Hang on Little Tomato

Pink Martini has been fairly successful for a band that with as little critical attention as theirs. They broke into the Billboard charts, nearly topping the independent chart with their third album Hey Eugene! due to exposure through National Public Radio. The eleven-piece ensemble draws heavy inspiration from the feel of Old Hollywood, and their sophomore release Hang On Little Tomato reflects that clearly.

Hang On Little Tomato alternately invokes the feel of a Katherine Hepburn screwball comedy, or the shadowy streets of a Bogart noire. When discussing their infuences, the band is every bit as likely to mention Pedro Almodovar as Jimmy Scott. But despite incorporating sounds that developed after the Old Hollywood period, it is hard to say that Pink Martini has “modernized” the sound. If anything, the music feels even more timeless because of what it has accumulated over the years.

If one pillar of the Pink Martini sound is reminiscence, the other is variety. The band is clearly rooted in jazz tradition and seems most at home playing Latin jazz, particularly bossa, but repetition is nowhere to be found in its idiom. Their style careens wildly from conga to slow swing to blues, then revels in harp-fueled balladry before diving into a cabaret number. Nearly every song promises a novel style or approach. Every bit as impressive as the band’s musical versatility is the linguistic prowess of vocalist China Forbes, who sings in English, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, and Croatian on the album.

Beyond the craftsmanship of the album, the music is just fun. The plaintive bass walk of “Veronique” pulls you into its rainy world, while you can almost feel the clarinet solo on the title track giving you a warm hug. Every song offers something uniquely exciting, lifting you on plumes of crescendoing strings before bringing you back down into the streets to play in the square. The moods vary as wildly as the styles presented, each one as sincere and intriguing as the one before it.

There may be a couple of tracks on which Forbes’s voice doesn’t seem quite suited to the style, but that’s largely attributable to the incredible range of styles presented, and greatly overshadowed by the album’s strokes of brilliance. Hang On Little Tomato is an incredible and varied experience, blending expert musicianship with a profound sense of fun.

Unwrapped

Nonfiction television programming has seen a bit of a boom in recent years, partially due to the explosion in popularity of reality television. Extending far beyond the simple origins of The Real World and Survivor, the programming that has spun out of peoples’ desire to see other people live their lives is fascinating. In a sense, The Food Channel’s Unwrapped builds on this voyeuristic tendency to fascinating and positive effect.

 

There is a distinction to be made between types of reality shows. “Competition” reality shows, such as Survivor or Big Brother, differ wildly from “documentary” reality shows, such as Hogan Knows Best or Newlyweds. However, they all focus on the same thing: Peoples’ desire to see real human beings reacting to their environment. The idea behind reality programming is that we as people want to see other people behave in a genuine fashion.

 

Unwrapped is more of a straight documentary program, but it clearly benefits from the primary lesson of reality shows – that people want to know what goes on behind the scenes of everyday situations. In Unwrapped, a famous obsessive-compulsive and evident plastic surgery patient Marc Summers leads audiences on a tour of the secret lives of their favorite foods. That may not sound like a terrific premise for a show, but it turns out to be fascinating.

 

The show discusses a wide variety of foods, typically mass-produced. It goes behind the scenes to show the manufacture of said foods, but it always includes a little something extra. For instance, an episode on chocolate shows Hershey’s manufacturing lines, but it also shows hand-crafted European chocolates, a man living in a Colonial-style living history setting who makes his own chocolate from the beans to the finished product, and a history of chocolate dating back to the Mayans and cacao.

 

Unwrapped’s subject matter is supremely interesting, and Summer’s narration, while at times a little forced, is frequently engaging as he takes viewers behind the scenes for the manufacture of everything from bubble gum to frozen ice cream treats. Summers seems to have a sincere appreciation for his genuinely interesting subject matter.

 

Perhaps due to the widespread necessity of food, Unwrapped has a larger following than you would expect for a show with such a didactic premise. Frequent surprises, such as the sheer number of things still done by hand in factories today, along with charming histories and insightful interviews make Unwrapped worth watching. While you might think that it would turn you away from these foods, knowing the stories behind them somehow makes them more personable. Watching Unwrapped is like hearing an old friend really open up for the first time, and almost as interesting.

Evildoers, You Face The Tick

The Tick was one of the 29 shows that aired in Family Guy’s time slot in the 19 months from November 2003 to May 2005. While Fox has a horrible track record with show cancellation, the span of time was a particularly horrible era. Family Guy marks the first time that home video sales of a show have pulled it out of cancellation. Additionally, The Tick, Wonderfalls, Firefly, and Greg the Bunny have all gone on to become cult favorites. (Firefly‘s fan base was so vocal that the show was adapted into a motion picture that continued the story. Another classic Fox cancellation cock-up, Arrested Development, is rumored to be in talks for a film now, as well, after finding a staggering second life in DVD sales.) The time span saw Fox throw away an impressive number of promising show premises, and The Tick was one of the most exciting of them all.

The Tick was originally conceived as a comic book by Ben Edlund in 1987. He’s a superhero, incredibly tall, nigh-invulnerable, and every bit as oblivious to reality as he is committed to fighting crime. Over the course of the comic, a Saturday-morning cartoon, and the live-action show, he’s sent up nearly every superhero trope in existence. The Tick features a vibrant cast of heroes and villains alike, but the biggest draw is The Tick himself, whose pseudo-inspirational narrations and self-aware philosophical musings lie in sharp contrast to his apparent ineptitude.

 

The 2001 incarnation of the show features The Tick (played by Patrick Warburton, known for his voice work on shows such as Family Guy and for playing Elaine’s boyfriend Putty on Seinfeld) and Arthur, his sidekick (David Burke), a former accountant in a flying moth suit who gets pulled unwillingly into The Tick’s adventuring lifestyle. Also featured are Captain Liberty (Liz Vassey), a hyper-patriotic, undersexed pastiche of the role of women in comics, and Batmanuel (Nestor Carbonell, who played that creepy guy with the knives in Smokin’ Aces), an apathetic, oversexed narcissist.

Whereas previous incarnations of The Tick focused on parody superhero action, the 2001 show adopts more of a sitcom approach. A couple of early episodes features actual crimefighting, but by and large, the show focuses on the absurdities of costumed heroes trying to live their lives in the middle of the city (aptly named The City) that they have sworn to protect. The altered format was adopted for a number of reasons, primarily budget and more than likely congruity in a prime-time slot. The show loses a lot of what makes the original work, but it brings a fair bit of fresh fun to the idea in the process. Gone are most of the city’s costumed crimefighters. An episode of the cartoon might feature dozens of deluded, tights-wearing vigilantes, and every episode had at least one distinctly absurdist villain for The Tick to fight. Heroes like The Human Bullet, Bi-Polar Bear, and The Sewer Urchin did battle with Chairface Chippendale, Zipperneck, The Multiple Santa, and El Seed (an ambulatory sunflower with a revolutionary streak). Trying to work out the logistics of portraying a skyscraper-sized clown on a live-action television show quickly makes it understandable that most of The Tick‘s action sequences were removed. However, that sort of action has always been central to The Tick. The ridiculous costumes, ludicrous powers, and impossibly obscure weaknesses assigned to our modern myths have always been central to The Tick schtick.

 

Regardless of these losses, The Tick shines. What it loses by not being a cartoon it makes up for by not being aired on Saturday morning. Topics that were only hinted at or ignored completely by the original series are confronted full-on in this show. Possibly the most consistently amusing addition is the analysis of the sexual hangups present – perhaps even required – in the sort of people who would hop around a city in pajamas battling evil. At first glance, it would seem like they’ve taken an old character and turned him into a venue for a tired sex comedy, but the outlandish situations, snappy writing, and The Tick’s wide-eyed innocence make it a whole new experience.

Another major addition is Patrick Warburton’s performance. He captures the character’s naivety and exuberance with such gusto that it feels like the character was written for him. Warburton’s Tick is joyfully oblivious, but not overtly stupid – exactly the way The Tick needs to be played. When Batmanuel mentions saving a bus of cheerleaders, he adds, “I saved them three times that night, if you know what I mean.” The rest of the conversation barely pauses while Warburton delivers an eager, enthusiastic, “Nope!” That sort of gag is easy to overplay, but it’s a brief interlude in a fast-paced conversation that takes place largely in spite of The Tick’s presence. Warburton is equally adept at dead-panning The Tick’s more eloquent moments. At one point, he has to convince a trepidacious Arthur to spring into action to save Jimmy Carter: “Destiny dressed you this morning, and now Fear is trying to pull your pants down! If you give up, if you give in, you’ll be standing there, exposed, with Fear laughing at your dangling unmentionables!”

 

The live-action show also deals with a wider variety of themes, from bureaucracy (The Tick finds he needs a license to fight crime, but doesn’t have a secret identity to put on the form) to social injustice (The Tick and Arthur are accepted into a Justice League-type organization that turns out to be wildly misogynistic) to watching your heroes falter (Arthur’s childhood icon The Immortal dies in bed with Captain Liberty). Classic comics clichés such as Clark Kent/Superman’s pair-of-glasses-as-a-disguise are lampooned in the show, but all in all this show is closer to the comic in its satire, and maybe even broader in scope. Driven by great characters, memorable dialogue, and great (if not perfect) use of the superhero gimmick, The Tick is a spectacular show that never got a fair chance.

Frisky Dingo follows a superhero named Awesome-X (in reality, multi-billionaire playboy Xander Crews) and the villain Killface in their respective attempts to save and destroy the world. At first glance it appears to be standard [adult swim] fare, but its colorful characters and gleefully convoluted plot quickly prove it to be much more. And, despite its lack of critical attention compared to the rest of the [adult swim] catalog, it proves to be one of the most consistently funny shows in the block.

The idea of “awkward spectacle as comedy” seems to be a recurring theme throughout [adult swim], and at times it feels like a cynical ploy, an attempt to see exactly how much nothing the Cartoon Network execs can put on television and still draw an audience. To some extent (especially during the early days of Aqua Teen), they deserve credit for pushing the envelope, but as shows like 12 oz. Mouse, Tom Goes to the Mayor, Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job, and Xavier: Renegade Angel lean more and more heavily on stilted, uncomfortable surrealism, it begins to feel less like an innovation and more like a crutch.

It was into this environment that Frisky Dingo debuted, and in its first few minutes, it seemed doomed to follow the same pattern. Killface, the villain and seeming protagonist of the show, outlines his plans for Earth’s destruction and then sits motionless for a full twenty-five seconds before anything else happens – a gimmick that would be amusing if it were still novel. When Killface blows someone in half a few seconds later, it seems as though the show will be a retread of the awkward silences and over-the-top violence that used to make adult swim fascinating before they became its stock-in-trade. All in all, it’s a decidedly inauspicious start, but Frisky Dingo soon transcends the trends of standard late-night cartoon fare.

Part of the fun of the show lies in its characters. Xander Crews and Killface are both completely amoral – Killface is a spot-on parody of the motiveless, why-the-hell-does-he want to destroy the world villain, and Xander is a spoiled rich kid whose superhero career has been primarily about how awesome it is to fly around and shoot things than it has been some overarching need for justice. Crews’s employees include Stan, a friend of his (dead) parents with big plans for the company and a boardroom full of clones of himself, Watley, an employee whom he convinces to undergo gene therapy to become a villain for a line of Awesome-X dolls. Killface’s camp includes his nearly mute, hip-hop fixated son Simon, and a UCLA film student-turned geisha-turned assassin named Valerie. The characters are vibrant and constantly changing, a large part of the show’s appeal.

The other selling point of the show is its ever-shifting plot, which feels as frantic as Arrested Development and as twisted as the last 30 years of Days of Our Lives crammed into two seasons. One of the shows main themes is the shifting balance of power, as long-suffering victims become supervillains and Crews winds up at the mercy of a group of Dungeons and Dragons players. People switch sides nearly every episode, and no-one ever really seems in charge, but that’s part of the anarchic beauty of the show. The second season opened with Killface making a presidential run after his initial attempt at destroying Earth wound up curing global warming, and the season has been largely concerned with his and Xander’s bid for the presidency. The show is currently breaking, but it comes back on March 30-just enough time to catch up.

TMBG as awakening

It’s hard for me to remember a time when my CD collection was manageable, much less merely budding, but there was such a point in my life, when I was just beginning to develop some tastes of my own. I very deliberately set out to build a wide-ranging music collection, but I found myself wanting something different still. Having a couple of Dr. Demento collections, I’d become acquainted with They Might Be Giants on the basis of their bigger hits – both of them. I thought that I wanted more, but I was sort of trepidatious. Every time that I thought about getting one of their albums, I felt all twittery. Maybe it was because I didn’t know where to start, or because so many of the album covers looked so bizarre that I was afraid of what might be in them.
In the spring of my junior year of high school, I went to Mardi Gras in Shreveport with some friends. Going to Mardi Gras in Shreveport is sort of like getting Mardi Gras Lite. You don’t have to travel as far, but you get the same festival atmosphere and parade, with less booze and few if any nipples. This is regarded by some as a plus.
As we wandered around Shreveport taking things in, we wandered into a Wherehouse Music store that was going out of business. We wandered around for awhile, marveling at the clearance prices, when I saw a They Might Be Giants anthology. I was excited, but strapped for cash. I went to the front to negotiate a little in light of the clearance. The boy at the desk looked around furtively. “I tell you what,” he said. “You pick up any other two CDs used, and I’ll give that to you.” He explained his actions. “When this place goes down, all of this is getting smashed up with it. I’d rather see it go out of here in peoples’ hands.” I took the opportunity to get a couple of albums I’d never pay full price for – the Pokémon the Movie 2000 soundtrack for a “Weird Al” Yankovic rarity, and the Madonna/Dick Tracy album I’m Breathless, for the Stephen Sondheim music. I left the store proud, eager, and deeply moved by kindness.
The day went on to include The Olive Garden, enough gold beads to perfect my Mr. T impersonation, and the drunkest person that my young eyes had seen since being propositioned by that middle-aged housewife at the Branford Marsalis afterparty. As manic and fun as the whole thing was, I was most looking forward to getting home and popping in my new prize. It was hellishly late when we got back, so I only had time to listen to a bit. First was “Birdhouse in Your Soul,” a piece from the perspective of a nightlight and a delightfully convoluted confession of love. The next song was far more rock-and-roll, more driving, than what I thought the Giants were about. I was impressed. Then came the lyrics.
Make a hole with a gun perpendicular to the name of this town on a desktop globe; exit wound in a foreign nation showing the home of the one this was written for
I was tired enough that I had to go back a few times before I realized that the girl in question was on the other side of the world. I wasn’t too tired to appreciate that it was a strikingly beautiful way to say something that’s almost impossibly clichéd. The lyrical variety kept going, from singing about President James K. Polk to setting Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” to a painfully upbeat melody. This was exactly what I’d found lacking pop, what drew me to “Weird Al” and Livingston Taylor.
The stylistic trappings were as wildly varied as the lyrics. They went from 80’s synth-pop to punk to rock and roll to acoustic folkiness in a heartbeat, from absurd minimalism to richly layered, perfectly crafted arrangements. I was hooked. I had found the sound that I had been searching for, or at least a huge facet of it. I had learned the fullest extent of pop songcraft, and how much artistry could be contained therein. From that day forward, I would accept nothing less than this. I eventually learned that there is a world of music like this – if not in depth, at least in spirit – and I began to delve even further. But discovering TMBG was a revelatory where I learned everything that I wanted from music but didn’t know to ask for. From there, I learned to pick apart what they were doing beyond “fun,” and I developed ears for really listening to an arrangements, but to this day I feel that I owe the bulk of my musical appreciation to the Giants. It was the beginning of a beautiful obsession with musical possibility.

Revisiting a classic – (Assignment for 01.23.2008)

The impact of Alan Moore’s Watchmen was as widespread as it was deeply felt. Moore completely changed the comics industry with his dark subject matter and fully fleshed-out psychological profiles of troubled antiheroes. However, he also affected the way the literary world views comics. Watchmen famously made Time magazine’s list of 100 best novels. It nudged open the door into“real world” acclaim through which few comics before it had escaped, paving the way for efforts such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World.
It was through the efforts of Edward Blake that the United States won the Vietnam War, but those who know him know him to be a womanizing, near-fascist alcoholic who enjoys the pain that he inflicts on others. After his death, a similar figure named Rorschach begins to investigate the possibility of murder. Rorschach is an emotionally scarred, right-wing sadist who thinks nothing of wandering into bars and breaking the fingers of random patrons until someone is terrified enough to answer his questions.
Also affected by the death is Laurie Juspecyk, a young woman who harbors bitterness over Blake’s history with her mother. While Laurie deals with Blake’s death, she finds herself leaning on two different men for emotional support – Dr. Manhattan, a god-like being who exists at every point in time simultaneously, but is crippled by a powerful sense of determinism, and Dan Dreiberg, a man who quietly slipped into impotent obscurity when masked adventuring was outlawed. Apart from Blake’s exploits, the only hero to make something of themself in the new world is Adrian Veidt, the world’s smartest man, who runs a massive international corporation. As Rorschach begins to uncover a possible conspiracy against the “masks,” they find that they must sort through old scars in order to face the challenge before them.
The whole group of heroes lives in the shadow of the generation that came before them, and of the Cold War – Dr. Manhattan’s presence in the U.S. has escalated tensions far beyond anything in our own history.
Moore breaks a number of comic-book conventions in Watchmen. Most notably, he forces the reader to ponder what sort of person would decide to fight crime in tights as a hobby, whether we would trust that sort of person with our safety, and where their authority comes from. Moore’s super-heroes are morally ambiguous, with complex motives and questionable methods in their search for justice.
However, Moore’s real strength lies with complexity, rather than merely breaking tradition. The story winds around and over itself with a convoluted interwoven-ness reminiscent of Joyce’s Ulysses. The story itself, combined with Dave Gibbons’s intricate art, provides a unique experience that utilizes the comics medium to its full potential in a way that few books do. The number of ubiquitous visual and conceptual motifs is almost unprecedented. Watchmen is a work meant to be re-read rather than read, and its careful craft has shown it to be a landmark work for both comics and literature as a whole.

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