August 2009 Archives

Many a writer has tried his hand at capturing in prose the town where I grew up. Chapel Hill, however, is such a complex, multifarious beast that its essence almost defies description, especially when one is pressed for space.

Will Blythe did an excellent job of describing it in To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever, but he did so exclusively through his chosen lens of the Carolina-Duke basketball rivalry. The fictionalized version of it in Tim McLaurin's novel Woodrow's Trumpet takes a somewhat broader view, but still does so in service to another agenda, namely the plot. To really get Chapel Hill, I suspect one has to be concentrating on just one thing: getting Chapel Hill.

And it's hard to get. Its mixture of Northern and Southern, rural and urban, simple and sophisticated leaves the place looking downright mottled at times, and damn near contradictory at others. But every once in a while, an observer makes the Hopkins-like realization that the beauty of the Southern Part of Heaven is in fact pied beauty, and that makes the observation worthwhile.

Wells Tower's "Life on the Hill" is such an observation, a brief and loving slice of analysis as sweet as pound cake and as clear as the Carolina blue sky:


While traditionally Red State Carolina may scoff at Chapel Hill and Carrboro's dubious Southern bona fides, I submit that we have salvaged most of what is good about the Southern way of things and left the unpleasant bits at the curb. Our schools are excellent, and yoga is a local epidemic, yet on a summer night in Carrboro, you need not look far to find porches stocked with people plucking banjos with utmost sincerity. In our downtown, million-dollar green-built condominiums are springing up like kudzu shoots, but we still have springtime eruptions of old-growth azalea and dogwood blossoms to gobsmack a Savannahian. Free parking is increasingly hard to come by, but drive three miles to the north or west, and you are in swaying cornscapes and pasturelands comely enough to stop your heart.


Please, click the link and enjoy the whole thing. Even if you know as well as I do that no CHPD siren ever sounded as half as soft as a mourning dove's cry.


9:12 PM

Sunday night, for the ninth time, I sat myself down at the computer and focused every bit of football knowledge, gaming savvy, and wiseassery I possess on one thing: the Fantasy League of Gentlemen/Gentlewomen draft.  It's a fairly remarkable achievement, actually. Since 2001, my friends Dan, Greg H. Steve, Reed, Ken, Nan, Mike, and I have been dutifully assembling to draft teams and spend the fall in in competition with one another. Granted, Mike did take a year off, and we've brought in new friends (Greg J. and Chris) to take the place of those who have fallen by the wayside, but FLOGG has become an annual celebration of not only our competitive streaks, but our enduring friendship. I've known Dan more than 40 years now, known Reed, Ken, Nan, and Mike for over 30, and Greg H. for 20, so it's sort of amazing that we're even still talking to one another, let alone giving each other crap for drafting players too early. When Dan suggested the league as a way of keeping in touch with our old buddies from Chapel Hill, he was living in Chicago, but I fully appreciated the idea, and it's been a rousing success.

Not that I've won a FLOGG title yet. Dan has--last year. So have Reed, Ken, Mike, and both Gregs. Nan's won two. But yes, Steve and I are starting to look at each other nervously, wondering which of us will be the last original owner to win a championship.

Will it be this year? Hard to say. I've been drafting in spots 6-10 for the last seven years, which means my squads have done well enough to finish in the top half of the league every season, but never well enough to actually bring home the Dick Dinkle Trophy (named after our first commissioner.) Instead, I've concentrated on the creative aspects of playing in this league, where each owner role-plays a character, and anyone who wants to can compose a news article, poll, or epic poem for the league's website. (I also served as Commissioner last year, but have handed in my key to the executive washroom.)

This year, picking sixth, I resolved to shake things up a bit, reasoning that even if I failed miserably, I could at least do poorly enough to assure myself a good draft position next year. I thus watched as the expected big four running backs were tapped (Michael Turner, Adrian Peterson, Maurice Jones-Drew, and Matt Forte, in that order) and the Screaming Boiled Lobsters picked 2008 fantasy stud DeAngelo Williams. I had the option of taking LaDainian Tomlinson, once the top back in fantasy, albeit an older one coming off a disappointing year of nagging injuries. Should I make the expected move?

I said no, and drafted Cardinals wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald. This year there are few top-tier WRs, and I reasoned that shaking up my draft strategy should mean grabbing rare commodities while the grabbing was good. Despite the fact that my competitors began snatching up quarterbacks immediately (the Frumious Bandersnatchi, picking 7th, grabbed Drew Brees, and the Donkeys got Tom Brady with the 10th pick), I forced myself to hold off, reasoning that capable signal-callers would be available later. In the 2nd round I took 49ers RB Frank Gore; in the 3rd, with all the top-tier QBs already off the board, I opted for Saints RB Pierre Thomas. And then, when my 4th round pick came up, I noted that all the teams behind me had already drafted QBs; knowing I could wait one more round to grab my man, I first picked top tight end prospect Jason Witten of the Cowboys, then waited until my 5th-round pick provided me with new Bears signal-caller Jay Cutler.

Whether Cutler is going to be the great player I hope he is will of course not be determined for a while, but I feel good about getting the highest-ranked WR and TE in the NFL, as well as solid players elsewhere. I'm also happy about our keeper rules; if you draft a player in round 10 or later and keep him on your squad all season, you can keep him next year as well. I opted to hang on to Chargers WR Vincent Jackson, whom I'd drafted in round 13 last year, and who should be a solid #2 wideout for me. But when the late rounds came this year, I started looking for promising young talent, securing RBs Rashard Mendenhall and Shonn Greene, plus rookie WR Percy Harvin. (I also got veteran WR Laveranues Coles and my required kicker, Ryan Longwell.) Here's hoping they work out to the point where I have trouble deciding who to keep next year.

The draft itself is an exercise in cracking wise about subject near and far, but I think my best crack this year concerned stretch where several consecutive teams drafted wide receivers with reputations as selfish and slightly off-kilter. I surmised that years from now, geologists investigating the draft would discover this layer of Primadonnium and theorize that a blast of egotism had covered the landscape.

But the point is, I'm ready to go play with my friends now, and here's what I'll be playing with:

(You can read that however you like.))

QB: Jay Cutler, Kyle Orton
RB: Frank Gore, Pierre Thomas, Reggie Bush, Ray Rice, Rashard Mendenhall, Shonn Greene
WR: Larry Fitzgerald, Antonio Bryant, Laveranues Coles, Percy Harvin, Vincent Jackson
TE: Jason Witten
PK: Ryan Longwell
D: Bears

Ladies and gentlemen, your Fighting Coelacanths for 2009!


1:47 PM

...and suddenly, it was 1985.

Well, in a manner of speaking. My old friend/bandmate/bartender Wendy Shadburn (a/k/a Taz Halloween) and I recently reconnected through the magic of Facebook, and this morning she posted the audio of a recording we made at the height of our former band's creative powers: "Cows from Hell" by Terminal Mouse.

If you follow that link (or try this one if the other doesn't work), you'll discover what happens when five people with too much creativity and no sense of restraint start farting around at band practice when they ought to be rehearsing their set. It's a seven-minute epic of beef, yuppies, blood, and revenge, and it was never duplicated, no matter how hard we tried.

The recording is a four-track job done at the home of Buck Parks, who plays guitar and sings background vocals here, with me on lead vocal and keyboard, Tom Reichenberger on drums, Taz on background vocals ("Where's the BEEF?!"), and the late Carey Floyd on bass.  Alas, the last ten seconds or so of the original recording have been cut off, so it ends rather abruptly, but that's not out of character for a song that has both sung and spoken-word sections, not to mention two main musical themes and two bridges, none of which share anything but a key signature. 

In that, it's a typical Terminal Mouse song. TM was founded in 1984 when Buck and Wendy, formerly of the Holla Band, started jamming with Tom and Carey. Until June of that year, I was in Manchester, England, but Carey had written me to invite me along, since the two of us had hit it off musically in the John Santa Band a couple of years before. He had originally said the group's direction was going to be something like Talking Heads, but it didn't exactly settle into that groove, especially because everyone but Tom was writing songs, and all of us had broad, eclectic tastes. Buck's love of Van Morrison and the shuffle beat gave his tunes (such as "Answer" and "Turnaround") a reasonably unified Southern-fried soul sound, but the rest of us were all over the map. Carey was writing manic ska tunes like "Another Altogether Too Early Alarm Clock Morning" and slow burning funk like "Breathing Room." I was letting my XTC obsession flower completely--at one point I'd gotten the band to cover no fewer than four XTC songs--but I also contributed "400 Chemicals" (a failed attempt at a Dixie Dregs-style instrumental turned into a pop ska dance), "Tiny Bubbles" (a lilting XTC-style tune), and "Camouflage," a straight-up big-hook pop-rock number.

Wendy was really pushing the envelope, though, exploring alternate tunings and pushing everyone to try new things. Her masterpiece, IMHO, was "Drenched Red Mouse," where she handled guitar and lead vocals to sing a sparse, spooky, polyrhythmic tune about menstruation. Carey stayed on bass, but I reduced my keyboard to percussive sound effects and concentrated on background vocals. Buck made the biggest change, taking to a small drum kit of his own to provide a basic backbeat while Tom went absolutely nuts.  (We decided Tom was playing "lead drums," while Buck was on "rhythm drums.") 

But we did came together on cover tunes. Our version of "Up the Ladder to the Roof" really shone, thanks largely to Wendy's vocal and Tom's complex 12/8 rhythm, and we did "History Never Repeats" and "Save It for Later" well, too. Our best cover may have been "Piece of My Heart," though, and that's all on Wendy; she is the ONLY person who should be allowed to do that song, barring the resurrection of Janis.

"Cows from Hell," however, was the only group writing we ever did, and it was largely an accident. I guess we were all punchy and tired of rehearsing the same tunes--some of which Buck & Wendy had been doing since the Holla Band's heyday--so when I happened to produce a growly noise on my synthesizer and Carey commented, "Ah--Cows from Hell," it started a lengthy five-way brainstorm about what a song called "Cows from Hell" ought to sound like.

I favored the slow, clopping tune that became the chorus, but Tom objected, saying it would have to be a fast-paced punk song, which he immediately started pounding out. Buck came up with the riff for the faster version, to which Carey immediately welded the bass part, and we decided those two pieces could go together and form the song... except that we needed a bridge. Naturally, with this many ideas flying around, two bridges were quickly constructed. Carey and Tom put together the punchy stop-and-go bridge (that has always sounded to me like the evil opposite of the bridge from the Pressure Boys' "Where the Cowboys Went") and Buck crafted the "stampede" riff, which Tom warped into a wonderful little bridge by leaving out one beat.

Wendy and I, meanwhile, were tossing out lyrical ideas. I came up with a lot of the more obvious stuff, like the Harleys and milking machines, but she was the one who threw out the crucial idea that yuppies had to somehow be involved, and from that point, it was largely a matter of me improvising the tale of the vengeful Hellcows. (I should note that I borrowed the names "Chip and Claire" from a song of the same name by legendary Dartmouth iconoclast Buddy Holocaust, but I doubt anyone other than Andy Cohen, CHHS '81/Dartmouth '85, would have ever heard both Buddy and Terminal Mouse.) With the music cobbled together, and everyone tossing out more smart-ass ideas than we'd have thought possible, we eventually brought the whole thing together into a monstrous seven-minute epic which we premiered (I think) at this Halloween show at Rhythm Alley:

And now that I listen to it with nearly a quarter-century's distance, I can hear what I've never noticed before: it really, REALLY sounds like a Frank Zappa tune.

TM was a grand creative explosion, by far my most artistically satisfying music ensemble experience, and I can't thank Wendy enough for resurrecting it on the web. I hope like hell Tom and Buck get to listen to it, and I feel fairly sure that Carey's got an ear out for it up in Rock & Roll Heaven as well.

Oh, and I can confess it at last: when we picked the name in 1984, I had no idea what a terminal mouse was, so I didn't understand why the others were laughing so hard.  Ah, youth.



9:02 AM

At the Food Lion

 

I miss the taste of Orange Quangaroos.

Of all the cereals I powered down

back in my sugar-laden, milk-wet youth,

I miss it most. The tiny corn puffs, round

and orange, more pastel than red or gold,

as if their glow had faded in the sun,

took to the dairy whiteness like a foal

still nursing, still a bit too young to run.

I know the taste was much more sweet than tart,

a citrus with the corners sanded down,

but even now, I make room in my cart

and dream of aisles in which it might be found,

and curse nostalgia's lying on my tongue,

and sigh, and miss the taste of being young.

7:26 PM

Living as we do only about 30 minutes from the Shenandoah National Park, it's become something of a family tradition to hike parts of it from time to time. When visitors arrive from out of town, a trip up White Oak Canyon or a climb up to the cliffs at Little Stony Man is often in order, but there's one hike I've done only with two groups: fellow Woodberryites (either students or faculty or both) and family members.  That's the hike up Old Rag Mountain.

Old Rag juts out eastward from the SNP, far enough away from Skyline Drive that it doesn't attract gobs of motor tourists, but it draws hikers like flies to honey because of its spectacular views (from a bare-granite summit) and its challenging Ridge Trail rock scramble. The Ridge Trail comes in from the north, up a series of switchbacks through the forest, until it emerges onto the granite at the mountain's eastern end; then it's time to get your arms and hands and back involved, because the scramble will require you to use them all if you intend to reach the summit. It's a bracing climb, and fun as hell, but it's not short, and it's not easy. I think I must have climbed the mountain at least once a year since the spring of '96, and all but one of those climbs were up the Ridge Trail.

With the family, things have been less frequent. Kelly and I attempted the Ridge Trail one fall day in about 1998, but we had to turn around a quarter-mile or so from the summit in order to pick up the boys from school. Because of the sheer necessity of strength, stamina, and reach, I didn't even attempt to take the boys up for some years. Ian and I took a father-son trip in the fall of 2003, but due to scheduling and equipment issues, I didn't manage to make the climb with Dixon until 2008. I guess that counts as a family tradition.

But as the clock ticks down toward the end of one phase of our family life, Kelly has been urging us to act on that tradition one more time. In June or so, she started pushing for us to take a family hike up Old Rag. I think Ian might have been willing to try the Ridge Trail again, but Dixon was a bit less enthusiastic about that option:


Yes, he's a charter member of the National Sarcasm Society (Motto: "Like We Need Your Support.")

Luckily, there's an alternative: the Saddle Trail up from Berry Hollow, which doesn't have quite the spectacular valley views or athletic challenges of the Ridge Trail, but is also less of a total-body workout and slightly less of a climb (only about 1500 feet of elevation change, as opposed to the Ridge Trail's 2200.)

With Kelly's work schedule leaving her free on Friday, we packed up the car with sandwiches and trail mix from Yoder's Country Market and headed out into the sun. The high at home had been predicted to be 82, and it's usually about ten degrees cooler atop the Blue Ridge, but since both the fire road up from the Berry Hollow parking lot and the Saddle Trail itself wind through the shade, we knew we'd be comfortable no matter what. We left the parking lot at 1:30 and started up the road, but at the intersection of road and trail, Kel and Dixon decided it was time to lighten their packs by a sandwichload:




2:13 PM