“Double Exposure” from Kelley Stoltz via Third Man Records
Kelley Stoltz is a prolific musician, but more importantly he is a nice man–a nice man who makes head-boppin’ toe-tappers here in San Francisco. After falling for his album Circular Sounds (2008), I crossed paths with Mr. Stoltz while working as a music journalist and he always took the time to say hello without artifice or agenda. This fact, combined with his impeccable musicianship, is why I’ll be attending his record release show at The Chapel tonight. Supported by The Mantles and Sopwith Camel, this event–staged in a converted mortuary fresh with a buzz-worthy restaurant appropriately named The Vestry–promises to be an evening of goodness for both your hearing holes and tastebuds. See you there!
There is nothing I love more than when Pop Culture mocks itself. For those who don’t know, Top Secret! was a 1984 Jim Abrams and David Zucker film that parodies World War II spy flicks, but in this absurd version rock and roll idol Nick Rivers (played by Val Kilmer) is central in the rescue of an imprisoned scientist in East Germany. I watched this movie REPEATEDLY as a kid, and while it’s a fairly terrible film I do still enjoy the mashups of imagery and sounds with which we’re all familiar, care of the Beach Boys and Elvis Presley among others. Take, for example, the song “Skeet Surfin'” that ran during the opening credits: a hilarious commentary on the place of firearms within American culture. Well, maybe not so hilarious if we think about it seriously. But (starting at 5 o’clock today) it’s the weekend! So enjoy this bit if Friday Funny.
Fiona Apple has had her ups and downs, publicly. There is her well documented Best New Artist acceptance speech at the 1997 MTV video music awards where she told us all that the “world is bullshit,” and, more recently, she stormed off stage during a performance at a Louis Vuitton event because the crowd was inconsiderately chatty. This is unfortunate since it dilutes the impact of her music, which is damn good. Coming of age at the height of Lilith Fair meant I have a profound connection to most female musicians of that era, but Fiona always spoke stronger to me. While I can’t imagine my mother was pleased to hear her 7th-grade daughter singing “Criminal” in the shower–“I’ve been a bad, bad girl / I’ve been careless with a delicate man / And it’s a sad, sad world / When a girl would break a boy just because she can”–her music, and my butchering of said music, was an integral facet of my development as a female. The ability to play act the scenes she sang about fattened my lexicon for real-life scenarios foreign to a sheltered kid. Plus, she made playing the piano look way cooler than it is, and I appreciated that as a fellow pianist.
My love for this woman is as wide as it is strong. Tidal, When The Pawn…, and Extraordinary Machine all save space on my shelf, and all three albums have, at one time or another, been invaluable companions on monotonous highways driving south. In fact, she’s been with me for so long, been through so much with me that I feel as if we’re old friends. Not in a Single White Female way, but in the spirit of mutual understanding–much like one could have with a bartender or barista at a frequent haunt. You don’t know them, they don’t really know you but you understand one another due to a shared interest and there is no judgement, it is a safe space. No, Fiona Apple does not know me but I probably know a thing or two about her because her music is nothing if not personal; this is the curse of being an artist.
Her music bonds the fragility of heartbreak to the venom of a breakup and the vacuum of the afterbirth, so to speak: that state of purgatory where love hasn’t fully seceded to hate or ambivalence, and you’re merely empty. It’s complex yet simple, and utterly relatable for a teenage girl whose every emotion is extreme (aided and abetted by watching too much My So Called Life). Listening to her old albums now is like a trip down memory lane where each song represents a different freeze frame in my life. I see the home in which I grew up, me sprawled on the floor of my bedroom, in winter, reading skateboard magazines with the comfort of my parents on the other side of the door yet shut out. I remember driving in my first car, sun roof open and hair whipping out the windows as I rushed through the warm Southern California night from one party to another and then home. So, what I guess I’m trying to impart on this Throwback Thursday is that Fiona Apple is home to me. The faces have been swallowed by the ground and the places have changed ownership, but I’m home in the house of memory as long as Fiona is by my side. And in these uncertain times, comfort may just be the quintessential throwback.
When I was 15, my English teacher told me to read On The Road and it changed my life. I became obsessed with all things Beat, reading voraciously and writing terrible poetry. Terrible, terrible poetry. At a time when my peers were swooning over your Josh Hartnetts or Paul Walkers, I was mooning over Jack Kerouac (with Chipper Jones as a close runner-up). To be sure, I wasn’t immune from the Hartnett-Walker whirlwind, but I prayed at a different altar.
Two years later it was time to go to college, and I was San Francisco bound. I arrived in our fair City with the naiveté to expect an entrenched Beatitude that was gone, beaten out by the first Tech Boom. I eagerly visited North Beach only to find a few bars that looked the part but were off-limits to an underager, and a mess of tourist traps. In the middle of this was and still is City Lights–the Ferlinghetti shop that time forgot–and this became the epicenter for my growing pains. I took to the City in spite of our initial misunderstanding, and even gave an obnoxious interview to the Golden Gate Express in which I pompously trash my childhood home in praise of the North in 2007. What can I say: there is no remedy for the arrogance of youth except to age, and the internet remembers it all.
I give you this background to note my attachment to the men of the Beat Generation: first Kerouac, in my teenage lust, then Ginsberg as I grew, and now–over a quarter century at my heels–a fan of Ferlinghetti. Beat women, however, never garnered much of my attention as they also did not from the media at large. This is because Beat literature marginalizes them as play-things and homemakers–or both in the case of Carolyn Cassady. They were plot points to be plotted, not characters at the wheel. Without my feminist footing, I unconsciously viewed them as the same. I only paid lip service to Diane DiPrima and never read works by Carolyn because, from my high horse, I assumed her books were the profiteering of a mediocre writer who benefited from liaisons with famous men. But I didn’t know anything about Carolyn save for the sound bytes I’d been fed from the fictionalized spoon of Kerouacian “history.” I knew she was beautiful and admired by mythical men, and in my youth that was enough to pantomime–but that is a very shallow well.
Carolyn Cassady died on September 20th at a hospital near her home in England, and obituaries which have run in reputable publications such as The Washington Post and The New York Times note the passing of this woman but barely mention her work. Instead, they marginalize her yet again as a Beat punctuation and devote more time to describing the men in her life than they do to her own accomplishments. The kinder ones tag her as a writer first, and the former wife of Neal Cassady second. If truth were told Carolyn Robinson, her maiden name, was an artist–an educated painter who excelled at set design. Carolyn Cassady became a writer of necessity to inject a dose of reality into the mythologized narrative of her own life; she wrote to add her own voice to her own biography. Her version, however, was not the one people wanted to hear. So, instead she’s remembered as the woman shared by Kerouac and Cassady (or not remembered at all), not as the conservatively raised artist who fell in love with a man marked by madness and did all she could to keep her marriage intact. After all, it was the 1950s and she was not as bohemian as the world had painted her.
Carolyn Robinson Cassady was a remarkable woman with impenetrable strength, and I am a remarkable ass for not realizing that sooner. In light of this, Ms. Robinson, I offer an apology. I am sorry that your story was told but not heard. I am sorry that those men failed you, repeatedly. I am sorry. Now, rest in peace.
For a blog taken with the mission of memories and memorialization, what better track to obsess over than “Oh Memory” from Hayden’s recent album Us Alone. Each track from this album resonates with my agenda–“Old Dreams,” “Blurry Nights,” and “Rainy Saturday”–and the album in total calls for quiet introspection. A cozy chair, the warmth of a tapered fire, and the type of stillness that settles dust. In short, Us Alone is primed to transition us into Fall. Which is perfect, because the nights have begun to chill.
I first became obsessed with urban decay (no, not the eyeshadow) and its progeny, the Urban Exploration movement, when I was in college and read too much philosophy. While it’s unhealthy to read Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord exclusively and in tandem, it plunged me into a lot of weird internet journeys during my many sleepless nights; this is when I found the website Forgotten Detroit.
I am rooted in Detroit, Michigan on my mother’s side of the family. There my grandparents met and fell in love while attending Thomas M. Cooley High School, and my Grandmother never understood why I found it so entertaining to hear her speak of 8 Mile (thanks, Eminen). Built in 1928, Cooley High was closed in 2010 and now sits abandoned, a hulking monument to days when Detroit was healthy and children were everywhere. As with all forgotten things, Cooley High is now in danger of demolition.
How does this happen? How can cities of this size become spectral and how can we, as conscious citizens, raze the physical manifestations of our history when they become too difficult to maintain? I understand the discourse fed by explanations of socio-political migrations, demography and the export of industry to developing countries. I get it: Detroit has been left without a purpose, and therefore was left by its people. Buildings need a use, and Detroit has not the population to use them. This, for lack of a better sequence of words, makes me sad. Sad for my own family history that is disappearing and sad for future generations who won’t be able to understand our nation’s history by standing inside of it, by feeling granite with their hands, seeing stairwells with their eyes and KNOWING that architects are dreamers because they build something out of nothing, and dreamers built this country.
In short, I am obsessed with Detroit: what it represents and what still exists to be saved. I’ve even (half-jokingly) asked my Fella if he’d relocate from San Francisco to the Motor City. So far, he’s nonplussed and I can’t say as I blame him; this is my calling, not his. No, I don’t have any immediate plans to leave an ideal climate for one that’s depressed and trying to find its relevance in a century that has moved away from its strengths. But the thought is germinating, I’m open to persuasion, and the video featured below encapsulates, in a very beautiful way, my connection to the plight of this urban belle.
Our musical education starts young, and is largely influenced by our parents in its infancy. I’ve oft hypothesized that you either grow up in a Beatles household, or an Elvis abode–that the two seem to be mutually exclusive. My father was a HUGE fan of the King. To my teenage horror, he would roam the house doing impressions: singing with his lip curled and pulling Presley tunes from his diaphragm. I even inherited a sweat-stained scarf he allegedly (according to lore from his own mouth) fought a woman for after Presley had tossed it into the audience at a show. To reassure you, the provenance of the item is legitimate, but the process of acquisition is suspect; my father could tell a tale.
Elvis Presley remains an integral thread in the fabric of our American heritage, he cannot be ignored, but he is also a controversial icon. Largely credited with the creation of Rock and Roll, he is also criticized as a thief for stealing music played more authentically by its originators, black musicians, and making money from their sweat with his white face and bedroom eyes. He was also a drugged-out psychotic who commodified women, loved guns to an uncomfortable degree, and was drunk on the power of his own mystique. Greil Marcus (my idol) discusses Elvis’ legacy as it relates to the American landscape far better that I in Mystery Train, which I suggest you read if you want to follow this thought further.
As with most criticisms, however, there is always a counter-argument. Elvis grew up dirt poor on the wrong side of the tracks, literally, so it stands to reason that he would absorb the rhythm and blues prevalent in the black community with which he interacted, bonded as they were in their poverty. He was also incredibly generous and while his taste was ostentatious and his entourage absurd, it’s easy to interpolate from these facts the underlying insecurities that drove the King of Rock and Roll–he would always be the Mississippi mama’s boy with dirt under his fingernails from scratching his way up into the world. To displace this, he lived lavishly and showered all he knew, even mere acquaintances, with finery as if to remind himself that he had made it, but also for the joy of giving and having. Once you taste the P in Poor, you never again want that flavor on your tongue and are compelled to spare others from the same.
My father was a lot like Elvis Presley. The plot lines of his early years were the same but different, the generosity almost identical if not financed on a lower level. I have a feeling he understood this even if he didn’t consciously dissect it’s meaning. The last years of his life were difficult and did not befit his stature, just as the way the world lost the King did not jive with all that he had given. No man who savored company as sweetly and cared for his loved ones so thoroughly as these two should have died alone, and in this respect I will always mourn the passing of them both with a pang of regret. When Elvis died, the world sobbed together and sort of lost their minds. When my father died, I grew up fast and soundtracked his last moments aboveground with an Elvis song. After all, my father had left the building.
This Throwback Thursday happened because I stumbled upon an uncut version of Elvis Presley’s glorious 1968 NBC Comeback Special. 1968 was a heavy year of world-wide social upheaval, and in its midst comes a svelte, leather-clad Elvis, looking better than he ever did before and ever would again, singing stories in an intimate setting. This is how I prefer to remember Elvis, and not as the bejeweled Las Vegas spectacle he became. After rolling through the Presley catalog like a stroll down memory lane, the special ended with the debut of “If I Can Dream”–a call for hope in a time seemingly gone made, and now, through the fog of nostalgia, a thought to guide a daughter growing older in a vacuum.
In 1927, Mark Sullivan wrote a book titled Our Times: The United States, 1900-1925. Part II of this work is called America Finding Herself, the first chapter of which is “The American Mind.” Here Sullivan defines a nation’s culture as consisting of, among other things, “the points of view every one has about individual conduct and social relations…his standards of taste and morals, his store of accepted wisdom which he expresses in proverbs and aphorisms; his venerations and loyalties, his prejudices and biases, his canons of conventionality; the whole group of ideas held in common by most of the people.” He goes onto explain that we learn these things from our parents and our system of education.
Webster’s definition of education is as such: “2. The knowledge or skill obtained or developed by such a process : LEARNING.” I note this to emphasize that the classroom need not necessarily apply to education. In fact, I would argue much educating, the kind that sticks and supports integrally, is found outside of a walled room. Learning is to be had in bars and underneath bras; on trains and in shallow waters; in movies and meadows; at the bottom of a bottle and the end of a race. And all the things I know can be found in song because music is the slate upon which Americans write their lessons–present but chalky, a mere swipe away from irrelevance.
With his 2007 album American Hearts, A.A. Bondy takes it upon himself to quietly draw us a roadmap to American history. Bondy’s songs so masterfully incorporate American imagery that the listener fails to know he/she are learning. This is the best form of education. American Exceptionalism, in particular, is on display from the battle cry of Don’t Tread on Me repeated in “American Hearts” to the reckless wanderer as outlined in “Killed Myself When I Was Young.” The track that filets the American mind best is “Rapture (Sweet Rapture)” for we are nothing if not descended from a group of miscreant Christians looking for the Rapture on their own terms in a City on a Hill. Even all these generations later, most of us are still looking for that City, for some sign, for a voice that brings us home. That’s the essence of an American heart: belief abutting doubt atop a bed of impudence in the lonely drive West.
In her label biography, Antenna Farm Records describes the music of Dana Falconberry as “stripped-down songs inspired by dreams, memories, and landscapes.” I cannot improve on this except to say I agree. I agree because the imagery which sprang to mind while listening to the track “Crooked River” off Falconberry’s album, Leelanau, is exclusively sourced from a 1989 film I was obsessed with as a child called The Teddy Bears Picnic. This comparison is not literal, the music not similar, but the sense of wonder and magic is present in both song and cartoon.
This bit of nostalgia is (OF COURSE) available for perusal on the YouTubes. What a delightful trip down memory lane courtesy of Falconberry and the Internet.
Spec’s is a North Beach bar filled with salty old-timers. The walls are filled with odd curiosities and ancient faces, and you would do best not to order a fancy cocktail or sit at a regular’s stool. Hidden behind the old Pearl’s (RIP) in a half-assed indent masquerading as an alleyway, this bar is one of my favorite in the City because I love old men who tell tales in dim light. Sadly, it’s being overrun by the Marina set these days, and this is partially due its growing reputation as a destination spot for out-of-town musicians. This is where (caution: name drop approaching) I drunkenly shared a booth with some of the gents from Franz Ferdinand, and it’s also where the good folks at La Blogotheque filmed Stars a few years back.
Stars of Canada have seen some travels as a band, and their album Set Yourself on Fire is so good, ’till the last drop, that it’s been in my rotation repeatedly since 2004. The featured video shows a roaming performance of “Your Ex-Lover is Dead,” an absolute beauty that gives you chills when seen live. This is a known truth; I’ve had the good fortune of finding myself in the crowd at a handful of Stars shows in San Francisco. One such night, at The Independent in June of 2010, I was even handed a white rose by their keyboardist. Charming.
These fine people return to San Francisco tomorrow night, September 17th, at Great American Music Hall with a follow-up show at Slim’s on September 18th. They are captivating performers that should not be missed. Maybe you’ll even walk away with a rose.
Nostos Algos 