Who Put the Red in the Read

A bookish sort, I. So the other day I volunteered to take part in Read across America, and for 20 minutes read My Friend Rabbit to a class of pre-K kids so tiny I must have looked like a Thanksgiving Day Macy's Parade balloon to them (and perhaps just as full of hot air, who knows). As one who is childless by choice, I figure I have to deal with the little buggers sometimes, and this seemed as contained and safe a way as possible. It turned out to be pretty rewarding, especially when one of the four-year-olds nearly high-fived my palm off afterward in celebration.

One thing we were told to do as part of the event was explain how and why books are important to us. To help prove my bibliophilic nature, it hit me I still had one of my favorite books from childhood, and I thought bringing something that old might impress the kiddies, since the book is even older than I am (its © 1955, my © isn't even 195_ ). So I fished out How Our Nation Grew (see image above) and was ready to tell them how it was a history book from one of my older sisters' classes (third grade, I'd guess) and it was one of the first things I remember reading, making me a preschooler with a perhaps unhealthy relationship to the Missouri Compromise.

But then I started looking at the book for the first time in years, and started wonder if I grew up in Texas and not New Jersey. The back of the book offers an important hint, as in big letters it says "The Christian Social History Series." That's a bit surprising as we grew up Catholic, and back in that day (197_) Catholics tended not to think of themselves as Christians, anymore than a super special square would deign to call itself a mere rectangle. But, reading through the book, it became clear to me just how holy a history this was, and not just because of the pages where I cut out the images of the Monitor and Merrimack, say, probably for some school report of my own (think of it as semi-intellectual hand-me-downs). For instance, here's how the book gets all sensitive about the issue of Native Americans back in the good old days when they were just Indians. "The Indians did not want to give up their land. They fought to keep it the only way they knew--by cruelty and torture." If they only knew better, than maybe they would have been able to keep their land. Fortunately, they all ended up on reservations, which is pretty nice of us. That meant, "Now the white man could settle the West in peace. He no longer feared the Indians would drive off his cattle, burn his home, or kill his family."

Of course, the Indians were an old, easily reserved problem. For in 1955, the problem was the USSR and "Communism...one of the most evil movements that has ever arisen in the world" since Communists don't believe in god and or that man has an immortal soul. There is no hint in the book that Communism might have anything to do with Marxism, or even anything to do with a political system derived from an economic idea. Turns out it's particularly bad to live in a Communist run country because, "They are allowed to read only Communist books, newspapers, and magazines. These are full of lies, and the people never learn the truth about their country or other countries."

Unlike, say, the children who learn history from "The Christian Social History Series."

But while the book holds a place in my memory if not my moral or political compass, the back cover was oddly highly predictive for this now left coast, left-wing agnostic; take a look at where the long, hard, covered wagon train ends--at the Santa Barbara Mission.

Parmesan Rhymes with Courtesan

While grating Parmigiano the other night while setting up the mise en place for risotto, it hit me what a great invention the whole block of cheese was. I mean, it had to be invented in my lifetime, for until I escaped from home went to college I would have bet my life that parmesan only came in green cardboard cylinders. Which is one way to say, my god, I've lived through a food revolution, haven't I? Growing up I thought my mom was a killer cook, but it wasn't till I started cooking myself that it hit me she killed more than she cooked, too often--just ask any vegetable that tended to be served as if she were feeding a family of hockey players who couldn't afford dentures. And I won't even get into Slovak food, which answers the culinary question, how many carbohydrates can you fit in one dish?

But my mom did do Italian passably well, making meatballs and sauce from scratch, even. So it's telling when things needed to get cheesy, out came the Kraft's, so much like cheese it doesn't need refrigeration. I love the photo above and its claim "the original flavor enhancer," which is vague enough to mean nothing, beyond a possible lawsuit from Accent, which I also remember in our 1970s spice cabinet. At least our kitchen appliances weren't avocado green.

So we certainly took cheese for granted, or for grated, as the case may be. Now I'm too sophisticated for that, of course, doing my cheese shopping at a proper cheese shop and brandishing my MicroPlaner with abandon at the slightest need for cheese (or zest--what handy tools). The work seems to make the food even better, somehow, or that's what I hope to think. I'm sure it's nothing about the distance I hope to make with even the smallest of choices, my childhood and its expiration date cabineted-away, hidden, I can only hope, by my way with words like Parmigiano, mise en place, risotto.

Happy Are the Mirth-Makers

Which came first, the twisted mind or the culture that twisted it? In my case, who knows. But I do know, for sure that Martin Mull and what turns out to be very short stints as Barth Gimble on Fernwood 2Night and then America 2-Night helped shape my sense of wit. We're talking years before Letterman, decades before Larry Sanders. We're talking the same spitting range as Mike Douglas and Merv, other fixtures of our televisual household (we were not an outdoors family). I learned a generation of wordless facial takes watching Mull mull-over the desperate, talentless, and clueless about him, and who doesn't feel that way about the world, especially at 14 and 15? How amazingly ridiculous everything seems, of course starting with one's own self, but it's so much easier to roll one's eyes in exasperation at everything not us, isn't it. (Please do not ponder how far I've grown past that 15-year-old, cause if you do I'll have to make a face.)

But my god how I like to make fun of things. And the roots of me as critic might start in parody like this, that essential sense of "aboutness." Sure you could create, or you can respond to what others create, and thus the ink doth spill, years and years of music reviews (we called them records then, kids!) and film and books and plays. If others didn't create I'd be nothing.

Of His Pasta Memories Are Made

I went looking for my youth in a bowl of pasta the other night and didn't quite find it, but at least I came up with this blog entry. It didn't even hit me when I placed the order for fettuccine Alfredo that I wanted more than the comfort of comfort food, but a connection, a memory, days that even when happening seemed like dream so now slip away all too easily. Somehow, while our family was decidedly middle class (the word once meant something, you know), we managed to head to Bermuda for vacation every couple of years, a mere two hour flight from Newark, but a crazy distance away--how genteel Colonialism can seem, especially when you're just a kid, particularly when you're more dazzled by an ocean so blue, you can walk into it and see your feet when up to your neck. This wasn't the Jersey shore, my friends. You West Coasters can keep Hawaii (where I must admit I have not yet been)--Paradise for me was Bermuda, weirdly more mid-Atlantic than Caribbean, and later, even better, the supposed "real" setting for The Tempest. Poor Hawaii's merely got a Brady Bunch episode (OK, a two-parter. With Vincent Price. But still.)

But I have parted far from my strand of pasta, haven't I? That's food for you. It didn't hit me till the other night's to remain nameless place serving me up a just not rich enough, just over-cooked fettuccine to realize what I longed for was the Alfredo served at the Princess, the wonderful once grand, at the time a bit, a tiny, tiny, what probably made it affordable for us bit, down on its heels old hotel where we would always stay. And waiters advanced to captains and they'd remember you year from year, as that's what fine service does, especially Italian waiters abroad who got to flirt with my sisters (older than me, it's not like there was something too weird going on) and deliver piping hot, cheesed to the nth degree fettuccine to teens like me. An odd dish for an island paradise, I know. But that's so often how paradise is, incongruous and everything we could want. Or maybe it's just our family (sans dad as this is all after the divorce, of course) sort of being one for a bit, getting along as the world was just too beautiful not to for a few days. Perhaps my mom came as close to happy as she'd let herself then.

You know what they say--watch what you eat as you never know what might repeat on you.

The Night Blogger

Childhood, Saturday night. Sure, other nights too, as they kept moving the _____ Night Movie of the Week around as they were ABC and only had Monday Night Football doing them any ratings good in those days. But this was what made weekends great when you were a kid and couldn't do anything else. Ah, television. Go look at the list of ABC Movies of the Week at Wikipedia and tell me you don't get back most of your childhood memories. Admit it, they aren't of playing catch with dad who was too busy working his ass off and avoiding home. They were of Karen Black turning into a Zuni devil doll, Dennis Weaver being terrorized (in a Plymouth Valiant, no less, what would be the very first car you "owned" as a hand-me-down, if a later model) by a hyper-malicious truck driver, and Kim Darby finding a horrible fate with the fireplace people in Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. OK, you might not remember that last one, as it's not as iconic as the first two, but if you saw it, you completely remember. It's part of your horror film DNA in a way that The Exorcist or Friday the 13th can't be as it was shown right in that little box in your own damn home. And wasn't really violent or gross. It just was intense enough to scare the bejeebers out of you. And you didn't even know you had bejeebers till they were gone.

Of course, who am I really trying to kid with the second person here--I'm writing about myself, perhaps to myself, but no doubt there was a Movie of the Week that dealt with a situation like that. But what a wonderful way to twist a kid's imagination, a series of films with titles like Dying Room Only and The Missing Are Deadly and The Legend of Lizzie Borden, with Elizabeth Montgomery bewitching in the title role. But in some ways I most remember the ones that are almost generic in their titles and promise and delivery, and still so so good, films like Skyway to Death and The Elevator and Trapped (guy gets mugged, left in department store men's room, wakes up after hours to find he's in the store with six vicious doberman guard dogs).

For, of course, child of the '70s I am, nothing beats disaster films, and while the big screen ones were fun, nothing beat the regularlity of one in your home each Saturday. Did I then realize they mimicked where the U.S. felt it was, post-Vietnam, post-hippie-60s euphoria, careening toward Carter's be-sweatered malaise? Did I realize they made grand my own feelings any teen has, the world so much possibility, so much to desire, so much that would say no and reject? Did I realize it was a large scale mirror for my family splitting in two?

Nah, I just liked cool, scary stuff. You can't beat Killdozer, say, the giant machine so brilliant and malignant, and me too young to quite catch camp yet even when a massive bulldozer, even if possessed by an alien force, can somehow sneak up on someone. Perhaps you have to save that knowledge for when what's scary in the world no longer seems supernatural, just mundane.

Instead we would create our own disaster films in our basements, an elaborate form of play when toy train set power boxes doubled as cockpit controls, crawlspace areas were just tight enough to creep through as varied scary passageways, and somehow we often prefered to kill our selves off rather than survive that final reel, death seemed so synthetic, filmic, dramatic, ick when ick was good.

Some Kind of Spinning Away

It's possible this song might be the first top 40 hit I remember from my youth, but like too much with the memory thing (or is that the fact thing?), when I look up the real true details, my memory is a mess. This was a a hit in 1970, but I'm remembering it from the years at the town's pool, Rello's, privately owned, where my sisters both worked summers as teens collecting fees/checking memberships at the gate and where I learned to swim, and what's now more valuable as real estate so is just filled in land plus everyone has their own pools now, so who needs community and the hope of crushes and the whole employee class of lifeguards who mostly just practiced winding the string on their whistles both left and right.

But at the snack bar, on the juke box, "Hitchin' a Ride." Now, do I really recall this from being seven? Was it still on the box for years, a top 5 hit someone liked, so the 45 never left its place? Is it just a song left spinning on the turntable in my head, a head old enough it still has a turntable in it?

I don't know. It's an old head that loves its turntable. And so I've avoided metaphors of the deep end, or the fear of the high dive, or telling the tale of the Rello grandchild, one of twins, who at age 10 died of weird complications after having his tonsils out. We knew the family, it was that kind of town. Also the kind where few probably read Thackeray (even if the band screwed with his novel's title), hitch hiking was considered something people from lesser, coarser towns would do, and being a one hit wonder would be an achievement, a getting out, a moment suburbia might bubble to something less sub-, if only for as long as the single played. How much hope can you expect so far down the Passaic River, where it's insignificant enough even William Carlos Williams wouldn't bother to write about it.

The Heart Is a Lonely Ian Hunter

What else might come to mind at the beginning of what's supposed to be (and sure is feeling like) a classic Southern California "it doesn't rain but it pours" six day soak? Still it takes more than a good rain to wash away the pull of this miraculously morose little gem that far too many people don't know (yes, that old theme again). If nothing else this still has one of the best two-line openers of all time: "Vinny says this town is dying/it's dying to be just like me" is cleverer than most pop has the right to be, a twist that helps the pessimism go down. For all the loser-filled angst in the lyrics, the song is so god-awful pretty, those little arpeggiated bits floating down, trying to wash something clean, or at the least say early '80s keybs with the a nostalgic, velvety vengeance. Sometimes rain isn't just rain you know. Or at least Ian Hunter knows--as his favorite theme, and how fitting for one who never quite made it as big as he would seem he should and is now mostly a relic, is being someone someday.

As for "Rain," it was just one part of the deluge that was Ian Hunter's run as my pity-popster of choice. Teenage me first gravitated to Jackson Browne and all that worry over being a pretender and not a contender; college-aged me found Hunter, and while I also loved his rocking side (Drew Carey, I want "Cleveland Rocks" back) and his close to Roxy Mott glamorousness (Mott and All the Young Dudes is a heck of a one-two punch), well, even on Mott I might like best the way the album grandly winds down with "The Ballad of Mott the Hoople" and the song that made me first love mandolin (I didn't come to it via my own country, no sir) "I Wish I Was Your Mother," a reinvention of the love song that's achingly tender. Who doesn't need a lesson in non-obvious tender?

For then there's this, too, that makes me forgive the sold soul sax of David Sanborn, makes me think there was value to Queen (that's that background bombast), that's so much that you could fill a vat of all the vinyl I've ever owned with it. We once called them records.

Totally overdone. And I'll take two, please.

The Memory that Goes Pong

This is about the first New Year's Eve I remember as NEW YEAR'S EVE, and no doubt this was a late revelation for me, say when I was 12 or 13, but I'm just that way--slow to what matters most. You have to forgive me, or admit I'm more like you than you'd like. For this is a memory of first buzzes, and in a lifetime of them, that means something (that I can remember them, yes, wise guy). What's lovely (and yes, there was childhood lovely, not that it ever felt that way being a child, of course), is so much of childhood gets wrapped up in this neat little bow that lets loose an arrow that pierces the Sears catalog, Andre Cold Duck, and Pong, not to mention my neighborhood friend Dennis Puglia, as it was at his house this happened, his parents' largesse that plopped the world's first home video game and two glasses of infernal bubbly in our probably barely teen laps, as if barely teen laps didn't have enough to deal with, suddenly recognizing what they were for and having no (beyond solo) way to do anything about it. Sometimes for years.

But there was this, Cold Duck, the first humble suggestion there was something delightful in bubbles, and no doubt miserable, but what does a 13-year-old know. He certainly didn't know what Wikipedia says now: "'The recipe was based on a traditional German custom of mixing all the dregs of unfinished wine bottles with champagne. The wine produced was given the name Kaltes Ende ('cold end' in German), until it was humorously altered to the similar sounding term Kalte Ente meaning 'cold duck.'" For if anyone knows humor, it's the Germans.

So we downed our unbeknowst to us thigh-slappingly named fizzy stuff, knowing only it made us fizzy, too. What grace, not to have to worry about the badness of things, the declasse-ness, though no doubt we made jokes about Andre wine and Andre the Giant, and no doubt felt about as body slammed by one as the other might have. We were 13.

And, of course, we tried feats of coordination and skill. (Was this to prepare us for drinking and driving? And don't be mad MADD, as this was years before that national bugaboo, when the drinking age was still 18 and America almost ached to be European a tiny bit, till that Puritan streak glowed brightly and smote fun.) That meant something the kids these days would consider as old as Lascaux, and as exciting -- Pong. The first home games of it came from the Sears catalog, even, and how cool is that, the poorly printed wish list for kids for years for Christmas, at least the ones wise enough to know mom and dad footed Santa's bill at the local mall (this was NJ, folks, and without swamps and malls, NJ would Brigadoon never to be done again). That the Sears Catalog wasn't just where you could pick out the latest games you'd want, but also where you could sneak peaks at bra ads years before Victoria unveiled her secrets was also a fine fine thing for a growing young man.

But, of course, that meant nothing, so you could always bat a little televised dot about. Via a dial. Wired to a console, wired to your tv. I mean, we're talking about an era pre-widespread remote controls for television. We were still not quite to the point with the magic cable box, even (and the hope for more illicitly spied boobies on HBO).

Even the marketing looks to be from another era. How simple we were in the 1970s. We could (well the adults then) even vote for Jimmy Carter for president. But I've got far away from two buzzed boys trying to twirl little controllers to keep the pong pinging from side to side. What a thrill that was, yet we had no idea. So much would get past us over the years beyond the little blip, eras of electronics, legions of liquor (at least in my case, or cases and cases I guess), plus each other. All those years of childhood friendship washed away in difference and lives and a desire by one of us not to be much New Jersey at all, for better or worse.

I raise my glass of sweet sweet Cold Duck to a couple of kids, then, anyway. We didn't know how sweet it was, did we?

The Border Halves a Piece of Paper into Here and Hereafter

I'm afraid we're losing maps. Sure, we're GPSed and hand-helded to death, pinned to electronic locations that emit their echoey read glow wherever traffic might slow us down. But they're not maps, and I miss them already. The way they unfolded space for you, offered you more vistas and promises of their friends that could take you further. I was kind of a map geek as a child, reading possible further travel into them, ever surprised how they could predict what one could actually do -- that right turn is really waiting just up there after all. I'd announce to adults when they made wrong turns, plot routes, want, so, to be in the control I knew I knew. (Sure it had nothing else to do with anything else in my life I'd want that.) Maps were a key to the world, so I spent time mastering how to unlock them.

One might say, "But maps, they go out of date so fast!" And I'd say, "Yes, how wonderful." All the history in them, the freeway before the earthquake tore it down, the home town signalled by an ever-growing circle of commuter population, the open space now besmirched with the box mall and its piddling roadwaylets no doubt named after the trees that used to stand where they now run.

For as a child I loved them for history more than anything. Those wonderful American Heritage books with the elaborate maps of Revolutionary or Civil War battles, Antietam's acres alive with troops, and then not very alive at all. The map made it seem so pristine, somehow, so much part of a paper-y safe story. Years later I'd stand on that land and it was as if a book rose about me, and some curious and mindlessly malicious child stared down.

Plus maps can never be folded back correctly, a sign once the journey's out there's no containing it, that we must keep looking, for the way is there and won't be denied.

Their Crazy Music Drives You Insane--This Way

Particularly given it's a lesson most never stumble upon, I'm damn glad I learned early weird is relative (no, not relatives--that's a very different post, and one not suitable for the generous-spirit of the holiday season)(I mean, I've been generous with the spirits, haven't you?). One of my greatest teachers in that, visually, musically, conceptually, was Roxy Music, and this clip captures that magic in all its early '70s glam-eliciousness, from the tip of Eno's shoulder feathers to the, uh, tip of Andy Mackay's codpiece (after all, sax players need to emphasize their horns). And then the music, one glorious rush of rhythm and words, a break for nifty soloing of all sorts--what is that sythesizer Eno plays?--this kind of thing defined rock and roll to me. So guess why today I don't listen to the radio.

As with so much, I didn't get this when it happened--playing a cut like this in East Hanover NJ in 1972 would have had me earmarked for scheduling with bullies from every nearby burb--but something I "saved" for college, as my freshman year was as much about discovering Roxy, the Velvets, Mott and reading my way from '60s classic to classic (Hunter S. to Tom Wolfe to Michael Herr--yeah Dispatches came out in the '70s, but it's Vietnam for me more than Apocalypse Now or godforbid Platoon) as Shakespeare or Intro Psych or even that Idea of History in American Lit seminar I took with mostly upperclassmen and then stayed up 68 of 72 hours to write the final paper (on Gatsby, natch, and perhaps the only thing I'm left with is a love for fine shirts, though no one's ever cried over mine), only to end that sleepless stretch mildly hallucinating at a Fred Frith concert, but that might just have been me Frith-ing at the mouth.

After all, there are editions of you, me, us, more than you can shake a tambourine at, all acting up, acting out, trying things on. Roxy Music granted permission to those willing to listen and look, eager to bend tune, blur gender, or merely willing to let others do and therefore otherness necessarily fades away. Acceptance is a sort of dance.

I'm Dreaming of a White Synthmas

Sadly another one of those vids that aren't artist created to go with the song, but this Monday it's got to be this song as Christmas bears down with enough weight to make this the shortest day of the year. I must confess my love for this confection, despite many (starting with my sweet wife) who mock and probably wisely do, a song featherbrained enough to ramble on about a turkey that doesn't dance but sings, and then those proto-samples of some older gent biting off the word "Christmas" so curtly you'd think Santa just told the guy he had to give back all his Xmas presents retroactively for life.

But this is 1984 and this is Captain Sensible, whose had a damned time of it and ended up doing synth pop created by Tony Mansfield who should be better known as the man behind New Musik but it's not like anybody knew them either. (Check out here for why the music was dreamy fine and why Tony Mansfield as Group Leader sort of had to become Tony Mansfield, Ace Producer--boy, he's one dynamo live!) "One Christmas Catalog" is all of an era for me, though, and getting to drag it out annually makes me want to sing "one Christmas too many," the catalogs ain't nothing. For this music is as fake and lovely as an aluminum tree, one with that spinning color light wheel in front of it, the tree ever awash in change and hope and so much fake it becomes the only thing real. Who needs tinsel when the damn tree is a-glimmer?

And isn't that true of this song, too? That drum machine disco bop, those airy chick vocals making the Captain's croak more sensible, the gloss just getting glossier at 30 seconds in when that other chittery lovely airiness gets all happily staccato. This song has never been touched by a natural instrument. And is all the better for it. Let's all have our little seasonal fantasies, after all--whether it be the son of god laid humble for us and our sins so we'll get someplace to go besides dead, whether it be each day's sun a few minutes more and therefore a sense we can turn any motherfucker around just by dragging it into the light, whether it be for 4 minutes a tune can make you feel a bit timeless and forgetful with its vaporous beauty that's silly enough it's ok it signifies nothing. As if you couldn't hope to aspire to be even that much.

UPDATE (1/6/2010): As commenter Ben pointed out, the original video I posted suddenly became a private video (ooh, to own Spencer's!), so I've put a new one up. Still something someone made, and now my comment about Spencer's is really confusing, but that's the way with memory. Someone always goes and tries to own it on you.

Got to Get It All to Get It All to Grow

I was 14 and it wasn't just lasers it was lasers and rock n roll, a combo better than stars and stripes, Rowan & Martin, an old-fashioned one ticket doubleheader, whichever two of Charlie's Angels most zinged your wings (and if you say Tanya Roberts and Shelley Hack, you're just being perverse). I liked ELO enough I even saw what's dubbed "The Big Night" tour at Madison Square Garden, complete with spaceship and live lasers (much cooler than those on tv, particularly 1970s sets, that now seem quaint enough that the smart apes of 2001 would no doubt pass right by them on the way to the monolith and HD). But still there's something charming about this, the thrill for them, "We've got mighty focused light beams--behold!" My childhood was a much much simpler time.

For then there's The Midnight Special, which, along with Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, brought live rock n roll into suburban homes and made us all a bit more antsy than we might have been if we had never got beyond childhood bopping on a hobby horse while listening to Herb Alpert's Whipped Cream and Other Delights (if, as a pre-teen, I understood the symbolism of riding and the flat-out sexuality of that LP's cover, I didn't know it at the time, promise). For you kids out there, imagine the M in MTV stood for music. That's what these shows were, but not just videos, concert footage, live playing, lips that moved as sound came out in time always. Plus the shows were on late, so seemed even more forbidden, at the edges of permission or into stolen moments territory. If, by some misfortune, you ended up sneaking a way to watch only to catch a mediocrity like Gary Wright, you just figured "Dreamweaver" had to be deeper than you thought. Late night rock TV--it had to mean something, or else why would they hide it?

Take "Do Ya," just one of the many songs that might have entranced you from ELO's A New World Record, so straightforward a pun it's practically an out-tendre, and I refuse to get into another of the album's cuts, the maudlin tugs of "Telephone Line" that somehow is playing at some high school party in some basement one of the first times I'm in crush and it still means the world to me, despite at a party you can just go talk to a girl and not use a phone, well, unless you're a humble bumbler like, oh, some people. "Do Ya" is the opposite of that, anyway, announcing itself with brio-istic chords that underline the title's do. And then all the strings, but I've on-ed and on-ed about them in pop before, all the grandness they confer, all the swelling we want to feel, all the drama. All the so much in goddam tune.

But then the chorus. The "do ya do ya want my _____s" relatively sweet, group sung, even (see, everyone thinks you need to be with me!) and then at the end of each line, the id flips its lid, the more guttural "I need it" and more insistent "c'mon now" and warning "ahhmmm look out!" How fitting for a tune titled "Do Ya" which is both the start of a question and all of a promise shading to threat. What else does rock ask? What else does a 14-year-old hope to know, and soon?

A Monday in Trouble (Is a Temporary Thing)

Some wisdom runs true whether you're 19 or much much older, and that gets us to this week's installment, Debora Iyall and the boys doing "Never Say Never," something you can't help but learn as ever keeps your never further at bay. The song, of course, rides on its infamous chorus couplet, which isn't just a sly come-on but also rhymes "better" and "together," suffering slant rhymes, hinting that the two won't always ever lock-step click no matter how much the bassline pulses its sexy slide. The name of the group is Romeo Void, after all.

Still a wonderful song for an undergrad to latch onto, a skittery dance that makes one re-think sexy as attitude and force and not just looks, and then Benjamin Bossi blasts and blats his sax and you knew what that meant, even young. The song so metallic and gimlet-eyed you want to identify, to be part of the cool San Fran hipsters smashing that glass that says guitar as the guitar you hear sheds its sharp shards. But in your heart of hearts, it's "Flashflood" you prefer, all ballsy ballady angst, cause you're soft and you know it. It's ok, Iyall does, too.

Steady as She Ohs

There are things I know I shouldn't like, but do. Or at least think I shouldn't like. Mostly because you, yes, you, like them. And I don't want to be like you or at least so many of yous. I assume, perhaps very wrongly, that quality is inverse to popularity. (Yes, perhaps this is an excuse for my self in the world, sure.) Of course I mostly mean yous who don't read this blog, but that's most of the yous in the known universe. So the majority of you are safe, if philistines.

And I can see I already need to start again. (How many of my entries begin this way? You readers are so patient with me. Both of you.)

I like the Eurythmics. There, it's in print. Don't love them, but have to admit they put on one of the best live shows I've ever seen about 1983 or so and here I am for the second time blogging about one of the best moments from that evening, a rising, ecstatic, SST of a solo by Dave Stewart to close the song. Yes, the silly YouTube of a performance of the song semi-similiar to the one I experienced isn't really a video but space shots backed with a bootleg. But it's quite a bootleg. Out of this world, you might say.

One of the best parts about "Jennifer" (beyond it being the name of the lovely lass who plucked my virginity) is its simplicity (and I'm talking about the song, not the lovely lass or my virginity)--so few words, so few notes, it might as well be Steve Reich and roll. But that steady as she goes just makes the ever-lifting end solo all the more needed, all the more damn right and lovely. And then there's the Laurie Anderson toss-off "ohohohohs" that are the line where the human and mechanical make the coldly beautiful, and therefore all the more unexpected, as we tend to like our beauty warm, don't we. (Digression: And who better for Annie Lennox to channel than Laurie Anderson, a fellow traveler on the androgynous express, which reminds me of the time as a graduate student instructor when I made the kids go see Home of the Brave, indeed I was one of those teachers, and one stunned and protected mid-West coed wrote in her viewing log "she's not very ladylike.")

Then again, that's the whole point of this entry--you never know what life might throw on your plate for your delectation. Things can be steady and patterns emerge but when they break--like the clever clicking of the drumsticks bit you can see starting at about 3:17 in this concert footage (plus odd claymation and too much ad for my liking but...) --at the least you end up with a smile on your face. At most you get transported. And to quote Laurie Anderson:

And you you're no one
And you, you're falling
And you, you're traveling
Traveling at the speed of light.

I Do Love a New Purchase, a Market of the Senses

Sorry but don't have enough time to say enough about this one with the holiday weekend closing in on my time and crazy things all due Dec 1 (who's idea was that?). But here's one of the best songs of all time. I'd have loved to have found a vintage clip but couldn't--the good news is the gang still really feels it, as far as the performance seems to show.

And it goes like this--I need to say thanks to music. Meant so much in so many ways but in particular I want to visit high school senior me holding Entertainment! in his hands, reading those liner notes about cowboys and Indians, taking in the lyrics that made Marxism dance in a suitably herky-jerky way. I want to say to him, "Don't be so confused, these guys from Leeds have it right. You'll see."

But maybe I don't have to. Instead I don't have to offer embarrassment and my usual excuses when someone asks me what the use is mixing pop and politics. I can just point. Something stirred in my little suburban brain as that guitar slashed and that bass insinuated its sly self into my still awfully angular white boy dancing. And years later when I finally read Horkheimer and Adorno, I already knew a soundtrack. (And do know how much they'd hate to hear me say that, but as Theodor wrote, the essence of the essay is heresy so I'll pull down my gods as I worship them.)

A Summons to All My Foolish Blood

First, all apologies that this is really just an audio track, and yes there are live versions of the recent Posies-fueled Big Star doing the song, but I wanted the original. Second, it's fitting I'm counting for something about this song leaves me doing math. It was released in 1972, and Alex Chilton, with Chris Bell's help we can assume, wrote it when he was 22. It's about being, of course, "Thirteen," but Chilton was 13 in 1963 (the year of my birth, which doesn't mean much but I like that things fall that way). "Paint It Black," which gets name-checked, was released in 1966, so that complicates the timeline a bit (of course, I've got a theory).

Third, I can see I've started all wrong. So sweet and seemingly simple "Thirteen" is, that to analyze it is akin to explaining a gorgeous dawn, which if it talked would say, "Shut up and just enjoy, dummy. Ray beam ray beam ray beam." The song totally nails the adolescent sexual ache, even better one sorta pure--those rhyming, chiming acoustic guitars are the poor boy's heartstrings, aren't they? So dads are bad and the Rolling Stones are good (we have something we worked out to say about it, pop's sweet puzzle telling us things we don't yet know) and it's a life that runs from the school to the pool to the dance, and asking someone to be an outlaw for your love sounds terribly romantic, even if you don't quite know what you even mean (but no doubt pop will tell us someday, and we don't mean dad). So much tenderness, the darn kid even thinks in harmonies.

But it's a vision of 13 we want to believe more than ever live, isn't it. Nine years out at 22 Chilton can wrap things up with a nostalgia that's utterly appealing. But how often is living 13 charming? Don't lie to yourself, or let a song lie to you. Note that Chilton isn't really singing about himself at 13, either, as he was 16 when "Paint It Black" got released. But memories, and pop songs, they pull tricks on us, allow us to create the narrative we call our lives. I'd like mine served up this pretty and wistful, wouldn't you?

For I'm a goddam liar too. No way was I a proto-hip nine-year-old buying #1 Record when it got released in 1972 (assuming the distribution snafu that killed the record didn't happen and I cold find it in a record store, of course). In fact, I first bought it as the twofer with Radio City CD that got released in 1992. Hoping to feel at least a bit cool, I want to remember it was one of my first compact disc purchases, from that upstairs place that existed on Iowa Avenue in Iowa City whose name I'm totally blanking on. But I didn't even live in Iowa City in 1992 and had had a CD player since at least 1988--so had to have CDs out the shelf's wazoo at that point.

How are all these years and memories not in harmony to me? I can't begin to fathom, but I can singalong with "Thirteen" again and somehow find some belonging.

Hey Two Ways

You can listen to it crunchy (from back in the day):



Or listen to it sweet (as a song with many uhs and whores and screams will allow):



And since the Pixies are doing Doolittle in its entirety live for its 20th anniversary, I get one more chance to feel the old fart I am. Thanks, Pixies.

So 1989 was pretty much set to the soundtrack of Doolittle, as I'm sure it was for many folks my age (+/- 3),the last blast of a decade that has too bad a rap given it offered up glories like the Replacements and Husker Du, and that's not even leaving MN (then there's Tom Waits' best, fine T-Heads, the early stirring of YLT, perhaps the Mekons' two best--the '80s weren't just MTV, ok?). Deliciously snotty and snarly set to sneaky tunes, it's the perfect disc for someone trying not to be a productive worker in society while still making enough money to get by. My first year out of grad school, 88-89, and my reward for those multiple masters was teaching comp at Penn State, three course per semester, "earning" a wondrous $19K. And we wonder why we are a nation of illiterates (we certainly don't pay people to teach us out of that hole).

So something that let me play-act feeling, really feeling, well, bring it on. Of course it seems Black Francis is doing the same, tipping his hand writing a song to kick off the album whose images he steals from Bunuel, both arty enough and at enough remove to seem safe even when shouting about "slicing up eyeballs." Surrealism is a romp in comparison to Dada, which, after all, rose within WW I's European ruin; rock n roll surrealism 60 years on is nearly quaint. (Off-topic subject--what if Bunuel started a band?)

Maybe that's why I don't listen to the album much anymore. Grown too comfortable to even feel the need for the fake fight, the miming at windmill tilting. But that doesn't mean I don't appreciate the simplicity of the line "Uh, says the man to the lady." Let's just boil this sucker down, what do you say? Plus the guitar gets to go where air quotes fear to tread.

Never for Ever Land

And in this week's episode...what happens when artists you love (or at least loved once upon a time) do things that embarrass you deeply. For while this song is beautiful on its own, if for nothing else than the fretless bass work and how that plays against the chorus in-outs that work more as sound than meaning, well, there's the rub isn't it? For the meaning is the big problem here. Yeah, it's sweet of Kate to care about a fetus worried not just about mom's smoking but also about nuclear fall out (talk about your prenatal worrywort!), but to literalize that, especially as Kate in the plastic bubble--that's just too much.

Then again, perhaps I react so strongly to this video because it's so dang earnest. She just means it all so much. Just see it in how her eyes roll from side to side. But it's hard not to imagine a growing up Kate as the girl in class who wrote the name of the boy for whom she pined in her notebook and then drew over the letters so often that she then obliterated what she wrote. By definition a crush must hurt, sure, as some other women would later sing, but you don't have to bring the pain yourself.

Bush tends to do this in video after video, each one seemingly directed by a mime who has learned the joys of props. These props get even more spectacular, and can include Donald Sutherland.

It's not that her songs aren't grand, of course. They have to be to fit that voice. But I guess I come from the school where you want to cut that grand, not make it grander. Where you don't gild the lily or bronze the orchid. Where just wonder should be enough.

Instead I'm left to wonder how one can be talented enough to come up with the song but not wise enough to know when to stop. But who am I to say anything, holding onto these memories and snippets of videos for decades, turning them about in my head as if figuring out why I hold them matters, as if they will help solve me for who I am someday, bits and pieces of fretless bass--something that should be grounding but yet seems to float--and images I know are wrong but can't get past, either.

I Make a Wrong Turn Right

I want to think it isn't that long ago, but Fakebook is already nearly 20 years old, so I guess this video, which I'm not sure I've ever seen before despite it being official and all (but we're talking Yo La Tengo, so even the official stuff disappears within seconds of being created), is fair game for this feature, now a whole 2 weeks old. And despite my snarkiness about YLT's commercial chops, I assume anyone wandering into this here blog knows who they are, as next to the Mekons (perhaps even before them) they've sustained me for longer than any musical group, while other faves, like XTC, say, easily fell by the wayside. Part of that is they seem to be able to do anything, from the super sweet and wistful (witness this video) to totally rocking pop ("Sugarcube") to stuff out there in numerous ways (a whole ep of Sun Ra "Nuclear War" covers, say). Maybe it's the NJ thing, too. They're even Mets fans. Plus the couple of times I've managed to meet them, they sure seemed nice.

As for this song, well, is there a better advertisement for the ease and ache of decay? How seductive it is to measure our lives in seasons, to think the calendar cares a whit. Yo La Tengo has consistently, of course, been drawn to fall, from "Autumn Sweater" to "Here to Fall" on the latest CD, which says I'm here to fall with you but also worries about worry, in such a YLT way. It's never easy, is it, even in summer when the pretty guitar parts let out string creaks as if to say you've got to earn that pretty, sucker.

That's the danger of thinking summer is casual as we dress down, heat up, take off. It's anything but. All that sun, all that day, so much that seemed hidden gets revealed. That's what the warning light might be--notice in the video the lovely visual rhyme of the stoplight and the sun. While that light will turn green, the sun is doing its amber hazy set, gorgeous as we've choked the sky with plenty for it to refract through, enough to hide it would blind us if it could. Those who've spent enough time in bars can generalize one of their lessons, for at closing time everyone is beautiful.

For, of course, the summer does come undone. Everything does--the simple pleasures of a simple pop song, the sentence perfectly said, that, yes that, kiss. You and I. If there's a tune we share we better damn well sing it while we can, even if we can barely sing, ants trilling our scraps. At the end we can hope it's sleep, we can.

Two Shots of Fantasy and One of Make Believe

And here we kick off a new feature that needs to be called something like Pops Yatch's Monday Misty Memory Musings or something, both to scare away the children tired of middle aged men's indulgences that their youth mattered, and as there's so much I feel the need to get down before I forget...wait, what was I going to say? Of course, much of it will have to do with music, as music and memory go together like 6-4 and 3, like gin and dry vermouth, like Ellen Sombers and some ache in your eighth grade groin you weren't old enough to recognize yet. Plus the magic of YouTube continually brings up new things you hoped existed and then suddenly find out do. That magic of the "this can't be really happening, and it's better than the dream."

So here's Any Trouble. Lost to the early 1980s for most, no doubt, if ever even found in the first place. A bunch of great albums, lead singer Clive Gregson going off to support Richard Thompson for awhile, more solo work. Lots of obscurity. And now this actual promo video. Of course it's half a joke, as Gregson, even as a young man--and I promise he's a young man here--had a face made for radio. So "Second Choice" for him might seem pretty good, all in all about the best someone of Gregson's mien might manage. Perhaps that's why the song is surprisingly sprightly for its subject.

It's not my favorite Any Trouble tune, preferring the nailing of the Friday night hope to meet and impress vibe "Playing Bogart," recorded both fast and rip-out-the-heart ballad style, or the songs that kick off album two Wheels in Motion, especially the catchy-clever "Trouble with Love" and "As Lovers Do," that does that wonderful add the verses up quickly reprise trick to bring itself to a powerful end.

But if you were them, here, couldn't you feel a bit hopeful, with Costello and Jackson and Parker making you think you had a shot, at last, and here's your goddam video, so let's sing our witty poppy song and hope and hope. Same old story, all love and glory, and art hankering after commerce, is a pantomime.

Even better, I never paid much attention to the little list of "moods" that a band or song are supposed to capture according to All Music Guide. My Any Trouble love got clarified mighty quick, I think, when I examined their supposed moods and thought, "Gee, I'd like to think these words were me." So here goes: Yearning Bittersweet Passionate Energetic Earnest Reflective Cynical/Sarcastic Boisterous Confident Quirky Bitter Wry Rollicking Quirky Literate Witty Amiable/Good-Natured.

So here's hoping I make a good, obscure post-punk pop band someday. I hope with better glasses.