Interview: Aaron Woolf, director of King Corn

The A.V. Club, Madison print edition, April 12, 2007 Link

Fields Of Green, Plates Of Beige

Corn products put the color in what Aaron Woolf calls “the big bad beige foods”—soda and chicken nuggets, for example. For their documentary King Corn, screening this weekend at the Wisconsin Film Festival, Woolf and friends Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis grew an acre of corn in Iowa, then tracked the product as it turned into some of the worst foods Americans eat, whether in the form of livestock feed or food coloring. Woolf spoke to The A.V. Club about the challenges and shocks of corn-centric filmmaking.

The A.V. Club: You moved from Baltimore to Iowa for college. What did you think of the cornfields then?

Aaron Woolf: I thought that those fields were so beautiful and otherworldly. To go from no knowledge of that landscape and that world to being awed and wowed by it, and then 10 years later to go back—we’ve denuded the prairie and created this very frightening landscape. It’s a massive swing in how you perceive those fields.

AVC: It must be hard to talk to a wider audience about all these ingredients that sound like gibberish on a food label, not to mention that it all connects back to corn.

AW: Oh my God, can you imagine? It was my job to go out and try to raise the money initially, and I went back to some of the people that had funded some of my previous stuff, and said, “Oh, there’s this incredible story, and we’re gonna make a film about agricultural subsidies and corn,” and you’d just watch their faces glaze over.

AVC: Do you find yourself trying to avoid foods that contain corn?

AW: Curt and Ian are always eating fast food throughout the film, I think partly to say that one of the great ironies is that you move to an area like the Iowa countryside, where so much of America’s food is grown, and it’s very hard to find anything to eat. You can’t eat any of the food grown in the fields, ’cause it’s all inedible until it’s processed, and the food in the restaurants is usually some re-packaged version of the commodity crops. It didn’t really change the way we ate too much, because that’s all we could eat. I think one of the scariest things that’s happening right now is that we’re growing into this two-food society. People who live on the coasts or in university towns have access to these co-ops and natural food markets and farmer’s markets and community-supported agriculture programs, and people who don’t don’t get fresh produce. They get all sorts of processed foods, and I think that’s the real tragedy.

AVC: So there’s no hope for a corn-free-food movement?

AW: Well, one of the things I also hope people take away from this film is that corn is not bad. Some corn does some things very well. It’s just that we shouldn’t be encouraging the over-production of corn year after year by subsidizing it this way, because that’s what makes the fast food so cheap. If a Happy Meal cost $4 or $5, then people might think, oh, I’ll get some broccoli tonight instead of eating McDonald’s.

Permanent Records: Beulah: The Coast Is Never Clear

The A.V. Club, Oct. 23, 2007 Link

The context: When it made 2001's The Coast Is Never Clear, San Francisco band Beulah had already proven that leaders Miles Kurosky and Bill Swan could make a pop song gleam without revealing too much information. Its 1999 breakthrough, When Your Heartstrings Break, hinted at Kurosky's bitterness as a songwriter, and on Beulah's final album, 2003's Yoko, he carved it in with all the grace of a rusty paper clip. In between, on Coast, the band's pleasant side struggled to make more room for a clearly difficult personality.

The greatness: When Kurosky's ego swells, the hooks push up against it. On "A Good Man Is Easy To Kill," he sings about his emotionally tricky father, obscuring the specifics with wordplay ("When they drilled holes in your skull / and screwed that halo to your head, did you think you could fly?") and keeping the universal in plain English ("Give, up, give up your love / I promise it's not gonna kill you, and I need you, lord I need you"). As he once told an interviewer, "There's a good Miles and a bad Miles," and they're both in this song—one just begging for relief and the other choking on his spite. Like much of the album, this song takes pride in wallowing, but Swan and the duo's collaborators give people choices: Whine along with Kurosky, or thump to the distorted bass riff and flute solo. Get sad, deliriously happy, or anything in between.

Horns, strings, synths, vocals harmonies, and guitars overload the songs, and they do need to be overloaded. Without its mournful trumpets—and its general sense that pop music is a distraction from life—closer "Night Is The Day Turned Inside Out" might still be a fearsome tearjerker, but harder to enjoy on repeat listens. "Popular Mechanics For Lovers" celebrates self-delusion following a breakup, and the piano traipsing around his words softens the resentment, or at least reminds that this is forgivable behavior.

Defining song: It'd be impossible to fill an album with open-wound epics like "A Good Man Is Easy To Kill," and the band finds more balance in "Gene Autry," a song that looks forward despite its anxieties. In the chorus, "The city spreads out just like a cut vein" and "everybody drowns, sad and lonely." Everything else about the song—the lazy gallop of the guitar hook, the affectionate Western fantasies, and one of the snappiest horn breaks ever played on a rock record—lets this drama queen bask in boyish optimism.

Interview: Bob Odenkirk

The A.V. Club, May 17, 2007 Link

The full version's long. Intro and excerpts:

Bob Odenkirk has never lacked an unmistakable comedic voice, but he'll admit that he's struggled to find the right place for it since he and David Cross finished with the sketch comedy of Mr. Show. It's been a treat whenever Odenkirk has popped up at all over the past nine years; he's taken small parts in TV shows and movies, directed several films that didn't satisfy him or his audience, and successfully mentored Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, the creators of Tom Goes To The Mayor and the new Tim And Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! Odenkirk recently told The A.V. Club why he thinks he's ready to rally with projects like Derek & Simon, a new series debuting May 16 on superdeluxe.com, and The Brothers Solomon, a film due for a fall release.

...

AVC: Since you've got such a writing background, it seems like it'd be pretty hard to get used to directing something you didn't write.

BO: Well, when I worked at Saturday Night Live and on Mr. Show, I worked with a lot of material that other people wrote, and I helped people develop pieces that they wrote, so I've looked at directing films that I didn't write in a similar way. "Look, I think I get your idea here, is this what you're going for? Well, I'll try to do that. I think I know how to do that." The problem is that when you're talking about sketches, it doesn't take so long to do, and it isn't so much pressure, and whether you fall short or not, you finish up and hope the writers are happy. That's how I feel about it. With a feature, to find yourself working as hard as you work and going under the stress you go through, and then going, "I didn't even write that, I'm only trying to help this be good. It's not necessarily something I would have done."

Obviously, if I had my way, I would've spent the last few years of my life doing a Mr. Show sketch movie, and doing my adaptation of The Fuck Up, or my movie [Kanan Rhodes: Unkillable Servant Of Justice] that I wrote with Scott [Aukerman] and BJ [Porter] and all that stuff. But to make my way into the feature-directing world, I have to make it any way I can. The first film I made was called Melvin Goes To Dinner, and it was a small movie that I co-financed that Mike Blieden had written, and I had a really good idea of how to shoot it, and had a great experience doing that. Still, again, nothing measures up to Mr. Show, even though I'm very proud of that and think I did a great job.

But in a lot of ways, I felt like I took someone else's vision and helped them to make it happen in a really strong way. And then I made two films that other people financed that they were auditioning people to direct, and I got those jobs: Let's Go To Prison and The Brothers Solomon, which comes out in September. I've gotten a lot out of those. To me, they're like film school—learning about running a set, learning about everything, and learning about the most important thing, which is dealing with the studios and the producers and the money people, and making a project go, and what makes something go for the business end of it, so that you can get to make the movies that you write.

AVC: So you're still learning to control the process.

BO: Yeah, absolutely. When it comes to features, if I have to do one to just make a living, I'll do it, but if I don't, I'm gonna try to do TV until I can find a movie that I think is extremely good. Either written by someone else or written by me, where I just really believe in it as much as I believed in Mr. Show or anything. I've done my service now. I've done my learning.

...

AVC: Does it surprise you that shows like [Tim And Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!] are attracting prestigious guest stars and a slightly wider audience?

BO: That's a strange thing, but I know all these people from a million places. I know John C. Reilly from Mr. Show, and then he was on Tenacious D, which I produced. There was one where I think Tim and Eric finally did cold-call people. It is a surprising and funny occurrence. Tim and Eric and I were saying how they went and saw John at the set he's on right now, and he can't wait to do Steve Brule again. Then you see the other side of that, which is all these celebrities did it because they love a chance to just be crazy. Tom Goes To The Mayor wasn't a hard production. You just walked in and went in the room and read your stuff and posed a few times, and it took a total of 40 minutes to do your guest spot, which is very rare and not how most things are done. I don't think there's a great proliferation of shows like that, so I don't see that things are too different overall.

I think the biggest change is the Internet and Funny Or Die and Super Deluxe, because Super Deluxe is not found video and it's not one-offs. It's not kids in their dorms eating as much baloney as they can, and saying, "Watch me change T-shirts 100 times." It's people making shows, and it's not just regular people, it's people in the comedy scene in L.A., and most are interesting people with funny, interesting points of view. That's the big new step, to me.

T.V. Club entry: The Boondocks: "...Or Die Tryin'"

The A.V. Club, Oct. 9, 2007 Link

Adult Swim has a habit of fattening its lineup with joyfully goofy, if often moronic, tidbits like Squidbillies, Assy McGee, and Frisky Dingo, and The Boondocks seems determined to wall off its own voice from all that. Even during its silliest moments, the adaptation of Aaron McGruder's comic strip gives its audience a stern stare.

The show also seems determined to bridge AS' comedy and anime audiences, tempering the strip's often explosive humor with a pacing that leaves a lot of room for emotional shifts. It doesn't force itself to be funny all the time, though its second season begins with a stinging, distinctly McGruder laugh, in a trailer for the fictitious terrorism thriller-cum-blaxploitation comedy Soul Plane 2: The Blackjacking! ("Come see why black incompetence is our funniest weapon in the war on terror!"). The hero? 50 Cent, voiced perfectly (kind of like a little kid mumbling a gangsta-rap fantasy to himself): "I'll stop those terrorists—or die tryin'."

Grandpa and Riley bounce off to the cineplex, dragging along Huey and the exceedingly innocent Jazmine. Huey keeps his mind on the wider struggles (inciting the theater's employees to unionize), while Grandpa continues his lifelong war against paying for tickets and overpriced snacks (oh, and having to butter your own popcorn). Soon, the satire gets almost too brutal to draw laughs--a pre-feature ad in the theater reminds that "Stealing movies is a felony. It's just like robbing the elderly--or murder," setting the message against a gruesome mugging-shooting scene. Again, The Boondocks doesn't insist on comedy--it's a collage of threats, fears, temptations, degradations, and obstacles a family faces (and sometimes brings upon itself).

The series felt a bit disappointing at first--narrow Adult Swim comedy-not-anime viewer that I am, I just expected more laughs--but now I'm actually grateful that the series is willing to do the things a strip can't. The strip needs punch, so the jokes and underlying pettiness tend to come out in neat, almost predictable jabs. The show lets you wallow in Huey's world a little longer, which actually makes it harder to, say, dismiss Grandpa as a jackass. Sure, he goes off on a needless rant about snack-counter service, making a scene in the theater lobby, but at least we see the filthy, disappointing condiments area through his eyes. All that uneasy space between the cruel laughs and the fight sequences? That's where this show thrives. This is the programming block that gave us Sealab 2021 and Tom Goes To The Mayor, so why not push the discomfort even further?

Grade: B+

Stray observations:

—"This is going to be the worst day of your life. I'm bringing nunchuks."

—Anime-styled crying children are the saddest crying children of all.

—Guest voices: Snoop Dogg and Mo'Nique, who appeared in the original Soul Plane.

—Really, whoever wrote this Soul Plane parody should've been born 15 years earlier and written parody bits for The Critic.

—Somehow, it's always satisfying when Huey's idealism meets not just frustration but true spite. When a ticket-taker tells Huey the theater's employers formed a union (on Huey's advice), and promptly got fired, this exchange follows:

"Well, uh, power to the peop--"

"Fuck you."

Album Review: Amiina: Kurr

The A.V. Club, June 19, 2007 Link

When backing fellow Icelanders Sigur Rós on strings, the four women of Amiina add to a surging muscle mass; Amiina's own work crafts a deceptively delicate frame. The group's color-coded dresses and effortless instrument-switching reinforce attention spans live, as strings join tuned wine glasses, hand bells, musical saw, harmonium, laptop, and much more. But when reduced to modest melodies, the songs on the group's debut album, Kurr, share warmth without trying to force a Sigur-style epiphany. Songs like "Seoul" don't wallow in the novelty—even the most unlikely instruments align in patient, twinkling patterns, contained like a storm in a snowglobe. Amiina's mystical patience makes Kurr decidedly non-overwhelming, and that's its victory. It proves that one of the world's strangest bands can also be one of the most approachable.

A.V. Club Rating: A

Album Review: Patton Oswalt: Werewolves And Lollipops

The A.V. Club, July 10, 2007 Link

Jon Voight's scrotum, megalomaniac chefs, and the epic flash-frying of a heckler—it all folds comfortably into Patton Oswalt's geeky warmth on his second stand-up album, Werewolves And Lollipops. As on his 2004 debut, Feelin' Kinda Patton, the bits swoop in for multiple kills, obsessing over absurd realities and morbid parallels. And again, this yields enough phrase-nuggets to rival Oswalt's collection of Star Wars memorabilia—"goof juice," "courtesy fat," "broods of failure." If Oswalt has a shtick, it's exhausting the crowd, propping it up, and wearing it out again, all without trying its patience. Playing Feelin' and Werewolves back to back has the same effect, in spite of the albums' similarities. From Oswalt, "more of the same" is never exactly that.

A.V. Club Rating: A

Album Review: The Fiery Furnaces: Widow City

The A.V. Club, Oct. 9, 2007 Link

Widow City is as much a trip to a musical rummage sale as any previous Fiery Furnaces album, and siblings Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger wrap their finds together with growing efficiency. In fact, the hints of clumsiness and chaos save the Friedbergers from getting too cocky. The bouncy "Ex-Guru" gives way to a lurching mutant orchestra for about 30 seconds, and then much of the mystery is gone again. As on previous records, The Fiery Furnaces earn repeated listens on hooks and convoluted storytelling alone, though 2003's Gallowsbird's Bark and Bitter Tea hold more surprises. They group still creates songs that constantly attack themselves with new sections and rhythms—"Cabaret Of The Seven Devils" finds an especially strong balance between "irritating" and "loveable"—but something's easing the transitions here. Maybe it's Eleanor's vocals, which relish love, bitterness, and fear alike with the flip tone of a big kid telling the younger kids a ghost story.

A.V. Club Rating: B

Album Review: Grinderman: Grinderman

The A.V. Club, April 17, 2007 Link

If Nick Cave's last album with The Bad Seeds, Abattoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus, was an opera triumphing on closing night, Grinderman is a smoke break during rehearsal, a place where Nick Cave can just be Nick Cave. (That's "Nick Cave" as in a character who already contains more personas than a loony bin.) It's also supposed to be a place where Cave and three Bad Seeds can write spontaneously, as the typewriter noise at the beginning of "No Pussy Blues" deliberately reminds the audience: Right as the drums kick up, the typewriter dings, and Cave presumably dashes over to the mic with his still-drying lyric sheet in hand.

In spite of the growling green monkey on the cover, Cave isn't satisfied with just being his primal self. Instead, he's at his best when making windy melodrama sound crude, and most trustworthy when he's most artificial. Instead of repainting for Grinderman, he's gotten hip to exposed brick and scraped down in a hurry, leaving a few remnants for good measure. "(I Don't Need You To) Set Me Free" could be a leftover from Abattoir Blues, and "When My Love Comes Down" recalls the slow burners of Let Love In through a sheet of static.

Spontaneous or not, Grinderman forces Cave to summon his basic strengths and little else. It favors the songwriting foundation that connects all of Cave's best albums, and—again, deliberately—downplays the tinkering that kept those albums from sounding alike. The result is a thorough reminder of what's majestic, funny, bizarre, and poetic about Cave. Which means it's probably the most redundant album this frequently repetitive artist will ever make, but life inside the loony bin never grows stale.

A.V. Club Rating: B

Album Review: Ted Leo And The Pharmacists: Living With The Living

The A.V. Club, March 20, 2007 Link

Nobody will ever be caught just picking a Ted Leo song at an open-mic. Leo's songs can't exist without his unflagging, youthful conviction, and unlike many equally good songwriters, Leo can produce that reliably. In other words, it'd be hard for him to put out an unexciting album right now, so excitement alone wouldn't cut it. After a short sound collage, Living With The Living announces itself as another fiercely satisfying Leo record with "The Sons Of Cain," but as on his previous albums, Leo is at his best when he holds off on gratification. Living takes up plenty of room for that, running at a full hour—the longest Leo/Pharmacists album yet, and 20 minutes longer than his last, 2004's Shake The Sheets.

When Leo wants to moralize, he's admirably direct, but he also chooses the most vulnerable moment possible: "Bomb. Repeat. Bomb," more violent than anything on Sheets, comes right after the wistful lull of "A Bottle Of Buckie." Leo's become something of a leader at a time when dissent has become its own form of instant gratification. "Bomb. Repeat. Bomb" turns it back into a challenge—Leo isn't just shunning the bomber pilot who doesn't see or care about his victims, he's trying to level with him, while showing listeners images that they haven't seen either.

Leo and producer Brendan Canty have brightened and polished the scruffy punk that worked so well on Sheets, easing shifts like the one between "Bomb" and the more plaintive "La Costa Brava." They also don't hide the ever-increasing tightness Leo, bassist Dave Lerner, and drummer Chris Wilson have forged on Sheets and Hearts Of Oak and at countless shows. With interruptions like the short "Annunciation Day/Born On Christmas Day" and the reggae bum-out "The Unwanted Things," the album doesn't seem to flow comfortably, probably because Leo isn't interested in comfort. Sure, he still offers sympathy in dark times, but he knows that's nothing without restlessness.

A.V. Club Rating: A

Album Review: Of Montreal: Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?

The A.V. Club, Jan. 23 2006 Link

It's not like Kevin Barnes has never written sad songs with coherent lyrics—he lurched in and out of good moods between his acid-fueled romps through the thesaurus on Of Montreal's last two albums, The Sunlandic Twins and Satanic Panic In The Attic—but it's a little surprising to hear nearly an entire album of them. "Suffer For Fashion," the first track on Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?, throws up a swirl of lo-fi synths and power chords, and for a few minutes, it seems it might continue the Satanic/Sunlandic party. It's clear that isn't the case by the end of the third track, "Cato As A Pun," when Barnes tells a friend, "I guess you just want to shave your head, have a drink, and be left alone," locking in the frustration and resignation that grips most of the rest of this album.

Still, it's all darkly beautiful, because Barnes continues to emote more through the music than through his words; "Cato" follows that stark message with close to 60 seconds of icy keyboards, as if to ease people into accepting that they're getting a newly unadulterated, prolonged taste of his personal life. The real test comes on "The Past Is A Grotesque Animal," which includes nearly 10 minutes of Barnes' plainspoken tales of failed relationships and self-loathing. As the track drags on, Barnes' directness cuts through much of the mystery and sheer weirdness that made his previous records so enjoyable, exchanging it for a single, rambling catharsis.

Barnes stops short of forcing people to feel his pain for 50 minutes: The bedroom-Funkadelic layers of vocals on "Faberge Falls For Shuggie" and "Labyrinthian Pomp" make it mercifully impossible to tell what he's talking about for most of eight minutes. The uneasiness lingers even on those tracks, but—in case his mastery of lo-fi delight made anyone forget—Barnes' melodic imagination doesn't stop at euphoria.

A.V. Club Rating: B

Interview: Ricky Gervais

The A.V. Club, Jan. 10 2007 Link

This one's long, so just click the link for the whole thing, but here are some highlights.

AVC: Do you think people sometimes laugh at things for the wrong reasons?

RG: I just don't think there's any pleasure in getting an easy laugh. There can be no reward. You stand at the back of a chain comedy club, and those guys come out and they're going, "Ha! What's going on with Scooby-Doo? A talking dog!" And I want to shout, "It's a kids' program!" What vein of comedy gold have they really hit upon there? Then some other guy goes, "Ugh, the '70s, haircuts were different, weren't they?" I want to go, "Well, yeah, but I don't know what you've done there." I don't get observational comedy. It's observational, but they've just left out the comedy bit. And these people are cracking up! They couldn't laugh any more. So you think, "Why would I try and make those people laugh? I don't need to make them laugh. They're happy enough. I'd probably just spoil it for them." I'm aiming at someone else. I'm not uptight about it. I don't want to close those comedy clubs down, I just don't want to play them.

....

AVC: Is Andy's disastrous sitcom, When The Whistle Blows, your nightmare show?

RG: I just wouldn't do it, and I know that I wouldn't be happy doing it, because it's too easy. There's nothing wrong with it. Those shows still exist in England, they have for 30 years, there's no change there, but you know what? On one side, there's people wearing wigs and doing smutty innuendo and shouting a catchphrase, and on the other side, there's Curb Your Enthusiasm and Arrested Development and Larry Sanders and Christopher Guest. I don't sit through shows and go, "Damn them, why do they put that on?" I just don't watch them. It's not a crusade. It's a source of comedy for me. That those shows exist is better for me, I think. That's great. Long live them!

Unfortunately, I'm compared with The Office. I can't win. That's what's unfair. I want Extras to be compared to When The Whistle Blows. For every wacky postcard, there's a million people waiting to buy it, and for every $10 million of those things, there's one Rembrandt. Purposely, I think I want to aim at doing something that a lot of people won't like. You want a door policy on your club. It's as simple as that. I'm just worried that it looks like I've compared my work with Rembrandt. "Gervais says he's better than Rembrandt!"

AVC: Don't worry, this isn't the British press.

RG: Oh, fuckin' tell me about it. There's not a day goes by when I don't go, "You fuckers!" And I've had a really good ride with them. And The Office is better than Shakespeare as well, by the way.

...

AVC: You didn't have any problem getting Diana Rigg to get a condom thrown on her head?

RG: That's a day's work, isn't it? I remember it. It was a really hot day on the bus, and I remember laughing while I was going, "Can you just hang it over the right eye a little bit more?" And I was thinking, That's a weird job. Asking Dame Diana Rigg to wear a condom hanging over her eye a little bit more. "What did you do at the office today?" "I hung a condom off Diana Rigg's head. What did you do?" But no, she was fine. It was in the script. She was a good sport.

AVC: One of the funniest scenes in season two is when David Bowie writes a song about you in a bar. Did he write that himself?

RG: He wrote the music, [but not] the lyrics. I sent him the script and I said, "We thought maybe it could be quite retro, something off Hunky Dory, with an anthemic chorus, like 'Life On Mars.'" He went, "Oh, sure, I'll just knock off a 'Life On Mars.'" And I laughed and went, "Oh, yeah, that did sound quite insulting, didn't it?" He knew what to give us. He gave us über-Bowie. [Sings.] "See his pug-nosed face…" The crew was singing it for about a week.

Throw Out Those Catalogues

The A.V. Club, Madison print edition, Dec. 21 2006

By now it’s too late to order Christmas gifts from your major mail-order and Internet food vendors and get them shipped on time. The A.V. Club explains, item by item, why you’re better off doing your last-minute shopping here in Madison.

Twelve Coffees of Christmas ($39.95)
Tired of coffee that just tastes like coffee? How about coffees that have been forced to taste like twelve other things, including egg nog, gingerbread, candy cane, and chocolate cherry?
Where To Get It: Harryanddavid.com
Turnoff: By now it’s just too late to enjoy this along the proper timeline. Christmas is ruined! Also, flavored coffees are often disgusting. Maybe these ones aren’t, but you just never know until they’ve already got your money.
Local Alternative: Harry and David’s gift pack offers only about a pound of coffee for a price that could buy you three or four from any number of places around town. If you must have theme with that, Ancora Coffee Roasters’ (various locations, see ancora-coffee.com) Holiday Blend combines Rwandan and Kona coffees, with none of that flavoring nonsense.

Moose Munch Basket ($49.95)
Harry and David has slapped the name “Moose Munch” all over many of its products, including its caramel popcorn, popcorn balls, coffee, and more. The name is supposed to be endearing, but it really sounds like the stuff should come in a feedbag.
Where To Get It: Harryanddavid.com
Turnoff: While moose are majestic creatures, watching them eat is not appetizing.
Local Alternative: Clary’s Gourmet Popcorn (105 State St., 255-2994) is selling its usual popcorn treats with some moderate, non-appetite-disrupting themes (red-and-green popcorn, etc.). If you still crave some moose in your life, Clary’s has tins decorated with the critters.

Any Smithfield Ham (Various prices)
For generations, the ham purveyors of Smithfield, Virginia, have ham-ified the holidays, heaping up all the hulking ham you can stand to cram into your ham-hole. Ham!
Where To Get It: Smithfieldhams.com
Turnoff: Smithfield’s hams look huge, threatening, and often grotesque in the catalogue photos. If you dropped one of them into Starship Troopers, it’d get shot to bits in no time flat.
Local Alternative: The beast in you may awaken from a ham-induced coma for the much-classier bison and ostrich roast options at Artamos Specialty Meats & Deli (714 S. Whitney Way, 442-5929).

Peppermint Martini Tray ($99.95)
Not only does it come with peppermint martini mix, it also includes a “snowflake-themed bar towel,” peppermint truffles, peppermint bark, and a serving tray.
Where To Get It: Harryanddavid.com
Turnoff: Who wants to sip on a peppermint martini after taking the brats to get peppermint ice cream, adjusting the giant plastic candy canes in the front yard, and throwing away friends’ joke gifts of peppermint condoms? (Editor’s Note: The A.V. Club made up peppermint condoms on a whim, only to do an Internet search and find that peppermint condoms do indeed exist.)
Local Alternative: Go to any of Madison’s respectable local bars. Order a martini. Observe the simple flavors that have made the martini a worldwide favorite for decades. Notice how none of them are peppermint. — Scott Gordon

Permanent Records: Elvis Costello's King Of America

The A.V. Club (Web only), Jan. 9 2007 Link

The context: By 1986—not even 10 years into his solo recording career—Elvis Costello had already sped across the map and back, from straight-ahead rock (My Aim Is True) to expensively arranged adventures (Imperial Bedroom). Appropriately, King Of America came between the cheesy mess of Goodbye Cruel World and Blood & Chocolate, the most instantly gratifying rock record he's ever made. For all but one track on King, Costello temporarily ditched his raucous backing trio, The Attractions, and longtime producer Nick Lowe, in favor of a country-tinged backing band (dubbed The Costello Show) and producer T-Bone Burnett, who'd already worked with rootsy musicians as diverse as Emmylou Harris and Los Lobos.

The greatness: Costello wasn't new to dabbling in country sounds, having fronted a country-rock band before going solo and craftily borrowed from Americana on most of his early albums. He's so confident with it on this album that it often sneaks by without notice, and his approach to his persona is just as restrained. Costello spent the early years of his career trying to prove what a vengeful shit he could be, but by 1986 he seemed comfortable admitting that he's just a bitter romantic, and thanks to the dry, subdued arrangements, it never sounds like he's trying to prove anything about himself. Without The Attractions' muscle behind it, everything from the unconditional (well, as Costello songs go) declaration of love "I'll Wear It Proudly" to "Sleep Of The Just" (which closes the album with an ominous scene of a group of soldiers courting a girl in their barracks) leaves Costello's songwriting almost naked. If that wasn't enough to minimize Costello as a musician, he credits his own guitar parts to "The Little Hands Of Concrete."

Definitive song: Costello may be admired more for biting wit than for storytelling, but "American Without Tears" is the climax of an album that masters both. How many songwriters can comment that "On TV they prosecute anyone who's exciting," then slip into a World War II-era love story without sounding idiotic? It's plainspoken enough to be anyone's favorite country ballad, but it still gives Costello room to say everything he wants to say.

Pure Carnage, All Night Long: Notes from the Music Box Massacre 2

(A.V. Club, Chicago print edition, Oct. 19, 2006)

Click for legible jpeg.

Going Overboard at Ravinia

(A.V. Club, Chicago print edition, June 29, 2006)

Click for legible jpeg.

Frank Black

(A.V. Club, Madison print edition, Nov. 2, 2006 Longer online version here.)

If Frank Black’s solo work isn’t as beloved as that of his former band, the Pixies, it might just be because there’s so much of it. Pixies’ output is easy to think of in terms of five convenient studio packages, but since the band’s 1993 breakup, Black has released an unwieldy sprawl of 11 solo albums. He’s currently touring behind 2006’s 27-song double album Fast Man Raider Man, much of which he recorded on a day off during one of Pixies’ recent reunion tours. For that album and 2005’s Honeycomb, Black traveled to Nashville to record with a cast of veteran session players that included Steve Cropper, Spooner Oldham, and Al Kooper--which sounds like a recipe for an all-star genre exercise, but actually yielded some of Black’s most distinctive songs. Black recently spoke with The A.V. Club about rock nostalgia, some recent recording, and why he hates Cracker Barrel.

The A.V. Club: You’re touring with a four-piece rock band right now--without any of the horns or slide guitar of your last two albums. Are you trying to replicate those albums’ sounds in concert at all?
Frank Black: No, we’re just trying to find our own sound, whatever this band is. I think we’re starting to do that. [It’s] Kind of loud. Songs that are slow, we play them even slower. It’s loud and muscular. We’re not going to try and sound like a Nashville record that had 10 guys playing on it, including pedal steel and Hammond organ and everything else. So it didn’t seem worth it to go there. I don’t think the audiences that I’m playing to right now are expecting that. I’m still playing the same nightclubs to the same crowd. It’s not like I have the alt-country crowd coming out to see us now.

AVC: There are a few interesting cover songs on these albums, especially “Dark End Of The Street” and “Dirty Old Town.” What are your favorite versions of those songs?
FB: People associate it with a couple of different R&B versions [of “Dark End Of The Street”]. And here I am, mister white college-dropout dude from Massachusetts. Who the hell do I think I am? [Laughs.] How dare I touch that? To be fair, my reference point is another white guy with probably more country-rock credibility than I have: Gram Parsons. That’s the one I know. When I heard the song, it really moved me. I didn’t know who wrote it, I didn’t know the history of the song or anything, but I remember being obsessed with it. “Dirty Old Town,” I just needed a song to do, ’cause it was the last day of the session and I didn’t have any more songs, and I happened to know that song. For me, the definitive version is the Pogues’. People are always saying, “No, no, you can’t do that. You’re gonna be like this. You were in Pixies. You’re alternative-rock music. Don’t do anything else.” And I don’t believe that. I realize that if you’re not a reggae dude, you might make some shitty reggae if you try to do it. But you know what? Go for it. Who cares?

AVC: What do you think of covers of your songs, like David Bowie’s version of “Cactus,” or TV On The Radio’s version of “Mr. Grieves”?
FB: I’m pleased when people cover my music, obviously. It’s a thrill. I don’t know that I can quite get as thrilled as someone might want me to be…. [People say,] “Frank, Kurt Cobain said that ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was a rip-off of a Pixies song. How does that make you feel?” I’ve been asked that question so many friggin’ times that I don’t even know what to say anymore. “So, Kurt Cobain said he liked you! Woo-hoo! Come on, Frank, did you get an erection?” I’m just so sick of all that. The whole culture is like that. The whole sense of nostalgia is crazy. I had breakfast the other morning at Cracker Barrel. Ugh! “Country, just like momma used to make.” Number one, it ain’t like my mom used to make. Yours sucks. Yours tastes like it was boiled in a fuckin’ plastic bag. [Laughs.]

AVC: You mentioned you’ve recorded a couple of new songs. What are they like?
FB: I like to think they sound… kind of Clash, kind of Rolling Stones, kind of old Rod Stewart--they’re not aggressive, but they’re loud. Kind of a laid-back loudness.

The Potbelly Players

(A.V. Club, Chicago print edition, June 1, 2006)

Click for legible jpeg.

Craig Minowa of Cloud Cult

(A.V. Club, Madison print edition, Nov. 9, 2006)

Minnesota’s Cloud Cult can lurch from childlike to sinister in seconds, switching just as quickly between funky electronic beats and spare acoustic passages. That variety brings out the sweetness and trauma on the band’s 2005 album, Advice From The Happy Hippopotamus. The band recently finished recording its next LP, The Meaning Of 8, due out in late February. Happy Hippo is still a pretty fascinating listen, so The A.V. Club talked with leader Craig Minowa about how it came together and how the band ended up touring with live painters (now a staple of a solid live show that drew a respectable crowd when it last came to Madison in September).

The A.V. Club: How is the new album going to be different?
Craig Minowa: We worked with a lot of studio musicians with this, and there are a lot of strings and horns on it. It’s a really thick, layered album. I feel like it’s gonna go over pretty good. My biggest concern with it is trying to figure out how the heck we’re going to play it live [laughs]. There’s probably two or three songs on there that I think we could pull off as a four-piece, and the rest of it, boy, there’s just so much going on [laughs].

AVC: You’re still planning on releasing it on your own label, Earthology, and you’ve turned down some label offers.
CM: Back with the first couple offers that we had, we made it really clear that we had to have the environmentally friendly CD replication as part of any kind of release that we would do. They just weren’t open to that, because it would cost more per unit. Now, the offer that we’re discussing right now, which would end up being ultimately a Warner deal, it looks like they would put out for that. It’s kind of surprising. But it’s also surprising [that] in finding out that they’d put out for that, we realize that we’re still not really interested [laughs].

AVC: You’re constantly referred to as an eco-friendly band, but you don’t do a lot of political or environmental songwriting. Why?
CM: Ninety percent of the time, the songs have nothing directly to do with that. I think that it’s just because there’s a lot to be said about living by your ethics. It takes a lot of energy to operate Cloud Cult the way we want, particularly environmentally ethically, and through our activist work we’re really focused on specific things in politics and whatnot. After doing all that, I’m not necessarily inspired to write lyrics about that.

AVC: How did you start having a painter onstage?
CM: I had a friend from high school and we played in a band together. Our first year in college, we played in this band in Minneapolis, and he was going to art school, and it just kind of seemed like his time focus was more on painting than it was on playing guitar in the band. And I said, “Hey, why don’t you paint on stage? That would be really super-cool.” He was kind of resistant to it at the time. I think he kind of took personal offense to it. “What, you don’t want me to play guitar?” Years later, Cloud Cult started to come together, and after [the band’s 2003 album] They Live On The Sun, it became a live-band thing, and it seemed like the kind of project that required a really elaborate show. So we started bringing painters on board and we rotated whoever we knew who was a painter that was available. Over time, [ex-wife] Connie [Minowa] and Scott [West] proved themselves to be the most long-term dedicated. There are occasions where they haven’t been able to do a show, and the crowd really misses it, especially people that have heard about the painters being there or people that have seen shows in the past, we hear them feeling gypped a little bit.

AVC: Who’s the hippo in the song “Happy Hippo”?
CM: The hippopotamus is something that pops up in my dreams a lot. I would have these dreams with the hippopotamus in them when I was at some sort of transitional time in my life, or there was some type of thing that I needed to understand, and the dreams were always pretty much the same. In the dream, the hippo never actually spoke, but it left impressions or ideas. That song is the introduction of that and you have a lot of transition in it, where it’s a playful sort of situation of crossing sleep with this hippo and moving into this really intense emotional understanding of the preciousness of life.

Calendar Blurbs

(A.V. Club, Madison print edition)

I write and edit preview blurbs on music, comedy, film events, and sometimes other things, for the Madison edition's local concert calendar. Some are written from scratch and some are updates of previous blurbs. I've included ones that I wrote entirely or almost entirely myself. When anything in these blurbs is from another writers' previous work, I've specified, and at most, that's usually only a final sentence or two that fill in factual information. Click on the images for more legible versions.

Shapes And Sizes, Nov. 30, 2006


Pernice Brothers, Nov. 9, 2006



Youngblood Brass Band, Sept. 21, 2006
Madison’s Youngblood Brass Band could beat up your favorite ska band and still have plenty of fiery, experimental jazz to spare. Its nine members play together with all the funk and agility of a jazz quartet, incorporating hip-hop rhythms and punkish aggression while they’re at it. Youngblood continues to make respectable commercial progress as well: It’s fresh off a European tour, and this date marks the start of an American tour that will take the band to both coasts. The band’s most recent studio album, Is That A Riot?, has technically been out since February, but it’s getting a nationwide release next month. YBB’s reputation has a lot more to do with its live shows than with its recordings, but Is That A Riot? succeeds in capturing some of the band’s live fervor. Opening: El Guante, MC Starr, DJ Pain 1.

Bill Engvall, Sept. 21, 2006
Bill Engvall’s most famous routine, “Here’s Your Sign,” proves you don’t have to be brilliant to rag on stupid people. The bit, which Travis Tritt adapted into a tackily boastful junk-country song, begins with Engvall knocking people for stating the obvious to start conversations, but no worries: If Engvall and his Blue Collar TV buddies Ron White and Larry The Cable Guy have taught us anything about the comedy business, it’s that unshakeable cockiness is much more than half the battle, fancy-dancy incisiveness be damned. And shouldn’t noticing stupidity be the minimum for proving one’s intelligence? It’s kind of a shame, because there are hints of a likeable, funny fellow under Engvall’s gloating-jerk-next-door stage demeanor. But redeeming bits, like his riff on the SkyMall catalogue, always come back to Engvall’s exhausted main theme—how big a loser this or that person is.

Raising Arizona, Sept. 21, 2006 (Image coming)
With the colder months upon us, what could be better than cozying up to this sturdy nugget of Southwestern hick charm? The Coen Brothers’ second feature, which helped them break through commercially in 1987, reminds moviegoers of a more innocent time, when they weren’t so damned ambivalent about Nicolas Cage. He gave arguably the best performance of his career as H.I. McDonough, a desperate but good-hearted career criminal who helps his infertile cop wife (an equally wonderful Holly Hunter) steal a baby from an Arizona furniture baron who’s been blessed with quintuplets. Along the way, they encounter a motorcyclin’ bounty hunter from hell, the drudgery of family life, and that masterfully comedic side of John Goodman (as one of H.I.’s escaped-convict friends) that only the Coens can bring out.

Freedy Johnston, Sept. 7, 2006 (Image coming)
It’s brave of Freedy Johnston to stick with his style. He doesn’t dive under the safe umbrellas of muscular rock or overwrought singer-songwriter dirges, but instead plays unabashedly sweet, melodic folk that somehow distinguishes itself from today’s blander troubadours. Maybe it’s the way he manages to balance his sentimental side with his moody side. Or maybe it’s his voice, which is sincere and graceful without being overbearing. Either way, Johnson’s balanced songcraft has carried him through a recording career that began in 1990. He hasn’t released a studio album since Right Between The Promises in 2001; his most recent release, Live At McCabe’s Guitar Shop, captures a 1998 performance.

John Hiatt, Aug. 31, 2006 (Image coming)
On John Hiatt's latest studio album, 2005's Master of Disaster, the quandary of Hiatt the songwriter is all too apparent. The title track matches Tom Petty's best for prickly wordplay, but plonky ditties like "Wintertime Blues" could make a Parrotthead roll his eyes (or at least bolt for another mai tai). The inconsistency doesn't seem to damage Hiatt the performer. He's musician enough that he can keep any song—yep, even a bad one—engaging with just his own piano or guitar, but mostly he's just straightforward and unassuming. Though his falsetto sometimes fails him (hint: watch out for "Have a Little Faith in Me"), he's solid on old and new songs alike. Hiatt refreshingly refuses to feign coolness--he’s often seen wearing dorky dress shoes with creepy white ankle socks. Besides, who could say no to a face like that? Opener: Paul Thorn.

Godhead, Aug. 31, 2006 (Image coming)
Godhead scrappily self-released three albums before joining Marilyn Manson's record label in 2001 and releasing 2000 Years Of Human Error, a decent LP of Nine Inch Nails- and Cure-influenced screeds. Have they grown? Here's a good indicator: 2000 Years' production masked lead singer Jason Miller's voice in a funky, angry blur; "Trapped In Your Lies," the first single from Godhead’s latest album, The Shadow Line, pushes the vocals up in the mix and polishes 'em up like so much leftover Scott Stapp, complete with a simplistic, soaring chorus. So it's appropriate that despite his bald-zombie look and outcast lyrics, Miller's been doing a lot of Jesus posturing lately (at least in recent music videos). This is just an acoustic set (see the full band Saturday at Taste Of Madison), but will a humble chain record store be grand and/or wretched enough for the band's increasingly messianic conviction?

Al Rose + Doug Hoekstra, Aug. 31, 2006 (Image coming)
Sometimes it’s pretty much impossible to tell what Al Rose is singing about, which brings en extra layer of interest to songs ranging from the straight-up-country title track of his 2002 LP, Gravity Of Crow, to the subtly ominous soundscape of “Fish Tale Blues,” from 1999’s Pigeon’s Throat. (“We're going flower-pot smoking down at 911, / having snail shell sex in a hot dog bun,” he sings on the latter. Do what?) When the lyrics are decipherable, they reveal a wry thinker behind the cleverness. Doug Hoekstra, meanwhile, is a simple oasis in an ever-bloated singer-songwriter desert. His new EP, Six Songs, showcases what he does best--wistful, narrative lyrics, infectious chord progressions and understated vocals that resort to neither the drowsy whispers or the desperate yelps of lesser singers.

Headlights

(A.V. Club, Milwaukee print edition, Oct. 5, 2006)


For a band that divides its time between the road and a farmhouse near Champaign, Illinois, Headlights is pretty easy to mistake for a Milwaukee act. The trio recorded much of its first LP, Kill Them With Kindness, here, and recently finished a month of tour dates with Milwaukee’s Decibully. (They’re now headlining a tour of the Midwest, East Coast, and South.) While the term “shoegazer” comes up nearly every time someone mentions Headlights (even on the band’s own MySpace page), Kill’s rhythms and arrangements run from symphonic ballads to jolly rock shuffles. The only constant is the breathy vocal interplay between keyboard player Erin Fein and guitarist/bassist Tristan Wraight. Fein, Wraight, and drummer Brett Sanderson recently spoke to The A.V. Club about (sort of) rural living, what’s good about Donovan, and why they’re not cute.

The A.V. Club: You play a lot in Milwaukee. Any reason?
Tristan Wraight: We have a lot of friends there, and they’re all in really good bands and let us play with them.
Erin Fein: We’ve played with New Sense, and The Championship…
TW: And The Mustn’ts, who broke up, I think.
Brett Sanderson: Obviously Decibully. Def Harmonic, Sport Of Kings.

AVC: You recorded your album with Kristian Riley, which seems kind of appropriate, because he also produced Maritime’s last album.
EF: He plays in New Sense, and we were friends of his for a long time before we recorded the record, and we just started talking about it and he started talking about it, and we wound up doing it there.
BS: It’s good to record with somebody you’re comfortable with.

AVC: You live and do some recording in a farmhouse. Have you had any difficulties with that?
TW: Yeah, it’s a real piece of crap. [All laugh.] It’s a total dump.
BS: It’s potentially haunted.
TW: It should probably be condemned. “Farmhouse” paints a romantic picture, but it’s really just a big, shitty house near a cornfield and a soybean field.
EF: And it has weird, lingering smells that come from the walls, and we’re pretty sure there’s some dead animals in there. [Laughs.]
TW: It’s a charming place to live. A fixer-upper, if you will.

AVC: How far away are you from people?
BS: You can see the mall from our window.

AVC: Nick Sandborn from Decibully is playing with you on this part of the tour. Do you prefer playing as a three-piece or a four-piece?
TW: I think it’s more fun to have a bass player, but it’s weird because there’s two versions of Headlights. The four-piece, we can fly by the seat of our pants, and the three-piece is very precise.

AVC: One review of the album described your vocals as “cute enough to pinch,” but you don’t sound like you’re actively trying to be cute.
EF: I think that there’s something about this boy-girl band phenomenon that the media has coined as something really popular right now. A lot of bands that have male-female vocals get described as cutesy or cuddly even if it’s not necessarily the case. I don’t think it’s a bad thing. Maybe it means they think it sounds pretty or light.
TW: We really don’t try to sound cute. We just try to sing the best that we know how. [Laughs.]

AVC: The album is all over the place stylistically, from symphonic tracks like “Your Old Street” to straight-up rock songs like “Lions.” Did you make a conscious effort not to settle on any one sound?
EF: I don’t know if that’s necessarily intentional. We draw from a lot of different influences, and I think that’s something that winds up happening. We’ve always had all these different kinds of songs; we want to be able to have the freedom to experiment with different sounds. We don’t want to say, “Does this sound like a Headlights song?”
TW: There are records that we really love that are very consistent, but we also really get excited when we listen to a record that takes you to a bunch of different places.

AVC: What are some of your favorite all-over-the-place bands?
TW: Take any Beatles record, and dare I say Pink Floyd? I thought the “Mellow Yellow” guy, Donovan, was always really up for having a really good time. [All laugh.]
EF: Mercury Rev is a good example of that. And they’re a huge influence on us, I think.

AVC: Before you got picked up by Polyvinyl Records, you were distributing The Enemies EP by burning people copies of it on the road.
TW: Wu-Tang style!

AVC: Is it nice not to have to do that anymore?
EF: It is awesome, but I also really like when bands do stuff like that.

AVC: When you’re trying these different kinds of arrangements, are you perfectionists, or do you just try and let things happen?
EF: There is a moment in “Your Old Street” where I can hear this little note that I’m singing a little bit flat, and maybe no one else can hear it, but we didn’t really have time. We just slapped it on, and I kind of like that.
TW: That’s the fun thing about recording—you never really know what will happen, or what mistake will turn into your favorite part on the record.

AVC: One of the songs from the EP, “Everybody Needs A Fence To Lean On,” was used in an episode of Grey’s Anatomy in February. What was the scene like?
EF: A husband and wife are breaking up, and then it switched over to this other room where this kid who had some sort of disorder had died.

AVC: That’s cramming a lot of pain into one scene.
EF: [Laughs.] It is!
TW: Which is why our song was perfect for it.
EF: I think I shed a tear.