Making Hard Men Humble
Now Playing: Earth, Wind, and Fire--"After The Love Is Gone"
I recently had occasion to listen to all of my Kinks CDs, The Kink Kontroversy (1965) through Preservation, Act 1 (1974). I still count the Kinks and Sleater-Kinney as my two favorite bands, and my occasional absorption in local music makes it a pleasure to revisit the two from time to time. This won't seem of any great moment to most of y'all, but it evoked profoundly affecting memories of my life directly before I moved to Ann Arbor in August 2002: life spent in a charmingly dilapidated, condemned house in Akron, Ohio, off the Perkins St. exit of State Route 8. The house is now sadly gone, not a timber left to attest its former life. I spent many a fond hour preparing lectures and syllabi, reading and writing, while lying in the bathtub with the window open and listening to the aforementioned bands, Television, the Flamin' Groovies, or St. Etienne, spring smells and the sound of birdsong all around. It all had to end, of course, and however overrated I sometimes find The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it was a kick to have to leave a house that was being demolished to remedy the sometimes lethal freeway exit system immediately north of I-76. Some of my fondest non-academic memories of Akron are of that. And Piatto. And Country Diner (God help me).

Speaking of old music, I found through a chance library CD that Henry Purcell's music for the funeral of England's Queen Mary II in 1695 formed the basis for the creepy yet compelling synthesizer score that opens A Clockwork Orange. I found that pretty cool (even if A Clockwork Orange is overrated, too).

Wednesday night I finally (and needlessly, it turned out) swallowed my pride and went to downtown Ann Arbor's Oz nightclub for DJ Josh Burge's "Plastic Passion," a night of primo 80s and early 90s dance music. I'd often wondered about Oz, which opened a couple of years ago as a Middle Eastern-flavored place, with hookahs and belly dancing. It's expanded since to include acts like Plastic Passion and the ubiquitous DJ Billy the Kid spinning reggae and soca.* I was impressed at the interior--dark reds and greys with lots of candles (the way the second floor of Crazy Wisdom ought to look) and space so my (or, in fairness, anyone's) dancing wouldn't cause injury. It reminded me of the red damask bedroom at the Count of Monte Cristo's place in Auteuil writ large. I ran into Sara and Marie (come to think of it, they literally ran into me), met their friends Chris and Guy, and we all filled out request cards and danced to an impressive array of tunes from everyone's new favorite decade. The usual suspects were there, but there were some pleasant surprises, like not quite canon stuff from Slowdive and Lush that painfully (in a good way) reminded me of my undergrad days at Roanoke. Of my dancing, I'll only say that it was a damn good thing the place was roomy.

* Billy used to work the second floor at Don Carlos late Thursday nights, when the not-all-that-strong rafters shook with Cosmos, bass lines, and the population density of Bangladesh. I had no problem with him, but he pissed off the doorstaff with some prima donna behavior. He wasn't nearly as amusing as a guy with (I've since discovered) the same name as a fairly well-known figure on the Ann Arbor music scene. After being challenged for ID and then barred for its absence, he squawked, "Hey, come on, man! All of Ann Arbor knows me! I'm--" We didn't care, but we laughed anyway.