CAMILLE DODERO

Just the two of us

CAMILLE DODERO — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:26:43 GMT

Nat Baldwin lugs his bass into your heart
I almost slept over at Nat Baldwin’s house once.

CONTRA-BAND: Baldwin’s approach is terrifically earnest, terrifyingly intimate, and terribly special

I almost slept over at Nat Baldwin’s house once. It was an accident, really, a not-even-vaguely scandalous incident involving a Portsmouth-bound carpool to a cozy martini bar called the Red Door and my ride back to Boston’s bailing to stay at Nat’s nearby place. I was kindly invited to crash there too, with the half-kidding caveat, “If you don’t mind the bass.”

Years later, I still can’t help minding the bass. Nat Baldwin’s upright bass is Joanna Newsom’s harp, Andrew Bird’s violin, Britney Spears’s coochie — a partner so indispensable, it’s a personal trait. Live, the 28-year-old Portsmouth native (who comes to Pierre Menard Gallery in Harvard Square this Saturday) drags his docile accomplice onto the floor, bow in hand, and saws away at her tummy like a man trying to cut a cow with a butter knife. Then over this gorgeous bull-fiddle hum, he belts out these melismatic flourishes: You-hoo-hoo leh-heft me on-hon the Lay-ake Ear-eee, Lay-yake Erie, Lake Erie. This delivery is terrifically earnest, terrifyingly intimate, and terribly special.

So special that few people know yet what to do with Nat, who at the moment is living in South Berwick, Maine. Telling strangers that he’s a singer who also slays on the contrabass nets “some funny reactions.” I mean, the kid shows up in a Celtics T-shirt? One time, a shall-remain-nameless dude who’s now in a “fairly popular new band” inquired with oblivious sincerity: “You play upright bass and sing? Is it, like, comedy?”

“I like the role of being this outsider,” Nat admits, calling from the Kittery shore. It allows for a broader range of inclusion: he can share bills with free-jazz jockeys or strident noise wankers or neo-folk beardos and not get anyone too upset. Unless you count that one little shit who didn’t like Nat’s experimental solo screechings April 11 at a Union Square loft and came up afterward to demand, “Why do you choose to sound bad?”

People probably once also said that about the Dirty Projectors, contemporaries with whom Nat has a tight affiliation. In the last few years, Nat has schlepped his voluptuous sidekick (“It’s like a big, delicate person”) around the country to play with the 2006 incarnation of Dave Longstreth’s rotating outfit and recorded the bass parts for that same band’s endlessly lauded Black Flag reimagining, Rise Above. Another connection that will set Google Alerts ablaze is the producer of Nat’s full-length Most Valuable Player, which comes out next Tuesday on Broken Sparrow: Grizzly Bear bassist/studio whiz Christopher Taylor.

Rock school

CAMILLE DODERO — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 23:36:40 GMT

Fall Out Boy, Avalon, January 13, 2007
Pete Wentz wanted the kids to curse along with the chorus.

Getting your kicks on Harvard Ave

CAMILLE DODERO — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 22:15:07 GMT

Sneakers!
Allston-Brighton isn’t the first neighborhood that comes to mind as a place to get a pair of crazy-cool sneakers.

You and your tech-chic

CAMILLE DODERO — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 19:04:23 GMT

As of 2006, new media isn’t just for geeks anymore
You must’ve already heard that you were named Time magazine’s 2006 Person of the Year.

You must’ve already heard that you were named Time magazine’s 2006 Person of the Year. The honor didn’t go to you because you turned America blue in the last election, brought global warming to multiplexes (that was good ol’ Al), or demoted Pluto to “dwarf planet” status. (Wouldn’t it be nicer to call it a “little planet” instead?) Instead, Time selected you because you posted drunk photos of yourself on MySpace; you embedded that hilariously bizarre Bollywood clip of the little Indian man maniacally break-dancing in your blog; and you “poked” strangers on Facebook, a perfectly legal social-networking feature that still somehow manages to sound like a raincoated sex crime.

But what Time’s all-inclusive, feel-good designation of you as the Person of the Year ignored was that you really weren’t so special — everybody else was doing this too. By everyone we mean, tabloid-plagued celebrities. An actress pretending to be a home-schooled blogger. Flavorpill’s “urban influencers.” Comedy Central writers. DJs. Teachers. Teenagers. Sex-party organizers. Your mom.

In 2006, to be culturally literate was to be Web-savvy and wired. In years past, to stay on top of shit (or pretend to), you’d buy the right records, subscribe to the right magazines, read the right books, watch a certain art-house genre of films. But in 2006, you had to read certain blogs, lurk on the right message boards, find the right You-Send-It leaks. You had to be on the right e-mail lists to know about the right on-the-downlow shows. This past year, terms like “early adopter,” “hypeman,” and “hipster” (whatever that means) became synonymous with “mouse clicker.”

Take for example, MySpace. Even emcees were obsessed with the Rupert Murdoch–created online hangout, perhaps because the “place for friends” proved itself to be another way to round up a sexy entourage — or to avoid wangling an ugly one. In “MySpace Jumpoff,” Queens-bred rapper Grafh narrates a hook-up forged through the site (“So you sent me a text. . . . It said somethin’ somethin’ somethin’ somethin’ sex”). Bay Area–rapper Nump devoted the paean “Thank Yew MySpace” to the site’s oft-acknowledged knack for turning icebreaking into bed-breaking. (“Hey, aren’t you that girl from MySpace?” he beckoned. “Shall we go to my place?”) Even Dirty Southerner T-Pain, a Billboard-chart rapper made most famous for his pole-luber ode “I’m N Luv (Wit A Stripper),” acknowledged that asking for a lady’s digits was so 1985: in “What’s Yo MySpace?” he begged A-listers like Beyoncé, Paris Hilton, and Lindsay Lohan to put him in their Top 8, the part of MySpace members’ profiles where people catalogue their favorite friends. (The eight has since been expanded to include up to 24.)

Fatal Attraction

CAMILLE DODERO — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 23:51:59 GMT

Meet Julie Carter, Troy Schoeller, and Spooky. Their entire lives are death.
Carter cuts apart dead people for a living. Schoeller works part-time putting them back together. And they have a year-old “baby”: a hairless cat named Spooky, who looks like an adorably wrinkled gremlin, knows how to flush the toilet, and has his own MySpace page.

How was your day, baby?”, Julie Carter asks her husband. It’s after nine on a Friday night, and the three of us — Carter, husband Troy J. Schoeller, and me — are at the Allston Malaysian restaurant Aneka Rasa, waiting to order.

“Okay,” says Schoeller. “Four bodies. One girl was definitely cancer. One guy died of some kind of cancer-related something — he was all like skin and bones.” He sighs. “I got blood on my shirt,” he laments, looking down at his Fred Perry sweater vest and the white dress shirt beneath it. “I was hypo-ing tissue- builder into a wound. I put the instrument in, squeezed the tissue-builder fluid, pulled it out, and it went — ” he makes a spltttttt sound, a noise meant to explain how some dead dude’s red plasma spurted out so quickly that it missed Schoeller’s apron and hit his shirt.

Julie is empathetic. “I hate when stuff like that happens! I just went to put on my sneakers and realized I had blood on those too.”

The casually mandatory how-was-your-day check-in is usually among a couple’s most mundane interactions. But with a pair like Carter, 26, and Schoeller, 30, even routine pleasantries quickly become the stuff of reality TV.

Carter cuts apart dead people for a living. Schoeller works part-time putting them back together. And they have a year-old “baby”: a hairless cat named Spooky, who looks like an adorably wrinkled gremlin, knows how to flush the toilet, and has his own MySpace page.

Carter is a pathologist’s assistant at a New England hospital (one she’d rather not publicize due to the confidential nature of her work), where she performs autopsies, often on homicide victims.

Schoeller, whose nickname is Rot (he has the word tattooed on his back), is a licensed embalmer and funeral director who’s been working in the death industry for 13 years. He also fronts two bands: Beware!, a thrash-metal foursome that’s performed not only in priest collars, but shirtless and covered in fake blood; and Hardly, a more serious hardcore four-piece that does song titles like, “Throw My Ashes in the River Charles.” (“That’s a song about a guy who kills a girl,” explains Schoeller. “Buries her under a tree. Burns himself. Wants his ashes thrown in the Charles.”) And a few weeks ago, Schoeller opened Horror Business, a retail clothing store on Harvard Avenue, in Allston, whose target market is “hardcore, punk rockers, skinheads, Allston metal dudes” — the sorts of working-class people, he says, “who can’t afford [Harvard Square’s] Hootenanny.”

Useful friends

CAMILLE DODERO — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 21:50:16 GMT

Brookline’s Mimoco Mimobots blur the boundaries between form and function
Ramona is a tattooed rockabilly chick with cat’s-eye glasses and a twin-lens-reflex camera strapped around her neck.

BETTY-LOU: posed in her adopted environment.

Ramona is a tattooed rockabilly chick with cat’s-eye glasses and a twin-lens-reflex camera strapped around her neck. She shops at vintage clothing stores, loves horror movies, and wears a red-and-white polka-dot dress that makes her butt look big — but she likes it that way. Her best friends are Betty-Lou, a pink-haired girl who’s into jitterbugging and bulldogs, and Link, a chain-smoking greaser with an affinity for hot rods and pin-up girls. Ramona and her friends are known as the Ginchys, and, for between $44.95 and $169.95, they’ll remember anything you want them to.

The Ginchys are Mimobots (pronounced Mee-moe-bots), meaning that Ramona, Betty-Lou, and Link are electronic-silicon creatures whose ancestors originated from planet Blõôh. What this means is that they’re USB flash drives — thumb-size portable data-storage devices with between 512 MB and four gigabytes of memory. They are also designer toys created by West Coast artist Lili Chen and manufactured by a company in Brookline called Mimoco.

“Designer toys” are hybrid novelty items, falling somewhere between action figures and tabletop statues — toys regarded more as objets d’art than as playthings. The KidRobot line (kidrobot.com), for example, features cartoony rabbit-shaped characters called Dunnys, whose personalities range from a black-clad anarchist to a zombie vampire, depending on the artist who designed them (Frank Kozik, the former; Nic Cowan, the latter). But Mimobots — two-inch-plus portable drives resembling Russian matryoshka dolls with ears and arms — aren’t just decorations; they’re tools you can use like any flash drive to transport digital files. With this unexpected combination, Mimoco founder Evan Blaustein has merged technology and urban consumer culture in a way that few products have.

Blaustein, who lives in Brookline, is the sort of guy who describes himself by his sneakers (I am “a wearer of Air Max 95s,” he told atypicalliving.com) and has always thought Wired was the coolest magazine. He came up with the Mimoco idea while he was in business school at Babson College, where he and his now-wife, Cecile, started collecting art toys. Inspiration came one day when Cecile, digging through her purse looking for her flash drive, instead pulled out a Bearbrick toy figure. “I was like, ‘This is about the same size as your flash drive,’ ” Blaustein recalls.

He’s sitting in Peet’s Coffee in Coolidge Corner beside publicist Nicole Rosano, who’s been with Mimoco since August. “That’s when the idea all gelled together. . . . All these toys, they were cluttering our desks. At least if we give functionality to these toys that we love, we’ll have a reason to buy them.”

We do too have celebrity sightings in Boston!

CAMILLE DODERO — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 15:31:35 GMT

Gawking and stalking
Who cares about seeing Sacha Baron Cohen eat dinner with Rachel Weisz and Darren Aronofsky at Fiamma?

Poor Little Rich Girl expands in Davis

CAMILLE DODERO — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 17:40:55 GMT

Goodbye porn room, hello cool shoes!
"Be Nice or Go Away" reads the sign above the cash register at Poor Little Rich Girl in Somerville.

"Be Nice or Go Away" reads the sign above the cash register at Poor Little Rich Girl in Somerville. And that’s pretty much the awesomely independent, help-me-help-you attitude exuded by Meredith Byam Miller and her consignment shop. Formerly tucked away in a 650-foot hole-in-the-wall closet along Highland Avenue in Davis Square, Byam Miller’s small business recently relocated to a 4750-foot expansive storefront around the corner, beside the Burren, where the West Coast Video chain store used to be.

That means, among other things, that West Coast’s legendary backroom of porn films has vanished, having since been gutted and repurposed for shoe racks and baby-carriage-friendly dressing rooms. (Since the move in September, Byam Miller has watched many a lone man unconsciously walk into the store and become visibly horrified to find Pumas in place of The DaVinci Load.) It also means that Davis Square, a neighborhood whose character is slowly being homogenized, given the loss of the Someday Café and rumors that a CVS and a gym are moving in, might not become totally lame.

Poor Little Rich Girl opened nearly five years ago. For the four years before that, Byam Miller, who’d majored in fashion design, managed the consignment shop Second Time Around in Harvard Square. “I never thought, ‘I’ll open a store.’ That seemed so ridiculous to me and out of reach,” she recalls. But over time, she learned that running a secondhand store wasn’t all that hard. “Then I realized, I’m not a great employee, and if I’m gonna do something, I’m gonna do it for myself.” And so the store was born.

Poor Little Rich Girl is not only the name of a 1936 Shirley Temple movie, it’s also the title of a 1965 Andy Warhol film in which Edie Sedgwick lazes around, talks on the phone, smokes cigarettes, and tries on clothes. It’s the latter film that inspired the store’s name. “I thought, it fit what shopping here meant: you’re poor but you like good stuff,” says Miller.

Stuff like, say, a hip-looking second-hand ski jacket priced at $24. Or a pair of Dolce & Gabbana striped heels marked down to $125. Or a pinkish-orange hand-knitted winter hat for $14. And even though the business name is gender-specific, Miller keeps a few racks of men’s things.

The next action sport

CAMILLE DODERO — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 23:37:28 GMT

Say hello to the new breed of pro athlete — and goodbye to their grassroots
At New York City’s Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in mid October, hundreds of people are squished into bleachers, staring at cyborg super-soldiers who’re killing each other.

RUSH HOUR: Super Smash Bros. Melee doubles team Daniel “KoreanDJ” Jung and Marcus Kennedy, who’s Chris Tucker to Jung’s Jackie Chan.

At New York City’s Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in mid October, hundreds of people are squished into bleachers, staring at cyborg super-soldiers who’re killing each other. The combat they’re watching is being projected onto giant overhead screens, controlled by eight young men onstage behind eight televisions. Divided into two teams, these guys will kill and kill and kill each other until one side wins. The successful squad will split $30,000. The loser, $20,000. Not a bad day’s wage for bashing away at buttons with your thumbs.

This is the final match at Major League Gaming’s (MLG) 2006 playoffs. The video game they’re playing is Xbox’s hugely popular Halo 2. The top-seeded team is Final Boss, the New York Yankees of Halo 2, whose dominance is already the stuff of prepubescent legend. Their opponents are Carbon, teenage underdogs who took advantage of Final Boss’s recent slump and defeated them at the last MLG-sponsored tournament in Orlando. Everyone on stage is under 22. As representatives of MLG, the largest sanctioning body of console professional gaming, like to say, these young men represent a “new brand of athlete.”

With mob scenes occurring over PlayStation 3 last week, and gaming popular across the generations, MLG co-founder Mike Sepso thinks this could be the next NASCAR. In other words, professional video gaming is becoming not only a sport, but a mainstream lifestyle — which seems all the more likely now that MLG is on TV in a seven-episode Saturday-morning USA Network series, Boost Mobile Major League Gaming Pro Circuit.

But MLG still has one foot in the gaming movement’s original grassroots culture. If an online title like Halo 2 represents MLG’s future, the other title MLG is hosting in New York today, the head-to-head Nintendo GameCube fighting game Super Smash Bros. Melee (2001), represents its past.

There are other differences: if Halo 2 is 3-D sci-fi, Smash is 2-D Japanese-pop fantasy. Halo 2 players morph into cyborg super-soldiers; Smash players pretend to be classic Nintendo characters like Pokémon’s pink globular creature Jigglypuff, Super Princess Peach, and that mustachioed Italian runt named Mario. Halo 2 is a mysterious ring-world of stony alien ruins; in Smash reality, the clouds have smiley faces. Halo 2 weapons are sniper-rifles, rocket launchers, and grenades; Smash players do battle with dinosaur eggs and turnips.

Apenest doesn’t want your sprinkle

CAMILLE DODERO — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 00:24:00 GMT

Print this!
One day, Brian Willmont decided he wanted to make an art magazine.

One day, Brian Willmont decided he wanted to make an art magazine. This, despite the fact that nearly everyone says print is dead. Or that even early-adopter glossies like Fader, Elemental, and Vice are experimenting with digital distribution, making entire issues available online as PDFs. No matter, Willmont, a 23-year-old painter and illustrator figured that assembling a full-color publication of New England–connected visual art with friend Cody Hoyt couldn’t be that hard. “We were like, ‘All kinds of people have magazines every month.’ We can have one. Why not?”

That was 14 months ago. As it happens, there are plenty of reasons why Willmont and Hoyt shouldn’t have a magazine. For one, they soon discovered that creative kids liked the idea, but didn’t actually plan to contribute. “You would tell someone about the project and they’d be like, ‘Yeah, that’s awesome.’ But people don’t really care about doing things; they just want to hear about them.” He sounds more amused than critical. “If you’ll have a party, they’ll go and drink some beer, but that’s about it.” Further proving Willmont’s point, the student graphic designer who promised to lay out the first issue suddenly vanished, never to return. Plus, the money thing was a formidable problem — they didn’t have any. “In a way, it was really good that we were really naive about the whole thing. I don’t think we would have done any of it if we knew how much work it would be.”

At some point, Willmont’s vision got a name: Apenest, a title that won by popular vote over Bananarexia and Paperabola. “Apenest is like the collective, the nest. It’s not for the singular. It’s for the people,” Willmont notes. Relying on the people was how they financed the project: asking each featured artist to donate a piece that a private art collector would buy for a lump sum, money that would ultimately cover printing costs. In the process, Apenest morphed into a 100-page-plus full-color 8”-x-11” art-book series that sold for $15 each — objets d’art, not disposable objects. “We wanted to make something that would get art into peoples’ houses — and not necessarily next to a toilet on a magazine rack, getting sprinkled on.”

Why I write

CAMILLE DODERO — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 23:55:43 GMT

what I write (for this paper)
One year ago this week, I was milling around a Theater District bar during what marketing types like to call “a launch party,” an opening reception for a clothing store that was essentially a Hot Topic for fake gangstas.

A SCENE FROM CAMILLE'S PARTY?: Cloud (background) photographed by Michael Manning. Assman (right) photographed by Joel Veak. "Jesus Guy" (left) photographed by Melissa Ostrow. Harmonix staff (center) photographed by Tanit Sakani

One year ago this week, I was milling around a Theater District bar during what marketing types like to call “a launch party,” an opening reception for a clothing store that was essentially a Hot Topic for fake gangstas. At some point during the night, the guy I was with came out of the bathroom, cracking up about a guy who’d just tipped the toilet attendant with a bumper sticker that stated I ♥ ASS. I don’t remember if I thought it was genuinely hilarious or stupid, but either way, I remember temporarily ditching my friend to find this dude: this was someone I should meet.

Turned out, he was a 28-year-old snowboarder who called himself Assman, a nickname he’d happily appropriated from Kramer. He was currently living in his parents’ suburban basement, trying to build up an independent company called Ass Industries whose signature product was a scented line of snowboard-wax pieces shaped like palm-size butts. Two weeks later, I was eating Mexican food with Assman, watching him explain to a bartender why his credit card said “Ass Industries,” and later riding with him in his Assmobile (a Jeep Cherokee marked with his signature stickers) en route to a Revere strip club where we would “critique ass” — all of which would be fodder for an article the following week.

I don’t tell you this to vaunt my lowbrow cred or pretend this required any sort of faux-gonzo bravery. Rather, I tell you because it illustrates why the paper you are currently reading is very different from, say, one of those tall, folded ones: I’m not only allowed to approach perfect strangers who call themselves Assman; I am, for better or worse, encouraged to do so. But aside from the novelty of this particular character and the fact that tracking down people like this is my job, the circumstances surrounding my introduction to Mr. Ass Wax speak to why I found this gnarly skate-rat entrepreneur worth documenting: urinal-side self-promotion is super-grassroots. See, if I’d gotten an e-mailed press release about Ass Industries, I probably would’ve deleted it; with the backing of a publicist, Assman just wouldn’t have had the same . . . charm.

Dear iPod listener

CAMILLE DODERO — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 21:28:32 GMT

A few things for the next five years
I can hear you all the way over here.

I can hear you all the way over here.

Yes, that’s me, across from you on the Red Line near Park Street. Think I’m exaggerating about how grossly tinny and loud your music is? Dude, I can actually make out Chamillionaire saying: “They see me rollin’/They hatin.’” Yes, I like “Ridin’ Dirty” too. And yeah, I know, there’s actually a line in it that blusters, “My music’s so loud . . . ” But c’mon, it’s eight in the morning, I’m trying to figure out my schedule for the day, and I just added “Swangin’” for 4:30 this afternoon.

The problem isn’t your volume, it’s those white spaghetti cords dangling from your ears. They suck. You have no excuse: we’ve told you this before. (See “Hacker’s Delight,” Music, August 6, 2005.) Never mind that the iPod turns five this week — and after years of looking at those voguing shadow-ad people, you should know that those fools are always dancing alone because those goddamn earbuds drive everyone else away.

At least “Ridin’ Dirty” shows you’ve got a little taste, no matter what those lame-o headphones say. Not like that douchey guy I sat next to yesterday, who indecisively kept scrolling around his “Girl Lead Singers” folder. Seriously, “Girl Lead Singers”? He might be forgiven if everything in this directory were Lilith Fair saps. But the people forever segregated in his iPod? No Doubt, Christina Aguilera, and Evanescence. Yes, they all have boobs.

Then there was this curly-haired college student on the train back from New York two weekends ago. Forget that she had 28 million cell-phone conversations in my ear about a cute text her crush sent over the weekend. (The “cute” text? “When R U coming back?” Sorry, girl, but what he really means is, “When should I tell the Romanian hooker to leave?”) Anyway, when she finally retired to her current-generation iPod, she listened to about 30 seconds of Paris Hilton’s “Stars Are Blind,” then settled on a song called “Reggaetón.” Nothing else, not even “Reggaetón Mix 1.” Just “Reggaetón.” After that? “Reggaetón3,” then “Reggaetón5.” After that (I kept looking), Fergie’s “London Bridge.” Those iPods whose batteries expired prematurely didn’t just die — they committed suicide. I wanted her to nod off so I could steal her iPod, hook it up to my laptop, and re-label every other song on there “Pop1,” “Pop2,” “Pop3,” ad infinitum.

Under the Covers battle

CAMILLE DODERO — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 13:31:35 GMT

Albums of the year
Rock-and-roll beefs are never quite as delicious as the heat-packing rivalries of their hip-hop brethren. Watch: Battle of the Album Covers

Rock-and-roll beefs are never quite as delicious as the heat-packing rivalries of their hip-hop brethren. Mogwai guitarist Barry Burns publicly hates on James Blunt by posting online, “I have spewed blood down dirty toilets with more talent than him. Twat.” But rappers like 50 Cent and the Game know that launching a flaming war is wack — you don’t mean what you say unless you’ve got a firearm to back it up.

So imagine a world where Billy Joel is a machine-gun-wielding street hoodlum who tosses rocks at glass houses and fires rounds at Rick James. Where Ozzy Osbourne bites off Rivers Cuomo’s head and leaves behind a bloody body-stump. Where the Dead Kennedys’ logo beats Van Halen’s winged emblem with the missing leg of the hobbled dog on an Alice in Chains cover. That’s pretty much the hysterically brilliant mêlée that goes down in Ugly Pictures’s Battle of the Album Covers, a two-minute-plus short film in which classic album covers come alive for an animated artwork-on-artwork Monty Python–esque Celebrity Deathmatch.

Commissioned for an annual charity event in New York City called Battle of the Ad Bands, Battle of the Album Covers premiered on September 27 at NYC’s the Supper Club. “The reaction was so amazing — nobody could hear the sound because people were cheering so loud,” says Ugly Pictures’s co-founder Rohitash Rao. “Minutes after the screening was over, people demanded a copy. The next day, we tried to put it on YouTube and somebody had already put it on there.”

The short took three months to make, from scouring record shops for vinyl — Ugly Pictures didn’t want to use CD covers, “so that the film would have a very textural quality to it” — to choosing the musical victors carefully. “You couldn’t have Coldplay defeat somebody like Pink Floyd — nobody would have it,” Rao points out. “If Van Halen had defeated the Dead Kennedys, I think people would have protested. And there was no way that Weezer was going to win against Ozzy Osbourne.”

Another detail the creators mulled over was what object would come out of the famously bulging crotch of the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers. The head of Phil Collins from No Jacket Required? Insect-size, buzzing Van Halen logos? They opted for the Velvet Underground’s Warhol banana.

The guerrilla-dance appeal of 123 Party!

CAMILLE DODERO — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 21:04:32 GMT

Dork moves
“Get the FUCK out of my bar!” Slideshow: 123 Party! out on the town

“Get the FUCK out of my bar!”

If the man who just yelled this was a cartoon, his ears would be smoking. He is so livid you’d think a Republican congressman had just IM’d his teenage son. It’s Saturday night, October 7, around 11:30 at the Rattlesnake Bar & Grill and this stocky, red-faced guy has just hightailed it across the floor, flipped a switch that killed the music (Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On”), and then dropped a dirty F-bomb on his giggling patrons. What’s made this man so angry isn’t a hammered jerk climbing behind the taps or a couple fornicating on a back table. What’s made Mr. Rattlesnake so furious is something not so strictly forbidden: a trio of dancing men.

Granted, one of them was just dry-humping a hand-railing. Another was weaving around tables and hopping on one foot like the Karate Kid, alternating legs on Timbaland’s bass beat. And yes, they rushed in dressed like gym-rat caricatures: matching neon-green T-shirts, short-black shorts, knee-high tube socks, headbands. But all they were doing was dancing, albeit hilariously like nerds. Everyone else is cracking up, grinningly bemused by their “dorky tight moves” — except the man apparently in charge. So now the three dancing dudes are unceremoniously ushered out by a smirking bouncer, told to leave (ha!), and never to come back again (ha ha!).

Instead, they stand outside on the Boylston Street sidewalk and make fish faces in the front window.

This is 123 Party!, a Boston-based boombox-toting guerrilla-dance gang whose members go by Dice (#1), Blaze (#2), and Fury (#3). On nights like tonight, they’ll jog around heavily trafficked streets assaulting meatheads, drunken girls, and jam-packed bars with their silly-stupid dance moves. They’ll do high-kicks, cartwheels, fist pumps, mixing-bowl pelvic thrusts, and leapfrog jumps. They’ll grind against parking meters, walk on their hands, stare down speeding taxis, and hump moving buses. Later tonight when 123 Party! spots an open delivery truck, they climb onto the vehicle’s sloped ramp, dance in a descending line, and get the truck driver to dance while he loads a dolly of boxes. 123 Party! doesn’t take up a collection; they do this for fun.

Gratifying Disappointments

CAMILLE DODERO — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 21:52:07 GMT

Tall Guy is in a (really good) band!
The Big Disappointments are an important local band for two reasons. One, they kill live. Two, their bassist is arguably the most famous spectator in the last decade of Boston live music. Big Disappointments, "Chemicals" (mp3)

KILLERS: The soul-bellowing body blast almost makes you forget that their bassist is the most famous spectator in Boston live music.

The Big Disappointments are an important local band for two reasons. One, they kill live, with a gut-quaking locomotive rumble of psych-rock riffs and rockabilly-voodoo beats. Two, their bassist is arguably the most famous spectator in the last decade of Boston live music. His government name is Jon Littlefield, but you probably know him as Tall Guy. Or Tall Jon. Or The Guy Who Goes to Every Show.

Don’t know who I mean? Yes, you do: at six-foot-seven, he cuts an unmistakable figure — Where’s Waldo reinvented to star a laconic art-rock/noise über-fan with Nick Cave’s cheekbones and Thurston Moore’s gaunt loftiness. He’s the scally-capped shape with the PJ Harvey T-shirt whose omnipresence is immortalized in Nick Zinner’s I Hope You Are All Happy Now, a softcover book of photos that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist shot from the stage. Further evidence that I’m not overstating Littlefield’s ubiquity: when the Big Disappointments played P.A.’s Lounge in early August (they’ll be there again this Friday), a dark-haired man who later introduced himself as Francis walked into the venue’s rec-room performance area, spotted Littlefield thrumming the bass, and excitedly whispered to a friend, “Holy shit! Tall Guy’s in a band!” Then he high-fived his buddy.

“We all know that we’ve all seen Jon at every show,” confirms TBD frontman/guitarist Eric Boomhower with a slightly bored sigh. “We weren’t seeking to have Jon in this band because he’s ‘Tall Jon.’ That’s not what this band is about.”

And it isn’t, even though Littlefield’s presence might be something of a selling point. Rather, the Big Disappointments are the sum of their four parts: a hurly-burly engine of desert-menace guitars, underlying bass trellis, and psychobilly stomp. They’re physically unassuming (aside from Tall Jon), with no visual agenda: two guitarists in plain T-shirts and jeans (Boomhower and Andy Abrahamson, both formerly of the In Out) and a cute, petite girl tucked behind the drum kit. But once Lisa Mullen (who happily tells me she likes playing music with guys because “I was once a boy!”) starts banging out that pomade swing, you’re confronted by a soul-bellowing body blast that makes you forget the beer you just bought or the stranger you just met or the taxi your ignorant ass just called. Instead you think about strung-out drifters speeding along cactus-lined highways, truck-stop death-panic scenes, the Gun Club, Lux Interior and his leather pants.

Hunting the wild Klosterman

CAMILLE DODERO — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 21:05:36 GMT

Things about the pop-culture writer that are true, things that might be true, and something that isn’t true at all
He is Charles John “Chuck” Klosterman: pop-culture critic, four-time author, celebrity profiler, Esquire columnist, ESPN Page 2 sportswriter, former Spin senior editor, unrepentant Billy Joel fan. And he makes girls spit. Chuck Klosterman reads from Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas (mp3)

“Oh my God!” gasps a Boston University student as he enters the room. “I’m like a little schoolgirl!” In her excitement, she spits on my knee.

She is Amanda and she has not just seen Brad Pitt. Or David Ortiz. Or the Crocodile Hunter’s ghost. The 34-year-old bearded dude who just caused Amanda to expectorate is not bringing sexy back. Rather, he is a six-foot-two native North Dakotan who has been called everything from “the voice of a generation” to “the new Hunter S. Thompson” to a “saggy ass-head.” He is wearing a jean jacket that could have been an iron-on canvas for Guns N’ Roses back patches 20 years ago. He is Charles John “Chuck” Klosterman: pop-culture critic, four-time author, celebrity profiler, Esquire columnist, ESPN Page 2 sportswriter, former Spin senior editor, unrepentant Billy Joel fan. And he makes girls spit.

If you’re familiar with Klosterman’s writing, this shouldn’t be surprising. If you’ve never heard of the guy, it might help to know that Seth Cohen read one of his books on an episode of The O.C. (Culturally speaking, this is the low-rent equivalent of Natalie Portman’s character name-checking the Shins in Garden State.)

Klosterman (pronounced Kloh-ster-man) became a prime-time-TV prop alongside Death Cab for Cutie and the Killers partly by publishing four books in five years that examined American life through the prism of pop culture: 2001’s Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural Nörth Daköta (a hair-metal-fan memoir); 2003’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low-Culture Manifesto (an essay collection dissecting such phenomena as The Real World, Pamela Anderson, and The Sims); Killing Yourself To Live: 85% of A True Story (a road-narrative meditation on love and death composed while on assignment for Spin, for which Klosterman visited rock-related death sites); and his most recent Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas. An anthology of celebrity profiles, columns, and a previously unpublished short story, CK IV is divided into three sections whose headings typify the Klosterman idiom: “Things That are True,” “Things That Might be True,” and “Something That Isn’t True at All.”

It’s also worth noting that people who expend mental energy thinking about Chuck Klosterman do so in three overlapping ways: a) being jealous of him, b) hating him, or c) loving him.

Curse of the twentysomethings

CAMILLE DODERO — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 18:41:37 GMT

20/20
What the hell does it mean to be a twentysomething in 2006? Generation Snark. By Nina MacLaughlin

What the hell does it mean to be a twentysomething in 2006?

If you watch Zach Braff films, it means you are a commitment scaredy-cat who adores the Shins and makes out in airports. Believe American Apparel, and you’re the sort of person who lazes around the house in terrycloth headbands and striped knee socks. But read the Random House anthology Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers and you might be surprised to learn that your peers are 1) remarkably self-aware, 2) still feeling like this part of life is a dress rehearsal, and 3) habitual procrastinators.

Those are just a few of the characteristics Random House editorial assistants Matt Kellogg and Jillian Quint discovered last year when they helped stage a twentysomething essay competition in which writers vied for both publication and a $20,000 grand prize. For one, the editors received the bulk of their submissions in the last hour and 59 minutes of the six-month-long contest. For another, there’s an unmistakable tension of quarter-life crises running through the 29 personal, occasionally solipsistic, pieces chosen for the final collection: how living with your parents after college is still considered a failure, how it’s terrifically easy to lose your starry-eyed idealism after college, how technology like Instant Messenger and Dodgeball have supplanted actual human interaction, how New York can be soul-crushing.

More or less, the anthology shows that being in your 20s means you’re still figuring out what comes next. “We’re all still really, really searching,” says Marisa McCarthy, a Boston College graduate whose writing appears in Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers. “Twenty-five now is probably a lot younger than it was ten, 15 years ago — I’m certainly hoping that it is.”

McCarthy’s second-person essay is called “Cliché Rape Story” and it’s a harrowing piece based on her own off-campus rape during her freshman year at BC. She wrote the piece while studying English in Chestnut Hill. “In the classroom, I’m sure people were a little more gentle with it than they were with other pieces,” she admits. “But when I workshopped this piece, there was one guy who just ripped it apart and wrote things on it like, ‘Did this even really happen? It sounds like it’s out of a TV show.’ And I think that’s kind of what compelled me to name it what I named it, because some of the things, although true, just felt kind of cliché.”

Strippers, cursing, and free music

CAMILLE DODERO — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 20:41:37 GMT

Campus notes
Students have been back in town only a few weeks, but already there’s noise about curtailing their bad habits. Here’s a list of what those pesky kids have been up to.

Students have been back in town only a few weeks, but already there’s noise about curtailing their bad habits. Here’s a list of what those pesky kids have been up to.

Swearing at Boston University. Yep, you heard it right. BU has cracked down on profanity at all major sporting events. Saying anything obscene, racist, or sexist is now grounds for game expulsion. Ushers will patrol the stands, listening for people who are violating the new policy. But don’t think of it as a punishment — this is your chance to insult creatively. At hockey games, when the referee makes a bunk call, try yelling “meat tube” instead of “dick.” Or, when the opposing team gets a penalty, substitute “cotton-pony-head” for “douchebag.” The former jeer may not pack the same punch as the latter, but it still has that same you’re-a-feminine-product sting. It could be considered sexist, though, so use sparingly. The big question: is it still okay to say that BC sucks? BU officials did not get back to us as of press time.

Stealing music at Boston College. In an effort to curb illegal downloading, BC has joined the Ruckus Network, the “premier digital entertainment service for universities” that grants affiliated users free and legal access to 1.5 million songs and an extensive catalogue of feature-length movies. Founded by two MIT grad students, Vince Han and David Galper, Ruckus has fewer songs than Napster (currently at 2 million). Unlike the big Nap, though, there’s no limit on how many times a song can be played for free. Ruckus already has rights to brand-new records like Justin Timberlake’s FutureSex/LoveSounds and Beyoncé’s B’Day. But the network still has some huge caveats: songs and/or video files can’t be transferred to iPods and personal collections don’t hold up after graduation (yet). Hey, in the long run, it shouldn’t matter anyway: by then you’ll have outgrown James Blunt.

Hiring strippers at an MIT residence hall with house cash. Call it a joke or a clever exercise in exploiting voter apathy. A handful of residents in MIT’s Simmons Hall managed to get $3000 of house money approved for adult-entertainment purposes by drafting a proposal while no one was looking. According to the school’s campus newspaper, the Tech:

The Joanna Newsom leak

CAMILLE DODERO — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 21:12:45 GMT

Right-click and steal!
It was the music-nerd equivalent of Katrina-style looting

Second Life P-town: Dick Dock, but no Lance Bass!

CAMILLE DODERO — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 20:27:34 GMT

Permanent vacation
Johnny Marathon is trying to attach his dick.

RAINBOW WARRIORS: Second Life’s version of Provincetown.

Johnny Marathon is trying to attach his dick. He’s standing stark-naked on a cobblestone road in Provincetown, a cigarette between his fingers, and he’s having a terrible time putting on his penis.

“Anything there?” he asks.

I move in closer to check. Nothing but a Ken doll–like lump.

“You’re still dickless,” I report.

“Damn,” Johnny curses.

We’re in a GLBT-friendly 3D cyberspace environment modeled after the Cape Cod vacation destination. Specifically, we’re hanging out in a corner of the quickly ballooning virtual “metaverse” of 600,000-plus digital residents called Second Life (SL) (see “Does Your Life Suck?,” News and Features, July 15). Second Life Provincetown doesn’t have a Crown & Anchor, a Bayside Betsy’s, or an off-season. It does, however, have a sex-organ-selling shop called Xcite!, which is where Johnny was coming from when I ran into him. (In SL, genitals have to be purchased and then attached to a human-shaped body, which makes the process of sexualization sort of like playing with a cyber-porn paper-doll.)

“What you will see, while not actually a ‘replica,’ tries to remain faithful to the look and style,” explains SL Provincetown owner Dillon Speculaas (real name: Dillon Jonas), before leading me on a personal tour. Considering that the first person I met here was a naked guy in search of manhood, I’d already say that the recreation is pretty faithful.

There are plenty of other similarities with the “real” world. A Commercial Street–styled shopping district of narrow walkways and wooden-planked decks. Pastel hues. Mewing seagulls. Rainbow flags. A gallery, a candy store (salt-water taffy coming soon), and a beach. A life-size cutout of a shirtless, crotch-bulging man peeking out of the Welcome Center window. There’s even a recreation of that well-known oceanfront landing-pier cruising spot, Dick Dock.

Speculaas runs SL Provincetown with his partner Getme Somme. (“He had no idea he’d become so active in SL when he made up that name!,” explains Speculaas over e-mail.) They collaborated on designing the place with land developer Kamael Xevious, who’s also responsible for building “the first real place for gay men to meet in SL,” a virtual Turkish Bath called Haz Pazzar. “Especially in the commercial areas, I wanted to capture the closeness and ‘crowded’ feeling of the original,” explains Xevious, who spent ten weeks over the summer constructing SL Provincetown from scratch. “One of the things that we couldn’t do was recreate a lot of the exact buildings,” he adds. “Many of them were copyrighted or had trademarked signs and graphics that we couldn’t duplicate.” So there’s no Lobster Pot. No Spiritus Pizza. And nothing named after the bear-friendly leather-bar the Vault.