There’s some sort of problem going on with this blog, at the ISP level.
Tech support is working on it, but we currently have no clue as to what’s going on.
I will resume normal publishing next week, if only to keep a presence on RSS…
Why yes, I overslept just a tad.
My usually 5-6:30 AM posting schedule is pretty much a ritual for me – so when something comes along to screw it up (like needing sleep), it throws everything off.
More posting, most likely, late in the afternoon.
Over the years, I’ve had any number of “to-dos”, and ticked most of them off in due enough time.
Some of the “to-dos” that have been ageing longest on the shelf involve guitar parts I need to learn.
Granted, I no longer play in bands; my last real attempt at it was back around 2001, and we never came close to playing out. But I still occasionally sit down and try to learn something new. And the things I try, most often, are the ones that have been ageing on that “to-do” list for the longest.
A few years ago, I more or less picked up “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” by Richard Thompson. And when I say “more or less”, I mean I can either play it really well but just a little slow, or I can play it at speed but about as sloppy as a Bolivian heart/lung transplant.
(It occurs to me that I’ll probably get an irate email form someone, sooner than later, saying “Hey, I am Bolivia’s leading heart/lung transplant surgeon, and I have a 100% success rate over 1,700 surgeries” – or, worse, “Hey, I’m on my way to La Paz with my father to get him a transplant – what are you trying to say?” It’s a dumb, possibly ill-informed joke, although I do know my Google Fu well enough to at least check. Whew . I’m not insulting the Bolivian transplant industry. Good times).
But one that’s been on my to-do list for two decades – through three careers, two children, an entire marriage, five moves and five presidents – has been “Sweet Child of Mine” by Guns ‘n Roses. For whatever reason – not playing in glam-metal bands at first, then being too busy, and then being even more too busy – I just never got around to learning it. And when I say “never got around to”, I mean I took the occasional swat at it over the years, and gave up.
Until this weekend.
Thanks to the miracle of YouTube, you can find people who can show you how to play just about anything. I solved the problem that’d always vexed me with the song (what position of “D” Slash used), and…
…voila! I can play it!
Well, more or less. I can play it slowly pretty well (for now), as I’m still getting the whole lick into “muscle memory” (which isn’t something I’ve done in a while, and lemme tell ya it’s a lot easier when you’re 18). Up to speed? Well, I’m about as sloppy as a Bolivian hear…
…er, pretty sloppy.
One of my life’s ambitions has always been to leave a word, or especially an aphorism, to the English language.
It’d seem that according to at least one source, I’m on my way. One of my aphorisms has turned up on a list (OK, a website) amid Euripides, Benjamin Franklin, Somerset Maugham, Stalin, Oscar Wilde, Stalin…
Oddly, it’s a toss-off from the blog some time ago:
When I die, I’d like to be scattered over my hometown. But not, like, cremated or anything.–Mitch Berg
A quick vanity-google shows that the saying has popped up in a whole bunch of places – including the chapter heading of a book.
Wow. The mission is proceeding apace.
Last year, I managed to commute via bike pretty much every day from late April to early October. I managed to get into the best shape I’ve been in in decades. It was great.
This year? Ugh. Not so much.
A family commitment left me driving to appointments early every morning for the past 11 weeks or so. That squeezed out most daily biking, of course; I got in the occasional weekend ride, but riding once a week doesn’t have the same effect as being out there every single day.
But school’s back in session, and things are clipping along generally fairly well – so yesterday, it was back in the saddle.
And…ugh. I feel like it’s mid-April all over again. Although to my credit, I managed the end-of-day climb up Cathedral Hill without any huffing and puffing, so maybe I held up better than I thought.
Anyway – the plan is to ride every possible day until the weather makes it utterly impossible – and by utterly, I mean “drifts over my 27″ wheels”.
Or at least that’s what I mean at the moment.
Anyone have a line on where I could find a couple of rear strut/spring assemblies for an ’01 Taurus relatively cheap?
Leave a comment, or (if you know the addy) email me, send me a message.
Please.
I’ve been twenty feet up a ladder, painting my second-level soffits and fascia, since six AM. No, I do not have energy to blog right at the moment.
However, I’ll try posting something before I go to the Fair (where we’ll be interviewing Eva Ng and Laura Brod).
I was digging through some old websites that I created, easily 3-4 years before I discovered blogging, when putting opinion on the web involved a lot of futzing around with HTML, FTP and various badly-designed “web editing” tools.
And I stumbled across a 1998 edition of the “DFL Dictionary”.
Back during my long-dead, unlamented career as a rock-and-roller, there were a slew of bars that everyone played.
Your band played innumerable gigs at the Seventh Street Entry for $20 and ten spots on the guest list and two drink tickets apiece to keep the hope of someday playing the stage at the First Avenue main room, opening for some kind of national act or another, alive. You knew that not only had the Replacements and Hüsker Dü and teh Suicide Commandos played on that very stage, but that the sticky residue on the “dressing room” benches had probably started as Tommy Stinson’s vomit, years before.
The Cabooze? You played there, if you could, because it was a little taste of the good life; a huge stage, a clean dressing room (that always started out the evening stocked with a cooler full of beer for the bands), a sound system that not only worked but made you sound like a rock star – the Cabooze kept the dream alive.
Mr B’s? Fernandos? MacReady’s? The Union? You played there to play. Usually to a bar full of four or five career alcoholics who would have polished their bar stools to anything from Sonic Youth to Lawrence Welk in the background.
But the Uptown? You played there – and hung out there – to see and be seen. The Uptown was where The Scene was. It was also the only live music joint in the city (other than the bars that booked only cover bands, like the Iron Horse or the Burnsville Bowl, which we just didn’t do) that the girls would ever go to on their own; Wednesday was “Ladies Night”, with $.50 drinks for the girls, which drew, mirabile dictu, guys, to hit on the girls and, failing that (and didn’t we all fail at that?), cadge cheap drinks off them. I plead guilty and the Fifth.
Getting booked was a sisyphean ordeal; booking agent Maggie MacPherson (known to at least a few of my frustrated, band-leading friends as “the Maggot”) was brusque, curt, uncompromising, and impossible to reach, ever. Fortunately for me, her boyfriend was a huge Don Vogel fan; it was worth a couple fairly choice bookings for my bands, back in the day.
The stage was as narrow and shallow as the hipsters that clogged the place. “Loading In” involved hoisting your gear through the back door directly to the stage – a miserable slog in mid-winter, which was inevitably when I played there. The sound system had a perpetual short-circuit that made everyone sound tinny and crackly. The bartenders were arrogant and played peevish favorites with all the grace of Nick Coleman reciting Percy Shelley. And it – at the corner of Hennepin and Lake, the epicenter of the “Uptown” neighborhood, the core of the Minneapolis hipster universe – was where everyone went (when they weren’t shooting pool at the CC or doing three-for-ones at Lyle’s).
And, as it has long been for most of the hipsters and musical C-list local heroes that used to run their lives around Maggie’s whims and the bands on the schedule, it looks like the party’s over:
Hopes of saving the Uptown Bar & Cafe at its present location dimmed Monday as the Minneapolis Planning Commission unanimously approved a development plan to level the long-beloved rock club and brunch spot in favor of a new, three-story retail space.
The developer behind the project, Jeffrey Herman, said a plan is in place to relocate the bar and keep its legacy as a music venue alive.
You can never go back, of course. And Uptown – the neighborhood, not the bar – certainly hasn’t. Just as the hipsters and wannabees grew up and got married and got day jobs that became careers and had kids and moved to Plymouth, the old hipster haunts have been gobbled up by soulless commerce; chain stores and theme eateries have replaced head shops and holes-in-the-wall; the same hipsters that used to sneak booze into the Uptown Theatre for the midnight showings of “Stop Making Sense” (I have no idea who I’m talking about here) now go to screenings at – I kid you not – an art-film multiplex, different only in scale and material from the mall-anchor megatheaters by the Gap they get their kids’ clothes at.
Of course, you want to go back:
Herman, whose company, Urban Anthology, helped bring Victoria’s Secret and American Apparel stores to Uptown, said he is among those who would hate to see the neighborhood lose such a landmark. That decision is up to bar owner Frank Toonen, 88, who approached Herman about the retail plan, the developer said.
Toonen wants to sell the property to raise money that he plans to leave to his wife and to the widow of his son, Kenneth Toonen, who ran the bar for several decades before he passed away last summer, said Herman.
“If they were younger and more able to handle running the business, they would, but as it stands this is strictly an estate-divestment situation,” Herman said.
I have fond memories of that time, of course. The temptation to go memorialize the era by walking in, hitting on and striking out with a U of M girl, handing off a demo tape, and puking in a back-alley dumpster is certainly there…
…but, these days, manageable.
There was no more dismal period in any genre of American music than country music’s ordeal from about 1975 to about 1990.
Pushed by Big Nashville’s urge to cash in on the big money in pop music, “crossover” was the watchword and goal and driving force behind Nashville’s main efforts during that whole stretch of time. Some country artists – Kenny Rogers and Eddie Rabbit and Barbara Mandrell and a whole lot of equally-forgettable tripe – existed purely to capitalize on the trend. The trend swallowed up years from the careers of some otherwise great country artists; who knows what could happen if Dolly Parton could get the years back that she spent trying to be a pop star?
And some of the best country music of the era – indeed, some of the genre’s only music of the era that anyone has reason to remember – was specifically done as a reaction to that whole noxious trend; “The Outlaws”, Willie Nelson, Hank Williams Junior, Waylon Jennings, Emmylou Harris, Rodney Crowell and a few others who stuck to and extended on country’s twangy roots, were about the only products of the era worth remembering.
Lee Greenwood was very much in the former group.
Is he country? Is he Vegas? Is he new wave? He’d just as soon you not worry about it!
Having worked in Country radio a few times – in 1982 and 1984 and 1991-92 – I can remember what an utterly dismal thing country was, in that wretched era before Garth Brooks and Patty Loveless and Dwight Yoakam and Holly Dunn and the whole crowd of “back to the roots” singers paradoxically made country a colossal success by dragging it “backward” twenty years. Lee Greenwood had been one of the big offenders, doing treacly, overproduced glop whose only connection with “country” was a little arklahoma twang in his voice and, of course, a relentless tugging on the heartland’s heartstrings.
Which is what gave us “God Bless the USA“.
And make no mistake about it; “GBTUSA” has everything that made Lee Greenwood such a lowlight of “country” music for that entire dismal period of time; lots of violins, but nary a fiddle to be found; electric guitars, but none of them pedal steel; lots of vocals, but the most generic voice imaginable. That cloying sense that the song is trying hard to push every button you have.
Perversely, though? It works.
Well, maybe not for you. Indeed, as John Edwards once said whilst running between a hair appointment and a date with his mistress, there are two Americas; one that hates “God Bless The USA” and is mildly creeped out by everything it stands for, and another that may or may not be silently amused by the song, but still gets a thrill in its heart from all of its glorious, mawkish sentiment.
And it is gloriously, over the top mawkish; if your heartstrings aren’t rated for 2000 points of pull, they will snap like Nancy Pelosi’s facial muscles when someone pops a paper bag behind her.
But aside from being perhaps a perfect lab experiment showing the absolute limits of emotional button-pushing in song, the song has been adopted – intentionally or not – by that second America, as a sort of huge, glowing middle finger aimed at the first one. Because when Greenwood and his background singers – it could be the Red Army Choir, for crying out loud – wind up and attack that last big finish, it challenges you not to say “Yes, Chauncey Boston-Cosmopolitan, the idea of America transcends its problems; the promise of this experiment supercedes its mistakes; it is a concept deserving of loyalty for its own sake; we are a shining city on the hill, and we are the best attempt at a nation that this world has ever seen, viewed objectively and ethically. You have the right to disagree – but in the meantime, shut your impotent babbling pseudointellectual piehole, because I’m gonna sing and wave the flag for a moment”.
A symptom of obstinate, unthinking jingoism? A thud-witted rejection of the reflexive dialecticism that “educated” Americans are supposed to embrace (and which many do, most of them with little more literacy than the most jingoistic redneck), that believes to every good there must be an equal yet opposite evil?
Perhaps.
But let me say in response that there ain’t no doubt I love this land. And, in conclusion, God Bless the USA. Or, as the kids today say, “America; F*** Yeah”.
Whoosh. Dang, I’m stoked.
There. I believe I settled that.
If you converted all the critical plaudits Radiohead has gotten over the past fifteen years or so into liquid form, and poured them into all the world’s supertankers, then an awful lot of supertanker crews would be frantically bailing their overloaded vessels out to keep the keels off the harbor floors.
Now, I’ve been around music a long time. I’ve listened to a lot of it. I’m about as openminded as it gets. I dig music on two levels; on the one hand, there’s music that grabs me in the liver, that connects with me emotionally right where I live and breathe. It’s the stuff I wear on my sleeve in this blog – stuff like Springsteen and Tchaikowski and Emmylou Harris and Richard Thompson and Prince and the Clash and Gustav Mahler and Sam and Dave and piobaireachd and Iris Dement and the Iron City Houserockers and middle-period Public Enemy and the Black Watch Pipes and Drums, and all kinds of stuff in between. Stuff that grabs me in the soul.
And then there’s stuff that misses my soul to one degree or another, but which I admire from a technical perspective as a musician, much like a programmer might admire good code or an engineer a perfect gusset plate, as great technique for its own sake. Stuff like Yngwie Malmsteen or or Alban Berg or Rush or Bela Fleck or Miles Davis or Charles Mingus or Rimsky-Korsakoff – stuff whose pure technical excellence I admire and enjoy to a degree, but which doesn’t grab me by the liver and say “this explains a key part of what life is about!”.
And at the juncture of neither of these avenues lies Radiohead.
Now, if you’ve followed this “Thing I Like/Things I Don’t” series over the past few months, you’ll know this is the point where I launch into a detailed explication of why, even though I know I should like something, and indeed find things in his or her or their body of work that I do appreciate, there is a paradoxical hitch that keeps me from liking it, or interferes with my appreciation.
But not here.
Because while I’ve tried, and King Banaian (as Radiohead-y of a Radiohead fan as exists) has tried, and other ‘head fans have tried, I can’t honestly say I care about them on either level.
And as with most of these love/hate articles, it’s not that I couldn’t or won’t be converted. And I’ll cop to the fact that the period from the band’s major-league debut up through what their fans call their “creative peak” (whatever that was – and if you get five Radiohead fans in a room, you’ll get seven answers to that question) happened at a time when I didn’t listen to much music at all, so it never really had a chance to get ingrained in my head, one way or the other.
It’s just that in a decade and change of (sorta) trying, nothing has pushed me in one direction or the other.
OK. Not much of an article. Sorry. I’m a creep and I don’t belong here…
…er, wait.
It’s been a long time since I’ve done one of these blog memes.
This one is via the random Candice.
Bold means “Mission Accomplished”.
01. Bought everyone in the bar a drink – I did it once. My two friends and I were the only two people there. I made a big show of yelling “A round for the whole house!” Bartender was not amused.
02. Swam with wild dolphins
03. Climbed a mountain
04. Taken a Ferrari for a test drive
05. Been inside the Great Pyramid
06. Held a tarantula – it was a MN Zoo thing.
07. Taken a candlelit bath with someone
08. Said ‘I love you’ and meant it
09. Hugged a tree – mainly to show that I was a uniter, not a divider.
10. Bungee jumped – Um, no. I’ll parachute before I bungee jump.
11. Visited Paris
12. Watched a lightning storm at sea – My time on the English Channel was cloudless and smooth as glass. Indeed, every time I’ve been to a traditionally rainy, dank place – Seattle, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, London – it’s been unseasonably sunny. It must be me.
13. Stayed up all night long and saw the sun rise
14. Seen the Northern Lights
15. Gone to a huge sports game
16. Walked the stairs to the top of the leaning Tower of Pisa
17. Grown and eaten your own vegetables
18. Touched an iceberg – Well, not at sea, anyway.
19. Slept under the stars
20. Changed a baby’s diaper – I calculated that I changed about 9,000 of them.
21. Taken a trip on a hot air balloon
22. Watched a meteor shower
23. Got drunk on champagne
24. Given more than you can afford to charity
25. Looked up at the night sky through a telescope
26. Had an uncontrollable giggling fit at the worst possible moment
27. Had a food fight
28. Bet on a winning horse – Sorta. I had a system where if I figured a horse would win, I bet “place” just to be safe. I made a bit of money at it.
29. Asked out a stranger
30. Had a snowball fight
31. Screamed as loudly as you possibly can
32. Held a lamb
33. Seen a total eclipse – a partial one, anyway, back in tenth grade.
34. Ridden a roller coaster
35. Hit a home run – In softball? A few. Including one against WCCO in media league softball back in 1986. Glory days…
36. Danced like a fool and not cared who was looking – It’s been a while.
37. Adopted an accent for an entire day
38. Actually felt happy about your life, even for just a moment
39. Had two hard drives for your computer
40. Visited all 50 states
41. Taken care of someone who was s**tfaced – it may have been my college minor.
42. Had amazing friends
43. Danced with a stranger in a foreign country – In a club in Köln, Germany. And on a ferry between Harwich and Hoek Van Holland. And in a bar in Edinburgh. And at a party in a little village north of Amsterdam. I should point out that I really discovered beer when I was in Europe…
44. Watched wild whales
45. Stolen a sign
46. Backpacked in Europe
47. Taken a road-trip
48. Gone rock climbing
49. Midnight walk on the beach
50. Gone sky diving – Someday!
51. Visited Ireland – my budget ran out before I could try.
52. Been heartbroken for longer than when you were in love
53. In a restaurant, sat at a stranger’s table and had a meal with them
54. Visited Japan
55. Milked a cow
56. Alphabetized your cds
57. Pretended to be a superhero
58. Sung karaoke – “You’re the only guy I’ve met who has the b*lls to do “Born to Run”.”
59. Lounged around in bed all day – Never.
60. Posed nude in front of strangers – not that I remember.
61. Gone scuba diving
62. Kissed in the rain
63. Played in the mud
64. Played in the rain
65. Gone to a drive-in theater
66. Visited the Great Wall of China
67. Started a business
68. Fallen in love and not had your heart broken
69. Toured ancient sites – The Hjemkomst counts, right? No, seriously – all sorts of ’em, including Augusta Raurica, near Basel (amazing Roman ruins) and a ton of ’em in the UK and Scotland.
70. Taken a martial arts class
71. Played D&D for more than 6 hours straight – Have I mentioned the lengths we had to go to to kill time in college in North Dakota if you didn’t have a girlfriend or much of a social life? Although in my defense, I haven’t played D&D since the summer after high school. I’ve done Traveller and Twilight 2000, though…
72. Gotten married
73. Been in a movie – I did audio for a really crummy indie production back in 1988.
74. Crashed a party
75. Gotten divorced
76. Gone without food for 5 days – Once, I had some strange, nonspecific fever. Between Sunday and Thursday, I had two enchiladas and four soda crackers. I think that counts.
77. Made cookies from scratch
78. Won first prize in a costume contest
79. Ridden a gondola in Venice
80. Gotten a tattoo – never will.
81. Rafted the Snake River
82. Been on television news programs as an “expert” – Does radio count?
83. Got flowers for no reason – I’ve gotten ’em for a reason – twice, I think.
84. Performed on stage – dozens of times, maybe hundreds. Many plays, many many bands, not a few solo gigs on guitar, and a ton of gigs with orchestras (cello) and concert (percussion) and stage and pit (guitar) bands.
85. Been to Las Vegas – I have almost no interest in this.
86. Recorded music – Why, yes. At home, and in the studio.
87. Eaten shark
88. Had a one-night stand – people do lots of dumb things after they get divorced.
89. Gone to Thailand
90. Bought a house
91. Been in a combat zone
92. Buried one/both of your parents
93. Been on a cruise ship – I’m sure a North Sea ferry doesn’t count…
94. Spoken more than one language fluently – “Fluently” is a big word – but I spoke German well enough that nobody made me as a Yank. I think they thought I was Dutch. And I spoke bad Dutch and French with a German accent, so they thought I was German…
95. Performed in Rocky Horror – as in “yelled on cue for the various parts of the movie”, or “dressed up”? I did the former. But I bet that’s not what they’re talking about…
96. Live in a foreign country, even for a brief time
97. Followed your favorite band/singer on tour
98. Created and named your own constellation of stars
99. Taken an exotic bicycle tour in a foreign country – Dunno how “exotic” it was; I rode from Uitgeest to Haarlem and, later, from Grave to Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
100. Picked up and moved to another city to just start over – Well, to “start” more than “start over”.
101. Walked the Golden Gate Bridge
102. Sang loudly in the car, and didn’t stop when you knew someone was looking
103. Had plastic surgery
104. Survived an accident that you shouldn’t have survived.
105. Wrote articles for a large publication – Define “large”?
106. Lost over 100 pounds
107. Held someone while they were having a flashback – Not a “flashback”, but while they were having a very dissociative episode, yes.
108. Piloted an airplane
109. Petted a stingray
110. Broken someone’s heart
111. Helped an animal give birth
112. Won money on a T.V. game show
113. Broken a bone
114. Gone on an African photo safari
115. Had a body part of yours below the neck pierced – never voluntarily. Never will.
116. Fired a rifle, shotgun, or pistol – many of them, including – twice – full-automatic.
117. Eaten mushrooms that were gathered in the wild
118. Ridden a horse
119. Had major surgery
120. Had a snake as a pet
121. Hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon
122. Slept for more than 30 hours over the course of 48 hours – when I had the aforementioned fever.
123. Visited non-US foreign countries – Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Switzerland, the UK and Canada.
124. Visited all 7 continents
125. Taken a canoe trip that lasted more than 2 days
126. Eaten kangaroo meat
127. Eaten sushi
128. Had your picture in the newspaper
129. Changed someone’s mind about something you care deeply about
130. Gone back to school – for a class or two.
131. Parasailed
132. Petted a cockroach – if by “pet” you mean “stomp”?
133. Eaten fried green tomatoes
134. Read The Iliad
135. Selected one “important” author who you missed in school
136. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
137. Skipped all your school reunions – Tough one. I will crawl across broken glass to make my high school reunions. But I haven’t been to any college ones.
138. Communicated with someone without sharing a common spoken language
139. Been elected to public office
140. Written your own computer language
141. Thought to yourself that you’re living your dream – Briefly.
142. Had to put someone you love into hospice care
143. Built your own PC from parts
144. Sold your own artwork to someone who didn’t know you
145. Had a booth at a street fair
146: Dyed your hair
147: Been a DJ – KEYJ, KDAK, KQDJ, KDWB AM/FM, and a zillion crappy bars.
148: Shaved your head
149: Caused a car accident
150: Saved someone’s life – Not sure that I’d be quite that dramatic. I’ve called the ambulance for several people who were sick, had had accidents, or were passed out on the street over the years.
How used am I to getting six hours of sleep a night?
Last night, for the second time in a week, I got to bed at 9:45. And for the second time, I popped awake at 3:45.
Today’s my mother’s birthday.
Mom is, of course, my polar opposite on most thing; I suspect if she hadn’t been married with three kids in 1968, she might very well have been a hippie. She certainly gives off that vibe today. I still don’t think she tells any of her friends that her oldest son is a conservative talk show host.
But happy birthday, Mom!
I went to the Saint Paul City Hall – the museum of all that was spectacular about institution art-deco in downtown Saint Paul – the other day.
Now, as always when I go to City Hall, I make a religious point of leaving every piece of metal in my car – coins, cell phones, everything.
Naturally, the metal detector picked up something – the shoelace eyes on my shoes, in this case. It always does, with everyone that tries to go to the courthouse. Every time.
And so the sullen, cranky security guard (there is no other kind working at City Hall) made me, like everyone else that tries to go into the building, stand aside and hold out my arms and turn around, waving the little wand around until he ascertained that, yes, it was just the shoelace eyes. As usual. As with everyone who ever goes into the damned building.
It’s to the point where it’s not an exercise in security; it’s a little ritual the city, like every body of government that surrounds itself with this kind of “security”, does to show you, the citizen who’s boss. “We can make you empty your pockets for our inspection, and make you stand in awkward positions and twirl on command, and if you don’t, Deputy Friendly will haul your ass to jail for “disturbing the peace” if he’s in a good mood and “making terroristic threats” if he’s not, so behave if you want to talk with your government masters, mere peasant”.
And it occurred to me – in an era when government is already out of touch with the citizens, and getting worse every day (because the agents of Hope and Change can’t be bothered by the hoi-polloi) – that there would be one great way to make government smaller, more sensitive to the people, and more responsive.
Remove the metal detectors.
Lose the security guards.
Let our city bureaucrats and elected officials know that when they make decisions that affect people, they are going to have to talk with them sooner or later, and they’re going to have to mind their manners, knowing that if someone gets out of hand, they’ll have the same recourse all of us taxpaying citizens have; call the police, and wait.
Carry this all the way up to the state and federal levels, too. Perhaps if legislators, executives and employees had to handle “irate customers” the same way the kid at the counter at Wendy’s does, we wouldn’t need term limits.
Beat in mind, I don’t want any nuts to actually do anything to government officials or workers. I mean, as long as we’re talking hypothetically, here.
It was Saturday, August 11, 1979. My first day “soloing” at KEYJ.
The station was a humble little 1000-watt operation, but Bob Richardson wanted it to do big things. Bob’s goal for the station was to serve the community, and to Bob that meant news, information, weather and sports – and lots of all of ’em.
So my Saturday morning shift – which I’d start in another week or so, after I earned my spurs soloing on the easier Saturday Night shift – involved an hour of music from 6 to 7AM, and then an hour of news, weather, sports, farm markets, local hospital reports, fire and police reports, the funeral home report and other such stuff, and then another hour more or less the same at 8, then two hours of music followed by “Trading Post” at 10AM (an on-the-air swap shop), then an hour of music, then another news-weather-sports hour, then usually a Class B basketball game from one of the outlying towns that’d been taped the night before (and would still keep the locals rapt around the radio).
But that was in the future. After a few weeks of training with John and Dick, tonight was my first solo.
I came in around 1PM for my 3 to midnight shift. I got my news together (there’d be a news hour at 5PM, sorta like the three news/weather/sports/info hours on the morning shift, but only, like, one of them); I drank pop and calmed down and got my mind in order.
And then it was three. Dick wrapped up his shift, and told the audience to stay tuned for “Mitch Berg, coming up next”. And then it was off to AP Radio News.
Five minutes.
I sat down in the swivel chair, arranged my three-minute newscast in front of me (five wire stories, some American Legion baseball scores, the forecast and the current conditions), and cued up my first two records, which were (yes, I do remember then distinctly) “Bright Eyes” by Art Garfunkel, and “All Things Are Possible” by Dan Peek. Dick stood by.
The AP News ended, and I hit the cart (like an eight-track tape) with the KEYJ news theme. “AM1400 KEYJ, I’m Mitch Berg with the news…”
…and that’s about all I remember, except that I got through the newscast fairly well, and then flipped the toggle to start Garfunkel on turntable one.
“Whew. I got through it…” I started, and then stopped as Dick lunged across the turntable to the mike off. I’d forgotten. I’d started talking over a live mike.
I gritted my teeth; calm down.
And it worked. I got through my first hours’ worth of spots, dropins, breaks, the bottom of the hour news and weather (yes, we did news twice an hour), weathercasts and music without any more problems, well enough that Dick was able to leave after the first hour or so.
And I was on my own.
Sometime after the 5PM news hour (which I remember going quite well, thank you very much), my Mom and Dad stopped by (reminding me that Dick hadn’t locked up the street-level doors when he left), bringing a burger and fries from the White Drug cafe downstairs. I figured they were just being clingy; now that I have kids (gulp) the same age, I guess I know what they were really thinking.
I got through the evening, following the rhythm of the “clock”, or hourly broadcast schedule; network news, local news, music, commercials, weather, taking hourly transmitter readings, watching the sky eventually turn red and then indigo through the window over downtown Jamestown, the ancient remote transmitter controller smelling of ozone, the phone calls trickling in on a desultory August evening on the prairie; song requests, nut cases, high school friends with encouragement (or, of course, not)…
…and finally, at 11:55PM, signoff. I opened the ancient black folder with the “liners” – the things that were there to be read regularly, like the signoff script. After a few weeks, I’d remember it as clearly as I still remember it today:
“At this time Radio Station KEYJ in Jamestown, North Dakota, leaves the air. KEYJ is owned and operated by KEYJ Incorporated, of 411 Main Street in Jamestown, North Dakota, and operates on a frequency of 1400 Kilocycles by authority of the Federal Communications Commission in Washington DC. Please tune in at 5:55AM tomorrow as we resume our broadcast schedule. On behalf of the entire staff and management of KEYJ, this is Mitch Berg wishing you good night”.
Then, I tripped the final cart – George Beverly Shea’s version of The Lord’s Prayer, which ran about two minutes. As the last strain died away, I tripped the switch that shut off the output stage plates on the transmitter, about a mile away on east edge of town, watching as the power gauges dropped to zero, like watching an ozone-spewing giant dozing slowly off.
I signed off my transmitter logs, shut off the lights, locked up the studio, production room and offices, and walked down the stairs to the street. I locked the front door, carefully stowed the keys (the first I’d ever been entrusted with!) in my pocket, and walked home down Jamestown’s hot, sweltering, nearly-vacant Main street.
It had been a brutally hot summer day, and it was still a hot, sticky night. I steered clear of the streetlights as I walked down Second Avenue to my parents’ house – in this hot, dry weather, they drew so many mosquitos and junebugs they looked like yellow-gray tornados spotted every 100 yards or so; walking through the cloud of bugs meant getting chewed up alive by North Dakota mosquitos, and having to bat junebugs out of your hair.
But I didn’t much care. I was hooked on the only drug that has ever really excited me, my whole life – the feeling that something I said, wrote or did could impact someone else (positively, of course). The thought that something I said into a microphone could affect the life of someone I had never met, miles and miles away. The idea that someone out there would actually be paying attention to me and what I was telling them; waiting for their kids’ baseball scores, or to find out where the fire was, or whether to head for the basement because a tornado was bearing down on them.
I silently calculated the hours until my next shift.
…at about this time that my oldest, “Bun” (not her real name) was born.
Her mother had gone into the “slow” labor three days earlier (at a KDWB Star Party, after Bell Biv Devoe’s set). About four the night before she’d gone into hard labor – which subsided as soon as we got to Ramsey County Hospital. A supremely arrogant resident, an Indian woman, sent us home – where the contractions jumped to one every 45 seconds the moment we got to the front steps.
Eighteen hours of back labor later, the room flooded with doctors and nurses; I was too dazed to realize “this is probably a bad thing”. She was going into fetal distress from all the pushing; she had a salad tong delivery just in time to avoid a caesarian.
She’s been about the same at getting to places on time ever since.
Anyway – it’s been a wild 12 years. Happy Birthday, Bun!
CORRECTION: Whoops – it’s been 18 years. I had to double-check it. Didn’t seem possible. But yep, sure enough – Bell Biv Devoe hasn’t even been on top 40 radio since 1991.
So ow. Yeah. My oldest is 18. My legal obligations just officially dropped in half. I say “officially”, of course; she’s not going anywhere for a while, yet. My “whack upside the head” factor, OTOH, doubled. The phrase “time flies” is terribly overused – but it’s true. It doesn’t seem possible.
Anyway – happy birthday, Bun!
Not one of those things I thought’d be happening when I woke up this morning, but my post “Sin For Ye, “Pause That Refreshes” for We” is now on the front page at Hot Air.
To: Midway Rainbow
From: Mitch Berg, longtime customer
Re: Thanks
I’ve been coming to your Midway store for nearly twenty years.
In that time, in exchange for prices slightly lower than Cub and a little higher than WalMart, I’ve endured the dirty, tatty condition of the store (although not since the remodel job), a generation of disinterested cashiers, checkout lines that vary from “oppressive” to “absurd”, and your infamous parking lot, AKA “Panhandler Alley”, where I have heard every phony sob story conceivable – although only rarely after the neighboring liquor store closes, to be fair.
But after this week’s Bing cherry sale – like, a buck a pound for the most delicious cherries I’ve had in years?
Yes. All is forgiven.
That is all.
…that I started in radio.
Officially, anyway.
I’d started hanging around the control room at KEYJ Radio – eight rooms squeedged into the second floor of the original White Drug building on First Avenue in Jamestown – almost a year earlier. Dick Ingstad, a friend of mine who worked there, let me in to hang around and shoot the breeze; he knew I was interested in the business. Dick, who was a year ahead of me in school, was pretty much your typical high school kid, with four key differences:
Anyway – I’d applied for a job the previous May, at the end of my sophomore year of high school. I’d called Bob Richardson, the gruff, irascible boss at KEYJ, one afternoon, calming the butterflies that almost incapacitated me as I worked up the nerve to talk with a legend in regional broadcasting.
After the phone call last May, I waited three months, until I got a call from him the Tuesday before. They’d just fired one of their weekend guys, which gave me an opening.
Mr. Richardson told me to start showing up at 5:00AM Saturday mornings to train with John Weisfenning, a student at Moorhead State who’d been in town working for the summer.
And today was the first day.
I set three alarm clocks – two electric and one wind-up – to make sure I got vaulted out of bed at 4:15AM. I jumped on my bike (a three-speed Schwinn that used to be Dad’s) and was waiting at the door by 4:45…
…for Weisphenning, who showed up at 5:10. “Hey, Mitch!”
I would spend two weeks learning the ropes – how to turn the mike on and off, how to run the ancient (late 1930’s) control board, with its heavy, perfectly-balanced bakelite rotary pots and mechanical key switches, how to take transmitter readings, to turn the transmitter on in the morning and shut it off at night. And then the hard part; all the programs I had to run.
I’d absorbed a lot of the basics of the night shift with Dick – but Saturday Mornings were a lot more involved. Richardson’s philosophy: everyone was a newsman. So the weekend people did an amazing schedule of news; two local news/weathercasts per hour, plus hour-long blocks of news, weather, sports, community information, fire department reports, funeral home and nursing home reports and the rest of the thrum of small-town life at 7AM, 8AM and noon.
The first job of the morning, at 5:11AM? Roll up the forty-odd feet of AP wire copy that had scrolled out overnight. Rip it. Sort it by content; state, regional, national, weather and sports. Look for local angles to highlight. Get the scores from last night sorted out and in order for the array of sportscasts to come (Jamestown High School Blue Jays and Jamestown College Jimmies sports first; then NDSU, UND and Mary; finally, the Twins, Vikings and North Stars, and any other national sports of interest after that. Weather – local zone, state and regional forecasts for today, the three-day, and the extended forecast for the coming week. Farm market and crop news. Local news from yesterday; keep and rewrite what was timely, file the rest. Look for opportunities for updates.
John made it look easy; I could see it taking some getting used to.
And then at 5:55AM, the big moment; he flipped the three switches that controlled the ancient transmitter, read the station’s sign-on script, and played the National Anthem.
And we were off to the races.
The next nine hours – the airshift ran from signon ’til 3PM – are a blur to me today. They were probably a blur back then, too; so much information. Cueing records, playing commercials, noting how John did newscasts and weather breaks, listening to the police scanner for anything of interest (there wasn’t), jumping through the ceiling as the “Plectron” fire alarm (a sort of pager that called the local volunteer fire department up for action; we had one, too) warbled the news of a fire somewhere, which John copied down and passed along on the air as we did with all local fire calls…
3PM came very fast. I was exhausted, and exhilarated, and could hardly wait for next week. I hung around an extra couple of hours for the beginning of Dick’s shift, just to absorb more the place.
I figured I could dig this.
Yeah, I know – Frank Zappa was a really great guitar player…:
…although I never really cared for him there, either.
Over the years, I’ve been told “the Mothers of Invention were the best band of the sixties!”
Which was, of course, rubbish; they were just another big, self-indulgent jam band, like the Grateful Dead without the pot-headed geniality but with all of the snide, smarter-than-thou precociousness that the world would soon call “Frank Zappa”.
Frank Zappa’s greatest trick was convincing the world that “shallow, smarter-than-thou aping of people with real talent” was “groundbreaking”. If we accept that Frank Zappa was the love child of Jerry Garcia, Jello Biafra and Weird Al Yankovic, then ask yourselves these questions:
Oh, no doubt about it; Zappa was a clever fellow. “Sheik Yerbouti”, his disco parody album from the late seventies…
…was one of the best visual gag/puns of the decade.
But his music?
“But he was so clever!”
No, he wasn’t.
“But he was a groundbreaking innovator”.
No, he was a dyspeptic crank with a creative streak.
“But he was a musical genius”.
No, he was a musical footpad with a cult following.
“But he was funny…”
Yeah, I know – don’t eat yellow snow. Got it.
From the day I checked The Mothers’ “Weasels Rip My Flesh” out from the Jamestown Library, to the day he passed away (lamentably young, I’ll add), I detested his music; I’d rather be forced to listen to early-period Pink Floyd than any of Zappa’s various incarnations.
But disliking music is a fairly ambient thing. My visceral dislike for everything Zappa represented was cemented years after my ennui for his music was set in stone.
Back in 1980, Zappa appeared on the New Years’ Eve edition of ABC’s old SNL knockoff Fridays, doing a “Top Ten Albums” countdown. Predictably, he hated every album on the top ten (except for the recently-murdered John Lennon’s dismal Double Fantasy, which he called “a testimony to the good taste of the American record-buying public”).
Now, #5 for the year was Styx’s vacuous Paradise Theater, an album I personally had no time for. I’d developed a cordial dislike for Styx by this point, especially anything involving Dennis DeYoung, inflamed by having had to play the sappy, treacly, unbearable megahit “Babe” about a million times at my radio job in the past year).
But what did Zappa mention in his review? DeYoung’s whiny “woe is me” over the travails of being a spoiled rock star? The trite bombast of everythign DeYoung touched? The conceit of doing a concept album about a theater at all?
No. He said – and I remember it word for word, 28 years and change later: “Styx. They grow wheat where these guys come from”, before flinging the album away.
Yes, Frank F****ng Zappa. They grow wheat where Eddie Cochrane came from, too. And they grew cotton where Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash and Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry came from. Bruce Springsteen comes from tomato country. Jimmy Hendrix? Apples. Liverpool was big for oats and potatoes. And Frank Zappa. who was not fit to carry any of their gig bags, obviously came from wherever they grow bumper crops of ass***es.
Frank Zappa – rest his soul – was a waste of musical time. He bores me. Of him, no more shall be said.
In my years of blogging, I haven’t found much I don’t enjoy. I’ve never really been tempted to quit. It’s really no less fun now than it ever was.
Of course, that doesn’t mean the downsides have changed. For starters, I’ve gotten really, really tired of the endless pissing matches between bloggers.
I’ve had my ups and my downs as a blogger and as a person in the past seven and a half years. But I’ve had a few standards about which I haven’t compromised at all.
Those have always been my rules. Not everyone sees it the same way, of course.
There’s a stream of “thought” among some bloggers – mostly but by no means all lefties – that if anyone criticizes the way Percy Leftkowitz approaches an issue, the best response is to toss out “dirt” about the critics. As if the presence of “dirt” in their personal, familyi or work lives invalidates what they had to say.
JOE SCHMO: “Percy Leftkowitz is wrong”.
LEFTKOWITZ: “Yeah, but Joe Schmo had a jaywalking ticket, so ignore him!”
It’s not debate. It’s just a way to try to shut other people up. It’s the mark of the intellectual coward.
Anyway; a little bird told me that a swarm of leftybloggers have gotten their cute little danders up over yet another dirt-slinging match. “They wanna fight dirty”, they chant, “we’ll play dirty too!”, and they circulate their little emails, and they grit their teeth and froth impotently.
Which is, of course, a sign that a squall of stupid is about to descend.
———-
Speaking of cowards, a number of local leftybloggers have been tittering about some “dirt” they think they have on me for the past year or so. I had a run-in with Saint Paul’s code enforcement division.
Actually, the tale the leftybloggers are tittering about is Part 2 of a three part story. They don’t know the rest of it.
Part 1? That’s family stuff. It’s a long, painful story, and – I’ll say this politely – it stays in my family. We’ve been working on it for years. It’s a work in progress. And it’s none of your business.
Part 2? Well, that’s the part the titterers – and a “source” who should have known better – are getting their yuks about. Things had, as of a year or so ago, gotten pretty out of control around my house; the place was in an awful state. And I wound up having to do a hell of a lot of fix-up work, very very fast. It was ugly, and embarassing, and probably the most difficult week of my life, and my family’s. Worse than getting divorced. Worse than being out of work. The worst. I’m not gonna go into details – it’s nobody’s business, and…well, read Part 3.
Part 3? This is the part that the poo-flinging monkeys who’ve been tittering about this story either don’t know or don’t think matters. There was a happy ending. Everything got done.
I couldn’t have done it myself, of course; at one point, I had over a dozen friends, family, neighbors, even people I’d never met, helping me out around here. And we got the job done, ahead of schedule. But for some eave-painting (and, uh, a new garage, although the fire was completely unrelated), I’ve been done since last fall. (And the eaves, and my third-level dormers, do need the paint. I hope to have it done by State Fair time. While we’re on the subject, does anyone have a cherrypicker crane they could lend me for a couple days?). And I had some very unlikely help; the DFL-run city council, at least one of whose members had gone through pretty much the same ordeal. While everyone knows I’m that Mitch Berg, they were a ton of help. I owe them my thanks – on this issue, anyway. And so while I differ from all of them on politics, I thank them.
At any rate – while I’m never going to be mistaken for Martha Stewart, my house is no worse than yours, right now. The hard part – working on all that stuff from Part 1 – well, we’ll be working on that one for a while, but again, that’s none of your business.
So. There’s “the dirt” on Mitch Berg.
What will you titter about now?
———-
So why did I bring that up? Well, certainly not because it’s anyone’s business. I’m not going to discuss it with anyone. The comment section is closed.
But I’m not afraid of the “story”. It happened, it was an embarassing, brutal, grinding ordeal (I put in six straight 20 hour days), and it sucked chunks through straws, but I dealt with it. It’s in the past. Life has moved on, very much for the better for all concerned.
I’m even less afraid of the people who’ve been doing the tittering. The people who’ve been getting their yuks from it have a lot more to be ashamed about than I do. One area leftyblogger went so far as to put up a fake, anonymous blog on the subject. I know who “he” is, by the way; it was about ten minutes’ work to prove it conclusively. He’s someone with a long history of scuttling around behind anonymity, but whining like a bitch when he’s exposed for the gutless worm he is.
And y’know what? I don’t care. Screw ’em. I am better than they are. Not just because I have the cojones to put my real name on what I write, but because even after all this, I’m still going to leave your families, your jobs, and your personal lives out of it.
Mostly, though, it’s because most of the “dirt” that lesser bloggers think they can dig up on other bloggers – even the “embarassing” “dirt” – is just so unbelieveably mundane it doesn’t deserve comment, much less to be waved around as a reason to discount someone’s opinion, or to try to scare someone into silence.
Someone posted to a listserve from a government computer; someone had a DWI fifteen years ago; the cops tagged someone after a bar fight; someone else didn’t pay a speeding ticket; someone got busted for shoplifting in college; someone told a bar-room story about themselves that didn’t check out; someone had an ugly divorce, or their kid got busted for burglary, or had plastic surgery, or they had a nasty fight with an ex-spouse that got out of control, or they were hospitalized for depression, or they’ve been out of work for two years…
Who are we talking about, here?
People. Regular people with strengths and weaknesses, whose lives have pasts with wrinkles and ups and downs and twists and turns and warts. People who have done pretty much everything but manage to keep their records squeaky, oppo-research-proof clean.
Y’know – the kind of people who write blogs and, lest we forget, do pretty much everything else in our society.
Let he who is “without sin” hide behind a cutesy nom-de-plume.
———-
And with that, I’m done with all inter-blog mudslinging bullshit.
Why yes – I do remember sitting in the living room on a balmy July day and watching, like everyone else in the world, Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon.
As I recall, Mom was there; Dad was (again, if I recall correctly – and I was six, for crying out loud) was off teaching summer school.
It’s hard to explain to people who weren’t old enough to remember it – or who weren’t born yet – just how exciting that moment was. Granted, I was very young, and I certainly couldn’t speak for all of society, but the nearest I can remember, there have been no similar events that brought pretty much the whole world together in excitement, worry and prayer like the first moon landing. Maybe 9/11, although that was very different, obviously. The whole world just doesn’t get behind much of anything anymore.
But there was a double-shot of excitement for me, that day. When Dad came home, he brought…my first guitar!
It was a cheapo catalog model that some kid had left in his locker three or four years earlier; it was the kind of thing that’d cost maybe $69.99 at WalMart today, and probably under $20 at the time. It was missing a string. And after I banged on it a little, it went into the closet, coming out over the next seven years to serve as a boat, a fort, a rifle and any number of things, until that day in March of 1977 when I decided I had to be a guitar player, dragged it out, put two new tuning machines and six new strings on it, and started working my way through the Gene Leis chord book.
Oh, I suppose after having written a long piece about my ambivalence about single-malt Scotch, you’re thinking “there Berg goes; he’s talking about grain alcohol. That explains a lot”.
Perhaps it does:
Eveclear is a pure grain alcohol. 198 proof (that is to say, 99% alcohol) in its standard form (it’s diluted to 175 proof in Minnesota), Everclear is a common request from Minnesotans whenever I go back to visit North Dakota; it’s the main ingredient in homemade schnapps. More importantly, some of my most treasured memories – or fragments of memories, anyway – started out with shot after shot after shot of the delicious, clear beverage. Which also doubles as a lamp fuel if you’re stranded in the woods…
…oh, OK. I’m yanking your collective chain. No, while you can drink the stuff, it’s really stupid to try.
No, I’m actually talking about the band:
Everclear, a Portland-area punk band led by Art Alexakis, had a brief Top-40 heyday in the mid-nineties. They had (by punk band standards) a fairly brief swerve through “underground” success – which I mostly missed, other than reading snippets and hearing things from friends who still had time and energy to keep up with music; my kids were little, I was changing careers around and trying to teach myself a new trade, and music barely qualified as background noise for the most part.
But the band struck it big in 1996, vaulting out of the underground with So Much For The Afterglow, with a troika of singles, “Everything To Everyone”, “I Will Buy You A New Life” and “Father Of Mine”.
Now, before I heard any of this, I started reading (on that new “web” thing I’d just discovered) the usual punk kids, doing the same thing they do every time a punk band gets mainstream success and income; “Sellout!”. That, I expected.
The part I didn’t expect was the sniveling some of the punk kidz were doing about the music itself; “boring stuff about parents and being a father”.
So I cocked my ear to it.
Turned out Alexakis was about my age (actually eight months older), had (unlike most rock and rollers) a kid or two, and that the singles that were starting to leak out on the radio were about…
…grown up stuff. Having kids. Trying to be a decent father and feeling really inadequate at it. Trying to keep a relationship from fizzling out. Y’know – stuff that actual grownups do when they have left the club scene and packed their guitars and amps lovingly away in the closet and have to get on with real life. Stuff that was real to him and, I add in retrospect, me, at the time.
“Santa Monica” is, along with “A Man In Need” and “Tunnel Of Love”, perhaps the best song ever written about watching a relationship crumble from the inside; the song has a wistful, doomed hope in clinging to the familiar (“we can sit beside the ocean, leave the world behind, swim out past the breakers, watch the world die”) that, no matter how many times its repeated, rings hollow; we know as well as the singer does that there’s really nothing to be done about it – there’s just too much ugly behind the hope in the chorus (“I am still dreaming of your face/Hungry and hollow for all the things you took away/I don’t want to be your good time/I don’t want to be your fall-back crutch anymore”).
But rock and roll is crawling with great breakup songs, from “Backstreets” to, yes, “The Breakup Song”.
What Rock and Roll does not have many of is songs about being Dad.
I was sitting in a cube at my job in 1996 when “Father Of Mine” came on the radio. Alexakis’ real father left his family when he was young – I didn’t need to read anything to figure that out. What catches you – or at least what caught me, 13 years ago – about the song is the blood-curdling anger that Alexakis feels for his own father and, above and beyond that, the fear-laced hope that he won’t pass the baggage from that horror, and well as fresh horrors of own, on to his own kids.
Having little kids of my own at the time, the song caught me between the eyes. The song was as angry as anything the Clash ever did – but the anger wasn’t a vehicle adolescent posturing and puerile politics. It hit me where I lived, not at age 16, but 33, and the anger and the fear were no different for me, and it hit me just as squarely as “London Calling” had, half a lifetime earlier. Maybe moreso; this was my life.
It still is.
And for that brief moment, once in history, old punks didn’t die; the anger just grew up and got some purpose. Just like the old punks.
Alexakis has never come close to that peak since then. The band went the way of all punk rock bands, self-destructing not long after their brief heyday. And Alexakis did embrace puerile politics, eventually; he was a delegate to and entertainer at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, and a reformed Everclear released a single, “Jesus Was A Democrat”, last year. I don’t even like it when people claim Christ was a conservative; the less said, the better.
But we’ll always have 1996.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I get single-malt Scotch. I know why people drink the stuff.
I get that the Scots (from which I’m at least partly descended) inherited from their Viking raiders and conquerors and eventual ethnic partners (from whom I’m also descended) a taste for taking perverse pride in aescetic self-abuse; the descendants of the Norse express this by eating lutefisk and living in Bemidji; those of the Scots, by professing a yen for haggis (or, really, any Scots cuisine) and, I suspect, drinking single-malt whisky.
And again, don’t get me wrong; I have enjoyed single-malt scotch in the past; a friend of mine broke out a bottle of 30-year-old Laphroaig at a party once, and I’ll confess I genuinely enjoyed it; smooth, nuanced, genuinely enjoyable. I’ll also confess I had had two Pims, a couple of Newcastles, and two vodka sours before we got to the scotch (yes, I was in George Jones mode, and no, I was not driving), and I could have probably found good points to drinking Drano by that point.
And I’ve tried – oh, lord, I’ve tried – to develop a taste for lesser marques of single-malt whilst more sober. Oban, Glenfiddych, Lagavulin, Dalwhinnie, Macallen, Talisker, Glenwhinggyggherfachgger, and only Robert the Bruce knows what else. I’ve read the critical reviews of the different brands, tried to wrap my head around the whole aesthetic of trying to find the differences between the nuances of the various brands (“was the shepherd who whizzed in the peat bog from which the water to brew it was drawn a diabetic, dehydrated or drunk, or all the above?” seems to be the big distinction), even learned to play the bagpipes. And so far, the best I can say is that it makes cigars taste smoother. (Not to take anything away from that, either…)l.
And while I’ll cop to not having time, money or interest in trying to ape the more foppish manifestations of bobo epicureanism, I do have a palate. I can give a very literate critique of beer, wine, even vodka. Don’t get me started on vodka. Better yet, come on over to Moscow on the Hill on Cathedral Hill, put down the credit card, and do get me started; Moskva Na Cholmye‘s vodka collection, aka “Around The Warsaw Pact”, is second to none; every bit the work of genius that Williams’ “Beers Of The World” has been for the past 20 years. I’m not a Coors-swilling yahoo (although after a weekend of yard work and paint-scraping, it has its place); I can tell good vices from bad vices.
But single malt, thus far, leaves me cold, Jimmy.
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