Video of the Day: St. Vincent, Liars, Os Mutantes and Beck, “Need You Tonight”
The latest from Beck’s “Record Club” reassessment of INXS’ “Kick” is perhaps the best, a paralyzingly seductive version of “Need You Tonight” with Annie Clark on lead vocals. As Jayne Cobb used to say on “Firefly,” “I’ll be in my bunk.”
Record Club: INXS “Need You Tonight” from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.
Oklahoma City Bombing, 15 Years Later: Phil Bacharach’s “The Prison Letters of Timothy McVeigh”
My friend Phil Bacharach, with whom I started my journalistic career in the mid-90s, extensively covered the Murrah Building bombing and, in 1996, interviewed Timothy McVeigh at the federal penitentiary in El Reno. McVeigh subsequently wrote Phil several times, and Phil eventually compiled these letters and offered fascinating commentary on their content in a story for Esquire titled “The Prison Letters of Timothy McVeigh.” It is fascinating reading, was reposted today by Esquire, and it’s a great piece of journalism written by one of my best friends.
Oklahoma City Bombing, 15 Years Later: Emerging Stronger
These days, it seems like another life: driving to the Norman bureau of The Oklahoma Gazette and hearing the news on the radio: that there had been an explosion in downtown Oklahoma City. My wife worked downtown at the time, and I was able to get through to Laura at her office before the phone lines became tied up. She had been walking to work at 9:02 a.m., passing a Chick-Fil-A, when the plate glass window exploded in front of her. She was okay, but obviously shaken up, and at that point, we still did not know the nature of the explosion — whether it was a gas line or an attack.
I called my editor, Mike Easterling, and he told me to drive up to the city, passing the billowing plume of smoke rising from downtown. I met up with fellow reporter Phil Bacharach, photographer Mark Hancock and contributing writer Madeline Tower and rode into downtown in Mark’s Jeep — our colleague, Jonathan Nicholson, took a separate car. The closest we could get was about a mile from the Murrah Building, and we were immediately struck by the broken glass everywhere. We walked in and stayed there all day, covering it from a cordoned press area about 100 yards from the building. Back then, only the TV reporters had cell phones, so we had to occasionally borrow one from Tamara Pratt, then with KWTV, just to check in with the office. Laura had left work, and we were able to stay in touch by checking in with the Gazette’s receptionist.
I was there every day for about three weeks, covering the rescue and recovery efforts as well reporting on the city of satellite trucks that brought journalists from around the world to cover this crime against our city, our nation, our children.
Hard news is not part of my life anymore, and while my inclination was always to become an entertainment journalist, I believe that the stories I covered in the year or so following the bombing, especially a story I wrote about a white separatist compound in eastern Oklahoma that Timothy McVeigh visited prior to the crime, hastened my move to writing about movies and music. We were all war reporters for a while. But the nightmares got to me.
Today, when I read Easterling’s excellent op-ed in the New York Times, I thought deeply about the bombing, and how it still affects us. It would probably be better if we all thought about it more often — not just on April 19. But Easterling got it right: we did not develop an identity as victims, but we remember what happened in our city to 168 of our parents, brothers, sisters, friends and children with “sober and respectful consideration of the past.”
Video of the Day: Kaki King, “Falling Day” on “Late Night”
Up to this point, Kaki King made music I admired for its virtuosity but didn’t necessarily enjoy. “Falling Day,” from King’s latest disc, “Junior,” is a whole other animal: it pushes my Belly button by sounding quite a bit like Tanya Donelly in a “Synchronicity II” kind of mood.
Video of the Day: Best Coast, “When I’m With You”
All I’m saying is that fast-food clowns might just be creepier than the ones that aren’t pushing meat at you. And this one is definitely pushing meat at you — at In-N-Out Burger, no less. Hell, he even hands Bethany Cosentino a cat — live meat!
Video of the Day: The Specials, “A Message To You, Rudy”
It’s a bit of a toss-up which Two-Tone band was my favorite, The Specials or The Beat, but while The Beat never managed a full reunion (in one of the lamest traditions in the annals of rock, both Dave Wakeling and Ranking Roger have versions of the band out on tour), The Specials are back together (minus only Jerry Dammers), are playing Coachella, and returned to the U.S. airwaves for the first time in nearly three decades last night on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.”
Right now, Fallon has the best booking team on late night television. Kimmel is close, but Fallon is just killing it these days.
Conan Signs With … TBS?
TBS announced today that Conan O’Brien will bring his talk show to TBS in November. The 10 p.m. CST show will follow a similar format to his “Tonight” and “Late Night” gigs on NBC, with George Lopez’ talker bumped back to 11 p.m. CST.
This was a shocker, since the conventional wisdom on Conan was that he was likely going to Fox, or possibly doing a trial run at FX before stepping up to the network level. But all things being what they are these days, it makes sense that Conan went with a basic cable model instead of the traditional network deal: more freedom to do what he wants, and he gets to be on what is shaping up to be the right side of history. The networks are not the quality players they once were, and in the case of NBC, Conan’s old home is only now getting smart about its 2010-11 season after years of chintzy, lowball programming.
An amazing turn of events.
Video of the Day: Karen Elson, “The Ghost Who Walks”
Bride of Jack White stars in a solid mood piece, but StaticBlog cannot muster a rave. It could possibly be that “The Ghost Who Walks” is simply a verse and a bridge in search of a great chorus.
Malcolm McLaren, 1946-2010
The notorious Sex Pistols/Bow Wow Wow manager, cultural-co-opter and general provocateur, Malcolm McLaren, died of mesothelioma today in Switzerland. He was 64.
Following his brief tenure as manager of the New York Dolls, McLaren and his girlfriend, Vivienne Westwood, opened a London boutique for punk-themed wear called Sex, after which he set about putting together a band of snotty, rotten nasties called The Sex Pistols. In the ’80s, McLaren persuaded most of the Ants to pull away from Adam and the Ants, and hired a Burmese-English girl named Annabella Lwin, who was just barely into her teens, to front a new band, Bow Wow Wow, which was also used to promote McLaren and Westwood’s new line of “New Romantic” wear.
After Bow Wow Wow imploded, McLaren set his sights on hip-hop, releasing his “Duck Rock” album in 1983 using the Art of Noise to create his version of wild style.
Six years later, he created a classical/techno amalgam with his 1989 disc, “Waltz Darling,” working with Bootsy Collins’ Bootzilla Orchestra. The “vogueing” in the “Waltz Darling” video and the clip for “Deep in Vogue” presaged Madonna’s “Vogue” by a year. By then, it was clear that the appropriator was being appropriated.
McLaren was 64. As Stereogum noted, this comes shortly after John Lydon’s Public Image Ltd appeared on U.S. television for the first time in nearly 20 years on “Jimmy Fallon.”
Video of the Day: Apples in Stereo, “Dance Floor”
Robert Schneider has a good beat and he and Elijah Wood can dance to it!
