January 2004 Archives

This is the first presidential election since I started blogging, isn't it? Yes, I believe it is. And from time to time, I'm going to have to acknowledge that fact. Now, for example. If you don't want to know about my political views, this might be a good time to scroll down to the last entry, or maybe skip over to one of the other pages

If you were thinking you knew my politics by virtue of my being a white Southern son of a Marine who teaches at a boy's boarding school in rural Virginia, I'm afraid I'm not quite that easy to nail down. My general tendency is toward moderation, but my philosophical leanings often point me toward the left-libertarian end of things.

To some degree, that's because of my upbringing in Chapel Hill, NC, a town whose liberal outlook once prompted Jesse Helms to claim that North Carolina could save a bundle on its state zoo by simply putting a fence around Chapel Hill. (No, that sentiment didn't endear me to Jesse; my only regret about moving to Virginia in 1995 is that I didn't get to vote against him one last time.) I still recall the shock I felt in 1972, the first year in which I paid real attention to politics, when Nixon won. How could that have happened? Everyone I knew supported McGovern!

Some may think my liberalism is my mom's fault. After all, she's a minority--she converted from Judaism when she married Dad--and was a feminist before feminism was cool, a charter subscriber to Ms. Magazine, and a woman whose frankness about "taboo" subjects was a profoundly liberating influence on me. In high school she very bluntly told me that I could always count on her for a ride home if I was drunk--she didn't want me drinking, but if I did it, she wanted me to be safe about it. I finally took her up on the offer in my senior year of college. After a slight overload on wine at a writing-class party, I offered to call her and have her ferry me and several tipsy classmates to safety. True to her word, she showed up, greeted everybody, and took us all back to our homes. (In fact, that's when she met Kelly, as I recall...) I admire her attitude more now that I have my own kids--jeez, how do you balance what they need to know against what you want to tell them?--and there's no question that my love of free expression stems largely from Mom. But that's not quite it, either.

My dad is a retired Marine, yes. But he's also a longtime educator, a product of North Carolina's public schools and state-stupported university system. He's intimately familiar with the good things that governments (and the taxes that operate them) can do, and I have every reason to think that his decades in Chapel Hill pushed his thinking to the left as well. All in all, sure, he's probably more conservative than Mom is, but I know of only one election where they didn't vote together--1984, when Dad couldn't bear to vote for Mondale and Mom couldn't vote for Reagan.

(That was also the first election in which I was able to vote, and I went 0-for-November: my choices for President, Senator, Governor, and Congressman all went down in flames. I went to writing class the next day with a black armband on; Kelly, whom I wasn't dating yet, showed up in mourning, with black nail polish on. Kismet!)

But I don't think it's all Chapel Hill's fault. My dad's father, Joe Cashwell, was born on a tobacco farm in the most rural county in North Carolina, Sampson County, but he wasn't exactly a conservative. Heck, the story is that he was known to march in the occasional May Day parade in his youth--something that didn't come up for discussion much in his later years. He went to college in Cleveland, got married, served in the Navy during WWII, and ended up as a high-school principal in the small textile town of Albemarle, in Stanly County near Charlotte. He later worked for the NC Department of Education, then retired to the edge of a golf course in Sanford. As far as I could tell when I was a kid, he was like every other old person I'd ever met: reactionary, strict, tightly wound, and ready to criticize anything modern, shaggy, or remotely sexual.

But then one day I was in the room while he was watching the evening news, where a story about illicit marijuana farming was being shown. Daddy Joe seemed to tense up, furrow his brow, inhale sharply, and do everything possible to suggest that an explosion was imminent. I was in my late teens, at the height of my long-haired anti-social period, and I was waiting for him to start a litany of the horrors that the Evil Weed had visited upon American society.

"Goddammit!" he bellowed. "I don't know why they don't just legalize it, tax the shit out of it, and fund public schools for the next century!"

Not until that moment did I really think about the fact that this was the man who raised my father, a man for whom the concept of the citizen-soldier remained clear all his life, a man who believed in America and freedom, and wasn't afraid to let his love of the latter direct him out of the former's mainstream.

So I apologize if I don't meet everyone's expectations where politics are concerned. Sorry. It's an old family tradition.

11:05 PM

So I went back in time the other night.

Not literally, no, but I did sort of have to reset my mind to a different time zone. It was a zone that stretched from roughly 1978 to 1991, from the end of junior high through high school, college, marriage, and right up to the onset of parenthood. This was a significant chunk of my life, but one I haven't visited (obviously) for quite some time.

During those years, my mind was focused largely on pop music. I was an obsessive collector of records, tapes, and CDs, as well as a student of everything from folk to ska to madrigals to rock opera to jangly pop. I took lessons on guitar and piano during those days, and took courses in musical comedy, theory, and music appreciation at UNC. I served as a deejay at WXYC for nine of those years, and a clerk at Record bar for three of them.

Most important, though, I was a working musician. I don't think I can say "professional," because that implies that I made my living as a musician, and I can't make that claim. I never made much money at it, but I'd estimate that I may have made enough in my lifetime of performing to pay for most of the equipment I've bought over the years. Even discounting the dozens of amateur ensembles I've played with from time to time, I've played for money in bands of every shape and size. The first was a more-or-less nameless five-piece guitar/bass/drums/sax band back in high school (we tried being "Galaxy" and "The Renegades" at times, but our hearts weren't in it in either case) that played one paying gig (my grandparents paid us $75 to play at a party at their house in Sanford) before morphing into a more successful group called "Dealer" after the drummer and bass player quietly found themselves a new pair of guitarists to play with. After that, I found myself playing in the John Santa Band, Terminal Mouse, Great Wall of Doo Doo, Rohrwaggon, Nipples for Men, and Elmo & PC (sometimes PC & Elmo, depending on who made up the posters). But it wasn't until around 1988 that I found myself onstage alone.

Playing solo is a strange thing. It's good because you have complete control--the drummer's not going to lose the beat, the guitarist won't throw a tantrum, the bass player won't break a string--but at the same time there's only YOU up there. If YOU lose the beat or break a string (or throw a tantrum), there's nobody to cover for you; the audience knows exactly what the source of the trouble is. In many ways, though, the best part of playing solo is the preparation; you can choose your own material, arrange it the way you like, and not have to worry about compromising with your bandmates.

What you lose, however, is the creative contributions of your peers. Even when you bring in a completed song, the players are going to add a little something to it. The version of "Camouflage" I brought to Terminal Mouse changed when Tom Reichenberg and Carey Floyd got ahold of the chorus; they added a couple of beats to the riff that I'd written, and suddenly the song had more life. Years later, when I was recording a demo version of the song with Mike Beard, he suggested that I make the structure less complicated; I changed the verse from A to D, adjusted the approach to the chorus, and made it better. It is a better song now, but though I still think of it as my own, I can't ignore the things that have influenced it since its birth; it's grown up and gone to school and been changed by its teachers and schoolmates. There's a great comfort in working with people like that, people who can so fully appreciate what you've created that they can guide it toward fulfillment.

Friday night, however, they weren't around. I was playing an open-mic night at the Cameron Street Coffee House in Culpeper. No bandmates. No recording engineers. Just me, an acoustic guitar, and a couple of microphones. In the audience were Kelly, Ian, and our next-door-neighbors, Greg and Shari. Everyone else in the place (which was packed) was a stranger. There wasn't much to hide behind, except for a bit of dry banter which didn't seem to engage the crowd too much. Instead, I tore into my two-song set, starting with my acoustic cover of the Bobs' "My Shoes," which they do (like all their songs) a capella. I was happy to get an enthusiastic response, so when I finished I asked the crowd if they wanted a cover they'd never heard before (I had Robyn Hitchcock's "Alright, Yeah" ready to go) or an original they'd never heard before. They called for an original, so I broke out "400 Chemicals."

I first wrote the basics of this song on keyboards when I was trying (and failing) to teach myself the Dixie Dregs' long, spacey, gorgeous "Night Meets Light." When I joined Terminal Mouse in 1984, I decided to adapt it into something danceable. I added a ska beat and some lyrics about a guy who's drawn to his girlfriend purely because of her pheromones; the title came from a commercial for some auto parts store that bragged about having "over 400 chemicals in stock." It was still a freakishly complicated tune, however, and though TM played it with gusto, it never quite achieved its potential.

Years later, I was drinking with Mike Beard in preparation to do some work in the studio with him. We were trying to decide which of my songs to record, and I mentioned "400 Chemicals." He opined that he liked the song, but that it was too complex for its own good. "It's a speed-metal song, PC," he said. I thought he was insane. We ended up recording "Camouflage" and a couple of other tunes, but we left "400 Chemicals" off the list.

Friday night, I played a stripped-down version. In E. With the bridge and most of the weird time signature changes removed. It was just me and my acoustic, but it was as close to speed metal as I could manage all by myself. But of course, I wasn't really by myself; at this point in my life, whenever I go onstage, I'm playing with dozens of people from another time zone, long ago. And they're doing their best to cover for me.

Thanks, guys.

6:28 PM

There are those who wonder if I actually teach, or if it's some kind of weird role-playing thing, like Snoopy pretending to be a fighter pilot. The fact is, I am a full-time teacher of English and speech, and have been since 1991. As such, I have occasional reason to offer instruction, and every once in a while I put that instruction in a form which may offer non-students something useful (or at least a cheap laugh or two, possibly at my students' expense, possibly at mine.) Here's a little something I sent out to my 11th-graders recently. Not all the points deal with grammar; some are simply my own preferences. With any luck, however, a student who learns these principles will annoy fewer educators down the road.

MR. CASHWELL'S PET PEEVES IN STUDENT WRITING:
A Guide for Students Seeking a Kindler, Gentler English Teacher

"Everyday"
Dave Matthews and Toyota are at fault here. If you do something daily, you do it every day—two words, an adverb. “Everyday” is an adjective meaning “ordinary.” Your everyday clothes are just ordinary clothes, but you wear clothing every day.
*OK: I go to the dining hall every day.
*Also OK: Going to the dining hall is an everyday experience for me.
*Not OK: I go to the dining hall everyday.

Direct Address
My friends, this is the truth: when you directly address someone, students, you must put commas on either side of that address. At the end or beginning of a sentence, one comma is enough to separate it from the rest of the sentence, dudes.
*OK: Dude, hand me those pliers.
*Also OK: Look, dude, I need those pliers.
*Not OK: Dude are you listening to me?

Who/That
When you start an adjective clause referring to people, use “who.” You are the people who should follow this guideline. “That” is grammatical, but a bit impersonal.
*OK: He’s a man who lives a life of danger.
*Not as OK: He’s a man that lives a life of danger.

Tense (One)
You may write in past tense or present tense, but be careful to pick ONE tense and stick with it. Combinations of the two are extremely distracting, and no spell-checker will catch the error.
*OK: George cooked his dinner. He shoveled down a plate of sausage.
*Also OK: George cooks his dinner. He shovels down a plate of sausage.
*Not OK: George cooked his dinner. He shovels down a plate of sausage.

"All Right"
The use of “alright” is possibly the most common error in English. This spelling may become acceptable someday, but it hasn’t yet. It’s two words.
*OK: I feel all right now.
*Not OK: I feel alright now.

"Y'all"
If you’re going to use it, spell it right. It’s short for “you all,” and the apostrophe replaces the missing letters. If you can’t use it correctly, use “you.”
*OK: I think y’all should try this.
*Not OK: I think ya’ll should try this.
*Also Not OK: I think you’ll should try this. (Spell-checkers will try to make you use this; ignore them.)

Punctuating Dialogue
Commas and periods always go inside quotation marks.
*OK: “I forgot my pencil,” said Phil.
*Also OK: Phil smacked his forehead. “I forgot my pencil.”
*Not OK: “I forgot my pencil”, said Phil.
*Also Not OK: Phil smacked his forehead. “I forgot my pencil”.

"Yeah"
Don’t forget the “h.” “Yea” is an obsolete form of yes, or else a cheer.
*OK: “Yeah, I’d like a pizza,” said Tim.
*Not OK: “Yea! I love pizza!” cried Tim.
*Also Not OK: “Yea, the Hebrews went forth for pizza,” the preacher read.

"Fellow Classmates"
This is redundant. If they’re mates, they’re already “fellow.”
*OK: My classmates understand me.
*Also OK: My fellow fifth formers understand me.
*Not OK: My fellow classmates understand me.

"Unique"
Like “dead” and “pregnant,” this is an absolute. It means “one of a kind,” and either something is one of a kind or it isn’t—it can’t be very one.
*OK: That’s a unique restaurant.
*Not OK: That’s one of the most unique restaurants I know.

"OK"
There are three possible ways to spell it. Use one of them and be consistent.
*OK: This is OK.
*OK: It is also O.K. to use periods.
*Also OK: It is even okay to spell the word out.
*Not OK: It’s not ok to make the word look like it’s pronounced “ock.”

4:36 AM

I'm a little worried about Doc Savage, folks.

For those of you who haven't encountered him, Clark "Doc" Savage, Jr., is a mysterious figure known as "the Man of Bronze." He's a huge, perfectly muscled guy with bronze skin, close-cropped (slightly darker) bronze hair, and eyes that are invariably described as "gold-flake" in color. He's a genius as well as an intimidating physical specimen, the greatest practical scientist in the world, gifted in fields as diverse as medicine, aeronautics, chemistry, criminology, and engineering. Women want him, men want to be him, and his shirt seems to be ripped to shreds with an alarming degree of frequency.

He is aided by five unusual gentlemen who are experts in their own fields: Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks, a/k/a Ham, is both a Harvard-educated lawyer and one of the globe's snappiest dressers. Colonel John "Renny" Renwick is a skilled engineer who enjoys knocking the panels out of doors with his fists for cheap laughs. Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, a/k/a Monk, is a simian-looking brawler who happens to be one of the world's leading chemists. Major Thomas J. Roberts ("Long Tom") is a pale, sickly-looking electrical engineer of unsurpassed ability. And William Harper "Johnny" Littlejohn is an emaciated specialist in geology and archaeology whose hobby is using obscure words. All are brilliant, bold, and dangerous in a fight.

Did I mention that they're fictional?

Doc and his assistants appeared in a series of pulp novels created by Lester Dent in the 1930s. Dent, who wrote under the name Kenneth Robeson, was clearly onto something, since his creation's trappings were liberally borrowed by later writers, including Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who not only gave their comic-book ubermensch a Fortress of Solitude just like Doc's, but even the civilian name "Clark." Dent wrote thirty-one short novels, starting with The Man of Bronze, before Will Murray took over the Robeson name and continued Doc's adventures through another sixty-odd titles.

I discovered Doc thanks to Marvel Comics, which adapted several of his stories (including The Man of Bronze, Death in Silver, and The Monsters) in a short-lived comics series in the mid-70s. Bantam Books was at the same time releasing paperbacks of Doc's adventures, and at the age of 11, I was transfixed by the sight of Doc's muscles bursting through his ripped shirt on the cover of The Derrick Devil. I read the book, loved it, and started on more: The South Pole Terror, The Majii, The Freckled Shark, The Motion Menace, Spook Hole, The Seven Agate Devils, you name it.

Most of the Doc books I read and loved, I later discovered, were written by Will Murray. More recently, however, I've read several Murray-penned books and come away deeply disappointed. The big, broad characters just clunk; the taut plots have seemingly come unstrung; and the pseudoscientific gimmicks that tread the edge of plausibility have leaped fully into the realm of "Oh, come on!" I've come away from Murray's The Magic Island, World's Fair Goblin, The Red Spider, and Merchants of Disaster with a feeling that Doc and his cohorts, a stalwart band whose adventures will always have a special place in my heart, right next to those of the Legion of Super-Heroes, are suffering from a severe case of Bad Writing.

And the horrible fear I'm unable to shake is this: what if they were suffering from it all along?

8:32 PM

LBJs

*It's happened, just as they said it would: Radiohead's Kid A has finally grown on me. It took a good while, mind you--so long that I still haven't picked up Amnesiac or Hail to the Thief yet--but I finally warmed up to its spacy and improbable charms. It may also have helped that I quit expecting it to be The Bends or OK Computer all over again. "How to Disappear Completely" has been coursing through my head on and off for a couple of days now.

*In the "Oh. My. GOD!" category of unlikely discoveries, Kelly and I discovered that an actor in one of our favorite TV shows actually made his debut on one of our OTHER favorite shows: James Marsters, "Spike" on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, debuted on Northern Exposure. We watched NE pretty religiously in its heyday, but neither of us made the connection until Kelly was checking out the extra features on her new Xmas present, the complete 2nd season of Buffy. There it was revealed that Marsters' first appearance was as "an uncomfortable priest" on NE. I don't know Buffy as well as Kelly does--she's called "The Buffinator" for a reason--but I'm still reasonably strong on NE, and I could think of only one uncomfortable priest. "You don't mean," I asked her, "that Spike is the priest who talks with Maggie's sister-in-law in Grosse Pointe?"

"What?" said Kelly.

"The episode where Joel goes home with Maggie to Grosse Pointe, and her sister-in-law's telling the priest, 'I have a body you could break bricks on... my breasts float..."

"Oh my god!" she said, and we started digging through our old NE videotapes. Sure enough, once we found it on the tape (our new VCR simply flies through its rewind and fast-forward functions) we could see for ourselves: he's got brown hair and an American accent, but that's definitely Spike in the dog collar.

Is that cool or what?

*Jesus! There's a MOUSE in my classroom! I thought it was a reflection off my glasses, but it's a real rodent. As cold as it is outside, I understand why it's in here. I just hope it doesn't take up permanent residence...

*My life list now sits at 295 species. Last weekend's count in Augusta County yielded three new birds: the American Tree Sparrow, Lincoln's Sparrow, and Common Redpoll. I'm planning a trip to the Everglades with my dad for March, so when I go through the 300 barrier, I'm planning to go through good and hard.

*Are you as cynical as I am? Do you think Pete Rose already has money down on the year when he gets into the Hall of Fame?

3:08 PM

Well, here it is, 2004 already, and I barely had a chance to say goodbye to 2003. I must admit that on a personal level, I'm rather sad to see the old gal go, because as years go, she was mighty good to me. After all, 2003 was the year in which:

*I published my first book.
*I visited San Francisco for the first time.
*I saw my first Hoopoe.
*I discovered that my favorite version of Saint-Saens' "Carnival of the Animals" exists on CD and bought a copy.
*I hiked to the summit of Old Rag with my son on his twelfth birthday.
*I welcomed my nephew Sam into the world.
*I got to take a trimester's sabbatical from work.
*I got a Christmas card from Martha Stewart.
*I saw Florence, Orvieto, Civita and Rome with my own eyes.
*I spent two weeks traveling through Italy with my wife while my parents tended the kids.
*I met dozens of my online friends face to face.
*I got my first royalty check.
*I finally read Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn, which I'd been meaning to do for years.
*I spent a week doing volunteer work in West Virginia.
*I appeared at the Virginia Festival of the Book and Book Expo America.
*I read 128 books--more than I'd ever read in a calendar year.
*I finally bought a DVD player.
*I learned the trick of playing "Here Comes the Sun" on the guitar. (Hint: put your capo on the 7th fret.)
*I saw the conclusion of the great epic film trilogy of our time. (The Lord of the Rings, not The Matrix.)
*I ate what may have been the finest meal of my life at Pergola in Orvieto: struzzo (ostrich) enhanced by a fine Orvieto Classico.
*I ate what was certainly the finest ice cream of my life: Pasqualetti's gelato. Mmm.
*I got to appear on three radio shows and a TV show.
*I turned 40.

I suppose it's unreasonable to hope that 2004 will be as kind to me as its predecessor was. At the same time, as I look at what 2003 has meant to the rest of the world, I know I'm one of the few who's sad to see it end.

My New Year's wish: that everyone's life will get a lot better from here. Maybe, for once, I just happened to get an early start.

5:20 AM