So I went to the
Odd Men Out Tour last night at the Wiltern. I did an interview with Rufus Wainwright for IN Mag Los Angeles (on newstands now) and the PR Rep was gracious enough to offer me a pair of tickets. I invited B- (yes, just like a Victorian novel) and we got there just in time to catch the last two songs of Ben Lee's set. B- explained that Lee is Claire Daines' ex-boyfriend and we watched him bop up and down and then walk through the crowd singing,
because he's just like you and me.Rufus came on shortly thereafter. He's really uncomfortable on stage; barely pausing between songs. I thought it was endearing, B- thought it was gay. The worst/best part was when Rufus made a plea that "things really are just not going right in this country anymore, so please, just do something." A call to arms it was not. Fortunately, he has the greatest voice of his generation and totally swept me away. From the new songs he played, it seems like Rufus' next album is going to be country, which fills me with all kinds of joy, being an arty country boy myself. If this were the 1800s, I'd be the librarian of Cripple Creek, which kind of sounds like a good title for Rufus' new album, no? It would probably also work well as a chick-lit fiction novel title.
Finally, Ben Folds came on. B- and I kept trying to figure out who Ben Folds was. I mean, we both knew "Brick", but the audience, an ammagalmation of O.C. pre-teens, their parents and many many a sensitive twenty/thirty-something, just went wild. At first I was ultra-cynical, whispering to B- "even his downtempo songs are chirpy", but geeky little Ben Folds won me over with his melodic rendition of Dre's
Bitches Aint Shit. Ben is sort of unrepentedly middle class, which is refreshing. I remember in high school sitting next to Andy Bayer in Friendly Physics class and talking about the Beatles and which Beatle we liked better. Andy, in his mid-90s "fight the system" military gaurd was an obvious Lennon fan who chastised me for liking McCartney. My response was something along the lines of "Yeah, but we didn't grow up like Lennon. We had it easy. My life sounds more like a McCartney song." Nowadays, I love Lennon, don't get me wrong, but that's sort of what I feel Ben Folds is about. Neat.
Random thought: Are shows like
Desperate Housewives and
Weeds the new
Leave It To Beaver and
Donna Reed? Underneath the cynical and satiric depictions are we, like the confused post-war family unit shakily moving on after four years of war, looking for safe reassuring images of America? Do these shows subvert the suburban all-American family or reaffirm it? Someone get me a Cinema Studies major to do a paper on this.
