KITTIE: It’s been two years since Chan Marshall, a/k/a Cat Power, released an album — 2000’s The Covers Record — and four since she delivered an album of new material — 1998’s sublime Moon Pix (both Matador). And though there isn’t even a rumor of a follow-up, the notoriously fragile singer/songwriter has booked a small New England tour early next month. Her performances, depending on your taste, are either excruciatingly intimate or intimately excruciating, but either way, this is likely the only chance you’ll get to hear a new Cat Power song — should such a rare breed prove to exist — for some time. She’ll play the Coolidge Corner Theatre, 290 Harvard Street in Brookline, on February 4. Tickets are available through the Coolidge and the Middle East box offices; call (617) 864-EAST for more info.
WINTER GREEN: With Weezer (the "Green" one as opposed to the "Blue") not yet a year old, and the tour behind it still in full swing, the band are offering up a lengthy preview of their forthcoming fourth album, which is already being scheduled for a late-April release. Weezer’s official site (www.weezer.com) includes free mp3s of demo versions (some featuring former bassist Mikey Welsh) of more than a dozen new songs slated for the as-yet-untitled album, which Team Green are expected to begin recording after undertaking yet another leg of their never-ending jaunt. The green machine rolls on with a local date at the Lowell Memorial Auditorium on February 8. Tickets go on sale to the public on Friday at 10 a.m.; call (617) 931-2000. There’s an Internet-only "pre-sale" in progress until 11 p.m. tonight (Thursday January 10); to access it, visit Weezer’s Web site.
NEXT WEEKEND:
Marc Maron
Most of the comedy clubs that Boston University grad Marc Maron frequented when he lived here in the 1980s are gone now, along with the stand-up-comedy boom that once fermented at places like Catch a Rising Star and Stitches. Maron still maintains a healthy stand-up career — he was on Conan a couple weeks ago — but he’s won exceptional critical acclaim (from the New York Times and the New Yorker, among others) for his monologue The Jerusalem Syndrome: My Life As a Reluctant Messiah (it’s now also a monograph, and also acclaimed), which tames the manic gust of his stand-up into a stiff gallop through the wilds of American narcissism. And next weekend he’ll be bringing the show to the Jewish Theatre of New England for its Boston debut.
Named for a psychological condition common among pilgrims to the Holy Land that leads them to believe they’re being spoken to by God, the show follows Maron on a neurotic-cum-spiritual journey from his Jewish childhood in Albuquerque through beatnik-worshipping paranoia to his cocaine-fueled rampage on the LA comedy scene — where he briefly was a part of Sam Kinison’s entourage — and on to a near nervous breakdown in the Holy Land itself, where he has a revelation while compulsively videotaping his pilgrimage. Along the way he illuminates the mystical/sacred underpinnings of contemporary consumer culture, making no less revelatory pilgrimages to Kerouac’s grave and the Philip Morris cigarette plant.
It was his visit to Jerusalem that sparked him to make the jump from stand-up to pursuing an Off Broadway one-man show. "I always aspired to it," he says over the phone from New York. "I always felt it was a logical progression. After I got back from Israel, I just saw that hook of Jerusalem as being an interesting way of beginning to take my neurosis and my life into a narrative. It [going to Jerusalem] was a pilgrimage to a certain degree — it was based on being invited there by a friend, and then in retrospect it became a pilgrimage in the way that I describe in the book, to kind of either validate my self-importance or dissolve my narcissism."
And although that narcissism is at the heart of Maron’s journey, in retrospect he credits a shred of modesty with saving him from the fate that befell his old pal Kinison. "I never had the same ego. I was never a megalomaniac. Which probably is the thing that kept me alive, and is also the thing that has allowed mainstream success to elude me. Sam on some level thought the world of himself. There’s a certain type of personality that doesn’t give a fuck about anything or anyone except themselves. I was never completely like that."
In its monograph form, The Jerusalem Syndrome ends with an epigraph set three years after his pilgrimage, with him performing his stand-up routine in front of his childhood congregation. Although he’s spent most of the book wired and married, he’s suddenly divorced and sober, with little in the way of elaboration. "Bam, I’m divorced and clean. What’s the gap?" he chuckles. "Well, it wasn’t funny yet. I had not assimilated the wisdom of my longstanding sobriety and also the failure of my marriage. I just couldn’t integrate it into the narrative — I mean, I probably should have. It’s hard to talk about leaving a wife without looking like an asshole. I’m finding humor in it now, and a certain amount of relief. But there’s really a lot of sadness that I haven’t been able to completely disarm comedically."
Which would seem to leave open the possibility of, uh — "Another one man show?" he laughs again. "Yeah. To some degree, there’s an evolution at some point. Now that I’ve taken self-indulgence to this mystical realm, I guess I’ll have to find a little humility with the next one."
Marc Maron performs The Jerusalem Syndrome: My Life As a Reluctant Messiah next Saturday, January 19, at 8 p.m. and Sunday, January 20, at 2 and 7 p.m. at the Leventhal-Sidman Jewish Community Center, 333 Nahanton Street in Newton. Call (617) 965-5226.
BY CARLY CARIOLI
