Pages tagged “issue 18”

Talk about a Renaissance Man. Recently named the World’s Best-Dressed Man by Esquire, fashionable pop/hip-hop icon Andre Benjamin will soon be launching his own clothing line. After that, the part-time painter—who works in oils, acrylics and pen and ink—will roll out his latest traveling gallery of artwork, a top-secret series he won’t yet discuss. His Grammy-winning, multi-platinum Atlanta outfit Outkast (where he’s billed as Andre 3000) is also working on a new album, he reports, as well as feature-length film My Life In Idlewild, in which he plays a mortician to his bandmate Big Boi’s club owner. Should be enough to tide over even the hungriest of artists, right?

Far from it. Once film directors caught wind of Outkast’s ultra-hip “Hey Ya!” video—in which Benjamin plays multiple versions of himself—they started tossing movie offers his way, at which point he made a life-changing decision: He rented an L.A. apartment and started studying acting in earnest—a trial by fire that included countless humiliating auditions. “I honestly didn’t see it as me being a music star and jumping into film,” he says. “Because that’s kinda the thing to do now, and I hate that cliché. I wanna be an actor—I don’t wanna be a personality onscreen; I don’t wanna be just me showing up and being myself.”

The method seems to be working. Benjamin did a ?ne comedic turn in Be Cool and a wickedly dramatic stint in John Singleton’s Four Brothers. He will also be appearing in Guy Ritchie’s new guns-blazing comeback Revolver. “I’m a loan shark in it,” he notes. “And Guy Ritchie fans are really gonna be pleased with this one.”

The 30-year-old Benjamin, with his slow Southern drawl, chiseled cheekbones and Bohemian goatee comes across as the epitome of Modern Cool. But all is not as it appears, he confesses. He completely lost his cool when Mrs. Guy Ritchie strolled onto the Revolver set one afternoon. Madonna—a huge Outkast fan—“made me so nervous, I couldn’t continue my scene,” Benjamin swears. “She stepped in during the middle of a scene, they yelled ‘Action!’ and I just forgot all my lines. Thankfully, we had to take a break then, and I had to go wipe off all the sweat. I’d soaked myself!”

(Above [L-R]: Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday)

My wife and I recently had an 11-year-old relative in our house, which doesn’t happen very often but we’re glad when it does. He came to visit for a few days, to hang out and see the sights in San Francisco.

After taking a look at the posters, DVDs and videotapes in our house he had one question: Who is Charlie Chaplin? I gave him a quick summary, and he asked if he could watch one of his movies. I was almost afraid to test my favorite hypothesis, the one where I optimistically think that an 80-year-old movie can engage someone in the age of video games, but taking the plunge I pulled out The Kid, Chaplin’s one-hour silent film from 1921.

Our visitor was intrigued right away, if only because a movie without dialog is quite a novelty. But the surface differences between old and new movies, which seemed vast when we first pushed “play,” eventually caved under the far greater heft of characters, ideas and emotions.

By which I mean he started to laugh. We all did. And then at that pivotal moment when the authorities come to take the kid away from Charlie, he objected—“They can’t do that!”—and I knew he was hooked.

The next day, during a day of roller-coaster riding and sight seeing, he said, “Hey, maybe when we get back home we can watch another Charlie Chaplin movie.” So it’s settled. The earth is round. Its atmosphere is mostly nitrogen. And kids dig silent movies, or at least this one does, and that makes two of us.

I’m not sure what he felt as he was watching that old movie, but I wonder if it’s anything like how I feel when I discover a film that flies in the face of how most people perceive old movies—that they’re dull and silly, naïve and chaste. I know these things aren’t always true. Some of my favorite movies were made before my parents were born. But I still feel enormous pleasure—even surprise—when I come across a movie that shatters the supposed barriers of time and technology.

In the history of American movies, what’s the film with the most witty, rapid-fire dialogue? You could make a pretty compelling case for His Girl Friday by the great Howard Hawks, made in 1940. Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell play a newspaper editor and reporter, both so quick on their feet that the movie sometimes seems like a wall of dialogue so dense that audiences, then and now, have trouble catching every joke and plot point. Grant, known later in his career for portraying suave gentlemen, was actually an acrobat before he entered the movie business, and in His Girl Friday he demonstrates that he’s also a linguistic stuntman with impeccable comic timing. Every line in the movie is razor sharp, but the looks on Grant’s face could sell cars and land planes, no doubt about it.

Much quieter and gentler is Ernst Lubitsch’s charming film The Shop Around the Corner, with Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan playing department-store employees who don’t much care for each other. Except when they’re writing anonymous letters, that is. The movie was remade as You’ve Got Mail with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. You might’ve thought a movie about an email romance was thoroughly modern, but Lubitsch has an analog surprise: men and women have been exchanging letters for ages.

That one’s a fun film, but it doesn’t compare to the feeling I had the first time I saw King Vidor’s The Crowd. It was made in 1928, just before the advent of sound, when great filmmakers had mastered the art of visual storytelling. The Crowd is about John Sims, a small-town guy who moves to New York, eager to set the world on fire but not very motivated to get up and do it. The movie follows him for several years, as he takes a job, starts a family and continues to believe that one day his ship will come in.

Vidor could’ve taken this story in several directions. It could’ve been a morality tale trumpeting the work ethic or encouraging conformity (or encouraging non-conformity, for that matter). It could’ve been a tragedy about a guy beaten down by the heartless city, a comedy about a rube who can’t survive in a sophisticated world, or a fantasy about a boy and his dreams. Instead Vidor stays painfully realistic, recognizing in John Sims something far more subtle: that all of us live in a society; it may be supportive at times and coldly indifferent at others, but to think of ourselves as somehow above or separate from everything around us is not simply counter productive, it’s delusional.

What’s most remarkable about The Crowd is how thoroughly Vidor embraces the visual nature of film to encourage empathy for John while simultaneously revealing his faults. When John is in shock, Vidor shows him ascending staircases with people clustered at his feet, as if he’s in a bubble rising above the crowd. He repeatedly uses the camera to slip inside—and then gently ease outside—of John’s head, so we never forget how John feels but also never lose sight of a more objective and critical view. There are many examples, but one of my favorites is when John rushes into a maternity ward looking for his wife who he thinks may’ve already given birth. He stops each passing nurse and physician. Can’t somebody help him find his wife? He’s the husband! Then the camera follows John, a lone soul looking for his mate, as he steps into a room we can’t quite see into. The camera follows him, moving forward, and gradually it reveals a whole room full of beds and new mothers. Seated in the hall is a long line of husbands eagerly awaiting news.

Yep, John’s an individual. But so are the rest of us.

The Kid is a discovery suitable for all ages, but The Crowd is a discovery awaiting adults who’ve had a taste of the world. It’s just a well-told story, but a story of truth, insight and courage—and, by the way, a story nearly 80 years old. But the hypothesis holds. People haven’t changed, not much. And good movies stay good for a very long time.

Director/Writer: Mohsen Makhmalbaf
Cinematography: Mahmoud Kalari
Starring: Mirhadi Tayebi, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Ali Bakhsi, Ammar Tafti
Studio information: New Yorker Films, 78 minutes
Original Theatrical Realease: 1996

Former militant revisits his past in fascinating blend of documentary and fiction

Before Mohsen Makhmalbaf was a filmmaker—before he was even an adult—he was an Islamic militant who stabbed a policeman in a botched attempt to take his gun, ending the officer’s career and landing himself in prison where he spent the next 5 years. Almost two decades later he takes a cue from Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up and recreates the event for A Moment of Innocence, a fascinating blend of documentary and fiction. Makhmalbaf humorously “documents” the casting of the young Mohsen and the young policeman and then films each of them traipsing across snowy Tehran to rehearse. The setup is all fictional, but it’s woven seamlessly with the truth of Makhmalbaf ’s personal history. Discarding his violent past, he presents the 1974 event as something unthinkable to a younger generation and arrives at a truly poetic, thoroughly optimistic conclusion.

A declaration of independence that betrays growing pains

On his latest long-player, the one-time Great White Hope of AOR pop begins by insisting “This will be the last song that I write,” while pounding out an aggressive acoustic strum. This song of resolution, fittingly titled “Mister New Year’s Day,” plays right into the backstory that accompanies the disc: after a crisis of purpose, Joplin refocused his muse to pursue a more organic approach to his music. Indeed, the production is refreshingly spare and direct, with Joplin exploring more introspective themes throughout. There are times when the new suit hangs somewhat awkwardly, as on the self-consciously self-aware “The World on a Shoestring” and “To All My Friends.” But he still displays a gift for bright hooks, as on “Arms To Hold Me” and the fun “Jaywalkers of the World.” Ultimately, Jaywalker is the sound of an artist struggling to truly find his voice, which in itself is commendable, if not entirely satisfying.

Songwriter eschews pop conventions and spews lyrical venom

Hatfield’s always had an on-again, off-again relationship with pop production and songcraft. On Made in China she jettisons everything she’s learned about nurturing a hook and gives her melodic songs a black eye, pinning them up against a wall of loud, first-take guitars. The songs don’t so much end as clatter to a close. She even roughens her girly voice with distortion. I’d hate to be the “you” targeted in these angry songs. Don’t try to lean on her shoulder, because she’s no Bill Withers: “You act like you’re the only one with a chemical imbalance,” she sneers. As with the best of Jesus and Mary Chain, however, there’s clarity visible beneath the waterline, sharp lyrics and even some hummable choruses.

Bass player for Omaha’s The Faint fleshes out decent side project

Joel Petersen’s day job allows him to tour the world, melting the hearts and eyeshadow of girls across the world, playing bass for Omaha’s premiere (and pretty much only) electro-New-Wave-pop-scenester outfit The Faint. But sometimes a man’s gotta moonlight his creativity; instead of driving gypsy cabs Petersen records as Broken Spindles. His latest effort presents another batch of minimal, electronically rooted pop tunes. The songwriting meanders at times, but some engaging moments—abstract piano lines and lo-fi guitar strumming over bubbling beats—surface throughout.

Not the first to attempt an Elvis Costello biography and unlikely to be the last, British music writer Graeme Thomson sticks to a chronological telling of singer/songwriter Elvis Costello’s life and career. Never strictly a punk, but benefiting from the shifting ground rules for rock stardom brought about by punk rock, Costello shot to fame in the late ’70s alongside other misfits like The Stranglers and The Police.

Complicated Shadows follows Costello’s journey from unknown pub-rocker to popstar, his early musical beginnings and his later left-turns into classical composition and jazz, briefly touching on his romantic and family life— with a few druggy, alcoholic tales of “life on the road” thrown in for good measure.

Claiming to have uncovered new details on Costello’s formative years and later recording sessions, Thompson lays out a mass of minor facts and figures in the hope that by pasting all these snippets of information together, the fully formed Elvis will magically appear. Unfortunately, the more-revealing quotes are culled from existing interviews and without the cooperation of Costello or his inner circle.

Costello floats through the book like a ghost in his own house. His prickly, reclusive nature makes it hard to know if there really is anything more behind the curtain than a talented workaholic, but Thomson’s flat, journalistic style and his timeline-styled approach to the musician’s life fail to enliven the story.

Okla-Home Movies: Oklahoma City art freaks buy Super 8 cameras, bunny costumes, run amok

“We’ve got this idea for a video,” the kid next to me tells the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne, who’s making good on his promise to hang out with all those who just dressed up in animal costumes and danced onstage amidst the Lips’ oversized disco balls, confetti and strobe lights. (I was a bunny.)

“You guys are all set up in a basement,” the kid explains, Coyne nodding enthusiastically. An elaborate meta-plot then unfolds involving various incarnations of the band members meeting their respective dooms in parallel dimensions on different TV screens. Or something like that.

“That’s great!” Coyne beams, white suit still sticky with fake blood. “We can’t be in it, though,” he tells the kid warmly. “But you should go ahead and make that movie at home with your friends. That’s all we do.”

Of the 19 videos included on V.O.I.D.: Video Overview in Deceleration, Coyne directs all but four with longtime collaborator Bradley Beesley. They’re mostly low-budget affairs, filled with splattered paint (1991’s “Talkin’ Bout The Smiling Deathporn Immortality Blues [Everyone Wants To Live Forever]”), Christmas lights (1993’s “Turn It On”), shaving cream (1994’s “Be My Head”) and—of course—fake blood (1999’s “Waiting For A Superman”).

Rarely as ambitious as the band’s records, the videos propel themselves with the same Okie art-freak charm that’s sustained the Lips through 20 improbable years on the pop fringe. In 1996’s “This Here Giraffe” (directed by a post-Godfather III/pre-Virgin Suicides Sofia Coppola), the band merely hops in a truck and goes to the zoo. But they sometimes make great art of it. While the domestic video for 2002’s “Do You Realize?” was easily the band’s biggest (and most fun) production yet, featuring elephants, showgirls and a flying Coyne, the U.K. version is even more effective. If you believe the band’s commentary track, it was conceived, shot and shipped in less than 24 hours.

“Four bored farm girls lament how nothing exciting ever happens to them,” Coyne describes in his earnest liner notes. “They get stoned and an apparition of a glowing singing man appears—he is accompanied by giant rabbits with sparkling spheres.” Though the concept is a little hard to glean, the clip is bizarre and evocative, cheap digital sunbeams spraying gloriously from Coyne’s torso.

As one part of the greater Lips project—their sci-fi film epic, Christmas on Mars, should be out any year now—Coyne’s DIY videos hold an odd standing. It was the surprise breakthrough Beavis and Butthead clip, 1993’s “She Don’t Use Jelly,” that gave the band the cultural pat on the back it needed to keep going.

The deceleration of the DVD’s title is literal—videos are arranged in reverse, and the Lips’ sleight of hand is revealed. Coyne devolves from white-suited respectability to bug-eyed alterna-weirdo, bassist Michael Ivins’ hair comes back (and bushes freakily), and one realizes how sound Coyne’s advice to the aforementioned kid really was: do it your dang self, because nobody else will, and you, too, might be followed by bunnies carrying disco balls. And Wayne will cheer for you.

Chicago street bluesman’s only LP finally available on CD

Blind Arvella Gray (born James Dixon in 1906) was a street musician who often performed his gospel and blues at the open-air market on Maxwell Street in Chicago. He recorded a handful of 45s in the 1960s, and his only LP was released in 1972 on Birch Records, at the encouragement of a young fan named Cary Baker. Now, 25 years after Gray’s death, his LP is seeing a CD-reissue on Baker’s brand-new label, Conjuroo.

The Singing Drifter is a collection of traditional gospel numbers (“Take My Hand Precious Lord”), original songs (“Those Old Fashioned Alley Blues”) and a few a cappella tracks steadied by Gray’s sparse clapping. But it’s the rolling melodies of Gray’s dobro that capture his essence: as he punctuates instrumental verses of “When the Saints Go Marching In” with a jubilant “Hallelujah!,” it’s easy to imagine the crowds that must’ve clustered around him on that Chicago street, ears inclined.

Historical novel filters Sherman’s infamous Civil War campaign through numerous perspectives

Concerning itself with the events surrounding General William Tecumseh Sherman’s march to the sea, which buried “an axe in the Southern heart” and helped ensure the Union’s victory, E.L. Doctorow’s 11th novel is a patchwork quilt of overlapping narratives, stitched together by a sure hand.

The March uses a multitude of perspectives to explore the military campaign, shifting point of view fluidly across an admirably wide range of characters: shell-shocked widows, dispossessed daughters, battle-weary soldiers and medics, and a few of the thousands of freed slaves who follow the marching blue uniforms. Even Sherman joins the large cast, commanding his forces from a pony mount and grieving for a lost child.

Best known for historical novels like Billy Bathgate and Ragtime, Doctorow maintains strict control over all the precise period details and calamitous goings-on, even as he creates an atmosphere in which absolutely nothing seems controllable; it’s as if the particulars of the march are outside the powers of its participants and its driving Union general, even outside the wills of God and author. Conflicts cease abruptly and often without resolution, and characters both major and minor fall away from the march’s forward movement.

It’s hard to imagine Sherman’s tale being told any other way.

Hometown: Los Angeles
Fun facts: Swift is a sometime touring member of shoegazers Starflyer 59 and often trades mix tapes with fantastical pop rockers Eisley. “They are just crazy-talented kids,” Swift says.
Why he’s worth watching: After a weekly residency in August at posh L.A. club Tangier, Swift will hit the road with the Brian Jonestown Massacre, The Walkmen and Earlimart.
For fans of:Rufus Wainwright, Modest Mouse, Harry Nilsson, Tom Waits

Richard Swift wants you to think his record collection ends in 1975. And his new release The Richard Swift Collection, Vol. 1, a part-vaudevillian, part-lo-fi double-disc comprised of two earlier self-released records is only the first piece of evidence.

“I’m just trying to get to a debate like [the one] between Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, who were big advocates of the ancients rather than the moderns,” Swift says. “Let’s get beyond the fidelity, whether good or bad, and get to the heart of the matter, the songs.”

Swift’s album argues this very point. The first disc, The Novelist, is a conceptual exploration of Tin Pan Alley lament while the second, Walking Without Effort, sounds like Bacharach reheating the choicest Leonard Cohen leftovers. It’s these textured flourishes that have inspired critics to compare him to fellow L.A. pop sound sculptors like Jon Brion and Michael Penn, a comparison Swift somewhat resents. “I think an appropriate thing to say might be that Richard Swift may have some of the same records as these guys, but a completely different life story.”

Perhaps Swift’s upbringing in a Quaker home, and consequent Protestant work ethic, may account for the two other records he’s been working on, not to mention side projects such as video and film ventures. Perhaps it’s only fitting that—like the other Swift before him—his work is being released in volumes.

Director: Adam Goldberg
Cinematography: Mark Putnam
Starring: Giovanni Ribisi, Franka Potente, Joshua Jackson, Christina Ricci
Studio info: ThinkFilm, 104 minutes

Promising but overwrought drama buries its characters in self-conscious style

I Love Your Work—directed, produced, co-written and co-scored by Adam Goldberg (Saving Private Ryan)—is so laden with movie references and in-jokes that it seems designed primarily to impress. Giovanni Ribisi plays a famous actor obsessed with a woman from his past and increasingly disillusioned by the superficialities of his life. He’s also an amateur photographer, which allows Goldberg to introduce elements of Rear Window and Blow Up, stirring them together with paranoia from The Conversation, Raging Bull and The Limey. These are all worthy models but each one was made by a filmmaker at the height of his abilities, directors working with a stylistic rigor that is, for now, beyond Goldberg’s grasp.

The movie also calls to mind Paul Auster’s New York novel Ghosts in which a man spies on someone who may or may not be himself. Goldberg’s most promising constructions play the same kind of reflexive identity game.

It’s an intriguing mish-mash, a meta-textual stew Goldberg, unfortunately, paints with a big, thick brush and then underlines with fat charcoal pencils. Where Hitchcock dismantles the wall between the observer and the observed so quietly we barely realize it, Goldberg is too afraid we’ll miss something to let it go without a remark. Where Auster examines his paradox with intellectual detachment, Goldberg wants us to be moved, or at least awed, by his rich confection.

The result is a movie without a single subtle moment. Ribisi is good, but his performance is no substitute for character development. Without it, everything seems arbitrary. If we can’t get a sense of what a character is thinking, and why, even the flashiest film made by the most ambitious young director feels tedious.

Director: Nicolas Roeg

The Film: A controversial film upon its initial release in 1980, Bad Timing is an unsettling (if rather plodding) sexual whodunit, serving also as a meditation on the price of obsession.

The Significance: As with the superior Don’t Look Now, Roeg toyed with chronology and point of view to build his mystery. Unfortunately, the characterization is thin and the actors seem out of synch themselves with the world of the film. Singer Art Garfunkel’s wooden performance makes the film feel far longer than it is, realizing the filmmaker’s fear that the film’s title would be used against it.

The Features: Interviews with Roeg, producer Jeremy Thomas and Theresa Russell, deleted scenes and a gallery of stills and posters.

Director: Mike Leigh

The Film: It shouldn’t work: a loosely structured 1993 film with a despicable protagonist who wanders London aimlessly and brutalizes everyone who tries to show him kindness. But it does, brilliantly, thanks in no small part to David Thewlis’ uncompromising performance.

The Significance: Mike Leigh’s gift for shaping naturalism came to full, devastating flower in this tour de force. Like the ballet of violence that characterizes Sam Peckinpah’s work, Leigh lends a sad grace to the emotional brutality that the characters display to each other, culminating in an indelible final shot.

The Features: A video introduction from Neil LaBute (the new auteur of emotional cruelty) and a conversation between Leigh and author Will Self.

For its contribution to '60s literature - 3 Stars
For its contribution to 21st-century zeitgeist - 5 stars

I was nine when I first found Jacqueline Susann in my mother’s bed, but that wasn’t unusual. I’d also found Mario Puzo in there a few times, and Satan, and dirty ashtrays, and once an electric toothbrush. My mother’s bed was not a very comfortable place, to say the least. Still it was her favorite place to read, even when I was there, too, twitching and affecting all the symptoms of an adolescent possessed by the devil (which happens when you have a nine-year-old in the house and you leave the book The Exorcist lying around on top of the covers).

But it was Susann’s Valley of the Dolls I remember most, probably because I read the whole thing, as opposed to select passages I’d heard about in junior high. At first I just flipped through the pages looking for sex scenes, but since there were so many I ended up reading it from jacket to jacket. The book was, of course, impossible to put down. Who can forget the cover art? That single image of a juicy human mouth—disembodied and slathered in scarlet lipstick, its perfect teeth biting down on a barbiturate.

Inside, the storyline was pulsating with scandal, betrayal and excess. Before reading this book, I understood nothing about sex and drugs. Afterward, I still didn’t, but could fake the symptoms fairly accurately. I took to wearing hot pants and halter tops, my hair a cascade of loose curls, my eyes webbed with textured false lashes. I was in the fourth grade and the world had been defined for me; it was full of lusty, talented women and the men who stuck to them like barnacles, and everybody took acid and used each other like toilet seats.

My mother’s paperback copy was printed years after the movie version of Valley of the Dolls hit the screen, and a picture of Sharon Tate, who played one of the prominent sex-kitten characters, was on the back jacket. She had already been horrifically murdered by the Manson family in real life, thus I found her lovely, doomed visage immensely gripping. It was hard to envision her with a noose around her neck, hanging from a rafter, gutted like a fish, but I kept trying anyway. After all, this book—the scandals in it and those surrounding it—became the keystone of a very important era: that of the tragically hip. We’re still there, Desperate Housewives and all.

Mistress of Minimalism examines relationships of all kinds, including the inter-dog variety

Amy Hempel’s latest endeavor resists categorization; it’s part short stories, part prose poetry and part letter to the Parking Violations Bureau of New York City. The Dog of the Marriage is predictable only in its nuanced examination of relationships—between strangers, lovers, spouses and, yes, even dogs.

In the title piece, Hempel writes, “Dreams: the place most of us get what we need.” The author’s willingness to make such absolute statements about people, to posit what it is we have in common, makes her writing difficult to deem “fiction.” This fearlessness of style isn’t surprising in light of the subjects she tackles, ranging from failed marriages and sexual violence to ghosts.

Despite the bleak material, Hempel’s insight and light touch never allow this collection to get mired. Rather, The Dog of the Marriage proceeds with as much alacrity as its “Jesus Is Waiting” heroine, a woman who considers it “a point of pride not to stop when tired.”

It’s tempting to try and locate the well-respected author in such descriptions, but in the end you merely learn a bit more about yourself from these pages. After some reflection, call them “portraits.”

In her shorts, knee-socks and retro Pumas, the London-bred martial-arts fanatic who’s dubbed herself MC Ninja is jumping up and down, eager to race into the San Francisco night and watch the city’s fabled fog creep in at sundown. But Ian Parton—her partner in Brighton, England’s colorful new combo The Go! Team—merely shrugs. The Bay Area is no big deal to this skinny mastermind/multi-instrumentalist; he spent a good deal of time here on assignment during his other career as a documentary filmmaker/researcher for Discovery Channel, National Geographic and the Learning Channel.

But Parton’s job certainly had some interesting moments. “I met some guy who had stabbed his girlfriend in his sleep, and they were still together afterwards,” he says. “So we set up a camera in serial-sleep-terror-man’s bedroom for a couple of weeks, until one night it just happened. He screamed and ran around the bedroom, and it was horrifying.”

Now, both Ninja and Parton are currently on employment furlough (Ninja from her social-worker gig), pending the potential breakthrough success of Thunder, Lightning, Strike, The Go! Team’s debut. Parton wrote the songs, then advertised for members to complete his sextet vision, and—via samples, live guitar, bass and drums, and Ninja’s soulful vocals—committed that concept to tape. The results, in feel-good, Up With People-ish cuts like “Panther Dash,” “Huddle Formation” and “The Power Is On,” sound like a cheerleading squad chanting from a distant mountaintop while a scratch mixer bulldozes through an adjacent Stax Volt valley.

Parton lured an intrigued Ninja from London, he says, “because I knew I had to have a female rapper for the kind of music I wanted to make—well-mixed, double-dutch chanty stuff with a ’60s Phil Spector feel. That’s what I was trying to nail. Then I set about turning it into a live thing.” And the name? That was the easiest part, Ninja says. “The Go Team are the people who clean up plane wreckage after the crash.”

And Parton can’t help it, he says. Thanks to all those nature shows, he now composes with images in mind. “I like a windswept feel, like the end of ‘Wichita Lineman,’” he concludes. “Or a block party-ish sound, or a good car chase. The Go! Team isn’t supposed to be soundtrack-y, but our music definitely puts pictures in your mind.”

An inflatable flying pig. A pair of colossal metallic heads. Light refracted through a prism. Visual artist Storm Thorgerson has introduced enough emblematic symbols into the pantheon of rock music to be considered something of a rock star himself. In many cases, his images are as recognizable as the music they represent. In addition to his best-known work with Pink Floyd, Thorgerson has created still-life cinema for Led Zeppelin, The Cranberries, The Catherine Wheel, Muse, The Mars Volta and many others.

After more than three decades, Thorgerson has launched his first North American tour of art galleries. Dubbed “Taken By Storm,” the show travels until early 2006. On the eve of opening night at Chicago’s Inspire Fine Art, Mr. Thorgerson offered comments on a handful of his iconic works.

1. Gentlemen Without Weapons: Transmissions
If I were to describe myself, I’d say in part that I’m a performance artist. I do “happenings” involving people, props, sculptures and so on. These events happen quite briefly and cannot be repeated for the large public, so we record them using photography. Otherwise, you wouldn’t see them at all. Sometimes, they’re quite difficult to erect. For instance, Transmissions is a line of telegraph poles stretching across the country, with people sitting on top of them. It was unbelievably difficult to do, and that’s real. What you see is what you get.

2. Pink Floyd: Wish You Were Here
I gave a lecture in Japan, which was a real hoot. I began with this image. I asked, “is this picture for real?” They said, “yes.” I said, “do you think I’m the kind of man who burns somebody for a picture?” They said, “no, no!” I said, “do you think the fire is unreal?” They said, “yes.” So, I said, “do you think I cheat you as the viewer?” They were very confused.

This image is trying to confuse you by putting a man on fire, while he’s behaving as though he wasn’t. That makes the fire metaphorical. In a sense, this is about absence and avoiding emotional pain, which is what the record’s about. I thought it worked very well—especially after Dark Side of the Moon, which was really difficult to follow.

3. The Mars Volta: Frances the Mute
Someone told me this picture represented current American attitudes toward kidnapping or terrorism. To me, that’s not remotely what it’s about. This is a picture of hooded drivers. The hoods are self-imposed. One might think, “why drivers, and not people walking in the street?” I saw these people as navigators, in charge of their movement. If they’re wearing hoods, how can they see to navigate? I always thought of this as a metaphorical picture about an imposed blindness. Toward what, I won’t tell you.

4. The Catherine Wheel: Wishville (“Eyes on trees”)
We went illegally into a wood of silver birches, and bespoiled them by sticking five hundred eyeballs on them. We nailed the photographs down to keep them from blowing away. It wasn’t pro the environment, on reassessment. But then, art doesn’t necessarily have time for politics—or does it? ... Or should it?

5. Peter Gabriel: Car
I always thought the water droplets looked amazing. We sprayed my old Italian car, and the wax caused the water to gather through surface tension. The little lumps are very reflective and have a highlight. What I did was to exaggerate the highlight by scratching each one individually. The retoucher said he was mad to have agreed to do it.

Also, I liked this because it’s a picture about Pete Gabriel, but you can’t really see him. He’s there, but not there.

For more information on Storm Thorgerson and his works, visit www.takenbystorm.us