So, I'm sitting here at the kitchen table listening to KPCC, the local public radio station, and of course they are talking about the fires that are burning down half the county. At about 10:40 they had a conversation with Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. He said the typical things they say when these fires happen every year, then to wrap up, the host asked, "Mayor Villaraigosa, if you could say just one thing to the people of Los Angeles right now, what would it be?"

The mayor let out a dramatic sigh and said, "I would say that everyone should pray for the people who have lost their homes..."

Huh?

Dear mayor, if my house burns down or is flattened in an earthquake or a riot, please - please don't pray for me. Don't ask JESUS, Allah, Joseph Smith, Guru Nanak, Buddha, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Yahweh or Meher Baba to help me. Don't ask the Smurfs, don't wish upon a star, don't leave a note for the tooth fairy. If you're going to do anything, call Jimmy Carter. At least that fucker knows how to swing a hammer and put up a new wall.

Seriously. Pray? That's what people who were just burned out of their houses need? Prayer? Is everyone in America mentally retarded, or what? "Those fires, yeah, wow boy, that is awful. Well, I did everything I could. I prayed."

Yeah. Okay.

You may remember art con man Charles Walker from the Who is Lonnie Tolliver, and why should you care? post. Well, that was a few years ago, so I thought you might want to catch up with Mr. Walker.

He no longer tries to foist fake Lonnie Tolliver paintings onto suckers. Maybe because searching on Google for Lonnie Tolliver brings up smog.net and an everlasting copy of his blog where he admits to "Lonnie Tolliver" being a con job. That could have something to do with it.

So let's see if we can do the same for "Grandma Clementine Reynolds," Walker's latest stinking minstrel show con.

Poor Charles Walker. Imagine spending your entire life believing you are an artist, and then it finally and painfully dawns on you that that no one wants to buy your paintings of stripes. What do you do? You can't get a normal job because you have no skills. That, and art school has instilled a sense of entitlement into you that you just can't shake, so a real job is out of the question. You could become a whore, but one has to be at least marginally attractive to pull that off. So what? What was Charlie to do?

Voila! Paint some fake "outsider art" and slap a fictitious name on it! Not only that, make up a little "outsider" story and use it in every auction!

Clementine Reynolds is my maternal grandmother. She is 76 years old and has lost her ability to speak when she was very young and she didn't learn to read and write until very late in her life. Since she was a child in Pinedale, Alabama she has been using her colorful and expressive art to communicate her feelings, often staying up all night to paint for hours on end, painting on found boards with acrylic paint, tempera and even egg yolks! Recently she has been interested in painting the town of her youth, where she lived until my family moved out of Alabama in 1941, as well as images inspired by the Bible.

I think her art is amazing and incredibly expressive and I asked her if she would let me try to sell it on Ebay, so she could get extra money other than her pension to buy herself whatever she likes. She was very excited about it and even had ideas on how to make her Ebay page look nice to better showcase her amazing talent. Her art is beginning to garner attention and a few collectors are becoming interested in her work, which makes her very proud. I hope you love her art as much as I do. Thank you for supporting outsider artists and thank you for looking!

The Grandma Clementine Reynolds auctions run under the r4398b4 eBay user. He apparently used that ID to sell video tapes of television shows (wait, isn't it illegal to sell copyrighted material? Charlie?) before he had to switch away from the capability-brown seller ID that he used for the Lonnie Tolliver auctions.

A funny thing happened on November 4th. I voted for a Presidential candidate who won.

I know, a lot of you did, but I've voted in every election since 1980, and this is the first time I marked the ballot for the person who actually won. Now I am left with this odd feeling that something is terribly wrong.

After 24 years of failure you get used to the feeling of defeat, and come to accept it as the way of the world. But every four years I would skip happily into the voting booth like Charlie Brown taking a few steps back to kick the football. I knew Lucy was going to yank that fucker out from under me at the last second, but I ran forward anyway, full of confidence and anticipation of sweet victory. Or at least a 10 yard squib that my offensive line could recover. Anything. But election after election I was foiled by the forces of political nature.

I should confess that I sincerely do not believe that who the President is makes a bit of difference. Call me cynical, or unamerican or socialist, but these guys are all politicians. And at the end of the day, it's only a certain type of person who becomes a politician. Kind of like the kind of person who becomes a radio disc jockey. They aren't really cut out for anything substantial, but they crave the spotlight, so they find a way into a public profession where they can pick up teenage girls off the request line, or out of the volunteer election staff.

So we end up choosing from a group of emotionally damaged narcissists whose primary talent is knowing how to use hairspray, which is all well and good in a farcical, absurd kind of way, but at the very least, let's be honest about who they are. Okay, Obama doesn't need hairspray, but that's just an accident of birth.

So, yeah, since 1980, that's eight Presidential elections if you're keeping score. In some of those elections I "threw away" my vote on candidates that I knew full well had no chance of becoming president. If there was a woman or an atheist or an anarchist on the ballot, I usually voted for them. Speaking of atheists, I have to say that in comparison, electing a black man is no great shakes. Call me when we elect an atheist. Then I'll agree with you that America has changed. I will gladly admit that I am wrong, and that the voters care about substantial issues when they mark those ballots, and not just popularity, PR or JESUS.

Well, here we are anyway, on the cusp of a great new era, right? I don't know, man. Ask Jimmy Carter how much fun it is to be president in a post war economy. Assuming these wars ever end, which seems unlikely at this point in history. But if Obama can get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan, expect the economy to slow to (more of) a crawl. That's history talking, not me. Look it up. I'm sure wikipedia has something about that. While you're there, look up Lenora Fulani. I voted for her for president in 1988 while the rest of you were busy electing G.H.W. Bush. Anyway, the HOPE and CHANGE multitudes will surely turn on Obama the minute government cheese becomes a dietary staple again.

Politics as a hobby does not appeal to me. When people start talking about politics or politicians - voluntarily, mind you! - I look for an exit. To me it's like talking about the weather, Beat writers or basketball. There's nothing there. My world has not changed much throughout the 10, soon to be 11, presidents that have ruled during my lifetime. Wars come and go, economies rise and fall, millionaires become billionaires, and through it all I have to keep working for a wage and paying most of that wage to this place or that place. One bank or another, landlords, governments, women. And I will keep working until the day I drop dead and can't show up on Monday morning, while Obama's children enjoy their inheritance on a beach in the Caribbean somewhere.

No sour grapes there. Let the rich have their riches. I am not ambitious or clever enough to join their ranks, or you can bet you ass I would. Then I would write here about important things like capital gains taxes and the stock market. No, I prefer this, whatever it is. So yeah, yippee! America. Like that funky elder statesman George (no relation to Hillary) Clinton said, let's paint the white house black! At least it's different. At least it's something. Something for us all to talk about.

Joaquin Phoenix is quitting the movie actor business and going to be a rock star instead.

"It's like greener pastures, you know what I mean? And so, I'm just going to try and like, I'll just be doing the other thing. Hopefully, I will emotionally impact you with that, as well."

Uh, yeah, man! The greatest thing about this though is the way Phoenix decided to stick it to the man with GOOD BYE! written across his knuckles, tough guy tattoo style.

Only problem is he got the hands a bit mixed up, so when he flashed his knuckles at the cameras at his latest (last!) premiere, they read, "BYE! GOOD"

I know you don't have to be a genius to be an actor or a rock musician, but come on Joaq.

And his vote counts just as much as yours.

I was having a beer with some young chaps from work the other night, and the Clash song "Rudie Can't Fail" came on the jukebox. I said, "Ah, London Calling, the greatest rock and roll album ever made," and one of the guys I was with whipped out his phone/computer/teleportation device and typed in "London Calling," and said, "Got it!" I didn't think anything of it, but the next day he had the album on his iPod and was listening to it. A couple of days later he came in to my office and said, "So why is London Calling the greatest rock and roll album of all time?"

The question kind of threw me for a loop. "Because I say so," seemed like an insufficient answer, so I hemmed and hawed and mumbled something about the time it came out, what was happening, great songs, and some other crap that I'm sure left him wondering if I was just too old to answer a direct question.

But why do I think it is the best rock and roll album of all time? It's an interesting question, and one of those idiotic "best" proclamations that is going to be different for everyone. Of course Rolling Stone and SPIN also called London Calling the album of the decade, but the 80's were a piss poor excuse for a musical decade, so I don't know how meaningful that really was.

It is a great record full of memorable, passionate music, but so are plenty of other records. Which music we choose to hold dear and make significant is probably more closely related to what was happening in our lives when we first heard that music. The Clash happened to be making records at a time when a lot of people were looking for something meaningful after a decade of indulgence and pretension, so the Clash became "the only band that matters" to a generation of malcontents and troublemakers.

Listening to London Calling now, it holds up very well. But that's because it's just a great rock and roll album, not necessarily a great punk rock album. Punk rock is more about attitude and outlook than musical style anyway. Or it was, until hardcore punk came and wrapped up thousand mile an hour thrash in a convenient bow that can be called "punk" for future generations to consume and catalog.

When I was 17 I had a friend who refused to listen to any "punk" records. One day he was at my place and I put on Never Mind The Bollocks without saying anything. A few seconds into the first track he said, "What's this? It's cool." When I told him it was the Sex Pistols he said, "But this is just rock music!"

He was right, of course. Musically punk broke no new ground, so you have to go by the message, such as it was (or intentional lack of message ala the Ramones). And I suppose the crux of that message was, "No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones," and that was about as much as you could get punks to agree on. And they didn't even really agree on that.

I just finished reading Chris Salewicz's 640 page opus, Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer. It was an interesting take on a really fucked up guy. A fucked up guy that a whole lot of people put a whole lot of weight onto. Including me. Imagine being an insecure person and having people come up to you almost everywhere you go, for the last 25 or 30 years of your life, saying, "You changed my life." I don't know how you can begin to deal with something like that. Well, I know how he dealt with it when I told him that very thing in 1979. He conveniently deflected and said, "Yeah, now let's get out there and make something happen!" I'm sure that as he got older he just smiled and said, "Thanks," but he was someone that inspired a lot of people, and like it or not, he did change many of our lives.

Punk is everywhere. My dog is punk. He won't do anything I tell him to do. Mozart was punk, Prince is punk, Bob Dylan, Radiohead, Bill Clinton, George Clinton, that kid standing in front of the tank in Tiananmen square...

So there, that's why London Calling is the greatest rock and roll record of all time. What? That's not an answer? I know it isn't. But there is no answer, mate, so that's all you'll get from me.

The future is unwritten.

Skyjuice! Only ten cents a bottle!

With three weeks until the election, a new Washington Post/ABC News poll shows McCain down 10 points to Obama, 53 percent to 43 percent, with McCain stalling or losing ground on many issues.

McCains reaction?

"My friends, we've got them just where we want them!"

Cool! Old, feeble and delusional! It kind of makes me wish he would win, just to see the circus come to town.

Shame that won't happen.

And please, must I hear one more dry-lipped zombie "citizen" at some McCain town hall meeting ramble on about how they could never trust Obama because he is a Muslim (or Muslin, as many of them say), and probably (if not definitely) a terrorist as well? I've heard variations of that three times in the last week. Are these people secretly working for the Obama campaign? If they are, let me be the first to say it is pure political genius at work.

Don't ever tell me that a large part of the voting populace in this country is not stupid. They are very stupid. Extremely, comically stupid. And every four years they are out in full force demonstrating that fact. It's just so much more blatant now. It's as if the dynamic duo of McCain/Palin have somehow liberated the stupid by their own example, and given them the courage to speak their minds.

Yee ha. Cue the deliverance banjos. JESUS IS COMING, bitches! And believe you me, he is going to smite all them Muslin terrorists, starting with their leader, Barak Obama! Halelujah!

The baseball playoffs are underway, and today the Phillies beat the Dodgers. Isn't that - I don't know - exciting?

I don't get it, myself. Rooting for a professional sports team. Isn't is kind of like rooting for Hummer to beat Land Rover in sales this quarter?

Don't get me wrong, I understand the history of regional rivalries in professional sports. But it's been a couple decades, at least, since players showed allegiance to anyone other than their agents. When I was a kid, pretty much the same group of guys would show up every year and put on Viking or Twins uniforms. There was a continuum there, and you felt like the players represented your state or your city. I know the reality of the situation is most of them couldn't have switched teams even if they wanted to, but from a fan's perspective that confidence in knowing the same players would be out there scratching their balls and patting each other on the ass every season was comforting. And after a while you felt like you knew them and their personalities, and a bond with the team as a whole was a natural extension of that.

But now, the players move, the teams move, everyone follows the money. There's nothing wrong with that. But I don't see how, as a fan, you can latch on to any one revolving door team and feel any affinity for it. Professional sports teams are corporations. They are logos. They are not people, they are not regions. It's like watching a television show where one of the characters is replaced between seasons, and no one says, "Gee, you look different." They just continue on as if nothing happened and everything is the same as it ever was.

I can still watch a major league baseball game once every 10 years or so. I understand and appreciate the game, and if two well matched teams are playing, it's like a (really long) game of chess. A game of chess where even the pawns are worth half a million dollars - but still. Caring which team wins seems utterly pointless. What's the difference? Is the city of Philadelphia better than the city of Los Angeles today? Do the Dodgers give a shit whether you sit in front of your television and cheer? Ask the people who used to live in Chavez Ravine whether the Dodgers really give a shit about anything that goes on in Los Angeles.

So yeah, the Phillies logo beat the Dodgers logo. Woot! I'll bet Major League Baseball tracks merchandise sales, and they could probably tell you how many more Phillies hats sold today. Those poor fucking Dodger hats though, collecting dust on the shelves. Tragic. You think the "Bud Bowl" was a joke? It was prophesy, baby. Bud wins! Bud wins! Well, that's just about as exciting as the Patriots winning, or whoever wins the Super Bowl these days. Or whether Barak Obama will beat John McCain. And McCain is definitely the Bud Light in that scenario. Or maybe the O'Douls.

Hey man, rooting for your kid's little league team, that's understandable. Hell, it's actually a lot of fun. Your high school team? Yeah, go for it. Those are your peers, and you probably know some of them. At least you've seen them around, or they steal your lunch money or slam you into the lockers as they pass by. College - eh...you're verging on the professional side there. It's unlikely the average dink walking around UCLA ever sees any of the star athletes in the bookstore or on the bus. It's abstract. The sports are barely related to the school, except in name.

Yet 60 year old men still sit in the expensive seats at the rose bowl every season, cheering for a bunch of kids from all over the country, who will scatter back over the country again as soon as they graduate or are drafted. But they wear that logo, and they (ostensibly) go to that school, so that is their team. And when their team wins, that is, naturally, a personal reflection of their own greatness.

Right?

Follow the money, babies. Go Hummer! Go Land Rover!

Yay.

Okay, I'm going to rave about a fringe movie again, one that will only appeal to one out of every hundred people who read this, but it's what I do, so don't try to stop me. The last one, Rockers, is mainly of interest to old school reggae lovers and Jamaicaphiles, and this one will hit a chord mainly with old punks and possibly fans of Diane Lane and Laura Dern. It's called Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains.

It was one of Lane's first films after A Little Romance, which made a big splash in 1979 and landed her on the cover of TIME magazine. Lane had just turned 15 when they began filming The Fabulous Stains, and Laura Dern was even younger (12 years old when filming began!), with only a bit part in 1979's B movie classic, Foxes, to her credit. Also appearing in the film are Steve Jones and Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols, Paul Simonon of the Clash, Fee Waybill, front-man for the Tubes, Ray Winstone, Elizabeth Daily, Christine Lahti and a cast of thousands.

The film was directed by Lou Adler, who had directed only once before, Cheech and Chong's Up in Smoke, and never directed a film again after The Fabulous Stains. Adler was more of a music business type, having founded Dunhill and Ode Records, both big labels in the 60's and 70's. He also managed dozens of groups, won grammys - no slouch, but perhaps not born to be a movie director. He may, however, have born to direct this particular film.

On the surface The Fabulous Stains is a rock and roll B-movie rags to riches to rags story. Originally titled All Washed Up, the writer, Nancy Dowd, had harassment issues during production, and wasn't exactly thrilled with the way the film turned out (a tacked-on "happy ending") so she had her name removed from the credits. That happy ending was shot almost two years after production had finished because the movie tested so poorly with audiences. They simply didn't know what the hell to make of it. Since they didn't understand it in the first place, maybe a downer ending seemed a bit much.

But this movie isn't for the typical "I dunno, I'll see whatever's showing" mall crowd. For those interested in the music of the era though (and the later Riot Grrrl feminist punk movement, some of whose key members have cited this film as inspiration), it is definitely worth a close look.

A B-movie, yes, but one that expertly captures many truths about the music business, perhaps more so than any other "rock and roll" film ever made. From the less-than-successful punk band (the Looters; Jones, Cook, Simonon and Winstone), to the even less successful - but once famous - glam/metal band, The Metal Corpses (Waybill), the film is populated by real world characters and the look and feel capture that world and that era incredibly well. I credit Adler's music business experience with supplying the stark, precise reality. No director who hadn't lived some of this stuff could have possibly recreated it.

The film never played to mass audiences, in fact, it has been said that only two 35 mm prints were ever made, and as of a few years ago, only one of the tattered prints survived, occasionally making its way to festivals and revival houses. But in the early 80's a couple of early cable channels aired it, bootleg VHS copies were made, and from there The Fabulous Stains earned its cult status.

I was one of those who made a VHS copy from cable (or more accurately, the lone pre-cable channel in my building, ON-TV), back in the early 80's. I dragged that tape around the country with me for 20 years, forcing it on people whenever I could. Not many appreciated it as much as I did, but I always blamed that on the awful quality of the tape, rather than my possible lack of taste. The quality of all the bootlegs was poor because the channels that aired the film were mostly scrambled UHF signal "cable," a primitive precursor to the digital cable services we have now.

Rhino has just released a DVD version of The Fabulous Stains, and it is a joy to behold. It is a wide screen transfer, which makes this the first time the film can be seen as-shot, unless you were one of the three dozen people to see it in a theater. One of the main problems with the bootlegs was muddy sound, but the DVD is pretty damn clear all the way around. It's almost 30 years old so it doesn't have THX DOLBY wraparound 3D ThunderSound, and although there is a 5.1 home theater audio setting, much of the sound in the film is definitely low budget indie, meaning you may have to rewind a few times to pick up a garbled line here and there.

The DVD is thin on "bonus" material, but it does have a couple of great commentary tracks, one by Adler and one by Lane and Dern. Interestingly, a "making of" short exists, but it is not included here. The only place you can find it is on a documentary about the rainbow wig "John 3:16" guy who used to be on camera at every sports event years ago. You remember him. He eventually wound up barricaded in a hotel room with hostages (surprise?) --- an interesting story in itself, but I have no idea why the making of The Fabulous Stains is on there. Allison Anders, director of Grace of My Heart, Mi Vida Loca, Gas, Food Lodging and Border Radio, writes the liner notes. So yay Rhino, I certainly never thought this would see DVD release.

Oh yeah, the film itself. I should probably say something about it, since I have probably bored everyone away by now with a thousand words of background.

Don't let the pictures here of the absurd hair and makeup on the girls throw you. I know it's Hollywood-wrong, but the hair ties into the story so you can consider it kind of a prop, and the angular lightning bolt makeup is really about the only place this film misses the mark.

In a nutshell, here's the story; a Rastafarian named "Lawnboy" (Barry Ford) is driving the Looters and the Metal Corpses around the bleak Northeastern U.S. in his bus, managing a tour of tiny dives. He sees Corinne "third degree" Burns (Lane) on a television news show after her mother dies, and for various reasons, offers the Stains a spot on the tour. So the Stains get on the bus and the fun begins.

I know, it's improbable. And there is the issue of that hair. But I have never seen another film that so successfully puts the bleak, no-budget rock and roll tour life onto the screen, or one that so deftly captures the "out with the old, in with the new" moment in time when punk threatened to make metal obsolete. The film was made in Vancouver and Pennsylvania, and a cold, wet, overcast mood permeates practically every frame. If it sounds dismal, it should. The majority of time life in a tour bus (or van, or car) is dismal. The Fabulous Stains nails that feeling perfectly.

The heart and soul of the film is the statement that Corinne wants the Stains to make. This is where the film gets into spooky precognition of the Riot Grrrl/third wave of punk scene, with its strong feminist message. Lines like, "I think every citizen should be given a guitar on her sixteenth birthday," and "They [men] have such big plans for the future, but those plans don't include us. So what does that make you? Just another girl lining up to die." Or at the pivotal moment of the film, "I'm perfect! But no one in this shithole gets me, because I don't put out!"

These are not the kind of things you heard from the actual female bands of the day, I promise you. Remember, it was post Runaways, pre-MTV when this was made, so you have to put yourself back into that time to realize how foreign and completely out of left field some of this stuff sounded. That Lane was capable of delivering such a believable and powerful performance without ever once crossing over into cringe or cheese territory - at the age of 15! - is really astounding.

So yeah, the Fabulous Stains. You could say I recommend it. Especially if you are old enough to remember those wacky late 70's, early 80's, when everything seemed possible. At least until it all collapsed under a blizzard of emptiness, advertising (a.k.a. MTV) and mediocrity.

Even if you're young and fresh and know full well that those old farts Green Day invented punk rock, it would be worth your while to watch the Fabulous Stains. I remember that I was slightly amused by watching all those old Elvis movies as a kid...that's what this will be like for you. Yet another ironic relic that you can smugly consume while maintaining your practiced distance and sense of entitlement and superiority. Knock yourself out.

read older posts

   

smog.blog powered by buddy V2.0