Crazy Enough

Versatile lead singer, rocker, and glamorous chanteuse Storm Large's frank, confessional memoir, Crazy Enough, featuring angry tales of coping with her mother's mental illness and manipulation and her own self-medicating addictions and reckless habits, starting in childhood, took me way out of my comfort zone.  That's a good thing.  Knowing that she's now a transcendent stage and club performer, using her huge voice and stage presence to the fullest, is what makes these sordid stories of her distant and not-so-distant past a hero's journey.  The only reason for rating her book at four stars instead of five is to express one smitten fan's opinion that her music is even better than her revealing, entertainingly crafted words.

One Review, Thirty Minutes

The ad hoc creative team of Amanda Palmer, Ben Folds, Damian Kulash, and Neil Gaiman met in a Boston recording studio yesterday. The ambition of their stated goal, to produce eight songs in eight hours (hence the project and band name, 8 in 8, and to let the Internet world watch while they did it, attracted both fascination and notoriety in advance. The least one can do to honor the project is to respond in kind, with a thirty-minute review of their final six-song product, "Nighty-Night".

That they fell short of their goal numerically, producing six songs in twelve hours, is the least important aspect of the endeavor. The project may have started with an artificial time-challenge, but when time ran short they kept going, and quit when it was no longer sensible to continue. This was not the musical version of Chopped, the timed gourmet-cooking competition show; noone was required to step back from the keyboards and mixing console at the end of eight hours.

The six tracks reflect the disparate sensibilities of the contributors. Author Gaiman's contributions are the most witty and writerly, in a Sir Tom Stoppard meets Sir Noel Coward kind of way. Gaiman's "Nikola Tesla", a rock-staccato track voiced by Palmer atop her piano-percussion banging and Ben Folds' drums, shows off the writer's science-minded wit while reintroducing Palmer's meme of the everygrrrl torching for celebrities, à la the Dresden Dolls' "Christopher Lydon" -- or in this case, for a celebrity of historical interest. Later, Gaiman voiced his own sword-sharp lyrics in the collection's closing track, "The Problem With Saints", a modern-day Jean d'Arc sequel as Tom Lehrer might imagine it -- if Tom Lehrer were English.

That the album session appeared to some advance critics to be a mere stunt -- one commenter had worried about the prospective "jokiness" of the result -- may have spurred the team to incorporate large elements of sadness and poignancy into the collection. The haunting plea for a missing child to return is the subject of a Folds-Palmer slow duet, "Because the Origami", that leads the listener out of the realm of Dr. Demento into the hurt and pain of parental grief and desperation.

"Twelve Line Song", a Ben Folds-led number that mixes funny and sad, features the unlikely still life of a squirrel suicide in a bathtub. One suspects Folds, Gaiman, and Palmer don't quite have the "Who Killed Amanda Palmer?" faux-death-scene photo project out of their heads yet. The happy sounding tracking vocals are a seriocomic switcheroo, a trick that Palmer and Folds have used before, in W.K.A.P.'s "Oasis".

With more gravitas, Damian Kulash of OK Go takes the lead on "One Tiny Thing", a break-up song depicting the fragile nature of relationships. Kulash's mournful vocals revealed a soulful musicality which seemed upstaged during much of the project by the alpha squirrels in the studio. If certain songs reminded chat-room onlookers of the Beatles, then Kulash was this project's George Harrison. One imagines "One Tiny Thing" could ultimately become the most honored of the collection, if tribute is reckoned by the number of future cover versions from a wide variety of artists.

Which brings us to the penultimate piece, "I'll Be My Mirror", to me the true payoff piece of the project. As much forceful poetry slam as song, "Mirror" takes a tragic scene that everyone can relate to, the street person out of their right mind; Amanda Palmer's emphatic vocals bring home the startled onlookers' pensive, but-for-grace-there-go-I apprehension in the presence of the subject. A catchy fanfare of a piano riff and a crashing rhythm guitar add an exclamation point to each stanza without interrupting the angst and poetry of the lyric.

The overall verdict? "Nighty-Night" is a bit incoherent as a song collection, but several of the songs are highly worthy in their individual graces. The team created something of value and opened a window into the creative process. In particular, they revealed that worthwhile endeavors invariably take longer than even the most talented and productive creative types imagine that they will -- and at a full hour and thirty minutes instead of the budgeted thirty minutes to write this review, it's time for me to join them in saying, that's enough for today.

Seal Rock

The humorist Dave Barry once wrote, "Yuppies have a very low birth rate, because apparently they have to go to Aspen to mate."

Clearly, Mr. Barry has never attempted to drive through the North Side of Chicago on a Wednesday night with a destination and an arrival time in mind. Yuppies, hipsters, and various bicyclists and jaywalkers, thick as a pod of seals on Seal Rock, crowd the sidewalks, their closely-spaced numbers both the result and proximal cause of privilege and procreation. The opportunity to reduce the surplus population is there for the motorist's taking, whether the heel at the wheel is a sociopathic Illini or a mild-mannered Wisconsinite in town for, say, a Dresden Dolls reunion tour concert at the Vic Theatre.

At least my Beloved Lady Seal and I knew better than to assume a trouble-free route to our destination. Ten years prior, our bucket list baseball pilgrimage to Wrigley Field had resulted in an apparently predictable two hours of futile wrangling with Addison Road gridlock, not to mention a supplementary idiot tax of $20 exacted by alley youngsters perpetrating a well-practiced, time-tested faux-parking ruse. We arrived to take our place on the Rock in the fourth inning.

Once inside Wrigley, our fellow fans crammed themselves into the tiny grandstand seats, more interested in animal partying and mating rituals than the batting averages of the alpha seals on the field, blocking our view of the ballgame annoyingly and repeatedly as they shuffled past us multiple times to make their way to the sea for more fish. The confines of Wrigley Field may be friendly, but when the perpetuation of the species is at stake, marine life on the Rock doesn't have time to spectate.

Ah, nostalgia. We were but pups then.

Seal Rocks are fascinating and diverse. A Rock can be seasonal, as with Aspen during ski season or Milwaukee Summerfest in, er, the summer. It can be a singular, temporal event, as with Woodstock or the Jon Stewart rally, or recurring, as with the quadrennial co-mingling of the athletes at the Olympic Village. A colony can evidence prosperity and generative energy -- the quickly constructed suburban schools, townhouses, and mega-malls ringing Washington, D.C. come to mind -- or high-density deprivation and a lack of alternatives, as with urban ghettos or tent villages. Recognizable-by-type residential and commercial districts, each with their own characteristics, surround military bases, factories, colleges and universities, and anyplace else that colonization and the raising of baby seals occurs.

Seals sometimes also go clubbing, a nifty role-reversal. On the aforementioned Wednesday evening in Chicago, we managed to wend our way through traffic and avoid running over the locals with the Silver Zloty at seal crossings, arriving at the Vic Theatre in the fourth inning -- i.e., near the end of the opening act. We found our way inside. The uniformly skinny, black-clad and/or costumed members of species H. Dresdendollus teemed on the lower level, performing intricate mating rituals, exchanging, if not genetic material, at least cellphone numbers, email addresses, and pirated MP3 files. Sharing fish with each other, as it were. Meanwhile, the older, heftier, balding and bespectacled members of the colony -- hey, that's me! -- headed for the higher altitudes of the balcony.

Having experienced a Seal Rock first-hand, I'm inclined to agree with the line from Jurassic Park: "Life will find a way." The entire colony danced its happy-mammal dance in the panorama before us, rocking and writhing to the percussive tones. It's hard to tell if the collective joy in the theater that evening was born of enthralled appreciation for the musical performance or warm affection for the musicians. Both, I'd say. But it was also a purely instinctual response: now and then, if you're a seal, it feels great to find yourself on Seal Rock.

All Tomorrow's Parties

What happens if a bunch of humans are stripped of their rationality and critical thinking abilities, electrified beyond the point of recovery with high-voltage music (and non-music), and let loose en masse to collide into one another for several days in a village?

I think I just caught a glimpse of that unsettling scenario tonight at a Milwaukee Film Festival offering. All Tomorrow's Parties, a feature-length documentary, captures the annual U.K. rock festival of the same name, for which various leading bands "curate" each year's acts. Named for a Velvet Underground lyric, the ATP festival was conceived as a counterreaction to the creeping corporate control of youth culture and music -- so sayeth the painfully inarticulate kid interviewed in one clip -- and by the usual metaphoric extension, as a critique of all society, man.

Staging a festival without overbearing corporate sponsorship is laudable. When you do that, however, the best act you can get just might be Iggy and the Stooges. That's okay; the real action in ATP is in and around the decrepit resort dormitories, which look like the worst two-level, exterior-entrance motels that you've ever stayed in. Here, beyond the obligatory Intermittent Spontaneous Musical Occurrences, we're treated to clips of drunken post-partiers wandering around aimlessly, peering into other people's rooms, and falling through cheaply constructed second-floor balconies. Before you can attend tomorrow's parties, it would seem, you have to survive today's first.

Anarchic and chaotic as the music festival itself, the documentary cobbles together miscellaneous film clips gathered from numerous attendees and participants over the years. Like the festival, the film seems not so much curated as thrown together. The only concession to the left-brain that craves information and a semblance of order is the briefly displayed band names, with curator and festival year, for a number of leading acts. The director overuses a multiple-windows technique for concert footage; somebody must have thought it looked really cool back in film school.

I didn't like many of the bands, but so what; it's no longer my generation's turn. Choppy editing aside, All Tomorrow's Parties is a fair depiction of a significant youth music gathering, now sprouting offshoots around the globe. A cultural time capsule, I suggest it be suitably buried for posterity. Perhaps in velvet. Definitely underground.

Hail to the 1970's! (Or Not.)

Are you embarrassed by your own generation? I was, at the time: the mid-to-late 1970's. I still am, to an extent.

From the predictable, drunken calls for semiprofessional garage bands to faithfully reproduce "Freebird"; to my college classmate who squealed his tires in a trashy salute while pulling away from my grandparents' house; to sportscoats in patterns and colors not found in nature; it was not the best decade in terms of taste.

We started the decade with a power-mad, bombing-happy crook in office and ended it with a moralistic, tone-deaf technocrat. When President Carter phoned U.S. Olympic hockey coach Herb Brooks to congratulate him on the team's astounding Gold Medal victory, including the "Miracle on Ice" game against the Soviets, Carter explained that he didn't watch the games because he was working on the Afghanistan crisis. No complaint here about the man's priorities, but he could have worked on his audience identification.

Don't get me started about President Ford's "Whip Inflation Now" buttons.

When Reggie Jackson held up three boastful fingers to the camera upon hitting three home runs in Game 6 of the 1977 World Series, the social virtues of modesty and good sportsmanship flew out the window, forever lost to the ages. When you see T.O. autographing a football in the end zone, or Jim Edmonds turning a routine fly ball into a highlight-reel catch, think Reggie. Braggadocio is classic and human, but amplified bombast is what our culture produced in the 1970's.

A friend of mine calls us a Lost Generation. I say, it's all been downhill since the 1969 Mets and the moon landings.

Our next-door neighbor's dad had a theory about the previous decade: the reason that the 1960's kids were angry enough to protest was that their pants were all too tight. Disco notwithstanding, ours in the 1970's may have been too loose, culturally speaking. Thirty years on, it still shows.

On Baby Boomers, Silver Zloty's, and Cosmic Things

It's happened. Our tame, elegant family cruiser, The Silver Zloty, has become an object of nostalgia. If only in our own minds, that is; you don't hear the music industry writing songs about 1992 Camry's. But it had to happen, just as assuredly as once-modern '57 Chevy's, '66 Mustangs, and '73 Super Beetles in their time became wistful objects of recollected desire. My '82 Tercel may have been the bee's knees, and our '88 Dodge 600 took us from Point A's to Point B's, but the Silver Zloty really aims to please!

This fact was driven home, so to speak, on this past weekend's round trip to Madison on I-94 for a Mothers' Day gathering. The Silver Zloty's ancient C-V joints popped and creaked, its tires flopped, its obsolescent cassette deck whirred, and its A/C system went unused due to a lack of ozone-destroying freon, its original supply of which we'd long ago released in a bid to kill off what remains of Earth's atmosphere. Long the recipient of $500 and $800 repair increments, per Wait's Laws, the Zloty has seen us through three multiple-trip moves, numerous weekend outings and holiday sojourns, and hundreds upon hundreds of workday commutes. It's been the sole survivor in our livery stable for more than ten years. It's still running -- just like us.

When my beloved spousal unit and I take the Silver Zloty out, fill it with 87 octane, and pop in the cassette of The B-52's Cosmic Thing album -- our soundtrack for twenty years of happy travel, the tape itself starting to fade and wobble -- it's not just a drive but a cruise. "Roam if you want to!/Roam around the world!"

Road trip!

Have Wait's Laws Been Refuted?

We have previously introduced and discussed Wait's Law and Wait's Second Law in this space. Namely:

(1) Everything in adult life costs $500.
(2) $800 is the new $500.

Today, however, a striking challenge to Wait's Law and Second Law arose, shaking my confidence in an orderly universe. Specifically, the Silver Zloty's car battery required replacement. Even opting for the Sears Die-Hard with the longer warranty, the invoice came to only $131 including tax, a far cry from the theoretically incontrovertible parameters previously set forth.

As with Rutherford's gold foil experiment, we cannot merely discard observations that seem inconsistent with existing theory. We investigate further.

Reviewing: it's true that today's charges fell short of the mark, and that the damage to the household treasury was, if not minimal, moderate. It's also true that this modest expenditure was voluntary, in part, as the battery had recharged itself adequately during the drive to the store since its earlier failure during the day. Does this fact account for the apparent exception?

(Aside: Is there a better unclaimed name for a rock band than The Cold Cranking Amps? Answer: No.)

Then it happened. The service technician uttered those magic words: "Mr. Wait, can I show you something?"

He points out the loose engine mounts. Price to replace: $800. The guy at Sears spotted them, for Pete's sake. Clearly Wait's Laws hold; confidence in their universality is restored once again. Naturally, I declined to have the work done this time, as before. Who has $800 just lying around?

Which leads us immediately to Wait's Third Law:

(3) If you think Wait's First and Second Laws don't apply: buddy, just you wait!

Ten Things I Know

1. How to spell and pronounce "Schenectady", "Schaghticoke", and "Rensselaer". Extra credit for "Oconomowoc" and "Fond du Lac".

2. The suburban backyard in Upstate N.Y. where a Volkswagen is buried.

3. The famous frozen custard stand in Milwaukee where MLB Commissioner Bud Selig eats his lunch daily (two hot dogs with relish).

4. How to make a killer French Onion soup; and how to get kicked out of a bar in Paris using only a French-English pocket dictionary.

5. The precise moment during the chorus of Gladys Knight's "Midnight Train to Georgia" when the Pips chime in with "Whoo-whoooo". (Hint: It's a beat later than you think.)

6. The B-52's song that requires both a cowbell and a door buzzer.

7. The family recipe for chocolate jumbles -- and the crucial baking tip.

8. How to get a two-minute penalty in adult rec hockey for "Unnecessary Roughness: Board Checking". (Hint: It's easy if you can't stop all that well.)

9. Where in Wheeling, West Virginia to get the best blueberry muffins on Easter Sunday.

10. How to sing "Rubber Ducky" ("Quietsche Entchen") in German.

They Had Me At "Brechtian"

It's fun to be 20 again -- especially when you're pushing 50!

Two years ago, my long-time best friend, an RPI engineer who owns some timberland, gave me a CD by The Dresden Dolls, a Boston-based rock duo that describe their niche as "Brechtian Punk Cabaret". He said some of the clever lyrics reminded him of Tom Lehrer, although his beloved spousal unit thought they were "too angry".

As a former German language student, they had me at "Brechtian". And again at "Cabaret". I would add: New Wave, expressionistic, confessional, theatrical, intense. The Dresden Dolls are a magically matched pairing of incredible lead vocalist, lyricist, keyboardist, and art party impresario Amanda Palmer with the equally leading, theatrically talented drummer Brian Viglione. The combination of Amanda's pounding rock piano and Brian's perfect punctuation and talent for expression creates a full orchestration with only two instruments. The music videos that they've produced are visual and aural wonders, artsy and polished, bringing out the duo's dark, angsty humor and dangerous edge.



Two years on, I've collected three Dresden Dolls CDs, two concert DVDs, plus the new solo CD by Amanda Palmer. I've attended one concert by The Dresden Dolls and one by Amanda solo, supported by an Australian performance art troupe, The Danger Ensemble. I've stood in an autograph line -- Amanda and Brian are famously welcoming to their fans -- and attended an afternoon sound check and photo op, where my beloved spousal unit gave Amanda & Co. three loaves of bread fresh from the bakery for their pre-concert table.

I've ironed the band's logo onto a t-shirt. Seriously, dude.

I once introduced myself to Amanda as a fan with the "Geezer Brigade". She responded to my self-deprecation with a cheerfully emphatic, one-word barnyard epithet. My redeeming encounter with the muse. It's good to be 20 again!

Summer of Sam

A Wall Street programming intern, I was walking on the streets of midtown Manhattan after work on a hot summer evening in 1977 when the lights went out. As in: out out. The Big Out. Street lights, traffic lights, office buildings, storefronts; everything but car headlights and emergency lights went dark.

The remaining sounds of cars and voices echoed eerily. You don't notice the pervasive 60-cycle hum of the urban, electrified world until it suddenly stops.

A few brave, most likely inebriated citizens took it upon themselves to stand in intersections to play traffic cop. That didn't work so well. Yet the Manhattan scene in my vicinity wasn't all that chaotic; it was only in the aftermath that I read reports of the smash-and-grab storefront looting in various sections of the city.

Being a suburban college kid from Upstate New York, where blackouts are considered almost cute, it didn't occur to me at first that my situation on the Midtown streets was possibly perilous. Then it did. I hustled back toward my room at the Vanderbilt Y, and ran into a friend who was gathering up a posse. "They're filming Superman at the Daily News building," he said in earnest. "They've got huge floodlights!" This seemed important at the time. We had to investigate.

We first saw the glow of the movie lights from a few blocks away. The Daily News building had been renamed The Daily Planet using an overlay facade. There was no sign of Christopher Reeve, Marlon Brando, or Margot Kidder, but dozens of cops in uniform swarmed the set. I thought they were there to prevent vandalism, until I noticed their uniforms: each officer's shoulder patch said "City of Metropolis". (The thick facial make-up should probably also have been a tip-off.)

Still the same kid from Upstate N.Y., still oblivious to the paralyzing effects of a wee little power outage, I actually tried to go to work the next morning. Figured out that the subways wouldn't be running, so I took the bus; but I forgot that the elevators (not to mention the computers - duh!) wouldn't be. Fortunately, I phoned upstairs before climbing the 27 stories. The phone rang and rang...

Excellent! I did what any Wall Street flunky with a suddenly free day and little cash should do, even today: I took the Staten Island Ferry and back, a.k.a. the poor man's guided tour of New York Harbor. The Statue of Liberty is magnificent, but it's nothing compared with the sense of freedom that's experienced by a summer intern who's escaped the office on a sunny day!

Two decades later, Spike Lee portrayed 1977 New York City in his movie, "Summer of Sam"; the "Son of Sam" serial murders had gripped the city. ESPN recently aired its terrific serial docudrama, "The Bronx is Burning", about the player-manager-owner melodrama on Reggie Jackson's 1977 Yankees. CBGB's, the iconic underground rock club that closed last year, was in full swing, and Judy Collins, Harry Chapin, and Bonnie Raitt played to mellow summer crowds in Central Park. Disco ducks wore leisure suits.

Completed only four years prior, the World Trade Center was still acquiring new tenants. The city itself was all but bankrupt, needing a federal bailout from the Carter Administration. Its fiscal woes led the voters to usher out the diminutive Mayor Abraham Beame and send in the brash Edward "How'm I doing?" Koch, with Mario Cuomo and Bella Abzug also in the running. The record-setting heatwave scorched the city, and the massive blackout roiled the populace. Apparently, I experienced a pivotal time in the storied history of New York. Who knew?

Did I mention that my Dad's name is Sam?