| Return of the Kings |
 A middle-aged bookstore clerk in a black t-shirt folds his arms and raises his eyebrows. He booms: “Kids these days are into such pussy shit. Kings of Convenience. Just fuckin’ listen to Simon and Garfunkel, they were doing the same bullshit 40 years ago.” Yan Yan isn’t surprised that Korean university students go weak in the knees for Erlend Oye. “Of course Korean kids like them, their music is all about being clean and neat and perfect.” I fully accept the implication that I’m a teenage girl at heart. Part of me even revels in a sense of sinister complacency. Often, all I want is a lush string section, a soothing voice. Music that’s poetic and vaguely melancholy. |
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The Silent Movie Theatre is hosting a series called “F is For Folk” on Thursdays this month, and last night was Vashti Bunyan night. An exceprt of The Family Jams was shown along with the amazingly beautiful new feature length documentary Vashti Bunyan: From Here To Before, which traces the legendary horse-and-buggy journey traveled by Vashti and her compatriots in 1968. Last night’s screening also included the 2-minute theatrical premiere of Same But Different, a short film I shot at a Mean photo shoot with Vashti. And now, for the cyberspace premiere! Enjoy: |
Once upon a time in Montreal in 2003, an indie pop band called The Unicorns emerged out of nowhere and released the type of album that has the power to change people’s lives. That lo-fi masterpiece, Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone?, would sadly be the band’s one and only full-length release, as The Unicorns were destined to disband before most of their die-hard fans had even discovered them. Two of the three Unicorns members went on to form the so-so but generally overrated group Islands, but for a long time the world was remiss of any work from the true heart and soul behind The Unicorns, gay musician Alden Penner, who had been only 21 at the height of The Unicorns’ fame. Six years later, Penner’s all grown up, continuing the Unicorns legacy through the sonically stimulating band Clues alongside former Arcade Fire instrumentalist Brendan Reed. Check out a live performance of the track “Remember Severed Head” below:
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Mirror Mirror’s debut album, The Society for the Advancement of Inflammatory Consciousness was one of my favorite records of 2008. Their new video for the track “Eugene” has already claimed its place as my favorite of 2009. Spaced-out gradients, sinister clowns, shirtless boys skateboarding through virtual territories, pizza, and 3D trees: what more can you ask for out of a music video? It’s even radder that this piece of cinematic brilliance was directed by the band themselves. The visuals here are a natural progression of their aural aesthetic. Long live Mirror Mirror! via Rudy Bleu |
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Jesse Spears (pictured on the top right, smelling a buttercup) is one of my favorite artists. In addition to the blog she uses to document her endless creative output (Long Live Cartoon!) she also keeps a personal blog called Carnage Knockout, filled with sublime ephemera: snapshots of plants and pets, 911 calls, bubble wrap, and lists: like, “Things I Don’t Understand,” and “People I Want To Meet.” It was on Carnage Knockout that I first came across Wendy Morgan’s godly music video for the Gnarls Barkley song “Going On.” Wendy Morgan is a Canadian commercial and music video director who’s made some great ad spots for Ikea, Girls Inc., and MTV Canada that are often bizarre or bemusing and occasionally even tackle the ungraspable nuances of Canadian national identity. Truthfully, Wendy’s MTV commercials are too good for MTV… though, who knows, maybe in topsy-turvy Canada, that sad vestige of a former pop culture powder-keg has managed to retain some semblance of watchability. Regardless of MTV’s contemporary significance, its legacy lives on in cyberspace as the music video medium continues to thrive on a newly global scale– thanks in no small part to directors like Morgan. She’s crafted unaffected, imaginative videos for bands like The Unicorns and Dragonette– bands which don’t get any significant air time on the highly corporatized cable networks, but are now finding a home on the information superhighway. I thought it would be fun to interview Wendy Morgan, but even more fun to let Jesse Spears do most of the work, since she loves the “Going On” video so much. Jesse came up with a bunch of questions, and I threw in a couple of my own, and we e-mailed them off to the jet-setting filmmaker, whose blog is replete with images from Jamaica, Barcelona, Italy and France. I’m enormously grateful to Wendy for humoring us by responding to this interview, and to Jesse for conducting it. I’ll pass things over to Ms. Spears for a proper introduction:
1. What was the crew like for the filming of the “Going On” video? Like, how big was the crew, and how long did it take and stuff.? We shot for two days, prepped for probably five days, the crew was around 20 or so people I think, it felt pretty small in reality. The producer was Jannie McInnes of Revolver Films, the cinematographer was Max Goldman, who makes a ton of great videos, and I think he’s amazing. 2. How did you come up with the story of dancing Jamaican kids finding a portal to an alternate dimension? Well, the original story that was written was: we do a musical-style approach with singing and dancing that takes place in Africa. But it made more sense to go to Jamaica, and I love dancehall style dancing, but you’ll notice there are no obvious Jamaican references or locations. I wanted it to be a nether world. The song sounded like dancing and celebration to me and lyrically, it talks about going on. I imagined the farthest you can possibly go is another dimension, so we’ll go there. |
Emerging from an angsty, melancholy, Bright Eyes-heavy bout of introspection in my last year of high school, I had the good fortune of catching an intimate Dr. Dog show at one small venue in UC Davis’ myriad of coffee shops. Like a dark cloud parting to reveal the big bright shining sun, Dr. Dog guitar-plucked their way into my teenage soul that night, and has remained one of my favorite bands ever since. So when the chance came to do an interview with co-lead singer Scott McMicken for Mean magazine, I leapt at the opportunity. After attending an awkward industry-only midday peformance in Hollywood, I met Scott in the parking lot of the Roosevelt Hotel and we spoke for a blissful hour and a half of matters great and small. The meat of that interview will be published in the upcoming August issue of Mean (along with my interviews of Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball, Towelhead star Summer Bishil, and my first sneaker column). In preparation of Dr. Dog’s amazing new album, Fate, which hits shelves tomorrow, my editor has given me permission to post some excerpts from the remainder of my rambling conversation with Scott McMicken here. Enjoy!
Download: “The Old Days” from the new album, Fate Have you ever thought about creating a Dr. Dog musical? That would be really awesome. We did this album, Psychedelic Swamp a long time ago, and we’ve always had dreams to make it a traveling piece of theater. There’s a real strong narrative throughout the album and it would be pretty easy and really fun to try and make it into a sort of low-budget theater production. But even a movie of that… Is Psychedelic Swamp available anywhere? I’ve tried to find it before and haven’t had any luck. No, it’s not. The problem is… we would have put it out already, but the concept on the album is that we didn’t make it, we got it in the mail. So the packaging is an envelope with our address on it. The idea is that we got it—this cassette tape—from this dude who used to live on earth, but escaped into this psychedelic parallel universe, as an effort to escape all the problems he was having on earth. And when he got there, initially he was like, “Wow, this is awesome! Everything is so weird, and everything is upside down, with psychedelic aesthetics—nothing is predictable!” But over time, as he gained his frame of reference there, he realized that the same problems persist and there’s no real escape other than accepting and dealing with these issues that you have in your life. So he wants to make this album and send it back to earth to spread that message, like, “I’ve made this mistake, I thought I could escape but now I’m just trapped here. Everything’s the same.” And he appeals to us, saying, “Can you be the band that’s going to translate this music into modern American pop music, so that the message is understood?” He’s becoming so detached from reality the more he’s there, his ability to communicate and his way of going about representing information is becoming more and more garbled and detached and that’s why it sounds like a very psychedelic album.
The reason we haven’t put it out yet is because before we do that, I want to do what he’s asking us to do, which is to take all the music and re-record it as a live rock band with no psychedelic elements whatsoever. Very straightforward, immediate delivery, just like he wants it to be—a translation of his psychedelic mess. So when we do that, we’ll put ‘em both together and it’ll be like a double album. Have you ever hopped a train? No… I want to. My friends do that. I have a few friends who live that way, riding around on the rails, and there’s something about it that’s very romantic. The three people I know who do it, it’s not a big social thing—they’re not with a huge group of people. Most of the time they’re on their own, so it seems kinda cool. Dangerous—very dangerous. Probably very uncomfortable. In truth, I’ll probably never ever do that, but I certainly like the idea of that. All I can picture are horror stories of getting sucked under and your legs get chopped off. |
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“Forget about the aesthetic,” says Becky Stark, the lead singer of Lavender Diamond. “Recent scientific studies have shown that men have a greater tendency to interpret things visually than women.” Stark and her cartoonist/drummer boyfriend, Ron Rege Jr., are the sole members of a new side project called Mystical Unionists. They played a low-key yet sublime show at the aptly titled Hope Gallery in Echo Park this weekend, where Rege’s artwork is currently on display. “This is entirely about the aural,” says Stark, hoping to effect a sea change, one small drop at a time, from the hegemony of the male perspective towards something much less aggressive. If she can get this small, devoted audience to even slightly alter the way they process things, perhaps it can affect a widespread shift towards the global acceptance of “love” and “peace” she’s always touting in her music, with utmost sincerity. “Close your eyes and let go of the visual,” she advises before launching into a subdued melody. “Well, except for Ron’s art,” she qualifies. “You should look at that.” Armed only with a microphone masking-taped to a wooden stick and a pair of carefully decorated floor toms, Mystical Unionists sounds something like a campfire lament at the end of the world and a hopeful appeal to America’s frozen heart. Ron and Becky are a dynamic duo whose artwork couldn’t be more aligned. In her lyrics and his cartoons, in her stage banter and his illustrations, the couple is devoted to building a Utopian world that shares the optimistic ideals of the 60’s, minus the questionable hippie trends of the day (is anyone really longing for a revival of door beads and lava lamps?). “I had a dream the other night,” Becky tells me when I approach her after the show, “where everything I had ever thrown out was turning into cups of tea that I was forced to drink. Every piece of Scotch Tape– everything.” A regime change or a liberal political upheaval is good, Becky says, but we can’t rely on politics to change the world for us. “Each one of us is accountable for everything we do.” Somehow, when Becky says it, it sounds less like a lecture and more like a fun challenge, full of dancing and color and song. Becky Stark is our generation’s Yoko Ono. Check out 21 pictures I took at the show, after the jump! |
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