Lesson Learned (I Instigate an Awkward Moment at the Pub)

If you are at your local pub, and an inebriated stranger approaches you and asks whether he should play Molly Hatchet or The Allman Brothers on the jukebox, the correct response is, "Whatever, man, they're both awesome!" but that's not what I said; instead I took a moment and sincerely thought about the question and told him, quite sincerely, that I couldn't recall any songs by Molly Hatchet so I wasn't qualified to decide, and this really astounded him-- that I wasn't familiar with Molly Hatchet-- so much so that he sang an a capella version of "Flirtin' With Disaster" to me and several of my friends, really belted it out, holding a fake microphone and everything, for an awkwardly long time, but I couldn't bring myself to walk away because he really wanted me to appreciate Molly Hatchet (but, of course, this had the opposite effect, as now any time I hear the name Molly Hatchet, I will associate the band with this horribly awkward moment).

Batting A Thousand (Sort of)

I saw three ex-students out-of-context in the span of three days and nailed all of their names:

1) saw a girl I had many, many years ago at a concert at The Saint in Asbury Park-- where her younger brother was playing drums in a band with one of my colleagues-- and though she is over thirty and has a kid and a house and a mortgage, she was far more surprised that I have kids and a house and a mortgage . . . "Mr. P. is all grown up!" was her reaction;

2) saw a dude I taught a few years ago stocking beer at the fancy beer store -- although I this one was a Texas-leaguer, as I only remembered his last name;

3) and, finally, an easy one . . . I saw a girl I taught last year lurking in the high school parking lot (there's nothing lamer than hanging around the high school once you've graduated, but -- to her credit -- I think she was waiting to give someone a ride).

Same Dave Under a Different Name

I have grown tired of Greasetruck as my fictitious band-name, and so I am changing it -- it's not like I have to consult with anyone! --and so the name of my new (also fictitious) band name is The Moving Rocks (The World's Second Greatest Rock Band) because I like the origin story of this name . . . anyway, here is my first song under this new moniker -- I am hard at work on recording a Moving Rocks album, and perhaps if I am extremely motivated, I will find some real live people to actually flesh out this project, but until then, this is nothing but Dave (and I've replaced the usual rambling psychedelic monologue with a guitar solo!)

No Plunge For 2013

For the first time in several years, we did not attend the Sea Isle City Polar Plunge -- the house we normally rent for the weekend was flooded out and we didn't find another place; instead we went to Philly for a night with several other couples and had a very different, much more civilized experience: we stayed at the historic Thomas Bond House, visited the art museum, ate fine Italian food, shopped at the markets, and saw a cover band that was the polar opposite of LeCompt . . . LeCompt is gritty, Jersey, weathered, and exceptional -- and this weekend made me realize how excellent they are; the only good thing I can say about the band we saw this weekend -- their name is Lima Bean Riot and they are heralded as one of the best cover bands in Philadelphia --is that they sound like the radio . . . they play horrible music, might be lip-synching, and incorporate a large number of medleys into their infinite set list of crap-pop, but if you turn your head, you wouldn't even know there was a band in the bar -- the auto-tuned noise coming from the PA speakers could have been WPLJ.

Anticlimactic Clinking

My wife was in a "I'm-going-to-get-a-lot-of-shit-done" mood over the four day Rosh Hashanah weekend . . . and in the midst of getting lots of shit done, she decided to take our two big jars of change to Stop and Shop; they have a CoinStar machine there and if you choose to get a Stop and Shop gift card, then you don't have to pay the 9% counting fee . . . you receive one hundred percent credit for the change you dump in the machine, an admittedly good deal, but this defeats the purpose of a change jar -- which is supposed to be "mad money" to be used for something frivolous (such as a pet monkey or the world's largest chocolate bar) -- to spend it on food . . . especially mundane grocery store food disappointed me (perhaps if we spent it on some kind of exotic food, like a dozen century eggs, then I would have approved) and so to make the event slightly more exciting, we all guessed how much money the jars contained: Alex said fifty dollars, Ian said sixty, I guessed two hundred and twenty dollars and Catherine -- ever the optimist -- estimated three hundred and seventy five . . . but when my wife returned from the store, she said that the machine was broken, and she couldn't cash in the change, and I am regarding this as an omen, and hoping that we will get to use the money for something more fun . . . perhaps I will finally get this (and if you don't think the title of this post is a great name for an indie band consisting of two nerdy percussionists, then you are a fool and I pity you).

Hey Michael Lewis! In A Book Titled Boomerang, Shouldn't You Visit Australia?

In his new book Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, Michael Lewis is more cavalier with is opinions than he was in his last book, the longer and denser The Big Short . . . Boomerang is more of a travelogue with some finance thrown in, and at times you get the feel that he's winging it, relying on his good name in each country, but he's an engaging writer and the book is a lot of fun-- considering it's about a depressing topic-- because for each country he visits, he tries to link their national character to the type of financial disaster they are experiencing: corrupt and tribal Greeks refuse to band together for the sake of their country; feral Icelanders treat high-risk banking the same way they treat fishing in the cold and dangerous waters of the North Atlantic; stoic Irishmen shoulder their country's debt with tight-lipped penitence, though they should have acted shamefully and defaulted; rule abiding Germans don't notice the filth under the sheen of the bonds they have bought (and here he takes a scatological side-trip into "the German's longstanding special interest" in "Scheisse (shit)" and tries to extend the analogy to the financial crisis, claiming that the Germans "longed to be near the shit but not in it," and although this is entertaining, I think his logic is stretched thin and that you could find loads of "Scheisse" jokes in every culture--  Mr. Lahey from Trailer Park Boys comes to mind-- so even Canadians stoop to this sort of humor); finally Lewis ends up in America, searching for the state that is the biggest financial disaster . . . and banking analyst Meredith Whitney determines this by invoking the logic of "the tragedy of the commons," she explains: "companies are more likely to flourish in stronger states; the individuals will go where the jobs are . . . ultimately, the people will follow the companies . . . Indiana is going to be like, NFW I'm bailing out New Jersey . . . those who have money and can move do so, and those without money and cannot move do not, and ultimately rely more on state and local assistance," and Lewis asks her, "What's the scariest state?" and I hoped her answer wouldn't be New Jersey, but she "only had to think for about two seconds" and then she said, "California."

Corrupted Blood Incident: A Good Name For A Screamo Band

Much of the new Neal Stephenson novel REAMDE takes place in a fictional Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) named T'Rain-- which is similar but more developed than the infamous World of Warcraft (and T'Rain has supplanted World of Warcraft as the most popular MMORPG in the world of the novel)-- and the plot of REAMDE revolves around flesh and blood teenage Chinese hackers that have co-opted the gaming platform to disseminate a computer virus that encrypts the victim's real data on his computer, and the hackers are receiving "ransom" payments for a data encryption key from infected users in T'Rain currency inside the world of T'Rain, allowing them to launder the money, remain anonymous, and profoundly intertwine the reality of the game and the reality of reality; much of this MMORPG stuff is new to me, and so Stephenson made curious as to how accurate the T'Rain stuff actually is-- as I have never played World of Warcraft-- and I ended up reading about the "corrupted blood incident" of 2005, an incident which must have had some influence on the novel-- because (and this is a real incident . . . or it really happened in virtual reality) someone wrote a computer virus that spread through World of Warcraft just like a real virus, through proximity and transmission-- it actually spread through the game like a disease-- and made the people in the game behave as if there was a pandemic: people holed up in the country, avoided other people, died en masse in the cities, etc. and the reaction was so accurate that doctors and scientists studied the game-play in order to further our understanding of how people behave during an outbreak (and I wonder if I had a character in World of Warcraft, if I could have him write a one sentence blog inside that virtual world, detailing his life in there . . . Sentence of Thok?)

The Waitresses Do NOT KNow What Boys Like (But I Do)

I wish my boys liked getting lost in a good book on a hot summer afternoon, but that's not the case . . . and The Waitresses have got it all wrong, they don't want to touch (or have anything remotely to do with) girls; I thought my son Ian liked winter, because all summer he kept telling me that he couldn't wait for the cold and the snow, so that we could have a snowball fight . . . but sometimes you don't know what you like until you try it . . . and when I saw my boys try it, then there was no question as to what boys like, and I am certain of this because I learned it empirically, through my powers of interview and observation: BOYS LIKE TO JELLYFISH FIGHT . . . last week at Midway Beach, my boys collected buckets of jellyfish and then hurled them at each other for over an hour, and I've never seen them happier . . . and my six year old son Ian explained why: "Jellyfish fighting is better than snowball fighting because a jellyfish doesn't hurt as much as a snowball when it hits you in the face."

P.S. Bucket of Jellyfish is a good name for a trance-band.

Individuals Tending Towards Savagery Is A Great Name For A Punk-Rock Band

 Sentence of Dave has often discussed risk assessment . . .  it's difficult to decide what to worry about in a world where so much unfiltered information is so readily accessible . . . and so I will place you on the horns of another anxiety-filled dilemma: should you worry more about Individuals Tending Towards Savagery, a radical Mexican anti-technology group that praises the writings of Ted Kaczynski and recently bombed two Mexican nano-technology professors at the Monterrey Technological Institute, or should you worry about their prediction: that nanotechnology research will result in the creation of nano-cyborgs, which will be able to self-replicate automatically without the help of humans and eventually form an exponentially increasing "gray-goo" that will smother all life on earth?

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."

Comment Away . . . You Might Become Slightly Famous

I was poking around the software that monitors visitors that come to this blog, and I noticed that several people had googled the words "residual glee" and ended up at Sentence of Dave, but I did not remember writing those words and it turns out I didn't write those words-- my friend Eric (who is an award winning writer) wrote those words in a comment, and somehow that comment became the top search entry on Google for the phrase "residual glee," and although this only lasted for a few hours, it's still weird to think that you could write a comment on my third-rate blog and end up tops on Google-- something companies pay marketing firms loads of money to accomplish-- and now, what is even stranger (and more meta) is that Eric's post about his comment is now the top search when you type "residual glee" into Google (and, also, on an unrelated note: I think Residual Glee would make a good name for an indie band).

Jamming Econo

The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert Heilbroner, is in a class of its own; it is a history of economic thought from medieval times through Keynes and Schumpeter and it includes all the greats-- Adam Smith , Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill and the Utopians (which is a great name for a band) David Ricardo, Thorstein Veblen, Karl Marx and crew-- and Heilbroner has done all the reading, so for each man, he presents you with an overview, a few entertaining and telling anecdotes, some pithy quotations, and a logical summary of their theory and how accurate it was . . . and his conclusion is that all these men were prescient and discovered something new about the economic workings of their own world and were able to predict into the near future, but as times and technology changed, their theories fell by the wayside (David Ricardo and globalization) and Heilbroner wonders if it will ever be possible to make such predictions again, as he sees the world now as a combination of economics and politics that is well near impossible to unravel.

11/10/2009

The documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil doesn't just allude to This is Spinal Tap, it is This is Spinal Tap, except that it's "real," or sort of real, because obviously director Sacha Gervasi is as much paying homage to the greatest of mockumentaries as he is telling the story of an absurd (but well regarded in the industry) heavy metal band . . . and if you are a fan of Spinal Tap, then the film becomes weirder and weirder as the scenes grow more literally parallel-- and some are obviously constructed this way: such as the montage of ridiculous Anvil album covers and the knob in the studio that goes to 11, but when the two founding members of Anvil!, who were childhood friends, nostalgically hum the riffs to "Thumb Hang," one of the first songs they wrote together, and the scene happens in a deli, you can't help but think of Michael McKeon and Christopher Guest riffing on "All the Way Home" and it just keeps getting more and more like Spinal Tap-- there is a scene at Stonehenge and a disastrous tour and the drummer's name happens to be Robb Reiner, until, finally, in the last scene (which I won't spoil) you wonder if the whole thing is an elaborate joke-- but apparently it isn't, so sometimes life mimics art, and sometimes art mimics life, and sometimes I think I've seen Spinal Tap more times than is good for me.

8/7/2009 Live from Sea Isle City

Some bad band names: 1) tonight in Sea Isle City at the Ocean Drive Bar (Fun Food and Music), "Burnt Sienna" is playing-- I suppose their name is in the same genre as Maroon 5, The White Stripes, The Black Keys, Goldfinger, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Green Day, Deep Purple, Blue Oyster Cult, Silverchair, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Black Crowes, Yellowcard, etc-- but I think they went for too obscure a shade 2) the other night at the Springfield Inn, Mike LeCompt opened with "Don't Pull Your Love," a groovy song from the seventies by a band that no one could properly name, and so I looked it up . . . and I can see why a one-hit wonder band who knew they were going to be a one-hit wonder band would want every member to get his or her due-- but it's not like they could predict the future, although with the name they chose they pretty much insured their future, but still, you'd think that the band would be more optimistic and at least try to come up with something catchier than Hamilton, Joe Frank, Reynolds & Reynolds (and though the second Reynolds isn't included on the youtube video, it is included on the Itunes MP3 version, which my cousin happened to have on his Ipod).

Plants/Birds/Rocks/Things/Heat/Hot

I was feeling pretty bad about the quality and content of yesterday's sentence, until I turned on the radio and heard the second worst song in rock and roll history-- the worst is Jethro Tull's "Aqualung," of course-- but the two chord classic "Horse with No Name" by America is a close runner-up; hearing their infamously vague lyric "there were plants and birds and and rocks and things" made me feel so much better about my own writing-- as did the phrase "the heat was hot" . . . but what can you expect by a band named after a geographic location, as they fall in with such ilk as Asia, Boston, Chicago, Alabama, Kansas, Europe, The Georgia Satellites and Styx.

The Best Band Name Ever

Here we are-- "The Hanging Chads"-- a teacher posted our entire performance, including the interminable fiasco with the cords, so if you want to see us actually play, fast forward (also: you can hear Ian in the background yelling "Daddy!" although I am hard to recognize and usually blocked by the PA speaker.)

Chads! Chads! Chads!

I was pleased with the last minute name I thought of for our faculty band's "Rock the Vote" performance: "The Hanging Chads"-- it has it all, an allusion to voting, a vaguely phallic sound, and a "the" at the beginning (Jimmy Rabbit says that all the great band names start with a "the")-- but my fellow band-members didn't know what I was talking about, and even though we rocked to a packed auditorium, I think only one nerdy kid got the joke; I also think I had the best "look" in the band (my typical school outfit, but black, sunglasses, my school ID, a pencil in my pocket, and a FILA hat) though I needed to be cued to do my guitar solo (Bob said, "Mr. Pellicane on the guitar" to remind me and we had to backtrack to it-- other highlights included Bob and I singing different words to the chorus of "American Idiot" and what felt like ten minutes of fumbling around on stage before we found the right cords to plug in) and I also had the most rabid fans-- Alex and Ian-- in fact, Alex told me I was the "greatest rock guitar guy in the world" and that when he was big he "wanted to get up on a stage a play a guitar" so I'm sure that this stunt will cost me in the end.

2/17/2008

Yesterday, my two sons and I formed a short lived rock'n'roll band, and my son Alex came up with our name: The Junior States (he had a rationale for this but I missed it because Ian had just jammed Legos into the keyboard and it was making a lot of noise).