This next Mog review is for the wonderful new record from The Felice Brothers, a real life group of brothers that traverse the country, live and record in an old school bus.

Originally appeared on Mog's main page and on the following post:

http://mog.com/Kronski/blog_post/146207

he Felice Brothers

The Felice Brothers

When you first hear an artist, the first dozen or so times you spin the record, or hit that big pillow of a play button in I-Tunes, or press the metallic gun metal grey button on your old cassette boom box, and you hear the gears engage, the tape sliding across that little tab of felt, the first few notes for a new band are always crucial. All the piles and gigabytes of music that sit un-listened to, if there’s one wrong note, it’s judged once and then tossed aside.

So this first time that I listened to the Felice Brothers’ second album, Tonight at the Arizona, it was through thirty-second sound samples where I tried to figure out what the rest of the record sounded like. The record cover had all five of them, but I only heard one, and my brain had to piece together what else might come up after the thirty seconds ended. What sort of burst of notes clustered together as melody might rise to the surface like some sort of bruise?

And what came out to me, almost instantly, was Bob Dylan.

Not the imitation Bob Dylan, not an actor in that Todd Haynes film, but someone going to that area around upstate NY, or the Catskills, someone very close to him just before the motorcycle crash, the time before John Wesley Harding and New Morning, his voice bringing the spirit of The Band and Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and The Pogues, all of this murky water turned up for me in bite sized thirty second clips.

And while some of the songs crept up in my dreams, it took seeing them live to really bring home that it was a family at work.

I had this on my mind when I walked into the Roseland Theater here in Portland the other night, and was surprised at not seeing one guy on stage, but five. The first one I noticed was the drummer, who introduced the band the way an older brother would, with a bit of a mocking tone, and ready to fight if needed. He introduced the singer who didn’t look like Dylan, didn’t have that harmonica welded onto his chest. The singer looked like he was about twelve and one of those runaway scamps from the Beat Generation. There was another brother who played a Hammond organ, well not a real Hammond organ, but a modern keyboard set to the setting of a Hammond organ.

They are all in their early twenties, these guys, all of them real-life brothers, and they remind me of the kind of guys that hung out in the photo lab at my university until long after dark, smelling of incense and the funny fixer or developer fluid that sticks to your skin for hours afterwards.

The more the songs sat with me, the more I realized that this was the music of hobos, street people, transients, vagrants, the big bally-hooed travelers on the back of a pick up criss-crossing the country with Keruoac narrating. With their lungs dipped in whiskey, the brothers brought the house down in my mind as together arm in arm, they swung around the loose work of the Pogues ala If I Should fall from Grace with God. And the whole time that Hammond organ going, creating a spine around the music.

For the songs on The Felice Brothers are brave songs, with wide brush strokes, wide in the mind because they hold the kernels of the American Revolution, from the Carpetbaggers and Beats to the Anarchists. Because in their voices are the voices of artists and poets and they know that by singing these songs in this register they are digging up the tenth grade literary canon. From Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, to the lazy way Walt Whitman smoked a cigarette on the last day of Spring, they capture that new found wonder and enlightenment. It made me think of the teenage kicks of Jack and Neal Cassidy burning down the road, of Dean Moriarity’s bandages coming loose and stained with dirt and nicotine and the never ending ribbon of road and that bulge of raw land.

A band that’s willing to create splashes of song, pocketed in between rousing choruses of death and eternity and when they do break out into song on stage as they do on this, their third album, they sound like five people standing in a dark alley, dancing and drinking, on a hot afternoon, and pretty soon everyone in the neighborhood is singing along, and the melody gets loud and strong, and the bleeding gums of Dixieland comes up, and it all happens so succinctly, and none of it is overdone.

Because on this self-entitled album we get a taste of all their styles, the vaudevillian melodies, the stories of dead junkies, old flophouses, heroin reference dropped in as casually as the sound of empty whiskey bottles hitting the floor. Each of them have their own style, one bringing in the W.C. Fields charismatic drunk act, another brother, the one who sings on “Don’t Wake the Scarecrow,” plays it straight, offering up a doomed street romance cut short by heroin.

For this is a record to live in, to try on, inhabit like the walls of an old house, and there’s always that one hallway that’s empty for most of the afternoon, but come night there is a party, and we bear witness to the enormity of it, and later there’ll be one person left, sitting on the front steps listening to the silence and tasting all that forgotten perfume.

“The Murder of Mistletoe” relies just as much on negative space, the sound of a piano in an empty hall, or maybe a street corner, this is music that takes time to fully reach you, as you have to row out to it, and each time you visit you hear something else bubble up to the surface.

They are all singers, and at least two of them are songwriters, and whenever one of them sings, I think it’s the drummer singer, I swear, he pronounces words the same as Dylan, the way Dylan pronounced War in “Masters of War,” letting out the raw “aw” sound and catching back in the throat like a boomerang, and in so doing, uncovers the journeys Guthrie and Dylan did, passing the torch from one to another, walking together at dusk in the Catskills on a railroad track.

“Love Me Tenderly” has the echo back draft of jazz filtered through Dylan, Miles, and Monk, until we can see thirty years of the musical notation blur under the influence of their pond.

By the end of the record, we are introduced to all of the brothers, so it all feels like one big introduction. For on The Felice Brothers, they all sit down on the rails, take their shoes off, and fall into the School Bus they live in, travel in and record in. There’s a picture I’ve seen of the younger brother singing into the microphone on a stand in the bus, their recording studio and their home. It’s covered in graffiti and never swept.

I can imagine that outside of the picture’s frame, there’s probably old Olympia pop tops in there, wind up clocks, and cigarette butts, old suits, and we can hear the one inch reel to reel tape flapping when the song finishes.

And that last song probably sounds like Tom Waits having more whiskey with Shane McGowan, and overhead Dylan is in the night sky, looking down on the proceedings sent from whatever abandoned old baseball stadium he plays in on his never ending tour.

And the brothers Felice are tired after listening to the playback, and they finish the last of the mulligan stew, put out the fire, climb back into the van, sleep close to the guitars and wash boards. And when the record’s done they hope the people that will listen to it will feel the way they do now, that underneath the stars in some nowhere town in the American Southwest, a long way away from home and all of it’s twisted Americana, is the sound of a family making music.

“Radio Songs” sounds like that, an epitaph that brings in Zydeco influences on this barnstorming sing along that acts as a mediation on the power of family and loved ones, albeit one enjoyed in a I-hope-tonight-never-ends-sort-of-way.
“Please don’t you ever die, you ever die, you ever die, moved me all of my life, all of my life, all of my life, all my radio songs, radio songs, radio songs.”

And after that who wouldn’t want to turn around and watch it all unfold all over again from track one? Like the best moments in life, the songs on The Felice Brothers are like fourteen different snapshots of time in a person’s life, sometimes it’s you and sometimes it's not, but it’s always sad and beautiful and mischievous and alive.

The End of Silence, for now.

If you've wondered where I've hung my be-spectacled head lately, its been on Mog ,
an online music community made up of ex music journalistas who now rabbit on about music like their lives depend on it, which, in a way it does.

This review of Mike Doughty's appalling Golden Delicious originally appeared on MOG's main page and under the following URL.

http://mog.com/Kronski/blog_post/144139

Mike Doughty, journeyman, skeletal poet, former member of Soul Coughing.

More on that journey later, but for now let me say how much the failure of his latest record, Golden Delicious, released on Dave Matthews’s ATO record label, stems from the first impression gained when we look at his arched eyebrow and that sepia toned shot of him and a golden delicious apple.

His MySpace caption says of Golden Delicious, “An Apple, an Album.”

Why Golden Delicious? Why an album named after a fucking apple?

"Drinking in My Dreams," a track from the sessions of his previous album (the comparably wonderful Haughty Melodic), implies that a former alcoholic can still feel his phantom limb beating underneath the stained sheets of what can surely be a golden delicious morning. So maybe he’s been sober for awhile, and with this record, this arrival of success — for all of Dave Matthews' fans will find a lot to like here, such as the overly repetitive melodies — means the arrival of eloquent set pieces that often take a turn for the worse. Such as when Doughty, midway through "I Just Want the Girl in the Blue Dress to Keep on Dancing," abandons the melody and goes straight for the mind-numbing choruses.

What starts out as a needed diversion, what could have been an opportunity to explore his inner longings, instead becomes what is wrong with every track on this record. Instead of getting to the root of his demons, or railing against Los Angeles, he instead finds a sing-song sound with which to sledgehammer the very promising melody into the listener’s head in the worst way possible.

"Da domb da domb dom dom, da domb da domb dom. Da domb da domb dom dom, da domb da domb dom."

Why does a man who published a book of poetry, Slanky, beloved of the New York Times, a participant in that grand old literary experiment known as McSweeney’s (one of Doughty’s earlier songs appeared on a compilation that accompanied said literary journal), a man with such a great capacity for language ... do this to himself?

Perhaps Doughty is just another accomplished artist who finally realized that it’s easier to pump sunshine and cliché through the skeletons of his troubled past then to use these same skeletons to explore further the depths of his demons. I liked him a lot better when he built up and got lost in the canvas he strung around the beats back in his Soul Coughing Days.

For New Yorker Mike Doughty, oddly enough, Los Angeles was his muse, his foil. The sick pock-marked city, with its boils and ills and fever-dreams, became a canvas, something to lie next to, a place to be polluted by, a place for him to rail against. Los Angeles was a live-in metaphor that he explored both on Soul Coughing records and on "No Peace, Los Angeles" on his solo debut, Skittish. And while stability, sobriety and life on an even keel is most certainly preferable to an unstable life pitted against the demon cellar of the biggest cities on either coast, it most certainly does not make for a very compelling listen here.

Maybe I am not the intended listener for Golden Delicious, and who am I to deny the process by which self-respecting artists turn into coffee-shop schlock? For I can see the display now, Mike and the golden delicious apple, advertising at a nationwide coffee chain near you, placed strategically right next to piles of overpriced fair trade Guatemalan coffee beans. Hey, at least he’s happy.

It's an evolution of sorts for Doughty, then, from back in the days of the first Soul Coughing record, Ruby Vroom; the recording and eventual blooming of solo debut Skittish; through to the end of Soul Coughing with El Oso; the well-elaborated-upon melodies of his solo breakthrough, the far superior Haughty Melodic; and now this supposed Golden Delicious, this blatant grab at fame.

Perhaps I can offer a cruel yet effective solution to Doughty. Maybe he should take his own advice, as he does in one track, and “put on the sauce/ put it on the sauce” — that is, go back to drinking, and repeat it as often as these choruses do on Golden Delicious.

The truly sad thing is how this once-talented dynamo sells out in such an unspectacular fashion. I would rather see him in a belly shirt, shaking his ass on stage in a Gap ad then to let his music fall so flat, so fast. For all of its overcookedness, Golden Delicious leaves us with the impression of a blatant and intentional leap off of the cliff of genuine artistry.

2007: The Music Issue

So better late than never right? So what if 2008 has already risen from the depths of our imagination. Winter break is quickly coming to its conclusion, so quit with the throat clearing will you and onto the music.

Two Thousand and Seven was an interesting year for me musically and otherwise. It was the first year that I began to feel the vacuum between my musical interests and the interests of the taste makers. Who are these taste makers that I speak of? Why they are the very taste makers on the web that dictate which music should be given the right amount of focus and which music should be what Paul Westerberg from the Replacements once said "Judge once and then tossed aside." (from the 1988 album Don't Tell a Soul for those who are keeping track.)

So I give to you not a top ten list of trendy music selections, ones that haven't already been shoved down the throats of thousands of readers (I'm looking your way pitchfork!) but have brought me a tremendous amount of pleasure during a most pleasurable year.


In no particular order:



1. Radiohead - In Rainbows

Ok, so this guy makes a point of not going the trendy way and what does he start out with? An album that almost everyone could agree on for having a place in anyone's top ten list.

But there is method in my madness, for this is Radiohead's most enjoyable record, that's right, pleasurable, since OK Computer. That doesn't mean that it had the same weight as said record. Listen to the melodies, on all but a few tracks (I still can't get through the entirety of the opening track 15 step, for example) and you will agree. From start to finish my favorite record of 2007, and the way it arrived, via a sudden announcement on their website. 'The Record is Done and it's coming out in ten days' Made this listener happier than when he heard OK Computer for the first time. And to feel that excitement at 35 about a record, both at the announcement and the sheer joy that is listening to it, was wonderful.

2. Dinosaur Jr. - Beyond

Having been a fan of J. Mascis for over fifteen years by no means diluted my own appreciation of this record. I was skeptical when the band announced they were reforming, complete with Murph and Lou Barlow. And the record itself, probably their best since Green Mind, maybe even better, full of soaring angst set to Dinosaur's roaring howl, and it sounds more palatable than their earlier records.




3. The National - Boxer

Readers of this blog will no doubt remember my lusting over the group's previous effort, Alligator and while Boxer is a different beast all together, full of mid tempo mediations on the excesses of love and the things we run to when the love goes wrong, it was just as compelling at the end of the year as it was last Spring, when it was initially released.







4. The Shout Out Louds - Our Ill Willis

The Pop Record. The one that I could not let go of until I wrenched every ounce of melody and fun out of. this record took me back to Head on the Door-era Cure, the kind of music that makes one want to abandon all of the responsibility and seriousness of being an adult and sit in a dank room all day and listen to records such as this one. The aural equivalent of hot fudge sundaes everyday.






5. Band of Horses - Cease to Begin

The Hometown Slugger. As impressed as I was with Ben Bridwell and Co.'s previous record, Everything all the Time, I was not prepared for this one to crawl up inside my brain and take residence the way it did. Mr. Bridwell has made a more mature album than his debut, one that shows a return home, from Seattle back to Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina. The slower songs on this record are the strongest songs he's recorded to date. And listening to their lazy South Carolina evenings sound, like all you have to do is close your eyes and listen to the cicadas lull you to sleep. A record that could have only come from the South, but one that didn't hit you over the head with its sense of place. The most comfortable record of 2007.



6. Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

The Swarthy Gangster. Hopes were high for Spoon's sixth record, after 2005's Gimme Fiction
expectations had grown to a fever pitch. Not surprisingly, Spoon returned to the experimentation of Kill the Moonlight, for one of the highlights of the year. Strange, infectious pop that bends over itself like the musical equivalent of a mobius strip. Layers of instruments rise up and grab the listener, then return to the soup, a record that uses negative space as much as positive space yet still retains its pop sensibility. A record where studio talk back, thick soupy bass lines, and crisp sharp vocals as starchy as the collars that don lead singer's Britt Daniel's fitted shirts all act as instruments that throw the listener to the other side of the room.



7. Okkervill River - The Stage Names

The Summer Fling. Things that I will forever now associate with Summer: Padgett Powell's novel Edisto, Tacoma, WA. Add The Stage Names to that list. All of them were there with me, as I explored the bike-able and not so bike-able regions of Tacoma. Stopping for Beers in the afternoon after class, reading out in the sun, Okkervill river was with me throughout. There's a world weary feeling that accompanies the look back in wonder at what a mess the narrator has made of his life, with lovely turns of phrases and novelistic embellishments.



8. Ryan Adams - Easy Tiger

The Prodigal Son. Musicians have multiple lives, especially American ones, who over said that their were no second acts in American lives? Mr. Adams bucks that trend. I was a huge Whiskeytown fan, but after his first excellent solo album, Ryan had a tendency to lose credibility by putting out everything he ever recorded. Releasing three albums in 2005 was a bit much, especially after the particularly excellent two disc Cold Roses. So it was easy to write this one off as another exercise in self-indulgence. But he came back in a big way for me in 2007 with a record that never really left me since its release this past summer.

Alt-Country finger picking, Grateful Dead inspired vocals, a duet with Sheryl Crow, it could have gone wrong in so many places, but in many ways this was his finest record in a number of years and the fans rejoiced. Now if he can only keep off the heroin.....


9. Rogue Wave - Asleep at Heaven's Gate

The Scrappy Welterweight. I don't think I've seen this one any other year end top ten list. When I clicked on the most played songs on my i-tunes, almost every track from Asleep at Heaven's Gate appears. And while I heard more substantive records this year, it was Rogue Wave that took the prize for most addictive. (although the Shout Out Louds did give them a run for their money)

The band evidently went through hell getting this one produced, with numerous deaths in the family, a kidney transplant for one of the band members, and the scars of collective ennui is evident on every meticulously produced track. So many suprises in between the frets and percussive blips on this record. One whose face seems to change with each listen, according to mood. It come across as triumphant, depressive, meditative, a schizophrenic record, to be sure, but one of the most rewarding records of the year.






10. Wilco - Sky Blue Sky

The Sleeping Giant.A lot of people were disappointed with this record, but for the life of me I can't see it. Granted, the tempo was slowed down a bit, so many dubbed this one Easy Listening, which is ridiculous, given the presence of new guitarist Nels Cline. A sublime bucolic record written after a period of serious strife in the life of singer Jeff Tweedy. A triumphant deceleration of love and freedom, and one that accompanies the arrival of Spring in a heartbreakingly elegant way.



Beloved Singles:





Willie Nelson - Songbird

Without a doubt, my favorite song of 2007. Even though it was released in late 2006, I didnt get around to listening to it until this year. All the ingredients of a fine Nelson ballad is here. Cry in your beer earnestness, tasteful arrangements (in this case provided by Ryan Adams and the Cardinals), and a blistering guitar solo at the end. What more could you want or need? Oh and did I mention its a cover of probably the greatest Fleetwood Mac song?

Bon Iver - Skinny Love

Bruce Springsteen - Girls in their Summer Clothes

Buffalo Tom - Bottom of the Rail

The Acorn - Hold Your Breath

Ryan Adams - Two Hearts

Dinosaur Jr. - Crumble

Super Furry Animals - Show Your Hand

Insomnia on Halloween

What a marvellous morning to be a zombie.
At work but not physcially grounded
not feeling the weight of the world underneath one's shoes
Driving across statelines in the fog
Cars backed upall the way down the line
Reminds you of being awake
a static, a know-it-all third person narrator
so aware of what's around him
that they can hear the sounds of stomach juices
digesting the lunchtime sandwich
hear the cries inside the child who cannot speak yet
from the new parents across the street
the moments fifteen years ago when he had similar troubles
Nation of Islam creationists
adverts for pain medication
educational movies without audiences
a soundtrack for those that are not watching but listening.
then Spanish language where every other word makes sense
Words chopped up and served warm
Until the morning comes thirty minutes later
and you turn around
do it again

Curtain Closes

The bright innards of an orange, the pulp between one’s teeth when they bite into an orange that’s been in the fridge all day, a respite on a hot day, reading to one’s content, read all day if you want to.

Hop on your bike, and ride, go back and forth to Tacoma, look forward to reading what’s written on a billboard with Uncle Sam’s Picture on it patriotic diatribes on the highway, reminding me of the rhetoric of the bald eagle on the Muppets. Health Provider Funded bike rides. Walking home from a bar on a hot summer night, the air cool and sweet and leading you through another morning of coffee and writing and reading from a bright computer screen. Clean shiny and new.

Seeing local bands for five bucks, bands who you’ve never heard before, never had the time recently until now.

The idea that summer lives on forever somewhere inside of us. Stay a little longer on the patio, look out at the beach, a different locale in each place you go, but always the beach.

Caliban, a scullery of crab, a man covered in barnacles clings to his bottle of booze, precious companion, and crawls up and out of the trap door in the stage, Shakespeare, modeled after the original theater, for this is The Tempest, in Ashland, and its hot, but never in the outdoor theater.

So the curtain begins its descent on Summer, and the regimented schedules of school return, the dank smell of Fall, and the rains that follow it, the burnt dust school smells, the pencil shaving and leather smell of the first day of school, strange fashions, new angular haircuts, picture day.

And somewhere in summer the idea that one doesn’t have to grow old necessarily, get old and boring, never hop in and swim on a hot fourth of July in a river that’s almost too polluted to swim in, treading water and staying afloat, the brown green water a dipping moving horizontal, to not be too old and serious that we cant run out to a freezing cold Pacific coast, feel numb in the toes, lift up your shorts so you don’t get too wet. No too old to pick shells all day in the sunshine.

Losing My Religion

Listening to REM at the end of another school year as a teacher is an odd prospect. Firstly, the music is different than when you were on the other side. Instead of a teenager struggling with identity,possibly suicide, and the inability to find even the most rudimentary of dates, you are now supposedly an adult professional, one who now listens to this music to remember what it was like to be a teenager.

Once you are that teenager (or at least feel it swimming through your bones like the floaters that pass by like buoys on a choppy channel) you can remember with utmost clarity the daily struggles you went through. And no one brings it home like REM circa '90.

Because as much as I write this from the point of view of the hidden narrator, where I write generally about what happened, instead of delving into the specific events. Maybe that's what music is for.

But I can't think about REM and High School without thinking about David. I knew him as a talented theater student, actor, writer, and to a lesser degree, an amply skilled mathematician and scientist. But David wanted to be an actor.

And like the archetypal private school parents (and this did happen at an archetypal private High School) they wanted more than just another actor, they wanted him to carry on in their footsteps, notably in the fields of math and science.

David's favorite band was REM, it was 1990, and it seemed like the whole school was into at least one REM album at the time.

I left that school junior year and moved to a bigger public school. Most of David's friends graduated, leaving just himself to follow around, and the shadows of last years companions.

One day I was walking to class when I ran into someone I knew back at the private school I had recently attended. She told me about David, and I had to sit down. When the janitors showed up for work that morning, they found David's body on the basketball court, his brains scattered a few feet in front of him.

REM's "Losing My Religion" was the next song I listened to, and for me it seemed so appropriate that it was the first song I heard after the news. Sitting in my brown Toyota with the left door smashed smoking a cigarette, I thought about all the times I saw David perform on stage, or dissect literature, all with a outlook on life that was rarely found in a teenager.

It was one of those moments that you know will be with you forever, and while on one hand the memory goes hand in hand with misery, nevertheless its a genuine moment where the music perfectly accompanies a turning point in your life.

So back to my original point, that by listening to music (it is ovlerwhelming to ones favor to be a High School teacher) and to play this music to High School students and have them not connect the emotions they feel to the songs you play in particular. To them its more of a relic, a time in your life doesn't match with a time in their life, or if it does, the soundtrack is probably not the same.

But now that I think about it, listening to South Central Rain every morning when I was in High School, noone in my grade had ever heard the song before, and neither had the teachers, which brings me back to the always original thesis. That there exists a kind of musical solipsism, for only the ones who had the original memories with the original songs, these are vacuum sealed into a time, and although you may, years later unearth said piece of music or said picture of you and your prom date looking electrified by all the things that were coming at you at once. You can only have one time in your life when the whole cosmodemonic rigmarole turns around enough to where all the pieces fit.

And when you find that moment in time, an album a song that describes the way you are feeling right then and there. Hold onto it, savor it. Because pretty soon a middle aged version of yourself will attempt to relive that feeling, say in 1995 with Pulp's Different Class and you were jumping up and down on the bed, trying to stay 23 forever

The Summer

If I were Harold Bloom, one of many protagonists from James Joyce's Ulysses, I'd detail every encounter, every stained hand, or maybe account for those receipts I throw out in my laundry. And as much as I believe that the most beautiful moments in life can happen in little moments such as these, I have, by nature of the form of this publication, this being an online function, which dictates small and concise reports from a particular state of mind, objects, breathing and inanimate, all of these things are more relevant than what some authors might deem mundane.

But this is not that story.

I read that in a short story once, its the tried and tested method of leading a reader down a hole, a passageway, one in which eventually is barricaded by the author, so that the reader, if she were a sheep, wouldn't run out of the wrong gate. But it is late, and this introduction is far too long, it reeks of older literature which does not mimic the syntax of the current mode.

Summer, a time which all teachers look forward to, the calendar year appropriately adjusted so that Summer previously occupies chambers formerly inhabited by Christmas.

But the idea of Summer has been co-opted by classes that truly feast on the marrow of the creative spirit, and that I would find to be complimentary to the courses I am enrolled in.

The teachers droll on and on, and while the content is useful, it would be more suited to a manual that I was required to read and then tested on later preferably posthumously, the human component deemed unnecessary.

But I am living, at the moment, not in my adopted home of Portland,OR but in Tacoma, WA. Firstly let me say that for the record, I like Tacoma, Washington, its quaint, there are views-a-plenty, streets that only the cruelest drafter could bore, and even though the people are really nice, and despite all of this, well, I miss my home.

I feel like Summer as a concept, as a thing has been put on hold. The writing waits to be judged added to the way a prisoner on a hunger strike squires and builds up meals, or the way a vacation rental acquires newspapers, steadily and with great cost.

I am living with people who are fifteen years younger than I. To say we have a different perspective is to make a great understatement. But still, despite all of this I am having a wonderful time.

I have read two books that have spun the top that is my brain this summer, one is a new discovery in the name of Padgett Powell, deemed enfante terrible, by the press, but he did create a most memorable account of growing up in the Antebellum south, specifically in Edisto, South Carolina, a place which I can say I have experiences which not only match up to his, but he paints a portrait that I just want to saddle up and live in.



So Padgett Powell's Edisto and David Gates's Jernigan in which he creates one of the greatest anti-heroes in Western Literature. With the mind of a scholar tethered to an alcoholic's mental electrical system, Jernigan has the mind of a steel trap with the internal terrain of self loathing.


I hope to write more when I return next week. despite a vacation where we will see lots of blue sky, sandy beaches and one of the best performing Shakespeare troupes in the galaxy, as found in Ashland.

Enjoy that marrow of life I talked about earlier, and have an intelligent conversation, if not to act as a counter-weight to my own daily torture as just to have an intelligent conversation, for the mere joy of it.

Wishfully, (no, not really)

Peter Jernigan

The Desire to be Heard

Its that time of day. The days experience catching up with yesterdays exercise. the sleep that didn't come when I woke up, my throat on fire, my legs burning. Sweat in the bedroom. A feeling that all was not all together well.

The time it takes for me to catch up, maybe tonight Ill sink down into the couch and live with small animals, pets scurrying by, swinging their paws at one another.

Left to be understood, lets strip the context from everything, so we see things as all inter-connected, the hallway at the Russell House. Why do I miss my old world so much?

Why is so much of who I am now is wrapped up in who I was back then? If I were to go back, to return, nothing would be the same. All times changed, people dead or in the ground, lost in themselves or in other people.

Why is it this way, why is the world mysteriously underneath something [else. We pick up an object, a bottle of water, and underneath it lives the collective experience with that object. It's never too far away from us, slipping through our hands the way water does. and then its down the drain, and there's no use chasing water, because it all falls away.

There are multiple levels of what may be called reality. Multiple reasons why we get up in the morning. And strange how on the way to work this morning the light was that contained in the middle of the afternoon, not at six thirty in the morning.

A drive on the way, lack of moisture in my bones, dry my head swimming in the morning fog that burned off long ago.

The soul of an artist, but one who cowers in response to criticism. If we have to congratulate ourselves, we are all done for.

I left my manuscript behind, didn't email it to myself this morning, now one day behind.

If I could, I'd bottle all the advice Ive ever been given and swallow some of it and spit the rest out.

This then, this ranting writing on a wall, not shared, but lived in, like dungarees, like chorded slacks with all of the grooves worn smooth, so it feels more like felt.

Walking in these pants is like wearing drapes, like whatever is between your legs is a stage, and with each step you unveil whats between the lines, the chords in the slacks, the performances gone unremarked.

Its hard to know how we are doing when everyone keeps walking away.

This desire to be heard, to write something down, a record, moment to moment of history, why the obsession? Why can't I just die and be content only with those I've touched on the past? Why do I want a future? Why do I want my name to be written in a tiny font, on the cover of a small volume of a novel, tucked away at the back of the store, after not selling a single copy. Why is it why do I feel the need. Why I cant just fade away, to be forgotten.


Is all of this for myself, or is any of it for the benefit of other people? Grease the wheel of thought. Things have a tenuous relationship with gravity. I have a fleeting relationship with reality. It leaves me alone during the strangest times. Who and with what person?

Over and out.

Grindhouse

Janet and I went to see Grindhouse last night.

We only made it through half of it, because of an incident that arose right in front of us, and fully engulfed the majority of the evening.

Peep this, these guys who were sitting off to the right of us were really being quite obnoxious, yelling at the screen, obviously very drunk, talking throughout the movie. When people told them to shush, they made fun of them, then the environment grew more hostile, until I joined the chorus that told them, rather loudly and with more authority to "shut the f%%% up!"

Things continued to grow more hostile between the crowd and this bunch of hooligans. Apparently those who acted properly didnt know how to enjoy this film, because it is a grindhouse film. The propietor came out and spoke to them, but they continued to state their case that the creators of this film had intended the film to be enjoyed in this particular fashion.

At this point Janet and I stand up, and Janet says, "That's it, we're leaving" When one of the guys said "We'll see you outside" to which I replied "Oh yeah?" i didn’t mean it for it to come out this way, but when the adrenaline is pumping, it kind of takes over.

So we go out to the lobby, and the guys follows us and one them tries to get us to take $20.00 to leave instead of getting refund form the theatre. We tell him we don't want his money and that his behavior was inapropriate. He insists that grindhouse movies are meant to be watched this way, continues to to try to make me take his maney and then shoved me right in the middle of the lobby. I tell him I don’t want to fight, and about how just because its a grindhouse film, etc. I finally leave, waiting for Janet immediately outside. (Janet was in the process of getting a refund from the cashier.) Then this same guy comes flying out, with a 20 dollar bill, waving it in front of my face, saying, "I'll give you this as your refund, Quentin Tarantino intended this for..." I back up repeatedly saying, "I don't want your money, I don't want to fight, I just want to go home." He pulls back and cocks me right above my left eye. My guard was already up, and I fell to the ground, and the guy leaned over me and kept punching/wailing on my head. Janet comes running out, screaming and yelling "Get off of him! What are you doing? Are you crazy?", and hits the guy in the face with her purse. Then the dufus's friend steps in, and breaks it up, luckily before the guy could have a go at Janet.

The two dudes leave as we go inside, wondering what the hell just happened.

The cops finally showed up after two phone calls and twenty minutes later. The guy who hit me was still standing around the corner of the theatre outside.

The cops hauled him away in a squad car, and I have to call the DA's office on Wednesday to press charges.

Needless to say, we didn’t finish the film.

Spring Break at Cape Kiwanda

The sun came out on the day we arrived, two people looking for the respite between the sun and the clouds. We pulled into Pacific City via the long way around, coming at it where the ocean was on our left, the big haystack rock looming over the proceedings.

Hotel right across the street.

Across the street from the hotel, right on the beach was the Pelican Brewery.
It was three hours until check in time, so we grabbed a beer and headed outside.

Rapture, the thrust of the day without schedules, deadlines, or class bells.

After lunch we went hiking up on this bluff, where you could see caves, open mouths thunderclaps of waves echoing through the portals of darkness and water. Emerald slime, and salt, the roots of trees at the top of the bluff, running down a mountain of sand, sand collecting in your rolled up jeans because you thought it would be too cold for shorts.

Driving down Highway 101 in search of supplies, the sunroof open, Pavement on the stereo, youth felt close, closer than the watchband on my arm.

Too much food, sun and open free time...

The sleep came gradually then all of a sudden, and in the middle of a Deadliest Catch marathon.

Capping off the week with Kayaking, making me feel small but proud in this world, content to drift in the wake left behind by bigger, more ostentatious boats.

The Quiet Before the Storm

All the greatest things in life come down to deadlines. If its worth doing, worth pursuing, then it will probably have a somewhat firm deadline attached to it.

The end of term flew in and out, without too many passengers say stranded at JFK.

Most of the week was standardized tests, and the pressure these students face is unimaginable. I suppose standardized tests have been high-stakes for awhile now, but then what? Once they pass the WASL in tenth grade, where do we go from here?

The answer is, quite resoundly, we don't care. It's a benchmark system. Trying to teach students to express themselves clearly is difficult in a world of standardized tests.

A new term came into town, savvy and sophisticated, if early journals are any indication.

Next week is more standardized testing, but today is a regular day. The in between days are the most important. We're in between areas, gasping for breath.

All this while trying to write, I must be mad. I've been reading Death of a Salesman again, research for my book, wherein the protagonist plays the part of Willy Loman in a High School play.

Each night I work on this I have vivid dreams, where areas and people are blended, like the United States in a grafted cross-stitch. My wife just finished her work sample, and is one step closer to being a licensed teacher. I remember the time.

Work doesn't want to acknowledge the fact I have a Video Department. Now I know how the Quebecois feel.

Its SxSw in Austin right now, thousands of bands and discovery. Youth, a concept I know well, but am distanced from. Too tall to ride that ride.

The new Wilco record, Sky Blue Sky, seems to anticipate the Summer. Languid, hot and free. The new patio, writing, reading paperback books until my hands sweat. Battling the Sleestacks in the backyard.

Rode the bicycle the other day. There's something magical about being on a bike path and having a river on your left and an airplane landing on the right. My Dad got his pilot's license. Perhaps someday, I'll bike to the airport to meet him there.

Creative time, ha. Yeah, how does he do it? Squandered time everyday. Working on a novel is continuous, always trying out new ways of doing something.

All for now,

Kronski

School Prayer and the Mountain Goats

Things happen to us, and because of the amount of space between the two of them, Tom Spanbauer would call it propinquity, we can't help
but meld them together.

What does School Prayer have to do withthe Mountain Goats? How can the concept of School Prayer and all of the free speech issues it brings up be linked up, connected, referred to indirectly in the same
sentence as John Darnielle ofthe Mountain Goats? Just what is the
connection exactly?

We can start with the most logical choice first. John Darnielle is a huge Death Metal Fan, on his blog Last Plane to Jakarta, John wrote thirty poems about Death Metal. So we can take that as an anathema to Christianity. The people punished for a morning group prayer meeting at the High School I teach were Christians, and this happened to coincide with the weekend that I got to see John Darnielle's band the Mountain Goats play live at the Doug Fir Lounge here in Portland, thereby making me groggy on the morning that students were at it again, attempting a morning prayer meeting, after their story was plastered all over the local news.

One of the greatest thrills of being a music fan, nay being a human
being is discovering worlds within worlds. Webs of connotation and
expression that live underneath concepts that exist despite one's lack
of knowledge of these said webs.

Since I first heard their named mentioned in music circles, the
Mountain Goats have intrigued me on namesake alone. It took me some
time to discover their albums released on their 4AD label, and when I
did I was richly rewarded.

Call it a slow conversion process. I acquired 'We Shall All Be Healed'
and read many interviews in which the word 'narrative' was applied
liberally to the man. The lyrics were unintelligible to me, but the
music was infectious.

It took the 2005 release of 'Sunset Tree' to make me wake up and hear
the stories he described. I was a tad disappointed in last year's 'Get
Lonely' record, but the 'Sunset Tree' never really left my mind.

It wasn't until last night that I became a converted Mountain Goats
Fan. In the weeks leading up to the show, I pulled out their records,
I listened with a firmer ear, I digested stories with shadowy
overtones. I read his reactions to Jazz records, downloaded Bill
Evans's 'Moonbeams' on his recommendation.

And then last night. The stories, the songs, the way in which he
played, with absolute radiant joy. His whole face lit up, his stories
were weired, semi-personal and semi-fictitious.

One of the songs, they played it towards the end of their set, I was
the only one who didn't know every word, who didn't sing every word out
loud and clear, much to John's insistence.

And now Monday I come back to work and its school prayer and controversy, and even though I side with the Administration on this
one, I still can't help but think about free speech, and what I
spectacle they made of it.

I am a convert to the mythically dark world of John Darnielle and the
Mountain Goats, and I found it without having it waved in front of me,
And while I may have risked feeling groggy the next day, It did not direct me to the path the prayer group took. My visit to musical nirvana was purely based on a love of music and maybe the telling of a good story.

All this time John and his band have played Portland time and time
again since I moved here, each time with different stories, to different crowd shout
outs. And now that I can see his full catalog in perspective, and I
can see how much the man has written, and how increasingly
sophisticated that writing has become. I can now marvel at the way it sat
in the back of my brain, never unraveled or opened, in the corner the
surface barely scratched.

And that praying, and the gaudiness of it, the free speech issue that
isn't there. I see it all in a new light, through the eyes of a Death
Metal fan.

Thank you John, thank you so much.


Mountain Goats - Woke Up New

Yesterday - Teacher Dispatch II

Wednesday was great, productive even. Thursday started out great.

I'm at my desk and it's early, checking email, swigging coffee. I get the email.

The kind of email that makes the walls touch your elbows, an email that turns your world into a goldfish bowl, bent around the edges, nothing else on your horizon.

In short, the video announcements I've worked so hard to curate, the team training, the proposals for equipment, all of that called into question.

Five utterances of the same word. An Andrew Dice Clay Concert, on the air for all staff, students, educational aids, janitorial staff, security,everyone.

That expletive, the five instances of the same fucking expletive, the person who said it, the host is gone for who knows how long. But the Announcements have a more distinct, mature face, and its mine.

One would think with my flare for the dramatic, and my tendency towards hyperbole, that I would welcome this kind of attention. But I don't. I hate their judgment, I can feel it, floating around my mind like a fever, and while most are supportive there is so much silence from so many others.

The bottom line, I didn't do it, it wasn't my fault, but it was.

So a videotaped mea culpa for all to see. Take ownership and bring it to the masses.

I know this will all blow over in a few days, but for now I want back to where I was behind the scenes, making my moves, shaking the waves underground.

Teaching Disptach

It's not a snow day.

It's the day after a four-day weekend. It's a sweaty late morning, and I've just finished my lunch. There's a feeing that teachers get, right before a tough class, where one ponders the mood and temperment of the students on a given particular day.

Will they be rambunctious after the weekend or not? Is it a high volume energy drink day or not?

It's always hard to say, especially after a four-day weekend.

A co-worker shaved his moustache. He still strokes his chin like he still has hair there.

Visualize a new bumper sticker.

Has hair there.

The writing stalled and died this weekend. I spent a part of a morning taking things away, but not adding any new information. Not a phrase, not a new word. Nothing.

Something hit me yesterday, when I awoke, that I felt, maybe for the first time in 2007, fully rested and refreshed. Maybe it had something to do with the sky light and the slate grey sky?

Sometimes words come to me in waves, humming thrones like bees well up in my blood, urging the synapses in my brain to talk to the fingers already, and see if we can't do something about this 'lack of writing thing'

Oh, and Michael Chabon is writing a serialized novel within the splashy colored confines of the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

All for Now

Snow Days

The front steps, and the stretch of road that lies in front of it has become a barometer of sorts, an area that usually does not get that much attention.

For the past three days now, school has been closed, and those that live in the designated vacation zones know that this means building any variety of snowman (seen yesterday, snow water buffalo, in the downward facing dog yoga position, it almost took my breath away) and snow angels.

It takes longer to walk places, driving in snow, is for me an alien concept, strange the way the ground is so unreliable, and can suddenly without notice slip underneath you, and jiggle you out of your safety zone.

All of this insulation, makes one want to be outside, then inside again. We've seen a few movies, strange hidden beasts from ten years ago. Sean Penn with perfect brown hair. Gary Oldman when he was rail thin, like a drunken Sid Vicious. Ed Harris with hair, who would have thought?

State of Grace did have some issues that it really never quite overcame, development time on a bust that never really happened, and that the audience knew would never happen, so the whole thing turns into a meditation on friendship, but couldn't we have done this in a more direct way?

Sometimes when I am tired, movies are a chore, and I find my eyes continually drift to the time remaining display on the DVD player.

This overall vague notion of the future, one that is controlled by mother nature, brings us back to man's earliest incarnations, reminding us just who is in charge.