It's Singalong Time!

A friend and fellow blogger suggested to me this piece of early twenty-first century wisdom: "There are no bad times, only good blogs." Everything becomes translatable into blog terms - miserable experiences make the best subjects (food poisoning, nose picking). Be careful about the conversations you have because you don't want to waste any blog fuel before you have a chance to type it into cyberspace. I try not to think like this, but I confess there is a certain anxiety that goes along with this performance.
That's why I chose today to discuss Karaoke. I came to the Karaoke party pretty late - at least in its most obvious form (see Bill Murray in "Lost in Translation"). My brother's fortieth birthday party featured a Karaoke machine. I shook off the initial four minutes of shyness and began perusing the catalog of songs: Show tunes, disco, even a little Johnny Cash. Where to start? "Ring of Fire" of course!
What followed was a haze of music and songs that I had forgotten or tried to forget. I sang alone. I sang with friends. I watched others sing as I worked to regain my strength. "Highway to Hell" takes a lot out of your upper register. At the end of the night, I sang a duet with my brother - "Summer Wind."
But it didn't end there. Days later, I spoke to my brother and he expressed the same feeling I had been having since the party. Every song he heard on the radio, in the elevator, at home or in the car was now potential Karaoke. Suppressing the urge to break into song was now a legitimate chore.
I've had time to tame those feelings - I still eagerly anticipate the chance to belt out this or that tune. And I've had time to consider the times in my life when singing at the top of my lungs has provided major catharsis. Springsteen concerts, Jimmy Buffett concerts - both have offered that kind of salvation. It helps to know all the words. In the back of my mind, I return to a night many beers ago - with my older brother at a place called the Dark Horse. It was Beatles night. We both knew every word, chord and pause to every song, and we played pinball and sang into the early morning hours. It was a little like going to church.
There is no bad singing, only good Karaoke.

Your Money's Worth

There was another near miss yesterday with a big screen TV. It wasn't the biggest or the best, but my lovely wife wrangled the financing and we gave in to our purient video urges. For about twenty-four hours. Then reality set in, again. So we're not going to have a great big deluxe plasma life-changing appliance in our living room.
Instead, we'll stay huddled around our thirty-two inch stereo TV hooked to the surround sound speakers with DVD, VCR and Tivo hookups. Alas, we are fated to stay firmly rooted in the late twentieth century. Did I mention the fact that we have three televisions in the house? My son doesn't have one in his room presently - though it was his understanding that if we were to buy another large TV that the trickle down electronic theory would put the twenty-eight inch mono set right there on his shelf next to his snake tank.
Why not? His parents have a TV in their bedroom - with a DVD player attached. We yearn for a TiVo in the bedroom for those moments when we're too lazy to drag ourselves the several feet to the living room to watch what TiVo has kept on hard disk for us. We live in a world of possibility constricted by our cash flow. We rationalize our home entertainment by the amount of time we spend being consumed by it. Consumer electronics - as in they will consume you.
The little TV in the back room is the one I got when I moved into my first apartment in 1981. I remember the year because it was one of those new-fangled "cable-ready" televisions, and I watched MTV on it for the very first time. It now has the Playstation hooked up to it. It makes picture and sound just like it's supposed to - but it's only eighteen inches - diagonally! We might as well be watching shadows dancing on the wall of our cave.
Will we own a monster television? Soon, I would guess. Right now it's all about the guilt and shame of excessive video. I could watch a DVD on the machine I'm sitting in front of right now. But it turns out this is better for writing.

Nostalgia Machine

The other night at the local food court I found myself repressing an urge to run up behind a pair of teenage boys and pull their pants up to their waists. I'm a cranky old guy now. There is no way to diminish it. The motorized scooters racing up and down the street outside our house have special names like "damn" and "fershluginer" - German models, I suspect. And the music these kids listen to these days - well, I don't mind most of it, but do they have to play it so gosh darned loud?
I used to ride a Kawasaki Trail Boss 100cc motorcycle back and forth on the same half mile of road for hours when I was fourteen. I could say that the engine noise from that machine was only slightly more sonorous than the two-stroke motors that power the "damn" scoooters, but I would be kidding no one. Once I got my driver's license and graduated to four wheels, did I become a more responsible driver and nieghbor? Not really - just ask anyone who saw me fly up Grape street (not Glenwood since it had Stop signs) in my gold Chevy Vega. I learned to "peel out" in front of my parent's house. They must have been so proud.
My parents were clever in one regard - as each of us passed into puberty, we moved into the bedroom downstairs where the ground provided some insulation from the pounding and feverish beat of the rock and roll that helped form our soft brains and limit our response to dinner time. I learned to recognize all Beatles songs by listening to them through the floorboards from my older brother's stereo. I'm sure my younger brother still has sympathetic vibrations to "You Shook Me All Night Long" - to name just one oft-repeated tune of my youth.
It's the perspective that gets you. I feel a certain amount of Karma leveling as my neighbors play Mowtown into the wee hours of the night. It reflects directly to a night when we celebrated Bruce Springsteen's birthday until one in the morning, culminating by pounding out the beat of "Born to Run" with a plastic baseball bat on our floor - and our neighbor's ceiling - on a Thursday night.
Still, in retrospect, I'm pretty sure I always left the house with my belt on.

Blowing The Lid Off Hooterville

Eddie Albert died yesterday. He was 99. Most people remember him as Oliver Wendell Douglas, gentleman farmer on the situation comedy "Green Acres." I will remember him as a full-fledged iconoclast and counter-culture hero.
A lot of people might make the mistake of viewing "Green Acres" as the opposite end of the telescope from "The Beverly Hillbillies." A cultured, privileged aristocrat is tossed into the boonies, where he must fend for himself. That would be short-sighted: Oliver chose to return to the land by choice, it was no fluke of "shootin' at some food" that altered his circumstances. It would have been easy enough to slip off into corporate attorney slumber and retire decades later as full partner - but this was not his path.
Having trouble buying this argument? Check out Mr. Albert's Academy Award nominated role as bohemian photographer Irving Radovich. I thinks Eddie comes by his beatnik cred very naturally.
So, here's this lawyer heading off to buy a piece of land he can call his own, along with his less-than-thrilled wife, Lisa. In Hooterville, he is viewed with some suspicion - an outsider who only wants the life of gentleman farmer. The residents initially set up a pool to see how long it will take before he and his flapjack flipping wife head back to the big city. Oliver is every bit as courageous in his convictions as Ray Kinsella as he ploughed his field under for a baseball field.
The obstacles Oliver encounters in his efforts to provide a simple life for himself and his wife are monumental. The contractors (Alf and Ralph - brother and sister - don't get me started) will never show up to finish the work on the house, Hank Kimball the county's agriculture advisor doesn't know a root from a stem, Mr. Haney would rather try and sell term life insurance than tractor parts, and to make a simple phone call Oliver has to shimmy up a ten foot pole. The help he receives? His hired hand, Eb, has only had his job for thirty seconds before he asks his boss about his vacation.
Does Oliver suffer these fools gladly? Not always - he is prone to outbursts of frustration and periods of latent stuffiness, but he has a vision that he wants to see through. He routinely seeks to unite his community, offering to mediate disputes and advocate on their behalf on legal matters large and small. Oliver is a man of the people - he even intervenes when Arnold the Pig is drafted.
Meanwhile, just up the railroad track, Kate Bradley is running a bordello called "The Shady Rest" - but all of that "Petticoat Junction" double entendre will have to wait - we bid a fond adieu to Eddie Albert - a man of means and conviction. May the Cannonball Express get him to heaven half an hour before the devil knows he's dead.

Memories Can't Wait

This is it. The beginning of summer. Gas up the station wagon and head out on the highway. It is expected - required. Perhaps in tribute to this notion, the Indianapolis 500 takes place on this very weekend as well - a 500 mile trip with only left turns.
This was the weekend that we would head up to the mountains to open our cabin for the season. A little like "On Golden Pond" without the loons. But before we went to the cabin, we stopped at Mountain View Cemetery. My mother walked around with dozens of cut iris from our yard, decorating the graves of the near and dear departed. The three boys always seized the opportunity to frolic and play on the field artillery piece that sat in a corner of the cemetery - standing watch over a very quiet patch of earth.
It has only recently occurred to me that "Mountain View Cemetery" is not unlike having a street named "Broadway" in your town. I live just a few miles away from a Mountain View Cemetery - about a hundred miles away from the nearest "mountain." A number of people who have lived here all their lives learned how to drive on the narrow gravel paths - I suppose in the worst possible scenario, it would be a great timesaver for any really bad drivers. I digress.
It took many years for me to start making a personal connection to the names on the markers and the people they named. I don't much care for cemeteries these days, as I have more and more intimate connections with the folks who have ended up there. I've buried friends, aunts, uncles, and a father. I prefer to keep my distance when I can - I'm sure I'll find my way back there by and by.
Memorial Day - a chance to head out on the highway and reflect on our own mortality before the summer begins in earnest. "I'm wide awake but these memories can't wait." - David Byrne

The Branding Iron

There used to be a restaurant in Nederland, Colorado called "The Branding Iron." It was owned and run with an iron fist by Vivian Ayers - her sister Celia held down a stool at the end of the bar and provided a certain amount of style to the place with her bright red hair and sailor's vocabulary. Sam, a sherman tank sized German Shepard kept an eye on things from the kitchen door. The help was a revolving crew of drifters and potential hippies, always on their way someplace else. We were lucky enough to be "regulars." We were good for a Friday or Saturday night just about every week during the summer, and even a few special winter and fall excursions.
The burgers were good: toasted buns and lean beef. A deluxe cheeseburger meant that you got lettuce, tomato and onion on the side. Kids never got deluxe cheeseburgers. Parents got the steak sandwich. There was an allure to the steak sandwich, but it seemed like an awful lot of work compared to the ground beef version. Everyone had onion rings. People who didn't like onion rings had onion rings at the Branding Iron. Decades before any of us had a concept of tempura these were the real deal. We would fight over the crumbled bits of batter left on the plate after the rings were gone, my father using his to scoop up any and all stray salt. It may not have been particularly healthy fare, but what doesn't kill us makes us stronger - especially if it tastes good.
The decor was wood. Tables, chairs, walls - all carved with initials of past and present. Behind the jukebox, someone had taken the time to inscribe the political ditty: "Why change Dicks in the middle of a screw? Vote Nixon in '72!" The Branding Iron was where the seventies happened in Nederland. There was plenty of spirited debate about Viet Nam, Watergate, and long hair as we held court at our table in the front room. My parents nursed their cocktails while the kids drew on placemats or went across the road to buy comic books.
There were times that we brought guests who weren't quite ready for the full-on BI experience. On those occasions, Viv would set us up with table in the back, behind the bar. We called it the Redneck Room, since it seemed to attract a more conservative clientele. When Pioneer Days came around once a year, we knew we had to get there early to stake out a table and then watch the action. I have a hazy memory of a guy going through the plate glass window at the front one time. I have a much clearer vision of the hush we all shared as we watched Nixon give his resignation speech. Looking back, I'm surprised that there wasn't more hooting and hollering - but that wasn't the kind of place the Branding Iron was. We shared the history quietly, and moved on.
Years passed, and we tried other places - the Stage Stop in Rollinsville had some of the same flavor, the Beaver Inn had the same initials, but the Branding Iron was a place and time. And those onion rings...

A Real American Hero

I read a haiku today about Ken - Barbie's boyfriend. It suggested that for a guy who had such a limited codpiece that he sure had his pick of the plastic chicks. Maybe he was that most rare of creatures - the Nice Safe Male. I played very much the same role for many years myself, but that's not what we're going to discuss here and now.
Instead I would like to take a few moments to celebrate the real stud of the doll world: GI Joe. When Heidi Wullschleger brought her Barbies over, Joe put in a request for extended leave. Skipper and Midge would toss Ken over in a second for a man in uniform. I am speaking at this point of the standard issue, twelve-inch variety - not the pathetic three and three quarters inch petite enemy of Cobra. Mine were rugged, fully jointed and poseable men of action. They sported life-like hair and a scar on his right cheek, left hand cupped to hold his rifle, right hand poised with his trigger finger extended. Joe was locked, loaded, and looking for a good time. By the end of the afternoon, there was always an elaborate wedding with much pomp, circumstance and small arms fire.
Joe provided me a link with that make believe world of "action figures" (dolls). Aside from the aforementioned adventures with Barbie and her friends, Joe opened a world of scientific possibilities as well. If you tie a string around the neck of a GI Joe and drag him behind the family station wagon down a dirt road, how many miles will it be before one has to shout at the driver to report that Joe has "accidentally" fallen out of the car? How many hours does it take to freeze Joe solid in a coffee can full of water? From what height will Joe's torso shatter when dropped off a cliff? Inquiring minds want to know.
Then there was the horrible mutations visited on my younger brother's astronaut Joe. Probably because he was so young, blonde and fresh shaven - he begged for abuse. We gave him a mohawk with an exacto knife and surgically implanted a dog's nose on his face. He deserved better. Later we painted him black and green and ran another in a series of "stress tests" on his 21 movable parts. Astro-Joe left this world as a pile of melted slag - he wasn't up to the lighter fluid. My guess is Ken would have fainted dead away at the sight of the kitchen matches.