Special 14-years-of-making-other-people-sick-with-our-happiness edition!
14) Giving her the gift that keeps on giving: gifts that take batteries.
13) Renewing vows while father-in-law points ceremonial shotgun at us.
12) Holding hands while mixing meth in the tub.
11) Hiding in the bushes outside home of spouse’s new spouse.
10) Devising conspiracy theories to make wife feel better about blowing seemingly insurmountable lead to an inexperienced black guy with a Muslim name.
9) Telling Barack yes, yes, oh God yes we can!
8) Handing the kids $50 and telling them to not come back for at least 15 minutes.
7) Selling our reading glasses for a hairbrush and selling our hair for The Collected Stories of O Henry.
6) Giving Rodrigo the day off so husband can “clean the pool.”
5) Replying, “It’s today? Oh, fack me!” before spending night on the couch.
4) Robbing a bank together just like old times.
3) Filling out application for Wife Swap.
2) Having a beautiful candlelight dinner together on Second Life.
1) Getting ready to chuck all these years of togetherness to have a creature who will say “Ewww” when we kiss on our future anniversaries.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Monday, May 26, 2008
What exactly are you kids doing on my lawn?
I mowed my lawn for the first time in 2008 today. That may seem late to people who live in their fancy schmancy temperate climates, where you have things like "spring" and "warmth." Considering the last of the snow melted a mere five weeks ago and it was 45 degrees without the windchill, the fact that I even had grass to mow was a triumph of the human spirit and photosynthesis.
One of the joys of being both a homeowner and now a parent-to-be is that I can officially play the "it's mine" game when neighborhood kids leave stuff on my property. Even though I have found balls and other toys in the backyard before, I've never kept anything. As I pushed the mower along the back yard today, I spied something shiny in the shaggy grass. Reaching down, I retrieved a pair of handcuffs. They were not real ones, as they had a release lever on each cuff. But they were metal, quite sturdy, and girthy enough for an adult wrist.
What does it say about our culture that it's not enough for kids to just play doctor anymore? For all I know, my backyard turned into Fisher Price's My First Dungeon, with kids paying up to $300/hr in Monopoly money for some twisted playtime. And if Dateline NBC shows up on my property, do you think they're going to believe that these handcuffs were brought by children?
So my first official entry into the "it's mine" game is a pair of handcuffs. Which I only took for their moral protection. Because handcuffs should only be used in a loving, monogamous marriage.
One of the joys of being both a homeowner and now a parent-to-be is that I can officially play the "it's mine" game when neighborhood kids leave stuff on my property. Even though I have found balls and other toys in the backyard before, I've never kept anything. As I pushed the mower along the back yard today, I spied something shiny in the shaggy grass. Reaching down, I retrieved a pair of handcuffs. They were not real ones, as they had a release lever on each cuff. But they were metal, quite sturdy, and girthy enough for an adult wrist.
What does it say about our culture that it's not enough for kids to just play doctor anymore? For all I know, my backyard turned into Fisher Price's My First Dungeon, with kids paying up to $300/hr in Monopoly money for some twisted playtime. And if Dateline NBC shows up on my property, do you think they're going to believe that these handcuffs were brought by children?
So my first official entry into the "it's mine" game is a pair of handcuffs. Which I only took for their moral protection. Because handcuffs should only be used in a loving, monogamous marriage.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Top Ten Tuesdays: How are we spending our stimulus checks?
Special expanded inflation edition!
11) Half a tank of gas.
10) Twelve hundred trips to the Dollar Store.
9) Investing in Uncle Ben’s hedge fund.
8) $29.99 on a shovel, $1169.01 in a hole in the ground.
7) Making double the minimum monthly payment.
6) Getting shirts for the kids that say, “My parents got a $300 credit because of me and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”
5) Falling into the Bagdad Gap after falling out from Bagdad patrol.
4) Buying an engagement ring so we’ll get twice as much money during the next panic.
3) Putting it on In Default in the fifth race.
2) Bidding on genuine Road Warrior costume so we’ll look authentic when civilization collapses.
1) Stimulants.
11) Half a tank of gas.
10) Twelve hundred trips to the Dollar Store.
9) Investing in Uncle Ben’s hedge fund.
8) $29.99 on a shovel, $1169.01 in a hole in the ground.
7) Making double the minimum monthly payment.
6) Getting shirts for the kids that say, “My parents got a $300 credit because of me and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”
5) Falling into the Bagdad Gap after falling out from Bagdad patrol.
4) Buying an engagement ring so we’ll get twice as much money during the next panic.
3) Putting it on In Default in the fifth race.
2) Bidding on genuine Road Warrior costume so we’ll look authentic when civilization collapses.
1) Stimulants.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Transcript of President Bush’s Address to Israel’s Knesset
Shalom. That’s Jewish for howdy.
Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to you today. And thank you very much for the bagels this morning. Or as I call them, Jewnuts. Like doughnuts, but Jewier. I also have to hand it to you, you’re Zagnuts for security. This morning, someone asked me if I wanted lox on my bagel. I said no, because who’s going to steal a bagel? But I appreciate the extra precautionation.
We have a lot in common, Israel and America. The Old Testament. An appreciation of Schindler’s List. Jerry Seinfeld. And a distrust of brown people.
We’re really like buddies in an action move. I like action movies. Lots of action, not so much talking, and even when there’s talking, it’s talking about action. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you can’t solve anything by talking. You got to shoot your way out of a problem or else the bad guys win.
Like buddies, we get on each other’s nerves a little. I’m always asking you to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior, and you’re always throwing my pork in the garbage. Although maybe I’d be a little lighter if I kept that cashmere diet like you folks. Anyway, even when buddies disagree, they still have each other’s backs.
But there’s somebody else in my country who’s not your buddy. Not going to name names, but he’s buddies with the other brown peoples, because they all stick together. He wants to talk things out, like Oprah—who’s also brown. But did Mel Gibson ever solve anything by talking? Oops, bad example. Did Bruce Willis ever solve anything by talking? Or Clint Eastwood? Or Ariel Sharon? Sorry, I couldn't think of a Jewish action hero. You should talk to your buddies in Hollywood and get that fixed.
These non-buddies want to do apleasement. It’s from the Latin, apleasin, and it’s when you give someone too much pleasing. They say we should talk with these folks, negotiationalize with them, as if a bunch of words will make an argument. We’ve heard this kind of foolish thinking before. During World War II, a man—kinda brown—once said to one of the greatest heroes in American history, “You throw me the idol, and I’ll throw you the whip. No time to argue.” But when he got the idol, he just dropped the whip. That kind apleasement is dangerous and can fool even our smartest arch-, uh, archeol-, uh, scientists.
That’s why we have to stick together and be buddies, and keep their buddy out of the White House. Because the only way we’re going to have a peaceful Middle East, full of tolerance and integration, is if we shoot our way out.
Thank you. That’s English for however you say thank you in Jewish.
Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to you today. And thank you very much for the bagels this morning. Or as I call them, Jewnuts. Like doughnuts, but Jewier. I also have to hand it to you, you’re Zagnuts for security. This morning, someone asked me if I wanted lox on my bagel. I said no, because who’s going to steal a bagel? But I appreciate the extra precautionation.
We have a lot in common, Israel and America. The Old Testament. An appreciation of Schindler’s List. Jerry Seinfeld. And a distrust of brown people.
We’re really like buddies in an action move. I like action movies. Lots of action, not so much talking, and even when there’s talking, it’s talking about action. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you can’t solve anything by talking. You got to shoot your way out of a problem or else the bad guys win.
Like buddies, we get on each other’s nerves a little. I’m always asking you to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior, and you’re always throwing my pork in the garbage. Although maybe I’d be a little lighter if I kept that cashmere diet like you folks. Anyway, even when buddies disagree, they still have each other’s backs.
But there’s somebody else in my country who’s not your buddy. Not going to name names, but he’s buddies with the other brown peoples, because they all stick together. He wants to talk things out, like Oprah—who’s also brown. But did Mel Gibson ever solve anything by talking? Oops, bad example. Did Bruce Willis ever solve anything by talking? Or Clint Eastwood? Or Ariel Sharon? Sorry, I couldn't think of a Jewish action hero. You should talk to your buddies in Hollywood and get that fixed.
These non-buddies want to do apleasement. It’s from the Latin, apleasin, and it’s when you give someone too much pleasing. They say we should talk with these folks, negotiationalize with them, as if a bunch of words will make an argument. We’ve heard this kind of foolish thinking before. During World War II, a man—kinda brown—once said to one of the greatest heroes in American history, “You throw me the idol, and I’ll throw you the whip. No time to argue.” But when he got the idol, he just dropped the whip. That kind apleasement is dangerous and can fool even our smartest arch-, uh, archeol-, uh, scientists.
That’s why we have to stick together and be buddies, and keep their buddy out of the White House. Because the only way we’re going to have a peaceful Middle East, full of tolerance and integration, is if we shoot our way out.
Thank you. That’s English for however you say thank you in Jewish.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Top Ten Tuesdays: What corruption are we covering up in Iraq?
10) Use of performance enhancers at the International Waterboarding Championships.
9) Government officials taking two-year lunches.
8) Siphoning $1,000,000 of rebuilding money to spend one night with Demi Moore.
7) Coordinated text message strikes on American Idol voting.
6) Blackwater’s excessive enforcement of the “no sandals” policy at Bagdad night clubs.
5) Bringing pre-whacked Sunnis to Iraqi Whacking Day.
4) The Iraqi Secretary of State and Condoleezza Rice getting into an debilitating shoe-off.
3) Halliburton’s harvesting of virgin blood for Vice President Cheney.
2) Iraq keeps drunk-dialing Iran for hot Shi'ite action.
1) Um, it would just be easier to list what we’re not covering up.
9) Government officials taking two-year lunches.
8) Siphoning $1,000,000 of rebuilding money to spend one night with Demi Moore.
7) Coordinated text message strikes on American Idol voting.
6) Blackwater’s excessive enforcement of the “no sandals” policy at Bagdad night clubs.
5) Bringing pre-whacked Sunnis to Iraqi Whacking Day.
4) The Iraqi Secretary of State and Condoleezza Rice getting into an debilitating shoe-off.
3) Halliburton’s harvesting of virgin blood for Vice President Cheney.
2) Iraq keeps drunk-dialing Iran for hot Shi'ite action.
1) Um, it would just be easier to list what we’re not covering up.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Questions we already know the answers to, Pt. XXVI
From a birthing video we watched in our baby class on Saturday:
"Do you want to see the placenta?"
"Do you want to see the placenta?"
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Vegas 2008: The Tickle-ing
Prologue: Venus de Hairo
If a picture says 1,000 words, then the picture on my cell phone said everything you need to know about my trip to Vegas for my brother Tickle’s bachelor party. It was the torso of a naked man from neck to mid-thigh. The abundant follicle density told me it was the torso of Trapper, one of Tickle’s friends and arespected health care professional. Only a strategically placed Diet Coke bottle covered Trapper’s keeper.
It was not the first semi-naked man I had seen over the weekend.
Tickle’s Nine
Like Danny Ocean, we assembled a crack team of Vegas professionals for the bachelor party:
Tickle...my younger brother, groom-to-be, and the glue holding the weekend together
Snake Anthony...my youngest brother, the youngest guy attending, and by far the most sane and mature
Z...the best man, the biggest man, and the straightest man
Hawkeye...Dr. Feelgood, the loose cannon who is a dangerous mix of beauty, brains, and pantslessness
Trapper...hairy, happy, and happening, The Cleaner who gets rid of the messes Hawkeye leaves behind
Double Down...playing the role of the guy who hates gambling and yet loses more money than everyone else
Smitty...Double Down’s Trapper, friendly and a generous laugher
Smoke...our local connection and the man who knows how to get things
Me...official chronicler and officially the old man at the club
Before we left, Hawkeye devised a roommate draft, creating a spreadsheet listing our ratings in various categories, from 1 (good/none/safe) to 10 (bad/exessive/dangerous). A few notable ratings:
Hair left behind
Double Down—1, freshly shorn
Trapper—11, SASQUATCH
Diabolicalness
Smitty—1, the new guy
Brando—8, old and angry
Gay tendencies when drunk
Z—1, almost too straight
Hawkeye—10, I apologize in advance
We secured the perfect lodging scenario: two regular rooms and one suite at the MGM Grand. The suite became our tenth team member, like a stadium supporting the home players on the field. It gave us plenty of space to drink, rock out, and get weird.
We Wear Short Shorts
I arrived late on Saturday, so I passed on gambling and headed straight to the suite, where everyone save Double Down and Smitty had gathered. As I exchanged handshakes and man hugs, I saw Hawkeye. He wore black biker boots, a black t-shirt, and a thin mustache that accompanied his long, trim sideburns. He had grown the mustache specifically to get a laugh out of us. “You look like the Dread Pirate Roberts,” I said.
Smitty and Double Down arrived shortly thereafter, with Double Down putting the “short” in shortly. I had not met either of them before, and for our first encounter, Double Down sported a pair of jean shorts cut so high, the pockets peeked out from below the cut. He also wore a white, see-through, mesh shirt that ended just above his manscaped navel. It was his version of Hawkeye’s mustache. I asked him where his rollerblades and headphones were.
Double Down was happy to attend the bachelor party festivities, but he was the least excited about coming to Vegas because he doesn’t like gambling. That’s a bit like deciding to become Amish even though you hate barn raising and love zippers. However, like so many others who come to this town, the sticky Web of wagering snagged him. He told us he had been playing blackjack (in his current outfit) and had been up $600 before crashing winding up $60 in the negative column. We all felt sorry for him. All of us had our own Gambling Icarus stories, tales of plastic chips stacked invincibly toward the sky, only to melt under the burning sun of house advantage. At least he looked fabulous while he was losing.
We departed to our separate rooms to clean up before going out. I luckily had drawn Snake Anthony as my roommate. My youngest brother is calm, cool, and collected, with the demeanor of a jazz drummer but minus the heroin habit. Tickle threatened to get our keys and still do things to us, but for the first time in my Vegas history, my middle brother would not be waking me up with his snoring.
When I returned to the suite, Double Down had changed into clothes more Gap display than Abercrombie spread. I was also horrified to see Hawkeye had shaved his 'stache. It would have been the perfect complement to the tasseled white loafers he wore. Hawkeye had arranged a special event for us: prix fixe drunkenness at a local dance club, where we could drink all the Ketel One vodka we wanted for one flat rate. At least when my liver went into shock, I would be in the company of doctors.
Upon hitting the club, Hawkeye and Trapper immediately hit the dance floor. The place was packed, and the light display above us periodically shot out flames. As I wrote the last time, Trapper is a dance machine, and I spotted him getting his groove on. He looked so completely happy that it inspired me. Normally when it comes to dancing, I am a wallflower. As The Lovely Becky often tells me when she tries to get me to dance, I need to unclench. Well, I unclenched. The combination of booze, Vegas, and Trapper got my feet moving and kept them going for several hours. It was merely a hint of things to come....
The Amazing Hawkeye
We packed it in after dancing and drinking our money’s worth. As we left the club, we spotted an empty fortune teller booth in the lobby area, a small alcove covered in red satin furniture, with only beaded curtains preventing us from entering. Hawkeye immediately ducked into it. He sat down, put his palms flat on the table, and lowered his head with menacing meditation. The rest of us went to work, telling passersby to come get a free fortune from The Amazing Hawkeye. I stopped a couple of women leaving the club and repeated the offer. “He looks like Criss Angel,” one of them said. I asked them if they were taking a cab and they said yes.
“Listen, I was skeptical, too, but this guy has a gift,” I said. “He told me I was going to be in an accident, and I swear, five minutes after I left, I was in one. Just a fender bender, but nevertheless an accident. He might tell you whether you should avoid a white cab or a yellow cab.”
“What about a blue cab?” they asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “That’s why you need to talk to him.”
They politely declined, but we did manage to convince one woman to sit for her fortune. Hawkeye took her palm and read it, staying silent for several minutes as he examined the lines. “Do you have two children?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, “two sons.”
Peering at her palm intently, he said, “You will have a third...a girl. She will go to medical school, where she will study psychology.” He filled his voice with soothseering foreboding. “But she will not finish!”
Business socks, feats of strength, and potions of healing
The next morning, my phone rang. “Put your business socks on,” Tickle said. “It’s business time. Come down to the room, we have IVs.”
I arrived at the suite to see Z in a chair, a blanket over his legs and a tissue in his hands. Hawkeye, wearing a T-shirt with a giant airbrushed image of Michael Bolton on it, stood over Z, prepping his arm for a needle. Trapper held a saline solution IV bag, attaching it to a hotel hanger and hanging it from the folded-up rollaway bed.
“Oh my God,” I said. “You really have IV bags.”
“Of course,” Hawkeye said as if he merely was applying some Head On and mixing a Bloody Mary. After a little blood and sweat but no tears, Z had sweet hangover salvation flowing into his veins.
It was before noon but happy hour for Hawkeye. He mixed a Red Bull and vodka, clearly not his first of the morning. I abstained, as my liver was still trying to process the Kettle 1 that had given me happy feet the night before. Somehow we got on the subject of pushups and how many we could do. With it being Vegas, this led to betting on how many we could do. Hawkeye set his over/under at 48. Tickle took the under. Hawkeye stripped off his Michael Bolton shirt and, for reasons only known to him, his shorts.
Technically, Hawkeye was wearing underwear. But the tidy whiteys he sported were so tight, they formed a second skin over his pelvic area. It looked as if he had been twelve years old the night before and, a la Big, had woken up as an adult, still wearing boys' underpants. He dropped to the floor and began pounding out pushups. He nailed the first 30 without any problem, before stopping and holding himself up over the floor. With the same lack of explanation as the stripping, he spit a couple times before pushing on to 40. After another camel imitation, he did 41 and then collapsed.
Tickle, wearing a shirt with a giant picture of Elmo on it, set his at 38. My brother is in good shape, and his shoulders are wide enough that he could have won the Republican presidential nomination based on that alone. I took the over for five bucks against Hawkeye. Tickle pounded out his push ups without stopping, propelling himself off the floor and clapping his hands together for good measure when he reached 39. My first wager of the weekend had paid off.
The Saga of the Speedo
Tickle, Snake Anthony, and I had poker plans for Sunday afternoon. As a present, a bunch of us chipped in to buy Tickle a spot in the $540 tournament at the Bellagio. Snake and I chose much cheaper waters. This kept us occupied through the afternoon and into the evening. When we returned to the suite, the whole gang was there. Hawkeye sat in the IV chair, an IV in his arm, his Michael Bolton shirt off, and a Speedo barely covering his surgical tools. Naturally, we had questions.
Trapper began to tell the saga of the Speedo. He and Hawkeye had departed for the pool after we left for poker. Like a Terminator, Hawkeye immediately found his quarry among the crowd—Smitty and Double Down, already lounging in the sun. He walked up to them, removed the Michael Bolton shirt, and dropped his shorts to reveal a new black Speedo.
After adjusting his package to the point where he nearly broke Vegas’s already lax obscenity laws, Hawkeye selected the chaise longue next to Double Down and laid out completely spread eagled. Double Down showed me a picture. With Hawkeye’s tall, lanky frame in that pose and wearing that Speedo, he looked like an albino praying mantis that just finished marching in a gay pride parade. He looked so “appealing” that an older gentleman approached the group, complimented Hawkeye on his “banana hammock,” and offered to buy the boys beers. With the clarity of a Dateline NBC fan, Trapper declined, and eventually led the Speedo-clad and highly inebriated Hawkeye back upstairs.
Given the competition, attracting attention in Vegas is not an easy job. Yet people in the casino stopped what they were doing to gawk at the man walking past them wearing oversize Ray Bans, socks, shoes, and a Michael Bolton shirt that nearly obscured his black Speedo. Yes, Hawkeye had decided to forgo his cargo shorts and walk back to the room as if he was the most carefree Continental European in the world. Hawkeye also began asking, loudly and repeatedly, “Why is it so hot in here? It’s not this hot in Tor-on-to!” Note that he is not from Toronto. He and Trapper entered the hotel elevator as a middle-aged man entered with his teenage kids. Hawkeye, louder than ever, asked, “Why is it so hot in here?”
The father looked at him and said, “Man, it doesn’t have to be that way. Just take off your shirt.”
I’m going to remember that one when I take TBD to Vegas.
We Are the Chosen People, Yo!
The tale and Hawkeye's IV finished, our hero removed himself to the bedroom where he passed out. We decided to hang out in the room, drink, and play music for a few hours. Tickle, Snake Anthony, Z, Trapper, and I then had the weirdest experience of the weekend: we got into a serious conversation about religion.
I don’t really know how it happened. One minute, Trapper (clad in merely his boxers) and Tickle (shirtless) were taking the gayest pictures I have ever seen two straight men take who weren’t being paid money. The next thing I knew, we were discussing Catholicism and what it took to get into heaven.
Tickle is the most religious out of the three of us. I am a believer but lazy and disillusioned with the Church. Snake Anthony is an agnostic. At one point, Tickle was explaining that he couldn’t believe Snake Anthony would not go to heaven, even if he didn’t believe in God, because Snake is a good person.
“Dude,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“What?” Tickle asked.
“We’re in Vegas,” I said. “Why are we talking about this?”
“Because I don’t get to see my brothers very often, and I want to have a real conversation with them.”
It’s a very odd day when I find myself asking Tickle to not be so deep.
Our religious exorcism must have cured the demons in Hawkeye, because he rose from his slumber, ready to commit mischief. We all decided to get cleaned up and hit the casino at a fashionably late 2:00 a.m. Little did we know our religious experience was not over.
A group of guys approached our roulette table. Group is not really the right word. Posse dorkitas might be the better phrase. They were led by a guy who looked like the president of Marshall Mathers fan club. His baggy clothes probably weighed as much as he did, and he wore a baseball cap high and crooked over his hair.
The table had hit black about a half dozen times in a row until our Beastie Boi showed up. He put a bunch of chips on red. It hit. He bet red again. It hit. “Back to back!” he said in a Modern Homeboy accent.
We couldn’t help but laugh. This guy was trying so hard to be street, but he didn’t look hard enough for Sesame Street. I halfway expected this to be a gag for some TV show. On the next spin, as the ball was going around, he reached out and took some of his chips off of red. The wheel hit black.
“You gotta manage yo’ money!” he said to us. “That’s what my people do.”
We looked at each other trying to understand what he meant. His people? Dorks? Caucasians? Caucasians shamelessly pillaging African American culture?
He must have sensed our confusion, because he turned his baseball cap around backwards. The back had a white, stitched Star of David on it.
We lost it. We started yelling “Back to back” and “Manage yo’ money!” with every spin. Unfortunately, our friend MC Dreidel didn’t find our humor too kosher, and he and his posse left in a bit of a huff for the craps table.
“I feel kind of bad,” I told Hawkeye, “they’re at the craps table like some kind of gambling diaspora.”
OH FACK!
Snake Anthony’s phone rang the next morning. I heard this sound on the other end of the receiver, like Charlie Brown’s teacher on meth after sucking an entire balloon’s worth of helium. It had to be Tickle.
Tickle had decided to talk in the same voice as the Eminem song, “Fack.” It’s a terrible song, which is probably why Tickle decided to do it. He kept his voice in a high, loud, nasal tone all morning.
“Do you guys want to eat?” I asked.
“YEAH, I’M FACKING HUNGRY” Tickle said.
“Stop talking like that.”
“LIKE WHAT? WHAT THE FACK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?”
Tickle, Snake, Z, and I went to the Spice Market Buffet at Planet Hollywood. Cruising the myriad options, Z stopped at the Middle Eastern section.
“They don’t have any lamb,” Z said.
“OH FACK!” Tickle said.
He increased to Category 5 obnoxiousness during lunch. At the table, just as Snake Anthony took a sip of his drink, Tickle said, “DRINK ALL YOUR PEPSI.” When I plopped a spoonful of ice cream into my mouth, Tickle observed, “YOU LIKE CHOCOLATE SAUCE ON YOUR ICE CREAM.”
After finishing our lunch and heading up the escalator, Tickle kept babbling a train of FACKs at Z. Without uttering a word, Z shoved Tickle against the wall, forcing him to slide against it all the way up from the buffet. “OW, FACK, THAT FACKING HURTS!”
Tickle thankfully collapsed when we got back to the room, but the damage was done. We all started saying FACK the rest of the weekend. In conversations, on the phone, in text messages. Everyone but Z. Even now, it randomly pops into my head.
Some days I really hate my brother.
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Thongs
That night, after another day of poker, I joined Trapper, Hawkeye, and Z for sushi at the restaurant inside the MGM. Looking over the menu, Hawkeye mentioned that the spicy tuna maki roll sounded good and he was going to get it.
“Would it be weird if I ordered the same thing you did?” I asked.
“No, not at all.”
Digging out my coyest voice, I said, “What if I said, ‘I’ll have what he’s having’?”
“Yes, that would be uncomfortable,” Hawkeye laughed.
I went first with my order. When the waitress turned to Hawkeye, he looked at me with and said, “I’ll have what he’s having.”
A bottle of saki and a giant Sapporo later, a group of young women entered the restaurant. The only real way to describe how they were dressed is hoochied. I don’t really know how else to label a skin-tight cheetah print dress or a black dress with a cleavage plunging like a Himalayan crevasse.
Hawkeye leaned in close to us. “I’ll bet at least one of those girls isn’t wearing underwear.” Trapper and I disagreed. Hawkeye took out a crisp Ben Franklin and handed it to Trapper. “Hundred bucks if you go over and prove they’re wearing underwear.”
Admittedly, it was a dick thing to interrupt some folks just having a nice dinner. I could tell Trapper didn’t really want to do it. But a hundred bucks is a hundred bucks, we had been drinking, and fuck it, we were in Vegas.
Polishing off the last of his drink, Trapper took the hundred and approached their table. He also demonstrated why he’s The Cleaner. Trapper is, simply put, the nice mischievous guy. He is happy to engage in these childish pranks, but he’s so friendly and disarming in the process that no one seems to mind. “Excuse me,” he said to the ladies. “I am so sorry to bug you and ask you this, but my friend bet me $100 and I had to take the bet.” He held up the Franklin to prove the veracity of his story. “He thinks at least one of you is not wearing underwear. I say that you are.”
Without missing a beat, one of the women said, “I’m so sorry, but your friend’s right.”
Trapper looked crushed. “You’re kidding?” he said.
She waited a beat before saying, “Yep, we are.” They all laughed, grabbed the sides of their dresses, and snapped the straps of their underwear to prove it. Chapman thanked them. The woman said, “You know, we’re impressed you had the balls to come over here and ask that.”
Never doubt the power of Trapper. He has a kavorka that ensnares men and women.
Brando II: Electric Boogaloo
We left to meet up with everyone else and close out our last night at the MGM’s dance club. Inside, the place was pretty hopping for a Monday night. I discovered that the club made an outstanding vodka gimlet—my drink of choice when I planned on having more than one. I began sucking gimlets down like gas was $2.00 a gallon and I was a Hummer.
At some point in the evening, Hawkeye had acquired a plastic scooper, like a sugar scooper for baking. I have no idea where he got or what possessed him to have it, but he carried it around in his shirt pocket for the entire evening, pulling it out to scoop alcohol from other people’s drinks. He whipped it out and took a sample of my gimlet. He nodded in pleasure, took another sip, and left to sample drinks from anyone who would let him sip from their cups.
We made our way to the dance floor. With my dancing hesitation broken earlier that weekend and my feet heavily lubricated with drink, I began busting my moves. It should have stopped there. However, the club had these platforms you could dance on—about the size and height of a large, square coffee table. I don’t know if it was the liquor or Vegas or maybe pre-parental ya yas that I just had to get out, but before I knew it, my feet were on the platform. I was table dancing.
And not just dancing. I turned into Trapper from our visit to Vegas last fall. I moved with the sweet, blissful ignorance of Elaine Benes at an office party. More importantly, I beckoned anyone and everyone to join me. Women, men, the guys I knew, perfect strangers, it mattered not. I wiggled my finger to invite them and pointed to the empty spot on the table where they could dance. Most looked at me with the skepticism reserved for strange men offering candy from unmarked conversion vans. Others declined amid their laughter. But damn if several didn’t climb up and dance.
The boys were enjoying the show. At one point I saw Snake Anthony and Tickle, looking at me and laughing in disbelief. I gave them a thumbs up and kept dancing. I felt a kind of power. Here I was, setting dancing back hundreds of thousands of years, yet through the sheer combination of total conviction and not giving a fuck, I got other people to join. This was so not me, and not being me felt pretty good.
It wasn’t until I stopped dancing and discovered that English had become my second language after gibberish that I realized the true source of my power. Courage, thy name is alcohol. Even in my drunken state, I was thankful no one had filmed it. I would have been less embarrassed to admit I was a 40-year old virgin.
It’s not a Trip to Vegas Until You Lose Your Pants and/or Appendix
Nine a.m. came entirely too early the next day. I opened a bleary, bloodshot eye, believing that the whole evening had been a dream. Until Snake Anthony saw me and said, “Oh my God!”
FACK!
We both got ready, packed, and headed to the airport. A text from Tickle informed us that a) Trapper and Hawkeye had missed their flight, b) Tickle had barely made his, and c) he had left half his clothes in the dresser and closet.
“Shit,” I said. “I forgot my pants, too.” I had neglected to check the closet and left my best pair of pants hanging. Snake Anthony realized he’d left his pants in there as well. And there’s nothing like coming home to your pregnant wife from a bachelor party in Vegas to tell her you’re missing a pair of pants.
Our loss paled in comparison to Tickle’s the following weekend, when my brother went to the hospital with terrible stomach pains. It turns out The People’s Champ had a loser of an appendix and had to have it out.
After finding out he was okay, I said, “It’s a good thing it didn’t happen in Vegas.”
“I know, that would have been terrible.”
“Although at least you would have had two doctors and plenty of IVs,” I said.
“True,” Tickle said. “FACK.”
If a picture says 1,000 words, then the picture on my cell phone said everything you need to know about my trip to Vegas for my brother Tickle’s bachelor party. It was the torso of a naked man from neck to mid-thigh. The abundant follicle density told me it was the torso of Trapper, one of Tickle’s friends and a
It was not the first semi-naked man I had seen over the weekend.
Tickle’s Nine
Like Danny Ocean, we assembled a crack team of Vegas professionals for the bachelor party:
Tickle...my younger brother, groom-to-be, and the glue holding the weekend together
Snake Anthony...my youngest brother, the youngest guy attending, and by far the most sane and mature
Z...the best man, the biggest man, and the straightest man
Hawkeye...Dr. Feelgood, the loose cannon who is a dangerous mix of beauty, brains, and pantslessness
Trapper...hairy, happy, and happening, The Cleaner who gets rid of the messes Hawkeye leaves behind
Double Down...playing the role of the guy who hates gambling and yet loses more money than everyone else
Smitty...Double Down’s Trapper, friendly and a generous laugher
Smoke...our local connection and the man who knows how to get things
Me...official chronicler and officially the old man at the club
Before we left, Hawkeye devised a roommate draft, creating a spreadsheet listing our ratings in various categories, from 1 (good/none/safe) to 10 (bad/exessive/dangerous). A few notable ratings:
Hair left behind
Double Down—1, freshly shorn
Trapper—11, SASQUATCH
Diabolicalness
Smitty—1, the new guy
Brando—8, old and angry
Gay tendencies when drunk
Z—1, almost too straight
Hawkeye—10, I apologize in advance
We secured the perfect lodging scenario: two regular rooms and one suite at the MGM Grand. The suite became our tenth team member, like a stadium supporting the home players on the field. It gave us plenty of space to drink, rock out, and get weird.
We Wear Short Shorts
I arrived late on Saturday, so I passed on gambling and headed straight to the suite, where everyone save Double Down and Smitty had gathered. As I exchanged handshakes and man hugs, I saw Hawkeye. He wore black biker boots, a black t-shirt, and a thin mustache that accompanied his long, trim sideburns. He had grown the mustache specifically to get a laugh out of us. “You look like the Dread Pirate Roberts,” I said.
Smitty and Double Down arrived shortly thereafter, with Double Down putting the “short” in shortly. I had not met either of them before, and for our first encounter, Double Down sported a pair of jean shorts cut so high, the pockets peeked out from below the cut. He also wore a white, see-through, mesh shirt that ended just above his manscaped navel. It was his version of Hawkeye’s mustache. I asked him where his rollerblades and headphones were.
Double Down was happy to attend the bachelor party festivities, but he was the least excited about coming to Vegas because he doesn’t like gambling. That’s a bit like deciding to become Amish even though you hate barn raising and love zippers. However, like so many others who come to this town, the sticky Web of wagering snagged him. He told us he had been playing blackjack (in his current outfit) and had been up $600 before crashing winding up $60 in the negative column. We all felt sorry for him. All of us had our own Gambling Icarus stories, tales of plastic chips stacked invincibly toward the sky, only to melt under the burning sun of house advantage. At least he looked fabulous while he was losing.
We departed to our separate rooms to clean up before going out. I luckily had drawn Snake Anthony as my roommate. My youngest brother is calm, cool, and collected, with the demeanor of a jazz drummer but minus the heroin habit. Tickle threatened to get our keys and still do things to us, but for the first time in my Vegas history, my middle brother would not be waking me up with his snoring.
When I returned to the suite, Double Down had changed into clothes more Gap display than Abercrombie spread. I was also horrified to see Hawkeye had shaved his 'stache. It would have been the perfect complement to the tasseled white loafers he wore. Hawkeye had arranged a special event for us: prix fixe drunkenness at a local dance club, where we could drink all the Ketel One vodka we wanted for one flat rate. At least when my liver went into shock, I would be in the company of doctors.
Upon hitting the club, Hawkeye and Trapper immediately hit the dance floor. The place was packed, and the light display above us periodically shot out flames. As I wrote the last time, Trapper is a dance machine, and I spotted him getting his groove on. He looked so completely happy that it inspired me. Normally when it comes to dancing, I am a wallflower. As The Lovely Becky often tells me when she tries to get me to dance, I need to unclench. Well, I unclenched. The combination of booze, Vegas, and Trapper got my feet moving and kept them going for several hours. It was merely a hint of things to come....
The Amazing Hawkeye
We packed it in after dancing and drinking our money’s worth. As we left the club, we spotted an empty fortune teller booth in the lobby area, a small alcove covered in red satin furniture, with only beaded curtains preventing us from entering. Hawkeye immediately ducked into it. He sat down, put his palms flat on the table, and lowered his head with menacing meditation. The rest of us went to work, telling passersby to come get a free fortune from The Amazing Hawkeye. I stopped a couple of women leaving the club and repeated the offer. “He looks like Criss Angel,” one of them said. I asked them if they were taking a cab and they said yes.
“Listen, I was skeptical, too, but this guy has a gift,” I said. “He told me I was going to be in an accident, and I swear, five minutes after I left, I was in one. Just a fender bender, but nevertheless an accident. He might tell you whether you should avoid a white cab or a yellow cab.”
“What about a blue cab?” they asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “That’s why you need to talk to him.”
They politely declined, but we did manage to convince one woman to sit for her fortune. Hawkeye took her palm and read it, staying silent for several minutes as he examined the lines. “Do you have two children?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, “two sons.”
Peering at her palm intently, he said, “You will have a third...a girl. She will go to medical school, where she will study psychology.” He filled his voice with soothseering foreboding. “But she will not finish!”
Business socks, feats of strength, and potions of healing
The next morning, my phone rang. “Put your business socks on,” Tickle said. “It’s business time. Come down to the room, we have IVs.”
I arrived at the suite to see Z in a chair, a blanket over his legs and a tissue in his hands. Hawkeye, wearing a T-shirt with a giant airbrushed image of Michael Bolton on it, stood over Z, prepping his arm for a needle. Trapper held a saline solution IV bag, attaching it to a hotel hanger and hanging it from the folded-up rollaway bed.
“Oh my God,” I said. “You really have IV bags.”
“Of course,” Hawkeye said as if he merely was applying some Head On and mixing a Bloody Mary. After a little blood and sweat but no tears, Z had sweet hangover salvation flowing into his veins.
It was before noon but happy hour for Hawkeye. He mixed a Red Bull and vodka, clearly not his first of the morning. I abstained, as my liver was still trying to process the Kettle 1 that had given me happy feet the night before. Somehow we got on the subject of pushups and how many we could do. With it being Vegas, this led to betting on how many we could do. Hawkeye set his over/under at 48. Tickle took the under. Hawkeye stripped off his Michael Bolton shirt and, for reasons only known to him, his shorts.
Technically, Hawkeye was wearing underwear. But the tidy whiteys he sported were so tight, they formed a second skin over his pelvic area. It looked as if he had been twelve years old the night before and, a la Big, had woken up as an adult, still wearing boys' underpants. He dropped to the floor and began pounding out pushups. He nailed the first 30 without any problem, before stopping and holding himself up over the floor. With the same lack of explanation as the stripping, he spit a couple times before pushing on to 40. After another camel imitation, he did 41 and then collapsed.
Tickle, wearing a shirt with a giant picture of Elmo on it, set his at 38. My brother is in good shape, and his shoulders are wide enough that he could have won the Republican presidential nomination based on that alone. I took the over for five bucks against Hawkeye. Tickle pounded out his push ups without stopping, propelling himself off the floor and clapping his hands together for good measure when he reached 39. My first wager of the weekend had paid off.
The Saga of the Speedo
Tickle, Snake Anthony, and I had poker plans for Sunday afternoon. As a present, a bunch of us chipped in to buy Tickle a spot in the $540 tournament at the Bellagio. Snake and I chose much cheaper waters. This kept us occupied through the afternoon and into the evening. When we returned to the suite, the whole gang was there. Hawkeye sat in the IV chair, an IV in his arm, his Michael Bolton shirt off, and a Speedo barely covering his surgical tools. Naturally, we had questions.
Trapper began to tell the saga of the Speedo. He and Hawkeye had departed for the pool after we left for poker. Like a Terminator, Hawkeye immediately found his quarry among the crowd—Smitty and Double Down, already lounging in the sun. He walked up to them, removed the Michael Bolton shirt, and dropped his shorts to reveal a new black Speedo.
After adjusting his package to the point where he nearly broke Vegas’s already lax obscenity laws, Hawkeye selected the chaise longue next to Double Down and laid out completely spread eagled. Double Down showed me a picture. With Hawkeye’s tall, lanky frame in that pose and wearing that Speedo, he looked like an albino praying mantis that just finished marching in a gay pride parade. He looked so “appealing” that an older gentleman approached the group, complimented Hawkeye on his “banana hammock,” and offered to buy the boys beers. With the clarity of a Dateline NBC fan, Trapper declined, and eventually led the Speedo-clad and highly inebriated Hawkeye back upstairs.
Given the competition, attracting attention in Vegas is not an easy job. Yet people in the casino stopped what they were doing to gawk at the man walking past them wearing oversize Ray Bans, socks, shoes, and a Michael Bolton shirt that nearly obscured his black Speedo. Yes, Hawkeye had decided to forgo his cargo shorts and walk back to the room as if he was the most carefree Continental European in the world. Hawkeye also began asking, loudly and repeatedly, “Why is it so hot in here? It’s not this hot in Tor-on-to!” Note that he is not from Toronto. He and Trapper entered the hotel elevator as a middle-aged man entered with his teenage kids. Hawkeye, louder than ever, asked, “Why is it so hot in here?”
The father looked at him and said, “Man, it doesn’t have to be that way. Just take off your shirt.”
I’m going to remember that one when I take TBD to Vegas.
We Are the Chosen People, Yo!
The tale and Hawkeye's IV finished, our hero removed himself to the bedroom where he passed out. We decided to hang out in the room, drink, and play music for a few hours. Tickle, Snake Anthony, Z, Trapper, and I then had the weirdest experience of the weekend: we got into a serious conversation about religion.
I don’t really know how it happened. One minute, Trapper (clad in merely his boxers) and Tickle (shirtless) were taking the gayest pictures I have ever seen two straight men take who weren’t being paid money. The next thing I knew, we were discussing Catholicism and what it took to get into heaven.
Tickle is the most religious out of the three of us. I am a believer but lazy and disillusioned with the Church. Snake Anthony is an agnostic. At one point, Tickle was explaining that he couldn’t believe Snake Anthony would not go to heaven, even if he didn’t believe in God, because Snake is a good person.
“Dude,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“What?” Tickle asked.
“We’re in Vegas,” I said. “Why are we talking about this?”
“Because I don’t get to see my brothers very often, and I want to have a real conversation with them.”
It’s a very odd day when I find myself asking Tickle to not be so deep.
Our religious exorcism must have cured the demons in Hawkeye, because he rose from his slumber, ready to commit mischief. We all decided to get cleaned up and hit the casino at a fashionably late 2:00 a.m. Little did we know our religious experience was not over.
A group of guys approached our roulette table. Group is not really the right word. Posse dorkitas might be the better phrase. They were led by a guy who looked like the president of Marshall Mathers fan club. His baggy clothes probably weighed as much as he did, and he wore a baseball cap high and crooked over his hair.
The table had hit black about a half dozen times in a row until our Beastie Boi showed up. He put a bunch of chips on red. It hit. He bet red again. It hit. “Back to back!” he said in a Modern Homeboy accent.
We couldn’t help but laugh. This guy was trying so hard to be street, but he didn’t look hard enough for Sesame Street. I halfway expected this to be a gag for some TV show. On the next spin, as the ball was going around, he reached out and took some of his chips off of red. The wheel hit black.
“You gotta manage yo’ money!” he said to us. “That’s what my people do.”
We looked at each other trying to understand what he meant. His people? Dorks? Caucasians? Caucasians shamelessly pillaging African American culture?
He must have sensed our confusion, because he turned his baseball cap around backwards. The back had a white, stitched Star of David on it.
We lost it. We started yelling “Back to back” and “Manage yo’ money!” with every spin. Unfortunately, our friend MC Dreidel didn’t find our humor too kosher, and he and his posse left in a bit of a huff for the craps table.
“I feel kind of bad,” I told Hawkeye, “they’re at the craps table like some kind of gambling diaspora.”
OH FACK!
Snake Anthony’s phone rang the next morning. I heard this sound on the other end of the receiver, like Charlie Brown’s teacher on meth after sucking an entire balloon’s worth of helium. It had to be Tickle.
Tickle had decided to talk in the same voice as the Eminem song, “Fack.” It’s a terrible song, which is probably why Tickle decided to do it. He kept his voice in a high, loud, nasal tone all morning.
“Do you guys want to eat?” I asked.
“YEAH, I’M FACKING HUNGRY” Tickle said.
“Stop talking like that.”
“LIKE WHAT? WHAT THE FACK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?”
Tickle, Snake, Z, and I went to the Spice Market Buffet at Planet Hollywood. Cruising the myriad options, Z stopped at the Middle Eastern section.
“They don’t have any lamb,” Z said.
“OH FACK!” Tickle said.
He increased to Category 5 obnoxiousness during lunch. At the table, just as Snake Anthony took a sip of his drink, Tickle said, “DRINK ALL YOUR PEPSI.” When I plopped a spoonful of ice cream into my mouth, Tickle observed, “YOU LIKE CHOCOLATE SAUCE ON YOUR ICE CREAM.”
After finishing our lunch and heading up the escalator, Tickle kept babbling a train of FACKs at Z. Without uttering a word, Z shoved Tickle against the wall, forcing him to slide against it all the way up from the buffet. “OW, FACK, THAT FACKING HURTS!”
Tickle thankfully collapsed when we got back to the room, but the damage was done. We all started saying FACK the rest of the weekend. In conversations, on the phone, in text messages. Everyone but Z. Even now, it randomly pops into my head.
Some days I really hate my brother.
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Thongs
That night, after another day of poker, I joined Trapper, Hawkeye, and Z for sushi at the restaurant inside the MGM. Looking over the menu, Hawkeye mentioned that the spicy tuna maki roll sounded good and he was going to get it.
“Would it be weird if I ordered the same thing you did?” I asked.
“No, not at all.”
Digging out my coyest voice, I said, “What if I said, ‘I’ll have what he’s having’?”
“Yes, that would be uncomfortable,” Hawkeye laughed.
I went first with my order. When the waitress turned to Hawkeye, he looked at me with and said, “I’ll have what he’s having.”
A bottle of saki and a giant Sapporo later, a group of young women entered the restaurant. The only real way to describe how they were dressed is hoochied. I don’t really know how else to label a skin-tight cheetah print dress or a black dress with a cleavage plunging like a Himalayan crevasse.
Hawkeye leaned in close to us. “I’ll bet at least one of those girls isn’t wearing underwear.” Trapper and I disagreed. Hawkeye took out a crisp Ben Franklin and handed it to Trapper. “Hundred bucks if you go over and prove they’re wearing underwear.”
Admittedly, it was a dick thing to interrupt some folks just having a nice dinner. I could tell Trapper didn’t really want to do it. But a hundred bucks is a hundred bucks, we had been drinking, and fuck it, we were in Vegas.
Polishing off the last of his drink, Trapper took the hundred and approached their table. He also demonstrated why he’s The Cleaner. Trapper is, simply put, the nice mischievous guy. He is happy to engage in these childish pranks, but he’s so friendly and disarming in the process that no one seems to mind. “Excuse me,” he said to the ladies. “I am so sorry to bug you and ask you this, but my friend bet me $100 and I had to take the bet.” He held up the Franklin to prove the veracity of his story. “He thinks at least one of you is not wearing underwear. I say that you are.”
Without missing a beat, one of the women said, “I’m so sorry, but your friend’s right.”
Trapper looked crushed. “You’re kidding?” he said.
She waited a beat before saying, “Yep, we are.” They all laughed, grabbed the sides of their dresses, and snapped the straps of their underwear to prove it. Chapman thanked them. The woman said, “You know, we’re impressed you had the balls to come over here and ask that.”
Never doubt the power of Trapper. He has a kavorka that ensnares men and women.
Brando II: Electric Boogaloo
We left to meet up with everyone else and close out our last night at the MGM’s dance club. Inside, the place was pretty hopping for a Monday night. I discovered that the club made an outstanding vodka gimlet—my drink of choice when I planned on having more than one. I began sucking gimlets down like gas was $2.00 a gallon and I was a Hummer.
At some point in the evening, Hawkeye had acquired a plastic scooper, like a sugar scooper for baking. I have no idea where he got or what possessed him to have it, but he carried it around in his shirt pocket for the entire evening, pulling it out to scoop alcohol from other people’s drinks. He whipped it out and took a sample of my gimlet. He nodded in pleasure, took another sip, and left to sample drinks from anyone who would let him sip from their cups.
We made our way to the dance floor. With my dancing hesitation broken earlier that weekend and my feet heavily lubricated with drink, I began busting my moves. It should have stopped there. However, the club had these platforms you could dance on—about the size and height of a large, square coffee table. I don’t know if it was the liquor or Vegas or maybe pre-parental ya yas that I just had to get out, but before I knew it, my feet were on the platform. I was table dancing.
And not just dancing. I turned into Trapper from our visit to Vegas last fall. I moved with the sweet, blissful ignorance of Elaine Benes at an office party. More importantly, I beckoned anyone and everyone to join me. Women, men, the guys I knew, perfect strangers, it mattered not. I wiggled my finger to invite them and pointed to the empty spot on the table where they could dance. Most looked at me with the skepticism reserved for strange men offering candy from unmarked conversion vans. Others declined amid their laughter. But damn if several didn’t climb up and dance.
The boys were enjoying the show. At one point I saw Snake Anthony and Tickle, looking at me and laughing in disbelief. I gave them a thumbs up and kept dancing. I felt a kind of power. Here I was, setting dancing back hundreds of thousands of years, yet through the sheer combination of total conviction and not giving a fuck, I got other people to join. This was so not me, and not being me felt pretty good.
It wasn’t until I stopped dancing and discovered that English had become my second language after gibberish that I realized the true source of my power. Courage, thy name is alcohol. Even in my drunken state, I was thankful no one had filmed it. I would have been less embarrassed to admit I was a 40-year old virgin.
It’s not a Trip to Vegas Until You Lose Your Pants and/or Appendix
Nine a.m. came entirely too early the next day. I opened a bleary, bloodshot eye, believing that the whole evening had been a dream. Until Snake Anthony saw me and said, “Oh my God!”
FACK!
We both got ready, packed, and headed to the airport. A text from Tickle informed us that a) Trapper and Hawkeye had missed their flight, b) Tickle had barely made his, and c) he had left half his clothes in the dresser and closet.
“Shit,” I said. “I forgot my pants, too.” I had neglected to check the closet and left my best pair of pants hanging. Snake Anthony realized he’d left his pants in there as well. And there’s nothing like coming home to your pregnant wife from a bachelor party in Vegas to tell her you’re missing a pair of pants.
Our loss paled in comparison to Tickle’s the following weekend, when my brother went to the hospital with terrible stomach pains. It turns out The People’s Champ had a loser of an appendix and had to have it out.
After finding out he was okay, I said, “It’s a good thing it didn’t happen in Vegas.”
“I know, that would have been terrible.”
“Although at least you would have had two doctors and plenty of IVs,” I said.
“True,” Tickle said. “FACK.”
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Top Ten Tuesdays: How do we know we're not in a recession?
10) eBay bidding has been brisk on our kidneys.
9) Government continues to give us free airfare and ammo to go abroad.
8) Only had to lease children to science.
7) After cutting him open, Alan Greenspan’s intestines said no recession.
6) Managed to keep home when the mortgage company couldn’t pay for our foreclosure.
5) Future is so bright, we told Microsoft to search for blow it out your USB port.
4) If it was a recession, we'd be making less than we did in 2001, not the same amount, silly.
3) Seeing robust growth in the fry, shake, and waistline sectors.
2) It ain’t a recession until The Decider decides it’s a recession.
1) Recessions are for the poor, old chap.
9) Government continues to give us free airfare and ammo to go abroad.
8) Only had to lease children to science.
7) After cutting him open, Alan Greenspan’s intestines said no recession.
6) Managed to keep home when the mortgage company couldn’t pay for our foreclosure.
5) Future is so bright, we told Microsoft to search for blow it out your USB port.
4) If it was a recession, we'd be making less than we did in 2001, not the same amount, silly.
3) Seeing robust growth in the fry, shake, and waistline sectors.
2) It ain’t a recession until The Decider decides it’s a recession.
1) Recessions are for the poor, old chap.
Sunday, May 04, 2008
Friday Random 11: The Significant 22, Part 2
I didn’t think that, when I decided to write about the 22 significant songs in my life, it would be so significant to me. It started out as a fun little “greatest hits” exercise, and I figured the hardest part would be trying to keep the list to 22 songs. I didn’t expect it to turn into music therapy. Figuring out why I chose these songs made me look at where I’m at in my life, how I got here, and what I’ve learned about myself along the way. I hope this little couch trip has been entertaining and hasn’t made anyone feel like they should be charging $200 per hour to listen to this.
So here we go, the most significant 11 songs in my life.
11) “I Should've Known,” Aimee Mann. For a long time, I was kind of sexist about my musical tastes. It’s not that I wouldn’t listen to female artists—I had a number that I liked very much. It’s just that, when push came to shove, I didn’t really take them as seriously as male artists. Early on in my music fandom, this had more to do with female musicians not engaging in the pseudo-masturbatory fretboard wankery aimed directly at teenage boys. But my bias didn’t really change even when my musical horizons widened.
Aimee Mann changed that. I liked her work in Til Tuesday, thanks to The Lovely Becky’s inclusion of those songs on our mix tapes, and Mann got dork props by appearing on Rush’s “Time Stand Still.” Her first solo album, Whatever, turned mild appreciation into revelation. From the chorus of this impeccable pop song, she not only grabbed my attention, she made me realize that I had viewed female artists differently. That in turn got me thinking about how I felt about women in general. I’ve always believed in female equality, but I hadn’t really treated female songs, movies, books, and art equally. By recognizing how great Aimee Mann was, I realized how subtle that bias could be.
That’s a pretty big revelation to get from a five-minute pop song, and that’s why Aimee Mann is on this list. I also apologize in advance for the rest of this list being a sausage fest.
10) “In Between Days,” The Cure. As I wallowed in a miasma of guitar solos and double-bass drums and fantasy concept albums, I attended a Southern California high school that was all Boingo and Depeche Mode and The Cure. My friends listened to that stuff and mocked my appreciation for hard rock. That made me sink my heels in deeper to my metal dragon mount and ignore the wider world of pop music.
One day, talking to my friend from junior high school, Tom—a fellow brother in Rush and my former Dungeon Master—he mentioned that he had started listening to The Cure. I was all, No way. And he was like, Way. Had he been replaced by some Dep’d, cargo-pants-wearing pod person? Or did The Cure really not suck? I set out on my fact-finding mission by borrowing a copy of Standing on a Beach, throwing the tape into my stereo with skepticism stiffer than Robert Smith’s bangs.
Not only did it not suck, I found myself enjoying what I heard. When “In Between Days” played, I stopped the tape, rewound it, and played it again. And again. I loved this song. It was emotional and mopey like I expected, but catchy and even a little rocking. I made a copy of the tape and played it to death for the rest of the year, bought Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me when it came out, and even wound up seeing them in concert when I was visiting Tom.
No other song expanded my musical horizons like this one. It opened my ears to music I never would have tried.
Except for Boingo and Depeche Mode. They can still suck it.
9) “Pretty Vacant,” The Sex Pistols. Punk was a natural progression for me after The Cure, because at least punk was loud and heavy like my beloved heavy metal. My first punk exposure was The Ramones, who I liked very much. They were catchy, funny, and so dumb they were clever.
It was The Sex Pistols, though, that made me a punk fan. I knew plenty about the Pistols, but had never heard a single song until my friend lent me his copy of Never Mind the Bollocks my senior year of high school. I expected the Pistols to sound more like the discordant hardcore punk that the Pistols inspired. I was shocked to find that these were real songs, with memorable choruses and words you could decipher. Yet they also had the power of a Doc Martin kick to the head. I couldn’t get over the fury of this record. I had heard political music before, but not like this. “Holidays in the Sun” and “Pretty Vacant” in particular stuck with me, and I wound up with a new set of air guitar heroes. This in turn led to....
8) “Complete Control,” The Clash. I got into The Clash via the most un-punk manner possible: I checked out the best-of The Story of the Clash, Vol. 1 from the library. I wasn’t even wearing any safety pins when I showed my library card.
As much as I liked the Pistols, The Clash took my appreciation for punk to a whole other level. They had the same fury, but it was more focused, more meaningful. There was construction among the destruction. Unlike the Pistols or Ramones or most other punk groups, The Clash grew with me. Over the years as I played their albums, I’d pick up new nuances I’d missed: lyrical meanings or instrumental flourishes. The Ramones and The Pistols and most other punk groups were moments in time. The Clash were timeless.
The Clash became even more important to me as my political views changed in college, especially when I went to graduate school. There I was, studying American history and questioning a lot of what I had learned growing up. Here were The Clash, challenging what they had been taught. Even though this song is about the record industry and the punk movement, the idea of throwing off those who would control you meant a lot to me, because I had to cast off a lot of preconceptions to get to the place where I could think for myself. The fact that they put that message in a fiery, classic bit of punk rock made that lesson stick.
7) “Hammerless Nail,” New Bomb Turks. Of course, some songs stick with you because they perfectly capture a moment in time. That’s what this hyperfast bit of Columbus, Ohio, punk does for me.
I was living in New York City when this came out, just getting started in the working world and married life. Married life was easy, as it always has been with TLB. I also loved being in the Big Apple. The buzzing guitar in this song reminds me of getting out of work on a nice day and walking around Manhattan, soaking up the hustle and bustle of the big city.
But then there was working and what I wanted to do. My original plan had been to get a Ph.D. in history and become an academic. Seven rejection letters from the programs I wanted to attend got in the way of that. TLB already had a job in New York, so I hit the pavement and got what seemed like a dream job, working for the history editor at a publishing house. I got to talk to scholars I really respected and I liked the people I worked with a lot. I envisioned myself becoming an editor, and for a while, I was happy.
Unfortunately, I found that to be an editor, you had to like working with authors. Most of them were great, but the ones that weren’t ground on my nerves like nails on a chalkboard. They were needy, they were arrogant, they were demanding. Over time, they wore me down. The final straw came when I worked with a very talented but very difficult author. He had a touch of Ken Burnsitis, a rock-star mania gripping historians who had appeared in a Burns documentary, as he had. To be fair, he was writing a big, important, and widely acclaimed book. But he also wanted to be treated like a big, important, widely acclaimed scholar, before he had achieved any of those things. One request had been a research assistant to help him sort through hundreds of photo choices for the book. We didn’t have the budget for that, but in the spirit of soothing his ego, I volunteered to come over on a Saturday and help him out.
I showed up at his apartment on a hot summer day, where he greeted me shirtless. I sat on the floor and began going through hundreds of photocopies of photos and artwork, while he worked on the book. Halfway through, he excused himself, and suddenly his wife entered. She had this pixieish presence, with a very girlish voice and ethereal way of speaking. She proceeded to tell me how great he was and how important his work was and that we should do everything we could to make this book a success.
I thought, why the fuck do you think I’m here working with your husband on a fucking Saturday? Of course, what came out was a completely polite acknowledgement of his greatness, which made me hate myself even more. I decided to cash out my chips. Not only would I quit my pursuit as an editor, but to leave New York altogether. I needed a new change, and a move and career change seemed like the perfect elixir to cure my blahs.
But there’s a line in this song that captured another, key part of the story: Avoidance is my stock in trade, I do it almost every day, til the days go by in a haze of okays.
TLB and I left for Chicago, I got out of editing, and I started over. I went into marketing and advertising, and for a while I was happy. Until I started getting annoyed with clients, with some of the idiotic products I had to promote, with....sound familiar? As much as leaving New York and editorial work was the right move, my motivations were all wrong. I was naive and foolish for thinking a simple change of career and locale would magically cure my ennui. I realized that there has always been a large part of it’s not you, it’s me when it comes to my happiness, and that for every external thing bringing me down, there’s usually something internal acting as an accomplice. This song always brings that lesson home.
6) “That’s Entertainment,” The Jam. I am an Anglophile. I have been ever since I first saw Monty Python. But even more than my sense of humor, my taste in music tends to favor the British. Which is why one of my favorite bands is arguably the biggest British band to never make it in the states.
Along with The Clash, The Jam were one of the few early punk bands that managed to mature and change their sound without losing their edge. They kept the youthful energy and anger that led them to start playing music in the first place, but found new, more mature ways to express those feelings. This song is a perfect example. It’s acoustic, it’s quiet, it’s pretty slow. Yet it captures the disillusionment and discontent of its surroundings better than faster, louder, and snottier songs. I was always impressed at how The Jam pulled that off, and it showed me in my own work that you don’t have to hit someone over the head to kick them in the balls.
5) “Cut Your Hair,” Pavement. Oh, sweet irony, where would I be without thee? I have admittedly kind of grown out of Pavement, but they hit me hard at the right time. I had not, before buying Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, listened to music that was clever and funny. The clever stuff was usually serious, and the funny stuff tended to be a tad crude (like David Lee Roth).
Pavement managed to be both. I loved the wordplay, the jokes, the we’re-trying-so-hard-to-look-like-we’re-not-trying vibe. They were one of the first bands where I paid more attention to the lyrics than the music. This song in particular captured them at their best: writing a perfectly crafted pop song that skewers the industry that creates pop songs. If you didn’t listen closely, you could easily miss the joke. That’s the key ingredient in all great satire, and it’s the model I try to follow when I write.
4) “Valentine’s Day,” Bob Hillman. This song is Iowa City for me. I met Bob the second year TLB and I lived in The IC. He was a fellow Wouse—Workshop spouse—who came to Iowa so his significant other could attend the Writer’s Workshop. We went to see him play a local club. From the moment he started playing, I dug the cleverness, catchiness, and craft of his songs. He closed with this number, a song that should have been huge, a song that should have been used in a movie where John Cusack realizes what an ass he’s been and that he has to drop everything right now and go get that girl.
Bob and I became friends, and while I’ve always enjoyed his music, it’s taken on a different meaning for me since we left. When TLB and I came to Iowa City, we were both in transition. Moving to Chicago had been very beneficial in a lot of ways, but we weren’t really satisfied, especially TLB. The specter of infertility was already haunting us, and TLB in particular was being ground down by white-collar life. What we found in Iowa City—and what we needed even more than we knew at the time—was a community of great people who were in flux just like we were. On many an occasion, we all met up to watch Bob play a show and then drink with him afterward, talking about music and politics and writing. It was like being in college again, only now I wasn’t broke and had at least a clue of what I was doing.
I was very sad that our time there had to end, even though that was the natural order of things. But now when I play this song, I think of those nights and how happy I was that TLB and I took the plunge to move there. Even though I wish Bob had hit it huge and made enough money to buy Bushwood, there’s a selfish part that’s glad I don’t have to share my little memento of Iowa City with millions of other people. Although John Cusack really should use this in a movie.
(If you like the samples on Amazon, you can buy CDs directly from Bob.)
3) “I Am a Scientist,” Guided by Voices. Robert Pollard, the guiding force of Guided by Voices, was 37 when he became an indie rock star. He went from being a grade school teacher in Dayton to a rock savior, a guy melding British Invasion pop with the surreal creativity of Peter Gabriel-era Genesis, all of it recorded with on cheap home equipment that made the songs that much more immediate and personal. No other songwriter of the last 20 years has cranked out as many gems as he has. If he had been from Athens or Austin and ten years younger when he was “discovered,” he would have been a household name.
More than being a great songwriter, he’s been an inspiration. Like I said, Pollard was already an old man in the rock game when he hit it big enough to quit his day job. By the time I saw GbV live for the first time, he was graying and well on the other side of 40. Instead of playing a cozy, VH1 Storytellers type of set that would have been age-appropriate, Pollard and has band of elder musicians proceeded to plug in, drink up, and rock out for three hours like they were 18.
It blew me away. As I’ve amply documented, I have had many self-imposed hang-ups about getting older, about making it as a writer, about being a success. When I started listening to GbV and especially after seeing them live, I realized how much unnecessary bullshit I had piled onto my psyche. None of that stuff mattered. If you wanted to create, create whatever you wanted, no matter how weird it was or how long it took. If somebody else dug it, great, if not, it didn’t matter as long as you were having fun. And if you kept working and kept having fun and stayed true to yourself, you might someday craft a two-minute diamond of a song that breaks you through long after most people thought you'd broken up.
2) “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” The Who. Most of these songs, while great on their own, are here for personal reasons. This song is here because it’s the greatest rock and roll song ever recorded, at least in my humble non-Rolling Stone opinion. It captures, as Spinal Tap would say, the majesty of rock and the mystery of roll. Epic, angry, amplified, political, and personal, it’s the rock anthem to end all rock anthems.
I see Pete Townsend as rock’s Shakespeare, the man who managed to be both accessible and wildly popular while keeping his work complex, deep, and adventurous. Imagine a song today being nearly nine minutes and featuring a long instrumental break in the middle becoming not just a huge hit, but one of the great songs of its age. Imagine the same song being unabashedly political, and yet being meaningful to liberals and conservatives. Now imagine that song being so timeless that it always seems appropriate, not matter how much things change or how much they stay the same.
It’s a case study of why breaking all the rules is necessary if you want to create something lasting, powerful, and original. And when I think of rock and roll, I think of this song.
And now, the number one...could I have a drum solo please....
1) “Walking on Sunshine,” Katrina and the Waves. The beauty of pop music is that it can say so much while still getting you to tap your feet. This ostensibly simple song is really an exploration of humanity’s place in the universe, grooving between the dark nihilism of Nietzsche and the blind faith of evangelicalism. The rhetorical and don’t it feel good? of the chorus challenges us to define good on our own terms, to find our own rays of sunshine on which we can walk toward perfect consciousness. Plus it kicks the crap out of Belle and Sebastian.
Okay, okay, the completely obvious number one....
1) “Tom Sawyer,” Rush. I have been a Rush fan for 26 of the 37 years I’ve been alive. In that time, I have loved and left a lot of bands. Being a creature of lists, I always have a running Top 5 bands in my head. Not only has Rush always been on that list, they have always been at the top of the list. Why?
The honest answer is I don’t really know. They tend to be a polarizing band. Their lyrics could be preachy and corny. Geddy Lee’s voice could range into dog whistle territory. In their efforts to evolve with the changing tide of music, they could do things like rap. Believe me, I know the criticisms of Rush much, much better than the critics of Rush.
Here’s the thing, though: Rush is the soundtrack of my life. When I heard "Tom Sawyer" and started listening to them, my family started moving around a lot because my father went back into the military full time. I continued those itinerant ways after I left college and got married. I’ve had arguably two constants amid all that flux: an enjoyment of boners and an appreciation for Rush. While most boners tend to blur into one lifelong erection, I can pop in any Rush album, play any song, and recall exactly what was going on in my life at that time. Not only can I not do that with any other band, I can’t do that with any other thing.
What’s more, their music lets me be a kid and grow up at the same time. They’ve changed their approach to music over time, leaving behind some of the youthful excess to craft more mature music. But even though they shortened their songs and Geddy Lee’s voice re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, Rush still retain a geeky adolescent energy, full of drum fills and guitar solos and screeching vocals about dystopian futures and adventures through black holes. They never lost what made them Rush in the first place.
More than anything else, that’s the lesson I have taken out of my love of rock music. I am going to grow up and mature and change. In fact, I should embrace those changes instead of fearing them and fighting them. But I should never, ever forget why I became a rock fan in the first place, and I should always keep this fountain of youth around, so that even as I get older, I never get old.
* * *
These two posts on these 22 songs have been the culmination of the Friday Random 11. I started writing music posts because I wanted to not only express my passion for rock, but challenge myself to express that passion in a creative ways. Since I started doing this in January 2007, I’ve written more than 42,000 words on my music collection.
That’s why, at least for now, I’m going to retire the Random 11 with this post. It’s been a great writing exercise for me—every week, I never knew what I’d write about, and it was really fun to find patterns in seemingly random songs. But I want to get back to writing more original material, and having one extra Friday a week to do that will help. I hope you enjoyed reading all those words as much as I did writing them.
So here we go, the most significant 11 songs in my life.
11) “I Should've Known,” Aimee Mann. For a long time, I was kind of sexist about my musical tastes. It’s not that I wouldn’t listen to female artists—I had a number that I liked very much. It’s just that, when push came to shove, I didn’t really take them as seriously as male artists. Early on in my music fandom, this had more to do with female musicians not engaging in the pseudo-masturbatory fretboard wankery aimed directly at teenage boys. But my bias didn’t really change even when my musical horizons widened.
Aimee Mann changed that. I liked her work in Til Tuesday, thanks to The Lovely Becky’s inclusion of those songs on our mix tapes, and Mann got dork props by appearing on Rush’s “Time Stand Still.” Her first solo album, Whatever, turned mild appreciation into revelation. From the chorus of this impeccable pop song, she not only grabbed my attention, she made me realize that I had viewed female artists differently. That in turn got me thinking about how I felt about women in general. I’ve always believed in female equality, but I hadn’t really treated female songs, movies, books, and art equally. By recognizing how great Aimee Mann was, I realized how subtle that bias could be.
That’s a pretty big revelation to get from a five-minute pop song, and that’s why Aimee Mann is on this list. I also apologize in advance for the rest of this list being a sausage fest.
10) “In Between Days,” The Cure. As I wallowed in a miasma of guitar solos and double-bass drums and fantasy concept albums, I attended a Southern California high school that was all Boingo and Depeche Mode and The Cure. My friends listened to that stuff and mocked my appreciation for hard rock. That made me sink my heels in deeper to my metal dragon mount and ignore the wider world of pop music.
One day, talking to my friend from junior high school, Tom—a fellow brother in Rush and my former Dungeon Master—he mentioned that he had started listening to The Cure. I was all, No way. And he was like, Way. Had he been replaced by some Dep’d, cargo-pants-wearing pod person? Or did The Cure really not suck? I set out on my fact-finding mission by borrowing a copy of Standing on a Beach, throwing the tape into my stereo with skepticism stiffer than Robert Smith’s bangs.
Not only did it not suck, I found myself enjoying what I heard. When “In Between Days” played, I stopped the tape, rewound it, and played it again. And again. I loved this song. It was emotional and mopey like I expected, but catchy and even a little rocking. I made a copy of the tape and played it to death for the rest of the year, bought Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me when it came out, and even wound up seeing them in concert when I was visiting Tom.
No other song expanded my musical horizons like this one. It opened my ears to music I never would have tried.
Except for Boingo and Depeche Mode. They can still suck it.
9) “Pretty Vacant,” The Sex Pistols. Punk was a natural progression for me after The Cure, because at least punk was loud and heavy like my beloved heavy metal. My first punk exposure was The Ramones, who I liked very much. They were catchy, funny, and so dumb they were clever.
It was The Sex Pistols, though, that made me a punk fan. I knew plenty about the Pistols, but had never heard a single song until my friend lent me his copy of Never Mind the Bollocks my senior year of high school. I expected the Pistols to sound more like the discordant hardcore punk that the Pistols inspired. I was shocked to find that these were real songs, with memorable choruses and words you could decipher. Yet they also had the power of a Doc Martin kick to the head. I couldn’t get over the fury of this record. I had heard political music before, but not like this. “Holidays in the Sun” and “Pretty Vacant” in particular stuck with me, and I wound up with a new set of air guitar heroes. This in turn led to....
8) “Complete Control,” The Clash. I got into The Clash via the most un-punk manner possible: I checked out the best-of The Story of the Clash, Vol. 1 from the library. I wasn’t even wearing any safety pins when I showed my library card.
As much as I liked the Pistols, The Clash took my appreciation for punk to a whole other level. They had the same fury, but it was more focused, more meaningful. There was construction among the destruction. Unlike the Pistols or Ramones or most other punk groups, The Clash grew with me. Over the years as I played their albums, I’d pick up new nuances I’d missed: lyrical meanings or instrumental flourishes. The Ramones and The Pistols and most other punk groups were moments in time. The Clash were timeless.
The Clash became even more important to me as my political views changed in college, especially when I went to graduate school. There I was, studying American history and questioning a lot of what I had learned growing up. Here were The Clash, challenging what they had been taught. Even though this song is about the record industry and the punk movement, the idea of throwing off those who would control you meant a lot to me, because I had to cast off a lot of preconceptions to get to the place where I could think for myself. The fact that they put that message in a fiery, classic bit of punk rock made that lesson stick.
7) “Hammerless Nail,” New Bomb Turks. Of course, some songs stick with you because they perfectly capture a moment in time. That’s what this hyperfast bit of Columbus, Ohio, punk does for me.
I was living in New York City when this came out, just getting started in the working world and married life. Married life was easy, as it always has been with TLB. I also loved being in the Big Apple. The buzzing guitar in this song reminds me of getting out of work on a nice day and walking around Manhattan, soaking up the hustle and bustle of the big city.
But then there was working and what I wanted to do. My original plan had been to get a Ph.D. in history and become an academic. Seven rejection letters from the programs I wanted to attend got in the way of that. TLB already had a job in New York, so I hit the pavement and got what seemed like a dream job, working for the history editor at a publishing house. I got to talk to scholars I really respected and I liked the people I worked with a lot. I envisioned myself becoming an editor, and for a while, I was happy.
Unfortunately, I found that to be an editor, you had to like working with authors. Most of them were great, but the ones that weren’t ground on my nerves like nails on a chalkboard. They were needy, they were arrogant, they were demanding. Over time, they wore me down. The final straw came when I worked with a very talented but very difficult author. He had a touch of Ken Burnsitis, a rock-star mania gripping historians who had appeared in a Burns documentary, as he had. To be fair, he was writing a big, important, and widely acclaimed book. But he also wanted to be treated like a big, important, widely acclaimed scholar, before he had achieved any of those things. One request had been a research assistant to help him sort through hundreds of photo choices for the book. We didn’t have the budget for that, but in the spirit of soothing his ego, I volunteered to come over on a Saturday and help him out.
I showed up at his apartment on a hot summer day, where he greeted me shirtless. I sat on the floor and began going through hundreds of photocopies of photos and artwork, while he worked on the book. Halfway through, he excused himself, and suddenly his wife entered. She had this pixieish presence, with a very girlish voice and ethereal way of speaking. She proceeded to tell me how great he was and how important his work was and that we should do everything we could to make this book a success.
I thought, why the fuck do you think I’m here working with your husband on a fucking Saturday? Of course, what came out was a completely polite acknowledgement of his greatness, which made me hate myself even more. I decided to cash out my chips. Not only would I quit my pursuit as an editor, but to leave New York altogether. I needed a new change, and a move and career change seemed like the perfect elixir to cure my blahs.
But there’s a line in this song that captured another, key part of the story: Avoidance is my stock in trade, I do it almost every day, til the days go by in a haze of okays.
TLB and I left for Chicago, I got out of editing, and I started over. I went into marketing and advertising, and for a while I was happy. Until I started getting annoyed with clients, with some of the idiotic products I had to promote, with....sound familiar? As much as leaving New York and editorial work was the right move, my motivations were all wrong. I was naive and foolish for thinking a simple change of career and locale would magically cure my ennui. I realized that there has always been a large part of it’s not you, it’s me when it comes to my happiness, and that for every external thing bringing me down, there’s usually something internal acting as an accomplice. This song always brings that lesson home.
6) “That’s Entertainment,” The Jam. I am an Anglophile. I have been ever since I first saw Monty Python. But even more than my sense of humor, my taste in music tends to favor the British. Which is why one of my favorite bands is arguably the biggest British band to never make it in the states.
Along with The Clash, The Jam were one of the few early punk bands that managed to mature and change their sound without losing their edge. They kept the youthful energy and anger that led them to start playing music in the first place, but found new, more mature ways to express those feelings. This song is a perfect example. It’s acoustic, it’s quiet, it’s pretty slow. Yet it captures the disillusionment and discontent of its surroundings better than faster, louder, and snottier songs. I was always impressed at how The Jam pulled that off, and it showed me in my own work that you don’t have to hit someone over the head to kick them in the balls.
5) “Cut Your Hair,” Pavement. Oh, sweet irony, where would I be without thee? I have admittedly kind of grown out of Pavement, but they hit me hard at the right time. I had not, before buying Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, listened to music that was clever and funny. The clever stuff was usually serious, and the funny stuff tended to be a tad crude (like David Lee Roth).
Pavement managed to be both. I loved the wordplay, the jokes, the we’re-trying-so-hard-to-look-like-we’re-not-trying vibe. They were one of the first bands where I paid more attention to the lyrics than the music. This song in particular captured them at their best: writing a perfectly crafted pop song that skewers the industry that creates pop songs. If you didn’t listen closely, you could easily miss the joke. That’s the key ingredient in all great satire, and it’s the model I try to follow when I write.
4) “Valentine’s Day,” Bob Hillman. This song is Iowa City for me. I met Bob the second year TLB and I lived in The IC. He was a fellow Wouse—Workshop spouse—who came to Iowa so his significant other could attend the Writer’s Workshop. We went to see him play a local club. From the moment he started playing, I dug the cleverness, catchiness, and craft of his songs. He closed with this number, a song that should have been huge, a song that should have been used in a movie where John Cusack realizes what an ass he’s been and that he has to drop everything right now and go get that girl.
Bob and I became friends, and while I’ve always enjoyed his music, it’s taken on a different meaning for me since we left. When TLB and I came to Iowa City, we were both in transition. Moving to Chicago had been very beneficial in a lot of ways, but we weren’t really satisfied, especially TLB. The specter of infertility was already haunting us, and TLB in particular was being ground down by white-collar life. What we found in Iowa City—and what we needed even more than we knew at the time—was a community of great people who were in flux just like we were. On many an occasion, we all met up to watch Bob play a show and then drink with him afterward, talking about music and politics and writing. It was like being in college again, only now I wasn’t broke and had at least a clue of what I was doing.
I was very sad that our time there had to end, even though that was the natural order of things. But now when I play this song, I think of those nights and how happy I was that TLB and I took the plunge to move there. Even though I wish Bob had hit it huge and made enough money to buy Bushwood, there’s a selfish part that’s glad I don’t have to share my little memento of Iowa City with millions of other people. Although John Cusack really should use this in a movie.
(If you like the samples on Amazon, you can buy CDs directly from Bob.)
3) “I Am a Scientist,” Guided by Voices. Robert Pollard, the guiding force of Guided by Voices, was 37 when he became an indie rock star. He went from being a grade school teacher in Dayton to a rock savior, a guy melding British Invasion pop with the surreal creativity of Peter Gabriel-era Genesis, all of it recorded with on cheap home equipment that made the songs that much more immediate and personal. No other songwriter of the last 20 years has cranked out as many gems as he has. If he had been from Athens or Austin and ten years younger when he was “discovered,” he would have been a household name.
More than being a great songwriter, he’s been an inspiration. Like I said, Pollard was already an old man in the rock game when he hit it big enough to quit his day job. By the time I saw GbV live for the first time, he was graying and well on the other side of 40. Instead of playing a cozy, VH1 Storytellers type of set that would have been age-appropriate, Pollard and has band of elder musicians proceeded to plug in, drink up, and rock out for three hours like they were 18.
It blew me away. As I’ve amply documented, I have had many self-imposed hang-ups about getting older, about making it as a writer, about being a success. When I started listening to GbV and especially after seeing them live, I realized how much unnecessary bullshit I had piled onto my psyche. None of that stuff mattered. If you wanted to create, create whatever you wanted, no matter how weird it was or how long it took. If somebody else dug it, great, if not, it didn’t matter as long as you were having fun. And if you kept working and kept having fun and stayed true to yourself, you might someday craft a two-minute diamond of a song that breaks you through long after most people thought you'd broken up.
2) “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” The Who. Most of these songs, while great on their own, are here for personal reasons. This song is here because it’s the greatest rock and roll song ever recorded, at least in my humble non-Rolling Stone opinion. It captures, as Spinal Tap would say, the majesty of rock and the mystery of roll. Epic, angry, amplified, political, and personal, it’s the rock anthem to end all rock anthems.
I see Pete Townsend as rock’s Shakespeare, the man who managed to be both accessible and wildly popular while keeping his work complex, deep, and adventurous. Imagine a song today being nearly nine minutes and featuring a long instrumental break in the middle becoming not just a huge hit, but one of the great songs of its age. Imagine the same song being unabashedly political, and yet being meaningful to liberals and conservatives. Now imagine that song being so timeless that it always seems appropriate, not matter how much things change or how much they stay the same.
It’s a case study of why breaking all the rules is necessary if you want to create something lasting, powerful, and original. And when I think of rock and roll, I think of this song.
And now, the number one...could I have a drum solo please....
1) “Walking on Sunshine,” Katrina and the Waves. The beauty of pop music is that it can say so much while still getting you to tap your feet. This ostensibly simple song is really an exploration of humanity’s place in the universe, grooving between the dark nihilism of Nietzsche and the blind faith of evangelicalism. The rhetorical and don’t it feel good? of the chorus challenges us to define good on our own terms, to find our own rays of sunshine on which we can walk toward perfect consciousness. Plus it kicks the crap out of Belle and Sebastian.
Okay, okay, the completely obvious number one....
1) “Tom Sawyer,” Rush. I have been a Rush fan for 26 of the 37 years I’ve been alive. In that time, I have loved and left a lot of bands. Being a creature of lists, I always have a running Top 5 bands in my head. Not only has Rush always been on that list, they have always been at the top of the list. Why?
The honest answer is I don’t really know. They tend to be a polarizing band. Their lyrics could be preachy and corny. Geddy Lee’s voice could range into dog whistle territory. In their efforts to evolve with the changing tide of music, they could do things like rap. Believe me, I know the criticisms of Rush much, much better than the critics of Rush.
Here’s the thing, though: Rush is the soundtrack of my life. When I heard "Tom Sawyer" and started listening to them, my family started moving around a lot because my father went back into the military full time. I continued those itinerant ways after I left college and got married. I’ve had arguably two constants amid all that flux: an enjoyment of boners and an appreciation for Rush. While most boners tend to blur into one lifelong erection, I can pop in any Rush album, play any song, and recall exactly what was going on in my life at that time. Not only can I not do that with any other band, I can’t do that with any other thing.
What’s more, their music lets me be a kid and grow up at the same time. They’ve changed their approach to music over time, leaving behind some of the youthful excess to craft more mature music. But even though they shortened their songs and Geddy Lee’s voice re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, Rush still retain a geeky adolescent energy, full of drum fills and guitar solos and screeching vocals about dystopian futures and adventures through black holes. They never lost what made them Rush in the first place.
More than anything else, that’s the lesson I have taken out of my love of rock music. I am going to grow up and mature and change. In fact, I should embrace those changes instead of fearing them and fighting them. But I should never, ever forget why I became a rock fan in the first place, and I should always keep this fountain of youth around, so that even as I get older, I never get old.
* * *
These two posts on these 22 songs have been the culmination of the Friday Random 11. I started writing music posts because I wanted to not only express my passion for rock, but challenge myself to express that passion in a creative ways. Since I started doing this in January 2007, I’ve written more than 42,000 words on my music collection.
That’s why, at least for now, I’m going to retire the Random 11 with this post. It’s been a great writing exercise for me—every week, I never knew what I’d write about, and it was really fun to find patterns in seemingly random songs. But I want to get back to writing more original material, and having one extra Friday a week to do that will help. I hope you enjoyed reading all those words as much as I did writing them.
Friday, May 02, 2008
Embarassing personal revelations still to come
I had hoped to finish either the Vegas recap or the second half of the Significant 22 songs by this morning, but I'm playing catch up this week on work and sleep. They are both mostly written, so I will definitely finish both this weekend.
Thanks to everyone for the blogoversary wishes. Hard to believe I've been doing this for three years already.
Thanks to everyone for the blogoversary wishes. Hard to believe I've been doing this for three years already.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Top Ten Tuesdays: Why are we still blogging?
Today is the third anniversary of Circle Jerk at the Square Dance. When I started this blog, I never gave any thought to how long I would do it. I figured as long as I had dick jokes to tell stuff to write about, I would keep posting.
Now, though, some fine blog friends have questioned their very bloggy existences. It’s a crisis I know well. There have been times when I have thought about ending the blog. I am certainly grateful that fun, entertaining people find my writing fun and entertaining. But with an audience comes expectation, and expectation brings pressure to produce something for that audience that’s worth their time and attention. Sometimes, because of pressures external and internal, that can feel like a real challenge. Even though my blog is quite unserious, I take my blogging very seriously.
Luckily, every time I get that sapped feeling, it doesn’t last long. Maybe that lack of inspiration makes me look harder for something to write about. Maybe the pressures of work or personal life or whatever make me appreciate that I have a creative outlet right at my fingertips. Before I know it, I’m writing again and laughing as I type. And despite relishing the feedback of my audience, I know the first person I have to entertain is me. I hope I’ve done the same for all of you, and appreciate everyone who has ever popped into my humble abode here on the Internets.
On to the Top Ten topic: Why are still blogging?
10) Much better drunken creative outlet than writing name in the snow.
9) Employer refuses to let us use LOLCAT in client presentations.
8) Want children to understand why daddy drinks.
7) Have to alert the world that Chocolate Skittles are people! They’re people!
6) Only way to have a relationship with an adorable girlfriend without violating marriage vows.
5) Saturn doesn’t give cars to just anyone who wants to drive around the country.
4) Someone has to write down what the squirrels are muttering.
3) Mom still can’t find the key to the basement.
2) Because in the Blogosphere, no one can write you a rejection letter.
1) Praise from anonymous readers is the new cocaine.
A post about this past weekend’s Vegas trip will be forthcoming. No pants were soiled, but they were certainly removed. Repeatedly.
Now, though, some fine blog friends have questioned their very bloggy existences. It’s a crisis I know well. There have been times when I have thought about ending the blog. I am certainly grateful that fun, entertaining people find my writing fun and entertaining. But with an audience comes expectation, and expectation brings pressure to produce something for that audience that’s worth their time and attention. Sometimes, because of pressures external and internal, that can feel like a real challenge. Even though my blog is quite unserious, I take my blogging very seriously.
Luckily, every time I get that sapped feeling, it doesn’t last long. Maybe that lack of inspiration makes me look harder for something to write about. Maybe the pressures of work or personal life or whatever make me appreciate that I have a creative outlet right at my fingertips. Before I know it, I’m writing again and laughing as I type. And despite relishing the feedback of my audience, I know the first person I have to entertain is me. I hope I’ve done the same for all of you, and appreciate everyone who has ever popped into my humble abode here on the Internets.
On to the Top Ten topic: Why are still blogging?
10) Much better drunken creative outlet than writing name in the snow.
9) Employer refuses to let us use LOLCAT in client presentations.
8) Want children to understand why daddy drinks.
7) Have to alert the world that Chocolate Skittles are people! They’re people!
6) Only way to have a relationship with an adorable girlfriend without violating marriage vows.
5) Saturn doesn’t give cars to just anyone who wants to drive around the country.
4) Someone has to write down what the squirrels are muttering.
3) Mom still can’t find the key to the basement.
2) Because in the Blogosphere, no one can write you a rejection letter.
1) Praise from anonymous readers is the new cocaine.
A post about this past weekend’s Vegas trip will be forthcoming. No pants were soiled, but they were certainly removed. Repeatedly.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Off to Sin City
I had hoped to finish the last of my Top 22 songs today, but it is a) not done, b) already in need of some serious editing, and c) I of course had to double-time working so I could take a couple days off. I'll post part 2 next Friday.
I depart tomorrow to wish my brother Tickle bon voyage to bachelorhood, in what is likely his last trip to Vegas for a while. It's also my goodbye to non-fatherhood, as it will likely be my last trip there for a while as well. Given that there are 10 of us, we have a suite, and we have an all-you-can drink event lined up for Saturday night, that's just as well.
Back Wednesday with a top 10 assuming I can move my fingers. I'll let Bon and the boys send me off....
I depart tomorrow to wish my brother Tickle bon voyage to bachelorhood, in what is likely his last trip to Vegas for a while. It's also my goodbye to non-fatherhood, as it will likely be my last trip there for a while as well. Given that there are 10 of us, we have a suite, and we have an all-you-can drink event lined up for Saturday night, that's just as well.
Back Wednesday with a top 10 assuming I can move my fingers. I'll let Bon and the boys send me off....
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Top Ten Wednesdays: How are we wooing the white male vote?
Special extended mullet primary edition!
13) Learned to pee standing up in order to stump at the urinal.
12) Showed artist’s rendition of Air Force One covered in sponsor decals and a giant number 3.
11) Promised that future 3 a.m. calls to the White House would be answered by bi-curious Monica Lewinsky (charges apply).
10) Promised that future presidential pastors would have to pass the Wayne Brady test.
9) Shotgunned a beer and burped out major policy proposals.
8) Announced that subsequent State of the Union addresses would be performed by Pacino and DeNiro.
7) Vowed to declare the Pittsburgh Pirates a federal disaster area.
6) Revealed running mate would be the King of Queens.
5) Offered to replace national anthem with John Mellencamp’s “This Is Our Country.”
4) Devised a plan to keep the railroad from running through Rock Ridge.
3) Gave away limited edition zubaz pants bearing the presidential seal in the seat.
2) Swore to not only catch Osama bin Laden, but have him impaled by Kiefer Sutherland just seconds before the bomb goes off.
1) Kept a straight face when hearing white guys whine about how they don't have any power.
13) Learned to pee standing up in order to stump at the urinal.
12) Showed artist’s rendition of Air Force One covered in sponsor decals and a giant number 3.
11) Promised that future 3 a.m. calls to the White House would be answered by bi-curious Monica Lewinsky (charges apply).
10) Promised that future presidential pastors would have to pass the Wayne Brady test.
9) Shotgunned a beer and burped out major policy proposals.
8) Announced that subsequent State of the Union addresses would be performed by Pacino and DeNiro.
7) Vowed to declare the Pittsburgh Pirates a federal disaster area.
6) Revealed running mate would be the King of Queens.
5) Offered to replace national anthem with John Mellencamp’s “This Is Our Country.”
4) Devised a plan to keep the railroad from running through Rock Ridge.
3) Gave away limited edition zubaz pants bearing the presidential seal in the seat.
2) Swore to not only catch Osama bin Laden, but have him impaled by Kiefer Sutherland just seconds before the bomb goes off.
1) Kept a straight face when hearing white guys whine about how they don't have any power.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Monday Random 11: The Significant 22, Part 1
There are times when you just need to let yourself have a break and recharge your batteries. Friday was one of those days. Which is why I am doing the random 11 on a Monday instead.
First things first: Last week’s Top 10 was an open poetry slam, for which I promised a prize. Ten different people responded, so I used this scientific method to select a winner. I rolled a 4, so congratulations to the man who puts the “bit” in bitter, Res Publica, el jeffe de Republic of Dogs. Res wins a $20 Amazon gift certificate for helping me out. Res, shoot me an e-mail me at brando.cjsd at yahoo dot com so I can e-mail you your gift. There is one stipulation: you must use the purchase at Amazon's new cockring store.
So, the music. You may want to use the facilities and grab a beverage, because this is a long ‘un.
A few weeks ago, The Lovely Becky went on our lovely college radio station to play two hours of her favorite music. I was extremely jealous, because I constantly have a burning desire to a) share my opinions in a definitive manner and b) apply “a” to music whenever possible. It also got me thinking about the songs that have made the biggest impact on my life.
I’ve been a music fan since my parents bought me a Mickey Mouse record player when I was a kid. I played your standard kid fare, but my earliest forays into pop music were Meco’s disco remake of the Star Wars theme and Chipmunk Punk. I am not lying when I say that Alvin and company turned me into a rock fan, albeit a fan for sped up vocals sung by fake animals.
When I was 10, my parents bought me a boom box for Christmas. That really opened the floodgates, as I started taping stuff off the radio a lot. I wish I still had those old Memorex tapes, full of The Knack and Blondie and Loverboy, with songs starting as the DJ talked over them and getting cut off three seconds into the following commercial. I would sit and listen for hours, waiting for a new song I wanted to record. These kids with their Internets and their torrent sharing, they don’t know how good they got it.
So for the next two Random 11s, I’m going to pick the 22 most significant songs from my life. They may have influenced me creatively, gotten me through some tough times, or turned me into the overgrown adolescent dillweed I am today. But they played some role in me being me.
22) “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” The Beatles. I’ll cut off the pretentious cobag accusations with this revelation: the first album I played to death after I got my boom box was Kenny Rogers Greatest Hits. I loved how every song told a story, and how the melody helped you remember the story. It was like redneck prog, minus the time changes and swords and demons.
Growing up in the 70s, I also soaked in The Beatles like Palmolive, and I knew a lot of their songs as well. Which is why Sgt. Pepper’s was the first tape I bought for my boom box.
The title track isn’t even my favorite song in the album, but the concept is what hooked me. Like Kenny Rogers, the album told a story, but more than that, The Beatles were pretending to be someone else, a fictional band playing a fictional concert. It struck a chord as deep and lasting as the final one in “A Day in the Life.” The opening title song epitomized that fiction, starting with the crowd and orchestra sounds and going all the way until they introduced Billy Shears before “With a Little Help From My Friends.”
21) “Take It on the Run,” REO Speedwagon. If Kenny Rogers doesn’t take me down, this certainly chops me at the knees.
To say I played Hi Infidelity a lot would be like saying there are a lot of Orcs in Mordor: a true yet woefully inadequate assessment. I didn’t just play this album, I air guitared it every chance I could get. I wanted to be on stage, ripping off Gary Richrath solos and having thousands cheer. By the time I would get to the solo in “Take It on the Run,” I was someone else, somewhere else, letting my imagination run as wild as the notes squealing out of the speakers. It pretty much ensured that I would be a life-long music fan. That makes this song a diamond in my book, even if the sparkle is stained with cheese.
20) “Country Feedback,” R.E.M. This song came out when TLB and I almost broke up. We both went to separate colleges, thousands of miles apart. To everyone’s surprise, including our own, we made it work. The problems started when I started making plans for post-graduation. I wanted to go to graduate school, and the places I picked would have kept me away from TLB for another year at least (she was a year behind me in school). The thought of more long distance and putting something else in front of us became too much. Visiting her that summer, we spent our time together growing steadily apart.
Like millions of other people that year, we played R.E.M.’s Out of Time religiously. This song in particular captured how I felt about what was happening: a dark sense of loss, that it was all slipping away and there was nothing I could do about it.
Except I could. I realized, like Michael Stipe sang, “I need this.” I needed TLB more than anything else in the world, because I didn’t want to be singing a song like “Country Feedback” and wondering how I let the thing we all chase harder than anything slip away. So I promised her that once I finished undergraduate school, I’d go to graduate school at her college so I could be with her. That saved our relationship. Now this song reminds me of what could have happened but didn’t.
19) “Still Be Around,” Uncle Tupelo. This is the flip side of “Country Feedback.” I had decided to go to grad school to be with TLB, but hadn’t thought much beyond that. While I was still away, she put this song on a mix tape for me. Now, as a long-distance couple in the 80s and 90s, we had a long history of mix-taping. There are probably a half-dozen other songs I could put here that would be equally important. But this one captured what we had gone through: after four years of being apart, we still wanted to be together. What more did I need to realize I wanted to be with this woman for the rest of my life? When TLB came out to California to help me move, I planned a stop in Monterrey, where I got down on one knee in front of the ocean and asked her to always be around. When this song plays now, I always think of that moment.
18) “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding,” Elvis Costello and the Attractions. I was a very tardy Costello fan, not really getting into him until I was in my late 20s. I was also not a liberal until late in life, as it took me a long time to divorce the conservative beliefs I inherited. Nothing sped up that process like the events after 9/11, when I watched terrorists use murder to supposedly promote freedom, and then watched our government squash freedom to ostensibly fight terror. It all seemed so nuts. One day I was driving down the street, thinking about the insanity of it all, and this song came on. I’d heard it plenty of times, but never quite like this. I sang along as loud as I could. When the song ended, I felt energized, like I wanted to say my piece about what was going on....
17) “Far Away,” Sleater-Kinney. Shortly after my Road to Iowa City event, I picked up Sleater-Kinney’s One Beat, which featured this song. After all the rah-rah flag humping filled the airwaves, it was a breath of fresh air. No other song about 9/11 sounds as horrified, appalled, and angry as this one. I still play it all the time, and it hit the same chord Elvis Costello did.
All great comedy comes from the blackest of emotions, from pain, anger, and depression. Hearing songs like this made me want to vent, but I don’t vent like this song does. The more pissed I get, the more I joke, skewering with humor. These songs didn’t plant the blogging seed, but they definitely shaped what grew from that seed. Some of my best stuff has been written while these two songs have played, and I think a lot of what I’ve written tries to focus their energy through my own prism.
Plus, I like women that rock. More on that next time.
16) “Highway to Hell,” AC/DC. It is no secret that I have a lot of Beavis in me. For all my master debating and cunning linguistics, at my heart I’m a 14-year-old boy that wants to play games and think about girls and listen to rock music. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that you do have to grow up, that having a Peter Pan complex isn’t healthy. At the same time that inner Beavis is still a core part of who I am. When I throw in some AC/DC, I get to release him for a bit, let him air guitar and shout fire! for a few healthy minutes. No other song lets me do that like “Highway to Hell.” Monster guitar riff, snarling Bon Scott, and singing about literally rocking you straight to hell. It’s a Flintstone vitamin for my soul.
15) “Welcome to the Jungle,” Guns N' Roses. I had a hair band problem in high school. As in I liked them. Ratt, Dokken, Whitesnake...the REO admission is tame by comparison. When I was a senior in high school, I took off with a couple friends to the beach. While riding in the back of my friend’s jeep, he popped in Appetite for Destruction. This was another of those musical moments where the scales fell from my ears. What the fuck was this? It sounded so dangerous and sleazy and genuine. There were no overly flashy solos or lunk-headed party anthems or faux danger. When Axl screamed “You’re in the jungle, baby, and you’re gonna die,” it sounded like he not only meant it, but had lived through it. For me, that moment stabbed hair metal through the heart with a sharpened can of Aqua Net.
Except for Def Leppard. I can’t quit Pyromania.
14) “Master of Puppets,” Metallica. Despite being into metal, I had avoided the really heavy, thrashing stuff in high school. I’m not sure why, because nothing gets Beavis going like fast riffs and pounding double-bass drums. But after seeing the GnR light and also discovering punk music, I gave the thrashier stuff a try. I borrowed my buddy’s Metallica CDs, and Master of Puppets immediately became a desert island disc. It sounded as dangerous and dark as GnR, but it added a progressive streak, with musical twists and turns amid the aggressive head banging. Even though I hate everything these guys now stand for, I still love this song.
“Highway to Hell,” “Welcome to the Jungle,” and “Master of Puppets” form a metal fountain of youth for me. When I feel the weight of the adult world bearing down, I play these songs and still get that youthful buzz. With every passing year, that fountain becomes more valuable to me.
13) “This Boy Is Exhausted,” The Wrens. There’s a famous scene in Garden State where Natalie Portman tells Zach Braff to listen to The Shins, because they would change your life.
The Wrens Meadowlands is my Garden State Shins. I was at a low point when this album came out. I had just gotten rejected again from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, after doing the best writing I had ever done to that point in my life. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to keep trying, yet the prospect of ditching writing to focus on my day job seemed even more depressing. TLB and I were also in the trenches of infertility. I was, frankly, exhausted.
Lots of musicians write about being angry teens, disillusioned 20-somethings, or remorseful middle-aged adults regretting what could have been. This album captured that in-between time, being in your 30s and not only feeling clueless about what you wanted to do, but realizing you were running out of time to do it. I don't think any other album has ever captured my mood the way this one did. It was the perfect album at the perfect time.
As “Country Feedback” and hundreds of other songs have done, wallowing in this musical depression became cathartic and helped pull me out of the funk I was in. When it comes to the Hi Fidelity question of “do I listen to pop music because I’m miserable, or am I miserable because I listen to pop music,” it’s definitely the former for me. And miserable music can almost always make me feel less miserable.
12) “Stevie Nix,” The Hold Steady. A lot of this 30-ish turmoil had to do with the conflict between being the person I was raised and the person I was becoming. I had gone through a whole range of changes: reversing most of my political beliefs, losing at least some of my religion, and not knowing what I wanted to “do” with my life. Maybe that’s why I had a Peter Pan complex in the first place: being young and not having to think and question seemed so much easier.
Of course, I know that’s a dead end, that it leads to the sad pining of Springsteen’s “Glory Days.” Which is why The Hold Steady blew me away the first time I heard them. Here was the soundtrack for lapsed Catholics who didn’t want to grow up but knew they had to. Even when Craig Finn sings “Lord, to be 17 forever,” he later adds “Lord, to be 33 forever.” In ten years, I’m sure it would be “Lord to be 43 forever.” As tempting as perpetual youth is, it’s not living. That realization has made me a much happier, saner person in the last few years.
Next week, all the way to number 1. I don’t think it will be much of a surprise....
First things first: Last week’s Top 10 was an open poetry slam, for which I promised a prize. Ten different people responded, so I used this scientific method to select a winner. I rolled a 4, so congratulations to the man who puts the “bit” in bitter, Res Publica, el jeffe de Republic of Dogs. Res wins a $20 Amazon gift certificate for helping me out. Res, shoot me an e-mail me at brando.cjsd at yahoo dot com so I can e-mail you your gift. There is one stipulation: you must use the purchase at Amazon's new cockring store.
So, the music. You may want to use the facilities and grab a beverage, because this is a long ‘un.
A few weeks ago, The Lovely Becky went on our lovely college radio station to play two hours of her favorite music. I was extremely jealous, because I constantly have a burning desire to a) share my opinions in a definitive manner and b) apply “a” to music whenever possible. It also got me thinking about the songs that have made the biggest impact on my life.
I’ve been a music fan since my parents bought me a Mickey Mouse record player when I was a kid. I played your standard kid fare, but my earliest forays into pop music were Meco’s disco remake of the Star Wars theme and Chipmunk Punk. I am not lying when I say that Alvin and company turned me into a rock fan, albeit a fan for sped up vocals sung by fake animals.
When I was 10, my parents bought me a boom box for Christmas. That really opened the floodgates, as I started taping stuff off the radio a lot. I wish I still had those old Memorex tapes, full of The Knack and Blondie and Loverboy, with songs starting as the DJ talked over them and getting cut off three seconds into the following commercial. I would sit and listen for hours, waiting for a new song I wanted to record. These kids with their Internets and their torrent sharing, they don’t know how good they got it.
So for the next two Random 11s, I’m going to pick the 22 most significant songs from my life. They may have influenced me creatively, gotten me through some tough times, or turned me into the overgrown adolescent dillweed I am today. But they played some role in me being me.
22) “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” The Beatles. I’ll cut off the pretentious cobag accusations with this revelation: the first album I played to death after I got my boom box was Kenny Rogers Greatest Hits. I loved how every song told a story, and how the melody helped you remember the story. It was like redneck prog, minus the time changes and swords and demons.
Growing up in the 70s, I also soaked in The Beatles like Palmolive, and I knew a lot of their songs as well. Which is why Sgt. Pepper’s was the first tape I bought for my boom box.
The title track isn’t even my favorite song in the album, but the concept is what hooked me. Like Kenny Rogers, the album told a story, but more than that, The Beatles were pretending to be someone else, a fictional band playing a fictional concert. It struck a chord as deep and lasting as the final one in “A Day in the Life.” The opening title song epitomized that fiction, starting with the crowd and orchestra sounds and going all the way until they introduced Billy Shears before “With a Little Help From My Friends.”
21) “Take It on the Run,” REO Speedwagon. If Kenny Rogers doesn’t take me down, this certainly chops me at the knees.
To say I played Hi Infidelity a lot would be like saying there are a lot of Orcs in Mordor: a true yet woefully inadequate assessment. I didn’t just play this album, I air guitared it every chance I could get. I wanted to be on stage, ripping off Gary Richrath solos and having thousands cheer. By the time I would get to the solo in “Take It on the Run,” I was someone else, somewhere else, letting my imagination run as wild as the notes squealing out of the speakers. It pretty much ensured that I would be a life-long music fan. That makes this song a diamond in my book, even if the sparkle is stained with cheese.
20) “Country Feedback,” R.E.M. This song came out when TLB and I almost broke up. We both went to separate colleges, thousands of miles apart. To everyone’s surprise, including our own, we made it work. The problems started when I started making plans for post-graduation. I wanted to go to graduate school, and the places I picked would have kept me away from TLB for another year at least (she was a year behind me in school). The thought of more long distance and putting something else in front of us became too much. Visiting her that summer, we spent our time together growing steadily apart.
Like millions of other people that year, we played R.E.M.’s Out of Time religiously. This song in particular captured how I felt about what was happening: a dark sense of loss, that it was all slipping away and there was nothing I could do about it.
Except I could. I realized, like Michael Stipe sang, “I need this.” I needed TLB more than anything else in the world, because I didn’t want to be singing a song like “Country Feedback” and wondering how I let the thing we all chase harder than anything slip away. So I promised her that once I finished undergraduate school, I’d go to graduate school at her college so I could be with her. That saved our relationship. Now this song reminds me of what could have happened but didn’t.
19) “Still Be Around,” Uncle Tupelo. This is the flip side of “Country Feedback.” I had decided to go to grad school to be with TLB, but hadn’t thought much beyond that. While I was still away, she put this song on a mix tape for me. Now, as a long-distance couple in the 80s and 90s, we had a long history of mix-taping. There are probably a half-dozen other songs I could put here that would be equally important. But this one captured what we had gone through: after four years of being apart, we still wanted to be together. What more did I need to realize I wanted to be with this woman for the rest of my life? When TLB came out to California to help me move, I planned a stop in Monterrey, where I got down on one knee in front of the ocean and asked her to always be around. When this song plays now, I always think of that moment.
18) “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding,” Elvis Costello and the Attractions. I was a very tardy Costello fan, not really getting into him until I was in my late 20s. I was also not a liberal until late in life, as it took me a long time to divorce the conservative beliefs I inherited. Nothing sped up that process like the events after 9/11, when I watched terrorists use murder to supposedly promote freedom, and then watched our government squash freedom to ostensibly fight terror. It all seemed so nuts. One day I was driving down the street, thinking about the insanity of it all, and this song came on. I’d heard it plenty of times, but never quite like this. I sang along as loud as I could. When the song ended, I felt energized, like I wanted to say my piece about what was going on....
17) “Far Away,” Sleater-Kinney. Shortly after my Road to Iowa City event, I picked up Sleater-Kinney’s One Beat, which featured this song. After all the rah-rah flag humping filled the airwaves, it was a breath of fresh air. No other song about 9/11 sounds as horrified, appalled, and angry as this one. I still play it all the time, and it hit the same chord Elvis Costello did.
All great comedy comes from the blackest of emotions, from pain, anger, and depression. Hearing songs like this made me want to vent, but I don’t vent like this song does. The more pissed I get, the more I joke, skewering with humor. These songs didn’t plant the blogging seed, but they definitely shaped what grew from that seed. Some of my best stuff has been written while these two songs have played, and I think a lot of what I’ve written tries to focus their energy through my own prism.
Plus, I like women that rock. More on that next time.
16) “Highway to Hell,” AC/DC. It is no secret that I have a lot of Beavis in me. For all my master debating and cunning linguistics, at my heart I’m a 14-year-old boy that wants to play games and think about girls and listen to rock music. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that you do have to grow up, that having a Peter Pan complex isn’t healthy. At the same time that inner Beavis is still a core part of who I am. When I throw in some AC/DC, I get to release him for a bit, let him air guitar and shout fire! for a few healthy minutes. No other song lets me do that like “Highway to Hell.” Monster guitar riff, snarling Bon Scott, and singing about literally rocking you straight to hell. It’s a Flintstone vitamin for my soul.
15) “Welcome to the Jungle,” Guns N' Roses. I had a hair band problem in high school. As in I liked them. Ratt, Dokken, Whitesnake...the REO admission is tame by comparison. When I was a senior in high school, I took off with a couple friends to the beach. While riding in the back of my friend’s jeep, he popped in Appetite for Destruction. This was another of those musical moments where the scales fell from my ears. What the fuck was this? It sounded so dangerous and sleazy and genuine. There were no overly flashy solos or lunk-headed party anthems or faux danger. When Axl screamed “You’re in the jungle, baby, and you’re gonna die,” it sounded like he not only meant it, but had lived through it. For me, that moment stabbed hair metal through the heart with a sharpened can of Aqua Net.
Except for Def Leppard. I can’t quit Pyromania.
14) “Master of Puppets,” Metallica. Despite being into metal, I had avoided the really heavy, thrashing stuff in high school. I’m not sure why, because nothing gets Beavis going like fast riffs and pounding double-bass drums. But after seeing the GnR light and also discovering punk music, I gave the thrashier stuff a try. I borrowed my buddy’s Metallica CDs, and Master of Puppets immediately became a desert island disc. It sounded as dangerous and dark as GnR, but it added a progressive streak, with musical twists and turns amid the aggressive head banging. Even though I hate everything these guys now stand for, I still love this song.
“Highway to Hell,” “Welcome to the Jungle,” and “Master of Puppets” form a metal fountain of youth for me. When I feel the weight of the adult world bearing down, I play these songs and still get that youthful buzz. With every passing year, that fountain becomes more valuable to me.
13) “This Boy Is Exhausted,” The Wrens. There’s a famous scene in Garden State where Natalie Portman tells Zach Braff to listen to The Shins, because they would change your life.
The Wrens Meadowlands is my Garden State Shins. I was at a low point when this album came out. I had just gotten rejected again from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, after doing the best writing I had ever done to that point in my life. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to keep trying, yet the prospect of ditching writing to focus on my day job seemed even more depressing. TLB and I were also in the trenches of infertility. I was, frankly, exhausted.
Lots of musicians write about being angry teens, disillusioned 20-somethings, or remorseful middle-aged adults regretting what could have been. This album captured that in-between time, being in your 30s and not only feeling clueless about what you wanted to do, but realizing you were running out of time to do it. I don't think any other album has ever captured my mood the way this one did. It was the perfect album at the perfect time.
As “Country Feedback” and hundreds of other songs have done, wallowing in this musical depression became cathartic and helped pull me out of the funk I was in. When it comes to the Hi Fidelity question of “do I listen to pop music because I’m miserable, or am I miserable because I listen to pop music,” it’s definitely the former for me. And miserable music can almost always make me feel less miserable.
12) “Stevie Nix,” The Hold Steady. A lot of this 30-ish turmoil had to do with the conflict between being the person I was raised and the person I was becoming. I had gone through a whole range of changes: reversing most of my political beliefs, losing at least some of my religion, and not knowing what I wanted to “do” with my life. Maybe that’s why I had a Peter Pan complex in the first place: being young and not having to think and question seemed so much easier.
Of course, I know that’s a dead end, that it leads to the sad pining of Springsteen’s “Glory Days.” Which is why The Hold Steady blew me away the first time I heard them. Here was the soundtrack for lapsed Catholics who didn’t want to grow up but knew they had to. Even when Craig Finn sings “Lord, to be 17 forever,” he later adds “Lord, to be 33 forever.” In ten years, I’m sure it would be “Lord to be 43 forever.” As tempting as perpetual youth is, it’s not living. That realization has made me a much happier, saner person in the last few years.
Next week, all the way to number 1. I don’t think it will be much of a surprise....
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Pope Benedict Announces Reforming of the Crusades
Plans Warm-Up Gig for Muslim Representatives at the United Nations
WASHINGTON - Pope Benedict XVI announced today that he is reforming the classic supergroup the Crusaders and will embark on a new tour and the first new work of the group in centuries.
“It is time for The Church to return to its roots in bringing souls to Christ,” said the Pope. He said that the group would make its first performance in more than 700 years later this week in front of representatives from Islamic countries at the United Nations
Critics immediately saw this as a shrewd move by a Catholic Church desperate for a hit. “They haven’t had much success since the release of ‘Vernacular Spectacular (Guitar Mass Blues)’ off Vatican II,” said noted music critic Anthony DeCurtis and author of Knights in White Satin: The Story of the Crusades. “It’s not surprising to see them try to capitalize on their biggest hits.”
Others greeted the announcement with blood-thirsty glee. “My prayers have finally been answered,” said William Donohue, president of the Catholic League. “I’ve been saving my cross shield and long sword for this day.”
The Pope, however, cautioned that this would be a different kind of Crusade.
“When you’re young, you’re full of the Holy Spirit and vinegar, and shedding blood for Christ seems so appealing,” wrote the pontiff on his MySpace page. “But we’ve learned a lot in the last ten centuries. This new crusade will capture the sound and energy of the original, but incorporate a lot of electronic and virtual elements. We want to spill the blood of your mind and soul more than your body.”
Divine debut
Considered by many to be the greatest religious-based warfare ever recorded, Crusades I set a new standard for bringing God into battle. While the Crusaders borrowed heavily from earlier influences such as Greeks, Romans, pre-Christian barbarians, and even the Jews and Muslims whom they fought, they fused these holy war influences with the seemingly non-violent message of Christ, making something uniquely their own.
“Crusades I took the world by storm,” said Rolling Stone editor David Fricke. “But beneath its everyman popularity was a real complex, even contradictory sound, meshing ‘turn the other cheek’ with ‘hit that cheek with a mace.’”
Crusades I spawned two major hits. “The Siege of Antioch” was a dark, violent work that captured the fervor and fury of the Crusaders. But it was the epic “The Siege of Jerusalem” that established Crusades I as the holy war of its generation.
Medieval critics showered Crusades I with universal acclaim. Ye Olde Musical Express called it “a tour de forces.” Der Aller Musikführer said that you could “practically feel the hot, salty spray of non-Christian blood on your ears.”
“Essential,” wrote Roger Bacon in his review in Spinne. “From Copenhagen to Constantinople, you can’t go anywhere without feeling the influence of Crusades I.”
Feudal follow-ups
With Crusades II, the group released an ambitious double crusade. The first half revisited the area well overrun in “The Siege of Jerusalem,” causing many critics to say they had heard this all before. But the Portuguese-influenced second half produced the smash hit, “Stairway to Libson (No More Moors)” and catapulted the Crusaders to even greater popularity.
Success, however, also brought problems. As the Crusaders approached their third work, they encountered artistic differences. “There was a lot of arguing over slaughter,” said former Village Voice music critic and author of Christgau on the Crusades Robert Christgau. “Some members felt that had taken the blood-soaked religious war as far as they could, while others wanted to go for an even heavier, brutal approach.”
These disagreements were compounded by a problem that everyone knew about but chose to ignore: rampant plundering. Indeed, the pursuit of easy loot became as much of a focus of subsequent Crusades as a passion for militarized Christianity.
Just as the work on Crusades III began, tragedy struck. Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I—known as “the cute one”—died when he fell from the cupola of the Vatican after proclaiming he was “a golden god.” His death exacerbated tensions between Phillip II—the French one—and Richard III, known as “the lionhearted one.” Critics panned Phillip’s decision to record his contributions in his traditional, aloof “Francophone” sound. Meanwhile, the Lionheart received the lion’s share of the acclaim, so much so that Crusades III became known informally as The Lionheart Album. But while Richard had success with “The Battle of Arsuf” and would become the face of the Crusaders, neither he nor any other Christian warriors would never approach the success of “The Siege of Jerusalem” again.
Indulgence and irrelevance
The frictions that surfaced during Crusades III would boil over during Crusades IV. Originally intending to get back to their Middle Eastern roots, the Crusaders instead declared themselves “bigger than Byzantium” before sacking Constantinople. This led to a schism with their Eastern Orthodox fans and, unbeknownst at the time, to the ultimate decline of the Crusades.
Five other Crusades followed, each less commercially successful than the last. A hodge-podge of side Crusades projects further diluted the appeal of the crusades, including their attempt to break into the tween market with the widely panned Children’s Crusade. Finally, after Crusades IX failed to chart, the Crusaders broke up.
Reformation and ressurection
The Church attempted to capitalize on the legacy of the Crusades with similar calls for conversion and obedience, but heavy use of gold, lands, noble titles, and indulgences made The Church’s message increasingly irrelevant and isolated them from their followers. Whatever chance they had to recapture the fire Crusades I fizzled when Christians everywhere turned to the new, personal, stripped-down sound of Martin Luther.
“‘96 Theses’ changed everything,” said Greil Marcus, author of (We’re So) Pretty Sacred: The Fifty Greatest Religious Conflicts. “It used to be that you couldn’t launch a Christian religious war without the Pope’s blessing. But now anyone could start a violent, bloody struggle in the name of Christ. It was very liberating.”
Soon, religious wars broke out all over Europe as Christians rushed to start their own personal crusades. This fervor eventually led to the Thirty Years War, which proved more violent and bloody than the Crusades ever dreamed. And a hardcore, local crusade scene flourished worldwide, most notably with the witch trials of Salem, Massachusetts.
Eventually, The Church realized it had to get clean and get focused if it wanted to recapture its position as the spiritual leader of Christianity. After entering a reformation clinic, The Church returned with the new, kinder, adult contemporary vibe of Vatican I and Vatican II, the sound it followed through the reign of Pope John Paul II.
Which is why Pope Benedict’s call for a new Crusade has surprised many. “I didn’t think they had it in them,” says Penelope Spheris, director of The Decline of Western Civilization: The Crusade Years. “I mean, who wants to see a middle-aged Crusader, in tight chainmail, trying to sack cities like he’s 20 years old again?”
But others feel that Pope Benedict is just the man to restart the Crusades. “After all,” says Robert Christgau, “who better to get the Church back to its fighting spirit than a German pope?”
WASHINGTON - Pope Benedict XVI announced today that he is reforming the classic supergroup the Crusaders and will embark on a new tour and the first new work of the group in centuries.
“It is time for The Church to return to its roots in bringing souls to Christ,” said the Pope. He said that the group would make its first performance in more than 700 years later this week in front of representatives from Islamic countries at the United Nations
Critics immediately saw this as a shrewd move by a Catholic Church desperate for a hit. “They haven’t had much success since the release of ‘Vernacular Spectacular (Guitar Mass Blues)’ off Vatican II,” said noted music critic Anthony DeCurtis and author of Knights in White Satin: The Story of the Crusades. “It’s not surprising to see them try to capitalize on their biggest hits.”
Others greeted the announcement with blood-thirsty glee. “My prayers have finally been answered,” said William Donohue, president of the Catholic League. “I’ve been saving my cross shield and long sword for this day.”
The Pope, however, cautioned that this would be a different kind of Crusade.
“When you’re young, you’re full of the Holy Spirit and vinegar, and shedding blood for Christ seems so appealing,” wrote the pontiff on his MySpace page. “But we’ve learned a lot in the last ten centuries. This new crusade will capture the sound and energy of the original, but incorporate a lot of electronic and virtual elements. We want to spill the blood of your mind and soul more than your body.”
Divine debut
Considered by many to be the greatest religious-based warfare ever recorded, Crusades I set a new standard for bringing God into battle. While the Crusaders borrowed heavily from earlier influences such as Greeks, Romans, pre-Christian barbarians, and even the Jews and Muslims whom they fought, they fused these holy war influences with the seemingly non-violent message of Christ, making something uniquely their own.
“Crusades I took the world by storm,” said Rolling Stone editor David Fricke. “But beneath its everyman popularity was a real complex, even contradictory sound, meshing ‘turn the other cheek’ with ‘hit that cheek with a mace.’”
Crusades I spawned two major hits. “The Siege of Antioch” was a dark, violent work that captured the fervor and fury of the Crusaders. But it was the epic “The Siege of Jerusalem” that established Crusades I as the holy war of its generation.
Medieval critics showered Crusades I with universal acclaim. Ye Olde Musical Express called it “a tour de forces.” Der Aller Musikführer said that you could “practically feel the hot, salty spray of non-Christian blood on your ears.”
“Essential,” wrote Roger Bacon in his review in Spinne. “From Copenhagen to Constantinople, you can’t go anywhere without feeling the influence of Crusades I.”
Feudal follow-ups
With Crusades II, the group released an ambitious double crusade. The first half revisited the area well overrun in “The Siege of Jerusalem,” causing many critics to say they had heard this all before. But the Portuguese-influenced second half produced the smash hit, “Stairway to Libson (No More Moors)” and catapulted the Crusaders to even greater popularity.
Success, however, also brought problems. As the Crusaders approached their third work, they encountered artistic differences. “There was a lot of arguing over slaughter,” said former Village Voice music critic and author of Christgau on the Crusades Robert Christgau. “Some members felt that had taken the blood-soaked religious war as far as they could, while others wanted to go for an even heavier, brutal approach.”
These disagreements were compounded by a problem that everyone knew about but chose to ignore: rampant plundering. Indeed, the pursuit of easy loot became as much of a focus of subsequent Crusades as a passion for militarized Christianity.
Just as the work on Crusades III began, tragedy struck. Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I—known as “the cute one”—died when he fell from the cupola of the Vatican after proclaiming he was “a golden god.” His death exacerbated tensions between Phillip II—the French one—and Richard III, known as “the lionhearted one.” Critics panned Phillip’s decision to record his contributions in his traditional, aloof “Francophone” sound. Meanwhile, the Lionheart received the lion’s share of the acclaim, so much so that Crusades III became known informally as The Lionheart Album. But while Richard had success with “The Battle of Arsuf” and would become the face of the Crusaders, neither he nor any other Christian warriors would never approach the success of “The Siege of Jerusalem” again.
Indulgence and irrelevance
The frictions that surfaced during Crusades III would boil over during Crusades IV. Originally intending to get back to their Middle Eastern roots, the Crusaders instead declared themselves “bigger than Byzantium” before sacking Constantinople. This led to a schism with their Eastern Orthodox fans and, unbeknownst at the time, to the ultimate decline of the Crusades.
Five other Crusades followed, each less commercially successful than the last. A hodge-podge of side Crusades projects further diluted the appeal of the crusades, including their attempt to break into the tween market with the widely panned Children’s Crusade. Finally, after Crusades IX failed to chart, the Crusaders broke up.
Reformation and ressurection
The Church attempted to capitalize on the legacy of the Crusades with similar calls for conversion and obedience, but heavy use of gold, lands, noble titles, and indulgences made The Church’s message increasingly irrelevant and isolated them from their followers. Whatever chance they had to recapture the fire Crusades I fizzled when Christians everywhere turned to the new, personal, stripped-down sound of Martin Luther.
“‘96 Theses’ changed everything,” said Greil Marcus, author of (We’re So) Pretty Sacred: The Fifty Greatest Religious Conflicts. “It used to be that you couldn’t launch a Christian religious war without the Pope’s blessing. But now anyone could start a violent, bloody struggle in the name of Christ. It was very liberating.”
Soon, religious wars broke out all over Europe as Christians rushed to start their own personal crusades. This fervor eventually led to the Thirty Years War, which proved more violent and bloody than the Crusades ever dreamed. And a hardcore, local crusade scene flourished worldwide, most notably with the witch trials of Salem, Massachusetts.
Eventually, The Church realized it had to get clean and get focused if it wanted to recapture its position as the spiritual leader of Christianity. After entering a reformation clinic, The Church returned with the new, kinder, adult contemporary vibe of Vatican I and Vatican II, the sound it followed through the reign of Pope John Paul II.
Which is why Pope Benedict’s call for a new Crusade has surprised many. “I didn’t think they had it in them,” says Penelope Spheris, director of The Decline of Western Civilization: The Crusade Years. “I mean, who wants to see a middle-aged Crusader, in tight chainmail, trying to sack cities like he’s 20 years old again?”
But others feel that Pope Benedict is just the man to restart the Crusades. “After all,” says Robert Christgau, “who better to get the Church back to its fighting spirit than a German pope?”
Monday, April 14, 2008
Top Ten Tuesdays: Why are we so bitter?
Special Mad Libs contest edition!
I am on the road all day tomorrow, traveling back to the land of ice and snow where the spring time wind is supposed to blow instead of suck. Seeing as I no longer blog and drive since that incident at the monster truck show, I won't be able to post a Top 10 tomorrow. Plus, a whole weekend of discussing features and benefits, in person, without a hint of irony, has left my creative juices a tad drained. So I'm turning some of the fun over to you, dear readers. I'll get us started with a top 10 item, and you can put your entries in the comments. I will randomly pick a winner in Friday's Random 11 and send that person avery special prize.
10) So busy that we have to resort to the kinds of cheap content gimmicks used by Atrios and morning zoo programs.
I am on the road all day tomorrow, traveling back to the land of ice and snow where the spring time wind is supposed to blow instead of suck. Seeing as I no longer blog and drive since that incident at the monster truck show, I won't be able to post a Top 10 tomorrow. Plus, a whole weekend of discussing features and benefits, in person, without a hint of irony, has left my creative juices a tad drained. So I'm turning some of the fun over to you, dear readers. I'll get us started with a top 10 item, and you can put your entries in the comments. I will randomly pick a winner in Friday's Random 11 and send that person a
10) So busy that we have to resort to the kinds of cheap content gimmicks used by Atrios and morning zoo programs.
Happy Birthday, TLB!
The Lovely Becky turned another year lovlier today. It's the 20th birthday I've celebrated with her, and sadly, one I had to celebrate away from her since I was off earning money to by the moose oil we so desparately need.
I usually get TLB the same present every year. That may sound boring, but she seems to enjoy opening it each birthday. In fact, she's hinted it's what she wishes for when she blows out the cake. But this year, she had to unwrap her pool boy all by herself.
Wait...maybe that is what she wished for.
So stop on by and say hey to my lovely lady. I'll be home tomorrow to see if a) our pool is clean and b) if we have a pool.
I usually get TLB the same present every year. That may sound boring, but she seems to enjoy opening it each birthday. In fact, she's hinted it's what she wishes for when she blows out the cake. But this year, she had to unwrap her pool boy all by herself.
Wait...maybe that is what she wished for.
So stop on by and say hey to my lovely lady. I'll be home tomorrow to see if a) our pool is clean and b) if we have a pool.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Working on the weekend
I had to bug out early on Friday to go out of town for work. Originally, I expected to have a fairly leisurely travel day, with plenty of time to post the first part of my most influential songs Random 11. Of course, this being April in the UP, we had a snow storm. I had to get out of Dodge early before I couldn't get out of Dodge. And now I'm working over the whole weekend, so the funny will have to wait. I'll be back with a Top Ten on Tuesday.
I'd also like to note that I'm two weeks away from another Vegas trip for Tickle's bachelor party. This one may actually kill me.
I'd also like to note that I'm two weeks away from another Vegas trip for Tickle's bachelor party. This one may actually kill me.
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Top Ten Tuesdays: Why did we get snubbed by the Pulitzer committee?
10) No category for Lost fan fiction.
9) Liberal bias prevented committee from recognizing Liberal Bias.
8) Kidnapped judges in order to write investigative report on the kidnapping of Pulitzer judges.
7) Composition Flight of the Chocolate Skittles for Concerto and Barf Bag considered tasteless bordering on toxic.
6) Writing novel about taking eleven years to write a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel not the same as taking eleven years to write a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
5) Still fighting for academic acceptance of naughty limericks.
4) Apparently none of the dillweeds who gave a special music award to Bob Dylan have ever heard of a little band called Led Zeppelin.
3) Photograph series, “What Will You Do for Mardi Gras Beads?” deemed too hot for prize recognition, but can be yours for just $19.95 plus shipping and handling.
2) Committee didn’t like our LOLcat adaptation of Tennessee Williams, Im on Ur Hot Tin Roofz Watching Ur Family Disintegrate.
1) Our nomination in the snark category was not taken seriously.
9) Liberal bias prevented committee from recognizing Liberal Bias.
8) Kidnapped judges in order to write investigative report on the kidnapping of Pulitzer judges.
7) Composition Flight of the Chocolate Skittles for Concerto and Barf Bag considered tasteless bordering on toxic.
6) Writing novel about taking eleven years to write a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel not the same as taking eleven years to write a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
5) Still fighting for academic acceptance of naughty limericks.
4) Apparently none of the dillweeds who gave a special music award to Bob Dylan have ever heard of a little band called Led Zeppelin.
3) Photograph series, “What Will You Do for Mardi Gras Beads?” deemed too hot for prize recognition, but can be yours for just $19.95 plus shipping and handling.
2) Committee didn’t like our LOLcat adaptation of Tennessee Williams, Im on Ur Hot Tin Roofz Watching Ur Family Disintegrate.
1) Our nomination in the snark category was not taken seriously.
Friday, April 04, 2008
Friday CJ Random 11
It's one more random than 10!
Today I walked to get lunch without putting on:
-- a coat
-- boots
-- sled harnesses on the cats
That’s the definition of a good day after a long, long winter.
The other big thing this week is that I finished a story for the first time in a long time. Not finished finished. It’s a first draft, and like all first drafts, it’s shitty and needs to be rewritten. But considering I’ve had a bad rut the last couple years of starting fiction pieces and not finishing them, it's an accomplishment. Plus I feel like, despite its present shitiness, it has the potential to turn into something pretty awesome.
1) “Dear John,” Ryan Adams and the Cardinals. Just a heartbreaking, beautiful song. Ryan Adams is always hit or miss, but when he hits, he hits for power.
2) “Sleeping Giant,” Mastodon. Heartbreaking as well, but more like a lance piercing the breastplate of your plate mail during a titanic battle against Orcs heartbreaking. I would have gone apeshit for this when I was 14.
3) “Untitled Track No. 8,” Sigur Ros. From the ( ) album. Almost as long as the Marquette winter. Normally You Tube comments are where intelligence goes to die a horrible, capped, misspelled death. But I have to agree with the first commenter about this song: "Magic." It really is.
4) “Immigrant Song,” Led Zeppelin. If Michelle Malkin had a Facebook page, I would send her this song to her every day, just to annoy her. Warning: the video may cause seizures from the strobe-light editing job.
5) “Post-War,” M. Ward. Like a jacuzzi bath for your ears. So relaxing. And no pruning.
6) “I Feel,” The Sundays. I do feel fine today. I struggled all week with this brochure I had to write for work. I didn’t really want to write it, and I procrastinated and started and stopped and generally got stuck with this thing hanging over my head all week. Finally, this morning, I got up early, sat down, and banged it out. And the rest of the day has just been gravy. There’s nothing like having that feeling on a Friday.
7) “Challenger,” American Music Club. One of those groups I have that I haven’t really explored, but always look up from what I’m doing when one of their songs comes on.
8) “Charmer,” Kings of Leon. There’s a very disconcerting, Ned Flanders-esque scream that like fingernails across a blackboard that’s strapped to my ear. Which is too bad, because it's otherwise a good song.
9) “History Never Repeats,” Split Enz. You can never go wrong with a little Neil Finn.
10) “Tommy the Cat,” Primus. Normally, when it comes to Primus, I am all DO NOT WANT. But I can haz this, especially with Tom Waits starring as Tommy.
11) “Teenage Depression,” Eddie and the Hot Rods. TLB often tells me that my biggest problem is that I had a very happy childhood. It’s true. My teenage years in particular were a lot of fun. Not in a sad, nostalgic “Glory Days” sort of way. It’s just that I had friends I liked, a lot of good times, and not a lot of trouble. The best way to describe them would be carefree. The worst thing that happened to me during that time—which at the time seemed like The Worst Thing in the World™—was having to move right before my senior year. But if I hadn’t moved, I wouldn’t have met TLB. Like I said, carefree.
So earlier this week, I was bemoaning work to TLB. I had been kind of down, not just about what I was doing this week, but work in general. I thought how much it sucks that, once you start working, you keep working constantly until you get old and retire. If you’re lucky enough to get an academic job, you get summers off, but not quite the same way as when you were a kid. Carefree seems so much harder to come by.
But then I got my project done, walked outside into the spring air, and felt completely fine. I thought about all the good things that have happened to me lately, and how even the big bad winter wasn’t that big and bad, even if it was long. And honestly, I felt pretty damn silly about my kvetching earlier. Maybe that’s the big benefit of getting older, knowing that, in the end, most things aren’t worth getting upset over, because you’re having a baby, you finished something you really care about, and you have a lot of good music to listen to.
Have a great weekend. I’m also planning a special two-part Random 11 the next two Fridays—the 22 songs that have most influenced me in my life.
Today I walked to get lunch without putting on:
-- a coat
-- boots
-- sled harnesses on the cats
That’s the definition of a good day after a long, long winter.
The other big thing this week is that I finished a story for the first time in a long time. Not finished finished. It’s a first draft, and like all first drafts, it’s shitty and needs to be rewritten. But considering I’ve had a bad rut the last couple years of starting fiction pieces and not finishing them, it's an accomplishment. Plus I feel like, despite its present shitiness, it has the potential to turn into something pretty awesome.
1) “Dear John,” Ryan Adams and the Cardinals. Just a heartbreaking, beautiful song. Ryan Adams is always hit or miss, but when he hits, he hits for power.
2) “Sleeping Giant,” Mastodon. Heartbreaking as well, but more like a lance piercing the breastplate of your plate mail during a titanic battle against Orcs heartbreaking. I would have gone apeshit for this when I was 14.
3) “Untitled Track No. 8,” Sigur Ros. From the ( ) album. Almost as long as the Marquette winter. Normally You Tube comments are where intelligence goes to die a horrible, capped, misspelled death. But I have to agree with the first commenter about this song: "Magic." It really is.
4) “Immigrant Song,” Led Zeppelin. If Michelle Malkin had a Facebook page, I would send her this song to her every day, just to annoy her. Warning: the video may cause seizures from the strobe-light editing job.
5) “Post-War,” M. Ward. Like a jacuzzi bath for your ears. So relaxing. And no pruning.
6) “I Feel,” The Sundays. I do feel fine today. I struggled all week with this brochure I had to write for work. I didn’t really want to write it, and I procrastinated and started and stopped and generally got stuck with this thing hanging over my head all week. Finally, this morning, I got up early, sat down, and banged it out. And the rest of the day has just been gravy. There’s nothing like having that feeling on a Friday.
7) “Challenger,” American Music Club. One of those groups I have that I haven’t really explored, but always look up from what I’m doing when one of their songs comes on.
8) “Charmer,” Kings of Leon. There’s a very disconcerting, Ned Flanders-esque scream that like fingernails across a blackboard that’s strapped to my ear. Which is too bad, because it's otherwise a good song.
9) “History Never Repeats,” Split Enz. You can never go wrong with a little Neil Finn.
10) “Tommy the Cat,” Primus. Normally, when it comes to Primus, I am all DO NOT WANT. But I can haz this, especially with Tom Waits starring as Tommy.
11) “Teenage Depression,” Eddie and the Hot Rods. TLB often tells me that my biggest problem is that I had a very happy childhood. It’s true. My teenage years in particular were a lot of fun. Not in a sad, nostalgic “Glory Days” sort of way. It’s just that I had friends I liked, a lot of good times, and not a lot of trouble. The best way to describe them would be carefree. The worst thing that happened to me during that time—which at the time seemed like The Worst Thing in the World™—was having to move right before my senior year. But if I hadn’t moved, I wouldn’t have met TLB. Like I said, carefree.
So earlier this week, I was bemoaning work to TLB. I had been kind of down, not just about what I was doing this week, but work in general. I thought how much it sucks that, once you start working, you keep working constantly until you get old and retire. If you’re lucky enough to get an academic job, you get summers off, but not quite the same way as when you were a kid. Carefree seems so much harder to come by.
But then I got my project done, walked outside into the spring air, and felt completely fine. I thought about all the good things that have happened to me lately, and how even the big bad winter wasn’t that big and bad, even if it was long. And honestly, I felt pretty damn silly about my kvetching earlier. Maybe that’s the big benefit of getting older, knowing that, in the end, most things aren’t worth getting upset over, because you’re having a baby, you finished something you really care about, and you have a lot of good music to listen to.
Have a great weekend. I’m also planning a special two-part Random 11 the next two Fridays—the 22 songs that have most influenced me in my life.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Smar-T: The Global Clue Positioning System
In a luxurious car, a female investment banker and a male investment banker talk.
MALE BANKER
Wow, I can’t believe you’re really going to quit investment banking.
FEMALE BANKER
The money and security are great, but I want to pursue my dream of going to grad school to study poetry.
A small device on the female banker’s desk lights up and rings.
MALE BANKER
What’s that?
FEMALE BANKER (reaching for the device)
It’s Smar-T, my new GCPS.
MALE BANKER
GCPS?
FEMALE BANKER
Global Clue Positioning System. (She turns on the Smar-T)
SMAR-T (in calm female voice)
Warning! Poverty approaching. Foreclosure, reposession, and student loan default imminent. Final destination: despairing obscurity.
FEMALE BANKER
You know, I could just write my poetry in between mergers. Thanks, Smar-T!
VOICE OVER
Smar-T is the revolutionary new device that gives you direction when you reach the crossroads of life. It delivers the clues you need when you need them most.
Inside a bar, two men, Frank and Benny, talk over beers.
FRANK
So I took your advice, even though Smar-T said not to. I told her I couldn’t deal with sneaking around any more and that she should tell her husband.
BENNY
Hey, you gonna trust your buddy Benny or some stupid piece of plastic? (They clink bottles.) So what does the husband do?
FRANK
He’s a Green Beret.
Frank’s Smar-T beeps.
SMART-T
Caution! Take immediate evasive action.
The door of the bar bursts open. A large man, dressed in full camo gear, scans the tavern.
CAMO MAN
Which one of you is Frank?
Frank extends his arm over Benny’s head and points to his friend. Camo Man grabs Benny and pulls him off the stool. Off camera, Benny starts to shriek.
FRANK
Thanks, Smar-T. I’ll never turn you off again.
VOICE OVER
Smar-T combines the collective wisdom of the greatest thinkers in human history, including: the Torah, the New Testament, the I-Ching, Poor Richard’s Almanac, Wikipedia, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, Vulcans from every Star Trek intellectual property, everything your mother ever told you, Winston Churchill, and Oprah. Use it for advice on parenting....
A mother and father talk.
MOTHER
How can we be open about sex with the kids without encouraging them to have sex?
SMAR-T
Suggestion: Intersperse discussion with graphic details of sexually transmitted diseases.
FATHER
I like it. Thanks, Smar-T.
SMAR-T
Downloading gonorrhea slides now.
VOICE OVER
finances...
A broker talks on the phone.
BROKER
Yes, I said take all of it out of Bear Stearns and put into JP Morgan. Trust me, a little birdie told me so.
SMAR-T
Insider information complete. Contacting nearest Porsche dealer now.
BROKER
Smar-T, you da man! Or da woman.
VOICE OVER
and relationships...
In a pitch black bedroom, a bed squeaks as a man and woman breathe heavily.
MAN (urgent)
Oh baby, oh baby...
WOMAN
Not yet, not yet.
The Smar-T lights up in the darkness.
SMAR-T
Climax unaligned. Think about baseball.
MAN
A hundred years since the last Cubs World Series...A hundred years since the last Cubs World Series.
The woman cries out and the man follows. They turn the light on and lie breathless under the covers.
MAN and WOMAN (in unison)
We love you, Smar-T!
VOICE OVER
Why trust your decisions to the irrational, emotional, erratic impulses of the human brain? Let Smar-T show you the way to better decision making today.
At the Trinity United Church of Christ, Reverend Jeremiah Wright preaches.
WRIGHT
I say, no, no, no, not God Bless America...
On his pulpit, his Smar-T vibrates. He pauses to listen to the message.
SMAR-T (whispering)
YouTube cliff approaching. White backlash ahead. African American presidential hopes fading.
The congregation leans in, silent, waiting for the Reverend’s next words.
WRIGHT (clears throat)
So, I say no, no, no, not God Bless America. God double-bless America! This is the greatest country on Earth! USA! USA! USA!
The congregation chants along with him. In one pew, Barack Obama turns around, holding up a Smar-T.
OBAMA
And it makes a great gift!
VOICE OVER
Get smart and get Smar-T today!
Original concept by Saying Yes Enterprises.
MALE BANKER
Wow, I can’t believe you’re really going to quit investment banking.
FEMALE BANKER
The money and security are great, but I want to pursue my dream of going to grad school to study poetry.
A small device on the female banker’s desk lights up and rings.
MALE BANKER
What’s that?
FEMALE BANKER (reaching for the device)
It’s Smar-T, my new GCPS.
MALE BANKER
GCPS?
FEMALE BANKER
Global Clue Positioning System. (She turns on the Smar-T)
SMAR-T (in calm female voice)
Warning! Poverty approaching. Foreclosure, reposession, and student loan default imminent. Final destination: despairing obscurity.
FEMALE BANKER
You know, I could just write my poetry in between mergers. Thanks, Smar-T!
VOICE OVER
Smar-T is the revolutionary new device that gives you direction when you reach the crossroads of life. It delivers the clues you need when you need them most.
Inside a bar, two men, Frank and Benny, talk over beers.
FRANK
So I took your advice, even though Smar-T said not to. I told her I couldn’t deal with sneaking around any more and that she should tell her husband.
BENNY
Hey, you gonna trust your buddy Benny or some stupid piece of plastic? (They clink bottles.) So what does the husband do?
FRANK
He’s a Green Beret.
Frank’s Smar-T beeps.
SMART-T
Caution! Take immediate evasive action.
The door of the bar bursts open. A large man, dressed in full camo gear, scans the tavern.
CAMO MAN
Which one of you is Frank?
Frank extends his arm over Benny’s head and points to his friend. Camo Man grabs Benny and pulls him off the stool. Off camera, Benny starts to shriek.
FRANK
Thanks, Smar-T. I’ll never turn you off again.
VOICE OVER
Smar-T combines the collective wisdom of the greatest thinkers in human history, including: the Torah, the New Testament, the I-Ching, Poor Richard’s Almanac, Wikipedia, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, Vulcans from every Star Trek intellectual property, everything your mother ever told you, Winston Churchill, and Oprah. Use it for advice on parenting....
A mother and father talk.
MOTHER
How can we be open about sex with the kids without encouraging them to have sex?
SMAR-T
Suggestion: Intersperse discussion with graphic details of sexually transmitted diseases.
FATHER
I like it. Thanks, Smar-T.
SMAR-T
Downloading gonorrhea slides now.
VOICE OVER
finances...
A broker talks on the phone.
BROKER
Yes, I said take all of it out of Bear Stearns and put into JP Morgan. Trust me, a little birdie told me so.
SMAR-T
Insider information complete. Contacting nearest Porsche dealer now.
BROKER
Smar-T, you da man! Or da woman.
VOICE OVER
and relationships...
In a pitch black bedroom, a bed squeaks as a man and woman breathe heavily.
MAN (urgent)
Oh baby, oh baby...
WOMAN
Not yet, not yet.
The Smar-T lights up in the darkness.
SMAR-T
Climax unaligned. Think about baseball.
MAN
A hundred years since the last Cubs World Series...A hundred years since the last Cubs World Series.
The woman cries out and the man follows. They turn the light on and lie breathless under the covers.
MAN and WOMAN (in unison)
We love you, Smar-T!
VOICE OVER
Why trust your decisions to the irrational, emotional, erratic impulses of the human brain? Let Smar-T show you the way to better decision making today.
At the Trinity United Church of Christ, Reverend Jeremiah Wright preaches.
WRIGHT
I say, no, no, no, not God Bless America...
On his pulpit, his Smar-T vibrates. He pauses to listen to the message.
SMAR-T (whispering)
YouTube cliff approaching. White backlash ahead. African American presidential hopes fading.
The congregation leans in, silent, waiting for the Reverend’s next words.
WRIGHT (clears throat)
So, I say no, no, no, not God Bless America. God double-bless America! This is the greatest country on Earth! USA! USA! USA!
The congregation chants along with him. In one pew, Barack Obama turns around, holding up a Smar-T.
OBAMA
And it makes a great gift!
VOICE OVER
Get smart and get Smar-T today!
Original concept by Saying Yes Enterprises.
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Top Ten Tuesdays: What April Fool's pranks did we pull?
10) Passed out special Green Zone whoopee cushions that make the sound of mortar fire.
9) Stuffed cucumber wrapped in tinfoil down pants before going to campus abstinence group meeting.
8) Replaced the water in waterboarding with Palmolive.
7) Hit spring in the groin with a giant snowball.
6) Developed elaborate cross-country road-trip ruse just to kidnap John Cusack.
5) Filled John McCain’s All-Bran with Viagra before breakfast fundraiser with the Concerned Women for America.
4) Hired Publisher’s Clearing House to deliver oversized eviction notices to defaulting home owners.
3) Gave Big Oil a stern tongue lashing before cracking up and giving them the usual tongue bath.
2) Dressed up in sombreros, bandoliers, and fake mustaches, then snuck through Lou Dobbs’s backyard.
1) Sent Americans their tax rebates in pennies.
9) Stuffed cucumber wrapped in tinfoil down pants before going to campus abstinence group meeting.
8) Replaced the water in waterboarding with Palmolive.
7) Hit spring in the groin with a giant snowball.
6) Developed elaborate cross-country road-trip ruse just to kidnap John Cusack.
5) Filled John McCain’s All-Bran with Viagra before breakfast fundraiser with the Concerned Women for America.
4) Hired Publisher’s Clearing House to deliver oversized eviction notices to defaulting home owners.
3) Gave Big Oil a stern tongue lashing before cracking up and giving them the usual tongue bath.
2) Dressed up in sombreros, bandoliers, and fake mustaches, then snuck through Lou Dobbs’s backyard.
1) Sent Americans their tax rebates in pennies.
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