Benediction For a Small Town

We moved from Mount Vernon, Ohio to Westerville, Ohio seven years ago. In Mount Vernon, we lived in a big old 150-year-old house with three-story white Corinthian pillars holding up the porch, hardwood floors, five fireplaces, and a wraparound staircase. We didn't have a garage. We had a carriage house. It was a cool place, if a little ostentatious. It looked like Tara in Gone With The Wind, and I think that when we moved there I expected the same kind of old-fashioned schmaltz to carry over into every aspect of our lives. Mount Vernon looked like an idyllic small town, and I had visions of raising apple-cheeked kids, and strolling the streets, and doffing my cap to passersby as they said "Mornin', Andy."

It didn't turn out that way. Here is something I wrote seven years ago, a couple days before we moved to Westerville.

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My friend/pastor Don Muncie asked me, just before he moved to Tennessee, “What is it you want to leave behind in Mount Vernon, Ohio? What do you want to bury here and not take with you?”

I couldn’t think of a particularly meaningful response at the time. I think I gave him the Standard Christian Line: my sinfulness, my selfishness, my lack of love. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good answer. Now what do you really want to leave behind?

Last night I walked around by myself for a couple hours. The kids were in bed. I had spent most of the evening taping and labeling boxes. I walked east, past all the grand old historical homes on Gambier and High Streets, their National Registry plaques proudly displayed next to the their front doors. I doubled back west and walked to the little park in the center of town. One hundred and thirty six years ago Abraham Lincoln sent the Union Army into this park to arrest Ohio Senator Clement Vallandigham, who was stirring up trouble among the Copperheads. Last night I was the only trouble afoot. Mike Merilees cruised by in his police car and saw me out there and waved to me. I waved back. Mike used to stop me and question what I was doing. Now he’s used to seeing this strange bearded fellow who has a tendency to stand by himself in parks at midnight. He can’t figure it out. I suppose I can’t either.

And so I made the rounds, walking north and west and south, keeping the night watches, making sure that Mount Vernon, Ohio was safe for democracy. It was. And I thought, and I prayed.

Dozens of people in Mount Vernon have asked me why we’re moving. They express shock and dismay. This is Norman Rockwell’s vision of America, after all, beautiful old homes with wraparound front porches and porch swings and American flags and a cacophony of ringing church bells from the five main churches (Catholic, Baptist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Methodist) on Sunday mornings, county fairs and Amish buggies rolling down the cobblestoned streets and family-run diners and antique shops and a Wal-Mart, our one concession to corporate America. Why would anybody in his right mind ever want to leave that? That’s the unspoken question these people ask: what, are you nuts? And I give them the standard spiel: the work commute is too long, the grant money for Kate’s job is drying up, even the semi-snobby response that we need to find better gifted programs for our kids.

The real reason is profound disappointment. The real reason is loneliness, the feeling of almost total isolation in the midst of friendly, honking and waving people. The real reason is anger and resentment at never feeling a part of this community, of watching Bible Studies and small groups fall apart because people couldn’t find the time to make them a priority, of spending almost eight years of my life trying to make a go of it in a church where I don’t belong, and of having that church as almost my sole contact with the life of Norman Rockwell’s America. It’s the reality of having two close relationships with people in town, and of having both of those relationships disappear with the moving vans. It’s frustration with a whole passel of multi-generational Mount Vernon families who have lived in this town since time immemorial, and who simply don’t have time for new people in their lives. And it’s doubt and insecurity and wondering what the hell is wrong with me.

Those are the real reasons why the moving van will pull up to my house Monday morning. I can’t tell anybody that. It’s the shallowness and sterility of what Kate calls the honk-and-wave fellowship. Everybody in town knows me. And it’s wondering if that’s why they only honk and wave.

I came to Mount Vernon thinking I was pretty hot stuff, that I would be an asset to any community and to any church, and that they’d better be damn glad to have me, too. And I’ve struggled big time with these Presbyterians, these sons and daughters of the Reformation who don’t know a thing about what John Calvin taught and believed, and who don’t give a rip that they don’t know. And I’ve referred to the Bible and have been met with blank stares, as if appealing to the Bible in church was about as relevant as appealing to Sports Illustrated Magazine, that everybody was entitled to their own opinions, after all, and that there were plenty of fundamentalist (translation: bigoted, small-minded, ignorant) churches who thought that way if I would care to check them out.

I don’t feel like much of a hot shot these days. About all I know for certain is my own brokenness, which is something these Presbyterians are good at emphasizing, and one of the few things they appear to get right. I don’t have it together. I love God, but not very well, and I love my family, but not very well, and I wave to everybody else. And now it’s time to wave goodbye.

What I’d like to tell Don Muncie, what I should have told him, is that I’d like to bury all the hurt. I’d like to give it a rest. I’m tired of trying to figure out how much of this is other peoples’ fault and how much is my fault, what I could have done or should have done differently. I’m tired of thinking about it. I just want to move on. The problem is that I can leave everything behind but me.

So eventually I wandered back home, to this magnificent old house, this ramshackle mansion that we affectionately call Tara in the Corn, and I sat on the porch swing on the grand old front porch, underneath those three-story Greek pillars, and realized that eight years of my life were gone with the wind, irretrievable. And I prayed, again, that God would change me, that He would make me into someone other than who I often appear to be. I closed my eyes and envisioned myself stretching out my hands above the whole town in a gesture of benediction. In my vision it all got muddled together, and I thanked God for the joy I had found in Mount Vernon, and I meant it, and I asked him to take away the sorrow and the hurt so that I wouldn’t drag it behind me to the next town. I asked if he would help me bury it here. I thought about different people, and their faces came to mind, and I thought about the times when they had infuriated me and the times when they had made me laugh, or had simply exchanged idle pleasantries with me. And I thanked God for all of it, the good times and the bad, and I raised my hands heavenward, as if I were pushing the whole load upward. Here, you take it, I thought. I sat on the porch swing, my own little mercy seat, and heard in my mind the standard Presbyterian benediction I’ve heard Sunday after Sunday, year after year. And I said this for the town of Mount Vernon, Ohio: The Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord lift up his countenance to you and give you peace.

I felt lousy, but that’s the way it has to be for sentimental, nostalgic fools. I went in the house and went to bed and eventually fell asleep. This morning on my way out of town, dog tired, I passed a couple folks I knew and they honked and waved to me, and I waved back and felt okay about it.

Chris Smither

I'm a longtime fan of folk/blues master Chris Smither, and his latest album Leave the Light On offers ample evidence of why he's always worth a listen. He's a phenomenal acoustic guitar picker, and this time he enlists the help of another phenomenal picker, Tim O'Brien, who plays mandolin and sings harmony vocals. He has a raspy, soulful voice. He writes first-rate melodies. And his songs are never less than soul baring, compassionate, and witty. This time there's a real spiritual dimension to these songs. I have no idea what he believes, but he sure understands the concept of digging empty wells ("My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water." -- Jeremiah 2:13):

Up and down, never mind the level
If down were up you couldn't get much higher
Diggin' deep, workin' with a shovel
Tryin' to set your soul on fire
Tryin' to set your soul on fire

There are nine superb originals, and great covers of Peter Case's "Cold Trail Blues" and Bob Dylan's "Visions of Johanna." And there is, at long last, Hallelujah, a protest song for these times that isn't ham-fisted and sputtering with inarticulate bile, that is as witty as it is acerbic:

It's gettin' edgy, time to find a war
There must be somethin' worth fightin' for
Peace is so peaceful, it ain't a way to survive
When nobody hates you, nobody knows you're alive

We got the guns, we got the oilmen too
They're like a choir, they wanna sing for you
Wham! Bam! Slip slidin' away
The less you got, the more you gonna pay

You want it, you'll get it
We got what you need
You ain't got to sweat it
We gonna make you bleed

We got some freedom, we got the iPod store
We got the savior, you couldn't ask for more
Take it or leave it, it's the deal of the day
And if you leave it, you get it anyway

You want it, you'll get it
We got what you need
You ain't got to sweat it
We gonna make you bleed

Get your coat on, you ain't supposed to laugh
This ain't a joke it's an epitaph
It's the rise and the fall, that's the name of the game
It's the land of the free, the blind leadin' the lame
It's the land of the free, the blind leadin' the lame
-- Chris Smither, "Diplomacy"

Albums That Get No Love

Almost everybody owns albums they love and cherish, but which they are embarrassed to display in polite company. Most people don't respond all that well to snickering, so why risk it, you know? Or they own albums that vanished from the radar before they had a chance to make an impact.

So, in the interest of full disclosure, I am bravely revealing my Top 3 Albums That Get No Love. But I like 'em anyway. Be gentle, gentle readers. I have a fragile soul. It is a tender flower that is easily bruised. And if you don't like my choices, screw you.

No, no, that's all wrong. I love you all. Really. Take it as the fervent hope and prayer of one fragile soul to another.

So before I break into a chorus of the Barney song, I'll offer a) Three Albums I Love That Everybody Else Hates, and b) Three Worthy Albums I Want Other People To Hear, But Nobody Ever Takes Me Up On It.

In the former category, I offer:

John Denver -- Poems, Prayers, and Promises -- John was an earnest little muppet, and the hug-a-tree sentiments became very annoying very quickly, but this album, one of his earliest, also shows that he was a fine songwriter. This one has "Take Me Home, Country Roads," which still brings a tear to the ol' rural eye. "Almost heaven, West Virginia" actually became a state motto. Never mind that the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah River are in Virginia, not West Virginia. Nobody ever said that those gap-toothed holler dwellers were geography majors. Or that John Denver was, either. It's still a fine song, one of the best examples of the laid-back country/folk that the hippies latched on to after Woodstock. It's totally uncool to like this album, or John Denver. Nevertheless, I like it.

Rick Wakeman -- Journey to the Center of the Earth -- Wakeman was the keyboard player for Yes. He liked to wear capes and dress in armor, and he would occasionally toss in Prokofiev quotes into the middle of rock songs. Eventually he had a solo career, and this was his second album. In typically overblown fashion, this one featured not only Rick's phalanx of pianos, organs, and synthesizers, but the London Symphony Orchestra, the English Chamber Choir, and several classically trained actors and actresses portentously intoning passages from Jules Verne's early sci-fi/fantasy novel. This is classic Spinal Tap fodder, and as such it has its comic elements, but it also features some astounding keyboard work from Wakeman. Strip away the ostentatious trappings and there's some great music here.

Steve Earle -- Shut Up and Die Like An Aviator -- By most accounts, this is the nadir of Earle's career. He was deep in the throes of heroin addiction when he recorded this live album, and he sounds like it. His voice, always an acquired taste, barely rises above a raspy whisper, and his band is loose in all the wrong senses of the term. The drummer can't keep the beat. The guitarist really likes that D chord, and plays it continually, whether it fits the music or not. Steve's long monologues in between songs are rambling and incoherent. But I like this album for the same reasons that I like to rubberneck at car accidents on the freeway. The carnage is fascinating. And these songs of desperation sound even more desperate.

There are so many albums that fit the latter category, but for starters I'll offer:

Tir Na Nog -- A Tear and a Smile and Strong in the Sun -- Good luck finding these albums. Tir Na Nog were a couple of Irish folkies who rose to what could charitably be thought of as their ascendance at the same time as Nick Drake and the early solo Richard Thompson, and they were clearly influenced by those artists on these early '70s albums. Nobody cared. They cover several Drake tunes (long before anybody knew who Nick Drake was), they write sweetly aching, melancholy originals, and they intertwine their acoustic guitars in breathtaking ways. Of course, they sank without a trace. But these are gorgeous albums, right at the top of my Best Music You've Never Heard list. Imagine Nick Drake harmonizing with himself, and you're in the ballpark, or on the soccer pitch, or whatever.

Chris Whitley -- Din of Ecstasy -- I will continue my one-man crusade for the greatest songwriter and guitarist you've never heard. Whitley caused quite a stir with his debut album, Living With the Law, an eerie mix of Edge-like atmospherics and raw Delta blues. Then he disappeared from the scene, and re-emerged four years later with this, his "grunge" album. At the time it was brutally slagged as a derivative attempt to jump on Kurt's bandwagon, and it effectively ended whatever chances Whitley had for hitting the big time. But listen to it now. It's raw, it's searing, it's gloriously explosive. And then there are the words -- an addict chronicling the desperate battle between soul-numbing escape and the desire to matter, to mean, to recapture some semblance of life. It's profane and it's angry. It's a man at the end of his rope, and it's a prayer. It's one of the most harrowing albums I've ever heard.

The Weakerthans -- Fallow, Left and Leaving, and Reconstruction Site -- Granted, these guys aren't exactly unknowns, but they are nevertheless criminally underappreciated. The transformation that lead singer/songwriter John K. Samson has wrought from Punk Brat (best shown in his former band Propagandhi) to Thoughtful Poet is nothing less than spectacular. The band mixes it up quite eclectically, tossing in influences from folk, country, and loud, abrasive rock 'n roll. But the secret ingredient is Samson's songwriting. He's one of the few songwriters whose words can stand alone as poetry. He tackles all the big subjects -- love and the loss of love, God, death, loneliness and alienation, the hole in the soul -- and he does so with compassion, warmth, humor, and something that sounds uncannily like wisdom. And he rocks like crazy.

The Myth of Self-Sufficiency

This faith business is puzzling.

I often experience the reality of God's presence in my life in the midst of turmoil and trauma. I rarely experience the reality of God's presence in my life in the midst of plenty, peace, and prosperity. When really, really good things are happening in my life, I tend to take God for granted. When all hell breaks loose, I sense my need for God, and I eagerly seek His peace and comfort. And God delivers. It's happened to me many times. My external world may be falling apart, but I have known a peace that passes understanding. Don't try to make sense of that from a logical standpoint. It doesn't make sense. But I know what I know. But when I am living my comfortable, complacent, middle-class American suburban life, God can seem superfluous. Thanks for being there, God. I'll check back with you when the shit hits the fan.

I wonder why that is.

Right now life is good on all fronts. I'm surrounded by family I love, friends I love. My employer pays me a lot of money to do work that isn't all that difficult. Free CDs magically appear in my mailbox. I win the door prize at random drawings. Blessings are busting out all over on the writing front, and I'm being offered opportunities that ought to leave me shaking my head in wonder and amazement. I'm heading out on vacation next week. And it's summer, and the sun is shining. God? Sure, He can come along to the beach, too. Maybe He can make it sunny all next week.

I am not as thankful as I ought to be. And I am not as cognizant of God's role in this process as I ought to be. This is particularly true on the writing front. It's about time, damn it, I think. I've worked hard, and I've waited years for the rest of the world to recognize what I've always known. Is "genius" too strong a word? I think not. Well, okay, maybe. How about "literary stud?" Andy Whitman, Poet of the Prairie, Westerville's Wordsworth, the Shakespeare of Suburbia, Dostoyevsky with a Dental Plan and a well diversified stock portfolio.

The problem is, I really do think that way sometimes. There is an ever-present tendency to incorporate all of reality into the Kingdom of Me, to see all of these seemingly random events through a lens in which I am the star player in a tragicomedy whose subject matter is no less than Life, the Universe, and Everything, as told (in marvellously entertaining fashion) by Andrew J. Whitman.

It's bullshit. If I have gifts and talents, they come from God. If I have peace and prosperity, it's because God has allowed that to happen. If I have trials and traumas, it's because God has allowed that to happen. And if I have breath enough to conclude this sorry posting, it's because God has allowed that to happen.

Here's a prayer: Jesus Christ, Savior of the world, have mercy on me, a sinner. It's not a bad way for Dostoyevskys with Dental Plans to pray. Please forgive my foolish pride. Help me to recognize that if I am the author of stupid and ultimately meaningless Birdmonster album reviews, you are the author of life itself. Take my story, which I have written badly, and re-write me into something beautiful for your kingdom.

Tracking Comments in Blogger

Someone named Mark! (love that exclamation point!) sent me the following comment in email: "I've always loved them."

Now, this is all well and good, and I like to share the love whenever I can, but honestly, I have no clue as to the object of Mark(!)'s love. To quote the great bluesman/early rocker Bo Diddley, who do you love? I've now written hundreds of blog posts about all kinds of subjects, and the possibilities are almost endless -- Sigur Ros? Julie Andrews? My family? (back off, Mark!). He apparently left a comment somewhere on my blog, and hotmail dutifully forwarded it to me.

So my question is this: is there some sort of blogger add-on that will allow me to identify a particular blog post when someone adds a comment to it? That would be very helpful in this case, and would possibly eliminate the feelings of jealousy and hostility that I'm currently experiencing toward Mark!

Birdmonster in Columbus

Because of my writing gigs for Paste Magazine and allmusic.com, I get a lot of free CDs in the mail. Every week twelve or fifteen of those shiny plastic discs get unwrapped, along with breathless press releases informing me of the rock ‘n roll epiphany I am about to unleash when I press the Play button. If I actually experienced half the thrills and chills I was promised, my heart would have given out years ago. There’s only so much excitement and aural orgasmic delight one fifty year old body can withstand, you know. I don’t get around to listening to half the music I receive. It’s nothing personal. It’s because I have a life, and sometimes I need to do things like go to work and actually relate to real, flesh-and-blood human beings. Of the half I listen to, most albums get a cursory overview -- the first fifteen or thirty seconds of each song. I end up going back to some of them and playing them all the way through. And once in a great while an album shows up, out of the blue, from an unknown performer or band, and I listen, and my body involuntarily engages in what could loosely be construed as “dance,” and I can’t hit the Replay button fast enough.

So about a month ago one of those CDs showed up in the mailbox. It was called No Midnight, and it was by a San Francisco band called Birdmonster. No label contact information, no big-time promotion, no glossy photos; these guys apparently adhered to the DIY school of music making. So out of curiosity I played it, and not once did I sense the urge to move on quickly. The first song was good. The second song was better. The third song was a flat-out aural orgasm, with an impossibly infectious hook, a rubberband bass line that would do The Strokes proud, and an unhinged lead vocal that left the detached Julian Casablancas marinating in his ironic cool. This music was not cool. It was hot, white hot, and it was passionate and intense, full of the manic whisper-to-a-scream shtick that The Pixies and Nirvana perfected years ago, but tricked out with banjos and cellos and deft little touches that left all the influences behind and gave the band a sound all its own. It also happened to rock like crazy. There were thirteen songs on the album, and twelve of them sounded about as fresh and explosive as anything I’ve heard this year.

So they came to Columbus last night and played in a campus basement dive called Bernie’s Distillery, the kind of place where the pipes on the ceiling leak some sort of dubious liquid on the heads of the patrons, and the bathroom stalls are covered with graffiti. About 25 people showed up, of whom I knew about ten, because I had conducted my own little private Come See Birdmonster crusade. That was apparently about 22 more than had shown up the previous night in Pittsburgh. It’s never good when the band members outnumber the audience.

At any rate, they played most of the songs from that album, and a couple I didn’t recognize, but which I assume appear on the EP I bought from Zach the drummer/merch table guy. They didn’t have the banjo or cello, and they were sloppy on some of the songs that came as unexpected requests from the audience (What? You know that song? Cool!), but they more than made up for it in the wildman abandon with which they played, and in the pure, unbridled joy of four friends making music together. I have no idea what kind of relationships these guys have with one another. But they certainly sold me on the kind of community that can develop when four guys are locked in together, playing their asses off, and reveling in the wonders of creating a glorious din. I have been to mega rock festivals, and watched with 100,000 other people some iconic rock figure the size of an ant projected onto a Jumbotron screen. But I’m telling you, nothing beats the pure pleasure of standing in a campus dive, three feet from a stage, watching some great but unheralded band strut their stuff. It’s the best feeling in the world, and I got to experience it last night. It was worth dragging the family out from the burbs, two generations of Whitman’s experiencing some genuine rock ‘n roll bonding. That was fun. It was worth hanging out with Zach the drummer/merch table guy afterwards, and discovering a wide-eyed music fan who is having the time of his life, even when only three people show up. And it was worth the wear and tear on the fifty-year-old body, the go-to-bed-at-two-and-get-up-at-six horror of a ringing alarm clock and another day in corporate America, totally fried but totally exhilarated.

These guys don’t have a big PR department behind them. It’s all word-of-mouth advertising. So watch my virtual mouth moving and telling you to go see them if you get the chance. You won’t regret it.

Favorite New Wave Albums -- UK Edition

I am an incurable list maker, and I am an unreformed taxonomist. I love categories and sub-categories, so here is a list of my Top 10 (okay, 11) favorites roughly conforming to the following taxonomy:

Music
Rock ‘n Roll
New Wave
U.K. Performers/Bands

“New Wave” is a notoriously slippery label, vaguely encompassing the primal energy and DIY aesthetic of punk and the hook-laden ethos of pop. To its Mohawk-sporting detractors, it was simply diluted punk, the commercialized bastard stepchild of what was supposed to be menacing and anarchic and anything but commercial. These were the folks who didn’t know that The Sex Pistols started out as a marketing gimmick in a sex/bondage clothes shop. For me it was simply superb music. I don’t have a problem with melodies and hooks, nor do I have a problem with three-minute singles dominated by intelligent songwriting and the immortal combination of guitars, bass, and drums. And these are the folks, circa 1978 – 1982, who did that the best. It was a great musical era, and a great time to be from the U.K. There were good American New Wave bands as well, but this was a musical epoch, like 1964, when the best and most bracing music was imported to American shores.

In no particular order other than alphabetical:

Any Trouble – Where Are All The Nice Girls?

This was the greatest early Elvis Costello album never recorded by Elvis Costello. By this time (1980) Costello was veering off into the genre experiments that have characterized his music up to the present day. But Any Trouble, led by future Richard Thompson band member Clive Gregson, was clearly enamored of Costello in his Angry Young Man phase, and they made angry music about being uncool dweebs. Gregson, who looked the part, pulled it off not only because of his bookish librarian glasses, but also because he wrote superb little chiming guitar pop gems with titles like “Second Choice” and “When You Lose at Playing Bogart.” Bonus points for the genuinely rockin’ New Wave cover of Abba’s “The Name of the Game.” Uncool guys who can make Abba look cool are particularly praiseworthy.

Aztec Camera – High Land, Hard Rain

You have to have a hit in order to be a one-hit wonder. So I’m not sure what to call Aztec Camera. But Roddy Frame, essentially a one-man band, wrote at least half a dozen songs on this album that deserved to be massive hits, and he achieved a surprisingly full sound with just overdubbed acoustic guitars and vocals. There are some absolutely timeless pop gems here like “Oblivious,” with its swooning backing vocals, and “The Bugle Sounds Again,” which swelled to a glorious crescendo like some Phil Spector Wall of Sound symphony. Roddy kept trying, but he never came close to this, his debut album. It’s a deliciously melodic, melancholic offering from a No Hit Wonder.

Elvis Costello – This Year’s Model

Well, you know, it’s a classic for a reason. As strong as Costello’s debut (My Aim Is True) was, This Year’s Model surpasses it in every way – in the wildly inventive wordplay, in the perfectly manic vocal delivery, and in the furious circus music dominated by Steve Nieve’s Farfisa organ. For me, this is still the definitive New Wave album, and it stands as the high water mark in a career full of very strong albums. Costello did vituperative scorn and musical one-finger salutes better than anyone since mid-‘60s Dylan, and his band The Attractions managed to capture the sound of a runaway roller coaster careening off the tracks. It was a 1978 model, but it sounds just as relevant and just as urgent today.

Dave Edmunds – Tracks on Wax 4
Nick Lowe – Labour of Lust
Rockpile – Seconds of Pleasure

Dave Edmunds and Nick Lowe were veteran pub rockers, compatriots of the Brinsley Schwarz guys who eventually formed the backbone of Graham Parker’s band The Rumour. Edmunds was at heart an unreconstructed rock classicist, as much in love with Chuck Berry and early ‘60s Girl Groups as he was with punk. His early solo albums are almost slavish imitations of Berry’s trademark guitar licks and the Phil Spector Wall of Sound, but Tracks on Wax 4 finds the right balance between artistic homage and creative exploration, with Nick Lowe’s songs exploding with manic rock ‘n roll energy. It’s easy to play Spot the Influence – Chuck Berry here, The Everly Brothers there, the Wall of Sound everywhere – but Edmunds’ singing and guitar work and Nick Lowe’s songs were a great combination. The same combination shines on Lowe’s Labour of Lust, this time with bassist Nick stepping to the forefront. Edmunds’ solo on “American Squirm” is a model of economy and precision, while “Cruel To Be Kind” and “Switchboard Susan” remain the models for something, perhaps how to write lascivious songs while employing as many bad puns and double entendres as possible. Eventually these blokes stopped making solo albums and officially joined forces in the band Rockpile, where, you guessed it, Nick Lowe’s songs and Dave Edmunds’ guitar work were the high points. Between them, they made a good half dozen albums that verge on greatness, but these three are my favorites.

The English Beat – I Just Can’t Stop It

At the forefront of the multiracial groups (The Specials, Madness) who merged ska with punk attitude and pop sensibilities, The English Beat delivered a masterpiece of a debut album. Dave Wakeling wrote the great punk/pop songs, toastmaster Ranking Roger and Desmond Dekker alum Saxa added the authentic ska influences, and together they created impossibly propulsive music, whether they were covering Smokey Robinson (“Tears of a Clown”), writing disquieting suicide anthems (“Click Click”), or protesting the indignities of Thatcher’s England (“Stand Down, Margaret”). You try to sit still, but your body wants to move, and you just can’t stop it.

Joe Jackson – Look Sharp

Before he turned into a piano lounge/ersatz jazz crooner and made millions, Joe Jackson was just an ordinary, not-so-good-looking bloke who had woman troubles and alternated between bouts of self pity and strident denunciations of all things feminine. That’s when he was at his best. Look Sharp, his debut album, features the ultimate study in sexual frustration, “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” and several more caustic bombs whose titles – “Happy Loving Couples,” “Fools In Love” – betray both the psyche of a wounded lover and an incurable romantic. Jackson’s band never rocked harder than they did on this album, and the whole thing has the sound of a greatest hits package, all wrapped up and delivered with a sardonic bow, the portrait of the artist as insecure asshole and raging libido.

Graham Parker – Squeezing Out Sparks

Yet another Angry Young Man, Graham Parker was the antithesis of the stereotypic rocker – he was short, balding even in his early twenties, and a buttoned-down conservative. But no one ever said that conservatives and spleen can’t mix, and Parker does some major venting on this album. He gets in his shots at the local girls (“Local Girls,” naturally enough) and his record label (“Mercury Poisoning”), but he saves his best and most incisive observations for “You Can’t Be Too Strong,” an anti-abortion commentary that still startles today:

Did they tear it out with talons of steel
And give you a shot so that you wouldn’t feel
And wash it away as if it wasn’t real?
It’s just a mistake I won’t have to face
Don’t give it a name, don’t give it a place
Don’t give it a chance, it’s lucky in a way

For some reason, no CCM band has covered that.

Parker’s band The Rumour burns throughout, squeezing out not sparks, but white hot, rampaging rock ‘n roll. Parker sounds like his head is ready to explode. Frothing at the mouth never sounded so good.

Squeeze – Argybargy

This isn’t the best-known Squeeze album (that honor probably goes to 1981’s East Side Story), but it’s stood the test of time for me. Every track is an idiosyncratic pop gem. Some Squeeze albums sound dated, but not this one. The gifted songwriting team of Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook spin out clever lyrics and sprightly, ever-shifting melodies on every song, and if you’re looking for evidence, consider “Pulling Mussels from the Shell” and “Another Nail in My Heart,” the opening tracks to this album. Driven by Jools Holland’s Farfisa organ (which somehow manages to sound hip instead of cheesy), these songs remain both quirky and endlessly accessible. The former, a quintessentially English story of tourists and their culinary preferences while on holiday, has to be the best song about bivalve mollusks ever recorded (with Soul Asylum’s Clam Dip and Other Delights a close second). The whole album offers convincing proof that pop music can be surprising, strange, and insanely catchy.

The Undertones – The Undertones

I never really bought the idea of The Undertones as a punk band. The Sex Pistols were a punk band, The Clash were a punk band, but The Undertones were a power pop band who liked to play their guitars really loudly. Feargal Sharkey, with his sheeplike, bleating vibrato, was about as punk as Maurice Gibb of The Bee Gees. That’s okay. John Peel, legendary BBC DJ, liked “Teenage Kicks” so much that he played it twice in a row over the air. And I think I probably played it five or six times in a row myself the first time I heard it. It’s that good. So is the rest of this debut album, in spite of Feargal’s ovine imitations. That’s because these Derry, Northern Ireland boys wrote perfect two-minute pop songs about adolescent hormones and the ageless fear of rejection – not only “Teenage Kicks,” but “Jimmy Jimmy” and “Male Model” and “Get Over You,” songs that still barrel out of the speakers and bowl you over, twenty-seven years down the line. The original album, which has since been padded out with demos and B-sides for the CD release, came in at a rousing 28 minutes. It’s not a second too long or a second too short, and by the end of it, you feel like you’ve been on one exhausting, exhilarating ride.

Sweet 'n Sour

I have lately been drawn to the musical equivalent of sweet 'n sour -- vocally ravaged singers backed by lush, romantic strings, as if a besotted Frank Sinatra had just escaped from a rehab facility and found refuge in a studio with Nelson Riddle.

Some new singer/songwriter favorites:

Micah P. Hinson and the Opera Circuit -- Micah P. Hinson and the Opera Circuit -- Micah P. Hinson grew up in a strict fundamentalist home, ran away, ran afoul of drugs and the law, spent some time in prison, and emerged as sort of an alt-country Tom Waits. This is far from Christian music, but it's Christ-haunted in the way that Flannery O'Connor's stories are Christ-haunted. You can hear the Holy Spirit moving over the turbulent waters, and you get the distinct impression that these tales of debauchery and Too Much Fun are desperate cries for help. His ragged yelp sounds a bit like Tom Waits with a southern drawl, and it stands in marked contrast to the sweetly romantic strings and old-time oompah brass band accompaniment, which reminds me of some of the sepia-toned music Waits did in the mid-to-late seventies on albums like Blue Valentine and Nighhawks at the Diner.

William Lee Ellis -- God's Tattoos -- Ellis comes out of the tradition of Rev. Gary Davis and Blind Willie Johnson, bluesmen who want to share the gospel while sliding a broken beerbottle neck over the strings of their guitars. He's a phenomenal slide guitarist, and these mostly original blues/gospel songs are far better than average. The title track is a fine meditation on the role of tragedies/trials in our lives, and how God uses them to refine us.

Lambchop -- Damaged -- Lambchop is original misfit/growler Kurt Wagner and whoever else he can coax into the studio. The band ranges from three to seventeen members, and it's not uncommon to hear pedal steel guitars, saxophones, and xylophones on the same song. Mistakenly billed as an "alt-country" band (probably because they hail from Nashville), Lambchop is, in reality, unclassifiable. Soul music, country, indie rock, and lush chamber quartet strings all find a home here. Wagner is the most idiosyncratic of songwriters, finding subject matter in the mundane, inconsequential, and anatomically explicit, but he sometimes startles me with his images. One song begins, "Here we sit out this tropical storm/Burning pages from your notebook just to keep your hands warm." Another starts off with, "Here’s a little story ‘bout regret/Doesn’t have an ending, it’s not finished yet." That's the best couplet I've heard this year, and the entire album is full of little bon mots and epiphanies. The fact that Wagner "sings" like Lou Reed is irrelevant. He makes lush, strange, and compellingly lovely music.

Writing, But Not Here

Life is busy. I'm writing a lot, but I don't have much time to do it here. Here is what is on the plate:

1) New music reviews for Paste Magazine
2) New music reviews for allmusic.com
3) A feature article on poetry slams for Paste Magazine
4) A proposal for a new IT development project at Columbus State Community College. This is actually taking up far more of my time than I desire. Damn employers. :-) But I have mad Work Breakdown Structure and Gantt Chart skillz, and I'm using them to great effect.

5) A book. We'll see. This is a huge effort, and I'm making far less headway than I want, but here's where it stands. Over the course of the last twenty years or so I've written literally thousands of pages. Many of those pages simply tell my story, much as I do in some of my blog posts. I've written about my life, my faith, my questions and doubts, my stupid choices, my joys, my sorrows. And those of you who read my blog already have an idea of what that looks like in print (or at least in pixels). Probably several hundred of those short, self-contained essays are salvageable to the point where I wouldn't be totally embarrassed if others read them. And so I'd like to salvage them, add some narrative padding around them, and turn them into a book. If you've read Donald Miller's Blue Like Jazz, you have some idea of what that might look like. He's just telling his story, too.

Is it farfetched? Maybe. But I'm going to go for it. The guys who run Paste are behind me in this, Donald Miller apparently is willing to help, and I have the backing of a marketing guru who can walk into anyplace and convince the powers that be to do almost anything. I figure if he can walk into CNN and convince those folks to give a fledgling little music magazine air time on a weekly basis, he can probably convince somebody to publish my writing.

For those of you who are praying types, I'd appreciate prayers for perseverence. A lot of work needs to happen before it can even be considered as a realistic possibility. In the meantime, I'm still working a fulltime job, writing for a couple magazines, trying to be a husband and father, and trying to be involved in other peoples' lives as a friend and fellow traveler on a spiritual journey. But I'm excited, and I'd like it to happen, not for any great desire for fame, but because this is what it feels like when the key fits the lock. Eric Liddell said in Chariots of Fire, "When I run, I feel His pleasure." I know that feeling, but it comes when I pound keys on a keyboard.

Core Warrior Values Training

I note with some interest that the U.S. military chief in Iraq has ordered all troops to undergo "core warrior values training." It's a great phrase, and would presumably include precepts such as "don't massacre the civilians." So the soldiers will watch a PowerPoint slide presentation, and then go back to driving down roads that may be booby trapped, and opening doors behind which someone may lurk with an AK-47.

I respect the troops in Iraq. They have been given an impossible job, and I can fully appreciate their desire to stay alive, and why they might snap when one too many roadside bombs goes off beside their vehicles.

This reminds me of a "Teamwork" seminar that I attended back in the early 1990s at Lucent Technologies, when U.S. workers were asked to train workers in other, cheaper parts of the world, who would then take over their jobs. The "Teamwork" ideas were, umm, not very well received. Good luck with that PowerPoint presentation, General. Better yet, send the troops home and forget about absurd and contradictory concepts such as core warrior values training.

Complimentary Extreme Makeover

My email informs me that I have just been offered a complimentary extreme makeover. I don't feel that complimented.

Used Kids Records, Pt. 1

I should know better than to venture down to Used Kids Records on the Ohio State campus with a credit card and an urge to explore. So now I’m slowly making my way through a pile of new music purchased over the weekend. I blame it all on my brother-in-law Bill, who goaded me into spending more money than I should have. I am so weak-minded. I now know how Kate feels when she hauls home those 55-gallon barrels of shampoo and the like from Sam’s Club. These great deals can cost a lot of money.

Here is what I think of the first few.

Sandy Denny – The North Star Grassman and the Ravens

Sandy Denny is my favorite tragedy, if such a term isn't an oxymoron. She was the lead singer of a band called Fairport Convention in the late sixties, the first group to merge the traditional folk songs of the British Isles, many of them hundreds of years old, with electric guitars and a backbeat. And she had a voice for the ages, possessing the kind of haunted soulfulness that everybody admired. That's her singing on Led Zeppelin's "Battle of Evermore."

But she was notoriously hard to relate to, and before she died at the ripe old age of 31 from falling down the stairs in a drunken stupor, her volatile temper and drinking and drugging ways impeded her ability to keep a band together. She left The Strawbs, then Fairport Convention, then Fotheringay, and then struck out on her own, all in the space of three years. This album, her solo debut from 1971, is prototypical Sandy Denny – a Dylan cover, a traditional English folk song, and a strong batch of originals heavily influenced by her Trad background. Intrusive strings mar a couple of the originals, but the marvelous voice, possessed of a miles-deep sorrow and smoky soulfulness, is strong and sure here. The constant in the last three lineups is one Richard Thompson, whose guitar and vocals add to this solo effort considerably.

Michael Penn – Mr. Hollywood Jr., 1947

Michael is the shy, retiring member of the Penn family. Brothers Sean and Chris went into acting. Michael made music, hid behind his infrequent studio recordings, and very rarely toured. Don’t tell anybody, but he may be the most talented of the bunch, and that’s taking nothing away from Sean or Chris. He’s a superb songwriter who has an effortless melodic gift, and here he fashions a genuine concept album based on life in post-World-War-II Los Angeles. If Raymond Chandler made rock ‘n roll, it might sound like this. Michael really likes The Byrds and The Beatles, and you can hear it most plainly in the chiming, descending guitar lines. That’s okay. I do too. Otherwise, he wraps his sadsack sentiments in disarmingly lilting melodies, and you find yourself singing merrily along to sweet little ditties about busted relationships and broken dreams. He continues to go his iconoclastic way, making one excellent, under recognized album after another.

Propagandhi – How to Clean Everything

The F bomb appears approximately 247 times on this album. Since the album itself is a short 33 minutes in length, that means that we, the happy listeners, are treated to a profane tantrum about once every eight seconds. But it varies. On sweetly tender ballads such as “Stick the Fucking Flag Up Your Goddamn Ass, You Sonofabitch,” the ratio is closer to once every two seconds. I bought this album because John Samson, the lead singer/songwriter, went on to form The Weakerthans, an honest-to-God literate, intelligent, compassionate, and even poetic punk band. But this 1994 album only shows how much he’s matured. Here he is pissed off about everything – politics (“Anti-Manifesto”), the corporate business world (“Middle Finger Response”), ex-girlfriends (“Fuck Machine”), ska (“Ska Sucks”), Bob Marley and reggae (“Haillie Sallassie, Up Your Ass”), even the Canadian winters. Maybe growing up in Winnipeg will do that to you. He seems like a much more contented and intelligent man these days, although I will confess that my inner immature brat genuinely likes the pure bile and unfeigned loathing of these very loud, very crass songs.

Paste's Top 100 Living Songwriters List

Various Internet music groups are abuzz over Paste's latest issue, which presumes to rank the Top 100 living songwriters. Most common comments: Where is John Lennon/Kurt Cobain/Johnny Cash? See, Paste, I told you that people would miss that little "living" disclaimer on the cover.

My favorite comment was from the guy who complained that the magazine has a bias against guys named Barry, noting that both Barry Gibb and Barry Manilow were missing from the list. It's true. Also Barry White and Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler. Where is the Barry love?

iPod/iTunes Questions

Okay, surely someone out there in my vast readership (Hi, Karl) uses iTunes on a Windows machine (XP), and has encountered these issues and has some words of wisdom for me.

The hard drive on my PC got filled up with music. So I bought an external 250GB hard drive and moved what I thought were all my music files to the new external hard drive.

But ... a lot of the music files disappeared. Stupidly, I deleted the files on the c: (PC) drive before I checked to make sure they were all there on the new external drive. They're gone from my PC. Many of them are gone from the external hard drive. But ... they're on my iPod. So here's my first question.

1) How do I create a new iTunes library based on what is currently on my iPod? Usually the transfer goes from iTunes --> iPod, and plugging in the cables from PC to iPod automatically starts this process. But I want it go the other way: iPod --> iTunes so I can re-create the music library that was lost/corrupted. How do I make that happen?

And a related question:

2) It appears that iTunes automatically looks for music folders on the c: drive -- specifically in the directory structure c://My Documents/My Music/iTunes/Library. But I want iTunes to reside on my new external hard drive (drive f: in this case). I can find no way within the iTunes application to change the location of where the music library resides. How do I do this? Somebody please tell me that I can do this. Otherwise, moving the files to an external drive is pointless.

Thanks.

Birdmonster

I have seen the future, and its name is Birdmonster. Granted, the future has a cheesy name and conjures up memories of bad Godzilla movies, but still ...

This (No Midnight) is the best debut album I've heard this year. Better than Gnarls Barkley, which is very good. Better than The Raconteurs (technically a debut, even though these guys play in much better known bands), which is very good. This is your basic post-punk/New New Wave album, obviously heavily influenced by The Strokes and Interpol, but with cellos and banjos and accordions, and an unhinged singer who sounds like Win Butler from Arcade Fire. And absolutely killer songs and loud, loud guitars. It's the best rock 'n roll I've heard in ages. Try it. You'll like it.

Dylan at 65

My first clue that Bob Dylan was something more than an average pop star occurred in my American History class. It was May 24th, 1971, and I was an acne-ravaged sophomore in high school. Mr. Goodman, our young, hip, twenty-something teacher strolled into the classroom and asked, “Does anybody know what day this is?” Thursday? Almost Memorial Day? Nobody did.

“Bob Dylan’s birthday,” he triumphantly announced. “Bob Dylan is thirty years old today. He’s now officially part of the world that cannot be trusted.”

I thought this was weird on many levels. Here was a grown man, college educated, presumably mature, who knew the birthday of a pop star. Thirteen-year-old girls who read Tiger Beat might know Donny Osmond’s birthday, but I didn’t expect American History teachers to spout off like giggling adolescents. Who was this Bob Dylan, and why did he inspire otherwise sober, respectable individuals to carry on about his birthday?

I decided to find out for myself. I knew Bob Dylan, of course. You couldn’t listen to the radio and not know Bob Dylan. One of my earliest musical memories, after acquiring the aqua transistor radio and wresting control of the radio dial away from my parents, was of Bob Dylan singing “Like a Rolling Stone.” In the summer of 1965 the song was ubiquitous. The condensed, edited version of the song came blasting out of that tinny transistor radio every hour or so. They played it over the loudspeakers at the local swimming pool, where I was developing my first pre-adolescent crush on Cindy Bechtel, and my memories of the song are inextricably linked with those hot summer days. How does it feeeeeeeeel? It feels all tingly. My cousin Mike had the unedited 45 RPM single, which was six minutes long, something strange and incomprehensible. And that was even before you listened to the lyrics.

So in the late spring of 1971, hard upon Bob Dylan’s passage into the world of untrustworthiness, I decided to check out what all the fuss was about. I took the money I had saved from babysitting and mowing lawns (how Bob Dylan would sneer at that), and during the next year or so I bought the entire back catalogue, starting with 1962’s Bob Dylan, and continuing right on up through New Morning, the most current album at the time.

Over the course of the next five or six years, through high school and well into college, those dozen albums were my constant companions. By that time Bob Dylan had already gone through four or five transformations, from Woody Guthrie acolyte and singer of traditional folk songs to writer of transcendent protest music to creator of surrealistic, hallucinogenic rock ‘n roll to Americana roots music hero to country crooner. No wonder Mr. Goodman was so excited. Bob Dylan packed more music into nine years than most musicians or bands pack into a lifetime. And the songs, of course, were mind-bogglingly great. They were so quotable, so full of memorable aphorisms, and even when they made no sense on a cognitive level, they still spoke to something in the deep, unfathomable psyche:

Inside the museums infinity goes up on trial/
Voices echo this is what salvation will be like after a while.

God only knew what that meant. Actually, God was probably confused, too. But it still rattled around in the brain and burrowed down into the nooks and crannies where the best poetry resides, finding connections to our unspoken longings and inarticulate groanings. Mr. Goodman was right to celebrate this man’s birthday.

But he was wrong about one thing. It turned out that you never could trust Bob Dylan, and turning thirty had nothing to do with it. From the very beginning Dylan created his own myth, defined himself on his own terms, invented a back story out of whole cloth that included riding the rails and working as a cowboy in Gallup, New Mexico. None of it was true, even if it revealed some truths. Hibbing, Minnesota’s Robert Zimmerman would have never become a rock star poet. Bob Dylan fit the part just fine.

He has kept at it, of course, for forty-five years now. During that time he’s released his share of insipid music. The Poet of the Sixties has managed to rhyme “moon” and “June” and “spoon” not once, but several times. He’s had albums – hell, he’s had multi-year stretches – where he’s just phoned it in, not even really tried. The voice, always an acquired taste, has now taken on the gruff timbre of a Delta bluesman, and he doesn’t so much sing now as chant querulously. And yet there is this astounding fact: he’s still capable of dropping a stone cold masterpiece at any time. Every time I’ve been ready to write him off, he’s come back with music so powerful, so majestic, that I shake my head in wonder.

They called him the Voice of a Generation, but they were wrong. He’s the voice of multiple generations, and he keeps on talking, and if we’re smart, we’ll keep on listening. His last studio album, Love and Theft, was released on September 11th, 2001, a day when terrorists were crashing airplanes into tall buildings.

Your days are numbered/
And so are mine

He told us that in one of the songs released that day, and if we had any lingering doubts, they were dispelled in the plumes of smoke rising from Ground Zero. He’s always spoken the hard truths, the eternal verities that we don’t want to hear but need to hear. And the astonishing truth, almost a half century down the line, is that he may very well be the Poet of the Oughties too.

How does it feel to be on your own, with no direction home?

He asked us that forty years ago. You would know, Bob. You tell us. There is a part of me that pities him as much as loves him and is astonished by him and is confounded by him. The Never Ending Tour has now been alighting at a city near you since the late ‘80s. This is the price of being Bob Dylan. You wander the earth, and you never stop long enough to leave the fingerprints of human connection. You connect through your music. And whoever he is – this mystery man, this mythical hobo now transformed into the real deal – he will not go easily or quietly. Don’t think twice about it, Bob. It’s all right. We wouldn’t want you any other way.

So does anybody know what day this is? It’s Bob Dylan’s birthday. Bob Dylan is 65 years old today. He’s now officially a part of the world that can collect a Social Security check. But don’t look for it to happen anytime soon.

The Sweetest Time

My friend Don has been a widower for four weeks now. A lot of the bustle that surrounds death – the funeral homes and memorial services, the out-of-town relatives who overstay their welcome, the meetings with lawyers to sort out wills and estates, the steady stream of well-intentioned people who don’t know what to say, but who want to be kind anyway – has now settled down. Now there is only the succession of interminable days, marked by the ticking of a clock in a silent room, an empty chair where someone once sat, an empty bed.

“It will get better,” I tell him. I don’t know what to say either. I don’t know if it will get better. I hope it does.

“Do you think so?” he asks. “I’m 65 years old. I’m set in my ways. I’m a farmer with a Ph.D, a vegetarian who juices five pounds of carrots every day. I go on week-long silent retreats at monasteries, but I don’t want to be a monk. And I’m crazy about Jesus. You think there’s a steady stream of soul mates just waiting to get in line?”

“You’re funny, Don” I tell him. “I think you have a wonderful, caring heart. I think everybody who knows you knows that. And right now I think you need to walk in the dark, and trust that God is good.”

It’s not much comfort, I know. There are really no good words for someone who has recently witnessed ventilators and heart defibrillators and morphine drips, the machinery of death. All the hopes and prayers, the desperate groping for a cure, the alternative medicines, the healing services, the late-night hospital trips, the flashing siren lights – all of it has passed now. There were weeks and months and years of frenetic activity. Now there is … nothing, a sort of dreadful peace and quiet. And I look to fill the void.

“I hear Rebecca Shaw’s cancer has disappeared,” I tell him. “You remember me telling you about her? It’s a miracle. The doctors are confounded. They don’t know what to think.” Don sits in silence. No kidding. What is he supposed to say to that? Stupid. What the hell is wrong with me?

"I’m sorry, Don,” I tell him. “I don’t know what to say, and I end up saying ridiculous, insensitive things. But I’m so sorry, and I’m so saddened for you.”

We cry for a while. We sit on Don’s farmhouse porch, and watch the sun go down on an impossibly bright, green May evening. For ten minutes there is no sound but the singing of birds, the chirping of crickets, and sobs. Eventually he speaks.

“I couldn’t go to church, you know,” he says. “Not on Easter Sunday, not when my wife died the day before. I couldn’t deal with all the Alleluias and the lilies. I’ve seen enough damn flowers lately to last me for a lifetime. So I stayed home, and sat on this porch. And I watched the Easter sunrise, not because I was up early for a service, but because I couldn’t go to bed. Did you ever do that?”

“No,” I tell him.

“Well, I watched the Easter sunrise. It was glorious. Joyce and I used to sit out on this porch whenever we could, morning or evening. A lot of times she woke me up in the mornings, and I didn’t mind, because it was always spectacular. You get some spectacular sunrises and sunsets out here, up on this hill, out in the middle of nowhere. There’s nothing but you and God. And Joyce, of course. There was Joyce.”

“Sure,” I say.

“So I can’t say that I was too brokenhearted about not going to church,” Don says. “But I’m glad I saw that sunrise.”

“I’m glad you did, too,” I tell him. We sit in the gathering darkness.

“Do you know what the sweetest time was?” he asks me after a while.

“No,” I say.

“Toward the end there, the last few months, Joyce couldn’t really walk very well. She was in a wheelchair, you know. But there was an evening back in early April, before she went to the hospital for the last time, when I lifted her up from her wheelchair and carried her out onto this porch. And I turned on the radio in the living room, but we could hear it out on the porch, and we just held each other and swayed and listened to the music and watched the sunset. Just slow dancing, you know. That was the sweetest time.”

“Hold on to that,” I tell him. “I’m going to help you hold on that.”

“How are you going to do that?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I say.

We talk softly for a while. I pray for him. I hug him, and tell him I love him, because I do. Otherwise, I mostly have the good sense to shut up. Then I drive home, a long hour-and-a-half journey through gently rolling Ohio farmlands, and I arrive to find a wife and two daughters and their friends, a place full of life and light and noise. Don sits in his living room, and listens to the ticking clock, and watches an empty chair.

Carpe Turfbuilder

Carpe diem. Seize the day. It's the mantra in Dead Poets Society. Robin Williams, the incurably romantic teacher, leads his students out into the hallowed halls of the venerable prep school, where he instructs them to examine the photographs of past generations of students on display in the trophy cases. The young men in those photographs are bright, inquisitive, confident. And very dead. “Food for worms,” Williams tell them. The implication is clear: life is short, time is valuable, suck all the marrow out of life that you can. Seize the day.

I’m still waiting for the sequel, the one where those fresh-faced high school kids are now 50 years old, settled into their corporate careers. Surely not all of those kids lived extraordinary lives. Some of them must have settled down to life in cubicles, filling out expense reports in their rumpled suits and mustard-stained ties on the redeye flight back from the sales meeting. Welcome to the banal, the monotonous, the irrelevant, and the tawdry. Just what is it you’re going to seize now, boys?

It’s a question I wrestle with fairly routinely. My pastor Jeff talks all the time about the mundane, about what we do with the ordinary, routine moments of our lives, and about how those times define who we are. I believe it. But I also know that I haven’t been pleased with how I’ve been defined by those times of late. Look up “Andy Whitman” over the last few days and you’d find a definition something like this: “Restless, discontent, critical of others, self-absorbed. Also see: jerk, prick, ass.” I have been short-tempered. I have blamed others for things that were either no one’s fault, or my own fault. I have thrown a pity party for myself (no one else came, although they were invited). And I have whined. And it’s all because of the mundane. It’s all because of a succession of routine days in which absolutely nothing of consequence has happened. I’ve risen, gone to work, returned home, done some chores, avoided some chores, escaped my family through television and music and books, and have ticked a few more days off the calendar, moved a little closer to becoming food for worms. Morbid? Who, me? But Thoreau was right. Most men lead lives of quiet desperation. Some of them even do it while alternating between life inside a cubicle and behind a fertilizer spreader.

At lunchtime I walked in a metro park with my friend Mike, and asked him about it. “You’re stuck in a cubicle, too,” I said. “And you don’t even get vacation time. You just work fifty hours per week, and then you go home to the Honey Do list. How do you stay sane?”

“Well,” he said. “I look for the small pleasures. I may not get a vacation at the beach, but every night I make myself a snack of wheat crackers and extra sharp cheddar cheese, and sometimes the taste of that cheddar cheese just seems like the most delightful thing in the world.”

I looked at him, unsure that he was speaking English. “Excuse me if sound dubious,” I told him, “but you realize that you’ve just seriously compared cheddar cheese to a vacation at the beach.”

“I know,” he said. “Sometimes when I taste that cheese, I feel like I’ve died and gone to heaven.”

“I don’t understand you sometimes,” I replied. And I don’t. But I decided to give it the old post-college try.

A few hours later I went home, and the lawn beckoned. I decided to look for the small pleasures. Carpe Turfbuilder. Seize the fertilizer. Dump it in the spreader. Set the notch to 4.5 to ensure even spreading for the late spring application. Then go forth, you not-so-young-man, and find meaning and sustenance in the mundane. Brother Lawrence could worship God by washing the dishes. You can do it by fertilizing your lawn.

I’m not sure if I really talked myself into it. I did talk myself into apologizing to my wife and kids, which was something I needed to do. I asked God to forgive me for my ongoing jerkiness. But I find that I’ve been influenced by movies like Dead Poets Society more than I would like to admit. I operate subconsciously from some place of Romantic Entitlement. Life should be full of passion and excitement. It’s the kind of dissatisfaction that causes some men my age to buy the cherry red Porsche or abscond with the secretary. I’m not going to do those things. But I understand the cavernous hole that drives that kind of desperation. It is the mundane that defines us. And it is the mundane that is so crushingly, soul-numbingly dull. So far I haven’t been able to muster up the requisite excitement for cheddar cheese. I love my wife. I love my kids. I love my friends, and I recognize that I’ve been surrounded by rich, full, deep relationships. I would be crazy not to see these things. But the dissatisfaction remains. It is the God-shaped hole. And I wish God would fill it. Fertilizer and cheese, at least at this point, don't seem to be doing the trick.

This Courtroom Ain't Big Enough For the Both of Us

Best headline ever: Snipers to Face Each Other in Courtroom. No one comes out alive.

The Hubris of Critics

This is from an online discussion. The other person's comments are in italics. Mine are in regular type. This discussion has come up before on my blog, so it seemed relevant to share it again, even though it comes from another source. It's the ongoing Hubris of Critics thread.

And Scott S., you were obviously on my mind when I wrote some of this.

Maybe this is where I get lost with many critics and awards deals -- that they see it as understood they are limiting their critique to the value of the art to connect to others, and not speaking to the value of the art between the artist and God and the artist and those few who do connect with it.

But critics are in no position to speak about the value of the art between the artist and God. It's unknown and unknowable. For the artist (or at least the Christian artist; there are plenty of artists who don't think in these terms at all) it's supremely important. But at some point artists finish their work, they glean whatever they can from the creative process and ideally grow closer to God because of the experience, and then put it out there for their audience to appreciate (or not). And at that point the idea of connection enters the discussion.

As far as "those few who do connect with it," there's no accounting for taste. Critics often do make absolute statements. But that's only because "in my opinion" is assumed to be prepended to every sentence in a review, and all the "in my opinions," if spelled out, would severely cut in to a reviewer's precious word counts. I have a good friend who loves Christian heavy metal. This is one of the great mysteries of the universe to me, up there with the nature of the Trinity and the ongoing popularity of Britney Spears. First, it's heavy metal, a cartoonish musical genre given over to bellowing and chest thumping and other Neanderthal activities. Second, it's Christian heavy metal, which means that the Neanderthals bellow Hallmark Card cliches usually found on posters with puppies and kitties. Why would anyone even bother with this? I don't know. But my friend, an otherwise sane, intelligent, compassionate, non-Neanderal, loves the stuff.

There's no accounting for taste. So I make it a point not to review heavy metal albums when I review music. It would be a disservice to the music, because there are obviously people out there who connect with it in ways that I don't. Ideally a reviewer and his or her audience are in sync. And if a reviewer knows his or her audience, and can assume a degree of knowledge and familiarity when he or she makes comparisons to similar works of art in a review, then the task is relatively easy.

I have a hard time seeing these qualifications when the language used seems to speak absolutely. I may create a work that expresses my joy of realizing some of the depth of my salvation, and have it be a very un-novel expression that doesn't connect much with anyone because it's bland and cliche and out of tune; something easily critiqued as "bad art". Something as crummy as the crayon drawings by my children over the computer monitor. But I love those, and they hold much value. I realize there's a desire (in my mind as well) to draw a big line between the crayon sketches and Michelangelo -- of course we'd never call the crayon sketches 'bad' - that's between you and your child, and besides, no one's even considering it as art ... but where on the continuum do we draw the line? Does it benefit us to try and draw the line? I've no issue with a critic who simply shares his experiences with certain works, so that if I find I'm of a similar heart than a certain critic, I can have access to additional works that speak to me that I may miss, or learn of new depths in the works I thought I knew. Going that extra step into "bad" and "good" and "best", "you win" "you lose" -- I think I always want it qualified.

A reviewer who simply used words like "bad" and "good" wouldn't be a very good reviewer, and such terms would be almost meaningless. But I don't know any reviewers who write that way.

Reviews typically involve comparisons. The reviewer identifies one or more (ideally more) works similar to the one being reviewed, and places the current work on a continuum ranging between "worst similar work" and "best similar work." Is there a subjective component to this? Sure. But it provides the readers of the review with some context. The readers, of course, are free to agree or disagree with the comparisons. If, for example, an album reviewer states "This album sounds a lot like Radiohead, and Radiohead is great," and you as the reader happen to dislike Radiohead, then you've now received enough clues to help you determine that you probably don't want to buy this album. But that doesn't make it a bad review. It just means that you disagree with the reviewer. In fact, the reviewer has provided the kind of information you need to make an informed decision about the album in question.

I just wrote a review of an album by a French band called Syd Matters. Syd Matters makes mopey folktronica -- acoustic fingerpicking and morose songwriting interspersed with ersatz strings from the synthesizer and spaceship blips and beeps. I listened to the album. I asked myself, "Do I know other musicians/bands who make music similar to this?" Sure enough, I do. Beth Orton. Beck on Mutations and Sea Change. Some early Radiohead songs. So I compared certain songs on the Syd Matters album to certain songs on those albums. Some of them compared favorably, and I said that. Some of them involved watching fairies dance in gardens, and I groaned at the unbearable tweeness of it all, so I said that. The end result, as you might expect, was a mixed review. Three stars out of five, to state it in shorthand. But that's the process I went through. It's not the absolute, categorical last word on Syd Matters. It's just my take on the album. But I'd like to think that there's value in that for those who have heard of the band, and are considering whether to buy the album.

Don't get hung up on the "absolutes" of reviews. Reviewers are paid to state opinions, and opinions often come off as dogmatic. It's up to you, as the reader, to determine whether you think the opinions are informed or not. I've been reading reviews in general, and music reviews in particular, for decades now. There are certain reviewers I've grown to trust over time. They've rarely steered me wrong, and thus I'm inclined to believe them when they state that a particular album is good or bad. Other reviewers (and, indeed, entire publications) strike me as fundamentally misguided, and I tend to ignore them. I'd just encourage you to create art, enjoy the creative process, draw closer to God through it, and seek out other works of art from people you respect and trust. It's really not any more complicated than that.

A New Writing Gig

I'm about to sign a contract to work with All Music Guide, a wonderful Internet music resource. I check allmusic.com almost daily because it's an exhaustive and highly reliable database of musical information. If I'm looking for a band's biography, or trying to track down who played the theremin on some sixties psychedelic freakout, or checking a singer/songwriter's discography, or simply looking for informed opinions about a particular album, allmusic.com is invariably where I go. Many of my favorite music critics already reside there, and I'm honored to be in their midst. I'll be writing as many reviews of new albums as the fulltime job, Paste, and other commitments permit.

Scott H. Biram, Jethro Tull, Greg Graffin, T Bone Burnett, Arcade Fire

My music listening patterns typically involve seeking out new music, returning to old favorites, and circling back to revisit music that didn’t receive the proper time and attention on the first pass through. And I’ve been doing a little of all of the above recently.

Scott H. Biram – Graveyard Shift

Biram takes the White Stripes/Black Keys minimalist approach and does it one better. He’s a one-man band, but he raises such an unholy racket that you’d swear you’re listening to a roomful of garage band incompetents. And I mean incompetents in the best sense of that term. Biram is surely no virtuoso anything – he can’t sing, and he can barely play the guitar – but there’s a primal energy about his three chords distorted through a stack of Marshall amps, and he has the kind of untamed howl and unrefined power that reminds me of blues minimalists like Hound Dog Taylor and John Lee Hooker. But the blues influence is only part of the story. Biram also has a convincing Hank Williams high lonesome tenor that he employs to great effect on several plaintive country originals, and his songwriting aspires to (but doesn’t quite reach) the fever-dream surrealism of mid-‘60s Dylan. In short, he’s raw, raunchy, soulful and poetic. That’s usually a pretty good combination, and it is this time, too.

Jethro Tull – Thick as a Brick

Yes, this is one of those dreaded early ‘70s prog rock suites; one song spread out over 45 minutes. But it has several advantages over its bloated brethren: 1) no lengthy drum solos (okay, there’s a two-minute drum solo, but that hardly counts), 2) no sci-fi themes were used in the making of this album, and 3) no mention of elves or dwarves. Sure, the transitions are jarring, but this is really a series of songs disguised as one, and they’re good songs, too, full of Ian Anderson’s melodic gifts and deft acoustic fingerpicking and inscrutable lyrics that seem to make more sense with each passing day. I’ve always heard this album as a poetic anti-war statement, and I still do.

So come on ye childhood heroes
Won't you rise up from the pages of your comic books
Your super crooks
And show us all the way.
Well, make your will and testament.
Won't you join your local government?
We'll have Superman for president
Let Robin save the day.

That still sounds more relevant to me than “Let’s impeach the President.” I love this album. I have for thirty-five years, and I still do.

Greg Graffin – Cold as the Clay

Greg Graffin has a Ph.D. in Zoology from Cornell U., and he’s the lead singer/songwriter for American punk pioneers Bad Religion, so you’d think that Appalachian folk songs wouldn’t be high on the priority list. But he’s recorded a batch of Appalachian folk songs anyway, and they’re mixed in with some originals that sound like they could be ancient Appalachian folk songs. True to his punk roots, there’s nothing slick about the playing, singing, or production, and the whole affair sounds like it could have been recorded by Alan Lomax with a field microphone in some backwoods holler in the 1930s or 1940s. Who knew that this guy aspired to be the male Gillian Welch? Not me. But this is a surprisingly great album.

T Bone Burnett – Twenty Twenty: The Esssential T Bone Burnett

This is a 2-CD, 40-song career retrospective. And even though I was already familiar with 90% of this material, it’s still great to hear it in a new context. The shuffling of the songs seems to have given them new life. I love T Bone’s songwriting:

Will you tell you tell me this riddle:
Who is the father of lies?
Who is the master of half-truth?
What is Madison Avenue?

It is everything you need to get close up
It is in search of an historic Jesus
It is expensive at 50% off

It is a 50 foot long bronzed naked girl
It is a travel poster in a prison cell
It is a wooden nickel in a wishing well

It is a death cult that terrorized the town
It is a love affair that brought a nation down
It is desperate desert battle to the death

Somehow the CCM industry never picked up on the Christian worldview inherent in T Bone’s music. I don’t understand it. Maybe it was the bronzed naked girl.

The Arcade Fire – Funeral

I blame it on Pitchfork. They’re a convenient scapegoat for all the ills of the world: famine, earthquakes, the price of gasoline, Paris Hilton, American Idol. But the fact is that I really don’t like Pitchfork or their condescending, smarmy hipness, and I tend to have an automatic aversion to anything they praise. Funeral is a couple year’s old now, and Pitchfork, of course, hyped it to death. And so I listened, initially with a snarl on my face, and then not much after that. My mistake. For once they got it right, and I’m so glad I took the time to listen again. This is a brilliant album.

The songs are heartbreaking, particularly the devastating “Wake Up” and “Rebellion (Lies).” The four-song “Neighborhood” suite is dazzling in its complexity, beauty, and raw rock power. And Win Butler sings like an even more unhinged David Byrne, and sounds at times like his skull is ready to explode. All of it is endlessly creative and unpredictable, careening off into totally unexpected directions, like the graceful little Motown coda that closes “Wake Up” after four minutes of hypercharged Bowie/Byrne New Wave overemoting. I’ve been listening to this album almost exclusively over the past few days, and I keep uncovering new surprises. This is Exhibit A, at least for this week, for why I care about music.

metacritic.com

Hey, I made it to metacritic.com, sandwiched in between E! Online and Rolling Stone.

No Hep Spat

It's an anagram. Paranoid? Who, me?

I been Mick Jaggered, silver daggered.
Andy Warhol, won’t you please come home?
I been mothered, fathered, aunt and uncled,
Been Roy Haleed and Art Garfunkeled.
And I just discovered somebody’s tapped my phone.
-- Paul Simon, "A Simple Desultory Phillipic"

I love our government. It's the best government on earth. I wouldn't ever do anything to criticize it.

So I'm just noting that this happened:

"The Republican chair of a key Senate committee said Thursday he would require phone company officials to testify after a newspaper reported that the U.S. agency in charge of a domestic spying program is building a database of every call made within the country."

It's all part of national security, and I feel very secure. And it only concerns those with suspected links to terrorism. Which is apparently all of us. For the record, for anyone listening, I hate terrorists, and I love the U.S. of A. I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free. And I'll start listening to Toby Keith real soon now. I promise.

The DaVinci Code and the Emergent Church

Thanks to Erik for pointing this out.

Emergent church guru Brian McLaren had this to say about Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code:

So you think The DaVinci Code taps into dissatisfaction with Jesus as we know him?

McLaren: For all the flaws of Brown's book, I think what he's doing is suggesting that the dominant religious institutions have created their own caricature of Jesus. And I think people have a sense that that's true. It's my honest feeling that anyone trying to share their faith in America today has to realize that the Religious Right has polluted the air. The name "Jesus" and the word "Christianity" are associated with something judgmental, hostile, hypocritical, angry, negative, defensive, anti-homosexual, etc. Many of our churches, even though they feel they represent the truth, actually are upholding something that's distorted and false.

I also think that the whole issue of male domination is huge and that Brown's suggestion that the real Jesus was not as misogynist or anti-woman as the Christian religion often has been is very attractive. Brown's book is about exposing hypocrisy and cover-up in organized religion, and it is exposing organized religion's grasping for power. Again, there's something in that that people resonate with in the age of pedophilia scandals, televangelists, and religious political alliances. As a follower of Jesus I resonate with their concerns as well.

You can read the entire interview here:

I think the problem (or a problem) is that many people read (and will soon see) The DaVinci Code and assume that Brown has somehow uncovered a scandalous part of church history. In fact, his scholarship ranges between shoddy and non-existent, and is full of distortions and outright lies.

And that matters. McLaren doesn't really address those issues in his interview. Brown purports to tell history in fictional form. But the "history" bears little resemblance to objective truth. And he hides behind the guise of fiction, as if that excuses him. What if somebody wrote a fictionalized account of WWII that was full of Nazi propaganda, and that proposed that the Holocaust never happened? And what if the people who read that book were too ignorant of history to realize that the premises of the book weren't true? That's the equivalent of what has happened with The DaVinci Code.

That said, McLaren is of course entirely correct in stating that many people are fed up with organized, institutional Christianity. So am I many days, particularly when I watch my faith co-opted to support a political philosophy that I believe is totally antithetical to what Christianity has taught and believed for 2,000 years. It sucks, and I don't blame people for being turned off by the unholy alliance of Big Church, Big Business, and Big Government.

But there's got to be a better way to promote the discussion that McLaren desires (me too) than to base it on The DaVinci Code. It's starting from entirely wrong premises. How can it possibly go anywhere productive?

Seeds of Peace

We've just passed the third anniversary of "Mission Accomplished." Hail to the Chief Obfuscator.

If we were to cast an eleventh commandment
In twenty years people would be amazed to learn
That there had once been only ten
And wouldn't care if there had been.
-- T Bone Burnett, "Every Time I Feel the Shift"

The American flag is tied to a fence on an overpass
With a homemade sign written in red, white and blue
And it reads "Welcome home, Jason Miller, Private First Class"
And I don't even know him but I'm grateful for any good news

What's become of my country torn by contradiction
The spirit of freedom propped up by a culture of fear
Where's it's unpatriotic to protest or even to question
Have we learned nothing from history or the last couple years

And the rain pours down
On the fallow ground
And the fruited plain as barren as the sand
Is it not within our will
How long must we wait until
The seeds of peace find purchase in this land

He stood on the deck and he said we'd accomplished our mission
And he twisted the facts 'til he knew it could pass for the truth
Vengeance can fill any fool with conviction
But he can't wash the blood of the fallen from his cowboy boots

And the rain pours down
On the fallow ground
And the fruited plain as barren as the sand
Is it not within our will
How long must we wait until
The seeds of peace find purchase in this land

I will not be shamed into silence by partisan thunder
And I won't fall in line and march to the drums on the wind
How many more daughters and sons will we see plowed under
How much longer must we wait 'til the harvest comes in

'Til the sun shines down
On this hallowed ground
And the fruited plain so bountiful and grand
Is it not within our will
How long must we wait until
The seeds of peace find purchase in this land
Will the seeds of peace find purchase in this land?
-- Mark Erelli, "Seeds of Peace"

The Monthly Paste Plug

I know I do this all the time. But I only do it because I'm convinced that every person who cares about the arts in general, and music, films, and books specfically, should subscribe to Paste Magazine. In addition to putting out a high-quality, glossy, superbly designed, and exquisitely written 150-page magazine, these folks also include a CD with 21 or 22 songs in every issue, and they frequently toss in an extra DVD with about four hours of short films, music videos, etc. For about $6. It's ridiculously great. Yes, I believe that. Apparently several hundred thousand other folks do too. And I'm glad.

The next issue of Paste is due out in a few weeks. It's the Top 100 Living Songwriters issue. Yes, Paste actually dares to rank the best 100 living songwriters, counting them down from 100 to 1. They recruited 100 different writers to write about their favorites. I've written about a guy named Jackson Browne. In addition to engendering never-ending, heated debates (What do you mean Sally Songwriter is #43? She should at least be #38!) , these lists also raise the thorny issue of why people feel the need to quantify and rank music (or any other form of art) at all. It's possibly a reflection of spiritual depravity. But here's my take on it: it's fun. For some of us, at least. It's my #4 favorite activity.

In the next issue I also have a feature article on jazz pianist Bill Evans, and album reviews of new releases from Paul Simon, Mason Jennings, T-Bone Burnett, Nickel Creek guitarist Sean Watkins, and folkie protest singer Mark Erelli. In upcoming issues I have articles on Celtic Punk pioneers The Pogues and Columbus' own Glam Rock kings Ronald Koal and the Trillionaires.

Let me encourage you to buy the magazine. You'll be glad you did. But there are other ways to enjoy Paste. There is, for instance:

The website

The store, where you can buy many of the fine albums you read about

The radio station, which allows you to sample the kinds of music covered in the magazine, and, last but not least

The podcast, which brings a weekly dose of music and interviews and general Paste goodness to an iPod near you.

I hope you enjoy.

Hootenannys and Hippies

Guys with guitars are cool. I once knew a guy, Phil, who had a halo of hair like Bob Dylan, and who always walked around with a guitar case slung over his shoulder. Occasionally there was even a guitar in the case, but he didn’t play it. He didn’t know how to play it, in fact. It was just a prop to attract girls. And it worked. Because guys with guitars are cool.

On Friday night, two guys, each armed with a guitar, came over to our house. They were cool. What was even cooler was that they knew how to play their guitars very well, and did. A bunch of other people came too, possibly attracted by the offer of free food, but they stuck around to hear the guitars. Matt played one of them, and Jeremy played the other, and they sang together on our back porch until the wee hours of the morning, harmonizing beautifully on some old hymns, some original songs, some old Beatles and Neil Young tunes, and some new tunes from Radiohead and The Shins. It was great. I love live music. I particularly love live music played on my back porch by people who can play it well.

For a while there I held Matt’s guitar. Just held it, you know, and looked meaningfully at Kate. I put it in the case and slung it over my shoulder. I don’t think she noticed.

On Sunday we had several scruffy looking psychedelicized neo-hippies over for lunch after church. I like neo-hippies, too, and their desire to live off the land, man, and dig the earth, not literally, but metaphorically dig it (you dig?), and eat organically and holistically and consume soybean products. They are admirable, if not totally comprehensible. I hate soybean products. They make motor oil out of soybeans, and I can taste motor oil in every tofu-laced dish I’ve ever had. Think about it, you vegans.

But it was fun. One guy wants to hop freight trains this summer, like Woody Guthrie. He knows the Lord, and he’s bound for glory, and I’m intrigued by how radically different his vision is from what I normally encounter in Westerville, which typically involves the kids growing up and leaving home, and the empty nester parents moving into a 7-bedroom, 5,000 square foot McMansion on the lake. Three of the neo-hippies were painters. As in artists. They work at places like the Barnes and Noble coffee shop, but they honestly don’t care. They eat tofu and they paint pictures. Good for them.

I sometimes wonder what our neighbors must think of this. I don’t think all that long about it, but it does cross my mind. They are out there on their lawns, criss-crossing back and forth, mowing the same grass that they mowed the day before, but this time at a 90-degree angle to create a wondrous crosshatched effect that must look fabulous from a helicopter or hot air balloon, and we are inside entertaining people who want to play hobo on freight trains. It makes me chuckle. They are into grub control, and buy specially marked bags of Ortho Weed ‘n Feed to deal with the pesky little buggers. Our grub control consists of making sure that we have enough food for the descending hordes. And if we don’t, then the hordes share with one another, and don’t think anything of it.

I think I may be reverting to second hippiehood, this time without some of the previous accoutrements. I’m thinking about buying a guitar. I’m thinking about becoming a coffee snob, like many of my friends, and working up the courage to speak about the winy acidity of Tanzanian dark roast, or the hint of fruitiness (right now I detect more than a hint when I hear this kind of talk) in Ethiopian coffees. I’m thinking about listening to Woody Guthrie, and I’m fairly certain we won’t buy a 5,000 square foot McMansion when Rachel leaves home.

I’d like to be more generous and less concerned about stuff, as in material, tangible stuff. And I’d still like to be able to send my two kids to college at the same time, which should still require about $40K - $60K per year on top of our normal living expenses. I’m not always sure how to put all of that together, and I can’t help but note that the neo-hippies have no children. Maybe I’ll put in a crop of soybeans in the back yard, and try to raise money that way. There’s got to a bull market for any fuel that costs less than $3 per gallon. Plus you can make fake burgers out of it.

Philosophical Action Figures

Why didn't I think of this? The wisdom of this idea (in the Logos sense of the term as developed by Heraclitus rather than in the Hegelian dialectic of reason/irrationality) is so apparent.

Get 'em right here.

I'm particularly fond of Awful Augustine.

Favorite Band Names

This is one of those fun little parlor games that only insecure music nerds play. I would like to say that they play it when they get together at parties, but insecure music nerds rarely shower and never leave their homes. So they blog about it instead (note to self: check to see if “blog” can be used as a verb). The gist of the game is this: What are your favorite band names, and why? Note that this is how it does not work: “I really like U2’s music, so U2 is my favorite band name.” Wrong, Bono breath. Your comments should be based solely on the name of the band. The quality (or lack thereof) of the music is immaterial (except when I think it’s material, as noted below). I’m looking for evidence of creativity in band names. And that’s it, mostly.

So here are mine:

• The New Pornographers – Brilliant. First, it’s bound to get all kinds of attention from various conservative factions who will wring their hands and wonder what’s happening to the youth of America. Cha-ching. Ring up those sales. But what makes it particularly wonderful is that it’s taken from the title of a Jimmy Swaggart book: Music: The New Pornography. And wow, do they make it well, too. It’s incredibly addicting power pop, and for once it’s an addiction for which you don’t need to be ashamed.
  
• You’re Soaking In It – Remember the old Palmolive commercial, the one where the all-knowing Madge tells her clueless friend, whose hand is inexplicably dipped in a bowl of green liquid, that she’s soaking in dishwashing detergent? As if it’s no big deal at all for people to dip their hands in mysterious green liquid while talking to their friends? There you go. You’re Soaking In It only made one album back in the ‘80s. It was terrible. But they had a great name.
  
• Birdsongs of the Mesozoic – This was a side project for members of the Boston punk band Mission of Burma. And the really funny thing about this name, a fact which only the nerdiest of nerds could appreciate, is that, get this, birds didn’t exist in the Mesozoic period. There were flying dinosaurs, yes, including Protoavis, Caudipteryx, and Mononykus, but to call these “birds,” in anything but the most euphemistically avian sense, or to characterize their cacophonous squawking as “songs,” is … I’m sorry, where was I? Oh yeah. Mission of Burma was a pretty cool name, too.
  
• When People Were Shorter and Lived Near the Water – First, they really were a terrific early ‘90s band who did utterly unclassifiable covers of music as varied as Herman’s Hermits, The Singing Nun, The MC5, The Stooges, and Herb Alpert, and who eventually released a drunken, disheveled punk version of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess – yes, the entire musical. But what a great name. The very specificity of its meaninglessness intrigues me. Kind of like this entire post.
  
• Fine Young Cannibals – This was actually a fairly popular band of the ‘80s. And really, if you’re going to be a cannibal and munch on manflesh, there’s no reason to be nasty and Orc-like about it, and you might as well put your best foot and fang forward and impress the style mavens of the day. These were fine, fine young cannibals – natty, stylishly hip, and not at all long in the tooth.
  
  So what are yours?

Bobcat Love and Celestial Light

On Saturday, Kate and I forced our daughter Rachel to get up far earlier than she would have preferred, kidnapped her and strapped her in the car, and escorted her to Athens, Ohio to visit Ohio University. We’re in the midst of the Spring College Tour Season, checking out potential alma maters for one member of the class of 2011, and O.U. was the next stop on the tour. It’s a place where I stopped for four years, back in the years that straddled either side of the mid-‘70s, so there’s a bit of a history there. And it was amazing how much of that history came flooding back while strolling those cobblestoned walkways.

I am biased, and I admit it. I can’t imagine going to college in any finer town than Athens, Ohio. You can’t stay there after you graduate. There’s no employment outside of the university and the many retail establishments on Court and Union Streets that cater to the students, but by that point you have a degree, and you don’t want to work at Taco Bell, so you move on. But you do so reluctantly. There are 10,000 people in the town and 20,000 O.U. Bobcats. And for the years between roughly 18 and 22, there is no better place in the universe to discover who you are, hang out amidst the natural beauty of the foothills of the Appalachians, and experience college life in the quintessential college town. My greatest challenge was biting my tongue and letting Rachel discover this for herself.

But there’s baggage that comes with that quintessential college life, and that resurfaced during our little campus tour as well. At some indeterminate point in the past the sixties appear to have ended in Athens, Ohio. Kids with short hair walk around the campus now, their cell phones pressed to their ears. They all look like C.P.A.s., and they look like they could be making business deals in corporate America. It wasn’t always that way. For a long time – maybe even for a couple decades after the fact – the sixties were alive and well in Athens, Ohio. Every day was Woodstock. And I can recall strolling those cobblestoned streets for the first time, being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of hair that I saw, being amazed by the number of people out on their front porches, picking guitars and banjos and sawing on fiddles, and being puzzled by the sweet smell that came wafting out of almost every doorway I passed. Just what was that? I figured it out soon enough. They were all just hanging out at home on those old streets, taking the cobble out of cobblestoned, and that was a road that seemed like it was worth exploring at the time.

So I walked around with Kate and Rachel and thought about all that. I thought about all the mistakes I made on this beautiful, picturesque campus. I thought about some of my classes. But mostly I thought about my friends, most of whom have scattered all over the world now, the ones that are still alive, and who I rarely if ever see. There was a girl. There’s always a girl. I don’t know what happened to her. And so when you visit your old stomping grounds a generation down the line there are bound to be a few ghosts trailing behind you, stirring up trouble and old memories.

We walked past Ellis Hall, the English building, the place where I first learned to love language, to listen for the music in the words, where I first caught the melody and was startled. And I remembered some words I first heard in that building, read aloud by some now deceased English professor, his voice finding all the right notes on an impossibly bright, green spring day just like this one:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;--
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

That’s good old Billy Wordsworth, and damn, I listened to those astonishing words and wanted to weep, and do cartwheels, and run around like a crazy man and yell at people to stop, to look around them, to check out the celestial light and see how good it looked in Athens, Ohio. I think I felt more alive and more love than I’ve ever felt in my life. I just wanted to tell them that life was precious, and time was short, and that there was no better place on earth to be than where we were, that day, that moment. And I remember that as if it was yesterday.

Then there was this:

The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare,
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

It was all a long time ago. In my twenties, I would grow melancholy listening to Lawrence Welk play Auld Lang Syne on New Year’s Eve. So William Wordsworth at fifty can just about make me suicidal. I walked around that beautiful, 200-year-old campus, hearing ancient voices bouncing off the ivy-covered walls, catching glimpses out of the corner of my eye of friends who were dead, or the victims of too many years and too many miles and too many generic Christmas cards, and I knew very well that there had passed away a glory from the earth.

I didn’t talk about it. What could I say? You see, there are these people you don’t know, and will never know, and they’re walking around behind me, and I hear their voices on the wind. Sure.

So we followed our tour guide, who recited his canned spiel, and showed off some new buildings, and told us above all not to have anything to do with OU’s big rival, Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. I believe he was serious. I stood next to Kate, my Miami girl for twenty-four years now, and listened politely. You do some crazy things for love. Our love child, soon to be a high school senior, took it all in, and looked around, and smiled. I didn’t have to say anything. O.U. and Athens worked their magic. I couldn’t shake the melancholy. But I was glad, very glad, to be with my family on a gorgeous spring day in southeast Ohio. And all the way home up Route 33, out of those hills and back into the flatlands of Columbus, I thought about the glory that has passed away, and the glory that remains.