Employees Of The Month

Photo by Noelle Burke

EMA

EMA hails from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, a factoid she has a hard time keeping to herself. Next time you talk to her, keep track of how often she says “Mount Rushmore,” “Sturgis,” or “Lieutenant Governor Dennis Daugaard.” We get it: All they do in South Dakota is drink and listen to Danzig. It’s great. We all get it. EMA is currently the most beloved substitute teacher in all of West Oakland. Her work in Gowns (and new band AWE) makes her inclusion in this issue a tad hypocritical on our part—for as much shit as she talks on touring, she still seems to do enough of it. Must be all that ethanol in the Midwest’s beer supply.

See

KEEPING IT BLEAK

NEIL BURKE
Neil Burke was raised in Newton, New Jersey, and graduated from Newton High, where he was once suspended for calling a teacher “horse dick.” Over the course of his adult life, Neil has worked as a cabbie, cartographer, garbage man, and nightclub doorman. He’s not too proud to admit that he was once arrested at a Wendy’s in northern Ohio. Perhaps you know of Neil as a guy who cofounded Men’s Recovery Project in 1994. But are you also aware of his first-class artwork and screenprinting services, available through monoroid.com? “Paint me to be a hero that someone would want to send money to,” explains Burke, 41. See A READER & WRITER’S GUIDE TO READING WRITING ABOUT MUSIC

JOHN MICHAELS

John Michaels was raised in Newton, NJ, and attended Newton High, where vice principle Kenneth Hart once referred to him as “an asshole and a ying yang” for clapping in approval to a Neil Young lyric about “getting high” during a teen arts festival. He lived in SF for the ’89 quake, NYC for 9/11, and NOLA during Katrina, so if you see him in your town, relax (when has lightning struck four times?). Perhaps you know of John as the guy who saved Men’s Recovery Project in 2000. But were you also aware of his stunning photography, viewable at johnmichaelsphotography.com? “I had several run-ins with Kenneth Hart,” Michaels reports. “Anything you can come up with to disparage that fucker would be great.”

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MUSICIANS

TARA TAVI
A native Marylander, Tara Tavi moved to Southern California in the early 80s. She’s also lived in Paris, sat next to Linda Hamilton and Gina Schock on two separate flights, and worked as Pizza Girl on a Da Lench Mob video shoot (in which Ice Cube warned an associate to “watch out” because “that chick’s into voodoo”). In 1998, Tara traveled China for ten months on a research grant, covering the umpteen thousand square miles between Beijing, Tibet, the Afghanistan border, and Inner Mongolia. She plays hammer dulcimer the way Venus Williams hits backhand. Her paintings, sculptures, and altered books are all on display at taratavi.com. Oh yeah, she’s also been a kindergarten teacher for 14 years. When’s the last time you did anything for 14 years? Thought so. See KEEPING IT BLEAK

Photo by Jim Herrington/ Sub Pop

RICK FROBERG

Because of this theme’s issue, it’s not really our place to mention the half-dozen offensively awesome bands Rick has played guitar and/or sang for. It is our place to mention his talent as both a freehand and a vector graphics illustrator. The problem here is that it is very hard to discuss the latter without discussing the former. In particular, the galling, maddening, brain-twisting

unfairness

of it all. Here’s a tip, Rick: The phrase is “Do one thing, and do it well.” NOT “Do several things, and do them so exceptionally that it makes everyone else feel chintzy”. It’s like if Neil Armstrong became the singer of Devo, cured AIDS, and married Rosario Dawson. It simply isn’t fair.

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ALL MUSIC IS SHIT TO GOD

DESTROYER THE CAT
There was a Destroyer in 1980s Albany, New York, so it seemed like a funny idea to pass the mantle to this little guy when he showed up two years ago. Big mistake. There’s nothing funny about this trembling fatty, for whom a chair leg scraping the floor might as well be the Archangel Gabriel trumpeting the earth’s explosion. Christ, what a weenis. But fair’s fair. Destroyer was also on deck (lap) for at least 5,000 words of this issue. Also, he’s got twice as many toes as a normal cat. Just last week an eighth toe was discovered in his many folds of pad fat, and it’s a disgusting little chicken-wing mutation that looks like the remains of a subsumed Siamese twin. I guess that explains some of the shame. See THIS ENTIRE ISSUE

SATELLITE #400,634

Much of the work on this issue required hours-long, filibuster-laden telephone discussions between the guest editor and the editor in chief. For these bicoastal conferences, we relied on good old S-4-Hundo, as we lovingly came to call him. Originally commissioned by the Soviets during the Cuban Missile Crisis, this tough little hunk of hardware still travels the heavens today. He’s a little the worse for wear, sure, but that only makes him cuter, like the beat-up, Slim Pickens-voiced robot BOB in Disney’s

The Black Hole

(1979). How could you not love that guy? And did S-4-Hundo sometimes have a circuit fart and patch an obscure spy-channel transmission into our fevered talk of comma placements and moral obligations? Sure. But that just added character. Besides, who hasn’t wanted to hear the Russian Woodpecker firsthand? We always did, and now we can confirm that it’s still out there. Perhaps that explains the Slavic-looking gentlemen in ill-fitting Hugo Boss suits who have recently been lurking outside our homes. Who’s to say?

See, again,

T

HIS ENTIRE ISSUE

ALEX SEARS
Alex, one of the new interns around our office, loves classical music. In sixth grade, she pasted pictures of Mozart photocopied from her mom’s World Book collection onto the inside of her Trapper Keeper. Then she’d sneak peeks at him during pre-algebra. In high school she traveled to South Carolina as her academic decathlon’s classical-music expert, scoring a resounding win after answering “OPERA BUFFA” to a question she no longer remembers. Tchaikovsky makes her want to rip her fingernails out almost as much as Debussy makes her want to have a dance party. She thinks Brooklyn Rider’s newest Debussy tribute album is just sublime. Her biggest regret is not having taken voice lessons, but she makes up for it by recording operatic renditions of Candlebox songs and posting them on YouTube. Anyway, she was a huge help with this month’s music reviews. Thanks, Alex. Sorry that we took all of your carefully thought-out, intelligently written opinions, turned off our brains, and rewrote them as idiots. See REVIEWS