Eponymous (The eBook)

May 21, 2012 by 8 Comments

The original print cover of the book, with which I was pleased.

I spent a few years, on and off, during the late 1990s and early 2000s working on a novel called Eponymous, which saw the light of day in a print edition in 2001. I got some nice reviews on it, sold a decent number of copies, made a few bucks off the project (though not enough to cover the time I spent producing it, even at minimum wage) and then decided that I never wanted to write another novel again. Eponymous was supposed to be in print for three years, but it still shows up in new and used editions in a variety of outlets, and I still get little royalty checks every six months or so. I don’t really think about much anymore, except to be gracious when strangers write me to say that they enjoyed it.

I was therefore pleasantly surprised to hear today that Eponymous has been converted by the publisher into a digital edition, and can now be downloaded and read on both Kindle and Nook, and possibly on other e-readers as well, though I have no clue what those might be. I looked at the sample on my Kindle, and it appears that they’ve done a good job of converting the text without making a mess of some of the lyrics and other pieces contained in the original print edition. While the print edition went for about $20, the eBook edition is available for around four bucks, or less. So if you have been, or are, curious about this lost classic (?), you can now read my first and last novel for less than you’d spend on a foofy whipped drink at a coffee shop.

Here’s a brief write-up on Eponymous that ran in the Albany daily newspaper back in 2002 to demonstrate that you don’t actually have to know me to like the book:

GOOD REASON TO ROOT FOR EPONYMOUS
Dark, well-crafted satire of band life is set in the Capital Region.

By Lisa Stevens

Collie Hay is a washed-up musician who is now a music critic in J. Eric Smith’s fast-paced novel, Eponymous.

Collie, full of self-hate and loathing, is writing a self-hurt book to try and alleviate the guilt that consumes him following a horrible accident involving his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Kris Dennison, a bassoonist and a school teacher. Cause of the accident? “Toxic stupidity,” Collie explains.

The Capital Region is the backdrop of this dark satire, which Smith deftly crafts. The author’s in-depth knowledge of band life and his talent for rich character development makes for great reading. You’ll find yourself cheering for Collie’s smart-mouth, smart-aleck attitude and wanting to scream “grow up” all in the same sentence.

Eponymous, in its darkness, is also a laugh-out-loud page turner. We can only hope Smith is at work on his next book.

Filed under Books, Writing Tagged with , , ,

Compassionate Grounds?

May 20, 2012 by Leave a comment

Note: Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi died yesterday. To acknowledge this occurance, I reprint an article below that I wrote some 30 months ago. My sentiments on the subject discussed herein remain unchanged.

Jim was my best friend in junior high school. He was a Navy brat, I was a Marine Corps brat, and we were fortuitously thrown together by the fates when our families both moved to Mitchel Field, New York before the start of our seventh grade year. We were both placed in a “Talented and Gifted” program at our friendly neighborhood junior high school, where they basically sequestered us and some other bright kids away from the mainstream of the school, likely turning us into odd ducks, if we weren’t so already. I suspect that Jim and I were in the latter category.

We essentially functioned as a two-person intellectual tag-team unit for the next three years at school and in our neighborhood, generally hanging out together except for during the six weeks in summer when he went to camp in Virginia, and we wrote long, elaborate, coded letters to each other laying out of plans for the year following his return. I still have a lot of those letters from him, most of them written with a fountain pen, blobs of ink all over them, preserving one of Jim’s more persistent (and eccentric) preferences at that time.

Jim and I first connected over our shared obsessions with the early music of Steely Dan and Jethro Tull, and we would spend hours and hours playing, discussing, analyzing and dissecting their albums. He was a bit more cosmopolitan than I was, and introduced me to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Monty Python, and Perrier. I think I introduced him to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom Series, Jean-Michel Jarre, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer (via a copy of Tarkus that I pilfered from the library of a nearby community college).Whatever we got into, we got into deep, and my cultural tastes today are largely similar to those that I forged with Jim during those formidable, formative years.

We did many of the things that smart junior high school boys do, and some that many don’t: we skateboarded, we smoked things we shouldn’t have, we figured out how to deal with girls, we wrote pretentious poetry, we worked on the school’s closed-circuit television show, and we designed elaborate linguistic and wargaming systems that combined Burroughs, Tolkein, and our own rather off-kilter senses of humor. We also liked to set things on fire, and once almost burned Jim’s house down while igniting model airplanes in his basement. (I still have scars on my left leg where molten model plastic splashed me).

Soon after the accidental fire, Jim hand-delivered a note to my house, which I still have. On the outside, it said “Special Bulletin to Eric Smith (Only)”. Inside it read:

“Though you may have guessed already, I will tell you that on the Friday 19th, after I took Wendy out (yup! yup!) my mother discovered her bottle of Sobo (TM) glue in the “small” room (basement) and also other things (hint: [some drawings of candles, model airplanes and fire appear here]). I made sure your mom didn’t find out, so things went a little easier, and I was heavily restricted for one night, for which I compensated by reading my (and Tolkein’s) companion. So, you guessed, fate has destined our pyromaniacal phase to terminate and I accept his decision on the matter and have decided that we now must enter a more conservative phase, where we must seek peace of mind, keeping within the limits, being subtle, yet radical, and settling down to more time with Wendy and Maria (yup!). But we must stay tactical, shrewd, uncanny, as we battle our foes. Also, we must be a team without civil war. I have drawn up a file to record and index anything or anyone concerning our organization(s).”

Of course, as happens with all organizations built around or for military brats, eventually duty calls for the military members, and their kids go with them. Jim left Mitchel Field first, the summer before our tenth grade year, moving to New Jersey, where (like me) he grew a foot in a year or so, and took up fencing, because he was the type of guy who just looked right with a sword in his hand. We continued to correspond regularly, and got together a couple of times that year before I moved to Newport, Rhode Island, for a year, and then to Jacksonville, North Carolina, at which point our letters tended to become less frequent, though more florid. I have a six-page, handwritten letter, for example, containing an epic poem called “Green Dragon Friday” that Jim sent me during the first semester of our senior year in high school. It’s really a spectacularly clever and creative piece, and it’s one of the reasons that I consider Jim one of the best writers (and smartest people) I’ve ever had the pleasure to know.

College time came, and I went off to the Naval Academy, and Jim was accepted to a prestigious Ivy League school, where he went on to become an All-American fencer. His school and my school were rivals on that front, so whenever he came to Annapolis to compete, we would get the chance to catch up. I made it through college in four years, but Jim’s wanderlust took him, and he left school before graduating, and headed off to Europe to explore, travel, think, and write for a couple of years before finishing his degree.

Just before Christmas of 1988, Jim boarded a plane in London to return to the United States. But he never made it home, perishing instead with 269 other people when Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, and plummeted to the ground, 31,000 feet below. Jim had a window seat, just above the wing. According to the investigation report:

“. . . when the cockpit broke off, tornado-force winds tore through the fuselage, tearing clothes off passengers and turning insecurely-fixed items like food and drink trolleys into lethal objects. Because of the sudden change in air pressure, the gases inside the passengers’ bodies would have expanded to four times their normal volume, causing their lungs to swell and then collapse . . . A minute after the explosion, the wing section containing 200,000 lb (91,000 kg) of fuel hit the ground at Sherwood Crescent, Lockerbie. The British Geological Survey at nearby Eskdalemuir registered a seismic event measuring 1.6 on the Richter scale as all trace of two families, several houses, and the 196 ft (60 m) wing of the aircraft disappeared . . .”

I think it’s safe to say that Jim would have liked to have lived another several decades, and to have spent his final moments not as described above, but rather in the presence of his loved ones, as will Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, the man convicted of killing him, who was released from his life sentence on “compassionate grounds” in August 2009, returning home to a hero’s welcome in Libya.

I lost only a childhood friend over Lockerbie and I’m viscerally appalled by the Scottish judge’s decision, so I can’t comprehend how those who lost children, parents, brothers, sisters, husbands and wives must feel. There are strong ties to Pan Am Flight 103 in the Capital Region and other parts of Upstate New York (especially Syracuse), and I grieve for those families here and elsewhere as they watch mercy being dispensed to the person who unmercifully robbed them of their loved ones.

Those families are the ones worthy and deserving of relief on compassionate grounds, though there is none to be granted them.

Filed under Communications, Government Tagged with , , , ,

Shall We Take Ourselves Seriously?

May 14, 2012 by 2 Comments

1. A month and a half into my great new gig at Salisbury House and Gardens, I have identified two favorite things among the many marvels of architecture, history, art, literature and culture around which I find myself working in a humble stewardship role. The first is the utterly mind-blowing library that the house’s builders, Carl and Edith Weeks, amassed during the 30 years when they made their home here. There are thousands of internationally-significant books and documents in the collection here, including (among many other wonders) the world’s largest known collection of signed, first-edition D.H. Lawrence books, one of the fewer than 60 extant pig-skin bound copies of William Morris’ monumental Kelmscott Chaucer, over 60 historic Bibles (including a leaf from the first pressing of the Gutenberg Bible), documents and books signed by Abraham Lincoln, Ernest Hemingway, Queen Elizabeth I and Charles Dickens, an epic, limited edition pressing of James Joyce’s Ulysses illustrated with engravings by Henri Matisse, and a galley proof of Joyce’s Tales Told of Shem and Shaun, with the author’s edits and notes penned within. As a lover (and sometime parodist) of Joyce’s exuberant, explosive language, working in the presence of those last two pieces moves me especially deeply. My other favorite thing at Salisbury House, so far, is the History Series that’s been running there for an even dozen years, supported all along by a pair of local couples (Harry Bookey and Pamela Bass-Bookey, and Fred and Charlotte Hubbell) with a deep commitment to sharing their own appreciation for the importance of historical study widely throughout the community in which they (and I) live and work. In the six weeks since I’ve been at Salisbury House, I have had the good fortune to see and meet a pair of remarkable writers and speakers: Philip Freeman and Jeremi Suri. Dr. Freeman spoke eloquently and entertainingly about his book, Alexander the Great, providing an informative capsule summary of Alexander’s life and career, while inviting the audience to ponder how our modern sense of the word “great” applied to the rash and sometimes ruthless conquerer of his own known world. Dr. Suri spoke about his recent book,  Liberty’s Surest Guardian, a riveting and thought-provoking look at United States policy-makers efforts to export their invention of representative government. With a pair of degrees in political science and public policy under my belt, I’ve spent a lot of time over the years listening to academics expounding on matters related to the functioning of our government at home and abroad, and I can state categorically that Dr. Suri’s presentation was among the finest and most thought-provoking I’ve ever had the pleasure to experience. Having written about William Howard Taft in my Fine Art of Presidential Failure  piece, I was especially delighted by Dr. Suri’s assertion that Taft was the most important political figure in early 20th Century American history, despite the fact that he is largely remembered today for his girth, not for his many monumental accomplishments. And as a long-term development professional, I deeply appreciate the opportunity to work with caring community members like the Bookeys and the Hubbells, whose generosity in supporting Salisbury House’s History Series has truly made a difference in the life of our community and my workplace. I can’t wait to see what next year’s History Series brings, since I know it will be fabulous. I hope I will see you there. Maybe we can go stand in the library in front of the cabinet housing the Joyce books and sigh with contentment when it’s all done. Swoon!

2. As delicious as the art and culture offered at Salisbury House are, I’d be selfish and dishonest if I chose to present my own workplace as the only venue in Des Moines for incredible, world-class artistic experiences, given how many others we’ve already had here. Recent cases in point: Marcia and I attended the season-closing evening of the Des Moines Symphony Saturday night, and experienced incredible performances of Arturo Marquez’ Danzon No. 2, Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story: Symphonic Dances, and Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, which is known as one of the most technically difficult piano pieces in the standard classical repertoire. The Marquez piece was new to me, and I had never seen the symphonic version of West Side Story, which incorporated familiar melodies and themes from the theatrical versions most people know, but mixed them heavily with darker, more dissonant and jazz-based elements than your average Broadway-caliber production would ever expose you to. I am familiar with “Rach Three,” but had a completely transcendent experience seeing this complex masterwork’s piano parts being delivered by Barry Douglas, the only non-Russian pianist other than Van Cliburn to ever win the Tchaikovsky Gold Medal. As verbose as I can be, words honestly fail me when I ponder how to describe his performance. It was sublime, to say the least, and when it was over, I whispered to Marcia “We will never see a finer piano performance, ever, no matter how long we live.” And I meant that, seriously. On the visual arts side, I had the chance to pop over to the Des Moines Art Center recently to stand in the presence of Jackson Pollock’s Mural, which is widely regarded as one of the most important paintings in the history of modern American art. The work is here on loan from the University of Iowa’s Museum of Art, and its energy is positively palpable, leaping off the canvas in ways that few other works in my experience have done. Having spent 18 years in New York, which often embraces cultural hyperbole as much as it embraces culture, it is a delight to be exposed to such seminal works in a community that presents and embraces them with matter-of-fact modesty, as though it’s just a normal part of the civic fabric to respectfully embrace artistic greatness, in whatever forms it presents itself. Well played, Des Moines. Well played, indeed.

3. Marcia and I also had the opportunity two Fridays ago to attend an Iowa Cubs baseball game, where we watched the Chicago Cubs’ AAA farm team win a 1-0 decision over the New Orleans Zephyrs, with the winning run scored on a walk-off wild pitch in the bottom of the ninth inning. We sat in the Homer Club, two rows behind home home plate, looking down the first base line. It was amazing to see the game from that perspective, as it looks dramatically different than it does from the bleacher seats where I’ve always experienced major and minor league ball. Here are a few snaps from our night out at Principal Park, a wonderful venue that sits in the elbow of the Des Moines and Raccoon Rivers, much like a Midwestern version of Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium.

The Iowa State Capitol over the left field wall at Principal Park.

Up close and personal with the on-deck circle.

A wild pitch on this at-bat ended the game, 1-0 for the I-Cubs, bottom of the ninth.

Filed under Art, Government, Iowa, Music, Sports, Work Tagged with , , , , , ,

BLANGA: In Praise of a New Hawkwind Album

May 7, 2012 by Leave a comment

My longest-standing claim to Internet notoriety stems from a 1993 online exchange on Compuserve’s RockNet Forum about the pioneering space-rock band, Hawkwind. Fellow RockNet denizen Zen Poet (a.k.a. Steve Pond, in the real world) shared my enthusiasm for Hawkwind’s thunderous noise-scapes, which he’d experienced in a very personal manner, both having seen the band in its heyday as an impressionable youth, and then later having played synths and guitar with Inner City Unit (featuring former Hawkwind mainstays Nik Turner, Dave Anderson and Dead Fred), and backing erstwhile Hawkwind frontman Robert Calvert (also with Dead Fred) during the final tours Calvert played before his untimely passing in 1988. (Steve and Fred still work together, by the by, now as the mighty Krankschaft).

At some point in some conversation way back then, in a stab at onomatopoeia, one or the other of us described the lock-step grinding guitar figures that anchor some of the group’s most scintillating flights of fancy as making a sound like “BLANGA BLANGA BLANGA BLANGA BLANGA . . .” We eventually started using the word “BLANGA” as a short-form description of the best qualities of Hawkwind’s music, and along with another RockNet chum named Dave Rice, we started compiling rankings of various Hawkwind albums based on their BLANGA scores, rating them on a scale from 0 to 10. As I wrote at the time: “A BLANGA Score of 10 is the epitome of the form; a BLANGA Score of 0 is ANTI-BLANGA, music from an evil alternate universe where all male musicians have their testicles removed at age 13, and female musicians are only allowed to sing seven-part amens whilst shrouded head to toe in surgical gauze.”

I had very limited Internet skills at the time, but Steve and Dave were both very technically adept, and at some point in the earliest days of the World Wide Web, the three of us agreed to craft an online version of our unofficial Hawkwind BLANGA Guide. I wrote the copy and assigned the ratings, then Dave worked his coding magic, and Steve did what needed to be done to host it on his Doremi website (named after the Hawks’ masterful Doremi Fasol Latido album), where it soon became an important part of the online Hawkwind experience. Amazingly enough, the BLANGA Guide lives there at Doremi to this very day, with one major sprucing and updating completed in 2010, some 15-plus years after the original version went online.

It has been quite an amusing treat over the years to watch the word BLANGA propagate among the Hawkwind community, to the point where I have heard band members using it in interviews, have been challenged by former band members about low BLANGA scores given to discs they played on, and seen tape traders rating various shows based on the quality of BLANGA therein. Other bands and their fans have adopted the term as well, with the most obvious nod coming from American space-rockers F/i, who titled their 2005 album Blanga, and filled it with songs like “In the Garden of Blanga,” “Blanga’s Transformation,” “An Extremely Lovely Girl Dreams of Blanga,” and “Grandfather Blanga and his Band Light it Up.” It’s kind of cool to have influenced people that way, without them having any idea that the word “BLANGA” wasn’t something that just emerged spontaneously from the ether, but rather has a specific, definable birth-place and pedigree. It was my word and it was Steve’s word first, but it has since flown away and taken on a life of its own, with meaning to countless people who we have never and will never meet. How cool is that? Pretty darn cool, I say . . . we invented a word!

Why do I bring this up now? Because on April 30, Hawkwind released a new studio album called Onward, and with a few days worth of listening under my belt, I’m thinking this disc deserves one of the highest BLANGA scores of the group’s past two decades, joining such latter-day crunchy classics as Distant Horizons (1997), Electric Tepee (1992) and The Xenon Codex (1988). It’s pretty amazing stuff for a band whose founder (Dave Brock) has been playing live for more than half a century, and who has worked with more members and put out more records than pretty much anybody this side of Mark E. Smith’s The Fall. It is also, frankly, pretty suprising to me, in that this is the second album produced by the current line-up (founder-leader Brock, stalwart drummer Richard Chadwick, prodigal synth player Tim Blake, and relative newcomers Niall Hone and Mr. Dibs), and the first studio record this version of the group released, 2010′s Blood of the Earth, did not impress me at all, from either a BLANGA or a melodic or a performing or a production or a songwriting standpoint. There were times on Blood of the Earth where I felt like I was listening to a Hawkwind cover band, so the creative growth in two short years that this group of players has achieved together with Onward is remarkable and delightful, as it is a very solid addition to their studio canon, with numerous songs that should be concert staples for years to come.

As has been the case with most Hawkwind studio albums since the late 1980s, Onward features an assortment of new compositions interspersed with recastings of older material from their catalog. Robert Calvert’s “Death Trap” and “Aero Space Age Inferno” both get excellent, high-energy treatments on Onward, while Dave Brock’s evocative “Green Finned Demon” gets a suitably moody treatment that presents it as well as it’s ever been framed since first appearing as a B-side to “Night of the Hawks” in 1984. “The Flowering Of The Rose” is a walloping long-form groove built on a riff that appears to have been culled from the Calvert-era “Steppenwolf,” with some tasty leads tossed out by some combination of Brock, Hone and Blake. 1993′s “Right to Decide” also gets a fresh run-through, and it’s a nice enough version, though it can’t match the power and passion of the original, which was one of the finest songs Hawkwind produced in the 1990s.

Among the new numbers, standouts include opening BLANGA-fests “Seasons” and “The Hills Have Ears,” (the latter featuring long-time lead guitarist Huw Lloyd-Langton in a guest spot), the acoustic-synthetic freakout of “Mind Cut” (which evokes the equally twangy-loopy “Hurry on Sundown” from the group’s 1970 debut album), the topical “Computer Cowards,” and the flat-out groovy “The Drive By.” The short spoken-word piece “System Check” is a worthy follower in the tradition of “Sonic Attack,” in which the concept of musical machinery as a weapon is explored, while “Howling Moon” and “Southern Cross” are evocative mood pieces, painting pictures with sounds and textures in lieu of tints and brushes. Onward is a long album, true, clocking in at nearly an hour and twenty minutes, but it is a very rewarding listening experience, and I recommend it highly, for both grizzled BLANGA veterans and space-rock newbies seeking a fresh thrill. It’s good to have fresh BLANGA in hand, especially when it’s delivered by the masters of the genre. We’ll have to update the BLANGA Guide soon . . .

Hawkwind 2012: Blake, Hone, Brock, Dibs, Chadwick.

Filed under Communications, Music, Technology Tagged with , , , , ,

A Token of My Extreme

May 3, 2012 by 7 Comments

There are 728 pins and nine pounds of plastic and cardboard hidden within this shirt.

1. I had to do a spot of clothes shopping recently to have some fresh duds for the new job. This is among my least favorite things in the world to do, since left to my own devices, and in a vacuum, I would spend all of my waking moments wearing loose fitting gym shorts and a t-shirt, ideally with a grocery store or progrock logo on it. I wouldn’t own a pair of socks, either, if I didn’t have play nice in proper society. Or shoes, when you get right down to it. My feet get on just fine without such extravagances. But, anyway, life is what it is, and expectations are what they are, so I dress the part in the corporate world, and I do it well, when I need to. I bought three new dress shirts at one store last week and upon getting them home, I went through the usual insane ritual of removing pins, bits of plastic, strings with labels attached to them, cardboard, more plastic, more pins, and some little sacks with extra buttons or collar stays in them. I have never been able to figure out why so much packaging is required for men’s dress shirts. I would be just as happy buying them hanging on hangars, where I could see the cuts of the collars and cuffs just as easily as I can when they are mounted with pins-plastic-cardboard, as though they were works of taxidermy determined to show you what shirts would look like if they were worn by two-dimensional, one-armed men. Shirt manufacturers, stop the madness!!!

Safe for the gym AND the hot tub!

2. I do most of my reading these days on a Kindle, wrapped in a zip-lock bag. Yeah, yeah, I know, I know, I’m a Philistine destroying centuries of literary tradition by sacrificing the magic of the printed page for the cold heartlessness of a hunk of plastic and silicon chips, and that does bother me on some plane, though not as much as it used to bother me when I wrecked expensive hard-cover books by sweating on them at the gym or dropping them in the hot tub. But, at any rate, one of the interesting features about reading books on a Kindle is that you get a little bar on the bottom of the page that marks your progress toward the end of the book as a percentage. I read a lot of nonfiction, so it has been really interesting to me to note how often I find myself at 65% or so, thinking I’ve got another solid day or two of reading ahead of me, only to find myself crashing to the end of the meaningful text, with 35% of my purchased product consisting of end-notes, bibliographies, author acknowledgements, indices, appendices and/or glossaries that I’m not actually interested in reading. Now, on a Kindle, there’s no cost to the publisher or the reader to providing these wasted pages, but it makes me wonder why publishing houses feel the need to provide all of that useless paper (for most readers) at the back of their print editions, when they have to factor paper and binding costs into their economic model. Wouldn’t it make more sense to end the print editions where the main text ended, with a little tag saying “If you really care about notes and cites and appendices, please visit our website at obsessedbookgeek.com”? My hunch is that they don’t do this, and that the end-notes and cites and other junk at the back of books are actually expanding in volume, because of fears about claims of plagiarism against the authors and publishers. That level of stringent documented rigor once only appeared in graduate school thesis papers, but it now seems to be a requirement for popular nonfiction as well. I did a totally unscientific survey on this topic by pulling a bunch of older nonfiction books off my personal library shelves, and I will note that many of the classics of the genre have virtually no post-text addenda in their printed editions. Why is this? I would welcome others’ thoughts on this trend, since I just find myself saying: Book publishers, stop the madness!!!

Filed under Books, Work Tagged with , , , , , ,

Thanks, Readers!

April 30, 2012 by 2 Comments

I’m a Southern Gentleman by both breeding and upbringing, so I’m generally not one to kiss and tell in public about the traffic that my various websites generate. But as Indie Moines closes out its fifth month in operation tonight, it was nice to look at the monthly summary page and see how things are trending, thusly:

After 12 years of blogging in a variety of places, it’s nice to still see positive trends in new environments. When Marcia and I launched this site in December, we had no idea whether what we’d done with Indie Albany would translate into a new market or not.  Apparently it did, and it’s been a pleasure to establish a variety of virtual relationships with new friends in Iowa, while also introducing old friends from back in New York to our wonderful world out here in Des Moines.

We appreciate all of our readers — old friends and new, active commenters and lurkers, regular readers and pop-in visitors — with equal fondness and vigor. Thanks for making our first five months here so rewarding, and for reading the piffle and tripe [See Note 1, below] we publish here. We appreciate it!

*****

[Note 1] For new readers, this seemingly self-deprecatory phrase was widely used on our old blog to describe the sorts of things we (and by we, I mean I) post online, culled from a poem I wrote, which follows:

“Piffle and tripe and balderdash!”
roared Lord MacCormack, his purple sash
rucked up beneath his ample chin,
as he pounded his desk again and again.
“Codswollop, blarney and twaddlerot!”
the good Lord raged, his temper hot,
his anger roused by news reports
of politics and sex and sports.
“Bosh, bunk, claptrap, bull and fudge!”
MacCormack the day’s events soundly judged,
while flinging his papers across the room,
and gesturing angrily into the gloom.
(His manservant, Roger, knew this was the cue
to roll in the cart, with the buns and the stew).

Filed under Communications, Iowa, Poetry, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

America Drinks and Goes Home

April 29, 2012 by Leave a comment

I have stayed here twice, and enjoyed the experience once.

1. Friday, November 11, 2011 was Veteran’s Day, which always moves me. And it was also the day that the happy life I’d lived for 12 years at 19 Cord Drive in Latham, New York ended . . . with me sitting on a bed in a room at the Airport Best Western Motel on Wolf Road in Colonie, staring at the awfully textured, and possibly mildewed, walls, wondering what the next day (and week, and month, and year) was going to bring. Marcia had left for Iowa six weeks earlier, and I had stayed busy at work and home getting through the sale of our house, office transition, and household goods move. On that particular Friday, I watched all of our worldly belongings get loaded into a truck and drive away, while me and the cats sat in Katelin’s former bedroom, with a suitcase, a couple of cat carriers, a litter box and a bag of cat food. I had no lamps or lights to illuminate the house, so I left the cats there and headed to my motel for a sleepless night, knowing I was going to have to rise at 5:00 AM the next day to load the cats into a car for two solid days of driving, and no real sense of what I was going to be doing once we arrived in Des Moines. It was one of the scarier nights of my adult life, to tell you the truth. It’s been a long time since I’ve leaped so far without a net, and (appearances of personal flamboyance aside) I’m fairly risk averse by temperament, so it was a big, big, big, BIG jump.  Fast forward to April 27, 2012 . . . when I spent a second night at the Airport Best Western Motel on Wolf Road in Colonie, on my way to do my duty as Secretary of the Corporation for the American Institute of Economic Research in Great Barrington. It was the first time I had returned to the Albany area since last Veteran’s Day, and as weird as it was to land at Albany International Airport and not drive to my old house, it really was significant for me to return to that same hotel, feeling great about my new gig, about Marcia’s job, about our child, about our house, about our cats, about Des Moines and Iowa, and about the move in general. I slept well that night, thinking at some point about one of the quotes that was drilled into my head repeatedly during my plebe year at the Naval Academy: He who will not risk, cannot gain . . .

2. I spoke at State of Now: The 140 Character Conference in Des Moines last week. It was a fun, edgy event, and I was glad to be there. I had originally planned to discuss the perils of virality by telling the Motley Crue story, but after my new job was announced publicly, the organizers slotted me into the tourism section instead, so that yarn didn’t seem like the right one to spin. I wrote a new piece instead, and delivered it improv style, with no notes in hand, though I had studied them well enough beforehand to be able to hit all the points I wanted to hit. I chose to focus on the fact that the word “tourism” is defined as “the practice of traveling for pleasure,” and if you embrace that concept in both the physical and the virtual world, then I have certainly had a lot of tourism adventures without leaving my home office. Here are my remarks as I typed them out, though this version may not quite capture the riffs I spun live. If video of the talk surfaces, I will share that.

3. The Bumble’s Thumbs allow her to manipulate Scrabble tiles far better than most cats are able. She was actually having a fine game of Scrabble tonight, until Marcia nailed her with a bingo and gloated (see photo below), forcing The Bumble to get all puffed up with indignation and chase The Nervous Orange Cat into the linen closet. I finished out The Bumble’s game for her, and got stomped:

Never challenge a cat with thumbs . . . if The Bumble says “QIJKUORX” is a word, then it is . . .

Filed under Communications, Family, Iowa, Technology, Travel Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Strictly Genteel

April 24, 2012 by 2 Comments

1. I have written before about the Loneliness of the Long Distance Royals Fan, so after 18 years of being the only Kansas City Royals follower in the state of New York, it seemed that one of the benefits of moving to Iowa might be living in a part of the country where folks might conceptually like the same baseball team I do, since it’s the closest major league franchise to Des Moines. This sense of possibly being able to connect with others was heightened during Spring Training this year, when the Beloved Royals inspired a good number of sports writers to opine that 2012 might be the year that they would finally arise from the American League basement. There was hope! And maybe someone to share my enthusiasm with! Huttah! Three weeks into the regular season, however, these optimistic thoughts have been thoroughly dashed, as the Royals sit at a Major League worst record of 3-13 (.188), after a twelve game losing streak. Oh well . . . at least I have extensive experience in how to handle the Royals’ failure in solitude, which is helpful, since it appears that Iowans don’t care much more about them than New Yorkers do. Sigh.

2. I lived in the Washington, DC suburbs in 1974 when the Washington Capitals hockey club took to the ice the first time. They were one of the southernmost National Hockey League (NHL) teams in the nation at that stage, and there wasn’t a whole lot of pent-up anticipation and interest in the sport as best I could see. But the marketeers of the day did a good job whipping up enthusiasm, and they captured my attention and held it, so the Caps have been the one and only professional hockey team for which I’ve ever held a manly sports crush. Which, for the record, has been even more futile than my aforementioned life-long love of the Kansas City Royals, as the Caps have zero Stanley Cups in their history, compared to the Royals’ one World Series title (now almost 30 years old). Over the past few seasons, the Caps have been particularly aggravating, racking up record-setting regular season records, then folding up like tacos when the postseason arrives. This year, they had a fairly marginal regular season, and I was actually rooting for the Winnipeg Jets to pass them for the last playoff berth in the Eastern Conference, since missing the playoffs might actually force management to disassemble the skilled, but generally heartless and gutless teams that the Capitals have put on the ice for the past half decade or so. Unfortunately (?), the Caps made the post-season, and now they are within a game of knocking off the defending Stanley Cup holding Boston Bruins. They will probably go on to win the Cup this year, just to aggravate me. I do not intend to notice, unless they win the whole shooting match, in which case I will claim to have loved them all along, through thick, thin and thoroughtly gutless.

3. The new Jack White solo album, Blunderbuss, is superb. I resisted his most well-known band, White Stripes, for many years, because I disliked their whole schtick of no-bass, drum-and-guitar bashing about, played by a divorced couple who pretended to be siblings. Jack was clearly a world-class talent, sure, but drummer/partner Meg was not, and it was just uncomfortable to watch her play the same couple of patterns over and over again. I always felt bad that she had to play so many high-profile gigs with so few chops after the group broke huge, and it didn’t surprise me that she had a breakdown after a few years of that. So I was relieved when she stepped aside, and I hope that she is happy and healthy in her post-rock band life today. She deserves that. I have enjoyed Jack’s other band gigs with Raconteurs and Dead Weather (especially the latter), but was excited to finally hear what he might do on a disc released under his name. My excitement was rewarded with Blunderbuss, which stacks up great song after great song, many of them arranged for keyboards rather than guitar. While it seems weird to say this, the album that this new disc most clearly evokes for me is the Grateful Dead’s masterpiece American Beauty, which merged great folk and blues songs/arrangements with stellar instrumental performances and weedy, but compelling, vocal tricks. While Jack White doesn’t really sound like Jerry Garcia, exactly, his singing voice does crack and wobble the same ways that Jerry’s did, and when you mix that tenor/treble warble with fantastic lead guitar or keyboard lines, magic happens. This album will definitely end up on my Top Ten of 2012 list, and after a few listens, I’d honestly be surprised if anything knocks it off as King of the Hill.

4. It occurs to me that I should explain the title of this post, since the stats page tells me that there are a lot of Indie Moines readers who might not have read Indie Albany before it. During my years of blogging at my own website and at a commercial site where I wrote, I often titled omnibus posts (like this one, covering multiple topics) with the title “Odds and Sods,” riffing off the classic Who compilation album of the same name. When I realized that I was over-using this title cliche, I started titling omnibus posts with the names of other Who songs, until that got old, and I went through a phase of titling such posts with Bee Gees song titles. Then that, too, got old, so I started titled omnibus posts with Emerson, Lake and Palmer song titles. Until (yes, you guessed it) that got old, too, so I started using Frank Zappa song titles, including the title to the post you are reading right now. So for newer readers, there is method to my madness, even if there is madness to my method . . .

Filed under Music, Philosophy, Sports, Writing Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

The Fine Art of Presidential Failure

April 21, 2012 by 1 Comment

With the suspension of Rick Santorum’s campaign, it has become overwhelmingly likely that the nation’s voters are going to be choosing between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney this fall for the Presidency of the United States of America. Come sunrise on November 7, one of these men will be on the way to four years in the White House — while the other will be consigned to that very special circle in (living) hell lined up for those who aspire to the biggest job in America, and fail to win in.

Alf Landon

While Michael Dukakis, Adlai Stevenson, Bob Dole, Walter Mondale, George McGovern, Hubert Humphrey, Alf Landon and Barry Goldwater (just to name a few relatively recent examples) all carved exceptional careers in the service of their nation, each of their legacies carries the hard-to-shake whiff of “loser,” based on the varying degrees of stomping that they received at the hands of their presidential opponents.

When historians write these statesmen’s biographies and critics or pundits synopsize them for popular consumption, it will undoubtedly be their failed campaigns that garner the most attention public attention. But despite their dubious lack of achievement in the most scrutinized contest in America, these recent Presidential losers are actually in pretty good company, when one takes the long view of electoral history.

Henry Clay

Consider the era between Presidents Jefferson and Lincoln, a period when most casual students of history would be hard pressed to name many of the largely undistinguished (with the possible exceptions of Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk) line of Presidents who led their nation on its inexorable march first to the Pacific, and then to the War Between the States. The three greatest political minds and forces of that era, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun and Henry Clay managed to pull together precisely zero successful presidential campaigns between them, with Webster losing to Martin Van Buren in 1836, and Clay falling to John Quincy Adams (in 1824), Jackson (1832) and Polk (1844).

Calhoun, for his part, managed to be elected as Vice President during Jackson’s first term, and should have been King Andrew’s heir apparent — except for the fact that he was unceremoniously dumped as Veep before Jackson’s second term, replaced by Van Buren, who rode his boss’ coat-tails to his own victory over Webster four years later. Nevertheless, the legacy of their age was, in large part, shaped more by these three Presidential failures than it was by the men who defeated them for the biggest prize in the land. History has certainly been kinder to them than it has to Presidents Fillmore, Buchanan, Taylor and Pierce. And history could have been kinder to Van Buren, too, who could also be listed as one of the most influential power-brokers and policy makers of that same era, except for the fact this his Presidency was the most marginal part of his career — and that’s what tends to be remembered, his other accomplishments paling in hindsight into insignificance.

In the twentieth century, we have been graced with a series of habitual presidential losers, largely from outside of the traditional two-party system. Socialist Norman Thomas ran (and lost) six times, in each campaign between 1928 and 1948, inclusive. He never captured the big prize, but he did get to watch Franklin D. Roosevelt implement many of the policies for which he had advocated during his early campaigns, and his insightful thoughts, writings and speeches against the Cold War arms race, poverty, racism, the war in Vietnam and the military-industrial complex in general were often prescient, and frequently pilfered by major party opponents.

Eugene V. Debs

Thomas followed in the oft-defeated footsteps of Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party’s candidate from 1900 to 1912 (inclusive), and again in 1920 — when he ran his campaign from his prison cell in Moundsville, West Virginia, to which he had been convicted for speaking out against American involvement in the Great War in Europe, in violation of the war-time espionage law. While Debs never slept in the White House, he was the lightning rod of the labor movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is still regarded as one of the most eloquent and passionate orators of his era.

Third party losing candidates Theodore Roosevelt (1912), Robert LaFollette (1924), Strom Thurmond (1948) and George Wallace (1968) all merit mention for actually having managed to win electoral votes, a feat that Debs and Thomas never achieved. Then former-President Roosevelt, the Progressive “Bull Moose” Party candidate in 1912, actually managed to win more electoral votes than incumbent William Howard Taft, who rebounded from his humiliation at the hands of Roosevelt (his former mentor) and Woodrow Wilson (who won the election because of Roosevelt’s maverick campaign) to ultimately become Chief Justice of the United States — the only man ever to hold both positions. All things considered, Taft would have been happier to be a failure in his first Presidential campaign as well: “I don’t remember that I was ever President,” he remarked late in his life.

Ross Perot didn’t manage any electoral votes, but he did pull enough popular votes to materially impact the outcome of the 1992 election, when Bill Clinton unseated George H.W. Bush. Eight years later, Ralph Nader’s Green campaign sucked enough votes out of the Democratic side to throw a squeaker of an election towards the Republican George W. Bush, leaving Al Gore to bear perhaps the heaviest tang of failure in recent electoral memory: like Samuel Tilden in 1876 and Grover Cleveland in 1892, Gore actually managed to lose an election despite getting more popular votes than his foe. Perot and Nader lost like gangbusters, sure, but they made a difference in tight campaigns, and that difference has helped spark additional interest in third party candidates and causes — and the impacts (intended and unintended, good and bad) that they can have on the nation’s discourse and governance.

Pat Paulsen

Our prior President, George W. Bush, appears to have studied past failed presidential candidates as well, and taken to heart some of their policy proposals. One such failed candidate once proposed an amendment to the Constitution that read: “All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the office of the President. He shall have power to lay and collect taxes to provide for the common defense and general welfare of his family and friends. If the country is in peril for the lack of essential minerals, oil and land necessary for its citizens, he may encourage incursions into other lands not belonging to the United States for the procurement of these valuables.”

The losing candidate in question? Sad-eyed actor/comedian and Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour writer Patrick L. Paulsen, a fringe candidate of the furriest variety from 1968 to 1996, proving that even the biggest losers sometime manage to influence the winners — even if no one knows (or wants to admit) that they’re doing it.

Filed under Government, Philosophy Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

The King of Tests Strikes Out

April 18, 2012 by 2 Comments

Our fabulous globetrotting daughter, Katelin, recently expressed an interest in taking the Foreign Service Exam this summer as she looks forward to college graduation in 2013. I totally applaud her interest in this most excellent course of career paths, even though it reminds me of a less-than-stellar chapter in my own life, which I wrote about in 2003 for a print outlet in Albany. I reproduce my article on this topic below, with a few updates, in hopes that my own spawn (and everyone else) can learn from my experience . . .

Once upon a time, I was the King of Tests. I was a marginal student, at best, and would generally spend more time and effort trying to get out of studying or doing work than it would have taken to actually do the work — but any time anyone put any sort of standardized test in front of me, the vast seething library of arcana and noise that’s rattled around in my head since childhood would suddenly click to order, files and data organizing themselves for the dump, and the test would be mine.

Lest you have any doubts about how test driven our society is, let me assure you that a marginal work ethic and high test scores carried me further than most of my hard-working, low-testing peers. Elementary school standardized tests placed me in a variety of gifted and talented classes, where we spent all sorts of quality creative thinking and processing and analyzing time that masked the fact that we really were working far less hard and having far more goof-off time than the kids in the regular classes. Junior high aptitude tests indicated to guidance counselors that I was college track material, and advanced placement tests later ensured that when I got to college, that I would be able to skip all sorts of typical first and second year courses.

And the SAT’s? Oh, the SAT’s! My SAT scores, with no advance effort to prepare whatsoever, overcame tepid grades and a marginal extracurricular record to get me admitted to one of the most prestigious colleges in America, where I spent four years as the King of Cram, leading a posse of like-minded slugs in the “Late Night Study Club,” packing just enough information into our heads to barf it onto the test forms the following mornings. And then we slept. After college, I spent a year in a postgraduate program, drinking and sleeping and drinking and sleeping, only occasionally coming up for air to take the tests that would get me selected for a prestigious position in a high profile government organization in Washington, DC.

When that gig was winding down, my girlfriend and I decided that we would take the Federal Foreign Service Examination together and, once we passed it with flying colors, we would jet off for an exciting, cosmopolitan life abroad, doing our best royalty waves at the natives, eating in the world’s finest restaurants on expense accounts, hobnobbing with the intelligentsia, and sleeping really, really often and well. My girlfriend, being a serious academic sort, did all sorts of research into the Foreign Service Exam, took sample tests, boned up on political science and economics and history, talked to people who had taken and passed the test. I, on the other hand, slept really, really well the night before the exam — figuring that if all night cram sessions had work well for me all those years, then a “well rested, well tested” approach should really reap spectacular dividends.

The test itself seemed no harder or easier than any other standardized test that I’d ever taken, and I was one of the first in the room to finish, not bothering to go back and check my work since, hey, I never went back and checked my work. My girlfriend, on the other hand, worked diligently through the entire testing period, while I sat thinking patronizing thoughts about how cute it was when she worked so hard on things.

Six weeks or so passed, and my girlfriend called me at my office to tell me that, yay, she had gotten the results of the examination, and she had passed! I congratulated her, and congratulated myself, since (to my mind) the only thing that could have caused us to not spend our lives jetting around the world together was for her to have failed the test. I was so glad that her hard work and preparation had paid off, and that our lives would now unfold the way we’d planned them — and I told her that.

Wait . . . you are supposed to PREPARE for this test?!?! Whoa!!!!

But I’d spoken too soon, since when I got home that night and opened my own test results, I discovered to my shock, horror and dismay that I had not passed the Foreign Service Examination. In fact, I had not even gotten close to passing the Foreign Service Examination. I had failed in a fairly spectacular fashion, and now I had to call my girlfriend and eat crow of a variety that I’d never tasted, with a healthy slab of humble pie for dessert.

And I had to reassess two basic personal premises in my life. Firstly, I could no longer waltz in to a standardized exam setting without preparation and have it carry me forward to whatever next step I had in mind. And second, and perhaps more profoundly, I had to stop acting like I was the smartest person that I knew  — because a lifetime of tests telling me that I was in the 99th percentile of this or the top decile of that had imbued me with an arrogance about my own intellectual capabilities that made me certain that I was always right.

So there I was, hoisted by my own hubris, planning a life that wasn’t possible because the King of Tests had struck out. The logical reaction, then, perhaps would have been to take the test again and redeem myself as Lord of All That I Multiple Guessed, but my reaction was, instead, to turn my back on such tests entirely for many, many years, to let my failure be the victor, to let that moment be a benchmark for a different approach to life.

So I didn’t take a standardized test or a college exam for 20 years after that day, and instead focused my energies on actually doing and learning things in practical, hands-on fashion, trying to earn tangible kudos rather than bluffing my way into paper victories. I didn’t become a Foreign Service Officer, but that didn’t stop me from traveling abroad, and bringing up my daughter to value the international experience as well.

And the girlfriend in the story? Well, I figured that the only way to deal with people who were much smarter than me was to stay very, very close to them, just to see what might rub off. We’ve been together for some 25 years now, and I’m still learning from her, gratefully . . .

Filed under Relationships, School, Work Tagged with , , , ,

I Like the Bee Gees

April 14, 2012 by 9 Comments

May 20, 2012 Update: Very sorry to hear of Robin’s passing today. Off to listen to “I Started A Joke” now. 

I am not ashamed to admit that I like the Bee Gees. A lot. And because of my affection for the group’s music, I was saddened to hear of Robin Gibb’s failing medical condition this week, just as his Titanic Requiem was being unveiled. Robin’s chin-quivering vibrato, earnest delivery, over-the-top lyrical and songwriting style, and charming penchant of singing with a finger stuck in one ear made him a truly delightful and unique stage presence. Check out this sublime live version of “I Started A Joke” if you don’t know what I’m talking about. He was a singer’s singer in his heyday, and an electrifying performer, in his own eccentric way.

I will admit that I rarely listen to the Bee Gees’ disco-era blockbuster albums Spirits Having Flown, Children of the World or Saturday Night Fever, since those discs really are relics of their time, and have not aged well. I’ll dance to them if I’m out a club and enjoy their songs in that context, but that’s about it. And after the hysteria that accompanied those albums, it seemed that the ensuing flame-out that accompanied the Bee Gees’ ill-conceived Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band film permanently knocked Robin, Maurice and Barry off their stride, and I don’t think they ever made a truly, consistently great record after their pop supernova imploded. Which is sad, since the bile and abuse heaped upon them when disco died was truly unfair and undeserved.

My favorite Bee Gees album.

All that being said, the 13 studio albums that the Brothers Gibb issued before their disco trilogy still make for very enjoyable, very rewarding, and very high-quality listening, for the most part, and they play often in our household, since all three of us enjoy them. The Bee Gees were once performing prodigies with great taste, covering the Beatles on television before Beatlemania had really reached their own antipodean corner of the planet. If you haven’t seen them singing “Please, Please Me” in 1963, then you need to. The 1976 Bee Gees Gold compilation album provides a good summary of most of their hits (in America, or elsewhere) between their precocious Australian era and the disco trilogy, but it doesn’t do justice to the depth of their distinctive catalog through those years. All their albums from that period deserve a hearing, even 1970′s Cucumber Castle, recorded without Robin when he briefly quit the group for a solo career.

The Bee Gees albums I listen to the most these days are To Whom It May Concern (1972) and Main Course (1975). The first is something of an obscurity in the U.S. at this point, since it only spawned one semi-hit (“Run to Me”), but it really is an important disc in their canon, as it marks the last record they made with Bill Shepherd, their producer since 1967, and has often been cited by the Brothers Gibb and critics alike as a farewell to the old Bee Gees sound. It offers an incredibly wide range of song styles and moods, and the material is exceptionally strong and well performed. Closing track “Sweet Song of Summer” is one of the weirdest things in their catalog, a nearly tribal/ambient chant with a fabulous Moog solo by Maurice. Highly recommended.

Main Course was the last album before the Bee Gees’ disco trilogy, and it features three hit songs (“Jive Talkin’.” “Fanny Be Tender With My Love” and “Nights on Broadway”) that casual after-the-fact listeners might assume came from the Saturday Night Fever era. But this disc managed to integrate the Bee Gees’ earlier vocal and songwriting styles into a sleek American R&B format without crossing the line into precious disco period cheese, and it remains a high-water mark in the group’s catalog. It’s a pity that this album often gets tarred with the same brush that so easily paints the records that followed it. Check out this live clip of “Nights on Broadway” to see what a great band these guys were at that point in their career, with Maurice on bass and Barry on guitar. It’s masterful, truly, and it’s interesting to see that the high-end vocal parts were being handled by Maurice, just before Barry’s falsetto became the quintessential hallmark of the disco-era Bee Gees sound. I also think that this song should be taught in music theory classes, as the prolonged “I will wait, even if it takes forever/a lifetime” bridge is such a dynamite tension-builder, a perfectly counter-intuitive example of exactly how to kick a song into a higher gear by slowing it down for a spell. Brilliant!

So I’m going to queue those two albums up on the iPod tonight, as wild plains weather roars outside here in Iowa, and think good and kind thoughts about Robin Gibb. I wish him a full recovery, but if that is not to be, then I also hope that when his time comes, he flies away peacefully and painlessly in the presence of his loved ones. He made a lot of people happy in his lifetime, me among them, and I’m not really sure that there’s any better legacy for a man to leave behind than that.

Filed under Music Tagged with , , , , , ,

The Lifestyle You Deserve

April 11, 2012 by Leave a comment

1. Save the date, if you’re in or near Des Moines: I (and many others) will be speaking at the 140 Characters Conference at the Stoner Theater on April 23. I had originally planned to tell the Motley Crue is the Worst Rock Band Ever story,  but given my new gig at Salisbury House, I think I’m going to shift my talk to discuss the ways that the technology of now can help facilitate transitions from point A to point B, either in a tourism mode, or in a permanent relocation situation. For me, the protest-launched Indie Albany spawned the more benign Indie Moines, which allowed me to use virtual resources to connect very quickly with an amazing pool of talented creative folks here in Iowa, and that played a direct role in landing my current job. Though, you know, I probably will still try to work in a couple of Nikki Sixx and Mick Mars jokes, just as a point of principle.

2. Speaking of blogging and Iowa, I have steadily been adding Iowa-based blogs to our links section (down there in the right-hand margin), but I feel that I should add an in-line shout-out to some of them, including:

  • Art Beacon Des Moines: A fantastic collection of passionate regional artists, who love sharing their enthusiasm for the local arts community, which is powerful, talented, and profound. One of the founders of this site, Rachel Buse, also has a great blog of her own, documenting her exceptional creative vision, here.
  • Daily Disgust: This blog is to Iowa what Keyboard Krumbs is to New York . . . stellar, tight, insightful writing on a wide-ranging pool of topics, delivered with just the perfect leavening of snark, humor and pathos. A must-read for me, daily, because I like to wallow in the disgust.
  • Des Loines: I have written about this blog before, but I am so awed by the author’s commitment to sampling Iowa’s myriad of pork tenderloin sandwiches, that I feel compelled to applaud it again.
  • Des Moines is NOT Boring: It really isn’t. Honest. But now that I am here, and happy about that fact, I plan to tell everyone back East how dull and awful it is, just so others don’t follow and mess things up. So don’t read this blog. Seriously. Stop it. Shoo!
  • Iowaves Music Blog: If you’ve known me for more than 18 minutes, then you know how passionate I am about (a) good music in general, and (b) good music made by my neighbors. This website does a fantastic job of documenting that second category, and I’m using it heavily as I work to get my hands around the music scene out here. One early observation: there are more rock bands with horn sections in Iowa than any other state I’ve ever lived in. I don’t know what this means, yet, though I suspect Iowaves will help me understand.
  • A Love Letter to a New Year: Strong writing, a deliciously experiential creative sense, and an infectious energy define this blogger’s online love story with a very specific 365-day window in her life. I don’t often wax nostalgic for years gone by, though the zest of this blog makes me consider doing so occasionally. Then I eat some prunes and pop a “Starsky and Hutch” tape in the Betamax player, and all is right with the world again.
  • Sugarwords: I am not 100% certain that this is actually an Iowa blog, though many posts bear “Iowa” tags. But wherever it’s based, I love the edgy short-story narratives, which remind me of the “Play In One Act” series that was created collaboratively on Upstate Wasted and Upstate Ether many years ago, and now resides on Indie Moines, just because I think it deserves to be preserved for posterity’s sake, whoever actually wrote the various pieces of the collection. I’m pretty sure Indie Albany’s S. Connick was one of the anonymous perpetrators, for what that’s worth, though he will probably deny it.
  • Take Betsy With You: An excellent travel-oriented site by a great writer, who uses her formidable story-telling skills to craft great tales from the road, be it a country one in Iowa, or a major freeway (or flyway) somewhere else, far, far away.

3. I am a deeply-committed music geek (as if that’s not obvious enough, duh), and there are very few things in my life that don’t feature background tunes when they’re happening. There is one major exception to this rule, though, and that would be cycling. I am pretty serious about the act of getting on a bike and taking to the road, or the trail, or the hidden deep-woods zones, and I never, ever, ever, never, ever do anything when I am on a bike that impedes my already damaged hearing, since the ability to perceive incoming sounds is a key to safely negotiating the path on a two-wheeled, self-propelled vehicle. So I always shake my head disapprovingly when I pass cyclists with headphones on, and have been doing so for many years. That’s dangerous and wrong. This year, however, I have been dismayed to discover a new source of sonic distraction on the bike trail: people riding with actual speakers on their bikes, so not only are they distracted from the dangerous world around them, but anyone else anywhere near them is also subjected to the tinny din of their trebly iPod-quality speakers. A few weeks ago, I was walking a trail with some family members, and the bucolic nature of our hike was disrupted three times by cyclists roaring up on us with speakers cranked, which (they seemed to believe) also mitigated the need for them to verbally notify us of their passage, via the courteous “on your left” or “bikes back” declarations that I always offer to pedestrians on the trail. Instead, we got bad Bon Jovi delivered with maximum volume and distortion, pushing us off the trail, and making conversation impossible until the owners of those odious musical rigs were well past us on the trail. This strikes me as a terrible evolution in the field of communal, public cycling, and I am hoping that these recent events are short-lived anomalies, though in my heart, I suspect they aren’t. I guess once you get to the point where you can carry on private conversations in public with a Bluetooth device stuck in your ear, then your ability to render courtesies to the other human beings within your sonic sphere atropies quickly, on foot or on bike. This seems a pity to me.

Filed under Albany, Communications, Iowa, Music, Sports, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , ,

← Older posts

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 27 other followers