SUPPLEMENTS:
art whino
ballyhoo stories
copyranter
fart party
garance dore
kottke
lightstalkers
tampa bay giants
the big ugly review
volt amps and ohms
wikipedia
------------------------------------------
Dunce Cap Quarterly
art whino
ballyhoo stories
copyranter
fart party
garance dore
kottke
lightstalkers
tampa bay giants
the big ugly review
volt amps and ohms
wikipedia
------------------------------------------
Dunce Cap Quarterly
Chinese authorities released provocative artist and recent international cause célèbre Ai Weiwei late yesterday in Beijing after holding him without formal charges for more than 10 weeks. DCQ Arts + Architecture Editor Ali Rodberg was there in the wee hours to document the scene as Weiwei emerged from his home in Caochangdi — the suburban Beijing arts hub Weiwei helped master-plan as a grassroots alternative to the city’s tourist-friendly 798 District — to address a clamoring throng of mostly Western journalists.
Weiwei refused to answer substantive questions, explaining that he could not grant interviews since he was free “on bail” — a line of reasoning that suggests Chinese authorities demanded silence from the noted dissident in exchange for his release.
Ali, for her part, jumped and jumped, and managed to capture a clump of Weiwei’s matted beard (and is that an eyebrow?) with her point-and-shoot through the tall forest of accredited Caucasians.
Fortunately, DCQ pal Nick Gervasi swooped in with sharp elbows and long arms to capture this video of the poor guy, who clearly just wanted to drink a hot toddy and catch up on Treme:
Meanwhile, at least four of Weiwei’s less-prominent associates — along with innumerable other political prisoners — remain detained in unknown locations “at high risk” of torture, according to Human Rights Watch. Woohoo! Here, forget that bit of unpleasantness by watching this excellent short on Weiwei’s preparation for his “Sunflower Seeds” exhibit at London’s Tate Museum last year, wherein the artist put 1,600 Chinese villagers to work hand-painting hundreds of thousands of porcelain orbs to resemble the show’s namesake:
Thanks to recent patronage and recognition by historically holier-than-thou academies — to wit, JR’s TED Prize, Banksy’s Oscar nomination for Exit Through the Gift Shop, even Shepard Fairey’s moonlighting turn as political propagandist — street art is under a mainstream microscope like never before. Grimy subversion is trendy again among the artistic aristocracy, and this time the momentum isn’t limited to a couple New York City crossover street artists with interesting names and/or marketable minority status. Rest assured that, just as disco supplanted the longhair political ballad, as Eminem’s daughter replaced Eminem’s homicidal mushroom trips, as the Macarena hokey-pokeyed all over Cobain’s grave, pretty shiny things will soon return to favor — Jeff Koons, breath easy.
Until then, however, the masses need to prep for First Thursdays and Third Firstdays in Soho and Soma, in Silver Lake and the Marigny and the Pearl, at Moma and Lacma and the De Young and other venues and warehouse neighborhoods where the promise of free Rossi and cocktail wieners attract the more self-respecting and educated of the city’s impoverished alcoholics. They need banter material, and to banter passably, one must know enough to feign expertise — preferably in something current, hip, and, crucially, appealing to attractive members of the desired sex.
Herein, as always, enters Taschen: In Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art, the iconic publishing house provides an encyclopedic overview of 150 of the most influential and relevant players in the game today. In profiling the core of the famously insular clique, Trespass sheds light upon an esoteric world dominated by semi-anonymous characters and complex discourse over the last few decades.
The book, released worldwide earlier this year, features context and commentary from the likes of Marc and Sara Schiller (Wooster Collective founders) and Carlo McCormick (senior editor at Paper magazine) alongside sprawling images tracking the evolution of the art form from its emergence in the early 1980s through the present day. The inconsistent quality and chronological distribution of the book’s photos would seem to owe much to advances in technology: Due to its ephemeral nature, urban art has long proven difficult to document, but thanks to the ubiquitous camera phone and the viral immediacy of twitter and its ilk, most works by today’s prominent artists are captured, disseminated and critiqued by the graph-geek crowd long before city workers or property owners get a chance to paint over them.
Portraying works by Keith Haring, Richard Hambleton and Paolo Buggiani, Trespass traces the roots of modern street art to Banksy and other contemporaries while posing a fundamental question about the motivation of its practitioners: Is street art an evolutionary step in the progression of human visual communication, or simply an instinct to mark territory as a dog would with its urine? This latter notion of human “aesthetic territorialism,” editor Ethel Seno asserts, dates back to the Paleolithic, in the form of cave paintings. And thus the crux of the debate is clarified: Is street art intended to push boundaries and awaken a systematically numbed public, as many of its major players claim, or is it merely “Kilroy was here” delivered in ever-more-elaborate forms? In other words, for all the artists’ grandiose proclamations of subversion and iconoclasm, is the basic motivator really just a yearning for recognition? In the case of NYC train bombers, BNE guy, Neckface, and your average neighborhood tagger, the answer would appear to be a resounding “yes.” When it comes to Banksy and Swoon, among others, the verdict is “uhhhh…well, that, uh…depends?”
To step backward for a moment — and not to get too abstractly philosophical up in here — many artists do seem to crave recognition and its attendant trappings of respect and, with the right medium and image, riches. Banksy can spit in the face of collectors and authority all he likes, but he’s no fool — he knows the best way to make a name (and a few enemies) is to upset the status quo. So when street artists attribute their work’s inspiration to principled flashpoints like “promoting the First Amendment” or “speaking truth to power,” digest this with the knowledge that controversy and artistic emergence are often symbiotic.
This, as outlined in Trespass, is where the prospect of publicity and mainstream acceptance threatens to endanger the multifaceted medium: Street art began as a form of protest — against the galleried art world, against municipal intrusion on freedom of expression, against crooked politicians, against the concept of rules and authority in general (although the anarchist angle rings hypocritical considering that old-school street artists operated under rules of etiquette so revered that they were often backed up with the promise of violence). Now, with its international profile on the rise and its most prominent artists on display in chic galleries and auction houses on both sides of the Atlantic, street art must accept the fact that it has become, in large part, a contributor to the art-world status quo. While perhaps not a full-privileges member of the establishment just yet — with Warhol’s Marilyn portraits in mind, let’s wait five or so years before issuing such a declaration — the subculture has surrendered some measure of its power to subvert simply by virtue of gaining acceptance. As the authors of Trespass point out, a fundamental tenet of street art is that it question general consensus from an outsider’s perspective — from the viewpoint of the willful nonparticipant oppressed by the whims of society’s majorities. The question is, will the medium’s leading artists retain the ability to effectively speak truth to power if they’re on the inside looking out? Can street artists still subvert now that their work has been sanctioned by the powers that be (cops excluded, of course)?
To that end, street art’s celebrities must reassess the impetus behind new work: With a newly-informed public finally thinking critically (and en masse) about street art — that is, dismissing authorities’ adorably outdated blanket condemnations of street art as vandalistic rubbish — the audience for such artworks has grown dramatically of late. Whereas street artists originally painted and drew with only their fraternity in mind, striving to out-do the next guy in terms of innovation and — perhaps more importantly — base prolificness, the primary audience of today’s stars has expanded to include the art establishment and the general public. With this in mind, street artists stand to make money (and plenty of it). One must assume that this will affect the intentions of some street artists while encouraging more persuadable (or desperate) practitioners of classically acceptable artistic genres to try their hand at street art.
The relationship between street art and the gallery crowd has recently undergone a radical reinvention, both following and stoking renewed public interest in, and acceptance of, prominent artists and works. This, in turn, is placing successful street artists in a conflicted position, one in which commercial success may prove groundbreaking while simultaneously calling into question the artist’s ability to carry out one of the original aims of their craft. How this will all play out is anybody’s guess, but Taschen’s Trespass does well to supply readers with the street-art background necessary to formulate such a prediction — a prediction, we remind you, that should prove très useful at the gallery next week when you’re trying to impress that waif with the regrettable fixie tattoo. And don’t forget a Ziploc: Nothing screams “breakfast!” and “free!” like a pile of soggy celery sticks and picked-over cheese wheels. Godspeed.
Disclaimer: Do not read this post unless you’ve got absolutely NOTHING better to do. Seriously. You will not feel better about yourself for knowing the following, though it may give you and your co-workers something to gab about over happy hour at Fuddrucker’s tonight.
Keith Olbermann just went public with what the conspiracy theorists among us have suspected for weeks: Charlie Sheen’s “meltdown” seems to be an act inspired by San Francisco Giants closer Brian Wilson.
It makes sense, and it’s not complicated: Wilson reportedly flew from spring training in Arizona to Los Angeles on Friday, February 18th, to meet with the actor and several former ballplayers — Kenny Lofton and Lenny “Ashtray Money” Dykstra among them. They all hung out at Sheen’s house. They reportedly did guy stuff. They probably ate things and said cuss words. Cocaine, alcohol, video games and/or prayer may have been involved. Who knows. Who cares. At some point, they allegedly watched Major League with some other Hollywood folks in Sheen’s private theater.
The details are irrelevant. What matters is the overarching plotline, and this can be boiled down to two all-important events:
February 18, 2011: Wilson jets to Sheenland for several hours of male bonding.
February 24, 2011: Sheen delivers the infamous rant; “meltdown” media frenzy ensues.
The common thread between the two happenings: As Olbermann observed, Sheen’s rant (and subsequent media appearances, hastily-produced online videos, etc.) reflect a persona that mimics Wilson’s in many ways. Peep the videos:
More than a passing resemblance.
Wilson told the press that he flew out to help Sheen understand the mentality and preparation that define a successful big-league closer — this in anticipation of the apparent unwarranted resuscitation of the Major League franchise (does nobody remember this?!). But Sheen’s vocabulary, cadence of delivery and overall demeanor in his subsequent meltdown productions suggest that the Wilson’s visit impacted the actor in a more immediate manner. The resemblance is too uncanny to be purely coincidental.
This assumption, then, prompts other questions: Is Wilson writing Sheen’s material? Did he help Sheen draw up the meltdown blueprint that fateful Friday night? Or did Sheen hijack Wilson’s persona without the pitcher’s permission? More importantly, did Dykstra wear shoes or arrive barefoot?
Then there’s the “Machine” angle. Wilson surpassed his teammates as the media fave last season thanks partially to the appearance of recurring masked S&M character “The Machine” (lifted from Nic Cage’s 8MM and reportedly reprised by teammate Pat Burrell) in televised interviews. As SF Weekly’s Peter Jamison points out, Sheen, playing himself in Being John Malkovich, is referred to as “Ma-Sheen” in once scene (a point not lost upon the creators of insta-site www.DreamMasheen.com). Tenuous, yes, but another similarity between the two.
The Sheen story is dumb, but that’s the point: He has capitalized on America’s celebrity obsession to reinvent his career, feeding his tabloid tormenters a perfect “Hollywood crisis” story — a paparazzo’s wet dream. True, Sheen may have lost millions by seemingly slamming the door on “Two and a Half Men,” but hey, now he doesn’t have to be on “Two and a Half Men.” Overnight, he again became relevant to the under-35 crowd (while simultaneously alienating millions of senior citizens who never bought into the radical notion of cable television). Let’s hope he can parlay this into meaningful projects and avoid becoming this year’s Betty White.
The extent of Wilson’s involvement in the saga may never be revealed, and Sheen may, indeed, prove to be mentally ill, but what’s clear is that there’s more to the story than People would have you believe. As with Banksy’s Exit through the Gift Shop and the Joaquin Phoenix faux-breakdown before, gamesmanship appears to be at play. The media, with its 24/7 emphasis on immediacy over accuracy (which encourages the publication of planted stories and devalues time-consuming endeavors like investigative journalism), are the enablers — though they also join the American public, once again, as the pawns.
Note: This post has run in a slightly different form in years past.
More important note: Recent paucity of DCQ Daily posts notwithstanding, we’re still working on things over here. Big things. Potentially monumental things. Just not the daily-blog-post sort of things. Please trust us. Your boundless loyalty will be rewarded in the not-so-distant future. Details coming soonish.
Pop quiz! Guess which of these Greenwich Village townhouses exploded exactly 40 42 years ago today…
a.) The one that looks different than all the others; or
b.) One of the others
Answer: A! The building with the funky-angled protruding living room.
Yes, that’s the one. A few members of the Weathermen (l/k/a the Weather Underground) apparently mishandled some nails and dynamite and…yeah, kablooie. According to ever-reliable Wikipedia, it took nine days of body part collection to determine that three people had died in the blast. Two others survived and escaped arrest, with one remaining on the lam for more than a decade before getting pinched for pulling an armored car heist with Tupac’s stepdad. We are not making this up.
A slightly more thorough reflection from Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn here.
Only in Williamsburg can one find the back of an otherwise unassuming café housing, somewhat surreptitiously, an unexpectedly excellent art and music venue. And that was precisely the case on Sunday night, when the “Noncerts” series kicked off its inaugural show at Cameo Gallery, located off North Sixth Street behind the Lovin’ Cup Café. (“Noncerts,” naturally, describing the new nonprofit string of concerts, the first of which benefited Brooklyn public schools.)
The brainchild of Dave Godowsky (who performs as John Shade), Noncerts’ mission may seem high-minded, but the proof is in the (concert) pudding: The show took on an otherworldly air, rendering quiet the rapt, capacity crowd. The ethereality of the show was further spurred on by the flawlessness of an all-star backing house band (the likes of which have played with everyone from Jay-Z to Lou Reed).
Late. Late. Late, late, late. As always, we’re late on this. Well, actually, that’s subjective: If you’re in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Miami, New Orleans, Portland, Seattle, D.C., Austin, Chicago, or the Greater Tri-State Area, we’re a good year late. If you’re in the rest of the country, we’re right on time. And if you’re in Mississippi, we’re eight years ahead of schedule. For you, Jed, we’re delivering news from 2019. Runtell your Unclebrothers and Sisterdaughters.
Exit Through the Gift Shop is Banksy’s feature filmmaking debut, and he remains true to iconoclastic form: Famous for his bold, rebellious street art and legalities-driven obsession with anonymity, Banksy has made his name — and, more recently, growing fortune — by undermining institution. And the movie, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2010, certainly excels in this regard, and on multiple levels.
First, though, a thorough, semi-spoiler (!!!) synopsis for the uninitiated: Exit is essentially a profile of Thierry Guetta, an excitable, thirtysomething Frenchman with no discernible job, a lovely and supportive family, and a habit, rooted in childhood trauma, of videotaping everything lest he forget anything. Guetta’s cousin, the film asserts, is the prominent street artist whose nom de guerre, “Invader,” is derived from the mosaics he epoxies to the sides of buildings in cities worldwide — works inspired by the heavily pixelated classic video game “Space Invaders.” Guetta follows and videotapes this cousin as he and other street artists decorate the walls of Paris, London, and other European locales before eventually landing in Los Angeles. Guetta’s big break comes when he meets up with Shepard Fairey in an L.A. Kinko’s (Invader is “sick” and thereafter more or less absent from the film) and convinces the RISD alum to let him shadow him; before long, Guetta has proven his mettle to Fairey as both a documenter and accomplice, and the unlikely pair sets off on a trans-continental spree of rooftop stenciling, scaffold wheatpasting, and cop-ducking.
However, for all Guetta’s happenstance success in videography — the courageous and innovative vandalistic exploits captured in Exit are many, and much of the footage is breathtaking — the film’s protagonist is never sated. Guetta is portrayed throughout as more or less ignorant of the genre’s major players and their oeuvres, yet for reasons only cursorily clarified in the film (personable guy, trusted accessory, charming accent, “eccentric” facial hair?), he’s fully cleared to tape their illegal nocturnal (and occasionally diurnal) forays. Never star-struck (because he doesn’t know who the stars are), Guetta is nevertheless entranced by the thrill of street art, and for a brief time, he seems relatively fulfilled — that is, until somebody clues him onto the existence of Banksy, the Zeus of contemporary graf-culture mythology.
Considering its use as a catch-all for music originating in the general “not North America or Western Europe” region, the “world music” label, while technically accurate, is arguably the laziest addition to the English language since Martha Stewart coined “fixer-upper” in 1914 (a title challenged in recent years as Twitter spawned The Verb That Shall Never Appear Herein).
If the sprawling genre should apply to any musical production, though, it would be to that of Thievery Corporation: Sure, Beltway stalwarts Eric Hilton and Rob Garza serve as the group’s core, but a revolving, polyglotic galaxy of guest contributors define the Corporation’s identity. From Anoushka Shankar to Seu Jorge, the collection has drawn from disparate corners of the globe over the past 15 years, mixing genres to oftentimes brilliant effect. Loyalists laud the mega-collab as groundbreaking in its synthesis of foreign sounds and cultures; detractors accuse the band of aspiring to a Starbucks-worthy brand of vapid backpacker trip-hop. Last weekend, it scarcely mattered: Thievery Corporation brought its lush consonance to San Francisco’s annual “Sea of Dreams” New Year’s festival, and 7,000 revelers converged to greet 2011 as one pulsing, euphoric mass of Day-Glo.
This isn’t to suggest, however, that the conglomerate played alone: Berlin’s Modeselektor and gypsy-punk-evolved Balkan Beat Box topped the roster of nearly two dozen acts on four stages. Thievery, in fact, effectively opened for brash SoCal DJ MiMOSA, whose 70 minutes of “crunk-step dub-hop” (his words) shut down the venue before an entranced crowd that thinned only minimally after Thievery stepped off. The throngs jiggled through a vast maze of stages, sideshows, vendors, and recovery stations, with throwback candyravers, goths, and all sorts in between ogling an impressive assortment of hanging jumbo neon constellations and other visual treats. Elaborately-bearded tea mavens from San Francisco’s OmShanTea served up hot refreshments in a Bedouin tent-like environment, while upstairs, UC-Santa Cruz grads and other mellow-outers vied for prime puffing position in the aptly named Hookahdome Lounge.
Thievery Corporation, which took the stage shortly after midnight and played well past 2 am, ran through a host of standards (yes, “Lebanese Blonde” included), drawing heavily from its latest and most political album, 2008’s Radio Retaliation (playing “Vampires,” “Sweet Tides” and “33 Degree,” to name a few). Co-founders Hilton and Garza — still the band’s only official members — presided over the stage behind twin turntables as longtime vocal mainstays LouLou (France), Sleepy Wonder (Jamaica) and Emiliana Torrini (Iceland) swapped turns in the spotlight with several other toasters, funksters and songstresses. Meanwhile, a DC-heavy collection of instrumentalists layered sitar upon sax, trumpet upon guitar, bass upon bongoes until the roof of the main hall, wracked from beyond by a howling winter’s storm and from within by relentless and rolling basslines and the heat of many thousands of sweating bodies, could take no more and dropped the first raindrops of 2011 onto the heads of the revelers below.
Never before has a leaking roof been welcomed with such enthusiasm.
Multimedia overload below:
Thievery Corporation (above and below).
Above: Vocalist Emiliana Torrini w/ Thievery Corporation; Below: Silver dude.
Thievery Corporation (above and below).
Above: DJ MiMOSA; Below: Thievery Corporation horn section, with Eric Hilton (l) and Rob Garza (r) between in background.
Above: “I cannot fucking believe he just ate all of my Adderall again”; Below: RASTAFARIANISM!!!! Badda-dingding-dingding-whooooaaaa…
Above: Klub Kidz Rool; Below: Mid-MiMOSA — 4 am and going strong.
Below: Decent videos with bass-blown audio. Maybe don’t watch.
Nick “Diamonds” Thorburn and Honus Honus share vocal duties for nascent indie super-conglom Mister Heavenly when they’re not fronting Islands and Man Man, respectively. (Yes, the same band that features Modest Mouse’s Joe Plummer and (for now) Michael Cera.) We caught up with them after their show last week at San Francisco’s Cafe du Nord. Among much malarkey and nonsense emerged these nuggets: Mister Heavenly’s as-yet-untitled debut album should come out around the end of next year (a new Islands album is also slated for release around the same time). Their current sound is “doom wop”; the ultimate goal is “reed-based jazz” (this means NO flügelhorn), and everybody respects everybody. Just watch the damn video already. Full transcription below.
Dunce Cap Quarterly: So tell us how this came to be — how you guys got together. Tell us the genesis.
Nick Diamonds: Mutual friendship. Just mutual friendship.
DCQ: And it’s been a few months in the works, right?
ND: Yeah, it’s been about a year. We came up a year ago, and we said we wanted to make a song or two together, and we ended up making a whole album, and we just mutually respect each others’ work.
DCQ: And you’re still doing the Islands thing, right?
ND: Still doing the Islands thing. Gonna make an Islands album in January. I think it’ll come out at the end of the year. The Mister Heavenly album will probably come out at the end of the year, too — the end of next year.
DCQ (referencing Cera): How does that Hollywood guy, the actor guy? I forget his name. He did he get involved?
ND: Oh, Keanu Reeves.
DCQ: Yeah. How’d you get him in the band? How does that work?
ND: We were just big friends of Bill & Ted’s, and The Matrix, and we just thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if Bill — or Ted — played bass for us?’ It was bogus, but…Bill was our first choice, but we got Ted, and…
DCQ: And the rest is history.
ND: …take what you can get, you know?
DCQ: This is a typical musical pseudo-journalism question, but what sound are you going for?
ND: Jazz. We’re trying to make a really authentic jazz record.
DCQ: Jazz? You seem like you might be a little bit…off.
ND: We’re working on it. I think it might take a couple records to get it to completely jazz. Right now what we’ve settled on is doom-wop, and that’s our genre. Doom-wop.
DCQ: Doom-wop.
ND: Doom. Wop.
DCQ: Describe that.
ND: Well, it’s doo-wop with doom-like subcultures. Sub…subcultures? Subtexts.
DCQ: Sub-something…
ND: Lyrically it’s doomy, but with a doo-wop aftertaste.
DCQ: Gotcha.
ND: But what we really are all into is clarinet-based jazz. Reed-based. Anything with a reed in it. So bass clarinet, clarinet, saxophone…
DCQ: What about flügelhorn? Flügelhorn?
ND: Nope, it’s gotta be reed-based…
DCQ: No flügelhorn.
ND: …but we’re getting there. We’re getting there.
DCQ: Well, we’re looking forward to it…And what’ll this album be called?
ND: I don’t wanna scoop too much, but…we haven’t settled on a title yet. But Mister Heavenly is the band — that we know. Sub Pop is the label — we’re contractually obligated to put (that) out. And (the rest)…we’ll figure it out.
(irrelevant non-sequiturious banter, cut to credits)
We also got ahold of the set list from one of Mister Heavenly’s earlier shows (not sure if this is from Portland or Seattle). Some guy told us that the track “Charlyne” was an ode to Michael Cera’s ex-girlfriend, but we have no way of verifying this, and, what’s more, nobody really cares. Song names, courtesy of Honus Honus:
This happened at Café du Nord in SF last night. Mister Heavenly, signed by Sub Pop before they played a show, is Joe Plummer (Modest Mouse) on drums, Nick Thorburn/Nick Diamonds (Islands) on vocals, Honus Honus (Man Man) on vocals, keys, and…uh…Michael Cera on bass. All played admirably, the place was packed, and nobody knew the words. Also, Honus Honus rules. More words and pictures soon, maybe.
by Jon Toulouse
Remember BMG? When they offered “Ten CDs for the Price of One,” they must have assumed that most of the kids who enlisted were too hopped up on Pogs and Big League Chew to mail back the overprints they tried to foist upon you with every delivery. I was no such mark. I monitored the mailbox religiously and ‘returned to sender’ with abandon, collecting my ten damn CDs for the low damn price of one, just like the good folks at BMG had promised. Never mind the fact that I spent the next year scrawling ever-more-threatening letters in an ultimately successful campaign to make them stop sending me Kenny Loggins compilations — I had my treasure trove, and among the trendy (Nirvana’s In Utero), obligatory (Marley’s Legend), educational (The Cream of Clapton), peculiar (Green Jellÿ’s Cereal Killer Soundtrack), and Sinbad-ish (Heavy D’s Peaceful Journey), I uncovered an album that would influence my adolescence more than any other: Bad Religion’s Stranger than Fiction.
At turns uptempo and anthemic, the album is defined by Greg Graffin’s relentless, scathing vocals and driving guitar work led by Brett Gurewitz in his premature swan song with the band (he famously split with the band to lead Epitaph Records’ evolution into a major indie force). Half punk, half thrash, half rock opera (yes, this shit gets three halves), Stranger than Fiction recruited kids like me and my friends on pure aesthetics, with singles like “Infected” featuring singalong hooks conveying vague malcontent and others, like “Hooray for Me,” issuing messages that no youngster would reject: “Can you imagine for a second/Doing anything just ‘cuz you want to/Well that’s just what I do/So hooray for me…and fuck you!”
But the extent of Stranger than Fiction’s impact only began to reveal itself once “21st Century Digital Boy” got stale around the 30th repeat and we started listening carefully to the rest of the album: I would wager good greenbacks that Americans born between 1980 and 1985 learned more middle-school vocab from this album than from the oeuvres of Twain, Steinbeck and Judy Fucking Blume combined. This from “Inner Logic,” as told to a 12-year-old more accustomed to the diction of Penthouse Forum: “Graduated mentors stroll in marbled brick porticos/ In sagacious dialog they despise their average ways/ Betraying pomp and discipline, they mold their institution/ Where they practice exclusion on the masses every day.”
My discovery of Stranger than Fiction laid the groundwork for exploration of many sorts, from exhaustive encyclopedia research on all things “-theism” to the rest of Bad Religion’s work. Frustratingly, my efforts to complete the former were thwarted by the band’s expansion of the latter throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s as they continued to mine such common themes as oppression and alienation in the context of contemporary events (notably those of the political variety). Along the way there were moments of creative paralysis and subsequent rebirth (Gurewitz’s return in 2001 seen by some as a flash point in the band’s return to form). But no album, to my mind, has come close to eclipsing Stranger than Fiction.
So, then, it was to my great pleasure that Bad Religion, while touring to support their 15th studio album, Dissent of Man, dipped well into the past as it played a sold-out Regency Center in San Francisco last Friday night. In addition to early staples such as “Fuck Armageddon…This is Hell,” the band played a handful of Stranger than Fiction cuts for the heaving crowd, most of which was significantly younger than the artists (though a sprinkling of grayhairs lurked in the rafters, heads bobbing). Graffin stoked EssEff pride by launching into the ambiguously-spirited “Los Angeles is Burning,” eliciting middle fingers and hearty “Fuck LA” chants not long after proclaiming San Francisco the band’s “second city” and describing how he was once accosted by a transvestite here during an early tour. The singer, less physical a performer than he was in his salad days, nevertheless exhibited the same moxie that impressed so many young people a quarter-lifetime ago (and clearly continues to lure new generations), charging through 25-plus songs in the two-hour set and leaving the audience screaming for more even after a second encore.
I was trying to think of a clever closing line, but it’s 5:50 a.m., and goddammit, I have to get up at Doesn’t Matter tomorrow, so just enjoy these crappy videos and pipe down already:
Evidence — sweet, indisputable evidence: Worst-case scenario, they’re long-lost brothers. Best-case scenario, they’re two large men, one even larger body. Two minds, one heart. Four eyes, four ears, two arms, two impeccably manicured soul-tees. Half Overweight Lover, half Oh, That Guy. And one pair of sunglasses until the next unemployment check arrives.
Fifteen years late on this, yes, thank you.
