St. Louis Post-Dispatch from St. Louis, Missouri • Page 53

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Unfortunately, it's been proving far harder to terminate the cheesy pop-culture yabbo named Quentin Tarantino, a man who simply refuses to go away. It's bad enough that Tarantino (or, as Ellen DeGeneres might say, Taran-tootie), was ever allowed to make films in the first place. Now, the man has ventured into music criticism of a sort with the release of the CD "The Tarantino Connection." This new release features songs from his various film endeavors Fiction," "From Dusk Till Dawn," "Reservoir Dogs," "True Romance," "Natural Born along with Tarantino's "spoken word" musings on why he chose the music Tarantino as rock critic It's not that I begrudge Tarantootie his right to take a stab at music criticism. When you come right down to it, you really don't need the standard resume to do it, considering that rock criticism was something originally invented by a bunch of drugged-out '60s longhairs. no Show 9:00 fIS Flat All Ages welcomes MARCH 20 CAKE wguest Doom Show 1:30 DOS All MARCH 27 FIONA APPLE wMorcheeba Doors 7:30 Show 8:30 $15 Flat ALL AGES Now You See Him 1 mtm ft U2U.

VA'o II Lit) Music Critic TilK IARANTlNb stealing and bastardizing the work of better directors. He has been acclaimed for some of the most hollow product ever to pass itself off as art. His gob is everywhere, his influence inescapable. He loosed a once-promising actress named Juliette Lewis into a noxious spiral of overbaked psycho-hillbilly roles. He makes you forget that Harvey Keitel was a guy who used to do credible work with Martin Scorsese.

To give credit where it's due, Tarantootie is a genius in a sense, a man befitting our times. He smelled the cheapening of our culture on the wind and, not one to miss a window of opportunity, took us straight into the heart of barfness. There was no need to ask if he'd still respect us in the morning. He glanced into America's contemporary soul, and seeing himself mirrored in emptiness, realized that respect had long ceased to be an issue. Inside the mind of a master "Having 'Misirlou' as your opening credits is just so intense," intones Tarantino on his new CD, referring to the furious Dick Dale classic that opens "Pulp Fiction." "It just says you're watching an epic, you're watching this big old throws down a gauntlet that the movie now has to live up to, 'cause it's just saying 'we're OK, I'll grant that Dale's furious instrumental is an epic.

It's big. It's just Tarantino who is very small. He's so cutting-edge Credit Tarantino for truth in advertising. The cover of "The Tarantino Connection" has the master's mug supplanting that of our first president on a blood-spattered dollar bill. His fans agree If you can't get enough of Tarantino telling you why the songs in his movies are so cool, you can now listen to him tell you what movies he thinks are so cool.

Quentin Tarantino's Rolling Thunder Pictures company reissues Quentin's favorite B-movies. The cover of Jack Hill's "Switchblade Sisters" assures video retailers that "Tarantino fans rent! His films attract the hot-renting 18-34 age group. If he likes these movies so will his fans!" He's, like, so cool "That's one of the things about using music in movies that's, like, so fulminates Mr. Hollyweird on his new CD. "If you use the right song in the right about as cinematic a thing as you can effect is you can never really hear that song again without kind of thinking about that image from the movie." Introducing the Stealers Wheel 70s hit that punctuates a particularly hideous torture scene in his 1992 film "Reservoir Dogs," Tarantino laughs, "Personally I don't know if (singer-songwriter) Gerry Rafferty necessarily appreciated the connotations that I brought to 'Stuck in the Middle With There's a good chance he didn't." With all apologies to Rafferty, I actually walked out on this scene.

It's not that I can't stomach my share of cinematic violence. I still believe that Ned Beatty is one brave actor for his harrowing performance in John Boor-man's screen adaptation of James Dickey's "Deliverance." I also distinctly remember honking my horn in solidarity at the drive-in during the avenging parent scene in the cult movie "Last House on the Left." Heck, I even sat through the loathsome B-movie exploitation film "I Spit on Your Grave" in an Indiana lesbian bar, a film that reduced most of the patrons to angry protests and eventually cleared the entire joint. The thing about "Deliverance" was that it was a film that attained the level of art. Those other two films were expressly in the exploitation genre, never lied about what they were, and never tried to wrap themselves in the guise of art. The trouble with Tarantino is that he makes gratuitous, empty films wrapped in the blinding sheen of kitsch, yet packages himself as the greatest auteur of our age.

And what's coolest of all, he's got the music in him! With his new CD, Tarantino is now what he seemingly always wanted to be a commercial for a commercial. Too bad he's saddled some good music with the suffocating weight of his fraudulent vision. Tarantootie is a genius in a sense, a man befitting our times. He smelled the cheapening off our culture on the wind and, not one to miss a window off opportunity, took us straight into the heart of barfness. 1 I Ilium iiiiiib mi in i ii nisiw em Mi A itness In its infancy, the job required little more than an extensive record collection, a typewriter on which to spew forth, handfuls of mind-altering substances, and the hubris to imagine rock as art.

To quote the great critic Richard Meltzer, writing in the foreword of the reissue of his insane and ground-breaking 1970 rock-crit opus "The Aesthetics of "It could be argued, furthermore, that my 'scholarship' is basically up my butt." Meltzer also quotes the now-infamous slag of his book by critic Michael Corcoran, who wrote in response to "It's been said that if you have an infinite number of monkeys pecking away at an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite amount of time, eventually one of them would write "Hamlet." It would take about 50 monkeys a couple of years to write Aesthetics of Rock." Using Corcoran's equation, it has taken one primate (Quentin Tarantino) exactly one film to mass-market disposable kitsch as art. The making of a legend Tarantino has gained renown for' Endangered Species of North America Photographers Susan Middleton and David Liittschwager in association with California Academy of Science have created remarkable photographic portraits of North America's most endangered species. Seeing this extraordinary project will raise your awareness about endangered species and bring you eye-to-eye with individuals poised on the brink of extinction. March 14 June 10. Missouri Botanical Garden Conservation.

Brought to you through the generous support of Monsanto Company and the Missouri Department of 15 -Is? 1 1 FEB. 20, 1997.