Forrest writes:

I don't know if there's any place for this in the land of Ishbadiddle, but I did a radio interview last week with Gerald Casale of DEVO. Here's the transcript:

==========

FO: If we could just start at the beginning... when the whole thing started, you and Mark [Mothersbaugh] were at Kent State, right?

GC: Yes.

FO: And you were there when all the stuff was going down. What did you see? How did that affect you?

GC: Well, I suppose whatever I would say would maybe sound trite, but it changed my life. I realize that sounds gaggy, but it did. Until then I probably was just a participant in pop culture, and was a bit of a hippie, and subscribed to that kind of apolitical, "love will conquer all" kind of feeling that was rampant. I had joined SDS a year previous to the murders - they were murders - at Kent State, and I had become somewhat politicized. I'd listened to Mark Rudd from Columbia, I'd heard Tom Hayden speak, and Jerry Rubin, and I'd started to understand the connections between big business and the military and how decisions were getting made. I was well aware of that by the time the governor of Ohio at the time, Governor Rhodes, declared conveniently martial law - which is something no kid today has ever heard about; they don't believe this can happen. But you can go back to the labor movement in the 30's and look at the killings at the Ford plant with mounted police on horseback and guns... it's happened several times in our history, not just against minorities but always motivated economically whether it's racist or not. Anyway, to make a long story short it was hideous and they got away with it, and they declared martial law and took away our rights to assemble. We assembled because of the expansion of the war into Cambodia. And National Guardsmen that were hiding in the heating plant and the gymnasium from the night before materialized within moments with tear gas and loaded M-16's.

FO: So in terms of the band, how much of what you were doing was trying to convey a serious message and how much of it was a put-on? Or were you using the humor of it to slip the serious message in?

GC: I can't really speak for the band, but certainly that's what I was doing. I realized all the way back then that if you met these issues head-on, like a person like Huey Newton did, you were going to end up in jail or shot. I probably didn't have their balls, nor did I have that position in life, so I resorted to creativity, you know, satire and Dada acts, and I think Mark shared that aesthetic with me. We were doing an end run, basically. We were very serious about our joke. And certainly musically we were serious!

FO: I know you had ongoing problems with distribution and promotion really throughout the history of the band. Going back now and listening to the stuff you guys did, is there anything you listen to and you say, "man this was really great, why didn't people get to hear this?"

GC: [laughs] Yeah, I suppose that's the story of our lives. We were the Rodney Dangerfields of pop music. We got no respect because I think we did it before they decided they wanted it. In other words, we did all the work, and we had the cutting edge and the content. Then people like the Cars just took the style or the form and namby-pambied it and made millions off of hits. But I don't see why "Girl U Want" or "Uncontrollable Urge" or "Freedom of Choice" shouldn't have been hits, other than the fact that mainstream radio, you know, FM radio controlled by people like Lee Abrams at the time, hated DEVO from the beginning for doing something before they decided it could happen.

FO: And yet, despite not having the mainstream success of some of those other groups, it seems like you hear DEVO all over the place these days, and in some really unexpected places.

GC: [laughs] Right.

FO: What do you attribute that level of success to? It's sort of a stealth success.

GC: Yeah. It doesn't translate to my lifestyle, that's for sure. But I just think it's because sometimes you can't kill something if there's a kernel of validity to it. And I certainly think we were what was new about New Wave, because we did structure songs differently, we did introduce new sounds into the lexicon of mainstream rock and roll music, we had lyrical content that was unprecedented at the time. And so I think what encourages me, like even what happens with our little Web site, clubdevo.com, is the people that e-mail me are like sixteen, eighteen, twenty-two. They've discovered DEVO, they've listened to the "Greatest Hits and Misses" on Warner Brothers or they've heard the "Pioneers Who Got Scalped" on Rhino for the first time. And they have some bootleg videos because those are unavailable, and a couple bootlegs of live, and they're turned on because they think, there's things that we did that are now totally in line with the best music going on today. It still sounds modern to me, even.

FO: Yeah, I'd agree with that. You guys were ahead of your time in so many ways. Videos are something that easily comes to mind, and you directed all of them, right?

GC: Yeah. It was at a time when there was no outlet for videos. MTV wouldn't exist at all for another three years when we started doing videos, and when they did exist they I think opened up in three or four major cities in the US and then didn't become a national franchise until, I think '83, or '82, maybe. And so at that point we'd already made six videos, and John Sykes and Bob Pittman who ran the company came to us and took us to an Italian restaurant for lunch and explained their wonderful vision which we, as na�ve artists, totally sucked up, and said you know, "but we need your videos for free... but this is gonna help you guys immensely."

FO: "Exposure," right?

GC: Yeah, and it was like, "okay great, here you go!" when they didn't have any programming yet, an then as soon as they went national and tied to a Top-40 playlist, they quit playing us. And when our manager, Elliott Roberts, called and goes "what's going on? These guys gave you all their videos, they're pioneers," they go "hey, they don't have a top 40 hit." [laughs] Meanwhile in the press they were taking credit for breaking bands and creating hits! Oh, it was so beautiful.

FO: Since the DEVO era, you've been doing a lot of other music videos and commercial work. Do you find that when you're up for a commercial directing job or a music video directing job, people look at you and say "oh, he's DEVO," and they put you into a pigeonhole? Is it like a straitjacket?

GC: Absolutely. Yeah. You know the old adage, "let no good deed go unpunished." What's wonderful in America is these kind of people who manage everything and are in positions of pseudo-power. They perceive their power as the power to be mean and say no. That's just America. It's becoming America more than ever. It didn't even used to be that much like that, but now that we live in neo-corporate-feudal fascist times with a completely right-wing government that's strangling the last juices of freedom out of the whole country, I mean I've lived now to watch... I was afraid in the '60s. And I watched along with my activist friends freedom being eroded then. And that was kindergarten compared to what's happening now. I've lived long enough that I will die watching no democracy left. I've lived long enough to watch the end of democracy and I never thought I'd end the last quarter of my life that way. But I can say safely that that's clearly what's happened here. Make no doubt about it.

So anyway, these guys go, "No." So what do they do about me? They go, "oh he did that? That means he can't do anything else." Rather than go, "well, that was brilliant, he must have a certain mental ability and aesthetic; if he can do one thing right maybe he can do another thing right." No, no, not in this mean-spirited, asinine culture. It's like, "well then, he's stupid and he can't do anything else." It's brilliant, it's just so brilliant. It's endless, and thousands of people can tell you the same story.

FO: It seems like every year, every two years, DEVO as an entity sort of re-appears, for an appearance on a soundtrack or something like that. And there was the Lollapalooza business a few years ago. Are those occasional reunions fun?

GC: They're certainly fun for me. I'd be doing a lot more if it was up to me. I don't think DEVO exhausted its reservoir of something to say. I mean every artist only has so much to say and then they should be quiet. Mostly it works the opposite way, long after they've had nothing more to say, they keep going. But I think the opposite happened with DEVO. I think it's more truncated relative to potential. And that came from the fact that Mark decided he didn't want to do it anymore and only concentrated on his scoring work, and I just personally find that apples and oranges. I don't understand... it's two different arenas. In one arena, you're getting paid to solve other people's problems, like I do when I direct commercials. And they go, "well here's the idea, how would you do this, how would you make it work?" And I solve it for them. They're paying me for problem solving, like in a college class where the professor gives you a theme and you go do it. When you're a band with original music, you're getting paid for being you. In other words, nobody knew they wanted that stuff until they heard it. So you're not problem solving, you're a voice in the marketplace. You're getting paid for being a poet. As to why he doesn't make that distinction, you'd have to ask Mark. We'd do a lot more if he wanted to do it, but nobody wants DEVO without the two guys who wrote all the songs and created all the stage shows and ideas and costumes.

FO: What was the dynamic between you and Mark in terms of songwriting? Was it complete collaboration or did you have specialties?

GC: In the beginning it was complete collaboration. And then in the boring kind of VH-1 Behind the Music reality that is such an idiotic clich� at this point in time, to every kid in the culture... It's like then once there's money flowing in and a lot of evil people whispering in ears about you're really the guy and he can't do that and you can do that, then it just gets all political and guarded, and not fun anymore.

FO: I don't want to take up you're whole afternoon, but there's one more thing I'd like to talk about. You mentioned the Club DEVO Web site. Who's involved in that? You're doing quite a bit there.

GC: I do as much as I can without having a major exposure of people knowing the site exists. We should do a lot more in terms of that, but that costs a lot of money. All we're doing is kind of maintaining. We can, because people have wanted some of the old stuff like the t-shirts and the red hats and everything on a merchandise level, provide that, and we do a "Tell Us DEVO" question-and-answer thing, and we have "The Brainwasher" [online newsletter] that I try to update. I'd like to expand it a lot further. In other words, DEVO is like The Onion. I love the paper The Onion. We should have our own Onion, but that requires full-time, 24/7 commitment. But the sensibility, the point of view expressed in The Onion is completely DEVO.

FO: You do a lot of interviews. Is there anything that nobody gets around to asking you and you wish they'd ask you?

GC: [laughs] Yeah! They never say, "Gerry, why do all the dumbest and meanest people rule the planet?"

FO: All right. Gerry, why do all the dumbest and meanest people rule the planet?

GC: Because we're all DEVO.

FO: I couldn't have said it any better myself.

posted by M E-L at 4:30 PM | this entry's link |

Several times we’ve seen items in Ishbadiddle gleaned from Spinsanity, and I’m happy to report that they are now in a distribution agreement with Salon to publish their observations. (First seen on Rebecca’s Pocket, since I hit that before Spinsanity itself.)
A propos of their piece on Rush Limbaugh’s and Oliver North’s* awful smear campaign against Tom Daschle, I was reminded of a part of a good piece on blogging — well, on writing itself — by Mark Pilgrim that dealt in part with the concept of logically rude. Information that I’m glad to have and that I use whenever possible.

*Man, you should see the disgust on the face of my father, a former Marine, if that name comes up.

posted by Tk at 3:22 PM | this entry's link |

Oscar trivia

So here's some Oscar trivia for 'ya. Get all the questions right and you'll be covered in honor and glory. Send your answers to me here. Answers and trivia winners next week.

* Which movie has won more Oscars than any other without winning the Oscar for Best Picture?

* Which movie has been the biggest Oscar-loser in history -- that is, which movie was nominated for 11 Oscars and failed to win a single one?

* What two films have received more nominations than Lord of the Ring's 13?

* Four people have been nominated for acting, writing, and directing in the same film. (One of them twice). Who?

* Who's the only Oscar to have won an Oscar?

* One Best Supporting Actress winner was on screen for 8 minutes. One Best Actor winner was on screen for 16 minutes. Who? (For a bonus point: what film did both of them appear in?)

* Kate Winslet and Judi Dench were nominated for playing the younger and the older novelist Iris Murdoch in Iris. This was the second time that two actresses have been nominated for playing the same character in the same film. What was the first? And what two actresses were nominated for playing the same character in two different films in the same year?

* What two actors received Oscars (in two different years) for playing the same character in two different films? (That's two actors, one character, two movies, two Oscars.) And what four actors were each nominated twice for playing the same character in two different films? (That's four actors, four characters, eight nominations, and eight movies.)

* What's the only sequel to win Best Picture?

* Four women have been nominated for acting in movies directed by their husbands. (One of them won.) Who?

* There are two families with three generations Of Oscar Winners. Who?

* Why didn't "Waking Life" get a Best Animated Feature nomination? (That's not actually trivia, I was just wondering).

(I'll post the question credits with the answers, natch.)

posted by M E-L at 2:29 PM | this entry's link |

Strange Times

Some days, the New York Times reads like News of the Weird. Like today, we have an article on a religious group in Wisconsin that's allegedly killing undertakers because they consider embalming to be a sin; a political party in India that wants to ban Valentine's Day; and a cloned cat called cc (presumably, she was bcc when she was first born). The Times does not indicate whether these are signs of the End Times.

posted by M E-L at 12:37 PM | this entry's link |

Tron Turns 10100

Patrick posts:

Copywrite law, shmopywrite shmaw, this is what you should be reading in SFgate: Tron's 20th Anniversary

Actually I have never seen it.

posted by M E-L at 12:20 PM | this entry's link |

Blogrolling Department

Ishbadiddle's second link from the outside world (after Bleahh) is now up at It's A Mystery, a blog that's always worth checking out for its reporting on matters of faith and religion and politics. Not your usual "I had breakfast this morning" or "Here's another meme" blog. Thanks for the link, James!

posted by M E-L at 12:17 PM | this entry's link |

WTC Memorial Idea

Here's an intriguing idea, assuming there's room to actually carry it out. KL & PC

posted by M E-L at 12:12 PM | this entry's link |

Marcus posts:

Here's a link to a cogent piece from the L.A. Times Op-Ed concerning the courageous hypocrisy of entrenched liberal interest groups. Perhaps Michael "N-Ron-W-Lay Ranch" Moore would be interested, as he seemed strangely silent during last year's revelations of Bill and Hillary Clinton's cash-votes-tableware-for-pardons deals in '00. Perhaps he was napping during the good ol' days of real political corruption - like the rest of the selectively "we're-sooooo-aware" Left.

posted by M E-L at 12:10 PM | this entry's link |

How have I been on the net for so long without finding {fray}? Great original writing, and then the vox populi to boot. In honor of St. Valentine's Day, here's a story about losing one's virginity.

posted by M E-L at 3:51 PM | this entry's link |

The next step in copyright law?

posted by M E-L at 3:16 PM | this entry's link |

Spot on. Bling bling. Know what I mean?
This nifty entry on Paul Ford's site took me back to long-forgotten evenings at the Monosyllabic Language Table in college. (Mike, who once made me a mix tape called "Songs with Names in Words of Just One Part," should get a particular kick out of this.)

posted by Andrea Moed at 5:02 PM | this entry's link |

Winner of the Good Grammar in Signage award:

Hot and Crusty (well, their predecessors in the same space next to the B/D/F/Q?/V subway under Rock Center) gets right what so few others do, that food is healthful, not healthy, unless you’re speaking of how well a plant has grown, which has no necessary connection to whether that plant is good for you. Makes me a little bit happy whenever I see the sign, morn or night.

posted by Tk at 9:18 AM | this entry's link |

In honor of Chinese New Year. And Liz Phair Day. (Here at Ishbadiddle, every day is Liz Phair Day.)

posted by M E-L at 3:58 PM | this entry's link |

Oscar nominations (FIVE FOR FIVE, BABY!)

The Oscar nominees were announced this morning, as scheduled, in Los Angeles. Most-nominated this year was 'Lord of the Rings,' thanks to its wealth of technical nods. But the favorite for most major awards is still (ecch) 'A Beautiful Mind,' which tied 'Moulin Rouge' with eight nominations. Biggest head-scratcher: no Best Director nomination for Baz Luhrmann, despite the predicted Best Picture nod for 'Moulin Rouge' -- fans of that movie, prepare yourselves for disappointment on Oscar night. Other semi-surprises were a near-sweep of acting nominations by 'Iris,' no nod for Gene Hackman in 'The Royal Tenenbaums,' and -- holy s#@?, what is Ethan Hawke doing in the Best Supporting Actor category?!

Now, the real news. ;) For the first time since 1997, I went five for five on my Best Picture predictions. I'm pleased but as stunned as anyone, given the wide-open race this year and my stated expectation that I could possibly do *worse* than in previous years. Go figure.

So now my annual Oscar nominees "essay" has a bit more shelf life than normal. It's still up at molanphy.com (and will be until further notice), if you're curious to know what made me pick those five movies. Don't worry; I won't my luck go to my head.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in with comments yesterday and offered their own picks (and sorry to you 'Black Hawk Down' fans).

Best,

Chris Molanphy

posted by M E-L at 2:57 PM | this entry's link |

From the PDA ridiculed to the PDA sublime...

I was predictably fascinated by this article from last week's Circuits about the variety of religions that have devotional texts and aids for palmtop computer users. Christians can get a searchable KJV Bible or beam the good news, Muslims can read the Koran and Zen practitioners can have their Pocket Zendo. As I might have guessed, we text-centric Jews have the most applications for the palmtop, including holiday calendars and kosher restaurant lists from PilotYid and the Lubavs' own PalmTorah, which seems far more street-friendly than those gas-guzzling Mitzvah Tanks. Of course, any subway ethnographer could have predicted this trend. The morning F train, at least, is filled with passengers alone with their gods in the crush of the crowd, reading from tiny books in Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish, etc. (Come to think of it, I predicted it myself in a 1996 Metropolis piece about computers as totemic objects and spiritual vehicles, the link to which has expired, dammit.)

posted by Andrea Moed at 2:47 PM | this entry's link |

Be careful where you leave your PDA. Link via Davezilla.

posted by Tk at 12:56 PM | this entry's link |

Ther’s a flick coming at the end of this week that not only belongs to one of my favorite genres, early 80s sci-fi (think Repo Man, Night of the Comet, Brother from Another Planet), but also was directed by the friend of a friend, guy by the name of Harry Ralston. It’s called The Last Man, and it opens on Friday, though where I do not know. Story of three people at the end of the world and their relationships. If that doesn’t grab you, perhaps Jeri Ryan melts your butter? Thanks to Naunihal for opening the floodgates of nepotism. :-)

posted by Tk at 9:39 AM | this entry's link |

Warning: Self-Promotion
Hey! Bleahh got mentioned in Tantek Çelik’s page about up-to-date sites. Not that the page he’s got up with the links is much to write about, but I feel validated. (Pun intended.)

posted by Tk at 5:54 PM | this entry's link |

R. Crumb meets Philip K. Dick meets the Holy Spirit.
(via randomWalks.)

posted by M E-L at 4:07 PM | this entry's link |

Kitsch and feeling (a summary)

Recently I have felt � more often than I'd like -- that September 11th was something I witnessed in a very bad dream or a documentary or some distant, irrelevant epoch of my life. It hasn't felt like something that happened fifteen blocks away from me, affecting people I know and a place I inhabit. After I "woke up" from my CNN-induced trance, I attributed this feeling to some sort of subconscious suppression. Then I began to think about the city's concerted attempts, say, to remove "missing" posters, which were especially prevalent in my neighborhood near the medical examiner's office and the East Side hospitals. Was my reaction the result of social engineering, delusion or something else?

A recent article in Salon by Daniel Harris, "The Kitschification of Sept. 11," suggests an interesting answer to this question. I'll just have to quote from it, rather than link, since it's from the "premium" content that only I have been sucker enough to purchase. In short, his essay posits that our collective memory of September 11th has been obscured by the accretion of kitsch. I'm not sure whether he ever does answer his own question: "does an event as catastrophic as this one require the rhetoric of kitsch to make it less horrendous?" But in showing how elements of the event that aren't kitsch-friendly have been papered over, he makes me think that the reason I sometimes feel like 9/11 didn't really happen, is that the 9/11 that we discuss now isn't the one that happened.

"Through kitsch," Harris begins, "we avert our eyes from tragedy, transforming the unspeakable ugliness of diseases, accidents and wars into something poetic and noble, into pat stories whose happy endings offer enduring lessons in courage and resilience. [...] Rather than making sincere efforts to understand the historical origins of the event in a protracted international conflict, we erect a schematic narrative that pitted absolute evil against absolute good, our own unwavering rationality against the delirium of crazed fanatics." Central to the development of our legend is the concept that we are completely innocent and were taken entirely by surprise.

Harris hits upon something very key here: to emphasize our side�s heroism and sacrifice, we must allocate our sympathy disproportionately. Firefighters are more palatable as heroes than office workers, he says, because they volunteered and because they were trying to save others � but they only represented 1/12 of the casualties. This last point squares with my own memories of the day -- at first all my coworkers and I were concerned for the civilians trapped within, who jumped from windows to avoid the fires. Only later, as the towers collapsed, did we think of the rescue workers. This reaction is more typical historically (aren�t we more horrified by the deaths of civilians?) but it�s not the one that has stuck.

Further, Harris exposes some of the more deceptive tactics of fundraisers. "[Children], and not adults, are easiest on the eyes, the most photogenic of panhandlers... Many did, of course, lose a parent, but many parents lost something equally important: their lives. Once again the primary victims of the tragedy were shuffled off to the sidelines to make room for a cast of more narratively appealing objects of compassion, much as the rescue workers were elevated into the starring roles of this 'Towering Inferno,' since their deaths were more dramatic than the banal denouements of file clerks collapsing at the water cooler and stock brokers suffocating in bathroom stalls." Yet it was while reading exactly these banal descriptions of Harris's that, for the first time in months, I once again felt what had actually happened.

What about advertisers that referred to 9/11 and our beleaguered economy to spur us to economic normalcy? According to Harris, they, too, are perpetrators of kitsch. "We discovered that we could have our cake and eat it too, enjoy that laptop or that surround-sound stereo system and simultaneously bask in the warm glow. If corporations engaged in charity impersonation, consumers engaged in a similar fraud: benefactor impersonation, with both parties participating in a mutually beneficial game of self-flattery." And who can deny that the endless commercials for, say, tanning salons offering 5% of their profits for the day to charity, have dulled our sense of what happened?

In the end, Harris has simply shown that in the war of What Happened Vs. What Appeals to Us, the latter is winning for now. With the Internet at our disposal, individuals have made an unusually large contribution to that construction. Which version will take the upper hand in the historical record is a question for which I think there is no adequate precedent to guide us.

[As for Harris, his essay veers off in an interesting direction at the end, and I'd be remiss in my summary to ignore the ending, odd though it is. Wondering at the perverse pleasure that people seemed to take in their communal mourning, he writes: "A society that seems to run by itself, that does not require us to perform any civic duties, is plagued by feelings of isolation and is particularly prone to bouts of pathological collectivity in which we hold old-fashioned neighborhood socials around a centerpiece of mangled corpses, a hideous incongruity that we hide behind a tearful mask of kitsch. In an atomized society, any crisis becomes a catalyst for instant togetherness in which the pleasure of companionship far exceeds the depths of sorrow, and our fierce tribal instincts reemerge with a vengeance, having been thwarted by the curse of autonomy that afflicts advanced Western cultures." Whether this post is "pathological," I would not venture to say.]

-- Emily

posted by M E-L at 11:22 AM | this entry's link |

> If anyone finds a baser example of September 11th Exploitation, please let me know.

You asked for it. (Also a propos of your stuff on marketing patriotism ... )

"Oh, Say Can You See?"

-- Lynn Harris

[NB: Lynn, you're right. This is worse than the dog show.]

posted by M E-L at 10:28 AM | this entry's link |

Hello fellow pop-culture junkies:

Hope y'all are enjoying the music top 10s. While I'm on a roll, now up at my website are my annual, totally unscientific predictions of the five films that'll be nominated for Best Picture at this year's Academy Awards. For those too busy to surf, the nominees (not my favorite movies -- just the ones I think will get the nominations) are:

1. A Beautiful Mind
2. Moulin Rouge
3. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
4. In the Bedroom
5. Gosford Park

Nominees are to be announced tomorrow (Tues, 13 Feb). Sorry about the short window. Last year, I went 4 for 5 on my predictions. This year is a much tougher call -- we'll find out soon enough how close I came.

Feel free to write back with your own picks. Thanks for reading...

Best,

Chris Molanphy

posted by M E-L at 10:25 AM | this entry's link |

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