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From: owner-mobility-digest@lists.xmission.com (mobility-digest) To: mobility-digest@lists.xmission.com Subject: mobility-digest V1 #55 Reply-To: mobility Sender: owner-mobility-digest@lists.xmission.com Errors-To: owner-mobility-digest@lists.xmission.com Precedence: bulk mobility-digest Tuesday, December 30 1997 Volume 01 : Number 055 Re: (mobility) speed metal (mobility) Moby and homosexualists Re: (mobility) speed metal Re: (mobility) Moby and homosexualists ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 30 Dec 1997 02:31:02 -0700 From: but not _the_ frankz <frank.z@wxs.nl> Subject: Re: (mobility) speed metal At 09:20 PM 12/29/97 -0600, you wrote: >Now forgive me, I knew Moby was a decent >guitar player, but I didn't know that he was THAT good!! Certainly he would >have impressed the likes of Marty Friedman (Megadeth) or Hetfield/Hammett >(Metallica). I would surely like to know how many of these other >electronic/whatever artists could possibly play guitar like that. Anybody >know? I would be surprised if any other dance person heck even alternative >band's guitarist could do that. I know, I know.... :-) I'm not a speed metal freak (I dig Ministry), but I listen to guitars since I was 15.... (that is sure a long song ago!) I have theory: You cannot possibly play a good guitar-solo on a synthesizer (comp.) so, electronic artists start to perform with a comp. & a guitar.... (this is where Rock meets Electronics) Now, fans, or listeners in general, get confused.... (because they all like to put it in a Class, class-sorting, is what gives people certainty, class sorting i.e. "this is rock, that is electronica"; is one of the first things you learn in life, and prob one of the things you have to do the most....) Like the style of guitar Moby plays in New Dawn Fades (I didn't know Joy Division was speed metal, well, never mind....:-) that's the old seventies hard rock style, as played by SO MANY guitarists (lot of 'm dead) hardly possible to mention all of 'm (yo know how many Gibsons there are sold?.... hehe :-)) Moby said in an interview his favorite guitarist was Tom Verlaine (ex-Television) a pure 80's guitarist i'd say... he has a live-album out together with Chris Spedding ('cocaine') who plays even better I guess! [there's an absurdly good number on that album, about him killing his girlfriend and feeding her to her own mother....yahk!... the guitar in that number is AWESOME...] [I would call it 'apres-Punk'] If you wanna hear GUITAR, go to a cd-shop and try out Frank Zappa's cd with that name! other great guitar-player is Prince, the OLD one, the one that LIVED, the one that rocked... (the Purple Haze guy...) First time I heard Animal Rights.... (don't shoot!!!) it reminded me of David Bowie! The OLD one.... the one from Ziggy Stardust ("time takes a cigaret.... and puts it in your mouth...") Listen to THAT guitar! (not Bowie himself if I remember correctly, if i'm not wrong it was a guy called Campbell or so... probably dead too) Electric guitar-playing was invented by the Ol' Bo Diddley ('I'm a man') on a WOODEN square BOX with snares he played the first (blues-)rock guitarsolo's ever played... he's the guy they ALL learned it from... No! Everybody shouts! ROBERT JOHNSON! He was the first.... but folks, that is SO long ago.... even before I had ears! There is this box though, The Collected Recordings of Robert Johnson.... i think every guitarfreak should hear that! forgive me, if i've let myself go, but when it comes to guitars, i consider myself a specialist (new cassette-deck is coming soon! so keep in touch!) Frank Zappa: "When it comes to guitarplaying, in fact, I'm a ONE NOTE player.... " and I immediately added: "...yeah, but that ONE note, he plays SO goooood....!" keesz _____________________________________ "Internet: your bright sight of life" - Kees - ------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 30 Dec 1997 00:43:05 -0500 From: Joe Clark <joeclark@interlog.com> Subject: (mobility) Moby and homosexualists As an avowed homosexualist writer who has covered Moby twice and spent a few hours with him, maybe I could set the matter straight, as it were. These stories are posted on my Web site. I'm giving you the whole shebang here, not all of it being Mobyesque. - -- <http://www.interlog.com/~joeclark/QiYE46.html> Mike Watt es mas macho! by [1]Joe Clark I apologize for starting off with an obscure Amerikanski TV reference, but does anyone recall the old Saturday Night Live sketch (later heisted by Laurie Anderson in Home of the Brave) parodying a Spanish-language game show? The whole sketch was such a non-sequitur it oozed a kind of abstract recherche charm, with Bill Murray as quizmaster asking, "Quien es mas macho, Lloyd Bridges o Jack Lloyd?" The answer back then was, of course, Lloyd Bridges (far more macho than Mr. Hawaii Five-O, who had Danno do all the manhandling). Now I wonder if maybe Mike Watt es mas macho-- or is at least a bigger, more charming, even more recherche non-sequitur. This Watt guy must be one powerful bearded hunk o' flesh to get away with an album of such surpassing eccentricity, such intricate packaging, and such megastar guest performers as Ball-hog or Tugboat? Watt is a hero among punk- and garage-rock queens, having written songs for and plucked various guitar strings in the Minutemen and Firehose. Indeed, careful study of the liner notes of Firehose's 1991 opus Flyin' the Flannel, with its comic strips and run-on lowercase text, gives clues to the gloriously overwrought design extravaganza that is Ball-hog or Tugboat?'s package. It's a mustard-yellow folder twice the height of a CD with three disc-sized pockets bound inside. One holds the actual disc. The second contains Ring Spiel '95, an engrossing, bizarre made-up lexicon ("corporate pawn: obvious palooka"; "one-on-one tug-o-war: solo record"). The last pocket holds a poster of album credits, one side of which is meant to look like a broadsheet for an 18th-century Mike Watt Wrestling Federation match. The inside front cover sticks with this theme, showing an apparently headless comic-book guy with his neck butted up against another fellow's privates and the headline "Sex with you is like watching scientific wrestling." Weird enough for you yet? But wait, there's more. (This is a music column, remember? Sometimes I forget.) The album is a puzzling pastiche of styles (blues rock, tuneless guitar meandering, mumbled pseudo-ballads) with largely nonsensical lyrics spewed by guest vocalists like tattooed egocentric carnivore Hank Rollins, overrated angst-rock poster boy Eddie Vedder (monotonously reciting the words "The kids of today should defend themselves against the '70s," a fancy way of saying "disco sucks"), underrated soul crooner Mark Lanegan, and bald-pated hovercraft-piloting oddity Frank Black. (What, Watt? No Traci Lords?) If musicians are more your bag than singers, you'll find a similarly rich coterie of alterna-rock gods here too. Si, Mike Watt es mas macho. I admit it. But can someone tell me why "Intense Song for Madonna to Sing" has no words to sing at all? _____________________________________________________________________ Not quite "everything" Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, dance(hall)/techno/punk/ambient/rave impresario Moby has been driving Little Miss Queer in Your Ear here's fabulometers to the redline with his welcome combo of NRG, S-E-X, and ethics. Though for years I was absolutely positive Moby was a fag, in fact he is not; apart from tell-all magazine interviews, evidence of the wee skinhead's flagrant heterosexuality comes from the video "Everytime You Touch Me." It's quite an effective collision of overlapping frames, snippets of naked bodies with exaggerated skin tones, and some passionate making-out that, on close inspection, takes place between Moby and a couple of women. (Look closely. It's boy/girl. Wishful thinking clouds one's vision sometimes.) Remarkably, the few seconds in which Moby is actually seen tonguing, pulling ropes off the legs of, or spooning treats down the throat of these women are surprisingly erotic. Since day zero we've all been saturated with depictions of guys and girls making out, which for a monosexualist like me elicit little more than boredom (or a fond desire for the woman in the picture to get lost), but Moby manages to make heterosexuality seem exciting, if only for a manageable few seconds at a time. Fancy that. Heterosexuality - exciting! Talk about beating the odds. And the fact that Moby is a Christian vegan adds to the joy. Everything is Wrong is the title of Moby's second album, spanning the gamut with dance tracks (featuring stand-in vocalists `a la Watt) and rock numbers and chill-out tunes. While Moby makes reference to the state of the earth and the pervasiveness of suffering, in fact "everything" is not wrong. There's very little wrong with Moby, or his music, or his ethos. If anything, Everything is Wrong is the antidote to its own title. Gulp down a lovin' spoonful. - -- <http://www.interlog.com/~joeclark/QiYE50.html> Moby is woman, hear him roar by [1]Joe Clark It's time to revisit that multitalented vegan heterosexualist musician dude, Moby. After praising his album Everything is Wrong a few months ago, I would later enjoy a superexclusive interviewette with the thoughtful, matter-of-fact lad, whose teeth look much shinier in person than in those dreadful television interviews. Everything is Wrong's signal achievement is assembling a startling range of genres in a sequence that, in other hands, might go over as well as matter brushing against antimatter. (In order, those genres are piano solo, jackhammer disco-diva dancehall, thrash metal, industrial, dancepop, techno, something akin to deathmetal, urbane synthpop `a la Stereo MCs, funereal dirge, more dancepop, another piano solo, New Age soundtrack, lullaby.) The secret to this winsome assemblage, says Moby, is MiniDisc, an oddball Sony recordable-disc technology that lets Moby audition various permutations until he finds one he likes. The album features a handful of session singer(ette)s and Moby's own trademark bellowing. "I guess I have a pretty broad view (1) of singing, (2) of pop music," explains Moby in a typical text-aware '90s sentence. (We're the first generation that talks in parentheses.) "You know when you're young, if you had to go to church, there's always some old guy standing behind you sort of mouthing the words? Everyone else is singing tunefully, and behind you [it's] 'On-ward-Chris-tian-sol-diers-mar-ching....' That's me. I can't do the tuneful thing. So I'm forced to scream and shout and vocalize. "I love female vocals. I have my sort of half-baked semi-adolescent theory that the first sound any human being ever hears is a woman passionately vocalizing, unless of course your mother was anaesthetized when she gave birth to you.... I think it sets a really powerful precedent for female vocals in our brains." Yeah, but in delivery rooms these days aren't there half a dozen doctors and nurses all saying "Come on! Push! Push! Push"? "Well, maybe that's the rap part of it," avers the deadpan bleach-blond megastar. "If you're in a room with five people, four of whom are talking rationally-- like, 'OK, come on! Push!'-- and there's one woman screaming at the top of her lungs, which are you going to pay attention to?" Men loving aliens loving men Two music videos making the rounds now offer oddly contrary vistas into alien realms. Lovable rotund bassist and flannel-shirt habitue Mike Watt (Queer in Your Ear passim) somehow talked Sony into filming a video for "Piss-Bottle Man," Watt's tribute to his father's habit of toting along a bottle to piss in during long car trips. As guest singer Evan Dando croons "Driving in his shoes, using the bottle he used/Every time I pop I think of my Pop and pay my dues," Watt cruises through the desert in his Datsun pickup and is ensnared by smooth-skinned, oval-eyed aliens. As he is flooded by white celestial light, all the while being lovingly pawed by a pair of the childlike creatures, the expression on Watt's motile face communicates wonder, inebriation, and disorientation all at once. In a music video about urine disposal, I suppose anything short of a golden arc counts as subtlety. Meanwhile, quite another conception of alienness can be seen in "Crush with Eyeliner," the long-delayed R.E.M video. (You can also find it on the new home-video collection Parallel.) Directed by Spike Jonze of "Sabotage" and "Buddy Holly" fame, it's the clip in which high-strung Japanese kids in L.A. impersonate R.E.M. onstage. Rendered in film stock so grainy it conjures memories of sand in your shoes at the beach, the kray-zee superstar stand-ins cavort, vogue (yes!), breakdance, and tussle, all the while lip-synching only a tad less competently than most English-speaking bands. "We all invent ourselves," sings Michael Stipe in an ode to a girlfriend he lovingly dubs "my kiss breath turpentine" (piss-bottle breath?). "She's a sad tomato. She's three miles of bad road" (piss-bottle road?). Predictably enough, three of the R.E.M. lads show up in "Crush with Eyeliner." At one point Michael Stipe is seen sashaying down a hall surrounded by his little Japanese friends. Where's the hovering spacecraft? Where are the little people taking you, Michael? Let's face it: In Los Angeles you'll find a heck of a lot more Japanese kids out for a good time than gaunt enigmatic bald bisexualist Georgian pop stars. So who's really the alien in this little tableau? It all leaves me with a funny taste in my mouth. - -- Joe Clark joeclark@interlog.com <http://www.interlog.com/~joeclark> ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 30 Dec 1997 17:32:24 -0500 From: "jason(INRI)" <rwparen@cyberus.ca> Subject: Re: (mobility) speed metal a mixture of rock and "electronica" (if that's what you want to call it) is called industrial. it's been around since the early seventies.... some modern industrial acts are nin and gravity kills... - -----Original Message----- From: but not _the_ frankz <frank.z@wxs.nl> To: mobility@lists.xmission.com <mobility@lists.xmission.com> Date: December 30, 1997 4:32 AM Subject: Re: (mobility) speed metal >At 09:20 PM 12/29/97 -0600, you wrote: >>Now forgive me, I knew Moby was a decent >>guitar player, but I didn't know that he was THAT good!! Certainly he would >>have impressed the likes of Marty Friedman (Megadeth) or Hetfield/Hammett >>(Metallica). I would surely like to know how many of these other >>electronic/whatever artists could possibly play guitar like that. Anybody >>know? I would be surprised if any other dance person heck even alternative >>band's guitarist could do that. > >I know, I know.... :-) >I'm not a speed metal freak (I dig Ministry), but I listen to guitars since >I was 15.... >(that is sure a long song ago!) > >I have theory: >You cannot possibly play a good guitar-solo on a synthesizer (comp.) >so, electronic artists start to perform with a comp. & a guitar.... (this is >where Rock meets Electronics) >Now, fans, or listeners in general, get confused.... (because they all like >to put it in a Class, class-sorting, is what gives people certainty, class >sorting i.e. "this is rock, that is electronica"; is one of the first things >you learn in life, and prob one of the things you have to do the most....) > >Like the style of guitar Moby plays in New Dawn Fades (I didn't know Joy >Division was speed metal, well, never mind....:-) >that's the old seventies hard rock style, as played by SO MANY guitarists >(lot of 'm dead) hardly possible to mention all of 'm (yo know how many >Gibsons there are sold?.... hehe :-)) > >Moby said in an interview his favorite guitarist was Tom Verlaine >(ex-Television) a pure 80's guitarist i'd say... >he has a live-album out together with Chris Spedding ('cocaine') who plays >even better I guess! [there's an absurdly good number on that album, about >him killing his girlfriend and feeding her to her own mother....yahk!... the >guitar in that number is AWESOME...] [I would call it 'apres-Punk'] > >If you wanna hear GUITAR, go to a cd-shop and try out Frank Zappa's cd with >that name! >other great guitar-player is Prince, the OLD one, the one that LIVED, the >one that rocked... >(the Purple Haze guy...) > >First time I heard Animal Rights.... (don't shoot!!!) >it reminded me of David Bowie! The OLD one.... the one from Ziggy Stardust >("time takes a cigaret.... and puts it in your mouth...") >Listen to THAT guitar! (not Bowie himself if I remember correctly, >if i'm not wrong it was a guy called Campbell or so... probably dead too) > >Electric guitar-playing was invented by the Ol' Bo Diddley ('I'm a man') on >a WOODEN square BOX with snares he played the first (blues-)rock >guitarsolo's ever played... he's the guy they ALL learned it from... >No! Everybody shouts! ROBERT JOHNSON! He was the first.... >but folks, that is SO long ago.... even before I had ears! There is this box >though, The Collected Recordings of Robert Johnson.... i think every >guitarfreak should hear that! > >forgive me, if i've let myself go, >but when it comes to guitars, i consider myself a specialist > >(new cassette-deck is coming soon! so keep in touch!) > >Frank Zappa: "When it comes to guitarplaying, in fact, I'm a ONE NOTE >player.... " > >and I immediately added: "...yeah, but that ONE note, he plays SO goooood....!" > > >keesz > > > > >_____________________________________ >"Internet: your bright sight of life" - Kees >------------------------------------------------------------------ > > > ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 30 Dec 1997 16:59:56 -0600 From: "Dennis Daniels" <ddaniels@wcs-net.com> Subject: Re: (mobility) Moby and homosexualists I have that Mike Watt album and as many people are on it (ie- Beastie Boys, 2/3 of Nirvana (or 3/4 if you count Pat Smear), Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, Evan Dando of Lemonheads, etc.), to put it truthfully, it wasn't near as good (to me, anyway) as it should've been. Anyway, I was told by someone that Moby did the James Bond re-version as a result of BMW wanting it for their ads. Is there any truth to that? Last thing, I got the Spawn soundtrack the other day, and that Butthole Surfers/Moby song is good, but Moby really needed to do a little more on that song. As a matter of fact, most of the songs on it sound like the "electronica artists" (for lack of a better term) were just on there to provide the background music, while the rock/metal artists basically took all of the credit. For example, the Marilyn Manson/Sneaker Pimps song sounds like M.M. took all of the credit and left S.P. in the dust. (M.M. and S.P. hate each other, but that's a different story). On the video for it-which sucks, just like the song.-only credit is given to Marilyn Manson; why is that? Just wondering. Later, D. - ---------- From: Joe Clark <joeclark@interlog.com> To: mobility@xmission.com Subject: (mobility) Moby and homosexualists Date: Monday, December 29, 1997 11:43 PM As an avowed homosexualist writer who has covered Moby twice and spent a few hours with him, maybe I could set the matter straight, as it were. These stories are posted on my Web site. I'm giving you the whole shebang here, not all of it being Mobyesque. - -- <http://www.interlog.com/~joeclark/QiYE46.html> Mike Watt es mas macho! by [1]Joe Clark I apologize for starting off with an obscure Amerikanski TV reference, but does anyone recall the old Saturday Night Live sketch (later heisted by Laurie Anderson in Home of the Brave) parodying a Spanish-language game show? The whole sketch was such a non-sequitur it oozed a kind of abstract recherche charm, with Bill Murray as quizmaster asking, "Quien es mas macho, Lloyd Bridges o Jack Lloyd?" The answer back then was, of course, Lloyd Bridges (far more macho than Mr. Hawaii Five-O, who had Danno do all the manhandling). Now I wonder if maybe Mike Watt es mas macho-- or is at least a bigger, more charming, even more recherche non-sequitur. This Watt guy must be one powerful bearded hunk o' flesh to get away with an album of such surpassing eccentricity, such intricate packaging, and such megastar guest performers as Ball-hog or Tugboat? Watt is a hero among punk- and garage-rock queens, having written songs for and plucked various guitar strings in the Minutemen and Firehose. Indeed, careful study of the liner notes of Firehose's 1991 opus Flyin' the Flannel, with its comic strips and run-on lowercase text, gives clues to the gloriously overwrought design extravaganza that is Ball-hog or Tugboat?'s package. It's a mustard-yellow folder twice the height of a CD with three disc-sized pockets bound inside. One holds the actual disc. The second contains Ring Spiel '95, an engrossing, bizarre made-up lexicon ("corporate pawn: obvious palooka"; "one-on-one tug-o-war: solo record"). The last pocket holds a poster of album credits, one side of which is meant to look like a broadsheet for an 18th-century Mike Watt Wrestling Federation match. The inside front cover sticks with this theme, showing an apparently headless comic-book guy with his neck butted up against another fellow's privates and the headline "Sex with you is like watching scientific wrestling." Weird enough for you yet? But wait, there's more. (This is a music column, remember? Sometimes I forget.) The album is a puzzling pastiche of styles (blues rock, tuneless guitar meandering, mumbled pseudo-ballads) with largely nonsensical lyrics spewed by guest vocalists like tattooed egocentric carnivore Hank Rollins, overrated angst-rock poster boy Eddie Vedder (monotonously reciting the words "The kids of today should defend themselves against the '70s," a fancy way of saying "disco sucks"), underrated soul crooner Mark Lanegan, and bald-pated hovercraft-piloting oddity Frank Black. (What, Watt? No Traci Lords?) If musicians are more your bag than singers, you'll find a similarly rich coterie of alterna-rock gods here too. Si, Mike Watt es mas macho. I admit it. But can someone tell me why "Intense Song for Madonna to Sing" has no words to sing at all? _____________________________________________________________________ Not quite "everything" Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, dance(hall)/techno/punk/ambient/rave impresario Moby has been driving Little Miss Queer in Your Ear here's fabulometers to the redline with his welcome combo of NRG, S-E-X, and ethics. Though for years I was absolutely positive Moby was a fag, in fact he is not; apart from tell-all magazine interviews, evidence of the wee skinhead's flagrant heterosexuality comes from the video "Everytime You Touch Me." It's quite an effective collision of overlapping frames, snippets of naked bodies with exaggerated skin tones, and some passionate making-out that, on close inspection, takes place between Moby and a couple of women. (Look closely. It's boy/girl. Wishful thinking clouds one's vision sometimes.) Remarkably, the few seconds in which Moby is actually seen tonguing, pulling ropes off the legs of, or spooning treats down the throat of these women are surprisingly erotic. Since day zero we've all been saturated with depictions of guys and girls making out, which for a monosexualist like me elicit little more than boredom (or a fond desire for the woman in the picture to get lost), but Moby manages to make heterosexuality seem exciting, if only for a manageable few seconds at a time. Fancy that. Heterosexuality - exciting! Talk about beating the odds. And the fact that Moby is a Christian vegan adds to the joy. Everything is Wrong is the title of Moby's second album, spanning the gamut with dance tracks (featuring stand-in vocalists `a la Watt) and rock numbers and chill-out tunes. While Moby makes reference to the state of the earth and the pervasiveness of suffering, in fact "everything" is not wrong. There's very little wrong with Moby, or his music, or his ethos. If anything, Everything is Wrong is the antidote to its own title. Gulp down a lovin' spoonful. - -- <http://www.interlog.com/~joeclark/QiYE50.html> Moby is woman, hear him roar by [1]Joe Clark It's time to revisit that multitalented vegan heterosexualist musician dude, Moby. After praising his album Everything is Wrong a few months ago, I would later enjoy a superexclusive interviewette with the thoughtful, matter-of-fact lad, whose teeth look much shinier in person than in those dreadful television interviews. Everything is Wrong's signal achievement is assembling a startling range of genres in a sequence that, in other hands, might go over as well as matter brushing against antimatter. (In order, those genres are piano solo, jackhammer disco-diva dancehall, thrash metal, industrial, dancepop, techno, something akin to deathmetal, urbane synthpop `a la Stereo MCs, funereal dirge, more dancepop, another piano solo, New Age soundtrack, lullaby.) The secret to this winsome assemblage, says Moby, is MiniDisc, an oddball Sony recordable-disc technology that lets Moby audition various permutations until he finds one he likes. The album features a handful of session singer(ette)s and Moby's own trademark bellowing. "I guess I have a pretty broad view (1) of singing, (2) of pop music," explains Moby in a typical text-aware '90s sentence. (We're the first generation that talks in parentheses.) "You know when you're young, if you had to go to church, there's always some old guy standing behind you sort of mouthing the words? Everyone else is singing tunefully, and behind you [it's] 'On-ward-Chris-tian-sol-diers-mar-ching....' That's me. I can't do the tuneful thing. So I'm forced to scream and shout and vocalize. "I love female vocals. I have my sort of half-baked semi-adolescent theory that the first sound any human being ever hears is a woman passionately vocalizing, unless of course your mother was anaesthetized when she gave birth to you.... I think it sets a really powerful precedent for female vocals in our brains." Yeah, but in delivery rooms these days aren't there half a dozen doctors and nurses all saying "Come on! Push! Push! Push"? "Well, maybe that's the rap part of it," avers the deadpan bleach-blond megastar. "If you're in a room with five people, four of whom are talking rationally-- like, 'OK, come on! Push!'-- and there's one woman screaming at the top of her lungs, which are you going to pay attention to?" Men loving aliens loving men Two music videos making the rounds now offer oddly contrary vistas into alien realms. Lovable rotund bassist and flannel-shirt habitue Mike Watt (Queer in Your Ear passim) somehow talked Sony into filming a video for "Piss-Bottle Man," Watt's tribute to his father's habit of toting along a bottle to piss in during long car trips. As guest singer Evan Dando croons "Driving in his shoes, using the bottle he used/Every time I pop I think of my Pop and pay my dues," Watt cruises through the desert in his Datsun pickup and is ensnared by smooth-skinned, oval-eyed aliens. As he is flooded by white celestial light, all the while being lovingly pawed by a pair of the childlike creatures, the expression on Watt's motile face communicates wonder, inebriation, and disorientation all at once. In a music video about urine disposal, I suppose anything short of a golden arc counts as subtlety. Meanwhile, quite another conception of alienness can be seen in "Crush with Eyeliner," the long-delayed R.E.M video. (You can also find it on the new home-video collection Parallel.) Directed by Spike Jonze of "Sabotage" and "Buddy Holly" fame, it's the clip in which high-strung Japanese kids in L.A. impersonate R.E.M. onstage. Rendered in film stock so grainy it conjures memories of sand in your shoes at the beach, the kray-zee superstar stand-ins cavort, vogue (yes!), breakdance, and tussle, all the while lip-synching only a tad less competently than most English-speaking bands. "We all invent ourselves," sings Michael Stipe in an ode to a girlfriend he lovingly dubs "my kiss breath turpentine" (piss-bottle breath?). "She's a sad tomato. She's three miles of bad road" (piss-bottle road?). Predictably enough, three of the R.E.M. lads show up in "Crush with Eyeliner." At one point Michael Stipe is seen sashaying down a hall surrounded by his little Japanese friends. Where's the hovering spacecraft? Where are the little people taking you, Michael? Let's face it: In Los Angeles you'll find a heck of a lot more Japanese kids out for a good time than gaunt enigmatic bald bisexualist Georgian pop stars. So who's really the alien in this little tableau? It all leaves me with a funny taste in my mouth. - -- Joe Clark joeclark@interlog.com <http://www.interlog.com/~joeclark> ------------------------------ End of mobility-digest V1 #55 ***************************** ------------- To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to majordomo@xmission.com with the line "unsubscribe mobility-digest" in the body.