June 2002 Archives

Payday usually brings a chance to do a little shopping, and yesterday was no exception. We hit the bins at Plan 9 Music and turned up a good bit of interesting stuff. Kelly found a couple of new things--the Hives, Richard Shindell--while I indulged my nostalgia by poking through the used CDs and turning up a bunch of retro stuff: Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell (the first one--I couldn't call myself a respectable Rocky Horror fan without it...), Billy Joel's Turnstiles (his last album before becoming a megastar), and the soundtrack from Wonder Boys, which features Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison, Buffalo Springfield, John Lennon and other rock veterans.

Perhaps most intriguing, I found a collection from Fox's TV Show called That 70s Album (Rockin'). It's got a number of odd little tunes that I wouldn't have sought out on other albums, but when put together made for a compelling mix: Argent's "Hold Your Head Up" (one of my favorite songs from childhood), Golden Earring's "Radar Love," BTO's "Let It Ride," the Kinks' "Celluloid Heroes," even the original studio version of Cheap Trick's "I Want You to Want Me," which is a wambly little pimple on the backside of the mighty live version from Budokan.

But somehow having found things I want always reminds me of the things I haven't been able to find, some of which may not even exist:

Rupert Hine's Waving Not Drowning album. I don't think this one has ever been released on CD, nor do I expect it to be. I'm at the point now where I'd settle for an LP just so I could own two brilliant pieces of proto-electronica: "One Man's Poison" and "Eleven Faces," both of which sound like analog versions of Nine Inch Nails. Melodic, dark & creepy--I want it.

Ralph Wiley's Dark Witness Wiley is a fascinating writer, whether the subject is race relations, sports, or literature, and I own two of his books (Why Black People Tend to Shout and What Black People Should Do Now), but I don't own the one that got me interested in him in the first place, the one which contains his marvelous essay on why Mark Twain is America's greatest writer. Can't find it, either--out of print, not at E-bay, not nowhere nohow.

the black girls EP Now THIS jones is likely to go permanently unfulfilled. The black girls were a Chapel Hill band from the mid-80s, a trio of piano, guitar & violin. Their first self-released EP contained only five songs, but two of them were just bloody wonderful--the jerky, jiggy "Devil''s Garden" and the languid, unsettling "Queen Anne." They later changed their name to the one-word blackgirls and released a couple more records, but the first one's the one I want. And if you think it's easy to find, imagine for a moment what you get when you run a Google search for "black girls."

We're living in a material world, so if any of you material guys or gals have a line on any of the above, let me know...

5:03 PM

There's not much to say about him tonight. He never said much about himself anyway. The other three talked enough that it was probably hard to get a word in edgewise. But he held the whole thing together--an anchor, as some said, to keep the group from flying apart. And then Moon found a way to fly off anyhow.

But tonight I'm just thinking about the sounds. There's a moment on Quadrophenia where everything good about rock music is outlined in fire--the first two seconds of "The Real Me," right after Daltrey has closed off "I Am the Sea" by shouting "Can you?" and right on top of Moon's cymbal-crashing entrance. Townshend hits a C-major chord twice. And over it you hear the notes, four of them, from the bass. His fingers were leaping down the neck, churning, plowing up the soil of the song to let the shoots come through, breaking through the ice and the tension. It's more than power--it's grace, agility, precision. It's like watching a plowhorse run the Kentucky Derby and win. He drives that song along for another three minutes and it's breathtaking. Nothing had ever sounded like that before, and nothing will again.

Rest easy, John. You've earned it.

4:25 AM

Cleaning off the desk...

Old reading quizzes for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? "What subject does George teach?" "What song does Martha keep singing?" etc. I'll need to copy those down in digital form so I can use them again someday.

Keys for grammar tests. I haven't taught grammar since May of 2001. These can go...

Brightly-colored placards I made for the mock Congress session we had in my speech class this spring. One purple, one white, one brown, one orange, one green, one pink. For some reason I'm thinking of the dwarves' hoods in the opening chapter of The Hobbit.

Paper clips. Everything is fastened with paper clips. I keep pulling them off as I toss the papers away, and they've filled my little magnetic dispenser to overflowing.

Letter from a colleague. Uh-oh. Should have answered that one...

Ack! My copy of Harlan Ellison's Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed! I've been looking for that! It's one of my favorite collections of essays, and it belongs in a place of pride on my shelf, not buried under a midden of vocabulary quizzes and out-of-date syllabi. Forgive me, Harlan!

One of many mysterious post-it notes, pale yellow with red ink: "Computer is ___. Needs: Male: 25 holes. Printer is ___? Needs 18 little fangs." Am I writing vampire cyberporn to myself?

No fewer than nine orange-and-black trimmed cocktail napkins, each bearing our school's seal and motto. I like our motto: A posse ad esse. English infinitives don't work well with Latin, alas, so the literal translation doesn't exactly sing: "From to be possible to to be." The best translation is "From possibility to being," which is a very cool statement for a school, in my opinion. It certainly fits in with the whole self-actualizing/Maslow's hierarchy thing.

Blank Lincoln-Douglas debate ballot with No Oral Critiques written in thick black letters at the bottom. Hey, I agree.

Xerox copy of "The Cask of Amontillado" with notes and handwritten glossary included. I gave definitions for the words amontillado, motley, flambeaux, nitre, vault and Mason, plus translations of Nemo me impune lacessit and In pace requiescat. I should ask the Foreign Language Department for a stipend.

Nature Valley Oats 'n Honey Crunchy Granola Bar. Wrapper intact. I'm pretty sure I put that there this morning, actually.

Hey! The print of Audubon's Columbia Jay that fell off my wall a few months back! I'll be putting some sticky gum on the back of that one and putting it back on the wall. My classroom walls have a lot of stuff on them: a couple of dozen pieces of construction paper featuring quotations from such luminaries as Dante, Lewis Carroll, Tom Lehrer and Frank Zappa; maps of the world, Virginia, and Middle-earth; posters of Oxford, Pete Townshend, Martin Luther King, the Who, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Buckwheat Zydeco, Star Wars, and Roger Dean's painting for Yes's Close to the Edge album cover; two clocks, one from the Boston Scientific corporation with stylized hearts for the numbers, and the other with birds for numbers (though I've disabled the on-the-hour birdsongs); two Audubon prints (Northern Cardinal and Columbia Jay); two calendars, one featuring photos of the school and one featuring tigers; a stuffed Wile E. Coyote hanging beside one clock; and a Cornell Ornithology Lab poster of Common Feeder Birds of Eastern North America. It's amazing what you can do in seven years.

Coffee mug. Oh, my. That really should have been taken to the sink some time ago...


9:21 PM

Trouble, thy name is hotel living.

I'm writing from Charlotte, where one of my debaters has been competing in the National Forensic League's annual National Speech and Debate Tournament. (This is the first time a Woodberry student has made it to NFL Nationals, though we've sent students to the Catholic Forensic League's Grand National Tournament on three previous occasions.) Coaches who attend tournaments, whether at the local or national level, are required either to provide judges or to serve as judges themselves. In order to spend more time coaching their students, some coaches bring along parents, former students, or even community volunteers. I, on the other hand, work at a boarding school in the middle of nowhere; the parents and alumni usually live far away, and the community isn't really large enough to produce a bumper crop of volunteers willing to gve up a week to judging speeches.

In short, I've been judging speeches. But because of the vagaries of scheduling, I finished doing so on Tuesday at noon. I spent another day coaching, but when the preliminary rounds were over and my debater hadn't advanced to the semifinals, he left. So since yesterday at 2:30, I've had nothing to do but hang around the hotel. And that's trouble.

I've stayed in hotels before, of course, but always because I had something to do. Here I faced the prospect of nothingness for over 48 hours before my flight back to Dulles at 6:50 pm Friday. I have books--I just started James Hynes' excellent The Lecturer's Tale--but no human contact other than that coming across the wires to my room's TV. And since my home has no cable, the TV is a constant temptation. I've watched more television this week than I have in three years.

I saw the US beat Mexico in the middle of the night to advance in the World Cup. I watched Spain defeat Ireland on penalty kicks. I saw Osmosis Jones uninterrupted on HBO and Total Recall cut to ribbons by the censor on TBS. I watched Sportscenter probably thirteen times and the CNN Headline News loop almost that often. I saw the memorial service for Jack Buck and am ready now to kill that idiotic dude in the Dell computer ads with my bare hands.

I'd forgotten what a huge, heavy monkey television can be. Or maybe it's just that my back has grown weak.

Thank god hotel TVs now have internet connections, too...



2:39 PM

I'm in the unenviable position of being an American who likes soccer a lot, but who has no way to watch the World Cup. We live in a TV sinkhole where broadcast stations are blocked (except for the CBS affiliate in Richmond, whose signal reaches us reasonably well if the weather's clear) and cable can't reach us. We could pony up the bucks for a dish, but given how few programs we're actually interested in watching, it's not an expense we can really justify.

So here I am, eager to watch the biggest sporting spectacle on the planet, and I'm reduced to following it on the Web and in the Washington Post. Luckily, this morning I had an invitation to watch the USA-Poland match at a friend's place, and he's got not only a satellite hookup but a big-screen TV.

I'm not sure why I find soccer appealing. Part of it is the struggle. As Adam Gopnick pointed out in The New Yorker back in 1998, soccer is a game where a point really means something. In basketball, just about every other trip down the court results in a score, making each individual basket insignificant unless it comes at the last second. In soccer, however, most scoring chances result in nothing but tension and frustrated anticipation. This makes soccer a lot more like real life; it's not Hollywood.

Another part of the appeal, I'm sure, is my own experience with the game. Back in ninth grade, I was actually good at it, winning the Best Defensive Player award for the Grey Culbreth Junior High School Cougars. I played fullback, the so-called "sweeper" position, and my job was to be the last line of defense before an opponent got a shot off. I was tall enough, fast enough, and able to kick the ball far enough to handle this assignment fairly well. I was also motivated by the fact that our goalkeeper was a small and inexperienced seventh-grader. I reasoned that the best way to keep his inexperience from causing problems was to give him as few chances to make plays as possible.

Soccer is also the only sport I've coached. I did one season as co-coach of a Rainbow Soccer team in Chapel Hill. Rainbow is a wonderful rec league, where scores and rankings aren't kept, and where the only rule is that everybody gets to play. You and your teammates can be as competitive as you want, of course, but the league itself doesn't demand it of you. I played Rainbow for years, but I must say it didn't really help me prepare for the job of coaching at the high school level, which is of course the next level at which I coached.

I did three years as head (read: only) coach of the varsity (read: only) team at Pine Forest Senior High in Fayetteville. I can't claim that my team's success was due to good coaching; I was lucky enough to have good players, particularly at the goalkeeper spot; we finished 4th in the eight-team conference twice, earning the 3rd-place spot in my last year and advancing to the state playoffs, where we got beaten by Wilmington Laney in the first round. That year PFS started a girls' team, and several things became clear: one, the girls' coach was much better than I was; two, he was teaching part-time and wanted a full-time gig; three, our second child had just arrived, and Kelly was swamped in the fall trying to chase after two boys. I told the athletic director that I'd be happy to remain assistant coach for the debate team, but that he'd need to find a new soccer coach--and that the girls' coach might be a good candidate for the boys' team, too. I'm happy to report that the AD agreed and hired the girls' coach--karma points for me.

Anyway, today I got up early and yelled at the greatest players in the country as though I know more about the sport than they do. I love this game.

2:58 PM

Some social crucibles are more intense than others. I was a drama rat in high school, and the pressures of preparation and performance do remarkable things to break down the barriers between people working on a show. Of the people in my wedding, for example, half the groomsmen and bridesmaids (we had six of each) were people I'd first met working on plays. By contrast, I've lost touch with most of the people with whom I worked on the yearbook, or who played on the 9th-grade basketball team with me.

Still, nothing has ever been as intense as the crowd with whom I played Dungeons and Dragons in college. We had the luxury of a large and comfortable place to play--the chambers of the Philanthropic Society, to which one of the players belonged--so we were able to engage in marathon sessions of gaming. They usually began just after lunch on Friday and continued until the early morning or even the late morning, so we got hours and hours of exposure to one another's little personality quirks, pet peeves, and underlying philosophies. D&D is a role-playing game, so each of us created a character with certain strengths, weaknesses, skills, preferences, and quirks; we would then engage in what was essentially a spirited session of make-believe at the direction of the dungeon master, or DM, who had created a variety of places, monsters, treasures and traps for our characters to negotiate.

What I find fascinating about role-playing games is the question of how much the characters and the players overlap. If you spend a lot of time playing a brilliant but fundamentally self-interested thief, is that a sign of something in your makeup, or just a role you're putting on? And if it's the latter, how long before the role begins to creep into real life, before the abyss begins to gaze into you?

My main character, for example, was a paladin, a holy warrior whose power came from his dedication to his deity (who was in his case Tyr, the Norse god of war). In D&D terms, paladins are "lawful good," meaning they must follow a rigid code of behavior that puts morality as Job One. One of the other players also had a paladin, but the two of us played our warriors very differently. Mine was named Gordian, a name suggesting that either morality is much more twisted than we might think, or that cutting through the bullshit to get to right and wrong was actually a pretty simple task. Gordian tried hard to do the right thing at all times, but if there was a dilemma whose horns were justice and mercy, he generally went with mercy; he was also a loner, living either on board his warship or in the basement apartment a friend kept for him in her castle, and focusing primarily on righting the wrongs he stumbled across. He eventually retired to a lighthouse, keeping unwary ships off the rocks. If there's such a thing as a libertarian paladin, Gordian was one.

My friend's paladin, by contrast, was named Beowulf; like her namesake, she was possessed of a certain degree of self-confidence, and after she'd gone up in the ranks of paladins, she became a monk. (Not a nun; in D&D, monks are a different class of character altogether--kind of like the Shao-Lin monks that Caine hung out with in Kung Fu.) After rising through the monkish ranks, Beowulf wound up founding an entire city based on principles of rational behavior, ruling and ordering it in minute detail in the name of law and order. The only real differences between Beowulf's rule and that of Mussolini were that Beowulf a) had a moral compass and b) could have kicked Benito's ass with her bare hands.

Still, there's a lot about the players to be learned by studying those characters. I wonder if the people who played Tarot, Mavel, and Duke have the same insights into me through Gordian that I have into them through their characters. I suspect so. And that may be why those friends still hold a unique place in my heart. After all, friends help you move; real friends help you move treasure liberated from angry dragons.

5:30 PM

I wonder sometimes whether aging really changes us all that much. Every once in a while I find myself in a mood that seems completely familiar to me. On Saturday I was in one that I've known for decades--that of the loner. People are often surprised to hear that I view myself as, down at the core, a very shy person. I can't deny that I'm very talkative, and I've become adept at injecting myself into conversations at a superficial level, but that's a skill I've gained through long practice. In fact, I could argue that most of my education has been a process of learning to share my opinions with strangers without fear--all the creative writing courses, for example, or the years of radio announcing, the plays, the improv work, the entire grad-school program in education. What was I learning in them if not to get over the stage fright and express myself?

The Web, like the announcer's booth at WXYC, is the perfect place to share your personality with the world under the most controlled of circumstances. If I felt like playing Prince's "When Doves Cry" or Queen's "Death on Two Legs" on the air, there was nothing my listeners could do except turn the dial--they couldn't get anywhere near me. And here in my journal, I'm free to play pretty much any tune I want, no matter how obnoxious or cloying, without fear of criticism. It's a great gig.

Still, sometimes I feel a bit cut off from friendships. I'm fortunate in being married to my best friend, and in having a few old buddies whom I think I could still call at 4 a.m. for bail money, and in having an enormous group of online chums--my "invisible friends," as one of them recently put it--with whom I can banter to my heart's content on a daily basis. Yet I feel as though I've gone a long, long time without making a really close friend.

Maybe it's the banter that's done it; I've become skilled enough in shallow chatting that I'm having trouble getting any deeper. Many of my deepest friendships developed during times of extraordinary stress and difficulty--high school, for example--when our facades were either incomplete or cracked and battered to the point where we could see the real people inside. Now that I'm older and hidden behind a secure and freshly-painted persona, it's much harder for anyone else to see behind it--and a hell of a lot harder for me to see others from inside it.

So, here I am--sitting inside the tall tower of a castle I myself built, wondering why no one comes to visit, and occasionally firing messages tied to arrows out of the window. You don't have to be a fan of Monty Python and the Holy Grail to laugh at that.


8:21 PM