It’s the end of another week here at BCB After Dark: the coolest club for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. Come on in and enjoy the fall air with us. There’s nothing with pumpkin spice here. There’s no cover charge. We still have a few tables available. The hostess will seat you now. Bring your own beverage.
CB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The
late-nighters are encouraged to get the party started, but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.
Last night I asked you who might step up to save the bullpen. There was a clear favorite as 40 percent of you picked Aaron Civale. Another 22 percent of you think that Shelby Miller will come off the injured list and provide the boost.
Here’s the part with the music and the movies. It’s up to you what to do with it, but it’s my favorite part.
We lost the great vocalist Cassandra Wilson yesterday at the age of 70, which isn’t young but it’s too young to go.
We’ll honor Wilson more next week, but tonight we’re going to feature a track from her 2002 album Belly of the Sun. It’s the Jimmy Webb song, made most famous by Glen Campbell, “Wichita Lineman.”
One of my favorite cult film, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains showed up on the Criterion Channel yesterday as August turned to September. This 1982 film, directed by legendary record producer Lou Adler and starring Diane Lane and Ray Winstone, was something that disappeared without so much as a ripple when it was given a limited theater release in 1982. However, it found its audience on cable television, in particular the late-night music program Night Flight on the USA Network, where it played regularly. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains isn’t a perfect movie, but strong performances from Lane and Winstone as well as a script that captures the feeling of the early days of punk make it worthy of watching.
Lane plays Corinne Burns, a teenager stuck in a hopeless situation in a declining rust belt town in Pennsylvania. She and her younger sister Tracy (Marin Kanter) are now orphaned after their mother had died of lung cancer. Will no chance of finding work and with her family home about to be foreclosed on, Corinne starts a punk band with her sister and cousin Jessica (A 15-year-old Laura Dern!) and changes her name to “Third-degree” Burns.
Corinne is angry at everything and she pours that anger out at everything. To tell you the truth, the Stains aren’t a great punk band. But what they’ve got is “Third-degree” attitude. Corinne has a punk haircut and eye makeup that seems related to punk fashion icon Soo Catwoman, although she calls herself a “skunk” and not a cat. Corinne uses the stage to tell the women in the audience how the entire system is rigged against them. The men in their lives are using them. Society doesn’t care. Her catch phrase becomes “We’re the Stains and we don’t put out,” by which she means sex but she also means she doesn’t sell out.
It will become apparent later that while Corinne’s musical talent is limited, her ability to create a scene, grab the attention of the public and manipulate the media is second-to-none.
The Stains are noticed by a Rastafarian tour manager named Lawnboy (Barry Ford), who takes a liking to the Stains’ and invites them to join his low-rent US tour. The headliner of the tour is a past-its-prime glam metal band called the Metal Corpses, whose lead singer is a stereotypical full-of-himself rock star, despite the fact that he hasn’t been big in a decade, played by The Tubes’ frontman Fee Waybill.
But more important is the other opening act, an English punk band called The Looters. The Looters are played by punk royalty, with Sex Pistols Steve Jones and Paul Cook on guitar and drums alongside the Clash’s bassist Paul Simonon. Winstone is Billy, the Looters’ lead vocalist and a kind of low-rent Joe Strummer. Billy hates the Metal Corpses, but he is immediately smitten with Corinne and The Stains, although he won’t admit it. He also is the first to realize that Corinne has star power, but her music is amateurish and unfocused. Corinne is uninterested in Billy’s advice and his attention.
The rest is a typical rise and fall of a rock star biography, as events conspire to turn the Stains into the headline act. Hundreds of teenage girls show up to their concerts dressed like “Third-degree” (or “skunks”) and their music takes off when they steal The Looters’ best song, “Join the Professionals,” which is an actual Steve Jones/Paul Cook post-Sex Pistols song.
The plot of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains is heavy-handed and much of the dialogue is just bad, especially from a local TV news reporter who sees The Stains’ phenomenon as her ticket to success. There’s a lot of commentary about television and how it can take any anti-establishment message and just incorporate it into a pro-consumerist message. The whole film can get clunky at times.
There’s also the matter of the ending and how it doesn’t really have one. Screenwriter Nancy Dowd (who also wrote Slap Shot, another film about desperate rust belt people looking for fame to save them) and Adler fought constantly over the script and eventually Dowd insisted to be credited under a pseudonym “Rob Morton.” I have little doubt that Dowd’s use of a male pen name was a sign that she felt her female vision of the picture was replaced with a male vision. Adler and Dowd never did agree on an ending and eventually Adler just shot an MTV-style video of The Stains performing a poppier version of “Join the Professionals,” indicating that The Stains had become The Go-Go’s, a similar band that had gone from being an all-girl punk group to shaving off their edge and becoming pop superstars. But it’s just kind of tacked on at the end as the credits roll.
But the heart of the film is a terrific portrait of Corinne and Billy and the relationship between them. Both of them turned to punk music after a lifetime of being dealt bad hands and their lack of any meaningful future if their desperate bids for stardom fail. Both characters are tough, angry, violent at times and anti-social. All of that is a front for two very scared and desperate kids. Lane and Winstone’s performances are what turn Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains into something more than a run-of-the-mill story of a fake rock band.
The film was also one of the first positive portrayals of the punk subculture in a (kind of) mainstream film. The music, much of it written by Jones and Cook, is pretty solid punk and it’s certainly fun to see the two of them as well as Simonon on screen. Waybill does well as a faded star and you get the sense that he’s channelling a bunch of unpleasant people that he’d met along the way while playing with The Tubes.
As I mentioned, I have a lot of fond memories watching Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains on late-night, Friday night cable when I was young. I’ve seen it a few times since then and I continue to think that it’s a flawed but worthwhile film. It’s also one of the few films of that era that capture the ethos of punk. Times Square, which came out two years earlier and which I’ve written about before, completely misses the attitude and feel of the punk subculture. (Times Square also had Tim Curry in it, and rest in peace on that.) There’s a reason so many of us fell in love with the flawed heroine Corinne “Third-degree” Burns on late-night cable all those years ago. Diane Lane has had a long and successful career since 1982, but she’ll always be a Fabulous Stain to me.
Welcome back to everyone who skips the music and movies.
Daniel Palencia still has minor league options. Is it time to send him down to Iowa to get straightened out?
I don’t have to tell you that Palencia was a very good closer last year. Not elite, but very good. He also has the kind of velocity that touches triple-digits that is in short supply in the Cubs bullpen.
I also don’t have to tell you that Palencia has been hurt most of the year. The Cubs were counting on him for the ninth inning coming into the season, but he’s only managed to record three saves in four attempts this year. He was on the injured list from April 17 to May 3 with an oblique strain. Then he went back on the injured list on June 16 to August 21 with right elbow immflamation.
While he was gone, the Cubs bullpen suffered. But since he got back, the Cubs bullpen has been even worse. Palencia threw a clean frame in his first appearance back from the IL. But since then, he’s made four relief appearances and has allowed three runs, one run, two runs and one more run, all in one inning or less.
So the Cubs could send Palencia down to Iowa to get straightened out. The problem would be who would the Cubs bring up? Shelby Miller is still working his way back from Tommy John surgery. Edward Cabrera isn’t ready to come off the IL. Neither is Justin Steele. The Cubs could promote Jaxon Wiggins (who also throws hard), but Wiggins has had health issues this year and has an ERA over five, although it’s 0.00 since he moved to the pen. Unfortunately, that’s just under 7 innings of work.
Eduarniel Nuñez has some major league experience last year and has been “OK” since returning to the Cubs organization. He’s another possibility. There are others. Kohl Franklin has been mostly a starter, but he’s been good since returning from the IL last month. Of course, he also missed nearly all of the past two seasons with injuries.
So would you send Iowa back down to Iowa? And if so, who would you call up? Tell us your move in the comments.
Thank you for stopping by tonight. We all need to support each other tonight. Get home safely. Recycle any cans and bottled. Tip your waitstaff. And join us again tomorrow night for more BCB After Dark.
