Yep, That's About Right

"this is our music from a bachelors den

the sound of loneliness turned up to ten

a horror soundtrack from a stagnant waterbed

and it sounds just like this

this is the sound of someone losing the plot

making out that they're okay when they're not

you're gonna like it but not a lot

and the chorus goes like this

oh Baby, here comes the fear again

the end is near again

a monkey's built a house on your back

you can't get anyone to come in the sack

and here comes another panic attack

oh, here we go again

so now you know the words to our song

pretty soon you'll all be singing along

when you're sad, when you're lonely & it all turns out wrong

when you've got the fear

and when you're no longer searching for the beauty of love-

just some kind of life with the edges taken off

when you can't even define what it

is that you're frightened of

this song will be here"

"The Fear" Pulp

A Movie for the Quixotic

Anybody who's ever had a big crazy ass dream needs to run, not walk, to see the new documentary "Man on Wire". It's the story of Philippe Pettit's 1973 wirewalk between the two towers of the World Trade Center. Part heist story, part portrait of an artist, it's a gripping film that's near impossible to watch without accompanying jaw dropping.

Fascinated as a teen by the mere of idea of the towers, Pettit once defaced a magazine in a doctor's office by drawing a wire between the two towers, with himself on it. He then spent years of his life preparing as the towers rose an ocean away (beautifully portrayed in split screen in the movie). The band of people who helped him, an international motley crew if ever there was one, are all heard from and represented in tastefully done recreations. One of the most striking things to me was the footage postwalk that showed all the reporters asking the same question, "Why?" But lest you despair of prosiac Americans consider the Port Authority cop who helped bring Pettit down from the clouds (and whose dry report gives the film it's title-complaint? "Man on Wire"). When interviewed by reporters he said, "You can't call that walking, you can't call that anything but dancing."

Despite the inherent crazy joy of the story it is, of course, shot through with post 9/11 sadness. To see the towers at the beginning of their lives, rising up, can't help but remind Americans of other, darker days. The film is not about that and so doesn't go there but I felt it was an unanswered question. I, for one, would love to hear Philippe's 9/11 story. If there's a foreigner as outraged as we, it would have to be him for he saw and experienced the towers as no other human did.

Is It Just Me?

I don't think that running mates, even if they are of opposite sexes, should kiss. There's more than enough puckering up in politics people, how about a nice firm handshake instead?

Yeah, It's a Visual Pun

Wild Politics from the Last Frontier

I have been ODing on the political coverage this week-like the Olympics I love the DRAMA of it all. I love the convention people all in a bother in their funny hats and the cable TV press teams all stumbling over themselves to make their points. And I love it today that I feel like I, the Hoyden, have a special insight. Not only have I actually heard of Wasilla, Alaska I've been there. I lived in Alaska for 2 years and can say, as a person who worked retail there, that Alaskans, native, Native or transplants, are independent thinkers with strong opinions. That's why they are attracted to and love such a wild place. As a people they speak plainly and aren't afraid to take a stand. So for that reason I say if a 'maverick' is what John McCain was looking for, picking an Alaskan almost guarantees you'll get one.

Me, Charming the Unsuitable. Again.

So I was driving back from KY yesterday (and yes, I do feel like I need my own mile marker on I-75) in my new thrift store shirt. It's a Fang one, chocolate brown with the words SPICY in orange sequins on the front. Yeah, it might be a bit young but I only had to pay the child's tee price for it (that's $1.50 for those of you keeping track at home) and I am still enjoying my recentish weight loss enough to like the way the snug shirts look. Plus, "Tight Tee Shirt" is my declared summer song. But after the third or fourth rest stop (yeah, it was one of THOSE drives) when the senior citizen WITH A WALLEYE leered at me and said, in what I assume he thought was a rogueish voice, "Is spicy really your name? Heh, heh (cough)" I wished I had worn something else. For pete's sake I was going for sassy not stripper on a day off. (Like that would ever be a likely mistake.) After all, the rest of the line from the song is "tight tee shirt/on a real sweet girl".

But I guess I can't bitch too loudly. I'm feminist enough to think men should treat women respectfully no matter what they wear, even if that's nothing at all, but practical enough not to wave a cape at a bull. You don't wear a shirt with sequins if you don't want attention. I guess it just wasn't the attention I craved.

I Love Rick Bragg

I love Rick Bragg.

I just finished listening to him read the latest book in his autobiographical series, The Prince of Frogtown, and I gotta say I love Rick Bragg. He writes so well, so evocatively that I was torn, caught in an emotional cyclone as I listened. I laughed (at the part of the story that started "There are no happy endings to stories that begin with the phrase 'then we found a case of dynamite' I very nearly had to pull off the road for safety's sake) and I cried. I also had a monster case of penvy.

This third book circles back to his first, the extraordinary All Over but the Shouting, and fills in the gap in that motherloving memoir tour de force by telling the story of his father. Bragg was inspired to do this by his father's death but more significantly by his own late in life marriage and the stepfatherhood it brought. When a man gets a boy of his own he thinks of the boy he was and one cannot do that and not consider his father. So he went on a journey and used the journalistic skills that won him a Pulitizer Prize to get to know the man he did not know, except for a few brief memories, in life.

I, for one, am astonished at his bravery. His family, and his career (at least in part), had been built around one telling of his life. To dare to tear that all down, to make the monster who loomed so large instead a small, flawed man must have taken a load of guts. What he discovered and how he learned how to love differently makes for a gripping listen. Yeah, I know he's married, yeah, I know he lives 5 states away and yeah, I got a big ole soft spot for Southern boys with accents who love their mommas but I gotta say I love Rick Bragg.

Saturday Morning Happiness

Sometimes, when the big stuff is too scary or just too much to contemplate-it's the little things that save the day. Like discovering that Ryan Adams' blog is back (it's wacky yeah, but never not interesting) or that they're making Alpha bits again. (I love Alpha bits!).

Yep, it's the little things.

Living in Loss's House

A Meditation on Jeff Black's "Sunday Best"





It starts with some of the most emphatic piano this side of Marc Cohn's "Walking in Memphis", arresting playing that captures your full and complete attention. Then the opening lyrics "wheels go round and round/it seems like we/never stop to rest" which start small-like a camera filter slowly opening-before expanding enough, unfurling really, to let us know what the occasion really is-a wake.

"People came from miles away/just to say goodbye"

Black perfectly captures the blunted feeling of loss that comes with a death (the full on pain comes later, when the shock wears off) and how the house feels when that happens, that awful unmoored feeling.

"What are we going to do now/was never said out loud".

I have lived in that house and can bear witness to the truth of that line. Perhaps the most powerful line of all though, one that I only discovered after many listenings, after I got past the bigger and splashier, "the Lord respects me/when I'm working hard/but he loves me when I sing" is "but his watch and/ his ring were gone". Such a simple observation that expresses it all-the complete and utter wrongness of the death of the beloved person, now forever gone.

Yes, it's a sad song but one I am happy to listen to. Repeatedly. Along with Patty Griffin's "Long Ride Home", it's one of the best songs I know about death's aftermath. And because I keep choosing new favorite lines and discovering new nuances, I'm sure it's one that will stay with me for some time.



You can check out more about Jeff Black at his website http://www.jeffblack.com/.

Moneypenny vs the Ring Girl

I have been applying for jobs like mad in the last month or so but of the 17 jobs I have applied for through Craigslist (yeah, it's so 21st century) the one I was most intruiged by was one I was least qualified for. Last week in the etc category (the etc jobs are always the best) there was an ad for a ring girl. You know, the girls at a boxing match who walk around the ring in a bikini between rounds with the round number signs..yeah, them.

I SO wanted to apply. How fabulously fun to have that on your resume!

Now I'm quite sure it's one of those jobs that's more fun to consider doing than to actually do-I bet ring girls don't get a 401k plan and it's for damn sure I'm not well, endowed, for the job. As I have claimed here before one of the many ways the world can be divided is into Bond Girls and Moneypennys and I am so a Moneypenny. And you really don't want a Moneypenny prancing around in a gold lame bikini. Alas.

Disaster and Me

Well, it has been a trying week to say the least. In case there was any doubt it got erased quick when my best friend said, "What's next? A plague of locusts?" and I could only agree. From the late night emergency visit to the animal hospital 2 hours away to the flooded apartment, it's felt like the Bataan Death March of petsitting. Extreme coping skills were the order of the day.

So it was ironic that my audiobook was Amanda Ripley's facinating The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why. The title pretty much says it all-why do some people rise to the challenge of a disaster while others crumble under the pressure? Ripley posits that personality is part of it but also lays lots of blame on official sources for not preparing people well enough. It's not enough to say we are at Level Orange for example, what does Level Orange mean? And what should I be doing at Level Orange?

There lots of food for thought here though. How people frequently waste time gathering things before evacuating (or even, crazily, trying to bring luggage down the emergency slide in a plane crash), how there are stages of coping that have to be gone through, rather like the stages of grief and how the faster people can work through them the better off they will be.

The one thing I quibbled with was the characterization that people who can disassociate easily are less able in a crisis. I can do that, I think most imaginative people can, but I have proven to have a cool head in the crisises I have encountered (admittedly no 9/11 sized ones). I may fall apart a bit after but then the danger is past. It's kind of like the crying thing. Crying is my go to response but it's just the first step. Tears don't mean I'm going to pieces or not coping-rather the opposite-they allow me blow off steam before I buckle down and do what needs doing. Yeah, I'd like to be more stoic, but I'm a crier-what are you gonna do?

Armed with the lessons of Unthinkable, hopefully I'm armed for the new week. I say Bring It!

Oh, Olympics

I am a total Olympic nerd. I pretty much love everything about it. The "we never met a heartwarming story we didn't like" coverage, the tearjerker commercials-I love it all. I'm especially fond of the Parade of Nations. I like bearing witness to these athletes' Olympic experience knowing that for most of them this is their Olympic experience. I also like the parade because I get surprised every time by some new country I never heard of. (Timor-Leste anyone? Gabon? Tuvalu?) It makes the world seem smaller in the best possible way.

Other first impressions:

-Love the Morgan Freeman Visa commercials. And the "If you've bought a Coke in the last 80 years" one was a good one too.

-Yeah, the fireworks were awesome but they ARE the Chinese-they invented them after all. They better be good.

-Judging by the number of participants in the artistic part of Opening Ceromonies I think we can safely say in the world's most populous nation manpower is not an issue.

-The National Stadium is stunning and yes, I totally see how it got the Bird's Nest nickname but am I the only one who thinks it also looks kinda like a toilet seat or a really fancy bedpan? I'm just saying.

-Torchlighting? Wow. Yeah.


Go USA! Go World!

Responding in Kind

From Ryan Adam's website:

"Top 10 Things I Think About When the World is Caving In

1. Knut
2. Albert Einstein (imagine a conversation between God and Einstein)
3. Hot baths and comic books
4. How much I miss my grandfather
5. The saying 'this too shall pass'
6. Sleeping in a pile of puppies
7. Charity
8. Being me for me
9. Making soup and tea
10. Accepting the world as it is, full of darkness and light, observing the balance and choosing the light"


Inspired by this (cause I love lists of any kind) I made my own:

Top 10 Things I Think About When the World is Caving In

1. How much my cat loves me
2. My suitcase full of birthday goodness
3. My friends' laughter and how much pleasure I get when I am the cause of it
4. How my niece screams, "Aunt Sam!" and flies at me whenever she sees me
5. Unexpected good mail, especially snail mail
6. Anticipation for the new-whether it's music, books, movies or people
7. The feeling of getting in the groove
8. The sayings 'this too shall pass' and 'I won't always feel this way'
9. My favorite poetry and music
10. Allison Johnson, Sir Ernest Shackleton and Hazel-rah

Cause Sometimes That's Just the Way You Feel

Willy Vlautin Saves the Night or, I Thought There Would Be Minions

So the part I left out of my previous post was Friday's unpleasantness. I was busting my hump moving furniture around the store getting ready for the party when a customer standing by the front door was greeted by another customer walking in. They moved quickly through the pleansantries and then got to the meat of conversation which was some of the worst racist talk I have ever heard in real life, all delivered as casually as discussing the weather. I won't get specific except to say this was straight up bile, so caustic it could peel paint.

Now I'm not so naive to think there aren't people who feel that way, I know there are and I fear in this election year we are going to find where all those dark places are, like it or not-places that will make the New Yorker cover look tasteful. But to be saying them in the doorstep of a public place? That shocked me as much as the words themselves.

I wish I could say I spoke up and said just the right cutting thing that shamed these men and made them shut up. But, to my shame, I said nothing. I wish I had, despite the fact I was a company representative who was essentially eavesdropping on paying customers' conversation. Regardless, I should have spoken up. No, because of that I should have spoken up. I should have said "This is MY store, I'm in charge and you will not say such things in here." I would not have had a leg to stand on and would have, I'm sure, gotten no backing but for the most important-knowing I had done right, the way I was raised to do.

Proved lacking in this everyday test, I was thrown into a funk (made worse no doubt by lack of sleep) until Saturday afternoon's mail. In it there was a poster tube which I knew was the Northline poster I had finally gotten around to ordering (I know-what took me so long?) but when I opened it I was shocked to find it crammed full with all manner of Willy Vlautin and Richmond Fontaine goodness. But what truly knocked me back was the enclosed note from the man himself wishing me a happy summer and explaining he had included 2 posters, one signed and one unsigned because he wasn't sure if I wanted his "chicken scratch" or not. A note that said clearly he remembered me and knew exactly who I was.

Now, let me be clear. I just ordered the poster and paid through PayPal like anybody. I didn't say I'm so and so and I did this or anything-just ordered the poster. It never occured to me that Willy would be the one packing the tube. I mean Richmond Fontaine is not the Rolling Stones-I don't think Willy has a footman or anything-but I thought there would be minions. But I thank the universe that was apparently not the case because this small act of kindness and open hearted generousity-which yes, amplify the themes of his book quite nicely thank you very much-made me feel much better about people and got me a little closer to letting myself off the hook.

So thanks Willy. Again.

Night With Bite Indeed

Anyone who thinks reading is dead wasn't at a bookstore this morning for the midnight release of Stephenie Meyer's newest, Breaking Dawn. Kids aren't into books anymore? Yeah, tell that to the 200+ tween girls (and some older folks too) who stampeded around all evening getting painted, answering trivia and just generally geeking over the whole, swoony fun of it. It was GIRL to the max. And yeah, tween girls can be so, well, tweeny with that one vocal register only they seem to possess (you know, the wince inducing one) but they were SO excited and it wasn't just the Red Bull talking. It warmed my old bookselling heart.

Now, on to the reading!

(Note: this is not a spoiler since I haven't even opened the book but if Meyer wants to try and please everyone on both sides of the Jacob vs. Edward debate she could have Jacob sacrifice himself in some noble but fatal way and leaving Bella with no hard choice to make.

I'm just sayin.)