Rockin' Out On Presidents Day

Among its many notable days (Black History Month, Groundhog's Day, Valentine's Day - the latter occurring in the month also designated as National Condom Month and National Mend a Broken Heart Month), "Festive February" marks the birthdates of American presidents Abraham Lincoln (February 12) and George Washington (February 22), the latter purportedly the "Father of Our Nation" - albeit in the days before paternity testing. And while cynics like me tend to view President's Day (February 20) as more of a capitalist pretext for a shopping spree than a real holiday, a number of musicians have found inspiration in these guys.


President's Day: a time to KISS you money goodbye?

So, in the spirit of the day, here are my favorite Presidents Day Tunes!

*** ABRAHAM LINCOLN (February 12) ***

The Skeptics - "Ghost of Abraham Lincoln"


Frederick, MD's own Skeptics (guitarist Andy McCutcheon, bassist Dennis Crolley, drummer Stephen Blickenstaff) pay homage to The Great Emancipator, "honest Abe, long tall Abe, good old Abe" - whose ghost is out to find John Wilkes Booth and kick his conspiratorial thespian ass.


Abe has a bone to pick with John Wilkes Booth

This video was directed by local boy-made-good Chris LaMartina, who as director of the horror-gore-galore film President's Day (2010) knows a thing or two about Mr. Lincoln! (See City Paper's "The Golden Abe of Horror," 2/10/2010.)



*** GEORGE WASHINGTON (February 22) ***

Cox & Combes - "Washington"


"Cox & Combes" is the alias of Brad Neely, a comic book artist and television writer/producer (South Park). Though we've all heard the mythic tales of our first Prez who couldn't lie when he cut down cherry trees and who single-handedly won the War of Independence, it's refreshing to learn that these deeds were merely the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. Neely informs us that no only was George six-foot-eight (bigger than life!) and blessed with "two sets of testicles so divine" (you need hefty hydraulics power to be able to father your country), but he also ate redcoats's brains and invented cocaine. (Knowledge is power, kids!)

*** THE OTHER PRESIDENTS WE HONOR ON THIS DAY ***

Though Presidents Day officially associates itself with Washington’s Birthday (and thus is celebrated on the third Monday of February, which is closest to George's February 22nd birthdate), it's still regarded as a day to honor all former presidents of the US of A. Here's a good way to remember the other chiefs we once hailed.

The Animaniacs celebrate "The Presidents" up through Clinton.


Nickelodeon sings "Presidents Song" up through George W.


Thanks to They Might Be Giants, President James K. Polk ("The Napoleon of the Stump"!) gets his due in song, too.

Watch TMBG's "James K. Polk."


Of course, Robert Smigel's Saturday Night Live videos have ensured that we don't forget about the superheroic exploits of the more recent X-Presidents: Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush.

Watch the "X-Presidents."


But for a definitive list of Presidential Pop, I kowtow to A.V. Club's definitive "Hails to the Chief: 70 songs about American presidents" that lists everything from The Blind Robins' "That Goddamn Herbert Hoover"/"We'd Like To Thank You Herbert Hoover" (from the Annie soundtrack) and The Ramones "Bonzo Goes To Bitburg" (not to mention Zappa's "Reagan at Bitburg") to Ashford & Simpsons' "Solid (As Barack)." Their list even credits Devo's "Whip It" - ostensibly about sex and masochism - as being a call out ("When a problem comes along, you can whip it!") to a beleaguered Jimmy Carter, who was was at the time beset by the Double Whammy of the recession and the Iranian hostage crisis.

But one of my faves is The Legendary K.O.'s "George Bush Don't Like Black People," one of the many George W. Bush ditty-disses.

Watch "George Bush Don't Like Black People."


*** More Festive February Working Holidays Songs ***



OK, on a related note...Festive February made me think back to Simple Machines Records' great "Working Holidays" series of 7" vinyl singles from the early '90s. One of these was the split single for February that featured two local bands - Lungfish 's "Abe Lincoln" and The Tinklers' "James Brown" (an homage to Black History Month by the whitest of white boy bands!). I remember it had a wraparound picture sleeve with the month's calendar on the reverse side.

Listen to Lungfish's "Abe Lincoln."


The rest of SMR's "Working Holidays" releases are shown below:

ROCK & ROLL

Lost in the Stacks #2: Hard-to-Find Video Gems from Pratt Central


It's only rock 'n' roll - but I like it, love it, yes I do!

Rock & Roll
directed by David Espar and Robert Levi
(PBS WGBH/BBC, 1995, 10 hours)

This 10-part documentary mini-series, co-produced by the BBC and WGBH and narrated by Liev Shriever, originally aired on PBS in 1995. (It was released in the UK as Dancing in the Street: A History of Rock and Roll.) The series had a companion book, Rock & Roll: An Unruly History, written by Robert Palmer. It traces the history and evolution of rock and roll music, from its rhythm and blues, country, gospel and jazz roots in the early 1950s, through the advent of folk rock, soul, psychedelia, heavy metal, glam, funk, punk, and reggae, to the emergence of rap in the early 1990s. Used copies of the five-volume VHS and DVD editions list for $60 and up on Amazon and eBay. Good thing, then, that it's still available for checkout in the collection of the Enoch Pratt Central Library!


Since I'm currently reading Will Hermes' riveting history of the New York City music scene from New Year's Day 1973 through New Year's Eve 1977, Love Goes To Buildings On Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever, I decided to backtrack and watch some episodes that I recalled had good footage of New York bands from that period, like the excellent "Punk" episode. And the Pratt videos are in pretty good condition, I'm glad to report.

Note that the BBC/WGBH Rock & Roll is not to be confused with Time-Life's similarly themed five-disc DVD series, The History of Rock 'n' Roll (2004). Though I haven't seen the Time-Life series, Internet user comments allege that after a promising start, it "drops swiftly into a meandering, lightweight and very unsatisfying, poorly edited mashup that's not worth the time to watch."

The nature of Rock & Roll's mission - attempting to document the evolution of R&R over the course of almost 50 years - limits its scope to selected themes and clips, but what really sets this series apart from other similar efforts is the quality of its shot-on-film archival footage. As Current magazine writer Stephanie McCrummen observed, "The look of the interviews themselves is enhanced by producers' decision to shoot on Super-16mm film. To a much greater degree than typical video, Super 16 captures intense colors and subtle shifts in lighting. Even on the tiny screening-room monitor in WGBH's studios, the look is grand."

And then there's the quality of its interviews and their mis-en-scene settings: Iggy Pop is interviewed in a Midwest cornfield, Lou Reed in a New York City boxing gym, and so on. I especially liked the episodes "The Wild Side" and "Punk." "The Wild Side" featured choice clips of Wayne County, the transexual musician whose appearance in the 1971 London theatrical production of Andy Warhol's Pork wowed David Bowie so much that he started wearing makeup and embarking on his androgynous Ziggy Stardust look after seeing the show; we also get to see rare footage of Julian Beck's interactive experimental Living Theatre in London, which so influenced Jim Morrison of The Doors and his confrontational stage style that culminated in his infamous Miami concert arrest for profanity and indecent exposure.

Watch a clip from "The Wild Side."


The "Punk" episode featured great archival clips of Patti Smith (from footage that had been stowed away in a fan's refrigerator for 14 years until the woman who shot the film died and her heir gave the film to the BBC), Television with Richard Hell, and a pre-Blondie Debbie Harry dancing around with The Stilletos. I think the "Punk" episode - which goes into great detail about the influence of Jamaican dub, rocksteady and reggae on Brit punk groups like The Clash and Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, was directed by Don Letts (who knows a thing or two about reggae!).

Watch a clip from "Punk."


As Dale Cooper commented, "the extraordinary, insightful moments are too numerous to even begin to catalog, but highlights that come immediately to mind - even now, years after seeing this for the last time- - include: Iggy Pop describing how he realized that the sounds of pistons in the machine shop he worked in were so simple that even his band could imitate them; Rufus Thomas pointing out how WDIA led to white teenagers buying Rhythm & Blues records in the late 40s and 50s in increasing numbers due simply to its extraordinary geographical reach resulting from its uncommonly high wattage - i.e. the demographic changes wrought by technology; the thoroughly brilliant "Shakespeares in the Alley" episode, which weaves together Dylan, the Beatles, the Byrds and others into one folk-rock tapestry that illuminates the complex cross-influencing of this era (particularly notable is the restoration of skiffle to its rightful place as the spark plug for British rock and David Crosby's subsequent comment that he heard folk changes being used in "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and other Beatles tunes and that this simply had not existed before--new musics resulting, he says, in his inimitable way, from previously unrelated forms being "smooshed together")."

Stephanie McCrummen's excellent review of the series is reproduced in its entirety below.

********************************************************************

ROCK ’N ROLL PILGRAMMAGE
PBS's big fall series looks at the music from artists’ perspective
by Stephanie McCrummen (Current, May 29, 1995)

From the beginning, the producers of Rock & Roll, PBS's biggest program event of fall 1995, envisioned a history of the music without reference to obvious names, footage and lore. The central idea throughout the 10-hour series, which debuts over five nights beginning Sept. 24 [2005], has been to tell the story of rock from the perspective of its innovators.

The resulting documentary skips over many Top-40 bands to spend time with more than 200 new interviews with artists, producers, musicians and others who made music rock.

"We were very determined that it should not be a 'clip show'," says Hugh Thomson, co-executive producer for the BBC. "We thought that there should be an attempt to understand and explain continually." Concert footage and music are interspersed with old and new interviews with the goal of demonstrating particular sounds or musical influences. Often music is layered under narration, location footage and interviews.

Each of the 10 segments, five produced by the BBC and five by WGBH, is directed to convey a strong sense of place, explains WGBH Executive Producer Elizabeth Deane. With no on-camera host, the films use narration and on-location interviews to tell the story of rock, evoking connections between the music, the artists and such interview sites as a Mississippi church and a Memphis recording studio.

"We wanted each episode to tell a story, not to just be a summary," explains Deane. "What holds people . . . is to be in the grip of a story which is unfolding, with a beginning, middle and end," she says. "It's very hard to do with a subject as encompassing as this, but that was the objective."

The approach is necessarily intellectual, because telling the story involves exploring connections between rock and other forms of music and writing. Producers seem unworried that the final product will be stodgy, however. "It's rock and roll," says Deane. "We wanted to be intelligent, but we didn't want to kill it."

Promotion plans are still in nascent stages, though several special events already are in the works, says WGBH publicist Betsy Higgins. One will be a one-hour screening at the opening of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, two to three weeks before the PBS debut.

A companion book, Rock & Roll: An Unruly History by rock critic Robert Palmer, will also be available from Harmony Books after the PBS debut date. Palmer, the chief consultant to the series, has covered rock for Rolling Stone and the New York Times.

Rock & Roll is only the second prominent series of this scope to document rock history. Last year, Time Warner produced A History of Rock & Roll, a 10-hour documentary hosted by Gary Busey, which had a play in broadcast syndication this year and is now available on videocassette.

Audiences should find few similarities between the two series, however. "Time-Warner themselves have said that theirs is very performance-driven," says Deane, "whereas ours is a deeper look at the history." The Time Warner film "missed some kind of overview," says Palmer. "A lot of ideas and conclusions were sort of dropped because there was no narrative to tie it all together," he says. "I was happy that what was wrong with it was stuff we did right."

By all accounts, Deane, Thomson and Palmer have shared similar visions of what was "right" for the film. Palmer, a musician himself (but not the suave, semi-famous rock singer of the same name), says he was "totally skeptical" when Deane first approached him in 1993 about writing the companion book and serving as consultant.

"I thought [the series] would be boring," he recalls. When he met with Deane and Thomson, production and writing teams were already assigned to do 10 roughly outlined shows, and some interviews had been shot. But Palmer saw that Deane and Thomson were treating rock as an art form with a great history.

"It's usually treated as a succession of rock stars," he says. "I'm much more interested in the musical collaboration behind rock and roll, [and] everyone was pretty much agreed to going that way."

Unbeknownst to each other, Thomson and Deane had been developing similar documentary ideas for several years before former PBS programming chiefs Jennifer Lawson and John Grant brought them together in 1992, Deane says. Thomson recalls that the BBC "wanted an authoritative history of rock" and was willing to "spend the time and trouble to do it properly." The British were also actively looking for a co-producer for their series, then called Dancing in the Streets.

In Boston, Deane had by 1992 won a PBS/CPB grant of $100,000 to research the series, and also realized the need for a co-producer. Ultimately, WGBH and the BBC split the responsibility for raising the $8 million budget. The Boston station received grants toward its half from CPB, PBS and the National Endowment for the Arts. WGBH is still seeking a corporate underwriter.

When the two executive producers first met in 1992, Thomson recalls, they quickly established that they shared similar ambitions for a series. "We both wanted the same broad sort of scope to the series and the same tone to it," says Thomson, adding that in his view, the history of rock and roll "has been a history of interaction between the U.S. and Britain . . . so there is an actual logic" for an Anglo-American coproduction.

Notably, WGBH is producing the segment that includes the Beatles, while the BBC tells the story of rap music. The task of dividing the segments between WGBH and BBC production teams "went easily,'' Deane says. "I was wondering, as we approached that, how we would decide," she says, but "by preference our people had more of an interest in the earlier programs and they in the later ones."

The style and content of the 10 segments emerged from a full year of pre-production planning, a constant flow of footage and treatments across the Atlantic and what Deane describes as "huge summit-style screenings" between WGBH and the BBC, where producers worked out major editorial decisions. The editing has been "arduous," says Deane. Decisions about what to include have been guided by producers' determination to focus on the innovators, explore the collaboration behind the music, and, to a certain extent, go with what works stylistically.

Ultimately, producers have not been seriously limited by the costs and logistics of obtaining rights clearances for music and footage, which could have been prohibitive. "We did a lot of work . . . to make sure we understood what this was going to cost," says Deane. Part of the decision to begin production, Deane says, was the feeling that it would be possible, if complicated, to obtain rights to the material they wanted. Though clearance has yet to be granted for some footage, Deane says that generally their efforts in this regard have been successful. "It helped that so many musicians . . . respected the program," adds Thomson. The fact that the project was for public TV, adds Palmer, also undoubtedly gave the series a certain amount of legitimacy.

The BBC archives have proven to be a "tremendous resource" as well, says Palmer, with many performances and interviews that have never aired in the U.S.

Luck has been kind. Thomson says that segment on punk rock contains footage of singer Patti Smith that had been stowed away, undeveloped, in a fan's refrigerator for 14 years. When the woman who shot the film died, her heir gave the film to the BBC.

Location interviews set the tone for each segment. Artists typically appear with instruments in hand, in settings significant to their music and their lives. Jerry Lee Lewis is interviewed at a piano in a Dublin nightclub where he was living "when he had a difference of opinion with the IRS," Deane says. The soul singer Martha Reeves speaks for the camera in Detroit's old Fox Theater, and Lou Reed, following his own suggestion, was interviewed in a New York City boxing gym.

The film strives to be "a sort of rock and roll pilgrimage," says Thomson, "so that you felt like you've visited certain key places" in the history of the music.

The look of the interviews themselves is enhanced by producers' decision to shoot on Super-16mm film. To a much greater degree than typical video, Super 16 captures intense colors and subtle shifts in lighting. Even on the tiny screening-room monitor in WGBH's studios, the look is grand.

Each interview is carefully crafted to evoke the artist's personality. For example, the BBC-produced program on ''glam rock,'' opens with Iggy Pop in silhouette at a distance, slumping gracefully as a classical statue in a sprawling yellow corn field on the outskirts of Detroit, where he was raised. As the camera glides toward Iggy Pop, he slowly turns and stares into the camera. Again, the setting was the artist's suggestion, Deane recalls. "He said, 'they always want to film me in front of a brick wall,' but he's a kid from the country so . . . the notion of growing up roaming around in the corn fields, thinking of stuff and hiding is very much Iggy Pop and it is sort of surprising."

By subordinating their personal views about rock, the producers have allowed the artists' own insights to surface. The interviews are both probing and compassionate, the result of interviewers' attempt to pose intelligent questions and understand the artist, rather than extract preconceived responses. "There's always a danger that if the show is too well conceptualized you are putting words in people's mouths," says Palmer, who conducted a number of interviews for the film. "We were real sensitive to that."

The reward for producers has been that some of the "more recalcitrant" performers, as Palmer put it, have acquiesced to interviews. "I think what [the artists] appreciated is that we were being serious about the past music history," says Thomson, who also conducted a number of interviews for the BBC segments, and, unlike Deane, directed some. "Many of [the artists] are used to doing 'push-the-button' interviews," he says, "which made it nice [for them] to sit back and actually reflect on when they began and talk about the music [and] not so much the sort of sex-drugs-and-rock-'n-roll side of things."

Though the 10 segments are roughly organized according to musical genres — blues, Motown, folk rock, psychedelia and so on — the stories in each segment converge, overlap and diverge, laying out an intricate matrix of creative influences. To a large extent, producers have taken to heart Palmer's dictum that "any chronological history of rock and roll is doomed to failure." The "glam rock" show, for example, begins with Lou Reed, former leader of the Velvet Underground, talking about how the writer Raymond Chandler influenced his lyrics. From that point, the segment expands to other major innovators like David Bowie, the Doors and Alice Cooper, the involvement of Andy Warhol, and theatrical influences.

One sequence on the Doors, for example, shifts from footage of Julian Beck's experimental Living Theatre in London, which band leader Jim Morrison followed closely, and the Doors' famous concert in Miami, where Morrison was charged with indecent exposure. The sequence intersperses the recollections of Morrison's friend from film school at UCLA, explaining that Morrison had gone to six Beck performances within two weeks before the Miami concert, and was trying to bring Beck's ideas of theater into the realm of rock. The footage from a Living Theatre footage and Morrison's performance are strikingly similar.

Rock & Roll bares the creative process by homing in on sounds and styles of the music. An interview with David Bowie's pianist reveals the tune of "Jean Genie" to be a riff from an old Muddy Waters song. David Bowie's set designers are interviewed as the story turns to Bowie's revolutionary theatrical productions, and later in connection with the '70s band Kiss. In a segment on West Coast musical influences, Dick Dale, innovator of the "surf guitar" (a sound undergoing a renaissance since its use in Pulp Fiction) is interviewed on a California desert with guitar in hand. A surfer himself, Dale describes his fascination with the jazz drummer Gene Krupa, explaining the driving rhythm of his own guitar as an attempt to emulate both Krupa's relentless beat and the sound of waves crashing in the surf. As he explains this, a bright blue wave breaks against the sound of Dale's guitar.

Even well-known archival footage is are revitalized by interspersed fresh interviews. In one sequence, Maxine Powell, founder of the Motown Finishing School, which groomed young Motown artists for the Big Time, discusses how she gave Marvin Gaye advice on matters of style: "I said, 'Marvin, you don't need as much as some of the other artists, but you do sing with your eyes closed. It gives the illusion that you're singing in your sleep. At No. 1 places around the country, you have to have your eyes open."

She observes, "Everything had to be done in a classy way. So if they were doing the Shake, or whatever, we didn't do it in a vulgar way."

For all its emphasis on the sound and look of rock, the series does not ignore socio-political contexts; they emerge subtly through the artists' own intriguing stories, rather than a filmmaker's self-conscious attempt to add weight to the subject.

The interest, says Palmer, has been to "tell the social part of it and all of the other parts of it from the point of view of the music."

"The context is in the background and comes into the foreground when it is appropriate," adds Deane. Motown musician Beans Bowles talks about his troupe touring the South by bus and being mistaken for Freedom Riders.

For Deane, it was in part the connection between political protest and rock music that led her to do the series. "Rock and roll music has been in the background of a lot of stuff I have done," she explains, referring to her work as a producer on Vietnam: A Television History, and the American Experience bio of Richard Nixon. "What were they listening to in Vietnam? Jimmy Hendrix, the Doors, Motown . . . what were protesters listening to when Nixon showed up at the Lincoln Memorial?"

Deane says that she was also drawn to the project because she thought there was a "fascinating history" to be told, adding that she prefers to think of herself as a "history-teller" rather than a historian, borrowing a phrase from documentarian Henry Hampton.

"Rock and roll can seem like a series of random explosions," she says, "but there are stories that connect those moments—that connect the people who made the music, the people who took the risks and pushed the boundaries, and took us into a world we might never have known without the music."

TV has not always given respect to those performers for their earlier work. Thomson tells a story of David Bowie sitting in a hotel room in the U.S. and hearing his famous song, "Changes" transformed into a diaper-commercial jingle.

"The thing is that these people have got all the money they need," Thomson says. "All they care about now is what history is going to make out of them, so this series is important to them, and they wanted to be put in the right place."

Production teams at WGBH and BBC are still making final cuts, and considering how to end the series, a decision that will reflect their approach and understanding of the music and the purpose of the documentary itself. The final segment pays relatively little attention to current artists, though the form of current music is explored. Palmer says that it is difficult to name today's great artists. "Ultimately the worth of what is happening is going to prove out with the changing musical generations," he says. "Basically it's the music that lasts and influences other musicians ... and it takes a while for that to become evident."

Deane says the last program focuses on rap, techno and electronic music. At the end of the pilgrimage through rock history, Deane hopes to leave a feeling — not a message — "that the same kind of freedom that has always been part of this music is still very present."

CINEMA EUROPE: The Other Hollywood

Lost in the Stacks #1: Hard-to-Find Videos Gems at the Pratt Library


Cinema Europe: Where the art of filmmaking all began

The DVD of edition of this six-part series chronicling the birth and rise of European cinema during the silent era has gone out-of-print due to rights issues, but the three-volume video edition is still available for checkout at the Enoch Pratt Central Library. Produced by British film historians Kevin Brownlow and David Gill and narrated by Kenneth Branagh, each of its six parts highlights a theme and a country (France, Sweden, Britain, Germany, Denmark) to show the enormous contributions they made to cinema in the early days of the movie industry. Viewers are treated to a smorgasborg of footage from early movies - including the work of Abel Gance, Afred Hitchcock, Max Linder, Sergei Eisenstein, Fritz Lang, and G. W. Pabst - along with interviews with film pioneers and luminaries. The finale episode ("End of an Era") looks at Germany, where by 1933 the jig was up as Adolf Hitler came to power and the potential of a Pan-European cinema was squandered with the mass exodus of Jews and freedom-seeking artistic talent to France, England, and the United States. As reviewer Sean Axmaker commented, Cinema Europe "captures a vital period when films readily crossed borders and distinct national cinema styles flourished. It was a cinematic garden in full bloom and it cross-pollinated through ambitious and inspired filmmakers around the world. When the lure of Hollywood and the rise of fascism pulled much the talent from Europe and the coming of sound created new language barriers, the garden went into a frosty winter."

Kevin Brownlow and David Gill previously produced the 13-episode 1980 epic Hollywood: A Celebration of American Silent Film. They had originally planned to make this another 13-part series, but David Gill died shortly after Cinema Europe was completed in 1995.

Used/stock copies of the DVD series list for $450 and up on Amazon; used copies of the video edition go for $65 and up.

Shorts Circuit

Some of the Best Shorts from Pratt's 16mm Film Archives


Saturday, February 18, 2012 @ 2 P.M.
Enoch Pratt Central Library
400 Cathedral St.
(410) 396-4616

Starting this weekend, the Charles Theatre will be screening "Oscar Shorts" - a two-part program featuring the 2012 Oscar-nominees for best live action, documentary and animated shorts - continuing the annual Academy Award-nominated shorts roadshow started by ShortsHD (a cable TV network specializing in short films) seven years ago. Among this year’s nominees are Pixar’s longest theatrical short, a live action film by Hotel Rwanda director Terry George, and a documentary about Japan's tragic tsunami disaster of 2011. I highly recommend taking advantage of this rare opportunity to see some of the best short films in their ideal environment - a movie theater (as opposed to viewing them on TV or YouTube) - in this, the appropriately "shortest" of months, February.

For those who long to see even more shorts - or who simply don't want to pay to see the ones at The Charles - I recommend checking out the free "Shorts Circuit" film program next Saturday at the Enoch Pratt Central Library. This 82-minute program features nine of the best live-action and animated shorts from Pratt's extensive 16mm film archives and includes four Oscar-nominated shorts and two Oscar-winners in Norman McLaren's Neighbors (Best Documentary, Short Subjects, 1952) and Chuck Workman's Precious Images (Best Live Action Short Film, 1987). All of the films featured at this free screening are available for loan from Pratt’s Sights & Sounds Department; call (410)396-4616 or check Pratt’s Web site at www.prattlibrary.org for more information.

Many of Pratt's 16mm film shorts are commercially unavailable (or extremely hard to find) elsewhere, including Muppets-creator Jim Henson's early live-action student film Time Piece (1965), Stan VanDerBeek's influential but rarely seen collage-montage Breath Death (1964), and Workman's Precious Images (1986). Part of the explanation why has to do as much with the nature of the format as with the market for such films; unlike Hollywood feature films (which are typically produced by a single studio), short films come from various sources and are rarely compiled into anthologies, though Pixar has released a few over the years.

"SHORTS CIRCUIT" Program Guide

SNOOKLES
(Juliet Stroud, 1980, 2 minutes, color animation, 16mm)


We open our program with macabre humor in the vein of Godzilla Meets Bambi in this unlikely encounter between a baby dragon and a baby bird.

TIME PIECE
(Jim Henson, 1965, 8 minutes, color, 16mm)

UNAVAILABLE ANYWHERE ELSE. This early live-action film produced by and starring Jim Hensen (of Muppets fame) documents a day in the live of one man in the urban rat race. While he is in a hospital bed, the typical day of a young executive flashes before his eyes. Realistic scenes cut to wild dream sequences that comment on the reality they interpret. Anticipates the free-form editing style Bob Rafelson would later employ in his Monkees cult film Head (1968). Nominated for an Oscar (Best Short Subject – Live Action) in 1966. Produced by Jim Henson, photographed by Ted Nemeth with music by Don Sebesky.

BREATH DEATH
(Stan VanDerBeek, 1964, 15 minutes, b&w, 16mm)


UNAVAILABLE ANYWHERE ELSE. Stan VanDerBeek, an early experimenter with collage-animation, creates a surrealistic fantasy based on 15th century woodcuts of “the dance of the dead” by cutting up photos and newsreel footage to produce images that are "a mixture of unexplainable fact ... with inexplicable act”; he dedicated the results “to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton." Artist/director Terry Gilliam has cited this film as an early influence on his collage-style animation with Monty Python. In 1975, VanDerBeek became an instructor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), where he founded the digital media center. He died in 1984.

NEIGHBORS
(Norman McLaren, 1952, 8 minutes, color, from 16mm)

In 1952, Norman McLaren was credited with introducing the technique of pixilation with this ground-breaking film that won a 1953 Oscar for “Best Documentary, Short Subjects.” Described as “the most eloquent plea for peace ever filmed,” it’s an anti-war parable that shows how a dispute over which neighbor owns a flower escalates into territorialism, war, and genocide. The film’s climax, in which the men’s wives and children are killed, was originally cut from prints (including the one shown at the 1953 Academy Awards ceremony) because the sequence was considered too shocking to the sensibilities of the time. Animator Grant Munro also acts in the film (he’s the neighbor on the right side of the picket fence.)

PRECIOUS IMAGES
(Chuck Workman, 1986, 8 minutes, b&w/color, from 16mm)

UNAVAILABLE ANYWHERE ELSE. No one captures "the moment" - iconographic images that define a film, an emotion or an era - better than montage master Chuck Workman (pictured at left), the Eisenstein of celluloid flashcards. In this Academy Award-winning film (Best Short Film, Live Action, 1987), Workman presents the greatest scenes from 50 years of film - from Citizen Kane to Star Wars – in eight breakneck minutes of skillful editing. Over 500 images appear in rapid-fire cuts of roughly a second each, presenting the “defining moments” of great films of half a century. Precious Images went on to become the most widely-viewed short appearing in schools, museums, film festivals and movie theaters worldwide. Precious Images is one of five Workman films in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York.


Rosebud is just one of Workman's "Precious Images"

Workman’s montages of Hollywood films are visual highlights of each year's Academy Awards telecast and his 100 Years at the Movies (1994) is frequently shown on cable TV’s Turner Classic Movies channel. Though editing dozens of images a minute became his trademark, Workman ironically also made a feature-length documentary on Andy Warhol (1987’s Andy Warhol: Portrait of An Artist), a man whose own specialty was using only a few images and keeping them there for up to eight hours. He also directed a feature-length documentary on the Beat Generation, 1999’s The Source, and has created movie trailers for Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Paris, Texas.

THE TELL-TALE HEART
(Ted Parmelee, 1953, 8 minutes, color animation, 16mm)

Director Ted Parmelee’s animated adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's classic horror tale of a man who is driven by an old man's "vulture eye" to kill him (only to be forced to confess his crime by the loud, insistent beating of the dead man's heart) comes from UPA, the studio most associated with Mr. Magoo, Gerald McBoing-Boing and Woody Woodpecker. It’s considered a classic in the development of the animated film because of its unusual subject matter, its use of dramatic visual techniques (created by Paul Julian and clearly indebted to the German Expressionist style featured in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), and the effectiveness of its soundtrack, which includes narration by the great James Mason – reason enough to see this film. Incredibly, it was the first cartoon to be X-rated (adults only) in Great Britain under the British Board of Film Censors classification system! Oscar-nominated in 1954 (Best Short Subject, Cartoons) and added to National Film Registry in 2001. For some reason, this short was included on the 2-disc edition Hellboy DVD.

LOVE LETTER TO EDIE
(Robert Maier, 1975, 14 minutes, color, from 16mm)

"I like being a star," says Edith Massey, in this tongue-in-cheek film "biography" which traces her life from a foster home, to a career as a B girl on the Block, a barmaid at Pete's Hotel in Fells Point, owner of the "Miss Edith's Shopping Bag" thrift shop at 726 S. Broadway and to the career which has made her famous across the U.S. - as the "glamorous" star of John Waters' underground films. Written, produced and directed by Robert Maier (line producer of Waters’ Desperate Living, Polyester and Hairspray), it won an award at the 1975 Baltimore Film Festival. Great period footage of 1970s Baltimore shops, bars, and people (including John Waters, Pat Moran, Mink Stole, Mary Vivian Pearce, Vincent Peranio, and LA showgirl Delores Delux).

We end our program with two psychedelic experimental films from the ‘60s...

OFFON
(Scott Bartlett, 1967, 9 minutes, color, from 16mm)


From Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde: “OffOn is a landmark avant-garde film, the first to fully merge video with film. Scott Bartlett’s goal was to ‘marry the technologies’ so that neither would ’show up separately from the whole.’” Made by feeding film loops into a color television channel and filming the results off a TV monitor (at 30 frames a second to eliminate flicker), Bartlett then optically printed much of the footage frame by frame, adding additional complimentary images solely on film. Then, to intensify the weaker colors of video, he dyed the film strips with food coloring.

Bartlett later commented, “There’s a pattern in my film work that could be the pattern of a hundred thousand movies. It is simply to repeat and purify, repeat and synthesize, abstract, abstract, abstract.” Significantly, OffOn opens with a close-up of an eye as if to suggest a new way of seeing. Interesting both for its technique and the implication "of the reality behind the reality we normally perceive",” this film is part of the National Film Registry.

7362 (1967)
(Patrick O’Neill, 1967, 10 minutes, color, from 16mm)


“I was interested in making something that was neither a negative nor a positive but an amalgam of both,” says filmmaker Patrick O’Neill of 7362, which takes its name from the stock number of the high-contrast black-and-white Kodak film commonly used for titles and mattes; this stock became the building block for the film’s special effects, which start with machine-like imagery and gradually merge into abstracted forms of the human anatomy. From Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde: “As they swing to the electronic throb of the sound track, the shapes grow more complex, refracting the oil pump and a dancer into mirrored patterns as they divide and mutate with strobe-light urgency...eventually the line between human and machine becomes impossible to determine. Black/white, negative/positive, man/machine, yin/yang – neither can exist without the other. In 7362, the unity of opposites enters the psychedelic age.” The soundtrack features music by Joseph Byrd and Michael Moore (no, not that Michael Moore!).

"Get Ready To Boink with the Boynks"

Or: The Musical Genius of Randall Peck


The Boynks
Get Ready To Boink with the Boynks
(Mr. Basement's House of Hidden Agenda, 2011)

*** Just who are these Boynks who wish us to boink with them? ***

The Backstory: Back in the early '80s, I had the pleasure/privilege of playing drums with Randy Peck, Jay Ludwig, Rick & Stephanie Eney, and Katie "Katatonic" Glancy in a pop music group called The Boatniks. We wore silly sailor caps and Hawaiian shirts and celebrated middle class life in our 'hood, the azalea- and rhododentrum-covered suburbs.


Boatniks' '81 World Cruise

Katie and I were freshly departed from punk band Thee Katatonix, and emerged from the rough-and-tumble sonic wilderness of the Marble Bar Scene to serve an apprenticeship under the song-writing workshop that was the Boatniks - an ensemble in which Peck, Ludwig and the Eneys all wrote songs (Jay and Randy even helped me out, like Beatles Paul and John with Ringo, on my "Bake You a Bundt" and "Teenybopper" songs).


Boatniks songwriters Jay Ludwig & Randy Peck

But it was Randy Peck's "pure unadulterated pop music" song stylings that most impressed me; influenced in equal parts by the lyrical inventiveness of Elvis Costello and the melodic, harmonious musical leanings of his beloved Brian Wilson-led Beach Boys, Randy's songs pointed to all the signposts Katie and I loved in pop music: British Invasion, The Beatles, The Zombies, The Raspberries, Badfinger, 10cc. It was Pure Pop for Then People, Old School pretty three-minute melodies in an era of harsh-sounding punk rock and the cold synth-heavy sang froid of postpunk music. In a word, it was kinda corny compared to what was on the MTV and radio airwaves then. The words were clever and humorous, if you stopped to listen to them, and the melodies were unabashedly pretty. And the "middle eights"! These were a revelation to Katie and I, accustomed as we were to the one-note simplicity and repetitive three-chord onslaught of punk. The songs even celebrated love without irony - OK, maybe some irony in lines like "I bought some pizza and I saw your face in it" from Peck's masterpiece "The Honky Tonk Is Over" (which won a songwriting competition and landed us free studio recording time and a gig at Washington, DC's The Bayou). Which is why I liked it. Plus, I learned how to play drums in the Boatniks, after years of faking it (though few were fooled!) in Thee Katatonix.


The little drummer boy became a man - thanks to the Boatniks!

Post-Boatniks, Randy Peck played for a while in Saddle Soar, went to culinary school, became a chef, got married, and became Randall Peck. But he never stopped writing songs and recording them in his basement (on analog tape, the dominant medium of the time) with the most rudimentary of instrumentation (Randy was never one for fancy tech gear - back then he'd just as soon use chopsticks and an ashtray for drums rather than buy a beatbox!). The only change since then has been technology; he's gone digital, invested in a few electronic gizmos, and now records onto CDs instead of tape. But his studio is still his basement, where he retires after a hard day at work to record his musings about life and love. And, like his muse Brian Wilson, he can create a whole mini-orchestra of sound working at his own pace in the comfort of his home.

On a recent visit to Randall's workplace, he gave me a copy of one of his latest home productions, which was called Get Ready To Boink with The Boynks. Though the attractively packaged CD attributed the music to The Boynks - specifically "Chad Boynk" and "Gordon Boynk" on guitar, "Kirby Carlisle" on keys, "Christian Velcro" on bass, and "Nigel Tripper" on drums - they are merely Brit Invasion Boy Band standins for one-man band Randall Peck himself.


RP: The One-man Band

Randall explained, "I figured you would 'get' this one because we like the same kind of stuff that no one I work with, these kids, appreciate. You know, Raspberries, Beatles, 10cc, Badfinger..." Yes, the usual pop suspects. He added, "And it's real poppy and uptempo, unlike some of my other stuff, so I had a feeling you'd appreciate it."


It's official: I'm a Fan!

Well, I do appreciate it - and I think others will too. Too bad Big Deal and Not Lame and those other power pop labels aren't around anymore, because Randall Peck's Boynks CD could be released on them as is. It's that good and that pro. For, like Mark Harp and Mark O'Connor (another former Towsonite, who made his "mark" with OHO, Food for Worms, Dark Side and B.L.A.M.M.O.), Randall is another local songwriting genius I've had the privilege of knowing (and wish more people knew about); Harpo is gone (well before his time - Goddammit!), but like Mark O'Connor, Randall is one of those creative-type dreamers (and full-time romantic, to boot) who will never stop plugging away, making home recordings of his music (a genre I hereby christen "Basement Beat"). To be Randall Peck is to create, whether it be cookin' up food or sounds. And if music be the food of love, as Shakespeare said, play on.

And speaking of play on, play on we shall...

*** OK, Now Get Ready To Boink with the Boynks! ***



I played the Boynks CD on my way home and was so excited that I played it next for my classic pop-loving girlfriend Amy. She loved it as well, and we both agreed that two things stood out almost immediately: 1) Randall loves the Beatles (whose influence is everywhere) - not to mention Elvis Costello (listen for the Steve Nieve-styled keyboard riffs) and The Zombies (all those harpsichord sounds and minor keys) and The Beach Boys (Brian Wilson was and will always be his Obi-Wan Kenobi mentor) - and 2) Randall loves kissing. In fact, we couldn't remember an album that so celebrated kissing, the lip-smacking phenomenon known alternately as "First Base" or "Oral Sex" to our Baby Boomer generation. (Alas, I believe today's cut-to-the-chase, 4G-speed cream-on-demand generation considers cunnilingus and fellatio "First Base.") At least a half dozen songs either specifically mention kissing ("Wake Up Baby It's Time To Kiss") or are orally fixated on the mouth and bussing. I, for one, find oscullation incredibly sexy, as did wrestler-turned-politician Jesse Ventura when he likened the act of face-chewing to "Two carp goin' after the same piece of corn." (A beautiful image for a beautiful act of intimacy, no?) But to Randall, kissing is as romantic as it gets and he's far from tongue-tied in celebrating the elation that comes when two tingles intermingle.


Randall Peck: Bitten by the Kissing Bug?

And, with my flair for the obvious (it's a true gift), I would add a third glaring observation: 3) Randall loves being in love. Following is the evidence to support my case:

Tuned In: Track by Track

1. "HEY GWENDOLYN"

"There she is full of fizz, just about to pop/All the while I just smile and I cannot stop/Hey Gwendolyn, you make gray skies blue/Hey Gwendolyn, I'm so turned on by you."



Things kick off with a blast of irresistably catchy fun (and yet another song to add to my A-Z List of Girl's Name Songs) flavored with Zombies-styled harpischord sounds and lyrics celebrating the Zen of Gwen. "Smartly dressed, she's the best you will ever find." In Arthurian legend, Gwendolyn was Merlin the magician's wife; in modern times, she's simply the girl who's cast a spell over RP.

Oral Fixation Factor: "To the lips takes a sip, spills some on her blouse/After tea, nuzzles me, plants one on my mouth."

2. "HOW COULD I FALL IN BED WITH A GIRL LIKE YOU?"


Romance Downy Ocean

A poignant and uptempo break-up song that unfolds at a Beach Boys setting, Downy Ocean ("You went off on vacation/I'm alone at the beach"), but while Brian Wilson preached that the girls on the beach were all within reach (if you knew what to do), Randall instead finds himself out of his depth: "Now I'm drowning in sorrow, and my beach towel is wet/You have taught me a lesson I will never forget..." but seems resigned to his plight. He had his thrill and got stung by the jellyfish of love. "There will be no tomorrow, I know that we are through/How could I fall in bed with a girl like you?"

Oral Fixation Factor: "You are sweeter than sugar/When you melt in my mouth..."

3. "WAKE UP BABY IT'S TIME TO KISS"


Only shallow non-romantics forgo kissing

To paraphrase Mssrs. Hall & Oates, this "Kiss" is on my list of the best things in life. (Quite a different take on rising-with-the-sun morning fun from Ian Dury's "Wake Up Make Love with Me"!) Personally, the first thing on my mind when I emerge from the Land of Nod is peeing and gargling with mouthwash, but Randall's a romantic who's allowed poetic license.

I am a fool for you, I love you through and through
I only go to be bed to wake up next to you

Wake up, roll over (sha la la) and join me in my bliss
This is one of those moments (sha la la) that I refuse to miss
Hello, good morning (sha la la) - wake up baby it's time to kiss

4. "ONCE AGAIN THAT GIRL IS ON MY MIND"



Another girl crush song, this one finds Randall obsessively pining every minute and every hour for someone he sees in every bouquet of flowers and even in his "toast with jam and tea." She's "one too many, all too much, one of a kind," small wonder that "once again that girl is on my mind."

Oral Fixation Factor: "Even when I lay my head, her name's my final breath/I dream about her every night, kissing me to death."

5. "IF SHE KNEW"


If she knew...

Randall's variation on The Beatles' "If I Fell." But the classic heart-felt ballad structure isn't limited to just the Fab Four, as I also hear the love-smitten inclinations of Brian Wilson circa "God Only Knows."

Oral Fixation Factor: "If she knew that I really want to kiss her/She may even laugh, if she knew."

6. "ALL-WEATHER SUNSHINE HAPPINESS GIRL"



Exhilirating upbeat ditty that walks on sunshine, regardless of weather advisory.

"She look so good, she looks so cute
She's on the town in her electric suit
She plugs it in and does a twirl
She's my All-Weather Sunshine Happiness Girl"

"She knows her Bach, she knows Chopin
She knows that shit like the back of her hand
She's an endless string of cultured pearls
She's my All-Weather Sunshine Happiness Girl"

Oral Fixation Factor: "Well she kisses hard and she kisses deep, and still makes love when she's half asleep."

7. "THING FOR YOU"


Got a Thing - for you!

A finger-snappin', toe-tappin' honky-tonkin' good-time romp. Randall may have honed his Country & Western chops during his stint in Saddle Soar, but the country-flavored pop in this song is more of the Beatles variety circa "Act Natural."

8. "DADDY I WRECKED THE CAR"



As a survivor of one too many heavy metal crashes in my wayward youth, I'm greatly amused by this clever, fast-paced pop song. Maybe Randall the Dad is anticipating the not-so-distant future when his kid will get his license - and become an insurance liability. (Ah, the Parent Trap.) Junior not only laments wrecking the car while out driving with a girl from outer space, but also wrecking the house (he was just doing his homework when somehow a party boke out), and finally wrecking his mind:

"My mind, my mind, Daddy I wrecked my mind
I took a little something I don't understand
That I got last week from the Ice Cream Man..."

Ha! I remember back at college the ice cream man was the campus drug dealer (was it that way everywhere? Has the Drug-Dealing Ice Cream Man become a counter-culture stereotype?).

Nice freakout - and guitar solo - during the middle jam. As Freakbeat revivalist Dave Cawley says, whenever you're rockin' out and run out of words, just scream "Wahhhhhhh!" and wail, baby! Works every time!

9. "GIRL IN THE WINDOW"


Window shopping for love

Very Zombies-like neo-psych. I can easily imagine Colin Bluntstone singing this over Rod Argent's farfisa organ; in fact, the song has a '60s Swingin' London feel with lines like those below evoking images of whatever Brit "It" Girl - Julie Christie, Twiggy, Jeannie Shrimpton, Marianne Faithful, Jane Asher - tickles one's retro fancy:

"When she purses her lips and starts to flirt - Girl in the Window
In her go-go boots and miniskirt - Girl in the Window
Well she's just the coolest thing I've ever found
So bear with me, while I expound: Girl in the Window."

Oral Fixation Factor: "She can play it cool, she can play it hard/As she blows French kisses to the Palace Guard."

10. "SUDDEN SORROW"



There's a vacancy I have inside, and it's where true love resides
Without warning, weeping quietly, a gentle wave sweeps over me
And I feel a sudden sorrow in my heart when I think about losing her

A remembrance of past love lost, l'amour perdu. Don't we all have one (or two, or three)? Bury those memories as we might, they still come back to us at unexpected moments - during a rainfall, looking through a photo album, passing an old dating haunt. Not an uptempo toe-tapper, but then sorrow isn't supposed to be.

11. "HOT TUB LOVE"



"Hot tub love, come join me in the jets/Hot tub love, let's make it a duet."

The album mood changes instantly from "Sudden Sorrow" to wet-and-wild fun in this sonic splash about really hot love. "Hot tub love, I miss you when you're gone/Hot tub love, the meter is still on/So crawl back in, and let the fun begin, with your hot tub love."

12. "PASSING ON A TRAIN"



Ships pass in the night and trains pass in vain, with barely time for fledgling flirtations to form ("You were gone just as fast as when you came"). But a glimpse of a girl with hat and gloves and bonnet on - looking "sweet in the gentle London rain" - is enough to fill the narrator with regret:

You were passing on a train that was stopped for a moment in the dark
Just long enough for that face to break my heart (doesn't it figure?)

I love the opening train sound effects, as well as the delightful nod to the Beach Boys at the end of the middle passage that recalls their acapella chorale showpiece "Our Prayer." It's only a snippet, but it's yet another reminder of Brian Wilson's pervasive influence on RP's songwriting. Paul Westerberg never travels far without a little Big Star; Randall never leaves ground without his Pet Sounds.

13. "PLANET LOVE"



"I'll take you where the stars light your hair
It's almost time - we're almost there, on Planet Love."

This dreamy ballad closes the album of a leisurely, lilting note and sort of reminds me of Santo and Johnny's "Sleep Walk" (which was famously covered by another of Randall's favorite '60s artists, The Ventures) as crooned (with an occasional hiccup) in his best emo-Elvis P. voice. It's meant to sound corny with the ice-rink organs and such, but I find it charming as Randall sings of love taking flight at the speed of light before reaching the final destination: "We'll crash, we'll burn, we'll land on Planet Love."

*** Final Thoughts ***

This is easily the best new music I've heard all year, with more melodic hooks and catchy choruses in one album than some songwriters manage in their whole careers. It's also one of the greatest feel-good discs you could ever pop into your CD player and immediately feel like you're walking on sunshine. It's already taken the edge off my normal road rage during the morning commute downtown to work. Lennon & McCartney...Bacharach-David...Elvis Costello...Brian Wilson...Bob Dylan...Graham Gouldman...Ray Davies...Todd Rundgren...Dee Dee Ramone...Randall Peck. Yes, that's right - I mention him in the same breath because he can take his rightful place alongside these legends as a fellow popsmith extraordinaire. I'm not kidding. In my musical wonderland, he goes toe to toe with the heavyweights and more than holds his own.

And yet I wonder how many people will ever hear his back catalog. He's so modest about his talent that Randall reminds me of those non-traditional "outsider" artists whose work is only discovered after the fact when it's displayed at the American Visionary Art Museum. You know - the unheralded artist who works a day job and comes home at night to create a secret cache of awe-inspiring works that remain unseen by the public until he dies and the landlady cleans out his room and donates them to a museum. So too does Randall create these recordings that are only known to a select few cadre of friends and associates. But that seems to be just fine by him. He loves making music and these songs are like his day journal, his diary, an audio scrapbook of who he was and what he was thinking at a certain point in his life.



Back in the Boatniks days, our "Ahoy Maties" press kit said this about Randall: "Randy's been happy lately...The happiest day of his life just might be tomorrow." Going by the sounds on Get Ready To Boink with the Boynks, it looks like that day is here - and how!

Baltimore Vice

The Night They Raided the 14Karat Cabaret
July 17, 1993


14Karat Cabaret director Laure Drogoul (photo by Kirsten Beckerman)

I was digging through the piles of yellowing newspaper clippings I've accumulated over the years and came across this City Paper article by Associate Editor Sono Motoyama (who loved any story involving sex) from July 23, 1993. It described a vice squad bust of Laure Drogoul's 14Karat Cabaret during an evening of performance art - an event I attended. As I recall, the performer who caused all the fuss was Jeffrey Clagett (aka "Hermaphrodite"), a local hairdresser and Cher impersonator who was a member of that evening's Haus of Frau ensemble; he distributed the fliers advertising "Free Blow Jobs" that caught the eye of the city vice squad, who should have known better because there's no such thing as a free munch. - Tom Warner



BALTIMORE VICE
14Karat Cabaret Director Locked Up on Permit Violations
by Sono Motoyama (City Paper, July 23, 1993)

Responding to a flier announcing a "Biggest Dick Contest" and "Free Blow Jobs" at the 14Karat Cabaret, plain-clothes officers from the central district vice unit of the Baltimore City police department and a representative from the city's zoning enforcement agency descended on 14Karat Cabaret late Saturday evening, July 17, the cabaret's final performance for the season.

Finding no violations of the type implied by the flier at the cabaret, part of Maryland Art Place (MAP), a nonprofit arts organization and gallery on West Saratoga Street, police arrested cabaret director Laure Drogoul for permit violations.

According to sector supervisor Sergeant John Baker, who was at the scene, Drogoul was charged with "operating a business without a permit and selling alcohol without a license." Licenses are required by the city and state for venues offering live entertainment and serving alcohol.

After being handcuffed and taken to the central district lockup in a paddy wagon, Drogoul spent about 13 hours locked up downtown. She was released Sunday on her own recognizance. Reached Monday afternoon, Drogoul said that she "forgot" to get a temporary liquor license as, she maintains, she has done during every cabaret performance except Saturday's.

Jack Rasmussen, director of MAP, speaking of the cabaret's lack of a permit for live entertainment, said, "We though we had all the permits we needed...We always thought we had all the permits we needed...We always thought of ourselves as an art gallery with performance art."

"You may call it art. They may call it entertainment," interjected Drogoul.

"We've been here for eleven years," noted Rasmussen, "and the cabaret's been here for four years, and it's never come up before. You have to be an attorney to figure it out.

The cabaret, which was characterized by one central district lieutenant as "primarily a homosexual or gay club," featured as emcees on Saturday night the Headhuntresses XXXtraordinaire, a duo who wore dildoes strung around their waists. Also on the bill were the experimental music group the Recordings, saxophonists John Eaton and Nancy Sexten, and Haus of Frau, a drag-queen performance group. It was the Haus of Frau who printed and distributed the fliers announcing the fictitious "Biggest Dick Contest" and "Free Blow Jobs."

"[The police officers] wanted vice and they didn't get vice," said Drogoul, "and they were just angry and looking to find anything they could. They had six [officers] here and a paddy wagon. I wonder why they weren't picking up real prostitutes on Read Street and Howard Street three blocks away. Our tax money could be better spent cleaning up crime and violence on the street."

Drogoul said she was taken across town while still wearing the gold lame dress she wore to introduce the Headhuntresses, and she was fingerprinted and photographed at the police station. She calims she was not told she had been arrested and not read her rights.

"It was very unpleasant," she said. "They just didn't like what they saw. They probably saw acts the didn't understand and music they didn't like." She characterized the officers as "mean and rude."

In a peripheral arrest, Joseph T. Brady, a comedian and a receptionist, was arrested outside MAP for disorderly conduct. After police asked everyone to leave the cabaret, Brady and some friends were standing outside MAP's front door. While waiting, they saw Drogoul being led away in handcuffs and driven off.

"We tried to find out why they were taking her away," Brady said, When he and his friends were told to disperse, Brady answered that he was waiting for a pizza he had ordered from a nearby shop. "Then they arrested me," Brady said. "I didn't expect it. When we were talking to the police, we weren't aware how serious they were being. We were upset and trying to find out what was going on. I don't believe we were going outside of our rights." Instead of enjoying his mushroom-and-onion pie, Brady commented, he spent about 12 hours locked up.

Tom Warner (an occasional City Paper contributor), who was with Brady at the time, said, "All [the pizza-parlor owners] were concerned about was who's gonna pay for the pizza. They did give us a bonus Pepsi, though - the incarceration special."

Interrobang - "Sex Obsession" 12"

"Who's selling all their Mark Harp records???"

!?/Interrobang 12"
Sex Obsession/We Have the House Surrounded (Harp-DeJong)
(Big Man Music, 1989)

"Best Local Single" - City Paper, 1989

On Saturday, Amy Linthicum once again scored another vinyl record by her ex-husband, the sorely missed guitar legend and all-around musical genius Mark "Harpo" Harp (born Mark Linthicum, 1957-2004), when she found this mint condition, sealed 12-inch single in the local music bin of Normal's Books & Music in Waverly. "Who's selling all their Mark Harp stuff?," Amy wondered out loud.

She well remembered this record, dating from Harp's Interrobang days in the late '80s when, like many others in that synth-friendly era, he put down his guitar and started playing with various electronic toys and gizmos. 12-inch extended play Electro Pop dance records were the lingua franca of the decade, and Harp was an early fan and subsequent master of the medium, which emphasized big beats and repetition of simple lyrics, often mixed with sampled soundbites; in many ways they were the precursor to today's even more extended and sophisticated digital mash-ups.

"Interrobang" (a punctuation convention that combines the ! and ? marks to express simultaneous wonder and curiosity) was the moniker Harp gave his collaborations with Mike DeJong when the two were messing around in his living room learning about sampling and beatboxes. Released as a (size matters!) 12" in 1989 on the (size matters!) Big Man label, the A-side "Sex Obsession" was named "Best Local Single" by the Baltimore City Paper "and got some airplay somewhere."


Sex Obsessed: "Peyton Place"

Not only size but length matters on the 12" A-side, which goes on for 8 plus minutes as the boys sample heavy from what Amy recalls was the 1960s TV series Peyton Place (the classic ABC melodrama that, inspired by the Brit soap Coronation Street, ran from 1964-1969 and launched the careers of Ryan O'Neal and Mia Farrow, among others). That would explain the references to "Mike" (Dr. Michael Ross, played by Ed Nelson) - "Is that you Mike?" "Oh, it's you Mike!" - and the obsession with, well, sex. Like the 1956 book and 1957 film of Peyton Place, the television series was considered sex-obsessed for its times, though the more controversial issues in the novel, such as incest, gave way to less scandalous plots like, oh, teen pregnancy.

"Sex? Yes! Mike? No!...Sex? No Mike - it's impossible!" - I'm sure Harp enjoyed this little injoke with Mike DeJong, who when not sampling sounds played keyboards and sax in too many Harp bands to remember. The song ends with the musicians' laughter drowning out the PP samples "Do you love me? That's impossible!" and "Sex? That's ridiculous!"

On the web site 24 Hours w/Mark Harp, Harp himself described the B-side "We Have the House Surrounded" as "Me and Mike DeJong in the living room learning about samplers and stuff." It starts off with a voice announcing "This is high fidelity," a sample taken off one of the many stereo demonstration records he collected. It then starts sounding like a bass-heavy Art of Noise big beat percussion workout, with Harp intoning "We have the house surrounded/Come out with your hands up" in what Amy characterizes as his charmingly thick "Bawlmer accent." Thematically, "We Have the House Surrounded" seems of a piece with another Harp law enforcement song, 1991's rap-parody "Cop Killer" - the latter one of the rare ditties featuring his then-wife Amy on sampled vocals (she alternates between letting loose blood-curdling screams and querying "Really?").

(Note: Baltimore's !? Interrobang should not be confused with the similarly named Boston, Chicago or San Diego bands or Interobang?! Magazine.)

Related Links:
Normal's Books & Records
24 Hours w/Mark Harp
"Sex Obsession" mp3
"We Have the House Surrounded" mp3

tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE remembers Baltimore's Punk Scene

tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE reviews BANNED IN DC

I came across this review of the book BANNED IN DC (long out-of-print, with used copies ranging from $86-$480!) after Googling "Da Moronics" to see if they had released any of their music on the Internet. Typical of the author's style, it was less a book review than a remembrance of the narrator's own personal experiences in Baltimore during its brief punk era - which is why I like it! (Well, that and the fact that I remember later kissing one of the girls whose photo appears in the book.) I was part of this fleeting punk scene, possibly my only (tentative) connection with the author.

Full Disclosure: I never "got" the artist who went by the impossible-to-spell and constantly changing handle "tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE" (not to mention "Monty Cantsin," "BalTimOre," etc.) or however he spelled it. (Most people just referred to him as "Tent" or even by his birthname, Michael Tolson. It was a blissfully short and simple way to refer to a guy who was anything but blissfully simple - though he was kinda short.) But then I never really knew him, though he was always exceedingly polite (and quiet) on the few occasions I did meet him and I knew people who knew him (my physical therapist and former N.E.M.B. bass player George Poscover once lived with him, as did my friend Melissy D's former boyfriend "Big Dave" Scheper; and Kenny Vieth of Henningers Tavern knew Tent from his Jockee Clubbe residence days, etc., etc.).

In fact, my filmmaker friend Skizz Cyzyk - who took over Tent's H.O.M.E. Viewing film series at The Mansion and turned it into (eventually) Baltimore's MicroCineFest film festival - swears he's a genius and considers him one of his all-time heroes (see Skizz's interview with t,ac on the occasion of screening t,ac's STORY OF A FRUCTIFEROUS SOCIETY at the 2005 MicroCinFest). Another filmmaker, Kent Bye, once started working on a documentary about him (tentatively entitled "Who is tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE?"), which has yet to see the light of day. I think Kent had the right idea and I really wish someone would not only make but finish a documentary about him because, like him or not, "get" him or not, Tent has led an amazing life. He seemed to know everybody - from John Doe to Vermin Supreme and everyone in between - and while I didn't always "get" his art, I can't fault his work ethic (Tent: "Work will make you Free Trade!"). This is a guy who made the commitment early on to be a full-fledged anarcho-artist 24/7 and he's never wavered from it since. In a different era, he might have been one of the nihilists Dostoyevsky described in The Possessed. Or burned at the stake in an auto-da-fe. As in the Sinatra song "My Way," Tent's had a few regrets - but he did it HIS WAY, for better or worse.


Tent - in yet another guise

He currently resides in Pittsburgh, looks a little like Ken Kesey and goes by the new handle Amir-ul Kafirs - but more importantly, he's discovered the free-publishing utility and social networking wonder of the Internet, which is a good thing because Tent is an amazing archivist; he's basically uploaded his entire life to the Web, a treasure trove of photos, writings, art and - more importantly - memories of people, places, and things he's experienced. And he's experienced a lot (Tent: "I've collaborated with so many people in so many ways that it's almost 'impossible' to keep track of it all"!) Speaking of his hard-to-keep-track-of-ness, we have some of his films - both in 16mm (Subtitles, Sound along w/ t he bouncing ball(s), Transparent SMILE) and video (H.O.M.E. encyclopedia) format - at the Enoch Pratt Central Library, but there are more that are almost "impossible" to find, "lost in the stacks" because of his non-intuitive, non-traditional, library catalog-unfriendly way of spelling and naming things! (Tent defends this approach as a refusal "to be contextualized w/in dominant careerist paradigms." All I know is: only rap artists are more problematic for librarians to look up - with all their monetary symbols and non-intuitive spellings - and my generation thought Slade couldn't spell right!). But maybe he wanted it that way. Maybe he wanted to be a puzzle to be solved, a hidden Easter Egg unearthed in the stacks.

*** tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE's review of BANNED IN DC ***

Banned in DC: Photos and Anecdotes from the DC Punk Underground (79-85)
by Cynthia Connelly, Leslie Claque, Sharon Cheslow
(Goodreads, July 2008)

[I took the liberty of adding some photos and hyperlinks to Tent's review.]

My initial review of this was 15160 characters - 5160 over the limit. I have to cut out over a 3rd of it. Looking thru it is like looking at a high school yrbk that's for the outcasts & rebels.

Around 1972, when we were both 19, John Duchac & I went to a concert called The End of the World Show. A group played that I sometimes credit w/ being Baltimore's 1st punk band: The Grand Poobah Subway. The latter were completely irreverant, they used styrofoam guitar props that they destroyed. It was cacophonous & bombastic. I loved it, John hated it. I think it was too 'amusical' for him, too 'tasteless'.


Meet "John Doe"

John moved to LA shortly thereafter where he became John Doe of the band X. John wd come back to Baltimore from time-to-time & by 1976 he'd turned me onto Devo's 1st single. But it wasn't 'til roughly 1977 that I personally felt punk as a new phenomena when I heard the Sex Pistols & when some friends in Baltimore started a band called Da Moronics.


Da Moronics outside Odorite building, 1978 (photo by Paula Gillen)

The Sex Pistols were ANARCHIST, as was I. That, in & of itself, was exciting. At the time, I only knew one other anarchist in Baltimore. But the music? Dullsville. I'd already long since left rock behind & this was basically the same old same old.


Tom DiVenti ascends his rightful throne (photo by Paula Gillen)

But Punk Rock was saved by a few obvious things: a sortof fuck-it! attitude that encouraged DIY raw flying-by-the-seat-of-yr-pants. & Da Moronics exemplified this. For me, they were Baltimore's 1st punk band. Tom DiVenti was the guitarist & a prominent poet/performer. He had a big carriage house space that he turned into the Apathy Project. This was a great place for shows. Tom was making things happen. Bill Moriarity was the singer.


Da Moronics singer Bill Moriarty (photo by Paula Gillen)

Da Moronics probably did songs about the most miserable shit, like cancer, w/ a great deal of irony & fuck-it!-that's-the-way-it-is! frankness. They were totally ragged at 1st but, as w/ most punk bands, they didn't let that inhibit them. They were fun. I remember one nite behind the Apathy Project a guy tried to rob a petite lesbian friend of mine in the nearby alley at gunpoint. She was in an early all-girl punk band called the 45s. She punched the wd-be robber in the face. He ran off.

Bill got sick of being in Da Moronics pretty quick b/c one of the main places they'd play was at the Oddfellows Hall in Towson (a pretty fascist suburb to the north of Baltimore) where the jockier members of the audience wd throw full pitchers of beer at him. He didn't get it - why the fuck did they think it was ok to do that do him?!

In 1979, I created a series of events under the name Crab Feast - the 1st of wch was a guerrilla installation. On January 24, 1980, 4 of us played as a band at the Telectropheremanniversary - the 1st anniversary of an underground phone network that I'd cofounded.

Crab Feast performed songs about herpes (wch I'd recently gotten), telephones, the Krononautic Society (a time-travel society many of us were in), some experimental instrumentals of mine, etc.. Thinking back on it now, that one gig was pretty historical.

There was very little connection between the DC & Baltimore punk scenes at this point. Bands like the Slickee Boys & Judy's Fixation played in DC but they were really from south of Baltimore rather than from the city proper. Judy's Fixation was from Annapolis. So was Sam Fitzsimmons who was one of the best party organizers & an all-round good natured guy. DC had the rep in Baltimore as being straight-edge - eschewing drugs & alcohol. B-More was definitely the opposite & most of the B-More punks were a bit contemptuous of straight-edge.


Sam Fitzsimmons (photo by Michelle Gienow)

Baltimore's punk scene was strongly nihilistic, punks were into getting as much out-of-their minds as they cd, as often as possible. We were all freaks & outcasts & we were flaunting it w/ a middle finger to all the people who tried to terrorize us into obeying. One way of doing that wd be to be so fucked-up that we'd be genuinely dangerous out on the streets. Of course, having fun was a big part of it too. Sex & drugs & rock'n'roll.

& the Marble Bar in the Congress Hotel was the perfect venue. The Congress had been an upscale hotel earlier in the century. Stars wd come & stay there & perform in the Galaxy Ballroom on the 1st fl. By the time the Marble was a punk club, the hotel was a halfway house for prisoners freshly released & a cheap fuck pad for married art school teachers to fuck their students in.


The Congress Hotel, home to the Marble Bar & Galaxy Ballroom

The Marble Bar was great - a sortof free zone where cops never came & most of the straight people who harassed us the rest of the time were too afraid to go. Once you went in there it was safe for all sorts of weird behavior. Still, I was thrown out twice but I was allowed back, there was an attitude on inclusiveness. All the freaks that the rest of society hated were welcome there.


Galaxy Ballroom Subgenius Con/Party flyer

The Galaxy Ballroom was where the more experimental stuff happened. Sam & I co-organized the 3rd Convention of the Church of the Subgenius there in September of 1983. At the SubG Con, the lead singer of Judy's Fixation participated in the "Sex? Straight? To Hell?" panel discussion. He'd recently plunged whole-assedly into the Gay Dungeon Master scene. On the panel he proclaimed that AIDS was to help you, not hurt you! He suffered from a ruptured internal organ shortly thereafter after being fist-fucked & then died very quickly from AIDS.


"The Singer Not the Schlong": Dungeonmaster Vaughn Keith ("Ben Wah") of Judy's Fixation (photo by Jack of Hearts)

Around this time, I was living w/ Stoc Marcut, the lead singer of Fear of God. At one point he bought a pig's head to use in a performance but the performance didn't happen, or some such, so he just left the pig's head rotting.. in his car trunk.. in the summer.


"Pig-headed": Stoc Marcut of Fear of God

By 1984, I'd started a new group called "t he booed usicians". We premiered at the 5th anniversary of the phone network, "t he Telectropeheremoanin'quinquennial" where our set involved phone sex. By today's standards we were a 'noise group', but I've never thought of it that way. The other groups on the bill were Sam's Motor Morons & [Mark] Harp's P.A.B.L.U.M. - wch was a parody group referring to Infant Lunch - a great B-More band who'd played at the SubG Con.

The Motor Morons were great! One guy played cans on a grinding wheel, another played electronics by pouring beer in it. A staple intrument was the one-string bass. A related group of Sam's was Oral Fixation. They played prop instruments, w/ tapes providing the actual sounds - except for the vocals, wch were live.


Before Kegasaurus there was...Oral Fixation! (photo by Jack of Hearts)

In 1985, I toured & performed at a place in CT called "Cafe Anthrax". There I was, a naked 31 yr old guy showing weird movies to a mostly much younger crowd & the cops came in. They didn't harass me about my nudity at all. Amazing. I'm told that Cafe Anthrax is a legendary punk club by now.

For me, punk was more or less dead by then. I didn't see much new coming out of it & heroin was creeping in to ruin things. I remember being at a Dead Kennedys show where some of us drew the DK logo on our hands to get in for free. We were told by someone associated w/ the band or w/ organizing the gig that that "wasn't cool". I thought: "This is an anarchist band?! Fuck these people!"

Another time, I was w/ my ex-girlfriend, Valerie Favazza, at a show where a film crew was touring. Valerie used to spend hrs putting her make-up on. People called her the "grandmother of punk", or some such, even though she was young, b/c she was so visibly out there. I was wearing a completely uncool white linen suit w/ pictures of lepers on it that I'd specially made & my hair was in a circle going sideways around my head. I was very 'uncool' b/c punk was already stylized & codified by then. Fuck that. Then the documentary guys asked us if they cd shoot footage of us. Valerie agreed & they went back to her place to shoot her elaborate make-up process. I declined. Punk was too dead to be associated w/ anymore. Too conformist. Now I kindof wish I'd done it. It wd be a nice record of the times. I'd still like to see the movie someday.

Then, yrs later, "BANNED IN DC" came out. People were excited! A bk about the punk scene! There was triumph in the air! As if by having a bk to document DC's scene, punk in general was validated as somehow REAL - rather than just the ephemera of a bunch of suicidal losers. I didn't care, I'd long since moved on, I'd never REALLY been a punk anyway - I was too extreme even for the punk scene. Still, though, looking thru this bk, I feel how important it was all over again.

To an outsider looking at this bk, the punks might look deranged, fascistic, riotous, dangerous - but to an insider, we were people who were trying to live freely & to the fullest. Most of us were barely surviving, the music was one of the only fun ways to make some extra bucks, to possibly escape from the deadend jobs. I'm grateful that "BANNED IN DC" exists. How much of that intense era has really survived? The music, sure, but that seems somewhat secondary to me in contrast to the hell-raising so many of us did. "BANNED" at least shows the people. Seeing them in the bk makes them seem somehow 'normal' in context - but in the rest of the world life cd be pretty dangerous for us given that the hatred for deviance was being expressed violently.

Thank you, Leslie [BANNED IN DC co-author Leslie Clague].

Related Tent Links:
Goodreads author profile for tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
footnotes by a cONVENIENCE tENTATIVELY
a mere outline website