I was talking to my friend Josh the other night. Josh was mad because he had just come back from visiting an artists’ retreat in the Marin Headlands, and he felt that the space and opportunity were being wasted on a lot of the artists in residence up there. Apparently artists are selected by some sort of committee and then are given room, board and a giant art space amidst the beautiful redwoods at the foot of Mt. Tamalpias - all for free. The idea is that without having to worry about stocking the fridge or paying the rent, the artists will be able to focus all of their time and energy on their art. The result will be more and better art that everyone can enjoy.
Whether or not the artists taking advantage of this are living up to the full potential of the opportunity is beyond me. But I will say that this is a great idea. Too often in this country the value of art is measured only in monetary terms. People rarely appreciate what abstract things like beauty and curiosity bring to our lives.
Other countries have figured this out though. Canada, France, and many other nations have programs that support artists in ways that are completely free of commerce. These countries put art - and the artists who make it - in the same category as public parks. As such, everybody contributes to their upkeep so that everybody can enjoy the benefits of having them there.
If you really want to stretch this idea, I suppose you could say that’s why we have Portland. The rainy city to the north is still a bastion of cheap rent and poor kids from art school trying to blow the world’s mind. Portland is especially well suited for musicians, since almost everybody there either likes playing, listening to or talking about music. Plus, all those cheap houses have basements that make for great practice spaces. And when it rains 349 days a year, what the fuck else are you going to do?
This is why Cameron Spies moved up there. Tired of the rat race here in San Francisco he left for a city where he could afford to make music and not die of starvation. That was last year and now Spies is back in the city by the bay for a show with not one, not two, but three new bands. His pet project Soap Collectors is at the top of the order and Phantom Kicks will be batting clean-up. In the center of the line up is his most personal project, the semi-ironically named Spesus Christ.
Spesus Christ makes music that is actually closer to art. The three tracks on their second EP are splatter painted with echoing guitars and voices drawn out into church-like reverb. Keyboards, pianos and drum machines make cameo appearances implying hip hop and electronica, but often disappear into the ether just when you get your head around them.
The whole package is experimental and a little unsettling, yet oddly enjoyable. It’s good to see an artist painting in something other than the every day colors. And it’s good to know that Spies only had to move to Portland to do it. Otherwise, I would have had to write this in French.
Spesus Christ plays The Hotel Utah Thursday 4/22/10 with Phantom Kicks and Soap Collectors
Have you ever come across someone so messed up on drugs that just talking to them made you feel high? That happened to me the other night. It was a really strange feeling. For the first three or four minutes I thought I was the one who was acting really weird while the rest of the world was staring at me cock-eyed. Turns out I was just talking to two people deep in the throws of some mysterious drug experience.
We were at a place called Baggy’s down by the lake. The bar looks like it might have been swanky back in 1964 or whenever it first opened. Now it just seems like a smokey rec room with equal parts hipsters and vintage alcoholics. Baggy’s is pretty much empty most of the time, but this being a weekend there were about a dozen people in there. Still, we had no problem finding a few seats at the end of the bar with a commanding view of the sidewalk and the chicken and waffles joint across the street.
My friend Jon went to grab drinks while Scott and I sat down to watch drunks outside through the picture window. Next thing I knew, a young girl with a sideways grin and oddly practical shoes was standing uncomfortably close to Scott. Scott looked at me, then at the girl. Several awkward moments of silence passed with the girl just grinning at us, like she had been a part of our conversation since we got there - and like she knew Scott well enough to dismiss any thought of his personal space.
Finally Scott said, “Uh, hello?” - not greeting the girl as much as verifying that she was aware of her surroundings. She just laughed and said “yeah.” Then she smiled at us both. Scott asked if they knew each other. She offered a few words, although nothing that could be misconstrued as a sentence or coherent thought. She smiled again and sipped her drink. Then she said “I was just…yeah,” looking at us as though she was saying something that required a response. Scott started to ask another question, but she cut him off, nodding her head and agreeing before he had even said anything. It’s important to note that at this point, she was practically in Scott’s lap.
Jon had been gone for a while, so I started thinking that this was somehow a practical joke of his making. Like, maybe he knows this girl, saw her on his way to get drinks and told her to go fuck with his friends while he paid for the beers. So I asked her. “You’re fucking with us, right? This is some kind of weird performance art or something? Or your friends are secretly taping this for YouTube? Do you know Jon?” She chortled into her glass and came over to stand uncomfortably close to me.
At this point I realized she was actually at the bar with another guy. He was sitting behind us and staring at Scott like he had just fallen out of a tree. None of us said anything for a full 30 seconds. The girl looked at Scott, looked at me, smiled and said, “Ha ha. Yeah, I know…ha ha ha! Maybe.” Then she and her weird friend stepped out side and smoked at least a dozen cigarettes in a row.
Jon came back with beer and I tried in vain to explain how weird these people were acting. Actually, first I tried to convince him to hit on the smiley chick standing outside. But I guess I was a little too eager because he didn’t take the bait. He knew we were trying to mess with him, but he couldn’t understand what we thought was so weird about a smiling girl in a bar who likes to stand close to you. In theory, that sounds like exactly the kind of thing most guys go to a bar on a Saturday night to find.
Then he looked out the window. The girl was playing full on tonsil hockey with some stranger who seemed to have just been walking by the bar, while her friend was sucking down cigarettes and staring at us with his face pressed up against the glass. We waved, flipped him the bird, mimed the words “what the fuck?” Nothing. It was like he was staring into a mirror and seeing outer space.
Eventually the guy, the girl and her new found love interest made their way back inside. They were joined by a couple of creepy looking older dudes who were drinking gin and shaking pill bottles, with the same lewd grins plastered to their faces. One of them must have taken a detour to the jukebox, because the ambiance at Baggy’s suddenly took a turn for the worse. Whereas before we were sitting in a dark bar listening to the standard assortment of generic rock songs, we were now accosted by a slow mix of Leonard Cohen ballads and the most depressing songs from the Morissey discography.
Which brings us to the moral of this tale. If you’re going to get loaded on horse tranquilizers and go down to the local bar to harass strangers with your weird narcotic behavior, at least have the decency to put on some good drug music. It shouldn’t be that hard, considering that more than half the rock n roll canon would easily qualify.
Or, since you’re already expanding your horizons, why not try something new? I suggest “£10 Bag” from the North London artist known as Rescuecat. The song sways from church choir interludes to flamenco guitar riffs to bouncy-yet-menacing electro pop. More to the point, RC himself assures me that it’s “about 80s computer games, childhood and heroin.” Perfect for somebody at the bottom of a K hole and the guys sitting next to her at the bar, just trying to have a beer and talk about the best lines from District 9 (winner: “I will eat your arm and gain your powah!”).
Did you catch that, weirdos? If you’re going to get so high that you don’t care what other people think of you, at least understand that you should care what they think about your taste in music.
When I moved from New York City back to San Francisco, I was determined to try and make Bay Area public transportation work as well as the subway does in Manhattan. I had a car, but I left it parked out in front of my apartment. Instead of driving, I walked to the BART station and took the train to work. Both my apartment and the TC offices were really close to BART stations, so it was actually pretty easy.
Yes, I know that BART trains only come every 14 minutes or so and the fares are prohibitively expensive. And the routes and schedules are more geared toward suburban commuters than city kids trying to get from one end of town to the other. And they’re also crowded and unreliable and some times the seats smell like a hobo’s sleeping bag. Still, I wasn’t sitting in traffic every day and I could be self-righteous about helping the environment, which means the pros outweighed the cons.
I also got myself a bike so I would be able to ride to all the places BART doesn’t go (i.e. any neighborhood west of Market Street, most places in Oakland, and anywhere after midnight). Right off the bat my brother said, “So you’re one of those guys who takes his bike on BART now…” like he was describing a leper or a person who’s way too into Burning Man. But I don’t care. I like the bike. It’s faster than walking, so you can actually use it as a viable form of transportation. At the same time, on a bike you also move slow enough to take everything in: sunlight reflecting off the tall buildings, the beautiful girls in the crosswalks downtown, the weird things people watch on their in-dash DVD players - all rolling past you at just under 15 mph. It’s kind of like a surreal music video custom made just for you.
Of course, it’s up to you to provide the soundtrack. If you’re brave enough to put on some headphones and tune out all those drivers who are secretly trying to run you over, then I suggest you listen to Soulo’s third and newest album, Sun Valley. The whole album plays like one long, hazy dreamscape. Sweet melodies and vocal refrains drift in and out of the ether. Listening to it, you can’t help but picture a slow, graceful ride down the sunny side of the street. Whether or not you end up at a warm, gleaming ocean or the edge of a black abyss is a mystery. There’s enough tension buried in the static to keep you guessing.
Come to think of it, this could work on the train as well. When I’m crammed into a crowded commuter car at the end of a long day I often take refuge in my headphones. It’s nice to know that even when I am pressed up against a pile of sad and defeated looking office workers, I can still close my eyes, turn on some music and imagine that I’m somewhere else: on a beach, on the moon or even just on my bike.
Anyone who has ever watched even a few minutes of stand-up comedy knows that guys are different than girls. If I have learned anything from the shallow insights of the countless cut-rate comics I have seen on TV over the years, it is this: girls like talking about their feelings, romantic dinners by candle light and shopping for shoes. Guys like sex, football, and fart jokes. There are variations on this theme of course, but that basically sums it up.
By extension, we also know that guys and girls like different kinds of movies. Hollywood producers certainly know this, and their market research has shown them that this universal truth can also be a guiding principle for film making. Males in the coveted 18-34 age bracket need to see explosions, kung-fu and boobs in their movies if they are going to throw the full weight of their demographic behind a film on opening weekend. Girls, on the other hand, need something that falls into either the romantic comedy or sappy melodrama categories to get them into theaters.
Needless to say, this presents a problem when guys and girls go to see a movie together - a pretty common occurrence, not to mention a classic American dating ritual. Sure, every once in a while you get a movie that everyone can agree on, but how many times can you go see Slumdog Millionaire? With most movies skewing toward one sex or the other, a compromise inevitably happens at the box office; either a couple sees the movie he wants (Crank 2) or the movie she wants (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants) or a movie that nobody really wants to see (Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail).
Since this is one of the greatest problems plaguing the world today, I decided to put my worn out, over-caffeinated brain to work on a solution. The result is a simple formula that can be applied to all date movies. If enough directors decide to incorporate it into their film making we might just eliminate the need for the romantic comedy genre all together.
The format basically works like a double bill compressed into one conventional length movie. One half of the movie would be for the guys, the other half for the girls. For an example of how this would work, I’ll apply the formula to the movie Felon starring Stephen Dorf and Val Kilmer. In the movie, Stephen Dorf plays a husband and father who is wrongfully sent to prison. He gets strong-armed into covering for the Aryan Brotherhood and ends up in the most hardcore part of the prison, where he shares a cell with a serial killer (Val Kilmer) by night and fights gangbangers in the yard by day.
For those of you keeping score at home, that’s prison + gangs + lots of fighting = guy movie. In order to turn that into one of our new unisex date movies, you would do two things. First, compress all of the fighting, prison gangs and weird Val Kilmer scenes into a trimmed down 45 minute section of the movie. This part is for all the dudes in the audience. Once they get their fill of blood and tattoos, you move onto the second half of the movie which is - you guessed it - for the ladies.
In this half of the movie, we find Stephen Dorf home from prison and working to put his life back in order. He is thrilled to spend time with his son and he finally buys his wife that dress she’s always wanted. He still carries the psychological scars of his time in prison, which initially makes him cold and distant. But eventually, he and his wife work through it, slowly rebuilding their life and their love together. They come through this ordeal exhausted, but happy to find that their relationship is even stronger for the effort. And then maybe Stephen Dorf gets in one last fist fight with a rude neighbor or whatever, just so everybody has something to cheer for right at the end.
In truth, I don’t usually go in for this sort of populism, but every now and then it works. Besides the afore mentioned unisex date movie, ice cream parlors and Jane’s Addiction, a good example of the something-for-everyone approach is Canadian band Beast. The duo has only been together for about a year, but they’ve locked in on a sound that works like a musical survey of the last 20 years. With touches of trip hop, hip hop, punk-funk and guitar rock, Beast plays what singer Betty Bonifassi calls “trip rock.” Bonifassi sing-raps her lyrical indictments of satan and other evil spirits over a booming drumscape that swells with gospel choirs and vicious synthesizers.
The end result may not represent a finely honed singular vision, but you can play it any party, club or biker BBQ and not piss anyone off. It stands to reason that both guys and girls will like the band as well. Pending any new advances in the date movie industry, you might just be better off taking your date to a Beast concert instead.
How dumb is Chris Brown? He fucked up sooooo bad. It’s like he not only killed the golden goose, but he also roasted it over a pile of burning baby seals and then ate it with his bare hands in front of the entire California chapter of PETA.
Seriously, until very recently his life could not have been any better. If you had stopped any random dude on the street two weeks ago and granted him a wish, he would have basically asked to be Chris Brown. “Well, it would be great to be young again. But wait, I would really like to have a fancy sports car. Although, I’d also like to have a hot R&B singer for a girlfriend. Maybe I could just be a celebrity myself…?”
Chris Brown has (had) all those things. He is 19 years old. He was dating Rihanna and he was on his way to perform at the Grammys in a brand new Lamborghini. What?! That’s like god decided to make sweet love to your life. You literally and tangibly had it better than 99.9% of the other humans on this planet. Why not just sit back and let amazing things happen to you?
Instead, Chris Brown decided to beat up a girl. There is no possible way he can justify that. I mean, what could he possibly say? She insulted him? She insulted his mother? She insulted him and his mother and his grandmother? So what? You’re Chris Brown. You’re in a $250,000 sports car with one of the most beautiful girls in the world. It should be pretty easy to keep insults like that in perspective. If I was in Chris Brown’s position I don’t think I would ever get mad. Rihanna could pee in my shoes and I’d be like, “That’s cool. I’m just gonna drive my Lamborghini over to Beverly Hills and buy a thousand new pairs of shoes. And then I’m going to have sex with, like, ten groupies at once. And then me and Justin Timberlake are gonna go catch a Laker’s game. Peace out.”
I guess it’s just a classic case of too much is never enough. This malady seems to strike a disproportionate number of celebrities - most likely because they are among the select group of people who almost always have too much. For you or me, just having the fancy car or the fancy girl or the fancy friends would probably be enough to make us feel pretty good. I’m sure plenty of people get a vicarious thrill just from imagining that they have those things. But for people like Chris Brown it probably takes more than a fast car and a hot girl to get his pulse pounding.
Unfortunately this seems to be a sad, but true fact of the human condition. The more we have, the more we want. This makes the pursuit of happiness an essentially futile task, since it will always be just out of reach. Which is a depressing thought, since I’m told that the pursuit of happiness is basically the whole point of life. Still, that’s no reason to go beating up your girlfriend. Why don’t you channel some of that anger into your art? You know, write a song about it or something.
That’s what New Villager did. The duo, which is equal parts California and New York, has composed a pensive little dance nugget called “Rich Doors.” This should have been the song they played during the meta-futuristic rave scene in The Matrix 2. The drums have a tribal pulse and the sparse lyrics have the quality of a poem spoken in the back of a long, dark cave. They seem to tell the story of someone who has it all and yet still searches for more, if only because there isn’t anything else for them to do.
If nothing else, it’s a beautiful song that is definitely celebrating something bittersweet. It could be celebrity excess or the meaningless pursuit of happiness in this lifetime. Their website leads me to believe it might also have something to do with The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, but I don’t really know what that is. So instead I will just assume it is a searing indictment of Chris Brown and domestic abuse. Listen to your fellow artists Chris. Stop the violence.
I’ve been learning a lot of weird things about internet content and culture this week. It seems that, because of the unlimited depth of cyberspace, anybody with a pulse and a keyboard can post information on the worldwide web. And in a striking contrast to what I generally believe about the ambition of the average pulse-having keyboard owner, a lot of them do. A lot of them. And thanks to the reach and efficiency of the modern search engine, they can easily find each other and gather in some poorly lit corner of the internet, obsessing over a bunch of pointless crap.
Of course it comes as no surprise that the internet is full of crap, but goddamn! Some of this crap is so crappy that the crap has twisted back into itself, causing layers of meta-crap to grow out of the original crap. On top of this crap grows whole online communities who have devoted themselves to the intricacies and subtle nuances of the crap. It’s like a small society of people who spent years and years breeding in a giant incestuous orgy, then took acid, then built websites based on what was in their minds.
I’m talking specifically about lolcats. This is the whole reason the expression “WTF?!?” was invented. Have you seen this shit? It’s pictures of cats ostensibly doing cute things with wacky captions written in some sort of juvenile half-wit Ebonics. That’s it. Just pictures of cats. With poorly written captions. And there are literally dozens of sites devoted to this. The most popular lolcat website gets over a million hits a day. The pictures posted there have hundreds of comments under them.
This means that every day over a million people turn on their computers, log onto the internet and look at pictures of cats while imaging that the cats talk like a four year old with a speech impediment. And hundreds of those people then make the additional effort to think of and write comments like “ah…da las fing souns jus ryt fur a cheezpeep.” I’m sorry, but that shit is too fucked up. I honestly think it would be a more productive use of your time to spend all day downloading porn. At least you would get an orgasm or two for your effort.
Another weird internet phenomenon is the practice of claiming first response in the comment section of any blog or website. Obviously you can expect some poor grammar or strange ideas to show up when you pass the mic to the public, but I don’t get this one. Basically, that way it works is, if you find that you are the first to comment on a picture, video, or article, you don’t actually write a comment. You just write “first!” which is then quietly acknowledged as a small personal victory by all of the other would-be commentors.
Although we here at Tough Customer//Wire pride ourselves on digging up obscure and unknown artists, we get no particular thrill from being the first to do so. And even though we usually are one of the first, we occasionally make exceptions just to prove this point. For example, take Nashville’s Kyle Andrews. We are definitely not the first people to sing the praises of his music. His new album Real Blasty is eminently likable and has a shiny pop finish that has caught the ear of many a blogger. The album features sing-along choruses, synthesizers that gurgle along with the verses and drums that bridge the gap as the music swings back and forth from electronica to indie rock.
And just think. We found this music using the same tool that somebody else used to find a picture of a kitten eating Cheetos. Cyberspace is indeed a strange, strange place.
I discovered Led Zeppelin when I was 12 years old. My dad bought me the Physical Graffiti album for my birthday and told me to put it on the stereo as loud as it would go. The sound almost blew my brain out the back of my head. The music literally blew my mind. The drums were massive and the guitars sounded like they were trying to claw their way out of the speakers. The next day I invited all my friends over to listen to my awesome “new” CD. Within weeks we had ditched our 2 Live Crew albums, grown out our hair, and started a band in the garage.
Of course, I didn’t discover Led Zeppelin at all. Physical Graffiti came out before I was born, and by the time I first heard it, millions of people had already gotten high, had sex, worked on their Camaros, tuned in, and rocked out to it. Still, when I played it for my friends that day, it was new to all of us. We reveled in the shared experience of the first time, and that one album served as a catalyst for many music and lifestyle decisions in the years to come (to think, I might have missed grunge completely…). Maybe my dad somehow knew this. Maybe it’s the kind of thing all dads inherently know - along with how to change their own oil or how to light a BBQ using three cans of lighter fluid without setting the backyard on fire. Either way I’m going to follow pop’s lead and play you something a little older. They’re not Led Zeppelin, but they might just be new to you.
Roots Of Orchis started off in San Diego before making their way up to San Francisco. Along the way they took trip-hop, post-rock, and a few other mutated genres and turned them into their own sound. The band suffers from Modern Struggling Independent Musician Syndrome, which means they all have real jobs and responsibilities and stuff. As such, they haven’t released a new record in almost four years. However, they claim to have a new album recorded and ready to release early next year. So, in order to get you excited about that, we’re posting a couple of their older tracks for you to share with your friends. Like dad says, everything old is new again.
We had, like, five different circuitous intros for this post. However, our editors determined that all of them would have been offensive to somebody somewhere. Apparently Germans, homosexuals, river trolls, priests, and deranged surgeons all have one thing in common: no sense of humor. Oh well. Your loss.
Instead, we’ll just give it to you straight (sorry homos!). Trost is the surname of one Annika Line from Berlin, Germany. It is also the name of her new musical project. She used to be in a band called Cobra Killer. Thurston Moore thought Cobra Killer was the bomb. Truth be told, they weren’t as good as Trost’s new solo project, which combines electronic production, older R&B, and a creepy Tom Waits/Kurt Weill kind of vibe into a strange, distinctly Teutonic funk. It’s the kind of music ghosts probably listen to when they throw a cocktail party. Deranged surgeons might like it too, but what do we know, right?
This is either the new hotness or old news, depending on where your head is at. White Flight is actually the work of one Justin Roelofs, who used to be in The Anniversary. His album came out a while ago and has already been reviewed by Pitchfork (”an overstuffed assortment of hip-hop beats, hippie poetry, and indie pop instrumentation.”). White Flight was even featured on NPR at some point this year and he/they have a page on Wikipedia. Oh well. We can’t always be the first to the feeding frenzy.
Anyhoo…apparently Justin swore off living in the United States and went down to South America to experiment with hallucinogenic drugs. Eventually the drugs wore off and he made his way back to Lawrence, KS (whattup Kansas!) where he recorded this album. That was last winter. Now, here we are at the onset of winter again and Roelofs has put out some bangin ‘ ass remixes of the White Flight album tracks. The original flavor is also good, so we included one of each for you. Settle in with some hot cocoa and your peace pipe and take a listen.
It is often said that you should never judge a book by its cover. But you know what? That shit is just not true. If you see a book cover with an oil painting of a pale maiden in 18th century dress, with a lovelorn look on her face, staring out across the English countryside…we promise you, that book sucks.
However, in the world of music a similar adage often proves to be true - namely that you should never judge the music by its maker. You can go to to Hot Topic and buy the “rock n roll look” right off the rack before you even take your first guitar lesson. As such, you should never write somebody off just because they don’t look like they spent last night shooting heroin into their eyeballs (a sign of true musical genius, btw).
Take, for example, LA electronic artist Nosaj Thing (née Jason Chung). He looks like he should be helping you with your physics homework. Heck, you might even let him date your sister. But Jason doesn’t have time for that. Know why? Because he’s too busy making face-melting electronica and remixing records for Health and Daedelus. It turns out that behind those shaggy bangs and mountains of computer parts lies one bad motherfucker. Judge not, lest ye be judged.
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