Month: April 2004

Kristin Hersh has long been one of our favorite songwriters from the post-punk flowering of the eighties, and we’re excited to see this new trio of hers, which promises to take full advantage of her ability to create full-on and ferocious rock (her solo and Throwing Muses work often strove for a more fragile beauty). Designed to be an energy-driven live act, 50 Foot Wave also operates on a short-sharp-shock philosophy for CD releases, with six-song EPs due every nine months; the first came out in March.

It’s 1979, and President Jimmy Carter is trying his damnedest. So are some of the finest new bands to emerge since the British invasion. Elvis Costello has just released Armed Forces, Talking Heads have offered up Fear of Music, and Neil Young has turned out Rust Never Sleeps. Yet Graham Parker’s Squeezing Out Sparks beats them all. Alas, as he sang many contracts later in “3 Martini Lunch,” the record biz is a “good life if you’re winning; it’s a killer if you’re not.” For Parker, it’s often been the latter; witness his being lowered to a free show at Brit’s last Bastille Day. Luckily, his chops and lyrics remain as keen as ever, and this time at least people will deservedly have to pay. He’s touring behind a brand-new disc, Your Country, on the likeminded indie label Bloodshot. 318 1st Ave. N., Minneapolis; (612) 338-8100; www.finelinemusic.com

Close your eyes during a Leon Redbone concert and you might imagine yourself on a rickety old back porch off the Louisiana bayou, sometime early last century, with banjoes strumming and an eccentric crooning to the harvest moon. Redbone has been crafting his unique blend of back-porch ragtime jazz and blues since the early seventies, with a charm and style that have gotten him called a “rural Bing Crosby.” With his ever-present white brimmed hat, dark sunglasses, and thick mustache, Redbone has become his own caricature, distinctive enough to be featured in a Far Side cartoon. His last album of all-new work was 2001’s Anytime, but he’s kept a busy touring schedule and even provided a voice for the recent Will Ferrell comedy Elf. 90 S. 9th St., Minenapolis; (612) 312-2828; www.bluestarjazz.com

Either childrens’ books have been getting progress-ively smarter recently, or our reading level has … Er. Let’s start again. Children’s books have been getting progressively smarter recently, what with the literary sophistication to be found in writers like Philip Pullman, Lemony Snicket, and, many would argue, J.K. Rowling. Hard Times is aimed at younger readers, too, but Alabama novelist and former Stillwater teacher Henderson doesn’t dumb things down, writing about violence and abandonment in moving and straightforward prose. Her fourth book for local publisher Milkweed is an absorbing story of survival during the worst years of the Great Depression. Twelve-year-old MaryJake, cast aside at the crossroads by her dirt-poor parents, disguises herself as a boy and strikes out on her own, sort of Huck Finn in reverse.

Hard-bop innovator Eric Alexander is always refining and reworking his vivacious sax styling, but remains true to his biggest influences—Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson, and many of the original bebop pioneers. In 1991, at the tender age of 22, his rep blossomed after he placed second to Joshua Redman at the prestigious Thelonious Monk Inter- national Jazz Competition. JazzWeek named him artist of the year in 2003, and his momentum hasn’t slowed. The Second Milestone is a paramount showcase of Alexander’s energetic and freewheeling approach, while Nightlife in Tokyo, his latest, builds upon his strength as a composer. In forty years, jazz cats will be covering this guy like they cover Wayne Shorter today. Expect a vigorous night of the aggressive yet harmonious bop-based action that Alexander has made something all his own. 408 St. Peter St., St. Paul; (651) 292-1359; mnjazz.com

As documented by Legs McNeil in Please Kill Me, the definitive chronicle of the early punk era, Deborah Harry and Joey Ramone were good people—two of the few CBGB’s scenesters at the time who refrained from pretending not to care about success, while stabbing each other in the back to achieve it. Even at the top, Harry threw it all away to nurse her bandmate/lover Chris Stein, who was suffering from the rare and horrible genetic illness pemphigus. While Stein recovered, the mostly retired Harry ballooned up to Kate Smith size, the object of tabloid ridicule. She gets the last laugh, though, in last month’s comeback record The Curse of Blondie, in which she looks and sounds as crackling as ever, with her band following suit. (612) 332-1775; www.first-avenue.com

A twelve-year, twenty-five-volume project to reprint every Charlie Brown cartoon ever made? Good grief. Well, even if you’re sick to death of the civic-boosting Schulz statues dotting (or blighting) St. Paul, this first volume provides a good opportunity to reassess Sparky Schulz’s work without the commercializing excesses that have gotten in the way. Despite repeated quotation by scores of Lutheran pastors looking to funny up their Sunday sermons, Schulz didn’t pretend to pursue any great religious or political insights through Peanuts. (He hated that title, by the way—“It has no dignity. It’s not even a nice word,” he complained, but his newspaper syndicate insisted.) What he did offer was simple and homespun humor with an edge of bittersweet pathos; not exactly Camus, but a melancholy, contrapuntal rejoinder to the fifties’ bright and shiny surface. Oh, and it’s also where Snoop Dogg got his name, so that brings a whole new level of street cred.

Now that E.L. Doctorow has been elevated to that rare pantheon of not-dead white writers worth reading, it will be worth checking out what has made him transcend the solipsistic excesses of Nobel laureate Saul Bellow and his ilk. World’s Fair, Ragtime, and Billy Bathgate were compulsively readable literature—and we have to thank Doctorow’s novel for inspiring the opening scene of the Bathgate movie version, when Dustin Hoffman is fitting Bruce Willis with concrete shoes, the better to toss Bruce in the East River. If only art really did imitate life. Sweet Land collects a handful of shorter Doctorow tales, all of which echo his familiar themes of alienation and survival in the American heartland.

The great news is that Pete is going to be a dad—the first in my little circle of friends. For no good reason at all, my little gang seems to have put off having kids. Even though Pete, Ben, Don, and I have all joked about being deaf to the ticking of the biological clock, our wives are beginning to get itchy. Fact is, all my guy friends would make great dads, and they are all signed up for eventual parenthood. Even Don, who is going through a sort of second adolescence involving lots of casual sex with women a decade younger than he is.

We’re all very excited about Pete. But something funny happened on the way to fatherhood. Amanda, Pete’s wife, decided that pregnancy created a mandate for cleaning the house. In particular, she went at the attic with a vengeance. Now, the attic is normally Pete’s domain. Every guy I know has carved a little space for himself at home—whether it’s a shop in the garage, or a corner of the basement. And it’s generally considered bad form to go into a man’s domain and mess around with things. Cleaning is an especially serious transgression.

So, Amanda found Pete’s inflatable sex doll. Needless to say, there were fireworks, recriminations, and tears. Pete claimed that it was a gag, given to him by his friends back in college when he was notoriously and involuntarily celibate. But Amanda did not believe him. Owing to her pregnancy, she said, she was especially disgusted with her husband and her husband’s friends, and she threw the doll in the trash. Knowing which battles are lost before they’ve even begun, Pete prudently did not object.

Technically, Pete’s claim was true, and I knew it. I had been one of the buddies who pitched in for the gift back in our college days, and was tickled to learn that Pete had held onto “Maureen” all these years. Of course, corroborating Pete’s story got him no closer to redemption with Amanda. That’s because we all assumed Pete held onto Maureen for reasons that went somewhat beyond comedy.

After the discovery, it was a tense week. It was unclear how big a deal Amanda meant to make of Maureen. Pete was officially in the doghouse, and Amanda seemed to be mulling the long-term consequences. So all the guys met up at the local to discuss the situation. It turns out that Pete had recently dug Maureen out of a box. Without getting into sordid details, Pete was feeling like it would be at least a year before he and Amanda would be making love again. He was anticipating a period of loneliness that reminded him of the bad old days of bachelorhood.

As usual, Don, Ben, and I all made fun of Pete. He deserved it! Did he really believe that pregnant women can’t or won’t make love? Ben said he’d heard that the hormonal whirlpool of pregnancy often made women very, very interested in sex. True, Don had heard that some women are so freaked out by pregnancy that they’d rather not touch a man for a decade. But the fact is, there is no reason to believe that pregnancy should have anything but a positive effect on the sex lives of married men. (Think about it: For starters, a woman can’t get pregnant if she’s already pregnant. No protection, no problem!)

Which brings us back to Maureen. I have no idea whether Pete had any intention of reinflating her, and that was hardly the point. The real problem was that she represented a kind of selfishness. There is nothing wrong with an inflatable sex doll in itself, and there is nothing wrong with using one for its intended purpose. But in Pete’s life, it represented a kind of self-centeredness that could easily be addressed by simply talking to Amanda about his fears and his desires. How did she feel about sex, now that she was pregnant? Would they need to try something new? If she felt like taking a break from intimate relations, would it be all right for Pete to go solo with a clean conscience?

So, after we made fun of Pete, we told him to go home—go home right now and have a heart-to-heart with Amanda about his fears and doubts, no matter how silly or selfish they might seem. Men hate to appear weak, vulnerable, or needy. And it’s only about a million times worse when those feelings involve their sexuality. But we have to get over that. It is not weak or shameful to worry about whether you’ll ever have sex again with your now-pregnant wife, but it is weak not to speak to her about it. And for heaven’s sake, Pete. Why the hell didn’t you throw Maureen away years ago? You made us all look like idiots!

The now ubiquitous spoiler—that horizontal fin typically perched on the trunks of sports cars—goes way back, back before the elevated brake lights that now decorate them on every third Honda you get behind on Lake Street. In the early days of Gran Turismo racing in Europe, about forty years ago, the spoiler was the solution to the problem of “lift.” At one hundred miles per hour and greater, the massive airflow under race cars has a tendency to lift the rear of the vehicle, depriving the wheels of traction, and preventing—as physicists and motorheads everywhere know—the transmission of power to the road surface. Clever engineers decided to capture the force of air rushing over the top of the car with a wing-shaped appendage on the back that would transmit that force down to keep the rubber on the road. In the sixties and seventies, Ferrari and Lamborghini added spoilers to their production cars, and it was only a matter of time before everybody wanted one.

The family tree of such bolt-on beauties has deeper roots, of course, than GT racing and Ferrari envy. Some would trace the lineage back to the Cadillac fins of the fifties, or even the running boards of the forties. But it took dealers a while to realize what kind of market share they were giving up to classified advertisers in the back pages of car magazines. By the seventies, enthusiasts were spending thousands to “personalize” their cars, and dealers were still just peddling rustproofing and the odd set of floormats after the deal. The enhancement trend reached the average consumer in the eighties as itinerant installers went from dealer to dealer like gypsies, dressing up defenseless, ordinary sedans with euphemisms like the “spring package” (white spoiler, white wheel covers, and a pink stripe on a white car) and “performance group” (rear-deck wing, chrome wheels, low-profile tires).

Observing the force that spoilers exerted on consumers’ wallets (if not their wheels), most dealers have now folded accessory departments into the showroom. To see the very latest in auto prosthetics, I paid a visit to a suburban metro dealer whose manager kindly asked that no one be named, though I can safely disclose that they sell a brand that rhymes with “gourd.”

The strangest new things are now sprouting from trucks. Our manager estimated that eighty-five percent of all new models are “personalized” before delivery. The decline of the once popular visor (so many fallen to automatic car-wash brushes, said the manager) has given way to “vent shades,” which are plastic deflectors apparently designed to keep air from entering the window, even if it’s open. “Cab back spoilers,” a matched pair of wings mounted vertically to the top of a pickup box where it meets the back of the cab, are still in some demand, but the strangest thing has to be the “tailgate spoiler,” a narrow little wing stuck out on the end of a pickup box like the last hot girl to leave a party. SUV buyers hate to be left out of anything, so they can get a “rear air deflector” mounted near the top of the tailgate too, though frankly, it’s less of a statement.

Despite the caricature that spoilers have become on trucks (and yes, even minivans), they have enjoyed a huge comeback in the street-racing subculture, where the Honda Civic (no kidding) has muscled into the gearhead niche inhabited thirty years ago by Novas, ’Cudas, and GTOs. Known either disparagingly or venerably as “riced-out,” depending on whom you talk to, Civics and even Acuras now appear alongside their big-block ancestors on the Porky’s scene in St. Paul, dressed in ground effects, $2,000 worth of trick wheels, and massive homemade spoilers that look like they might have been stripped from a Cessna.

Ever mindful of our readers’ needs, we found an expert to explain what folks are actually getting for their aftermarket dollar. Automotive engineer Simon Palko took a strong stand for fiberglass conservation. “You’d be better off throwing fifty pounds of bricks in the back,” he said of the various truck enhancements I described, adding that the wind drag inherent in pickup and SUV design is merely exacerbated by the add-ons.

What about the Civics cruising Lake Street like nobody’s business? Palko pointed out that all of these cars are front-wheel drive. Were they to go fast enough to generate lift, he said, “adding down force in the back is acting like a lever, reducing force to the drive wheels in the front.” He doubts, however, that many of them reach the velocity where it matters. “With most of those cars, for every fifteen horsepower they add in performance modifications, they add fifty pounds of plastic for cosmetics. It all kind of balances out.”—Joe Pastoor