I'm Not One to Blog, But...

A Neither Fair Nor Well Farewell

2010-10-02T10:17:00.000-07:00

Somewhere this better be happening, my big beautiful boy going happily in every direction at once, preferably on a beach, as he loved the sand under his paws more than anything. But I chose this photo for another reason, too, one I can't believe. Poor Nigel passed away last night, folks. A few days ago he ended up with bloat--a greyhound danger--and despite heroic surgical efforts, he never quite recovered. Ended up with post operation pneumonia and despite oxygen (have you ever seen a dog with nose tubes gently stitched to the sides of his muzzle so he can't fidget out of them?), he finally could breathe no longer.

Yeah, I know, it's never the right time. I know there's never enough time. But knowledge ain't worth jack when you feel like this.

We'll all miss you, Nige, who never grew out of your puppy-wonderfulness in nine so short years. There's a bit less life force in the world right now.

Nigel

September 17, 2001 - October 1, 2010

Franz Strokinand?

2010-06-16T12:08:00.000-07:00

Catchy as heck, no matter. And that's a mighty fun video, too. LA band makes good.

Arkantsas

2010-06-10T08:01:00.000-07:00

Big Ed can get on my nerves sometimes, working too hard to be Mr. I Shoot Things Folksy Not One of Those City Lefty Liberals, but he totally nails things here.

If nothing else, it's sort of fascinating to see how much the Obama White House can disappoint.

Tuned v. 1 no. 6: "Constructive Summer," The Hold Steady

2010-05-14T08:01:00.000-07:00

found on The Hold Steady's Stay Positive (2008)

Tuned In:
In lieu of a concert review (for a killer show by THS at El Rey in LA on May 5), I thought it might be more instructive to examine "Constructive Summer," which I'd like to subtitle "It's All Over but the Rocking and the Pointing" and goes a little like this:

Sneaky, huh, how it passes up the "Lust for Life" drums it name-checks in line one, the bop-bop-bop bop-bop-de-bop-bop beat that even Colin Meloy nicked for "The Sporting Life," and that improbably Carnival Cruises stole as a theme song for awhile (Iggy at sea sort of confounds me, but what do I know about marketing), to opt for something much more straight-ahead, driving--even the piano makes a lie of its name and is all tympani. But that's the song, isn't it, cutting grammar off at the pass--"Me and my friends" indeed. No surprise later our singer didn't like schooling none, is it.

For this is a you and me song, one that throws its friendly arm over our shoulders. You have to sing along to one of our psalms for the "this summer" shouts, one of which turns out to be "get hammered," and why not, this town is dying. For maybe we're in a real place and maybe we're in Springsteenvania,* for Craig Finn, The Hold Steady's leader, certainly has an affinity for the Boss. In some ways at times THS seems to write its songs the way so many filmmakers now make movies--why write from life when you can write from the art that precedes you and moves you? Life can be a bore, but the best art--by which, of course, I mean the art you like--is even thrilling in its losses, so monumental.† "My friends that aren't dying are already dead," is just such a line, how grand our misery is, it proudly asserts.

Cause it can't be true now, can it, not with a song this zippy? It puts the vim in invigorated, the way we have to raise our hands in defiance, the way we have to rock really hard and of all ridiculous things hope. Sure the song ends dead on its last two lines "Getting older makes it harder to remember…we are our only saviors/We’re gonna build something, this summer," and you have the feeling our fine Finn-y friends sing this tune each and every Memorial Day with not much to show but a hangover back to work at the mill on Tuesday. But perhaps that's ok. It sure felt good thinking about it. And while all this hope can be fit in under a 3 minute rockin' nutshell, there might be a next song that kicks in before we know it. We can all be something bigger if it's nothing more than knowing that wherever two or three of us gather in rock's name...you know, they're called power chords for a reason.

*In particular nowhere more than "Racing in the Street," the closest Bruce has ever got to Raymond Carver goes to New Jersey, although that might be as much as close as Roy Bittan has got to Raymond Carver goes to New Jersey. You can check a video of the famous 1978 Capitol Theatre in Passaic NJ version, even. Note Bruce's version is a ballad. Perhaps that's where St. Joe Strummer comes in.

† Think of the sheer joy in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, say, before people started to like him and his moves codified, or to refer to one of Tarantino's references, the Truffaut of Shoot the Piano Player, all that joy in knowing what we know and letting you know it too. Come bathe in our collective cool.

Tuned Out:
Does everyone have a water tower in his or her past? There was one right outside the gate of our high school and I never climbed it let alone took part in the annual graffiti-ing, which was never clever, just a claim that Class of ____ was here and you damn well better remember it. (Till Class of ____+1 comes along.) Might my life be different, having looked down from such a lofty, and no doubt slightly drunken, perch, I do not know.

And that was even with hearing the call of St. Joe Strummer even then, buying London Calling at a Sam Goody's on 6th Avenue in New York, a double LP for $5.99 and liking it plenty, but of course they weren't really punk by then (just, for a moment, the world's best band? that title no one can hold for long as it's just too much to be that wise and sloppy at once to survive). And I was never punk, despite to this day thinking "Blank Generation"‡ speaks to me, but I came to The Voidoids late, and so much of that speaking is Quine's guitar, so the unspeakable. So I'm a fraud--the life of a secret punk isn't very punk at all.

That's why I need so music so much, something has to give me a way out, a way to hold steady.

‡ And how have I never seen this before on YouTube? And why the hell do they cut away from the song to interview wasted audience members? Richard Quine, how I miss you.

Good-Night, Sweet Prince

2010-05-03T20:01:00.000-07:00

Mookie this morning, May 3, 2010

And may your noble, cracked heart fly with the angels, for certainly you could fly on earth. Here's what I wrote last November:

It's Mookie's 12th birthday today, and at least for now I want to think of him again as the fastest dog in the park, the one other dogs would chase and then they would cry, realizing how quick he was, how it broke their heart to witness such swiftness and point them out as the plodders they were. I want to hang to all the joy in that speed, that sense of singleminded purpose. To the lift of moving with all of you in the air. Young Mooks had that and more.

So here's to the wonder he was and the sweet old hobbler he is now, no doubt still lightning quick in the dreams he dreams in his daily snoozes, so often guarding a Milkbone he's not even sure he wants, he just knows Nigel doesn't deserve.

Poor Mooks gets to dream those dreams full-time now. He had been losing weight and growing weaker nearly by the day of late, and this weekend it was his breathing that started to go, too. The only gift we had left to give him was to ease his pain, and as much as that was the right choice, it's a "gift store" I don't want to have to shop at too fucking often.

In the mornings while getting ready to go off to work, Mookie would almost always assume his same favorite spot, on the top of the bed across all the pillows, exactly the kind of comfy a greyhound cherishes. Despite finding his perfect perch, if I came up and asked him if he wanted a hug, he'd scoot a bit up the bed to give me room, as if inviting me. And I told myself every day, running late or not (but of course almost always yes), I had to lay down and give him that hug. I cherished all of those moments, telling myself he wasn't going to live forever. Beauty, love, us, you and me--all so insubstantial.

I know that. And I know nothing at all.

Mookie,

November 24, 1997 - May 3, 2010

Another Bolero, Another 10

2010-04-28T13:31:00.000-07:00

This appeared on Edhat yesterday as a thank you for the free tickets, but I figured it belonged here, too.

Larry Keigwin + Company, Bolero Santa Barbara

Hands down, hands are crucial to the work Larry Keigwin choreographs, as was amply evident during the four piece performance his troupe (and a wonderful bunch of locals, but more on that in a bit) presented on Friday at the Lobero. Take one repeated bit the company made in the piece "Wind," set to a soaring Philip Glass soundtrack - often while circling, the dancers would bring their arms up from hips, bringing their palms together in front of their faces, as if taking off, as if supplicants in church. On a wing in a prayer literalized, you could say.

But of course I've zoomed in a bit too quickly to give an overall sense of this wonderful, wide-ranging night of movement. As usual (Keigwin has been a frequent visitor to town, thanks to Dianne Vapnek and Summerdance, now DANCEworks), the work was both poignant and playful, as anything involving humans on the move should be. The opening, "Air" (perhaps as in "as light as") had the dancers in natty flight attendant costumes, turning the usual safety instruction pantomime into something clever, all set to the Fifth Dimension singing "Up, Up and Away." (And while it's hard during such a number not to think of Bob Fosse's "Take Off with Us" from All that Jazz, the Keigwin piece stayed nice and far from naughty.) The second movement of "Air," a coy duet danced by Keigwin himself with Matthew Baker, popped clichés of love (even going so far as to include balloons), while still luxuriating in the danceability of a croonerly gem like Perry Como's version of "Catch a Falling Star."

"Triptych" was another piece fascinated with arms and hands, limbs swinging often in a mechanical way, dancers set in lockstep (what's the arm equivalent of lockstep?). At times a line of four or five would cut across the stage, the last dancer briefly breaking out of the routine, only to jump back in before leaving the stage. The piece seemed to tease the tension between being one with the group versus the need for being an individual, the comfort of the many versus the risk of going it solo.

The darkest piece of the night was a preview of "Exit," the work the company has been developing during their Santa Barbara residency. Performed on the bare stage with stark lighting, dancers often were up against the wall itself - a piece about limits, as if to suggest all dance is, since it's always about flesh. Composer Chris Lancaster played his original music on electric cello live, and its occasional grating was cleverly mimicked when one dancer would draw his hand along the wall, fingernails on the performance's chalkboard. It will be fascinating to see where the work-in-progress "Exit" ends up.

The evening ended on a much more joyous note, with "Bolero Santa Barbara," featuring 50 Santa Barbarans of all shapes, ages, and dance ability (plus one local dog Edhat needs to feature soon). Opening with the performers aptly moving from the aisles/audience onto the stage, it reveled in Santa Barbara as 3-D postcard - bathing suits, beach scenes (with surfing on towels across the stage), Trader Joe's bags, bikes, even a few bare bottoms (provided by the professional dancers - New York sassiness invading our poor provincial town). That it was done so lovingly took away any of the possible sting of condescension, and that the performers were clearly having the times of their lives added to the joy. For what is dance, after all, but celebration, and to make that celebration Santa Barbara-specific…well, that can only be a great time.

The Cows that Agriculture Won't Allow

2010-04-20T12:30:00.000-07:00

If you started with the videos, there's really no point in reading what I've got to say, is there. For while this performance wasn't from Yo La Tengo's concert last night at Velvet Jones in Santa Barbara, it certainly is close enough to the version essayed yesterday to give you the full meaty flavor of what was a typically terrific show from the veteran outfit. "More Stars than There Are in Heaven" is probably my favorite track from their most recent CD, the tongue-in-cheekily named Popular Songs, with its lovely noisy wanting-keening, so it was wonderful for it to get such a mind-blowing, Ira-bending workout. Not that those of us who have been following the band for years expect any less--even back in the early mid 1980 days when 10 people might show up for a show and a peeved Kaplan would merely feedback solo for a half hour, the mild-mannered guitar hero was always in the making. Here, though, such control of that chaos. Such beauty out of noise. If only it were a land we could walk hand-in-hand in. (How fitting it can't be contained in one video.)

For it has to be said, Kaplan is a man possessed in concert. For not only was there this work out, and the set-ending opus that the magisterial instrumental "I Heard You Looking" became, but there was his all out attack on the keyboards for "Sudden Organ," too, blatty-blasts punctuating the song as he'd seemingly randomly fall onto his right elbow. In many ways while they performed much of the latest disc, the heart of this live set was Painful, a hint both of when the band came together with not just alternately but often simultaneously supple and muscular bassist James McNew, but a world view: Beauty hurts, it has to--it teaches us how much is ugly then it ups and leaves.

Take McNew's prime turn at the mic (well, except for the encore's "Ant Music," just as fun as you would have hoped) "Stockholm Syndrome." I'm far from the first person to point out its Neil Young-ish folk rock charms, but just as you get used to the gentle ride, Kaplan jumps in with a guitar solo that makes the tune a mad mash-up: if it were Disneyland, it would be like getting ripped from the carousel, and you're not even on one of the up-and-down horses, and ending up on Tower of Terror, everything about you free-fall guitar.

Alas, I don't mean to ignore Georgia Hubley, whose drumming keeps her wildman husband's ways pinned tight to the songs. How steady she is, mallets-aswinging. How unwilling she seems to want to step into the spotlight, even during a rousing encore version of "Emulsified" when she was called on to take a drum solo. (Perhaps, though, it was Kaplan saying, "take it my little lady," that kept her laughing, instead of drumming crazy.) And then, despite the crowd's noisy rumble (stupid crowd), she also got to sing "Hanky Panky Nohow," that gorgeous John Cale lullabye of sorts, and totally make it her own.

Forget about Ant Music. Let's hear it for YLT Music.

Who Put the Red in the Read

2010-03-01T13:27:00.000-08:00

A bookish sort, I. So the other day I volunteered to take part in Read across America, and for 20 minutes read My Friend Rabbit to a class of pre-K kids so tiny I must have looked like a Thanksgiving Day Macy's Parade balloon to them (and perhaps just as full of hot air, who knows). As one who is childless by choice, I figure I have to deal with the little buggers sometimes, and this seemed as contained and safe a way as possible. It turned out to be pretty rewarding, especially when one of the four-year-olds nearly high-fived my palm off afterward in celebration.

One thing we were told to do as part of the event was explain how and why books are important to us. To help prove my bibliophilic nature, it hit me I still had one of my favorite books from childhood, and I thought bringing something that old might impress the kiddies, since the book is even older than I am (its © 1955, my © isn't even 195_ ). So I fished out How Our Nation Grew (see image above) and was ready to tell them how it was a history book from one of my older sisters' classes (third grade, I'd guess) and it was one of the first things I remember reading, making me a preschooler with a perhaps unhealthy relationship to the Missouri Compromise.

But then I started looking at the book for the first time in years, and started wonder if I grew up in Texas and not New Jersey. The back of the book offers an important hint, as in big letters it says "The Christian Social History Series." That's a bit surprising as we grew up Catholic, and back in that day (197_) Catholics tended not to think of themselves as Christians, anymore than a super special square would deign to call itself a mere rectangle. But, reading through the book, it became clear to me just how holy a history this was, and not just because of the pages where I cut out the images of the Monitor and Merrimack, say, probably for some school report of my own (think of it as semi-intellectual hand-me-downs). For instance, here's how the book gets all sensitive about the issue of Native Americans back in the good old days when they were just Indians. "The Indians did not want to give up their land. They fought to keep it the only way they knew--by cruelty and torture." If they only knew better, than maybe they would have been able to keep their land. Fortunately, they all ended up on reservations, which is pretty nice of us. That meant, "Now the white man could settle the West in peace. He no longer feared the Indians would drive off his cattle, burn his home, or kill his family."

Of course, the Indians were an old, easily reserved problem. For in 1955, the problem was the USSR and "Communism...one of the most evil movements that has ever arisen in the world" since Communists don't believe in god and or that man has an immortal soul. There is no hint in the book that Communism might have anything to do with Marxism, or even anything to do with a political system derived from an economic idea. Turns out it's particularly bad to live in a Communist run country because, "They are allowed to read only Communist books, newspapers, and magazines. These are full of lies, and the people never learn the truth about their country or other countries."

Unlike, say, the children who learn history from "The Christian Social History Series."

But while the book holds a place in my memory if not my moral or political compass, the back cover was oddly highly predictive for this now left coast, left-wing agnostic; take a look at where the long, hard, covered wagon train ends--at the Santa Barbara Mission.

The Subject Was Toes-es

2010-02-26T08:13:00.000-08:00

For Dog Blog Friday: It's not like we don't know why our bed is always a mess....

Friday Random Ten

2010-02-26T08:01:00.000-08:00

Tara Key "Jack of Hearts" Bourbon County
Elvis Costello "All This Useless Beauty" All This Useless Beauty
The Halo Benders "Bombshelter Pt. 1" Don't Tell Me Now
Hem "A-Hunting We Will Go" Eveningland
Spoon "Vittorio E" Kill the Moonlight
Built to Spill "Sidewalk" Keep It Like a Secret
Syd Straw ""Future 40s (String of Pearls)" Surprise
The Replacements "Alex Chilton" Just Say Sire: The Sire Records Story
Talking Heads "Air" The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads
Bright Eyes "Make War" Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground

bonus
Richard & Linda Thompson "Did She Jump" Shoot Out the Lights

After a few straying, mean weeks, iTunes returns to my door, plaintive, carrying chocolates and flowers. Lots of good in a lot of different flavors.

The House of Tomorrow (or Tuesday)

2010-02-25T17:03:00.000-08:00

So Tuesday is Magnetic Fields in LA day, and to get psyched, and keep that doleful-ness you've come to expect this week, here's a band that's led by a guy everyone says sounds like Eeyore...

First, I really got into the band with the release of The Charm of the Highway Strip, a road album of lost highways and the beloved losers who drive them, and usually they don't do songs from it on tour, but lookie here....

Just as lovely, lovelorn, as it needs to be.

And since that song mentions fireflies...there's what's still his most famous song, "100,000 Fireflies," which also is getting played this tour (and if they don't do it Tuesday, I'll do my best to not cry for the rest of the week, but am not promising anything):

Then, during my YouTube ramble I discovered this, a Stephin Merritt documentary!

I'll Be a Friend, I'll Tell You What's in Store

2010-02-24T12:40:00.000-08:00

The rain today makes it easy to think of this one, especially since it popped up on a 15-year-old mixed tape the other day, especially since it keeps the week's theme of dourness, the Democrats, disconsolateness, drinking, and dysphoria running (damn the D's, full blog ahead). And while Cole makes a joke of it in his story, what does it mean to drag in a chorus of children to sing the la-la-la-la's on a song baldly billed "Unhappy Song," it's like singing Richard Thompson's "End of the Rainbow" to them, or worse, making them sing it themselves. But that's not quite right, is it--they get the leavening la-la-la's, the bit that's meant to be sweet. Cause there's always sweet in the unhappy, isn't there, otherwise we'd never know it for the dolefulness it is. We sing, of all things, our sorrow. How human of us.

Can't Spell Disease without DC

2010-02-24T12:06:00.000-08:00

Nod and point time. Steve Goldman is back at his blog Wholesome Reading, and not just busy at work at BP and Pinstriped Blog, so that means one more sharp cookie is on the political shelf. (OK, nowhere to go with that metaphor--it's kind of like health care reform, or HCR, as they like to call it, which, tellingly is an anagram of HRC or Hillary Rodham Clinton, a symbol for the last time the Dems started "reform" by selling out to the monied interests.) Here's part of how he kicked off his return, and proof you should be paying attention. He says exactly what I feel, so thanks for doing it so well, Mr. Goldman.

Beyond Obama and the ineptitude of an administration that would lead and won’t counter-punch, the paramount reason for my frustration is this: while there has been jockeying between political factions for the hearts of the voters virtually since day one of the Republic, there used to be more of a sense that election season was election season but in between you had to accept the results and get on with the business of running the country. That obviously didn’t mean 100 percent cooperation, but you picked your battles. The basic maintenance of the country wasn’t neglected to score political points. That has changed. On one side of the aisle, we have a party that only says no, which means its loyalty is to party first, country second, and of course the Constitution not at all. On the other side, the Democrats (in case you were confused as to who was who) are, in the words of Winston Churchill, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent. Putting your trust in these guys is like rooting for the Kansas City Royals. Who would want to who didn’t have to?

So the country, and by extension us, is a priority for no one, and we’re reduced to being the audience for a kind of masturbatory reality show version of a government while Rome burns. The Democrats have won and haven’t shown that they have a plan. The Republicans will win in November on a nihilistic platform that won’t lead anywhere either. There’s nothing left to hope for. As such, I’ve found that even when I’ve had time to write something here, I’ve felt too discouraged to try. What use would it be, when we’ve given up as a country? Karl Marx wrote of history, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. I’m not sure which version of the fall of an empire we’re in here, but I’m leaning towards farce. Imagine the ad for the movie: “The United States is a zany romp!–Gene Shalit.”

Still, even if our leaders have quit on us, we can’t quit. I’m going to stick with it if you will. Let’s light a candle and curse the darkness. Who’s with me?

I have to admit I'm worried my matches are damp....

If You're Sad, and Like Beer, I'm Your Film

2010-02-23T12:21:00.000-08:00

Oddball that I am, mid-Olympics I had us not watch the NBC-tape-delayed-USfest but a six-year-old movie set 77 years ago and shot like it was made then, set in a Canada not just lost in snow but lost in the Depression, and all-too-eager to remind you that depression isn't just a word from economics. The Saddest Music in the World is a film by unclassifiable filmmaker Guy Maddin who is fittingly named like one of his film's characters, for he's one mad guy. Mad for cinema, particularly German Expressionism, Russian Constructivism, but then other batty bits, a touch of noir, an arc of something arch from Astaire and Rogers. Mad for melodrama; his plots would put a soap opera scribe to shame, but he offers them so matter-of-factly--why of course that dad who believes he's responsible for his young son's death carries the boy's heart preserved in his own tears around in a jar--you want to laugh at the cliche, but it's so goddam believed, so ratcheted up to be more than cliche, you can't.* Mad for memory, not just in his magnificent mish-mash of styles, but in his characters, one amnesiac and lovely, another forlorn and begrudging, another, notably the one who passes himself off as the American, doing his best to bluster and shyster his way past his own terrible history, but we'll see what happens there (look out, America?).

To make a comparison, Maddin sits somewhere between David Lynch and Daniel Handler, a lemony surrealist, a formalist eager to drill down into the psychosexual heart of the world. How could I not love a man who writes things like, "Eschewing digital effects as grotesque artifacts of the present," or "Feeling that happiness depends on structure and hierarchy, I set my rank as director apart by donning jodhpurs and an imposing fez."

Does the contest of battling nations, hoping to prove they possess the saddest music in the world (and win the prize of, as Isabella Rossellini's character puts it, "25,000 Depression-Era dollars"), actually discover the singular song of sorrow? Or does it do something more, finding sorrow in our mini-tribes we know as the family, our pacts and treaties of love that we can't help but betray, mangle, defy, reify into some grand meaning, of a way to have the world feel, if just a tiny bit (I will play my song for my lost love, drives one character; I will repent for my great sin by repairing the one I love with something imaginable, beautiful, glittering and full of beer, thinks another).

It's telling a Jerome Kern chestnut ("The Song Is You"--what else could be more navel-gazingly dolorous, sad-sack?) played by a Canadian cellist posing as Serbian haunts the movie. Worldwide we've all shed tears in our beer, but that doesn't keep us from drinking.

*In his laudatory essay when the film came out, the Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum quoted Umberto Eco: "When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb Homeric profundity. Two cliches make us laugh but a hundred cliches move us because we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion."

Parmesan Rhymes with Courtesan

2010-02-22T08:01:00.000-08:00

While grating Parmigiano the other night while setting up the mise en place for risotto, it hit me what a great invention the whole block of cheese was. I mean, it had to be invented in my lifetime, for until I ~~escaped from home~~ went to college I would have bet my life that parmesan only came in green cardboard cylinders. Which is one way to say, my god, I've lived through a food revolution, haven't I? Growing up I thought my mom was a killer cook, but it wasn't till I started cooking myself that it hit me she killed more than she cooked, too often--just ask any vegetable that tended to be served as if she were feeding a family of hockey players who couldn't afford dentures. And I won't even get into Slovak food, which answers the culinary question, how many carbohydrates can you fit in one dish?

But my mom did do Italian passably well, making meatballs and sauce from scratch, even. So it's telling when things needed to get cheesy, out came the Kraft's, so much like cheese it doesn't need refrigeration. I love the photo above and its claim "the original flavor enhancer," which is vague enough to mean nothing, beyond a possible lawsuit from Accent, which I also remember in our 1970s spice cabinet. At least our kitchen appliances weren't avocado green.

So we certainly took cheese for granted, or for grated, as the case may be. Now I'm too sophisticated for that, of course, doing my cheese shopping at a proper cheese shop and brandishing my MicroPlaner with abandon at the slightest need for cheese (or zest--what handy tools). The work seems to make the food even better, somehow, or that's what I hope to think. I'm sure it's nothing about the distance I hope to make with even the smallest of choices, my childhood and its expiration date cabineted-away, hidden, I can only hope, by my way with words like Parmigiano, mise en place, risotto.

Nigel's Julie Andrews Moment*

2010-02-19T08:11:00.000-08:00

For Dog Blog Friday: It's a heck of a climb, but if you get to the top of the San Ysidro Trail, you get Nigel and Rickey's view.

*And yes, it would be better if it were a Julie Andrews Bedazzled moment.

Friday Random Ten

2010-02-19T08:01:00.000-08:00

Modest Mouse "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes" The Moon & Antarctica
Red Dirt Rangers "Idabel Blues" Vol. 1--Full Tank
Emmylou Harris "Cup of Kindness" Stumble into Grace
Laurie Anderson "Tightrope" Bright Red / Tightrope
Leo Kottke "Three/Quarter North" One Guitar, No Vocals
Esquivel "Lazy Bones" Space Age Bachelor Pad Music
Pavement "Brink of the Clouds" Wowee Zowee--Sordid Sentinels Edition
Elvis Costello & The Attractions "Busy Bodies" Armed Forces
Kate Bush "Deeper Understanding" The Sensual World
Big Star "Baby Strange" (live) Keep an Eye on the Sky

bonus
Jon Langford "Buy It Now" Gold Brick

Methinks iTunes is hating on me of late. Pretty blah. Do like that Big Star T-Rex cover, and the box set is so wonderful it's good to see it in the list. That's a lovely, sneaky cynical song by Jon Boy to go out on, too.

Don't Let Your Sun Go Round on Me

2010-02-18T12:05:00.000-08:00

Friday would be the 537th birthday of Nicolaus Copernicus if he wasn't dead and rotting in hell as he had the nerve to prove you can't take the Bible literally. (Fortunately no one takes the Bible literally today--after all, Catholics formally apologized for the trial of Galileo in 2000, although many think that was just a Y2K glitch on John Paul II's part.) And no, the church didn't hate him because he was a quadrilingual polyglot (after all that would just be a lucky priest's good afternoon with three altar boys). They hated him for saying the earth wasn't the center of the universe, sure (take that 1 Chronicles 16:30, Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, Psalm 104:5, and Ecclesiastes 1:5), but he also had the nerve to suggest there's stuff called evidence and it can be used to prove things. Luckily no one is like that anymore--I mean it's not like only 39% of Americans believe in the theory of evolution or anything. Of course, making Copernicus the center of this entry would probably perturb him--even during his lifetime his own public persona kept shifting, as the spelling of his name constantly changed, to the point where if he were a dog he would make the noise "woof woof" in English but "hoang hoang" in Thai, not that he ever went there for Thai stick or that sex tour. When he asked you to check out his telescope, he really meant it.

Happy Are the Mirth-Makers

2010-02-17T16:40:00.000-08:00

Which came first, the twisted mind or the culture that twisted it? In my case, who knows. But I do know, for sure that Martin Mull and what turns out to be very short stints as Barth Gimble on Fernwood 2Night and then America 2-Night helped shape my sense of wit. We're talking years before Letterman, decades before Larry Sanders. We're talking the same spitting range as Mike Douglas and Merv, other fixtures of our televisual household (we were not an outdoors family). I learned a generation of wordless facial takes watching Mull mull-over the desperate, talentless, and clueless about him, and who doesn't feel that way about the world, especially at 14 and 15? How amazingly ridiculous everything seems, of course starting with one's own self, but it's so much easier to roll one's eyes in exasperation at everything not us, isn't it. (Please do not ponder how far I've grown past that 15-year-old, cause if you do I'll have to make a face.)

But my god how I like to make fun of things. And the roots of me as critic might start in parody like this, that essential sense of "aboutness." Sure you could create, or you can respond to what others create, and thus the ink doth spill, years and years of music reviews (we called them records then, kids!) and film and books and plays. If others didn't create I'd be nothing.

Damn Those Puparazzi

2010-02-12T08:15:00.000-08:00

For Dog Blog Friday: You don't have a camera out in there, do you?

Friday Random Ten

2010-02-12T08:01:00.000-08:00

Alan Feinberg "Clap yo' Hands" Fascinatin' Rhythm
Rilo Kiley "I Never" More Adventurous
Shriekback "Nemesis" Oil & Gold
Alison Krauss & Union Station "The Boy Who Wouldn't Hoe Corn" New Favorite
Crooked Fingers "Run, Lieutenant, Run" Forfeit/Fortune
Muzsikas "Bonchidai Lassu Magyar" The Bartok Album
Crooked Fingers "Devil's Train" Bring on the Snakes
Astor Piazzolla "Adios Nonico" Un Siecle de Tango Volume 2
Chavez "Top Pocket Man" Ride the Fader
Stereolab "Monster Sacre" Emperor Tomato Ketchup

bonus
The Arcade Fire "Ocean of Noise" Neon Bible

22,852 songs and that's the best you can do, iTunes? And as much as I like Eric Bachmann, he could be much better represented if he's going to hog 2 spots. Barry Andrews and the gang are probably top dog this week. (FWIW, it took to cut 13 to get to a total total fave, Superchunk's "Driveway to Driveway.")

C'mon Baby Fight My Lyre

2010-02-11T18:12:00.000-08:00

Ready to feel old? Not only does Christina Ricci turn 30 tomorrow, Ray Manzarek turns 71. Now perhaps those doors closed for you long ago, and if you're like me you might like him best for producing X and kicking ass on "The World's a Mess, It's in My Kiss," but still, goddam those 60s are far away, aren't they. So here's to Manzarek, the actual talent in the band dominated by a guy as phallocentric as a Maypole (poetry is not the phrase "great golden copulations" ok?). You've got to give props to any man famous for playing his organ in public. And so well!

Two-Mealed Drive

2010-02-10T16:27:00.000-08:00

Alas I somehow never got around to writing about meal 1, even if it was a month ago, but George had more than a little lamb and it was wonderful. Dylan at Hollister hooked up with Barbara and Bill Spencer at Windrose Farms not only to score 95% of the produce, but also a lamb. Then Dylan had to make 40 five-course meals out of 42 pounds of processed lamb. To do that he did what you'll read here (touch it to make it bigger):

And it was all wonderful. That first course was what all the heat over hoof and snout eating is all about--flavors of a richness we too often tend to deny ourselves, out of meekness, squeamishness, politeness, silliness. Just eat the whole thing. If you admit you're a carnivore, it seems silly to elevate some parts of an animal over others. Plus if you want to be a considerate carnivore (is that like a compassionate conservative?), it makes more sense to eat as much as you can, to honor the beast, to avoid the waste. Promise, if cooked correctly (and what else would Dylan Fultineer do?) there's nothing awful about offal.

Otherwise, so much lamb-y heaven. That pasta course, with pasta brilliant enough by itself. The perfect break of the salad, with the tiny apples sliced so thinly they appeared to be radishes, but then deliciously were not. And "The Tender Stuff" was just that, probably the best traditional lamb I've ever had, probably because the folks at Windrose are so good they treat their animals well. And guess what, that caramel in the dessert course? It largely consisted of lamb stock cooked down till syrupy.

Another amazing evening from the folks at Hollister. Here's hoping Eric gets well soon.

Then, just this past Monday Amy and I drove to LA for dinner. Yes, after work. Somehow the traffic just flew (it can happen in LA, no snickering) and we were in Hollywood in no time. (In CA driving, an hour and a half is no time. Your mileage may vary.) We'd been wanting to try Lou for about a year, especially one of their Monday night 3 course, 5 wine dinners, especially for cassoulet, as we are cassou-holics, as you all learned if you read about the last Hollister Beer Dinner. Here's the menu and the amazing, almost all from a stone's throw from Toulouse (they grow the rock-throwers big and strong in that region):

Salade de gésiers confits
Chateau Laffitte-Teston Pacherenc du Vic Bilh Sec “Cuvée Ericka” 2007

Cassoulet with house-made pork and duck confit
Tasting flight of rustic red wine
Domaine Le Roc Fronton “Folle Noir Amblat” ‘07
Domaine Matha Marcillac Cuvée Lairis “07
Domaine des 2 Ânes Corbières “Premier Pas” ‘07

Tangelo and Marsh grapefruit sorbets,
passion fruit gelée, toasted almonds
Chateau Laffitte-Teston Pacherenc du Vic Bilh Moelleux ‘07

All crazy yum. Yep, that first course is all about the duck gizzard, but it's not over-powering at all, a pleasing gaminess that played off the walnut vinaigrette wonderfully. The cassoulet was very very good, but as a personal thing, I like a bit more of a sauce. Still, that house-made duck confit was some of the best I've ever had, meaty and rich with duck fat, crispy skin, completely moist. And now it seems I like Fronton, and I never even had heard of the grape before. The dessert was brilliant, the vivid citrus flavors shooting through the previous richness like a laser. They also serve killer Monkey and Son coffee, which I must now search out.

Of His Pasta Memories Are Made

2010-02-08T12:58:00.000-08:00

I went looking for my youth in a bowl of pasta the other night and didn't quite find it, but at least I came up with this blog entry. It didn't even hit me when I placed the order for fettuccine Alfredo that I wanted more than the comfort of comfort food, but a connection, a memory, days that even when happening seemed like dream so now slip away all too easily. Somehow, while our family was decidedly middle class (the word once meant something, you know), we managed to head to Bermuda for vacation every couple of years, a mere two hour flight from Newark, but a crazy distance away--how genteel Colonialism can seem, especially when you're just a kid, particularly when you're more dazzled by an ocean so blue, you can walk into it and see your feet when up to your neck. This wasn't the Jersey shore, my friends. You West Coasters can keep Hawaii (where I must admit I have not yet been)--Paradise for me was Bermuda, weirdly more mid-Atlantic than Caribbean, and later, even better, the supposed "real" setting for The Tempest. Poor Hawaii's merely got a Brady Bunch episode (OK, a two-parter. With Vincent Price. But still.)

But I have parted far from my strand of pasta, haven't I? That's food for you. It didn't hit me till the other night's to remain nameless place serving me up a just not rich enough, just over-cooked fettuccine to realize what I longed for was the Alfredo served at the Princess, the wonderful once grand, at the time a bit, a tiny, tiny, what probably made it affordable for us bit, down on its heels old hotel where we would always stay. And waiters advanced to captains and they'd remember you year from year, as that's what fine service does, especially Italian waiters abroad who got to flirt with my sisters (older than me, it's not like there was something too weird going on) and deliver piping hot, cheesed to the nth degree fettuccine to teens like me. An odd dish for an island paradise, I know. But that's so often how paradise is, incongruous and everything we could want. Or maybe it's just our family (sans dad as this is all after the divorce, of course) sort of being one for a bit, getting along as the world was just too beautiful not to for a few days. Perhaps my mom came as close to happy as she'd let herself then.

You know what they say--watch what you eat as you never know what might repeat on you.

Hey, Good Lickin', What Ya Got Mookin'

2010-02-05T08:18:00.000-08:00

For Dog Blog Friday: Look out, Mooks, the tongue that licked Cincinnati is behind you!

Friday Random Ten

2010-02-05T08:04:00.001-08:00

The Mountain Goats "New Star Song" Beautiful Rat Sunset
Destroyer "My Favourite Year" Trouble in Dreams
Space Negros "The End of Transition" Dig Archaeology
Terry Radigan "When I Get Around" Vanguard 50 Years Sampler
Moby "Slipping Away" Hotel
Lucinda Williams "Side of the Road" [live] Passionate Kisses [ep]
Television Personalities "Closer to God" Closer to God
Simian Mobile Disco "I Got This Down (Invisible Conga People Remix)" Wichita Free Sampler Summer 2008
Marshall Crenshaw "Mary Anne" Marshall Crenshaw
Johnny Adams "Release Me" Big Ol' Box of New Orleans

bonus
Tom Tom Club "L'Elephant" Tom Tom Club

Well a bit of the all-over there. Still, a classic Crenshaw chestnut, one of Lucinda's under-rated ones, and much other fun. And tonight it's Ahab Music Live!--Langhorne Slim at a local coffee shop! Really.

It Takes a Pork Pie Hat to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry

2010-02-04T15:12:00.000-08:00

83 years ago this Friday marks the release of one of the greatest films of all-time, Buster Keaton's The General. Upon release it received miserable reviews--the LA Times, and no, not a young Kenny Turan, called it "neither straight comedy nor is it altogether thrilling drama"--and it performed horribly at the box office.

Today we have Avatar.

Taste, appreciation for brilliant popular art, justice--that's the real unobtanium. (Footnote: Not only is it a clunky term, Cameron nicked it. Even his bad ideas are stolen.)

If you have never seen The General, see it at once for the beauty of Matthew Brady photos and the humor that only a daredevil like Keaton could pull off. And if you've seen it, see it again, as it endlessly rewards--try to find a screening someday with live musical accompaniment.

Here's a cool little clip that discusses Keaton's clever, risky stunt-work:

Into the White

2010-02-04T09:28:00.000-08:00

So on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac in the index for Stephen Dunn this poem gets typoed, and is called "Lineliness." That's poetry for you, and one why, perhaps, I'm giving most of my poetry books away since I've been a deceased poet for over decade now. But I'm not giving away my Stephen Dunn, not when he writes a poem like this one.

Loneliness

So many different kinds,
yet only one vague word.
And the Eskimos
with twenty-six words for snow,

such a fine alertness
to what variously presses down.
Yesterday I saw lovers
hugging in the street,

making everyone around them
feel lonely, and the lovers themselves --
wasn't a deferred loneliness
waiting for them?

There must be words

for what our aged mothers, removed
in those unchosen homes, keep inside,
and a separate word for us
who've sent them there, a word

for the secret loneliness of salesmen,
for how I feel touching you
when I'm out of touch.
The contorted, pocked, terribly ugly man

shopping in the 24-hour supermarket
at 3 a.m. -- a word for him --
and something, please,
for this nameless ache here

in this nameless spot.
If we paid half as much attention
to our lives as Eskimos to snow...
Still, the little lies,

the never enough.
No doubt there must be Eskimos
in their white sanctums, thinking
just let it fall, accumulate.

The Night Blogger

2010-02-02T21:23:00.000-08:00

Childhood, Saturday night. Sure, other nights too, as they kept moving the _____ Night Movie of the Week around as they were ABC and only had Monday Night Football doing them any ratings good in those days. But this was what made weekends great when you were a kid and couldn't do anything else. Ah, television. Go look at the list of ABC Movies of the Week at Wikipedia and tell me you don't get back most of your childhood memories. Admit it, they aren't of playing catch with dad who was too busy working his ass off and avoiding home. They were of Karen Black turning into a Zuni devil doll, Dennis Weaver being terrorized (in a Plymouth Valiant, no less, what would be the very first car you "owned" as a hand-me-down, if a later model) by a hyper-malicious truck driver, and Kim Darby finding a horrible fate with the fireplace people in Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. OK, you might not remember that last one, as it's not as iconic as the first two, but if you saw it, you completely remember. It's part of your horror film DNA in a way that The Exorcist or Friday the 13th can't be as it was shown right in that little box in your own damn home. And wasn't really violent or gross. It just was intense enough to scare the bejeebers out of you. And you didn't even know you had bejeebers till they were gone.

Of course, who am I really trying to kid with the second person here--I'm writing about myself, perhaps to myself, but no doubt there was a Movie of the Week that dealt with a situation like that. But what a wonderful way to twist a kid's imagination, a series of films with titles like Dying Room Only and The Missing Are Deadly and The Legend of Lizzie Borden, with Elizabeth Montgomery bewitching in the title role. But in some ways I most remember the ones that are almost generic in their titles and promise and delivery, and still so so good, films like Skyway to Death and The Elevator and Trapped (guy gets mugged, left in department store men's room, wakes up after hours to find he's in the store with six vicious doberman guard dogs).

For, of course, child of the '70s I am, nothing beats disaster films, and while the big screen ones were fun, nothing beat the regularlity of one in your home each Saturday. Did I then realize they mimicked where the U.S. felt it was, post-Vietnam, post-hippie-60s euphoria, careening toward Carter's be-sweatered malaise? Did I realize they made grand my own feelings any teen has, the world so much possibility, so much to desire, so much that would say no and reject? Did I realize it was a large scale mirror for my family splitting in two?

Nah, I just liked cool, scary stuff. You can't beat Killdozer, say, the giant machine so brilliant and malignant, and me too young to quite catch camp yet even when a massive bulldozer, even if possessed by an alien force, can somehow sneak up on someone. Perhaps you have to save that knowledge for when what's scary in the world no longer seems supernatural, just mundane.

Instead we would create our own disaster films in our basements, an elaborate form of play when toy train set power boxes doubled as cockpit controls, crawlspace areas were just tight enough to creep through as varied scary passageways, and somehow we often prefered to kill our selves off rather than survive that final reel, death seemed so synthetic, filmic, dramatic, ick when ick was good.

Friday Random Ten

2010-01-29T08:58:00.000-08:00

The Magnetic Fields "Fido, Your Leash Is Too Long" 69 Love Songs
Elvis Costello "The Other Side of Summer" Mighty Like a Rose
Guided by Voices "They're Not Witches" Alien Lanes
Brian Eno "Back Clack" The Drop
Tony Lucca "Welcome to the Bay" Sin City Social Club Volume 3
Sonic Youth "The Sprawl" Daydream Nation
Archers of Loaf "Let the Loser Melt" Seconds Before the Crash
Neil Young "When You Dance I Can Really Love" Live Rust
Leo Kottke "Peckerwood" One Guitar, No Vocals
Roxy Music "Out of the Blue" Country Life

bonus
New Musik "On Islands" From A to B

QOTD: "If I have an aneurysm tonight, it's out of gratitude." Not a bad list this week, if nothing too obvious.

Long Dog's Longing

2010-01-29T07:58:00.000-08:00

For Dog Blog Friday: Mookie figures if gougeres are good enough for guests, they should be good enough for him.

Sure She's Got Her "S" in an Odd Place, But....

2010-01-28T14:51:00.000-08:00

Got nothing today. Damn the corporate toadying Supreme Court, the paralytic CA constitution, the stupid fumbling incompetence of Martha Coakley, of Air America, of the Democrats, of Omar Minaya, of NBC. I'm sure there are people/groups/dupes/dummies/disasters I've left out. You can create your own loser list.

In the meantime, fun two ways. Gotta love this woman.

She makes me bust my frame and I don't even mind.

Lunching at a Club that Wouldn't Have Me as a Member

2010-01-27T08:01:00.000-08:00

As James at Coyote Mercury would have it, this post isn't here. As some of you may know, if your blogworld collides with your FBworld, I had the great privilege to eat at Club 33 in Disneyland with Amy, and TL, and the Queen (and it was even a royal birthday!) a few weeks back. Wrote about it. That finally got published. Wanna read about where you can't go? Then go here.

Once I Made Shit Up, Part II

2010-01-26T21:15:00.000-08:00

Lots of paid hobby to do tonight, folks, so in the meantime here's something no one would ever pay me for, promise--what I think is the last short story I wrote, probably back in 1992ish? Note--pre-cell phones. What a simpler world. I like some of this, and some sort of embarrasses, and I bet you can guess what is what. Luckily the main character is totally completely wholly unlike anyone I've ever met.

Oh, and the sucker's kinda long, too, at least for blogtopia.

ROADSIDE AMERICA

Past Tom fast the Volvo went, so much so it seemed its logo’s V’s tilted forward like arrows of intent. All he saw was this--Volvo. And this--three antennae. Radio, CB, phone, he figured. Out his windshield Tom spied his own poor excuse for an antenna, bent at 80° from the hula skirts and the brush at the car wash. His didn’t even retract.

He wasn’t one to worry over cars; for him cars were made to go. But this antenna thing was a new wrinkle in the highway. What would be next, satellite dishes? Who wants to be so connected in a car?

So yes, he was driving alone, but that’s how Tom liked it, for it was the lone time he felt safe to let his voice out and into a song. He sang badly and knew it, shocked himself with the keys he could unlock, but what the hell, the noise kept him awake. He particularly liked pretending he could do accents, figuring if he already butchered things, he couldn’t kill the dead deader. There was Billy Bragg, say, all that Briton in his mouth. And no, not the political Bragg, he liked the lost at love Bragg, the one who sang when the world falls apart, some things stay in place. Bragg probably should have been the last but he was just the latest of a long line of pity-pop Tom invested too much of what Hallmark calls heart in.

Superhighways were super, he figured--you could space on them and still not die. Still, there was a flipside: You had to worry about where to whizz. This was the kind of highway you had to get off of to leak, and Tom had a bad habit of picking the exits without return ramps. He never had much trouble finding the interstate again, but he hated the roads that paralleled them, the way they were clearly big shit once, and now all their strip motels were for sale. Highway Darwinism, he called it. Not that he ever stopped at a greasy spoon so slowed the grease had congealed, and it wasn’t just how depressed it would make him. He could be depressed enough on his own. It was the past; he hated how much it hung on like toilet paper glommed to your shoe. It was his past; it just kept getting longer. And he knew he couldn’t resent that too much, because if it stopped elongating like a Slinky pulled away from him, that meant the Slinky was hurtling back, his own personal universe collapsing. If the past stopped, it meant those studies about Alzheimer’s and TV dinners were true, or it meant he stopped, period. Tom couldn’t imagine the dead remember much.

Ah, the highway whizzes of yore, back before Minit Marts and Uni-Marts, when you had Marty’s Esso, and got dinner glasses with each fill-up, and had to ask for the bathroom key, which was attached to a foot long dowel stick too many morons had etched their initials into. Nothing cleared the sinuses like the stink of gas station bathrooms--if they smelled like ammonia they would have been pleasant. They smelled of truckers’ piss, he figured, all that coffee and all those miles. What you pissed would reek, too, if it came from a dick that wore the condoms you could buy in those places, from the machines you had to pull the metal sheet down from, so kids wouldn’t freak seeing the woman with the O-for-orgasm mouth that meant French Tickler or Swedish Massage Oils.

Of course, when a kid Tom never didn’t pull the metal guard down, even faked having to pee on trips to the point his parents took him to a urologist. Years later condoms were boring, he knew that, just as he knew he wouldn’t have to worry about them for a while.

Gina was gone.

He figured exit 38 was as good as any, and lit into the ramp fast, steering with his knees because Gina hated when he did so and she was gone and maybe the car could work as some odd voodoo doll. Gone was dramatic, he knew, he always ran commentary on his own pity like the alternate soundtrack on laser discs when the movie’s director lets you in on the secrets and explains the magic away. But Gina was magic and Gina was gone, so the syllogism was easy to finish.

They had been together only two years, but he never saw a woman half that long, and after six women he had to believe it was partially his fault. Each relationship he took a lesson away: Anne--clip your toenails, Toni--don’t clip toenails in bed, Missy--pleasantly plump isn’t a compliment, Cordelia--read more, Celia--don’t call her Cordelia when coming, Steph--nice people aren’t interesting. But he knew he was being reductive, and he knew he just didn’t talk well, although he could speak and he could listen.

But Gina said, “We don’t talk....”

Tom hated ellipsis in conversation, could feel each period leap to his own tongue as if they were pills he had to swallow. He at least knew enough to turn off SportsCenter.

“Talk?” he asked, like an actor hoping to remember lines.

“I don’t know if you’re capable,” Gina said, both her hands going up into her black hair as if Tom’s words, those right words, might be lost in there, just not making it to her ears.

Tom wanted to say, “Talk about what?” but he knew he was supposed to know. That he didn’t know. “How was work today?”

Gina’s face looked like it tried to smile and it just wouldn’t happen. “We work in the same place. You know the answer. You know Gib’s an asshole and that our computer screens are giving us tumors and that we’ll never get raises and that the boys we work with will be lewd and crude...”

“Ah, yes, I know the dudes to whom you allude...”

“I’m trying to be serious here--quit evading things. Let’s talk.”

They sat there till even the furniture grew quiet. They didn’t even seem to breathe.

Tom had a choice between Exxon and Texaco at the top of the ramp and turned to the Exxon. He wouldn’t buy their gas but took perverse pleasure in peeing in their stations, his own kind of environmental revenge for the Exxon Valdez. Sure enough the Exxon was just far enough off the highway that he panicked and cursed, two actions that almost always followed each other for Tom. He hated waiting for what was promised, and this stupid anger--he called it stupid anger, the sudden, quick rages he could consume himself with, but only over nothing--this stupid anger made him forget about Gina.

Instead he panicked about not wanting. What if one day his want just dried up? He knew many would say that’s what life is about, an asceticism so pure. Yet he was convinced the sound of one hand clapping was the sound of a hand needing a hand, as it were. Yet what if one didn’t get to refuse desire? If it just left, like a lover? Maybe thinking about milestones was a millstone around his neck, forcing his head to look down, look backward. Here he was a half year away from thirty and what shocked him most wasn’t thirty but that he felt nothing, that even his own existence for three decades seemed abstract. Now, a nervous breakdown, that could signal something, a spasm and release, a kind of psychic shit-letting. But thirty, all he could say was, So?

The Exxon appeared at a hill’s bottom, sure enough one of those modern ones with the “roof” suspended so high over the pumps you knew people would get wet from sideways rain, anyway, and what was worse, some engineer, grinning tight-lipped, planned it that way. Beneath this too high canopy sat what appeared to be ten phone booths fused together--the station itself. Vending machines. Lots of white. Fluorescence. Doors to bathrooms. No nostalgic leak would be left here.

By the pumps sat the Volvo, its three antennae gesturing to Tom with what he imagined was the Swedish way of giving the finger. It was revving up and pulling out of the Full Service island, and a sixteen-year-old scrambled to scribble down the license plate number on the credit card slip. As he walked back to the office he asked Tom, “You lost or do you just need to use the lav-or-atory?” saying it like he just watched a Frankenstein movie.

Tom pointed to the bathroom door as an answer. The kid, tossing the credit card clipboard down, sang, “Some car,” in that rising envy singsong teenage boys have for things measured in cubic inches.

The bathroom was spotless. The fan drowned out the kid, if he was still talking, Tom couldn’t tell. Tom was too busy confronting the tallest urinal he had ever seen. Tom was six foot plus, so his worst worry was a crowded bathroom and having to stoop to the boys’ urinal. This was a new experience. He felt he needed a step ladder, or had to perform a trick shot and turn his back and fire a stream up over his shoulder. Instead he just got up on tippy toes. Whose idea was this urinal? He imagined he were still closer to Harrisburg and Three Mile Island, and ever since 1979 everybody had just grown and taken their plumbing fixtures with them. He imagined the mammoth pisses of the nuclearly enlarged. Laughing didn’t make staying on tip-toe any easier; he would have to check his shoes for errant spray. Not that it mattered: the only person who could see him was the kid outside the door, fantasizing about multi-antennaed Volvos. As picky as Gina was about clothes, she never complained about his shoes. Must have been because she was nearly as tall as he, well, not really, but close enough they heard World Trade Center jokes. And she was into eye contact, locked you into those chocolate browns so deep you could feel like a hot fudge sundae melting. It never seemed she looked anywhere but the back of your skull--through the rest of your head. She mostly criticized Tom’s clothes, then, when she was taking them off him. He stopped reminiscing when he realized he was just standing there, his hand holding his penis slowly coming to life. The idea of an erection in an Exxon bathroom, however sanitized, scared the shit out of him, a feeler out for disease. He jiggled, tucked, zipped, flushed, headed out the door.

“Some car,” the boy was still singing, shifting emphasis, getting more out of two syllables than anyone could, unless that anyone had to work a six hour shift alone.

Tom figured the kid needed the conversation, and was curious, so asked, “Why is the urinal so high in there?”

“High?” the kid said.

“Yeah, it’s a good foot further up the wall than most....what if, oh, Mickey Rooney stopped here?”

“Mickey Rourke?”

“Rooney--he’s before your time. He’s short, that’s what matters.” Tom began to worry about his attempted conversational altruism.

“So you’re saying it’s high?” The kid got up and went to the door to look. Tom began to wonder if the kid belonged here--no blue overalls, no name in an oval over the right breast. “Gee, I never realized, you’re right. I just tinkle out back.”

Tom felt an urge to leave quick; even sixteen is too old to say tinkle.

The kid, though, sensed it was a turning moment, so grabbed Tom’s right arm and gave it a little pull as if testing to see if it was attached. “Hey,” he said, “wanna see something really weird?”

Tom wasn’t sure there was weirder and made a face as if he sat on three aces in poker. The kid continued quick, “Down the road? Shartlesville? Roadside America? There everything is small. You have to go that way anyway to get back on the highway.” The kid sat back down nodding his head as if he told his best secret. Tom moved as fast as he could without seeming to move fast, tossing a thank you over his shoulder like flipping a bone to a dog to distract him.

Tom was happy back in the real world of his car. Saw the blue sign for the highway, the sign with the “TO” over it which meant you’re getting hotter but aren’t boiling yet. That’s when he glimpsed the sign “Roadside America--1 mile--World’s Largest Miniature Village.” Why not go? Slowing down on the way to his parents’ house always seemed worthwhile; once there he would merely sit through evenings seeing them both fall asleep in their matching Laz-y-Boys, and he would watch the cable channel that previews all the video releases. They spice it up by using different clips from the same films, he had to give them that. He knew that this time the love stories would pang him a bit, and he would long for love in sixty second doses.

How home did to him he never knew, but what it did was clear--scrape his marrow clean with grapefruit spoons. The hope was to avoid saying anything that could anger anyone, which got harder and harder. The secret was finding the thing outside the family that everyone could hate unanimously--bureaucracy, bad drivers, rotten waitresses, radon. That was practically the whole list. Tom had visiting home down to major holidays, which meant religious ones, and/or major illnesses, which meant his mom’s. Tom would go and sit in the church he hated even more than he wanted to and pray for his mom’s good health.

“It’s a large small world after all!--1/2 Mile” the sign beamed in that paint full of glitter. Tom couldn’t understand how they got around the Disney copyright, but why would the wonderful world of Walt--on ice, Tom joked--care about Podunk, PA? It was harder for Tom not to care. Even as a child he kept confusing maps of America and their red interstates and blue highways with his Visible Man model he painted himself, with its red arteries and blue veins. He joked he couldn’t go because the name was redundant: all America was Roadside, and all Roadside was America.

But he knew such a philosophy meant he was avoiding something. In college he always seemed to learn the tangential lesson in each class, clinging to the aside while the meat of the matter rotted. From philosophy all he remembered was philosophers led bitter lives. Something about Nietzsche in bed with syphilis and a relative charging admission to glimpse him. Having such a life, Tom would seek beyond good and evil, too.

He made his own self-diagnosis years ago--compulsive quasi-impulsiveness. Tom would get himself right to there, then back away. Drive through the scenic town, but never stop. Sit on a high wall as a besotted freshman in college, imagine tilting over just enough, imagine the fall, but never imagine, let alone actually, die. Nearly ask Gina to marry him. He wanted to; he knew it vaguely had to do with her desire for talk. Gina just wanted to know what was next. How he felt about next.

Tom hated next. Even sex for Tom was best when they could both sleep it off, still tangled, somehow, that sudden move from exertion to placidity, from twoness to oneness to nothingness. He loved love in the afternoons and could count on the dreams it would bring. Gina was perturbed by this regularity, he could tell, but even that couldn’t stop him--neither sex nor a nap by itself was ever the same.

Roadside America just appeared, it would be too hard to drive past it. Inside, it was a shock to see the world so small. He expected a train set, or something, but this was frozen moment, ground level. His head bobbed about like the Goodyear blimp above the Astroturf--this odd world small and far away. He thought back to the extraordinary urinal and felt ready for it, now.

Tom wanted to quip, “This isn’t a big deal,” but there was no one to share a sly smile with. What was almost odder than a world in miniature was he could see the superhighway out the window, everybody headed somewhere, like they knew something. That’s what was wrong with Roadside America--whoever set the models up put no roads in it. The diorama had lanes and avenues and all the polite ways we have for pouring asphalt. But then it didn’t need a highway, Tom thought, it had one right outside. He wasn’t sure he liked how large the models made him feel, unsure he was big enough to be who he felt he was becoming.

If Gina were here, he could hold her, fold her into him. He would say, “Who needs words when we are the giants of our world?” realizing as he said it he needed words, he was using them to say he didn’t need them.

Maybe he could get Gina back if they were apart. He needed to get her to Roadside America alone, to let her tower over something for awhile. Maybe then she could feel she could need him and not have to give anything up. Maybe the world, the one outside, is this small. All this size stuff just confused him.

Back out in the car again, he wasn’t sure if he missed the on-ramp on purpose or not. The road he was on ran the right way, edging along the zip of the highway. It was growing colder, the way December does--each minute of the clock is a degree on the thermometer in a late afternoon. He pulled his headlights on even though it was too early for them. He snuggled his parka tighter, thinking how Gina gave it to him on one of their last kitsch excursions together. They would do discount stores on Sundays like religion; almost bought one of those cleaners that smoke slowly like hookahs at the center of most stores.

“Oh divine,” Gina shrieked in her shopping voice, the one full of sliding stress and exaggerated joy.

Tom came running, not much into the hunt for the day, trying to hide his sudden boredom, worrying they were losing each other. He knew from past failures each relationship had a moment it ticked off like lights going out, and it was just a matter of how long the couple would sit there in the dark before exiting though separate doors. Didn’t the couple that thrift-shopped together bop together? At least that’s what one faux-Chinese scroll they bought read.

“Put it on. Put it on.”

So he did, the pea green parka with the hood with the indeterminate animal fur fringe.

“It’s so you.”

“I had one of these when I was, geez, twelve, I guess.”

“There you go.”

“There I went, you mean. I don’t wear my Qianna anymore, either.”

Gina pouted. He hated when she pouted because he found her so cute that way, and worried what that meant. He also hated knowing she knew he loved her pout, her full lips pursing as if they’d just been kissed. Gina had a mouth worth setting up camp in.

“How ‘bout I buy it for you?”

Tom couldn’t say no, now. She always won these battles, mostly because he hated risking public arguments. Or, when he was honest with himself, he admitted he hated risking any arguments. Tom was the Neville Chamberlain of love always willing to sign any of his Czechoslovakias away.

“You have to wear it home.”

He did. Grew to like it. She once made him wear it when they made love, made him tie the hood tight, the kind of hood so deep it made his eyes disappear into it like the space alien on Bugs Bunny. The hood was so snug, she had to force her own head into it, too. Gina loved to be languorous, making love as if underwater and there was too much pressure to bear. So much of time with her was like that, though, the world slowing down. He couldn’t stand future talk because of it. Tom wanted a life like slow sex--those days when they massaged each other so much yet so gently easily that they couldn’t tell when they were touching or not. Burnished, they were. Ah, to gleam like that, bright bodies.

He shook his head to wake himself up to the roadway, knowing full well side roads don’t allow for as much inattention as highways. Sure enough he came up fast on a truck hauling out Christmas trees, folded tight like umbrellas. “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” he said aloud, “or there’ll be no Merry Christmas, Thomas.” His headlights beamed into the green and chick wire, spinning emeralds. Gina and he had used a fake tree last year, an aluminum jobby with one of those turning wheels of colored light you point at it--they got it at a thrift store, of course. It wasn’t just a case of what Tom called “kitsch as kitsch can”--they hated the idea of chopping something down. Or as Gina said, “O lord, we welcome you as a baby into our world by killing this innocent evergreen. Happy now?”

The truck made a wide right onto the highway, another entrance Tom missed. But Tom knew that following the truck was like passing a black cat’s path--he would have to renounce too much before he was ready. He continued on the smaller road, half giggling at himself, for the highway was always nearly in sight--some hero he was.

Some Christmas this was going to be; he hadn’t even been able to tell his folks Gina wasn’t coming with him. They would be cordial about it to his face, but happy behind his back for he knew Gina was too weird for them. She represented another step on the de-evolutionary ladder away from who his parents were. They feared Tom would mutate into her, leaving them alone, wishing for opposable thumbs, or nose rings. That just showed the gulf between Tom and them--he couldn’t bring himself to get an ear pierced, let alone a nose. There was something he didn’t like about giving up any part of his body, after all, he thought, you never know when it might come in handy. As for Gina’s tiny diamond in her nose, well, that’s all she ever wore. That was her style: do something unusual so matter-of-factly it could stun. He liked to fancy her exotic, a trip to other worlds, like that kid in “Araby” thinking he found the spice of the Middle East in a cheap Dublin bazaar and getting that all mixed up with love. That was one story he couldn’t forget from college, and not just because it got taught to him several times. He couldn’t tell if he’d ever get past such a notion of love--the quest, the foreignness of it all. He always felt as if he were on a secret mission, yet everyone could sense he was a spy. And then finally he’d be found out, unable to speak the language, unable to keep up with the words he didn’t quite know.

Tom got spooked by what was at the side of the road, casting short shadows in the last of the day’s light. Baby Christmas trees, fields of them. They got taller as they grew away from the road and up the slight rise to his right. Imagining himself back at Roadside America with his giant’s-eye-view, he could see the pines as a kind of razor stubble. At dusk the trees seemed to glow green, especially rising out of the winter grass gone white like straw. He could never get over how failing light made the world more vivid, how the contrast between day and night set everything in sharper relief. The trees held the half-light in their boughs. The poor things, Tom thought, just growing unknowing. Filling up their allotted space like cookies going from dough to baked, their purpose was to die, to stand in the corner of somebody’s living room and then lie on the edge of somebody’s curb and then rot in a landfill on which more trees might someday grow. But for now they had the innocence of all little things.

Close to crying as he had been in years, Tom pulled the car over and stopped, not quite sure why he did either. Out of the car he hitched up and over the fence with some grace, his body responding to something, finding its room to uncoil.

He headed up the hill, the trees rising in size, knee-high, thigh-high, waist-high, the air green, the air spruce, his mind a pine cone. He passed his hands so slightly over the trees, damp with their sap, and sweet. He touched so many he wasn’t sure if he was still touching them anymore.

That’s when he spotted one missing. The neat regimental lines, this parade of pines, and one good soldier gone. There wasn’t a stump or anything. Just a space, a six by six with nothing to fill it. I can’t stay here long, but long enough, Tom thought, as he crouched down, flipping his hood up. He felt the cold this once, and tightened his parka against it, burying his hands deeper in the deepest pockets--it was one of those coats with two sets, as if it knew hands had days they wanted back into the body. He never knew green came in so many colors. He never knew so much was waiting and so little waited back. He never knew loneliness wasn’t a privilege, and didn’t make him any more special. These trees are all the same and beautiful, he knew.

Far below him the highway moved what didn’t seem fast anymore, cars off both ways, coming and going. He couldn’t hear it, couldn’t tell if that was distance or the muffling of his hood. When the breeze blew, he felt himself shift on the balls of his feet ever-so-slightly, then rock back to where he was. When the light was gone, he would get up and leave. The trees were whispering, he knew, but they weren’t saying anything he could tell, going empty with green, so, so close to something.

Some Kind of Spinning Away

2010-01-25T08:01:00.000-08:00

It's possible this song might be the first top 40 hit I remember from my youth, but like too much with the memory thing (or is that the fact thing?), when I look up the real true details, my memory is a mess. This was a a hit in 1970, but I'm remembering it from the years at the town's pool, Rello's, privately owned, where my sisters both worked summers as teens collecting fees/checking memberships at the gate and where I learned to swim, and what's now more valuable as real estate so is just filled in land plus everyone has their own pools now, so who needs community and the hope of crushes and the whole employee class of lifeguards who mostly just practiced winding the string on their whistles both left and right.

But at the snack bar, on the juke box, "Hitchin' a Ride." Now, do I really recall this from being seven? Was it still on the box for years, a top 5 hit someone liked, so the 45 never left its place? Is it just a song left spinning on the turntable in my head, a head old enough it still has a turntable in it?

I don't know. It's an old head that loves its turntable. And so I've avoided metaphors of the deep end, or the fear of the high dive, or telling the tale of the Rello grandchild, one of twins, who at age 10 died of weird complications after having his tonsils out. We knew the family, it was that kind of town. Also the kind where few probably read Thackeray (even if the band screwed with his novel's title), hitch hiking was considered something people from lesser, coarser towns would do, and being a one hit wonder would be an achievement, a getting out, a moment suburbia might bubble to something less sub-, if only for as long as the single played. How much hope can you expect so far down the Passaic River, where it's insignificant enough even William Carlos Williams wouldn't bother to write about it.

Make Your List, Fat Guy

2010-01-22T08:01:00.000-08:00

For Dog Blog Friday: Nigel hoping to get an early start on being a good dog for 2010. That damn Santa, always watching.

Friday Random Ten

2010-01-22T07:55:00.000-08:00

The Golden Palominos "Wings" Pure
The Magnetic Fields "The Way You Say Good-Night" 69 Love Songs
Peter Blegvad "Shirt & Comb" King Strut & Other Stories
ABBA "Knowing Me, Knowing You" The Best Of (The Millennium Collection)
Tom Verlaine "Sleepwalkin'" Warm and Cool
Channel Light Vessel "Little Luminaries" Automatic
Marshall Crenshaw "Never Coming Down" Jaggedland
David Sylvian & Robert Fripp "Jean the Birdman" The First Day
The Du-Tells "We're Still Here" Wish You Were Here: Love Songs for New York
The Gothic Archies "This Abyss" The Tragic Treasury: Songs from a Series of Unfortunate Events

bonus
3 Mustaphas 3 "Anapse to Tsigaro" Heart of Uncle

Inspirational verse: "You've got a devastating point of view/and everything you say is true." Obscure "super" group: Bill Nelson, Roger Eno, Kate St. John. Great guitarists in odder settings. A 9/11 song into Lemony Snickett. And some fake ethnic music to take us home.

So, a Needle Pulling Cleopatra

2010-01-21T12:58:00.000-08:00

At least by my any-day-in-history calendar Friday is the 229th anniversary of the erection of Cleopatra's Needle in New York's Central Park, one of the few times the words "erection" and "Central Park" were not followed by a bust by the vice squad. Wikipedia, however, says the date is February 22, 1881, but who knows, it might take a month to get a 240 ton obelisk up (sadly, I wouldn't know). The funny part (you certainly didn't think it was my jokes did you?) is the tower's title is a misnomer, as it stood in Egypt a good 1000 years or 8,765,800 hours prior to Cleopatra...that's over 2 million x greater than modern medicine says is healthy, of course, but facts like that tend to bite you in the asp, don't they. No, it was Thutmose III (formerly known as Smutnose, no doubt a buddy of Biggus Dickus and Incontinenta Buttocks) who thrust the mighty cylinder skyward. Alas, he never got into a Shakespeare play, let alone got portrayed by Claudette Colbert or Liz Taylor, so no memorializing for him. And if you wondered about the inscriptions, and who doesn't, they were added during the reign of Ramsesses II, therefore making the shaft ribbed for your pleasure.

Democratic Math

2010-01-19T23:07:00.000-08:00

60 - 1 = 49

Blog Is Good for Anything That Ails You

2010-01-19T22:54:00.000-08:00

Last week the ever-clever Steven Goldman of Baseball Prospectus and the Pinstriped Blog (he's a real writer trapped in a baseball writer's paycheck) added to what seems to be a sort of meme flying around the world of baseball bloggers--a list of their Top Ten favorite movie musicals. His is pretty good (certainly better than Keith Law's and Joe Posnanski's), but of course you know mine's better, cause it's mine and all. It seems the "rule" was to leave off rock docs/concert films, so mine does not include faves like Stop Making Sense, The Last Waltz, Big Time (why is this not on DVD?), perhaps even Urgh! A Music War (which I haven't seen since the '80s and it might not have aged as well as I have, very unfortunate for it). But my list also leaves off animated musicals, because, after all, you can make a cartoon sing any way you'd like (it's like auto-tune, but done with drawings and computers and probably the powder they made from Walt's head when they realized it wasn't worth keeping him on ice any longer). *

Clearly my love of the musical takes a bit more twisted and dark a turn than these fellows, who might know baseball better, but in Goldman's case, he's a Yankee fan, so the smarts has to stop a bit short of a full double feature, no? Without more overture, and with all apologies to musicals from my youth that have their horrible little songs lodged in my brain (what I'd give to excise "Truly Scrumptious" from my head) but really aren't very good--Willy Wonka (the Wilder one, no comment on Johnny Depp as Michael Jackson as Wonka), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang--and then something like Grease, which I had seen on Broadway and realized the movie was a big big sell out/mistake, even then, proto-snob that I was.

10) Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
How this film didn't make one of the three lists is a mystery to me, but then again it probably wasn't an immersion experience for everyone. At least for this suburban NJ boy, it certainly helped me to think about not dreaming it but being it. Plus the first hour, till Meatloaf gets served again, more or less doing an imitation of all of Sha Na Na at once, is pretty damn fun.

9) Pennies from Heaven (1981)
Steve Martin revealing his coarser side, music suckering the characters first, us second, Bernadette Peters' best film role, Christopher Walken years before Fatboy Slim made him dance famous, and some lovely lovely original period songs, all set to Edward Hopper recreations. Not a happy film about film as the wrong way to happiness.

8) The Wizard of Oz (1939)
It's simply undeniable. Plus Margaret Scary Hamilton.

7) It's Always Fair Weather (1955)
Way better than On the Town--it's sort of a sequel--for my money, as it's about disillusionment (I'm a sourpuss, ain't I?). But there's Cyd Charisse, ever lovely, and the trash can dance, and the -wise song, and people worried advertising was a sell out in 1955. All in CinemaScope (except no substitutes).

6) All That Jazz (1979)
When Roy Scheider passed away, it's this film, not Jaws, that lept to my mind, which says something about me, doesn't it. Very '70s, very Fosse, not in the least fussy. Go see more of what I wrote upon Scheider passing. In fact it's interesting how many of these films have made their way into the blog at least a few times before this accounting.

5) Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)
How did this not make any of the three lists? Hilarious, moving, and great great songs (although, oddly, like one of its obvious models RHPS, it sort of loses steam towards the end--I guess with a mere inch it's easy to peter out?). John Cameron Mitchell is an amazing talented man. Bonus points for Emily Hubley animation (yes, Georgia of Yo La Tengo's sister).

4) Top Hat (1935)
I love Fred Astaire, would want to be Fred Astaire, all that amazing grace, how sweet the feet. All the Astaire-Rogers musicals are great, and they can seem interchangeable, but I'll give this one the nod. Plus here's a tip of the top hat to Eric Blore and Edward Everett Horton.

3) Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
Nostalgic about 1904 in 1944 and therefore now a double time trip. Great score. Judy Garland before she was all fucked up. One of the classic child performances of all-time by Margaret O'Brien (for the Halloween section alone). Not on one of the other guys' lists. Huge mistake by all three.

2) Singin' in the Rain (1952)
Hate the ballad. Love all the rest. Even the ever-too-beaming Kelly. (Remember, all his most famous dance bits, like the title one here, are un-partnered. Hint hint.) Still wishing there was a sequel following Jean Hagen and Donald O'Connor in which the studio hires him to be her tutor
and they somehow fall in love. Probably has to do with singing.

1) The Band Wagon (1953)
Got a whole essay up about this one, so what more can I add now? Oh, Jack Buchanan cracks me up. And this is a lovely number, isn't it?

*Please tell me you don't read my parenths, as sometimes they get a bit excessive.

The Heart Is a Lonely Ian Hunter

2010-01-18T13:17:00.000-08:00

What else might come to mind at the beginning of what's supposed to be (and sure is feeling like) a classic Southern California "it doesn't rain but it pours" six day soak? Still it takes more than a good rain to wash away the pull of this miraculously morose little gem that far too many people don't know (yes, that old theme again). If nothing else this still has one of the best two-line openers of all time: "Vinny says this town is dying/it's dying to be just like me" is cleverer than most pop has the right to be, a twist that helps the pessimism go down. For all the loser-filled angst in the lyrics, the song is so god-awful pretty, those little arpeggiated bits floating down, trying to wash something clean, or at the least say early '80s keybs with the a nostalgic, velvety vengeance. Sometimes rain isn't just rain you know. Or at least Ian Hunter knows--as his favorite theme, and how fitting for one who never quite made it as big as he would seem he should and is now mostly a relic, is being someone someday.

As for "Rain," it was just one part of the deluge that was Ian Hunter's run as my pity-popster of choice. Teenage me first gravitated to Jackson Browne and all that worry over being a pretender and not a contender; college-aged me found Hunter, and while I also loved his rocking side (Drew Carey, I want "Cleveland Rocks" back) and his close to Roxy Mott glamorousness (Mott and All the Young Dudes is a heck of a one-two punch), well, even on Mott I might like best the way the album grandly winds down with "The Ballad of Mott the Hoople" and the song that made me first love mandolin (I didn't come to it via my own country, no sir) "I Wish I Was Your Mother," a reinvention of the love song that's achingly tender. Who doesn't need a lesson in non-obvious tender?

For then there's this, too, that makes me forgive the sold soul sax of David Sanborn, makes me think there was value to Queen (that's that background bombast), that's so much that you could fill a vat of all the vinyl I've ever owned with it. We once called them records.

Totally overdone. And I'll take two, please.

Glamhound

2010-01-15T08:10:00.000-08:00

For Dog Blog Friday: Yes, he knows he's gorgeous.

Friday Random Ten

2010-01-15T08:01:00.000-08:00

Carla Thomas "I Kinnda Think He Does" The Complete Stax/Volt Singles 1959-1968
Ensemble Romulo Larrea and Veronica Larc "Casapueblo" Collection Un Siecle de Tango--Astor Piazzolla
Nouvelle Vague "I Melt with You" Nouvelle Vague
David Byrne "The Revolution" Look into the Eyeball
Peter Blegvad "You & Me" Just Woke Up
Peter Gabriel "Here Comes the Flood" Shaking the Tree: 16 Golden Greats
Penguin Cafe Orchestra "Vega" Concert Program
R.E.M. "King of Birds" Document
Steve Earle "Six Days on the Road" Ain't Ever Satisfied: The Steve Earle Collection
Radiohead "(Nice Dream)" The Bends

bonus
Talking Heads "Blind" Sand in the Vaseline

Solid enough if not a killer, heavy on a bunch of famous folks as much as folks I like get famous. Anybody know if the "Here Comes the Flood" from Robert Fripp's Exposure is available digitally? I've got it on cassette only, of all things.

Fast Pass, We Don't Need No Stinkin' Fast Pass

2010-01-14T23:33:00.000-08:00

Space Mountain, the first (WDW that is), turns 35 on Friday but in scream years it's probably close to going supernova. Leave it to those Imagineers to gussy up a mildish if far from Mickey Mouse rollercoaster by turning off the lights--or maybe it's because as they are geeky science guys their wives only have sex with them in the dark, and they figured that's an okay enough ride for them so it should do for everyone. Of course they teased us with a cookie planet for years, too, only to have that constellation crumble, so we know how mean these folks can be. Just ask their wives, who really get tired of the "Have you met my little animatronic friend" jokes.

I ♥ Cheese

2010-01-13T13:00:00.000-08:00

I'm sure I've posted a version of this before (even if Blogger's crummy search won't fess up to that fact), but I haven't posted this one and E-6 got me thinking about it and it's a day when I need it so y'all will get it too. To be in such joy at what one can do. To share that joy. Lucky lucky few, Petra Haden and her Sell Outs (so named, not because of their commercial potential but because she formed them to help her recreate live the a cappella Who Sell Out she recorded all by herself).

And while this performance is fine, it's the oh-so-NYC hip crowd I'd like to smack upside its collective too cool for school head, and I'd do it, too, if I wouldn't get my hand impaled on their retro-nerdy glasses. For they want to laugh at "Don't Stop Believin.'" And while Journey might be worth a chuckle or two, the song sure isn't, especially when it's getting sung like this. That's why pop music moves us so, after all--for as long as you sing it, you can believe it. Don't ever think singing is natural, which is why those folks who can't stand musicals because people suddenly burst out in song miss the point entirely. What else is theater, is something as grand and glorious as film (we are made of light and big!), supposed to be but absolutely unnatural? (Leaving aside all traditions of realism, which are really just an act put on with a paltry budget and I'm not sure if I mean money or imagination). Singing let's us rhyme "thrill" with "fill" and not feel like utter douches. Or, more directly, singing let's us feel.

[Digression even for me, so therefore brackets...Which gets us to Glee that co-opted this take of the song from Petra Haden, and of course it did as the show is pure cheese, the underdog losers we all feel we are finding their home, at last, on the island of misfit boys and girls, even if they don't know it, can only show it when their mouths get wide enough to let their hearts out. Which is why Sue Sylvester is so needed, as the Addison DeWitt/Waldo Lydecker to balance out all that sappy-dopey-sweet on the other side of the otherwise off and up in the air teeter-totter. That they then go and auto-tune everything is a problem, and denies the sheer touching, don't-laugh-at-this humanity of Haden and her far from sell outs, but I guess I wrote myself out of my bracket, didn't I?]

So do it, I dare you. Hold on, for one more day.

The Memory that Goes Pong

2010-01-11T08:01:00.000-08:00

This is about the first New Year's Eve I remember as NEW YEAR'S EVE, and no doubt this was a late revelation for me, say when I was 12 or 13, but I'm just that way--slow to what matters most. You have to forgive me, or admit I'm more like you than you'd like. For this is a memory of first buzzes, and in a lifetime of them, that means something (that I can remember them, yes, wise guy). What's lovely (and yes, there was childhood lovely, not that it ever felt that way being a child, of course), is so much of childhood gets wrapped up in this neat little bow that lets loose an arrow that pierces the Sears catalog, Andre Cold Duck, and Pong, not to mention my neighborhood friend Dennis Puglia, as it was at his house this happened, his parents' largesse that plopped the world's first home video game and two glasses of infernal bubbly in our probably barely teen laps, as if barely teen laps didn't have enough to deal with, suddenly recognizing what they were for and having no (beyond solo) way to do anything about it. Sometimes for years.

But there was this, Cold Duck, the first humble suggestion there was something delightful in bubbles, and no doubt miserable, but what does a 13-year-old know. He certainly didn't know what Wikipedia says now: "'The recipe was based on a traditional German custom of mixing all the dregs of unfinished wine bottles with champagne. The wine produced was given the name Kaltes Ende ('cold end' in German), until it was humorously altered to the similar sounding term Kalte Ente meaning 'cold duck.'" For if anyone knows humor, it's the Germans.

So we downed our unbeknowst to us thigh-slappingly named fizzy stuff, knowing only it made us fizzy, too. What grace, not to have to worry about the badness of things, the declasse-ness, though no doubt we made jokes about Andre wine and Andre the Giant, and no doubt felt about as body slammed by one as the other might have. We were 13.

And, of course, we tried feats of coordination and skill. (Was this to prepare us for drinking and driving? And don't be mad MADD, as this was years before that national bugaboo, when the drinking age was still 18 and America almost ached to be European a tiny bit, till that Puritan streak glowed brightly and smote fun.) That meant something the kids these days would consider as old as Lascaux, and as exciting -- Pong. The first home games of it came from the Sears catalog, even, and how cool is that, the poorly printed wish list for kids for years for Christmas, at least the ones wise enough to know mom and dad footed Santa's bill at the local mall (this was NJ, folks, and without swamps and malls, NJ would Brigadoon never to be done again). That the Sears Catalog wasn't just where you could pick out the latest games you'd want, but also where you could sneak peaks at bra ads years before Victoria unveiled her secrets was also a fine fine thing for a growing young man.

But, of course, that meant nothing, so you could always bat a little televised dot about. Via a dial. Wired to a console, wired to your tv. I mean, we're talking about an era pre-widespread remote controls for television. We were still not quite to the point with the magic cable box, even (and the hope for more illicitly spied boobies on HBO).

Even the marketing looks to be from another era. How simple we were in the 1970s. We could (well the adults then) even vote for Jimmy Carter for president. But I've got far away from two buzzed boys trying to twirl little controllers to keep the pong pinging from side to side. What a thrill that was, yet we had no idea. So much would get past us over the years beyond the little blip, eras of electronics, legions of liquor (at least in my case, or cases and cases I guess), plus each other. All those years of childhood friendship washed away in difference and lives and a desire by one of us not to be much New Jersey at all, for better or worse.

I raise my glass of sweet sweet Cold Duck to a couple of kids, then, anyway. We didn't know how sweet it was, did we?

Friday Random Ten

2010-01-08T09:18:00.000-08:00

The Smiths "Shakespeare's Sister" The Sound of the Smiths
Sue Garner "Something Else" To Run More Smoothly
Billy Bragg "Raglan Road" Worker's Playtime
Maddox Brothers & Rose "Fried Potatoes" On the Air: The 1940s
Billy Bragg "Wishing the Days Away" Talking to the Taxman about Poetry
That Dog "Every Time I Try" Retreat from the Sun
Talking Heads "Love --> Building on Fire" The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads
No Man Is Roger Miller "Voluptuous Airplanes" Win! Instantly!
XTC "My Brown Guitar" Wasp Star (Apple Venus, Pt. 2)
The Magnetic Fields "Nothing Matters When We're Dancing" 69 Love Songs

bonus
Seam "The Wild Cat" The Problem with Me

I'll take it--starts with the name of a much more famous blog and ends with a cut from a band I loved loved loved back in '93-'94 with some juicy nuggets in between (like one of my favorite early T-Heads). Is kind of odd it can hit on Bragg twice and not get past the ok though.

The Sunshine of My Mook

2010-01-08T08:14:00.000-08:00

For Dog Blog Friday: We didn't mean to tell him there's no Santa Claus....

Presley Sage Resigned in Time?

2010-01-07T17:30:00.000-08:00

Friday would be Elvis Presley's 75th birthday, if only he didn't go to the bathroom. To do drugs. And die. But it is curious to wonder what he'd be doing if he were alive today, beyond clawing at the inside of a coffin. (I should bury that bad joke, I know.) Would he be "Elvis the Surgically Replaced Pelvis"? Would he rerecord "I Forgot to Remember to Forget" for the Alzheimer's Association? Let alone "All Shook Up" for the Parkinson's Disease Foundation? Would he at least have kept Lisa Marie from marrying Michael Jackson? or Nick Cage? I do think I'd totally pass on what would no doubt be his latest film "Viva Los Branson."

How Bro Can You Go?

2010-01-07T12:58:00.000-08:00

Sure Palestine, New Mexico is a bit of a mess, but what play with that title couldn't be? Currently running at the Mark Taper Forum in LA, PNM is the latest creation of Culture Clash, the brilliant Chicano theater threesome now celebrating their 25th anniversary together. Anybody who has followed Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas, and Herbert Siguenza over the years knows their ambitions keep growing, as they've moved from outlandish, socially conscious sketch comedy to more observational, interview-based works, to their more recent plays like Chavez Ravine and Water & Power, still full of madcap humor while addressing in more traditional dramatic form what makes Los Angeles Los Angeles (hint: see linguistic root of the town's name). Palestine, New Mexico expands their reach even further, for that red-rocked desert set is at times an Indian reservation and at others Afghanistan, places of all sorts of heat that the play tries to air out.

That said, the play is informed by one of the most infamous cries ever uttered in LA, "Can we all just get along?" Of course, everyone made fun of Rodney King for that and it's easy to bat the seemingly simple-minded plea about with our cynicism sticks--silly fools, of course we can't, we're nasty, self-serving humans. That's why Culture Clash's humor is so important--it makes it clear that they want their message of brotherly and sisterly love while having some fun with it, too. But it means something this play is the first for CC in which they are bit players--the focus is clearly on Kirsten Potter as Capt. Catherine Siler, a soldier desperate to figure out why PFC Birdsong, a man in her platoon, died. She goes to his res (short for reservation) for answers, and ends up finding ones about herself, too, with help from a crazy cast of characters and a tongue-in-cheek over the top peyote dream quest starring a cactus golem, among other hallucinations. Even stalwart Native American activist and actor Russell Means shows up, in his first play, to portray Birdsong's father and the chief of the tribe. Talk about gravity amidst the levity.

I also want to defend the part of the play that seems to shtick in other critics' throats--when the CC trio come out as old VFW geezers and run through a series of jokes you expect to hear rimshots after. First, it is a pretty funny sequence, so you have to give them that--you can feel their joy in trying to put over some old chestnuts. Second, at this point CC are the vets in the play, so to suggest they are just for laughs is relatively pointed self-criticism. Third, the play will end with a coffin and a kaddish (multi-faith division). There's a dead young man who just wanted peace in there. Who are we to judge anything as ridiculous in the face of that.

The Border Halves a Piece of Paper into Here and Hereafter

2010-01-05T21:16:00.001-08:00

I'm afraid we're losing maps. Sure, we're GPSed and hand-helded to death, pinned to electronic locations that emit their echoey read glow wherever traffic might slow us down. But they're not maps, and I miss them already. The way they unfolded space for you, offered you more vistas and promises of their friends that could take you further. I was kind of a map geek as a child, reading possible further travel into them, ever surprised how they could predict what one could actually do -- that right turn is really waiting just up there after all. I'd announce to adults when they made wrong turns, plot routes, want, so, to be in the control I knew I knew. (Sure it had nothing else to do with anything else in my life I'd want that.) Maps were a key to the world, so I spent time mastering how to unlock them.

One might say, "But maps, they go out of date so fast!" And I'd say, "Yes, how wonderful." All the history in them, the freeway before the earthquake tore it down, the home town signalled by an ever-growing circle of commuter population, the open space now besmirched with the box mall and its piddling roadwaylets no doubt named after the trees that used to stand where they now run.

For as a child I loved them for history more than anything. Those wonderful American Heritage books with the elaborate maps of Revolutionary or Civil War battles, Antietam's acres alive with troops, and then not very alive at all. The map made it seem so pristine, somehow, so much part of a paper-y safe story. Years later I'd stand on that land and it was as if a book rose about me, and some curious and mindlessly malicious child stared down.

Plus maps can never be folded back correctly, a sign once the journey's out there's no containing it, that we must keep looking, for the way is there and won't be denied.

Oh, Bucket!

2010-01-05T21:14:00.000-08:00

Hey, there's a post over here!

Their Crazy Music Drives You Insane--This Way

2009-12-28T23:50:00.000-08:00

Particularly given it's a lesson most never stumble upon, I'm damn glad I learned early weird is relative (no, not relatives--that's a very different post, and one not suitable for the generous-spirit of the holiday season)(I mean, I've been generous with the spirits, haven't you?). One of my greatest teachers in that, visually, musically, conceptually, was Roxy Music, and this clip captures that magic in all its early '70s glam-eliciousness, from the tip of Eno's shoulder feathers to the, uh, tip of Andy Mackay's codpiece (after all, sax players need to emphasize their horns). And then the music, one glorious rush of rhythm and words, a break for nifty soloing of all sorts--what is that sythesizer Eno plays?--this kind of thing defined rock and roll to me. So guess why today I don't listen to the radio.

As with so much, I didn't get this when it happened--playing a cut like this in East Hanover NJ in 1972 would have had me earmarked for scheduling with bullies from every nearby burb--but something I "saved" for college, as my freshman year was as much about discovering Roxy, the Velvets, Mott and reading my way from '60s classic to classic (Hunter S. to Tom Wolfe to Michael Herr--yeah Dispatches came out in the '70s, but it's Vietnam for me more than Apocalypse Now or godforbid Platoon) as Shakespeare or Intro Psych or even that Idea of History in American Lit seminar I took with mostly upperclassmen and then stayed up 68 of 72 hours to write the final paper (on Gatsby, natch, and perhaps the only thing I'm left with is a love for fine shirts, though no one's ever cried over mine), only to end that sleepless stretch mildly hallucinating at a Fred Frith concert, but that might just have been me Frith-ing at the mouth.

After all, there are editions of you, me, us, more than you can shake a tambourine at, all acting up, acting out, trying things on. Roxy Music granted permission to those willing to listen and look, eager to bend tune, blur gender, or merely willing to let others do and therefore otherness necessarily fades away. Acceptance is a sort of dance.

That's Not A Nifty Noel Nigel Cap

2009-12-25T10:11:00.000-08:00

For Dog Blog Friday: Every day is Christmas behind a greyhound, if you just look fast enough. Merry, happy to you all!

Mild Gift

2009-12-22T11:00:00.000-08:00

So I cheated yesterday, but I'm a writer, and that's what we do (back in my teaching days, I used to tell my students "sometimes you have to try to dance so fast so your readers might fail to notice there's no music playing"). The entry was supposed to be something to do with memory, that being the Monday feature and all, but instead I just used the song as a jumping off point for, well, I'm not sure what, but jump I did. Perhaps I was doing what was supposed to be a regular feature of this blog years ago but I never got past five of them tops, but here's one if you don't remember, and why should you.

So here's the memory or at least as much of it as I can coax through the decades of doing my best not to remember, hoping I could pass myself off as a self-invention who just showed up in college, well, I certainly can't say fully formed, but at least not anything to do with a child. Let alone one lying on the floor of the living room, usually verboten (life was lived in the family room, on the bottom floor, and the living room, the middle of the split-level, was for entertaining), and staring up at the Christmas tree, which all through my childhood was a fake one, for fear of fires, for needle-less neatness. The rest of the room's lights off so the tree's lights seem magical, even through the transition one year from the now what we think of classic bulb size to the smaller pinpoints, the ones easier to make star-up if you squinted at them right, caught them through the phony boughs at the proper angle. Of course there was the manger in front of me, too, so if you got a light in the right spot, insta-star of Bethlehem over the baby Jesu, poor thing in his crib with a corner chipped, the set so old, yet all his attendants still marveled, the gift-bearing kings, the shepherds, one even with a sheep on his shoulders, the donkey I wanted to call an ass just to get to say something dirty with impunity, and the cow, the one with little horns made of spring that were irresistible and had to be spronged.

It seemed I might lie there for hours, but at this point the memory is like a dream from which you awake right before denouement, so you're ever left shy of what you might have ever wanted, or maybe just the plunge into another dream. What did that young boy think? Perhaps it was simple as wishes, desire for the rod controlled hockey game or some new magic trick, that would be forgotten by the next Christmas. Perhaps it was as complex as pondering the Holy Family as my own became un-whole, knowing I could do nothing. Perhaps I myself was a gift under the tree waiting for a time, at last, to be present.

I'm Dreaming of a White Synthmas

2009-12-21T17:20:00.000-08:00

Sadly another one of those vids that aren't artist created to go with the song, but this Monday it's got to be this song as Christmas bears down with enough weight to make this the shortest day of the year. I must confess my love for this confection, despite many (starting with my sweet wife) who mock and probably wisely do, a song featherbrained enough to ramble on about a turkey that doesn't dance but sings, and then those proto-samples of some older gent biting off the word "Christmas" so curtly you'd think Santa just told the guy he had to give back all his Xmas presents retroactively for life.

But this is 1984 and this is Captain Sensible, whose had a damned time of it and ended up doing synth pop created by Tony Mansfield who should be better known as the man behind New Musik but it's not like anybody knew them either. (Check out here for why the music was dreamy fine and why Tony Mansfield as Group Leader sort of had to become Tony Mansfield, Ace Producer--boy, he's one dynamo live!) "One Christmas Catalog" is all of an era for me, though, and getting to drag it out annually makes me want to sing "one Christmas too many," the catalogs ain't nothing. For this music is as fake and lovely as an aluminum tree, one with that spinning color light wheel in front of it, the tree ever awash in change and hope and so much fake it becomes the only thing real. Who needs tinsel when the damn tree is a-glimmer?

And isn't that true of this song, too? That drum machine disco bop, those airy chick vocals making the Captain's croak more sensible, the gloss just getting glossier at 30 seconds in when that other chittery lovely airiness gets all happily staccato. This song has never been touched by a natural instrument. And is all the better for it. Let's all have our little seasonal fantasies, after all--whether it be the son of god laid humble for us and our sins so we'll get someplace to go besides dead, whether it be each day's sun a few minutes more and therefore a sense we can turn any motherfucker around just by dragging it into the light, whether it be for 4 minutes a tune can make you feel a bit timeless and forgetful with its vaporous beauty that's silly enough it's ok it signifies nothing. As if you couldn't hope to aspire to be even that much.

UPDATE (1/6/2010): As commenter Ben pointed out, the original video I posted suddenly became a private video (ooh, to own Spencer's!), so I've put a new one up. Still something someone made, and now my comment about Spencer's is really confusing, but that's the way with memory. Someone always goes and tries to own it on you.

Blue Mooks for Christmas

2009-12-18T09:12:00.000-08:00

For Dog Blog Friday: Yes, the focus is soft, but that's just trying to cushion the sadness of a greyhound lying on his deconstructed bed as the outside part is getting washed.

Friday Random Ten

2009-12-18T08:01:00.000-08:00

ABBA "Dancing Queen" The Best of (The Millennial Collection)
The B-52's "52 Girls" Time Capsule: Songs for a Future Generation
David Byrne & Selena "God's Child" Blue in the Face
Rockpile "Pet You and Hold You" Seconds of Pleasure
Glenn Gould "Toccata in D major, BWV 912 -- Vivace" Bach Toccatas, Vol. 1, BWV 910-916
Lucinda Williams "Blue" Live @ the Fillmore
Guided by Voices "Bomb in the Bee-Hive" Mag Earwhig!
Beirut "Prenzlauerberg" Gulag Orkestar
Tears for Fears "Change" The Hurting
Steve Earle "Hillbilly Highway" Ain't Never Satisfied: The Steve Earle Collection

bonus
Kasey Chambers "Paper Aeroplane" Wayward Angel

Started off like iTunes wanted to dance party, but then things faded to Bach and "Blue."

The Business of America Is Giving Americans the Business

2009-12-16T16:42:00.000-08:00

Time for one of those point and nods, although this time the nod is pretty much immediately followed by weeping, gnashing of teeth, and the ripping up of my voter registration card. I mean, really, is there a point in voting? I "love" the line in here that a constituent is someone who can afford a lobbyist. I don't have enough money to matter.

Think I despair too much? For those of you who don't want to read the entire Matt Taibbi article, here's the very late in the game kicker (that should make you start from word one):

There's no other way to say it: Barack Obama, a once-in-a-generation political talent whose graceful conquest of America's racial dragons en route to the White House inspired the entire world, has for some reason allowed his presidency to be hijacked by sniveling, low-rent shitheads. Instead of reining in Wall Street, Obama has allowed himself to be seduced by it, leaving even his erstwhile campaign adviser, ex-Fed chief Paul Volcker, concerned about a "moral hazard" creeping over his administration.

"The obvious danger is that with the passage of time, risk-taking will be encouraged and efforts at prudential restraint will be resisted," Volcker told Congress in September, expressing concerns about all the regulatory loopholes in Frank's bill. "Ultimately, the possibility of further crises — even greater crises — will increase."

What's most troubling is that we don't know if Obama has changed, or if the influence of Wall Street is simply a fundamental and ineradicable element of our electoral system. What we do know is that Barack Obama pulled a bait-and-switch on us. If it were any other politician, we wouldn't be surprised. Maybe it's our fault, for thinking he was different.

An Inconvenient Turd

2009-12-15T23:34:00.000-08:00

Forget about bitching about Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize days after ratcheting up Afghanistan--turns out Change We Can Believe In means "I'll think a long time before doing what you lefties don't want me to do, but you'll still vote for me, haha." Instead I think we first need to get Al Gore to give his Nobel back. Why? Three words--Joe Fucking Lieberman.

He was an obscure moralizing asswipe before Gore decided he had to prove he was so over Big Bad Bill he needed to pick someone all moral and shit, but, alas, Lieberman turned out just to be a shit. And since then he has thought he's somebody, and there's only been hell to pay. Of course instead of kicking his toches out of the Democratic caucus, Obama insisted on kissing it instead. And you know how that ends up. How one of the few shots of something good--the expansion of Medicare--to come out of the ever dwindling health care reform gets shot down thanks solely to Lieberman.

The good news is I get to feel better and better about that Nader vote in 2000. Don't give me that ridiculous Eric Alterman argument either--Gore cost himself that election, and it all starts with how he campaigned, and that is embodied in the junior jack-off from the Nutmeg State. All he could think of was to run from Clinton, despite how popular he was is and ever will be. And how did putting Lieberman on the ticket help? Was he going to lose CT without him? Did he help him win over a few folks whose undies were in a knot about Monica Lewinsky's thong, in some Bible, not fellow human, thumping place, like, oh, I don't know--his home state of Tennessee, which he didn't carry? Which would have won him the election and saved us GWB?

Got to Get It All to Get It All to Grow

2009-12-14T23:58:00.000-08:00

I was 14 and it wasn't just lasers it was lasers and rock n roll, a combo better than stars and stripes, Rowan & Martin, an old-fashioned one ticket doubleheader, whichever two of Charlie's Angels most zinged your wings (and if you say Tanya Roberts and Shelley Hack, you're just being perverse). I liked ELO enough I even saw what's dubbed "The Big Night" tour at Madison Square Garden, complete with spaceship and live lasers (much cooler than those on tv, particularly 1970s sets, that now seem quaint enough that the smart apes of 2001 would no doubt pass right by them on the way to the monolith and HD). But still there's something charming about this, the thrill for them, "We've got mighty focused light beams--behold!" My childhood was a much much simpler time.

For then there's The Midnight Special, which, along with Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, brought live rock n roll into suburban homes and made us all a bit more antsy than we might have been if we had never got beyond childhood bopping on a hobby horse while listening to Herb Alpert's Whipped Cream and Other Delights (if, as a pre-teen, I understood the symbolism of riding and the flat-out sexuality of that LP's cover, I didn't know it at the time, promise). For you kids out there, imagine the M in MTV stood for music. That's what these shows were, but not just videos, concert footage, live playing, lips that moved as sound came out in time always. Plus the shows were on late, so seemed even more forbidden, at the edges of permission or into stolen moments territory. If, by some misfortune, you ended up sneaking a way to watch only to catch a mediocrity like Gary Wright, you just figured "Dreamweaver" had to be deeper than you thought. Late night rock TV--it had to mean something, or else why would they hide it?

Take "Do Ya," just one of the many songs that might have entranced you from ELO's A New World Record, so straightforward a pun it's practically an out-tendre, and I refuse to get into another of the album's cuts, the maudlin tugs of "Telephone Line" that somehow is playing at some high school party in some basement one of the first times I'm in crush and it still means the world to me, despite at a party you can just go talk to a girl and not use a phone, well, unless you're a humble bumbler like, oh, some people. "Do Ya" is the opposite of that, anyway, announcing itself with brio-istic chords that underline the title's do. And then all the strings, but I've on-ed and on-ed about them in pop before, all the grandness they confer, all the swelling we want to feel, all the drama. All the so much in goddam tune.

But then the chorus. The "do ya do ya want my _____s" relatively sweet, group sung, even (see, everyone thinks you need to be with me!) and then at the end of each line, the id flips its lid, the more guttural "I need it" and more insistent "c'mon now" and warning "ahhmmm look out!" How fitting for a tune titled "Do Ya" which is both the start of a question and all of a promise shading to threat. What else does rock ask? What else does a 14-year-old hope to know, and soon?

A Good Old Yawn

2009-12-12T15:49:00.000-08:00

For Dog Blog Fri, er, Saturday: You humans bore me. Peel me a Milkbone or something.

Friday Random Ten (Saturday Edition)

2009-12-12T15:36:00.000-08:00

The Mar-Keys "Grab This Thing (Part 1)" The Complete Stax/Volt Singles
The Mekons "We're Just Outside London" Pussy King of the Pirates
The Handsome Family "Beautiful William" Last Days of Wonder
Chavez "Unreal Is Here" What's Up Matador?
Wilco "I Thought I Held You" A.M.
Talking Heads "Animals" The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads
Allison Krauss & Union Station "The Lucky One" New Favorite
Tom Russell (with Nanci Griffith) "Outbound Plane" Long Way Around
Tom Waits "Big Black Mariah" Rain Dogs
John Doe & the Sadies "It Just Dawned on Me" Country Club

bonus
Pere Ubu "Worlds in Collision" Worlds in Collision

This one took a bit to warm up, but that's fitting given I did it a day late. Some lovely Americana here. And that Chavez song made me buy the whole album, only to find out I really only like the one song. Damn samplers.

This Could Stop Christmas, Among Other Things, From Coming

2009-12-09T16:49:00.000-08:00

Post edited to take out the player that kicked in every time you visited INOTBB. All apologies. If you want to hear the song, go here yourself:

http://www.adultswim.com/music/athfchristmas/index.html

Yes, this grosses out even me. But it sort of nails my holiday cheer at this point. Why can't I get it up for Christmas this year? Do I need Elve-itra? I don't even want to go Christmas shopping--time for Buy-agra, I guess.

Neko Case probably won't hurt.

Play with Matches and You Might Get Learned

2009-12-08T18:15:00.000-08:00

Moments just prior fascinate me, mostly because we can never know they are what they are till what happens happens. They are always ex post facto, receding in the rear view mirrors of our lives, open to interpretation, to the outline finding details as needs be. That's just one of the fascinations of An Education, which captures a slice of England 1961 before The Sixties--now a construct, not just a decade!--happened. More importantly for our 16-year-old heroine Jenny, the Second Wave of Feminism had just started to stir off the cultural shore, so she's left to bob in mighty calm and boring seas for the meantime, a calmed pool of stratified bourgeois striving, with hopes of going to Oxford to read English as her way out (to what, exactly, becomes the question). It's certainly not to the world about which she dreams listening to Juliette Greco records, as the film lovingly, languorously captures her in one scene, rapturously listening on her bed--where better for such a wealth of feeling she can only feel she should feel.

Till David shows up. He's thirtyish, dandyish, cleverish--so full of "ish"es any young woman should probably know enough to run the other way. But he's got charm, so much so he can even convince Jenny's parents to let him take her to a concert (with a harp!) and a post-show supper. It's here that Jenny might as well admit she has a feeling she's not in Kansas anymore (or whatever the English Kansas is), for the film practically shifts from black and white to color--they go to a posh nightclub where a chanteuse holds sway and the whole room seems slinky jazz. Carey Mulligan is wonderful in scenes like these, so suddenly awake, so stirred, she practically pops off the screen. Director Lone Scherfig completely presents this world to us, and there's no question why it's so seductive to Jenny--we damn well want to live in it too (heck, that's one reason we go to movies after all).

I don't want to give away the movie, just tell you to see it, to feel the ache of a smart girl in a time when smart girls didn't have enough to aspire to and therefore men, caddish, men. (Perhaps this is an old story.) True, it ends too quickly and neatly, but it pulls off not just a music montage but one set in Paris with aplomb (indeed, it's so perfect you realize it can't be real), but it features secondary characters you want to know more, like Cara Seymour as Jenny's mom, who knows too well her daughter's pains (watch her react when Paris plans almost include her), like Rosamund Pike as the ditsy Helen who is smarter than she seems (one reviewer's comparison to Judy Holliday is spot on). And then there's Peter Sarsgaard's David--perhaps even that he's a Yank impersonating a Brit for the film should be a hint. But never has a rogue seemed so enchanting. He plays David as a man who has even fooled himself, at least at times, and when those crinkly lines form around his eyes when he smiles, he's hard to resist.

As a postscript, here's a sidenote of 20/20 hindsight: where has Floyd Cramer been all my life? The film uses his delightful confection "On the Rebound" for its title sequence, and talk about charmingly seductive....

A Monday in Trouble (Is a Temporary Thing)

2009-12-07T12:43:00.000-08:00

Some wisdom runs true whether you're 19 or much much older, and that gets us to this week's installment, Debora Iyall and the boys doing "Never Say Never," something you can't help but learn as ever keeps your never further at bay. The song, of course, rides on its infamous chorus couplet, which isn't just a sly come-on but also rhymes "better" and "together," suffering slant rhymes, hinting that the two won't always ever lock-step click no matter how much the bassline pulses its sexy slide. The name of the group is Romeo Void, after all.

Still a wonderful song for an undergrad to latch onto, a skittery dance that makes one re-think sexy as attitude and force and not just looks, and then Benjamin Bossi blasts and blats his sax and you knew what that meant, even young. The song so metallic and gimlet-eyed you want to identify, to be part of the cool San Fran hipsters smashing that glass that says guitar as the guitar you hear sheds its sharp shards. But in your heart of hearts, it's "Flashflood" you prefer, all ballsy ballady angst, cause you're soft and you know it. It's ok, Iyall does, too.

Through a Glass, Multiply

2009-12-04T09:22:00.000-08:00

For Dog Blog Friday: Our work cloning Nigel is almost complete.

Friday Random Ten

2009-12-04T08:59:00.000-08:00

Elvis Costello "You Tripped at Every Step" Brutal Youth
Richard Buckner "Hand @ the Hem" Since
T Bone Burnett "I Can Explain Everything" The Criminal Under My Own Hat
Luna "Romantica" Romantica
Tom Verlaine "The Day on You" Songs and Other Things
Son Volt "Windfall" Trace
The Mekons "Cowboy Boots" I Have Been to Heaven and Back
The Gants "Wonder" Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era
Steve Earle & the Del McCoury Band "the Mountain" The Mountain
Beck "Scarecrow" Guero

bonus
David Lindley & Hani Naser "Mercury Blues" Live in Tokyo

Good list, if only I could hear it. Seems the iPod will pick a giant Shuffle Songs, and will advance from cut to cut, but won't play any music. Uh-oh. And I thought the day would all be easy after having to pick up Mookie's dump in the building lobby as we waited for the elevator to get to my office.

Mama Cassoulet!

2009-12-03T12:59:00.000-08:00

You did want to be there for a feast to end all feasts, the latest Beer Dinner at Hollister (two previous paeans to pigging out are here and here) that we crazily enjoyed last night. I won't go on and on given you can read the menu and make your own drooling conclusions. But some things do need to be said.

1) Celery root soup is way way better than anything with the words celery and root in its name deserves to be. Soothing, rich, the perfect warm up on a chilly winter evening (those of you with real weather, no laughing, please--it was like in the low 50s last night here). And the tiny diced sauteed apples sub for bacon much more effectively than you'd think.

2) Shave me some fennel and I'll be your friend for life. (Fennel with 5 o'clock shadow isn't nearly as tasty.)

3) Pomegranate seeds and persimmon together is not over-kill.

4) If you put three kinds of squash in enough cheese and no doubt some butter and cream, no one will ever tell you squash is boring.

5) Anything is better roasted. I might eat gravel if it spent enough time in olive oil and a 375° oven. Plus it's fun to say rutabaga.

6) Three different kinds of kale braised is not over-kill, especially when one is delightfully purplish and doesn't lose its color when cooked.

7) No doubt on Olympus they had French chefs and ate cassoulet. It is the perfect meal, based on beans so it keeps you humble, yet then there's the rich sauce, the duck, the pork, the sausage. And it has to come in a big pot, all together--none of this deconstructed shit. I mean, if a put a bunch of steel girders and rivets on your plate, I couldn't call it the Eiffel Tower now, could I. Don't screw around with French brilliance. Unless you want to make gunciale sausage. That's just smart.

8) Evidently you can cook Hachiya persimmons and not make mush.

9) Asking for a small glass of hip-hop double IPA to end a meal like this one means you've got one of the deadly sins nailed for life.

Motel Is Let Em Spelled Backwards

2009-12-02T13:24:00.000-08:00

Not much to say about this but, gee, they're cool. If looking a bit old. (Aren't we all?)

Arnie Rhymes with Blarney

2009-12-02T13:00:00.000-08:00

Perhaps you didn't see this last week, being preoccupied turning yourself into a turduckhuman (now with more human!) or watching too much football (I saw over a down--way too much) or plotting your 4 a.m. shopping strategy (shopping carts make even more effective battering rams on people pre-sunrise, I've heard), but the AP reported and even people in Kansas City (motto: "is NOT an oxymoron!") cared:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says photographs of his Porsche illegally parked in a Beverly Hills red zone are proof that even he makes mistakes.

The Republican governor said Tuesday his Saturday violation shows "no one is perfect--not even me."

Frankly I'm shattered. If I thought there was anyone perfect in this world, I thought it was the governor of a state whose unemployment rate is 12.5 percent, its highest level in nearly 70 years; the governor of a state whose once glorious universities will raise tuition 32% next year; the governor of a state where tax revenue won't bounce back until the 2014-15 budget year, while near term, the state faces a nearly $21-billion deficit.

I mean, that's perfect. If not as perfect as Kindergarten Cop.

Ach, Marx the Spot

2009-12-01T23:50:00.000-08:00

Sure it's a cheat not only to blog for the "day" at ten to midnight but also to post something you wrote years ago. All I can do is ask for forgiveness. In the meantime, here's something I should have posted for the weekend anyway, or perhaps never posted ever, as it's a poem from the vaults. This goes out to folks in Zeno's, btw...

BAR SONG

The month’s end and my friends
are down to singles,
their wallets fat and poor,
hungry bulging stomachs.

What can one do when
hands are empty and so much
needs filling?

There’s a song about this
American Reds in their cells sang
before they knew Stalin
was offing heads by the gross.

If someone told them
they would keep singing.

The words are gone,
Stalingrad is gone,
and the beer is almost gone,
but scraping our change
together buys us another
pitcher, if we stiff the waitress,
which we do.

Like the rest of us, she can
drown her sorrows by the glass
after work. What’s one tip
in a night lugging fuel
to fire the forgetfulness of drunks?

We worked hard, too, to buy
ourselves this bitter, this blind.
Unkind as dawn, we are, or
the fearful clarity of light
they throw on us at last call.

Steady as She Ohs

2009-11-30T21:15:00.000-08:00

There are things I know I shouldn't like, but do. Or at least think I shouldn't like. Mostly because you, yes, you, like them. And I don't want to be like you or at least so many of yous. I assume, perhaps very wrongly, that quality is inverse to popularity. (Yes, perhaps this is an excuse for my self in the world, sure.) Of course I mostly mean yous who don't read this blog, but that's most of the yous in the known universe. So the majority of you are safe, if philistines.

And I can see I already need to start again. (How many of my entries begin this way? You readers are so patient with me. Both of you.)

I like the Eurythmics. There, it's in print. Don't love them, but have to admit they put on one of the best live shows I've ever seen about 1983 or so and here I am for the second time blogging about one of the best moments from that evening, a rising, ecstatic, SST of a solo by Dave Stewart to close the song. Yes, the silly YouTube of a performance of the song semi-similiar to the one I experienced isn't really a video but space shots backed with a bootleg. But it's quite a bootleg. Out of this world, you might say.

One of the best parts about "Jennifer" (beyond it being the name of the lovely lass who plucked my virginity) is its simplicity (and I'm talking about the song, not the lovely lass or my virginity)--so few words, so few notes, it might as well be Steve Reich and roll. But that steady as she goes just makes the ever-lifting end solo all the more needed, all the more damn right and lovely. And then there's the Laurie Anderson toss-off "ohohohohs" that are the line where the human and mechanical make the coldly beautiful, and therefore all the more unexpected, as we tend to like our beauty warm, don't we. (Digression: And who better for Annie Lennox to channel than Laurie Anderson, a fellow traveler on the androgynous express, which reminds me of the time as a graduate student instructor when I made the kids go see Home of the Brave, indeed I was one of those teachers, and one stunned and protected mid-West coed wrote in her viewing log "she's not very ladylike.")

Then again, that's the whole point of this entry--you never know what life might throw on your plate for your delectation. Things can be steady and patterns emerge but when they break--like the clever clicking of the drumsticks bit you can see starting at about 3:17 in this concert footage (plus odd claymation and too much ad for my liking but...) --at the least you end up with a smile on your face. At most you get transported. And to quote Laurie Anderson:

And you you're no one
And you, you're falling
And you, you're traveling
Traveling at the speed of light.

Nowadays a Walk Involves Some Sit, Too

2009-11-27T14:13:00.000-08:00

For Dog Blog Friday: Still looking mighty spiffy at 12, Mooks!

Friday Non-Randon Ten

2009-11-27T10:01:00.000-08:00

Alex Chilton "Thank You John"
Big Star "Thank You Friends"
Fairport Convention "Now Be Thankful"
Holmes Brothers "Thank You Jesus"
Luna "Thank You for Sending Me an Angel"
Talking Heads "Thank You for Sending Me an Angel"
Same & Dave "I Thank You"
Yo La Tengo "Be Thankful for What You Got"
William DeVaughn "Be Thankful for What You Got"
Sly & The Family Stone "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)"

bonus
The Three Wise Men "Thanks for Christmas"

Spot the theme, or, they call it a smart playlist for a reason. And yes there are duplicates, but you can't say thanks for an angel too many times, or be too thankful for what you got. And you know who you are, friends.

Twelve Years of Mook-a-liciousness

2009-11-24T08:01:00.000-08:00

Not the highest quality image, but that's memory for you, so all the more fitting. It's Mookie's 12th birthday today, and at least for now I want to think of him again as the fastest dog in the park, the one other dogs would chase and then they would cry, realizing how quick he was, how it broke their heart to witness such swiftness and point them out as the plodders they were. I want to hang to all the joy in that speed, that sense of singleminded purpose. To the lift of moving with all of you in the air. Young Mooks had that and more.

So here's to the wonder he was and the sweet old hobbler he is now, no doubt still lightning quick in the dreams he dreams in his daily snoozes, so often guarding a Milkbone he's not even sure he wants, he just knows Nigel doesn't deserve.

I Do Love a New Purchase, a Market of the Senses

2009-11-23T12:53:00.000-08:00

Sorry but don't have enough time to say enough about this one with the holiday weekend closing in on my time and crazy things all due Dec 1 (who's idea was that?). But here's one of the best songs of all time. I'd have loved to have found a vintage clip but couldn't--the good news is the gang still really feels it, as far as the performance seems to show.

And it goes like this--I need to say thanks to music. Meant so much in so many ways but in particular I want to visit high school senior me holding Entertainment! in his hands, reading those liner notes about cowboys and Indians, taking in the lyrics that made Marxism dance in a suitably herky-jerky way. I want to say to him, "Don't be so confused, these guys from Leeds have it right. You'll see."

But maybe I don't have to. Instead I don't have to offer embarrassment and my usual excuses when someone asks me what the use is mixing pop and politics. I can just point. Something stirred in my little suburban brain as that guitar slashed and that bass insinuated its sly self into my still awfully angular white boy dancing. And years later when I finally read Horkheimer and Adorno, I already knew a soundtrack. (And do know how much they'd hate to hear me say that, but as Theodor wrote, the essence of the essay is heresy so I'll pull down my gods as I worship them.)

Friday Random Ten

2009-11-20T09:18:00.000-08:00

Crooked Fingers "Under Pressure" Reservoir Songs
Portastatic "Cheers and Applause" Be Still Please
Orlando Cachaito "Oracion Lucumi" Cachaito
Loretta Lynn "Family Tree" Van Lear Rose
Los Lobos "Estoy Sentado Aqui" Just Another Band from East L.A.
Brian Eno "Taking Tiger Mountain" Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)
Les Negresses Vertes "C'est Pas la Mer a Boire" Mlah
Les Negresses Vertes "Le Pere Magloire" Mlah
Chris Mars "Outer Limits" Horseshoes and Hand Grenades
Tom Waits "Fannin Street" Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards

bonus
Billy Bragg "Accident Waiting to Happen" Don't Try this at Home

Sorry I'm a bit late this week--actually did the list on Friday morning for a change. Fun little wide-ranging mix. And it really did play two from Mlah back to back. Glad I wanted to point out how fun that album is--French Pogues indeed.

Consider All the Pupsibilities

2009-11-20T07:53:00.000-08:00

For Dog Blog Friday: Whatever it is, I promise I didn't do it, Nigel thinks. (Quit laughing, he does to think.)

Presenting This Year's Miss Timed

2009-11-19T12:09:00.000-08:00

In case you've ever wondered if you can be both hated and forgotten, consider the case of Willard Bundy, who is to Bundy-dom as Gummo is to the Marx Brothers, although you have to admit Ted makes for a lousy Harpo. It seems our forgotten Bundy invented the punch clock on November 20, 1888, thereby turning us all into more efficient wage slaves, at least till we all got internet connections at work and figured out cats say the funniest misspelled things. Makes me want to say rats, Willard. By the way, the invention was originally called a time clock, thereby joining the day calendar, automotive car, and look-and-hear television as early phrases for things so astounding they had to be named twice. You can probably imagine how the invention got the name punch clock.

Do the Standing Still

2009-11-18T10:10:00.000-08:00

Haven't pointed and nodded in Pierce's direction for awhile, partially, I have to sadly admit, because he seems of late mostly to cryptically cackle and link to his source of derision, but he nailed what I'm thinking about health care so well, I will quote him verbatim:

I'm sorry but while both Ezra KLEIN and Jon COHN have done great work on this issue, they are talking here about a country and a political system that no longer exist. And their responses to Marcia Angell's CRI DE COEUR are largely political, and not really to the point of her piece, which is that no substantive reform of the system is possible until the control that the insurance industry exercises over the practice of medicine is broken forever. The now-familiar argument is that the House bill--even if it had a snowball's chance in hell of surviving the Senate intact, which it doesn't--represents a good first step. When exactly was the last time our political system--to say nothing of the Congress--did anything in "steps"? We don't progress. We move a step ahead, and then there's an election, and then we move another step in the opposite direction. The idea that the current debate will produce a system that will somehow be immune to our febrile and idiotic politics is naive to the point of translucence. [emphasis mine] For this to have worked at all, it had to be so huge and transformative as to immunize itself thoroughly in the event that Congress or the White House--or both--change hands. It had to be so immense as to be unmovable so that it would be permanent enough for enough people out in the country to become invested in it that the political danger would be to monkey with it at all. (Which is pretty much the way things are in Canada now. Their system, for all its flaws, is politically sacrosanct.) It also had to be a big enough change to overcome the fact that one of our two parties will be completely off its head for the foreseeable future. Whatever comes out of this process is going to be far too fragile to survive the kind of boneheaded thinking that produced this NONSENSE this week. And Social Security has a more solid constituency than whatever the new healthcare plan will have.

Or, let's just rename the Democrats the Something Is Better than Nothing Party.

Totally Dishy

2009-11-17T14:37:00.000-08:00

Some fun stuff going on over at the New York Times blog, where a guy who is opening up a restaurant on Long Island listed 100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do. There are already pages and pages of comments, ranging from agreement to shock anyone would suggest such a detailed list. Of course, the list sort of begs the question--what is dining out for? And starting at that beginning seems much more interesting to me, but I like to complicate things, don't I? (For what it's worth, I think it's a pretty good list that I might quibble about--yes, the muted flugelhorn line seems worth of Niles Crane--but it's mostly lover's quarrels.)

One step behind even that question, of course, is noticing how the people most upset about the list seems to be waiters. The list kind of hides the implied master-servant nature of the restaurant dynamic, and how we can overcome that without making the waiter the master (and that does happen sometimes, let's face it--conventions of fine dining can oppress the diner into meek obsequiousness, hoping merely not to faux pas one's way through a tangle of too much silverware and the grand theater of tasting the wine). For I have seen patrons treat waiters like crap, and one could easily compile a list of "how to be a good person at a restaurant," but, alas, much of that would also make the list, "here's how not to be an asshole anywhere, but you can't seem to do that, can you." Too many folks think since they're paying money for the evening they're buying the person, and therefore anything goes. (Parallel problem: People who give big money to non-profits and then think the non-profit staff works for them as part of their hefty donation. Sorry, not true. Your dollars don't trump the 13th amendment.)

Back to why we eat out (and get your mind out of the gutter)...true, just a part of it is food. It's often always social (unless one is a "singleton"--hey, no judgment in that term, is there? and can I be the mayor of singleton?), and an engaging waiter can be one bit of that party, but of course, a bit player, no more than an Edward Everett Horton or Thelma Ritter. The trick is reading the situation. Is it a couple clearly lovey-dovey? Don't get tangled in their roost. Etc. I like to think of dining as rhetorical, all about audiences and needs, attitudes, and knowledge. Read the table. Proceed.

So that's rule 1 at my place. How about yours?

A Summons to All My Foolish Blood

2009-11-16T12:58:00.000-08:00

First, all apologies that this is really just an audio track, and yes there are live versions of the recent Posies-fueled Big Star doing the song, but I wanted the original. Second, it's fitting I'm counting for something about this song leaves me doing math. It was released in 1972, and Alex Chilton, with Chris Bell's help we can assume, wrote it when he was 22. It's about being, of course, "Thirteen," but Chilton was 13 in 1963 (the year of my birth, which doesn't mean much but I like that things fall that way). "Paint It Black," which gets name-checked, was released in 1966, so that complicates the timeline a bit (of course, I've got a theory).

Third, I can see I've started all wrong. So sweet and seemingly simple "Thirteen" is, that to analyze it is akin to explaining a gorgeous dawn, which if it talked would say, "Shut up and just enjoy, dummy. Ray beam ray beam ray beam." The song totally nails the adolescent sexual ache, even better one sorta pure--those rhyming, chiming acoustic guitars are the poor boy's heartstrings, aren't they? So dads are bad and the Rolling Stones are good (we have something we worked out to say about it, pop's sweet puzzle telling us things we don't yet know) and it's a life that runs from the school to the pool to the dance, and asking someone to be an outlaw for your love sounds terribly romantic, even if you don't quite know what you even mean (but no doubt pop will tell us someday, and we don't mean dad). So much tenderness, the darn kid even thinks in harmonies.

But it's a vision of 13 we want to believe more than ever live, isn't it. Nine years out at 22 Chilton can wrap things up with a nostalgia that's utterly appealing. But how often is living 13 charming? Don't lie to yourself, or let a song lie to you. Note that Chilton isn't really singing about himself at 13, either, as he was 16 when "Paint It Black" got released. But memories, and pop songs, they pull tricks on us, allow us to create the narrative we call our lives. I'd like mine served up this pretty and wistful, wouldn't you?

For I'm a goddam liar too. No way was I a proto-hip nine-year-old buying #1 Record when it got released in 1972 (assuming the distribution snafu that killed the record didn't happen and I cold find it in a record store, of course). In fact, I first bought it as the twofer with Radio City CD that got released in 1992. Hoping to feel at least a bit cool, I want to remember it was one of my first compact disc purchases, from that upstairs place that existed on Iowa Avenue in Iowa City whose name I'm totally blanking on. But I didn't even live in Iowa City in 1992 and had had a CD player since at least 1988--so had to have CDs out the shelf's wazoo at that point.

How are all these years and memories not in harmony to me? I can't begin to fathom, but I can singalong with "Thirteen" again and somehow find some belonging.

Friday Random Ten

2009-11-13T08:01:00.000-08:00

The Music Tapes "Cumulonimbus (Magnetic Tapes for Clouds)" Music Tapes for Clouds and Tornadoes
Elbow "Snooks (Progress Report)" Cast of Thousands
Big Star "What's Going Ahn" Keep an Eye on the Sky
Steve Earle "Some Dreams" Sidetracks
Ollie & the Nightingales "I Got a Sure Thing" The Complete Stax/Volt Singles
Brian Eno "Put a Straw Under Baby" Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)
Roger Dean Young & the Tin Cup "Ravenna" Pilgrim
Heavenly "Atta Girl" P.U.N.K. Girl
Rilo Kiley "Does He Love You?" More Adventurous
10,000 Maniacs "Candy Everybody Wants" Our Time in Eden

bonus
The Decemberists "The Perfect Crime #2" The Crane Wife

Not half bad, from wonderfully depressing Big Star to Eno's fine lullabye to Rilo Kiley getting all un-mellowly dramatic.

Pants While He Belts Out

2009-11-13T07:57:00.000-08:00

For Dog Blog Friday: He doesn't belt it out anymore, but he gives it his mouthy, miming best for everyone's birthday.

I've Got You, Under My Hudson

2009-11-12T12:22:00.001-08:00

I'm probably going to dig a hole with this one, but Friday is the 82nd anniversary of the opening of the Holland Tunnel, about which Manhattan is no doubt still bitter as it made it easier for New Jerseyites (as in parasites) to invade. Notice there is no toll to leave NYC and go to NJ. And people born in NJ like to make jokes about terms like "tube diameter, it's not just for tunnels anymore." But no lie can pass from my two lips, so I must say the Holland Tunnel (woo-hoo, got tulips into the Holland entry!) is named after its original chief engineer, who dies before it was completed. The second person to have the position died after being on the job only a few months; I believe his name was John Paul I (they even referred to him as I from the beginning, for the just had this uneasy feeling). It was quite a feat, building the tunnel and not just because the digging workers had to be sure not to get the bends, which you think would have been easy as it was decades before Radiohead even recorded the album. At the time, they weren't sure how to clear the carbon monoxide from a tunnel. So they experimented on Yale students (true story) to see how much CO they could take. Alas, this was years before George W. Bush was a student there, so it explains nothing.

The Blog That Stares at the Men Who Stare at Goats

2009-11-11T20:22:00.000-08:00

I don't think it just makes me old and crotchety to say they don't make stars like they used to, since the ones I'm thinking of--the Gary Coopers and Marlene Dietrichs and Cary Grants and Katharine Hepburns--existed or at least starred before I was even born (guess that makes me a crotchety gleam in my parents' eyes, but that assumes they enjoyed the three times they had sex to have me and my sisters). That digression is more than fitting, actually, since what I'm trying to do is write a review of The Men Who Stare at Goats, and it, like my intro sentence, has tonal problems. So I sympathize. But I also didn't ask you for nine and a quarter from your wallet and an hour and a half of your life.

You see, I think that George Clooney might be one of our possible stars. (And another digression--Harrison Ford was one, why he could pull off Indiana Jones so effortlessly, back in the day, like Grant in Gunga Din, but something happened. I'm trying not to blame Calista Flockhart.) It doesn't hurt Clooney's Gable-esque and gorgeous, but there's a certain magnanimity of character he effuses. And while he never seems too full of himself, he isn't yet a parody of himself, either, like Nicholson or DeNiro, say. All that helps us want to like him a whole bunch, and that good will carries us through much of Goats, as we keep thinking it has to be better than it is. That's a star up there, after all.

Alas, even with a story that seems ripe for much--the film proudly announces "more of this is true than you would believe"--about an actual U.S. Army project to create a group of mind warriors, as it were, Jedi (this is from the Stars Wars era) who could bust clouds or goats with one mighty psychic stare. Clooney, as Lyn Cassady, is perhaps the best man from that unit, and if he's the best, well, you can see as the movie goes on there's going to be problems. For here we are with him and Ohioan reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor, stuck playing straightman, Crosby to Clooney's Hope), trying to win his wife back by going to the Iraq War and being a man. Lots of desert hi-jinks ensue.

And suddenly intimations of Abu Ghraib. For what is often a very silly picture (c'mon, jokes about McGregor maybe being a Jedi? the person who steals Wilton's wife away has a prosthetic arm, just so we get a smidgen of Strangelove into the picture?) right down to the obligatory ass shots of the two leading men in hospital gowns that don't close (a little something for the ladies...) really wants to be about the darkside and those who want to profit from war and the torturing of prisoners. What's more, the nastiest character is played by the as usual mild-manneredly menacing Kevin Spacey. And if you bring in Keyser Soze to be your evil, you've got to mean it.

The wild tonal shifts just don't work, so what's supposed to be powerful and gut-wrenching seems shocking and misplaced and then the humor seems inappropriate. And it's not that I'm a prude--I'm more willing than most to make a sick joke at the wrong time just to let out the air of solemnity and sadness--it's just the jokes aren't that good. And the seriousness seems unearned, too.

There is plenty to enjoy, like the ever fine Stephen Root in an early cameo, and especially Jeff Bridges as Bill Django, the leader/guru of the New Earth Army, who even walks funny and has an amusingly blissed out look for most of the film. It's just that you keep hoping it might be funnier, or more powerful, and it can't pull either off. You keep wishing it could go all out satire (the Strangelove route) or suddenly pull you up with the sense of the danger and darkness in all of us (to stick with Kubrick, the Paths of Glory route, maybe?). Instead, the movie will just get your goat trying to be all things at a muddled once.

Fits and Starts

2009-11-10T21:09:00.000-08:00

I was doing so well for awhile there, having that daily entry ready to run at 8:01 every am, and now, thank god for the archives. Here's something that was just getting to the meat of the matter, but turns out to be mostly butter sizzling in the pan, a-waiting. Still, it certainly contains all sorts of themes I've kicked around this year, even if it's from 10 years ago, so, for what it's worth....

Lili Taylor, who has always beguiled me despite her never really getting to play a babe (except, tellingly, in Bright Angel, a film that proves the hard-edged prose of Richard Ford, another kind of beauty that has always beguiled me, seems so odd when spoken by real people and not the page), made her first impression, way before she was queen of the indies, in Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything. If you’ve seen the film you must remember her as the sweet and moony girl with a guitar who has written 65 songs for the boy who has dumped her. She could be laughed at. But we, and here I hope I have earned the plural first person, can’t, really. The knitting and re-knitting of obsession we all know a thing or two about, especially when music is the thread we use to sew up our dreams. After all, how does John Cusack finally woo and win Ione Skye? With a boombox held high over his head, and Peter Gabriel singing his thoughts for him, and without even knowing it making “In Your Eyes” an anthem for high school proms for half a decade.

But that’s pop music for you, or me, or us. And pop, although short for popular, perhaps only works its magic when it speaks to us, whispers to us, crooks its finger in our direction, one stained-with-sadness heart at a time. That we follow, lost and in love, and soon notice we follow others, that there’s a line of lovers, well, that’s what makes pop pop. Choose any song that chose you, that held you in its chords, that played its clichés like strings just for you, and you’ll see what I mean.

Ain’t love, life, grand. That’s all, and one gigantic three letter word that is, and all pop hopes to attest to. No, that’s not right, either, for attest is one of those hedge words with time written all over it, intellect too busy with a spray can in its hand. The best pop is-es. Present tense in a way even writing can never be, as the sentence winds its way by its very accumulative nature off into short term memory. Why does rock and roll matter? It’s the rare place America lets art and entertainment be one, it lets the venal and spiritual (or the economic and sexual, if you prefer) collapse--the old melting pot--or better yet, expand into something bigger than us, a collective experience, if that isn’t too much to ask of three minutes, two guitars, bass, and drums. But the real thing (and try to use that phrase without thinking Coca-Cola) is never too much: “Jailhouse Rock” is the real “We Are the World.”

Or, to start again (and again and again, a juke box’s, that is a real one that still plays 45s, series of drops, a DJ’s segues from tune to tune)...love, rock ‘n’ roll, and religion all talk the same language of ecstasy and damnation, stairways to heaven and free-fallin’ to hell. What the greatest songs do is enforce this, which is why we get scared and excited and confused and contradictory, and love and hate like a coin toss. It’s all about life closing down while it opens up, about projection and unity, about communion--there, I’ve said it--and the way rock is beyond academia, literary journals, and this very blather I can’t help but tease through. The stubborn streak of true-blue-American anti-intellectual venom is on the mark: fuck thinking, let’s dance, or go one better, fuck dancing, let’s fuck. Even the caring, careful appreciation of a thinker like Peter Guralnick or Greil Marcus is too much; you want to just seize the moment, after all, and thinking is always kind of past tense, isn’t it?

It’s sad, then, that with CDs one of the things we’ve lost beyond the elusive “warmth” audiophiles go on about, and perhaps means something else all together, is the very term “record.” Let’s make a record. We’re a real band now, we’re going to record. That’s what music is, or can be, the mark, the memory, the moment written out in space. Like the Buzzcocks sang, it feels so real, but why can’t I touch it? Getting back to Cameron Crowe, again, a failed director of fine moments (which is an achievement, really it is), and to his film Singles (and how could the pun not be intended), there’s the seduction moment, with Campbell Scott alone at last with Kyra Sedgwick in his apartment, and he’s got LP’s and by the way he holds them you know he loves them, which means he can love, which means he’s been sold the whole bill of goods and the two of them are destined for each other, she cannot resist, particularly in a movie, the only thing that hypes love more than music, as it’s the only thing bigger, even in the tinniest of mall theatres. Scott’s character says without saying, If I let you see this much of me, what can I have in return, what will you hum for me, what can you share, and how could you not? Because it is vinyl, and it is my heart.

Of course here I romance an age, my past, romance itself. But doing it and recognizing I’m doing it takes nothing away from it as a fact. An attempt at ironic detachment only attaches me more, for now I lavish attention on the ephemeral, which I realize, as a collector of LPs and now CDs, as a one-time disc jockey and a long-time music critic, has been my life.

But then again, we’re all ephemera if you take the long look at it.

Hey Two Ways

2009-11-09T08:01:00.000-08:00

You can listen to it crunchy (from back in the day):

Or listen to it sweet (as a song with many uhs and whores and screams will allow):

And since the Pixies are doing Doolittle in its entirety live for its 20th anniversary, I get one more chance to feel the old fart I am. Thanks, Pixies.

So 1989 was pretty much set to the soundtrack of Doolittle, as I'm sure it was for many folks my age (+/- 3),the last blast of a decade that has too bad a rap given it offered up glories like the Replacements and Husker Du, and that's not even leaving MN (then there's Tom Waits' best, fine T-Heads, the early stirring of YLT, perhaps the Mekons' two best--the '80s weren't just MTV, ok?). Deliciously snotty and snarly set to sneaky tunes, it's the perfect disc for someone trying not to be a productive worker in society while still making enough money to get by. My first year out of grad school, 88-89, and my reward for those multiple masters was teaching comp at Penn State, three course per semester, "earning" a wondrous $19K. And we wonder why we are a nation of illiterates (we certainly don't pay people to teach us out of that hole).

So something that let me play-act feeling, really feeling, well, bring it on. Of course it seems Black Francis is doing the same, tipping his hand writing a song to kick off the album whose images he steals from Bunuel, both arty enough and at enough remove to seem safe even when shouting about "slicing up eyeballs." Surrealism is a romp in comparison to Dada, which, after all, rose within WW I's European ruin; rock n roll surrealism 60 years on is nearly quaint. (Off-topic subject--what if Bunuel started a band?)

Maybe that's why I don't listen to the album much anymore. Grown too comfortable to even feel the need for the fake fight, the miming at windmill tilting. But that doesn't mean I don't appreciate the simplicity of the line "Uh, says the man to the lady." Let's just boil this sucker down, what do you say? Plus the guitar gets to go where air quotes fear to tread.

Nice Dog Day at Work If you Can Get It

2009-11-06T09:21:00.000-08:00

For Dog Blog Friday: Next time I'm bringing a bed for me, too, and joining them. I doubt anyone at work would complain.

Friday Random Ten

2009-11-06T08:44:00.000-08:00

East River Pipe "My Life Is Wrong" Shining Hours in a Can
Liz Phair "Crater Lake" Whip-Smart
Cheb Khaled "Hana-Hana" Kutché
PJ Harvey "Who the Fuck?" Uh Huh Her
The Band "Don't Do It" Heaven Must Have Sent You--The Holland Dozier Holland Story
Neil Young "War of Man" Harvest Moon
Belle & Sebastian "Act of the Apostle" The Life Pursuit
Yo La Tengo "By the Time It Gets Dark" Little Honda ep
Sonny Landreth "South of I-10" Big Ol' Box of New Orleans
Coward Brothers "The People's Limousine" Twenty Twenty: The Essential T Bone Burnett

bonus
Nick Lowe "Heart" Basher--The Best of Nick Lowe

Plenty of good stuff, today, from all over, starting with one of the best sad laments of all time. I do have to admit, though, I like the jaunty Rockpile version of "Heart" way better than Nick's lazy reggae.

All the New Thinking Is about Loss

2009-11-05T08:01:00.000-08:00

I thought for sure that I'd written about this, but here we are again, endings. Hate 'em, despite all the practice, small and bigger than I could have ever hoped. Right now it seems something simple, another baseball season over. But that means Friday, nary a box score, but even they are going the way of dodos and doubleheaders and memory and parents and newspapers. The other day in a bookstore, of all probably doomed places, I ran across a book called Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By, and thumbed through it, only to find listing after listing for things I once cherished, from mixed tapes to writing letters. Perhaps I am a once common thing passing myself by.

And when people wonder why baseball matters to me so, it's for reasons like this, that it seems not just a beautiful game with feats of physical prowess a shlub like me can barely dream of thinking of doing, but also a way into the world that seems innocent but is anything but.

Of course I'm lying, pretending I'd never figure out life without baseball. (I probably won't ever figure it out anyway.) This was supposed to be a simple entry, at least earlier in the day when I imagined it, about straightforward things, like Phillie manager Charlie Manuel saying about Brett Myers, "What happened between [Hamels and Myers], they're friends and that was more 'Brett being Brett.' He likes to throw a jab at you. People hear that sometimes, they don't know how to take it," about a guy who was once charged with beating his wife. We love ourselves some brutish athletes, just as long as they don't do steroids. That might fuck up the children.

And about this, in the same LA Times article we learn that "Alex Rodriguez, hitting .360, has 18 RBIs in this postseason, one short of the record shared by David Ortiz, Scott Spiezio and Sandy Alomar Jr." Despite this news, there are over 600,000 Google hits for A-Rod not clutch, since he had such a terrible streak in the postseason for a bit and people want to hate him as he does seem sort of a, well, to get high school about it, a douche. (And it's not just because I got caught up on Glee episodes tonight that I go to high school for a reference point, but that I think most of us, athletes and non, form our notions about the sporting life then and never get beyond them.) We like bending the evidence to figure what we so assuredly already know--and a jerk like A-Rod mustn't have any character, and therefore, well, point to that small sample size that says just that. But note well the other postseason RBI record holders--Mr. Clutch himself, one of the best-loved men in baseball Big Papi (why are A-Rod and Manny so reviled as dopers, but Ortiz seems to get it easy?), but then two mostly nobodies, Scott "Ridiculous Goatee" Spiezio and Sandy Alomar Jr. How much of RBIing is the luck of being in the right place at the right time? How much of life is luck?

Baseball, at least for this year, won't tell. But with any luck spring will bring some new hope, but that's spring's job, after all. We've all got jobs to do, if only we could hear them call, something distinct like an ump shouting safe.

Now the Boot Is on the Other Footnote, Isn't It?*

2009-11-04T08:01:00.000-08:00

And now it seems Wednesday will always be one from the vaults, as Tuesday night is write my hobby job ass off night. (Note: if you don't want to go crazy, don't ask 6 different chefs for recipes for one story and then have to try to make them all look uniform. You will go Tbs. v Tsp. crazy.) At some point I will run out of old things to run, and then, well, I guess I won't publish here as much. But in the meantime, here's one that I can remember going over big years ago at a live reading, especially when I held up an asterisk to read all the footnotes. Or especially after we had all been drinking. Thank you Eliot, Nabokov, Barth, Yuengling. Oh, and that title is the real title, despite its protestations.

Working Title: Is It Perfume from a Dress?

It began, well, I’m not exactly sure when, but in my youth, my preteen years or so. I developed a nagging theory that would often overwhelm me: I feared that I was an exceptional child, but in the odd meaning of the word.[1] The horrible thing was that I convinced myself of a conspiracy: everyone was too polite, or mean, perhaps, to call attention to my problem. Nonetheless, my dubious distinction, whatever it was (the actual malady didn’t even seem to matter), preceded me like a leper’s death rattle. I did not belong; everyone knew; they treated me like everyone else.

Now I’m puzzled by the denotation of paranoia. The dictionary[2] comforts me by claiming the problem is “nondegenerative” and “limited.” Yet, the dictionary assails me with terms like “chronic” and “psychosis,” too. Which words should I believe? Who developed this definition?

Ask a person on the street, and they’d claim paranoia is organized worrying or a persecution complex. I prefer these connotations, for they avoid the overtly psychological. (After all, one might slip and imagine a Perry Mason episode featuring a witness for the persecution.) My mind, when it begins this happy trail of association, almost never ends. Paranoid sounds like a gland problem. Part of me (which part?) wonders if there is such a thing as mononoia. Then there’s the bathroom graffiti line: “I used to be paranoid, but now I’m just annoyed.” (That’s not as good as the graffiti in an oriental restaurant’s bathroom: “All employees must wash hands before returning to wok”--but that line merely digresses while proving humor is a mean-spirited thing.)[3]

I am still paranoid today, about many things. Part of me (probably not the part mentioned previously) thinks this paranoia is a life-coping device and a way to prove I’m from the East Coast.[4] People from the East Coast worry about living because they have more ways to die. One friend actually saw a knifing in New York City because the knifee accidentally bumped into the knifer. True, the killer was probably the paranoid one of this pair, but he surely gave us clumsy folk something to think about. However, paranoia is not merely life-preserving. It’s being convinced the check-out girl says, “Do you want that pop in a sack,” so my ear will bridle at her colloquialism. I have yet to say, “No, but put the soda in a bag, dummy.” I do not carry a knife. The Midwest might be safe.

Paranoia, of this sort, is a two-way street, or a too way street, as I almost wrote. I’m puzzled if paranoia can truly be privately owned. We can all share Murphy’s Law, so even he’s not very special, although his name gets bandied about a lot. I am sure we are all paranoid about love. I, personally, have suffered the crashing breaker’s of love’s high-tide-paranoiac-swim-without- the-life guard. It’s easy to drown doubly here: not sure which other swimmer to swim for, whether any are in reach anyway, whether the shore--where one can be dry and alone--is the only place to be. (I’ve grown rather to like this metaphor.)[5] Does she love me? Do I love her? Or her? Or do I only love myself, so who am I trying to kid anyway? Plato wrote an entire Symposium on the issue, and while he made great fun of the people he didn’t like, I’m not sure Socrates’ spiritual love is what I have in mind, either. It does seem love goes from the physical to the spiritual, but then becomes so unreal or ethereal (the similarities make me screw up the pronunciation) that I (and who else, might I add?) desire some of the physical again. Which is to say I know nothing more now than I did at the paragraph’s beginning.

People were once so paranoid that they had to make a flourish after their signatures to prevent forgeries. A professor I once knew said at a seminar that he held in his home that Laurence Sterne took to signing copies of Tristram Shandy to prevent bootlegs. To prove this point, the professor took an authentic, signed copy of the book from his own shelves. This made me paranoid; I would rather not be sure who wrote the book I’m reading than have such a professor, who was actually a nice guy, really.[6] Still, there seems to need to be some bounds. I’m not sure whether Sterne needed to use a paraph after his signature to prove his book’s authenticity even further (imagine an 18th century huckster with fobs and Shandys under his ample waistcoat, corner-waiting). What worries me is that paraph and paragraph come from the same etymological roots, and I never knew it until I looked up paranoid. You’d think it was a plan; at least I would.

I cannot get my mind to stop working this twisted way. I’m on the verge of a deeper paranoia here, not of man versus man, but of man versus . (Fill-in your own all-purpose world belief, but make sure it allows for a good cosmic guffaw every now and then.)[7] One day I was busily writing notes about my major movie-going experiences and got to my first PG movie, The Poseidon Adventure. The boat turns upsidedown; people try to escape by going up to the bottom of the ship. The film is entirely un-noteworthy, but I wound up quoting John Ashbery by the time I was done scribbling a page. Every thought explodes into another like a good breakshot in a billiard game with an infinite number of balls. So right now, I’m thinking of The Color of Money, which I despise,[8] and my own pitiful pool skills, and how it’s fun to diddle with the chalk to have something to do, and how we’ve created such time-possessing insanity to fill-up our lives.[9] If we don’t distract ourselves, the balls might bust right out of our heads, probably leaving each of us alive, but killing everyone near us. As Bryan Ferry once sang, “I can talk talk talk talk talk talk myself to death.”[10] (It sounds better with the music, but here I go again. People won’t understand. They’ve told me the essay is the form that most desires to be understood.)

If I stripped away the veil of pretense, I’d abandon the Latin and head straight for the Old English--fear. I am scared, senseless, and about everything. (Oddly, I write senseless now, when paranoia comes from roots meaning “beyond mind,” which doesn’t leave me much, does it?) I am even more scared that others feel the same way. No, I have to change that. I’m even more scared some people aren’t afraid (I believe many of these people are called Republicans, but that’s a different essay) (and a cheap shot). Paranoia is a way to hold my own insanity at arm’s length and turn it over like a rock with ugly squigglies beneath it. Maybe I can throw the rock far (with my arm?) away, but the lousy worms will drop at my feet. I’d probably just break a window with the rock, anyway. Now what? Maybe I can drop the rock hard enough to crush the worms, at least. But then the rock’s left, and that’s the problem, really. It is the metaphor I have to up and live with, or else drop, and then go running into the hills, hoping for a scratch of land where lonesome is usual and only.

I either end here or on and on.

At least one of us is spared the other.

[1] At one point my parents nearly (well, not so nearly, but they did discuss) sent me to a place called Educational Insights. This institution was an alternative school that for some reason also ran bus trips to Jets games. I never went to the school, but did go to the Jets games. Several years later, Educational Insights was busted: it turns out there was no school at all.

[2] The American Heritage Dictionary, to be precise.

[3] Banzai, Rt. 46, Dover, NJ. Banzai is a Japanese restaurant known for sushi and those funny Benihana-famed chop-at-your-table productions; I’m not really sure anything is woked there. It seems the graffiti artist liked the line as much as I did, and felt the urge to scribble away anyway.

[4] East Hanover, NJ, pop. 9926 as of the 1990 census. Twenty-five miles due west of Manhattan.

[5] A sneaky way to allude to an essay I’ll probably never (be able to) write. There is safety in a metaphor.

[6] Dr. Richard Macksey, professor of Humanities, Johns Hopkins, Baltimore. Macksey is independently wealthy, so this occurrence is par for the course. Once, when I was fortunate to have dinner with Edward Albee, Albee commented on Macksey’s son arriving at a book signing with first editions of all of Albee’s plays. The talk moved on to Macksey’s wealth, for which we all offered opinions: inheritance, a scientific invention, and Albee’s refinement of the latter, that the good professor had invented the Macksey (sic) pad. (It’s not polite to name-drop in the body of an essay, and since no one reads notes anyway....Notes are to essays as the Bridge column is to the newspaper.)

[7] For me, Catholicism, even, on very rare occasions, church-going (a kind of Bridge column), but more for the sense of a larger world, a sense that a Big Love should be worshiped, a sense that some kind of muse, maybe mere meditation with a ritual backbone, can help me along with poems and essays. Besides, Catholicism allows for much humor, simply ask Isaac or Job or Judas (the one given to us by James Wright, that is).

[8] Sorry, Marty.

[9] Checking one’s split ends is a friend’s pastime. As for me, I watch HBO I haven’t paid for, but receive better than all the other channels. I can sit through an entire fiction film about the tribulations of attempting to make the U.S. Olympic volleyball team.

[10] “Re-make/Re-model” from Roxy Music, Atco, 1972.

*Reference to Jon Langford getting to review one of Robert Christgau's decade collection books and giving it an A-.

Mistah Kurtz, He Dead

2009-11-03T08:01:00.000-08:00

I realize I'm supposed to do some victory dance or pen some biting entry about Travis Armstrong finally biting the dust at the News-Press, but I just don't have it in me. The biggest part of that is that the N-P sort of seems like--and pardon me for going all 1970s Jersey on you--Karen Ann Quinlan to me. You mean that rag is still around?

And while one more vile suck-up minion shuffles off into the sunset (aka Palm Springs), the real problem doesn't go away, does it. We're still stuck with Wendy McCaw, and surely some new vile suck-up minion will show up for she's certainly still got the bucks. As long as there's a corporate model, there will be toadies. Some will even convince themselves they are a force for good, either by actually buying into the corporate-think (and McCaw is one freaky corp of one) as Armstrong did or by assuming they can mitigate things a bit. Perhaps those people are the worst, for they then can be pointed to by the corp as evidence it's not all bad. Remember the cover you provide, folks. Just saying.

I'd also like to assume that Armstrong is now a journalist no one would hire, but I know better. I know FOX is out there, say, and if even "real" tv networks can trot out the like of Bill O'Reilly and Michelle Malkin as if they know anything about something beyond their own cretinous hearts, there will be a place for lesser evils and dimmer fools.

I would like to assume this would make Santa Barbara a better place, but it's sort of like removing cancer cells from a corpse. Time we all move on, as so many of us have, and find our news elsewhere. It isn't going to be coming from the south end of DLG Plaza.

While I'm at it, as it's election day without the chance to vote (does anyone else feel cheated by vote by mail, like civic duty just got too friendly?), here's hoping that the east side of DLG Plaza isn't soon over-run by those backed by a billionaire no one knows anything about. Things like that tend not to turn out so well around these parts.

Never for Ever Land

2009-11-02T08:01:00.000-08:00

And in this week's episode...what happens when artists you love (or at least loved once upon a time) do things that embarrass you deeply. For while this song is beautiful on its own, if for nothing else than the fretless bass work and how that plays against the chorus in-outs that work more as sound than meaning, well, there's the rub isn't it? For the meaning is the big problem here. Yeah, it's sweet of Kate to care about a fetus worried not just about mom's smoking but also about nuclear fall out (talk about your prenatal worrywort!), but to literalize that, especially as Kate in the plastic bubble--that's just too much.

Then again, perhaps I react so strongly to this video because it's so dang earnest. She just means it all so much. Just see it in how her eyes roll from side to side. But it's hard not to imagine a growing up Kate as the girl in class who wrote the name of the boy for whom she pined in her notebook and then drew over the letters so often that she then obliterated what she wrote. By definition a crush must hurt, sure, as some other women would later sing, but you don't have to bring the pain yourself.

Bush tends to do this in video after video, each one seemingly directed by a mime who has learned the joys of props. These props get even more spectacular, and can include Donald Sutherland.

It's not that her songs aren't grand, of course. They have to be to fit that voice. But I guess I come from the school where you want to cut that grand, not make it grander. Where you don't gild the lily or bronze the orchid. Where just wonder should be enough.

Instead I'm left to wonder how one can be talented enough to come up with the song but not wise enough to know when to stop. But who am I to say anything, holding onto these memories and snippets of videos for decades, turning them about in my head as if figuring out why I hold them matters, as if they will help solve me for who I am someday, bits and pieces of fretless bass--something that should be grounding but yet seems to float--and images I know are wrong but can't get past, either.

Friday Random Ten

2009-10-30T08:01:00.000-07:00

Pere Ubu "Over My Head" Datapanik in the Year Zero: 1975-1977
Louis Armstrong "Cornet Chop Suey" The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings
Waco Brothers "The Lie" New Deal
The Mekons "Dark Dark Dark" Natural
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah "Is This Love?" Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
Talking Heads "A Clean Break (Let's Work)" The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads
XTC "Miniature Sun" Oranges & Lemons
The Fratellis "Henrietta" Costello Music
The Scene Is Now "Room of Wicker" The Oily Years (1983-1993)
Rilo Kiley "Close Call" Under the Blacklight

bonus
Cat Power "Breathless" Jukebox

Hard to beat that Louis Armstrong. That last few seconds of the Rilo Kiley comes close. (A close call?)

Eye-Yi-Yi

2009-10-30T07:01:00.000-07:00

For Dog Blog Friday: You will look into my eyes. You will give me boxes and boxes of Milk Bones.

Consuming Costuming

2009-10-29T08:01:00.000-07:00

There's a pressure in dress up for me as October 31 rolls on up like a giant pumpkin ready to squash me with its oppressive social demand to be something else. And if I'm going to be something else, I want to be something else entirely--why be a sexy pirate, say, when you can be a sexy Flying Spaghetti Monster, and thereby spend the night touching people with your noodly appendage. I've always been a fan of the conceptual costume, too, like the year the person that I was with then and I dressed up as Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, the Supreme Court case that suggested Roe v. Wade might not be settled law. I wore a judge's robe, and held a chain that went around fake-pregnant her. I never said I was subtle.

Other years things were simpler--the time I went as a Baskin Robbins, decorating myself in pink and brown dots, attaching a now serving sign on my back complete with a pull chain, carrying an ice cream scoop. That was a sweet costume. And I admit that last year (this was really only just 12 months ago?) I had no costume until about 20 minutes before party time when I grabbed a plunger, put a cap on backwards, and talked stupid most of the night, even before drinking. Yes, I was Joe the Plumber.

For a costume is one thing, assuming another personality is even better. Why not pull a bewitching switch on yourself? That's how Cal and Carl Gionfriddo were born, with some help from the hair and ears section of an old Ronald Reagan mask. I cut the face part off, you see, and the hair, when worn, sort of transforms a person. The Gionfriddos, one a bit sleazier than the other (I can't even remember which was which, now), were song-stylists, and were fond of polyester and white shoes (alas two sizes two small for me, so they were always a bit cranky, too). They were the kind of guys who called a dame a doll, pointed when they talked, but with both index and pinky stretched, as if they were forking their targets, and even better, wore not just gold chains but one chain with a pierced quarter on it, the first tip they ever earned at the piano bar. They were cousins, for some reason (OK, for the obvious reason--Brooklyn Bums, were they, not damn Yankees), of Al Gionfriddo, who made a famous catch against Joe DiMaggio in the 1947 World Series. One time, playing one of the Gionfriddos I was so successfully obnoxious people at the party who didn't know me complained to the hosts about my demeanor. I want to say I was brilliantly disguised that night.

I guess my problem this year is deciding who I want to be. I'm willing to take suggestions, but time is short for any special transformations. I partially would like to go as a "Robust Public Option," since Halloween is time for fantasy and all. I'm not sure--just like our friends in DC, I guess--how that might look, though. Yeah, I could pack a codpiece and add fake muscles for the robust part. Bring a stethoscope with two listening ends, it is/I am so strong. Be sure I have lots of pictures of Joe Lieberman to take out and rip up, as he's sort of the Lex Luthor to my Robustness. And besides just ripping up his photo would be fun.

That said, I'm asking for your help, here. How can I keep everyone healthy, at least for an evening? They say laughter is the best medicine, so get in line to make me a punch line to remember.

Fairy Tales Can Come True, They Can Happen to You, If You're Young and Hard

2009-10-28T08:01:00.000-07:00

Time for one from the vaults as it's paid hobby writing deadline night for me and I like these popping up first thing in the AM. Not quite sure how old this one is, at least 15 years, but I think versions of it have kicked about for 20. And the narrative it tells is almost 30 years old.

Bare Feet, Glass Slippers

Back when I was poet I had lines I loved but had no home for. I would place them in a poem, but they'd glitter like green glass amid the gravel. There's one line I kept dropping into poems, but it never sat quite right: The poem had to be called “White Pages” and the line read, “In a hundred years, it will be an obituary.” Maybe the line is destined to wander, an orphan among words.

But such a list could lengthen with all the never-settled images that seemed to sparkle, all the local musics that seemed as indelible as Stevens’ “Sunday Morning,” at least as hookable as the Stones’ “(Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Homesick for the land of pictures, every writer’s desire is to put things away, in places they belong, even if, particularly if, no one knew.

The first time I fell, really fell, in love (this is one of those romanticizings of losing one’s virginity), the woman recognized, when we were yet just friends, how a song moved me, how bathos hid me in its bubble. The song, Ian Hunter's "Irene Wilde," about a dumped-lover dreaming, “I’m going to be somebody, someday” in an "I'll show you" petty pity party way engraved like an invitation to seventeen-year-old wannabe poet me, can still edge me to tears, when the lights are low, the evening late, the liquor drank, and life is just life. There is a power in the maudlin of mothers’ calling children home at dusk. And so I fell in love, marveling someone knew I was moved, stunned someone felt me feeling. It was little surprise, then, the night we ended up in bed spring had sprung, it was March, and things started at an odd dorm party where we, madly kissing, thought we could hide behind a Christmas tree.

Why hide? Because Jenny was involved with someone else. There’s always a sensing of things, so Joe knew and was at Jenny’s door, and what became a straggled out week of romantic stealth ended. “Joe, go away.” Inevitable tears--the kind you cry when you find yourself wanting to hurt someone, those sins of omission. The movie Jenny and I saw earlier that evening was Tess, and it’s the film’s men I couldn’t understand. Roman Polanski, the director, has trouble with forgiveness, of course, but even Angel is unreasonable, too, too the preacher’s son. Could Tess refuse a strawberry on a fine day?

The patch of blood on the ceiling spread from strawberry size on. The arrest, at Stonehenge, is all the primal heading off in Nastassia Kinski’s sullen women-child beauty, something even she hasn’t got over: her looks have permitted her career only this one role. At Jenny’s room, later, Joe’s outside, we’re inside, the lights off, but the movie cannot stop. I am cruel and in love.

Joe will not speak to me for years, although I am left by Jenny in a similar if less dramatic fashion six months later. The stories go on, veritable palimpsests: A mad rollercoaster dash, a spaghetti plate’s last strand, a trig function gone awry.

Yet--or perhaps I mean yes--stories are made to sweeten. Few know how grim Grimm fairy tales are, how Cinderella, say, ends with the stepsisters, who are actually beautiful (if brilliantly cruel), so desperate for the prince, so fat of feet, chopping their own toes, hoping to squeeze into the shoe, which through a faulty translation, has been changed from fur to glass. To gaze down at that bloody clotted fur is to glimpse the ever-opening hope of slipping into something, is to forget their story is western culture's analog to foot-binding. That gaze is hoping a fairy tale like love is home, passing judgments like one word sentences: This. Here. Now. So, eager for a new life, to find a fit, the sisters risk blood, willing love and not caring about becoming cripples.

It’s an overstatement to say: Smearing prints and blood, we mark each other with desire, with our hopes we are living. And of my lines left wandering, I find these: “I wasn’t blind enough when I was blind;” “It’s for this I love and never forgive you;” “We are all dying for a better life.”

The March from Justice to Just Us

2009-10-27T08:01:00.000-07:00

Want to win me over with your musical, mister? Then come up with a big love song called "All the Wasted Time" that's keyed to the lovely sung line "I never knew anything at all." That's just part of the astute choices that makes Parade, which is currently running at the Mark Taper Forum in LA, such a powerful theatrical experience. Of course, Parade isn't your typical musical. Simply its subject matter sets it apart, as it's based on the true story of Leo Frank, a Brooklyn-born, Ivy League educated Jew who marries a southern Jew, moves to Atlanta for what seems like a good job, and ends up in a nightmare. For Frank is accused of a horrendous crime, the murder of a 13 year old girl who works in the pencil factory he helps manage. It isn't a pretty tale, to say the least, and the play pulls few punches.

Which means it only hits harder. Evidently the original Broadway production back in 1999 was conceived as an epic--big cast, big orchestra--not so big a run, a mere 84 performances. For it can seem cold, as Frank is far from a cuddly hero, and even in the new production (with a good 20% changed material, or so said music and lyrics writer Jason Robert Brown in a post-show discussion) T.R. Knight (yes, from Gray's Anatomy) plays him close to the vest. While we feel for him, we don't really feel him--he's all intellectual in a place where that seems to mean nothing, especially when justice turns out to be a sham.

The secret to the new production, as re-thunk originally for the Domar Warehouse in London, is to go small. The Taper, with its classic thrust stage, is perfect for that, and the tripling of roles and the concise orchestra tucked away above the stage out of sight, makes it hard not to feel implicated, to feel the feeling sometimes the characters themselves seem unable to feel. It's not like you have to reach much to find all the amazing strands of themes: north v. south, racism, anti-semitism, sexism, populism gone vigilante crazy. (Tell me the historic Tom Watson, a virulent racist pamphleteer who makes an appearance in the play, not the golfer, isn't simply a century old forbear of Glenn Beck.) So it's better to focus, keep us with the characters (all the fine acting and siging helps, of course), and let the ideas do their work the way ideas do, in amongst the cracks of lives lived.

For it's a damn 'nother play about love, after all, about how Lucille goes from the plaintive and all-too-real "What Am I Waiting For?" to fighting for her man, despite everything she has to hear about him. Despite the wickedly powerful testimony of the shopgirls, singing their catchy creepy song about how Leo was bad, like a musical threesome version of the scary Shining vision twins. Despite Leo himself, who almost doesn't realize what he has until it's too late.

For forget about justice being blind--just think about love. How we can stare it in the face for years and not know. This even gets rhymed by the governor and his wife, both calling each other jack-asses in the tenderest way imaginable. You can do the right thing and still be damned, and still be in love, the play insists. The parade of history, even with its vicious lynchings, is a parade of love.