Proof that Santa Claus exists

He was on Batman:

Infrequent blog update

My old friend Keith works for the Utne Reader. On Thursday, he interviewed Lawrence Lessig for a profile in an upcoming issue. He says:

Lessig totally shifted gears and is now waging a campaign against corruption in Congress (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080616/hayes). Talk about an uphill battle …

Have you seen any good live music lately?

I'm looking forward to reading the profile. Here's a clip of Lessig comparing McCain and Obama on tech issues:



I haven't seen any good live music lately, but earlier in the year I saw the Ramsey Lewis Trio perform at the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Unity Temple right here in Oak Park, and the CSO perform Mahler's 6th Symphony (turned out to be way cooler than it sounds). Tonight I'll likely see Hammond B3 master, Dr. Lonnie Smith. Calexico is playing for free at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, with Mariachi Luz de Luna. That should be incredibly cool. 

In October, I'll see Ravi Shankar with his daughter Anoushka. That is, unless I'm roasting for eternity in a lake of fire after the hadron collider vaporizes us all...

Nothing much

I really should post about a restaurant at which I dined last night, thus fulfilling the original reason I started this blog. But, I 'm lazy and my coffee intake hasn't quite achieved the desired effect. Instead, check out these two additions to the blog roll on yonder left:

Princess Sparkle Pony's Photo Blog, and Cake Wrecks.

There but for the grace of God, go I...

The reason I can never get a tattoo is because it would surely be something like one would find here, in the Bad Tattoo Gallery.

From the book No Regrets.

<-- Yeah, we all know that's supposed to be Patrick Swayze, but it also bears a surprising -- if not strange -- resemblance to my old pal, Butch. He's a Sag, too.

Celebrity sighting

Brush with fame: I saw Hedy De Vine: Brunette Phantom at the Wedge tonight. 

My purchases: lasagna and an expensive cookie.

Only an expert can deal with the problem

So I got the email -- one of those canned ones that you usually just delete without reading -- and it said:

Buy now before they are gone.
A limited number of great seats have just been made available for Laurie Anderson's Homeland on April 16 at 7:30 pm. Don't miss this extraordinary performer

.

So I freaked out...and I did.

So I made my flight back from DC in the nick of time. I got myself down to the theatre with moments to spare. I was zipping up my fly from peeing when the chime sounded for us to take our seats.

We all took our seats like happy, excited cattle. I was farther back than I was for the New York Ballet. For that one, I was close enough to hear toes pounding the floor. This time I couldn't see facial expressions. It didn't matter.

Laurie told a story: about a time long ago, before there was a world -- only air. And the birds flying in it, around and around, had nowhere to land. And one day, a bird's father died. And she had nowhere to put him. She didn't know what to do with him. And then she got an idea. She buried him in the back of her head.

This is how memory began.

A little later, Laurie played this one:

We all clapped our fingers off afterwards.

Shiny happy people

Did anyone else catch REM on The Colbert Report last night?

After a rather amusing interview -- wherein the host sat on a much larger stool than his guests, and asked Michael Stipe about picking girls out of the audience, and Peter Buck mentioned D. Boon --  Mike, Mike and Peter were joined by guitarist Scott McCaughey and ex-Ministry drummer Bill Rieflin for a pretty decent performance of their new "Supernatural Superserious."

Check it out here:

And here they are from nearly 25 years ago (can it be that long already?) on their very first television appearance with David Letterman:

The once over twice

X is a band that's so good I had to see them twice in one week. And a week later, they're still in my dreams.

X is the sound of love being so right but going so wrong...songs of love and jealousy and hope and decay...

songs of trying to stick together until it hurts...

of drunken house parties that start out fun and end in fights...

of one of you upset, staying up all night on the couch, chain smoking and watching some bad old movie because you can't sleep...

of starting out happy together at a bar and ending up so mad you throw your jewelry and car keys anything else you have in your hand across the room, and waking up the neighbor and the landlord...

of waiting up for the one you love to come home, but suspecting they're with someone else -- but you make out like crazy when they do show up...

of thinking that it's true love and being so happy, only to slowly realize that you're not right for each other...

of the knowledge that Hell is an eternity of seeing the thousands of ways the Devil can make you fall in love, and knowing that you'd do it all over again...

of crying 96 tears in 24 hours, with sex once every hour...

of dancing with tears in your eyes...

all with a killer guitar riff.

Photo: at least two ecstatic X fans at the Cabooze in Minneapolis, March 22, 2008.

Here's X, playing True Love, Pt. 2, eons ago:

And here they are more recently, performing In This House That I Call Home:



And just because they're so groovy, a couple of performances from Penelope Spheeris' The Decline of Western Civilization:

I just heard this sad song by another band

In 1967 the Doors recorded a little ditty called "Soul Kitchen". Ten years later, a couple of guys posted nearly identical ads in the same newspaper on the same day, looking for like-minded musicians. They got together, found a like-minded drummer and a female voice, and ended up re-recording "Soul Kitchen" -- this time with original Door Ray Manzarek producing.

31 years later, that band -- X -- is touring again, and they are a sweet treat indeed. In the time between, the guitarist had left the band, the female voice had a kid with Viggo Mortenson, and the bass player and male voice had been playing the father of troubled teens on various tv shows and movies (ok -- over 60 at last count, and not always as the father of the troubled teen).

They played at Metro last night on Clark Street in Chicago, a fast and furious night of loud guitars, humming amps, fuzzy ears, sweat and pure rock & roll. I thought I'd jot down the set list, but my pen was knocked out of my hand during the opening chords of the opening song, and I didn't much mind. In 75 minutes they'd pretty much whipped through nearly every song on their first two albums, Los Angeles and Wild Gift, with generous helpings from More Fun In The New World.

Instead of smiling his shit-eating-grin off into nowhere while he played his signature silver guitar, Billy Zoom was smiling down into the crowd, boring creepily into every individual who dared lock eyes with him; John Doe showed that he's got to be the happiest man on the planet, being able to do what he loves and working up a lather doing it; Exene's no longer that messed up hot chick we lusted after, but now an older sister, showing us how cool it is to be a singer in a rock & roll band; and drummer D.J. Bonebrake revealing how the most fit drummer in the land keeps in shape. (Stark juxtaposition: just 4 months ago, I saw Doe crooning Merle Haggard's "Silver Wings" into a lone mic with an acoustic guitar -- looked like he was loving that, too..)

A critic once suggested that X "were not just one of the greatest punk bands, but one of the greatest live rock acts of all time." I can't argue against that point, and I have to say that seeing them in a smaller club could underscore that point -- and best of all I have a chance to prove it to myself again Saturday night in Minneapolis.

Here's X during the recording of "White Girl":



And here's an interview with Ray Manzarek and a performance of "Soul Kitchen":



Oh, and...does anyone out there know the identity of the bearded gentleman who read the awesome poetry before X took the stage?

Thanks to Seitz, who answered the poetry question in the comments.

The poet was Thax Douglas. His poem is here.

Chicago Sun-Times review is here.

I guess everything's relative

27 years ago I lived in a house with four or five other guys. Some of us pretended to go to school, and some of us pretended to work, and in between we'd have a whole hell of a lot of fun.

The entire main floor of the house was like one giant room with a kitchen and a half-bath hanging off it. It was, therefore, conducive to hosting massive parties. Good thing, too, because the place was such an energy sieve that we had to throw monthly massive parties just to generate enough cash to pay the heat bill.

On the Saturday nights that we weren't nearly breaking a floor joist because so many people were dancing to "Police & Thieves" or "Janie Jones", we were probably huddled around the TV trying to warm up by the sickly glow of Night Flight on the USA Network. There might be a Cheech & Chong movie, or some combo of weird animation and videos they'd never show on that brand new thingie they called MTV.

And, about the time of day we were either putting down the beers and firing up the bong, or putting down the bong and cracking open the beers, something called New Wave Theatre would catch our gnat-like attention spans. One thing New Wave Theatre was not, was boring. It was hosted by the annoying Peter Ivers, whose stream-of-consciousness raps about gherkins and Ginkels made us almost wish someone would bludgeon him to death. Then someone did. Sorry, Pete. You're still missed after all this time.

Here's a clip from New Wave Theatre by the Suburban Lawns that I've been obsessively watching over and over again. The song is called "Janitor," the lyrics of which came from a real-life conversation between lead singer Sue Tissue and a friend trying to converse in a noisy room when they first met.

She asked me what I did for a living. I said, "I'm a janitor," and she thought I said, "Oh my genitals."

All action is reaction...
expansion...
contraction...
Man the manipulator.

Underwater
Does it matter?
Anti-matter
Nuclear reactor
Boom boom boom boom

Who's your mother?
Who's your father?
I guess everything's relative.

The Suburban Lawns are/were:
Sue Tissue, vocals
John McBurney, lead guitars & vocals
Vex Billingsgate, bass & vocals
Frankie Ennui, guitars & vocals
Chuck Roast, drums

Not quite as Way Back...

...but still haunting, 45 years later:



Music for the afternoon: Material's Seven Souls, featuring William S. Bourroughs lobbing his words from the crypt over sounds made by genius bassist and producer Bill Laswell, guitarist Nicky Skopelitis, and reggae drumming legend Sly Dunbar. Here's Burroughs from Track 3, "Soul Killer":

There is intrigue among the souls, and treachery. No worse fate can befall a man than to be surrounded by traitor souls.



Can any soul survive the searing fireball of an atomic blast? If human and animal souls are seen as electromagnetic force fields, such fields can be totally disrupted by a nuclear explosion. The mummy's nightmare: disintegration of souls.

And this is precisely the ultra-secret and super-sensitive function of the atom bomb: a Soul Killer, to alleviate an escalating soul glut.

Scientists always said there's no such thing as a soul. Now they're in a position to prove it.

Total Death -- Soul Death. It's what the Egyptians call the Second and Final Death. This awesome power that can destroy souls forever is now vested in far-sighted and responsible men in the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon.

Governments fall from sheer indifference. Authority figures, deprived of the vampiric energy they suck off their constituents, are seen for what they are: dead, empty masks, manipulated by computers. And what is behind the computers? Remote control, of course.

Look at the prison you're in -- we are all in: this is a penal colony that is now a death camp, Place of the Second and Final Death.

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything we have ever believed in can hope to escape.

Don't intend to be there when this shit-house goes up. Nothing in and out but the recordings. Shut them off. They are as radioactive as an old joke.

You can also listen to Track 2, "Seven Souls", here. It's inexplicably paired with video from Closet Land, featuring perennial villain Alan Rickman and a pre-lip job Madeleine Stowe.

Dr. Peter Piper's Way Back Machine

Instruction and advice for the young bride. Excerpt from a late-19th century treatise written by a minister's wife:

One cardinal rule of marriage should never be forgotten: GIVE LITTLE, GIVE SELDOM, AND ABOVE ALL, GIVE GRUDGINGLY. Otherwise what could have been a proper marriage could become an orgy of sexual lust.