Thursday, June 3, 2010

Rock of the 80s, Talking Food, Evil Clowns

•I don’t know if anyone’s interested in joining me or if tickets are still available, but I notice (Bauhaus-like) She Wants Revenge opening for Psychedelic Furs here tomorrow, which kinda makes sense (and it’s standing-room, so no need to coordinate ticket-purchasing). Just a thought (also gotta see the Guillermo del Toro-produced and reportedly brainy and disturbing biotech-themed thriller Splice, opening tomorrow, at some point).

•I was half-tempted to see the band Das Racist (playing with a band called Junk Science) last week, they being the geniuses behind the song “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.” I did not — but last month I did see live Aqua Teen Hunger Force, an impulse purchase made when I overheard one of the Bill O’Reilly staffers sitting near the Napolitano team say he was too busy to use the tickets he’d purchased. I learned that Dana Snyder basically really is Master Shake, though you wouldn’t have thought a human could look that much like an animated milkshake.

•I think this blog entry adeptly sums up the experience — including the unexpected appearance of the amazing, dark, and operatic singer Puddles the Clown. We will hear more from this Puddles, I am convinced. And, in a reminder that certain patterns keep recurring, here’s a pivotal paragraph from the front page of Puddles’ website:

Puddles and MonkeyZuma first joined forces in 1999 in Atlanta when they formed the all-clown/all-monkeygirl band “Greasepaint” with the Rev. Uncle Laffo. Greasepaint performed for years with highlights including the Maxim Magazine Libertarian Party hosted by Jello Biafra during the 2000 National Republican Convention in Philadelphia and as opening act for Tenacious D

•Speaking of sinister clowns, historian Christine Caldwell Ames forwards this photo of Glurpo the underwater clown who used to perform at an aquarium and will now perform in your nightmares.

Law & Order is ending, but the spin-off …SVU survives, as does a new spin-off called LOLA: Law & Order Los Angeles — and I learned this, coincidentally, one day after shaking hands with an SVU star on the street (I had previously met Joel de la Fuente back at Brown and a couple times since). Mere hours later, as it happens, I found myself being cordoned inside a building for a while so cops could examine a “suspicious vehicle” outside. Quite a contrast with what I was doing inside the building, which was seeing a spirited punk concert by the Buzzcocks last month. If the music were really working properly, I suppose we would have rioted rather than follow police instructions, but then again, Buzzcocks draws an older punk crowd.

•The aforementioned O’Reilly staffer is one of many people, like me, who was pleased to see how much attention the death of rocker Ronnie James Dio got. I introduced him to the Dio video for “The Last in Line,” which I contend is not only very cool but is likely where the Star Trek designers got the idea for the look of the Borg. Dave Whitney’s not a big Dio fan but confesses to liking “Man on the Silver Mountain” from Dio’s Rainbow period and “Mob Rules” from back in Dio’s days with Black Sabbath and was pleased by Dio’s appearance as a mentor-figure in the Tenacious D movie (again, it’s all connected).  But, heck, I’ll confess to liking a Rainbow song that  wasn’t even from the Dio period: the later “Street of Dreams” from 1984, which may be the most quintessentially hairband song of which I’ve ever been fond.

1 comment:

Todd Seavey said...

Jeez, all roads lead from Dio-related bands to Star Trek: I just realized the main character in the “Street of Dreams” video appears to be played by Alexander Siddig, a.k.a. Siddig El Fadil, a.k.a. _Star Trek: Deep Space Nine_’s Doctor Bashir. Siddig, incidentally, has been involved romantically with at least two Trek actors: Nana Visitor, with whom he had a child, and Kim Cattrall (who played a Bajoran and a Romulan/Vulcan, respectively, Bashir of course merely being an illicitly genetically-engineered earthling, as we learned in one of the clever war plotlines that arguably made that the best of all Trek series, with the possible exception of the original).