Viva TLC
I've listened to TLC's "Waterfalls" a dozen times in the last few days. I've liked it from when I first heard it on the radio, almost ten years ago, but the other day I put it on my mp3 player, and I find myself listening to it again and again.
It's weird how a song can be so dark and yet so groovy and tuneful at the same time. In case you don't know it, it's about feeling helpless when compulsive, addictive behavior kills people you love. This has happened to way too many people I care about, and that's probably why I find the song so moving and upsetting.
The hook, "Don't go chasing waterfalls / Please stick to the rivers and the lakes that you're used to," used to bother me. I found this too clumsy a metaphor for addiction or anything else, and I'm still not exactly sure what it means. But all these years later, I find an honesty in the hook that appeals to me. It makes me think of when people say, "Words fail me." Sometimes we are so overcome that our feelings don't make sense to us, and that just might make us, yes, use a clumsy metaphor to try to describe them.
I just looked up the words to the late Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes' rap near the end of the song. Lopes describes addiction as succinctly as I've heard anyone describe it, especially the qualities of addiction that make some people call it a family disease: "Who's to blame for tootin' 'caine into your own vein / What a shame, you shoot and aim for someone else's brain."
Saturday, November 01, 2003
Friday, October 31, 2003
R is for writer
As promised, here's my stuff from today's Isthmus--this time, two short movie reviews and a music preview:
Once Upon a Time in the Midlands
A twitchy Nottingham gas-station manager (Rhys Ifans) and his girlfriend (Shirley Henderson), a soft-spoken drugstore clerk, try to build a stable life together with her 12-year-old daughter (Finn Atkins) � until the girl's father, a violent thug (Robert Carlyle, the violent thug in Trainspotting), shows up. This family comedy is sweet and funny, if sad, but the large ensemble cast features perhaps two more cloyingly eccentric peripheral characters than it needs (24).
Scary Movie 3
The third edition of the Wayans brothers' horror-spoof franchise is helmed by Airplane! auteur David Zucker, whose patented gag recipe � keep them coming � again proves sturdy. Alas, Zucker's satire goes easier on targets like Eminem and M. Night Shyamalan than it might, but the actors are funny and game, especially Charlie Sheen, still deadpanning with the best of them, and an underutilized Queen Latifah, whose performance is a pleasantly mellow surprise (Ibid.).
Mom-and-pop operation
Meet the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players
When you are inventing a new art form, it does not pay to be modest. Case in point: Jason Trachtenburg, who says of his band, the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players (appearing November 1 at Luther's Blues), "There has been nothing like it in the history of pop entertainment." And about the group's methodology, which has to do with writing and performing music to accompany slides recovered from thrift stores, he adds this: "We genuinely feel like it could change the world if applied correctly."
Trachtenburg, 34, says people often compare the Trachtenburg Family to the Partridge Family. He does not mind. "They had some good songs," he says. "They changed the world in their way." There are indeed similarities, the most obvious of which is the presence of a child in the Trachtenburgs' lineup, Rachel Trachtenburg, 9. And their new CD, Vintage Slide Collections from Seattle, Vol. I, has a bouncy, keyboardy sheen that is not altogether un-Partridge-like.
But Jason Trachtenburg is quick to distance his band from the Partridges. For starters, he says with just a hint of contempt, "We're a real family": at shows, he sings and plays guitar and piano while his wife, Tina Trachtenburg, operates the slide projector and Rachel, their daughter, drums.
Then there are Jason Trachtenburg's songs. On their surface they are about things like vacations ("Mountain Trip to Japan, 1959") and industrial training ("What Will the Corporation Do?"). But the lyrics keep veering into dark, unsettling places, so where a Partridge might sing, "I think I love you, so what am I so afraid of?" Trachtenburg croons (on "Fondue Friends in Switzerland"), "Geese are held in isolation, execution awaits."
It would seem to be the Trachtenburgs' moment, what with recent mentions in Entertainment Weekly and the New Yorker and, earlier this year, an appearance on Conan O'Brien's TV show. For Jason Trachtenburg, it's about time. As a singer-songwriter he plied Seattle's music scene for most of the 1990s, and he put out a solo album produced by the Presidents of the United States of America's Chris Ballew. But, Trachtenburg says, "In early 2000, my wife said correctly that my entertainment career was going nowhere."
It was time to try something new. "She said maybe we should take some slides to correspond with songs I'd already written, songs about every day kind of stuff, like car insurance," Trachtenburg says. They bought a projector and an old box of slides to try out the idea. "I just became fascinated by these people's slides. It was voyeuristic. So for the sake of a concept I said, 'Let's write a song about them.' I never thought it would set the entertainment world on fire."
Last year the family moved to New York City and began fighting the music-business hegemony of what Trachtenburg p�re calls "dudes playing dude-rock." Now, with the recent purchase of two stadium-scale slide projectors, the Trachtenburgs have committed themselves to trying their act out on America.
Even so, Jason Trachtenburg seems almost at a loss to explain his family's success: "This is a goofy concept" (20).
As promised, here's my stuff from today's Isthmus--this time, two short movie reviews and a music preview:
Once Upon a Time in the Midlands
A twitchy Nottingham gas-station manager (Rhys Ifans) and his girlfriend (Shirley Henderson), a soft-spoken drugstore clerk, try to build a stable life together with her 12-year-old daughter (Finn Atkins) � until the girl's father, a violent thug (Robert Carlyle, the violent thug in Trainspotting), shows up. This family comedy is sweet and funny, if sad, but the large ensemble cast features perhaps two more cloyingly eccentric peripheral characters than it needs (24).
Scary Movie 3
The third edition of the Wayans brothers' horror-spoof franchise is helmed by Airplane! auteur David Zucker, whose patented gag recipe � keep them coming � again proves sturdy. Alas, Zucker's satire goes easier on targets like Eminem and M. Night Shyamalan than it might, but the actors are funny and game, especially Charlie Sheen, still deadpanning with the best of them, and an underutilized Queen Latifah, whose performance is a pleasantly mellow surprise (Ibid.).
Mom-and-pop operation
Meet the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players
When you are inventing a new art form, it does not pay to be modest. Case in point: Jason Trachtenburg, who says of his band, the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players (appearing November 1 at Luther's Blues), "There has been nothing like it in the history of pop entertainment." And about the group's methodology, which has to do with writing and performing music to accompany slides recovered from thrift stores, he adds this: "We genuinely feel like it could change the world if applied correctly."
Trachtenburg, 34, says people often compare the Trachtenburg Family to the Partridge Family. He does not mind. "They had some good songs," he says. "They changed the world in their way." There are indeed similarities, the most obvious of which is the presence of a child in the Trachtenburgs' lineup, Rachel Trachtenburg, 9. And their new CD, Vintage Slide Collections from Seattle, Vol. I, has a bouncy, keyboardy sheen that is not altogether un-Partridge-like.
But Jason Trachtenburg is quick to distance his band from the Partridges. For starters, he says with just a hint of contempt, "We're a real family": at shows, he sings and plays guitar and piano while his wife, Tina Trachtenburg, operates the slide projector and Rachel, their daughter, drums.
Then there are Jason Trachtenburg's songs. On their surface they are about things like vacations ("Mountain Trip to Japan, 1959") and industrial training ("What Will the Corporation Do?"). But the lyrics keep veering into dark, unsettling places, so where a Partridge might sing, "I think I love you, so what am I so afraid of?" Trachtenburg croons (on "Fondue Friends in Switzerland"), "Geese are held in isolation, execution awaits."
It would seem to be the Trachtenburgs' moment, what with recent mentions in Entertainment Weekly and the New Yorker and, earlier this year, an appearance on Conan O'Brien's TV show. For Jason Trachtenburg, it's about time. As a singer-songwriter he plied Seattle's music scene for most of the 1990s, and he put out a solo album produced by the Presidents of the United States of America's Chris Ballew. But, Trachtenburg says, "In early 2000, my wife said correctly that my entertainment career was going nowhere."
It was time to try something new. "She said maybe we should take some slides to correspond with songs I'd already written, songs about every day kind of stuff, like car insurance," Trachtenburg says. They bought a projector and an old box of slides to try out the idea. "I just became fascinated by these people's slides. It was voyeuristic. So for the sake of a concept I said, 'Let's write a song about them.' I never thought it would set the entertainment world on fire."
Last year the family moved to New York City and began fighting the music-business hegemony of what Trachtenburg p�re calls "dudes playing dude-rock." Now, with the recent purchase of two stadium-scale slide projectors, the Trachtenburgs have committed themselves to trying their act out on America.
Even so, Jason Trachtenburg seems almost at a loss to explain his family's success: "This is a goofy concept" (20).
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