Monthly Archives: March 2010

Scratching in the Dirt: Peter Gabriel’s Scratch My Back

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Peter Gabriel Scratch My Back

 

As a Peter Gabriel fan for over two decades, it’s dif­fi­cult to admit that I find myself strug­gling to appre­ci­ate his first new album in years.

There have always been three core things to love about Gabriel’s work: his lit­er­ate song­writ­ing, metic­u­lous sound­scapes, and emo­tion­ally expres­sive voice. Behind the creep­ily organic album art, Scratch My Back is an exper­i­ment in sub­trac­tion. It finds Gabriel cov­er­ing other artists’ songs, accom­pa­nied only by solo piano or orches­tra (the oddly defen­sive mar­ket­ing pitch “No drums, no gui­tars” says it all). That leaves only the voice. Soul­ful and grav­elly even as a teenage cofounder of Gen­e­sis in 1967, Gabriel’s voice should be more than enough to jus­tify any­thing, so my pat reduc­tion here is not totally fair. Gabriel and John Met­calfe clearly labored over these orches­tral arrange­ments, but I miss the com­plex son­ics of the rock and world music instru­men­ta­tion that has char­ac­ter­ized most of his music for over 40 years.

Gabriel did very nearly the oppo­site a decade ago, when his high-concept mil­len­nium project Ovo made a point of cast­ing Paul Buchanan and The Cocteau Twins’ Eliz­a­beth Fraser to sing his songs. The most recent col­lec­tion of his own songs was 2002’s Up, fol­lowed in 2009 by the col­lab­o­ra­tive project Big Blue Ball. Casual fans of his music might not be aware that Gabriel is an active human­i­tar­ian, par­tic­u­larly as cofounder of Wit­ness and The Elders, so the tem­po­ral gap between his musi­cal ven­tures is not entirely explained by chronic pro­cras­ti­na­tion (although he would prob­a­bly be the first to admit he’s eas­ily dis­tracted). Gabriel has stated that he hopes to work on more song-swap projects in the future, but first plans to work on some of his own songs. How long until he pre­pares a new album over which he can claim sole authorship?

Peter Gabriel Scratch My Back

Gabriel told the New York Times:

“I was try­ing to make a grown-up record […] This is treat­ing peo­ple as if they can han­dle dif­fi­cult music and words. Not that I’ve courted the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor before, but there’s a play­ful­ness and child­ish­ness in some of my older work that isn’t present on this record.”

He is pre­sum­ably refer­ring to the media satire of “Games With­out Fron­tiers” and “The Barry Williams Show”, the randy sex romps “Sledge­ham­mer” and “Kiss That Frog”, and the vaude­ville silli­ness of “Excuse Me” and “Big Time”. Gabriel is one of the few musi­cians that I first lis­tened to as a teenager, but whose music has aged with me. So I would have expected myself to appre­ci­ate an album of him cov­er­ing many songs that I know and love well (par­tic­u­larly David Bowie, Lou Reed, Elbow, and Talk­ing Heads), but I find that I don’t know what to make of Scratch my Back even after repeated listening.

Many song­writ­ers lose their dark edge as they age (case in point: Pink Floyd’s once tor­tured, prickly Roger Waters is now a big smi­ley softie), and by all accounts Gabriel should have been fol­low­ing that track too. After leav­ing Gen­e­sis in 1975 to deal with fam­ily issues, his first four solo albums were increas­ingly dark and sin­is­ter. But 1986’s So marked a notice­able turn­around in tone and an appar­ent psy­chic heal­ing. Now report­edly still pals with his old Gen­e­sis cohorts, aging grace­fully into a pot­belly and gnomish goa­tee, remar­ry­ing, father­ing two new sons, and rec­on­cil­ing with his two daugh­ters from a pre­vi­ous mar­riage, he seemed to be trans­form­ing into a cud­dly grand­fa­ther fig­ure. A trickle of releases over the past decade showed him favor­ing directly-worded songs for chil­dren, includ­ing the Oscar-nominated “That’ll Do” (from the movie Babe), the unsub­tle “Ani­mal Nation” (from The The Wild Thorn­ber­rys Movie), and “Down to Earth” (from Wall-E).

Sud­denly, he appears to have reversed back into depres­sive ter­ri­tory. Nearly every song cho­sen for Scratch My Back has been trans­formed into a mourn­ful dirge. Espe­cially when lis­tened to in one sit­ting, I find many of the inter­pre­ta­tions to be too depress­ing, and I actu­ally like depress­ing music. My favorite exam­ples along these lines are Michael Andrews and Gary Jules’ cry-your-guts-out cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World” (from the movie Don­nie Darko), and Elbow’s ago­niz­ingly heartrend­ing ver­sion of U2’s “Run­ning to Stand Still” (from the War Child ben­e­fit album Heroes).

Peter Gabriel Scratch My Back

Gabriel’s ver­sion of The Mag­netic Fields’ “Book of Love” has appar­ently become some­thing of a sen­sa­tion on YouTube, licensed in tele­vi­sion shows, and played at celebrity wed­dings. Per­haps I’m cold­hearted, but it does absolutely noth­ing for me. Song­writer Stephin Mer­ritt says his ver­sion was sar­cas­tic, while Gabriel’s is deadly serious:

At first I thought, How hilar­i­ous, he’s got a com­pletely dif­fer­ent take on the song. But after a few lis­tens I find it quite sweet. My ver­sion of the song focuses on the humor, and his focuses on the pathos. Of course, if I could sing like him I wouldn’t have to be a humorist.

Did Gabriel just plain miss Merritt’s point, or did he inten­tion­ally trans­form it into some­thing sen­ti­men­tal, singing the same words but alter­ing the instru­men­ta­tion and deliv­ery? All that said, some­thing to cher­ish in Gabriel’s cover is the pres­ence of his daugh­ter Melanie on back­ing vocals.

Elbow’s “Mir­ror­ball” is one of the most rav­ish­ing love songs I’ve heard. Elbow remixed Gabriel’s “More Than This” in 2002, pro­vid­ing a more organic rock struc­ture to Gabriel’s per­haps over-processed stu­dio orig­i­nal. But Gabriel does not return the favor here, turn­ing their gor­geous love song into a depres­sive bummer.

The once case where Gabriel’s bummer-o-vision may have actu­ally been appro­pri­ate is with Paul Simon’s “Boy in the Bub­ble”, which actu­ally does have very dark lyrics.

The orig­i­nal record­ing of David Bowie’s “Heroes” boasts an unfor­get­table lead gui­tar line from Robert Fripp, which by his own rules Gabriel must sub­tract. He sings Bowie’s Berlin-inspired lyrics in cracked, anguished tones, not an emo­tion I asso­ciate with the song.

The one song I liked imme­di­ately was “Lis­ten­ing Wind”. The orig­i­nal is one of the odder tracks on Talk­ing Heads’ Remain in Light, and Gabriel rather amaz­ingly draws out a catchy melody embed­ded in the exper­i­men­tal song.

The Spe­cial Edi­tion includes a sec­ond cd with four bonus tracks: a cover of The Kinks’ “Water­loo Sun­set” and alter­nate ver­sions of “The Book of Love”, “My Body is a Cage”, and “Heroes”. It might have been inter­est­ing to also include some of Gabriel’s past cov­ers, includ­ing The Bea­t­les’ “Straw­berry Fields”, Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne”, and Joseph Arthur’s “In the Sun”. I would have also very much liked to hear instru­men­tal mixes of some of Metcalfe’s orches­tral arrangements.

Offi­cial Peter Gabriel site: www.petergabriel.com

Buy the Scratch My Back Spe­cial Edi­tion from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Dennis Hopper’s Colors

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Colors movie poster

 

Den­nis Hopper’s Col­ors may be a buddy cop flick on the sur­face, but it’s hardly typ­i­cal high-concept Hol­ly­wood mate­r­ial. It does have a token over­ar­ch­ing plot (involv­ing a mis­matched pair of cops trac­ing the per­pe­tra­tors of a drive-by shoot­ing), but it’s merely a loose thread to hold the movie together. If nei­ther a char­ac­ter study nor a plot-driven thriller, Col­ors is a por­trait of an issue, a set­ting, a problem.

A pro­to­type for the HBO series The Wire, Col­ors is actu­ally a por­trait of the dete­ri­o­rated, hope­less sit­u­a­tion in a failed Amer­i­can city lost to gangs and the drug trade. But unlike The Wire, which deeply explores the eco­nom­ics of how and why gangs func­tion as orga­ni­za­tions, Col­ors doesn’t offer much detail on how they oper­ate and what they do. How­ever sen­si­tive and bal­anced Col­ors may be, it still takes the point of view of pre­dom­i­nantly white law enforce­ment. As such, it’s easy to see why film­mak­ers shortly turned to films like Men­ace II Soci­ety (read The Dork Report review) and Boyz N the Hood (read The Dork Report review), which would look at some of the same issues from the other side of the milieu.

Sean Penn in ColorsSean Penn in Col­ors: “You don’t wanna get laid, man. It leads to kiss­ing and pretty soon you gotta talk to ‘em.”

The inter­est­ing title most obvi­ously refers to the term for a nation’s flag(tying in with the themes of war and the insti­tu­tion that wage it) or the sig­na­ture col­ors of three major war­ring L.A. gangs: the Bloods (red), Crips (blue), and a Latino gang (white). The real col­ors that divide these groups are, of course, race. The one sign of equal­ity in late 80s L.A. is that nearly every­one calls each other Holmes.

The nar­ra­tive is loosely hung on sev­eral cliches, most notably the trope of vet­eran cop sad­dled with rookie part­ner. Offi­cer Hodges (Duvall) is bit­ter at being drafted into the L.A.P.D. C.R.A.S.H. anti-gang pro­gram, after a life­time of ser­vice that ought to have qual­i­fied him for sen­si­ble hours, a safe desk job, and more time with his fam­ily. Offi­cer McGavin (Penn) is an aggres­sive, preen­ing dandy, eager to attack the gang prob­lem with the blunt tool of incarceration.

Robert Duvall in ColorsRobert Duvall in Col­ors: “you got a prob­lem with the whole fuckin’ world, and I’m in it.”

But it’s not long after the movie sets up these cliches that it begins to knock them down. The osten­si­bly wiz­ened Hodges makes a crit­i­cal mis­take, set­ting free a young gang­banger on the assump­tion that a brush with the law would scare him straight, while simul­ta­ne­ously intend­ing it to be a les­son to the head­strong book ‘em-type McGavin. The punk turns out to have been a major player in the shoot­ing. Another cliché short-circuited: McGavin romances a local girl from the bar­rio (Maria Con­chita Alonso), but she turns out to be far from the madonna he imag­ined. Not only that, she rejects him anyway.

Col­ors ends on a very down beat, not just the death of a sig­nif­i­cant char­ac­ter, but what comes after. McGavin is forced into the posi­tion of impart­ing wis­dom before he’s earned much him­self. The film ends with a long shot held on his face (echoed much later in the final shot of mind Michael Clay­ton — read The Dork Report review) as he most likely pon­ders his ineffectiveness.

Of note are early appear­ances by Don Chea­dle and Damon Wayans, the lat­ter fea­tur­ing in a stand-out sur­real sequence in which his char­ac­ter T-Bone is out of his mind on drugs. Her­bie Hancock’s score has not dated well, nor has the vin­tage rap sound­track, includ­ing the angry theme song by Ice-T. The open­ing cred­its are set to “One Time One Night” by the local L.A. band Los Lobos.

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Where not to go for coffee in Manhattan: M. Rohrs’ House of Fine Teas & Coffees

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M. Rohrs' House of Fine Teas & Coffees

 

M. Rohrs’ House of Fine Teas & Cof­fees has a com­plete and utter con­tempt of their pay­ing cus­tomers, and has lost my busi­ness, for­ever. Yes­ter­day after­noon, they kicked out myself and every other sin­gle cus­tomer, cit­ing a new pol­icy that accused us all of “loi­ter­ing.” I am not mak­ing this up.

M. Rohrs is one of the last remain­ing cof­fee houses on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. As oth­ers have noted on Yelp, they rou­tinely invent new poli­cies, such as chang­ing the terms of cus­tomer loy­alty cards (in fact, I think they sim­ply rescinded them alto­gether at one point). Until the very recent past, any cus­tomers that wished to sit down after 7PM must have ordered at least $10 from the menu. That pol­icy was not entirely unrea­son­able, but it was unfea­si­ble. M. Rohrs is not a restau­rant, and it is actu­ally dif­fi­cult to spend more than $10 at a cof­fee house. But as of yes­ter­day at least, that require­ment has now expanded to all hours, every day. It’s also worth not­ing that the new pol­icy did not seem to spec­ify a dol­lar amount, so I sup­pose they can arbi­trar­ily eject any­body they deem to have spent too little.

Here’s what hap­pened yes­ter­day after­noon at about 4-5PM: I bought a cof­fee and muf­fin, tipped, and sat down. About 10 min­utes later, the vol­ume of the music sud­denly got VERY LOUD (painfully, dis­tract­ingly so) for no appar­ent rea­son. Then one of their employ­ees vis­ited every cus­tomer in turn and pre­sented us with a long-worded sign explain­ing their new seat­ing pol­icy, which used the word “loi­ter” sev­eral times. I don’t think this employee speaks Eng­lish as a first lan­guage, so there was no oppor­tu­nity to dis­cuss it with him, even if the music had not been deaf­en­ing. He was not apolo­getic. Every sin­gle cus­tomer in the store at that time had only pur­chased cof­fee and pas­tries, so we all had to leave. There were only about a half-dozen cus­tomers at the time, so the man­age­ment can’t claim that we were hog­ging seats from hypo­thet­i­cal meal-eating cus­tomers (of which there were none). If the new pol­icy had been posted up front when I placed my order, I did not see it.

I used to like to go to M. Rohrs occa­sion­ally, some­times for a sand­wich or some­times just cof­fee. I would usu­ally sit and work or just read for about an hour or two, which I don’t think is unrea­son­able at any cof­fee shop, Star­bucks not excluded. All the other neg­a­tive com­ments on Yelp are true; the ser­vice is often rude and neglect­ful (I once had them com­pletely for­get to make my sand­wich — but at least they apol­o­gized), and they charge for wire­less access and for elec­tric­ity. Worse is their atti­tude; it would be one thing to sim­ply charge peo­ple to plug in their lap­tops, but the signs plas­tered about the place couch it in terms of “theft of util­i­ties,” essen­tially accus­ing cus­tomers of crim­i­nal behav­ior. After the clos­ing of the vastly supe­rior cof­fee shop DTUT a few years ago, M. Rohrs is pretty much the only place of its type in the neigh­bor­hood, so I used to patron­ize it any­way. No more.

The word “loi­ter­ing,” as any lit­er­ate per­son should know, has crim­i­nal con­no­ta­tions, and I sus­pect the man­age­ment of M. Rohrs knows this. I deeply, deeply resent being called a “loi­terer” despite hav­ing paid (and tipped!) for cof­fee and a pas­try. Upon leav­ing for the last time, I only regret­ted not demand­ing my tip back.

Per­haps they intend to tran­si­tion away from being a cof­fee house into a restau­rant with a take-out cof­fee bar. If so, they will have to hire more staff, improve the speed and accu­racy of their ser­vice, toss out the couches, and stop accus­ing their pay­ing cus­tomers of crim­i­nal behav­ior. Good luck with that. If any­one asso­ci­ated with the estab­lish­ment hap­pens to read this, I invite you to please com­ment below. I would love to hear your jus­ti­fi­ca­tions. I signed up for Yelp for the sole pur­pose of post­ing a copy of this review, and I sin­cerely hope lots of poten­tial cus­tomers read it.

So that you know where not to go get your cof­fee, M. Rohrs’ House of Fine Teas & Cof­fees is located in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, at 310 East 86th Street, between 1st and 2nd Avenues.