Most bleached blondes make me not want to be blonde at all. But Els Pynoo makes me want to go crispy white again. And Danny Mommens's artfully shredded shirt is actually quite practical concert wear. He won't get too sweaty with the air vents. What a hot couple! Am I talking too much about their looks? Everyone does. Even they do, on their official Web site, where their bio boasts, "Danny and Els are sex gods with an innate sense of sexy showmanship." Like Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, they hail from Ghent.
Santogold's MySpace has pulled down all its everything and there's a message saying go to Santigold, because she just changed the spelling of her name for legal reasons. Either way she sounds great and looks like a million bucks.
I was talking to Kirsten, who just had a show at sister. She said she's really getting into The Chefs, and that Helen McCookerybook, who is (or is it was?) in the band, is also in Helen and the Horns. "Tell Annie! This is Annie music!" she enthused. Annie's in The Trusty Knife, and she made a nice video for the band's song It's All Built In. Annie's singing and musical sensibility is sort of like The Chefs and Helen and the Horns. I can see the similarities. She sings in The Trusty Knife. But not much. Usually she's playing bassoon.
Writer Laure Limongi, who has a great blog (if you read French), has been posting songs like crazy on Facebook this afternoon (actually it's night where she is). One of them is Le Zoute Tango by Jacques Brel. It's late-career Brel, with heavy instrumentation and very dramatic. Here he is singing Je ne sais pas, his favorite of his œuvre. And mine, too.
One thing that's interesting about Lux Interior's death is that when you skim through the various obits, no one seems to be in agreement on how old he was. Or even where he died. Since The Daily Swarm quotes The Cramps' reps Girlie Action, I tend to believe he died in California. Plus, he and Poison Ivy lived there, so that makes more sense than New York. But all the conflicting facts and figures make the man seem that much more mysterious.
Another thing that's interesting are the random similarities between his group and the French Les Rita Mitsouko. The Cramps and Les Rita Mitsouko both were both big '80s groups, although The Cramps started in the '70s, and at the core of both groups were an artistic couple. Both bands rocked almost non-stop for decades, until the lead man died. And there are more similarities: although Fred Chichin had been battling cancer, he technically died in November 2007 of heart failure. Lux Interior "passed away this morning [February 4th] due to an existing heart condition."
I won't belabor the things they had in common, except to say that I sincerely send out my condolences to Poison Ivy. And to Catherine Ringer, even though it's been over a year. To lose a lover and artistic collaborator of over thirty years is an enormous weight.
