Play’s the Thing .2

Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players By Jim Dunn

Iwas the AV guy in high school: 16 mm projectors, record players, videos—all loaded on a cart and rolled down the hall, put together with my fat ass, dorky hair, and clothes—classic geek. Like all geeks, I wanted to be Angus Young, but I believe the closest Angus and I ever got was vinyl—he recorded on it and I played it. Turns out I was closer to rock stardom than I thought. My instrument, the slide projector, is the hot new instrument, especially in the hands of Tina Pina Trachtenburg.

Tina, along with her husband Jason (vocals and guitar/keyboard) and their nine-year old daughter Rachel (drums), are the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. Last month, they played to a packed house at the Mad Art Gallery. As Jason and Rachel played a loopy set of songs, Tina showed the slides (meticulously timed) that inspired the songs.

This all started back in Seattle, where Jason would spend his days tending to their dog-walking business and his nights in the local clubs, playing guitar and singing. One day, Tina picked up a packet of slides and a projector at an estate sale. Obsessed with the anonymous family’s tale they told, Jason wrote a song to go along with the slide. Thus, “Mountain Trip to Japan, 1959” was born, and next came the coordination of the family into the act (Rachel started on harmonica and moved to drums). What was one song at the end of his act soon became theact and a hot ticket around Seattle. The Trachtenburgs decided to move to Brooklyn, and soon they were appearing twice a week at local clubs to sellout crowds, opening for They Might Be Giants and becoming the first unsigned act to appear on Conan O’Brien’s show.

Talking with Jason Trachtenburg can be somewhat disorienting. He has the look, mannerisms, and enthusiasm of the guy who rhapsodizes eloquently—too eloquently—about how good the tofu at Whole Foods is. There is a part of him that knows this act is part unique art rock and part Second City TV skit, but he is as earnest as can be. He declared that the TFSP was “formed as a necessity to save entertainment. We have had it with all the sorry, sad, monotonous, predictable music out there. We have been commissioned by a higher power, whatever that means, to bring entertainment back to the masses…and good songs.” No small job this band has set up for itself.

Using the slides-as-inspiration method, he has come up with songs like “Fondue Friends in Switzerland,” “Eggs,” and the irritatingly memorable “European Boys.” The songs are good and fun and any thought that they might not hold up on their own without the presence of the slides or the nine-year-old drummer with pigtails and poise were dispelled the first time I put it in my CD player. The songs fall somewhere into They Might Be Giants territory and, like TMBG, carry all sorts of underlying messages. According to Jason, the band has raised audience expectations. “Some of our songs can be interpreted three or four different ways depending on how you look at it. There are many different levels,” he said, adding, “We are really deep.” He theorized that the recorded output of the band must be strong. “People say ‘Is it going to be OK without the slides?’ Then I feel defensive and we have to prove ourselves, moreso than almost any other band out there, by making the best CD possible.”

Though they are unsigned, TFSP have talked with several labels, including Bar None, Minty Fresh, and V2. Signing with V2 would put them on the same label as the White Stripes, who have turned out to be fans. They showed up at their concert in Detroit and Spinran a piece comparing Rachel’s drumming style with Meg White’s.

Some of the slides shown during the performance edge into people’s private lives. During one song called “Look at Me,” the mundane slides

“I think, for some of these people, we have made their lives worth living,” Jason said. “Their life was meant to be immortalized in our song. That was the whole purpose of it.

Not working for Boeing.”

PROFILE

show the lives of two women as their friendship takes them through war, marriages, and life. Suddenly the slides take a detour, as one of the women appears topless. The Trachtenburgs walk that thin line between an invasion of privacy and a shot at immortality. “I think, for some of these people, we have made their lives worth living,” Jason said. “Their life was meant to be immortalized in our song. That was the whole purpose of it. Not working for Boeing.”

While we talked, Rachel Trachtenburg was running around the gallery, chased by a person wearing a cheesy fake mustache. He turned out to be her drum teacher. It is sometimes easy to forget that this girl is nine. She has amazing poise, whether staring out into the audience while keeping a steady beat, or reacting (sometimes disdainfully) to her father’s joke-heavy stage patter. One minute she is Ringo Starr and the next you realize that her father is carefully making sure that her equipment is put away for her. Having once been nine, I think this must be a totally cool life for a kid. But the more adult me wonders if this is any kind of life for a little girl. Wouldn’t she rather have a nice, “normal” life?

“As fate would have it, our real life is the exact same thing as the show,” says Jason. “Rachel is brought up in this environment where everything we do is part of our act and that is normal for her. We wouldn’t work in a traditional situation.” That is not to say they don’t have their moments. Jason went on to say that there are time when he would want himself or Tina to be a better parent, or Rachel to be a better child; this is true of all families. However, he noted, “There are those times during the day that we do these miraculous things together. Totally full of synchronicity and universal connectiveness parenting, music, rock and roll, slideshow situation…” At that moment, in his normal earnest way, Jason Trachtenburg was nothing but a proud parent, content to have combined his family and his musical passions all into one basket.

WHENTHE CULTUREPOPS

In May...we’re there

TED LEO & THE PHARMACISTS May 7, Creepy Crawl You might remember Ted Leo from the New York hard-core scene with bands like Citizens Arrest and Animal Crackers, or as leader of the DC mod-punk band, Chisel. You may even be lucky enough to have caught the short-lived but long remembered Sin Eaters, whom Ted fronted from 1997-1998, photo courtesy Lookout!Records or his touring stint with the Spinanes during those same years. Probably, though, you are most familiar with the understated but forceful path he’s been blazing as a solo artist since 1997. His songs are fragile but proud, and exalt in social and musical purpose, with inescapable melodies and tangible yet romantic lyrics that could easily draw comparisons to greats such as Billy Bragg or Alex Chilton.

THE SAMPLES May 10, Mississippi Nights The Samples had appeared to be a band that successfully bucked the system, playing to devoted crowds across the country and releasing albums on their own terms, without record company hassles nor the benefit of radio support. So it was something of a shock to read frontman Sean Kelly’s incredibly emotional letter on the band’s Web site back in early March. In it, Kelly laid bare the band’s financial woes and asked fans for financial support. The response thus far has been quite positive; see for yourself when Kelly &Co. make another stop in the Gateway to the West.

Contents

Profile

Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players . . . . .1 Justin Tolentino . . . . . .3

Play by Play . . . . .5

Aphex Twin, Black Keys, Rosanne Cash, Vic Chestnutt, Nicolai Dunger, Exies, Flaming Lips, Matthew Good, (hed) Planet Earth, Daniel Johnston, Damien Jurado, My 2 Planets, Serengeti, Summer at Shatter Creek, White Stripes, Lucinda Williams, Yo La Tengo, Pete Yorn, Saddle Creek 50

Backstage Pass . .10

Sea and Cake, Mary Alice Wood, Jump, Little Children, Fire Theft, North Mississippi All Stars, Datsuns, Keller Williams, Cave In/Piebald, Postal Service, Jurassic 5, Ani DiFranco

Cover Story . . . .14

Cursive

Now Playing . . . .16

Anger Management, Confidence, Morvern Callar, Till Human Voices Wake Us

Play’s the Thing .20 HotHouse’s In the Blood

Elliot Goes . . . .20

Local Scenery . .21

College Radio Confessions . . . .23

Take Five . . . . . . .24

The Reactions

Page by Page . . . .25

Mark Bego, Lloyd Kaufman

You Are Here . . .26

Private Sector

Backstage Pass . .27

Playback St.Louis One-Year Anniversary Party

Publisher Two Weasels Press LLC

Managing Editor Laura Hamlett

Associate Editor/Art Director Jim Dunn

Contributing Editors BryanA. Hollerbach/Kevin Renick

Contributing Writers Kyle Beachy, Jim Dunn, Rick Eubanks, Jessica Gluckman, Alex Graves, Laura Hamlett, Dan Heaton, Bryan A. Hollerbach, Jeremy Housewright, Mandy Jordan, Kevin Korinek, John Kujawski, Cayte Nobles, Wade Paschall, Andy Rea, Kevin Renick, Stephen Schenkenberg, Jeremy SegelMoss, Pete Timmermann, Ross Todd, Rev. Mike Tomko, MicheleUlsohn, Taylor Upchurch, Ben Weinstein, Mike Zapf, Rudy Zapf

Contributing Photographers Jennifer Carr, Alex Graves, Molly Hayden, Cayte Nobles

Cover Photograph Courtesy Saddle Creek Records

Printing by Kohler and Sons Inc. Nancy Allen • 314-428-9800

Distribution Two Weasels Press LLC

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ustin Tolentino’s studio in the Lemp Art Stables doesn’t much adhere to the finer principles of decor. In one jumbled corner there’s an aging “L” couch, its yellow and orange cushions saggy from years of strain. A short wooden coffee table sits awkwardly within the couch’s crook; on it sits the obligatory glass ashtray packed with butts and thick tiers of slag. The only other piece of furniture is the small end table that supports a simple, black boom box, which in turn supports a sloppy stack of CDs.

Everything else in the room either is, or is becoming, Tolentino’s artwork. There are rows of glass bottles (too many to count), some the approximate size of your standard alcoholic grandfather’s flask, the others probably five gallons each. Both sizes are painted with various faces, characters, or animals. On one, what looks like a drunken, deranged cartoon chicken is squawking at nothing. Dominating the studio, though, are the paintings, either hung or leaning in rows against the wall, that span the gamut from 3” x 5” postcards to 4’ x 4’ canvases. In between are the found wooden objects of various size and shape: old oak shutters from a forgotten window, discarded, tired signs from a long-gone era, etc. In other words, anything that will accept several coats of paint.

When Istopped by, there were a bunch of flags draped over two pipes that run just below the ceiling, hanging almost to the floor like a bizarre set of multi-colored curtains. In between the two rows stood Tolentino, his truck-driver cap restricting his wild, neck-length thatch of brown curls. He wore what he always wears: jeans, slick Euro-style shoes, and a T-shirt. He usually has a mustache and sometimes a goatee, neither of which is ever especially full.

“It’s my new medium,” Tolentino said, nodding to the flags he found ditched in a trashcan somewhere. One was from A.G. Edwards; others weren’t immediately identifiable. But there were also a couple Missouri State flags. Tolentino pulled one of these from among the group and, wearing a devious expression that would send any mother worth even half a shit to her early grave, said, “This is really going to piss some people off.”

If it were up to him, Tolentino would still be practicing his craft on an entirely different set of canvases. He started painting graffiti during the eighth grade, after opening up an issue of The Source magazine and seeing photos of tags in New York. “Listening to the music, I felt like I was already a part of this hip hop culture, but I didn’t feel like I was taking part as much as I could. I wanted to do all four elements and just be good at all of them, but because of my background in art, this was the part I focused on.” And for years, throughout high school in Fenton and a four-year stint in Tennessee attending the Memphis College of Art, graffiti was a major component of Tolentino’s life. “There’s no drug that will ever match the feeling you get going out and painting a wall and wondering if you’re going to get caught.”

Property owners, though, aren’t especially fond of graffiti, nor are many city courts. Tolentino admits, “I’ve been locked up too many times to go out any more. It gets expensive. Last time cost me like $1,200, with court fines and vandalism and trespassing fines.”

These days, he spends a lot more time indoors. Now 25 and one of two curators of the ever-revolving collection at the Art Stables, Tolentino’s paintings aim to capture the urban aesthetic of a bombed freight car in a more potable, marketable dosage. His work is like visually matured graffiti, condensed and refined for a smaller stage. Most involve figures—myriad cartoon faces that convey things like frustration, disappointment, constipation, intellectual malaise, a hangover, etc.—against rudimentary, simply colored backgrounds aimed at emulating the textured surfaces of train cars and weathered walls. Many of the images, including the several tobacco-themed works, deal with “mocking myself, mocking people’s vices. Just the things

people do.” Others represent Tolentino’s jabs at American culture. Explaining a pair of paintings, one an eyeball hanging open by its lid from a fishing hook, the other an ear plugged with a cartoon cork, he said, “Western culture wants you to see, but they don’t want you to hear. They force you to see everything, and then downplay what’s actually going on.”

There always seems to be a CD playing in Tolentino’s studio. “I listen to everything,” he said, “a lot of raggae, and I do listen to a lot of underground hip hop.” Acts like Slug, Eyedea, and Sole, along with the Anticon crew, who, he says, “allow my brain to concentrate on something completely different than the painting, so my subconscious just streams through my hand. It takes my mind off of what I’m doing.”

Tolentino’s is one of five permanent studios at the Lemp Art Stables (sidebar: if you haven’t been to one of the monthly shows put on by ArtDimensions in the Stables, go as soon as possible). Out of his disorderly studio comes a brand of artwork that likely wouldn’t have found a home had it not been for Davide Weaver and ArtDimensions. Tolentino understands this, and is eternally grateful for the opportunity. “There’s a lot of people out there who can paint really pretty portraits or really pretty landscapes, and a lot of the galleries in St. Louis, that’s what they’re looking for. What we do here, we’re pretty much open to anything.”

Just outside of Tolentino’s studio are two enormous paintings, each featuring a photo-realistic image of what looks to be an Abercrombie or Gap model. Behind them, in an ocean of sepia tones and pencil strokes, are the skewed, misshapen faces and figures that exemplify Tolentino’s artwork. Though from early in his career, the pieces are a perfect summary of the artist: a trained painter capable of realistic renditions of the beauty in our world who would rather focus on the madness that stays hidden in the background. “Those were basically me telling my school to fuck off,” Tolentino said with that devious smile.

Tolentino’s art was born of a culture that defies domestication. Now, with ArtDimensions finally providing a venue for local art that stretches beyond really pretty landscapes and portraits, he’s found a home for his brand of refined graffiti. A messy, crowded, smoke-filled home with a constant soundtrack bridging the gap between consciousness and his rag-tag collection of unlikely canvases. For more info, go to www.studiotolentino.com.