It’s Friday after work and there’s one picnic table left at the bar.
But it’s not really open, because a guy is sitting there, talking to people at the next table over.
I ask him if we can sit there too.
He gets up and moves to the other table.
I say, “Let me buy you a beer.”
He says, “I’m not gay.”
I come back with his I.P.A. and the show begins.
Bobby Joe O’Reilly has fine features and pale, almost translucent skin which he covers up with lots of ink.
But there’s no ink on his face.
What’s on his face is a war movie that will not stop playing.
It stars, oddly enough, Sargent O’Reilly himself, although he’s a younger man in the movie.
The more O’Reilly drinks the louder and more obnoxious his movie gets.
“Take those damn sunglasses off, they’re bothering me,” O’Reilly barks.
Here’s a man ready for hand-to-hand combat.
“I was in Kosovo,” he says.
He pauses for dramatic effect, a habit he picked up by watching late night Westerns.
“I watched four friends die right in front of me.
A sniper pinned us down and then a ‘bowling Betty’ came rolling down the narrow street.
Boom, my friend turned to ketchup right in front of me.
Splat, another friend turned to ketchup.
Bang, another.
Shit, another.
And I told that dumb ass Lieutantant we had no business in there, but he didn’t listen.
And you know what else?
I had one fucking bullet in my chamber.
One fucking bullet thanks to the U.N.
I fired that bullet and so did my men and the sniper died by our bullets.
I went to see his body and he was a kid.
A 13 year old kid!”
“You did what you had to do,” I say.
“A 13 year old kid!” screams O’Reilly.
Later, a cab pulls up for O’Reilly.
He stumbles and falls to the concrete.
I think, “Man down!”
But he makes it.
He survives.
Again.
As a native Nebraskan, I make it a point to keep up with the progress being made by other Huskers.
Interestingly, new media stars keep shooting from the corn. Evan Williams founded Blogger, sold it to Google, then founded Twitter. Ana Marie Cox rode Wonkette to a book deal, a job with Time and talking headom on the cable news circuit. Now, Rachelle Hruska, creator of GuestofaGuest.com is making some noise.
Ms. Hruska arrived in Manhattan in 2005 to work as a nanny, after graduating from Creighton University, a Jesuit school in Omaha, and ended up an Internet entrepreneur — a small-town-girl-makes-good tale, with a New Media gloss.
Guest of a Guest chronicles night life from the city and the Hamptons through dozens of daily posts and photographs. For followers of such coverage, the coin of the realm has traditionally been exclusivity, a sneering velvet-roped rejection. But GofG, as it calls itself, gives civilian readers the illusion that they can attend these parties, too, as virtual guests. Who would believe that the effusiveness of Nebraska Nice could sell? But in bad-news times, maybe that’s precisely why it does: the site, Ms. Hruska said, which began on April 1, 2008, broke even just this month.
What a charming assessment. But it’s safe to say there’s more than “Nebraska Nice” at work here.
Next Tuesday when, Murdering Oscar and Other Love Songs is released on Rush St. Records, Patterson Hood will see one of his earliest projects come to fruition some 15 years after its inception.
On his MySpace, Hood explains:
I moved to Athens, GA on Aprils Fools Day, 1994. Perhaps I thought I was kidding myself, just stopping in on my way to the bigger city an hour to the Southwest. I moved into a little house on Ruth St. with my new friend, Brandon. We had panhandlers in our driveway and had a crack head that frequently banged on our door at four thirty in the morning. I had a shitty job and only knew two other people in town. I was alive with the fresh opportunities posed by moving to a town with an actual music scene and clubs to conquer. I wrote an album’s worth of songs and called it Murdering Oscar (and other love songs).
Unfortunately, I didn’t have any money for studio time, much less financing or support to actually release it. I also didn’t have a band and didn’t know any of the hundreds of musicians residing in my new hometown. Instead, I recorded all of the songs on a boom box in Brandon’s bedroom (it had better acoustics than my room) and began dubbing cassette copies to give to anyone I met. I probably gave away about 500 of those suckers that year.
Hood moved on from his solo material, and Drive-By Truckers born. ten years later, in 2004, while DBT was taking some time off, Hood found one of the old cassettes, dusted off the old material and wrote some new songs as counterpoints to his former mood. In 2005, he took the songs into the David Barbe’s Chase Park Transduction Studios and recorded the majority of this album.
For the first time, The Northwest 100, The Seattle Times’ annual ranking of the region’s best-performing public companies, has fewer than 100 companies listed.
The main culprit: last fall’s stock-market slide, which pushed dozens of Northwest stocks below $2 a share. The Northwest 100 long has excluded companies whose shares have dropped below $2, but never — not even during the dot-com collapse earlier this decade — have so many companies fallen below that threshold.
Another reason for the decline: fewer and fewer publicly traded companies are headquartered in Washington, Oregon or Idaho.
A decade ago, nearly 200 Northwest companies were trading on major exchanges; today, there are just 136. Dozens evaporated in the dot-com bust; others, from big names like Safeco, Puget Energy and Immunex to younger tech firms such as Captaris and Advanced Digital Information, have been vacuumed up by larger companies and private-equity firms.
“Should the dearth of new public companies persist, the region could become a less vibrant, compelling place to work and create,” suggests Drew DeSilver, the Seattle Times reporter on the story.
I think when you couple this report with news that Oregon’s unemployment shot up to 12.4% last month, there is reason for concern. I also find it interesting that these trends are present in a region that thinks of itself as innovative, smart and self-reliant. From the one person design shops to the slow food restaurants and sustainable wineries all the way to Amazon.com and Nike, Northwest companies tend to shoot for the stars. In general, I’d say people have higher standards here.
So, why isn’t this beautiful part of the country, rich in human capital and natural resources, booming? It’s a conundrum.
The Oregonian did a nice job with this video. The economic story in The Dalles is interesting, so that’s a good place to start. But the paper is also showing it can create compelling video content, which is essential for an online media enterprise.
Keep It Hid is not a retreat from the sonic explorations Auerbach undertook on Attack and Release, it is an expansion of them. The songs stretch out with that familiar multi-tracked guitar base, augmented throughout with the often subtle employment of organ, banjo and bass. This work unquestionably signals a step forward in Auerbach’s rapidly evolving style.
Auerbach is not aping classic riffs so much as they seem to sweat out of his pores. It’s all up there, in his head, and he is channeling it into his own vision in a manner that is consistent and convincing.
I don’t listen to much DJ music, but I’m intrigued by the group called N.A.S.A., which stands for “North America, South America.”
N.A.S.A. is Sam Spiegel (Squeak E. Clean) and Ze Gonzales (DJ Zegon). They make extraordinary mashups and put striking images to the beats, as you can see above.
“Money” features graphics from Shepard “Obey Giant” Fairey. The combination of elements, musical and graphic, make a strong impression to say the least.
To learn more about N.A.S.A., see this interview they did with Carson Daly.
Phish is back and the thing I like about it is it’s Phish, not an imitation of Phish.
The Vermont-based jamband returned to the stage last night at Fenway Park in Boston after a three-year hiatus. I’ve been listening to the show today, and from what I can tell they delivered, particularly from a set list perspective, as the show was full of classic tunes like “Sample In A Jar,” “Chalkdust Torture,” “Cavern,” and “Down With Disease.”
Phish also busted out two choice covers–Led Zeppelin’s “Good Times Bad Times” and “Curtis Lowe” by Lynyrd Skynyrd.
I know the Gorge shows in August are sold out, but I might have to materialize some tickets.
Name Your Tale asks for a title and if they like it, one of the site’s writers creates “a very short story, in fact, exactly 100 words.” Jenny Nicholson, who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and works in advertising by day, “while plotting world domination at night,” was kind enough to write to my title idea.
I just submitted three “six word stories” for consideration. They are:
Will work for mansion in Wilmette.
It takes beer to make wine.
Before Twitter she did not type.
Maybe these bits will be digitally elevated on Six Word Stories. Or maybe I need to work harder to get away from bumper sticker copy. Either way, it’s a fun exercise and I appreciate the efforts of those involved.
