WE ARE ALL COUNCIL BLUFFS: BAR RESCUE GOES TO O'FACE

It may be a long time before Council Bluffs lives down O’Face. The comically named dive bar was featured on a recent episode of “Bar Rescue” as a sort of boozy object lesson in mismanagement. The staff drank on the job, seemed to have no professional skills, battled each other in the parking lot, and the owner offered an employee money to throw a staffer through a window. Eventually Jon Taffer, the bulldog-like host of the show, walked out, making O’Face the first bar he has refused to rescue.

For the show, the episode was useful. As H.L. Mencken once said, there is a moment when you must spit into your hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. It was important for “Bar Rescue” to establish that there is some behavior that will not be tolerated, and there are some bars that cannot be rescued, and O’Face was the location of that particular narrative. I am not sure that the show’s producers knew this would be the endgame when they started with the bar, but there are a lot of clues they did, including a mysterious piece of footage that conveniently shows up at the end of the episode and causes Taffer to march out. Reality shows are pretty contrived affairs, and, while I can’t prove it, I suspect it was never in the cards for O’Face to be rescued.

And they probably don’t deserve rescuing. I don’t think anything was invented on this show -- I think “Bar Rescue” simply found the most awful bar and the most obnoxious staff they could and then let their cameras roll.

For most of America, this means nothing. Council Bluffs is likely to be unfamiliar to them, recognizable perhaps as one of the early locations of “Hell on Wheels,” which represented to town as a depopulated stretch of plains (nary a bluff in sight!) But to many Omahans, Council Bluffs is a sort of a running joke, and O'Face confirmed our expectations. 

The nickname Omahans give Council Bluffs is “Counciltucky,” and locals speaks of it as though the town were nothing but hillbillies and meth labs. Some of this, I am sure, is the sort of gentle ribbing twinned cities offer each other as a matter of course -- I used to live in Minneapolis, and made fun of Saint Paul quite often, although I have a lot of affection for Saint Paul.

Some is probably rooted in actual competition. After all, Council Bluffs very literally invented Omaha, declaring it a township while Nebraska was still Indian country in order to encourage Union Pacific to build its transcontinental railroad through both towns. It worked, too, but then Union Pacific selected Omaha as its headquarters, and the two towns have looked at each other with askance eyes ever since.

And some of it is probably that, for many decades, Omaha has treated Council Bluffs like a Tijuana on the Missouri, thanks to Omaha’s increasingly moralistic and paternalistic local government. Council Bluffs allowed people to drink younger and later, and so the bridge across the Missouri became a migration route for thirsty Omahans. Council Bluffs has Riverboat gambling, Omaha does not, and so a new migration route developed. Council Bluffs strip clubs offered greater pulchritude, and so back and forth Omahans went, looking to their neighbor to the east for cheap thrills.

It should probably be noted that there are actual hillbillies in Council Bluffs as well. They’re here in Omaha, too, but for whatever reason seem to have influenced Council Bluffs more. Now, hillbilly is a disparaging term, and I will cease to use it from this point on, but I use it advisedly. 

Omaha and Council Bluffs were two of the northern termini of something called the Hillbilly Highway. This was a massive migration of rural southerners in the mid-20th century, who followed U.S. Route 23 and Interstate 75 north seeking semiskilled work. Enough of them landed in Chicago and Detroit to form a distinct subculture there, but there was work to be had in Omaha at the packing plants and work to be had in Council Bluffs on the railroads, and so some settled here.

There are hints of their influence in Omaha. Omaha cookbooks tend to be a mix of Bohemian recipes and southern cooking. The urban legend of the albino farm in Hummel Park is an Appalachian legend, transported north. Stoysich, the House of Sausage, will dress meat for customers, and the owners admit they dress squirrel and groundhog. Finally, I don’t think it is an accident that the Omaha sound includes unironic country influences. Many Omahans legitimately grew up listening to country, and it has had its influence.

But Council Bluffs? Even their accents betray a slight twang. If Omaha music is country inflected, country music often seems to be the soundtrack to Council Bluffs; in fact, this June sees a new country festival called Country on the River in CB. The Mid-America Center is home to a square dancing festival this weekend. And never mind that Council Bluffs produced jazz great Art Farmer (he only lived there to the age four), if CB is known for anybody now, it is known for teen mom and sex-tape star Farrah Abraham, which is about as trashy a celebrity as one could claim.

Mostly, though, I think Omaha's view of Council Bluffs is the result of a phenomenon known as the narcissism of small differences. In the way identical twins will play up the qualities that distinguish one from the other, twinned towns will highlight their differences. Omaha is not a town with a strong sense of place anyway, for reasons I shall detail another day, so it becomes even more important to distinguish ourselves from Council Bluffs, which is so very like us. And if there is one thing history has shown repeatedly, it is that we frequently place our fears about ourselves onto somebody else, another psychological mechanism, this time called projection. If Omahans fear they may be seen as rural yokels, well, at least we're not Council Bluffs.

I feel comfortable saying that, to a very large extent, the following is true: Omaha’s idea of Council Bluffs isn’t so much rooted in the actual town, which, like most towns, is varied and complicated. Omaha’s idea of Council Bluffs is based on what we fear people might be saying about us, and what we fear might be true about us.

We have met the O’Face, and he is us.

THE CONTENT AND THE CONTROVERSY: NSAA BANS POEMS WITH GAY THEMES

Let me introduce you to two poems. The first is titled “Swingset,” and is by a poet named Andrea Gibson. As poets go, Gibson has some cache – she was the first winner of the Women’s World Poetry Slam, and, to quote her bio, Gibson’s poetry “has been featured on the BBC, Air America, C-SPAN, Free Speech TV and in 2010 was read by a state representative in lieu of morning prayer at the Utah State Legislature.” She has a CD of her poetry out just now, called “Truce,” and it is her fifth.

Her poems often address questions of gender and sexuality, and “Swingset” addresses both. She is a former preschool teacher, and the poem addresses her recurring experience of children questioning whether she is a boy or girl, and deciding it doesn’t matter. She parallels this with adults, whose challenges have a sense of real threat to them. She describes being challenged when she uses a women’s bathroom: “Sir, sir, do you realize this is the ladies room?”

“Yes, ma’am, I do,” she responds. “But … I didn’t feel comfortable sticking this tampon up my penis in the men’s room.”

The second poem is called “Same Love,” which is a Macklemore song about growing up and performing in the shadow of homophobia that begins “When I was in the third grade I thought that I was gay, 'Cause I could draw, my uncle was, and I kept my room straight.” You may have heard it recently – it was performed at this past year’s Grammys, and has repeatedly been remixed and revisited, its message becoming a conversation. There was Angel Haze’s version, as an example, which replaces Macklemore’s abstract fears of being gay with the more direct experience of it:

"At age 13, my mother knew I wasn't straight / She didn't understand but she had so much to say / She sat me on the couch looked me straight in my face and said / You'll burn in hell or you'll probably die of AIDS."

I mention this because both have become news in Omaha, but, in the manner of a lot of news, the controversy is reported at the expense of the content. The story is not terrifically complex, and I quote the World-Herald: The Nebraska School Activities Association has asked a state champion from its speech contest to change the content of his poem before recording it for a television program.

Here, I suspect the word “asked” is misused; I would guess it was not so much a request as a command. The student in question is Michael Barth of Gordon-Rushville High School, who was a first-place prize-winner at a state high school speech tournament. This would ordinarily net the winner a spot on Nebraska Educational Television’s “Best of the Best” program; in this instance, with these poems, it won’t.

"We don't want to use a showcase for the best of the best to promote personal agendas," the World-Herald quotes an administrator, a sort of official statement that masks more than it reveals. Is this really the policy of the Nebraska School Activities Association? Will they exile all speech that promote personal agendas, whatever that nebulous phrase means?

She is paraphrased later as saying broadcasting the speech might give the indication that NSAA endorsed the speech and this might cause controversy.

And that second part, I think, is the crux of it. It’s a decision rooted in cowardliness, and I think it is shameful. You cannot on one hand encourage students to explore the power of public speech and then deny them that speech when its power becomes controversial. You cannot reward them for their excellence in speech and then tell them that the public will punish, in some ill-defined way, if that speech is heard by too many, or by the wrong sorts.

And I mention the content, because I think it is useful to discover what, precisely, the administrators find so threatening. A poet whose work was read in lieu of morning prayer at the Utah State Legislature. A popular hip hop artist whose work has been at the top spot on the Billboard chart – and the very song that NSAA find too challenging has worked its way to #11 on those charts. The very song that has been on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards, and, as I mentioned, the 56th Grammy Awards.

(Note: There is the possibility that Michael Barth performed something other than the Macklemore song of the same title; news stories haven’t been very detailed in this regard. However, given the description of the contents, the Macklemore song seemed the most likely match for the banned poem.)

I cannot imagine the reasoning behind disallowing these pieces from the “Best of the Best” show. They already have met the NSAA’s standards for community decency and excellence; the Lincoln Journal-Star notes that the versions performed by Barth removedany offensive language (one imagines the penis reference was absent). There may be a reason beyond fear, but, if there is, it hasn’t been clearly articulated. These are relatively mainstream poetry pieces, challenging only in that they directly address homophobia. The likeliest people to object to these poems are homophobes, and should we be capitulating our sense of excellence in speech to them?

No, there is a message being communicated here, and it is one that the NSAA would do well to consider very carefully. And that message is, speak freely, until people who hate you and hate what you have to say object, and then shut up.

It’s a terrible message for an educator to communicate. It’s a terrible message for a speech program to communicate.

It’s a terrible message for anyone to communicate.

NO STRANGERS AT KANEKO

Once, there was a stamp. It was diamond-shaped, and on it was a picture of a camel racing a locomotive. It came into the hands of a young boy named Richard Feynman, and his name may be familiar to you, because he later grew up to the win the Nobel prize in physics in 1965.

As a boy, Richard collected stamps, and the one with the camel joined others in his collection, all from someplace in the world called Tuva. At night, he dreamed of Tuva.

It was then inaccessible, and very little was known about it. There were field recordings of Tuvans singing, their voices somehow producing two tones at once, one deep and guttural, one high and flutelike. Richard spent his life obsessed with Tuva, and, at the end of his days, sick with cancer, he tried to go to the country that made the stamp. It took him a decade to make arrangements, and he died just before his visa arrived.

This is the power of an image. Sometimes it seems like the world is not so very big a place, but then we see something that reminds us that there is still so much of it we haven’t seen and do not know. We’re all a bit like that boy in Far Rockaway, Richard Feynman, looking at a stamp of a camel racing a train and wondering at it.

The gallery space at KANEKO is just now filled with images like these. It’s an exhibit created for the Annenberg Space for Photography, called “No Strangers: Ancient Wisdom in a Modern World,” and it was organized by a man named Wade Davis, who knows a thing or two about how big the world is. He has a remarkable title – he is the Explorer in Residence at National Geographic. His career has mostly been focused on ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology, fields that look at how indigenous cultures use plants for ritual purposes and for medicine.

Davis also authored a book many years ago called “The Serpent and the Rainbow” that recounted his experiences in Haiti trying to track down the origins of stories about zombies, which he credited to blowfish poison, which can simulate death. The book was made into a horror film of the same title in 1988, in which Bill Pullman, as Davis, is buried alive and must dig his way out of a coffin, and how many ethnopharmocologists can claim that? There can’t be more than five or six, probably.

Davis takes photos on his adventures, and he’s not alone. This exhibit is made up of a handful of photographers’ work, spanning the globe and investigating the intersection between culture, history, and the world. The text of the exhibit alternates between alarming – we are in a period of mass language extinction, as an example – and a bit woo, in that there is a tendency to describe these cultures as somehow being mystically in touch with the ebb and flow of nature in a way modern man has forgotten. And perhaps they are – I haven’t met them, and all I really know about nature is that I am sure it would kill me if it had a chance.

But it is the photos that do the most work. Or, rather, I should say that they have the potential to inspire the most work, in that the images raise questions that demand to be answered, and the viewer needs to take responsibility for finding those answers. There are images of African tribal rituals and of Buddhist training (including an image from the Shaolin Temple that provides more evidence for a pet theory of mine: everything is improved by kung fu.) There is a startling image of fowl hunters emerging from the Indus River in Pakistan with birds attached to their heads like masks, effectively making the hunters into living decoys. There is a photo of a Pashupatinath yogi engaged in “penis yoga,” hoisting bricks with his member while staring at the camera with an expression that is not easy to discern, although it is not the expression I would have picked were I in the same circumstance.

The images seem to belie the title – these are images of strangeness. Indeed, the show highlights the moments that distinguish their subjects from their viewers – few Omahans, as an example, will participate in teenage circumcision or scarification rituals. Although, in fairness, the world may be big, but people travel a lot in it, and so there may be a few Omahans who will experience these things. I won’t be doing penis yoga anytime soon, but there are those of you who might, and I’ve seen more surprising things become popular. Perhaps Omaha will find itself at the forefront of a penis yoga fad, for those who are finding hot yoga a bit dated and are looking for something a tittle more outré.

I am sure there will be those who respond to the Pashupatinath yogi, in the way that the diamond stamp of the camel struck young Richard Feynman. There were photos that struck me, and, in fact, they are no too far removed from Feynman’s beloved Tuva. They are photos by Hamid Sardar-Afkhami, a Harvard-trained scholar and photographer with a fascination for outer Mongolia. And who wouldn’t be fascinated?

Sardar-Afkhami’s photographs look into Mongolia, especially the “Dark Havens,” a no-man’s-land regularly targeted by Tuvan bandits, where reindeer herders have gunfights with rustlers, and where men on horseback hunt with eagles. The images are extremely striking, especially to me – I imagine it’s very much as Feynman felt as a boy, seeing the Tuvan stamps. The photos demand investigation. Who are these people? How is it that there is a place in the world where horses rear back with fur clad riders atop, and there, at the end of one arm, wings rising for flight, is a golden eagle?

And perhaps this is why the show is called “No Strangers.” These Mongolians are strangers now, but I have already done some reading. I have already started to learn about them, to satisfy the curiosity that the photos engendered. They were stranger a few weeks ago, when I first saw the images. And a week before that, they were unknown to me.

I don’t know if these eagle hunters will stay with me the way the Tuvans did Feynman; if, at some moment, I will decide I must travel to the Dark Havens to see the bandits, the reindeer herders, and the eagle hunters. But I might. I surely might. One day, these people may not be strangers to me at all. One day, I might be on ponyback, in furs, and eagle on my arm.

In my dreams, I already am.

"No Strangers:  Ancient Wisdom in a Modern World" appears at KANEKO through April 19.

WAYNE SHORTER

Sometimes it seems like everyone wants to tell me jazz is dead. People have stopped ending phone conversations with “goodbye” and instead quickly mutter “jazz is dead” and then hang up. Greeters at stores welcome me with a booming cry of “Jazz is dead!” Email spammers promise fortunes of African cash, all for me, if I only transfer them some money to assist in the movement of Krugerrands and, oh, by the way, jazz is dead.

Jazz isn’t dead. What dies? People die, but the things they make live on. Culture has its moment, and then seems to fade, and then suddenly arrives again, sometimes having gone underground and armed itself. The time of the hobo came and went, but there is still a hobo convention in Iowa and people still carve nickels as creative tramps once did. And so it goes, working its way back in time. Everything that had its moment still has its adherents, and will rise again. There are musicians making early classical music on antique instruments. There are poets writing in Old English. There are still painters whose primary media are earth pigments and cave walls.

Jazz is not dead, because Wayne Shorter is not dead. He is 80, or 80-something, and still tours and still puts out albums. He is a link to the past, but he is also proof that the past is still with us, still doing its thing, still biding its time until it can become the present again. Jazz will always be with us, singing old stories in our ears, and telling new stories to those who want to hear it, and one day, once again, there will be many who want those stories.

In the meanwhile, there are enough who still care to bring Wayne Shorter to Omaha and have him play at the Holland Center, one of Omaha’s premiere venues. And that is as it should be, and those of you who know Shorter already know this. His resume is too long to completely summarize, but it involves defining roles in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Miles Davis's Second Great Quintet, and Weather Report, which is sort of like having played with Elvis, and then The Beatles, and then Led Zepplin.

Shorter is a man with a saxophone, which, for a time, coupled with the trumpet, were the instruments of jazz’s triumph. Jazz had been America’s pop music, but, after World War Two, it became the language of America’s introspection. Combos became small and wildly adventurous, and so you have the blues-driven hard bop of the Jazz Messengers, which dug deep into the African and rural American roots of jazz while still exploring the stratospheric possibilities of composition and orchestration. Shorter wrote some of the medium’s defining songs, such as “Lester Left Town," named after saxophone great Lester Young. There was Shorter, looking back at one of jazz’s legends while looking forward to the medium's possibilities. The song replaced Young’s unhurried sweetness of melody with startling chromatic runs, but maintained the musician’s swinging precision.

Jazz was ravenous then. There were no sounds that Miles Davis wouldn’t explore, and Shorter became one of his primary composers. There was “Nefertiti,” as an example, a soaring acoustic composition that moves at a funereal pace, consisting of an ambiguous melody that repeats itself for almost eight minutes as the rhythm section improvises wildly underneath. That was Shorter’s composition, dating to 1967.

And then, in the following year, Davis went electric with long, rock-inspired compositions. The album was called “Miles in the Sky,” a direct nod to The Beatles, and included a song called “Paraphernalia.” The song featured an angular, groovy guitar riff and ratatat drums underneath spacey horns, and that was Shorter too. It all culminated in 1970’s “Bitches Brew,” an album that magnificently combined Davis’ relentless ingenuity in arrangement (the band had two bassists, two to three drummers, two to three electric piano players, all playing simultaneously) with the sonic possibilities developed by rock and roll, especially the wild psychedelia of Jimmy Hendrix. Shorter was part of it, and wrote the final track on the album, ‘Sanctuary,” a mellow, soulful song that somehow seems to be all edges, the finish to the album that created jazz fusion and is one of its finest examples.

And then there was Weather Report, which everybody insisted on calling fusion except the members of the band itself. For 16 years, Weather Report explored a lot of territory on the musical map of the world, the band more or less continually improvising at every moment around songs that referenced Afro-Cuban sounds, rhythm and blues, soul, funk, pop, and big band. Shorter was there, often in the background, stepping in with his saxophone to add a needed harmony here, a improvised hook there. The band defined the restlessness of jazz in the 70s, its sense of being both unmoored in time and very much of its era. (Jaco Pastorius’ fretless bass playing remains one of the sounds that best defines the 70s.) It was an era in which jazz seemed to stop declaring itself, and claiming that it could be anything, and instead seemed as though it was questioning itself, and asking “what am I?”

It’s a question the form is still asking, and Shorter is still there, adding nuance to the question and providing his own answers. He put out an album just last year, “Without a Net,” which All About Jazz described as “devoid of nostalgia and full of improvisational freedom.” These are not the words you use to describe a dead genre whose practitioners are living waxworks, recreating the sounds of a receding past. These are the words you use to describe a still-dynamic genre whose possibilities are only limited by the fact that, at the moment, it is slightly out of favor.

That moment will pass, and jazz will return. One hopes that Shorter is there for that moment as well.

Wayne Shorter appears at the Holland Center on April 2; go to Omaha Performing Arts for more information.

WALKING DEAD, SEASON FOUR

As any skilled zombie hunter will tell you, the first and hardest task is to identify the zombie. They all seem approximately similar, or at least they do now, ever since George Romero lensed “Night of the Living Dead” in 1968. All have sallow skin, lurch when they move, crave human flesh, and are dispatched by a coup de grace that destroys the brain.

But, aside from the visual spectacle of postmortem cannibalism and spontaneous head trauma, these details are the least important things about zombies. One must, instead, determine if this is the sort of zombie that precipitates a social collapse, wherein men are more dangerous than monsters, as with all of Romero’s films and “28 Days Later.” Or perhaps the zombie is a disease vector, as in “World War Z.” Are they symbols of mindless consumerism, as in “Dawn of the Dead”? Are they just a purposeless version of us, as in “Warm Bodies”?

Zombies are powerful monsters, but they are especially useful metaphors.

This question is a particularly hard one when addressing the zombies of “The Walking Dead,” because they are alarmingly protean. They are whatever the story needs them to be when it needs them to be that. Sometimes the world teems with them, and sometimes only one or two appear per episode, when the apocalypse seems almost as an afterthought. Sometimes they quickly overpower even a large crowd, sometimes a single person can fight off an entire zombie horde.

But, then, this is a show that doesn’t seem to have much interest in zombies. Last season the show introduced a fellow who somehow had been press-ganged by circumstances into acting as a scientist, Milton. He ran a few rudimentary tests, learned nothing, and then turned into a zombie, which didn’t help his experiments. There is a character this season, Eugene, who claims to know the cause of the outbreak, but he hasn’t been forthcoming, instead ambling about like a southern-fried version of Rain Man. We haven’t learned much about the undead, except that they are attracted to sound and fire, and that it is possible to hide yourself from them by covering yourself with their entrails, or by using mutilated and jawless zombies as camouflage. These facts are made us of or ignored, depending on how much jeopardy the plot demands of its characters.

In “The Walking Dead,” zombies are machines of story momentum, and little else. They are not metaphor. They are a writing aid. And this isn’t much of a surprise, as this is a show that is strangely bereft of metaphor. It is as though the first casualty of the apocalypse is subtext. Characters say precisely what they are thinking at the moment it occurs to them, and they even vocalize the theme of each episode, as though defending a college thesis rather than fighting for survival in what author Carrie Ryan dubbed a "forest of hands and teeth."

But so be it. In my experience, if a piece of art seems disinterested in something, it is because it is more interested in something else. And this is a show that has taken extraordinary efforts to chart the development of its characters, especially in the past season, which has been showrun by Scott Gimple. Under his watch, “The Walking Dead” has enjoyed some especially fine writing, subtext or no. It’s become a lot less talky and progressed at a breakneck pace, occasionally taking unexpected detours.

And the worldbuilding is growing sharper. Even though the show is not interested in zombies, it is interested in people, and it is especially interested in the tactics people use to survive, the moral compromises that result from those tactics, and, especially in this past half season, how people live with those compromises and what it turns them into.

In fact, the past half season has been like the longest, strangest band photo ever made. Everybody dresses in grungy outfits, looking like one sort of 60s musical combo or another. There was Maggie and her crew, in ponchos and thrift-shop jeans, looking like an acid rock band. There was Daryl and a group of murderous rednecks called “The Claimers,” who not only looked like an outlaw country band (the leader even had a Day of the Dead cowboy shirt!), but had the name of one. And there was the paramilitary outfit that Glenn joined, which, honestly, looked like every single cover band in every dive bar I have ever been to.

They all posed by railroad tracks, which is what bands do, and looked soulful, which is what bands do, and killed zombies, which is what bands do, or at least what the band Guitar Wolf does. And they spent the season singing their songs, and they were songs of regret, of missing someone who is away, of the pleasures of alcohol, of forging simple rules to help you get by, and then of breaking those rules. It was a great album, even if it was necessarily a compilation album.

The season seemed as though it was preparing to end on an unexpectedly ambiguous note, with the characters reunited but trapped in a dire circumstance, expertly manipulated into becoming the prey of an gang of Conor Oberst lookalikes.. But then, with the last line of dialogue, it turned hopeful. And it was justified.

Because as bleak as things may have been at the moment, at least it got the band back together.

THE FAINT: DOOM ABUSE

I have a new wave story to tell. Years ago, when Peter Gabriel’s “So” came out, a song from it caught my mother’s ear. We were driving somewhere, and it was on the radio, and she asked “Is this Peter Gabriel?” And then she said, “We used to live by him.” 

Many years ago, my family lived in Bath, a ceremonial county of Somerset in Southwest England. Properly, we lived in Swainswick, a civil parish that is part of the Bath and North East Somerset unitary authority, and I will demur from any more of these details, because the more you discuss the English countryside, the more Mr. Toad and Mr. Badger it all becomes. Let’s just say that I lived on the sort of little farm you see in movies, and my brother constantly fell in nettle patches, and there was a large hill out my back window that had a tiny little village on it called Woolley, and Woolley had an annual fair with hobby horses and Punch costumes and morris dancers.

So it was that sort of a place, and not the kind of place you expect to discover Peter Gabriel lived, as he was then making densely-layered, synthesizer-based art pop with a distinct international influence. Instead, you sort of expected to move a toadstood and find a bearded man in a newsboy cap playing a hurdy gurdy.

But there he was, in Woolley, and the hill it was on was Solsbury Hill, which became one of his songs. My mother was friends with his then-wife, who organized the Woolley festival, and, as it turned out, I went to a little 12th century church once in a while with his daughters, and it’s all turning Toad and Badger again. 

The reason I mention this is because I am writing about The Faint’s new album, “Doom Abuse.” I know everybody mentions new wave when discussing The Faint, and I know it must be tiring for them, although they have let on that they do listen to a lot of new wave, but let me explain why I once again am raising the dreaded specter of a moribund genre to discuss a contemporary band.

I was a new waver when I was in high school, and, in my heart’s private chambers, I still am. I had skinny ties, high tops, and that hairstyle that consists of longs bangs that drape across the eyes as though all the bleaching and all the dry look mousse had finally exhausted it. I was then a Minnesotan, and new wave appealed to me for a few reasons. Firstly, it had an art school worldliness to it, with its hits tackling such international subjects as The Metro, commissars, luftballoons, and the pop music of New York, London, Brussels, Munich. Secondly, especially with synthpop, it seemed very science fiction. I may have been a Minneapolitan, and, for a while, when I was very young, an English country boy, but as a fan of new wave, I was a citizen of the world, and it was the world of the future. 

As it turns out, Peter Gabriel’s Bath years aren’t unique. Tears for Fears also hailed from Bath, and, in fact, would borrow instruments from Gabriel. Aztec Camera came from suburban East Kilbride in Scotland. Bauhaus came from Northampton, 70 miles northwest of London. The Cure came from Crawley. Depeche Mode came from Basildon. Echo and the Bunnyman were Liverpoodlian. And on it goes like that, through the alphabet: Q-Feel from Southampton, Soft Cell from Leeds, XTC from Swindon, Yazoo from Basildon. All these cosmopolitan spacemen roaming the streets of tomorrow’s international cities hailed from farm towns, fishing villages, and coal mining centers. New wave was not an exclusively rural phenomenon, but it was largely a rural phenomenon, and perhaps that’s why it appealed to a boy who lived in a midwestern mill town, and perhaps that why it still has resonance in a midwestern train terminus and meat packing center.

Whenever I read about The Faint, they are asked about Omaha, perhaps with the same surprise that I felt in learning that Peter Gabriel lived on the same nettle patch that my brother used to fall into. And nobody really seems to know what to say about this once boom town, this dimmed and tarnished jewel of the Missouri, except that it’s cheap to live here and there’s a lot more going on than you might expect. But it’s the perfect place to be a new waver, or, at least, to be part of a band inspired by new wave. Because you can live anywhere and, if you have a synth guitar and enough mousse, you too can be a citizen of the future world, and the truth is, if you move aside a toadstool, you’ll find a new wave band.

Anyway, I have listed to The Faint’s new album a half dozen times in the past few days, and it’s terrific. It’s the first in a half-dozen years, years the band describes as ones in which they were rediscovering the joy of being a band. They set out to make this album fast and sloppy, so they wouldn’t get bogged down in the humdrum of precision production. They wanted to catch their music at the moment they discovered it, and they wanted to plug in sounds they discovered at the moment they were still excited by them. At least, that’s the sense I get from the few interviews and press statements they have put out about the album.

I love it. I love that their sense of fun involved really noisy machine sounds. I love that the album is repeatedly punctuated by guitar riffs that sound like somebody threw Prince down a well and the pelted him with garbage. I love that so many of the songs are about unbalanced psychological states, and that the sounds that excited them sometimes resemble the harmony parts from Styx’s “Mr. Roboto.” It’s a breakneck pile-on of an album, and it’s the product of people who have an awful lot of pop craftsmanship, and so even when they’re losing their minds, it comes out as hooks and bridges and intros and middle-eights. This is The Faint’s idea of fun, and it is my idea of fun, and I’m ready to break out the skinny tie again, put it around my neck, and then, inspired by the mania of this album, set it on fire. 

It’s great stuff, and it’s no surprise it comes from Omaha. Like Sussex, like Essex, like Wessex, like Devon and Dorset before us, we’re more than capable of strapping on our synthesizers and climbing through dirty old windows into a Metro of our mind. We may need it more, and we do it well.

THE TRAP ROOM

Let me tell you a few secrets, although I am always loathe to do so. Sometimes secrets exist for a reason -- because to tell is to ruin them. But cultural journalism is the business of secret ruination, I suppose.

I can at least console myself in the fact that, at the moment, I have about three readers, and, further, I have never succeeded in making anything popular in my life. I have committed everything I have ever loved to paper, dreading that the object of my affections would soon be swarmed with lessor suitors, and instead had them met with total indifference.

But I still fear spilling my secrets, so come close, and I will simply whisper what I am about to say, and then we must both look away, knowing that we must never acknowledge that I have said it.

In fact, I have multiple secrets, and the first is a bar called the Trap Room, just north of downtown in the same complex that houses Film Streams and the Slowdown. This is, of course, a secret that is no secret at all. The Trap Room has received plenty of press, in no smart part because of its association with Saddle Creek Records.

The Trap Room is owned by Jason Kulbel and Robb Nansel from the label, who also own Slowdown, and it initially seems puzzling for bar owners to open a bar directly opposite the bar that they own.

I asked about this when the Trap Room first opened, and was told that the owners noticed that after bands performed at Slowdown, they and their audience inevitably left to another bar, and Kulbel and Nansel decided that they might as well also offer the other bar. I recently asked one of the bartenders how this has worked out, and was told it has and it hasn’t, depending on the band and the audience and the mood of the evening.

This makes sense. The Trap Room is a very particular sort of drinking establishment. It is bijou, about the size of a basement bar in an uncle’s house, which it resembles. It is the most Omaha-looking bar I have ever been to, in a certain way. This town is crowded with thrift stores and inexpensive antique stores, and so there are more than a few Omahans who live in apartments that look like they were interior designed in 1963 by a designer obsessed with kitsch, Americana, and mustard colors.

This is what the Trap Room feels like, and I am given to understanding that much of its interior design was rescued from eBay. Despite the presence of two televisions playing sports, the bar encourages conversation -- strangers who belly up next to each other often wind up talking, at least for a few minutes, and friends will group up to sit at a table or outside to converse. This is ideal for one sort of band afterparty, where everybody furrows their brows and sips their drinks and confabulates. It is imperfect when you want to take poppers and dance naked, as some bands do.

Nonetheless -- and this is my second, and bigger, secret -- the Trap Room is very much the place to go to meet musicians. This is unsurprising, given its association with a label and proximity to a performance venue. But I am frequently surprised that audience members who want to hobnob with artists don’t know enough to find out what bar they are going to.

I used to live near the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and my girlfriend and I made a regular habit of going to their bar just as their shows were letting out. We would introduce ourselves to actors, and, if it was somebody we especially wanted to meet, offer to buy them a drink. It’s a trick directly out of the groupie playbook, although I don’t think stage actors are typically the targets of this sort of behavior, and, as I understand it, with rock stars you do not buy them a cocktail, but cocaine. Nonetheless, if you are bored and looking to insinuate yourself into a lively group, now you know how.

I will warn you that there is a risk, when borrowing from the groupie playbook, of being mistaken for a groupie -- there was one Chicago-based actor who invited us back to his hotel room for drinks, and it seemed that he suspected us of being swingers. We were not, but you might be, and so swing away, dear friends -- the arts community will thank you for it.

But I should close by saying that one need not go to the Trap Room with a stratagem, although stratagems always make an experience more entertaining. Sometimes you just want a quiet place to drink a well-poured cocktail, and the Trap Room is that as well.

I am a drinker who prefers a well-made classic cocktail, and, even in this era of craft cocktails, it can be disappointingly had work to find a bartender who pours a good martini or manhattan. They do at the Trap Room -- I have been going for about a year, and have yet to have a bad drink, and had just about given up on finding a good martini. Martinins are especially tricky, as bartenders tend to panic about the vermouth and use too little, and use poor vermouth, and neglect to refrigerate their vermouth, and -- well, I won’t go on, but there are a lot of issues with vermouth.

This is not the case at the Trap Room. Come for the musicians, stay for the vermouth. Although, if my past experience as a critic is anything to go on, you won’t take any of my advice at all, and this is probably for the best, as I would feel just awful about ruining it.