Hair and Boxing

I went to get my hair cut today, down near 30^th Avenue in Astoria. That long walk, through Little Egypt, always featuring the clumps of sullen Middle Eastern guys in front of the hookah cafes, some international soccer channel playing inside, a night game in Tunisia, that strong, sweet hookah tobacco smell all over the block.

The barbershop is run by an older Russian guy and his son, friendly people, I’ve gone there about six times now. The price is right, the cut is usually good enough. I always expect my back and sides to get buzzed or be shorter, because they grow in so fast. But I’ve gathered I’m never happy with the length and let it go. The older guy must be around 60, his son late 30s. His son has a big, wavy hair-metal mullet, a real head of hair, the kind of thing I expect to see on a non-balding Russian barber in the 718s. (I prefer getting him as he gives a better buzz cut on the back and sides. The last time, he had his eight-year-old son with him, and the kid kept grilling me on professional wrestling, which I knew nothing about.)

As I was sitting there getting my hair cut by the old man, I heard the son mutter, “Oh, shit, here comes the cry baby.” I couldn’t look out the window, but I could see in the mirror, a man and woman dragging a small boy down the sidewalk. Looked to be of same vague Eastern European descent, maybe Armenian – not dark enough to be Middle Eastern, but clearly somewhere in that hazy meeting ground between western and arabic cultures.

They burst through the door, and, christ, the kid was pitching a fit. The scene in The Omen where they try to take Damien to church? This was the same freak out. The kid was wailing like he was about to be circumcised with a butter knife. His hair wasn’t that long, straight and black, probably about halfway over his ear and down his neck. Tears, screaming, desperate pleading in whatever their native language is. Hippies getting forced crew cuts in some redneck jail circa 1968 after a routine traffic stop were probably less emphatic.

It’s been awhile since I’ve been around anyone that emotional. I mean, this kid was laying it all out there, no bullshit, a truly naked display of full-on emotion. Whether it was rage, fear, whatever, I don’t know. But the father stayed outside while the mother dragged him into the chair. Because the chair was next to mine, I was worried that this wired little prick would bump the old man while he was straight-blade razoring the back of my neck. They had another guy working there (which was unusual), and it was his job to corral the kid, get him to sit still and shear him. The younger son kept offering the kid a lollipop, which seemed like offering a cigarette to a prisoner about to be shot by a firing squad.

The mother picked out the cut: “Give-ah him, Number 3 onna the sides, and Number 2 on top. Short. Real short.” She started jabbering at the kid in their language, which only made him howl louder. Seeing this kid go apeshit brought back to me the one or two times I pulled the same stunt, a faraway memory, but I do recall cutting loose like that at least once.

The difference is, I had real reason to be scared. Leo the barber back home in Pennsylvania would buzz me so that all I’d have left on the top of my head would be a patch of stubble and burred sides. I don’t think he even bothered with scissors – just used that large buzz clipper and ran it up and down the sides of my skull, clipping off whatever overhang there was on top. Took about five minutes. (Later, as I mentioned in a previous post, he once shaved spots into the side of my head just like punk rockers at the time were getting, save Leo knew nothing about punk and was just giving me a deeply strange haircut.) I think I cried earlier because of two things: the sense of a change about to occur, and the act of something, even if it was only hair, being cut off my body. It scared me in some very real sense, enough to make me cry, hard.

Of course, the same thing would happen with me as did with this kid. Once the haircut got underway, I was reduced to sniffles and those odd crying hiccups, but I’d calm down so that when the barber was done, I’d be totally rational and ready for my lollipop. As with this kid, too, I remember my mom being there to calm me down. It made sense that the kid’s father waited outside – he needed his mother to soothe him in this troubled time. By the time I left, the kid was totally under control, and seemed to be reasonably happy with his cut. His mother made a motion to step outside, and the kid turned, cried mommy, but not as urgent. She said something in their language, probably to the effect of “I’m only going outside to talk to your father,” and he turned around, like a big boy, and gazed at himself in the mirror. It’s interesting to note that he never said a word to any of the barbers, who were constantly trying to talk to him, reassuring things like “that’s a good boy” and “there, now, you’re acting like a fine young man, good, good.”

The weird thing? Tie this in with my previous experience shopping at the supermarket – these guys were playing some crazy shit on their sound system. While I was there, I heard “Love Is Blue” by Paul Mauriat (a great 60s instrumental), “Bip Bop” by Wings (off the Wild Life album, a song I’ve never before heard played publicly), “Sound and Vision” by David Bowie, “Killer Queen” by Queen (the old barber knew the words … imagine some 60ish dude singing “Drop of a hat/she’s as willing as/playful as a pussycat” in heavily-accented Russian while he shaves your neck) and two euro-disco type songs in Russian I didn’t know, which sounded like “Johnny and Mary” by Robert Palmer. This is some seriously freaky shit for me to be hearing in a barbershop. Why am I hearing really cool music every time I step inside traditionally non-cool places like supermarkets and barbershops?

Apropos of nothing really, but I also wanted to note something that’s been happening in my boxing class lately, the one on Tuesday. Understand that with these classes, there’s a core group of regulars, of which I’m one. Some classes, like the one on Sunday, there’s a floating group of 10 or so people who show up on a regular basis, although rarely at the same time. The only constants are me and the instructor’s girlfriend, an Indian girl in top shape who really kicks ass. (She attends all of his classes, about six a week.) The Monday class, the regulars are about five or six of us. Tuesday, the same.

But the classes are rarely just the regulars – they’re the regulars, plus people who show up, either once and never again, or sporadically. Maybe attending for a few months straight and disappearing, or showing up as their schedule allows, here and there. By far, the bulk of attendees are in the “once and never again” camp. As stated earlier, you will be physically challenged in these classes, however tough or in-shape you are, and a lot of people don’t want to deal with that shit on a regular basis. And that’s fair enough – it’s not for everybody, and there’s certainly no shame in this. I’ve taken classes in the gym where I thought, “No. I’m never doing this again.”

Then there are the weirdoes. Every now and then, some person shows up who becomes semi-legendary to the regulars because he (always a he) is so strange that his presence stands out. On Sunday, there’s a guy I call Lee Harvey (as in Oswald) who’s become a regular. Lee Harvey’s a strange guy – looks to be of some military background and is in stupendous physical condition – probably as good as the instructor and his girlfriend. Thing is, he has that off-kilter, quiet military intensity about him, and he likes to kick-box every chance he gets. Thus, if you get placed on a heavy bag with him, you know at some point he’s going to start dropping very hard side and head kicks into the bag, which can be a little disorienting and frightening if you don’t know it’s coming. We’ve all come to accept Lee Harvey for who he is – it’s clear that he’s basically a good guy – but nobody wants to get on a bag with him because they know how weird he’s going to get.

On Tuesday, a guy I’ll call Julio has started showing up. Not his real name, but Julio is a Latino who could pass for white – I thought he was a Hasidic Jew the first time I saw him. Just has that look about him – dark brown, longish hair, pale skin, full beard, long straight nose, gangly demeanor. He’s got a weird body, too – very out of shape. Skinny, but with big love handles, a pot belly and puckish little man tits. No muscle at all in his legs. He also smokes, which he proudly admitted to the instructor the first class – he’s got yellow teeth. Throws off the vibe of somebody who’s either been homeless or in prison. A mildly unsettling presence about him, a sort of negative charisma.

To put it kindly, the guy has the attention span of a five-year-old on crack. Thus, he finds it impossible to follow along in the class. While the rest of us are doing those soul-sucking drop-down/push-up/jumping jack routines (20 of those will get anyone winded, assuming you can do 20 in a row), Julio will calmly retreat to the back of the class, or leave the gym, and pace around, returning when he can see that we’ve moved onto something else. When we’re doing combinations, he’ll be doing something else, usually just punching straight ahead, while we all do synchronized moves. The worst is running. The instructor has us running all the time now, sprints up and down the gym that remind me of high-school basketball practice, and Julio will just stand there pretending that he’s invisible when this is happening.

The instructor can’t fucking stand him – understandably so. As with any class, somebody doesn’t follow along, it disrupts the flow. I’m surprised he hasn’t demanded that Julio leave. I understand that Julio showed up at another of his classes, and the instructor demanded that he follow along. Julio went nuts, yelling about how much he’s paying to be in the gym, he doesn’t deserve this shit, why are you singling me out, etc. The guy’s clearly a bit nuts. And he physically threatened the instructor. Please understand, I outweigh the instructor by about 60 pounds. If he ever challenged me to a fight, I’d start running. The guy’s been a professional boxer, he can hit as hard as I can despite being much smaller, and he can hit much faster. He’s probably the best physically-conditioned person I’ve ever met – strong as an ox, compact, incredible endurance. You don’t threaten a guy like this, unless you have a death wish.

I think the instructor’s response was to give him a calm “you’re about to lose consciousness” stare, and state: “Don’t do it. Leave. Now.” Which Julio did. I think that showdown knocked a little sense into him, but the guy’s still wacked out and showing up to class, still blowing off the harder physical routines, still unable to execute even the most basic combinations because he’s just not paying attention. What he’s still doing there, I don’t fucking know. The other week, I got him on a heavy bag, the instructor thought pairing him with me would enlighten the guy a little as to how to act in a boxing class (i.e., pay attention and do everything you're asked to the best of your abilities). And Julio had a blast holding onto the bag while I destroyed it – I made it a point to really cut loose with him on it, and he was impressed. When it came his turn, he flailed on the bag like a high-school girl in a cat fight, started panting after 15 seconds, went out and got some water.

I could see he was basically a nice guy, despite his strangeness. Very friendly, talkative. The thing is, I’m not there to be talkative. Before and after class, sure, a lot of us will stand around and banter. But not during. There’s a girl who shows up sometimes on Tuesdays, too, actually her and a friend (they never show up alone). She has a lot of tattoos and a lip ring, real bad-girl material, but she knows she in a class with people who are physically tougher than she is. You can tell she’s a little intimidated, but holds her ground. Once, we were both paired on the same heavy bag, and the instructor was getting ready to start us on 30-second rounds, holding or hitting, trading places every 30 seconds. I’d never said anything to her, but as I was getting ready to unload on the bag, my right hand cocked back to land that first overhand hook, her eyes met mine, she could see I wasn’t fucking around, and that look we exchanged, a shared, knowing grin, I could tell she “got it” at that moment, why she was there. Have hardly said two words to each other, but I feel like I understand her in some quiet way, and I suspect the feeling’s mutual.

But Julio fucks around, to the extent that I can’t sand the sight of him, even though I know he’s not a truly bad person. People that weird generally don’t last more than a few classes, but he’s been hitting that Tuesday class every time the past month, and doing the same in each: not paying attention, blowing off conditioning, and not learning a damn thing about boxing. The instructor can’t wait for him to disappear. Both of us know he will. We’ve seen many freaks and weirdoes in his classes over the past decade, but Julio may take the cake in terms of lasting the longest.

Not sure what the connection is between Julio and that wailing Armenian kid. But for some reason, I felt like writing about both.

Pennies on the Tone Arm, MP3 Style

Back when vinyl records were king, there were plenty of problems with them. Not so much problems – it’s just that if you didn’t take meticulous care of your records, they often got scratched to shit and sounded awful. Guess what? I was a kid. I didn’t handle my records with special gloves (which I’ve seen vinyl enthusiasts do). I dropped the needle all over the record to skip certain songs. I accidentally dragged the needle across the record. I often left records out of the sleeve, thus exposing to them to dust and more chances to be scratched.

As a result, most of my records sounded like shit after a few months. (If it was a record that really grabbed me, I’d play it incessantly for a good few weeks.) Snap, crackle and pop were part of the soundscape. Some scratches were so prominent that I remember them as much as I remember musical passages in certain songs, and am surprised not to hear my memorized skip on a clean CD version. Skips were the worst, especially when they stopped a song cold. There was a way to get around skips: put pennies or other small coins on the tone arm to force the needle deeper into the vinyl grooves. It was a bad thing to do, wearing out the vinyl more quickly, but sometimes it was necessary. The only thing worse than a skip was a mis-shaped record. I once left a T. Rex greatest hits collection sit on the seat of a car in summer. In direct sunlight. The record looked like a big black contact lens after that, totally ruined.

As you gather, I’m not a “miss the warmth of vinyl” person. (I think the "warmth of vinyl" dudes would be much better served by the warmth of a bare tit.) I’m much more a music fan than an audio enthusiast. CDs, for the most part, sound fine to me. (You want a kick, go to a website run by Steve Hoffman, apparently a famous mastering engineer, and read some of the dozens of posts on there regarding CD sound quality. Guys arguing over the Japan mastering of Hotel California that costs $500 on E Bay, as opposed to the Dutch mastering that you can get for $25 on import. And another guy who found the rare DCC version that trumps them all in sound quality in a used bin at a record store in Pasadena for $4.99.)

MP3s, if they’re created at 192 kbps or higher, sound fine to me. (Even some that are recorded lower sound fine – the source material dictates the quality of an MP3 file.) MP3s, in my opinion, are the greatest thing to happen to music in my lifetime. (Of course, they’re the worst thing that’s ever happened to the music business in terms of lost sales and future audiences believing “music is free.” In short order, the music industry is going to have to figure out how to survive without physical product to sell, and millions of people openly pirating the un-physical product. I don’t envy them!)

The problem with MP3s? Really nothing, save that sometimes the players we store these things on malfunction, and when they do, christ, it is hell.

Nothing really went wrong with MP3 player (a Creative Nomad Zen 60 GB Jukebox) this past weekend. What went wrong was my Windows XP quietly upgraded the media player to version 11, which apparently has bugs in it that make not just the media player, but my entire computer, including the Creative software that allows me to transfer tracks to the MP3 player, not recognize the MP3 player. Doesn’t sound like a big deal? Without my computer’s ability to recognize the MP3 player, the player is frozen in time – can’t add music to it, can’t transfer that music anywhere else.

Understand this player holds 60 gigabytes of music – right now, I have about 40 gigabytes on there, roughly 8,500 songs. Of those songs, I have about 80% of the various folders (50s Rock, 60s Pop, 70s Rock, Blues, Country, etc.) backed-up on DVD discs. The remaining 20% or so falls into two folders: Pop and Country Rock. Pop is basically new pop music from the 90s onwards (all quirky, indie shit … no Britney Spears, I’m afraid). Country Rock is any sort of alt. country music from the 90s onwards. We’re talking roughly 2,000 songs that were in danger of disappearing for me. About 1/3^rd of them are backed-up on a previous MP3 player, another 1/3^rd I could painstakingly recreate from reloading songs from Emusic and my CD collection, and about 1/3^rd comes from other sources that would have just disappeared. A few hundred songs, gone just like that, and a few dozen hours spent re-loading and burning tracks.

That’s the main issue with MP3s now. You have the ability to create such large collections that it may not dawn on you, until you’re in a situation like this, just how much music you have on these players. We’re talking the musical equivalent of dozens of albums. If you had taken a few dozen of my albums back in 1979 and threw them on a fire, I’d have shit my pants in rage. In 2007, you can lose a few dozens albums worth of songs in the blink of an eye, or the momentary change in software on a computer that wipes the slate clean.

I was pissed.

I got even more pissed when I went on the Creative discussion boards to find that the company had done virtually nothing to address the problem, and that hundreds of other people had the same problem. Unfortunately, I started trying the various “home remedies” some of these people have come up with (all with varying levels of success) to correct the problem. After half an hour of trying various solutions, my MP3 player had switched into some strange safe mode, stayed frozen in that window and did not appear to be working. A condition which lasted all of Saturday night while I shit bricks in my shorts and exhaled steam from my ears.

A piece of advice on these internet discussion boards related to products you purchase: never listen to them. They’re always fucked up. The people on there are often snotty tech-heads who leave out key steps in the process that end up really fucking with you and your product. For instance, I had a previous player where the earphone jack wasn’t connecting properly. (If you take apart any audio device with an earphone, you realize that when you plug an earphone in, all you’re doing is forcing one piece of metal to touch another, thus tapping into the audio.) Various tech-heads on the discussion board laid out instructions on taking the machine apart and fixing the headphone jack yourself – one guy even laid out a picture diagram on how to do it. What his picture diagram missed: the small gasket-style casings, springs and other parts that immediately popped out of the player once you unscrewed the back. I went apeshit with that. Eventually sent the player back to Creative (it was two weeks old and the earphone jack was already malfunctioning) and demanded they fix it, which they did after weeks of hectoring and a warning from the Better Business Bureau.

In short, the guys on these boards … picture the arrogant prick in the I.T. Department who treats everyone like an asshole because their computer knowledge isn’t as broad as his. (Which, uh, is why they gave the job to the prick in the first place?) It’s guys like this, who really aren’t very smart. You want to know what true intelligence is? It’s the ability to share your knowledge with other people in a way that let’s them understand and do what you do. Many tech-heads aren’t capable of that deeper, empathetic level of logic. Like so many people, they either guard their knowledge so no one else can have it, or they’re incapable of demonstrating it to anyone else. In a word, no, make that two words, fucking useless. This is the kind of revelation that occurs to you when pop off the back of a $400 MP3 player, springs and other small metallic shit pop out, and you realize you’re in much deeper shit than you were before, thanks to some guy you used to beat up in high school.

Luckily, Sunday morning I found the right driver so that I could at least get my player working again. Still, the computer would not recognize it. What I eventually ended up doing was “rolling back” the version of Windows Media Player to 10, erasing all my Creative software, reloading it and new drivers from the Creative website … and it still didn’t work. I did notice on one of the message boards reference to a non-Creative piece of software that you could buy for $25 that would act as a Windows Explorer type program that would allow you to load up your player. Guess what? I bought it, and it worked. What’s even funnier is that after that software worked, it kicked off some internal (competitive?) switch in the Windows Media world and allowed the Creative software to work again … so now everything is working, although I’m not exactly sure why.

And as far as I’m concerned, the sooner I get those Pop and Country folders copied to my hard drive and burned onto DVD, the better, because I now trust this shit as far as I can throw it. (I can probably throw that player about 50 yards, the laptop about 20. And I may end up doing both before this saga concludes.) I feel like a mental patient in some type of remission, where everything is sane and clear now, but in a few days, I’ll descend back into the darkness of tangled synapses and dementia. Who knows, maybe everything really is all right and I have nothing to sweat. But still, all this week I’ll be getting those thousands of songs onto my machine and then onto DVD discs.

What have I learned? Nothing about Microsoft Windows, which has always been rife with these sort of aggravating blindsides. It’s just mindblowing that they allow this stuff to happen, and more accurately, probably do this sort of shit on purpose in some misguided attempt to thwart MP3 file copying. They’re like that king ordering back the ocean: good luck, assholes. Microsoft is bad, but fucking Creative, they know they have this enormous problem, and do absolutely nothing to address it. Next player I get, I’m not sure what to do. I don’t want to get an iPod; I just don’t like the clunkiness involved with converting everything to those Mac files for the machine. Although I do think their player design and ease-of-use are the best. Their price tag also sucks. But Creative has to have the worst customer service I’ve encountered with any product, much less one you spend hundreds of dollars on. Their actual product is good – my previous 30 MB player is like a tank that will outlast every player I’ll ever have. But their software, the issues with Windows Media Player 11, the total unresponsiveness of the company to address such a key problem: unbelievable. It’s like walking into a fast-food joint, and the pimply-faced kid behind the counter takes a cheeseburger, grinds it into your face and screams, “Fuck you!”.

What I’ve really learned is that music means more to me than I thought it did. It’s easy to take it for granted, quietly sitting in huge gigabyte folders on your player. But when you’re placed in a situation where you’re about to lose all of it in a moment, man, you fight like hell to keep it and take it personally. I want to keep this stuff the rest of my days and am kicking myself now for not backing up files on a regular basis. If you’re reading this and are in the same boat, do it, now, back this shit up, either on disc or external drive. You will be one sorry bastard if you don’t and find yourself behind the eight ball like I almost did this past weekend. If you need to register this in your mind properly, go back to your physical product of choice, be they CDs or records, and imagine a bonfire with Bill Gates in a red devil’s outfit pitchforking every album you own and chucking them into the flames.

The Quality of Supermarket Muzak

Something odd happens every time I go to the supermarket now. I should preface by saying I love going there anyway. It occurred to me last night while picking up a few items (coffee soy milk, peanut butter, a big bottle of this weird Greek grape drink “made with real aloe” although it’s pretty much high-fructose junk, but the aloe is real, and I lightly chew on the small bits as I drink this). But the air conditioning, the lighting, the small thrill of spending money, particularly on food that provides sustenance. Even in a bad supermarket, I enjoy myself.

I’m not sure if all supermarkets are like this, but there’s one by my place, part of the Best Yet chain (which I’d never heard of before it bought the old Waldbaums there previously), that has the best muzak I’ve ever heard. It’s not even muzak – it’s clearly either satellite radio geared towards an extremely tasteful oldies station, or some programmed music that really works. In short order, yesterday I heard: “Try a Little Tenderness” by Otis Redding, “Heaven” by The Talking Heads, “The Girl I Knew Somewhere” by The Monkees, “So Alive” by Love and Rockets, “The Wanderer” by Dion and the Belmonts, and “Nights on Broadway” by The Bee Gees. It’s like this every time I go in, a cross-section of hits spanning the 50s to the 80s. The muzak being played in my supermarket is vastly preferable to the predictable sounds that come spilling out of any jukebox in any bar.

Do kids today even know what muzak is? Until a few years ago, every time you walked into a supermarket, elevator or doctor’s office (or were put on hold), you heard muzak: orchestral versions of hit songs that were often schmaltzy or mind-bendingly bizarre in their arrangements. Sometimes, it wouldn’t even be hits – just casual, leisurely orchestral music designed to chill everyone out. Think Lawrence Welk.

But I guess those days are gone. Most public places now, I hear identifiable pop music being played on sound systems. My gym plays the worst fucking music: late 90s pop. I guess they figure the gym is populated mostly by people in their mid-to-late 20s, therefore they play this shitty music from these folks’ teen years. I can’t even identify the artists – if it’s not late 90s, then it’s current. I don’t ever need to hear “Hollaback Girl” again – the though of this woman in her mid-30s singing such a fucking infantile, bad song – it boggles the mind. (It’s “Micky” for today? I always thought “Micky” was a pretty generic new-wave song, made all the worse by its constant repetition over the years. Does anyone listen to that song seriously and enjoy it? Don’t answer that.) Or some band of post-Mickey Mouse Club wiggers in pajamas drawling “yeah, yeah, yo Dre, turn it up” while they croon some horrendous, generic “soul”/vaguely hiphop number. The only thing worse is the occasional emo/hard rock song with some goateed 19-year-old braying like a billy boat with his balls caught in a vice. It’s either that or generic Matchbox 20-style rock, which I’ve never been able to listen to.

That’s the reason I wear headphones when I get on a cardio machine or lift weights. My boxing classes, the instructor favors a mix of hiphop and caribbean soca-style stuff. Really not that awful, but it’s background noise to me. There’s a guy at the Tuesday class, another instructor, who boxes alone before our class begins, and he’s invariably blasting nothing but Eminem at ear-splitting volume while he goes apeshit on one of those long kickboxing bags. I can’t be in the same room – it’s literally uncomfortable to be in the room with the music that loud. Nice enough guy when you talk to him, but his taste in music, man, it blows. And I haven’t quite made the correlation to how loud music improves a workout.

I’m in mild shock that the supermarket is the one public place that “gets” it musically. Then again, I’ve thought about this and have to wonder. At my age, I’m fully aware music made from the 50s to the 80s is now considered “oldies” in some sense. Yes, even all those hip alt 80s bands – they’ve been around two decades now. And never mind that current “hip” bands are pale imitations of them (The Arctic Monkeys? Meh. I hear all these bands critics and hipsters carry on over and think one thing: been there, done that, next.) Music from the 50s and 60s is not “my” music. I wasn’t born in the 50s, and I was a small child in the 60s. “My” music was the 70s and 80s. I’ve gone on listening to pop music since then, have taken in country, blues, big band, soul, reggae, etc, along the way, but naturally the music of my youth is 70s and 80s. And only with the 70s do I allow myself to love some of the really bad popular stuff.

With the supermarket, I’m wondering, what does some kid make of this music? Like it? Recognize that it’s generally much better than the schlock that’s being vomited on him these days? Think it’s annoying? Think it’s bad? I ask these questions, because I cast myself back to the teenager I was in the late 70s, in a supermarket in Pennsylvania, and I can’t imagine anyone liking that music. The caveat is that canned muzak was playing on the system – probably a samba version of “Yellow Submarine.” I know the music has changed since then, but I’m wondering how much I’ve slipped into the role of an older person “digging the oldies” as he shops in a supermarket, as opposed to a lifelong music fan who appreciates the good shit the supermarket is now inexplicably playing on their sound system.

Whatever the case, it’s a strange feeling to realize the fucking supermarket is a much hipper place to hang than most bars these days. They played “Mama Mia” by ABBA last week. What a long, strange trip it’s been with that band. Of course, ABBA are now considered pop geniuses, despite or because of the cheese factor that accompanied their routine: two married Swedish couples singing in phonetic English. I surely recall the 80s and even early 90s, when you couldn’t find an ABBA CD anywhere, they were considered some lost, campy 70s band that rightfully faded away, and the first collection I finally found for them was a greatest hits import from the UK that made the hipster at the record store snicker when he bagged it.

Take it further back in time. Brother M, who had a good-sized collection of 70s pop singles, played records constantly in the basement, where he had a stereo, a chair and a small barrel to put his albums and singles on while he sat there, listened to music and smoked. That was it – his teenage domain. I’d eventually invade his domain by lifting weights down there, but there wasn’t much overlap as he’d head down there later in the evening. His tastes started out cheesy enough, but eventually he got high-faluting by 70s standards, getting into prog rock and Steely Dan, and the kicker, Todd Rundgren and Utopia stuff, some of which is stamped on my brain. (Todd's Hermit of Mink Hollow album is indelibly tied in with Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey as a result of him dogging the eight-track on one our summer shore visits to our uncle’s house there.)

Since Brother M got so heavily into “intelligent” rock (fucker stole my Alan Parsons Project I Robot album), he often found the stuff I was listening to laughable. Queen. ABBA. ELO. I remember him mimicking the idiotic chorus to “Telephone Line” at me (“Doo-wop/ Diddy-doo-do-wop/ Do-wah Do-Lang/ Blue Days/ Black Nights/ Do-Wah Do Lang”), as a not-so-subtle hint that the latest three-song (in outline format) Utopia album was way beyond that silly pop shit. Most of the kids in his graduating class chose Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine” as their favorite song. (A bunch of stoned idiots, really – that’s not even the best song on that album. And I can guarantee not one of those stoners puts on that song now and thinks, "Ah, the good old days." He thinks, "What the fuck was I smoking the day they passed around the "favorites" sheet for us to fill out?")

Well, one night, I clearly remember, there was a thunderstorm, and I couldn’t sleep, so I went downstairs and for whatever reason, tried to sleep on the sofa. It must have been past midnight, one of those hot/humid nights where sleeping is just not good, no matter what you do. To add to the insomnia, I could hear bass rumblings coming from the basement: Brother M was down there listening to music. Probably just back from various teen misadventures with various troubled youth from the neighborhood.

After about half an hour, a startling revelation occurred to me: he was playing ABBA’s song “Mama Mia” over and over, at top volume. He must have been high, that was my only explanation. If he thought ELO were a bunch of jackasses, ABBA was beneath contempt. (I had all their singles in the 70s … don’t think I ever bought an ABBA album … that only happened in the 90s when their material started being reissued.) I was afraid to go down there, and find some space alien sitting in front of the stereo instead of Brother M.

I’ve kept that secret for almost 30 years. Cat’s out the bag now! Not much of a secret, really, but when I heard “Mama Mia” in the supermarket the other week, I immediately pictured 17-year-old Brother M, in a tie-dye shirt with “Young Americans” on the front in home-made block letters, smoking, huddled in the darkness on a stormy summer night, listening to this great pop song alone in the middle of the night, lest he die of shame for publicly admitting he liked it.

Ended up buying a six-pack, mega-roll of Charmin, shit, almost $10, but closer to $8 with the coupon I had, while I traveled in time from Queens to a small town in northeast Pennsylvania.

The Dandees

I’m sitting here now watching the NCAA Women’s Softball World Series, as I’ve found myself doing the past few years come early June. Just one of those things that eases into my viewing schedule, and I enjoy watching. The games are usually competitive: a shorter field, more strategy, more singles and home runs, good pitching, and the girls have a strange cult-like way of cheering from the bench that resembles the inspired lunacy you see in Japanese baseball.

(I’ll be watching the Little League World Series later in the summer, although I’m mildly annoyed that they now refuse to show kids crying when they lose … about the most honest moment in any sport. They’ll show these kids spitting all over the field and grabbing their dicks, emulating their idiot idols in the major leagues, but they won’t show the kids crying. I often find myself rooting for the more well-mannered kids from the Far East.)

But I have to admit, the main attraction to softball is how attractive some of these women are. Those tawny, long-legged ones with great asses: good-looking tomboys. Last year, I was crazy over Cat Osterman, the legendary Texas pitcher who now plays professionally in Cheap Trick’s hometown, Rockford, Illinois. I could wax poetic over her talents, but the truth is I simply loved the way her ass gently quivered in her tight pants after releasing each pitch. And as softball games are televised just like baseball games (with the left/centerfield camera focusing from behind the pitcher’s back as she throws), that meant every pitch. Along with the unexpected eroticism of women’s olympic curling (again, it’s all in the camera angles), two of my favorite women’s sports to watch.

When I decided to write about this, a convergent thought occurred to me. When I go back home to visit Pennsylvania now, I make it a point to go out driving with my Mom as much as possible. Again, with Dad’s passing, I had the concept of time being finite driven home completely, and realized I should spend time with Mom whenever I can. I hadn’t made the connection earlier, but thinking about women’s softball, it opened a door to the memory of Mom and me driving to my sister’s softball games back in the 70’s. She was part of a pre-high school league (the equivalent of teener league), and her team was The Dandees.

If I wasn’t mowing lawns or playing baseball in the neighborhood, I’d pack up lawn chairs (and a few cans of A-Treat Cream and Root Beer sodas) with Mom and head out to watch the Dandees play. At the time, I must have been 10-12 years old, that quizzical age boys reach where they haven’t hardened into their adolescent stance – not as precocious as an eight-year-old, sort of a weird philosophical boy’s age. I think this picture was taken when I was 13, but there it is. What a total fucking dork I was – which I’m now vaguely proud of. That’s one of those 70s t-shirts, with red shoulders, and “Elton John” lettered over a severely-faded picture of his Captain Fantastic album cover. (I recall that album being my favorite for a good few years in the late 70s.) You’re not seeing my striped white tube socks pulled up to my knees and shitty Fayva sneakers. Or my John Denver wire-frame glasses.

These drives we take now remind me of both of us getting in the car on a summer’s evening and heading off to whatever field the girls were playing at. Since their league was unofficial, they had to take space wherever they could find it, which often meant cruising to remote farm fields or Little League practice fields – never the well-kept high-school fields. Thus, the need for lawn chairs, since there were no stands. It was usually just the mothers of these girls, a few fathers, and some kids like me who tagged along because there was nothing better to do.

The local high-school softball coach, Doug, ran the show, and he had that stoic, fatherly way about him all good male softball coaches (there aren’t many) have. The Dandees somehow got uniforms, light blue with orange lettering if I remember correctly, which was a miracle. There was zero money for their league – no admission and no concession stands. (Little Leagues often made a small fortune selling soda, pizza, french fries and ice cream at their games.) It was no frills. I don’t know if the situation has been remedied since then, or if these leagues still exist in the same way, or girls simply start playing softball in junior varsity without any previous leagues.

The Dandees kicked ass. They were a perennial powerhouse in the league, thanks to Doug’s tutelage, and as a result, our local high school was a softball powerhouse for years to come – still is, from what I understand. The key to kids at that age, maybe at any age, is solid, no-bullshit, fundamental coaching, and that’s all the guy did. Taught the basic skills, what to do in given situations, and the girls either bonded and played well, or didn’t.

Understand that they’d be playing on some truly shitty, remote fields, in shorts, so it was nothing for a girl to go home with a long cut up her league after sliding over a rock, or poison ivy after digging a foul ball out of a clump of bushes. Some girls went for cheerleading, or in the 70s getting stoned all the time, but you had those relatively rare girls who dug sports and wanted in on the action. With guys, there were dozens of guys in each class, like me, who played neighborhood sports of all kinds, but didn’t go out for high-school sports for various reasons. With girls, pretty much every one in a given class who was into sports was on the playing field or court.

We’d often make a big deal about “softball dykes” when we were kids, but with the Dandees, I don’t remember that being such a big deal, maybe because we’re talking girls in the 12-14 age range. Some of the girls were on the bigger side and leaning butch, but that didn’t necessarily translate itself into some bulldog image to be ridiculed. I suspect they were like that when they were eight, and are like that now, whatever their sexual preference.

The truth is, the girls seemed to have more fun, a better concept of team work and didn’t have that dickheadedness that so many guys in sports suffer from. I think the worst part of high-school/organized sports for me was the rah-rah bullshit, as opposed to the simple pleasure of just playing, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, and understanding that’s how the world works. There was rarely that sense that you had to lose your cool when you lost, or humiliate a fellow player who fucked up. (It happened sometimes, but that was just as often longstanding personal beefs that came out in a given situation like that.)

It’s interesting to note the issue of sexuality with sports, because I’d be willing to bet lesbianism is an open secret in sports like softball and women’s basketball. It’s sort of just there and accepted, not a big deal. Whereas a gay guy in men’s sports (save figure skating?) is considered a big deal, even now. I’m just not seeing the real relation between competence in sports and a person’s private sense of sexuality – beyond the stereotypes we’re fed growing up.

On Saturday, I was in the gym, hitting the weights as I’ll do a day or two a week when not boxing. As noted much earlier, I lift weights for the simple reason that as we get older, it makes perfect sense to keep our bodies in reasonable condition. Beneath the bluster and hyper-macho bullshit so many serious weightlifters attach to it, it’s just a basic form of exercise that makes sense.

As I was coming into the locker room, there were three blockheads sporting all the usual affectations that lead me to believe these guys are frightened and need to intimidate people with their looks: bad facial hair, lame tattoos (barbed wire around the biceps, dumb tribal tattoos, dragons and snakes on their shoulders, etc.), shaved heads (to cover receding hairlines), bloated, stuffy-looking bodies due to far too much weightlifting and no real physical conditioning. Guys like this over-populate every gym I’ve ever been in – which is fine. Most of them mind their own business, the same way I do.

But these guys were carrying on about “some fag” they just ran into onto the floor, mimicking a stereotypically gay accent and saying things, that implied to me, that this guy, whatever his orientation was, was actually pretty nice to them, but they thought it was a riot that this “fag” must have been “hitting on” them for approaching them and being friendly.

It was the dumbest conversation I’ve heard in awhile. If you haven’t seen the movie Idiocracy (now available on DVD), I’d recommend renting it … and then realizing that people are this dumb now, as the futuristic movie gets into the whole “you sound like a fag” rebuttal to anyone who speaks intelligently. These three guys were standing there, chuckling away, under the assumption that everyone around them was heterosexual and digging their cool verbal takedown of “this fag who hit on them.” There was also the implication of how they were carrying themselves, standing in the middle of the room in towels, trying to make eye contact with guys around them, that they saw themselves as the center of attention in the room, the truthsayers.

What do you say to guys this stupid? That a public display of something like this is just plain embarrassing, and leads me to believe each of these guys has a mental image buried deep in his sub-conscious of him sucking a great big cock? What’s the point? So I can get in a senseless tangle with three deeply insecure Queens juice heads?

I can't stand dealing with self-satisfied pricks like this, whatever the situation. And I really have no burning issue with their opinions – whatever they believe, it’s fine by me, wouldn't want to get into the hornet's nest of mixed signals their bodies and words imply. It’s just that false sense of security and the lack of recognition that they’re in a public place spouting this shit that should be done privately. Sort of like people spouting deeply racist shit publicly (and I’ve seen this go on in all directions) and not having the common decency to recognize they’re way out of line for doing so.

But it’s that lame attitude that drove home the concept to me of sexuality and male sports … and how we could learn a few things from women’s sports like softball. When I watch these softball games, this is one of the under-currents I sense, beneath whatever fleeting attraction I feel towards some of these beautiful women on the field, fully recognizing chances are good some of these girls aren’t batting on my side of the plate! Whatever. The Dandees seemed pretty cool to me back in the 70s, playing their asses off in farm fields for hardly anybody, and it’s a kick now to see something like a televised world series for softball on ESPN. I’d like to think Mom is watching back home, but knowing her TV viewing habits, she has one of those grotesque cop shows on as she works on a crossword puzzle.

Mowing Lawns

On my last trip back to Pennsylvania, I was worried when Mom told me my sister had mowed the lawn two days earlier. I’m never quite sure why people carp about mowing lawns – I love doing it, and do it every chance I get. The sound of the mower, the physical exertion, time spent in the sun, the visible sight of a finite job being completed – all these things make me enjoy the experience.

Luckily, my sister must have set the wheels way too high, because it became clear a few days later that the grass needed to be mowed again. So I did, and had a rough time as I had the wheels on their lowest setting and the grass was still a little wet from rain the day before. The mower kept conking out on huge chunks of wet grass stuck in the exhaust vent, but after awhile, it got done.

Ultimately, something like mowing a lawn is a direct connection to nature. The grass grows, with or without you, and if you want a nice clean field to walk on, you have to make it that way. With snow or leaves, you have to clean up after nature. Doing these seemingly minute things reminds you of the constant motion of the world – and your small place in it, and that you have to do something to exert control over it. But I think my true pleasure with mowing lawns is tied into the fact that I made a lot of money as a kid doing this.

I can’t remember how we got roped into mowing other people’s lawns, but I’m glad my brothers and I did. The first big client came with Dr. Heber, who lived out the road on a few acres of land – a humungous front and back lawn. Brother M. started doing this, but after awhile realized he was on an eight-hour slog every time he mowed, thus Brother .J and I were enlisted to help with old lawn mowers Dad had tinkered back into (sporadically) working order.

It would take the three of us about three hours to do the whole lawn, with Brother M. stuck with the literally shit job of mowing over the septic tank. The 70s were a weird time for septic tanks. When I visit Pennsylvania now, everyone has a septic tank, as the municipality switched over to this system a few years ago. (And that was pretty onerous and unfair. Every property owner had to pay out of his own pocket to have the tank and a well installed simultaneously – an unwelcome four-figure sum for most people.)

The only way you’d know everyone has a septic tank now is that you can see the pipe tops jutting a few inches out from the grass in each yard. Back in the 70s, the few people who had septic tanks all had the desperately cheap habit of letting the tank overflow, thus creating small shit swamps in their yards, and toxic run-off into near-by gutters. Our neighbors, the Hanlons, got on everybody’s bad side by pumping their septic tank one summer night. I’ll never forget that. We were all sitting around watching TV, probably Chico and the Man, when the most overpowering stench of fresh shit filled the air. This was like Dad, who took the most astoundingly “my god, what did he eat” dumps, taking 10 in a row and lighting them on fire.

We ran out in the streets – everyone on the block did – to realize that Mr. Hanlon had run a hose into his tank and was pumping into the street. A few of the neighbors, my dad included, called the cops, and that was the end of that. Mr. Hanlon alienated a lot of people with that stunt, as well he should have. After that, he still left the tank overflow on the lawn. It should be noted their house was next to a school where dozens of us played baseball all summer. Many of us had sneakers suctioned off our feet when we had to romp through their lawn to retrieve a rubber ball.

With the Heber’s lawn, Brother M. would find himself ankle-deep or worse in sewage sludge and clods of floating grass. It was virtually impossible to mow. All you could do was hack it down a few inches with scythe and sickle. (This was before weed eaters came into vogue.) He’d often find dead or dying copperhead snakes stuck in the sewage, craning their heads while the rest of their bodies baked in shit. He’d usually put them out of their misery with a whack of the scythe. If that sounds harsh, try picking up an agitated, shit-covered, poisonous snake by the tail and walking it a hundred yards to the nearest woods without getting bit.

I’d do this, too, eventually. In fact, I remember Brother J and I taking over the business and doing the Heber lawn ourselves, 4-5 hour mowing marathons that would find us drinking a gallon jug of water a piece and still dying of thirst by the end. The lawn was an easy mow; it’s just that doing a few acres with a push mower is a time-consuming ordeal. I looked at it as a strenuous vertical sun-bathing session that I got paid to do. The worst aspect, beyond the horrible metallic sound of a blade violently scraping on an unseen rock or chunk of wood, was the mowers running out of gas, which would entail at least 15 minutes of fruitless chord-pulling in extreme heat. Once those mowers got that hot, restarting them was a bitch. We learned the trick of unscrewing the carburetor cover and jamming a screwdriver into the gas-flow valve.

Many times, I’d be there in my skimpy 70s shorts, my balls nearly hanging out, white tube socks pulled up to my knees, pair of chlorophyll-stained sneakers, tan as any surfer, cursing over a dead mower that wouldn’t start. But you know what? To get through that, drive back home, unload the mowers, sit in the backyard in the cool of the evening, sipping Kool Aid, with $10 in my pocket (the job went for $20, which seemed like a lot of money to kids back then), and the knowledge that I’d be driving to the local mall in an hour or two to buy a few albums – a nice feeling.

There were other lawns. The next worse was a woman just up the road from the Hebers who had a pretty non-descript, shady lawn, save that it had a “rock garden.” This meant a bunch of decoratively-painted rocks placed into a ridge on her lawn – it was about 15 feet long, four feet wide. The problem we had with the rock garden was that we had to get down on our hands and knees to pick out grass and weeds from between the rocks, making sure to leave any colorful flowers or heather untouched. What a pain in this ass this was. It would take an hour to mow the lawn, then three more hours to clean out the rock garden. On our hands and knees, or leaning on rocks for leverage. Couldn’t use gloves either as they’d make our fingers too clumsy to grab the small weeds. Thus, we’d leave the place with sore knees and backs, small scrapes and cuts on our fingers. The rock garden only happened once a month, but we dreaded it.

Even our own lawn had its problems, namely dogshit. God bless cats for having that internal radar to know to shit in a box. I prefer dogs for their personalities, but if only they knew how to shit like cats. Running over dogshit with a lawnmower is not a sweet proposition. The terds are cut and flung over the lawn, leaving the mower, and maybe you, smelling like dogshit. So, before every mowing session at home, I’d have to shovel the numerous mounds of dogshit from the lawn, and, man, that was no fun. We kept the stuff in an old tar bucket, then once it was full, bury the contents in the backyard. It was sort of a dogshit stew in that tar bucket – the contents somehow liquefied over time. A real nightmare would have been one of my older brothers chasing me down with that bucket and dumping it on me.

What I remember most about lawn mowing is that deep-summer zen, the same feeling I’d get distance running. The heat would add to it. Anyone who’s done any prolonged cardio workout knows the feeling – your body is under duress, but it’s also working at peak form, pumping out sweat to cool down, the repetitive action lulling the mind into a sense of calm. People would never believe me when I’d tell them how relaxing it was to run seven miles in 85-degree heat, but it was. The same went for lawn-mowing, along with that sense of isolation the sound of the motor would bring. The outside world existed only in passing, a wave to a friend passing by on a 10-speed bike. Even now, if someone starts up a piece of equipment like a lawn mower, I can sleep straight through it, so long as the sound remains steady. You couldn’t hear anything outside it, you had to concern yourself only with what was directly in front of you, and that was a visible square that shrunk to a smaller box with every passing lap, until there was nothing but a freshly-mown lawn, and the smell of it mingled with hints of gasoline. A perfect little world.

And a pocket-full of dough afterwards. I can trace back my relationship to money and work to allowances (believe it or not, a quarter a week ... how in the hell I did anything with that amount of money is beyond me now), but it wasn't until lawn mowing that I got the first taste of comparatively big money. A strange thing about me, work and money -- maybe good, maybe bad. I've found that so long as I feel productive and useful, money's not a burning issue in my life. Sure, I could use more -- most of us could. But I'm not driven by money -- I'm driven by the concept of work. You better believe, when people work with me, they're pretty happy that there's one person around who is more interested in getting shit done than in fucking with them in some sense. I enjoy working, and it's surely a detriment to me that I don't insist on climbing a money ladder to ensure my self worth. That may not seem like much of a distinction, but from what I've seen, it's a huge one in terms of the difference between ambition and work itself. This all goes back to mowing lawns, and the simple pleasure I got, and still get, from being able to take stock in a job well done, and knowing the whole process will need to be done again, and again, and again.

The Riverside Shakespeare

The secret bane of college life, as I remember it, was having to buy over-priced text books for classes. It had to be the biggest racket on campus – books that should have gone for no more than $20 being sold for $120. And you had to buy them. Luckily, the campus had a pretty good used store, so I could buy these shit-bag, never-to-be-used-again books for $50. Of course, the worst aspect of used text books, and even worse for novels: passages highlighted in yellow that made no sense to highlight, and scribbled notes in the margins that suggested the previous owner was a complete moron on acid.

I now own only one book purchased for classes from that time: The Riverside Shakespeare. I’m not really sure why I still own it, as I haven’t read any Shakespeare in years. If you’re not familiar with this edition, the thing is twice the size of a New York City phone book. I’m trying to remember how I carried this thing to class – in a wheelbarrow? I think it’s a lot like the poetry books I bought so many of in my 20s; I can’t seem to part with them even though I rarely read them. (I just don’t have the time more than anything.) They’re status symbols of past ideals, so I can show people I really gave a shit about such things, once upon a time.

Hell, since discovering the joys of the New York City Public Library, I may never buy another book again. I’m looking at my life and recognizing time is an issue in terms of re-reading books … so why buy them? I say this knowing full well that if I had a few lucky breaks, I’d be begging people to buy my books. When the reality is I can’t be bothered to buy them myself. And I can’t stand the atmosphere at bookstores. I like the atmosphere in my boxing classes. I wish I could merge both and beat the shit out of various art snobs and such who make small indie bookstores such a stale experience.

But let’s get back to The Riverside Shakespeare. I was lucky enough to have two professors who worshipped him, so I actually pulled something from their classes, as opposed to the millions of kids who take similar classes and feel like they’re sleepwalking in hell. Charlie, my English professor/mentor at the branch campus I attended for two years, specialized in Shakespeare, to the extent that he’d insist when we read in class, we’d need to re-enact everything. Ergo, if there was a thundering storm, he’d enlist a few kids to bang the shit out of close-top desks and wail. It was great fun. And since Charlie was such a hip guy, at least as far as English professors went, he knew how to connect the writing to contemporary issues. Not in that shithead “let’s re-do Hamlet with helicopters and a hiphop soundtrack” way – just in making the emotional connection between those characters and how people are now.

My second professor, at the main Penn State campus, christ, I can’t remember his name, an older man, but this guy was excellent, as good as Charlie in terms of his knowledge and passion, and just as engaging. For the quality of instructors I had teaching me Shakespeare, I should be a lot more enamored of his writing than I am now. I guess the problem was/is I can’t stand stage acting and plays. I hate seeing actors act. I can handle movies, but when I see people on a stage, over-emoting and carrying on like mental patients, I just turn off. I’d rather watch American Gladiator reruns than any Sam Shephard play. One-man shows? Forget it. Hideously bad over-acting in my book. No one ever acts like that, unless they’re high and/or deranged – which is the case some of the times with the characters portrayed, but just as often not.

And directors have a way of mangling Shakespeare to “update” his style, which always comes off terribly. I know a lot of actors eat this shit up, a chance to tap into the classics, throw in Ibsen and such, but it’s just an art that I don’t appreciate, and lord knows, I tried. My response to "let's go see play"? It's "let's just fuck instead, and save $20 a piece and bad plastic cup of warm white wine at intermission, ok?".

But The Riverside Shakespeare, this haunting doorstop, goes on sitting in my apartment. I keep telling myself, “it’s good to have that as a reference,” but god-damn, the last time I referred to it was probably about 1991 or so. Why do I keep this fucking thing?

I guess it’s like the baseball glove I keep in one of my drawers, which dates all the way back to the late 70s when I bought it at the tail end of my Little League stint, to use in neighborhood ball, which went on a few years more. I used it, too, in the short-lived publishing/advertising softball league days of my mid-late 20s, which I enjoyed at the time, but more for the rambunctious bar scene afterwards, getting really hammered and flirting with those nutty/beautiful advertising chicks who never knew what they wanted. And I do have nice memories of being out on Ward’s Island as the sun set on a mid-summer evening, cool breezes coming off the East River, playing softball, catching a look at Manhattan between pitches, as our team usually lost 26-7 or so, but no one gave a shit. When the game ended, we’d take a yellow school bus back to a dive bar on the upper east side. I distinctly recall pissing on the streets of the Bronx like a dog marking his trail, because I just couldn’t make it home in time to unload about six pints of Guinness I’d had in the previous two hours.

The glove isn’t so much a reminder as a physical extension of a memory – something that seems so elemental and tied into who I was that it makes sense to keep it. I have baseball hats like this, too, that I’ll probably never wear again. Sentimental things, when you get down to it. Throw in The Riverside Shakespeare. With college stuff? There are damn few physical reminders of my time there – a few pictures, some yellowed newspaper columns (that make me cringe the few times I’ve looked at them), a diploma. Everything else is carried in emails and conversations I’ve had and continue to have with a handful of old college classmates over the years.

And none of us are nostalgic for those college days, even though most of us had a blast at Penn State. The Riverside Shakespeare makes me think of this girl Ann from South Dakota who was in my second class at the main campus. A beautiful girl with long black hair – looked a lot like the actress Jordana Brewster. I was dying to fuck her, but we never quite clicked. I’ll never forget the night I snuck into her dorm, so we could play Chuck Berry’s “Great 28” album I had just bought ("Bill, you bought the album? Get over here, now!"), and she went nuts doing the twist for about an hour – I should have went for it then, dude. But it didn’t happen, and we went on, carrying our gigantic copies of The Riverside Shakespeare to class three times a week. We both got A’s, and I guess she went back to the Badlands to live out her days.

Why is it that I think just as much about her, or Charlie, as I do anything I actually learned while reading The Riverside Shakespeare, when I look at that book on the shelf?

When Michael Stipe Had Hair

I’ve been doing one of those huge MP3 projects again. This time, I’m wading through all my 90s pop CDs that came out pre-MP3 boom in the late 90s, and transferring the cream of the crop to MP3. It’s a lot of stuff – adding 400 some tracks to a general Pop folder that already had 800 or so songs.

The same thing happens every time I do these projects: it occurs to me that I no longer want to own certain CDs, and in some cases, jettison entire phases of certain artists’ careers. All in utter astonishment at why I bought this shit in the first place. Sometimes, the bands do it for me in real time. I couldn’t stand Radiohead’s change of pace with Kid A, made the bad mistake of buying the electronic blip/blop follow-up, threw both out and swore to never again buy Radiohead product unless it featured two guitarists. The shock for me is that Kid A is their most popular album; it’s a piece of shit.

(Sidenote: I can't use the excuse that I "was high, man." The only time I've ever purchased music while in any state of inebration was a strange Friday night shortly after I had just been dumped by a girl I can't even remember. I went out and got drunk with a few friends. Afterwards, since I was near the Tower on 4th and Broadway, I inexplicably headed over there and plunked down what was then a good chunk of change on the Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons box set -- on vinyl at the time. The next morning I woke up and thought this was totally nuts. But you know what? After playing the thing a few times, I realized it was a sound purchase, made under emotional duress.)

I now have a stack of about 30 CDs I’m going to junk. In the old days, I’d try to sell these, but now, I’d rather just throw them out then go through the whole Half.com process, which is a lot of work, to clear less than $100 over a few-month period. There are a few multiple-album dumpings. The White Stripes: after the first two albums, aside from a few songs I handily saved, the rest of their stuff sounds so bad to me. Boring, repetitive, wildly over-rated. Jack needs to stop dressing like a rodeo clown on acid and get back to business.

But the real revelation, which shouldn’t have been much of one at all, was REM’s output from the 90s on. Thus, the title of this posting … because the only REM I will now own harkens back to days of yore when Michael Stipe still had hair. And I’m not recognizing those days as being quite so golden. A few months earlier, I noted how surprised I was that a recent listening to REM’s 80s material left me feeling that a lot of their music was overly precious college rock, mainly because of Stipe’s murky poet image. The music was fine. Some of the songs are legitimately great: “So. Central Rain,” “I Believe,” “It’s the End of the World As We Know It,” “Talk About the Passion,” “Good Advices,” “Don’t Go Back to Rockville,” etc. The consistent weak point is the lead singer – not his voice, which is actually fine for the material. I’m talking lyrics and image more than anything.

They had enough great material that I could see why I was a huge fan at the time. The general vibe back then was that REM was akin to The Beatles, as The Replacements were to The Rolling Stones. And both were in a friendly competition to be the best indie band around. Then REM really took off with “The One I Love” and things escalated from there, to the point where they became something far from the cool indie band they once were. The last song I recall falling for was “Losing My Religion” – the video of which imparts where they were going wrong. Indulging in all sorts of artsy imagery, pompous in a "college sophomore on his first Camus jag" way, vague hints of Stipes’ politics seeping into the music, etc. Sort of like U2, who followed a similar trajectory. Save you knew that was going to happen with U2 – REM should have never got that big. They were meant to be shaggy bohemians, not shaved-skull rock stars dressed like Johnny Bravo.

Luckily, The Replacements didn’t become rock stars, and sucked when they tried. Paul Westerberg found his niche as a tasteful cult artist, but even that’s been problematic. His albums are uniformly mediocre – just not enough good songs, plenty of songs that sound right, but aren’t quite there. To read critics’ reviews, you’d think he’s doing Exile on Main Street every time out; he’s not even doing Goat’s Head Soup. The fan base seems to be filled with very odd people who treat Westerberg like a god and maniacally shout every lyric of every song at every show. (I don’t remember Replacements shows ever being this way. They were fun. Not a church service for a bunch of people who never got past 20 in their emotional development. I don’t mind 20-year-olds with this kind of mindset, although, again, Replacements fans back in the 80s seemed like a tough, cynical lot not prone to singalongs. But when you’re 35?) As ambivalent as I feel towards Westerberg these days, his fate has been vastly preferable to that of REM.

Getting back to REM, I also recently bought the video collection of their early IRS material, and that was a fun watch. I see a lot of myself and how I was in the vibe of those videos, those college days of the mid-80s, when we were all making it up as we went along. I remember staying up late to watch the episodes the band did on the MTV show, The Cutting Edge, and thinking that’s how it should be: a bunch of skinny kids on a shoestring budget, gallivanting all over the country in a van, sleeping on the living-room floors of fans when money got too tight for a hotel, jamming in big empty rooms, not taking it all too seriously. They lived in an abandoned church, man. A fucking abandoned church! Did I mention my friends and I once chatted with Michael Stipe in a graveyard on the campus of Bucknell University on a pre-Fables of the Reconstruction mini-tour? On campus at midnight after the show. A fucking graveyard, man!

But the 90s version of REM is just so awful. Michael Stipe, of course, is the key, but the rest of the band seems to have lost its ability to write good songs. “Man on the Moon”? This song is so bland and inoffensive – hardly a fitting tribute to Andy Kaufman. “Shiny Happy People”? Even if it’s being ironic, it’s still a deeply foul song. “Everybody Hurts”? I don’t like Sean “Puffy” Combs, but I’ll give him credit for lampooning this song in his "All About the Benjamins" video for being the hack pussy-work it is. “Nightswimming”? A song about skinny-dipping late at night. Written by a guy in his mid-30s. Who the fuck, in his mid-30s, still goes skinny-dipping? This is the kind of thing ROCK STARS do, as they rarely have to get up at 6:30 the next morning -- John Cougar could have written this song. “What’s the Frequency Kenneth”? I guess this is the guys getting back to their “rock” roots. But it’s boring as shit: a neat summation of REM’s 90s output.

I can’t even recall what the song was, but REM did a video where they showed up at a New York City high school to play for the kids. And the kids looked perplexed. I’m assuming most of them had no idea who REM was, and didn’t care. So you have the visage of these increasingly haggard looking guys wearing these manufactured Chess King rock-star duds, jamming out on some tuneless song, for a bunch of kids who think they’re a joke. All I could think was, “Once you make a few million dollars through a bogus record contract that the label wishes it could rescind in light of greatly diminished sales, reality becomes a distraction.”

After wading through their 90s discs this past weekend, and salvaging four tracks from all of them, all I could think was, don’t blame the band, blame me. I was an asshole for buying all these CDs long after it had been made clear to me that the band was phoning it in shortly after their first stadium tour.

Why did I do it? Partially out of loyalty, because the band genuinely meant something to me in the 80s, and I had faith enough in them that they’d somehow “find the magic” again, a false hope bolstered by critics who tend to make really bland albums by previously-indie bands like this sound like they’re worth purchasing. (And they rarely are.)

I think a greater reason is cultural inertia. Which is to say, when something that was once good and right in our culture hangs around, despite the fact that it has seen better days, there’s a strange cultural force that compels people to stick with it, full well knowing they’ll be disappointed. I believe this force has kept the music industry afloat for decades. It’s surely kept dozens of long-in-the-tooth bands around long, long past their prime. Part of that is nostalgia. You want to go on being the relatively innocent kid you were, plugged into a genuinely heartfelt and exciting experience. By buying that band’s now-shitty albums, you go on having faith that they’re still somehow the same people, as you are, too, by extension.

But part of it is just business. The album comes out, it garners anything from favorable to rave reviews, and after awhile you realize that when a record company throws seven and eight figure sums into signing a band (which is what inexplicably happened to REM in the early 90s), they want some ROI (Return on Investment) and are going to do everything they can to make this happen. I know REM’s albums have sold like shit-flavored ice cream since the mid 90s. (And rightfully so!) But to gather by the tour support they routinely get (I hope they recoup some of that money on the road), the publicity for each album, and the critics in their back pocket, you can suss out that it would be in their best financial interest if you bought the album, even when you sense it’s going to be a dog. (The last album I bought had a song called “Imitation of Life” which was a fantastic return to form the band – the rest of the album was so fucking bland and pointless, just not something I’d ever listen to again.)

For me, REM is the Alt 80s version of Rod Stewart, someone who plummeted from respectable creative heights (his first few solo and Faces albums are still incredible) to what we thought was horseshit (“Da Ya Think I’m Sexy” … followed by his 80s synth-pop period), but wasn’t that bad compared to the absolute horseshit of Stewart singing standards. (Whoever’s buying these albums, and someone is because they’re sizable hits … fuck you. There’s something really wrong with you. Allow me to reiterate: fuck you. If you want to hear standards sung a few thousand times better, drop me an email.)

The thing is, not many people are willing to bust REM on sucking at that same level. But they are. I’m sure they’re still a bunch of nice guys. That Stipe can look you in the eye and have an earnest conversation that makes you think he’s a wizened southern nut. And that Buck still has that cool record-store clerk countenance about him. And in Mills you can still see that gawky kid playing bass in a Georgia high-school marching band. But for the life of me, something died a long time ago, it started reeking like roadkill skunk on the Dixie Highway in late August, and it wasn’t until a week ago that I finally came to my senses and buried it. My bad!

Crazy Old Lady Shit: The Bird Edition

Old women often do things that aren’t so much strange as idiosyncratic – the sort of things geniuses do inadvertently, or the idiot next door does as a matter of habit. With my Mom, she has a bizarre obsession with the sight of records or CDs. When vinyl was king, through the 70s and 80s, brother J and I built quite a collection – hundreds of albums, which were stored nicely in basic black metal shelves that didn’t looks bad at all, a major step-up from the old cardboard boxes and milk crates we had them in.

The sight of them drove Mom nuts, despite the fact that she had a houseful of knick-knacks, silly ceramic things that served no purpose other than to show that someone in the house had weird taste that was in no way ironic. She muddled through the vinyl years, only to find that the vinyl would eventually be ditched for CDs – again, all of which fit easily into those black metal shelves. They’re neat, orderly, nothing wrong with them at all. In fact, the shelving space was cut in half due to the smaller size of CDs, so there was less to irk Mom.

Still, some time in the early 90s, she came up with her solution: take an old vinyl shower curtain, cut it down to size, and velcro it to the top of the black metal shelves so the shower curtain would cover the sight of the CDs. Now, I’m of a mind that people can do whatever they want in their homes, but there’s only one place a shower curtain looks right: in a motherfucking shower! As “tasteful” decoration in a bedroom? No!

It must have been one of those things Mom read in “Hints from Heloise” or something – she was always reading those nutty “home improvement methods using household products not designated for that purpose” books, you know, get vomit stains out of a rug by using vinegar and Clorox … so your now-spotless rug can smell like vinegar and Clorox, with faint whiffs of stomach acid. I remember washing my hair in beer and using mayonnaise to get rid of zits. What the fuck was I thinking. With the CDs, she should have bought a tasteful curtain and hung a rail on top of those CD shelves, and that would have worked. Although, again, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the sight of those CDs placed neatly on a shelf.

Crazy old lady shit! I got a small jolt of it yesterday with my landlord. Not in a bad way – crazy old lady shit rarely comes in a deeply offensive form. Her thing in general is lawn gnomes and such – she has a few dozen plastic elves and swan planters. A life-sized statue of a fawn with a lot of paint chipped off the head, like someone was shooting at it with a BB gun (the Queens version of the Sphinx?).

It doesn’t bother me at all. I can tell it’s the kind of thing that kids home in on as being so far outside their little outlaw world that it’s worthy of their derision. A few years ago, some of the douche bags from the public school across the street would routinely sneak into her yard before classes and move the fawn around. Those kids got busted in a matter of days – by me. Never confronted them head on – bunch of black kids, who seemed to have problems with authority figures, much less male, much less white. I don’t need that sort of shit first thing in the morning. Simply walked across the street, got hold of the first security guard (security guards for seventh graders … welcome to New York City), explained the problem, demanded to talk to the principal or “my attorney” would, and from that next day onward to this day, kids are not allowed to be anywhere near the yard – as enforced by the beefy shaved-headed gym teacher in a sweatsuit who stands out there every school morning.

But in terms of my landlord’s yard decorating tastes, she really made a statement about two years ago. In the back corner of her patio she has a storage shed, filled mostly with gardening tools, but also some emotionally charged items: the wheelchair her now-deceased husband used in his last few years of physical decline, a tricycle and a wagon for her grandkids who come over sporadically (whenever she's not squabbling with her daughters). But the weird one was this gigantic plaster bald eagle. The thing was huge with a wing span of about three feet, was just about as high. I kept wondering, why is this beautiful-but-cheesy bird of prey sitting in her shed?

Well, I guess she was just waiting for the right time to have one of her Greek neighbors get in touch with a landscaping nephew to have the thing bolted on the front of her cinderblock wall facing the street. It happened one weekend while I was away. When I came back, there it was, this giant plaster eagle, positioned just a few feet away from a pair of plaster white owls she has on the edge of her little front garden. It looked like the eagle was getting ready to eat the owls.

Knowing this neighborhood, I thought it would be a matter of weeks before some 15-year-old shithead, on some lazy 2:00 am in deep summer when he couldn’t get his flunky guido nephew to buy him some spray paint, would take a baseball bat to it. But no such thing happened – her eagle is still there, forever spreading its enormous wings and grimacing at all who pass on the street.

And just this weekend, the bald eagle got company. Right next to it, two golden eagles, a good bit smaller, probably about 18 inches high, both very regal looking with wings pulled in, painted a dull yellow, and both facing each other on the cinderblock wall. Please understand, I’m the wrong guy to talk to about this stuff. I once had a fascination with ceramic lawn donkeys and the often dozy, sombreroed figure leading them on a plastic chain. This stuff has always seemed silly to me. Even in the context of this silliness, the birds of prey are pretty strange stuff. But you see this sort of thing all the time in the 718s: life-size figures of saints in front gardens, ornate wooden doors on ramshackle rowhouses. A block down, there’s a row house with this gigantic cage built over the front of the house, with a buzzer on it and a security camera over the door. What goes on there? Probably nothing – just some guy with money to burn who always wanted a cage on the front of his rowhouse.

What to make of this? Here’s my take. At first, I thought this sort of display was a giant fuck-you to the world – the old lady equivalent of sporting a purple mohawk. Some kid wants to take an aluminum bat to it? Go right ahead – she’ll buy another and have it replaced within a week. I used to fret that I’d come home one night to find her weeping, the bald eagle in various pieces on the ground in front of her house. Who knows, that day could still come to pass.

After awhile, it occurred to me that this was just her taste, and it comforted her to have these odd knick-knacks displayed on her property. It’s her thing. Not a statement of purpose, or a confrontation with the world. She thinks it looks nice … much like the giant macramé picture of a stagecoach barreling through the woods at night she took out of my place when I first moved in. I got plenty of Jesus paraphernalia in my place (although I’ve really cut down over the years). A Kit Kat clock. One of those cool ceramic asian cats with his right paw raised in the air. A snowglobe Elvis. Various pictures of dogs playing poker.

But other than that, it’s stuff that means something to me directly. Various snapshots of my hometown. A picture of Dad and me from my college graduation (a great day for both of us, although I was still puking drunk), along with his funeral card and a picture of him studying at school as a young guy. Pictures I took in Scotland when I was over there in the late 90s.

I’d rather have stuff that means something to me on my walls than what I had previously, which was a smattering of the ironic stuff noted above and posters of various rock bands and movies. It occurred to me in my early 30s that this was a holdover from college. Not bad to have some of that stuff around, but that was my whole M.O. for years.

I guess as you get older, you want to let people know who you are, or what you appreciate, as opposed to appearing cool as an unspoken defense against the world. And thus, you get to the heart of cool: not caring what anyone else thinks about you. I can assure you, an old woman with these batty plaster birds all over her yard couldn’t give a flying fuck what anyone thinks about this. And when you look at people lives, you see what they’ve gone through – in her case the prolonged death of a spouse, off-and-on tiffs with her kids, a serious health problem for herself when her digestive system nearly conked out.

When you go through all that shit, if it gives you pleasure to look at tacky plaster birds and plastic lawn trolls in your yard, so be it. It takes a long time to come around to that way of thinking, and I am miles away from the kid who would point at a ceramic lawn donkey and laugh hysterically. You roll with this shit in life. Reminds me of the time Eddie, my landlord in the Bronx, asked me to help move an old couch to a neighbor’s house. Eddie was Puerto Rican, the neighbors were black, and I’m white, maybe the first white guy they ever had in their house. Every piece of furniture in the house was clear plastic-coated, which I’ve since learned is a staple with a lot of working-class black folk. I could tell when I came in, the hostess was eyeing me up to see if I rolled my eyes when I sat down on the couch and made it squeak. But you know what? They paid good money for that sofa, and if they wanted to make sure no one got stains on it by coating it in plastic, that was none of my business. Reminded me of the car seats from my mom’s old Skylark station wagon.