bad bad bad bad bad, bad technology*

*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

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

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

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

Sometimes DNS servers do the darndest things.

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

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

no robyn hitchcock's jug band xmas for miles goosens

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

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

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

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

Unfortunately for me, this has been a case of "watch out, you might get what you ask for." His shows beginning with that January 2004 gig at the Bluebird during the Spooked sessions haven't been to my taste, causing me to label them "Robyn Hitchcock's Jug Band Christmas." They've been 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

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.