Patrick Sisson - Writer, Journalist, Cultural Documentarian, Music Lover

PATRICK SISSON

Apocalypse How?: Chicago’s second-city status in monster-movie destruction

Article
A.V. Club Chicago
October 2009
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Despite the trauma of 9/11, it didn’t take long for Hollywood to revisit and ravage New York City. In just the last few years, monsters, mankind, aliens, and zombies have laid waste to Manhattan in countless post-apocalyptic thrillers and natural-disaster porn. L.A., admittedly subject to its own different disasters, also gets the cinematic send-off in style. The Capitol Records building usually gets gutted, or the letters of the iconic Hollywood sign get re-arranged hastily. But only a few (mostly campy) disaster movies, horror flicks, and post-apocalyptic films deign to threaten the Windy City. It doesn’t seem worth the trouble to destroy.

It’s doubtful screenwriters have a soft spot for the Midwest. Cheapie ’80s horror flick Alligator featured a Chi-town sewer gator named Rámon that splits a few suburbanites in half. The Relic tells the story of an Amazonian beast that comes alive and wrecks havoc at the Field Museum, but it was only filmed here because New York’s American Museum of History wasn’t available. The only thing that comes close to a post-apocalyptic Chicago movie is Streets Of Fire, a 1984 film set in an alternative future where the ’50s and ’80s (and their respective clichés) are mashed together. Despite our scenic skyline, large population—not to mention cool underground tunnels for the survivors—the city has rarely been threatened with wide-scale on-screen destruction. With that in mind, The A.V. Club presents this list of the handful of movies that get serious about wiping Chicago off the map.

Beginning Of The End (1957)
Plot: Grasshoppers, mutated after eating some radiated, weapons-grade wheat at a government lab, march toward Chicago in this nuclear-age monster flick. While the tagline touts stellar special effects—“So Big…we had to coin a new word for it…NEWMENDOUS!”—it’s a rote exercise in altered perspective and crappy acting. (No wonder it was lovingly ribbed by Mystery Science Theater 3000.) Stereotypically precocious reporter Audrey Aimes (Peggie Castle) and Dr. Ed Wainwright (Peter Graves) warn others while the military considers the Nuclear Orkin option: bombing Chicago to destroy the crazed critters.
Biggest insults to Chicago: Many obvious geographic errors mar this already terrible film: Michigan Avenue is called Michigan Boulevard, forests and trees are shown in scenes depicting the suburbs, and footage of crowds supposedly panicking on the South Side show people fleeing Grant Park. No actual South Side locations are used. Plus, the scenes of bedlam on city streets and abandoned intersections are amateurish. It’s also obvious a Chicagoan didn’t write this film; cicadas would be the local go-to apocalyptic insect.
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Matias Aguayo: Ay Ay Ay

Music Review
XLR8R
October 2009
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Chilean producer Matias Aguayo (formerly of Closer Musik) has created a dark carnival of an album on Ay Ay Ay, a restrained event with sustained creepiness underlying the celebration. Filled with thudding drums and melodies constructed from vocal tics, tones, whispers, and asides, it plumbs disorienting depths—imagine an Audion track where the corkscrew melodies have been replaced with a choir composed of the whispers from Lost. Lead single “Rollerskate” bobs and weaves with bubbling voices, a genius track never lacking for simplicity or propulsion, while “Koro Koro” brings a Ladysmith Black Mambazo vibe. As the party closes on “Juanita,” with revelers quietly clapping and accordions taking shallow breaths, Aguayo bows out on another singular album.

For those about to book rock: Bands with advice for Lincoln Hall

Article
A.V. Club Chicago
October 2009
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The Chicago History Museum recently put out a call, via its blog, for memorabilia related to the Lounge Ax, the legendary Lincoln Park rock club that closed in 2000. Venues come and go, and few last long enough or make enough of an impact to warrant any kind of canonization. The deceptively simple rules of running a good club—treat the crowd and talent with respect and book good music—aren’t always easy to follow. Lincoln Hall, a new venue run by the crew at Schubas, recently opened on the same block as Lounge Ax. In honor of its second weekend of operation, The A.V. Club asked a few musicians who are playing some of the earliest shows at Lincoln Hall to provide some advice to the owners, and recount their worst venue experiences.

Eddie Argos, Art Brut, playing Nov. 10
Advice: “As a touring band, I’d tell the people that run clubs that it’s a good idea to have a strong lock on the bar. It’s pretty straightforward. Hire a big room, get a PA, and make sure the backstage area isn’t next to the toilet.”
Worst show: “We played a club called Razzmatazz in Barcelona, which is actually a great club, but they were trying out a new PA system. That was quite embarrassing. They put it in wrong. They put the mixing desk behind the stage, so the sound engineer had to run around the stage to hear how things sounded. The sound was fucking awful. The guy was like a big drunk bear running backwards and forwards.”

Jamie Levinson, White Rabbits, playing Nov. 12
Advice: “Bands spend upwards of eight to nine hours a day in vans and vehicles that barely pass inspection just to get to shows. We wouldn’t be offended by any level of hospitality. There’s a club in Birmingham, Alabama, called the Bottle Tree, run by the drummer in Man Or Astro-Man?, that’s all about accommodation. There are Airstream trailers in the back of this humble club, along with massage chairs, great books, and DVDs. It feels like you’re being treated at arena level when you’re just playing a small club show. It’s really a psychological battle on the road. When someone reaches out with an olive branch, it sets the tone for the rest of the day.”
Worst show: “We’re like any other band. There are plenty of nightmare stories. We spent the bulk of our time on the road when we were starting out. You play for gas money, and those are trying times. I don’t think any band expects blue M&Ms in a glass bowl.”

Langhorne Slim, played Oct. 23
Advice: “It’s a pretty easy formula. One thing I’ve picked up on is clubs that are run by musicians tend to be the best in terms of treating touring musicians and sound. They know what makes you feel a little more at home.”
Worst show: “There are probably a few of them. When I first started, I was playing anywhere I could in New York. I would play in sports bars with a big screen above my head as people were trying to watch the Knicks. That was a disaster.”

Cullen Omori, The Smith Westerns, playing Oct. 27
Advice: “It would be great for a new rock club or a venue to be a loft or something free, because people our age don’t want to pay for [a show]. If anything, someone needs to open a space that’s cheap, a good venue and a place to party and hang out. Even the kids that aren’t into music at first can absorb it. We don’t have that right now.”
Worst show: “The worst place to play is probably the Beat Kitchen. The door people don’t care about music. They’re assholes. Our first time out of Chicago, we played at the Painted Lady in Detroit. We played with a band from Italy no one knows about. There was literally one kid headbanging. We got like $17 and we had driven four hours.”

Do Make Say Think: Other Truths

Music Review
Pitchfork
October 23, 2009
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7.2

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When instrumental rock bands get tapped for soundtracks, it can be kind of a gut-check that tests how a wider audience may view their music. Sigur Rós’ folkloric melodrama and emotive language made sense as a backdrop for Vanilla Sky, itself a sort of sci-fi fairytale about misplaced and unrequited love starring someone prone to over-excitement. The charged music of Explosions in the Sky fit the open expanses and crushing blows of Friday Night Lights‘ take on Texas high school football culture (hell, guitarist Munaf Rayani sometimes bends over his instrument like a lineman crouching down into a three-point stance). So it seemed odd that a track by Canadians Do Make Say Think was chosen for the oil industry drama Syriana. Not to say the Toronto post-rock band doesn’t make the kind of mesmerizing music suitable for a film score (or that the more tense, overtly politicized music of Godspeed You! Black Emperor might have been a better fit). But DMST can sound so pastoral– the music was literally recorded in a barn, in some cases– it may seem to lack the bite for a blood-for-oil flick.

While Do Make Say Think can project a gentle, laid-back vibe– member Charles Spearin did just finish The Happiness Project– they’re far from spinning their wheels and rehashing post-rock clichés. Other Truths doesn’t roughen up the band’s jazz-steeped aesthetic. But it does add more dimensions and sharp textures to their songwriting, which continues to get tighter yet wider in scope. Spread across a suite of four lengthy tracks and titled with the same string of verbs as the band’s name, the album isn’t about momentum as much as it is about transitions. Opener “Do” starts with crisp, intertwined guitar lines playing off one another. As the track morphs and unfurls– cue the slow-build and crescendo– the themes reappear more charged, parrying with horns and descending into static. “Make” quietly delays the payoff, slowly ratcheting things up and marching toward a climax with a floor of tense bass, echoing chants, and sinewy, stretched string notes. When a warm motif of horns and fuzzed guitars begins to cut through the dread, the song’s color noticeably shifts. “Say” strikes a grandiose yet road-weary tone, as a lonely slide guitar melody gets echoed and expanded by trumpets and churning drums, while “Think” may be its companion and comedown, a slow trail set forth by a quivering, reverb-laden guitar line.

Compared to the group’s first few albums, filled with echoing melodies reflective of cavernous recording spaces, Other Truths shows Do Make Say Think more adept at sketching out and imagining their own widescreen landscapes. The interplay here is more complex than You, You’re a History in Rust, showcasing restraint and more subtle shifts. Calling instrumental rock “soundtrack music” might be stating the obvious. But when it manages to sound as composed and calculated as Other Truths, it isn’t meant as a slight.

Anti-Pop Consortium: Fluorescent Black

Music Review
XLR8R
October 14, 2009
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Part of the millennial hip-hop avant garde that included groups like dälek and Company Flow, Anti-Pop Consortium paired Earl Blaze’s dystopian, mechanical beats with a trio of steely, free-associating MCs who crammed complex wordplay into three-minute tracks. It wasn’t always a formula for laughs, but on their last and best album, 2002’s Arrhythmia, they showed they weren’t too forward thinking to be self-aware and self-deprecating. On the skit “Tron Man Speaks,” a robot calls into Earl Blaze’s radio show to play a single from his album, Tron Man Stigmata—basically processed static from an old Victrola—then gets testy when he thinks Blaze would prefer something “more R&B… something more for the females.”

Now reunited after its 2002 breakup, the underground rap crew returns with Fluorescent Black, a set of anxious electronic rhythms, technospeak, and knotty boasts. But joking about experimental leanings might not be as funny, since the future may have caught up with the forward-thinking New Yorkers. By their own standards, they haven’t taken a great leap forward sonically, instead becoming a more self-conscious and focused unit. While it’s tempting to imagine what next-level bangers they could aspire to, it’s also somewhat refreshing to hear them develop their angular music past the beta stage. They’re ostensibly still looking ahead, but with a bit of a retro-futuristic tinge.

There’s still plenty of abstraction, including the minimal march of “Timpani,” the digitized sludge of “Dragunov,” and the title track, which makes a chorus of squeegee-sharp synth licks sound like a nest of chirping machines. But while Arrhythmia was marked by negative space and a sense of refined chill, the tracks on Fluorescent Blank are more crowded and busy. The anxious beat of “New Jack Exterminator” competes with various strains of mechanical noise, and “Reflections” runs through arpeggiated synths before dropping into swirling riffs and drums that recall The Roots.
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Hudson Mohawke: Butter

Music Review
Pitchfork
October 12, 2009
Link
6.7

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Showcasing his stuttering spin on hip-hop beats, 23-year-old Glaswegian producer Ross Birchard, who records as Hudson Mohawke, demonstrates no shortage of ideas and energy on Butter. Like the album’s neon-scorched cover, which includes hawks with mohawks, he doesn’t do restraint or subtlety. “Joy Fantastic” has to be the true over-the-top cartoon moment of the already wired debut album. Preceded by a silly skit featuring two kids whispering about escaping to a magic land, the track of sinewy, bulbous beats features vocalist Olivier Daysoul laying down some fantasyland pap that makes Fonzworth Bentley sound like a thug. He also deadpans “You can swim the Minnetonka,” dropping the last word like Dave Chappelle imitating the Purple One. An amusing aside on an overly precious track, it might also obliquely suggest where Mohawke is going with this electronic carnival.

He gets both richer and more restless with Butter, aiming to inject more soul into his skewered style while still fidgeting through pitched-up, Premier-inspired beats, tripped-up drum patterns, and shorted-out 8-bit melodies. Hudson Mohawke already has a track record of refracting hip-hop and R&B through his own neon-colored prism. Between the re-imagined jams on the Oops EP, the Polyfolk Dance EP– the latter named after a track by prog-rock violinist Jean-Luc Ponty– and various singles and remixes, he’s helped position his LuckyMe crew and the Wireblock label at the forefront of a multi-city axis of boundary-pushing producers. And new tracks like “No One Could Ever”, which rolls out with dull snare taps and sped-up vocal snippets, would make fertile ground for a freestyle.

Butter overflows with these kind of neon-tinted beats, almost tropical in the way they suggest warmth and sunshine (see “Rising 5”), and deliriously happy. A teenage DMC champ, Mohawke made some initial forays into producing as a teenager by messing with the Music 2000 program on his Playstation, and it’s clear video game tones and quick-cuts form a large portion of his musical vocabulary. Melody lines aren’t just bright, they’re blinding, buoyant, and sometimes verge on child-like. So high they sound pitch-shifted, the tracks still manage an unsteady swagger and would fit in well with Alexander Nut’s recent Rinse mix. “FUSE” glides between pitches, tweaked to massive effect despite a lack of bass. “ZOo00OOm” blends bleeps, waves of bass, and what sounds like a beat boxer with a facial tic. “Shower Melody” soars on a virtuostic, screaming guitar riff while “Gluetooth” slowly bumps, chipmunk vocal chirping over a steady low-end march. His collaborations with Dam-Funk, especially “Tell Me What You Want From Me”, are a bit more slinky, but the overall sheen is hard to escape.

His wobbling, histrionic beats can also showcase his propensity for going over the top. Like a child on a sugar high, he dives into ideas– short tracks like “Twistclip Loop” and “3.30”– and doesn’t always follow through, taking multiple directions at once and occasionally dropping under-developed tracks, which flash and quickly fizzle without much resolution. While the album has been in the works for a while, Butter suggests he’s moving at a rather frenetic pace. By the time the closer “Black N Red” rolls around, another bombast of tinny keyboards and chipmunk vocals, it’s not contagious, it’s overkill. Hudson can definitely do tweaked, but he has work to do before being transcendent.

The Grand Tour: Kanye West and Aussie photographer Nabil Elderkin collaborate on a coffee table book like no other

Article
Men’s Book
October 2009

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The modern big-budget music tour balances outsize ambitions with the reality of hauling sets cross-country. When the artist on the marquee is Kanye West, however, restraint and compromise aren’t usually part of the equation. Factor in his Daft Punk fetish, retina-scarring detail on massive screens and a crew of gangly Jim Henson puppets and you begin to approach the indulgence of the rapper’s 2008 Glow in the Dark worldwide tour, the subject of a new coffee table tome by Rizzoli.

“Kanye is super-talented, driven and he wants what he wants,” says Nabil Elderkin, whose photos are featured in the book, also called Glow in the Dark, alongside Kanye’s sketches.

“It” entertainer West dreamed up an entertainment epic of Roman proportions — Rihanna in sci-fi body armor, orchestral scores for all his songs and a HAL 9000-like female voice, J.A.N.E., that tells Kanye he’s the brightest star in the universe mid-set. Elderkin captured a fan-level view of these neon-drenched proceedings, but the real standouts are the backstage photos — a Kubrick-like shot of Kanye in a dressing room, the rapper munching on cereal, gold chain contrasting nicely with Cap’N Crunch — that detail touring life.

Elderkin’s intial contact with Kanye was part go-getter and part GoDaddy. The photographer, who spent most of his youth in Australia and started out shooting surfers, was living in Chicago and heard one of Kanye’s early mixtapes. Impressed, he searched for kanyewest.com. When he realized the domain name wasn’t taken, he bought it. Reps from Roc-a-fella records called a few months later to see if they could buy the website, and Elderkin gave it away for free — under the condition, that is, that he get a chance to shoot the up-and-coming rapper at his West Side studio at Sacramento and Lake. The result, a photo of Kanye posing with a Louis Vuitton backpack, was his initial press photo circa College Dropout and the beginning of a long-time photo and music video collaboration.

Kanye isn’t the perfect person to photograph — Elderkin prefers beautiful Brazilian women — but he’s an intriguing study who combines myriad influences, styles and subjects. “Sometimes during shows, before he went on, he would be near the stage watching and the people next to him wouldn’t know it was him,” says Elderkin. “When they recognized him he wouldn’t get weird, he’d just say what’s up. He knows he’s a regular guy, a human being like all of us. He’s very humble in those regards.”

There’s Nothing Like Home Cooking

Article
A.V. Club Chicago
September 2009
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One of the greatest advantages of being a melting-pot city is the eclectic tastes and cuisine that immigrants import into their adopted home. Granted, the American palate can sometimes be a bit bland, but that hasn’t stopped generations of newly arrived Americans from setting up shop in Chicago and selling food the way mother used to make it. Since cuisine and the immigrant experience often go hand-in-hand, The A.V. Club asked three Chicago restaurant owners/immigrants to talk about their experiences with the quirks of foodservice in the U.S.

Julio Perez from Siboney Cuban Cuisine
Coming to America: “I emigrated in a boat, the same way Scarface did,” says Julio Perez, the co-owner of Siboney. After arriving in 1980, Perez did things the American way and went to college at the University of Indiana. Desperate for a home-cooked meal, and depressed by the lack of local Cuban options and terrible Mexican joints at the time, he teamed up with seven Cuban law students, acquired a Cuban cookbook, and got to work.
Food from home: Perez remembers always being hungry from Fidel Castro’s food-rationing program. Still, he has his favorites from home, including tasajo, cured dried beef, and pig’s feet. He thought about adding it Siboeny’s menu, but then had second thoughts. “Are you really going to try and serve this to American people?” he remembers thinking. “They’ll puke on the plate.”
Cooking translation: Siboney Cuban Cuisine is an attempt to recreate sophisticated, old-school Cuba from the ‘40s and ‘50s, the scene you’d see in a movie like The Lost City. Perez dropped his 20-year real-estate career to open the restaurant with a partner. He researched old Cuban recipes on the web, and the current chef just came from Cuba, so he doesn’t cook with “foreign ingredients” like cilantro. Perez says he doesn’t have any problem recreating food from home, but the meat in the U.S. is a bit off. “It tastes different, due to the way it was raised and processed,” he says. “Here it’s hormone-based and fat. The flavor is missing.”
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Mayer Hawthorne: A Strange Arrangement

Music Review
Pitchfork
October 2009
Link
6.9

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A Strange Arrangement, in addition to being the name of Mayer Hawthorne’s falsetto-laced debut, also describes the story behind the making of this one-man soul studio. Performing in L.A. as DJ Haircut, Michigan-born hip-hop fan Drew Cohen thought it would be interesting to record his own sample-friendly music. His complicated form of crate digging eventually attracted the ears of Stones Throw founder Peanut Butter Wolf. According to a Real Detroit Weekly interview, Cohen even turned to the adolescent-approved porn name formula– his middle name and the street he grew up on– as a device for creating his sweet soul singer alter ego. When he received a recording contract for what he thought was a single release, he realized Wolf wanted a full-length and had to bunker down, since he ended up writing and recording just about every part on the album himself. It’s not as authentic and gritty a bio as those found in the liner notes of many soul reissues. But Hawthorne’s on-the-fly origins are fitting for this release, alternately carefree, charming, and sometimes as green as the 29-year-old crooner.

Hawthorne’s smooth voice draws deeply from the work of legends like Smokey Robinson, Curtis Mayfield, and the Stylistics’ Russell Thompkins, Jr. While his naming convention may suggest otherwise, Hawthorne never gets near any R-rated love affairs. Posing in a study surrounded by ephemera on the cover, he sort of looks like a lost Tenenbaum, and plays up a lovelorn, sweet angle throughout the album.

He shines brightest on straightforward tracks where he doesn’t overplay his hand, instead folding his innocent vocals into catchy, energetic, and unfussy arrangements. He can’t match the instrumental chops of Daptone bands or Mark Ronson projects, so he sticks to the basics. Coasting on driving backbeats, feel-good horn and sax melodies, and pleas for passion, “Your Easy Lovin’ Ain’t Pleasin’ Nothin'”, “One Track Mind”, and “Make Her Mine” are streamlined soul, catchy singles that do right by their obvious 1960s influences. “The Ills” nails a Mayfield vibe out of the gate, threading fluid congas among empowering choruses and lyrics about broken levees and single-parent families. “A Strange Arrangement” and “Just Ain’t Gonna Work Out”, mid-tempo numbers with more falsetto and apologies for walking away from relationships, showcase blended vocal harmonies. Other than the occasional clockwork backbeat, the closest this comes to Cohen’s hip-hop roots is when he slurs “scared” so it rhymes with “bird.”

The lovelorn singer doesn’t always handle being on the receiving end of a break up quite as well. While lamenting on “Just Ain’t Gonna Work Out”, his syrupy vocals stall a bit, and “Green Eyed Love” lumbers along on a half-hearted organ melody and slack rhythm. Hawthorne clearly has the ability to integrate and recreate his influences in his own compositions; it would be revelatory if he added more of his own signature sounds and soul into the music.

David Bowie: VH1 Storytellers

Music Review
Pitchfork
June 2009
Link
4.5

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“Oh you don’t know the half of it.” Said in an over-the-top manner, this was David Bowie’s inauspicious kick-off to an over-sentimental start to “Life on Mars”. Like the rest of his 1999 performance on “VH1’s Storytellers” series, it poses a question, or more accurately, suggests the audience will be privy to inside information. But the answers don’t come during a mostly tepid eight-song set.

Broadcast in August 1999, a quarter-century after he hung up his Ziggy Stardust kimonos, this episode teased fans with a rare chance to hear the shape-shifting artist discuss and deconstruct part of his mythology. Bowie was running on the fumes of what was a disappointing decade– between albums like Earthling, Outside, and the then forthcoming Hours…— but if anybody had an iconic back catalog, a colorful personal narrative (or narratives), and an amazing supporting cast to draw stories from, it was Bowie. Sadly, only flashes of his wit and gregarious storytelling come out during this CD/DVD release of his television performance.

Standing at the center of what looks like a bad community theater stage set, entertaining an overly polite audience while donning a gray hoodie, Bowie comes off likable and very off the cuff. Take his introduction to “China Girl”. After a hushed retelling of a story about a story– Iggy Pop, over coffee, recalling a 1970s Berlin punk show where German artists built and destroyed a replica of the Berlin Wall– he says, “this is a song I wrote with Jim at around that time, and I guess this one’s also about invasion and exploitation, take it away, Mike.” There’s no mention or insight into Nile Rodgers, the Nazi reference in the song, or the then-controversial, award-winning music video– just a somewhat interesting little tale followed by a piano intro better suited to some low-budget made-for-TV movie. His storytelling continues in this vein, jumping between the Paul Anka connection to “Life on Mars”, an Eartha Kitt obsession and the shocking admission that the mid-70s was a dark, drug-fueled period impervious to recall. What’s especially frustrating is that he’s charming and self-deprecating, tossing out casual references to a meeting with Abbie Hoffmann and doing an amusing Marc Bolan impression, suggesting he could actually tell dozens more interesting, relevant, and revealing stories if he felt like it.

Musically, things don’t go much better, occasionally sliding into cheesy, cabaret-lite renditions from a band that looks like a casting call for session player stereotypes. Two of the tracks on the original broadcast, along with two more of the bonus tracks on the DVD, come from Hours…, not many fans’ first choice. Two of the extra tracks, “Always Crashing in the Same Car” and “I Can’t Read”, provide a slightly more-well rounded look at his career, but none come with additional commentary, making them four modest live performances, nothing else.

It’s part of the puzzling DVD/CD element of this release. A DVD with a companion CD that doesn’t bother to separate the songs from storytelling or include the bonus tracks makes it an audio recording of a television episode. Don’t major labels have enough problems with venerable and archaic media formats without working hard to invent new ones? The substance of this reissue seems indebted to a famous name instead of adding significantly more insight into a famous and intriguing career. It’s hard to imagine a fan outcry for a DVD filled with decent to muddled performances.

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