#Oceansongs

For this year's San Francisco Olympians Festival, whose sub-theme was mythology and deities related to The Wine-Dark Sea, I thought about how many artists have found inspiration in the sea, and decided to put together a playlist of ocean-themed music. Each night of the festival, I posted a video on Facebook and Twitter and tagged it #Oceansongs. Now that the festival is over, I thought I'd post the whole playlist here so that it's preserved and accessible in a slightly less ephemeral medium.

The first year of the Olympians Festival (2010), when I served as box-office manager, I themed my outfit to each night's play. I am trying to figure out what it says about me and my growth (?) over the last five-plus years that I've switched from curating outfits to curating playlists.



One. "Fuor del mar" by Mozart from Idomeneo. Starting off with an old-school classic! ""Saved from the sea, I have an even more fearsome sea raging in my breast, and Neptune does not cease to threaten me." Also, Idomeneo is all about fathers and sons, and so was the Olympians show that night, Triton.



Two. "Surfer Girl," by the Beach Boys. The Olympians Festival show that night was "Bevy of Beauties," a series of short plays about minor sea goddesses and nymphs, so a love song to a beach bunny felt appropriate.



Three. "Under the Sea," from The Little Mermaid. I'm no Disney fangirl, but being a child of the '90s, I couldn't forgive myself if I made an ocean-themed playlist and neglected to include Howard Ashman's clever maritime rhymes.



Four. "The Shipwreck Coast," by the Lucksmiths. This song has no particular connection to that evening's Olympians Festival show, but I love this band and will take any opportunity to promote them, and as Australian indie pop, they bring some musical and geographical diversity to the playlist.



Five. "The Mariner's Revenge Song," by the Decemberists. The show that night was "The Crew" so I posted the sea chantey to end all sea chanteys. I previously wrote about why I think this song is so brilliantly written and constructed (in the context of explaining why I don't think the Decemberists' rock opera The Hazards of Love is so brilliant).



Six. "Seafarer," by Tennis. The show that night, Allison Page's Jasons, was a comic, pop-culture-crazed interpretation of the story of Jason and the Argonauts -- who definitely broke a lot of female hearts as they sailed the seas. Thus, this love song to a sailor.



Seven. "The Tide is High," by Blondie. Because Medea (subject of that evening's show) is not the kinda girl who gives up ju-ust like tha-at. Oh no-o-o-o! Also, this video is amazing. Debbie Harry can't dance, and yet she seems like the essence of timeless cool. The backup dancers move gracefully, and yet they seem tacky and cheesy. One could ponder this paradox for hours.



Eight. "Sloop John B," by the Beach Boys. The show that night was about the ship, the Argo, itself, so here's my favorite song about a boat. This was also the day after the Paris attacks, when everyone I knew was feeling gloomy and hopeless, and it is in such moments that we need the piercing, transcendent beauty of the Beach Boys' a capella harmonies.




Nine. "La Mer," by Charles Trenet. That evening, I was playing a French woman in Delphin: Christian Teen Dolphin-Sex Beach Party, so I had to post a classic French chanson.



Ten. "Never Let Me Go," by Florence + the Machine. One of the Olympians Festival shows that night was based on the sorceress Circe, so Florence's witchy, mystical persona seemed to fit.



Eleven. "The Island," by the Decemberists. This was the night of the staged reading of my own Tethys, or You'll Not Feel the Drowning -- whose spooky subtitle is taken from a lyric in this Decemberists prog-rock opus.



Twelve. "Octopus's Garden," by the Beatles. Another obvious choice for the playlist. I posted it the day of the staged reading of Meg O'Connor's play Pontos, or High Tide, because I have fond memories of singing Beatles songs with Meg and her husband.



Thirteen. "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay," by Otis Redding. A special bonus song posted the day after the Festival ended, to make this a baker's dozen, to include Redding's bittersweet and thoughtful tribute to the San Francisco Bay, to thank everyone who participated in and attended this year's San Francisco Olympians Festival.

By the way, the subjects for next year's Olympians Festival have already been announced, and they are underworld and chthonic deities, including a week of Egyptian gods. Which means I'm already thinking about next year's playlist. Hashtag #Deathsongs.

Pop-Culture Obsessions, February 2014

 When I was a teenager, I hated bluegrass music and I hated Nirvana. But for some reason, I'm absolutely obsessed with Patti Smith's apocalyptic-bluegrass cover version of "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Well, I love a good upright bass, and the Americana arrangement makes it clearer than ever that this is a timeless youth anthem. I saw Patti Smith perform live at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in 2012 (though I don't remember her singing this song, appropriate though it would have been). I want to be her when I grow up.

Watching the Vancouver Olympics in 2010, I fell in love with ice dancing, and particularly with the gold-medal winners, the Canadian team of Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir. So I was VERY excited for their epic re-match this week with Meryl Davis and Charlie White, their American rivals who train under the same coach.

I do like the Americans, who won the competition this time. The final sequence of their long program was super impressive: they skated full-tilt and did one cool trick after another. But ultimately, my loyalty still lies with the Canadian pair. The Americans are hard-driving; the Canadians make it look effortless. They have sprezzatura. Tessa Virtue's smiling face seems to say "I can imagine no experience more blissful than being flung around an ice rink in the arms of Scott Moir." I know that the Olympics are an athletic competition, but unfortunately, I've always been more interested in aesthetics than athletics. Is it unfair to judge athletes on the basis of grace, beauty, elegance, and how much I want them to just kiss one another already? Probably. Do I do it anyway? Yes.

Ice dancing is ridiculously heteronormative and sentimental, yet I love it to bits. There's drama in the choreography, drama in the question of "are they in love or just extraordinarily talented actors?", drama in the judging. The routines must include a lot of specific technical elements, yet art still manages to emerge from within the constraints. If only I could figure out a not-ludicrous way to depict ice dance on stage, I'd make it the subject of my next play.

Photo of Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir's free dance by Richard Lautens of the Toronto Star. 

We Will Never Be Royals @ SF Theater Pub Blog

I'm taking the week off from my San Francisco Theater Pub column, due to the Thanksgiving holiday, but in the meantime, here's a column from a few weeks back that I never posted to marissabidilla.

The column is titled "Theater-Goers of the World, Unite!" for a taste of Marxist rabble-rousing, but then the next day I heard Lorde's ubiquitous song on the radio and thought maybe I should've titled my piece "We Will Never Be Royals" instead?



After all, the point I was trying to make feels similar to what Lorde is singing about -- how the media (pop music, big regional theaters) present an image of elitist wealth that is out of reach of "average" people, especially in an era of rising income inequality. But shouldn't we be making art for the average person in the first place?

(It was about a year ago that I first heard and became obsessed with Pulp's song "Common People." Evidently I like my pop music with a good helping of socioeconomic commentary.)

Whatever you want to call it, my column got a good response and high marks from my editor, so go check it out.

East Coast Girl (at least for a week)

Tomorrow, I'm traveling to New York for a week to attend my 5-year Vassar reunion (where did the time go?!), catch up with East Coast friends, see some Off-Broadway theater, avoid getting attacked by cicadas... you know, the usual.

There'll probably be no new posts while I'm away (well, except for a link to my new Theater Pub column when it's up). But I do hope to have some fun adventures, and to share them here once I've returned home!

Song for the moment, a.k.a. New Favorite Song: "East Coast Girl" by Cayucas.



When I first heard this song on the radio, a couple of months ago, I liked it a lot, but I also thought "This band sounds like they are trying to out-Vampire-Weekend Vampire Weekend." Turns out I'm not the only person who thinks that: the good people of Pitchfork have come to the same conclusion regarding Cayucas' musical style. Unlike the snooty Pitchforkers, though, I'm not so bothered by the way that Cayucas sounds like a breezier, less substantial version of one of my favorite bands. Music need not be epic or groundbreaking to have value, and it's hard to hate such summery, charming indie-pop.

I bought Cayucas' album, Bigfoot, the week it came out, and listened to it while I was on my way to a hipster barbecue in the Mission District. The sun was shining. I was wearing cut-off jean shorts. I rode the J-Church train past Dolores Park and saw San Francisco's golden youth spread before me, day-drinking and sunbathing on the grass -- full of beauty and promise and entitlement and absurdity. And with Bigfoot playing in my ears, it was a perfect moment.

This isn't to denigrate "darker" or more ambitious music -- in fact, I love the way that Vampire Weekend's new album, Modern Vampires of the City, deals with twentysomething angst and despair and "the nagging pressure to make the most of their finite youth." Goodness knows, I've been feeling a lot of that lately, as the realization "Marissa, you graduated college five years ago" sinks in, deeper and deeper. But sometimes you need an antidote to such negativity: lilting music that speaks of summer fun, a weekend reconnecting with old friends and celebrating the good things that have happened in the last five years.

That's what I hope Reunion will be like, at least.

"Blackbird Fly" Music Video Shoot: Mad Tea Parties and Three-Piece Suits

Last November, I got an urgent email from my friend Meg O'Connor. She was producing a music video for a local singer-songwriter, and one of the actors had just dropped out. Would I be interested in waking up early on Saturday, going out to Thornton Beach, and spending the day as an extra in a "mad tea party" scene? I seemed like the kind of person who'd be up for that sort of thing — not to mention the kind of person who could put together an appropriate "mad tea party" costume on short notice.

I was intrigued by Meg's offer and, as it turned out, I had recently dressed up as a suffragette for Halloween, so I had just bought a long Victorian-ish skirt that would work well as the basis for my costume. Meg and her boyfriend picked me up at 7:30 AM on Saturday and I spent a sunny, windy day at the beach, chatting with my fellow extras, pretending to drink tea and eat treats, and trying not to freeze to death.

Despite the cold, the shoot was a lot of fun. So, a month later, when Meg put out a call for dozens more extras for a nightclub scene, I decided to go to that shoot, too. It was a work night; the Olympians Festival was in full swing; I was very busy, and very tired... but something compelled me to participate anyway. "Maybe you'll meet somebody interesting," I told myself. "The reason you live in San Francisco is to take advantage of weird-but-cool opportunities like this."

And as I stood around in the nightclub waiting for filming to begin, I caught sight of one of my fellow extras, a man in a gray three-piece suit and a fedora. And he caught sight of me. I contrived some kind of excuse to chat with him, and soon the conversation was flowing naturally. I learned that he was a high school teacher and a former Classics major — he thought it was so unbelievably awesome that I was involved in a Greek-mythology theater festival. Throughout the night, we continued talking, and discovered more and more points of similarity and connection (we're both from Portland; we went to rival high schools!). Film sets are actually great places for getting to know people — you have a lot of time to stand around and chat with the other extras.
We exchanged numbers and had our first date later that week, seeing Meg O'Connor's Olympians Festival play. Long story short, we continued to see each other throughout the winter, and as of the vernal equinox, we officially became boyfriend and girlfriend.

Needless to say, we are both so glad that we chose to go to the film shoot on that December night, and we love that there's videographic documentation of the night we met! After several months of post-production, the video has finally been completed and released to the Internet. Here it is:

Volary - Blackbird Fly [Official Music Video] from Independent Art Film Productions on Vimeo.

There are several shots of me in the tea party scene (from about 2:00 to 2:40), including a nice close-up. In the scenes at the club, my boyfriend and I can be seen briefly at 1:29 and 3:22, with a slightly longer shot from 3:26 to 3:28 (we're behind the singer, standing against the brick wall).

Here's a behind-the-scenes photo of us on that night (flanked by other friends/extras) if you need a better idea of who to look out for.

My boyfriend and I are well aware that this is one of the most ridiculous "meet cute" stories ever. At the same time, we like to think it's a good story. And it proves the old truism that the best way to meet people is to keep busy and force yourself to do interesting, unusual things.

And maybe the following isn't a truism, but it should be: sometimes, after years of having a love life that is either bad or boring, a man in a three-piece suit will come along, and you'll be smart enough to take notice, and he'll turn out to be a better fit for you than you ever thought possible.

I'm a lucky girl.

The Bicoastal Playwright-Producer-Translator

I think I mentioned a few weeks ago that my play Pleiades was selected by the Atlantic Stage Co. in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina for their New Voices Play Festival. At this very moment, 1:30 PM on the East Coast), the staged reading of Pleiades is beginning in South Carolina...

...and I can't be there, because I am at the Cafe Royale in San Francisco in my capacity as the producer of San Francisco Theater Pub's April show, my new translation of Orphée. (OK, fine, I wrote this blog post in advance and have timed it to go up on Sunday morning.)

Tech rehearsal for Orphée on one coast, a staged reading of Pleiades on the other. Weekends like this don't come along very often.

And it should be no surprise that this beautiful song has been stuck in my head all week: "South Carolina" by Tennis:

She Fills Her Head With Culture, She Gives Herself an Ulcer (New SF Theater Pub Column)

My latest column (part 1 of 2) is up at the Theater Pub website. Recently, I've been feeling overwhelmed by the Internet and the mentality that it encourages in us. "We’re living in an information deluge, and the salt water is starting to fill my lungs," is, I think, the key line in the piece. (I titled it "Sur Moi, Le Deluge.")

This was a difficult column to write. I was in a weird mental state at the time, and wanted to convey that, but in such a way that readers wouldn't just say "Marissa, do you need to get therapy?" It also has less to do with theater than my Theater Pub columns normally do.

The day after I wrote this column, I was listening to BBC 6 and heard the song "At Home He's a Tourist" by Gang of Four. Couldn't help thinking that one of the couplets perfectly summed up the mental state that I was trying to describe in my column:

"She fills her head with culture / She gives herself an ulcer." Oh yeah.

New Favorite Song: "Needle in a Haystack" by the Velvelettes

Maybe I've got girl groups on the brain because it's the 10th anniversary of my singing girl-group pastiche songs in Little Shop of Horrors. But then, you know, I've always had a weakness for the girl-group style. So when I heard an obscure but totally awesome Motown girl-group song last week (thanks to Lauren Laverne on BBC 6) it made my day. This is my new jam: "Needle in a Haystack" by the Velvelettes.



I love the backing vocals, love the harmonies, love the stomping rhythm. I listen to it over and over and try to decide whether the lyrics can be interpreted in a proto-feminist way (a girl warning her friends to stay away from men who are bad news) or whether they're just garden-variety early-60s sexism (assuming that men have just one thing on their minds and girls ought to "play hard to get").

Oh, who am I kidding. Really, I listen to it over and over because it's a great Motown pop song. I think it deserves to be much more widely known, so give it a listen, why don't you?

"The Chapter In Your Life Entitled San Francisco" - there's more to the story!

On Saturday night, I was at a small party hosted by a friend of a friend, in an apartment north of the Panhandle. A framed book cover, hanging on one of the kitchen walls, caught my attention, and I went over to investigate it.

The cover was plain but elegant: light blue, with a cream-colored rectangle containing the book's title, written in a fine italic script: The Chapter In Your Life Entitled San Francisco.

All at once, I started freaking out. The good kind of freaking out, that is. Because, last spring, I fell head-over-heels for a song called "The Chapter In Your Life Entitled San Francisco," by the Lucksmiths, a band from Melbourne. For a long time last year, they were my new favorite band and "The Chapter In Your Life" was my new favorite song. I couldn't believe I'd never heard it before. I wanted to tell everyone I knew (particularly all of my San Francisco friends) to drop everything and listen to it ASAP. In short, I am probably one of the few people in the United States who is an evangelist for this song, so it felt like some kind of gorgeous serendipity to stumble upon that framed book cover in that apartment kitchen.

The owners of the apartment had no idea that there was a song called "The Chapter In Your Life Entitled San Francisco," so I made them find it and watch it on YouTube as I sang the excellent lyrics under my breath. "Are you ever coming clean? / Or will I never know the meaning of the lines you scribbled out / So that I couldn't read between?" Brilliant stuff.

They also took down the picture frame and opened it up, to show me the Chapter In Your Life Entitled San Francisco book. It's a slim guide to the city and its sights, dating from the late 1940s. You can get a copy on Amazon. I didn't get to look at it for very long, but it's probably fascinating — I love vintage travel guides! The woman who lives in the apartment told me that some New York friends had given the book to her when she moved to San Francisco.

Knowing that the Lucksmiths stole the title of their song from an old book doesn't diminish my appreciation of their music. In fact, I enjoy learning where artists get their ideas. And because you really can't ever have too much Lucksmiths, here's the video again:

Sylvia, You Deserve Better

My recent obsession with Jarvis Cocker led to my discovering the show he hosts on BBC Radio 6 Music, which then led to my discovering 6 Music in general. And it's pretty great: a commercial-free alternative-rock station, playing lots of new indie music plus some fun, unexpected oldies. I now frequently listen to it at work, instead of relying on my iPod. When I arrive at work in the morning, it's late afternoon in the UK, and Radio 6 is playing the "teatime" show hosted by Steve Lamacq. (And how charmed am I that they call it the teatime show rather than the drive-time show? Very charmed.)

One regular feature that Lamacq does is called the "National Anthem," where he reads a news story (typically a kind of whimsical human-interest story — not a major headline) and invites his listeners to suggest songs whose titles/lyrics have something to do with that situation. For instance, last week Lamacq found a news story about a cosmetics company that plans to market perfumes based on the '70s, '80s, and '90s, and the listeners decided that the appropriate National Anthem for that story was "Smells Like Teen Spirit." You get the picture.

Meanwhile, I've also been following the controversy about the new U.K. cover for the 50th-anniversary edition of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, which ignores the book's sad and serious themes in favor of a colorful, frivolous image of a woman with a powder compact:

(Personally, when I saw the Bell Jar cover, what it most reminded me of is the cover of the 50th-anniversary edition of Breakfast at Tiffany's, another book that people want to pretend is far more full of Midcentury Manhattan Glamour than it really is. But at least the Tiffany's cover is a bit darker-colored and more serious-looking; the Bell Jar one is a total mismatch for the book's themes.)

And then, well, you know I've been listening to a lot of Pulp lately, and I realized that if the Bell Jar cover controversy were a National Anthem story, I knew the perfect song for it. What could it be besides Pulp's "Sylvia"? The one whose chorus goes "I know that you deserve better"?



Obviously, the Sylvia that Jarvis Cocker is singing about isn't Sylvia Plath, but I wonder if Plath is the reason he chose that name for the character in his song. If you're writing about a beautiful and troubled girl, your lyrics will gain an extra resonance if you name the girl "Sylvia," patron saint of the beautiful but troubled. It's a lovely name, and sounds similar to trendy names like "Sophia" and "Olivia," but it's rarely used, perhaps because of its tragic associations.

Which is really a shame. As are so many things related to Sylvia Plath. "You deserve better" is what I'd like to say to her on this, the 50th anniversary of her death. A better book cover. A better marriage. A better era in which to be a female artist.

Now with extra Pulp

Since this blog is intended as a chronicle of the art I'm making and experiencing, I've been meaning to tell you about how, a few months ago, I became obsessed with the '90s band Pulp. But it can be hard to write about things that you love unreservedly — it takes courage to share your passions, and not merely your opinions, with the world. In fact, I've been tinkering with this post for weeks, hesitant to take a deep breath and publish it. But then, today, Pulp's first new song in a decade became available on iTunes — so I should post this in the interest of timeliness, right?

I'm prone to sudden, random obsessions — stumbling upon a movie or a song or a performer that, for whatever reason, resonates with me so deeply that I need to research it to death and make it an integral part of myself. So, back in November, I was wasting time on the Internet and came across the music video for "Common People," Pulp's biggest hit song.



I'd vaguely heard of Pulp,  but this was the first time I'd ever listened to any of their music. As I watched the video, my thoughts were roughly as follows:

1. This is a pretty good song.
2. This guy is odd-looking.
3. No, wait, this is a really good song.
4. I want to do this song at karaoke. I wonder if they have it?
5. He may be odd-looking, but he's incredibly charismatic.
6. And he has some sweet moves.
7. He is milking this "rock-and-roll frontman" thing for all it's worth.
8. OK, he's hot! He is really, really hot.
9. Is it weird that I think he's hot?

Subsequent internet research revealed that "this guy" is named Jarvis Cocker; that I am far from the only woman to find him attractive; and that critics tend to consider Pulp the best of the Britpop bands and "Common People" one of the best songs of the '90s. Cocker is famed for his sense of style, his onstage shimmying and posing, and his witty songwriting — and for being heterosexual despite all of that. In the U.K., where people affectionately refer to him as just "Jarvis," he is considered a national treasure and one of the coolest men alive.

Of course, all this raised the question of why he and his group had failed to register on my consciousness previously. I mean, why didn't anyone ever tell me about this tall, skinny British guy who wears hipster glasses and sharp suits, dances "like a sexy rubber band," and writes great lyrics? Hell, in 2011, Nirmala Nataraj titled her Olympians Festival play Selene, or Someone Like the Moon after a Pulp song — and Nirmala is uber-cool and glamorous, so why didn't I take that as a hint to investigate this band right away?

At the same time, I was glad to learn that my initial instincts were correct: this was a band and singer worth knowing about. Especially because I'm always on the lookout for catchy and well-crafted pop/rock music that also has something interesting to say. So I downloaded Pulp's major albums and have been listening to them on repeat. They've become the soundtrack to this period of my life; I'm even doing silly things like quoting the lyrics in my diary.

Because the songs are quotable, and super smart. It's almost impossible to avoid knife-related metaphors — "keenly honed," "sharply observed," "cutting wit" — when describing Jarvis Cocker's lyrics. While Oasis, the most successful Britpop band, are known for writing nonsensical lyrics, Pulp songs tell coherent, though often sordid, stories. They're full of racy come-ons, withering put-downs, and wry despair. The lyrics may not be complex in the sense of being brilliantly rhymed or packed full of wordplay, but they're complex in the feelings and situations they evoke. For instance, from Pulp's 1995 masterpiece Different Class, "Disco 2000" is an exuberant disco-rock song about nostalgia, failure, sexual frustration, and "damp and lonely Thursdays"; "Sorted for E's and Wizz" is a "let's get high and go to a concert" song that ends with the narrator losing his friends and wishing he could call his mother; and "Something Changed" is a sweet love song with an oddly philosophical twist. There's also an anguished ballad about "Underwear."

As a singer, Cocker has a rangy baritone voice and a fondness for punctuating his lyrics with sneers, sighs, gasps and other effects. There's something theatrical about his singing — you can hear it in "Common People," how he goes from aloof quipping to impassioned belting in the course of one song. Another thing he likes to do is deliver spoken monologues to musical backing, which sounds risky but somehow works, thanks to his charisma and the band's talent. (I particularly love "David's Last Summer," a gorgeous and heartbreaking monologue about a summer idyll and its inevitable end.) Overall, I'd say that Pulp's appeal is in the anthemic grandeur of the music mixed with the biting specificity of the lyrics. They have a knack for creating pop hooks on both guitar and synthesizer, and it pleases my feminist sensibilities that the keyboardist is a woman, Candida Doyle. If you are also a Pulp newbie, check out the Guardian's top 10 Pulp songs for beginners.

Actually, I don't know whether to refer to Pulp in the present or the past tense. They disbanded in the early 2000s, reunited in 2011 for some touring, and, as I mentioned, just released a new song. But also, evidently, they're about to go on hiatus again. It's a bit confusing, and I selfishly wish that they'll continue on in some fashion. Otherwise, it's rather embarrassing to discover and fall for a band just before they call it quits for the second time.

Meanwhile, Jarvis Cocker (great name for an English rock star, that) has made two solo albums and become something of a Renaissance man. He's revealed a literary side, publishing a book of his lyrics and writing a very funny and insightful review of The John Lennon Letters. And I've become addicted to the show that he hosts on BBC Radio 6 called, with typical irreverence, "Jarvis Cocker's Sunday Service." He plays eclectic records, commemorates events that happened on this day in history, and delivers droll between-songs musings in his Sheffield accent. It's like a much hipper and quirkier "Writer's Almanac" and always causes me to download a motley assortment of songs from iTunes.

I find myself incapable of getting a crush on anyone, even a celebrity, if all he has going for him are his looks. Even as a preteen, I never crushed on boy-band members, no matter how cute they were, because I didn't think that they were interesting people. So I guess it makes sense that when I do get a crush on a rock star, it's on a wry British eccentric. Humor and intelligence are sexy. Though geek-chic outfits, snake-hipped dance moves, and innuendo-filled lyrics don't hurt.

La vie est ailleurs

Having one of those insanely busy weeks where I am being hit with about a dozen deadlines at once, so even though there's a lot of stuff I'd like to blog about here, I'll have to put that off. In the meantime, you can find me elsewhere:

• I'm conducting interviews with the Bay One-Acts (BOA) playwrights for the BOA blog. First two interviews (with Bennett Fisher and Anthony Clarvoe) are up now -- more are on the way!
• Twitter! Yes, I finally joined. Find me @MarissaSkud.
• I'll be at the Cafe Royale tomorrow night for the Super Secret Kickstarter Fundraising Party for BOA! OK, not sure why the event title includes the word "secret," because we want LOTS of people to show up and help us reach our Kickstarter goal! And if you're not in the Bay Area or can't make it tomorrow night... you can donate online here.

And a little music before I go: French-Canadian singer Coeur de Pirate performs "La vie est ailleurs" (which means "Life is Elsewhere" -- like the Kundera novel)

 

New Favorite Song: "The Chapter In Your Life Entitled San Francisco" by the Lucksmiths

"Is it April yet?

A valid question (to which the answer is "yes") -- but I'm not asking you that. Rather, I felt like quoting the opening line of "The Chapter in Your Life Entitled San Francisco" by the Lucksmiths -- my new favorite song about my favorite city.



Why have I lived in San Francisco for nearly 4 years and never heard this song (it came out in 2005)? Why doesn't everyone I know consider this their theme song? Why did it not become a massive smash hit? Ah! It's so good! Intelligent lyrics! Sunny melody! Cute Aussie boys with cute Aussie accents!

I love how the Australian perspective informs the lyrics, too -- it's a song about loving someone who's in a different hemisphere, with different seasons and "unfamiliar stars." A friend of mine who's been to Australia says that that's the most disorienting thing -- to step outside and literally not recognize the constellations.

If I had a cabaret act I would perform this song in a medley with the Magnetic Fields' similarly-themed "Come Back From San Francisco," naturellement.

I actually learned of the Lucksmiths yesterday when reading Alec Nevala-Lee's blog post about the Magnetic Fields, to which a very enthusiastic commenter named Darren Goossens had responded with a lengthy comment implying that if you love the Magnetic Fields, you'll also like "the great Australian wordy-pop band, the Lucksmiths." (It seems that Mr. Goossens merely moonlights as a pop-music enthusiast and in his day-to-day life, he is a nuclear scientist. Curiouser and curiouser!) The quoted lyrics greatly appealed to me, so I investigated the Lucksmiths further. They put out several acclaimed albums in the '90s and '00s but disbanded in 2009.

"The Chapter In Your Life Entitled San Francisco" comes from the Lucksmiths' 2005 album Warmer Corners, which I listened to today and warmly recommend to all lovers of well-crafted guitar pop. Other standout tracks: "A Hiccup in Your Happiness," "The Music Next Door," "Sunlight in a Jar," and "Fiction." After hearing this last song, which is about a girl with the word "fiction" tattooed on her arm in typewriter font, I now have my answer to that recent AV Club Q&A about mandatory pop-culture tattoos...

"Bernadette" and False Endings

Oddly enough, I'm reading two novels in a row that mention/discuss the song "Bernadette," by the Four Tops.

From A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (this is in the infamous PowerPoint chapter, so I can quote the text but not the formatting):

Right now, [Lincoln's] obsessed with rock songs that have pauses in them.
Songs with Lincoln's Comments:
"Bernadette," by the Four Tops: "This is an excellent early pause. The voice tapers off, and then you've still got 1.5 seconds of total silence, from 2:38 to 2:395, before the chorus kicks back in. You think, Hey, the song didn't end after all—but then, 26.5 seconds later, it does end."

From Anthropology of an American Girl by Hilary Thayer Hamann:

The jukebox finished a song, then whirred to a new start. It was the Four Tops.

Bernadette. People are searching for—
the kind of love that we possessed. 
Some go on searchin' their whole life through
And never find the love I've found in you.

"Do you know the lead singer's name?"

"Levi Stubbs," Mark said matter-of-factly.

I reached for his sleeve. "Listen," I said, adding his name, "Mark. I love this part. The false ending. The way he screams her name. Bern—a—dette."

I sighed. "I'll never be loved like that."

He shook his drink, looking into it. "I doubt that."

I couldn't recall ever hearing "Bernadette" and had no idea that it was so widely known for its false ending/mid-song pause.  So I looked it up. Here it is for your listening pleasure:



The trouble with listening to songs on YouTube or an iPod is the little bar that indicates how long the song is and how much more of it remains, meaning that the false ending can't surprise you the way it could on the radio or an LP record. False endings and hidden tracks are becoming a thing of the past. Music is more convenient than ever (I mean, how nice that I could look this up on YouTube instantaneously!) and yet less able to surprise us.

Then again, when you read a book, you always know exactly where you are in it and how many pages remain, and that doesn't ruin your enjoyment of it. Why should it be any different when you know exactly how many seconds remain until the end of a song?

And now this is making me think of the "Aria with Diverse Variations" dialogue in Gödel Escher Bach where the Tortoise and Achilles discuss exactly this problem.

Tortoise: You've undoubtedly noticed how some authors go to so much trouble to build up great tension a few pages before the end of their stories--but a reader who is holding the book physically in his hands can FEEL that the story is about to end. Hence, he has some extra information which acts as an advance warning, in a way. The tension is a bit spoiled by the physicality of the book. It would be so much better if, for instance, there were a lot of padding at the end of novels.

Achilles: Padding?

Tortoise: Yes; what I mean is, a lot of extra printed pages which are not part of the story proper, but which serve to conceal the exact location of the end from a cursory glance, or from the feel of the book.

Achilles: I see. So a story's true ending might occur, say, fifty or a hundred pages before the physical end of the book?

Tortoise: Yes. This would provide an element of surprise, because the reader wouldn't know in advance how many pages are padding, and how many are story.

(And then, because this is Gödel Escher Bach, it all gets very meta.)

I don't have a Kindle, so I'm curious to know: on an e-reader, do you know exactly how much of the text you have remaining, or is it left mysterious? Wouldn't it be funny if the iPod caused this problem for music (of always knowing how long the work of art is) but the Nook or the Kindle eliminated this problem for books?

The Magnetic Fields at the Fox Theater, Oakland: Love and the Lack Thereof

I was at Oakland's gorgeous/kitschy Fox Theater on Saturday night to see the Magnetic Fields' tour in support of their new album Love at the Bottom of the Sea (my review). Their 90-minute acoustic set included seven of their new songs and plenty of older favorites.

Stephin Merritt is famous for his world-weary baritone voice and deadpan stage presence. Both were in ample evidence on Saturday night. He delivered such quips as "You can never have too many revenge fantasies," and provided short, sardonic intros to the songs: "This is a song about a dead animal" (cue "A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off"), or "This is a song about a horrible, horrible town that some of you may have been to" ("Come Back From San Francisco").

After Shirley Simms sang the brief ditty "Boa Constrictor," Merritt commented, "You know, I think that's my favorite one of the 69 Love Songs." And then promptly launched into everyone else's favorite song from that album, "The Book of Love." We all sang along, quietly, during the choruses. The atmosphere was almost worshipful.

He introduced the beautifully bleak "Smoke and Mirrors" ("That's all love is / Behind the tears / Smoke and mirrors") by saying, "This is a song about love and the lack thereof," which raises two questions:

1. Why hasn't Stephin Merritt written a song called "Love and the Lack Thereof"?
2. Would he mind terribly if I did?

(Seriously, it's not every day that you realize that the English language contains an under-utilized rhyme for "love.")

We attendees of the Oakland concert got a special treat: the normally five-person band was joined by a sixth member, accordionist Daniel Handler. Handler plays on Magnetic Fields records, but presumably his commitments as a well-known novelist (under his own name and that of Lemony Snicket) make it impossible for him to tour with the band. He lives in San Francisco, though, so he came onstage and played on several songs. Most memorably, he capered around with his accordion while Claudia Gonson sang "The Horrible Party" and Merritt played a noisy kazoo.

Gonson was a cheerful presence at the piano and the mic, singing "Reno Dakota" and "My Husband's Pied-à-Terre" with great enthusiasm and some hammy gestures. The band's other female member, Shirley Simms, played her ukulele like a trouper and tended to sing the more country-flavored numbers like "Fear of Trains," "Drive On, Driver," and (from the new album) "Goin' Back to the Country." The two women harmonized beautifully on "Plant White Roses," another sad country song.

Indeed, the all-acoustic instrumentation (cello, guitar and harmonium in addition to the aforementioned piano, accordion and uke) made clear the Magnetic Fields' debt to country and folk music, even if many of their albums draw on synth-pop. It also seemed to make the quieter moments and slow ballads more effective than the more upbeat or humorous songs. Though the witty lyrics of "Andrew in Drag" definitely made the audience laugh, the live performance felt less invigorating than the recorded version.

But what really stands out for me is the band's performance of the gorgeous "Busby Berkeley Dreams." In the album version (from 69 Love Songs), the chorus lies at the top of Stephin Merritt's vocal range, and the song gains much of its emotional power from the way his voice sounds like it could crack at any moment. Saturday night, Merritt elected to sing the chorus down an octave, which lessened its soaring sadness, and made the final note so ridiculously low that you couldn't help but giggle. Then, after the instrumental break, he sang one chorus in the original, higher octave -- and the effect was absolutely heartbreaking. And then he got so discomfited by people taking photos that he muffed the lyrics, and we got so discomfited by his discomfiture that we applauded before the song was actually over, though we knew it by heart. From the ridiculous to the sublime and back again, in the course of a three-minute pop song.

"Love at the Bottom of the Sea" by the Magnetic Fields: Sad Gavottes

Love at the Bottom of the Sea is the Magnetic Fields' first album in over a decade to feature synthesizers, their first album in fifteen years not to be guided by an overarching formalist conceit -- and (I add, solipsistically) their first new album since I became a fan two years ago. Long on sharp, specific lyrics and unusual synthesizer textures, if short on straightforward emotionality, this collection of under-three-minute pop songs has been entertaining me since it came out last week.

Lead single "Andrew in Drag" is delightful, a catchy tune about an appealingly off-kilter situation: a straight dude realizes that he has the hots for his friend Andrew, but only when Andrew is dressed as a girl. It's sweet and playful, but vaguely melancholy too, since the narrator's desires will never be fulfilled. And I love the Magnetic Fields when they are in sweet-but-melancholy mode (cf. my abiding affection for "The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side").



My other favorite song on the album is the waltz "The Only Boy in Town." "Oh, if only you were the only boy in town / For then I could not play the field and let you down," it begins, and continues for three verses and a stunning bridge, full of damnably clever lyrics including a rhyme on "France," "seance," and "for the nonce." But for all the skewed logic and screwy wit, I found it the most relatable song on the album. It's about a woman who wishes she could force herself to love someone wholeheartedly -- and who among us has not felt the same way?

Several of the songs on this album mix old-fashioned Tin Pan Alley songwriting craft with contemporary subject matter -- "Andrew in Drag," a consideration of the vagaries of sexual attraction, being a prime example. The satirical "God Wants Us To Wait" is the perfect song for an era (and a nation) that considers Rick Santorum a viable presidential candidate. It is not a very pretty song, but presumably the martial beat and robotic-sounding vocals are intended to convey that evangelical anti-sex freaks are scary and fascistic. "The Machine in Your Hand" is a song about wanting to be your lover's smartphone the way that Romeo wanted to be a glove upon Juliet's hand -- the lyric "I'll have magical powers / Only they're scientific!" made me giggle.

Speaking of Shakespearean allusions and magical powers, the album also has a song called "I've Run Away to Join the Fairies." Reading the title, I was afraid we were in for something terribly twinkly and twee, about what jolly good fun it is to live in Fairyland. Fortunately, Stephin Merritt sees fairies as powerful and frightening, the way they are portrayed in traditional European folklore. To suitably eerie music, he sings that the fairies "will enchant me and enslave me" and give him an ass's head.

The Magnetic Fields are in goofy high spirits in many of these songs. "The Horrible Party," clearly a take-off on Noel Coward's "I Went to a Marvelous Party," sounds like it should be in a Broadway musical version of Vile Bodies. (Have I mentioned that Vile Bodies and the Bright Young People are my new obsessions? Because they are.) And the album ends with an electro-mariachi parody number exhorting us to "hire Saatchi and Saatchi / To advertise the sausage in your pants."

Yet I think the lyric that sums up Love at the Bottom of the Sea occurs in the unrequited-love ditty "I'd Go Anywhere With Hugh," which calls a love triangle "a sad gavotte." This feels like an emblematic Magnetic Fields line, and not just because Stephin Merritt is one of the few working songwriters who'd use the word "gavotte." "Sad gavotte" describes the characters' situation, the musical style of the song, the overall mood of the album, and, ultimately, the value and the appeal of the Magnetic Fields.

Thinking Creatively, Thinking Practically

NPR once did a video feature where they asked Stephin Merritt (the brilliant songwriter of the Magnetic Fields et al) to compose and record a song, so they could document his creative process. To get started, they provided him with a few writing prompts to choose from. Merritt picked a creepy-looking photo and the number "1974." He explained that he would interpret "1974" as the 1, 9, 7, and 4 notes on the scale and use that as the basis of the melody.

I thought this was so interesting. Most people, if they got a prompt that said "1974," would interpret it as the year 1974, and write a song about an event that took place that year, or using a style of music that was popular in 1974, or something. So, in one sense, Merritt was thinking outside the box. But in another sense, he was thinking quite practically. NPR gave him just 2 days to write and record the song, and under such constraints, all shortcuts are helpful. His decision to see 1-9-7-4 as notes of a musical theme probably saved time and kept him from being overwhelmed by too many melodic possibilities.

You know, sometimes we consider "creative thinking" diametrically opposed to "practical thinking," but it ain't necessarily so. Especially in the arts! So much of the fun of making art comes in working within the constraints of our genres and materials, which spurs both creative and practical thinking.

I found myself pondering this -- how thinking creatively can also mean thinking practically -- after the first writers' meeting for the scribes of Theater Pub 3.3: The Odes of March. Karen, our producer, asked us why we were drawn to the specific odes we were writing. People went around the room giving heartfelt, touching answers, e.g. "Not a lot of people know what a House Manager really does and I wanted to share that with the audience," or "Good stage managers are so underrated and I wanted to pay tribute to them."

Then it was my turn. "Well," I said, "I signed up to do the Ode to the Props Master because a props master is always dealing with a lot of different things --I mean objects, nouns, you know -- so I thought it would be easy to rhyme."

Everyone laughed and I felt a little ashamed to have chosen my topic in such a logical/practical way, rather than emotionally or intuitively. But I knew that if I paid attention to the practical considerations first, I could more easily exercise my creativity later.

All of this is a digressive preamble to lead up to the announcement that YES, I have two pieces in the Odes of March Theater Pub next Monday night, the 19th of March.  Ode to the Props Master, in stately heroic couplets à la Alexander Pope!  And Ode to the Costume Designer, in anapestic quatrains with trick rhymes!

There will be 19 odes total, performed by some of the most charismatic actors of the San Francisco indie theater scene. Including McPuzo & Trotsky's latest composition, a send-up and deconstruction of every Broadway musical ever written -- trust me, you do not want to miss this!  As per usual, the performance begins at 8 PM at the Cafe Royale (corner of Post & Leavenworth), San Francisco.

Additionally, I hope you don't mind that I began this post by talking about Stephin Merritt, because March will be Magnetic Fields Month on my blog! I'll be going to their concert in Oakland on the 24th and hope to blog about the performance, as well as their new album.

Very excited about attending both of these shows, Odes of March and the Magnetic Fields. Rhymes galore!

Bonjour "Adieu"

A while back I posted a music video from French-Canadian singer-songwriter Coeur de Pirate, whose album of piano-driven chansons quickly became one of my favorites. I just learned that she has a new album out, Blonde. Here is the the first single, "Adieu":



Judging by this, it sounds like her sound on the new album is a little less folk and a little more '60s pop -- and who doesn't love '60s pop?  And the music video casts her as a sassy, tattooed version of Samantha from Bewitched.

Even better, the actor who plays her cheating boyfriend in the music video also plays the cute guy at the center of the love triangle in Les Amours Imaginaires (Heartbeats), which I think is my favorite movie I've seen in a theater all year. (Not that I've ended up seeing a lot of movies this year, but still.) I keep meaning to blog about Les Amours Imaginaires. Maybe all it does is prove that Québecois hipsters aren't much different from American hipsters, but the film has really stuck with me.

According to her website, Coeur de Pirate also sings on a new Christmas album, Noël! Noël!! Noël!!!, from legendary French composer Michel Legrand. Looks like her track is only available on the French edition of the album, though; the English edition has Rufus Wainwright singing "White Christmas" instead of Coeur de Pirate singing "Noël blanc". Other than that, the album seems to have the potential to become a Christmas kitsch classic, what with the lush orchestral arrangements, the First Lady of France crooning about Christmas trees, and Iggy Pop singing "The Little Drummer Boy." If there are any campy Francophones on your Christmas list, get them this album and a DVD of Les Amours Imaginaires and they will love you forever.

And Now the Final Frame

Tributes to Amy Winehouse are tending to center around two things: The Voice (raspy, smoky, sexy, old-school, a big bluesy voice in a tiny little body, capable of holding you spellbound without resorting to show-off diva tricks) and The Problems (drugs, addictions, fights, self-destruction, a knack for being her own worst enemy). What has not been mentioned as often as it should, I think, is that she was an amazingly talented songwriter. "Rehab" is that rarity: an extremely catchy pop song that isn't annoying when it, inevitably, gets stuck in your head. (In summer 2007, it got stuck in my head so often that I wrote a parody of it.) And in her ballads she found memorable turns of phrase to sing about that oldest of subjects, the pain of love. I particularly liked her use of alliteration: "I tread a troubled track" from "Back to Black," or "Memories mar my mind," from "Love Is a Losing Game."

"Love Is a Losing Game" just might be my favorite of her songs -- there is something almost classically beautiful about it, in the purity of its sadness and its hard-won wisdom. The lyrics sit perfectly on the music. Not a word is wasted.

Here is her demo recording of the song:



And here she sings unplugged versions of her four biggest hits: "Back to Black," "Love Is a Losing Game," "You Know I'm No Good," and "Rehab":



In performances like the ones in the video above, she was so present -- clearly connecting deeply with the songs as she sang them, she varies the phrasing and the melody from the album version. Seeing this, it's all too easy to lament the times she took the stage and wasn't fully present, due to drinking or drugs -- and also lament that we won't get any more Amy Winehouse performances, sober or not. We ask, how could she write songs that were so beautifully crafted and displayed such wit and insight -- then live a life that was so out-of-control and such an inevitable downward spiral?

She lived fast and died young, and while I find it ghoulish to speculate upon the appearance of her corpse, she did leave behind a beautiful body of work. And it's the work of an old soul.

As I read elsewhere on the Internet earlier today, Back to Black has just become the saddest album of the '00s.

Midwinter Music Mania

Coming to an iPod near me in the very near future:

• The King is Dead, by the Decemberists (downloading it as I type this). As I wrote at the time the last Decemberists album came out, "I am a pretentious theater-nerd from Portland, so I am contractually obliged to love the Decemberists." And I am on record as preferring the Decemberists in literate pop-song mode to the Decemberists in heavy rock-opera mode. The King is Dead -- ten folk-inspired songs in forty minutes -- is exactly the kind of music I was hoping the band would make after the excesses of The Hazards of Love, and I look forward to listening to it tomorrow.
  

• Cleopatra: Arias from Giulio Cesare, by Natalie Dessay (to be released February 8). Man, I was looking forward to this as far back as two and a half years ago, when the word first surfaced that Dessay would add the role of Cleopatra to her repertoire. She's my favorite opera singer, and Cleopatra's "V'adoro, pupille" is perhaps my favorite Handel aria. And now she's recorded it!

Dessay is also currently performing in a production of Giulio Cesare in Paris, at the Palais Garnier. Must resist the urge to look up cheap flights to France...

I'm so excited about both of these albums! I feel as though I'm back in college! -- the era when I discovered both of these artists. Blissful afternoons of sitting on my dorm-room quilt and listening to the Decemberists and Dessay -- I really don't do that often enough, these days.