A Talent for Idleness

6 shameful things of which my writing has gotten me accused

2012-01-05T00:13:00.008-06:00

I’ve been writing professionally for essentially my entire adult life. I’d like to think I’ve left most of my readers happy, or at least indifferent. Every now and then, though, I’ve managed to inadvertently plant my foot on some sensitive toes. Here are a few of the most heinous crimes against literature, decency and humanity of which I’ve been accused.

Basic racism
While penning a brief review of The O’Jays’ set at the 2003 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival for Where Y’at, I took specific note of the crowd’s infectious enthusiasm. Even though some would dismiss the O’Jays as a warmed over oldies act, I said, “this music obviously means the world to these people.”

A few days after the issue hit the streets, we received a letter from a local activism group cautioning us that “these people” could be interpreted as a dismissive slur against African-Americans. I was baffled at first, and then increasingly insulted. In my thinking, for “these people” to be offensive, the group in question would have to be homogenous. From where I stood, that O’Jays crowd was made up of music fans of all ages, races and stages of sobriety, my lily-white self included. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like the letter writer was the one making rash generalizations. I considered sending a reply informing her that not just black people enjoy the smooth sounds of The O’Jays, but I ultimately left well enough alone.

Ignorance of railroad terminology
Not long after I started my first writing gig as intern reporter for my hometown newspaper, my editor called me into his office and told me he wanted to make me into “the Charles Kuralt of Monroe County, Wisconsin.” That entailed me taking a weekly trip to one of the tiny towns that dotted the county and writing a profile of the community’s history and culture, such as it was.

Some towns lent themselves to this format better than others. When I couldn’t come up with much to say about a place, I’d do my best to fill out my word count with trivia. When tasked with covering the generally charmless railroad town of Wyeville, for instance, I eked a few sentences out of the fact that the “wye” in the village’s name referred to a Y-shaped intersection of crisscrossing train tracks. Two days later my editor got an angry letter from the proprietor of the nearby Little Falls Railroad and Doll Museum. He explained in less-than-friendly terms that a wye was actually triangular, not Y-shaped, and that I should be sure I had my vocabulary straight before I included railroad terminology in any future articles. My editor wrote the guy off as a crank, but I had to admit the gentleman had a point. Then again, homeboy also ran a Railroad and Doll Museum.

Spreading anti-teacher propaganda
One of the toughest aspects of business copywriting is coming up with fresh spins on the same information week after week. During my stint as a copywriter for a women’s active wear retailer, I once wrote a lead-in for an early summer sale that went something like, “Once you’ve graduated, the end of the school year loses a lot of its excitement. (Unless you’re a teacher!)”

Later that week the company owner got an email from a woman who was outraged that we would perpetuate the stereotype of lazy schoolteachers spending their summer vacations slacking off on the taxpayers’ dime. That interpretation had never crossed my mind. For the record, I’m 100% pro-teacher. I just meant that they probably get a little bit excited to put another year’s worth of raucous students behind them. I mean, they do, right?

Oppressing Native Americans and/or Juggalos
When I started writing an article for MadeLoud about pop music’s shameful history of caricaturing and marginalizing Native Americans, I wanted to include a few positive counterexamples. I looked for Native American musicians who had found success on their own terms without being pigeonholed into roles predetermined by the white-dominated music industry. One of these artists was Anybody Killa, a Michigan-based rapper closely affiliated with Insane Clown Posse.

It didn’t take long for someone to misinterpret my intentions. A week later I got a message from a young Juggalo who wanted me to know that Anybody Killa was his own man and was going to be a force on the music scene for years to come. He was especially upset that I claimed that the most prevalent portrayals of Native Americans in recent music have come from non-Natives. I think he read “prevalent” as a qualitative rather than a quantitative term. He wrapped things up by telling me that it was a pointless article that probably shouldn’t have been written. I sent him a polite reply letting him know that we were really on the same page and assuring him that I wished Anybody Killa all the success in the world. I never heard back.

Exploiting a long-dead child-star
In 2009 my MadeLoud editor asked me to review Benjy Ferree’s new concept album Come Back to the Five and Dime Bobby Dee Bobby Dee, a tribute to the short, troubled life of ‘50s child star Bobby Driscoll. I liked the album so much that I immediately requested an audience with Ferree. The resulting interview is one of my favorites that I’ve done, a glimpse into the weird, wonderful mind of a talented singer-songwriter who’s really into old Disney movies.

I was taken aback a few weeks later when I got a message from a woman claiming to be Mr. Driscoll’s daughter. She accused me of exploiting her father’s memory by giving Benjy Ferree a forum and implied that I was an insensitive profiteer of other people’s pain. She also noted that Driscoll’s death was drug-related but not, as I’d stated, caused by an overdose. (I’d read “overdose” in several sources, but I changed the wording anyway.)

I’ll admit I felt sort of bad about this one, even though I firmly believe that I did nothing wrong. An arts writer’s job is to write about art, and Benjy Ferree’s album was one of the most compelling works of art I’d encountered in a while. Still, I can’t help but sympathize with a person who’s likely been contending with salacious, half-informed media accounts of her father’s sad decline for her whole life. I think Ferree’s celebration of Bobby Dee – and, transitively, my coverage of it – is respectful to the point of reverent, but that’s easy to say from this angle.

Golden Retriever ownership
After I moved from New Orleans to Chicago in late 2003, I started writing a monthly column for Where Y’at about the difficulties of readjusting to the Midwest after finally getting acclimated to the wonderful weirdness of the Crescent City. One of my early columns focused on the relative difficulty of entertaining visitors – Chicago offered plenty of activities, but it was a far cry from New Orleans, a city where nearly every corner hides something most folks have never seen before.

The Where Y’at message board soon received a lengthy diatribe from a young woman who’d recently made the reverse move, from Chicago to New Orleans. She accused me (with a certain amount of justification) of willfully resisting the charms of Chicago and over-romanticizing New Orleans. That was all well and good, but near the end of her missive, she characterized me as the type of guy who barreled around Lincoln Park in my shiny new SUV, trying to squeeze in a five-minute run for my Golden Retriever at the local dog park before heading back to my overpriced, lake-adjacent condo. I can handle criticism, but I really felt that crossed a line. Golden Retrievers are gross.

"How I use my useless degree" or "English major? What're you gonna do with THAT?"

2011-12-16T00:28:00.010-06:00

The Occupy Wall Street protests have inspired a whole heap of emotions, arguments and odd conjectures in my little corner of the internet. I’m not here to add to the ruckus by offering yet another inconsequential opinion piece on Occupy – I’ll just say I’m for it and leave it at that – but I would like to address one recurring complaint that hits close to home for me.

I’ve seen a number of people dismiss the Occupy protestors as kids who chose their college majors poorly. Depending on who you listen to, young students of the Liberal Arts are anything from pitiable suckers who’ve been duped by a cash-hungry university system to whiny morons who should’ve known better than to think a History degree would get them anything but a very expensive wall-hanging. In between lies a huge range of criticisms and even a few cogent points (the notion that many colleges have become tuition-gobbling diploma mills has much credence), but the underlying message is the same: in terms of employability, a Liberal Arts degree is useless.

I am the holder of not only a B.A. in English from a Big 10 university, but also an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from a big-city art school. Conventional wisdom suggests that my tuition fees were a poor investment, as getting “DO NOT HIRE ME” tattooed across my face would have gotten me the same results for a fraction of the cost. Back in my undergrad years I grew accustomed to witty wisecracks along the lines of, “English major, eh? Hope you like making lattes!” (I rather do, but that’s beside the point.) And yet here I sit in late 2011, a productive, tax-paying homeowner gainfully employed in an occupation directly related to my course of study. Either I’m some kind of paragon of hard work and overachievement or my education isn’t quite as worthless as you might think. (Hint: it isn’t the former.)

Contrary to popular belief, my liberal arts education has been instrumental in landing me jobs. My first genuine, cubicle-and-benefits job was writing copy for an apartment location service in Chicago. I’d been futilely sending out applications to all manner of companies for many months when a company I’d never even applied to contacted me out of the blue. The company’s human resources manager reached out to me because my CareerBuilder profile noted my creative writing background. During the interview she explained to me that they were specifically looking for someone with a creative flair, someone who could bring more to the table than the dry, lifeless copy one usually got from business majors.

That’s been a common theme throughout my career. Since leaving the apartment finders, my day jobs have included writing copy for a women’s activewear catalog and editing an online magazine for the mobile phone division of Best Buy. In each case, I started the job with no practical knowledge of, qualifications for or particular interest in the subject at hand. I was hired for all of those positions because the employers were looking for someone creative, talented and adaptable. Coincidentally, those were all skill sets I honed while pursuing my Liberal Arts degrees.

I can’t really blame folks for thinking artistic studies are impractical. Most of them are to some extent. (But what isn’t?) I certainly can’t claim that being able to write a 20-page essay on unconscious colonialist themes in Thoreau’s Walden has served me directly in the workplace. But I also think many people simply don’t know how wide the tentacles of the creative arts truly spread. When I tell people what I do for a living, I’m consistently amazed at how many of them give me a confused look and say, “So wait, you write for Best Buy? What is there to write? Like, the flyers they give out in the stores?” It has apparently never occurred to them that every word they have ever read, be it in a newspaper, on a billboard or down the side of a can of spray cheese, was written by an actual human being.

I’m looking out my dining room window right now at the Wendy’s parking lot two doors down. As an example, let’s look at the Wendy’s drive-thru order box. The name of every item on that menu was carefully chosen by a copywriter in the marketing department. Every word of text was diligently proofread by someone with editorial training. The incandescent portraits of burgers, shakes and salads were all snapped by a professional photographer. The font, the color scheme, the layout of items in a readable, customer-friendly tableau? These are all the domain of college-educated graphic designers. Hell, even the physical design of the order box itself is likely the work of a well-compensated liberal arts major. None of that crosses the mind of the average Wendy’s customer, but those arts students’ contributions have an undeniable daily impact on America’s lunch hours.

Even setting all that aside, I’ve never really understood what the alternative is supposed to be for us artsy types. It’s easy enough to say, “Study something useful and go get a real job,” but I can’t imagine that working out in practice. Sure, I could have relegated reading and writing to hobby status and pursued, say, an Engineering degree. The only trouble is that I would make an awful engineer. Not only would I find it dreadfully boring, I don’t believe I could ever be mentally capable of doing that kind of work. I often tell people that I’m good at exactly two things in life: writing and making coffee. It’s a joke, but one that’s not far from the truth. Certain people are good at certain things and it’s futile to pretend otherwise.

No one would toss a business executive on a stage and expect her to dance a palatable Swan Lake, but plenty of people would say a Dance major would be better off shoehorning herself into an unfulfilling office job. I don’t mean to suggest that every Dance major needs to stick it out and dance for a living or die trying. There are plenty of careers that incorporate physical grace and movement in much the same way that my office jobs employ my talent for creative writing. Sure, given the choice, I’d rather be writing short stories as my sole source of income, but that’s just not realistic. This is a way for me to both stay financially solvent and apply the invaluable career skills I learned while pursuing that Fiction Writing M.F.A. (Thanks again, Columbia College Chicago!)

Look, I’m not going to pretend that there aren’t a lot of pipe-dreamers in the liberal arts. Heck, when I was 18, it never even crossed my mind that I wasn’t going to be revered worldwide for my art by the time I was 23. I didn’t have a master plan or even a vague career path. I simply took for granted that the world would be gobsmacked by my creative genius and toss me right up the ladder of success. That’s just part of being a young kid with big dreams, and I don’t think I’d care to inhabit a world where it isn’t. For better or for worse, though, those dreams usually give way to a harsher reality. When that happens, those useless degrees may come in far more useful than a lot of folks would have you believe.

An open letter to the NBA regarding my son's relationship with a man in a wolf suit

2011-11-05T00:07:00.013-05:00

I’m a big fan of the Minnesota Timberwolves. I know I don’t have to tell you that this is not the easiest thing to be. At its very pinnacle, Timberwolves fandom meant rooting for Latrell Spreewell and Rasho Nesterovic, and nobody really wants to do that. Yet there I am every November, huddled in front of my TV, feverishly deluding myself that maybe this will be the year that the Wolves climb back to the NBA’s lower-middle echelons.

I’ve been especially excited about the 2011-12 season, which looked to be Minnesota’s strongest shot in nearly a decade. They were all lined up with a Hall of Fame coach, an insanely talented lineup of young ballers and even a grizzled old center who might teach the kids a thing or two. Needless to say, the increasing likelihood that there will be no NBA season this year has me crestfallen.

But I’m not writing this letter on behalf of myself. I’m writing it on behalf of my son Selby. Selby will be turning two this December. He’s at a stage in life where he is soaking up knowledge at an alarming rate and developing the earliest vestiges of personal taste. He already has favorite toys, favorite foods and even a favorite album (Paul McCartney’s McCartney, oddly enough). He hasn’t chosen a favorite team or sport yet, but that’s not for a lack of effort on my part. The very first item of clothing he owned was a Minnesota Timberwolves sleeper that my wife and I purchased months before he was even conceived. He’s been attending games at Target Center in his tiny little Kevin Love jersey since he could just barely hold his head up (not to mention all of his in utero visits). And, of course, he loves Crunch.

Crunch, if you don’t know, is the longtime mascot of the Minnesota Timberwolves, an energetic, man-sized wolf who engages in all the capering and crowd-pumping one expects from a professional-grade mascot. I’m a big fan. I’ve sat through many a dreary fourth quarter where Crunch is the only thing in the arena worth watching.

Selby has had a Crunch hand puppet and bobblehead among his playthings since he was very small. He’s even met the wolf himself on a couple of occasions. He was too young at the time to remember those encounters, but he recently unearthed an autographed poster from last year’s big “Crunch’s Birthday” celebration (always my favorite game of the year). His fascination with the array of mascots pictured on the poster led to me showing him some YouTube clips of Crunch in action, which in turn led to a number of crying fits when I wouldn’t let him watch Crunch videos for hours on end.

This was to be the season when Selby really got to know Crunch. I couldn’t wait to take him to his first game of the year and watch his face during the first break in play when he realized, “Hey! That’s the guy from the poster!” I was going to take him to team events, let him swap high-fives with a giant wolf, snap another picture for his ongoing Crunch yearbook. Heck, that’s half the reason teams even have mascots these days, right? As a way to bond with/market to a demographic too young to maintain focus on a full four quarters of basketball? And Crunch was just the first step. I wanted to have the boy saying “Lazar Hayward” by mid-March. I hoped the sight of Nikola Pekovic on the TV screen would produce near-Big Bird levels of enthusiasm.

I mean, come on, NBA – I’ve been doing your job for you! This was a potential lifelong customer who would have required no additional indoctrination on your part. But you went and squandered that on a multi-billion dollar game of chicken. Look, I can’t claim to know all the specifics of the lockout. My gut (and virtually everything I’ve read about the situation) tells me the blame lies primarily with the owners, but the result is the same either way. If this season doesn’t happen, as it looks like it won’t, that’s a huge year of bonding over basketball that my son and I will never have. As much as I was looking forward to that, it’s not like Selby and I are hurting for things over which to bond. We’ll be just fine. I’m not sure, however, what this will do to Selby’s relationship with you.

The general mindset amongst NBA higher-ups seems to be, “There’s always next year.” True enough, but there's still this year. And this year matters. Even if this season disappears into the ether, I’m sure I’ll be back as a Timberwolves fan before too long. But I don’t know if I’ll be back with the same passion I’ve maintained up until now, or how eager I’ll be to pass that passion on to my son.

Look, I know that this whole situation is overblown in the grand scheme of things. A few dozen billionaires fighting a few hundred millionaires over a ball game is downright frivolous in contrast to most of what’s going on in the world at any given time. But on a personal level, this hurts, probably a lot more than it should. If you shut down the NBA now, you’re denying my son entry to a world I dreamed of sharing with him long before he physically existed. You’re denying him the pitiful passion of Minnesota Timberwolves fandom. You’re denying him Crunch.

I mean, who are we supposed to bond over now? Goldy friggin' Gopher?

Hey, I kinda like the Lou Reed and Metallica album, because of course I do.

2011-11-02T01:30:00.006-05:00

Let us now praise famous men who should probably know better but go ahead with their follies nonetheless. I speak, of course, of Lou Reed and Metallica, whose new collaboration Lulu has already attained legendary debacle status on its first official day of release. The AV Club’s Jason Heller gave Lulu one of its kinder reviews when he called it “not merely a failure, but one of the bravest, most fascinating failures in rock history.”

If you’re familiar with my well-documented Lou Reed fanboyism, you’re probably expecting me to declare Lulu a misunderstood masterpiece. I’m not going to do that. I actually do like the album a lot more than, well, everyone else in the world, apparently. But even I have to admit that it’s a maddening mess in constant danger of drowning in its own pretension. If I wasn’t so tuned into Lou Reed’s particular brand of artistic auto-eroticism, I might be just as scornful of this venture as everybody else is.

In the reviews I’ve read, Lou’s lyrics rank second only to his deadpan delivery as Lulu’s most derided aspect. I can absolutely see how verses like “To be dead / have no feeling / Be dry and spermless like a girl / I want so much to hurt you” could be off-putting to the uninitiated, and that doesn’t even get into the album’s astonishing amount of dog-sex imagery.

I think, however, that it helps to keep Lou’s inspirations and aspirations in mind. In recent years, Lou has seemed increasingly determined to be remembered as the musical equivalent of envelope-pushing fiction writers like William S. Burroughs and Hubert Selby. He goes so far as to compare himself directly to both men in his preamble to “Street Hassle” on 2004’s live Animal Serenade album. Viewed from that angle, the scatology and surreal sexuality of Lulu make a lot of sense. This may not be Lou’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, but it’s at least an ambitious attempt.

Of course, you could also say that of The Raven, Lou’s notorious, two-disc Edgar Allen Poe tribute album. I’ve been plenty vocal about my disdain for The Raven in the past. In the light of Lulu, though, I wonder if I haven’t judged it too harshly. Yes, a lot of the album consists of wildly overwrought melodrama and ill-conceived rewrites of Poe’s classic verses. But there are also plenty of strong, even excellent songs, all revolving around Lou Reed’s genuine adoration of an artist who shaped his world. It’s hard for me to hate too hard on that, even if I do find Lou collaborating with Fisher Stevens at least as off-putting as him teaming up with Metallica.

Speaking of those guys, I must admit that the duration of Lulu is as much time as I’ve ever spent in their company. I have nothing against Metallica specifically; it’s just that metal is one of the few genres that’s never really done anything for me. So it’s hard for me to join in the chorus of head-bangers who are either bemoaning the latest in a long string of Metallica disillusionments or complaining that the music on Lulu would be solid if not for that gibbering old man talking over it. From where I sit, the music sounds quite good, if a little overbearing at times. The hard rock grind makes a fine compliment to Lou’s ugly, pointed monologues and gives the whole proceeding the kind of dark edge that often hems his finest work. I probably prefer Lou’s usual late-period band – Fernando Saunders and Mike Rathke do well by him – but the only times I’m really turned off by the Metallica mash-up are when that dude (Lars, maybe? Is Lars the vocalist?) starts singing. He has a fine voice for metal, but his occasional verses change the vibe so much that I’m yanked right out of the moment.

Look, I’m not going to try convincing anyone to like or even tolerate Lulu. You’re well within your rights to dismiss this as the wrong-headed, overblown fiasco that it probably is. For my part, I’m choosing to embrace it. It’s like “Like a Possum” – another widely despised Lou Reed effort that I happen to adore – writ large and made even grosser. If that doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, it probably isn’t. Heck, after a decade of watching Lou dabble in photo galleries, overstuffed stage shows, iPhone apps, t'ai chi and dog concerts, I'm happy just to see the man making music again. And hey, if nothing else, I hope that we can all agree that this is at least a step up from Hudson River Wind Meditations.

Adventures in Liner Notes: Dino, Desi and Billy’s 'I’m a Fool'

2011-10-15T12:48:00.007-05:00

I don’t relish bad music quite the way I do bad movies. A bad movie can be an exhilarating, uplifting experience for me. A bad album is usually just depressing. Every now and then, though, I manage to unearth a record that fascinates me for all the wrong reasons. Case in point: Dino, Desi and Billy’s I’m a Fool, probably the worst album I’ve ever listened to a dozen times in a week.

I’m a Fool is what happens when you hand a bunch of rich kids with famous dads (Dean Martin, Desi Arnaz and their realtor – OK, so Billy’s dad was only fame adjacent) a wad of cash and a recording contract. From the dorkescent cover photo to the name-dropping moniker to the soulless blanditude of the songs within, this is musical equivalent of a cut-rate, early ‘60s greaser flick. But don’t take my word for it –I’m a Fool’s gloriously purple liner notes speak for themselves.

Be Turned on By
DINO, DESI AND BILLY
Hollywood’s Hip Hit Teens Sing
I’M A FOOL
And Other Large Songs

That’s the indifferently capitalized headline topping the back cover. I’m intrigued by the wording of this little blurb. It’s clearly an attempt at teenspeak, but it doesn’t sound especially authentic to me. I wasn’t around in 1965. For all I know, kids of that era tossed around slang like “Hip Hit Teens” and “Large Songs” all the time. But I wouldn’t wager on it.

It’s easy to be born. It’s after that that it gets tougher. Giving birth, for instance, to a hit single… ‘taint simple.

I would suggest that being born is no picnic, but even beyond that this opener baffles me. The only possible excuse for employing this strained birthing metaphor is to remind us right up top that these kids are the scions of American royalty (and American royalty’s realtor). If that’s your hook, fine. Own your blatant nepotism. Just don’t go backpedaling in the very next sentence.

Dino, Desi and Billy were born into show business, but then, so were a lot of young people. A lot of illustrious Jrs. have tried to follow their forefathers’ star footsteps, and bombed out. Dino, Desi and Billy have removed themselves forever from the $600 deduction class. They’re now in a class by themselves.

That’s some pretty decent spinning designed to convince us that these kids are more than coattail-riders. I did have to look up that “$600 deduction class” business – apparently it’s a slangy way of saying the boys are no longer dependents in the strictest sense of the word. That seems like a bit much pressure to saddle a 14-year-old with, but whatever. When this album came out, it looked like it might be the truth.

“I’m a Fool” is the first step into this new class. “Not the Lovin’ Kind” is a second. And this album wraps them both up.

The two songs called out by name, “I’m a Fool” and “Not the Lovin’ Kind,” are indeed standouts. Each made a minor splash on the Billboard charts, peaking at #17 and #25 respectively. They’re both pretty generic ‘60s pop tunes, but they have decent hooks and inoffensive presences.

What the liner notes don’t mention is that more than half the songs on the album are covers, and poorly chosen covers at that. If you absolutely must hand off a few Bob Dylan tunes to the blandest bunch of privileged pubescents in town, I suppose “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It Ain’t Me Babe” are reasonable picks. The boys’ rendition of “Like a Rolling Stone,” on the other hand, is worthwhile only as a illustration of what’s left of an icon when all that is iconic about it has been stripped away. At least the DDB version of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” is good for a laugh, what with its references to driving, smoking, womanizing and other pursuits generally reserved for the above-14 crowd. (For what it’s worth, my personal favorite track on the album is the grungy “The Rebel Kind.” That one is actually pretty rocking, despite the laughable notion of anyone being threatened by the rebellious nature of Desi Arnaz, Jr.)

Dino, Desi and Billy had one of the best introductions to the entertainment world that any neophyte trio could hope for. Two of the three members come from highly successful show business backgrounds. Dino’s the son of Dean Martin. Desi’s the son of Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. Billy Hinsche’s father became rich selling real estate to the other two lads’ fathers.

I don’t mean to rip on Billy too badly. For all I know, Billy might be a cool guy and the most talented member of the band. But damn if that last line doesn’t smack of “Hey, what can we say about this other kid? His dad’s not even on TV!” You can’t help but feel a little bad for the boy.

The three boys, all in their earliest teens and students at Beverly Hills Catholic School, met on a Little League diamond. Dino was in the process of pitching a no-hitter against Desi’s team. The three ball players soon discovered mutual musical interest too. They formed a trio.

See? These aren’t just a bunch of spoiled rich kids who nepotised their way into a record deal. They’re all-American, baseball-loving Catholic schoolboys who just happen to rock. They could easily be the boys next door, provided your door is in one of the more exclusive corners of Beverly Hills. Also note that the author clearly reinforces the hierarchy established in the band’s name: Dino is the alpha male tossing the no-hitter, Desi is the beta on the losing end, and Billy is also present.

Frank Sinatra heard the three rehearsing in an upstairs bedroom during a visit to Dean Martin’s house, and brought them to the attention of Reprise.

I have my doubts that this ever happened.

Producer Lee Hazlewood took over from there, working with the trio and some of the best background musicians in Hollywood, including Al Casey, Billy Strange, James Burton, Jim Gordon, Jim Troxcel, Dr. Jim Simmons, Jimmy Grey, Donald L. Owens and others. The results: this album. And the results have added a new generation of music to Hollywood and to America.

Notice that those last couple of sentences are suspiciously lacking in qualitative assessments. The first sentence, though, speaks to the true strength of the album, such as it is. I’m a Fool isn’t a good record by any means, but it’s much more listenable than it ought to be. I’m going to give credit to the background genius of songwriter Lee Hazlewood and that cast of ringers he brought on board.

‘60s music buffs will recognize most of those names – along with the album's co-arranger Jack Nitzsche – as members of The Wrecking Crew, the uncredited session men who did the legwork on a staggering number of hits released by superstars from Nat King Cole to The Beach Boys to the Partridge Family. These guys were renowned in the industry for cranking out incredibly tight, indelible arrangements at the drop of a hat. Reading up on them can prove seriously disillusioning to fans of '60s pop (Seriously, check out that link above), but for a bright-eyed boy band they were just the ticket. They couldn’t quite work their magic for Dino, Desi and Billy, but they made a game go of crafting some genuinely Large Songs for this trio of Hip Hit Teens.

Postscript: I don’t want to come off too harsh on the actual Dino, Desi and Billy. From what I’ve seen online, they seem to be decent chaps with some genuine talent and a love for music. Heck, they even got the band back together in the ‘90s and toured as Ricci, Desi and Billy until a few years ago. (Dino, a Captain in the California Air National Guard, died in a jet crash in 1987. His younger brother Ricci joined the group in his place.) I have nothing but fond wishes for Dino, Desi and Billy as people. As a concept, though, I find the band deeply fascinating and highly amusing.

My four biggest beefs with Dr. Seuss

2011-08-23T09:02:00.010-05:00

Sure, I dig Dr. Seuss. What good-hearted American doesn’t? The contributions the man made to children’s literature and American culture are unimpeachable. Heck, the thrill of reading Fox in Socks out loud would earn him a place on my eternal respect list by itself, and I rather adore his lesser-known early work. But as I’ve moved farther along in this fatherhood gig, I’ve had occasion to revisit a fair bit of Seussiana, and I have to admit I have a few beefs. Here are half a dozen bones I’d like to pick with the good doctor.

Lazy rhyming

There’s no question that Dr. Seuss was a master wordsmith. The bulk of his rhymes were inventive, original and memorable as hell. Nevertheless, I’ve been irked to realize how frequently he fell back on the borderline cheating of making up rhyming words from whole cloth and assigning the new “name” to some fantastical creature. There’s a Wocket in My Pocket is probably the worst offender here. It's as if a writer's blocked Seuss wandered around his house and swapped out the first letters of whatever household objects his glance settled on. I can maybe buy a “bofa on the sofa,” but the “nooth grush on my tooth brush” is just plain overreaching.

Confusing politics

I think popular opinion holds Dr. Seuss as a raging liberal, owing mainly to the overt environmentalism of The Lorax and, to a lesser extent, the Cold War tut-tutting of The Butter Battle Book. Dig a little deeper, though, and you’ll find that Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose is a none-too-subtle takedown of socialism suited for any Tea Party reading room. And then of course there are the infamous anti-Japanese propaganda cartoons, typical products of their era but quite upsetting regardless.

My biggest issue, though, is with the possibly the biggest sacred cow in the Seuss catalog. Green Eggs and Ham is generally accepted as a lighthearted lesson in not being afraid to try new things. That’s part of the picture, certainly, but when you look at the story from Sam I Am’s angle, it’s also a testament to the power of harassment. Badger someone incessantly and inflexibly enough, Seuss suggests, and eventually they’ll bend to your will. Sam I Am traffics in the same style of non-violent bullying favored by generations of door-to-door salesmen and hard-line politicians. That he’s the ostensible hero of the story – by the end his victim is even thanking him for his brutal mind games – chills me to the core.

The Cat in the Hat

The Cat in the Hat is creepy. Anarchic fun aside, there is no way on earth I would ever have guessed that grotesque, disturbing man-beast was a cat in a hat if Seuss hadn’t spelled it out in the title. Needless to say I’m not too keen on the Cat’s original incarnation, but that revulsion is mild compared to what I feel toward more recent takes on the character.

Being a grown adult possessed of decent taste and free will, I have never seen the 2003 adaptation of The Cat in the Hat. I have, however, seen its ads. If there’s a Hell below, I firmly believe the walls are plastered with posters of Mike Myers smirking soullessly behind unholy layers of cat-man makeup.

As the father of a toddler, I have seen a fair bit of the PBS cartoon The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That. One might think that relegating Martin Short to a voice-only role would temper the horror somewhat, but one would be grossly underestimating Mr. Short’s capacity for horror. I once caught an episode of Law & Order: SVU where Short played a phony psychic with a penchant for sexual assault. That wasn’t half as creepy as his work on The Cat in the Hat. In his hands, the Cat is a giggling, spastic tornado of directionless energy. In cartoon terms, he falls somewhere between early Daffy Duck and the Batman: The Animated Series edition of The Joker. Even if he didn’t sing constantly, Short’s skin-crawling intonation of “Your mother will not mind at all if we do!” (delivered at least once an episode) would almost be enough to make me forget all the fine work he did in his younger days.

I suppose this is outside the realm of Dr. Seuss’ command, what with him being conveniently dead and all. Still, I’m going to argue that he could have had the foresight to forbid his estate from licensing his work to any endeavor fronted by any aging, manic Canadian sketch comedy legend.

Furries

This one isn’t really Dr. Seuss’ fault either, but I have no one else to blame so he’ll have to do. Ever since I learned of the existence of a fetish group that gets sexual gratification from dressing up as furry, costumed characters, Seuss’ fuzzy animal-human hybrids have made me vaguely uneasy. To each his or her own, but the idea that someone out there finds whatever manner of being Sam I Am or the hopped-on Pop are meant to be primally arousing squicks me out to no end.

[Yeah, there are videos out there to illustrate this, but I’m not going to subject you to them. Instead, here are some youthful Canadian sketch comedy legends.]

My five-step Google+ strategy

2011-07-21T12:41:00.002-05:00

1) Sign up.

2) Poke around for a few minutes.

3) Get annoyed.

4) Decide I have neither the time nor the energy to throw into navigating yet another social media outlet.

5) Wait for Google+ to either burn out or become ubiquitous enough that I have no choice but to get addicted.

"Perception of The Doors" or "Light My Fire Under a Bushel"

2011-06-09T22:28:00.012-05:00

I’ve never been a big fan of The Doors. That’s hardly a controversial statement within my circle of music nerds. The hipster line on The Doors for years has been, “Pretty cool musically, and obviously important historically, but way overburdened by Jim Morrison’s ego, vocal dramatics and insanely bad songwriting.” I’ve never been an outright Doors hater either – I own a few of their albums and listen to them on occasion – but I’ll admit my gut reaction when I spot someone in a "Jim Morrison: American Poet" t-shirt is to avoid discussing music with him or her if at all possible.

No, as ‘60s music goes, I’m into more obscure stuff. I love poking around the weird little side alleys of hip record stores in search of long-forgotten psychedelic acts. Show me a band that pressed two or three LPs for some fly-by-night California-based label in 1966-71 then disbanded and faded into the ether and I’ll be slapping my Visa card on the counter before I’m finished reading the liner notes. The albums don’t even have to be uniformly good, so long as they’re reasonably interesting and have a standout track or two. I’ve unearthed a lot of good stuff over the years, but true lost classics are hard to come by. My dream find is an album that’s deeply trippy, slightly hooky and as dark as ‘60s rock standards allowed. Sort of like, oh, I don’t know… The Doors?

I was recently listening to a Nico album, and that got me thinking about her cover of “The End,” and that got me thinking about the original Doors version of “The End,” and before I knew it I was listening to L.A. Woman beginning to end. About halfway through “L’America,” it struck me: if The Doors weren’t THE DOORS and instead some forgotten psych rockers I’d discovered in the Oldies section of Rolling Stones Records, this would almost certainly be one of my favorite albums. Everything about it fits my template. It’s grim and grotesque and grimy as hell. It seethes with the kind of menacing organ riffs I adore. Sure, the lyrics are rather cringeworthy, but you could say the same for a whole lot of albums I love (Bullshit philosophizing was just a natural byproduct of the 1960s).

And yet here I sit, still not a huge fan of The Doors. This has made me question a lot of things about my taste in art, my public persona and the very core of my existence. If I read myself correctly, I’m guilty of the worst kind of hipsterism. The Doors’ mainstream success and rabid fan base has led me to hold them accountable for musical offenses that I’d ignore if they were committed by, say, The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. If L.A. Woman was an unknown commodity, I would take immense personal pride in having “discovered” it, just like I do with Trader Horne and Joe Byrd and The Field Hippies. I’d be sending my buddy Zachary links to barely read internet articles on the band’s history, just like I did after I first heard Yahowa 13.

That last paragraph gets to the heart of my problem. I didn’t need to name-check all of those artists to make my point, but I did it anyway, because I want you to click on those links and hear those bands. That’s partially because they’re all wonderful artists who deserve a wider audience, but it’s just as much because I want you to check out these bands specifically on my recommendation. I want to bask in their reflected glory and revel in the narcissistic pleasures of my own obscure, impeccable taste.

Are The Doors a better or a worse band than any of those groups? That’s a matter of opinion, obviously. What’s a matter of fact is that Oliver Stone never felt compelled to make an awful movie about Joe Byrd and The Field Hippies. See, quality is only one factor among many in my complex recipe for musical adulation. The truth is that part of the reason I’ve never cultivated a real passion for The Doors is that they’re already well-traveled territory. There’s nothing exceptional about being into The Doors, and I don’t find the band itself exceptional enough to make much of a deal about them. I’m a big fan of plenty of near-universally adored artists – The Beatles, Bob Dylan, David Bowie – but I think all of those performers are remarkable enough to supersede their mainstream acceptance.

On another hand is a band like The Grateful Dead, a group deeply beloved by a huge swath of music fans and intensely hated by just as many. I’ve started digging the Dead more in recent years. It’s because of that very hatred that I feel OK about stating that publicly. A chance to play the contrarian trumps most things for me. In the case of The Doors, though, the contempt isn’t quite feverish enough and the natural talent isn’t quite mind-blowing enough for me to get past their popularity with Budweiser-swilling undergrads.

So I guess it boils down to this: I like The Doors, but not as much as I would if they were more obscure, more talented or more hated. Of those three, only the talent requirement makes any logical sense, and it’s probably the least important to my public embracing of a band. I realize that this is a ridiculous, possibly contemptible attitude. It’s self-absorbed hipster elitism in the first degree, and it does a disservice both to blameless musicians and to me as a music lover. Still, I can’t see myself fully turning away from it anytime soon. My musical neuroses are too closely tied to my fragile self-image and the theoretical scorn of an imaginary peer group.

At least I recognize the problem. Give me time and I might even reach the point where I feel comfortable including a Doors track on my annual summer party mix. I’m thinking maybe “Hyacinth House.” Sure, “L.A. Woman” or “Love Her Madly” would probably be better party-rockers, but that shit’s way too mainstream, man.

MadeLoud: My kinda site

2011-06-03T14:24:00.006-05:00

Y'all know I'm not generally much of an advertiser (except when it comes to blatant self-promotion), but one of my favorite music sites/employers is in need of a boost. If you're a lover of indie music and its attendant culture, check out MadeLoud. Musicians can learn how to promote a band online, music fans can download exclusive mix tapes, and everyone can enjoy incisive analyses of musical minutia by one of the most criminally underrated writers on the web.

We now return you to your increasingly irregularly scheduled programming.

The seven most embarrassing artists I've seen perform live

2011-05-04T00:33:00.008-05:00

Attending a concert is always a crapshoot. Even if you’re seeing an artist whose work you love deeply and who you’ve seen kill on stage a dozen times, there’s still a chance you’re going to catch a rare off-night. There are some performers, however, who can sully your reputation by their very proximity. I’ve been to a lot of shows in my day. These few stand out as the ones I least like admitting to. In my defense, there were extenuating circumstances involved in most (but not all) of these experiences. Please don’t think less of me for having shared their airspace.

Better Than Ezra
This would be mildly embarrassing if I’d seen them in the mid-1990s, when their hit single “Good” was riding the top of the pop charts. But no, I saw them in 2002, when most of the nation had long since moved on. In my defense, I only went as a friend’s guest. Also, I saw them in New Orleans, the band’s hometown and the one spot in the nation that never stopped carrying the BTE torch. Seriously, Better Than Ezra was still huge in New Orleans in 2002, maybe because they’re still pretty much the only local alt-rock band ever to break through on the national stage.

They played under a gigantic tent in a parking lot near Lee Circle. The music was tolerable, but an obnoxious, fratty crowd that screamed along with every lyric more than compensated. There are people out there who can recite the entire Better Than Ezra songbook. Think about that.

Goo Goo Dolls and Dishwalla
I know that Goo Goo Dolls had a big hit song. I know that it was called “Iris.” I know that it’s a song I would recognize. But if you played “Iris” for me right now, I would not be able to identify it as a Goo Goo Dolls song. They’re a band that has simply never held my attention long enough for me to form any kind of lasting impression. I am quite certain that I sat through their opening set while waiting for Violent Femmes at the 1997 Milwaukee Summerfest, but the only thing I remember clearly from that performance was the portly man in front of me, who spent the whole show gyrating suggestively in ludicrously short jean shorts. Oh, and Dishwalla was there too. Everything I said about Goo Goo Dolls goes double for them.

Michael W. Smith
When I tell people I used to be a regular on the Christian rock festival circuit, the first thing they ask is usually, “Did you ever see Amy Grant?” (No.) The second thing they ask is usually, “Did you ever see Michael W. Smith?” (Yes. Twice.) I make no apologies for my youthful experimentation with Contemporary Christian music. It was what was available to me, and some of it was actually pretty decent stuff. I take no shame in having seeing acts like Randy Stonehill, Bride or SFC do their thing on stage. But Michael W. Smith is in a different league. For much of the ‘80s and ‘90s, he was the male face of cheesy, overproduced Christian pop, one of the only God Rock performers identifiable even to secular audiences.

His live shows were pretty much exactly what you’d think: bland and affable and laden with synthesizers and saxophones. I first saw him play at the Agape Festival in Greenville, IL (actually a very important formative experience for me as a young music fan), but the real standout was a Target Center gig in 1993. I recall a lot of glittery outfits, at least one keytar solo (though that might have been part of Petra’s opening set) and a moving walkway extending off the front of the stage. MWS used the latter as an ingenious prop, strenuously walking against the grain as an illustration of his struggle to keep within reach of Jesus. Or something like that. I was never too clear on the metaphor.

No Doubt
I saw maybe two minutes of No Doubt while wandering the grounds at the 2002 New Orleans Voodoo Music Experience. That was long enough for me to hear Gwen Stefani shrilling about how “fucking awesome” it was to be in “New fucking Orleans,” or something to that effect. Her ostentatious street-smart pose was so obviously forced and artificial that I immediately moved on to another stage to catch a few minutes of the only slightly less embarrassing Macy Gray. Or maybe it was Counting Crows. Damn, that was a lame Voodoo Fest lineup.

Sum 41 or maybe Good Charlotte
In 2002, The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn taped a week of programs in New Orleans. I got tickets for the Wednesday episode, which turned out to be the weakest of the run. Not only was Craig’s guest played-out prankster Tom Green, the musical guest was one of the abovementioned weenie punk acts. I honestly can’t remember which one. I suppose I could find out pretty easily online, but hell, why bother?

Carman
If you’ve never heard of Carman, and I have no reason to assume you have, imagine a Christian version of Neil Diamond, except about 75% tackier and more theatrical. He specializes in elaborate story songs like “The Champion,” a hammy, histrionic, eight-minute account of a boxing match between Jesus and Satan.

It’s baffling to me to think that I – or anyone else, really – was ever capable of appreciating Carman unironically, but at 13, I was a hardcore, fist-pumping fan shouting along from the upper decks of the La Crosse Center.

Vanilla Ice
By the time I saw Vanilla Ice in 1999, he was already a walking punchline. This was during the grotesque period when he was trying to reinvent himself as a Limp Bizkit-style thrash rapper. I purchased my $10 ticket ironically, as did virtually every other smirking scenester who filled the Hollywood Theater in La Crosse, WI (he was originally scheduled to play the smaller, hipper Warehouse, but the demand proved too great). That show went a long way toward convincing me not to spend money ironically anymore. Simply put, it was an embarrassing experience for me, for Vanilla Ice and for pretty much everyone involved.

Vanilla spent much of the set stomping around the stage declaring himself free from the mental slavery of celebrity and music labels. “No more puppet!” was the refrain of the evening. The crowd was openly hostile throughout. Several onstage security guards were kept busy fending off an endless stream of aspiring bum-rushers. When Vanilla Ice’s hype man (yep, that was an existent career in 1999) was foolhardy enough to try crowd-surfing, he was instantly dragged down and enveloped. The security guards had to physically pull him back on stage to spare him a beating from the drunken front-row hooligans.

The band played “Too Cold,” their hard rock revamp of “Ice Ice Baby,” halfway through the set, after which at least 3/4 of the crowd immediately filed out. By this point I was feeling pretty sorry for poor Vanilla, so I stuck it out. I’m glad I did. The folks that left missed out on a live performance of “Havin’ a Roni,” and that’s just not something you see every day.

The five worst Lou Reed album covers of all time

2011-03-01T23:51:00.003-06:00

When people discuss great album cover art of the rock era, Lou Reed’s name doesn’t exactly fly to the forefront. Except for maybe the knock-off Warhol portrait on Transformer, Lou’s album visuals have never achieved anything like iconic status. As a tireless Lou apologist, I’m personally fond of quite a few of his covers. The contemptuous bad-assery of Street Hassle and the trippy interactivity of Set the Twilight Reeling are particular favorites, though I might like the back cover of Sally Can’t Dance best of all. I can’t deny, however, that flipping through the Lou Reed section at your local record store will likely produce more groans than grins. In honor of Lou’s 69th birthday, I’ve compiled my choices for the five worst covers in his extensive oeuvre.

Ecstasy (2000)

I actually rather like the design of this one. It’s stark and simple, the fonts are well chosen and the red-and-black color scheme is quite striking. None of that offsets the fact that the combination of photo and title gives the distinct impression that we’re looking at Lou Reed’s O-face. As big a fan as I am, that’s something I never needed to see.

New York (1989)

He’s hip, he’s cool, he’s 46! And there are five of him for some reason.

New Sensations (1984)

I suppose there are ways Lou could have made this cover more instantly dated. Maybe throw in a gigantic jambox, some Wacky Wallwalkers, a couple of Smurfs… But why mess with a good thing? If nothing else, this artwork allows us to ponder the awesome possibilities of Lou Reed: The Game. I’m sure it would’ve been at least as much fun as the Atari E.T. game.

Growing Up in Public (1980)

“OK, Lou, if you want to go get changed, we’ll get this cover shoot in the bag.”
“I don’t need to change.”
“Oh... So you wanted to take the picture wearing that, um, olive green v-neck sweatshirt?”
“That’s right.”
“Huh. You sure? I mean, it kind of looks like you just got in from raking the leaves or something.”
[Grim silence.]
“Yeah… OK… I can work with that. Just let me change out this cheesy red backdrop. We had a high school yearbook shoot in here this morning.”
“Just take the fucking picture.”

Mistrial (1986)

For a man who’s spent the better part of two decades wearing leather jackets and sunglasses, Lou sure looks awkward wearing that leather jacket and those sunglasses. If you didn’t know who Lou Reed was, this could easily be mistaken for a publicity still for that weird guy who works the night shift at the supermarket and responds to every “Guitarist wanted” ad in the back of the local alt-weekly. This photo is so hokey that it almost seems defensive, as if Lou is announcing to the world, “I don’t give two shits what anybody says – I still fucking rock!”

(Note: If I were to compile the Five Greatest Lou Reed Album Covers of All-Time, Mistrial would occupy the number one slot on that list as well, for exactly the same reasons.)

Remembering Ric Hess, the Hilly Kristal of Chicago literature

2011-01-18T22:27:00.005-06:00

I can’t claim to have been close friends with Ric Hess, the Chicago writer and restaurateur who died unexpectedly on Monday. We chatted from time to time and knew each other by name, but our relationship was more that of colleagues than friends. That didn’t keep Ric from playing a major role in my writing career.

People from outside of Chicago are often puzzled when I explain that city’s culture of readings in bars. I can understand that. In many people’s minds, literary readings are supposed to be mild-mannered affairs relegated to bookstores, coffee shops and maybe the occasional wine bar. Conversely, the accompanying entertainment to a night of drinking is supposed to be a karaoke machine, a raucous bar band or, if you’re feeling intellectual, a pub quiz. The Chicago scene is different, as I learned in my four years in the Fiction Writing Master’s program at Columbia College. Chicago, much to my delight, is peppered with writers unpretentious enough to debut their new stories in front of a hooting crowd of barflies, and bars open-minded enough to host them.

As the owner of Sheffield’s, Ric Hess was instrumental in shaping what I believe to be a genuine literary movement. In a neighborhood renowned for drunken hooliganism, he built up a classy yet welcoming bar and grill beloved by beer connoisseurs and gourmands. By opening his doors to Reading Under the Influence, Sexy Bald Men and other local reading events, he nurtured a vibrant, enthusiastic artistic community the likes of which I’ve never seen anywhere else. When I think of the key landmarks from my time on Chicago’s fiction writing scene, Sheffield’s is second only to Columbia College itself.

When you attended a reading at Sheffield’s, you weren’t just going out to hear some gasbag writers over-enunciating their meticulously groomed manuscripts. No, you were throwing yourself into the midst of a twisted, talented family of artists whose primary objective was to support, inspire and appreciate the hell out of one another. Any given Reading Under the Influence (RUI) installation could run the gamut from Julia Borcherts spinning a tale of an illicit romance with a Harry Caray impersonator to Rob Duffer reading a breathlessly detailed passage from Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage to Kathy Bergquist blessing the room with the most hilariously gruesome fisting scene ever committed to paper.

Ric presided over all this writerly rabble as both patriarch and participant. A damn fine writer himself, he sometimes graced the RUI stage with his tough, muscular prose and confident delivery. Most nights, though, he was behind the scenes. I’m sure many of the attendees had no idea who he was, or how instrumental he was in fueling the boisterous, breathtaking literary scene they were all a part of. If Sheffield’s was our CBGB, Ric was our Hilly Kristal, a courageous, innovative entrepreneur who wasn’t afraid to put himself on the line for the art he believed in. Whether I was there to read or just listen, stepping into the back room always gave me a warm, welcome feeling, even before I got a pint of Red Hook in me. That’s not an easy effect to pull off, especially when you’re dealing with a group as mercurial as up-and-coming authors. As a reader, a writer, a drinker and a lover of the arts, I appreciate the hell out of Ric and all he did to facilitate that feeling.

Godspeed, Ric Hess. I wish I'd thanked you when I had the chance. For what it's worth, you damn sure made the world a better place than it was when you showed up.

The five most misleading album covers in my record collection

2011-01-04T23:18:00.011-06:00

One thing I really like about buying vinyl records – they’re often cheap enough that I can afford to take a gamble on a band I’ve never heard of just because I like their cover art. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is often possible to judge an album by its cover, especially when you’re dealing with psych-rock, prog or funk. Sometimes, though, I fall victim to the old bait-and-switch. It’s uniquely disheartening to discover that the insane record sleeve I’ve so graciously invited into my home is nothing but a façade for garden-variety garbage. After thumbing through my collection, I’ve called a few of the worst offenders on the carpet.

Brick – Good High

Is that not one of the greatest album covers of the 1970s? Just looking at that beaming dude and his illicit candy bar is enough to get your toes tapping. You have to assume that this is going to be one tripped-out funk record, or at least something with a cool reggae influence. Instead, it’s a fairly standard proto-disco funk disc, boasting a few nice breaks and a lot of filler. It’s not an awful album by any means – the much-sampled “Dazz” is pretty hot – but the chasm between my expectations and reality has seldom been deeper.

Dreams – Imagine My Surprise

You have to figure a band cool enough to commission cover art by Gahan Wilson – the macabre cartooning icon who’s like a bridge between Charles Addams and Gary Larson – is going to bring something to the table, right? Especially since they were apparently fine with Wilson drawing them pajama-clad and on the verge of being swallowed by a giant vagina monster? Sadly, what’s inside is undistinguished horn rock that could charitably be called “a poor man’s Chicago.” Dreams bassist Will Lee did go on to a lifelong gig with David Letterman’s house band. I guess that’s something.

Don Ralke – Bongo Madness

Look at that cover. Look at how much fun those folks are having. Maybe their little bongo party hasn’t spilled over into full-scale madness yet, but it’s in the mail, that’s for sure. It’s just too bad that the accompanying record inspires exactly none of the emotions on display in that image. Oh, there’s bongo, to be sure, but the madness is regrettably hard to come by. These tepid easy-listening grooves are more like Bongo Mildness.

Casiopea – Eyes of the Mind

OK, you’ve got your astrological band name, your eyeball-and-spacescape cover art and your pretentious album title. Then you flip the jacket over and find that not only was the album released in 1981, but the band is also entirely Japanese. Is there any conceivable way that this is not some bizarre lost classic of prog rock? Well, yeah. Apparently the other option is that Casiopea is an elevator jazz combo that churned out the blandest Muzak knock-offs this side of my neighborhood Pamida store.

Barrabas – Watch Out

I have no recollection of buying this record. I assume it was a trophy from one of my psychedelic shopping sprees at Reckless Records in Chicago that got filed away before I got around to putting it on the turntable. Whatever the case, I was hyped when I pulled Watch Out out of my stacks a few months back. The Biblically inspired band name coupled with a nude snake-woman teasing her hair in an oppressively purple dressing room carried the promise of something dark, trippy and deeply psychedelic. But no worries, Barrabas – you guys go on ahead with your watered-down Euro-disco. Oh heavens no, your undeniably killer album cover is in no way tainted by the sub-roller-rink jams you’ve seen fit to preserve in vinyl. Whatever gave you that idea? Say, what’s Spanish for “infinitely forgettable”?

Of Lou Reed, Susan Boyle and the dreaded "Hallelujah" effect

2010-11-10T21:39:00.007-06:00

I was as moderately tickled as anyone when the whole Susan Boyle phenomenon kicked off last summer. It was a nice moment of underdog catharsis that I figured would flare up and burn out quickly like any good viral video. I didn’t expect Susan Boyle would still be registering on my consciousness in November of 2010, and I certainly didn’t expect that my main man Lou Reed would be pulled into her vortex.

And yet, here we are. Lou recently took some heat for allegedly refusing to let Boyle sing his lovely junkie ode “Perfect Day” at some benefit or awards show or what-have-you, a slight that apparently reduced England’s latest rose to tears. Now, of course, it all turns out to have been some big misunderstanding, and Lou is inexplicably eager to make sure that nobody thinks he’s maybe sort of a bit of a jerk (a textbook case of too little, 40 years too late).

We all know that Lou doesn’t do anything half-assed (The Raven notwithstanding), so a mere apology simply wouldn’t do. No, Lou stepped up to the plate and offered to direct the music video for Boyle’s “Perfect Day” cover. It’s a very Lou Reed type of favor, in that he gets a chance to look like a good guy even as he advances his decade-long agenda of being taken seriously as a genuine artiste. The video is okay in my estimation – Lou shoots some nice, moody landscapes and Boyle’s Enya-esque vocals are decent if not stunning. It’s a handsomely mounted, crowd-pleasing production, and therein lies my concern.

I remember back in the day having arguments with my music nerd buddies about the superlative rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” – Cohen’s, John Cale’s or Jeff Buckley’s. (I stand by Cale, though Buckley seems to be the consensus pick.) Ah, but those were different times. Somewhere down the line, Rufus Wainwright’s edition of “Hallelujah” was licensed for use on the Shrek soundtrack, thereby catching the attention of a generation of bland young songbirds. Since then it’s become nigh unavoidable, spilling from the glossy lips of unimaginative vocalists on prime time TV shows, in karaoke clubs and at acoustic open mic nights. Cohen’s masterwork of sexual frustration and Biblical allegories has been stripped of its power and reduced to a higher-minded “You Light Up My Life” for the new millennium. I used to adore “Hallelujah,” but it’s gotten to the point that I cringe as soon as I hear a breathy intonation of “I heard there was a secret chord.”

The “Hallelujah” effect is what I fear for “Perfect Day.” Aside from maybe “Sweet Jane,” it’s already probably Lou Reed's most frequently covered song. That makes sense – “Perfect Day” works well in unexpected contexts. Its use as the backing track to a heroin overdose in Trainspotting was transcendent. Duran Duran scored a solid hit with their 1995 cover. Reed prodigy Antony’s rendition is beyond haunting.

But few songs can withstand a “Hallelujah” style vault into ubiquity, and these two share some unsettling traits. They’re both very pretty songs about some ugly subjects. They’re both literate enough to lend some unearned gravitas to nearly any singer. And they’re both written by guys who can be easily name-checked for instant street cred.

I got a little nervous when “Perfect Day” was featured prominently in a very tasteful ad during the recent Winter Olympics. It already holds a surprisingly high profile in the UK thanks to a fairly dreadful, “We Are the World” style 1997 charity recording featuring Lou and a cast of all-stars. Now this Susan Boyle business makes me worried that it’ll be popping up whenever an aging pop starlet wants to prove something with more “serious” material, or worse yet, when American Idol or Glee feel like working a little edge into the mix. Hell, the Norwegians are already all over it:

I know it’s silly to be so protective of someone else’s song. After all, can anyone ever really own a work of art? But heck, I freely admit to my snobbery. I understand that “Perfect Day” belongs to the world, and that’s what scares me. I mean, have you seen some of the stuff the world is into these days?

Tom Emmer believes in having seven children

2010-10-26T20:53:00.011-05:00

When it comes to politics, I suppose I’m what they call a single-issue voter. I really don’t give a lot of thought to budgets or tax breaks or things like that. What I’m mainly concerned about when I walk into my local polling place is where the candidates stand on the issue of having seven children.

That’s why Tom Emmer is my man in this year’s Minnesota gubernatorial race. Tom Emmer made it very clear right out of the gate that he is strongly in favor of having seven children. In fact, he's made having seven children one of the cornerstones of his run. His earliest campaign ad was entirely dedicated to this immensely important issue. The ad prominently featured the smiling faces of Emmer’s kids, all lined up outside the family home in an easy-to-tally fashion. If anyone ever tries to tell you that Tom Emmer is soft on having seven children, you can count them for yourself: One, two, three, four, five, six… seven!

Even when Emmer doesn’t include his own seven children in his campaign advertising, the topic is clearly never far from his heart. Subsequent ads run on Emmer’s behalf have featured a variety of multi-ethnic children being traumatized by the policies embraced by Emmer’s opponents. Some might say that this is pandering or overselling the concept, but I don’t believe so. These ads simply reflect Tom Emmer’s passion for and tireless dedication to having seven children.

I don’t mean to disparage Tom Emmer’s worthy opponents, both of whom have some admirable qualities of their own. But the fact of the matter is that Emmer is the lone candidate with the courage to have seven children. It’s difficult for me to fully embrace Independence Party candidate Tom Horner’s wishy-washy position of having three children. To me, that suggests hedging one’s bets and playing things too safe. Worse yet, DFL candidate Mark Dayton showed a disturbing lack of backbone when he joined the “two children of a failed marriage” camp. Despite any other winning traits these men may possess, I’m afraid I just can’t look past their lack of commitment to having seven children. At a certain point, one simply has to wonder whether the poor planning that contributed to Dayton and Horner’s failure to have seven children will bleed over into their governance.

I know what you’re thinking: “But what about Tom Emmer’s history? Hasn’t he flip-flopped repeatedly on the having seven children issue?” It’s true. At various points in the past, Tom Emmer has adopted multiple views on this topic. Among other positions, he has previously adhered to the doctrine of having six, five and, yes, even two children. If one follows the paper trail back far enough, there is even evidence that Emmer took a steadfast position of having no children for much of his youth. Some see this as hypocrisy, but I think of it as an indicator that Tom Emmer is a man willing to learn, expand his worldview and grow as a person. Past positions aren’t important. What’s important is that Tom Emmer is currently committed to having seven children, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.

I fully understand if you’re not swayed by this analysis. I realize that I have a certain degree of tunnel vision when it comes to this issue, but it’s one that I hold dear to my heart. As always, I encourage my fellow Minnesotans to follow their own hearts when they head to the polls this November. I, for one, will be voting for Tom Emmer.

Because Tom Emmer believes in having seven children. And that’s what matters.

Father spoke of the New York Yankees

2010-10-08T23:22:00.006-05:00

"No," Father said, "The Yankees are not evil, no more than a germ is evil, or a tornado. Things like these are creations of nature. They only follow the constraints of that nature and can never hope to do otherwise, can never hope at all. That nature may have evil results, may destroy those things we deem good, but it is not itself evil. It only is."

Father took a small sip from the tumbler, his gaze focused somewhere on the horizon beyond our heads. "Because evil is a human construct, and tornados and germs and Yankees are not human. Perhaps these Yankees were human at one time, but to a man they surrendered all claim on humanity the instant they paid their busfare and lit out for the Bronx. Now they are little more than automatons, an unfeeling fleet of pinstriped golems laboring without thought or joy or even ambition, prevailing inevitably because that is what they do and why they are."

He sat then, folding into the worn leather armchair with a weariness we had never seen before. "There is no shame in losing to these Yankees," he murmured. "Just as there is no thrill in winning for these Yankees. They will continue, insensate and unblinking, and we will stand in the shallows, steel-jawed and buoyed by false bravado, like beachcombers trapped in a cove, praying into an indifferent void that maybe this will be the one time among millions when the rip tide ebbs before reaching the shore but knowing in our hearts that our drowning is imminent. And in the end our only comfort may be that no matter how many glories they reap, they will glean no enjoyment, no fulfillment, because again these feelings, all feelings, are the domain of a humanity that is no more than a vague shimmer of memory for these Yankees."

"No," Father said, "The Yankees are not evil, but they are damned. They are damned." And Father was weeping now, but when we looked in his eyes we saw no trace of sorrow.

- Ira Brooker

Stephen Malkmus sums up the Pavement reunion (and reunion tours in general) in one pithy bit of stage banter

2010-09-13T19:36:00.004-05:00

"The fuckin' '90s were cool; hummus was exotic."
- Stephen Malkmus, September 12, 2010 at Roy Wilkins Auditorium in Saint Paul, MN

A Modest Proposal for BP CEO Tony Hayward

2010-08-01T23:38:00.004-05:00

Dear Mr. Hayward,

Let me just say right at the top that I know you have already taken far more heat than your limited personal involvement in BP’s Gulf Coast oil spill probably merits. I have no doubt that the events leading up to the spill occurred too far down the corporate food chain for you to ever notice until it was too late. That said, you are the company’s CEO for at least a few more months. Fair or not, the buck stops with you. It is human nature to want to attach an individual face to any major event. Yours is the face of many of BP’s past successes, and it will forever be the face of this catastrophe. To paraphrase Batman’s rationale for sacrificing his reputation to uphold Harvey Dent’s in The Dark Knight, this crisis needs a symbol. That symbol has to be you.

I do hope that you count yourself lucky, Mr. Hayward. You are getting out of this morass with only a presumably brief period of unemployment (subsidized by a multi-million-dollar pension, no less) as your penance. That is a lenient sentence by anyone’s standards, especially considering the very public penalties paid by your counterparts in China. Had this happened in Chinese waters, you may well have been executed for your negligence, just like a number of officials and executives who oversaw recent safety violations by Chinese corporations.

Now, far be it from me to advocate China’s philosophy toward crime and punishment. Their human rights record is far too heinous for me to ever seriously endorse their punitive methods. Still, it is oddly refreshing to consider a system that regards the architects of massive corporate violations as roughly equivalent to hit men, drive-by shooters and other profit-oriented murderers.

And make no mistake, Mr. Hayward – you and BP are indeed murderers. Even beyond the 11 lives snuffed out in the initial explosion, beyond the myriad animal species driven to the brink of extinction, your callous incompetence has shattered the existences of thousands of families across the Gulf Coast and beyond. Worse than that, the ongoing devastation wrought by your oil spill threatens to effectively extinguish one of the last vestiges of indigenous society in America. The Louisiana bayous are home to a distinctive Creole and Cajun culture that has survived for hundreds of years. Now your oil is on pace to obliterate the livelihood and surroundings that have previously sustained that culture through all manner of natural and man-made disasters. I hope that I am wrong, but it is quite possible that BP has launched what amounts to environmental and economic genocide.

I’m sure you genuinely believe yourself to be mostly blameless in this whole debacle, Mr. Hayward, but as a human being you must understand our need to see someone suffer some consequences for this. That, I believe, is what is especially maddening to many observers – the knowledge that neither you nor anyone else from BP will spend so much as a day behind bars. Yes, I know there are possible criminal charges pending. You know as well as I do that BP’s pool of attorneys runs too deep for anything of substance ever to come of those. The worst the company is looking at are a few hefty fines and maybe some probationary sanctions.

Fortunately, I believe I have identified an acceptable middle ground between state-sponsored execution and getting off scot-free. Mr. Hayward, the most honorable action you could take now is to commit seppuku. I am not the first to suggest this course of action for you and your associates, but as the situation has developed, it seems more and more like the only satisfactory solution. So long as you continue to draw breath, your existence will stand as a constant reminder to Gulf Coast residents that the people who destroyed their way of life are still out there moving freely and making money. Even if you were to somehow end up in the prison cell you so richly deserve, you would still be a living, breathing, taxpayer-subsidized symbol of the arrogance and negligence that has savaged us in more ways than we can count.

So seppuku it is. It needn’t be an ignominious thing. In fact, it could be a borderline heroic acknowledgment of your sins against humanity and nature. Like Jesus said, “Greater love hath no man than this: that a man lay down his life for his friends.” If you are truly a friend to the people who have dedicated their lives and labors to making you and your cronies obscenely wealthy, then I would advise you to rent The Godfather Part II and take some tips from the final conversation between Tom Hagen and Frankie Five Angels. Or, if you really want to make your contrition known to the world, you might read up on the very public demise of State Senator Budd Dwyer of Pennsylvania. Either way, your passing would be a symbolic act above all other symbolic acts.

I suppose there might be one other way for you to redeem yourself and begin the healing process on the Gulf Coast. You could liquidate that golden parachute BP so generously strapped across your shoulders, withdraw all the contents of the numerous bank accounts you no doubt hold and dedicate that money exclusively to the oil spill clean-up and restoration effort. You could then call in favors from your presumably extensive network of expert colleagues in the energy industry and devote yourself wholly to developing clean, sustainable alternative fuel sources that will help to eliminate future spills like the ones currently destroying Louisiana, Nigeria, Michigan and so many other places around the globe.

Oh, but who am I kidding? That scenario is much too far-fetched. No, best to stick with the original plan. Please, Mr. Hayward, for the good of yourself and everyone involved, fall on your sword, as literally and as quickly as possible.

Four songs to break a Hipster Dad’s heart

2010-07-01T01:19:00.005-05:00

Disclaimer: My pal Doc Waffles recently congratulated me on not letting fatherhood push me into "going all Mitch Albom" with my writing. Apologies to the Doc, but this column is where I let my inner Albom get the better of me. If you have a low tolerance for sentimentality, I suggest you skip this one. I'll be back to our regularly scheduled irreverence soon enough.

I knew going into fatherhood that a lot of my entertainment options would change. I wouldn’t be attending nighttime concerts with any regularity for quite some time, for instance, and I’d have to wait for the baby to fall asleep to pop in those Breaking Bad DVDs. But I didn’t expect just how much impact having a kid would have on the way I hear certain songs.

For some reason, I’ve never been especially bothered by songs about children dying. I think that’s just too big a concept and too far-removed from anything in my own experience to make a real impact on me. That hasn’t changed since I’ve had a child of my own. I can still listen to Violent Femmes’ “Country Death Song” or The Decemberists’ “The Rake’s Song” – both sung from the perspective of a father who murders his own kids – and regard them as appropriately macabre murder ballads.

No, what really get me are songs about kids living, or to put it more accurately, songs about kids aging. I’m not talking about obvious tear-jerkers like “Cat’s in the Cradle” or “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Those songs are a bit too on-the-nose and preachy to really grab me. The ones that knock me for a loop take a subtler, more lived-in approach that makes me think the songwriters have really been there. That type of song has always done a number on me, but now that I have a son of my own, they’ve become downright hard to listen to. Here are a few that consistently put a lump in my throat.

Joni Mitchell – “The Circle Game”

I can’t always take a whole lot of Joni Mitchell in one sitting, but I’m an unabashed devotee of her Ladies of the Canyon album. Even amongst all the stellar songwriting on display there, “The Circle Game” stands out as a spot-on, only slightly sentimental assessment of a child growing into manhood. Mitchell captures the wide-eyed wonder of growing up while avoiding the fetishization of childhood that tainted much of her contemporaries’ work. Joni remembers that terror and frustration (“Words like, ‘When you’re older’ must appease him / And promises of someday make his dreams”) are huge parts of being too young to fend for oneself.

The part that slays me, though, is one line in the last verse: “So the years spin by and now the boy is twenty / Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true.” That hits awfully close to home. I’ve never dealt well with the way advancing years force us to sacrifice and alter our dearly held dreams. Sometimes that’s a good thing – at 20, for instance, I was just starting to get the idea that the world wasn’t going to fall at my feet and vault me into the pantheon of Great American Writers unless I put in some years of hard, thankless work. Now that I’m 31 with more than a decade of writerly labor under my belt, I’m still clinging to my dream of fame and prestige, but it becomes a little harder to believe in with each passing year.

It terrifies me to think that my son will have to abandon his dreams one day. For the moment, it’s not a big concern. His current dreams seem to involve propelling himself forward rather than back, getting a hold of his mom’s Nalgene water bottle for gumming purposes and maybe being as tall as he is when I carry him on my shoulders. Soon enough, though, he’ll be able to assess the world and decide what he wants from it. I truly hope that he will be able to realize the dreams that matter most to him, but deep in my heart I know that few people ever do.

Neil Young – “My Boy”

(Sorry for the cover - Neil is pretty touchy about his videos being shared online)

Oh man, I have a long emotional history with this one. It’s from Young’s underrated country record Old Ways, an album I received as a Christmas gift from my dad when I was 15. My dad’s not really one for picking out presents, so when he does, it usually means the gift is something personal that he knew the recipient would specifically appreciate. My copy of Old Ways was dubbed from his friend’s record collection onto the B-side of a cassette tape, with Van Morrison’s Moondance occupying the A-side. Some might think giving a dub as a gift rather chintzy, but in my estimation the hand-lettered cassette case and the time dedicated to picking a record and playing it through as it recorded just gave it all the more sentimental value.

But on to the song itself. The summer after my freshman year of college, my dad and I took a road trip in his Toyota Camry station wagon to visit some friends in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Somewhere in the middle of the Nebraska flatlands, I popped Old Ways into the cassette deck. We’d hit that point in every long drive where chit-chat fades away into hazy silence when “My Boy” came on the stereo. We sat there quietly, staring out on the vast nothingness of rural Nebraska, listening to Neil Young wistfully asking his son why he was growing up so fast. I couldn’t help but wonder if my dad was feeling something similar, taking a cross-country trip with a young man who used to be his little boy.

To me, that sounds like a realization both painful and wonderful, terms that seem to appear in conjunction an awful lot in the course of fatherhood. As tough as I know it will be to let go of my son when the time comes, I hope I’ll at least have been able to pass a few totems of art and beauty along to him like my dad did with Old Ways.

Ben Folds – “Still Fighting It”

Folds’ Rockin’ the Suburbs was one of the first albums I ever reviewed, way back when I was a lowly intern at New Orleans’ Where Y’at magazine. It was a positive review overall, but I was underwhelmed by a few songs. I specifically singled out “Still Fighting It” for trafficking in what my 22-year-old self thought to be trite, maudlin observations about the nature of aging.

What a difference nine years makes. Oh, and a baby. The baby makes a fair bit of difference too. Listening to “Still Fighting It” now, I hear the song for what it really is: a young father sending his child an advance apology for the painful realities of existence and his own failings as a human being. The former is, of course, something we can’t do much about. The latter, though, is something I imagine to be a near-universal source of fear for parents.

I know it is for me. Since my son has been born, I’ve been on a personal improvement campaign. I’ve improved my diet, committed myself to working out consistently and re-energized my dedication to making art. I’ve never been much of a sleeper, but these days I’m clocking more hours of consciousness than ever as I work my day job, keep myself in shape, try to complete a novel, shop around old writing to publishers and, most importantly, take care of my baby. The way I see it, I’ve been in a holding pattern for too long. Now I’m in a race against time. I only have so long to make myself into someone my son can look upon with genuine pride and awe. I want him to be able to tell his little playground buddies, "My dad writes books!" The last thing I ever want is to have to look him in the eye and say, like Folds’ narrator, “You’re so much like me / I’m sorry.”

Low – “In Metal”

Even six months into his existence, I’m amazed at how quickly my own son is, to quote Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes, “speeding forward through the plate glass of maturing selves.” As much as I love seeing him grow and develop, part of me wants to cling to his infancy and not let go. Sometimes when I’m holding him in my arms, I consider the fact that I’ll only be able to do this for a very limited period of time. When my wife and I put him to bed each night, I often ponder that the boy we’re laying down will be gone in the morning, replaced by a noticeably older, larger, more self-sufficient edition. He’s already so much bigger than he was just a few weeks ago. The day is fast approaching when he’ll be so big that I’ll never be able to cradle him again. That breaks my heart beyond belief.

And so I am totally with Mimi Parker when she sings this beautiful, wrenching ode to the tininess of babyhood. The tears come right to the surface every single time I hear “Partly hate to see you grow / And just like your baby shoes / Wish I could keep your little body / In metal.” I can’t wait to see what he’ll become, but I know I’ll always miss what he is right now. And right now. And right now.

- Ira Brooker

"Lou Reed's Concert in the Bark" or "Old dogs, Lou tricks"

2010-06-05T10:55:00.012-05:00

6/5/2010

To: Mr. Lou Reed

From: Mr. Ira Brooker

Re: Concert for Dogs

Dear Lou,

You don’t owe me anything. In fact, with all of the joy and enrichment your work has added to my life, I probably owe you even more than the hundreds of dollars I’ve spent on your albums over the years. I just want you to know that I’m not speaking as some kind of falsely entitled fanboy here. No, I’m announcing this as a dedicated fan who cares deeply about your art and your vision: I give up.

I give up, Lou. Not on you or your music; quite the contrary, actually. What I’m giving up on is hoping that you’ll ever conform to my expectations. I understand that you’re not entirely satisfied with your status as a music icon, that you need to identify yourself as a paragon of artistic versatility. That means different things to different people. Tony Bennett, for instance, still croons with the best of them while also finding satisfaction in painting pretty good portraits of his celebrity cronies. Russell Crowe, Juliette Lewis, Billy Bob Thornton and at least a dozen other big-name actors fill the space between gigs by making mediocre music. And I won’t even get into the baffling sphere of celebrity fragrances.

But you’ve always been far too hip to take that easy a route, no matter how much Middle America yearns to smell like Lou Reed. When you expand your horizons, you push them in directions nobody else had on their radars. The past decade or so has seen you dabbling in theater, photography, Eastern meditation, literary myth-building and even mobile phone app-building. You’ve done a little bit of pretty much everything, except, of course, record a new album.

And now I hear that your latest venture is a concert for dogs. Australian dogs, at that. There was a time not too long ago when this would have upset me, both as a music fan and as a dog hater. I’d have been on the internet within minutes voicing my displeasure, wondering why you’re wasting your time with silly, pretentious art stunts rather than heading into the studio to wash the taste of The Raven out of my mouth. But that was then, and now I’m more inclined to step back, assess the situation and give you a heartfelt, “Huh.”

I mean, sure, there are things I’d rather see you do than spend 20 minutes playing inaudible notes for an audience more interested in Gravy Train than “Sweet Jane.” I’d rather see you do pretty much anything else, really. But I have to admit there’s a certain Andy Warhol/Laurie Anderson vibe to this thing, which makes sense, obviously. At this point, I’ve sat through so much of your weirdness that I’m content to chalk this up to just Lou being Lou. I can't do much more than smile, nod and count myself fortunate when you deign to lay down a track with Gorillaz or The Killers. If and when you decide to go back to doing what you do best, I’ll be waiting with open ears.

And if you ever release this dog concert dealie on CD, I’ll go right out and buy it like the tunnel-vision acolyte I am. I can’t say I feel good about that, but that’s my problem, not yours.

Hang tough,
IOB

Mostly tha Voice: On Guru, "Hard to Earn" and the Passion of my Little Brother

2010-04-21T23:05:00.007-05:00

Being a hip-hop fan was no easy task in the mid-1990s Brooker household. Like a lot of parents of the era, my folks were extremely wary of this profane and relatively new genre. Relentless media scaremongering about rappers’ glorification of drugs, violence and misogyny led them to institute a fairly strict censorship policy: Christian rappers like Michael Peace were embraced, all-audiences acts like Arrested Development and MC Hammer were grudgingly tolerated, and anything meriting the infamous Parental Advisory sticker was outright banned. In hindsight, I’ll admit that they were partially right to worry – Too $hort and Eazy-E probably weren’t appropriate listening material for middle school kids – but that didn’t dissuade my younger brother in his quest to become the biggest hip-hop head in Sparta, Wisconsin.

Gang Starr’s Hard to Earn was the first hardcore rap album to slip under the radar. My then 13-year-old brother used some of his birthday money to buy it on cassette at Musicland during a family outing to Valley View Mall in La Crosse. Thus began an extended exercise in musical obfuscation. The album sleeve and its telltale advisory sticker quickly became kindling for our potbelly wood stove. In their place, my brother fashioned a homemade sleeve with a blank sheet of yellow legal paper and a Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers playing card. Realizing that the very name “Gang Starr” would be a red flag, he scraped the ink off of the cassette itself, obliterating the track listings and artist information. He then stashed the album in the back of his tape box and only listened to it on his headphones or while riding in my car.

Yet somehow our parents sussed out the offending tape and promptly confiscated it. Undaunted, my brother snatched it back one day when they were out. By now he’d started building a fairly sizable hip-hop collection on the sly. He kept it under wraps O.G. style, stashing any CDs or tapes that might be deemed questionable in a beaten-up guitar case he’d inherited from our grandpa. My folks made several more attempts at shutting him down, but his dedication to hip-hop culture eventually won out. By the time he graduated high school, my brother’s bedroom walls were plastered with magazine clippings of Redman, Canibus, Brotha Lynch Hung and other hip-hop heroes, with his own hand-painted portrait of Ol’ Dirty Bastard as a centerpiece. That old copy of Hard to Earn still maintained a prominent place in his music collection, though by now it had been played so many times that the cassette had to be held together with masking tape.

I relate this story to demonstrate the kind of passion Gang Starr and the late, great Guru could inspire in a pubescent white kid growing up in backwoods Wisconsin. Hard to Earn was a perfect musical gateway drug for my little brother and, to a somewhat lesser extent, for me. There was something about the combination of Guru’s literate, monotone flow and DJ Premier’s jazz-soaked production that made Gang Starr slightly less intimidating than a lot of other rap groups. I can see how my parents would have been put off by the profanity and references to drugs and violence (though all were quite mild by general hip-hop standards), but under that gritty surface I found a thoughtful, soulful work of art that resonated on a surprisingly universal level.

I was especially fascinated by “The Planet,” a song recounting Guru’s youthful move from Boston to Brooklyn and his early struggles breaking into the rap game. Guru eschews the angst and melodrama common to so many “back in the day” tracks (i.e., Coolio’s “I Remember,” Ghostface’s “All That I Got Is You”), instead painting a picture of that odd blend of exhilaration, desperation and boredom that comes with being young and on your own for the first time. I consider the song a masterpiece of subtlety, filled with evocative, identifiable images (“Kissed my mother / Gave my pops a pound / Then he hugged me / Then he turned around”). That’s pretty much how I regard the whole of Hard to Earn and the Gang Starr canon in general. Guru and Premier simmered while other hip-hoppers boiled, creating a sound that struck a delicate balance between intensity and detachment. It was a style without precedent at the time, and one that’s never been equaled since.

That’s why Guru's untimely passing earlier this week hit me harder than celebrity deaths usually do. I celebrate the entire Gang Starr catalog, as well as Guru’s rather daring Jazzmatazz side project, but it’s Hard to Earn that earned him a place in my heart, both for the brilliance of the music and for my memories of the passion it inspired in my little brother.

R.I.P. and F.A.L.A. to a real MC.

A brief memo to Tea Party and Code Pink activists and their ilk

2010-03-31T09:46:00.004-05:00

When I was 23, I was outraged with my government. I talked a lot about how the president was an evil dictator bent on destroying the country, and ranted to anyone who would listen about the creeping changes that would inevitably bring about the end of freedom as we knew it. I was a bubbling cauldron of what I believed to be righteous indignation.

And then I grew up.

“Jughead Jones: Superhero” or “Mr. Jones and me look into the future”

2010-03-19T22:24:00.003-05:00

I’ve read a lot of articles trying to explain the endless appeal of superhero comics. Hardcore comics fans frequently cite lonely or traumatic childhoods that left them feeling largely powerless. They claim to have been comforted by the idea of super-powered beings who could cast off the bonds of everyday life and fight the forces of evil on their own terms. Every outsider group seemed to have a tailor-made hero: science nerds had Spider-Man, kids who’d lost loved ones had Batman, gay teens had the X-Men, rage-filled youngsters had The Hulk, straight-up sociopaths had The Punisher and so on. In the most overt instance, Captain Marvel’s secret identity was Billy Batson, a scrawny, handicapped child who could transform himself into an all-powerful über-man.

I liked superhero comics quite a lot when I was a lad, but I can’t say they ever connected with me on exactly that level. I dug Spider-Man because he cracked wise, slung webs and had a cool-looking costume. Oh sure, Peter Parker’s geeky background held a certain appeal for a bookworm like me, but I was grounded enough to leave his adventures mostly on the printed page. That isn’t to say that I never had a comic book role model. It’s just that my hero was of the non-super variety.

For me, Jughead Jones occupied the role that Daredevil and The Flash filled for other kids. As I’ve mentioned before, I was and am a huge fan of Archie comics. I found the antics and adventures of the denizens of Riverdale comforting and familiar, though I started reading their stories when I was much younger than the teenage protagonists. Even so, I probably would have quickly outgrown Archie and the gang if it wasn’t for Jughead.

There’s really nothing all that remarkable about the students of Riverdale High. From Archie’s clumsy amorousness to Reggie’s status-seeking misanthropy to Veronica’s mindless opulence to Betty’s apple-pie goodness, the main cast is a pretty bourgeois bunch. The tertiary teens who hang around the core group aren’t much better, as each is mostly defined by a trademark trait or two. Dilton is super smart, Moose is dumb and jealous, Big Ethel is ugly and infatuated, Chuck is a jock (and later an artist, for sensitivity’s sake), etc. None of that detracted from my enjoyment – in fact, the easy characterizations have always been a big part of Archie’s comfort factor – but it was Mr. Jones who really cemented my love of the medium.

Much like my peers and their superheroes, I saw in Jughead a projection of what I might be in an idealized fantasy world. In reality, I was a nerdy little kid growing up in the backwoods of Western Wisconsin. I wasn’t exactly ostracized at my tiny country school – with only five boys in my grade, there wasn’t much room for outcasts – but my bookish ways and vaguely hippie upbringing placed me about as far on the outskirts as possible. I recognized early on that I was doomed to be the “weird kid” in most social settings. That might have been a major downer if I hadn’t had Jughead Jones’ example to follow.

Along with fellow oddballs Gonzo the Great and J. Wellington Wimpy, Jughead (especially as depicted by the amazing writer-artist team of Frank Doyle and Samm Schwartz) taught me that weird could be OK. More than that, weird could be cool. Alone amongst Riverdalians, Jughead ignored the passing trends and teenage silliness that consumed his classmates, opting instead to float around the periphery of the high school experience. To paraphrase Sterling Hayden in Dr. Strangelove, he did not avoid his classmates, but he did deny them his essence. He indulged in bizarre hobbies, ignored the constructs of fashion, refused to be drawn into the quagmire of the dating scene and generally marched to his own beat. Jughead was not without his failings, sloth and gluttony being his deadly sins of choice, but even these became more like charming quirks when paired with his personality.

Despite his contrary nature and odd predilections, Jughead was not the outcast one might suppose. As a matter of fact, he was a fairly popular kid who might even be called a local institution. Sure, Reggie and Veronica needled him from time to time, but only because Jughead was one of the few who was neither impressed with nor intimidated by their wealth and prowess. Ironically, his very refusal to seek the approval of his peer group made him one of the best-liked people in town.

That struck a resonant chord with my adolescent self. As I sprawled on my parents’ bed, paging through my stack of Double Digests for the umpteenth time, I imagined myself growing into that same kind of cool, confident teenager. I dreamed of a day when my artistic nature and offbeat sensibilities would merit more than just a teacher’s scrawled “Very creative!” in the margin of a fourth grade essay. If I just played it cool and embraced my inborn weirdness without flaunting it, I figured I could make it through the minefield of high school relatively unscathed.

And you know something? I think it worked. I know that trying to gauge one’s own high school popularity is a fool’s game, but I believe I emerged from four years at Sparta Senior High with a solid Jugheadian reputation – an odd but entertaining guy who was at least well-liked enough to be voted graduation speaker for the class of ’97. Maybe that doesn’t sound like the most impressive accomplishment, but Jughead also taught me to keep my fantasy within the realm of possibility. My dreams may not have been as lofty as those of my superhero-obsessed brethren, but I guarantee I came a lot closer to living the life of Jughead Jones than they ever did to leaping tall buildings in a single bound.

Note: As evidence of my ongoing obsession, pictured above is the rear wall of my home office, complete with hundreds of Archie comics, 12-inch Archie and Jughead dolls, a portrait of Jughead painted by my sister-in-law Diana, and my new prize possession, Samm Schwartz’s original artwork for my all-time favorite Jughead story, 1983's Crowning Glory (frame pending).

An open letter to the narrator of Chicago's "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?"

2010-03-15T06:13:00.004-05:00

Dear Sir:

A simple "I don't have a watch" would suffice. Don't be a dick.

Thank you,
Ira

Meditations on Lou Reed’s “Hudson River Wind Meditations”

2010-03-02T23:09:00.006-06:00

I’m writing this on Lou Reed’s 68th birthday. As I’ve discussed before, this has long been an important personal holiday for me. For more than 15 years, I’ve celebrated Lou surviving another spin of the globe by buying one of his albums. You might think I’d eventually run out of purchasing options, but a steady stream of mediocre live albums and back catalog reissues have kept me rolling thus far. Up until this year, though, there was one Lou Reed album I resisted: 2007’s Hudson River Wind Meditations.

It might seem odd to a modern observer that one of rock music’s preeminent provocateurs would release an entire album of instrumentals intended as backing music for t’ai chi exercises, but those were different times back in the mid-Oughts. The Chi-sploitation boom was in full effect. Everywhere you looked, the entertainment industry was pumping up the hedonistic T’ai Chi Lifestyle, with all the cheap thrills and crazy risks entailed by moving very slowly in a public space. One might have hoped that a genuine artiste like Lou would have had the integrity to resist cashing in on that kind of glitzy trend, but the man’s not made of stone.

All kidding aside, I can’t fault Lou Reed for dedicating his musical talents to something he’s truly passionate about. I’ve seen a number of interviews in which Lou professes his love for the discipline and philosophy of t’ai chi, even going so far as to say it saved his life. That’s how I eventually convinced myself to set aside my doubts and lay down ten bucks for Hudson River Wind Meditations. I figured that this project means a lot to Lou Reed, and Lou Reed means a lot to me, so I may as well give it a go.

Now that I’ve listened to the album in its entirety, I’m beginning to suspect that Lou Reed and I are very different people. It’s not that the appeal of t’ai chi is entirely lost on me. The demonstrations I’ve seen make it look very peaceful, and I admire the kind of mental focus that must go into keeping one’s movements so studiously controlled. But if the music on Hudson River Wind Meditations is an accurate indication of the t’ai chi experience, I think I’ll stay on the sidelines.

The opening track, “Move Your Heart,” is not much more than a gentle sonic pulse. As such, it’s quite soothing. It definitely makes for a few minutes of pleasant listening. Problem is, it goes on for more than a few minutes – nearly thirty, in fact, with the only changes being barely perceptible shifts in tone. Still, it accomplishes its goal of relaxation, creating an effect similar to waves rolling in on a beach. I can see how it would lend itself to a slow-moving martial art, but it ain’t quite my cup of tea.

The title of the free-form second track, “Find Your Note,” seems like a dare. I can find plenty of notes in it, but no two of them seem to belong together. Burbling about with a lot of meandering hums and high-pitched droning, this thing is slow and formless enough to make John Cage sound like Joey Ramone. Musically, it bears a fair resemblance to Lou’s notorious Metal Machine Music, but I like that recording much better. I think of Metal Machine Music like a piece of abstract art: spend a little time with it, and ideas begin to emerge from the chaos, revealing different things to different people. I don’t get that vibe from “Find Your Note.” Instead, it walks a fine line between soothing white noise and headache-inducing squall. I believe I’d have to abandon any workout with this as the soundtrack for fear of full-on madness. Lou closes out the proceedings with one track that’s mostly the sound of blowing wind and another reprising the undulations of “Move Your Heart,” in case the first 30 minutes left us hungry for more.

Look, I understand that I’m not the target audience for this album. I don’t do t’ai chi, so I don’t know if there’s some kind of psychic relevance that’s just going over my head. For all I know, Lou Reed has crafted the definitive masterpiece of the genre. So apologies to any practitioners of the slow arts who might take offense; I’m sure Hudson River Wind Meditations will continue to be a boon to your maneuvers for years to come.

As for me, I’m tucking it in the Oddball File alongside Lou's weird stabs at stand-up comedy and literary theater. They may not generate a lot of listens, but at least they're evidence of an artist who's still trying new, very peculiar things five decades into his career.

Happy birthday, Lou, and long may you meditate.

Johnny Cash: Torturer – “Five Minutes to Live” and the Maniac in Black

2010-02-23T23:28:00.013-06:00

Back in the days before at-home internet access was the standard and IMDb topped every cinephile’s bookmarks list, I was an avid user of the Videohound Golden Movie Retriever, an annually published compendium of films available for home video viewing. As a voracious young movie buff and aspiring critic, I’d spend entire evenings poring over and memorizing the casts, directors and capsule descriptions of thousands of films. I studied the 1998 edition harder than I ever did any schoolbook. Eventually, I could have my pal Joel flip to any page and call out a random title, and 90% of the time I could tell him the plot and principal cast.

That encyclopedic knowledge came in handy when I browsed the racks at my local video store, but it also made me realize of the shop’s limitations. Videohound clued me in to dozens of intriguing-sounding titles that were simply unavailable in most of the outlets I frequented. Those obscure objects of desire ranged from trash like The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here! to artsy fare like Alex in Wonderland to the mellifluously titled Spaghetti Western You’re Jinxed, Friend. You’ve Met Sacramento.

One forgotten film loomed above the rest on my must-see list, a low-budget crime flick from 1961 called Door-to-Door Maniac. That’s an indisputably great title, but that wasn’t the primary reason I wanted to track it down. That honor went to the actor playing the titular role: none other than the great Johnny Cash. The title, the star and Videohound’s damning bone-and-a-half rating made me believe that this was a movie I needed to see forthwith. Back in 1998, however, that was easier said than done.

Twelve years later, I finally fished a copy of Door-to-Door Maniac (presented under its less exciting, if more accurate, original title of Five Minutes to Live) out of the Cult Films section at my local Cheapo Discs. I don’t generally buy movies sight-unseen, but I reckoned I couldn’t really go wrong for eight bucks. I reckoned right.

On its surface, Five Minutes to Live is a grimy but not especially remarkable movie. It’s the story of the Wilsons, a bland small-town family with a few skeletons in the closet. Dad (Donald Woods) is prone to weekday hangovers and is having what looks to be an exceptionally chaste affair with a matronly neighbor. Mom (Cay Forrester, who also wrote the screenplay) buries her discontent under a blanket of passive-aggressive over-involvement with her women’s club. Junior (Ron Howard) channels his rage into a shrill series of precocious wisecracks and plots to one day torment humanity by making a string of grotesque, soulless, mega-budget movies.

These folks are so relentlessly unpleasant that it’s much easier to root for the purported villains, a smooth talker named Fred Dorella (Vic Tayback, looking especially large-faced) and a psychotic fugitive from New Jersey (!) called Johnny Cabot (Mr. Cash). Dorella has hatched a plan to knock over the local bank without pulling a stick-up: Cabot worms his way into the Wilson house and holds Mrs. Wilson hostage. Meanwhile, Dorella calmly orders her bank vice president husband to hand over $70,000 or his wife has five minutes to live. (Hey, that’s the name of the show!)

What follows is sort of an early ‘60s take on the techno thriller, with the perils and foibles of person-to-person calling at the center. As robbers, solicitors and nosy neighbors play a deadly game of phone tag, Cabot entertains himself by smashing Mrs. Wilson’s precious knick-knacks and torturing her emotionally, physically and possibly even sexually (the latter is only implied – this is a sleazy movie, sure, but it’s still 1961). Ultimately, it’s not a perfect B-movie – the ending is a cop-out that lets Dad off way too easy – but it’s sure as hell a memorable one.

It’s the Cabot character and Cash’s performance that establish Five Minutes to Live as something special. Forrester’s screenplay is surprisingly slimy, especially coming from a female writer of her time. It doesn’t try to pawn off a neutered, watered-down villain like many products of the era would. Within the first ten minutes, we see Cabot machine-gun a cop and shoot an unarmed woman in cold blood. This is a violent, remorseless and sadistic guy, and Johnny Cash is fully up to the part.

The cinematic vaults of the '50s and '60s are lousy with half-assed vanity projects for the era's pop stars, but this part bears little resemblance to Mel Torme’s frog-faced hood in Girls' Town or Roy Orbison's weirdness in The Fastest Guitar Alive. Sure, Cash is saddled with singing a tie-in title tune, but he makes it into a bad-ass meditation on evil and existence. In several chilling scenes, he taunts Mrs. Wilson with the song, looming close, strumming softly and reminding her she’s down to her last five minutes. It’s a brutal, muscular performance that sometimes goes over the top, but never egregiously so. There’s every reason to think it could have been a stepping stone to a long career of playing celluloid heavies for the Man in Black, had he chosen to take that route.

So how come nobody’s heard of this movie? It’s hard to say. My best guess is that Cash wasn’t particularly proud of Five Minutes to Live, not because of his performance, but because of who he was at the time. When Johnny Cash died in 2003, the few retrospectives that even mentioned his acting career focused on his '70s and '80s output, which ranged from half-respectable Westerns to made-for-TV garbage. In those later films (not to mention his prime-time variety show), a clean-and-sober Cash played variations on his somewhat tongue-in-cheek ‘70s “outlaw” persona. Five Minutes to Live, on the other hand, captured him at his pill-addled worst. The Johnny Cash of 1961 was a man of many demons, and they’re all right there on the screen. Later on, Rick Rubin helped him embrace his innate darkness while still walking the line, but it’s not too shocking that Cash would prefer that this documentation of his ugliest days stay buried.

Ordinarily, I’m all in favor of respecting a dead man’s wishes. In this case, though, the ongoing obscurity of Five Minutes to Live does a disservice to lovers of Johnny Cash and trash cinema. This movie needs to become a full-on cult classic post-haste. I encourage you to spread the word. After all, not everyone has time to sit around memorizing Videohound guides.

You can watch the entirety of Five Minutes to Live right here. You should do so. Right now. Come on. It isn’t very long.

“The names of the game” or “Fey ball!"

2010-01-05T23:07:00.005-06:00

I’ve always been a big fan of naming living things. When I was a youngster, I gave personality-appropriate names to all of the trees in my parents’ yard: “Big Bart” for the giant cottonwood, “Scarface” for the box elder with barbed wire embedded in its trunk, et cetera. As an adult pet owner, I thrilled at the chance to saddle a cat with a pretentious literary name like Orwell. I’ve actually considered buying pairs of goldfish just so I could parcel out allusive names I know my wife would reject for more permanent creatures, names like “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “Quentin and Caddy” or “Showalter and Grimsrud.”

Two weeks ago, my wife had a baby, giving me a chance to name an actual human being. In the naming game, this is pretty much an invite to the big dance. You don’t want to blow it by getting too outré (something like “Blanket” or “Kal-El”), but you also don’t want to go too timid (“Mike” or “John,” say (Apologies to all the Mikes and Johns I know)). After considerable deliberation, we went with “Selby,” a name that summons thoughts of both Selby Avenue (a major thoroughfare in our son’s home city of Saint Paul) and author Hubert Selby (whose work I’ve not read much of, but who was a major mentor for a lot of my writerly friends at Columbia College Chicago), even though he’s not officially named after either.

Last week one of my Twitter pals told me that “Selby” was a very good name, but it was unlikely that my son would be playing middle linebacker with a handle that twee. I have to admit, that gave me pause. I’ve often mused that there’s a correlation between the greatness of an athlete’s name and his performance. The roster of legendary NFL quarterbacks, for instance, is rife with exceptional monikers: Joe Montana, Johnny Unitas, Peyton Manning, Bart Starr, Fran Tarkenton. Of course, an amazing name isn’t an automatic ticket to excellence; if that was the case, Vinny Testaverde would be remembered as the greatest QB of all time. And guys like Larry Bird, Mike Schmidt and Barry Sanders can attest that a standard-issue name isn’t necessarily a stumbling block either.

But I can’t deny that it’s a tough row to hoe for guys with more high-toned names. Despite increasing evidence to the contrary, sport is still thought of as the domain of big, brutish guys of unerringly macho comport, and that includes their names. On the manliness spectrum, “Selby Brooker” isn’t exactly “Little Lord Fauntleroy” or “Thurston Howell III,” but neither is it “Carlos Boozer” or “Takeo Spikes.” I have no idea whether my son will be athletically inclined when he comes of age, but his genes suggest he’ll be a big guy built for basketball. I’ll admit that I do harbor hopes of watching him hold down the paint on the varsity squad someday. With that in mind, I scoured the current rosters of the MLB, NFL and NBA and tracked down five guys who have enjoyed a solid bit of athletic success despite having names better suited to Masterpiece Theater than Sportscenter.

Tyson Chandler

The veteran big man pulls off the neat trick of having two first names that are also last names. “Chandler Tyson” would sound slightly more snooty, but just barely.

Chauncey Billups

“Chauncey” is an awfully fey name in any context, and pairing it with the slightly silly-sounding “Billups” conjures images of low-level British aristocracy. I halfway think the name has kept Chauncey from getting the props he deserves as one of the most stone-cold playmakers of his era.

Chase Utley

Chandler, Chauncey, Chase – there’s something about that “Ch” sound that just smacks of high-tonality. Also, Newhart ensured that I’ll forever associate the name “Utley” with quaint New England inns (although Tom Poston’s George Utley was about as far from blue-bloodedness as you can get).

Percy Harvin

NFL Rookie of the Year candidate or prep school ne’er-do-well? Can’t you just hear a long-suffering butler saying, “I beg your pardon, Madame Harvin, but Willowhaven just phoned. It appears Master Percy has been involved in a bit of a to-do in the dining hall.”

Channing Frye

You can’t tell me this isn’t the name of the snooty jerk who loses his girlfriend to the blue-collar lead in an ‘80s slobs vs. snobs comedy.

So yeah, if these guys can make a living amongst the ball-and-sweatband set, I have to think there’s hope for my boy. Macho may be the rule of thumb, but if there’s room in the Baseball Hall of Fame for a guy named Gaylord Perry, there’s got to be an opening for Selby Brooker.

The Velvet Underground responds to Lou Reed’s iPhone app

2009-12-16T11:44:00.003-06:00

In one of the more unexpected recent collisions of art and technology, Lou Reed has released Lou Zoom, an iPhone application that allows readers to zoom in on text and refine contact searches on their mobile phones. Not to be outdone, some of Lou’s former Velvet Underground associates have announced plans to follow suit. Here’s a brief look at what mobile users can expect.

Cale Tales by John Cale
Automatically inserts oblique historical references into any document. (Warning: May not be compatible with all versions of Lou Zoom.)

Sterling Silver by Sterling Morrison
Runs in the background, coordinates other apps for a more satisfying user experience.

Mo Go by Maureen Tucker
Reliable, deceptively simple app speeds up and slows down processes as the situation demands.

Yule Tool by Doug Yule
Budget edition of Lou Zoom performs decently for a brief spell, then mysteriously disappears from your desktop.

Yule 2L by Billy Yule
Mo Go knock-off suffers the same deficiencies as its sibling app.

Nico Speak by Nico
Converts standard text into illegible Teutonic fonts and adds noisy, impenetrable backgrounds to every screen.

The App Factory by Andy Warhol
Automatic app generator creates dozens of niche applications every day. (Warning: Most of these mini-apps amount to little more than desktop clutter.)

"Night train to Crazy Town" or "A town by any other name would be as crazy"

2009-12-11T19:51:00.006-06:00

Every so often I’ll get an unexpected e-mail from my buddy Max. E-mails from Max are cause for celebration, as they generally include links to some fascinatingly useless material. Video clips involving horror movies and professional wrestlers are a recurring theme. Max has graced me with wonders ranging from Mean Gene Okerlund interviewing Andy Warhol to selected scenes from Lindsay Lohan’s opus I Know Who Killed Me. Seriously, if you’re not receiving e-mails from my buddy Max, you owe it to yourself to get on his mailing list.

This past summer, however, Max sent me something much more troubling than his usual fare. In a message entitled “An unfortunate retrospective on human stupidity,” he linked to the music video for “Butterfly,” a song performed by a California band called Crazy Town. This video is quite possibly most horrific thing ever committed to film, and I’m including war atrocities, “Two Girls One Cup” and that footage of Shawn Livingston’s leg snapping in half. Max aptly describes it as “a smorgasbord of late nineties crap, complete with bad piercings, surfer skater Bermuda bullshit, digitally enhanced raver head backgrounds, and just about the worst fusion of rock and rhyming in the history of crappy rap/rock fusions.”

Max’s e-mail made me remember the era when “Butterfly” was an unavoidable radio staple. Now, top 40 radio hasn’t been a factor in my life since I quit my college job at the pom-pom factory. Whenever I happen to see a list of the week’s top hits, I’m hard pressed to find even one that I recognize. But back in ’01, that “Come my lady, come-come my lady” refrain was ubiquitous enough to worm its way into my consciousness. I hadn’t, however, known who exactly was singing it. Learning that “Butterfly” was performed by a band named “Crazy Town” opened the door to a whole new dimension of horror. I believe I was previously aware that a band with that name existed, but I’d never stopped to reflect on the disturbing implications of that fact.

Think about it: At some point in the not-too-distant past, a group of people got together with the intention of naming a band. I can’t say for sure whether this collective involved the band members themselves or just whatever corporate marketing team was tasked with branding this new musical commodity. Regardless, this group of people presumably cycled through a wide array of potential handles, with numerous suggestions being proffered and shot down. And somehow, when all was said and done, this group of people decided that “Crazy Town” was the way to go.

Look, I sympathize with these folks. As a copywriter, I am often tasked with naming things, and it is easily my least favorite part of the job. Coming up with a single word or phrase that captures the essence of a product or concept and isn’t already being used by someone else is a difficult endeavor. It can’t be simple to think up a totally original moniker for a new group, especially when you’re competing in the teeming marketplace of post-Chili Peppers Cali rock-hop acts. But even taking all of that into consideration, there is no conceivable way that “Crazy Town” was the least objectionable option on the table. If Crazy Town was the best name available, what got rejected? “Loonyville”? “Insannesburg”? “Psycho City*”?

I mean, dear lord – Crazy Town. It sounds like a playground insult or the setting for a Nicktoon. Are we to presume that the band members are residents of Crazy Town? Are they the sole residents, or is Crazy Town a city on the grow? Does Crazy Town have an infrastructure and a political hierarchy? Is there, for instance, a Mayor of Crazy Town? Wouldn’t “Mayors of Crazy Town” be an infinitely better band name?

Given the quality of the music, I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised by the awfulness of the name. This is, after all, a band whose front man voluntarily went by the name “Shifty Shellshock.” But man, even by the standards of their audience and era, Crazy Town is ridiculous. At least the other fratty douche bands of the early Oughts chose flat-out infuriating names like Limp Bizkit, Papa Roach and Hoobastank (OK, that last one is almost as bad). Crazy Town is just plain silly. Had I been an upside-down visor enthusiast in 2001, there is no way I would have ever shown my soul patch at any performance by a band with a name so thoroughly un-rocking.

Maybe I’m getting too worked up about this, but I don’t think it’s too much to ask that sacred institutions like cheesy rock bands abide by some sensible standards of nomenclature. Today’s rockers could take a cue from my own high school band, Inflatable Grandpa. Now there’s a name with all the dignity and grace that befits a true progenitor of the musical arts.

*Actually, that one’s already taken. About 10 years ago some friends and I went to a karaoke night at a now-defunct dive bar in Northeast Minneapolis. One of the regulars was a short, scruffy little guy who specialized in singing ‘80s hair band tunes. For some reason, he took a liking to us and told us in great detail about his dream of assembling a metal band called Psycho City, in honor of his favorite Great White song. My point: even a sketchy drunk who devotes his evenings to belting out “Something to Believe In” at a grimy bar on Hennepin Avenue can come up with a marginally better, or at least more alliterative, name than Crazy Town.

Criticizing Dave Eggers' critique of critics

2009-12-03T21:15:00.004-06:00

For someone who seems to be a pretty genuine and decent guy, Dave Eggers inspires a weird range of emotions. I know plenty of people who regard him as the living embodiment of all that’s wrong with modern literature. I know just as many who think of him as the voice of his generation. I have mixed feelings about his work, but I definitely side more with the supporters than with the haters. I have nothing but admiration for the youth writing programs he’s helped foster across the country. I thought his A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was a very good memoir, even though I disliked its quirky footnotes and meta-textual devices. I like a lot of the work McSweeney’s has done, but I’m not much for its postmodern affectations.

Recently, though, I came across a quotation from Eggers that rubs me every which way but right. It’s from a lengthy 2000 interview in the Harvard Advocate in which a question about “selling out” prompts a passionate response. Eggers makes some excellent points about a particular, poisonous breed of hipster criticism, specifically citing an acquaintance who haughtily dismissed The Flaming Lips because one of their songs was used in an episode of Beverly Hills 90210. He rails against those who would place limits on an artist based on an arbitrary code of authenticity or assail someone’s work to gratify their own egos.

I’m with him most of the way. His irritation with the ever-hypocritical “sellout” refrain is fully justified. His tone is pretty defensive throughout, but that’s at least partially excused by the interviewer’s own palpably smug tone. But when Eggers starts taking broad swipes at the institution of criticism, he loses me in a big way. I find this comment especially galling:

“Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a fuckload of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes.”

There is so much I disagree with in that passage, I’m not even sure where to start. I guess my biggest problem is with the idea that anyone who hasn’t written a book is unworthy of criticizing someone else’s. He does acknowledge elsewhere in the interview that there are some helpful critics in the world, but still holds that “by and large, the only book reviews that should be trusted are by those who have themselves written books.” So then, if I’m not allowed to dismiss a movie without having made one, am I also unqualified to embrace it? Am I within my rights to complain about my malfunctioning DVD player even though I’ve never built one myself? Is it OK for an author to perform a satirical reading lampooning Dick Cheney (as I saw Dave Eggers himself do in Chicago a few years back) even though the writer has never been Vice President of the United States? Eggers’ stance is elitism masquerading as populism, and I find it disingenuous and insulting.

I’ve been both a working artist and an arts critic for my entire adult life. Few things bug me more than artists casting criticism by “non-artists” as irrelevant. First of all, that suggests that criticism is not, in itself, a form of art. In my estimation, a well-written, well-reasoned piece of criticism can very easily stand on its own as an artistic statement made in reaction to someone else’s artistic statement. If the film writing of folks like Roger Ebert, Nathan Rabin or Jaime Weinman is somehow invalidated because the writers are not filmmakers themselves, then I’ve wasted an awful lot of reading time over the years. (Yes, I know Ebert dabbled in film early in his career, so maybe he gets a pass by the Eggers standard.) Actually, an argument could be made that non-artists sometimes make better critics. People who work within the same discipline can be too close to the subject to view it objectively. I’ve had plenty of conversations with writers whose critique of others’ stories boils down to, “That’s not the way I would have written it!”

Eggers’ statement about his critical “rage and envy” also hits a sore spot for me. One of the most common knocks I hear against the institution of criticism is that all critics are failed artists lashing out against the world that rejected them. Maybe that was true of Eggers, but that doesn’t mean critics as a whole are a spiteful den of vipers – it just means Dave Eggers was a bad critic. As much as I like the idea of some shadowy cabal of critics plotting revenge on the art world like so many scorned supervillains, I think questioning anyone’s motives for writing anything puts one on shaky ground. Heck, half of Eggers’ piece is a defense of making art for money. Critics gotta get that dollar too!

I’ve worked with a lot of critics in my day, and in my experience there is no more enthusiastic group of art lovers in the world. One of the greatest periods of my creative life was when I worked as a music writer for Where Y’at magazine in New Orleans. On at least a weekly basis, one of the other writers would pop some hot new find into the office CD player and insist that the rest of us gather ‘round and share in the glory. Sure, Michael Dominici, the magazine’s Music Editor, sometimes used his podium to utterly savage albums he found lacking, but anyone who heard him gush effusively about relative unknowns like jazz singer Lizz Wright or swamp rock old-timer Joe Barry could have no doubt about how much the man loved music. Mike didn’t scorn or envy successful artists. He celebrated them and made it his mission to share just what made them and their work so special.

Maybe I’m misreading or oversimplifying. I know Eggers is specifically addressing people who turn up their noses at things that are perceived as too unhip or mainstream, but it seems to me that his argument also precludes artistic criticism, at least of a negative bent. Earlier in the interview, he says that “the critical impulse… is to suspect, doubt, tear at, and to take something apart to see how it works. Which of course is completely the wrong thing to do to art.” I disagree. That process describes exactly what Donna Bowman does in her exceptional, ongoing analysis of one of my all-time favorite TV shows, NewsRadio. Some might argue that Bowman’s approach is fussy and overly analytical, but no one could claim that she doesn’t truly love her subject matter. Her in-depth look at what made the show tick makes me reflect on the particular greatness of NewsRadio’s writing, cast and direction, and that only enhances my viewing experience.

In my estimation, Eggers’ stance supports the creation of art but puts strict limitations on how we should evaluate it. If every piece of art is left to bob around the world, seen but unanalyzed, does it even count as art? If we regard every creative endeavor on an even plane and keep our negative opinions to ourselves, don’t we effectively stifle an important, culture-wide dialogue? If we give the failures a free pass on the grounds of being “open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting,” don’t we do a disservice to the good and great works sharing the same stage?

Look, I know I’m getting a bit too worked up about a decade-old comment from a writer I generally admire. I really don’t intend any of this as a personal attack on Dave Eggers. He’s a sincere, hardworking writer who’s done as much good for writing in the past decade as just about anyone. It’s quite possible that his opinion has changed in the past ten years. He’s recently given a fair bit of time to The AV Club (my favorite arts publication, if my links weren’t enough of a clue), so it’s clear that he doesn’t eschew the critical establishment entirely. It’s just that I’ve seen too many artists blindly bashing critics over the years, and this piece happened to hit most of my hot buttons.

I understand that it hurts to have something in which you’ve invested your heart and soul assaulted on a public stage. I’ve gotten my share of negative feedback, and it’s never pleasant. It depresses me, angers me and puts me on the defensive. But it comes with the territory. Job evaluations are a part of every career. They help keep us at the top of our games. If my boss at my office job gives me a negative performance review, I don’t have the option of brushing it off as jealousy or ignorance or irrelevancy, even if I believe all of that to be true. Instead, I have to get my act together or risk dismissal. Criticism ideally serves a similar purpose for artists. We don’t have to take every negative word at face value, but we should at least acknowledge that there’s something to be learned from a reasoned critique. It’s just a fact that those who choose to share their art with the public will have it evaluated by the same. If you can’t handle seeing your work torn apart or otherwise “dismissed,” then you may have chosen the wrong path.

By the way, I’m pretty sure I’m authorized to make these comments, because I have written a book. Of course, my book hasn’t yet been published, so maybe I don’t make the cut. It’s a tricky gray area, that.

Note: I briefly posted a slightly different version of this entry earlier, then took it down when I decided it needed some clarification. Apologies if that created any confusion. Though I can't imagine what confusion that would create.

"The Chapstick Prophecies" or "The Mothman Slummeth"

2009-11-30T23:05:00.009-06:00

A recent Twitter conversation reminded me that it’s lip balm season in the upper Midwest, which naturally got me thinking about one of the great moments of unintentional movie comedy in the past decade. The Mothman Prophecies is a justly forgotten 2002 supernatural thriller based on the allegedly true story of a small town plagued by a flying, fuzzy humanoid with a knack for predicting the future. It stars Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Will Patton and, uh, Debra Messing. Dang, how was this thing not a hit?

Anyway, the titular Mothman starts cluing in some of the locals on various upcoming tragedies, giving Gere’s reporter a chance to indulge the standard jaded-journalist-turns-wild-eyed-believer shtick, Patton's off-balance townie a chance to get all spooky and Messing's irksome wife to die. To be fair, it isn’t a terrible movie, just not an especially engaging one. But it does pull off one moment of truly transcendent awfulness. Watch the trailer below and wait for the 1:37 minute mark.

Let me get this straight: the screenwriters knew they were pitching a moody, atmospheric thriller. Presumably they went through multiple drafts of their screenplay, trying to capture just the right tone and select the absolute perfect words. Yet somehow, when tasked with giving the creature a single, chilling word that would underline just what kind of powerful force was at work here, they couldn’t come up with anything scarier than “Chapstick”? (Or, more accurately, “Chap! Stick!") And not only did the filmmakers keep that scene in the movie, they even considered it hook-y enough to include in the trailer!

For years now, I’ve been working this scene around in my head, and I have come to the conclusion that there is no conceivable context in which “Chapstick” could be a scary word. No matter what your inflection, accent or intent, the effect of “Chapstick” ranges from banal to laughable. The best-case scenario I can think of for the use of “Chapstick” in a horror context would be for a character to offer a tube to someone who’d recently had his lips removed, but even there it would be more sadistically ironic than scary.

So how does something this silly make it onto the big screen? Was it product placement arranged by Chapstick executives looking to corner a share of the lucrative “lipless, clairvoyant, otherworldly being” demographic? Was it intentional tinkering by some in-studio Gere-hater, perhaps a Robert Altman acolyte still bearing the scars of Dr. T and the Women? I know The Mothman Prophecies is based on a supposedly non-fiction book, so perhaps “Chapstick” is a direct quote from what “actually” happened. But my lord – Hollywood bends the facts to suit its needs all the damn time. If they can make a murderous wretch like Robert Stroud into a noble-minded peacemaker or turn the bombing of Pearl Harbor into a romance for the ages, they can put something less ridiculous inside Richard Gere’s hand. Any of the following items would have been at least as scary as Chap! Stick!

- A stick of chewing gum (“Big! Red!")
- A different brand of lip balm (“Burt's! Bees!”)
- A creepy religious pamphlet (“Jack! Chick!")
- A video of another Richard Gere flop (“First! Knight!")
- An Eric B. and Rakim reference (“Nothing! But sweat!”)

Of hunting carols, Turdy Point Bucks and the cultural currency of the Upper Midwest

2009-11-28T01:04:00.009-06:00

I have never been a deer hunter. As a matter of fact, I’ve never so much as held a gun. That made me quite the anomaly growing up in my neck of Western Wisconsin. In that particular nook of the Upper Midwest, deer season is a half-step removed from being a religious holiday. Maybe not even that – I know plenty of people who devote more zeal to buck-bagging than most folks ever do to church, state or fellow man. It was pretty much a given that the populations of classrooms and workplaces would drop drastically for a couple of weeks every November. “Gone huntin’” wasn’t regarded as a medical excuse per se, but there was an unspoken understanding.

Even though I didn’t hunt, it was impossible to avoid the impact of deer season. The normally quiet woods and fields surrounding my family’s house suddenly teemed with blaze-orange blobs, their stocky frames standing in sharp contrast with the dirty white snow of early winter. Every time I left the house, the sound of rifle shots echoed in the distance, making the trek to the school bus feel like a bit like a sniper scene in some Vietnam movie. When we took our dog (a Viszla whose coat was only a shade redder than that of your average deer) out for a walk, we tied a red bandana around her neck and popped bright orange stocking caps on our own vulnerable noggins. November was an unusually tense month around the Brooker compound.

But the oddest manifestation of deer season, culturally speaking, would have to be the hunting carols. That phenomenon is exactly what it sounds like. Every year, all of our local radio stations, regardless of format, slipped two hunting-themed tunes into their regular playlists. For two weeks a year, “The Second Week of Deer Camp” and “Da Turdy Point Buck” dominated the airwaves just as surely as “The Little Drummer Boy” and “Feliz Navidad” would a few weeks later.

“The Second Week of Deer Camp” is a venerable classic, an accordion-driven, ramshackle accounting of how a bunch of shiftless hunters spend the titular time period. (Spoiler: They “drink, play cards and shoot the bull, but never shoot no deer.”) This one has been getting major play on Wisconsin airwaves for two decades now, even though the band responsible, Da Yoopers, isn’t technically Wisconsinian. “Yoopers,” in fact, is a nickname for the residents of that eerie no-man’s land called the Upper Peninsula, more commonly known as the U.P. Technically speaking, it’s part of Michigan. Geographically speaking, it should be part of Wisconsin. Realistically speaking, it’s not much more than an afterthought for anyone but the people who live there and the scads of hunters who invade its teeming woodlands every November.

Anyhow, Da Yoopers have actually recorded a fair number of musical comedy albums and garnered a cult following in the upper Midwest. “The Second Week of Deer Camp” is arguably the shiniest jewel in their crown (their Christmas carol “Rusty Chevrolet” also gets a good bit of airplay come December). An amiable romp through a drunken week when most of the sportsmen have given up all pretense of actually hunting, the song is punctuated by frequent belching, Spike Jones-y sound effects and some unfortunate outhouse imagery. The action, such as it is, unfolds over a simple accordion rhythm and is narrated in a thick Northwoods accent that makes Fargo seem subtle. It’s appreciated both by hunters who don’t take themselves too seriously and by the folks at home who always assumed there wasn’t a whole lot of deerstalking going on. It’s lowbrow for sure, but the rhymes are pretty funny and it succeeds in making a week of drinking in a cabin sound like a lot of fun.

If “Deer Camp” is the tried and true classic, “Da Turdy Point Buck” was the glitzy blockbuster. Often mistakenly credited to Da Yoopers, this laconic rap parody is actually the work of another U.P. group called Bananas at Large. A loose narrative of one hunter’s ill-fated encounter with a deer “created by God just for outdoor magazines,” this song was absolutely unavoidable in Wisconsin the winter of ’92. The cassette single – packaged in a blaze orange label, naturally – never got widespread distribution, but it was available at all of your finer gas stations and convenience stores.

The song essentially takes every element of the Yoopers tune and cranks it up a little: the accordion accompaniment is even sparer, the accent even thicker, the belching even ruder. In other words, it contains all the elements of a Wisconsin cult classic. Most of my middle school classmates (the male ones, at least) could recite the “Turdy Point Buck” lyrics word for word, adopting a deep-woods ‘Sconnie accent that really wasn’t too far removed from the way most of us talked normally. In fact, listening to the original recording now, I realize the cadence I’ve stored in my memory banks is actually that of Tim Schendel regaling me with his version during lulls in Mrs. Gatzke’s Earth Science class. I can’t deny that I loved it wholeheartedly when I was a youth, or that some of the imagery has proven remarkably enduring. Living in Chicago made me especially appreciative of the passage about the narrator’s “no-brother-good-in-law… from Illinoise.” (No offense to my actual brothers-in-law in Illinois.)

Putting it in hip-hop terms, “The Second Week of Deer Camp” is “Fight the Power” and “Da Turdy Point Buck” is “U Can’t Touch This.” The former feels lived-in and true-to-life, while the latter is just kind of derivative and silly. “Buck” is probably the more widely known amongst Midwestern rifle-toters, but both have worked their way deep into the fabric of Wisconsin’s holiest holiday.

Don’t think I’m being dismissive of either. In their own way, these hunting carols represent a unique piece of Midwestern culture. They’re a bit of a throwback to the early days of rock and roll, when radio stations were allowed to choose their own playlists and it was possible to have such a thing as a regional hit. Sure, these songs fall quite a bit farther on the Blue Collar Comedy side of the spectrum than my usual tastes, but I like having a pop culture reference point that’s instantly recognizable to every one of my rural grade school classmates and completely foreign to my big city friends. Call it flyover country all you want, but we’re every bit as capable of producing a distinctive musical mythology as anyone else is. Ours just involves a bit more beer and deer than most.

Highlights from The Trashmen's 2010 "Word a Day" desk calendar

2009-11-23T23:36:00.008-06:00

Saturday, February 13: "Bird."

Monday, April 26: "Bird."

Thursday, June 3: "Bird."

Saturday, September 25 (Featuring special guest wordsmith Joey Ramone): "Bird."

Sunday, October 31: "Bird."

Wednesday, December 15: "Bird."

Of Virgil Trucks, the Detroit Tigers and the meaning of life

2009-11-22T21:41:00.007-06:00

I think it’s generally agreed upon that sports metaphors are more overused than the Cleveland Browns’ punting unit. Rare is the modern business meeting that does not include a mention of tossing Hail Marys, sending in the B-team or making a game-time decision (I’ll admit to being a frequent abuser of that last one). Hackneyed or not, these metaphors serve their purpose. It’s a little easier to pretend that life makes sense when it’s framed in the context of an organized athletic competition. Plus, describing an overly complex planning session as “having 12 men on the field” will get me many more knowing nods than will comparing it to the audio track of an Altman film or the first half of The Sound and the Fury.

And sometimes a sports metaphor can be more than just convenient. I’m thinking specifically of Virgil Trucks’ 1952 season with the Detroit Tigers, a campaign that I believe may provide me with a model for life itself.

Virgil Trucks has led a pretty interesting existence by just about anybody’s standards. A native of Birmingham (reputedly the greatest city in Alabam’), Trucks was a Major League pitcher for 17 years. He played in two All-Star games, brought home a World Series ring in 1945 and almost certainly would have won a Cy Young Award had it existed in 1953, when he finished fifth in MVP voting. He also served honorably in the Navy during WWII and even has a tangential connection to the modern jam band phenomenon: Virgil is the uncle of Allman Brothers drummer Butch Trucks and the great-uncle of guitar-slinger Derek Trucks.

That's all well and good, but I choose to cherish one of Trucks’ more ambiguous achievements. You see, in 1952, Virgil Trucks finished with a disappointing record of 5-19. Two of those wins, however, were no-hitters. Throwing one no-hitter is a rare feat. Throwing two in a season is something only four men have ever done. And throwing two in a decidedly losing season is my new ideal.

As I see it, in the game of life, there’s not much point in playing to win. Hard work and good intentions will only get you so far. Ultimately, the breaks are going to fall for you or against you, and you really don’t have much say in the matter. You can change up speeds, try a different grip on the ball, even file it down with an emery board in your effort to win, but the odds are that you’re going to rack up plenty of losses and no-decisions.

Some people are going to find a groove and pull off something spectacular, like Denny McClain’s 31-6 season with the ’68 Tigers. I don’t believe I know anyone personally who fits this profile, but I’m sure they’re out there. Other people are helpless to do anything but watch the losses pile up, like Adam Bernero’s 1-12 2003 campaign. This is how I picture life for that poor Star Wars kid from the YouTube video, or those guys who are always smoking cigarettes outside the weekly-rates hotel up the street from me. Those scenarios are, I think, beyond anyone’s control. Winners win, losers lose, but I don’t think many people fall completely in either category.

It seems like most people dedicate their lives to breaking even, like Paul Foytack going 14-14 for the 1959 Tigers. It’s not necessarily a bad goal. Closing out a season with 14 wins is pretty impressive. Losing 14 games isn’t great, to be sure, but at least you didn’t finish below .500. For a lot of folks, that’s enough. But me, I’m not content with aiming for the middle.

To me, what Virgil Trucks accomplished in that 5-19 effort is far more impressive. 19 is a lot of losses, and Trucks had enough success in his past that I guarantee every one of those blown games stung like hell. There must have come a point when he realized that his 1952 season was a wash-out, that there was no hope of him turning it around and posting a winning record. From that point on, I bet even the wins felt bittersweet, a reminder of what good pitching was supposed to feel like, and what it wouldn’t feel like until at least the start of the next season.

As a writer, that’s how I feel every time a rejection letter arrives in the mail, or a form e-mail from a literary agent shows up in my inbox. I count my losses with every story that writes itself into a corner, every line of dialogue that sounds embarrassingly stilted when read aloud, every scene that plays great in my head but falls flat on paper. Expand the metaphor to life in general and I could rattle off an endless litany of losses both tangible and intangible. Sure, I have some wins under my belt – more so than a lot of people, if I’m honest with myself – but most days the won-loss record feels even more lopsided than Virgil Trucks’ 5-19.

What pulls me through are those two no-hitters. Sure, 1952 was a lousy season for Virgil Trucks, but twice that year he achieved something very close to perfection. In those two games, he accomplished something that only a handful of human beings have ever done. The feeling he must have had when he recorded the last out of his first no-hitter is something few of us can conceive of. The feeling after the second one must have been indescribable.

That’s what I want out of life. I want my two no-hitters. Sure, it would be great to post a winning record too, but if tossing my gems means I lose in the long run, so be it. I will suffer my defeats with gratitude, so long as they’re in the service of two moments of ultimate, near-flawless success. Until then, I can only hope the sun keeps shining, my pitching elbow stays strong and the league doesn’t go on strike.

"Confessions of a video virgin" or "What's in the boooox?"

2009-11-09T21:58:00.007-06:00

For someone who grew up to be a fairly devoted cinephile, I was a pretty sheltered kid. I grew up in the country, in a converted grain barn half a mile from the nearest paved road. We got four, sometimes five channels on our fuzzy 19-inch TV, depending on the weather. (Even if we’d had the money for cable, I don’t think our local provider delivered that far out.) We didn’t own a VCR until my great uncle gave us a hand-me-down RCA behemoth when I was around 12. Before that, we’d occasionally rent a video player and a stack of movies as a weekend treat. My selection was pretty limited, as my parents were very dutiful about keeping my brother and me on a righteous path and protecting us from the uglier side of the entertainment industry. There were a lot of re-watchings of the Star Wars trilogy, Yellow Submarine and old Laurel & Hardy shorts.

The point I’m very gradually getting to is that I didn’t see horror movies as a kid. The closest I came was when the local Fox affiliate showed a week’s worth of those Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy/Frankenstein/The Invisible Man movies one summer, but there wasn’t much resembling genuine scares in those. I didn’t see a bona fide horror film until my fifth grade field trip to Washington, D.C., when someone played the not particularly terrifying The Lost Boys on the bus-wide video system.

You’d think that this combination of protective parenting and backwoods exile would have kept me ignorant of the horrors of Hollywood. Quite the opposite, actually. In the grand childhood tradition of yearning for that which is forbidden, I became obsessed with horror movie video boxes. Every time we took a trip to the video shop or the grocery store, I couldn't help myself from lingering in the horror section, where out-of-context imagery from all sorts of '80s trash played hell with my fragile, Christian psyche. I had no idea what the actual movies were like – and I had no real desire to find out – but there was more than enough evil stuff going on on the covers to keep me wide awake at night, listening to the coyotes howl in the valley (seriously, we were hill people).

I was reminded of all of my video box nemeses recently when The AV Club ran a Halloween feature on “Entertainment that terrified us.” That inspired me to seek out some of the old nightmare fuel and see just how much of the terror holds up. I was plagued by dozens and dozens of covers back in the day, but these are a few that stand out as the worst offenders.

House

I think what got me about this one was the ambiguity of it. Whose severed hand was that? What business did it have with the residents of the titular house? How the hell did it float like that? I lost a lot of sleep coming up with answers to all of those questions. It didn’t help any that the artwork reminded me of the illustrations in those Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books, another reliable source of middle-of-the-night terror. The dangling veins and tendons made me look down at my own skinny wrists and reflect on how fragile a thing the human body really was.

Current take: I’ve never seen House, but looking back, it seems silly to have been scared of anything that prominently featured George Wendt.

The Nightmare on Elm Street movies

I think most of my classmates had similarly sheltered existences, but in a school as small as Leon Elementary (Fewer than 100 students, grades 1-6), pretty much everything is a community experience. Just the images of Freddy Krueger’s claws and scars would have been enough to freak me out, but mixing them with Brian Brooks’ vivid descriptions of Freddy’s various eviscerations created a potent cocktail of dread.

Current take: I’ve seen a few of these as a grown-up. They’re pretty fun, really. Wes Craven at the top of his game can craft a damned entertaining horror flick, and Robert Englund’s performance as Freddy is deservedly iconic.

Firestarter

I really couldn’t tell you what disturbed me so much about this cover. There’s nothing inherently scary about it. For some reason, though, I found the image of little Drew Barrymore glaring intensely while some sort of inferno erupts behind her deeply unnerving. Obviously, something terrible has happened to push her to this point, and whatever she’s doing is going to lead to even worse things. I know some kids would have found the idea of a girl their own age being able to wreak havoc on the adult world exciting and liberating. Me, I never got the whole resentment of grown-ups shtick. Grown-ups made my meals, got me to school and kept me safe from the evils of the world. Why would I want to give that up?

Current take: I caught Firestarter on TV a while back. There was nothing to be afraid of – it’s really more of a thriller than a horror film. I was surprised at how much I liked it. I might even call it the best performance of Drew’s career.

Basket Case

Once, when I was around eight or nine, we were at my parents’ friends’ house and I stumbled upon their teenage son’s stash of comic books. The first story I flipped to involved a soldier waking up from surgery to discover that his arms and legs had been amputated. There was a full-page splash panel of the terrified man reaching his bandaged stumps up to the ceiling and screaming, “What did you do to me? I’m a BASKET CASE!” I shut the comic right there and went home that day with a shiny new disturbing image to worm around in my brain. From then on, the Basket Case box was a double-whammy for me. I was mortified both by the slimy claw creeping out of that wicker basket and by flashbacks to that unfortunate soldier in some unknown ‘80s horror comic.

Current take: I recently watched Basket Case and rather loved it. It’s a perfectly sleazy little slab of exploitation cinema, the way mama used to make it.

Mother’s Day

OK, this one still makes me shiver a little bit. There’s something about the combination of that grinning, skull-faced old lady, her freakish sons and the frozen scream on the lips of that decapitated head that moves beyond horror and into the realm of pure sadism. This one didn’t scare me so much as fill me with an existential dread. I’d heard and read enough stories about real-life serial killers to know that this kind of evil did exist in the world. I was still at the age of wanting to believe in the inherent goodness of humanity, and the smirking cruelty of this video box called that into question.

Current take: From what I’ve heard about Mother’s Day – it was one of my wife’s traumatic childhood movies – it’s every bit as brutal as I’d imagined it. I like a good horror film, but I don’t take kindly to rape and torture.

Xtro

Why was Xtro my number one video box bogeyman? It’s hard to say. Looking at it now, it’s by far the cheesiest of any of these images – just a badly drawn alien juxtaposed with a serious-faced little boy. I think what really got to me was that tagline. I interpreted that to mean that the boy on the box was going to slowly turn into the abomination behind him. There was something about unholy transformations that shook me to my very core. I was also frightened by the pull quote from Twilight Zone Magazine (seriously) about Xtro making xenophobes of us all. Not knowing the definition of “xenophobe,” I used context clues to surmise, ironically enough, that it was the name of an alien race. The notion of everyone I knew and loved being transformed into slathering space monsters invoked terror on par with the Book of Revelations for me.

Current take: I’ve never seen Xtro – I’m not even sure if it’s available on DVD – but I’ve heard it’s pretty laughable. I kind of want to watch it and I kind of don’t. I’m pretty sure the real thing wouldn’t live up to my nightmare visions, and some part of me wants to preserve my boyhood fear. In a weird way, it’s sort of comforting.

Five things I have never said to myself upon finishing a John Irving novel

2009-11-03T00:07:00.014-06:00

1. "Is there a more fascinating narrative sport than collegiate wrestling?"

2. "If only he were less ambiguous about his feelings for Charles Dickens."

3. "You can never have too many queasy rape scenes."

4. "I wish there'd been a little more deus in that machina."

5. "Needs more bears."

(Photo courtesy of this interview)

An open letter to the addressee of Young MC’s “Bust a Move”

2009-10-28T15:54:00.002-05:00

OK, I just want to say right from the start that I’m not trying to step on anybody’s toes here. I know you and Mr. MC go back a ways, and that you look to him as something of a mentor, young though he may be. Really, I have no strong objection to any of Mr. MC’s advice. His cautions against overzealousness, overeating and vows of celibacy are all spot-on. I do feel his methods may rely a bit too heavily on move-busting, but then, I don’t move in the party-hopping, beach-going, high-class-luncheon attending circles that you do.

No, what has me concerned is your relationship with Larry. You know, Harry’s brother? I’m worried that Larry may be a little, for lack of a better word, off. Now, don’t get upset. I know you’re slated to be the Best Man in the man’s wedding ceremony, but that’s exactly my point. Best Man is a very personal position with a lot of emotional ties attached to it. Are you telling me that Larry’s closest male bond is with his brother’s best friend? Does he not have any other friends of his own? Are you and he even friends in your own right?

And let’s talk about the timing of this whole thing. Larry is getting married in five days from now. Doesn’t a five-day window seem a little narrow for nailing down a Best Man? I know when I got married, the whole wedding party was informed months ahead of time. It’s not like this is a spur-of-the-moment shotgun wedding or some kind of Vegas chapel quickie. Larry has a church reserved and he expects you to rent a tuxedo. This thing’s been in place for a while. Maybe the previous Best Man canceled and you’re a last-minute substitute, but even then it seems odd that you vaulted from not even being invited into one of the most prestigious spots in the wedding party.

That’s another thing – he wants you to make it there “if you can”? Just how non-committal is this chump? If his bride-to-be is anything like mine was, she’s going to insist on having every detail mapped out, every RSVP accounted for, every “t” crossed and every “i” dotted. His casual attitude toward your attendance – toward his Best Man’s attendance! – speaks either to a total disregard for his future wife’s peace of mind or to some deeper level of sociopathy. Either way, it doesn’t bode well for the marriage, and it certainly doesn’t make Larry seem like someone I’d want as my friend.

Now look. I know you love Harry and would never want to do anything to put him on the outs with his family. But I really suspect this brother of his has some issues that you don’t want to involve yourself with. It’s not too surprising, I suppose. After all, he was raised by the sort of parents who thought giving their sons rhyming names was a good idea. If I were you, I’d come up with some kind of excuse for the wedding day and try to avoid Larry as best you can in the future.

I mean, tell the truth – you’re really only doing this in hopes of busting a move with one of those slatternly little bridesmaids, aren’t you? Why bother with that when you’ve been doing so well in so many other, Larry-free venues? Why don’t you give that girl from the movie theater a call? You know, the one who wore that yellow dress? She seemed nice. I think she was really into you, too.

But hey, don’t let me tell you what to do. If you want to waste your time with all of that faking and goodness-saking, that’s on you. Just don’t tell Larry we had this conversation, OK? That guy gives me the vapors something fierce.

"Broke, Busted, Disgusted" or "Wolfking in creep's clothing"

2009-09-25T07:27:00.006-05:00

NewsRadio is one of my favorite TV programs of all time, a smart, fast-paced comedy boasting the finest ensemble cast of its era. While he was never my favorite cast member, Andy Dick was a vital piece of the NewsRadio dynamic. His portrayal of reporter Matthew Brock as a childlike weirdo prone to pratfalls, freak-outs and hero-worship was off-kilter and endearing.

In the years following NewsRadio, however, Dick became primarily known as an out-of-control druggie prone to truly inappropriate outbursts in public settings. With every new drug bust or model-groping, a little bit of the shine came off of the Matthew character. By the time Jon Lovitz, of all people, gave Dick a sound thrashing for disrespecting the late, great Phil Hartman, it was difficult for me to separate the comedy from the comedian. I still love Dick’s work on NewsRadio, but when I watch it today, I can’t help but wonder how stoned Dick is in any given scene, or just how close Joe Rogan was to punching him out with the cameras rolling. Losing a TV friend like that just makes me sad, and I kind of hate Andy Dick for spoiling Matthew.

It’s not news to anyone with an awareness of the ‘60s California pop scene that John Phillips was an unconscionable bastard. It wasn’t until this week, though, that the world learned the full degree of the man’s bastardity. In rock star terms, Papa John’s descent into worthless junkiedom could be viewed as an occupational hazard. His cavalier abuse of a liver transplant he clearly didn’t deserve ratcheted up his detestability a few notches, but still didn’t place him in the upper echelons of celebrity bastards. This whole daughter-fucking thing, though – that’s pretty much one of the last remaining unforgivable sins.

Obviously, the biggest crime here is the one perpetrated by John against his daughter. If Mackenzie's allegations are true, and I rather believe they are, he took a sacred role of trust and guidance and used it to score a convenient drug buddy and sex partner. Transgressions don’t come much viler than that. But Phillips also committed a crime against his own artwork, and that of his numerous talented collaborators. As noted by my favorite pop culture commentator Sean O’Neal, from now on any time “Monday Monday” or “California Dreaming” gets queued up on a jukebox, someone’s going to make a snide remark about Phillips’ private perversions. Certain venues will probably stop playing anything Phillips-affiliated altogether, for a while at least. The sins of the father have sullied an amazing body of work, and that’s a tragedy in its own right. (As for Mackenzie Phillips’ claim that Mick Jagger had been lusting after her since she was ten – well, you’ve heard “Stray Cat Blues,” right?)

A few years back, I discovered Phillips’ first solo record, John the Wolfking of LA, in my local library’s CD section. I’d never heard of it before, but having a general if not passionate appreciation of The Mamas and The Papas, I figured it was worth a listen. As it turns out, it’s something of a minor masterpiece, and maybe my favorite artifact of the California country rock era. Phillips’s songwriting was never stronger than on this collection of sometimes sad, sometimes sleazy, always deeply personal pop songs. The music is fantastic, moving effortlessly from the reflective strums of “April Anne” and “Holland Tunnel” to the piano hall stomp of “Mississippi” and “Let it Bleed, Genevieve.” I quickly came to regard Wolfking as that ultimate object of hipster desire – a should-be classic album that hardly anybody else knew about.

Now I’m left to wonder just how tainted Phillips’ masterwork will be. I’m certainly not naive enough to think that all, or even most, or even many, of my artistic heroes are good people. I’m currently reading a biography of Lou Reed – my musical idol numero uno – that pulls no punches about Lou’s assholery toward just about everyone he’s ever had dealings with. That type of thing doesn’t upset me. I can fully appreciate the artwork of people who would probably bug the hell out of me at a cocktail party. Sometimes it’s fairly clear-cut – what film buff hasn’t watched a Roman Polanski movie and felt a twinge of guilt at enjoying the work of a fugitive child-rapist? Other times it’s more personal. Andy Dick’s sins clearly don’t rival those of John Phillips or Roman Polanski, but they’re almost as distressing to me because I hold NewsRadio so dear to my heart.

I’ve been listening to John the Wolfking of LA off and on since Mackenzie Phillips’ revelation. I’m somewhat relieved that the experience isn’t quite as tainted as I’d feared. It’s still a damn fine album in every regard, but I can’t help seeing it in a different light. The songwriting is personal to the point of autobiographical, so knowing that his incestuous affair was developing around the same time the album was being recorded makes Phillips’ references to secret lovers and infidelities feel pretty icky. Especially troubling are a pair of outtakes: “The Frenchman,” in which the singer warns a young girl against starting an affair with an older lover, and “Lonely Children,” just for its title.

I suppose only time will tell just how big an impact my new image of John Phillips will have on my love of Wolfking. I suspect that it will never again attain its full luster for me. Just as it’s impossible to watch Twilight Zone: The Movie without thinking about Vic Morrow and his young charges being decapitated, it will be tough to appreciate the bouncy rhythm of “Mississippi” without flashing on Phillips mounting his own drugged-up daughter. Still, I’d like to hope that after enough time has passed, I’ll be able to appreciate a tune like “Topanga Canyon” for what it is: a pleasant little ditty about a self-loathing junkie driving to the country to score some smack. Now that’s the John Phillips I’d like to remember.

“I’m OK, you're Computer” or “Blues for Pablo Honey”

2009-09-15T18:54:00.005-05:00

A little while back I had a conversation with my uncle Gene, a career educator who’s one of the best-read, most intellectually curious people I’ve ever met. He’d recently started reading William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, possibly my favorite novel of all time. He confessed that he’d given up on it about a quarter of the way in out of frustration with Faulkner’s circuitous, repetitive storytelling. I started to stand up for my man Bill, but when I thought about it a little, I decided to leave well enough alone. Truth is, Absalom, Absalom! is a laborious slog. I ultimately find it invigorating, chilling and fascinating, but I absolutely can’t fault anyone who doesn’t respond to Faulkner’s intentionally grueling style.

I bring this up because I find myself on the other side of the coin when it comes to Radiohead. Now, I’m somebody who’s pretty aware of the modern music scene, and I like to think I have pretty good taste. If I don’t get the appeal of a popular band, I usually just chalk it up to not being my speed and let it ride. But Radiohead is different. This is a group so universally beloved that I’ve always felt like there’s something wrong with me for not falling head over heels for them.

Don’t get me wrong – I’ve never disliked Radiohead. I’ve been moderately fond of them ever since my pal Nathan picked up Pablo Honey back when it first came out in ‘94. Trouble is, I’ve never gotten past moderate fondness, so I’ve long been perplexed by the endless stream of superlatives heaped on the band. Every time I hear OK Computer referred to as the default Greatest Album of the 1990s, my brain says, “But that’s a decade that produced In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Enter the 36 Chambers and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain!” And whenever someone refers to Radiohead as “our generation’s Beatles,” my thoughts turn toward the equally adventurous but more pop-friendly flows of OutKast.

I sometimes feel like this is a failing on my part – 50 million Thom Yorke fans can’t be wrong, right? I’ve been browbeaten so many times by my friends and colleagues that I feel I have a responsibility as a music fan to teach myself to adore Radiohead. I recently took my most proactive approach to date, sitting myself down with the band’s entire discography (including a couple of non-canon selections that I happen to have in my possession) and listening in earnest for whatever it is that’s been eluding me. The results have been equal parts frustrating and illuminating. Here’s my take on every album, in order of listening.

Kid A
When I’ve felt like I was on the verge of a Radiohead breakthrough in the past, it’s usually been while listening to a track from this album. I figured that made it as good a place as any to start. I wasn’t wrong – the best parts of Kid A embody the things I like most about Radiohead. Cuts like “The National Anthem” and “Optimistic” are slightly off-kilter, intensely produced tracks that aren’t afraid to rock out. Call me pedestrian, but that’s what I find enjoyable, and Radiohead is damn good at it when they put their minds to it.

Unfortunately, a lot of Kid A indulges the other side of Radiohead – the moody, broody soundscapes that flutter interminably against Thom Yorke’s mournful vocals. A lot of people have told me that these songs are the primary evidence of Radiohead’s genius. If that’s the case, genius treads a fine line between deadly dull and painfully grating.

Airbag/How Am I Driving? EP
I like this one. I like it quite a bit, actually. It’s like a compaction of the elements I most appreciate on OK Computer. The songs are well-crafted, straightforward and flow together well. I especially appreciate the instrumental “A Meeting in the Aisle,” as Thom Yorke’s vocals are a constant stumbling block for me. The guitar work and arrangement on “Polyethylene” veer fairly close to classic rock territory, which is a welcome development in my book. There’s a cool, trance-y vibe to this EP that’s not nearly as self-serious as a lot of the band’s work, and I dig that a lot.

Amnesiac
I’ve read this one described as the band’s overlooked masterpiece. I do not find it to be that. In fact, this is probably the Radiohead album that gives me the least to grab onto. It’s not bad, by any means. The production is elegant as always, and the electronic experimentation is consistently interesting. But at the risk of sounding like a record executive in a bad movie, “Where’s the single?” It’s not the case with every band, but with Radiohead I find that having at least one semi-conventional, stand-out track to focus on really helps me wrap my head around the rest of the album. Amnesiac doesn’t have that, and is thus my least favorite of their discs.

The Bends
Why is this such a derided album amongst the Radiohead faithful? I understand that it pre-dates the sonic experimentation that would become the band’s hallmark, but I find it to be an engaging, accessible example of mid ‘90s alterna-rock. As such, it sounds a lot fresher and more innovative than most albums of that era. I know Radiohead has a certain genius for pushing the envelopes of songwriting and sonic structure, but they also have a rare gift for cranking out great rock songs. This album is full of the latter. It also features “Fake Plastic Trees,” the first of too many slow-paced, “Moanin’ Tom” tracks. I feel these songs bog down a lot of the subsequent albums, but this one is graceful and utterly lovely.

OK Computer
I’ve tried OK Computer from so many angles since 1997. It means so much to so many people who mean so much to me that I feel it’s my duty to learn to love it. After my most recent round, I can report that I’m not quite there, but I’m closer than I’ve ever been. I still patently dismiss the idea of it being the best album of the ‘90s (I wouldn’t even call it the best of ’97. That’d be Built to Spill’s Perfect From Now On), but I can’t deny there are plenty of moments of greatness here. I’d even go so far as to call “Karma Police” a near perfect song, a lyrically chilling, musically enervating mission statement that deserves its iconic status.

And then there’s “Paranoid Android,” the album’s other focal point. My reaction to “Paranoid Android” kind of sums up my reaction to a lot of Radiohead: It’s peppered with bits of weird brilliance, its lyrics sparkle and it accomplishes some impressive musical feats, but it’s ultimately overwrought and overreaching. (Also, I’ve always hated the music video for some reason.) As for the rest, my reactions vary from “Hey, this is pretty damn good!” to “How long is this song again?” (The exception being “Fitter Happier,” which just plain sucks.) OK Computer still isn’t working its way into my heavy rotation anytime soon, but I’m getting less likely to skip over it when I scroll through my albums.

Alpine Valley, WI, August 2003
This is a live bootleg I burned from a friend a while back. I included it in my listening because I’ve heard a lot of great things about Radiohead’s live set. Listening to this disc, I can definitely see where they’d put on a killer show. There’s a lot of energy in these recordings, even on the slower numbers. It’s nice to hear a band with such meticulous, layered studio productions adapting so deftly to the immediacy of the live stage. It’s not an essential album by any means, but it does a nice job of humanizing an act that’s often chilly and uninviting by design. Also, I think I may prefer this rendition of “Paranoid Android” to the original.

Hail to the Thief
This one takes some knocks from the hardcore fans for being a bit more pedestrian than its predecessors, which may be what I enjoy about it. I suppose it suffers a bit from the same hooklessness as Amnesiac, though I like this one a little better. The experimentation is scaled back a bit, but it’s still nowhere near as accessible as something like The Bends. Hail to the Thief never reaches the highest heights of OK Computer or Kid A, but it also doesn’t traffic as much in the stuff that bugs me. I guess we can call it a draw.

In Rainbows
I don’t think anything is ever going to quite make me fall in love with Thom Yorke’s singing style. I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something about his florid moaning that really puts me off. But I recognize that’s Yorke’s singing is an essential part of the group’s sound, and In Rainbows puts it to good use. It’s a more coherent, approachable and consistent album than anything else in their recent catalog. That said, I’m looking back at the list of my 10 favorite albums of 2008 and I really can’t see anything I’d bump off in favor of In Rainbows (Yes, I know it’s technically a 2007 release. I’m going with the physical CD version, which still gives me more integrity than the Grammys). What does it say about me that I’d rather listen to the light-pop stylings of She & Him than the universally acknowledged Album of the Year? I don’t know, but “This Is Not a Test” is sure a lot more fun to sing along with than anything on In Rainbows.

Pablo Honey
Maybe it’s misplaced nostalgia, but I like revisiting the alt-rock of my 1990s heyday. As I said, Radiohead wasn’t at the top of my list back then, but they were on my radar. Revisiting Pablo Honey today, it sounds mainly like a really good ‘90s alt-rock album. There’s not much indication of where the band would be in four short years (one point where I can understand the Beatles comparison). Honestly, I like this one quite a bit. I’d even go so far as to say that this and The Bends are my most likely candidates for repeat listening. I realize that this probably makes me quite lame.

*****

So what did I learn from a week’s worth of Radioheadation therapy? Nothing too earth-shaking, I suppose. The band occupies pretty much the same slot it did before the experiment. I still think of them as a good group with some great songs and a fair bit of stuff I just can’t connect with. I think it’s about time for me to stop paying heed to friends who tell me, “Just keep listening and I guarantee it’ll click for you eventually.”

I’ve listened. It hasn’t. And that’s okay. I’m simply not that big a fan of Radiohead, and that’s all there is to it.

I do, however, love the hell out of Jaydiohead.

"Bird is the word" or "Lord knows we can't change"

2009-09-01T22:29:00.005-05:00

It’s impossible to make an objective statement about what is funny. Humor is perhaps the very definition of a subjective topic, an unknowable abstract with as many interpretations as there are human beings. There are, however, some things which can be definitively declared not funny. Among these I would include certain diseases, various human-on-human atrocities and ventriloquist Jeff Dunham. And, of course, yelling “Freebird!” at a concert.

The latter is an especially curious case. It is possible to imagine a time when yelling “Freebird!” at a concert may have been amusing, given the proper context. Say you were in the crowd at a Roberta Flack show in 1975 and some wise guy took advantage of a long pause between deeply felt acoustic ballads to holler a sardonic request for “Freebird.” In that setting, the irony of his suggestion may have been enough to provoke a titter or two. After all, Ms. Flack is a very different kind of artist than Lynyrd Skynyrd. The notion of her performing a Southern-style electric guitar anthem, particularly one of such recent vintage, would have been patently absurd.

But it is no longer 1975, and very few of us are currently attending Roberta Flack concerts. (Though not for lack of trying – get that booking agent of yours in gear, Roberta!) Whatever novelty there once was in yelling “Freebird!” at a concert has long since faded away. And yet the yellers persist, not to be swayed by obsolescence or standards of civility. At any reasonably well-attended rock show, especially one at which alcohol is served, shouts of “Freebird!” are almost as inevitable as getting stuck standing next to a jaded guy in a tight t-shirt who spends half the set explaining to his friends how the band isn’t nearly as tight as the time three years ago when he saw them play to a tiny audience in a sketchy dive bar in downtown Austin. Any time a show is lagging, or just when you’ve reached the point in the evening where all the morons start yelling unsolicited requests from the back catalog, you’re going to hear “Freebird!”

I understand the thinking behind yelling “Freebird!” at a concert. It’s an instantly identifiable, solo-heavy song popularized by a band whose music is frequently enjoyed by a demographic that many music aficionados think of as socially inferior. Trouble is, it also kicks major ass.

I am an unashamed lover of “Freebird.” From the bleeding, mournful opening guitar lick to the broken weariness of Ronnie Van Zandt’s vocal to the five-minute frenzy of dueling guitars, it’s a masterpiece of ‘70s album rock. In a just world, “Freebird” would be just as revered by the cognoscenti as any of Pink Floyd’s broody soundscapes or Led Zeppelin’s derivative caterwauling. Instead, for reasons that probably have as much to do with Yankee disdain for Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Southern heritage and good ole boy image as with actual musical merit, it’s become a punchline without a joke.

I’ve seen artists have a lot of disparate reactions to shouts of “Freebird!” Most of them simply ignore it. Some get upset – I once saw Eels front man E stop the show to eviscerate a heckler with something along the lines of “‘Ooh, I’m gonna go to an Eels show and yell ‘Freebird’ at the band!’ That’s awfully fucking clever, asshole.” Some put their own spin on it – David Cross used to have a bit in his stand-up act where he’d present an award to an audience member who he dubbed the one-millionth asshole to yell “Freebird” during a performance. But by far the best reaction I’ve ever seen came from Built to Spill, who simply played “Freebird” note-for-note, beginning to end. It was a thrilling performance that I suspect was wasted on much of the audience. I wish more artists – Roberta Flack, say – would take that approach. There is no shortage of people I’d love to hear covering this song, though I guess that would just make matters worse by inspiring a non-stop barrage of “Freebird!” shouts at every concert everywhere.

I suppose it’s sort of a compliment that “Freebird” has spent 30 years as the go-to song for guys who love to yell things. You would think that over that span of time, another ironic hard rock anthem would have emerged to take its place. If it was me up on stage, I know I’d be much more insulted to hear someone bellowing “Every Rose Has Its Thorn!” at me, or “Nookie!” or “Whatever the Name of That Godawful Kid Rock Song That Mashes Up ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ and ‘Werewolves of London’ Is!”

But for the time being, “Freebird” endures as the popular favorite. If anything is going to kill it off, it may be that very popularity. “Freebird!” has been yelled long enough and loud enough to push it well past cliché status. People are still yelling it, to be sure, but lately they’re more likely to be met with a groan and an eye-roll than a polite chuckle. Maybe things really are changing for the better, or maybe audiences are just all laughed-out from guys yelling “More cowbell!” That one’s never going to get old!

- Ira Brooker

(Photo courtesy of this dude.)

Four years later, still a heck of a job.

2009-08-31T16:34:00.002-05:00

The fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina passed this weekend. A lot of good things have happened in New Orleans since then. A lot of bad things have happened too. As usual, I have plenty I could say on the subject, but I’m just going to link to the short story that’s thus far my definitive statement on it.

Six weeks after Katrina, I bought a ticket on the first Amtrak train into New Orleans since the storm. I spent a week talking to survivors and witnessing the devastation. Most of the hardest-hit parts of the city were still off-limits to visitors, but what I saw was plenty disturbing. I started writing this piece on my train ride back to Chicago after reading an article in the Times-Picayune about two women campaigning to get their mother’s remains released from a morgue. It was the most difficult thing I ever wrote, and it’s miles away from my usual style and tone, but in a lot of respects I think it may be my best work.

So then, all of that said, here’s “St. Gabriel’s Morgue.”

"Requiem for a wasteland" or "There's cheese in them thar hills"

2009-08-24T23:10:00.006-05:00

From the steaming jungle of Fitzcarraldo to the snowy wasteland of Fargo, an impressive shooting location has been a vital element of many a classic movie. Great locations have also been responsible for classing up any number of unremarkable movies. Just look at the countless no-budget Westerns shot in Arizona’s monument valley and the mountain country of Italy. It’s a perfectly logical train of thought: If the best we can offer our audience is Lee Van Cleef shooting it out with badly dubbed Italian extras, we may as well give them something nice to look at in the background.

That’s all well and good, but I’ve always had a soft spot for filmmakers who lacked the budget or the motivation to move out of their own backyard. I’m talking about movies shot in my all-time favorite location: the arid hills outside of Los Angeles.

Now, I’ll admit that I’m a biased Midwestern boy who’s partial to verdant pastures and green, rolling valleys. I’ve seen quite a few places and still rank Western Wisconsin among the loveliest I’ve laid eyes on. That said, I’ve also been to the arid hills outside of Los Angeles. They’re not without their charms, but there is very little about the arid hills outside of Los Angeles that I would describe as especially scenic or beautiful. And yet, countless directors of the ‘50s and ‘60s dragged their barely paid crews and barely verbal actors out to the arid hills outside of Los Angeles time and time again. Guys like Roger Corman and Bert I. Gordon were such regulars out in those hills that the local woodland creatures started following them around, Snow White-style. (Though in Gordon’s case, the animals may just have been angling for future starring roles.)

Obviously, the major benefit to shooting in these hills was cost-effectiveness. They’re close enough to Hollywood that budget-minded directors could shoot all their location shots in one afternoon and be home in time for happy hour without burning so much as a full tank of gas. If you were shooting a cheap drive-in feature focused on bikers, monsters, hippies, aliens or any combination thereof, those grungy hills offered everything you needed. Also, they covered enough ground that nobody was likely to hassle you about permits and other such trivialities.

It’s also a relatively versatile landscape. The tall grass, sparse forests and rocky slopes and occasional creek beds are actually fairly distinctive, but they make a barely passable substitute for just about any terrain. I’ve seen those hills stand in for everything from prehistoric worlds to post-apocalyptic landscapes, to varying degrees of believability. (Mystery Science Theater 3000’s Mike Nelson hilariously pointed out “the famous Illinois Mountains” in Gordon’s Beginning of the End.) They’re like a mediocre impressionist – you never forget it’s him doing the voices, but you can at least sort of tell what he’s going for.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a new cheapie shot out in that terrain. I suspect that has a lot to do with the rise of affordable filmmaking tools and the decline of in-theater sleaze. Today, just about any upstart with a digital video camera and a limited distribution model can crank out a straight-to-DVD monster movie full of digitally rendered effects and backgrounds. Shooting in one’s own backyard is easier than ever, and industry competition has gotten so heated that making a legit film in California is often an expensive proposition, even in the arid hills outside of Los Angeles.

In a way, that’s a shame, because it feels like we’ve lost an important element of low-budget filmmaking. But it also makes me kind of happy to know that this terrain will be forever tied to a specific age and a distinctive kind of movie. Hiking through Topanga Canyon a couple of summers ago made me feel like I was part of some zero-budget film shoot. At every bend in the path, I half expected to be set upon by acid-crazed bikers, cheaply costumed monsters or scantily clad space women. But the genres and budgets that facilitated those characters faded away as Hollywood passed on to a different age. Perhaps it’s best that the sweaty, rocky, gorgeously unremarkable landscape they called home is relegated to the same fate.

- Ira Brooker

Lyrics to the song "Everybody Knows" from the album "I'm Your Man" by Leonard Cohen, condensed for time considerations.

2009-08-12T22:36:00.008-05:00

"Slut."

"Talking (and talking and talking) 'bout my generation" or "A lot of people hate this hat."

2009-08-06T23:14:00.011-05:00

I'm starting to suspect that I never had any generationally appropriate idols.

Having already written arms-length obituaries for Kurt Cobain and Michael Jackson, I once again find myself faced with the death of an undeniably important artist whose work never grabbed me the way it was apparently supposed to. The films of John Hughes defined the cinematic experience for many of my agemates, the first generation to grow up in front of the VCR. Many of my friends can quote his screenplays for The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink and Sixteen Candles more or less verbatim. Had I seen any of those movies at the time, perhaps I could too.

But, like so many other vestiges of the 1980s, my family managed to avoid most of the Hughes oeuvre. By the time I got around to watching the abovementioned holy trinity, I was a jaded college kid unable to see the charm in the broad stereotypes and thinly drawn caricatures my classmates grew up regarding as family. Yes, I could pick out certain moments of charm, but by and large I saw these films as dull mélanges of stilted dialogue and unlikely characterization. (Seriously, has anyone ever responded to marijuana the way Emilio Estevez does in The Breakfast Club?)

So yeah, when the topic of John Hughes comes up, I’ve always been that one contrarian jerk in the group who derides your taste and bespoils your cherished childhood memories. But even I can admit that the man had some real talent. As a writer, he penned an awful lot of crap, but he was also responsible for some damned hilarious scenes, particularly in those Vacation movies. And there are even a couple of his directorial efforts* that I hold as dearly as the rest of you – one perhaps even more so.

The first, obviously, is Ferris Beuller’s Day Off. This is the one instance where I believe Hughes’ vision of teenage life rings mostly true. There’s plenty of shaky material here, mostly involving Principal Rooney’s slapsticky pursuit of Ferris (though Jeffrey Jones does a good job with the role). Even Matthew Broderick’s smirky charm would likely wear thin if not for the support of the movie’s true hero: Alan Ruck. I can’t think of many characters who more accurately embodied the exquisite angst of teendom than Ruck’s Cameron. Whereas most American films from this era and genre come off hopelessly dated today, Ruck’s is a performance that actually improves as I get older. The look on Cameron’s face before he plunges into the pool has more to say about youth and melancholy than all the speechifying The Breakfast Club could muster, and I give Hughes credit both for creating the character and coaxing a career-defining performance out of his young second lead.

And speaking of career-defining, let’s talk about Hughes’ work with John Candy. Although I like Ferris, it’s Hughes’ two Candy vehicles that stand up best for me. Planes, Trains and Automobiles is almost a no-brainer: put a manic John Candy and an uptight Steve Martin in close quarters and watch the hilarity ensue. It’s a straightforward, personality-driven comedy that’s one of the few Hughes films to capture the verve of his writing in the Vacation movies. I remember liking it a lot, though I haven’t seen it in at least a decade.

But for me, the definitive Hughes film will always be Uncle Buck, a film that went considerably darker than Hughes or post-SCTV Candy had ever gone. No, it’s not a great movie, and a lot of the flaws are Hughes’ fault (Macauley Culkin’s unbearably overwritten role, for instance). But it’s also the rare Hughes’ film to occasionally drop the shiny veneer and let a bit of grime through. Candy’s Buck may be a lovable loser, but there’s no avoiding the fact that he really is a loser through and through. He’s essentially Randy Quaid’s Cousin Eddie (another keen Hughes creation) cast as the lead rather than just the comic relief. No other film role better utilized John Candy’s entire skill set, and he predictably turns in a powerhouse performance. Buck runs the gamut of affability, vulnerability, gregariousness, slovenliness and gluttony, with a previously seldom-seen streak of genuine malevolence mixed in. Hughes provided Candy with the part that gave us a great indication of what the big man could have done if he’d ever been allowed out of the Funny Fat Guy ghetto. If Candy hadn’t died so young, Uncle Buck suggests he might have flourished in this age of smart showcases for guys like Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen.

But I digress. This is supposed to be about the other John, the one who’s been such a constant puzzle to me. This is a man whose writing brought out the best in John Candy, Alan Ruck and Chevy Chase and yielded some of the most memorable comedy scenes of the 1980s. On the other hand, his work on offal like the Home Alone movies and worthless remakes like Flubber and 101 Dalmations also contributed to many of the worst aspects of Hollywood in the ‘90s. He’s an unmistakable influence on many movies I really dig, from Mean Girls to Superbad (possibly my favorite film of the current decade). He also, however, opened the door for directors like Allan Moyle (whose dreadful Pump Up the Volume and Empire Records are basically Hughes films made somehow even less subtle) and Hughes’ greatest protégé, the odious Chris Columbus.

I suppose that any artist will be judged primarily by his finest work, and John Hughes at his best created some iconic material that made a huge impact on a generation. It’s not his fault that most of that work never really connected with me, or that it did connect with a lot of people who made poor future use of it. Heck, if nothing else, he brought me the indelible image of John Candy leering downward, chomping a stogie, wearing a bad hat and wielding a power drill.

Still, if we’re talking ‘80s teen movies, I’ll take Heaven Help Us any old day.

* Possibly important note: I’ve still never seen Weird Science. Maybe that would be the one to win me over.

Five important skill sets for aspiring actresses of the early 1970s

2009-07-27T10:49:00.006-05:00

Sure, you’ve taken acting classes. You’ve enrolled in art school, studied at the feet of Uta Hagen, tested your mettle in avant-garde off-Broadway productions. But now you’re trying to make it in the movies, and none of that makes one lick of difference. We’re living in the ‘70s now, ladies, and all of that hoity-toity training has exactly zero bearing on the way real movies get made. If you want to know the actual scoop, take a look at this brief overview of the true skills any thoroughly modern actress needs to break into this beautiful business we call show.

Dancing spasmodically

The era being what it is, the odds are pretty good that your movie is going to involve some dancing. Your producer is a cynical creep in his sixties, and he believes that you’ve got to include a drugged-up go-go dancing scene if you want your picture to appeal to the kids. He may even have procured the services of some supposed up-and-coming rock band looking to spotlight their new single on the big screen. In any event, you should be able to flail and gyrate more or less in rhythm with the band, preferably while wearing a tight polyester microdress. Keep in mind that there’s a fairly good chance you’ll be called on to dance while simulating the effects of a psychedelic drug trip. Also, you may be topless, which brings us to our next category.

Having weird breasts

Maybe some day in the future, audiences will demand full, flawless, perfectly formed breasts in their nude scenes. As of today, though, strange-looking bosoms are the name of the game. Are yours pointy, low-hanging or barely tangible? Are your nipples strikingly large or dark, or do they point off at bizarre angles? If so, off with that top! And don’t ask if your nudity is integral to the plot. Nudity is integral to all plots. Haven’t you ever seen a movie before? And speaking of nudity…

Playing rape scenes

Look, we know it’s ugly and exploitive and potentially traumatizing. But hey, audiences today are a bunch of sickos, so whattaya gonna do? It’s a brand new era, and rape-as-entertainment is the latest thing. The kids who buy tickets to the drive-in feel cheated if they don’t get at least a little bit of the rough stuff. Hell, this is the ‘70s – the only company not playing the rape card these days is Disney, and even there you’ve got that pervert Bob Crane doing God knows what behind the scenes. So grin and bear it, and trust that your director is going to handle the scene with a tasteful, artistic touch. Or maybe not, because the producer says that kind of artsy shit doesn’t put asses in the seats. Well, whatever. You can chalk it up as a form of feminist statement or some such.

Screaming

You’d think this one would be a no-brainer, right? You’re a woman in the movies – of course you’re going to be doing some screaming! But you’d be surprised how many girls come through the door with no clue on how to let go with a real blood-curdling shriek. Chances are pretty close to 100% that you’re going to spend the bulk of your screen time being chased by axe murderers, discovering dead bodies, having drug freak-outs and, as we’ve already discussed, being raped. You’re going to need a quality set of pipes to adequately express your consternation at the myriad misfortunes that continually befall you. If you need some motivation for mustering real horror, meditate on your next task.

Faking attraction to Charles Bronson

Look, every young actress wants to star opposite Robert Redford right off the bat. But Bob doesn’t do the kind of movies you’re working on, and the odds are that you’re never going to be working on the kinds of movies he’s in. No, one of your most important tasks will be using your sex appeal to distract the audience from the thorough unattractiveness of the male lead. Try to wrap your head around it by degrees. Lee Marvin might be your best-case scenario: not a good-looking dude by most standards, but he’s a tall, strong guy with a certain blue-collar Irish appeal. Or maybe consider George Kennedy, another big, meaty fella who won’t be gracing any pin-up calendars, but who carries himself with a confidence that passes for charm. If you’re really scraping bottom, you might end up in a Ross Hagen movie. Sure, Hagen could charitably be described as poor man’s Steve McQueen, but many a starlet has found herself powerless in the face of his wooden anti-charisma.

If you can imagine yourself lost in a soft-focus sex scene with any of those guys, you may be almost ready to scale Mount Bronson. That’s right, through some quirk of time and space, that mumble-mouthed, beady-eyed, saggy-faced geezer has become a viable leading man. There’s a distinct possibility you’re going to find Chuck’s mustachioed lips pressed to yours in the near future, and you’re going to have to act like it’s exactly what you’ve been dreaming of for your entire young, nubile, frequently topless life.

Welcome to Hollywood, ladies!

Three steps to becoming a best-selling business writer

2009-07-07T15:10:00.004-05:00

1. Think up broad metaphor.

2. Extend metaphor for at least 150 pages.

3. Buy boat.

Seven lessons learned from Prince's "Graffiti Bridge" soundtrack

2009-07-03T10:18:00.007-05:00

I’ll confess right up front that I’ve never seen Prince’s 1990 film Graffiti Bridge in its entirety. I’ve never read a single good word about the movie, and as a big fan of Purple Rain, I’ve always feared that watching the sequel would taint my appreciation of the original. (I’ve also never watched Purple Rain while even remotely sober, which may contribute to my belief that it’s a cinematic masterpiece.)

I do, however, own the Graffiti Bridge album, a weird piece of work even by Princely standards. It’s not an awful album by any means. As Prince soundtrack albums go, it ranks well below the flawless Purple Rain and the minor classic Parade (Music from the Motion Picture Under the Cherry Moon), but considerably above Batman. Whereas the first two would stand alone as excellent albums even if you didn’t know the films existed, the songs on Graffiti Bridge sound very much like pieces of a larger, disjointed narrative. It’s a mishmash of guest stars, skit-songs and tonal shifts whose whole is rather less than the sum of its parts.

Still, it’s an interesting listening experience with some scattered but worthwhile highlights. On my most recent spin, I realized that Graffiti Bridge even has a few things to teach us, some more vital than others.

Want to underline your sequel’s inferiority? Open with a weak knock-off of the original.

When Prince was writing “Can’t Stop This Feeling That I Got,” he was probably consciously trying to create a musical link between Purple Rain and Graffiti Bridge. Trouble is, he did it too well. His opening track sounds so much like “Let’s Go Crazy” (minus the awesome spoken-word preamble) that my primary reaction to it is to wonder why I’m not just listening to “Let’s Go Crazy” instead.

The concept of Prince featuring George Clinton is way cooler on paper.

There’s no question that Clinton’s brand of whacked-out space funk was a major influence on young Prince, but there’s also a considerable difference between their sounds. A confluence of these two powerhouses should have shaken the music world to its very foundation. Instead, “We Can Funk” is a pretty decent entry in the Prince dance track canon. The most Clinton-esque elements to be found are a long group chant toward song’s end and the awesome/atrocious lyric “I’m testin’ positive for the funk / I’ll gladly pee in anybody’s cup.”

Place them side by side and Morris Day can easily upstage Prince.

This should come as no surprise to anyone who’s seen Purple Rain or heard an early record by The Time, but Morris Day is one of the great showmen of his era. As wild and weird as Prince can be, Morris brings so much more manic energy to his couple of tracks, especially “Release It.” Granted he’s not half the musical genius Prince is, but when Morris starts bossing his "stellas" around and stealing nookie from his side men, I find myself wishing Graffiti Bridge had been his vehicle rather than his benefactor’s.

Once upon a time, there was Tevin Campbell.

Remember Tevin Campbell? That sweet-voiced pretty boy who ruled the R&B charts in the early ‘90s? He’s part of the bizarre Graffiti Bridge entourage, and he’s rather awesome. His “Round and Round” is both one of the best tracks on the album and a more enjoyable effort than Campbell’s future work. By this point, the Prince-Michael Jackson feud was pretty well wound down, but it would be easy to read Prince’s championing of a charismatic child star with a voice soulful beyond his years as one last shot across the bow.

Mavis Staples can do no wrong.

Prince being Prince, he probably could have recruited Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner or another top-tier mega diva to fill this role (he did allegedly pitch the part to Patti LaBelle). Instead he went with the less iconic but equally skilled Mavis Staples, and her brassy, classy presence gives the album just the boost it needs in its saggy second half. Her “Melody Cool” is an undeniable highlight of Graffiti Bridge, a swaggering slab of soul that’s one of the few blatantly cinematic moments that translates gracefully onto wax.

Prince should never dabble in hip-hop.

Sadly, Prince viewed the half-assed flow shoehorned into “New Power Generation (Part II)” not as a failed experiment in genre-bending, but as the gateway to several albums’ worth of hip-hop flirtation. It’s all pretty embarrassing stuff. “Cocaine was a thing that I took on / and Nowhere was a place that I was goin’”? Really?

“Thieves in the Temple” is no “When Doves Cry,” “Graffiti Bridge” is no “Purple Rain.”

Don’t get me wrong – Graffiti Bridge’s big single is a damned good song, maybe even a great one. But unlike its predecessor, it’s just not sturdy enough to hang an entire album and feature film on. As for the title track, it’s little more than a pleasant coda, utterly lacking in the majesty and passion of “Purple Rain.” You know that famous scene at the end of the first film, where Prince’s guitar neck erupts during the fadeout of “Purple Rain,” dousing the crowd with highly suggestive sparks? “Graffiti Bridge” is more like half-hearted wanking with no money shot.

- Ira Brooker

"The Man in the (Rear-View) Mirror" or "World Without Glove"

2009-06-26T13:37:00.008-05:00

I’m feeling a little left out of the whole Michael Jackson mourning process. Much like Kurt Cobain, Jackson never really impacted my life the way I’m told he was supposed to.

A lot of that has to do with my upbringing. Where pop culture was concerned, the ‘80s hardly even happened in my neck of Wisconsin. During Jackson’s peak years of media dominance, the majority of music being played in the Brooker household fell into either the Contemporary Christian or Oldies genre. My main exposure to the King of Pop came via jokes in Bloom County strips and the Z93 DJs who yammered away during my morning school bus commutes. The former taught me that he was a creepy freak straight out of some macabre children’s book. The latter made him emblematic of the depravity, decadence and unbearable annoyance I came to associate with Top 40 radio.

I was familiar with some of his songs, sure. Half the girls in my fourth grade class were enamored of him (really not that impressive a feat, as there were 12 students total in my fourth grade class). I really didn’t have much of an opinion on his music, but my inborn contrarian streak made me dis him at every opportunity, to the chagrin of the young ladies of Leon Elementary. I specifically recall Katie Pottinger getting rather upset with me for insisting that there would not be any Michael Jackson songs played at my wedding. (For the record, there were not.)

When I reached my twenties, I started piecing together my Lost Decade by listening to some of the music I’d ignored at the time. Compared to a lot of other musical decades, I still find the ‘80s pretty lackluster, but there’s a lot of greatness there. Digging into the archives led me to quite a few amazing artists, from Talking Heads to Kurtis Blow to Laurie Anderson, not to mention a mighty impressive string of one-hit wonders (one area where the ‘80s truly dominated).

And eventually, I even got around to exploring the works of the Great Gloved One. Listening to Michael Jackson 15 to 20 years after the fact was a peculiar experience. There was no denying the man had recorded some great songs – “Billie Jean,” “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” “Black and White,” just to name a few. There was also no denying he’d recorded a lot of saccharine dreck full of subpar lyrics and ostentatious chirping. Taken as a whole, though, the Michael Jackson oeuvre really made me appreciate the vision, drive and dedication of a deeply troubled, endlessly electrifying musical genius. A genius named Prince.

To me, Michael Jackson’s most important musical legacy is inspiring Prince to spend more than a decade soundly and consistently kicking his ass. Accounts vary on whether their rivalry was friendly or bitter (my absolute favorite Prince and MJ anecdote suggests some acrimony), but there’s no question that each man pushed the other to greater heights. In my estimation, Prince’s heights soared far, far higher than Michael’s. Jackson dominated headlines and ruled the charts, but Prince’s output was more prolific, his skill set more versatile and his sound more timeless (Batman not withstanding). When Jackson started making revolutionary music videos, Prince went ahead and made a groundbreaking feature film. And Thriller may be the all-time best seller, but Purple Rain is a perfect album.

In my mind, it’s clear that Prince wins this contest, but I also doubt he would have reached those peaks if he hadn’t been constantly glancing at Michael Jackson in his rear-view mirror. I know that Jackson deserves plenty of credit in his own right – heck, his Jackson Five vocals alone would earn him a place among the greats – but where my own personal musical education is concerned, I’ll think of him most fondly as a supporting player on the path to Sign o’ the Times.

- Ira Brooker

"Kanye the Barbarian" or "Kanye West doesn't care about book people"

2009-06-02T13:18:00.006-05:00

As he is apt to do, Kanye West raised quite the kerfuffle last week when he declared himself a “proud non-reader of books” (while promoting his own ludicrously slim book, no less). Kanye went on to say, “Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed… I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book’s autograph.”

The outcry from the writerly community has been predictable, with a lot of righteous fulmination on our culture of ignorance and the unforgivable arrogance of Kanye West. Say what you will about Kanye. Personally, I think he’s an excellent producer and decent rapper who’s adopted a manufactured messiah complex as a means of keeping his name in the headlines (The line about not wanting a book’s autograph is just too over-the-top not to be performance art), but I get why so many people have come to hate him.

I won’t go so far as to say Kanye has a point here. I don’t think he’s even trying to make a point, beyond proving that he can generate controversy by making controversial statements. But he does open the door for what I think is a long overdue conversation. Simply put, I think readers have a tendency to overvalue what they do.

Don’t get me wrong – I love reading, I love writing and I love books. In fact, I freely admit to being a literary snob. But I’m snobbish about what I read; my problem is with people who are snobbish about the very act of reading. There seems to be a prevailing idea that being a regular reader affords one a certain superiority over less bookish types. Even though I usually love any opportunity to indulge a false sense of superiority, I’m afraid I can’t completely agree.

My favorite bookstore in the world, Maple Street Book Shop in New Orleans, sells a popular bumper sticker emblazoned with the slogan “Fight the Stupids.” Much as I love the shop, I really dislike the implication that people who don’t read a lot are stupid. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for not reading much, from learning disabilities to time constraints to a basic lack of interest. Just as I know many exceptional writers who can’t spell to save their lives, I know plenty of well-rounded, intelligent people who seldom crack a book. It’s a matter of personal preference and learning style, and it’s nobody’s place to think himself better or worse because of it.

I think that strain of snobbery has hurt the institution of reading as much as any video game system or prime time reality show. The idea that books are only for nerds and eggheads was born out of centuries-old class struggles that carry on to this day. It’s perfectly natural for readers to have a defensive reaction when someone bashes books, but that shouldn’t manifest itself in disdain for those who don’t know David Foster Wallace from David Alan Grier. It’s something of a tyranny of the minority: a relatively small population of voracious readers has long convinced the world that those who don’t care for books are illiterate morons, and that’s too bad. In my experience, heaping shame on people for what they’re not is one of the least effective methods of changing their opinions.

Of course, I don’t believe that not reading is anything to be proud of. If I thought Kanye was doing anything but playing a role, I’d agree that he deserves chastisement for that part of his statement. But think of it another way – if Kanye had called himself a “proud non-watcher of television,” would it have generated the same kind of backlash? I strongly doubt it. In fact, he’d probably have been heralded as a positive influence by the “Kill your television” contingent.

I’ve never understood the knee-jerk “books good, TV bad” mindset. I’ve had intense, life-enriching experiences while enthralled by books, TV shows, movies, albums, paintings, graffiti tags, what-have-you. I’ve also been repulsed and scarred by all of the above. It’s all art, and none of it is inherently better or worse than the rest. Scrolling through any given New York Times best-seller list will reveal a slew of books that I’d consider far less life-enriching than most of what I watch on TV.

Would the “television rots your mind” set really try to tell me that my brain cells would be better served by reading Tucker Max’s I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell (#4 in paperback nonfiction this week) or Steve Harvey’s Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man (#1 in hardcover advice) than by engaging the brilliant screenwriting of shows like The Wire or The Venture Bros? And even beyond disposable volumes like Max’s and Harvey’s, there’s some truth to Kanye’s statement: plenty of roundly acclaimed authors really do be so wordy and self-absorbed (I’m looking at you, John Irving). Television at its best is just as valid and worthwhile as any literary format, but somehow bashing TV is seen as meritorious, while dismissing books approaches heresy.

At the bottom of it all, I’m sort of glad to see that comments like Kanye’s can still spark such a vehement response. I’m a great supporter of the written word, and it’s nice to see that so many people still defend literature with such gusto. That gives me hope for the days when my own books finally see print. At the same time, I think we could all stand to chill out and take stuff like this a tad less seriously. The world already looks at the literati as a bunch of uptight blowhards. Looking down our noses at non-readers and whipping up tempests in every passing teacup does little to combat that image.

But don't get me started on Kanye's off-hand dismissal of Twitter. Them's fightin' words!

- Ira Brooker

"Archie, my Archie, why has thou forsaken me?" or "The Last Temptation of Jughead"

2009-05-22T11:29:00.008-05:00

The first time I remember feeling betrayed by a force beyond my comprehension was the day Jughead fell in love.

Jughead Jones was my childhood hero, a lazy, gluttonous cynic who cast a welcome shadow on the generally sunny landscape of Archie comics. Aside from his insatiable appetite for hamburgers, his defining personality quirks were a loathing for romance and a general disinclination toward women. I had no particular problem with girls, but I always admired Jughead’s refusal to fit into the typical teenage box occupied by the rest of his lovestruck peers.

Then, some time in the early ‘90s, the Archie staff decided to shake things up by introducing a storyline in which Jughead not only fell in love, but did so with two girls at once. To make matters worse, my sedentary role model – a man with a talent for idleness if ever there was one – took a fast food job to support his newfound woo-pitching habit.

I was crestfallen upon reading this revolting development. The character who had taught me that it was not just okay but downright cool to buck the system and follow one’s own path was suddenly just another everyman, a dark-haired knock-off of his predictable pal Archie. In one fateful issue, the writers had reduced Bob Montana’s greatest creation (OK, so Montana lifted more than a little from E.C. Segar’s Wimpy) to a weak-kneed also-ran no better than old-school Archie knock-offs like Wilbur and That Wilkin Boy. Heck, Jughead even traded in his signature crown for a burger joint ball cap. I wouldn’t have been surprised at treatment like this from a conniver like Reggie, but coming from Jughead it really stung.

Thankfully, the majority of Archie fans shared my sentiments. Reader response was overwhelmingly opposed to the cuddlier, canoodlier Jughead, and his career as a romantic lead was scrapped almost as soon as it began. Me, I was left with a bad taste in my mouth. I realized for the first time that the world of fiction is a malleable thing, and that the people who created the worlds and heroes that I loved might sometimes be misguided, cash-blinded or outright stupid. (All of those ideas were reinforced in spades soon after, when I first watched Superman IV, but that’s another story.)

I bring this up because Archie Comics has recently announced its latest “re-imagining” of its keystone characters. In a forthcoming storyline set in Archie’s post-collegiate future, Mr. Andrews will allegedly resolve his age-old love triangle by proposing to either Betty or Veronica. I’m no Reggie-come-lately to the Archie universe (as evidenced by my Archie-memorabilia-strewn home office), so I fully expect some convoluted scenario that will lead to our hero remaining unhitched and undecided. And that’s good. That’s as it should be.

What bothers me about this whole scheme (besides the fact that they’ve done it before, albeit in a weirder format) is the callous obviousness of the marketing ploy. I’m sure it’s not an easy time for Archie Comics. Their titles were fairly dated and pedestrian back when I started reading them, which was part of their strange appeal. Judging by my recent readings, they don’t hold up too well in the increasingly frenetic world of adolescent entertainment. I can’t really blame them for their frequent reboot attempts, which have included a creepily realistic art makeover, saddling Jughead with a baby sister, and launching yet another in a long series of uninspired animated shows. It’s just that this retooling never ends. When I was a kid, there were flailing efforts to re-cast Archie as a street-smart middle-schooler, a superheroic adventurer and, oddly enough, a remote-control racing enthusiast. Heck, even back in the ‘60s, the comics writers were shameless about trying to capitalize on the surprise chart success of a song from Archie’s Saturday morning cartoon show.

So yeah, I get that this supposed Big Decision is a desperate attempt to score some national press coverage and get losers like me talking about Archie on our barely read blogs. Obviously, it’s working to some extent, so kudos to the marketing department. But you know what else gets people talking? Quality.

I was originally drawn to the comics because of their universality. Some of my earliest memories as a reader are of Archie stories. The appeal was easy: they were peopled with lively, funny characters with whom I loved spending my summer afternoons. As I got a little older, though, I started to see more of the nuances. The crisp, exhilarating artwork of Samm Schwartz, for instance, was often filled out with surrealist background gags worthy of early Mad comics. Sure, a lot of the storylines were predictable, but there were plenty of weird, impeccably written little gems tucked in the pages of my Double Digests: a quirky piece in which Jughead is kidnapped by a crown-coveting religious cult, or a clever bit in which the denizens of Riverdale High can speak only in rhyme, or a fast-paced farce in which Archie throws the school into a panic using only a tackling dummy and a rubber mask.

Archie’s myriad creative teams have never gotten the kudos they deserve. With that in mind, it’s no wonder they now feel driven to chicanery like this marriage malarkey, but I think they’re underestimating the power of the internet. A stunt like this is a quick, cheap way to grab the spotlight. A better long-term solution would be to hire some sharp, new writers who could restore that long-gone sense of creativity and quirkiness while working within the established confines of the Archieverse.

Back when the Archie team was flexing its creative muscles more frequently, there was no real established network where people could spread the news, so those creative efforts went unnoticed. Nowadays, a sudden jump in quality would create a groundswell of buzz on the web, and a continued commitment to quality may very well engender a cult following. Countless cartoons and children’s books have proven that it’s possible to appeal to kids and adults at the same time by maintaining fresh, funny writing that works on multiple levels. Heck, I personally know a number of comics-experienced writers who would undoubtedly be up to the task (and I wouldn’t mind a crack at it myself).

The good folks at Archie Comics have given me a lot over the years, and I’ll be forever in their debt. When I see them resorting to gimmicks like the supposed resolution of Archie’s eternal triangle, however, I get nervous about their viability for the future. Rather than cranking out one-shots that are maybe worth a glance, I sincerely hope they’ll direct more of their future energies toward crafting comic books that are genuinely worth reading. Perpetual adolescence and arrested development needn’t be one and the same.

- Ira Brooker

"Ira's Hot 100, part four" or "The end of the tour"

2009-05-11T09:05:00.006-05:00

Well, it's been a delightful four days, but all mildly distracting things must come to an end. Here, then, are the 25 most important albums of this aging hipster's lifetime. You may be a bit surprised by what occupies the number one slot. Once I realized it, I rather was.

I'd also like to give a shout-out to my dad, Mr. David Lee Brooker, who made a conscious effort to introduce me to some of the music that most impacted him in his youth. He led me down a number of musical alleys that I might never have stumbled upon without his guidance. As far as I'm concerned, that's one of the finer things a father can do for a child.

25. Bob Dylan – Bringing it All Back Home

This was neither the first nor the best Dylan album I ever heard, but it’s the one that really did it for me. Somewhere between the bleak “darkness at the break of noon” of “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” and the surrealist bowling ball attacks of “Bob Dylan’s 115^th Dream” lies everything I like best about Bobby D.

24. Lou Reed – Street Hassle

My family moved into town for six months during my junior year of high school while our house in the country was being renovated. Street Hassle was the theme music to my chilly, unfamiliar room on the top floor, a gritty, sleazy album that blusters and curses and brings Bruce Springsteen in for a little cameo. Lou Reed has recorded three solo albums I’d call masterpieces. This isn’t the best of the three, but it’s definitely the baddest.

23. Patti Smith – Horses

“Gloria” is amazing, “Birdland” is impossibly great, and then we get to that crazy stream-of-sex-and-violence-and-semi-consciousness that is “Land,” blazing off of the turntable like some kind of coked-up Faulkner. “He got PEN knives and JACK knives and SWITCHblades preferred!” “And I fill my nose with snow and go Rimbaud go Rimbaud go Rimbaud.” “I put my hand inside his cranium / and we had such braniac-amour / but no more.” I’ve got CD and digital copies of this album readily available, but given my druthers, I’ll always go back to my vinyl edition. It’s just that kind of album.

22. Neutral Milk Hotel – In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

The more I listen to Jeff Mangum’s masterpiece, the more I’m convinced it’s the greatest album ever recorded. Listening to Aeroplane is like re-reading a great book that reveals more about itself with every visit. I was hosting a college radio show when it first came out, and I remember being kind of nonplused when it first shuffled its way into my playlist. That’s probably because these songs are just not meant to be split up. This album is one organic whole, a seething, heartbreaking portrait of madness, atrocity and despair that’s somehow one of the most uplifting musical experiences imaginable.

21. Robert Johnson – King of the Delta Blues Singers, Volume One

My dad gave me this cassette for my 15^th or 16^th birthday. In terms of long-lasting, life-shaping impact, that may have been the best birthday present I’ve ever received.

20. Lemonheads – It’s a Shame About Ray

Why Evan Dando? I don’t know, but something about this album made me feel the way other people seemed to feel about Nirvana’s Nevermind. Maybe I appreciated Evan’s good, honest songwriting in the face of the era’s pervasive tortured angst. My mom liked him because he smiled while he sang on David Letterman’s show. Maybe that had something to do with it too.

19. Prince – Purple Rain

C’mon. What do I have to say here? This is a perfect album. There’s not one thing about Purple Rain that doesn’t work. In the face of Prince, the rest of the 1980s didn’t stand a chance.

18. Sly & the Family Stone – Anthology

Possibly the last album I ever bought at a Sam Goody, this was an awakening. There was a vitality to Sly’s stuff that just couldn’t be classified. It wasn’t quite rock, wasn’t quite R&B – it was just damn good music, as pure as it could be. This was my go-to album when I got my first Walkman in the early ‘90s.

17. Deltron 3030 – Deltron 3030

I’d been a fan of Del tha Funkee Homosapien ever since I first heard his I Wish My Brother George Was Here back in the early ‘90s. That still didn’t prepare me for the insane majesty of Deltron 3030. From the first spin, it was clear that this was a different kind of hip-hop disc, a post-apocalyptic concept album incorporating elements from all across the musical spectrum. If you saw me roaming the University of Minnesota campus in spring 2001, there’s a good chance this is what was pumping through my big old earmuff headphones.

16. Professor Longhair – ‘Fess: The Professor Longhair Anthology

My dad brought this home one day when I was in ninth grade and told me I had to hear it. I could tell instantly that there was something different about ‘Fess. He sounded a little like some of the other old-time rock and blues players I’d heard, but with an off-kilter rhythm and bizarre delivery that knocked me clean out. When I moved to New Orleans, Professor Longhair was one of the few familiar elements I could find in my deeply foreign surroundings. The bust of ‘Fess in the entryway of Tipitina’s was like unto a religious icon for me.

15. The Dead Kennedys – Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death

For a while there in my late high school/early college days, I considered myself quite the punk. In hindsight, I was little more than a dilettante on that scene, but while it lasted, this was my punk rock bible. Jello Biafra’s wit, profanity and political savvy got me amped up like nobody else in the genre. “Pull My Strings” became the undisputed anthem for my senior year of high school.

13. Johnny Cash – American Recordings

Along with Boogie Down Productions’ Ghetto Music, the first CD I ever bought, at a seedy pawn shop in downtown La Crosse, Wisconsin. So dark and moody, and a bit rougher than Johnny’s other “American” albums. I consider this the pinnacle of one of the most amazing careers in music history.

14. Violent Femmes – Violent Femmes

“Take one, one, one ‘cause you left me and two, two, two for my family…” Another key piece of my emergence as a music fan, again with an assist from my pal Nathan. Not only do the Violent Femmes bring all their equipment on the bus, they were probably the first band I got into whose name drew only befuddled looks from my peers at school. And I love drawing befuddled looks.

12. The Beatles – The Beatles

I pay no heed to the endless debate about which Beatles album is the greatest. It’s “The White Album,” no question about it. The darkest, strangest conglomeration of sounds and ideas the group ever came up with, this album is great because of, not in spite of, its lack of cohesion. When I first read Nicholas Schaffner’s The Beatles Forever in 6^th grade, it seemed ridiculous that Charles Manson could have thought The Beatles wanted him to kill. When I finally heard The Beatles about a year later, I still knew he was nuts, but I could see where he was coming from. And I dug it.

11. They Might Be Giants – Flood

I was a nerdy, bookish kid in my early teens. They were They Might Be friggin’ Giants. What else needs to be said?

10. Warren Zevon – Mr. Bad Example

Late night TV introduced me to a lot of great music in the ‘90s. I videotaped Warren playing the title track from this album on “Late Night with David Letterman” and re-watched it until I knew every word. I bought the cassette from my ever-reliable Best Buy cut-out bin a few weeks later and thus launched my ongoing relationship with my favorite songwriter of all time. Warren’s passing shook me more than any untimely celebrity death since Phil Hartman.

9. Wu-Tang Clan – Enter the 36 Chambers

I liked hip-hop before Wu-Tang, but I’m not sure I really understood it until I heard my first RZA production. The intricacy of the Wu-Tang sound, the attention to detail and the striking interplay of personalities made me see for the first time that at its best, hip-hop is one of the most complex art forms in the world of music. This is the rare album that still sounds as fresh and weird today as it did in 1993.

8. David Bowie – Hunky Dory

Possibly my favorite album of all time (it jockeys with Diamond Dogs depending on my mood), this is David Bowie at the peak of his ‘70s perfection. Every word, every note, every inflection is classic. “It’s a god-awful small affair / to the girl with the mousy hair” ranks alongside “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” in my pantheon of literature’s greatest opening lines. Also, the cover art graces one of my favorite t-shirts in my considerable collection.

7. The Dead Milkmen – Beelzebubba

I owe more to The Dead Milkmen than I probably even realize. My pal Nathan picked up this album some time during our freshman year of high school, and there was no turning back. Here was snide, snotty, soft-core punk rock with no higher aim than to be entertaining and generate a few laughs. It was pretty much everything I’d ever wanted out of an album without realizing it. A massive influence on every ridiculous, pop culture-infused song I ever wrote.

6. KRS-ONE – Return of the Boom Bap

And here’s where my love of hip-hop really begins. As usual, it started in my pal Nathan’s basement, where I was blown away by the literate rhymes and raw beats of KRS-ONE’s first solo release. I’d dabbled in the works of Ice-T and Christian rappers like Michael Peace, but nothing had connected for me quite like this. This album is about as hardcore as KRS ever got, and it sounds just as good today as it did booming out of my parents' minivan in 1995.

5. The Velvet Underground – The Velvet Underground & Nico

If you heard this album in your formative years and were neither amazed nor repelled, I don’t think I want to know you. For me, it was the former. Sitting in the back of a rented van, heading to the wilds of southern Illinois to attend a Christian rock festival, my pal Nathan and I huddled around a battery-powered boom box and reveled in the scary decadence of “Venus in Furs,” “The Black Angel’s Death Song” and, of course, “Heroin,” the song that became my pump-up anthem before high school sporting events. Never had it, never will, but there’s something universal about Lou Reed’s paean to his chosen source of ecstasy.

4. Pavement – Crooked Rain Crooked Rain

Something broke wide open when my pal Nathan dubbed Crooked Rain Crooked Rain onto an old Amway tape for me. What this band was doing didn’t even resemble the music I was accustomed to. It was raw and new and so, so exciting. When I took my first solo drive in my parents’ minivan, this was the album cranking from the tape deck.

3. Lou Reed – New York

My pal Nathan and I huddled around a boom box at Yogi Bear’s Jellystone Park, listening to the Lou Reed cassette I’d just dubbed from my friend Paul. When “Last Great American Whale” came on, we froze and listened in silence to an epic about a marine mammal fighting crime and racism on the Carolina coast. This was something we had not heard before, and I knew it was something I wanted to hear much, much more of. This wasn’t the first Lou Reed album I owned, but it was the one that launched an obsession that continues only slightly abated to this day.

2. The Beatles - Rock & Roll Music

Originally a lazy compilation slapped together in the mid-‘70s to try and milk a few more bucks out of the long-defunct Beatles, this homely little hodgepodge became the cornerstone of my musical education when I sifted it out of the discount bin at my local Pamida. Looking back, it’s hard to imagine the thought process that led someone to wedge “Dizzy Miss Lizzie,” “Got to Get You Into My Life” and “Revolution” into the same album, but I’m glad someone did. That mishmash of older and newer hits and misses provided a perfect primer for a small town Wisconsin kid looking to learn about The Beatles. And once that gate was opened, all manner of stuff came a-flooding in.

1. Paul Simon – Graceland

This is pretty much where I became a music fan. When I was nine or so, a friend of my dad’s brought this cassette over to listen to as they remodeled our living room. At the time, Amy Grant’s El Shaddai was about as cutting edge as the music got in our household, so Paul Simon’s cacophony of guitars and drums and African harmonies blew me out of the water. From here on out, music wasn’t just something to sing along with or play in the background. It was something to absorb, to dissect, to experience. If this was a list of my 100 favorite albums, Graceland wouldn’t make the cut (although it’s a damn fine record). When it comes to importance, though, there’s not much that comes close.

This concludes our broadcast day. Thanks for reading.

-Ira Brooker