Congratulations Philadelphia Phillies!

On your 10,000 losses. And thank you, thank you so much for making us all feel a little better about the teams we root for.

Kwik E Mart comes to Denver!

As a kid, my parents always made sure that my sister and I were exposed to our cultural heritage. Trips to Old World Wisconsin, Boston's Freedom Trail, and the Civil War battlefields of Mississippi are among my favorite childhood memories.

Today I passed the torch on to my daughter as we visited the Kwik E Mart. Denver is lucky enough to have one of twelve 7-11 stores in the world to get the Kwik E Mart makeover. And while the Krusty-O's were sold out, we had plenty of fun rubbing elbows with Comic Book Store Guy, Homer, and Apu, and the Squishee wasn't half bad.


Let's do Denver - Broadway style!


Ooh! Can I have some Krusty-o's?


Nice to see you, Apu.


Mmm...hot dogs...


...mmm...donuts.


"Choo-choo-choose me?" "Noooooo!"


Brrrrrrr...buy 3 for the price of 3!


Stay away from the egg salad.

Mmm...Squishee...

Can I get mine all syrup?

Vote 4 Quimby!

Worst movie promo ever!

Thank you! Come again!

A shout in the street (Independence Day)

Last night as I lay in bed, I listened to the shrieks and giggles of several children in the street. Their voices mingled and rose as one into the summer sky. Like many of the children in my neighborhood, they spoke Spanish and hushed only when one of the adults with them lit off another round from their cache of fireworks.

I did not get up to watch the scene, but kept listening and smiled each time the light from one of their sidewalk-crawling fireworks lit up my ceiling, as it undoubtedly lit up the street.

Coolhand Band

My poor pal, the mini-boss sent a shout out to me re: Coolhand Band, our rock-n-roll mentors, and I failed to respond.

So, better late than never, here's a hastily compiled album (of sorts), of our favorite Coolhand hits. I don't think any of this ever happened, but if it did, I know mini-boss was holding my hand.



1. Learning to spell
2. She sees by degrees
3. 33
4. Turning down
5. Cocktail walk
6. Chocolate box
7. Would
8. Lightn'ng fence
9. Halby learns guitar (what's with all the learning?)
10. Out'tha freaks
11. Wired & ready
12. Save me bravely

Did I really overlook Acetate?

-----------------
Caveat:

"Never happened" - or something like that - comes from some pre-show banter of an REM bootleg I have circa 1983/84. Someone shouts "Athens Georgia." Mike Mills deadpans into the mic "Never exsisted." Never thought it meant a thing until tonight.

Caveat too:

I've been accused of not posting enough pictures of my daughter. Blame me, I'm overprotective (Kitt, these are for you). You can't have her, you can't have her, no, not for free.

One giant leap for Western Civilization

Behold: The Beer Shirt!

Available from the wonderful BREW CITY.

What more needs to be said?

For further explanation - sigh - click here.

Tough part of town

A squirrel sat near a dumpster at 10th & Lincoln this morning with a cigarette butt dangling from its mouth.

Apparently city squirrels grow up fast, forsaking eternal salvation for earthly pleasures.

The people in your neighborhood II

The heat finally wavered as the sun went down, so I headed out for a walk through Cheesman Park before it got too dark.

No sooner had I entered the park and started down its tree lined paths than a bum shouted at me from a bench. I had my headphones on and kept walking, but something caught my eye. His face was bloodied and his hands were drenched in blood. I do not know how this happened.

I stopped and pulled my earplugs out and he asked for a cell phone. His hands were drenched in blood. I told him I did not have one. (I lied.)

Within shouting distance you could hear children shrieking on the playground and beyond them the laughter from folks wrapping up their weekend picnics.

"Could you use a few bucks?" I asked. He laughed, as he should have. Then he nodded his head. Yes, he could use a few bucks. I gave him whatever I had in my wallet, which wasn't much, and continued on my way.

A moment later the sirens of a fire truck interrupted my music and I turned back. The City of Denver came out in full force. I watched as they patched him up. He was joking with the EMTs as they led him to the ambulance.

The people in your neighborhood

This afternoon I walked back from my lunch break on the 16th Street Mall where they were setting up for an evening concert. I happened to pass two police officers who animatedly discussed something or other.

Not far off, a saggy fellow of indeterminate middle age watched on. He wore a volunteer fire department cap. He looked as though he'd just dropped his ice cream.

I think he just wanted to go up to the officers and ask if they'd be his buddy.

Woah-ho I'm Excited Now

If you haven't noticed, Prince Fielder is having one of the great seasons in Milwaukee Baseball History.





Prince hit his 26th ding of the year tonight, he had 28 all of last year. And the Brewers currently enjoy a 7 game lead in the NL Central.

Cure for the Summertime Blues

With summer fast upon us it was time for Oscar the Cat's summer shearing. Though you couldn't tell it from his expression, this always makes him very happy.

Before

After

The Case of the Missing Books

The Case of the Missing Books: A Mobile Library Mystery
by Ian Sansom

Israel Armstrong is your other-than-average man about Londontown; at least he'd like to think so. He knows a great cappuccino when he encounters one, loves art house flicks and can speak at length on Dostoevsky.

But can he run a small, Northern Ireland public library? Especially when that library happens to have been shuttered for years, is now on wheels, and, most distressingly, all the books have disappeared? It'll take more than a bibliophile's knowledge of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot to recapture the missing library in a hilarious whotook'em that relies more heavily on Sansom's memorable characters than the mystery that envelopes them.

At a time when the literary anti-hero is most often a leather-clad, drinking and smoking, but ultimately big-hearted rebel, the passive aggressive, less than gifted Israel Armstrong is truly enjoyable precisely because he is so utterly unlikable.

Sansom also succeeds in depicting modern Northern Ireland without succumbing to the specter of the Troubles. His junk food munching bureaucrats, small town bullies, knowing baristas and seductress journalists humanize the region in a way that a more overwrought narrative might not. The effects of the Troubles exist in these characters, but they do not dominate their quotidian lives.

Thankfully, my sister passed The Case of the Missing Books on to me, which, after a slow start, I delightedly sunk my teeth into. With a baby at home my recent fiction reading experiences have been filled with false starts, frustration and boredom. For some reason nonfiction has been easier to hang with while sleep-deprived and listening for the tiniest sounds emanating from the nursery. Fortunately, book two of the Mobile Library Mysteries, Mr. Dixon Disappears, is available in the States next month.

On the web:
Ian Sansom for your information
Ballykissangel

Caveat to Pepper

This weekend witnesses the 40th anniversary of the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Last month saw the 40th anniversary of a more subtle, but no less gorgeous pop moment, the release of the Kinks "Waterloo Sunset."

If the Beatles "got by with a little help from their friends," then Ray Davies seems almost bemused to admit "but I don't need no friends."

No disrespect to the Beatles, but I think I'll hang around North London with Terry and Julie. I don't think Lovely Rita Meter Maid will miss us.

On the web:

Sanctuary Records 40th Anniversary Waterloo Sunset release.

Should we talk about the weather?

When we moved to Colorado from Wisconsin somewhat unexpectedly nearly three years ago, I turned to the literature of the West to help me understand just where it was we now called home. In the ensuing years I have read several Wallace Stegner novels, reread My Antonia and tried to delve into Katherine Ann Porter. Contemporary novels Augusta Locke by William Haywood Henderson and The Willow Field by William Kittredge, along with the wonderful Fort Collins journal Matter, have also helped me get my bearings.

One quote that resonated with this transplant in particular comes from Stegner, who bluntly informs us that when living in the West:

"You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time."

For the most part I agree with his assessment, it is a far different environment in Denver and Colorado than the upper-Midwest I grew up in. Unfortunately I have not gotten over the green, not yet, and I do not expect to any time soon. And so, with Denver in bloom it seemed natural that I would pull my rarely used copy of Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac to read up on Wisconsin in March.

Writing in the 1940s, Leopold's March entry is a love letter to geese. He opens by telling us:

"One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring."

Though Leopold's writing is like home cooking for me, I couldn't help but wonder how much the state's climate and environment has changed since he wrote those words, and since our awakening to the effects of global warming.

Oddly enough, my former hometown rag, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published a story this weekend that answered my question. The Journal Sentinel reports that Leopold's daughter, Nina Leopold Bradley, has taken up her father's mantle in chronicling the natural events of her father's old stomping grounds. The article reports:

But spring's advance has been so dramatic that if Leopold were alive today, he'd have to rewrite parts of his seminal book, "A Sand County Almanac."

Take, for example, the Canada geese. Leopold wrote that they "tumbled out of the sky like maple leaves" in March.

But records by his daughter show that migratory geese are returning home more than a month sooner - now arriving about Feb. 19.

The article can be read in its entirety here.

Obviously this is a grim prognosis. I am not comfortable preaching about the consequences of global warming - I need to get my own house in order - but I can say that when you encounter its effects in an individually familiar setting, the reality becomes all the more stark.

...

Whatever the future holds, today we witnessed a beautiful spring day in Denver. The view from here:

Have we grown complacent?

"Every fury on earth has been absorbed in time, as art, or as religion, or as authority in one form or another. The deadliest blow the enemy of the human soul can strike is to do fury honor. Swift, Blake, Beethoven, Christ, Joyce, Kafka, name me a one who has not been thus castrated. Official acceptance is the one unmistakable symptom that salvation is beaten again, and is the one surest sign of fatal misunderstanding, and is the kiss of Judas." - James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Martin Luther King Jr.'s I have a dream speech.

Robert Kennedy's comments on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Year in review

"I'm a knight in shining armchair..." ~ Paul Westerberg

Denver Blizzard part II

Those of us who had to drudge out into the elements found a pleasant camaraderie with the people we encountered. You’d expect everyone would be in a foul mood but instead I found just the opposite. Pedestrians, drivers, even people in their doorways were all in pretty good spirits, just making the best of the situation. (Click on photos to enlarge images.)

Denver is a beautiful city, perhaps no more so when it is frosted.



Capitol Hill, our favorite neighborhood. You listening Pill Hill? Beacon Hill?



Broadway was empty. Imagine East Wash or Comm Ave or Wisconsin Avenue devoid of activity.



The Public Library, the Colorado Historical Society (that Buffalo is taller than either you or I), and the new wing of the Denver Art Museum.

The Capitol, outside the Denver Post, and an Inner City Sasquatch.

The view from work. The Library and Art Museum overlooking Civic Center, Civic Center sans drug dealers, and the the State House.

The sun peaked out just before setting. And I biffed pretty major on my walk home.

The Denver Blizzard

Moore School on Capitol Hill - Wednesday morning

Moore School - Thursday morning

Even the snowman was burdened by snow

Capitol Hill facing East to Cheesman Park

The King Soopers parking lot is normally packed by this time of day

It snowed and snowed and snowed and snowed
And when it stops nobody knowed.

Albert Ayler In the Aeroplane Over the Sea?

Sometimes you can convince yourself you hear something even if it isn't really there. For instance, is that Albert Ayler keening amidst the horns on The Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea?

The short answer is no, for Ayler, the free jazz saxophonist, died under mysterious circumstances in 1970, nearly thirty years before Neutral Milk released their master work.

The longer answer leaves the door ajar, as the ears don't lie.

For those of you who don't know Ayler, he grew up in a household that encouraged him to engage music. As a young man he joined the army, where he played in the army band. Many of Ayler's songs begin deceptively simple, with bold, military march-like statements or folk-like melodies. He quickly dismantles the familiarity of these formats, though, usually after running through a melody's first phrase. He eviscerates his songs and pushes them as far as he can, either by expanding them to skyward or folding them into some minute, mitochondrial corner. The results make for exhilarating, if not difficult listening.

The universe he unfurls finds a kindred spirit in Jeff Mangum's voice, itself a rude but convincing instrument, and instrumentation found on In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.

Mangum's lyrics have a certain biology to them, the human body and the human condition are fraught with bewildering emotion, but also clinical objectivity. When he sings "Now how I remember you / How I would push my fingers through / Your mouth to make those muscles move / That made your voice so smooth and sweet," I cannot tell if this is a tender moment, or one of self serving discovery. Need they be mutually exclusive? Ayler explores a similar sentiment in his songs, especially as he allows his rhythm sections to explore their instruments with an intimacy befitting of any Two-Headed Boy.

To that end, I cobbled together an album of both artists.

In the Aylerplane Over the Sea :

1 : Ghosts: First Version : Albert Ayler (Spiritual Unity)
2 : King Of Carrot Flowers Part 1
3 : King Of Carrot Flowers Part 2 & 3
4 : In The Aeroplane Over The Sea
5 : Two-Headed Boy
6 : Our Prayer : Albert Ayler (The House That Trane Built Impulse Records Story)
7 : Holland, 1945
8 : Communist Daughter
9 : Oh Comely
10 : Ghost
11 : Our Prayer : Albert Ayler (At Slug's Saloon Vol. 1)
12 : Two-Headed Boy Part 2

Any takers?

A thousand tents in Wisconsin

Or, A very EAoD summer



My favorite musical moment of the year comes two minutes and forty-two seconds into Everything Absent or Distorted's "The Exit Parade," from their novella The Soft Civil War. Just as the song lulls listeners into a soothing but knowing round of "And we love you..." its promise is interrupted by a Salvation Army brass line. For a split second the horns threaten to scatter the tranquility, but instead they bolster the mantra and allow the song to ride out on a wave of hope.

Were it not for a friend of a friend I might never have known EAoD. Since that fateful April night ("Change instruments!") I've discovered a band that:

...makes you wanna dress in pink to meet friends and strangers at a cemetery to flail about wildly whilst toting balloons while contemplating exactly whose grave it is you dance upon.



...makes you wanna dance with friends and strangers into the wee hours of the night even if the band has requested the deejay spin "The Final Countdown."



...makes you wanna leave your house on a weeknight to pogo like its 1995 and shake pompoms if kind strangers happen to provide them.

...makes you accept the women's XL t-shirt (that doesn't fit anyway) when what you really wanted was a men's medium.



...makes you feel like a moderately decent pool player.



...makes you finally get around to self-publishing that little book.

At their record release party in August the band invited everyone out for an evening of music and dancing and flowers, and yes, "The Final Countdown." For that night audience and artists happily commingled. As I shuffled out of the Hi-Dive with the rest of the faithful, it was with a feeling one wishes to make greater acquaintance of; hope.


Thanks guys.


PS I have not asked permission to post most of these pictures. I would be happy to pull/credit any photos upon request.