This is it — tonight’s the night The Partly Dave Show makes its long-prophesied return, at 7:30pm at The Neo-Futurarium.
I’ll dish out one more exciting little fact about tonight’s show: Even in Blackouts will be unveiling* the brand-new Partly Dave Show theme song, hot out of the oven** and never before heard by human ears!
If that doesn’t have you weak-kneed with anticipation***, I give up on you. Pig-headed schmendrick.****
Here’s all the info, one last time:
WHAT: The Partly Dave Show: Party Mix Edition!
WHO: Hosted by Dave Awl, with his co-hosts Christopher Piatt and Diana Slickman, plus performances by Neo-Futurist Rachel Claff, Kurt Heintz of e-poets.net, and Jonathan Messinger of The Dollar Store show. Plus live music by the one and only EVEN IN BLACKOUTS!
WHEN: Wednesday night, May 2nd, at 7:30pm.
WHERE: The Neo-Futurarium, 5153 N. Ashland (at Foster), in Chicago
HOW MUCH: $12 suggested donation, or “pay what you can.” Feel free to donate more if you can, but don’t stay home ’cause you’re broke!
Also, Jonathan Messinger is making me blush. In a good way.
*Is it possible to unveil a song?
**For that matter, do songs come out of ovens, and if they do, would they burn your ears? Is that covered by our insurance? Oh, just go with it.
***Experts have not been able to establish a medical correlation between anticipation and weakness of the knees or other joints.
****The term “schmendrick” is used here in a purely vernacular sense and any resemblance to any actual schmendricks, living or dead, is purely coincidental. You schmendrick.
Previously: More on the May 2nd Special Edition of The Partly Dave Show
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Andy Towle is right. This is absolutely sickening.
The short version of the story: An Indiana journalism teacher is being punished for allowing a high school sophomore to publish an essay in the school paper that essentially said gay people deserve to be treated like human beings. Here’s a quote from the student’s essay:
“I can only imagine how hard it would be to come out as homosexual in today’s society. I think it is so wrong to look down on those people, or to make fun of them, just because they have a different sexuality than you. There is nothing wrong with them or their brain; they’re just different than you.”
The idea that that would be remotely controversial to anyone is horrifying. The idea that people in charge of a high school would not only disapprove of it, but choose to suspend the teacher who nurtured that admirable expression of tolerance boggles the mind.
But that’s what happened. The high school’s principal, a man named Edwin Yoder, suspended the teacher, Amy Sorrell, and put her under “investigation.” (Suspicion of not being an idiotic bigot?)
The results of that “investigation” (inquisition might be a better term) by the administrators of Woodlan High School have now been announced: Sorrell will be transferred to another school and not allowed to teach journalism for three years.
That’s right — take a talented, dedicated teacher and lock her away so she can’t possibly teach any other young minds to think in intelligent and compassionate ways. Apparently the administrators are hoping to find someone who’s willing to indoctrinate the local youth in a proud tradition of ignorance and hatred instead.
They’ve also forced Sorrell to issue an apology (!) and Superintendent Kay Novotny made a sanctimonious, sputtering statement about how the administrators are frustrated with the “spin” in the media, saying their reputations have been “tarnished” by the implication that they’re intolerant toward gay people.
But it’s their own actions that have tarnished their names, and that of their school — and if the spin fits, wear it.
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Ah, another thrilling YouTube find!
Some of you will know Suzi Quatro as the most prominent female glam rocker of the early 70s, racking up a string of hits with Chapman-Chinn numbers like “Can the Can.” Some will know her only from her soft-rock duet “Stumblin’ In” with Chris Norman, which you have to have a soft spot for 70s Top 40 to love. Another large group will only remember her from her role as the feisty rocker-girl Leather Tuscadero on Happy Days.
But a few old New Wavers like me will remember her most fondly for her New Wave/Punk phase at the turn of the 80s, which produced the fun and feisty anthems “Lipstick” and “Rock Hard” — the latter of which featured prominently in the infamously studio-butchered New Wave film epic Times Square.
Times Square tells the story of a couple of young misfit runaway girls who call themselves The Sleaze Sisters, and create a sensation by staging impromptu punk concerts on rooftops dressed in trash bags, dropping television sets onto sidewalks all over New York, stealing ambulances to escape from hospitals, and baiting the father of one of the girls, a conservative politician who wants to “clean up Times Square” about a decade before Rudy G and Mickey Mouse got around to actually doing it.
They’re assisted in this campaign by the always fabulous Tim Curry, playing a radio DJ who likes their moxy and brings them into his radio studio for live improv broadcasts in which they issue foulmouthed tirades over smokin’ guitar riffs, directed at daddy and other grownups who are hacking them off.
If you’ve never seen it, you can watch a trailer here that’ll give you a feel for it.
We’ll never know how good a movie Times Square might have been if the studio hadn’t decided it was too long — and maybe a little too queer — and cut it to shreds over the protests of its director, Allan Moyle. The final edit was so barely coherent that despite avidly watching it half a dozen times on HBO during my high school New Wave heyday, I never twigged to the fact that the girls were having a lesbian romance along with their punk rock and guerilla art happenings. I only figured that out when the movie finally emerged on DVD a few years ago and I got to read up on the behind-the-scenes drama.
Despite the studio’s mangling, there was a lot to love about Times Square — not only its romantic public-art-as-rebellion manifesto, the culture-jamming sensibility of its TV-tossing and rooftop concert scenes, and the aforementioned Tim Curry, but also probably the best New Wave movie soundtrack of all time.
In addition to a couple of Sleaze Sister originals, it came glittering with cuts like Roxy Music’s “Same Old Scene,” Patti Smith’s “Pissing in a River,” The Cars’ “Dangerous Type,” The Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated,” The Pretenders’ “Talk of the Town,” Gary Numan’s “Down in the Park,” Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” and of course Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime.” The scene of the girls skipping down a city sidewalk to that song in the wake of a boom-box carrying fellow pedestrian is forever lodged in my mind as the epitome of life-in-the-big-city cool.
The soundtrack came as a big gatefold double album that filled cut-out bins for a while in the early 80s, and almost everyone I know had a copy they’d nabbed for $2.99 even if they’d never seen the film. Sadly, it’s never been issued on CD, although if you have a fetish for it like I do, you can round up most of the songs on other collections.
Among the few holdouts is Suzi’s “Rock Hard,” one of the two or three best songs she ever recorded (in my biased opinion), and one of the key tracks from Times Square because it’s the song that Tim Curry’s DJ character dedicates to the girls over the air.
I’ve never been able to find this track on CD except for a re-recorded version from many years later, which lacks the punch of the original. But at least, courtesy of YouTube, you can now see and hear Suzi performing the original version of the song. This one goes out to The Sleaze Sisters.
Bonus: Suzi performing her UK Top 10 hit “If You Can’t Give Me Love,” which has a nice jangly Nick Lowe kind of sound. (I’m bummed that the video for “Lipstick” doesn’t seem to be on YouTube at the moment, because that’s Suzi’s all-time best cut in my opinion, and the video is way fun.)
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The Doctor Who two-part story “Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks” wrapped up this weekend on the BBC, with the Doctor and Martha battling Daleks (and their pig-headed assistants) in the newly built Empire State Building in early 1930s New York, against the backdrop of the depression. The episodes featured some great historical background, with part of the action taking place in a “Hooverville” — the name for the makeshift villages of homeless people that sprang up in the Herbert Hoover era.
The Daily Record has an interview with Ryan Carnes (of Desperate Housewives fame) about his experience donning heavy pig drag for his role in the episodes. Click through to see what it looked like. Key quote:
“I didn’t really get to see people at lunchtime because I had to be very careful with my pig face. I had to go to my trailer and sit in front of the mirror and watch myself eating so I didn’t wreck the prosthetics.”
He also says:
“I wasn’t a fan, but I’d known about it because a friend of mine had a Doctor Who pinball machine in his basement when I was a teenager, so that was my first introduction as an American.
… “I’m a huge fan of Doctor Who now. I gained a whole new respect for science fiction.”
Meanwhile, for the stateside fans, Outpost Gallifrey News says:
The Sci Fi Channel has announced it will start airing Series Three of Doctor Who in the USA from July 6 at 9pm.
Hopefully that means Season 3 DVDs will be available in time for Whovian Holiday shopping.
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Tom Tomorrow had a great “special edition” cartoon up on the Huffington Post last week, revisiting some of the things that pro-war pundits had to say at the start of the war. Here’s a small excerpt from the cartoon.
That’s just the first four of 12 panels — click on the cartoon excerpt to go see the whole thing, and Tom’s commentary on it. Believe me, it gets better.
What’s fascinating about these quotes is that during those heady first few weeks after the initial “victory” in Iraq, the neoconservatives and their apologists in the media were clearly gearing up to rub progressives’ faces in the dirt for being wrong. They just couldn’t wait to start telling us how wrong they thought we’d been for suggesting that taking over Iraq would be harder than they thought. There was clearly going to be no greater crime than having been wrong about the glorious victory in Iraq. They were going to make us eat helping after helping of crow pie for years and years and years because we had been so nana-nana-boo-boo wrong.
And then, oops, the shoe turned out to be on the other foot. Turns out it was the neoconservatives who were wrong about how the occupation of Iraq would go, just an eensy bit, so guess what? All the crow pie got covered with foil and put back in the fridge. Nothing to see here, move along. Why make a big deal out of who was right and who was wrong? We all make mistakes. Let’s not dwell on ancient history — it’s so petty and unseemly. The important thing is to figure out where we go from here.
And the best people to figure that out? Why, all the neoconservative pundits who were wrong about what would happen in the first place, of course.
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Earlier this year it was announced that Neil Finn was getting back together with bassist Nick Seymour and guitarist Mark Hart to reform Crowded House. The new version will of course be missing its original drummer, the late, lamented Paul Hester, whose duties will be taken over by former Beck drummer Matt Sherrod.
The band is already playing some warm-up gigs, and the latest news is that their new album Time on Earth is due out in July:
“Time on Earth” will be released July 2 in the U.K. via EMI’s Parlophone label, though there is no confirmed release date or label for North America just yet. Sister label Capitol handled U.S. distribution for Crowded House during its first incarnation.
The album was formed from the foundation of what would have been frontman Neil Finn’s next solo album, which was in the works with Crowded House bassist Nick Seymour.
… One cut, “Silent House,” was co-written with the Dixie Chicks, whose own version of the song appeared on last year’s Grammy-award winning “Taking the Long Way.” Guitarist Johnny Marr, formerly with the Smiths and now with Modest Mouse, contributed to a pair of songs.
The official EMI site adds:
The long-awaited new album contains 14 songs and, in old Crowded House tradition, the album cover features a Nick Seymour painting. The band were joined by Johnny Marr on two tracks, ‘Don’t Stop Now’ and ‘Even a Child’, which he co-wrote with Neil Finn. The album also contains ‘Silent House’, which Neil co-wrote with the Dixie Chicks, and whose version of the song has been released previously.
The Crowded House page at Frenz.com has the tracklist for the album, and says the first single from the album will be “Don’t Stop Now,” released on June 25.
I’m thrilled that Johnny Marr is collaborating with Neil again. Below is the clip of Neil and Johnny performing “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” together, from the video 7 Worlds Collide, with Neil putting a brilliant spin on one of The Smiths’ best songs. The climactic high note he hits in the closing stretch of the song is an absolutely sublime touch. And for some reason I love the way Neil and Johnny call out each others’ names at the end of the song, too.
And let’s have some classic Crowded House: click through for the video for my personal favorite CH song, “Distant Sun.”
Bonus: Visit the em-pea-three section at Something So Finn for tracks from a live Finn Brothers gig at Regent’s Park in London from August 2004.
• Previously on Ocelopotamus: Music: Split Enz & Sparks
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I have three days’ worth of links accumulated and only one Friday afternoon roundup post to squeeze them into! Help me with the zipper.
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Bill Moyer’s Buying the War documentary on PBS, about how the Washington press bought into the administration’s marketing campaign and enabled it during the runup to the Iraq War, obviously made a big splash this week. I haven’t had time to watch it all myself yet, but you can view the whole show online here.
Here’s a one-and-a-half-minute clip to get your feet wet:
And here’s a good five-minute excerpt. (Unfortunately, the sound is off-sync, so the audio doesn’t quite line up with the image, but it’s worth putting up with that.)
David Sirota says Washington reporters are in “meltdown, damage-control freak out mode” over the show. They ought to freak out. The fact is that the mainstream media failed to do its job during the first Bush term. They tossed aside their supposed objectivity, and failed the American public who depend on them to ask hard questions. Instead, people like Tim Russert and Chris Matthews bellied up to the Kool-Aid bar.
Digby highlights the show’s exchange between Moyers and Russert, and takes it apart in Hullabaloo’s usual eloquent style. One of the most annoying things Russert does in that exchange is to pull out his “I’m a blue-collar guy from Buffalo” act. I’m not sure if there’s anything more repellent than when these millionaire media celebrities — rich and powerful men by any standard — try to act like they’re jus’ plain folks, really just like the guys who work down at the plant, only, hey wow! — somehow they wound up with a teevee show. Never mind that they make more money in a week than a lot of hard-working Americans see all year.
Also, Atrios has a little snippet of Peter Beinart from The New Republic getting grilled by Moyers.
And here’s Bill Maher interviewing Moyers about the show.
Finally, if you haven’t seen it, don’t miss Kevin Tillman’s riveting testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Kevin talks about his brother Patrick Tillman’s death in Afghanistan, and how the administration lied about it for propaganda purposes. Needless to say, it’s intense, and he has difficulty getting through it at times.
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At last it comes out (so to speak): the full behind-the-scenes story on the Heroes character who was supposed to be gay, and then wasn’t anymore. Popgurls.com interviews Heroes producer Bryan Fuller, who spills more beans than have previously been spilled from this particular can of beans.
What happened:
It absolutely was a path that we were going to take. In the first meetings when we were sitting down and talking about the show, one of the things about the show that Tim said that he wanted all these characters to represent different people in the world and we had an Asian guy and an Indian guy and… a whole bunch of white people. He just wanted it to be a united Benetton cast. I said that’s fantastic, but if we have this many people, then we need to have a gay character. If you want to represent the world, that’s certainly a demographic that we need to hit. [Tim completely agreed and] was thinking Claire’s best friend might be a good person – and I couldn’t agree more. So we were definitely going down a route of making [Zach] the gay character and having him have a big role in her life and sort of teaching her to come out about her ability and embrace herself and actually using the coming out metaphor and the gay metaphor in that instance as a fun piece of storytelling.
There was an unfortunate miscommunication and when the script arrived that had the line in it, ‘I would take you to homecoming but you have to know that I don’t like girls that way.’ The actor [Thomas Dekker]’s, manager threatened to pull him from the show because he was up for the John Carter role in The Sarah Connor Chronicles and she didn’t want him playing a gay character because it might affect FOX’s interest in hiring him. It got really ugly.
The aftermath:
In really, in all of our minds, the character was still gay but we couldn’t say it explicitly. I was very upset by it – I was not happy about it at all. There were times I had to avoid talking about it because we didn’t want to have a negative reflection on the show. The show’s been such a positive experience for so many people, we didn’t want to get hung up on the fact that one actor’s management felt that it was a career killer for him to play a homosexual which, as a gay man, I found incredibly insulting. We had episodes planned for him to be in, and she pulled him from the show altogether. So that’s why he sort of disappeared.”
… why do I suspect that in the long run, this kid’s management has done his career a lot more harm than good? If he’d played the first gay character on Heroes, he would have had a devoted fan base for the rest of his career. He could have been the Jack McPhee for the current crop of gay kids in high school. But that ship has apparently sailed — and who knows if he’ll ever have another chance to do something that memorable?
(Via Towleroad.)
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I can’t quite put it into words, but on a certain level this video reminds me of what my entire childhood was like.
(… for those stuck on slow connections, it’s a four-year old kid who for some reason is standing in the end zone at a football game and gets tackled full-force by one of the players. Video says he needed stitches afterwards.)
Definitely brings back some bad PE trauma memories. I wonder if this kid will grow up to share my horror of organized sports.
Via Towleroad.
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Since I’m doing meta today: In case any of you are wondering exactly how I came up with such a cockamamie name for this blog, you can put at least part of the blame on The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero, which I’ve been carrying in my backpack for the last couple of months since I spotted the lovely new Penguin Classics paperback edition at a bookstore.
The book is exactly what the title suggests — an alphabetized compendium of the fantastic creatures human beings have dreamed up through the ages. It’s one of those books you don’t have to read in sequential order — it’s enjoyable just to flip through it from time to time, learning about the centaurs and cyclopes of classical mythology (the latter listed under “One-Eyed Beings”), the fever-dream chimeras described in medieval bestiaries, legendary Chinese and Native American creatures, and biblical monsters like the Behemoth and the Leviathan.
As the authors themselves put it in their foreword to the 1967 Edition, “Our wish would be that the curious dip into it from time to time in much the way one visits the changing forms revealed by a kaleidoscope.”
The expected beasts — unicorn, gryphon, basilisk, kraken — are all present and accounted for, as well as more obscure and fascinating animals like the ink monkey, the humbaba, the a bao a qu, and The Bird That Makes The Rain. You may be surprised to find out that the panther and the pelican were imaginary beasts before their names were given to real ones.
The authors flesh out their text with citations from a range of authoritative sources, including Pliny, Herodotus, Sir Richard Burton, H.G. Wells, C.S. Lewis, Franz Kafka, ancient Hebrew and Islamic texts, and many more.
There’s an online version of the book available here, although clicking around a Web site is vastly less magical somehow than opening the cover of a tome with a title like The Book of Imaginary Beings. With the book, you have the vague suspicion that each time you open it, new beasts might appear in the pages — ones that weren’t there yesterday, and might not be there tomorrow.
At any rate, I’d been enjoying the book for a couple of months when I started trying to come up with a unique name for my blog, and finding that every name I thought of turned out to be taken by a software company in Canada, a design studio in Western Australia, or a band in Brooklyn.
So, inspired by the fantastic creatures in the book, I decided to create a brand-new imaginary beast to name my blog after. The simplest approach would be to fuse two beasts together, in the manner of creatures like Pegasus, the gryphon, or the centaur.
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