The Balloonist

On a moody afternoon I float above the sprawling corduroy earth in a helium balloon, wisps of clouds tickling my lip. Seagulls glare because I'm invading their turf. As I pass over a village, everyone comes out of their houses to learn what is causing the demonic shadow splashed across the land. They peer up at me, shading their eyes with saluting hands. One after another they grab up rocks & heave them in deadly arcs at me. One glances painfully off my shoulder. Another strikes the basket, causing it to wobble. I clutch at the harness to steady my balance. Another projectile smashes against my wrist & I hear something break. Most sail past harmlessly. A schoolteacher takes careful aim & drives her rock through the fabric of the balloon. I hear the hiss of gas escaping. The balloon comes crashing down to earth where the villagers set upon me with their rocks.

The Critic

Yes, as a matter of fact I have looked over your manuscript. Intriguing ideas you possess, I must say. Unfortunately I'm forced to turn it down for publication. It is far too dark and dreary for our standards. The modern reader wants to be uplifted, not submerged in an abyss of hopelessness and despair. Your characters are unbelievable and devoid of personality, with no psychological depth. The plot, if indeed it has one, meanders all over the place, your metaphors are ridiculous, there are loose ends everywhere. There isn't even a proper ending—it just trails off as though you grew tired of writing it and simply gave up. Your use of surrealism is irresponsible. I have no doubt you have a very rich dream life, but just because something is vivid in your head doesn't mean it translates onto the page. People want stories they can identify with, that inspire them, empower them, reaffirm their moral values. Stories that restore their faith in humanity. Your story does none of these things.

What I suggest you do, rather than submerge yourself further in this sort of gloomy weirdness, is set up a cozy little workspace for yourself—by a window if possible, with lots of sunlight, maybe a nice little plant to make it feel cheery—and try coming up with something a little more uplifting, with likeable characters, and most importantly a good solid plot. That's your backbone, you know. That's what carries the reader along.

And for heaven's sake, take this godforsaken manuscript home and burn it at once. It is simply unpublishable. You have talent as a writer, I grant you that—but I might as well tell you, so long as you keep writing this sort of muddled nonsense, you will never make a profession of it. You may as well find yourself a more reliable position in the insurance business and save yourself a lot of grief.

Now I'm afraid I must send you on your way—my time is valuable, you see, and I have a rather pressing engagement I must attend to. Please help yourself to a breathmint on the desk. That's what they're there for.

Err, Lena, can you step into my office for a moment. Yes, would you be a dear and please escort Mr Kafka to the elevator?

Thatta girl...

The Gospel According to St Bozo

Before the beginning, there was this turtle. And the turtle was alone. And he looked around, and he saw his neighbor, which was his mother. And he lay down on top of his neighbor, and behold! she bore him in tears an oak tree, which grew all day and then fell over - like a bridge. And lo! under the bridge there came a catfish. And he was very big. And he was walking. And he was the biggest he had seen. And so with the fiery balls of this fish - one of which is the sun, the other the moon...

Yes, some uncomplicated peoples still believe this myth. But here, in the technical vastness of the future we can guess that surely the past was very different. We can surmise for instance that these two great balls…

We know for certain for instance that for some reason for some time in the beginning there were hot lumps, cold and lonely, they whirled noiselessly through the black holes of space. These insignificant lumps came together to form the first union, our Sun, the heating system. And about this glowing gasbag rotated the Earth, a cat's eye among aggies, blinking in astonishment across the face of time.

Well, we were covered with the molten scum of rocks, bobbing on the surface like rats. Later when there was less heat, these giant rock groups settled down among the land masses. During this extinct time, our earth was like a steamroom, and no one, not even man, could get in. However, the oceans and the sewers were simmering with a rich protein stew, and the mountains moved in to surround and protect them. They didn’t know then that living as we know it, was already taken over.

Animals without backbones hid from each other or fell down. Clamasaurs and oysterettes appeared as appetizers. Then came the sponges, which sucked up about ten percent of all life. Hundreds of years later, in the Late Devouring period, fish became obnoxious. Trilobites, chiggerbites and mosquitoes collided aimlessly in the dense gas. Finally, edible plants sprang up in rows, giving birth to generations of insecticides and other small, dying creatures.

Millions of months passed, and twenty-eight days later, the moon appeared. This small change was reflected best perhaps, in the sand dollar which shrank to almost nothing at the bottom of the pool where even dumb amphibians like catfish layed their eggs in the boiling waters only to be gobbled up every ten seconds by the giant sea orphans and jungle bunnies which scared everybody.

And so, in fear and hot water, man is born!

Hieronymus Bosch for Kids

I saw MirrorMask this evening. Ay carumba! I've been pretty hostile towards CGI in the past. Mainstream filmmakers have been awfully self-congratulatory with their own efforts, but to me it just looked like someone drew on the film. Which I suppose is essentially what it is. The audience was clearly supposed to be awed by what to me looked barely a step up from Harryhausen-esque stopmotion. But after Sin City & now MirrorMask, I think the technology has finally caught up with the artisan. The medium has come a long way since the Lucas/Spielberg cartooniness that I once smirked at. And it figures the first of the master craftsmen would be summoned from the realm of the graphic novel.

I wasn't too familiar with Dave McKean's work going into this. I've read Gaiman's Good Omens & some of the Sandman series. So I wasn't exactly sure what to expect. MirrorMask is like Labyrinth as seen through the eyes of Jan Svankmajer. Visually, what Brazil was to the eighties & City of Lost Children to the nineties, MirrorMask must be to the aughts. To say it's dreamlike is an understatement. It looks as if it was filmed on breathing parchment. We've heard this sort of storyline before - not much different from the classic Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland "girl on quest through strange land" fare - but the brilliance lies in the presentation. As if we've been propelled from sock puppet theatre to a Cecil B DeMille production. Also, I can't get its eerie reinterpretation of Bacharach's "Close To You" out of my head for the life of me.

This film is a reassuring sign for the direction of cinema. I'm genuinely excited to see what else lies around the corner.

Comic Book Chicanery

A stroll through the image galleries of Superdickery can provide endless hours of amusement.

Distance

At the far end of the playground a woman perches on a bench, visibly upset. She clutches a bag of pretzel shards in a frail hand. Scattered about the bench in several directions and distances lay a litter of lifeless squirrels. She eyes them mournfully, her shoulders sagging in a posture of defeat. Her body is wrapped in a dusty overcoat to shut out the autumn wind, the belt drawn tightly across her midriff. She instantly brightens as an animate squirrel bounds out of the underbrush and scurries towards her, balances on the metal rim of a trashbin, watching her with blank eyes. Her skeletal fingers dig through the bag and emerge with a fragment of pretzel, and crescents of pretzeldust buried under her nails. She offers this to the squirrel, who twitches a whisker, then hungrily accepts. It downs the pretzel in a frenzy of teeth and claws, then hops off the bin, staggers a few brief steps, nose raised as if sniffing danger. The squirrel gets barely a foot from the bench before collapsing on its side, breathing heavily until the breathing stops entirely. The look of anguish returns to the paper skin of the woman's face, her eyes yellow with moisture. "Why are you playing tricks on me?" she utters to the inert creature. She prods it with the tip of her shoe. Not harshly, just a gentle poke. "Wake up. Why are you pretending to sleep? Wake up!"

The Return of the Bride of the Ghost of...

So David Berkowitz, notorious Son of Sam, has renounced serial murder in favor of Christianity (as if the two were mutually exclusive) & offers his own Official Home Page to spread the Word of the Lord. Maybe this is common knowledge to the masses, but I stumbled onto it by mistake & was somewhat amused, in a dismal sort of way.

Zaireeka!

I need to arrange a Zaireeka listening party. Set up four stereos in each compass direction facing inwards, provide some wine & some voodoo candles, recline in the center on a rug, then cue up the CDs & listen. Problem is, all the people I would want to invite to such a thing are inconveniently scattered across the country.

Yesterday I dumped the four CDs onto my computer & cakewalked the tracks together, just to get a sense of what it would sound like. But that's cheating - definitely not the aural equivalent. You can't stack up the tracks like cartoon gels - you need to build a hologramic temple of sound.

More Songs About Seaweed & Twine

Recently I've been mulling over the possibility that, as online music purchasing grows more prevalent, consumers will lean towards buying individual songs, no longer fettered by the physical limitation of the CD itself. They'll simply go online & download that last particular song that was lodged in their head when they heard it over the loudspeaker while buying wallpaper earlier in the day. Thus, with the consumer's ability to pick & choose exactly what they want to hear, the artist will inevitably lose control over the context of the music. The decades-old concept of the album as a deliberate artistic structure will be abandoned & we'll return to the pre-Sgt Pepper milieu of songs existing of themselves. The concept album will become an artifact. Not to mention cover art.

The only thing I lament about this likelihood is that instant gratification could rob us of hidden treasures. I can't imagine how many times I've bought an album, picked out a few songs as my favorites & concentrated mainly on those, only to later discover one of those supposedly "weaker" tracks contained some subtle piece of magic that I never would have recognized had I left them off my shopping list just because they didn't grab me first time around.

Humans, being creatures of arrogance, most of the time act too hastily for our own wellbeing - flailing around & knocking things over. Sometimes it's better to let an impulse stew for awhile before we act on it. We don't always recognize a good thing first time it rears its head. That's all I'm saying.

"The only public conveyance was the streetcar. A lady could whistle to it from an upstairs window, and the car would halt at once, and wait for her ... too slow for us nowadays, because the faster we're carried, the less time we have to spare." ~ The Magnificent Ambersons

The Night is Young & We Have Umbrellas In Our Drinks

It's a drag coming back to Boston after a stay in NYC. I may be outgrowing the proverbial city of beans in favor of the proverbial city of apples. It's like going on one of those kiddie rides at a theme park after tackling the big kahuna of roller coasters. Walking home through Somerville at two in the morning - the streets are deserted, except for the occasional taxi driver nodding off & plowing into a hedge. Everything shuts down at night. Windows are dark, sidewalks are barren. Bars in Somerville close at one & there's nowhere to go but home to bed. Store 24 closes at midnight. Never figured out what the "24" is supposed to signify. The quantity of chewing gum brands, perhaps? If this was NYC, I'd be having a tasty grilled cheese sandwich in a sadluck diner right now, & watching a wino chew on his toenail in the next booth.

Tonight was the sixth incarnation of Ukulele Noir, a monthly event I try not to miss - where ukuleles & porkpie hats collide. Craig Robertson accompanied by 2/3rds of the Sob Sisters (swoon), the falsetto croonings of Rick Russo, the dynamic duo of Tim Mann & Greg Hawkes (yep, the guy responsible for all those chirps & grunts in The Cars), the tuneful Melvem Taylor & the Fabulous Meltones, & straight outta Ohio, Tom Harker & his Prodigal Sons. Now, first, I find it mildly surprising that there are this many ukulele enthusiasts in the Boston area. And second, I find it odd that they all choose to assemble at the Skybar, which is a "beer in plastic cups"-style dive sandwiched between an auto body shop & a baseball field. Then again, they host a goth night as well, so let's hear it for juxtaposition.

I'm going to seek out the identity of the stenchridden lugnut who drove the 12:05 am number 87 bus out of Lechmere roaring past me without stopping & shall cause grievous injury to his person. Yet because of him I stopped into Toad & heard a smokin' jazzfunk band called The Freelance Bishops - one of the tightest combos I've heard in eons. Sort of like an atomic clock with sex appeal. The horn player blew into a device called an EWI that sounded like an elongated electronic kiwi. Due to that & the keyboardist's vintage Rhodes, they often reminded me of something midway between Jan Hammer-era Jeff Beck & incidental music from an episode of Barney Miller. Good merchandise.

Sleep tight, Somerville - you despicable early risers.

Foreign Devices

Pamela Martinez - Self-Titled EP
CD Review from Sonic Heart, June 2005 issue

Okay, sure. First impression is that Pamela Martinez is doing butterfly strokes through Bjork's end of the pool. This is due to a certain vocal weightlessness and melodic riskiness. A minute and a half into the first song on her new EP one quickly remembers that you can only get so much mileage out of comparisons before a work honestly must be dealt with on its own terms. The sonic palette stretches across a wide span of temperatures, from warm resin-caked strings to frosty electronics. Meanwhile Pamela's voice glistens down the resulting corridors of ice and earth like some sort of disembodied sorceress. The album contains four songs in total. The first three could be tone poems told from the p.o.v. of a kite wafting across a bed of refrigerated circuit boards as synapses spark through the troposphere. Gravity is toyed with and time is perverted. The epic-length final song, "Foreign Devices (Remix Balanc3d)," is a desperate pursuit across an existential terrain of broken Atari 2600 video games embedded in ice. Sort of an arctic nod to that prototypal chase sequence, Pink Floyd's "On the Run." The vocals are used more as a smear of background shadow than as a central narration. Ms Martinez and crew are talented weavers of sound. I recommend listening to this album in a dim, candlelit room, preferably with a strong aroma of wood.

Release the Hounds

Alright, folks. I contributed a CD review to the latest episode of Sonic Heart magazine. Reportedly it can be found in all sorts of Boston area independent music stores, most notably Newbury Comics. The purpose of said magazine is to spotlight the local electronic music scene, & so they do. Pick up a copy today & help pay for the kindly editor's excessive parking tickets.

By the way, the album I reviewed belongs to one Pamela Martinez. Give her a spin. She helms some diabolically good tunes. And her live show is nothing to sneeze at either.

Flim Flam

Hate to come across as backwards thinking, but does anyone else find it rather odd when a band takes the stage, the keyboard presses start on his sequencer, & the musicians all stand there motionless while the pre-recorded music plays? Especially when it turns out that every song in their repertoire is sequencer-dependant. A large percentage of the music is not created in front of you, but rather replayed from computer disk. I've seen a number of such performances lately & it makes me wonder what the point of focus here is. The barrier between performance & karaoke is narrowing.

I remember watching a DJ open for The Eels. He took the stage with pipe in mouth & proceeded to play a series of records for us. The audience, myself included, stood there watching him do this, as though he were the act itself & not just the sound operator. We watched him smoke his pipe & flip through his crate of albums looking for suitable followups.

This opens the door for a whole slew of performance art. Imagine next time David Bowie comes to town, his opening act could be the carpenters & electricians actually building his set. During the show the lighting booth could be backlit so that should we grow bored with the onstage events, we could turn & watch the lighting engineer pulling levers. Between acts we could turn & focus on the bartenders. And we could hoot when one of them delivers a particularly stunning head of beer.

I sense potential here.

Revelry to Nowhere

A quick summing up:

The Can Kickers. A threepiece backwoods jug band featuring banjo, fiddle, & a maniacal drummer who plays the washboard while pogoing crazily off his kickdrum pedal. The crowd burst into a flaying hoedown during the opening song & never relented until it was over. Even joined in on the sea chanty singalong "What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor?" Occurred to me you can fuse punk energy with ANYTHING & have noteworthy results.

Bread & Roses. Can't find a website for these guys. That's probably intentional. They played with no electricity, just gathered the crowd around them in a circle & roared. They had a distinct dusty 1930's Great Depression leftie Guthrie Steinbeck Wobblies IWW vibe. Filtered through the sensibilities of The Pogues, of course. Instruments of choice included standup bass, fiddle, & Irish whistle. The singer looked a little like Gary Oldman as Lee Harvey Oswald. Very impassioned. I think they even snuck a Johnny Cash tune in there.

Black Cat Burlesque. Deliciously subversive strip teases. One woman serenaded another dressed in male clothes with a seductive torch song. As soon as the clothes were sufficiently removed, she proceeded to strangle her with the microphone cord. Another artist satirized jingoism with American flag pasties, faux cheerleader enthusiasm, lewd gestures, & finally smearing ghoulish makeup on herself. At least I think it was makeup. Could have been hummus for all I know.

La Gata Negra. The finest in masked lady wrestling. The evening's bouts featured Mistress Cheetah vs. La Hornita, The Irish Twins ("I'm gonna cut you!") vs. the Bad Habits (yes, nun wrestlers), & the tag teams El Gecko/Agent Orange vs. Missy America/G.I. Jane Doe. Has to be seen to be believed.

The whole shindig was organized by Black Ocean.

The Illustrations of Mister Reusch

www.misterreusch.com

La Gata Negra

Cinema of Sleep #2

Making their way on creaky bicycles through the gloomy shrouded caligarian streets, our elderly heroes pedal for freedom. The triangular walls of the streets, narrow at the top, wide at the base, feature long dark stripes running lengthwise along them. The city seems to be sleeping & the escapees keep as silent as possible so as to not rouse notice. But just as they reach the gate leading out of this godforsaken city, a bark of authority in French (with subtitles, mind you) orders them to STOP! Closeup of bicycle tire grinding to a sudden halt. Burly guards approach with threatening scowls. There is a brief interrogation which we can't hear but can easily follow the body language, resulting in a fluid swing of a guard's sword. As a whimsical circus waltz kicks in, we see from the point of view of the decapitated head as it arcs gracefully in the air, then back down again towards a squat old housekeeper in an apron, arms poised to catch it. But the head lands back on the torso of its owner because our heroes cannot be disposed of so easily. We see a dazed look on his face, a nick on his wizened forehead as a reminder of the sword. The youngest of our trio of Don Quixotes — the newcomer — speaks out of turn in outrage. Next it is his bewildered head's turn to sail through the air, again to the tune of that evercheery circus waltz. A craggy darkclad figure comes up the street & passes through the gate, perhaps a doctor headed with medicine bag to an urgent call, or a lawyer on his way to trial, or more likely an undertaker on his way to the grave. Our heroes, the guards, & the housekeeper all turn silently to watch him pass. The moviegoers (for this is all a movie) recognise this figure as Bob Dylan, & his tale will follow shortly. A few whispers of reverence are heard throughout the audience. One of the guards turns partially to face us with a furrowed brow. This is Dylan as well, perhaps a younger version, & his expression is to be interpreted as "where have I seen that man before?" & we all understand that, in an error of dreamlogic, the man passing through the gate is supposed to be his mentor in real life & his puzzled expression is an inside joke — two actors stepping outside the story momentarily to recognise each other.

Fun With Your New Head

Coming to a piano factory near you... the Messiah!

Okay, I exaggerate somewhat. In fact it's a sparkling new play by the indefatigably bewildered Sean Michael Welch. Reluctantly based in New York City, land of crumpled yogurt containers, Welch whiles away the hours fighting mail fraud & selling subversive literature to nuns, biding his time until he becomes the next brilliant playwright you've never heard of because you don't leave the house much these days & they don't feature him on Masterpiece Theatre because he's not dead yet. Regardless, he's got a body of quality work behind him more vast than many playwrights twice as dead as him.

Welch's first big success was Earl the Vampire, which won big bucks at ACTF & was subsequently published by Samuel French. Manufacturers of plastic vampire teeth reported record high sales that year. Coincidence? Could very well be. Success number two was Boise, Idaho (the play, not the city) which was published by Francis Ford Coppola's swanky Zoetrope Magazine & has been performed in all sorts of weird countries which I can't spell. To this day the citizens of Boise, land of unbreakable shoelaces, proclaim their adoration of Welch for putting their town on the map. Aside from his achievements in playwrighting & cartography, Welch has also been churning out film scripts & novels at an alarming rate. Recently he's been negotiating to have his quasi-Pythonesque screenplay Well Done, Pear Danube! turned into a film of Pantagruelian proportions. And that's far from all.

His style is eerily similar to Harold Pinter forced at gunpoint to write episodes for Three's Company. In fact, Welch claims he learned everything he knows about comedy from John Ritter. Of course he's also been known to say that about Robespierre & Manfred von Richthofen, so we tend to take such remarks with a slug of salt.

The new play is called The Trojan Whore & we feel you'll agree when you see it. Whore is being staged by the Mill 6 theatre troupe, who also claim moral responsibility for previous performances of Welch's Boise, Try Not To Step on the Naked Man, & The Last Adventure of Lance Adventure in Boston, land of belligerent fire hydrants. It promises to be funnier than anything you can possibly fathom. I recommend you go see it immediately, or risk having your kneecaps bitten off by anthrax-infected raccoons. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Here's the bird's-eye lowdown.

Guerrilla Artwork with Ron English

Mullets Against Hunger

I recently watched the DVD compilation of Live Aid, twenty years after the fact. Hadn't paid attention to it the first time around. (My favorite band as a kid was the Beatles, & since they weren't performing, I wasn't interested.) A few thoughts:

• Quick summary - "Hairspray, eyeshadow, DX7s, & lots of prancing."
• Rik Ocasek has the world's most prominent gullet.
• Who's Nik Kershaw?
• Tom Petty's muttonchops blatantly overstep regulation standards. Was he issued a fine backstage?
• At least we can be thankful John Lennon was mercifully spared the sight & sounds of "Revolution" publicly castrated by Carrot Top.
• What on earth prompted Bowie to go evangelical in the eighties?
• U2 kicked some serious rump in those days. Wow. Hands-down the strongest performance.
• For all his crimes against humanity, Phil Collins is still a pretty rockin' drummer when he shuts up long enough. Remember those early Genesis records?
• Was this Roger Daltry's final musical appearance before hanging up his microphone & going into politics under the pseudonym of John Kerry?
• George Michael is so gay it's painful.
• Duran Duran frontman Simon Le Bon kinda looks like Ewan McGregor. Is it the chin?
• Wasn't anyone heterosexual in the eighties?
• Other than U2, the scant few performers that came off with some degree of dignity include The Pretenders, Elvis Costello, & Judas Priest.
• Peter Gabriel is suspiciously missing.
• Imagine the same concert, only with the principle players recast as REM, The Replacements, Kate Bush, Tom Waits, The Cure, XTC, Husker Du, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, The Pogues, Talking Heads, Cocteau Twins, Stevie Ray Vaughan. There was good music going on somewhere back then. Honest.
• Twenty years ago, Mick Jagger was lookin' pretty old. Man, he's one floppy sockpuppet.
• Mmm... Tina Turner's legs.
• That end bit with Dylan, Richards, & Wood was spectacularly horrible. As in, "Bob, quick, get outta bed, zip up your trousers, & get on stage!" "Whu-?" Kinda charming though.
• "We Are the World" is a dreadful tune. Sorry folks. I hope we're not going to get pummeled with it on its twentieth anniversary.
• Run-DMC was at Live Aid? Everyone watches with blank looks. "What is this stuff these crazy negros are pumping out? They're not even singing."
• "Dancing in the Street"?
• I hope this thing ultimately fed a lot of people. It was a high price in cultural damage to pay.

Man, I hated the eighties.

Ophelia Drowns

The Greatest Show in Hell

Getcher genuine packaged sawdust right here, folks. Ringleader's Revolt by the fabled Beat Circus. One whiff & the damn thing won't come out of your stereo for weeks. It's one big trapeze act of banjo, accordion, trumpet, & tuba mayhem. As an evil ringmaster twirls his mustache in the corner, plotting the demise of your sanity. It's glorious. You can smell the salted popcorn & elephant dung from your living room. And it's not one of those scratch-n-sniff CDs either.

This outfit of crazed windjammers is masterminded by Brian Carpenter in his caulked Belgian hat, who leads them through song titles like "The Contortionist Tango," "Requiem For John Merrick," & "Daredevil Chicken Trapeze." Two-thirds of the Sob Sisters even put in a glamorous appearance, bedecked in peacock feathers (bad luck, y'know). More fun than a rubber ladder. More thrilling than a runaway lion with mange. More tasty than gobstoppers & fried dough.

Grinning clowns prowl the midway with daggers, among the hypnotised ballerinas with lost eyes, psychopathic swordswallowers, roguish roustabouts, angst-ridden acrobats. Somewhere in the depths of Clown Alley a snooping towny gets a pie in the face. And JP Sousa has risen from the grave, seeking revenge. And this is the soundtrack to it all. These maverick carnies were probably cosmically intended to be the backing band for Tom Waits circa Frank's Wild Years, but things didn't pan out. Accidents happen in threes.

Yes indeed. These are the songs I want playing on the gramophone when I take that final boxcar ride into Hell. Hey Rube!

Mah Spoon Is Too Big

Cinema of Sleep #1

On top of a tall building under a windy grey sky, someone is scheduled to jump off the roof at four o'clock. I lurk around the edge pensively, wondering if it's me who is to jump. All those ants below, none of them are concerned on just another workday. I even start crawling over the edge, clinging to the underside of a stony outcrop, feet dangling in space, fascinated by the thought of impact.

Aboard a bus, grainy archival footage of the Rolling Stones playing "Under My Thumb" is shown on an overhead monitor. But something's wrong with the bus - mechanical failure? All very vague. The twerp in charge of the excursion goes up front & turns off the video before the song ends, then announces that the bus will be pulling over soon for repair. And warns us not to use the bathroom. A haughty middleaged woman in jewelry & strategic makeup, clearly used to getting her way, comes back to use the bathroom anyhow, goes past the twerp dismissively. Through the bathroom door we hear her complain, "hey, the water is coming over the sides of the bowl." The twerp snickers. I notice a puddle forming at my feet too, oozing up from beneath the carpet. And the water is a very artificial red. Tainted by some chemical. Maybe this situation is serious after all. I'm still sore about him shutting off the music midsong though.

Sitting in the passenger seat of an old jalopy, staked out overlooking a railroad track on an arid Texas road. I'm trying to explain to the driver why I disliked a particular scene in a movie which went on much too long. The driver shakes his head & defends the scene, saying it's an effective use of climax. "What climax?" I protest, "it takes place at the beginning of the film." The old bloated transvestite beside me sympathizes. She can't hear too well & I find myself talking into her ear, which is gnarled & misshapen, maybe even partially chewed off. "What? I can't hear you," she keeps saying.

Garter Belts & Bathtub Gin

In my continuing saga of fledgling musical journalism, I bring to your attention The Sob Sisters. These three feisty flappers play from a repertoire of jazz standards culled from the Roaring Twenties. I was fortunate to catch them recently at the nefarious Ukulele Noir.

Karen & Renée flank the stage on artful cellos. Haven't quite figured out their musical modus operandi, but I'm under the impression that Renée is mostly responsible for the grunts while Karen takes care of the swoons. Meanwhile, Kitty in the middle bows her singing saw, coaxing out warbles like a ghost on a wire. She's also adept on kazoo & a variety of tiny wooden instruments that go plonk. Karen doubles on ukulele & Renée blows a mean pennywhistle. All of the Sisters take a turn on vocals.

This night they took to the stage with fleurs in hair & pearls around necks, & launched into a mischievous version of "I'm Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover." Karen sang "Paper Moon" in a husky voice full of aplomb. Renée treated us to a devastating rendition of "Am I Blue." Kitty sang a ditty about a magician making her inhibitions disappear. Ukulele maven Craig Robertson tilted his fedora & joined them for "My Blue Heaven," an original called "The Hypnotist," & several others. They capped the evening with a rousing "Mister Sandman."

It was a fabulous show. I spotted F Scott & Zelda at a table in the front tapping their feet along in merriment. Harry Houdini, that sly scoundrel, hovered near the side of the stage behind a potted plant, sneaking glances at Renée's pulse-quickening gams. Near the bar, Clara Bow couldn't help but break into the Charleston during Kitty's swinging kazoo solo. TS Eliot hunched over a table, scribbling a mellifluent ode to Karen on a cocktail napkin. I'm fairly certain that was Lady Brett Ashley I saw lurking near the door with a frumpy look on her face because all the male attention was devoted stagewards instead of on her. The RCA Victor dog even left his post at the victrola to waggle over & give a listen.

So again, that's The Sob Sisters - keeping the romance alive & now appearing at a speakeasy near you.