San Franciscans, tonight you are in for a special treat. Mer is performing with the Ragwater Revue at The Stork Club! If you have never seen Mer perform, let me tell you: it’s an experience. I’ve seen her twice, so far. One time, she played violin with The Dresden Dolls, and the other time, it was at our launch party, rockin’ the theremin. And let me tell you people – people faint when she plays. She’s that good.

So imaginging Mer with the Ragwater Revue – “a lethal concoction of booze-fueled swamp lust” – makes me want to hop on a plane to the Bay Area right now. Ragwater Revue combines elements of swampy blues, rockabilly and 1960s garage rock with lyrics that invoke alligator babies, glass eyes and cemeteries.  “Imagine an old seedy bar in the 1930s where women adorned in puffy mink shawls smoke using long Cruella DeVille-like cigarette extenders and dark-haired men in suits slowly tap their feet to some jazzy blues,” writes Artsweek California. “Ragwater Revue would be the band on the stage.” As an added bonus, tonight’s show also debuts Coilhouse’s own star commenter Gooby Herms on bass! This show is not to be missed.

21:00 at Stork Club: Death Rock Dive Bar!
2330 Telegraph Ave, Oakland, California 94612. Cost: TBA.

When I first heard about Sita Sings the Blues, my initial reaction was one of near-disbelief. “No, wait, you’re telling me that someone made a feature-length animated version of the Ramayana focused on much-put-upon Sita and if that wasn’t enough, it’s filled with musical numbers set to Annette Hanshaw’s inimitable jazz vocals? With sarcastic shadow puppets?! You’re kidding, right?”

No, Nina Paley‘s Sita Sings the Blues is very, blessedly, real. My next reaction was that something this eclectic and experimental in concept was going to either crash and burn or succeed brilliantly.

The result? Well here’s a glimpse:

After attending a sold-out showing at the Asheville Film Festival a two weeks ago, I was blown away. It is, without a doubt, like nothing I have seen on screen. There are very few movies anymore where one can gleefully proclaim, mid-way through “Wow, I’ve got no fucking clue what’s going to happen next!”

Sita‘s magnificence is a testament to the tireless hard work and innovative vision of Paley, a longtime alternative cartoonist, who made the whole film on her home computer over five years. The ideas for the movie stem from a particularly harsh break-up (that story’s also told in the movie). Her struggle still isn’t over either: her creation still faces numerous hurdles, both from Hindu fundamentalists and corporate music juggernauts. This thankfully hasn’t stopped it from tearing up the festival circuit across several continents, getting much acclaim at big name fests like Berlin and Tribeca.

So how did something like this come about? Paley was kind enough to talk about the movie’s genesis, its challenges and why audiences these days are doing more than just buying tickets.

COILHOUSE: Why make a feature movie out of the Ramayana, of all things?
NINA PALEY: Well, I was moved by the story and it seemed to speak so much to my life at the time, my problems at the time. It was cathartic to retell the story.

The tagline you use in the movie is “the Greatest Breakup Story Ever Told”
Which is a nod to the Bible movie, the Greatest Story Ever Told.

Soy represents dense nutritional life. Bomb is, obviously, an explosive destructive force. So, “soy bomb” is what I think art should be: dense, transformational, explosive life! —Michael Portnoy

I sometimes wonder how the NYC folks I’ve lost touch with are doing these days. For instance, my former roomie and occasional partner in performance art/music/fashion shenanigans, Michael Portnoy. A multi-talented, mischievous fellow who rented me a room in his flat on the Lower East Side when I first arrived in town, Michael’s “diverse practice spans dance-theater, metafunctional sculpture, fascist socials, experimental stand-up, prog-operatic spectacle, an aerobic restaurant where food leaps out from the walls, and Icelandic cockroach porn.” Noble pursuits, one and all! However, Mister Portnoy remains best known for his balls-out impromptu guerilla dance’plosion during Bob Dylan’s performance of “Love Sick” at the 1998 Grammy Awards:

(I love that it took almost a full minute for anyone to realize Soy Bomb wasn’t part of the show and “escort” him offstage.)

A bit of background info: the Grammys production team had hired Michael and two dozen other extras to stand in the background and wriggle in a shambolic, vaguely beatnik fashion to “give Bob a good vibe.” $200 to do a bit of insincere finger-snapping on live television? Not bad work if you can get it. But Michael had more grandiose visions, and of course, the rest is history. Love it or hate it (and to be sure, I love it a little more every time I watch it) “the Soy Bomb incident” has become one of the most memorable moments in televised award ceremony history, right up there with Sasheen Littlefeather declining Marlon Brando’s Academy Award for him to a chorus of boos, Jarvis Cocker interrupting Michael Jackson‘s pretentious BRIT Awards spectacle, and Sally Fields mewling “you like meee!”

A very wise, oft-quoted fellow named Joel Hodgson once said “we never ask, will anyone get this? We just assume the right people will get it.” On that note, without further explication, here’s the infamous “Twelve Tone Commercial” raillery (recorded back in 1977 by some super-awesomely eggheaded musicians) more recently set to an inspired collection of moving pictures by some wacky genius who may or may not reside in Austria:

The audio on this was recorded 40 years ago by Robert Conrad, founder of WCLV classical radio. A prolific American conductor named Kenneth Jean produced it, and revered Swiss composer/conductor Matthias Bamert is said to have had a hand in it as well. Bless ’em all.

To anyone peeing their pants and rolling on the floor laughing right now: you are officially the nerdiest music nerd that ever nerded from Serial Composition class.

High fives.

When the dust settled from the October Revolution in 1917, diagnosis there was a brief, shining period of uninhibited artistic experimentation in Russia. Before the authorities clamped down on such “decadent” behavior, Russian artists in the 1920s explored communist ideals with more sincerity, hope and optimism than probably at any other time in history in every medium, from architecture to graphic design. In the realm of film, this exploration manifested itself as Kino-Eye, or camera eye. Devotees of this filmmaking style believed that the camera should be used to record the truth of Soviet life without the aid of screenplays, actors, makeup or sets. “I am kino-eye, I am mechanical eye,” wrote Dziga Vertov in the Kino Eye Manifesto in 1923. “I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it.” The crowning achievement of the movement was the 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera, made by Dziga Vertov (a name that translates to “Spinning Top”) and his brother, Boris Kaufman. The film presents the day in the life of a Soviet city from morning until night, with citizens “at work and at play, and interacting with the machinery of modern life.”  The below is Part 6 of Man with a Movie Camera, one of the most dynamic sequences in the film (the entire film is behind the cut). Best if watched with speakers on:

Though the original, which premiered at a planetarium in Hanover at an event hosted by Kurt Schwitters (someone get me a time machine, now!), was silent, the director left behind notes for how music for this film should be composed. Dozens of interpretations have emerged over the years; the Biosphere, In the Nursery and Cinematic Orchestra versions are among the most well-known.

Sadly, things didn’t end well for Dziga Vertov in Russia, though they ended better for him than for most people in his position. When Socialist Realism was declared the “official form of art” in 1934, many of his colleagues were ostracized or exiled. Vertov was able to get away with a couple more films in the 30s, but they were edited to conform to the government’s expectations. After his last creative film, Lullaby, in 1937, Vertov worked on editing Soviet newsreels for the rest of his life. Interestingly, his brother Boris was able to move to America and worked with Elia Kazan and Sidney Lumet as a cinematographer. Kazan infamously named many colleagues as communists to McCarthy’s committee, but Vertov’s brother wasn’t one of them. I wonder if the two brothers stayed in touch, and how they felt about their work and how their lives had diverged. Was Vertov a bitter man as a news editor? Not necessarily; a lot of people, even when robbed of their ability to make art, made up excuses and remained devoted to communist ideals to the very end.  And how did his brother Boris Kaufman fare in the paranoid environment of McCarthyism? Who felt that he got the better end of the deal, I wonder?

[via my pops, who now has a blog]

Moe Hamzeh of The Kordz during the Cedar Revolution, photo by Lynsey Addario

In 2007, the documentary Heavy Metal in Baghdad chronicled the trials of Acrassicauda, dubbed “Iraq’s only heavy metal band.” No doubt many did a double take at trying to reconcile visions of headbangers with environs like Iraq or Lebanon.

Part of that surprise comes from the tremendous heaping pile of bullshit out there about the Middle East. This is, in mass-media world, the land of They. Here is one teeming mass of zealots, driven as by incomprehensible creeds towards destroying you, dear viewer. Fear! Cower!

This is a lie. Growing from the very real repression and devastation faced in these lands, metal of all varieties is thriving from North Africa to Pakistan. As Moroccan metal founding father Reda Zine proclaimed: “we play heavy metal because our lives are heavy metal.”

The resulting fusion sounds both old and new. Middle Eastern metalheads have gathered in the hundreds of thousands, rivaling the Islamist rallies that induce so much hand-wringing in the West. In defense of the most basic freedoms they’ve had showdowns with dictators and fundamentalists. Sometimes, they win.

Elgar, Pooyan and Fasrshid at the Desert Rock Festival. Photo by Megan Hirons.

In the West, critics and popular imagination have long dismissed metal as unserious, adolescent stuff. Across the ocean, forget it: this is one of the gutsiest musical movements in the world — and they mean every damn word.

Morning, mein lieblings. Not that it looks much like morning out there, with the streetlamps still on at nearly 7am and a sky as cold and dark as Satan’s bunghole. The only sign of life in the street below my window: two scabby possums going at it atop a mildewed stack of phone books over by the garbage bins. Dunno what drugs they’re on, but I could really use some right about now. Stupid uncontrollable yawning. Stupid irrational mid-November mood slump. Stupid Seasonal Affective Disorder with its stupid, STUPID boohoo abbreviation. How is anyone supposed to take that name seriously, anyway? “Hey boss, sorry about my general nonproductivity, irritability and/or copious drooling… I haz TEH SAD.”

Guten Morgen. We’re German, we’re mod, we’re impassive, and inexplicably, we’ve changed Ozzie’s lyrics to reflect our deep admiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s masterful mystery story, The Hounds of the Baskerville. PS: Bert took the brown acid. Do not make direct eye contact.

Consider this week’s Better Than Coffee clip a kind of “could be worse” meditation. Judging by their sickly pallor and glazed eyes, phlegmatic-bordering-on-undead “dance moves” and seeming recalcitrance to the sainted spirit of Sabbath, I’m certain that Cindy, Bert and the rest of the Hits a Go Go kids are in far more desperate need of full spectrum light therapy than any of us. (Especially that one ‘luuded up little bitch with the unfortunate Friends-era Jennifer Anniston hairdo. Gah. What a dog!)

No, home-brewed coffee just ain’t cutting it today. If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to catch one of those possums and gnaw the hot, steaming pineal gland right out of its face. Tschüss!

It’s a given: many of us will be prone to spontaneous fits of hysterical laughter and/or tears today. On that note, Amanda “Gams” Palmer has just released a grim-but-hilarious new music video promoting her solo album. Directed by longtime Dresden Dolls collaborator Michael Pope (a man who always manages to make micro-budget videos look like a million bucks), “Oasis” is a vicious little slice of tongue-in-cheek indie pop featuring Amanda as a ditzy teenage wastrel, producer Ben Folds as her stricken boyfriend, and various chums of Amanda’s as abortion clinic nurses and pro-life wingnuts. “Never again will you be able to see me get drunk, date-raped AND get an abortion ALL IN ONE VIDEO!”  Appropriately, she’s dedicating it to Sarah Palin.

In the late 60s and eary 70s, the Rankin/Bass production company made a slew of endearingly hokey holiday-themed “Animagic” flicks that I’m just barely old enough to remember watching in early reruns. I couldn’t have been older than seven or eight when the popularity of such saccharine-injected TV specials as Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and The Year Without A Santa Claus had begun to wane. While I’m too sentimental to harsh on any of that star-studded, sticky-sweet fare, only one of their films has really stuck with me all these years later. Tellingly, that movie is Rankin/Bass’s Halloween special, Mad Monster Party, and it’s all MAD Magazine‘s fault.

Classic Mad Monster Party illustration by Frank Frazetta.

Let’s talk for one sec about MAD. Who here read it growing up? Who still does? If you did/do, I bet it’s high on the What Made You Weird list. Founded in 1952 by editor Harvey Kurtzman and publisher William Gaines, this last gasp of the EC Comics line remained one of the most consistently clever, intelligent, and merciless satirical publications in print until at least the late 90s.*  Nothing was sacred and no one was safe. Founded at a time when aggressive censorship and Cold War paranoia muted the voices of activists and humorists alike, the broadly grinning face of MAD’s mascot, Alfred E. Neuman, was a cheerfully innocuous “fuck you” to authority, and has remained so for generations. Honestly, I could rant and rave about the importance of MAD for hours, but it’s Halloweenie time, so I’ll shaddup for now, at least.

So! Mad Monster Party. Kurtzman and longtime MAD cartoonist Jack Davis were very hands on in writing and conceptualizing this island of classic horror movie monsters, and it shows. Appropriately, Boris Karloff loaned his voice to the character Baron Frankenstein (his final role). Phyllis Diller basically plays herself in it, which is even creepier than it sounds. One guy I know has claimed that the redheaded, husky-voiced fembot lab assistant, Francesca, gave him his first boner. Obviously, MMP influenced the hell out of Tim Burton. Studded with Forrest J. Ackerman-worthy puns and ridiculous musical numbers –including the song “Do the Mummy” performed by a skeletal Beatlesesque quartet called Little Tibia and the Fibias– MMP is campy, witty, and surprisingly risque for children’s fare… I’m pretty sure this is the only kiddie film that’s ever ended with a mushroom cloud!

Whether you’re revisiting it for the umpteenth time or watching it for the first, I hope you’ll enjoy Mad Monster Party with me on this most darque and spookylicious eve of Goth Christmas.

*I haven’t read the magazine since the late 90s, so I couldn’t honestly say if the rag’s still in top form. A lot of folks have said Mad’s gone downhill since becoming dependent on ad-revenue in 2001. The publication had been ad-free for decades until that time (beginning with issue #33 in April of 1957). It  was, by a long shot, the most successful American magazine that ever published ad-free, and of course, by staying independent of ad revenue, Mad was free to tear American culture’s less savory, more materialistic aspects endless new arseholes without ever having to answer to financiers.

I haven’t been so overjoyed by a piece of music news in a very long time:

Jeff Mangum, the fragile, brilliant musician who created In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and On Avery Island, has not performed the material publicly since 2001… until now. The notoriously reclusive Mangum finally broke several years of radio silence this month to revisit some Neutral Milk Hotel songs with his old friends from the Elephant 6 crew on several stops of their Holiday Surprise Tour.