are we not skirb?

Well people of the planet Earth, another * bleh * holiday season is creeping upon us like a rash, like an assassin. If you thought this recent Halloween was lackluster, wait until this holy shopping season really begins, there's gonna be some conflict there. Of course its begun already, even a week ago when the giant ornaments went up in the holy shopping shrines. However there was this curiosity from our good friends at the Westfield Shopping Center, otherwise known as Nordstroms in downtown SF:

So when is a sign not a sign?  Or when is a not-sign a sign?  Well here’s a good example. It accomplishes the same thing as the giant holy ornaments of neighbor Bloomingdales, yet comes off as somehow holier than thou, or at least holier than Bloomingdales which is even better. Yet it still refers completely to the holiday and the shopping and as such is as much a “sign” as the Bloomingdale’s.  This is the kind of co-opting, dishonest advertising that we are constantly subjected to, the anti-ad, which as you now realize is as much an ad as… an ad.  The anti-ad wants you to “think different,” think you’re one of them (a-hem) “mavericks” that goes their own way and thinks for themselves. But of course if Nordstroms really cared about “family” and the proper celebration of holidays they would have just not put up the decorations and not put up a sign announcing their controversial, yet heartfelt decision to wait until Nov. 28, of all crazy, wreckless notions, to jam their desperate pleas to consume down our throats. So, thanks, Nordstroms!  I’m a rugged individual and appreciate your acknowledging that, so you get my… whoops, forgot, still got that recession over here. Still got a house worth less than its mortgage, still being scammed by everybody from the dudes standing on Fifth and Mission to the fake mortgage companies and banks. Maybe a gift card?

Stop. I didn’t really want to get totally bah humbug on you. Plenty to celebrate over the next month and days. Family, friends, all that rot. But its good rot. We’ll be traveling to the ‘burg again for the graving, will be seeing some favorite  relatives, etc. Will be fighting the ol’ man for rights to pick apart the turkey carcass and eat all but the large bones.  Yes, we skirblogs are bone crunchers. Gnawers to the end.  Neckbones are particularly desired. And most of the semi-crunchy, semi-chewy parts as well.  The ol’ man goes even further and will digest all of the above plus what I won’t even touch, parts of various densities and viscosities.  And to think, I used to be a vegetarian! True, about 9 years worth. Still making up for lost time there.

A few little pre-holiday treats to lay on you before I hit the air:

And Then We Came to the End. Hell of a funny book, by Joshua Ferris. Told in the first person plural if you can imagine such a thing, and its totally perfect. Follows a few eccentric and well drawn characters of a Chicago ad agency in post-internet decline, layoffs loom. The hive mind is ablaze in absolute spot on minutia and its hilarious. If you have even populated a cube of any size, you will recognize all this and be floored. He’s nailed the various office archetypes, and the insanity of spending one’s day as we do, working in these... offices. Plus a few great subplots and some first person singular, even some pathos and seriousness make this a good one for sure.

You know that I often get stuck revisiting old music, just to discover more and more about it, and luxuriate in loving it all over again with new appreciation.  We saw this with the Cramps, Minutemen, Screaming Trees and many others. Lately I’ve re-appreciated how excellent the Sonic Youth release “Goo” was. And risking angry comments from Sam Matthews aside, I’ve been disappointed with most of the Youth’s stuff since then actually. Even Goo, when it came out was like “what?” But hearing it now it crackles with energy and of rocks quite enormously. Even Kim G. sounds goo-d on it. So what do I know?

But here’s the real find, by way of my DEVO jag. Yes, we must admit. We are Devo. Can’t be helped. I had, and still have a huge admiration for them, and am still inspired by their oddity and vision. A while back I rented “The Complete Truth about De-evolution” and enough cannot be said about those guys and trip they were on. They invented their own type of music and their own complex mythology from scratch. Yet it wasn’t ponderous or academic, it was satire, and fun and often toe tappin' (or even rockin', see "Mongoloid."

One reason for my reverence of DEVO was the frankly life-changing moment in 1978 when I saw them famously play “Satisfaction” on Saturday Night Live. Moreso than seeing the the Doors play "Light My Fire" on Ed Sullivan when I was 5 (or even better, Jose Feliciano playing it a year later probably on Mike Douglass, which scared me even more...); or the first moon landing as a 7-year old in what, second grade? Finally when I was 15 or 16 something on TV that spoke...

Saturday Night Live was in its second season and was the talk of the town. Subversive and original in its own right, they also tried to showcase more eccentric music back then. (Remember Leon Redbone?) At that age I was still into the rock of the times. Mainly the Who. I had not yet been exposed to music off the grid. That episode of Saturday Night Live was packed with strangeness, like several of the mini-films that Devo made, surreal, culture-jamming type stuff in video that nobody was doing in ’78, nor would do for years to come.  But the real moment was when Fred Williard announced their performance and they, clad in the ubiquitous yellow hazmat suits, the 3-D glasses, on a set covered in green plastic sheeting like a giant Hefty bag, thoroughly deconstructed the Stones song "Satisfaction" in a way that still echoes and reverberates today.

I can remember it vividly.  I was first struck by Mark Mothersbaugh’s guitar, where he had all his pedals and wires and shit taped right onto the face of the thing, and as outlandish and confusing as it looked, it played! and it sounded great. He buzzed the main guitar line of Satisfaction for a few bars, (unlike the album version where only the drums play the original song's melodic tag line, which in itself it enormously noteworthy and hilarious.)  The electronic pedals taped onto the guitar fascinated me, and that small detail got me thinking hard about the tropes of rock music and the silliness of the posturing and posing that goes on. Why not tape the effects boxes onto the guitar where you can easily reach them? Call attention to the processed nature of the sound, the electricty, the tubes.  I save more analysis from my next MFA thesis.

Next you couldn’t help but to notice the kinetic movement of the rest of the band members: jerky, like robots, but not the kind of robots you see people emulating, more like a kind of half-human, spastic robot that has been wound up, and is only operating maybe 75% the way its supposed to. They’re glitchy people-robots, off kilter. To pull this off while playing the fairly precise riffs they were playing on live instruments on live TV could not have been easy. They were the Blue Man Group before such a thing existed

We can easily say this blew skirblog’s 16-year-old mind, and set me off in search of more like minded stuff.

So of course you can get on youtube and see it anytime you want right? Wrong! Totally taken off the air by the suits at NBC. And I hunted high and low for a clip of this thing. (In the meantime watched nearly every clip of Devo that is on youtube – a fun way to spend a few late night hours… Their famous Honda scooter commercial, their many renditions of Uncontrollable Urge through the ages, from their youthful beginnings, to embarrassing old age, girth versions at stupid Apple conventions; even their many great appearances on the rival SNL show “Fridays” when they had switched to all keyboards, clean electronics, and treadmills…) Defeated, I had to give up searching for a while, but, finally, through insane amounts of wasted time, I found it. And as an early Xmas present (but we’re not, you know, actually celebrating it, you know…) here it is:

via videosift.com

Peace.

Comments

[Michael LaVella]

Ah, the clip that changed so many lives. I'm glad I managed to stay up that late on October 14th, 1978 as well.