25 first lines: answers

July 20, 2006 //

So either these were harder than I thought, or I need more readers.

I’m going to do this again soon, whether or not anybody still wants to play. It’s fun, in that extremely wanky blog way. Meanwhile, here are the answers to the first one. The ones no one got are in bold.

1. How often she has gazed from castle windows o’er, and watched the daylight passing within her captive wall—Sandy Denny, “Fotheringay.”. Somewhat surprising that Phillip didn’t get this one.

2. So close and yet so far away and all the things Iâ¿¿d hoped to say will have to go unsaid today—Townes Van Zandt, “Tower Song.”

3. With the shipwrecked sailors searching for some foolsâ¿¿ gold—Soul Asylum, “Ship of Fools.” Note: I’m not completely sure about the first word; it could be “we’re.” I tend to assume that I know all the words to every SA song from “Say What You Will” through “Hang Time,” but that’s actually not always the case.

4. Standing here now you wash over me—The Spinanes, “Noel, Jonah, and Me.” A recent happy rediscovery, one that I think is going to earn its own blog post soon.

5. Close my eyes, feel the fire—Sebadoh, “Temptation Tide.” I’d have been seriously impressed if anyone had gotten this one based on just that rather generic first line. Cool song, though. It’s the Bob Fay song on “Bakesale”—the song I always forget about when I’m thinking of the record, not because I don’t like it but because it isn’t a lovelorn Lou song or a crunchy Jake song.

6. Here she comes across the street but I’m already there downstairs to meet with her—Buffalo Tom, “Velvet Roof.” So I guess no one else listened to this song over and over and over again for a year or so after “Let Me Come Over” was released, hm? This song still thrills me, howevermany years later.

7. Two days past 18, he was waiting for the bus in his army green—Dixie Chicks (or Bruce Robison), “Travelin’ Soldier.” (Jason)

8. In 1649, to St. George’s Hill, a ragged band they called the Diggers came to show the people’s will—written by Leon Rosselson, recorded by Billy Bragg and Karan Casey, among others, “The World Turned Upside Down (The Diggers’ Song).” (Marcia)

9. Within the fire and out upon the sea—Fairport Convention, “Crazy Man Michael.” The iPod was in a Fairport-related mood that night, clearly.

10. She said she was leaving so I went to follow—Robbie Fulks, “Georgia Hard.” I’m telling Robbie on all of you.

11. A teenage dream so hard to beat—The Undertones, “Teenage Kicks.” (CK, Tom, Chris)

12. So messed up, I want you here—Iggy/Stooges, “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” (Tom, CK)

13. I’m gonna hide if she don’t leave me alone—Shangri-Las, “I Can Never Go Home Anymore.” If you’ve never heard this masterpiece of symphonic sentimentality, you really should. It’s impossible to describe just how over-the-top it is.

14. This place is a prison and these people aren’t your friends—Postal Service, “This Place Is a Prison.” No Postal Service fans here? That’s terrible.

15. I’m quitting, giving up on being good enough—Dolorean, “Violence in the Snowy Fields.” Such a great song.

16. Bad liquor, bad liquor, who took the good out of the bottle?—American Music Club, “Bad Liquor.” (Jason)

17. You’ve finally gone and done it, broke it right in two—Allison Moorer, “No Next Time.” If only she would make another record half as good as the one this song comes fromâ¿¦

18. In your white lace and your wedding bells, you look the picture of contented new wealth—The Jam, “The Bitterest Pill (I Ever Had to Swallow).” (Chris, Tom)

19. This is the lotus hour, it’s time for us to leave—Dolly Varden, “The Lotus Hour.” The good news: there’s a new Dolly Varden record on the way. The less good news: …in January 2007. (Tom)

20. You can say the sun is shining if you really want to, I can see the moon and it seems so clear—Nick Drake, “Road.” I’m a little bit shocked that no one got this.

21. On a night like this you can’t brush away all the faces in the street—The Clientele, “Missing.” I now have almost as many Clientele songs on my iPod as Delgados songs, i.e. a whole lot, so the odds of a song of theirs coming up during this exercise were excellent. Odd that there were no Delgados songs, come to think of it.

22. Well I wish I’d known your name—Bettie Serveert, “Palomine.” (Phillip)

23. I am a dull and simple lad—The Kinks (or the Jam), “David Watts.” (Jason)

24. We used to say “There’d come the day we’d all be making songs”—Fairport Convention, “Meet on the Ledge.” One of the greatest songs ever written. And that’s not even hyperbole. (Marcia; partial credit to Phillip)

25. I jumped straight at it when I had the chance—Scott Miller, “Red Ball Express.” Arguably the best song on the slightly subpar but nonetheless unfairly underappreciated “Upside Downside.” (Jason; partial credit to Tom)

Thank you all for playing. Try to do better next time.

Categories Music

Today’s edition of “Why didn’t I think of that?”

July 18, 2006 //

This is the coolest thing I’ve seen ever, or at least this week.

Stop-Motion Human Space Invaders

Recommended especially to those who, like me, are fans of old-school video games. I really do wish I’d thought of it first.

Categories Nothing in particular

25 first lines

July 11, 2006 //

Jason had this meme on his blog, and it struck me as so cool that it actually brought me out of blogging lurkdom. This is how it works:

Step 1: Get your playlist together, put it on random, and play.

Step 2: Write down the first line from the first 25 songs that play or close to it.

Step 3: Post and let everyone you know guess what song the lines come from.

Step 4: Cross out the songs (or similar) when someone guesses correctly.

To submit your guess, just leave a comment (and remember, comments will disappear into the moderation queue until I get to them, which I will try to do faithfully even though I’ll be stuck with a dial-up connection over the next few days).

Given the obscurity of some of the songs on my iPod, I’m thinking that this could be a challenge, but who knows.

And yeah, I’m back. Maybe. More on that, and on my prolonged absence, one of these days.

1. How often she has gazed from castle windows o’er, and watched the daylight passing within her captive wall

2. So close and yet so far away and all the things I’d hoped to say will have to go unsaid today

3. With the shipwrecked sailors searching for some fools’ gold

4. Standing here now you wash over me

5. Close my eyes, feel the fire

6. Here she comes across the street but I’m already there downstairs to meet with her

~~7. Two days past 18, he was waiting for the bus in his army green~~(Jason)

~~8. In 1649, to St. George’s Hill, a ragged band they called the Diggers came to show the people’s will~~ (Marcia)

9. Within the fire and out upon the sea

10. She said she was leaving so I went to follow

~~11. A teenage dream so hard to beat~~ (CK, Tom, Chris)

~~12. So messed up, I want you here~~ (Tom, CK)

13. I’m gonna hide if she don’t leave me alone

14. This place is a prison and these people aren’t your friends

15. I’m quitting, giving up on being good enough

~~16. Bad liquor, bad liquor, who took the good out of the bottle?~~ (Jason)

17. You’ve finally gone and done it, broke it right in two

~~18. In your white lace and your wedding bells, you look the picture of contented new wealth~~ (Chris, Tom)

~~19. This is the lotus hour, it’s time for us to leave~~ (Tom)

20. You can say the sun is shining if you really want to, I can see the moon and it seems so clear

21. On a night like this you can’t brush away all the faces in the street

~~22. Well I wish I’d known your name~~ (Phillip)

~~23. I am a dull and simple lad~~ (Jason)

~~24. We used to say “There’d come the day we’d all be making songs”~~ (Marcia; partial credit to Phillip)

~~25. I jumped straight at it when I had the chance~~ (Jason; partial credit to Tom)

(Some of these actually include the song title in the lyric, which seems sneaky, but I was just following the dictates of my iPod on shuffle, which also accounts for why one artist is represented twice here. And then again, some of them even I had to look up, so it will all even out, I guess.)

Categories Music

The NBA playoffs and other matters

May 18, 2006 //

Yeah, I haven’t been around. And yeah, it’s because I’ve been depressed. A combination of the previously discussed crisis of confidence at work, unseasonably hot weather, my supply of antidepressants running low, and some other crap all contributed to the onset of what had all the early signs of a severe depression: loss of interest in things that I usually enjoy (all four of them*), complete lack of energy, inability to concentrate, desire to sleep all the time, etc. Fortunately, it seems to be just maybe starting to subside—and I stress “seems” because a) I don’t want to push my luck and b) the symptoms haven’t fully receded yet, the creeping tendrils are still grabbing at my brain. Plus the temperatures, after dipping below average for the last few weeks, have started to climb again. But I’ve been less totally inert lately, at least, and that’s just maybe a promising sign.

I’ve always resisted describing myself as a “victim” of depression, because I’ve been conditioned by various cancer patients I’ve known to avoid that sort of language, but I have fewer qualms about saying that I suffer from depression. Because, well, I do; it is suffering, when I’m in that state, suffering of a kind I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. It’s always easy, when I’ve had a long stretch of feeling pretty good, as I have recently, for me to forget that depression is a disease, and one that can’t always be cured. For people with major, chronic depression, like me, these cycles just have to be accepted and gotten through, basically. That’s wearying, and I wish it weren’t the case, but it always has been for me, medication or not, therapy or not, positive or negative situational factors or not. And though I’ve broken the streak a few times in recent years, the fact is that I nearly always get depressed in April; in my world, it really is the cruelest month, which is fitting for an Eliot fan like me. (I have a New Yorker cartoon on my fridge, one that will always be on any fridge where I happen to live, that’s captioned “T.S. Eliot Meets Beavis and Butthead” and features a guy sitting at a table looking depressed and saying/thinking, “April sucks.” I Love That.) All of my worst depressions (and I mean the real ones, not things like grieving) have occurred or started in April, including my very first brush with the disease. Sometimes they linger into May and June; with luck, this won’t turn out to be one of those.

Anyway. One of the things that’s been keeping me relatively chipper lately is the NBA playoffs, which have been way more exciting than I can remember the early rounds being in several seasons. With the sad exception of the Grizzlies getting blown out (sad because it means no more Bobby Jackson to root for this season), the first round was more dramatic than I would have expected it to be, and how cool was it that the Wizards—who were laughingstocks not all that long ago, though it’s easy to forget that now that they’ve got Butler and especially the marvelous Gilbert Arenas—played Cleveland so tough? How beautiful was it to see the Bulls get to blow the Heat out by 19 points in one game and kept them close in most of the others? Not that I hate the Heat, really—like most other people on the planet, I’m sick of Shaq, though mostly I’m indifferent to him, but how could anyone hate a team that includes Dwyane Wade, who you could pretty convincingly argue is the best all-around player in the game today? (I wouldn’t make that argument myself, but it can be plausibly made). It’s just that the Bulls are my favorite team to watch in the Eastern Conference these days, and they’re only going to get better, at least for the immediate future.

(It’s weird to root for the Bulls, in a way, because for years, from my perspective, rooting for the Bulls was like rooting for air or sunlight or something; they were there, they were going to win, and rooting for them didn’t really seem to have much purpose unless you were a Chicagoan. And I got sick of MJ, not quite in the same way that I’m now sick of Shaq: no, I’m not for a second denying his brilliance on the court, and I can’t seriously argue that he wasn’t the best ever, but players who so totally dominate a game just become boring after a while. It’s a fact of life. So I always rooted against the Bulls, unless they were playing a team I hated (usually the Jazz). But that was a whole nother era ago, and today’s Bulls are just too exciting not to love.)

If the first round was more exciting than any in recent memory, the second round is starting to look like it will go down as the best second round in the modern playoff era. Nail-biting finishes! The Cavs making Detroit look not just mortal, but even occasionally feeble! Duncan and Ginobili playing incredibly well given that they’ve been hurt, and the Spurs still in danger of losing in six! (I’d say “at likely risk of losing in 6,” but I don’t want to jinx the Mavs.) And most amazing of all, the unbelievable spectacle of the Clippers—the Los Angeles Clippers—looking like a team that could maybe even win it all, especially if by some miracle Cleveland actually does send the Pistons home.

Though the Clippers better not win it all, because that would mean the Suns losing, and I’m not ready for that. (It would be bad for my mental health, which is, as noted, currently rather frail. I hope Sam Cassell will keep that in mind when he suddenly starts hitting late-fourth-quarter threes tonight.) Since I don’t even want to utter the name of that team from my hometown that I’ve rooted for my whole life, and my other team, the Wolves, were barely more worthy of mention this season (bring me the head of Kevin McHale, please—seriously, how much longer can he ride his status as Beloved Minnesota Icon before Glenn Taylor notices that his GM hasn’t made a good move since KG was drafted), the Suns were my team this year more than any other, even without Amaré Stoudemire, one of my favorite players in the league. I tend to like guard-led play and smaller teams, so the Suns play my preferred style, and it’s also been so cool to see these unexpected stars emerge: Boris Diaw most notably, but also Leandro Barbosa, and Raja Bell (who’s no rookie, but who had dropped off the map for a while there), and geez, even Tim Thomas has been playing like a near-star. Shawn Marion has had a stellar year even by his already stellar standards, and then of course there’s Steve Nash. I’ve recently decided that I have a deep and abiding love for/crush on Steve Nash, embarrassing Jackie Earle Haley hair and all. He’s smart, he’s gentlemanly, he seems eminently normal, he’s Canadian…and he usually has just a hint of a mischievous twinkle in his eyes during interviews, which makes me think that he’s a guy who’s having a pretty great time being him.

Which brings me to two minor and basically irrelevant points that I’m going to mention anyway:

1. I would like to nominate the Suns as having the highest percentage of really handsome players of any NBA team in recent memory, and possibly ever. I mean, have you looked at those guys? Raja Bell could model. Boris Diaw…let’s just say it makes sense that his surname rhymes with “Wow!” And Shawn Marion, needless to say, is a serious looker. Same for Leandro Barbosa. I’ve always thought Stoudemire was a very handsome young man too. I don’t mean to be all People magazine here, but it’s really hard not to notice what an attractive team this is.

2. Is it just me, or is the league more crowded with classy, likeable, poised young players now than it’s ever been? I’m not suggesting that it’s been filled with thugs in the past; I tend to believe that most of the supposed badasses, including Iverson and Ron Artest and Kenyon Martin, etc., are pretty good guys too. (Artest has indisputably done some dumbass shit, on and off the court, but I think he’s both gentler and more complex than people think, and Iverson has certainly shown over the years that just because he doesn’t scrub up pretty, it doesn’t mean that he’s any kind of gangsta; as he’s said recently, he’s a dad guy in his 30s these days, he’s not hanging on the corner. I always hated the bad rap that Iverson got, even before his Georgetown days. But that’s a story for another day.) But the emerging stars now just seem so…so nice, and so adult, and (mostly) so well-spoken and thoughtful. LeBron? Class all the way. Same for DWade. I’ve seen interviews in recent days with Cuttino Mobley and Richard Jefferson and a couple of others and just been struck by how likeable they all are. Which makes it even more of a pleasure to be an NBA fan right now.

*I always chuckle at those PSAs and questionnaires that pop up during National Depression Awareness Week or whatever that list the symptoms of a possible depression, which always include something like “Do you find it hard to take pleasure in activities you used to enjoy?” because as a nearly lifelong depressive, my response is usually “No, because there are no activities that I used to enjoy.” But that’s a slight exaggeration, especially lately, and this time around, when I noticed that I couldn’t even work up the energy to knit or read, I knew I was genuinely depressed.

Categories Muzzy-headed introspection, Sports

And double blah, no added g

April 20, 2006 //

I started to write a long-winded rant about what a crappy week at work I’ve had, but then (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) the laptop ate the post, and it’s really not worth reconstructing, because honestly, what’s more boring than people complaining about work? The point of it, anyway, was not so much to just bitch as it was to fret that because of various bits of nonsense that I had to handle this week (which were nobody’s fault, including mine; just the fault of the way my company is structured, which might be the most negative thing I’ve ever said about them/us), I’m now in danger of a) not doing as good a job on my current big project as I hope to do, and b) more damningly, running late on that same project. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t fuss too much about being behind schedule; I’ve worked at enough jobs where there were no significant consequences for missing deadlines that I’ve become far too cavalier about making them. But in this job, if I’m off schedule, that messes things up for a whole chain of other people, sometimes at great and wasted expense…and I really, really hate it when my screwups create problems for other people.

All this ties into my previously mentioned ongoing crisis of confidence about my ability to be good at my new career. (I mentioned this in passing to a friend a week or so ago, and for some reason it prompted chuckles and mutterings behind my back and at my expense; I’m still a little miffed about that.) It also ties in to the several odd dreams (okay, the second most boring thing in the world, after people complaining about work, is people telling you their dreams, but this will just be a sentence, I promise) that I’ve had recently about Minneapolis. Something is calling me back there, I think…not sure what yet, but as I’ve said in the past, in some ways, it’s the last place that I truly felt at home.*

I’ve been idly glancing at the Mpls./St. Paul Craigslist for rental apartments lately, and toward the end of the workday today, I looked at my old employer’s Website (not Twin\Tone, God knows—the job after that) and fleetingly considered writing to the two people who are still there to whom I am closest and saying, “I’ve had enough; I want to come back.” The scary (if somehow comforting) thing is that I probably could go back there; it would take some persuading and pleading, and a big pay cut, but it could probably be done. And here’s the thing: no crises of confidence would ensue, because if there’s one vocation I’ve been good at in my life, it’s being a children’s book editor. This is probably just me being a brat; I’ve always tended to duck out of things that don’t come easily to me, and it would be useful for me to remind myself that I’m still very new at a career that isn’t easy to master, one where you can’t just take a couple of classes in and immediately master; I need to stick with it before I can accurately determine whether or not I suck at it. One reason I refuse to give up on knitting—a skill that does not come especially easily to me, as I am arguably the least craft-ish person in the known universe—is precisely to combat that tendency to walk away from things that I can’t immediately master. It’s different, though, when it’s your livelihood, and your avocation (of sorts), on the line; that’s why it’s tempting to contemplate going back to children’s book editing, at which I am quite literally a seasoned pro.

But you can’t really go back, can you? and it would be pretty silly to waste my MLS—still the thing I’m proudest of in the whole world—to leave the library-related professions entirely.

Wouldn’t it?

I don’t know. I don’t know if I have the energy to venture any farther down this path of contemplation tonight; I think instead I’ll go and put some stuff on my iPod that’s been embarrassingly missing for way too long. And soon I hope to write about some especially exciting new music: the debut album by Dirty Pretty Things, the new band formed by Carl Barat, the non-drug-addicted, non-Kate-Moss-dating ex-Libertine of whom I am a massive fan. It’s due out in the UK in early May, and I’ve already pre-ordered it. Plus, my copy of “It’s Art, Dad,” the for-fanatics-only early recordings comp by the Clientele, should be on its way to me shortly. And there’s still Scott Miller to write about. But tonight, I’m going to go put “Rattlesnakes” and “Easy Pieces” on the iPod. Those are the only records I own by Lloyd Cole, which is sort of scandalous; someone who knows way more about him than I do (I have a vague idea that that someone might be known as The Krueg) needs to fill me in on the post-Commotions world of Lloyd Cole. I’ve heard, and liked, “Don’t Get Weird on Me Babe,” an early Cole solo record, but that’s about the extent of my knowledge. I need to be clued in.

*Sort of. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel utterly, blissfully at home when we moved back to Manhattan and then to Park Slope in 1998; thing was, I didn’t stick around long enough to fully appreciate the feeling of being back at home.

Categories Music, Nothing in particular

Blah(g), plus: that thing I do in June

April 11, 2006 //

Yeah, I haven’t been around much lately. This is partly because it’s getting increasingly difficult for me to be at the computer when I don’t have to, and partly because I haven’t really had a whole lot to say lately. Apart from an ongoing crisis of confidence about my ability to be any good at all at my job, things have been pretty quiet in my world. I’m not depressed, not at all (although I can sense some weather-induced doldrums coming on, as the forecast for this week has temperatures climbing to the mid-80s in friggin’ April); I’m just not up to much, I guess.

A few things have come up that are worth talking about recently, though. For one, against all recent signs and indications, there is going to be a Twangfest this year. It was a nightmare to book this one, and I don’t even do much booking. (As it turned out, in fact, I didn’t do any booking, though it wasn’t for want of trying.) It’s the tenth year, and we wanted it to be spectacular, or something close. We wanted to bring back some performers from the earliest days of Twangfest, and then also have some totally new and dazzling headliners. A major country artist, say, like Marty Stuart or Dwight Yoakam, or someone totally unexpected but entirely appropriate, like Sharon Jones. But when we started putting out feelers and making inquiries, it was one disappointment after another. One artist who we thought was absolutely locked in got some dates in Europe in June, and we couldn’t even be made at him because we know he makes better money there than he does here. (And because he loves Twangfest, as we love him, and wasn’t trying to shaft us, I hasten to add. He’ll be welcome to play anytime he wants, if there are more Twangfests to play.) Others weren’t touring in June and would have had to be flown in to perform, an expense that our budget couldn’t handle.

In the end, we’ve put together, completely out of our asses, a great lineup that I’m quite excited about, with an array of fine purveyors of American roots-ish music ranging from the Dirtbombs to BR5-49, and much in between. See for yourself in a few days when the lineup is posted on the Twangfest site. And in the end, Twangfest X will be as memorable a musical and social experience as all the other Twangfests have been; I’m completely confident of that. I know the next ten weeks or so will be thoroughly dominated by Twangfest, and I’m looking forward to that (though juggling it with my more than usually heavy workload will be, um, interesting). I’m sort of dead weight when it comes to most of the work that makes Twangfest happen—I don’t really do booking, and I’m even less useful when it comes to finding sponsors, because I am almost pathologically incapable of asking strangers for money. But this is the time of year when I try to sort of make up for my uselessness. I coordinate the Dan Pack (named for our beloved friend and Twangfest supporter Dan Bentele), which allows people to make a small donation to Twangfest and get a good deal on tickets and a t-shirt and poster. (Asking friends and acquaintances for money is apparently easier than asking strangers, I guess.) This year, I’m back to answering the queries that come in to our general e-mail box, which pick up in volume this time of year. I’ll be writing a press release.

And then my favorite part: running the on-site merchandise sales and paying the bands. I love paying the bands, because I’d be too shy to talk to most of them otherwise, but paying them gives me a built-in excuse. (And somehow they always seem to like me. I’m sure the fact that I’m handing them money has nothing to do with it.) Paying the bands means I have to stay sober at the club, which is a good thing, and handling merch means that I get to hide behind a table instead of mingling, so that people won’t quite figure out how truly shy and awkward and tongue-tied and unprepossessing I am. It all works out very well. Twangfest is as social an activitiy as I can imagine, and it’s the sort of thing I’d ordinarily fervently avoid—I’d rather eat dirt than go to SXSW, for example—but somehow when it’s Twangfest, its okay. It’s pretty much the best thing I do all year. It’s almost scary how much of my identity is tied up in being part of the Twanggang, actually. That’s something I prefer not to dwell on too much or too often, though it’s been harder to escape this year because there are questions about the future of Twangfest and about my future with it. More about that if and when it’s appropriate, though.

Anyway, Twangfest fever has officially set in, and that’s cause for a blog post if anything is. There’s more to talk about too—for one thing, the new record by (Twangfest X performer) Scott Miller has been out for several weeks now, and I haven’t even written about it. I’ll save that for next time, along with some other musical commentary.

Categories Uncategorized

Tolerating the intolerant

March 23, 2006 //

I’ve been struggling with the issue of tolerance lately. Tolerance is an absolutely essential part of my personal moral code; I was raised to be tolerant and to value tolerance, and I consider it a necessary part of being a decent human being. But I have to admit that I am not very tolerant of…well, you know. The extreme right wing, the fundies, the wingnuts. (Let’s just refer to them as “those people,” to turn one of their nasty little code-word phrases back on them.) It’s a passive sort of intolerance, which is the only kind I’m capable of, really: I’m just not interested in a two-sided conversation with them, I don’t want to hear their opinions, and I wish they would all just go away and take a few US states with them.

Oh, on a one-on-one level, I’m as tolerant as I have to be, of course; with my fundie co-workers at my last job, for example, I just avoided all topics that might cause controversy, and as a result, we all got along fine and I knew them to be essentially decent people, just horribly misguided in some of their beliefs. But on a broader scale, I am not tolerant of those people, and I don’t feel as bad about it as I maybe should. After all, if tolerance is so important to me, shouldn’t I take a live-and-let-live attitude toward them instead of wanting to put them all on a boat that sails around the world for all eternity? And if I don’t take that attitude, then aren’t I guilty of the same sort of intolerance as they are, just with a smaller target zone?

Yet I can’t seem to make myself feel any more tolerant of them than I already don’t (to use one of my husband’s cleverly twisted locutions). So when I read this in Salon this morning, I felt both better and worse about the subject: better, because it’s hard to feel terribly guilty about loathing someone who can publicly express such an abhorrent sentiment, and worse, because the quote makes me feel even more intolerant (though I can honestly say that I stop short of being able to apply that same abhorrent sentiment to, y’know, those people).

Categories Politics 'n' stuff

RIP Kirby Puckett

March 6, 2006 //

I moved to Minnesota in October 1986, when the Twins had just ended a season full of promise. I was aware of this even though I hadn’t been a baseball fan for years, because I had just started watching the game again while I was still living in Austin; one of my roommates (on whom I had a sort-of crush, and on whom my cat Tim had a major crush) would watch Rangers games on nights when he was home, and Tim would follow him into the bedroom where the TV was, and I would eventually follow Tim and get drawn into the game as well as the company. It was a good time to move to Mpls. as a reborn baseball fan: the following year, the Twins overcame their mediocre road record to clinch the division, and then the pennant (in an exciting series with the tough-as-nails old guys from Detroit that we interrupted work to watch), and finally the World Series. I was a Twins fan, and a Minnesotan, for both of the team’s Series victories, and the 1991 Series was an amazing one from a baseball perspective…but from a great-story perspective, the ’87 Series was even better. And though Kirby wasn’t my favorite Twin (that would be Kent Hrbek, who always took the game just seriously enough, never too seriously, and played with the same sense of joy that a little kid does), he was clearly the hero nonetheless, and the most reliable player on the team for years, and I loved him just like everyone else in Minnesota did. It’s hard to describe how wonderful it was to experience that ’87 Series as a fan, and Kirby was the symbol of everything that was great about it. Even people who had never paid attention to sports before got caught up in it.

I loved his public persona, too. For a year or so, I did a radio show on the cable radio station (remember cable radio? No? That’s okay, neither does anyone else) in Mpls.’s Warehouse District with one of my co-workers, and we used to have lunch afterwards at the Loon Cafe, a favorite hangout of Kirby’s. We’d see him there more often than not, and though I never had the nerve (or the desire, really; I’m big on leaving celebrities alone) to approach him, lots of others did, and he was always gracious and accommodating and easygoing. The staff loved him too. He still lived in the city at that point (though not for long; he moved to the ‘burbs shortly thereafter), and there was even talk of him running for mayor, though nothing ever came of it and who knows if it was ever even a real possibility. But just the idea of it fit in with Kirby’s overall image: he was salt of the earth, a true class act. It was impossible not to love him. It still is, really.

All of which, of course, made it harder to accept the awful stories that came out after he was forced to stop playing baseball. Not just the sexual assault charges, of which he was acquitted, but the horrifying, and apparently accurate, accounts published in Sports Illustrated of his physical and sexual violence and abusiveness. For the longest time, I just refused to accept those stories, and when it finally became impossible to ignore them, I simply stopped thinking about the subject at all; my mind would sort of close up when Kirby’s name was mentioned. We don’t get to have many heroes in sports anymore, and seeing one who had so thoroughly seemed to be the genuine article was crushing.

So maybe now I should feel worse than I do about allowing myself to have rose-colored memories of Kirby. But he’s gone, and it feels like a little bit of my own history is gone with him, and I will mourn him in spite of everything. It’s not quite the same as “trust the art, not the artist,” because whereas it’s possible to divorce an artist’s abhorrent personal traits from the work they produced, with Kirby, part of what made him a great baseball player was the stuff beyond the stats: the enthusiasm that he brought to every game, his graciousness off the field (with fans and other players, at least), the way he mentored younger players, his fidelity to the Twins when he could have commanded more money elsewhere, the way he served as a spokesman and a role model for so long. All of those things gave extra impact to his brilliance at the plate and in the field. (There was no sight on earth quite like seeing that short-legged, pot-bellied little guy leap halfway to the sky to make a catch at the centerfield wall.) And if beneath all of that was a man of much poorer character, then the public character becomes tainted, inevitably. But then again, I didn’t experience Kirby the person; like thousands and thousands of other Minnesota fans, I experienced Kirby the Hall of Fame-bound baseball player. And that’s who I’m mourning tonight, with all my heart. So rest in peace, Kirby, and thanks.

Categories Sports

Worst. Oscars. Ever.

March 5, 2006 //

Yeah, I know, maybe not ever. But this was a rare year in which I actually saw more than one of the movies nominated for Best Picture; I saw two, one excellent (“Good Night, and Good Luck”) and one abysmal (“Crash”). So of course, the abysmal one wins…and the really good one gets completely shut out of the awards. And Jon Stewart, though he started strong, wasn’t nearly as funny as he should have been. At least the Supporting Actor and Actress award winners were worthy; I didn’t see “Syriana,” though I will eventually, but George Clooney is always great in whatever he does, and Rachel Weisz was superb in the slight but effective “Constant Gardener.” (Ralph Fiennes was typically excellent also, though I guess it was too minor a movie for him to merit a Best Actor nomination.)

I don’t usually care much about award shows, though I almost always watch the major movie and TV and country music ones (I haven’t watched the Grammys in more than 25 years, and I find it surprising when people with similar musical tastes do watch them, because they have so little to do with most of what we listen to). As I said, it’s a rare year in which I’ve seen even one of the nominated films, because over the years I’ve become less and less of a moviegoer (or even DVD-watcher); somewhere along the line, I stopped being all that much of a movie fan. Besides, there’s usually other stuff on TV on Sunday nights, so that I miss most of the Oscar show. But this year I watched the whole thing, and I didn’t for one second believe that “Crash”—seriously one of the worst major motion pictures that I’ve ever seen—would win. I was sure it would be “Brokeback Mountain,” which cornered a majority of the other non-acting awards. I haven’t seen “Brokeback” and don’t have much desire to (mainly because it’s based on a short story by E. Annie Proulx, whom I consider a truly dreadful writer, the worst sort of earnest middlebrow shlock with literary pretentions), but I’d have been much happier if it had won rather than “Crash.”

What’s so awful about “Crash”? Oh, I dunno. Is it the hamfistedness of its “message”? Is it the ugliness of every single one of the characters? Is it the way that it purports to make us confront our fears and prejudices while actually sort of glorifying them? Um, yeah. That and a whole bunch more. (And I like Paul Haggis, who created one of my favorite TV shows ever, “E-Z Streets”…though in retrospect, that show was pretty heavy-handed too. But it had a sense of dark humor, something that is completely lacking from “Crash”).

It’s hard for me to describe how much I hated “Crash,” from the very first scene on, and why, so I’ll let Andrew O’Hehir do it for me. From Salon:

Look, it’s not like “Crash” is a war crime or something. A lot of the acting is quite good, and the honorable intentions of this achingly earnest sermon (“Racial Pain: Los Angeles, America, the World?”) are obvious. But it’s exactly the kind of portentous, piss-elegant middlebrow trash that many critics (and, unhappily, many viewers) see as Important Cinema. The only difficult part about identifying the preaching and speech-making in “Crash” is finding the places when it stops. No one in this movie ever talks like an identifiable human being, starting with the notorious early scene where two young African-American men who are about to carjack the L.A. district attorney get into a philosophical argument about the prevalence of white racism. (I had high hopes for that scene when it appeared they might have to shoot Sandra Bullock’s eterna-whiny rich-bitch character. After that, it was all downhill.)

I should have just skipped the Oscars and watched “The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” (which I have out from Netflix at the moment) instead.

Categories Books, teevee, movies

Band of the moment

February 27, 2006 //

I don’t know what it is about Scottish bands, but so many of them are just irresistible. Okay, maybe it’s not fair to generalize quite so broadly—there are 5 million people in Scotland, after all—but a disproportionate percentage of Music I Really Love seems to emanate from Scotland. The Delgados, for instance, are perhaps my favorite “discovery” of the last decade (along with Dolly Varden), and since finding the Delgados, I’ve become a big fan of a lot of other artists on their label, Chemikal Underground. There’s Malcolm Middleton, whom I’ve discussed here, and his band Arab Strap, and Mogwai. And then, in another corner of the Wonderful World of Scottish Music, there’s the magnificent James Yorkston and the Athletes, whom I unaccountably left off my best of 2005 list. Not that they had a record out in 2005, alas, but I did want to mention their gorgeous 2004 release, “Just Beyond the River,” as my favorite record of 2004 that I didn’t hear until 2005. And of course, my affection for quirky Scottish pop goes way back before any of these bands to the heyday of the great Postcard label, especially Orange Juice, whom I’ve been listening to a lot lately now that their mid-period stuff has been anthologized (on “The Glasgow School,” which I just put on my iPod last night, to go along with the best-of collection that’s been on there for a while. There are few songs in the world, and I’m not even exaggerating when I say this, that make me as purely happy as “Felicity.”). Not to mention the Delmontes and Josef K and, well, Scotland rules, pretty much.

And just recently, I’ve become reacquainted with another slightly quirky and enormously entertaining Scottish pop band: Spare Snare. I used to hear Spare Snare all the time on Radio K, the University of Minnesota’s often superb student-run station, way back in the mid ’90s, but I’d all but forgotten about them until I found out that a guy in a CD-mixer group that I belong to is a member of the band. They just launched a MySpace page (have I mentioned how much I love it when bands have MySpace pages? Let me mention it again), and after listening to all the songs there this evening, I can’t wait till they have a full-length CD out so that I can give them my money for the import. I’d call them charming, but that makes them sound sort of twee and cute, and they’re not that; they’re just completely original and entirely captivating. (And sort of vaguely lo-fi, which is a bonus for me.) They’ve also got one of the best Websites I’ve seen in a long time, and given how thoroughly over the Web I’ve been feeling lately, that’s high praise indeed.

There’s a fair amount to talk about on the music front lately: an early entrant in the race for CD of the year (that would be the new Rosanne Cash), the allegedly forthcoming Scott Miller record (“allegedly” because it mysteriously disappeared from the online CD retailer site from which I had preordered it, something I didn’t find out until they sent me an order update about a CD I’d never heard of, rather than Scott’s CD; Sugar Hill still lists it as due on March 14, but I’m a little suspicious), the overhyped but still thoroughly enjoyable Arctic Monkeys CD, and more. But just at the moment, I’m all about the Scots,* and Spare Snare in particular. Go listen to them.

*Okay, and the Clientele, of course. Nothing has yet knocked them out of heavy rotation. But hey, their frontguy has a Scottish name, so maybe they count too. Sort of.

Categories Music