33 rebellions per minute
"we'd rather stay at home and have a screw"
2000
Go-Kart Mozart, INSTANT WIGWAM AND IGLOO MIXTURE
You were, I'm sure, desperately hoping that my first sheaf of reviews from Boston would include a "review" serving as a lame excuse to first spend four paragraphs telling you how my new job is going. So, okay, here. For newcomers and those of you with dodgy memories, I have signed on as a "community organizer" for ACORN (Association of Communities Organized for Reform Now), a highly admirable national organization responsible, even in just say the last 18 months from the standpoint of zipcode 02124 in Dorchester (Mass.), for getting Jacobs street repaved; getting two new traffic lights on Evans St.; getting Mora and Evans declared one-ways to make children safer; getting one new park and one refurbished one; saving a few dozen locals (and thousands elsewhere) from fraudulent home-loan practices and foreclosure by the AmeriQuest corporation; getting the state minimum waged raised to $6.75/hr; and establishing a Living Wage for Boston-area contracts of $8.71/hr. (indexed for inflation). The agendas are set by ACORN members, i.e., the dues-paying low-income residents who come to the neighborhood meetings and the protest actions. It is merely the job of the organizers, paid $17,000 for a year of 54-hour workweeks (except when we're really busy), to do bloody everything else: recruiting new members, making sure the old ones know what events are scheduled, nagging old members into helping, preparing flyers, contacting the media and city officials, researching issues, and training even newer organizers.
I admire the organization deeply. I have no doubts that moving to Boston to be here was a good thing to try (staying with my Mormon girlfriend would've required following her to Utah, and suppressing the far-too-automatic wince I get every time I knock a door with Jesus Loves You or Got Jesus? stickers). And I'm not going to quit anytime _too_ soon... but I have formulated a definite opinion that ACORN's decision to expand to so many new Massachusetts offices that the trainees outnumber the trainers, _while_ pressing its second-ever statewide legislative efforts (the minimum wage press having been its first), _while_ working with the teachers' union on school reform during very tense teachers' contract negotiations, was a mistake. Today, 9/25/00, I am to start my third week on the job by already being given a new neighborhood to go organize for myself. I am, on the whole, promising as a recruiter of new members. Normally i'd be happy to receive credit for this. But in the frantic rush of my trainers to get everything done, I still haven't been taught how to explain ACORN's housing assistance and credit-repair program, I still don't know how to input changed data into our membership file, I'm still working with obselete membership lists (which suggests I'm not the only person unaware how to use the files), I still have a terrible fundraising record and a crappy attitude about improving it, and I still don't know what new neighborhood, where, I'm supposed to be organizing.
For all that, I could, I think, have been more energized than discouraged by the mess. I mean, I _wanted_ to be in over my head, I think. According to Thespark.com's Personality Type Test, I am a Submissive Introverted Abstract Thinker, which seems right, and am classified as a Mastermind ("behind your reserved exterior lies an active mind that allows you to analyze situations and come up with creative, unexpected solutions. Normal people call this 'scheming'. Don’t learn German"). You know how the opposite, a Dominant Extroverted Concrete Feeler, is classified? An Activist. So okay, the desire to do something about all the problems I like to write essays about got me into weirdness. I was fine as long as my main same-rank co-workers were people like Amy, a cute nose-ringed slacker with a mastery of the ironic cynical half-drawl who, but for having a patently idealistic job, would make a great first impression as a juvenile delinquent. I seem to work harder than she does, therefore I must care, therefore my outrageous hours are an expression of caring. This is how the mind reasons, psychologists have discovered: we reason about our own motives like we'd reason about anyone else's. And if I care more than Amy, who does after all do the work despite equal ill-training, then I must be happy here.
Then, four days after I was hired, came K. It turns out I give initials here to anyone I have irrationally strong feelings about, loathing as well as love; K., by all means a very attractive young woman if I didn't have to share the office oxygen supply with here, is an apple-polisher. Never mind that the word "apple-polisher" is one I've probably never heard, maybe read twice or thrice a decade ago; it came flooding back to me the first time K. spent the daily training session asking a long series of very perceptive questions without ever asking the obnoxiously difficult questions _I_ seem to ask. It strengthened itself in my mind when she came back from a day meeting with ACORN members and gushed "this doesn't feel like a job; I can't believe they're paying me to talk with people all day!". Then when she regretted aloud, at the end of a 10-hour day, that she couldn't spend an extra hour working -- and meant it -- I was ready to grab the first available excuse (her laugh is kind of braying) to want her to die. I mean, she's a wonderful person: she's helpful and smart and happy and wants nothing more than to improve the human race, and everyone should be like her. But I'm crabby and introverted and distractable and want nothing more than to improve the human race for a bit and then read more Terry Pratchett novels and have some pizza. Suddenly, with her around, I remember than I'm selfish and irritating. Suddenly, with her around, I remember that the right to bitch about my boss for no good reason is enshrined in the United States Constitution. Suddenly, with her around, I remember how many people died in the cause of 5-day, 40-hour workweeks. Suddenly, with her around, Go-Kart Mozart's "We're Selfish and Lazy and Greedy", which I coulda sworn was a joke song, is my daily anthem. And arguably no album is fully ready for review until I've learned how to make all the joke songs into anthems; but then I couldn't tell you about 'em forever, and then they'd be out of print.
INSTANT WIGWAM AND IGLOO MIXTURE is the latest project by Lawrence, formerly the leader of Felt and Denim, and apparently it continues in the same direction as the final Denim album. I wouldn't know, I haven't heard 'em. Felt and Denim, tragically, were not named Go-Kart Mozart, and I never ran across reviews suggesting that they were the product of mental breakdown. I disagree, probably -- MIXTURE sounds more playful to me than deranged. But I will admit that "Mrs. Back-to-Front and the Bull Ring Thing", while using an established "Bohemian Rhapsody" strategy in mixing falsetto children's story, the voices of the wailing damned of several species, and a bouncy commercial for a shopping center, is the first such song I've heard include, as part of the arrangement, the author's own exasperate renouncement of the song's existence.
Otherwise, the arrangements on MIXTURE tend to be baroque assemblies of cheesy electronics. Think early Magnetic Fields, if they'd had Dudley Klute (the theatrical light voice on the Fields' "the Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side") and he'd learned Cockney. Cockney vocals added to the Moog Cookbook would be even closer, and to Sarah DeBell's GRUNGE LITE (unexpectedly good counterpointed cocktail-Muzak arrangements of Mudhoney/ Melvins/ Pearl Jam etc grunge songs) closer yet. "...Greedy" fits this description; melodically it would sound almost like "White Christmas" if Lawrence could be bothered to lift his voice beyond a half-octave range, but he can't. "Here Is A Song" is more like synthetic Elton John, including at one point a lascivious whistle from, apparently, robot #5 in the movie Short Circuit. "Sailor Boy", a numb, robotically cheery song about being anally raped in jail, employs a jungly breakbeat, theremin, taunting sing-song, and the staccato singing voice of the Vapours ("Turning Japanese"). "City Synthesis" and "Plug-In City" are instrumentals -- pretty much the same instrumental -- seemingly made entirely from analog Moog knobs, and sound like a fierce argument (over drum machine) between a duck and the Archie it had raised in the wild.
Other songs include the straight-faced jingle "the Queen Mum she is great, the Queen Mum she is top, and now she's out of hospital, she's the queen of the old hip op". And the circa-1970 Rolling Stones stylings of "Wendy James", a salute to the old Transvision Vamp singer ("you're second to the very very great Joan Jett") with the liner note "Elvis C, you shouldn't have written her solo LP, it should've been me" (I liked Wendy's solo LP a lot; maybe Lawrence could get her to do a second?). And the desperate doo-wop inflected "Plead With The Man" (for some musical equipment). And of course the cheesy-music anthem "Wear Your Foghat With Pride", with primitive drum machine and a flurry of electro-banjo, and with the lyric "there's a turgid cacaphony emanating from the music biz's backside" delivered in the same plain-folkness his voice usually has.
If "...Greedy" is an anthem -- and it is -- I can no longer assume he doesn't mean the rest, from beat to electroid beat. But since I don't see any reason to disagree with any of it, either he hasn't broken down, or I have. And when I do, I think I'll be able to tell and let you know. I'll probably disguise it as a music review.
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