The Culture Bunker
by William Ham
Greetings and salivations. You know, people, you may think that the whole affecting-the-tilt-of-the-planet unanimously-beloved-and-lauded culture commentator scam is all peaches and herb, but you are dead wrong, sputnik. Between the high-tension bidding wars (damn it, Rupert, I said I’d think about it), those liquid brunches with the von Bulows (yeah, I know, but that just means more for me and Claus), and hiring those migrant workers to negotiate the space bars and shift keys, sometimes the effusive brilliance just doesn’t spatter all over the foolscap the way it should. I’ve been toiling down here in the Bunker, flop sweat flying, but that eight-part award-winning column, provisionally entitled, “That Prince Guy – He’s Kinda Loopy, Huh?” just won’t come somehow. But tremble not, gentle reader, the Muse is watching over me. (At least I think that’s the Muse.) Working well into the night, a brilliant, resonant, and completely original idea suddenly came to me – A TOP TEN LIST. Brilliant, no? Structurally sound, nicely rounded, and it helps to assuage our collective guilt over never quite getting the hang of that whole metric system thing. Moreover, this being a mass-media factory outlet of sorts, I can use this as a platform to hip you, the ever-famished, semi-literate consumer, to the real quality merchandise out there, especially now that that grudge rock deal has peaked and people are starting to get bored with that Steinfield show.
So here’s my list (in no particular order except for 3, 8, 10, 4, 9, 1, and 5-7):
1) Club Snub (weeknights, Wholesale Music Network) – Today’s popular dance hits play while a gaggle of modestly-dressed teens stand up against the walls opposite one another, waiting for someone to make the first move. No one has yet; worth watching anyway.
2) The Rimbaud Quintuplets, Spectral Zamboni (12BC/Onan Records) – The pioneers of the sub-ambient craze reach a supposed peak with this, their eighteenth album. Once again, the seven-piece Birmingham sextet weave a rich and wistful tapestry of ethereal melancholia without actually turning on their amplifiers or touching their instruments. Highlights: “Xerxes Watches Azuramazda Get Fitted for Jodhpurs,” in which “vocalist” Bhopal O’Hadid audibly clears her throat (bringing to mind her muffled coughing fit on their 1986 three-disc masterpiece Ordure of Taurus), and their cover of the run-off groove from Tim Buckley’s Starsailor. Another alleged classic.
3) Popular Mechanics (a film by Questo Stimucin) – Yet another pungent celluloid spasm from the nail-technician’s-assistant-turned-cinematic-guerrilla. This one follows the exploits of a brace of sociopathic-but-sensitive lowlifes as they attempt to pull off the greatest plotline theft in history, but (all together now, folks), things don’t go quite as planned. I won’t give too much away, but the hilarious sequence where the lead anti-heroes (Mason Reese and Yahoo Serious can consider their career batteries jumped) deconstruct the theme song from The Jeffersons while graphically disemboweling a gymnasium full of Shriners with a roto-tiller is worth the price of admission all by itself. Great soundtrack (Bloodrock, Uriah Heep, Zager and Evans), and everyone ends up dead. (Oops.) Also starring Harvey Keitel, as required by federal law.
4) Boy, Do I Remember! (Tuesday nights, as soon as something else gets cancelled, ABC) – From the production mills of Unsold Pilot Productions comes this bittersweet nostalgic slice-of-life-à-la-mode comedy/drama about a young Jewish boy growing up in an abandoned coalshaft in the early 1950’s. In the premiere, Shlomo falls in love with an Presbyterian girl four years his senior when she accidentally falls in. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll have misplaced the remote.
5) Tab Volcano and the Schenectady Philharmonic, Allegro in ‘E’ (Permanent Records) – Several have attempted to combine the divergent sounds of chamber and psychedelic musics. Few have succeeded. Fewer still particularly care. But Tab Volcano, chief theoretician and substance-tester for England’s Psychotic Ringworm (best known for their thirteen hour antacid-house classic, “¿”), has made a valiant attempt at it with this collection of interpretations of the likes of Vivaldi (“The Four Seasons”), Stravinsky (“Firebird Suite”), and Cliff Richard (“Devil Woman”). His unique approach to this stylistic melange (slipping three hundred and fifty doses of street acid into the Philharmonic’s communal drinking water without their knowledge or consent) provides for a deliciously original take on these oft-performed warhorses. Particularly fascinating is the version of “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,” which begins fairly conventionally but takes an interesting turn when renowned violinist Georges Spyttfysh interrupts the lilting middle section with a cry of “My lips are melting!” and an audible attempt to gore the entire woodwind section with his unresined bow. National tour unlikely.
6) The World, Really (new season) (40-60 times a week, MTV) – The start of another enervating season of whiny verité with a new batch of videogenic youngsters and their all-too-humanoid cohabitative joys and sorrows. This year, however, having run out of willing North American cities, MTV has put up this disparate bunch in an unfurnished one-room shack in Kuwait. Watch as Meg (the ex-lesbian vivisectionist) chides Joe (the aspiring hot-dog vendor) for not doing his share of the dishes, Sandra (the one with the cute accent) lapses into a deep depression after a really bad bleach job, and Gerald (the token black guy) gets his left leg blown off by a fragmentation grenade. The best season yet.
7) The Pusillanimous Forest: Essays on Seven Centuries of Invidious Abstraction, by Ruprecht van Heflin, O.D.S. (Arbitrary House hardcover, 935 pp.) – The first of a projected eighteen volume series on the development of the… the… all right, so I haven’t read it. But my washing machine doesn’t wobble nearly as much now.
8) Extreme Unction (a film by Allen Smithee, Jr.) – The craze for big-screen adaptations of old TV series continues unabated, in spite of the box-office disappointment of 1993’s 60 Minutes: The Movie (great version of the theme song, though). This latest is a version of the old Bishop Fulton J. Sheen show of the 1950’s, in which Sheen (Emilio Estevez) teaches gentle lessons in Christian morality by day, and with the help of a magical wafer, becomes an Uzi-wielding supernovitiate by night. The holy trinity of thrills, romance and adventure reigns over us all as the good Bishop takes on a gang of ecclesiastical thugs (led by Denis Leary as the leather-surpliced, chain-smoking Father Scar) who are conspiring to replace all references to “God” in the Gideon Bible with the name, “Biff.” But the conspiracy doesn’t stop there, as Sheen finds himself in the labyrinth of death-and-credibility-defying twists and turns that culminate in a hotly anticipated sequence in which he tries to save a group of undernourished but damn cute orphans while hanging from a Vatican helicopter and still be back in time for vespers. And who is the mysterious “White Hat”? Could be the box office also-ran of the year (although a sequence involving Melanie Griffith and some glow-in-the-dark rosaries had to be trimmed to avoid an NC-17). Thou shalt not miss it!
9) Caucasians with Beepers, “Blunt Gangsta Juice Style” (ToneDef 12″) – A real surprise for me, since I’ve always found their blatant attempts at ivory-colored street cred to be utterly pathetic and rather desperate. This time around, however, they’ve taken what would be a stiff, derivative and uninspired b-boy ripoff and overlaid it with squealing feedback and distortion that knocks the stuffing out of the song and brings it into realms reminiscent of Sonic Youth, Big Black, and early Jesus and Mary Ch – – oh, wait a second, the grounding wire fell out of my turntable. I’ll just put it back and see if . . . oh. Never mind.
10) (Note to myself – this last one has to be really boffo. Readers will forgive the really lame jokes before it if you give ’em a big payoff at the end. Don’t procrastinate this time. The only thing worse than an incomplete column is a top-ten list with only nine items on it. And for god’s sake, don’t leave the article laying around where the cleaning lady might see it and send it off unfinished. That would be really embarrassing.)
