Last week the Borders Group, parent corporation to the chain of Borders Books, Music, Movies, Borders Express and Waldenbooks was going into liquidations, and all of its remaining stores would be shuttered by the fall. For anyone paying attention, the writing was on the wall back at the start of the year, when the company went into bankruptcy, and most folx were aware of the hole the chain would have to dig itself out of in order to regain some semblance of solvency. Attempts to sell came to naught this summer, and so the booksellers have headed to demise after almost 40 years in business.
There have been a lot of reasons for Borders' end bandied about for a good couple of years, since the company has steadily lost money since something like 2006. The long and short of it was, the book industry is changing quite a bit, and Borders didn't adapt to those changes much.
That said, does the end of the Borders Group mean the likely demise of the big box book store? Media and entertainment superstores like Tower, Media Play, FYE, even Blockbuster have rapidly faced distinction in the 2000s, and it is all too plausible the notion of the super-sized book store is likewise going the way of the dodo, as Amazon dominates the book retailing market, and the market, much the same way as the music industry shifts towards a digital dominance.
Unfortunately, it says something more than a little sad about modern culture's communal nature: we don't have one anymore.
I for one am going to miss Borders. Yes, it was a 'big box' store, but if you're going to succumb to corporate megaliths, at least you could enjoy some culture. There was something genuinely pleasant about going into a virtual labyrinth of books of inordinate variety, browse to one's content, grab a coffee, spend a third of one's paycheck (okay, that one just belongs to me before I started paying for a house), and have a genuinely mellow and enjoyable afternoon or evening.
Yes, folx have complained all along that the big box bookstores were largely responsible for killing off independent book sellers, and there is some truth to that. Years back here in Buffalo, there were all sorts of small to moderate bookstores, catering to all sorts of genres or markets, from Village Green, to Outland, to the Buffalo Book Sellers in the Northtown Plaza. Today they're few and far between.
It's possible, with the demise of so many big-box media stores, the sole survivor will ultimately be, surprisingly enough--the niche market mom and pop book stores. We've witnessed similar events in music retail. Big box stores have steadily died out for years, while many smaller retailers met their sad fates as well. But, for example, here in Buffalo, the stores that survived, were record retailers who have managed to eke out, and carve out a small, yet dedicated niche. One that will likely stick around for some time. The Record Baron in Kenmore, NY has, and continues, to make its name as a haven for vinyl record collectors. A vinyl collector is already as niche as you can get, and while the consumer base is small, it's not likely to get any smaller. Granted, these tiny stores could fall victim to a seriously bum market economy, but as is evident this decade, size can't prevent that problem either. In fact quite the opposite may be true; mom and pop retailers have already been accustomed to running a fuel mixture that's as lean as it can get.
So the survivors in the Buffalo book stores may wind up being places like Talking Leaves, who have stuck it out all these years. Even if they don't choose to follow the digital wave, they and other small bookstores may survive as collector's niches in the same manner as vinyl record stores have. This may mean a lengthy future for the likes of Old Editions downtown. We should be so lucky, if for only a few semblances of locations where people congregate and exchange not just money, but human ideas. The saddest thing missing in music nowadays was the rapid rate of exchange between actual human beings, not just trolls bad-mouthing artists or albums on an anonymous iTunes review. I don't want the book world to fall victim to being just a set of Amazon ratings, as useful as they can be.
The death of Borders of course makes a lot of people wonder about the likes of other big slugger stores, like Barnes & Noble. B&N had been smart enough to go on-line almost in lock step with the rise of Amazon back in the '90s, and they weren't too slow on the draw in coming up with and marketing e-reader technology to keep from falling behind on the digital revolution. They may survive for at least another 5-10 years. But unfortunately, I always prefered shopping at Borders.
I like Barnes & Noble just fine, sure, but it never felt like the place a bona fide bookworm would hang if they're going to choose to hang in a big box mecca. To me, Borders just felt more book geek friendly. B&N instead always comes off as a place where a soccer mom who wants to appear well-read would go. A lot of national critics nit-picked that Borders staff was too young or not knowlegeable enough, but c'mon guys. One blogger noted that you'd never find a Borders employee who could tell you who won the Pulitzer this year. My response was, I'M a guy who reads a friggin' TON of books, and I couldn't give you the answer to that either!
And so, with the announcement made, the trek to oblivion began. This past weekend we walked into the Orchard Park location of Borders, the liquidation sales already at a fever pitch. the was busy, seriously so, though not on a gradiose levels more than the stores in our area generally ever did. That was the thing, we still had quite a few people in the local stores shopping and buying all along.
There was, however, a discernible pall over the mood of the store, which would on ly be expected. A mix of dread you feel, just after the death of an elder relative, or after they've been moved into a home; when the family members start turning out the closets and drawers in their house, picking through the flotsam and jetsam of a full life, in search of things they can claim as useful to themselves.
In the case of the store, it wasn't yet in a state of full-on disarray; closing sales have usually been going on over a week before a death-tolling store starts really looking like a picked over carcass. However, there was a maudlin, scavenger-y vibe going on, and it made me vaguely sick to my stomach, even as I participated in the carrion-feeding myself. I dare say, it won't likely take our area stores very long before they've shuttered permanently, at least at the pace the grave-robbing was going this weekend.
The sentimental side of me remembered all the Sunday afternoons I used to do writing homework there, or the Christmas shopping, or just the general post-work-shift-I-hate-my-life retail therapy spent among the shelves, and was overcome with a shudder of defeat.
The real defeat came from the chalk-board still hovering above the already-closed, and mostly emptied coffee kiosk. Scrawled in yellow chalk, the crew from the counter wished to thenk their regulars, and give a fond farewell. but it felt like a note from the dead, still hanging after the apocalypse.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Off the Mat: The Heat Machine
Time to spend a little time with what is likely my biggest guilty pleasure....
In pro wrestling, there is a strange kind of industry-speak that derived from the secretive con-artist origins of the "sport". Way back, as legitimate wrestlers toured the circuits, they commonly wound up performing at carnivals, festivals, circus attractions, et al. where they inevitably began crossing paths with the nefarious sorts who usually operate in those environs. Back in those early days, wrestling was still a legitimate professional sport. It was also usually pretty boring. Matches could sometimes go for three hours, with combatants basically clenching each other in the middle of the mat and not doing anything. Even when they were doing something, fans could barely tell they were doing anything. Basically, if any of you are old enough, and were paying attention enough to the UFC's earliest days, before they came up with a round system, a judging system, or any stand-up rules...well, you know how dull this type of sport can get.
It was only a matter of time, of course, before the carnival hucksters explained something to the wrestlers: "If you scripted the matches some, and played up the action like theater instead of sport, you'd sell a lot more tickets." Thus, the pro-wrestling as we know it today (i.e. "sports entertainment") was soon born. Along with it, that secretive code-speak used among its practitioners: carney talk.
In pro-wrestling carney, there is a set of booking practices designed to create and maximize a dramatic story arc. Every match tends to promote an 'angle' or storyline. The dramatic arc is designed to take place, usually, over a series of matches. Just like fiction, you have a protagonist (usually 'the babyface'), an antagonist('the heel'), the resulting conflict, and, if done properly, a climax and resolution. The climactic match is usually one with a more action packed stipulation ("This one is hair vs. hair!"--"The loser must leave town!!!"), where the stakes are high, along with the drama. Carney strippers used to call their third act (the one where they 'Take it all off!') the 'Blow-off', so naturally, so did the wrestlers.
The key to the drama is really how much the fans can get behind the face character, and how much they can really despise the heel. This is called 'getting over.' When a heel had a crowd really good and riled up, it was called 'getting heat' from the crowd. Soon, 'heat' and 'pop' from the crowd was the indicator of how well the performers were doing.
Sometimes the performers might need a little help though. Heels and promoters would often 'plant' people in the crowd for the heel to have confrontations with (one of the most famous tropes is for a child to hold a sign declaring devotion for his hero babyface, only to have the heel march up, snatch it from his hands, and tear it up in front of the youngster's now tear-soaked eyes--fans used to each this shit up). 'Building heat' was a tough and sometimes experimental skill set, which often depended on the changing sensibilities of the audience. One crowd in Minnesota might lose their shit if you called Fran Tarkinton a fag. Another crowd might not budge if you turned and punched someones grandma. You never knew.
Then technology got involved, and things got weird. That weirdness, amazingly still goes on today. You see, wrestling never really reached its golden age until it was televised. It didn't really, REALLY reach its gift for the con, until something called 'pre-recording' came along. When that came along, we have the entrance of what became known as the artificial Heat Machine. Today, it's called 'Canned Heat'.
I'm amazed it took me as long to notice it, but the first time I caught wind of Canned Heat was watching an episode of WCW Thunder back in the '90s (like I said, can't believe it took me that long). This was during the spectacular rise of Bill Goldberg as a superstar, a guy who was legitimately big, legitimately strong, legitimately at least semi-tough--and legitimately un-skilled. Looking back, for all his charisma, he couldn't talk a promo for shit, he had about four total moves in the ring (all of them inordinately stiff and therefore brutal looking), and if the match went past five minutes, he'd probably have 'blown up' (in carney, that means to run out of gas, become too exhausted to perform properly).
The powers that be looked at a guy who could pretty much make folx want to shit their pants when he marched out to the ring, and had to figure out how to get this guy over, when he couldn't perform for shit at all once inside the ring. The answer? Artificial heat--in any way shape or form. First, promoters put him in squash match after squash match (a 'squash' is a match where the performer you're trying to 'push over' goes in the ring and basically kicks the shit out of some hapless victim assigned to 'do the job' for him). With each stunningly short victory, Goldberg became known as an unstoppable monster, an irresistible force that no one could dare get in the way of). The 'Winning Streak' replete with exagerrated numbers ("How'd he go from 32-0 to 49-0 in only four days?") was a means of building heat. But that still wasn't quite getting the deal done.
Unlike WCW Monday Nitro, which was aired live, Thunder was generally a pre-recorded show. You could edit out the gaffs, make more ordinarly moments look a little more extraordinary...and you could tweak the sound edit. Enter: Canned Heat. As Bill Goldberg stalked ruthlessly out to take on his next victim, an audible roar of "Gooooooldberg!....Goooooooldberg!" emanated from the crowd. It was illustrated as part of the phenomenon. This big, scary, mean bastard had won over the crowd. And it was mostly bullshit. When you actually watched the crowd, especially when shot behind the wrestlers in the ring...nobody was doing anything. The roar seems like it can be heard from all over the arena, yet there isn't a single fucking person opening their mouths out there. In fact, it almost looks like no one hardly gives a shit.
Eventually, the heat machine actually worked. After weeks of showing matches of Goldber with the canned heat of his named being screamed from the rafters, crowds figured that was actually what they were supposed to do, and started doing it legitimately. THEN the producers were smart enough get the camera on them as often as possible.
It's basically a tool to fool the unobservant television viewer. Much like artifically inserted cheering between tracks on a live concert album, it's a notion of 'keying' the audience in on the excitement, whether the excitement is there or not. It's also more prevalent in wrestling than you think. All year ESPN Classic has been airing old episodes of 'AWA Championship Wrestling' from back in the late '80s, and the amount of canned heat used to sell the product of a promotion that was clearly dying a painful death makes its imminent demise all the more painful to watch now. As the arenas became more and more empty, seated mostly of old folx and special-ed classes (not a stretch) who were likely given the tickets for free to simply TRY to put an audience in the building for taping (another common aspect of the heat machine, BTW); it just made the canned heat all the more flagrant and pathetic. I don't how I never spotted it as a kid back then.
Unfortunately, Canned Heat lives on, even though it's a very old trick, one smarter viewers and wrestling fans can generally spot in a second today. So, when it's spotted, it's usually regarded as a very dismal sign of things not going well for the promotion. Exhibit A: Spike TV's current episodes of 'iMPACT Wrestling'--formally branded as TNA (Total Nonstop Action), the promotion decided to brand itself after the name of its show this year as another example of a perennially hapless promotion forever grasping at straws. TNA has been a promotion always placing a distant second to the virtual monopoly that Vince McMahon's WWE product has had on the industry for the last decade. Its existence was once built largely on sheer spunk, the ability to hire talent often shirked by McMahon (which is considerable), and its promotion of what it called the 'X Division' (highly choreographed wrestling devoted greatly to what are called 'high spots' in a style often comparable to Mexican Lucha Libre wrestling).
Recent years have drifted away from that notion. Money was spent hand over fist in search of gimmicks, angles and booking that made it look like a lukewarm version of WWE. Hulk Hogan was infamously brought on to help run the creative teams, even though the guy never ran a book in his career. In spite of every attempt to garner more attention, the results have proven more and more futile. Enter: the Heat Machine.
Until recently, TNA (now iMPACT Wrestling) did nearly all of its recording and pay-per-views at the Universal Studios facility dubbed the iMPACT Zone, nestled in the heart of Universal's Orlando theme park. As a means of filling the studio for its twice-weekly tapings, the promoters merely had to open its gates to the general theme park populace. While audiences got in for free (since nowadays gate sales rank a distant third or fourth in importance to things like TV ratings, PPV buy rates, and merchandise sales), thus assuring an always full studio, Orlando did wind up providing a pretty hardcore base of genuinely interested fans. Free or not, if enough of the hardcore fans got in, the (admittedly modest) studio arena could get plenty loud. Often, remarkably, in spite of not even requiring Canned Heat, production never figured out how to take advantage. The sound on the recording was, amazingly, rather low-key.
Nowadays, in an attempt to 'spread the word' (I GUESS), iMPACT Wrestling has recorded many more episodes outside of the iMPACT Zone. Problem is, now you don't have your hardcore audience to show excitement (even if you can't hear it). And so, you guessed it, producers started canning the heat. I can't tell you how often you can watch an episode, where the heel walks in, I see half a dozen folx out there with their arms raised--and they're cheering!-- amongst a crowd of dazed seeming drones of apathy, while the canned heat of incredibly fake sounding boos seems to rain down from, apparently, nowhere.
Want to smell failure? Sniff an iMPACT show nowadays.
For the record, canning heat has been regarded as a mainstay of wrestling recordings, even if things were considered on the right track. It just becomes more feeble and apparent when the audience is clearly not reacting. Wrestling forums claim that iMPACT has been canning its heat all along (which strikes me as funny, considering how badly they once must've done it, no one recognizing much vocal crowd reaction after all, even when they were visibly pretty animated). It's also said WWE, taking a lesson from their tapings in the 80s (which were remarkably successful without requiring 'piping it in' as its called) has been canning the shit out of its 'Smackdown!' tapings for a while now. Ratings for WWE programming have dipped over the years (mixed martial arts garners more of an audience now), but are by no means unsuccesful. It seems producers, with the luxury of a taped episode, simply can't resist piping a little extra oomph in.
How do you, however, as a producer, ignore the reticence of a crowd on camera, while you dredge up some absurd sound track that sounds like it's come from a 1938 Nuremburg rally? Do you still regard your TV audiences as this dismally unaware? We've all actually LEARNED the carney, and know what canned heat means, after all. Don't you think we know how to spot it when we see it by now?
Well, as the industry says, 'marks' (people who buy into the program) come in many shapes. Maybe the industry is, perhaps accidentally, in the process of creating an all new type of mark. Maybe it's one like me!
In pro wrestling, there is a strange kind of industry-speak that derived from the secretive con-artist origins of the "sport". Way back, as legitimate wrestlers toured the circuits, they commonly wound up performing at carnivals, festivals, circus attractions, et al. where they inevitably began crossing paths with the nefarious sorts who usually operate in those environs. Back in those early days, wrestling was still a legitimate professional sport. It was also usually pretty boring. Matches could sometimes go for three hours, with combatants basically clenching each other in the middle of the mat and not doing anything. Even when they were doing something, fans could barely tell they were doing anything. Basically, if any of you are old enough, and were paying attention enough to the UFC's earliest days, before they came up with a round system, a judging system, or any stand-up rules...well, you know how dull this type of sport can get.
It was only a matter of time, of course, before the carnival hucksters explained something to the wrestlers: "If you scripted the matches some, and played up the action like theater instead of sport, you'd sell a lot more tickets." Thus, the pro-wrestling as we know it today (i.e. "sports entertainment") was soon born. Along with it, that secretive code-speak used among its practitioners: carney talk.
In pro-wrestling carney, there is a set of booking practices designed to create and maximize a dramatic story arc. Every match tends to promote an 'angle' or storyline. The dramatic arc is designed to take place, usually, over a series of matches. Just like fiction, you have a protagonist (usually 'the babyface'), an antagonist('the heel'), the resulting conflict, and, if done properly, a climax and resolution. The climactic match is usually one with a more action packed stipulation ("This one is hair vs. hair!"--"The loser must leave town!!!"), where the stakes are high, along with the drama. Carney strippers used to call their third act (the one where they 'Take it all off!') the 'Blow-off', so naturally, so did the wrestlers.
The key to the drama is really how much the fans can get behind the face character, and how much they can really despise the heel. This is called 'getting over.' When a heel had a crowd really good and riled up, it was called 'getting heat' from the crowd. Soon, 'heat' and 'pop' from the crowd was the indicator of how well the performers were doing.
Sometimes the performers might need a little help though. Heels and promoters would often 'plant' people in the crowd for the heel to have confrontations with (one of the most famous tropes is for a child to hold a sign declaring devotion for his hero babyface, only to have the heel march up, snatch it from his hands, and tear it up in front of the youngster's now tear-soaked eyes--fans used to each this shit up). 'Building heat' was a tough and sometimes experimental skill set, which often depended on the changing sensibilities of the audience. One crowd in Minnesota might lose their shit if you called Fran Tarkinton a fag. Another crowd might not budge if you turned and punched someones grandma. You never knew.
Then technology got involved, and things got weird. That weirdness, amazingly still goes on today. You see, wrestling never really reached its golden age until it was televised. It didn't really, REALLY reach its gift for the con, until something called 'pre-recording' came along. When that came along, we have the entrance of what became known as the artificial Heat Machine. Today, it's called 'Canned Heat'.
I'm amazed it took me as long to notice it, but the first time I caught wind of Canned Heat was watching an episode of WCW Thunder back in the '90s (like I said, can't believe it took me that long). This was during the spectacular rise of Bill Goldberg as a superstar, a guy who was legitimately big, legitimately strong, legitimately at least semi-tough--and legitimately un-skilled. Looking back, for all his charisma, he couldn't talk a promo for shit, he had about four total moves in the ring (all of them inordinately stiff and therefore brutal looking), and if the match went past five minutes, he'd probably have 'blown up' (in carney, that means to run out of gas, become too exhausted to perform properly).
The powers that be looked at a guy who could pretty much make folx want to shit their pants when he marched out to the ring, and had to figure out how to get this guy over, when he couldn't perform for shit at all once inside the ring. The answer? Artificial heat--in any way shape or form. First, promoters put him in squash match after squash match (a 'squash' is a match where the performer you're trying to 'push over' goes in the ring and basically kicks the shit out of some hapless victim assigned to 'do the job' for him). With each stunningly short victory, Goldberg became known as an unstoppable monster, an irresistible force that no one could dare get in the way of). The 'Winning Streak' replete with exagerrated numbers ("How'd he go from 32-0 to 49-0 in only four days?") was a means of building heat. But that still wasn't quite getting the deal done.
Unlike WCW Monday Nitro, which was aired live, Thunder was generally a pre-recorded show. You could edit out the gaffs, make more ordinarly moments look a little more extraordinary...and you could tweak the sound edit. Enter: Canned Heat. As Bill Goldberg stalked ruthlessly out to take on his next victim, an audible roar of "Gooooooldberg!....Goooooooldberg!" emanated from the crowd. It was illustrated as part of the phenomenon. This big, scary, mean bastard had won over the crowd. And it was mostly bullshit. When you actually watched the crowd, especially when shot behind the wrestlers in the ring...nobody was doing anything. The roar seems like it can be heard from all over the arena, yet there isn't a single fucking person opening their mouths out there. In fact, it almost looks like no one hardly gives a shit.
Eventually, the heat machine actually worked. After weeks of showing matches of Goldber with the canned heat of his named being screamed from the rafters, crowds figured that was actually what they were supposed to do, and started doing it legitimately. THEN the producers were smart enough get the camera on them as often as possible.
It's basically a tool to fool the unobservant television viewer. Much like artifically inserted cheering between tracks on a live concert album, it's a notion of 'keying' the audience in on the excitement, whether the excitement is there or not. It's also more prevalent in wrestling than you think. All year ESPN Classic has been airing old episodes of 'AWA Championship Wrestling' from back in the late '80s, and the amount of canned heat used to sell the product of a promotion that was clearly dying a painful death makes its imminent demise all the more painful to watch now. As the arenas became more and more empty, seated mostly of old folx and special-ed classes (not a stretch) who were likely given the tickets for free to simply TRY to put an audience in the building for taping (another common aspect of the heat machine, BTW); it just made the canned heat all the more flagrant and pathetic. I don't how I never spotted it as a kid back then.
Unfortunately, Canned Heat lives on, even though it's a very old trick, one smarter viewers and wrestling fans can generally spot in a second today. So, when it's spotted, it's usually regarded as a very dismal sign of things not going well for the promotion. Exhibit A: Spike TV's current episodes of 'iMPACT Wrestling'--formally branded as TNA (Total Nonstop Action), the promotion decided to brand itself after the name of its show this year as another example of a perennially hapless promotion forever grasping at straws. TNA has been a promotion always placing a distant second to the virtual monopoly that Vince McMahon's WWE product has had on the industry for the last decade. Its existence was once built largely on sheer spunk, the ability to hire talent often shirked by McMahon (which is considerable), and its promotion of what it called the 'X Division' (highly choreographed wrestling devoted greatly to what are called 'high spots' in a style often comparable to Mexican Lucha Libre wrestling).
Recent years have drifted away from that notion. Money was spent hand over fist in search of gimmicks, angles and booking that made it look like a lukewarm version of WWE. Hulk Hogan was infamously brought on to help run the creative teams, even though the guy never ran a book in his career. In spite of every attempt to garner more attention, the results have proven more and more futile. Enter: the Heat Machine.
Until recently, TNA (now iMPACT Wrestling) did nearly all of its recording and pay-per-views at the Universal Studios facility dubbed the iMPACT Zone, nestled in the heart of Universal's Orlando theme park. As a means of filling the studio for its twice-weekly tapings, the promoters merely had to open its gates to the general theme park populace. While audiences got in for free (since nowadays gate sales rank a distant third or fourth in importance to things like TV ratings, PPV buy rates, and merchandise sales), thus assuring an always full studio, Orlando did wind up providing a pretty hardcore base of genuinely interested fans. Free or not, if enough of the hardcore fans got in, the (admittedly modest) studio arena could get plenty loud. Often, remarkably, in spite of not even requiring Canned Heat, production never figured out how to take advantage. The sound on the recording was, amazingly, rather low-key.
Nowadays, in an attempt to 'spread the word' (I GUESS), iMPACT Wrestling has recorded many more episodes outside of the iMPACT Zone. Problem is, now you don't have your hardcore audience to show excitement (even if you can't hear it). And so, you guessed it, producers started canning the heat. I can't tell you how often you can watch an episode, where the heel walks in, I see half a dozen folx out there with their arms raised--and they're cheering!-- amongst a crowd of dazed seeming drones of apathy, while the canned heat of incredibly fake sounding boos seems to rain down from, apparently, nowhere.
Want to smell failure? Sniff an iMPACT show nowadays.
For the record, canning heat has been regarded as a mainstay of wrestling recordings, even if things were considered on the right track. It just becomes more feeble and apparent when the audience is clearly not reacting. Wrestling forums claim that iMPACT has been canning its heat all along (which strikes me as funny, considering how badly they once must've done it, no one recognizing much vocal crowd reaction after all, even when they were visibly pretty animated). It's also said WWE, taking a lesson from their tapings in the 80s (which were remarkably successful without requiring 'piping it in' as its called) has been canning the shit out of its 'Smackdown!' tapings for a while now. Ratings for WWE programming have dipped over the years (mixed martial arts garners more of an audience now), but are by no means unsuccesful. It seems producers, with the luxury of a taped episode, simply can't resist piping a little extra oomph in.
How do you, however, as a producer, ignore the reticence of a crowd on camera, while you dredge up some absurd sound track that sounds like it's come from a 1938 Nuremburg rally? Do you still regard your TV audiences as this dismally unaware? We've all actually LEARNED the carney, and know what canned heat means, after all. Don't you think we know how to spot it when we see it by now?
Well, as the industry says, 'marks' (people who buy into the program) come in many shapes. Maybe the industry is, perhaps accidentally, in the process of creating an all new type of mark. Maybe it's one like me!
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Google Has Made Me Obsolete
It's time to 'fess up here. I don't think I've ever been really good at all that much in my lifetime. When I graduated with an art degree, I spent about a year buzzing around ignominy plying my trade making comics for an underground band, which lead to t-shirt designs and CD covers, and stuph like that. I don't think I made a red cent off of any of it. I also discovered if I was going to make it as an illustrator, I was likely going to have to spend many more years of working a day-job, spending another ten hours a day hustling for, and trying to deliver, work, and still not likely make a red cent off of it. Somewhere in that stretch, I bailed.
Yeah, I know, for a while, people probably thought I had a reasonably capable singing voice, and as an indie-rock frontman, I could probably offer up at least a modicum of somewhat entertaining theatricality. I even had the work ethic and tireless determination thing down in this line of work. But after ten years of that, especially towards my later twenties and into my thirties, even I had to look myself in the mirror and realize, in the end, I was just a stubby little ex-dork (with little emphasis on the 'ex' in that term) who by then had accumulated too much of a beer gut to ever be proclaimed, in anyone, understanding, a 'rock star.' I didn't bail, the vocation simply bailed on me. Or, more accurately, I failed.
After that, I guess, I took a swing at some sort of notion of writer / journalist, but I can't even claim much line of real talent or accomplishment on that of the game. Stephen King once said: "If you write, and you've sold something you wrote, and the money which you made selling what you wrote has paid one of your bills, I consider you talented." Under Stephen King's criteria, I am not talented.
The one thing, unfortunately (aside from spending my twenties getting drunk at least two or three nights a week) I ever showed any genuine aplomb at was devoting enormous chunks of my ever-atrophying brain to little more than sifting through the detritus of human information, and accumulating a veritable wealth of utterly useless knowledge. I was a conversation stimulator. A pundit / shit-stirrer / hobknobber extraordinaire. I could contribute to nearly any discussion about almost any topic you'd like to cover, at least for five to ten minutes. I frequently could even stand the old trope "Running an inch deep but a mile wide" on its ear some. I could run 100 wide...and maybe a foot and a half deep. I could be the backbone of your party or dinner conversation, as long as you kept the Irish whiskey under three glasses, otherwise I'd probably piss someone off.
I've been a smart guy. It's just been for the most useless of stuph. In no sort or discipline did I amass any sort of knowledge that might make me (gasp) marketable, let alone employable. As result, my rather blue-collar workplace and paycheck was almost inevitable, no matter if my nickname in many places was "Professor". Plenty of people used to say they'd choose me as their "lifeline" if they somehow got on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire". I just joked I was priming myself for one day making the longest run on "Jeopardy!" (I still haven't got on).
Still, even while all this shit I've managed to learn, and, quite implasibly, keep stored in my memory banks--like some 21st century version of Frank Herbert's race of Mentats in the Dune books--has never made me any scratch in the bank, some could argue it, at least, made me some sort of interesting human being, and a likely important contributor to the ongoing human discussion.
Then Google came along. And more importantly than just Google, people started walking around with SmartPhones all the time, which, at the touch of a button, could now access Google. Once, it at least took the discipline of making a point to sit down at your computer, and LOOK SHIT UP, and then remember it for the next time it became remotely pertinent to a conversation. Once the SmartPhone species of technology came along, the one flimsy barrier that separated me from any inordinate cavalcade of the myriad Drones of society now utterly ceased to exist.
So here you see me. A human artifact. Like the transistor radio, or the printing press, or the guys who used to cobble shoes by hand, I have been passed by. Human society needs me no more, because a fucking phone with some widgets and apps can do more than I spent years of my life honing my brain to be capable of.
I sure hope I can get on that short list of "Jeopardy!" applicants next year. Otherwise, I'm a fuckin' dinosaur.
Yeah, I know, for a while, people probably thought I had a reasonably capable singing voice, and as an indie-rock frontman, I could probably offer up at least a modicum of somewhat entertaining theatricality. I even had the work ethic and tireless determination thing down in this line of work. But after ten years of that, especially towards my later twenties and into my thirties, even I had to look myself in the mirror and realize, in the end, I was just a stubby little ex-dork (with little emphasis on the 'ex' in that term) who by then had accumulated too much of a beer gut to ever be proclaimed, in anyone, understanding, a 'rock star.' I didn't bail, the vocation simply bailed on me. Or, more accurately, I failed.
After that, I guess, I took a swing at some sort of notion of writer / journalist, but I can't even claim much line of real talent or accomplishment on that of the game. Stephen King once said: "If you write, and you've sold something you wrote, and the money which you made selling what you wrote has paid one of your bills, I consider you talented." Under Stephen King's criteria, I am not talented.
The one thing, unfortunately (aside from spending my twenties getting drunk at least two or three nights a week) I ever showed any genuine aplomb at was devoting enormous chunks of my ever-atrophying brain to little more than sifting through the detritus of human information, and accumulating a veritable wealth of utterly useless knowledge. I was a conversation stimulator. A pundit / shit-stirrer / hobknobber extraordinaire. I could contribute to nearly any discussion about almost any topic you'd like to cover, at least for five to ten minutes. I frequently could even stand the old trope "Running an inch deep but a mile wide" on its ear some. I could run 100 wide...and maybe a foot and a half deep. I could be the backbone of your party or dinner conversation, as long as you kept the Irish whiskey under three glasses, otherwise I'd probably piss someone off.
I've been a smart guy. It's just been for the most useless of stuph. In no sort or discipline did I amass any sort of knowledge that might make me (gasp) marketable, let alone employable. As result, my rather blue-collar workplace and paycheck was almost inevitable, no matter if my nickname in many places was "Professor". Plenty of people used to say they'd choose me as their "lifeline" if they somehow got on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire". I just joked I was priming myself for one day making the longest run on "Jeopardy!" (I still haven't got on).
Still, even while all this shit I've managed to learn, and, quite implasibly, keep stored in my memory banks--like some 21st century version of Frank Herbert's race of Mentats in the Dune books--has never made me any scratch in the bank, some could argue it, at least, made me some sort of interesting human being, and a likely important contributor to the ongoing human discussion.
Then Google came along. And more importantly than just Google, people started walking around with SmartPhones all the time, which, at the touch of a button, could now access Google. Once, it at least took the discipline of making a point to sit down at your computer, and LOOK SHIT UP, and then remember it for the next time it became remotely pertinent to a conversation. Once the SmartPhone species of technology came along, the one flimsy barrier that separated me from any inordinate cavalcade of the myriad Drones of society now utterly ceased to exist.
So here you see me. A human artifact. Like the transistor radio, or the printing press, or the guys who used to cobble shoes by hand, I have been passed by. Human society needs me no more, because a fucking phone with some widgets and apps can do more than I spent years of my life honing my brain to be capable of.
I sure hope I can get on that short list of "Jeopardy!" applicants next year. Otherwise, I'm a fuckin' dinosaur.
Thursday, June 09, 2011
What Makes Buffalo Great:
Mighty Taco and Terrapin Station Ads During "Off Beat Cinema"
If you're night owl enough on your weekends, you probably know by now that "Off Beat Cinema" is often terrible, but usually deliberately so--the films are usually chosen because they're campy drek; that's what late night movie programming is supposed to be about. The fact that "OBC" hasn't really seemed to film a new one in several years is eclipsed by the consistent, laughable charm of the randomness of its ads. Mighty Taco and Terrapin Station clearly understand which (large) niche of their consuming public to whom they're reaching out, and every commercial is a tribute to 3am Stone-Gloriousness.
Who cares if, while you are watching, with two foot gravity bong ensconced lovingly in lap, and bag of day-old Cheetos and its dust staining your fingers into what Patton Oswalt once called the Failure Claw, you can't actually MAKE a run to either Might Dog or 'the Station' (both are closed at that hour)? The seed has been planted in your subconscious self once you are awake at some time during the daylight hours (likely well after noon).
This marketing genius was fully realized some years back, just before the Christmas Holiday of either 2005 or 2006 (the memory is suitably hazy on detail). "OBC" was airing the spectacularly awful Mexican production of that Santa Claus movie whose title always escapes everyone (no, not the legendarily terrible Santa Claus vs. the Martians, the OTHER one). My roommate John and myself were passing a bowl in his bedroom, high as kites, when Mighty Taco aired an obvious reference to its target audience, lettering aglow in oil-projection psychideliciousness. Terrapin Station made a nod to the holidays on its commercial break, with a big shot of Jerry Garcia as Santa.
"They really know who's watching right now," John remarked while still trying to hold his last inhale in his lungs.
That was probably one of the very last times I got truly stoned to the bejeezus, and I remember laughing my ass off into the night at that terrible, terrible movie, and those wonderful, wonderful ads. It is now one of my fondest memories (if fuzzy) of living in that apartment.
author's note--"Off Beat Cinema" has found itself syndicated across the nation over the years. I'm told they often leave the commercials in there (would depend on the market airing, I'd imagine); a nod to the transplants from Buffalo who've scattered across the wind to places like the DC area, Florida, Pacific Northwest, et al). Also, for the record, Mighty Taco has become as another Buffalo restaurant that'll FedEx menu items to places outside their normal purveyence. A B'lo pot-head still demands a certain kind of junk food, I guess, no matter where they now live.
If you're night owl enough on your weekends, you probably know by now that "Off Beat Cinema" is often terrible, but usually deliberately so--the films are usually chosen because they're campy drek; that's what late night movie programming is supposed to be about. The fact that "OBC" hasn't really seemed to film a new one in several years is eclipsed by the consistent, laughable charm of the randomness of its ads. Mighty Taco and Terrapin Station clearly understand which (large) niche of their consuming public to whom they're reaching out, and every commercial is a tribute to 3am Stone-Gloriousness.
Who cares if, while you are watching, with two foot gravity bong ensconced lovingly in lap, and bag of day-old Cheetos and its dust staining your fingers into what Patton Oswalt once called the Failure Claw, you can't actually MAKE a run to either Might Dog or 'the Station' (both are closed at that hour)? The seed has been planted in your subconscious self once you are awake at some time during the daylight hours (likely well after noon).
This marketing genius was fully realized some years back, just before the Christmas Holiday of either 2005 or 2006 (the memory is suitably hazy on detail). "OBC" was airing the spectacularly awful Mexican production of that Santa Claus movie whose title always escapes everyone (no, not the legendarily terrible Santa Claus vs. the Martians, the OTHER one). My roommate John and myself were passing a bowl in his bedroom, high as kites, when Mighty Taco aired an obvious reference to its target audience, lettering aglow in oil-projection psychideliciousness. Terrapin Station made a nod to the holidays on its commercial break, with a big shot of Jerry Garcia as Santa.
"They really know who's watching right now," John remarked while still trying to hold his last inhale in his lungs.
That was probably one of the very last times I got truly stoned to the bejeezus, and I remember laughing my ass off into the night at that terrible, terrible movie, and those wonderful, wonderful ads. It is now one of my fondest memories (if fuzzy) of living in that apartment.
author's note--"Off Beat Cinema" has found itself syndicated across the nation over the years. I'm told they often leave the commercials in there (would depend on the market airing, I'd imagine); a nod to the transplants from Buffalo who've scattered across the wind to places like the DC area, Florida, Pacific Northwest, et al). Also, for the record, Mighty Taco has become as another Buffalo restaurant that'll FedEx menu items to places outside their normal purveyence. A B'lo pot-head still demands a certain kind of junk food, I guess, no matter where they now live.
Monday, June 06, 2011
The Simplest Pleasures
It seems to me, when you get a little older you come to realize the inevitability of the fact that most of us don’t really spend our lives up to all that much importance. Really, when you think of it, most of our lives could be broken down to half a dozen or so “significant” events or matters, most of them only really pertaining to our own lives, or to the lives of a handful of people who traveled through life alongside us, or maybe just in our periphery.
Realization of our genuine level of triviality in the greater workings of the universe is usually the cause for what philosophers tend to call ‘the Existential Crisis’ -- the despair in the truth that our being is ultimately purposeless and unimportant. Most existentialists would have told you that the solution winds up merely being: “Find what’s important to you, and make it as important to you for as long as it lasts.” In other words, mis amigos, we’ve got to find our own way.
That’s not the point of this essay, really. I’m not here to wax overly philosophic here. My point is to identify the fact that, in our oh so unimportant, ultimately somewhat pathetic little lives, what so often gives our lives a semblance of mystique winds up, often, being a collection of very small, rather insignificant seeming things.
In other words, life is built on very simple pleasures, the cohesion of which may make up a happy life, as long as we can treasure them appropriately enough.
These are a small collection of my simplest pleasures, the ones that make me feel like getting up in the morning, or the ones that help me rest a little easier when it’s time to fall asleep. Or maybe just the ones which make me squeeze my stress ball a little less when I’m at work.
Glen Park, by the Falls, Late Spring
I prefer it just before it’s gotten hot and humid in the park, and every step winds up being an exercise in suffocation, if it’s possible. The falls by Glen Park is where Williamsville got its start, and some of my favourite things in life (as you’ll see in this list) are places or things where the profoundness of the history of things can be felt best. This small expanse of Ellicott Creek is where the water transgresses the epochal Onandoga escarpment, a geological phenomenon that stretches back to the last ice age. In the early 19th century, settlers used the falls to build a mill that still stands. What you have in a couple square thousand feet is a few dozen millenia of natural and human history.
Coffee and Book, Plus People Watching equals happiness
Maybe it’s the (failed) writer in me, but observation of the human condition, particularly the act of interaction, is one of my favourite pastimes. The irony is often in the fact that I usually care little for people, yet I’m compelled to find how they behave fascinating.
A trip to the coffee shop (preferably a cold caffeinated beverage over a hot one lately), with a book that’s really got me interested (my favourite of late has been Bret ‘the Hitman’ Hart’s autobiography), and a solid two hours of accompanied people watching is often all I need to make my day worth getting up for. Sometimes they’re hilarious (without knowing it), sometimes, just annoying. Always worthwhile, if for no other reason, for me, to follow the cadences of how real people talk to each other; to garner how regular people frame the things that are important in their lives with each other; to listen to the trivialities and simple pleasures that have made their own insignificant lives feel somewhat less pathetic. And then sometimes I write what they say down to put in a another book I’ll never finish…HA!
A Freshly Poured, Favourite Beer
Do I have to explain this one all that much? The head cascading and then settling, that frothy cap from the tap stem melting back into the amber evanescence? The sweat on the frosty glass that begins just after it’s poured on a hot day? The first sip, when the bouquet of the hops (if it’s a fucking GOOD beer, mind you) envelops your nose and lips?
‘Nuph said.
Thursday Night Shows
Thursday night is still my one night where I make an appointment to settle in and actually watch television for a designated block of hours. Mind you, I still watch a lot of TV on plenty of other days and nights. But ever since the fucking ‘Cosby Show’ I think, Thursday has been the one consistent night in my life where I have had to set aside at least two hours of my week to just watch TV. Of course, back in my early twenties it was punctuated by trips to eat wings afterward, and drink beers all the way through. Then in 2000, along came ‘Survivor’ and the Survivor Drinking Game, which led to the ‘ER’ Drinking Game in ‘02. Thursdays were never really the same after that. Nowadays, even when I watch TV alone, Thursdays have a personal sort of appeal. I have never really been disappointed in an episode of ‘The Office’ (though some have) and almost never turned off ‘30 Rock’ since there is, without fail, at least one, really, really laugh out loud moment. I miss ‘ER’ now, and still bemoan there is no drama in the 10pm slot as historied as Thursday’s. But I’ll still be there. For at least a couple of hours.
Sunday Funnies on the Couch
I used to be a hardcore sleeper-inner on weekends, even beyond my twenties. The last couple of years, my girlfriend’s dog has changed all that, but I’ve found a strange new pleasure in spending the morning in the robe, while the sun is still coming up, with a glass of juice, the politicos rambling in the background on TV, and the newspaper on the couch. The punctuation to that morning is a return to the childhood ritual of the Sunday funnies. When I was a kid, Sunday meant getting up early for church, pancakes on the griddle, and Sunday Funnies at the dining room table, especially, as a teenager, to read ‘Bloom County‘ and ‘Calvin and Hobbes‘, to make fun of how cheesy ‘Peanuts’ had gotten, and to develop a late-stage fascination with ‘Prince Valiant’.
Nowadays, Berke Breathed and Bill Waterson left the syndicated comics world behind, Charles Schulz is passed on, but the syndicate had the werewithal to re-print ‘Peanuts’ in the era when it still combined its ‘60s sense of alienation with its more sentimental influences (Schulz was nothing if not an outsider seeking something in which to find sentiment). I read ‘Pearls Before Swine’ because it’s the one comic that has the edgy sense of self-hatred to know and make fun of all the things gone wrong with its own medium. And now I make fun of ‘Funky Winkerbean’ for the fact that it was never anything but cheesy, and now it’s just cloyingly nostalgic cheesy. I finally understand ‘Doonesbury’ enough to laugh out loud at it sometimes, and I silently despise myself for the pretentious square that I’ve become for that fact. And I have managed to re-invigorate my love for ‘Prince Valiant’ perhaps because it’s the one thing that feels unchanged (even though it’s written and drawn by different people), and that makes me feel 13 years old again, if only for 48 seconds.
Classic Wrestling Clips on YouTube
Too often is the case that I have to admit this guilty pleasure I have, this obsession with old school sports entertainment, but I’m a die-hard junkie wrestling historian at this point in my life, my book shelves and book piles (of numerous location and drift) dotted with an assortment of biographies, histories and autobiographies on wrestlers and wrestling promotions from yore. My DVD library is also pretty stocked full of box sets and documentaries. But the hunger still goeth unquenched at times. Or, more simply, sometimes I just want to find that Harley Race vs. Terry Funk match in Toronto--the one where Harley Race won the NWA World Heavyweight title from Funk by submission, a match end that had never happened before in NWA history (the promoters back in the day didn’t like titles changing hands that way because they thought it made the loser look extra bad, and they’d never get decent money on any rematch to follow). Not surprisingly, YouTube prevails at stocking random (sometimes very low-quality) footage from some of the randomest moments in wrestling history, whether it be some obscure promo interview by Jerry ‘The King’ Lawler during a stint in Georgia Championship Wrestling, or the finale to the epic match between Dynamite Kid and Tiger Mask in Tokyo. Yes, you will find it on YouTube. God Bless ‘Em.
Spotting the Wind Turbines from the Thruway
Statistically speaking, Buffalo boosters will tell you that the Buffalo area has more sunny days than most places in the Eastern U.S. I dunno if that is quite accurate (I can verify that, during the summer, we have more clear days than anywhere else in the Northeast--but year ‘round, sunny, or the whole east is another thing). That said, clear enough days for visibility to reach more than a few miles seems pretty less than average in these parts. So a day clear enough where you can spot the lake shore’s grand wind turbines spinning from the I-90 is a pretty remarkable one. From the same vantage (especially the higher spots passing over the CSX and Norfolk Southern rail yards on the east side), it’s remarkable enough to spot the historic Central Terminal’s profile in the distance (in reality, it’s only a couple miles away, if even that). But those really good days, when the turbines are spotted, spinning away against the blue backdrop behind, are those momentary glimpses where I can feel my place in the world. I don’t explain why, it’s just the way my romantic notions drift for some reason.
Walking Elmwood on a Saturday
There used to be a time I wandered around Elmwood so much it wasn’t even anything to remark about at all, especially when I was still in school, and often as not, just getting back to your parking spot from classes involved some amount of traversing ‘the strip’. Nowadays, it’s usually only once or twice a month (if that) I’m in the neighborhood. But there is an oddly comforting element to being in the Elmwood Village, with girlfriend in tow, basking in the bohemian city element, getting to browse the boutiques, maybe grab a caffeinated beverage (or stronger), or even a bite to eat. It is still easily the most vibrant and dynamic place in the entire city (although Hertel could truly compete if they added one or two things to their element). A Saturday without work, a good pair of walking shoes, and my city. That’s enough to fill a couple hours of happiness.
Learning Some Odd / New Bit of Info of my Town
Again, like Glen Falls, I think this has to do with the profoundness of the history of the place. Mind you, anyone who’s developed a love affair with the place they’re from and have lived--no matter how complicated that affair can get--often have accumulated little bits of trivia about it. I am one such sucker. One who has walked the rather unremarkable confines of the Old Ebenezer Cemetery on West Seneca’s Main Street, pondering the empty center area which folklore claims to be sight of a cursed home (folklore also claims the graveyard is haunted, even though it‘s in the middle of such a humdrum suburban landscape, it seems hard to imagine). I’ve also wandered around the Park Meadow neighborhood just east of Elmwood in search of the exact spot McKinley was shot over a hundred years ago, traversed the east end of Delaware Park to find the location of the hundreds of buried War of 1812 soldiers who succumbed while encamped on the old Flint Hill site. And I found myself giddy learning of the misguided Fenian movement, conspiring in the Old First Ward to “invade” Canada on behalf (somehow) of Irish independence. Our town is loaded with great, gorgeous quirks, and all it takes is a little turning over of some long ignored stones.
Realization of our genuine level of triviality in the greater workings of the universe is usually the cause for what philosophers tend to call ‘the Existential Crisis’ -- the despair in the truth that our being is ultimately purposeless and unimportant. Most existentialists would have told you that the solution winds up merely being: “Find what’s important to you, and make it as important to you for as long as it lasts.” In other words, mis amigos, we’ve got to find our own way.
That’s not the point of this essay, really. I’m not here to wax overly philosophic here. My point is to identify the fact that, in our oh so unimportant, ultimately somewhat pathetic little lives, what so often gives our lives a semblance of mystique winds up, often, being a collection of very small, rather insignificant seeming things.
In other words, life is built on very simple pleasures, the cohesion of which may make up a happy life, as long as we can treasure them appropriately enough.
These are a small collection of my simplest pleasures, the ones that make me feel like getting up in the morning, or the ones that help me rest a little easier when it’s time to fall asleep. Or maybe just the ones which make me squeeze my stress ball a little less when I’m at work.
Glen Park, by the Falls, Late Spring
I prefer it just before it’s gotten hot and humid in the park, and every step winds up being an exercise in suffocation, if it’s possible. The falls by Glen Park is where Williamsville got its start, and some of my favourite things in life (as you’ll see in this list) are places or things where the profoundness of the history of things can be felt best. This small expanse of Ellicott Creek is where the water transgresses the epochal Onandoga escarpment, a geological phenomenon that stretches back to the last ice age. In the early 19th century, settlers used the falls to build a mill that still stands. What you have in a couple square thousand feet is a few dozen millenia of natural and human history.
Coffee and Book, Plus People Watching equals happiness
Maybe it’s the (failed) writer in me, but observation of the human condition, particularly the act of interaction, is one of my favourite pastimes. The irony is often in the fact that I usually care little for people, yet I’m compelled to find how they behave fascinating.
A trip to the coffee shop (preferably a cold caffeinated beverage over a hot one lately), with a book that’s really got me interested (my favourite of late has been Bret ‘the Hitman’ Hart’s autobiography), and a solid two hours of accompanied people watching is often all I need to make my day worth getting up for. Sometimes they’re hilarious (without knowing it), sometimes, just annoying. Always worthwhile, if for no other reason, for me, to follow the cadences of how real people talk to each other; to garner how regular people frame the things that are important in their lives with each other; to listen to the trivialities and simple pleasures that have made their own insignificant lives feel somewhat less pathetic. And then sometimes I write what they say down to put in a another book I’ll never finish…HA!
A Freshly Poured, Favourite Beer
Do I have to explain this one all that much? The head cascading and then settling, that frothy cap from the tap stem melting back into the amber evanescence? The sweat on the frosty glass that begins just after it’s poured on a hot day? The first sip, when the bouquet of the hops (if it’s a fucking GOOD beer, mind you) envelops your nose and lips?
‘Nuph said.
Thursday Night Shows
Thursday night is still my one night where I make an appointment to settle in and actually watch television for a designated block of hours. Mind you, I still watch a lot of TV on plenty of other days and nights. But ever since the fucking ‘Cosby Show’ I think, Thursday has been the one consistent night in my life where I have had to set aside at least two hours of my week to just watch TV. Of course, back in my early twenties it was punctuated by trips to eat wings afterward, and drink beers all the way through. Then in 2000, along came ‘Survivor’ and the Survivor Drinking Game, which led to the ‘ER’ Drinking Game in ‘02. Thursdays were never really the same after that. Nowadays, even when I watch TV alone, Thursdays have a personal sort of appeal. I have never really been disappointed in an episode of ‘The Office’ (though some have) and almost never turned off ‘30 Rock’ since there is, without fail, at least one, really, really laugh out loud moment. I miss ‘ER’ now, and still bemoan there is no drama in the 10pm slot as historied as Thursday’s. But I’ll still be there. For at least a couple of hours.
Sunday Funnies on the Couch
I used to be a hardcore sleeper-inner on weekends, even beyond my twenties. The last couple of years, my girlfriend’s dog has changed all that, but I’ve found a strange new pleasure in spending the morning in the robe, while the sun is still coming up, with a glass of juice, the politicos rambling in the background on TV, and the newspaper on the couch. The punctuation to that morning is a return to the childhood ritual of the Sunday funnies. When I was a kid, Sunday meant getting up early for church, pancakes on the griddle, and Sunday Funnies at the dining room table, especially, as a teenager, to read ‘Bloom County‘ and ‘Calvin and Hobbes‘, to make fun of how cheesy ‘Peanuts’ had gotten, and to develop a late-stage fascination with ‘Prince Valiant’.
Nowadays, Berke Breathed and Bill Waterson left the syndicated comics world behind, Charles Schulz is passed on, but the syndicate had the werewithal to re-print ‘Peanuts’ in the era when it still combined its ‘60s sense of alienation with its more sentimental influences (Schulz was nothing if not an outsider seeking something in which to find sentiment). I read ‘Pearls Before Swine’ because it’s the one comic that has the edgy sense of self-hatred to know and make fun of all the things gone wrong with its own medium. And now I make fun of ‘Funky Winkerbean’ for the fact that it was never anything but cheesy, and now it’s just cloyingly nostalgic cheesy. I finally understand ‘Doonesbury’ enough to laugh out loud at it sometimes, and I silently despise myself for the pretentious square that I’ve become for that fact. And I have managed to re-invigorate my love for ‘Prince Valiant’ perhaps because it’s the one thing that feels unchanged (even though it’s written and drawn by different people), and that makes me feel 13 years old again, if only for 48 seconds.
Classic Wrestling Clips on YouTube
Too often is the case that I have to admit this guilty pleasure I have, this obsession with old school sports entertainment, but I’m a die-hard junkie wrestling historian at this point in my life, my book shelves and book piles (of numerous location and drift) dotted with an assortment of biographies, histories and autobiographies on wrestlers and wrestling promotions from yore. My DVD library is also pretty stocked full of box sets and documentaries. But the hunger still goeth unquenched at times. Or, more simply, sometimes I just want to find that Harley Race vs. Terry Funk match in Toronto--the one where Harley Race won the NWA World Heavyweight title from Funk by submission, a match end that had never happened before in NWA history (the promoters back in the day didn’t like titles changing hands that way because they thought it made the loser look extra bad, and they’d never get decent money on any rematch to follow). Not surprisingly, YouTube prevails at stocking random (sometimes very low-quality) footage from some of the randomest moments in wrestling history, whether it be some obscure promo interview by Jerry ‘The King’ Lawler during a stint in Georgia Championship Wrestling, or the finale to the epic match between Dynamite Kid and Tiger Mask in Tokyo. Yes, you will find it on YouTube. God Bless ‘Em.
Spotting the Wind Turbines from the Thruway
Statistically speaking, Buffalo boosters will tell you that the Buffalo area has more sunny days than most places in the Eastern U.S. I dunno if that is quite accurate (I can verify that, during the summer, we have more clear days than anywhere else in the Northeast--but year ‘round, sunny, or the whole east is another thing). That said, clear enough days for visibility to reach more than a few miles seems pretty less than average in these parts. So a day clear enough where you can spot the lake shore’s grand wind turbines spinning from the I-90 is a pretty remarkable one. From the same vantage (especially the higher spots passing over the CSX and Norfolk Southern rail yards on the east side), it’s remarkable enough to spot the historic Central Terminal’s profile in the distance (in reality, it’s only a couple miles away, if even that). But those really good days, when the turbines are spotted, spinning away against the blue backdrop behind, are those momentary glimpses where I can feel my place in the world. I don’t explain why, it’s just the way my romantic notions drift for some reason.
Walking Elmwood on a Saturday
There used to be a time I wandered around Elmwood so much it wasn’t even anything to remark about at all, especially when I was still in school, and often as not, just getting back to your parking spot from classes involved some amount of traversing ‘the strip’. Nowadays, it’s usually only once or twice a month (if that) I’m in the neighborhood. But there is an oddly comforting element to being in the Elmwood Village, with girlfriend in tow, basking in the bohemian city element, getting to browse the boutiques, maybe grab a caffeinated beverage (or stronger), or even a bite to eat. It is still easily the most vibrant and dynamic place in the entire city (although Hertel could truly compete if they added one or two things to their element). A Saturday without work, a good pair of walking shoes, and my city. That’s enough to fill a couple hours of happiness.
Learning Some Odd / New Bit of Info of my Town
Again, like Glen Falls, I think this has to do with the profoundness of the history of the place. Mind you, anyone who’s developed a love affair with the place they’re from and have lived--no matter how complicated that affair can get--often have accumulated little bits of trivia about it. I am one such sucker. One who has walked the rather unremarkable confines of the Old Ebenezer Cemetery on West Seneca’s Main Street, pondering the empty center area which folklore claims to be sight of a cursed home (folklore also claims the graveyard is haunted, even though it‘s in the middle of such a humdrum suburban landscape, it seems hard to imagine). I’ve also wandered around the Park Meadow neighborhood just east of Elmwood in search of the exact spot McKinley was shot over a hundred years ago, traversed the east end of Delaware Park to find the location of the hundreds of buried War of 1812 soldiers who succumbed while encamped on the old Flint Hill site. And I found myself giddy learning of the misguided Fenian movement, conspiring in the Old First Ward to “invade” Canada on behalf (somehow) of Irish independence. Our town is loaded with great, gorgeous quirks, and all it takes is a little turning over of some long ignored stones.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
2010 Endies: Live Performance of the Year
And you thought I forgot about this list, didn't you?
Anyway, this year's win also goes to Rush, for their Sep. 2nd performance at the State Fairgrounds in Syracuse, NY.
Granted, everyone who knows me wouldn't be that surprised by this choice, given my fondness for the band, particularly their live shows in the past decade. For a bunch of guys many would consider up in the 'geezer' category by now, their live performances have only gotten stronger in so many respects over the last few years. I've said before, something seemed to occur to them back in '02, when they did their leg of shows for the first time in South America, witnessed the all-too-rabid support, and came to the conclusion: "Hey, we really are that good."
Since then, each tour has showed a grizzled sort of self-awareness, a sense of accomplishment, a new gained (albeit nearly 40 year old) confidence that was often kind of lacking in their first twenty years as a band.
The summer tour seemed a tad extraneous. The band had only gotten about half-finished with their yet-to-be-released record, and opted to release its single as sort of a teaser. Longtime fans were a little puzzled as to what the point of touring was for (a show-business insiders hint: bands don't make money on albums now, so touring is a financial necessity more than ever; drummer Neil Peart, as old as he is, is nonetheless a new daddy, meaning an all new college fund to build upon for the next twenty years).
In order to make it feel like the tour would be worth the audiences', and in a likely sense, the band's time, they decided they would make performing Moving Pictures in its entirety the central portion of the show. This has been a bit of a gimmick among musicians lately. Sometimes running a little cliche at this point. This time it still worked. Some songs off of MP haven't been performed in twenty years or even longer. Some songs hadn't been played long enough that some fan's hadn't even been alive the last time they were done. I, for one knew the band had performed'The Camera Eye' during their Signals tour,however
I'd been ten years old at the time, and, y'know,hadn't been there for that (I wasn't a fan until I was eleven). I watched ten and twelve year old fans watching the band play 'Vital Signs' for the first time for them to experience it. This was an act encountering its third generation of fans, and for them, 'YYZ' getting played was still a new proposition. 'Red Barchetta' was a fresh experience. And in the encore set, 'Working Man' as old as it was, had never been experienced live in their lifetime (and Alex shredded the fuck out of a solo that by today's standards is considered kind of classic-rock overlong--and we didn't care). It was like watching a band reborn again.
Anyway, this year's win also goes to Rush, for their Sep. 2nd performance at the State Fairgrounds in Syracuse, NY.
Granted, everyone who knows me wouldn't be that surprised by this choice, given my fondness for the band, particularly their live shows in the past decade. For a bunch of guys many would consider up in the 'geezer' category by now, their live performances have only gotten stronger in so many respects over the last few years. I've said before, something seemed to occur to them back in '02, when they did their leg of shows for the first time in South America, witnessed the all-too-rabid support, and came to the conclusion: "Hey, we really are that good."
Since then, each tour has showed a grizzled sort of self-awareness, a sense of accomplishment, a new gained (albeit nearly 40 year old) confidence that was often kind of lacking in their first twenty years as a band.
The summer tour seemed a tad extraneous. The band had only gotten about half-finished with their yet-to-be-released record, and opted to release its single as sort of a teaser. Longtime fans were a little puzzled as to what the point of touring was for (a show-business insiders hint: bands don't make money on albums now, so touring is a financial necessity more than ever; drummer Neil Peart, as old as he is, is nonetheless a new daddy, meaning an all new college fund to build upon for the next twenty years).
In order to make it feel like the tour would be worth the audiences', and in a likely sense, the band's time, they decided they would make performing Moving Pictures in its entirety the central portion of the show. This has been a bit of a gimmick among musicians lately. Sometimes running a little cliche at this point. This time it still worked. Some songs off of MP haven't been performed in twenty years or even longer. Some songs hadn't been played long enough that some fan's hadn't even been alive the last time they were done. I, for one knew the band had performed'The Camera Eye' during their Signals tour,however
I'd been ten years old at the time, and, y'know,hadn't been there for that (I wasn't a fan until I was eleven). I watched ten and twelve year old fans watching the band play 'Vital Signs' for the first time for them to experience it. This was an act encountering its third generation of fans, and for them, 'YYZ' getting played was still a new proposition. 'Red Barchetta' was a fresh experience. And in the encore set, 'Working Man' as old as it was, had never been experienced live in their lifetime (and Alex shredded the fuck out of a solo that by today's standards is considered kind of classic-rock overlong--and we didn't care). It was like watching a band reborn again.
Sunday, January 02, 2011
The Endies-- Record of the Year
This year, I think, was a tougher one to pin down. A lot of albums were coming out late this year, which means I don't make them eligible until next year, and the bottom line is, there wasn't a ton of records that I was finding myself acquiring, outside of filling in on my vinyl collection, and stuph like that.
So the one that I kept coming back to turned out to be Rush's single release 'Caravan' this year (which was more of a preview of the upcoming Clockword Angels, set for a spring release). Truthfully, it wasn't 'Caravan' itself which got my attention, so much as the b-side, 'BU2B' which could almost be the theme song for Four Horsemen-style secular activists and anti-theists. Critics have panned the Neil Peart's lyrics on the tunes as preachy and self-righteous, but I'll still side with any song that echoes sentiments of James Hetfield's anti-religion screed "The God That Failed" (which was much less preachy, and maybe more anguished by first-person experience). It's also the best marriage between music-vocals-lyrics the band has put together in some years (I wasn't very impressed by anything they did on Snakes and Ladders back in '07), so it was a happy return to form. Hopefully, that's an indicator of things to come next year.
Honourable Mentions--Ben Folds and Nick Hornby--Lonely Avenue; Peter Gabriel--Scratch My Back
.
So the one that I kept coming back to turned out to be Rush's single release 'Caravan' this year (which was more of a preview of the upcoming Clockword Angels, set for a spring release). Truthfully, it wasn't 'Caravan' itself which got my attention, so much as the b-side, 'BU2B' which could almost be the theme song for Four Horsemen-style secular activists and anti-theists. Critics have panned the Neil Peart's lyrics on the tunes as preachy and self-righteous, but I'll still side with any song that echoes sentiments of James Hetfield's anti-religion screed "The God That Failed" (which was much less preachy, and maybe more anguished by first-person experience). It's also the best marriage between music-vocals-lyrics the band has put together in some years (I wasn't very impressed by anything they did on Snakes and Ladders back in '07), so it was a happy return to form. Hopefully, that's an indicator of things to come next year.
Honourable Mentions--Ben Folds and Nick Hornby--Lonely Avenue; Peter Gabriel--Scratch My Back
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