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Archive for January, 2009
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January 26, 2009Theater Review: ‘Mammals’
January 23, 2009Hollywood, CALIFORNIA — Mammals is a biting, exhilarating meditation on the human struggle between civilized behavior and animal instincts. Written by first-time British 
playwright Amelia Bullmore and directed by L.A. theater veteran John Pleshette, the story unfolds in the London home of Kev and Jane, a not-so-newly married couple who are in the process of realizing that the institution of familial commitment is laced with landmines they were never aware of.
Each character has their own axe to grind with the others around them. Well-meaning Kev struggles to convince everyone that his infatuation with a coworker has nothing to do with his wife. Jane struggles to reconcile Kev’s absurd logic, all the while harboring a secret attraction of her own. Ill-timed house guests Phil (an old mate of Kev’s) and Lorna (Phil’s beguilingly narcissistic girlfriend) are in the midst of answering questions about their relationship as well, namely whether or not they are an actual couple or, in the words of Phil, just “a three-year-long one-night-stand.”
Both couples’ relationship woes are exacerbated by the presence of Kev and Jane’s young daughters, Jess and Betty. The girls cry over spilled milk, whine over broken toys, and yell about their half-formed theories on “how to sex” and whether or not “hell is rubbish.” The fact that six-year-old Jess and four-year-old Betty are delightfully played by adult actresses makes the amount of room the girls take up in the adults’ lives (and in the house) all the more hilariously apparent.
Director Pleshette’s pacing is spot-on; the play moves forward at a comfortable sprint, chucking out barbs of Bullmore’s wit-spewing dialogue as it drives toward its jarring conclusion. The actors, too, are well-cast, each one viciously present in the flawed character they inhabit. Relationship drama and familial conflict are nothing new to the stage, but Mammals attacks these topics with such punchy fervor that they feel like brand new theatrical territories.
Los Angeles is not traditionally known for its theater scene. While stage productions do get reviewed, it’s sometimes difficult to get people in this town to go to a theater with three-dimensional entertainment. Angelenos, take note: do yourself a favor — ditch the Lost re-runs and go to The Lost Studio to see this play.
Mammals will run at The Lost Studio on Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 pm and Sundays at 4:00 pm through Sunday, March 8th. For ticket reservations call (800) 595-4849, or visit tix.com.
Another Mockney Classic
January 21, 2009Link to the Buzzine video review
Though it’s hard to imagine right now, in recession-infested America, there was once a time in our country where rappers (and pop stars) were constantly griping about the fact that they had too much money, that their sudden wealth was causing them more stress, more anxiety, and, in the words of Sean Combs, just Mo’ Problems in general. This complaint always seemed a little obnoxious (wasn’t capitalism the point of living in America in the not-so-distant past?) and a little one-dimensional (with great wealth comes a whole new set of issues, yes, but why is this so?).
In her new single, “The Fear,” off her soon-to-be-released sophomore album, It’s Not Me, 
It’s You, Brit-pop songstress Lily Allen sings about the pitfalls of sudden personal financial gain. As well she deserves to; in 2007, Allen’s debut album, Alright Still, made Allen a huge star and got her real, real paid. However, in both the song and the video for “The Fear,” Allen comes across as neither obnoxious nor one-dimensional.
Most music videos convey the Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems conundrum by including slow-motion sequences of blinged-out fans screaming, as the tortured artist looks mournfully into the camera. Allen forgoes the self-pitying melodrama and features pastel bunches of balloons with legs as her backup dancers, and plates of cupcakes as her props. She sings things like “everything’s cool, long as I’m getting thinner,” as she skips through rainbow smoke with a smile on her face.
What makes Allen so unique is that her heady ideas, such as “I’m being taken over by The Fear”, and f*%$-‘em-all mentality such as “I’m killing them all on my own little mission,” always manage to fit perfectly into Allen’s quirky electronic pop songs. “The Fear” is classic Allen; singing “I don’t care about clever, I don’t care about funny” while peering out from the window of a pastel trailer is exactly what makes Lily Allen, and her new video, both clever and funny.
Download “The Fear” on iheartmusic, or catch it on YouTube .
Keep up with all things Lily and the February release of It’s Not Me, It’s You on her MySpace.
Katy Perry’s “Thinking of You”
January 12, 2009Link to video review on Buzzine.com
Over the course of the Iraq War, there have been a handful of pop ballads sung by American females that deal with 
the subject of losing a loved one to war. In our country’s current “us versus them” political climate, these songs have generally divided audiences; they’ve been embraced by the conservatives as heartfelt patriotism, and shunned by the liberals as part of the Christian agenda.
Leave it to ingenious pop ingénue Katy Perry to bridge the gap between the red and blue musical tastes. In Perry’s new video for her song “Thinking of You” (off her latest release One Of The Boys), the narrative follows a young woman as she laments the fact that the new man in her life doesn’t quite measure up to her one true love, who has been killed in battle. The video for “Thinking of You” does not draw any battle lines or ask its viewers to take a conservative or liberal side. It does this 1. Because it is set in the ’40s, a time when war served as a unifying, not dividing force for the nation, and 2. Because it stars Katy Perry.
There are no shots of young men riding 21st century tanks, or shots of little girls in Hannah Montana shirts crying for their daddies in this video. There are only trees, dirt roads, fields, a couple of dusty interiors, and, most importantly, Perry, looking stunning in her close-ups, dressed in what has always suited her best — a get-up and make-up circa 1942.
Since Perry burst onto the scene with her risqué hit, “I Kissed a Girl,” she has always stood apart from her peers. No other pop star could pull off a vintage aesthetic with the naturalness that Perry does. No other pop star could pull off those strange contralto vocals with the same appeal that Perry does. And no other pop star could pull off a war-themed video concept like the one in “Thinking of You” and still be likeable to the red, white, blue, and everything in between. Katy Perry pulls it off and, like all great artists, makes you wonder what she’s going to come up with next.
Get your copy of One of the Boys, plus other Perry merch and tour date info on Perry’s official website or MySpace. See the video on Buzzine.com.
On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno
January 9, 2009Link to Book Review on Buzzine.com
Music criticism is a funny thing. Someone becomes a critic because they are overwhelmed by their own subjective 
opinions about music, yet it is the job of the critic to become completely objective about music. Good critics are good at distancing themselves from a subject that they feel very close to. Perhaps this is why the best pieces of criticism are usually written about music that the critic has never felt particularly close to in the first place, and perhaps this is why On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno should not have been written by one of Brian Eno’s biggest fans.
Author David Sheppard has taken on the Herculean task of researching Brian Eno, whose “bafflingly convoluted job description” is, in Sheppard’s accurate words, a “‘record-producer-cum-experimental-musician-cum-visual-artist-cum-epistemologist-cum-belle-lettrist-cum-one-man-think-tank-cum-parfumer’ and so on.” Like all great zealots, Sheppard is an excellent researcher, and it shows. Sheppard leads readers meticulously through Eno’s early days in Roxy Music, through his glam-turned-ambient solo efforts, to his status as producer heavyweight. Every collaborator that Eno has ever worked with, every minutia of musical inspiration that Eno has ever had in his waking life, every rival who has ever hated on Eno — all are chronicled by Sheppard so extensively that, at times, there isn’t even enough room in the paragraphs, and things spill into parentheticals and asterisk-marked footnotes. For any obsessed Enophile who thought they knew everything there was to know about Eno’s 1978 ambient classic Music For Films, or just what Eno’s specific lyrical involvements on U2’s “Pride (In the Name of Love)” were, think again. David Sheppard knows way more about these things than you do.
Problem is, though Sheppard might be armed with more trivia than any other Eno fan alive, he still comes across as just that — a fan. His 400-plus pages overflow with hyperbolic statements of praise and adoration. He makes the claim that “you’ve long been able to set your socio-cultural alarm clock by Brian Eno.” This may be true for Enophiles, but what about the rest of the planet? Sheppard comes across as oblivious to the fact that some people in this world do not wake up every morning with their cellphone alarm clocks set to play “Needles in the Camel’s Eye.” If Sheppard intended to convince the world that “to trace the arc of Eno’s…career is to follow the…parabola of Western cultural evolution itself,” then he should have taken a step back and examined Western cultural evolution itself, not just the Eno-worshipping contingent of it.
Sheppard’s facts and figures on Eno’s creative process and studio experiences are interesting. Sheppard’s passionate defense of Eno against other “numbskull” critics’ blasts is endearing. But where is the honest examination of Eno’s early failings as a young father? Where is the unbiased assessment of Brian Ferry’s side of the Roxy Music division? Where is the objective criticism about anything that Brian Eno has ever done, as a musician or as a human being? On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno is lacking in objectivity. This makes it not really a biography of a 
musician written by a music critic, but rather a 400-plus-page fan letter written by an adoring Enophile. While other Eno biographies (Eric Tamm’s Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound) or even autobiographies (Brian Eno’s A Year With Swollen Appendices, Brian Eno’s Diary) may not be as factually thorough as On Some Faraway Beach. These books pick and choose which facts are the most relevant ones, thus allowing their readers to gather a clearer, more understandable portrait of who Brian Eno was and is.
In the very last paragraph of On Some Faraway Beach, Sheppard provides readers with one last quote that one of Eno’s contemporaries said about him. The quote, Sheppard writes, “offers a tribute to which all Enophiles can surely raise an assenting glass.”
Maybe this is David Sheppard’s way of explaining his own intentions in writing On Some Faraway Beach. Maybe Sheppard never even wanted to write a properly objective music critique on the life and times of Eno; maybe all he wanted was to offer a tribute to which all Enophiles could surely raise an assenting glass. If this is the case — if this is David Sheppard’s aim in writing this book — then it should not be held to standard music biography guidelines, and this writer, as an Enophile herself, surely raises an assenting glass.
