Senses Working

Spanish Mosh: The Fest 8, Gainesville, Oct. 29-Nov2 (Day 3)

2009-11-30T15:37:00.000-08:00

After a fitful night of sleep, we headed over to Bagels Unlimited on University Avenue for coffee and fuel. It was full of sleepy Fest attendees and band members who had tickets for free food. It's a pretty good place to ditch a hangover, and a good place to eat even if you lack one, and none of us were suffering too much. Full, we headed to The Venue, since Ninja Gun's drummer Jeffrey Haineault would begin his double-duty day as the Ship Thieves' drummer. We arrived early, before the doors had opened, the line already long, but we were let in soon enough. Male and female Festers in black clothes, black boots, and glinting steel studs strolled up and down the Ave. searching out the sounds they wanted to start their "morning" with. At the dark, cavernous Venue, the first band, Broadway Calls, set up their gear while the sparse bleary-eyed attendees bellied up to the bar to beer away their hangovers. BC started their teen-movie-friendly punk, gently waking us into familiar bouncy-bouncy and a decently congenial crowd. Probably a good idea to start the day without anything too challenging.

Off With Their Heads was next and Matt was expectant; I, on the other hand, didn't know what to expect from these Minnesotans. The crowd milled, but the feeling was surprisingly mellow and we just kind of stood around and talked next to the stage. The band set up without hurry, but, finally ready, they launched into their first note and I was instantly paninied into the stage-front crowd as the beer showered from above. The mosh pressure was instant and omnipotent up front, and I couldn't move. It's best to go with whatever shape they press you into so long as it's not crushing any limbs or organs, and so I did, while overhead crowd surfers climbed the stage or up the backs of anyone handy and surfed until they fell. It's Darwinism, pure and simple, and since this wasn't an activity an injured (bad shoulder) nearly fifty year old would naturally select, I was ultimately expelled slowly through the seven circles of mosh until I was finally on the periphery of the heavy action. Still, I held my good arm up to support a few surfers and, before I was expelled to the margin, I served as involuntary ladder for three or four surfers. The music? It was loud, raucous, punk for the executioner in all of us.

Chris Wollard & the Ship Thieves, up next, would provide a marked contrast in styles and would challenge the expectations of the crowd assembled. They set up slowly, with more elaborate instrumentation (including keyboards, computers) than the punk outfits before them. I noticed the guy prepping his guitar was the nice guy, Chris, from the night before. I'd been chatting with Chris Wollard, legendary member of Gainesville punk icons Hot Water Music, recently disbanded, and hadn't known who he was exactly. He looked almost too scholarly to be a punk icon--tall and lanky, with a slight beard--but then again, his new music moves him decidedly away from punk into more standard Americana-tinged rock territory. They opened up with "Dream in My Head," a song that announces Wollard's departure from HWM and that punk milieu. Their sound is tight and sophisticated, as Wollard places his raspy, plaintive vocals in a register between Springsteen and Westerberg, and the driving rock rhythms followed suit, through "Sick, Sick Love," "Long Wave," "Modern Faith," and "No Exception" ending the set repeating, "This is not a test." Many in the crowd seemed to expect them to play some Hot Water style thrash, and they even started an impromptu mosh during "No Exception," which seemed very odd given the music, but it felt like a good-natured tribute to Wollard's past, if not outright denial that one can outgrow punk. Yet Wollard seemed at ease in the new music, and the band was tight, and watching Jeffrey keep the rhythms mathematically fluid was especially pleasing.

We left The Venue to close out The Fest at Rumrunners, a small bar with lousy acoustics. The Terror in Tiny Town, a self-proclaimed Gainesville "supergroup," was already playing a fast, pumping set of energetic indie-punk songs embellished by some deft keyboard work. Heavily tattooed and exotically lovely Heather handled the heavy vocals duties; they sounded a little like Rainier Maria with extra caffeine. They finished up soon after we got there, but I enjoyed their work.

Towers of Hanoi, whom I've reviewed before, was up next. I'm always glad to hear them play, as their music challenges easy description. They blend math, metal, and indie elements into a sonic pastiche that powers through simple genre definitions. Rachel climbs primal vocal mountains while her husband Travis articulates intricate guitar riffs that contain the music perfectly. Jon on drums and Dru on bass underpin it all with forceful, relentless rhythms. The crowd was relaxed and friendly, and we enjoyed their short set that featured a strong new song, "Heart of Reason," to go with their signature works, including "Danger, Danger," and my favorite, "Empty Chapels." which gives Travis a chance to step out and sing in calm counterpoint to Rachel's theatric style. Coyote Throat followed up with an urgent set of punk songs in the Gainesville mold.

But I was there to hear Valdosta's Trailer of Tears, up next (Jeffrey's second show of the day, this time as frontman), and their unique blend of psychadelic punk doo-wop that they refer to as "trailer pop." After their obligitory round of tequila shots for good luck (after a day of beer), they played an exuberantly Replacements-esque set about love and loss, from the new and catchy "Don't u be Afraid," through TOTs classics like "Oh Baby," "Go Home" (in which Jeffrey channels Bryan Ferry as if he were fronting the Toy Dolls while Taylor, smiling the whole set, hammers the drums into submission), and "Not My Baby Anymore, " a truly inspired, 50s-flavored pop complaint. "Lonely Eyes" continued the nostalgic doo-wop relationship woe-ooo-oh-ooo-woes, and they finished their originals with the excellent "Family Values," which allows Jason on ringing lead and Bobby countering on bass to step out and rescue us from relationship hell with power and even some unpretentious majesty (Think of the opening of "In a Big Country," but the beat is heavier). They closed appropriately with a fun cover of "My Little Runaway," and the set ended in lots of laughter and a very pleased crowd. Their live shows are about fun, but check out the web site to hear the sophisticated blend of pop influences, from Beach Boys to Kinks to Todd Rundgren.

Thunderlip played their final gig. Technically fine neo-Zepplin rock, but Wolfmother has apparently stolen all that thunder.

West Palm Beach boys Surfer Blood kept us at Rum Runners despite headliners Youth Brigade and the Samiam reunion at The Venue. They pulled in from an all day drive at the end of the Thunderlip set and set up quickly. They look very young (the eldest is 24), but their music is a precocious blend of Pet Sounds and new wave that surprises with its unabashed musical righteousness. The played most if not all of their debut release, Astrocoast, beginning with "Floating Vibes" and lighting on the percussion heavy "Take it Easy," the Pitchfork-praised, "Swim (to reach the end)," "Harmonix," both "Jabronis," and "Twin Peaks," among my favorites. Any band who can reference David Lynch all bouncy calypso like and who lists Flannery O'Connor as an influence appeals to my biases. They don't sound live exactly like they do on the cd with all its distorted, washed vocals, but the raw effort appeals because the band has so much fun. They paired very nicely with Trailer of Tears in exuberance and influence, and they finished the Fest 8 perfectly for me, as we headed home after the set. Overall, Surfer Blood and Lemuria were my best new finds of the Fest, though I worry that Surferblood could get overheated given the hype they're already generating.

We straggled tired and spent into the Waffle House in a late night assault, talking about what we'd heard and seen, met by a sudden chill that chased away the Indian Summer and woke us slowly back into our South Georgia lives.

Spanish Mosh: The Fest 8, Gainesville, Oct. 29-Nov2, Day 2

2009-11-17T15:00:00.000-08:00

Taylor, the Captain (both of No More Analog, Taylor in Trailer of Tears), and I headed up Saturday and convened at a building housing a number of local musicians, and a Valdosta refugee or two, to hook up with various gentlemen from Ninja Gun, Trailer of Tears, and the Ship Thieves. We were hearing tales of long lines and waits outside the most popular venues, so, once we had our wristbands, the Captain and I left Taylor and headed to the Civic Media Center to check up on Andrew Jackson Jihad, but the line was infinite and the space was minute, so we gave up and headed to Common Grounds, where the line was manageable and moving and several good bands were to play.

After grabbing some coffee to amp up for the evening, we waited. We waited patiently. We waited patiently, even when the three attractive girls in front of us magically gained immediate admission. Morgan from Hard Girls saw us and joined us in line and we conversed pleasurably about bands, the Fest, etc., and then we finally made it into the venue. The Measure (SA) was up on stage playing some affable, energetic punk, closing their set with "Drunk by Noon," which tends to be the raison d'etre for many Festers. Of course, to be fair, many are still drinking from the night before.

Cheap Girls of Lansing, MI, was up next, one of the two bands I wanted to see at Common Grounds, and it was terrific to see them on a full stage this time. Ian wears nerdy, thick glasses and writes great, crunching pop songs with smart lyrics. "Her and Cigarettes," always a crowd favorite, provokes spontaneous crowd singing ("I love her and cigarettes so much/We took the long way so we could have another"), but all the songs are raucous twenty-something anthems: "I lost my keys, but then I found them/ I lost you too, but that was kind of on purpose." Ben and Adam keep the songs driving, and they would all make Bob Pollard proud.

Buffalo's Lemuria was up next and their indie/punk set layered sweet frosting on the cake of my ears (I know. Kinda gross). Sheena plays guitar and sings with energetic, not-quite-twee but not-quite-riotgrrrl urgency, while Alex provides the deep vocal counterpoint, especially in "Wardrobe." "Lipstick" with its hints of early Liz Phair, Rilo Kiley, and Sleater Kinney alone sold me the album Get Better, which makes me want to wear lipstick to cover my morning coffee breath. Can music be both delicate and muscular? Lemuria answers yes.

The jolt of estrogen pushed me out of Common Grounds and I needed more, so I went to The Atlantic to catch up with Athens' Madeline, whose house show here made me a big fan. She was fully banded for the Fest, and it was great to hear the fleshed out songs live. More girls graced the audience here, and they were clearly appreciative of Madeline Adams' beautiful voice and her lucid observations. But it's for her songwriting I think White Flag is one of my top ten albums of 2009. Songs like "Shotgun Wedding," "Belly of the Beast," drip with that weird southern blend of sin, gin, and the scary bible brought down to earth in a way that lets us all know we've been left behind and it ain't gonna stop, and she manages to weave unusual words into images that make it hurt all over again and forever. When she broke out into "Shotgun Wedding" I was made whole by the poetry even as the song takes you apart in all its gorgeous exploration of falling. Her relationship with the audience was intimate, and when she finished her set and found out she had two minutes left, the audience cheered when the band left the stage and she soloed us out with "I Left the Light On" from Kissing and Dancing, which she self-released when she was only 17.

I left refreshed and on to the Market Street Pub, commandeered that night by Suburban Home Records acts, and had a bite in the restuarant (ih), and then headed in, where The Takers were playing straightforward honkytonk--good sad drinkin' and fightin' music. Waylon Jennings may be dead, but he's certainly not gone as songs like "Curse of a Drunk" and "Friends in Bottles" "celebrate" fuel for outlaws, and "Drift" knows love is a gamble and the house always wins.

Tim Barry was up next, but I was out at the Ninja Gun merch table with Jessie and Dottie. Barry plays what amounts to country emo, baldly autobiographical, and you'll either love the ambitious honesty or find it a little over the top. But in the lobby, all the Ninja Gun and Trailer of Tears guys were hanging around and so we compared notes and drank cheap beer. Chris walked up and said hello. Jeffrey and Coody had introduced me to him at the Atlantic before, and I remembered him as a warm, intelligent guy then, and we reconnected. It wasn't until the next day that I found out who I was talking to, but I'll leave that for then.

Tim Barry finished up his set early, but nobody told Ninja Gun, so they set their gear up and started before their scheduled time slot, which meant some of their crowd hadn't arrived yet and they arrived steadily through the set and filled the room. I've written a lot about this band and these guys have become friends over the last few years, and it has been amazing to watch them grow from the first time I saw them grinding out a good-natured set at a shitty haunted pizza pub with a shittier sound system here in town, playing songs from their first cd (Smooth Transitions), and finishing up by covering "Hey Ya" and "Twentieth Century Boy" while the kids jumped and shouted. But tonight was prime time on a big stage and Coody, Thad, Jake, and Jeffrey played a tight set, mostly from their second cd, Restless Rubes, including the rocking but plaintive "Eight Miles Out" and the wonderfully satirical "Darwin Was a Baptist," and they previewed a song that should anchor the next album, "Time and a Half," which could just become the next anthem for the working class. They articulate the "Red State Blues" better than anyone born and raised in the South, and, while the lyrics can bite and snarl about everything that's wrong with smalltown south Georgia, the guitars ring optimistic, as though some essential goodness down here can come out and "start shinin' again." My only complaint was that they played the minutes scheduled instead of the minutes afforded by Tim Barry's brevity, but nobody told them until they were done. Two more songs would have been awesome.

Whiskey & Co. were up next, and I love their enthusiasm for drink and bluegrass-flavored country, but Matt and Taylor wanted to shed the country sound for some essential hardcore punk, so we headed to the 1982 to hear the Brainworms. Unfortunately, we arrived to a lengthy line because the club was already at capacity, and no one got in until someone left, so we waited and heard this girl complain vociferously that she PAID ALL HER MONEY AND DROVE SIX HOURS JUST FOR THIS SET AND THIS IS A FUCKING BULLSHIT RIPOFF, but unfortunately the city council wasn't in line to vote to change the fire codes just for her. We finally were allowed in about twenty minutes later. Brainworms were last and went a little long, so we were in for about a half dozen, mosh-insane songs. Greg handles vocals and bears the signature great red beard and beer belly and a great coat of sweat halfway through the show and he looks like a mad giant hypermotive leprechan. Moshers attempted to crowdsurf despite the low ceiling and surged toward the stage and threw beer. You'd think it was mayhem in there, and one guy lost his glasses, but somehow they made their way hand-t0-hand out to the periphery safely as the mayhem continued. The music was loud and relentless and unapologetically punk like they really don't fucking care if you think they suck, and that's their strength because they are loved. The crowd knew all the words to songs like "Sunrise Dudes" and "Born with a Beard" and the energy was a good way to close the evening. Taylor, Matt, and I stepped into the warm evening and tried to figure out if we could make it to catch the end of the Textbook Committee, a Bob Pollard approved GBV cover band, but it was too late, and so Matt and I went back to unwind in the cheapass motel room with some cheapass red wine while Taylor went out to find just one more party, but that's his story, not mine.

Spanish Mosh: The Fest 8, Gainesville, Oct. 29-Nov2 (Day -1)

2009-11-07T19:30:00.000-08:00

Gainesville's Fest 8, one of the biggest punk-flavored festivals in the country, drew close to 350 bands and thousands of music lovers from around the world. Sure, many are from the area, and many wouldn't be labeled as "punk" in the contemporary sense, but if you consider the more generous definition that counted people like Patti Smith and even Gainesville's favorite son Tom Petty as punk rockers, it's definitely a punk fest and a legendary annual celebration of the virtues of PBR.

I've extended the dates beyond the three days of the festival, because, well, all those bands gotta play somewhere on the way in and out of town, and five of the bands played in Valdosta before and after, so the Fest festers beyond the armpit Gainesvillers represent the town as and we begin here with Fest: Day -1.

I went to the Bleu Pub here and was disappointed to find that having dinner at home after my evening class made me late for Ninja Gun, who was loading out their gear when I arrived. Amy T. came up, gave me a hug, and raved about their set. I'd mentioned them to her a few hundred times before, but she finally popped her NG cherry and was awash in post-sonic bliss. No surprise there.

Carson was back in town and the bar was full of beery people, so, while it wasn't the Fest, we were all feeling extra festive. Ready the Jet, a trio out of LA, set up next. Live, the punk influences, Misfits and Black Flag, prevail at the front of the sound, but their late-Guided-by-Voices hooks and Replacement's/Husker Du sympathies come through the noise enough despite the pared tour instrumentation and open brick acoustics (the album New Record Highs is, in fact, an enjoyable listen for anyone who misses 80's Minnesota/90's Ohio indie or for anyone who wants to hear it translated into SoCal themes, e.g "Normandie," "Butane Vistas," and "Mile of Miracles").

Hard Girls of San Jose continued the positive infusion of west-coast, Fest-ready sloppy-joes indie punk. Songs like "Quinceanera," "Strange Carafe," and "Beach Party!" drip all over your shirt and make you want to lick your fingers. Max hit the skins so hard that Jay from Ready the Jet had to get on the floor and anchor his kit. They had fun and said after the show that Valdosta was the best place of the tour so far. It was fun to catch up with folks from that part of California, too, as I spent about a year there and my daughter was born there. Morgan, Max, and Mike are mercilously fun, super-nice guys, so if they're in your neighborhood, go see them.

V-town's No More Analog closed the show with a raft of new songs and a fuller sound that enthusiastic bands are comparing to The Replacements. Sure, they've been listening to a lot of Big Star and the Zombies, so it's no surprise that they're underpinning their punk tendencies with a strong sense of pop melody and incisive writing. This is clear in new additions "Been So Good," which breaks out a celebration against all the whining haters of our fair little city, and "Big City Dreams," which is about a girl with higher aspirations. The new songs deliver sharp observations packed into short, tight compositions with plenty of fuzz and feedback to go perfectly with that next PBR and pub fries, and they don't feel at all out of place with all our NMA favorites, like "Fresh Romance," "Field of Diamonds," or "Anasazi." Get that record done, gentlemen.

This was as close as I would get to Friday's Fest, as I couldn't go until Saturday, my ears were primed nicely for what was to come.

This is not an album review: On Califone's All My Friends Are Funeral Singers

2009-10-07T15:09:00.001-07:00

Note: This post began as a comment to Harry S Truman's article at Owl and Bear, but because of its unweildy length, it's here instead.

Made the long trip to Connecticut (which will get its own post) with Califone's new All My Friends Are Funeral Singers on heavy rotation, and "Giving Away the Bride" was on the mix for my daughter's wedding that occasioned the trip. All My Friends Are Funeral Singers builds and builds and, while I appreciate the high marks from Pitchfork, All Music Guide (nice writeup there), and others, I think this should have hit at least a 9 at Pitchfork. It perfects the Califone project with more than subtle variations on the whole Califone/Red Red Meat oeuvre. And, while I like much of what Mr. Tangari says, I respectfully disagree that Califone has but one song to sing. Sure, the band has defined a voice, blending cooling Studebaker radiator syncopation with ball-peen hammer percussion, found noise and odd instruments underpinned by blues-folk string virtuosity, but it's certainly not a monolithic voice, as Tangari suggests."Pink and Sour," "Krill" (Jim Becker on lead vox), and the Tangari-praised "Giving Away the Bride," on the last two albums demonstrate otherwise, along with both Deceleration projects. "Luis Bunuel" steps all the way into alt country territory."Polish Girls" is cheery even in its dark moments, with terrific pop hooks, yet it's still Califone, noise underneath, grit in the vinyl groove hissing and popping. To suggest that Califone has one song to sing is like saying, "Oh, that? It's just another Joseph Cornell box."

I also had recent Pitchfork standout picks Bitte Orca and Merriweather Post Pavilion on the trip along with my favorite road trip album, Slanted and Enchanted L&R, but AMFAFS made it into cd slot more than anything else because it gets better every time I hear it. This is the kind of CD that reinvigorates the album as a relevant form. Rutili is one of the most underrated singer songwriters in indie music, and his phrase montages build to create an atmosphere out of the ghosts of America's secret vocabulary. The fact that Pitchfork and AMG give the album essentially the same score but build their arguments highlighting mostly different songs suggests that there's more here than a very good to excellent album. This is a five-star album, a top-ten list album. I appreciate Harry S Truman's "relief," and 8.1 is a terrific Pitchfork score, to be sure, but part of me also wonders if PF penalizes Califone a point for being from Chicago, or maybe they're overcompensating for that lofty 9.2 on their debut EP. Califone's oeuvre is strong, but because this is Califone's most completely realized album so far, it merits a higher score than, say, Heron King Blues (8.4), which is nasty improv and worthy of the score, but Funeral Singers brings it all together, and so it should be scored higher.

No, this is not an album review, though it responds to one. I won't review it here because I recorded a superstition one of my students, Taylor Patterson, told me and sent it to Tim, who used some of the recording (his voice in "Krill") and references the superstition on the album (the writing spider in "Polish Girls," beautifully phrased). It's a tiny contribution, but still, it prevents me from being objective enough to write a real review.

Fruitbats: Atlanta, The Earl, 9/6/09

2009-09-20T14:36:00.000-07:00

. . . the sun like a high beam
In the rearview mirror, when the song comes
On the radio like a pre-programmed miracle
Amid the grim preaching and interference.
The theme song of your life when you were
The main character, and the film rolls out
On the reel of the road where billboards
For food and fuel, fireworks and casinos
Paint vague sensations of pleasure and danger
Awaiting your exit, the ever so often crawl
Of the same motels under the ever deepening sky.

from "A Mass Hallucination of Motels" by Stuart Dischell from Dig Safe

This begins with poetry because I headed to Atlanta in time to catch the last reading event of the Decatur Book Festival, my old friend Stuart Dischell reading along with two writers I didn't know, the audience populated by luminaries (in poetry, anyway) like Tom Lux and Ed Hirsch and new generation poets like Southern California's Jeffrey McDaniel and some guy in a stripper-festooned Clermont Lounge T-shirt who bought Stuart's new book Backwards Days when I did. But I quote from a poem that approximates what life must be like on the road for a touring band in the south, albeit romanticized a bit.

I left Stuart and friends because I needed to find my own room close enough to the Earl, and so the Motel six became my "same motel" and I left my bag and headed over to the club, where I dined until Andi came out from their sound check and filled me in, and her brother joined me with food and teaching shop talk. Her band, Night Driving in Small Towns, would open at 8:30 sharp with a 45 minute set, and then Death Vessel, and then The Fruit Bats. I recognized Ryan, sound genius from several Califone tours (and a terrific musician himself, according to Tim Rutili), who filled me in on all the news from Chicago's collective music scene. Congrats especially to new dad Joe Adamik!

Night Driving In Small Towns has become more adventurous since moving from Valdosta, where their blend of folk/indie pop originals and pitch-perfect Rilo Kiley and Feist versions made them local favorites and one of Rolling Stones top 25 unsigned myspace bands, to Atlanta and Lower 40 records and a big-city music scene. They were a bit nervous, since this was arguably their biggest gig so far and they were premiering three new songs of nine, so they came out fast, opening with brand new song "Holiday" right into "Restaurant, " a gorgeous torch song. The highlight of the set was another new song, "Serial Killer," which features Andrea Roger's incisive lyrics and a deft arrangement from Colby Wright, with Dan on bass and Tyler on drums pinning down the rhythm. They finished with "Kick," another new one with a terrific pop hook that had me singing along and wishing the new album was out already. (Fruitbats guitarist and keyboardist Ron Lewis was eminently pleased with how they folked up Lindsay Buckingham's "Holiday Road" with Colby on vox, stating that he always wanted to cover it and was pleased NDIST had the balls to do it.)

If you heard Death Vessel was playing next absent any context, you might expect something hardcore, something metal, and Joel Thibodeau looks the part a little--darkly gnomic, all in black, long stringy black hair, a certain intensity. But the presence of an upright bass, violin, and various folk strings quickly dispel any such misconceptions. Still, the moment Joel opened his mouth to sing startled me more than just about any sound I've ever heard at a live show. His voice is high. If Neil Young and Joan Baez had a eunuch lovechild, he would sing like Joel Thibodeau. But once you get past the strangeness, the beauty of it washes over and you relax into it. The set mainly focused around their new release Nothing is Precious Enough for Us, which the link will take you to, but, live, the sound was more expansive than the leaner production the album offers. "Jitterakadie" especially benefited from the fuller treatment, and with "Block the Eye" and "Bruno's Torso" anchoring it, Death Vessel's prog-folk set pleased a very receptive audience.

Eric at the merch table. Photo by Andrea Rogers.

Fruitbats came in fresh (wholesome boys from the Midwest, ya know) from finding out that The Ruminant Band had supplanted Wilco at the top of Billboard's college charts the week before, plus it was a big Sunday night crowd, so they were in a good mood and performed like it. Eric Johnson can also reach the higher registers, as he demonstrated capably in his the opening salvo with spirited versions of "Primitive" and "The Ruminant Band," the first two songs from the new album (a quiet one at first listen, but its complexity builds with repeated listening). Then through the rest of the show they moved back and forth in time through their oeuvre (though Echolocations was notably absent), hitting Spelled in Bones crowd pleaser "Canyon Girl," then back further into Mouthfuls with the doleful "Union Blanket" and the shambly "Rainbow Sign," which is as close as the Fruit Bats would come this evening to performing a song that suggests Eric's work with The Shins. "Rainbow" is slower, edgier, though. Then they returned to Ruminant territory with "Flamingo" and its antique piano feel and fatigued calliope circus chords. The upbeat pop of "My Unusual Friend" and honkytonk (think Leon Russell)"Feather Bed" rounded out the return to the pleasant present . They closed out the set with "Earthquake of 73," "Tegucigalpa," and the upbeat but bittersweet "When U Love Somebody" (". . . bite your tongue; all you get is a mouth full of blood") while the tall blond giantess kept rhythm pogoing through until the end and after, and because she was so tall and bouncy, the band came out and encored two from the new one, "Being On Our Own" and "The Blessed Breeze," which carried us out into the warm Atlanta evening after all the conversations died down and the merch was put away. The Fruit Bats, perhaps, are not going to change your whole life, but they are going to make you feel better and more connected to the one you're already living, whether through tears or laughter, irony or deadpan honesty. This was a terrific evening of music start to finish, then the road again, back to our respective motels, small soaps, white towels, all that smeared, clean light.

True Health Care Facts! (I want what my mom has!): Updated

2009-08-25T14:03:00.000-07:00

As the intelligence and tone of public discourse devolves into apoplectic frothing, gun toting, and absolutely inane claims from the extreme right, the primary victims, other than the millions of Americans lacking health coverage, have been the facts.

At the town hall in Valdosta, GA, Representative Jack Kingston, to his credit, spoke in favor of what Sarah Palin has famously called "Death Panels," and he spoke with sincerity (tough for most politicians) about how the end of life issue touched his own family, and he called the provision, accurately, "counseling for living wills" instead of "death panels." He's spoken up against the rhetoric, and pointed out on his "Health Care Checkup" that end-of-life preparation could save Medicare $77 million dollars, not a big chunk of change in these trillion-dollar times, but that would fund a few neighborhood clinics. I applaud him for his clarity on that point.

However, in many of the other bullet points, Kingston presents facts that dissemble the problems families face with our current health care system. Among the most egregious is his assertion that, whereas consumers once paid 47 cents on the dollar out of pocket for health care, now we pay only 13 cents. This misleads because it suggests that we're actually getting a bargain and we should be grateful that employer- and public-funded insurance is so generous, and that's perhaps not surprising for someone whose largest campaign contributer is AFLAC, and three of the top five funding categories are insurance, lobbyists, and health care professionals (opensecrets.org).

The more important figure is how much of one's income is going out for health care, and how much larger a burden that 13 cents is on families today. Donning my old Forest Service statistical clerk hat and using figures from US Dept. of Health and Human Services Excel spreadsheets and US Census data, I could very quickly see that the burden for US families is growing astronomically. Since Jack compared 1960 with today, I did too (or as close to today as the spreadsheets and census data would take me--2006).

In 1960, the annual consumer burden, per capita, for health care was $101. That seems tiny, but the average male income* was only $4080. Still, that's only about ~2.5% of his annual income.

In 2006, the annual consumer burden, per capita, was $2256 for the same male who earned $32,265. The burden for health care for that individual has jumped to about 7%.

To put that in some perspective, if incomes had risen as fast as health care cost, the male in 2006 would have had to earn $91,336 to enjoy the same health-care-cost-to-income ratio as the male in 1960.

And it's only worse for women. In 2006 the average woman earned only $20,014, but her health care burden was the same, so her consumer burden is over 11% today. Marry the average man and average woman and add a child or two and you can see why the consumer burden for families approaches 20%. Employers have helped with some of the burden, but more and more employers are eliminating or reducing health care coverage for their employees. Still, if I added my own health insurance contribution and the average out-of-pocket amount, I would come in a little over the average listed above. But average itself is a misleading word.

Realize that half the country earns less than average, and you can see why so many are increasingly unable to afford health care.

Then realize that the averages also spread the burden across the full spectrum of the population regardless of health. Most people don't get really sick, and so the averages mask the astronomical burden faced by the seriously ill, the chronically ill, people with insurance and good jobs who go bankrupt when the co-pays begin to add up to the tens of thousands of dollars. People like my sister.

We haven't even begun talking about rescission, the act of canceling policies for preexisting conditions uncovered when someone becomes seriously ill (i.e. expensive). I can speak personally about this, because my first job out of college was to sell life and health insurance. Agents aren't trained medical professionals, and offices want premiums sold, so we were encouraged to check "no" whenever customers said "I don't know" to a health question. I was 22 (i.e. naive) and simply didn't consider that a company could behave so unethically as to cancel a policy after someone had paid into it for years. But writing premiums gets money flowing into the company, and, to keep it from flowing back out, companies don't expend the effort to check up on their customers unless, heaven forbid, they should become seriously ill (i.e. a liability).

Outlawing rescission and eliminating the practice of refusing customers with preexisting conditions, which would be the right thing to do, will make health care more expensive in the current setup, too expensive for millions more Americans. But these millions are at the mercy of tens of millions who like what they have mainly because they haven't used it much. Comes out of the check before they see it, co-pay's 20 bucks, most prescriptions are covered, no worries. To the majority, especially to those making more than the average, it still feels like a pretty good deal even if that number on the check keeps getting bigger every year. So, all those people out there with signs, many on Medicare, are essentially saying, "Screw the millions," and, as Kingston did elaborately on his Checkup, claim that it's fewer millions than the media is reporting. Fewer millions equals less guilt I guess.

At any rate, after doing my own math, I have questions about some of his other bullet points. He touts medical tourism as proof that our system is the best (40% of the world's medical tourists come to the US). First, boob jobs aren't real medical procedures, but I doubt such procedures were excluded (he has no citation for this figure, so I can't check it), and no one disputes that, for the very wealthy, we do have the best health care system in the world.

For everyone else, our infant mortality rate is a better measure of how we aren't taking care of the millions. According to the CIA fact sheet, we rank 45th, just behind Cuba.

But these are facts, and it's clear that, in this debate, the facts don't seem to matter. And the 45,000* adults under 65 who die each year (according to Harvard research published in American Journal of Public Health, more than die from breast cancer, by the way) for lack of adequate health coverage? They're the facts that seem to matter least in this debate.

Me? I don't see why I can't have what my mom has. She's on Medicare, with a supplemental policy. I pay into Medicare. I'm OK with people keeping what they have, but I want what my mom has, and I want you, Jack Kingston, I want you, Congress, to do your job and figure out how we are all going to pay for it.

(Psst. I think it would help Medicare, btw, to have an influx of younger, healthier clientele. You know, actuarilly speaking. Just sayin'.)

*Why male? The census in 1960 doesn't break things down into median household incomes, so we have to cobble together a bit to get a sense of the burden to families. *2 The original figure of 18,000 cited from a radio broadcast earlier has been replaced by this more authoritative figure.

Milton the blind kitten is probably dead by now

2009-08-05T14:10:00.000-07:00

What do you do when you walk out and this rain-wet kitten covered with flies drags itself out of the empty lot onto your property?

You think it won't make it a few more steps and it mewls when you get close and when you get close it's covered not only by flies but maggots and one of its eyes is bulging and glaring soap-scum white. One of the eyes is bulging but the other isn't, yet it's blank as a nickel and it's clear the kitten is blind and there's no mother but the rain and it's covered with maggots and the flies keep coming. What do you do? You spray the cat with vegetable soap to kill the maggots and keep the flies at bay and nearly drown it trying to wash and comb out dead maggots and it mewls and shivers alive and it might just die right there next to the tomato plants, but if you use one of those turkey injectors without the needle you can put milk in its mouth and put it in an empty aquarium and cover it up and try to dry it with a wad of paper towels and then you can fill a shell with milk and it drinks it on its own and so fill it with milk again and again and it drinks it and coughs and coughs. Put it in the laundry room so it can't cough its death into the cats that already live there and where it is warm and dry and cover the aquarium so no more flies can lay eggs in its sick black fur and it is blind and as comfortable as possible before you go hear some live music and drink beer with friends.

After returning from hearing live music and drinking beer with friends, you check the aquarium and it's empty. Somehow Milton the blind kitten has crawled out and mewls behind the washer and it's amazing that a little milk could give it the strength to crawl out and drop blind off the top of the washer and not be more damaged. It comes out and tries to think a shoe is its mother because it was nearby when milk was there. Then canned cat food is near the shoe because cow's milk isn't good for cats, they say. The shoe tries to be a good mother but it has no idea if this blind kitten is old enough for solid food. It is and it eats and eats and sneezes and sneezes.

Now it's Sunday and it's clear it's better but not well, coughing and its eyes aren't better despite the neosporin salved in. The animal shelter won't open until Tuesday and it is a matter of waiting out what will worsen and what will become better. What will worsen is unexpectedly a back, because of playing basketball, and its cough, and what will become better is the blind kitten's appetite and its affection for the shoe, which is its mother now like in a child's book. Ants scour the food plate for remains. It mewls and mewls. Its sorry fur is fluffier and it no longer possesses a wet rat's tail, but its eyes and cough are worse, and the blind kitten Milton is a poet of survival despite what's killing it anyway.

My shoe is its mother and I'm sad for it as I, not you, have to take it to the animal shelter because its sickness is fatal as all survival is in the end. What will become better is sleep. Then its always open eyes can close and the shoe can be sad for its loss.

Spay and neuter erases all this except the inexorable factuality of the conclusion for all.

Dirty Projectors, Atlas Sound, and Miscellany

2009-07-24T13:16:00.000-07:00

July 17: Dirty Projectors, Atlas Sound

Andi and I headed from her pleasant apartment in East Atlanta to Flat Shoals for Thai before the show on a beautiful and surprisingly cool (for Atlanta) summer evening, so we walked around as long as possible, or so we thought. After they let us in, there was a long delay, which turned out to be because The Dirty Projectors were still en route from Baton Rouge. Finally, Altas Sound opened the show with a five song set that surprised mainly because angel-voiced Bradford Cox (Deerhunter) added a band (three Selmanaires) two days before and they managed to crunch out a fine country-laced set, departing from Bradford's more electronic Atlas Sound peregrinations. Listen to their set here. We both liked the effort, which I likened to country Radiohead and she compared to early Travis, if that tells you anything. These are definitely worth downloading, even if the band isn't as polished as it will be by the time they tour in support of the forthcoming Logos EP. Bradford played with the confidence and panache of a salsa champion and the band couldn't help but follow his lead, even if there was a misstep here and there.

Dirty Projectors, I'm gonna say it, sound better live than on the record, a fascinating listen regardless, but the studio makes it, well, more studied. Or as another attendee put it, "they were sick. and he sounded more real than i imagined. and they were fabulous." I agree. Live, the timing and precision of vocalists Amber Coffman, Angel Deradoorian, and recent addition Haley Dekle arrested and amazed. The effect was most eerie on an extended version of "Remade Horizon," when they traded notes so quickly and flawlessly, they sounded as one perfect instrument. I was reminded of a lecture by Brian Eno I attended at Berkeley years ago, when he talked at one point about working with David Bowie for Low, describing how he assembled a "guitar solo" from notes played individually (yes, simple now because of his work). Eno admitted he was amazed when Adrian Bellew learned to play the impossible solo for the Stage tour, which I caught in Oakland. Theirs was a more impressive accomplishment, their living voices magnified and compelled one to thoughts of spirituality.* Andi and I just looked at each other, awestruck. Yes, they arrived late, road weary, and Haley was sick, so it might have been excusable for Dave and Co. to phone it in, but the music took over and they played with energy and enthusiasm, working mainly through Bitte Orca featuring Dave Longstreth's high capoed Afro-Carribean guitar licks and unusual time signatures pinned down effectively by Brian and Nat, but they also included selections from earlier works, like "Rise Above" and a strong David Byrneless version of "Knotty Pine." "Musical Director" and Yale-alum (Did you know him, Liz?) Dave Longstreth's vocals were unusually measured, but clear and emotive, and his stage presence was relaxed. He was clearly enjoying himself, joking at one point about the stresses of the road on bands (Amber rolled her eyes), and they stopped to announce that it was Angel's "18th" birthday, and we all sang to her, so I suppose all of us there can claim to have sung (sloppily, to be sure) with the Dirty Projectors.

*Of course, this was The Earl, and recognizing the aforementioned spirituality for some (like me) meant setting down the beer and saying, "Oh, shit,"or, in the manner of the tilting girl in front of us, throwing up in her cup and passing out while her boyfriend propped her up because he lacked the decency to take her home ("Hey, I paid for this"). Unfortunately, Andi stepped in it, so we didn't get to hang out much after the show, one worth being relatively sober for given the complexity of the music and the consummate effort of the musicians this cool summer night.

July 22, 24: Locally

Back home, I stood on a log over the pond behind my house between a hunting rat snake in front of me and a young hawk, landing awkwardly just behind me. The snake looked at me and crawled on slowly, while the hawk finally heeded the parental squawk and flew back up. I hopped off the log, walked inside, thinking of this, reflecting on Amy's brief visit. She left before the show at the Bleu Pub that night, which was a good one.

Atlanta's The Wild, on tour with Pedals on our Pirate Ship s, opened with an enthusiastic set of songs from their new self-titled EP. They play joyous clear-eyed folk punk and covered a Mountain Goats song. Locals No More Analog played next, and they continue getting tighter and have developed a singular voice. I think they're ready to record and tour seriously. Pedals played a bicycle friendly and active set, and Trailer of Tears finished up late, getting ready for their Friday show in Gainesville with the Virgins (of Richmond, not New York) and the Takers.

At Common Ground, Trailers played a nasty set of their unique neo-glam doo-wop and the Takers followed later with a straight-up country rock set that would sit well on the shelf next to Lucero and Drive-by Truckers any day. I drove the church van back all night, as I won (lost?) the sobriety contest, and the boys (Jeffrey, Bobby, Jason, and Taylor) and me and Wayne and Coody and Jessie played name-a-band-that-begins-with-the-last-letter-of-the-previous-band-name (usually S or R) until the morning. It was a fun trip.

Locally, as fall approaches, there appears to be a venue crisis, as all the house-show holders moved to apartments and Vito's moved from the haunted house to a more upscale location not suited to live music. The Bleu Pub and Jack's shed (and occasionally Sur Este) is all that's left, and that means the local scene is in serious need of a new playground.

Jenny Lewis and Heartless Bastards, June 30, Jacksonville

2009-07-04T14:30:00.000-07:00

I packed my cross-eyed Hyundai full of people who like good music (Rebecca, Laura, Kat, and Stuart) and we headed to enjoy the sun and sand at Jacksonville Beach and some decent Mexican food before the show at Freebird's (owned by a former member of Lynyrd Skynyrd, so shout it all you want). It's an interesting venue, two floors with an atrium, a full bar on either floor, so we headed upstairs to get a good view of the stage.

The Heartless Bastards opened the show, but they're so good, I prefer to think of them as co-headliners (Metacritic shows both bands' new albums at solid 75s), despite an abbreviated eight-song set (in no particular order) including "The Mountain," "Out at Sea," "You Could Be So Happy," "Hold Your Head High," "Early in the Morning," "Swamp Song," and "Sway." I compared Erika Wennerstrom's voice elsewhere to Grace Slick's, and I've read others compare her to Janis Joplin, PJ Harvey, even Robert Plant. Let's say she possesses the emotional urgency of the latter group and the vocal fog-piercing clarity of Grace. Erika's a blue-collar angel belling over the crunchy, deeply felt blues-rock she and her band lay down. It's a different band than the three-piece that toured with Lucinda Williams a couple of years ago. Erika moved to Austin after breaking up with Mike, the former bass player, and made The Mountain with studio musicians and, for the first time, a producer (Mike McCarthy), but because her vox and writing have always been the focus of the Heartless Bastards' sound, The Mountain sounds like an HB record. For the tour she added old friends Jesse Ebaugh and Dave Colvin, who played on the original HB demo, and capable Knife in the Water guitarist Mark Nathan. The addition of Nathan frees Erika from having to carry so much of the sonic burden, and she seemed more relaxed at this show than she did in Tallahassee with Lucinda, less working the music and more loving it. I mentioned this to Erika after the show and she agreed that she felt more relaxed and that she enjoyed the added elements that a four-piece allows, including at one point a nice extended dual guitar jam. On the other hand, part of the relaxed mood may be because, as Jesse explains, "Touring with Jenny Lewis has been fun. They're so funny and we've been laughing the whole tour."

I suppose that's not surprising given that Jenny Lewis spent her youth performing with the likes of Lucille Ball and the Golden Girls. She's spent the last ten proving that video hasn't quite killed the radio star, as her music achieves ever more mainstream cred, along with Elvis Costello's seal of approval (and vox "Carpetbaggers"). After Rilo Kiley's Under the Blacklight, it's not surprising that she strutted onstage confidently, vamping like a trailer-park cougar. No more innocent promish dresses and Toys R Us keyboards for Jenny (Execution of All Things tour). She's bringing back hotpants sass with energy and a wide smile. The crowd, populated by many young women, sang along and raised fists on cue, cheered and reveled over the course of her respectable set (list below) that began with the ambitious "The Next Messiah" and then moved back and forth equally between Rabbit Fur Coat and Acid Tongue, plus two new songs: "Just Like Zeus" and "Big Wave" and one Rilo Kiley song ("Silver Lining"). Her supporting band, including "boo" Jonathan Rice on lead guitar and duets, seemed very happy to be on stage with her. Barbara Gruska pinned down rhythm with deft drumbeats along with Jonathan Wilson on bass, while Farmer Dave Scher stepped out from rhythm guitar to bend fine and lonesome lap steel notes. Our little group, ladies and gentlemen all, fell in love with Danielle Haim (listen!), whose innocent look foiled Jenny's vamping beautifully, and she seemed to be having more fun than anyone else, shifting from guitar to cowbell to drums and backing up on vocals with spirited enthusiasm and a hell of a voice. The show ended with Danielle and Barbara hammering out a primitive drum duet to close "Born Secular" as everyone else left the stage.

We took our happy ears out to the beach's more primitive soundscape and frolicked a bit before the two-hour drive home featuring a lively literary discussion about some British classics ("Heathcliff's a dick!" "No he's not!").

All photos by Rebecca Lynn. Pictured Kat and Laura (front) and Stuart, me, and Rebecca.

April in June: LA Times Bookfest, Day 2, and Santa Barbara

2009-06-23T20:47:00.000-07:00

The last day of the festival started off with one of my favorite living poets, Kim Addonizio, and it was good to run into her in the green room, along with Elena and Carol Ann and catch up briefly before the reading, and to meet Barbara Hamby again, who lives just about 80 minutes from my south Georgia home. We headed out quickly, though. The last day often is lower energy after Saturday, but not today. Here was the line up:

10 a.m.

Kim Addonizio, Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within

10:30 a.m.

Kevin Prufer, National Anthem

11 a.m.

Barbara Hamby, All Night Lingo Tango

11:30 a.m.

Jim Natal, Memory & Rain

12 p.m.

Carol Ann Davis, Psalm

12:30 p.m.

Mark Irwin, Tall If

1 p.m.

Jeffrey McDaniel, The Endarkenment

1:30 p.m.

Juan Felipe Herrera, Half of the World in Light: New & Selected Poems

2 p.m.

Brendan Constantine, Letters to Guns

2:30 p.m.

James Ragan, Too Long a Solitude

3 p.m.

Sesshu Foster, World Ball Notebook

3:30 p.m.

Douglas Kearney, Fear, Some

4 p.m.

Gail Wronsky, Poems for Infidels

4:30 p.m.

Readings from the Great Poets

Kim pulled out her harp and blew blues in the middle of a fine poetry set and the crowd was awake and alive. Students I introduced her work to five years ago still talk to me about her influence, and her poems have made their way into the high school curriculum of at least two schools in south Georgia. Kevin Prufer, good friend of fellow poet Noah Blaustein, was charming and affable and his excellent work was well received. Barbara made the audience laugh and think, which is a perfect Sunday morning combination, better than church. The rest of the day was packed with LA area poets, except Carol Ann, who now lives in South Carolina. While it might be easy to dismiss the locals as locals, these are good writers. Jim's an old friend and his poetry is wonderfully observed. Carol Ann read from Psalm, mostly, a book I own and like. Mark, who teaches at USC, read his relatively more avant garde work, which I enjoyed, and so did the crowd. Jeffrey McDaniel's subversive, hilarious poetry pushes the boundaries, and I like that. Juan, who spent many years in Fresno, is aging nicely, and his beaming smile warmed the crowd. Brendan, whose poems I hadn't heard before, was sharp-witted and his performance brought lots of people to the tent. James, who draws a big crowd every year, gave his usual strong reading. I missed most of Sesshu (Margaret beaned in, and I had to escort her to the Green Room to hang out briefly before her meeting with Pico Iyer), but he kept the crowd, and quite a few of his young students showed up. Douglas Kearny read with spoken word energy and joyous ferocity, and he didn't let the stage restrict him. His work surprised me. (I read from the books I buy when I come back, and his was probably the class pick.) Gail writes dark, edgy poetry, and she's kind of an LA rock star (No, wait, that would be her daughter playing guitar in Kate Crash). Some of us closed the day reading poems from whomever wasn't us. The last slot is usually slow, so we wanted to spare a reader the indignities of a vanishing crowd. More people were there than we expected, though. I read a Larry Levis poem from California Poetry, an anthology co-edited by Chryss Yost, who provides a nifty segue into the next paragraph, the next city, because she lives in Santa Barbara and she would be joining us for dinner.

Elena tried to get me to stay for drinks with some of the poets, and it's an offer I hated to refuse, but I'd promised my Santa Barbara hosts Amy and George that I'd be in Santa Barbara for dinner, so I hopped in my lame-ass rented Aveo and headed north on Highway 1 through Malibu. Even in an Aveo, it's a beautiful drive, and in about 90 minutes I was there, greeted warmly by Amy and George and Mookie and Nigel. The plan was to dine at the Hollister Brew Pub, where they make excellent beer and good food in a mall. I headed up to Chryss' briefly to catch up with her and her menagerie. And we headed to Hollister for dinner. It was very, very good, but not as good as the company, because, along with Amy and George, Chryss, Dave, Patrick, Cookie Jill, and Barry came out and we enjoyed dining and drinking under the TVs tuned to various sporting events. The casual atmosphere allowed us to be, well, casual, boisterous, and loudish (but never loutish) at times. After dinner, we headed back to the house for a nightcap or two from George's cellar. We started with an amazing Golden Eye pinot and we concluded with a Williams Seylem Sonoma. In between I know we tasted something Rhonish (a grenache, I believe) from Paso Robles, and, after everyone left and Amy had gone to bed (early Monday meeting), George put The Bird and the Bee on while we sipped the last of the pinot.

The next day was quiet, as everyone worked. I went out for Indian food and wandered around on foot, the weather too overcast to head to the beach, and then had a nice coffee at Jeannine's with the ageless Barry Spacks and ageless Chryss and it was good to catch up on the local poetry scene and everything else. Ageless George and ageless Amy had tickets to see a famous blues act whose name eludes me, so many of the people from the night before came over and we hung out until they came back and we enjoyeed more wine and hung out and ate pizza and watched part of the Joy Division documentary, finishing off this too quick visit in high spirits. I had to drive to LA and fly back the next day, classes to teach, finals to write, energy renewed by this trip home, this time with good poetry and great friends and my wonderful hosts. I've been very fortunate to spend this time every year working the book festival and renewing my bonds with friends in LA and Santa Barbara. Soon after I returned home, the San Jesusita fire threatened George and Amy's house and Chryss' (the fire literally stopped at the end of her road) and probably several others and brought home the tenuousness of everything, my great fortune in these few days each year with the best people I know.

April in June: LA Times Bookfest, Day 1

2009-06-12T13:25:00.000-07:00

The nice thing about going west from east is the ease with which I wake up early, since 6:30 LA is 9:30 GA. I shower, shave, dress up (for me), and zip to the UCLA campus to hit the green room before Elena and I start working the Poetry Corner Stage, which features a new poet every half hour. You'd think we'd get tired of hearing two full days of poetry, but it doesn't happen. We have too much to do but still we stop and listen. Elena's already in the green room buzzing with authors and entourages, and she's sitting down for coffee with David St. John, and I rush to join them. It's always a joy to see David because he's so welcoming and much more stimulating than the coffee I set down at the table. Robert Pinsky (who taught me much at Berkeley) comes in and Frank Bidart, who won the LA Times Book Award for poetry, and Marie Howe and Linda Gregerson and Dana Goodyear and Victoria Chang and we're introducing and sitting and chatting for twenty minutes before we have to get to work. It's a whirlwind of conversation, threads across time and place and new threads randomly. Robert mentions that we should get innoculated for shingles based on his own recent experience with this common illnes (and I think my friend John Guzlowski would agree). I talk with Frank about having heard that Lee McCarthy, a mutual friend and fellow central valley poet, had recently passed away, and we connected and appreciated her unique energy. Then Elena and I had to go work the stage.

It's always wonderful to see Bill and the staff of Small World Books (their presence is the best part of Southland Tales), who stocks the tables with a fine selection of poetry from people who'll read at the stage and other excellent poetry books that you should own. Saturday's lineup (and their most recent publications)? Funny you should ask:

Poetry Stage

10 a.m.
Dana Goodyear & Victoria Chang , Honey & Junk and Salvinia Molesta respectively

10:30 a.m.
Robert Pinsky, Gulf Music

11 a.m.
Matthea Harvey, Modern Life

11:30 a.m.
Linda Gregerson, Magnetic North

12 p.m.
Carol Muske-Dukes, Sparrow

12:30 p.m.
Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival

1 p.m.
Marie Howe, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time

1:30 p.m.
Jill Bialosky, The Intruder

2:00 p.m.
This was supposed to be Jorie Graham's slot, but she cancelled.
To avoid dead air, Elena Byrne, Tony Barnstone, Sarah Maclay and I took turns reading from our works (and one of Jorie's poems).

2:30 p.m.
John Felstiner, Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems

3 p.m.
David St.John, The Face: A Novella in Verse

3:30 p.m.
Cole Swensen, Ours

4 p.m.
Connie Voisine, A Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream

4:30 p.m.
Mindy Netifees & Richard Silberg, Sleepyhead Assassins and Deconstruction of the Blues

5 p.m.
Get Lit Players: Classical Teen Poetry Troupe

Saturday featured a strong lineup with good variety. Robert and David and Connie were my personal highlights, and it was good finally to hear Frank Bidart read in his driving style. I went to Utah with Connie and she was a prize nominee this year! Her book is terrific and I'll teach it in the fall (note: order books, dumbass). Richard Silberg, an avant garde icon, and the Get Lit Players, a troop of young spoken word champions, were very pleasant surprises. John Feltsiner gave the first lecture at one of these events, which he peppered with other people's poetry. Good message, but I think some in the crowd were puzzled. It was one of the smoothest days we'd ever had. Only one reader forgot how to tell time, but we handled that quickly. And Jackson Wheeler, David Oliveira's Solo co-editor, showed up, and we caught up best we could.

Elena hosted a party that night at the Ruskin Center. I enjoyed the drive up, listening to Henry Rollins post-punk program on KCRW, Television, Joy Division, and especially (because I hadn't heard it in ages) The Normal's "Warm Leatherette," which bled into one of my own poems (albeit with a very different ethos), among his many fine selections. I showed up early, set up chairs and tables, while Elena and Carol Ann Davis cooked pasta and made lovely sauces and salads and there was wine. Lots of LA poetry royalty arrived at this casual gathering and to name a few would slight the many, but we ate and drank and enjoyed a fine first day of poetry and conversation and pasta and a perfect LA evening in the Miracle Mile.

April in May: Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, Day 1 and 2: my LAs

2009-05-25T15:57:00.000-07:00

My annual trip to California for the LA Times Festival of Books was a quick and busy foray into my home state. Because of my teaching schedule, I didn't make it home to Fresno, so it's just LA and Santa Barbara this year, with a side trip to Huntington Beach.

After landing, I checked into the Airport South Travelodge (clean, cheap, but a bit noisy right on Sepulveda) and called my friend Margaret, left a message, then wandered across the street to Ralph's to buy fruit and wine for my stay, walked around El Segundo to enjoy the cool, unusually clear weather and wake up after a day of travel, then went back to see if Margaret had called back. Making contact was more complicated this year, since stupidly I left my cell phone on my futon in Georgia.

The phone light wasn't blinking, so I called my friend Noah to say hello, and he insisted that I come over right now. I called Margaret back; she was writing a script and committed for a few hours anyway, so I headed to Noah and Cristina's to see them and beautiful Siena and the bubbly new baby and the redesigned house. The house was redesigned so dramatically that I walked up and down the street twice before I realized I was directly in front of it. They added a storey (and a view), updated the look, made it architecturally fabulous and open and flexible. Noah either performed or supervised the work, so I told him he should get a contractor's license; this talent (and just about any other) pays more than his poetic talent, considerable though it is. He was justifiably proud and he beamed and Cristina and Siena played with Lego's, built another tiny happy house. I was impressed. They've together made a home in LA, where transience is the preferred mode of existence. Since I had later plans with Margaret, I had to turn down their generous offer of a meal and a Laker's playoff game on the flatscreen and I headed back to the motel to check for a blinking light.

It didn't blink. I called and left a message and Margaret called later to explain that the writing had gone well and she couldn't stop and I couldn't fault her for that; I wish I had more of those days writing. We agreed to meet at the same El Salvadorian restaurant run by a warm, beautiful, matronly woman and her family. Nothing in the world can beat papusas and carne asada and Margaret's lazer-bright gaze. She tells me what I need to hear instead of what I want to hear, so I value her friendship and counsel, and I'm excited to hear about all her new creative projects. She still acts, but now producing and writing are taking over. She can do exactly what she wants, and to be in the presence of her confidence and calm bearing amid LA's chaos pleased me. I'm the one turning fifty in the fall, but she's the wise one this night, the one with insight and advice on what I should think about, how I should move. I went back to the motel full of beans and light, sipped some wine and reflected, listened to the whoosh of trucks and tv through the thin motel walls.

I took Friday slow, worked out, ate a gyro at a local popular Mediterranean restaurant, came back. The light blinked, Elena touching base about the festival. The prize ceremony I usually attend had been downsized and people who merely worked the festival no longer received free tickets, and you couldn't buy them anymore, either. You had to be invited, and I wasn't, and I might be upset ordinarily, but my dear old Santa Barbara friend and co-editor David Oliveira was reading in Huntington Beach Friday night, and I would have skipped the awards to see him anyway. I left Elena a message not to worry, that I was happy to miss it for David and that I'd see her bright and early Saturday morning.

David lives in Cambodia now with his partner, teaches at a University, and this would be his last trip for a few years, so I had to see David. He offered to pick me up and we drove down together and talked about old times and our current lives. We made a side trip to Long Beach so he could drop a letter off to a friend, and he showed me little Cambodia and told me about the local history, which I knew nothing about. LA seems monolithic, partly because we just call it LA, and that works if you stay on the freeway, but we're really talking about so many different places. Long Beach is not Santa Monica is not the San Fernando Valley is not Sherman Oaks is not downtown is not Montana Street is not Hollywood is not Echo Park is not Venice Beach, etc.

Cambodian signs make me want to stop and eat, but David wants to make sure we get to Huntington Beach with plenty of time so we can eat and find the reading location. He wants Mexican because it's one of the pleasures he misses, and he fills me in on his Cambodian life, what he can get only there and what else he misses from here. I want to go visit him in his home on the Mekong river, browse his considerable poetry library, and share as we have so often a good bottle of wine. His reading was a wonderful success, his voice clear and his new poems authoritative, his new life beginning to emerge in them. I met again Mifawny Kaiser, whom I'd met briefly at various poetry events, but I enjoyed getting to know her better. She's a writer who runs Tebot Bach press and brings poetry to and into the world. I was grateful to be there on a clear night at Golden West College to hear David and another poet I'd met before, Carol V. Davis, read their works. The crowd seemed populated mostly by retired people, and there would be an open mic. I usually cringe at these events because they're too often merely festivals of annoying self-indulgence, but there were surprisingly good writers there and David and I talked about this on our hour long drive back to LA. He came in and we shared a serviceable Bordeaux and a long, warm hug before he left me to another night of whoosh and muffled roomsound.

Thinking about Craig Arnold

2009-05-04T15:04:00.000-07:00

Go back to the sunlit world and tell your story.
from "Hymn to Persephone" by Craig Arnold

Thinking because that's all I can do at the moment. That, and worry. I have a trip to blog about, people to thank, papers to grade, but since returning home to the news that Craig never returned to his hotel from his hike up the volcano on Kuchino-erabu-shima, it's been difficult to think of much else than Craig's sudden absence from the observed world. I yet have hope. As children, we all play at getting lost, being rescued. We practice this. We want to find new worlds, bring them back to share with friends and family. This is my hope, that Craig will be found soon, that he found something amazing he just couldn't leave, something he'll bring back to the sunlit world, a story he'll yet tell us. Please.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=74254019683

Update: Oh, Craig, we'll miss your mischief, your song, your light. Until I too am merely story.

Pond Monsters

2009-04-17T15:42:00.000-07:00

Hiking around in the woods behind my house both keeps me in touch with nature and also reveals what we humans do to it. Big storms deposit garbage throughout the flood plain, from fast food wrappers to lost soccer balls to dumped futon mattresses. Wildlife is nevertheless abundant, especially birds, including owls, hawks, and great herons, but I've also run into raccoons and snakes, turtles and salamanders, lizards and, once, an armadillo. I've blogged previously about evidence of beavers back there (which has attracted many one-handed typists to this blog, according to the tracker), but there's been no recent beaver activity.

Today I found interesting pondkill. At first I thought it was a dead snake, especially given its size, a bit longer than two feet. Upon closer inspection, I determined that it was some kind of amphibian, with its smooth, slimy skin and tiny eyes. It appears to be an amphiuma, and they can grow up to three feet long. They have sharp teeth and can inflict serious damage, should I for some reason decide to start wading in ponds at night. They're nocturnal and stay mostly in water, because their tiny legs are vestigial, but they can move on land if they have to, mostly to lay eggs. It's big, but only grows to about half the size of the largest salamander, either the Chinese Giant Salamander or the Japanese Giant Salamander (sources disagree which one is actually the largest).

Harvest of Hope, Saint Augustine, Days 3

2009-04-04T15:11:00.000-07:00

I know you're on pins and needles, having waited, both of you, so patiently for my review of day three of the Harvest of Hope festival. I arrived around 1:30, since there were few acts I'd wanted to see in the morning. I only have two ears, and I'd almost used up both of them the night before, so a quiet morning was a good way to prepare for the day and night ahead.

Canada's Tokyo Police Club was first up for me. They'd rescheduled their Friday performance due to a "minor health issue" according to their website, and I was grateful for whatever effluvium delayed them because they provided probably my most pleasant surprise of the festival, with their upbeat sound and clever lyrics. Maybe it's the English major in me, but when they sang "Give us your vote" in "Your English is Good," I was ready to. I don't know, maybe think of kicking them through the goalposts of The Decemberists on one side and Los Campesinos! on the other. Oh, Canada, indeed.

Israel's Monotonix was next up on stage one, or, rather, in front of stage one, since they're renowned for performing in the crowd, for being "chaotic." I didn't last long, though. The music was unremarkable, and watching a hairy Levi Elvis wipe his naked ass crack with the mic filled me with ennui. Junior varsity G. G. Allin schtick on a beautiful spring day was as wrong as the hype. Nevertheless, the tight donut of cultish fans morphing around the trio seemed to be enthused, malleable to every one of Levi's commands. I just hope, for the sake of the acts to follow, LE brought his own mic.

So I wandered a bit. Stage two mostly featured rap on Sunday, and I went to check out Inspectah Deck, but he was late and some guy was stalling with his own soul, which wasn't bad, but the crowd was restless. Monotonix thankfully gave way to Holy Fuck, an electro band that interestingly features live precise bass and drums to nail down all the throbbing computer riffs. The musicians around (including aformentioned fellow Canadians TPC) were impressed, but the music seemed suited to more chemical moods than my state at the time.

I wandered back to stage two briefly. Inspectah Deck had finally shown and was rapping while GZA watched and helped. It was hilarious to see the large crowd of all white suburban indie kids from St. A and Gainsville raise their skinny fists like antennas to Compton when ID said, "This one goes out to all my homies in the 'hood," as though he meant them. ID was congenial and I enjoyed watching, listening, but I needed to head to stage three, where my real homies, Ninja Gun, were going to play. I passed through the nearly non-existent crowd for Tiger City, pausing to hear what they're like. It seemed their crowd hadn't made it out from the 80's to hear their legwarmedover Duran Duran/"Mr. Roboto"-era Styx tunecraft.

Tim Version, another of Gainsville's gruff punk mainstays at HOH, was up on Stage three, likable guys with a sense of fun. Gainesville punk is essentially good, Irish-inspired drinking music, and these guys can fuel a good beer binge. I wandered from the stage to say hello to Jessie and Marie, who were "manning" the merch table with Coody and Thad (when they weren't checking in on TV) before the show. (Thanks for the T-shirt, Coody.)

In SAT analogy parlance, Gainesville style, Tim Version is to Gaslight Anthem as Ninja Gun is to:

a. Fake Problems (ok, they're from Naples. You got me, but who said the SAT was fair?)
b. Against Me!
c. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
d. Grabass Charlestons

The answer is c. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Of course, I have to qualify this some. Ninja Gun is from Valdosta, not Gainesville (even though they're bigger in Gainesville), and, while Tom Petty might be more their entree than any of the Gainesville bands I've heard, their sides would have to be the Kinks and T. Rex. Maybe some Buzzcocks or early Beatles for dessert. That is, their blend of country punk is sweet tea cool, and their songs are wryly observant and well-written. "Eight Miles Out" showed off their angular guitar-drenched driving rock capabilities, while "Darwin was a Baptist" revealed their strong sense of regional irony in its beautifully satiric chorus: "Can I get a little more church in my state?/" (and this is an enjambment to make an old poet like me jealous), "give me one more reason to hate/ everything around me/baby it surrounds me" John Coody is a bona fide, Johnny Cash lib'ral, and it's a pleasure to listen to him weave his words through classic rock and country territories, sounding both familiar and brand new at the same time. They're going on national tour starting this month. Look for them.

Grabass Charlestons and Whiskey & Co. were up next on three. Grabass is a longtime, popular Gainesville punk outfit, a little slower, grungier than most Gainesville bands, and they're good live. Whisky played a fine drunken country sprawl of a set, a nice follow-up to Ninja Gun. "Happy Hour" could be a bar anthem if it wasn't so short. Set it on loop and watch out for the floor, honey.

I stepped over to one to check out Ra Ra Riot for a couple of songs. They weave violin and cello nicely into their new-wave inspired sound. Fortunately, they refract the more interesting side of the 80's with updated, sophisticated, multi-layered pop and clear vocals. If you typically like who NPR recommends, check them out.

Heading into the heart of the evening, stage one featured Jacksonville's Pitchfork-darlings-then-rejects The Black Kids (they sold out SO FAST). They were more enjoyable than I expected, having downloaded their initial ep and, sure, it's clear they requested "Love Cats" and "Let's Dance" often on 80's dance night and they probably have tapes of Talk Talk and Culture Club somewhere in the back seat. "I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance with You" is genuinely fun, but the next new thing? Pushing that pile of expectation on top of them could have ruined them. They're virtue, after all, was their uncritical, charming enthusiasm, and I'm pleased to say that, live, their enthusiasm still shows through as they project a nerdish affability.

But I left The Black Kids to check out KRS-One, and he was preaching the virtues of old school (90's, not 70's, the real old school) hip hop, arguing that it's not dead, showing off quick rhymes over anything. Dixie said she admired him for his experimentation, bringing any musical genre into rap, and when he freestyled over "In the Mood," I was convinced.

So when she and Camille said to check out Paul Baribeau over at stage four, I tagged along. I'd never heard of him and I knew what Gaslight Anthem was gonna sound like. PB put out some fine, amusing, observant acoustic guitar, coffeehouse music perfect for thirty-somethings who like a little wisdom and experience along with their sound. Paul would have fit nicely in Saturday's Vanderslice/Darnielson mix with his simple voice and humorous banter between songs. "Think of all the things that are wrong with your life and fix them." He makes it sound easy and fun.

We lingered for acoustic punk-folk activists Ghost Mice, and enjoyed their energy, which flowed nicely after Paul B., but I'd had enough enthusiastic acoustic and headed after a few songs back to stage one, where New Jersey's Gaslight Anthem was finishing their crunching mainstream blue-collar punk set. They've played in Valdosta and they're nice guys.

I wandered over to three briefly to check out the Young Livers, yet more Gainesville punk, maybe angrier, but I needed something slower, so I went back to one and waited for The National, the last act of the evening, while the Ninja Gun crew were headed to three to support Fake Problems, whom I'd seen in VD.

Brooklyn's The National were professional, serious, passionate, which was why I wanted to see them live. The crowd knew the songs, reflecting aging worldliness underlined by music that can ring melodic fatigue or erupt into a frontal guitar assault. They played exactly an hour, and, while it's easy to put them in the Springsteen revival pigeonhole along with The Hold Steady, these songs fit me better, since I've enjoyed that slowdive baritone style via Tindersticks and Arab Strap for some time. I nominate "All the Wine" to the top ten wino list just for its chorus ("All the wine is all for me"), and "Fake Empire" still stirs with its reflections about what we've become, those optimistic horns prophetic at the end, I hope. Unfortunately, they had to cut their set short due to the 11 PM curfew, and so "Abel" didn't make it into the warm spring air that night. I left with the image of Matt Beringer banging together two white wine bottles (which he'd dutifully emptied during the course of the set) along with the beat to one of the songs, but I don't remember which. "All the Wine?" "Squalor Victoria?" "Mr. November?" "Apartment Story?" I think it was "Apartment Story." It punctuated nicely, sounding about to shatter. I left feeling "tired and wired," somber and wanting wine myself, but red, not that white Matt was drinking.

I ran off the festival Monday at Anastasia state park, the waves my music, the white beach my stage.

Harvest of Hope, Saint Augustine, Days 1 (sort of) and 2

2009-03-12T09:49:00.000-07:00

Large music festivals are always crucibles of noise and odors, and clearly the allure of wonderful noise makes us tolerate the portapotties and the unshowered aromas of musical sophisticates pushing against you toward the stage. Year one of the three-day, four stage Harvest of Hope Festival (schedule), a benefit for migrant workers, was no different. The Saint John's County fairground location was reasonably accessible and spacious, and it was a quick drive from lovely Saint Augustine (and my hotel room; I like showers).

While I had to miss Friday's shows and headliner Girl Talk (not well-received by those I talked to), I did catch two of the acts, Cheap Girls and Failure's Union, the Wednesday before the festival at a local shed show. Excellent bands both, and friends of Ninja Gun, so we were lucky to have them until the cops showed up and shut us down. Michigan's Cheap Girls played a set pleasurably ensconced between 80's Minneapolis punk and 90's Ohio indie, while Buffalo's Failures' Union crunched through a healthy set of blue collar punk. FU's Jason also plays bass in Lemuria, a terrific band my Pandora station introduced me to.

I arrived Saturday, early afternoon, in time to catch Her Space Holiday's last two songs, and then I headed to stage three to hear Alabama blues vet Willie Green sing and blow harp for a small but enthusiastic tribe. Excellent grounding for what was to follow, though he deserved more than the twenty minutes they allotted him. I rambled over to stage four to catch some of Gainesville's excellent Towers of Hanoi (thanks for starting with fave "Empty Chapels" ) before checking in on Pitchfork darlings Deerhunter. They were pleasant enough--sort of Ian McCullough fronting Saucer-Full-of-Secrets-era Pink Floyd pleasant--but it was 2:00 pm, brightly sunny, and there weren't any chemical enhancements save beer around to chill the crowd into the kind of nodding acquiescence toward ecstasy the music suggests.

Midafternoon's S1 acts didn't appeal, so I headed back to S4 and its regional punk flavor for Saturday. Moutbreathers were loud and raucous, and Hometeam featured sloppily affable beer-fueled punk, so, drunk with that noise, I headed over to catch some of Strike Anywhere and touch base with many of the Valdostans who attended, but left quickly to S2 to catch the end of Alabama's Wild Sweet Orange's set (definitely worth listening more into) in anticipation of John Vanderslice and Mountain Goat's John Darnielle's back to back sets. Vanderslice made it feel like he was home, and he was close, playing his well-crafted and intelligently penned unplugged pop. I checked in on Bouncing Souls between the sets, and they pleased their crowd, but I left quickly to hear Darnielle, accompanied at times by Vanderslice, play his Mountain Goats nerd-chic witty or wry song narratives concluding with "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton," giving me the chance to yell out "Hail Satan" and smile big.

Among the most anticipated Saturday performers, Bad Brains took over stage one and proceeded to lecture the crowd into irritation. I mean, just play. You don't have to explain to those who don't get that you're covering all of your genre-bending oeuvre (hardcore, reggae, and metal). Who cares if they get it? Nobody goes to music festivals for the lectures.

I left to go hear Nebraska's Tilly and the Wall, at Dixie and Camille's suggestion, and I wasn't sure at first. I have what I hope is a healthy skepticism about the new wave revival; I think most of the groups are listening to the wrong bands, the sappy, superficial leg-warmer synth-pop of the 80's played to excess at so many 80's dance parties. Tilly also features, to my knowledge, pop's only tap-dancer as a key percussion component. She's cute and keeps the beat, but she made me feel a little like I was at a dance recital. Still, the band managed to win me over. I think it was their cover of Yaz' "Only You" that finally won me over, and "Pot, Kettle, Black" has a nice, hard, anthemic, nasty adolescent edge.

I caught some of Gainesville's Against Me!, much lauded and big supporters of the HOH cause, on the main stage. It's the popular punk style these days, and they're enjoyable enough, but after a few songs I gravitated back to S2 to catch Lucero's driving set. The music is honest and you feel it in the belly and the heart: "I kissed the bottle when I shoulda been kissin' you." Pedal steel slide and Ben Nichols worn out voice found that front-porch moonshiney place that hadn't been touched all day, and the crowd love it. I headed back to stage one for the last act, Propaghandi, but it was the wrong energy after Lucero, so I took that with me out to the car and the short drive back to St. A. and a night's sleep before Sunday's musical feast.

Listen Up

2009-02-28T12:06:00.000-08:00

The Kids are Alright: House Shows, Georgia Style

2009-02-09T12:30:00.000-08:00

Somebody posts a bulletin on Myspace, flyers the walls at school, texts a few people, and we show up. Jason and Eric's. Ria's House of Sin (bring some paint for the walls). Jackson's shed in our many warm months. Or Bobby and Tina's (especially if she's baking cakes). Bonfire and trees and Spanish moss, kids on porches, lots of vinyl against the wall. Drums and guitars. Music in South Georgia happens in homes, because the bars want cover bands so drunk sorority girls and jocks can sing and swill along. It's not that we don't like covers at the house shows--a good song or two in a set is expected. But there are few places for original bands to play in this town, which surprisingly boasts much excellent original music. In this blog, I will summarize the last few weeks here, why I stay.

Last Friday Madeline came into town on her way to Gainesville and she played a solo set at Jason and Eric's. John G. opened and sang his childlike, offbeat songs and strummed pleasurably as the crowd grew inside and on the porch. One might say that he's our version of Daniel Johnston, but John is finishing an MA degree in Biology, so whatever madness compels him comes most likely from a bottle. (Later he was excused after excess overcame him and he accidentally put Bo's head through a window, but usually there's no drama, and even so, all is quickly forgiven).

Madeline Adams of Madeline was lovely and her voice bell perfect as she belted out songs of love, loss, grief, and the classic conflict between desire and faith ("the bible or the bottle" indeed). Her new album, White Flag, set for release this month, boasts some of her best songwriting to date. And as listeners to the album will discover, surrender isn't necessarily a bad thing. Even in the face of death and despair and lost love, desire remains her touchstone. So surrender. Maybe it was because it was a house show, but she looked up into the audience while she sang, asked for suggestions, seemed, well, at home, hanging out with friends. They knew all her songs and she played until she ran out of ones she remembered the words to.

Trailer of Tears (affectionally known as TOTs) played next. TOTs is a side project of local music godfathers Ninja Gun's drummer Jeffrey Haineault, and blends doo-wop, psychedelic rock, glam, and punk with exciting results. He and NG's talented frontman Jonathan Coody recorded the Myspace tracks at the infamous trailer, though now Jeffrey has surrounded himself with a live band of local talents. Travis of Gainesville veterans Towers of Hanoi remarked at their Gainesville debut last week that Jeffrey seems to be in one of those amazing creative zones. He doesn't know what he can't do yet, and let's hope he never finds out. Travis said Pavement and I said Roy Orbison and we both said yes. And we could have said Brian Ferry and Jerry Lee Lewis and T. Rex and Chuck Berry and Replacements and we would have said yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. The Myspace songs are just the tip of what has been coming down from their DiCaprio-killing iceberg, given the new songs they've added to their oeuvre that aren't even recorded yet. When they play house shows, it's loud and fun and the crowd is effervescent with energy (and PBR). Taylor Patterson keeps a steady beat on drums along with Bobby on bass, while Jason adds deft lead to Jeffrey's punked up doo-wop/glam croons.

No More Analog closed out this night, Taylor back on drums along with the Captain on bass and vocals and Jackson on lead and vocals, and this fine trio played a strong set of pumped up punk and power pop. NMA isn't afraid to raunch it up, and so if songs about pregnant sex ("No Vacancy") and hermaphrodites ("Pseudosexual") offend, well, you wouldn't have been invited in the first place. But their sound blends bass forward fist pumping punk with classic 80's and 90's guitar pop sensibilities (think Replacements, Cracker, Soul Asylum, Pixies) with an irreverence only a place this deep in the south could produce. They're newest song, "Fresh Romance," sounded especially fine, as its chorus screams, "Tonight."

Just a week before that, pretty much the same lineup of locals showed up at Jason and Erik's in support of Greenland is Melting, a "fauxlk" band featuring banjo, an old suitcase fitted with a bass drum pedal, mandolin, the occasional guitar, and lots of vocal enthusiasm. It's hard not to get caught up in their downhome upbeat songs laced with irony and humor. They're fun and coming back here next month for more and I'll be there.

P.A.W. (Pinnacle of American Weaponry) played their two songs that night. P.A.W. is a new project featuring Nick Riggle of VD veterans Second to Edison along with Jake and Jeffrey from Ninja Gun and Jason Storer of TOTs. Still too new to characterize, so far I've heard driving guitar-driven rock and I'm looking forward to more from them.

And a week before that, Ria opened her House of Sin to a ten-band show featuring most of the local bands above, along with False Arrest and Mandala.

False Arrest is a phenomonal band of four young men intent on resurrecting 80's hardcore, if only to pull its brain out by the stem and smash it to the floor. I missed them at the House of Sin show, because I was hosting David St. John's poetry reading, but they play all out. Jimi is a gymnastic frontman screaming out vocals and slamming his slim half-naked form all over the floor ("I don't even know what's going on in my own head"). Teddi and Bo handle guitar and bass, and Anthony machine guns on drums.

I walked into the show while Mandala was playing their psychedelic instrumental space jams. Some of their extended guitar riffs remind me of Hum or Quickspace, dense and throbbing and complex, at times majestic in their sound scape. I love "Readheads, Huh," which I can hear Dave, bass and guitar, saying in poetry class quizzically and without irony. They've threatened to write lyrics, but it's the guitar interplay and complex rhythms that make this more than acid jams.

Meanwhile, people are coming and going, painting on the walls, a sudden Francis Baconesque figure at the back of the house, pixies and cartoon balloons, the obligatory naked manikin hung from the ceiling. Or vinyl Joe Jackson spinning while folks are still arriving, or the hot shed full noise and mirth when it's warm. Tina will be usually be dancing and everyone is welcome, even the police officers if they happen show up to shut us down, and they occasionally do, but not before a lot of good music has fed our local starving ears. Ya'll come over for the next one.

Los Campesinos! and Titus Andronicus, Jan. 19, Jack Rabbits

2009-01-26T00:17:00.000-08:00

Multiply literate existential anarchists Titus Andronicus, from New Jersey, could be the bar band in a Thomas Pynchon novel. At Jack Rabbits in Jacksonville, Patrick Stickles perched above the rest of the band, impassioned channeler of the songs, more medium than singer. It's the only way I can explain his remarkable range of vocal influences, from Lou Reed to Replacement's Westerberg to Clash's Strummer to Pogue's MacGowan, though he's slight and jerks around sometimes as though possessed by Ian Curtis. The band lays a storied sonic tapestry underneath Stickle's voice, woven through with rich influences from sock-hop and surf-rock, classic punk, jig and dirge, grunge and 90's indie, even the Boss. Two of them have literature degrees, but, while allusions from Brueghel (clearly Auden's) to Hunter S. Thompson and Albert Camus to Cormac McCarthy punctuate their work, they're working class scholars and know that when the revolution comes, they'll attack the ivory tower first. That is, their songs are accessible and ironically intelligent anthems for the meaninglessness of life, which I suppose boys from the New Jersey suburbs know more about than the rest of us. The pinaccle for me was "Fear and Loathing in Mahwah, NJ," as Stickle hammered out a long closing jig crescendoing into collapse and a bleating recorded reading from the darkest passage of the bloodiest Shakespeare play. Fuck this description, which is just lists and lame comparisons. If you like nothing, you will love Titus Andronicus.

Envoi: After the Los Campesinos! finished, while fans milled about groveling for autographs and conversation (myself included), Patrick started playing around with Los Campesinos!' glockenspiel, fascinated, picking out a melody, utterly absorbed. Perfect.

Los Campesinos! followed with a strong and strikingly upbeat set (despite the absence of ill Harriet [get well] and her violin), but certainly not diminished in enthusiasm or dancibility. They're difficult to describe, but think Toy Dolls backed by Arcade Fire (on nitrous oxide) singing songs Robert Smith and Siouxsie Sioux might have composed chronicling their various beautiful dissipated difficulties and darknesses. LC! threw out their ironically, clashingly upbeat symphonic tight pop in all its exuberantly desperate yearning. No matter how fucked up the situations in the songs, it's hard to be sad when you're dancing, and everyone was, from the "classics" like "Death to Los Campesinos!" through the new songs dealing with love and loss and the sad, shitty state of the world we're all slogging through. I especially enjoyed the "Box Elder" intro into one of their songs. Which one? I can't recall, but we should all be happy that, as the title song posits, "WE KID OURSELVES THERE'S FUTURE IN THE FUCKING, BUT THERE IS NO FUCKING FUTURE." And we collectively were, carried by Garreth's bright cheery vocals and Aleksandra's Elizabeth Elmore-ish countervocals and the band's perfectly timed chaos and even that one girl on the dance floor who never, ever stopped dancing.

After the lights came on, the band hung out and chatted and signed merch. Garreth is personable, charming, and as cheerful as the band sounds. Aleksandra is absolutely lovely and a bit shy (I mentioned my fondness for Elizabeth Elmore's Sarge and The Reputation). Tom, lead guitar and song writer, turned out to be a fellow Califone fan, so we had that, you know, irritating to anyone not in the know, whole nerd fan conversation.

Stuck in the Office

2009-01-18T14:53:00.000-08:00

It's raining outside and I'm stuck in my office, so I'll make the most of it by writing my first blog of the year, two days before Obama takes office and even as the sigh of national relief begins its slow release, not toward rest, but to regather for the hard work ahead--so much damage to undo, more than we even know of, no doubt. Expectations are high, but I'm just hoping he can crash land this mother like Sully into the Hudson. Extracting the tendrils of incompetence (i.e. ideological hires in career positions) from so many institutions is going to prove tricky, at best, but here's to hoping for the best. But he can change the American ethos.

Two of the members of my Harlem Renaissance class are attending, and they will offer their first-hand accounts in class. It's a good time to be teaching a Harlem Renaissance class with its theme of liberation and free expression in the face of a nation besotted so long in bigotry and lynching. Harlem in the twenties offered hope through literature, art, and music that carries through all of this, and so, as the music plays and as Elizabeth Alexander reads her poems this week, I have to think those early voices speaking out, those humanizing voices, have finally won their argument.

Year End

2008-12-30T15:18:00.000-08:00

It's been a long one and over too quickly at the same time. Much has happened that I skipped because love needs me to for now or because I was too busy. Importantly, I failed to record my parents' 50th anniversary, which I attended in Fresno, and the trip to get there, which took me through Santa Barbara and visits with many of the friends and fellow writers about whom I've written previously in this forum--my hosts George and Amy and Chryss and, since it was Amy's birthday and she had a party, a cavalcade of Santa Barbara's elite (well, they're elite to me). There was an all too brief side trip to visit Chris and Nadya in Lompoc to deliver my tiny book. Then on to Fresno, a warm and lovely trip, topped off by my surprise arrival to the celebration that my sister Kelly organized magnificently, and which included many family members, cousins and uncles and aunts, including my brother Todd and his family, and even one old high school buddy, Mark Driscoll--some of whom I hadn't seen in years. Mom and Dad were radiant as I've ever seen them, even youthful. Then the next afternoon, I drank another bottle of wine and conversed with Peter Everwine (I wish everyone this new year the gift of a fine bottle shared with an imminently wise friend), and then briefly visited Charles Hanzlicek and his wife Diane and talked about life and politics and their war of election signs with their neighbor. In many ways, this trip was both time travel and another coat of laquer over the grain.

Time is weird. It passes largely outside of us, around us, because in this moment we feel largely the same, fizzing away in our acuities and abstractions, ebb as flow, so when we re-arrive into a bubble of familiarity many years later, its passing is writ in wrinkles and frailty on others and to them, I suppose, on me. But for me (and, yes, you), now is always now, and I feel much as I did back in school, a kid with a new piece of chalk or worried about Daisy Wallace and would she be all right after the fire that took so much from her. It never leaves, the senses of possibility and concern. Certainty and uncertainty swirl, and the un becomes one like Schrodinger's cat and you open the trunk and, looking right at it, you still aren't sure if it's dead or just sleeping. Yearning mediates each moment still, if not as uncontrollably, and loss accumulates irrepressibly, and to what end is always the wrong question to ask anyway. There's never an end. There's just stopping, and there's just going until you do. So, go.

On the Road Trip that Never Ends: Skipping Woodstock

2008-11-26T14:46:00.000-08:00

I like writing about road trips, car full of scraps of places I've been, things I ate, windshield the best movie I ever saw, skies and skies. Asphalt and shoulder and exit and merge and falling rock. That painful self-extraction from the driver seat after three and a half hours at 80 miles per to buy gas and a bag of m&ms.

But I can't go to Woodstock the way I've gone everywhere else. I can't just report on the KTD monastery and my hike up the mountain, Bread Alone, beautiful Devil's Kitchen (and the black trumpets I picked there), The Poet's Walk on the Hudson, my crappy motel, buying a little Tibetan carpet, coffee and ice cream, Annadale and Rheinbeck. You see, I was with Amy those three days, and to try to report on all these moments, sweet as they were, makes all this too complicated for here. Love is not a tourist. I can't separate it out, and so I won't.

I went to Woodstock, and then I went home, spent one more night in a Virginia motel, sauteed those trumpets in butter with pasta, and arrived home to three cats and looming fall classes. I've been waiting for distance to kick in so I could narrate all this, so I could take what's inside and put it out here. I can't.

It's a Girl

2008-11-21T11:51:00.000-08:00

Results

We guess http://sensesworking.blogspot.com is written by a woman (57%), however it's quite gender neutral.

Thanks to George (Georgia?) and the Gender Analyzer and Julia Kristeva, and yes, we just gotta have fun.

Seven Squared

2008-11-18T22:50:00.000-08:00

Birthday starring two classics: a 1982 Leoville Las Cases and The Big Lebowski. Thanks to Rob for the latter. Thanks to my patience for the former.

Finally

2008-11-04T22:25:00.000-08:00

For the first time in my life, I feel that I have a president. His speech moved me. His humility and grace, his sense of purpose, his refusal to bask in the glory of his triumph and instead point to the tasks ahead, well, Yes We Can.

McCain's concession flashed a return of a candidate I once admired even when I disagreed with him in 2000.

It's good to see the results closing very late in Georgia, even though it won't be enough.

We cannot rest. We cannot rest.

(But I can't resist celebrating with a good Barolo for Barack.)

Lucky 100 for Change and Hope: Random Thoughts.

2008-11-03T22:01:00.000-08:00

Rest in peace, Toots. I hoped you'd be around long enough to see your grandson become president.

Polls show Obama with a large lead, but polls don't vote, so you have to. I "voted," but on Diebold machines, so who knows? Mark Crispin Miller and others say maybe I didn't. And even if I did, no one can prove it. If Obama wins Georgia, it'll put me at no end of ease, and I'll have to direct my paranoia elsewhere.

Sadly, a student reports a bunch of Obama signs stuffed behind the local Baptist Student Union and supposes they were stolen from people's yards. I guess "Thou shalt not steal" can be trumped by political self-righteousness. Funny how secular humanist relativistic reasoning comes in when these otherwise absolutists need a little ethical wiggle room.

What will I do with my time now that I'm not glued to fivethirtyeight.com, watching numbers rise and fall, trends dissected, etc.? If Obama wins, I'll start looking for the next Newt Gingrich. If he doesn't, I'll be looking at election returns the way I did in '04.

On a thoroughly pleasant note, it's Andrea's birthday today. Hope Atlanta is treating you well.

South from Vermont

2008-10-28T12:03:00.000-07:00

I headed south through rural Vermont toward Massachusetts, where I passed Mt. Graylock, Melville's whale, and the rest of the Berkshire's, beautiful country at the heart of 19 century American Literature. I wanted to get out and climb, but I had no harpoon, so I Ishmaeled it out of there and stopped at the MassMOCA museum for a stroll in converted industrial buildings to absorb whatever they were showing. The best exhibits included Anselm Keifer's sculpture and paintings. The controversial sculpture (Connecticut courts forced the owners to remove it) filled a room with concrete and rebar, contemporary ruins to complement the giant landscapes exploring war. Earth erupts in blood and flowers. Jennifer Holzer's Projections pleased as well with its elaborate use of space to project bilaterally the poems of Wisława Szymborska into a dark warehouse-sized space filled with giant amorphous shapes. Words shined on me and seemingly through me. Eastern Standard: Western Artists in China was more problematic. Some of the images were stunning, but some photographs and video installations seemed rather to sneer at the environmental degradation occurring in China. Art revealing the obvious isn't art, and it's useless as journalism. Regardless, it was a fine way to spend a morning on my way to Woodstock.

After the museum, I passed through Stockbridge along with a plethora of vintage vehicles there for some kind of auto show. Because of the traffic, I didn't stop to find Alice's restaurant or wander through the antithesis of MassMOCA, the Norman Rockwell Museum. I had to go to Woodstock. I had to find my way to the Karma Triyana Dharmachakra monastery. I had to find Amy.

Interregnum: Trip Interrupted by Trip and Cold Water and Politics

2008-10-19T21:08:00.000-07:00

I promised to blog but I'm so far behind I'm trying to remember remembering the details of my journeys--devil's horns under my seat--but it will all come out, Woodstock and California and the adventure of living without hot water for 6 weeks. Stay tuned, loyal reader. But in the midst of these interruptions, I interrupt myself with a rant:

I. The Free Market is My Weakness

Economic crisis? What crisis? A serious depression would have been the free market solution they've been promising all along, because a true free market is absolutely Darwinian and mercilous. Now we find out how those free marketeers react when they step out into the real wild: "Help me, mommy." Every promontory leads to an abyss and woe to those without precious metal parachutes. Most of us carry lead and bears are at the bottom, snarling, hungry.

In summary: capitalism, of course, capitalism, Capitalism, Capitalism!, CAPITALISM! CAPITALISM! CATACLYSM! Oh, socialism. . . . Better red-(faced) than bread (lines, that is). Just think of the "bailout solution" as, like, ANWR's for banks, where cash can still run free, protected by fiscal rangers to keep out the greed poachers and the financial "drill-baby-drillers."

I suppose. Better if someone had figured out ideas of balance and fairness, you know, like, rules, like, say, in baseball, where competition reigns, but you generally don't get four strikes and you have to stop at second if the ball you hit bounces over the center field wall.

Look, the free market isn't all bad. It's great for ipods and fast cars and boner pills and giant fake breasts and anal bleaching and baldness and cell phones and single malt Scotch and reality TV and make-up and golf clubs and fine, leather fetishwear and all things chia.

It's just lousy for antibiotics and health care and education and nation building and natural disaster recovery and our voting procedures (those softwares are a protected trade secret, your honor). You don't want someone looking in your jaundiced eye saying first, "We've got a spectacular new ocular peroxide treatment that will take that yellow out, pronto, Susie. No one will ever know you have scirrosis." You don't want Blackwater thugs on the streets of New Orleans with semi-automatics and immunity and no clear chain of command (that's a trade secret, your honor).

Yes, the free market can do some things better, but certainly not everything. And it's funny how so many of those so-called free marketeers adulate the military so much, despite the fact that it's the biggest social(ist) program in American history, despite Donald Rumsefeld's attempts to auction as much as possible to the least competant but most well-connected bidder. It's hippocrazy season again.

II. Christian Fundamentalism (What would Jesus Do [without you]?)

Clearly, if you were are a born-again, fundamentalist evangelical Christian who believes that global warming is God's will and Barack Obama is the anti-Christ, don't you have to vote for him? I mean, if you're completely right about prophecy included in a selected anthology compiled a few hundred years after quasi-historical events? Don't you have an Obama sign in your yard? Clearly, God isn't omnipotent enough to handle Armageddon without your personal intervention, which is why you're so interested in Israeli politics, after all. Clearly, that "Render unto Caesar" detail wasn't about separation of church and state. It certainly was not about that Roman governor who sentenced your community organizer to death. So, yes, a true believer and avid reader of Left Behind books would have to vote Obama.

III. Rovey Wade

This is the most egregious fake political issue in history. This is where liberals are most conservative, and conservatives most liberal. Roe vs. Wade is a conservative decision. It keeps government out of your decisions as long as possible. The government has no business, as it were, in your lady business, period (no pun intended), or lack thereof (ok, intended). I'm pro-choice and anti-abortion with respect to my own personal decisions (nuance alert: I don't believe life begins at conception, nor do I confuse seeds with trees, and I am, to follow through, snipped), but I don't presume to impose my personal values out of inspired self-righteousness on others. In fact, I have yet to meet anyone who is truly pro-abortion, who would like to see abortion figures increase (though many pro-lifers are for the death penalty and would cheer more executions; go figure).

The problem is, pro-lifers are being manipulated (Karl). No one tells pro-lifers that Roe vs. Wade also protects women from forced abortions. No business in your business? Why should it work for the free market but not for your body? Ok, it doesn't completely work for the free market (see above), but I don't think anyone advocates late term abortions as a method of birth control, either (though, ironically, post-term abortion [capital punishment] remains popular). A significant personal and spiritual ambiguity exists here, and a decision should respect a woman's choice and her faith, whatever it is, and should ultimately strive to preserve her health. Roe v. Wade does that.

Leaving Vermont

2008-10-02T21:32:00.000-07:00

The next morning was wine-slow and blinky, but we ate breakfast and I packed to leave. The plan was to head to New Hampshire and stop at an amazing wine store Wyn had talked about where you could get free Ch. Haut Marbuzet and we looked at maps and drank coffee quietly, weary of the previous evening's celebration. It was time to leave Wyn and Shawna's lovely home and company and head south, toward Woodstock, then home, but I had a day to kill before Woodstock.

I got in the car and drove down the hill, the gravel drive, and at the end of it, I made a financial call and decided not to go to New Hampshire. Decided to head back toward Bennington where I had spotted a motel that boasted of $35 rooms, and it was near enough to Bennington to explore the town a little more and to enjoy hiking and the view of the small lake across the road. Cash only. I liked the guy that owned the place, his hat and his moustache. "Cash only," he said, but he let me go into town to get some.

The hike lacked the beauty or views of the hike up Hogback, but it was exercise and I needed that. I stepped in mud. Later I went into town for coffee and people were gathering. A woman was chatting familiarly to several people and then she announced that she would read poetry, so I stayed in solidarity. She even read a few about central California, where I'd moved to Georgia from. Spring wildflowers and I even heard her say "Oxnard." I smiled, thought of Jackson Wheeler. She read about it as though the coastal mountains were exotic and amazing. It is. They are, but if you live there, Vermont is exotic and infinitely greener and the towns are small and Vermont seemed a liberal paradise.

I applauded the poet's efforts and went searching for something to cook in the room that night for dinner, found a nice grocery store with decent wine selection and purchased a few things for dinner, naan and a good Spanish wine and cheese and headed back out of town to make dinner (naan pan pizza and pasta and salad) and enjoy the spartan room. It had the same shower my house in Georgia had when I bought it, something plastic and cheap, suitable for summer camp. I smiled at that. It was a quiet place, a quiet night. I sipped a little of the Spanish and thought about Woodstock, about seeing Amy.

Vermont Feast: Day 3

2008-09-12T15:22:00.000-07:00

My last full day in Brattleboro was simple. Shawna had planned a feast for the evening. Before the feast, we went on a hike up Hogback Mountain, once used for skiing, and now only for "snowmachining" (thanks, wannaveep). The trail was often overgrown, and a couple of garter snakes slithered across, frightening Shawna, until we reached the top, on which loomed a large old firetower, occupied by other hikers when we arrived. I went up, and Wyn and Shawna decided to stay below since they'd seen the view and knew the ricketyness of the tower. Wyn said I'd be able to see a hundred miles, and I would see Melville's Mount Greylock to the south and the White Mountains to the north. The occupants left as soon as I reached the top (sniff armpits--not too bad given the climb) but they talked to Wyn and Shawna while I enjoyed the view. It was wonderful and windy and the only problem was the scratched up glass windows that I had to hold open to see all the green folds of New England.

Afterwards we cut over to the road, where there was a cheesy (literally) giftshop. I spotted a chanterelle just off the trail under a tree as we approached-- small, but at its pickable peak--and so I was able to talk fungus and let Wyn and Shawna smell the delightful apricot aromas of the fresh cantharellus cibarius and then walk around the store guarding the little gold treasure in my palm. We snacked on salami and cheese and crackers and watched all the RVers who stopped to load up on maple syrup and Vermont cheddar and corny tee shirts and other chachkies. We walked back down Hogback and, just before the road, I spotted two large, perfect chanterelles under a tree and I added those to the collection, and Shawna added them to the dinner menu.

We made it back to their house in the early afternoon and Shawna immediately commenced cooking, and Wyn set the grill up for the steaks and opened the lovely Lemelson. The menu speaks for itself and for the kind of evening we savored, so here it is:

Hors d' oeuvres

Heirloom tomato bruschetta

Gravlax on cucumber
with capers & crème fraiche

Parmesan cups with herbed farmers cheese

Main Course

Grilled steak
with red wine reduction & Chanterelles

Potatos au gratin with bleu cheese

Fillet beans
with marcona almonds

Mixed green salad
with carrots & blue cheese

Wines

Lemelson Thea’s Vineyard Oregon Pinot Noir 2005
Morgan Double L Vineyard Pinot Noir 2006
Foxen Vogelzang Vineyard Cabernet 2005
Siro Pacenti Rosso di Montalcino 2005

Shawna's an amazing cook. We ate and drank too much and too well again, and talked over this divine feast all night and the stars again and I didn't want to leave this lovely place but I didn't want to kill Wyn and Shawna with their own superb hospitality. I can't thank them enough for being such wonderful hosts and friends. Come down so I can cook ya'll up something southern, and, of course, my wine cellar's always open for you, Wyn and Shawna.

Vermont, Day 2: er, mmm, It's a, all about the Ol'. . . . Mamet's, his play, um, Oleana

2008-09-02T10:25:00.000-07:00

It was a late morning kind of previous evening, but I awakened early enough to sneak out and do some more serious mushroom foraging and to get a sense of the landscape up the hill, and found a trail up behind the house that let me explore it more. The trail led past a rocky area toward the next farm. Further up, according to Wyn, was a stone marker memorializing a triple murder/suicide that had taken place on what had been a larger farm about a hundred years ago: farmhand hot for the farmer's wife and things got out of hand, an old story. Trees, slope, rocks, a small stream. I found a few past-perfect chanterelles, some nice bicolor boletes, and one stunning Caesar's mushroom (amanita caesari) that I was tempted to try, but I don't eat amanitas, since a mistake can be fatal.

Back at the house, Wyn had the eggs out and toast in the oven coffee and we set into planning the day around Shawna's evening performance, a staged reading of Mamet's Oleana for a community theater across the river in New Hampshire. Shawna would spend the day at kick boxing, then getting ready, while Wyn would show me more of the area and run an errand or two. He showed me Saul Bellow's house, near his, and the sky opened up into muscular rain and we stopped and chatted for awhile with Wyn's friend, a Marlboro graduate who did interesting work in Physics and Photography and chi, while stopping to pick up some organic garlic. We then stocked up on provisions--by provisions I mean wine and by wine I mean from the lovely Wyndham Wines run by people who know wine very well, people who gave up academic tenure to pursue this dream, and by dream I mean I'm damned jealous. We spent maybe 90 minutes in the store, too long, since Wyn and I were going to have dinner at Alici's and we had to make the play at 8:00. Shawna doesn't eat before she performs, so we were to meet her after. Wyn and I shared some exquisite carpaccio and a half bottle of cab and I ordered a very rare filet mignon burger, which for 10 dollars was a bargain. It was served with truffle-0il fries and garnished with blue cheese, spinach, and tomato, and it was second in my experience only to the legendary burger served at My Father's Office in Santa Monica. Wyn ordered the duck confit pizzeta, which tasted very good (could have been just a bit more confit), and the server sped things along nicely so we could enjoy the food despite our limited time there.

We walked into the theater just before the beginning of the play. I wasn't sure what to expect, since I'd never seen a staged reading. I knew the play, though, having taught it once, and I found it difficult for freshman who struggled with Mamet's verbal ticks and the moral difficulties presented by both characters. I wasn't sure what to expect, but Shawna and the male lead were both stellar, and the setting, a professor's office, was perfect for making the play book just another part of the usual professor's office detritus. The play is a study in power--age, gender, and institutional power relationships--and no one comes off sympathetically. The male lead, a lawyer with much professional acting experience, crumbled magnificently, while Shawna played her character with wonderful nervous subtlety despite the tremendous vocabulary shift that occurs between act I and act II. I remember this shift seeming heavy handed when I read it, but not here. Shawn, however, deftly presented the character's discomfort with the vocabulary as she spoke it. When it was over, we headed to the Pub after all the post play congratulations and then back to the house for a little more wine and conversation, stared up and up at the beautiful stars, the milky way evanescing above the trees.

We Have Been to Vermont, Day 1

2008-08-22T11:27:00.000-07:00

The landscape changes suddenly out of the Albany/Schenectady corridor into southwest Vermont. Route 9 changes to Route 7, billboards and traffic vanish. Suddenly an obelisk towers (I want to veer onto the side road and touch it, but my thumbs and politics are already opposable) over the valley in which Bennington nestles, famed for its writing workshop, and, according to Wyn Cooper, a place I'm more likely to run into John Gardner's ghost, since he spent much time there. I stop in town for coffee and a walk up and down the main drag, festooned with statues of people very much like an Americana statue I recall from Santa Barbara of a guy washing a window, kid sitting on his shoulders. He's here, too, or his brother, along with numerous others by the same artist. It makes me think of State Street, but it's only three blocks long, no Museum of Art or Anthropologie or Restoration Hardware or Saks. It's quiet and cute, and I don't see a chain anything, so I get a cappuccino at the non-Starbucks and head east over the Green Mountains toward Brattleboro, toward Wyn and Shawna's place in the mountains above Marlboro.

I nearly missed the turn off of Route 7, but slammed on the brakes, thankfully no one behind me. The pavement vanished and I was on back roads into the low mountains, ultimately along the Green River until I found Wyn and Shawna's driveway--steep gravel up to a lovely home with a large deck. Wyn and Shawna were there with open arms and smiles, but Shawna had work and rehearsal, so I wouldn't see her much till later. I felt immediately welcome. Their house is gorgeous, filled with art and broadsides and books, ensconced in maple and pine forest just up the hill from the Green River. After catching up about the drive, etc., Wyn readied to take me to the "swimming hole" at an old wood damn beside a covered bridge about ten minutes from his house. I suspected immediately that this would be a lovely place to look for mushrooms and, while he was getting ready, I stepped outside and found a chanterelle in the woods just steps from the back of his house. When he came out, we jumped in his sweet '63 MG and headed into the village down the river a bit. He swam while I balanced on the rocks. I was ambivalent about getting in. I'd have to undress. Wyn explained that nudity was legal in Vermont unless a community passed a specific law against it. Still, there was a couple there from NYC and, more importantly, the water was chilly, so I just stayed with the rocks and the river music and enjoyed the scenery and the sweet air. We chatted briefly with the NY couple before we headed back to the house, then into Brattleboro to shop for provisions--by provisions, think wine--to go along with the Memphis barbecue Wyn planned to pick up for dinner after Shawna's rehearsal.

We went into town and it happened to be a first friday artwalk evening, and we walked through several very cool galleries and Wyn introduced me to a few of the area artists and gallery owners. We stopped at a local brewpub for a beer, and Wyn knew everybody, it seemed, so he had to make a few rounds around the room. I sipped my beer and enjoyed the atmosphere. Wyn sat down and we enjoyed our pints. The server was also a friend who had acted with Shawna, and Wyn explained that she would soon be off to Guatemala, plans unspecified. She recognized my Califone T-shirt and we talked a little about the music before her next round was up and she had to leave. Life in Brattleboro is good. I have finally been to Vermont and I can retire the first poem I ever published ("Lunchtime in Vermont"), which was, to be kind to it, an exercise in line breaks and immature mindfuck postmodernism, as I understood it at twenty.

Later, we picked up the barbecue, supped late, and drank later--excellent barbecue washed down with big wines, including a lovely Italian Aglianico Rubrato and a Turley Moore Earthquake, both gorgeous wines with barbecue. Good wine and good food don't matter, though, if the company isn't up to the sensual pleasures. Wyn and Shawna, on the other hand, as we all love fine foods and grand vins, would make peasant bread and a jug of dago red a royal meal. We talked late, too late, about Shawna's impending performance, friends, poetry, music, art, politics, love, and who knows what else? I was there and it was a perfect evening. All I can say is thanks for my good fortune, my good friends. I hope I can return the favor one day.

Toward New England with hot plate.

2008-08-18T13:33:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, July 30th at the crack of 10 a.m., I crawled into the Hyundai with cds and a few bottles of wine and much to think about, and set off north to see Wyn and Shawna in Brattleboro and Amy in Woodstock. While driving can be a kind of emotional peristalsis, I'll focus on the more mundane, the gourmandish kind. Instead of fast food or Shoney's or truck stop fare along the way (in great contrast to my friend at Imnotonetoblog but's Parisian gastronomic orgy), I picked up a 10-buck hotplate at Big Lots and threw some utensils and olive oil in a bag, along with a cooler full of stuff that I'd have to throw away (bananas, organic eggs, cheese, salad fixins, juice) if I didn't take it, along with a bag of pasta shells and a can of sauce. The first night in Roanoke, VA was simple. I got there around 8ish and found a grocery story across the street to augment my simple pasta shells and sauce dinner with a full salad (nothing special, but healthier than the Waffle House and McDonald's within walking distance of my curry-scented [I'd love to have knocked on the door and held out a bowl] Travelodge). A spiced egg with a little balsamic vinegar sunnyside up on toast (roasted gingerly pinched with a fork and a spoon over the open burner) made a simple and filling breakfast the next morning before I headed north again.

I hit Binghamton, NY, in the early evening with plenty of time to walk around downtown and along the river, and to look for a decent restaurant and the ghost of John Gardner, but finding Binghamton generally abandoned, and arriving the day before Spiedie fest (one-handed grilled sandwiches suitable for Grendal), my choices were limited. Instead, I headed to the grocery store near the hotel, picked up some live clams and local Italian sausage and bread, and decided to busy myself for the long evening steaming clams in dark beer, cooking pasta and sausage, and enjoying these with bread and salad and a decent red. It's a serial process, but given the lack of nightlife thereabouts, it made the evening pass simply and deliciously, though I'd have loved to stick around and sample the full variety of spiedie's. After a breakfast of another egg, quesadilla, and a banana, I headed to Vermont for finer and more fulfilling culinary experiences.

Congratulations, Jason Lezak

2008-08-11T23:26:00.000-07:00

He touched the wall first, sprinting from behind to wash all the mots from the trash-talking and heavily favored French team. Everybody saw it. You saw it. Michael Phelps saw it and his joy was the image the media loved, but, athletically, Jason's performance was among the finest perfomances in the history of Olympic swimming, and definitely the finest in relays. His swim was a celebration of will.

I loved it most because I didn't know Jason was on this year's team until he took his turn. I hadn't been paying much attention to the Olympics. Phelps lead off and I watched, went to the kitchen to get a glass of water, and listened to the progress. I was excited to hear the announcer call Jason's name, because he was one of my business writing students at UCSB, and we used to talk about swimming and basketball (my sport) and his plans. He was serious about improving and making nationals, talking possibilities, angles that would make him better. He was committed.

What impressed me most was that he thought about swimming long-term. He talked about the work he needed to do, his faults, the demands of the sport, his desire, all the realities of the swimming world. He was very good, tall, broad-shouldered, and slim, and he knew it, but he wasn't any kind of physical freak. Yet he excelled, and I remember being surprised to read that he'd won a gold in the relay in Sydney, and then medalled again in Athens. I figured he was done, had had a great career--it's a sport for the young, after all.

Not this year. Dana Torres couldn't be my daughter, and Jason--younger than her by several years--couldn't be my son. He demonstrated what work and commitment and long term devotion can do. He's an exceptional athlete, though more for his work ethic and determination than his simple physical ability. Congratulations, Jason. You definitely earned it.

Update: Jason helped Michael Phelps pick up his 8th with another superb relay anchor, plus he picked up his first individual Olympics medal (bronze) in the 100 m. freestyle.

Just the facts

2008-08-10T16:20:00.000-07:00

Back from Vermont and New York, and here are a few random facts. Narratives to come.

Miles I schlepped: 2600+

" per gallon: 35, freeway

Highest priced gas: $4.07 9 (Woodstock)

Cheapest gas: $3.379 (Southern Maryland)

Folks visited: Wyn and Shawna in Vermont, Amy at the KTD monastery, Woodstock.

Most beautiful scenery: Devil's Kitchen cataract from the cliff edge with Amy. (Hike to firetower above 100-mile viewpoint, VT with Wyn and Shawna was an excellent second).

Best wine: You'll have to wait. There were many and they were excellent.

Best meal: Shawna's (menu to come).

Scariest moment: Sudden downpour on 81 that washed the windshield opaque.

Museum visited: Mass MOCA.

Play attended: Olleana (starring Shawna).

Movie: The Wackness.

Subtle surprise: Server at the pub in Brattleboro (and friend of my hosts) recognized my Califone t-shirt. Hope she likes Guatemala.

Mushrooms foraged and enjoyed: Chanterelles and boletus bicolor in VT; bb and black trumpets in NY.

Worst road name: Beaver Ruin Road (north of ATL).

Best Hotel: Lakeview outside Bennington for $35, cash only and a plastic shower exactly like the one I ripped from my bathroom.

Best new custom: Motel hotplate cooking (recipes to follow?).

What I missed at home: Ninja Gun CD release party and a shed show.

Best Bread. Bread Alone's SF Organic Whole Grain Levain.

Best moment: Looking in Amy's eyes again and finding her happy in Woodstock.

Hiatus

2008-07-29T14:13:00.000-07:00

I'll be on the road to parts north to see friends and relatives and enjoy America's fine motel decor. Meanwhile, enjoy this pic of the Delaware River.

Photo credit: Mom

Waits at The Owl and the Bear

2008-07-21T13:58:00.000-07:00

Tristan over at The Owl and the Bear has kindly reposted my Waits review. You'll also find a cool concert recording of Red Red Meat at The Hideout in Chicago (flac files).

Tom Waits, Jacksonville, July 1

2008-07-10T16:25:00.000-07:00

"I'm like a fucking race horse."

--Tom Waits, Jacksonville, July 1, 2008

Tom Waits' tours are fairly infrequent, so when I heard he was headed to Jacksonville two hours away from my house, I splurged. Jacksonville? Why Jacksonville? It's not really the red dirt, bluesy part of the south Waits wanted to see. Jacksonville is South Beach's conservative opposite, militarized vanilla beach Florida, which tolerates the small, local counterculture because it's essentially irrelevant. Jacksonville is by some definitions lovely, but it's not, well, cool. When, early in the concert, Waits mused about why he'd never been to this attractive city beside a sparkling river and the Atlantic Ocean, he said his friends had always told him, "You're not old enough." I don't know whether he's finally old enough now or if the prospect of hauling the tour bus and three semis ten hours south and back north was too much for his pocketbook or his carbon footprint, but he arrived with a copious supply of merchandise--including vinyls, a chapbook in which he interviews himself, and t-shirts with pictures of oil stains he thought were cool--as well as a sweet stage set that could evoke alley-cat twilight austerity, late-night honkytonk, or red-devil cartoon hell.

Tom Waits in his undersized bowler gangled out to the round center platform as though he were under the influence of some hobo marionette and lit into "Lucinda"/"Ain't Going Down to the Well No More" and quickly into "Down in the Hole" to an adoring audience of sophisticates of all ages (along with a few bellowing idiots). We were clearly in for a hell of a ride. During "Chocolate Jesus" (I believe), he stopped mid-song to admonish the audience, albeit congenially, for clapping out of time. They hadn't encouraged audience clapping, so I think he was a bit pissed, though he turned the awkwardness into a humorous moment. He's serious about his oeuvre, and this audience "interference," enthusiastic as it is, can ruin a song. (This may have been the reason "Clap Hands," one of my favorites from Raindogs, didn't make the cut for any of the shows. The Eyeball Kid has set lists for every show plus a compilation for all the shows, including Jacksonville [I swear I heard "Jockey Full of Bourbon" though, which isn't listed for J'ville], so I won't belabor the entire list.) There wasn't a sour note, from the stage at least, and the band was incredibly tight and the timing and interplay were perfect. It was one of the most polished shows I've ever seen, musical "theatre" of the best sort, as if Broadway had bled somehow into the old Bowery.

The show both peaked and nadired for me in the middle of an arresting extended performance of "Rain Dogs"/"Russian Dance." Waits' performance was violent. The moment seemed Brechtian, confrontational, perfect, eviscerating what can come off sometimes, if one isn't listening closely enough to Waits' superb writing, as a kind of sentimental nostalgia for hard times. His gyrating, barking performance annihilated any possible sentimentality. But as I looked around, I sensed no one seemed to be getting this. Most were too busy being fans to feel his indictment of all of us, our asses sitting in the hundred dollar seats of this lovely theater on the river, six dollar beers bubbling away in comfortable, pudgy guts. No recession here, mind you, but "Rain Dogs" should have awakened everyone to what people go to shows to forget, all this American consumptive excess that leaves so many out in the cold, hungry and bemused and sodden, while so many inside listened to songs about those people, then got in their SUV's and drove away, pop-culturally sated. Perhaps I'm projecting my own guilt, my own excess here, sitting there with all my Waits stuff, taking it too seriously, but it unnerved me.

The epigraph above came from a moment that added to this feeling. Someone screamed out that he wanted Waits' sperm to make a baby. Tom stopped, and said, "Wait a minute. We just might be able to arrange that. You'll have to talk to my manager. But I must warn you, I'm very expensive. I'm like a fucking racehorse." Then he laughed like a carny knowing you're going to piss your jeans on this ride. This and some comments he made about show business--noting at one point that Sarah Bernhardt's amputated leg on display at a circus was earning more than the actress herself, who was performing "across the street"--suggested his contempt for this consumerist attitude, this objectification of people, and his understanding of the irony of his own position as he enriches himself and his family singing, even iconically, songs about the downtrodden I believe he truly cares about, knows. I think he wanted this contempt to come through, not vitriolically (I think of Jello Biafra cursing the mosh pit "jocks" in Fresno, 1985), but through the power of the music and the words. Waits was polite and played along, a trickster minstrel, hoping maybe someone will get it all after the beer and white wine wear off. I hope so, too.

As if to emphasize this theme, he stepped away from center stage to sit at the piano, stage right, while all the musicians but Seth Ford-Young on bass left the stage. While idiots yelled for their favorites, he ignored them, and settled into "On the Nickle" to continue a theme, slowly and beautifully. Counterpoint. Do you get it now? It was truly a high point in an extraordinary show. The piano solo moved through "I Can't Wait to Get Off Work" and "Invitation to the Blues" and "Lost in the Harbour" wonderfully, creating the emotional heart of the show.

Continuing his theme of exile, the band returned, and a single, flickering bulb descended to "accompany" him on the poem "Circus." Then, like a fireworks show, a grand finale in which he crowed and stomped and sagged elastically through "Hoist that rag," "Lie to Me," "Anywhere I Lay My Head," "Singapore," "Cold, Cold Ground," and "Make it Rain." They left the stage and the audience wanting more.

After much applause, they came out to finish, slightly anticlimactically after all the heavy pyrotechnics, with "House where Nobody Lives," and then they left. And then I got in my car and listened to Frank's Wild Years all the way home, because he didn't play my favorite from that album, and I am, after all, innocent when I dream, and I needed to hear that after all the indulgence in my extravagant solitude.

Perigrinations north with music (Ninja Gun) and both scheduled and chance meetings: Pt. 2, Atlanta

2008-07-02T13:39:00.000-07:00

After checking into the Highland Inn, (the best place to stay in Atlanta in my humble opinion, even with its funky percussive radiator heating--hey, Joan Baez slept there), I walked around Little Five Points, browsed The Junkyard's Daughter, flipped through the bins at Criminal Records (find of the day, a good, used Wombats A Guide to Love, Loss, and Desperation--an upbeat, silly antidote to my serious, sad bastard tendencies, though "Let's Dance to Joy Division" conflates it all nicely), and wandered among the few tattooed and pierced hipsters brave enough to face the heat and daylight and yuppie moms power-strolling toward the park. It was a good way to kill time until I was to meet up with Tara, a former student and fine singer who's soon off to China to teach, and her old Valdosta friend Leigh Ann for dinner before the Ninja Gun show at The Earl. We supped at Zaya nearby where the girls could load up on dollar Ketel One drinks before the show and the food was generally very good Middle Eastern/Mediterranean fare, especially the hummus.

We headed to the show at the Earl and met up with many other former and current Valdosta folks, including Dixie and Camille and Kenny and Jason and Damon (my hero for booking The Reputation at Vito's here) and John and Maybeth and Jessie (Coody's sweet gal), ready to enjoy our local heroes Ninja Gun at a serious venue (hey, Califone played there). It's Elephant opened enthusiastically enough, but didn't capture my interest as the lead singer tried too hard to modulate between Eddie Vedder and Robert Plant.

Ninja Gun started the strongest set I'd heard from them, assisted by a superior sound system that let them showcase their country punk songs with lucid vocals yet still as loud as they wanna be. They opened with their new, sweet Rainbow Song ("Hey, man, do you wanna see a rainbow?") that Coody co-penned with his niece, then pumped things up with "Restless Rubes," the title song that revises Robert Frost, just a bit:

A hometown can burn you to the ground
So turn a tire around until you’re fine.
In a yellow wood
Two roads converged and the way he should
Go was clear
He left them bridges burning

They powered through a strong set from the new cd, including "Darwin was a Baptist" with its deft humor and fine, ironic chorus, "Can I get a little church in my state?/ Give me one more reason to hate everything around me," anchoring a biting critique of life that "surrounds" anyone in the bible belt. "Eight Miles Out" rocked with its upbeat take on doubt, and maybe my favorite on the album, "Permanent Press," with it's ringing guitar progression and its poignant hint of William Carlos Williams' "Between Walls" in the light-through-glass imagery for this ars musica:

So write yourself in melody and make the words agree
Lay it out for all to see just who you used to be.
‘Cause oh the seasons, do they pass
Like naked sunshine through broken glass
The days will slide on by too fast if you don’t try.

"The Last Cowboy" and "Asking Price," an anthem against selling out, also shone before the enthusiastic crowd at The Earl. They closed with their raucous country punk version of "Please, Please Me," which Coody asserts is the first true punk rock song. Ninja Gun makes a convincing case, and all of us from down here in little ole Valdosta were swelling with pride.

Missy Gossip and the Secret Keepers closed out the night and surprised with Lauren Staley's strong vocals hinting at what Linda Ronstadt dipped in Georgia peach might sound like. They played a good, crunching southern rock set punctuated by a fine torch song or two.

It was a fine evening to share with friends, and I headed back to the Highland, a good bottle of red waiting to help my evening reflections.

Perigrinations north with music (Ninja Gun) and both scheduled and chance meetings: Pt. 1, Athens

2008-06-29T13:53:00.000-07:00

One winces anymore at the numbers tumbling up and up on the Pilot and Roadway and BP marquees as we approach five dollar gas and each trip becomes a tough decision, so I feel for all the troubadours wandering the country in vans and trailers filled with amps and instruments and merch as they try to bring us live music while they worry about the next few gallons. Wednesday, I went north to see Ninja Gun in Athens and Atlanta. Yes, they're from here, but they were finishing their tour in Atlanta, and I missed their send-off, so I decided to welcome them back to Georgia and to visit former students Kaleb and Ashley in Athens and Tara and Kenny in Atlanta, and to check in on Amy's parents in Waleska (They're loving the Lake Arrowhead life).

The Athens show was fun as much for the company as the music. I've seen NG many times in a bar with a less than stellar sound system, and the Transmetropolitan is one of them. The opening band (Timber?) played an enthusiastic acoustic set, and Ninja Gun followed up with a fun but quick set of songs from the new CD, Restless Rubes (scroll down). Ace reporter Ashley Fielding was there, putting the band up (or up with the band?) for the night. It was good to catch up with her and hear that she's doing well, and to see that the boys had survived the long days on the road without too many scars and smelling reasonably clean, though they'll get home broke and tired and unemployed. The major Athens surprise was the presence in the bar of Patrick McKinney (Langtry, Iron and Wine), who enjoyed the show and who glowingly endorses the Transmet's Tofu sandwich. A virtuoso musician of considerable accomplishment, he complimented NJ on their sound and Coody for his stage presence. We ran into him later in another bar that specialized in Belgian-style beers, and he suffered Kaleb's girlfriend's abuse (sometimes drunk guys in bars are more than just drunk guys in bars; sometimes they're musicians or even poets) as he was trying to recommend that I stay in town for the Sun City Girls tribute show. (Alas, no one was around to take care of the kittens, so I had to head home Friday.) We ended up the evening on Kaleb's balcony with cheap red wine and Kaleb's puppy to mollify her mortification after she found out who Patrick was ("I really like Iron and Wine," she offered penitently). Finally to the couch at around 4:00 am. Thanks for putting me up (or up with me?), Kaleb, and the Thai place the next day was lovely.

George Carlin vs. My Senior Prom

2008-06-23T12:47:00.000-07:00

I stumbled through my late last semester at Fresno High as I suppose most people stumble through theirs, wondering what adventures lay ahead while feeling the first inklings of what we would later identify as nostalgia. (The French must have a word that means "prescient nostalgia.") That is, my future had been decided--I was moving to Berkeley for college--and everything else that mattered in school had come to a close--high school basketball, my senior romance. We were just living out the final weeks attached to our familiar cliques, performing our class duties, eating lunch at the same hangouts, everything that until then had defined us as we approached that looming, transformative (we hoped) cusp. The end game for most students revolved around the prom, who would go with whom, which parties would offer the most debauchery, boutonnieres and cumberbuns and orchid corsages and waxed cars, or maybe even a limo for the Fresno wealthy. I don't know. I didn't go.

Instead, shy as I was, I accepted an invitation from the lovely and intelligent Cristina, a talented musician, to avoid the teenage atrocity that was the prom and see George Carlin instead. It was one of the great evenings of my youth. We'd of course heard the seven words bit from Class Clown. Everybody had. The funniest thing about the bit is its pure reasonableness, its demystification of language in a way that would later help inform my move from physics to poetry in college. Cris and I laughed so hard that warm spring night that we were sure no one at the prom had an evening that approached ours. Carlin was funny and intelligent, pacing the stage, delivering his lines perfectly, varying enough so that those who'd heard the record would still be surprised. Carlin was a master, an accessible genius.

Cris and I left, tears in our eyes from the laughter, and talked for awhile about the show, about music (I remember trying to make some argument about keyboards being superior; she was into brass and had even jammed with Tower of Power. Obviously she made better points), and about the future (the cusp and all) that would take us away from Fresno and from what for me had become a wonderful but too brief friendship. But the evening remains, in all its polysemously profane glory and celebration of the language of the Angles and the Saxons, and "shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits" became a generation's mantra against fake propriety and, for me, a doorway to nostalgia of a wonderful evening. So, thanks George for your wonderful assaults on our disingenuous culture, and to you, Cristina, wherever you are and whatever you're doing. I hope your memories of that night, our little anti-prom, are as fond as mine.

Loaf Will Tear Us Apart

2008-06-13T14:58:00.000-07:00

My own private sourdough (and this concludes post-punk punning for this post), baked in my own oven with my own home-grown sourdough starter. I added no baking soda, as many recipes call for, and it turned out fine, with a chewy crumb and a mellow sour flavor. The other half of this batch became a fine pizza crust.

Making sourdough is easy. Mix about a cup of organic rye flour with a cup or so of spring or filtered water and a little salt, stick it in the fridge in a container with room for the starter to grow, and go on a trip for a week. When you come back, the near batter should be bubbly with a slight sour odor. To achieve a stronger sourdough taste, it helps to let the starter you plan to use sit out at room temperature for awhile (overnight or most of a day, depending on your baking schedule). I keep my starter in the fridge and feed it about once a week. (You only need the rye to get it started. You can feed it all purpose after that.)

To make a loaf, I mix several flours (usually King Arthur all purpose, about a cup of whole wheat, a little extra gluten, and a couple tablespoons of flax meal), add water and about half my starter, blend and knead thoroughly until it feels good and springy, and let it rise 8-12 hours before I work it gently into a loaf and proof it for one to two hours. I bake it on parchment and pizza stone in a preheated steam-treated oven (500 degrees F, then drop it to 450) until it looks right, about half an hour, and let it sit a couple of hours to finish the loaf.

Note: I don't measure anything, so don't ask, or check out the reference below. To steam, put cast iron pan in the oven before you preheat; and carefully pour a cup or two of hot water in it after you place the loaf on the stone. I read Local Breads: Sourdough and Whole-Grain Recipes from Europe's Best Artisan Bakers By Daniel Leader, Lauren Chattman (Thanks Elizabeth) before I started, but I've modified most of the instructions to fit my kitchen and taste preferences.

This is What We Do

2008-06-07T11:37:00.000-07:00

Why wait to book a bar when you can call your friends and play music loud and sloppy on a warm Georgia night? Jack and Taylor called some friends in bands and put the word out and people showed up at Jack, John, and Maybeth's place across from the graveyard and assembled around a makeshift stage, an old deck under the stars, under gorgeous black silhouettes of long-leaf pines next to a shed out back.

Fancy Blood's "salsa bossa nova glam" stylings opened as Zach's fine ironies and dark observations barked out over nervous complex guitar licks, while Chris throttled his bass and Steve laid down a raucous beat support on drums. It was raw geek-angst chic of the best sort, and sloppy. Sure, Zach had to stop a time or two ("Sorry, fuck!" maybe an album title?) as someone missed a bridge or forgot lyrics, but that was part of the charm--intelligent music for friends, lots of laughter and cold beer on a hot night. They're very new, but show a lot of promise in their urgency and lyrical cleverness. I think they're leaning toward a Fugazi meets Pavement aesthetic, though they might cite more obscure musical references. Feel free to correct me.

False Arrest, the youngest band of the night, changed things up with classic 80's-style hardcore skate punk. They machine-gunned through their set, finishing in a sweaty heap by the end of their irreverent 20 minutes. I suspect they woke the dead across the street. One highlight was the perfect punk minimalist party narrative "More Beer." Between furious guitar licks, they chanted "more beer, more beer, more beer" all through the minute-long song until the last chorus, "more pot." Funny and honest. I enjoyed talking to the bass player, Bo, after, who spoke enthusiastically about Bad Brains, Black Flag, and Woodie Guthrie.

Jack plays guitar for No More Analog, next up, which features Taylor Patterson on drums and The Captain on bass and vocals. The trio modulates between witty punk and heavier post-rock. "No Vacancy" is my favorite so far, while "Anasazi," offers smart punky social commentary. The set ended prematurely when the police arrived to shut down the party. The officer, reasonable even in the face of The Captain's miked anti-establishment banter ("Dude, he can totally hear you!), said he'd have preferred to join the crowd rather than shut it down. Nevertheless, despite John's patient persuasion and offer to continue the show inside the shed, there was no way to talk around some new ordinance. Apparently one of the dead across the street who maintained a posthumous antipathy toward the Anasazi called to complain.

People didn't want to leave, so the party moved to a nearly vacant house a few blocks away so Cyclops could have their turn without a blue light show. They kept it inside, but they cranked through their precise prog-math rock influenced set in front of a receptive crowd. I never thought I'd live long enough to hear King Crimson's influence throb back into the music scene, though their guitarist, Nick, mentioned Yes when I asked him about it. Made me want to go home and fix the turntable so I could pull out primordial Genesis' Trespass and crank up "The Knife" again.

The party broke up, and everyone headed to Rachael's to swim. I headed home, but with music in my head from the night and from the previous shed show a few weeks back that featured a reunion of the Honest A's, local heroes who put out a great ep a few years back. Carson was back from Okinawa to visit, and she and Rachael and Dustin filled up the hot shed with their standards, my favorite among them ending with the perfect Zen punk chant, "This is what we do! This is what we do! This is what we do!" Everybody screaming it over and over. This is what we do.

Note: Most of the Myspace sound quality on some of the links is lousy, but you might get a hint.

Day 6,7,8 Reprise and Foxen

2008-05-31T14:07:00.000-07:00

Having spoken with George the previous about wineries to visit on the way to Fresno, focusing primarily on other Paso Robles wineries, I surprised myself and headed instead up Foxen Canyon and stopped at Foxen winery, whose wines George said were getting better and better. Their pinots are become expensive and rare, and so I was disappointed the tasting room had none available to taste. The syrahs, cabs, and merlots were all good, and I sent some home, but they also whispered that they had 'a few' magnums "just in today" of their famed Sea Smoke vineyard and their Block 8 available, so I paid a ransom for one of each to add to the rest, and so I hope the government is happy that I used my "stimulus" check for wine that I hope will be very stimulating.

But much of the rest of the trip was a reprise of last year, and happily so, as I visited Mom and Dad and Haley and Hannah and Chase and my sister, who is still recovering from being slammed by a semi, my old neighbors Al and Lavonne, and, of course, the seco palms. We sat on the porch a lot. Watched the sky threaten rain. I shipped back some of my vinyl records even though I have nothing to play them on, but they're here in South Georgia.

I also spent another fine afternoon with Peter Everwine, and we talked again about poetry and life and friends and our work. And to my delight he is working. He remarked that he wasn't sure he had time to finish another project, but, leaving, I reminded him that Phil Levine predicted he'd give us another thirty years after he suffered a heart attack some years back, and I pointed out that you don't fuck around with a Phil Levine prediction. He laughed and said, "Well, I guess I have a few more to go, then." Many more, we all hope. We shared a bottle of Hartley Ostini pinot I picked up in Santa Barbara and we drank it into the afternoon, a sweet wine for sweet words.

Up early the last day to drive to LAX and home to grading and kittens after another good trip.

Day 5, Santa Barbara Style

2008-05-23T15:07:00.000-07:00

Day five was nice and slow. Patrick and Robin offered up their house for a pizza dinner party Monday night, but Monday day meant everybody working but me. I caught up on end-of-semester panicky emails from students and then left around noon for lunch with the wonderful company of Chryss and Barry Spacks. I parked at the beach and walked up to the UCSB campus, which I hadn't been to since I worked there at the end of the last millennium. It looked the same and strange at the same time, as though someone had reconstructed campus from faulty partial memories. The lagoon was where it was, but the Student Union seemed pressed into the wrong place until I arrived and looked out the window at the lagoon.

Then Barry walked up, whom I hadn't seen but very briefly last year, and Chryss, and everything fell back into place. Barry, who hasn't aged a day since I first met him, was wonderfully Barry, upbeat and sparkling. If he were fatter I might even call him jolly, but he's not, so witty and wise will have to do. Chryss and he joked around during our quickish lunch, and I filled them in on my weekend in LA and life in general (kids, Amy, kittens, etc.) and then I took Barry home, as Chryss had to get back to the job, and they I shopped for the evening's wine and ingredients for the homemade tapenade I offered to make to contribute to Patrick's pizza. I also found some Fontina Val d' Aosta and had to purchase just for the transmogrifying irony of it (I live in Valdosta, folks, that's in Georgia, where the favored cheese is Velveeta or other 'mer'can styles).

I headed early (though I was briefly lost) to Patrick's to help with the pizza, tour the new home and see its lovely hillside view of Santa Barbara and the ocean. But friends George, Amy, Chryss and Cattie, and Barry from the night before, along with old friends Tom and his terribly cute son and Madeleine and Bob and their lovely daughter Sophie showed up to enjoy the new home and the old friend (i.e. me). It's been nearly twelve years since I moved to Santa Barbara and met all these wonderful people and we get older and the kids grow taller and things in the body hurt more or there's less of it or it's changing color and we fumble for glasses we didn't need then and it doesn't matter because this night reprised what was best about all my time there--these friends on a warm beautiful night with food and wine and the casual poetry of hanging out and love. Thanks Patrick and Robin.

We made our way back down the hill, George, Amy, and I, and we continued a smaller version of the party until the wee hours.

(I don't remember all the wines we drank, but it would have been a fine list. I contributed an Emile Moro from Ribera, and I know George brought some fabulous wines. Remind me?)

Road Trip Day 4: Books to Beans

2008-05-15T10:32:00.000-07:00

Day four was OUR day. Elena's and mine. We've toiled away happily at the Poetry Corner for ten years, and, finally, they let us read. Happily, we both had fresh projects to read from: Elena's Masque (Tupelo) and my own chapbook, Other Medicines (Redbone). We chose to alternate rather than chunk it up, and that seemed to work well, create a different rhythm. Friends were in the audience, including Chryss, Margaret, and new friend Tristan with his lovely fiancée (and, oh, Jackson was there Saturday). And Robert, who read after and who taught me at Berkeley, showed up early to listen, but this is all I'll say about us basking in our tiny glory. We still had to work the rest of the day, and it was also a fine one, with Robert reading from his strong new book, and on through many regulars to Stanley Plumly in his best basso radio voice, to another old Fresno compadre Sam Pereira, and Wanda Coleman, who briefly turned it into a revival tent with heavy with eros. The complete lineup follows.

Elena Byrne and Marty Williams
Masque and Other Medicines

Robert Pinsky
Gulf Music: Poems

Maurya Simon
Cartographies

Al Young
Something About the Blues

Elaine Equi
Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems

Jill Bialosky and Dana Goodyear
The End of Desire and Honey and Junk

1:00 PM
James Ragan
In the Talking Hours

Adam Kirsch
Invasions: New Poems

Stanley Plumly
Old Heart: Poems

Carol Muske-Dukes and Sam Pereira
Sparrow and A Café in Boca

Chris Abani
Hands Washing Water

Wanda Coleman and Diane Ward
Mercurochrome and When You Awake

Luis J. Rodriguez
My Nature is Hunger

It was especially lovely to see Margaret, whom I bean seein' here every year and who beacons her smile wherever she goes. I left her in the green room with Robert and Pico Iyer. After the reading, Elena and I tried to meet up with Noah, who usually comes out but was visiting family in San Diego. That was perhaps the only disaster of the entire trip, since Noah was coming on bike and I had to leave for a gathering in Santa Barbara the moment he arrived. I needed more Noah time. But the three of us parted and hugged and I headed north, where I stayed with George and Amy, and where Chryss and Cattie and Dave and Patrick and Barry remained despite my latish arrival. We drank great wine (including a lovely '98 Dehlinger pinot) and laughed until late. It was nice to be home.

Road Trip Day 3: Book Festival and Party

2008-05-09T15:15:00.000-07:00

After ten years or so, co-emceeing the poetry corner at the LA Times Festival of Books is fairly routine. Wake up, show up, set up, keep track of who's next and track them down if necessary. Buy books at Small World Book's tent. Sometimes the work keeps you from listening to the poetry, but given that it lasts all day, the words and poets can run together without time away from the tent, so I try to listen to a few carefully before I run off to check for the next poet, break in the green room, etc. The line up on April 26th was strong, so catching as much as I could became a challenge. Mark Doty, always a strong reader, began the day and he brought us a terrific early crowd that seemed to sustain itself throughout the day. Here's the whole list:

Mark Doty
Fire to Fire

Sholeh Wolpe
Rooftops of Tehran

Eloise Klein Healy & Elizabeth Bradfield
The Islands Project: Poems for Sappho & Interpretive Work: Poems

Albert Goldbarth
The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems, 1972-2007

Brian Tracy
Driving with Dante

David St. John
The Face: A Novella in Verse

Jean Valentine
Little Boat

Marvin Bell
Mars Being Red

Christopher Buckley
Flying Backbone: The Georgia O'Keeffe Poems

Sarah Maclay and Charles Hood
The White Bride and Rio de Dios

Susan McCabe
Descartes’ Nightmare

Lynne Thompson
Beg No Pardon

Jennifer Kwan Dobbs
Paper Pavilion

Tony Barnstone
The Golem of Los Angeles

Catherine Daly and Stuart Dischell
Locket and Backwards Days

Mark, David St. John, Marvin Bell, Chris Buckley, Shole Wolpe, Jean Valentine (quietly), Stuart, and Eloise were all high points on an unusually strong list. My favorite moment, though, was when Albert Goldbarth read among the most masterful complaints in the history of letters, I believe, in his diatribe against the obligatory post-reading Thai restaurant meal. I was laughing, crying, and starving for a chili-cheese burger with a side of onion rings all at the same time. Tony Barnstone's work surprised me most, and he'll be in my classes next year, for sure.

Later, Sholeh and Tony hosted a party in Barry and Sholeh's loft downtown. The place was lovely, the conversation excellent and spiced with laughter, and the Persian cuisine was wonderful. Writers from both days attended, and Tony even brought along a little Hollywood, as Kimberly Oja (an OC regular) showed up. I told Elena that I felt a little out of place, outclassed, Fresno boy that I continue to be, but truly the gathering was warm and I was happy to cab Stuart and Jill Bialosky back to their hotel around midnight, and then the 405 back to the Hacienda.

Road Trip, Day 2, plus meme

2008-05-07T16:08:00.000-07:00

Friday in LA was soft, warm, no plans or obligations. Just a few possibilities that never came to pass. I did the California thing--shopped in an upscale mall built no doubt on reclaimed toxic ground next to the refinery. Wine and a blazer. That's what I bought. Then I explored El Segundo, which merited all of that second as the cafe I stopped in for caffeine blared a soap opera. The walk was good. The beach was unwelcoming unless you were in an RV. The hotel lunch wasn't bad, a Mexican buffet of sorts, but the seafood soup was a very pleasant surprise. Just killing time until the evening.

The LA Times Book Awards ceremony was, as usual, long, but pleasant enough. I sat with Elena and fellow "Fresno Poet" and friend David St. John and his lovely daughter. You can check out the winners here, if you're interested. I was mostly interested in poetry, and Stanley Plumly won that for Old Heart: Poems among many worthy nominees this year (Albert Goldbarth, Marvin Bell, Jean Valentine, and Elaine Equii). The afterparty was lavish as usual, with chocolate fountains and food stations that featured lobster farfarelle and Korean barbecue shortribs and sushi and other savory items. We ate and drank, ate and drank, and talked into the evening. Stuart Dischell was also there, old brother in the word, another transplant to the south, and Albert was delightfully witty, as usual. The evening passed quickly into memory and I made it back to the Hacienda early enough to rest up for the book festival.

Because this is shorter, I'm going to take care of some meme nonsense because Chryss and Amy E. said I have to.

Here are the rules:
A) The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
B) Each player answers the questions about himself or herself.
C) At the end of the post, the player then tags five people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

1) Ten years ago I was...
finishing my PhD, which I defended the same day the Santa Barbara pier caught fire. Driving back from LAX, I saw it burn fiercely and bright, probably all that creosote, but I thought from some distance it was all of downtown.

2) Five things on today's to-do list:
Lunch (Sonia's Cuban) with Carson and Taylor, Toby's rec letter, proof poems for Chattahoochee Review, syllabus for tomorrow, house show (Honest A's reunion cf. Carson above) tonight.

3) Things I'd do if I were a billionaire:
Hmmm. Are supermodels things? Bad joke, but really, don't you have to be some kind of asshole to hoard that much money? I'd like to think I wouldn't keep that much. I'd have to start some kind of foundation divided between environmental and human rights concerns that would keep me from every accumulating that much money.

4) Three bad habits:
Hmmm. 1) I procrastinate. I'll do the other two later.

5) Five places I've lived:
Here (Valdosta), there (Fresno), Berkeley, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Salt Lake City, Utah. (That's six, but I'm still down two bad habits, and maybe Fresno counts as one of my bad habit[at]s?)

6) Six jobs I've had in my life:
Custodian, Snack Bar slave, Statistical Clerk (US Forest Service), Life Insurance Agent, High School Teacher, College Professor. (Be honest, guys, how many of you typed "blow" and then erased it.)

I'll tag Mike and Liz and John and all of my Myspace friends.

Road Trip: LA, Santa Barbara, Fresno: Part 1

2008-05-05T12:50:00.000-07:00

The Hacienda Hotel next to LAX is cheesy, good, LA cheesy, 4o's or 50's American Cheese that tries to convince you you're in a more glamorous place than you are, visiting a more glamorous and exotic time, say, the quaint Mexico of TV yore, Zorro and the Cisco Kid Mexico--courtyards and fountains and murals (and there should be sequins on hats), its own dive bar to acclimatize you to time travel with Margaritas or Bud Light. Tourists, mostly from Europe, add to the confusion, German, French, Russian spoken here. Spanish, too, but mostly by the maids and janitors. It's tall and jets whiz into and out of LAX just to the north. To the south, the tall spires of El Segundo's refineries rise holy in this late era of gas and oil blinking red warnings to airplanes in the night. The air is warm and I'm tired, but I have a dinner date with friends, so head down Sepulveda to Palos Verdes with my little bag of dried Georgia porcini to contribute to the meal.

Palos Verdes is eucalyptus and peacocks and 60's California ranch homes and horseback trails on the hills overlooking the sea and the city. Elena Karina Byrne, my dear friend and fellow poet and the reason I get to go back to LA every year, shows me her house and its lovely view, and we begin cooking very quickly. She's planned to use my porcini in a recipe that calls for heavy cream and balsamic vinegar, a combination I'm ready to be surprised by. It's good to catch up, to be back in California. Peter and their daughter are at soccer nationals, so will arrive later. In fact, the big news around the house is their daughter's full scholarship to Oregon to play soccer. She's still a junior. She's that good. Every few minutes Elena and I have to go check the view, sundown over the city, lights coming on, the mountains in the distance, Santa Monica bay just visible to the north. And we catch up about mutual friends and friends she made out here when she visited. It's warm and we dine and the porcini sauce over the chicken is fantastic and holds up nicely to red wine. It's nice to be there with my friend in her lovely home, warm, almost ethereal. Elena shows me some new poems and they spark in the mind, bare wires against sheet metal beautiful, and we read until Pete and C. arrive from soccer.

It's good to see Pete, too, and we catch up, too. He's on tour with Naked Eyes this summer on a big east coast swing with ABC and Belinda Carlisle and Flock of Seagulls and, I think, the Human League. It's fun to hear him reminisce about seeing Hendrix and Traffic and Syd's Pink Floyd and Clapton's various incarnations when they were just coming out. He plays me some of his new music, the 80's synth-pop influences still prominent, but in a deeper timbre, more mature. The demos sound excellent and ready to go, though he points out how much more work they need in the studio. Then I head back down to the Hacienda, past the peacocks and eucalyptus trees, warm in the belly, warm in the head, tired from all the travel .

Califone and Iron and Wine, Freebird's, Jacksonville, April 13

2008-04-23T15:50:00.000-07:00

"Rhythm"

Easier trip this time, earlier, time for dinner (Mexican food, not bad), time to walk on Jacksonville Beach on a sparkling perfect late afternoon and watch the ocean hush and hush before the Sunday evening show. This time my traveling companion was Andrea, lead singer of Night Driving in Small Towns, a graduate student who writes wonderful poetry and songs.

Freebird's is an odd, two-storey venue where some of the crowd looks down on the stage from upstairs, but it's charming in its own way. It's owned (if the name of the venue didn't clue you in) by an ex-Lynard Skynard musician, and the resident sound guy was Molly Hatchet offspring (no evidence of those Satellites), so Southern heritage was thick as a tick on a sleeping redbone hound. But Sam Beam is from around these parts, so the Jacksonville show doubled as a homecoming of sorts. His parents and other family members attended, so Iron and Wine played a generous, enthusiastic, passionate, and outstanding set.

"Melody"

Califone opened, and this time, we were there before the start. They eased into the show with a sweet "Tayzee Nubb." This time the crowd was more aware, interested, and clearly many in the audience knew the oeuvre and grooved along. They moved through their short set seamlessly between [Roots and Crowns] material and older works. "Orchids" surprises no matter how many times I hear it, and "Fisherman's Wife" after "The Eye You Lost in the Crusades" reminds us that music is pure time and stops it. Feel its rhythms directly; lose count. "Horoscope Amputation Honey" has become Califone's raga live, as its slow opening, its folky troubled poem ("braid your sins into its mane/and kick it to the county line/shake your chains cold and loose/there's nothing safe in your stars") builds into a bardo of rhythm and improvisation that hurts when it stops. Live, it's a folk-shaman symphony. They turn it up.

Sam Beam and his bassist (superb Chicago guy with a great sense of humor) came out to help finish the set, and, while the quieter "Spider's House" played more to Iron and Wine's traditional fan base, they erupted into "Pink and Sour," surprising for its heavy harem flavors and its strong rhythms. The bass crunched magnificently and Sam added to the strong rhythm superbly. And that was it.

After the show, everyone was happy. After goodbyes, Andrea and I drove two hours back to Valdosta, all the music in our heads keeping us awake and talking.

cellphone photos courtesy Andrea Rogers

Tallahassee Roadtrip: Califone and Iron and Wine

2008-04-20T16:51:00.000-07:00

Getting to The Moon in Tallahassee on the 10th wasn't as easy as the 86 miles between us, since I had to sit through a stomach-churning committee meeting an hour too long. My wonderfully patient friend Dixie and I unfortunately arrived late, too late to go out to dinner before the show (The Moon's gumbo, though, ain't too shabby), and just in time to catch Califone's last two songs--"Orchids" and "The Eye You Lost in The Crusades." It wasn't even 9:30. The crowd (lots of FSU kids admitted free with ID), clearly showed up only because " free with ID," and maybe because they'd sorta kinda heard that Iron & Wine song on an M&M's commercial or something and somebody in the sorority said like one of their indie rock nerd friend's said it like might be awesome, and so they talked loud and had already drunk too much. Only 9:30 and some guy passes flat out in front of the stage during "Eye," a beautiful and arresting song, that, yes, could in fact cause one to swoon, so perhaps I'm being harsh. To be fair, plenty in the audience knew what they were listening to and were also irritated by the fraterlopers.

Tim Rutili, whose writing I've long admired, was kind enough to come out and wait with me for Dixie, who was out talking to guitarist and filmmaker Jim Becker, dutifully handling merch duties after the set. Tim rescued us and let us back stage where I caught up with him and Joe Adamik and Ben Massarella. Dixie had a good time hearing Joe reminisce about his single Valdosta experience way back when he was married to a woman who spoke only French. The owner of Groucho's (a classic dive and current biker bar called Mikki's) almost kicked Joe's band out because they refused to cover Skynard or Molly Hatchet or the Georgia Satellites, demonstrating that our famous deep South hospitality doesn't apparently apply when it comes to issues of musical diversity.

Iron & Wine began with their earlier quieter works, just Sam Beam with his acoustic and his sister Sarah with violin, pleasing those in the crowd who like Sam Beam's whispering ballads, his quiet stories. Then the entire band joined him, deftly weaving complex rhythms and melodies without overwhelming Sam Beam's natural vocal gifts. In fact, the bigger sound brings out the richness and purity of his voice, and live he proved that Shepard's Dog wasn't all Brian Deck's brilliant production. Every song on the setlist sparkled, especially my favorite from the new album, "Pagan Angel in a Borrowed Car," its southern love-gothic imagery clear and dark ("Love was our father's flag and sewn like a shank/In a cake on our leather boots/A beautiful feather floating down/To where the birds had shit our empty chapel pews) against surprising uplifting rhythms. The backing band was tight all evening, but never mechanical.

Watching from backstage, I focused on Ben Massarella, who plays in both bands, while he worked his percussive wizardry. Usually, from the front, he's hard to see, especially in larger venues. He's constantly picking something up and putting it down, his head bobbing behind the bank of "stuff" he plays like a bear hesitant to come out of the cave after a winter of hibernation, lots of up and down, lots of beautiful noise, that full head of hair, but mysterious. From the back, I watched him pick up instrument after instrument, many found objects, and make the perfect, perfectly timed, bang, shirrrr, ting, beat, or rattle. At times he held so many odd sound-fetishes live in his hands like spirit animals, it looked like he was performing shamanic ritual exorcism (especially during the thundering extended finale of "Horoscope Amputation Honey" in Jacksonville, more on that later). He also smiles when he plays; he loves the music, the sound he helps sculpture. I mentioned my amazement to Tim after the show. He just nodded and smiled, said, "He plays the air."

Photos by Dixie.

Visitors

2008-04-01T12:04:00.000-07:00

Blogging and entertaining visitors for me are mutually exclusive, but I don't mind when people come and hang out here in Valdosta to read poetry or go to the swamp and look for alligators, so if either one of you missed me, please know the cause was righteous and just. First Elena Karina Byrne* (link on the list), a long-time friend, came and read from her new book Masque and taught in my beginning creative writing and contemporary literature class. She stayed for several days and I cooked, which was fun, and the reading was terrific even though I had to throw a sorority out of the building. Standing up to well-dressed, privileged girls, threatening to call security (we were in the right, so I wasn't being a jackass here), was one of my prouder moments. My proudest moment, however, was pulling a sourdough loaf out of the oven that looked and tasted like real sourdough, with the wonderful chewiness and the lightly sour tang that the local strain gives the bread. The next night I turned the remaining dough into a lovely pizza crust, which set itself off perfectly against the fresh sauce and aged fontina, provolone, and parmigiano reggiano. Best pizza I ever made, and second best Elena had ever had (after Italy, she says). Her wonderful smile was worth it all.

My nephew, Erick, also visited, beginning early Sunday, so we cooked on Happy Wake Up Jesus Day a fine leg of lamb, which has since become curry. He came to classes, to the reading, and enjoyed the post-reading "party" with former student and friend Jessica, who showed up with a bottle of the Captain and somebody found a shot glass and, somehow, we ended up in the back yard at midnight doing hula hoops. Fortunately, I stayed away from the captain (as did Erick) and so can document the late night silliness, and can say with no small amount of pride that I can, in fact, still hula that hoop. We did make it out to Grand Bay and spotted a large alligator not too far from the viewing tower, so our swamp trip was also a success. Erick also managed to find time to skateboard and we had fun walking around Little 5 Points in Atlanta, eating at the Vortex, buying T-Shirts at La Petite Mort, before he hopped on the plane for Coos Bay.

Note: Elena and I will be reading together Sunday, April 27th, 10:00 AM at the LA Times Festival of Books Poetry Corner.

Spring Broken

2008-03-13T14:34:00.000-07:00

All the kids are at the beach drinking and smoking too much and reawakening their tan lines while spring arrives in fits and starts, tornadoes and frost and warm days in among them fooling us that winter's over, really. It's the spring of a thousand broken candidacies, the wrong time for a recession and our continuing national decay, the spring my congressional representative calls me and leaves a message on my phone to say he just wants to chat. What would I say to him? Thanks, Jack, for getting Stephen Colbert in front of the National Press Corps to ream the administration and especially the corps? Sure, but other than that, we agree on nothing I can think of. When I think of national security, I don't think of defense spending and war and spies and terrorists. I think of the security of our privacy, of our rights, of our ethos as a nation. These things erode from the inside, as when we violate our own laws, evade our own checks and balances. We don't need no stinkin' terrorists. This is our national insecurity, our belly-flop into the pool of blood and silence, of acquiescence to this culture of voyeurism and violation and torture.

Recently, the FCC fined ABC $1 million + for an episode of NYPD that originally aired in 2003. This is old news, but if you go watch the scene in question, you'll get a sense of what truly frightens this administration. Modesty. Privacy. A woman readies to take a shower; a boy walks in; she covers herself, mortified. The scene brilliantly turns on the voyeurism of the viewer, just settling in to see another famous NYPD Blue ass shot. She's relaxed, natural, alone (except for the eyes of the nation), and she exposes all of us and our desire to spy on her as she disrobes. And it's this repudiation of our cultural voyeurism that the FCC fears most. Go watch "reality." Watch Big Brother, then go online to catch the T&A. Watch CSI Miami, all its thongs and all its access to personal information, "for our protection." We are a people in training to be watched 24/7, and we're expected to like it. ABC isn't being fined for showing Charlotte Ross' ass. The FCC is fining them because she catches us looking, because she covers up.

AWP Moments*

2008-02-27T16:08:00.000-08:00

Dinner the first evening with the Utah crowd (delectably tender short ribs at Thalia).

Lunch with Elena Byrne at the Stage Deli for a 21 dollar sandwich.

With Mark Strand on the street talking about wine. (He corrected my pronunciation of Sassacaia, a wonderful wine however you say it.)

Drinking the stuff with Kurt Brown and Wyn Cooper and Shawna Parker and Katie Coles and Steven Huff. What was that Grenache again, Katie? Who was that guy taking notes? Following it up with magnificent gyros from the street cart.

One of my favorite poets, Kim Addonizio, stops me and calls me by name. Too, too briefly.

In the lobby catching up with Terry Hummer.

Chinese food with John Guzlowski and running into Thom Ward, in search of his missing Fedora, on the way out.

"Eye Spy" with Paula while Margot Schilpp entertained her and Jeff Mock's lovely baby Leah.

Lunch with David Oliveira and Florence Weinberger at that little Thai place, then later seeing proofs of David's new book with his publisher, Peter Money.

The panel "Being Crazy Doesn't Make You Interesting" (in order of appearance) with colleague and organizer Jeffrey Vasseur, me, Marita Golden, Bob Shacochis, Amy Bloom, and David Kranes.

With Robert Pinsky after his reading remembering together Thom Gunn.

Talking to Rebecca Fussell while she waited for Anna Gatewood to show up.

With Wyn, Shawna, Tom Hazuka, and Ralph Wilson in the Old Castle where I ran into the delightful Joy Castro for the forth time while we wondered if Martin Amis would find us (he didn't).

Talking about Larry Levis with Alex Long and his former students in the conference hotel bar.

Seeing Yerra Sugarman again in her NYC element.

Answering the question, "Where's Amy?"

The other Utah dinner at Sardi's: steak tartar with fries.

Not being confused with Scott Cairns for a change (he's grown long, lovely locks) and meeting his long, lovely wife, Marcia.

With fellow Berkeley alum Sharon Dolin, talking about tough times, and finding out the good news that Bob Hicok had picked her book for Pitt.

Central Park and MOMA with Wyn and Shawna.

*The conference as a whole huge. There were many people I wanted to see that I didn't see (Jackie Osherow, Jill Rosser, to name two that I knew were there) or didn't see enough of (Rodney Jones, Kim Addonizio, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Bob Wrigley, Kim Barnes, Mary Flynn, Greg Donovan, Mark Jarman). These are a few of the moments outside of slogging through crowds to panels or book tables that stood out.

Road Trip, Valdosta to New Haven (New York City)

2008-02-12T13:32:00.001-08:00

Was a distant voice
Made me make a choice
That I had to get the fuck out of this town
I got a lot of things to do
A lot of places to go
I've got a lot of good things coming my way
And I'm afraid to say that you're not one of them.

-- "Box Elder," Pavement

I had to head north for a conference, for some peace on a long drive, distance from and distance to heartbreak and a night at the home of the best poet writing today in America along the way. Wine (thanks Uncle Gene) and a fine dinner with Bob and Eve and much laughter, a few honest tears. Tears, because, honestly, no matter how much you do, it's not enough if you care, whether Blacksburg or Fresno or Valdosta, anyplace where people can't stop what's in their heads.

The road is a sweet hum otherwise, a veer and a slope, movement and purpose even in a dubious rented Aveo, but it had a CD player and I drove and listened and drove and made good time through all the states 75, 85, 77, 81, 78, 287, and 95 touch. I went the back way up and down, felt the mountains behind me, drank bad coffee and gripped the cold steel of the pump at gas stations, thanked all the fine people who sold me water and m&ms and who let me pee in the employee restrooms. I made it to New Haven in good time on day two, had Pizza from famous Pepe's with my beautiful daughter and James, her beau, and then headed into the city for AWP, which will be another entry. This is about the road and the way the mountains fur with trees in winter, about every white line saying I miss you all the way, north and south, Tim's voice singing it whisper soft, SM explaining why the hard way through Georgia rain and construction zones and Shenandoah Valley and where New Jersey is pretty, trochaic tire thump miss yous, slow miss yous in the wind and the miss miss of wipers whipping only the rain off the glass, and it's ok, this hard work, this forty hours of missing you. Coming home, south, it was all I could do to keep myself from hitting 87 North, north and north to where you are, but I couldn't do that because I wanted to too much. Too much.

Not blogging lately

2008-01-21T14:11:00.000-08:00

Well, for the one or two readers perhaps wondering why nothing is here lately, my life has been otherwise occupied and this forum hasn't been the appropriate place for my musings. I'll resume when my attentions can go elsewhere.

It's been about as cold as it gets here. Yesterday I lifted an octagonal pane of clear ice from the birdbath. looked through the crisp blur of it at the house across the street. The cat sniffs the gap in the door I've opened so she can go out, and she backs up, turns around. Me, too. Me, too.

Five percent solution?

2008-01-09T15:29:00.000-08:00

Hillary wins by a tear, according to the pundits. I saw the clip, and she seemed genuinely moved, and such a moment shouldn't be read as weak, though among the more endomorphish Americans, those who would prefer the cartoon from 300 for president, or Ahnold, the tear will provide proof that Hillary should go back to baking cookies.

But that's not the point. The real point here is that the press is jonesing so hard for story that they're starting to make them up, passing judgments and pronouncements so often that they don't even have time to notice their own contradictions, their own shaping of the outcome. To whit, while everyone argues whether Hillary weeps the tears of a clown (though the press was around) or crocodile tears or that this redeems Edmund Muskie's "dirty trick" snowflakes, the real story goes untold, perhaps because one might have to make reference to observer effects (you know, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in physics).

The press spent so much time salivating over Obama's poll numbers that it affected the outcome. Why be part of a double-digit assured victory when one might have more New Hampshire-style impact by voting in the republican primary to dump Romney? There's also the little matter of ballot design, which a Stanford scholar argues cost Obama 3% of the vote. But a single tear, a five percent solution (i.e. a ten percent swing) to a double-digit deficit? That's a better story. It's just not the real story.

(I haven't, by the way, joined the camp of either candidate, but the way this has been covered, even on NPR, has been outrageous, though an astute New Hampshire caller on the Diane Rihm show this morning pointed out the anti-Romney response to the earlier polls suggesting Obama was a lock.)

Congratulations to Jackson Wheeler, Burning Down the House

2007-12-27T14:21:00.000-08:00

After finding out that John was recognized by Writer's Almanac, I received word that old California friend Jackson Wheeler's "How Good Fortune Surprises Us" is today's pick by former Laureate Ted Kooser on today's American Life in Poetry column. It's a pdf, but Jackson's worth downloading any software you might need. Hit the link.

Congratulations to John Guzlowski

2007-12-27T13:56:00.000-08:00

I want to break my self-imposed holiday blogging silence to send congrats along to John Guzlowski, my co-collaborator over at Poetry Worth Reading, who's poem "What My Father Believed" was read today by Garrison Keillor on Writer's Almanac. Congratulations to John Guzlowski for what his poems give us every day.
Hit the link at PWR and give it a listen. Happy New Year to all.

Poetry Worth Reading: New Blog Announcement

2007-12-18T14:14:00.001-08:00

John Guzlowski and I are starting a new blog called Poetry Worth Readin g. The point is to write about poetry we like. Period. I hope you'll check it out from tome to tome.

Impromptu Oyster Mushroom Noodles and Chicken Recipe

2007-12-14T12:57:00.000-08:00

Walking around in the woods behind my house, I found some perfect oyster mushrooms growing on a log across the shallow pond, so I used them in an Asian style noodle recipe I made up on the fly (so measurements are extremely approximate. Just play!) to go with grilled chicken and freshly baked bread.

Grilled Chicken Marinade

Orange juice (about 1/2 cup)
Soy sauce (three or four tablespoons)
Lime juice (one lime)
Red Wine (1/2 cup)
Balsamic or other vinegar (2 tablespoons)
4-8 cloves garlic (I opt for the high end)
One chopped red pepper (jalapeno, thai, or cayenne)
Fresh ground pepper
Honey (two tablespoons)
Ground coriander seeds (a teaspoon)
Cumin (a spinkle)

Marinate the chicken for about 8 hours, then grill, reserving marinade.

Noodles

1 package chow mein (or other Asian) noodles
Reserved marinade (1 cup or so)
(Add additional soy sauce, orange juice, honey, etc. if chicken has absorbed too much marinade)
Fresh ginger, chopped, (1-2 cm)
Fresh garlic (1-2 cloves)
Fresh grated carrot (one medium)
Three green onions
Celery (1/2 stalk, finely sliced)
Fresh Oyster Mushrooms (1/4-1/2 lb.)
One or two chopped Thai peppers
1/4 cup vegetable oil
Corn starch (2 teaspoons)
Bean Sprouts, angel hair cabbage, almonds, etc. (optional)

Finely chop ginger and add to reserved marinade (or add to marinade to begin with).
Add corn starch to marinade and stir until blended.

Fry cooked, cooled chow mein noodles in 1/4 cup oil (I blended olive, grapeseed, and sesame) with finely chopped white ends of the green onions and garlic until hot.
Add grated carrots and mushrooms and continue tossing until blended.
Stir marinade and add to noodles. Continue tossing.
Top with fresh green onion ends (1 inch pieces) and Thai chiles and optional ingredients.

The mushrooms stand up to frying and provide a nice meat substitute. To make a vegetarian meal, try it with marinated grilled portobellos.

What's the Difference?

2007-12-05T15:08:00.000-08:00

My friend George composed a wise and enlightening post for his blog reminding us of the importance of the ideas of George Orwell in these strange and frequently frustrating times, frustrating for those of us who stand up for rational responses during this time of war and divisive politics. One of his trolls lectures on and on about the need to confront "islamofascism" and the "axis of evil" to win the "war on terror," as though these words bear any substantive meaning. These words, in the language of the "conservative" political agenda and their punditariat, are employed to cow us into excusing such recent American moral excesses as torture, the invasion of Iraq, or the surrender of our civil liberties.

I don't need to be lectured about the so-called "war on terror." I've already won it. I refuse to be terrorized. I refuse to give up my rights and freedoms, my moral sense of justice, my principles--my American-ness, if you will--in favor of security. I'm perfectly willing to die for my country in my country, if I have to, to save it. But I want it to be a country that refuses to torture or make up excuses to invade countries, one that doesn't spy on me or listen to my phone calls, one that doesn't make up fake language to scare us into giving up our civil liberties and our ethical principles. I consider this a more authentically conservative stance, since it prefers the Bill of Rights over political vicissitudes, Rovian or otherwise. If Wolf Blitzer asked the troll whether he'd pick national security over civil liberties, he'd answer, like Democratic presidential candidate Chris Dodd, "National security," in a blink. I'd say, Dodd should have said, "What's the difference?" The supposition that one must choose is really to ask the question, "Do you want America to be destroyed from outside or inside?" William Kristol can froth at the mouth all he wants about the suitcase nuke scenario, how it excuses torture, but, really, if the loss of my innocent life, or even, heaven forbid, the loss of an American city, can cause us to toss out our uniquely American ethos to buy a little more security, then this whole America thing is pretty shaky. We can be ethical and secure, even if it makes security more challenging. We possess the strength, the rationality, and the creativity as a nation to meet the challenge, unless we surrender, whether to the outside, or from the inside. What's the difference?

Sans turkey, sans ham

2007-11-27T10:43:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving in the deep south marks the beginning of autumn here. Leaves are finally turning gold and brown and beginning to litter lawns and woods. Some nights are chilly; some days are still balmy.

Amy and I spent the holiday with the Mostels near Madison. We looked for mushrooms, lit a bonfire, spied a nearly full moon. Toby mixed Pimm's Cups and made a fabulous seafood, vegetable, and rice dish with a side of spicy aioli. I baked some bread and contributed a zinfandel from my uncle's vineyard (Rosenblum, Richard Sauret vineyard) and we enjoyed the meal with the Mostels and their guests from the northeast, including their charming niece Holly, her beau (another mushroom aficianado), Toby's witty friend, Mark S., and Clay, a local young transplant to Long Island. Albert (Toby's Parrot) prattled and the pigeons pigeoned. It was a warm afternoon and we didn't miss the turkey or stuffing or ham or mashed potatoes or cranberry sauce or gravy or football or discussing the post-Thanksgiving ardors of Christmas shopping. We enjoyed the time with our friends, thought of family, conversed about all manner of things familial, political, and poetical. I left with the gift of a wonderful poem by Aileen's dear friend Heather McHugh and inspired by Aileen's dream. This is my thanks to them for a fine and memorable Thanksgiving.

Birthday Wine

2007-11-19T14:29:00.001-08:00

Amy and I spent my birthday yesterday quietly, highlighted by a trip to Grand Bay to enjoy the beautiful weather surrounded by the mossy loveliness of the swamp, and Amy gifted me most delightfully with a t-shirt featuring the artwork of our friend, Tobias Mostel. Then a nice dinner of grilled pork tenderloins and mashed potatoes and salad, and later still the continuation of a ritual I've begun with Amy, opening a cellar classic to see how wine can age gracefully. I hope drinking good aged wine will at least carry over into the living spirit, if not the flesh.

Three years ago I opened a 1982 Chateau Latour, still dense and full and alive and complex, with aromas of rich red fruit remaining vibrant behind the cedar and a lingering spiciness laced with smoke. Then next year, joined by wonderful visiting poet Robert Wrigley and dear friend Jessica Fellows two years ago, we opened a chest-thumping 1982 Mouton Rothschild. It wanted out and needed air and it visited us all evening with its hints of mineral and earth over the fruit. Last year it was a very fine 1985 Caymus Special Selection, complex, even opulent, in the nose, but slightly thin on the finish, perhaps opened two or three years past its prime. Still, it opened up toward the end into berries and a touch of the Caymus smoke I love.

Last night I ventured away from cabernet, opened a 1982 Guigal Cote Rotie La Landonne, a single vineyard Rhone syrah I bought before Guigal's fame launched the single vineyard prices into the stratosphere. It's color surprised me first, bright ruby barely fading to berry-brick at the edges. Its aroma was fruity and complex, but didn't quite deliver the bacon smoke I like in great Rhones. Still, the wine branded my tongue with a laser of fruit that went on and on, underscored by a healthy acidity that suggested I could have left it alone for another ten years or so. I have a few good bottles left, so, with luck, I'll see you next year here (old wines don't travel well), and we'll drink what's left. Cheers.

Correction. In an earlier version, I erred when I said, "Last year it was Margaux, an '86, and it was very fine, improving into an excellent wine with some airing, but its famous violet bouquet was understated beneath the complex fruit." I didn't err about the wine, but it wasn't for my birthday. I opened it for an old friend, T. R. Hummer, and a new one, John Holman, when they were here for a conference last fall.

Poetry Reading: Get Your Brain On

2007-11-13T12:23:00.001-08:00

Thursday Night, 7:30, Odum Library Auditorium

MARGARET GIBSON

East Window, Moon

It shadows the bed with a lattice of light,

this moon whose ridge pole sinks beneath its own weight,

rising slowly, laboriously, late.

I'm in a new house, unfamiliar to my feet,

strange to fingers that touch the walls uncertainly

as I walk through the dark of it at night.

Outside, different trees, different stones on the path.

Closer to death I want to know great faith and great doubt.

What no one taught me, that's what I want to remember,

immersed like Blake, his inner eye

a storehouse for the infinite

flashings the fontanel let in, before it knit the bone door shut.

I have always been alone, and I have never been alone.

What I used to call the self is a windowing of light

in the flood plain of the boundless.

Originally Published in Blackbird vol. 5, no. 1.

Margaret Gibson, five-time nominee for the Pulitzer Prize, is the author of nine books of poems. Among these, Long Walks in the Afternoon was the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets in 1982, Memories of the Future: The Daybooks of Tina Modotti was co-winner of the Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America in 1986-87, and The Vigil: A Poem in Four Voices was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1993. She will be reading from these, as well as from her most recent collection, One Body, published this year by Louisiana State University Press. Gibson has also been honored with a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and two Pushcart Prizes. She is now professor emeritus at the University of

Connecticut, and a new book, a memoir titled The Prodigal Daughter, is forthcoming from the University of Missouri Press.

Coincidence and Photography: Lost and Found

2007-11-01T10:53:00.000-07:00

I took some pictures of a large caterpillar that has cocooned itself over our doorway, a kind of threshold over a threshold, silk above wood and aluminum. I can't find the disk with the photos to post, so instead of blogging about autumn yesterday, I decided to get some work done gathering publication information for the acknowledgments page of my forthcoming chapbook, Other Medicines, coming out in January from Redbone press.

Two of the poems were commissioned (thanks to the efforts of Patsy Hicks) by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art for photographic exhibitions, so I had to look up titles and dates. One of the poems was for an exhibit titled An Eclectic Focus: Photographs from the Vernon Collection. Leonard Vernon and his (then) recently late wife Marjorie had collected thousands of photographs from 1840 to the contemporary era, and Leonard attended the reading on August 28, 1999, to listen to poems written in response to his collection. David Oliveira, Barry Spacks, Chryss Yost, and I read our poetic responses as visitors walked around and viewed the photographs, some with our poems beside them. Leonard Vernon was wonderful at this event, and it was clear how much for him the exhibit and our poems in response connected him with Marjorie. He smiled and spoke so fondly of her and of their collecting. I had the feeling that for him this exhibition was not about the pride of owning rare, often very famous work. The exhibition was about their love, and about their time together finding beauty. She lives on through this collection. They live on.

I was saddened to learn yesterday that Leonard Vernon had died the previous day, October 30th, his threshold to cross, I hope, back to Marjorie.

For me it also brought back warm memories of dear friends, of our poems and our work together, of an event that showed how art makes living possible.

Wall Shadow

—after a photograph by Josef Sudek (from the Vernon Collection)

A sign above the avenue is blank.
A window pulls the dark across its pane.
A single figure leans beneath the sign.
Everyone who should be here is gone.
The cobbles bear our shadows down the lane.
The grey walls grind the coruscating moon.
Something else was written on the sign:
“Everyone who should be here is gone.”
Moonlight pools beneath the figure’s robes.
The avenue keeps busy with its cracks.
The pipes bear out the effluent of hope.
Everyone who should be here is gone.
A window pulls the dark across its pane.
The cobbles bear these shadows down the lane.

The Dalai Lama Comes Down to Georgia

2007-10-22T13:38:00.000-07:00

I saw no sign of Charlie Daniels or Richard Gere. But I did see the Dalai Lama himself, post W., if from some distance. I saw him once before, almost thirty years ago, when I lived just above the Tibetan Monastary in Berkeley, but this was from my window and he stepped out of the limo and was quickly escorted into the lovely wooden building.

At Emory, the Dalai Lama performed a sangha, and I went with sweet Amy. He entered while monks sang in the traditional throat style, sat, chatted and joked a bit in English, then started the lesson in Tibetan. Another man, seated near him in a business suit, interpreted, and we listened to a lesson on mindfulness and emptiness and achieving the kind of awareness that may lead with much practice to enlightenment.

This blog, however, composed as it is out of the fishnet of words, is firmly grounded in the samsara, so I won't burden you with a spiritual discussion just now. I would just like to put in your mind the image of half a dozen Tibetan monks in their maroon and saffron robes after the event eating pizza at a tavern across from the university. I remember wondering where they keep their wallets. Meanwhile, someone outside protested David Horowitz's Islamophobic events and people drank and watched as Byron Leftwich became the latest Atlanta quarterback/victim and Amy and I and her parents and our friend Anna sat and waited for food, or, in Anna's case, a ride.

We had come down from the mountain where Amy's folks now live, after hiking, moving boulders, killing a scorpion (my scorpio soul winced), buying and drinking fine wine (Buying='03 Sociando Mallet; drinking=Talley Pinot), eating great Thai food at N'ham in Alpharetta, driving and driving in the cooling autumn air and enjoying a fine weekend outside of wet, swampy Valdosta, where the drought has abated a bit of late. Om, mane padme, Om; Oh, dharma, keep on spinning. . .

George's Random Ten and the Dalai Lama

2007-10-19T12:50:00.000-07:00

I refer you today to George's weekly random ten + 1 songs for a lesson in ultra-cool music history, because I'm off to see the Dalai Lama at Emory University Sunday morning. (If I have the chance, I'll try to talk him into putting up his own list next week, George. )

On not blogging

2007-10-16T12:16:00.001-07:00

Is it because I have little to say? No. I wrote a blog and buried it, because instead of whining about a local political issue, I decided to make direct contact with someone concerned hoping to effect change more directly. We'll see how that goes. At any rate, I'll be talking about appropriate responses to Virginia Tech at the upcoming AWP Conference in New York, and I'll have more to say later.

I have a few other ideas, fits and starts of them, but I need some pictures for a couple of them.

Local band Ninja Gun is having success getting songs on Friday Night Lights. I'd give them some kudos, but I hate that word. So, ya'll will have to accept my mere congratulations.

Oh, and vote for Night Driving in Small Towns, our local Rolling Stone-approved indie/blugrass band selected as a finalist in zigzaglive's contest. Hit the "Vote for Bands" button and vote for their song "Cast Your Love Around." Do it now. Both of you.

October Already

2007-10-05T14:25:00.000-07:00

and the Cubs are blowing it again and I can't really care too much for baseball as I used to when the Dodger's pitched and ran and I pretended to be Don Sutton or Claude Osteen or Bill Singer or Jim Brewer in the ninth twisting screwballs into Joe Ferguson's glove, or Davey Lopes stealing second or the Penguin (Ron Cey) or Steve Garvey hitting one out or Bill Buckner making the play at first base (as he did with great regularity before he became unfairly stigmatized for the one cursed play with the Red Sox). Manny Mota was the greatest pinch hitter ever (remember that old guy stealing home? Might be my favorite baseball moment), and Walt Alston managed the team like an old law professor waiting for the right answer. It was Vin Scully's fault, really, because I'd rather listen to the game on the radio than watch it, though I watched plenty, watched Al Downing give up an unasterisked 715 to Hank Aaron and was happy for them both, watched Steve Yeager stabbed by a broken bat and it scared me and scarred him.

But now the Dodgers have collapsed and the ex-Dodgers (Mets) even more gloriously and I don't know their names anymore, haven't since a few years after Kirk Gibson hit that one-legged homer out. I don't know why. Steroids? Selig? Players changing teams so often it's hard to feel the word "team" after baseball anymore? All of it? At any rate, you'll likely have to watch the world series without me. Mr. October's cameoing in bad movies and the game has lost any sense of grace.

My Beautiful Chanterelle: Art Deux

2007-09-27T13:55:00.000-07:00

Cantharellus Cibarius

Photo by sensesworking

The good news: this was delicious tossed with pasta, butter, and garlic. I found this perfect chanterelle within walking distance of my house, across the street from a park where I'd found lesser examples of this fungus. It was just after a light rain and it fairly glowed, orange-peel bright and smelling typically fruity.

The bad news: I returned three days later to see how the smaller eruptions were doing, only to find that a construction company had untreed part of the property and laid it upon the holy ground, perhaps removing the rhizomal foundation the mushrooms need to survive.

Note: reports on mushrooms that I found and/or cooked represent my personal experiences, and in no way should be taken as recommendations for readers. This is not a guidebook. Eat wild mushrooms at your peril.

Art and Politics: "The Industrial Complex"

2007-09-21T13:02:00.000-07:00

The Faculty Art opening last Monday featured many fine works by VSU faculty. The following piece by Michael Schmidt, one of my first new friends here, was for me the most striking piece.

Photo by Michael Schmidt (click photos for full size)

Oil in, bullets out? Bullets in, oil out? It depends on where you stand, how you read--left to right (English, western) or right to left (Arabic, Hebrew). Michael Schmidt's work features a melange of styles and materials, as he indicates on his web site, but the two most interesting are used motor oil and cast 50 caliber bullets. The oil is from all of us and represents our rapacious appetite. The bullets are molded from an actual spent round provided by a young soldier who will soon leave for Iraq again, if he hasn't reported already. (We hope he will return soon and safe, hopefully accompanied by most or all of our troops.)

Photo by Michael Schmidt

The bullets enter or leave from a vaginal, gothic-cathedral-style door that pierces the blue line, penetrates some watermark, exceeds a reasonable limit. Their whiteness violates the meaning of the word purity.

The oil in porcelain "styrofoam" cups drinks in your eye. It shines back, accusing. It's not subtle, not meant to be. It is, however, a beautiful sculpture. The cathedral door is too big, but barely large enough, as though the cups were once smaller, the factory walls wide and high enough. Everything now is squeezed, soon to be crushed perhaps. I also imagine bullets and oil both entering, filling the factory with the blood we refuse to see boiling down into our want for more and more, "honoring" our spirit of rapacity, of privilege, soon to go up in smoke.

Photo by Andrew Nuse

Mike also produces a lot of functionals, many embellished with old logos from oil and gas companies, many no longer in existence. They function as art. I call them post-oil retro pieces, because they already feel quaint and nostalgic, but they also suggest an apocalypse, like kitsch from the future come back to warn us that our thirst will make deserts everywhere, that the age of oil was some dream become myth. They make us remember the future.

Crying Game, Porcini style

2007-09-19T10:33:00.001-07:00

Photo by Jamie Harmon/uberphoto.com

At twilight on the way to the Faculty Art Opening Monday evening, I spotted these two large fungi under some old longleaf pines. "Porcini," I said to myself, salivating, planning meals in my head, "Big ones!" I picked them quickly and headed off with my bounty, catching odd glances from students who must have thought I'd lost my mind (or that I'd hoped these might help me do so). I bore them proudly, however, arriving at the opening, entertaining numerous glances and, from friends, questions about what the hell I held and what the hell was I going to do with them. I patiently explained that these were porcini, worth about $40 a pound on the fresh market, and that I was going to eat them. They asked whether I might poison myself, and I explained that I knew which were poison, which weren't, and I wouldn't risk my life for a taste of amanita phalloides, the death cap, or any other liver killers. I enjoyed the art (more about that later, I'm awaiting another photo), talking to friends, chatting with my students afterward, and then taking these home for verification and an immediate place on top of my pizza. I Berenstain Beared these babies (If they look like porcini, if the smell like porcini . . . ). However, I noticed a certain amount of staining and the pore tubes, upon closer inspection under a lamp, were browner than normal. I decided to give it the definitive test--the taste test--so I sliced the smaller of the two up and sauteed a sliver in butter. It wasn't bitter, which was good, but it wasn't porcini, either. It was a Tylopilus, a boletus edulis lookalike. I put a little on my pizza anyway, and while it didn't detract, it didn't add much flavor and its texture was a bit grainy. No, this wasn't the choice dish I had expected, and I ended up discarding the rest of this bland date.

Note: reports on mushrooms that I found and/or cooked represent my personal experiences, and in no way should be taken as recommendations for readers. This is not a guidebook. Eat wild mushrooms at your peril.

Early Halloween Photo

2007-09-11T13:20:00.000-07:00

A reason to look up once in awhile while foraging for mushrooms. This cluster of argiopes stretched their webs over a cluster of mushrooms in the lot beside my house, and I nearly walked into all of them. (I'm learning to appreciate the dangers of hunting and gathering.) Their prey is a rhinoceros beetle, mine, boletus edulis. We resolved the issue peacefully.

Note: reports on mushrooms that I found and/or cooked represent my personal experiences, and in no way should be taken as recommendations for readers. This is not a guidebook. Eat wild mushrooms at your peril.

Yes, We Have No B. Ananas

2007-09-04T13:20:00.000-07:00

I found this warty mushroom growing at the base of a longleaf pine on the VSU campus. It's boletellus ananas, an odd bolete due to the presence of a veil remnant on its warty red cap, but it's a little dried out so the cap has dulled.

This shows the classic blue staining qualities that many boletes possess. Just behind them, drying porcinis, and just behind that, the base of a glass of cab and a sliver of my swiss army knife.

Last week I went to the Mostel estate and picked mushrooms with Aileen and Jane Whitehead (an Etruscan scholar). Most weren't edible, though one bolete was tasty sauteed in butter. We found two deadly destroying angels, too, but the highlight was a mushroom giant, the macrocybe titans, growing near their house (photo by the Mostels). These can grow to enormous proportions (larger than two feet tall) in Central America and Mexico, but in North Florida they tend to stop at dinner plate size. They are supposedly edible, but one commentator described their cooking smell as something akin to "dirty laundry," so we left it to sporulate.

Note: reports on mushrooms that I found and/or cooked represent my personal experiences, and in no way should be taken as recommendations for readers. This is not a guidebook. Eat wild mushrooms at your peril.

Reduxing the Zeitgeist

2007-08-28T12:15:00.000-07:00

Movies, even mediocre ones, are being remade with greater frequency as our culture demands "new" entertainment without new ideas. We're no different politically.

As Iran unconscionably replaces Iraq in our warspeak, the nation prepares to replace a Bush with a Clinton again. I believe this will be a national mistake, not because she isn't qualified, but because she will merely employ the same old executive ideas (and their expert spin-sters) we've suffered through for a generation. She's essentially a Reagan Democrat, recently a Jesus-freak lite, all for big money and lobbying and executive power and free market solutions. She galvanizes the opposition because she is too like them for their own power-loving comfort.

Certainly she will mollify some on the left with standard centrist positions, but she'll take what she can get from W's excesses. She'll come back 50 steps from his 100 steps into crazy and consolidate power in the executive branch. She'll do better than W, but not necessarily different when it comes to power. She'll crony and spin. Support for the third Bush will crystallize around what will become hatred of all things Hillary, as the conservative hounds will bay mercilessly after the old Clinton scent. As much as I'd love voting for a woman to be president, I believe a vote for Hillary in '08 will result in President Jeb in '12. I hope I'm wrong.

We need new ideas, not yet another Poseidon Adventure.

An Itch to Scratch: Unintelligent Design, or Reducible Stupidity

2007-08-22T10:26:00.000-07:00

Balls, the very testicle--that haphazard refugee from the body and its sterilizing heat--offer proof of the opposite of intelligent design.

This shifty pair, rather, proves hasty design:

trailer-park-engineer, duct-tape-spliced-extension-cord, tinfoil-rabbit-ear "entertainment system" design;

neophyte-deity-pulling-an-all-nighter-after-bingeing-all-weekend, hoping-to-pull-a-C- design.

What god except a punishing trickster would've--rather than ensconce the family jewels in, say, an irreducibly complex velvet-lined cooling system secure deep in an abdominal haven--hung these all-important procreative nuggets in a handy sack, providing easy, painful, and potentially emasculating access to dangers as varied as invading hordes, royals who like their singers permanently falsettoed, angry ex-lovers, and careless leg-crossers?

Testicles--those perfunctory dangling shape-shifting afterthoughts fashioned from leftover skin and wires exposed to all manner of nauseating abuses--are prime evidence of theologically shoddy design. I suppose Dr. Behe might say the Prime Mover--the Causus Ballus, if you will--was too busy fashioning the flagellum for bacteria to spend time on a proper house for our homunculi. So, Dr. Behe, I say nuts to your intelligent design, ballocks to your irreducible complexity.

Global warming feels like Fresno

2007-08-14T12:26:00.000-07:00

Perhaps if global warming were described in this way, people would pay more attention to it.

Meanwhile, Dean begins perhaps the latest fall onslaught as it starts winding up in the mid-Atlantic. Will it be Nolan Ryan in his prime, or a Hoyt Wilhelm knuckler that floats around and dies at the plate? At any rate, I'll be checking the forecast, watching the satellite, wondering, worrying, thinking about the weird arcing blue light, the hum of power lines crashing, blowing out the transformers, watching the trees all night.

In California, we worried about earthquakes tacitly, distantly. Your disaster or relief comes instantly. Hurricanes come in like political campaigns, with a lot of noise and bluster, polls and forecasts, this sick anticipation and even disappointment should it fizzle, pure terror if it comes full strength. Global warming feels like Fresno. Global warming feels like junior high, bully on the corner you have to pass to get home.

Meetings

2007-08-09T14:01:00.001-07:00

Not much to post about lately. The beginning of school is upon us here and every day is devoted to meetings. We're all wonderful. We're going to have to tighten our belts. The parking situation is a mess. Correcting the parking situation will be a mess. We have to do more with less. Growth. Attrition. Retention. Accountability, accountability, accountability, and more (fake) accountability. The missionstatementization of higher education is rampant and sitting in meetings on metrics and efficiency and infrastructure occur with increasing frequency. It's not that these things are all inherently negative or useless. Some of those things lead to positives: cool new buildings, a giant Starbucks, a bigger bookstore. It's just that what seems to get lost in all this kind of consideration is our students. Our students as individuals. That will, I hope, change Monday. School will start. They'll be looking at me wondering what the hell we're going to do all semester. And that's when it will finally be real again.

For All Those Lost

2007-08-01T14:34:00.000-07:00

Fresno High School's class of 1977 will hold its 30th reunion this Saturday Night in Fresno, California. Circumstances don't permit me to attend, but I thought about going, so I looked up info on the alumni web site, perused a few pictures, read names I hadn't thought of all these years trying to raise a family, start a career, move to Salt Lake, Santa Barbara, finally the Southeast.

I'm thinking of Jerry Haydostian right now because his name isn't listed among the dead with old friends Kurt Pempek and Craig Jue. He isn't the only one missing, but he was as much a member of our class as anyone else. He moved around the corner from my parents' stucco tract home on Lafayette when we were still in elementary school. I knew him a little from the neighborhood, stingray bikes in summer, his shock of blond hair, his intelligence already clear in the creative ways he approached things, the way he talked, the way he looked at things. We became better friends in Jr. High-- Cooper with its low roofs, caves for locker rooms, Algebra with Shegeby, wood shop with Peterson ('rrrrrRRRR-ight! cut the horseplay!), English with Ms. Wofford. He was one of the smart kids. At FHS we joined Senate together along with Jim Bane and Paul Luby and Danny Morgigno, and we took German and his hair grew longer, but he was still that smart, friendly kid. He always made you laugh with his wry sense of humor and easygoing personality.

He also didn't let on too much about what was going on in his head, his confusions. He didn't quite fit in, not completely, not in Senate, he wasn't an athlete, and he didn't like to showboat. We all talked about girls, but I don't remember a particular girlfriend. We also once talked about a teacher we shared, a teacher who liked to have students over to his house, our German teacher, Mr. Roy, who told stories and made you feel intelligent if he was interested in you, and it was hard to imagine him as anything other than a fat old kraut, but he had illicit designs on the young men he invited to his house, and both Jerry and I were unfortunately objects of his predilection for young men. My own story is documented in a poem I published years ago, only remarkable for its sad banality. Jerry's story remains implied in the questions he asked me that day. He nodded a lot. He didn't say a lot. He didn't need to. Back then, confused as we would have been even in the healthiest of environments, the added confusion of Andre Roy's affections doesn't necessarily explain anything, but it added an unnecessary burden. Maybe more than most, though, Jerry was one of our classmates, and this is for you, Jerry.

Mushroom Marathon

2007-07-31T13:09:00.000-07:00

The rains continue, which means fungi will be sprouting for the next month. I've already dried some porcini and last night I put some on a pizza. The nuttiness complements the cheese nicely, and makes a fine, firm meat substitute (though I had mine with some uncured pepperoni). I put a small bicolor bolete (red cap, yellow tubes) on my lunch burrito. You could almost live here on what people kick over and stomp.

Porcini Weather

2007-07-25T11:43:00.001-07:00

"Porcini Weather" is the title of a poem I've been working on and it's been raining and warm and muggy lately, so when I walked gingerly around the empty lot next door stretching my bad back after tweaking it playing basketball, I was pleased to see peaking through the the weeds and tall grass several chestnut-suede buttons of the delicious and nutritious boletus edulis, more commonly known as porcini in the Italian, or ceps in France, or King Bolete in English. I picked three yesterday and four today, about a third of what I found growing. Sometimes the most difficult thing to do is to leave a few alone to to their work so they keep coming back.

They're terrific in soups and sauces, pasta and risotto, or just sauted in butter, and I'm looking forward to finding something delicious to do with them, something that will accompany the chickens I smoked yesterday. Last night I contributed to a dinner at a colleague's house by stir frying a few buttons with saffron rice, butter, garlic, and shallot. Simple and flavorful. Tonight, who knows? But these four beauties will find a place on our plates.

Speaking of smoked chickens, Amy "drew" a picture to show how it's done 'round these parts and how it's spelled:

Update: Harvested half a dozen more (12-16 oz), plus an Agaricus Campestris. Smoked Chicken and porcini rigatoni alfredo last night. Risotto con porcini tonight. Omelets tomorrow.

Last Day of Summer School Classes

2007-07-24T13:54:00.000-07:00

Sweet!

Now go download music at Owl and Bear: Wilco, Shins, Daniel Johnston, Uncle Tupelo up now, plus a nice podcast.

Mmmmm, Chanterelles, Boletes from the Hostel in the Forest

2007-07-18T13:51:00.001-07:00

Amy briefly describes that ecotopia, the Hostel in the Forest, in her blog, and provides a link. We had a wonderful weekend there skinnydipping in the lake, watching the summer thunderstorm from the safety of our treehouse, dodging copious chickens, and avoiding the plentiful argiope spiders that hung between the branches. I spent much time foraging for mushrooms that I hoped would bless my table, and recent rains had brought out fungus in great numbers, feeding my hopes of finding mycological treasures, especially chanterelles. The most dramatic find was a troop of amanita muscaria v. alba, the white version of the soma mushroom said to have shamanic hallucinatory properties, though it's usually categorized as poisonous. I picked a large one and gave the little Buddha statue in the tree house a rather dramatic umbrella. I also gathered a number of boletes, sauteing an all white button in butter in the Hostel's communal kitchen, but its extreme bitterness disappointed, meaning I was likely dealing with some kind of Tylopilus. Another violet/black with white spore tubes also proved to be bitter, while a spongy pink-capped, yellow spore-tubed variety I began slicing had too many maggot holes to bother with. I soon gave up, leaving the remaining specimens in the cooler for further study at home.

We left Sunday afternoon, Amy to her friend Dottie's in King's Bay, as she was flying out of Jacksonville to NY to attend a retreat, and me with Dottie's boyfriend Thad, who plays lead guitar for local country punk heroes Ninja Gun, currently hard at work on their second album. On the way out, I spotted a spray of chanterelles along the ditchbank. Thad stopped and I gleefully gathered young, tender chanterelles from two locations just before the gate, and we were on our way, listening to Ween, Giraffes, Soft Boys, and GBV all the way home.

On Monday I decided to use the chanterelles and I kept it simple: linguine in butter with chopped garlic, chaterelles, sea salt, pepper, and freshly grated parmigiano reggiano. Delicious. The next night, I examined the boletes, tested one, and found it to be delightful, perhaps a butter bolete. At any rate, I sauted it to accompany a ribeye steak and the leftover chanterelle linguine. Mushroom mission accomplished.

Note: reports on mushrooms that I found and/or cooked represent my personal experiences, and in no way should be taken as recommendations for readers. This is not a guidebook. Eat wild mushrooms at your peril.

By the Roadside, Night Driving in Small Towns

2007-07-12T14:39:00.000-07:00

By the Roadside, the debut album from Night Driving in Small Towns, deftly blends classic folk country sounds with a contemporary vocal style that'll have you settin' on the front porch, tappin' your barefoot toes, sippin' sweet iced tea. The themes are love-gone-wrong-don't leave-me-now-I'm-better-off-without-you country/folk familiar, but the arrangements are understated, flavored with bluegrass instead of twang to set off Andrea Roger's dulcet contemporary vocals.

"Whiskey" starts it off with an empty bottle and an empty heart, but its light and still drunk and the looming hangover isn't hurtin' yet as uplifting rhythms swirl around the classic heartbreak epiphany, "The only one you love is you." "Close Encounters" put them in Rolling Stone's top 25 unsigned Myspace bands, and it anchors the album with Colby Wright's upbeat mandolin underpinning Andrea Rogers' honeysweet voice. "Close encounters of the first kind,/ Brief encounters of the close kind/And then you run away" cleverly summarizes those brief relationships she's sick of; she wants this one to stay. "Little White Dove"'s folk gospel yodeling optimism may just save Christianity from Christians, since it cheerfully steers away from the ideological judgmental gloom that seems to pervade much of the faith these days: "Oh, I know Jesus saves,/ so bring on the rain,/ I can build a boat/ and I can float away." It truly hearkens back to a time when people used words like "hearken," when folks went to church to hear about the spirit and sing uplifting songs and live and let live. It instantly belongs in every church coffee house hymnal and would feel right at home on Prairie Home Companion (Somebody call Mr. Keillor).

If the first half of the album is about innocence and its loss, the second half completes the Blakean circle in its explorations of experience. "'Cast Your Love Around" is about a lover who does and "Infidelity" wryly explores the perfect relationship: "The only one for me/Is infidelity/‘Cause I know he’ll be/Faithful to me." The album concludes with "Waking Up," slower, wiser, in a lower register, its images clear and deft: "A fallen leaf/Fluttered by my windshield today/And I mapped out its decline/Likened it to mine." But this, the saddest, slowest song on the cd, ends in cautious optimism--"Your hands just touch me/And I feel OK/Your voice just whispers/Give it one more day"--finishing this fine first effort with a healthy dose of mature realism. South Georgia songwriters Rogers and Wright (mandolin, guitar) are backed up admirably by Sage Cady (bassist), Daniel Gonzalez (guitars), and Tyler Shores (drums, harmonica). All in all, this is a terrific first cd.

This and That

2007-07-10T13:39:00.000-07:00

Owl and Bear is currently posting live shows from Mark Lanegan, Jeff Tweedy, Low, Built to Spill (a little quiet, but includes a sweet cover of Eno's Third Uncle"), and Tortoise.

My friends Night Driving in Small Towns have put out their first CD, By the Roadside, which I'll review here soon. Influences include Rilo Kiley (and Jenny Lewis) and Gillian Welch.

Interdependence Day

2007-07-03T13:42:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow my friends Mike and Nancy shall be wed in St. Augustine. Mike and I came to Valdosta at the same time, two artists (he works with clay; I work with words) moving cross country to teach at this quiet, regional university with modest resources and a low profile. We met auspiciously at the cookie table during orientation, reached for the same macaroon, glances all Lady and Trampish , and we began a conversation and a friendship that continue. I moved out alone, leaving behind my California, my friends, and most of all, my son, who couldn't see himself in South Georgia. This Wisconsin kid came with Nancy, his model-lovely vivacious girlfriend from Cleveland who didn't know what she wanted to do here. Moving here was a huge change for her, but she took a chance on love, an almost cheesy chance, but given the Wisconsin factor, perfect. She found her calling in real estate, and found her heart with Mr. Schmidt. Congratulations.

This toast is for you both, a magnificent pinot for you, Mike, and a silky chardonnay for you, Nancy. May the fireworks soar higher and shine a little more brightly for your happiness tomorrow.

Cool stuff elsewhere

2007-07-02T14:36:00.000-07:00

The Owl and Bear is currently posting live show recordings from Bonnaroo (four sets), Wilco, and Uncle Tupelo. They're flac files, so you might have to modify your WMP to listen.

John Guzlowski is famous for being a new blogger at New Works Review.

Bong Hits for Jesus: SCOTUS OKs slide toward Fascism

2007-06-27T09:35:00.000-07:00

The US Supreme court this week ruled against the free speech rights of the high school student who unfurled a banner that said Bong Hits for Jesus during the Olympic Torch run in 2002. They argued that, since his school was there, he was subject to school rules and requisite speech limitations. One can quibble about the rights of students on field trips, etc., but he had never attended school that day, and this is crucial. The majority was so intent on supporting the administrative authority of the principal to control speech, they completely overlooked the in loco parentis issue, which affords schools certain rights and responsibilities usually only afforded to parents or legal guardians.

The effect of this ruling is to raise the in loco parentis rights of schools over the natural rights of parents, since the student was not at the rally in his capacity as a student, but rather as the independent minor child of his parents. As of Monday, your children belong more to the state and less to you than they did before the ruling.

Taken to its logical extreme, the schools now can monitor any private student behavior and override parental rights in order to preserve the school's authority.

The Owl and The Bear

2007-06-23T12:24:00.000-07:00

Just want to point you to this site, link to the left, that republished my narrative with photos. Lots of cool stuff there.

Califone in DC, Bitter Tears and Cardinal Sins

2007-06-18T15:45:00.001-07:00

We drove to D.C. on a whim, twelve hours each way on 95, for Califone 's show at the Rock and Roll Hotel. Highway barbecue, coffee, a night in South Carolina where "Deluxe" still describes cheap motels. Slither on HBO. North to President Inn ('s not included) on New York Avenue near the arboretum. Capital Dome: I bare my ass to it in the window, more than they deserve, and Amy and I head out. The neighborhood is depressed, restaurants all closed or takeout Chinese or ff chain. We eat shrimp lo mein and fried rice and walk to the club.

Mannequins wearing animal skulls menace the upstairs bar, and the bartender, bright red hair, big slash of candy-red lips and green eyes and what'll you have, a pretty apocalypse. Guinness, red wine. We sip and wait for the show. Rooms of old velvet furniture, obligatory rock posters. The drinking, white, young college-age elite begin to gather along with the music nerds, order cocktails. We talk to Joe downstairs, setting up the merch, about solo projects, Jim's new film/music project, Interkosmos, and future tours, records, Yoko Ono at the Pitchfork Festival, Slint's Spiderland. Head back up for another beer and watch Jim play pool with Amy, who will guest at cello for the evening. These United States finally starts the show. Decent Americana, but we head out, where Tim is relaxing, smoking. We catch up. The band's future, other projects, etc. We talk about school, heat, humidity. Amy bums a cigarette from Tim, rolls it. A lost traveler asks for cab fare, and we give her what we can. Tim blesses her with water for dopamine, hope for light. She is big-eyed and missing and kind in that desperate way. She asks us to pray for her upcoming move. This is mine. Tim shows us pictures of his beautiful son. I talk about my two. Ben comes up, asks Tim something, leaves. Then Tim excuses himself to get ready for their set.

We hang out a little longer outside, but go in to hear Bitter Tears. Hammer-subtle irony. They're boisterous, musically random and literate and funny. (I recall Oingo Boingo in costumes marching and blaring up Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley for some reason, but this is darker.) Their instruments are horns, upright bass, drums, guitar, and Weimar irreverence mixed with country prank. They wear prom dresses or bunny ears and lipstick like the bartenders', but smeared and sweaty. The crowd laughs and cheers, but avoids, otherwise, interaction. Too bad.

Finally, Califone opens with "Golden Ass," while the defrocked Bitter Tears horn section ignites around the fuse of guitars and percussion, the pulsing vocals. After the song, Tim introduces their guests; he says he went to seminary school with them in Chicago, and he reminisces in some kind of hieratic code, a little jokey, a little edgy. That edge breaks the beginning of "Slow Right Hand" and they restart it after a few bars and it breaks out over our heads, falls in like orioles into bushes when it rains. The long flat room is a matchbox and it squeezes the music; the songs want to spread out more. This isn't a set list. I don't remember the order. I remember trying to find a place to hear better, "Orchids" with horns, "Michigan Girl" with Amy on cello, "The Eye You Lost in the Crusades." Finally I settle next to the speaker, and the room stays out of the way and the pain in my ear is maraschino masochism. "Pink and Sour" with its '40s big band harem themes begins and the floor erupts in dancing. This is the one the girls were waiting for, this spiked Shirley Temple, cologne at the nape. The song concludes and the dancers evaporate. I guess this is the one from the local college radio list, their evening apparently over. Califone's wasn't. Tim snaps a guitar string, lays it down. They reset. He comes out of the next song squeezing his head, first side and side, then hair and chin. He starts speaking about seminary school again, some Cardinal or priest, something in the woods, body of a young boy, hints of things we aren't supposed to see or know like some weird Franklin scandal action. They're almost Pentecostal now and everyone's nervous. Ben and Joe sit and look down at their skins and bones, Jim looks on concerned. Tim moves close to Alan and holds his face, starts talking about the priest, he's here in D.C. somewhere and they're failed priests and that body in the woods and they should turn him in. Alan looks like the drama mask that makes you think of Medea ripping at her breast. Real babydoll tears in Alan's eyes and the crowd on edge and time is nearly up, so Tim steps away and announces the last song. "Horoscope Amputation Honey" begins slow, keyboards, twang, a little noise, builds, breaks out into long legs of improvisation, twenty minutes or so. Alan joins in and more horns and they jam 20 minutes and end finally into a short song that's a prayer. And that's it. No encore. No one explains. The bar shuts down, kicks us out or upstairs after a few minutes.

Outside later, we say our farewells to Tim and Jim and Ben and Joe and it's warm. Some storm has passed. We walk into the DC morning. I owe Tim a whiskey.

Meme a whippa, meme a whippa (catching up)

2007-06-18T15:15:00.000-07:00

I don't do these, ordinarily, extraordinarily, or otherwise, since by the time they get to me, anyone I'd tag is tagged, but since Amy asked, I have to (though I'll cheat by posting this to my myspace friends instead of tagging 8 people specifically.)

1. I have to post these rules before I give you the facts.
2. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. (You’re not the boss of me!)
5. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

1. I can make my knuckle dance.

2. I enjoy low degrees of separation from many sports and entertainment figures because I've played pickup basketball with Les Connor (Oregon star, respected journeyman pro--long ago, in Berkeley), Joe Rose (Cal and Dolphins tight end), Tim McDonald (49ers d-back in Fresno--his elbow ruined my fine falsetto), and Rob Lowe.

3. Cleaning my office is considered "optional."

4. I used to watch scary movies as a child from behind the sea foam green Naugahyde footstool.

5. The most beautiful places I've been are in Nepal, Ireland, Utah, and Santa Barbara.

6. I used to be jealous of Kathy Helm at Woodrow Wilson Elementary because she could color in the lines and I could only dress up in women's clothing.

7. One day I will have to surrender my dream of making my 57 Benz run again.

8. I drink red wine with fish.

So, myspace friends and John G., go.

God's eyes are closed, just like yours: Califone in DC.

2007-06-05T12:46:00.000-07:00

Off to DC to see Califone, as close as they'll get to the deep south on this tour. Unlike some of the bands I've enjoyed over the years, Califone has maintained a rare level of aesthetic integrity and intelligence. I first heard "Dime Fangs" from an early ep while ensconced in my cubical atop QAD's hill in Summerland, where I wrote manufacturing software text with earphones on, where I went out to the parking lot with Mike Thorne on breaks to chat and sip coffee and look for dolphins leaping in the oily Pacific.

Their songs hit me in two opposing registers. So familiar. So strange. Early on, explaining it to people, I oversimplified it by calling it avant bluegrass. The two registers spiral around a palpable but invisible axis anchoring everything. Tim's hand-rolled voice and Jim's slide guitar and banjo power chords and Joe's tight snares and Ben's percussive inventions lull you like a summer afternoon at a family reunion in the park where they filmed Carnival of Souls. Lines drawn sharp like a cartoon memory (banjos, fiddles), but the ghosts of interference shadow everything, tense vivid dreams and unreconciled longings, accumulations of personal history, intimacy and terror, and once in awhile release in a pure rock burst, like a sigh's.

I briefly reviewed Roots and Crowns on Amazon, and it still feels pretty good:

If Joseph Cornell's boxes could sing they'd sound like this, narratives blown like an old transmission, parts clinking along the pavement, underwires pinging and cupping lasciviously, all sweet blues and sweeter decay. If you're familiar, Califone improves on their already remarkable range, lacing horns into the loops, pulling a gem out of Psychic TV's catalog with "The Orchids." If you're not familiar, it helps if you like the slow surprise of a junk drawer opening, scraps of paper scrawled in pencil, that bolt you need, that tiny photo of someone you used to know. The lyrics are poems, the songs sublime.

Discography

Aesthetically Disturbing

2007-06-01T12:15:00.000-07:00

Went into our town's only Starbucks Wednesday (They must have heard me bragging once that I thought we were possibly the largest city in America without one), and on their music shelf I see Wilco's Sky Blue Sky in between albums by Maroon 5 and Michael Buble'. Don't get me wrong. I'm glad for Jeff and co.'s financial success, but this just looked wrong.

Valdosta Beaver Hunt

2007-05-30T13:36:00.000-07:00

Sorry, trawlers for porn, this post features many photos, but not of the Larry Flynt variety. We're looking for the real thing.

This is my house from the woods on my property, as I move toward the city-owned green belt through town. Today, woodpeckers knock and rattle dead and dying trees for bugs.

Looking into the woods from the path behind my house.

In these woods, where smoke from burning swamps seems less oppressive, water is rising into once dry areas despite the long drought. Maybe the ground is sinking or maybe rain from a tiny cloud falls on a sad cartoon man lost in the woods. Small trees had been cut down, wood chips flecking ground. I was enraged, wondering who could be wandering through the slim green slash through town by two-mile creek cutting down trees. Toothmarks grace some of the stumps, so I perform some environmental arithmetic. Beavers.

Lunch?

I'd heard they were around, but this locale seemed improbably urban--good for the occasional raccoon, hawk, opossum, or pilieated woodpecker, but beavers? Around the margin of the expanding pond, two dams that confirmed recent activity.

Dam 1

Dam 2 (Harder to see, but the dam crosses the A about 2/3 of the way down)

Finally, I discovered evidence of the actual creatures.

The one- to two-feet deep pond, not deep enough for a lodge, sits above the deeper two-mile branch. Perhaps young beavers are exploring, or perhaps they're just creating an area friendly for feeding off the creek. Or perhaps they've been displaced due to the work on the emptied Mill Pond, into which the creek drains. I'll keep watching.

Graduating Ian, pt. 3

2007-05-28T14:18:00.000-07:00

Graduation eve at Lehigh could have provided several plot lines for one of those disfunctional family movies, with the requisite minor dramas, hurt feelings, impositions, etc., and I won't go into it because it's boring. What wasn't was hanging out with Ian and Elizabeth and playing dollar-a-game pool and drinking Yuengling (5 bucks!) by the pitcher at a local pub, or eating more Indian food before that (not bad, but not enough spicy heat). I'll just say that we survived dinner with my former in-laws after my ex-wife opted out. It's weird dining with former in-laws, but it was, in fact, lovely. The hotel restaurant was loud, and, upstairs, a prom was going on while a polished jazz quartet forged ahead with some jazz standards next to our table, all of which added to the surrealism. Somehow it all worked out.

Graduation the next day was long, but the weather was outstanding, the stadium surrounded by green forested hills, the occasional raptor soaring between mountaintops and clouds. Three and a half hours to call out all the names and listen to the speeches and watch the green and blue and hide from the sun when I could. I've been to so many graduations it was all pretty ho-hum until Ian's name was called out and we all cheered and whistled. He couldn't hear us, of course, but he was happy with his friends and to have us there, and that made it all worth while. After everyone else left, Amy and I attended an afterparty briefly at a friend's house. Nice friends, banjo music, and good outdoor fare. After that it was decompression and a long day journey home. We stopped in Philly for a quick bistro lunch of chicken sandwiches and hit Indigo gallery on 3rd street, where Amy bought some gemstones and I bought a Mexican ceramic cerveza delivery truck with two skeletons.

Graduating Ian, pt. 2

2007-05-25T11:40:00.000-07:00

The second day in Philadelphia meant a visit to Chinatown and lunch at Penang, a popular Malaysian restaurant on the east coast, where we sampled rice (Nasi Lemak, with coconut chicken curry and anchovy chili curry) and chicken curry (Penang Kari Ayam). Tasty and filling, Malaysian cuisine blends Indian, Thai, and Chinese influences nicely, and the web site boasts one or two pretty fair Engrishisms. Nicely fueled, we walked from Chinatown to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for a long afternoon of walking and looking. It's worth it for the Duchamps room alone, but the museum has a fine collection of Cezanne, Degas, Monet, Gris, Rousseau, and the obligatory Van Gogh paintings that denote any serious collection. It has its holes (no Klee?) and its contemporary collection is spotty (some decent pop art, but . . . ). Exhibitions featuring 18th-century brush masters and couple Ike Taiga and Tokuyama Gyokuran and Harlem Renaissance artist William H. Johnson will satisfy lovers of print and brush. Of the older pieces, a small Heironymous Bosch delighted me. Of the more recent, Marc Chagall's Half Past Three (The Poet) hit home, the empty bottle, the happy head upside down, green kitty tongue. Too bad reservations for the Barne's collection were unavailable. Amy liked the Gauguin and Renoir.

Late in the afternoon, the museum presented a happy hour jazz concert in the atrium, but sensually overloaded, we headed out to walk beside the Schuykill River and trekked on to South Street where we saw the mosaic work of Isaiah Zagar and all the shops and restaurants and missed Andrew Bird at the Fillmore (sold out). We finally collapsed in a small Indian restaurant and snacked before we headed, exhausted, to our fine Motel 6 room across the river in Maple Shade, New Jersey, next to the apparently popular Elbow Room.

So, well-fed and cultured, we headed the next day to the Super 8 in Allentown on Airport Road, as close as we could get to Bethlehem and Lehigh. Allentown itself was uneventful, even drab, but we didn't give it much of a chance. The goal was to track down my son (thanks Elizabeth) and we did, dining at Sal's near the campus. Good pizza and garlic rolls, and a glass of Carlo Rossi Paisano is free if you want one (I passed), since it's one of many byob places around the campus (they can give it away, but they can't charge for it). Best of all was hanging out with Amy and Ian where he lives, which is why we came. It's weird to see your kids grown up, talking about plans for the future, maybe the Peace Corps. We were all silly together, and it was good.

Philadelphia

2007-05-23T13:16:00.000-07:00

Before attending my son's graduation at Lehigh, Amy and I spent two lovely days wandering the streets of Philadelphia, eating grandly, enjoying the fine weather, and even pausing at some of the many historical landmarks. The first full day, we walked around historical Philly, saw the "back" of the Liberty Bell (which ironically lacks the crack) and Independence Hall and cobbled streets and many fine old buildings adorned with plaques emblazoned with notes on events and people in American history. We didn't go to a Phillies game. We didn't eat a cheesesteak sandwich. We wandered happily and half-oblivious. Blackberry people came suited appropriately out of the Chemical Heritage Foundation on Chestnut near Trotter's Alley, Elbow Lane, Black Horse Alley; they had Homeland Security badges on and talked animatedly about the chemicals they looked forward to consuming on our dollar. We didn't follow them. A horse pulling tourists in a carriage filled the gutter with a huge rush of piss. Our legs ached. We looked and walked. We smelled garlic. We talked and smelled. Garlic. Crowded and lively. We went in.

We went into La Locanda del Ghiottone on 3rd and sat and had a wonderful meal. The antipasto plate was fine, not extraordinary. Amy had chicken, nicely done and wine-sauced and capered with a side of roast potatoes. I had a revelatory saffron seafood risotto in a tomato sauce that, amazingly, didn't overwhelm the saffron. The seafood (clams, mussels, shrimp, calamare) was tender and the generous portion they served me evaporated. Purists might complain that the rice wasn't al dente enough, but the flavors were so wonderful and balanced, it was a good time not to be a puritan (though Puritans would be happy we didn't drink wine, because it's byob and we were unprepared). The restaurant is apparently controversial, because, looking through reviews, mostly outstanding, it appears that if you don't quite get it, they're happy to chase you out. It's Philly don't-fuck-around elegant. The room is crowded and a little loud, but it is romantic and the staff has personality. And I can still taste that saffron. Next time, I'll show up early with a nice Barolo.

Georgia Fire

2007-05-16T12:33:00.000-07:00

The smoke is blowing somewhere else, today, so yesterday's blood orange sun is back to lemon and clouds and someone else is choking on swamp turning into light and ash and air. I worry about making my flight tomorrow to go watch my son take his turn across the stage for Lehigh's graduation ceremony, that little square-hat dance. Roads open and close depending on the winds, and we'll have to get in the car at 3 AM and drive into it. I'll have to get in the car and worry about what I might run into running away from it all, because all that life has to go somewhere if it is to avoid becoming light and ash and air. The swamps here can be marvelous and beautiful, quietly spooky, cypresses laced with Spanish moss, alligators, turtles, and pike swimming around the cypress knees, snakes curled up in trees, frogs flipping like dimes into dishes at the county fair. When the swamp dries, it becomes the worst sort of biofuel and can burn for years. Permanent signs on highways say "Possible Smoke Ahead," but my imagination wants impossible smoke.

We'll get in our car and drive into it, and end up in Philadephia where nothing's burning, exactly, though Philly fans are starting to smolder. We'll get a slice at Lorenzo's and avoid the famous cheesesteak stands and then make our way upstate for a city that burned itself up and out long ago in fires of industry and capital, where my son's on the verge of, the fulcrum of, becoming an engineer, the future ahead for all of us obscured by smoke and the fire we're turning the world into.

Fresh Homemade Sausage (Italian, Thai)

2007-05-13T14:37:00.000-07:00

The local grocer occasionally puts out odd cuts of pork that the label calls "pork fat." It appears to be boneless trimmings from brisket, neck, and rib end sirloin, and has lots of lean with the fat. It's .69 cents a pound and makes terrific sausage. Yesterday I got my exercise grinding about four pounds of it with my hand grinder, and made two kinds of sausage, mild Italian and Thai. Obviously one could use lean cuts of beef, chicken, or turkey to blend, but nothing tastes better than grilled pork fat. Recipes follow:

Italian Sausage

2 pounds fresh pork sprinkled with fresh ground sea salt and red wine

10 cloves garlic
10 large basil leaves
Fistful of fennel seeds
tbsp fresh rosemary
one fresh green or red chile or dried red pepper
four sprigs of fresh oregano
tbsp olive oil

Chop the above ingredients into a course mix. Feed mix and meat into grinder, alternating to create a basic sausage. Afterward, add tbsp of paprika and red pepper flakes, black pepper, or cayenne pepper to taste. Blend thoroughly. Let rest in refrigerator for a day before cooking. Good on the grill or on pizza.

Thai Sausage

2 pounds pork, sprinkled lightly with lime juice and fish sauce

6 cloves garlic
Tbsp lemon grass
3/4 to 1 sq inch fresh ginger
tsp galangal powder
3 or 4 fresh thai green chili peppers
2 scallions (white heads only)
Tsp (or more, to taste) ground coriander
Fresh coriander leaves (cilantro) or basil to taste, optional

Chop the above ingredients into a course mix. Feed mix and meat into grinder, alternating to create the basic sausage. Add Fresh ground white or black pepper, red pepper flakes, or cayenne pepper to taste and blend thoroughly. Sweeten with 1/4 cup orange/lime juice blend and/or tamarind juice to taste if you want a sweeter sausage. Make sausages into patties or stuff into casings, or make into meatballs for use in Thai noodle or curry dishes. Great on the grill.