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About The daily Nebraskan. ([Lincoln, Neb.) 1901-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 26, 1993)
Nebraskan Thursday, *•>1 ArtsBEntertainment Fungis’ unique new style grows on listeners Band of veterans combine to create indefinable sounds This is not rock and roll as wc know it. The membersof Lincoln’s hottest new band, the Fungis, are like beings from another planet. Only their music gives away the fact they’re Earthlings. The music is what some people call World Beat — music that knows no boundaries of space or time. Side by side with Incan death mantra music come happy-go-lucky polkas, television theme songs and the best of Devo. “See the world and never leave the room," is their motto — according to saxophonist and front man, Andrew Vogt. And it’s true, the Fungis are a road map of planet music, a homing beacon for the lost generation—they have the keys to the secret Kennedy files of beat. This is dance music from everywhere at once. Each of the band’s members have long musical biographies. They’ve appeared in some of the area’s most happening groups: John Carlini on keyboards, veteran of the Jazz Monks. Dave Novak on percussion straight from Cool Riddum and Trilogy. Vogt, who also swings an occasional clari net, most recently from Homathology — and Melissa Carper on Bass from god-knows-where, Jupiter maybe? Someplace not. Together they are the Fungis — plural for fungus, get it? And together they are Lincoln's most alter native band. In a time when "alternative bands” all sound the same, the Fungis never do: you can’t step in the same riff twice. From note one they’re in trouble. No one knows what to call them. "The Fungis” is who they are—but what the heck are they? Jazz? No doubt. But a kind of iazz that hops around biting at its fingers, howling. The band’s been thrown out of at least one of Lincoln’s stuffier brewpubs for being too rau cous for the stuffy patrons. But Duffy’s won’t sign them either not Trnvw H«ying/DN Msffstt Carper on bass and Andrew Volt on sax are one half of the Fungi*. enough like Nirvana. The band will play tonight, at Morgans, 1409 0 St It’s a place new enough not to know what it wants to be when it grows up. A person might check them out there, if they were so inclined — decide for yourself just what's up. Any list of the Fungis influences would read like a music critic’s suicide note, but “The mother ship is definitely Brave Combo,” Carlini said. Maybe so, but how do you define Brave Combo, a band so indefinable The Zoo Bar’s calendar simply called it “our favorite weirdo band?” You see the problem: name that tune to the Nth degree.Maybe it’s name that genre. r But aU this i9 academic. The Fungis are music to dance to, to whoop it up and kiss your sweetie. They are the music of the future, today. No matter what you call it and no matter what planet it’s beamed in from, the Fungis are fun guys. Get some. —Mark Baldridge Courtesy Universal Pictures The hunter becomes the hunted as Chance (Jean Claude Van Damme) leads the killers on a wild chase into his home terrain. Improbable gore won’t block action film’s path to success M Hard Target" Director John Woo’s American debut film “Hard Target** is going to hit the proverbial — and monetary — bull’s-eye in the American movie market Woo, who has achieved cult status in Japan for his films “The Killer” and “Hard Boiled,” teams up with executive producer Sam Raimi, director of the ridiculously funny “Army of Darkness,” to deliver a pounding action-ad venture flick set in New Orleans. Like Raimi’s “Army of Darkness” and “Darkman,” the filmmakers encourage the au dience not just to put their brains on standDy, but to leave them at home. In “Hard Target,” Jean-Claude Van Damme stars as Chance Boudreaux, a down-and-out seaman who is behind in paying his union dues. In an effort to make money, he decides to help Nat (Yancy Butler) search for her father, who turns out to be a homeless Vietnam veteran. Unfortunately, the man was a participant in a slightly altered version of‘The Most Danger ous Game,” run by an ultra-evil psychopath named Emil Fouchon (Lance Henriksen, “Aliens” and “Stone Cold”) and his mondo cruel strongarm, Pik Van Cleaf (Andrew Vosloo). The two find homeless Vietnam vet erans and offer them $ 10,000 to be the prey of See TARGET on 16 Gia Mono offers Lincoln dreamy painted furniture By Mark Baldridge Staff Reporter__ Walking into Gia Mono is like stepping into someone else’s dream. The furniture appears almost luminous, existing as waves of color. The ceiling: a square of sky in which clouds drift lazily. An antique dresser is painted in dark ribbons of red and yellow — faces, and figures from ancient Greece, peer from the backs of chairs and the tops of tables. The store, located at 726 O St., is a fairy land of painted furniture, furnishings and decorator items. Owners Barry and Cynthia Monohon, and their partnerGia Rouchnot have created a dream of their own in the shadow of the Haymarket and the O Street overpass. A person’s first visit to the store is likely to create a sensation of pleasant unreality. The second, an urgent need to buy some thing — to take something of wonderland home. “I have a real love for furniture,” Barry said, “sometimes for something a little less than perfect.” He, his wife and Rouchnot find antiques —often damaged or poorly painted -7 and then take them to a studio above the Haymarket Art Gallery. There they turn them into the furniture of angels: strange, one-of-a-kind objects, half art, half oak. Sometimes the process works in reverse. “I found that table,” Bany said, indicat ing a small green end-table in a comer of the store, “It was obviously a piece of cottage furniture. “Someone had stripped it and it was just — M Time's no one doing this kind of thing here yet —Monohon owner, Gia Mono -ft - ugly pine. “As far as I’m concerned I restored it, because that’s how it would have looked when it was made,” he said. Barry said collectors were only begin ning to figure things like that out. There is another way in which Gia Mono is ahead of the pack, at least in Lincoln. “There’s no one doing this kind of thing here yet,” he said. That may cost the store a little. “People are a little hesitant to try some thing first,” he said, “They want to wait ‘till it catches on. Then it’s safer.” Barry said people from larger towns are less surprised by Gia Mono. He said many of his customers are from out of town. But business isn’t bad. Open since mid-June, Gia Mono has al ready reached the “break even” point, Barry said. They hope to do even be*ter in the coming months—if Lincolnites catch on to the dream. Barry Monohon has been painting seri ously since 1979, and many of the store’s See GIA MONO on 16