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

Infomercial Reviews

I'm responsible for much of Beachwood Reporter's Infomercial Reviews Catalog. Here's one of my favorites.

Youthful Essence by Susan Lucci

Beachwood Reporter, Dec. 11 2006 Link

You can put your best face forward, but it'll still leave you feeling inadequate.

What it is: A personal microdermabrasion system. Not to mention Susan Lucci's beauty (that being a flexible term for our purposes) secret.

Description: The basic setup is a cream that smoothes the skin with its "special crystals" and a "resurfacing tool" that gently massages the cream on.

Quote: "Thank you, Susan Lucci, Thank you so much."

Shills: Susan Lucci, leading a coven of actresses from All My Children and Passions who praise the product. Mixed in there are a few common wenches (with good skin, of course), a dermatological surgeon, and the product's inventors, SoCal salontrepreneurs Dean and Amby Rhoades.

Set and Costumes: A variety of generic but gleaming-white studios, plus one that we are probably supposed to think of as Susan's living room. Everyone's got on Hollywood casualwear - all tasteful, except that Susan has a habit of choosing slightly low-necked, thin-strapped shirts, which emphasize her protruding collarbone and jaw.

Cost: $89.95

Gimmick: Blurring the line between fiction and reality. Susan tells us how much her character on All My Children has been through, adding, "Believe me, that can take a toll on a girl's skin." In one vignette, Susan and her actress friends go to a "chic Manhattan restaurant" and jaw about skin care to the tune of a rip-off of the Sex And The City theme. They never touch their water glasses, and the only food on the table is an ignored basket of rolls.

Parallel Gimmick: Blurring the line between talk show and reality. Susan interviews Dean and Amby, and later, a few audience members come forward for "Guess My Age": 24? no, 31! 29? no, 40! 48? No, 49! 49? No, 58! Applause!

Interwoven Gimmick: Intimacy and familiarity with Susan Lucci. Bones aside, she just seems sweeter than most hucksters. And she invites you into her AMC dressing room and demonstrates how to use the system herself, instead of just letting models do it.

Product Limitations: It's admitted, or at least not hidden, that this won't magically erase all your non-dermatalogical flaws. AMC's Eden Riegel gushes about Youthful Essence while her eyebrows arch up like a pair of menacing ferrets. In the "Guess My Age" segment, a 40-year-old female cop from Long Island says that thanks to Youthful Essence, "I can put my best face forward," but that isn't saying much.

Implied Fringe Benefit: It's also a vibrator, and not just in the way that various items that happen to vibrate can be vibrators. Nobody says it directly, but the resurfacing tool comes with three interchangeable heads, one of which is intended for just massaging yourself. A woman is shown using this option on her shoulders and arms in the bathtub, but since this is a waterproof device, any dope can tell where it's gonna end up. And why else would we need to know that the tool vibrates and 4,000 micro-orbits per minute? To cap this off, Kassey DePaiva (of One Life To Live) calls it "instant gratification in a little bitty box."

Evaluation: Fill up Xanadu with golden calves, translate it into advertising, and you've got this infomercial. It's sleek and Hollywood, even in its clumsy excesses, and it's never quite obnoxious enough to induce a headache. In fact, it's almost intoxicating. La Lucci proves herself the megalomaniacal Kim Jong-il of the paid programming world; you'd like to look away, but God only knows what havoc she - or her clavicles - would wreak upon the pores of humanity if you did. Then again, Susan, I won't care how smooth your skin is until you pack away a few months' worth of steak dinners. The collarbone's got to stop stealing the show.

Score: 8

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.

The Potbelly Players

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

Click for legible jpeg.

Phony Beatlemania Biting the Dust

(The Beachwood Reporter, Sept. 12, 2006 LINK)

You can hear that music play,
any time of every day,
every rhythm, every way!

- The Kinks, "Denmark Street," Lola versus Powerman and the Moneygoround Part One

One of the advantages of my current job as a local editor for The Onion's A.V. Club is I get so much crappy music in the mail. It's not the most opulent of fringe benefits, and it rarely actually helps me in my work, but I'm not complaining because you never know in just which ways crappy music has the power to entertain. For example, a few weeks ago I received a pair of sophomore albums from The Gurus and The Winnerys.

The press release header - a bar of yellow between two red stripes, as on the Spanish flag - read: "Rainbow Quartz (Records) presents TWO BANDS FROM SPAIN. But you wouldn't know it unless we told you . . . they sing in perfect English!"

They also achieve the stunning feat of borrowing from the Beatles (and the Kinks), the press release notes earnestly, inadvertently leading to a question much larger than the mere existence of two more slabs of trite-pop in the universe: Will phony Beatlemania ever really bite the dust?

The Gurus' and The Winnerys' emphasis on borrowing from the Beatles' mystical Revolver days, along with the albums' titles, The Swing Of Things and Daily Urban Times, suggest a kind of hip farsightedness while at once admitting that it's just stylistic gibberish. On the Daily Urban Times cover, the illustrated face of bassist Javier Polo (yeah, I want to kill him and steal his name, too) even seems to be gazing at me in detached, Lennonesque derision. Some of the lyrics credited to Polo follow suit. For instance, from "So Many People:"

So many people I heard crying oh my God!
As they all watched the wreckage of their world
Swimming under heavy flying mysteries
Hiding out from heavy dust


I ask myself: Did he fucking pay attention in English class? (The title of the group's first album at least suggests a familiarity with bad puns, so I'm a bit confused.) Or did he listen to a bunch of psychedelia records and figure, "It's all gibberish anyway; all I need to add is a specter of humanistic concern?" Then I figure out that Polo's a garden-variety 9/11-ist, sloppily appropriating the various emotions and politics therein, and it makes a little more sense, though it still has an impressionistic fuzziness that could be either sincere or just lazy.

Polo's also an Iraqist! Dig "No Longer White:"

How did you get to that throne?
Did you forget your best wishes at home?
Can't you hear all that roar?
Isn't so much pain enough?
Is this the job you can do 'fore you go?
Leave those Muslims alone!
Stop destroying our land drinking blood and tears
Swapping killings for oil is your vilest deal
Stop playing chess with the poor and the weak

It puts me in a militaristic mood. I say America should strike back by exporting me, my acoustic guitar (which I can barely play), my mostly forgotten Spanish, and all the combined musical glory that implies, to the most revered galleries of the Prado, the most Moorish edifices of Cordoba. That'll learn us to leave those Muslims alone! And isn't playing chess with the poor and the weak at least a way to provide them with a little company?

Want a measure of just how blatantly The Winnerys appropriate Beatlemania, their press materials aside? The first track on Daily Urban Times is called "Get Into My Life." Which implies they're taking the classic "Got To Get You Into My Life" and making it less interesting. For my money, the better tribute is Beatallica's truly inspired parody, "Got To Get You Trapped Under Ice."

Yet The Winnerys' competence at creating '60s pop mockups almost obscures the fact that the listener is essentially being lectured in Pidgin. I tend to notice the music first because I've had so much experience with the latter on public transit. And this Pidgin slides under the radar, because it's been buffed free of the halting and trepidation that usually accompany a speaker's second language. "No Longer White" paves over its own lyrics with Rubber Soul/Revolver-inspired cheer. In spirit, I guess, it's probably meant to resemble the Beatles' "And Your Bird Can Sing," a spiritual scolding that bubbles with George Harrison's giddy guitar hooks. Maybe Mr. Polo is telling us that he's ascended to a new plane of derivative hip by delivering a tirade without losing his pop-crafted cool. But ultimately I'm going to have to agree with the ever-sage Allmusic, which calls The Winnerys "the Castilian Rutles," a label that seems even more perfect once you've heard "My Daily Ray Of Sunshine:"

. . . You're my daily ray of sunshine
The daily ray of sunshine of my world

The trick is to tell yourself the tears are from laughter. Mine are. The chorus of the Beatles' "Good Day Sunshine" is shorter and somehow less dumb. Conciseness is key in English, Polo.

The Gurus seem to be the newer and more urban ones, and not just because their CD shows the band staring at a mysterious glow emanating from one member's crotch, and/or the center hole of the disc. The Gurus on this record can be found often mixing their best George Harrison impersonations with their best Beck impersonations, which I can sometimes enjoy without feeling like a twerp. And, unlike New Urban Times, it never makes me feel like I'm playing "name the Beatles song this song most resembles," aka "Pictionary in Hell." I wouldn't spend money on this album, but I will give the band the benefit of the doubt: They at least seem capable of evolving their sound, psychedelic dick jokes aside.

The Gurus' LP ends with a cover of "I Need You," one of the Kinks' many early throwaway singles. It's a song that was charming because it was so disposable; see Lola versus Powerman and the Moneygoround Part One for background, not to mention "Lola," the Kinks single that kicks every other Kinks single's ass straight to hell. But of course, while The Gurus are doing all this bald imitation, they've got to try and sound like cheeky musical anthropologists. And their bass player, at least, is trying to look like one: Scroll down to the bottom of this page to see the video for "Good Morning," in which he plays a Paul McCartney-favored "violin"-body bass and even tries to make some of those goofy faces Paul makes when trying to make eye contact with the audience.

But what's really going to screw both of these bands? Their label and publicists. Don't expect me to be surprised at anyone from Western Europe who has a fair command of English. Especially not after hearing better bands like Sweden's The Hives (who I guess are just as derivative, but they used it in the interest of pure, tongue-in-cheek fun, just mowing people the hell over instead of clumsily coaxing them into listening) and France's Phoenix. National and linguistic boundaries don't really help us explain or appreciate rock music, and if you think they do, you're no better than the jerk who wouldn't stop yelling "CAAA-NA-DAAA!" between songs at that New Pornographers show I went to last year.

The Clash said phony Beatlemania was biting the dust in 1979. Nearly 30 years later, it's still biting it. Maybe one of these days it will finally be dead.

Where wine is king

The A.V. Club, Madison print edition, Nov. 2 2006

How often do most people get to sample a formidable gauntlet of wines and eat lobster mashed potatoes out of a plastic cup (with a plastic fork that looks like fine silverware) while watching a mild-mannered chef competition from the metal bleachers inside the incongruously drafty Alliant Energy Center’s exhibition hall? The A.V. Club, for one, pounced on the chance to do just that on Friday, Oct. 20, when The Madison Food And Wine Show opened.

The show is like sample day at the supermarket, only bigger, fancier, and with booze—and all the excess and disorientation that implies. Food might be billed first, but wine is king. And even the people who aren’t selling wine here have a shrewd eye toward matching their products with wine. Not sure if you should pair that piece of havarti on a toothpick with that Dixie cup of cab-sav? Check your handy-dandy wine-and-cheese-pairing wheel, courtesy of the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board.

Food and beverage divination devices aren’t the only swag up for grabs at the show. When visitors first enter the hall, they pick up a commemorative Food And Wine Show wine glass, and sample wine after wine from it throughout the evening. Some people use it for the beer tastings too. (Capital Brewery and Redhook Ale Brewery are here with their fine brews, though the wine options far outnumber the beer options.)

At most of the wine booths, the idea is to keep the line moving and enjoy the stuff without getting too fussy about it. But for wine showoffs, there’s a smelling contest. Entrants sniff at little scented Q-Tips inside wine glasses and match what they smell to a list of flavors for a chance to win a set of glasses. Among the aromas is “cut hay.” Remarking that this is weird, The A.V. Club gets hit with a “gotcha!”—many wines have that aroma. Are the wine world’s many affluent, urban newbies also studying up on farm smells?

If anything, American wineries seem to keep such things at a pleasant distance in the minds of wine drinkers, with names that are often reminiscent of suburban streets—vague, pleasant, perhaps with a dignified nod to nature or history. White Winter Winery, Von Stiehl Winery, Cedar Creek Winery—replace “Winery” with “Lane,” “Circle,” or “Court” and you’ve got yourself a respectable subdivision. There are always exceptions, though, like Modesto, California’s Barefoot Wine. One of the men at Barefoot’s booth tells The A.V. Club that his decidedly unpretentious presentation (which includes fake palm trees) is aimed at just about any wine consumer, but the booth projects a very Jimmy-Buffet-goes-to-Mardi-Gras vibe. Especially when a woman puts on one of the booth’s free plastic beaded necklaces (complete with a Barefoot-logo medallion).

Forsaking the show’s reigning elegance entirely, though, is Oregon’s Bee Barf Honey. “That’s what it is!” one of the women at the Bee Barf booth says matter-of-factly. (“Bee Vomit” was an early candidate, but didn’t have the same alliterative snap.) The A.V. Club asks her if she feels out of place among so many dignified-sounding companies. She admits the atmosphere can get a bit “snooty,” and adds: “But you know what? We drink the wine. We’re not above it.”