February 2003 Archives

My fault. I did it.

That four-to-eight inches of snow we're getting now and tonight and tomorrow? My fault.

Sorry.

What did you do, PC? you may well ask, and the answer comes down to one word: footwear.

When the big blizzard hit a week and a half ago, I changed into my heavy weather boots, my big brown-and-green Timberlands. Ordinarily I use them for hiking, but they're the most durable (and warmest) of the shoes I own, so when there's ice and/or snow on the ground, I put them on. I wore them on Saturday the 15th, as the precip started down, and then again on Sunday and Monday, of course. Once the long slow thaw began, I was still walking through and around puddles and snow patches, so I kept them on whenever I went outside for another week. But on Sunday night, I finally opted to wear my Nunn-Bush mocs to our final seated meal of the winter term, and I followed that decision up by wearing my New Balance cross-trainers to work on Monday so I could write my exams.

Obviously this cockiness was too much for the Snow Demons, because when I got home from work yesterday, they were already sending down the white stuff anew. And now we're supposed to get somewhere between four and eight inches. I've heard that the Farmer's Almanac predicted over fiftyinches for us this winter; we're certainly well on our way past thirty already.

And I have every intention of wearing my boots until May, OK? Satisfied.

Sorry. Really.

9:11 PM

It's the final week of my school year and there's still snow on the ground--how weird is that? Yes, the end of the year is within sight. I'm taking a sabbatical during the spring trimester, as I think I've mentioned before, and all I have to do now to have some time to myself is complete the following eight steps:

1) Finish grading for the marking period. I still have five English essays to grade, plus a couple of batches of reading quizzes, but that's not a huge obstacle. To my own surprise, I'm already done with my Speech students' grades for the fourth term.

2) Give exams. I wrote the English exam yesterday, and students will be taking it tomorrow. I have to finish writing the Speech exam, though I've got a pretty good start on that, and I'll give it on Wednesday afternoon.

3) Do one last dorm duty. I'm on call Wednesday from dawn to midnight. Ordinarily this is a pain, but in this case, I can use the time away from home because of #4.

4) Grade exams. This will take some time, but since I'll be on the dorm, I'm hoping to have some.

5) Write trimester grades and comments. To calculate the trimester grade, I have to factor in three sets of figures: third-term grades, fourth-term grades, and exam grades. Once that's done, I can write the comments for each student. Since these are read by parents (and eventually even colleges), I try to put a little extra effort into them, but the occasional temptation to write "He would do a lot better if he weren't so lazy" is powerful. Luckily, I've got a few glowing comments to send home this time out, and several kids turned their grades around very nicely during the fourth term, which makes the entire process a lot more pleasant for all concerned. It's time-consuming, but it's a big part of the individual attention we try to pay each student. It also beats the hell out of the bubble-sheet grading I had to do when I taught in Fayetteville; when a kid was failing, I would just bubble in the code for the computerized comment "Parental conference requested." Naturally, most of the kids who were failing had parents who wouldn't bother to show up for a conference--another frustration of working there. So I don't complain too loudly about writing comments at WFS.

6) Get my two qualifiers ready for Saturday's VCFL State Tournament. Woodberry's done fairly well there in past years; last year we had five qualifiers, two of whom ended up winning berths at the CFL Grand Nationals. This year the Va. Catholic Forensic League's schedule didn't mesh well with the WFS schedule, so we were able to attend only one qualifying tournament. Still, I'm hopeful that we can do well this Saturday, though travel details are becoming rather complex at this point. From the tournament, I'll depart for step #7

7) Drive the minibus to Chatham, Va., to pick up a crew of students for our week-long community service project in the West Virginia mountains. I'll be driving and supervising a crew of 5-8 students while they repair, renovate, and build housing for some of the poorer folks in the region. I haven't had much chance to work on my carpentry skills since the fall play ended, so I'm looking forward to getting my hands dirty again. I can think of worse ways to start a sabbatical, too; since I'll be spending the next six months focused on myself and my book, a week of focusing on other people who aren't so lucky will probably give me the proper perspective.

8) Drive the minibus back home.

What then? Play with the kids, kiss Kelly, and kick back and relax for a few days. I'll have a little over a week before my first reading, which will be at the Virginia Festival of the Book on March 19th. Here's hoping I can last that long...

4:48 PM

I was recalling my days at WXYC (89.3 on your FM dial) and realized that in some ways, I was participating in a sort of prototypical internet situation. I was an announcer at XYC for ten years, from before I started at UNC to after I'd gotten my second degree there. Except for my year in England (September 1983 to June 1984), I had a regular weekly show from the summer of 1981 to the summer of 1990, and still did some substitute shifts all the way up until I left Chapel Hill in July of 1991. That's a lot of hours in the announcer's booth.

And during a lot of those hours, I was bored out of my skull. Oh, sure, there was always a new song or an old favorite to play on the air, but there were dead spots, too, especially if you were inclined (as I was) to play long songs. When it came to dropping the needle down on a ten-minute Genesis track from Selling England by the Pound or one of Jethro Tull's album-sized cuts, I never hesitated in the slightest. But once the needle was safely down, what was there to do?

The answer came in the form of graffiti. Not only is it an annoying word which I still misspell fifty percent of the time, but it's also a great way to fill vacant moments, and I soon became one of the station's main suppliers of the stuff. Album covers were of course the main area for such self-expression, especially if the albums were in the playbox and had aroused strong feelings in me. When U2's October had been in heavy rotation for what seemed like a full calendar year, I made mention of the fact on the album cover, provoking a quick response from Carla, the program director. From that point on, I decided to restrict myself to writing on the covers of older albums that Carla was less likely to notice.

What I soon realized, though, was that others had this same compulsion. To this day, I can recall the fluid penmanship of Mike "The Howler" Tuck, whose commentary graced the covers of many a prog-rock album. At one point, he wrote a glowing comment about Chris Squire and Steve Howe on the cover of Yesshows, one of Yes's less-than-crucial live releases. I replied with a note about the Dixie Dregs' Andy West and Steve Morse, my own favorite bass-and-guitar combination at the time, and we were off: a once-a-week dialogue began that eventually wound up in a discussion of our favorite drummers--thread drift, of exactly the sort you can see in any discussion area on the web.

The best place for comments, however, was on the posters that lined the walls of the station. I don't remember them all, but many of them had been doctored by XYC jocks with creative juices a-flowing. One jazz pianist, Robert somebody, had autographed his poster; Mike was apparently horrified by the photo, because he quickly added "Hey, Robert! You got fat teeth! Love, the Howler" to it.

Nothing ever topped the Fleetwood Mac poster, though. I still don't know which jocks did the honors, but all five members of the band had ballpointed thought balloons coming out of their heads:

*Stevie Nicks: "Wisps... I'm thinking of wisps... maybe I'll write a song about them..."

*Mick Fleetwood: "Goin' t'the barn dance in my dungies..."

*Christine McVie: "But does he like me...?"

*John McVie: "Let's see... $10,000 per show works out to about $14.79 per bass note, minus $5.88 per coke line sniffed... I can probably afford new ice cube trays!"

*Lindsey Buckingham: "Every male in America would like to bang Stevie's cute little box... So why is it all I can think of is drooling schnauzers and big bunny suits?"

I guess we were on the cutting edge of more than just music.

8:04 PM

As I mentioned in my last entry, we recently saw Chicago and were impressed enough to snag a copy of the soundtrack that very evening. The kids have been relentlessly listening to "Cell Block Tango," "We Both Reached for the Gun," and "When You're Good to Mama," and I'm finding all of the above (not to mention "Razzle Dazzle" and "All That Jazz") running through my head on a regular basis.

I like musicals.

Actually, I like the music from musicals. As a form, the musical comedy is an odd duck, neither play nor opera, and having all the disadvantages of each, but for the most part a good set of songs can save even a show with a dumb script. Unfortunately, it's sometimes hard to get past the basic ridiculousness of having characters burst into rapturous song, which is why for a good decade now the best musicals have been animated cartoons, where your disbelief is already suspended to allow for talking meerkats, mermaids, and furniture.

So here are my top ten musicals of all time, in alphabetical order. An eclectic list? Well, sure--what do you expect from a guy who's never seen Oklahoma! or The Producers?

Beauty and the Beast -- From the opening strains of "Belle" through the Busby-Berkeley-meet-Martha-Stewart dazzle of "Be Our Guest," this score touches all the bases. Even if the the title tune is a bit drippy, it's more than countered by "Gaston," which gets into show-biz Valhalla purely on the strength of the line "I use antlers in all of my de-co-raaaaaaa-ting!"

Cabaret -- I prefer the stage version, which has more songs, but "Don't Tell Mama" and the title song are hard to ignore either way. And "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" has a chilling beauty that's unlike anything else you'll ever hear.

Fiddler on the Roof -- Even if I didn't like Aleichem's stories, the music in this show is simply inspired. Even a potential throwaway like "Sabbath Prayer" has real punch. OK, so "Miracle of Miracles" is lame. "Matchmaker" and "If I Were a Rich Man" more than make up for it.

Jesus Christ Superstar -- You can't say it's not an interesting story. And when Ian Gillan (Jesus) and Murray Head (Judas) go at it on the soundtrack album, it's terrific listening.

King Mackerel and the Blues Are Running -- A bit more obscure than some of these others, admittedly, but a wonderful show. UNC grads Bland Simpson & Jim Wann cooked up a series of stories about the Carolina coast and put them together in this "musician's theater"-style play with some wonderful and evocative songs about the same. From the title track to "Food Chain" to the haunting "Georgia Rose," this one satisfies all the way.

The Music Man -- There ain't nothin' else like this one. "Trouble" is one of the two or three great set pieces in American theater, and if you aren't tapping your toes to "Seventy-Six Trombones," you're clinically dead.

Oliver! -- I forgive it the exclamation point, because the songs are too good not to. The ensemble pieces alone are stunning: "Food, Glorious Food," "Who Will Buy?" and "Consider Yourself" work beautifully, and "Reviewing the Situation" is simply a masterpiece.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show -- Camp, sure, but full of terrific music. "Science Fiction" and "There's a Light" are quite beautiful, and "Eddie" is too cheerfully goofy to resist. Plus, I must admit, this one gets extra points for having Susan Sarandon in white cotton undies.

South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut -- Crudely animated, profane, blasphemous, immature, and offensive on so many levels that they can't be named individually, this is not only one of the most pointed satires since "A Modest Proposal," but a wonderful musical to boot. "Blame Canada" got an Oscar nomination for a reason (though the Academy was too chickenshit to award it.) "Mountain Town," "What Would Brian Boitano Do?" and "Mmmkay" are relentlessly catchy. The international chorus of "Kyle's Mom's a Bitch" is a delight. And, god help me, I not only find myself singing along to "Uncle Fucka" on a regular basis, but actually enjoy listening to the instrumental break where the entire nation of Canada farts tunefully along with a Copland-style ballet. There are so many reasons for me to dislike this movie that the simple fact of my not disliking it is powerful evidence of its musical brilliance.

And where does Chicago rate? Give me a few more days to listen. I'll get back to you.

1:29 AM

Last night I pulled my first all-nighter in a long time. They were a regular occurrence back in college, and occasionally after, but it's been a long time since I've had so much that I had to get done before an 8:00 class that I had to stay up all night. (Granted, if I hadn't gone out for dinner and a movie earlier in the evening, it might not have been necessary to stay up all night, but dammit, Kelly and I wanted a night out, we had a free babysitter, and we both wanted to see Chicago, which is deserving of its scads of Oscar nominations.)

I stayed up all night for the first time when I was in my early teens. I was at Atlantic Beach, spending a week or so in the Tar Landing home of our friends the Prices. My brother David, Tripp and Ken Price, and the Butscher Sisters, Lisa and Amy, spent the night talking and laughing and (speaking for the boys) wishing there were more Butscher sisters (or at least half as many Prices and Cashwells). By the time the rays of dawn started peeping in the venetian blinds, I was pretty tired. I remember the pinkness of the sky cut into horizontal strips, but not much else.

I didn't have to pull a lot of all-nighters in high school--well, there was the epic weekend when I had to catch up on 600 pages of European history because my girlfriend had been in town for a week and I'd quit doing the reading, and Monday was the exam--but once I got to Carolina they cropped up rather more often, especially if I had a paper due. For example, I turned in one short story after pulling an all-nighter on the Tuesday night before it was due in Wednesday's class--and still failing to put anything together. I begged for a week's extension from my teacher, Bland Simpson, and he graciously gave it to me. What did I do with it? I waited until the next Tuesday night, started a story at 11:00 p.m., and finished it as the sun came up the next morning. (It was called "Rain Is a Feeling" and ended up being published in the UNC literary magazine, the Cellar Door, proving that deadline pressure can sometimes focus the mind wonderfully.)

The most brutal of all-nighters came when I was leaving for my junior year's exchange trip to Manchester, England. I still had an incomplete on my record because I owed Dr. Townsend Ludington a paper; I might ordinarily have let it slide, but he taught in the American Studies department, and the AS department was the group sponsoring the exchange. Rather than risk his well-placed wrath, I stayed up the night before I caught my plane and pounded out a paper on some topic or other--I no longer recall, which gives you an idea of how much insight I had into the subject--and hopped on the plane having had no sleep for twenty-four hours.

What I'd forgotten was that I can't sleep on planes. I've always been that way; something about the upright posture, the close quarters, the dry air--whatever it is, I can't sack out. I'd nod off briefly, only to jerk awake when my chin dropped to my chest, and kept up this same maddening cycle for the full trip. When I arrived at Heathrow, at dawn, GMT, I had a full load of luggage to haul to the train station and no brains left to do it with.

I can't sleep on trains either.

I staggered into the cab zone at Victoria Station in Manchester with the look of an Old Testament prophet, I feel sure. For one thing I was fully bearded and thoroughly hairy, and I was wearing a pair of white canvas painters' overalls. English friends later told me that only two groups of people wore such things at the time: house painters and homosexuals. Perhaps one of the cabbies was hoping to get lucky, or perhaps he wanted me to help him get right with God, but he let me load my cases into his cab for transport to my dorm. "Grosvenor Place, please," I mumbled as I climbed in. The cabby didn't say anything to me, but as we pulled out of the lot, he saw a friend on the same loop and rolled down his window. "I got Grosvenor Place!" spat my cabby disgustedly, which puzzled me a bit. I realized why when he pulled up to Grosvenor some three and a half minutes later--the station was perhaps half a mile from the dorm. The fare was just over a pound, total.

I was dead tired, stupid, and running on fumes after forty-seven straight hours of wakefulness. I'd have been incapable of walking that half-mile if I'd had my feet grafted to a pair of turtles.

I handed him a tenner and told him to keep the change. I didn't look back, but I hope his opinion of Hebrews and/or homosexuals went up as a result of that tip. I hauled my luggage to my room--the one at the absolute greatest distance from the entrance, of course--fell onto my unmade bed, tugged a blanket over myself, and didn't come out for fifteen hours.

I feel a lot like that now.

7:41 PM

I was born in 1963, so I have no real memory of the days before the Fab Four ruled the pop music universe. At first, their omnipresence irritated me. I also really, really hated "Michelle," which seemed to be the Beatles song most likely to be played on any radio station during my childhood. They also had an animated show on TV that struck me as pretty lame, and when a five-year-old calls something lame, it's got to be lame indeed. Besides, I was a Monkees fan--they had a live-action show, and as far as I was concerned, that made them superior in just about every respect, especially since even then I knew "Last Train to Clarksville" was a great song. When the Beatles broke up, I was in first grade and didn't think much about it; I was still waiting to lose my first tooth.

Things began to change over the next few years when Mom and Dad got a car equipped with an eight-track tape player. They snagged Carole King's Tapestry, Paul Simon's There Goes Rhymin' Simon, and The London Chuck Berry Sessions, but they also got a copy of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and played it frequently. Soon they picked up Hey, Jude, the American-only collection of singles that featured both late-period hits (the title track and "The Ballad of John and Yoko") and raw and energetic tunes from the band's early days ("Can't Buy Me Love" and "I Should Have Known Better"), and I began to appreciate the Beatles. Granted, my taste in Beatles tunes was at first rather odd; I had no idea who wrote or sang which songs--to this day I'll sometimes confuse Paul's voice with John's--but the ones I disliked the most tended to be edgy, repetitive things. "Rain" and "Don't Let Me Down" just made me want to change the program entirely, something you could do with a satisfying "ka-chunk" on an eight-track player. But I loved the carnival atmosphere of "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite," the weird rhythms of "Old Brown Shoe," and the driving piano of "Lady Madonna." At that point, I had to admit, I'd become a Beatles fan. The Monkees had fallen by the wayside.

And then I wandered into Lisa Crumpton's bedroom.

Lisa was the older sister of my friend Bruce, and her room was at the opposite end of the upstairs hall from his. When I was playing at Bruce's house, there wasn't much reason for me to go down that long hall, but on one occasion when we did so, I saw on her wall a strange poster: photos of John, Paul, George, and Ringo slapped together in a free-form collage. Lisa, who was at least four grades ahead of us and never had much interest in us, tolerated our presence in her room on this occasion and mentioned that the poster had come from something called "The White Album." I'm still not sure why I asked to borrow it, let alone why she agreed, but her copy of the White Album went home with me.

Well.

For the first time, the lyrics seemed to step forward into the light. Certain mysterious phrases I'd read in comics or encountered in books began to make their origins known: "Happiness is a warm gun..." "My guitar gently weeps..." "The Walrus was Paul..." The music was fascinating in its own right, though. "Rocky Raccoon" was an immediate favorite, as were "Piggies" and "Julia." I found much of sides three and four upsetting or off-putting; "Helter Skelter" and "Revolution 9" were creepy even if you didn't know squat about the Manson murders. I was also intrigued to discover the originals of several covers--I'd first heard "Blackbird" as a Billy Preston song, and as far as I knew, "Mother Nature's Son" was John Denver's.

Since then, a lot has changed. I've learned to play several instruments, which changed my opinion of a number of songs--"Rain" and "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" are spectacularly cool tunes to play. The band's influence has waxed and waned, and the brief decade of their pre-eminence has been followed by three more, and now only Ringo and Sir Paul are left. My musical tastes have shifted in many directions, but there has always been a fondness for the Beatles under everything. When I launched myself into full-blown worship of XTC or Robyn Hitchcock, it's not because I was consciously searching for music that aped the Beatles, but because their musical vocabulary, like my own, uses familiar words, words that were first spoken to us by John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

After September 11th, magazine covers seemed engaged in a perpetual contest to show us something more depressing about our world every week. That contest was finally ended when Time featured a black-and-white cover of George Harrison, one hand behind his back, holding a sunflower to his chest. George's death wasn't welcome, no, but that memorial cover was; for the first time in months, America seemed able to feel that something other than terror was significant. Even George seemed to know how important he was; I don't mean in the egotistical sense, or even in the socially relevant sense. Sure, he was famous, and he'd done his best to use his fame to help people, such as the citizens of Bangladesh. But he knew, I think, that he was important because beauty is important, and the makers of beauty, even that strange kind of beauty in rock and roll, are important because of what they make. You can see it in his face on that cover--a knowledge that in this flawed, cold, and grubby world, there are still flowers worth the cultivating, and still gardeners worthy of our respect.

9:17 PM

LBJs

*My appearance at the Virginia Festival of the Book has become less insubstantial. I'll be doing a reading (from The Verb To Bird, presumably) at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, March 19th, at the Cavalier Best Western. That's the first night of the Festival, so it'll be a chance to kick out the jams and get the party started. Or at least to snarf down a bunch of the refreshments before the rest of the guests show up.

*I'm listening to Robyn Hitchcock's beautiful, haunting "Linctus House" at the moment, and it remains one of my favorite RH tunes, despite the fact that I have no earthly idea what he's going on about. It does contain one of my favorite lines: "If we understood each other, there'd be no need to talk..."

*I had my first interview last week, with Albemarle Magazine; judging by the ads, I'd expect the subscribers to have disposable income that they might cheerfully blow on a book or two. I'm reminded, however, of my experience in the palatial manse of Barry Bergman, the founder of Record Bar. Barry had sold the chain to an enormous European company for some ungodly number of millions, which he spent on a huge house north of Chapel Hill. I had the good fortune to be a friend of the place's caretaker, as well as a Record Bar employee in my own right. Thus, when Barry & his wife moved in and needed someone to sort and file all their CDs, my friend decided I had the proper qualifications. I did the sorting--an enormous job, given the huge number of CDs they'd acquired from artists, promoters, and labels over the years--and as an extra reward (in addition to my usual hourly rate at the Bar) was invited to spend an evening there with the caretaker, her fiance, and Kelly, but without our hosts. Kelly and I spent much time marveling over the master bathroom (his and hers showers), the brushed-steel fixtures in the kitchen, the automatic vertical blinds on the window in the master bedroom, the Warhol of Mick Jagger that hung over the stereo system (which looked like something out of Close Encounters, but with a bigger special-effects budget), the garage (containing a blazing red Ferrari and a creamy white '57 T-Bird--my appreciation for Barry's taste went up a notch there) and the hot tub, but the thing we couldn't get over was the absence of books. The place must have had thirty rooms, and we found books in exactly one of them--a single small shelf of them, perhaps four feet long, with a paperback dictionary, a thesaurus, and a couple of Jackie Collins-style romances. I cannot imagine having that much money and not filling room after room with books. Then again, maybe there's a reason why I don't have that much money...

*We let the boys watch Jaws with us on Friday. Hmm. That was a weeeeeeeeeee bit more gory than I'd remembered. It doesn't help that the PG rating has been almost entirely devalued since Bruce the Shark hit the screen. Nowadays, "PG" means "Disney, but there's a fart joke." Teens lump G and PG movies together now, and unless something gets at least a PG-13, it's not going to bring in that perfect demographic: people with money, but no mortgage or rent. Admittedly, I'm not always spot-on where ratings are concerned. I showed The Man with Two Brains at Dixon's ninth birthday party, forgetting that it was rated R. (There are two shots of naked breasts; don't ask me how I forgot that...) Then again, when The Score, last summer's Brando-DeNiro-Norton caper flick, gets an R, it's hard to judge anything; the film has limited violence (one fight involving a baseball bat, and lots of shooting to little effect), one character smoking a joint, and a terrycloth-robed Angela Bassett spending the night at DeNiro's place without benefit of matrimony, but why on earth was it rated R? Because the word "fuck" is spoken with regularity. And that word, goodness knows, is far worse than watching Robert Shaw writhing and spitting blood in the maw of a Great White...

*Last night Kelly and I played Scrabble with her mom, Ruth, and the game was freakish. On my first turn, I played a bingo (a word that uses all seven letters, for those of you haven't yet read Stefan Fatsis' wonderful Word Freak): PASTORED. The game then started closing up, with a very tight board, and nobody could score much. I had all the vowels, Ruth had all the consonants, and Kelly couldn't get a good spot for her words to save her life. In the end, I had a choice of two plays: either build down from the Q to the triple-word square in the lower left corner, or build over from an E next to the left-side triple-word square. Problem was, the former play was QUO; it was worth 36, but I wasn't sure the word was in the dictionary. If I played EYE in the latter place, I'd score only 18, but I knew the word was legit. I also knew I had the game's last U, and that both blanks were out, so nobody else could use the Q easily. I decided to play it safe and try for the 18 with EYE. Kelly promptly laid down her own bingo, FASTENED, on the first E, and ended the game. Some days it just doesn't pay to play it safe...

*We went to the Target in Fredericksburg on Saturday. We'd never been before. Danger, Will Robinson, danger...

11:09 PM