Meat Puppets

From left, Cris and Curt Kirkwood, and Ted Marcus

I will confess that I was never much of a Meat Puppets fan. I had heard songs by them during the latter years of high school, but they never made much of an impression on me. Later, I was exposed to many of the band's defining albums when I worked at a record store in college (I'm dating myself, lol). The only one that struck my fancy at all was "Too High To Die," chiefly because of the Puppet's breakout tune, "Backwater." That album is probably still my favorite and was, for a long time, my only tether to a truly brilliant band. Considering that the Puppets live a mere 100 miles away from me, I must also confess more than a little shame for having waited so long to fall in love with them.

I always enjoyed the twangy, guitar-driven sound of cowpunk. Some of my early favorites included X, Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper, The Dead Milkmen, and Guadalcanal Diary, to name just a few. The Puppets were an almost impossible sell, though. Something about their sound baffled me. In hindsight, I can now say it was because I was too young and narrow-minded to appreciate the musical complexity of a band like the Puppets.

I have found this to be a common theme among many of the albums that have collected dust on my shelves for the past couple decades. Back then I bought a lot of music, owing to a pretty generous employee discount from the aforementioned music store. Many of the albums I bought were based upon recommendations from my coworkers. I had the good fortune to be surrounded by many experienced aficionados of music at that store, and consequently bought a lot of music sight (or sound) unseen. Many of my coworkers were in local bands, others were merely older and more hip to styles of music I had never experienced.

I loved working at that store. It broadened my interests across all genres of music, from country to rap. Despite my expanded musical horizons, though, some albums and artists in my collection have slipped through the cracks over the years; the Puppets are among these. As I mature, I find myself increasingly attracted to bands that straddle many musical influences, and I now find myself revisiting bands that puzzled me many years earlier, like the Puppets.

My current infatuation with Puppets began after a friend posted a link on Facebook to an in-studio session with the Puppets at NPR. Hearing "Plateau" for the first time since I last listened to Nirvana's "Unplugged" album was a revelation: I missed the point of this band the first time around. Obviously, I had some appreciation for the band from earlier experiences and because of Nirvana's album, but I resolved to relisten to a bunch of the Puppets' back catalog. I replaced "Up on the Sun" and "Monsters," two albums I had sold off in college to pay rent during a couple lean months. I also picked up "Meat Puppets II," "Huevos," and "Mirage." And, of course, I still owned "Too High to Die."

The Kirkwoods' drug problems and run-ins with the law have not taken anything away from these hard workin' Phoenix boys. "Sewn" is, in my opinion, far more accessible than some of the Puppets' previous work. Perhaps it's slightly more polished production, or maybe it's just that I'm older. I dunno. That being said, much of the material on this album is pretty reminiscent of earlier albums. "Nursery Rhyme" cadges a few licks from "Up on the Sun," while "I'm Not You" and "Rotten Shame" are plucked straight out of classic Puppets' fare. Virtually every song on this album is good. Curt Kirkwood's guitar work is as brilliant as ever, which is to say, awe inspiring. And the lyrics ... weird as ever. Some of my favorites:

• "if frogs fell from the air i'd have to say i didn't care/i'd have to put them down and move off to some frogless ground" ("I'm Not You")
• "say you want nothing, that's all right/cause nothing is easy and nothing'll last you all night ... not saying nothing, that hasn't been said/and nothing is easy to say so i'll say it instead" ("Go To Your Head")
• "the rabbit hole opened so in they all went/and the height of the evening was when you said/we got computers inventing the perfect head/so we all put on our gowns and a truck brought loads of hay/and out of the fog flew a rubber baby" ("Nursery Rhyme")
• "this is the story of the history of night/from the beginning it has never seen the light/it takes a while to never understand/it holds the gift of darkness in it's hand" ("The Monkey and the Snake")

"Sewn Together" has been in constant rotation on my iPhone for at least five months now, and I have still not grown tired of it. God willing, these boys will keep cranking out the albums for another thirty years.

Hell in the Pacific

Being a fan of the 1985 sci-fi remake, "Enemy Mine," I have been meaning to watch this film for a number of years. "Enemy" was almost universally panned by critics; however, I found it to be a surprisingly touching little gem. At the video store I worked at in college, "Enemy" was part of my basic rotation of films played during each shift. I probably played that movie a hundred times before I found out that it was, in fact, based upon an earlier film.

That film was "Hell in the Pacific," the 1968 film pictured above, starring the incomparable Lee Marvin, and Japan's most celebrated actor, Toshiro Mifune. The basic plot of both movies is the same: two enemy soldiers are marooned together in total isolation, and they must rely upon each other to survive their respective inhospitable environments. "Enemy" takes place on a barren planet that is constantly bombarded with meteors and is inhabited by flesh-eating alien critters. "Hell" takes place on a small tropical island in the Pacific Ocean. In both films, the main characters are mortal enemies that must put aside their differences for the sake of survival, and to some degree, for basic human (or humanoid) companionship.

I think the thing that drew me to "Enemy" in the first place was seeing what appeared to be an American soldier developing compassion, respect, and ultimately, love for an enemy that he had never before bothered to understand. I don't know that Dennis Quaid's character in "Enemy" was actually American, but it was clearly intended to be a depiction of your standard Western force versus some foreign horde. I am no hater of America or its military, but it was refreshing to see a movie that intentionally added more dimensions to what would have otherwise been a pretty standard space-war flick.

So naturally, I was curious about "Hell in the Pacific," having grown up watching America's post-WWII offerings. For the most part, movies of the post-WWII era demonized non-Western enemies, especially Asians, which I always found annoying, being of Asian descent, myself. Japanese soldiers particularly were portrayed as either the Coke-bottle-glasses wearing, overbite buffoons of the comedies, or they were portrayed as suicidal fanatics. While I am not Japanese, it was always obvious to me that neither depiction adequately represented the complexity of a national character forged by thousands of years free from foreign invasion. Japan ended up being so interesting to me that I minored in Japanese in college. But I digress.

"Hell" was a surprisingly good film. The cinematography was exquisite, as could be expected from the scenic natural beauty that is Palau. What I found particularly interesting was how little dialog was exchanged between the main characters. Having watched "Enemy" first, I fully expected the characters to try to learn each other's languages, even if just a little. They did not. What little dialog existed in "Hell" was pretty much limited to one-way conversations, screams, and infuriated, puzzled expressions. Some of the most arresting moments between the main characters were exchanged purely through the eyes. Brilliant work by both actors to be sure, and I have to wonder what the banter was like on the set.

My sole complaint with the film was the ending, a pretty typical complaint from the info that I gleaned about the movie on the Web. The men struggle mightily in the last half of the film, working together, and seem poised for some sort of rescue by the end. That in itself is a lingering source of questions for the audience: which side will find the men and how will each character react on behalf of the other? SPOILER ALERT: STOP READING NOW IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW HOW THIS MOVIE ENDS. After the men discover a bombed-out, abandoned Japanese outpost on another island, they finally have a chance to clean up, revel, and drink (with found sake). Sensing their final turning point, tensions erupt between the two, paving the way for what should have been the film's most meaningful moment. Alas, it was not to be. The sounds of artillery in the distance provide an abrupt cop-out in the final seconds of the movie: both men are blown up by a stray shell. The end. Roll credits.

The DVD's only extra is an alternate ending, which replaces the final 20 seconds or so. Instead of unexpectedly blowing up, both men exchange a laden stare before turning and going their separate ways. In my opinion, the alternate ending should have been the theatrical ending, which made for a more complex and unresolved ending. Having both characters die in such an abrupt fashion cheapened the experience and made "Enemy" stand out even more in my mind as the better film. Don't get me wrong: "Hell" is worth watching and features two stellar actors at the height of their careers.

On a personal note and apropos of almost nothing, I once stood behind Lee Marvin in line at a convenience store in Tucson, where he lived. He was, not surprisingly, buying smokes. It must have been around 1987 or so. He was wearing shorts and had the skinniest legs I've ever seen on a man. The screen really does add pounds, because he couldn't have been much heavier than me, and I was a 120-pound weakling back then.