// Category Archive for: Issues

Bebel Gilberto, All In One

By Ann Clarke

I am fully aware of Bebel Gilberto’s namesake, and the fact that she’s been around for awhile. . . but I can honestly say, I’d never heard anything by her. I knew she was a Brazilian musician and her parents were famous musicians (João Gilberto and Miúcha), but that’s about it. So in essence, I can’t compare Bebel’s new album, All In One, to any of her previous works, since I don’t know them. I can say this: I was interested in reviewing this album, because I am willing to listen to foreign vocals without hesitation.
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High School Record DVD

By Noreen Sobczyk

File under “seemed like a really good idea.” This film, which played Sundance in 2005, was essentially promoted as a tale of awkward high school students and their escapades of embarrassment. But it came off more like indie hipsters trying hard to act like awkward geeks in situations the director/writer (Ben Wolfinsohn) thought were terribly clever. As it happens, the film features members of No Age, Mika Miko, and Lavender Diamond. There was also a short cameo by Mike Watt (Minutemen).

It’s a bare bones budget film inspired by a short which is included in the DVD bonus features. Unfortunately one of the most clever moments of the film was extremely similar. Also unfortunate: the film is cast with actors who seemingly never bothered to learn to act. And the viewer is therefore never drawn in enough to forget they are watching a film. Perhaps the director is a fan of the punk rock film Suburbia (cast with local punks), and was emulating the same vibe achieved there by Penelope Spheeris. Or he might have been aiming for the kitschiness of Dave Markey’s Desperate Teenage Lovedolls. Odds are it was a riff on Napoleon Dynamite and Freaks and Geeks. High School Record falls short on all accounts.

This mockumentary opens with a performance by a male/female guitar/drums duo who made me curse the existence of The White Stripes. This band decides to film their art school classmates for a documentary which focuses chiefly on four high school seniors and their clumsy attempts at popularity and sex. The strongest component of the film is the short lived relationship between Sabrina and Caleb. Their dynamic is unique, engaging, and simultaneously painful to watch. Sabrina isn’t interested in Caleb’s attempts to make a space age cooking show for kids, and is embarrassed when he sports tinfoil shorts to school. That moment might have been brilliant if its intended effect weren’t already perfectly achieved by the donning of an infamously ridiculous polyester jumpsuit by Sam on an episode of Freaks and Geeks.

Overall, the film had several eclectic and funny moments. The trouble is that they were stretched out over 89 minutes chock full of unsuccessful gags and slow periods. Had the film been limited to 60 minutes, and the participants been a bit less precious, it may have been more successful.

You may order High School Record directly from the Factory Twenty Five website. You can also check out images and a clip from the film there or watch a trailer on YouTube.

Revelations And Resistance: The Music Of Muse

By Lisa Anderson

I’ve loved British things all my life, but my most recent discovery is the band Muse.

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Confessions Of A Recovering Anglophile

Rupert Everett in Dance With A Stranger, 1985

It wasn’t the Beatles; despite Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and select songs from the White Album, I could hardly tell they had accents. And it wasn’t David Bowie because he wasn’t even from Earth, never mind the UK. I should probably blame Julie Andrews, since it was surely my obsession with The Sound Of Music and Mary Poppins that started it.
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A Guide For Getting Into: The Tubes

By Matt Keeley

I have many things to thank SCTV for in my life. Mostly, all the great sketch comedy and showing me how it should be done. But there’s something else: my Tubes fandom.
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There’s No Actual Evidence For It, But It’s Scientific Fact: The Work Of Chris Morris

By Matt Keeley

Perhaps the oddest thing about comedian and writer/director Chris Morris’s lack of popularity outside of the UK is that he’s peripherally involved in things that ended up being quite huge in the States.
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This Charming Man: Peter Cook in The Rise And Rise Of Michael Rimmer

By Emily Carney

Before alcoholism, various drugs, loose women, and cigarettes took their toll, Peter Cook was perhaps one of the most gorgeous, sought-after men of his generation (oh yeah, he was also exceedingly witty).
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Cockney Rhyming Slang Is À La Mode

By Margaret Cross

Being a huge fan of Brit flicks, the BBC, Brit writing, and of course, Brit gangsters, I have been in the thrall of so-called “Cockney Rhyming Slang” for close to two decades now. I’ve been an avid student, doing my best to understand the riddle that is rhyming slang. Here, for you Popshifters, I break it down in the easiest way I am able. These are some clever Brits!
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A Bit On The Bits From A Bit Of Fry & Laurie

By Jimmy Ether

To misappropriate one of my favorite quotes, writing about comedy is like dancing about architecture. It’s difficult to articulate what it is about something that really makes us laugh. Like music, humor touches us deep down at the core. It reaches into our baser instincts where fear, sexual desire, and the cravings for candy reside. On paper, a skit appears to be trite silliness. The analysis obscures the subversive nature of great comedy in which it fights to acknowledge the world and our lives as a ridiculous, nonsensical mess—and then laugh at it.
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1,000 Umbrellas Open to Spoil the View: XTC’s English Legacy

By James Thurston Davis

I first encountered XTC around 1982, probably their English Settlement album, probably in my friend Marc’s tiny bedroom with the Roger Dean posters on the wall and the cedar chest stuffed with vinyl. I like to think the first thing I remember about that album was Andy Partridge’s snarling vocals on “No Thugs in Our House,” or the aural explosion of “Jason and the Argonauts,” but what really struck me immediately was the overwhelming sense of Englishness that came over me the moment the needle dropped on “Runaways.”
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