2007-01 Vital Source Mag – January 2007
Berzerk!
By Russ Bickerstaff The Bucks won a close one against the Timberwolves at the Bradley Center on the evening of December 16. Across the street that night the late 19th century decay of the Tuner Hall Ballroom looked like something out of Escape From New York. Lights that were cast into a vast darkness mixed with light coming in from downtown to bathe the mostly empty 7,000 square feet in a pleasantly eerie visual drama. The restoration of the Ballroom is far from complete, giving the overall impression of a once great performance space that is slowly waking up from a long hibernation. Alamo Basement and Insurgent Theatre were set to perform a series of alarmingly short bits – an evening they’d titled: Gorilla Theater: Berzerk! Before the show began, Alamo Basement’s Mike Q. Hanlon took audience-suggested sentences and playwrights were then given the task of incorporating them into theatrical bits they were given 10 minutes to write. The bits were set to be performed at the end of the show. Someone in the audience suggested something about low-fat lard that fell on deaf ears. Local stand-up comic Rich Greenfield suggested, “The dog went home,” which was perfect. Anyone who has ever attended an improv comedy show knows that the vague and ambiguous suggestions tend to illicit the best responses. In the less than two hours that followed, roughly 20 – 22 short plays quickly cascaded through the shadows. Prior to the evening, local writers were given lines from Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland and asked to form whole bits of staged comedy and drama from them in ten minutes or less. As evidenced by the show that night, the writers had met with mixed success. Voices and footsteps echoed around the darkness announcing the title and author of each piece. The lights raised and a piece was performed by actors dressed mostly in nondescript black garb. The lights fell and there was applause mingling with the sound of actors scurrying about in preparation for the next bit. With the audience flanking the actors on two sides with folding chairs in the big empty of Turner Hall Ballroom, voices echoed a bit much at times and it was a bit difficult to hear all the dialogue, but Alamo Basement and Insurgent Theatre put on an unsettlingly enjoyable evening with Gorilla Theater. The bits ranged in style quite a bit, but the overall feel was one of surrealist comedy. Stand outs included Hanlon’s eerie Anticipation and Wes Tank’s vividly surreal The Un-Rainbow Kind. John Manno’s Iphegenia’s Doggie was the story of a woman losing her pet dog as told in the fashion and passion of a Greek tragedy complete with chorus. Shannon Smith’s I Never Heard of Uglification featured perhaps the most visionary visualization for the space. A narrator from the second floor balcony vividly spoke words detailing actions performed in silence on the stage below. The Ballroom’s balcony was used in a number of pieces, most prominently in Alisa Rosenthal Haywire […]
Jan 1st, 2007 by Vital Archives
The Broken West
By Heather Zydek Prior to last fall, The Broken West were The Brokedown, until a Midwest punk band claimed they came up with the name first. After the name change, the quintet released one EP (The Dutchman’s Gold) until Merge recently snapped them up. The band’s own MySpace page describes its sound as “ghettotech/regional Mexican/rock” and cites influences like Unicorn, Spinal Tap and George Harrison. The sound on I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On, their debut full-length rlease, falls somewhere between the boozy frivolity of classic party rock and the artful pop of classic alt/college-rock. The dozen songs on I Can’t Go On unroll at a medium pace, revealing songwriting that is melodic, if a bit clichéd. The songs are pretty enough not to offend the ear, but stubbornly refuse to stick in the mind the way really, really good songs (and really, really bad songs) do. The exception is “So It Goes,” a lovely, slightly melancholic pop-rock ditty reminiscent of something Teenage Fanclub might have written circa 1990 (see: “Star Sign” on Bandwagonesque). Serious power-pop aficionados and fans of more upbeat classic rock will probably enjoy I Can’t Go On, as will those who prefer the tried and true over the gimmicky and novel. For the rest of us, The Broken West’s music is respectable but more or less forgettable. VS
Jan 1st, 2007 by Vital Archives
Gwen Stefani
By Nikki Butgereit It’s hard to tell who’s copying who when everyone sounds the same, and Gwen Stefani has fallen into this trap with her second solo effort, The Sweet Escape. On the album’s first single, “Wind It Up,” you can sing the lyrics to the Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps” to its bridge, and the beat sounds exactly like Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous.” Minor redemption comes by way of a sample from The Sound of Music and a driving chant reminiscent of 2004’s “Hollaback Girl.” The rest of the music is catchy and enjoyable on its own, but doesn’t work as well when coupled with Stefani’s intensely “personal” lyrics: yet another song about her first love, songs about domestic discord and claims about being “just an Orange County girl,” which come off as terribly contrived in her pouty whine, considering her years of No Doubt and solo fame. The album closes strong with a song co-written by pop hit-maker Linda Perry, who (strangely enough) makes Stefani sound more like herself and less like the other artists on the radio today. It’s this song, the songs produced by No Doubt band mate Tony Kanal and the ballad “Early Winter” that most clearly reflect the creative promise Stefani demonstrated on her first solo album, 2004’s Love. Angel. Music. Baby. Ideally, she’ll focus future efforts more on setting – or, better yet, ignoring – trends, rather than following them. VS
Jan 1st, 2007 by Vital Archives
He says…
By Terisa Folaron On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz, the largest and most notorious of the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. On the same date in 2007, the United Nations will commemorate the first International Holocaust Remembrance Day, though the unanimous approval of the General Assembly’s resolution didn’t come without concerns regarding the remembrance of other genocides. The reservations of some Assembly members were most aptly summarized by Maged A. Abdelaziz, the Egyptian ambassador, who stated “No one has a monopoly on suffering.” It is a point well-made. Ongoing acts of genocide are still being reported in Darfur, Sudan, and the recent Review of the Holocaust Global Vision Conference in Iran set out specifically to debunk the substantive fact of the Nazi genocide during World War II. And with violent and hate crimes on the rise in Milwaukee and recent reports chronicling Milwaukee’s poor race relations, January seems the perfect month to reflect on the impact of past hate and violence as a cautionary tale for today. Albert Beder wore a yellow star on his chest. He survived the Holocaust, and his story reminds us of the strength of the human spirit. Albert was born in Kovno, Lithuania (now Kaunas) on June 13, 1928. Albert lived through death marches, diphtheria, overcrowded ghettos and forced labor camps. He was just 13 years old when he was placed into his first ghetto internment camp. He says, I had a family. I had two older brothers, two older sisters, one younger sister. I had a mother and a father. Albert was in a summer youth camp near the occupied East Prussia/Lithuanian border when his family, still in Kovno, attempted to flee from the advancing Nazis. “They managed to get maybe 30 kilometers before the Germans caught up with them. But they lost my little sister Reva on the road. She was 6 years old. There were many families running and trying to escape. Planes were shooting at them.” The Germans collected Albert, along with the other Jewish youth in the camp, and, like his family, he was returned to his Kovno family home, where Jewish citizens were preparing for their forced move into the Kovno Ghetto. “In Kovno, we received orders that all Jews had to move and had to live in that area that was fenced in with barbed wire. It was August, 1941. The consequence for not following these orders was the death penalty. You had to wear the star. If you did not, that was also the death penalty. Back then everything was the death penalty. They let us take everything into the ghetto. We didn’t know in the end it wouldn’t matter. Twice, as we were preparing to move, soldiers came looking for my father to send us to Ninth Fort. We knew there were lots of killings there. They came to the door and asked for my father. My mother would say, ‘He is sick and cannot come to the door.’ She offered them silk stockings […]
Jan 1st, 2007 by Vital Archives
