Oil and rust

RustedRobot wins the blogger of the week award. After writing an inspired post about his new hometown a few days ago, he's landed an interview with The End of Oil author Paul Roberts. Jeff's own commentary is quite thoughtful too.

Since the 70s, my family had cars that got good gas mileage. It was more a matter of being frugal back then, but my folks certainly were aware of the environmental impact of cars. Today it's hard for me to imagine buying a vehicle without considering the environmental and political implications of doing so.

I started living a lot more gently once I arrived in California six years ago. The bills are higher, sure, but the big story for me was confronting real scarcity for the first time. It doesn't rain for eight months out of the year here; environmental engineering and land use have always been hot-button issues as a result, especially in a place of such natural beauty. Battles over water rights, virtually unknown back east, are the subject of court battles and screaming headlines. (Great movies, too.) The book that really did it for me was Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert, but the power crisis of 2001 helped a lot too. It isn't just about oil -- it's about using less of everything. Lower thermostats in the winter, more wool shirts, less driving, more walking. Compact fluorescents have come a long way. I don't like telling my roommates what to do (let alone my downstairs neighbors, with whom I share a power bill!) but I've tried to gently show them that we can all stand to shrink our eco-footprint. It probably makes me an annoying bastard sometimes but that's a price I'm willing to pay. (The real annoying bastards are the drivers of giant trucks with "Keep Tahoe Blue" stickers on the bumper, aren't they?) Still, the change that can occur at the regulatory level is probably greater than what all the individual citizens put together can do.

Anyway I recommend spending a little time with RustedRobot's blog today. It's worth it.


FMFM: The Pixies' knockout performance at Coachella 2004.

Rooster strut

"If my heart were made of bases, you'd be Scott Podsednik."

Hm. No wonder I'm in tenth place out of eleven teams.


FMFM: "Jupiter" Symphony and Thelonious Monk's Alone In San Francisco. Upcoming: Ted Leo/Pharmacists' Shake The Sheets

Take me 'way to nowhere place

RustedRobot's post about Maynard, Massachusetts gets me thinking. (This was almost a comment on your blog, Jeff, but I elaborated further, and went with this method instead.)

I grew up in a real nowhere place in New Jersey. It wasn't really a town at all -- just a bunch of unincorporated farmland past the remote exurbs of NYC that eventually filled up with tract housing and had to become a town. The community leaders constantly struggled with ideas for how to make the place seem more like a real town. They toyed with the idea of building a little fake downtown somewhere in the middle, but it never got off the ground because the access roads just aren't built for that level of traffic. The only road that can handle substantial traffic is a state highway that is almost completely choked with strip malls. There's one medium sized indoor mall too, which continues to be quite busy on Friday nights. So are the diners. There aren't many interesting restaurants, and if you want to sit at a bar and watch a ballgame with your neighbors, you're doing it at Bennigan's.

It's amazing how quickly someone's American Dream ("a twenty-inch tube and a fenced-in yard," as Robbie Fulks once wrote) resulted in places like this. Amazingly, quite a few of my high-school friends still live there.

I graduated high school at 16. You can't drive a car in New Jersey until you're 17. Is it any wonder I wound up with a fabulous record collection?

I've long believed that the explosive population growth and sprawl around places like Las Vegas and Phoenix will soon result in some of the nastiest places in the country. Today much of the land in those cities and their suburbs is dotted with ugly, rapidly-built houses that don't really hang together; I believe those brand-new neighborhoods will be half-vacant and considerably more violent within a generation. Think of it this way: why would a person (in 2025) buy someone's twenty-year-old house in one desert glen instead of a brand-new one that barely costs more, just on the other side of the artery road? If the construction trends continue, you'll have places that turn from new housing to rough parts of town faster than we've ever seen before.

Factor in the high number of retirees in the area. Add, in the case of Vegas, no real reason for the place's existence outside of the tourist/sin industry, i.e. no docks, railroad industry, shipping, river, etc. Consider, for goodness sake, the potential for a water-related disaster that would destroy those cities' lifelines; or perhaps, high demand causing utilities to become expensive, driving people out of the area once its resources are stretched. You have a recipe for one big suburban slum, and Vegas and Phoenix could be only a couple of decades away from that point.


FMFM: Ellington's 1947 concert in Carnegie Hall, along with the Giants-A's game.

Musical baton

RustedRobot sends along a musical baton...

Total volume of music files on my computer: 10.98 GB (in iTunes)
The last CD I bought was: "Gimme Fiction" by Spoon
Song playing right now: "Elevation" by Television - bootleg, Portland OR, 1978

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:
1. "Mood Indigo" (1930 recording) by Duke Ellington
2. "Rock And Roll" by the Velvet Underground
3. "Saint Dominic's Preview" by Van Morrison
4. "Bryte Side" by the Pernice Brothers
5. "Each Coming Night" by Iron & Wine

Obviously I could go on. Those were in chronological order of release, by the way.

I'm passing this baton along to: Jordan? Lefty? Marlee? [Update: Looks like the baton made it to Marlee separately. But I know Matt has been ignoring his baton.]

(PS - I wrote this post two days ago but failed to post until now. The song actually playing right now is Iggy Pop's "The Passenger.")

Translate slowly

This is my age group, infant.

Also, did you hear about Nuge's vegan cookbook?


Just heard: The Gourds' galloping "Blood of the Ram"

Wild Pepper

Apologies to the blogosphere for my long delay between posts. I've been wrapped up in a few things. I hope my extended New Orleans travelogue kept you busy, though.

I spent a couple of days in and around Lower Lake, California, this week. Now, I'd guess that every single person who reads this Weblog regularly lives in a city, or at least in a metropolitan area. Blogging does seem to be largely an urban phenomenon, for the most part; the very term "blog" will get you some funny looks in Lake County, California. I've been to far more rural parts of California, mind you, but this was plenty rural: monster trucks, methamphetamine, telltale out-of-fashion words like "Oriental" slipping out of people. And I'm not sure they know about the blogosphere.

You know what they did know all about? Karaoke. There were plenty of people still singing their hearts out after midnight on a Tuesday. I've seen incredible rural karaoke crowds before -- a Friday night in Weaverville, California, and a Saturday night in Twentynine Palms spring to mind -- but those were weekend crowds. This was an impressive showing, and boy, was it not full of good singers.

The best karaoke performance I've ever seen was some kid doing "Angie" by the Stones, down in the desert. Had the place in stitches.

At any rate, I returned home with some belongings of a late friend -- a couple of guitars, some videos and records, mostly things of little value that I took for their personal significance, in exchange for a donation to his niece's scholarship fund. There was one major discovery in the bunch, too: I spun the monaural Sgt. Pepper last night, and learned just how different it is from the one I've been hearing for the last eighteen years. Guitar solos that are buried in the other mix, outbursts of applause and laughter, weird edits, the faster "She's Leaving Home" -- it was like hearing a whole different album.

Remember when CDs were new? (It was the mid-eighties, when treble ruled the day. Good sound was frequently associated with crystal-clear hi-hats and bright 12-string guitars, rather than chest-thumping bass and broad use of the sonic spectrum.) The 1987 CD issue of Sgt. Pepper isn't overly trebly, but it is the stereo mix. I remember hearing it for the first time on CD and thinking, "I'm hearing tons of things I never heard before." Well, as it turns out, the main reason for that wasn't the quality of the CD mastering -- it was that I'd grown up with my parents' monaural LP. Duh.

They say George Martin and his staff spent 50 hours mixing the mono masters, with the Beatles themselves present for the sessions. The stereo master was done in 10 hours, and the Beatles were not present. And while some things are cleaner in the stereo mix, like the famous chicken-cluck-into-guitar-note as the "Sgt. Pepper" reprise begins, the mono record sure seems like the definitive version. There have been rumors of reissues, but none yet. I understand that if you buy the CD today, the booklet still refers you to the cutouts on the long box, so maybe it's time. Maybe when it was forty years ago today?


Just heard: The Zombies' stellar Odessey & Oracle

Walkin' to New Orleans

I think a weekend in New Orleans will cure anyone of just about anything, except for whatever it is you might catch down there.

I've just returned from three-plus days in the Crescent City. It was the weekend of Jazzfest, as well as an extended bachelor party for an old friend. I've returned home with a light wallet, a perceptibly larger waistline and a head full of music.

I'd long heard those familiar tales of how urine and vomit run in the streets like cherry wine down in The Big Easy, but I'd never seen it for myself. I was lucky enough to splash into the experience by landing after midnight and arriving at my hotel in the Quarter at about 1:00am, stone cold sober, with directions to meet a merry band of revelers at the far end of Bourbon Street. This meant that I was about to become the Sober One in the staggering and lurching capital of the world. I headed downstairs, acquired a very tall cup of beer from a "bar" that was really nothing more than a window, and navigated through the massive outdoor Bourbon Street party for roughly a half-mile, doing my best to catch up quickly but still aware that I was way, way behind these people. Certain words kept springing to mind: depraved, surreal, decadent. And this was still only Thursday night.

I don't mean to imply that the weekend was all about public intoxication -- we were there to see lots of music, from noon til late every night. The Jazzfest occurs at a horse track uptown, toward Lake Ponchartrain. It was quite warm the first day, but breezy, showery and cooler on Saturday. My biggest highlight was Saturday afternoon's performance by Allen Toussaint, whom I knew as a songwriter, pianist, producer and arranger but not really as a performer. Wow. Toussaint knows the deep, deep intricacies of groove as well as anybody. His horn arrangements were dynamite, his band was well-rehearsed and sometimes seemingly telepathic. If there is one person who encapsulates everything I experienced in town -- the French, the Spanish, the Caribbean, and the all-kinds-mixed-together American thing, plus the sweat, the funk, the feel, and the elegance -- it's Allen Toussaint.

Elvis Costello and the Imposters had the unenviable task of following Toussaint. EC happily ran through his early hits and newer material, though I can't imagine why he didn't get Toussaint to stick around long enough to join him on "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror," their 1989 collaboration. (Elvis didn't play it at all.) It would've made my day.

The solo performance by Randy Newman made everyone uncomfortable. "Short People" may amuse, "Political Science" may be shrugged off as a dated, goofball Cold War comment (though it's really not that dated, is it?), and "The World Isn't Fair" may be taken for comedy as much as a bizarre remark on the fall of Marxism. But there is no denying that singing "Rednecks," down in Louisiana, shuts everyone up and grinds the party to a halt. People really didn't know what to do with themselves. (The guy next to me with the LSU hat and the "George W. Bush Is My Homeboy" t-shirt sure didn't like the second verse, I'll tell you that much.) A couple of songs later, "Sail Away" didn't really get the party re-started either. Newman is still making trouble, at 61 years old. It was a strange, idiosyncratic performance. I think he's brilliant.

Elsewhere, I saw Doc Cheatham's old bandmates play a 1925-style tribute to him. I saw the Dirty Dozen Brass Band -- another onetime Costello collaborator -- tear it up. I saw a fair amount of hot zydeco, and I saw the gospel tent erupt for "When The Saints Go Marching In" (among other things). I saw about five minutes of Galactic before I was bored to tears -- don't they know how obvious their mediocrity is when Allen Toussaint is playing a couple of hundred yards away? -- and thankfully, I saw an awful lot of fans of bad music disappear when Dave Matthews started playing at the far end of the Fairgrounds, making it a lot easier to enjoy the good stuff at our end.

Some of the best music I saw all weekend was in a tavern on Bourbon, a few steps beyond the part that seemed to attract the most drunk college kids. A dazzling clarinetist, a strong saxman, a couple of fierce-strumming banjoists, a loose-handed piano player and a powerful upright bassist traded fours all night at Fritzel's European Jazz Pub. And it was free.

In addition to our time at the Fest, we did make it out of the Quarter a few times to explore the city and its food. The nightspots on Frenchman Street attracted a mix of tourists and locals, but became crowded quickly and featured some cheerfully terrible music. Our dinner at Mother's, a cafeteria on Tchoupitoulas among some warehouses beyond the downtown region that was recommended to us by a couple of people, was extremely (ful)filling, though the best meal had to be the muffuletta from Central Grocery, consumed atop the levee with the Mississippi flowing at our feet. And, interestingly, our most expensive meal -- dinner Friday somewhere fancy on Decatur -- was probably the worst.

I'm already ready to head back there, once I regain my sanity. Meet me down there, anyone?