Happy Birthday Siouxsie Sioux!

May the creative and wonderful Siouxsie Sioux have a fabulous birthday!

Siouxsie Sioux (neé Susan Ballion) was born 54 (!) years ago in Southwark (that's where Shakespeare's Globe was located - it subsequently went into decline. Parts of it were known as "the Mint", where criminals would hide out in the 17th-18th centuries as it was outside of the jurisdiction of the authorities of London).

She is and was a punk rock legend, my inamorato and I just saw clips of her in the Filth and the Fury the other night. Like so many genius artists, she embodies a persona and a particular aesthetic down to her very bones. Her look was so interesting and visually striking, her imitators turned it into a goth cliché. And I loved her band, the Banshees, when I was growing up. I saw her live in the 80s at least once (possibly more - things begin to fade).

She was married for many years to her drummer, Budgie, and they lived in gothic decadence in the South of France. Of course, the Banshees first drummer was Sid Vicious. She and Budgie have since divorced, I was sorry to hear. You can see them in happier times at right.

But it's really about the music, and the performance, isn't it? See here her video for Dazzle (embedding disabled) and you can see that she might be almost single-handedly responsible for bringing back the aesthetic of movie stars of the teens or twenties - wouldn't Mr. Ziegfeld wanted to hire her? Below is The clip for Spellbound:

I love how tall and strong and elegant she is - such a huge and endless influence. May she have the happiest of days!

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains

Remember Night Flight? It aired on USA from 1981 through 1988 and they played videos and movies and stuff? Things that never wound up on MTV or most anywhere else really?

I remember they played videos of lots of LA Punk and New Wave bands, but I mostly remember the movies. Breaking Glass, Rude Boy and some of the Paul Morrissey directed Warhol films. And best of all, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains starring a barely turned fifteen Diane Lane. I think I watched it every time it aired which was fairly frequently as they didn't have too many movies in their rotation. But then it disappeared. I left home and more or less forgot about it.

Since it had aired so many times during my formative teenage years, I had no idea how obscure and hard to find it would prove to be over the subsequent decades. There were all sorts of problems behind the scenes, and it never received any sort of proper release. The screenplay was written by Nancy Dowd who won the Oscar for penning Coming Home a few years earlier. She subsequently removed her name from the project for reasons that remain obscure. There is apparently only one print of the movie in existence and for many, many years it was pretty much impossible to see.

No more! In this age of accessibility, one can now stream The Stains via Netflix. Which is precisely what we did here at Cabinet Headquarters recently, and I got the chance to watch it for the first time in over twenty years.

First things first: it holds up. Truly. Recently, I've been watching lots of movies from the 80s and early 90s and it really makes one realize how strange and/or sanitized American films have become. Diane Lane plays Corinne Burns, a young girl who lives alone with her younger sister as their mother has just died of cancer (at 38). The two girls and their cousin (played by an extremely young Laura Dern) have started a band. They live in a dying coal town in Western Pennsylvania, where there's nothing for them. In a subtle way, the film correlates growing up working class and disenfranchised in Middle America to growing up working class and disenfranchised in London. Punk speaks just as well to kids in either place.

The film starts with a news interview with Corinne as a local station reports on "The Town That Wouldn't Die". Really, the moment you say that about a town, you know it's dead as hell. Corinne spouts teenage nihilism at the camera, calling herself, "Third-Degree Burns". Lane is remarkable with her tough little face and her eyes so full of hurt and anger. She's doomed and she knows it, all she has left is her rage and teenage bravado. She's about to lose her apartment, she can't find a job, school is a non-starter, she doesn't get along with her aunt (Christine Lahti), when she goes to see whatever band is playing at the local club that night. As Corinne watches The Looters, a punk band from London play, she first looks as if she's been hit in the face with a plank, then a look of recognition and joy plays across her face as she realizes this is it. This is what she's been looking for her whole life.

The fictional Looters sound as realistic as any fictional punk band in the movies, probably because it's comprised of two Sex Pistols and a member of the Clash (Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Paul Simenon). They are on a depressing, low-rent tour opening for an aging Spinal Tap like band of dinosaurs (the lead singer is hilariously played by Fee Waybill of The Tubes). The Looters have been promised sunny California, but have wound up in Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Kentucky. The tour is being run by a Rasta named Lawnboy who meets Corinne, and having seen her on the news report asks them to join the tour. Despite her bandmate's understandable reluctance (they've had all of three rehearsals), she jumps at it. The Stains are born.

Their first performance is something of a fiasco, and Corinne's frightened bandmates leave the stage when they're laughed at (cut them some slack - they're like 14 years old). But then Corinne reveals the look she's invented for herself in all its proto-Riot Grrl glory: striped hair, red eye shadow, see-through red top and tights. She sneers at the audience: "I'm perfect, but no one in this town gets me. Because I don't put out." As the tour goes on she develops a tentative relationship with the lead singer of The Looters (played by a very young and hunky Ray Winstone), but she's emotionally cut off and made of pure aggression and ambition, so he doesn't really stand a chance. Corinne's ability to grab media attention is worthy of Madonna (who I bet watched this movie with great attention). A local reporter knows she's news and starts following the tour. As little girls across the heartland start worshipping her and dressing like her, Corinne becomes something of a monster. But she's a pretty glorious one.

This movie is amazing in the way it anticipates both Madonna and the Riot Grrls. Dowd clearly knew that something was in the air, that girls were waiting for something, that there was so little out there for them. There are also shades of The Go-Go's who began as an LA punk band, but sold millions of records when they started playing sparkly incandescent pop. The Runaways may have also been in her mind, as the ultimate proto-punk teen rock band. Corinne is a creature of pure resentment and anger and carries a gigantic chip on her shoulder that causes her to do some pretty unforgivable things (mostly to Winstone, who proves to be something of a romantic), but that doesn't mean what she says on stage or in interviews is wrong.

The media satire is dead on and I'm always a fan of movies where the girl doesn't get broken. Let the girl be a monster, or a jerk, that's fine - just please don't grind her into powder. Enough of that. Third Degree Burns tells girls: "Don't get had". And the movie, remarkably, doesn't punish her for it. Awesome.

How Exene Cervenka Saved My Life

Last weekend, my inamorato and I sat down to watch the 1986 documentary X: The Unheard Music which I hadn't seen in well over twenty years. Back when I was a deeply alienated teenager, I saw it many, many times.

It was the weirdest thing. Aside from how much I love the band X, it was just like stepping into a time machine to the eighties. Let me just say right up front that few things are weirder and more off-putting to me than 80s nostalgia. It must have been how lots of people viewed the 70s nostalgia of the 90s, i.e. just baffling. The 80s were kind of the worst in a way, not miles away from living in these United States under Bush II. I think most people have forgotten or never knew.

It was the time of Iran-Contra, the first implementation of trickle-down economics, ketchup is a vegetable (when feeding children and the poor - so often the same thing) and the country, as whole seemed and felt culturally dead. In other words, a fine breeding ground for punk.

Exene Cervenka moved from Florida to Los Angeles in 1976 and formed X with John Doe (her soon to be husband whom she had met at a poetry workshop), Billy Zoom and D.J Bonebreak a year later. Their first four albums are all just great, all produced by Ray Manzarek from The Doors, and I had them all and played them again and again. My favorite has always been Under A Big Black Sun, their third.

Back in high school, I didn't have anywhere near the kind of money most of my classmates did. I mean, I couldn't compete with the mean little capitalist drones who sat in bio class with me, so eventually, and relievedly, I stopped trying. I wore clothes from thrift stores and yard sales (and there was some great stuff back then, believe me), my Mom's old clothes from up in the attic and my Dad's narrow lapeled suit jackets from the late 50s. I mostly stopped listening to Madonna and Duran Duran and began listening to stuff like X and The Cramps and The Replacements. Those first few REM albums and The B-52s and The Cure and The Velvet Underground and the (early) Clash records. And I began picking through my Mom's large and varied collection of LPs, stocked with folk and country and various oddities of all sorts.

Exene is a poet and a rock star and an artist right down to her bones and I worshipped her. I used to make all kinds of collages, and watching The Unheard Music, I wonder if I first started gluing stiff to paper because I saw her doing so in the film. Maybe. You can see at right a page from a more than 20 year old notebook. I don't remember where I found that picture of Exene. From Interview Magazine maybe? Way back in the early 90s she collaborated on a book called Just Another War about the first Gulf War. Henry Rollins published it on his press and I saw her on her book tour in '92. I was so thrilled to see her.

In some ways I feel she is the last of the true believers. She still writes and sings and wears thrift store clothes. She has a son in his early 20s who she had with ex-husband Viggo Mortensen (the amount of street cred he garnered when I found out he had been married to Exene for ten years is pretty much incalculable) . I just read she's been diagnosed with MS, which is just heartbreaking, and is likely why I haven't hear much from her recently.

I realize I've been writing a lot about people who have a very particular LA folk aesthetic. If I was to classify it, I would say it's a mix of old time Hollywood, punk rock, Mexican Folk Art and The Great American West. X's aesthetic falls somewhere in this too. I can't remember off hand if they are name checked in Weetzie Bat, but I think they might be. I'm a New York girl through and through, but there's something about the myth of California that's always appealed to me. When I was growing up in suburban NY, it saved me to know there were other places out there even if they were fictional: Narnia, Middle Earth, Old Hollywood, whatever. It was mysterious and glamorous and unattainable.

So, yeah, I don't know. I don't know if Exene Cervenka actually saved my life. But sometimes it sure as hell felt like it.

Photo: Jim Jocoy, We're Desperate

Elizabeth McGrath: Everything That Creeps

I'm not sure where I first came across the work of artist Elizabeth McGrath, but I know I wasn't living in the current Cabinet headquarters, so it had to have been more than five years ago. I also own a book of her art, Everything That Creeps, and I have no idea where it came from. Well, things accumulate.

McGrath is a part of the punk-pop-goth-fairy tale aesthetic that is just busting out of Los Angeles from seemingly all directions. She constructs meticulously put together sculptures which often include small dioramas embedded somewhere inside them, using found objects, doll furniture and taxidermy. Her more recent work has a cleaner, more nursery rhyme feel, while her earlier work is much, much, much darker.

I always admire people who know how to make things, as my hands are clumsy and I'm no good at it at all.

See the pig below:


And then look and see what's embedded in its belly!

Her work is strange and beautiful and one gets the pervasive feeling one has entered an other-worldly dime museum. As if unseen wonders and horrors are being presented to us.

McGrath has some larger scale work too, of which I am less fond. I have a feeling, that like myself, she is a miniturist at heart. She's someone with which I would love to collaborate, actually, as I feel the people (or beings) in her work are just crying out for stories.

For now, she's on my list of artists whose work I'd like to own if I can ever afford art. I have to say, I'm a little transfixed by her earlier, slightly more diabolical work, which somehow really inspires me. Taxidermy (of all things) is having a moment, isn't it? I've talked about this here before about my fear of maggots and arsenic, but the fascination still lingers. And there this, a class on mummification coming up. I'm sorely tempted.

Poly Styrene, I love you!

All The Coolest Redheads Are Turning 70

Seventy years ago on the British Isles there must have been something startling in the water, as two of the most interesting (and red-headed) women in fashion were born. In addition to the previously mentioned Grace Coddington, Vivienne Westwood turned 70 last week as well.

For good or ill, Ms. Westwood holds primary responsibility for what punk rock looked like in London, and continues to be worn in one form or another by disaffected (and fashionable) young people the world over. She is one of the most influential designers of the past 50 years. Without her, there couldn't have been an Alexander McQueen.

Dame Vivienne Westwood, like that other ravishing 70 year old fashion icon,Grace Coddington, emerged from a working class background. She spent only one semester at Harrow Art School because "I didn't know how a working-class girl like me could possibly make a living in the art world". She instead got a job in a factory and took a teacher training course (which, amazingly enough, is something Johnny Rotten would later do as well) becoming a primary school teacher, whilst designing and making jewlery that she sold at markets and on the Portobello Road. She met the always slippery Malcolm Maclaren in 1965, leaving her then husband for him. She continued to teach until they opened their shop, Let It Rock, in 1971 on the King's Road and fashion, music and social history would be absolutely changed forever.

I think Maclaren and Westwood's store is likely the most influential shop in history. In 1975 it was renamed "Sex" and became the center of punk (again, for good or ill). Westwood still owns it and sells her World's End clothing line from its historic environs. The question of who invented the punk look is always up for debate. Like all street styles, its influences and creators are manifold - but punk was small and contained in the early days, so its genesis isn't as difficult to track. Rotten and Maclaren had a lot of influence, and some of it came out of wearing one's poverty on one's sleeve. I've heard Rotten sneering at the idea of punks wearing head to toe leather (as popularized by Sid Vicious) as only rich people could afford such a look so it wasn't punk by definition. Westwood, the artist in the bunch, obviously has a lot to do with shaping the look. In later years, she has been extremely blasé about it, emphasizing that it was fashion.

Her first runway show was in 1981 and was inspired by pirates, launching what I vividly remember being the New Romantics, with Adam Ant and the early Duran Duran in their puffy shirts and Buccaneer jackets. She said she remembered seeing, when she was a small child, a woman dressed in Dior's New Look, and it left a huge impression on her. There's an extravagance in Dior that is definitely visible in Westwood's work, but it's never plays straight as Galliano often did with the same influence. It's always tweaked. Her garments are so deeply infused with fashion history, but her work, though decadent, never takes itself particularly seriously. Everything is always a little off center, as if this working class girl, now Dame of the British Empire, is still thumbing her nose at the upper classes. Most designers just make pretty dresses, but Westwood manages parody in hers.

Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books

Francesca Lia Block has an entry in the modern fairy tale book I'm still in the midst of reading. I haven't gotten to it yet, but with all this thinking about fairy tales, I've been thinking lots ablout Block's masterwork, the five short novels that are collected in the one volume omnibus, Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books.

I don't see them brought up in discussions of fairy tales particularly often, which I think is a shame. I really believe they are some of the best YA books of the past few decades and I think in these dark and doomy times we are living in they need to be brought up more often. Sadly, I've seen them mentioned in the paper usually when these delightful and positive books are being challenged by some religious nut job. But, nut jobs aside, I know they're not to everyone's taste.

With the first book, Weetzie Bat, in 1989, Block invented a new literary genre: Los Angeles Fairy Tale Magic Realism. I know some people find them too twee, too glittery, too Californian and I have a tough time disagreeing, as they are all these things. I guess, as with all art, it comes down to whether they speak to you in a deep and real place.

I truly believe they are some of the few modern books that contain real magic. I first heard of them about a dozen years ago and looked at Dangerous Angels in Barnes & Nobel, but didn't have the money to buy it new. The very next day I was walking down Prospect Park West, and someone was having a stoop sale, and there it was with that pretty winged figure on the cover, on sale for $1 (my weird fixation on the image of pretty winged women is a discussion for a different day). I started reading right away.

The five Weetzie Bat books were originally published individually (Block subsequently published a sixth, which I have not read), but I think of them all as parts of a whole. The first book serves as an introduction of sorts. Weetzie is a teen girl living in a magical, now mostly lost, 1980s Los Angeles. Block's prose is simple and glittery, and it tells how Weetzie becomes best friends with Dirk, and cobbles together a family in her magical house (inherited from Dirk's Grandma Fifi) in the Hollywood Hills. The title comes from something Dirk says: "Love is a dangerous angel" (which, of course, it is). In it, all the main (and most of the subsidiary) characters are introduced: Weetzie's great love and life partner, My Secret Agent Lover Man, Dirk's boyfriend Duck, Their children Cherokee and Witch Baby, and Weetzie's parents: Charlie Bat and Brandy-Lynn (who met on the set of a Monster Movie in the '50s).

The books are filled with events, much in the way a fairy tale or an opera is. And like in all fairy tales the happy endings must be earned. The trials the characters go through are dark indeed: some people are dangerous and violent and not to be trusted, AIDS ravages the gay community, drugs dim the beauty and fire of some characters and destroy others: Charlie Bat, Weetzie's junky, ex-screenwriter New Yorker father finally takes too many pills and never comes back (except as a ghost). Depression and despair in the the face of the world's ills plague the characters occasionally. But, the most important thing in the book, and the thing that has gotten the religious nut jobs in such an uproar, is Block's magical vision of family.

Beautiful blonde Cherokee was conceived by Weetzie because she wanted a baby desperately, and so she Dirk and Duck all sleep together so that they would all be her parents. My Secret Agent Lover Man fathered Witch Baby with the wicked Vixanne. But she too was happily absorbed by Weetzie into he household. All of the above happens in the 70 pages that comprise the first book. It's all embedded deeply in Los Angeles with echoes of Marilyn and Jayne Mansfield and the Monster Movies of the '50s and especially of Charlie Chaplin. The soundtrack is likely X and The Blasters and The Cramps.

In subsequent books, Cherokee and Witch Baby become teenagers themselves and have to forge their own paths. We travel to NYC with Witch Baby as she is helped to find her beloved Angel Juan by the ghost of Charlie Bat, we learn more about Dirk and his Grandma Fifi and a genie in a bottle.

They're all pure magic.

I'm beginning to realize more and more, that when it comes to art I live in a place of metaphor. I don't feel super confident writing about the literal in my fiction. And sometimes naturalistic stories feel over-specific to me and therefore unrelatable. Most times they leave me cold. I think fairy tales tell a more truthful story.

The following are the final two paragraphs of The Weetzie Bat books, and they serve well as yet another light in the defense of stories as an essential part of the human psyche:

"Stories are like genies, Dirk thought. They can carry us into and through our sorrows. Sometimes they burn, sometimes they dance, sometimes they weep, sometimes they sing. Like genies, everyone has one. Like genies, sometimes we forget that we do.

Our stories can set us free, Dirk thought. When we set them free."

The Continuing Story of Carla Rhodes

I've been meaning to catch Carla Rhodes's act for a while now, and finally made it down to her monthly jaunt at Arlene's Grocery a frigid Sunday night a week ago.

Carla is a cool rock 'n' roll ventriloquist who escaped a miserable childhood and adolescence in Kentucky to make it to the big time here in Gotham. After seeing more solo shows (both live and on video) than, well, most people, I think she possesses in spades the most important element: being the sort of performer that people are happy to watch for an hour. It sounds so simple, so obvious. Yes, it's sometimes ever so elusive.

Carla is full of self-deprecating Southern charm, and her interactions with the awful under-bed alligator, a homeless squirrel and disturbing vaudevillian Cecil Sinclaire (pictured left) are all hugely entertaining. The show as a whole needs some work. Though Carla is a terrific performer, I felt the need for a little more forward momentum. The show is divided between her bedroom at home and her arrival in NYC, and there are simply too many numbers that all take place in one setting and don't really lead her anywhere new.

This really does seem to be ventriloquism week here at The Cabinet! That said, feel free to give Miss Arkansas a miss, and head downtown (or, uptown or into town, depending on where you're coming from), and catch Carla's very cool show. She'll be back at Arlene's Grocery on February 20.

Photo: Leslie Van Stelten

RIP Ari Up

Punk rock (like most all other rock) was pretty much a boy's club, which was one of the things that made The Slits so super cool and exciting to me when I was growing up. Another thing that isn't paid enough attention to these days is how much the bands (in both NYC & London) that were collected under the umbrella of punk rock differed from each other stylistically. The Slits were punk as fuck, but sounded nothing like The Clash or The Sex Pistols, or anyone else really.

Well, Ari Up, lead singer and driving force behind The Slits died yesterday at the age of 48. She will be missed.