Home again

Being in a band is an almost unimaginably gigantic pain in the ass. And in the fingers. And in the back. I'd remembered the fun stuff, but I'd completely forgotten about the part where you carry lots of heavy stuff at 11:30 p.m. and then drive for three hours.

We're gonna get an Eggs website together for the upcoming shows, and we're trying to figure out whether it's viable to sell T-shirts. We will definitely be making a lot of records available for very little money. Which, come to think of it, is a phrase that neatly describes our career.

Eggs rehearsal, Dec. 29

A dead man's luggage

Tomorrow I'm heading out for a couple days of practice with a band that broke up ten years ago. The distance between my life then and now is neatly summed up by the contents of my foyer: a stroller parked next to two cased-up guitars, a keyboard, and a bag filled with cables.

Those guitars in the hallway really freaked me out last night--once, back when home was little more than a mailing address, they'd be ready each evening for the next day's travel. Now they're back, like a forgotten debt or...a persistent rash! Last night I restrung them, which I used to do nightly. It took me an hour and a half (why, oh why, did I ever buy an electric TWELVE-string?). During that time I took stock of the last decade, remembering despite myself how to best get a neat coil on each tuning post.

I remember Eggs being a pretty good live band toward the end of our existence. I don't know if that memory's been burnished by the rosy glow of ten intervening winters, and I guess I'll find out tomorrow whether muscle memory is the stronger brand of recollection. Tonight I'm gonna just try to remember everything I need. Cables? Check. Tuner? Check. Does the amp work? Oh, crap....

Pictures up tomorrow night if possible.

Addendum

For some reason I thought Dizzee Rascal's Boy in Da Corner came out in 2003. It's a 2004 release, and should have been near the top of my list.

Slim Charles freed!

Ralph Anwan Glover, a.k.a. Big G, a.k.a. Genghis, the D.C. go-go star who plays Slim Charles on The Wire, got acquainted with one of the perks of celebrity yesterday--getting away with carrying a gun illegally. This piece has a lot of background on the man behind one of the most intriguing bit parts on TV, including that he's been shot nine times (reason enough for anyone to roll strapped) and that he counts George Pelecanos among his supporters.

There was a segment about Big G in the go-go documentary The Pocket, but he's been a lot less forgettable as Slim Charles, who's well positioned as Stringer Bell's replacement in the Barksdale organization should there be a fourth season of the show.

Year's end

Some years I like doing Top Ten lists because it's easy to choose favorite records. This year wasn't one of them. It's not like there was a bumper crop of awesomeness; I'm just not discerning enough to pick ten. I submitted my list to the City Paper, but then I remembered about ten records I also liked as much.

I wouldn't grant me any authority when it comes to this stuff. I spend a lot of time listening to music I don't personally give a hoot about, and eventually a version of Stockholm Syndrome takes root. I start liking a Dogs Die in Hot Cars song, for example. So take this list with a grain of salt--there's definitely records on here I wouldn't have listened to twice if listening to music wasn't my job. A job I'm very lucky to have in any event.

In no order, then, and I apologize in advance to anyone appalled by my weakness for pop-punk or my appalling taste in general.

Team America: World Police soundtrack
Favorite tracks: “America, Fuck Yeah”; “Freedom Isn’t Free”

U2, How to Dismantle an Atom Bomb
Favorite tracks: “Vertigo”; “Miracle Drug”

Kanye West, The College Dropout
Favorite tracks: “We Don’t Care”; “Jesus Walks”

Prince, Musicology
Favorite tracks: “Cinnamon Girl”; “Illusion, Coma, Pimp & Circumstance”

Snoop Dogg, “Drop It Like It’s Hot”

Franz Ferdinand, S/T
Favorite track: “Take Me Out”

Interpol, Antics
Favorite track: “Evil”

Say Anything, Say Anything Is a Real Boy
Favorite tracks: “Woe,” “Spidersong”

Scissor Sisters, “Tits on the Radio”

Robyn Hitchcock, Spooked
Favorite tracks: “We’re Gonna Live in the Trees,” “Television”

Adem, Homesongs
Favorite track: “We Are Your Friends”

DrugMoney, Mtn Cty Jnk
Favorite track: “I Know”

A.C. Newman, The Slow Wonder
Favorite track: “Miracle Drug”

Good Charlotte, The Chronicles of Life and Death
Favorite track: “Predictable” (Hey, you gotta give em points for titling a song this)

Travis Morrison, Travistan
Favorite track: “My Two Front Teeth”

The Streets, A Grand Don’t Come for Free
Favorite track: “Dry Your Eyes Mate”

k.d. lang, Hymns of the 49th Parallel
Favorite track: “Hallelujah”

American Music Club, Love Songs for Patriots
Favorite track: “Patriot’s Heart”

The Faint, Wet From Birth
Favorite track: “Erection”

Pedro the Lion, Achilles Heel
Favorite track: “Foregone Conclusions”

Eminem, Encore
Favorite track: “Mosh”

Green Day, American Idiot
Favorite track: “Jesus of Suburbia”

Danger Mouse and Jemini, Ghetto Pop Life…
Favorite track: “The Only One”

MF Doom, Mm..Food
Favorite track: “One Beer”

Simple Kid, 1
Favorite track: “Average Man”

Tulsa Drone, No Wake

Donovan, Beat Café

Sum-41, Chuck

Drive By Truckers, The Dirty South
Favorite track: “The Day John Henry Died”

Elliott Smith, From a Basement on the Hill
Favorite track: “King’s Cross”

Noooooooooo!

This is a cruel world, and I understand why people turn to drink.

Captain fantastik

I want to apologize for an error I made in an Elton John review I wrote in the most recent Tracks: I was trying to be clever (a lot of work for me) and described the man's voice as a "buttery elto." Microsoft Word dutifully changed this to "alto," which makes a lot more sense, except when you consider that very few men have alto voices, and Elton John is not among them. Whoops!

I'm trying hard to meet a deadline, but I hope to get my year-end favorite records up today or tomorrow.

Business in the hole

Mark Holmberg steps up for the East End in this column about Sir Frederick's market, basically shuttered since Tropical Depression Gaston washed away access to the shop. I live about five minutes from Sir Frederick's (it's where I used to indulge my lottery-ticket weakness; I've since moved on to the Market, but that just doesn't feel the same), and I'm flabbergasted that Government Rd. still isn't open. It's not just Sir Fred's that I'm missing, it's the quick way to the airport. At the other end of my street, a road that cut through to the Ukrops shopping center on Laburnum hasn't been fixed since either.

I realize Richmond's got problems, but Jesus. Four months and they can't fix a freaking road? In the article, our councilwoman, Delores McQuinn (whose irrelevance my new favorite person, Doug Wilder, seems to be emphasizing of late) says the fact that these roads are in a poor part of town has no bearing on their neglect. Anyone who lives in the West End care to disagree?

The true meaning of Christmas

From this week's Sports Illustrated, in an article about athletes' fondest Christmas gift memories.

Some gifts were re-gifts, like the one Lakers forward Luke Walton can't forget no matter how hard he tries. "We got a lot of weird stuff," says Walton, son of eccentric Hall of Famer Bill Walton. "When you play in the NBA, you get a lot of free stuff, right? So my dad used to save all that stuff and wrap it up and give it to us. I remember this one time, I had this heavy box. It was sitting under the tree for a while, so I was all excited. I opened it, and it was a big box of PowerBars."

Smooth operator

Just in case your copy of last week's Economist got lost in the holiday postal crunch, here's a link to the magazine's story on Doug Wilder's return to Richmond. It calls Richmond "rotten"! (You'll have to watch a rather long Salon-style ad to read this.)

The Cropp hits the fans

Come to Richmond, Linda W. Cropp! The D.C. Council president's last-minute change of heart on the deal to bring baseball to Washington is classic Richmond material. She had assurances on every concern she'd mustered, but, as she put it, ""as I listened to the debate...the concerns I've had over the past couple of months kind of percolated."

Well, we're all waking up and smelling the coffee now. Cropp could have negotiated this deal ten months ago, when everything was on the table, but I guess that was would have interfered with watching swim meets. Now she's very close to putting the kibosh on the return of baseball to D.C., and all the tax revenue that would have meant.

Yes, the stadium is to be publically financed, but that's a bit of a misnomer—only the top 11 percent of District businesses were to pay the tax; not a cent was coming out of the General Fund from which the D.C. government is funded. Almost unanimously, those businesses were quite enthusiastic about the prospect of baseball in town. The city was to keep all the revenue from taxes within the stadium, plus it would have a major part of the waterfront rebuilt and redeveloped for free, basically.

So I'd like to extend an invitation to Cropp to come here. She may be, as Thomas Boswell says, "bush league," but she's miles better than the turkeys we've got down here. Outgoing mayor Rudy McCollum, the lamest of these gobblers, defended the council's decision to give city manager Calvin Jamison a raise before his position is eliminated at the end of the month. That means he'll get an even bigger severance package for making Richmond a worse city. Crime's up. Population's down. The schools are steadily slipping away.

Our only hope seems to be a mayor who's acting more and more like a dictator, and I gotta say, I don't think that's such a bad approach. It's too bad Tony Wilson can't seize the reins in the manner Doug Wilder seems determined to do. I can only hope that Wilder's able to make Richmond a better place for middle-class folks as he makes the trains run on time—but he's gonna have to fight a few Linda Cropps of his own to achieve either goal. Nine of them, to be precise.

I've seen your flag on the Marble Arch

I do not recommend US Airways for overseas travel. The company's been "restructuring" for four months now, and while domestic flights are fine, the strains show when you cross an ocean with this outfit. You have to wonder whether the cost savings from charging for headsets and drinks aren't offset by repeat business disappearing. Personally, I don't drink on airplanes, but I like watching movies on the trip home. You could use your own headphones, of course, as long as you had an adaptor. Or, like me, you could plug in your iPod headphones and experience I, Robot's glorious left-hand audio channel.

I usually don't eat dinner when I'm traveling eastward—I try to go to sleep the moment I get on the plane so I feel like I had a poor night's rather than no night's rest when I arrive. When I woke up before we landed, I was pretty hungry and looking forward to the little breakfast. Breakfast was...a doughnut.



I never much cared for London, but this time I really enjoyed it. Maybe my standards have slipped since I moved to a broke-dick place like Richmond, or maybe my taste has just improved. It's still inexcusably expensive, and in my experience, people who live there either make absolutely no money whatsoever or a pasha's ransom. There seems to be very little in between. I don't know whether a middle-class life is really possible if you want to live in the city.

The other problem is transportation. The Underground is fantastic when it's running. But at midnight it bears an uncanny resemblance to Snow White's chariot. I had to take a minicab from Brixton back to my hotel room after the band I was writing about finished their show. You're supposed to agree on a price beforehand with those guys, but I forgot to do that (all I can offer in my defense is that I'd had about four hours sleep in the past 48), so as we set off, the guy said, "This will be £25." That's nearly $50 with the weak dollar.

"The guy in the venue told me it should be £15 at most." I said.

At this point the driver slowed down and pulled the cab into a very dark and foreboding street. "How about £20?" I offered, remembering every horror story I'd ever heard about minicabs. For a second I imagined morning breaking, The Wire-style, with birds singing and my feet poking out of one of the trashcans.

I was pretty relieved that he said yes. I got real chatty with the guy, trying to make him like me so he didn't kill me on principle. "So you're from Brixton," I ventured lamely. "I'll bet you've seen a lot of changes around here." We talked a lot about neighborhoods gentrifying. He kept me nervous by asking over and over again about crime in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn. It was a very genial and gentle mugging.



A bouncer I met my last night there told me a funny story about ejecting a famous patron that I won't retell in case he's working on his memoirs. That seems entirely possible, as I noticed that, unlike most of the editors I know, this guy used the word dilemma properly (it's a choice between two more or less equally unpleasant outcomes, not just a problem). It made me recall Bill Bryson's observation that he isn't sure whether it's impressive that Britain is a country where engine drivers know about Tintoretto and Leibniz or that it's apalling that Britain is a country where people who know about Tintoretto and Leibniz end up driving engines.

Lottery winners are often unhappy

Sincere congratulations to Richmond's River City High for winning some MTV2 contest. If they owe any of you money, please note that part of the prize was in cash.

Hopefully, they'll avoid the Richmond Curse, which holds that the moment a local band wins one of these contests, or signs to a non-regional record label, they will either fade into a provincial imitation of fame (e.g. Carbon Leaf, Fighting Gravity) or somehow cause the record label to implode (Sliang Laos, Waking Hours).

Any ideas as to why this holds in pretty much every case? I can think of only a few bands from here that avoided it: Labradford, who built their career very slowly and independently; Cracker, which wasn't exactly starting from Square One; Gwar; and probably a few others I forgot.

In an aside, I had a roommate once whose band won a contest in the '80s that got them "a recording contract" with EMI/Manhattan. The contract consisted of one 12-inch record of their song "Beer Goggles." I kind of wish I had a copy of that.

Also, bow ties are an unbearable affectation

This sentence

If legislators in the General Assembly ever supped sufficiently from the fool's porringer that they considered forcing newspapers to publish certain authors, the broadsheets of this Commonwealth would raise unholy hell.

Comes from

• A letter from Patrick Henry to his young charge Dobbins
  
• An excerpt from Virginia governor Westmoreland Davis' inaugural address in 1918
  
• The lede in an op-ed in Tuesday's Times-Dispatch
  

If you chose the last option, you would be correct. Who are these guys, and why do they think talking like Phileas Fogg is the best way to communicate with NASCAR city? It's as if they imagine themselves fanning themselves in a darkened room cooled by a block of ice and a fan, pecking out missives on their Underwoods and shouting "COPY!" whenever they achieve a particularly fine bon mot.

I can't imagine there's a single person in the T-D's small circulation area that reads these things for anything other than entertainment value; obscure references such as "fools porringer" seem thrown in to delight fellow dandies and no one else. Leave behind the neanderthal politics of the editorial page--I'm talking about how unreadable the damn thing is. What's weird is that no one seems to mind, or more likely, they're just ignoring it. I should, too, yet every few weeks I feel compelled to see what's happening on that island of Dr. Moreau down on Franklin.

It's never impressive, except in its weirdness, the work of this collection of goofballs and cretins. So what's the attraction? Are they articulating the views of most Richmonders with the hifalutin language we all wish we could wield? Are they a guilty pleasure? More likely, are they just pleasing themselves?

In the documentary The War Room, James Carville watches on TV as Ross Perot slow-dancing off into the sunset with his wife as Patsy Cline's "Crazy" plays. "That's got to be the single-most expensive act of masturbation in history," Carville marvels as the announcer says that Perot spent $60 million on his campaign. If I owned MediaGeneral stock I'd say Perot got off cheap, so to speak.

Stars fell on...

If you ever get depressed by the tyranny of stupidity in Virginia politics, just remember: it could be worse. (From the Birmingham News)

Gay book ban goal of state lawmaker

Wednesday, December 01, 2004
KIM CHANDLER
News staff writer

MONTGOMERY - An Alabama lawmaker who sought to ban gay marriages now wants to ban novels with gay characters from public libraries, including university libraries.

A bill by Rep. Gerald Allen, R-Cottondale, would prohibit the use of public funds for "the purchase of textbooks or library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle." Allen said he filed the bill to protect children from the "homosexual agenda."

"Our culture, how we know it today, is under attack from every angle," Allen said in a press conference Tuesday.

Allen said that if his bill passes, novels with gay protagonists and college textbooks that suggest homosexuality is natural would have to be removed from library shelves and destroyed.

"I guess we dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them," he said.

A spokesman for the Montgomery-based Southern Poverty Law Center called the bill censorship.

"It sounds like Nazi book burning to me," said SPLC spokesman Mark Potok.

Allen pre-filed his bill in advance of the 2005 legislative session, which begins Feb. 1.

If the bill became law, public school textbooks could not present homosexuality as a genetic trait and public libraries couldn't offer books with gay or bisexual characters.

When asked about Tennessee Williams' southern classic "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof," Allen said the play probably couldn't be performed by university theater groups.

Allen said no state funds should be used to pay for materials that foster homosexuality. He said that would include nonfiction books that suggest homosexuality is acceptable and fiction novels with gay characters. While that would ban books like "Heather has Two Mommies," it could also include classic and popular novels with gay characters such as "The Color Purple," "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and "Brideshead Revisted."

The bill also would ban materials that recognize or promote a lifestyle or actions prohibited by the sodomy and sexual misconduct laws of Alabama. Allen said that meant books with heterosexual couples committing those acts likely would be banned, too.

His bill also would prohibit a teacher from handing out materials or bringing in a classroom speaker who suggested homosexuality was OK, he said.

Allen has sponsored legislation to make a gay marriage ban part of the Alabama Constitution, but it was not approved by the Legislature.

Ken Baker, a board member of Equality Alabama, a gay rights organization, said Allen was "attempting to become the George Wallace of homosexuality."

Aside from the moral debates, the bill could be problematic for library collections, said Jaunita Owes, director of the Montgomery City-County Library, which is a few blocks from the Alabama Capitol.

"Half the books in the library could end up being banned. It's all based on how one interprets the material," Owes said.

E-mail: kchandler@bhamnews.com

This ruling reeks!

Maybe the good Justice is a bit closer to the matter being discussed than he cares to admit: a possibly mis-edited excerpt from Monday's medical-marijuana debate in the Supreme Court.

JUSTICE STEPHEN BREYER: "You know, he grows heroin, cocaine, tomatoes that are going to have genomes in them that could, at some point, lead to tomato children that will eventually affect Boston. You know, we can — oil that's never, in fact, being used, but we want an inventory of it, federally. You know, I can multiply the examples. And you can, too. So you're going to get around all those examples by saying what?"

Presumably, this was not followed by Breyer trying to cue up The Wizard of Oz and The Dark Side of the Moon at the same time.