Tower of Song

If You Could Perform Yoga to Iron Maiden …

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Roderick Romero, co-frontman of Seattle’s Sky Cries Mary has braids Willie Nelson would covet and a disheveled suit worthy of the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne. His voice is the occasionally ferocious yin to his wife Anisa’s ethereal yang. Together they carve slices out of the sky and serve them to the audience, like lovers who brush the silverware off the table, finger-feeding each other the last bite of tiramisu.

Last night Bellingham experienced Sky Cries Mary— what Roderick coyly called his band’s style of “space rock.” Their music is so much cooler than two words can describe— or even this entry’s 514. If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then this blog has no chance of pinning down the essence of their music. And that may be OK: nobody ever danced to pin anything down.

Last night I danced like I hoped to pluck out my own pins. The opener, “Elephant Song,” like virtually all of SCM’s music, seems to have remained largely under the radar for the past decade or three. With enough commercial appeal to grace three Hollywood films (including Higher Learning and the delightful Tank Girl), I suspect SCM’s sound is too mysterious, too rich, deep, and powerful to grab hold of the deep-pocketed, drive-thru masses that radio stations and CD hawkers are after.

[By the way, at lunch in Seattle the other day, I was telling Rivers that the film Harvest (in which SCM’s “Elephant Song” appeared), managed to triumph despite its theme of a man hunting down the people who stole his kidney. Its success for me was sprung from the relentlessly brooding mood it conjured (largely helped by the texture and angst of one of SCM’s most towering, climactic songs) along with some excellent sex scenes.]

Last night’s show had the added bonus of Manooghi Hi setting the stage. The band’s leader, lithe headbanging BombaRock diva Mehnaz Hoosein is the sort of nymph who could lure men to drop their own babies and march into mortal battle. Mortal battle, that is, of the sort that involves joyous dancing and raucous prog-rock riffs, amid unfettered cheerful enthusiasm. If you could do yoga to Iron Maiden in a Bollywood movie, Manooghi Hi might be the soundtrack.

To round out this review, Bellingham’s Wild Buffalo was the perfect intimate scene for the psychedelic transformations of SCM and Manooghi Hi. Both bands have a stage presence and wall of sound massive enough to fill stadiums, but it’s when you get up close that you see the pure passion they pour into their performances. There is even a billiards room above and behind the stage, complete with make-out couches. They don’t serve food, but you can bring in your own. The bouncer recommended the $7 (now $9) pulled pork from the Bayou Bar next door and all three of us concurred: it was a damn good sandwich sauced with plenty of fire.

SCM is playing Neumo’s in Seattle tonight. Tomorrow they play my beloved Dante’s in Portland, near the original Voodoo Doughnut. Manooghi Hi will again be providing the opening workout: don’t be late.

Thanks for reading. Cheers,

Greg

Photos by Sky Cries Mary & Manooghi Hi

A New Ambivalence

Obey This: Intelligent Disobedience

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Blog 7 of 12 in tribute to a century of scouting worldwide.

After four months of fairly obvious virtues found within the 12 points of the Scout Law (“A scout is helpful, friendly, courteous, kind …”), we’re back to one that has that oppressively dogmatic ring of “law.” Ah, obedience. What, no love for freethinking creativity? No room for conscientious objectors here? We can’t be disobedient even if we’re civil about it? Is obedience really a virtue in today’s society? Read on and I will give you clear guidance that you must obey.

Intelligent disobedience is a trained virtue in seeing-eye dogs. Picture a blind woman trying to cross a street. A hybrid car approaches, too quiet for her to hear. She moves to cross the street. Her dog sees the car and disobeys his master’s command. And that’s a good thing.

To be fair, I know that this is actually the exception in dog training. As the owner of a puppy-school dropout, I know that most of the time it’s in a dog’s own interest to obey its master. Not all humans are dogs, though, and the concept of intelligent disobedience can actually be quite valuable for anyone with a shred of virtue. It’s akin to civil disobedience when thoughtful people decide society has gone astray. Or creative thinking, when everyone else seems stuck in a rut.

But anarchy only works as a minority approach. If we all disobeyed everything, there would be nothing left of substance. Without substance— well, what then are the anarchists supposed to tear down? You can only stomp on rubble so long before it starts to look merely like a teenage tantrum. So perhaps for every demolitionist, the world needs nine engineers building things back up?

Questioning, challenging, even tearing things down is important, but it’s also the easiest part of the equation because it’s reactionary. It’s always simpler to react to things than to create them in the first place. Frankly, I’m more interested in the act of creation. In my opinion, it’s a fascinating mix of obedience and disobedience. We obey proven principles to carry us to the limits of our current understanding of things. We obey right up to the edge of our comfort zone. Then we disobey certain assumed limits in order to achieve something new. That’s creativity.

I’m currently directing a film that’s all about that sort of balance. One of the personalities we’re profiling, for instance, is Mike May. He obeys certain principles that help him get around, in fact he has created a GPS system that provides a reliable resource allowing people with impaired vision to navigate like never before. Then, at certain opportune moments, Mike disobeys limitations that might seem imposed on him. The writer Robert Kurson named his book on Mike after these moments: Crashing Through.

While those dramatic leaps of faith are the stuff of great stories, even Mike acknowledges that much of life is preparation for those moments. While we were filming, he told me his speed skiing coach, the great Franz Weber, always said: “people say I’m crazy for going a hundred and thirty miles an hour. You’re only crazy if you don’t train for it.” That training, from the former World Champion, provided Mike with his own speed skiing world record: 65 miles an hour, completely blind (a record that still stands).

Preparation like that sounds a little like obedience, and is that really so bad? Obey what propels you forward; disobey what holds you back (unless a hybrid car is coming).

Thanks for reading. Cheers,

Greg

Photo by walknboston

Levity

Multicrastination: Putting the “Pro” in Procrastination

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I woke up with that usual seesaw of to-do lists bouncing between my ears. My whining puppy finally rousted me from bed: I grabbed my clipboard and coffee to begin another hard day’s procrastination.

Your typical multitaskers, they might be checking voicemail and email while doling out directions to several coworkers on a morning like this. I was there earlier in my marketing life: we used to compare who had the most voicemail messages in a single day. I was pretty proud to break fifty, but I was among bona fide multitask mavens who had broken a hundred.

In those days I multitasked with the best of them. Now it’s up to me, and only me, to fulfill my immense capacity for trauma management and multi-task madness. For that, I rely primarily on multicrastination. Take today: I have one huge project to complete. All the other chickenscratches on my clipboard are the things I would love to do once the bulk of this assignment is off my shoulders. And here I am, multi-caffeinating:

multicaffeination – the multicrastinator’s friend: combine coffee, Mountain Dew, and chocolate for a 100 percent reliable mid-day sleep aid

All the while I’m adding more things to my to-do list and ultimately blaming my failure to start today’s big project on you, dear blog reader. Actually, I’ll take my defense in the words Harlan Ellison has taped to his typewriter (yes, typewriter— he keeps a supply of discontinued ribbons in the refrigerator):

Sat ci sat bene.
“It is done quickly enough if it is done well.”
— from Dreams with Sharp Teeth, the fascinating documentary on speculative fiction’s feistiest penman

Any writer can procrastinate, but for the really big projects that you need to put off a while longer, try swimming in an endless sea of things you really ought to be doing instead. As writing tutors we learned this was called “pre-writing,” that period before sitting down to the keyboard, when the best ideas foment (or ferment) in the backs of our otherwise utterly distracted minds.

For creative types, it’s sometimes hard to justify our long hours spent staring blankly out windows. If you find yourself in this position, nothing fools yourself or others better than long lists of things you appear to be coordinating. If that sounds like your bag, join the multicrastinators: we postpone more by noon than most people do all day.

Thanks for reading. Cheers,

Greg

Photo by AirplaneMouse