The Louisville post-punk quartet – whose only LP, 1983’s Poke It With A Stick, is getting the reissue treatment at the end of this work-week care of Drag City – was key in its all-too-short tenure to the region’s indispensable wave of punk and post-rock in the 80s and 90s, definitely as influential on the scene as Maurice, which also has been resurrected on YouTube in these Slint AD days. The Drag City LP, in fact, is getting the re-press thanks to post-rock forefather David Grubbs, the Louisvillian-cum-Brooklynite, Squirrel Bait alum, and Drag City artist who jokes about his hometown being littered with spray-paint announcing, “Eat Your Food or eat shit!”

But is the record, a murky, rhythmic quagmire prepped by a bunch of self-taught miscreants, any good? Oh yeah.

The dark comic fantasies and sense of disillusionment summoned on Poke It With A Stick call to mind a rough-around-the-edges brand of post-punk where Link Wray flirts with Joy Division. The repetitious grooves of bass and drums lull you into false slumber as the edgy guitar scrapes at your ears. When these guys break down their more carefully built constructions – though seeing that term in print somehow seems too sanitized  – they wax psychedelic (break down in “Corners”) or thrash like true American punks (“Cowtown”). The classic “Don’t Be,” a single if there’s any on here, combines throttling bass and crunchy guitar with vicious drum patterns and spit-take vocals from singer Douglas Maxson (formerly of Dickbrains). On the closing “Order,” apparently cut live, feedback is king. “Baby Jesus” is Big Boys gold.

The whole thing is a very punk affair, even if these guys aren’t cranking up the dial to 11 on every track. Only on “Order,” though, does the band sound unhinged. For the rest of the eight tracks here, listeners are treated to a kind of mutant Birthday Party, with Cave replaced by an angry teenager fueled, in the words of the press, by cheap beer and baked beans. Your Food goes for the throat, even if it’s not always barking. After 30-ish years of vinyl obscurity, we all should be welcoming them back into the fold.

Happy spring 2018! Don’t get excited!

Just because you like it doesn’t mean it’s the best. But again, just because it’s the best doesn’t mean you’ll like it. There’s a lot of territory in-between and that’s why the Isn’t That Awful podcast is here. Take careful note of the lack of punctuation, because it’s important! The Isn’t That Awful podcast seeks to find the good in what is regularly considered “low brow” entertainment. 

In each episode, two commentators go head-to-head and bring comparable entertainment topics to the table with one critical mission: find appreciation for a pop culture artifact that typically isn’t celebrated.

Pop culture and political commentator Josh Dobbin, author of the book Of Love and Snackcakes and Other Short Works, seeks the merits of Foreigner’s big hit “Juke Box Hero” and Roxette’s bigger hit, “The Look.” Writer Dw. Dunphy rots you lock a horrican with two songs by Scorpions: “No One Like You” and “The Future Never Dies.” In-between, Josh and Dw. consider the red-light rock-out mute button phenomenon, reminisce about camp and school, and wonder aloud if Jim Steinman just wrote the same song over, and over, and over, and over again. 

Check out the podcast below or on Apple where you can subscribe to receive Isn’t That Awful, and don’t forget to comment below!

Isn’t That Awful Episode Two

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The New Group has two productions going. After its successful revival of David Rabe’s savage Sticks and Bones in 2014, the company is staging the New York premiere of his latest play, Good for Otto. While it has a few trenchant things to say about the sad state of our health care system (the setting is a mental health clinic in rural Connecticut) it takes Rabe a long-winded three hours to say them, with too much of those given over to whimsical asides, like the entire large cast (pictured above) indulging in quaint little singalongs. (Otto is a pet hamster, which should tell you something about the play’s woozy tone.)

Some of the play takes place in the imaginings of its protagonist, Dr. Michaels (Ed Harris), who himself can’t get over the mother issues that emotionally hamstring a few of the facility’s patients, notably Otto’s autistic owner, Timothy (a sentimental child-man turn for Mark Linn-Baker), and a pre-teen cutter, Frannie (Rileigh McDonald, a former Matilda), whose latest foster parent, Nora (Rhea Perlman), is at her wit’s end. Michaels’ colleague, Evangeline (Amy Madigan), is also struggling with a contingent of no-hopers, including Barnard (F. Murray Abraham), who at 77 is pondering mortality. Abraham’s monologues, as dexterously delivered as you might expect from a wily veteran (one’s performed as he changes from pajamas) offer respites from the surrounding murk. Otherwise the boldface names are awkwardly cast: Harris and Madigan, New Group mainstays, seem too old for their parts, and Perlman is more grandparent than mother. They at least have a fighting chance with their material–as the clinic administrator, Lily Gladstone, the Native American actress who received considerable acclaim for the indie film Certain Women, runs on and off stage barking orders, and does not.

Introducing a tormented gay character into the mix just when you’re wondering why there isn’t a tormented gay character in the mix, Good for Otto is like several seasons of HBO’s In Treatment jumbled together. Michaels’ rancorous phone conversations with a case manager (Nancy Giles) at “Colossal Care Insurance” have a bit of contemporary life to them, unlike the stale dramaturgy underpinning his past (his mother, who killed herself, stops by for insinuating visits) and those of the patients. Director Scott Elliott hasn’t given us much to look at besides the chairs the overemoting players sink into (New Group productions usually have more visual snap to them) and when the first act concluded with Abraham announcing “To be continued” the woman behind me snapped “Not for me! The end!” and stormed out of the theater. With Good for Otto, Rabe, who was inspired by a book titled Undoing Depression, inadvertently triggers it.

“Dip me in chocolate/Throw me to the lesbians.” Eat your heart out, Stephen Sondheim–Jerry Springer: The Opera has finally hit town, after 15 years of exasperating sensitive viewers since its Olivier-winning showcase in London. My wife and I saw its North American premiere, in Chicago, in 2007, and before this its only New York exposure was a Carnegie Hall staging ten years ago, starring Harvey Keitel, of all people, as Jerry. David Soul, a West End regular at the time, created the part, which was played by Broadway stalwart Terrence Mann (Cats, Les Miz) when I saw it. Matt McGrath, a more “Jerry-ish” type than the urbane Mann, is closing out the run, which differs from preceding productions in that Springer, who goes to hell and back (literally) in the course of the show, now sings a couple of songs. (Why shameless Jerry himself hasn’t played the role of his lifetime is a mystery.)

The show’s first act, a recreation of a typical episode concocted by Richard Thomas (not that one) and Stewart Lee, is an absolute riot, a bacchanal, a high-style assault on good taste. Dripping with piety, the ringmaster trots out the hour’s freaks: the trailer-trash adulterers, poopy-pants diaper fetishists, and “chicks with dicks,” all of whom have their vulgarly operatic say. Though mourning the scandalous end of his career in Democratic politics, Jerry prides himself on providing some sort of forum for those on society’s lowest rungs, who throw themselves at the camera, and each other, hoping for stardust to rub off. But he’s irked by his new warm-up man (Will Swenson), who’s goosing the crowd too hard.

When one nutcase “takes his shot,” as  the star of a more decorous musical might say, Jerry, hovering in purgatory, discovers that warm-up man is actually Satan, who wants him to referee a grudge match with God. It’s the debauched lowlifes from Act One returning as Biblical characters in the second act that’s inflamed some audiences (most spectacularly, Justin Keyes’ transsexual Montel morphs into Jesus) but here in jaded, soul-dead New York that’s kind of a yawn (mock TV commercials promoting guns got more of a rise), and as in Chicago the show droops into a faux-religious muddle. (The Book of Mormon may have learned from its strengths and weaknesses.) Director John Rando (Urinetown) provides the “visual snap” in spades on the Signature’s most intimate stage, to little avail. Swenson, no musicals slouch himself, lets loose a mighty, multisyllabic “fuck” at one point, trilling the word for what felt like a full minute, but to hell with God, I wanted my freaks back, like diapered siren Baby Jane (Jill Paice). Final thought: While Jerry Springer: The Opera is a divine inferno at its zenith, the White House show has far outstripped it in moral and ethical retardation.

Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo conjoins his first Off Broadway success, the one-hour The Zoo Story (1959), with its late career prequel, Homelife (2004). Mounted at New York’s Second Stage as Peter and Jerry in 2007, the show has returned under its new and deadly accurate title: The home may be near cozy, prosperous Central Park, but wild things abound.

Then and now, my feeling is that Homelife is unnecessary, restating what’s obvious in The Zoo Story, but Albee (who died two years ago) decreed that they be performed together. In collaboration with director Lila Neugebauer and Andrew Lieberman (who has scribbled together a wonderfully abstracted set in the Signature’s largest venue), Robert Sean Leonard, as textbook publisher Peter, and Katie Finneran as his loving wife Ann, do what they can with tryingly “provocative” material. Peter’s complacency is disrupted when Ann, who keeps her discontent hidden, reveals elaborate sex fantasies and goes otherwise TMI on their marriage.  Order is restored as quickly as chaos descended, and Peter goes out for a walk.

In The Zoo Story, Peter is all but ambushed by Jerry (Paul Sparks), a talkative bohemian he meets in Central Park. Jerry’s chatter, however, goes from insinuating to insane, and a primal battle erupts on the park bench. All id, Sparks (he was the disapproving critic in The Greatest Showman, and is quite the showman himself in this kind of let-it-all-hang-out role) pulls out every stop as Jerry, as does Finneran, who brings an explosive candor to Ann. (That’s not to overlook Leonard. Good as they are, this exceptional stage actor has the chops to make Peter’s composure compellingm, and gives them something to ricochet off.)  If Homelife is Albee “doing” Albee, laboring to shock, The Zoo Story is Albee in undiluted form, pouncing onto the scene, unleashed–and reason enough to recommend the pairing.

Well, like I said, nearly.

For those willing to give Chenaux the time, the compositions [say, the somber “Slowly Paradise (Lush)”] can sometimes border on the masterful. Chenaux pastes together scraps of disjointed guitar bits, digitized and warped beyond any traditional kind of recognition, and composes moments of real beauty. (The solo on the closing track is EPIC in all caps.) At his most cerebral, Chenaux channels the work of pioneers like Cheer-Accident’s Thymme Jones, no stranger to crooning over deconstruction, whose voice Chenaux occasionally parallels.

But, for those looking for a concept to play out in shorter epiphanies, look elsewhere. Chenaux’s work often demands more than just a little focus and more than just a little willingness to give over enough time to the work to flourish. Yes, “There’s Our Love,” the “single,” is a well-wrapped, even inventive package of musique-concrete. But opener “Bird & Moon,” despite an epic jazz solo for Atari-distorted guitar, lingers longer than it needs to, and, at times, feels like its 8:30 run-time is a conservative estimate, at best. Songs that stick to more recognizable forms of presenting un-amplified electric guitar, like the excellent and divisively quirky “An Abandoned Rose,” fare better, without a doubt, but there’s a lot of material on the 41-minute-long disc that makes it feel twice as long – not always in a good way.

Chenaux closes the LP with an epic – the drowsy refrains of “Wild Moon” – and here his somber timbre fits an unexpectedly spare accompaniment with apparent ease. But it’s not enough to save a record that occasionally drowns in its ambitions. Chenaux is clearly onto something and might even require a second generation of those inspired by him to perfect the delivery. Yes, yes, it’s an engaging conceit he’s cooked up here but, as a record, a collection of compositions made for aural dissection and – dare I say – aesthetic pleasure, it’s not as brilliant as it could be.

Take any screenwriting course worth its salt and a basic rule for writing is this: conflict drives the plot. However, conflicts need resolutions, and the job of the screenwriter is to find the elements set up in the first part of the story and find a way of resolving them at the end. Season 3 of the Netflix series “Love” excels in conflict. Indeed, the entire premise of “boy meets girl” is complicated by the fact that the boy is a clingy, pushover whose ever-present smile masks a darker side. And the girl is an emotional mess of a person who is trying to recover from substance abuse — while trying to keep her abusive side in check. The boy is Gus (played by show co-creator, Paul Rust), and the girl is Mickey (Gillian Jacobs) — who make up an unlikely couple whose relationship ups and downs are the center of the story. Gus is a teacher of child actors on the set of a teen witch show called “Witchita,” while Mickey works as a producer for a popular satellite radio sex talk show. We’ve seen two seasons where Gus and Mickey’s professional life has moments of advancement, but in this season, it’s clear Mickey’s career is taking off as the show she produces gets more airtime. Gus? Well, he’s kind of stuck. He wants to write screenplays, maybe direct movies, but he’s been pigeonholed into a role of obsequious movie set teacher who is at the beck and call of his superiors (who really can’t stand him, but keep him around because he does what they say). The tensions in Gus’ personal and professional life manifest themselves in a road rage incident, in meeting an old girlfriend at a wedding (one of the better episodes featuring a very moving performance by Vanessa Bayer), in his effort to direct a short film, and just being kicked around at his job (which he’s really hating, but represses it).

In a way, Season 3 is about revealing the dysfunctions in Gus’ life. Rust plays him with a near-constant veneer of Midwestern charm. But underneath the fake smiles and willingness to “help” in whatever way he can, masks a deep resentment that his life didn’t turn out the way he hoped. Mickey, for the most part, is trying not be the horrible person she started out as, but she can only contain her monstrous personality for so long, and she does lapse into destructive rages at times during this season. As a recovering alcoholic, she tries to tamp down the temptations of drinking by smoking — but even that’s a habit she’s trying to break. In short, Mickey is making an effort to be what she alluded to towards the end of Season 2 when she confessed to her ex-boyfriend Dustin (Rich Sommer): “Honestly, some part of me doesn’t want to deal with big career responsibilities. I just want to get married, have kids, and live a simple life…I just want a happy family, erase the bad one, and give my kids fucking the awesome childhood I never had.” Mickey doesn’t see that future happening with Dustin. But with Gus? He has potential to be a good husband and a great father.

Gus, though, is not sure Mickey is someone he can trust to be a good mom. He’s suppressed his feelings about Mickey’s addictions, her volatile personality, and if she really loves him. All this comes out toward the end of the series when Gus takes Mickey back to South Dakota for his mom and dad’s 40th wedding anniversary. There, it’s revealed how Gus got tracked into teaching and how his promising career in the movie industry was thwarted by an unfortunate email. It took three seasons, but we finally get to see Gus resolve some of the conflicts in his life. In a way, we get to see Mickey do the same, and — in an episode that’s one of the best — we also get a storyline devoted to one of the best characters in the series, Bertie (Claudia O’Doherty). Most of the character arcs don’t really get resolved in to “Happily ever after,” but that’s not the point “Love.” It’s about damaged people understanding what love is in their own messed up lives. Credit goes to show producers Judd Apatow, Lesley Arfin, and Paul Rust for developing the natural progression (and regression) of the characters and for creating some truly funny situations (and, alas, some that fall flat) in a series that I found both maddening and compelling. I’ve never worked in film or TV in Hollywood, but if Apatow and company are reflecting what they have experienced, forget all that “Hollywood Liberal” stuff. This industry is stacked head to toe with Grade A Assholes. I supposed the fallout with Harvey Weinstein’s scandal (and others like it) should confirm what most know: When it comes to an industry where careers are made on personal relationships — and not one’s credentials — it’s shouldn’t surprise anyone that such a culture is ripe for exploitation on many levels. That’s what put me off the first season so much. The level of assholery among some of the central supporting characters was so high at times, that I wondered why they labeled this a comedy. However, over to course of three seasons, “Love” did what other shows like it (i.e., “Girls”) struggle to do: make the viewer care about annoying and somewhat unlovable characters in such a way that we hope they live happily ever after. The show never gives us that assurance, but it does leave us thinking, “Hey, it could happen.”

This week’s show: adjectives, one word only. There are lots of those, as it turns out, and I now have TONS of leftover songs, so if I didn’t play your song this time, I will most likely get to it next time.

Lots and lots of acts making their Dizzy Heights debuts, including a couple of shockers: 10,000 Maniacs, Big Head Todd & the Monsters, Blondie (!) The BoDeans, The Cure (!!!!), Fairground Attraction, The Housemartins, Kerli, Patsy Cline, Skunk Anansie, Sloan, and a female pop superstar whose name I’m afraid to mention for fear the Web Sheriff will come for me.

Programming Note: Dizzy Heights will be on vacation the week of March 29, returning on April 12.

Thank you, as always, for listening.