Apologies (sort of) for the recent absence. Lots of work to be done these days, along with other extracurricular activities, both personal and of a work-ish sort.
For instance, I most recently experienced my first voice lesson. Here's how it went:
Step 1: Warm up by singing "ooooooo" (not "oh" but "eww") while making a noise something like the sound of Wile E. Coyote plummeting off the edge off a cliff.
Step 2: Place hand in center of torso below ribcage and try to make it move, a sign that you're either breathing into the diaphragm or experiencing an unusual gastrointestinal event.
Step 3: Sing ooo's along with the notes on the piano, up, then down, then up and down. Do this while making sure to breathe into the diaphgram and sing out of it, pushing a little harder for the high notes. Also make sure to purse lips prissily to avoid straining the throat in forming the sound. In other words, try to sing naturally while keeping track of doing eleven different awkward things correctly.
Step 4: Same as above with "eees" and "ahhhs." Watch vocal coach shake head sadly and suggest that the ahhh's should wait until another time. In addition to everything else try to remember to sing the eees from the diaphragm, but to form the sound as if singing through the cheekbones. (The ahhhs, having to go through the forehead, were apparently just too much for my overtaxed brain).
Step 5: Back to the ooos and pat yourself on the back when vocal coach points out that you've made it 3 notes higher than the one you couldn't manage to hit when you started twenty minutes ago.
Step 6: Take home tape of piano lines to practice the ooos and eees for ten minutes each day, much to the delight of your cruel, cackling wife.
Anyway, after twenty years of alleged professional singing I thought I might try to learn a thing or three about how to actually sing properly. The new record's gonna be a good one and I can't be yelping and howling all over the place on what is starting to come together as the highest-quality production I've been involved with to date. Not to mention, if J. King does by some miracle manage to convince me to start taking my show on the road here and there (don't hold your breath for that one, sportsfans), it would be nice to be able to get on stage and actually sing somewhat in key, and to be able to speak sooner than 8-12 hours after the show.
And the lessons are tax-deductible, so what the hell.
Last week a postcard arrived informing me of and inviting me to my 20th high school reunion. Having attended no less than four high schools I had to scan the card carefully to figure out which one was reuniting to reminisce about the bad old days.
Turns out it was John Hersey high school in Arlington Heights, Illinois, which I had attended for all of 3 weeks as a freshman and a semester as a senior (in the night school program, along with all the other outcasts who had come back for a diploma after having dropped out).
Ah yes, Hersey high, where hopes are squashed, dreams are crushed and dignity is slammed head first into the toilet bowl, preferably after having been be-fouled by some knuckle-dragging jock. I spent very little time there, thank God, and in fact have never been invited to a reunion before (again, thank God and all the angels in heaven). I wonder what kind of half-insane dingbats get together and decide that since high school was such a horrifying experience we should all meet up when older and fatter to re-live it. Stepford wives of some sort, I imagine.
I'll tell you one little story to explain how perfectly evil the inmates of Hersey high school were.
About five years ago I was having some work done by a photographer friend - Tim Carlson - who is my age and who managed to get through the singular experience of Hersey high school without bouts of chronic truancy, crime, drugs and eventual incarceration in rehab as did yours truly. We were sitting in his office waiting for something or other when I asked him if it was just my imagination or if our high school had been home to an unusually large number of cruel, sociopathic pinheads who saw it as their life's mission to destroy everything decent, honest and true they saw lurking in the souls of their fellow man.
"It's not your imgaination," he answered. "Remember Ted Orvis*?"
Of course I remembered Ted Orvis. Junior high. I was a vicious little bastard. If karma is anything more than a Buddhist myth, every misfortune I've experienced in life can be traced back to my acting like a nasty little prick for one ugly year in the eighth grade. Ted Orvis was not a frequent target - that would have been too cruel. He was thought to be retarded, though in retrospect he was probably mildly autistic. All you'd have to do to freak him out was to say his name in a sort of sarcastic, jeering, sing-song manner - which I usually did only when extremely bored - and he'd crawl under his desk in Science class and start feverishly picking his nose and muttering to himself.
By the ninth grade, I'd grown up enough to decide that picking on people was retarded. Besides which, I wasn't exactly the biggest clown in the circus, and if it weren't for the crowd I ran with I imagine I would've been getting my ass kicked on a daily basis. Knowing that I'd somehow been spared the experience humbled me.
I barely actually attended high school enough to be acquainted with anyone other than the usual suspects; I certainly don't recall ever seeing Ted Orvis again. But apparently the other deviants never eased up on him. They tortured him for what must have been four long, agonizing, hellish years.
Ten years later it's high school reunion time. Tim, for reasons only he can explain, decides to go. And Ted Orvis shows up. Like many autistics he is more or less a genius - a fact that was likely ignored at Hersey by his tormenters - students and faculty alike. Now he's making a ton of money and he's got a terrific, great-looking wife. And here's the incredible thing - he's not holding a grudge. He's not holding it over anybody's head that they tortured him mercilessly and now he's raking in the dough while they're doubtless stuck in the soul-crushing, dead-end jobs they so richly deserve. He's polite to the people who made his life a living hell. He forgives them.
And what do they do?
They sarcastically crown him king of the reunion, that's what they do, in pure Carrie fashion.
Those are the people I went to high school with.
And they wondered why I never bothered to show up.
*Name changed for obvious reasons.
Remember the thumbs-up guy I told you about last April? The one from Australia who I hat-tipped via the All-American Rejects photo? Here, catch up.
Anyway, he interviewed Rejects guitarist Mike Kennerty for an Aussie paper and managed to work in a goodly number of references to yours truly. Check it out.
Which reminds me that I need to decide if I'm going to add one of the demos to my new MySpace page (the one that's so good for business - I'm just sitting around waiting for the money to start rolling in). Sooner or later at least one of 'em will go up there I guess.
I still have a few songs left to demo here before they get sent down to Mike so he can do 'em up right. The demos should all be finished, or close, within a month or so. Then the tracking of guitars and drums will take place over the following four months or so as time permits. And then, theoretically anyway, bass, keyboards and vocals will be tracked up here in February, followed by the mixing and mastering. With any luck the album will be out a mere eight months from now. At which point it'll have been four years since I've released a new album. Man, it's getting harder and harder to get a record out. Guess I should do like everyone says and get with the times by going out on the road.
Yeah, like that's gonna happen...
Really, as much as I like Husker Du, and I like them a lot, their records are never as good as I remember them being. I always think of New Day Rising as a totally amazing record but then every few years I'll put it on and end up walking away disappointed over the lack of great songs. The songs are good, they're just not mind-blowing the way I remember. In the case of NDR, the title track and "The Girl Who Lives On Heaven Hill" more than make up for the rest of the album being good-but-not-great and they're well worth the price of the album but the rest of the stuff hasn't aged very well in this man's view, sounding in 2006 an awful lot like 1985.*
I ran across this item this morning and the first thing I thought was "Great! Asta Kask have a new album coming out! Happy days!" But since I've never actually owned an Asta Kask album and since I haven't actually heard them since sometime in the very late 80s or very early 90s, I'm wondering if I'm giving 'em too much credit. Were they really as amazing as my memory says? Anybody remember?
*Do not, I repeat do not leave a comment here defending the honor of Husker Du. They were a great band, I already said so. But I don't agree with the view that they (or the Replacements, who I found to be incredibly boring most of the time) were some sort of pedestal-occupying jewel in an ocean of punk rock shit. That's 80s college kid/hip rock critic talk and I won't have it here.
Inspired by a desire to save money on Mach 3 cartridges, as well as by this and this (both by the same writer), I decided a couple of months ago to swap the plastic razor for one of these. Along with one of these and some of this (or this or this, depending on my mood) I set about my task.
The first day I got a great shave. On my cheeks. The moustache and chin areas didn't fare so well. I didn't get too close a shave and I gave myself a small colony of nicks; my neck was chopped up something fierce. By the end of the first week I was getting closer on the chin, but the moustache area was still left ragged, so I unconsciously pressed down on the against-the-grain pass (never press down with a safety razor) which only shredded my upper lip. My neck, at least, was only getting ripped up every other day.
Two months in, I've learned more about my face than I'd ever wanted to. After a couple of weeks spent shaving the moustache area with the Mach 3, I went back to the Merkur and discovered that I'd found a lighter touch that left the skin smooth without any razor burn or nicks. No problems there. I've also learned that I simply can't shave against the grain on my neck, pressure or not, without drawing blood.
Here's how it works: The first pass, with the grain, doesn't do a whole lot. It really just cuts the hairs down a little. Rinse off, apply more cream and then start shaving up against the grain (except on the neck) and it's a whole 'nother ballgame. The shave is so close you can't believe you're not bleeding. For good measure, I rinse and lather up once more and shave horizontally to get that pesky stubble in the tough areas like the jawline, chin and upper neck.
It sounds time-consuming and it is, at first. But two months in I know how to handle the razor and I know the contours of my face well enough that it's taking a little under fifteen minutes. I'm getting closer shaves than I ever imagined possible and I'm only spending a little more time shaving than I did in the old days.
It's all very metrosexual I suppose, but the dough I spent on the razor, brush and creams will ultimately be nothing compared to the coin I would've dropped on Mach 3 cartridges. Plus, I just feel better all day walking around with a close shave. On top of everything else I enjoy shaving now so I'm shaving every day rather than three times a week, which makes my wife very happy. Also, I feel tough, like John Wayne or James Coburn or Charles Bronson.
You can't put a price on that.
UPDATE: Having just come in from my morning run I feel obliged to mention that the post-run shave is the best shave possible. You don't even have to use hot water for the first pass - just slap the shave cream right on your sweaty face and let 'er rip.
This essay was originally on my old weblog, then re-written and printed in Chin Music in 2003. Allegedly, anyway. They never sent me a copy in spite of repeated requests. So here it is again:
I recently subjected myself to the torture that is Field Of Dreams, a film I hadn't seen in so long that I'd relegated it to the "harmless" file in the back of my head. Dusted off and re-assessed, I have to put a warning label on it. This movie is not harmless. This movie is representative of everything that is currently wrong, and always has been wrong, with the way we look at baseball. Field Of Dreams is not a good movie. That alone is not, of course, offensive; there are very few good baseball movies. In fact there is exactly one: The Bad News Bears. Failing in a genre in which failure is the norm is no crime - what makes Field Of Dreams an affront to decency is that it is morally corrupt. More precisely, it's pure fucking evil. The reason it's pure fucking evil is because it sells a dangerous lie that is ultimately not only damaging to the sport of baseball, but to art, and to the truth of the human experience.
Field Of Dreams was conceived of and made by Baby Boomers, those overweight, out of touch oafs who are always looking for any excuse to justify their greed and moral weakness while assuring the world that they still carry with them the spirit of their generation - the ragged but proud glory of "The Sixties."
Fuck "The Sixties." Anybody who uses that phrase reverentially is automatically full of shit and can be counted on to have never been a part of anything more radical than perhaps having tacked up a poster of Martin Luther King, Jr. on the wall of their college dorm. These spineless creatures drank, drugged and fucked their way through college and their early twenties, and when they had their kids - my generation - they told us not to do the same. They echoed Abby Hoffman's "Property is shit" line until they realized they wanted a little property themselves. And they wanted a lot of expensive toys, too. So as they grew older and became more and more out of touch with generations that followed - as they turned into their parents - they didn't do what countless generations before them had done. They did not move gracefully into middle age. They went kicking and screaming like the spoiled brats they always were. The Boomers were the first American generation of whiny, narcissistic shitheads, their sense of entitlement only surpassed by their hubris as they grabbed - and continue to grab - what they want when they want it, and fuck everybody else. The Boomers don't like being reminded that they're out of touch; that they've become everything they always hated; that they've pissed all over the world and that maybe they should be held accountable for it rather than be allowed to make somebody else clean up the mess while they clean up the profits. Nope, they want to have their cake and eat it too. So to justify their miserable existence, they use pop culture to get the word out that they aren't so bad after all; at least part of my seething hatred of the Beatles can be attributed to spending my entire childhood listening to alleged adults quote those corny hippie lyrics as a solution for everything from world peace to how to fix a leaky faucet.
What Field Of Dreams is really about is providing Boomers with justification for selling their souls. It's another version of the Boomer lie, the one that tells you that you can be a socially responsible person with the strength of your convictions and you can still make a shitload of money doing it. When push comes to shove in Field Of Dreams and the character of Ray Kinsella is going to lose his farm and, thus, his ability to support his family if he sticks to his guns, we are assaulted by one of the last in a long succession of the script's flowery, officious, smoke-pouring-and-sparks-flying-from-the-bullshit-detector speeches, this time from James Earl Jones's character, who assures Kinsella that his hard work and commitment have not been in vain because people will come to his ball field to watch the magical dead ballplayers play catch. They'll suddenly decide to take a vacation in Iowa without knowing why. They'll get bored with Iowa City and, again, without knowing why, they'll drive to Ray's farm, and they'll want to see the game.
And Ray can charge twenty bucks a head.
That's what this movie is really about: Stand up for what you believe in, even if everybody else thinks you're nuts! Uh, yeah, well, but only if there's a safety net underneath... wait, strike that, you've worked hard, why settle for a safety net? You're an American: you deserve to turn a healthy profit! At its heart, Field Of Dreams isn't about standing by your principles while simultaneously dealing with fiscal responsibilities; it's a fairy-tale about social responsibility in which right action is rewarded with a good income, and in which the money that is inevitably a byproduct of organized social action (in this case, presented as a vaguely Quixotic stand against sanity by a moron from Iowa) becomes the end to the means. If it were simply bullshit, it wouldn't offend so much. But it's sneaky, manipulative bullshit that is designed to ease the guilt of those Reagan Democrat yuppies who had spent almost a full decade looting the country by the time this film was released.
Field Of Dreams is a movie based on an inherently dishonest, cynical concept that urges us not to confuse ourselves with the facts. I'm sure I can't be the only one to find the whole ugly thing to be an insult to all human intelligence. Ray Kinsella is clearly an idiot at best, a dangerous sociopath at worst. His wife is almost as culpable; her decision to stand by her man in spite of his reckless idiocy is akin to handing the killer the bullets for the gun.
Besides all that, the movie never explains what the ballplayers' cut of that twenty bucks a head will be. Sure they're dead, but they are, after all, ballplayers so it's only logical to assume that they'd be demanding a fair cut of the scratch, if only for a little afterlife booze and pussy. All the dimbulb Kinsella did was build a field - who's actually out there putting on the show that people are paying for? In a surely unintended way, the movie effectively takes the side of ownership over players. Field Of Dreams continues in the shameful American tradition of romanticizing and simplifying the motivation of professional entertainers, a tradition that has caused and continues to cause serious damage to the level of quality in American entertainment, whether it's sports, movies, music or any other type of talent-based entertainment. By ignoring basic financial realities in favor of portraying entertainers as people who are only vaguely concerned with money in an eccentric, absent-minded way, this concept stacks the deck against the vast majority of them, portraying as frauds any of them who consider the facts of life in a society in which money is a necessity; if you're concerned about earning a living, you can't be good at what you do (if you are, it must be in a contrived, calculated way), and you certainly can't have the same love for it as someone who would continue to do it full-time even in the face of poverty. Such thinking benefits only one group of people - those making the bulk of the money. The ballplayers in Field Of Dreams are portrayed as being happy to just play ball for the sake of it while Kinsella rakes in the profit. If there were ever a sequel to Field Of Dreams, logic would dictate that we would see a tale of dead ballplayers on strike with their ghostly union head administering a spectral ass-kicking to Old Man Kinsella. Ideologically speaking, Kinsella's ball field resembles North Korea's Propaganda Village more than anything else; it is a laughably transparent attempt to continue to sell a lie that we should have shit-canned years ago. Yeah, it is so, kid. Comiskey screwed his players one time too many. It is so, and stop pretending to be so shocked, ya little brat.
On top of everything else, as if cynical, guilt-ridden self-justification disguised as narrative isn't enough, in true George Will fashion this piece of celluloid fluff abuses a great sport to spread its fertilizer. Field Of Dreams is the kind of movie that used to be made before Jim Bouton wrote Ball Four. We know better now. The baseball players in Field Of Dreams ought to be completely unbelievable to any viewer over the age of ten because Bouton told us so and he did it almost twenty years before Field Of Dreams was filmed. But the Boomers ignored him. To this day we are fed a ludicrous myth about the game of baseball and the men who play it; this in spite of the myth being beaten to a pulp starting with Bouton and continuing with tell-all ballplayers up to today. Even Mickey Mantle - whose fans would've gladly lynched Bouton after the publication of Ball Four - eventually wrote his own book that should've killed the ugly baseball lie. But Bouton, even though he tried - now here's a guy from "The Sixties" who wasn't a phony, and who had the strength of his convictions, and who wasn't afraid to admit, publicly, that yeah, he could be a real asshole sometimes, too, and who took a hell of a beating for telling the truth - even though he tried to put the lie to rest, Bouton ultimately failed because the Boomers wouldn't let the myth die. Baseball was a metaphor; it was their Capra-esque connection to a mythologized innocent time - the 1940s and 50s (ah yes, those magical times of segregation, Joe McCarthy, and the censorship of everything from Catcher In The Rye to Alfred E. Neuman) and, in the case of the writer of Field Of Dreams, it represented a common bond between father and son that had been ripped apart by "The Sixties." Sure, says the movie, in its patronizing tone, the upheavals of "The Sixties" were necessary, but some things are timeless, like good ol' baseball.
Bullshit. Bullshit, and fuck you and all your friends - not for buying into the lie, but for insisting on selling it to the rest of us. Fuck you, Baby Boomers, for telling your kids not to do drugs or fuck while you snorted coke off of your secretary's tits and your wives back in the suburbs got fucked up on Valium and experimented with bisexuality. Fuck you for not even trying to bridge the gap between social responsibility and the realities of life in this country, thus allowing fringe comedians like Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky to take center stage and turn the Left into a colossal joke. And fuck you for romanticizing a game; for turning it into a bullshit symbol to justify your inherent lameness; for writing gooey, poetic nonsense about it being a metaphor for life; for getting all Doug Henning on the rest of us about the magic of baseball. Grow up, you fucking retards. Baseball is eighteen grown men on a field throwing a ball, catching a ball and hitting a ball with a bat. It isn't a metaphor for anything. The men who play it are not heroes. They are just men. Some of them are creeps and some of them are terrific guys and most of them fall somewhere in between.
Art is supposed to speak to the human condition, not lie about it. Let's stop lying. Baseball is a great game, a uniquely American game. But it is just a game. Movies like Field Of Dreams tell us seductive lies. They may be pretty, but they're still lies. See this movie for what it is, see its corruption, see its condescension, and at the very bottom of the warped heart of movies like Field Of Dreams, see the truth about the men who make them: that there are no depths to which they won't sink to avoid the terrible truth that their generation wasn't and isn't so important after all.
