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Friday, May 23, 2008 ( 5/23/2008 03:03:00 PM ) Bill S.  "NOW I MISS WHAT I COULD NEVER SEE." What a difference two decades makes. Twenty-plus years ago, Kristi Callan and her sister Kelly were part of an engaging pop-rock band called Wednesday week (their first elpee was subject to a recent much-needed reissue on the Noble Rot label). Today, WW's lead singer Kristi is fronting a five-woman country band called Dime Box for Kelly's indie label, Avebury Records. DB's debut disc, Five and Dime Waltz, has recently come out, and while it doesn't sound much like Wednesday Week, the songwriting smarts of both Callan sibs and former bandmate David Nolte continue to show through - as does Kristi's open-hearted straight-talking singing voice.The band's sound is pure back porch country: acoustic guitar and bass, lightly brushed percussion plus omnipresent fiddle and/or mandolin; Kristi tackles the lead vocals, while three of her bandmates add warm, uncomplicated harmonies. There's not a trace of Nashvillian slickness to be found on this disc, which suits the music's honest lyrical approach. Where the younger Callan/Nolte/Callan songwriting triumvirate crafted tracks reflecting the angst and confusion of their songs' young heroines, the Dime Box juke proves more maturely rueful: songs about the aftermath of divorce, the travails of single motherhood, and just plain wishin' you knew then what you know now. If at times, the words get a little too homiletic (e.g., "honest work will see you through"), the energetic music (lotsa credit to guitar picker Yolande Ng and hoe-downy fiddler Edie Murphy here) lifts you past it. The best tracks (nine originals, plus a dulcet Dolly Parton cover) contain plenty of telling detail and empathy: the goofy friend who repeats the same Dollar Store joke, the struggling mama buying day old bread, the well-behaved stick-in-the-mud who didn't smoke or drink - but "sure could complain." In "Mama," Kristy looks back at her My Mother, Myself relationship with more experienced eyes; in "Nobody," she describes just how wearing and rewarding it can be for two lovers to stick together; in the blue-grassy "Bone to Pick," she gives a no-nonsense kiss-off to a no-good lover. ("I want you up and gone by the end of this song.") This may be a critical cliché, but in this case, it appears to hold true: if rock 'n' roll is about adolescent possibility, country is about living with restrictions, about trying to find snatches of happiness within the struggles of the day-to-day. Dime Box is about finding the music in those fleeting moments - and playing it in a pure, enjoyably unvarnished style. # | Thursday, May 22, 2008 ( 5/22/2008 09:38:00 AM ) Bill S. NO TIME TO WALLOW IN THE MIRE: We live way past the outskirts of town in an area most townies call "the Foot of Mount Graham," even though we're still a couple miles from where the mountain road begins. I love getting up in the evening with acup of java to water the backyard plants and just spend a few minutes staring at the mountain, though two days back I got to view an event on the mountain that was new to this transplanted Midwesterner: a fire on the mountain. Hadn't read or heard that one way planned, so it was initially a bit disconcerting to notice the thing when I came home for lunch. At that point, the fire was still pretty small; all I saw was a whiff of smoking floating from small part of the trees. But when I left to return to work, the smoke had turned from white/gray to a dirty yellow and had grown considerably. "Should we be worried?" spouse Becky asked. I replied that I didn't have a clue, but I'd quickly found out. I soon learned that it was a "controlled burn," something the Forestry Department does on occasion to prevent bigger ones. Back in 2004, Mt. Graham saw an unplanned wildfire that took two weeks to get under control, so I guess I could understand the reasoning behind the act. "It's a controlled burn, alright," more than one local told me, "only it don't look like they've got it much controlled." Me, I had to wonder about the wisdom of even attempting a controlled fire on a windy day when temp climbed into the triple digits, but what do I know? It made for a cool sight when the sun went down: slivers of flame dotted here there along the dwindling treetops. Back in town, I'm told that folks drove out to Discovery Park Road, a good high visibility spot, to watch the night fire. When I woke the following a.m., all I could see was a lone puff of smoke again, but the nightglow reappeared by evening again. I'm told that by the end of summer I'll grow accustomed to this sight, but I'm not sure I really want to be. Fire's not something you should ever take for granted . . . # | Wednesday, May 21, 2008 ( 5/21/2008 07:15:00 AM ) Bill S. "FASTER PUSSYCAT, THRILL, THRILL!" Let's take a look at the video to the title song to the B-52s' reunion disc Funplex. (Review here.) # | Tuesday, May 20, 2008 ( 5/20/2008 07:10:00 PM ) Bill S.  "ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO GO BACK TO THE HUMDRUM DAYS OF HOUSEHOLD DRUDGERY?" The idea of comically placing pristine middle-class women in a grubby criminal milieu is one that clearly strikes chords on both sides of the Atlantic. In America, we've got Weeds, with its MILF weed dealing heroine Nancy Botwin; in England, it's the ladies of Little Stempington, home to the aptly titled Suburban Shootout.An engagingly nasty Britcom that initially aired in the states (in, one suspects, significantly bowdlerized form) on the Oxygen network, Shootout has reportedly recently been purchased for Americanization by HBO. Having viewed all eight episodes of the original series' first season, courtesy of Acorn Media's spiffy one-disc DVD collection, I have to wonder if the American version will be able to successfully replicate its source's satiric outrageousness. To these Yankee ears, at least, there's something extra funny about hearing full-blown obscenity being spewed forth with an English accent. In the series' opener, for instance, there's a great scene where a geezerly grocer store attendant (Trevor Stuart) roundly cusses out a little lady for trying to snag a handicapped parking space. I'm just not sure it'll work as well coming out of an American mouth. The British Shootout centers on Joyce Hazledine (Amelia Bullmore), a mousy bourgeois housewife whose hubby Jeremy (Ralph Ineson) has taken a job as a copper in the seemingly crime-free community of Little Stempington. Though the town looks remarkably clean and quiet (there's not a speck of graffiti to be seen on any of the buildings), the reason has nothing to do with good policework. The town, as Joyce soon learns to her dismay, is under the sway of two rival gangs of gun-toting hausfraus. First group, led by the diva-esque Camilla Diamond (Anna Chancellor), is capable of giving Tony Soprano and his crew a run for the money: one of the first things we see 'em do is blow up the local Wicker Barn for not keeping up on protection payments. ("We'll bury you alive in matching wicker coffins next time you miss a payment!" she shouts to the store's fleeing owners.) Wicked Camilla quickly works to hook Joyce into her duplicitous business by framing her for the explosion; with this, she hopes to keep a finger on Joyce's policeman spouse. On the other side is a trio of women led by Barbara DuPrez (Felicity Montagu), a more matronly but no less ruthless vigilante on the side of British bourgeois righteousness. Leader of the Little Stempington Wildlife Protection League (primarily devoted, one eventually learns, to keeping the lower classes out of her beloved little burb), Barbara strives to keep the town tag-free and combat Camilla's illicit schemes, the most recent of which involves dealing industrial strength estrogen patches to the community's pub crawlers. She guilt-trips Joyce into acting as a double agent, while ol' Jeremy doesn't have a clue about the dire deeds taking place all around him. In Little Stempington, a simple afternoon tea can suddenly erupt in gunplay (after one such shootout, Barbara surveys the blood on the rug and cheerfully states, "It's Scotchgard protected!") and a Tupperware container is just as likely to contain a handgun as it is crisp leftovers. Poor Joyce quickly finds herself caught up in both gangs' battles. Before long, she's terrorizing local librarians and dealing with an oily continental drug dealer named Emil Lesoux. "I'm a drug dealer, dealing hard drugs," she says to herself as she kneels on the floor of her well-kept middle-class home, picking up her son's underwear. Yet even as she bemoans her lot, we also see her blossoming - growing less frumpy and put-upon - in her new role. Aiding the two feuding gang leaders are a comic quartet of suburban women, the funniest of which are housewifey ditz Margaret Littlefair (Cathryn Bradshaw) and her evil mannish counterpart Lillian Gordon-Moore (Emma Kennedy). Frizzy haired Margaret is loyal to a fault and a comically bad shot with handguns, but it's the sinister Lillian who gets one of the funniest sequences in the first season when both she and Joyce test-drive the high-strength estrogen patches for Camilla at a botox party. Uncharacteristically cheerful, she babbles about moisturizing her trigger finger as Joyce gets progressively more wrecked on patches. As with the equally amusing Weeds, the language and subject matter of Shootout are way beyond the cozy parameters of most sitcoms. There is no real effort on any of the principles' part to be a likable "identifiable" character and why should there be? Like the anti-heroines in another classic modern Britcom, Absolutely Fabulous, the women of Little Stempington are cheerfully unafraid to be as grotesque as the situation requires, all in the service of good, take-no-prisoners comedy - and a well-kept middle-class existence . . . # | Monday, May 19, 2008 ( 5/19/2008 10:06:00 PM ) Bill S. WHY SEELEY BOOTH IS A COOL GUY: Beer and a Green Lantern comic book in the bathtub . . . # | Sunday, May 18, 2008 ( 5/18/2008 02:35:00 PM ) Bill S. TATTOO YOU: Living in a state where the ninety-degree May means that we see a lot more folks more often in shorts and sleeveless tees, I've grown more accustomed to seeing a variety of tattoos on folks who I wouldn't otherwise associate with 'em. Saw a middle-aged woman at Safeway the other day with her husband/boyfriend/? and was amused to notice two blue tats on her gams. Thing is, the woman was also beginning to develop prominent varicose veins on her calves, and as she pushed her shopping cart ahead of me, I wasn't sure where the art ended and the physiology of aging took over. Something to keep in mind, kids, if you're considering body art. # | ( 5/18/2008 09:25:00 AM ) Bill S. WEEKEND PET PIC: Too bad you can't hear the "let me out, Dad!" whine coming out of Ziggy Stardust's mouth as he jealously watches Bill & Becky standing outside the house, taking pictures of the landscape. It's truly a piteous sound.  THE USUAL NOTE: For more cool pics of companion animals, please check out Modulator's "Friday Ark." # | |
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