March 2007 Archives

It's that time of year again: Spring, when a 44-year-old man's fancy turns to thoughts of diamonds.

At 4:00 this afternoon, as we have for the past three years, I and my learned colleague Greg Jacobs, a/k/a "The Nachoman," will take to the web to broadcast Woodberry Forest's opening home baseball game. You can tune in to our streaming audio by clicking on this link to Woodberry's broadcast link, or by going to www.woodberry.org and following the links there.

My qualifications for doing this broadcast should be apparent from this journal: I'll talk about anything, whether I know what I'm talking about or not. But how, you may well ask, is this Jacobs guy qualified to do baseball play-by-play? I'm glad you asked:



Greg is an award-winning physics teacher by profession, but his knowledge of the national pastime is encyclopedic. This is not hyperbole--he has actually written an encyclopedia. It's The Everything Kids Baseball Book (which you can order by clicking on the title). He is also working on the forthcoming Everything Kids Football Book, and you can enjoy his cheerfully acerbic and insightful sports columns for grownups by visiting http://fc.woodberry.org/~greg_jacobs/ or clicking on this link to Nachoman's Baseball. (For those who are wondering: yes, I make an occasional appearance in the Nachoman's columns, under my nom de guerre El Molé.)

We'll also be broadcasting both tomorrow's game and the pregame dedication of the new flagpole to our retired colleague, history teacher/baseball coach/banjo picker Nathaniel A. Jobe. Tune in tomorrow at about 12:30 if you want to hear Nat's wisdom, or at least hear Greg and me talking about it.

Play ball!

4:11 PM

(Above: Zone Cab logo, taken outside Great Lakes Brewing Co.)

I'll be writing up a report (with a picture, honest) of my panel at VaBook sometime soon, but in the meantime, I thought I'd add a few pics from my trip to Cleveland a few weeks back. (Everybody, say thank you to Kelly for the nice memory chip that allowed me to take all these photos. Thank you, Kelly.) Click on any photo to see a larger view.


Here I am, just before departure, having celebrated the end of the winter term with a margarita and a quesadilla at Pancho Villa's. (Why are the best pictures of me always snapshots taken at Mexican restaurants?)


This is the view from our twentieth-floor hotel room at the downtown Marriott. The ice shelf on Lake Erie is visible out beyond the dark line of the seawall; the sun is visible through both windows of the corner room in the building across the street. I'm happy I was there at the right time to shoot this.



Here's what you've been waiting for: bird life! This is a Ring-billed Gull on the icy surface of Lake Erie just behind the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame; he's apparently trying to power down this fish, but with limited luck. I like the sunset light in this shot; I also like the fact that the other gull is there to support his buddy and take on the burden of that fish if necessary.



Another shot from the lakeshore near the R&RHoF. That's my brother David, my dad, my cousin Mort, and me. The weather was inexplicably gorgeous the whole time, except for one blustery morning--naturally, the morning I went out to get a Goldeneye. A new lifer makes for a far sunnier afternoon, apparently.



That's my brother at the Raymond family plot in Lake View Cemetery; the Raymonds were the family of my father's mother's mother, i.e. my father's maternal grandmother, Ruth Raymond Ruttkamp. She's buried there (under a stone reading "Ruth Raymond") along with her husband, August Ruttkamp, her siblings and her parents (identified only as "Father" and "Mother"). I learned a few things about how I want my monument to be set up.


And here's the final shot of the trip, Dad and me outside the Orange County Library, with Kel behind the shutter to snap this shot of us in front of Dad's massive Nissan Titan. (Note the Browning decal on the window; Dad believes in keeping a truck safe through intimidation.) Note also my spiffy new green fleece hoodie, purchased at a hideous discount in Wheeling, WV. Thanks, Dad!


And that? Uh, that's Ralph Steadman's drawing of Hunter S. Thompson. I don't think he was in town...

2:45 AM

Reminder: I'll be appearing at the Virginia Festival of the Book this Saturday, March 24th, at 2:00 p.m. Along with Grayson Chesser (woodcarver and co-author of Making Decoys the Century-Old Way) and Jonathan Alderfer (co-author of the National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America), I'll be part of a panel called Flocking Together: Books for Bird Enthusiasts at Blue Ridge Mountain Sports, 1125 Emmet Street, Charlottesville, VA. Call (434)977-4400 for more information about directions.

The torch is passed!

Kelly and I try not to push stuff on the kids all that hard, but it is satisfying to see them take up something we enjoyed when we were younger (or even when we were pretty much as old as we are now.) Usually we just let them join in when we're watching something on DVD, which is how they became fans of everything from Buffy to Scrubs to Battlestar Galactica, but when it's musical or literary, we have to play it a bit more coy. It's rare that any reader responds to a book that was shoved into his face, and the boys have usually been loath to pick up a recommendation of ours (unless it's a comic book; they recognize that we're on the same wavelength there, I think.) We've got a whole shelf of mass-market SF/fantasy paperbacks, but Ian, who reads both voraciously and rapidly (he's now faster than his mother, who's faster than I am) has read only a few, such as Heinlein's Starship Troopers and the complete works of family favorite Terry Pratchett.

The boys are also usually a bit hesitant to like (or at least to admit liking) any music we play that doesn't involve serious thrashing. When I play Robyn Hitchcock or R.E.M. or anything on the jangly-poppy end of my musical tastes, they tend to recoil. They like the Who, though, especially Dixon, who has been wearing out A Quick One since he was about nine years old, and they're generally pleased when we play our Metallica, Buzzcocks, or Offspring discs. They're not quite as certain about the Clash, but I have high hopes. They have certainly welcomed the chance to listen to our Nirvana discs, though I think the two of them, Ian in particular, are still vaguely uncomfortable with the fact that Kurt Cobain was basically my age; he'd have turned 40 this year, after all.

But every once in a while, Kel and I get a nice little boost for our parental egos. On the night before last, I came home to discover Ian folded into a chair with a school copy of Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, one of my very favorite SF novels--a true mindbender that never fails to get me maudlin and philosophical. I was pleased to discover that his English teacher had chosen the book for the class, but I was most delighted to discover that Ian was already seventy percent of the way through it; he'd been assigned the book only that morning and told to read the first three chapters. Ha!

Last night, having been inspired to pick up another favorite Clarke book, Rendezvous with Rama, I was sitting on the living room sofa, reading at my petty pace. Ian was upstairs, no doubt devouring another couple of books before bed, while Dixon surfed the internet, listening to one of his ever-evolving playlists as he did so. I wasn't listening intently, but I semiconsciously tracked the songs as they moved from familiar tune to familiar tune before settling onto one that I only recently ripped onto our computer: the Pogues' "If I Should Fall from Grace with God." Ha!

I don't know that our boys will ever be rich or famous or powerful when they grow up, but they will damn sure have taste.

7:36 PM

Looking for stories that "not only establish a link to Cash’s music and personality, they explore and extend that connection in entertaining, sometimes unusual and unexpected fashion"? Take the Nashville City Paper's advice and pick up Literary Cash : Unauthorized Writings Inspired by the Legendary Johnny Cash . Contribute to Readerville.com while you enjoy PC's short story "The Snow Chaser," Russell Rowland's "One More Wrong Thing," Gayle Brandeis's "Tumbling," Gretchen Moran Laskas's "Things Might Happen," and more.

I'm back. Did you miss me?

Maybe not. I do occasionally disappear from this joint for a few days at a time, but if you're a regular reader of this page, you may have wondered where I've been since my last entry, and I'm here to dish: over the last week or so I've been out on a mission: to visit Cleveland, Ohio.

A strange mission for early March, you might think, and I suppose I understand why. Despite vigorous attempts at rebranding, Cleveland remains a victim of its past reputation as a post-industrial slum on the shore of a polluted lake... with bad weather. To be fair, when you set your river on fire, you shouldn't really expect people to forget the fact, but I've been pleasantly surprised by enough places (Iowa City, Manchester, Delaware) that I was willing to give Cleveland a shot, too.

It helped that I had my dad along, though. In fact, he's really the reason for my interest in Cleveland in the first place: he was born there. My grandfather, Joe Cashwell, went from his home in North Carolina to the shores of Lake Erie back in his early 20s, after his older brother Jim reported that jobs, scarce in Depression-era NC, could be had in Cleveland. Daddy Joe got a job pumping gas, but he also got the chance to attend Western Reserve to finish up the college degree he'd started at Wingate College. He also met Lucille Ruttkamp, younger daughter of August and Ruth Ruttkamp. August worked for U.S. Wire and Steel, while Ruth's family had founded the Raymond Piano Company (later Raymond Piano and United States Organ), and they were somewhat dubious about handing over one of their daughters to a pump boy from the poorest county in a distant southern state. Nonetheless, Daddy Joe was able not only to graduate from Western Reserve, but to take Mama Lou's hand in marriage and produce, on his own 27th birthday, a son and heir, Richard Gordon Cashwell.

Dad lived in Cleveland for the first few years of his life, but doesn't really remember much from those days; the family moved to NC when he was three. He returned to Ohio during vacations, of course, and even spent some time living in his grandparents' West Side house while Daddy Joe was serving on a sub-chaser in the Pacific from 1943-45. He recalls those days much more clearly--days spent sledding down into the gorge of the Rocky River, for example, or wandering down to the bakery at Kamm's Corner. He's a Tar Heel to the bone, my dad, but his Cleveland heritage pops up in odd places every once in a while, as in his fondness for the Indians or a plate of good German food.

But me? Until last week, I'd barely even entered the state of Ohio. Dad's cousin (whose mother, Aunt Lolly, was Mama Lou's sister) married a gal from the Ohio River valley, and Mort & Melania's wedding was held in a church within shouting distance of the river. Other than for that one ceremony, I'd crossed the Ohio exactly once, en route to Saint Louis back in 1989, but then I went from Kentucky into Indiana. Needless to say, my ignorance of the Buckeye State was profound, and I reasoned that it was ludicrous for me to have so little first-hand knowledge of my roots. Thus, when Woodberry's annual spring break gave me (but not Kelly or the kids) a bit of free time, I suggested to Dad that we use the time to visit his birthplace.

My brother David, who often meets us for part of our spring break trips, was not at first very positive about the idea of visiting northern Ohio before the spring equinox, and I suppose he was right in that the lake was still largely frozen over. Other than one rainy morning, however, Dad and I stayed in Cleveland from Thursday afternoon to Monday afternoon without a single weather-related complaint. I recognize that this is a meteorological fluke, of course, as every Clevelander we met cheerfully announced, but four days of clear, cold sunshine isn't something I can really dislike.

Besides, there was a lot to do. Dad and I went to the Cleveland Lakeshore Park and birded, spotting dozens of unusual ducks--Redheads, Canvasbacks, Greater & Lesser Scaups--on the unfrozen waters close to shore. That was also where we spotted the trip's birding gem, my first-ever Common Goldeneye:



We dined at the Great Lakes Brewing Co. not once, but twice, enjoying pretzel-covered chicken, maple salmon, an absolutely enormous sausage sampler (waaaaaay too big for an appetizer), and a selection of delicious beers (my favorites being the Edmund Fitzgerald porter and the Holy Moses white ale. Once Dave arrived, with Mort in tow, we visited the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, marveling at everything from John Lennon's handwritten lyrics for "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" to Janis Joplin's glasses to one of Pete Townshend's unsmashed Les Pauls. Dad & I traveled to the edge of the Western Reserve campus, where the Cleveland Museum of Art was displaying a collection of Monet's works from Normandy. We visited with friends from both my online life (Hi, Christina & Fishboy!) and Dad's past life in Oakton, VA (Hi, John & Reeva!). We went to the houses where Dad spent his earliest years and his war years. And on Sunday morning, David, Mort, Dad & I went out to Lake View Cemetery, ignoring the famous spots like the graves of Eliot Ness and James Garfield and finding this site instead:



There in the Raymond family plot the four of us found the graves of August and Ruth, as well as Ruth's parents and siblings, with the grass just starting to turn green and buckeyes lying scattered everywhere. Daddy Joe and Mama Lou are buried near Ingold, NC, and lord only knows where the rest of our clan will lie in the end, but I find myself pleased to think that some of us are resting there, where the gulls fly overhead on the way to the shores of the Great Lakes, and where a sunny day is never, never to be taken for granted.

4:35 PM

March comes in like a lion... a lion clutching a copy of Literary Cash : Unauthorized Writings Inspired by the Legendary Johnny Cash in its mighty paws. Contribute to Readerville.com while you enjoy PC's short story "The Snow Chaser," Russell Rowland's "One More Wrong Thing," Gayle Brandeis's "Tumbling," Gretchen Moran Laskas's "Things Might Happen," and more.

Good news: Kelly gave me a new memory chip for the digital camera, a gift which will allow me to take more than 19 pictures over spring break.

The main gift I wanted to discuss today, however, was the one the boys got me: a CD of the Pogues' 1988 masterpiece, If I Should Fall from Grace with God. (Here's the original band-as-James-Joyce cover, left, and the more traditional new one, right, which was originally on the album's back cover.)



When this album came out in 1988, it immediately achieved an unusual status in my workplace, the Franklin Street Record Bar. The R-Bar was, unsurprisingly, staffed by people who cared passionately about music, which led to rather pointed disagreements about the albums we played in the store. I have never had a better boss than Richard ("Dickie") Layne, the longtime manager, but his tendency to throw on Mahler first thing in the morning wasn't his most admirable trait. He and the assistant manager, Shakin' Sherman Tate, were also the only two staff members who enjoyed playing the music of Appalachian folksinger Hazel Dickens, whose folk bona fides are beyond criticism, but whose sense of pitch simply made my fillings hurt. My own tastes weren't universally admired, either; every time I played XTC's 1986 Skylarking album, the devoutly Christian head clerk, Gayle Murrell, would walk out onto the sidewalk whenever the pointedly atheistic "Dear God" came on. Sherman's own religious beliefs were similarly affronted every time Gayle played Public Enemy's "Fight the Power," and he would turn down the volume or walk out onto the sidewalk himself rather than listen to Chuck D claim that Elvis was "a stone-cold racist" who "never meant shit to me."

In short, there were very few albums the whole staff could tolerate. Among those chosen few were the New Orleans-centric soundtrack of The Big Easy (a film I found intensely uninteresting, but whose soundtrack is an utter delight, except for the one song sung by Dennis Quaid) and the one yuletide album nobody ever got tired of, Vince Guaraldi's score for A Charlie Brown Christmas.

But before long, If I Should Fall from Grace with God reached a similar level of universal acceptance. The Pogues' punk attitude, combined with their use of traditional Irish instruments, made them good candidates for such acceptance, but on this album they also reached new heights of brilliance in their songwriting, and they expanded their appeal through their willingness to experiment with decidedly un-Irish musical styles, adding a Middle Eastern flair to "Turkish Song of the Damned" and a thoroughly Mexican groove to the breakneck "Fiesta." Add to that the gorgeous voice of Kirsty MacColl on "Fairytale of New York," a Christmas song that manages to be maudlin, scathingly funny, and heartbreakingly beautiful all at once, and you've got an album that could appeal to anyone in the Bar: me, Dickie, Gayle, Sherman, Sixties pop guru Keith Weston, alternative fan Liz Bennett, hard-rocking Jack McCook, avant-garde expert Glenn Boothe, club-pop enthusiast Rick Haughton, the whole crew, really.

Why then did I never buy this album on CD? I have no idea. It was one of those albums that so obviously needed to be a part of my collection that I must have assumed at some level that it was part of my collection (along with the two Pogues CDs I did already own, Red Roses for Me and Peace and Love.) I certainly never forgot about If I Should Fall... I learned (and frequently played) "Fairytale of New York" on the piano. I compared the Pogues' version of "The Rocky Road to Dublin" to the Chieftains' version (which is longer, but not nearly so energetic as the former). I even worked up an arrangement of the title track with my colleague Paul Vickers for one of Woodberry's open mic shows, one which we were unfortunately never able to play.

But I never actually had the music in hand. Maybe that's why I had the reaction I did on Thursday night.

The boys gave me the disc late that afternoon, and as we piled into the car to go to dinner in Charlottesville, I naturally popped the CD in. Kelly and I knew both Ian and Dixon were fans of such trad-punk outfits as the Dropkick Murphys and Flogging Molly, so we were enthusiastically pointing out that the Pogues were the innovators to whom those bands owed a great debt. That is, we were pointing that out when we weren't singing along. Shane MacGowan's slurred brogue may make many of his lyrics impenetrable, but that's no reason not to wail along with him, particularly when he's shouting out a clear lyric like "Twenty-fuckin'-five-to-one, me gamblin' days are done/ I bet on a horse called the Bottle of Smoke, and my horse won!"

But then we turned onto US 29 south, heading into the dusk, and Philip Chevron's "Thousands Are Sailing" came on. It's one of my favorite songs, one I hadn't heard in ages, a six-minute epic about immigrants fleeing Ireland's poverty and modern-day Irishmen walking in their footsteps in New York, and I was singing along, loud and bold.

And I choked up.

Honestly, it came out of nowhere. In my own Whitman's Sampler of ancestors, there are relatively few European nations unrepresented, but one of them is Ireland. I may have family from Poland, England, Germany, Wales, and even Lithuania, but so far as I know there's not a single Hibernian hanging on the family tree. There's thus no personal reason for me to get weepy about the trials and tribulations of the Irish. I've got no stake in the Troubles, nor do I feel any particular connection the historic upheavals of 1916 or Black '47. JFK's election wasn't a watershed event for me, and I don't wear the Green or the Orange for reasons other than camouflage or high visibility in the woods.

But there's something about the plaintive twang of Jem Finer's banjo, or the lonesome piping of Spider Stacy's pennywhistle, or MacGowan's whiskey-ravaged voice that simply can't be communicated, even when you imagine them as the setting of Chevron's verse:

In Manhattan's desert twilight
In the death of afternoon
We stepped hand-in-hand on Broadway
Like the first man on the moon
And "The Blackbird" broke the silence
As you whistled it so sweet
And in Brendan Behan's footsteps
I danced up and down the street
Then we said goodnight to Broadway
Giving it our best regards
Tipped our hats to Mister Cohan
Dear old Times Square's favorite Bard
Then we raised a glass to JFK
And a dozen more besides
When I got back to my empty room
I suppose I must have cried

How does anyone pack that much into one verse? How does one careen from dancing in the street to crying in a hotel room, breathing in nostalgia all the while? It shouldn't work. It should seem artificial beyond belief. At the very least, one should have to know the setting, the people, the attitudes, to feel anything when such a verse is sung. I've spent scant time in New York and feel no real attachment to it, and I've never so much as set foot on the Emerald Isle, but there I was, driving down a Virginia highway, tearing up and unable to finish the verse.

Maybe it's appreciation for the generosity of my sons. Maybe it's fondness for the voice of my wife, whose Irish heritage has been passed on to those sons. Maybe it's my own nostalgia for the old days at the Record Bar, a beloved store now long gone to corporate ownership, then rebranding, then oblivion. But I'd like to think that it's the gift of the Pogues themselves: to make everyone, for at least a brief moment or two, feel Irish. And if we can all do that, well, there's a chance that we'll recognize that we can all feel, well, human.

2:52 PM

Celebrate PC's birthday with a gift for yourself: a copy of Literary Cash : Unauthorized Writings Inspired by the Legendary Johnny Cash ! Contribute to Readerville.com while you enjoy PC's short story "The Snow Chaser," Russell Rowland's "One More Wrong Thing," Gayle Brandeis's "Tumbling," Gretchen Moran Laskas's "Things Might Happen," and more.

Well, here it is, the start of Year 45. I'm celebrating, so far, by drinking coffee, reading a few pages of Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers, and making a new playlist for myself. I decided I'd create a CD's worth of my favorite tunes, but as usually happens, I went waaaaaaaaaay over the 80-minute limit before I'd even finished examining the albums beginning with the letters A and B. Naturally, it's not entirely indicative of my tastes as a result--there's no Robyn Hitchcock, no Who, no They Might Be Giants--but it's not a bad snapshot of my musical tastes here at the end of Year 44: a little snarky, a little wistful, a little low-key, maybe, but full of choice melodies and pure pop goodness. Feel free to copy it on your own computers!

*Matthew Sweet/"Sick of Myself"
*The Church/"Just for You"
*Rod Stewart/"Maggie May"
*Todd Rundgren/"Cliche"
*Elvis Costello & the Attractions/"Crimes of Paris"
*Violent Femmes/"Gone Daddy Gone"
*Robert Palmer/"Looking for Clues"
*Radiohead/"(Nice Dream)"
*Billy Bragg/"St. Swithin's Day"
*Arlo Guthrie/"City of New Orleans"
*The Beatles/"Here Comes the Sun"
*Johnny Cash/"Field of Diamonds"
*The Beatles/"Blackbird"
*Ben Folds Five/"Boxing"
*Suzanne Vega/"In Liverpool"
*Brian Eno/"I'll Come Running"
*XTC/"Harvest Festival"
*R.E.M./"Nightswimming"
*Pete Townshend/"Slit Skirts"

Happy March!

5:29 PM