Irish Blatherings Post 1: The Importance In Realizing Your Lack of Importance

Soooo...I am 52.  I thought for a while that I was 53 but then I did the math.  It was interesting to realize that no single fact could be less meaningless than whether I was 52 or 53.  Not to anyone.  Certainly not to me.  At 52/53 I am BUSY!  BIZZY!  CRAZY, STUPID BiZeeeee!  Get it?  I am busy because I am RFP (really Fucking Important).  I am:

1. A husband

2. An empty nest father

3. A lawyer which for me means:

a. I have clients who expect me to be available

b. I have employees who expect that I will bring in enough paying clients so they

can eat.

c. I need to bring in enough paying clients so I can eat.

d. I have to take care of a lot of administrivia (i.e. getting bills out to clients,

getting clients to pay bills, making sure we have supplies and helping to deal

with shit when it breaks.

4. I volunteer a lot of time with SLU’s law clinic

5. I blog infrequently and intelligently.

6. I keep in touch with a large number of people younger than myself on Facebook

(nothing creepy about that).

7. I am a home owner.  There is stuff to do.  Getting things fixed (can't fix them myself),

cleaning up and of course cooking.  I have to cook a lot because of specific dietary

needs related to being an asshole.

8. We also have a place in Michigan which requires attention and visiting.

9. My parents are old.  They don’t “require” attention but they “merit” attention.  More

thanI give.

10. My siblings had children who I like but who might or might not be “damaged” and are

now having children themselves.

11. I was active in my old church, I sense the same will be true of my new church.

12. I read

I say this not to impress anyone.  I trust you have busy lives as well.  But what I have realized is that… for some period of time… all of these things go on, things get dealt with and many things… thrive, in my absence.  This is, in no particular order,

1. Humbling

2. Frightening; and (if you're paying attention)

3. Liberating

I am a bitter, shallow man.  I complain...A LOT!  My glass, half empty.  This is a character flaw.  Arguably a DRAMATIC character flaw but if God is kind to you he delivers a modicum of self knowledge along with all the aches and pains and maladies that complainers deal with as they age. My recent dissatisfaction is evidence of how little I have to complain about.  That is a two headed complaint.  

1. My “career” does not lend itself to enjoying sabbaticals and as I have grown older and realized I might only be ⅔ of the way through my work life, the concept of sabbatical seems eminently sensible.  But this plays in with my second complaint;

2. I don’t travel enough, specifically internationally.  Every time I have left the country in my life it has been a broadening epiphany giving me a look at the world outside my silo and making more appreciative of our great country, God’s baffling kindness towards me, my family and my country and my home, wife family and… kitchen.  Sometimes it can even help to make me more appreciative of my job!

So my New Years Resolution was that for the rest of my life I would leave the country twice a year.  My wife and I then spent some time together in Florida visiting her parents and we stretched it out that in 2015 we would take two weeks and go live in another country, towards a goal of moving for one month a year to another country and just taking it in or in the immortal words of Jules in the movie Pulp Fiction we are going to “Walk The Land”.

Jules: I'll just walk the earth.

Vincent: What'cha mean walk the earth?

Jules: You know, walk the earth, meet people... get into adventures. Like Caine from "Kung Fu."

That is good stuff.  But my plan I think is to fly the earth, drive the earth, live around people I didn’t grow up with for a while each year and do it with my wife.  Sooo… my daughter is in Cambridge this semester and my wife decided I should go visit her so went and met her in Dublin and I decided I would spend a few days wandering around Ireland on my own which led me to Galway for a few days where I am now typing away preparing to fly back to the Lou tomorrow.  In my absence it appears things have gone… splendidly.  Perhaps I should leave more often and… perhaps I will but the next several posts will be known forever as my own personal “There And Back Again” and if you don’t get that reference, shame on you and Google it, but I think I will call this little series my…”Irish Blatherings”.  Round one was yesterday when I put up the Edward Sharpe Concert.

Peace!

Edward Sharp And The Magnetic Zeros at The Olympia

Soooo… when traveling, as a music head, I always like to look and see who is playing wherever I am traveling too.  Unless you're going to NYC, L.A., Austin, Nashville, Chicago, Minneapolis or Athens GA you are setting yourself up for a variety of disappointments.  You will never find local bands unless you have a local source and even then it is hit or miss and national acts do not tour on your travel schedule but over the years I have been able to see some fabulous shows.

When I scheduled my Irish boondoggle with daughter I went online and after thrashing around found Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros were playing at the Olympia Theater in Dublin and after a little more thrashing around I found out that it was a very cool, historical venue.  We have some great places to see shows in St. Louis.  The Fox is of course in a class by itself but it is too big.  This place had the same setup but it was intimate, more like The Blue Note in Columbia but without the cigarette burns on everything, the holes in the drywall, the lack of lighting, the building code violations and the smell of urine… everywhere.

http://www.olympia.ie/venue-info/about-the-theatre/

I epically failed to get tickets because ticketmaster said the show was sold out.  It was saddening and comforting at the same time to see that even our Irish brothers are beholden to the Ticket Monster Franchise.  I was able to remember and become infuriated all over again about how long the process takes, how I can never read their code which allows them to allegedly stop the robo dialing scalpers (that is a lie) only to find they are “SOLD OUT”.  I considered stubhub, but was scrambling at work to get out of town so… I guess what I am saying is that I got lazy and got cheap.

I arrived at the Dublin Airport at 9:00 Friday morning having slept about three hours on the plane.  My daughter had a full day planned and we hit a lot of sites in downtown Dublin including Jamieson and a museum and we got me a gluten free lunch at The Millstone and then we were walking along and saw the Olympia.  So I walked into venue and asked and the nice old Irish lady said “we just had a cancellation!  So we bought and the tickets cost less than i would have paid online.

My daughter who was trying to take care of me helped track down a gluten free pizza place and painstakingly got directions.  Our iPhones do not work apart from a WiFi so  she got directions and took a screenshot and we headed to town in the rent a car.  We did not count on dark and rain and my general stupidity and abject fear driving on the wrong side of the road.  We never found the restaurant and ended up back by the theater where we got a burger and some wings and then knowing doors were at 7:30 with the opener at 8, we headed down casually around 8.  The street was weirdly dark.  Laura wanted a chocolate milk or something to take the burn out of her mouth from the wings but the grocery was dark as well.  They were lined up 40 deep outside the theater.  We were instructed to go down a side alley if we had balcony seats so we went down a dark alley using the phones as light.  It all felt sketchy but by the side door we were told, “Power outage.  At Least ½ hour.”

So we went and had a cocktail at “The Czech Inn and then the lights were still off so we got another cocktail at some place where we were speculating on the average patron’s drug life.  As we walked around the corner, the lights popped on in the street and we knew all would be well.

As we got in the opener was conducting a sing along because they still had not completed sound check.  It was charming I guess but the crowd was having none of it singing along to U-2 and getting to sing a particularly painful version of Wonderwall.  Still, it was suitable to have another drink to and prepare for the main course.

After a brief break he comes out… with is band… and they keep coming out… and keep coming out.  9 players (2 drummers, keyboard, organ,  multi instrument, guitar player, bass player, random percussionist, and another guitar player and a female backup.  An 11 piece band?  Really.  When I was listening to him on Spotify I did not really get it.  I get it now.  Edward Sharpe is an:

1 Entertainer

2. Songwriter

3. Misanthrope

4. Band Leader

A band leader!  A bandleader singer!  Like Ricky Ricardo! But cooler, and not dead.

He kicked it off raucously with a song called “In The Summer” and for several songs just did whatever the audience shouted out and it was a lot of fun.  There is a joy to a loose set list and there is a joy to a band that is comfortable enough in their gig and good enough to roll with it.  It is not that easy a thing to find, especially with 11 people playing together.  And Sharp is an entertainer.  He patters with the crown, he shuffles around and does odd things with his hands...he whistles… and he sings.

He then lit into “I Don’t Want To Pray” which is at best an...irreligious (is that a word?) song.  But it is a good song with a nice hook.  He sang a few verses and then had band members and audience members make up verses and… it was fun.  As the show went on his patter wandered more and more but was always entertaining and  then he jumped off the stage and waded into the crowd and started singing down there with them.  He was given a gift of Skittles which he shared.  he explained to people that Dublin was the New orleans of Ireland.  He told a long story about drawing a picture of sitting bull as a child and how it morphed instantaneously into a song… and he spoke of the beauty of melody.

Finally, he gave everyone his hit du jut “Home” and though, after the raucous evening he was a little out of voice and whistle it was a celebration.  

Live at Bonaroo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qa10--IPdI

He was forced to wrap up quickly because of the late start due to the power outage and announced to everyone’s dismay that there would be no encore.  But daddy was ready to go home and I had the joy of seeing a guy who is absolutely at the top of his game.  I got to see him with my daughter.  I got to see him at a cool theater in a foreign country.  Life is indeed. good

Book Review: Hyperbole and a Half

Soooo...A lot of people are depressed.  A lot of people have stupid dogs.  A lot of people cannot draw.  But not a lot of people are depressed, with stupid dogs, cannot draw AND ARE FUNNY.  Allie Bosch is funny.  Scary, poignant, funny. Think of this book as a “Where The Wild Things Are” for adults.  And it turns out all the really scary shit is in your head.

I think I got turned onto this through Terry Groos and her NPR fanzine “Fresh Air”.  That is probably unfair to Terry and the show but I do respect that on her show, at every break (and there are at least 5 of them in one of her typical hourly shows will say something like:

“I am here with Allie Bosch, author of the blog “Hyperbole and a Half” which has just been released in paperback”.

Terry really shills for her guests.  I don’t know, maybe it’s nice.  In any case Terry Gross bats about .400 in putting on interesting people and a .400 average will (I am told) keep you in the majors for quite a while.  Anyway, Bosch started her blog while mired in depression and the things she writes about it are true, and frightening and if damaged enough, funny.  Most of the drawings have her in them.  I learned from Gross’ show that the yellow thing on her head was her attempt to draw a pony tail.

Anyway, crude drawing of her, her dogs, her mom and occasionally objects.  The art adds to the damaged quality of the prose but her narration of her plight, or her dogs plight, or her mothers mental illness are all spot on and leave simple people like me humbled both by the writings quality, it’s honesty and it’s humor.  I mean, if you cannot laugh about severe and clinical depression, what can you laugh about?

This is a book to put by your toilet.  Easily chopped up chapters time out excellently for the task you are poerfomring there.  Sometimes it is good to read a really easy book with a lot of pictures but this book made me laugh out loud at least a dozen times and… I need that.  Buy this book, give it to a friend, but not if it is the copy you kept by the toilet.

Peace, and your welcome.

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com

The St. Louis Diner Review Presents: The Never Ending Playlist

Soooo… I have another idea.  Everything I read about music leads to several trends which at this point are not even really trends but reality.  With my recent boycott of the news and my desire to put together my “Best of 2013” list I buried myself in music for the last month and a half and I was impressed and humbled by how little of it I had screened or listened to at all last year.  So here are the things I have learned and am trying to assimilate into my musical listening life:

1. There has never been more good music out there.  Seriously.  A ton of people are out there recording and writing and when you put a million monkeys at a million typewriters…it is like taking a million monkeys and equipping them with a million Garageband programs…  It might not be the Guttenberg Bible… but you might get “Royals”.

2. Being overwhelmed with product (anyone can put out a CD) because of ease of entry to market (Garageband, Pro Tunes etc…) we are overwhelmed.  We are also overwhelmed because we can access 99% of what is out there for free on Spotify, Pandora and YouTube.  YouTube, by the way is taking over the position that Radio formerly held for finding new music.  The key is to find the filters that take out the crap and that is a challenge.

3. The record companies are dinosaurs similar to the legacy airlines and mainstream religious denominations.  Their main value is their history (library of recordings and rights) and their ability to still get media attention. But don’t be confuse, they are irrelevant.  The industry will continue to amble along and give us Katy Perry and Britney, and Madonna and U-2 and the Eagles but the old bands are only marketable because they are old and Katy Perry and the like (Beiber) have limited shelf life and so we need a constant parade of good looking kids singing well written over-produced dance numbers.  There is an exception (sort of) for country music in that they have found a current recipe (take good looking younger singers who can sing, provide them with Nashville Hit Machine Songwriting (America, Trucks, Patriotism, Beer, Heartache, Darkness, Rain, Alcohol, Pride) and find a back up band that can crank out the same Eagles based power chord country rock) to keep selling new music, all of it listenable and most of it shit.

4. The CD is dead.  It has gone the way of the 78, the 45, and the LP.  I have 1500 CD’s in my basement and to the extent they are not on my iTunes Cloud they might as well not exist.  Perhaps my future grandchildren can build things with them.

5. The format of an artist putting out an album every two years or so is dying, dying, needs to die and is almost DEAD whether the artists or industry realize it or not.  The public buys by the song unless you're like me and you're a junkie.  No one but a small slice of us give a shit about 9 crappy tracks on a CD other than “the hit”.  People like us like a song and wonder what else is there and sometimes we find something good.  A CD with 3 good songs is a GREAT CD and the public will buy those three songs and pay .99 cents or $1.29 or whatever Apple Tells us to pay and the kids will download them for free but we don’t want or need an album.  The industry needs the album/CD because it is their “model”.  Music has moved on.

6. EDM (Electronic Dance Music) is the thing where there is growth and excitement in the industry.  I am 52 and I would posit that if you're over 40, don’t try and pick up on this music.  I know a lot of it is excellent and well done but it does not translate to those of us who grew up thinking ZZ Top was edgy.

So what I am going to do to try and make sense of this new world is to curate the St. Louis Diner Review, “Neverending Playlist”.  I am thinking I keep it at 50 songs.  Not everything will be recently released.  Some of the songs I stumble over have been out there for some time and some are just “chestnuts” for me which I want to share occasionally.  Those of you who look to me for some new music ideas can click on this link and go to the playlist where I will try and add a new artist or recently released CD and post 3 songs from it in the mix.  I plan on keeping this going in my car myself as my 2014 soundtrack.  Perhaps I just keep adding to it and never delete anything but I think “the weak must die” and that even the great tune deserves to ultimately be retired.  I will be happy to receive any feedback on the list or on additions to it as the year progresses. I don’t know how much time this will take and it could be an epic fail but the thought of it amuses me and I need more amusement.

I am going to start it with 15 songs.  I will do three songs off of a recently released album.  You have to go find them or download them though perhaps I could put a YouTube link in… but most of the songs are too new to be up yet.  Get your iTunes account or get set up on Spotify and load em up.  

We are starting with 15 songs and will go from there.  The thought right now is three songs from a new CD and one random track from my iTunes library.  Sometimes discovering old music is just as good or better than discovering new music.  

So Willie Nile, as I have said before heaping praise on him is some cross in attitude, singing style and lyrical quality with Dylan and Lou Reed.  It is all New York attitude and swagger.  he came to my attention several years ago with a song called “Cell Phones Ringing In The Pockets Of The Dead”.  It is a nice metaphor.

A chestnut from Built To Spill this is a Friday after work song, perhaps when the sun is shining. “Life is just a joyride, drink a lot of beer and climb inside!” Just the advice to give your high schooler.  Listen, smile and turn it up.

Gaslight Anthem:  Never know what to think of them.  Cool name.  This is evidently a collection.  They started as a Jersey punk band in 2006 and I would now argue have learned to sing and play their instruments.  I love covers and their version of “Tumbling Dice” pleased me. It takes balls to cover the stones.  Chris Christie/New Jersey balls.

Beth Bombara:  Local songstress.  Has an EP out that is really good and she puts on a nice live show normally backed by a “Tennessee Two” type ensemble.  Live her songs twang but her recorded stuff is much more refined.  Great pipes.  Local girl.  Go buy it and even better see her live.

Rosanne Cash:  River and the Thread is a little early to be album of the year but the critics have jumped on hard and fast.  It is a really sweet CD with nice even production and great writing.  She brings some friends along to play on it and it has some nice surprises.

Bree Sharp:  Another one from deep in the iTunes Library.  She sings like a likeable Sheryl Crow.  Really like this song.  I think I found her because she recorded a pretty good cover of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.”

Sleepy Kitty:  Of course I am a fan.  Another local band via Chicago they are getting a nice national buzz.  Throw them on a Saturday Night Live performance and they would be unstoppable.  They are becoming a pillar of the Cherokee Street scene.  I keep saying “they” because it is Paige Brubeck and Evan Sult.  She rocks the guitar in a Jack White manner and Sult pounds the drums and sings and does everything else needed.  They just wow me and I was worried I would like this CD because their first CD “Infinity City” was so unstoppable.

ST. LOUIS DINER REVIEW NEVERENDING PLAYLIST

Artist	Album	Track Name	Listen	Date Added
Willie Nile	American Ride	Life On Bleeker Street	2014	2/3/14
Willie Nile	American Ride	Holy War	2014	2/3/14
Willie Nile	American Ride	There Is No Place Like Home	2014	2/3/14
Built To Spill	The Normal Years	Joyride	1996	2/3/14
The Gaslight Anthem	The B Sides	Tumbling Dice	2014	2/3/14
The Gaslight Anthem	The B Sides	Queen of Lower Chelsea	2014	2/3/14
The Gaslight Anthem	The B Sides	American Slang	2014	2/3/14
Beth Bombara*	Raise Your Flag	Mountain Sun	2013	2/3/14
Rosanne Cash	The River And The Thread	A Feathers Not  A Bird	2014	2/3/14
Rosanne Cash	The River And The Thread	Modern Blue	2014	2/3/14
Rosanne Cash	The River And The Thread	Your Southern Heart	2014	2/3/14
Bree Sharp	Sunday School And Cigarettes	More BS	2006	2/3/14
Sleepy Kitty*	Projection Room	Batman: The Ride	2014	2/3/14
Sleepy Kitty*	Projection Room	The Hoax	2014	2/3/14
Sleepy Kitty*	Projection Room	Hold Yer Ground	2014	2/3/14