porch swingers not in tupelo

Sometimes DNS servers do the darndest things.

Mandy and I both use Statcounter.com to keep up with traffic on our various interweb endeavors. It tipped us off to the fact that, for the last few days, our IP address shows up as being in Tupelo, Mississippi. Then we also noticed our respective Facebook pages were serving up Tupelo advertising.

Perhaps the John Lee Hooker trojan horse got past our virus protection - or Comcast's - but we're in Nashville like, well, always, and it's the same ol' IP we usually have. And it's still going on. I did a page view on this blog just before writing this sentence, and... yeah, it's still Tupelo Time.

no robyn hitchcock's jug band xmas for miles goosens

Robyn Hitchcock and Founding Father Pete Buck,
Exit/In, Nashville, Tennessee, April 6th, 2009

or, a setlist that begins with "I Often Dream of Trains" and has two songs from Black Snake, Diamond Rôle can't go wrong

Robyn Hitchcock is one of my favorite musicians, ever. Period. From the moment I discovered him in a 1985 dual review of Fegmania! and a Katrina and the Waves album (Waves songwriter/guitarist Kimberly Rew was in the Soft Boys with Robyn) in Spin, Robyn's pop smarts and his dazzlingly erudite, surreal lyrics endeared him to me to no end.

I used to complain that Robyn didn't play here in Nashville nearly enough. From his Nashville debut at the Bluebird Café in 1990 through 2004, Robyn usually did a show here every five to seven years. However, once he recorded Spooked in early 2004 at Woodland Studios right here in Music City, Nashville has become a regular stop on the Hitchcock Express.

Unfortunately for me, this has been a case of "watch out, you might get what you ask for." His shows beginning with that January 2004 gig at the Bluebird during the Spooked sessions haven't been to my taste, causing me to label them "Robyn Hitchcock's Jug Band Christmas." They've been heavy on the inferior material from Spooked, they were guest-star heavy, and all of them seemed to feature about seventeen Basement Tapes covers.

I'm sure those shows were a fun change of pace for Robyn, but for me, they're short on the Hitchcock I really love. I'd read setlists from shows in other towns, and he'd be whipping out "Flavour of Night," "Airscape," "Globe of Frogs," and all the other songs I wanted to hear, but here, umm, no, it's more Spooked for you. Not even getting to see surprise guest John Paul Jones - playing mandolin the entire night, no less - at the 2006 Belcourt show could cure my Hitchcock melancholy.

Until tonight. Tonight's Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3 show at the Exit/In was so good, it could cure cancer. As Robyn said to me during a brief chat afterwards, "well, it's a rock band." And they surely rocked it. From the moment Robyn took the stage tonight, said "My mother was sixteen coaches long, and this song is about her," then went straight into the reverie of "I Often Dream of Trains," Robyn and his bandmates could do no wrong.

Featuring longtime accomplices Pete Buck of R.E.M. on guitar, Young Fresh Fellow / Minus 5 kingpin and auxillary R.E.M.ster Scott McCaughey on bass, and Bill Rieflin, the current occupant of the Bill Berry Drum Chair, on, well, drums, the Venus 3 has evolved into a true band rather than a randomly assembled supporting cast. Their current album, Goodnight Oslo, though completely guided by Hitchcock's vision and sensibilities, benefits from a collaborative feel and dynamic interplay that's been missing from Hitchcock's work since the demise of the Egyptians in the early '90s.

Tonight's set offered many delights. Two lesser-played sizzlers from Hitchcock's 1981 solo debut, Black Snake, Diamond Rôle, "Out of the Picture" and "The Lizard," thrilled aficionados. 1986's Lennonesque piano workout "Somewhere Apart" got a frantic guitar-heavy re-make/re-model, and I never realized how Goodnight Oslo's "Up To Our Nex" was built on a Bo Diddley beat until hearing Rieflin pound it out onstage. "Airscape," one of Hitchcock's most beautiful, enduring songs, was an exercise in crystalline perfection, and I was pleasantly surprised that a personal favorite, "Vibrating" from 1988's Globe of Frogs, made it into the setlist. "I'm Falling" was gorgeous, "Authority Box" commanding, and "Goodnight Oslo" was even more haunting than the studio version.

But even with all of that going for the show, the two biggest highlights of the evening were:

• "Beautiful Queen." While I never disliked this song from 1996's Moss Elixir at all, I wouldn't have listed it as one of his 20 or 40 or maybe even 60 best songs. For, it was always overshadowed by its predecessor on the album, the chiming, ruminative "Speed of Things." Tonight, however, it became the linchpin of the setlist. Hitchcock and Buck have added a "noodly prelude" (in Robyn's words after the show) whose dual-guitar interplay builds tension and sets the mood, then releases into the powerful groove of the song. And tonight, that groove was amped exponentially beyond the familiar studio version and just kept getting more and more urgent as the song progressed. "Beautiful Queen" didn't crescendo so much as continuously build right through the end, thanks to remarkable interplay between all four bandmembers. I haven't heard anything this breathtakingly hypnotic since the version of "What Goes On" on the Velvet Underground's 1969 Live. Simply amazing.

• "Listening to the Higsons." The night became even more R.E.M.y when Mike Mills joined the band for the final encore. Mills and McCaughey took over guitar duty, Rieflin moved to bass, and Buck slid behind the drum kit, while Robyn moved to mic-wielding cock rock god. As the band raised an unholy primal racket, Hitchcock paraded the stage in mock rock star mode, gesticulating grandly, leaning into Mills' mic for joint "whooa-ooooh"s, and clearly having fun. But it was only half-parodic, because he was every bit the rock star tonight.

Two floral shirts, a million blinks, and two hours after "I Often Dream of Trains," Hitchcock and the Venus 3 left a surprisingly small crowd - less than 100 people, I'm thinking - in rapturous bliss. And tonight, that bliss washed over me too. Thank you, Robyn Hitchcock.

summer glau/winter babe

I've never watched Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles aside from seeing the last few minutes of it the last few Fridays, i.e., what airs just before Joss Whedon's latest TV venture, Dollhouse, takes over the Fox Network airwaves.

But if I were to watch the small-screen Terminator, it would probably be because of another Joss Whedon connection: Summer Glau is in it. Preternaturally smart / crazy / beguiling / scary as River in Whedon's Firefly, and absolutely owning Serenity (the Firefly movie), the idea of Ms. Glau as a terminatrix is pretty darn appealing.

However, Summer Glau alone does not a TV series make. For those o' you who might be watching Terminator: is the show worth adding to my TiVo season passes? I have an iffy record with James Cameron creations; it's probably easiest to sum it up by saying that I liked the first two Terminator movies just fine, and everything else seems pretty half-baked and not nearly as smart/cutting-edge as Cameron thinks he's being (The Abyss, Titanic, Dark Angel, etc., etc.).

By the way, I'm still reserving judgment on Dollhouse, but I hate that I'm this far into a Whedon joint and not totally crazy about it yet. After I watch this past Friday's episode, maybe I'll blog on My Dollhouse Impressions Thus Far.

dreams so real

You may be an undigested bit of Frisco Melt, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of Chili Mac...
- Ebeneezer Goosens, 2009


Last night, after leaving work at 11 PM, I picked up some good eats from Steak n Shake on the way home. Once I arrived back at the domicile, the wife and I chowed down, then spent a couple of hours unwinding, mostly with a TiVo'd Wife Swap that aired earlier that evening. We finally went to bed around 1:30 or 2 AM.

That night, I could swear that I started feeling sick. Not "I ate something too late and it's not agreeing with me" sick at my stomach, more like "damn, I must have caught a cold at work tonight" sick. I remember kinda sorta waking up a few times with my throat hurting. I felt feverish at one point, and I was thinking stuff like "it's gonna suck to be so sick during the BVLL Rookie Draft tomorrow" and "wonder if I'll be well enough to go to work on Sunday?" (I had today - Saturday - off.)

I finally woke up for good today around 9:30 AM and... felt completely fine. And have felt fine all day up to and including right now.

I'm really puzzled by this. Once my throat starts hurting, it doesn't un-hurt in midstream - I always get the full-blown cold. So was I actually feeling sick last night, or did I dream the whole thing?

feels like 1974

Last week, my ex-wife left me a voice mail telling me that the Milner-Matz Hotel in Bluefield, West Virginia, had collapsed.

My first thought wasn't about how the Colonial Theater, which was next door and is now crushed in the rubble, had hosted many a celebrity of the '20s and '30s, or about how the once-swank Matz hotel I remembered only from its seedy '70s Milner-Matz denouement wouldn't be part of the Bluefield landscape any more.

Instead, it was "where will people commit suicide in Bluefield now?"

For me, the Milner-Matz was part of that weird early-to-mid-'70s vibe where it seemed like everything might fall apart. Vietnam, race riots, Patty Hearst, Baader Meinhof, Watergate, airplanes being hijacked to Cuba, "Duke/Funk" graffiti on a bathroom stall at Grant's Department Store, Wacky Packages, Jimmy Hoffa, WHIS' March of Dimes Telerama, Quincy, Greeks vs. Turks in Cyprus, women trying to shoot Gerald Ford, shirtless Mark Farner, The Arthur Smith Show...

...and people jumping off the roof of the Milner-Matz on what seemed like a weekly basis. Yes, that was the rich social tapestry of my early youth. Sometimes I think the oddness and uniqueness of those times gets lost in the shuffle between Woodstock and disco, but they're all vivid memories for me.

The Milner-Matz roof jumpers of the '70s seemed like a local manifestation of the symptoms plaguing the nation and, heck, the world. It doesn't surprise me that the Bluefield Daily Smellograph... er, Telegraph (sorry, old Welch Daily News loyalties showing there) doesn't mention the Milner-Matz suicides in their retrospective article, but if I'd written the piece, I would have at least worked in a passing mention.

Anyway, I'm going to relive some more childhood memories now and go be afraid of the cover of Hair of the Dog. Have a nice day!

where the streets had no name

I grew up in a house in McDowell County, West Virginia, that was up a hill "a piece," about three-quarters of a mile from the nearest paved road. Topography sometimes had its disadvantages. For instance, we didn't have cable television until 1984 because of our location - well, that and one person's grudge against my mother, but unfortunately he was the head of our local cable company. The only channel we could get over the antenna was WHIS (which is now WVVA; the call letters changed after a 1979 Supreme Court decision about radio and TV station ownership forced the heirs of Bluefield media mogul Hugh Ike Shott to sell the station).

That meant that I was stuck with NBC in the '70s, and it also means that I unfortunately know more about B.J. and the Bear and Supertrain than you likely do. I only saw non-NBC shows while on family vacations or, after she moved out and got married, while visiting my Aunt Ellen.

Our house's location also meant that mail and packages didn't usually come directly to our house. Back home, most places didn't have "street names" or even streets. It was coal mining country, and the vast majority of the towns were unincorporated: a cluster of houses in the bottom, and more homes strewn across the hillsides. The US Census Bureau classifies it as "rural non-farm," and while that still strikes me as odd - people are in very real communities, not one house here and the next 40 acres away - I guess it's right.

OK, my point was that mail and packages wouldn't come to our house. The US Postal Service didn't offer delivery to folks' mailboxes. Instead, you had to rent a post office box if you wanted to receive mail. For example, everyone's mailing address in my hometown was something like PO Box 55, Powhatan, WV, 24877. Again, unless you lived in an incorporated town, you didn't have a street address to use as a backup.

UPS was even worse, absolutely refusing to drive their trucks up the hill to deliver at our house. They would deliver to people who lived along the main arteries (in our neck of the woods, US Route 52), even without a street address, but not to us. Weirdly, of their own accord, our local UPS guys decided that since we had two kinfolks who did live on US 52, they'd just drop off our packages at their houses. They didn't even bother to get the consent of these relatives; they just started doing it! Sometimes the UPS guys would even leave the package at some other random Powhatan household, and we'd only find out about it if the chance recipient decided to play good samaritan and carry it over to the post office for us.

All of this was extremely annoying when trying to deal with the rest of the world. I remember trying to order concert tickets from Ticketron for something in Charleston, WV, or Roanoke, VA (given the timeframe, it was either ZZ Top or David Lee Roth), and I got into this argument with the Ticketron operator because she absolutely refused to believe that there was a place without a street address. And I guess in the five blocks of New Jersey she'd ever seen, that was certainly true to her experience, but she simply could not get her head around the fact that I could not give her a street address. I could have made up a street address - my mom sometimes did! - but who knows where the tickets could have gone then? She did finally give in and I got the tickets a few days later, so that had a happy ending, but over twenty years later, I still remember the mind-numbing uncomprehendingness on her side of that argument.

I got even more peeved a few years ago when UPS began airing a commercial that showed them delivering a package to a guy living on a houseboat in Hong Kong. You mean to tell me that you can deliver a package to a guy on a boat in a crowded harbor half a world away, but you can't get a package to my mom's house here in the good ol' US of A? That guy wouldn't only not have a street address, his whole home could be somewhere completely different on the next ebb tide. Yet he can get UPS to put his Sweatin' to the Oldies tape directly into his hands, and my mom can't? There's something wrong there.

For better or worse, the "streets" do have names now. A few years ago, a 911-related project forced street names - seemingly random ones that had nothing to do with the local inhabitants and their history - upon all the back alleys, dirt paths, and tram roads back home, including the one that goes past my mom's house. So now the house I grew up in has a street address. There's still nothing street-like about the "streets," everyone still has to get their mail at the post office, and UPS still won't deliver to my mom. So plus ça change 'n' all that.

owner of an oily scalp

I'm nearly out of shampoo, so the last few times I've been on shopping expeditions, I've been keeping an eye out for what's available and what it costs.

But what I've discovered is this: you can't find shampoo for "oily" hair any more.

Used to be that nearly every shampoo bottle in the universe said clearly and in big letters on the front of the bottle that it was for either "normal," "oily," or "dry" hair. And there's still plenty of stuff on the shelves for "normal" and "dry," as well as "damaged," "color-treated," and a half-dozen other classifications.

But between two Targets and two Krogers, I didn't see a single shampoo that said on the front of the bottle that it was for "oily" hair. There's one variety of Head & Shoulders (I think "Citrus Breeze") that says on the hidden-away blurb on the back of the bottle that it "removes oil." That's all I've found.

Has "oily" been named something else? Has it been removed from hair-typeitude like Pluto was de-planetized recently? Is it looked at as insulting or demeaning to be said to have "oily" hair? Seriously, I feel like I've missed a major development in the shampoo industry. I guess I should resubscribe to their trade periodicals.

By the way, I'm open to believing that maybe I've misdiagnosed my hair type. What happens with my hair is that if I go 30 hours without shampooing, it definitely gets oily, and after about 48 hours, it feels oppressively oily to me. Also, when I've been forced to used "normal to dry" shampoo that puts moisturizers in my hair, my hair feels icky and slick within minutes of getting out of the shower. So that's why I think I have oily hair. Could be wrong, but all that says "oily" to me.