How I Spent My Fall Vacation

Kate and I are back from our vacation in Italy. Our itinerary took in Rome, Venice, Padua, Florence, Siena, and Rome again. Aside from airplanes and *#$^ Delta Airlines (cancelled flight and a lost vacation day on the front end, lost luggage on the back end), it was a magical experience. Here are some scattered thoughts.

The Maze

You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.
-- Zork I

Venice is beautiful. Venice is maddening. Some sadistic Doge, back in the 1400s, conspired with the city planners to make the streets as confusing as possible. There was a certain perverse logic that went something like this:

1) Make no street longer than 200 feet.
2) If possible, ensure that the street dead ends at water (either the Adriatic Sea, or a canal).
3) Even though the streets cannot, by law, be longer than 200 feet, change the street name two or three times along the way.
4) Streets shall not be straight. Curves are good. Circles are better.
5) Add helpful arrows to point to tourist landmarks, such as the Rialto Bridge and San Marco Piazza. But make sure the arrows point in several directions simultaneously.
6) Provide future generations of tourists with a useless map that contains approximately 10% of the streets in Venice. And then watch the ensuing hilarity.

We spent hours wandering around in circles. As a Point A to Point B kind of guy, I found this inordinately frustrating. "Get lost," Rick Steves' travel guide advised us. "You're on an island. How lost can you get?" As it turns out, pretty lost. Venice is also the Niagara Falls of Italy, with tacky T-shirt and trinket shops around every curve, and it's amazing how much alike Venice's Best T-Shirts! on Via Canal dei Francesca can look when compared with Venice's Most Awesome T-Shirts! on Via Canal dei Francisco.

But here's the thing: those canals flow in their fetid fashion through the most gorgeous city you will ever see. Pastel-colored fifteenth and sixteenth century palaces are everywhere, and Renaissance churches overflowing with artistic masterpieces, and delightful piazzas full of bubbling fountains that look like they belong in museums, not slaking the thirst of some soccer-playing kids on the square. So we got lost. So what? It took me a couple days to figure that out, but so what?

You Don't Say

"GRAHT-see," I say to the young woman at the checkout counter.
"GRAHT-see-AY," she corrects me.
"Mi scuzee," I say.
"It's okay," she replies.

It's a good thing that almost everybody in Italy speaks English. I had the best of intentions. A friend loaned out her 24-CD set of Italian language instruction, and I really did intend to listen studiously on my drives to and from work. But there were albums to review, and new albums to listen to, and it didn't happen. And so we arrived in Italy armed with a 30-word vocabulary, including tortellini, gnocchi, mozzarella, and vino.

It turned out that it really didn't matter that much. The Italians we met were friendly, helpful, and more fluent in English than I had any right to expect. Granted, it would have been difficult for them to carry on a conversation with me about, say, the merits of premillenialism vs. amillenialism. But that's some boring shit anyway, and most people were only too happy to assist us with directions to museums, prices, and the location of the nearest WC, which were the things we needed to talk about. Thanks to nothing I did, the language barrier turned out to be no barrier at all.

The Birthday Girl

There are far worse places to spend one's 50th birthday. This is Kate perched atop a piazza overlooking the city of Florence.

Royale With Cheese

Vincent
You know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris?

Jules
They don't call it a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?

Vincent
No, they got the metric system there, they wouldn't know what the fuck a Quarter Pounder is.

Jules
What'd they call it?

Vincent
Royale with cheese.
-- John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson in "Pulp Fiction"

I swore that I would not be that guy. The ugly American who moans that there's no ice in the water glasses, and that it's impossible to find a regular-sized cup of coffee around here. But I became that guy against my wishes.

Italians do some foods really, really well: pastry, coffee, wine, gelato. And they do some foods really, really poorly, including the ones you would think they would do well: pasta, pizza, and seafood. It's possible that there are random trattorias and osterias out there that prepare and serve these foods in delectable concoctions, but we couldn't find them, at least in Venice. Well, more correctly, we found them, but with ridiculous tourist prices ($70 for a hunk of fish; that's not for the meal, that's just for the piece of fish). With the plunging value of the dollar against the Euro, we decided that we didn't need to indulge that badly.

And that left us with ham and cheese. Here's the deal: the Italians are inordinately fond of the pig. I have nothing against the pig, and have been known to scarf down bacon, ham, sausage, and the occasional pork medallion. But when the only meat you can find on the menu involves the pig, and when every lunchtime panino is some fancy-sounding variation on the serviceable ham and cheese sandwich, you start to long for a little variety.

So I decided to be adventurous. "I'll have a speck panino," I told the guy at the counter.

It turned out that speck is some inedible part of the pig. Intestines. Brains. Something like that. Trust me. You wouldn't like it. And so, out of self defense, we finally located a McDonald's. And yes, I ordered a Royale with Cheese. It was mighty, mighty good, too.

Pissing Away Our Money

Everything in Italy costs money. Everything. It costs $1.50 every time you pee at a public WC. It costs $6.00 for two people to sit down in an outdoor cafe. Just to sit. Food is, of course, extra. We spent a lot more money than we should have. We didn't have many options.

Traveling Companions

Perhaps because we were starved for conversation beyond "Grazie" and "Buon giorno," the normally reticent Andy and Kate became flaming extroverts when they encountered English-speaking travelers. We met Jeremy and Caroline from Manchester, England, in Venice for their honeymoon. We met married doctors Jay and Sandy from Tampa, Florida, who were planning to bicycle through Tuscany. We met Dan and Gloria, from Hollywood, California, whose California mission-style house gets tranformed into a house in Pennsylvania every week on a television show I've never seen. And I met a longtime e-friend, Martin, with whom I've corresponded on various Internet discussion lists for more than fifteen years. Martin lives in Seattle, Washington but our families hooked up in Florence, Italy. Go figure.

Thumbs Up













This is the thumb of St. Catherine of Siena. It has been preserved in a reliquary in a cathedral in Siena for the past six hundred years. We also saw the tongue and vocal chords of St. Anthony of Padua, and the entire grinning skeletal remains of several other saints.

There is a part of me that really doesn't understand the focus on relics. Then I remember that I have traveled to Cleveland and the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame to view Eric Clapton's guitar pick, also encased behind glass. So we saw several Saint Hall of Fame locations.

At St. Anthony's stomping grounds in Padua, we saw the devout kissing the good saint's tomb, and rubbing their hands against it. Some people pinned notes to a wall next to the tomb. Some people posted pictures of little kids who had simply disappeared, loved ones who hadn't been heard from in thirty years. St. Anthony is the patron saint of lost things. Watching the devout, some of them in tears, I hope and pray he can help them find their loved ones. I don't fully understand it. But I understand that hole in the soul, that feeling that a big part of your life has been torn away. Please do whatever it is you do, St. Anthony.

All This Useless Beauty

What shall we do do, what shall we do with all this useless beauty?
All this useless beauty?
-- Elvis Costello, "All This Useless Beauty"

Our church meets in the auditorium of an elementary school. Every Sunday we set up the folding Samsonite chairs, and then we take them down at the end of the service. The only art to be found comes from the occasional display from Mrs. Jorgenson's 4th grade class.

I suppose people travel to Italy for different reasons. But for us, it was a chance to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. And to see art. And so we spent the time we weren't wandering around lost, or sitting in a cafe or restaurant, touring a dozen world-class museusms and two dozen monstrous cathedrals. We saw a monastery in Florence whose cells were decorated with frescoes by Fra Angelico. The good brother spent the last few decades of his life creating art that he believed only his fellow monks would see. We saw a chapel in Padua that is covered from floor to ceiling with paintings by the early Renaissance master Giotto. We saw Gothic, high Renaissance, and Baroque churches dripping with sculptures from Michelangelo and Donatello and Bernini, paintings from Raphael and Leonardo Da Vinci and Titian and Tintoretto and Veronese, Ghirlandaio and Fra Bartolomeo and Fillipo Lippi. And we saw dozens of works that even I, perhaps the least visually oriented person in the universe, recognize from my meager knowledge of art. If you wanted a crash course in the art of western civilization, at least as created by white guys from ancient Rome through the late Renaissance, you could hardly do better than follow our itinerary.

It was all too much. I couldn't take it in. Consider, for a moment, that the Cathedral of San Marco in Venice is covered -- and I mean that every square inch of the interior of a fifteen-story building is covered -- with millions of tiny tiles that comprise the most majestic mosaics to be found on the planet. Consider that it took a large group of highly skilled artists a couple hundred years to make that happen. And then consider that San Marco was one of several such establishments we visited on one day of a fifteen-day trip, and that I haven't even mentioned the paintings or the statuary or the jewel-encrusted crucifixes, or the mind-boggling architecture of the building itself. Multiply by infinity. Blow your mind.

It was all too much; useless beauty everywhere, an embarrassment of riches, both literally and in terms of the incalculable worth of the artistic vision that found palpable reality. That writhing fellow above is Laocoon, a priest of Troy who warned his fellow citizens about that strange looking wooden horse in Virgil's Aeneid. Here he is assailed by sea serpents. His image, found in the Vatican Museum and carried across the space of twenty-two centuries, still startles. Astoundingly, it is carved out of a solid block of marble. No one knows the name of the sculptor who sat patiently, month after month, year after year, carving those rich details, capturing, impossibly, the look of sheer terror. Out of solid rock.

I don't worship art, although I know people who do. Theologically, I'm part of a good, upstanding Protestant tradition that is suspicious of all the extravagance, all the unnecessary frills. No pomp and ostentation where we come from; no sir. But we're missing something. Maybe you had to be there. I can recognize that a Samsonite chair and a neon-lit elementary school auditorium will do the trick. But I can be thankful for, and amazed by, all the useless beauty.

October

October
And kingdoms rise
And kingdoms fall
But you go on and on
-- U2, "October"

There are ruins everywhere in Rome. There are the obvious tourist traps -- the Colosseum, the Forum. But we were astounded to find a stray column, a random bit of carved rubble, almost everywhere we turned.

It was a sobering thing to see the ruins of a magnificent civilization. In Largo Argentina, a once bustling market square, wild cats prowl around the disintegrating columns. It was once an important center in the most important city in the world. Now it is the denizen of cats.

We touched down in Columbus Saturday night and caught up a bit on the news from Iraq, the baseball pennant races, the ongoing saga of Lindsay Lohan's rehab. It's good to be home. We missed our kids, and we missed our friends. I missed Starbucks, my iMac, and Donato's Pizza. But I remembered those crumbling columns, and I tried to keep it in perspective. I tried to remember what lasts.

Great vacations, sadly, do not. But I am so grateful for the opportunity to see these things.

Rubble

Oh, the streets or Rome are filled with rubble
Ancient footprints are everywhere
-- Bob Dylan, “When I Paint My Masterpiece”

And so they are. In about 6 hours Kate and I will be headed to Rome, the first stop in a 16-day journey that will also take us to Venice and Florence, and perhaps a couple other cities along the way. It’s an impossibly extravagant venture, one we can’t really afford with two kids in college, but you do what you have to do. It’s our 25th wedding anniversary, and somehow a weekend at Lake Erie just didn’t seem quite adequate.

Twenty-five years is a long time. Twenty-five years ago I was skinny and had a lot more hair, and Kate, the silver fox, had dark brown hair. In between we had a couple kids, moved a few times, changed churches a few times (echoing Bono's heartfelt lament, "I still haven't found what I'm looking for," although I think we're pretty close this time), and became different people.

The reasons people marry are many and varied. I wouldn't have stated it this way 25 years ago, but one of the big ones for me is that I was in panting lust with the woman who was to be my wife, and, as a Christian, I had a hard time justifying just hopping in the sack. So I did what good Christian boys are supposed to do. I got married. There was a lot more to it, of course, because there is a lot more to Kate. But that was a big part of it. I was lonely, I was horny, and here was a beautiful, kind, intelligent woman who loved the Lord and who was willing to marry me. Did I mention beautiful?

I think the shit hit the fan about Day 3. And it has flown intermittently ever since, primarily because I've managed to chuck the turds at the rotating blades on a fairly routine basis. It has not been easy to be married to me. Everybody enters marriage with baggage. I came dragging old foot lockers and trunks, carry on bags, an assortment of Samsonite luggage, junk stuffed willy-nilly into plastic totes. The shit was everywhere, and although some of it was out in the open, some of it was buried deep in storage compartments, hidden away under lock and key. And here is one sad but glorious fact: the shit is still there, but 25 years down the line it isn't piled nearly as high as it was. This is because I am married to the woman who said "I do" 25 years ago, and who has lived through days where she has regretted that, but who has never once wanted to say "I don't."

Don't let anybody tell you that this Christianity business isn't hard, or that it isn't fraught with surprise and mystery. One of my friends has recently decided to check out of the business. It's too confusing. You look for God to show up, and when you really need Him to put in an appearance, He's AWOL. I sympathize. He doesn't play by any rules I understand. But I also look around at the people He has brought into my life. They are remarkable. And I know, without a doubt, that the way He seems to work is through those people, through the inexplicable love they have for me when I am not lovable, when I am not kind, when I am only concerned about the ongoing expansion of the Kingdom of Me. You can put Kate at the top of that list.

Because life is one big soundtrack to me, I carry around tunes in my head as I prepare for our trip. One is by Bob Dylan, and is quoted above. The other is by Bruce Cockburn. Bruce Cockburn is a Canadian musician who has been writing the soundtrack to my life since I first discovered his album Night Vision way back in 1974. I haven't missed any of his albums since. And he wrote a song that nailed the strange patterns, the halting little minuet that two non-dancers do when they are still trying to figure out the steps. Sometimes I despair of ever really changing. But sometimes, after 25 years, I survey the scenery and I discover something amazing. The rubble is still there, and it crunches underfoot. The ancient footprints are everywhere. But I look around, and there appears to be a new building under construction. It's not spectacular, but it's held up for a while, and if you squint your eyes it looks kind of pretty. I am 52 years old, graying and balding and fatter than I was back in my youth, and crazy in love. And I know, without a doubt, that God allowed me to marry the right person in spite of myself.

This is how Bruce Cockburn's song goes:

Guess I'd get along without you
If I had no choice
It's taken me this long to find you

Done a lot of getting ready for this
Some things we learn so slow
But look at you, you've got plenty behind you

There's lots of ways to hit the ground
Not many answers to be found
We're faced with mysteries profound
And this is one of the best ones

There are eight million mysteries
In the naked body
Can't even sight on some distant horizon

Like the nine billion names of God
Don't bring you any closer
To anyone you can simply set eyes on

But in the same way it's as real
Don't always recognize what I feel

But of the dancing scenes that life reveals

This is one of the best ones

Say what you will
There's no snake oil or pill
Can make love less painful or fine

There's no theatre

Even of the absurd
Can express what goes on in this meeting of hearts and minds

Guess I'd get along without you
If I had no choice
But please never make it so I have to

Paid a lot of dues to get here
And after all this life
I'm a loser if I don't live with you

There's lots of ways to hit the ground
Not many answers to be found
We're faced with mysteries profound
And this is one of the best ones

And so it is.

Goodreads and Bad Spam

I hate when this happens. And when you combine a technophobic personality (I know; I work in the IT world, but I've been faking it for 25 years) with a basic lack of attention, it seems to happen to me fairly frequently.

Here's the deal: A friend sent me an invitation to be a part of her Goodreads community. "What the heck is a Goodreads community?," I asked myself. So I clicked the handy link in her email to find out. The link informed me that Goodreads is an online community where folks can share with one another the books that have been most meaningful to them. Did I want to see the books that were most meaningful to my friend? Sure I did. So I created a login and a password (Mistake #1), and clicked the "Submit" button (Mistake #2). Up came a list of people with curious checkmarks next to their names. I thought, "Hey, isn't it wonderful that my friend and I know so many people in common?" What can I say? It was late on a Saturday night. I wasn't paying close attention, or I would have realized that my friend, who is from Ohio and 20 years younger than me, probably didn't know my high school English teacher in Crete, Illinois, or the guy who laid the tile flooring in our kitchen. I should have realized that those were my Contacts in that list -- all 438 of them. But I didn't. And so I clicked another magic "Submit" button (Mistake #3, and a big one) because I was impatient to move past the stupid list of names so I could actually see the books my friend liked. And every single one of those 438 contacts received email from me, asking to be a part of my Goodreads community. I'm sorry. I don't want to have a Goodreads community. I love books. I read them all the time. And I love all my contacts. Okay, I respect some of them, and loathe one or two, but they're relatives. But honestly, I have better things to do with my life than assign star ratings to my favorite books.

The good news is that I've now heard from more than a dozen people I haven't heard from in years. Ex-bosses. Former CCM stars. Which is kind of cool. But if you received that email from me, I apologize. I didn't mean it. Some 284 people on that list have added me as a "friend" in the past few days. Again, this is good, I suppose. I was their friend (or respected acquaintance, I reckon), and now I'm their virtual "friend." I've had more than 1,000 books recommended to me. Someone make it stop.

Chip Taylor and Carrie Rodriguez -- Live from the Ruhr Triennale

Chip Taylor has led a nomadic life. The brother of actor John Voight, Chip started off with a less-than-successful stint as a professional golfer, dabbled as a songwriter and did pretty well for himself, writing hits in the '60s for The Hollies, Janis Joplin, and Merrilee Rush, wrote the proto-garage anthem "Wild Thing" (yes, that one, for better and worse), journeyed to Hollywood and acted for a while (Melvin and Howard), and dropped out of the music business for twenty years and survived as a professional gambler. But he saved the best act for last, re-emerging six years ago as a wizened, world-weary troubadour a la Robert Earl Keen and Guy Clark, with young Texas fiddler and Lucinda Williams soundalike Carrie Rodriguez in tow.

Taylor and Rodriguez have recorded five albums now, and they're all worth tracking down. The Trouble With Humans, from 2003, is probably my favorite, but you could do a lot worse than starting with their newly released Live from the Ruhr Triennale. It's a fine compendium of the best songs from the previous four albums, and it's the only place to hear a Chip Taylor career overview, since Taylor includes not only his newer duets with Carrie, but also his own versions of songs that were hits for others ("Angel of the Morning," usually associated with Juice Newton, and yes, the inevitable rave-up closer on "Wild Thing"). There are also great covers of Merle Haggard ("Today I Started Loving You Again') and Johnny Cash ("Big River" and "Long Black Veil"), and a surprisingly effective honky-tonk take on Chuck Berry's "Maybelline." The band is phenomenal -- the Session Men Who Play on Two Thirds of All Recorded Music From the New Millenium (Bill Frisell, David Piltch, Greg Leisz), augumented with Carrie's jumping fiddle and Buddy Miller's twanging guitar work.

Basically, Chip and Carrie cover all the bases. If you're a fan of great country duet singing, telepathic interplay between band members, or great songwriting, there's much here that will delight you. If you happen to like all three, as I do, then you will be grinning from ear to ear.

John Fogerty -- Revival

John Fogerty, Mr. CCR himself, has a new album called Revival due out October 2nd. This one is getting a lot of pre-release hype, and it's being hailed as Fogerty's best work since his Creedence Clearwater Revival days.

Umm, no. It's not bad, and musically it's actually kinda great, but I haven't heard so many wince-inducing couplets since I ... well, since I sang a couple of those Vineyard choruses yesterday morning. Never mind. But if this rock 'n roll thing goes down the tubes, John, you probably have a big career ahead of you rhyming "loss" and "cross" and "grace" and face."

The good news is that Fogerty sounds absolutely fabulous. His voice, which is a force a nature, one of the greatest rock 'n roll sledgehammers ever, is still miraculously in its prime. And certainly he rocks harder here than he has at any time during his sporadic solo career. Fogerty gets in his scathing digs at the current presidential administration and actually conjures up the old dread of "Bad Moon Rising" on "Long Dark Night," the highlight of the album. There are two short rockabilly numbers here -- "It Ain't Right" and "I Can't Take It No More" -- that will have longtime fans recalling "Travelin' Band." And "Creedence Song" (not the only piece of self-referential work on the album) whips up that old, familiar swamp boogie that fueled albums like Bayou Country and Green River.

The bad news is that Fogerty doesn't have a poetic bone in his body, and he can only present ideas in hackneyed Hallmark Card cliches that I would like to think even the Hallmark company would have the good sense to reject. There's a lot of wistful hearkening back to the Summer of Love (including the song "Summer of Love," which manages the considerable feat of stealing the guitar riffs from both Hendrix's "Purple Haze" and Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love"). There's a lot of cowboy imagery, in which John claims that what the country needs is a good gunslinger (which I thought he had labeled as the problem in "Long Dark Night," but maybe it's only a problem when the gunslingers are in the White House). Then there is the album's first single "Don't You Wish It Was True?," in which John opines that it sure would be swell if everybody loved each other. Don't come looking for deep thoughts. Or consistency.

So consider it a decidedly uneven effort. This is one time when singing the proverbial phone book would have been preferable to the actual lyrics.

A. J. Roach -- Revelation

Folksinger A.J. Roach may call San Francisco home, but he’s got the mountains and hollers of his native southwestern Virginia deep in his veins. It turns out he may have other things in his veins as well. And when you put that together, you end up with one hell of an Appalachian confessional album, called Revelation, replete with biblical imagery and harrowing addiction stories set to gentle banjo, mandolin and fiddle accompaniment.

“Revelation” is right. The power of this album lies in the juxtaposition of the traditional mountain gospel accompaniment and iconography with the tales from the gutter. Consider Roach’s alternate take on Psalm 23:

Whiskey is my shepherd; I shall not want
It maketh me lie down in a strange woman’s bed
It maketh me talk out of both sides of my mouth
It maketh me feel like I’d be better off dead

And there’s plenty more moonshine salvation where that came from. As is fitting for someone who hails from the same county that gave us The Carter Family and The Stanley Brothers, Roach has got it, but you just have to hear it to understand. Critics have given it a label, and called it the high lonesome sound, but that doesn’t do it justice. It’s a gentle Scottish burr transplanted to the new world, encountering backwoods ghosts and night terrors, and emerging as something haunted and haunting. And Roach has it in spectral spades. He employs it on tales of sleeping in a freezing car, coming down from cheap cocaine, of walking bleary-eyed through the streets of Omaha. Revelation is a simultaneously grim and lovely album, full of sharp, vivid writing and soulful singing. It’s the southern gothic gospel of the halfway house and the homeless shelter, and it’s one of the best albums of the year.

Hey Hey, They're the Granddaddies of Country Rock

With all due respect to Gram Parsons and Bob Dylan, the real shitkickin’ granddaddy of country rock was a Hollywood star, and a Monkee. It happened a full year before Parsons introduced Merle Haggard and the Louvin Brothers to the hippies with the International Submarine Band’s Safe At Home and The Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo. And it happened a full two years before Dylan emerged as the country squire on Nashville Skyline. Mike Nesmith was the granddaddy’s name, and his music is now all but forgotten in the ongoing hipster backlash against the Prefab Four. It shouldn’t be.

I am no hipster, but I am as guilty of the backlash as anyone. I was a young adolescent in 1966 and 1967 and 1968, the time when The Monkees were omnipresent on television, on collectible cards, and on lunchboxes, and outselling The Beatles at the music stores. But even then I hated the goofy slapstick of the television show, found the hits (particularly the Davy Jones ersatz Broadway tunes) cloying and saccharinely sweet, and proudly disdained the efforts of four band members who couldn’t even play their instruments. I was in a band, and I couldn’t really play my instrument either, but I wasn’t getting rich by pretending I could. I thought The Monkees were everything that was wrong with commercial music, and I was smug in my own thirteen-year-old version of aesthetic superiority and anti-capitalist sentiment. Up against the wall, motherfucker. Now I need to go study for my algebra test.

To state the obvious, I didn’t buy any steeeeenking Monkees albums. So I missed out on all the album tracks that, four decades down the line, convince me that I was wrong. The recently released deluxe reissues of two 1967 albums – Headquarters and Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. – have been nothing short of revelatory for me. The third and fourth albums from the band, respectively, they show The Monkees asserting creative control over their careers. Having recently sacked their Svengali-like promoter and manager Don Kirshner, the band set out, by God, to play their own instruments, write their own songs, and make music on their own terms. And they did. And although Jones still has his cloying ballads, and half the tracks still sound disposable, one shining fact emerges: Mike Nesmith was the real shitkickin’ deal. Long before the hipsters claimed the hallowed ground as their own, Mike Nesmith was writing great country rock tunes.

I knew several of these songs – “What Am I Doing Hangin’ ‘Round?,” “Nine Times Blue,” “You Just May Be the One” – from Nesmith’s later stint as leader of the First National Band. There’s no question about the country-rock imprimatur of that band. But the FNB albums dated from the early 1970s, well after the seminal contributions of Parsons and Dylan. What I didn’t know is that Nesmith had recorded equally twangy versions of the songs with The Monkees, and that those songs predate the generally acknowledged pioneers of the genre. Listening now, forty years after the fact, it’s amazing how well they hold up. And it’s amazing how little critical acclaim they’ve received. So I’ll do my small part to set the record straight. I’m still not a big fan of The Monkees, and Davy Jones still strikes me as the template for cuddly, utterly innocuous pinups from David Cassady to Donny Osmond to Justin Timberlake . But give credit where it’s due. Mike Nesmith singlehandedly changed rock ‘n roll music. And he did it while he was a member of The Monkees. Who could have imagined such a thing? Certainly not my smug, thirteen-year-old hipster self.

Paste -- Not For Sale

I don't normally post press releases, but this one is worth passing along, I think.

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Today, Paste and OurStage launched our joint donation campaign aimed at helping The Not For Sale Campaign to end slavery around the world. For each sign-up to OurStage driven by this campaign, OurStage will donate $2 directly to NFS. The campaign will be tracked in real time on Paste Magazine’s web site – www.pastemagazine.com, showing abolitionist supporters the difference they are making with each registration.

Throughout the year, I’ve been increasingly exposed to the horrible global injustice of modern day slavery. It’s invisible to most people, but the reality is that 27 million people live in slavery around the world—from teens sold as sex slaves in Southeast Asia to children abducted in Northern Uganda and forced into unspeakable acts as soldiers for the Lord’s Resistance Army. About 80% are women and children. Even in this country, more than 200,000 people are held against their will, repeatedly raped or made to work without pay, trapped by threats against themselves and their families.

We’re thankful to be able to add our voice to the growing chorus of people fighting to end modern-day slavery through our partnership with OurStage. Our hope is to raise at least $25,000 in donations by the end of the year. The goal is to engage music and film fans to support the Not For Sale efforts by educating them on the enormity of this global criminal activity and then giving them an easy way to help solve the problem. By simply signing up with OurStage (a free online community, where you can discover new music and judge the best artists to be awarded monthly prizes), you can help end worldwide slavery.

I’ve gotten to know David Batstone who heads up Not For Sale, and his organization is working on the ground here and throughout the world, supporting both the efforts of those actively rescuing slaves and those doing the important restorative work to help them make a life for themselves once they’ve been freed.

OurStage has my deepest gratitude and respect for joining us in this cause. Sign up for OurStage at http://www.ourstage.com/go/endslavery and tell others about this important issue. You’ll see a counter on our homepage over the next several months, showing how much you’ve helped raise.
The Facts
The commerce in human beings today rivals drug trafficking and the illegal arms trade for the top criminal activity on the planet. The slave trade sits at number three on the list but is closing the gap.
Nearly 200,000 people live enslaved at this moment in the United States, and an additional 17,500 new victims are trafficked across our borders each year.
The European Union (EU), has been unable to stop the flood of 120,000 women and children trafficked each year into its member states.
UN surveys from 2004 found 700,000 children forced into domestic labor in Indonesia alone, with staggering numbers as well in Brazil (559,000), Pakistan (264,000), Haiti (250,000), and Kenya (200,000).
Of those individuals extracted out of impoverished countries and trafficked across international borders, 80 percent are female and 50 percent are children.
We can, and have to, speak against injustice. Now it is easier than ever to end slavery. Everyone is invited. Welcome to the movement. Become an abolitionist today!

—Josh Jackson
To support the NFS efforts by registering on OurStage, please visit: www.ourstage.com/go/endslavery
To donate directly to NFS, visit: http://notforsalecampaign.org/Donate.aspx

Justice

Everybody loves to see justice
Done on somebody else
-- Bruce Cockburn, “Justice”

Start with someone who has difficulty parsing the English language, add some bits of willful misrepresentation, mix liberally with inflammatory statements, and top with a hazy love of all things Flower Power that can’t recognize the ambivalent nature of the Summer of Love. That’s a recipe for slander, and I got a big dose of it yesterday.

Okay, I’m starting off all wrong. I wish this didn’t bother me. I wish I could just shrug it off as a difference of opinion. But it doesn’t seem to be in my personality to be able to do that. Yesterday the new issue of Paste Magazine (with the fantastically bearded Iron and Wine on the cover) arrived. As usual, there are about a hundred pages in this issue. But within minutes, all I could focus on was the two inch by three inch text square in the Letters to the Editor section that vilified me for my recent column on The Summer of Love. In that remarkably small text box I was informed that “Andy Whitman” is a pseudonym for ultra-conservative G. Gordon Liddy, that I am ignorant, that I don’t understand irony, that Paste needs to find an editor to ensure that tripe like mine isn’t published, and that, thanks to my ill-informed tripe, the letter writer will be cancelling his/her subscription to the magazine. So a few hundred thousand people got to read that, if they cared to do so, and it was enough to keep me up for about half the night.

Look, criticism comes with the territory, and I understand that. I just wish the criticism was based on an accurate understanding of what was said. It's more than a little frustrating to be vilified for views I don't hold, and taken to task based on a woeful misreading of what I wrote. But beyond that, I spent a fair amount of time last night, tossing and turning, simply thinking through and praying through why I react the way I do.

It’s the injustice of it all that gets to me. Okay, I don’t like criticism. But I really don’t like criticism when it’s unfounded. If I screw up, then call me on it. I may not like it, but I’ll probably eventually come around to your point of view. But when you totally misrepresent who I am, and when you just don’t have a clue about what I’m saying, then it pains me, to the point of sleeplessness, to contemplate what is being communicated. I start concocting elaborate revenge fantasies involving grammar lessons, a flaming pyre of Paste Magazines at the feet of the heretic, Jimi Hendrix’s highly combustible guitar, and Allen Ginsberg thumping on a tambourine and chanting “Ohhhmmmm” as the spectacle rages around him. Burn, baby, burn. That was part of the dazzling, golden sixties, too.

And it’s all wrong, and I know it. I don’t want to respond this way. So I spent a fair amount of time praying for grace, for compassion, for forebearance, for the opportunity to impart some basic grammar lessons and principles of literary interpretation to … You see how quickly it goes awry. It’s a battle. I find myself angry. And I find myself praying all the time. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. But it’s so much fun being called “ignorant” in a national forum. It’s so much fun to read that in print at Barnes and Noble. I know. Most people won’t care. Most people I know won’t care. I understand that. But I think I need to pray some more.

Bruce Cockburn had it right. Justice is what we want to see inflicted on others, and the last thing we want to see for ourselves. So I pray for something that goes completely against my natural personality: grace. It's not deserved. That's the point.

Anders Osborne -- Coming Down

First, the bad news: Anders Osborne’s latest album is highly derivative, and he does little more than channel early ‘70s Van Morrison. Now, the good news: Anders Osborne’s latest album is highly derivative, and he does little more than channel early ‘70s Van Morrison. Since the new Van can’t sing like the old Van, there’s something to be said for imitation, particularly when you can scat off into the mystic like this guy. There’s also something totally delightful about the Swedish ex-pat Osborne, long a resident of New Orleans, paying homage to the iconoclastic Belfast legend. Call it international chutzpah. Fortunately, he has the voice to pull it off, and, surprisingly, the songs to match.

The Big Easy musical influences that dominated Osborne’s earlier albums are toned down here, although a sousaphone still peeks through occasionally to make its presence known. What’s left are the songs, stripped down for the most part to a lean acoustic guitar, drums, and upright bass. Osborne’s seen some hard times personally, as has his adopted New Orleans, and he alternates between rueful and occasionally harrowing reminiscences of addiction, laments for his drowned city, and (to balance out the gloom) stirring odes to love, love, love, love, crazy love. “Down on Dumaine” is his version of “Cypress Avenue” – a soulful look back on a neighborhood now gone. “Oh Katrina” is the tour de force here, the hurricane personified as the age-old heartbreaker and homewrecker. It’s a song that can stand with similar statements from Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint, Shawn Mullins, and The Dirty Dozen Brass Band. Otherwise, Osborne sings of his own wild nights and the Tupelo Honey who keeps him sane. He’s cooked up an altogether tasty gumbo of soulful blues, hard-won wisdom, and that impossibly great voice, magically conjured across the space of 35 years. “Between the hurricanes and the heartaches/My old heart is doing fine” he sings near the end of the album. As further evidence, he’s created one of the best albums of the year.

Centurions

Some thoughts on Jeff’s sermon from yesterday …

“When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, "Surely he was the Son of God!"” – Matthew 27:54

We don’t expect the most despicable people on the planet to experience spiritual transformation. It’s not supposed to work that way. We like it when sweet little old ladies like Mother Teresa encounter God early in their lives and then live out many decades of love and service. God bless the little old ladies. We don’t like it so much when, say, puppy murderer Michael Vick claims to see the light, and expresses a desire to use his prison time to get right with God. Despicable people should just stay despicable. Otherwise we have to start forgiving them, and we all know how messy that can be.

The particular centurion in question was a leader in the Roman army, which happened to be the occupying power in Judea at the time of Christ. The Romans, in spite of what you may have read in your high school or college history classes, were not always nice, enlightened people. They routinely executed anyone who was perceived to be a threat to their rule, and had, in fact, just done the same with Jesus, for the very same reasons. Before they did that, however, they tortured Jesus. They beat him, spat on him, mocked him.

We who have seen the tapes from Abu Ghraib have seen these diabolical dynamics played out. They are images that do not fade quickly or easily. There is far more than physical abuse at work here, although there is certainly that. There is also emotional degradation, humiliation, dehumanization. It is a scene that has been repeated throughout history, from the time of Christ to the Spanish Inquisition to the Nazi concentration camps, from Stalin’s gulag to the killing fields of Cambodia to Abu Ghraib. It is appalling and deeply disturbing what human beings will do to other human beings. It is who we are when we are at our worst. And the centurion in question was in on that kind of action, the kind that is designed to suck the soul right out of somone who has the inalienable right to his or her soul, his or her stamp of humanity. It is treating human beings as less than human, and becoming a monster in the process.

So what does it mean when that kind of monster, that most despicable of human beings, has an encounter with God? How is it even possible that such a monster should encounter God? What about the notion, found in Romans 1, that God gives people over to the desires of their hearts, to be the people they want to be, and that monsters who want to be monsters are granted their wish? Can they be turned into handsome princes again, just like that? Should they be?

Jeff didn’t say it, but I will. I live with a fundamental schizophrenia: I don’t want to have mercy on some people, but I’m really glad that God has mercy on me. There is something in me that rebels at the notion of the centurion, or of serial killer/cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, receiving the mercy of God. It’s not fair.

Which, of course, it is not. But it is gracious, and I’m very thankful for grace. Apparently it takes an earthquake to rouse some people from their lethargy, to make them see the truth. It did for the centurion. We don’t know what happened to him. He’s never mentioned in the Scriptures again. He disappears from history, having undergone some sort of spiritual epiphany, but I like to envision the story continuing. I like to envision him approaching Peter, John, any of the surviving apostles after the resurrection of Christ. I can picture the revulsion on their faces, the utter distaste with which they must view the man. I can see him admitting his guilt, and what he now knows to be true about the Son of God. I can feel the unbearable tension in that room. And I can see Peter – it would have to be Peter – slowly reaching out to touch him, to embrace him. Peter would understand what it’s like to betray the humanity of another. He would understand real guilt, and he would understand real forgiveness. And that’s the scene I try to call to mind when I don’t understand, when my foolish heart proclaims its innocence, and I need to be reminded of the monster within.

Evangelicals and the Arts

Here is a recent article from Touchstone Magazine that I’ve seen rewritten under various titles for most of my Christian life. It starts out like this:

The modern Christians who are important writers are all from liturgical churches: Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox. The closest thing Evangelicalism has to a name that could rank with these is probably Walter Wangerin, Jr., who is not really a mainstream Evangelical but a Lutheran—again, from a liturgical tradition.

Try to think of a conservative Baptist, a Free or Wesleyan Methodist or a Nazarene, a conservative Presbyterian, a Plymouth Brother, a member of the Evangelical Free Church or the Christian and Missionary Alliance, a Pentecostal, or a member of an independent Bible church who belongs in that company. (Some have mentioned writers who used to be in those churches—but the phrase “used to” in the observation is telling.)

The liturgical churches foster a lot of schlock and kitsch of their own, but they also nurture great writers and great writing. So far, we Evangelicals have not. In fact, we often positively discourage “literary” writing as being of questionable spiritual value.

This is something of a mantra in Christian academic circles, and I typically encounter this lament at least once every six months: where are the evangelicals, and why does their art suck? The kindly professors probably wouldn’t state it quite so baldly, being nice, proper academics, but the evangelicals would comprehend the question better because they don’t understand big words, so we’ll let the crudeness slide.

I've read these sentiments, and others like them, so frequently that they’ve become cliches. There's only one problem: they’re not true. They bear little relationship to reality.

Look, I love Flannery O'Connor as much as anyone. Kate will attest that I lobbied long and hard to name our first-born daughter Flannery in honor of Ms. O’Connor. She and the other High Church literary cherubim and seraphim – Graham Greene, Walker Percy, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien – have enriched my life tremendously. But Percy, the most contemporary of those writers, has been dead for fifteen years, and O'Connor, Greene, Lewis and Tolkien were writing fifty or more years ago. And you know what? In the intervening half century, evangelicals have actually produced some worthwhile work. Two of the most celebrated Christian novelists working today, Marilynne Robinson and Leif Enger, are writing from a decidedly evangelical perspective. Enger's Peace Like a River was named the 2002 Book of the Year in the L.A. Times, and was lauded in almost every review. Robinson's latest novel Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005. This does not suck. And when you add in contemporaries such as Frederick Buechner, Annie Dillard, John Updike, and Anne Lamott, who really don't fit into either the High Church or the Evangelical categories, it seems fairly clear to me that non-liturgical, non-High Church Christians have as much of an impact on literature as their High Church contemporaries, and maybe more. And the odds are even more lopsided in the popular music world, where it is evangelicals like U2 and Sufjan Stevens who have arguably released some of the best and most popular albums created from a Christian worldview. In other words, the argument in Touchstone was valid thirty years ago. It doesn’t apply now, and it hasn't been true for a long time.

I will confess that part of it is that I don’t understand the categories. Why is it, for instance, that “liturgical” and “evangelical” are presented as mutually exclusive terms in the Touchstone article? In my church we incorporate elements of the liturgy and fixed-hour prayer into both our public and private worship, but theologically we would align ourselves along evangelical lines.

I also don’t know what to make of the many stereotypes found in the article – that evangelical art is often little more than religious propaganda, for instance. Sure, there is no lack of horrendous schlock out there. Just walk into the Christian Family Bookstore of your choice and peruse the puppy and kitty posters with Bible verses, or the rack of Precious Moments figurines. But the world the author describes is simply not the world I encounter. My church is heavily skewed, nay, infested, with artists – painters, poets, photographers, musicians, writers, standup comics, graphic designers. I would guess that artists make up 40 to 50 percent of the adult population, and many of these folks make their full-time living through art. They are not making “Christian” art or religious propaganda; they’re creating art, and they’re out there in the marketplace competing with everybody else. What I don’t know is how typical or atypical my church is. I don’t have any way to gauge how this compares with the evangelical world as a whole. So do me a favor. I’d love to hear from those of you in other evangelical churches, and find out how the arts are viewed in your church. Are they valued in and of themselves? Or are they viewed as “witnessing” tools? And for those of us in my church, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what you think the variables are within our church that seem to lead to a high view of the arts. Thanks.

Patti Scialfa -- Play It As It Lays

It's not her fault that Patti Scialfa must go through life known as Mrs. Bruce Springsteen. Patti had her own (admittedly lowkey) musical career before she met The Boss, and she's sporadically released solo albums throughout her marriage. And they've been fine, albeit a little too reliant at times on Broooooce iconography and E-Street accompaniment to put them across. But Patti's new album Play It As It Lays, out today, is her first real musical triumph. She gets it exactly right, and she's very much her own woman.

Sure, Bruce is here, and contributes on guitar and harmonica, and fellow E-Streeter Nils Lofgren is around as well, but this music bears little to no resemblance to the music her famous husband has made. It's starker, more blues-based, more reliant on the slide guitar, full of gospel melismas that accompany decidedly secular tales of love and lust, betrayal and deception and doubt. It's the kind of album that could only be made by a 40-something wife and mother who is more interested in the hard work of loving when it's tough than in celebrity and notoriety. It's a fine album; sexy, soulful, literate, and honest. It's Patti doing Dusty in Memphis, and the E/Beale Street mashup works just fine.

I'm Not There

Cate Blanchett (yes, Cate Blanchett) as Bob Dylan in Todd Hayne's upcoming film "I'm Not There."

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Oxygen
Ohio State Football
Food
Water
Shelter
....
Self-Actualization

T-minus 24 hours until the start of another wacky season in Buckeye football land, and the team's first two games are officially in limbo (does that still exist, or did the Catholic Church relabel it the Big Ten Network?). Oh, they'll be played all right. It's just that if you're not one of the lucky 110,000 sitting inside the Horseshoe, you won't be able to see them. That's because the B10N still has not reached an agreement with any central Ohio cable providers. Last year all 12 Ohio State regular season games were televised by ABC/ESPN. They were free ("free" being a relative term meaning that they were part of the basic cable package). Most were shown in high definition. This year we have the privilege of paying extra for a premium cable service that currently no one can receive, to watch games that currently cannot be broadcast in high definition even if some cable company miraculously steps in and works out an eleventh-hour deal. Somebody explain to me again just why this is a good thing ...

What if they invented a new network and nobody came? One can dream.

Michael Vick Chew Toy

Somebody came up with a brilliant marketing idea.

Coming in the Clouds (Inspired by The Fifth Dimension)

For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. -- 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17

The Singles of the Summer of Love

Before Labor Day arrives and we bid a fond farewell to the Official 40th Anniversary Celebration of the Summer of Love(TM), let's revisit the top singles of that groovy summer, shall we? Here they are:

Van Morrison - "Brown Eyed Girl"
The Hollies - "Carrie-Anne"
James Brown - "Cold Sweat"
Soul Survivors - "Expressway to Your Heart"
Wilson Pickett - "Funky Broadway"
The Beach Boys - "Heroes and Villains"
Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood - "Jackson"
The Box Tops - "The Letter"
The Music Explosion - "Little Bit o' Soul"
Tommy James & The Shondells - "Mirage"
Bobbie Gentry - "Ode to Billie Joe"
The Monkees - "Pleasant Valley Sunday"
The Supremes - "Reflections"
The Animals - "San Franciscan Nights"
Scott McKenzie - "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)"
The Turtles - "She'd Rather Be With Me"
The Tremeloes - "Silence Is Golden"
Janis Ian - "Society's Child"
Spanky & Our Gang - "Sunday Will Never Be the Same"
Lulu - "To Sir With Love"
The Mamas & The Papas - "Twelve Thirty"
The Fifth Dimension - "Up, Up and Away"
Procol Harum - "A Whiter Shade of Pale"
The Association - "Windy"
Jackie Wilson - "(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher"

Note the relative lack of hippie wankery. Sure, Scott McKenzie is there, and blissfully instructs us to wear flowers in our hair. But "Scott McKenzie" is to "Hippie" as "Velveeta" is to "Cheese." The Monkees, the Prefab Four, offer the radical suggestion that we should all fire up our suburban grills for a nice barbecue. Lulu greets us with a sappy ballad to her favorite teacher, and The Fifth Dimension, already one step away from a Vegas lounge act at the onset of their careers, exhort us to get high by riding in a hot air balloon. To be sure, there are some great songs and performances there. Van is Van, and nobody's ever sung "sha-la-la-la-la" any better. Bobbie Gentry scored her one hit, and then disappeared, but what a hit it was. Procol Harum proved that it was possible to marry Bach to trippy imagery, and Brian Wilson was heading quickly toward both sonic brilliance and a mental breakdown. And James Brown, Wilson Pickett, and Jackie Wilson all delivered classic soul performances. But I'm struck by just how ordinary and pedestrian so much of this music was, and is. The revolution was happening, and somebody forgot to notify AM radio.

By the fall of '67 they'd figured it out, and we'd soon be hearing groundbreaking music from the likes of The Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, and Santana. But outside of San Francisco, the Summer of Love was remarkably quiet, and remarkably ordinary.

Uncle Tupelo's Kids

It’s been almost fifteen years since the Great Uncle Tupelo Schism rocked the music world. Okay, perhaps I exaggerate. Outside of Belleville, Illinois and the minds and hearts of a few thousand dedicated fans, probably not many people even noticed. But I did, and I mourned for a couple years before the first Wilco and Son Volt albums appeared. The chief protagonists, Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar, have certainly moved on to bigger and better things in the intervening years – Tweedy with Wilco, and Farrar with Son Volt. But, truth be told, as much as I like them now, I liked them better when they were alternating songs on classic albums like No Depression and Anodyne.

There are apparently others who remember as well. Here are two bands who have chosen sides in the schism, but who capture that early Uncle Tupelo energy nonetheless. And when you put the two CDs together and play them in shuffle mode, you’d swear that it was 1993.

Southeast Engine – A Wheel Within a Wheel

Representing the Wilco side of the schism we have Athens, Ohio’s Southeast Engine, and lead singer/songwriter Adam Remnant, who does a more than passable Tweedy impersonation. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that Adam Remnant is a pseudonym, because there are more biblical allusions here than in the entire U2 catalogue, starting with the opening rocker “Taking the Fall” and continuing right on through the final track “Let It Be So,” which sounds like The Partridge Family (complete with ba-ba-ba-dah chorus) discovering the Book of Revelation. There’s an openness and vulnerability that makes it all more than palatable, though, and when Adam sings the asshole-returning-to-Jesus confessional ballad “God, Let Me Back In,” his voice cracking like Tweedy’s in all the right places, there is a world of hurt in those straightforward lines. This is unironic, poetic Jesus Americana. Tweedy pulled it off with “Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down.” Southeast Engine pulls it off for forty minutes here. (Out October 16th on Misra Records)

Macon Greyson – 20th Century Accidents

Representing the Son Volt side of the schism we have Dallas’s Macon Greyson, and lead singer/songwriter Buddy Huffman, who has Jay Farrar’s craggy, soulful tenor down to a sadsack science. There are times when it’s impossible to tell them apart. Like the early Son Volt albums, Macon Greyson’s songs alternate between blistering roots rockers and country-inflected ballads. The ballads are just fine, and showcase Huffman’s social conscience and better-than-average lyrical gifts. But this band really shines on the rockers, where they take the no-frills ethos of the best bar bands and kick it right into the back alley. The bluesy Stones swagger of “Black Light” may offer the best Keith Richards guitar lick since “Brown Sugar,” and the sturdy power chords of the title track and “Minnesota Weather Map” will have the air guitarists pumping their fists. It’s straightforward rock ‘n roll for the millionth time, and, as is the case with all such miracles, it sounds utterly fresh and vital. (Out October 9th on Fat Caddy Records)

People Take Warning!

In 1930, commercial radio was still a novelty, and television and CNN were as fanciful as the notion of travel to Alpha Centauri. In the rural southern United States, still largely bereft of electrical power, news traveled slowly, and was usually conveyed not by professional journalists, but by itinerant musicians who set up shop on the steps of the general store, or in the jukejoint on the outskirts of town.

People Take Warning!, a 3-CD box set about to be released by Tompkins Square Records, collects 70 topical songs recorded between 1927 and 1938. These are songs you might have once heard on the general store steps or in the jukejoint, and they chronicle disasters great and small – floods and tornadoes, hurricanes and fires, prison riots and sinking ships, crashing airplanes and collapsing coal mines and serial killers; a whole panoply of tragedy and devastation. Not surprisingly given the early recording technology, the sound is abysmal. The performances range from mediocre to superb. And the songs themselves are utterly harrowing. The deaths per song ratio has to be higher here than any music not related to Auschwitz or Hiroshima.

There are well-known, even legendary performers here – Son House and Charlie Patton, Charlie Poole and Furry Lewis, delightfully mixed together during a time when genres like “blues” and “country” were not so rigidly defined. Even more impressive are the one-hit and no-hit wonders who appear in this collection, perhaps once famous on the local circuit, now lost to the cultural memory – Richard “Rabbit” Brown, an old medicine show performer who frequented the steamboats and barroms of New Orleans, traveling evangelist Elder Curry, who saw the Memphis flu epidemic of 1930 as the judgment of God, the Dykes Magic City Trio, whose murder ballad “Poor Ellen Smith” was outlawed by the local North Carolina sherriff because it caused a riot whenever it was sung. There’s also Kansas Joe’s and Memphis Minnie’s 1929 recording of“When the Levee Breaks,” a song you have may seen credited to the old itinerant bluesmen Page/Plant.

It’s ancient music, to be sure, and the pious sermonizing and saccharrine sentimentality surely mark it from another, distant era. But it’s surprising how contemporary some of these songs still sound. “The Muder of the Lawson Family” could be an outtake from Springsteen’s Nebraska. And the grizzled Bob Dylan is still recording songs like this, and “Nettie Moore” from Modern Times could be lifted directly from this collection. It’s a fascinating glimpse into our musical past, and an ongoing reminder of how little some things have changed. I watch scenes on CNN of miners trapped in Utah, and these songs form the soundtrack in my mind.

Walk Score

Here's a handy, fun, and utterly worthless tool that calculates the Walk Score for your particular residence. Go ahead and try it. I did and found that my particular abode registers a 28 out of 100, which is considered "Poor."

But if you were to actually look at the map that comprises all those walkability components near my home, you would see a bunch of green and blue -- green for parks, and blue for water. You know why? Because I live within a half mile of two metro parks, and within a couple hundred yards of a lake.

Here's the deal: I live in the perfect neighborhood for walking, and I walk all the time. I walk through the woods. I walk along the shore of a lovely lake. And when I take a walk, those are the kinds of places I like to walk. But because I can't easily walk to a Starbucks, and because the nearest Tae Kwan Do establishment is miles away, my neighborhood is dinged for not being very walkable. Screw it. What urban moron thought that these categories would be meaningful to anyone who doesn't wear a robe and a headband all day?

Hold Steady, My Man

Yes, they are coming back to Columbus. October 27th at the Newport Music Hall. Anybody want to join me and my white-haired Emmylou Harris lookalike for a night of gutter poet/cowgirl beauty queen fun?

New All Music Guide Reviews

The Mendoza Line -- 30 Year Low/Final Reflections of the Legendary Malcontent
Golden Dogs -- Big Eye Little Eye

Go, Kid, Go

Start with a plaintive nasal whine, a la Dylan, and end in an agonized howl, a la that raccoon you caught in the trap last summer. Pummel your guitar in the middle. Go, kid, go. Oh, how I love this album.

God is a middle aged woman
With planets for earrings
And international date lines
At the corners of her eyes
And she’s thinkin’ ‘bout remarriage
To a guy she recently met
And hasn’t even asked out on a date
Okay, to be perfectly honest
He’s never even spoken to her
He barely even knows she exists
But hey, God is really shy
She doesn’t like confrontation
And she’s not so young anymore

But oh God, won’t you just say hello?
Oh God, you can take it real slow

It’s been hard since Jeremy left her
And sometimes it seems so pointless
Like she’s unlovable
But I love her very much
I love the way she looks
And I just want her to be happy
I wish I could talk some sense
Into her troubled head
Full of beautiful grey hairs
But I am only human
But maybe that’s just it
Or maybe that’s just what she needs

Oh God, things are gonna be fine
Oh God, don’t lose your head over some stupid guy
Oh so beautiful on the patio at night
Oh so wonderful
How did I not see it before?
Oh God
Oh God
-- Ezra Furman, “God is a Middle Aged Woman”

Harry Potter: Dreadful and Vulgar?

Some of you are ready to cast Cruciatus curses my way even now. So let me explain.

I'm a Harry Potter fan. I find myself caring deeply about him and his Hogwarts friends and teachers. I want him to win the hand of Ginny Weasley, pass his O.W.L.s and, in general, restore order to the universe. But Harry has his critics, both literary and moral. Some reviewers have castigated author J.K. Rowling for her awkward prose. And the moral guardians of truth? Where does one begin? How about with Spokesperson for the Moral Masses James Dobson.

Last week he reiterated his criticism of the books:

We have spoken out strongly against all of the Harry Potter products. Magical characters — witches, wizards, ghosts, goblins, werewolves, poltergeists and so on — fill the Harry Potter stories, and given the trend toward witchcraft and New Age ideology in the larger culture, it's difficult to ignore the effects such stories (albeit imaginary) might have on young, impressionable minds.

One hopes that someone will eventually introduce Dobson to the writings of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. This week he bemoans the loss of sacrificial heroes in our culture. If the irony were any thicker, you'd have to cut it with a Lumos spell.

It's unfortunate when the clueless have vast influence, but I honestly don't spend much time worrying about James Dobson and his woeful misconceptions. Of far more importance to me is the prevailing view in some circles that the Harry Potter books are lowbrow fluff, literature in only the most tenuous sense. To gain a better appreciation of those who hold this view, I refer you to this excellent article, written by Paul Spears.

To probably no one's great surprise, I am somewhat sympathetic to this view. I've read all seven Harry Potter books. And every five pages or so I found myself wincing at the awkward sentence structures, the lazy writing, the adjectives that weren't quite right. And my Inner Snob, which all too quickly becomes my Outer Snob, was offended. Spears describes this process very well:

Many who consider themselves academic are embarrassed to admit the guilty pleasure of popular literature, and in our public capacity believe it is our duty to point out that Harry Potter is not Dante’s Inferno. For some reason critics think that if people quit reading popular novels and spent more time immersed in the work of Homer or Spenser the world would be a more ethical and beautiful place.

I will note that this view applies not only to literature, but also to -- oh, let's just pick an artform at random -- music. The prevailing view among music critics is that popular equates to crap (to use the popular vulgar term), and that, in spite of occasional aberrations about once per decade (U2, Bruce Springsteen), there is an inverse relationship between number of albums sold and quality. According to this theory, the greatest music is currently being made by some kids in their bedrooms in Portland, Oregon, who are known only to four of their friends and their grandmothers. Since this music will be difficult to find, you might want to check out new albums from people named Ezra Furman and Joe Henry instead. Hypothetically.

But getting back to Harry, let me note again that I read all seven books. And I deeply enjoyed all seven books. Awkward writing be damned, there was something there that compelled me to read more than 4,000 pages of the story of the boy wizard. And sure enough, Paul Spears nails what that is, too:

The world of Harry Potter is grounded in transcendent truth. In J.K. Rowling’s magical world there is no doubt about the fact that there is good and evil. It may be difficult to determine who is good or evil (Snape), but whether or not good exists is never in question. Heroic acts are lauded by the good people, and pencil-pushing bureaucrats who are legalist for the sake of legalism are seen as not truly understanding the fight between good and evil. You learn that good is worth fighting for even when it puts you in mortal danger. It is because Rowling draws from the transcendent that we so resonate with her fiction.

It is good that Harry Potter is dreadful and vulgar. It appeals to those of humanity who, according to Chesterton, “have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared.”

To put it another way, you can't beat a ripping good story. But it's interesting to note what makes it so good -- those transcendent themes that transform us even if we are not cognitively aware of them. One of them, which Spears doesn't touch on directly, is laying down one's life for others. That reminds me of something, some big religious deal I'm thinking. Nah, that couldn't be right, because this is a demonic wizard we're talking about.

Garfield's Houses

Former President James Garfield’s impressive home (called Lawnfield, as opposed to my own home, called TractHome) is about a mile down the street from my sister-in-law’s place in Mentor, Ohio. Because there isn’t a lot to do in Mentor, Ohio, particularly when it’s raining or snowing, as it often is, Lawnfield is a favorite destination during our visits. As befitting an ex-president, it’s a showy, ostentatious Victorian castle with some friendly midwest trimmings, including a wide front verandah that stretches the length of the very long house. The ol’ homestead fell into disrepair for a few years, but since then it’s been lovingly restored to its former glory, fitted out with period furniture and Victorian frills and patriotic bunting. Now packs of blue-haired women roam the grounds, admiring the gardens, the carriage house, and the servant’s quarters.

Twenty-five hundred miles away, right where the canyons of L.A. give way to the start of the San Gabriel valley, the singer/songwriter and musical archaeologist Joe Henry lives in the home built for James Garfield’s widow Lucretia. Joe claims that he can hear Lucretia’s ghost wandering around at night, and that she seems to be soothed by anyone playing the piano. Who am I to doubt him? Joe’s been exhuming old skeletons (both in and out of the closet) and mysterious scraps of poetry and long-suppressed nightmares for about twenty years now, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he’s turned up a ghost or two along the way. I just think it’s fairly amazing that one of them lived at Lawnfield.

Joe Henry has a new album called Civilians coming out in a few weeks. It’s another in an ongoing series of poetric dreamscapes from the coolest lounge in the universe, the one where the piano player reads Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Chandler, where the patrons all drink their bourbon neat and play Tom Waits on the jukebox in between sets. It’s lounge noir, and it’s desperate, and desperately tender, tinged with an aching sadness and the flicker of hope, with the increasing awareness that the tiny dramas enacted here are not tiny at all, and that they echo in eternity.

Here’s the way Joe expresses it in the liner notes:

I have noticed with surprise - and only in retrospect - how often God is mentioned throughout this 12-song cycle, and He must be surprised as well. I recognize in His many appearances, though, not the god of my Methodist raising, who sat judging tennis balls “in” or “out” from high on a perch, but one among us, who stretches like the net itself, wholly visible and there but to frame the attempt. (To me, this is the God of Shakespeare, Wilde, Moliere, and Buster Keaton, and could easily be played by Gene Hackman, if he wasn’t otherwise so occupied.)

It probably won’t win any points for theological precision, but it does just fine in the human interest department, the one that matters when you’re writing songs about conflicted human beings instead of hymns and praise choruses. And nobody writes songs about conflicted human beings better than Joe Henry. A few albums back he wrote one about Richard Pryor that pretty much set the standard for how to portray sinners and saints who inhabit the same body, and he does it all over again here with a song about Charlie Parker, surely nobody’s idea of a saint, but a marvellously gifted musician who was touched by the divine.

This is the state of the union as delivered by a 46-year-old man, subject to the ravages of time, trying and failing at times to be a good husband and a good father, increasingly aware of his shortcomings and the hope that lies outside of those shortcomings:

We’re taught to love the worst of us
And mercy more than life, but trust
That mercy’s just a warning shot across the bow
I live for yours and you can’t fail me now
I live for your mercy
You can’t fail me now

It’s a proclamation and a prayer, a statement of fact and a fervent plea. It’s also a damn good love song, the kind between a man and a woman, and not between a man and his maker. Joe Henry does that kind of thing pretty well, too.

But sure enough, there are metaphyscial and biblical echoes throughout these songs, including one that employs Passover imagery to allay the ravages of time and death:

If you fear the angels above while you sleep
Then I’ll be the blood you paint on your door
Your dream is a worry that nothing will keep
But time is a story and there will be more

These are sad songs, even desperate songs. But always there is a glimmer of hope, of something like the belief that love might actually make a difference, and that there is still time to make a new start. And they were recorded in that house haunted by ghosts.

James Garfield never really got started. He was felled by an assassin’s bullet a mere seven months after he took office. Unlike the mythologized Lincolns and Kennedys, he stuck around for a while, and all the melodrama of martrydom melted away in the tedium of a long recovery that never quite happened. He lingered in a coma for a few weeks, then seemed to make a miraculous comeback. He regained consciousness, then lucidity, and was bundled up and shipped to the New Jersey seashore in the hope that the invigorating ocean air would speed the healing process. The bullet didn’t kill him, at least not directly. An infection did, ten weeks after the murderous fact. He died of sepsis, the old wound festering and leaking poison throughout his body.

Joe Henry sings on his new album:

We build this up and we knock this down
We call our little mob a town
We nail a sign above the door
God bless our little civil war

He could be singing about The Shiites and the Sunnis, or the internecine warfare between husband and wife. But I like to think that he’s singing about James and Lucretia and, by extension, all of us who are caught between the safe, neatly manicured world we think we can control and the shock of sudden tragedy, walking around with the shrapnel of an ancient wound lodged in our souls. Say hello to Lucretia for me, Joe, and play her a sweet and sorrowful tune on the piano.

Paste #35

Paste #35 (September 2007) is out now. Kanye West, his humble self, is on the cover, and there are long feature articles on Kanye, K.T. Tunstall, and Rilo Kiley, plus the usual album, film, book, and video game reviews, and a 20+ song CD sampler. I have album reviews of Pentangle and Raul Midon and a meditation/essay on the wonders of a folk/protest singer named Peter Case.

One of the criticisms that Paste Magazine receives on a fairly routine basis is that albums are ranked too highly, that there are too many four-star reviews (although, to their credit, Paste rarely awards a five-star review because, quite frankly, there just aren't that many five-star albums). So I thought about that criticism again when I opened the album reviews section and saw album after album rated as four stars.

Is the criticism justified? Maybe, but only if you think it's unlikely that fifteen or so really good albums could be released every month. Personally, I have no problems with all those stars so liberally festooned over the pages. Paste, like most magazines, is presenting a skewed sample. The magazine covers what it wants to cover, and most people want to write about things they like. Paste receives roughly eight hundred new album releases every month. Is it really that hard to believe that fifteen of them are really good?

For what it's worth, I did my little part to balance out the proceedings by assigning 2.5 stars to Raul Midon's album. But then I blew it by assigning 4.5 stars to Pentangle, and by raving about Peter Case. Sorry. I like them, and I want to tell people about them. The tagline of the magazine is "Signs of life in music, film, books, and culture," and those signs of life are everywhere.

A New D****?

There are few curses more dire than to be tagged the New Dylan. Anybody remember Steve Forbert these days? So I won’t say it. I’ll keep it vague and say that Ezra Furman’s nasal vocals, harmonica work, and wildly poetic imagery might remind you of somebody.

Ezra Furman is a twenty-year-old kid from Chicago, via Tufts University in Boston. He’s got a band, The Harpoons, and he’s titled his debut album Banging Down the Doors. It’s been out for a couple days now, and you ought to buy it. Today. He has got, as they say, one hell of a Voice. Not much in the way of the vocal kind, mind you. That voice is completely untamed, and often doesn’t bother with trivial little things like pitch. The kind that makes you jolt out of your seat as you hear one startling image and one pithy aphorism after another. The kind that, you know, that other guy came out of the gate with, the freewheelin’ wild kind that cuts through the bullshit and makes you see the whole crazy, beautiful world in new ways:

She is pressing foot to petal, she is zooming straight away
She is swimming in the jukebox of the screaming, driving day
She’s about the age of Mary when she had her wonderboy
She’s an alcohol enthusiast whose dad is unemployed

That’s the way one of Ezra’s songs starts out before careening off into reflections on faith, doubt, Starbucks coffee, premature death, and the peculiar malaise of the times in which we live, all in a neat three minutes and ten seconds. Then he follows that up with a love song to God, who in Ezra’s fervid theological imagination is a middle-aged woman who wears planets for earrings and has international date lines at the corners of her eyes.

These are acoustic songs, for the most part, although they’re a million miles removed from laid-back folky territory. There’s a manic, propulsive energy at work here, and these songs hurtle by at breakneck speed. That other guy once said that he wrote songs so quickly because he couldn’t envision the world lasting much longer, and you get the same sort of feeling listening to these songs. Like Alec Ounsworth of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel, Ezra Furman sings like his skull is ready to explode. He’s got the world’s biggest migraine, and he spits out his words like machine gun fire, and at times he abandons language altogether and simply howls like a feral wolf. It’s frightening, and it’s brilliant.

I moaned a few weeks ago that I had yet to hear a 5-star album this year. I’ve heard one now. Midway through these extraordinary proceedings Ezra yelps,”This is only our first record, I want you to love me!" Don’t sweat it, ye precocious harpooner. Mission accomplished. These are songs that sink deep, and they draw blood every time.

Pulling Up the Drawbridge

There's an interesting discussion underway at the Arts and Faith forum. It's the age-old conundrum of how much we, as Christians, should allow the surrounding culture to influence our lives. Typically, this discussion breaks down along fairly predictable lines. The conservatives/fundies accuse everyone of being worldly and having lost their salt and light, the rock 'n roller moviegoers accuse the convervatives/fundies of being narrow-minded, judgmental, and out of touch, and the non-Christians look on in disgust and thank the Higher Power As They Understand Him/Her/It that they are not Christians. I'm thankful to report that, for the most part, the current discussion has not degenerated along the predictable lines.

There is a tension here that will never entirely disappear. Nor do I think it should disappear. It is evidence of the struggle that we face as Christians; trying to follow Christ, and being acutely aware of our own proclivity to give in to temptation and to sin.

I do think that the whole focus on evil being “out there” is fundamentally misguided, though. The problem isn't movies, or rock 'n roll. You can retreat from all media influence (or limit that influence solely to the “wholesome” Christian cultural ghetto), hole up in the fortress, pull up the drawbridge, fill the moat with pirahnas, and still find evil, because we cannot escape from ourselves. The problem is “in here,” not “out there,” and until we start to address that we’re focused on the wrong things.

But I think it would be disingenuous to claim that the culture doesn’t influence us, sometimes in negative ways. I love rock ‘n roll, and I write about it for my living (or at least part of my living). I obviously find value in that, and yes, I find value as a Christian. But I’ve also struggled with some addiction issues in my life, including some years when I was a Christian. How did that happen? Because of my own inherent weakness and proclivity to sin, because of genetic disposition, because of peer pressure, because of the lure of idolotry and the promise of an instantaneous buzz instead of the hard work of spiritual transformation. Take your pick. Probably all of the above. But also because I listened to Grace Slick telling me to “feed my head,” and because I watched a bunch of crazy hippies in Michael Wadleigh’s documentary of the original Woodstock Music Festival and thought to myself, “hey, I think I’d like to do that the rest of my life.”

Jefferson Airplane didn’t make me do those drugs, nor did Michael Wadleigh. But it would be silly for me to deny that they influenced me. And so, to this day, I am careful about what I allow myself to be exposed to in music and in film. I can handle a lot of things, and shrug it all off in the name of art and believe (rightly, I think) that art is made by broken people and experienced by broken people, and that it is still possible to find great beauty and insight in the midst of the carnage. But as one of those broken people, I can’t watch movies that feature drug use, nor can I listen to music that advocates drug use[1]. I simply can’t go there because I’ve gone there in the past and almost destroyed my life.

It is not true that Anything Goes, although I think we should be very careful about proscribing what goes and does not go in a group setting, including the church. We need to leave enough room for the Holy Spirit to work in individual lives, and trust that individuals are sensitive enough to know what they can experience as worthwhile and praiseworthy, and cannot experience because it would be detrimental to their souls, if not their marriages, and their very lives.

Do I think it's okay for churches to show films, or to sponsor rock 'n roll shows? Sure I do. At the same time, I want to leave room for people to opt out of the proceedings without fear of judgment. The problem is not “out there.” The problem is me. But sometimes what is out there can undo whatever spiritual transformation has already taken place. And nothing is worth that, not even rock 'n roll.

[1] Don't you hate it when the footnote is longer than the original post? Me too, but you're gonna have to deal with it. I think it's important to note here that tone and context is everything, and just because a film/song contains references to drug use, that does not necessarily mean that said film/song is advocating drug use.

Take, for example, virtually every song recorded by my favorite rock 'n roll band, The Hold Steady. There are drug references galore. But you'd have to twist the meaning of those songs quite dramatically to believe that songwriter Craig Finn is advocating drug use. And because I will go to great lengths to work in Hold Steady lyrics into any form of writing I engage in, including recipes and directions to a friend's house, here's an example of what I mean:

I was not involved at the northtown mall
as a matter of fact i didnt even know that's where it happened

i was france ave when they came out dancing
i was lyndale south. i was kicking it with cousins
we were talking about going clubbing
instead we just started drinking

i've been straight since the cinco de mayo
before that i was blotto
i was blacked out. i was cracked out
i was caved in.you should have seen all these portals
that i've powered up in.

we started recreational
it ended kinda medical
it came on hot and soft and then
it tightened up its tentacles

i wasnt there
i was blind high
i was scared. i was lake and columbus
i was cutting off all my hair
i was unfurling a flag of defiance
aimed at my guidance guy

so this is it
this is the end of the session
i ain't gonna be taking any more questions
i think my attorney's gonna second that notion

it started recreational
it ended kinda medical
it came on hot and soft and then
it tightened up its tentacles

the band played screaming for vengance
and we agreed, this world is mostly manacled
it started ice cream social nice
it ended up all white and ecumenical

there are guys
with wild eyes when they ask to get you high
there are girls
that will come to you with comfort in the night
that's right

we started recreational
it ended up all medical
it came on hot and soft and then
it tightened up its tentacles
the band played sabbath bloody sabbath
you thought it was stoney and adorable
it started in the vestibule
it ended in the hospital

there are guys
with the wild eyes when they ask to get you high
there are girls
that will come to you with comfort in the night
there are nights
where it all comes on a little bit too bright
there's a cross
and in the center there is a hot soft light
-- The Hold Steady, "Hot Soft Light"

The Mendoza Line -- Thirty Year Low/Final Remarks of the Legendary Malcontent

I've been spending more time with The Mendoza Line's Thirty Year Low/Final Reflections of the Legendary Malcontent, the band's upcoming 2-CD swan song. The more I listen, the more I like what I hear. The only bad news (other than the obvious marital crash and burn that is well documented here) is Timothy Bracy's Dylan impression that occasionally borders on parody. But he's a fine writer, and the manic guitars cover the multitude of drawn out, nasal vowels.

And Shannon McCardle? Wow. If Bracy tends to cushion his sorrows in poetic ways, McCardle goes straight for the jugular, snarking about the picture of the kitty on her rival's sweater, and offering sweet little vignettes like this:

Come on over honey
Grab your pens and get your shit
She's drawin' blueprints, layin' marble,
Built a shrine around your dick

Hell hath no fury. McCardle's songs are white hot, furious, and absolutely great. I hate divorce. I don't wish it on anyone. At the same time, I'm thankful for the superb art that sometimes emerges from the crucible of pain. This is bitterness and recrimination set to a backbeat, and in its voyeuristic way it's brilliant. My sympathies to Timothy and Shannon. My thanks for creating such a wonderful album.

I Hate Blogs

Not all the time. But many days.

Here's how it works:

1) You post some lovingly crafted tome of cultural analysis, or some agonized personal reflections. Nobody responds.

2) You read your friends' blogs, who post about breast feeding, or the baby's hard turd. Four hundred forty seven people respond, and share their own loving baby poop stories.

3) You get depressed.

Today I hate blogs.

My kids used to poop in their pants. No kidding. Not for a long time, though.

Being Bob

Nobody but Bob Dylan can be Bob Dylan, but you can’t blame a songwriting guy for trying. In order for this to work, you have to simultaneously sound profound and utterly inscrutable. The response that you’re aiming for here is a sage nod of the head, even as each audience member secretly thinks, “umm, just what the hell was that about, anyway?” So here’s Adam Duritz of The Counting Crows, pulling it off better than most.

I woke in mid-afternoon cause that's when it all hurts the most
I dream I never know anyone at the party and I'm always the host
If dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts
You can never escape, you can only move south down the coast

I am an idiot walking a tightrope of fortune and fame
I am an acrobat swinging trapezes through circles of flame
If you've never stared off in the distance, then your life is a shame
and though I'll never forget your face, sometimes i can't remember my name

Hey Mrs. Potter don't cry
Hey Mrs. Potter I know why but
Hey Mrs. Potter won't you talk to me

Well, there's a piece of Maria in every song that I sing
And the price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings
And there is always one last light to turn out and one last bell to ring
And the last one out of the circus has to lock up everything

Or the elephants will get out and forget to remember what you said
And the ghosts of the tilt-a-whirl will linger inside your head
And the ferris wheel junkies will spin there forever instead
When I see you a blanket of stars covers me in my bed

Hey Mrs. Potter don't go
Hey Mrs. Potter I don't know but
Hey Mrs. Potter won't you talk to me

All the blue light reflections that color my mind when I sleep
And the lovesick rejections that accompany the company I keep
All the razor perceptions that cut just a little too deep
Hey I can bleed as well as anyone, but I need someone to help me sleep

So I throw my hand into the air and it swims in the beams
It's just a brief interruption of the swirling dust sparkle jet stream
Well, I know I don't know you and you're probably not what you seem
But I'd sure like to find out So why don't you climb down off that movie screen

Hey Mrs. Potter don't turn
Hey Mrs. Potter I burn for you
Hey Mrs. Potter won't you talk to me

When the last king of Hollywood shatters his glass on the floor
and orders another, well, I wonder what he did that for
That's when I know that I have to get out cause I have been there before
So I gave up my seat at the bar and I head for the door

We drove out to the desert just to lie down beneath this bowl of stars
We stand up in the palace like it's the last of the great pioneer town bars
We shout out these songs against the clang of electric guitars
You can see a million miles tonight But you can't get very far
Oh, you can see a million miles tonight But you can't get very far

Hey Mrs. Potter I won't touch
Hey Mrs. Potter it's not much but
Hey Mrs. Potter won't you talk to me
-- Counting Crows, “Mrs. Potter”

People Take Warning

I realize that there are only about a thousand people on the planet who would be excited by such things, but I am one of them. Somebody should write a song about bridges in Minneapolis.

-----------------------------------------------

People Take Warning! Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs 1913-1938
Landmark 3CD Box Set Coming September 25th, 2007

"In the late 1920's and early 1930's, the Depression gripped the Nation. It was a time when songs were tools for living. A whole community would turn out to mourn the loss of a member and to sow their songs like seeds. This collection is a wild garden grown from those seeds."
- Tom Waits, from the Introduction

Songs of death, destruction and disaster, recorded by black and white performers from the dawn of American roots recording are here, assembled together for the first time. Whether they document world-shattering events like the sinking of the Titanic or memorialize long forgotten local murders or catastrophes, these 70 recordings - over 30 never before reissued - are audio messages in a bottle reflecting a lost world where age old ballads rubbed up against songs inspired by the day's headlines.Featuring beautifully remastered recordings by the some of the cornerstones of American vernacular recording such as Charlie Patton, Ernest Stoneman, Furry Lewis, Charlie Poole and Uncle Dave Macon, these songs tell of life and death struggles forever immortalized on these rare and compelling 78 rpms.

Produced and annotated by Grammy winning team of Christopher King and Henry "Hank" Sapoznik with an introduction by Tom Waits, the accompanying 48- page three-CD anthology designed by Grammy award winning Susan Archie brims with many eye- popping historic images never before reproduced.

People Take Warning! Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs 1913-1938 TSQ 1875
Release Date: September 25th, 2007

The Appetite for Difficulty

I was struck by New York Times film critic A.O. Scott’s appreciation of the great Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, who died earlier this week. Like fellow searcher/director Michelangelo Antonioni, who died the same day, Bergman asked the tough questions and probed the great mysteries in his films. They were not easy going, these films. They were dark, obtuse, freighted with symbolism that asked the viewer to actually work at its meaning, and that implied that it might take more than one viewing, and a fair amount of thinking and discussion, to adequately explore that meaning.

Scott wrote, in part:

There was, among certain filmgoers in the 1960s, an appetite for difficulty, a conviction that symbolic obscurity and psychological alienation were authentic responses to the state of the world. More than that, the idea that a difficult work had special value — that being challenged was a distinct form of pleasure — enjoyed a prestige, at the time, that is almost unimaginable today. We would rather be teased than troubled, and the measure of artistic sophistication is cleverness rather than seriousness.

Given all that, it may be hard for someone who wasn’t there — who never knew a film culture in which “La Notte” didn’t already exist — to quite appreciate the heroic status conferred on Mr. Antonioni and Mr. Bergman 40 years ago. I don’t believe that the art of filmmaking has necessarily declined since then (I’d quit my job if I did), but it seems clear the cultural climate that made it possible to hail filmmakers as supreme artists has vanished for good. All that’s left are the films.

It was and is an utterly radical proposition: that enlightenment and entertainment were not mutually exclusive concepts; that one could come blinking into the sunlight from a darkened theater and emerge not numbed, not mollified, but as a better human being.

A comparable movement was underway at the same time in the world of popular music. In the same years that Bergman and Antonioni were at the peak of their considerable powers, The Beatles were redefining what was possible in pop music with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Marvin Gaye was probing the incongruities of Black Power and life in the ghetto, and Bob Dylan was spinning out couplets like these:

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

Now we get:

I’m hot coz I’m fly
You ain’t coz you not

Yeah, okay, I’ve stacked the deck, and I’m picking examples that suit my argument. And yes, there are exceptions. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t view the sixties as some sort of mythic golden age in the history of music. I was there, and I had my ear to the radio, and I’m here to tell you that there was as much musical swill then as there is now. But what was different is that complex, innovative music and culturally engaging lyrics could still find a mass audience – even when that audience had to listen to the songs three or four times before even conjecturing on their meaning.

The wonder is not that music such as Sgt. Pepper’s … or Marvin’s What’s Goin’ On? or Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde could be made. People are still making comparably challenging music today. The wonder is that it could achieve mass acceptance, that people – a large number of people, at that – actually listened to these albums, really listened to them, sat around and pondered lyric sheets and debated rhyming couplets, and that people like Bob Dylan could have #1 hits on the Billboard charts. The miracle is that Bob Dylan was utterly inscrutable, and yet he was a certifiable rock star who sold millions of records.

We could debate endlessly about why we, as a culture, no longer have an appetite for difficulty. We could toss around terms like “MTV” and “video games” and “American Idol” and engage in hand wringing over the cultural lobotomization of America. And that’s a fun game. I’ll be sure to play it next week. But for right now I’d simply like to salute what was, and what may never be again. Bergman and Antonioni are gone, and so are Lennon and Harrison and Marvin Gaye. They made me a better human being. They made a lot of people better human beings. And they miraculously entertained us in the process.