G'Phwarg-Glarb-Flang -- ROCK!

Alexi Laiho of Children of Bodom. Freddie got this one off the DiamondVision; the live ones were not so good.

Merriwether Post Pavilion, Columbia, Md, April 26, 2008: Gigantour. Headliners: MegaDeth; openers (in order of appearance): High on Fire, Job for a Cowboy, Children of Bodom, In Flames, Megadeth.

When I was in college, my then-girlfriend left our school to go live in Boston. She ended up sharing a house with members of a struggling New Wave band called the Zoo Types.

(Wow. Here's a kick in the stomach: Googling the Zoo Types, I found out that their leading light, Tas Calo, died just last month. The guy who posted the linked announcement, Screeg Neegis, was a fixture around the house. Jesus. Memory. Th' fuckin' Internet and its psychic powers... Tas was one of the Good Ones. I'm slightly devastated.)

At any rate (now that I have my emotions under control), I have a memory of the Zoo Types, one of those recollections that plant themselves into your consciousness and then expand and flower as time reveals their fundamental truth. They decorated their house with marvelous band memories, little bits of flotsam that had crossed their path, the mementos of rock-n-roll veterans.

Taped to the refrigerator was a manifesto written by that very selfsame Tas Calo, the band's bassist. It read, in part, "I will never again play in a band in which the bass parallels the guitar."

(I mean, holy fuck! The guy crosses my mind for the first time in nearly thirty years, and I find out he died a month ago! Please, let me regain my composure...)

What Tas meant by his slightly gnomic declaration, was that, in the Post-Punk Era, the era of Rock-and-Roll Dumbness was over. If the bass plays the root note of the chord the guitar is playing, in essence, the band is playing "In-Na-Gadda-Da-Vida." The whole band is playing one stupid blooze riff in unison, and the results. while providing a nicely satisfactory heavy sound, are boring, boring, bow-ring.

The New Paradigm, according to Tas' manifesto, was what Paul McCartney, James Jamerson and Brian Wilson had already been doing for years: Creative rock-bass playing, choosing notes that somehow comment on a harmony, or widen the sonic palette of an arrangement. Take a listen to Colin Moulding's bass playing with XTC: Pure bass heaven. That's where Tas Calo wanted to go. Intelligent bass. Sophisticated bass. Bass that's been to college.

You can call me a philistine if you want -- I can take it -- but Heavy Metal has always shrieked to me of bass-paralleling-guitar. It's actually an unfair, knee-jerk judgment: Listen to the bass in "Smoke On the Water" -- it's actually doing some pretty interesting things, for all the song's Spinal Tap dumbness: Playing eighth-notes to the guitar's quarter-notes, Roger Glover actually takes the riff to nice places, commenting on it, embellishing it.

Which brings me to the concert under review. When my son brought Heavy Metal back into my roots-and-jazz-obsessed life, I didn't appreciate its presence. I think the last time I came into contact with it was a late-night "Headbangers' Ball" episode in the Eighties -- perhaps I'd fallen asleep in front of Saturday Night Live, I don't know. I do remember thinking that hair-circles were pretty fucking stupid, that the relentless hair-thrashing must lead to sore necks in the morning, and that the music was all parallel bass-and-guitars.

My eyes have been opened, and yet they remain closed. The first two acts, High On Fire and Job for a Cowboy, just couldn't have sucked worse. High on Fire -- granted, they did thank MegaDeth for even including them on the tour, so that was kinda sweet, I suppose -- but good Lord, did they suck. Job for a Cowboy, a quintet, had a fine drummer, but the stagecraft was hilariously overdone: every sixteen bars, the four-man front line would switch positions so that each instrument was playing to a different section of the theater -- Cordless Clusterfuck Choreography, I think we could deem it without cavil. The first time I laughed at it, I looked cautiously over at Freddie to gauge his reaction: To my immense relief, it was clear that he understood just exactly how jive the whole thing was too. Good kid.

Then, the great revelation of the night: Children of Bodom were fuckin' excellent! I raised the devil horns! They suffered ever so slightly from the destroyed-vocal-chords school of HM singing -- H'm flarg-m-grbl-blag! delivered from the throat of Cthulhu Himself -- but that seems to be pretty much the Way You Do It these days. But I was able, amid the Sturm und Drang, to detect actual lyricism -- moments of, like, actual melody radiating forth. And Alexi Laiho can fuckin' shred! I was quietly pleased that my son, the flesh of my flesh, showed the excellent taste to pick a quite fine band to go teenaged-gaga over.

I do have to say, I was impressed by the drumming in every minute of five-and-a-half hours of Heavy Metal. The boys in the audience (about 90% of the house, average age about 20) were glomming onto the guitar shreddage; I was most impressed with the drumming. So that's where all the great modern drummers went! Seriously, keeping sixteenth-notes going on two kick-drums is seriously athletic work, and every one of these guys kept it up for minutes at a time.

In fact, that's what started me thinking about bass playing in HM in the first place. That concert-space was rigged to let those sixteenth-note kick-drums just roar; the bass guitar was pretty much a sonic afterthought. So if the Kick-Drum Is King, why, the thought occurs, not let the bass do some independent work? Why not let it reach for color notes, for non-root component notes? It's not like the bottom end is gonna suffer, with all that enormously compressed Heavy Metal Thunder coming from the kick drum?

Oh, and, by the way...

...MegaDeth can just suck my cock.

Calculated, slick, professional, whatever you want to call it, it was exactly the same fucking show I saw in 1976, at the already-washed-up Uriah Heep's gig at the Koncertgebauw in the Hague. My first rock show. All of 16 years old, I walked away nauseated. Same smarmy showmanship. Same self-satisfied rockstar chest-puffing. Same fuckin' stage moves, even: On prearranged cue, the bass and the second lead guitar skip across the stage and switch places, play to alternate sides of the house. Yecch. Lame shreddage, feeble audience-puffery, clearly rehearsed "sponteneity." Revolting.

They did open the bass up, though. Oh -- and the only harmony singing of the night -- if limited to about four bars in the opening number. That's why they're the pros.

I'd like to see the same audience turn out for Gid Tanner and the Georgia Skillet Lickers. See what happens. Yes, sir.

Pray For Me

Or at least my precious, precious eardrums...

I am taking Freddie this afternoon to see Gigantour at Merriwether Post. Perhaps you have not been privileged to know of this phenomenon that is sweeping the nation's youth; I know I hadn't heard of it until Freddie started following me around the house, making sighing noises, and muttering, "I wanna see Children of Bottom!"

Huh?

Turns out Children of Bodom, a hard-rockin', not-talkin' Finnish outfit, is touring with In Flames (Sweden) and MegaDeth (The Eighties) this summer. This is what I have voluntarily subjected myself to, for the love of a son.

Ah, well. You'll find me cowering behind the concession stand, fingers in my ears, humming Buddy Holly songs to myself as I gently rock back and forth. You know. Self-comforting behavior.

Gimme Some o' That Technology!

I've been snuffling around at Wikipedia, trying to figure out the answer to a conundrum for my book. Not to quote it or anything (oooh, you naughty boy!) but just to understand the thing.

I've "known" as a matter of received knowledge that these old Victor 78s I've been listening to rather obsessively could be no longer than three minutes, because that's how much a 78 side could contain. But as I look at the timings of these things in digital format (because, pout pout, my editor won't buy me a Victrola and a stack of eyewateringly rare and expensive 78s, the catchpenny swine), many of them are quite a bit longer than that. In particular, "Darlin' Cora," recorded by B. F. Shelton with Ralph Peer in 1927, is 3:50 long, according to iTunes.

At any rate. My problem to solve. But reading a Wiki article on the history of recording technology, I came across this paragraph, which elicited a hearty guffaw. Also, I laughed.

In the 1930s radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi developed a system of magnetic sound recording using steel tape. This was the same material used to make razor blades, and not surprisingly the fearsome Marconi-Stille recorders were considered so dangerous that technicians had to operate them from another room for safety. Because of the high recording speeds required, they used enormous reels about one metre in diameter, and the thin tape frequently broke, sending jagged lengths of razor steel flying around the studio.

Yes, I can see why it didn't catch on....

George Martin, on the talkback mic: I'm afraid we've a spot of trouble, lads.

John Lennon: What is it, Georgie?

Martin: Well, you see, we've had to call an ambulance for Geoff Emerick; I'm afraid there's a spot of blood on the tape op's chair. And on the ceiling, too, now that I look. Oh, dear, and splashed about the studio walls, too, rather higgledy-piggledy. It's going to take ever so long for EMI to have the cleaners in.

Paul McCartney: It's that bloody Marconi machine again, innit? That's the fourth tape op we've lost this week!

Martin: Yes, the razor-sharp, high-tension recording medium wrapped itself around his head and torso a right treat. Rather looked like a Chinaman undergoing the Death of a Thousand Cuts three months in. Well, bright spot: Geoff's screams of agony have died away somewhat. Don't know if that's because it's stopped being quite so dreadfully painful, or because he's weakened from loss of blood. Blessing for the rest of us, at any rate. Shall we run though that new one, then? What is it? "You Should Know Your Mother"?

He Takes the Call

Time: Perhaps 2004.
Scene: Men's room, Former Employer. A four-seater.

Your Correspondent is in Seat One, enjoying the Morning Excremeditation, with a copy of perhaps a Dilbert book, or some other light reading. I am alone, as is my earnest wont. (I cannot make Those Noises with anyone else in the room. I just cannot. I will wait till somebody leaves before committing those mortifying, though, I recognize, thoroughly human, noises. I have experienced physical pain in order to avoid this mortification. Call me an eccentric.)

Somebody comes in. Ah, nuts. Maybe he's just in for a Number One. Maybe he'll just wash his hands and go.

Nope. Stall Four. Down go the pants. In for the Long Haul. Boogers.

A chirping sound comes from Stall Four. His cellphone goes off.

He.

Takes.

The.

Call.

Before he could even get to the second syllable of "Hello?" I was pants up and gone.

He! took! the! call!

If you want to grow old with me, if you want to sit with me in a rocking chair on a porch in our dotages, drinking moonshine whiskey, smoking cheap cigars and telling whoppers about girls we've had and cars we've boosted, you will never -- that's never -- have taken that call. You will have perhaps fished it out of your pocket in the pool of trouser at your feet, flipped it open, seen who it was, and flipped it shut -- and the reason you will have done that is to shut the fucking thing up, so others can go about their business in peace without a fucking cellphone ringing six feet away.

You will not have taken that call.

Jesus Suppurating Christ on a frying pan. Civilization's over, kids. We're headed for a New Dark Age. A Nude Ark Age. Blame cellphones. I know I do.

Freddie Amuses

Driving home from soccer practice yesterday. The news is on the radio -- the Pope dominates (as he does). Freddie (14) muses, "When he was young, do you think the Pope wanted to grow up to be the Pope? Like, he aspired to be the Pope?"

I thought for a bit. "I don't know about the current guy. I do think the last one, John Paul II, did want to be Pope when he was pretty young."

"So do you think that when he was a kid, he'd be outside in the back yard, like, pretending to be Pope? Blessing stuff? Waving to imaginary crowds?"

The ensuing mental picture was worthy of a chuckle...

Thank You, Donnie G.

Don Geronimo, half of the Washington afternoon-drive radio comedy team of Don and Mike, retired today after 23 years with Mike O'Meara, and over 40 years in radio. His last show this afternoon was a somber affair, in which he revealed that doing the show after the violent and untimely death of his wife Freda Sorce a couple of years ago was simply too full of painful reminders. He hasn't been psychically right since then, and I wish him all the best in his healing.

Don could be a spoiled child on the air. He could be painfully cruel to idiotic callers. He could bore the listener with his petulance at the station's management. But when that show was hitting on all cylinders, when it was really working, it was unquestionably the funniest thing on the radio. I don't listen to something daily for 17 years without being convinced of its quality.

Other shock-jocks who try to be funny just get the formula wrong, wrong, wrong. They are aggrieved. They are sarcastic. They seek victims. The Don and Mike Show first repelled me when I heard an early incarnation of it in the late Eighties, at WAVA. They too were cruel and sarcastic and aggrieved.

When they moved to WJFK in the late 80s, something truly clicked. The show became utterly compelling listening. The personalities of the hosts and their coterie of side-men gelled. They learned the subtleties of sarcasm, what attracted and what repelled the listener. The show became, rather than a series of preplanned "bits," simply a four-hour-long conversation among three or four people in the studio and unscreened callers, reacting to events of the day. The show they put on on Sept. 11, 2001, will go into the record books as one of the most cathartic and healthy things ever broadcast on radio. If for nothing else, I'll be eternally grateful to them for talking me down off the windowsill that day.

Don began his radio career, he revealed today, at the age of 11, as a volunteer for Armed Forces Radio. He is roughly my age, and I know what I was doing at 11. It wasn't radio. He came to the radio comedy business late, after a long career as a wandering record-spinner. His contempt for what radio has become -- a marketing-driven sarcasm of its former self -- was daily palpable. In his chest there beats a rock-n-roll heart. He is a patriot.

He got his first job as a radio deejay at the age of 16, after lying about his age. He became an astonishingly adept board-operator -- a skill he put to great comedic use on the Don and Mike Show, assembling and playing sound-clips that ran into each other surrealistically. One of their best late bits was a huge assembly of quotes from John Wayne movies, which they would use as a kind of Magic Eight-Ball, asking the Wayne Oracle questions and playing the clips at random. Very funny, very Dada.

But Geronimo's talking about his experience as an itinerant deejay provided, for me, the finest and highest moments of the show. He would adopt an exaggerated deejay voice to "talk in" records (the Don and Mike Show didn't actually play records, this was all for comedy's sake). You "talk in" a record by doing deejay patter over its opening strains. The best deejay knows how to time his patter to end the instant the vocal begins; absolutely no one in the world is better at this than Don Geronimo. Don is very proud of the fact that he once "talked in" "Stairway to Heaven"; the opening recorder-and-guitar passage is about two minutes long. You never talk in "Stairway to Heaven." It's a Deejay Law.

Don's funniest radio story? I think it was the time that he described losing a job in some podunk town for getting the phrasing just wrong in his patter: "It's a beautiful Saturday, highs in the nineties, so wear something flimsy, gals... Traffic and weather together on the eights here on KRCG, and now, everybody Come On Eileen!"

He did it on purpose, of course. I told you, a rock-and-roll heart.

I had to listen to today's farewell show in my car, as that's where I've heard the huge majority of the show over the last 17 years. In his last segment, he spun a couple of records, just for old times' sake. The first he dedicated to his family: Jimmy Buffett's "Come Monday." I was picking up a pizza for the fam, and I listened to that segment sitting in the pizzeria's parking lot. The second song, which, of course, he talked in perfectly, was dedicated to the fans. The Beatles' "In My Life."

I'm afraid I blubbed a bit.

Don, I'm going to miss the shit out of you, you imperfect, petulant, childish bastard. God Speed, Radio God!

I highly recommend popping over to hear some Don Geronimo air-checks from the late 70s and early 80s. And ask yourself as you're listening to them, What have they done to my radio?

OK, You Rock-and-Roll Patriots...

Draw me a connection between Frank Zappa and "Jesus Christ Superstar."

You need only two degrees of separation.

These degrees may include song lyrics, band members, musical passages, or biting and chewing poodles.

Two degrees shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be two. Three shalt thou not enumerate, neither enumerate thou one, excepting that thou then proceed to two. Four is right out. Two degrees. Of separation.

Ve Haff Vays...

More unintentionally funny comic panels here.

"So, they laugh at my boner, eh?"

Bubbles

Not that I'm any kind of expert, but a visit to a hair salon must be something like a trip to a cathouse.

I'd noticed myself getting a tad shaggy these days, so I made an appointment for today at noon, a little place near work. The girl on the phone asked if I wanted to "see" anyone in particular, and as I hadn't patronized this place in a good long time, I said no.

I walked into the place and announced myself. Unisex hair places try very hard for that ultramodern feel, lots of brushed aluminum fixtures, photos of sexy models on the walls, glass and chrome furniture -- I'm sure it's the outcome of a lot of very careful psychological research. All the stylists in the place, nearly all of them quite attractive women, are dressed in black, black, black.

Again, the receptionist asked me that rather intensely uncomfortable question: Is there anyone in particular I'd like to "see"?

Now, for me, a haircut from a sexy babe in stylish black clothing is a rather, how do we say, erotic experience. It is, I'll admit here and now, the closest thing I get in my life to permission to perv out a little bit. From the shampoo, her fingers massaging my scalp with foofy shampoo, to the cut itself, as she leans in very close to get just the right angle and a pert breast brushes my back, her breath and perfume mingling with the fruity hair-care-product smell of the place, as, in the mirror, all the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo: The whole thing serves to put rather unwholesome thoughts into the Jingo cranium.

And I don't think I'm alone in this dirty little secret.

So asking me if there is anyone in particular I'd like to "see" is a big semantic matzoh-ball. The intention of the question and its interpretation are oceans apart. Most female customers will understand it -- correctly -- as a challenge to assess the competence of the stylist who gave her her last cut; got a good one, repeat. Bad one, move on. This male customer, who happens to like women very very much thanks for asking, thinks it's exactly the same question that they ask at the front desk of the Mustang Ranch. I do suppress the urge to look around the room until my eyes light on a cutie-pie who's just my type and point and say, "Well, that petite blonde in the ass-pants and sleeveless t-shirt, she looks like a goer!"

But just barely.

Instead, I shake my head, a little sadly. "No, I'm new here." Thinking, I'm at your mercy. Please pick me a nice one. Oh, and by the way, if you can read my mind, you'll be forgiven for declaring me a complete and utter pig and throwing me into the street.

I got the only dude in the place.

What's worse, he gave me a real nice haircut. I got his card.

I can't go back.

Tick Talk

WASHINGTON, DC — March 26, 2008. A local conference of IT professionals was thrown into disarray when an outbreak of deer ticks in the beds of Omni Shoreham Hotel conference attendees forced hundreds of information-technology workers into the streets of Washington, DC, at three o'clock in the morning, fearing Lyme disease and worse.

"This totally sucks, man!" shouted one displaced technology worker, clad only in his plaid jammy-pants and Anakin Skywalker t-shirt as he froze, barefoot, in the street outside the venerable hotel. Exterminators swarmed the sidewalks around him, vying for the order to spray individual rooms for the dangerous, disease-bearing insects.

All is not completely lost, however. One attendee used the occasion to perform some valuable entomological research; with some highly specialized sonar equipment he "just happened" to have in his room, he was able to trace and document the communication patterns of the revolting critters.

"Yeah, they talk really fast!" said Jim "Ethernet" LaPorte, of Kankakee, IL, in town for only one night. "You gotta slow it down a lot, but if you do, you can totally hear 'em saying, 'Must... eat... blood...!'"

Representatives of the Fox Television network have reportedly been in discussion with the ticks about the development of a movie deal with the marauding arachnidae. However, they have met with little or no success.

The idea that ticks possess the ability to communicate with humans has most reputable entomologists scratching their heads. "Beats me," said one local professor of entomology. "Didn't ever think of that before. Talking ticks. Huh."

---

The headline in Variety the next day:

TICKS ATTACK TECH TALK
TECH CLOCKS TICK TALK!
TICKS, FOX EXECS NIX TALKS!
TICK TALK?
TICK TALK!

Marking the Resurrection

My work buddy Jason spent his Saturday in a far sillier way than did we, who prepared to mark the Resurrection with deep contemplation and fervent prayer.

This sort of thing must be stopped, for the greater good of the Republick. John Adams would not have approved.

Goddamned Insolent Bunnies

This year has been a bumper crop for bunny rabbits chez Jingo. Can't walk from house to garage without tripping over one. I just made the trip up there for liquid refreshment, and a bunny sat in my way, glaring insolently, like a soccer hooligan at a referee. As I walked, it moved just enough to get out of my way, and sat its ass back down in the grass. Insulted -- I thought I was a bit more threatening to the property's leporine population than that -- I moved toward it again. Again, it moved just enough to get out of my way, and then plunked its fat little ass down in the grass.

That's it. I'm going Farmer MacGregor on their asses. Ate my whole cucumber crop last year, little bastards. An exemplary rabbit stew with spring vegetables begins to take shape in my perfervid mind. I will leave it, untouched, by the forsythia under which they camp.

Also, them lazy-assed dogs are going to get a very firm talking to. If I have to resort to the words of Captain Nolan at the Battle of Balaclava -- "There, sir, is your enemy!" then that is what I shall have to do. I take no pleasure in it. No satisfaction.

Time to man up.

Timeshifting

These days, I've been listening to podcasts from NPR on my commutes to and from work. One of these is "Car Talk," with Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers. A regular feature of that program, to which I'm sure nobody needs any introduction, the Puzzler. Ordinarily, I gloss over the Puzzler, because they usually involve Higher Logic, small bits of paper with cryptic notations on them, or algebra, which I leave to the pros and concentrate instead on the often very funny byplay with the callers.

This week's Puzzler, though, I figured out nearly as soon as Ray Magliozzi read it out. Here it is; see if the answer is as immediately apparent to you as it was to me (quoting from memory):

I visited my friend Mary in her office. As I walked in, she was dialing the phone. She shushed me, saying she wouldn't be a minute, she was calling her husband. The call went through, and when her husband answered, she said, "Hi, Tim, it's me." She then asked a question that would have been a very strange way to open a conversation twenty (or thirty, or fifty) years ago. A strange question for any caller to ask anybody, not just Mary to Tim. What was the question?

Write your answer on a 5000-watt Black & Decker electrical generator, with stereo speakers, full carpeting, eight-cylinder Speedo rack-and-pinion flywheel wind-up, and a pony, and send it to...

Calling the Neddie Jingo Irregulars....

Some few weeks ago, I found a site that was utterly astonishing in its thoroughness and attention to detail. It documented absolutely every bluegrass song in the Classic Bill Monroe/Stanley Brothers Canon, with painstaking notes on recording dates, how many times each song was recorded, by whom, down to Child Ballad number, if applicable.

I've just discovered it's disappeared. Somebody didn't renew a domain name, it appears. Now all I get is a generic Search page.

This is fucking devastating news for my book. I was using that bitch like toilets hadn't been invented. A more useful resource you could not possibly find.

I know there's such a thing as the Internet Archive. Nothing that has ever been posted has actually disappeared. (I know this through dire, dire experience.) But how do I operate it???

Help me, somebody!

The original URL for that site was http://www.bluegrassmessengers.com/master/

How can I get that stuff back? Musical History demands to be rescued!

And I will be eternally, pleasure-you-in-a-way-that-will-endanger-my-marital-vows kind of way, grateful...

Edit Next Morning: Turns out, as you Irregulars pointed out to me (and I thank you from the heart of my bottom), that I'd accidentally stumbled across notes belonging to Richard Matteson of the Bluegrass Messengers, toward a book of his own, Bluegrass Picker's Tune Book, published in 2006, which you can get here, and which I've already this morning ordered. I found the notes quite by accident when Googling the lyrics of "The Little Girl and the Dreadful Snake" for my "Soul Butter" post a few weeks ago. No violation of copyright (or privacy) was intended, and for any information I gleaned from the notes, the book (not the web site) will be rigorously and properly cited. I did email the site's administrator when I found the notes, to ask about provenances and sources, but never heard back.

Speaking of copyright violations, in the course of the search for the foregoing, someone linked me to a copy of the book at books.google.com. I was slightly horrified to find that the entire book has been posted by Google. Not, as at Amazon and similar sites, the cover and a few representative pages, but the whole flippin' thing! Surely -- surely! -- that's got to be a copyright violation. I'd read about Google's project to make every book ever published available on the Net, but only now do I see the implications. Are we authors about to get the same ass-fucking that musicians get from file-sharing? Why charge money for a book ever again?

A Four-Diamond Girl

I have to confess myself completely flummoxed by the concept of a $5000 hooker.

The WashPost this morning declared at $300 (after, no doubt, a great deal of careful market research, hands on keyboards, no subtle fingers tweaking the Importunate Equipment under the desk) the going price of the kind of lady-of-the-night who will report to your hotel room and place herself at your disposal.

This gives us a discrepancy of $4700 between the price paid by your average horned-up convention-goer and that paid by Elliott Spitzer.

The question burns, like a chlamidia-victim's gorgonzola, what the hell does $4700 buy you?

The girl may be fine, she may be so-fuckin'-refined-she-smells-like-Hyannisport-in-August, she may have an ermine-lined snatch for all I know, but... Jesus Christ! An orgasm's an orgasm, y'know? And post-coital chit-chat's post-coital chit-chat. Does the $4700 girl lecture you on Wittgenstein afterwards? You can buy the same goddamned honey-of-a-spasm for 25 simoleons on 14th Street -- and your provider may even remove her upper plate for extra gratification. If Spitzer had managed to confine himself to that kind of independent provider, he'd still be governor of New York.

It may come as a bit of a shock to my regular clientele when I admit: I've had sex! I've even had really, really, really good sex! So, as an experienced man-about-town, I have to wonder: What is it about paying 4700 clams to dip your wick that is so fucking appealing?

I'm sure it has a whole lot to do with the same Absolutely Nothing that differentiates a $500 bottle of wine from a $50 bottle. You pay it just because you can, because that's what makes the difference between the Rabble and the Übermensch — and for that, Elliot Spitzer will now be privileged, forever, to just go fuck himself.

For free.

Schadenfreude's a Bitch

I'm afraid I emitted a long, low, throaty chuckle when I read this graf. I'm not going to mention the name because I want to stay out of the search engines --they still hold a small amount of power over me -- but read the rest of the article here.

Several recently departed executives contacted this week described the climate at [company name redacted] as acrimonious. They said there had been confrontational meetings of employees as well as screaming matches in offices, as senior executives worried about making their aggressive quarterly ad sales goals.

Bastards are going down.

We Is Not Learning

We read in this morning's WashPost of Conspicuous Organic Consumpion. "Anna Sova Luxury Organics Turkish towels, 900 grams per square meter, $58 apiece. The eco-friendly 600-thread-count bed sheets, milled in Switzerland with U.S. cotton, $570 for queen-size.... [We buy a] 2008 LS 600 hybrid for $104,000 (it actually gets fewer miles per gallon than some traditional makes, but, see, it is a hybrid). Accessorize the interior with an organic Sherpa car seat cover for only $119.99...."

Pretty sharp stuff, for the petroleum-based rapacious destroyer of forests that is a newspaper.

We here chez Jingo are trying to be good green citizens. As they burn out, we've been replacing our incandescent lightbulbs with those newfangled windy-twisty jobbers. I used up the last one just now, and was preparing to throw the package away when a whacking huge observation smacked me like the hot kiss at the end of a wet fist. (Twelve points for ref.) I wrestled the thing to the floor and photographed it immediately:


Do you see what I saw?

The package is huge! It's twice the size it needs to be! The space used for branding the fucking thing is the same size as the thing itself! And of course, what is all that wasted space made of? A little cardboard and a ho-ho-whoooole lot of thick plastic. This package isn't meant to Save the World; it's meant to Sell Lightbulbs. And I, sucker of suckers, thinking I was Saving the World, Bought Lightbulbs. Probably killed about eight acres of rainforest doing it.

Well. The first thing to do, I suppose, is to fish the damned thing out of the trash and put it with the recycling. (There will be a sign on the recycling dumpster: "Bottles and Cans Only!" Screw it. It goes in.)

Now, those little windy-twisty lightbulbs are fragile. Really fragile. You can't wrap them in jute or switchgrass or something. They need a shell to protect them. Maybe the recycled cardboard they make egg cartons out of might do the trick. But with examples like the above, where the need to brand a product supersedes the need to actually be environmentally responsible, we're probably consuming ourselves into extinction.

(Free tip from the Jingmeister: In the few weeks we have before the Collapse of Civilization As We Know it, there's a bloody fortune to be made in the invention of a device that lets you change those lightbulbs on the ceiling while standing on the floor. The thing I use now, the one designed for rounded, incandescent bulbs, has so far broken three of the new ones.)

A Linguistic Conundrum

I am cursed to ponder, this fine early-spring Sunday:

What is the relationship between

Coo-coo-ca-choo, Mrs. Robinson

and

I am the eggman
They are the eggmen
I am the walrus
Goo-goo-ga-joob

The odd thing is, both lyrics were written at approximately the same time. Paul Simon adapted the song for 1967's "The Graduate," and the song was officially released on "Bookends" in 1968. Lennon wrote and recorded "I Am the Walrus" in September 1967.

Was this nonsense phrase, you know, "in the air" at the time?

And why does this question torture me so?

Unwholesome, Unhealthy, Unknowable

Wanda Jackson inspires thoughts in me that verge on the Unwholesome... The Unhealthy... The Unknowable...



I've always found myself unable to resist a woman who can rock as hard as a fella. Patti Smith scared the shit out of me in 1976 -- a raging succubus who had no qualms about demanding Just Where She Wanted to Be Touched. I fell hard for Allison Robertson of the Donnas when I saw her wielding a Les Paul with all the panache of a Jimmy Page. Joan Jett, despite my lack of chances with her, gets me seriously hot and bothered.

But this Wanda Jackson... Wow. That beaded skirt, which she doesn't hesitate to make move in all kinds of disturbing shimmery ways. That hardened, raspy voice, singing Biblical parables about Sampson and Delilah, about Ahab and Jezebel, with a lustiness and abandon that suggest so much more than they say overtly...

I don't know who that guitar-flogger is who comes in halfway through, playing that weird two-necked instrument -- half Telecaster, half Gibson mandolin -- but man he's good! Contrastingly, I'd like to gently remind that trumpeter that the trumpet is not a rock-n-roll instrument, and would you please go peddle that shit elsewhere...

A Remarkable Young Man Is He

This morning, as my mind wandered (where it will go), a snatch of melody entered the Jingo cranium. (This is not quite as pleasant as a melody of snatch, but ah well.)

It was a tune that I last heard sometime in 1964, from a single in my parents' collection. Astonishing that it has remained with me all these years. The melody is obviously very catchy -- I suspect it of being adapted from another tune. The lyric (as best I can remember it) goes:

John F. Kennedy
A remarkable young man is he
At age forty-three
Elected to the Presidency

He served his country proudly
And when the war was won
This hero of the Solomons
Went on to Washington.

(Repeat chorus)

He was born in Massachusetts
In the city of Brookline
And tumpty-tumpty-tumpty tum
On PT One-Oh-Nine....

That's a much as I can reconstruct, from memory and a Google search.

But what a remarkable little ditty, no? From internal evidence, it's not a campaign song -- it must have been written after Kennedy's election, and I don't remember it referring to any assassination, although I could be wrong about that.

Some time ago, Hilary Clinton's campaign held an online survey to choose her campaign song -- and the result pretty much lost her my vote.

When did we stop coming up with original campaign songs? I suspect the shattering of the national musical aesthetic into a million shards of incompatible tastes and genres might have had something to do with it: It's hard to imagine a single song in a genre that would appeal to the public mind at large. A country campaign song? A hip-hop tune? An aria? You see the problem.

But you see, we once had an Official Musical Language that was OK for everybody to like -- or at least tolerate:



Later Edit: Those are some graphics, huh? And they're completely, unutterably pre-ironic! The world really did once look like that!

After You've Gone

As promised earlier, here's a master-class workout from Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli.

If, after the lick Django pulls off at 1:25 (first instrumental break after the scat-singing -- a bit more than a third of the way through), the top of your head is still attached to your skull, you seriously need to check your pulse. The proper reaction to that break is an exploded head, brains all over the ceiling, tragic phone calls to the relatives, Oh dear god the poor thing listened to "After You've Gone" without proper due care, forewarning, and protective gear...

After You've Gone (pops)

Cat Could Blow...

Two fingers.

He did that shit with two fingers on his fretting hand. The ring finger and pinkie were almost completely paralyzed -- although you can see from this vid he did use them for chords.

There's a take of "After You're Gone" that contains the single most jaw-dropping guitar lick I've ever heard. I'll post it up after I get home to the Collection.

I'd thought that the above was the only existing footage of Django Reinhardt playing, but apparently not.

Operator Error

I once walked up to an elevator in a New York apartment building. It was an elderly edifice, and its elevator was similarly venerable.

A man approached the elevator door at the same time as me, but from the opposite direction. Unremarkable occurrence.

We stood, as strangers do, well apart from each other, and stared discreetly off into space, examining the floor, the elevator door, the ceiling -- anything to avoid an embarrassing meeting of the eyes.

We waited.

And waited.

And waited.

In a situation like this, after a certain amount of time has passed, it becomes permissible in the presence of a stranger to betray a certain amount of polite impatience. No kicking the wall or pounding the elevator door -- but a quiet sigh and a murmured "Jeeze, slow elevator, huh?" will not get you marked as a lunatic. My interlocutor gave a mild grunt of agreement, and we went back to staring into space.

And we waited some more.

I wasn't staring at my watch or anything, so it's hard to gauge objectively just how long we stood in front of the elevator door, but it was a good long time. Four minutes? Five? Long enough, anyway, for me to begin to suspect that the elevator was out of order and the building's management negligent in failing to post a sign to that effect. (There was no gauge on the wall indicating the elevator's current position; it was too old for such fripperies.)

By and by, an old but reliable lesson from the early days of industrialization occurred to me: When a machine isn't working as expected, and no obvious mechanical symptoms present themselves, it is wise to consider Operator Error. My fellow stooge must have had the same thought, or something like it, because we turned to each other and we said in mortified unison:

"You did push the button, didn't you?"

Soul-Butter

Under the rubric of General Research, I took a couple of weekend afternoons to reread Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I haven't poked my nose into for quite a few years. (I say, Neddie, is that at all relevant to the Origins of Bluegrass? You bet your ass it is, Chuck-o!) I'd forgotten completely what an asshole Tom Sawyer proves to be, and certain passages -- particularly the ecstatic description of river-raft life on the lam in Chapter XIX -- misted me up a little. The ending's a little rushed, I think.

My edition was edited by Henry Nash Smith, whose Introduction is worth reading. In his insightful curating, he makes this fascinating point about Victorian language:

Just as effective as the individualizing of the characters by their speech is Mark Twain's device of establishing a common diction and rhetoric for all characters the moment they try to claim for themselves a false pathos...or an undeserved moral authority.... Different as the characters are in their natural selves, when they fall into pretense they all sound alike because they all begin to speak in a burlesque of the exalted rhetoric of the official culture. This "high" language might be called the "alas!" or the "soul-butter" mode of speech.

(The term "soul-butter" is Huck's own invention, which he uses after watching a transparently phony speech by the Dauphin, and the watching crowd strikes up "the doxolojer": "Music is a good thing; and after all that soul-butter and hogwash, I never see it freshen up things so, and sound so honest and bully.")

We don't do "soul-butter" much anymore -- and probably rightly so. If asked to deliver, say, a eulogy, I would shoot for tasteful, direct language rather than hifalutin phony poetry -- for precisely the reason Smith points out: We're trained (not least of all by Mark Twain himself) to view that "Alas!" school of rhetoric as a disguise for pretense and dissembling. The writers of Deadwood understood this brilliantly; the chief source of soul-butter in that cast of characters was the loathsome, sticky E. B. Farnum, who never spoke any other way.

Of course, there's good soul-butter and bad. The Gettysburg Address, I think we'd all agree, is very good soul-butter indeed, an application of "exalted rhetoric of the official culture" put to good use. King's "I Have a Dream" speech. Twain's hysterically funny poem, attributed to the young, departed Emmeline Grangerford, "Ode to Stephen Dowlding Bots, Dec'd," ("Then list with tearful eye/Whilst I his fate do tell/His soul did from this cold world fly/By falling down a well") would occupy the opposite extreme. The poem on the obverse of John Mobberly's gravestone? Quite awful Victorian soul-butter.

Here's one of the reasons why Huck Finn is relevant to the Origins of Bluegrass: Quite a few of the sentimental Tin Pan Alley songs that formed much of the early repertiore were lyrically quite soul-butter-intensive: Think of "The Little Girl and the Dreadful Snake":

I heard the screams of our little girl far away
Hurry daddy there's an awful dreadful snake
I ran as fast as I could though the dark and dreary woods
But I reached our darling girl too late

Oh, I began to sigh, I knew that soon she'd have to die
For the snake was warning me close by
I held her close to my face she said Daddy kill that snake
It's getting dark, tell Mommy goodbye

Mmm, pour that melted soul-butter over my popcorn, an' throw in some salt! I'm here for the duration!

Trabajando

I'm back working.

Won't say exactly where in public, but it's a good gig, I like the people, and they're not evil.

I did enjoy unemployment to its fullest, but it was time. You can get yourself into mighty bad habits, and I found it quite disconcerting not to be able, occasionally, to say with confidence what day of the week it was. Knowing where the next paycheck is coming from, and that the kiddiewinks are covered by health insurance, are both Very Good Things.

Today I found myself actually enjoying drawing flow-charts for an online registration system in OmniGraffle. Enjoying stretching the mental muscles, feeling blood returning to parts of the brain that had atrophied a bit.

Leaving the house at 8 AM? Not so much.

A Reason to Go On Living: The Poor Boy's On the Line

(Cross-posted at NewCritics.)


A friend, knowing the kind of research I'm doing for my book on the roots of bluegrass, hipped me to a collection called "The Music Never Stopped: The Roots of the Grateful Dead." The collection, an amalgam of the original versions of songs covered by the Dead, perhaps unintentionally demonstrates how good the Dead were at taking lively and engaging roots music and turning it into turgid, sludgy, boring slop.

(The last time I ripped into that band in these pages, I got into an unpleasant comment-fight with a fervent Deadhead, so I'll stop there...)

I was listening to the collection in my truck, driving home from the grocery store, loving Reverend Gary Davis, Howlin' Wolf, Marty Robbins ("El Paso," a song I had on an LP as a kid -- nostalgia rush there!), Merle Haggard, Cannon's Jug Stompers. Then Chuck Berry's "Promised Land" came on, and I found myself whooping and pounding the dashboard.

Is this a great song, or what? (pops)

I left my home in Norfolk, Virginia,
California on my mind.

A more pretentious person than myself might try to read High Mythic Meaning into this little tune. I have to admit, Chuck suggests it himself in this brilliantly economical little couplet. Never is his protagonist's actual purpose in this journey mentioned -- it seems like a trip out West just for its own sake. It also suggests Huck Finn's "lighting out for the Territory," escaping the "sivilizing" he's in danger of. Wagons, Westward, ho!

I straddled that Greyhound, rode him into Raleigh,
And on across Caroline.

Greyhound bus as trusty big-assed steed! Anthropomorphizing a goddamned bus! (Or whatever the right word is for turning an inanimate object into an animal...) Genius!

We stopped in Charlotte but bypassed Rock Hill,
We never was a minute late.
We was ninety miles out of Atlanta by sundown,
Rollin' outta Georgia state.

Blair Jackson, who wrote the liner notes for The Music Never Stopped," suggests that Berry managed to avoid having his music associated with any particular region of the country by universalizing his place-names: "He literally brought cities from all over America into his lyrics, effectively unifying different regions under a new rock-n-roll banner." That's as may be -- it certainly doesn't hurt the chances you'll buy a record if your own home town is named in it -- but this litany of American place-names, all whizzing past in this gorgeously economical narrative, reminds us not of our unity under a rock-and-roll banner but of the astounding distances between places in Flyover Country.

We had motor trouble it turned into a struggle,
Halfway cross Alabam',
And that hound broke down and left us all stranded
In downtown Birmingham.

"Left us all stranded..." In downtown Birmingham, Alabama -- in, presumably, 1964, when this lyric was written, perhaps even in jail. (Berry did a four-year stretch for violation of the Mann act, 1959-63.) How'd you like to be a black man, just out of prison, stranded in that place and that time? But notice the collectivity of that "left us all stranded": It's not just the Poor Boy's journey -- we're all bozos on this bus...

Right away I bought me a through train ticket,

Get outta town, Poor Boy!

Ridin' cross Mississippi clean
And I was on that Midnight Flyer out of Birmingham
Smokin' into New Orleans.

Somebody help me get out of Louisiana
Just help me get to Houston town.
There are people there who care a little 'bout me
And they won't let the Poor Boy down.

Sure as you're born, they bought me a silk suit,
Put luggage in my hands,
And I woke up high over Albuquerque
On a jet to the Promised Land.

So this leg out of New Orleans seems to have been accomplished by panhandling just enough scratch to get to Houston, or maybe by hitching a ride. Times are dire. Our Hero is at his all-time lowest point. Just get to Houston, Poor Boy! But who are these Unseen Benefactors, who "care a little about me"? How did the Poor Boy ingratiate himself so thoroughly so as to earn a new suit, and "luggage in his hands"? There's volumes in what Chuck doesn't tell us, here... I love the ambiguity in the third line: Listen to the way Chuck phrases, "Woke up [pause] high..." How high did you wake up, Poor Boy? How'd you come to fall asleep?

Workin' on a t-bone steak a la carte
Flying over to the Golden State;
When the pilot told us in thirteen minutes
He would set us at the terminal gate.

Swing low sweet chariot, come down easy
Taxi to the terminal zone;
Cut your engines and cool your wings,
And let me make it to the telephone.

A la cartey! Har!

Look how the language changes when the plane reaches the Promised Land, how many ultramodern (for 1964) terms he gets in: "terminal gate," "taxi," "terminal zone," "cut your engines," "make it to the telephone." Up till now the trip's had several modes of transport, most of them originating in the Victorian era -- buses, trains, cars. And note how few nouns that aren't place-names there are in the first verses. To a Poor Boy, raised in that world, the East he's lighting out from, the things he observes in his surroundings just don't seem to be worth mentioning. But now that the Promised Land is near, and he's using the most up-to-date -- and pricey -- mode of transport possible, he busts out with all this observation, this noticing of things.

And, in the midst of all this enthusiasm for modernity, he throws in a Negro Spiritual.

God, what a great lyricist!

Los Angeles give me Norfolk, Virginia,
Tidewater four ten oh nine
Tell the folks back home this is the Promised Land callin'
And the Poor Boy's on the line.

"Norfolk, Virginia, Tidewater four ten oh nine" works out to (757) 844-1009 ("Tidewater" referring to the old-style local exchange, TI, which is 84.) I so wanted to call that number, even if just to ask if the Poor Boy ever calls any more.

Alas, it's not in circulation.

It's Due When?

It was one of those classic moments of parenthood: late last week, Betty, a tenth-grader, allowed it to be known, far too late, that her biology assignment is due this Tuesday (tomorrow).

The assignment: To make a realistic model of the human skeleton and label all the major bones.

Build a fucking skeleton. In three days. Go.

Wonder Woman bought some modeling clay and a spool of wire. Betty panicked and took to her room. The dogs barked helpfully. Freddie shrugged and took to his room too, to play Rock Band on his XBox 360 and irritate the hell out of the rest of the house. (More on this revolting phenomenon later; suffice to say if I never again hear "Black Hole Sun" while listening to out-of-rhythm clacking on a toy drumset, it will be far too soon.)

After talking Betty off the ledge, and forcing her participation with threats both mundane and dire, we started bending wire and kneading clay, muttering imprecations at the ridiculousness of the assignment ("I've got to make ten metatarsals out of this crap? What does a fucking metatarsal even look like?).

We just now finished. While the skull looks more like something from Olduvai Gorge than a recently deceased homo sapiens, it at least has a clearly labeled cranium, mandible and maxillus. The vertebrae are little cubical clay beads strung on a wire, rather than the incredibly complex cervical, thoracic and lumbar processes shown in the diagram we got from Wikipedia, but at least they get bigger farther down the spine.

I have instructed Betty, on pain of punishment, to turn in the assignment tomorrow
while reciting to her teacher the following verse, which occurred to me while I was trying to ramrod a clay model of an impossibly complex bone into something at least vaguely resembling its real-life counterpart:

Songs are made by fools like Elvis
But only God can make a pelvis.

One Man's Superstition...

These days, I await the arrival of our local freebie advertiser, The Purcellville Gazette, with bated breath. Its Letters to the Editor section is a delightful collection of crackpottery; they'll publish just about anything, as long as it fills out the page. The result is a cross-section of the loony, the obsessive, and the addlepated, with a generous dollop of the Nativist, the Racist, and the Just Plain Wacky thrown in. Better bathroom reading you couldn't wish for.

Like, no doubt, much of the country, the bursting of the mortgage bubble has hit us hard. On a drive down Mountain Road, you might be forgiven for wondering if there are any houses that aren't for sale. Folks are getting desperate.

Desperate people resort to desperate methods. Last week's Gazette included a letter, meant in the satirical vein, but falling just short of its intended target. One Joseph LaFiandra noted a custom among hopeful sellers: burying a statue of St. Joseph, head-down, on the grounds of the home to be sold. (Why head-down? Got me, Snickelfritz.) LaFiandra, whose house had languished on the market for eons, said that he'd noticed that a statue of St. Joseph had disappeared from its customary spot in the house. He extracted a confession from his wife, who said she'd spirited the statue away some weeks before and buried it, the sooner to sell the house. LaFiandra's punch-line? He dug the statue up, cleaned it and restored it to its customary spot.

The house sold a week later. (Rim-shot!)

In the latest ish, Jami and Dave Dittmeier weighed in -- and watched the joke sail four hundred feet over their heads. Proprietors of something they are pleased to call The Christian Shoppe, they were, it is immediately evident, appalled at such an ignorant superstitious practice -- damned near Popery, it is clear from their subtext. Appealing, quite properly, to the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, they assert, "We do not dispute the fact that people have sold property, but we question whether the burying of the object had anything to do with it. Why not bury a frying pan or some other inanimate object?" Such deplorable superstition! Such monstrous delusion!

"St. Joseph," they go on, "holds a special place in the history of Christianity, being the earthly father of Jesus and husband to Mary. We believe that every time a statue of St. Joseph is buried, satan [sic] has a good laugh."

Old Scratch's guffaw was as dust in the wind compared to mine when the Dittmeiers reached their own punch line:

"We believe that what sells property is prayer."

Comedy gold, Jerry! Comedy gold! You can't make stuff up like that!

I love that paper. Keep it coming, folks!

Shake Your Puddingbowl, Bhattacharya!

Sometimes Life Its Ownself should just be allowed to testify about its own delightful weirdness...

A Sixties Bollywood Beatles sendup:

Lebanese Blond

For some reason, Venice keeps popping up. Don't know why, don't know how, but in the last few days I've been bombarded with images of Venice. As these things do, the aerial assault has triggered a long-forgotten second-hand anecdote that needs to be preserved.

I've recounted before that my first job out of college was as a recording engineer at The American Foundation for the Blind, recording Talking Books for the blind. The folks who actually read the texts I followed along with, monitoring to ensure the text was followed exactly, stopping the tape when an errant belt buckle or nose-whistle produced an extraneous noise, were from a broad range of the dramatic world. Some were Broadway chorus boys who couldn't kick it up anymore; others were voiceover talents whose golden pipes I still to this day hear on commercials.

One of the most delightful to work with was Jim Sheridan. Then the director of the Irish Arts Center in Manhattan, where he directed Irish plays for the Hibernophile set, he went on to become the director of "In the Name of the Father," "My Left Foot," and "In America."

To say that Jim was a drinker would put it mildly. In my penurious state at the time, I could afford the occasional six-pack but not much more. I would watch with utter amazement -- and no small amount of envy -- as Sheridan poured into an 8:30 AM session, his eyes painfully, seethingly red, his head obviously still reeling from the previous night's excesses, which appeared to have ended perhaps fifteen minutes before.

The book he was reading was Myles na gCopaleen's Best of Myles -- to this day one of my all-time favorite books. na gCopaleen is quite possibly the funniest newspaper columnist who ever lived -- his novels, published under the name Flann O'Brien, are no funereal events either -- and these sessions with Sheridan frequently came to a grinding halt with both painfully hung-over reader and bright-eyed young recording tech rolling on the floor.

In the course of these sessions, Sheridan took a liking to me, opening up conversations that sometimes took up the lion's share of our two-hour session. "Fuck da clock, Neddie. We'll get t'rough Myles anodder day," he would observe seraphically. One day, Jim told me about a moment in Venice that left me hiccupping hours later.

Then a young actor in the Seventies, he attended a drama festival in Vienna. It was an enormously convivial affair, and great friendships were formed among the Up and Coming of Europe's dramatic set. One such newly formed friend, at the closing of the festivity, had pressed into Jim's hand a quite large -- and, as we shall see, intimidatingly potent -- chunk of Lebanese Blond hashish. Jim accepted it without much thought. It was, after all, the Seventies.

But the Seventies were also dangerous for traveling Irishmen, mere actors an they be. The IRA was at the height of its depredations, and an Irish passport at a border crossing was a near guarantee of a nasty interrogation, possibly culminating in a cavity search. Jim's next stop was Venice, another theater event. He cadged a ride with another actor -- and the hash didn't even enter his consciousness until he saw the road-sign indicating that the Italian customs shed was a kilometer away.

Well, what would you do at the prospect of a vengeful Italian fist up your rectum? He pondered his two options -- throw it away or eat it. This was a fine chuck o' honey, damned pity to waste it, so down the hatch it went.

Might as well do this famous-movie-director-like. After all, it's how he told it.

Cut to Venice, hours later. A Citroen Deux-Chevaux, an absolute tin-can of a car, recently arrived in town, screeches up at the entrance of a cheap hotel. Its driver emerges, visibly irritated and voluble, walks around to the passenger side door, opens it. From the foot-well of the passenger seat -- not the seat, mind you, but where you put your feet -- a timid hand emerges. Slowly, agonizingly, the hand feels around outside, its trajectory downward, to the ground. Finally it touches the cobblestoned street. Amazed to be touching something solid, it continues to feel around. Finally assured of the solidity of the ground, the hand's owner manages to roll out of the car's foot-well onto the street, weeping with gratitude that the ground, so unexpectedly corporeal, was not a Venetian canal.

Dey don't have fuckin' sthreets in Venice, Neddie! It's all fuckin' water! It's canals, man! I'd spent six hours in absolute fuckin' panic on the floor of that car, completely convinced I was a dead man, trying to reach Venice by land!

I miss that job. I really do.

Come-a, Come-a Down Doobie Doo

Yes, you can crack a Cichlid. You can snap a Siamese Fighter. Annihilate an Angelfish? Without even breaking a sweat. Go ahead, bust a Bichir. Piece of cake.

Lambaste a Loach. Make mincemeat of a Minnow. Truncate a Tetra. Slice a Swordtail. Ruin a Rainbowfish.

Falling off a log, I tell ya.

But breaking Guppies? Hard to do.

Fisticuffs

One imagines it's the Football Playoff Mania that's sweeping the nation (just like the Mudshark) that's filling the pages of the Washington Post with stories of rude behavior in the stands and parking lots of our nation's football emporia. Post readers, Redskins fans, reported being treated dreadfully by their neighbors at the Seattle game last week, prompting a Seattle resident to apologize in a letter to the editor.

At the amateur level, Jeanne Marie Laskas writes a column in the Magazine section on the discomfiture of a mother who is required to watch a film on courtside etiquette for parents; she's obliged to sign an affidavit that she's watched the film before her daughter is allowed to play in her league.

It would appear that all over the nation, and all throughout the history of amateur and youth sports in the United States, parents habitually break out in fisticuffs, abuse referees, harass the
players (their own children and others'), and loudly and obscenely question coaches' decisions. This is an epidemic. It's Clearly a Symptom of Something Very Wrong With the Body Politic.

Only, I've never once seen it happen. I played three seasons of Little League baseball, three of Pop Warner football, high-school baseball and competitive skiing. Freddie has been a league soccer player since he was four -- he's fourteen now -- and has played in more than a hundred soccer matches in two different leagues, nearly every one of which I've watched from beginning to end.

And I've never seen a parent who wasn't fully supportive, encouraging, polite and positive. We cheer when the boys do well, and we comfort when they don't. A referee's bad call engenders no abuse -- some quiet muttering among the dads, certainly, but never anything hurtful. I've never seen a parent confront a coach over a strategic or personnel decision. I think I saw three yellow cards and no red cards this last season, even as the teen lads start playing the full-speed, serious and physical men's game.

So where is this dreadful behavior happening? Have you seen examples of it? Drop a comment, won't you?

See That My Grave is Kept Clean

Well, my heart stopped beating and my hands turned cold
And my heart stopped beating and my hands turned cold
Well, my heart stopped beating and my hands turned cold
Now I believe what the bible told

There's just one last favor I'll ask of you
And there's one last favor I'll ask of you
There's just one last favor I'll ask of you
See that my grave is kept clean

—Blind Lemon Jefferson

Yesterday, a briskly windy day, the power went out. Again. A tree collapsed on the line downhill, blacking out our road for several hours.

Rather than sit around in a dark, cold house waiting for the Dominion Power guys to do their slow and steady thing, I decided I'd go look for old John F. Hartman, the fellow who carved his name into Buzzard Rock in 1851. Or at least what's left of him.

I knew which cemetery he'd been buried in, but I'd never visited it. I knew of its existence, but only in theory.

From the 1830s to the 1880s, there was no Methodist church on this side of Short Hill. The nearest churches in this valley were in Lovettsville, some four miles away from the ridge, and they were Lutheran and Calvinist. The pious area Methodies along the eastern foot of the mountain would walk over it to attend Ebenezer Church in Waters -- so what if there was a hulking great 800-foot-tall obstacle between them and the Lord?

The road over the mountain, imaginatively called the Ebenezer Church Road (or, alternatively, the William Graham Road, for reasons I've not yet figured out), began to fall into disrepair in the 1880s, when a Methodist church was built on this side of the mountain. The Ebenezer Church itself was moved to a more central location in Waters, and the old graveyard abandoned.

When we hear "abandoned graveyard," I think most of us might be tempted to think that they simply stopped burying people there, and leave it at that. But for reasons I can't yet fathom, this particular graveyard was not only discontinued, but left to return to a state of nature.

Even though I knew its approximate location, it took me quite a while to find it. I even had to call a friend who had visited it before for help. Although it's just off the road, you wouldn't know it was there unless you actually dove into the woods looking for it. It must be completely impossible to view in the summer, when the undergrowth is impassable -- not to mention the snakes and ticks that would no doubt feast on you.



On a forbidding January day, to say this place is creepy is a world-class understatement. I'm not a believer in ghosts in any nonmetaphorical way, but I wouldn't blame you for getting a little spooked here. Quite a few horror-film conventions crept into my mind as I gingerly tiptoed around. Holes opening up and swallowing me, a bony hand reaching out of the rotting leaves and grabbing my ankle, a disembodied voice calling me...



When a nearly impassable high ridge stands between two towns, there is a very real "this-side" and "that-side" feeling to the human relations between them. When you have to work quite hard to walk to a place, you might be tempted not to do it. Nowadays, when I want to visit my friend Marty, whose luthier shop stands quite high on the other side of the mountain, perhaps two miles from me as the crow flies, I have to drive around the mountain, crossing the Potomac at Brunswick, MD, and back into Virginia at Harpers Ferry. The whole thing takes a good half-hour, door-to-door.

Not so in 1840. The walk is certainly hard, but the spots where the road is still usable go quickly. "This side" and "that side" wasn't nearly such a barrier then. You could visit a sweetheart or a business partner or a relative in a reasonably short time. This graveyard is evidence of the existence of the road: There are both "this-side" and "that-side" names here. Everhart: This side....


...Demory: That side.


Demory's gravestone is merging with that tree; the tree is literally consuming the stone as it grows.


What's most affecting about this place is the forgottenness of it. We carve our names and the dates of our lifetimes in stone to preserve them, and we trust our descendants to honor and remember them. There's something quite wrong about finding these unhonored and unremembered names here, like a trust has been violated. As I've said, I don't know why this graveyard was allowed to fall into this silent decay (I suspect money was somehow involved), but it's ineffably sad to witness it.


I may have made the walk sound too easy. I've never gone up and over Short Hill twice in one day; my treks have almost always been to the summit of the ridge and back down again on my side. A few times I've climbed over the mountain and then returned by the riverbank at the north end, but never up and over twice. I was utterly destroyed during the second descent, my thighs and knees burning and my new hip bitching awfully.

So I bear the folks buried here, the "that-siders," enormous respect, and unmitigated admiration. To make that walk to attend church every Sunday must have given them a quiet pride and self-satisfaction. We, I can hear them saying, we walk over this mountain for the Lord. We don't make a big deal out of it, we just do it. It's what we do.



I never found Hartman's gravestone. The name preserved in stone at the top of the mountain, which I imagine he carved as a casual lark on a bored afternoon, is the inscription that testifies that he lived. The stone meant to commemorate his life, at the mountain's foot, is gone.

The Big View

The view west from Short Hill, at Buzzard Rock. Harpers Ferry left, South Mountain right. Click to embiggen.

Perhaps to cleanse the bad taste in our mouths from yesterday's defeat of the Red of Skin, Freddie and I hiked up Short Hill this morning to get a look around. It's not a huge mountain -- the vertical drop is about 800 feet, some one and a half Washington Monuments. But we were both woofing when we got to the top. The climbing is tiring enough, but the writhing through, under and over brambles and downed trees is pretty exhausting.

The view from the top rewards the effort, though. Short Hill is a ten-mile-long ridge that begins in Hillsboro to the south and plunges dramatically into the Potomac at the north end. From the summit, at "our" end of the ridge, the view west encompasses three states -- Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland. The railroad bridge from Sandy Hook to Harpers Ferry is just visible, and on the northern vista you can see South Mountain. It's a Civil War lesson writ large: You can point to Harpers Ferry, Sharpsburg is just around one corner, and Gettysburg is just out of sight over yonder.

As you stand on Buzzard Rock, below your feet is a steep, broken cliff that, if you clamber down it, reveals caves and myriad hidey-holes. I have absolutely no doubt that mad young John Mobberly knew well of these caves, explored them as a young lad, and used them as his stronghold in his guerrilla raids on the farmers and encamped armies in both valleys below. (Not talking Carlsbad Caverns, here -- these are literally little cracks between boulders where a man, or perhaps two, can easily disappear from a tracker unfamiliar with the territory. Mobberly was famous for his ability to do just that.)

Besides the Football Disappointment, I had another motive to explore Buzzard Rock. On a previous hike, I had noticed something that made me regret not having brought my camera:


Graffiti, carved into the living stone of Buzzard Rock. Quite old graffiti, too. This one's dated "'88," and dollars to doughnuts that's not nineteen eighty-eight:


Here's the oldest one that I could find:


J. F. Hartman, 1851.

John F. Hartman, of Waters, as it turns out. (The place-name has died out, but it's at the lower left quadrant of that panorama at the top of this post -- basically at our feet.). I just found him in the voter rolls of the May 1861 Virginia Vote on Secession; he voted with the Union. There's no Hartman residence marked on the 1854 Yardley Taylor map of Loudoun County, but that doesn't mean much. (My house isn't on it either.)

(If any of you with paid access to the materials at Genealogy.com want to research any more about him, please don't let me stop you!)

Hartman probably -- no, almost certainly -- knew Mobberly, who also lived in Waters, a very small settlement. Quite possibly ran into him up here while he carved his name: Mobberly would have been about nine years old when that graffito was carved, living just a mile or two away, and exploring the mountain like a young goat.

Our photography of the graffiti accomplished, we walked along the ridgetop southward to White Rock, which commands a view of the German Settlement and the Catoctin Valley to the east of the ridge.

On a clear day, you can see as far as Sugarloaf Mountain, also in Maryland, as well as Furnace Mountain and Catoctin Mountain. Lovettsville is laid out at your feet. Today was a bit hazy, so distant details weren't clear, but we did get a lovely view.


The view east, at White Rock. Brunswick, MD, left, Lovettsville below. As before, click to embiggen, won't you?.

It was a bright, unseasonably warm day, and we both shed our coats as we admired the view and pointed out the houses and geographical features that we recognized.

On the walk down (nearly as physically arduous as the trip up!), we found the remains of yet another road, this one marked on no map that I've ever studied. Almost certainly a logging road, used to bring down felled trees from the wood-lots far uphill, it may also have been used as an access to higher-up cabins that have long since been lost. I found cornerstones to lots I'm familiar with, and several mysterious fenceposts that hint that the mountain was once cleared for farming far higher than I'd previously thought.

So, scratched-up and filthy, the two wanderers returned home with tales to tell.

Tales of Life in a Quiet Place

From this morning's Loudoun section of the Washington Post:

Officer Comes to Aid of Skunk

LOVETTSVILLE, Redwing Song Lane, Monday. An officer responded to a report of a skunk with a cup stuck on its head. The officer located the skunk, which was running in circles with a yogurt cup on its head. The officer confined the skunk and removed the cup. The skunk appeared healthy and uninjured, so the officer released it into the wild.