Wednesday, April 5
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Fall Out Boy SJSU Event Center; Seventh and San Carlos streets, San Jose; 408.998.TIXS; Wed (April 5) - 6:30pm; $30 Fall Out Boy is so ripe for ridicule. It gets hate from all corners—from the emo vanguard, the überindie bitches, the MySpace gangsters and even CD jacket layout artists for its long, unwieldy song titles like "I've Got a Dark Alley and a Bad Idea That Says You Should Shut Your Mouth (Summer Song)," "Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dying (Do Your Part to Save the Scene and Stop Going to Shows)" and the epochal "I Slept With Someone in Fall Out Boy and All I Got Was This Stupid Song Written About Me." But Fall Out Boy shakes off the hate—more than 2 million Hollister-clad kids and henpecked parents bought their second album, From Under the Cork Tree. Its money shot of a single "Sugar We're Going Down" is an aptly titled pop confection with big buildups, singalong choruses and Patrick Stump's little-boy-lost cry. The band will go to its grave singing, "I'm just a notch in your bedpost, but you're just a line in a song." It's a track that will appear in previews of Kirsten Dunst romantic comedies for eternity. It's fair to label Fall Out Boy's rise as meteoric. The band formed in a suburban Chicago basement in 2001. It wanted to blend hardcore with the candor and warmth of bands like Lifetime and the Descendents. It put out Take This to Your Grave in 2003 on independent Fueled by Ramen and was picked up by Island/Def Jam. Fall Out Boy is like emo's Journey—songs about unrequited love and revenge, a fey singer and not a lot of substance. Speaking about hate, also on the bill is Hawthorne Heights, which was in the press recently but not in a good way. A Victory label associate, in order to boost sales of Hawthorne Heights' new album, If Only You Were Lonely, suggested a plot to curb sales of its biggest Tuesday release competitor, Ne-Yo. In an email traced to Victory's street-team director Abby Valentine, she wrote, "If you were to pick up [a] handful of Ne-Yo CDs, as if you were about to buy them, but then changed your mind and didn't bother to put them back in the same place, that would work ... just relocating a handful creates issues." The story broke, and after a few angry phone calls from Ne-Yo's Island/Def Jam camp, Valentine sent a second email claiming the first email was a joke. Well Ne-Yo had the last laugh. On Black Tuesday, Ne-Yo scored the top album in the Billboard charts, beating Hawthorne Heights more than 2:1. Hawthorne Heights came in at No. 3 with 114,000 units sold of If Only You Were Lonely. The numbers are not shabby, proving that the market for rock does exist. Fall Out Boy, Hawthorne Heights, All American Rejects, From First to Last and The Hush Sound play the San Jose State University Event Center on the Black Clouds and Underdogs tour. (TI) Ironhead, Los Dryheavers The Blue Lagoon; $5; 9pm. Many bemoan the lack of sheer danger in rock music these days, but few are doing anything about it. I'm not talking about a carefully cultivated, postmodern representation of danger—I'm talking about absolute don't-give-a-shit rock & roll menace. Hailing from the unlikely sleaze-rock cesspool of Virginia, Ironhead aim to change all that by resurrecting the dirgey fuzz-rock of '70s icons such as Alice Cooper and the Dead Boys. At a time when arty post-punk acts have become the indie equivalent of the boy band, it's refreshing to find a band whose MO wholly revolves around raising hell. Los Dryheavers certainly know a thing about danger and menace as well, and not just due to the constant threat of guitarist Felix stripping down to his underwear. Deep down in the band's trad-punk anthems is a metal beast waiting to be unleashed, evidenced by the labyrinthine guitar leads this band turns out amid the ruckus. (PD) Robert Brady Sculpture: 1989-2005 Palo Alto Art Center; 1313 Newell Road, Palo Alto; 650.329.2366; The show runs through April 23 After a long and successful career working in ceramics, Bay Area sculptor Robert Brady switched his primary material in 1989. Entranced by wood in its natural state—striving trunks, columnar branches—Brady creates attenuated figures that evoke Giacometti's skeletal studies. Brady's figures are often caught in aspects of worship or submission—kneeling, praying, bending to higher forces. The wooden surfaces are either stripped down, skinned of bark or painted in glossy colors. Angel (1991) is a penitential form, resting on one jointed knee. The streamlined torso is armless; the head marked only by two black dots for eyes. Our attention is drawn to the spectacular paddle-shaped red wings, scored with white lines as if they were made of brick. Another Angel, from 1993, boasts a stretched-oval head from a Modigliani painting and green-tinted wings for arms. Fledgling (1992) is a female figure balancing on her knees like a diver. Her arms are made from swooping curved pieces of wood arching backward. The arms are whiplike, as if about to propel the woman forward with a rush of potential energy. Nash (1995) is a spiderish man-chair resting on the point of his legs and arms, his ribcage lightly delineated with surface carvings. More explicitly metaphoric, Yolo (1989) consists of a large two-piece headless figure twisting at the waist. The arms are clutched behind, forced to drag a stone weight; the feet are buried in the base. This female Sisyphus is eternally poised between pulling and being pulled. Brady also favors pod shapes—giant cocoons with blank eyeholes and Celtic tracery carved on their surfaces. Fid (1993) is hermetically sealed, hiding secrets we can't penetrate. The King's Journey (1993) opens with a hinge to reveal a scooped-out yellow gourd filled with a stamen of sorts and three green seeds. The Brady retrospective is nicely complemented by Deborah Barrett's "Wildlife" show, which runs concurrently. Barrett is a pack-rat artist, happily collaging away with assorted snippets of material and creating pieces that combine the look of great age with disturbing currents of modern madness. For Man in Profile (2000), Barrett has drawn in gouache and pencil an exquisite portrait bathed in white light. The torso is a simple outline from which a piece of cloth in the shape of a sleeve hangs. Monkey on a Horse (1999-2000) reproduces styles from several eras—a Dürer stag beetle, a Japanese monkey, a Persian horse. Rendered on heavily soiled and creased linen, this drawing looks like a lost volume from a Babylonian library. (MSG) Heavenly Bodies San Jose Museum of Art; 110 S. Market St, San Jose; 408.294.2787; Tue - Sun, 11-5pm; show runs through April 9 In an affront to the static quality of oil painting, the video works in "Heavenly Bodies," in the historic wing upstairs at the San Jose Museum of Art, all embrace notions of time and change. In essence, the pieces in the show are experimental video shorts turned into installations pieces. In You Called Me Jacky, a four-minute-long video, artist Pipilotti Rist lip-syncs with exaggerated gestures the title song while indistinct images flow and mutate behind her. The work may be a comment on bad music videos or it just may be a bad music video. In similar fashion, Drew Brandt's Dance, Video, Dance (2002) subverts a battling-warriors video game called Soul Caliber into a disco video. Instead of attacking each other, two armor-plated Voldos with knife-blade hands engage in an intricate dance routine in the halls of some Lara Croft underworld full of columns, vaults and dragons. Two large installations resonate to much greater effect. In one darkened corner, Ajna Joy Lichau's San Shi (Dispersion) consists of a large, faint wall-mounted photo of Angel Island on the wall; on the floor, a color image of a nude woman floats face down in the water. Subtly, the shifting reflections of light create a rippling surface. Upon closer inspection, it turns out that the video is being projected on a bed of sand, which gives it a 3-D quality. Is this a murder waiting to be solved or the beginning of a transformation? The shimmer in the dark remains a mystery. Ruth Eckland's Star Fields (2005) casts a six-minute montage of star bursts and silhouettes of persons and landscapes unknown. In time to a an electronica score, the video turns red, blue and yellow. The video is projected on a series of hanging translucent scrims before falling on a wall. The result--fragmented and layered--is like a hologram journey through deep space with flickering memories of Earth. Local computer artist wiz Jim Campbell offers a Self-Portrait With Disturbances. A small black-and-white TV with its innards exposed broadcasts a grainy shot of the artist's head. As the viewer walks past the screen, a video camera records the movements and adds them to the feed, creating a ghostly trail of pixels, like an animated Etch-a-Sketch. New media offers lots of possibilities, including the chance to flop. Bjorn Melhus' No Sunshine (1998) is a short video about two yellow-wigged proto-humans conversing in baby-talk gibberish until interupted by a pair of more (supposedly) evolved hairless beings in body suits. It is exactly this kind of avant-garde art-school indulgence that gave rise to the SNL parody Sprockets. As Dieter used to chide, "Your story has become tiresome." (MSG) 'Oh, Seuss! Off to Great Places' Oct. 15-May 2006 at the Children's Discovery Museum, 180 Woz Way, San Jose. (408.298.5437) Horton, the Cat in the Hat and a plethora of other Dr. Seuss characters will be the main attraction as the Children's Discovery Museum's newest exhibit, "Oh, Seuss! Off to Great Places.' This hands-on fun zone, borrowed from the Children's Museum of Manhattan, honors the great kids' book author on his Seussentennial. A Wealth Of Ideas Hoover Memorial Exhibit Pavilion; Stanford University Campus; 650.723.3563; Runs Jan. 31-May 6; open Tue-Sat, 11am-4pm; free Liberal it ain't. Stanford's Hoover Institution is the gold standard of conservative think tanks. The well-endowed (with money—despite the phallic symbolism of the Hoover Tower) institution possesses a deep collection of unusual historical documents on the topics of revolution, politics and world leaders. As a prelude to a book about the institution's archives by fellow Bertrand M. Patenaude, the Hoover library is mounting an exhibit of some of its rarest holdings. (MSG) Calendar Home | Metroactive | Back