Category: Uncategorized

Straight, no cheaters.

I found my six-disc set of Miles Davis and John Coltrane and ripped the first three discs today. I hadn’t been listening to much jazz in the last three months and now I’ve dived back into it. This is exactly the kind of jazz I love.

When I listen to this music it does the same thing as the classical music I grew up with; it completely sucks me in. I don’t want to do anything but listen and follow the melodic line, the rhythm, everything, as closely as possible. I find myself smiling at little musical jokes and getting shivers when something unexpected happens.

Music geeks my age or younger are all about post-rock music. If they’re enthusing about an innovative artist, chances are it’s Four Middle Class Kids Making Somewhat Dissonant Noises to a Pop Beat. There are probably at least two electric guitars involved, and if they don’t exactly make rock and roll music, that’s their background. If they do a cover song, it’s likely to be a post-Beatles pop number.

And then I put on a CD like this and think: The most sophisticated and subtle music America produced is here. It’s from the late fifties and early sixties. And it was made by largely uneducated people from poor families, most of them from a mistreated and disadvantaged ethnic group, working under tremendous commercial pressure. The music these people made still feels new today. And there’s more innovation and exploration in one of these songs than a hundred faux naive indie pop albums can muster.

I still like pop music. I can’t be one of those “Well now that I’ve heard jazz I can’t be bothered with pop music” elitists. But the armies of college kids with guitars and Pavement CDs have some catching up to do.

stomping grounds

The Diedrich coffeehouse with the patio will close down. The building is collapsing. The thing hasn’t made money in forever. It’s big and relaxed and welcoming, and that’s over in this part of the world, killed by high land prices and spreadsheets. There’s a new one a block away that’s small and Starbucksy and all spreadsheet-optimized for profit. Push push push the yuppies through the revolving door. The big wide patio is a relic. I assume that they’ll announce that it’s going to be remodeled, close it, and never reopen it.

This makes me sad, because I’m the kind of person who attaches to places far too strongly. I get terribly emotional about places I’ve been, and not just the pretty ones or the ones where I was happy. I get sort of misty thinking about Kansas City and I only lived there for 9 months on a contract job, fer chrissakes. I imagine myself returning to the site after it’s torn down and morosely standing around looking at the Junta Juice or Yiffy Lube or whatever goes there in a couple years.

Five years ago I knew this guy D., friend of Greg’s. D. was a really nice, smart guy. He was that Alternative Pierced Guy with the weird beard: tall and thin, soft-spoken, deferentially pleasant. He was really into Greg’s band so I saw him a lot, and we’d talk a little about music or art, both of which he knew a lot about. D.’s particular interest was clothing, and he opened a vintage clothing store. He didn’t just have good taste; he was hard-working, understood how to run a store, and totally committed to doing this right. I believe it was in Silverlake; I never went there. He had an eye for that stuff and girls loved his taste, and he was doing well.

Then came the surprise. This scary guy started hanging around the store all the time, and he didn’t fit. He was a hardcore criminal recently released from prison for the latest in a series of violent crimes. He was covered in nonironic tattoos of dire significance and almost always drunk. He’d just show up, 40 in hand, and talk to D. in what was intended as a friendly manner, and scare the shit out of him. The guy was foul-mouthed, racist, misogynist, usually angry, and always in search of money. He scared the girls away. Business went to hell. Any suggestion that he might find somewhere else to hang out enraged him, and threats were made. Even if he left the store itself, he’d always be around within about a block, ready to come back. The last I heard, D. had finally closed the store, almost entirely because of this crappy Cape Fear remake he’d been pushed into.

And why was Mr. Ex Con there at all? Because before D. got that space it had been a crappy liquor store, bars in the cash window and all, where Sideshow Bob here had spent many a happy day in the years before he got that big sentence. When he got out it was time to go back and have him some fun again! There was a new business there, but it was still the same corner. This wasn’t Cape Fear; Poor D. had wandered into the retail version of the hotel in The Shining.

I’ve heard a possibly apocryphal story that in rural Kenya, the trick played on new people in town is to sell them cheap land for their new houses. People are enthused; they get acreage with water access and good soil, and it’s so cheap! A year later they find out they’re on the track of an elephant migration. The elephants come through the same places each year, and they don’t let anything get in their way. There are a lot of them. Things get… …flat.

I wish I was an elephant.

News wrapup

  1. Kristen took a stand. South Orange County strippers disapprove of the London terror bombings, in case you wondered if they were straddling the issue. (via myspace chain letter).
  2. I think the time has come in pop music for tribute bands to have their own tribute bands. Some of these guys have more than passed the M*A*S*H threshold and outlasted their idols by decades. Pick your local tribute band and start giving them the due they’ve earned. Around here I suggest: “Two Doors Down, a Tribute to Wild Child” and “Drive Their Car, a tribute to Rain“. You probably have your own local meta-heroes to emulate. Come to think of it, I bet wossisname Cafferty already has tribute bands.
  3. Can’t seem to face up to the facts; tense and nervous, can’t relax.

My Hitler

  1. My father once had a dream in which he was staying in a Swiss pension. There was a boarding house group from several countries, and as typical in these places meals were communal, all at one table. Shortly after his arrival he discovered that the elderly German gentleman with the mustache was, in fact, Adolf Hitler. Since dream logic was in effect, the problem was not how to kill Hitler, or call the police or the army, or even berate him for his crimes. The question was: how to address him at dinner?

    He couldn’t just be “Mr. Hitler”; the guy was a former head of state. “Herr Führer”, though, would imply approval of the Third Reich and his dictatorship, which can’t be done even at dinner. Finally he figured it out: “Herr Reichskanzler Hitler” [sp?]. Since that was his official elected office, it was the best choice for being introduced or asking the guy to pass the salt.

  2. I once saw a lecture by a psychologist whose field of expertise was the psychology of contagion. This was just a few years into the AIDS epidemic, so it was a topic of current interest. He pointed out that how people think and behave about infection and contagion is related to scientific knowledge, but separate and different. And way stupider. For example, physically handicapped people are treated the way we treat people with an infectious transmittable disease: stay away, don’t touch. The mentally handicapped, too. NIMBY arguments against group homes sometimes boil down to “I’m afraid to have this near me”, as though one could catch mental retardation or multiple sclerosis from the water supply or at the mall.

    The most fascinating part of the lecture was the discussion of the contagion of clothing. People were asked a series of questions about clothing that had been worn by others. No one wanted to wear clothing that an AIDS patient had worn, even if it had been thoroughly cleaned. Many people didn’t want to wear clothing that a handicapped person had worn. And finally, the contagion of evil enters the picture when we’re talking about clothing. If some beloved figure like Mother Theresa has worn a sweater, most people responded they’d love to wear it. However, if Adolf Hitler had worn the sweater, no one wanted to wear it. And if the sweater had been worn by Adolf Hitler and then by the Dalai Lama, they still wouldn’t wear it. Some kinds of contagion can’t be purified.

So anyway that’s how I learned that you can turn into Hitler if you sit on the wrong toilet seat, and that you don’t want to stay in a hotel with the guy.

London trains and London bombs

I spent a couple of summers in London as a kid, and oddly enough that’s the city where I learned about living with terrorist bombs, and also the city where I learned to fear trains.

This was during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the Irish terrorist campaign was in full swing. Everywhere you looked there were signs advising you to report abandoned objects, not to accept packages from strangers, etc. People there were used to it but as a teenager from Southern California I found it both exotic and terrifying.

But that’s not how I got my fear of trains. In the summer of 1980, my father and I were waiting for a train in the Tube station near our place. There was a woman next to me, dressed for the office and carrying a purse and a sweater. I turned to my father to ask him something, the train arrived, and I heard screaming. When I looked back there were her shoes, and her purse, and her sweater neatly folded on top, but no woman. She had jumped in front of the train.

I remember getting on the bus to continue our day while the train was shut down. Every time the bus went over a bump I thought it was a body.

Ever since then, I’ve stood a good long way away from the tracks when I’m in a train station.

F List Trim.

It feels a little dumb even mentioning this, but experience has taught me that it’s worse not to do so.

I trimmed the list. This does not mean that I am not your friend; that you are a bad person; that I have hated you for years; or that I won’t sit with you at lunch. It probably means one or more of:

  1. You are an RSS feed.
  2. You don’t exist any more.
  3. It makes no sense for me to show you my protected entries because I’ve never interacted with you, even one little time.
  4. It makes no sense for me to have you on a list of people to read because you’ve never said anything in this community, even one little time.
  5. I have hated you for years. Just kidding!
  6. You removed me from your own list and it made sense for one of a number of reasons to keep that symmetrical.

If you’re one of these people and it bugs you and you want to yell at me or ask me what the hell, please email. Thanks! Unless you don’t exist or are an RSS feed.