Pop Culture Gadabout

Pop Culture Gadabout

( 3/15/2008 08:14:00 AM ) Bill S.

McNULTY AND CO.: Haven't had access to HBO this year to catch the fifth and final season of The Wire, but judging from the thoughtful dia/monologue that Sean Collins has posted about the series, it looks as if the show's swan song was more than a little problematic. Of the first four seasons, I tend to fixate on Seasons Two and Four (the dockworker and school system seasons, respectably), in large part because they make you feel for the characters being ground down by their respective milieus. I have a hard time imagining the show generating a comparable level of emotional involvement for a bunch of newspapermen - the big story focus for Season Five - but I'll reserve judgment until I've had a chance to view the final results.

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( 3/14/2008 06:28:00 AM ) Bill S.

"ME, I'LL BE FOUND AT THE SALVAGE STORE AMONG THE LOST AND FOUND." There's something about Southern Illinois (which, as everyone knows, is any place in the state south of Joliet) - its blend of corn-fed conservatism and Bucky Fuller-esque idealism, perhaps - that's made it a fertile region for alt-country troubadours. Uncle Tupelo (from whence rose Son Volt and Wilco) came from the area, as did first of the great cow-punk outfits, Jason and Scorchers. Led by yelping Jason Ringenberg, the son of Sheffield, Illinois, hog farmers, the Scorchers provided a stormy mesh of guitar thrash and straight-faced Nashville songwriting that holds up to this day. Their disbanding left a void on the musical scene that in many ways has grown larger with the increased plastification of commercial country.

Ringenberg has kept a-goin', of course, and if his solo material has never quite equaled the punk power of his breakthrough work, there's plenty of strong material to be found in his still-growing catalog. To bring this point home, our man has just put together a two-disc retrospective, Best Tracks And Side Tracks (Yep Roc), for our musical education. With thirty cuts to cull through, the set showcases his strengths and weaknesses as a singer/songwriter.

Though the collection is meant to illuminate his work outside the Scorchers, Ringenberg understandably can't resist folding several of the band's more popular songs into the mix. "Best Tracks" disc one opens with a fiddle-heavy remake of "Shop It Around" and provides an equally countrified rendition of "Broken Whiskey Glass" as its penultimate track, while the "Side Traces" odds 'n' sods disc gives us a pre-Scorcher rendition of "Help There's A Fire" with comically gawky faux Elvis vocals. If none of these versions make us forget the Scorchers, they still serve to remind us what a sharp songwriter Jason was from the get-go.

Jason is still a strong tunesmith, though there are times when his earnestness intrudes on his songcraft. "Best Tracks" primarily is devoted to three solo albums (Pocketful of Soul, All Over Creation and Empire Builders), and, of these three, the weaker cuts almost all come from the thematically overburdened Empire. Whether waxing sentimentally about orphan trains and a dying Chief Joseph or over-emphatically recalling the Tuskegee airmen, you can hear the singer struggling to get his ideas across - at the expense of both the ideas and the songs. The only two sampled cuts from Empire that fully work are the ones where he relaxes enough to have some fun: a modernized version of Burl Ives' corn-pone folksiness called "Rainbow Stew" and a galumphing collaboration with Los Straitjackets in tribute to "Link Wray."

Elsewhere, the man assays two sweet tributes to his daughters ('Camille" and "Addie Rose"), duets with Steve Earle ("Bible And A Gun") plus offers up a quintet of taut rockers, including the unmatchable "Punk Rock Skunk" from one of his two Farmer Jason children's albums. Of these, a re-recorded "Life of the Party" (redone for the set since contractual craziness kept the original One Foot in the Honky Tonk track from being included) perhaps comes closest to the welcome blasts of the good ol' days, though All Over Creation's sonic collaboration with the Wildhearts, "One Less Heartache," has its own appealing radio friendly bombast.

The "Side Tracks" set is smaller (ten tracks to the first disc's twenty) and definitely more marginal. But it still contains some goodies: an oblique new rocker entitled "The Sailor's Eyes;" an extended remix of a second Farmer Jason track, "Moose on the Loose;" an unjustly rejected track recorded for a Tom T. Hall album, plus a tribute to SIU's favorite son, "Buckminster Fuller We Need You." Though Ringenberg has relocated to the Nashville area, he always remains cognizant of his Midwestern roots. Back on disc one, he even includes a country rocker originally sung for Stace England's Greetings from Cairo, Illinois, lamenting the hard times that've befallen this notorious little lynch burg. Very alt-rootsy, very Southern Illinois . . .

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( 3/12/2008 07:04:00 AM ) Bill S.

ME ON THE WEB! Hey, that recent issue of The Comics Journal which I mentioned here is being posted in its entirety for a week on the Fantagraphics website. Why not check it out?

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( 3/12/2008 06:53:00 AM ) Bill S.

MID-WEEK MUSIC VID: Let's join them nutty boys from Madness on a "Night Boat to Cairo."

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( 3/10/2008 06:57:00 AM ) Bill S.

BUSH'S VETO: I like to think that I'm hard-nosed enough to recognize that sometimes you have to make some awful choices in life – and that war (even one as malleably defined as the War on Terror) increases the likelihood that such choices will be made. But I also believe that these awful choices should not be easy or consequence-free. In that light, Bush's veto this weekend of a bill outlawing waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation" techniques (to use the gummint Newspeak) has to be the one of the most squalid acts yet from a president who continues to dig ever deeper into the moral low ground . . .

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( 3/09/2008 01:16:00 PM ) Bill S.

"WHY DOES THIS STUFF ALWAYS HAVE TO SOUND LIKE THERE SHOULD BE BLOODY HOBBITS SINGIN' IT?" After maintaining the same creative teams on their first two graphic novels, the editors at IDW decided to share the wealth with their third Angel series, Spotlight. A graphic anthology collecting five issues showcasing different secondary characters from the Mutant Enemy teleseries, each entry features a different writer and artist combo. The results are predictably variable.

The two strongest entries play off of what is arguably the original teleseries' most affectingly tragic storyline: the death of girl genius Winifred "Fred" Burkle, whose mind and soul gets devoured by a primordial demon named Illyria. Though reliant on the reader's knowledge of the original series for part of their ironic impact, both "Illyria" (written by Peter David & illustrated by Nicola Scott) and "Wesley" (Scott Tipton & Mike Norton) also work as their own little self-contained tales. "Illyria" opens the set up with a nice wallop: a scene where a brutal killer named Alex Rich shockingly disrupts a mother s courtroom speech. As written by David, this works as a variation on one of the Buffy/Angel staples - the moment where a character's high-flown monologue gets cut off mid-sentence - and quickly establishes just how reprehensible our story villain is. A neat bit.

The underlying plot of "Illyria" hearkens back to a subplot featured in the teleseries' final season: Illyria's curiosity about the humanity she's subsumed in Fred's body. Commissioned to deliver the killer to some Wolfram & Hart clients, the demon first quizzes him as to whether he felt any regrets for the acts he has committed. It's the capacity to feel remorse, Fred's ex-love Wesley asserts, which makes us human - but, if this is so, where does that place pure sociopaths like Rich?

Wesley Wyndham-Pryce gets to test the levels of his own humanity in his own one-shot, which is set before Winifred's destruction. Centered on Wes' attempts to save the life of Knox, the man we know will ultimately sacrifice Fred to the Lovecraftian Old Ones, the story ups our protagonist's moral quandaries by emphasizing Knox's role as Wes' romantic rival. To emphasize this point, the vampire Spike (at this point in the series continuity, an incorporeal apparition) serves as a nattering chorus, encouraging Wesley to not do anything. "We both know he's an annoying little wanker," Spike says, but we also know that Wes'll do the right thing - even though this will ultimately have dire consequences for the woman he loves.

More than any of Spotlight's other scripters, Mike Tipton does a slick job recalling the snaky legal world that part of the teleseries. It's a world where duplicitous shysters send their opponents a "blood subpoena," a spell designed to kill the lead opposing lawyer on a hopeless case so they can drag it out and get a continuance. "Why do you think there's never anyone manning the front reception desk?" vampire gal Friday Harmony notes, forcing this reader to try and recall whether he even saw a front reception desk on the old TV show.

The three remaining entries - "Gunn" (Dan Jolley & Mark Pennington), "Doyle" (Jeff Mariotte & David Messina), and "Connor" (Jay Faerber & Bob Gill) - prove less memorable, in part because the characters themselves give the writers less to work with. (For many Angel fans, myself included, the petulantly adolescent Connor is an irritation more than an engaging character.) Even Jolley, who's demonstrated an engaging ability to make second-stringers amusing in the Marvel Universe, seems at a loss with Gunn, the urban monster slayer, while Mariotte, who scripted the first two Angel GNs, does even less with a character who couldn't even make it to the end of the series' first season. If this collection was a "giant-sized" floppy comics anthology, all three of these pieces would be much shorter back-up features.

Spotlight's five artists are generally up to the task of efficiently delivering the storytelling goods, though Pennington comes dangerously close toward injecting his own visual personality into the proceedings. Perhaps the only minor character to not fare well in these tales is airhead vampiress Harmony, barely recognizable in her two small cameos. The most consistently expressive character renderings, to these eyes, come from Mike Norton's depiction of a tight-lipped Wesley.

The next volume in IDW's series of Angel trades, Auld Lang Syne, returns to the fuller graphic novel format and once more gives its title lead story prominence. The problem is the story - vampires Angel and Spike are visited and tormented by figures from their past - is one that we've already read in Old Friends. Why scripter Scott Tipton would choose to revisit this storyline so early in the comic series' history is a mystery. Perhaps the company already had his script on file?

We even get a replay of an Angel and Spike street fight, made mildly more interesting by shifting artists for the space of a chapter from the familiar Messina to a more calculatedly raw-lined artist named Elena Casagrande. The shift is smoothly managed, but it's the only surprising thing about this GN. If Auld Lang Syne had been published ahead of Old Friends (even the titles echo each other), things might've been different.

But for most fans, I suspect, IDW's fourth graphic novel has mainly served as a mildly diverting placeholder until the "sixth season" comic book mini-series commenced.

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Pop cultural criticism - plus the occasional egocentric socio/political commentary by Bill Sherman (popculturegadabout AT yahoo.com) - now with hexa .. . hexa . . . hexachloraphine!