The Kills, House of Blues, San Diego September 11, 2011

Saw the Kills last night and they are shaping up to be one of my top favorite bands. There's something about Jamie's guitar that seems to mine a well of...uh...plumb a vein of? some deep rock structures so that everything he plays seems seminal even though at the shortest count, fifty years of rock have already passed...uh...under the bridge. (Metaphors are deserting me.) Listening to Kissy Kissy, I seem to hear every rock riff I ever enjoyed inside the sparse guitar-and-drum-machine arrangement, and song after song can summon up the Kills' odd mixture of nostalgia and shock of the new.  Recently, they've added a Mellotron, and for some reason, they can now sound like New Order at its finest, even though I'm not convinced New Order ever had a Mellotron.

They are also very danceable.

They move a lot, and so not a single picture of the Kills last night from my cellphone is worth posting. But I will anyway, as a block of text is very intimidating.



Suffice to say Alison Mosshart's new pink hair is a shock to those of us who envied her thick, straight black locks, but it works beautifully on stage where it's a colorful centerpiece to the duo's kinetic act.  Jamie was craggy and masculine as usual, machine-gunning the faithful at the barrier with his guitar and generally appearing to have fun.

I'm feeling a bit ranty about support acts though. Yesterday we had two. Why on earth would any concert goer need more than 33% of a support act, never mind 200%? What are they actually for?

Yesterday we had Mini Mansions. I've seen them before, supporting the Dead Weather, and quite liked them then. They have a Beatlesque way with words and harmonies that is completely charming, though Heart of Glass appears to have mutated since then to lose the great slide guitar. I'd be happy to pay $5 to hear them in a bar or something.  Their main drawback, in my view, is that they don't have a drummer. Their lead singer plays a snare drum and a floor tom, standing up while singing. However, his job is to go "BANG!" on a drum whenever he feels a "bang" is the noise the music needs. This is all very well, but the drummer-as-timekeeper concept is entirely missing and it makes me feel like I'm at a rehearsal where the drummer couldn't be bothered to turn up. I imagine there are drummers out there who would like the gig, and the singer would be able to go "BANG" when he felt like it even afterwards, so what's the downside in hiring one?

The other support act was Eleanor Friedberger. She had a vigorous musical style that seemed very 80's Valley. She was dressed in standard Lesbian chic - blue shirt and pants, natural hair and natural skin, and a big, big, green guitar. Her singer-songwriter style made us wonder why she'd brought a band - a workmanlike drummer (hey Mini Mansions, there's your chance!) and a bassist and guitarist, both with really boring, non-rock'n'roll hair - since they didn't seem to add anything to it. By happenstance, they stayed still long enough for me to get a picture.



A name for them formed immediately - Tom Patty Smith and the Heartbreakers - and nothing they did made me think they'd improved on the 80's originals.  However, my feet began to hurt so much from standing that I was close to the point of demanding human sacrifices when they fortuitously left the stage.  I totally wanted to go home and read a book. My appetite for rock and roll had been ground off to a nub (uh, metaphors haven't recovered yet). So much for support acts being "warm up" bands.

So, once again, what is a support act for? If it's to get me ready to rock'n'roll, these two weren't it. I'd prefer a decent DJ with 45 minutes of great dance tunes to loosen me up than two hours of derivative post-rock. Oceangal said she'd like something like a comedian, to get us out of ourselves and ready for the headlining act. Is the point to break new music the headlining act really likes? I had no sense that was the case yesterday. And if people want to break new music there has to be a way of doing it that doesn't lead to me to wanting to buy voodoo dolls of them and sticking pins into them. Is it simply to sell more drinks before the headliners come on? I think you might have something there.  Give me a two drink minimum cover charge then, man, so I don't have to stand up two hours on a crowded dancefloor before the Kills come on.

Frankly at my time of life, my ideal concert-going experience would be to have Pegasus whisk me off in my favorite armchair and deposit me at the barrier approximately one drink before the headliners come on.

Heaven.

(Edited)

New ponds for old, rebuilding pond part 2

Go to part one.

Once the fountain was placed, we started the water. The little blue shark has been in the fountain bowl for years. We found it under the silt and put it back in again. We're hoping that the moss will come back to life once it's been rewetted for a bit.





We had to cut the plants back drastically. But basically, Jimmy likes it.



So that's a positive result.

New ponds for old, rebuilding a pond part 1

In about 2001, we dug a hole in a planter in the atrium, and put in a hard-shell pond liner. We filled it with water, put ferns around the outside, put a fountain in it, and presto, a lovely white-noisemaker for sleeping purposes and a refuge for our iguanas.



That one's of Jimmy, in about 2007.

The hard shell pond liner was guaranteed to last ten years, or fifteen years or something. And it was in a planter - not subject to earth movements, giant pointy stones or tree roots. Nevertheless, this year it began leaking. This was a big problem. The fountain was just about maneuverable when we were forty. Now it's too heavy. Draining the liner and inspecting it showed numerous tiny splits in the plastic, of unknown origin. We taped them over with pond repair sticky patches and refilled.

Bingo! For two months. Then it started leaking again. Miserable fish. Algae covered atrium. Roots growing in drain.

We called the manufacturers who said they still had that model and it would be $60, but since they no longer had any California dealership arrangements, it turned out shipping would be $400. We were too British and polite to mention the warranty thing.

So, we had to 'repair' the hard pond liner by overlaying it with a flexible pond  liner. Last week we bought a flexible pond liner that people use to drape over shaped ponds in the ground. Our assignment - to line our hard liner. First we had to disassemble the fountain and haul it out with a block and tackle. Luckily STB understands pulleys. I 'did it' in physics but never actually pulleyed anything.







Then we had to drape the flexible liner over the hard shell pond liner and fill it slowly, ensuring that the folds in the material went where we wanted them, rather than where the weight of the water put them.  The plants growing around the shell are very aggressive, so we had to tuck the flexible liner right underneath the lip of the hard liner.  I still think that the ferns will get under it, so I guess we'll have to clean it out occasionally.








Once it's all tucked in, we left it to condition for a week. And then the effort of craning the hardware back in occurred.








Click to go to part 2

Baby Gecko

A change from Baby Ruthless, at least. I found this baby gecko outside my house in the middle of the night. What was I doing up in the middle of the night? I have no idea. For scale, he's sitting next to the 1/2" of grout between a 12" Saltillo tile and the white stucco wall. He looks to be three or four days old.



A couple of days later I was up in the middle of the night - same reason - and his dad was there instead.

Alison Mosshart: What a Wonderful World

This is proof that Alison Mosshart and Baby Ruthless are two different people. Alison has covered the granddad-beloved smarm-fest What a Wonderful World. If Baby Ruthless had a solo single I'm sure it would be called something like I Claw My Way Into Your Frozen Grave And Consume Your Soul (Baby).



It's quite nice, isn't it?
Although, I guess, it was for the TV show Sons of Anarchy, which I bet isn't a reality show about people who rescue baby rabbits or anything.

Robot Chicken

The Oliver Postgate chicken.

These little piggies went back to the start...

The following is an ad. If you can overcome cynicism long enough to watch it until its final frames when the sponsor's name appears, I think you'll be able to concentrate on kvelling over the marvelous animation.



The soundtrack is Willie Nelson covering Coldplay's The Scientist, although I have to say I couldn't tell his treatment from theirs. The theme is a farmer moving from traditional to intensive farming methods, and after a while realizing no-one is benefiting - himself, his customers or his livestock - and so he goes back to the start. The commentariat at YouTube is particularly scathing about this ad, as getting emotional over this little fictional story doesn't actually mean you're doing anything about factory farming, but I reckon as long as you bear that in mind while watching, no harm done.

And the animation, by London's Johnny Kelly, is as I said, superb. There's a making-of video available here [link partially broken]. It really is stop motion, using molded and even three-d printed characters arranged on a long, long table so the video looks like one extended tracking shot. It works perfectly with the song. Logically, a linear tracking shot implies time passing as well as geographical space passing, and by definition you can't get 'back to the start', but in this treatment, the story is told in such a way that the time paradox adds to the experience rather than nullifying it. Nice video.

Sunspots in OC

And it was off to Orange County Museum of Art today to see the last day of the Alexander Calder and Contemporary Art Exhibition, Form, Balance, Joy.



OCMA is in central OC,  near Fashion Island, so driving around there entails spotting Maseratis, Lamborghinis and Ferraris. If you only have a Porsche, you're non-U. My Hyundai (Hyundai Hyundai's his name) doesn't even register. Inside the museum we toured the Calder exhibition and then went to the closing day artist's talk, which didn't feature Calder of course (that would be table tapping) but a young artist called Jason Middlebrook and an itinerant astronomer called Bob Noss.  (STB called him a street astronomer, which is a great name and possibly the official title for this kind of guy - he had set up a telescope outside for us all to look at eruptions on the sun.) Middlebrook told us about his Calder-influenced art - he does a lot of mobiles, though unlike Calder's thin-sprung sheet iron, Middlebrook tends to go for organic pendulums, driftwood or dumpster wood. Bob gave a gosh-wow tour of the solar system which did indeed wow most of the audience, who had presumably come here for the art but stayed for the science. They then all asked Difficult Questions like "What is gravity?" and "If the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?" Bob fielded them without difficulty, tempting me to ask, "If light travels one light year a year, and that galaxy you talked about is a million light years away, how come we can see it since the Creation is only 6,000 years old and the light hasn't gotten here yet?" I didn't, though. Orange County is only 1/3 fundie and so the audience might have spotted me as a troll. I expect Bob can answer that pretty smoothly, anyway. Astronomers all over the world learn to deal with lunatics early on, as an infallible sign of lunacy is discovering the Secret of the Universe, such as Einstein Was Wrong, and the walls of observatories are literally papered with the letters people write.

Eventually someone asked about gravity, and after Bob had explained it, this presented a chance for Middlebrook to leap in and actually talk about his art, as after all, mobiles are all about gravity. And his other pieces are boards - raw wood boards, painted - that leaned against walls, taking the characteristics, as he explained, of both mobiles, which are subject to gravity, and paintings, which are confined to flat walls.  Afterwards we finished touring the exhibition. I think most people are familiar with Alexander Calder, and the show didn't exactly shatter one's expectations, although there was more recycling of used materials in the pieces (both Calder and modern) than I'd expected and the cards that explain things pointed this out repeatedly. I noticed that those perforated-leaf steaming trivets came up a lot in the modern pieces and broken tail-lights came up in Calder's - and many people are familiar with the tin can Bird, 1952, one of the most joyful of all pieces of art (pictured above).

Black Mahal, Orange County Great Park

Last night we went to Orange County Great Park, home of the World's Most Boring Balloon Trip, to see Bhangra band Black Mahal play their fusion of funk, hip-hop and traditional Punjabi music (with a little reggae on the side).

Led by traditional singer and dhol player Ustad Lal Sing Bhatt, augmented by bass, drums, saxophone and trumpet, they are a party mixture of P-Funk, Public Enemy (if PE had had their great uncle on vocals) and as STB pointed out, classical-era Gong. They taught us some Indian dance moves but we must have been too crappy at it for them to actually teach us a whole dance.

Lots of fun.

Lick My...

The internet is all a twitter...so to speak...over the fact that Jack White produced a single with Inane Clown Posse singing. The record seems to have been a joke based on the fact that Mozart (for it his he) made beautiful music, but in this case called it something naughty. Here it is. Judge for yourself.



Ha ha! Oh, wait, wrong video. That was the same joke done better twenty-seven years ago. In fact, I'm not going to link directly to the JW single. No point in encouraging people.

I feel a little sorry for ICP. From the recent interviews it seems Jack called them over, gave them the hilarious joke to sing and then kicked them out.

"He explained to us the song was basically called 'Lick My Ass,' and we went, 'Ah, figures. 'Lick My Ass' featuring ICP,' " the Detroit rap duo's Violent J tells Billboard.com. "We like to think there's more of a method to our madness. We don't just do songs with a dumb name. But once (White) explained to us how (Mozart) had a sense of humor and everything, and we saw how excited (White) was about it, that got us fired up, and we really got into it." From Billboard.

But it was definitely a collaboration. I like [B-Side] "Mountain Girl" a lot better than the ["Lick Me in the Arse"], myself. It was more ICP's feel. We were kinda hoping they'd go with that as a single, but it's cool. The more I hear ["Lick Me in the Arse"], the more I dig it.
But as far as things we woulda done--like stacked our vocals or doubled our vocals--they weren't having that shit. This is garage-rock style. You go off, one-take style. From Village Voice.

When they were finished recording, White played them some of the material he'd been working on, including songs with Tom Jones and Detroit rapper Black Milk. J returned the favor by playing White some of "The Mighty Death Pop," "but he just did not seem interested," J says. "He was real nice about it, super cool, but it was kind of like look-at-your-watch, let's go." From Detroit News. [Link broken and Detroit News apparently too cool to have it archived at the Wayback Machine]

Thanks to Mike in comments for bringing this up, and to Kali, who found all the articles about the single (but is unlikely to agree with my conclusion. Or Mike's either.)

And thanks to Spinal Tap for "Lick My Love Pump" (Nigel was always my fave rock musician.)

OK, I relent. Here's the trailer to the ICP version, which ends up with the text telling you which URL to use to  "hear it in it's entirety".  That really is a very Third Man Grocers' Apos'trophe. Well done.

Raccoons

For the last ten days, the local raccoons have ripped up my lawn looking for, apparently, grubs that resemble succulent prawns that live under the turf. I've attempted to kill the grubs, which this late in the season means applying Sevin, a totally poisonous dust, to the grass.

It hasn't made any difference - each night the raccoons have torn up the turf. But something in their dynamic has changed. This morning at 6 am, I heard them fighting. I got out too late to see what they where squabbling over. A few minutes ago at dusk, I heard them fighting again, and watched them climb into the tree that serves as their stepladder between my yard and everyone else's. Hopefully this means that the free shrimp bar is over and the patrons are arguing about the remnants. I'm only sorry that I had to apply the world's worst insecticide to get it done. Next year I'll apply less harmful barrier products earlier in the year.

Today in Shopping

I was treated as a potential criminal at a store today. It was the Farm to Market in San Juan Capistrano, where I go to get cheap local produce, herbs, spices and above all, organic hair dye. My hair's been fading from red to ginger over the past couple of years. Being of British origin, ginger doesn't exactly cut it, so I first resorted to henna, then Herbatint. I suspect Herbatint is made of exactly the same stuff I would buy in Vons, but it's very careful to tell me it's "herbal" and I fall for that kind of stuff.

The woman behind the cosmetic counter asked me if she could help me, and I said no. After a second I realized all the hair dye had been put behind the counter glass, so I said, "Apparently you can help me...I need a box of Herbatint and it's behind glass now."

She fished for the shade I wanted, handed it to me and then as I made to push the cart off into the uncharted waters of the Made-Up Vitamins Aisle, she stopped me. "You can't put that in the cart. I have to take it up to the front. We've had kids taking them. Are you done shopping?"

I wasn't done shopping, I said, but I didn't point out I was far from a "kid".

"Nothing personal," she said as she took the box from me. "You can collect it when you're ready to leave."

It might have been "nothing personal" but I felt like I'd been singled out as a common criminal. I fumed in humiliation all the way through the store and wanted to leave without collecting the dye - at $17, it was twice the price of everything else I was buying combined, but not exactly an X-Box or an iPhone - but I realized that if I left without it, I'd definitely be known forever as the Woman Who Tried To Lift Our Hair Dye But Was Foiled.

"Ready," I grated at her when I was set to leave. She made small talk and wished me a nice day about eleven times on the way to the cash register, but all I could think of was that she'd essentially accused me of being a thief.

I won't be going to Farm to Market in San Juan Capistrano in future. I don't need to be humiliated while shopping. The city has a farmer's market in town once a week where I can get fresh vegetables, and I can buy ordinary hair dye at Vons like a normal person. It won't be "herbal" but then again it doesn't seem to harm anyone else.

Farm to Market is one of those places that sells organic veg along with things like negatively-charged water (the extra electrons stop the water molecules clumping together, apparently), water with added oxygen, and Colloidal Silver. SJC is a pragmatic town, and I'm surprised there are enough Fans of the Woo to keep Farm to Market going. Well, it just lost me, and my steady $20 a month. A major blow, I'm sure.

I first got this treatment many years ago in East London, when I was shopping in some megastore - English equivalent of Target or Walmart - and a security guard came up and followed me around. He didn't follow at a discreet distance, but shadowed me from a foot away, looking at what I was looking at and bending when I bent down to look at something. I spent longer than I should have pretending it wasn't happening and trying to act normally, but after a while I gave up and left the store, which is what he undoubtedly wanted. I never went back there again, either, but since I can't remember where it was, I can't badmouth it on the internet.

I remember later, also in East London, going to a chemist's opposite the teaching hospital where I worked and asking for carbon tetra-chloride. The assistant called for the pharmacist who came down some wooden stairs from the attic like a wandmaker from Diagon Alley, and stared at me like I was a bug. "I don't have any carbon tetra-chloride, and even if I did, I wouldn't sell it to YOU," he said, as if I were Amy Winehouse or something. "What do you want it for?"

"I need to clean carbon deposits off the nylon spindles on my amplifier knobs," I said, trying to be reasonable in the face of frank condescension. "The build-up is making the sound crackle when I change the settings."

"Use nail polish remover. Acetone," he said, walking away from me.

I wanted to shout at him, "Nylon is soluble in acetone, you utter failure as a supposedly degreed chemist! It'd soften the spindles and wreck my entire amplifier." But I didn't. I just learned to hate East Londoners.

Although I no longer wear a leather bike jacket and a Ramones t-shirt, it appears I'm still in the drug-addict/thief class as far as store owners are concerned. Fuck 'em all.

Scrubs, the jammies of the medical professon

I saw another woman in the supermarket wearing scrubs today.

I HATE that. I can just imagine her shopping while thinking, "Shit, what a horrible day I've had in the Emergency Room, treating people with MRSA, Rabies, drug-resistant TB...that HIV-positive guy who'd had the bloody catfight with the Hepatitis C-infected guy...then the possible-Ebola guy bleeding out all over the floor and Ol' No Nose Phil, the Leprosy Man, coming in to have a few bits of dying flesh snipped off...I'm too tired to even change my clothes!" Meanwhile she's squeezing avocados and bending over the peaches looking for a good one.

I can also imagine her leaning over some deathly ill Flesh Eating Bacteria Guy in the hospital cleaning out his wounds as her scrubs' top rubs against him, the same top she was wearing when she carried the bag of moldy onions on her hip back to Von's to get her money back at lunchtime.

Update: an article in the Atlantic on the subject of scrubs in food shops - by an MD!

A rose in Spanish Harlem blooms no more

Yesterday, Jerry Leiber died.

Who?

The guy who wrote Hound Dog, among a thousand more.

Nick Ashford died today as well.

RIP both.

Black Waterside

As for White Summer/Black Mountainside, in case anybody feels my fangirliness precludes adequate exploration into Jimmy Page's roots, here's Black Waterside by Bert Jansch.




And here's the corresponding Zeppelin tune. Can't figure out how to embed it, so you'll have to click. I think Jimmy wins, but then I always did.

And White Summer? Davey Graham.