In 1835, the New York Sun ran a series of articles reporting the discovery of life on the moon. The Sun claimed that a British astronomer, using a powerful telescope, had observed all variety of lunar life, including a race of intelligent bat-like men. The whole thing, of course, was just a circulation-building hoax. This blog has absolutely nothing to do with the Sun, the moon or hoaxes. I just happen to like that story. My name is Sean Glennon.

 
Magnolia Electric Co.

Had a piece in last week's Journal News about the Jason Molina's current band, Magnolia Electric Co. Looks to me like they ran short on space and ended up cutting the piece down pretty significantly, which is fine. But I like what I wrote a bit better than what ran (though what I wrote certainly needed an edit), so I'm gonna post my original story here. If you'd rather read the shorter, edited version that showed up in print, you can do so here. Otherwise, I hope you dig this.

Jason Molina doesn’t insist on a vinyl pressing of every record he makes because he wants to offer something to collectors. He doesn’t do it for the sake of vanity, either. He doesn’t really even do it because he’s one of those people who thinks music sounds better coming off a turntable.

Molina, the Chicago-based singer-songwriter who’s calling his current band Magnolia Electric Co. (after the title of the final album recorded under his previous project name, Songs: Ohia) insists on vinyl because, unlike CDs, records are expensive to manufacture. And when Molina takes a band into the studio, he believes he owes it to himself, his fans and his label, Secretly Canadian, to produce a work that’s worth the expense of pressing on vinyl.

"There’s a finite number of people who we can expect to buy [a record] on vinyl, because people don’t buy it as a novelty, they’re buying it because it’s the way that they prefer to listen to music," Molina says. "So we always said that if you don’t think that this record is worth putting out on vinyl, then it’s not worth putting out. And I’ve always really stuck to that. I’ve never put out an LP that I wasn’t happy with."

That’s fairly astounding given the volume of music Molina has produced as the leader of various projects over a recording career currently in its tenth year. With Songs: Ohia, a "band" that amounted to Molina and whomever else a particular group of songs suited, Molina made seven full-length records and an assortment of EPs and singles between 1996 and 2003. After wrapping up Songs: Ohia with Magnolia Electric Co., Molina last year stepped aside and offered the solo disc Pyramid Electric Co. under his own name. And this year, working for the first time with a stable-membership backing band, he’s been behind two full-length CDs already -- the live Trials and Errors and the studio effort What Comes After the Blues -- and has a five-song EP, Hard to Love a Man slated for release in October.

The fact of the matter, however, is that both fans and critics, by and large, have echoed Molina’s satisfaction with his recorded output. Songs: Ohia’s records, which typically rang with the stillness of spaces too big even for the sorrows and passions spilling out of Molina’s mouth and guitar, were embraced for Molina’s uncanny ability to evoke distance and intimacy at once. Pyramid Electric captured the ear and the mind by presenting songs more aching, more raw, darker, and a Molina more pitiless in self-examination than anything Songs: Ohia had produced. And then Magnolia Electric came forward and put the muscle of a real band, a country-rock band with the hard, dangerous edge of Neil Young’s Crazy Horse, behind Molina’s still mostly sorrowful lyricism and expert guitar playing, giving the songwriter the ability to rock out like he means it -- or not to rock out in a manner that leaves little doubt but that he means not to.

What all of Molina’s work shares is an unrelenting sense of immediacy. And that derives nearly as much from the way in which Molina has chosen to create his records as it does from his considerable skill as a songwriter. While every record Molina makes is carefully thought-out -- the songs written with care, the players selected with an eye to commitment and work ethic as much as for talent -- Molina prefers not to belabor production of his releases.

Molina has chosen, from the very start, to record his music live in the studio. He doesn’t even use scratch vocals (vocals recorded in live performance that are later overdubbed) as many "live in studio" bands do. He wants the authenticity of a band playing all at once, even if it makes the recording process more difficult. He says he understands, though, why his technique is uncommon.

"We like the character of the performances," Molina says. "We don’t want there to be obvious mistakes, but this is the kind of presenting of songs that tries to keep all the human elements in there. And so, you know, in the middle of the song, I’ll play the chord, but because I’m playing guitar and singing live, I might not hit the chord hard enough for it to ring out all the way and you just get two notes instead of five. And I don’t worry to go back and fix that, because I think overall people are listening to it as a whole unit, and if anything that stands out to someone."

If everything goes right, Molina says, he believes he and his band can get an album tracked, start to finish, in four hours of recording time. That’s helpful, he notes, when you like to put out a lot of records and you tend to spend eight months a year on tour.

Indeed, Molina notes that during a recent short break in touring, Magnolia Electric spent a few days at producer Steve Albini’s studio, Electrical Audio, putting down tracks for the band’s next full-length CD. Molina expects to release the disc early next year.

"They’re finished," Molina says of the new songs. "We did at least 13 songs, I think, by my count. I’m hoping that we can get at least 11 or so of them on the record. It just comes down to however much we can fit safely on the LP."
posted by Sean at 8/24/2005 11:52:00 AM

 
The Zincs/James Elkington leftovers

Had a pretty average piece in yesterday's Journal News about the Zincs, a very good indie rock band out of Chicago, that doesn't sound entirely like a Chicago band (and to the extent it does, it's more like a post-rock band than one of those full-on Chicago alt.rock things). Band has a terrific record called Dimmer out on Thrill Jockey. And it's frontman/founder, James Elkington, is a very forthcoming, good natured and funny British fellow (grew up in a little town just outside London, spent some time in London then moved to Chicago because he liked the music he'd heard coming out of there).

Here's what's left from my interview with James after I pulled out quotes for the story. As usual, it's presented in a Q&A format, though it was never intended to show up that way. Also as usual, I'm leaving out the small talk from the start of the interview, which, in this case morphed into some chatter on particulars about the upcoming tour (when he's headed out, etc.). We'll pick it up from there.

(By the way, as you may notice, I changed some stuff stylistically this time. I didn't like the way the bold/italic setup looked on my screen, so I went back to the old way, with questions in itals, answers in plain text.)

So are you touring with the same band that's on the record?
Yeah. we started talking about making the record, it was with a view that we would all go out and tour it as well. That was part of the project.

It's a four-piece?
Yeah.

But now you have some female vocals that pop up on this record from time to time, right?
Yeah, actually. You know, there are. And I just was thinking about that the other day, because there hasn't been ... I don't really get asked a lot of questions about this record, but no one's actually mentioned it so far and I don't know if it was, um, because they're mixed kind of low, or just because people weren't interested or whatever. But, yeah, Janet Bean sings on a couple of songs.

And so you just use arrangements that don't include those?
Well, the bass player, Nick [Macri], sings a little bit, too. Some of the stuff Janet sings is really high, and Nick doesn't -- I mean, you can't get that high but it alarms people, so he just sings the stuff that's in his more normal register.

[I tell him how much I enjoy Dimmer and how I can't bring myself to take it out of my CD player some days, which sets up some of the quotes at the end of the piece, the ones about how he thinks people no longer take the time to listen to records over and over again. There's some stuff attached to that, though, that I had to leave out for space, but that I think is interesting, so here it is, in a weird, fairly contextless -- unless you go back to the story and see where it fits in -- manner.]
I remember when I got Surfer Rosa, I didn't actually even get to side two until I'd actually owned it for about six weeks, I think, because I didn't believe that side two would be anywhere near as good as side one. But, um, nowadays, it's like, it seems -- and I don't know if this is just my age or something, but I don't really -- you know, it's like, you don't really have to live with a record in the same way.

You know, you talked about how the records you didn't like best on the first spin would often end up being your favorites [it's in the story]. I find I have that same experience with songs. A lot of times, songs I hardly notice the first time through a record turn out to be my favorites. Like with Dimmer there are a couple of songs that jump right out at you -- like "Moment Is Now ...
[Interrupts with a nervous laugh] It's, uh, yeah. It's ... I mean, I like that song, but it's more of a kind of ... [laughs more] I don't know. I mean, you're right. It's a more immediate ... it's definitely a more immediate tune.

It sounds like ... um, have you had a falling out with the song?
No, I haven't. It's a funny thing. Actually, that's a much more recent song. That and "Beautiful Lawyers" are both more recent songs. And they were supposed to be part of what the next record was gonna sound like. But in actual fact, when I listened back to demo versions along with some of the older songs that make up the album, the newer stuff sort of complements the older stuff. So the thing is with songs like "Moment Is Now" is I don't dislike the song at all. I like it quite a lot. But what I like mostly about it is how it relates to the rest of the stuff, and how that helps to make it an album rather than just a collection of songs.

Is that important to you -- to make an album versus a collection of songs?
Yeah, if I can. I don't know. It ended up ... it sounds like an album to me at this point, and I'm quite pleased about that. I don't know if I'll be able to do that every time, but we managed to get away with it this time.

It seems like the bands that get in danger of presenting collections of songs are straight-ahead pop bands. And it doesn't seem like your style of music is gonna channel you in that direction.
I think lots of bands get kind of A&Red to death. That's the thing. I've known people who have written, you know, albums only for their record label to turn around and say, "Well, we think six are keepers. We want you to go back and write another four." And they go back and write another four and then they say, "Well, we like two of this four, but the other two are gonna have to go." So, you know, through this sort of rewriting and rewriting, you end up with a bunch of songs that everyone can agree on, but when you actually put them all together it doesn't necessarily work in the same way. This is also a good argument for including bad songs on albums, you know, in order to help the flow of the whole thing. [Chuckles.] This is how I sneak through all my bad material.

I don't know, man. I've heard some pretty awful material that seemed like it had an A&R person behind it.
Yeah. But I would imagine that they just wanna hear things that they think other people will like. I like to include a lot of stuff that I think nobody will like. [Laughs again.] To help the flow, you understand? The yin and yang.

Hey, going back to something you were saying a little while ago -- about the mix of older songs and newer songs -- can you sort of give me some sense of what time frame we're talking about? I mean, how old and how new?
The majority of the songs are a couple years old. And these songs are more like a year old or something like that. And like I said, I kind of had this collection of older songs and I was building a collection of newer songs. And the older songs, even though I like them more, they kind of ... it didn't seem to flow so much as a record, so I kind of pilfered some of the newer stuff. And the newer stuff is ... well, you see, it was new then and I've actually kind of moved back to an older songwriting style now. So I keep moving around. I think I'm just trying to keep myself entertained. So sometimes the writing will take a bit of a shift and things will become more upbeat. I'm in this weird stage where I'm not exactly sure what i want, is the thing, so I'm sort of moving in a lot of directions at the same time.

I'm gonna guess, though, that in some ways that is exactly what you want, all that jumping around. You must get something out of that.
As a writer, that's the thing. There's still kind of a lot of things that I want to try. And the thing that's interesting sometimes is what solution you come up with to a certain problem. So the thing to do is to put yourself in slightly different writing situations and see what comes up.

Can you elaborate on that a little bit for me? Let me see into your creative process?
For example, if you sit down to write a song just singing and with a guitar, you're going to get a different result from if you sit down at a piano, or if you sit down at a drum machine. Like the "Beautiful Lawyers" song came totally backward. That was, like, drums first. I kind of had an idea for a song and how I wanted it to sound, and the details -- the melody and so on -- were kind of the last thing. And actually "Moment Is Now" is kind of like that, too. And that's what sets those songs apart from some of the other ones.

But you're not writing like that anymore?
I went back to working mainly on guitar. And I'll probably be back on the drum machine in, like, a month, when I get back from tour.

[Here again, I run into some long quotes from which I took a line here a line there, but I wanna preserve more of what he said, so I'm just gonna go ahead and include what's left and try to give it some context.]

Is it safe to assume that lyrics usually come last for you?
Pretty much, they do. If I'm feeling particularly conscientious, I will try to make a point of writing ideas for lyrics down when they actually come to me.[Here was the bit about how he doesn't enjoy writing lyrics.]

Why do it at all, then?
Well, that's the question. I mean, that's the thing. I've been thinking about that a lot myself. ... I did actually just give up for a while, and, umm, and I was more miserable.

OK, that one you have to explain.
... That's the thing. It's not really miserable. It's not different from what any person in any walk of life goes through all the time. It's just for some reason, if you've got a guitar, you complain about it more. But the reason I gave up was it was just an experiment. It's been so long that I've been involved in music and wanting to pursue that, that I'd forgotten what it was like before. I'm not sure there was a time before. I used to smoke a lot of cigarettes, and around the time that I gave up was around the time that I could no longer remember what it was like to not be a smoker. And I knew that I'd had 15 years of not smoking, but I couldn't remember it at all. So it was kind of like that, really. I thought, well, maybe if I just released myself from the pressure of having to come up with things, and make songs and things, that I'd just sort of have this calm, balanced, civilian existence. But it didn't happen.

What happened instead?
I just felt incredible guilt. I don't know where that came from. I just felt guilty that I wasn't doing something.

Huh. Does it have something to do with ... Do you enjoy singing?
Somewhat. I think I will enjoy it more, the more I do it. I'm hoping to get better at it. I think the better at it I am, the more I'll enjoy it.

You're singing sounds fine on the record. Should I assume you really produced the hell out of it?
[Laughing] We did. I sang each separate single word. And then we put them into sentences.

Well, there you go, then. But, seriously, maybe you're just being really self critical or modest or something, but it doesn't sound like you need to get much better at singing to me.
The songs actually were ... the majority of the songs we've been playing live for a couple years, so I didn't have to think too hard about it. I didn't have to have any lyrics in front of me when I was singing, you know? I knew them all. And that's a good thing. It was good for all the musicians in the band, actually. The songs really had a chance to bed in a little bit over a few years, so people didn't have to think too hard about what they were doing.

And that's pretty much the end of the useful stuff, right there. So there you go.
posted by Sean at 5/20/2005 12:45:00 PM

 
Are You People On Dope?

Lemme ask this question: What kind of utter fucking moron would pay $5,000 to see the Rolling Stones? Or any rock concert? Or any single entertainment event? And doesn't the fact that there apparently are people who will plunk down that kind of money for a ticket absolutely cry out for the institution of a federal stupidity tax? That is, shouldn't someone who will play five grand to go see a bunch of geriatric has-beens pretending to play rock and roll also be required to play an equal amount into a national fund that could be used to pay for actual worthwhile things, like schools and roads and health coverage for the uninsured?

Look, Jack, I'm a huge Rolling Stones fan, OK? (Says so right here, so it's gotta be true, right?) This isn't about the Stones. But to the extent it is, let's be honest, shall we? Whatever Stones fans may want to believe, the band's best days are easily three decades behind them. That's 30 years. More maybe. That's a mighty long time. I mean, you know, the band was still pretty good 25 years ago, marginally decent 20 years ago, and worth a sideways glance just out of curiosity's sake 15 years ago. But now? Nothing. They're totally faking it. Keith can still play like hell when he cares to, but Mick can't sing for shit (and he mostly doesn't sing -- he mostly talks his way through songs). And there's nothing even remotely relevant about these guys. They're done, done, done. And it's sad, sad, sad.

But you know what? Even then, if you wanna pay $64 to see them, well, that's your business. If you wanna pay $454 to see them, you're too damned stupid to talk to, but, again, you earned it, and if you don't throw it away on the Stones, you'll probably throw it away in Vegas or something, so whatever. But $5,000 plus? No. Sorry, Charlie. Doesn't wash. You don't deserve to have enough money that you can drop $5,000 on a concert. You don't deserve to have enough money to spend $10 on a movie for that matter. You should be stripped of most of what you own and your money should be used for the betterment of society. We can't do that, of course. But I see no reason not to take it from you one stupid decision at a time.

I propose instituting exactly what I mentioned above: a national stupidity tax. You pay $5,000 to see a rock concert (high-end benefit type events excepted), you pay an equal amount in idiot tax. I'll be in charge of collection. All everyone else has to do is watch what's going on around them and report to me when you see stupid-ass shit like this happening. I'll draft up a bill and send it off to the dipshits, who can make their checks out to the IRS, but who will have to write "my abject stupidity" on the memo line (or face a stiff penalty). The money will be used for important stuff in hopes of offsetting the silliness with which its twin amount was wasted. And stupidity tax payments will not be deductible come April 15.

$5,000 to see the most broken down acts in rock. What a goddamned joke.

You know what else (before I go)? Let's start shutting these ticket-broker scumbags down, shall we? I don't give half a shit about free market this or that. These guys make their living stealing from people who just want to see a band (or team, or musical ... ) they like and it ought not to be tolerated. Yeah, stealing. That's what these fucks do. They steal. They take a ticket that, in this case, the band and promoter decided was worth $454, and mark it up by 981 percent. And because there are such enormous profits to be made, they make it pretty much impossible for anyone who actually wants to see one of these shows to get a ticket at face value. That's not capitalism, it's exploitation. And the pieces of shit who make their living that way shouldn't only be put out of business, they should be tied up and poked repeatedly with sharp sticks (or subjected to something slightly less pleasant than that, perhaps). The certainly shouldn't be allowed to continue doing business.

That's it. That's all I've got.
posted by Sean at 5/17/2005 01:52:00 PM

 
Stars, and leftover Torquil Campbell quotes

Had a piece in last Friday's Boston Globe about the Montreal-based pop band Stars. I've been a fan of Stars for a few years now, and I'm really, really loving their latest CD (their third) Set Yourself on Fire. Great songcraft. Nice male/female vocal thing going on. And the music, while heavy on the new wave/electronic influences, is actually far more organic than it seems on first listen. They're part of that Broken Social Scene-centered Toronto-Montreal circle. In fact, Stars' place in that community of musicians is a big part of what the Globe piece is about.

Had a really nice chat with Torquil Campbell, who co-founded the band and is one of its vocalists. Lots and lots of nice leftover quotes, which I offer now in the usual broken Q&A format. [As usual, the interview doesn't really begin where the conversation begins. There's small talk first, which I leave out, because of how it's small talk.]

Do some of the members of Stars still take the stage with Broken Social Scene?
Oh, we all do. And some of them take the stage with us as well. It tends to be that when we're together everyone just plays in each other's bands. That's the way it always seems to work out, because nobody wants to be left out. And we all just don't wanna hang out back stage, so people pick up a tambourine or play guitar, or whatever.

I remember speaking with Kevin [Drew, of BSS] maybe a year ago and hearing him tell me how important that cooperation is for him and the band.
It's a great joy for everybody. It's something that we've never really planned out too much or thought about too much. I think it was just a natural outcropping of the fact that it used to be that the only people who were at each other's shows were ourselves, so we just sort of did it as a way of hanging out together. And now it's become part of what we do as bands. But it's not something that we ever planned out or sat down and thought about. I think we all are very big fans of one another, so we have that experience of being excited to just be on stage with a band you really like and be playing music with them. Yeah, it works out wonderfully well.

And it works out even though you guys are in Montreal and Broken and some of the others are in Toronto?
Well, you know, they're relatively close. They're about five hours away. And there does seem to be more and more -- I mean, we all grew up in Toronto but Stars live in Montreal and Jeffrey our manager who runs Arts & Crafts has moved down to Montreal recently. We do go back and forth a great deal. And when people are talking about the Montreal scene or whatever it's sort of deceptive, because really it's just a group of people who live in a few different cities and all get together to make music. I mean, I certainly lived in Toronto for a lot longer in my life than I've lived in Montreal, even though we're thought of as a Montreal band, because that's where we live now.

But Stars actually started out in New York, right?
Yes. I was in New York for seven years, acting, and we started the band there, and then when it became something we really thought we were going to do for a while, New York just seemed so prohibitive in so many ways. And it seemed like the scene there, and what was happening musically, was something that we didn't really feel connected to. And we wanted to go back to Canada, but I think we all felt that Toronto was a place where we'd been children and we had a lot of past there and we kind of wanted to reinvent ourselves and find an identity for the band that was our own away from all of our friends and away from all of the influences of the outside community that we have there. So Montreal seemed like a good place, because it's so easy to move in here and become an artist. It's so cheap. So it just made sense for us. It wasn't like we really knew what we were doing or that we'd been to Montreal a lot, but it turned out to be a good choice, because it's a place with no market. There's no place to sell what you're making, so you have a very long time to just make it apropos of nothing. And I think the results of that is that are that you get people who have a very considered and a very thought-out, unique way of expressing the music that they wanna make. It allows you a lot of gestation period, I guess. And that was a good thing for us.

When you say you started the band in New York, who do you mean? Was it just you and Chris [Seligman]?
Me and Chris were living in New York and then we finished Nightsongs, which was our first record, which was put out on an indie label. And then when we realized that if we had to play it live we couldn't play it alone, so we got Amy and Evan involved. And they were living at the time in Toronto, and so it wasn't easy for them to go and move to New York and ... . You know, New York's a funny place. It's like, unless you're from there, I think there's always a sense of being lost in a crowd and kind of struggling to have yourself heard or find a place for yourself over the enormous amount of hype and bullshit that is surrounding that place all the time. So we just ... yeah, it was a collective decision to go someplace where we could be influenced a bit more by what was around us and where we might have a bit more influence as well.

So did you find that New York kinda lives up to its reputation as being a city without a real music scene?
It's a marketplace, so it's very hard to make a scene, because you're either in the market and you're selling your stuff and you're doing great, or you're not in the market and you're serving salads to people in restaurants. It's such a struggle to live there and to make a living out of it that I think it leaves artists very little time to have the energy to make great art. And I don't know if always was that way. I don't think it was. I think there was a time when you could live cheaply in New York. But it's sort of killed it's own reputation in a strange way by becoming such an enclave of the rich. It's not very good for indie rockers.

[I'm taking out a little bit of chatter regarding who'd be on stage with the band for the Boston show, which Torq wasn't entirely sure of and which consequently made for quite boring conversation.]
It's still fairly amazing to me that you're able to just add and subtract pieces with such fluidity. How ... I can't figure out how it's even possible to prepare for shows that way.
There's the five of us who are the core of it. We've rehearsed so that if worse comes to worst we're capable of doing a show that way. But the music is very layered and ornamental and it's kind of easy if musicians are good to get them to come in and add another layer. It doesn't alter very much what we're doing. There's a lot of space in our music, so it's easy to find space for other people to play, which we like to do. It's nice to have other people come in and give their perspective on what we're doing.

But, then, your music, on the record, at least, sounds incredibly carefully crafted.
[Laughs.] It's torturously carefully crafted.

And yet you're able to let people come in and just add to it sort of as they will.
[Lifted some stuff for the Globe piece from here.] ... And again, I mean, all these people who are playing with us are people who are dear friends of ours and who know the music very, very well, and who we kind of idolize in a way as musicians, so it's ... . What am I gonna do, tell Andrew Whiteman not to play guitar on my song? I'm a huge fan of his work. And it's like, even if he screws up, it's just exciting to have him there. And I know that sounds kind of weird and Pollyannaish, but it literally is the way that it goes down with this crew of people. There's a great deal of kind of idolization of each other. And I think in a way we're each other's heroes. So if your hero fucks up, who cares? It's still your hero. They're still there playing with you.

Does that play a role in your songwriting as well? Or, that's probably too broad a question. I mean, how do you go about writing?
Well, with this record in particular, Stars tend to isolate ourselves a great, great deal when we're writing. That outside influence doesn't really come in. On Set Yourself On Fire we wanted it to, but for some reason in the end we decided we had to say what we had to say exactly the way we wanted to say it, and not let anybody else be responsible for it. The one person who always seems to get involved is James Shaw who plays in Metric, who was my first guy that I was in a band with, and the first guy that Chris was in a band with, and is a dear friend. And he always seems to show up and participate on some level. But with Set Yourself On Fire, we were very determined to make it a record that we wrote in a room together as a band with a drummer playing. You know, the previous two albums had been in a bedroom with a computer and the song would start with a beat or a bass line or something and we would slowly, slowly layer something together that eventually became a song. With this we wanted very much to make sure we were writing songs that kind of stood up immediately on their own just being played in a room.

[Pulled more stuff for the story from here -- all the stuff about the full-band writing process.]

Maybe it's just that I'm outside it and I don't see it at work, but it seems like a pretty complex and ... . You know, it seems like I'm always hearing songwriters -- and I guess this probably goes for anyone who does any kind of creative work -- tell me that they worry that it'll go away. You know, that ability to write. And you've got that times four. Or five. Am I assuming too much, or is it that much scarier your way?
It is. It's a constant sort of source of amazement to me. And it's not always easy. And there's always that thing of having finished a record and thinking, Christ, can we actually do that again? That was such an intense and subtle experience. Can we recreate that again? And, you know, we have three times, so hopefully we'll be able to do it again. But it's rare that you find people who you can do that with and I think that was just dumb luck. We had a sense that this particular group of four people were capable of writing songs together. And it worked. And it's, you know, it's one of those things that you don't really talk about for fear of jinxing it. We never sat down and sort of went, wow, this really works this way and, wow, I like it when you do that. It's sort of an unspoken thing. Nobody wants to mention it in case it all disappears into the ether. It's like writing. It's like can I write this again? When I sit down today will I be able to do what I did yesterday?

So then, what? You can't help but tempt fate by taking those songs and inviting a bunch of other people to contribute to them?
Yeah. But again, as I say, it's like we come from such a communal approach to music and there are so many other bands involved in our career -- it's sort of like, if they hear what we're doing and they don't like what we're doing then it can't happen. Almost. In a way. It has to be part of some kind of collective decision that we're all making to make a certain kind of music. Certainly, there's no veto power there, but you feel their passion or their loss of interest and it means a lot. It moves you forward into directions that you might not otherwise go But there's a lot of options. We're very lucky, you know? There's all kinds of people around and in that sense it makes it easier, because there's always energy. There's always somebody who's willing to help out or has an opinion, or, you know, has something to contribute.

[I ask him whether this collective approach, which one sees elsewhere in indie pop these days, though certainly not to the extent to which it's manifest in Toronto/Montreal is something that's been there all along and I missed it, or if it's something new. And the first few sentences of his response are in the Globe piece. It's the bit about the expanding gang mentality of pop bands. And I think the rest of what he had to say is interesting. So we'll pick up his response after those two sentences.
... I think that it's partly a sort of outcropping of the way our generation perceives family, and have lived in the world. You know, the family structure is not the way it used to be, and people are making their friends their family. There are communities of friends that kind of look after each other more and more in our generation. People are living together as roommates and not getting married as early -- all that kind of stuff. And so there is much more affinity to the idea of a community, being a cog in a wheel, you know. And I think that pop music has to expand somewhere, right? It's got to get more orchestral. It's got to get more complicated. I'm always in favor of there being great four-on-the-floor pop bands, but in order for the musical form to last, people have start pushing it into different areas. Just like jazz kind of imploded -- you know, like, jazz started with orchestras and with horn sections and arrangements and all those things, and eventually bebop came along and it was like, no, we're gonna do this with three guys or four guys, I think kind of the opposite is happening in a way in rock and roll. People are getting slightly more grandiose in what they feel they might be able to do with rock and roll. And because of that they need more people. They need more instruments. They need more arrangement. So I think it is new. I think it is a relatively new thing.

You know what occurred to me as you were making that comparison to jazz -- talking about that inverse movement -- is that it seems to me that as jazz bands got smaller, the music started to require more from its audience. And in the same way it seems that as rock bands get bigger, their music starts to require more of its audience.
I think that's true, too, and I think the audience wants to participate more. I think we live in, obviously, dark, dark times. Often very frightening and very confusing and very alienating times. And I think I think what a lot of pop bands are choosing to do at the moment is try to create community experience where people feel together and supported and sort of hopeful in the idea that there might be a whole bunch of other people who are feeling the way they do. And I think the audience wants to have things demanded of them. They want to go to shows and have their lives be affected, feel like something important is happening to them. And rock and roll for so long in the '90s was an interior thing and was so much about people's inner experience and about irony and about darkness and that kind of stuff, which is all valid and beautiful, and there was some great music made. But the natural progression, I think, becomes to try to head out into the sunshine a bit more and try and find some universal points, some points where we all agree to experiences that we've all shared, you know? [Here's where he told the story, that's in the Globe piece, about the audience response to "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead."]

I find it really interesting to think about the fact that you're using bigger bands, more instruments, to look at little moments.
I really enjoy that aspect of it. Pop music is a pretty simple form, you know? There's a 4/4 beat and a bunch of chords. But what it's good at is really acting as a signpost for people about certain moments in their life. And when they come to a concert and they're cheering and they're singing along, they like the song, but it's not so much the song they're celebrating as it is their lives, their own lives, the feelings that those songs evoke for them about themselves. Everyone is the epic star of their own movie. Everybody else in the world is just a minor character in that huge drama that is their lives. Every single, solitary person is living out that huge drama, and has massive hopes and makes massive decisions and goes through massive moments of fear and joy. Life is epic, even if it's only happening inside you. Everybody sitting on the bus is having some huge fucking emotional experience -- if they're anything like me, and I think they are. So that's the dichotomy of pop music -- it's one of the things I like most about it -- is that it can be simultaneously very grand and very important and portentous, and extremely dumb and throw-away and simple. I think that's what the name Stars refers to. There are stars in the sky. there's the universe, there's all those profound questions about life. And then there's Jennifer Anniston and what we know as stars in our world.

[And that's about it. I tell him I think that's a good note to end on. We make a bit more small talk. And that's that.]
posted by Sean at 5/02/2005 09:44:00 PM

 
Leftovers: Howie Payne of the Stands

I've taken most of a week to get around to this, but so it goes. Had a piece in last Thursday's Journal News about the Stands, a British pop band that is just incredibly fun to listen to. I hope they succeed in building an audience here in the States.

Howie Payne, the band's songwriter and frontman, was a very pleasant interview subject. Engaging, good humored and down to earth. If you're from the Valley, I can give you a bit of a sense of what he's like in conversation by telling you that he reminds me very much of John Allen of the Big Bad Bollocks in both temperament and voice. In case that's not helpful to you, I'll say that Payne's speaking voice sounds a bit like Jon Langford's singing voice (which is pretty much the same a Jon Langford's speaking voice, for whatever that's worth).

I've got plenty o' leftover quotes from my chat with Howie. And here, in the usual rough Q&A format that they were never meant to be presented in, they are.

[Note: We're gonna jump in sort of in the middle here, because the first quotes in the piece come from the beginning of the interview, with Howie responding to a question about what it's like to be in the States supporting a two-year-old record just as a brand new disc is being released at home.]
That is a strange thing, because in England and in Europe when we do shows, we're doing new stuff. So that is a bit strange, the fact that when we come over here and people are asking us about it in interviews: "So Howie, how are you feeling about ... ? What does this song mean ...? Where were you when you wrote this?" I don't remember, man. It was like eight years ago. So it's kind of strange to come over. It feels like we've stepped back in time a little bit, which is kind of strange.

But that can only go so far, right? I mean, you're not over here trying to rediscover the mindset you were in two years ago. You just play the songs the way you play them now -- I mean, assuming that's changed some. Does this question -- I'm not sure it's even a question -- does it make any sense?
[Laughing] Yeah. We've always done a fair amount of jamming on stage anyway. I don't like to play the same stuff every night. It's just something I don't like to do. So a lot of the songs, we'll just go off somewhere and have a little groove for a little bit with something or other. So it's not like we're trying to just repeat the same things every single night. You know, I'm always sort of careful. I don't like playing one song too much. I always change the sets around and things like that, you know? How I'm feeling tonight kind of thing, you know?

[Here's where we got into all the other stuff that's in the print piece, the stuff about how All Years Leaving got made in a hurry. We come out on the other side with Howie just having told me that he feels like the finished record is the American version, which just came out.]

But you didn't ultimately change all that much, right? I mean, it's not like you decided to go back and start from scratch. You tweaked one song, used a different mix of another. It's not a radically different version of the record that we got here.
I look at it like a photograph, you know? It's kind of like, you don't look at a photograph and think I should have had my hair cut differently. It's done. What are you gonna do?

So was making the new record a completely different experience for you?
The biggest difference is that I felt like I'd exhausted my knowledge of the studio with the first record. I have an amount of knowledge, but ... it's different. I just didn't want a very polished record for the first record. I just wanted, like a kind of "microphone in the room with the band" record, you know? With all our frailties and warts and all. These are the songs. This is real people playing real songs, you know? But it puts a lot of pressure on you, you know? Not from like an outside source, but, you know, internally. Because you kind of get too attached to it, and I found I couldn't really get a perspective on exactly where I was at with it. But I was determined to finish myself and not get somebody in. But for the second record I didn't want to do that. I just thought, OK, I want to work with someone now, I want to learn some more. So we went in with a producer in the form of Tom Rothrock and we got together and worked really closely on the pre-production. You know, we did like weeks of pre-production and then three weeks recording again. So to me, it was a much smoother process. I could concentrate more on, you know, just keeping the band playing the parts that we'd focused on, and just getting the sounds right in the room.

So now here you are and -- you'll be here in the States touring this record when the new one comes out in England, right? I know we talked about this already, but I'm still thinking about it, because it's starting to hit me just how strange that has to be.
We just left England and everyone's geared up for the next record and then we come to America and it's all happening for the first record. That's what's really strange.

And it's not like you restrict yourselves to your old stuff on stage here, right?
[Laughs again.] No, man, no. We're kind of playing some of the new stuff anyway. We're not being snobbish about it and being like, hey, we've moved on. It's not like that. We just kind of like playing some of the new stuff, so we're playing some of the older stuff and some of the newer stuff. But we kind of do that anyway. Half or our sets that we do in England is b-sides, you know?

So that tells me that you just trust your audiences to go along with what you're doing.
Oh, yeah. Our audiences are not ignorant about what's good and bad. You don't do your gig for your audience as much as you do your gig with your audience. There has to be a respect of your audience's ability to know if you're doing a good job or not.

[Everything after this pretty much amounts to small talk, so we'll end it here.]
posted by Sean at 4/20/2005 03:25:00 PM

 
Ducked Out?

OK, so after not blogging in any real way in who the hell knows how long, here I come with what might well be the most inane post in the history of inane blog posts (which is actually saying something). Still, I've gotta write something somewhere, because this is driving me nuts and I've gotta get it out of my head.

Let's start with some background. In the town where I live (Northampton, Mass.) there is a terrific park called Look Park. It's privately held and managed, but open for public use. I buy a season pass every year, and spend lots and lots of time there, mostly strolling and picnicking. It's pretty. And it's big. There's an outdoor amphitheater there where a company I used to work for presents some pretty impressive concerts every summer. There's a little zoo. There's all variety of playgrounds and playing fields. There's a little pond where people go for paddleboat rides. There's a little shed near the pond where people get married. There's a little choo-choo for kids to ride. So, you know, like that.

And there has always been, for as long as I've been going to the park, a pretty sizable sord of mallards that just kinda hangs out there and gets fed like crazy. The ducks don't leave during the winter, probably because there are still plenty of folks who go to the park and feed them (plus I've seen park staff showering them with little duck corns scooped out of a giant bucket, so even if no one were showing up, they'd be doing pretty well).

So, OK, those ducks are there all the time. You go to the spot where the ducks hang out and there they are, hanging out. You put a quarter in the little gumball type vending machine, get a handful of corn and delight your toddler by getting the duckies to come right up to his feet in pursuit of a free meal. It's just ducks, but it's big happy shit when you're a little guy.

But here's the thing. The ducks are gone. Gone where? I don't know. Just gone. Three, maybe four weeks ago, they disappeared. And they haven't come back. So now, you go to the spot where the ducks used to hang out and there they aren't. Not a duck. Not a drake. Not a nothing. So what I'm wondering is, as a particular little fellow I know puts it, "Where duckies go?"

I've got a pretty good idea where they didn't go. They didn't go off to breed. Mallards breed in August. And, sure, summer does seem to be coming on a lot more quickly than usual here in New England. But no one's likely been fooled into thinking it's August, especially not ducks. So there's that.

I'm not the only one thinking about this. I've overheard a good number of conversations about it while at the park. No one seems to know the answer. No one even seems to have a decent guess. But everyone seems to think something weird is afoot.

On my way out of the park yesterday, I decided to ask about it. I stopped and asked the kid "park ranger" at the gate if he knew what was up. He might have, but if he did he wasn't saying. He looked startled by the question, but not in a "there's a weird question I would never have seen coming" kind of way. He looked started in a "oh, shit, they're asking about it now" kind of way. Or that was my read, anyhow. And, not to pat myself on the back too much, but I've always been pretty good at reading that kind of thing. "I don't know," he shrugged after taking a few seconds to recover. "They all just sort of left."

I don't believe it. I don't believe that after however long it's been, this great group of ducks just decided en masse to leave a nice little spot filled to overflowing with easy eats just as the lean season was winding down and the buffet was set to open. That said, I can't imagine what else could have happened. Would the park have had them removed? I can't imagine it. Why? What would be the point? And there's no way duck rustling can be in any way profitable. (Or at least not enough so to make it worth the risk of hanging. Duck rustling is a hanging offense, right?) So tell me, what gives? Where duckies go?
posted by Sean at 4/11/2005 11:42:00 AM

 
Crooked Fingers
story and leftover quotes

Haven't done this in a while. Haven't done much blogging of any sort in quite a while. Why? Dunno. Doesn't matter. Right now, what I've got is a link to a Journal News feature on Crooked Fingers and some leftover quotes from my interview with Eric Bachmann, the guy behind Crooked Fingers. Before I get into the disjointed Q&A bit, though, lemme tell you that if you're digging the new Crooked Fingers disc, Dignity & Shame as much as I am you should try to get out to see the band live. Bachmann's out with six pieces right now. It's everyone from the record except, unfortunately, Lara Meyerratken, who's vocals on the disc are so awesome. Eric assures me, though, that those female vocal parts are well covered in the live sets, so it's not that huge a deal.

Actually, Eric and I started our interview, which took place about an hour before the band's first live show in support of Dignity & Shame, talking about the live band and their sets. We got to chatting about arranging some old songs, originally written for Bachmann to play solo on the early Crooked Fingers records, for the new band and I asked him if he found he liked certain songs better in their full band permutations.

I like 'em the same. I mean, it's just a song, man and it's different every time. You have to change it up. I like to do things where you record them one way and you take them out differently every time you can. I don't believe there's the perfect version of a song. I believe if a song works with any arrangement, you've written a good song. At least that's my attitude.

Have you always operated that way? I mean, I ask that assuming the answer is no. Like, it sort of sounds to me like you used to believe there was a perfect way to perform or record a song.
Yeah, I used to do it that way and it didn't work for me. I would spend five years on a record. And I just took on a belief through that painful process that you've just got to let it go; it's not that important. It's important, but it isn't important. It's important to me, but it ain't important to anybody else.

So now you look at it as ... um, well, how do you look at it?
You've gotta just take it as a document of where you are at that time.

That sounds like a pretty major change in approach. Do you feel like it's made you better? I mean, I suppose at the least it has to have made it easier to get your work done.
It was huge, man, it was really huge, because it's like it makes your ego smaller. It's a ... I just realized that I wasn't getting anything done. I would go back and fix something that I thought was broken and it wouldn't be better. It wouldn't be better at all. It would just be different.

And does it then open things up for you when you go back to revisit a song, like when you do a new arrangement?
That's a great question, because, yeah ... I don't know what I'm doing. I don't wanna know what I'm doing. And the only time I figure out what a song is about is after the fact. I like to think that if I'm writing a song it's not up to me. I like to feel like I'm just sort of putting it out there, but it's not me. It's like that whole idea that you just get working and whatever comes out of you comes out of you. It's, again, essentially reducing your ego. If you think of it that way, that you don't have to know what it means until later then you can look back and ... it also keeps things from being too rigid, because if a song means one thing and that's it, then how many times are you going to listen to that over and over again, you know?

So you're obviously someone who writes when he's inspired, right? I mean, you're not one of these guys who sets aside two hours a day to write and just pumps out song after song.
No, no, it's inspiration.

Is that scary in a way? Are there times when that inspiration hasn't come along in a while and you're wondering when it will, or are you pretty much always getting something, or is it ... you know, something else? Did that question make sense?
Yeah. The key is to be ready for it to hit you 24-7. You can have months go by when nothing hits you and then you can write a song in an hour. Like on the new record, "Sleep All Summer" took like three years and "You Must Build a Fire" took like an hour and a half.

How does that work -- when a song takes three years to write and it's a matter of inspiration? Is the inspiration just sort of coming and going?
For me, it happens in chunks. Like, I'll write different parts, like a first line and I'll think, that's a good first line, I'll keep that. And I'll work on it, because I like the line, but I'm not gonna force it if it doesn't work. So I'll set it aside. I'll work on other stuff and I'll come back to it months later. Ah, nothing's coming again, I'll leave it alone. Then, all of a sudden three months later, you'll be asleep and you'll wake up, oh, yeah, that's what it is. And you have another part of the song written. Then you put it away for another six months. But that song, oddly enough, was pieced together. For years it was just pieces and then when I was writing for Dignity & Shame it just fell out and was finished in an hour.

[Took a good chunk of stuff from here for the Journal News piece. We'll come back in toward the tail end of the interview, with me asking Eric about whether he thinks he'll stick with the approach he took in making Dignity & Shame (full band in the studio; songs written by EB, arranged by all; 11 days making the record -- six tracking, five mixing).]

I guess the results sort of speak for themselves, but I'll ask anyhow: Are you happy with how this record turned out? Do you think you'll keep making records this way?

I know the next one, I'll work this way, because I've already written a lot of songs for that record. But the thing is, you always wanna throw curveballs to yourself. Like, I did the first two Crooked Fingers records pretty much by myself, and I had to do that because I'd just spent eight years collaborating with a band and I had to change that formula. ... So for me, if I'm doing this collaborative thing now, maybe two, three records from now I might want to do it by myself again, or just do something completely different, whatever it might be. You've just got to listen to the voices in your head and whatever they tell you to do, you do. Trust it.

Is that belief in change something you've always had, or did you have to grow into it?
I'm sure it's something I've grown into. I mean, I never thought about it, man. And I don't even think about it now when I'm writing. But I do think that I've always had that in the back of my head, because I knew when I was making the first records I was making that I didn't want to repeat myself. I didn't call it what I just called it, but I knew.
posted by Sean at 3/25/2005 11:33:00 AM

 
I guess I haven't been posting much of anything here lately. Too busy spouting off about football stuff (including, just today, the Randy Moss trade) on This Football Blog. That should change soon. But for now, here, at least, are some links to some recent pieces, most of which I should have posted as they appeared, but so it goes.

I've got a piece in today's Journal News in which Lou Barlow discusses his new record, Emoh, and the upcoming Dinosaur Jr. reunion (that's right; J, Lou and Murph are getting back together for some shows).

And in recent weeks I've had pieces in the Journal News about Buddy Miller and Low, and a review in The Boston Globe of Michael MacCambridge's football history book America's Game.

So there's some stuff to read.
posted by Sean at 2/24/2005 11:26:00 AM

 
Guess Whom I Blame

Ah, hell, never mind with the guessing. I'll just come right on out and tell you: I blame all the so-called "progressives" who voted for John Kerry in November because it was just soooooo important to get George Bush out of office. All the pseudo-progressives who decided it was important to embrace a candidate who didn't represent, or even pretend to give a shit about, their values, because, you know, by compromising a little bit now, we'd get more of what we want over the long term. All the well-meaning but hideously unrealistic folks who dismiss my warnings about the ongoing rightward creep of American government as unwarranted fretting from a lefty ideologue.

I blame you for what I read about in the Boston Sunday Globe yesterday. Reporter Susan Milligan wrote about how the Democratic Party is moving to soften its stance on abortion rights, which is a nice way of saying that the chickenshit Dems, having failed to nominate a candidate who could beat George Bush, the worst president in U.S. history, are, precisely as I (and others) predicted, getting ready sell out their core constituency on one of the most important issues of our time. Why? Because they've got their fat little fingers in the wind and they figure it's blowing in from the right. So rightward (once again) is where they're headed. Wow. What a fucking shock.

Get it through your skulls, kids: The Democrats were never concerned with progressive values. They're not concerned with anything except power. They think they know what they need to do to win some elections going forward, and that's precisely what they're going to do. And if abortion rights don't survive, they can live with that (no matter what some of them may be saying at the moment). Indeed, you'd better believe me now even if you haven't in the past, the Dems can be trusted to safeguard nothing of what progressives value if they believe there are votes to be got by going the other way. They'll work their asses off to spin their moves, to claim they're not actually betraying what were supposedly deeply held beliefs, but they'll be betraying progressive causes everywhere you look just the same.

So why do I blame Kerry voters for that? Surely, those progressives who settled for Kerry, who bought into the lesser-of-two-evils bullshit the Dems were laying down during the campaign, did so out of a sincere belief that the best choice for president was Anyone But Bush. Yup. They did. And they were wrong. They were wrong then, and they're being proven wrong now. And, as I said then, they fucked the lot of us by going along with the Dems. Dig what Milligan wrote (and didn't write):

Offering a warmer welcome for antiabortion voices would give Democrats a chance at bringing back voters who might agree with the party on economic and foreign policy issues, but balk at what they perceive is an uncompromising stance on abortion, Democrats said.

She doesn't go on to write about the voters this move will force out at the other end -- i.e. "progressives" -- because she doesn't need to. You folks proved to the Dems this time around that you'll readily swallow whatever steaming pile of shit they offer you, because you're so fucking scared of Bush and the GOP. (And why's that? Well, if I'm to believe what a lot of you told me earlier this year, one reason is that those guys wanna take away a woman's right to choose. Oops.) The Dems aren't worried that they'll lose you by moving rightward because they won't. You'll vote for whatever candidate they nominate in 2008 and you'll buy into whatever moves they make to weaken the pro-choice planks in their platform, because you think they're better than the other guys. Once again, you're wrong. They're the same as the other guys.

If you'd stood by your beliefs. If you'd cast a vote for a progressive candidate this time around (as many of you did in 2000), we'd have the same guy in the White House as we do right now, but the Dems would be talking about what they need to do to bring progressives back into the party rather than how they can more effectively court regressives (not conservatives; the Dems are conservatives; abortion foes are as regressive as the ignorant religious nuts who want to teach creationism as science in public schools and the homophobes who want to write discrimination into the Constitution). They'd be talking about firming up their fight against Republicans who want to eliminate choice rather than trying to find a quiet way to join them. They'd be preparing to do battle to keep right-wing ideologue Nino Scalia from becoming Chief Justice, rather than hinting that they'll support his nomination.

So, yeah, like I said, I blame you. I also trust most of you to make the same mistake again in 2008. So let me say this for now and for then: Fuck you. Fuck you all.
posted by Sean at 12/20/2004 01:32:00 PM

 
Nothing To Smile About

Here's a long story to illustrate a little point:

A few years ago, I was working for this company that owned a bunch of music venues and presented concerts at them (and at some other venues, too). And one day Brian Wilson's big comeback tour stopped at one of those venues (a medium-sized, beautifully restored theater). I went to the show and it was an incredible experience. Of course it was. How could it not be? Brian Wilson was on stage. Brian Wilson. The genius behind the Beach Boys. The guy who created Pet Sounds. The guy who then went nutty as a fruitcake and who, for all intents and purposes, disappeared for a few decades. Sad, sad, sad. But, no, not sad anymore. Not disappeared anymore. Triumphant. Reemergent. Magnificent.

Only, no. Not really. Not magnificent, anyhow. (But yes, yes, yes, the other stuff. Yes.) I mean, seeing Wilson play was an emotionally satisfying and intellectually meaningful experience. And his backing band, mostly the Wondermints, couldn't have been better. But Brian was ... well, he was off. He seemed a little lost most of the time. He was mostly happy, and more entertaining than I would have hoped (not musically, I mean -- musically he was, you know, Brian Wilson -- but personally), but he sorta seemed like he didn't quite feel like he belonged there. He seemed a little fragile. And he seemed a little sad. (And his voice wasn't quite there, but you've gotta cut the guy a break on stuff like that, right?)

Still, for all that, I was moved. Literally moved to tears at one point. Not sobbing tears, just a little wetness around the eyeballs, you know? And glad I'd got the chance to see it. And willing to forget the ways in which it was less than what I would have liked it to be (though not less than I expected it to be) in the interest of letting it be what it was and of finding someplace warm inside me to store something that didn't need to be anything more than what it was, because it wasn't really the it of it that mattered, but the idea of it and the realization of the better part of the idea (if the lesser part of the ideal) of it.

Afterward, backstage, I met Brian Wilson. Got my picture taken with him and everything. This is huge, because I've met dozens, scores ... whatever ... of people whose music I enjoy (adore, even, in some cases) and I've never had my picture taken with any of them. Or asked them to sign anything. Or anything like that. Because that's just not my scene. It's not that I'm against it. If that's your thing, then bully for you. It's just that it all just feels very artificial to me. (There are guys I talk to regularly -- you know, have friendly chats with -- who are, you know, whatever they are. Rock stars? No. I'm not a rock star knowing kind of guy. But sorta like that in the little world I live in. And that's cool. But it's not something you force, like having your picture taken with some dude you just met -- and didn't even really meet -- just because he's famous and you can.) But with Brian Wilson I didn't care if it was artificial. Someone said, "Hey, let me take your picture with Brian," and I said, "OK" and I stood there smiled like an idiot. Because it was Brian Wilson. You know? Brian goddamn Wilson.

But you know what? It kind of wasn't Brian Wilson, after all. Or it wasn't the Brian Wilson who existed in my head -- who I imagine lived his life decades ago when he and the rest of the Beach Boys were young. It was this zombie type guy. He was stiff and awkward and quiet and confused. He didn't really seem to be there. He didn't really seem to be anywhere at all. He was just wandering through the backstage kitchen area, grazing from the various catering trays and not really seeming to realize that there were all these people there being in awe of him. And he wasn't doing it in a snobby way or in a humble way, but just in a sort of vacant way.

And the fact is that I regret meeting Brian Wilson. I regret every second of it. There's never been a single time when I've thought of that show and didn't end up wishing I'd just caught the music part and walked away.

I don't even know where the picture of Brian and me is. I tried looking at it now and again for a while, but it just reminded me of how much I regretted meeting Brian and so I put it away somewhere. Maybe when I'm 70 and I've forgotten the bad aspects of that evening, or when stuff like the disappointment of meeting someone you admire only to have him turn out to be a zombie doesn't really matter to me anymore, I'll be able to show it to a grandkid and try to explain why it was a big deal to meet and have my picture taken with Brian Wilson. But not now.

I've tried to keep my mistakes of that evening in mind when listening to Smile. I've tried to, you know, let Brian have his moment out of respect and admiration for who he is (was?) while working hard not to look too closely at the thing, because I know what (and who) is behind it and I neither want nor need to see it. But when you do a thing like that, you have to be careful, I think, to resist the urge to take it too far, to start seeing (hearing) something that really isn't there. And the fact is, though I'm not gonna dwell in this now or ever (because I've learned that lesson more than once, so I'm just not) that there's a lot that's been said and written about Smile that wants to be true, but isn't.

So what I'm saying (and here's the thing that got this whole bit going, believe it or not) is, yeah, Kristen, yeah. You're right.
posted by Sean at 12/08/2004 03:53:00 PM

 
At The Mall
or Hickory Vin

You're not gonna get anything meaningful out of this, so if you're looking for something meaningful, go on ahead and look somewhere else. Or, you know, stop surfing fucking blogs and go volunteer to help the needy somewhere or something. And my god, man, stop complaining to me about how your life has no meaning. Did I tell you to sit around reading this stuff? No. No, I most assuredly did not. Quite the opposite, in fact.

If you're not looking for something meaningful, then good. I'm glad we've found each other. Keep reading. I'll try to kill as much of your time as possible.

So this is a story -- actually it isn't a story at all; it's mostly just a bunch of random bullshit -- that starts with a trip to Target. But that's only because I had to go to Target this afternoon. Not for anything important. Just stuff. But the stuff I needed was a Target, so there I went. And I needed a good bit of stuff, too, so the getting it and the standing in line with it and the paying for it part of my trip took a good while, which meant I had to pick up lunch at the Hampshire Mall (which is where the Target where all my stuff was at was at), because there simply wasn't time left for going anywhere else. And, you know, because sometimes horrible mall Chinese has a pretty strong appeal (though don't ask me what that is; I ate chicken wings today that were so poorly an incompletely plucked it left me to wonder whether the poor bird had actually been slaughtered properly or simply rent wing from wing on its way into the deep fryer).

All of this crap you've now waded through, by the way, is just a hideously overextended mechanism for explaining what it was that set me walking through the Hampshire Mall (which, I suppose I should explain, on the off chance you're not a resident of the beautiful Pioneer Valley, is one of these lame little malls that should have died a quiet little death 10 years ago but is still going, and, except for Target and the movie theaters -- and maybe Ground Round if you're the kind of person who doesn't know Ground Round stopped mattering when they stopped giving you peanut shells to throw on the floor -- is just getting sadder and sadder all the time), which is when I had the following two utterly meaningless thoughts.

Pointless thought for the day, number one: Is a Hickory Farms gift basket anything more than a way to say, "Not only can I not begin to give half a shit about you, but I'm fairly resentful of the fact that, for whatever reason, I've found myself in a situation in which I'm obliged to buy you a gift"? Hickory fucking Farms? There's still such a thing as Hickory Farms? I'm quite certain that I know no one who has ever either given or received a Hickory Farms gift basket -- or if I do, they're not saying anything about it, most likely because, a) it's enough to have been forced to deliver that message, and they can see no need to relive the experience; or b) it's enough to have felt the heartache of receiving such a message, and there's no need to relive the experience. How on earth does Hickory Farms stay in business? Who's eating all that summer sausage?

Pointless thought for the day, number two: So you know how every year you walk past the booth at some mall or another where they're selling the poorly painted, framed portraits of various celebrities, pseudo-celebrities and assorted fictional characters (the one that caught my eye as I walked past today was a portrait of Vin Diesel) and you think (or say to whomever you're shopping with), "Who buys that shit?" And you never know the answer because you never see anyone buying that shit and you've never walked into anybody's home and seen a portrait of Vin Diesel or the cast of The Sopranos hanging above the mantel. And you don't really even think about the answer because it's really just a rhetorical question, because you're really just thinking (or saying to whomever) that clearly no one would ever buy that shit. But you know what occurred to me today? There's an actual answer to that question. There has to be. Know how I know? Because I've been asking that question every year at this time for probably 20 years, and no business keeps running for 20 years if no one ever buys the shit it's trying to sell (just ask Adam Smith). And the thing that really baffles me is that this means there's someone out there other than Vin Diesel's mother (who, I'm gonna go ahead and assume, already has all the poorly painted portraits of her son holding some impossible pistol that she could ever want -- I mean, Mrs. Diesel must be proud of her boy, but at some point it just becomes ridiculous) who wants, who believes he or she has some use for, a poorly painted, framed portrait of Vin Diesel. And so the very real questions now become, a) who is this person? b) how many of this person are there? (because, you know, once you've got your Vin Diesel portrait, you're probably all set and I'm guessing these guys have done a nice business in portraits of the Rock -- should I capitalize the T in the? -- and C. Thomas Howell -- I don't know why I picked C. Thomas Howell just then, but you're in this deep already, so you might as well stick it out with me, right?) and c) Is this person (are these people) familiar with Mr. Diesel's work? Because ... I don't know ... I saw Pitch Black when it came out and that was pretty much all I needed. I mean, the fact that Pitch Black is an absolutely awful fucking movie isn't entirely (or even disproportionately) Vin Diesel's fault -- this film wouldn't have been good with Marlon Brando in the role of Riddick (though it would have been pretty fucking funny), but that doesn't really let Vin off the hook, does it? Or to the extent that it does, OK, I gave Vin a second chance. I did. Not on purpose or anything (though maybe it should have been on purpose because you really can't tell from one role whether someone's bad -- look at Jim Varney, for example; he stunk as Virgil Simms on Fernwood 2Night but then turned it all around with his masterful portrayal of ... ah, shit, never mind), but really just because of cable television, which is evil for a good number of reasons, the biggest of which is that it forces me (and when I say forces I mean ... well, forces, which I would think would be fairly plain) to watch really bad movies, like, say xXs, a, yes, Vin Diesel vehicle which is something to do with spying and such (it's not that I didn't get it, just that it was late and the movie was mercifully forgettable). The point, anyway, is that I know Vin Diesel isn't at all good at what he does. Not even a little bit. So say you liked Vin Diesel for some reason (maybe you just like the cut of his jib, which would be odd, but, you know, to each his own), but then you went out and saw one or two of his movies, wouldn't you then stop liking him? Or at least come to some understanding of the fact that its a bit embarrassing to have poorly painted, framed portrait of him hanging up somewhere? You might think so, as I did, but as it turns out, for some reason, for someone, somewhere, you'd be wrong. Just wrong.

Of course, I suppose there's one other explanation: Maybe all the Vin Diesel portraits (except for the ones Vin's mom buys) are purchased as gifts. Maybe it's the thing you give to the person who gave you the Hickory Farms gift basket.
posted by Sean at 12/06/2004 03:44:00 PM

 
Right On. Nice Going.

Jeff at Rumi Nation expresses a sentiment that any progressive who bought into the Kerry campaign's "beat Bush at any price" nonsense would do well to consider.

He's right, folks. Like it or not, as it turns out it was a vote for Kerry that was wasted. (I'm not talking to Democratic party loyalists here. Their votes for Kerry were expected, if equally pointless. I'm only talking to the real progressives, the ones who know damned well there's no place for them in the party but who went ahead and cast their support to the Democrats' center-right nominee anyhow.)

You could have made your voices heard. You could have told sent the Democratic party a message. You could have voted for Ralph Nader or David Cobb, and, in so doing, let the party know it can't win your vote or keep your support if it's determined to keep moving further and further rightward.

You squandered that opportunity because you bought into the lesser of two evils bullshit the Democrats were peddling. More fool you.

Worse yet, you cut the legs out from under whatever little chance we had to force the party to take the left into consideration. Four years ago, we began sending a message to the Democrats about what they needed to do to get our votes. They responded, in entirely predictable fashion, not by embracing us, but by condemning us. We with our silly convictions, cost them the White House, they screamed. And then, instead of looking for legitimate ways to bring us back in, they adopted a strategy of fear and low-level coercion. "If you don't support our guy," they warned, "you're gonna end up with this truly evil motherfucker for four more years." They could have coupled that with a concession here or there to progressive values, but they didn't. They went with a guy who kinda supported the death penalty (but, you know, only for terrorists), who is "personally opposed" to abortion, but pretty much pro-choice (like that's OK), who is pro-war, only not the way the administration is pro-war. And they told you, "Hey, better this guy than that other guy." And you fucking bought it.

And, as if buying it for yourself weren't enough, you pointed fingers at guys like me who stuck with what we believe and told us we were wasting our votes. You told us we were silly. You said we had to give in and support the conservative Democrats, because we had to, because ... well, we just had to get Bush out.

As you know, it didn't work. Bush is still in. And the Democrats are looking around thinking they need to be even more conservative. They're also feeling pretty confident that you're gonna keep on doing whatever they tell you they need you to do going forward, because you can't get over your guilt at voting for the right guy in 2000.

If you'd had the cojones to vote for a progressive candidate, Bush would still have won, but maybe, just maybe the Democrats would have had to look at us and try to figure out how to bring us in. Maybe, seeing that scare tactics didn't work, they'd have started to fucking listen. Fat chance that'll happen now.

You know what didn't happen as a result of your decision, because you saw that grinning boob of a president we're stuck with lying through his teeth about uniting Americans on TV yesterday. But do you know what is going to happen because of your decision to betray your principles? I'll tell you what: The Democratic party is going to move further to the right in an effort to try to hold on to the "moderates" Bush is looking to bring over to the GOP. And in four years, they're once again going to insist that you have to go with them, that you have to further compromise your beliefs, in order to keep the Republicans from tightening their grip on the country. (And do you know what I predict? Most of you are gonna buy right into it yet again.)

Guess what, folks? The right wingers aren't compromising on their core values one damned bit. They're putting forth an agenda of bigotry, zealotry, intolerance and institutionalized repression that would make the fucking Taliban envious. And they're bringing the center along with them, not because it's what the center wants, but because they're the only ones doing any pulling.

You refused to fight as hard for progressive values as the right is fighting for regressive values, because you thought you could find some comfort in the middle of the road. And now there's a big-ass truck called the religious right barreling at the lot of us, me and all the other real progressives included. And -- like it or not, admit it or not -- it's all your fucking fault.

You wasted your votes. All of you. And in compromising to try to get half a win in the short term, you pretty much ensured major losses for all of us over the long term.

Thanks a lot.
posted by Sean at 11/04/2004 01:17:00 PM

 
What Happened? And What's Next?

Here's what happened yesterday (take it for what it's worth):

America looked at its choices, failed to see any real difference, shrugged, and flipped a coin. The coin came down tails, but so what? Because in the end, it's not even a matter of whether the candidates were different, it's a matter of whether they serve different interests. And the fact of the matter is that they don't. The same corporations would have been in control either way.

For the second straight time, the Democrats failed to nominate a candidate capable of beating a guy who shouldn't be able to win a spot on a trailer park puddle cleanup commission. This didn't have to be the case. As Iowa approached, the Dems looked like they were headed toward nominating a guy who would have presented a clear alternative to the guy in office, a guy who was polling so far ahead of Bush it wasn't even funny. But backroom dealing and a deep commitment to establishment, party hacks, ended Dean's chances in Iowa, and the Democratic electorate fell in line. The Dems acted like the bunch of chickenshit GOP wannabes they are and screwed the fucking pooch in the process.

America chose the guy who looks us in the eye and tells us he's fucking us and we'd better learn to like it over the guy who would have spent four years talking about and pretending to be interested in doing the right thing while fucking us and telling us we really should like it.

Here's some of what's gonna happen next:

There's gonna be a draft. This isn't because Bush was reelected, though. It's because he was elected the first time. That is, it didn't matter who won yesterday, there was always gonna be a draft. Because we're in Iraq and we can't just up and leave. And we can't sustain this occupation (which is gonna go on for a long, long, long time) without a draft. So there's gonna be one. Democrats should take some solace in knowing that at least it'll be a Republican who gets caught in the no-draft lie. Maybe that'll swing things the Dems' way in 2008. Probably not, though, because the Republicans will say they wouldn't have needed the draft if it hadn't turned out that we needed to invade Iran, too. (We'll be in Iran before next year is out.)

We'll continue to replace decent jobs with low-wage jobs, ensuring that the rich continue to get richer and the poor poorer, which is exactly what would have happened if Kerry had won.

The makeup of the Supreme Court may become considerably more right-wing rather than simply rather more right-wing. Whoopee shit. They've been taking our freedom away from us piece by piece for so long, and under so many administrations, both Democratic and Republican, that it's unlikely anyone will even notice.

The Democrats will once again fail to recognize that they keep losing because they keep nominating bad candidates. This despite the fact that they don't have Ralph Nader or the Supreme Court to blame this time out (and not just because they did everything they could to prevent progressive voters from having the option to support Nader). They will continue to believe that anyone whose politics aren't to the right of their own owes their vote to the Democratic nominee. And they'll continue to believe that they can win elections by out-Republicaning the Republicans, the utter absurdity of it all notwithstanding.

The Democrats will turn their backs on what little is left of whatever progressive values they may once have held. They'll leave the pro-choice movement high and dry. They'll become even more outspokenly anti-gay. They'll fail to challenge right-wing ideologues who are nominated to the federal bench. They'll speak out in support of school prayer. They'll do it all in pursuit of those voters who claimed they'd gone with Bush because of his support of "traditional values" (and pretend they don't know that's code for institutionalized hate and repression). And the craziest thing of all is that many pseudo-progressives will still support the Dems (and argue that real progressives should do the same), claiming they're not as bad as the Republicans, even though they pretty much already are and certainly will be by 2008.

In four years, as the economy sits in the dumper, thousands upon thousands more lie dead in the Middle East (and probably here at home as well), and the wealthy continue to laugh at us miserable masses from on high, the GOP will anoint Rudy Giuliani or Jeb Bush as the next douchebag to take charge, the Democrats will nominate another weak party hack to take him on, I'll vote for Nader (again -- despite whatever bullshit, anti-democratic tricks the Dems pull to keep him off ballots) and the whole stupid cycle will start anew. La di da di de. La di da di da.

Oh, and this: Maybe. Just maybe. With no higher office to pursue, no aspirations to consider every time he has to cast a vote, John Kerry will become the good, strong senator he should have been all along. But, you know, I'm not counting on that.
posted by Sean at 11/03/2004 01:58:00 PM

 
Once Again, Politics Makes Me Ralph

Well, no matter what happens today (for the record, I stand by the prediction at the close of my week eight NFL predictions post on This Football Blog), I can spend the next four years knowing I didn't vote for the corporate stooge in charge. That's right, as promised, I cast my vote for Mr. Ralph Nader.

Why? How could I, in such an important election, cast a vote for a candidate who doesn't represent one of the major parties and can't win? As I've said before, I'm a progressive. And, while others can do whatever they like (and rationalize it in whatever way they choose), I wouldn't feel like I could call myself a progressive if I went out and voted for a conservative candidate, even a conservative candidate who's slightly less conservative, considerably more honest, and infinitely more qualified than the other candidate. I know I'm in a tiny little minority here, but I just don't believe choosing the lesser of two evils is ever going to bring about positive change.

No. Scratch that last bit. I know for a fact that the best you can do with choosing the lesser of two evils is maintain the status quo. And anyone who isn't blind should be able to see that the status quo in America isn't working for anyone but the rich and powerful.

Will we get real healthcare reform if Kerry is elected? Shit, no. We'll talk about it a lot, but nothing will happen, because the corporations that own Bush own Kerry and own pretty much everyone in Congress and they don't want it. Will rich people be forced to pay their fair share of taxes under Kerry? Come on, now. They may lose the tax break Bush has given them (though probably not), but the bulk of the burden for running our government and carrying out global warfare will still fall on the shoulders of working people. Will the corporations that run this country lose any of their power? Not a chance. They own both of these guys.

How about those Supreme Court nominees everyone is so worked up about? Won't electing Kerry keep Bush from stacking the court with right-wing ideologues bent on overturning Roe v. Wade and approving school prayer? Yeah, obviously it'll keep Bush from doing that, since he won't be in office to do it. But do you think Kerry's gonna appoint a bunch of liberal justices? And if he does, do you think the Republicans in the Senate are gonna let them make it onto the bench? He won't, partly because they wouldn't. So we'll end up with an assortment of nominees who are as conservative as those named by the last Democratic president. And won't that be wonderful for us progressives?

So, yeah, I voted for a guy who actually shares many of my values, a guy I would trust to do what's right for America and Americans, both at home and abroad, a guy who can't win, largely because he can't be bought. Shame, shame on me.
posted by Sean at 11/02/2004 10:20:00 AM

 
Football Boy Stands In (Hopeless) Awe

Oh, man, I guess I haven't been here in a while. This promoting a book stuff is time consuming work.

Still, here I am. I wrote this essay yesterday morning thinking I might be able to sell it somewhere. But it ain't selling and it's got a terribly short shelf life, so I'm just gonna go ahead and post it here. Like this:

I knew I was inviting trouble, but I had to ask just the same: "Are we gonna watch the game tonight?"

My wife, the baseball fan in the family, rolled her eyes. "You're not gonna pretend to be a baseball fan now, are you?"

"No," I said. "But, you know, it's game seven. Sox and Yankees. You have to watch, right?"

"So we'll watch," she offered. Her shrug said "Whatever," but her raised eyebrows said something more. They offered an unspoken warning: "Don't go jumping on any bandwagons, football boy."

She needn't have worried. I wasn't about to become any more of a baseball fan than I've ever been just because the Red Sox had battled back from 0-3 to force a game seven with the hated Yankees. Nor am I likely to abandon my great sports love, football, now simply because the Sox are in the World Series for the first time in 18 years.

I was born to love football, which has been my favorite sport for as long as I can remember.

My relationship with baseball has been far less solid. I've watched from time to time over the years, but mostly passively, catching a game on a barroom TV set here, in a friend's living room there, rooting for the Red Sox, of course, but rarely feeling as if I had any stake in whether they won or lost.

And I blame the Sox for my lack of passion for baseball.

I grew up in Central Massachusetts, surrounded by Sox fans. My father is a Sox fan. His father was a Sox fan, too. In fact, many of my childhood memories of my grandfather, who died when I was a teenager, involve the Sox. When we'd go to visit in the summertime, I'd look out of my father's car as it pulled into the driveway of my grandfather's farmhouse (the farm he'd grown up on and worked for years was long gone by then) to see the old man sitting in his chair by the kitchen window, knowing he'd have his little black and white TV tuned to the game.

The Sox were a religion for my grandfather, as they have been for thousands upon thousands of New Englanders. And I could never betray his love for the team, or my father's, by backing another. I could never be a Braves fan or an As fan. And, of course, it's all but a hanging offense to back the Yankees in my part of the country.

Still, I never had the heart it takes to be a true Red Sox fan. Or if I ever did, the first time the team tore it out -- losing the 1975 series to the Cincinnati Reds with a huge game-seven collapse after Carlton Fisk's homer brought about a thrilling 12th inning victory a game earlier -- it stayed out. By the time Bill Buckner's name became forever all-but-unspeakable in Boston in game six of the '86 series against the Mets, I had come to expect disappointment from the team. When the Sox gave in to the Yankees in game seven of the American League Championship Series last year, it didn't hurt at all, because I hadn't let myself hope for even a second that things might work out otherwise. I had abandoned baseball specifically to avoid the temptation to allow such hollow hope to creep in.

So I won't be tempting my wife's ire by pretending to be a baseball fan over the next 10 days.

I will be watching the World Series, though, just like thousands of other New Englanders who normally care only minimally about baseball. I'll be watching with keen interest. And, in spite of everything I've learned during a lifetime of peeking around corners at the Sox, I'll be watching with at least a touch of that hopeless hope folks in this part of the sports fan world hold onto so dearly.

It would have been impossible not to get swept up in the excitement of what the Sox did in their 2004 ALCS go-round with the Yankees. A year after a hard-to-take loss to the villains from the Bronx, the Sox pulled off the most stunning comeback victory in professional sports history. Better still, they put a permanent black mark on the Yankees' record. The greatest fold, the greatest choke, the most embarrassing tripup in all of sports is now part of the Yankees' record. And whatever may come of the Sox in the series, whatever may happen with the alleged Curse of the Bambino, knowing the Olde Towne Team made monkeys of their bitter, and almost always better, rivals this time around carries a level of satisfaction that won't fade quickly and will never be forgotten.

So, just as I had to watch game seven of the ALCS, I have to watch the World Series. I'll still be going to Foxborough on Sunday to watch New England's football heroes, the Patriots, extend their 20-game winning streak by beating the despised New York Jets (completing the New York sweep in the process), but I'll be finding a bar where I can watch the Sox immediately thereafter.

I should know -- as should all the real Sox fans (full- and part-time alike) -- that the odds remain good that Sox are only setting us up for disappointment. Breaking hearts, after all, is what this team does. They've been doing it for 86 years. And no one will ever truly believe that run is over until ... well, until the victory parade gets underway -- and possibly for some time thereafter.

And, really, I do know that. I'm fully aware of the fact that while it's OK to get excited about what the Sox did to the Yankees, I'd be a fool to invest any part of my heart or my soul in this World Series. I know I should sit back and watch the Sox just as I always watch the Sox: dispassionately, disconnectedly, rendered impervious to heartache by the very expectation of it.

Only this year, at this moment, that doesn't seem possible. I'm not on the bandwagon (really, honey, I'm not) but there's a weird feeling in the air. There's a sense that the impossible might turn out to be possible after all.

It feels like this year, this time, everything has to be different. It does, doesn't it?
posted by Sean at 10/22/2004 03:30:00 PM

 
Peace Activist, My Ass

Can we please, please, please stop referring to this fuckwad Cat Stevens as a peace activist? Peace activist, my ass. This giant turd masquerading as a human being (who, yes, wrote some amazing songs a million years ago), spoke out in support of the Islamic fatwa against Salman Rushdie. This is a death sentence issued against Rushdie by religious fanatics who were offended by Rushdie's book, The Satanic Verses. Rushdie's been in hiding for 15 years because of it. So how the fuck is a guy who supports the suppression of speech a peace activist? I don't care what else he's done. I don't care what else he's said. You say someone deserves to die for writing a book that you disagree with, you're not a peace activist, you're a lunatic.

Now, none of this has anything to do with whether Stevens, who is on a government watch list, should have been denied access to the United States earlier this week. He's on that list for a reason. He's been accused in the past of providing monetary support to Islamicist extremists. But who knows? Maybe he's done nothing wrong, and if that's the case, he should be able to speak about his beliefs just like anyone else. But you know what? The innocent act is a bit much to take, frankly, particularly in light of the evidence he provided back in 1989 (the Rushdie thing) that he's all in favor of killing in the name of radical Islam. And the bottom line is, why should anyone give half a shit about protecting this fucker's right to speech? You wanna take speech away from others, Cat, you can't really go around whining when it's been denied to you.

Cat has moaned in the past about the ongoing boycott of his music, saying it violates his right to free speech (which, of course, it doesn't; you've got a right to say whatever you want, but you don't have a right to expect me to listen to it -- and you certainly don't have a right to ask me to pay to listen to it). Now he's gonna take legal action against the U.S. government for keeping him out? Good. I hope this puts the spotlight back on what a dickhead this guy is, so people who missed or forgot about the Rushdie incident remember not to buy his records. (Oh, and maybe they'll reissue the Rushmore soundtrack without "Here Comes My Baby," and I'll finally be able to go out and buy a copy. I'd like to see Yo La Tengo ditch it's cover of that song, too, so I could buy a copy of Fakebook.)
posted by Sean at 9/24/2004 01:43:00 PM

 
In Northampton? Really?

Henning reports on his visit to Cold Stone Creamery's newly opened downtown Northampton shop. And I'm stunned. Flabbergasted. Blown away.

My puzzlement isn't to do with why someone would go to a chain place when Herrell's (which sells some of the best ice cream you will ever eat anywhere) is right down the street. Henning answers that question.

Nor do I want to get into the whole tipping for counter service thing. OK, well I do, but just a little. I always say I'm not gonna do it, but the thing is you can't help it. You fell like such a fink if you don't. I mean, the kind of service one tends to get at counters in Hamp (more on that in a bit) should make it a good bit easier to resist the instinct to tip, but still ... . I will say this: I wish there were a way to get everyone to stop tipping for counter service. My theory is that if we all just didn't do it, shop owners would have to increase what they pay their workers rather than getting us to cover for their cheap asses. Then they'd raise prices to make up for the wage increases. But, get this, those of us who tip would actually end up spending less than we do now, because we'd no longer be subsidizing the cheapness (or, let's face it, wisdom) of those who refuse to tip for counter service. Everyone would make out better in the deal (except the people who don't tip now, and, you know, screw them). And the quality of counter service wouldn't dip any, because, let's face it, it just can't get any worse.

What I can't get over about this Cold Stone place is the idea of the singing. They sing, Henning says, if you tip them well. (Debbie offers some qualifying thoughts on this.) The employees, that is. At a downtown Northampton shop. They sing. Sing. For tips.

Now, let's set aside how inane this practice is and how annoying it absolutely has to be. (Never mind that this is a chain. Never mind that there's world-class ice cream around the corner. I won't go near the place because I'd end up killing the staff.) Let's set aside, too, Henning's accurate observation that this has to be degrading for these workers. My question is, where the hell did they find these people? People who sing for tips. Who have come to work in a downtown Northampton shop. I don't even know what to do with this information.

Now, if you've never been to downtown Hamp, you maybe don't understand what I'm getting at here. The point is, as I started to note above, in most downtown Northampton shops, you can hardly get the workers to take your order. They're slow. They're surly. They're interested in just about everything but helping customers. They're often too cool to be bothered with helping customers. Of course, they still expect a tip. But they're not gonna so much as thank you for it. Forget asking them to sing (they save that for when they rehearse with their bands that never play out anywhere, because they don't have the energy -- after a long day of ignoring customers -- to go out and book a gig).

So who are they, folks? Where do they come from? And do you think there's any way to spread their attitude while maybe, you know, axing the singing bit? Any thoughts? Henning? Debbie? Anyone? Anyone?
posted by Sean at 9/02/2004 11:18:00 AM

 
Bad News For W.Mass Bloggers

The bad news for Mr. Shelffo is that if things ever get better on the bagels and pizza front (that is, if you ever stop noticing how bad both are here in Western Mass.), it takes at least a decade. I've been here for a little more than nine years now, and I still haven't found a bagel or a slice worth getting excited about.

The best local bagels get is at the Vermont Country Deli in Northampton. They're about one 100th as good as a real New York bagel, maybe a tenth as good as what you can get at the better shops in Brookline, Mass. And you've got to wait in two different lines watching some of the most slothful workers in a town of unbelievable slothful food service workers to get one. If you've got that kind of time, you might as well drive down to NYC and get the real thing.

Pizza? I've fallen into the habit of getting that fancy-pants stuff at Paradiso, because at least then I'm not comparing it to actual pizza. You might try that. You never forget what real pizza tastes like, but it's kinda like getting into that Chicago crap, where it's different enough that you can just consider it a different kind of food with the same name. (Oh, and don't fall into the "Joe's is awesome" trap some folks lay down. Joe's sucks.)

The bad news for Scott: I'm one of those people who uses the cash/Fast Lane line with cash, and I can assure you, we ain't gonna change. As a nearly lifelong resident of Massachusetts (there was that two-year adventure in New Hampshire a little more than a decade ago), and a long-time Pike user, I know one thing: you get in the shortest line. And, because a lot of people are confused by the combo booth that's usually where the shortest line is. I don't have Fast Lane. Don't want Fast Lane (I don't need the state to be able to track my comings and goings, thanks). But I've got cash and I couldn't begin to give a shit about whether the folks with the transponders get slowed down a bit.

posted by Sean at 8/28/2004 08:06:00 AM

 
Hello, It's Me

Yes, you're right. I haven't been around here for a while. Why? Well, I took a vacation, spent a week on Cape Cod. (Yes, it was very nice. Thanks for asking.) And then I've been straight out with work and with stuff related to my soon-to-be-released book, This Pats Year.

The Web site, ThisPatsYear.com, is up and running. You can find out all about the book, take a look at the press it's getting (which ain't much so far, but give it time), and check out my new/other blog This Football Blog. The blog, which is where I'll be posting football-related stuff from here on in, also includes an up-to-date listing of events -- readings, signings and whatnot.

I've got some stuff I'm kinda pissed off about and I'll try to get to it sooner than later, so come back. Meanwhile, if you don't find me here, look for me over there. It'll be fun.
posted by Sean at 8/26/2004 12:14:00 PM

 
A Big, Giant Tub Of Jim White Leftovers

Start with my Journal News feature on the alt.Americana singer-songwriter, who's currently in middle of a Northeast swing opening for Lucinda Williams (they're at the Calvin Theater in Northampton August 8). Then come back and feast on these tasty leftovers from the interview I did with Jim on July 26. (The format is the same as usual.) [Note: It's not necessarily easy to tell from the words alone, but Jim's a very good-natured fellow who laughs a lot and clearly intends a good bit of what he has to say to be taken as at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek.]

[We're gonna start coming right out of the small talk bit, because things just sort of take off from there. I've asked White whether he's already out in support of his new record Drill a Hole in That Substrate and Tell Me What You See and he's told me he's on his way to meet up with Lucinda and start the tour.

So these are the first dates in support of this record?
Yeah. Well, in America. The album was released in Europe a month earlier than in America, so we did our European tour and then we came back and we kind of sat on our heals until this opportunity, because it's a great opportunity for a nobody like me.

Are you still a nobody three records in?
I'm still a nobody. And you know what? Don't think that it's all bad being a nobody. There's lots of good, too.

What's the best part of being a nobody?Here's what I noticed. I was on Letterman once and when I came back to Pensacola, the guy at the post office, who I always had nice, easy-going, casual, humanistic conversations with, stared at me like I had a third eyeball or something. And he could only say things like ... you know, before I'd say, 'How you doing today?' And he'd say, 'Ah, you know, my back hurts.' And we would talk. And now when I see him, he says things like [adopts an odd, halting, distant tone of voice], 'Heyyyyy, what've you been doing? Anything interesting?' He saw me on TV and it absolutely poisoned the easy, simple pleasure of our conversation. So being a nobody, there's lots of pleasure in just living your daily life and not having people have preconceptions about who you are as they talk to you. 'Cause most of the preconceptions are absolutely erroneous. This guy probably thinks that I have girls throwing themselves at me and I have money pouring out my ears, when in fact I'm like a traveling salesman with one suit, you know? And what I'm selling is my own tattered personality.

Do you think the fact that the guy saw you on TV has a lot to do with his reaction? I mean, it's hard to imagine he'd have had the same response if he'd seen you on stage or something.
TV is a magnifier, but I notice this a lot, that a lot of people have this kind of inane reverence for entertainers and it makes them go all silly, and they lose their analytical facilities. And, you know, the entertainers can get away with anything. Like, I was talking to this guy who worked with this English band in the ’80s, you know, like those English romance bands or whatever they were, and apparently the lead singer, when he was recording, liked to walk around with a pencil sticking up his butt. He would walk around naked with this pencil sticking up his butt. And, you know, someone should have just slapped him and said, stop that. But because he was this entertainer, he was just thought to be creative and what have you. I think that when you take on this title of entertainer, all bets are off on behavior, and I don't think that's good. I think you should still be able to change the oil in your car, and that you should still be able to do yard work if you have to, and that you should still be able to lead a normal life. I don't think it's any good being an entertainer if it makes you so freaky and weird that you can't enjoy the simple pleasures or life. In fact, you know Ricky Williams, the football player ... did you hear about that?

Oh, yeah. Of course.
I think that's really beautiful that he retired. I'm proud of him.

So what's your theory on what happened?
He was Mr. Franchise, you know? From the minute he came out of Texas when he went to the Saints he was Mr. Franchise and he was gonna be the savior. And they put the weight of the world on his shoulders and they wanted him to be a rock star and they sort of pressured him into being a rock star. And he never did like it. And you could tell that he was kind of a sensitive person. And I think he retired because he just realized, 'I've got $30 million in the bank, what the fuck am I doing this for? What am I jumping through these hoops for?' And I think that that's really cool. Take the money and run, Ricky.

Seems to me that ... yeah, why destroy your body for these guys, all for what? A little shelf in Canton, Ohio. Who needs that?
Now, look what happened to OJ. OJ is the antithesis of Ricky. OJ stayed in as long as he could and milked the celebrity thing to the point where he was ... . Ricky/OJ, there's a good compare and contrast essay question.

But, now, are you a Dolphins fan?
Not in the least. Not a Dolphins fan. If I was gonna follow any team, hmm, I've always liked the 49ers, you know? I like the 49ers. I'm definitely not an Oakland can. But I spent a certain amount of time in San Diego, so I've always kind of liked the Chargers ... . See, now, I couldn't go to the post office and talk to that guy about football. He'd wanna talk about my celebrity lifestyle.

Well, we can talk about your celebrity lifestyle if you'd rather. Did you get the oil for that van yet? [Jim's been talking to me from outside an auto parts store.]
[Laughs] Yeah, exactly. So where are you, New York?

Well, I'm writing for a paper in New York, but I'm actually in Western Massachusetts. Northampton. You're here in a couple of weeks.
So what's that like? College town?

You've never played here before, huh?
No. I don't think so. I've played Boston a couple of times and that's always a war. Every time I play Boston, I almost get in a fight.

Really?
Yeah.

What are you doing? You out there in a Yankees cap or something?
Hell, no. Just minding my own business. Sometimes it's when I'm doing the show. Last time, I played this little club and this fuckin' guy wouldn't stop talking at the top of his lungs. So I stopped the show and said, "Hey, pal, I understand that what you're saying is important, but there's a bar attached to this room where you can go and shout at the top of your lungs and you won't disturb all these good people who paid their money." And he started shouting back at me. And I was about to get off the stage. And finally the owner of the club came and yanked the guy out by his collar. But, you know, there were people at that show who came up afterwards and said, "I've been waiting five years to see you and I'm so grateful that you stopped that guy from ruining the show." And generally that's my method. If someone's ruing the show, for a lot of reasons I'm gonna stop that.

I like that. When a performer stands up for himself.
My feeling is this: If there's 100 people in there who have paid $10 to see me, that's $1,000 someone has given on behalf of me. And if someone entrusts me with their thousand dollars, I'm damned sure gonna make sure that they get their money's worth out of it. I mean, I'm not crazy about being a performer. I'm not crazy about standing on stage. But I realize that the people who come come with love in their hearts for the most part. There's a few people who come trying to pick up chicks or trying to ... like, I had one guy who told me he was Jack Kerouac's guitar player or something ... no, Allen Ginsberg's guitar player -- Allen Ginsberg was doing some spoken word -- and this guy, he just had to talk over the whole show and him and me kinda had to go at it. You know, I'm kinda grouchy to begin with on the road, 'cause I don't like leaving home and I'm driving in an old van. I like being around my kid and going to the post office and talking normal talk. I don't like the road lifestyle. So I'm in a bad mood to begin with, and then if someone messes up my show, then I really have to go crazy.

So do you actually end up getting in fights during your own shows?
No, no, no. Because usually what happens is I start getting on somebody and they start jawing back at me and then all the people who are fans get the courage to speak up and say, hey you are ruining the show, and they guy who's an idiot then kinda realizes it.

I can't for the life of me understand the mindset of that jackass who has to talk through a show.
It's the mindset of enebriation, usually. I played a show in Cork, Ireland about three weeks ago, and these three guys were sitting up there just talking, I mean, so loud that I could not hear myself sing. And so I stopped the show and said, "You fellas, what did you come here for?" And they said, "Oh, to see you, Jim." I said, "Well you're ruining the show for me and for everybody else. Can you do me a favor and just, I realize that what you're talking about is important, but can you please just be quiet?" "Oh, yeah, Jim. We love you." And so I started singing and a minute later they were shouting again. And I stopped the song and ... I ended up talking to them the whole freakin' show. I ended up talking to one of the guy's wives on the phone. He had a cell phone and he was talking to his wife while he was watching the show, and I said, "Can I talk to her for a minute?" You know, "Can I ask you a question, lady, does he always talk this loud?" And she hung up on me. Part of the problem is that there's club promoters that put you on at 11 o'clock at night when people are just bound to be drunk. It's Saturday night; they wanna get drunk, you know?

So are you excited to be heading out on a theater tour, then?
I don't know. I like a kind of a mixed crowd. If it feels too sacred, if everybody's like, oh, the saint is speaking, then that also is irritating. I sort of like it where people are in a good mood and they're intelligent ... . Like, whenever I play in Edinburgh, and I ... I talk extemporaneously during the show a lot just to kind of ... you know, I get bored just playing the songs over and over again, so I wanna talk to people, so I shout out something to the audience and people shout something back. And that makes me really happy. If we can, through our collective minds, come up with something that wouldn't have been come up with otherwise, then I start to feel good. And in particular in Edinburgh they always are just shouting the funniest things at me, and I'm shouting the funniest things back at them as a result.

So it's a difference between participating and heckling ... or disrupting?
There are times when people feel it's too sacred, you know? And I would imagine ... it's to a certain level of that with me, but I can only imagine what it must be like with Lucinda Williams. I can only imagine. Because she's an oracle for a whole cross section of society who don't fit in.

Does that desire to have the audience participate ... does that -- I'm going back to something you said earlier about how you're not that comfortable on stage -- does it help, then, when you interact with the audience a bit?
Well, sure. It's lonely up there. If I was up there singing, you know, like, party songs, then the party feeling would carry me along. But I'm up there singing about sorrow and loneliness and things that have driven me to the end of the world. And if I'm up there singing that song, the last thing I want is to actually feel like I'm alone. I want them to offer to some consolation to me, like I wrote those songs for a reason and we're all here and we're all celebrating the fact that through sorrow we can be enjoined. That's a beautiful thing I you can make it work.

You're not gonna be up there alone on this tour, though, right?
This time I have a band. I do do solo shows, where I come out with a bunch of crazy loop pedals and just have at it with my loop pedals. And it's really fun. I build a whole band sound with just me on stage. You know, I've got drum loops and bass loops and I'm triggering things and it's really very entertaining for me. That's actually fun for me, doing that. But this time I have a live band, because I'm touring on an album and I've gotta approximate the sound of the album.

Is it easier for you to play with a band than solo? I mean, 'cause you've got some company on stage?
I've never really enjoyed playing with a band before, but I in fact enjoy playing with these guys, because they're incredible.

How come you've never liked playing with a band?
I never could get the right components together. I always felt like I had the right drummer and the wrong bass player, or the right guitar player and the wrong drummer. I never could get the formula right. And I thought real hard before I put this band together and I think everybody suits everybody. You need one person in the band who's your anchor. You need one person who's colorful. You need one person who's straight and steady but has little funny quirks. You need all of these aspects of personality represented if you want to present a full spectrum of musical experience.

And are you ... is this band actually able to duplicate the sound of the record? This is a studio record.
All bets are off. There's a couple songs where we tried to approximate ... we tried to, but we also tried ... I figure if people wanna hear it just like the album, they can go and listen to the fuckin' album. I'm gonna take the musicians that I'm playing with and I'm gonna see what their talents are and them I'm gonna use them to their greatest abilities. I'm not gonna try to get them to be by rote tape recorders of what's on the album. It's a little bit of this, and a little bit of that. It's not your basic service-the-album type of tour where every note sounds like the album. It's sort of