Wednesday, April 30, 2008

When an Idea's Not Half-Bad ...

I'm still here. I'm still very busy. I rea;ized that when you move into your own place with few of the essentials because you plan on buying them new, you wind up purchasing many Rubbermaid trashcans.

I'm still chuckling over local Tidewater talk radio host Tony Macrini's suggestion from this morning that the ultimate dream presidential ticket for 2008 is Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Pat Buchanan. As Macrini said, that'd have to be one huge tent to fit in the far-left and far-right wing.

I hope to get my next real post up Saturday or Sunday. Thanks for your patience.

Saturday, April 26, 2008

Just Like Watching the Effectives


Album: Elvis Costello and the Attractions, The Best of Elvis Costello and the Attractions, 1985

Best Track: "Beyond Belief" (There is not a bad song in the collection, however.)

Lasting Memory: In the spring of 1997, I gave two of my grad program classmates rides up state. Frankie accompanied me all the way from Blacksburg, Va., to Washington, D.C., where I had what turned out to be an unsuccessful interview with The History Company and Frankie had one of, it seems, seven older brothers living off 17th Street.

My other ride-along was Alison, who had grown up in rural Saskatchewan. She needed a ride to the Roanoke airport because she was flying home to visit her ailing cattle-ranching grandfather. Even though she was Canadian, Alison's English was excellent.

Years after driving Alison to the airport, I made her older sister shoot red wine out of her nose with the "excellent English" line during a dinner party. I can never hear Elvis Costello's "Alison" without thinking of that drive and that dinner party.

I can also never think of that trip without flashing back to a joke from my old stand up routine that ran along the lines of "I'm a student at Virginia Tech. Excellent engineering school. Physics. Chemistry. Health Sciences. So, of course, I'm a history major. I figure once I graduate, I'll just go to work for the history company."

I'll probably get fired, though."

My boss will be all, like, 'Lamb! How many times do I have to tell you it's chronological? Chronological!"

Serious problems like training hard for assured eventual unemployability is one of Elvis Costello's pet themes. Just check out "Shipbuilding."

This is no doubt reflective of the former Declan MacManus' Irish heritage, which my bother decries -- and I embrace -- as not exactly defeatist but most assuredly expecting of the worst. Summing this worldview up nicely is an anti-Successories placard my sister Clair brought back from Ireland for me:
Being Irish
he had an
abiding sense
of tragedy
which sustained
him through
temporary periods
of joy.
-- W.B. Yeats
What has really paid Costello's (it's his mother's maiden name) bills and fed his muse for what is going on 33 years now, however, is the underlying philosophy of "Alison." To hear the man himself tell it on VH-1 Storytellers, he wrote this particular song about a woman he knew he could never be with and, deep down, knew he didn't really didn't want to spend time with.

What is one to to do with love that that is both unrequited and unwanted? Costello's answer is to write songs such as "Everyday I Write the Book" and "Watching the Detectives." The less said about the simple-minded but largely unobjectionable politics behind Costello's angry young man songs like his cover of Nick Lowe's "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understnding" or his own-penned "Oliver's Army" the better, except to point out that they rule the rock world as protest songs that have a good beat you can dance to.

The other thing to do with feelings of unworth, unbelonging, and uncertainty is to drink those emotions into submission. Costello did exactly that until about 1991, when he graduated from AA and released an album called Mighty Like a Rose, whose name makes no sense.

Anywho, The Best of is sequenced chronologically, which tracks Costello's 1975-1985 personal and professional lives from horny/angry to drunk/resigned to drunk/sentimental. The best part of Costello's career, in my opinion, was his resigned phase in which he created and recorded the three-song set of drinking praise and regret included on this greatest hits collection. "Clubland" concludes the spot-on description of the functional sot:

You barely get required sleep to go lingering with contemptment
Thursday to Saturday
Money's gone already
Some things come in common these days
Your hands and work aren't steady
The third song, "Watch Your Step," is self-explanatory and riffed on in a nonalcoholic vein below.
But the apotheosis of Costello's epiphanic dunkardom is "Beyond Belief":


History repeats the old conceits
The glib replies the same defeats
Keep your finger on important issues
With crocodile tears and a pocketful of tissues

I'm just an oily slick
In a windup world with a nervous tick
In a very fashionable hovel
I hang around dying to be tortured
You'll never be alone in the bone orchard
This battle with the bottle is nothing so novel

So in this almost empty gin palace
Through a two-way looking glass
You see your Alice

You know she has no sense
For all your jealousy
In a sense she still smiles very sweetly

Charged with insults and flattery
Her body moves with malice
Do you have to be so cruel to be callous

And now you find you fit this identikit completely
You say you have no secrets
Then leave discreetly

I might make it California's fault
Be locked in Geneva's deepest vault
Just like the canals of Mars and the great barrier reef
I come to you beyond belief

My hands were clammy and cunning
She's been suitably stunning
But I know there's not a hope in Hades
All the laddies cat call and wolf whistle
So-called gentlemen and ladies
Dog fight like rose and thistle

I've got a feeling
I'm going to get a lot of grief
Once this seemed so appealing
Now I am beyond belief

You could spend a lot of time unpacking those lyrics, which I'll leave you all to do. Me, I've got unpacking of actual boxes to which to attend. The move is complete, and thanks to James, successful.

Up Next: Mark Erelli, Untitled EP, Sometime before 1994 (dubbed off my roommate Toby in 1995)

Note from Management: According to Google, this blog post is the first-ever Web-published usage of the phrase "epiphanic drunkardom." Please use the phrase to mean "drinking until it all makes sense" as often as possible. I've always wanted a coinage on my resume.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Watch Your Step

This is not the much-overdue post on The Best of Elvis Costello and the Attractions. Rather, it is a quick-hitter to let everyalls know that I'm still alive and have my nose fully yolked to the mountain of e-docs.

I'm moving this weekend, and I should be all set up in my new place by the end of next week. While James is being kind enough to help me with that, keep yourselves busy figuring out which of the lyrics from "Watch Your Step" apply to the project, to me now, to me in the past or future, or to your own persons.

Don't say a word
Don't say anything
Don't say a word
I'm not even listening
I read in the paper about their escape
They're just two-bit of kids from a bunch of sour grapes
You better watch your step

Watch who's knocking on your front door
Now you know that they're watching
What are you waiting for?
Think you're young and original
Get out before...
They get to watch your step

Ev'ry day is full of fun
And family spies
They're making heroes out of fall guys
They say it's good for business
From Singapore to Widnes
You better watch your step

Broken noses hung up on the wall
Backslapping drinkers cheer the heavyweight brawl
So punchdrunk they don't understand at all
You better watch your step

Ev'ry night
Go out full of carnival desires
End up in the closing time choirs
When you're kicking in the courtroom
And you're drinking down the Eau de Cologne
And you're spitting out the Kodachrome
You better watch your step

Bye
I send you all my regards
You're so tough
You're so hard
Listen to the hammers falling in the
breaker's yard
You better watch your step
You better watch your step
Ooh, watch your step


And keep a good thought that my brother and I will be able to watch our respective steps. I'll circulate an e-mail next week with my new address and phone number.

Friday, April 11, 2008

Proudly Pro Noun


Album: Melissa Etheridge, Melissa Etheridge, 1988

Best Track: "Bring Me Some Water"

Lasting Memory: There is a quiet, happy, warm, sunny, breezy place in the back of my mind. It's the place I let my thoughts drift to when the world is too much with me. I don't know if I could ever find this place again in the world outside my reverie. I can't even be sure whether I was ever actually there, or if the place even really exists. But I am absolutely certain that in this place I do not know -- and never will learn -- that Melissa Etheridge is gay, that her long-former partner conceived a baby using sperm donated by David Crosby, or that Ms. Etheridge is now keeping company with the ex-wife of Lou Diamond Phillips.

I do, of course, know in this place that David Crosby is the Walrus, coo coo a choo.

But back to my main point, and to quote Edwardian actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, "Does it really matter what these affectionate people do--so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses!" Which is as much to say, S-H-U-T U-P and ROCK!

Etheridge does a decent amount of rocking on her epnymous major label debut. It would be difficult to find better electrified blues boogie than "Bring Me Some Water" or "Chrome Plated Heart." She also does a more-than creditable Tunnel of Love-era Bruce Springsteen impersonation on songs like "Occassionally' (a.k.a., "Ain't Got You") and "Like the Way I Do" (a.k.a., "Tougher Than the Rest").

Her follow-up album, Brave and Crazy, was pretty good, too. I can't blog it because a friend stole it going on 16 years ago, but I remember B&C being a decent listen. And then Etheridge had to open up her boudoir for all the world to gawk at.

Coming out didn't ruin Etheridge's career. By all measures, she continues to be a major recording artist, but I will argue that coming ruined Etheridge's art and her fan's experience. Every song she has recorded or performed since 1992 or whenever that Rolling Stone came out has been self-conciously IMPORTANT. Etheridge never lets anyone forget that fact long enough to allow anyone just enjoy the music, (wo)man.

The real shame of this is that aside from gay-rights advocates and behind-closed-doors-only gay bigots who feel the need to act more tolerant than thou in public, nobody gives two (or three) fingers about Etheridge's sex life. Sure, there's a school boy's red-faced giggle worth of purience in playing the pronoun game with lyrics like
Tell me does she love you like the way I love you?
Does she stimulate you, attract and captivate you?
Tell me does she miss you, existing just to kiss you like the way I do?
Tell me does she want you, infatuate and haunt you
Does she know just how to shock you, electrify and rock you
Does she inject you, seduce you and affect you like the way I do?
but that doesn't in any way reward the chore that listening to Etheridge's post-outing music has become. Treat Her Right had more than apoint when they observed, " Aw models, critics, wimpy art-school punks/ Gettin' on my nerves/ They're killing all the fun in rock 'n roll." When the rock artists themselves go out of their way to remove the enjoyment from music, what chance do listeners have?

Up Next: Elvis Costello and the Attractions, The Best of Elvis Costello and the Attractions, 1985

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Pure Autobiography

Album: Ed Lamb, Broken Record, 2008

Best Track: "I'm Really Busy"

Lasting Memory: Remember that last time I posted about how I wasn't posting because I couldn't make time to post. Good times, man. Good times.

So here's what's up. I hit the freelancer lottery about 10 days ago when I got hired to compile a couple of news feeds for two business Web sites -- packagers and food processors. The work inolves reviewing newswires and plucking out articles and press releases of interest to the respective audiences. Relatively straightforward, but definitely time-consuming.

On top of that prime gig, I have a journal issue's worth of HR articles to heavily edit, a series of HR personnel screening test technical reports to proof, between four and six pharmacy policy/market articles to write, and some spot editorial work for an RFID information clearinghouse to do. The deadlines for most of the projects is May 1, but the news feed will eat 4-6 hours each business day.

Since March 29, I've written three articles, finished editing a 500-page book on Air Force history, and foresightedly turned down two more assignments for book edits.

And, oh yeah, I'll be moving the weekend of April 19.

Music posts will be few and far between through the rest of this month. I will blog Melissa Etheridge by the end of this week -- if only to get this picture (>>>>) off my desk -- but after that, we will all just have to wonder along with David, Edie, Alex, and Mike.

Friday, April 4, 2008

I Know What I Know, if You Know What I Mean


Album: Edie Brickell & New Bohemians, Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars, 1988

Best Track: "Little Miss S Beat the Time [behind] The Wheel [so] She [could] Keep Coming Back [to] Nothing [in the] Air of December [but not] Love Like We Do [or know] What I Am"

Lasting Memory: From a whsiper so faint that it's not even really there to a roar so loud that the person in the car beside me at the red light would swear I spent all my money on auto audio, I have had the lyrics "I'm not aware of too many things/ I know what I know, if you know what I mean" running through my head continuously since some time in the fall of 1988. And the worst part of that has been that after 20 years, I still have no fucking idea what Edie Brickell meant. ARRRRRRGH!

That is a slight exaggeration, in the same way as saying that Bill Clinton regularly took counsel from space aliens is stretching the truth a bit. But damn if the pop folk triffles that make up Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars don't stick in one's head. I suspect that it was partly a self-preservation instinct that blocked me from listening to this tape for more than a week.

Now that I've overcome that aversion, I'm neither traumatized nor healed. The songs are stuck in my craw, but the loop playing in my head is pleasant enough for now. I just need that loop to stop this weekend.

All the songs pretty much sound the same. Refresh your own memory of this at your own risk by checking out "Circle" or "Love Like We Do". The similarity of the album tracks has two benefits. First, it makes Shooting Rubberbands a suite in all but name, which is sweet. Second, the phenomenon gave me an excuse to write another of my many stunt sentences instead of ruling on the relative merits of each song.

On the negative side, hearing pretty much the same song 11 times in a row is both kind of boring and totally brainwashing. Shooting Rubberbands went double platinum. We should probably be thankful that "Beat the Time" wasn't some kind of subliminal message for the college students in the noon of America to take up arms against the Bush I regime. Though there is still time on the clock for Bush II. If The Manchurian Candidate taught us nothing, it showed that all it takes is a queen of hearts to trigger our programming. So no solitaire until after January 20, 2009.

Up Next: Melissa Etheridge, Melissa Etheridge, 1988 (feat. Melissa Etheridge and with an Introduction by Melissa Etheridge)



Old Bohemians

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Why Businesses Fail

Because business professors are capital M morons. The stupid lead the blind into disaster.

Here is a direct quote from the press materials of a biz school professor who seemingly has a Svengali-like sway over strategic decision makers in the public and private sectors and who is giving a major address at an upcoming govenment conference I'm doing some consulting for:

"[H]e encourages his individuals to look within to extract the keys that underlie all accomplishment."

Keys underlie doormats, not accomplishment [sic].

Look within what?

Does he own "his individuals," or is the professor an unfortuate sufferer of shiczoaffective disorder. If the latter, perhaps his 20-year-old personality can unlock all the other voices' potential to achieve a coherent thought.

Christ, I hate business speak. It's worse than meaningless. It's actually destructive of meaning and understanding.

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Which Would You Rather Listen To

National Public Radio during the Anuual Spring Fundraising Drive or Edie Brickell?

Paul Simon made his choice, and I've made mine. I'll see if I can bite the patchoulli-scented pop-folk bullet today and get up a blog-theme-relvant post tomorrow.

If you're interested in sharing, what album, tape, CD, or download in your music collection would just stop you dead if you were told you had to listen to it? I'm not saying there's a gun to your head or that the fate of the free world hangs in the balance, but what would you just as soon never aurally belly up to ever again?

Yep. That's a real picture. >>>

If you can find a photographic or artistic rendering of a belly ear, feel free to share that, too.