Fall Colors
I was fortunate to visit Salt Lake City last week, where I saw live music, close friends and mountains ripe with color. Here’s my photoset from the trip.
“And We Dropped Our Young To A Ragtime Feel”
I interviewed Oliver Crowe of The Stills Thursday night. We sat on cushioned benches atop the outdoor patio at In The Venue in downtown Salt Lake City. I said, jokingly, “You don’t have a Canadian accent.” He said emphatically, “I’m French!”
One of the interesting things Crowe said is “rock was shameful during the Clinton years. Whenever we start bombing people, rock comes back.” I see his point, as all artists have more to say when the country/world loses its way.
City Of Lost Wages
I’m live blogging this entry from the MGM Grand on the Vegas strip. The place lives up to it’s name. According to Wikipedia, it’s the world’s largest hotel building, with 5,044 guest rooms, suites, villas and Skylofts (including 3,153 no smoking rooms).
In 2000, in an attempt to appeal to a more mature clientele, the hotel underwent a major renovation. The theme is now more of the Art Deco era of classic Hollywood and the hotel started billing itself as The City of Entertainment, a similar title given to Los Angeles.
I must say one could wander from shop to show to fine dining to gambling to the bar to the pool and so on for days. Not that it’s a healthy pursuit. I’m just saying.
Manual Tools For Thinkers
Kottke is pointing to a Legal Affairs article on yellow pads, objects many find useful even in a modern world dominated by screens and gadgets.
Once used only by law students and lawyers, the yellow legal pad is now employed to a degree unrivaled in stationery. “End career as a fighter,” President Richard Nixon wrote on a legal pad in August 1974. Five days later, on the top of another one, he scratched, “Resignation Speech.” Jeff Tweedy, front man for the rock band Wilco, writes his songs on a legal pad. Jim Harrison, the laureate of the untamed heart, wrote Legends of the Fall on legal pads; Elmore Leonard writes his crime novels on them.
In 1888, Thomas W. Holley, a 24-year-old paper mill worker in Holyoke, Mass. had an idea for how to use the paper scraps, known as sortings, discarded by mills. Sortings were anything trimmed away as scrap or considered of lesser quality than the writing paper eventually packaged and sold. Holley’s notion was to bind the scraps into pads that could be sold at a cut rate. Convinced he had a winning idea, he founded his own company–AMPAD–to collect the sortings from local mills (Holyoke was then the papermaking capital of the world) and began churning out bargain-price pads.
Philip Moustakis, a mid-level associate at the New York firm of Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle, uses one legal pad per case, and prefers yellow over white pads and a faint, as opposed to a dark, rule. “The darker lines intrude upon my thinking–they’re yelling back at you,” he explained. “You want a more subtle line.”
The yellow-to-white sales ratio can be as high as 2 to 1. Some consumers feel white pads emit too much glare.
American Organic
How does the word “democrat” make you feel? Given the Democratic Party’s total ineptitude at present, and the current state of American “democracy” chances are you’re not feeling too good about it. I know I’m not.
In December of 1949, 80-year old Frank Lloyd Wright, descended upon Radio City Music Hall and The Mary Margaret McBride Show. While discussing his organic architecure and his Middlewestern sensibilities, he said the Midwest is the heart of the country and the heart of democracy.
If democracy has a heart, of course, that’s the thing that particularly distinguishes it, isn’t it, from other -isms? The fact that it has a heart. The fact that it insists upon the individual as such and defends him. It has to live on genius–democracy. Democracy can’t take the handrail down the stair. A democrat has to have courage–keep his hand off the handrail and take the steps down the middle. That’s a democrat.
As with most things Wright, I’m blown away. The man could really think and he had an undying passion to care a great deal about important things. Nothing is more important than freedom and nothing is more American than freedom. Democrats–affiliated with the political party of that name, or not–need to be free to stand up and tell it like it is. I, for one, am not loyal to a man nor an office nor a political party. I’m loyal to my country. A country that needs me to be an agent for change, to speak up against institutional injustice, to offer better ideas.
Here’s one: Let’s stop paying oilmen to invade other countries and start paying teachers to educate our youth.
Paperless Elections No Good
As we fast approach the mid-term election, Princeton University has bad news regarding the integrity of voting machines used in precincts throughout this land. Princeton computer scientists studied Diebold voting machines and found that they can easily be hacked and an election thrown all in a matter of seconds. A paper trail would help safeguard against this malfeasance, but the machine in question leaves no such evidence.
Polish Love The Mule
Sven Philipp interviewed Warren Haynes for Glide Magazine. Here’s what Warren says about playing in Europe, Poland in particular.
It was just incredible. The shows sold out in minutes and they were so into it and over-the top. It was nothing like I’ve ever seen. We’ve been pretty astounded at the European shows in general and the audience was so much more aware of our music than we realized. To see people singing the words to virtually every song has blown us away. The audience recognized the songs after the first notes, and Poland was the most exaggerated version of that yet. For example, when we started “Soulshine,” the place in Warsaw just erupted. We just didn’t know what to expect. We knew we had a lot of fans there because we’ve been getting a lot of e-mails, but until you go, you just don’t know what to expect? It was beautiful.
All Ears On Austin
The Polyphonic Spree at Emo’s, Austin, 9/14/06
photo courtesy of Flickr user, nathan_malone
Austin City Limits Fest is underway. Ryan at Muzzle of Bees is deep in the middle of it:
ACL is just getting kicked off, and we are still gathering our thoughts and recollections from last nights debauchery on 6th street. Austin is quite the city, I can’t remember the last time I went to a dueling piano bar, but the one we found our way into last night was pretty sweet, just don’t request “It’s raining men,” they won’t play it. We even found a bar that offered complimentary arm wrestling booths, score!
The Making Of A Nashville Word Man
Kathleen Rooney interviewed poet and rock star, David Berman, in 2003. Berman’s first book of poems, Actual Air, was critically acclaimed. Now that it’s sitting on my coffee table, I can see why, for he writes strangely lucid lines like: “Out the garage window he sees a group of ugly children enter the forest. Their mouths look like coin slots.”
KR: Whose work, if anyone’s, are you influenced by? Who do you like to read?
DB: The books I took the most from were Henry Miller’s Nexus, Sexus, and Plexus when I was a 14-year-old. It gave me permission to enjoy life. He was filled with praise for the universe and scorn for suckers. After that, I’d say Robert Stone, especially Dog Soldiers and a short story called “Helping.” Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samara, Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine and Melville’s The Confidence Man had an effect on me.
KR: I can’t help but notice that you don’t list any poets among your chief influences–are there any poets (or, for that matter, songwriters) whose work you especially enjoy or from whom you draw inspiration?
DB: There are hardly any great poets from the last 50 years. Poetry has been taken over by uncharismatic nerds who use the word “desire” pointlessly and “absence” as a noun even more pointlessly. That being said, the poets that kill me are, Kenneth Koch, and…..Kenneth Koch. After that it’s Michael Burkard (who I can’t figure out why he’s so amazing), half of Franz Wright, Robert Frost, and, big surprise, Wallace Stevens. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is like the “Stairway to Heaven” of 20th-century poetry.
I’ll Have Some Quiche With My Novel
“To trace the trajectory of the novel is to follow the struggle of the novelist–even, perhaps especially, the male novelist–to be taken seriously–that is, to raise the perception of his chosen form from that of a piece of silly frou-frou to the higher, more male realm of capital-A Art.” -Margaret Atwood
According to In These Times senior editor, Lakshmi Chaudhry, the novel was once considered “a low-status, frivolous, pastime of ladies of leisure, unfit for real men.”
It may be so considered once more. Britsh novelist Ian McEwan last year tried to give his novels away for free in a London park.
Only one “sensitive male soul” took up his offer, while every woman he approached was “eager and grateful” to do the same.
Unscientific as McEwan’s experiment may be, its thesis is borne out by a number of surveys conducted in Britain, the United States and Canada, where men account for a paltry 20 percent of the market for fiction. Unlike the gods of the literary establishment who remain predominantly male–both as writers and critics–their humble readers are overwhelmingly female.