Chicken Out of Hell
An Andrew
Hamlin Joint
How
Long Can This Go On Dept.: The premiere of Fred
Savage's TV comedy Working came off
glib, heavy on rituals exaggerated into
improbabilities and that exposition-in-dialogue
crutch the Stranger's Wm.(tm) Steven
Humphrey pegged so precisely: "I am indeed
your boss, and you are my secretary, and I am
here as a sports columnist in order to gain a
substantial enough paycheck to feed my two
precocious daughters whom I am raising
alone..."
It held, however,
some droplets of agglutinated disquiet along the
same line. The cute, too-bouncy officemate tells
Fred how many aggregate hours they'll spend
together, how they'll see more of each other than
they will their friends or loved ones--enough
time, the mind ruminates, for Fred to cringe from
her bounciness, allow her cuteness to override
that, buy her drinks, take her to dinner, hear
her say she has a boyfriend, apologize for his
interest, avoid her eyes for a few days, and then
cringe from her bounciness, start to finish a
hundredfold, a sped-up study on the life cycle of
celestial bodies.
And the show's
theme, sculpted by Mark Mothersbaugh, was his old
band Devo's old hit "Working in
a Coal Mine," an even older hit for Lee
Dorsey, written by Allen Toussaint (whom I hope
is getting paid somewhere).
Devo and Dorsey
inflated Toussaint's literal and lyrical monotony
(the song's only verse: "Five o'clock in the
morning/I'm up before the sun/When my work day's
over/I'm too tired for having fun") into a
cartoon, into what, I suspect collegiates of the
50's folk revival broke up over in gouts of
guilty laughter after everybody they didn't know
went home. People lived like this? They
spent twenty hours a day in a hole in the
ground? It just couldn't be real. They tried
on figurative coal helmets and fell over
guffawing, just as their kids, bolstered by
much-improved car stereos, strapped on imagined
gats and took the minivan to regulate with Nate
Dogg and Warren G. at the nearest Albertson's.
The cartoon
withered before Working; in
Mothersbaugh's new mix the singing voice stood
alone, mostly resigned, denied even middle
management for company, kept and protected only
the shuffle-chugging and rhythmic whistles
marking out the prison of measured time. A mere
twenty seconds it ran, and praise be to
Allah--condensing white-collar workweeks into
black comedy presented as escapism takes laudable
gumption. but twenty more seconds with those
whistles could have lit up nationwide enactments
of Suicide's "Frankie Teardrop," who
had a full ten minutes of factory noise to endure
before snapping the necks of his wife and
children.
Bite-size sounds
call conspicuously. I never read Heinlein's Starship
Troopers and never felt like I should; one
friend called him "the worst kind of sexist,
the kind who doesn't know he is one,"
another friend said he suffered womb envy, and I
think the two observations meet in the middle. I
suspect however that Heinlein's ideas are not the
ideas in the preview of Paul Verhoeven's
"Troopers" movie: Men in helmets versus
Greyhound bus-sized bugs sprung straight from
1957's The Beginning of the End. (Forty
years later, new bug movies landed this fall in
lumps worthy of Alfred Kroeber's study--Mimic,
Spawn, and even the upcoming Alien4
feature the clicking of the mandible.) The
preview's background noise? A stark guitar
clicking and a wet "woo HOO!" looped ad
infinitum--"woo HOO!"... I sat
scanning recent radio hooks until--yes, folks,
it's "Song 2" by Blur filling in for Apocalypse
Now's "Ride of the Valkyries" and
the DATF's "These Boots Were Made For
Walkin'" outside the Branch Davidian
compound, just the stuff for your bug-punching
space jockey with a better-than-average chance of
getting his head ingested. Somebody wake up Hicks
a little earlier this time.
Good
Book Dept.: Dar Williams and Richard
Shindell, 10/10 at Meany Hall, Seattle. I loved
Dar bouncing the time on her clog heels, and when
put her guitar down before "Teenagers Kick
Our Butts" to shake a
tambourine--fulfilling, she said, a
"lifelong fantasy"--I knew what Monkees
episode that came from, and laughed as hard as
anybody else. But Shindell, who opened the show
with a paltry six songs and then came back to
play in Dar's band, held bigger secrets and
deeper resonances; I don't follow the line about
his "storytelling ability," but he
sketches with a supple and classic line. I knew
nothing about the weary traveler of "Next
Best Western" except his weariness, and his
sadness that he couldn't share the faith of the
preacher on his radio, but nothing else mattered.
Shindell's finest "story song" might be
"Fishing," and even there I can't tell
you the name of the INS man or the illegal alien,
or the second mans' friends whose names the first
man wanted to know. I will tell you I think that
that all the fish the INS man ever caught rose up
in the last chorus to envelop and smother him
under a thousand mouths, and that he welcomed
this or seemed to anticipate it with a sense of
justice done. As stories go, this was no free
ride when you've already paid.
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