1. art and entertainment
2. music

the process of
wedding out
be seeing you
jody & andre get married (and ask
their friends to write about some
songs)
wedding reception may 16, 2015, 4 p.m.
wang chung to live and die in l.a.
jody beth rosen and andre lafosse
conrad flynn
THANK you for celebrating with us! Jody drew this (never took a lesson).
Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful; and the end of
that mirth is heaviness. —Proverbs 14:13
"Everybody Have Fun Tonight" —Wang Chung
EVERY party has to end sometime, but for those who come to Los Angeles
from the normal parts of the world, which is just to say the less
insane parts, the abruptness with which the party ends in this town, or
reveals itself from the beginning to be a farce, is astonishing. One minute
you're on Sunset, singing "Hi-Diddle-Dee" with Katy Perry and
Slash, and wondering where you got the top hat that is currently on your
head, and the next you're asking for strange favors from mafia men near a
North Hollywood laundromat just so you can afford the bus ride to leave
town.
EVERY party has to end sometime, but for those who come to Los
menu
Passed Canapés:
Mushroom Tart
Whipped Ricotta on Toast
Chicken Meatballs
Angus Beef Sliders
On the Side:
Charcuterie and Cheese Boards
Crudités
Cake:
Almond Wedding Cake With Toasted Almond Cream Cheese Buttercream
Blueberry Walnut Wedding Cake With Sweet Lemon Buttercream
Coffee and Tea Service
Open Bar
events
Join us at 5 p.m. for (we hope) a Google Hangout with friends and family
across the globe, and at 7:30 for an afterparty in our Palihouse hotel room.
Room number to be announced.
Now, of course, most people's experience with the highs and lows of L.A.
falls somewhere in the middle, and that's probably what Wang Chung is
singing about here! With "To Live and Die in L.A." Wang Chung stands
next to Evelyn Waugh's "The Loved One" in literature, and George
Harrison’s "Blue Jay Way" in “bottom-of-the-catalog Beatles album tracks”
in being "British chums who come to our sunny shores, enjoy L.A, think it's
great, and then are suddenly alienated by the superficiality, the
unwholesomeness, the sense that things aren't quite as they're depicted in
the brochures and ‘80s movies. That behind all the glamor (this is Wang
Chung: glamour) there is an inner rot being concealed, and that one day
the great Earthquake not only will come but should come to this city,
come and tear it all down.
The British are fascinated by the dynamic L.A. has on offer! The classical
British characteristics of understatement and modesty: inverted into
showbiz hype and sleaziness. It's the city as The City: the great
opportunity and the worst influence. An alternative version of Pilgrim's
Progress, where Pilgrim never leaves the City of Destruction.
Around 2000, I guess? My company is still in the World Trade Center.
Somebody tells me the wallcovering guy died. A few reflections on
mortality, and I ooze back into work, unwillingly.
Today. I don't remember his name. I don't know anybody who'd
remember; some of them have died. Betcha Mottola doesn't even mention
him in his biography. Maybe he didn't even sell vinyl wallcoverings. Maybe
it was something else.
olivia newton-john magic
kate izquierdo
IF you are familiar with “Magic”—even if
glossy roller-disco musicals are not your
sweet spot—the song will evoke instant
rainbows, and an aura that’s ever-so-slightly
seductive.
Interviewed for a promotional behind-thescenes documentary, Olivia Newton-John
explains that Xanadu is an entertainment
picture and adds, “And I think the world
could use that now.” The music for this
particular brand of fantasy, which she goes on to call "modern nostalgia," is
an intentional blending of big-band orchestration with the contemporary
keyboard– and guitar-fused rock of the time.
Xanadu is typically associated with Electric Light Orchestra: their
appropriately modern yet nostalgic neon logo featured prominently in the
soundtrack's artwork. It floats majestically, borne aloft by Newton-John
the goddess in diaphanous shirt dress and matching leg warmers, courtesy
of costume designer Bobbie Mannix. But “Magic” had different origins.
Featured on the "ONJ" side of the album, the songwriting and production
for “Magic” are credited to John Farrar, Newton-John's longtime
collaborator. Farrar, importantly, was someone who understood NewtonJohn extremely well—he’d been writing for her for decades.
“Magic” works because it was created for its singer, tailored to a voice
initially made famous in folkier settings for its power and warmth. On
“Magic,” her innate understanding of pacing allows the song to build into a
sultry paean, placing a gentle twang on her enunciation at the right
moments, a perfect match for the keyboard-slick country ballad.
All of this mood-building wraps around lyrics born of a single fantastic
premise: each life, no matter how mundane, has moments when we truly
experience joy, when all the drudgery, missed appointments, and broken
strings make sense. In moments of love, there is that chance to roll right
into the orange sherbet sunset of your choosing.
1970s. Paper Lace and Stavisky and Paper Moon and Bugsy Malone and The
Great Gatsby and The Sting. Even Star Wars in bits.
rush subdivisions
ned raggett
I ALWAYS enjoyed “Subdivisions”—hey, it rocks.
And I loved it more from the version I actually
had, the live one on A Show of Hands, the first
Rush album I actually owned. (One starts
somewhere, after all.) I remember a couple of
people with Signals tour shirts in middle
school in upstate New York, and in retrospect
that made total sense, “Subdivisions” being a song about isolation in some
sense from the main scene, wherever it was. High school halls, shopping
malls—we had ‘em but they were smaller than others.
So I didn’t really understand “Subdivisions” totally until I finally flew into
Rush’s hometown of Toronto, straight to Toronto Pearson International
Airport, code YYZ itself (“YY Zed”), on a day hop from New York City a few
years ago as part of a larger trip. From the plane, I saw downtown on the
water, where it all started, and then this… sprawl. A polite Canadian
sprawl, if you like, but it seemed like this flowing grid that just kept going,
going, going, fading into haze in the distance on that summer’s day. It was
weirdly disorienting; it wasn’t like Los Angeles was any different, but then
again, L.A. was bounded by hills and ridges, broken up, where this wasn’t.
The idea of a suburbia as a subdivision, something all too cleanly
organized, sure it all feeds into the restless dreams of youth, and some end
up reading Ayn Rand, but others actually are Rob and Doug Ford. But when
you actually see the damn thing like the flat Ontarian version of the
Cyclopean city behind the mountains of madness, minus the ice, you trip
out at least a little. Of course, then I probably just went back to making
“eh?” jokes.
vengaboys we like to party
scott boxedjoy
THERE'S a chiming horn at the start of “We Like to Party” that could just as
easily be a cry of "All aboard!" (as easily as it could be
—cont.—
Around 1977. Even as a child I recognize it: alongside the Mickey Mouse I
know and love there's this old-looking Mickey Mouse in some Disney
products who’s weird and loose and rubbery, a triangular notch in his
pupil.
1982. I build a paper Chrysler Building and realize there's a name to that
Mickey Mouse aesthetic: Art Deco. That year is also the last gasp of the
craze, right? Taco's "Putting on the Ritz," right?
1980s. Most people with real, adult memories of the time start dying off
and the culture moves on.
A day ago. @LeavittAlone, in three tweets: "One of my evergreen seasons is
how different time periods interpret the recent past, like there was a big
and long enough 1900s revival in … the ‘30s that it's hard to parse out
what was contemporary and what was throwback, which actually ended
up ... bleeding into the ‘70s interpretation of the ‘30s, ‘cause it really
emphasized the stuff the ‘30s loved about the 1890s.”
Around 2004. Matos and I figure the '30s would've been especially
attractive in an age of permanent recession. A recognition that bad times
could be laughed at BECAUSE WELL IT'S BETTER THAN KILLING
YOURSELF I GUESS, and good times can't exist without bad times
permanently haunting the horizon.
1976. "Maybe he'll find her. Maybe he won't."
1994 again. This guy came from New York, maybe the Bronx. He had an
accent. I think there’s a circumspectness there: pride at what he had been,
an elision to how he went from that to selling vinyl wallcovering. I mean he
doesn’t tell me, and I don’t ask. It seems rude.
Late 2000s. There is—surprise!—videos of the band! On YouTube! RCA
actually put money into this thing! A little bit, anyway! These kids, these
kids from the Bronx, with their bowlegged moves and their music lessons,
these kids seem so young, they still have dreams, which is ridiculous. They
take the past because it is rightfully theirs, they earned it; they finally take
my heart because it is rightfully theirs, they earned it. Oh, oh, oh.
—cont.—
dr. buzzard’s original savannah
band whispering / cherchez la femme / se si bon
michael daddino
PROBABLY 1994. A phone call. How did
we start talking about music? Maybe I
put some Chopin on my voicemail
message—please, go ahead, judge me.
Later, my boss tells me to take it off.
She thinks the furniture vendors
wouldn't find it "professional." I still
have to wear a tie every day. "I used to
be in the music business, you know,"
the guy on the other end says. "You
know Dr. Buzzard?"
1990 or 1992. An armory in Annapolis on a college weekend. Aisles of
vinyl and I think I pick through most boxes, methodically. I have nothing in
mind. I want to be surprised. The album has a green dot sticker indicating
it’s cheap. I have a budget of $100. Sure, why not? Maybe it'll have more
impact than the single alone. It sort of does: Doug E. Fresh sampled
"Sunshower"!
1985. I see Robert Christgau gives it an A, with reservations. Funny name.
Never heard of 'em.
1988. There's a 12" in Tower Records. I buy it thinking I may never get
closer to the album than this. It sounds exactly like I think it would. It
doesn't blow me away.
1994 again. Oh yes. "Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band." I give him the
full name. As further proof, I sing the opening line: "Tommy Mottola lives
on the road." He chuckles in recognition. Mottola just married Mariah
Carey.
Around 2004. In one of our phone calls, Michaelangelo Matos identifies the
stubborn '20s-'30s nostalgia of the '70s and I totally get what he's talking
about, immediately.
—cont.—
"Get out the way!"). Because that's how the Vengabus tours: a bludgeoning
steamroller of tinny trance synths and ESL funtimes lyrics that's as allinclusive as the Club 18–30 holidays it was designed to soundtrack.
With a bassline built on perpetual motion and the deadpan, vocodered
cries of the title, the Vengabus doesn't waste a second on its journey
through hedonism. It might not be sophisticated or nuanced but there's a
kitsch playfulness that no amount of grace could substitute. "Happiness is
just around the corner," it promises, but the secret isn't the destination, it's
the getting there, and on this the Vengaboys offer a ticket that's irrefutable.
buck owens who's gonna mow your grass
kaleb horton
FORTY-SIX years after this song went to number one on the country charts, I
was sitting with my grandpa in East Bakersfield, where everything you
touch is half dirt. I was hoping to get a testimonial on the damn thing: you
know, an expert opinion, a primary source. He was twenty-nine when it
came out. He knows it like the back of his hand. His opinion is worth more
than mine. It was noon. I was talking and he was smoking. Not Camels
anymore. The king-size generics from the Indian reservation in Porterville.
"Well, grandpa, what about that Buck song? It was number one, right?"
Long pause. "Number one for a while."
No answer. His mind was drifting. He was still mad that Bob Dylan recently
called Buck Owens a better songwriter than Merle Haggard, an opinion
known as mathematically impossible to hold when you're on my grandpa's
property. He put their greatest hits LPs on the kitchen table and said "look
at that—just look," and the discussion was over. So here's my opinion,
which is worth one one-hundredth of his.
"Who's Gonna Mow Your Grass" came out in January 1969. It's about a putout fella telling his gal all about the things he does for her. It's a Buck song
alright. I can imagine bumming around town in a truck without seatbelts
during Bakersfield's notorious 115-degree winters and getting in a good ol'
mood with that song at moderate volume. For exactly one minute and
twenty seven seconds. Then the fuzztone happens. Damn.
skinny puppy censor
art garfunkel 99 miles from l.a.
dan perry
mrs. jody beth lafosse
SWELLING synth
washes buffet
the ears and
the shoulder
blades grow
tense. Ambient
samples fill in
the spaces left
in the
arrangement. A
coarse
growl/howl
delivers a feverish stream of consciousness while intermittent guitar lines
punctuate with isolated points of melodic resolution.
BEFORE Jay Z or Nena or Toto got there but after the bottles of beer on the
wall, Albert Hammond knew 99 was a great pop number. He knew a lot
about crafting hits, despite his chief success as an artist being a song about
abject failure—“It Never Rains in Southern California.” Indeed, one feels
less pity for that “man, it pours” broken hopeful when one learns
Hammond co-wrote “The Air That I Breathe,” “When I Need You,” and
“Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.” But in 1975, he reapproached the well of
despair with “99 Miles from L.A.,” a Hal David co-write that reached
number one on Billboard’s AC singles chart. Johnny Mathis covered it the
same year, but the most affecting version from 1975 was Art Garfunkel’s.
Any portion of Skinny Puppy's "Censor" could be sequestered and
discussed but what ties the song together is the percussion. The drums are
battering rams: crisp, scalpel-delineated snare hits surrounded by the
pummel of toms floating over a kick drum’s thunder. The bassline is a
beast, every staccato note a plucked fury. Unsettling and forceful, the angry
energy relays the lyrics’ menace and distaste without us ever having to
understand a word.
When words do pierce the fog, they confirm the unease. "Censor" isn't
interested in a straightforward narrative or message; instead, a litany of
disturbance suggests a ranting street preacher, incoherently and trying
desperately to communicate the end of the world to passers-by who may
share his language but not his syntax or vision.
Hints of clarity jump out: "Livid gnaws fasting on tick and flea in vain /
Again" may be inscrutable on its face but the sentiment behind "You clown
/ You asshole" isn't.
Still, everything links back to the thuds, thumps, and bangs at the heart of
“Censor.” The confluence of syncopation and vitriol buttresses the idea
that percussion is a language; here, Skinny Puppy have mastered it
thoroughly.
Garfunkel was perpetually overshadowed by Paul Simon as a bandmate, a
solo act, and as of Simon’s first SNL appearance two weeks after the
October 1 release of Garfunkel’s Breakaway album, an onscreen
personality. (Garfunkel joined Simon that night in Studio 8H, but it was
Simon who would emerge over the decades as Lorne Michaels’s darling.)
The biggest U.S. hit on Breakaway was the sole cut that survived the duo’s
sessions from their aborted reunion. The Breakaway cover art, with our
hero peering past the flurry of aloof Hollywood iniquity with a mug that
puppies save for adoption fairs, shows what a lonely place a crowd can be.
From its title, “99 Miles From L.A.” evokes getaways: the survivalist alien
arthropods on the desert road to Vegas, the seafood-chowder fog along the
Ventura coast. But the tug is downward, not outward. The chords fall
steeply, like thrill rides where machinery outpaces gravity. The name isn’t
all red herring. The “99” stops short of a tidy round number, suspended
unfulfilled. The narrator wants to distance himself from “L.A.,” the
dismissive diminutive that cuts a complex region to shreds in two haughty
syllables. He’s laughing in his new accommodations; he’s loving. He doesn’t
sound happy in the slightest. What would the hundredth mile bring?
Even in the steady chorus, Garfunkel is ill at ease; the shoe may drop and
the terror may overwhelm. As Hammond compositions go, this is not one
for the Mannequin soundtrack or the Seoul Olympics. It’s almost admirable
that the guy who helped make Starship so generic dug up a Palm Springs
swimming pool of latent ache in the soul of Art Garfunkel.
ani difranco born a lion
adam and the ants cartrouble
tim finney
mark sinker
“BORN A LION”
charges (roars?)
out the gate with
a percussive
flamenco strum
at once frenetic
and iridescent, as
if the drug-hazed
lassitude of the
Meat Puppets’ Up
On The Sun was
melted and recast
into urgent
clarity; no drumming, but a hand taps against the soundboard with a boom
like distant thunder. “I’m not hurting anyone!’ Ani immediately offers in
her own defence, but this opening gambit comes off more like a boast, or
maybe a threat; either way, she sounds way too pleased to be on the
defensive.
TOPPING and tailing a
moment, "Cartrouble Parts
1 and 2” opens Dirk Wears
White Sox, the orphan alb of
post-punk never quite
canonised alongside Cut or
Metal Box or Unknown
Pleasures. Not named as
such, “Part 2” was also the
single after the LP, the final
statement before Adam’s shift towards dandy panto-strut and global
breakthrough: indeed you can already hear this future Adam, trademark
falsetto voice-wriggles and Londonoid interjectional frame-breaking, agile
as ever among the moments of anxious reflective repose.
Puddle Dive, her fourth album, is the artist’s most exuberant and, oddly,
introspective, a consistently wry celebration of both her ugly duckling
status and her restless need to keep moving; “Born a Lion” is the
apotheosis of both themes. Ani the lion can’t be pinned down,
sociologically or geographically, and the disapproval of others (“What’s the
big deal? / Get over it! / Relax!”), or the intense but fleeting relationships
formed on the road (“Everything I do / I do for the first time / I got a big
crush on you / And it’s crushing my mind”), aren’t just the wages of sin but
badges of honour.
More than the thrill of there being “lots of stuff to say,” the attraction of
Ani’s world is that these choices never feel like choices, just the logical
consequences and parameters of the world through which she skitters for
an enthralling 109 seconds: rhymes so perfect but unlabored that they
become simply the language in which she thinks to herself; musical
accelerations and decelerations like limbs stretching out and retracting in
a joyful canter. “Don’t bother trying to act tame”, she advises, but here at
least she never sounds like she’s trying anything.
(parts 1 & 2)
Actually “fragment” would serve better than “part,” the two sections yoked
together without transition or explanation, the mood sour, clotted, busily
over-concise—ambitiously odd in address, with hard-to-parse topics
splayed into slippily ambiguous stance, a marriage of parts radiating
horrid uncertainty, each cycling through the other, undermining and
queasily stranding the listener.
Skip to Part 2: jangly production and straighter delivery making appeal to
shared experience: “Have you ever had a ride in a light blue car?” The car in
pop is badge of hip status, means of escape to thrills and seductionenabler. Still-punky Adam side-eyes all of this. Existing technologies of
diversion and leisure-age domesticity are traps; pleasure is the fetishistic
locus of perversity. He’s no puritan—it really is pleasure—but he doesn’t
let you forget its victims.
Part 1 provides the memory-bed for all that follows. A patter of drums and
a wiry curlicue of a riff: dry, clipped, harmonically static, the selfdeclaration of someone misshapen and conventionally unfortunate, if
strikingly turned out. Maybe you feel pity and want to help. If so, the song
instantly calls you out as a hypocrite, your fellow feeling a smug flaunting
of self-importance. How is it you see victims again? “Have you ever stopped
to think who's the slave and who's the master?”
broadcast michael a grammar
broadcast michael a grammar (slight return)
michael daddino
mrs. jody beth lafosse
BROADCAST are a counterfactual band: they imagine a Swinging London
awash with
synthesizers
or, alternately
but perhaps
relatedly,
more dread
than pop
music
could've
tolerated at
the time. A
YouTube
somebody set
this song to clips from Halloween, and while this is one of the band's
brighter tunes, it's not even entirely a joke. "My feet are dancing so much,"
Trish Keenan avers as Michael Myers hooks a victim to a door, feet
dangling inches above the floor. "And I hate that."
MUSICIANS have ragged on their own insider-outsider culture since Talking
Heads deemed Mudd Club and CBGB less immediate than whatever crisis
they wrote “Life During Wartime” about, since The Television
Personalities’ “Part Time Punks,” since Bob McFadden & Dor’s bongoskewering “The Beat Generation,” since Harry Gibson’s ambivalent boogiewoogie treatises on jive-talking white jazzers (on “Handsome Harry, the
Hipster,” he implicates himself). Examples must abound in vaudeville,
blues, and early popular song as well.
Even at their most Captain Easychord, Broadcast refuse to give you simple
pleasure. Pleasure, sure, and a lot of it, but it's never simple. “Michael a
Grammar” has an exhortation to "let go" but premises it upon ludicrously
unnecessary rhetorical convolutions: not "You wanna let go? Then let go"
but "If you're feeling like you're looking for a chance to let go, and if you're
feeling like you're looking for that chance, then let go." And as the hook, the
main hook, is my name—the receipt of the purchase other people have on
my life—it feels less like a hook than a poke at the most reactive part of my
brain. "Michael. Michael, Michael." That's my Mom's voice calling up from
the stairs to my room, the admonishment of a school teacher, my boss at
work, do this not that. And I hate that.
Well, not here. A song with nagging doesn't necessarily nag at me, not
exactly, just as a song about pain doesn't necessarily cause me pain, or a
happy song make me feel happy. But it keeps me on edge.
Broadcast’s 2005 “Michael a Grammar” came one year after X1’s “New
York is So Cool,” three years after LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge,”
and five years after The Dandy Warhols’ “Bohemian Like You,” situating it
in a kind of micro-trend as the smallness of internet worlds made many of
the “alternative” kids (thanks, ‘90s) realize they weren’t especially special.
When Trish Keenan entreats the titular Michael to “let go,” yes, there’s a bit
of dance-music abandon packed into the meaning (with the playful beat as
arm candy), but it’s also a purposeful rejection of the anxiety of the
ultramodern. Letting go means letting yourself go: not watching the
cholesterol as much, dressing for comfort rather than high style, a
resignation to dull grind instead of assaultive novelty. Keenan frames this
resignation as freeing, though. In their career, Broadcast used the recent
past as a palette of art materials. But artists fear surrender to their media;
it’s a rabbit hole they either scramble to avoid or are lured into with
attractive carrots despite their cooler-headed intentions.
It’s within this context that Keenan lures herself, and Michael, to the
Brutalist postwar tower blocks of that recent past, away from the sawtooth
wave of being a young person in a deep-rooted city, toward the endless
static of the vaguely ahistorical but dated new town. “The old high-rise is
coming down”; how’s that for the day’s excitement? Well, it’s not the chicly
tedious party of “Come on Let’s Go” but it does promise a certain thrill
(from a distance); public-policy failures make for gripping research. And it
will remain research for these characters, because it’s too hard to stop
dancing. What’s the point in wasting time on people that you’ll never know?