New Origivation Magazine feature

I wrote another feature for Philly music rag Origivation on acoustic/rock artist Kevin McQuiston. Check me out!

If you don't want to download a pdf (although there are other cool pieces in the issue too), here's the text.

Emerging
with Alexandra Jones

Kevin McQuiston is probably happier than you. Not because Sway, the first EP from his latest project, Refurb, blends slick-as- hell rock with heartrending, emotional lyrics. Not because he gives the impression of being the hardest-working musician in Philadelphia, burning out his BlackBerry to promote his projects. Not because the way he’s selling Sway is a new platform that could change how bands market their music online.

He’s happy, it seems, because he wants to be.

Among other faiths, McQuiston identifies as a Buddhist, and applies a beatific, live-and-let-live philosophy to daily life and relationships. “[Being happy]’s not easy, but it’s really pretty simple,” he explains – to passengers in the cab he drives for his day job. “You do this, you do this, and if that doesn’t work, you try that.”
As chill as he can be in person, however, McQuiston is dedicated to his art, his band and its marketing. He’s gone beyond the independent musician’s typical marketing toolkit with “Karma Currency,” an online platform that gives potential listeners a few different ways to pay for music. Would-be listeners can choose between four options to acquire digital downloads of individual tracks: Pay “market value,” the iTunes standard of 99 cents; pay what you want, à la Radiohead’s In Rainbows; accept the track for free as a gift from the artist; or pledge to do a good deed – helping others, animals or the environment, perhaps – in exchange for the download. The last option requires users to type in how they’ll pay it forward, which might seem like more of a guilt trip than it’s worth. McQuiston, of course, sees the good in the system.

“You’re not responsible for what other people think, say and do, just what you think, say and do,” he says of the honor code implicit in Karma Currency. “You can actually ask for it [as] a gift. If they’re so harried that they can’t find a kind moment, we’ll give it as a gift. We’ll do the kind moment for them.”

While McQuiston’s ostensible goal is to gain exposure for his music, the Karma Currency model fits him in particular. When his last band, acoustic-pop outfit KMB missed out on a record deal when their A&R man left his record label, McQuiston
turned away from rock ‘n’ roll fun and entered an interfaith seminary in New York City.
But hold that thought – McQuiston is no Scott Stapp. “I don’t think I’ve ever written a non-secular song,” he says. “And yet everything I write, because I write about love - love is my religion. I might wrap it in Buddhism and Taoism and Quaker Unitarianism, but to me, really, everything’s about love. Love and fear, [those are] the only two things in the universe. Everything’s based in one or the other, and I base mine in love.”

True enough - although the songs on Sway evoke the longing, bitterness, and loneliness that can accompany unrequited love more than its warm, fuzzy counterpart. Despite McQuiston’s cloud-nine disposition, his muses are lost loves, or loves that
never were.

“Somebody asked me the other day, ‘What’s the harder part, writing the words or writing the melody?’” the singer explains. “And I said the hard part is living through it. Having that thing mean enough to you that you need to express it. I have to cough this shit up on a regular basis, so, to me, it’s gotta kinda mean something.”

What made McQuiston transition from acoustic music to electrified rock? “It could have been like a midlife crisis, I suppose,” he says. “I bought a Les Paul and a Marshall [amplifier], and I’d always kinda had this sorta Ani DiFranco-meets-Chris-
Isaak-on-crack kinda [thing].”

Refurb, however, is a four-piece outfit that sets McQuiston’s songs, from cool brush-off tunes to gritty breakup missives to straightforward rock ‘n’ roll. They’re billed as “indie-tinged alt-rock,” but the music doesn’t bristle with quirky-as-hell instrumentation or sound like it was recorded in a bedroom closet. What defines Refurb is the combination of McQuiston’s deeply felt poetry and his band’s ultra-tight but soulful vibe – a solid formula that would benefit from neither bells nor whistles. “Everybody Likes You” is the badass riff-rocker of the EP, while the bittersweet “Too Much For You” boasts a vibrant, voicelike guitar melody.

The band is McQuiston’s project, but he gives even more credit to the other three members of Refurb as he does himself. Darnell Hillary plays drums, Ron Telfor (who was also involved with KMB) is on bass, and Kirk Abernathy rocks keyboards and guitar. “People just go ‘You’re so lucky,’ and I just let them be themselves,” McQuiston says of Refurb’s sweet skills. Although he has to be his own street team, the setup works for him. “On those nights when I’ve been online for like eight hours promoting a show, or sending out MySpace bulletins or flyering or press releasing or whatever, and I’m
like ‘[I wish] I had a regular band where the people help me out.’ And then I remember, these guys, they show up and they kill, and they’re so underpaid by me compared to the other people that they play for,” he says. “They play with me because they like my music, and they like what they do, and it works out pretty good.”

McQuiston has also been working with Sway’s producer, Mike McCarthy, in yet another project. “Don’t Miss You Like I Used To,” available on McQuiston’s personal MySpace, is a smoldering, “Sexy Sadie”-esque ballad boosted by McCarthy’s near-jazz flugelhorn melodies.

He’s not yet sure what will happen with Refurb – a soul project next, maybe? “I know I’m changing styles,” he says. “I’ve been listening to a lot of Amy Winehouse…”

Wherever he goes, McQuiston seems to have it – whatever “it” is – figured out.

“When I was younger, I wanted a deal,” he says. “I wanted a record deal and a limo deal and an actress girlfriend deal, and now all I want is to make a living from my craft.”

Relevant

As you probably don't know, I am slightly enamoured with David Mitchell, the less conventionally attractive (and much nerdier, neurotic, and black-humoured) half of the Mitchell & Webb comedy duo. He and Robert Webb (voted 88th sexiest man in the world, as I learned watching Would I Lie to You?) star in The Mitchell & Webb Situation, That Mitchell & Webb Look, and Peep Show, which are all awesome and worth watching right this very moment.

Despite the similarities and heavy borrowing between US and UK television, they've got one sort of programming over there that's no longer around over here: panel shows. These are part game show, part chat show -- basically, a game show with no prizes whose contestants are minor celebrities, TV personalities, and comedians. The entertainment lies in the competition and the contestants saying funny and ostensibly off-the-cuff stuff. Would I Lie to You? is one, along with my favorite, QI, which is hosted by Stephen Fry and would never take off in the US because of its emphasis on knowledge and wit. David is a regular on WILTY? and frequently appears on QI -- there are more, god knows. While most of the TV comedians here (Mencia, Larry the Cable Guy, Colin fucking Quinn) totally suck, many of those on these shows are actually funny and quick witted (plus they can swear): Jimmy Carr, Rob Brydon, etc.

ANYWAY. In my hunting around for more of Mitchell's work, I found this, even though it's sponsored by some eco-friendly Euro equivalent of Axe body spray or something:



Go watch all of them right now.

PBR never raped anybody

So the American Psychological Association publishes a journal called Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, which recently published the results of a study on college women's drinking habits. Specifically, the study asked hetero female students how many drinks they thought their male peers preferred them to drink in social situations. Hetero male students were asked how many drinks they wanted female friends, potential sex partners, and dates to drink. (Prior studies have determined that college students in general overestimate how much their peers drink/find acceptable for others to drink, and that female students may be more susceptible to the influence of their peer groups' normative behaviors.)

The study found that women greatly overestimated how many drinks they thought their male peers wanted them to have. The journal article concludes that this discrepancy between what women think men want them to do and what men actually want can be exploited to get female students to drink less.

Here's what's fucked up: That alcohol abuse educators, however well-intentioned, still base efforts to curb binge drinking among women by invoking what men will think of them. I remember a pretty offensive anti-drinking ad campaign at Michigan that strongly implied that getting drunk would lead to women -- only women -- to (regrettable, of course) whorish behavior. If they're not invoking the spectre of sexual assault (which the APA article does in a section of statistics on women and drinking), they're warning you about stepping outside the bounds of male-defined femininity. Never mind trying to educate men on the consequences of binge drinking, and god forbid we recognize and address that what causes rape and sexual assault is the action of the rapist or attacker, period.

I can't judge the women in the study for the reasons they decide to drink, but it's really fucking depressing that this kind of thing still factors into the thinking of so many women in just about any area of life from clothes to careers to everyday behaviors like this.

Grrr. The super-short version of the study's findings is here. The 6-page peer-reviewed article is here.

YAY Lionsgate has finally acquiesced to Mad Men creator dude Matthew Weiner's probably outlandish (and totally deserved) contract demands for TWO more seasons.

Let us celebrate:

Mad Men: No News, Not Good News

God DAMN it, Matt Weiner, get it together!

How much money can you possibly want? Haven't you heard about this thing called THE ECONOMY and how we should all be happy that we have jobs at all?

I know there's gonna be a third season either way, but if anyone except Weiner takes the reins, I will always believe that really Betty Draper put her head in an oven sometime in early 1963.

Review: Max Tundra, Parallax Error Beheads You

Of the handful of CDs I'm reviewing for Beyond Race, this one is my favorite. I still haven't heard Some Best Friend You Turned Out to Be or Mastered by Guy at the Exchange yet.

Go listen to "Orphan" from PEBY.

"Oh, Ted. Don't be so conventional."

And so, we return to the Divorce Ranch. Or more accurately, movies in which Norma Shearer plays an ex-wife. The Divorcee (1930) shows her in much more glamorous and pre-Hays-code form. Nine years prior to her matronly turn in The Women, Shearer doesn't look classically beautiful so much as she looks like an art deco illustration come to life – a perfect aesthetic match to the time period.

Check out that profile!

Ok, I am going to try and restrain myself from getting too obsessive about set/costume design. Despite the lack of a technicolor fashion show, however, the turbans and dresses and furniture and flatware are AMAZING.

I can't restrain myself from getting more into Shearer's personal life, though, as it's pretty fascinating stuff. One of MGM's stable of stars since the mid-1920s, she successfully transitioned from silent to talking films, and apparently managed to overcome a lazy eye as well. She married one of MGM's top producers, “Boy Wonder” Irving Thalberg, in 1927, which had a lot to do with her ability to land plum roles. Joan Crawford hated her (who didn't Joan Crawford hate?), especially as Shearer managed to oust Crawford from the lead role in The Divorcee by sending Thalberg some racy lingerie shots; he had told her she wasn't sexy enough for the part. Crawford fanatics bemoan this fact even today, but I'm kind of glad. Love Joan and all, but she's so larger-than-life that it's hard to get past HER, you know?

Thalberg was a sickly Brooklyn-born Jew (Norma converted) who lived with his mother, and then his wife and his mother, until his death at age 37. Bum ticker. His various afflictions left Shearer a little sex-starved, and supposedly she made up for the lack while shooting love scenes. Depending on which semi-trashy Golden Age of Hollywood Tell-All you're reading, Clark Gable either said that she “kisses like a whore in heat” or that she didn't wear underwear to the set “for realism.” Also, she was Quebecois. God, don't you love her?

A quick synopsis of the movie itself: We open to a party of high-class NYC types gallivanting at a country estate. Jerry (Shearer) and Ted make out in the woods and Ted proposes. The announcement of their engagement distresses Paul, her would-be lover, so greatly that he drunkenly wrecks his car on the trip back to the city, nearly killing one of his passengers, Dorothy.

Then, three years in the future, Jerry discovers Ted is having an affair. He insists it's no biggie, totally meaningless. In despair and retaliation, she sleeps with Ted's caddish friend Don (“I'm just trying to hang on to the marvelous latitude of a man's point of view,” she tells him). Jerry confesses her infidelity to her husband, who promptly freaks out about it, leading her to utter the line serving as the title of this post. They get divorced; Jerry proceeds to have lots of vague affairs with minor European nobility. Sex: implied. “What you feel for me is not love; it is the call of the gorilla to his mate.”

Paul comes back into her life, although it turns out he married Dorothy because he felt bad about permanently disfiguring her face in the car accident. He heroically saves Jerry from some date-rapey foreign fellow on a train, and promises to leave the maimed Dorothy, whom he has never really loved, in order to wed Jerry. But then, Dorothy arrives at Jerry's apartment, shrouded in an eerie black veil, begging Jerry not to take away her husband. Jerry gets noble and realizes her folly, tells those two crazy kids to work it out, and reunites with Ted.

So: is The Divorcee any more progressive or scandalous than the divorce movies made later in the decade? Well, for starters there are some lines that wouldn't get past the focus groups today, for sure -- “I want to make love to you until you scream for help” comes to mind. That Ted, so suave! (The appropriate response to this is to clutch your throat as if you've lost your voice, coyly claim you cannot scream, and giggle.) So, yeah, it's obviously not exactly a feminist polemic. Jerry does have a career and her own money, though, and pretty directly addresses the double standard with which Ted slams her when he finds out about her infidelity.

In general, sexuality is just way nearer the surface here. For Mary of The Women, divorce means moping around, catfighting and wearing cowgirl outfits. The thought of another man never seems to enter her mind. The divorcees of The Philadelphia Story and His Girl Friday spend most of their time bickering with their ex-husbands and ignoring their less-charismatic new fiances. Jerry, on the other hand, sleeps the hell around. In a choice that reminds me of the “no men on screen” rule of The Women, most of her lovers don't quite make it into the frame – we hear their voices and see their hands dart in to give her jewelry but they stay largely anonymous. It's not the faux-feminist “empowering” sluttery of Sex and the City and its ilk – moral judgment gets passed, and hard. Remember, girls, being easy will get you RAPED by a EUROPEAN COUNT, and also you will become a wannabe homewrecker of poor mangled drunk driving victims. But none of that means the picture doesn't try to make her affairs titillating and glamorous – what better way to get the audience into the theater?

The ending is the strangest part, really. It's interesting that Paul is willing to commit to Jerry, in full knowledge all her shenanigans. But spectral Dorothy steals the show. Never removing the (short) black veil, she acknowledges that Paul never wanted her but weeps that he's still her only reason for living. Like some creepy apparition of The Ghost of Shitty Marriages. When Jerry acquiesces, she announces that the only time she has ever broken her word was when she broke her marriage vow, and that she shouldn't have quit trying just because the relationship wasn't perfect. Like Dorothy, she now intends to hang on for dear life, no matter how crappy things get, because a promise is a promise, by God. It's a logical enough argument, I suppose, but it's not exactly convincing. The moral lesson seems more conditional than universal -- if Paul weren't burdened with a disfigured spouse, nothing would have been standing in their way.

After this scene, there's a brief tacked-on bit where Jerry and Ted reconcile at a New Year's Eve party, but even the filmmakers don't seem to think it's that interesting. The party noise is so loud it almost drowns out the dialogue. They embrace, fade to black, etc. Unlike the movies I wrote about last time, the reunion hasn't been set up as inevitable or expected. Perhaps because the movie was based on a scandalous book, The Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott (fabulous name!), in which the heroine does not remarry her first husband. Hollywood pictures may have been a little more unfettered in 1930, but to leave Jerry single or on a second husband was still pushing it too far.

I kind of want to get my hands on a copy of The Ex-Wife, and check out some other scandalous flicks from the early 30's. Sign of the Cross looks especially good. Claudette Colbert in a milk bath!