Margaret Cho's Fingerbang

Margaret Cho is a comedian best known for her tattoos, her bellydancing, her cancelled sitcom, her clothing line, for being too Asian and not Asian enough, and for her explicit and honest discussions of sexuality. You'd be surprised, then, to learn that her latest show, 'Fingerbang,' a musical revue, is performed at the Largo, a decidedly traditionalist LA establishment, one used to hosting The Watkins Family Hour and John Brion.

'Fingerbang' delights in its variety - a list of performers includes an unfulfilled housewife, a stereotypical lesbian singer-songwriter in drag, and also more sincere musical acts like Susie Suh and Grant Lee-Phillips

Strangely, 'Fingerbang' more closely resembles “A Prairie Home Companion” than you might expect. Cho has been learning guitar (the inspiration for the show) and her voice is surprisingly sweet and well-suited to sing lyrics like, "You can't break up with me / I'm Margaret Fucking Cho." It might have been just a by-product of the space, but her performance was almost wholesome. Maybe Cho can add that to her list.

Originally in Los Angeles Magazine

Self-Indulgent Portraiture

If this were a men's magazine, one with lists and tips and centerfolds and unrealistic stories from supposedly experienced men, the advice I have would come near the bottom of a stack of bullet points which, if unstacked and followed precisely, would enable the reader to Live Harder, Pick Up Women, and Be Better Men.

This list would undoubtedly be composed of expensive masculinity: Eat a steak made from walrus meat; heli-ski the northern slope of K2; fend off a school of Amazonian Piranhas—a momentous sequence of to-dos.

If my small adventure were shuffled in among these, you'd be forgiven for overlooking it. But if the goal is to truly be a better man (or woman, for that matter) there is no path more certain than this: commission a painted portrait of yourself.

I guarantee those deep insecurities held over from middle school will be confronted and excised far more directly in front of an artist than in front of a Mako Shark or on top of a glacier. The great challenge for man (and I'm talking Homo sapien man, here) is against himself; challenges against nature, challenges against other beasts—these have been fought (and won) by our far hairier predecessors.

No, the greatest challenges are those in which our own evolutionary prize—our minds—creates the challenge. Crippling self-doubt. Trust. Impatience. These are the guardians to adulthood.

And this is why your portrait must be topless. Perhaps I should have mentioned that earlier. Here's what to expect:

Weeks before you are painted, you will begin to train. This will be like training for a marathon, only motivated by vanity alone. Abs: you'll need them.

You'll agonize over expression, posture, stance. Any wayward look of hunger, fatigue, depression, surprise or haughtiness could be captured permanently in an object you can never throw away.

Soon afterwards, you'll realize that any intention you have to convey hunger, fatigue, or any emotion, any expression at all, depends not on you but on the artist. Plus or minus some measure of ability, what you'll see when the easel is turned around and your portrait is revealed is quite literally the artist's perception of you. What you'll see is how others (or, at least one other) see you.

But first, you'll have to wait (yes, topless), standing, posing for hours. You'll live and die, staring at a burl in the floorboard or a notch in the ceiling, your eyes crossed in the boredom of meditation, your limbs encased in glue while they are painted, then released one-by-one in a momentary search for relaxation as your artist moves across the canvas.

Keep in mind that your portrait will hang with good company—Presidents, Generals, Captains of Industry, attractive women, etc. The one surefire way to fit in is through the clever use of props. Try posing as if you are signing a bill into law or preparing a Falcon for the hunt. I decided to hold a pipe.

Needless to say, this was a bit ridiculous. But, in defense of the pipe, it did insulate me from the burden of seriousness. My silly prop means that I won't be confused with one of those kinds of people, the type who would actually get a portrait painted of themselves. You know. The kind who reads men's magazines.

Originally in SpliceToday at: http://www.splicetoday.com/pop-culture/sitting-vainly

Yield to Total Elation - Four Tet

What is the goal of an avant-garde electronic musician? To play Carnegie or Coachella? To kick Daft Punk off their glowing pyramid and change the face of dance music? To catch the ear of a music supervisor at Weiden + Kennedy and wind up scoring a Nike ad?

If this last goal was Kieran Hebden's, Four Tet would have been a success almost a decade ago. But crisscrossing joggers exercising to "Everything Is Alright" from Four Tet's second release, Pause, was not enough for Hebden. 2003's Rounds heralded a possible new future, not only for the young UK-native, but for electronic music as a genre. Rounds had a humanity about it—it is soulful without copying retro samples, distorted and unbelievably complex without devolving into noisy pretension.

And then something happened. Something changed. The wave of electronic acts that should have followed Four Tet's march into intelligent sincerity never did. Instead, the genre was sidetracked by an unlikely revival of 80's synth and 70's disco cheese. Gregg Gillis began calling himself Girl Talk and started playing short versions of songs everyone had heard before and for a couple of years, Night Ripper was the only record you'd hear at parties.

And the movement really grew. M83's career-spanning tribute to 80s soundtrack icon Vangelis sold out the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Australian act Cut Copy had to be moved to Club Nokia when the LAFD determined that the Music Box was too small for the number of fans who wanted to see them.

Four Tet performed to only about a hundred people at The Echo. But we hundred spent no time lamenting. Four Tet's recordings are so finished in their execution that it can be difficult to appreciate their true complexity. Hebden set his mind to creating the many layers one-by-one on stage, unveiling them out of sync and shuffled in with glimpses of other songs. As if on a scavenger hunt, the crowd cheered every find - the drum track from "As Serious As Your Life" or the staccato mandolin from "Spirit Fingers."

The true triumph of the night came from the piece-by-piece reconstruction of "A Smile Around The Face." The vocal tracks alone seemed to take twenty minutes to build and when Hebden hit the chorus a shout crossed The Echo like it was the final round of the World Cup; Kieren Hebden had won, Four Tet had won. For a second, it was possible to forget the wayward path of the last few years, to scream and cheer and dance.

And that, I think, should be the goal.

Originally in Los Angeles Magazine

The Best of Celebrity Booze

So, you're a celebrity. You've sold out concerts/topped the box office charts/slept with dudes/chicks. There's nothing to do during the daytime and idle life Bel Air isn't as fresh as the Prince suggested. Most of your bored celebrity friends have started their own clothing lines or found a depressing or uplifting charity in need of a public face. Bo-ring!

If only you could show your fans that you care about things other than sex and money without having to pose for any pictures with handicapped orphans…

Booze! That's the ticket out of your malaise—you need to start your own celebrity-branded line of limited-edition liquor. First, you have to live up to those fine celebrities who came before in the service of the sauce. Here are my five favorite celebrity alcohols:

5. Francis Ford Coppola's Director's Cut Zinfandel
This wine stands out from the other booze on my list because, quite simply, it's not too preposterous. Apparently, this Zinfandel has a rating of 90.0/100on wine website cork'd, and an A- is never a bad thing. It is a shame, however, that nearly the closest Coppola got to any actual film over the past decade was to wrap this bottle in faux-35mm.

4. Sean Combs' Ciroc Vodka
With Kanye West making so much noise lately, it's easy to forget about the original front-runner in the Asshole Olympics, Mr. Daddy. Combs debuted his vodka clad in a tuxedo, riding a jet ski. Or, wait—maybe I'm thinking about his new fragrance. Or maybe a new line of tuxedos from Sean John. Or maybe a new alias. This vodka is aimed at consumers who like rap music enough to want to buy vodka for its connection to a rap star, but not enough to actually listen to rap lyrics, where the only vodka consumed is Grey Goose (to get loose, duh).

3. Dan Ackroyd's Crystal Head Vodka
Oh, Dan—if only you were kidding. If only the seven-minute video you've posted online talking about your belief in the supernatural was some kind of advanced prank. If only you didn't commission a “noted sculptor” to design a skull-shaped glass goblet for your premium vodka and then refuse to call it a “crystal skull” because a “skull” is dead and a “head” is alive. If only you didn't decide that three stages of filtration wasn't enough—that, no, you would filter it a fourth time. Through diamonds. If only…

2. Marilyn Manson's Mansinthe
This one shone down upon me on one of those Internet days when you realize that There Must Be A God and He Probably Likes Jokes, Too. I can just picture all of the small-town Manson fans lining up outside their local liquor mart with their piercings, waiting to get blotto on Mansinthe and write hate poetry towards 'Society'.

1. Danny Devito's Limoncello
About two-and-a-half million people have YouTubed Danny Devito's drunk appearance on The View, where he admitted to downing seven limoncellos, a traditional Italian liquor, with George Clooney. But the truly extraordinary thing is that his public drunkenness didn't hamper Devito's career at all—on the contrary, he made it his career.

Devito ordered some fancy bottles with scratch-and-sniff lemon labels and set to work making his own limoncello. And if that weren't enough, he commissioned a smooth-voiced Italian lounge singer (who must have been waiting to finally break out of the hotel/motel bar circuit) to sing the “My Way” of commercial jingles. Fantastic.

Originally in SpliceToday at: http://www.splicetoday.com/consume/the-best-of-celebrity-booze

Sometimes It Hurts - Tindersticks

Before the curtain rose and the Tindersticks came on stage, I had an entirely serious conversation with one of the security guards at the Henry Fonda Theatre about how easy his job would be that night—a half-capacity crowd of NPR listeners seated in gray plastic chairs didn't present much of a security risk. And it wasn't as if the band would incite any riotous behavior. Tindersticks have been playing slow-core since before people started using 'core' as a suffix to create questionable musical genres.

For most of the show, we were right. The crowd's deference to the band gave way to silence between songs, broken only by the occasional drink sale at the bar.

And then it happened: During perhaps the quietest part of the quietest song of the show, an elderly Asian man in a red vest started yelling at his girlfriend. Drunk, he got up from his seat and started jogging down the center aisle, still yelling, and began to dance in front of two security guards.

As the guards ushered him towards the back of the theatre, the man's girlfriend came to the center aisle, and started to dance behind him. As he was dragged towards the front door, she flashed her breasts at the band. The Tindersticks didn’t seem to notice.

At the front of the theatre, you could hear her boyfriend yelling at the guards, saying he just wanted to find his girlfriend so they could leave together, quietly. The guards, in full faith, let the man back into the theatre unaccompanied. He paused at the bar for a breath or two and then started yelling once again, this time he was nonsensical and loud enough for the band to skip a beat.

Within seconds, another man at the bar, a balding man in a blazer, perhaps an NPR listener himself, decided he had enough—and proceeded to take him the fuck out. A combination of a fist to the face and a Street-Fighter-style sweep kick brought the loud man to the ground, where he was quickly surrounded by a gang of other quiet scarf-wearers, eager to work out their repressed anger. Once more, the loud man was dragged out of the theatre, this time for good.

Unfortunately, this was the most thrilling part of the show.

I understand Tindersticks' urge to tour completely on a new album. But The Hungry Saw, their first release in three years, is a real downer, even compared to their other downers. Perhaps fan favorites like ‘Tiny Tears’ or ‘Bathtime’ were left off the list in deference to the three band members who’ve left Tindersticks. The full orchestra the band toured with in the 90s has been trimmed to what lead singer Stuart Staples termed a 'semi-orchestra', though the only strings I could spot belonged to an upright bass. The final song of the night, their big closing number before an already-assured standing ovation, was ‘My Sister,’ an eight-minute spoken word ball of misery.

That's not to say the concert wasn't good. Staples could call out numbers at the DMV and it would sound sonorous and intimate—and I'm not saying that touring bands have an obligation to play their greatest hits. I just think that if you happen to be in a band with such a catalogue of absolute barn burners—songs that would very quickly turn a half-full seated show into a rock concert—maybe you should, you know, play them. Perhaps then, you couldn't be overshadowed by a quiet riot and a pair of tits.

Originally in Los Angeles Magazine