Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
Saturday night E and I were excited to score a pair of tickets to see Phoenix at The Tower from awesome XPN local music blog The Key. The seats were prime – slightly forward of the soundboard, just off the left aisle.
Unfortunately, the concert was less than prime. Way less. (For a more positive spin, check out the review @ Phrequency, which includes some killer photos.)
The Tower, as shot on my phone this June when we saw Conan there.
Most romantic comedies are neither romantic nor a comedy.
Discuss.
Really, is there much romance in watching two highly paid stars drift together over the course of two hours? And, are the situations ever truly funny, rather than simply awkward?
I don’t watch RomComs for those very reasons – they emphasize wattage over chemistry, and winces over laughter. My own life is more romantic and comedic than most movies in the genre.
None of that is true for TiMER, a beautiful, witty, indie flick full of love and laughter. It’s a romantic comedy through and through, but it hardly delves into the pedestrian trope of most RomComs thanks to its clever titular premise.
A near neighbor to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and similar to the quirky premise of How I Met Your Mother, TiMER is speculative fiction without the ray guns or alien races. It depicts an alternately reality only a shade different from our own, where science has found a way not only to divine your soul mate, but to define the exact day you’ll first meet them.
The process is simple. Visit a TiMER storefront (as ubiquitous as a cell phone store) and have a small digital screen implanted into your wrist. Your screen will count down to zero: the day you meet your true love.
It sounds ideal – you’ll know exactly when the one is really the one; no more worrying you’ll die alone or dating your way through losers.
Right?
Step-sisters Oona (Emma Caufield) and Steph (Michelle Borth) are a microcosm of why finding the one isn’t as simple as science. Oona’s TiMER won’t start counting down, while Steph’s is ticking towards a date in the far-flung future. And their little brother, barely old enough to have the device installed, gets an unexpected result.
Are any of the three situations better than going on blind dates, or having unrequited crushes? Both disappear from life when finding your soul mate is a matter of waiting for a special ring tone, which explains why many people in the world of TiMER go defiantly bare-wristed. Otherwise, romance would be extinct – no more courting, or transforming from friends into lovers. At least, not if you’re hoping it will last forever.
Emma Caulfield, most known for portraying the daffy, rabbit-fearing, reformed-demon Anya on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, carries the film with comedic aplomb. It’s surprising to see her take center stage so handily after watching her as an ensemble player.
Caulfield is just neurotic enough to come off normal, an orthodontist on the verge of 30 who is beginning to worry that it’s her that’s defective rather than her timer. Her typical zaniness is dialed down, leaving her sympathetic and vulnerable as the lovelorn Oona.
Similarly, Michelle Borth plays what could have been a flat depiction of promiscuity as an exercise in ethics. She portrays Steph as smartly self-aware instead of simply slutty (while remaining an utter bombshell). If your true love is years away, why not enjoy yourself with no strings attached with others in the same situation?
The rest of the supporting cast is strong, especially romantic foil John Patrick Amedori, exuding magnetic charm from his first line, and the rest of Ooma and Steph’s extended clan.
The movie wisely plays fast and loose with its science – in lieu of special effects and lengthy expositions it wields a script that injects reality into an unreal situation. The workings of the central device are left largely unexplained and to the viewer’s imagination, leaving room to speculate around the main story.
TiMER finds a way to inject romance into a world supposedly devoid of it, and stays comedic throughout. It’s also the first film so wistfully romantic that I was driven to actually hold my wife’s hand at the climax.
Highly recommended.
TiMER is currently showing in limited release, and is also available for streaming via Netflix.
This past month I was out of musical commission for as long as I’ve ever been – longer than when I had my tonsils removed, though perhaps not quite as long as when I broke my collarbone (although I have many grimace-inducing memories of propping my back up against the cinder block walls of Calhoun hall so I could leverage my left hand up high enough to fret chords).
In any event, it was a long time without music – from when I came down with bronchitis on January 9th through when I started playing piano again on February 1st.
Three weeks might not sound like a long time to you, but in time without music it’s an eternity, so I’ve been happy to get back to my musical routine this past week.
Every Wednesday: LP Open Mic @ Intermezzo (3141 Walnut)
Last week was my first week back to our open mic after a three week recess, and also a week of my hosting duties.
It turned out to be an evening of great fun. I opened with a trio of tunes so new that I don’t even have lyric links for them yet, let alone recordings, plus a new Beatles cover I had dreamt up on an old guitar the night before.
The turnout for the night was much lighter than usual, which resulted in the open mic becoming an effective round robin of me, Arcati Crisis, Mike from Shackamaxon, and my most-adored band in all of Philadelphia, Blueberry Magee, plus two appearances by our friend and fellow LP Artist Ashley Brandt. All three of the artists on that list are some of my favorites in Philly, and it was wonderful to share an exclusive bill with them for the night.
This week Dante Bucci and his hang drums are the host, but Gina and I will still make an appearance. If you’re around University City between 8pm and 11pm you should drop by.
Thursday: Arcati Crisis Rehearsal!
Okay, not really much of a scene to be seen on, but from our insanity at the open mic it was clear Gina and I were craving a chance to catch up and work on some new material. We picked our next four AC songs (two of which are from my super-new trio from the prior evening), and got most of the way through a guitar arrangement of one of mine – “Better.”
Our arrangement decisions tend to take forever when we’re inside of them, but in retrospect seem like they occurred in a flash. On “Better” we started out moving Gina into different capo positions to find a good interplay against my open progression in E. She wound up on the fourth fret.
At one point in following my chords she fell one chord behind me, and I stopped her and said, “you’re on to something.” Twenty minutes later we had crafted a fanged hook for the song that sounds perfectly at home despite the fact that it is wickedly out of step for Gina compared to my part.
We were pretty satisfied with ourselves at that point, and just sketched in the idea of the bridge before calling it a night. We still have to break out harmony vocals, which tends to be where the bulk of our arrangement battles lie.
Friday: The Pretenders @ The Electric Factory
I have a short list of bands that I absolutely must see once at some point in my life, mostly because I have been lucky enough to see bands while they are at their peek – before they become a rarer commodity.
For a long time one of those bands has been The Pretenders.
I remember my introduction to them pretty succinctly. When I was in high school there was a popular commercial that featured a Barbie and a G.I. Joe wheeling around in a plastic car to the tune of “Message of Love,” and I decided it was one of the best songs I ever heard. Googling for lyrics wasn’t quite as instantly gratifying at the time as it is now, but in relatively short order I discovered the song was by the Pretenders.
Of course, I knew all the singles, and had maybe even seen their Behind the Music & Storytellers before, but “Message” was my first succinct connection. Later, my Freshman year of college, I stopped by HMV after getting my now-legendary New Year’s Eve haircut and picked up their first trio of discs.
I was instantly hooked, and for a while that’s all I owned. They’re a succinct statement – two discs of the original lineup, and one that responds to their absence.
In recently years I beefed up my Pretenders collection, including their last two albums – Loose Screw and Break Up the Concrete. Both of them were critically lauded, and in both cases I agreed – neither is a stagnant act retreading past glories; both explore new arrangements while staying true to the core brash defiance of The Pretenders.
I was pining to hit their show, but it seemed like we might be too exhausted from the honeymoon to plan on it for sure. So, it came down to Elise and I in our living room at six o’clock on a Friday night, asking, “are you sure?”
We weren’t, but we still went, and I’m happy we did. The Pretenders were spectacular – muscular and mimeographic as they churned out faithful renditions of songs from the full range of their career. Chrissie Hynde not only sounded pitch perfect in comparison to her records, but also cut a svelte figure in her high boots and single-tail tux jacket – dancing an exaggerated sidestep in “Brass In Pocket.” It was plain as day the through line from her to PJ, Shirley, and Karen O.
It was also clear that she is one of the great, under-appreciated rhythm guitarists in classic rock – she’s effectively the backbone of every arrangement, even galloping time changes like “Tattooed Love Boys.”
The band played half of their newest disc, and nearly the entirety of their debut, plus all the notable singles between with the exception of “2000 Miles,” “Middle of the Road,” “Ohio,” and “Stand By You” (also, my manager saw them the prior night and got “Mystery Achievement,” which I had lamented not hearing).
One more band struck from the “once in a lifetime” list (the last prior cross-off was Cyndi Lauper, another stunning concert). I’m actually hard-pressed to think of who’s next at this point. I’m tempted by the Fleetwood Mac hits tour, but I don’t know if I could count it as the real thing without Christie McVie along for the ride.
Every Monday: Open Jam @ Connie’s Ric Rac (9th just under Washington)
Connie’s Ric Rac is my neighborhood open mic, as well as being the room that spawned my recent asphyxiation and the subsequent interstate love song that Gina is currently endeavoring to learn.
As the story goes, the Ric Rac (named thusly as a misnomer for bric-a-brac) used to be an Italian Market discount store owned by the titular Connie, and when the storefront closed down the shop stayed in the family. Later, her son(s?) proposed that they open the doors as a sort of counter-culture community center, complete with art classes, concerts, and open jams.
Thus, Connie’s Ric Rac. I was a little nervous about attending, because it’s a totally new scene to me, but I was encouraged by the fact that February’s guest host is the darling Katie Barbato, and the night was themed with Beatles covers as a tribute to the band’s first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show 45(!) years prior.
I arrived much too early to a Ric Rac family scene replete with snake-feeding, wine-drinking, and banjo recitals – all with the easy laughter and chain smoking that I recall from a childhood spent in my grandmother’s South Philadelphia kitchen. I was happy to remain a wallflower through the family affair until the night kicked off.
In addition to Katie (playing a sad, Across the Universe style “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and a new original with a killer chord change in the chorus) there was house band Discount Heroes (valiantly slaying “Revolution” and “Don’t Let Me Down” despite their singer’s flu), a freak-R&B act whose name I did not catch doing a remarkable version of “Savoy Truffle,” and Vince & Chuck.
Vince and Chuck were pure magic – performing note-perfect Beatles covers of a great selection of tunes – “Here Comes the Sun,” “If I Fell,” “Baby’s In Black,” and “Please Please Me,” plus another I can’t recall. I essentially pleaded with them to come to the LP Open Mic to share their Beatles tunes, and this was before discovering that Chuck AKA Charles Ramsey is a phenomenal songwriter in his own right.
Since the directive was early-Beatles I debated “Do You Want to Know a Secret” and “You Really Got a Hold On Me,” but settled on long-time favorite “All My Loving,” which I wailed like a fucking banshee. Katie assures me it was awesome. I also played the repeatedly aforementioned “Connie’s Ric Rac Love Song AKA Better,” “In My Life,” and later “Ob-la Di Ob-la Da,” plus a handful of other originals.
Katie will host out the month, and I’m going to make an effort to make it to the next two Monday’s to hang out with her and the Ric Rac family before shifting my attention to either Fergie’s or The Fire in March. She gave me a copy of the brand new full-length by her band The Sleepwells, and her voice is so freaking sexy on it. I might blush the next time I talk to her. Wow.
Every Tuesday: Open Mic @ Studio Luloo (916 White Horse Pike, Oaklyn NJ)
Yes, my friends, I got all the fuck around the scene this week.
Gina and I have had Studio Luloo on our to-do list for a while, and it was elevated by our missing an appearance from Year Long Day last week. We discovered that it is virtually around the corner from Gina’s abode, and tonight finally endeavored to make an appearance.
It was a completely worthwhile endeavor! Luloo is hosted and operated by the entirely charming Sara O’Brien, who shares songs, healing arts, and a tangible joie de vivre in this cozy shopfront slash recording studio with the best monitor mix we’ve ever heard.
No joke. We were first after Sara, so had no idea what to expect, and we started with “Bucket Seat,” which is not amongst the simplest of our songs, and the mix was just perfect. We could hear what we really sounded like, and not some faraway facsimile thereof. We also made a successfully epic run at “Apocalyptic Love Song” (click that link – Gina should win a freaking Grammy for that performance), and an entertaining jaunt through “Pocahontas.”
Playing first can be a curse if you want to get heard by the room at it’s fullest, but when you’re just out to chill it’s a wonderful pressure deflator. We had time to chat with some of the crowd, including super-sweet Dave from Never Trust, and Ryan Williams, who was the feature.
I’ve met Ryan before, but never heard him, and his songs are great. Like, actually great, not just hyperbolic great. He has a new one, “Audio,” that is pure aural dynamite. Scary-good.
I was sad to miss out on talking to a cool kid playing a Guild with a series of partial capos, his name maybe being Jeremy Hines? He had a really tuneful sensibility, and reminded me of Honorary Title – the sort of music I consistently fail at making when I write things like “Standing” or “Love Me Not.”
In other news…
I had designs on hitting the Tuesday open mic @ Time on the way home from Luloo, but Gina smartly deposited me back at my house so I can rest my voice a bit.
Not too much other news, other than I stopped by Cafe Grindstone over the weekend for a fabulous lunch of vegan kielbasa and a soy banana milkshake and spoke with Jerry at the counter a bit about how one gets selected to play there. It’s just about as close to me as Ric Rac, so I’d love to drop by to sing every so often.
Also, Battlestar Galactica. I could say a lot about this week’s episode, but right now I just have one thing on my mind: the return Ellen Motherfrakkin’ Tigh.
Coming up!
Hopefully some fucking sleep!
But, seriously, tomorrow night we’ll be at the LP Open Mic @ Intermezzo. If open micing is not your thing, get thyself to the Tin Angel to see Shackamaxon, awesome Mad Dragon recording artist Andrew Lipke, and a band called StereoFidelic which is likely awesome based on the company they keep.
Also, biggest news for last: Arcati Crisis will be splitting a bill with our friend and musical confidante Joshua Popejoy on February 28th at our much-beloved South Street venue Upstairs @ Zot! This will be a BIG SHOW – big sets from both of us, a big(ger) PA system, a big comfortable room for you to stretch out in, and hopefully A BIG CROWD.
$8, beer specials, awesome acoustic pop music. Mark your calendar. Tickets here.
What now? Oh, right, sleep.
.
Peter is a Philadelphia singer-songwriter, half of the band Arcati Crisis, and Director of Communications for Lyndzapalooza (LP).
The two exhibitions we’ve enjoyed the most both just opened this week – what luck on our part! Both played to our specific interests, which made them even more fascinating.
Today’s at Jeu de Paume was a phenomenal Robert Frank photography exhibit that perhaps I can get Elise to write up for you, as she would do it better justice than I could.
Yesterday’s deserves its own post not only for the conversation it inspired between the two of us, but also because it’s newsworthy – it just had just opened that morning!
Louvre initiated a groundbreaking partnership with a collection of famed French creators of bandes dessinees – comic books, though in this instance it refers to graphic novels – for the new exhibition Le Louvre invite la bande dessinée.
Just the idea of the exhibit is groundbreaking. Louvre is a classical institution, and it has heretofore neglected to recognize bandes dessinees as fine art worthy of mention. Yet, it isn’t just its inclusion that broke ground, but it’s execution. The exhibition is not just a static display of the work of famous comic artists. Instead, Louvre engaged a panel of artists to write and illustrate a series graphic novels set in Louvre, each centering on one of its specific works.
The result was a set of imaginative, fantastical, diverse graphic novels by authors Nicolas de Crécy, Marc-Antoine Mathieu, Éric Liberge and Bernard Yslaire – each with their own style and identity.
The exhibit features bios of each artist in French, English, and Japanese alongside of original plates of their work. Additionally, a series of video screens display the steps of digital illustration that went in to some of the books (said Elise: “Oh my god, Lindsay would love this.”).
One of our favorite genres of art in Louvre was paintings of the halls of the Louvre, because their artists had to painstakingly reproduce other artists’ works as seen at oblique angles and lighting conditions. The graphic novels do just that … arbitrarily, and on each page, all while imagining a narrative playing against that classical backdrop.
While many of the novels predictably featured the Mona Lisa, we were drawn in specific to Eric Liberge’s Odd Hours – partially because it is about Nike of Samothrace deciding to fly away from her moorings, but mostly because his illustrations are stunning. The plate of Liberge’s work literally stopped us in our tracks, which only a few other pieces in the entire museum managed to do.
This was a temporary exhibition, so we were prohibited from taking photos – and the comics are so new that I can’t even find any images online! I’ll try to shoot a page of Liberge’s stunning book to show you, as there’s no way I will be smooshing it onto my scanner at home.
As to the rest of my awesome weekend, there was the bit where we moved an entire house of belongings from one place to another in less than 90 minutes of manual lablor, and then there was the bit where I slept for a really long time because I was not feeling super, and then there was Amanda FUCKING Palmer.
(Actually, I skipped the bit where I walked up and down South Street belting out Dresden Dolls harmony vocals to see if I could attract the attention of anyone on the tour who would introduce me to Amanda, which in my opinion is a way more effective version of stalking than most of her fans might undertake. But, I digress).
Elise and I (and many of our other friends) are tremendous Dresden Dolls fans, so we all took the news of Amanda’s impending solo record with several grains of salt. Would it be an indulgent glamour project where she indulged all the inane songs Brian refused to drum on?
In a word: no.
Who Killed Amanda Palmer? is a fantastically layered, nuanced album that runs the gamut from heart-rending ballads to two massive pop blitzes catchier than anything the Dolls have undertaken (and this is coming from someone who has “Backstabber” tattooed on my brain – it’s my #1 most-listened to song in iTunes).
I’d tell you more about the album, but I’m already entrenched about 2500 words deep into my review of it, so it’ll have to wait. Instead, a word on the concert.
It wasn’t a concert.
At least, not in the sense you would typically expect. It was truly a cabaret – songs mixed with spoken word, mime, question and answer sessions with the audience, and unplugged performances on ukelele. It was an interactive, unconcertlike experience. At one point Amanda and The Danger Ensemble did a choreographed dance to the entirety of Rhianna’s “Umbrella” (which I had mercifully escaped hearing up until that point).
If that sounds like a damnation by faint praise … well, only a little. There were definitely points where the act of Amanda got slightly tiresome, and the show visibly bled audience at those points. In the past that blood has been me. But, on Saturday it finally felt like cabaret and not a concert, maybe due to the absence of Brian, and maybe because of how much Amanda chatted directly with the audience – explaining the funding behind her tour, or asking us to send her a text message.
It was much about atmosphere and attitude, texture and taste, as it was about playing all the hits. Case and point, perhaps my favorite song of the night wasn’t any of the ones I was hotly anticipating, but a take on her hilarious collaboration with Neil Gaiman, “I Google You” (explained hilariously via a blog comment chain by Neil), the best bit of which is definitely,
And I’m pleased your name is practically unique
it’s only you and a would-be PhD in Chesapeake
who writes papers on the structure of the sun
I’ve read each one
At the end of the night she came out for an encore of her current single, the hot horny mess of “Leeds United,” slapped onto the record complete with an “Oh! Darling” losing-my-voice single-take vocal. Introducing it (or maybe earlier), she mentioned that her record company didn’t like the video as-is because she looked “fat.”
We’re talking about someone on my list of five famous people I’d sleep with. Fat doesn’t really enter into the equation. Behold:
Right. Fat. Sure.
In any event, I loved the concert, and I’m happy that Amanda is getting the chance to make her own music away from the Dolls. If any of this sounded interesting (even if you don’t love Amanda’s music) I would suggest you check out her mammoth story of recording the record, which is more detailed and frank than any episode of Behind the Music.
(wow, that was supposed to be a short post)