patsy Cline, Carole King, Loretta Lynn, Judy Collins -- all except King were more noted as interpreters than writers anyway, although at least King stood out, according to Joe Queenan, as the harbinger of the Yuppie Apocalypse).

Joni Mitchell first came to attention writing folk songs. She wrote strong, unconventional melodies and strikingly well-observed lyrical details,

Lizard King, wizard bling

You know that I would be untrue --
You know that I would be a liar --
If I said I'm the kangaroo
Who played Bunk Moreland on "the Wire".
Please turn on the stove-top fire.
My hot dog's name is Oscar Meyer.
Sometimes my rhyming's uninspired.

*****
People are strange when you're a stranger.

Yes, but can we stand United?

I have Facebook friends linking an article about how what's wrong with the United Airlines incident is what's wrong with America. As anti-corporate as I am, my first inclination was to disagree here. It refers to a case in which United Airlines realized it needed space on a passenger flight in order to emergency-transport its own employees; offered $800 plus a free room at a nice hotel to anyone who volunteered to be moved to a flight the next afternoon; then, when no one accepted, it called in police force to eject randomly-chosen passengers (including a surgeon who had an operation to do the next morning).

My immediate feeling is that while the resort to police is a problem, I've been

Synonym toast

James: "To whoever stole my thesaurus, you made my day bad. I hope bad things happen to you. You're a bad person."

Me: "I vouch and authenticate, esteemed sir, that the iniquitous and nefarious perpetrator of the aforementioned malfeasance was veraciously not myself. But you have my unfeigned aspiration that the deed's elucidation and subsequent redemption are forthcoming imminently."

(What will happen next? Tune in next week, when you learn that the entire incident was a joke with, one fears, an extremely limited lifespan!)

#415: Xenia Rubinos, "Mexican Chef" (2016)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u1VAa1HBpM

Where disco music encourages athletic, flashy, gracefully stylized dancing --  y'all's Facebook suggestions from my Gloria Gaynor post have been much appreciated, and even caused three small transfers of money from me to iTunes -- I personally feel more comfortable moving to beats that encourage a bit more stomping, a bit more herky-jerkiness, or just some more straightforward swagger. "Mexican Chef" is from the second album by Xenia Rubinos. While she generally suggests to me what Bjork might have been like as a rowdy young NYC Latina whose Dad for some reason collected Emerson Lake & Palmer records [example]), this marks her first direct foray into just that kind of dance energy.

Maybe the signal is the noise: on U.S. standardized tests, from best to awfulest

I have three part-time teaching jobs, one of which, for Princeton Review, involves preparing students for standardized tests. Friday night, the Princeton Review job also involved me staying awake the entire night and taking three Advanced Placement tests in a row (because I hadn't been able to find any other free time to take them in), and reflecting how exceptionally well-designed they are, in comparison to the highly dubious tests I often help with.

Since teaching is one of my passions, and tests are a key force shaping (or mis-shaping) teaching in the United States, I'll share some of my opinions on the tests I'm familiar with. Ranked from best to worst: