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Saturday, March 22 ( 3/22/2008 08:26:00 AM ) Bill S. LOST AND CASS: Been a while since Lost pulled in some classic obscuro pop/rock to use as a counterpoint to the action, so my ears definitely perked up when this week's ep used its second Cass Elliot track (Barry Mann & Cynthia Weil's "It's Getting Better") as an ironic background to a character's suicide attempt. Not sure I accept that Michael would be playing Mama Cass on a car radio, but, still, her sonic reappearance is worth noting. What's next? "Dream A Little Dream of Me"? # | Friday, March 21 ( 3/21/2008 09:27:00 AM ) Bill S.  "I'M AT THE MALL ON A DIET PILL!" Good to know that some things don't change: that sixteen years after their last studio album, Fred Schneider still remains an emphatic doofus while Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson can harmonize and bemoan lost love with the best of 'em, that Keith Strickland can plunk out deceptively simple brain-ticklin' guitar lines, and that the B-52s are still capable of blending sci-fi kitsch and club beats into addictive musical confections. Good to know, in other words, that a reunited group can name their new album Funplex and actually live up to the billing.If you know and love the Athens, Ga., dance rockers, you know what this disc sounds like. Toss out a stanza ("Private property; hippie be quiet/Your peace sign tee-shirt could cause a riot!") and you can already imagine what it'll sound like with Fred declaiming it. If Funplex (Astralwerks) has any surprise, it's in the plain fact that this material sounds as fresh as it does. For a band so focused on the ephemeral, the B-52s sound has proven remarkably durable. I've been playing this disc for weeks, and, to my ears, it's the most consistently solid album these Southern goof-butts have ever released. (Even their beloved debut, B-52s, falls down a mite in its second half.) Other bands should use a decade-plus hiatus so smartly. To enhance the plexiness, Funplex is also the most explicitly carnal album ever released by these inveterate party apotheosizers: the image of pumping and stroking regularly recur on the disc. "There's a rest stop, let's hit the g-spot," Fred yammers in "Ultraviolet," to which the girls happily respond with a high-pitched soulful trill. The erotic theme remains so palpable that when our man starts comically droning on about "erotobots" and "bootybots," it almost seems redundant. First track in ("Pump") and the band is already talk/singing about the old in-&-out, and you imagine the filthy moves that this track'll most likely inspire on the dance floor. Elsewhere, the band manage to reference both Russ Meyer and Jerry Lewis in the disc's primo title cut - a trio of amusing dramatic monologues set in a shopping mall ("I'm a daytime waitress at the Taco Tiki Hut/I'm a daytime waitress, here's your stupid Seven-Up!") - and celebrate onetime Fellini spouse Giuletta Masina ("Juliet of the Spirits") in a song that could've fit snugly onto one of Blondie's better albums. They dabble in Kraftwerkian electrofunk with "Eyes Wide Open" and provide an always-welcome psychedelic pslide to "Too Much to Think About." By the time Strickland's guitar starts chiming in with proto-Stones vigor on the final cut, "Keep This Party Going," it's clear that the B-52s still have something to say to the next generation of would-be hedonists. "Take this party to the White House lawn; things are getting dirty down in Washington," the girls proclaim. Only the irredeemably tight-assed could deny the call. # | Thursday, March 20 ( 3/20/2008 06:34:00 PM ) Bill S. LIBEL & TROUBLE: With so much television still in post-strike rerun mode, we've been watching a lotta DVRed stuff from TCM lately. The last two nights, in fact, were devoted to old movie comedies: 1936's Libeled Lady, which I remembered seeing years ago and liking, and 1932's Movie Crazy, Harold Lloyd's first sound film. Lady, featuring the always watchable William Powell and Myrna Loy (with Spencer Tracy and Jean Harlow in somewhat supporting roles), is a blithely cynical screwball comedy set in the newspaper world. The plot centers on down-on-his-luck reporter Powell's attempts to set Loy's heiress up in a phony scandal so that she'll drop a libel suit against editor Tracy's paper. An amusing film, even if its writers never quite figure out how to end the darn thing. Harold Lloyd (along with writer/director Clyde Bruckman) has no difficulty concluding Crazy, which concerns his hero's attempts at breaking into Hollywood movies: he simply ends with our hero, Harold "Trouble" Hall, and heroine Mary (Constance Cummings) beaming triumphantly at us through a broken window. As an early talkie, the film doesn't have much to recommend itself dialog-wise (the snappy patter of a Libeled Lady is way beyond its reach), but there are plenty of funny physical set-pieces, the highlight being a movie set fight between Lloyd and his acting/romantic rival Kenneth Thomson. If some of the movie's other gags were recycled by Bruckman for later Three Stooges shorts, its climactic fight scene is something that could only have been handled by the athletic Lloyd. (That and a very funny bit where our hero chases a shoe down the street.) Definitely worth checking out if TCM reruns it, though I still prefer Lloyd's silent comedies. # | Wednesday, March 19 ( 3/19/2008 07:35:00 PM ) Bill S. CHARLIE: Reading today that two possible gravesites have been found at the Manson Family ranch got me remembering what a psychic mindfuck the Mansonites repped back in their day. We've seen our share of creepy violent cults in America over the years, but back in '69, Charlie Manson and his brood were something special: a loud and violent refutation to the sixties' audacity of hope. Even if you believed back then that the already dying hippie movement was largely b.s., the antics of the longhaired Manson and his heavily damaged acolytes were disheartening - if only because they served to reinforce every negative stereotype that the media and opportunistic political hacks like then-governor Ronald Reagan used to employ against those ungrateful hippiefreaks. You can see the counter-cultural dismay reflected in some of the more memorable underground comix published in the aftermath of the Sharon Tate murders: R. Crumb did a bloody Manson strip ("Jumpin' Jack Flash") for Thrilling Murder Comics, one of the first of the horror comix, while Greg Irons & Tom Veitch's Legion of Charlies memorably conflated Manson with the My Lai massacre's Charlie Company. Looking at 'em today, you still see the sense of rage and betrayal driving each cartoonist. Even the most cynical undergrounder could still be appalled by the Family . . . # | ( 3/19/2008 06:42:00 AM ) Bill S. "SWIM OUT PAST THE BREAKERS/WATCH THE WORLD DIE." Everclear is releasing a collection of favorite covers (ah, the Moondog Cafe gambit!) So let's take a gander at the lads back when they were still young up-'n'-comers playing Sparkle And Fade's "Santa Monica." # | ( 3/19/2008 06:42:00 AM ) Bill S. ONE MORE SIGN THAT WE'RE NOT IN ILLINOIS ANYMORE: Waking up this a.m. to see Savannah Cat playing with a small scorpion on the bathroom floor . . . # | Sunday, March 16 ( 3/16/2008 06:13:00 PM ) Bill S. AMONG THE LOST AND FOUND AGAIN: I haven't been as enthralled by the Oceanic Six plotline as many Lost fans, but I have to admit that this week's ep (which I just watched this a.m. on DVR) was the first one this season to totally engage me. (I've missed the lack of mysterious dread in this season so far.) I don't necessarily buy that Jin Kwon is dead, but, then, I'm wondering why - with all 324 passengers supposedly accounted for as underwater corpses - the return of the Oceanic Six hasn't led to a whole lotta inconvenient questions being asked . . . # | |
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