The Presets singing, pressing buttons to the delight of the crowd @ Bowery (photo: marmar_photo)

Aussie disco punk at it’s finest. I had become a fan of this band from Digitalism’s remix of Down, Down, Down and few other singles off of their earlier album, Beams. Little did I know how much I would enjoy the tracks from their new album, Apocalypso which I had not heard before the show.

This new record will probably be a strong contender for the best electronic/dance album to come out this year but we have a lot of year left and clearly, some big releases have been falling through the cracks for me.

The show itself is what you would expect from an electronic band and unless you love to dance and/or get off on vintage electronic gear from the 70s and 80s, this show might have gotten a little boring. However, a friend of mine, who has a lot of experience at the Bowery, said he had never seen the crowd dancing like they were for The Presets. And if you take into consideration that New York crowds are supposedly boring, this show just might have been exceptionally good.

I enjoyed it.

Talk Like That
Down Down Down
Girl
A New Sky
Yippiyo-ay
Are You The One?
Together
Aeons
Girl and The Sea
Steamworks
This Boy’s In Love
Kicking and Screaming

My People
Anywhere
I Go Hard, I Go Home

I will continue to support Barry for a variety of reasons which I may touch upon here and there during the general election season.  The first reason is a distinct difference between the candidates that several of my colleagues will appreciate: barackobama.com utilizes standards-based markup with near-valid xhtml and CSS positioning. Naturally, johnmccain.com uses the – ahem – old practice of table-based layouts with little thought to accessibility and web standards.

Brendan Benson and Jack White rock. The audience salutes. (photo: Play Vicious)

Yet another show I was convinced I needed to see only to realize I shouldn’t have needed any convincing. If you like the White Stripes…imagine a full, southern-rock/blues influenced band backing up Jack White. Rockers in the audience were certainly impressed by Jack White’s presence and energy while the rockaphiles were getting blown away by the jams the band kicked out on each song.

Brendan Benson fronts a couple of songs and as good as he is, they end up being forgettable. Maybe he was overshadowed by Jack White singing into the mirror he had mounted on his guitar stack. Or maybe Benson is overshadowed by the entire band he’s involved with. Yeah, that’s it.

Also, this was my first show at the brand, spankin’ new music venue Terminal 5. What I think sums up this place is the fact that it reminds me of the dance club in Basic Instinct. That’s just weird.

Consoler of the Lonely
Store Bought Bones
Hold Up
You Don’t Understand Me
Top Yourself
Old Enough
The Switch and the Spur
Level
Keep It Clean (Charley Jordan cover)
Steady as She Goes
Many Shades of Black
Rich Kid Blues
Blue Veins

Salute Your Solution
Broken Boy Soldier
Attention
Carolina Drama

I can’t remember if I actually got to unwind because I was distracted from the total piece of crap this film was. As much as it pains me to write it, Spielberg and Lucas need to open up the Ark of the Covenant and have their faces melted off for this missed opportunity.

Act I

The film starts with Indiana Jones already captured by the Russians who were able to infiltrate Area 51 by shooting the guards at the gate. Apparently, nobody else is stationed at Area 51 which is surprising, since the facility contains some of the government’s greatest secrets (as seen at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark).

The Soviet soldiers were stupid, lifeless and completely un-threatening, which makes me think they used the same software creating them as they did the Stormtroopers in the latest Star Wars films. The exception, of course, was Cate Blanchett’s character…Dr. Spalko. Blanchett is an accomplished actress, and even as a weird psychic Soviet scientist with a bob cut, I found her attractive. At least that was how the character was established when she blew up the transformer controlling the warehouse door with her mind. I would have loved to see what else Dr. Spalko could do with her mind, but that never happened since they never follow up on her own psychic abilities. That was an enormous oversight for what could have been the best villain the series has seen.

As campy and lame as the villains were, for me, it was the cute, furry and cuddly CG animated groundhogs that set the tone for the entire film. Why does George Lucas insist on mucking up these movies with product placement for children’s toys? Clearly, he did not learn his lesson from the Jar-Jar Binks debacle. I just want to remind him that I was able to enjoy Raiders of the Lost Ark as a child with images of vicious, slithering snakes and not a digitized version of the groundhog from Caddyshack. I must infer that Lucas considers today’s children to be a bunch of pussies that require constant coddling even in an action-adventure film. Maybe he’s right, but does it need to be encouraged?

The climax of the first act ends with a nuclear bomb exploding near one of those creepy model towns built by the military to see if a nuke would annihilate or destroy everything in it.  Thankfully for Dr. Jones, he’s able to fit inside a lead-lined refrigerator just before the explosion, which sends the refrigerator flying through the desert.  Harrison Ford, now 66 years old, spills out of the fridge after a “rough ride”.  Ouch, that must have hurt…if it was at all belivable.  To me, this felt like a regurgitated sequence from Temple of Doom in which Jones, Mrs. Spielberg and Short Round beat the odds by jumping out of Lao Che’s abandoned cargo plane in an inflatable life raft.  Except it felt a little more believable therefore more entertaining to watch.

Case in point: Mythbusters did a test on using a life raft as a parachute.  Although the myth was busted pretty quickly, I don’t anticipate any experiments involving 1950s-era refrigerators and a nuke.

Act 2

Shia Labeouf. Really?  Watch River Phoenix in Last Cruscade…or even that guy who was in the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, and tell me this is the actor who deserves to be cast as Indiana Jones’ son.  Ooops, did I spoil that for anyone?  It’s just ridiculous.  Shia is just a part of these recent crop of young actors who maybe talented in their own right but haven’t really earned the audience’s respect yet.  Let me put it another way:

Sean Connery > Harrison Ford > Shia Labeouf

Maybe the kids enjoy him but I’ve seen too much of his work to take him that seriously.  I guess Spielberg didn’t watch the second season of Project Greenlight.

The second act was slightly more enjoyable than the first although this was the point that I stopped really caring about what was going on and was just looking forward to the end.  That’s never a good feeling, especially when watching a film tell a story you’ve been waiting on for 20 years.

Act 3

I read that Janusz Kaminsky took great lengths to appropriate the look and style of the previous films.  But I’m not buying it.  There were plenty of Peruvian jungle scenes in the 2nd and 3rd acts that looked nothing like the beginning of Raiders and more like scenes from Peter Jackson’s King Kong.  Too many ultra-wide shots and some obvious CG crutches.  Like those computer animated ants.  Ants.  Big friggin deal.  It was lame in The Mummy ten years ago and it’s still lame today.

I’m not a spoiler site so I could continue discuss the failures of the end but I will refrain.  Or leave it like this: the climax at the end could have involved an object/vehicle from a previous Spielberg film but they didn’t and again, went for the most un-original direction possible.

If this film was truly created “for the fans”, than I am disappointed and offended.  But I believe the film wasn’t made for the fans - just the suits who want to revive a franchise and make a bunch of money. Lucas already is pimping Shia as the next Indiana Jones but I won’t be there to watch.

It’s too obvious when you take beloved, well-crafted characters and stick them into a film consciously trying to plug into a concise formula of demographics and audience types.  The former Indiana Jones films didn’t feel like this — they felt like they were made un-aware of their boxoffice potential. I think the difference is, these movies aren’t made by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, the filmmakers.  They’re made by Steven Speilberg™ and George Lucas™, the soul-less corporations who don’t care about the product as long as it sells some tickets and lucrative merchandise deals.

Don’t look at it. Shut your eyes, Marion. Don’t look at it, no matter what happens.
- Indiana Jones

One story in particular was interesting to watch - the aftermath of a tornado running over a pig farm.

Richard Ashcroft has a deep thought at their first New York show in years (photo: ryandombal)

Finally, I get around to reviewing this show two weeks after the fact. The simple truth is, the show was like taking a time machine back to 1997 when a college buddy first turned me on to Urban Hymns. Richard Ashcroft and the band look and sound just like they did 10 years ago. I was taken back several times during the show at how good Ashcroft sounded. I was standing pretty close to the stage, near the left PA and I couldn’t see him wearing an ear monitor. Perhaps it was tiny and wireless but the guy can still rock the vocals.

Another obvious observation: everyone there was my age…or older. Ashcroft made references to coming to play New York for the first time when they were 21. Something tells me they were a lot like the younger musicians I meet these days: punk douchebags. But their talent has carried them through some superb material, a long break-up/hiatus all to return in 2008 to make a boat load of money from the reunion tour and, oh, record a new album.

Believe it or not, the two new songs performed were some of my favorites of the evening. It’s not their same sound but more their psychadelic-rock view of today’s indie-rock music. Although a cool song on its own, expect a slammin’ dance remix of Love is Pain to be hitting the bars and clubs later this year.

The rest of the show, as Ashcroft remarked, proved the break didn’t make them any less psychedelic. My only complaint is that they didn’t play Blue - my favorite song by the band. It also didn’t help that I lost hearing my in left ear for a couple of days (I’m sure some of it is never coming back) but that wasn’t their fault. I maybe getting to that age where earplugs are a good idea.

New Decade
Sonnet
This Is Music
Space In Time
Life’s An Ocean
Already There
Weeping Willow
Sit and Wonder (new)
The Rolling People
Gravity Grave
Drugs Don’t Work
Lucky Man
Come On

History
Bittersweet Symphony
Love Is Pain (new)

When Mushroom Men was first presented to me I was coincidentally on the perpetual late fall hunt for the elusive King Bolete mushrooms which dot the West Sonoma County landscape where myself and my family dwell,” said Les Claypool. “The yearly quest for these fabulous, fungal delicacies has become a bit of a seasonal obsession for myself and my two children over the past few years. Coupled with my son’s obsession with fantasy gaming, it was all I could do to get anything else done around Rancho Relaxo once he got wind of the impending Mushroom Man game and the creator’s interest in having me do the soundtrack. After seeing the design material and mock-ups online, I was queried on a daily basis whether or not I had ‘talked to the Mushroom guys’ and would they be sending us a beta version to try out. I knew at once that this was an opportunity to gain massive brownie points in the eyes of my offspring, a feat that becomes more and more difficult the closer they get to adolescence. Thanks Mushroom Men.

I was just listening to Les Claypool - Mushroom Man

I was just listening to Pink Floyd - Money