Throbbing Gristle hits NYC

A mere minutes after hearing about the gig, I was on ticketweb to buy my way into the Throbbing Gristle gig on April 16. The band is playing the Brooklyn Masonic Hall, its first NYC show since 1981. I just posted a lil announcement on the Time Out New York blog, with basic—very basic—background for those unfamiliar with TG.

While Genesis P-Orridge has had the highest profile of all four ex-TG members, I much prefer both Chris and Cosey and Coil—once the smoke surrounding P-Orridge's personal antics has cleared, the music itself just isn't very inspiring. The 1980s albums of Chris and Cosey, on the other hand, still sound great (The Essential Chris and Cosey Collection gives a good overview), while the apocalyptic visions of Coil's early output, especially 1984's Scatology and 1986's Horse Rotorvator, remain terrifying.

This Hamlet I want to see

Apparently David Tennant is the greatest Hamlet of his generation, or so says The Guardian. Okay. Needless to say, these photos are not from the production that's taken London by storm. Rather, it is, as you might have guessed, a German staging—more specifically, one by Dilettante favorite Thomas Ostermeier.

I don't even know why I specify it's German because if you've been following international theater of the past 25 years, it's pretty obvious that it is. (The equivalent works in opera, too, as those who read La Cieca and her hilarious Regie quizzes know full well.)

I know, I know: It's so easy to make fun of those productions. And yet I often find them entrancing because they are so demented. I ran into a composer friend at a Park Slope coffee shop a couple of weeks ago, and we had the beginning (because I was running late and had to go) of an interesting conversation about this. I tend to fall in the pro-Regie camp, which holds that you can completely reenvision a play or opera, and his basic question was, If you're going to mangle something beyond recognition, why don't you come up with a new play or a new opera to begin with?

A valid concern, of course, to which I say: If we've seen Hamlet 100 times, why not make take liberties with the 101st? Granted, this does assume that the audience has seen enough Hamlets to be interested in a radical reimagining of it; I'm not sure one can make this leap about our local audiences.

Chances are we're not going to see Ostermeier's Hamlet here, unless maybe BAM does well enough with Sam Mendes's The Cherry Orchard and The Winter's Tale in the coming month, and uses part of the profits to import Hamlet for a five-day run. That to me is one of the reasons to mount this type of staging—so it can finance more commercially hazardous ones. We'll see.

A little sucking action

A couple of nights ago, I went down to Sunset Park to attend the NY premiere of G.B. Jones's 13-year-in-the-making epic, The Lollipop Generation, at Light Industry. In more ways than one, it was like watching a home movie made up of vacation footage pieced together: Most of it was shot in Super 8mm and because filming was done over several years, the appearance of some of the actors changes rather visibly. But it also fulfilled the memory-triggering role of a home movie, transporting me back to the heady days of homocore, the queer-punk movement that briefly lit up the fringes in the early to mid-’90s.

I still have my Fifth Column albums, and when the time came to part with my zine collection (there's only so much space in a New York apartment), I couldn't bring myself to part with two masterpieces Jones and her star Jena von Brucker were closely involved with, J.D.s and Double Bill. I still love the way they obsessed over pop culture and rock with self-knowing rage (Double Bill was about how William Conrad is cool and William Burroughs is evil!) and the way they spat out venom at the assimilationist mainstream gay movement. Now that the gays are all rallying behind marriage (to be clear: I want all those rights but I'm perfectly fine if they're gathered under the secular umbrella of "domestic partnership" or something), this feels so…refreshing.

Their Hit Parade

Sunday night I caught a show that reminded me of why I live in New York. Oh I know, there are many good reasons to live here, but once in a while you see something that's so demented, so unpredictable, so plain fun that it just nails you to your seat. And on Sunday, it was the beta-testing of Our Hit Parade, a new revue orchestrated by the brain trust of Kenny Mellman, Bridget Everett and Neal Medlyn at the Zipper, with the goal of making it a monthly event in ’09.

The concept is deadly simple and deadly great: A bunch of downtown performers go through the Top Ten hits of the moment. Actually, they took some liberties because Amy Winehouse's "Valerie" and Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" are a little old by now, and I'm pretty sure Riskay's "Smell Yo Dick" didn't make it to the Top 1,000. But whatevs: the general idea is sound, and the execution was nothing short of awesome.

Let's get the dud—yes, there was only one, which is a pretty amazing batting average by any standard—out of the way first. Jonny "the Gay Pimp" McGovern's rewrite of Beyoncé's "Single Ladies" bombed. Changing the lyrics is cheating, and if you're going to do it anyway, you'd better be funny—and the Gay Pimp just wasn't. Next!

It's hard to beat Everett for sheer audacity. Everytime I think "Oh no she won't," she just does. Is there anything this woman is afraid to do to a song and to an audience? Off went the clothes, because it's so much more comfortable to sing in a bra and thong, especially when you're going on and on about coming home at 5am and sniffing something funky (see ref. to Riskay above). And especially when you're doing it while thrusting your crotch in the face of a guy sitting in the front row. At another point, Everett orchestrated a giveaway in which audience members won CDs by eating candy up from her tongue and then from her self-described cooch.

It's worth mentioning that a few minutes earlier, said candy had been strung together to form a jolly penis pouch for Neal Medlyn, his stage attire for his performance of Miley Cyrus's "Wake Up America." I guess that's what the fearless candy-eaters were smelling, as Riskay would say. Medlyn is so comfortable being nude—or just wearing candy—on stage that he looks weird in a suit.

My shortcomings in the dancing department (even, sadly, chair-dancing) were glaringly obvious during the Varsity Interpretive Dance Squad's genius take on Estelle's "American Boy." They drilled the entire crowd through the interpretive routine we would do during the chorus and while it was pretty basic, I have no muscle memory and could not remember the sequence—being distracted by the VIDS' own moves on stage didn't help either. With my pathetic exception, however, the entire audience rose to the challenge.

Another highlight was Molly Pope's saucy cover of "I Kissed a Girl." The deceivingly demure-looking Pope has real pipes (check out the videos on her site) but she also knows how to interpret a song. She completely reinvented the meaning behind Katy Perry's words without changing them (note to Gay Pimp: that's how it's done), turning an exploitative ditty into a carefree, sexy awakening.

It may have been freezing cold outside, but at the Zipper, we were all basking in the warmth of entertainment magic.

Shakespearean Borat

Now I certainly don't want to echo Stockhausen's remark about 9/11 being "the greatest work of art there has ever been," but a line in Ayman al- Zawahiri's latest communiqué did strike me as uncommonly poetic: "Be aware that the dogs of Afghanistan have found the flesh of your soldiers to be delicious, so send thousands after thousands to them." Keep in mind I'm merely talking about style, not content.

Note, for instance, that the dogs have not found the flesh delicious: They have found it "to be delicious." There's a certain flow to it, like Borat writing a Shakespearean sonnet. The tone throughout is also oddly sexual in a subliminal manner—the mix of desire and violence is startling. Al Qaeda may have a future writing for HBO if, you know, they weren't such blood-thirsty fundies.

No reunion is impossible!

Last week my colleague Mike Wolf asked me what show I would love to see even though it was highly unlikely to happen. "Dusty Springfield!" I yelped. No, a show by someone alive—picky, picky, picky. "Kylie Minogue!" No, more rock. I couldn't think of anybody at that moment and he couldn't hold it anymore: "Teenage Jesus and the Jerks are playing the Knitting Factory in June!"

Okay, I have to say that on the cool scale, that one's an 11. Teenage Jesus, of course, was the ultra-abrasive no-wave band that unleashed the young Lydia Lunch on the world. They played short songs, recorded a couple of EPs and disappeared. Now they're back for one night, with Lunch handling both vocals and guitar.

Mike has more details on the TONY blog. The only question right now: When am I going to find the time to go to the Knit's box-office and buy tickets.

P.S. Teenage Jesus' shows were brief: 15-20 minutes. Which is the way it should be. Too many bands now, full of egotistical self-regard, go on forever. I was reminded of that sad state of affair Saturday, when the utterly mediocre Bodies of Water, opening for Sons and Daughters at Bowery Ballroom, rambled on for an unconscionable 45 minutes. And another note for Bodies of Water: Vocal harmonies doesn't mean four people singing at the same time but in collaboration. Which, you know, requires some actual work.

This is hardcore

One of my favorite black-metal bands is Norway's Gorgoroth, fronted by a true-blue psychopath named Gaahl (that guy on the left). Alas, Gorgoroth is unlikely to ever play in the States, and there's two main reasons. One is that Gaahl has a police record, having spent time in the clink for assaulting a man; the other is that Gorgoroth's live show includes rather interesting props. Click on this link and admire photos from a gig in Oslo. Nude crucified people wearing hoods—makes Chris Ofili's painting of the Virgin Mary made with elephant dung or Andres Serrano's Piss Christ look like Pat the Bunny, huh?

It's doubtful the band could ever get a visa to play in the US, except maybe…Here's a crazy idea: The Guggenheim or P.S 1 or some such institution should bring them over as an art project. Yes, that's it! Curators, if you're reading this please get on the horn! Otherwise New York fans will have to book a ticket for the Wacken Open Air festival in Germany, where Gorgoroth is scheduled to play this summer. Not a bad option, actually, considering this year's lineup also includes the Carcass and At the Gates reunions.

Gorgoroth "Wound Upon Wound" (from Ad Majorem Sathanas Gloriam, 2007)
Gorgoroth "Untamed Forces" (from Ad Majorem Sathanas Gloriam, 2007)

Welcome back

Looks like Your Flesh, a zine I used to read with great interest back in the late 80s and early 90s, is back in action as an online publication. Okay, it's not really new news, but I'm happy enough to give them a belated shout-out. One of the reasons I so enjoyed the mag back then is that it plugged a lot of so-called pigfuck bands, which overall I much preferred to the concurrently happening—and much more successful—grunge acts.

Even better, Amphetamine Reptile, one of my favorite labels ever, is back in action. Cows, God Bullies, King Snake Roost, early Boss Hog: AmRep classics. (It's not a coincidence that the word "noise" was pretty much part of AmRep's logo.) Not only that, but flagship band Halo of Flies, led by label boss Tom Hazelmyer, is back as well! Watch out for a forthcoming three-song 7" by Lydia Lunch backed by…Halo of Flies! Oooh mama!!! I was lucky enough to hear a burn and it oozes bile. Just fantastic stuff—I listened to it five times in a row this afternoon, then went on and ordered the vinyl from AmRep mail order. You should as well.

I'll never forget that time in the early 90s when I went to the Park Slope food co-op (just visiting!) wearing a T-shirt bearing AmRep's signature slogan "Dope, Guns and Fucking in the Street." A woman stared at me and said, sotto voce, "You know you have a bad word on your shirt, right?"

Fortunately some brave souls are keeping the flame alive. There's Clockcleaner in Philly, for instance, and White Drugs, a quartet of mad Texans I know nothing about except their album Harlem is messed up in all the right ways:

White Drugs: "I Hate Yr Face" (note the righteous spelling of "your")
White Drugs: "Surrounded by Studs"

A Springer in my step

I saw Jerry Springer: The Opera at Carnegie Hall and was somewhat impressed—by the show itself rather than the production—even if I can't say I reached the gushing heights of Ben Brantley, going all Edmund Hillary on us in the NY Times. In brief: the score is absolutely superb, the lyrics are uneven, the libretto even more so.

Two particular elements that Brantley singled out for praise were glaringly faulty to me: The orchestra sounded tinny and sometimes cheaply undersized (cost-cutting measure?), and Harvey Keitel was a problem in the title role—as in, he had zero stage presence. This proved to be disastrous in the second act, in which Jerry Springer really comes to the fore and has to carry a lot more of the action than in the first act, where the parade of trailer-trash guests provides all the entertainment we need (but even there, the book could have been tightened up). Unfortunately, Keitel was a blank, robotically walking through the evening. Good thing the rest of the cast was superb, with a particular shout-out to Max von Essen, who made a brilliant entrance in a mini-skirt and pumps.

That was only one of the many bright moments that night. I'm no fan of profanity in shows, for instance, finding it usually a weak, cheap crutch, but there the avalanche of raunchy language and situations became completely surreal and turned into a kind of touching and often very funny poetry. (I'm waiting to see if Mamet is able to pull off a similar feat in his new play.)

There's basically two ways to get me at the theater: come up with a completely new device, something completely crazy I've never seen before; or find the extraordinary in the ordinary, sucking art out of the most mundane, the crassest spectacle. Normally I cannot bear the Jerry Springer Show—even at the gym with the sound off I can't look at it. But in that context, it became utterly captivating.

Jerry Springer: The Opera looks at its subjects with both and a refreshing lack of condescension. In that it resembles Mike White's Year of the Dog, possibly the most underrated movie of 2007. I've been told that the trailer makes the movie look like a romcom focusing on the relationship between Molly Shannon and Peter Sarsgaard, played against a cute-pet background. This could not be more misleading, as the film actually looks at a woman taking a drastic turn in her life and at how a certain kind of (benign) extremism can take hold in someone. (There are quite a few incensed posts on IMDB from viewers lured to the movie by the trailer and bitterly complaining about being cheated.) White never patronizes Shannon's character, even when she sinks to a unhinged low at some point; he's also very clear-eyed about the manipulative aspect of Sarsgaard's animal-loving character. And from a purely filmic point of view, White proves to be a more than adept director, coming up with beautiful compositions that really play up the eerie flatness (as in, lack of depth) of the SoCal location.

Osterreich & roll

A couple of years ago, I reviewed Der Blutharsch's When Did Wonderland End? for TONY. It was a fairly positive review—at least about the music itself, since it's hard not to have qualms about the band's politics. I'm sure the band doesn't get much mainstream attention that actually focuse on its sound, as it plays martial folk and is prone to military uniforms and listing its song titles in Gothic font. In other words, Der Blutharsch causes me real problems because I quite like many of its albums but the reality of what bandleader Albin Julius is about makes me squeamish, to put it mildly.

Anyway out of the blue—or rather out of Austria—landed on my desk a package containing Der Blutharsch's latest album, The Philosopher's Stone. At first I was mildly freaked out because if there's one mailing list I'm not convinced I want to be on, it's that type. But the rock critic in me quickly took over and I listened to the album.

Judging by the one-sheet that came with it, the CD seems to be Der Blutharsch's last: The self-described "inventors of military pop" are "leaving the arena and heading towards new territories, the promised land on the search for the tower of song." (Huh?) The band's current motto further confuses matters: "Uniforms are always changing — Rock ’n’ roll will stay forever!" Yeah, whatever you say. At least we won't read this in Pitchfork anytime soon.

Once again divided in numbered segments, the CD isn't as diverse and compelling as When Did Wonderland End? (and the production sounds a bit muddy to my ears) but it has its moments, like the weird doomy-psych vibe on track 5. Not to mention that when it comes to a certain kind of grandeur, I'd love to see an oil-wrestling match between Der Blutarsch and the grad students in Arcade Fire.

Der Blutarsch "The Philosopher's Stone II" (from The Philosopher's Stone, 2008)

Pre-postap hoopla

It's raining postapocalyptic novels! Cormac McCarthy's The Road has pulled off a neat little trifecta—Pulitzer, Oprah and film deal. Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown and Jim Crace's The Pesthouse are getting reviewed everywhere Crace got Francine Prose in the Times and Joyce Carol Oates in The New Yorker—double whammy! Personally I found the latter book a flimsy little read, with too many plotholes (I'm willing to buy that America has reverted to feudal times while Europe seems to do relatively better, but why hasn't anybody ever returned from across the pond to report, if it's so great over there?)

Readers of this blog know that I love postap fiction, so I'm pretty psyched—if not exactly reassured, in the grand scheme of things—by this onslaught. And let's add to the list. Of course I'm going to be fascinated by someone who describes American cities as being surrounded by rings of "necrotic suburbs,"somone who paints a future in which "aviation will become an increasingly expensive, elite activity as the oil age dribbles to a close, and then it will not exist at all," while "the circumstances we face with energy and climate change will require us to live much more locally, probably profoundly and intensely so. We have to grow more of our food locally, on a smaller scale than we do now, with fewer artificial 'inputs,' and probably with more human and animal labor."

Except these visions aren't from any of the aforementioned novels but courtesy of James Howard Kunstler via his 2005 book-length essay The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century and his blog Clusterfuck Nation. Yes, Kunstler is among my favorite pre-postap (are you following?) doomsayers. That I essentially agree with many aspects of his pessimistic predictions (while being frustrated by his occasional embarrassing social conservatism) makes him even more compelling.

Kunstler's theory is simple: The American way of life is built on the abuse of unsustainable energy sources and is bound to crash, leading to changes that will be beyond radical. He exposed this basic idea in the book and has been expanding on it ever since, most recently in an article for Orion, which I quoted above. And no, switching to ethanol or french-fry oil or whatever the hell is pushed as an alternative energy source this week won't change a thing: "The truth is that no combination of alternative fuels or systems for using them will allow us to continue running America, or even a substantial fraction of it, the way we have been."

Among the many consequences is that our age of global economy would disintegrate as communities would need to become more self-reliant, as they did before the industrial revolution facilitated the transportation of goods and people. Say goodbye to that cheap T-shirt from China, American teenager! Most U.S. cities would be in real trouble (enter the necrotic suburbs, a memorable expression worthy of the best postap fiction), relying as they do on the ferrying in of food and of pretty much every consumers' product they need. This change will also have repercussions on large and/or national bureaucracies such as the education system and government itself, which will be as unable to function as the cities.

If this isn't postap in its rawest state, I don't know what is.

What to do about it? Everybody from politicians to Times columnist/flatearther Thomas Friedman (one of Kunstler's favorite whipping boys) is accused of delusional myopia that leads them to a single-minded emphasis on finding new sources of energy while we should instead focus on, among other things, "walkable communities and public transit." Europe, with its well-developed public-transportation network, smaller cars and inferior energy waste (there's a lot less air-co in summer over there for instance—I grew up in the Mediterranean but never encountered large-scale systematic air-conditioning until I moved to the US in 1987) is way ahead of the US on this count, though by no means perfect.

What good is sitting alone in your room?

Latest quickie in Time Out New York: a review of the new Fujiya & Miyagi album. And look! A song from it!
MP3 Fujiya & Miyagi "Ankle Injuries" from Transparent Things (2007)

And now to the fun stuff, meaning the ka-razy Weimar New York show last Friday at Joe's Pub. Curated by Earl Dax (and previewed by my colleague Adam Feldman in TONY), Weimar New York is a diabolically entertaining revue that purports to revive the politically aware and subversively decadent spirit that once infused the cabaret scene during the Weimar Republic. Or did it? It's hard not to suspect that said scene is now largely idealized, but who cares when the new version is so wild?

The inspired organizing principle behing Weimar New York is that it packs a lot of acts into a couple of hours but they only do one number, two at most, so if things hit a lull, you know it won't last. How to describe the atmosphere? For me Penny Arcade nailed it when she exclaimed "I feel like I'm back in 1993!" Perhaps it was the heady sight of half-naked downtowners cavorting around a tiny stage. Perhaps it was a Belgian chantoosie wailing Brrrrrrrel next to a burlesque queen being molested by a severed hand next to a freakazoid (I say this with great admiration) flashing his anal piercing to the crowd. Perhaps it was Justin Bond singing Patti Smith. And perhaps it was that friggin' Penny Arcade was there! I guess that's what comes "from too much pills and liquor."

Next to that, Trisha Brown at the Kasser in Montclair over the weekend was quite sedate, but at the same time it was heady to see Brown herself get onstage at the end of I love my robots. If a 70-year-old woman choreographically engaging with robots (ie remote-controlled cardboard tubes on casters) isn't aggro in our age of youth obsession, I don't know what is.

Two of the three pieces used music by Laurie Anderson, and I was reminded of how well her work suits dance. It actually made me listen to bits from United States again—no matter how good Anderson sounded at the Kasser, there's still no way I could sit through anything she's released in the past ten years.

Hate in a cold climate

Let's take a break from the wild cabaret stylings of Leslie Kritzer Is Patti LuPone at Les Mouches (which I saw for a third time on Saturday night) in order to focus on a particularly unholy week: The old-school black metallers in Dark Funeral and the fierce proggy Vikings of Enslaved land at BB King's for a Scandi double whammy on Wednesday 10, while Northsix shows that America can throw a mighty punch as well by hosting a seriously scary evening of domestic brutality that includes Southern Lord signees Lair of the Minotaur and cultish BM band Krieg on Saturday, January 13.

To get in the mood, here's a selection of MP3s by some favorite underground extremists, harvested from various European fields. Think of it as Travel + Leisure for the maleficent set.

I find extreme metal makes for invigorating listening, which some may find odd considering it's a genre dedicated to nihilism and eeeevil. But the sheer intensity and ultra-dense texture of these sonic tapestries is unparalleled; the listening experience is very tactile. And I realize I may torpedo whatever cred I have left by writing this, but this stuff also works great at the gym. The crazy-fast BPMs would get anybody going on the treadmill, and the looks from people next to you hearing the primitive shrieks bleeding through the earphones? Priceless.

England's Anaal Nathrakh pretty much laid down the rules for the necro subgenre on its debut, The Codex Necro. The duo plays some of the most stomach-churningly violent music I've ever heard, and its latest, Eschaton, shows no sign of slack. I reviewed it for TONY a few weeks ago, and here's a taste:
MP3 Anaal Nathrakh "The Necrogeddon" from Eschaton (2006)

France, where metal and hard rock had always faltered, has recently emerged as a rather fertile ground for mysterious—even by BM's standards—combos that take black metal in unpredictable, often experimental directions, making the Scandis sound like the nerd squad in a John Hughes comedy. Hailing from the darken lands of Normandy and Burgundy, as well as the hellhole known as Paris, I give you Malcuidant, Arkhon Infaustus and Blut aus Nord.
MP3 Malcuidant "…et la complainte se tut…" from L'Hymne de la Ghilde (2005)
MP3 Arkhon Infaustus "Epsilon: Saturn Motion Theology" from Perdition Insanabilis (2004)
MP3 Blut aus Nord "The Howling of God" from The Work Which Transforms God (2003)

The aforementioned Enslaved is only the top of the Viking metal iceberg (so to speak). Good thing that the field's crowded, too, because frankly you can never have enough albums hatched in forges by burly men claiming to be inspired by valkyries and ice-covered paganism. Speaking of ice, deaths in extreme metal are known to be pretty dramatic: Musicians die of exposure, or they fall from a bridge and break their neck on a frozen river—which at least isn't as bad as allegedly eating your dead bandmate's brain.

Tyr comes from the Feroe Islands and offers a melodic, almost dreamy, folk-inspired version of the Viking genre; the production values are relatively high as well, which seems to be a folk-metal trademark (think of Estonia's Metsatöll or the grandiose Finntroll). On the other hand, take Graveland, hailing from the well-known Viking province of, er Poland, with a big grain of salt. The band aims for the majestic with no small success but it's a really good thing we can't understand what they sing about—in interviews leader Darken espouses the kind of stupefyingly dumb theories sadly common in a certain black-metal fringe, eg Burzum et al., and among such Neofolk and industrial outfits as Death in June and Der Blutharsch. The power of the music is hard to deny; the politics stink to high heaven.
MP3 Tyr "Olavur Riddararos" from Eric the Red (2003)
MP3 Graveland "Prayer for My Ancestors" from Fire Chariot of Destruction (2005)

Similar ethical issues emerge with the Ukraine's Drudkh, though its take on Slavic pride is a lot more literate—the lyrics to The Swan Road are influenced by the work of 19th-century Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko.
MP3 Drudkh "Eternal Sun" from Lebedynyy Shlyakh: The Swan Road (2005)

Finally, a short trip across the Mediterranean to Israel and Tangorodrim—hey, if Israel can compete in the Eurovision Song Contest, I can include it in a post about European extreme metal. The band's latest is on Southern Lord, ensuring easy access in the US at least.
MP3 Tangorodrim "Bestial Scent" from Unholy and Unlimited (2006)

And speaking of the US, Americans aren't well known for BM (or Viking metal for that matter) but there are exceptions, and they tend to be one-man bands like Xasthur, Leviathan and my favorite of all, rehtaF ruO. Hailing, I believe, from Florida, [edit: as it turns out, San Antonio, TX] rehtaF ruO has made a demo CD and one proper album, Boiled in Goat Blood, a monument of paradigmatic bedroom metal. The entire thing is terrifying, a mess of lo-fi hisses, buzzes and inhuman screams, but this track has got to be the worst of all.
MP3 rehtaF ruO "Child Sacrifice" from Boiled in Goat Blood (2000)

Enjoy!