First: J, Janet, and Cal moved on out to the burbs (Pikesville, yo), and we had the pleasure of brunching with them last weekend. The new house is freaking fantastic and utterly bizarre in totally good ways. The best way being that the main living spaces are on one floor, so Cal (and for the moment, his back-challenged parents) will no longer have to contend with the hundreds of stairs that comprised the better part of their living space back in Butcher's Hill. J has posted about the new pad here.
Second: I got my knee surged! Yes, after a stupid work-related injury (I define hanging out with my neighbors and playing sports that we're all too old and enfeebled to engage in "work"), I required some rad surgery on the old left knee. For those really deep into the Jawbox trivia, it is indeed the same knee that was featured on the cover of the Tongues/Ones and Zeros seven inch from 1992. And you're a nerd if you read that last sentence and knew or cared what I was talking about. Sorry, cheese. I have posted about it at length and with pictures on my guerrilla blog, the Barbotian Ocean 2.0.
Go off and be wicked, but Santa's watching, so not too wicked. Listen: Menomena, Radiohead (yes, believe the hype, the new record is great, shut up haters), The Thermals, Tokyo Police Club. God bless us everyone.
- posted by Bill @ 3:14 PM, Sunday, December 09, 2007
This piece originally appeared in Smug 'zine in April of 1997, 10 long, crusty years ago. I got home from the gym today and came across it in a random act of ZoomInfo on myself, and thought it was still pretty fresh. Enjoy, or something.
To call him a fat man is not only politically insensitive but also an understatement: the man is a house. No brick rambler either: a full-on duplex or even a small cluster of moderately-priced townhomes would have a hard time getting this guy up on a see-saw. This fat man, this duplex, became a fixture of my early attempts at this year's resolution, regaining some of my high-school hardbody at the gym. No matter what time I arrived or left the locker room, he was always there. He would sit for an unnaturally long time in the same spot by his locker, talking to whomever walked past about whatever was up, always smiling, pleasant and disturbingly moist. And except for the shoes, he was always completely stark raving naked.
So the fat was never really the issue so much as the naked. "Why the hell," I screamed at him in my inner voice, "is a 300-pound forty-year-old man paying $650 a year at a health club to sit around all day being naked? Don't you people have jobs?" But I was the new guy (not to mention considerably smaller and considerably more clothed), so me and my inner voice never got up the nerve to get the scoop.
Who am I to talk anyway: as a so-called "professional musician," I have been euphemistically "self-employed" for the better part of this decade. I try to shelve any notion that just because a man isn't wearing a desk-tie-and-suit outfit (or in the fat man's case, any outfit at all) from dawn 'til dusk doesn't mean he can't be if not employed at least, well, gainful. "Yes, I am different!" my inner voice shouts. "I lead the exciting life of a self-starting indie-record-label operative, professional rock musician, and moreover, I'm a wiry little cuss! I make my own hours! These other cretins are all ... erm ... unemployed, or at least, weirdos! What in the name of god are all of these able-bodied men doing naked at the gym at 2 PM on a workday?"
You don't know anything about what goes on in the locker room until you know Fred. Fred is a transplant from Nigeria, a place he still calls "home" even though he hasn't been there since 1978. He is technically what sociologists might call "invisible people;" he cleans the toilets, squeegees the mirror, picks up the discarded towels. But Fred is far from invisible. "WHY YOU QUERYING ME" Fred is screaming at Pablito, the subordinate towel boy, an authentic invisible. "WHAT ARE YOU SOME KIND OF LAWYER" That inimitable and unimitatable African monotone - note the lack of any inflection or punctuation - makes his presence in the room all too known. It also sucks you into conversation with Fred.
The fact that he's "the help" doesn't stop all the retired white guys from getting all buddy-buddy with him while giving him grief about the towel bin being too full or too empty or too whatever. The white guys talk to Fred like he's a good dog: they'd pick him up by the ears if he wasn't twice their size. But Fred never seems to care about how somebody talks to him (maybe he hears in monotone, too?), and since everybody talks to him, I figure he's my best source to figure out what these jokers are up to besides not pitching in to the Gross Domestic Product.
But I'm a bit shy around strangers, so I have to rehearse my line several times to make sure I don't come off as a complete jackass when I do actually open my mouth to speak. Which, of course, ensures that I positively will sound like a jackass. More so when I open my mouth and ask Fred, "So, Fred, this might sound kind of weird, but I'm a freelance writer and I'm working on ..." and turn around to look at him. And now Fred, everybody's buddy, health club employee of the month, special envoy of the People's Republic of Nigeria, is also standing there stark raving naked. "WHAT ARE YOU SAYING MY MAN?"
So my piece about what all of these characters at the club are doing there in the middle of that Ramadan for America, Regular Business Hours, turned into a piece about naked guys. It turns out a few of them are real estate agents between closings, a few more are bouncers at clubs, one sells sex toys and leather goods on the web (www.bedtime-stories.com), one took an early retirement from the police and another is the night man at the Washington Post distribution center, according to Fred, who caps off each day with a quick jaunt on the treadmill and a subsequent period of nudity.
No story there, until you see them naked, which I do now, and all of the time. They come out of the shower naked, they shave naked, they fix their hair naked, they talk sports naked, they sit down and look at the walls naked for hours at a time. For all I know, they leave the damn club naked and go work at the Washington Post Naked Distribution Center. Naked Nightclub. Naked Real Estate. Naked Sex Toys, of course. Naked or not, it seems like they are the ones who should be asking me what I'm doing there in the middle of the day fully clothed. Besides being gainful.
Walking down the street with my dog the other morning I ran across a couple of neighborhood kids beaning the bejeezus out of an aluminum can with a slingshot. The pellets, rocks and particles were flying all over the place, not too close to me, but close enough for an old-fashioned white-guy "Heads up fellas, coming through." But that doesn't stop kids these days, intent as they are upon becoming liberal homosexual glue-sniffing campaign-contributing video ciphers; no, these punks just kept right on plugging away at the old (and now thoroughly unrecyclable) can.
As a Shakespearean aside, and more as a test for myself to see if I could really say what was on my mind to a couple of twelve-year-olds sorely in need of a whipping, I muttered in my best old man mutter, "Don't you kids have to be in school?" Very Abe Vigoda, I admit, but one of those things that just slips out. But the friggin' wiseguy with the slingshot had an ace up his sleeve: "Don't you have a job, naked man?" Touché. Ouch. Can't fight 'em, join 'em.
- posted by Bill @ 1:47 PM, Saturday, April 28, 2007
See some stupid stuff on my new tumblog at http://bbarbot.tumblr.com. Then go off and do something like read a book or walk in the park. It's springtime, stop spending so much time being a "content consumer." Be a wine and oxygen consumer. Be a beer and baseball consumer. Be a light and sound consumer. Do not Twitter.
Yes, that is a BOSTON quote. Because BOSTON ROCKS. I've been thinking a lot about all the young, loud, and snotty punk rock I listened to post-1984 (which I consider the "year of my conversion," when my cool friend Joan Chasson let me borrow her copy of "London Calling," and when Dave Holley and I went to Kemp Mill Records in Rockville and argued for ten minutes about which one of us should buy the No Trend record, and who was gonna buy the Minor Threat 7" comp [red jacket - I came out the winner], and I somehow wrangled a copy of "Urgh! A Music War" on cassette from my friend Fikri Yucel who was new wave when new wave wasn't cool) as I have been listening to Rush, Boston, and AC/DC. Now, AC/DC has had closet cool lo these many years with punkers because, let's face it, even though they weren't punk, they were total punks, and that made them okay among the less doctrinaire of us who were into music for the music, anyway.
But Boston? And - gasp - Rush? Boston remains, and will probably always remain, a guilty XM pleasure for me - something I won't turn off when it comes on, but that I don't really find myself craving, the way ex-smokers NEVER LOSE THAT YEN. Rush, my friends, is another matter. I stumbled across a fabulous site (fabulous if you are a complete and utter music nerd - join me, brothers and sisters!) which I have gone so far as to bookmark: ProgArchives.com. It is a wonder to behold, if you have absolutely no interest in retaining any cred whatsoever with people who used to think you were cool.
All you proggers reading this (and I bet there are more than a few, because, let's face it, proggers are nerds, and Jawbox was a nerd band, and DeSoto is in many ways still a nerd label, so if you're here, you're probably a nerd and hopefully damn proud of it) might think, "F* you, pally, I still am cool! And so is Dream Theater!" Of course, you are wrong, but I'm not here to argue why. If you don't know, you are proving my point, and if you do, then you are also proving my point - this is what we call in Philosophy 101 a "no-win situation for proggers."
(Speaking of Philosophy 101, my old friend Joe Cruz is now a philosophy professor at my alma mater, Williams College, and still, god willing, has his 6-string Specter bass and still, god willing, LOVES RUSH).
I digress (my lifetime habit, I know). The point is that I found ProgArchives.com and spent about 3 hours (that I was supposed to be working - don't tell my boss, wait, I am my boss, dang, I will have to fire myself one of these days) totally geeking on Magma, King Crimson, Can, and ... you guessed it, Rush. Damned if I didn't download (I feel justifiably, since I have owned the vinyl of the records in question for over 20 years) "La Villa Strangiato," "Cygnus X-1" (prologue and all three movements of Book One!), and "Jacob's Ladder," and spent the next three days playing them constantly. I did. I admit it. Let he who is without prog sin cast the first stone. Mm-hmm. That's what I thought.
The point ... there was a point in there somewhere ... ah yes, the point being, and someone please write this down (someone besides me, because nothing is real on the Internet until it has been repeated/quoted ad nauseam): Be Not Afraid of Rush. Geddy Lee is still a bit of a stretch on the vocal front (so is Jon Anderson, but yes, yes, my friends, I like Yes), and Neal Peart's (over)playing is a bit, erm, exaggerated at times, but man, those guys were tight, and had a remarkable ear for melody, played delicate and heavy with equal aplomb, and had really awful hair.
So go forth now. Especially that dude that was complaining about the days when all I had to rant about were wallet chains and Hot Pocket wrappers on my lawn. Savor the prog. I think I'm going bald.
I have been revving my engines for a good month or two to write an election-oriented piece, but whenever I get started, I find SO MUCH to write about, it's difficult to know where to begin. I can only hope that the recent flap about the missing tonnage of explosives continues to damage the President's hopes come Tuesday, but at this point, I suspect minds for the most part are made up. I personally don't know any undecideds - my crew, my neighborhood, and my whole state are all solidly Democratic, or at least voting that way - but I can't imagine how at this point someone can really fail to see the choice at hand. Which, in my opinion is: (Bush) Corporate glad hander; Friend of the military-industrial complex's efforts to maintain a state of constant war; A failure as an economic leader; A "Christian" who sees no conflict in killing over 12,000 Iraqis, many civilians; An isolationist; An abject failure as a "uniter, not a divider;" Unable to see that "staying the course" works in sailing, but not in executing a military exercise in which change is a constant; Whipping boy of the international energy cartel. (Kerry): Not Bush.
I wish I were in love with Kerry, but I, like many Kerry voters, am more interested in dethroning Bush than in installing Kerry. I hope that I come to like him more after he wins - god, I hope he wins. The idea of "four more years of Bush - how bad could it really be?" did cross my mind, but then I realized that, free of the worries of re-election, four more years of Bush hands the powers of government (rebuilding the Supreme Court, forcing absurd constitutional amendment down Congress's throat, maintaining the aforementioned constant state of war, the list goes on) to Karl Rove, Dick Cheney (Larouche may not be wrong in calling him Satan's right-hand man), Donald Rumsfeld, et al.
If Bush were just the innocuous, ineffectual dullard the (so-called "liberal") media would have us believe, that would be one thing; our system of checks and balances is supposed to take care of situations like that. But with the ability to restructure one-third of that system in its own image (the judicial branch, rebuilt by an 8-year Bush reign, would no longer serve its role as a watchdog of the legislative and executive branches), and a pandering House of Representatives (the Republican-controlled 108th Congress has been rightly considered the least effective congress in this country's history), checks and balances no longer come into play for a second Bush administration. Electing Bush this time around hands a blank check to his cohorts to further isolate America in its efforts to throttle the global energy markets through cronyism (Israel, Saudi Arabia), war (Iraq), or threat of war (Iran, North Korea), while deluding well-intentioned conservative moralists who think they're electing the guy who gives a shit about gay marriage and the revocation of abortion rights.
The smoke screen of "family values" continues to be mind-numbingly effective in hiding the sinister, anti-Christian actions of the current administration. I wish Christian preachers would spend more time in the pulpit asking their congregations, "What would Jesus do if he were president?" Would Jesus declare a war on Rome, then attack the Samaritans, because they were easier to find? Would Jesus lie about it afterwards? Would Jesus declare that gay marriage is eroding the family values of this country, while ignoring a close to 50% divorce rate among heterosexual married couples? I am not a Christian, but I am sympathetic to the moral teachings of Christianity (and Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, etc. - organized religion has many problems, but for the most part, good intentions and a sincere desire to do the right thing is usually not one of them). It blows my mind how many Christians have been bamboozled by this President's smoke and mirrors. Talk about a diversionary tactic.
Anyway, I've gone on much longer than I had planned. Once I get going, I just start rolling, and I fear that my arguments become less effective the longer I go on - as I mentioned before, it's hard to know where to start; it's also hard to know where to stop. Vote your conscience on Tuesday, but see through the web of political tricks (Kerry is not without sin in this regard, too, but his are far less sinister and destructive) before you make your choice.
War In Iraq. Anybody see the excellent The Minority Report? There it is. Catch 'em before they've committed the crime, and crime rate goes down. Easy math. Did Saddam Hussein commit other crimes? Crimes that could be considered by the sane as atrocities, even? Of course. But where were we then, with the swift sword of Bushian justice? Hearing the formerly sane Mr. Blair exclaim that, even if those darned elusive weapons of mass destruction are never found, Saddam got what was coming to him because he's a big old meany who did some other bad things worthy of a foreign invasion undermines every last principle of U.S. and probably even British criminal justice. We didn't catch you for murder, but we caught you for shoplifting, so make yourself comfortable in this wooden chair while these nice fellas strap you down and shave your temples.
Another American Family that Supports President Bush and Our Troops. Nick and I (that's my aforementioned two-year-old son, for those not familiar) took the back way to and from the pool this summer, which meant driving frequently past a sign in front of a neighbor's house more often than I cared to that claimed that the occupants of said house are "Another American Family that Supports President Bush and Our Troops." Every last one of the dozen-odd times we went past, I was so sorely tempted to head directly down to the basement to make my own sign: "Another American Family that Thinks President Bush and His Insane Foreign Policy and Neglect of the Economy is Driving America Into the Ground." But I didn't.
The whole "Support Our Troops" bag that started back in the first Gulf War (full disclosure: a war I much more actively protested to the point of being spattered with someone else's blood in an unfortunate billy club incident) really puzzles me: What better way to support our troops than to insist that they be KEPT OUT OF HARM'S WAY UNLESS NATIONAL SECURITY FACES A LEGITIMATE THREAT?
I am not so foolish as to think that the definition of "legitimate" is anything more than as fluid as the whim of whoever holds the trigger over on Pennsylvania Avenue, but the idea that to be AGAINST THIS WAR is somehow tantamount to being AGAINST OUR TROOPS is fully implied by these silly, boorish, anti-intellectual, jingoistic stickers/signs/t-shirts. I am FOR our troops. Be as namby-pamby liberal as you want, but face the facts: we need a military to protect as against the aforementioned legitimate threats. What I am AGAINST: having our troops killed in a power play by a guy who has one goal in life: to be re-elected.
Iraq is a quagmire. White House apologists claim that all we need is more time, as if a country whose infrastructure, both physical and political, has been completely and violently upended by a foreign force with dubious motives will suddenly heal itself. The administration, in a hilariously ironic turnabout, admits that we do need more troops, as long as they aren't American! Imagine the nerve - ignoring world opinion (non-UK western Europe, the UN, all of our non-Israel Middle Eastern allies) to launch the war, then demanding help to clean up the mess we made from the same! How do Rumsfeld and the formerly respectable Colin Powell keep their jobs? Oh I know, their boss is a bigger moron than they are!
Is anyone besides me livid at the fact that this quagmire is currently costing us some $87 billion dollars more than we have to pay for it, and that every last penny many of us paid in federal taxes last year is going to pay to rebuild a country that every last penny of our federal taxes from the year before went to destroy?!?!?! I simply cannot stop vomiting every time I make out that check to the IRS (I pay my taxes quarterly, so there's a lot of puking going on around here).
Anyway, next time you see a "Support Our Troops" sticker (locater hint: look for a little cartoonish pirate-like guy pissing on either a Ford or Chevy logo, scan left over the large, slanted "3", and you'll probably find it thereabouts), consider asking the driver to support our troops by getting them the hell out of the quagmire that is Iraq.
Here, Have One Fifth of a Pizza. From the Shift Gears Entirely department: On vacation in the lovely Rehoboth Beach (yes, this is my way of apologizing to anyone from Delaware who may have been annoyed by my "humorist"-style jabs at Delaware a few months back - see below. Rehoboth Beach is lovely, and even during high season, more diverse, and leaps and bounds more livable, cosmopolitan, interesting, and clean than DC), I bought and prepared a "Freschetta" rising crust pizza for Kim and myself (Nick had already eaten something substantially more healthy, so no, I was not starving him). Delicious as it was, I couldn't help but read the label (more disclosure: I am a compulsive label reader; making sure you don't get hidden meat products in your apparently vegetarian meals painfully opens your eyes to all the other crap mass-market food companies are foisting on the American public - pray, what in jah's name is disodium inosinate and what is it doing in my Morningstar Farms veggie sausages?), and learn that:
1. The pizza serves five; 2. Each serving contains about 14 grams of fat.
Fair enough. But ... hey, wait a minute! A pizza serves five? That makes each serving ... one fifth of a pizza!
My "I'm being raped by shysters" alarm started going off. What special pizza wheel must the marketing wizards over at Freschetta have that can evenly slice a pizza into fifths? The answer: there is none (unless you are so talented with the wheel that, upon reaching center, you are uncannily able to take an exact 72-degree turn, in which case you should be on That's Incredible, not eating pizza). So, the nub of my gist: If you're in marketing, just be honest about how much fat, calories, sugar, heroin, whatever, there is in your product. Do not base your product labeling on absolutely fictional assumptions about how much of your product people are going to eat: tell us what's in it and stop BULLSHITTING US.
Last piece of advice before I bid you goodnight: avoid Burger King's Triple Cheeseburger. Just don't do it. Someone much smarter than all of us has a grand scheme all worked out to make a trillion dollars out of Americans all dying from fat pains. Don't give them your money. Give it instead to the Fed, so the powers that be in the White House can spend your hard-earned money blowing some other unsavory little third-world bully into the bronze age.
Soundtrack provided by Stereolab's The Groop Played Space Age Bachelor Pad Music
- posted by Bill @ 9:35 PM, Saturday, September 06, 2003
