Category: ultraphotographic

An Entertainment Bonanza

Me and Mary and ElayneI don’t know if it’s possible to really explain Marty and Elayne. At least, I don’t think anyone could express exactly what it’s like to see them, to hear them.

Marty and Elayne are a husband-and-wife lounge act who perform nightly at a Los Angeles restaurant/lounge called the Dresden. This place is the toniest. It’s all brown velour walls and furniture and gold light fixtures. Circular booths and small tables surround a baby grand piano ringed with a counter and chairs.

Elayne sits at the piano with a pile of sheet music and a couple of extra Casiotone keyboards. Next to her is Marty and his stand-up bass, with a drum kit on the side just in case. Marty is the stone-faced protector of Elayne, the ethereal artist who lives through the music she plays. It sweeps her away, and Marty makes sure everyone respects that. Together, as they’ve done for the last twenty years, they wail out popular favorites and old standards. They don’t just perform simple smarmy covers, though. Every song is transformed into something unique, something unbelievable, something bordering on the incomprehensible.

Without fail, they start every song in a simple way, with either Marty singing in his pitch-for-pitch Sinatra voice, or Elayne in her own jazzy, high-frequency way. After a verse and a chorus, though, the fun begins. Elayne scats. She scats like a cat in heat. She scats in song and plays improvised, otherwordly riffs on the piano. Marty keeps the beat and keeps it strong, plucking or pounding away a steady rhythm that moves Elayne along like a runaway roller coaster. The overall effect seems pretty cheesy, but there’s something about it — something way beyond the humor and the impossible.

You see, these guys have passion for what they’re doing. They’re serious and it shows. If they were just going along in a happy state of shtick, I don’t think it would work. It would be too over the top. This is the real thing, and it makes all the difference. Their enthusiasm is infectious. Of course, I saw people in the room who were watching them with a superior, Lettermanesque shit-eating grin, but most everyone, the people who looked like they kept coming back, was having fun: they all really appreciated Marty and Elayne in a goofy way. Dresden is by no means a cheap gin joint. There’s no cover, but people wouldn’t pay those drink prices if the show wasn’t worth it.

Marty and Elayne perform a huge selection of tunes, mostly on request, like
“Girl from Ipanema,” “Staying Alive,” “Fever,” “Mack the Knife,” “Muskrat Love” and other crowd-pleasers. The most amazing number I heard of them all, by far, was “Light My Fire.” This transcended mere performance. I think it transcended mere music. With Elayne taking the vocal reins and the keyboards, and Marty on the drums, these two wailed away in a frenzy I couldn’t have ever expected. I haven’t seen musicians swept away like that in a looooong time. All hail Marty and Elayne, keeping the sanctity of the lounge alive!

Boogie Nights at the Moonlight Rollerway

When was the last time you went roller skating? I don’t mean sleek rollerblades, I mean four thick wheels, big orange stopper in the front, disco blaring all around you. that’s what happened to me and my friends at the Moonlight Rollerway in Glendale.

We were originally attracted by the novelty of going to the only rink in California that had a real organ player, but we found that it was the organist’s day off, and the rink was actually a time capsule from 1982.

Now in 1983, I was a regular patron of Skate Odyssey on Staten Island in New York. Moonlight had all the same elements that defined my early adolescent years — earth-toned rugs, slushees, disco balls, and “Jam On It.” They were even having a birthday party for some kid while we were there, and he got his own solo skate on the rink.

I would only sound gushy and totally retro if I spent too much time raving about the fun to be had here for four dollars, so I’ll keep it simple. We did a disco hokey-pokey on skates. We ate a big soft pretzel. We skated to “Double Dutch,” “YMCA,” and even Elvis. I learned I could still skate backwards, and my friend Monica, a Ph.D. candidate in religion and philosophy, was so moved that she stripped down to a catsuit to boogie on the rink. I’m sure all the twelve-year-olds will never be the same again.

Gawking in L.A.

Dan Rhatigan, your resident megalomaniacal self-publisher, wrote, lived, and photographed this shocking tale of disaster and wonderment.

Accommodations provided by Northwest Airlines and the sinister Dr. Lau.

This was my first time
Wow.

I mean it — wow. Wow. Wow! Freakin’ WOW!

I just returned from my first trip out West — a brief week in Los Angeles
to visit my oldest pal Eddie and see what the whole West Coast thing was
like. It would be a criminal understatement to say that I got my money’s
worth from my discount airfare tickets. I got adventure, trash, sorrow,
glamour, nostalgia, chicken and waffles, and natural disaster. Bad omens,
however, started pouring in as I left Boston. I left work early so I could get a head start to the airport for a six-thirtyish flight. I optimistically (foolishly, whichever) ignored the warnings of snow, fiercely determined to escape to the land of seventy-six-and-sunny come hell or high water. The plane left a little late, but I wasn’t too worried, since I had a direct flight, needing only to switch to a different plane with the same flight number in Minneapolis. (You can see this coming, right?)

I packed my warmer layers into my tote bag and checked it once I reached the airport. I patiently waited at the airport, eavesdropping on a conversation between a jappy girl and a trashy family as they compared notes on their respective trips to Portugal. This girl was sitting around reading, and soon the thirteenish daughter from the family recognized her and started interrogating her about her vacation. Soon, the whole bunch got into the act, bombarding the slightly horrified young lady with ardent small talk. At one point, she was struck dumb when the young son of the family started asking her about her romantic life, and if she knew “Joe Escobar,” apparently a friend of the family’s in Portugal. I left before I started to suffer brain rot.

The plane ride itself was uneventful as those things go. The selection of music was catastrophically poor — the blandest possible assortment of inoffensive pop hits and country-western ditties. This was not the best assortment for someone who prefers music that’s a little more challenging. The in-flight news and travel show, a shameless promotional vid by the airline, was a paltry attempt to distract the passengers from the fact that we were getting no movie. Again, it was meant to be singularly inoffensive. Their little travel info pieces on different cities like San Francisco and New Orleans would suggest that every city in the country is a pleasant racial mix, straight, and affluent. A lifelong city-dweller, I was skeptical. The news was little more than entertainment dreck profiling Michael Bolton and some retail magnate. Admittedly, though, I have never been one to enjoy lowest-common-denominator entertainment. Craving distraction from that cultural vacuum, I scarfed down free snacks (those honey-roasted peanuts aren’t as bad as standup comedians would have us believe, don’t you think?) and Cokes (they’ll give you a full can of Coke as opposed to a thimbleful of anything else) and struck up conversation with the guy sitting next to me, a music scene guy from Minneapolis who was visiting his sister in Beantown. We talked about the state of rock clubs in Boston and junk like that, and I thought it was really wacky that you can have a long conversation with someone while traveling without exchanging names, since they’re largely unimportant. I started getting nervous when the airline began to make announcements about which connecting flights had already left Minneapolis, since they made no mention about the fate of the flight I was on. I’m a pretty unseasoned traveler, so I had no idea how these direct (as opposed to non-stop) flights operated.

Continue reading “Gawking in L.A.”

alt.youth.media

Ooze title

monitorOoze bites the hand that feeds it! Ooze came one step closer to its formidable goal of total media domination this past fall when it was included in an exhibit called alt.youth.media at New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art. Could this really be a sign of recognition by the digerati and the art-world elite or just another hoodwink?

Trusty pal Mark and I were deputized as East Coast Correspondents and dispatched by Ooze International Headquarters to attend their prestigious art opening in New York’s infamous Soho. Getting our lazy asses there involved a flurry of e-mail and much FedExing of tickets, info, and promotional Ooze T-shirts (buy yours today, or suffer the humiliation of going without).

The entire block of Broadway in front of the museum (a misnomer at best: the space isn’t much bigger than the sweatshop loft Mark and I call home) was bustling with “alt.youths” as far as the eye could see. Yessirree bub, it looked like someone was lumping the malcontents at Ooze in with lots and lots of teenagers who took punk rock and hipster threads VERY seriously. It felt a lot like going to a high school art club meeting.

Showing skinFeeling sufficiently smug, Mark and I donned our Ooze shirts, got the disposable camera ready, and elbowed through the pubescent crowd at the door. It took a little bit of doe-eyed doubletalk to get our friend, world-famous wine critic Tom Maresca, inside with us since the invite was not so much an announcement as much as a means of Gestapo-like crowd control. Eventually, we were allowed to enter, squeeze past the gift counter, and plunge into the midst of this hullabaloo of teen self-expression. (“I wasn’t expecting this to be such a scene!” said the ever succinct editor of exhibit-sponsor Metrobeat.)

Mark and Dan
My first observation: damn loud and damn crowded. I tried to start slow, so I stopped to look at the blown-up photos of kids in their rooms and read the pithy, Wired-esque blurbs about the exhibit’s aim to showcase the work of a generation thoroughly schooled in media blah blah blah blah blah. I slapped some of my own stickers up over the tags and other stickers covering the whole wall and got on with it.

The inside of the exhibit was a lot like craft day show-and-tell at the average summer camp. Half the room was devoted to zines pinned up on the wall and strewn across a bunch of counters. A nicely equipped “Do It Yourself” area sat in another corner where they encouraged people to play with copiers, rubber stamps, markers, glue sticks, and old magazines and make their very own zines right there on the spot! You only needed to read through the stuff other people had done for about ten minutes to be reminded that some people don’t really lighten up until they grow up a little. I haven’t seen so much gratuitous, angst-ridden manifestos since . . . well . . . since I was about sixteen. Naturally, the gents and I felt compelled to dive into the fray and produce our own punky, subversive, politically-charged zine right their on the spot so we wouldn’t be denied our own shot at uninhibited self-expression! Let’s just say that the long-awaited third issue of Rumpus Room is a little skimpy, but it’s a blistering satire of other zines, and it’s now in the collection of a museum in a major East Coast city. Or at least in its prestigious dumpster.

I had to search pretty hard through the amateur video area and the music sampling studio before I finally found the terminals for the big multimedia section in the back. Well, the verdict was in: The Web may be Big Business in the press, but the alt.youth.artworld thought it only rated two tiny monitors in a far, shadowy corner. Each terminal “featured” about 20 websites, so I felt Ooze needed a break. We hoarded the computer from time to time and forced innocent strangers to watch Ooze on screen while Mark and I took pictures of each other as a cheap publicity stunt.

Free drinksAs soon as we finished the free fancy sodas (no wine at an art opening?!) and tired of hob-nobbing with the teen zine scenesters, we beat a hasty retreat. Those t-shirts definitely work, though: we got funny looks all night long from people who couldn’t quite decide if the baby with the fork in its head was valid self-expression of a just a joke in poor taste. Score one for our side.

[Originally published in September 1996 for Ooze.]