from San Diego Fahrenheit, circa summer 2003:
The Multiplex Dreams of Bollywood
by Jesse Jarnow
“These seats are real comfy,” my friend whispered as exotic birds fluttered floridly across the movie screen and landed.
“Yeah,” I giggled. “It’s almost like they want you to stay.”
We were somewhere in the middle of Winged Migration, a low-grade Disney-style nature flick, in the fourth theater on the third floor of the local multiplex which featured – give or take – 20 or so inexorable looking pieces of shit. But, despite the theater’s dubious quality, they also possessed a refreshing lack of security, coupled with labyrinthine system of escalators and a pair of unwatched smoking decks. It was an unbeatable deal: for $10 one could construct his own Indian-style multi-hour epic replete with sweeping drama, garish dance sequences, and – hell – even a mutant slasher or two. So we did.
From the anthropomorphic goodness of Winged Migration, we dropped into some previews. If Winged Migration was an abstract tune-up, then the previews were an overture. They acted as a series of condensed plot arcs, keynotes for the dramatic themes to be explored later. Under The Tuscan Sun (chick flick), Cat In The Hat (future cult-favorite dark horse), and Brother Bear (a Disney cartoon with a puzzling appearance by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas reprising the McKenzie Brothers in the form of a pair of talking moose), attuned us as viewers to the range of emotions we would likely be expected to feel later.
Then, a dash into the thick of it, to the movie we had actually bought tickets for, the 9:20 show of Spy Kids 3D. As I turned to survey the theater, I realized the other viewers had actual 3D glasses. “Yeah, it’s in 3D,” my friend confirmed, noting my puzzlement.
“Well, why don’t we get some?”
We zipped down the escalator to the Guest Services Counter and demanded what was rightfully ours: two pairs of gloriously old-fashioned cardboard glasses with blue and red cellophane lenses. Back in our seats, the screen instructed us to put our glasses on. We had worn ours up the escalator and into the theater. Suddenly, the landscape morphed into a grid, Tron-like and perfect. For the next 40 minutes, minus a quick nip to the smoking balcony, we were immersed in a genuinely vintage 3D world. It worked as well as could be possibly hoped. Objects shot out of the frame, characters progressed with no other motivation than that it might look cool.
And it did. A senseless feast for the eyes unfurled in a picaresque series of spectacles. The plot was occasionally stirred by a suitably bizarro b-movie villain played with Jerry Lewis aplomb by the impossible-to-take-seriously-ever-again Sylvester Stallone. In 10 years (or even 10 months), this could be a serious midnight classic, assuming theater owners have enough ingenuity to track down (or make) a crate or two 3D glasses. So, the little kid and Grandpa saved the universe or something and it went back to plain ol’ two dimensions, and we split.
Falling plum into the middle of a movie can be disconcerting. At first, one clutches desperately to the dialogue, trying to figure out who is who, what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it. After doing it two or three times in a row, plots became irrelevant. Other details took on new importance. Dialogue and acting could be taken objectively on their own immediate merits as performances. Messages could be found, y’understand? Any film could be turned into a Rocky Horror-style gimmick-fest with cues and whistles.
I looked for triggers for us to leave: a parrot escaping in a cage in Winged Migration, the end of a montage sequence in Freaky Friday, which we checked out after Spy Kids. Montages kick ass, instantly understandable dumb shows that rarely fail to express cinematic momentum, regardless of the quality of the movies they’re nestled in.
Gigli was the final stop for the evening. A guard hovered by the door of the theater, though made no attempt to stop us, despite the fact that we still wore our 3D glasses. Though it was supposedly legendary in its terribleness, Gigli didn’t seem all too bad — or, at least, no more horrible than a random 10 minutes out of Freaky Friday. There was Ben Affleck, and Jennifer Lopez, and a retarded kid, and Ben Affleck sticking a syringe in his character’s mother’s thong-dipped ass. What’s so bad about that, eh?
It still looked way cooler with 3D glasses on, though, red and blue hues swirling the film to Stan Brakhage-like abstraction. The guard stood by the door. “What if he doesn’t let us leave?” my friend hissed as J-Lo launched into a display of histrionics.
“You got a problem with the retarded kid?” I asked her. “Are you insensitive?”
Apparently, the guard was, because he soon left. And so did we.
“Ouch!” – The Rutles (download) (buy)
from The Rutles (1978)
released by Rhino
(file expires July 16th)
Ostensibly parody, Bonzo Dog Band leader Neil Innes’ songs for the Rutles are more like what the Beatles themselves might’ve written under slightly different circumstances. Sure, repurposing “Help!” into “Ouch!” is silly, especially with those extra-long verse phrasings, but the sentiment is just as sincere. Why should “Ouch, don’t desert me, ouch, please don’t hurt me!” be any less emotional or effective than “Help, I need somebody, help, not just anybody”? It’s just that John Lennon chose the latter. Innes’s version, really, is just as naked and direct. That’s not to say that Innes is a better songwriter than Lennon, but the whole original soundtrack is great stuff. Like top grade Nuggets faux-fabs, Innes nails the Lennonesque wistfulness repeatedly. In fact, I might even prefer Innes’ “I know you know what you know/But you should know by now that you’re not me” to Lennon’s “I am he as you are me as you are she and we are all together.”
Episode 23: Songs In the Key of Your Mom
(Link here.)
1. “You Broke My Heart” – Lavender Diamond (from Cavalry of Light EP)
2. “It’s Summertime” – The Flaming Lips (from Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “Rain” – Bishop Allen (from The Broken String)
5. “When Love Was the Law in Los Angeles” – Tarwater (from Spider Smile)
6. “Selling Oakland By the Pound” – Mushroom with Eddie Gale (from Joint Happening)
7. “Fall Breaks and Back to Winter (Spring Breaks and Back to Winter) – Jim O’Rourke (from Smiling Pets compilation)
8. “Plin” – Hermeto Pascoal (from A musica livre de Hermeto Pascoal)
9. “Witchi Tai To” – Harpers Bizarre (from Harpers Bizarre 4)
10. “Ruby” – Silver Apples (from Contact)
11. “Black Swan” – Thom Yorke (from The Eraser)
12. “Spotted Pinto Bean” – The Residents (from Meet the Residents)
13. “Red River Valley” – The Mountain Goats (from Daytrotter Session)
14. “Brazil” – Frank Sinatra (from Come Fly With Me)
15. “Tropicalia” – Caetano Veloso (from Caetano Veloso)
16. “Summer Turns to High” – R.E.M. (from Reveal)
Well, there was a new Frow Show to post & some other odds & ends, but Ropeadope is off ’til Monday, and I’m gonna do the same. We’re just gonna get back to detonating marshmallows for freedom now.
I am not quite sure what to call the below episodes of Robot Chicken and Powerpuff Girls, in which fairly fuckin’ hilarious Star Wars and Beatles references, respectively, are framed in the shows’ usual styles. They are not mash-ups, except conceptually. They are too scattershot to be parodies, and too oblique to be tributes, though that perhaps comes closest. Anyway, it’s probably making too much of them, but both make comedy from the secret vocabulary of intimate fandom.
It’s not like other shows haven’t done the thematic-inside-joke-as-leitmotif before, but these two happen to do it with worlds that have been with me (and probably a lot of people) since early childhood. So, it’s absurd, but it somehow runs deeper than that — as when the Robot Chicken dudes tell the story of Ponda Baba, one of the many creatures from the Mos Eisley cantina that resonated with my adolescent self as grotesquely creepy, or when the whole Powerpuff episode builds towards a joke based almost exactly on More Videos
“Arrival in Mas” – recorded by David Baker (download) (buy)
from Pitamaha: Music From Bali (2000)
released by Amulet
(file expires July 4th)
There’s lots of gamelan music to be had besides Amulet’s Pitamaha: Music from Bali, and I’ve had some of it, but David Baker’s compilation of field recordings was my first exposure. “A thousand toy pianos twinkling madly,” is how I described it before I knew anything about the genre, about how each “instrument” is actually an individually tuned set of sub-instruments. And, to be honest, I still don’t know much about it, give or take a few shadow puppet traditions. It is not that the rhythms sound foreign to me. They sound as instantly natural as ever, as does the tone. They sound like another dimension, like the alternating consciousnesses of Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland & the End of the World, a place I’ve been all along.
Album reviews:
The Mix-Up – The Beastie Boys (Relix)
The Complete Rich-R-Tone 78s – The Stanley Brothers (from Paste #16)
Indie-Weirdo Round-Up, featuring: Dandelion Gum by Black Moth Super Rainbow, While My Guitar Violently Bleeds by Sir Richard Bishop, Mirrors by Battles, Corona: Tokyo Realization by Jim O’Rourke, and Spider Smile by Tarwater (JamBands.com)
Track reviews:
“Melody Day” – Caribou (with interview) (PaperThinWalls.com)
“Wave Backwards to Massachusetts” – Hallelujah the Hills
Columns and misc.:
BRAIN TUBA: Friends & Other Hippie Pap (JamBands.com)
“Summer Salt” demo
“Meet the Mets” cover
In print:
Paste #33 (Can Rock Save the World? cover): feature on Ghosts of Cité Soleil director Asger Leth, film review of Death at a Funeral
July Relix (Page McConnell cover): album reviews of the Beastie Boys, Praxis, Buffalo Tom; book review of Dub: Soundscapes & Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae)
“Sad and Lonesome” – RANA (download) (buy) [live versions only on iTunes]
from Here in the USA (2002)
released by Bonesaw
(file expires July 2nd)
Man, after five years (!), RANA’s “Sad and Lonesome” is still so perfectly languid. Though they sometimes played at being an indie band, the New Jersey quartet never quite mastered the hipster, er, edge. But when they played to their strengths — chemistry, mainly, and berserker lead guitar — they sounded fantastic. Though “Sad and Lonesome” references both blues (a pair of harmonica solos) and country (the title, and a twangy solo from guitarist Scott Metzger), the song is decidedly neither of those. But it’s definitely sad, and it’s definitely lonesome. A lot of the mood comes from songwriter Matt Durant’s Rhodes, a naturally sleepy instrument that simulates warm, nocturnal air. On paper, the lyrics are an ambiguous jumble — Durant claims, “It’s such a nice night to be married” before he declares that he’s gonna “find [him]self a bride” — but it’s no matter and (in practice) makes exactly enough sense as it needs to.
“Meet the Mets” – Funny Cry Happy (download)
(Ruth Roberts and Bill Katz cover)
(file expires July 1st)
If anybody was wondering what a Funny Cry Happy arrangement of “Meet the Mets” would sound like, well, wait no longer. Conceived during the atrocious 4-14 stretch and recorded with a mite less mope following their three-game sweep of the A’s this weekend, it’s… um, I guess it’s something I made on a Sunday evening for the hell of it. Forgive the extra/dropped beats.
