Soul

Yesterday at the gym, I experimented with the concept of not using my iPod while hitting the weights circuit. I always feel like I’m missing out on something in the gym by wearing headphones, as I well know from my boxing class, where people interact and get to know each other. Well, nothing really happened. Like most people, I’m there to work out above all else, not to meet people. Weightlifting, like the cardio machines, is not a group exercise: you’re on your own.

But what really struck me, as I’m also well aware of via the too-loud PA system in the locker room, was how god awful their music is. I’d gather that as a gym chain, they’re using some prescribed service aimed at their marketing demo (which I’m assuming is 25 to 40, although with an emphasis on 25 as people want to feel “younger” when they work out). Their version of classic rock is No Doubt, Creed and The Goo-Goo Dolls. But a vast majority of what they play is Top 40 pop music, leaning towards club/dance music, erased of hiphop to avoid bad words. It really sucks – the music isn’t awful, per se. It’s just bland, limp, totally devoid of creativity or substance. Top 40 now is worse than ever, and from the 70s onwards, it’s been pretty bad in general.

Soul-less. That’s the quality occurred to me most. I always thought it would be a great idea for gyms to allow the membership to upload MP3 files into their sound system, like a jukebox for people as they work out, chosen by the people. But I gather doing so would be a licensing nightmare and nigh on impossible. Take my word for it – the ear buds are going back in next time I hit the weight circuit! If I make eye contact with some hottie on the seated bench press machine, just write it down to a nice moment while I listen to The Beatles, or Hank Williams, or Chuck Berry, or Supertramp, or The Ramones.

Or any number of other great artists who will never be on the gym P.A. system. Like Otis Redding. I’ve been on a bit of an Otis kick the past few days, tracking down missing songs from his canon that I have mostly covered with a Rhino four-disc box set. It’s got me thinking I need to re-vamp my abbreviated 60s Soul output on the iPod, as I had originally played it very close to the vest when uploading tracks on my more space-limited Nomad player.

I think it would also make a nice read to describe how I got into soul music in the first place, since I wasn’t raised with that appreciation, to say the least. White kids in rural America in the 70s were pretty much into pop and rock music, and nothing else. Soul music was around us, but I remember that being more of a Top 40 singles thing as opposed to a deep, abiding appreciation. Stevie Wonder stands out in my mind. You couldn’t avoid hearing multiple songs from Songs in the Key of Life when it first came out, and for two years after. I somehow willed myself not to like it (while later realizing the guy was a genius, and this was his crowning moment). That horn-section intro to “Sir Duke” … you play that now, and I think summer 70s.

Al Green, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, Barry White … all these artists were going full gun in the first half of the 70s. Including Wonder, the only physical product I had at the time from any of them was the 45 of “Got to Give It Up (Pt. 1)” by Gaye, and White grumbling the romantic intro to “Kiss and Say Goodbye” by The Manhattans. White artists like The Bee Gees registered with songs like “Jive Talkin” and “Nights on Broadway.” It’s important to mention them, because with the dawn of disco, unfortunately for dumb kids with zero sense of history, that sense of soul music being tied in with that format sort of killed the idea of appreciating soul music in any form for a LONG time afterwards.

Which was a shame, but I think that’s a fair assessment, and not entirely racist. Disco got to be pretty disgusting, pretty fast. Not so much the music itself, more so the sense of lifestyle and party-guy emptiness tied in with it. Its presence was smothering. And all these great soul artists had a choice – veer in that direction or fade away. So disco, in effect, did co-opt soul music, roundabout the mid-70s. (You can argue that Barry White always was disco, but I’d put him more in category of very tasteful, inventive disco, like a lot of it was before it became such a massive cultural phenomenon.) You can see the same culturally stifling shift with hiphop, which has decimated other strains of “black” music in terms of popularity in an extremely negative, empty way. My age-old gripe, of course, was disco lasted less than a handful of years while hiphop has had a stranglehold for close to two decades. To someone who was raised with the concept of pop music culture shifting every few years, this sort of creative stasis is mystifying, and depressing. (I gave up on all this shit by 1995, when it became obvious major record companies were pile-driving hiphop and not looking for any new growth areas, save shitty boy bands and pop idols. We’ve been in that same grotesque mid-90s doldrums ever since.)

But getting back to soul music, I had very little knowledge of it as a kid. Again, as noted, singles. “The Bertha Butt Boogie” by The Jimmy Castor Bunch. “Jungle Boogie” by Kool and the Gang. Even early disco like “Doctors Orders” by Carol Douglas. Stuff like that registered, but 60s soul? I think Motown was the most prevalent at the time, but that was pretty much played only on Oldies stations, despite being only a decade (or less) old. I think my first stirrings with soul came with buying a huge Motown singles box set in my freshman year of college, which would be 1982. The one Motown song that would always slay me when I heard it on the radio was “I Can’t Help Myself” by The Four Tops – eventually realized that I just had to have it. I recall that box set being incredibly cheap for what it offered – dozens of Motown hits.

It was cheap for a reason: all the songs were ruined by “historical” spoken-word intros by DJs and the artists that spilled into the first minute of each song. It was fucking terrible … but I could still recognize how great the music was. In my mind, I used that box set as a bookmark, figuring that one day I’d buy this stuff again without those shitty introductions (and I surely did … a few times over on vinyl and CD). When I went to Penn State’s main campus for my junior year, the used bins at the time had those incredible two-album Motown artist retrospectives, and that’s where I got the full blast of Motown, picking up sets by The Four Tops, The Temptations, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross & the Supremes, etc. I bought those things like candy, and they were great.

This might be embarrassing to admit, but my real immersion into soul music came with a John Hughes movie: Pretty in Pink. If you recall, there was a scene where Ducky, the nerd played by Jon Cryer, dances around a record store to the tune of Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness.” I was floored … not by Cryer, but by the song. I had no idea it was a classic covered by many artists from the Big Band era on. (And I can only imagine how revolutionary Otis’ version must have sounded at the time.) I rushed down to the nearest record store, which was the shitty National Record Mart chain on the main drag, and stumbled upon a greatest hits package for Otis in the shit bin for $3.00. I spent the rest of that week burning that song in particular into my brain.

That kicked open the doors to that great Atlantic Rhythm & Blues series that came out in two-album volumes covering the entire 60s. I’ve found the series was released just before this time period for me (late 1985/early 1986), but now that I was aware of what I was missing out on, I jumped in head first, spending all my money on nothing but them and various Motown compilations. It’s safe to say that the first half of 1986, I listened to nothing but soul music, and most of it was revelatory, stuff I had never heard before that simply blew my doors off.

It was my habit to buy one of those Atlantic sets a week, record the whole thing to cassette, and if I was driving back home that week (a two-hour drive on a Friday night), blast that as I barreled through the woods lining Route 80 all the way. I don’t know if that’s the best way to appreciate soul music, but it worked wonders for me, with a 7-11 Cherry Coke Big Gulp between my legs and the wind whipping through the windows. I drove a yellow AMC Hornet station wagon: badass.

Can’t say too many people shared my enthusiasm! Most of my college friends were headlong into indie music, which was a huge college thing at the time (still is, I’m sure). My old friend PG from the paper did have a pretty solid soul collection, but mainly because she was older and actually bought those records when she was a teenager in the late 60s. Back home? Man, forget it. I think Brother J developed an appreciation for the harder-edge soul songs like “Soul Man” and “Mustang Sally,” but most of it didn’t register with anyone back there.

The oddest connection I made with soul music came one New Years Eve in the late 80s, I’m thinking 12/31/86. Having recently returned from Venice, CA with my tail between my legs, an aborted attempt to strike out on my own, but things just didn’t go well out there, staying with recent college friends on the verge of dumping each other. I was surely at loose ends that winter, the employment situation being awful in rural PA. It wouldn’t be until that fall that I’d move to NYC and get a new start – that period when college ends and your adult life really hasn’t begun can be a genuinely spooky time, or at least was for me.

I had no plans for New Years Eve (which I’ve since realized is the best plan), so neighbor JB put forth that we head out to the Millman’s house out the road, as he’d been invited to a small get-together there. I knew Mr. Millman’s kids, a guy a year behind me at school who was a nice kid, and his two daughters who were slightly older than I was, both hot. I knew Mr. Millman himself from my Little League days, as he coached his son’s team and seemed like a good guy in general, one of the more rational, friendly coaches.

So, we drove out there, and Mr. Millman greeted us at the door … in a prison guard uniform. I had no idea the guy worked at the local federal prison that had just opened up. His being a Little League coach, and a respectable one at that, had conditioned me to seeing him as a staunch authority figure. Which I’ve since learned isn’t a hard number to run on kids. If you are an adult, and you act like one, kids will treat you as one. But … the dude was a prison guard? Man, it made no sense. On top of which, I had a mental image of prison guards being large, nasty guys with attitudes. Mr. Millman was one of the nicest guys you could ever meet, and well under six feet and trim. I’d have expected him to be a guidance counselor, or insurance agent, or something like that.

“Yeah, got double shift at the prison starting at midnight, come on in, guys,” he said with a smile. I should have guessed Mr. Millman wasn’t some executive type just by his house, which was your average small two-story place that must have felt cramped with five people in it. We came in, and his two daughters were there with their boyfriends, along with a few other guys I knew from high school, but wasn’t really friends with. It wasn’t an awkward night, although it was strange to learn that a kid who had positioned himself as a bad boy in school made a batch of toll house cookies that was pretty good. With their father there, the girls were on good behavior. Alcohol consumption was reduced to a few beers, a few glasses of wine. I’ve surely had worse New Years – this one was sedate and pleasant in an odd way.

The night was moving right along when Mr. Millman excused himself and went into the next room. The whole time, he was in his prison guard’s uniform, not sure why he got dressed hours before his shift started. I heard the telltale ker-chunk of an eight track tape being popped into a player. Believe me, that’s a sound I haven’t heard in years, but must have heard thousands of times in the early 80s. Seconds later, it was Otis Redding singing “I Can’t Turn You Loose.” Jesus Christ, that was the last thing I had expected visiting a prison guard in rural Pennsylvania. Then I thought about it. Mr. Millman must have been in his early 20s in the late 60s, so this could have easily been “his music” from that time.

The girls looked at each, than ran off into the other room. I looked in. These two hot girls, a few years out of high school, were dancing with their father in his prison guard uniform, to Otis Redding. And I mean cutting loose, doing all those 60s dances: the Mashed Potato, Hully Gully, The Bird, The Pony, etc. They knew them all. And I could see they had their moves down, i.e., Mr. Millman must have raised his kids teaching them these dances and giving them an appreciation for 60s soul music. And that’s pretty damn interesting, for a guy whose lot in life was to be a prison guard, in a place where, I can guess fairly accurately, there must have been times he popped in that eight track and got, “Get that nigger music off the stereo” in reply.

It was a cool little moment that’s stuck with me years later. I remember him waving me over to dance, and I blew it off, mainly because I didn’t know how, and I didn’t want either of the boyfriends, both former badasses, getting uptight about me. But those three stayed in that room the rest of the night, winding it out to Otis, and I guess that’s a pretty good way to ring in any new year. Of course, Mr. Millman would later put on his tie, grab his hat, and drive through the snowy night to the federal prison to pull his shifts. But such was his spirit that you could meet him after the shifts, and he’d no doubt be just as friendly and open as he always was.

I’ve since realized that there wasn’t a lot of difference between soul and country back in the 60s. Sure, the fast/dancing songs were different, but when you listen to the ballads, the types of music are very similar, in ways that I find encouraging. And in ways that no longer seem to exist, once hiphop flooded over everything and demanded a sharp turn towards all things black as opposed to sharing any kind of common ground with more white musical influences. A real shame, but that’s how the times went, even when disco rolled around. I recall reading a passage in a book where the few white musicians in the Stax/Volt studios in Memphis tried to walk around the neighborhood after Martin Luther King was assassinated, they could feel something was way off, and their presence was no longer welcome there. So maybe it goes back even that far, to the death of the 60s in some sense with cataclysmic events like that. A real shame, but as I learned that New Year’s Eve back in the mid-80s, and in my own life as I grew to love 60s soul, all was not lost.

The Phillies T-Shirt

I don’t have kids, and that’s a real mixed bag. I can plainly see people having a blast with their kids and can recall many cool moments from my own childhood. But once you get into teenage years, it seems like every kid is a dice roll, and you’ll often find snake eyes and seven in the same family, sometimes the same kid over the span of a few years. It’s occurred to me more recently that one of the ulterior motives in having kids could be having someone to take care of (or at the least watch out for) you in your old age. But from what I’m seeing, that’s far from a given, and you run equal chances of being shunted off to a nursing home, with the requisite awkward quarterly visits, or simply resented for not batting a thousand with your kids.

It must be like anything else in life: not what you expected, in good and bad ways. I have two friends now going through stressful situations with their almost-grown sons, which I will not get into to avoid embarrassing them, suffice to say it’s all shit no one planned on and a load to deal with for each. Hard stuff that represents a sharp, hazardous turn in their lives they’re going to have to take to move forward, and no one knows where that new road is going.

There’s one thing I’ve gleaned from their problems: kids, more specifically teenagers, tend to be fucking idiots. There, I said it. Makes me crotchety and old? So be it. When I’m made aware of the arrogance and stupidity that some kids walk around with, the kind that would get me killed or shunned like the plague as an adult, I just shake my head and hope it’s a maturity issue that will be out-grown one day. I know it’s not an “old age” issue, because I can clearly remember my friends and I being just as idiotic and immature.

We’ve constructed this shrine to youth in our culture, which has to be about the most empty thing we’ve done in my lifetime: empty because the building of it has entailed painting the act of aging as a crime, when most sane cultures throughout history recognize it as a good thing, at a minimum. I’ve recognized it in my own life. I wouldn’t call it getting better. But I’ve found that if I keep my eyes open and try to make sense of the things going on around me, generally based on experience, there’s a sense of reason I never had as a kid, or well into my 20s, that makes me feel self assured and hopeful. Aging and moving with time are blessings, not crimes of nature for which we must feel like imbeciles because the bulk of pop culture is aimed at making kids feel like temporary gods. Like many lies in life, it’s a shallow money grab once you peel away the layers.

I can recall one particular instance with my Mom where I did something that may not strike you as horrific, but still cuts me to the core because I sensed how hurt she was. I’ve been a Philadelphia Phillies fan since the early 70s. I’m from northeast Pennsylvania: Philadelphia was the nearest big town, thus I’ll always be a Philly fan in all sports. I grew up with this and could never abandon it; I’ll never trust sports fans who aren’t tied to a team by childhood geography, unless they have a very good reason. Usually that comes down to kids glomming onto winning teams. Not me. The Phillies sucked donkey balls for years when I started following them, as did the Eagles in football.

This must have been 1978 or so, my mid-teen years. Early summer, probably right about now season-wise. The Phillies were just starting to get good as a team, with guys like Steve Carlton and Mike Schmidt hitting their professional stride. Mom knew how much I loved the Phillies, and while she was out shopping one day, came across a Phillies t-shirt that she thought I would love. A basic white t-shirt, with that big fat 70s Phillies “P” in the middle, with the word Philadelphia on top in red letters, and Phillies on the bottom. A very basic look, which she thought would suit me fine.

She brought it home for me, apropos of nothing. Not my birthday, hadn’t done anything to merit her surprising me with a gift. Just the kind of thing a good mother would do for her son because that’s what good mothers do. She comes through the door, and I’m lazing on the couch, watching TV. I got a surprise for you, she says, and pulls out the t-shirt, smiling. I take one look at the shirt and blurt out, I hate it, I’m never going to wear it.

I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking. But I can still remember my verbatim response to this day, and the look on her face, which went from a warm smile to a look that implied I just shot her through the heart. It wasn’t just hurt. It was hurt and pissed off. That she took the time and money to think about me, and like the spoiled kid I could be at times, it just didn’t register. On top of the lack of manners to not just graciously accept the gift. I remember she dropped the shirt on the floor, shook her head, tears welling up in her eyes, and walked away.

The thing was, when I picked up the shirt a few minutes later, after pretending it wasn’t even there, it suddenly occurred to me that I liked it. I really liked it. Sure enough, I’d go on to wear that shirt constantly, until I out-grew it a few years later. And I never apologized to her for the way I acted. Put it in context. Slightly too young to drive, so that meant I had to tag along with Mom when she went to the mall. Kids at that age tend to be resentful that they’re still that dependent on their parents. I’d make sure when we were in the mall that we weren’t walking together, lest one of my equally emotionally-stunted friends saw us walking together, and what would they think of me walking with my Mom. I was willing my parents NOT to exist because doing so acknowledged that I was still a kid.

And … I … was … such … a … fucking … idiot. That incident shames me to this day. You have to understand, my mother is a saint. I don’t mean that in a corny mother-son way. I mean that whenever she goes, hopefully not for a long while, a lot of people are going to come up to me and tell me she was a saint – and mean it. Always a kind word for everyone she meets. Friendly to everyone. Everyone who has ever met her has later told me they couldn’t believe how kind she was … and I could tell my friends were impressed that I had such a good person as a mother. There have been many stray dogs and cats who lived much longer than expected because she pulled them off the streets and fed them for awhile. I can guarantee you that the times in my life where I stumble upon or make genuine efforts at random acts of compassion, that’s simply me trying to be more like Mom. Because I know she got that right in life, and things go a lot easier when you show people kindness. (Women seem to grasp this concept a lot more readily than men do. But I’m trying!)

I can still recall those warped years where every ounce of common sense I now have regarding parents and kids was turned on its head, and I acted like a complete asshole more than a few times. When I think that sort of baseless cultural shame of acknowleding your parents’ authority has been woven into teen culture over the past few decades, it makes me sick. Forget about out-growing it – it should be something you never experience, unless you're unfortunate enough to have bad parents. I had plenty of time as a teenager to develop my own identity – much more time than kids are allowed to do so today, what with cellphones serving as dog leashes, and parents monitoring their kids’ whereabouts and actions as if they were on parole. We were set free like wild animals in the 70s, in comparison. I had much more time and freedom to get into shit if I so desired. Much more time on my own or with my friends to get into whatever questionable behavior. To think I couldn’t cut my Mom some slack and walk with her for 15 minutes in a shopping mall is a tribute to the arrogance of my youth.

I have a lot more respect for cultures of the past, or even other cultures in the world now, where there are no artificial dividing lines purposely drawn between generations. We should all realize this junk is mostly the product of post-World War II American popular culture which has surely imparted some very cool things on the world, but this unfortunate stance aint one of them. I think I’d be a lot more prone to having kids if I knew I could raise them to disregard this cancerous crap, to live like a family where we’re going to have each other’s backs, no matter what age we are, or what little gripes and personal scrapes come up along the way. From what I’m seeing these days, again, it seems like so much in the world conspires against that basic foundation. And from what I’m seeing, too, if you’re going through life without that sort of foundation, it’s often by the seat of your pants and getting the shit knocked out of you routinely.

This is small beans, I know, in terms of mistreatment and bad memories. Plenty of people out there with angrily divorced parents, missing and errant parents, sometimes horribly abusive, etc. It gets a lot worse than a grown man remembering an incident decades earlier where he treated his Mom like an asshole. I guess that’s about as bad as I got, or at least I don’t recall giving Mom or Dad worse grief than that as a kid. Either way you cut it, if you’re smart, you make up lost ground in your adulthood, and make amends with these people, or at least see them as just people that you can hopefully befriend in some sense. They’re always your parents, but it helps if you can see them as people, too, and recognize they didn’t pitch a perfect game. I’d imagine if you have kids, it must make even more sense to come to this place, because you’re seeing what an ordeal raising kids can be.

As for my friends, I wish them luck. I can see both of them sailing into this uncharted territory, and it doesn’t look like any fun for anybody. As an outsider, I can offer impartial advice and such (which I’m good at), but the reality is I don’t have to live with any hard decisions the way they will. It does help to see these things happen, though, because there it is, life itself in all its thorniness, as opposed to some paint-by-numbers picture of happiness. I wouldn’t even say I distrust that. When people try to portray their lives to me like that, I just roll along with it. Because that’s what they want me to see, whether it’s reality or a wish on their part. It’s probably a good bit of both, and there are worse things to wish for. I never ask people, “How are you?” – not because of bad manners. It’s because if they’re being honest, the answer will take about five minutes and have no easy response. I’d rather just accept the fact that if you’re conscious and walking upright, something’s going right in your life, despite having problems, as we all do.

Jay Bennett

I don’t know why, but whenever a musician passes on who never got his full due while alive, I’m on it. The last time I felt this way was for Sean Costello, the young blues guitarist who was just starting to find his voice before checking out in a run-down hotel room in Atlanta. When Ronnie Lane passed on quietly in a small town in Colorado, that hit me like a thunderbolt, as I had spent the past few years discovering the great music he made after leaving The Faces.

And, now, Jay Bennett, formerly of Wilco, checks out far too early. Not sure if it was misadventure or on purpose, but I don’t think anyone’s scoring that too closely. He was a year older than I am, which I found shocking … thought he was much older than I was, or I was much younger. He always seemed so middle-aged, probably due to his body type and big head. He had one of those burly midwestern bodies and head, you could picture him in a pair of horn-rim glasses, a black leather hat with ear flaps and a big-ass Woolrich coat. Shoveling snow, or selling newspapers on the corner in Chicago, or bouncing a niece on his knee at a cookout. The dreadlocks were out of place on him, but that was his thing, to be this typically midwestern-looking guy who had a lot more going on.

Apparently, he was in the process of suing Wilco over the issue of royalties related to his appearance in the documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart which, let’s face it, has created this “story” about Jay and the band that will be his legacy. (Jay was also needing a lot of money for a long-delayed hip operation, without health insurance.) In the documentary, Jay is made out to be this mad genius, constantly smoking, who spends all his time in the studio and eventually gets too nuts for Jeff Tweedy to deal with, so he’s asked to leave the band. We never get to see this happening. Sure, there’s a scene where Jay’s fretting over an intricate segue between two of the songs, complete with Tweedy vomiting in the rest room when the tension over their disagreement on this issue boils over, but that didn’t seem all that harsh to me. If you know bands, you know that break-ups tend to result over a long period of fights and issues that make stuff like that passage seem like small change. Whatever caused Jay to be dumped from the band, we didn’t see it happening.

And that’s a shame, because Jay was responsible for pushing the band to its creative peak, with Summerteeth and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Only the band knows for sure, but both those album, Jay’s presence is all over them, whether as a songwriter, arranger, producer or musician. When he left the band, that musical density and greater pop sense disappeared with him. I still love the band, but you can hear what Jay meant to them when he left. This two-part interview from Glorious Noise – the first part letting Jay expound upon why he left and the second outlining exactly what he did on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot – gives excellent insight into just how integral his role was to the band.

I’m guessing his imprint was even larger on the previous album, Summerteeth, which many fans consider the band’s peak. I do, too, although I didn’t think much of the album at first. Brother J was a Wilco fan before I was, because of their alt country beginnings, but Summerteeth, he threw his hands up and said fuck these guys. Their previous album, Being There, was considered their creative breakthrough, and even then, Jay’s imprint was being felt in more loose/trippy arrangements. I know more than a few people who couldn’t stand this sort of “branching out” and thought the band was over-rated, but there are certain songs like “I Got You,” “Red Eyed and Blue” and “Dreamer in My Dreams” that are the sound of a band hitting its stride.

Jay leaves the band, and Tweedy veers Wilco into a more lean, less poppy direction. Which I still love. Every time I listen to Wilco, I feel like I’m listening to a guy, Tweedy, who really likes marijuana. Everything he does is trippy in a way suggesting that intelligent, but slightly askew take on the world so many heads have. But you can hear that pop sense Jay imparted greatly decreasing, and when Jay was with Wilco, he was writing material that’s about as good as pop music gets. Two songs in particular represent Jay’s creative peak.

“My Darling” from Summerteeth underlines the issues so many older Wilco fans had with the band: too much shit going on. I recall Brother J’s reaction to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot: “These guys are writing basic songs that sound fine and then lumping all this sonic shit on top of it to make it sound experimental.” Which he thought was bullshit, and sometimes it was. This was truly the case for “My Darling,” which was mostly Jay’s song, maybe all Jay’s song from what I gather, and if you want to hear the best version, try this one from his first post-Wilco album, The Palace at 4 am. Less is more in this case – I put this song on the same shelf as “Imagine” by John Lennon. It’s that good! To come up with a melody that basic that hasn’t been used before, to me, is a sign of someone who has the ability to function on a higher creative level than most musicians.

The absolute best, though is “California Stars” from Mermaid Avenue. I don’t know what Jeff Tweedy has to do with the song, and I suspect that asshole Billy Bragg just sat in a corner strumming an acoustic guitar. It’s my understanding that this was one of Jay’s song, too, with lyrics, of course, by Woody Guthrie. “California Stars” is one of those songs that defined the 90s for me, maybe the best song of the 90s, along with other songs like “Creep” and “Common People.” First time I heard that song, it made perfect sense: that sad, floating feel that did impart someone looking up at a night sky and wishing he was back in California. The lap steel work by Corey Harris is also outstanding, really makes the song.

Those two songs alone put Jay Bennett on a higher plane for me. He didn’t stop making music after Wilco either, putting out solid solo albums that had flashes of the same brilliance. Try “My Little Wicked One” and “Hank,” which now takes on new meaning. I hadn’t known it at the time, but Jay’s musical presence was in my life back in the early 90s. Brother J had read a review of the band Titantic Love Affair that compared them favorably to The Replacements, with their first album having a cover designed by Chris Mars. “Planet Strange” was their big song, and they weren’t quite The Replacements. I never warmed up to that album; it just wasn’t on quite the same level. Still, that’s Jay Bennett, skulking under his straggly hair in the background. I think Brother J still has that CD back home in his rack, although I’ll bet he hasn’t looked at it, much less played it, in years.

His legacy will always be the work he did with Wilco which, of course, will be tainted by the negative vibe attached to his departure. I’m watching I Am Trying to Break Your Heart right now, and it still seems like Jay got a raw deal, although, again, none of us have any idea what went down between him and Jeff to blow things apart. Like most bands, Wilco seems like a strange beast, full of guys jockeying for position and “yes men-ing” it to maintain status quo in that floating perception of power within the band. Which never seems real until you’re thrown out on your ass. I gather being in a band is like being in a reality TV show, like Survivor, where you can tell yourself this isn’t real, but it is. I would never do these things in my real life, you tell yourself … but this is your real life. The camera following you around is your fame, your image, and it’s always watching you and influencing how you act. I don’t think Tweedy or Wilco are bad people at all – quite the opposite. But I’d gather they’re a bit fucked up, like all bands are, which is what happen when you travel around for years in a bubble with the same people all the time.

But poor Jay punches his ticket over the Memorial Day weekend. He deserves better than to be thought of as some talented crank who talked his way out of a great band. He wasn’t full of shit regarding his place in the band, as it became evident how important he had been when he left, and the band’s direction took a sharp turn. Summerteeth will be like summer itself, representing a time and place that stays the same while you go on, or don’t go on. Man, Jay looks like hell in this documentary, constant cigarette, hangdog face, clearly some kind of drug usage going on. Ditto Tweedy, they look like hell. But that hell they put themselves through left behind some great music. I don't doubt Jay was a pisser to work with, but the end results speak for themselves. Hats off, Jay.

Forgetting How to Ride a Bike

I haven’t been to a high-school reunion in a few years, think the 20th was the last. The 25th didn’t happen – apparently not enough interest. The old class seems to function better on the zero years, and 10 years is a nice round number to see people again. But this isn’t about high-school reunions, per se.

I commented a few weeks back about Facebook – the concept of our lives turning into permanent high-school reunions by constantly keeping in contact with people from our past. When I first moved to New York, and even now, it felt important to me to maintain contact with people “back home.” Some people move to cities to leave their pasts behind, but that always struck me as foolish. You can’t escape it. Whatever you were there, you’ll still be that here, no matter how hard you try to bullshit yourself. New York is crawling with douchebags – a lot of them were born and raised here. And you get that certain kind who moved here, who would be chased out of any town where more than a small circle of acquaintances and coworkers knew who they were. They move here to escape, not realizing they can’t escape themselves, that it’s not where they’re from, it’s who they are that’s so troubling.

Going back home these days implies knowing a lot less people: a handful of old friends and immediate family members. This has been the case for a long time now. There was that era in my 20s where there were still plenty of other guys in their mid-late 20s at relatively loose ends (unmarried, going to bars, etc.), but that scene faded out over time as people either got married or moved away. I go back home to clear my head out for a few days in a rural area as much as anything else. But it’s still important to me to maintain that connection. What something like Facebook would do is point out numerous, maybe dozens of, other people back there whom I’ve lost contact with and put them back in my life in some respect.

While that would feed my ego in terms of hang-out options, I’d also have to wonder how genuine it all was. I don’t crave having dozens of people I’ve lost touch with pushed back into my life – the concept neither offends or appeals to me. It’s just not something I’d do on my own … so why have a website do it for me? I’d see through the ruse and realize this “homecoming” of sorts would be more a tribute to social networking websites than any real urge I had to know these people again. I’d rather a relationship developing like that be more organic – you meet someone by chance, hey, we still get along, let’s keep in touch, here’s my email address, etc. This is what high-school reunions are for: to meet with these people again, have some drinks, kick back, talk about old times, then all go our merry ways again for another 10 years.

I don’t think that particular social construct was meant to permeate our every-day lives. It’s a privacy issue at heart. Or maybe just relates to the kind of person you are. I’ve come across many people in New York offices who don’t seem to have any real sort of relationships: the ones they do appear to have are related purely to what the other person can do for them. That may sound mildly evil – it’s a way of seeing the world I’ve never quite accepted – but that’s just how some people are. They’re “networking” sort of people no one ever really gets to know. They don’t know you – they network you, in hopes that if they scratch your back, you’ll scratch theirs somewhere down the road.

And that odd way of seeing the world is in synch with horseshit like Facebook, Twitter and the Permanent High-School Reunion these things hope to perpetuate. You’ll never really get to know anyone, but you’ll “know” hundreds of people. In effect, everyone you know will be an acquaintance, and only in way that somehow serves your sense of well being, with little regard for theirs. It’s an extremely mercenary form of friendship that, as noted, I’m already familiar with via dealing with business people in NYC offices. The focus is on self, not on others, not on how self and others interact. It’s all about you, which is why this stuff gives me so much trouble. The ruse, the selling point, is that you’re building this wonderful world of people around you to help each other get through with life, when the reality is you’re only building a monument to insecurity.

What are real friends? That’s always a good question to ask. I look at my own life and can see how these situations change over the years. It’s obvious how it works when you’re a kid, and well into your 20s: these people are around you, you spend real time together, you go through a lot, most importantly, at times in your lives when you’re far more open to trust people and create lasting bonds that could run the rest of your lives. Before you get out on your own, you’re forced into these relationships simply because the people are physically there in your life, in the same house, or street, or town, or home room, or math class, etc. You find some like-minded individuals, and you bond, in ways that you think will last forever, but you’re not fully aware that the simple passing of time will push you in different directions, with some of these relationships ending, some going on.

It’s not as easy after that. You get exposed to the world; you move around in it. You see how genuinely awful some people are, and this taints your view of humanity. You become more careful with whom you trust. Some of the people you trust turn out to be awful; some would die for you. Some people you thought were assholes turn out to be all right. Most are varying mixes of both. Chances are good that the physical sense of everyone you know in your life being right around you will disappear – either they will, or you will, or you’ll just stop knowing each other once you no longer have reason to be in regular contact. Marriage, kids … things like this tend to take up people’s every waking hours on top of work. Some people will work like fiends, with time for nothing else.

That traditional way of defining friendship no longer applies to my adult life. Most of the people I know are spread out. Some back home in PA. Some are in NYC. Some were, but most moved around the general area, so that even being 30 miles outside the city represents a travel scenario that's a pain to deal with. My neighbors are pricks and weirdos for the most part – I’m not going to befriend them. It would be nice to meet people around where I live, but as noted, the casual trust that’s so abundant with kids fails me as an adult. I find it a lot harder to make real friends as I get older. They seem to spring up here and there through various circumstances, but again, the way these things go, it’s never in that traditional way.

I recall in the 80s TV show Thirtysomething, there were the friends in that age group, all living in the Philadelphia area, who always seemed to be constantly, and physically, in each other’s lives (not relatives either). I feel like seeing Joe. Hey, I’ll just get into my car and drive over to his house, and we’ll have some beers in his den!

Does your life work that way? Man, mine doesn’t! I have to make appointments days, more likely weeks, in advance to hang out with people, and half the time those plans get jumbled or tossed along the way. I get the impression if you, as an adult, live where you grew up, you do have a more built-in network of people constantly in your life. I also get the impression you wish you could kill some of these people, and both they, and the concept that you never moved, gets to you after awhile. I like the idea of portraying myself as a rural sort of guy, but part of that is being in a city and really appreciating certain aspects of that way of life (more space, less traffic, more greenery, etc.) … while conveniently ignoring certain aspects that would drive me nuts were I to live there all the time. This last trip, I couldn’t stop noticing how trashy so many people look back there these days: missing teeth, idiotic tattoos, dingus facial hair … and this was just the women. I’m usually against using a term like “white trash,” but man, there were a lot of trashy white people around! Much more than a decade ago, much less two. And these folks seemed to be not just self conscious over how grubby they were, but taking a perverse sort of pride in it, too. Soap, deodorant and toothpaste are your friends, folks!

Every so often, “Bob Dylan’s Dream” will come up on the iPod, and it always gets to me:

While riding on a train going west
I fell asleep for to take my rest.
I dreamed a dream that made me sad
Concerning myself an' the first few friends I had.

With half damp eyes I stared to the room
Where my friends and I spent many an afternoon.
Where we together weathered many a storm
Laughing and singing till the early hours of the morn.

By the old wooden stove where our hats was hung
Our words was told, our songs was sung
Where we longed for nothing and were satisfied
Joking and talking about the world outside.

With hungry hearts through the heat and cold
We never much thought we could get very old
We thought we could sit forever in fun
And our chances really was a million to one.

As easy it was to tell black from white
It was all that easy to tell wrong from right
And our choices they was few so the thoughts never hit
That the one road we traveled would ever shatter or split.

How many a year has passed and gone
Many a gamble has been lost and won
And many a road taken by many a first friend
And each one I've never seen again.

I wish, I wish, I wish in vain
That we could sit simply in that room again
Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat
I'd give it all gladly if our lives could be like that.

I guess these days with that group of friends, one would be Twittering on his iPhone, while another sends a text to someone he'd be meeting in five minutes, while another cuts off one who was talking to take a meaningless call, and the last two would be stone-faced in front a TV set with a Playstation for hours on end. None of them would give a shit about each other. Dylan wrote this in his early 20s, a time in which I knew what he was singing about, but never would have come near defining it as well. The song means a lot more to me now. Of course, I also think if you reunited those friends in a room with Dylan, he’d shuffle around uncomfortably, making goat sounds, and would excuse himself after five minutes. He longs for that feeling of seemingly endless stability and certainty more than the friends. Another song by Jonathan Richman, “That Summer Feeling,” hits the same nail on the head with the great line: “Do you long for her?/Or the way you were?”.

A few weeks ago, I youtubed my old high school and town names around that area, and came across this: two teenage girls goofing around to 60s songs on an iPod. What really struck me was that both girls had memorized the lyrics to ALL the songs, so they knew how to anticipate each line and silly mannerism. And they're listening to great pop music that's 40 years old! I can guarantee you, we weren't sitting around in the 70s with megaphones crooning Rudy Valee and Bing Crosby songs... but I think their love and appreciation of the music is a very cool thing.

It was also a nice little moment, documented for all time, the kind of moment you rarely have as adult, but seems like second nature when you’re growing up. Every high school reunion aspires to a drawn-out moment with the same feeling these girls have effortlessly clowning around in the living room on a boring Friday night. What happens to that feeling? I don't know, but it gets harder to find with passing time. Call it forgetting how to ride a bike.

Trash Weekend

I was going to call this one “White Trash Weekend,” but, as you'll read, that title wouldn’t have been all-encompassing. Back in my 20s, I used to get these “vibes” along the lines of “why is the world closing in on me,” generally based on a combination of minor things going off-kilter in my personal life, coupled with random events on the street or at work, that left me feeling like I was under some type of cosmic attack. I had somehow displeased the gods, as if Zeus was hurling thunderbolts at me.

Well, I’ve since written that sort of mental state down to self absorption. The world wasn’t spinning around me. Good and bad things happen to everyone all the time, the only recognizable pattern being that sometimes they will be caused by my previous thoughts or actions, i.e., you’re gonna’ reap what you sow. And the random things that happen just walking down the street are just that. Random. I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time and being exposed to douchebaggery, which never makes anyone feel good, but as I’ve learned, just keep moving, and that shit is gone. In other words, no reason to question why you’ve stumbled on a very minor, temporary losing streak for a few hours or days.

Friday started with the news that an old friend had been diagnosed with a severe disease, and that’s about all I’m going to say about that, because that’s about all I know at this point. Never good to hear news like that.

When I went to leave for work that morning, I took my usual glance down the side street to see if there’s anything I need to address on my landlord’s sidewalk: graffiti on her wall, garbage on her sidewalk, etc. Sure enough, there was garbage on her sidewalk. Upon closer inspection, the remnants of an informal party: two pizza boxes stuffed with uneaten crusts and about two dozen cigarette butts. Three empty six packs of Heineken. Various plastic bags with napkins, plastic cups and shit like that. Someone methodically made a neat little pyramid pile of all this junk, as if they were sitting in a car, everybody got done, very nicely put all their refuse in one spot on someone else’s sidewalk: how nice of them to be so thoughtful.

That’s pretty typical stuff for me to deal with – I get that immediate flash of anger (“what kind of wretch would knowingly dump garbage on someone else’s property?”), but sooner or later realize no one else is going to pick it up and throw it out but me, and if I don’t, the asshole Sanitation folks may very well ticket my landlord for that. At this point, I know the drill: deposit whatever’s there in the garbage bin and get over it, because it will happen again, and there’s not much I can do to stop it.

Rest of Friday was thankfully routine. Saturday morning, I wake up to what smells like burning plastic and rubber. A really harsh “this is not good” chemical smell. This part of Queens is routinely under attack by various toxic orders, usually of two kinds. One, a very sickly-sweet smell like burning maple syrup, or cow shit. The maple syrup smell has since been identified as some type of confections factory in New Jersey (!) wafting its odor over the entire New York City area, and the cow shit is a sewage treatment plant about a mile away that’s has had ongoing issues with a failing turbine. It must be hell to live right near that plant, but this entire part of Queens, you get “that smell” sometimes, and it’s foul. Welcome to New York … and this has grown into one of the more “exclusive” areas!

I never did found out what this smell was – if I had to guess, I’d go with one of our bozo, broken English neighbors who occasionally get up to some weird, illegal chemical disposal hijinx that people normally do in zoned areas of factories wearing space suits and respirators. Not a good smell to wake up to, and I never did find out where it originated. There must be a trailer park in Athens that’s spiritual home to some folks around here.

I get online and check out my home county newspaper to find that the gang of teenage creeps who beat to death an illegal immigrant in Shenandoah, PA have all been let off with a simple assault charge, i.e., a bunch of drunken kids in a mob got away with third-degree murder. Horrible stuff, makes me embarrassed for my home county. (Can’t write it down to a typically Shenandoah thing: the trial took place in Pottsville, the county seat, and presumably had jurors from all over the county.)

An unbelievable verdict. I know how court rooms work. A defense attorney’s job is to create reasonable doubt at every corner – the O.J. trial is a tribute to this. And if you get people dumb enough on a jury, they can be lead like sheep, i.e., made to feel they have to toe a defense attorney’s line of reasoning instead of recognizing a few basic truths. There’s a dead body in the street. Not suicide. A bunch of kids were seen by numerous witnesses beating this person before he died. No one denies this. They killed him. Want to get picky over minor issues of who delivered the final blow, or what color his sneakers were? Go ahead. Somebody got murdered. Someone is accountable. Only two kids were charged. From what I gather there were more than five kicking and stomping this guy as they yelled racial slurs. This is reality non one refutes. Courtroom reality is no one is to blame unless you can prove it without a shadow of a doubt; this form of reality blows, and our world would be chaos if it existed outside a courtroom. It's not justice; it's bullshit.

Shenandoah has always been a mess of a town, but this takes the cake. I have one friend who lives there (and I wish he’d move), but that’s all I’m ever going to have to do with that town from now on. Frankly, if there are demonstrations and riots all summer long, so be it. This is foul. What kind of message it sends to these assholes, I have no idea. I can only hope federal and civil cases are in the works.

And just when I’m getting myself into a nice “white racism/bad” lather, something else comes along to remind me jackasses come in every color. Later in the morning, I got into my usual routine: laundry, groceries, quick sweep up of the landlord’s sidewalk. My Saturday mornings tend to be pretty busy, nonstop activity once I get rolling. So, I’m out there cleaning up the sidewalk – an easy one this time, probably won’t be out there more than 15 minutes. As I’m doing so, two black kids, couldn’t be more than 13 or so, who had been playing basketball at the schoolyard next door come sauntering by.

From the corner of my eye, I can see that dumb walk long before they get near me. Walking very slow with their heads tilted back, frowns on their faces: they’re already mimicking the affectations and attitude of street trash. Just goofball kids who can’t even walk down the street without getting into shit. When I lived in the Bronx, I would see this transformation occur constantly – from a sweet/open 10-year-old to a fake wanna-be thug by 13. I can see the logic in adopting a stance like that as a defense against the world, but right there, that's admitting cowardice and defeat. You can’t face the world as you are, so you pretend to be something you’re not. Teenagers of all colors are prone to this sort of insecurity, and woe unto the numerous adults I’ve come across who never break through this shithead barrier.

As they get near, one of the kid pulls out a plastic bottle of some garbage concoction, looks pink, and it’s frozen. He makes a big show out of repeatedly smacking it against the wall along the landlords property (to break up the ice) … thinking in his mind that this is going to antagonize me into a confrontation. Got news for you, kid – if I’ve gone through years of black and hispanic kids spitting as I pass them on the street, you’re going to have to try harder than this to get me to hit you. Kids don't realize what adults are up against if they get caught beating some them on the street: not just various assault charges, but also child abuse charges, and in this case, probably some type of racial intimidation thrown in for good measure. It doesn’t serve my purpose to lay a finger on this kid; it could open up a very bad can of worms that could haunt me for years afterwards.

But the kids keep walking. Understand, this is all peripheral vision on my part – I’m not even looking at these kids. I didn’t see it, but at the far end of the sidewalk, the other kid drops a foot-long scrap of tin foil, obviously on purpose as he sees me out there sweeping, and thinks it would be cool to make “whitey” pick up after him, because he’s such a playah.

Can I tell you how many times I’ve come across this Dance of the Dumb in my travels in New York? Dozens and scores doesn’t do it justice: hundreds, if not thousands. Always the same attitude, the same “please hit me” vibe that, clue me in, I outweigh both of these kids put together and would pulverize them in a street fight. They might be carrying guns? I strongly doubt it; try playing basketball with a gun in your waistband.

What they’re doing goes all the way back to slave days, although they’re probably unaware of that. They’re treating me as the authority figure who must be “secretly” taunted to show how smart they are and how dumb I am. I have seen this lame, defeatist attitude thousands of times with black kids. These kids don’t realize they’re already conceding power to me by acting this way, that instead of treating me as a normal, equal human being and passing, they’re viewing me as an authority figure they feel some need to get over on, because they feel inferior, although they have no reason to feel that way. I don’t see them in terms of inferiority or superiority – they’re just kids walking down the street. I’m just a guy minding my own business. If they saw me as inferior and wanted to prove it, they would attack me, which I would welcome!

You tell me – I’d love to be enlightened on this. Rank stupidity and total lack of self awareness strike me as debilitating diseases of the mind. I’ve seen this sort of role playing enough to note it as a common occurrence. Do I feel sorry for this kids? I feel sorry for their level of stupidity, sure. But, no, I don’t feel sorry for them at all. As noted above, you’re going to reap what you sow. You go around acting like that, bad things are coming your way, and I’d rather not be one of them. I let them pass on crap this minor, because engaging assholes like this in any sort of real dialogue is a waste of time. I wouldn’t know how to tell these kids that manhood is not allowing anyone else to control your actions, that you don’t go through life burdening other people with your bullshit.

Besides which, I know that sidewalk, little things get dropped along the way all the time, whether I’m there or not: water bottles, empty potato chip bags, etc. I’d be like King Canute ordering back the sea if I got into a physical confrontation with every scumbag littering out there.

So, this, too, passes. I take a nap, listen to some music, then head out to the gym later in the afternoon, normally a relaxing walk down to 30th Avenue, about half an hour each way, and a workout that usually clears me out nicely. But two blocks from my apartment, I come across something odd unfolding. A man and a woman, in their 20s, white, arguing. At least, it looks like arguing – from a distance, they could be monkeying around in that annoying way couples do in public that comes close to physical assault. As I get closer, I can see they're not monkeying around. The woman takes a swipe at the guy’s head, and he ducks back with a grimace on his face. He’s got club-hopper written all over him: grotesque Ed Hardy t-shirt, little square soldier’s hat cocked at asshole angle, pencil-line facial hair and soul patch. If I were to look up "douchebag" in the dictionary, there'd be a picture of this guy with the definition. The woman is pretty good-looking: angular, long black hair, blue eyes, a real looker. What she’s doing with a guy like this, I haven’t got a clue.

Nor does she at that moment. I hear her blurt out, “You’re going to jail! You hear me? Jail!” She’s trying to dial her cellphone. I get the vibe that I’m walking in on an ongoing, bad confrontation between a woman who, for whatever reason, must have a court order out against this guy to stay X number of feet away from her. It has that feel, the “couple gone seriously awry” sense of two people about to get physical, like many times before.

As I’m about 10 feet away, she looks at me, and this is where I decide how I’m going to deal with this. If her look in any way says, “please help me,” or if she flat-out states that, I probably will help her, which would could mean nasty business with Pencil Beard. I’m not too big on violence against women, especially with a guy who looks like this, on the street, in my presence. This guy can see me, too, can see that I’m walking straight towards both of them, not moving, making eye contact, letting them know I’m not intimidated, just want to go along my merry way.

But her look says, “I can handle this.” I look at the guy, and I can see the same sort of stupidity and arrogance I saw with the black kids a few hours earlier. Just a lost little jackass who can’t deal with a woman properly, which I don’t care about one way or another, just don’t do it in front of me. And for however attractive that woman is, the burning question: “Whatever possessed you to be with a lost little boy like this?” So if she looks like she can handle it, and she’s dumb enough to have this clown in her life, I feel fine just walking on by. Hell, for all I know, I’d side with the guy on this if their full story was explained to me.

But all in all, I had a pretty good weekend! Wrote this, cleaned my apartment from top to bottom, did my usual routines, got about 400 new songs transferred onto the iPod for an upcoming trip to PA, a very productive few days. This is how life is. I don’t understand people who carry on about being happy or sad. Life isn’t like either all the time – if you think it is, you’re delusional. In the course of a day, I’ll go through both emotions, and then some, a few times over. As far back as I can remember, life has always been like this. Trying to label your life, or periods in your life, is a luxury you shouldn’t indulge. Just get on with it.

Phony Beatlemania Hasn’t Bitten the Dust

I remember that line from The Clash’s “London Calling.” At that time, Beatlemania, the stage show, was in full swing. Brother J saw it while at Penn State – and loved it. Many Beatles fan, even of age, never got to see The Beatles. They stopped touring in 1966 and broke up (officially) in 1970. And something tells me seeing them in America any time from 1964-66 wasn’t that great a musical experience. Sure, you had that sense of something enormous happening, but it was tens of thousands of hysterical girls, too, at these things, screaming for the entire 35-minute concert.

Beatlemania was a tribute show, generally stocked by guys who were good musicians (Marshall Crenshaw being one of them), who performed a detailed sampling of The Beatles recording career, at a time when fans had been constantly craving a reunion that was never going to happen. It seems pretty harmless now, but at the time, anyone who perceived himself as hip – or punk – laughed at Beatlemania. Until then, it had been mainly Elvis imitators. Imitating The Beatles kicked open the door to a different generation of tribute, and there have been scores of rock-based tribute bands since, most of whom do pretty well for themselves on the road.

I’ve been thinking about and listening to The Beatles a lot lately due to the announcement of their catalog finally getting the “remaster” overhaul and reissue this fall, no doubt at top dollar. The Beatles are infamous for doing this … well, because they can. People will pay too much for their repackaged product because it’s The Beatles. Holds just as true today as it did in the 70s, when I witnessed those hits collections come out and sell pretty well, presumably to a newer generation, but I wasn’t buying that shit (save for the Blue and Red albums) – I suspect it was the same old fans wanting to be completists, as these new CDs will be in September.

But it got me listening to The Beatles again, and all I can say is, everyone else, man, just go home. These guys were it. Obviously, I don’t mean go home – I’ll get over this Beatles jag. But they’ve clearly been the best band of my lifetime. Forget about genres, whether they were pop or rock, or what have you. The Stones were surely a better rock band. But until they stumbled onto that evil formula with “Jumping Jack Flash” and worked it through Exile on Main Street, they were chasing The Bealtes in vain. Everyone was. About the only album I can think of that gives me anywhere near the same sense of wonder is Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, which is a great album in its own more mature way, but has that same sense of musical reach.

One of the things The Beatles aren’t noted for as much was the habit of wiping the slate clean for each album, from about Rubber Soul on, and giving each album a set, identifiable personality. They all sound different – radically so when you go from Sgt. Pepper to Let It Be. And within each album, you have the band exploring different styles. That sort of musical talent and sense of adventure was something I came to expect from 70s bands – and the great ones pulled it off.

What separated The Beatles most at the time was their sound – I’d imagine because they had an experienced producer like George Martin running the show, he knew how to make their records sound good. I recall when getting the Blue and Red albums (must have been 1974-75 or so) how much more I was drawn to their latter-day material (still am) because it sounded as advanced as 70s pop rock in terms of production values. (The earlier stuff was too boy/girl poppy for me, but I came around on that stuff, too.) My appreciation for the Stones, Kinks and Who lagged behind simply because the production values on many of their classic 60s recordings was way behind George Martin and The Beatles. This is probably because the bands were run by hustlers (Andrew Loog Oldham, Kit Lambert, Shel Talmy) masquerading as producers, whereas Martin really was one. The Stones snapped out of that production lethargy the quickest, but it took other bands awhile to catch up.

Put that all in the context of a 70s kid listening to shit like “Billy Don’t Be a Hero” and “The Night Chicago Died.” “Crocodile Rock” was my favorite song for a few years, probably from about the age of eight to 11 or so. I really don’t regret being a huge Elton John fan as a kid. He “got it” the same way The Bealtes did in terms of making each album a new and individual musical statement. And "Crocodile Rock" was probably knocked from its perch by "Bohemain Rhapsody," which kicked my ass the first time I heard it on the radio in my Mom's station wagon while she hit the bank in Gordon.

Childhood was all about those profound introductions to music. I recall once going to a neighbor’s house and him playing his older brother’s records, one of which was the “Hey Jude/Revolution” 45. “Hey Jude” was just one of those songs that made immediate sense, the kind of thing where you’d sit and watch the Apple spin on the vinyl because you didn’t know what else to do while the song played. Just floored by it. With “Revolution” I distinctly recall at a pool party about that time, kids taking turns getting a running start on a deck and jumping into the water, making sure to time their scream with John Lennon’s at the start of “Revolution” … while a designated kid had to pick up the portable record player’s tone arm and drop the needle at the start of the 45. I’m sure we took turns and had a blast. That scream had to be one of the coolest musical memories from my childhood. (Another great one was a bunch of kids in pajamas dancing at night in front of a blanket hung on a clothes line to Grand Funk Railroad’s cover of “The Loco-Motion” while other kids shook flashlights at them, causing a strobe effect.)

So, a bunch of decidedly non-hippie kids in rural Pennsylvania were using “Revolution” as back-drop for pool parties … what happened between 1968 and 1973? It’s always strange for me to recall that I came of musical age shortly after the Beatles demise – literally only two or three years after. But I can assure you, I “missed” The Beatles, as people 10 years older who were there often tell me, and I know that being of age and hearing that stuff for the first time as it came out had to be a glorious musical experience. Shit, it was glorious for me a few years after the fact. And in retrospect, taking full boyhood joy in Lennon’s scream seems a lot more innocent and useful than fucking Nike using it to sell sneakers about 10 years later.

So much time has passed between now and the 60s, yet it’s crucial to note that 70s kids missed out in some sense on that music, even if we discovered it less than a handful of years later, the same way I’ll discover a band now who had a good album out in 2003 or 2004 that I missed. But that same sort of impassable musical wall doesn’t seem to exist now. No one’s going to lecture me for not picking up on a band a few years too late – there’s been no recent cultural/musical revolution that I missed out on. That sense of cultural ownership seems non-existent now, only with hipsters, and the sort of bands they lord that sense of belonging over, man, most people have no idea who those bands are. (And that’s what being a hipsters is all about: exclusivity.)

Take that sort of artistic exclusivity that seems so esoteric now and apply it to an entire generation, with the realization that these people weren’t full of shit, the music really was that good, and that sense of cultural hipness was common currency as opposed to a secret handshake. I will always defer to Beatles fans who were teenagers in the mid-60s, because they “got” that music like no one else has since and understand it in that “musical DNA” manner so much of the 70s means to me.

Remember that none of The Beatles stopped making music in the 70s, so they were always hovering around in some sense. Ringo Starr may have been a bit of a put-on, but “Photograph” is probably the best solo Beatles single, and a song that makes me feel like it’s summer time, 1974. George Harrison got a rousing start with All Things Must Pass, and I recall his single “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)” in tandem with “Photograph” as a perfect summer song. But after that, phew, he put out some bland albums after the first two, and I wasn’t buying. Lennon, of course, started out like a genius, lost his mind for a short while, then got it back after a long break, albeit never quite on that same level. “Mind Games” is that one single I recall spinning over and over, but that whole album leaves a lot to be desired. Hell, even his cover of “Stand by Me” feels as real and classic as anything else he was doing around that time. I can’t tell you how I excited I was the first time I heard “Starting Over” on the radio in the fall of 1980. Just took my breath away to hear him get “it” again, I knew from the first few strummed chords that he meant business again, and what a horrible shock when he was snuffed out by a maniac months later.

Paul McCartney ruled the 70s in terms of post-Beatles solo output. Even his supposedly shitty stuff (McCartney, Ram, Wild Life, Red Rose Speedway) sounds pretty good to me now, if a little raw. Band on the Run sounds like the pop gem it was and is – I was just playing “Mrs. Vanderbilt” on my iPod yesterday and couldn’t believe that loping bass line he came up with for that song. The whole album is filled with those sort of nice touches – album tracks like “Mamunia” and “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five” sound even better to me now. Sure, he got too big with Wings at the Speed of Sound. But I like that he got that big again – one of those guys had to, and he was the obvious candidate. (Besides which, another great childhood memory was trying in vain to win that fucking album at the spinning wheel stand on the Point Pleasant boardwalk one night while visiting our cousins down there. I must have spent $15 trying to win an album I could have bought for $7.) You want a cool “70s” experience, pick up the live album, Wings Over America, go home, crack open a beer or two, turn off the lights and play the first track, “Venus and Mars/Rock Show” at top volume. It still fuckin’ rules! (And I realize what an assclown the previous sentence makes me come off as ... such is life.)

Along with the music, there were so many interesting books about The Beatles that came out in the 70s. I had them all. My favorite, and one I hope to pick up again, was The Longest Cocktail Party by Richard DiLello, the “house hippie” at Apple Records describing his days at the record company. Apple to the Core by Peter McCabe and Robert D. Sconfeld was the hardest read as it dealt with the details of the Beatles breaking up in court as opposed to rock mythology, but I suspect I’d find it a lot more interesting now. You have to remember that at the time, there weren’t a lot of books about rock artists, and the ones that were tended to be cheap, picture-laden biographies aimed at fans as opposed to serious readers. To this day, I love a good “rock” read, but it seems like these books don’t get written nearly as much as they did 1980 to 2000 or so. (Believe me, I’m no prime candidate to write one. The amount of research and interviews that would go into a book like this on any band or artist would take years … of financial support. I still don’t understand how many of these books got written in the first place, unless it was by a critic or a professor with a paying day job and lots of down time to pursue this.)

The other day, I made the comment to a friend that listening to The Beatles now was like recalling a special blanket or stuffed toy one used to have as a kid. Those sort of connections are nothing to scoff at or discard. Sure, I think there’d be something sick about indulging in that feeling exclusively, to the exclusion of all others. But I can assure you, the adult Beatles kick is a passing phase, something that I’ll indulge intensely and appreciate while it goes on, but come back in a few weeks, and I’ll be on to something else. That’s how I find my musical tastes go now – these intense fixations that last anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, generally followed by another week or two of floating around musically, with another fixation kicking in soon thereafter. Shit, last month I thought Supertramp was godhead. Still do, but I’m not listening to them right now. Something about The Beatles, though, really registers with the elemental strains of however I came to love music in the first place, going all the way back to the start.

I’m not sure how this registers with kids now, nor do I care. I wasn’t too crazy about the movie Superbad, but one cool scene, when the obnoxious chubby kid had to describe how good something was to his friend, he blurted out, “It’s like the first time you heard The Beatles!” So I’m assuming there are plenty of people still “getting” this stuff the same way I did second-hand in the 70s. No shame at all in listening to this stuff over and over again, in weird hard bursts as time goes on. If anything, that sort of recurring passion for great music is something that keeps me looking for more new stuff to keep that feeling somehow alive, as opposed to living inside some sort of cardboard box of memories behind the 7-11. I'm more of a wandering bum of musical memories.

Panda in the Rain

Had a weird the other Saturday while cleaning up the landlord’s sidewalk. It was a crappy day weather-wise: a steady, soaking rain falling through the afternoon. I wasn’t really sweeping, but picking up any stray trash deposited on her sidewalk, which is always a given. As I moved down the sidewalk, I saw that someone had left a large stuffed panda wedged against the front fender of a pick-up truck.

It had a face like the animated pandas from that recent movie. Not quite sure what it was doing there, a stuffed animal left against a car bumper in the rain. This is what you call junk. No one was leaving it there to pick it up later. There’s a night club a block over, and I gather that late in the night, when that place clears out, people who are parked over here come back to their cars and sometimes leave odd shit behind. Predictable stuff usually – used rubbers, empty six packs, cigarette butts and those little clear plastic packets that held ecstasy, crank, speedballs or what have you. Assholes go to nightclubs, at least around here, not good people.

I knew enough not to leave it out there. That’s the kind of thing that some wise-ass group of kids heading to the basketball courts would most likely kick, or beat, knocking the stuffing out of it, making a bigger mess. When I picked it up by the arm, I saw something weird underneath it: a $1.00 bill. This is the first time I’ve ever found money out there, so that made my day. I grabbed the bear by the arm, which made me feel weird, like a kid, and dragged him back to the big hard-rubber garbage bin I keep on the landlord’s back patio. The damn thing was heavy, too, as it was water-soaked.

The bin’s nearly full after a few weeks of putting stuff in the there. Stuffing the panda in there … now I know how Tony Soprano felt when he had to dispose of a body. It wouldn’t fit. Should I cut its arms off? Its head? Legs? I had to dispose of this thing. No way was I keeping it. But stuffing it into a black garbage bag in a bin literally felt like I was trying to ditch a corpse. The quizzical panda face looked back at me as if to say, in Jack Black’s voice, “Hey, buddy, why you doing this to me?”

I stepped on his head a few times, and that made enough room. But it got me thinking about the stuffed panda’s backstory. What happened to deposit that panda on the front fender of a pick-up truck? These things are meant as presents for kids. Was someone trying to hurt a kid by stealing the panda and dumping it on an anonymous sidewalk in Queens? What I’m trying to say is what kind of person would dump a stuffed animal on the street in the rain? I’m taking it they’re not giving out stuffed animals as prizes for Biggest Guido over at the nightclub. I often ask questions like this in Queens, as there’s a surly attitude way too many natives seem to carry around with them like a cap gun, under the mistaken impression that they’re armed with a .44.

That panda had bad vibes about it. I expected it to animate itself early Sunday morning, crawl out of the garbage bag, bust into my apartment, and kill me with a carving knife. But I wasn’t the one who left him, so I slept easier on that knowledge.

*

Another Queens note. A few weeks ago, I made the leap and got “Go Green” bags from my local supermarket. Actually, they were giving them out as a special promotion, one per customer, so I tried it. And I came to a stark realization. Grocery bagging really is a huge waste of cheap plastic. When I come out of that supermarket with plastic bags, each bag a double-bag because these things are so cheap, I’m carrying at least 12-14 of these things. Just totally useless. And it occurred to me that using one of the more sturdy green bags was just easier. I didn’t have a few dozen pieces of rumpled plastic digging into the creases on the insides of my fingers. I walk about 300 yards back to my place, up a hill, so it’s a bit of a trek.

The next week, I bought one for a buck or so. I have two arms. I only need two bags. I’m not really focused on the environment. This is just easier. And the cashiers, instead of bagging with me, let me bag myself since they can’t reach over into my cart, thus I get a good, balanced weight in each hand. So, I look like a pussy toting these bags up the hill to my place, but what the hell, they work better, so I’ll keep on using them.

I also think one of the managers there is trying to hit on me. Female, thankfully. Not a bad looking girl either, curly blonde hair, pretty, svelte. Every time I go there, it seems like she finds some reason to talk to me or make some kind of contact. This last time, she hustled over and tried to bag for me (clearly wasn’t bagging for anyone else), but I told her, no, I got my own bags, but thanks anyway, blah blah blah. The one drawback. I’m older now, and one of the things I’m really aware of with women is how other women view them. When this woman casually makes contact with me, figuring out an excuse to talk to me or what have you, I notice the looks on some of the cashiers' faces, and I’m getting the vibe they don’t like her (which could just be a boss/employee issue). Some of the cashiers, as nice as they are, and actually pretty good at their jobs, are pretty homely. Good people, for sure, but not erection inspiring. Still, when I spot the eye roll, or one of them makes eye contact with me as if to say, “I know you’re not falling for this” … it makes me wonder. Ugly women tend to have pretty solid bullshit detectors.

*

The other day, a new girl at work asked if we had a company softball team. Of course, the place I work is so cheap they wouldn’t even put out for a checkers team, much less the few hundred dollars it would cost to register a team with a league, buy a few bats and balls, and budget a post-game beer kitty. But it got me thinking about my adult softball days, playing with the team from my smallish (about 60 people) ad agency, which for me lasted from roughly the ages of 25-28.

All these leagues in Manhattan are in constant struggle to find playing fields, as there’s just so much free parks space. You’d think Central Park would be the gold standard, and surely is in terms of location and that New York vibe, but the cold reality was playing there sucked. The fields were often uneven, pock-marked with holes in the outfield, and the infields nothing to write home about. They were also crowded as hell, with overlap. I recall once nearly getting into a scuffle with a teener league team from Spanish Harlem holding a practice who wouldn’t give up a field, although they had to. Kids acting like surly creeps, at the behest of their idiot coach. All their empty saber-rattling lasted about 15 minutes before a parks commissioner one of us ran to get came by and threatened them with a permanent ban, and the coach with arrest. I recall a lot of “we’re going to get you” mumbling and such, but the general vibe was adios, douchebags, this aint your block.

We played on artificial turf a few times, at a public park on the upper east side, called Asphalt Green, I think, an odd name for sure. As with most Manhattan fields, two games over-lapped each other on each end of the park, thus if you hit one to the outfield, chances were pretty good you’d have at least a triple as the outfielders would have to contend with balls and players coming from the other direction. The strangest game we played was at a small park by the United Nations, in which there was an encampment of homeless people in right field. Made things a bit awkward. They weren’t moving for anything. Any time a ball came into their encampment, they’d simply throw it out to the nearest person – they knew the drill. But imagine being homeless and having softballs line-shot at you every other day in the summer! Obviously, they shouldn’t have been there in the first place, but such is life in Manhattan that people often work around odd scenarios like this.

But most of our games took place on Ward’s Island, the ass end of Randall’s Island. (I understand both islands are joined by a landfill, and aside from softball fields, you’ll find an insane asylum, a fireman’s training school and a few stadiums/small venues for musical festivals. I saw the Fleadh there a few years back, and had a blast.) If you played on Ward’s a lot, you got the vibe your softball league wasn’t premier. Which was fine by me. The team I was on sucked for the most part (although they’d catch fire a few years later, with the help of ringers, and go up against the much larger ad agencies, with their crews of ringers, and win).

There was a softball bus, a yellow school bus, that would pick us up at some appointed place along Madison Avenue, and drive us out to Ward’s, all the teams inter-mingled on the bus. Co-ed, so there were plenty of hot advertising chicks along for the ride. It was such a relaxing thing to do after work. The concept of getting on school bus and going to an island to play games … it was like being back in grade school. My main memory of those games would be, in more quiet moments, turning towards the East River and seeing Manhattan laid out like a jewel in the summer evening, a light breeze blowing off the river, and thinking, this is paradise.

The games themselves were a lark for the most part. Even when we were serious, we were joking. I’m a bit leery of grown men who play team sports in a deadly serious fashion in their leisure time. It’s fucking tiresome to be around guys like that – let up already, dudes, you missed the boat in high school, get over it, the rah-rah attitude should have ended with intramural sports at college. I attended nearly every game, simply because I knew how much fun it was. One game, I distinctly recall, we were getting our asses handed to us, and I was playing third. A guy named Tom on the business side was in leftfield – Tom rarely came due to being stuck late at work. A hard grounder was hit my way and got through – unless I had dived, which I could have, I wouldn’t have stopped it. Tom sees my lack of effort and flips out, yelling incensed, dive, Repsher, dive, at the ball! All I could think was, eat me, douchebag! Tom was generally a nice guy, but he had a prick sheen about him, too, that would come out sometimes on the job.

Understand, we weren’t total losers. Our record would usually be about 4-6. And some of those losses, as noted, were sure-fire shellackings going up against agencies with literally 10 times the number of employees and that much larger a talent pool to draw from. Sure, we had the mailroom guys. You had guys like me who were coordinated and could still play, but were no great shakes. You had one or two guys who played softball in more competitive leagues and were really good. And one or two girls who were pretty good, the rest just showing up for the hell of it, which no one minded at all. The overall gist was to go out after work and have a blast …

… which would happen AFTER the game. That same yellow school bus would come rolling down the dusty roads around the baseball diamonds just before sundown, and we’d all pile on, this time with one destination for everyone, some sports bar whose name I can’t recall on the Upper East Side. And, believe me, that’s where we won. The beer allowance was generally about 3-4 pitchers, and we would get shit-faced with the other teams, often making nice connections with people who were pretty much in the same boat mentally and work-wise. I can still recall K.D., our jock team captain, having two girls from the recording company next door to us (who played on our team quite a bit) “dance” with him one night, which meant grabbing his cock through his shorts and whispering “we know you have a hard on” in his ear. I got touchy-feely with another girl from over there who loved Led Zeppelin and stole my Reading Phillies hat – a mutual attraction going on – save she was on the verge of getting engaged to her lawyer boyfriend, and things never quite got off the ground, despite getting very friendly.

Getting laid was not the norm, but we got plastered in lieu of this, and in general, got to know our coworkers as genuine people. You get that with sports and drinking, seeing people on a whole different level … which is why I like sports and drinking! There’s a woman in my boxing class I saw on the street the other day, and didn’t recognize until she tugged my arm. “I didn’t recognize you with your clothes on,” I said … meaning work clothes as opposed to the skin-tight hot pants with the word “Angel” written across her wonderful ass cheeks, and a sports bra top, which is how I normally saw her in class. She laughed, because she knew just what I meant. It was the same with softball – I got to know people in a way that was much more different than work. Part of that was being in my 20s and seeking out those kind of connections (which I don’t do nearly as much anymore), but part was simply letting the guard down and trusting people enough to get blasted with them.

Getting home to the Bronx from that bar was always a bitch. One thing I’ve learned: if you drink a gallon of beer, which isn’t hard to do over the course of 3-4 hours in a bar, it’s a good idea to take piss breaks, particularly one before leaving. If I didn’t, man, my bladder would be bursting by the time I got home. Trains run later at night, thus I could wait anywhere from 2 to 15 minutes in the station, and then take a roughly half-hour ride back to Kingsbridge Road, at which point I had a brusque 10-minute walk to my place. There were times I pissed in the street like a lost dog marking his territory. I just couldn’t hold it in. We’re talking the Bronx – not too many people were keeping score. I wouldn’t pull my penis out and go right on the sidewalk. I’d scout out some quiet spot between buildings, or slip behind a dumpster, and let loose for upwards of a minute. At that time of night, probably around midnight, the streets weren’t exactly teaming with people.

Never puked, from what I recall. But at the very least, stumbled home, feeling pretty fine after an evening of softball by the river, hanging out with some cool people (one of the few benefits of advertising), eating pizza, getting hammered on cheap beer and commiserating over our lots in life in one of the most over-rated industries ever created. Most nights, I could barely even remember who won or lost, or who screwed up on the field. Advertising parties in general, and there were a lot, got way too wild – too many people doing coke in the bathroom and such, and too many uptight upper management types either being too stiff or getting too strange. The creative people would be even worse, manic depressives already blown out on the fact that they weren't famous artists and writers, doing hard drugs and feeling like failures despite making fortunes. The softball crowd felt just right – not too stiff, not too crazy, no Van Gogh's cutting off their ears. “Even the Losers” by Tom Petty could have been our theme song. We kept a little bit of pride and got lucky sometimes.

Web Gunk

Lately, it seems like I can’t go five minutes without hearing about Facebook or Twitter. A handful of people I know have gotten on Facebook in the past year or so. The pattern’s usually the same. At first, they’re amazed by the number of people from the past this thing turns up, as if by magic, they had ceased to exist before Facebook waved its magic wand. They spend a few weeks exchanging pleasantries with the girl who gave them a hand job in the seventh grade, or the guy from their dorm who used to rule on the beer bong.

After awhile, they realize knowing these people again is no big deal, don’t really have a lot to say to each other, and the “Dude, can’t believe you still tread the earth” vibe wears off. (As if people die when we stop knowing them ... the level of self absorbtion in our society never ceases to amaze.) And they find themselves annoyed with the constant stream of updates, also noticing the mercenary sorts who use Facebook as a way to generate publicity for whatever cause they’re into. I’ve never actually started or looked at a Facebook account, save to see that home page for various people, so I have no idea what goes in the day-to-day function of it.

But I’m willing to bet the reaction after awhile is much like mine, without even using it: I spend enough time screwing around on the web already without adding another serious waste of time. When people first get into Facebook, they’re addicted, and begging you to join (in the fun). After a month, you never hear it mentioned again. It seems like some people strike a happy medium, where they check in once or twice a day to see what’s going on, post pictures for family members, etc. … only to find the guy they rode the bus with in fifth grade noted that he took a legendary shit this morning after having a bran muffin.

Which seems like the kind of thing Twitter is used for. (I’ve gathered you can stream Twitter posts on Facebook.) I sort of resent being made to feel like I’m somehow “behind the times” for not indulging in this nonsense. Facebook is a more tasteful Myspace, and Twitter is texting on a computer (although you can share the nonsensical minutiae of your day with X number of people as opposed to one, what a breakthrough). I recognize texting and Myspace for what they are: meant for kids and self-absorbed adults.

I gather the younger you are, and the more spare time you have, the more likely it is that you’ll indulge in this stuff. My frame of reference regarding communications goes back to rotary-dial phones and letter writing. Try calling five people on a rotary-dial phone … you’ll probably be wearing a finger splint afterwards. When you called someone, that meant something, and if the person wasn’t there, the phone just kept on ringing. (I even pre-date answering machines – technically, not, but answering machines were not a given when I was a kid.) That wasn’t such a bad thing, unless you were madly in love or closing some type of deal. Person’s not there? I’ll try again tomorrow. Do something else in the mean time.

It would take me days to write letters to friends, and I used to love doing that. My emails tend to still be pretty long-winded as a result. (I’ll never text anyone … texting is pure dogshit to me, the devolution of thought and language. May also be why I’m holding off on an iPhone, which I like in theory, but don’t like the idea of thumbing incessantly to send an email.) I love to communicate with people through writing. They write back, and with the people I know, that tends to be a pretty worthwhile exchange of ideas. Not “C U LTR, QT.” Or whatever the fuck else people functioning on a much different wavelength than mine put out routinely. The letters I wrote were rambling, hand-written things you had to spend time on. We should all be forced to hand-write everything for a week to gauge just how much things have changed …

… And how much easier it is to communicate now, yet people seem to communicate much less, or much less effectively, than ever before. Particularly people raised in this culture. Everything is a glib, never funny, never insightful one-liner, or symbols that suggest the person now thinks in terms of text messaging as opposed to fully-worded thoughts. For them to write a paragraph of any size seems to be an alien undertaking. You write a well-worded reply to them, and their reply is, “Y don’t U write a novel.” No, motherfucker, this is two or three paragraphs, not a novel … you ought to try reading one some time to grasp the wonders of attention span.

You grasp this when you overhear a superfluous cellphone conversation. For me, that happens constantly on the subway train, when it comes above ground in Queens. If you need a good thumbnail description of “asshole” … an asshole is someone who pulls out his cellphone just as a subway train surfaces from below ground and immediately calls someone on it. Always, and I mean always, to have a totally meaningless conversation, in a crowded public place. What you doin. Oh, not much. I’m on the train. Yeah. Yeah. No shit. Yeah. Yeah. That’s so cool. Yeah. Yeah. I’ll see you in five minutes. The conversations seem to take place only to convince the caller and listener that each is still alive and walking the earth … although they’ve already texted each other earlier in the day that they’ll meet later. That’s a strange sort of insecurity I don’t understand. I think part of it is demonstrating to the people around you that you are more important because you’re making a call on your cellphone in a crowded public place. You have shit going on in your life, people to call, things to do. (Generally, if my cellphone rings on a subway train, I let it go to voice mail. The reception on a train is horrible, and I know how uncomfortable it is to be sitting next to someone on a train indulging in one of these conversations.)

The mindset of someone raised with all this gunk has to be fragmented. I wasn’t even raised with it, and I’ve noticed how much more fragmented my thoughts, and my life by extension, have become. Just because you can communicate with people much more quickly, and have so many more options to do so, doesn’t mean that you can communicate any better than how people have in the past. Communication is one thing; modes of communication are another. If you don’t learn how to communicate in certain ways, you just won’t be good at it, no matter what you do. So much of our communication these days is focused on the written word, be it simple email, Twitter, Facebook, web message boards, etc. And I’m gathering people simply aren’t learning how to write well. How to string together numerous thoughts into a cohesive statement. How to imbue their words with emotions and concepts that communicate with readers on a much deeper, more human level.

I used to get in trouble on message boards for stating the obvious: that some people on them were bad writers. I’m not talking syntax and grammar. I mean just the ability to communicate through writing. A lot of people on message boards are like cardboard cut-outs, or crash-test dummies, when it comes to writing. They’re dull, at best, which is probably why they’re spending so much time there. And these things never die. You can get off the merrygoround whenever you want, but it will keep spinning. I’ve never seen the guy or group running a message board state, “This place has seen better days – let’s close it down.” Message boards are like high school or work – you have friends, but you have to spend serious time each day hanging around a certain number of people you really don’t like, and a larger number of people you’d normally have nothing to do with. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about sound mental health, it’s that you shouldn’t spend any time around anyone who inspires negativity and loathing, and vice-versa, of course. If that’s the work situation, good luck, but to do it on a message board, all in the name of false sense of “community,” man, you tell me.

I also find an alarming number of people on these boards who went to college through the 90s and after: a strange tribe that indulges in therapy-style jargon about feelings and such, yet have a Lord of the Flies style of dealing with anyone or anything that threatens their homogenous little worlds. There’s a sameness about these people that’s spooky: liberal (but not too far left, no sir, I’m a regular joe), WASP-y (my Dad owns a chain of restaurants ... could we not talk about this ... how do you like this bowling shirt I bought at the Salvation Army?); let’s cut the crap, they’re always white, and filled with self loathing (for reasons I will never understand). Used to be you went to college to set yourself free – in the past two decades you do so to be indoctrinated with a truly bullshit way of seeing the world. Used to think the future would be a bunch of enlightened people walking around in robes … it’s more like an Alanon meeting of sensitive 13-year-olds.

The whole idea of message boards, Facebook, Twitter, etc., seems to be to generate traffic, heat, immediate contact, and contact with an unbroken flow. This is bad news for writers. One, printed media is being phased out, more rapidly in the past year or two than anyone had imagined. Two, writers are going to be making less money writing on the web for whatever given publication; no one seems to have cracked how to make real money on the web via advertising, and subscription services have not done well. Three, the writers will have to adjust their styles to fit into this condensed, fragmentary way of writing … and I’ve already noted why this is cancerous. It will be dumbing down our writing skills to reach people who don’t know how to communicate anything real and have mistaken nothingness for reality.

Worst of all, the web is crawling with people who just can’t accept how mediocre they are as writers, and they have the mistaken impression that anyone can do it. Because they’re doing it. And when someone tells them the truth, that they suck at it, that person gets shouted down for noticing, because everyone’s equal on the web. Again, we’re talking black, organ-chewing cancer of the worst kind here … but these are misguided attitudes I see routinely displayed. And these are the intelligent people! Check out the responses to videos on You Tube or the greetings expressed on Myspace pages – fucking unreal. I wish these people were joking, or parodying idiots, but they’re not. I’m picturing some slobbering, cross-eyed, egg-shaped being with a propeller beanie and one big tooth, tapping on a keyboard with one hand while eating a snow cone with the other.

Am I being too dark here? Probably, but I’m also being honest and have spent enough time with this to know what I’m writing about here. And don’t get the impression that I’m against new trends and technology. Christ, I love these things when they make sense and make clear how much easier life can be by using them. Cellphones truly are a blessing, especially in emergency situations, and I love the mobility of them. (As noted, I’ve pondered getting an iPhone, but have to be honest with myself in that I don’t really need one, despite all the cool gadgets contained therein.) Email is fantastic – it changed my life in terms of maintaining relationships that would often go months or years without any sort of support. (No one with email needs Facebook. If the god damn person isn’t in your life already, take a hint, no offense, some people just fall by the wayside, as you do for them. Are we that lonely that we need to dig up people from our past and pretend they're in our lives now? It's like a never-ending high-school reunion.) MP3s, and now video files, have simply changed how we’re going to consume these types of media, and I love it, the possibilities seem endless with this stuff. Any time I pick up a copy of Wired or talk to a gadget-leaning friend, I have my mind blown over some of the innovations that are headed our way.

I just didn’t anticipate communication skills going down the toilet conversely to the rise of technology. If anything, I thought more and faster options would mean better skills – if people were forced to communicate all the time at top speed, they’d simply get better at it, be more expressive and descriptive. Writing is like any other endeavor – the more you do it, the better you get at it. I think the issue is we pull ourselves in a thousand directions with all these innovations, performing high-tech juggling acts every day, and often end up doing a number of things either passably or poorly, and nothing very well. If you never had the foundation of someone teaching you how to write well, and then had time to nurture this skill, it appears all you can do is tap out graceless one liners and have conversations that are more like monologues where no one really listens to each other.

When I see someone dogging a cellphone on the street, you know the type, the motherfucker can’t be off the thing for more than a minute at a time, I can’t help but think that person is more in the love with, and addicted to, the concept of using the device than feeling any real need to communicate with anyone on the other end of the line. The overheard, meaningless conversations bear this out. I gather people are more enamored of their iPods and all the accessories that go with them than they are the actual music on the iPods … the music is secondary. Simply having one, and displaying it publicly, that’s the main thing these days. How we got into this bizarre state of affairs, I’m not sure. Gadgets are now more valid than art.

It’s not an age thing. I’m hoping there are younger people out there looking at their friends and associates caught up in this crap and thinking the same things I am now. I’m assuming there are still plenty of sane people out there. I spend five minutes around someone stuck on his cellphone, texting or talking, and I just want to get the hell away from that person, whatever his age is. The lack of manners involved with this is another huge issue, but people stopping conversations to read a text or answer a call has become so routine that I don’t think most people notice what a breach of manners that is.

Am I full of shit? Making too much out of all this stuff? I hope I am, but suspect I’m not. If there’s good stuff I’m not seeing from things like Facebook and Twitter, texting, Myspace and such, someone, please, for the love of Christ, enlighten me. All I’m seeing is a childish waste of time masquerading as progress. Something that starts out fun, but turns tedious real fast. When I eat candy now as an adult, the first five seconds are a blast, and then I start feeling like a horse’s ass for eating such junk clearly aimed at kids in every conceivable way. Here’s what happens when I eat too much candy. Happy Easter!