Miles natters on about stuff. Probably music, knowing him. He leans more Faulkneresque than Hemingwaylike, so there'll be a lot of words. Unlike Faulkner, not all of them will be wonderfully deployed.
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?
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.
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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.
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.
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."
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 unsavoryconnotations for the word. And after all, you want nothing but savory connotations if you're advertising your roast chicken.
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.
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.
