The Conical Glass: September 2007

Sunday, September 30, 2007

People love free stuff

Brain: There is a mysterious power that no human can resist, Pinky; a thing so great, that the strongest of souls bend, and surrender to it instantly!
Pinky: GASP! You mean... the Ark of the Covenant??
Brain: No, Pinky... the most tremendous force in the cosmos... FREE T-SHIRTS!!

Sue adds: Free CDs are almost as powerful.

One of the things I've learned over the years I've spent on the fringes of the record biz is that it's darn hard to promote an unknown artist. That's especially true when said artist is (1) something of a recluse, (2) shy, and (3) lives 7,000 miles away from the record company HQ. No longer do I say, "Why, that won't matter -- I'll just get people to listen to the music and they'll be won over!" Yes, I'm smarter now. But moments of cock-eyed optimism still poke through from time to time.

Last night, my pal Bradley organized a killer free show at Berkeley's Starry Plough, featuring his own ensemble, the Bye Bye Blackbirds, as well as the Family Arsenal, Statuesque, Gil Ray, and Scott Miller of the Loud Family. Statuesque is basically one guy, London's Stephen Manning. I happen to believe that he's an unsung pop genius. I was turned onto his music by Bradley. Between the two of us plus Sarah Gordon, who maintains Stephen's MySpace page, you've pretty much got the sum total of the world's Statuesque true believers. 125 released a Statuesque CD called Choir Above, Fire Below a couple of years ago, and it got rave reviews ("Manning's stuff stands up alongside your favorite Smiths, Morrissey and Radiohead records, while sounding totally unique and individual," said The Big Takeover) and sold, like, in the high double digits. Nevertheless, it holds a special place in my heart and may be my personal fave in our entire catalog.

Manning, who had flown across the pond to attend Bradley's wedding to the lovely Gina, was battling some horrible throat ailment (unfortunately, he got ill on his last visit too -- I guess international travel just doesn't agree with some people), but managed to perform a strong set, including numerous heretofore-unreleased tracks. Since it was a free show, and one to celebrate a wedding with loads of friends & family in attendance, Joe and I decided to bring a box of 50 Statuesque CDs and give them away after Stephen's performance. I am hoping folks were intrigued by Stephen's song stylings and wanted to hear more; I suspect some just heard the word free and reflexively grabbed a copy, but my hope is that at least five or 10 of those people will listen to Choir Above, Fire Below and become diehard Statuesque fans. Unfortunately, I don't think it's financially feasible for 125 to do full-fledged releases of Stephen's new albums, Calling Nature's Bluff and The Grape and the Grain, but I have offered to put them out digitally so at least people can buy them on iTunes or eMusic. I hope that will come to pass later this year.

Anyway, I figured I'd make the same offer, exclusively available to the readers of The Conical Glass. I can't afford to ship them for free, but if you send $3 via PayPal (U.S. addresses only, please) to info125@125records.com, I'll mail you a copy of Choir Above, Fire Below. Offer good while supplies last, or until I decide I've given away enough CDs, so act now!

posted by 125records @ 3:45 PM 1 comments

Saturday, September 29, 2007

Fall flops

I went to a wedding today where the bride & groom used a recording of ABBA's 1976 instrumental "Arrival" as their processional. I don't know how many other people in the crowd ever delved deep enough into the ABBA back catalog to recognize it, but can I just say that I found it to be the coolest thing ever? If Joe & I ever renew our vows, maybe we'll make our entrance to Pavement's "Rattled by the Rush." (In fairness to Joe, our recessional can be something from The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.)

Ah, October. The weather's getting crisp, and the fall arts season is in full swing. Ordinarily, that means I'd be accumulating stacks of tickets to all sorts of events, but this month I have commitments that will prevent me from spending too much time on the town. (More on that later, perhaps.) So I'm compiling a list of the 10 upcoming Bay Area events I would least like to attend. These are all real events that were advertised in the Chronicle, Bay Guardian or online.

1. The Brian Boitano Skating Spectacular featuring Barry Manilow live, performing the Great American 1970s Songbook (Dec. 5, AT&T Park): Take heart if you don't agree with me that this event would be icy-cold torture; it's being recorded for eventual broadcast on network TV.
2. "High School Musical -- On Ice!" (Oct. 24-28, HP Pavilion): That's right, if it's on ice, I probably won't want to go. Especially if the audience consists mainly of shrieking 12-year-old girls.
3. The Van Halen Reunion Tour with David Lee Roth (Dec. 22, Oracle Arena): What are the odds this train won't derail long before they hit Oakland?
4. "Transformers: The Movie: Now in IMAX!" (now playing, Loews Metreon): Blowing it up so it's 10 stories high won't make me any more interested in going.
5. The Good Vibrations Amateur Erotic Film Festival (Oct. 12, the Parkway Speakeasy Theater): Worst case scenario: "Oh my God, honey, isn't that your boss (dentist, mailman, accountant) and his wife?"
6. The Exotic Erotic Ball (Oct. 27, Cow Palace): The annual party for everyone who thinks it would be fun to submit a DVD to the Good Vibrations Amateur Erotic Film Festival.
7. Fifth Annual Rock Paper Scissors Championship (Oct. 6, Flamingo Resort, Santa Rosa): Amazingly enough, ESPN2 broadcast a RPS championship game a few months ago, and I TiVo'd it just to see if it was as boring as I imagined it would be. It was.
8. "Postal" (Oct. 12, in theaters nationwide): Uwe Boll tries to be funny -- on purpose. Sure to be the wackiest 9/11 comedy since "American Dreamz."
9. Beth Holloway signs her book Loving Natalee: A Mother's Testament of Hope and Faith (Oct. 20, Book Passage in Corte Madera): You know, that whole Natalee Holloway case got so little media publicity, I just found myself wanting more.
10. Sing Blue Silver: A Tribute to Duran Duran with Japanese Baby: A Tribute to The Cure (Oct. 26, The Rockit Room): Because I feel old enough already, thanks.

Best band name I saw in the Guardian this week: The Fuxedos

posted by 125records @ 7:07 PM 4 comments

Monday, September 24, 2007

Global-ization

After five whirlwind days of world music and sopapillas, we are back from New Mexico. I must admit that I'm just a tad disappointed with the people of Albuquerque. Everyone I've met there has been super-nice, but I can't help but feel that there should be way more support for Globalquerque! than there has been for its first three years. The attendance did go up this year, but the large plaza at the National Hispanic Cultural Center could easily hold twice as many people. I would love to see 3,000 attendees per day at the festival. It's such a remarkable event, it gets oodles of publicity, and it's super-cheap (as little as $25 per day if you buy in advance, which apparently no one does). I mean, the Saturday headliners, Mickey Hart's Global Drum Project, are scheduled to appear at Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall this week at $52 a pop. Even if you buy a Globalquerque! ticket at the door, they're only $35, and you get to see ten bands/artists over the course of almost six hours.

Because the majority of G! tickets are purchased on the day of the fest, this year's event could easily have been a disaster. If you read my blog on Thursday, you know about the huge rainstorm that hit Albuquerque the day before the festival. I think all of us who are involved with the event were nervous -- "We have lots of indoor spaces if we need to move anything," Neal promised on the web site. Luckily, Friday dawned warm & sunny, and the weather was perfect for the entire festival. Then on Sunday, as Joe, Neal and I sat in a cafe eating pizza, the skies opened up again and the city was absolutely deluged. We all agreed that we were blessed in regards to the weather. I am sure that if it had rained on Friday or Saturday, most people would simply have opted to stay home and G! would have lost barrels of money.

Perhaps part of the problem is that people think music festivals are arduous -- I know I have avoided events like Lollapalooza and Coachella because of a fear of crowds, porta-potties and $5 bottles of water. However, G! is a super-pleasant event, there's lots of comfy seating (one of the three concert venues is the state of the art Journal Theater auditorium), you can bring in your own agua if you so desire, and there are ample indoor restroom facilities. I do believe that if Neal and his business partner Tom continue to put the fest on every year, it'll grow and prosper as attendees tell their friends about the incredible thing that is going on right there in Albuquerque.

Here are a few of my favorite G! moments:

-Hearing Yungchen Lhamo sing -- she performs a cappella, and I can't help but think her soaring voice is what an angel would sound like. Between songs, she spoke in her quiet caress of a voice about her experiences fleeing Tibet, the importance of being kind, or her personal story of 9/11 (she lives in New York, and her son fled his school on foot in an effort to find his mother), frequently punctuating her stories with a wistful "Ya, ya." I think everyone who saw her will remember the experience forever. I got to snap a photo of Yungchen and Mickey Hart (with her camera, so I'm afraid I don't have the pic myself); I considered having my photo taken with Yungchen, but she's so tiny and goddess-like, I feared I would look like a moose standing next to a gazelle. At right, Yungchen does a Q&A about Tibet at Saturday's free day program.

-Senegalese kora master Lankandia Cissoko and balafon player Balla Kouyate -- I'm pretty sure that no one came to Globalquerque! because they're fans of West African harp-lute music, but people went nuts for it, dancing around and sticking dollar bills into Cissoko's kora (which has a convenient hole in it -- great opportunity to make some extra cash!). They even got an encore. Watching Kouyate work the mallets with lightning speed (the balafon is a bit like a xylophone) was amazing.

-Native American performer Kevin Locke doing his 28-hoop tribal dance at his evening showcase. The audience could scarcely believe what they were seeing, and applauded his every move. At his Saturday afternoon workshop, Kevin tried to teach several volunteers how to maneuver three hoops -- I don't think anyone quite got the hang of it, but it was fun. After his Saturday night show, I asked Kevin how he managed to do a bit where about 10 of the hoops seemed to be linked together as he danced around with them. He winked and said it was a bit of an optical illusion -- however he did it, it's mind-blowing!

-Another Native American, Shelley Morningsong, wowed the audience when she brought her husband and daughter, dressed in full Native regalia, up to dance as she sang a traditional song. It was too dark for me to get a pic, but I did find one of her husband Fabian, a member of the Zuni tribe, on the web.

Other G! favorites included Latvian folk quartet Ilgi, Moroccan sintir player Hassan Hakmoun, and Colombian singer Marta Gomez. Who knows what corners of the world next year's performers will hail from? I just hope the weather's nice.

posted by 125records @ 11:53 AM 1 comments

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Desert rainstorm

This is not my normal Thursday afternoon: sitting at a picnic table under a tent at the New Mexico State Fair with a beautiful Tibetan singer, watching a torrential downpour and eating an ear of roasted corn. We travel to experience new things, right?

Joe and I are back in Albuquerque -- when we left this beautiful place last fall, we vowed we'd come back again soon, so here we are. Once again, we decided to attend my friend Neal's annual world music festival, Globalquerque!, which begins tomorrow and will feature an array of performers from around the world, including India, Italy, Colombia and Senegal. Exiled Tibetan singer Yungchen Lhamo came into town a couple days early, and for some reason she thought it would be fun to attend the state fair on her day off. I don't think it turned out to be at all what she expected (I assured her that this was a completely typical American state fair), but she seemed to enjoy it anyway. We played a coin toss game on the midway and I won an ashtray -- hey, it might be useful if we have guests who smoke (outside, of course). After too brief a time, though, it started raining. We took shelter in a picnic area and Yungchen spotted a man who looked Tibetan. She started speaking to him, and it turned out he was from Tibet and now lived in Santa Fe, so they passed the time with an animated conversation. Yungchen is an exquisitely beautiful, serene person; she seems to get stopped all the time by people telling her how lovely she is, or admiring her knee-length dark hair.

The rain let up a bit, but it was still sprinkling, so we decided just to go back to the car. This proved easier said than done, as the tunnel we had entered through was flooded and the dirt parking lot was now pure mud. (That is going to be a serious mess for at least a few days.) Yungchen was wearing a stunning embroidered dress and I hoped it wouldn't be ruined. She was so gracious about it all, though, and seemed to regard it all as a fun adventure. The desk clerk at her hotel had warned her about the "bad weather," to which she replied that there was no good or bad weather, which seemed to me a very sensible attitude -- I mean, New Mexico's always having droughts, and probably needs a good soaking every once in a while. I am pretty sure that it would be very bad for Globalquerque! if it rained tomorrow or Saturday, though, so I hope the sun shines brightly.

I've traveled all over this great land, and I really believe that Albuquerque is one of America's best-kept secrets. It's just a really comfortable, fun, slightly eccentric place, and there are breathtaking vistas everywhere you go. Plus, they have the world's greatest coffee house/restaurant/wireless internet purveyor, the Flying Star, and many other fine places to eat (always an important consideration in vacation planning). Come visit!

posted by 125records @ 8:08 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Did you come here for a pie, sir?

Everyone has their quirky little anxieties & phobias. Indiana Jones may have been a fictional character, but didn't his fear of snakes make him seem more real? There's a lady in our building who is afraid of dogs, and gasps in fright whenever she sees Hobie. Howie Mandel, the host of "Deal or No Deal," is famously mysophobic.

According to Wikipedia, "Many specific phobias can be traced back to a specific triggering event, usually a traumatic experience at an early age." That is certainly true with my phobia, which is too obscure for The Phobia List. I have a real hang-up about cannibalism. Now, I realize that most people don't find it a pleasant topic, but it seems to be a subject of cultural fascination; The Encyclopedia of Cannibal Movies lists an astonishing 377 films that involve flesh-eating, from the highbrow ("The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover") to the ultra low-budget (2003's "Cannibal Hillbillies"). I plan to avoid them all. Next year's Left Coast Crime mystery convention has named its banquet after Alferd Packer.

Anyway, I know exactly why cannibalism terrifies me. When I was 9 or 10, I had a couple of gerbils. They had babies -- tiny little pink ones -- and I guess there wasn't enough room for a family in the Habitrail, because they ate them. Apparently this isn't uncommon gerbil behavior, but I literally had nightmares about it for months afterward.

Therefore, when I heard that the opening play of ACT's new season would be "Sweeney Todd," I was nervous. It's about a barber who kills people -- that part is OK; I do read a lot of mysteries, after all -- but then his landlady takes the bodies and makes them into meat pies. Mega-yuck. Joe, a big Sondheim fan, has seen the musical several times, but I've never gone along because of, well, you know. Still, I was determined to get through this because I haven't missed an ACT play in years, and it was supposed to be such a great production, with most of the cast coming straight from Broadway.

Here is the good news: director John Doyle's interpretation of "Sweeney" is so stylized that even cannibal-phobes have nothing to fear. In the original staging, Sweeney's victims were swept from a trick barber chair down a chute to be made into meat pies. Doyle dispenses with the chair altogether; once Sweeney slits a throat, the dead person puts on a blood-stained lab coat and then rejoins the ensemble. That's necessary, since this ultra-sparse staging doesn't have an orchestra; the company members play all the instruments, and all 10 are onstage throughout the show. When Mrs. Lovett offers Sweeney a meat pie, she gives him an empty plate, and he mimes eating it.

The music, of course, is excellent, particularly the catchy "Pirelli's Miracle Elixir" and even "A Little Priest," the most cannibal-specific song -- darn it, the wordplay is just so clever. I particularly enjoyed Tony winner Judy Kaye as tuba-playing Mrs. Lovett; she does the voice of Kinsey Millhone for the Sue Grafton audiobooks, so she's nothing if not versatile. David Hess as Sweeney had a slightly ragged voice, but his performance didn't suffer since it seemed to complement the character's desperation.

"Sweeney" will be everywhere this Christmas, as Tim Burton is directing a film based upon the musical, with Johnny Depp in the title role. Somehow, I doubt the movie version will be as un-gory as Doyle's production, so I'll most assuredly give it a miss. But at least I can finally hold my head up and say that I endured, and even enjoyed, the play.

posted by 125records @ 10:17 AM 5 comments

Saturday, September 08, 2007

Have a seat

Back in October 2005, I complained about the new age, pan-flute-music-playing, frou-frou nature of spas, and indeed, I have stayed away from them since then. However, during the past few days, my old neck and shoulder problems have recurred, and I really wanted some relief. What to do?

I have finally discovered the perfect, no-frills solution: CHAIR MASSAGE. A nearby pharmacy, Elephant Pharm in North Berkeley, has devoted a corner to On the Spot Massage, and you can drop by and get a 10- or 20-minute rubdown. You keep all your clothes on, there are fluorescent overhead lights but no scented candles, and since it's right next to the pharmacy counter, you can overhear people ask questions about their prescriptions as you sit there. This lack of atmosphere might be a detriment to some folks, but I find it relaxing as can be. Plus, you can grab shampoo, cough drops, and a tub of organic yogurt on your way out. Now that I've found it, I just need to be careful, lest I become a chair massage addict.

Autumn means the activity calendar is back in full swing. On Wednesday, I caught the new movie by Tom DiCillo, "Delirious." DiCillo directed the cult hit "Living In Oblivion," which came out in 1995 -- it played all of one night at Baltimore's Charles Theater, and somehow, I managed to catch it (I seem to recall that my friend Neal suggested it) and I was blown away by how clever and entertaining it was. His last feature film, 2001's "Double Whammy," never even got a theatrical release; since then, he's been directing for TV. "Delirious" uses some of the same tropes as "Oblivion" (i.e., a scene that you think is "real" until a director yells "Cut" and you realize you've been watching a movie-within-the-movie), and stars the same actor, Steve Buscemi. He plays Les, a New York paparazzo who is stalking a blonde pop tart named K'Harma (Alison Lohman). One day, he meets up with a young homeless street kid, Toby Grace (Michael Pitt), who somehow manages to persuade the irascible photographer to take him on as a sort of unpaid assistant. "Delirious" rubs your nose in the ugliness of New York's grungiest back alleys, and Buscemi's apartment looks like it could be condemned at any moment; indeed, Buscemi himself gives a performance that lacks even a shred of vanity, showing us how pathetic and nakedly vulnerable this character is. The plot kind of meanders, but the acting and the filmmaking -- especially the contrast between loser Les's dirty, smelly, miserable existence and the luxe life of the pop star, which are exquisitely rendered -- are top notch. Oh, and if you see it, stay until the very end of the credits or you'll miss the last scene.

Thursday, Joe and I headed to Cobb's Comedy Club in San Francisco to one of its special 25th anniversary shows, featuring four comedians who got their start at the club back in the early 1990s. Blaine Capatch has written for numerous TV shows and hosted a program on VH1; Brian Posehn co-stars on Comedy Central's hit "The Sarah Silverman Program"; Greg Behrendt made a fortune from his smash self help book He's Not Just That Into You; and Patton Oswalt is the funniest human alive today, along with the voice of Remy the rat in Pixar's "Ratatouille." I've seen Posehn a couple times and was just not that into him, but at this show, for some reason, his giant (seriously -- he's six and a half feet tall) nerd persona just worked for me, and I thought he was hilarious. I saw Behrendt do stand-up here in town from time to time before he became the mega-successful author he is today, and I had forgotten about his almost Tourette's-level use of profanity. Seriously, I think he used the "F" word about ten thousand times in 30 minutes. At one point, he mentioned a friend who was "into f---ing animals" -- he didn't mean that the friend had sex with animals, he just inserts that word in between pretty much any given pair of words, the way teenage girls use "like." But it kind of threw me for a sec, because I was expecting a bestiality gag. Loved the bit about his wife's crush on "The Office" star John Krasinski, though. Patton, of course, was Patton; I've lost count of how many times I've seen him live and he is always gut-bustingly funny. Of course, he went on last, because no one wants to follow him.

Today, Cerrito Classics was showing "Out of the Past" as part of its September film noir series. Out of the five films being screened, "Past" is the only one I had never seen before. It is really, really bleak, but Robert Mitchum couldn't be more splendidly nonchalant as the hero who gets involved with a beautiful but deadly dame (Jane Greer). At the risk of sounding like I'm 90 years old, the classic noir films prove that it was possible to make a suspenseful crime drama without excessive violence or cursing. Of course, instead of blood & the "F" word, the directors of yesteryear had cigarettes. Mitchum eventually died of lung cancer and emphysema, which will come as a surprise to no one who sees how much he smokes during this movie. I hate to say it, but even as a lifelong nonsmoker, I've gotta admit -- when people smoke in those old black and white films, it does look sensationally cool.

posted by 125records @ 9:31 PM 1 comments

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

For sentimental reasons

One of the running themes of this blog has been my ongoing battle with clutter, most recently in my epic X-Mess series, which ended prematurely when I came down with a dust-induced cold. (I have a severe dust allergy, which makes cleaning perilous, yet necessary.) Joe and I have a little storage unit that came with our condo, and we try to clean it out every couple years or so. We decided Labor Day Weekend would be an appropriate time to tackle the job, so we pulled everything out.

In the storage unit, we keep our luggage, a fan and a heater, Christmas decorations, and the extra pillows that came with our already over-pillowed couch. Those are all keepers. Easy choices to go: Joe's crutches and "moon boot" from when he broke his ankle. Then there were the tapes.

Hundreds of cassette tapes, and a box full of video tapes. We'd sorted through these boxes a couple of years ago, and these were the ones we chose to keep. Only thing is, they hadn't been out of their boxes since. We really only listen to CDs and MP3s these days. So we filled up three big cardboard boxes with tapes. Out of everything, we kept only 50. We probably won't listen to those either, but these were the ones we just couldn't part with -- mix tapes we made for each other early in our relationship; family history interviews with my grandmother; some advance cassettes that have special meaning to me. But so much is going: tapes I recorded of my college radio show, mix tapes from long-ago friends and pen pals, live bootlegs of shows I attended.

You just can't keep everything, I tell myself, and unlike my grandmother -- how her children and grandchildren delighted in the things she'd left behind, from old letters and postcards to ancient theater programs -- I have no heirs, so eventually it'll all be so much junk anyway. By the way, my cast-offs are not headed to the landfill -- this is Berkeley, after all! -- but to the Alameda County Computer Resource Center, which recycles and reuses media detritus.

Even without the tapes, I have no shortage of possessions. I may be getting rid of my old radio shows, for instance, but I still have all the playlists in a file folder. I don't need 10 copies of a story I wrote for the Baltimore Sun Magazine way, way back in my journalist days, but I'm keeping one copy. And some of my old stuff lives online; for instance, I found an old VHS tape of "Siskel and Ebert" TV shows, which have recently been archived on the web. Who needs 20-year-old video tapes of MTV (back when they actually used to show music videos) when VH1 Classic and YouTube have all the 80s stuff you could possibly want?

There is still much left to purge. I just need more holiday weekends.

Speaking of the 80s, we did take a break on Monday to go see "The King of Kong," an extremely entertaining documentary about grown men competing for the all-time high score in the classic arcade game Donkey Kong. DK was always my game of choice when I was a wee lass hanging out at Aladdin's Castle at North Kent Mall, though as is emphasized in the movie, it is a particularly difficult one and it's really hard to make it past the first 2 or 3 screens. The last time I tried playing was about 8 years ago in an arcade on the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, and I lasted maybe all of 45 seconds. But even if you weren't a DK aficionado, "Kong" is good fun, focusing on the rivalry between Machiavellian video game titan Billy Mitchell and recently-unemployed lovable loser Steve Wiebe. The film's director has described them as "the Salieri and Mozart of 'Donkey Kong,'" which is a surprisingly apt analogy. So far "Kong" is only playing on 21 screens, but it's proven to be rather successful -- its planned "one-week-only" Berkeley engagement has now stretched to three -- so it may be hitting smaller markets eventually.

posted by 125records @ 11:29 PM 0 comments

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Name: Sue
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