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Show I ChRONicU TucsdAy, January 19, Paqe Eiqhi ACCENT- - 1988 On Arts ta era m nmaksrs have side Band explores emotional, physical By John Pecorelli Chronicle assistant feature editor Editor's Note: The Rainmakers will perform at the Zephyr Club tomorrow night. A temporary Zephyr membership can be purchased for $5. Odd dudes, these Rainmakers. After their extremely debut album, they were sitting pretty to hit the With their sharp melodic sense and doctoral big time. knowledge of pop hooks, these Kansas City boys could have been raking in more dough than Phil C. and Loverboy combined. All it would have taken was a cute, sugary pop album about sunshine 'n' luv. So what did the Rainmakers do? They released Tornado, an album about atom bombs, alienation, tornadoes, cattle of romance. mutilation, insensitivity and the I spoke with the Rainmakers' lead singer and songwriter Bob Walkenhorst (who sounds like Stan Ridgeway, only better). With all these seemingly cynical lyrics, I was curious as to the band's philosophy or message in general. "I'd never say that I'm speaking for all the guys in the band," Walkenhorst told me, chuckling. "Because I'm sure that some of the things that take place in the songs and lyrics they don't want to take responsibility for. "But I really don't feel like I'm the lone voice in the wilderness or anything," he continued. "I really feel like the lyrics of ousongs are things that are important to real life, that occur to everyone and sometimes well-receiv- ed non-existen- ce of rock just aren't addressed in rock 'n' roll very much." In fact, one of the strongest points of Tornado is the lyrics. words are a welcome relief Walkenhorst's down-to-ear- th from all the "I love my baby" tripe that's infected rock radio since time began. Take a gander at this bit of wisdom from "The Wages of Sin": The wages of sin, the reward offear Is worrying and fretting every second of the yearThe Church and the State, your God and Countrykind One gets your body, the other gets your mind. And while Walkenhorst denies his message is at all cynical, he does admit his lyrics may have cost the band a little airplay. "Some stations will react negatively," he said. "They won't play the song because it has the word 'Jesus' or 'son of a bitch' in it. But we've never been too concerned with that, we just do what we like to do." The Rainmakers, fresh off a successful European tour, are currently making their way across the States. Since the band's next gig is here in Salt Lake, I asked Walkenhorst what audiences can expect from the band live. "Well, I think our records and our songs were kind of thought upon as being slightly on the wordy side," he said. "I think that the lyrics have something to say and there's certain politxal, social and emotional implications. "But that's what happens on record. Live, to me, is a time to embrace the physical side of music and the way it affects our bodies. So you can expect volume, volume, volume. And lots of sweat. It's a rock 'n' roll show. . 1 The Rainmakers will perform Wednesday at the Zephyr Club. The band's new album, Tornado, features everything from atom bombs to cattle mutilation. rock and roll can be a lot of different things," he continued. "When you do it live, it's time for the physical side of it. When you make a record, it's a little more time for the emotional side." Dig it, brothers and sisters, dig it. "I just feel like Keith Moore Literary ? acceptance comes easily in Utah Acceptance in all the arts is difficult, granted, but I'd like to describe how literary acceptance in Utah goes from nearly 30 years of intense experience. What qualifies in Utah as authentic literature? Only these eight things are accepted by the literary establishment: 1. Anything written by a doctorate-holdin- g member of a department of English, be it his grocery list. 2. Anything written by any doctorate-holdin- g faculty member in III any university. .... r J i y Au Revoir Les Enfants, a beautiful, haunting reminiscence of a French child's experience during World War II, will be shown Saturday at the U.S. Film Festival. U. student's short film is part of film test's many offerings By Kelly Hindley Chronicle staff writer When University of Utah student Dorna Khazeni mailed her film Whimsy to the Sundance Institute, she expected a standard rejection letter in reply. Thank you for your interest in the U.S. Film Festival, but . Her 16mm film, after all, was only two minutes long. She wasn't an established filmmaker, she was a graduate student a novice, a beginner. But instead of a rejection notice, Khazeni received a telephone call. And when the 1988 U.S. Film Festival opened Jan. 15, she was the only Utah filmmaker included in the festival. as "Part of it is a fluke," Khazeni said. "It is, far as I know, the tiniest portion of the festival." But having even two minutes of her work shown in one of the United States' largest and most influential film festivals is a crucial step in her career, she said. Whimsy is a film about the identity of sexual ambiguity, Khazeni explained. Her black and white, silent film is also about magic, about quirky shifts in expectations. "It's insignificant as far as the film world it really is," she said. "But it is concerned maintains a level of tension for two minutes. It maintains interest in that's sort of it see and wacky. People they like it." Khazeni created Whimsy as an assignment for a U. film class. She is in her third year of graduate film studies and also teaches an undergraduate history of film a way class. Although the U. film department is small, "it's a department that gives you what you need to make a film," she said. The only thing the film department can't give its students, Khazeni said, is money. te film, cost $300 to Whimsy, a two-minu- produce. Khazeni estimates her current film project will cost $3,000 to she works three different jobs and produce, to finance her film projects. But Khazeni believes the expense and 10-min- ute difficulty of filmmaking are more than repaid by the results. When she makes a film, Khazeni said, "a chunk of my mind is evidently put across to the rest of the world you feel like they can finally see what you see." Born in Iran, Khazeni studied in London and Paris and moved to Utah to join her family. At the film festival, Whimsy is shown as the first selection in Rogues' Gallery, a collection of six short films. But Rouges' Gallery is only one of more see "filmfest" on page nine 3. Anything written by an already established or "known" person, such as Wallace Stegner or Brewster Ghiselin. It helps if the work is written in an abstruse and vain style that relates as little as possible to humanity. 4. Tiny books of poetry, especially if written by a faculty member. There's one right now selling for $4. There are more prelude and postlude pages in the book than the book itself, which is one poem spilling onto alf pages. 5. Anything written by anyone with the power of influence based on his or her position or academic degree, be it a quatrain, a forgettable story, a sketch or memoir so exiguous it says next to nothing. 6. Anything written by a group or committee of collaborators, especially if they are conscripted from among doctorate-holdin- g faculty members. The criterion of is that it no one presents personality and no one style or message rising from the heart of any one distinct artist, but rather from the inchoate and pseudosophisticated cerebrums of a diffuse gaggle of credential-holde- rs who individually and collectively have no heart or guts and certainly no nerve. 7. Anything trivial, small, tiny, exiguous, flippant, faddish, and redolent of the latest in ephemeral sentiment, especially if glibly subliterate and misspelled and mis punctuated. 8. Anything, no matter how scant, written by a faculty member whose purpose in writing it is to make prestige points and not to attempt to produce team-literatu- re herd-instinctu- al lasting, real literature. Credential-holde- rs disdain length, sincerity and style because it's all too damned much work and would take time away from getting materially secure. It is the firm belief of all university people of power that art can come only from someone with a doctorate and a sinecure, and that if a preface is needed we must as a foregone conclusion press into service someone like Ghiselin because of his heavy credentials. Writers like him roost in rarefied eyries and feed on a pedantic style and a body of content unconcerned with the common man. It is doubtful they will go down in literary history, but while alive they are the darlings of their campus respected, fawned over, adored, sought, rewarded g, for their forced never-varyin- esotericism. As one example, Stegner comes along in his waning years with Recapitulation, in which he flies his protagonist to Salt Lake City and pushes him up several blocks of South Temple and marionettes him to utter five or six banal reminiscences of the Salt Lake City he abandoned and didn't care about all through his maturity. And then the local literati turn around and gush and gasp about how informed and intelligent and artistic Stegner is in his understanding and description of Salt Lake City. Stegner doesn't give a crap about this city. He spurned it as beneath him and spent his life on the West Coast. And he is not an authority on what goes on in the guts and hearts of Salt Lakers. He is a credential-holdwho confects a knowledge of Salt Lake City based on youthful memories always told weakly and scantily; he is a Stanford professor who has built a snowjob of duping Utahns into kowtowing his er bogus authority on Utah. But there's no interest in Utah for see "artwatch" on page nine |
