Dancing About Architecture, Vol. III

June 18, 2005

Tonight’s Episode: Anya Marina and guests. Saturday, June 12, 2005, Lestat’s, San Diego.

Been a while since I’ve been to see live music, ‘sides classical. Anyway, Vera, Chris and I went to Lestat’s coffee house last Saturday to see the widely, at least locally, adored Anya Marina do her singer-songwriter-cheeky goofball shtick. It was, to put it mildly, a night of contrasts.

Lestat’s was the perfect locale for this stuff, being a local-run coffee house on one side and a quiet, dark, quasi-cabaret atmosphere with a stage on the other. We got there early enough to get a tiny table with our very own colorful candle holder. We waited a long time (Vera: “Um, why isn’t someone performing…?”) for the first act, a young, boyish lesbian Bostonian named Sara Wolfe, who sang to her acoustic guitar sometimes funny, mostly cloying songs about being a young, boyish lesbian. Her first number was a blues called, I guess, “Eat Shit and Die”. Hard not to like, if only for its straightforward approach to angst. Her songs were either about being dumped, ala “Merit” named for her last girlfriend who said their relationship lacked that particular quality, or about being mistaken for a boy or just plain shat on for being a lesbian. I kinda liked her amateur style, like shoving way too many syllables into a refrain (“and realize we’re doin’ fine” don’t make it into four quarter notes, not easily), but mostly I liked the story, put into a song, about two old ladies who freaked at a department store when Wolfe headed for the ladies room, told her, “the little boys’ room is over there, sonny”, and got summarily flashed a boyish lesbian boob.

After this short set of straight-up coffee house fodder, we were treated… no…. more like… subjected….to Il Bambino. From the moment this perspicacious duo took the stage, we knew we were in for something surreal, but oh! how little we knew. One in a black suit, the other a white one, both wearing fedoras and enormous fake moustaches, they came bouncing onto the stage like bats out of an Italian tourist cruiseship hell, with Whitesuit shouting, “’Allo! ‘allo, ever-y-bo-dy! Ha-ha-ha-ha! We are Il-a Bambino” in a ridiculously affected Italian accent, whilst taking un-aimed Polariod pictures of the audience and tossing them over his shoulder. Blacksuit remained stolid throughout the performance, and led the musical numbers (I guess you could call them) as he was clearly the only one who knew how to sing and play instruments. They started with what remains my favorite piece of theirs, with Blacksuit standing in the back, looking solemnly down over his autoharp hugged to his chest, singing in alternating I-IV chords, “Doo-doo-doo do you have-a the moustache?” in a quiet durge; meanwhile Whitesuit worked the audience yelling the refrain, asking people in the front row that question and giving them the microphone. It was damn funny, actually. Kinda like watching your old Bar Mitzvah video is funny. Squirmy, surreally funny. Whitesuit was a sort of Chico/Groucho hybrid who “interpreted” Blacksuit’s Italian crooning over his accordion (did Blacksuit actually study Italian folk songs in college?) – every so often White hit a joke with that. They also did “Autobahn, Autobahn” chanted over bongos, and some other crap with Black playing the banjo. White must have felt he was losing steam with us, so he traipsed out into the audience, wrapped himself around randoms and took their Polaroid together. The real highlight, of course, was when he came by OUR table (NO! Yes! Please don’t come here! Oh, I HOPE he comes over HERE!) and took a Polaroid with his arm around Chris (and me in the background). Chris, I hope you kept it. It’s probably the only thing you’ll remember in the long run about that night. All in all, it was an act so overtly offensive in so many ways, we had to laugh, but it was hard to tell if we were laughing for the reasons they wanted us to or not. The whole thing clearly was conceived at 3:00am after lots of illicit substances had been consumed. So kids, next time someone offers you drugs, remember Il Bambino. Think about this little story. THIS could happen to you!

Change gears. No, change planets. Up come Jane Lui to the stage, settling the question of who the hell that is on the meticulously designed postcards left meaningfully on our little table at the start of the evening. Ms. Lui is a tall, self-consciously cute Asian woman whose onstage persona is at once appealing but also a little tiresome if you try to imagine being her friend. She had a Yamaha keyboard which was set to sound like a piano on reverb, and after the first chords instantly we were out of whatever the hell came before and into a completely new universe. This universe was one where someone, having taken lots of piano lessons and forced to practice a lot, and having a good amount of talent and is also blessed with a natural pop diva voice to boot, writes Celine Dion songs. But somehow, they were better than that. She had a great command of the keyboard and had written lots of songs with unusual structures and resolutions, and weren’t so self-absorbed as they could be. One song was about a fantasy book she liked. Lui has a beautiful voice and a refined understanding of how to use both it and the piano to evoke emotion. She even worked in a strutting blues for part of a tune, and made it work with her pop voice without sounding corny, because she wasn’t even trying to be Bessie Smith. After a while, though, I got bored, maybe because the songs mostly lacked heavy hooks, or because that style of singing is just too much for me, or maybe I was just tired. It was like, I’d buy your CD because you’re very talented, but I can’t imagine listening to it more than once. Chris summed it up just right, when she was done, with “Kate Bush just left the stage”. So I didn’t buy the CD.

Finally, Anya Marina. For those of you not in San Diego, she’s a tiny blonde DJ on the alternative rock station here, who has become a sort of folk hero among the smart, cheeky and haughty Gen-Xers because she’s smart and cheeky without seeming haughty, commodities which that group (yeah, me included, yeah) considers undervalued in this corner of the world. I’d heard her album, and seen her play a few songs once before. This time she was accompanied, besides herself on guitar, by the drummer from Reeve Oliver, a so-so local band she’s plugged relentlessly on her radio show, or at least she did until my car radio died. His set was appropriately minimal, just a box which he sat on and played, a hi-hat, and a snare. Anya probably played a total of eight songs in her forty-five or so minutes on stage, due to the constant banter going on between her and drummer boy. Not just him, but another keyboard player came on and off stage a few times, over which a great deal of witty banter was also traded. Jane Lui came on for one or two songs as well – clearly, she and Anya knew each other well, or at least wanted us to know that each thought the other was either “so hot” or “so cute”, meaning they are good friends and respect each other’s work as well as hotness/cuteness. Lui showed off in her own cute Asian way (is it an affectation? Hard to say) her homemade marimba mallets with faces on them: one is Zorro and one is Jewish. Zorro made sense, because he was wrapped mostly in black, but from my vantage point I couldn’t tell what made the other one Jewish. Don’t misunderstand, the witty banter was hugely fun, partly because it really was fun, and partly because of aforementioned consideration of the dearth (or at least, elusiveness) of such wittiness outside my own circle of friends. As for the songs themselves, they’re better than they seemed (not my joke). Her wispy voice is well-matched for her sometimes clever, ironic lyrics (“I love you baby/I hope you choke” in a song about desperate love) and the songs have lots of those hooks I’d been waitin’ on. The drums worked great, especially on her CD’s title track “Miss Halfway”, which is hooky indeed. She tried out a new song, “Reno”, which met those criteria but was also genuinely a bit sadder than the other tongue-in-cheek fare, even if she had a little trouble hitting the high notes. She did a pleasant version of the “Three’s Company” theme song – more Gen-X pandering, but who cares – although the slow take on “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” was a foray into maudlin I could have done without. But all the players in Anya’s bag of smartees were decent musicians and each funny in their own way, which made all that came before it worth the wait, and the $6 cover worth the cost. It was exactly, maybe a little bit more than, what I would want out of a Saturday night at a coffee house. A special thanks goes out to Il Bambino for being so fuckin’ weird.