Friday, October 31, 2008

Hodgmanalia

Happy October 31. Here's a description of this fine holiday for those who don't know, according to John Hodgman, Unreliable Expert on Most Things (and author of "More Information than you Require"):

"OCTOBER 31, HALLOWE’EN (apostrophe not generally pronounced.) Originally called Samhain, this is the traditional Pagan-American holiday in which we ask our children to ponder the fragility of life by dressing them in darkly colored costumes and vision-impairing masks and encouraging them to walk around in the road."


Note to my readership: I am undergoing a period of John Hodgman ecstacy. Please accept my apologies if I nudge all conversation Hodgmanward for while.

Forget Hodgman as PC, or even Hodgman on the Daily Show (which doesn't quite work). I knew he had something going on back in the winter of 2006 when, as "The Deranged Millionaire," he talked about "challenging the estate of Marvin Gaye to a 5K road race" (TMBG Podcast 3A):

Cecil: We can just keep it loose.
The Deranged Millionaire: Okay.
C: So we're, uh, going satellite in about 20 seconds.
TDM: Check, check. This is The Deranged Millionaire, broadcasting from my personal state-of-the-art---
C: We can hear it. We can hear it just fine.
TDM: Can you hear me?
C: So we're going on in five seconds.
TDM: That's fine, just as soon as we can get it over with.
C: Alright. Welcome back. My name's Cecil, I'm your host, it's 45 degrees outside our studio. It's time to play Six Questions. Our guest today is no stranger to fans of They Might Be Giants, he's the narrator of the Venue Songs DVD. The Deranged Millionaire is here with us today, we wanna welcome you via satellite, and welcome to the show.
TDM: Well, it is a contractual obligation.
C: My first question has got to be, 'Do you get tired of being called a Millionaire?'
(long pause)
TDM: Would you? I enjoy being a millionaire very much. Main-mainly on the account of the millions of dollars that I own. It reminds me of my wealth.
C: The other question I've gotta ask you... Do you feel offended when people call you a Deranged Millionaire?
TDM: Yeah well I once had a real traditional first and last name like most normal people back when I was a...a Sane Thousandaire.
C: One thing that a lot of guests on Six Questions have in common is they've had a Batman-like experience...
TDM: Uh, but you know, the sad the thing is that as you may or may not know once you become a millionaire, you don't have any real friends anymore. People just like you for your money. And, as I'm sure you definitely know, it's the same thing with derangement, people love to hang around with the deranged guy. Ladies love derangement, but they don't really know your heart. So if you're both deranged and a millionaire, you can understand why that would be doubly lonely. And after a while, I just didn't see any reason to continue on with my original name, and simply became what I was, a deranged millionaire, period. It's seemed more honest somehow. Go on with your next question, please.
C: Uh, before we went up on the satellite, we were talking in here. Now you challenged They Might Be Giants, and we were wondering if there is uh, any other bands, or people that you had made deranged challenges to.
TDM: As you point out, on the Venue Songs DVD, I challenge They Might Be Giants to create a new original song for each venue they performed in. Now, they fulfilled that challenge much to my anger and dismay, and appropriately I had to fulfill my end of the bargain, and appear on the DVD and do certain promotional spots, such as this one - I'm not very happy about it, but I am a deranged millionaire of my word. In the past, though, I've been a little bit more lucky. For example, I challenged Greg Allman to cut off his hair and sell it for a gold watch chain.
C: Now for our listeners, that's Greg Allman of the Allman Brothers B-Band.
TDM: Yes, that's accurate. That worked out very well for me, I got a beautiful gold watch chain. Recently I challenged the estate of Marvin Gaye to a-a 15K road race, which I'm glad to say I won, and as a result I control the rights to Marvin Gaye's likeness and image now.
C: Really.
TDM: Yeah, you've probably seen him on some Hennessy billboards, that money is flowing... directly to me, Marvin Gaye is now posthumously shilling for Hennessy. And in the next couple weeks, you'll see him in a series of Bed, Bath & Beyond ads, and we digitally reanimate Marvin Gaye as he walks through Bed, Bath & Beyond, and you know, says some words on behalf of the company. It's not Marvin Gaye's voice, because, well, he didn't say anything about Bed, Bath & Beyond in this life, so I had to dub it in.
C: But, you'll have to forgive me for jumping in here, but I've gotta pay some bills as they say. You are listening to They Might Be Giants podcast 3A, uh, this is Six Questions with our special guest The Deranged Millionaire.
TDM: A-appearing out of contractual obligation.
C: We were talking about music, your musical influences. Now, is there anybody else... is there any other influences for you besides Marvin Gaye?
TDM: Well, I'm not... I'm not a musician, I mean, like most cultured people, I was trained at an early age to play the viola, but then, y'know, I very wisely... y'know I, I smashed that thing to bits when I reached thirteen. I was done with it. It was uh, keeping me from reaching my higher potential.
C: I'm glad you brought that up, because I think a lot of our listeners would be interested in your higher potential program. Could you tell us about the higher potential program?
TDM: Well, it's a combination of motivational cassette tapes, and various kits I send out to people to help them reach their higher potential. You know, the thing is that most people want to be happy and successful in life, but they're wrong. What they need to be is deranged, and worth millions of dollars. And my higher potential program helps them to reach that by these motivational cassette tapes, and uh, as well, kits that they can use. I can send them lathering soaps, and various different kinds of um, headsets and uh, recordings; I'm doing a hypnotic podcast. Now, for subscribers, if you pay me the money I'll give you the website and you hear me recording hypnotic series of numbers that help you reach your higher potential. And of course, everybody gets a viola they can smash themselves as part of the initiation rite.
C: Hypnotic podcast.
TDM: Yes that's right, a hypnotic series of numbers that helps you reach your own potential - higher potential.
C: All right, well, it's time to wrap things up. At Six Questions, we have a tradition here; we like to end the interviews with a question Jann Wenner liked to end his interviews at Rolling Stone with. If you were to die, what would you like the angels in heaven to say about you?
TDM: Okay, for various legal reasons and agreements with the cryogenic company that's going to freeze my head when I die, I can't actually answer that question. Instead, I have a prepared statement that I'd like to read.
C: All right.
TDM: Begin transmission. Four, nine, three, two, nine. Six, nine, twenty three, forty seven. Nine, three, twenty three, ninety two. End transmission.
C: All right. We want to thank our guest The Deranged Millionaire for being on Six Questions today. Get back to the regular podcast, you're listening to They Might Be Giants podcast 3A, and thank you again.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

U.S. Presidentiality Explained

For my foreign readership (Angus?), who may be understandably baffled by the hubbub surrounding the presidential election process in the United States, I share with you now a concise overview of the history and key facts about the electoral process, courtesy of John Hodgeman.

You people who live here already know all this, of course.

Saturday, October 25, 2008

One More For the Mate

One more Bragg moment and then I'll leave it be:

Live in Seattle, 2006, "Waiting for the Great Leap Forward".

Friday, October 24, 2008

Fury in Your Soul, Mate


From a 2004 interview in "Mother Jones" with Billy Bragg:
MJ: So when you look in the mirror, you see a Clash-inspired songwriter rather than a middle-aged family man?

BB: I am a middle-aged family man, too, but that doesn't preclude you from having the fury in your soul, mate. I've been singing a Laura Nyro song called "Save the Country" that has a great line: "I got fury in my soul. / Fury's gonna take me to the glory goal. / In my mind I can't study war no more." I still got fury in my soul and I can't write in any other way.

I haven't even thought of Laura Nyro in 20 years, but I saw Mr. Bragg play this song last night in a little New Hampshire opera house.

If you can watch Laura Nyro play this song in 1969 and imagine Billy Bragg playing it last night--alone with an electric guitar, just before a huge American election--you know it was a special moment. And you know he's right when he reminds us that the election is not the end of the story, it's when the work really begins.



Come on people
Come on children
Come on down to the glory river
Gonna wash you up
And down

Come on people
Come on children
There's a king at the glory river
And the king loved to sing
In the sun -
"We shall overcome"

I got fury in my soul
Fury's gonna take me
To the glory goal
In my mind I can't study war no more
Save the people
Save the children
Save the country

In my mind I can't study war
In my mind I can't study war
There'll be trains of blossoms
There'll be trains of music
There'll be music...

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Blame Me

If I fail to vote in November, feel free to blame me for the outcome of the election:





Tuesday, October 21, 2008

The Big Dot Dot Dot

From my vast readership I'd like to request huzzahs, sighs of relief, and even, well, hopeful prayers...and please point them toward both England and the tiny island nation of Sao Tome and Principe--where our online friend Angus and his family (separated still) are celebrating the end of Kezia's leukemia treatment.

Angus, you cantankerous soul, you know how I feel about going off-treatment. But--realistically or not--with every check-up comes a slightly stronger feeling of safety. Really. I hope your family is reunited as soon as possible.

Friday, October 17, 2008

Not Me

While it's true that I work at the University of Vermont, I do not "moonlight" for our friends at Clear Channel Communications. So don't be misled: this 'aint me:

Open Letter to Starbugs

(sent to Starbucks earlier today)

Hello kindly Starbucks Quality Control Masters and Mistresses.

Longtime Starbucks fan (broadway store, seattle, 1985-ish), first time complainer.

So look, here's my story: I was traveling from Vermont to Seattle (my home for 20 years, thank you very much), in September, when I had to change planes in the under-appreciated Detroit airport (which, by the way, has one of the coolest fountains anywhere). Realizing that meals are no longer served on airplanes, my wife and I rushed to the nearest Starbucks to buy a couple fine beverages and to grab some food for the trip to Seatac. After some hems and haws (and some furtive gawking at a woman with freakishly artificial looking breasts who was nearby) (sorry, but it's true), we settled (foodwise) on a couple of fancy ham and cheese sandwiches sold by your fine company, the kind that come on foccaccia bread or whatever.

To cut to the chase, we ate the first sandwich as we lifted off from Detroit, and it was tasty (albeit with kind of dry bread). A couple hours later we prepared to eat the second sandwich when lo and behold, before my wife could open the seal on the package, what should she discover but an insect running around there, INSIDE THE PACKAGING. It was not a cockroach (though it moved quickly), and not a fruit fly (though it had wings), and it seemed pretty desperate to get the heck out of there. We, on the other hand, were suddenly quite desperate not to eat our lovely sandwich. Have a look:





It should be clear that this bugger was inside the packaging (otherwise it would have flown away--into First Class or something).

I must say, bugs in my food is the last thing I expect from The Starbucks Experience, yes? (and just yesterday I heard that you have stopped selling molasses cookies??? The horror!). Are these truly such tough times for Starbucks that we must expect to see the closing of stores, the discontinuing of your finest cookie, and (gasp) the insectifying of your fine comestibles?

What say ye, oh Quality Merchants of Yesteryear? Is it time to refocus on food quality and insect eradication and maybe not so much on lifestyle branding and your own line of audio CDs? One wonders.
***
The response, from "Jessica F., Starbucks Customer Relations:

Hello Rob,

Thank you for contacting Starbucks Coffee Company. We appreciate you taking the time to share with us your concerns regarding the sandwich that you purchased.

Starbucks is committed to providing our customers with the highest quality beverages and food, so we take any concerns about product quality very seriously. I would like to share your comments with the management team responsible for the store, as well as our Quality Assurance team, in order to address the issue properly, however I was unable to locate the store that you visited.

As a customer service gesture, I would like to send you a Starbucks Card with my apologies for your experience....


All in all, this is a fairly lackluster response to the concerns I had regarding my sandwich.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

From The Strange and Beautiful World Department

My apologies to those of you who have already seen this stuff (it's a couple years old), but please watch "Pinky the Cat" (first video) and then watch "Pinky the Cat Redeux". What does "Pinky Redeux" tell us about 21st century western culture? I honestly can't tell you if this is delightful or scary.



Friday, October 10, 2008

Ocho

It doesn't say enough to say that he was a good kitty. But he was.

Ocho

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Second Life and Polygamist Haikus

I often find poet and National Public Radio commentator Andre Codrescu to be insufferably cute, in a writerly/Latka Gravas kind of way. But today's commentary caught my ear, and held up to reading, and so here it is:

October 9, 2008.

I was sharpening my chain saw when they called me from Washington, D.C., to ask me how to fix the economy.

This request focused my thoughts, or the lack of 'em, to such a fine point, I gave my 14-inch Echo an edge it never had. Good enough for cutting half a cord at least, to keep the wood stove going through October. I love not paying the oil company a nickel. Except for the half-gallon of gas and the chain oil, but I'm fixin' to make the thing run on plum brandy. I've got a plum tree.

Ah, where were we? The economy, yes: $700 billion is more than enough money to buy every able-bodied American a chain saw, a solar-powered generator and a stake in a communal well and windmill. Also, red dirt and plum trees. That would probably only cost about $100 billion, and you can use the other $600 billion to buy everybody their house outright.

Now everybody can own their house and be green and self-sufficient, and can go back to whatever they were doing before the world ended: watching TV. Except for me. I was sharpening my chain saw.

So I go back to it, and I see a line of refugees coming up the road to move in with me. Oh my God, it's the '70s again. All my deadbeat friends — dead and alive — are being chased out of their homes and heaven for not owing any money. They are debt-free in a world that can't exist without interest rates. The dead are especially egregious in this regard; you can't squeeze even an extra penny out of them.

Oh, no, now that they are getting closer, I don't even think it's people from the '70s: It's people ... from the future!

It's worse than I thought: These are people independent from foreign oil, carrying solar-powered chain saws, full of American ingenuity. After the bailout, they owned their own homes, they didn't pay into a corporate energy grid, and they didn't worry about food because they grew it on the roof. They didn't drive, because they didn't have any jobs to drive to, and every garage in America was the site of an invention that was so darn beneficial nobody needed anything from the store.

Without worries about money, without a job, and with extra space in the garage to grow food and invent, these people forgot about the stock market, stopped borrowing money, even forgot how to shop — in short they stopped being American. These un-Americans got their exercise raking the compost instead of circling the mall; they home-schooled their children and were never again embarrassed that their kids knew more than they did. Heck, they were in heaven, the place where the pursuit of happiness leads to when you stop pursuing it.

Such self-sufficiency made the economy grind to a halt, so the government had to do something again: They called in the Army to chase everyone out of their self-contained greenhouses.

And now they are coming up the road to my place because I'm a poet, and I live in a compound defended by polygamist haikus.

"What did you do wrong?" I asked the first of the refugees to get over the palisades.

"Nothing," he said. "We just got out of debt and stopped watching TV! So the urge to buy things on credit disappeared. So they sent in the troops. First thing they did was to put a 40-inch plasma TV in every room and fixed it just so we couldn't turn it off. Just like in Orwell, only with much sharper images. They are calling this the Second Bailout, or the Bail Back In."

"At least the Second Amendment is safe," I said. "Nobody took away your guns, and the Founding Fathers didn't say anything about TV."

And with that, my chief haiku welcomed them thus:

make yourselves at home

you won't be bailed in or out again

you're safe in Second Life

Source


Second Life

Sunday, October 5, 2008

Two Songs For Strangers

How do you pick two songs to share with strangers? That's the premise of the so-called False 45th Record Club, an informal group of music fans who meet up in Montpelier to share a few drinks and songs every now and again. The result—both socially and sonically—is eclectic, educational and, well, only slightly less geeky than a dungeons and dragons meeting. So far it's also a bit of a white male thing, but we're travelling hopefully.

Record Club #2 happened recently at Montpelier's Black Door. Leading up to it, the hardest thing, of course, was: What two songs to pick?

For some reason I knew that I wanted to contribute a garage-rock song by Bellingham (WA) band the Mono Men (though I briefly considered a grungy thing by Hammerbox). But I ran through several options for my second song--before more or less tossing a coin. It shouldn't have been a big deal; odds are the songs would not get played adjacent to each other (playback on Club night and on the discs we all come home with is completely random). But still, I certainly wouldn't pick another garage-rock or surf-rock thing if my first song was going to be the Mono Men. So what to consider?

One that almost made it was "Why Can't He be You," by Patsy Cline, which would have made for a nice counterpoint to the Mono Men, and added to the female (and country & western) balance sheet—both of which were in short supply at the first Record Club.

I tried out several Gang of Four songs, but maybe the forced-monotone of, say, "At Home He Feels Like a Tourist" might have been a little much for the ostensibly upbeat atmosphere of a record club gathering. Or, sadly, a little dated.

Taking a different tack I almost went with the post-apocalyptic cabaret stylings of the Tiger Lillies: I considered "Russians," which seemed topical, too, given that Russia had recently invaded Georgia. Then again, "Slough" at least had an accordion, and had a zippy bounce to it (Slough, a city in the UK, must be a swell place to live). In the end, I wasn't quite ready to drop Martin Jacques' counter-tenor vocals on a room full of half-drunken strangers. Still, you have to admire a band that not only has a member named Adrian Large but another one named Adrian Huge.

Conor Oberst (also known as—wince--Bright Eyes) almost made the cut with his lovely duet with Emmylou Harris, "Landlocked Blues." I'm late to the whole Bright Eyes thing, having been amazingly put off by the name. But this song captures something about the way wartime events interweave themselves into our private lives--and we are at war, right? Plus, I love the trumpet solo in the middle—playing "Taps," I think. But Conor Oberst is quite popular these days, and I didn't want to roll any eyes at the Record Club. Rightly or wrongly I take it as an unspoken rule that you're not supposed to share the obvious.

Finally I decided to counter the simple garage-ness of the Mono Men with some classic soul: "Aint No Sunshine," by Bill Withers. I've always loved this song, even though I completely forgot about it for a decade or two. It's a song that evokes a wistful time for me--and even a particular year at summer camp. Go Camp Tousey! (Go Record Club!)



Tiger Lillies: "Slough"








Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough
It isn't fit for humans now
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, death!

-John Betjemen, 1937

Friday, October 3, 2008

Vermont: It's Small

Like everywhere else, Vermont has its People of Note. Some of them are relatively Large (Michael J. Fox, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, David Mamet), some relatively small (James Kochalka, Fred Tuttle).

Frankly the relatively small are more valuable to me.

But the striking thing about Vermont is how SMALL it--the state, the culture--all is. Six degrees of separation is more like 2 degrees of separation here, especially when it comes to the Relatively Small. On recent flights to or from Burlington, I've struck up conversations with people who turned out to be friends of friends, and run into co-workers coming back from vacation, and seen minor celebrities, like Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home. The woman who ran Fergus' playgroup in Montpelier lived next door to William H. Macy and Felicity Huffman. Other friends are neighbors with Frank McCourt's daughter. Speaking of daughters, Alistair Cooke's daughter is a minister at the church down the road. My favorite breakfast place happens to be David Mamet's favorite local breakfast place (though I've never seen him there). My wife's veterinary clients include the writer Howard Norman and, um, Sandra Bullock's sister (She introduced her as "My sister Sandy" when they both came in to the clinic).

It all sounds rather silly when you write it down like this, but it really is amazing how everyone is connected up here. Here's another example:

While we were in Maine last weekend, Montpelier apparently had a kind of street party called "Army of Fun," as you can see in this little video. The video itself includes two adults that Fergus knows (the mysterious Ben T. Matchstick and cardboard-samurai Pete Talbot), a girl that Norah knows (Maggie), a guy I know (Brian Murphy) from the local Record Club, and the wife of a guy (Earl) who did some work on my house last year. You can smell the patchouli in the air, a bit, but it's all rather charming.