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Doggedly Sexy Star

The big draw at the Sonoma-Marin Fair in Petaluma this past Sunday wasn’t the greased pigs or the demolition derby: it had to be Keanu Reeves, playing on the Budweiser main stage with his band Dogstar.

The girls were all there, packed about six rows deep more than an hour before Reeves ambled onstage. Decked out in their finest — slip dresses, halter tops, the contents of their makeup bags plastered on their face in full force — they did their best to scream and thrust out little signs and photos every time Reeves looked their way. Silent, jeans-clad, and shifting his weight from one leg to the other while plucking his bass, Reeves responded with a boyish — could it be shy? — smile and offered little waves, miming his appreciation with nods or points when a CD or wrapped gift was tossed his way.

I was amazed by the attention Reeves got from the blonde, bodacious babes who were craning their necks and undulating in the actor’s direction, as their boyfriends folded their arms and looked, oh, mostly grim (when they weren’t checking out other babes in tight clothing). As I watched the women watching Reeves’ every move, it struck me that the guy was probably the biggest Anglo-Asian sex symbol, ever.

As an API figure, Bruce Lee might have been more groundbreaking, more iconic. But after his early, tragic death, he is now more like the James Dean of Asian actors — a myth rather than a man. But Reeves is right here, with an ironic sense of career longevity, making bad movies (Sweet November, The Replacements, I Love You To Death), blockbusters (Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventures, A Walk in the Clouds, Speed, The Matrix), interesting but flawed endeavors (Dracula, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, The Last Time I Committed Suicide) and even the occasional good film (River’s Edge, My Own Private Idaho, The Matrix).

You have API musicians and API actors but never the twain shall meet — particularly on this skewed socio-economic level — except when Reeves performs with his nondescript modern rock trio comprising of guitarist/vocalist Bret Domrose and drummer Rob Mailhouse.

So the band can’t write a distinctive song to save its life. So their music merges together into a miasma of sameness.

They’ve been around since 1994 and they do play their own songs, throwing in only one cover, the Carpenter’s “Superstar.” Reeves, who was taking a break from filming The Matrix Reloaded in Alameda, played his bass with more skill and enthusiasm than other moonlighting musicians might muster. He downplayed his presence as much as possible — staying away from the first encore, which Domrose took solo. And the band kept the snotty attitude to a minimum, performing at a small country fair without apologizing or playing down to the corndog totin’ crowd, for which we can all be thankful.

Whatever you think of Chinese-Hawaiian-English Reeves’ acting abilities, musicianship or general articulateness, you have to admit that the sex symbol status probably couldn’t have been pegged to a more gracious hapa kind of guy — the very kind you might find hanging on the beaches or at the malls in Honolulu. Dude, in your own way, you rock.

other musical notes:

Some ever-intriguing Japanese artists, both veteran experimentalists and a new up-and-comer, have recently released a couple of CDs.

Kyoto, Japan, resident Nobukazu Takemura started his musical career as a punk and new-wave fan, but quickly turned to keyboards and tape decks in junor high. Free jazz, contemporary music and hip-hop became the basis for his remixing experiments and DJ gigs. Inspired by Brian Eno, Afrika Bambaataa and John Coltrane, Takemura has released two albums as Child’s View and has collaborated with DJ Spooky, Jim O’Rourke and DJ Krush, among others. He recently completed a North American tour, opening for Thrill Jockey labelmates and critically acclaimed post-rockers Tortoise.

Hunched intently over a luminous laptop onstage at the Fillmore in San Francisco on June 5, Takemura generated a hypnotic array of burbling noises and beats, while he sat in front of images of Galaga-style space invaders, drifting down the screen like snow flakes. “Sign (Album Version)” from his new domestic CD, Hoshi No Koe (Thrill Jockey), most resembles his music on tour. Beats are bright and marimba-like. The keyboards whir like generators, and the vocals are Esperanto-anonymous, generated by a computer as a sonic texture rather than a lyrical statement.

The track “A Chrysalis” on Hoshi No Koe deconstructs the sound of gamelans, reconstructing them into a John Cage-ian meditation. Baroque clarinet, recorder and strings are disassembled and reordered with touches of marimba in the whimsical, austere “White Sheep and Small Light.” “The Voice of a Fish” burns into the listener’s memory with its warm, repetitive keyboards and bubbling digital coo. It’s refined, ambient electronica for listeners who are still enamored with the natural world, but can be seduced by elegant artifice.

And don’t write off Pizzicato Five. Their last album of the millennium, The Fifth Release — which originally came out on Columbia in November 1999 in Japan and was released by Matador a year in the U.S. — is a typically varied and oh-so-listenable collection of manic, imaginative snippets.

The Shibuya-kei popsters are still kitsch kids. Multi-instrumentalist/producer Yasuharu Konishi and vocalist Maki Nomiya cobble together metal riffs with punchy ’70s TV scores on “LOUDLAND!,” paste lush keyboards to infectious loping bass on “Wild Strawberries,” and suture harpsichords-on-speed to game-show themes on “A Room With a View.” The la-la-la-la’s, mod cheese and the relentlessly “up” beats may seem a bit forced and “Austin Powers”-annoying to some in these down-in-the-dumps downtempo times, but the Five can’t be faulted for simply sticking to their prime agenda: to be the life of the party.