Happy Holidays!

'Never figured you for a Doors fan...'

If you were ever into the Doors, in that way only misfit teenage boys can be, you probably know the outlines of the Jim Morrison creation myth. You know more than that he was a film student, or that he had dead Native American spirits haunting his soul. You know that he was a Navy brat, that his father was an admiral or something, and you probably guessed all sorts of horrible things about what that would mean for his upbringing. How it led to all that ugliness at the height of “The End” and was the torturous forge that created his Art.

So I was surprised to see a news article that quoted the Admiral himself commenting on his son’s life and work. You may have been surprised that he betrayed real affection. “We look back on him with great delight… the fact that he’s dead is unfortunate but looking back on his life it’s a very pleasant though,” Admiral (ret.) George Morrison said in a new authorized band memoir.

Of course, it sounds like there was a little wishful thinking there. “He knew I didn’t think rock music was the best goal for him,” the admiral said. “Maybe he was trying to protect us.” A part of me wonders if he was completely aware of what his son did… and sang.

I think sister Ann got closer to it: “He liked mystique, too. He didn’t want to be from somewhere.” But I’ll go farther with my conjecture: that it is too bad he didn’t live long enough to outgrow his moody adolescence.

The tragedy of Jim Morrison is the tragedy of the band. As a fan in good standing, I’d chart their history like this: two albums of sheer youthful explosion. That mix of youthful energy and insight coupled with not inconsiderable skills that gave us two of the best rock albums of the period. That was followed by slump, in which they produced two albums that are kind of floundering. The first is at least interesting and catchy in its searching, the second is a crashing failure. Then they grew up. Suddenly they produced two very strong albums with maturity, a sense of humor. It is an interesting trajectory, considering the weird pressure cooker of the music industry: they did all that in the midst of a relentless touring and recording schedule with lots of people treating them like meal-tickets. And Morrison’s death – like those of the other big ticket rock stars – was stupid and avoidable. (But kudos to the rest of the guys for soldiering on for two more, terrible, Jim-less albums).

And as with everything that I seemed to like as a teenager, it is hurt by its fans, and by the weird fact that they keep coming – it seems a new group of kids hits the beaches every ten years or so. “Every generation has its Doors fans,” said Dave Brock, frontman of a Doors tribute band in Orange County recently profiled in OC Weekly.

Lester Bangs was onto it during the first big Doors revival, writing in August 1981 about the first Second Coming, including the hilarious rumor about a biopic starring John Travolta. He wondered about why so many kids were so into this stuff, and came to a snap judgment, taking contemporary to task for its “relative lack of passion, expansiveness, and commitment.” “There is a halfheartedness, a tentativeness, and perhaps worst of all a tendency to hide behind irony that is after all perfectly reflective of the time, but doesn’t do much to endear these pretenders to the throne.” (in 1981?)

He writes that the Doors were for the “the one guy [who] used to sit there all day and night toking on his doob and intoning things like ‘Genius… is very close to… madness.’” He wishes that Morrison was a better singer, and teases out the sense of irony and humor the band had at their success and pretension. And in the end…

Perhaps what we finally conclude is that it’s not really necessary to separate the clown from the poet, that they were in fact inextricably linked, and that even as we were lucky not to have been around any more than our fair share of ‘Dionysian’ infants, so we were lucky to get all the great music on these albums, which is going to set rock n’ roll standards for a long time to come.

The Kids in the Hall:

Happy Thanksgiving!

Montaigne’s advice for new dads

I know very well that I have it pretty easy compared to what Olga has to do. I just cook, clean, and change lots of diapers. I’m loosing plenty of sleep though, which I have always handled very badly. Luckily Ol is a pro at all-nighters thanks to grad school and our domestic sanity is somewhat preserved. But overall for me, the experience of early fatherhood has been like going to the coolest, most amazing concert you can imagine, but getting stoned to just shy of incapacity right before in the parking lot. Day to day, I perform a lot of moral and support services, but in the broader sense feel somewhat superfluous. And while Motherhood is sublime, fatherhood is just complicated. I’m sure I’ll have a lot of thoughts on the subject for, roughly, the rest of my life. But I’ll start with one of the first places I turned to for advice.

The day before Mila was born was a cold and drizzly Saturday. We were waiting around the house, pretty certain something was up but not yet ready to go to the hospital, and I spent much of the day in Olya’s gliding rocker reading while she napped. I read some Chekhov stories, and some essays by Michel de Montaigne, one in particular that caught my eye was “Of the Affection of Fathers for their Children.”

Montaigne has a reputation as a particularly sympathetic figure not only to literal generations of readers, but to his contemporaries who regarded him as an accomplished statesman in a time of terrific religious and civic strife.

As the founder of the essay-genre, his personal jottings are loopy, honest, often funny, and usually insightful. On fatherhood, he begins by making plain his sternest his thoughts on children. “I cannot entertain that passion which makes people hug infants that are hardly born yet, having neither movement in the soul nor recognizable shape to the body by which they can make themselves lovable,” he writes. “And I have not willingly suffered them to be brought up near me.”

The foundation of the adult-child relationship clearly must be of stronger stuff:

“A true and well-regulated affection should be born and increase with the knowledge children give us of themselves; and then, if they are worthy of it, the natural propensity going along with reason, we should cherish them with a truly paternal love; and we should likewise pass judgment on them if they are otherwise, always submitting to reason, notwithstanding the force of nature. It is very often the reverse; and more commonly we feel more excited over the stamping, the games, and the infantile tricks of our children than we do later over their grown-up actions, as if we had loved them for our pastime, ‘like monkeys, not like men.’ “

Indeed, those were different times. There was probably an element of psychological self-preservation in all this, as for most of human history childbirth and childhood were incredibly dangerous times. Montaigne and his wife had five daughters, only one of whom survived past infancy.

And it is worth remembering that for about the same amount of time marriage and families were not actually about love and affection in any real way, but about property, kinship networks, and clan survival. Montaigne spends a lot of time considering how to handle inheritances and preserving your family’s good name.

The greatest reward that comes with reading Montaigne is seeing through the customs and the particular times into the mind of a person. His digressions and anecdotes are of his time and his place, but it is in the wandering that you discover what is great and eternal about being human. As when he wanders away from that initial severity.

He betrays himself at times as a soft touch as the essay progresses: in his position on corporal punishment (“I have seen no other effect of whips except to make souls more cowardly or more maliciously obstinate.”) and about being a miser (“A father prostrated by years and infirmities, deprived by his weakness and lack of health of the common society of men, wrongs himself and his family by uselessly brooding over a great heap of riches.”)

And he knows full well the limits of keeping too severe an attitude. He quotes the Marshal de Monluc, who lost a son and was full of regrets. “He had lost, he said, by that habit of paternal gravity and stiffness, the comfort of appreciating his son and knowing him well, and also of declaring to him the extreme affection that he bore him and the high opinion he had of his virtue.” Montaigne concludes “this lament was well taken and reasonable.”

As a new parent I’ve done my best to avoid anything but the most technical parenting advice from books, though I eagerly court advice from friends and well-wishers. I laughed to myself this afternoon while burping her – which I do dozens of times a day – when I realized that all this little creature does is yell, grunt, and stare at me, and I’m completely mad about her. We haven’t even gotten to the stamping, the games, and the infantile tricks yet.

Mila's first night out

Mila visited her first restaurant Friday night: Webster's Fish Hook in Northampton, after a visit to great grandfather. She didn't eat much though, and in fact slept through the experience.

Mila's first Election Day

I’ve been following elections since around 1984, through fits of curiosity, elation, disappointment, drunkenness, fear, and loathing. But there is nothing that puts things in a new perspective more than the way I watched last night’s late late returns come in: when CNN called Missouri’s Senate race for Democrat Claire McCaskill at about 2 a.m., and my nine-day old Mila spat up on my knee.

Considering my line of work, and my desire to avoid having to defend my objectivity in awkward situations, I try to keep my thoughts on our political climate very simple and vague. But I simply can’t hide that it is very important to me that my daughter grow up in a civil society that refuses to be guided by greed, hate, and fear. The fact that any honest person reading that line can tell exactly where I stand should tell you a lot about American political culture in the past few years.

I spent most of the night at the Eagle running our election blog, which unlike the primaries, was terribly boring. The Democratic state senate candidate Ben Downing had it in a walk after very early results. And the governor’s race was not much of a contest at all.

Good. It shouldn’t have been. Republican Kerry Healey’s campaign was one of the most vile in memory, more so because it was perfectly unnecessary. In all the mud and bile she paid to spew across the state, many may have overlooked the fact that she is a moderate on most issues, and probably a very nice person beneath it all. But she chose to take a very dark path – she became her own Lady MacBeth. She could have used this race to build an amiable public persona, she could have positioned herself for a serious run at some of our weaker House seats or even at John Kerry the next time he comes around. But she refused to do that, and she deserves a nice quiet life in private sector oblivion because of it. (The Globe reports on the incredibly weak thinking behind it here)

It is a testament to the fact that things are, indeed, different that Democrat Deval Patrick refused to hop into the gutter as well. I’ll confess that I was a late-comer to the Patrick bandwagon, which lit people on fire around here in the Berkshires. He has a house in Richmond a few towns away, and I remember a year and a half ago getting emails and calls from Democratic folks around the area telling me about meet and greet events with Deval, and my response was “Who? Holy cow, don’t you realize the election is a year and a half away!”. I admit I was suspicious of his background: I don’t believe that success in business in any way qualifies you for elected office, and telling me you were a high-level executive at Texaco and Coke is like telling me you were a third-mate on a pirate ship. But through the primaries I came around and inhaled the spore with everyone else.

So while I was in the newsroom keeping tabs on the local races, the television gave dribs and drabs of what was happening at the national level. I didn’t have a chance to really start paying attention until after deadline, when it was down to Tennessee, Missouri, Montana and Virginia. When I got home I took Mila to the living room so we could watch some results before collapsing myself.

This afternoon I caught glimpses of Bush’s press conference. For the first time he looked and sounded like a beaten man, like someone who has heard the music. He was vicious and ruthless having won, and ferocious and nasty while in the process of loosing. But having lost almost seems to agree with him. I even laughed at one of his jokes (the one about Karl and the reading list). I almost can’t believe I’m saying this, but I have a hunch that the glad-handing bipartisan Texas governor we heard so much about years ago might make an appearance after all because he is all out of options. And if recent political history has taught us anything, it is that the Republicans are probably a more skillful minority party than a majority one (remember Newt Gingrich?). The next two years will be very interesting. But at the risk of sounding like a Massachusetts Republican, thank god there will now at least be a little bit of balance in the nation’s government.

On Halloween night, when we were still in the hospital, I turned on the television to watch the news. On the Albany stations there were a lot of awful ads in the Sweeney/Gillibrand race. We switched to the Vermont channels and there were lots for the Rainville/Welch race. We turned the whole thing off.

Those first few days in the hospital are a real blessing. You have lots of people around to help you out, you have no cares or responsibility beyond the new member of your family, and you have nothing ahead of you but the bright field that is the rest of your life. Yet it doesn’t take long for you to be ready to head off into the big Whatever-it-may-be, to get bored with the hospital walls and the hospital halls and to get back Home. Even though one can’t know what awaits, I knew all along this election day was coming. And in addition to hoping for a happy, healthy baby and wife, Tuesday was one of the things I wished would happen. I hope we earn it.

Axl and Kurt

For whatever reason last night while Mila was keeping us awake I started thinking about that strange rivalry between Axl Rose and Kurt Cobain. It started late one night months ago when I was watching VH1 or some such and found myself trying to remember what I thought of Guns n’ Roses, and how weird and portentous the feud between frontmen Axl Rose and Kurt Cobain was, and whether there is a larger point buried in it.

GNR was very big right when I was in junior high school, and I remember they were everywhere during those years. But by the early 90s the tide had gone out. They entered their baroque period, with the lavish, expensive videos, stadium tours of dubious quality, and Axl veering into a singular rockstar eccentricity while his bandmates just veered. Then came the grunge revolution, and Seattle’s indie scene became the Platonic “alternative” music ideal, with sonic mix of punk and metal and its flannel-clad, latte-fueled aesthetics.

At the time it was clear where the humor was, but looking back the picture becomes blurred. Although GNR came from the worthless Sunset Strip hair metal scene, they had the talent and creativity to beat it, and it is remarkable how well many of their songs hold up. Meanwhile grunge has has revealed itself to be just plain hilarious: all along maybe it was just metal that took itself way too seriously. I can’t listen to Soundgarden or Alice in Chains without chuckling. Nirvana was a rather large exception, and I think they knew it and it was one of those pressures that made them so uncomfortable in the limelight.

One point of friciton in these tectonic shifts was the famous feud between Axl and Kurt. There are stories Axl had wanted Nirvana to tour with them, which came to naught in some incidents at the 1992 MTV Music Awards involving Courtney Love and Axl’s entourage. There are many variations and rumors about what exactly happened, but Kurt seems to have seen Axl as a phoney, washed-up rockstar, while Axl saw Kurt as a heroin-addled whiner. At this moment, each of them seems to have had a point.

Over the weekend I saw an article in the Guardian by a filmmaker who traced Cobain’s last few mysterious days before his death. There are some very interesting moments…

In Seattle, we met up with Duff McKagen, bassist in Guns n’ Roses who’d bought a ticket on Delta Flight 788 to Seattle on April, 1 1994, and found himself sitting next to a crumpled figure wearing sunglasses.

It was the first irony of Cobain’s final week. Having jumped the wall of the Exodus Recovery Center near LA… Kurt found himself sitting next to a junkie rock star on the flight home. Duff is amazingly frank about what happens when two drug addict musicians meet up on a plane. “You cop some dope and then talk about quitting… ‘Yeah, this is the last time right?”

Or this…

Back in Seattle, Cobain proceeded to start scoring inordinate amounts of heroin, heading on out to the seedy-as-fuck Aurora Avenue to score them in Room 226 of the Marco Polo Motel (checking in as “Bill Bailey,” the real name of Axl Rose).

As much as I like Nirvana, I don’t regard Cobain nearly as highly as his fans do. I want to think this was a weird kind of solidarity and connection, a sense that when you strip away the personae they had to put on, they were just people trying to make art and live their lives. But alas, I fear when Kurt dragged himself into the hotel and gave that name, there was nothing more on his mind than a silly joke, made by a floundering jerk.

The years since have seen Cobain’s legend explode – as seen by his remarkable posthumous earning power. Meanwhile Axl has vanished into the studio, working on that mysterious single album that may or may not ever be finished, and is almost certainly going to be so worked over that it can’t be very good. Instead of being a slave to drugs, he’s a victim of his own perfectionism and difficult temper.

Sometimes you see kids running around in t-shirts with images of dead rock stars – Jimi, Janis, John Lennon, etc etc. This thanatos is the great drawback of rock culture, and we could do without it. It’s the kind of thing that turns Jim Morrison from the singer of a pretty good band into, as Lester Bangs dubbed him, a “bozo Dionysus” with an annoying afterlife.

It's a girl!

Olga and I welcomed into the world little Mila Jane Marcisz on Sunday, Oct. 29. She was born at 11:25 p.m. at Southwestern Vermont Medical Center in Bennington, and checked in at nine pounds, twenty inches.

No respect I tell ya...

It is a terrifically discouraging time to be a journalist, and many more posts here would include my thoughts on the subject but since nobody likes other peoples’ shop-talk, I try to keep it to myself. Though sometimes the conversations taking place way up in the stratosphere of Big League Journalism trickle down onto my head while mucking along down here on earth. I like Jack Shafer’s work very much, and usually agree with him. His work on the disheartening prevalence of anonymous sources in the national media is especially worthwhile. But the very idea of writing about media and journalism is weird and self-referential. And in Mr. Shafer’s case it seems that he has had too long to get comfy with a steady gig from a big family-owned news concern, and hasn’t talked to nearly enough people actually out in the hills trying to do this stuff. Lately he has been complaining about complaining about cuts at newspapers. He was talking about the big guys, whose steady stream of lay-offs has had ripple effects down to every level of the profession. He thinks it’s no big deal, and journalists should stop being so full of themselves. He feels so strongly about the subject that he even chose to refine his points in the face of criticism today. At first, I though all this was just the obnoxious, knee-jerk contrarianism that has been Slate’s bread-and-butter throughout (I always expect to see the headline, “Why not smoking and eating a healthy diet is bad for you”), but there is a little more here. I work at a newspaper that has already been cut away to nearly nothing. We had our big purge in 1995 when a certain big corporation bought the place from a well-regarded lcoal family and came in with sharpened pruning sheers. I know very well what it is like to have to do far too many things – cover too many towns, responsible for too many project stories, keep track of too many people. And what’s worse, the people you write for do little but complain about all the things you can’t do. But perhaps what gets me is Mr. Shafer’s rather sharp dismissal of journalism’s beloved self-positioning as watchdog and civil servant:

“Scratch a serious reporter, and he'll offer volumes about the "public service" his newspaper performs in the form of investigations: It watchdogs government. It keeps corporations honest. It uncovers the dastardly deeds of foreign dictators and prevents genocide. It exposes quacks and charlatans. (It turns the common man into a Socrates if he reads the editorials!)”

Well, har har har. Last night I covered a selectmen’s meeting in one of the seven towns I’m responsible for. There were the five board members, the town administrator and assistant, two reporters, and one concerned citizen. They were talking about the upcoming budget, but couldn’t help but spend several minutes at the end of the meeting in a red-faced rant-fest complaining about the media, disagreeable people who attend meetings, and all the other evildoers that have conspired to create a truly difficult situation for the town. I don’t know if our presence there just gave them something else to holler about, but if the interest of the majority of residents who pay taxes and can’t even be bothered to vote is any hint, we are doing something that Mr. Shafer has forgotten about. Now earlier in my career I spent awhile working in that stratospheric big-league journalism world and I saw a lot of things that made me shake my head at how callow and silly it all was. And I listened to many, many chest-thumping pep talks at J-school hitting all these notes Shafer mocks, and many of my colleagues there are now very successful and following along the agenda that he thinks is so funny. But when I moved out to a smalltown newspaper, making so little money I can barely make my student loan payments, with little hope of going anywhere because every place I’d like to work is firing people, it really gets you down to the brass tacks of what this is really all about. He writes: “My admiration for original investigative reporting knows no bounds. But the defenders of journalistic excellence will have to make a better case for the connection between big staffs and great journalism before I don my helmet and rush to man the Los Angeles Times barricades.” So how about a kind word for the connection between tiny staffs and alright journalism? Jesus, I have to stop reading Slate.

Chris is a punk...

... for never updating this bloody thing. Who knew just waiting around could be so busy? I'll have more soon. But tonight is the last night at CBGB's which, if you are like me, you've never been to but walked past once or twice -- knowing full well that a giant clump of your favorite bands were launched there. Many a time while living in NYC I scratched my head at the band listings in the Voice and told myself to get down there anyway, but I never did. Anyway, spend a minute...

David Ortiz's 41st

Congratulations to David Ortiz, who broke Jimmie Foxx’s single-season home run record for the Red Sox, which was set in 1938, on Thursday night.

My friend Jamie stopped by for a little while, and while that was cool, he also brought for a visit -- and then forgot at our house -- this…

That is David Ortiz’s 41st career home run. It was hit on the night of August 6, 2002, when he was just a chubby underachieving slap-hitter for the Minnesota Twins, who were visiting Camden Yards to play the Baltimore Orioles. It was hit in the sixth inning off of Sidney Ponson, and drove home Cristian Guzman. The homer was a shot to center-right field, and was caught by my friend Jamie, who was sitting immediately to my right. The Twins went on to loose that game, 9-2, and would give up on Ortiz after that season. The rest is history.

Primary night post-mortem

Primary night blogging went pretty well, judging by the responses we received and word around the office. I put up 33 posts through the course of the night, most were more processing returns than analysis, but it was a good run for the first time not just for me, but the Eagle as well. We had a very close state senate race that actually managed to keep us at the edge of our seats toward the end, and some conclusive and fascinating statewide results. The biggest surprise was that people started demanding the results fiftenn minutes after the polls closed, which suggests that we’ll need to do a little more explanation of the counting and reporting process for November.

Primary night in the Berkshires

Even if you aren't a hardcore political junkie who won't be able to fall asleep tomorrow night until you know whether State Senate Candidate X carried North Adams' Ward 2, you should still check out the Berkshire Eagle's primary night blog. I'll be your host for the evening, so wish me luck!

On Christgau

I flinch whenever senior journalists are canned through some corporate nonsense or other. So it was pretty alarming when Bob Christgau was unceremoniously shoved off his perch at the Village Voice. He has enough stature that he’ll land on his feet someplace, but I’d love to know how got that high in the first place. I think very highly of rock criticism as a genre – when done well it is an entertaining and insightful blend of unabashed fanboy enthusiasm, home-cooked literary theory, and bold, creative leaps and connections that define what is best about postmodernity. And while I can, if pressed, dig appreciations on Christgau (like this one in Slate) I don’t wholly agree with them.

His signature column – the “Consumer Guide” – was a periodic list of capsule reviews, and as a regular act of journalism they were darn near useless. Reading it is like intercepting fragmented telegrams aimed to one of his close friends. In-jokes, awkward grammar, unclear frames of reference, no sustained thought beyond a snap judgment (his longer pieces, I might add, are little better. Or rather, they may be incredible, but I’ve never gotten through any). I’ve read the Voice pretty regularly since high school, and I’ve never understood what he was on about. Frankly, it’s not English. And I’d love to learn more about this “fearsome line-editing” Jody Rosen write about. I’m afraid to admit I always believed he was a once formidable critic and intellect who had gotten a bit too cozy and lazy and was phoning them in.

To his credit, he maintains a terrifically comprehensive website, and looking back – especially if you look at whole columns as they originally appeared – turns out he was always that way. However, if you search by particular bands, bits and fragments jump out through the fog with some impressive – and concise -- insights. And he starts to look more like the Ezra Pound of rock critics. He’s an important figure at a critical time, he’s incredibly grouchy, and his vast body of work is a giant ash-heap with a few gems buried inside.

And about that grouchiness… Some gloomy critics are like doomed lovers in Gothic romances. Sometime, somewhere, they had a powerful, transformative, ineffable encounter with Art. Maybe it was one night in the dark at the theater, and some mix of words and performance laid raw some experience. Perhaps it was alone at home one night with headphones and some LP record sent shockwaves down your spine. Or maybe it was hours hidden away one quiet summer afternoon with a book. Something snapped in that moment and you can’t explain it, but you are so moved by its power you roam the earth seeking to find it again. But all you meet, over and over again, is the bitter taste of failure and the frustrating twilight of only seeing shadows of the wonders in your memory. That personal journey is all well and good, and often, it’s even fun to read.

And you can’t deny he’s dug deep, so visiting his website is a fun way to waste time. Consider this blurb on my favorite Soviet rock-band, which, amazingly, he got his hands on…

Kino, Grupa Krovy, 1989: Just Russian new wavers, their translated lyrics unobtrusively poetic, alienated by habit, politically aware, resigned. But Victor Tsoi's solidly constructed tunes have a droll charm that's fresh if not new, and to an English speaker, the physical peculiarities of his talky voice, which saunters along as if a low baritone is the natural human pitch, seem made for the offhand gutturals and sardonic rhythms of his native tongue. When his boys ooh-ooh high behind "It's Our Time, Our Turn!," it's as if someone has finally concocted an answer record to "Back in the U.S.S.R."

Here area a few I can certainly dig…

The Ramones, Ramones, 1977: But my theory has always been that good rock and roll should damn well make you uneasy, and the sheer pleasure of this stuff--which of course elicits howls of pain from the good old rock and roll crowd--is undeniable. For me, it blows everything else off the radio: it's clean the way the Dolls never were, sprightly the way the Velvets never were, and just plain listenable the way Black Sabbath never was. And I hear it cost $6400 to put on plastic.

The Eagles, The Greatest Hits, 1976: Hum 'em high--ten poptunes from the Four Lads of I'm-okay I'm-okay are probably a must for those who've concluded they're geniuses by listening to the radio.

Pavement, Slanted and Enchanted, 1992: Though no outsider wants to believe it, they're not just the latest scruffy rumor. And though no insider wants to believe it, they're more well-schooled than inspired--skilled, gifted, of enduring artistic value, condensing a decade of indie thrashing about into a two-year recording career that takes off with their debut album.

Pulp, Different Class, 1996: This year won't produce a more indispensable song than "Common People," but that doesn't mean young Americans know enough about the bourgeoisie to get it.

And these just make me say ‘y’ouch’:

The Doors, The Doors, 1967: I admit that some of the tunes retain considerable nostalgic appeal, but there's no way I can get around it--Jim Morrison sounds like an asshole.

The Stone Roses, Stone Roses, 1989: Their music is about sound, fingers lingering over the strings and so forth. And in the end they're surprisingly "eclectic." Not all that good at it, but eclectic.

Son Volt, Trace, 1995: Finally the answer to a question that's plagued me for years. I'd pound my pillow at night, drift into revery at convocations on fun, plumb forget how my dick got into my hand, wondering why, why, why I could never give two shits about Uncle Tupelo. But the answer, my friends, was blowing in . . . no, I mean hopes "the wind takes your troubles away." Name's Jay Farrar, never met a detail he couldn't fuzz over with his achy breaky drawl and, er, evocative country-rock--and needn't trouble with the concrete at all now that that smart-ass Jeff Tweedy is Wilco over-and-out. In the unfathomable Tupelo, Tweedy whiled away the hours writing actual songs, leaving Farrar the drudgery of mourning an American past too atmospheric to translate into mere words. As sentimental as Darius Rucker himself, Farrar is only a set of pipes and a big fat heart away from convincing millions of sensitive guys that he evokes for them.

Summertime has passed and gone

Our best investment of the summer was a regular old small charcoal grill, which, as a Weber, Olga nicknamed "Max." Steaks, burgers, salmon, clams, jerk chicken, and many ears of corn were among the dinners successfully prepared in our first year of outdoor cookery. We will have the naked spot of burnt grass outside our porch door to remind us of the good times for the rest of the year. That's me on the rocks at Pemaquid Point, Maine, Aug. 27. A perfect late summer dinner. At the Lobster Dock restaurant, Boothbay Harbor, Maine. Aug. 28. View of Williamstown from Stone Hill, August 2006.

Talkin' Not Goin' to Wahconah Park Blues...

When I found out Bob Dylan was going to play Wahconah Park in Pittsfield last year, I thought about going. But I didn’t, for all the typically lame reasons: the traffic, the crowd, and I felt a little bad about it. Then when I heard he’d be coming back this year, to play this Saturday, I was excited for a few minutes, then decided I wouldn’t be going. And it isn’t just the $49.50 ticket price.

Before I go any further I should state clearly that I am a huge fan of Dylan’s early albums, which are on regular rotation in my iPod, and am a pretty decent amateur Dylanologist who can could parse the meaning of being followed by a Persian drunkard or of “jewels and binoculars hanging from the head of a mule” until the wee hours of night. That said, his live performances, and everything he’s recorded since Blood on The Tracks is just… is just… is just…..

I’ve seen Bob live three times. The first was in fall 1992 when I was in high school at the Paramount Theater in Springfield. Back then I was big into classic rock and the 60s and 70s, and since so many of my heroes and just about everyone I really liked was dead, I was quite in awe of the fact that Dylan was still around. And indeed, I was so star-struck that I felt bad for thinking that the band was ragged and sloppy and that the best moments were when he was alone on stage – like the old times – and grumbled out one of his classics.

I saw him again in December 1995, at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia. This time, he was wearing a weird sparkly blouse and again, the band chugged like some engine that was spitting out screws and blue smoke. He grunted, garbled and chudded through a boring set of what I thought I recognized as Bob Dylan songs. He wasn’t helped by the fact that he followed up his opening act, Patti Smith, who was playing one of the first shows of her comeback and damn near blew the roof off the place – to my incredible surprise, because I didn’t really like her all that much before that night. Bob didn’t have a chance, and I actually left early.

Last time was late 2001 at the MCI Center in Washington. It was the worst place to see a concert, though we got good standing spots along the boards of the hockey rink stage left and had a good view. I have much fonder memories of this show. His band was certainly much, much better. They were on a tighter leash, and clearly far more in tune with what Bob was up to. Maybe I’d just grown up, or knew the work better, but I could see the stubborn way he tried to make his songs new, by changing the rhythm and the intonations. That said, I dug it as an intellectual exercise, but my heart was elsewhere.

So while I might not think his most recent stuff really compares to his early stuff as much as some other serious fans do, I still have a lot of respect for him. The first volume of his memoirs, Chronicles, Vol. 1, was one of the most interesting and insightful things I’ve read in a long time. I like that in an upcoming article for Rolling Stone he refused to come down against Internet music downloading. That and the fact that he still makes a living as a musician should – by going out and playing music for people – signals that he absolutely has the right attitude about his art and his craft.

On Saturday night I’ll probably put on Blonde on Blonde wherever I am, but I won’t be going down to Wahconah Park. I hope everyone who is has a great time.

Eh, just call it a massacre already

After thinking about it for far longer than a guy my age should, I think I’ve finally found the faint silver-lining in the five-game, four-day beatdown the Red Sox suffered at the hands of the Best Team Money Can Buy this weekend at Fenway. No more of our guys got hurt – though, in keeping with the spirit of this unbelieveable catastrophe, the jury is still out on Manny and his hamstring.

As a pessimist, I’m rarely surprised by how bad things turn out. I believe behavioral science has proven conclusively that people as a matter of course exaggerate how bad or how good outcomes will be. So it’s amazing when something like this comes along and a part of you just shakes your head and is surprised that happened. My friend John had morosely predicted last week they’d loose four out of five, which I thought a bit skeptical, but probably on target.

The horror of this series, as any fan will tell you, was that it was perversely much closer than it looked. Baseball is aggravating like that – each of these games had discreet moments when things could have gone one way or the other. And the specific horror of baseball fandom is those moments keep coming back to you until you somehow push them out of your mind.

And it is perhaps a bit harder for me because I am not buying into any specific scapegoats. I remember 2004 too well to get down on Mike Timlin for long, and I just feel bad for those kids in the bullpen who were thrown at this buzzsaw like a batch of conscripts on the first day of the Somme. And I can’t even get on the case of management, because I am one of the few lonely voices that agreed with the decision to stand pat. There really wasn’t much on the market, and grossly overspending on junk at the deadline is what the Bad Guys do, not us. Remember this motley crew was in first place in the AL East most of the year, and was only down by one and a half when this bloodbath started. So I can stick with Theo Epstein and company because I remember that we won it all in 2004, and I believe that Willy Mo will work out, that Damon was overpriced, that we have to be smarter and more patient than the Yanks, and because two of their most recent screw-ups – acquiring Edgar Renteria and letting Doug Mirabelli go – were rectified as quickly as possible. For all these reasons I can handle a season going awry with a certain amount of faith. Which leaves nothing but the black kernel of hateful desire to see the Yankees not win anything. Not only are they the embodiment of everything that is wrong with baseball, they also are everything wrong and perverse about America. I’ll probably have to get into this later in the season.

Which, I might add, has awhile yet to go. Things are very dour, of course, but not out of reach. Key players can go cold, and they can get hot. In a few weeks we’ll (hopefully) have Varitek, Nixon, Wakefield back. And as the Yankees have proven every season since 2001, a baseball team is not always the sum of its parts. Besides, August is always a bitch.

"Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung"

It is amazing how more than sixty years on, unexploded bombs from the Second World War are still tilled and blown up with surprising regularity. Last week, Nobel laureate and long-time anit-war author Guenter Grass revealed more details about his record during the war, particularly that he served in the notorious Waffen-SS. There are a host of mitigating factors here: that his unit was a figting one, not one of the ones that ran the death camps, that he originally tried to serve in the submarine service, and that in 1944 young German men hardly had many choices in the desperate waning months of Nazi rule. Every honest writer, journalist, or historian knows is that nothing is black and white.

In the course of cleaning out my old belongings from my parents house before they moved, I came across many of my old books from college. One particularly valuable discovery has been my copy of William Shirer’s Berlin Diary, which is really an overlooked classic of the run up to the war from his perch as one of the “Murrow Boys,” covering Germany for CBS radio. He would go on to write the definitive first comprehensive history of the Nazi era – and become a regular columnist for the Berkshire Eagle after he retired to Lenox.

Shirer clearly had little love for the Nazis, and he rightly saw them as cheap thugs and whackos as brutalized and led a once brilliant nation into war. He wrote on the fly, and the book was published even before America got involved in the conflict in 1941. He knew nothing of what was to come, naturally, but his observations are just as valid and are worth remembering as we try to look at that period through the truly horrible knowledge of everything else that happened, and see through the pervasive preconception that Germany was little more than a mob of goose-stepping thugs hell-bent on world domination.

Here is Shirer writing about the Sudeten crisis in autumn 1938, a full year before the war actually broke out, but when Hitler’s increasingly crazed bullying of his neighbors made it seem a repeat of the First World War was imminent (and was only averted by appeasement at Munich)…

“Berlin, September 27…. A motorized division rolled through the city’s streets just at dusk this evening in the direction of the Czech frontier. I went out to the corner of the Linden where the column was turning down the Wilhelmstrasse, expecting to see a tremendous demonstration. I pictured the scenes I had read of in 1914 when the cheering throngs on this same street tossed flowers at the marching soldiers, and the girls ran up and kissed them. The hour was undoubtedly chosen today to catch the hundreds of thousands of Berliners pouring out of their offices at the end of the day’s work. But they ducked into the subways, refused to look on, and the handful that did stood at the curb in utter silence unable to find a word of cheer for the flower of their youth going away to the glorious war. It has been the most striking demonstration against war I’ve ever seen. Hitler himself reported furious. I had not been standing long at the corner when a policeman came up the Wilhelmstrasse from the direction of the Chancellery and shouted to the few of us standing at the curb that the Fuhrer was on his balcony reviewing the troops. Few moved. I went down to have a look. Hitler stood there, and there weren’t two hundred people in the street or the great square of the Wilhelmsplatz. Hitler looked grim, then angry, and soon went inside, leaving his troops to parade by unreviewed. What I’ve seen tonight almost rekindles a little faith in the German people. They are dead set against war.”

And a year later, when war did break out…

“Berlin, September 2… I was standing in the Wilhelmplatz about noon when the loud-speakers suddenly announced that England had declared herself at war with Germany. Some 250 people were standing there in the sun. They listened attentively to the announcement. When it was finished, there was not a murmur. They just stood there as they were before. Stunned.The people cannot realize yet that Hitler has led them into a world war.”

Of course, many things happened in the next few years. But it seems hardly worthwhile condemning one of the leading voices of sanity and healing because of this brief and marginal moment. We should be suspicious of those that see this as an opportunity to advance their own agendas, and understanding of those that still can’t see the shades of grey.

Ando way they go...

I didn’t expect to make this a space for metacommentary on my regular work, but if the opportunity presents itself, might as well. On Friday architect Tadao Ando was in the area visiting one of his latest projects, the new “Stone Hill Center” – as it seems they want to call it – at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown. It’s not everyday you get to follow around a Pritzker Prize winning architect. I’d covered his last visit to the area last year, when they unveiled the final drawings for the building.

This week he was in town with a posse of consultants, officials, Japanese media, etc. and we all followed him up to the building site near Stone Hill. It felt a little bit like those scenes in 8½ when Marcello Mastroianni is taking the crowd around the movie set. There were lots of people with cameras and microphones milling about, all following around a mysterious genius who drops cryptic remarks around and seems both nervous and perfectly at home at the center of attention.

I should say that architecture is one of the more interesting of the arts in my mind. I wish I could say that there was one building or experience that won me over forever, but I think it was a gradual think. I remember I agreed with little thought when I read about how the Situationists were into architecture as the purest total artform because of its power to immerse and dictate experience, and by the time I made my first trip to Chicago in December 2004 I was far enough along that I thought it was one giant and super-cool museum. It is one of those things that grabs me for no real reason. How I could find so interesting something so basically functional and practical when all my other interests are based on abstraction, serendiptity and non-utility is a great mystery. Architecture’s submission to physical reality, ruthless emphasis on process, existence in everyday life, are all interesting, but hardly the kind of things that usually float my boat. And that whole thing about architecture’s durability, that it lasts, strikes me as a bit fatuous.

So it was great that Ando was designing something like this on my beat. It would be one of those buildings serious architecture nerds are going to drive out of their way to see, there will be fancy photographs of it at sublime angles in expensive glossy magazines. And I’ll get to follow it from the start. Though I have to say I was skeptical at first. Architectural drawings, no matter how fancy and chic, seem silly to me. I always get a kick out of the faceless CGI people walking about like ghosts. Here are ones for the Stone Hill Center…

But as I learned more about it, the more I came to buy into it. When I write I usually try to find the thing that interests me the most and start from that. Usually, what interests me would not interest anyone else, which is why daily journalism is probably not my perfect metier. In this case, the interesting thing to me is the concrete.

When you think about concrete as a building material a lot of very negative things probably pop into your head. Like the Boston City Hall, a building which has its unique charms in terms of being like a fat upside ziggurat suspended in mid-air, but the material looks cruddy when it rains, and it is almost certainly an inappropriately brash thing to have in the center of America’s most European and traditional cities.

So for awhile I had a hard time understanding how Ando’s building on Stone Hill would involve concrete. How could that work? But the interesting thing is that Ando’s concrete is nothing like the gravelly crumbly stuff on sidewalks. As with the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis, the stuff is extremely dense, set in place by specially made forms and settled with industrial vibrators (they have an interesting slideshow about it here). The end result, amazingly, actually shines in the sunlight.

What Ando is doing here is creating a sense of harmony with the the surrounding hills. Based on the mock-ups at the site, the forms will be made of Yellow Pine, and will give the finished concrete – which again, is more like a dense and molded stone that anything you’d see out on the street – a horizontal plank appearance with the grain textures embedded. That will work with the cedar planking in other parts of the building, along with the glass and metal elements, to create something that fits in.

It also seems that for all his poetic license – last year Ando went on about the building as a jewel hidden in the landscape – it does seem to be in harmony with the surroundings. While a construction site never looks in harmony with anything, and we couldn’t see the promised views because it was overcast and drizzly, it should work out. It is not a high building, it is fit carefully ino the hillside, and there will be only small roads and paths to get up there. You won’t be able to see it from the rest of the Clark campus.

It all seems to be coming together pretty well. And perhaps the backhanded fun of this is that you just won’t know how the thing is work until after the $25 million is spent and there’s no turning back.

Extraordinary time for the Sox

I keep trying to explain to wife that we are not living in ordinary time when it comes to the Red Sox. That this is why after we get back late from birthing class I instantly flip on the game, for the last few innings, and that even though it looks like an ordinary listless midsummer loss, with a pall of trading deadline malaise and freak injuries in the air, I stick to it. Because David Ortiz is likely to come through with something like that. I know pretty well this is temporary, this is something we go through for a few years every decade or so. One of the beautiful things about being a Sox fan is that you know your team isn’t going to plunge into one of those death-spirals you see in markets that don’t take baseball seriously. But there is something in the air right now. I felt it during the game at Fenway I made it to this summer, a Monday afternoon makeup game that went into extra innings, and the whole time I wasn’t worrying about whether or not the guys could pull it off, but rather when they would finally finish up and win the damn thing already. It was that feeling I imagine Yankees fans have all the time. Granted, my wife doesn’t entirely believe that this weird moment of grace happens to conincide with our moving back to New England three years ago and we started getting NESN with basic cable. But I know full well this is a special time, and that’s its not enough to just read the box score everyday.

July shows

It's been a very very good summer for concert-going this year. Here's some footage someone shot at the Wilco show earlier this month in Northampton...

They say at good ole Camp Howe...

A lot of things have been conspiring lately to make me think about summer camp, including this week’s package in Slate about American summer camp. I went to Camp Howe in Goshen, Mass., right off Route 9, which I drive past everytime I visit my parents or see a concert. I remember when I was eight and was dropped off there at what felt like the very end of the earth.

It was a 4-H camp, which meant I had a chance to learn how to shear sheep and the proper way to harness a donkey. In the course of seven weeks, I met probably hundreds of kids, from all sorts of backgrounds and towns, and I knew very little about any of that beyond the quality of their personality. For example, I had a very good Puerto Rican friend for many of the weeks I was there. I didn’t realize that Ananda was actually Indian until I took an Indian studies class in college.

It is incredible what I learned in those few weeks. It sounds trite but the volume of memories from that place shocks me. From memory I could draw a map of the compound, whose cabin was where, how to get down to the lake, why you should use that bathroom rather than this one, etc. I remember campers like James, who always wore this yellow polo shirt, and this other kid named Chris who had a tendency to get bloody noses. We had very cool counselors. Ours wore this Pony t-shirt and kept a tin of Skoal tucked in the calf of his white tube socks (this was 1984, so this was pretty cool). He taught us how to slow dance with a girl by demonstrating on the post of the cabin one night after lights-out when all we had were our flashlights. We had another fellow named Hank, who had a fearful reputation as a bit of a jerk, and who looked like he walked out of a Billy Idol video. But I remember during one of our afternoon quiet periods he came to make rounds. I was reading a novelization of the second Indiana Jones movie, and he came over to my bunk, looked at the book, and said with touching seriousness, “tell me how it ends.”

I remember my first baffling experience of arbitrary human nastiness, when I was walking down the winding forest path to the lake with a kid I vaguely knew named Ben who out of the blue began hurling insults at me. By the time we got to the beach we were near to blows, and the counselors broke us up and demanded to know what was going on. Ben explained that I had called him “Ben-Gay.” I had done no such thing, and hadn’t heard of anyone else doing such a thing -- but I made sure that everyone in the camp called him that by the end of the week.

I have memories from other camps as well, like Boy Scout camp in 1985 when I came thisclose to being named “Camp Clown” for my outgoing and funny personality (it was a toss-up between me and another kid, so there was no official clown that year. We each got booby-prizes: mine was “Camp Singer” because I knew a bunch of stupid campfire songs I’d learned the previous summer at Camp Howe). No one who had known me before or since can believe that, but I swear it is true.

What it's worth

As a working journalist I check Romenesko about four times a day, and eagerly follow every letters-section dust-up, usually yelping my thoughts at one side or another. The latest interesting one is about journalist pay and what it is doing to the profession. This recent thread (it can be found here), reiterates a lot of the questions everyone finishing up their CSJ applications should be asking themselves.

Some of the postings I’ve noted include young journalists complaining that it is impossible to earn a living in this job, former journalists who loved it but left it for public relations, older journalists saying it has always been this way and you should do it for love and the Holy Mission of Reportage, and older journalists telling these worthless pups to zip it already because they had to walk uphill both ways to their first job etc. I’ve been in one of those moments where I’ve been thinking about these things lately, and not just because I just cut my monthly Big Check to pay for my fancy education (more on that in another post!). Just the other day I spent a few hours cruising around the website for The Oshkosh Northwestern because they had posted a job that I think I would like. It’s a fantasy of course: I’ve no ties to the broad middle of the country, and who knows what my wife would do out there, but that’s what journalism is all about nowadays. While it might not register the first time you hear it, but whenever I have doubts about journalism and whether it is worth it I turn back to Hunter S. Thompson. In December 1958 he was moved to write to Editor & Publisher in response to a column about – wait for it – how young journalists weren’t coming to the profession because of low pay.

“The reason for journalism’s shortage of young talent is just as obvious as the fact that most of the newspapers in the country today are overcrowded rest homes for inept hacks,” he subtly notes. “Burial grounds do not attract talent.”

And later…

“Journalism, for my money, has nearly tumbled head over heels in its hurry to toss away its integrity and compromise with the public taste, the mass intellect, and the self-sighted demands of profit-hungry advertisers. Now how in the hell do you expect to keep on attracting top talent? Sacrificing good men to journalism is like sending William Faulkner to work for Time magazine.”

That’s 1958 folks!

“A free press is not indispensable unless it makes itself indispensable,” he concludes. “So how about cleaning up your house and then bellowing about now one wanting to come in?”

A Year

Hard to believe that it was only one year ago today in Moscow when I, Olga, and her parents piled into a black Volga sedan for the trip from her parents’ apartment in Shchukinskaya to the Central Palace of Wedding Registrations, It was a bright, midsummer day, clearly going to be hot. I remember when our driver skillfully used some side roads to avoid traffic -- dear Ol praised him on his skill finding his way to the ‘Palace,’ assuming he must’ve ferried a lot of people there. Instead he suspiciously shot back “what’s that supposed to mean?” We soon found out he’d already been married three times.

We’d gone through a lot to get to that trip across Moscow. It started on a hillside here in Williamstown in April, when our dog Gryeka discreetely ran off for a little while so Ol and I could have a talk. It included a trip to Boston for me, where I got to see the official Seal of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and get a stack of documents from the Northampton City Hall, Mass. Department of Public Health, and the Berkshire Eagle officially sealed. That was nothing compared to the bureaucracy Ol had to weave through in Moscow, and what we had to manouver together once I finally arrived. After leaping through the official paperwork, we still had only ten days to find a restaurant (we gave up and had it at home) and find shoes for Ol.

I love my wedding memories. I love handing off my passport and visa to a Russian civil servant, while Robbie Williams’ “Rock DJ” absurdly played on the sound system. The way we had to defend not laminating our wedding certificate, and have our music picks for the ceremony narrowed down to what the assembled musicians could hack through that morning. And the waiting around in puffy leather chairs until our turn was called and our party could march on in. How given my very limited Russian skills I understood only some, but was amazed and amused by the fact that this civil hall had a full-blown and brightly sun-lit clerestory. And signing the documents, only knowing where to sign by the skillfully deployed long twisted plastic pointing stick. And Ol planting this ring on me that hasn’t been moved since.

We all had a toast of Novy Svet champagne in the lobby, and then walked off into the day. We took a regular old Lada to get back to the apartment, and set about turning the study into a big dining room while father-in-law prepared the feast of satsivi and other tasty things. And of course leaving before all the guests had left so that we could catch a car to get to the railroad station for the overnight train ride to St. Petersburg for our little honeymoon.

So one great year has passed, and an even better one lies ahead.

This is not a test post...

Erm, actually it is.