Saturday, November 30, 2002

Back from Somewhere Just returned from the planet of Little Chute, Wisconsin, where I had four days of welcome relief from the pace and pressures of left-coast living. During my stay, I only had one meal: it began when we arrived at my girlfriend's mother's house at 8am on Tuesday and ended when we were packed into our seats on the commuter flight out of Appleton Airport yesterday afternoon. I had been working out at the gym madly in anticipation of this inevitability, but I learned the hard way that lost weight is like money in the bank - once you spend it, you don't have it anymore. It's amazing what the traditional Thanksgiving meal will do to the wasteline when it's bracketed by a diet whose staples are beer, cheese and home-made Kit-Kat bars (layers of soda crackers and peanut butter topped with chocolate, in case you're interested. Just try to resist). Oh well - back to the treadmill! 11:36:22 AM    Emphasize This! []

Battleshopping The last two days, Rayne has been blogging hard about her husband’s shopping habits, to which I added these observations about the differences between male and female shopaholics:   Male power-shoppers are a breed apart from females. While women often enjoy the process of selection and the thrill of the spontaneous discovery, most men do not consider shopping is an experience in and of itself but rather an exercise in goal-accomplishment. As one myself within my very narrow fields of interest, I can recognize the telltale characteristic of the male battleshopper: an obsessive fixation on military-style strategy and precision.   Men generally don't browse, except within very exacting parameters. Browsing is a separate activity, with its own time-budget allotment. Shopping is all about getting it done fast, cheap and right. Men identify their targets in advance: make, model, price. They form a battle plan: depart at 0500, proceed along this route, stake out this position at this entrance (which reconnaissance indicates is opened first according to store procedures). They come equipped with coupons, checklists, feature comparisons, questions to ask sales reps (if necessary) and price comparisons in case bargaining is required. If it's a solo mission, potential hazards such as mispriced items, unresponsive sales clerks, or other shoppers are identified and neutralized. If a squadron is enlisted, it is essential that everyone understand their role in the mission and execute according to the battle plan. If objectives are in question, the general tactic is to seize everything within reach and perform triage later.   Women who have male battleshoppers in their households and think they can turn these skills to their advantage are well-advised to remember an important gender-based distinction. Females who enjoy shopping seem to enjoy it non-directionally, but most male battle-shoppers are specialists. Book-and-record guys (like me) are lost in hardware stores. Men who can knock off a 20-item gift-list in an hour may spend 45 minutes trying to decide between two heads of lettuce in the supermarket. Stereo-shoppers are useless on kitchen-equipment missions. And any straight guy who makes a mission of shopping for his own clothing is useless in general. 10:41:56 AM    Emphasize This! []

Bad Folk Rock, or, Bob Dylan, David Blue and Me   Much of my taste in popular music is founded on the cornerstone of Bob Dylan. An adolescent fixation on his mid-60s era work left me with an indelible appreciation for good lyrics and a boundless tolerance for rough-hewn but expressive vocals. Since I grew up 20 years downstream from Bob's prime, the tides of time had already washed away a lot of the residue of his influence from those years, including the slew of Dylan imitators and followers whose work was pervasive in the early 70s. Over the years, I've tried to hunt down specimens of this species and found them a very mixed bag. Strident protest singer Phil Ochs eventually matured into a genuinely tragic Romantic poet, and his last few albums are as great as any music made in the late 60s, whereas hacks like Tom Paxson started bad and only got worse. I thought John Prine's first album was Dylan when I first heard it - a mistake I'd never make about his departed colleague, the occasionally-inspired but often-insipid Steve Goodman. One name from that era that always intrigued me was David Blue (né Cohen), a hanger-on from Dylan's Greenwich Village period who recorded a few records in the late 60s and early 70s that were reputed to be the closest emulation of Dylan's style that anyone dared commit to vinyl even in those shameless times. However, Blue died sometime ago and his oevre is now entirely forgotten (save by current-day folk gangster John Wesley Harding, who memorialized him in a song called "Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, Steve Goodman, David Blue and Me"), so I despaired of ever hearing it for myself. Enter Don, my ex-brother not-in-law (e.g., my girlfriend's sister's ex-husband), owner of the finest record collection in Appleton, if not the entire Fox River Valley, whose enthusiasm for this sort of music runs deeper than can possibly be imagined. He was good enough to provide me with David Blue's magnum opus, These 23 Days in September, which he had painstakingly transferred from his original vinyl to CD - along with "bonus tracks" of fellow forgotten folkies from that era such as Eric Anderson and Patrick Sky. 30,000 miles over Billings, Montana, I had my first listen. Does anyone here remember a track on an old Simon and Garfunkle album called "A Simple Desultory Philippic," in which Paul Simon does a merciless parody of the Dylan style over an organ-driven blues track? Imagine an entire album of this, meant to be taken seriously. Bad singing, flat melodies, pretentious lyrics that miss by a mile, dated production, the works – all cringe-inducing, but not quite terrible enough to be funny in spite of itself.  I guess when even Bob Dylan himself is a second-rate Bob Dylan imitator these days (at least when he performs material from his 1960s catalog), what did I really expect? Oh well – I guess some historical time-pieces are meant to stay buried. 10:30:09 AM    Emphasize This! []