BITCHIN'

Here's the cover of the new Donnas album.

When you look at the back, it makes complete sense. Straight up eighties posturing.

But I have to wonder a couple of things. First: I am curious about the meaning of putting ass on the cover of your record. I know, the Donnas have always worked that jailbait/seductress thing, and I do appreciate that they're clothed all tough-like on the back here, not in corsets--more fatale than femme. But when Girlschool put an ass on their cover (the obvious reference here), what audience was that playing to, back in 1980?

And so, what about the Donnas? When is objectification tongue-in-cheek/kitsch? Or maybe the qualification is really, to whom--and can it ever be, fully? I know, I'm being all Bummer Feminist here. I'm just thinking aloud.

Design-wise, I'm not that interested in design that purely mimics a previous aesthetic. It seems lazy to me. And it also obviates the designer--where is your invention, your way of seeing? It's just pastiche. (I'm way more excited by, for example, the stunning opening credits of "Mad Men," which integrate 1960 mid-century minimalism with a modern illustrative sensibility--the Herman Miller and Knoll catalogs appear on screen for a moment, but they're the means, not the end.) Design has its own equivalent of Stone Temple Pilots--imitation so pure it's not even flattery, it's self-effacement. A fake so meticulously executed you'd think it's real. Which can be parasitic.(1)

The Donnas cover isn't parasitic, as it's not sucking the life force out of anything. Nostalgia is about the Over. And the eighties are definitely Over, though the nostalgia for them is through the roof. I'm curious about this, because the true believers, especially fashion-wise, seem to be mostly people who were born in the '80s or even '90s--the people who were basically babies, if that, the first time around. (Even though I was formatively age four to fourteen during that decade, I have pretty much zero nostalgia for the '80s. Maybe it's because I was living, literally and in my mind, in a woodland bubble with minimal/delayed pop culture exposure. We got three channels and I didn't watch them. I played in the woods and wrote horse novels. I never had a Madonna or Michael Jackson record. Totally missed David Bowie. Most '80s music I like now, I didn't discover until the '90s and the '00s. (2) )

Anyway, what I've heard of the Donnas record so far sounds exactly what the cover looks like. I really am not trying to dis the Donnas here. I think they are great musicians and performers and people. And I have a huge soft spot for pop-metal, despite the heinous misogyny of it (the lyrics to "Once Bitten, Twice Shy" will make any Rock'n'Roll Camp for Girls believer's stomach turn)--it was the soundtrack to high school, and I am ever a sucker for an inescapable pop hook. So it's cool that women are reclaiming/reappropriating that sound for their own purposes.

I'm just saying: when I saw that big purple ass at the top of the eMusic charts this morning, it struck me in all these ways. It grabbed my attention, and got me to write all this stuff about it; and just by looking at it, you know exactly what the record sounds like.

So maybe, ultimately, it's a design coup.


(1) Remember when that first STP single "Plush" came out? (No, if you're lucky.) The exactness of the Pearl Jam imitation was stunning. They were the first (of many) to reduce Vedder from a voice to a mannerism, just like Silverchair did to Cobain, et al., ad nauseum. The chameleon gone cannibal.

(2) My nineties nostalgia, on the other hand: encyclopedic.

INCIDENT REPORT

I subscribe to the Park Rapids Enterprise, my hometown newspaper (comes out twice a week, circulation 6000.) I used to work there in the summers of '93 and '94. Since it's a tiny paper, I was able, even at ages 17 and 18, to do pretty much everything--I reported, took photos, edited, and did layout. This was pre-digital times: we were exacto-ing out the text columns, feeding them through a machine that coated the back of the paper with a skin of warm wax, and sticking them down into place. Peeling off and taping down long thin stripe-stickers to frame the photos. (O ye olde twentieth century.)

The Enterprise was housed then a couple blocks off Main Street in one of the strangest structures I have ever worked in. It looked like a tin can, cut in half the long way and tipped over, and painted dark brown. (Basically, a turd.) The walls were cinder blocks, the roof was corrugated metal, and it had two doors and one window. Inside: carpet, dark fake wood paneling, and an open room of desks. I sat three feet away from the editor-in-chief, LuAnn Hurd-Lof, who was/is openly feminist, worked all the time, and constantly drank from a small styrofoam cup of office coffee.*

Today I went through recent issues with a scissors to extract some clippings. As always, there are a few Onion-worthy pieces--"Couple Liked It Here In Spite of Incident," and an amazing editorial called "Bleach Accident Causes 'Bullet Hole,'" which describes in detail a laundry mishap, and which I may have to reprint here in its entirety. But the INCIDENTS section is hands-down the best part of the Enterprise and 90% of why I subscribe. On a slow news week, they print every single call that comes in to the police station. I have one in front of me that takes up a full five columns. They break it up into categories: Miscellaneous, Animal-related, Fires, Accidents, ATV-related, and Burglaries, thefts. Here is a selection of things that made the paper last week:

Careless driving and rude gestures were reported in Akeley Township; A male was reported shooting rocks through a PVC pipe into a Park Rapids park; A red boat was driving "very crazy" in Mantrap Township; A "weird odor" was reported coming from a neighbor's house; A house was toilet-papered; A caller asked to speak to an officer regarding her aunt exploiting her grandmother; A highly intoxicated female who's "worked up" was refusing to leave in Lakeport Township; A Park Rapids caller asked to speak to an officer regarding his neighbor who ran over his ice cooler; A Helga Township caller requested 27-year-old daughter be removed from her home; A caller reported her granddaughter broke into her home while she was gone and had a party; A caller reported her renters vacated property at her request, but left horses behind, which she's been feeding; A "skinny dog" was reported in Todd Township; A horse with a saddle, no rider, was reported in the ditch; Shoes were reported stolen while caller's son was at the neighbor's house; A foreign car was reported to have flown around a corner and hit a tree in Park Rapids; Loggers were reported cutting through the night on the east side of Lake Minnie, disturbing caller's sleep; a Todd Township mailbox was "stuffed with something."

Thefts: gas, chainsaws, the food shelf, guns, money, rings, golf clubs, tires, a wiper blade.

The masthead of the Enterprise today is still made up of three quarters of the people I worked with then. Can you imagine being a sports writer in a town of 3,000 people? The only sports are high school sports. But Vance Carlson has been doing it for at least two decades. He goes to every game and meet, he takes the pictures, he writes up the stories. He is a veritable thesaurus of ways to say "defeat" ("Seals Swim Past Panthers" said a recent headline.) I have nothing but respect.


* LuAnn liked me and paid me more than I'd ever made: $7 an hour. She even let me have an opinion column. Fresh out of my first year at Oberlin, leftist fires a-blazing and jarred by re-entry culture shock, I chose as my first subject the Little Miss Park Rapids pageant; my second, the word "feminazi." The newspaper received a surge of letters, including a four-page handwritten-in-blue-ballpoint missive about baby-killers, and one cane-waving (no joke) lady stormed in demanding to have a word with me--"Who's this Chelsey Johnson? Where is she?"--alas/luckily I was out "reporting." But I also got stopped and thumbs-upped in the supermarket by the rad middle-aged women of P.R.'s small yet ardent feminist posse.

T:BA Festival

I'm a member of the "Press Corps" for PICA's Time-Based Art Festival this year. I have been gorging myself on performances and art and performance art. Here are links to writeups I've done so far (most with pictures too):

• Seeing Mikhail Baryshnikov dance in Donna Uchizono's Leap to Tall
• A breathtaking light installation of constructed eclipses
• Mirah and Spectratone International
• A roving guy reading On The Road aloud

I am formulating things to write about some of the other things I've seen--Taylor Mac, William Kentridge's 9 Drawings for Projection, the Dutch theater/film group Kassys' weirdly awesome Kommer. And there's still a whole slew of things to hit this weekend. I'll update as I go.

Here's Kassys, the super cute Dutch film/theater group.


UPDATE: I got sick! Terribly sick! And missed almost everything after. But despite anyone's better judgment, I staggered down to see the Nature Theater of Oklahoma's No Dice Saturday night.

OSCAR WAO

Yes! I have been waiting for this book since December 2000, when a story called "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" appeared in the New Yorker. I liked the previous Junot Diaz stories I'd read, but this blew Drown out of the water, bursting with bravado and heart and breaking all kinds of rules. I was in my first semester at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where many of my classmates liked to formulate you-can'ts about all kinds of narrative strategies--you can't switch tense! you can't shift point of view! you can't leave this track unresolved! ("Can you ask them if they've ever read fiction?" my girlfriend in New York commented), so the pleasure of reading this raucous, tumbling, cussing, unwieldy, POV-shuffling thing, featuring one particular sentence that took up a full column and a half without stopping, thrilled me. I made copies of it and for the past seven years it's been the literary equivalent of that one song you always put on mix tapes. Friends, students, colleagues, woo-ees: they all get it from me.

This part comes about halfway in:

The first time I met Oscar was at Rutgers. We were roommates our sophomore year, cramped up in Demarest, the university's official homo dorm, because Oscar wanted to be a writer and because I'd pulled the last number in the housing lottery. You never met more opposite niggers in your life. He was a dork, totally into Dungeons & Dragons and comic books; he had like a billion science-fiction paperbacks, all in his closet; and me, I was into girls, weight lifting, and Danocrine. .... Those were the Boricua Posse days, and I never got home before six in the morning, so mostly what I saw of Oscar was a big, dormant hump crashed out under a sheet. When we were in the dorm together, he was either working on his novel or talking on the phone to his sister, who I'd seen a few times at Douglass. (I'd tried to put a couple of words on her because she was no joke in the body department, but she cold-crumbed me.) Those first months, me and my boys ragged on Oscar a lot--I mean, he was a nerd, wasn't he?--and right before Halloween I told him he looked like that fat homo Oscar Wilde, which was bad news for him, because then all of us started calling him Oscar Wao. The sad part? After a couple of weeks, he started answering to it.

Besides me fucking with him, we never had no problems; he never got mad at me when I said shit, just sat there with a hurt stupid smile on his face. Made a brother feel kinda bad, and after the others left, I would say, You know I was just kidding, right? By second semester, I even started to like the kid a little. Wasn't it Turgenev who said, Whom you laugh at you forgive and come near to loving?

The mix of slang and literary reference and Spanglish and comic books (Marvel and Daniel Clowes) sucked me in, but what I loved most about the story was the raw vulnerability beneath all the bluster and fast talk: people dying to, and for, love. But that was it. Nothing else from Diaz, at all. All I had was this photocopy from the New Yorker. Finally this June, another Junot Diaz story appeared: "Wildwood." And instantly I recognized Lola the sister, and lo, there was Oscar himself, and, joy, an author bio snippet that mentioned a whole book. Here it is! (Michiko Kakutani loves it.)

Thursday! I'm on it!
This is, like, my Harry Potter.
Also, Diaz comes to Powell's on September 25.

BRUISECAM, days one and two

Blinded by smoke machine and a row of bright floor lights, I stepped off a stage. I could have sworn there was floor there.

DAY ONE. It tingled for like three hours. I was all, Whatever, I don't need to ice it, and kept on working. Then suddenly, deep bone ache with every step.

It swelled to the size of a small mango. I mean, you could see the bulge in my jeans. I should have taken a profile shot.

DAY TWO

Here we see a more expressive palette emerging.

The trailer moment

Joss Whedon interview on The Onion. Love it. So long. This is sometimes the bane, but in this case the blessing, of the internet: no word count limit.

AVC: What do you mean when you say you write trailers before you write projects?

JW: I'll have an idea, and then I'll start to think about what's behind that, and what would be the big emotional moment, what would be the catch, what would be the thing I'd love to see. ....

The most obvious example, and I've used it before, is Buffy in the alley. I really thought about it: [Trailer narration voice.] "It's a bad town to be in, especially at night." There's the girl in the alley. "Especially if you're alone." And then the monster attacks her and she kills it. "And especially if you're a vampire." It was that turnaround, which I hadn't seen, and which has obviously been seen a million times now, but this was 20 years ago. I wrote that, and it's in the actual movie. They didn't use it for the trailer, and the scene isn't shot exactly how I imagined it. But when I'm thinking of a trailer moment, I'm not just thinking of how I can grab people. That's my whole philosophy. My entire career is in that trailer moment: The emotional highs of the movie, and the thing you haven't seen, and the thing you're longing for. They should all be connected.

That's just one of those things where I read it and I instantly want to go write.

Svag!

Amanda and I hit the IKEA Grand Opening on our way out to a dog romp--we didn't bother waiting in line, etc., just barged in on the opening ceremony. You missed: TV crews, Swedish national anthem, old man in knickers creakily cranking up Swedish and American flags, ladies in Swedish national costume handing out canary-yellow swag, Tom Potter droning, finally ABBA blasting "Dancing Queen" as the manic hordes burst forth and flooded (shuffled) through the doors, waving their inflatable IKEA thunder-sticks.



Picture the throngs below streaming out of the left side of the frame and all the way around the back of the building, where hundreds more patient consumers waited in the paved and barren shadows, far out of earshot and sight of the "entertainment."

The front-of-line people started camping out on Monday for the Wednesday morning opening. For this, they were rewarded with I WAS ONE OF THE FIRST 100 AT PORTLAND IKEA T-shirts. (Which you can see tied around/tucked into? the waist of the middle lady.)


Amanda and I targeted the Swedish dames like fighter pilots, swooping in on as much tacky swag as possible in fifteen minutes. (The dogs were waiting in the car.)



I am unexpectedly excited to now own a "cellphone chair," a yellow nerfy thing upon which my battered mobile is currently resting.

The future is waiting

Backstage at the Rock'n'Roll Camp for Girls showcase last night.

ROBERT, 1975-2007

My friend Robert died last night. He was found in his apartment in Oslo by a bandmate. It is in the Norwegian newspapers.


(That's Robert, on the left. Then Frode, then this other singer Ane Brun, then Sivert.)

I met him in 1997, during one of a handful of amazing summers where I'd go to Norway for a whole month. He and his bandmates had moved from their tiny town way above the Arctic Circle to Oslo, to make it as a band. They were called Abbey's Adoption, one of the worst band names I've ever heard. (Also: imagine it spoken with a Norwegian accent.) Frode explained (sheepishly) that, unable to agree on a name, they had opened up the English dictionary to A and picked out two of the first words they found. Fortunately, they dropped it after like two shows and became Madrugada.

Miraculously, they actually did make it and became one of the biggest bands in Norway.

I originally wrote way more in a huge long post here but it made me feel weird, writing all these things about it. I haven't seen Robert in a few years. But he was a sweet, kind person, and I knew him at a really good time in my life, and his. And I'm terribly, deeply sad that he "left," as they say in Norwegian. His summer was booked with shows and he was in the middle of recording Madrugada's fifth album. He was only 31, two and a half weeks older than me. Isn't in medias res where you're supposed to start, not end?

Hva tenkte du, kjære venn? Du var ikke ferdig her.

WE ARE GONNA BREAK IT DOWN FOR YOU

The rock camp session one showcase was one of our best yet.
The Today Show was there to film it! Segment airing sometime in the next couple weeks!
Here are photos.

UPDATE: Here's the Today Show segment. I am in it for two seconds. Disclaimer: I had no idea they were going to be at camp when I arrived the first morning of the session. I definitely had not showered.