Our Band Could Be Your Life

Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 by Michael Azerrad, is less about the music and more about the story of thirteen indie bands, including some of my favorites such as Dinosaur Jr, The Minutemen-- who provided the title-- Minor Threat, Mission of Burma, Husker Du, The Replacements, Sonic Youth, and Fugazi . . . and the story of these bands is surprisingly similar:

1) feel detached and isolated from the other young people around you
2) form a band
3) practice an insane amount while the rest of your peers are doing school, girls, sports, and other "normal" things
4) procure a beat up van
5) go on a DIY "tour" in aforementioned van, playing sixty shows in fifty days-- in odd venues-- to crowds ranging from a half-dozen to a hundred people, making very little money, barely enough to cover food
6) record an album on the cheap, very quickly, but proficiently, because you are so well practiced from your tour
7) do more tours in the dirty and cramped van, which will insure conflict between the band members and everyone else "touring" with you, but also get your name out there
8) finally receive critical acclaim, but after it is too late
9) attempt to sign with a major label, but either get screwed or lose artistic control or fall apart because of the constant touring
10) realize this would have been so much easier if the internet was around . . .

I give the book ten EP records out of a possible ten, and though I've outlined the archetypal structure of most of the chapters, God is in the details, and Azerrad treats the details just right-- he doesn't idolize or romanticize these bands and their music but he does get across the epic nature of what they were trying to accomplish, and he shows how they achieved success with minimal technology, support, popularity, and (sometimes) musical ability . . . as The Minutemen said, "We jam econo."

Appropriate Meta-Cameo

I rarely recount my dreams here because if I did, I'd be labelled a hypocrite (and because I almost never remember them) but bear with me on this one: I was having a typical spooky nightmare, driving on a dark snowy road in Maine and when I arrived at my house, someone (or something) had jabbed large icicles in a pattern on the door and around the windows and up onto the roof of the house . . . and then Stephen King and I got out of the car to investigate and we were eventually attacked with snow and ice by some delinquent, inbred kids . . . pretty scary stuff, except that I had Stephen King by my side, so I was never all that scared of the situation because no one is scarier than Stephen King and he was my ally (at one point, I even playfully tossed a snowball at him and nearly hit him in the nuts and he laughed about it).

Don't Squash My Delusions

I am really, really good at swatting flies-- definitely way above average (or so I believe, but this could be an example of the Lake Wobegon Effect . . . as I also believe I am a really, really good driver).

Bonus Post at G:TB!

If you love America, athletics, and women, then  you'll probably want to check this out.

Is This Rude or Just Clueless?

So at the condo we stay at in Chatham, we often see the same families year to year-- and my parents have befriended some of them-- so an older mom that lives in New York City . . . a woman who I haven't seen since last Fourth of July, who I would say I know tangentially in the least, and who I've never had an actual conversation with . . . greeted me in this fashion when I first saw her at the pool: "I have a favor to ask you . . . do you think you could teach our son how to ride a two-wheeler, he's seven and a half and he still can't ride," and though her husband was playing with their son in the pool, right there, he didn't say a word-- so I'm not sure which is ruder, asking me that monumental favor, or standing there-- as a dad-- and letting your wife ask such a monumental favor and not saying something like, "She's just kidding . . . you're kidding, right, hon?" but he didn't say anything and so I was forced to answer her and I should have said something about the time, effort, pain, and suffering it usually takes to teach a kid to ride a bike, but instead I suggested that she "take him to a ball field" where he could ride on the dirt and not get as scraped up (and my parents reported that they did see them all at a ball field, their son decked out in elbow and knee pads trying to ride a bike that was too small for him).

OBFT XVIII

I thought this would be the year I finally missed the annual Outer Banks Fishing Trip, but I was able to get from Cape Cod to Kill Devil Hills in a long evening of travel (and, ironically, I went from sunshine and warm water on the Cape to fog, rain, and cold water in North Carolina) and so my streak continues-- Rob, Whitney, and I are the only folks who are eighteen for eighteen-- and this usually guarantees you a bed (as we have a "bed lottery" based on how many years you have been on the trip, but without Cliff to organize the "bed lottery" it didn't happen . . . and because Jason, Craig and I showed up so late on Thursday, all the beds had been claimed and so I spent the weekend attempting to sleep on a variety of surfaces: the floor, couch cushions, under a table, a hammock, and a cot that opened like one of those cartoon bear traps) but despite the lack of sleep, it was still an excellent time; this list may only make sense to fishing trip attendees, but here are a few highlights and low-lights: 1) T.J. dealing (cards) 2) Johnny dealing with T.J.'s dealing 3) July Madness . . . I especially liked watching Whitney dutifully filling out "the notebook" while we all sat at the bar at Tortuga's 4) Saturday's staggering bill at Tortuga's 5) the "race" back from Tortuga's . . . Rob, McWhinney, Jerry, and I staggered the mile and a half home on the beach after consuming a staggering amount of food and beer . . . McWhinney runs away with it, Jerry resolutely takes second and Rob and I dog it and tie for third . . . thanks again Whit!

Two Uses For A Stand-up Paddle Board

 
Stand-up paddle boarding on the Oyster Pond in Chatham is an excellent way to sneak up on cormorants, herons, and kingfishers . . . or-- if you're my wife-- Harry Connick Jr.

If The Economy Is So Bad, Why Is Everyone Driving To Cape Cod?

When you wake up at 4:00 AM to drive to Cape Cod, you feel as if the universe owes you a traffic free ride . . . but the universe could care less about your earnest resolve and it will let cars accumulate on Route 25 despite your sidereal effort.

Syrian Memory #7

To show his devotion to God, St. Simeon the Stylite lived atop a fifty foot stone column for forty years . . . and if you visit this holy site, which is near the city of Aleppo, you can buy a St. Simeon Frisbee to celebrate his accomplishment.

Syrian Memory #6 (Catherine Screws Up)

We were lucky enough to accompany some US Embassy folks to the very high security "Austrian Position 16" in the Golan Heights-- though we had to pass through countless checkpoints and endure many extended radio conversations-- we were finally granted permission to go up the mountain and see the view: the post overlooks the Sea of Galilee and the Biblical farmland where Paul walked to see the promised land, you can also see an Israeli checkpoint and this is the area where the Druze-- members of a strange religion somewhere between Christianity and Islam-- negotiate cross-border marriages with megaphones to prevent inbreeding-- and on our way down the mountain, while I admired the fabulous mustaches that all the Druze men sported, Catherine realized that she left her jacket up at "Austrian Post 16," her nice Gore-Tex jacket that I bought her as a gift . . . and it took us six months to get that jacket back, finally a nice UN soldier from New Zealand got it to us when he was on leave in Damascus.

Syrian Memory #5

If you step on a land mine in the Golan Heights and hear that fatal "click," this is what you do: get someone to pile stones on your foot until you think there is enough weight to hold down the mechanism, and then cut your leg off at the knee and consider yourself lucky.

Syrian Memory #4 (Warning: This Is Gross)

While eating some pinkish chicken at a dodgy bar/dojo I contracted a parasite-- I won't go into details as to how the lab diagnosed that I contracted this parasite-- but the doctor was sure that giant intestinal round worms were living in my intestines . . . and according to Kara, our bio teacher, I should be quite proud that the little buggers made it to my intestines as full grown adults (8-9 inches long), as it is an arduous process: when you first swallow an ascuris,  it goes through the stomach and into the intestine and lays eggs, then these eggs hatch into larva, which molt and flow through the bloodstream to the lungs, and like salmon swimming upstream, the larva proceeds up the trachea, and then they are re-swallowed and they move through the stomach again, where they reside until you take a big pill, Zentel, and even after I took this big pill, things still weren't right, so I called the doctor and had this conversation: "I took the pill, doc, but . . ." and he said, "Remember, you injured your stomach and intestines, it will take a little while to return to normal . . . you are eating what I told you? Rice and bananas and tea?" and I said, "Yes, but how will I know when the worms are dead?" and he said, "You'll see them when they come out, of course . . . have a nice dinner."

Syrian Memory #3

We received two notes this week at school: note #1 was given to me in the middle of Public Speaking class and it said our school would be closing early as per orders of the US Embassy because of "demonstrations" in honor of Palestinian martyrs" . . . so we went to Kevin and Emmy's apartment and sat on their roof and drank beer and watched a mob of teenagers throw some stones at our school-- it was hardly a riot and the mob was also carrying text books and protractors . . . it was like getting school closed for a dusting of snow; note #2 was from the school nurse and it advised us that we should not eat at Station 1, our favorite schwarma joint, as ten cases of food poisoning had been reported in the past two weeks . . . so we will take that into consideration, but still, they do slice a tasty schwarma there . . . maybe it was a coincidence.

Syrian Memory #2

The Umayyad Mosque, the third holiest place in the Muslim religion (and the site has been a holy place for thousands of years: a temple to Haddad, and then Jupiter, A Greek Orthodox Church supposedly harboring the head of John the Baptist) is awe-inspiring-- fields of polished marble, walls of mosaics, and a monumental mosque housing a Shrine to Hussein (Mohammad's grandson) where Shiites were busy kissing a grate . . . the area was so holy that you couldn't wear your shoes, so I left my old stank Nikes in a pile of other shoes by the door, but when I returned, they had been stolen-- obviously the person who stole them didn't know that this was the third holiest place in the Muslim religion-- and then, conveniently, there was a youngster outside the gates of the mosque who took a quick look at the white man in his socks and immediately led me to the shoe souk-- where I'm sure he received a commission-- and his cousin sold me the crappiest pair of sandals in the Middle East.

Syrian Memory #1

While I am on vacation in Cape Cod and Kill Devil Hills, I have pre-loaded some thematic sentences for your reading pleasure . . . some of you might remember the long winded e-mail updates I sent out each week while Catherine and I were teaching in Syria; I have decided to revisit these in order to find the best moments and condense them into single sentences . . . so here is Syrian Memory #1: just after we arrived, my wife and I took public transportation to the ancient Christian village of Maalula, where the houses are nestled in the high desert mountains and painted a pleasant blue and where the people still speak the language of Christ, Aramaic-- and though I helped unload the vegetables from the van we did not receive a discount on our fare; we hiked above the town to visit the main attraction: the Shrine of St. Tekla-- here, supposedly, a woman converted to Christianity just before she was to be wed to a pagan man and she was flogged for this heresy, and then she fled and, miraculously, a beautiful gorge opened in the rocks to facilitate her escape and there is now a monastery at the foot of this gorge and inside the monastery are the typical relics and pictures and also a fountain where water drips into a basin and this water is supposed to relieve flatulence, and oddly, Catherine (who is never flatulent) drank from this fountain, but I did not . . . and in retrospect, this was my greatest regret from all our overseas adventures, that I didn't drink from that fountain, because sometimes, especially when I mix beer and ice cream, I wish I drank from that fountain.

More Style Over Substance

I couldn't really follow the plot of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and I'm not sure if you're supposed to-- it's a modern parody of Raymond Chandler's byzantine style-- and the narration is overly ironic and stylistic, but I will still recommend the movie if you are in my age bracket (forty-ish) because it's more like a get together of old friends . . . hanging out with Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer is a blast, they are natural entertainers, and though their dialogue isn't terribly significant in regards to the plot, and though it's certainly not as clever as the insignificant dialogue in Pulp Fiction, it's still worth seeing how the two of them deliver it-- they are both old pros: three severed fingers out of five.

I Choose Style Over Substance

After reading six hundred pages of the second George R.R. Martin novel, A Clash of Kings, I have given up-- and while I admit that the plot is awesome and epic, I need a few adjectives when I am reading a novel . . . a little bit of style, and so instead I am wading through China Mieville's densely described genre-bending Perdido Street Station, a tale of bestial love in the city that is a veritable bestiary, New Crobuzon, and though the book has a map at the start, you don't need it . . . you can just groove on the freaky descriptions.

Memories Live In My Skull

The first compact disc I ever bought was The Cult's Sonic Temple-- I was a freshman in college and I didn't even own a CD player yet, so I had to travel from room to room to listen to tracks, but I knew that compact disks were the future and I didn't want to spend any more money on cassettes (if I were really smart, I would have stopped buying music altogether and listened to the radio until I could pirate stuff on the internet . . . think of the money I'd have saved)-- and though I was a little disappointed by Sonic Temple . . . it wasn't as good as Electric . . . I still held on to it, but the second compact disc I bought was called Positraction, by a band named Live Skull, and, with noisy, chaotic songs like "Circular Saw," and "Amputease," it was a little too disorganized for my tastes at the time-- and none of my friends liked it either-- so I sold it back to The Band Box and it remained in their used CD collection for my entire stay at William and Mary (and then I think Whitney bought it and gave it back to me so I may have the CD somewhere in my house) but I pretty much forgot about the existence of the band until I was reading Michael Azerrad's excellent book Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 and I came across this sentence in the Sonic Youth section: "Why did Sonic Youth succeed when all of their peers-- bands like Live Skull, Rat At Rat R, and the Swans-- eventually fell by the wayside?" and so I went on Amazon and gave Live Skull a second chance and they are much easier to listen to now, since I've been listening to post-punk and post-rock and no wave for years and my ears are better attuned to pulling melody and order from dissonance.

Things You SHOULD Worry About

Matt Ridley has convinced me not to worry about global warming-- near the end of his book The Rational Optimist, he makes a strong case that though it is certainly occurring, the effects won't be as disastrous as the worst of the doomsayers believe-- and he says our time could be better spent on more tangible terrors: "the four horsemen of the human apocalypse, which cause the most premature and avoidable death in poor countries, are and will be for many years the same: hunger, dirty water, indoor smoke, and malaria," and he even shows that from a more aesthetic, environmental view, global warming is not the cause of the loss of biodiversity on earth: "the threats to species are all too prosaic: habitat loss, pollution, invasive competitors, and hunting," and then he returns to his thesis, which he believes will eventually solve these problems . . . he says, "so long as human exchange and specialization are allowed to thrive somewhere, then culture evolves whether leaders help it or hinder it, and the result is that prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and wilderness expands". . . as long as ideas can "meet and mate, to have sex with each other."

How Did You Miss This, Ridley? Maybe Because You're a Limey.

Matt Ridley, in his new book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, does a fantastic job of debunking the prevailing pessimism from previous decades: "In the 1960s the population and explosion and global famine were top of the charts, in the 1970s the exhaustion of resources, in the 1980s acid rain, in the 1990s pandemics"; he runs through each of these plus many other apocalyptic scenarios predicted by scientists (DDT, mass extinction, deforestation, the evils of the railroad, cancer epidemics in children, etc.) and then he comprehensively illustrates that none of these panned out in the devastating manner that was predicted and that the average lifespan, amount of leisure time, freedom from disease, and living conditions have improved over time for all humans-- but then he ends with the "great pessimisms" of today: Africa and global warming and when he describes Botswana (an incredible success story on a generally impoverished continent) he explains that they-- like many African nations-- are saddled with this list of failures: 1) they are landlocked 2) they have poor roads 3) exploding birth rates 4) AIDS and other diseases 5) they have never fully recovered from the slave trade 6) they were once colonies 7) their most promising industry-- agriculture-- is stifled by price controls and trade barriers 8) there is ethnic strife 9) the windfalls of resource wealth serve only to corrupt democratic politicians . . . but despite these problems, Botswana succeeded because of its good institutions-- "people could own property without fear of confiscation by chiefs or thieves"-- and it was barely paid attention to "by colonial rule" and so had to develop its own policies, and as I was reading this I was waiting for Ridley to compare Botswana to America . . . if you look at that list of "problems," each and every one has a parallel to America when it was first developing, and the factors that allowed America to succeed-- good institutions and the fact that we were too far from Britain for them to really police us, also makes sense-- but Ridley never made this connection, perhaps because he is British (and I've yet to finish the final chapter and see what he has to say about global warming).