Reading Pronunciation

i am finally one with the force

2016-12-24T09:49:00.002-06:00

No, I'm not telling you whether Alan Tudyk dies.

Star Wars fans finally have the Star Wars movies they deserved all along.

The justly-reviled prequel trilogy brought into sharp relief what had actually been true about the entire series: The movies really were never that good.

George Lucas' hare-brained, ham-fisted mishmash of Joseph Campbell musings, bastardized Kurosawa, half-assed space Muppets, and Saturday matinee serials was saved from a fate as future MST3K fodder only by Harrison Ford's charisma and ad-libs, and special effects twelve parsecs beyond what any of us had seen before. Otherwise, it held true to the serial-defined limits of George Lucas' imagination - clunky dialogue, wooden acting, and jaw-droppingly awful character names.

But here's what happened: People loved it.

And this love made the series transcendent. Never mind that this love was showered upon movies that, with the qualified exception of The Empire Strikes Back (tellingly, the one with which Lucas was the least involved), were wholly unworthy of that level of devotion. Star Wars engaged the imagination not just of the preteens of 1977, but of each generation after that.

And it is that engagement with its audience that made the series more than a dumb western in space. Children imagining themselves as Luke, Han, Leia, or even Darth Vader, fighting their own lightsaber duels, and most importantly, making up their own stories, this was the true transubstantiation that turned purloined pulp into bread and wine.

And here's another truth, Star Wars fans, and it's one that you probably realized yourself once you saw The Phantom Menace: Your Star Wars stories were better than George Lucas' Star Wars stories.

The young adults and children whom Star Wars captivated took the basic building blocks of Lucas' universe and not only invested them with affection, love, and, as they aged, the rosy light of nostalgia, but those fans with genuine storytelling abilities busied themselves filling in the blanks. They created their own backstory to fill plot holes, and transformed the two-dimensional sketches of the original trilogy into robust three-dimensional life. Some of this remained in the realm of fan fiction, while some of it took on an official imprimatur in officially-licensed novels and video games set in the Star Wars universe.

Many of these were stories worth reading, and in the case of Knights of the Old Republic, games worth playing. And once the prequel trilogy became a reality, the truth became unavoidable: these were things that George Lucas was unable to do himself. Lucas' dialogue and directing somehow managed to take perfectly-capable actors like Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, and Hayden Christensen (don't believe that Christensen is capable? Watch Shattered Glass sometime) and render them far more robotic than the actual robots that populate his universe.

The Emperor had no clothes. Really, he never did, aside from the ones that you yourself draped upon him without even knowing it.

And this, dear readers, is why you should celebrate The Force Awakens and especially Rogue One. These are Star Wars movies that are actually *good.*

Everyone in them can act, and many of the actors have true charisma. The plots and dialogue preserve the history and flavor of the franchise, but now the stories make logical and dramatic sense (Rogue One, in fact, does a yeoman's job of not only being good on its own but patching up logical gaps from the *first* movie ex post facto) and the dialogue is sharp and flowing. There are no patronizing kid-friendly/comic-relief sops - no Ewoks and no damnable Jar-Jars in sight.

And, as Rogue One brings home, there are now real consequences in this universe - maybe it's just that Babylon 5 and the new-model Battlestar Galactica upped the science-fiction show ante over the last 20 years, but every action has a cost, and not everyone in your plucky band of heroes is going to miraculously survive to the happy ending. This adds true dramatic and emotional heft to a franchise that, beyond its original Oedipal arc, has often lacked both.

I knew that freeing the franchise from Lucas was its only hope (reference intended). But the actual results to this point have exceeded my loftiest expectation.

These are the Star Wars movies you, the fans, deserved all along. I'm glad they're finally here, and I'm glad that even a longstanding Star Wars skeptic like myself can get to enjoy them with you. Nearly 40 years after that June 1977 day that I picked up a Star Wars comic book as my family headed out on our yearly summer vacation - I thought it was just a new comic book series until I read an ad inside of it for the movie - I am finally now one with the Force and the Force is with me.

my adrian belew story

2013-12-31T18:44:00.000-06:00

Same Adrian Belew, different hat

I'm ashamed that I haven't posted a darn thing to my blog in 2013. But I shall remedy that at the 11th hour, with a story that has nothing to do with New Year's at all.

In fact, these events happened on October 5th, 1999. My now-ex-wife and I were going to attend a Richard Thompson show that evening, at a now-discontinued series of outdoor shows in Nashville called the "Uptown Mix." We decided to simplify our evening by also getting dinner in the Vanderbilt/21st Avenue Area, and we decided to eat at South Street.

Once we parked and walked to the restaurant, I went inside and put our name on the list. Then, because it was a pleasant early autumn evening, we plopped down on a bench outside for the promised 30-45 minute wait. Almost as soon as we sat down, I noticed someone oddly familiar walking our way.

A moment later, I realized who it was: not someone I knew personally, but King Crimson guitarist extraordinaire Adrian Belew. I had never even seen him in concert, but I knew he had moved to nearby Mount Juliet, Tennessee, a few years before. (We apparently traded Peter Frampton to Cincinnati for him.) He was wearing a hat and holding the hand of a little girl, presumably his daughter, and, yes, it was unmistakably him, probably doing the same thing we were - grabbing a bite to eat before seeing Richard Thompson.

And... he was walking this way! In fact, he and the kid were headed directly toward us, and I hurriedly whispered to my wife, "that's Adrian Belew!"

Belew and child stepped onto the South Street porch, but then Adrian grimaced, turned around, and headed back onto the street. As they were walking away at a brisk pace, I heard him mutter sotto voce to the child, "They recognized us."

I figured he had to be referring to me. I really, really thought I hadn't been obvious about recognizing him. Sure, I did whisper about it to my wife, but I deliberately wasn't staring at him, was not going to make any attempt to intrude on his evening in any way, wasn't about to hop up and gladhand him, etc. etc.

But I still felt bad about it. I figured there was something in my expression or deportment that had made him think that I was going to hassle him, and as a consequence, he had to change his plans for the evening. I wouldn't have wanted to inconvenience the man who played the world-rending solo on Talking Heads' "Crosseyed and Painless," for gosh sakes, and somehow I'd given him the impression that I was about to throw my arm around him and tell him about how only I could understand the secret messages you hear when you play "Elephant Talk" backwards.

Several years later, among a group of friends, I was telling this story - and not telling it for the first time during these several years, mind you. I got to the part where Belew says "they recognized us," and my wife interrupted.

"It was me."

I was baffled. "What was you?"

"It wasn't you he was saying that about. It was me."

(pause)

"Why? I thought you didn't recognize him."

(longer pause)

"I didn't. I had been staring at him because he was wearing a terrible hat."

appalachian refugees (2001 wayback edition)

2012-12-11T14:53:00.004-06:00

[My interview with ex-V-Roy Scott Miller originally ran in the online magazine Toast in 2001. Since Toast has long ago lived up to its name, I'm giving it a permanent home here at my blog. I'm still enormously proud of this piece. Enjoy!]

Scott Miller is in the passenger seat of my car as we take a left from Broadway to Fifth Avenue North in downtown Nashville. The Staunton, Virginia, native has made the drive from his adopted home city of Knoxville to Music City on this balmy Friday afternoon in May to wrap up preparations for the first tour in support of his debut solo album, Thus Always To Tyrants, due in stores in mid-June from Sugar Hill Records.

As we drive past the cathedral of country music’s past, the Ryman Auditorium, we run head-on into a disturbing reminder of country music’s present: the baleful, Damien-like stare of preteen "One Voice" phenomenon Billy Gilman, his visage looming from an enormous billboard that threatens to dwarf the Ryman. Miller exclaims, "Look at him! He’s one of the goddamn Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, I swear!" and I realize that I’m not the only person in the car whose soul feels the touch of icy fingers.

If anyone has the ability to stave off the Gilman-induced apocalypse, it’s Miller. As a member of the V-Roys and now as a solo artist, Miller has demonstrated a command of the fundamentals of country and bluegrass music. But rather than rendering his music with museum-piece formalism or, as per the current country radio trend, as power ballads in fiddle-and-Stetson disguise, Miller’s songs are supercharged with a white-hot emotional core. Whether the emotion manifests itself in wild-eyed rock guitar fury or in the quiet heartbreak of an exquisite ballad, Miller fully inhabits his creations in a way that’s compelling and captivating, providing his music with two qualities almost wholly missing from Music Row’s modern-day creations: genuine roots and genuine passion. In "Virginia Way" (from the V-Roys’ second and final album, All About Town), when he sings

This is where Grandaddy sat
In a big straw hat and a cigarette
This is where his daddy sat
In a big straw hat and a cigarette

Blue Ridge on the east side to protect me from the rain
And Appalachia’s loving arms to welcome me again

There’s something in the intonation of the vocals and the sound of his guitar picking behind them that goes beyond the words themselves, telling you everything about who he is, where he’s from, and what he’s about.

In fact, Miller originally conceived Thus Always To Tyrants as a song cycle with passages from "Virginia Way" woven throughout the record, and he performed the songs that way during his live shows in 1999 and the first half of 2000. "That was kinda my goal for [the album], to make it like a ‘phases and stages of the Redheaded Stranger.’ As I got in there, I knew it was gonna be tricky, because something like that can get really precious and heavy. It can get really precious if you really try to shove something like that down people’s throats. Do you have Quadrophenia, do you enjoy Quadrophenia? Sometimes a concept can get in the way. My plan was to use that ‘Virginia Way’ theme [he sings the melody of the verse] to lead in and out of songs." Miller ended up opting for a more subtle inclusion of "Virginia Way," reworking a few instrumental passages at the beginning and end of songs to include "Virginia Way"’s bluegrass-tinged melody. "I snuck it in different songs, and you can hear it" in "Across the Line," "Highland County Boy," and "Room on the Cross."

It’s the concerns of "Virginia Way" – identity, place, and, above all, responsibility – that are at the heart of Thus Always To Tyrants. From the protagonist of "Across the Line," who’s attempting to start over even though he knows "you take your troubles with you," to the Civil War soldiers facing obligation and mortality in "Dear Sarah" and "Highland County Boy," to the hellbound drunk driver of "Absolution," Miller’s characters are struggling with defining their roles as adults and being accountable for their actions.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the author of these songs has been undergoing a similar struggle. Over the last two years, Miller has passed the age 30 milestone, endured the breakup of his band, fought to get a new solo record deal, and as of this past April, became a husband. "When I wrote this album, I’d turned 30… and I kept thinking ‘Am I a boy, am I a man, what am I doin’ with my life?’ The V-Roys have crashed and I’ve come this far, what in the world is up? Well, maybe when you get older, you should start being a man… well, a girl, a woman, whatever, an adult… but you take responsibility."

Having come to this conclusion, Miller asked himself "Well, what do I have responsibility to?" "I was reading these Ernest Gaines novels at that time, and he had a lot of boy/man themes in the books, and it’s kinda what I took from them. You got responsibility to your family, you’ve got responsibility to your community, you’ve gotta give something back… I think you’ve got a responsibility to figure out your relationship wiuth the cosmos, be that God or be that whatever, you probably ought to owe some thought time towards that. Your significant other, your relationship, you’ve gotta put in effort and take care of that. And then yourself, man, you’ve gotta be able to live with yourself or you’re not gonna do anybody any good. So I just tried to change and just tried to make my life better in a step like that, the same way West Virginia left Virginia."

This would seem to make "Across the Line," the album’s opener, set in the Virginia/West Virginia border town of Pocahontas ("where the main street’s the state line") the pivotal song of Thus Always for Tyrants. "That’s why it’s first… and why it’s got the most production, Jesus Christ! We threw the damn book at it. I wanted that one just bigger than big, epic." The strings and vocal effects add drama to an already intense track, in which the singer is trying to escape the debris of his past and "be brand new again" if he can survive the journey through "swollen gorges" and "sheets of flame" to his new home.

Says Miller, "Look at how West Virginia just stepped away and said ‘look, we’re not playin’, we’re takin’ our ball and goin’ home.’ And boom, here’s a line, and now you’ve stepped across it and you’re different. In a way, I kinda feel like I was tryin’ to do that in my own life. I had just turned 30, and you know, God, I’m 30, am I a man, or a boy? I gotta change, I gotta get my shit straight. So I just kinda made a decision to start tryin’ to live my life a lot better. That kind of sense is what I was going for," both with the song and the album as a whole."

Can physical relocation – whether it be the protagonist of "Across the Line" changing states, or Miller’s own journey from the Shenandoah Valley to the western Appalachians – provide the needed impetus to confront your problems? "Any kind of shakeup in your life. It’s hard to change. What’s familiar sometimes, like the V-Roys… we were on tour, we could do our jobs and everything, we weren’t exactly in a creative spurt or anything. I think it was time to move on, shake something up. My family’s still there [in the Shenandoah], so that’s gonna draw you back… sometimes what’s familiar, even when it’s bad, is better than what’s not."

"Absolution," a searing rocker that embraces drinking to oblivion with a vengeance, seems to be about the complete avoidance of responsibility. "I loves to drink, sir. It’s my church sometimes. We were just looking for that place where you can not care about anything, it just gets too much. And I still have those days."

"Absolution" and "Goddamn the Sun" – the latter clocking in at a Ramones-like sub-two-minute mark – are overpowering, searing rockers, propelled by John Davis and Don Coffey of fellow Knoxville rockers Superdrag. Recounts Miller, "I knew they would rip those songs. ‘Absolution,’ we wrestled with that thing. I kinda knew what I wanted, but we just couldn’t get it. Then we thought well, maybe we could break it down and then try to build it up acoustically, and all this kinda stuff. All those hours we were working on it, and then Don Coffey said ‘Fuck it, let’s just play it! Put those electric guitars back on and let’s just play it!’ And that was it!"

Elsewhere, Thus Always To Tyrants employs a more subtle, folksier approach, particularly on "Dear Sarah" and "Highland County Boy," songs based on the letters of Miller’s great-grandfather, a Civil War veteran. "In Virginia, history just comes up out of the ground. Some of it’s a dead history, but some of it I think is still vibrant and living, in churches and battlefields and stuff." Again, the search for identity comes up – perhaps Miller, in his Oedipal struggle with his father (see "Daddy Raised a Boy"), turned his attention to a male figure from his family’s past who seemed to face up to the responsibility thrust upon him? "I’m related to him, and he looked like me… I’m not a very big fellow and he wasn’t a very big fellow either, but look what he accomplished and did."

Handling the production chores for Thus Always to Tyrants was R.S. Field, best known as the producer, cowriter, and all-around co-conspirator of Nashville roots-rock legend Webb Wilder. Miller has nothing but kind words for Field. "He’s a genius, is what he is. He’s a Mississippi man, has his Mississippi ways… I don’t know why people don’t just go and beg him to do produce their records. He’s very creative and imaginative, and very sensitive to his artist’s needs too. It was a completely different experience, and I really loved it, and he’s responsible for so much of this record that’s good."

The "completely different experience" is in contrast to Miller’s previous foray into the studio, with the Steve Earle/Ray Kennedy team on the V-Roys’ All About Town. While largely capturing the group’s live sound on the V-Roys’ 1996 debut, Just Add Ice, the E-Squared boys gave 1998’s All About Town a production-heavy sheen and added several instrumentalists from the Del McCoury Band, reflecting Earle’s infatuation at the time with McCoury’s bluegrass outfit. Miller still bristles when the subject of his former label and boss comes up: "I definitely felt like I had something to prove, whether to the ex-V-Roys, or to E-Squared. Is that good motivation? I don’t know. Does it matter? Here’s what I got, this is the way I do, this is what I want it to sound like. R.S. helped me understand how to get it."

He may have something to prove to his ex-bandmates, but he bears them no animosity. The other three V-Roys were involved in the Faults, the band led by the other singer and songwriter in the V-Roys, Mic Harrison. Harrison is frequently in the audience at Miller’s shows, and even joins Miller onstage sometimes. Says Miller of Harrison, "There’s no problem there. He’s just a good son of a bitch, I love him so much. He’s a great songwriter, and he really can twist an idea or phrase, and his perspective on stuff is so good sometimes. He’s got a great heart."

Thus Always To Tyrants isn’t the only Scott Miller album of 2001. Earlier in the year, he self-released Are You With Me?, a live CD drawn from a December 2000 solo/acoustic performance in Johnson City, Tennessee. "I pissed off the record label," chuckles Miller. "It was taking so long to get the deal with Sugar Hill done. We were already making the record, and I was broke, you know, so it was a warning shot across the bow. I just took some new songs, a couple of V-Roys songs, and two songs that would be on this record, and just recorded a bunch of those live shows and put it out and sold it so I could eat. They were not happy about it, but I never really pushed it or promoted it or anything, I just used it for what I could."

Are You With Me? includes a good number of Miller originals that don’t appear anywhere else, including the riveting opener of his solo shows ("Can You Hear Me Tonight?"), perhaps his best Civil War song ("The Rain"), a train song that resonates with the same themes as much of Thus Always To Tyrants ("Amtrak Crescent"), and a rave-up written for the movie You Can Count on Me ("Bastard’s Only Son," which was ultimately rejected, though three V-Roys songs made the cut). Miller doesn’t think he’ll revisit any of these songs for studio versions with the possible exception of "Amtrak Crescent." "I’m not done with it. I’d like to try to work up a band version of that and record it again. I got a few more lyrics to tweak on that song."

One regular song from Miller’s solo shows is absent from both Thus Always To Tyrants amd Are You With Me?: "Ciderville Saturday Night," a rockabilly rave-up about David’s Music Barn, a landmark country venue north of Knoxville. When asked about it, Miller was convinced he had included it on Are You With Me? When shown otherwise, he offered "I shoulda put it on there [the live record]… it really didn’t fit with my Virginia stuff, since it’s about East Tennessee. Depended on which direction I wanted to take, leaving Virginia or moving to Tennessee…" He promises it’ll see the light of day in the future.

Appearing on both albums is another key player in Knoxville’s rock history, Peg Hambright. The ex-Judybat contributes piano on Tyrants’ closer, the plaintive gospel of "Room on the Cross," and provides exquisite fiddle and backing vocals on Miller’s live cover of "I’ll Go To My Grave," a song originated by Miller’s fellow Staunton natives the Statler Brothers. Miller waxes enthusiastic over working with Hambright. "One of my best friends in the world is her husband, and she and I just kinda ran in the same circles. She is one of those people who just makes you sick, she’s so talented. They’re a musical family, her father builds and tunes pianos and stuff, and every one of those kids can sing and play anything, pick up an instrument and have it mastered. She bakes cakes, quit the Judybats cause she didn’t like bein’ on the road. So whenever I go and hang out at her house when I’m drunk, they’ve got this old church hymnal, and I always pull it out and make her play. Like ‘Holy Holy Holy,’ which is my favorite hymn, takes me back I guess. So that’s why I got her to play piano on ‘Room on the Cross.’"

During the course of our conversation, Miller discusses literature, offers to point me toward a book sale he’s visited earlier in the day in Nashville that features Civil War books, and reveals an affection for the Pixies and Robyn Hitchcock, two influences one seldom hears in Miller’s own music. With one foot in country and gospel, another planted in rock, and his brain engaged with Ernest Gaines and T.S. Eliot ("Amtrak Crescent" contains a line that makes simultaneous reference to "Prufrock" and the Allman Brothers!), I ask Miller if he ever struggles to fit it all together. "If anything, it’s harder to keep from going back and back and back, especially as a Virginian. You know that joke about how many Virginians it takes to change a light bulb? Five – one to change it and four to talk about how good the old one was. It’s harder for me to try to keep moving forward. I could go back there and wallow in that stuff and just wallow in it – history, my family, the glory days of Virginia when we ruled."

Thus Always To Tyrants is a Virginia record through and through. The title is Virginia’s state motto, the cover image is the Great Seal of Virginia, and its subject matter and sounds drawn straight from the hills. To Miller, place and person are inseparably intertwined. "When I cut this record, I thought, ‘here I’m making this record about a region, in a global world’ and it may be pretty stupid [to do that.] But I think so much of where you’re from, is that the land around you is gonna affect how you are. How you think, how you approach things… part of that is environment, whether you had hills around you when you grew up or not. When you live in the same place that your great grandparents did, and you see the same moon and you live around the same hills that they did. And it affects you."

you can't beat it

2012-12-03T19:49:00.000-06:00

Pete Townshend last night. Photo by Karen Kraft

Before last night, I had not only never seen the Who live, but had never seen any member of the Who in any configuration. It turns out that somehow the Who had never played here in Nashville before last night, which partially explains why I haven't seen them during the 24 years that I've lived in Music City.

Roger Daltrey played the Ryman a few years ago. During the bit of onstage banter and baiting between Daltrey and Pete Townshend that followed the Quadrophenia portion of the evening's entertainment, Daltrey referenced that show as the best of his career. Pete tartly replied that it couldn't have been that great "because I fucking wasn't there!"

Both of those gentlemen were very much in the hizzouse that is the cavernous, clangorous Bridgestone Arena last night, and they did their legacy proud. They served up their ambitious 1973 double-LP Quadrophenia in its entirety, followed it with The Only Five Who Songs You Hear on the Radio These Days, and then it concluded with the group's sole survivors, Pete and Roger, alone onstage for a little-known acoustic number.

For me, the drawing card besides getting to see the Who at all was that they were playing all of my favorite album. While I'm very sympathetic to the argument that the group's best period was their 1966-67 The Who Sell Out / A Quick One pinnacle of Who poppiness, for me, their crowning achievement was Quadrophenia. This concept album tried to combine the story of Mods vs. Rockers in the mid-'60s England of the group members' adolescence with a powerful subcurrent about Pete Townshend's own misgivings about his group's rise from the same mean streets as main character Jimmy (in "The Punk and the Godfather," the group even blows off Jimmy when he tries to greet them at the stage door!). And there's stuff about mortality and the ocean and drowning, because it's Pete Townshend, and that's just what he does, dammit.

Despite there being a Quadrophenia movie and the album selling millions of copies in its day, it still seems overshadowed in memory and music criticism by the group's previous "rock opera," 1969's Tommy. To me, this is unfortunate because Quadrophenia is by far the superior record. I'm not much of one for concept albums (except for the Coolies' Doug, a brilliant parody of concept albums), but part of why I love Quadrophenia is that you can easily throw out the oft-inchoate storyline and Townshend's clumsy attempts to make Jimmy's split-personality "four faces" correspond with each of the Who's members, and what you're left with is a bunch of articulate, self-aware, brilliantly performed tunes. Tommy, on the other hand, features lackluster studio performances and chains many of its songs into the Procrustean bed of its wobbly concept, and I can never quite fathom why so many people love it so much.

Thanks to Roger Daltrey's initiative, on Sunday night at the Arena, we got Quadrophenia. All of it. Every song, in order, and, surprisingly to me (I remained completely spoiler-free for the show), with no breaks, pauses, chatting up of the audience, etc. There wasn't even a small tick of time between the sides of the original double LP - it flowed just like you'd put on the CD and let the whole thing play out just as the group intended.

For me, this was a huge treat - no hoping against hope that they'd play more than a couple of songs from Quadrophenia, but a guarantee that every single song would get played! Not just "5:15" and "Love, Reign O'er Me" (as much as I love both), but "Drowned," "Cut Your Hair," "Helpless Dancer," "I've Had Enough," the instrumental portions, every song, every measure, every note. If it had horns, horns were on it. If it had synth and piano and horns, they were all present. Even Entwistle and Moon participated from beyond the grave via non-creepy uses of modern technology (the band played live behind the Ox's "5:15" bass solo and used Moonie's original vocals for "Bell Boy"). The steady stream of video montages on the multiple screens actually added dimension and impact to the Quadrophenia material, drawing equally from footage of the post-WWII U.K. and the group's history. Even the visual foray into post-'70s world events that played behind "The Rock" had real impact rather than settling for being a ham-fisted "message.". I paid rapt attention throughout the set, and loved that Roger and Pete had committed to bringing their album to vivid life in a live setting.

Unfortunately for a large segment of the audience, Quadrophenia seemed to be a drag, and they sat, unmoved, not singing along, waiting for The Only Five Who Songs You Hear on the Radio These Days. They all kind of knew the album's climactic track, "Love Reign O'er Me," and got inappropriately excited whenever its melody popped up elsewhere in Quadrophenia's score, because they thought the band was about to launch into the song itself - yet more evidence that the audience didn't know the damn album. Even when the band was smashing through uptempo material like "The Punk and the Godfather" with swagger and verve, the audience still sat. The tour is thoroughly advertised as "Quadrophenia and More," and it's hardly a state secret that they're going to play the whole album, but apparently this message didn't get through to the people who ponied up considerable sums to see the band play this music that they didn't know.

And what music it was! Roger stood stage center and delivered the album's boatload of lyrics, in very good voice, with all the mic twirls and the progressively-more-unbuttoned-shirt progression that you'd expect. He obviously has some back and leg troubles that don't allow him the flexibility of his youth, but he got as close to a split as his body would allow, and he more than made up for any infirmity with a real commitment to quality belting.

And seeing Pete Townshend... to me, Pete was even more of a star, singing with a rawness I don't often associate with him, and oh my, when he was on the electric guitar... just magic. For the early part of the Quadrophenia set, Pete often played acoustic and/or rhythm, ceding lead duties and even one lead vocal to brother Simon Townshend. But mirroring the album's steady gain of momentum as it hits Sides 3 and 4, Pete retook lead guitar duties, and the intensity ratcheted up proportionally. His playing in these songs was the perfect balance of keeping to his assigned role in his own intricate compositions. yet slashing through every other instrument onstage with his razor-sharp fills and raw snarling leads. As I watched Townshend, I couldn't help but think that what he is about onstage, in that instant, isn't money (which he probably doesn't need) or adulation, but that these sounds, these feelings are in him, and they've got to get out. And seeing him brave his harrowing tinnitus to let them out was downright inspiring.

In the wake of "Love, Reign O'er Me," the audience, energized by kind of knowing a song at long last, came back to life. After Pete and Roger introduced the band and traded several barbs that felt a little too real, they proceeded to play The Only Five Who Songs You Hear on the Radio These Days, and the only suspense was what order they'd be in rather than what five songs they'd be. And one after another, they came and went: "Who Are You," "Behind Blue Eyes," "Pinball Wizard," "Baba O'Riley," and "Won't Get Fooled Again." And of course the crowd finally went nuts.

Despite my not-so-veiled complaint about the utter predictability of this portion of the setlist, I offer it with the caveats that 1) the Who may be contractually obligated to play some or all of these songs (this is a much more common medium-venue-and-up requirement than haughty music cognoscenti seem to grok when they complain about the Big Popular Songs being played at every single gig), 2) if Pete and Roger are tired of playing these (in Daltrey's words) "old ones... but good ones," they sure didn't show it, and 3) hey, I got every little bit of my favorite Who album, one that was probably something of a difficult sell to U.S. promoters (and may well have required them playing these five warhorses as a concession), so I should probably just stop bitching.

At the end, the rest of the band walked off, leaving Daltrey and Townshend alone onstage, thanking the audience enthusiastically, but also clearly not quite ready to end the show. A roadie handed Pete an acoustic guitar, and he started playing a wistful tune I didn't recognize. As Roger and Pete vied to introduce the song and occasionally locked eyes during it, even from my vantage point in Section 118, Row K, Seat 3, I could feel the cavalcade of emotion between these two legends standing before me - the fellowship, the rage, the love, the jealousy all happening at once.

Forty-eight years together, and Roger and Pete still can't decide whether to kiss each other or stab each other. This is why it works, and why it was worth every penny it took for me to get to watch them last night. And why I cried big real tears when Roger sang these words.

All of us sad
Lean on my shoulder now
The story is done
It's getting colder now
A thousand songs
Still smoulder now
We played them as one
We're older now

All of us sad
All of us free
Before we walk from the stage
Two of us
Will you have some tea?
Will you have some tea
At the theatre with me?

bring me the head of euell gibbons

2012-09-17T19:22:00.001-05:00

My maternal grandfather, Berry Hester Miles, was a breakfast-eatin' kind of guy.

He liked my granmother's staple breakfast of bacon or Gunnoe's sausage, accompanied by eggs however you'd like them, with a side of toast, the latter buttered and broiled on the top rack of the oven. He also liked her pancake breakfast. My grandmother was a great scratch cook, but for pancakes, she always used Aunt Jemima's mix, and the finished product was eaten with plenty of butter and Karo pancake syrup.

He'd also sometimes whip up his own breakfast. In season, he'd gather the fallen crabapples from the apple tree in our backyard - the apple tree had a fork in the middle that made for easy climbing to a certain height even for a height-averse non-climbing kid like me, and it also served as first or third base during my solo baseball games, depending on whether I was hitting plastic balls toward or away from the house. Anyway, he'd pick up the small, lumpy, green apples right off the ground, discarding the ones that had rotten spots and avoiding the ones that already attracted the attention of bees. Then he'd take them into the house, peel them, and fry them up in a skillet.

He'd go to the Smoky Mountains twice a year, once with the whole family in the summer, and again in the fall during the Crafts Fair, but making the latter trip just with my grandmother. (We thought it was cute that they still liked to be alone together as a couple.) Every time, he'd go to the Old Mill in Pigeon Forge and buy a five-pound bag of buckwheat flour. When he got home, he'd have my grandmother make him buckwheat pancakes for weeks on end. None of the rest of us could stand the taste, but he was all about it.

And he also loved Grape Nuts. This fiber-rich breakfast cereal was the mainstream natural-foods health-conscious breakfast champion of the '70s, before there was Kashi or Colon Blow. Hell, it had been around since 1898.

But in the America of the 1970s, the face of Grape Nuts was Euell Gibbons. I only knew him from the Grape Nuts commercials, but apparently his 1960s books on natural foods happened to hit the best-seller list a minute ahead of the counterculture, and that movement's interest in all things organic and non-processed helped make Gibbons into a minor celebrity, despite him not only being over 30 but over 50. Today, Gibbons would almost certainly host TV shows on both the Food Network and the National Geographic Channel.

"It Gets You Back To Nature" was the most well-known Grape Nuts slogan of the '70s, as seen in this commercial featuring said Euell Gibbons:

Anyway, one fateful morning, my grandfather ate not one, not two, but three bowls of Grape Nuts.

At one sitting. Voluntarily.

This was highly unusual - he loved food but was not a glutton by nature. Plus it's hard work to eat even one bowl of Grape Nuts, much less three.

Afterwards, my granmother asked him, "Berry, why did you eat three bowls?"

His answer: "Because it tasted good."

Anyway, after he ate the three bowls of Grape Nuts, a short time passed. Then we heard him move swiftly into the bathroom, hurriedly close the door, then turn on the bathroom fan.

And he didn't come out of the bathroom for an hour and a half.

When he did finally emerge from his toilet sojourn, he saw us looking at him quizzically.

He said, "Well, that really got me back to nature!"

Then he walked back through the hallway toward his bedroom, chuckling all the way.

how do you work this thing?

2012-06-23T12:32:00.000-05:00

my inadvertent birds-and-bees talk

I didn't find out about sex from "the talk" with a parent. Or from the other kids at school.

Nope, I learned about it from The People's Almanac.

I actually got The People's Almanac 2 first, as a gift in 1978. Sadly, it was a paperback, and paperback editions of anything with that enormous of a page size (1,500+ pages) don't wear well. But I repeatedly put the book's wobbly spine to the test and incessantly devoured all those fascinating bite-size nuggets of information and entertainment that Irving Wallace, David Wallechinsky, and their team of anonymous fact-finders had compiled. In the pre-Internet era, these books (and the related Book of Lists series) were crack for knowledge addicts.

Sometime in 1979, my mother gave me the original The People's Almanac, and in a hardcover, no less. It was every bit as fascinating to me as the second volume. Between the two, I learned about "People Who Had Become Words," like the Rev. Spooner (that section will put me in stitches to this very day). I learned about Charlie Starkweather, well before I'd see Badlands or Springsteen would write the title track of Nebraska. I learned that Timbuktu was the hottest city on Earth. I learned about Burma-Shave signs. One of the Almanacs had a perpetual calendar that listed every possible configuration of calendars; I made use of that for years, before it became even easier to look up any given year's calendar on the Internet.

And, at twelve years old, I learned how sex actually worked.

Both People's Almanacs (I know there was a third one, but I can't remember if I had it, much less what was in it) had a section called "The Best in Books," which excerpted some of the editors' favorite then-contemporary books. In the original 1975 volume, alongside Our Bodies Ourselves, a Karl Marx bio, a "health food" recipe book, and many more, was this entry:

"Where Did I Come From?": The Facts of Life Without Any Nonsense and With Illustrations. By Peter Mayle, illustrated by Arthur Robins. Secaucus, N.J.: Paul Walter Lyle Stuart Inc., 1973.

While my mother was always very protective of me and would have felt very uncomfortable talking to me about sex, to her credit, she never kept it a secret from me that babies grew inside their mothers - no "stork" or "cabbage leaf" nonsense. And this idea made sense to me, since I loved my mother very much and it felt safe and natural being around her; it made perfect sense that I had come from inside her. I also knew that a "daddy" had to be involved, and, I supposed, some physical affection. But precisely what happened to make the baby was beyond my knowledge.

And until this juncture in 1979, I probably hadn't been curious about the details, but puberty was starting to take its course, and girls had begun to transition for me from silly things wearing their stupid baby-blue Leif Garrett t-shirts to mysterious beings of intrigue. But I knew that asking my mother or grandparents about these feelings would only lead to rebuke and disastrous inquiries ("Why do you want to know about those kinds of dirty things? Has someone been talking to you at school? You better not have a girlfriend until you're 21!"). So I kept these thoughts and whatever questions were arising in my mind to myself.

But there, on page 68 of The People's Almanac, was the answer to one of the biggest of those possibly rebuke-inducing questions. For this was the fateful excerpt Wallace and Wallechinsky or a committee of underlings had chosen from "Where Did I Come From?":

MAKING LOVE -- This is a very nice feeling for both the man and the woman. He likes being inside her, and she likes him being inside her. It's called making love because it all starts with the man and the woman loving each other. It's a difficult feeling to describe, but if you can imagine a gentle tingly sort of tickle that starts in your stomach and spreads all over, that will give you some idea of what it's like. And, as you know, when you're feeling tickly you wriggle about a bit. It's just the same here, except it's a special kind of wriggling. It's easier to understand when you realize that the parts that tickle most are the man's penis and the woman's vagina. So most of the wriggling happens down there. The man pushes his penis up and down inside the woman's vagina, so that both the tickly parts are being rubbed against each other. It's like scratching an itch, but a lot nicer. This usually starts slowly, and gets quicker and quicker as the tingly feeling gets stronger and stronger.

Why does the tickling stop? Now you may be thinking: If it's so nice, why don't people do it all the time? There are 2 reasons. First, it's very tiring. More than playing football, or running, or skipping, or climbing trees or almost anything. Good as it is, you can't just do it all day long. And the 2nd reason is that something really wonderful happens which puts an end to the tickly feeling, and at the same time starts the making of the baby. When the man and the woman have been wriggling so hard you think they're both going to pop, they nearly do just that. All the rubbing up and down that's been going on ends in a tremendous big lovely shiver for both of them. (Again, it's not easy to tell you what this feels like. But you know how it is when you have a tickle in your nose for a long time, and then you have a really big sneeze. It's a little like that.) At the same time, a spurt of quite thick, sticky stuff comes from the end of the man's penis, and this goes into the woman's vagina.

For me, this was the "so, that's how this actually works! That's what those parts are for!" moment. Made complete sense. And from there on out, I knew.

I really don't think my mother knew that this was in the book, and I lived in terror that she'd leaf through The People's Almanac someday, stumble upon this passage, and take the book away, but that never happened. And both of my People's Almanacs had "Love and Sexuality" sections - which introduced me to Kinsey, homosexuality beyond "whatever that thing is Anita Bryant is against," definitions of various acts and parts, and a lot more - so she may have thought it was OK for me to start getting this info.

In fact, my mother never took any book away from me, and as it turned out, despite the annual conference between her and my grandmother on whether I should be allowed to have the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition (she allowed me to subscribe to SI, so it showed up in the mailbox every February like dynamite with a lit fuse), I always ended up being allowed to have that staple of of semi-prurient Americana. And I'm grateful beyond words to her for allowing me the freedom to read as I wished and explore most any intellectual interest.

However, I do think that she wasn't completely sure that I had this particular info, because a few years later - I think I was 14 or 15 - she gave me a book about sex and sexual health geared for teenagers. So even if she couldn't bring herself to have "the talk" with me, she wanted to make sure that I had the knowledge I needed. And even if I'd learned it already from a book that I'm fairly sure she had no idea contained it, I'm still thankful for that gift - and for all the others that she's given me throughout my whole life.

But anyway, perhaps appropriately, I learned "the facts of life" from the premiere factbook of the 1970s. Far out, man.

my depeche mode story

2012-03-04T08:21:00.004-06:00

One day in the early 2000s, my now ex-wife and I were visiting our relatives in southern West Virginia. During this visit, my then-brother-in-law told us this story:

Said ex-brother-in-law worked at an electrical manufacturing shop in Bland County, Virginia, that makes things like large electrical generator parts for factories. All the employees at the shop except for one were white, which is very reflective of Bland County's lily-white demographics.

But that one exception, a middle-aged African-American janitor, continually sported a Depeche Mode baseball cap.

While one doesn't wish to generalize based on race, age, or location, the probability that an African-American male in his 50s or 60s in Bland County, Virginia, would be wearing any item of Depeche Mode clothing seems fairly low.

My ex-brother-in-law was understandably curious, and one day he asked the guy about the cap.

The man's response? "My son is Martin Gore."

My ex and I were completely "whaaaaaaaaa?" This sounded like crazy talk.

But on the other hand, it seemed like such an improbable thing for this guy to have decided to invent - not "my son's Jerry Rice" or "my daughter is Halle Berry," but "my son is this pale guy from this English synth-pop group that no one would think I've ever heard about and most of the people around me wouldn't even know."

Well, it turns out that it's completely true. The guy was a GI stationed in England in 1960-61, and he was indeed the biological father of Martin L. Gore.

So this humble African-American janitor in rural Bland County, Virginia, begat one of the titans of '80s synth-pop. Who'd'a thunk it?

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?