Paris Peasant

My friend Jerome and David Ivar-Herman Dune, Paris December 2004

Four years ago, I was an American in Paris on the eve of an election that would inflict unprecedented presidential ignorance, armed violence, and corporate corruption upon the world. Bush’s victory, his very existence soiled my sojourn in many ways– but between the deep sense of defeat and geographically appropriate existential despair, I found a French band whose music countered my own ex-patriotic impulses. Singing in slightly accented English the sort of insouciant folk-pop that to me is more reminiscent of the “Indy” aesthetics of my Pacific Northwest, rather than the smoky chill of Paris and continental Europe– Herman Dune was a band that reflected my own hang-ups about travel, indulgence, homesickness, and American ugliness in strange ways. Herman Dune’s singer seemed taken with a particular sort of nostalgia for an imaginary America, and as I consider the band now I feel a nostalgia for an imagined/remembered France and those feelings of being far from home.

I have particularly distinct memories of watching Herman Dune perform on the same bill as Little Wings, the ethereal local-ish group whose best songs are akin to whispered dreams. The bands played a bar/club that was actually a converted Chinese Junk sitting on the Seine near the Bibliotech Nationale. This boat called La Guingette Pirate, slightly swaying on the river Seine seemed a surreal place to see any show, let alone one with an American band I had seen so many times in Seattle.

2004 sketch of Little Wings performing at La Guingette Pirate

Now, in anticipation of an election that has the potential to bring the ideological antithesis of the past four years, its an odd coincidence that Herman Dune is playing my home, perhaps to witness the transition to a imagined ideal America? The band plays the Triple Door on this coming Monday night, a tough sell given that fans of folk-influenced Americana are potentially split between a few other high-profile shows. Between the Mountain Goats’ soaring, acerbic story-songs and the o-vah enunciated swagger of the Kings of Leon, Herman Dune may have a hard time attracting folks to the Triple Door for their American-but-not-American French pop (especially with a ticket price of $19! Yeeeesh).

So, chalk this up as just another post of navel-gazing indulgence clogging up the blog-o-webs but Herman Dune is a band that has a strange and varied connection to my personal history, a soundtrack of sorts to a time and place but moreso a lens through which those now blurry early twenties can be recalled and examined. I think most music fans have bands just like this, music that follows them around appearing and disappearing at different times in their lives.

X-Posted at LineOut The Stranger’s Music Blog

Chocolate and Peanut-Butter

David Schmader, one of The Stranger’s most consistently hilarious and humane writers posted this advert over on The Stranger’s Slog, saying that,

“Ten years ago, if you’d have told me that an openly gay former child star would one day be hired to hawk the butchest old-school man’s man scent in America, I would have laughed in your face, and maybe called the cops on your obviously-whacked-out-on-PCP ass.”

And to point out what’s probably obvious to my fellow nerds: the patient that Neil Patrick Harris TVMD is so dutifully examining is Anthony Stewart Head of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer (and International Coffee) fame. So in a subtle way, Old Spice is marketing their (grand)dad smell on both the gays and nerds, whom are the chocolate and peanut-butter of adolescent victimization.

I mention the latter because comics are a venue where the geeks, weirdos, nerds, and otherwise bullied have often found voices and resonance. Whether you think about the context in which Jews like Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman in the anti-semitic 1930s, or the X-Men’s deliberate parallels to the 1960s civil rights movement (and later parallels to gay issues in addition to racial politics), and the wide array of comics as autobiography– for whatever reason, comics have been a place for many marginalized voices to flourish. That’s not to say comics haven’t also been a forum for political and moral bigotry or that the major publishers of comic books have had some noble intention (most didn’t and don’t in the present).

The reason I bring any of this up, is because as we’ve seen in the popularization of the “graphic novel,” and comics in film/television– advertisements once aimed at a much different class of people (or to inspire jealousy of that class/type) are now, more than ever, setting their sights on us– the once socially dispossessed who’ve found outlets in mediums like comics and the internet. Without getting all Adbusters on you about capitalism, the evils of niche marketing (pandering?), et cetera– I wanted to talk about this Old Spice advertisement because it brings up the sorts of tangential connections to identity, pop culture, and politics that I think about all the time. Before I start laying down the snark on one side of an issue or another, I want to start mapping those connections and the questions that they raise.

-chris

p.s. Fun F-word Factoid: In 1999 Tony Head guest starred as “Dr. Staretski” on the epicly mediocre sitcom Two Guys, A Girl And A Pizza Place, a show which somehow managed to have four fucking seasons! And people wonder how/why the internet is replacing older media formats.