Reading Pronunciation

the best thing anyone ever said about nuclear power

2011-03-13T18:29:00.006-05:00

...came out of the mouth of Jay Leno.

Yes, kids, I know this is difficult to believe, but Jay Leno was once a reliably funny, hard-working standup comedian. Really. My fingers aren't crossed while I'm typing this, honest.

This all changed the moment that Johnny Carson retired; upon becoming the permanent Tonight Show host, Leno and his writers became relentlessly lazy, lowbrow, and conservative. And of course by now l'affaire de Conan has stripped any remaining feathers of Leno's dignity, not that there were many left after 1992's l'affaire de Letterman and nearly two decades of being terminally unfunny on a nightly basis.

Nevertheless, before 1992 (and by some accounts, even till this day when he makes unannounced appearances in comedy clubs), Leno was, at least to me, pretty funny. And this joke is from those days.

In the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which before what's happening in Japan right now was the worst nuclear accident in history, Leno made an appearance on... well, I'm not sure if it was Late Night with David Letterman or Carson's Tonight Show, though I'm leaning Letterman. In my memory, he didn't tell this joke as part of a standup routine but on the couch, talking to the host. The screenshot above may even capture him in the midst of telling this joke.

Anyway, this is strictly from memory, and thus paraphrased and subject to the inaccuracies that twenty-five years have inflicted on my brain. But, to the best of my recollection, here it is. It is a joke that Leno wouldn't dare attempt now, at least in front of cameras:

Every time there's a nuclear accident, the nuclear industry always gets some expert to go on TV and say "nuclear power is safer than crossing the street." Well, all I know is that if I get hit by a bus in Philadelphia, they don't make people in Sweden stop selling vegetables.

And that, kids, is all you really need to know about nuclear power.

reveal: ten years gone

2011-02-20T10:36:00.006-06:00

[My older reviews and interviews which are no longer available online need a home, so why not here? This review appeared in the online magazine Toast not long after Reveal came out in 2001; Rob Sheffield's contextual line in his Rolling Stone review of Collapse Into Now about "their underrated 2001 gem, Reveal" inspired me to repost this today as a rejoinder to that spit-take-worthy opinion.]

You know, I had developed this whole theory about Up, the first R.E.M. album that required me to employ rationalization. I told myself, “They were still figuring out how to go forward without Bill Berry. Warner Brothers wanted to see some return on that record-breaking megabucks deal they signed just before New Adventures in Hi-Fi, so they pressured the band to give them some product. R.E.M. gave them the best fourteen tunes they had at the time, even though thirteen of them were midtempo lopes or dying death dirges that, taken as a whole, would challenge the most keen attention span. They didn’t have time to put together an album with more variety and a sense of pacing. They’ll get it right next time.”

Well, Reveal blows that theory all to hell. Two and a half years after Up, they’ve basically done a more streamlined version of Up. This time, they kept my interest through the first six songs (with Up, it only took four songs before I was snoozing or anticipating how soon the CD changer would get to Beck’s Mutations), they made better use of auxiliary players Ken Stringfellow and Scott McCaughey (who also shone on R.E.M.’s 1999 tour), Stipe’s lyrics seem moderately happier, and it’s thankfully several minutes shorter.

Other than that, it’s another exercise in stacking one meticulously-arranged midtempo song on top of another meticulously-arranged midtempo song. The overall effect is numbing; no matter how meticulously arranged these songs may be, after hearing three or five or eleven sauntering tunes in a row, they start to run together. If surrounded by songs that offered even a hint of lively contrast, Reveal’s best numbers might shine through like “Perfect Circle” and “Country Feedback” did on better-balanced albums. But instead, marvelous moments like the dark jewel of “Saturn Return” and Pete Buck’s guitar solo at the end of “She Just Wants To Be” fade into the elegiac torpor that has apparently become R.E.M.’s signature feel.

I wish I could blame Reveal on the unfortunate late-‘90s revival, at least in “alt” circles, of arranging and craft substituting for edge and energy. To me, a song or two of Bacharach/David lounge fare or Pet Sounds orchestration is plenty, but whole albums of them get on my last nerve. Nevertheless, in the end, I can’t pin Reveal on Elliott Smith, the High Llamas, Stephin Merritt, Stereolab, or Richard Davies. If Buck/Mills/Stipe want to settle into a turn-of-the-20^th-century adult contemporary act, it’s their business, I suppose, but it’s also their fault. Somebody wake me up when the Nirvana and Wire revival hits, O.K.?

challengers

2011-01-28T23:42:00.008-06:00

On January 28th, 1986, I was in the second semester of my freshman year at Concord College. I lived in Men's Towers, where the room setup was a two-room suite. The rooms housed two students each - so four students lived in each suite - and shared a common foyer, large closet, and bathroom. My cousin Rusty and I lived in one room, and Kenny and Jeff, two grads of Baileysville High School, shared the other.

I got back to Towers that afternoon after my last class of the day, so, I'm thinking, a little after 2 PM. Kenny and Jeff had the door to their room propped open, and their TV was on. (Oddly, I can't remember if Rusty was present. Since I don't remember anything about him being part of this scene, I'm thinking he was still in a class.)

I walked past their open door without noticing what was on their TV, said something like, "Hey guys, how's it goin'?" and started to put the key into the lock on my room's door.

Jeff said, in a detached, indistinct monotone, "Space shuttle blew up."

This phrase just didn't make sense to me. At all. It was like a string of nonsense syllables.

I said "What?"

Jeff said, again, in just the same way, "Space shuttle blew up."

That time I understood him. I wish I hadn't.

how i learned to stop worrying and not love WoW

2010-07-04T07:18:00.005-05:00

on the first-ever boat on the Turalyon server from Menethil Harbor to the Howling Fjord, November 12th, 2008

Sometime around a year ago was the last time I logged into World of Warcraft.

My history with the game goes back to the first week it was live to the general public, in December 2004. Despite my love of computer games, especially role-playing games, I had never played an MMO (massively multiplayer online game) before. Not Everquest, not Dark Age of Camelot, not Star Wars Galaxies, nothin'. But for whatever reason, I wanted to give World of Warcraft (WoW) a spin.

For the next year and a half, WoW became my primary hobby. The game was more fun and addictive than I had even imagined. At first, I wasn't that enamored with the idea of interacting with and teaming up with other players, or joining a "guild," which just sounded silly. But within a month or so, I was making friends and could also see the advantages of working cooperatively with other players. And a couple of months after that, I had actually started my own guild. Quelle suprise!

But in mid-2006, I quit the game. There were two major factors:

(1) Being a GuildMaster (GM) was wearing me out. In those pre-Burning Crusade days, you needed forty - count 'em, forty - players to do endgame raiding and advance in the game. At first, our tiny, happy guild kept losing players who would join up with us to learn the game and level their characters, then as soon as they hit level 60 (the pre-BC cap), depart for a "raiding guild" so they could get cool stuff and continue progressing in the game. So then I and the other guild leaders decided that we should try to become an endgame-type guild, so we stepped up recruiting and formed a partnership with another guild to get the forty people we'd need to raid Molten Core and beyond.

While this was the only decision we could make if we wanted to be more than a happy fun leveling guild, it went all Treasure of the Sierra Madre in a hurry, especially after we stated taking out Molten Core bosses and having good stuff to divvy up. People argued about the loot reward system. Touchy personalities jostled for key positions like main tank, puller, and raid leader. People bitched about not being on the raid list even though these same people failed to sign up in a timely fashion. And, most weirdly, a lot of folks who had carped endlessly about us not doing endgame content would make themselves unavailable or be playing alts during our endgame raids. So performing this balancing act became a big ol' dose of No Fun every weekend, and my hobby was no longer bringing me pleasure.

(2) My girlfriend at the time hated WoW. Or rather, she hated me playing it. (Her young adult son also played, and she didn't seem to mind that.) Never mind that it was a long-distance relationship, so it wasn't like she was coming home to me leading a party around Blackrock Depths while dishes piled up in the sink. Or that I never took away any time that I could spend with her and gave it to the game - in fact, I'd drop everything at the prospect of a phone call or visit. In the end, I think she viewed WoW as a competitor for my attention, even though it really was no competition for her at all.

But anyway, #1 and #2 combined to suck all the joy out of a great game, so I finally put my account on hold and left the game entirely in May 2006.

During the next thirteen months, the tempestuous long-distance relationship ran its stormy course, and in April 2007, I began dating the woman who'd become my second wife. In June of that year, my youngest sister and I took a trip to Dallas. She brought with her a belated birthday present: World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, the first expansion for the game. She and her husband had gotten hooked on the game in 2006, around the time that I was quitting, and the gift came with the caveat that I would be reactivating my account and moving my upper-level characters to her server.

I had some trepidations about playing again, especially since I had just started a new, promising relationship, and had just exited a relationship where the game caused problems. But I took the unexpected gift as a sign that I should just go with what life was handing me, so I jumped right back in as soon as I returned from the Dallas trip.

And the results were nothing but good. Now WoW time became family time, and I got to connect with my youngest sister, my brother-in-law, and to a lesser extent, my oldest sister and her long-time boyfriend by playing the game. I also think I managed to balance work, WoW, and my healthy new not-long-distance relationship. My new girlfriend was a chef and had a job where she generally worked from 2 PM through 10 or 11 PM five days a week. I only played WoW on evenings when she worked, and this seemed to satisfy all parties. My sister's guild was very reminiscent of my old happy fun guild: mostly nice, smart, fun folks who were good company in guild chat and made playing the game worthwhile. Plus she and two other folks were the co-guild masters, so the burden of leadership wasn't mine and I could feel free just to play.

This situation prevailed through my girlfriend and I both losing our jobs within the space of a couple of months in 2008, us moving in together and getting married, and me getting a new job in retail in October 2008. The retail job was supposedly a day shift joint, but from late 2008 through the first half of 2009, it turned out to be mostly closing shifts (2:30 or 3:30 PM through 11 PM or 12 AM). So I ended up playing on off-days, or, on work days, from breakfast until I had to get ready to leave for work, and super late night when I was back from work and too wired to sleep. My wife was usually asleep or close to it by the time I'd get home at night, so, again, the game took little or no time away from the two of us.

So why'd I leave WoW a year ago if I was having such a great time playing? Strangely, it wasn't intentional per se, it just kind of happened. Around this time last year (July 2009), my work schedule changed and I began working days as promised, instead of nights. One of my initial thoughts was, honest to goodness, "hurrah! Now I can have more time for WoW - I can raid every night instead of just certain ones!" Seriously, I thought this would lead to me spending more time in Azeroth, and the prospect delighted me.

However, what actually happened was this: My wife and I were suddenly on the same schedule for the first time ever. Every night, we were having dinner together and spending the evening watching TV and talking to each other, like a couple ought to be doing.

Suddenly, playing WoW didn't seem nearly as attractive. I really thought during those first few weeks that the next day would be the day I'd get the itch and log back in, knock out a big batch of daily quests, and reconnect with my WoW friends.

Weeks and months went by, and that day never came.

I feel the need to add that none of this came from spousal pressure, explicit or implied. My wife has always been cool with the game, and we always worked together to plan around scheduled in-game events like guild raids. (Before you can ask: She has zero interest in WoW and would never ever be interested in playing it, alongside me or not.) The only time we even had words about WoW was one Saturday or Sunday when she and I were supposed to go run some errands in the late afternoon, and a Stratholme jaunt turned into a crazy revolving-cast all-day thing and I lost track of time. Day turned to night without me even noticing, and if I were on the other end of that, I'd be a little steamed too. I'm completely sure that if tomorrow I decided to start playing again, she'd be fine with that, wish me well, and help me maximize my time there.

Anyway, as you've seen, this post isn't a fanatical screed about the addictive nature of MMOs and how they destroy your "real life." My 2007-2009 return to WoW was rewarding and fun, and I enjoyed almost every minute in the game, especially spending time with distant family and building new relationships. Having fun and being with people you like is as "real" and "worthwhile" as it gets, and WoW provided massive quantities of both for me.

However, something even more worthwhile is an evening at home on the sofa with the wife and puppies. And I'm not willing to take time away from that, at least not now. I miss flying around Northrend trying to beat jackass thieves to herb and mine nodes, and evenings of endless in-jokes in Naxxramas, but right now I'm exactly where I need to be.

a hunka hunka

2010-06-27T08:10:00.004-05:00

My maternal grandfather was born in 1908, and he grew up in a world that was far less, um, ethnically sensitive? (I hate the term "politically correct.") To him, the Caucasians of the world could be divided into the following groups:

Englishmen
Tallys (Italians)
Germans
The French
Hunks

That last category not only took in actual Hungarians, but all the Central and Eastern European ethnicities that didn't fit one of the other four categories. Czech? Slovene? Serb? Pole? Yup, all "hunks." I don't remember him mentioning Scandinavians or inhabitants of the Low Countries, but he was a very smart man who definitely knew his geography, so I think they would have been "Dutch" or "Danish" or what have you rather than subsumed into the "Hunk" category.

I hasten to add that my grandfather never made any claims that any of these groups was superior or inferior to any other in any way. Our corner of the West Virginia coalfields wasn't one of those distressingly homogeneous places that you find so often in central Appalachia; instead, it was a real melting pot. Folks from all over the U.S. and western Europe had been recruited to work the mines from their opening in the 1880s though World War II, which gave eastern McDowell County, WV, a passel of first-generation immigrants back in his day, not to mention a majority African-American population that persists through the present. (We had a lot of coke ovens. Working them was the hottest, most degrading task around the mines, and mine owners recruited blacks from the American South for those jobs.) My grandfather was born there and worked as a carpenter for the mines, so he worked alongside all kinds of folks, and was a friend to them all, rather than being some Archie Bunker troglodyte.

But I explain too much. The point, and I do have one, is that the word "hunk," to me, growing up, denoted "person of Central or Eastern European descent." Then, around 1980, I remember hearing Tom Selleck being described - I think maybe by Sarah Purcell on Real People - as "a hunk."

Sure, my grandfather said "hunk," but even at age 12 or 13, I realized that doing that kind of thing was part of the past, and I couldn't help but be puzzled why Tom Selleck being whatever he might be - with that mustache, some sort of Balkan or Russian background certainly seemed likely* - was relevant. It took me running into the term as applied by the media to "beefcakey-lookin' guy," and to ones that didn't sport facial hair straight outta Sarajevo, a few more times for the context to become apparent.

But yeah, for a while there in 1980, I was genuinely puzzled as to why these muscular guys the women were fawning over were all of Central European descent.

*I just Googled to find out Mr. Selleck's ethnic background, and turns out that Tom's dad is of Rusyn ethnicity, i.e., a Ukranian/Carpathian minority. So I guess both Sarah Purcell and my grandfather would have been on the money. I also discovered that the term "hunk" to describe "sexually attractive male" goes back to the 1940s, when it appears first in Australian slang, then in "jive talk." But I sure don't remember it being bandied about until c. 1980.

now i don't have my ph.d.

2010-06-01T08:48:00.004-05:00

or, reason #1,375 why grad school might not have been for me

I've blogged before - either at my old MySpace blog, or here, or both - about how there's a non-stop jukebox in my head. There's always a song playing, and it's usually triggered by something in my environment, even if I'm not conscious of it at the time. For example, as an undergraduate, one afternoon I was wondering why the Hoodoo Gurus' "Dig It Up" was in repeat mode in my head, and then I realized that earlier that day in my 200-level British and American Literature class, we'd read and discussed John Donne's "The Relic."

Donne:
WHEN my grave is broke up again
Some second guest to entertain,
—For graves have learn'd that woman-head,
To be to more than one a bed—
And he that digs it, spies
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,
Will he not let us alone,
And think that there a loving couple lies,
Who thought that this device might be some way
To make their souls at the last busy day
Meet at this grave, and make a little stay?

Hoodoo Gurus:
My girlfriend lives in the ground
My friends ask why she's not around
She won't come home
I'm so alone (you'll never know!)
You can't bury love
You've gotta dig it up

So yeah, it's a musical word association game in my head pretty much 24/7.

Anyway, in my first year of graduate school at Vanderbilt, one of the books we were assigned for a Colonial American History class was Patricia U. Bonomi's Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America. It was a very good book, but that's beside the point.

My point is, and I do have one, that while I am unsure how Ms. Bonomi pronounces her surname, whenever I saw or thought about her name, the only thing could possibly go through my head was:

U-bon-o-mi! U-bon-o-mi! U-bon-o-mi! U-bon-o-mi!
....Now I guess I'll have to tell 'em
That I got no cerebellum
Guess I'll get my Ph.D.
I'm a teenage U Bonomi!

This probably explains a lot about why I never finished my grad school education. Vanderbilt, so much to answer for.

the guy in the wheelchair

2010-05-14T11:32:00.004-05:00

When I first moved to Nashville in 1988, it was to attend grad school at Vanderbilt. For those first two years in Nashville, my now-ex and I lived in an apartment in Lewis House, a nondescript dormitory on the south side of Vanderbilt's campus. At the time, Lewis House was all grad student housing, whereas its twin across the commons, Morgan House, and all the smaller, cooler-looking buildings strewn around the commons were homes to the overprivileged (i.e., Vandy undergraduates, or as I quickly dubbed them, VandyKids™).

Anyway, one of our fellow Lewis House residents was a young man who was confined to a wheelchair. I never knew his name or story. He looked very fit and muscular, so I always wondered if he had only recently suffered an injury that put him in the wheelchair. He was not an amputee; both of his legs were present and accounted for.

In fact, the only thing I discovered about him during that first year at Vanderbilt was that you couldn't please the guy. Our only interactions were passing each other coming and going at the elevators and exterior doors of the building. The first time I encountered him, I held the door open for him. He swiveled his head toward me, looked me in the eye, and absolutely glowered at me.

"OK," I thought, "so he doesn't want any help with the door. He wants to do things for himself. That's cool."

So next time we ran into each other at the building's exit, I didn't hold the door open for him.

The result? He swiveled his head toward me, looked me in the eye, and absolutely glowered at me.

So what was I supposed to do? For the rest of that year (he wasn't around the second year I spent at the dorm), I defaulted to leaving him be and gave him as wide a berth as possible in an attempt to avoid another soul-scorching stare from the guy.

Even 22 years later, part of me is still angry at this guy, which worries me about myself. I mean, I get his anger, as much as I can. If I was in a wheelchair, particularly if I was young, good-looking, and athletic, and whatever put me in the chair had just happened, or hell, if it happened to fat fortysomething me tomorrow, I could well be angry at everyone and everything in my path. So yeah, guy was pissed, and understandably so.

But all I wanted from him was to know what to do. Hold the door open? I'm cool with that. Let him get it for himself? I'm cool with that too. But he needed to pick one, damn it!

See, I'm still mad. What I really ought to be taking away is that I'm fortunate that I can amble around on my own two legs and don't have to live my life burdened by a head full of trouble that I visit upon strangers and friends alike.

Instead, I'm still fixed in time at that door 22 years ago, flabbergasted that the guy in the wheelchair won't tell me what I need to do - or not do - to help him, even though the answer was almost certainly "nothing."

accepted stroke, left

2010-04-28T00:25:00.006-05:00

Tonight I went with friends - my America-tourin' out-o'-town pal Anna Borg, and Lisa McGuire, who's local but with whom I hadn't hung out in an embarrassingly long time - to see Julian Casablancas, aka "That Strokes Guy," at the Cannery Ballroom.

I know, you're used to detail-filled concert reviews, but in this case, I'm not the man to provide one. I owned the first Strokes album for about a minute, wasn't thrilled with it, sold it, and haven't kept up with the Strokes or Strokes-related things since. Setlist? Not when I don't know the songs!

Actually, none of us fortysomethings were really expecting much of anything. We were mostly just looking for something fun to do together, it seemed like the best entertainment option available tonight, and Lisa could get us in for free. Winner!

Anyway, if anyone wants to know where the hipster doofi of Greater Nashville were tonight, it was at the Julian Casablancas show. In fact, tonight I had the revelation that I listen to Old Person Music, because I realized that the hemlines at the shows I usually attend are no longer nearly as short as those sported by even the most conservative young women at tonight's festivities. So I guess I also no longer listen to Short Skirt Music, since I don't see them anymore when I go out.

I also wasn't prepared for how LOUD the show was! I wore earplugs to almost every show in the '90s, but hearing loss plus the fact that I listen to Old Person Music in small clubs had led me to abandon the practice with no discernible ill effects. But tonight, the sound was so loud that I could barely hear all the songs I didn't know.

Anyway, That Strokes Guy played That Strokes Song - actually very early, three songs in - plus some other songs that are probably from his recent solo album. The crowd was enthusiastic, bopping and singing along between trips to the bar for more PBR.

That Strokes Guy also played a faithful cover of Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark." When it first started, I thought "huh, he's playing a song that sounds like... wait a minute, IT IS!" And to close the regular set, he played "I Wish It Was Christmas Today," the latter-years Saturday Night Live yuletide staple (Anna recognized it long before I did). I would have been even more amused if he had covered Courtney Love's "But Julian, I'm a Little Older Than You."

Still haven't quite figured out what That Strokes Guy was wearing, and we also didn't figure out if he was bored or if that's just the way he rolls, super mumbly and hanging on to the microphone stand for dear life. His band did rock out effectively, and the crowd was eating it up, so he was indeed able to connect successfully to the Short Skirt/Hipster Doofi demographic.

After we felt like we'd seen enough and were tired of standing up - after all, we are consumers of Old Person Music - we prepared to exit at what we thought was an early departure point, but it turned out to be the end of the regular set! We were out of the building by the time the encore(s?) started, beating the crowd to the exits and returning across the Cumberland unhindered by traffic. Having observed Hipster Doofi in their natural habitat, we were relieved to be back to our homes and cats and physical media before midnight. It was a great evening mostly because of the company, but That Strokes Guy didn't hurt it either.

(Photo courtesy Lisa McGuire; title reference courtesy Game Theory)

sweet cream of jesus

2010-04-22T18:48:00.007-05:00

When I was in high school, if one of our athletes had muscle aches and pains, the remedy our teams used was an analgesic cream. While I was merely the statistician for our basketball teams, and only played baseball my senior year (and even then, not often and not well), I spent a large chunk of my extracurricular time involved with our athletic programs. And the distinctive aroma of this product - somewhere between ammonia and Ben-Gay - still wafts across all of my high school sports memories.

I had remembered two things about this substance besides its smell, only one of which turns out to be true:

It was called "Creamogesic."
Most of our players inevitably called it - and they weren't joking, they really thought it was the actual name - "Cream of Jesus."

Misunderstanding the name kind of makes sense. Jesus healed the sick. Why wouldn't a cream named after Him miraculously cure your inflamed bicep? I can still remember basketball star Antonio Martin, who had a notoriously balky knee even as a junior, always calling out for the "Cream of Jesus." Jesus-infused or not, the ointment helped Antonio lead Northfork High School to the West Virginia AA final in '82-'83 and to a championship in '83-'84, so maybe it did have that saviouriffic touch.

Since those days, I had tried to Google "Creamogesic" a few times, with no success, but for some reason, I found it today. I also found out why I hadn't stumbled upon it earlier: I had misremembered the name. Turns out that it's Cramergesic, a product of (surprise!) Cramer Sports Medicine.

Despite my surprise at discovering that I too had goofed on the name, this makes Cramergesic's etymological transformation into Cream of Jesus even more amusing to me, since it involves misinterpretation of both halves of the product name.

Even though it turned out to be merely Crameriffic, this sports cream will always have a heavenly glint for me, especially when I look at those two West Virginia State Basketball Tournament plaques on my wall. Can't tell me that there wasn't divine intervention involved.

the secret of a happy marriage, as determined by me at approx. age 9

2010-04-11T21:26:00.008-05:00

My mom and dad divorced, acrimoniously, when I was six years old.

I certainly wasn't one of those classic "kids of divorce" who went around thinking it was their fault. I didn't believe that for a minute! But thinking ahead even then, I desperately want to figure out what had gone wrong with their marriage. That way, when I became an adult and entered a relationship, I could avoid the pitfalls that ultimately drove my parents apart.

Unfortunately for me, there wasn't a lot of information about their troubles to help me out. My dad and mom were rarely together under the same roof (yes, I see as an adult how that in itself was a huge issue), and I don't remember seeing them fight when they were, so I completely lacked observational data.

"Why not ask your mom?", you might say. Well, my mom ain't one to be talking about that. She rarely brings up anything about my father or their relationship. Even now, 37 years after the divorce, it still hits a nerve for her. Since we live 400 miles apart and see each other rarely, our time together is precious, and I certainly don't bring up my dad or the divorce unless absolutely compelled to do so. And when I was a kid, under the same roof? No way was I going to cause her pain or antagonize her. So I didn't ask, and and she didn't tell.

But one day, out of the blue, she volunteered something. It was the first thing she had ever confided in me about their troubles. And it was this:

She and my father had fought about which way to put the toilet paper roll on the holder.

I held onto this piece of information like it was gold during a recession. I vowed to myself that when I got married, I would find out which way my spouse preferred the toilet paper to go, and that's how it would go, forever and ever, amen. To my little kid mind, this small bit of spousal consideration would ensure that my marriage would succeed where my parents' had failed.

As it turned out, my first wife did not have a preference. Perhaps our willy-nilliness when it came to putting toilet paper on the roller symbolized larger inconsistencies in how we conducted our lives, or violated some basic feng shui tenet, since she and I ended up splitting.

Mandy and I have had no toilet paper incidents thus far, but it occurred to me the other day that we really haven't faced this crucial relationship hurdle yet. "How can that be?" you ask. "Haven't you guys been together for nearly three years? Surely you use toilet paper and not corncobs or the Sears-Roebuck catalog, unless you carry on your West Virginia outhouse customs?"

Why yes, Dear Reader, Mandy and I have been together for nearly three revolutions around Old Sol. Nevertheless, we have not had to broach this issue, because our tiny bathroom in our tiny house does not have a toilet paper holder. Instead, we have one of those free-standing roll-holder dealies, where you can stack three rolls on top of each other.

So the number one most important pressing concern for any cohabitating couple, as determined by me from the evidence I gathered as a child, has never come up. If Mandy and I move to a new place next year and get divorced not long after, you'll know that it was an Under-Over marriage, and ne'er the twain shall tolerate each other for long.

tin ears and tin mines

2010-02-02T17:27:00.004-06:00

or Reason #2,317 why I'm not a musician

When I watched the telecast of the Grammy Awards Sunday night, Taylor Swift's performance was actually my favorite of the evening. Yeah, it wasn't studio perfection, but Ms. Swift exuded lots of charm and enthusiasm, seeming genuinely glad to be on stage not only performing bits of two original songs, but exuberant that she got to sandwich them around Fleetwood Mac's "Rhiannon" with Stevie Nicks herself joining Ms. Swift onstage. (And, for that matter, Stevie Nicks sticking around to contribute backing vocals and tambourine to "You Belong With Me.")

So after the broadcast, when I did what any self-respecting person does immediately after a major TV event - check my Facebook live feed - I was shocked to see comment after comment about how Taylor Swift cannot sing. This was particularly common among my many musician friends, who responded en masse like dogs gathering around the source of a sound that only they could hear. "Pitchy." "Butchering 'Rhiannon.'" "Atrocious." Status after status, comment after comment, the pros and accomplished amateurs had nothing but bad things to say about Hendersonville's Own and the pain that her attempted warbling had put them through.

But really, was Taylor Swift's performance that horrendous? My own initial impression, as stated above, was favorable. Sure, I didn't think she was note-perfect, but I thought she was well within acceptable parameters for live singing. But suspecting that over 50,000,000 musicians on Facebook can't be wrong, I watched the performance again today via YouTube, listening with very critical ears this time.

And... ok, she was perhaps more off than I thought she was initially, but no way was it even close to the crazy bad disaster that I keep hearing about. From all the commentary, you'd think this was a trainwreck on the level of Roseanne Barr or Carl Lewis attempting "The Star-Spangled Banner." Even after relistening, I think Taylor Swift's performance was not only genuine, open, and fun, but was hardly the affront to professional singing that everyone else seems to think. In fact, I think she got stronger as the performance went on, and she brings things home in fine style with suitable shadings of vulnerability during "You Belong To Me."

But then again, I'm almost certainly not the best judge. Even though I love music beyond almost anything else, I have known since at least junior high that I lack the natural skills that real musicians exhibit without even trying. In umpteen years of playing piano and trumpet (I abandoned both when I graduated from high school), I was always a slave to the sheet music. I rarely could play anything by ear. To this day, I can't tell you what chord is being played, or what key a song is in. If you asked me to sing a "middle C," I probably couldn't. I'm not tone deaf, at least according to the definitions I've read and the online tests that I've taken, but I'm pretty sure I'm not musician material.

Nevertheless, I still opine that this is a good performance. And thanks to YouTube, you can be your own judge:

around the october horn

2009-10-29T16:48:00.004-05:00

Baseball has been my favorite sport as long as I can remember, but somehow in more than a year of blogging, I don't think I've mentioned it outside of a passing reference to a Strat-O-Matic draft.

I find this odd, since I truly love the sport, and spend a lot of my leisure time with Strat or Baseball... um... Sports Weekly. And I devote a good chunk of my time on the Internet to superb baseball websites like Baseball Prospectus, Dodger Thoughts (I'm not even a Dodger fan, but Jon Weisman is such an eloquent, fair-minded writer and the DT community that's grown around the blog is so fun to read that it's always worthwhile to hang out there), Baseball Musings, Aaron Gleeman's Twins blog, and a bevy of others. In fact, I usually eat breakfast at the computer while pouring over the previous day's baseball bloggitude.

So here's some random and not-so-random baseball thoughts on this cloudy October day.

I'm rooting for the Phillies in the World Series. Following the Reds all these years has made me a very solid National League fan, and unless I view the NL entrant as despicable in some way and/or see the AL team as historically outstanding, I'm always for the NL team. The 2009 Phils do not strike me as objectionable, therefore I want them to win.

Plus the Phillies are playing the New York Yankees. I'm for anyone who's playing the Yankees. While I do not loathe the Yankees of the '90s and 2000s like I did the loathsome 1970s Yankees of Reggie Jackson, Billy Martin, Thurman Munson, Mickey Rivers, Bucky Dent, and Roy White, there is no way I can ever be for any incarnation of this franchise.

Three of the races for individual honors in MLB should be no-brainers (operative word there: "should"): Zack Greinke for AL Cy Young, Joe Mauer for AL MVP, and Albert Pujols for NL MVP. The NL Cy Young is less clear-cut, with about seven or eight pitchers having decent cases, but I'm going with a repeat for Tim Lincecum, slightly edging out Adam Wainwright. For the record, I'm a pretty standard sabermetric thinker on these things, heavily discounting team-dependent counting stats like runs, RBIs, saves, and, worst of all of 'em, pitcher wins. I also don't give a crap whether someone played on a contender or not when it comes to an individual award. For instance, I believe Mauer should be the AL MVP even if his Twins had collapsed during the final week of the regular season. Yep, the Twins did go on that hot streak that got them into the postseason, but as far as Mauer's deservingness goes, to me it doesn't matter if they won by 10 games or finished 20 games out. If he's the best player, he's the MVP. Period.

Speaking of things I don't give a crap about, the whole performance enhancing drug thing is a total non-starter with me. I am not interested in it. I don't care. I am not morally outraged if athletes attempt to perform at a higher level. I don't think it's wise to use human growth hormone, steroids, etc., but I am not going to get worked up about it if they do. I don't think the stars of the '60s and '70s should be disgraced because many of them were swallowing greenies by the handful, nor is there a public outcry that they should be. For some reason, steroids generate more faux outrage amongst the press. The bottom line for me is this: Barry Bonds was the best player I've ever seen (Johnny Bench was my favorite, and he's arguably the best catcher ever, but Bonds was a better player). Roger Clemens was not only the best pitcher of his generation, but has to be in any discussion of the five or ten best starting pitchers in baseball history. Excluding them or Mark McGwire from the Hall of Fame strikes me as completely silly.

While broadcaster Joe Morgan's increasingly terminal case of old-player-anti-stats-crony-pimping-itis makes him an easy and deserving target for every baseball blogger's ire, I do want to point out that when Mr. Morgan began his broadcasting career in 1985 with the Reds' TV network, he was the best baseball color man I've ever heard. Joe's primary strength then and even now is his ability to explain how the game is actually played, and I learned more about baseball from listening to Joe Morgan cover the '85 and '86 Reds than I probably did in all my other years of watching baseball combined. Even my decidedly non-sports-loving mom chimed in during one of those games (maybe one of the epic '85 confrontations between Reds rookie Tom Browning and the Mets' mighty Dwight Gooden) that she enjoyed listening to Joe, because he made the game understandable to her. Unfortunately, these days it's Morgan's only redeeming quality, but back in the '80s, and even the early '90s, when he became ESPN's primary MLB color announcer, Joe was not so anti-stat, and much of his commentary was very friendly toward many of the same concepts that had captivated me in Bill James' Baseball Abstract annuals.^* In fact, on those '85 Reds broadcasts, I distinctly remember him explaining how then-Red Gary Redus was a valuable player despite his low batting average, because Redus walked a lot and stole bases at a high percentage. Modern-day Joe would dismiss Redus based solely on that low BA, and I for one mourn that as Joe has aged, he has allowed his mind not only to harden but to narrow. Just remember that it wasn't always that way.

^*I'm not suggesting that Joe Morgan read any of James' work back then. What I am saying is that what Joe Morgan said on those Reds broadcasts produced no cognitive dissonance in my mind with what Bill James, Pete Palmer, Craig Wright, et al, were writing about at the same time. As many folks have pointed out during Joe's dotage, it's ironic that he should be so anti-sabermetric given that Morgan's strengths during his Hall of Fame playing career practically make him the poster child for sabermetrics: he walked a lot, he got on base a lot in general, he hit for power at a premium defensive position, and he stole bases at a very high percentage. If only what came out of Joe's mouth then had stayed consonant with what made him an all-time great, Fire Joe Morgan would have been firetimmccarver.com instead.

not expecting both perspex and lowe bonnie

2009-10-19T18:10:00.008-05:00

The musicians who spent most of Saturday night (October 17th, 2009) together on the Bluebird stage, none of them as they appeared on the Bluebird stage, but their photos do appear L-R in the configuration in which they stood: Abigail Washburn, Robyn Hitchcock, Rayna Gellert

After reviewing April's Robyn Hitchcock and the Venus 3 show at length, I think folks are expecting me to review Saturday's unprecedented second Robyn show in Nashville within a calendar year. Especially the person from Winfield, Alabama, who landed on that previous entry today while searching for "robyn hitchcock bluebird review." Since I don't want to let my happenstance audience down, I'm going to oblige him/her, if he/she Googles their way back here.

So's anyways, I certainly wasn't expecting a full-on rock extravaganza like April's show, given the tininess of the of the Bluebird Cafe's stage. I did think we might get a Venus 3 member or three, and likely some Gillian Welch and David Rawlings since it was a Nashville Robyn show on what appeared to be an off night for GilNDave's various projects. It could have ended up a repeat of the Basement Tapes covers/Spooked-heavy shows that characterized Robyn's non-V3 Nashville appearances during the 2000s.

Instead, none of those people appeared and none of those things happened.

A few minutes after the listed showtime of 9:30 PM, a pair of slender women walked onstage and set up banjos and violins. I thought they might be an opening act, though the show, billed only as "An Evening With Robyn Hitchcock," listed none. But then they left the stage, and Robyn, harlequin shirt donned and acoustic guitar in hand, walked on and began the show with Olé Tarantula's "Museum of Sex." Nothing out of the ordinary solo Hitchcock show there, and Robyn said something about some "friends" joining him later, getting the crowd all a-twitter (and probably all a-Twitter) over whom might be appearing.

Robyn would play four more songs by himself, including the always-gorgeous "I Often Dream of Trains" and Welch/Rawlings' "Elvis Presley Blues." During the intro to the latter, we learned that GilNDave would be elsewhere tonight, so two likely "friends" could be ruled out then and there.

After the fifth song, "Full Moon in My Soul," he called for those "friends" to join him. The two women who set up the banjos and fiddles beforehand reappeared, picked up their respective instruments, and assumed flanking positions around Mr. Hitchcock. Then some fiddling and picking commenced, but it wasn't until Robyn began singing that I knew what they were playing: the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows."

Tonight's friends were Abigail Washburn on banjo and vocals, and Rayna Gellert on violin and backing vocals. Though both looked vaguely familiar to me, especially Abigail, I didn't immediately know them, and even after post-show Googling, haven't found a project of theirs I think I've seen or heard. As far as I can figure, the connection to Robyn Hitchcock may be that both women played in the band Uncle Earl, an album of whose was produced by Robyn's sometimes-collaborator John Paul Jones (yes, that John Paul Jones).

Anyway, after Abigail and Rayna joined Robyn, the rest of the set took on a very traditional/folk feel, more so than Robyn's work with violinist Deni Bonet or even on Spooked, the album he recorded here in Nashville in 2004 with Welch/Rawlings. During this most rootsy part of the setlist, we got two, maybe three "trad."-authored songs, along with an apparent new Robyn tune ("Thank You Timegirl"?), a very traditional-sounding song that Abigail sang from which I couldn't decipher a Google-friendly lyric, and, my personal highlight of the evening, a rare sighting of the beautiful "Birds in Perspex."

For the encores, Robyn started solo again, with a cover of the Doors' "Crystal Ship," following it with a song by "another dead songwriter," Nick Drake's "River Man." Abigail and Rayna rejoined Robyn for another song that it tickled me to hear: I Often Dream of Trains' "Ye Sleeping Knights of Jesus," which was perfectly suited for the banjo/fiddle/acoustic guitar setup. Then it was back to just Robyn, who returned to the Jim Morrison Songbook for the last tune of the evening: "The End."

While walking out of the Bluebird and even on the drive home, I had a lingering feeling that's difficult to put into words. It wasn't disappointment, because the quality of the show was high and Robyn put his heart into his singing and playing. So it's not a case of "Do you ever feel like you've been cheated?" Not even close.

I suppose it's more like confusion: I not only didn't get what I was expecting - which is not always a bad thing and wasn't a bad thing on this particular evening - but I'm still not sure just what I got or what Robyn's intentions were. New project? Fun one-off? Two Doors covers in one show? I left with more questions than answers, but I'm still glad that I went.

Complete setlist follows:

1) Museum of Sex
2) Elvis Presley Blues (Welch/Rawlings)
3) I Often Dream of Trains
4) I'm Falling
5) Full Moon in My Soul
[Rayna and Abigail join Robyn]
6) Tomorrow Never Knows (Lennon/McCartney)
7) Thank You Timegirl (?)
8) Lowe Bonnie (trad.?)
9) Ole Tarantula
10) ?? Something that Abigail sang
11) Birds in Perspex
12) Log Cabin in the Sky (Trad.?)
13) Balloon Man
==========
[Robyn solo again after brief encore break]
14) Crystal Ship (Doors)
15) River Man (Drake)
[rejoined by Rayna and Abigail]
16) Ye Sleeping Knights of Jesus
[just Robyn again]
17) The End (Doors)

baby, can i buy your car?

2009-10-17T08:33:00.007-05:00

It happens the same way every time. I walk out of work, get in my car, turn the key, start to pull out, and then I spot it: one of these notes on the windshield.

They're always the same medium: ballpoint pen on paper grocery bag. And the same message, whether it's from Andre or Dave or Zach: they want to buy my car. As soon as possible.

I've gotten these notes eight or nine times this year, and twice this week.

My car is not a Lamborghini, Lotus, or even a Miata. It's not a Model A or '55 Chevy. It's a red 1998 Pontiac Sunfire GT with over 125,000 miles. In other words... uh, you want to buy this?

I was completely mystified until a few months ago when I posted a Facebook status asking why anyone would be so hot and heavy to buy my car. Jaimie Vernon responded thusly:

It's a popular chassis size that's easily converted into a street-racing car for the Honda Accord street thugs. Before I got rid of it, I had similar offers for my 1998 Ford Escort.

Huh. I had no clue. This makes me think I should be calling these guys and thanking them for offering to buy my car rather than just stealing it.

A few years ago, before I knew my wife, her '94 Mazda Protege got stolen. It turned up in a salvage yard a few weeks later, burned out and with "#90" spray-painted on the side. I hope the Happy Little Red Car does not have a similar fate awaiting it.

carradio (autumn sweater mix)

2009-10-14T16:33:00.004-05:00

As I get older, I find myself more affected by Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). When I was younger, my mood and energy were impervious to weather. But now I feel listless and glum when it's cloudy and gray.

As my car gets older, it too is more affected by the weather. Or at least my car's stereo system is.

This cloudy, gray, cool morning, with rain coming down in that annoying quantity between "drizzle" and "umbrella needed," my car stereo exhibited a sign of the changes of seasons as sure as leaves turning or Vanderbilt's football team getting trounced in SEC games. When I started the car and backed out of the driveway for the commute to work, the CD I left in the car overnight started sputtering and skipping. I didn't even make it off my street before giving up on the CD player and switching over to the NPR (as the kids call it these days).

My '98 Sunfire didn't come from the factory this way. Unfortunately, over the last four or five years, when the weather's cold, or cool and humid, the CD player is practically inoperable - certainly intolerable - when I start the car. I guess all the bumps and rattles over eleven years have made the car more, um, porous? Dash gets more moisture, moisture fogs up the laser and CDs, CD skips until the in-dash fog burns off.

Mind you, if I'm going on a longer jaunt, this is only an annoyance for the first 15-20 minutes: eventually the daylight and/or the defrost warms up the console, and then the CD player works normally for the rest of the drive.

But for the morning commute, which usually lasts 15 minutes, it means I'm stuck with the radio for the length of the drive. My default radio option is WPLN, our local NPR station. While I'm very NPR-friendly, I'm not in the mood for news and talk every morning. Tolerable music options just aren't on the dial: maybe WRVU (Vanderbilt University's station) will, at this particular hour on this particular day, feature a DJ whose tastes I like, but they probably won't; classic rock is, well, classic rawk; WRLT, a.k.a. "Radio Lightning," a.k.a. our market's "adult alternative" station, will be up to its usual adventurous-only-to-Brentwood-housewives strummy midtempo tricks.

And to anticipate two likely reader suggestions: I don't feel like investing in an iPod car audio solution is worthwhile, since I'll probably buy a new vehicle with a built-in auxiliary jack within the next twelve to twenty-four months, which renders superfluous any purchase of an iTrip or its ilk. And there's not room in the budget right now for Sirius or XM (I'd likely pick the latter since they have Webb Wilder and Major League Baseball).

So until Spring sufficiently thaws Middle Tennessee, it's probably going to be all NPR all the time for me.

one more for chef michael

2009-10-08T22:25:00.006-05:00

At the risk of going all Andy Rooney - wait, I guess it isn't, since I'm not railing against everything that's changed in the world since 1952 - I don't get why there's this explosion of "gourmet" or "chef-created" pet foods.

While we can't be sure just how canines and felines perceive taste, my understanding was that what their taste buds register is more than likely not even close to how humans perceive flavors and seasonings. Cats, from what I've read, are strictly a four-taste show: sour, salty, bitter, and sweet. I've had a couple of cats who prefer beef to fish, but that's about as far as it went. Dogs have more taste buds than cats, and like with people, the appealingness of the food gets intertwined with its scent, but dogs in general seem far less discriminating than cats about what they put in their bellies.

So why, then, do we have "Tuscan"-style pet entrees and chefs putting their name on pet food? It seems like wasted effort as far as the cat or dog's appreciation of the greens, seasonings, and textures; all I can figure is that it's supposed to make their owners feel better about themselves and up the manufacturers' profit per pound.

The most disturbing thing I've seen in this regard isn't Purina's Chef Michael line, as depicted above, but the new-ish Fancy Feast line of "cat appetizers." First, there's the notion of a cat meal having courses, which seems like anthropomorphizing of the first rank.

But worse, it's pitched as "an entirely new way to celebrate the moment."

What? I'm not sure if the target audience here is the stereotypical "crazy cat lady" or practitioners of bestiality, but this seems wrong on so many levels. You shouldn't be having "moments" with your cat! Or at least not the kind of moments you celebrate over a meal with courses and a glass of wine.

All this romancing-the-pet ickiness reminds me of a picture my former employer used in an award-winning advertising campaign. The "About Life, About You" series of commercials and print ads for our bank featured black and white shots of people insipidly doing the insipid things that were supposedly important to them, like fishing with the grandson or planting tomatoes outside Del Boca Vista II or setting up a nursery for the new arrival. By implication, our bank was helping them do these insipid things.

But anyway, the shot I'm remembering featured an attractive young lady of Asian descent. She was wearing a semi-formal dress as though headed out for a date, but she was sitting at what appeared to be a table in her residence eating what appeared to be a nice dinner. Across the table, sitting in a chair, was a dog, who also appeared to have a place setting in front of him/her.

Every time I saw this picture, be it at an ATM or the wall of a branch or in a statement flyer, I wasn't thinking how our financial institution was enabling young, attractive Asian women to live out their dreams. All I could think was She's on a date with her dog.

This woman would definitely be working the Fancy Feast appetizer, that's for sure.

meeting in the ladies' room/they're all gonna laugh at you/duke + funk (medley)

2009-10-05T16:38:00.011-05:00

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time in ladies' rooms.

I know, I know, all of you who know me are saying "well, that explains a lot." Here's the sitch: It was the early '70s. My dad, who would divorce my mom in 1973 and then exit the picture completely, was rarely on the scene even then. My household from birth until age 17 was my mom, my maternal grandparents, and, until December 1976, my aunt. That's three women and one elderly man, plus me. So when we went out, odds are that I was in the care of one of those three women. And they were not going to let their little boy go into a men's room by himself.

And who can blame them? It wouldn't be a great idea to let a preschooler go into a men's room by himself now. But this was the '70s, when child kidnappings and cult abductions seemed to be in the news every day. So when my mom, grandmother, and/or aunt needed to go to the restroom, or even if the restroom visit was on my impetus, it was always to the ladies' room and accompanied by one of them.

You may be asking "why didn't your grandfather supervise that?" Well, he wasn't always on these outings, so he may not have been there. Even when he was, he just wasn't a "tend to the little kid" kind of grandfather. Don't get me wrong, I never doubted that he loved me completely, and he was a wonderful man whom I miss more every day. But out in public, he did his own thing. During our visit to whatever store we were in, he more than likely would have wandered off from the main family grouping to eyeball what was new in the hardware department, or he would have flagged down another old man whom he recognized from a carpentry job in 1948 and they'd be chattering each others' ears off out in the lobby.

So it was a life of ladies' rooms for me. This would come back to haunt me in first grade. The women who raised me, who did a boffo job in the things that matter most in child-rearing (unconditional love, nurturing, protecting, giving me intellectual freedom to become myself), didn't really understand male-specific things. And one of those male-specific things they never thought to teach me was to use my zipper when urinating. Every adult I saw urinate dropped their pants to do so, so I did it too.

This didn't matter when all my toilet visits were either at home or behind the closed door of a ladies' room stall. But on my second day of school, Mrs. Semanco marched her Switchback Elementary first graders (I never attended kindergarten - that's a blog entry for another time - so first grade was my first year of school) to the restrooms, where the class split by genders: girls to the girls' room, boys to the boys' room.

So for the first time in my life, I was alone with a bunch of other boys in a male-only toileting facility.

OH. MY. GOD. This was a different world. The stalls had no doors. (I'm not sure if I ever did #2 at school in all six years I spent at Switchback. Pooping in public? No way!) There was another, larger stall that housed some large non-commode porcelain objects, but on that early September day in 1973, I had no idea what a urinal was. (A few years later, when the girls' room was being repainted and the girls and boys had to take turns in the boys' room, Vanessa Rucker exited the boys' room and excitedly asked the waiting line of boys "do y'all ever take showers in there?" Obviously, she also didn't know what a urinal was.) Plus, relative to what I was used to, the conditions were filthy.

I had never seen anything like this before. I was freaked out.

But I also had to pee.

So I went into one of the open stalls and reluctantly did what I always did when I had to urinate: I undid my pants, let them fall around my ankles, and started peeing.

The gales of laughter started almost immediately. And in some ways, wouldn't stop for twelve years, even though I subsequently figured out what that zipper was for and never dropped my pants to pee again. It wasn't like I could explain to them over all that cacophonous cackling the context that I just spent umpteen paragraphs explaining to you. Heck, even if I could have explained it, they wouldn't have been more understanding. They were kids. And kids are cruel.

I'm not kidding about the humiliation lasting for twelve years. David Law, who was present on that day and for the remainder of my pre-college education, found fit to mention this incident to me when we were both in high school, and Mr. Law by then had become a good friend, so in some ways I never lived this down.

And, I guess by retelling the story here in a public forum available to God, man, and law, I might never live this down. But that wasn't what this blog entry was going to be about, even though it's about that now, I guess. What my intro was really about was some background for a totally different toilet anecdote, which will still follow:

So, there I was, going to ladies' rooms in the early 1970s. Graffiti, while not a new phenomenon, was reaching unprecedented proportions in the U.S., and was the subject of much denunciation from the mainstream media as well as from my family.

And graffiti was in the ladies' rooms of southern West Virginia. For whatever reason, the one piece of graffiti I remember most was on the door of one of the stalls in Grant's in Bluefield, West Virginia. (For the WV locals, Grant's was on Cumberland Avenue in a shopping center with the non-downtown Kroger and the bookstore, and the location became our area's first K-Mart after the Grant's chain went out of business.)

Also, keep in mind that, as you probably have surmised, I had a very sheltered childhood, so my notions of obscenity and vulgarity were my mom's and my grandmother's, i.e., lots of things were obscene. I have yet to hear my mother utter a single curseword. Ever. I heard my grandmother say "shit!" once, when someone pulled in front of her. My grandfather would occasionally say "shit!" and get roundly chastised for it. And even more mild stuff like "heck" and "darn" was equally prohibited, because, to quote my mother, "it's just standing in for the worse word, so you're still thinking the worse word." My family was not particularly religious beyond a kind of general Protestantness; they all believed in God and Jesus and the Bible, but we didn't go to church except for my grandmother on Easter, and they thought the super-Christian folks amongst us were, well, nuts.

So it wasn't religious zealotry. They were just prudes.

Anyway, on the door of one of the ladies' room stalls at Grant's in Bluefield, WV, was inscribed the following item of graffiti:

DUKE
+
FUNK

To my little mind, this was the Most. Obscene. Phrase. Ever.

I'm not sure why I thought that, or why it's still stuck in my head nearly 40 years later. Was it "funk"'s proximity to the truly reviled "f" word? But at that age, I hadn't encountered the f-bomb at all. And why did I think "DUKE" was also a "nasty" word? I knew that "duke" could be a title, and I didn't think that the Duke of York or "Duke of Earl" were nasty. I don't even think my mom or grandmother had pointed out this particular piece of graffiti as disgraceful. So I got nothin.'

But "DUKE + FUNK"... oh man, I thought I had to cover my eyes when I went past it on the way to the next stall or back to the sink for handwashing, lest Billy Graham yell at me and I end up in Hell.

OK, I'll stop writing any time now. Let the psychoanalysis begin!

bad bad bad bad bad, bad technology*

2009-08-12T18:09:00.004-05:00

*to the tune of Red Guitars' forgotten gem "Good Technology"

Sure, everyone's got their own "We can put a man on the moon, but we can't do Apparently Simple Technological Task X" homily. My grandmother's favorite was to lament how WHIS couldn't come in clearly at our house 15 miles away from the transmitter, even though we could get clear footage from the Moon.

Well, the footage from the Moon would have been clear at our house if WHIS had a stronger signal or if we could have gotten ahold of a Greenbank antenna, but that's another story.

The story I'm about to tell, and I do have one, is about my pick for the Most Volatile Technology of the Modern World. It's my own personal We Can Put a Man on the Moon, But... story.

I have traveled all across this great land of ours, and one thing is true, no matter if you're in Roanoke or Raleigh, San Francisco or Sarasota, Nashville or New York, Peoria or Pittsburgh:

The Frozen Coke machine doesn't work.

It doesn't matter if it's called an Icee or Slushee. It doesn't work.

It's not frozen enough.

It's too frozen and doesn't want to come out of the machine.

The Coke - or flavoring of your choice - isn't mixed correctly and tastes icky.

Most likely, the machine isn't working at all.

I myself am not a fan of nor a connoisseur of Frozen Cokes or similar beverages, or my list of maladies might be even longer. But I have been involved with significant others who scour with eagle eyes every gas station, convenience store, food court, food avenue, and other possible fountain-drink-dispensing venue, ever hopeful that they'll spy a Frozen Coke machine.

Sadly, even when they've identified their prey, their initial jubilation oft becomes disappointment within minutes, even seconds.

Why? Because the Frozen Coke machine doesn't work.

Forget about obvious, general advance in technology during the past few decades, like how a $5 flash drive you can buy at any discount retailer has over 100 times more storage than the hard drive on my first computer. Many food technologies have improved greatly over my lifetime as well. Soft drinks in two-liter plastic bottles no longer taste like plastic. Frozen pizzas still aren't as good as the real thing, but the gap has narrowed considerably from the cardboard-with-bad-pepperoni-esque-meat-pieces days of yore. Packaged cookies were once all brick-hard, but now soft and moist prepackaged cookies - if that's the kind of cookie you're after - are abundant and tasty.

But the Frozen Coke machine still doesn't work.

Forget putting another man on the moon by 2020. What our government really needs to be pouring those R&D dollars into is into doing something that hasn't been done before, i.e., solving the greatest technological hurdle of our time: making a reliable Frozen Coke machine. T. Boone Pickens, are you reading me?

oh those overflow women gimme gimme gimme the overflow blues

2009-08-08T06:59:00.004-05:00

At my alma mater, Concord College (now pretentiously remonikered as Concord University), the two largest dorms are twin buildings on the west of campus, Men's and Women's Towers. My cousin Rusty and I roomed together in Men's Towers for the duration of my time there.

At the beginning of the new school year in both 1986 and 1987, there were more women signed up for the freshman class than could be housed in the dorm space normally allocated to the fairer sex. So both years, Concord's administration decided to clear the bottom two floors of Men's Towers to house these women.

Bizarrely, the college decided to call the women residing in Men's Towers "overflow women."

I kept expecting one to float up through our toilet, or for a torrent of them to rush out of the lobby and into the street - a cataract of buoyant females and random dorm room jetsam flooding downtown Athens. Could the administration have come up with a more unflattering term?

Both years, the situation didn't last for long. The normal attrition of no-shows and early drop-outs allowed the tide of overflow women to recede into Women's Towers and Wilson Hall within a week, probably to the disappointment of the men who wasted all the time they spent drilling peepholes into their floor.

But still... overflow women? Seriously?

sign fail x 2

2009-07-29T15:51:00.008-05:00

Side 1:

Inglewood Market, Gallatin Road, Nashville, July 29th, 2009

Side 2:

Inglewood Market, Gallatin Road, Nashville, July 29th, 2009

I can't decide which side I love the most. On the one side, we learn only Cricket-branded phones are allowed to play the lottery at the Inglewood Market. One pictures a line of scorned AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon phones queued up at the Mapco or Circle K checkouts, each with a Powerball submission in hand, ready to buy the Tennessee Trifecta (beer, smokes, lottery).

On the other side, we are presented with "PLAY LOTTERY HEAR." Is it a commercial variant of "y'all come back now, hear?" Or maybe just two verbs with a noun plopped in the middle, three separate reminders from the market's proprietors to us, the general public: keep a spirit of fun in your day, always listen with an open mind, and, oh yeah, bring your Cricket phone here so it can play the lottery.

education fail

2009-07-29T15:46:00.004-05:00

East Literature High School, Nashville, TN, July 29th, 2009

Here's hoping subject-verb agreement makes it to the curriculum!

porch swingers not in tupelo

2009-05-30T18:36:00.003-05:00

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

2009-04-07T00:40:00.010-05:00

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 weighed down with 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 at the 2006 Belcourt show - playing mandolin the entire night, no less - 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 me, 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

2009-03-22T16:05:00.005-05:00

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

2009-03-14T18:49:00.003-05:00

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

2009-03-13T14:04:00.003-05:00

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

2009-02-01T08:24:00.010-06:00

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

2009-01-19T23:44:00.006-06:00

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.

minute maid, minute maid, the amazing soda

2009-01-18T12:05:00.003-06:00

Back in my 1985-88 undergrad days, my cousin/roommate Rusty and I mocked many things. One of them was a commercial campaign for Minute Maid Soda. In fact, since the commercials for Minute Maid Soda so prominently featured the word "amazing," any time we heard someone else use the word "amazing," we'd promptly go into the "BUH-waku-waku... UHHH-maze-ING!" routine from the commercials.

In the intervening years, everyone but me and Rusty had forgotten this commercial. I mean, you put the two of us in a room together, we'll still do the "buh-waku-waku... UHHH-maze-ING!" thing, but no one but us will know why. Not only doesn't anyone else remember the commercial, they usually don't even remember that Minute Maid made a soda.

But today, thanks to the magic of YouTube, I can now prove that Rusty and I did not hallucinate the whole thing. Here's one of those mid-'80s Minute Maid Soda commercials:

The magic phrase occurs at the 20 second mark.

However, instead of "BUH-waku-waku," the sound in this commercial goes more like "ah-uh-uh-oh." Rusty and I did this so much back in tha day that I've gotta think there was another one that went more "BUH-waku-waku."

Anyway... vindication good!

seasonal hair fare

2008-12-23T11:13:00.008-06:00

A Christmas Story (1983) seems to have a secure place as a "holiday classic" these days, and is the most recently-made addition to the Holiday Classic Movie Pantheon. Maybe Elf (which I still haven't watched because of my contempt for Will Ferrell, even though it has the godlike Bob Nehwart in it) or one of those Tim Allen holiday movies or even the creepy "they have no souls!" animation of The Polar Express will get there someday, who knows?

(By the way, that's assuming that The Nightmare Before Christmas - one of only two Tim Burton films that are great all the way through - and Bad Santa will remain more "cult Christmas" than "TNT 24/7 Christmas Day repeat marathon" in their level of mainstream acceptability. We're talking society's picks when I'm talking "pantheon," not my personal choices.)

I used to dislike A Christmas Story. It didn't strike me as funny the first few times I encountered it in the '80s. My aunt and uncle adored it, I think in large part because its near-perfect recreation of the 1940s reminded them a lot of their own childhoods in the 1950s. But other than the Leg Lamp (and yes, I know there are A Christmas Story-branded Leg Lamps now - we just don't have a place for one!) and how the "you're gonna shoot your eye out!" thing ends up, it was pretty laugh-free for me at the time.

Nowadays, while I don't think I'll ever list A Christmas Story as a favorite, the repeat viewings have had their effect, and the movie's grown on me. I certainly laugh more at it now than I used to, but the thing I appreciate most about the movie is its attention to 1940s period detail.

However, there is absolutely one thing about A Christmas Story that, every time it comes into the frame, takes me right out of the story:

The mom's hair.

I mean, look at this!

Ladies and gentlemen, that's not 1940s hair. That's a vintage 1983 poodle 'do from Hair Affair at the Mercer Mall. Could no one on this film convince Melinda Dillon (the actress playing the mom) to succumb to a period hairstyle? If she was so attached to that crazy frizzy thing (which I hate hate hated on women 'n' girls at the time, much less now), couldn't she have put on a wig? And unless I missed the Melinda Dillon Ascendancy of the early '80s, she wasn't a big enough star, then or ever, to have demanded "no one touches my hair!" and gotten away with it. Maybe she was boffing the director, I dunno.

Hairstyles are usually the downfall of period pieces. Of course, there are plenty of other clues to when a period piece was filmed, most often in the cinematography / lighting / color processing, but usually it's someone running around 33 CE Rome or King Arthur's court or Studio 54 c. 1977 with Anachronism Hair, like they just pulled them off the street, threw chainmail or a leisure suit on them, and called it a day.

So yeah, every time Ralphie's Mom is in the frame, it totally undoes the decor, the sweaters, Darren McGavin's irascible Dad (surely an ancestor of That '70s Show's Red Foreman), and hours and hours of painstaking research, set decoration, and costuming, all because that woman had to keep her damn poodle hair.

I usually am a purist when it comes to being against ex post facto alterations of movies and TV shows. No colorization, no Apocalypse Now Redux bloating , no George Lucas-style reedits. But if I could, I would digitally alter this film to put an actual 1940s hairstyle on this woman.

By the way, in Googling up the photo for this piece, I discovered that many, many men developed pre-adolescent crushes on Ralphie's Mom, and still think she's totally MILFy. Who knew? For me, the hair by itself trumps any other virtues of Melinda Dillon's, at least in this film. But then again, I was 16 when this movie came out, so I was spending my time pining over very real girls at school rather than getting dewy-eyed over Ralphie's Mom. Plus my own pre-adolescent crush on a TV or movie mom was Elizabeth Montgomery, and what poodle-haired latecomer could compete with that?

total eclipse of the heroes

2008-12-16T03:44:00.003-06:00

So I'm slowly catching up on this season of Heroes, via the good ol' TiVo. While it's certainly a blogworthy idea to explain how I feel about the show (in general: first season good, second season bad, third season in between but more iffy than not), I just watched "Eclipse: Part 2," and this is what I have to say right this minute, while the thought is still pipin' hot:

In case you don't know anything about Heroes (not that there's anything wrong with that): On this show, there are a bunch of folks with superpowers. Not all the characters, but most.

In the two-part episode I finished watching tonight, these folks lose their respective superpowers during a solar eclipse.

Somehow, it doesn't occur to any of the show's characters - and their ranks include powerful leaders, off-the-charts scientific geniuses, mind readers, time travellers, super duper quasi-government agents, etc. - that once the eclipse is over, these superpowers might come back.

I mean, yeah, having everyone lose their powers for a few hours opened up lots of possible character development and interesting plot twists (interesting by the standards of last season and this one, anyway).

But it did this totally at the expense of suspense of disbelief. None of these people thought "hey, when the eclipse is over, all those powers might come back"? C'mon. I think even this episode's Comic Book Guys (Breckin Meyer and Seth Green in cameo appearances) would know that was the Worst. Idea. Ever.

police on my back

2008-12-13T00:46:00.004-06:00

I was supposed to have today off but got asked to work this evening. I need the money, so I said "yes."

My start time was 6 PM, so I left the house at 5:30 PM, which in this here northern hemisphere at this time of year means that it's dark already.

I was almost to my workplace - about a mile from it - and traveling in the left-hand lane on my side when a cop pulled behind me.

The scene:

I'm on Gallatin Road, a city street.
There are two lanes of traffic on either side of the street.
There is a turn lane in the middle of the street.

The police cruiser then moved closer to me and turned on the ol' flashing lights. It didn't look like the cop was trying to pull me over, and rush hour traffic meant I was in no danger of speeding, so I concluded that he had just gotten a call and wanted to pass me. Since I had traffic in the lane on my right, I simply slowed down. The turn lane to our left was completely clear, so he could have easily gone into that lane to get around me.

Instead, he pulled closer and stayed behind me. Even though he didn't have his siren on, I then figured "well, he's pulling me over." I slowed down more and he still didn't pass me. I tried to look at the cop to see if he was signaling me, but since it was dark outside, I couldn't tell.

So, still thinking I'm being pulled over, I put on my right turn signal, and cut through the lane of traffic to my right, and then on to the shoulder. In the dark. In rush hour. Because a cop has on his flashing lights and is all up in my tailpipe and seems to want me to pull over.

And the cop didn't follow me. He stayed in the lane we were in, turned off his flashing lights, and went on up Gallatin Road with no sense of alacrity whatsoever.

To which I can only say: huh?

the ubiquity of iced tea

2008-12-12T00:12:00.008-06:00

On Thanksgiving Day, we had the traditional midday dinner at my wife's aunt's place. It's one of those meals where there's enough attendees and little enough space around the table that once you sit down, you're pretty much locked in place until the plates are cleared in advance of dessert.

After we had loaded up our plates and sat down to begin mass consumption, two beverage choices were passed around the table:

unsweet iced tea
sweet iced tea

I don't like iced tea, but I didn't want to make a fuss, and I'm not a person who needs to drink while eating. And somewhat later in the meal, someone noticed that I hadn't chosen a beverage and at that point, I did receive liquid sustenance (in the form of good ol' H₂O).

My point in bringing up this example is that in my adult life, I have found myself at dozens of meals - at workplaces, with significant-other families, at daytime/working-hours parties - where not only was iced tea the only beverage option offered, it didn't even seem to occur to the organizers that some poor miscreant might not want iced tea.

I've tried iced tea plenty. I'm not much for any kind of tea, but I imagine my aversion to hot tea has to do with my lifelong bafflement at how to consume hot beverages (grist for another blog post, that).

But iced tea... oh yeah, I've tried it. As a kid, as a teenager, as an adult, as a quadrigenarian, you name it. And I've never liked it.

Not sweet or unsweet, lemon or no lemon, never, no way. To me, it's like someone put a stick in some water and called it a beverage. It's work for me to drink, and I can't get down even half a glass. The only variant that I've been able to drink a glassful of in one sitting is "fruit tea," and that's grudgingly, and with enough fruit content that it may not quite be tea anymore.

We didn't drink any kind of tea in the house I grew up in, so this beverage was foreign to my own upbringing in West Virginia. But my first wife grew up 15 miles from where I did, and she and her family quaffed iced tea like it was going out of style. In fact, during the nineteen years we were together, her mother never remembered that I didn't like iced tea, resulting in many unpleasant moments for me at meals when I hadn't noticed that I'd been served tea. I'd pick up the glass, and take a big swallow of what I expected to be Coke or Pepsi or at least Big K... and bleagh! mouthful of TEA!

One more example: in the late '90s, I organized and implemented conversion training in three cities for the employees of a bank that my then-employer had bought. In Jackson, MS, I left the catering arrangements to my local counterpart. As I'm sure everyone reading this has already guessed, at every meal during these training sessions - which I'm thinking was ten meals during the course of that week - the only beverages offered were sweet tea and unsweet tea. By the second day, I tried to make sure that I either brought in a couple of drinks for myself or had enough change for the vending machines at the training center. However, I was the only person out of dozens at these sessions that I saw use the machines. Everyone else blissfully quaffed their iced tea.

But I want to know... is it just some weird southern / Appalachian thing to offer only iced tea, and to assume that everyone loves iced tea? Or is it all iced tea all the time everywhere?

ready for the crush

2008-12-11T00:38:00.004-06:00

Recently, I began playing U2's Achtung, Baby (one of my favorite album titles) for the first time in a lonnnng time. Maybe for the first time in more than ten years, even though I like the album very much.

And during the first of these recent listens, I realized that I'd been slightly misquoting "Zoo Station" for a lonnnng time.

In discussing the song, I'd quote the lyrics as

ready to let go of the steering wheel
i'm ready
ready for what's next

All of those lyrics actually appear in the song, so I'm not just making it up out of whole cloth, or having a mondegren moment.

But "ready for what's next" comes early on, and far away from "ready to let go of the steering wheel." The line that actually comes after "ready to let go of the steering wheel" isn't "ready for what's next," but "ready for the crush."

Nevertheless, the way I (mis)remembered it is important, because it says what's important to me about the song and how the song relates to my life. Over the years, my memory had simply pared it down to the thesis.

I've made a lot of changes over the last three or four years. While I had a modicum of happiness where I was before, it was only a modicum. I wasn't really happy. There was always something wrong.

Nowadays, things are different. Instead of resigning myself, I've made an effort. I've taken a lot of chances, at least by my standards. Even when events didn't turn out how I might have liked, I've gained from every experience. I've found out that I can actually get the things I really want. I've finally lived.

I'm not sure if I let go of the steering wheel or if I finally took hold of it. Somehow, I think I did both.

And I am far, far happier for it.

Don't get me wrong, my life isn't without challenges. But now, when I face those challenges, there's a tranquility at the eye of the storm because I feel better about myself and my life.

Both sets of lyrics turn out to be true.

I was finally ready for what's next.

I am ready for the crush.

hatful of grumble

2008-12-03T14:07:00.003-06:00

McGavock Pike, December 2nd, 2008

Since 'tis the season to be charitable, we're assuming that the e's completely sold out on the day after Thanksgiving.

"it is time to purge this place of the cult"

2008-11-29T00:55:00.004-06:00

An NPC just said the titular line to me while I was doing this quest in World of Warcraft. I might safeguard a copy of "She Sells Sanctuary," but other than that, yeah, let's purge those hookless morons all to hell!

I remember them being pretty popular on WRVU back in '88 when I moved to Nashville, in some sort of "so uncool they're cool" reverse hipster move. Now, if it was AC/DC, well, they deserve some nods from the cognoscenti - if they'd emerged four years later than their actual debut, a lot of people who scoff at them would revere them as much as they do the Ramones - but... the Cult? My mind's still thoroughly boggled by that. I know a few weeks ago I blogged about sons of Jim Morrison that I like better than the Doors, but Ian Astbury is proof that the bombastic excesses of the progenitor sometimes still predominate in the DNA. Plus Asbury is far more dumb than his hero, and Jimbo himself wasn't always the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Also, I kept wishing the Cult would keep dropping parts of their name with every release. Remember how they went from "Southern Death Cult" to "Death Cult" to "Cult"? I kept waiting for them to be the "ult" or even just "C" (though "C" will always really be for "Cookie"). Now that, I could have respected.

i know when to fold 'em, i just don't know how to fold 'em

2008-11-27T11:04:00.005-06:00

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! And I want to send out a special "happy birfday" to my friend Sue!

I've got a lot of blog ideas bubbling around and should have more time off over the next couple of weeks than I've been having, so expect more posts, probably in concentrated bursts (i.e., several in a day instead of only one per day). It's just a matter of writing up my notes.

Today's "thing I've been meaning to mention" is inspired by my straighten-the-house efforts to clear the dining room table for tonight's nice just-me-and-the-wife dinner (the family event is a midday gathering at her aunt's): For the life o' me, I cannot fold clothes.

It's one of those things that the people who already know how to do it seem incapable of explaining, or at least I feel incapable of understanding what they are telling me.

When I'd ask my mother what to do, she'd give a simple two-step direction, then her hands turned into a motion blur. And out of the blur would emerge a perfectly-folded shirt: sleeves tucked neatly in back, center of the shirt (design, if a t-shirt) facing up and looking crisp, like something from a store shelf. And then I'd try to follow her directions, but the moment I started to make folds on the sides, the sleeves would escape my grasp and enter some kind of gravity field where they absolutely defied all efforts to be submitted. Instead of my mom's perfect rectangle, I'd end up with something decidedly wrinkly, lumpy, and irregular, whose surface area could only be measured with an arcane calculation that would trip up even the most-prepared math field day contestants.

Then my mom would shake her head and just do it herself.

It was like when I'd make an attempt to learn to swim. I remember conversations with my ex-wife about this topic, usually while she was supine in epic relaxation aboard her yellow float at the pool, while I clung for dear life to the side of the shallow end:

"How do you float?"

"I dunno, you just float."

"But what are you doing?"

"I'm not doing anything. You just relax and float."

"You must be doing something. Because when I do nothing, I sink."

"Here, I'll show you."

She'd slide off her float into the pool, and demonstrate floating.

"Looks to me like you're doing something. You're moving your legs a little, wiggling your arms every now and then. You're making adjustments."

"Well, to me, it's not doing anything. I'm just floating."

"Yeah, but you're doing something."

"Well, try it and let me see what happens."

So I'd relax, let the water lift my legs up, and try to do nothing...

...and my butt would start sinking to the bottom immediately.

Then she'd look at me like my mom looked at me when I was trying to fold shirts, shake her head, and exit pool left (usually not pursued by bear or by Rush).

Surely, some of you, dear readers, must be able not only to fold but able to explain how to fold. If so, I'm all ears. Or, since this here blog stuff is readin', all eyes, I guess.

Oh, and for those of you who read this via RSS, sorry for the early appearance of a blank post. Somehow "enter" got pressed when I was still working on the title, so you got nothin'! Hopefully you clicked on the post and eventually got something. Well, you wouldn't be reading this unless you did, would you? :)

suddenly, it's last summer

2008-11-24T13:23:00.005-06:00

Today I was listening to Fresh Air on NPR, and while host Terry Gross was talking with actor James Franco (being a baseball nut and a Reds fan, I almost typed it "John Franco"), she mentioned Pineapple Express as a movie from "last summer." My immediate reaction was "no, that wasn't 2007! That was this past summer!"

Then I realized that she also meant 2008. But I have always found this specific "last" formulation misleading. To me, the summer of 2008 won't be "last summer" until at least January 1st, 2009, and maybe not even until June 21st, 2009. Until then, it's "this past summer."

I hear this most often in sports, where a number of talking heads and writers start talking about "last season" a minute after the regular season ends. For the sports calendar to turn over to "last" for me, we need to be in the next season. So for me, the 2008 baseball season won't be "last season" until pitchers and catchers show up for Spring Training in February 2009.

However, this will be my "last" blog entry until my next one goes up.

rock rock to the 30 rock, don't stop

2008-10-29T17:28:00.004-05:00

So the wife and I just finished watching Season One of 30 Rock on DVD. We certainly liked what we had seen of the first two seasons, but somehow we never watched the show regularly. I think we'd seen maybe three complete episodes (including the amazing 2007 one with "who's crazier, me or Ann Curry?," Alec Baldwin role-playing all the parts in the Tracy Morgan intervention, and the "NBC page-off") and parts of four or five more, so we had a lot of new-to-us stuff on these DVDs.

And color us impressed. Season One was consistently funny, delivering rapid-fire, smart, quality laughs every episode. I'm really looking forward to guzzling the second season in what will likely be a couple of big, delicious gulps.

The funniness of 30 Rock raises this question, though: Why in the h-e-double-hockey-sticks was Saturday Night Live so desperately unfunny over the last few years? Tina Fey was SNL's head writer from 1999 through 2006, and many of her SNL co-conspirators play prominent roles on 30 Rock. Based on that alone, I'd expect 30 Rock to bite the big one, but instead, 30 Rock achieves an almost Arrested Development-like level of intelligent, densely-layered hilarity.

While I do think that SNL improved during Fey's final years on the show, that's like saying that Revenge of the Sith was an improvement on Attack of the Clones. SNL's been an unmitigated disaster since 1992-1993, the season after the last of the excellent Hartman / Carvey / Myers / Lovitz / Hooks / Miller cast flew the coop. Heck, I laugh more at Tracy Morgan in any two minutes he's on 30 Rock than I did during his whole SNL tenure.

So what's holding SNL back? Is it Lorne Michaels? Lingering Mary Gross syndrome? What?

they can't stand the rain

2008-10-16T16:19:00.002-05:00

Nashville suffered through a gloomy, rainy day today. The worst thing about the weather isn't so much the weather itself, but the poor driving of Nashvillians when faced with any inclement weather whatsoever. Instead of taking more precautions, people here decide "hey, there are no rules!" and begin taking more chances. Put poor decision-making together with bald tires, poor drainage, and easily-saturated limestone soil, and it's a recipe for disaster.

The worst such incident I ever saw happened during the surprise blizzard of early 2004, when I witnessed a guy back across four lanes' worth of snow and ice on Nolensville Road. But today's behavior was uniformly bad: pulling out in front of traffic, sudden stops, running lights even later than people here normally run lights. I even sat for five minutes at 7th Avenue North and Broadway because someone up at the corner had parked in the street. In the middle of the day. Not conked out, not wrecked or disabled and seeking help, not waiting to make a quick passenger pickup. Parked.

But the most strange thing I saw today wasn't a bizarre driving incident. It was a man sitting on the road on Scott Avenue. He wasn't on the shoulder, he was sitting on the street itself, with no raingear save for the plastic grocery bag upon which he was seated.

I had thought that the randomly-materializing rooster who lives up the street and the dogs who ride the tractor were pretty weird. But right now, they feel like part of the comforts of home. I'm glad to be back inside, and I'm not going out again tonight. No sirree.

=====

WoW Ret Paladin followup (non-WoW audience can stop reading here): I discovered the magic ret paladin formula last night. Seal of Command -> judge -> Crusader Strike -> repeat last two steps ad infinitum. I should have known that if it was something a ret paladin could manage, it couldn't be brain surgery.

if you don't build it, they won't come

2008-10-15T14:13:00.007-05:00

Well, my readership has tapered off by half so far this week. I guess that's what happens when you end up skipping a couple of days! I was struggling with having enough time to write something in which I was really invested...

...but then it occurred to me today, ex post facto, that I should probably have just blogged about what was actually going on in my life the last few days, however geeky or mundane it may be.

So I'm taking my own advice! Here's what I've spent the bulk of the last three days doing:

Catering! My wife and I have been working on launching a catering company since July. She's a talented chef with over 20 years in the culinary industry, so the business is built on her mad food skillz and her astonishing creativity. Business has picked up a lot lately, and over the last few days, we were doing everything associated with two orders, one of them pretty large. Pricing, shopping, errand-running, assembling, delivering, you name it. Keep your fingers crossed that this continues to be the state of affairs: we want to stay this busy!

World of Warcraft! WoW launched its major pre-Wrath of the Lich King patch yesterday. Patch days for any MMO are insane, but this one makes a lot of stuff obsolete that players had been used to since at least 2006, and in some cases since the game's launch in December 2004. So there wasn't just the usual server unavailability and instability associated with Patch Day, there was also a major decision on respec'ing talents awaiting every one of us, on every character. I had things mapped out pretty well for my main character, a holy priest, and a quick heroic run late last night went painlessly. However, my other level 70 toon, a paladin, took the opportunity (at the urging of a guild leader) to respec from holy to retribution. So now I have no idea how to play this character that I've carefully built, leveled, and equipped in an entirely different way. I'm really struggling with it, and none of the player guides seem up to date for 3.0.2 ret pally spell rotation. Thow in dozens of add-ons that won't function yet in the 3.0.2 environment, whose absence is messing with my play style, and my little hobby hasn't been very fun for the last 36 hours.

Aren't you glad you asked? Wait, did you?

this post is made from the skins of dead jim morrisons

2008-10-13T08:08:00.002-05:00

Several days ago, when I composed this post about Echo & the Bunnymen's "The Killing Moon," it occurred to me that while I like several singers who were clearly heavily influenced by Jim Morrison - most notably Julian Cope and the Bunnymen's Ian McCulloch - I don't really care for Morrison himself that much. There is something cool about the deep voice action, sure, but so often Morrison's delivery is sooooo over the top, and the lyrical misses sooooo bad, that I don't think I could ever describe myself as a Doors fan (sorry, Dan).

This got me to thinkin' 'bout other cases where I like the sons better than the fathers. Here are some that came to me right away:

The Byrds
REM, Robyn Hitchcock, Tom Petty

The Beach Boys
Lindsey Buckingham, Lloyd Cole, the Blue Nile, The Negro Problem / Stew

Big Star
Game Theory/the Loud Family, the Replacements, the Posies

Stereolab
Broadcast

I'm getting diminishing returns from thinking about it more, so I'll throw it over to the readership at this point.

Oh, and while I'm not a Doors fan, I am a fan of this skit. "Greatest hits albums are for housewives and little girls."

we never liked uncle clucky that much anyway

2008-10-11T16:31:00.006-05:00

Actual sign, Madison, TN, 10/11/2008

While I'm hardly the first blogger to post an image of a restaurant sign that depicts animals, often wearing chef hats, merrily serving themselves or their relatives as fare, this one adds a layer of voyeurism to the proceedings. Are these barnyard fowls trapped in a pollo concentration camp where they are forced to watch friends and family members succumb to the roaster one by one, the witnesses contemplating their own similar, inevitable fates?

Or do they freely choose to watch their late defeathered friends cook? The scene certainly suggests a family gathered around the TV set for an evening of entertainment. Perhaps it could be the poultry version of Tyburn, a public meting out of justice for the main dish's crimes against chickendom.

I'm also disturbed by the choice of pollito instead of pollo. I'm no Spanish speaker, but I know there are a number of unsavory connotations for the word. And after all, you want nothing but savory connotations if you're advertising your roast chicken.

bring us your hirsute toys

2008-10-10T18:33:00.003-05:00

Actual sign, McGavock Pike, 10/10/2008

I'm relieved that Nashville Barbies can now get their peach fuzz removed. And that they don't have to make an appointment for it!

Incidentally, this place is at least consistent with their apostrophes; it's "PERFECTION'S" not only on this changeable copy sign, but on the permanent sign affixed above the door.

kick-ass songs of the '90s: wilco, "misunderstood" (the '90s, pt. 3)

2008-10-09T18:40:00.011-05:00

For a while, Wilco was my favorite band.

REM had held that position from 1983 on, but 1998's Up, the first in a series of snoozefests, left them vulnerable. In '99, Wilco released Summerteeth, their third long-player. Wilco's first two albums were terrific, especially 1996's double-disc Being There. But Summerteeth not only represented continued growth and exploration from an already-stellar band, there was something about the way Jeff Tweedy was expressing his own struggles with identity and adulthood that resonated deeply with me. "A Shot in the Arm"'s refrains of "something in my veins / bloodier than blood" and "what you once were isn't what you wanna be / anymore" hit me right where I was living.

It was a symbolic moment of the first order when later in '99, I saw Wilco open for REM at northern Ohio's Blossom Amphitheater, a coincidental passing of the "Miles' favorite band" laurels. As if that wasn't enough, during Wilco's set, the band brought out a birthday cupcake for Jeff Tweedy, and someone onstage - Jay Bennett, John Stirratt? - said it was his 32nd, which meant that he was a fellow 1967 baby. Yup, me, Tweedy, and Kurt Cobain - bumper crop, eh?

Not that sharing the same year of birth ensures fellowship; if it did, school would have been a lot easier. But knowing this small fact about Mr. Tweedy made me feel like it wasn't coincidence that Jeff was feeling the same things at the same time I was feeling them, or, from what I could tell from interviews and the music itself, that he seemed to have a lot of the same experiences and perspectives as me.

Even though Summerteeth was and is my pick of the Wilco litter, I'm reaching back to Being There for the song that belongs in the "kick-ass songs of the '90s" series: "Misunderstood."

The leadoff track of Being There, "Misunderstood" begins with 45 seconds of instrumental mayhem: Nashville's Own Ken Coomer driving the drumkit forward as an ominous undertow of guitar feedback emanates from Tweedy and multi-instrumentalists Jay Bennett and Max Johnston.

Then, almost abruptly, it's piano, acoustic guitar, and Jeff Tweedy's voice, solemn, wistful:

When you're back in your old neighborhood
The cigarettes taste so good
But you're so misunderstood
You're so misunderstood

A lot of Being There is about being a music fan, and/or maybe a musician (later on the album, "The Lonely 1" captures the fan/musician relationship in exacting, heartwrenching beauty). It's hard to tell what's going on lyrically sometimes, as Tweedy cagily shifts perspectives, not just from song to song, but within an individual song. "Misunderstood" is no exception:

It's only a quarter to three
Reflecting off of your CD
You're looking at a picture of me
You're staring at a picture of me

Is the "you" a fan of Tweedy's? An old friend or lover? Is Tweedy narrating this song, or a character? Like a lot of my favorite music and art, the ambiguity forces the listener to do some interpretation of their own, which also results in the listener investing in the song in a way that wholly straightforward narration can't match.

After Tweedy quotes some telling Peter Laughner lines ("take the guitar player for a ride / 'cos he ain't never been satisfied"), the feedback, which has been bubbling under the acoustic interlude all along, surges front and center, threatening to tear the song apart. But after a few seconds, it recedes, leaving Tweedy' plaintive voice once again exposed:

There's a fortune inside your head
When all you touch turns to lead
You think you might just crawl back in bed
With the fortune inside your head

I know you're just a mama's boy
You're positively unemployed
So misunderstood
So misunderstood

As that last "misunderstood" slips out, now the song cashes in the tension that's been building for over four minutes: Coomer's drums roll and cymbals crash, the electric guitar trio reconvenes, and as the crescendo mounts, Tweedy has to shout to be heard:

I know you've got a god-shaped hole
You're bleeding out your heart full of soul

And then the third-person narration turns into something crueler and uglier, a messy explosion that's equal parts anger at the world and self-loathing. And guess what? It's not third-person any more, no sirree.

I'd like to thank you all for nothing
I'd like to thank you all for nothing at all
I'd like to thank you all for nothing

And then the whole band hits each of the next words in unison, drums and vocals and guitar and god knows what else all punching together, each "nothing" a sledgehammer blow, pulverizing everyone and everything in their path:

Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing at all
Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing at all

And then there's nothing at all, or nearly so: nothing but ruins anyway, shards of feedback falling to the floor, as the wounded basic riff of the song somehow still is ticking along somewhere in the wreckage.

Wilco's live performances of this song were often exercises in confrontation between artist and audience. The raucous feedback and Tweedy looking dead at the audience, screaming "I'd like to thank you all for nothing!" - and often extending the number of "nothing!"s far beyond the studio version - created a palpable tension in the room, providing a direct challenge to an audience that seemingly was expecting something more convivial. And when the band performed in front of half-indifferent audiences, as was more common before their Yankee Hotel Foxtrot / I Am Trying To Break Your Heart canonization, those bracing "nothing! nothing! nothing! nothing at all!"s carried extra venom.

I wanted to link a YouTube performance of the Bennett / Johnston / Coomer lineup doing "Misunderstood," but all the ones I could find are from the more recent Nels Cline / Pat Sansome / Glenn Kotche era. While all three of the latter-day gentlemen are probably better musicians than the guys they replaced, I think Wilco was more ferocious and raw in its prior lineup.

Nevertheless, I'm linking a "Misunderstood" from a 2007 show, and it's a good performance which will get across some of what I'm talking about. (And the guy singing along at the beginning either shuts up or gets drowned out pretty quickly, never fear.) But to me, this is a shade too smooth and ornate, and, as my friend doug might opine, "needs more demons."

[edit as of 7/11/2009]
Just found this version of "Misunderstood" on YouTube, posted after Jay Bennett's death. While this version doesn't have the three-guitar gonzo finale that I remember from the '99-'02 shows, it's splendid, it's got the right lineup and it's far more what I was after. Hopefully it also illustrates some of the aforementioned differences between that Wilco and present-day Wilco.

get on the dancefloor, it's a timeslot hit

2008-10-08T20:45:00.012-05:00

So a few days ago, we were watching our usual dose of Seinfeld reruns, and one of them was the one where Jerry goes onstage before hopelessly unfunny rival comic Kenny Bania, and Bania's act unexpectedly generates a bunch of laughs. When Jerry figures out that Bania's doing well because Jerry has already got the audience laughing, he calls Bania a "timeslot hit."

That got me to wonderin' if future generations will get this joke. I mean, in and of itself the plotline is funny. But the real deliciousness of Jerry's line comes from knowing the meta joke: it's a reference to NBC's practice on its "Must-See Thursdays" of airing sitcoms more lame than Bania's act in the 8:30 PM and 9:30 PM eastern/pacific slots, i.e., in the gaps between huge ratings hits Friends (8 PM), Seinfeld (9 PM) and E.R. (10 PM). No matter how insipid or atrocious or savaged by critics these shows were, they'd always be in the Nielsen top 10 because enough people wouldn't bother to change the channel between shows. Veronica's Closet, The Single Guy, Madman of the People, Union Square... need I go on for anyone who lived through this era?

In the world's best-ever Rolling Stone interview, NewsRadio creator Paul Simms dubbed NBC's approach to Thursday nights "the shit sandwich." I can't find the full text of the interview on the Internet anymore, but I can quote my own quoting of it from this Fegmaniax post of mine from days of yore:

Simms on NBC's "Must See Thursday":
"People are starting to realize Thursday night is
like a big double-decker shit sandwich with three
good pieces of bread, and in between..."

Q: If "NewsRadio" doesn't last, would you turn
your back on sitcoms?
"Yeah, this is the best I can do. Pretend
you're God and you say, 'If you do a show
about a single father who's dating a lot
and has two teenage sons, and it doesn't
have to be funny, and it'll be a huge hit.'
I'd say, 'Fuck you, God.'"

It's all of this that went into Jerry's joke, which made me guffaw when the episode first aired, when I watched it last week, and probably will for years to come. But as NBC's "Must-See Thursday" recedes into the dustbin that's already home to CBS' '70s Monday night comedy juggernaut, the true resonance of the "timeslot hit" line is likely to be as lost on the young'uns as the archness of Alexander Pope is to me. Annotation is no substitute for living memory.

the battle of the boulevard, presidential-style

2008-10-07T12:42:00.012-05:00

If you think tonight's U.S. presidential debate is getting round-the-clock coverage in your neck of the woods, imagine what it's like if the debate is happening nine miles from your home. This debate logo is plastered on billboards all over Nashville, and the minute last Thursday's Palin-Biden debate ended, local news went from daily coverage of the Belmont Debate* to saturation coverage. Heck, I'm surprised Snowbird isn't the moderator.

It also means that Nashville is going to be seen on every news outlet for the entire day, and that's never any fun if you live here. Why? Because most of the time, it's an excuse for columnists, TV hosts and copy writers looking for an easy angle to whip out the most hackneyed tropes about our town being the capital of hillbilly doofusdom. For what it's worth, it doesn't matter to me if it's Fox News or The Daily Show doing it; it still rankles me. Today, when I read that right-wing shill and poor excuse for a country artist John Rich (you may know him from Big and Rich, lucky you if you don't) serenaded John McCain on CBS's Early Show this morning, I audibly sighed. This is exactly the kind of Hee Haw nonsense that Nashville doesn't need.

So rather than opine about the politicians or the debate itself, I'd rather use this space to let you know that Nashville is a great place to live, and is far more sophisticated than any way it's likely to be portrayed today or in the post-debate punditry. It may be the capital of a "red state" (god, I hate that "red state/blue state" taxonomy - did the news outlets hold a Council of Nicea in 1993 or something to regularize which party was red and which was blue? I swear, I remember the party/color correlation varying from network to network until then), sure, but Davidson County itself went for both quasi-native son Al Gore and purported Yankee elitist liberal John Kerry in the most recent presidential elections.

We have an opera and an Opry. We have a bazillion international dining options, a large and still-growing Hispanic population, an internationally acclaimed symphony, the greatest live rock band ever, and snowball-throwing polar bear statues:

(image taken from The Bridge & Tunnel Club because I'm

not risking motorcade traffic to go take a fresh pic myself)

It's not London or Paris or New York, but it's got enough of everything for me. Today it also has Barack Obama, John McCain, and millions of viewers, but keep in mind as you watch the festivities that you not only need to be sorting out truth from fiction when it comes to the candidates, you need to be doing the same thing with what you see and hear about Nashville.

*held at Nashville's own Belmont University, which was Belmont College when I moved here in '88, and was previously best known as That Formerly Baptist College That Vince Gill Is Always Donating To That Turns Out All Those Music Biz People. The "Battle of the Boulevard" referenced in my title is what the local press calls the basketball smackdowns between Belmont U. and their just-down-Belmont-Boulevard denominational-college neighbors, the Church of Christ's own David Lipscomb University.

kick-ass songs of the '90s: curve, "faît accompli" (the '90s, pt. 2)

2008-10-06T00:53:00.016-05:00

I inaugurated my '90s series last week with this way too long introduction to the subject. Between its premise (which is mostly "the '90s sucked musically compared to the '80s") and my Jay Tarses(es) series this weekend, I've gone on too long about things I don't like. It's time for some positivity about things that I love.

So today, we're gonna talk about one of the greatest songs of the '90s, Curve's "Faît Accompli." This 1992 single from their debut album, Doppleganger, is one of the most badass things I've ever heard - or in the case of the video, seen. The opening electro-percussive twitchery immediately intrigues the listener, and then - vroooooom! - there's the whole band, led by Dean Garcia's giant wall of guitar. But instead just raining a hail of feedback through the whole song, as fun as that would have been, the band immediately displays a sense of dynamics by having the guitar drop out.

What comes to the fore then is ominous low-end that was there all along, a bassline that sounds less like a bassline and more like something cold and evil rumbling up through the earth. And then Toni Halliday starts singing:

Every day, there is some kind of darkness
That just won't go away no matter how hard I try

As Toni intones that last line, the guitar reengages, and though the tone's already set, the pivotal line's next:

It crawls into your system while your guard is down

The first few times I heard "Faît Accompli," I heard this as "while your God is down," which I also like. But either way you hear the line, the same thing's happened: God, or one's guard, like a firewall, has crashed, and something cruel and evil exploited the gap immediately.

By the time Toni sings the last line of the chorus, she's either shifted perspectives or become fully possessed. Because when she sings

My name is Fate

it's not her anymore. It's something ancient, powerful, dark, and deep that's speaking, something older than the Christian God and Lucifer - something like, well, Fate.

And when Fate speaks its come-on in the song's bridge - and by now the low-end menace has congealed into a pulsing, primal rhythm - you can't turn your head away, you can't refuse:

I've come to crush your bones
I've come to make you feel old
I've come to mess with your head
Cos it'll make you feel good
I've come to make you feel good

Few songs conjure up this kind of primal power for me - P.J. Harvey's Rid of Me and "Down By the River" (contenders for this series within a series) and Shriekback in the days of Jam Science and Oil & Gold. Even the darkly punning title of the song is perfect: Fate is a done deal.

I enjoy the rest of the Curve catalog, but nothing they did before or since has matched "Faît Accompli"'s impact on me. This thing is a sonic tour de force, and if it's not the best song I heard in the '90s, it's damn close.

It's a rare thing for a video, but the one for "Faît Accompli" actually adds to the experience. It's sort of a performance clip, as the band is playing instruments in it, with smoke and wind machines aplenty. The choice to have the camera thrust up into the band creates motion and energy, and the perspective helps unsettle the viewer - guitarists everywhere but with the instrument centered in the frame and heads and feet often cut off, and often the only visible face is Halliday's sultry visage, at the height of its full "my name is FATE!" power.

Despite the band playing their instruments for the length of the video, it's less like we're seeing Curve play a song, and more like we've intruded on a ritual. There's a group of ominous hangers-on in the wings who appear to be waiting for something besides the load-out. The most prominent one among them is a Jean Kasem-like blonde woman, whose purposeful arm gestures and dancing lend a cult feel to the proceedings. But even more disturbing to me is the presence of the sheep - I immediately wonder if he or she is going to survive the evening, and several times later in the video, the hangers-on appear to be wrestling it to the ground. The sense of power and menace is just as keen in the video as in the song, and I highly recommend both.

If you want this song and video to crawl into your system, let your guard down here:

By the way, the best mix of the song, in my opinion, is the one used in the video. It's neither the album version on Doppelganger nor the long mix on the Pubic Fruit compilation; instead, it's the punchier Flood mix that, as far as I know, was only on the Faît Accompli EP. So if you really like this song as presented here, that's the version you should seek out.

jay tarseses throughout the decades, pt. 3: the 2000s

2008-10-05T08:36:00.006-05:00

Prior Installments
pt. 1: the 1980s
pt. 2: the 1990s

The Jay Tarses of the 2000s
Judd Apatow. First came Freaks and Geeks, which I really, really wanted to like. It looked smart and funny. It was set in 1980, right in my cultural and musical wheelhouse. And the titular Geeks were 7th graders, as was the real-life me in 1980! And it had SCTV's Joe Flaherty in it! I thought, "at last, a show for me! a show that speaks to me!"

Instead, I couldn't stand it. The music they got right, I'll give them that. But the clothes and hair, aside from Linda Cardellini's character wearing her dad's army jacket, seemed way off for 1980. Worse, the show was clearly written not only from the sole perspective of the geeks, but with no understanding of the other half of the titular equation.

Initially the "freaks" - a gang of pot-smoking high school teens whom Cardellini's character befriended - were depicted as menacing, and engaged in behaviors such as mailbox destruction that I much more closely associate with jocks, not potheads. To me, this demonstrated that the show's creators and writers had no actual experience with "freaks," who would have been the least likely kids in school to beat up the geeks or engage in bullying and violence. In fact, the "freaks" I knew usually had a genial live-and-let-live attitude, and bullying would have gotten in the way of more rewarding pursuits like getting stoned in the boys' room while listening to 8-tracks of AC/DC. (Also, Flaherty's over-the-top performance made it seem like he was acting in an entirely different show, but I digress.)

As Freaks and Geeks' lone season progressed, the writers transitioned the "freaks" from menacing goons to lovable lummoxes. But this showed just as little insight into the "freaks" as depicting them as thugs did, plus it reeked reeked of rote series-writing methodology (hey, let's make the bad guys turn out to be the good guys!). Many of the pot-obsessed folks I knew growing up were actually bright, funny people who weren't sufficiently challenged in school - they were often Mitch Hedbergs, not idiots. Apatow needed to spend less time in junior high cowering in the lunchroom and more time actually getting to know these folks. And if you want to see high school life in the '70s and '80s rendered in loving accuracy, rent Dazed and Confused; Freaks and Geeks misses on all counts.

But Freaks and Geeks found a loyal audience among critics, whom, one assumes, empathized with the show's "geeks" to such a degree that they failed to notice the program's many faults and chronic unfunnyness. Apatow followed it with another canceled-in-its-first-season TV show, Undeclared, which failed to connect either with me or with audiences, though it too had reams of favorable press.

But we shouldn't cry for Apatow too much: he's become the reigning mogul of movie comedy. The 40-Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up did major box office as well as garnering Apatow's usual critical raves. Throw in protégé Seth Rogen (Superbad, Pineapple Express), whose movies Apatow usually produces, plus a host of recent Will Ferrell comedies that Apatow has written and/or produced, and Apatow Inc. has become an unstoppable comedy factory.

But I'm still not laughing at his stuff. I haven't seen every movie that I just named above, but what I have seen doesn't strike me as either that smart or that funny.

Honorable Mentions

David E. Kelley, who isn't a Jay Tarses, but more of a category unto himself. He ruined the latter seasons of L.A. Law, and his subsequent series crimes are legion.
Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick. thirtysomething alone should earn them a special place in hell. However, since I actually liked My So-Called Life and the first season of Once and Again, they're disqualified from Tarsesdom. Lately, they were up to their old freighted-with-unearned-meaning tricks with web series Quarterlife.
Amy Sherman (I think she's dropped the "-Palladino"): I tried really hard to love Gilmore Girls. After investing nearly two seasons' worth of watching - I thought it was a lost cause after the first three episodes, but since several of my friends were avid fans and their recommendation meant a lot to me, I kept on trying - I would have even settled for just liking it. But I hated it, from its pretentious dialogue to the cardboard-cutout Stars Hollow greek chorus (if only Sherman had been a little smarter, she could have had major allegory action going on). Right now, Sherman's a leading contender for Jay Tarses of the 2010s. Keep an eye on this one, she's going places! Not places I want to visit, but places!

jay tarseses throughout the decades, pt. 2: the 1990s

2008-10-04T10:41:00.007-05:00

read "pt. 1: the 1980s"

The Jay Tarses of the 1990s
Aaron Sorkin. From the godawful script of A Few Good Men (I guess between Nicholson's rendition of the "you can't handle the truth!" speech, which is constantly replayed on TV as a "classic scene," and Pacino finally winning the Oscar for Scent of a Woman, the moral of the story is that scenery chewing pays!), to his self-righteous White House posturing (The American President and TV's The West Wing), Sorkin continually sounds clever, while not actually being so. A specialist in the category of "dialogue no actual human would ever say," Sorkin's barrage of verbiage and many wise casting choices have beguiled critics, who really ought to be able to discern how second-rate and hollow his material actually is.

The only Sorkin creation I could stomach longer than five minutes was the first season of Sports Night. But in retrospect, I think that had more to do with an extraordinarily gifted cast - Josh Charles, Peter Krause, Josh Malina, and especially Felicity Huffman - transcending the torrent of words, and less to do with Sorkin's words themselves. Quality control on the second season fell off dramatically (Dan's sudden Jewishness being the most egregious "wtf?" example), so I went right back to hating Sorkin again.

Like Sports Night, The West Wing also featured a pretty darn talented cast, and I'll always be grateful that the show gave veteran character actor John Spencer his long-overdue day in the sun. But here we not only got the Dialogue No Actual Human Would Ever Say, but it came in deadly combination with Heavy-Handed Moral Posturing (see also Sorkin's script for A Few Good Men). I'm not against tackling tough moral issues on TV; heck, favorites like Homicide and the new Battlestar Galactica sometimes cover six such dilemmas before the opening titles. But Sorkin doesn't seem to know how to do such things subtly and naturally like the aforementioned shows did; instead, every "important" plot might as well have a flashing red light attached, screaming at the audience "IMPORTANT! HEY, OVER HERE! WE'RE DEALING WITH REAL ISSUES HERE! HEY!" Sheesh, it makes me tired just thinking about watching that show. No wonder that I watched the sublimely silly Drew Carey Show instead.

While The West Wing straddles the 1990s and 2000s, I'm not going to let a technicality like that deprive Mr. Sorkin of this much-deserved honor. So Aaron Sorkin, congratulations! You are the Jay Tarses of the 1990s! Don't spend that Arby's gift certificate on something I wouldn't!

Tomorrow: we reveal the Jay Tarses of the 2000s! Plus honorable mentions!

jay tarseses throughout the decades, pt. 1: the 1980s

2008-10-03T13:09:00.007-05:00

Most of the time, I enjoy "critically acclaimed" television shows. Hill Street Blues is still my all-time favorite show, and it pretty much defined "critically acclaimed," particularly during its early years when it struggled mightily in the ratings but took home a boatload of Emmys. And I have loved oodles of other programs that swept critics off their feet: The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Office (British and US versions), Twin Peaks, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica (the current-day one, not the original) are just a few examples where I think the hosannas are well deserved.

But there are shows that never click with me, no matter how much good press they get. One of the first "critically acclaimed" shows I remember not liking at all was Buffalo Bill, which starred Dabney Coleman as a crass, mean-spirited local talk show host. Its low ratings were often blamed on the deliberate unlikability of the main character.

For me personally, liking or relating to the characters isn't a prerequisite for enjoying a movie or TV show, so that wasn't a problem. I think Dabney Coleman is a fine comic actor, and his presence made me want to keep giving the show a chance. Heck, it even had Geena Davis in a supporting role, and I was harboring a major crush on her at the time (a crush that came to an end when she went into Streep/Close "I'm a serious wonderful actress so worship me, peons" mode sometime after Thelma and Louise). I should have liked this show!

But I didn't. The sticking point for me was that it just wasn't funny or smart enough. Yeah, it was smarter than your average sitcom, but not as smart as it thought it was being. As far as comedies about unlikable characters go, the equally short-lived Cheers spinoff, The Tortellis, made me laugh hysterically (Dan Hedaya has to be one of the greatest unsung character actors ever), and had all the smarts and moxie that Buffalo Bill never mustered.

Jay Tarses was the creator and executive producer of Buffalo Bill. Despite his pedigree as a writer for The Bob Newhart Show, a show that I love, I just didn't like the shows he came up with on his own. Tarses went on to create The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, which was part of the great "dramedy" boom of the mid-'8os (Doogie Howser, Hooperman, my beloved Frank's Place, etc.). Molly Dodd was another show that critics ate up with a spoon, but, like Tarses' previous venture, it left me both unamused and bored.

Since then, it seems to me that to every generation of television, a Jay Tarses is born. Every decade has its signature creator of multiple shows that find favor with critics, yet whose creations aren't as funny or smart as their perpetrators think they are being, nor are they as funny or smart as they are made out to be in the press.

For your reading pleasure, I have selected a Jay Tarses for each of the last three decades. This weekend, I will discuss each of them in their own individual blog post. Today, it's the Jay Tarses of the 1980s, and the winner, please (cue drum roll)...

The Jay Tarses of the 1980s
Jay Tarses. (See above.)

Stay tuned tomorrow, when I reveal the identity of the Jay Tarses of the 1990s!

well, somebody has to be paul weller if he's not gonna do it

2008-10-02T04:11:00.015-05:00

I reactivated my eMusic subscription the other day. They were dangling the 75 free download carrot, and Bugs Bunny-like, I bit.

I got a bunch of suggestions from the many eMusic-friendly friends o' mine, plus I stumbled upon some stuff I hadn't known was out, such as two newish Shriekback albums. As a result, by the wee small hours of today, I'd used up 104 of my 105 total October downloads (the 75 freebies plus the normal monthly allotment of 30).

Looking for candidates to be that 105th track, I did a number of fruitless searches. For example, I'd think "hm, I like Goldfrapp... do they have any Goldfrapp rarities/mixes?," but as it turns out, there's only one Goldfrapp track on eMusic, a forgettable mix of "Strict Machine."

Striking out with everything I could think of, I switched to alphabetically browsing the new arrivals in the "Alternative/Punk" section.

And there sat a live EP by From the Jam.

I knew that bassist Bruce Foxton and drummer Rick Buckler, the rhythm section of the Jam, had formed this group last year to play material by their classic band... minus singer/songwriter/guitarist / raison d'etre Paul Weller, who refused to participate in this reunion. It almost seemed like the punchline of a joke, to reform the Jam without the guy who wrote and sang almost everything.

But here was a chance to find out how it all turned out, so I chose "Down in the Tube Station at Midnight" as my final download of the month.

And holy cow. It's not only a spot-on, red-hot rendition without a trace of lameness or rote nostalgia, but new vocalist/guitarist Russell Hastings has Weller's voice down cold. Every intonation, inflection, and phrasing is exact. You'd never know it wasn't Paul Weller singing if you weren't tipped off.

What's funnier, at least for me, is that ever since the Style Council ended, my main complaint about Paul Weller is that he stopped singing like Paul Weller! Beginning with solo albums like Wild Wood and Stanley Road, Weller affected an unrecognizable ersatz soul voice. I mean, the guy is the world's best Paul Weller, but he ain't never gonna be Sam Cooke or Smokey Robinson, and why he wants to be something that he's just not, I can never figure out.

Heck, he not only stopped sounding like Paul Weller in '92, he stopped being interesting at all. Well, that last part happened sometime during the first full-length Style Council record, but even when Weller's post-Jam joint was awash in jazzbo didacticism, the man still sang like himself. Apparently there's not only no hope of a full Jam reunion, but no hope that Weller will integrate his rich past with whatever he chooses to do in the present, right down to not using the same singing voice.

So more power to From the Jam and Russell Hastings! If Paul Weller's not interested in being Paul Weller anymore, somebody else might as well be! And I can't argue with these kind of results.

does anybody know what day it is? does anybody really care?

2008-10-01T22:29:00.005-05:00

Weird Blogspot stuff:

Mandy just told me that she didn't see a post from me yesterday. But I so published this gargantuan entry yesterday - Tuesday, September 30th.

However, she's totally spot-on, as Blogspot shoes me as having published both it and the prior entry on Monday, September 29th.

I saved a draft of the post in question on Monday, September 29th, but I did not click "publish" until the the morning of the 30th. That shouldn't have messed up the post's date. Right?

Anyway, no matter what date Blogspot assigned to my initial foray into analyzing the '90s, I have kept my goal and not missed a day of blogging. Where are all the one-week anniversary gifts?

fate up against your will sergeant

2008-10-01T18:51:00.010-05:00

On the way home today, I put on for the first time a live Echo and the Bunnymen CD. I hadn't even heard of it before I rescued it from the Great Escape this past summer.

This CD had even been in the car since early September, when I repacked my travel CD case (my car, a '98 Sunfire, doesn't have an iPod hookup), so I don't know why I hadn't played it sooner. I guess I hadn't been in the mood for it until today.

And maybe I was too in the mood for it today, because I cried at least twice while listening to it.

Me, I'm All Smiles, the album in question, documents a very nice 2005 London performance of the reunited Bunnymen. Even with boffo original drummer Pete de Freitas long dead and bassist Les Pattinson once again an ex-Bunnyman, the group still sounds great live. Ian McCulloch's voice seems a little rougher, whether from accumulated wear and tear or maybe just the particular circumstances of that evening, but it's still grand. And guitarist Will Sergeant just gets better with age. He's not often cited as one of the great guitarists, but hearing his always-creative rhythm work and the ring and burn of his precise, Verlaine-toned leads is one of the greatest guitar treats the world has to offer.

Both new ('96 and after) and old material come off well on this album. And I really like the number of Heaven Up Here songs (their difficult, sometimes underrated second album) that made the setlist.

But what made me cry were two other old standbys: the title track from "Ocean Rain," which closes the set ("sailing for sadder shores / your port in my heavy storms / harbors the blackest thoughts" always does me in), and especially "The Killing Moon." I realize "The Killing Moon" is up there with "Lips Like Sugar," "The Cutter," and "The Back of Love" as one of the most played and widely recognized Bunnymen songs. But I don't care if it's a crowd favorite or not. It absolutely wrecks me every time I hear it.

"The Killing Moon"'s lyrics seemed cribbed from the climax of a Thomas Hardy novel, so much so that I expect Eustacia Vye or Bathsheba Everdene to walk across the moonlit heath any second: doomed lovers meeting at night, "fate up against your will," the "you" of the song apparently pledged to another "him." I'm not sure if McCulloch has ever talked about a Hardy connection; maybe it was like how McCulloch hadn't actually read any John Webster, but absorbed enough from his girlfriend reading Webster to come up with Porcupine's "My White Devil." Such lyrical ventures risk pretension, but fortunately, McCulloch's phrases are just abstract enough to come off as pleasingly evocative rather than awkwardly literary.

But what really makes the song is Sergeant's playing. Whether it's the signature opening riff or the short, furious, urgent lead break before the last verse, the song is a showcase for everything Will does well. And has there ever been a more devastating use of the whammy bar than when Will transitions out of that lead and back into that gorgeous, grand riff?

Somewhere in that lead break is always where the tear always starts making its way down my cheek, no matter how many times I hear the song. Some of what produces that tear is the emotion of the song itself, and some of it is the quarter-century of affection I've invested in the song.

But most of it is the pure awe of experiencing a work of art so beautifully composed and executed. We get so few moments of transcendent joy in our lives. For me, this song is one of those joys, and hearing it always makes me feel connected to art and literature and music and life in a powerful, direct way.

I'm thankful that "The Killing Moon" exists, and I'm very glad I got to experience it again today - and that I can share that joy with you here.

i didn't die, i got old (the '90s, part one)

2008-09-29T17:32:00.025-05:00

In a recent entry in his "Music: What Happened?" series, Scott Miller of Game Theory/Loud Family renown^* leads with the following sentence: "The nineties were better than the eighties."

Scott's argument is typically erudite, and I get what he's trying to say, especially when one considers his heavy engagement with the biz itself during the '80s, when Game Theory was trying to eke out a career.

But oh how I wince when I read and reread that statement. "The nineties were better than the eighties." Oh. my. God.

This is not my experience at all. Not even close. For me, the '80s were vibrant, teeming with ideas and energy and an abundance of spectacularly great albums (including at least one all-time classic from Scott himself). In my ultra-geeky yearly best-of lists, 1985 alone has twenty-five (twenty-five!) albums to which I'd give four and a half or five stars, and some other '80s years (1980, 1984, and 1988 in particular) were in my estimation almost as grand.

But something happened in the '90s. Whether it was to me or to the musical world, I'm not sure. I suspect that the "has the world changed or have I changed?" blame game probably should be scored 50/50. It's my hope that my upcoming blog entries^** get me closer to answering that question.

Nevertheless, I know this for sure: what happened in the '90s wasn't good. For me, musically, the '90s don't come close to the '80s in either quality or depth. And this change, which has in many ways persisted for me into the 2000s (as per this earlier entry, we haven't Named That Decade yet), continues to distress me on a number of levels.

Like with most sea changes, there wasn't a convenient marker or milestone that I perceived at the time (though Kurt Cobain's April 1994 suicide was part of the fabric of the decade and saddened me deeply). To put it in baseball terms, it's not a slump when a guy goes 0 for 4 in a single game... but a week later, when it's up to 1 for 32, it's a slump.

And speaking in non-parenthetical terms about Cobain and 1994, it was 1994 when I realized that yeah, it was a slump. At that point, there hadn't been a year since 1988 that overflowed with great music. In fact, in the '90s, I often struggled to come up with 20 albums I actually liked for my year-end lists. (You can't tell by looking at the lists now; retroactive discoveries have upped the quantities.)

Through '94, my tastes were more or less in sync with the music press, college radio, and like-minded friends. My favorite band in the '80s was R.E.M., and just like most fans of "underground" or whatever you want to call it before the early-'90s rise of the "alternative" label, my collection had many beloved entries from folks like Robyn Hitchcock, Julian Cope, Husker Du, the Minutemen, XTC, Elvis Costello, the Clash, Prince, X, Sonic Youth, the Smiths, and most of the usual CMJ / OPtion / Trouser Press suspects.

Perhaps not liking some of the early '90s darlings - My Bloody Valentine and Pavement, to name my most prominent misses of the day - should have tipped me off that something had changed. But at the time I perceived them not as harbingers of a drought but as the occasional whiffs that one encounters in any matter involving subjective taste.

Also, in '88 I at last gained true college radio when I moved to Nashville. WRVU, Vanderbilt's venerable station, entertained me to no end in those days, and my tastes and collection continued expanding thanks to things I heard there for the first time. They even caused me to reevaluate some previously-held dislikes. For instance, hearing "A Forest," "Charlotte Sometimes," and "The Hanging Garden" for the first time courtesy of WRVU completely reversed my opinion of the Cure.

And when friends who liked the same kind of stuff recommended other artists I didn't know, those recommendations usually paid off, be they from Danny Cantrell when I was at Concord College, or, from 1982 on, then-Welch Daily News sports editor Dan Stillwell. That world of like-minded friends expanded greatly when I got a modem in 1993 and discovered BBS message boards. Shortly thereafter, I "found" the proper Internet itself, and suddenly it was a whole new ballgame. It wasn't just me and fewer people than I can count on one hand who knew who Robyn Hitchcock was; I was on mailing lists with dozens and even hundreds of people who were just as knowledgeable, if not more so, then me.

Many of my dearest friends of today are folks I met during my early days on these lists. And these new friends and acquaintances had heard lots of music that I hadn't yet encountered, so my world was awash in recommendations. And since we all had so much in common musically (particularly from the 1977-1990 punk/post-punk/underground/indie world from which we'd just emerged), I fully expected to like the new names I was hearing about.

So I bought albums by newish artists that lots of my friends were way into. Albums by Guided By Voices. By Stereolab. By Elliott Smith. By the High Llamas. By Richard Davies and Eric Matthews, together and separately. By Belle and Sebastian. And I fully expected to love them.

I didn't.

Some of it was growing popularity of Pet Sounds overorchestration and the baleful influence of soft pop, which began dominating the indiepop world from the mid-'90s on. Soft not only became the new loud, but midtempo became the new rocking. And for a song or two, surrounded by contrasting material, I'd be fine with midtempo con strings e vibraphone. But we're not talking a song or two, we're talking whole albums permeated by a sound that I never came around to enjoying, all played at torporiffic speeds. Sean O'Hagan's Banjo of Doom might as well have been the battle-cry of the Valkyries, because once I heard those string-plucking strains, I knew my enjoyment didn't have long to live.

But even the more rocking things left me cold, too. For instance, Guided by Voices was never shy about inheriting the loud, drunk, brash rock tradition. The music press always compared them to Wire, which gave me high hopes for GbV since Wire is one of my all-time favorite artists. However, that turned out to be a facile comparison based on GbV's proclivity to pack a lot of short songs onto an album. This is something that Wire did only once (their 1977 debut, Pink Flag), and GbV didn't really sound like Wire in any meaningful way.

None of that is GbV's fault - rather, it's the fault of lazy journalists - and I promptly adjusted my expectations once I heard the actual music. Unfortunately, I didn't like the actual music. It's tough for me to explain it, but the combination of low-fi with bombast and Bob Pollard's voice never clicked for me. And while something like "Portable Men's Society" was an achievement for evoking Rush, the epitome of "hi-fi" sound, in a low-fi context, well, I never cared for Rush.

Stereolab at least invoked the cool sounds of the Velvet Underground, and when they most veered into Velvetsy rhythms, I did actually enjoy them. But they also were about incorporating lounge and easy listening (albeit the hipper stuff like Escovel) into their sound, and that half of the equation was a turnoff for me, evoking memories of my mom listening to Sergio Mendes and the Brasil '66 on her reel-to-reel.

Even old favorites became unreliable. My most beloved artists of the '80s, R.E.M., Prince, and Robyn Hitchcock, models of consistency in the '80s, turned into hit-or-miss acts as far as their new releases went. I was a huge fan of Husker Du and of Bob Mould's initial post-Huskers solo forays, but his new band Sugar completely bored me. Morrissey's '90s offerings were so dull, aside from the glam-rock trappings of Your Arsenal (1992), that it was easy to forget that he'd ever been any good at all. My interest in hip-hop, which peaked with Digital Underground's wacky P-Funk vibe and musically rich 1990 album Sex Packets, waned as the genre gravitated toward the opposing poles of New Jack Swing and gangsta.

I don't want to make it sound like I didn't like anything in the '90s. Each year of the decade brought a slew of new releases that pleased me greatly, and some of those albums (off the top of my head: Nirvana's Nevermind, Wilco's Summerteeth, R.E.M.'s New Adventures in Hi-Fi, the Loud Family's Interbabe Concern) spoke as directly to my soul as anything I'd heard with a 197* or 198* date.

And yes, since the turn of the millennium, things have picked up for me, but only somewhat. Loud and fast made a comeback around 2000, which was a welcome turn of events after being stuck in Midtempoland for at least a half-decade. However, a lot of the new artists purveying that music were so derivative that the only thing I could think about while listening to them was, "well, I already have Stooges albums."

And I also realize that many of my favorite new artists of the last few years - Interpol, Editors, Goldfrapp, Spoon, the New Pornographers - strongly evoke the '80s music I love, so I can't help but think that I'm still failing to go - or grow - with the times.

Back in the '80s themselves, I used to make fun of the guys I knew whose musical worlds ended in 1977 even though they were only a little older than me. They hadn't liked anything since Skynyrd's plane crash, and they bitched over beers and joints while a 8-track of Paranoid crossbled in the background about how the new music of that day sucked. You couldn't even talk them into giving Van Halen and Cheap Trick a shot, much less something more adventurous like the Clash or Talking Heads.

I never thought I'd become one of those guys. I thought my mind would remain flexible, vital, open to new sounds and new artists.

Instead, substitute "1989" for "1977" and there I am, a coot before my time. Like the title says, I didn't die, I got old.

*There's another musical Scott Miller that I love, and I'm sure you'll be hearing about him in this space too.

**I do envision this as a series about the '90s - more specifically, of my struggle to come to grips with the '90s on a personal as well as musical level - of which this will be by far the longest post. Think of this as the two-hour pilot with lots of explication. I'll be serving up punchier, more concise one-hour episodes afterwards. Everyone exhale, ok? It'll be fine.

it was like i could read your behind

2008-09-29T03:47:00.008-05:00

or, where have you gone, tammy copenhaver?

I find it highly unfortunate that I have lived long enough to see lettering on the posterior of women's garments return to the fashion world.

In case you don't know what I'm talking about, I'm talking about stuff like the picture in the upper left-hand corner. Ladies, this isn't hot. Seriously. Like bicycle shorts, this has never looked good on anyone in the history of humankind.

When I was in college (1985-1988), the "lettering on the ass of the shorts and jogging suits" thing was in full vogue. But then, it was at least largely confined to sorority girls, who honored their respective benevolent social organizations by sporting their sororities' respective three-letter emblems on the respective seats of their pants. I remember this unfortunate sartorial choice being particularly virulent among our campus' Tri-Sigs.

But nowadays, apparently you don't have to be a sorority girl to look as cheap as one. Again, ladies, this has never looked good. Not on the girls at my college, not on Gwen Stefani, not on J-Lo, and certainly on not you, no matter how attractive your appearance may otherwise be. Please stop wearing this sort of thing. Please.

Or if you must wear something like this, at least make it interesting. For example, instead of the "Juicy" logo, why not an eye chart? It still wouldn't look good, but at least you'd be walking away from a better kind of laughter.

i first thought of this post back in the year four

2008-09-28T18:19:00.009-05:00

One of the side effects of reading Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series of historical novels is that you begin to think in the language of those books. For those not familiar with these twenty wildly entertaining volumes, the setting is the British navy in the Napoleonic era (1790s-1815), and the series served as source material for the first good Peter Weir movie since Witness.

When I first discovered the Aubrey-Maturin books, I was completely hooked, and was consuming two to four of them a week. At this level of immersion, the words would just start occurring in my brain naturally. For example, I'd be driving through the parking building adjacent to my then-workplace, and I'd think "I'd better steer to starboard to weather that pole." Or someone at work would be going on about the Sting luxury box tickets they lucked into that weekend, and I'd think - and sometimes actually say, depending on whether I thought I could get away with it - "I give you joy of that." (For some reason, I think Dave Foley would be proud of that.) Or instead of saying to a pal, "This round's on me," it might come out "A glass with you, sir."

I doubt any of these expressions will make a comeback outside of fans of these books. But there was one turn of phrase that struck me like it would be very applicable to the world of today. When the events of the books moved into the 1810s, the characters began saying things like, "A glass with you, sir, as we drink to Nelson's glorious victory in the Year Five."

It took me just a second, but I realized "the Year Five" (and by extension, "Year Six," "Year Seven," etc.) was how the characters were referring to the events of the previous (180x) decade. And I like it! And I think that's how we ought to be referring to the 2000s.

I don't think society has come up with an easy, elegant way to say the years of the current decade. So far, we're just saying the whole darn year, and who wants to say "Two thousand and two"? Heck, half the time, I find myself wanting to say "Nineteen ninety two" because I haven't wrapped my head around it being the 2000s yet, plus "Nineteen" part was just so ingrained in us growing up (after all, we had a whole century of it).

So I'm stumping for doing it the Aubrey-Maturin way. After you read this post, you'll look back fondly on the Year Eight, when you finally lit on the best way to talk about this Decade That Is Apparently Going To Be Named Later.

And yes, "Later" is a funny name for a decade.

the great moth invasion of 2008

2008-09-27T14:10:00.008-05:00

I grew up in a home that was extra-vigilant about many things. One of those things was moths. I just took it for granted that everyone stored their woolens in cedar chests, had mothballs in their closets, and transferred their out-of-season clothing to closed bins or bags with (of course) some mothballs or moth packets inside. My ex-wife's family did the same thing, even taking things one step further: when my ex-mother-in-law and her late husband were building their home, she insisted that every closet be lined with cedar.

Perhaps it's just a West Virginia thing: in Nashville, people in general don't seem as concerned with these winged cloth-eaters, and my wife, who has Nashville roots but grew up mostly in Champaign, Illinois, says that she never remembers her family taking any precautions against moths. And in 2007, she and I didn't have any problems here in the current abode.

But 2008, oh, it's been a different story. My mom and grandmother certainly raised me with a surfeit of caution, but this may have been something that they were spot-on about.

In the spring, weird, small, dark cocoons appeared on the ceiling. Mandy and I dubbed them "the wiggles" because you'd notice them furiously gyrating, doing a veritable twist in order to traverse the ceiling and walls. We did housewide removal of them a couple of times, but we admittedly didn't always stay ahead of them, because pressing issues - not petty everyday things, but huge life stuff like health emergencies, job instability, and me moving from my apartment to here with Mandy - consumed our spring.

Now we have a full-blown moth infestation. We see many of them flying around each day. The fact that the closets in the house (clearly added during a 2006 retrofit) are all completely open doesn't help matters. We've put cedar chips in the drawers, and we've hung cedar blocks and, out of desperation, smelly naphthalene moth cakes in the closets. If there was surveillance footage of us in our home - and given the way the Constitution has been shredded since 2001, there might well be - it'd look like we were tripping on acid, engaged in some sort of spastic dance with flying phantoms, given the number of times we spring up from the couch and slap our hands together in mostly-vain attempts to swat moths on the wing.

The most visibly effective thing we've done was Mandy's idea: we put flystrips up. It's not aesthetically pleasing in any way, but there is a lot of visceral satisfaction in seeing the moth corpses collect on them.

Nevertheless, despite everything we've done so far, the moths continue to materialize on a daily basis. I'm sure our wardrobe is suffering, though we've only found only a couple of chomped-up garments so far, and the moth onslaught of 2008 shows no signs of abating.

We're not sure how to reclaim our house and protect our clothing, and what we've found on the Interwebs isn't of much help. So if you have any suggestions - short of signing the lease over to the moths and moving into my ex-mother-in-law's cedar fortress - please let us know.

gallatin roads and signs seen

2008-09-26T14:24:00.007-05:00

Now that I have a "real" blog, I feel more of a need to have "new" content on a regular basis! I can't promise daily updates, but I'm setting that as a goal. I'll do my best to emulate the frequent-update example of friends Steve and Rog, who not only post on a daily basis, but provide high-quality readin' too.

I definitely have some longer posts in the gestation stage. For whatever reason, my creativity's been in high gear the last few days, and I've had an abundance of ideas.

But for today, I give you a sign seen earlier this summer at the Cat's Records* on Gallatin Road:

HOT
USHER
PLIES
ALANIS MORRISSETTE

While nothing in the way of marquee mad libs can compare to the days when Snatch was in theatres, I chuckled at this sign every time I made a Kroger run this past summer.

*The current incarnation of Cat's Records is technically still the same company as the one I knew in the '80s when I first moved to Nashville. But the Cat's of today is basically the 2008 version of yer '70s-'90s mall store (think Record Bar, National Record Mart, Camelot, Sam Goody's), and very unlike the great, long-defunct Cat's on West End with the well-stocked indie/import section that educated a generation of Music City rockers and fans. For example, it's the place where I discovered that Game Theory had another album besides Lolita Nation. Unfortunately, I arrived in town a few years too late to see Jason & the Scorchers play the most legendary parking lot show at Cat's (this may have been the show where Jason climbed the billboard).

in the big inning

2008-09-25T16:40:00.002-05:00

Hi. My name is Miles. Here are some things to know about me:

I'm from West Virginia, and like all Mountain State expatriates, I can and do talk endlessly about the state I no longer live in and too seldom visit.
I've lived in Nashville for 20 years, and love it here.
I'm blessed with the smartest, funniest, most creative, most fascinating, most beautiful wife that there could possibly be.
We have wonderful dogs - and one of them is not only subjectively but nominally great, since he's a Great Pyrenees.
I once shot Mike Reno, just to watch his headband die.
The rest, well, you're just gonna have to wait.

I have maintained a small, very occasional MySpace blog for a year or so now, and I haven't decided whether to discontinue it or not. I actually enjoy MySpace for what it is, bloated interface and all (how the heck it works as well as it does is beyond me), so I'm not in the brigade of MySpace haters.

However, the creation of this blog is, in part, my attempt to make my writing, my thoughts, and my life in general more accessible to everyone who might want to participate in them. MySpace forces folks to register if they want to view my blog or post comments. I understand anyone's reluctance not to submit to that requirement, and since I want more participation and community, not less, here we are.

Annnnnd.... here we go! In the words of Wilco's Jeff Tweedy before the first Summerteeth tour show I saw, "hope everything works."