by Todd for Flipside, Sept. 12

It's a contention in art that a painting is affected by its surroundings. Think of a Picasso nailed on top of a toilet that's clogged and overflowing with shit and your hand just slipped on the stall knob. The substance between your fingers is brown.
  Then think of a Picasso, well lit and temperature controlled with a beer in your hand. In this case, Picasso isn't important.
  It's an artist you like: Tongue; and an artist you used to like a ton but aren't too sure of now: Agent Orange. The venue is so weird that both of the sets - for me - were consumed by it.
  I felt like I entered a real time movie. Liz Tongue - when I looked solely at her face, blasted the hardcore. As soon as I lost close focus she was blasted up on a 20 foot screen (along with her claymation, which was definitely a treat) where she looked almost like Tia Carrera - funny how TV does that. The entire place was freezing, possibly to keep the under- attended crowd from breaking a sweat.
  As soon as Rick Tongue got a little spazzy, a long-haired fellow readjusted his mike, his personal fan, and parted his hair to get it out of his eyes (not really, but the doting was weird). There were sections of their set with fog machines and tens of thousands of dollars worth of lighting. A phalanx of silicon, surgery-corrected, therapy-dependent bar-goers looked on like clean glass - expressionless.
  Tongue's hardcore is like tweaking a thin piece of metal - the faster it moves, the more it heats up and at the end it snaps in half with a sense of accomplishment in breakage. I like them. I had to pee.