I Died Alone... A Long, Long Time Ago
Now Playing: Toots and the Maytals--"54-46 Was My Number"
Spring's springing slowly, very slowly.

I pledged $25 to WEMU, and am very glad I did, as it's saving my life at work. Fresh Air (Seymour Hersh and Mary Harron today) rules and Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me is a great Saturday morning treat. Work itself is actually becoming somewhat tolerable thanks to one of my new co-workers.

Things in general aren't all that bad right now. I feel a little stupid for missing financial aid deadlines for fall library schools over concern for my outstanding Akron library fine, as it turns out that I don't have one. The silver lining? The money I don't have to pay them. So it looks like I'll be trying to insinuate myself into the system for winter. Speaking of Akron, an old friend contacted me, leading to conact with another old friend (who works with another old friend), bringing back more memories of that city I can't help but view with rose-tinted specs. The WRAP library is almost finished; I put in two early evenings cataloging the non-fiction section and can soon begin entering them into the database. Saturday, I felt less alone in the world vis-a-vis my socioeconomic situation, visiting my friend and former coworker Jenee, the day chef at the Earle Uptown, and later that night my friend and former coworker Phill and his boyfriend Lee. Phill was pretty much my best friend in Ann Arbor for some time until he moved to San Francisco (before moving back several months ago), and hanging out with him is always a pleasure. We all chatted, drank wine, and had a convivial and low-key evening of the kind I haven't had in a damn long time. He capped off the evening by giving me his old DVD player, which was a tremendously nice thing to do and launches me into the 21st century, but also poses the threat of chaining me to the TV room for what could be the rest of my life. Last but not least, one of my stories received some very nice compliments in the British Horror Films Forum.

So life's to enjoy right now.

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.

A Danceable Solution
Now Playing: The Kinks--"Two Sisters"
Nary nothing of note...

The Saturday Actual Birds show at the Halfass was pretty good; Dustin was backed by a great assemblage of musicians including Annie, Scott DeRoche, and Aleise Barnett. There was a fun vibe to the show that was tragically wasted on me; I think I need to take serious naps before those shows so I won't be too tired. I stayed through part of Liz Janes' set, which was pretty good, although long, slow, and sad for my current taste. Bed never looked so great.

More to my speed was the Mike Waite show at the Old Town Sunday night. Waite, it turns out, is linked to two sets of friends, which goes to illuminate Ann Arbor's relative smallness. Unlike Misty's show earlier, the audience seemed oddly segmented and segregated, although that may have been due to my position at the bar rather than a table or booth. Mike Waite ripped through a set of boisterous folk that occasionally featured John Churchville on drums or my illustrious Planned Parenthood volunteer boss, Jessica Ross (who told me about the show), on those sticks that one occasionally "clicks" together and whose name escapes me. I spent most of the evening commiserating with Matt, Jess' husband who's generally tremendous fun. That night wasn't all that much different, except that I think we both had a little too much. Even so, it was a lot of fun; I ran into Greg, chatted with Jess and Matt's friend Eric, and re-met Nora, Mike Waite's sister and a friend of Jess' that I've met several times in several different places... "re-met"'s a weird concept, but very useful for somewhere like Ann Arbor.

Cougar Opaque
Now Playing: The Durutti Column--"Otis"
I got into a conversation at Planned Parenthood Volunteer Night concerning the local Clear Channel station, 107.1 FM. "More music to pique your interest." 107.1 is actually the only radio station we reliably receive at work, presumably since its faceless parent corporation can shell out for superior broadcast capacity and crowd out the ability of almost anyone else to beam their signal into the priceless architectural treasures of downtown Ann Arbor. It may seem petty to go on about this, but WQKL (I think) forms an ominously large part of my life, as we listen to it all the time while working. While marginally better than the techno crap that one of the newbies plays, it's still a trial. The format's gone through at least one major tectonic shift since I've formed part of the captive audience. No more easy-listening late 60s through early 80s dreck; now, instead of hearing Edison Lighthouse once a day, we can hear a Dave Matthews song every fucking hour!! I wonder about WQKL; the responses of the "random listeners" who spout crap like "I love the variety," etc. sound suspiciously uniform and similar to the pronouncements of the station owners. "Say this," they'd say to random passersby at the mall, shoving a notecard in their face and receiving bovine obedience. Then there's that "pique your interest" line. One of the DJs started going on about some lame band one morning--the Fray, maybe--and said, "you know, that band really piqued my interest," simply parroting the station's idiotic catchphrase. Sundays aren't too bad, with all the specialty shows, but I don't work Sundays, and every other time it's pretty much a write-off. While baking Saturday at work, I tuned into WEMU, the local NPR station out of Ypsilanti. As it was pledge drive time, they played a lot of unusually entertaining stuff--Bob Edwards interviewing Peter Guralnick (for the new Sam Cooke biography; for another review go here) and George Clooney and David Strathairn (for Good Night and Good Luck); David Sedaris reading a fairy tale on This American Life; and Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, which I should really listen to more often. So grateful was I that I'm actually considering pledging.

Come back, radio.

Untitled Weekend
Now Playing: Mirah--"Special Death"
I bit the bullet Saturday and went to the Ann Arbor Film Festival, one of the oldest and most vital in the United States. Held at the Michigan Theater, the Festival ran for nearly a week, with the briefest digital shorts standing shoulder to shoulder with prestigious, high-minded documentaries. Buying a day pass, I saw two programs of shorts and one full-length film. It was a pretty odd experience, sitting in the theater for nearly eight hours (with a dinner break) and soaking in so many cinematic visions. The effect was all the more powerful for my recent lack of attendance in theaters.

"The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello": This visually stunning little horror-adventure animated gem out of Melbourne was nominated for an Oscar earlier this month, and manages to pack all sorts of grim themes--plague, vampirism, insanity--into the half-hour story of a navigator in a weird parallel nineteenth-century world who feels he has something to prove because of a pastt tragedy. Reminiscent of Edward Gorey and 1920s animated flicks such as The Adventures of Prince Achmed in its seeming use of silhouettes (I won't even pretend to understand the technique used), it was probably the best fictional film I saw there.

"The Bread Squeezer": Twisted, Day-Glo family fare from Atlanta about an orphan who grows up with a bread fetish, yet manages to find love at the local grocery. A plot rundown really wouldn't do it justice. Tal Harris is terrific as Andrew, the blond-bobbed, emotionally stunted protagonist.

"La Vie d'Un Chien": Hilarious John Wyndham-style sci-fi story (with "apologies to Chris Marker" in the credits) presented in a photo-montage about a scientist in 1962 Paris who develops a serum replacing human chromosomes with those of dogs. Mildly ribald chaos ensues, leading to a fateful decision.

"Ride of the Mergansers": Light and silly account of hooded merganser ducklings in northern Minnesota learning to make it on their own. Music by Richard Wagner and Percy Faith. Fluffy as hell, but I love ducks; what can I say?

"Ikuma Siku": Painting in motion, creating a lyrical, haunting picture of life and dreams in icebound 1849 Labrador. Between this and Hatching, Matching and Dispatching, Newfoundland and Labrador's rapidly becoming a prime tourist destination (for me, anyway).

"A Long Struggle": Harrowing documentary by Lea Rekow (who risked her life to make it) about the Karen ethnic struggles against Burma's druglord dictatorship. I did my master's thesis on Burma's eastern frontier during the nineteenth century, and while my area of study was some distance north to "Struggle"'s setting, it was a jolt to see the scenery I'd imagined long ago while writing it, and even more so to see the disturbing footage of Karen casualties, dead and enslaved.

B.I.K.E.: The description led me to believe that this documentary, looking at the gritty interstate phenomenon of the "Black Label Bicycle Club," would be some standard left-wing rabble-rouser to get the Ann Arbor audience all fired up, like Fahrenheit 9/11 (of which I wasn't a fan). The BLBC is a loosely organized and theoretically apolitical group of bicycle enthusiasts, often operating on the margins of society, who espouse a renewable, DIY ethos that some chapters try to convert into more concrete political action (the New York chapter joined, for example, the yearly Critical Mass bike demonstrations, as well as the protests at the Republican National Convention in 2004). I was pleasantly surprised to find B.I.K.E. a gripping mix of stories--the larger tale of the BLBC subculture and the more intimate one of filmmaker Tony Howard trying to break into the club and out of the downward emotional and psychological spiral of his own life. The fondness Tony's Black Label friends in New York feel isn't shared by the national leadership in Minneapolis, and Tony, after a number of futile attempts to prove himself, forms the upstart "Happy Fuck Clown Club" even as his girlfriend dumps him after finishing rehab and he starts with the dope again. Real-life drama galore and a progressive political ethos made for a real crowd-pleaser, but it's not to be missed if you get the chance.

I seriously considered skipping Sunday night at the Old Town--I begin toiling around seven, Monday morning, and going to bed early works very well for me. Fortunately, I changed my mind, and it was an awesome show. Dabenport opened for its lead singer Misty Lyn at the Old Town Sunday night, with the same lineup for Misty's band that played at Arbor Brewing Company a couple of weeks ago. The Old Town's acoustics have been a bone of contention in the past; allegedly the oldest bar in Ann Arbor (dating in one way or another since the end of the Civil War), it hosts bands and artists in the middle of the restaurant, itself shaped like an unusually plump dumbbell tenement. The music is generally either too loud or not enough, but I didn't really notice, and it increasingly didn't matter as the night went on. Misty actually works at the Old Town, and there was a warm homefield feel to the evening. Most of the music was straight-up alt-country, with some psychedelic underpinnings courtesy of Dabenport, just the thing for a Sunday night hanging halfway between winter and spring. Misty's voice amazes me each time I hear it. Pretty solid applause all round--it got so intense at my table that the vibrations, made from our elbows while clapping, knocked my water glass onto my leg and thence onto the floor. Feeling bad about it, I picked up most of the shards, piled them into what was left of the glass, and gave it to our server, who I'm pretty sure thought I was a little "slow." Afterwards, nearly everyone went to Leopold's and had a high old time until as wee the hours could get between Sunday and Monday. After four and a half hours of sleep, I proved surprisingly active at the cafe Monday.

Not that anyone would have really been able to tell the difference.

Reality Crows-foot
Now Playing: George Frederic Handel--"Hornpipe" from Water Music Suite No. 2
The other day (perhaps the same day and place a friend of mine had her food sneezed on by an "acquaintance") I took the deposit over to the bank, as I do most every day. Due to time constraints, I had to take a delivery to a local coffeeshop in the same trip, and informed my boss thusly.

"Just make sure you keep it safe," she replied.

It was a good thing she gave me the advice. On my way back from the delivery to the bank, I ran into a clown in a top hat who was selling things out of a multi-colored box fringed with ribbon. Curious, I walked up to him and asked him what he was selling.

"Beans, man. Magic beans."

Now, I had very little personal money with me, and the thought of magic beans was really hard to resist. Who knew what kind of hijinks, scrapes, or fantastical adventures I might get into with these ensorceled legumes? It was even harder to resist once I found that he was selling magic beans labeled "X-TREME," and some that were, in fact, vanilla-raspberry flavored.

Then, though, my boss' words came back to me. "Keep it safe...keep it safe..."

I turned the guy down and continued on my way. Just think--if I hadn't been told to safeguard the bank deposit containing our gross income for the previous day, I might have blown it all on magic beans.

Of course, then I might have become King of Somewhere and not faced any consequences.

That story might as well have been true.

Trappings of Competence
Now Playing: The Decemberists--"The Legionnaire's Lament"
The title's from Josh Marshall's hilariously (in a grim sort of way) prescient article on the Bush Administration published a few years ago. He now has this interesting post where he struggles with an intellectual question I bet many of us have been facing recently. I have little hope left. Almost three more years. Think about it.

A-m-e-l-i-o-r-a-t-e
Now Playing: The Small Faces--"The Autumn Stone"
Somewhere in South Wales in the early fifth century, the young man who would become St. Patrick probably had no idea that, not only would he be canonized and have a holiday named after him, but that said holiday would enable people to start drinking in bars before eight in the morning (that was the impression I received, anyway, walking to work in the early hours). I'm not wholly exempt from blame--after a particularly wild night back in Akron at Karen and Patty's, I started on a six-pack of Bud Light around nine-thirty the next morning--but this involves large masses of people, which is a little unnerving. I remember reading some book on Irish literature and seeing a picture of Brendan Behan already a couple of sheets to the wind (looking like it, anyhow) at ten-thirty. That was weird. He looked like someone had put James "Scotty" Doohan in a vacuum cleaner and let rip. I wonder what I'll find on the streets tonight.

My Saint Patrick's Day was Wednesday, when Misty Lyn gave a tremendously soulful show at Arbor Brewing Company backed by an alarmingly talented array of musicians--Jim Roll, Matt Jones, Colette Alexander, Carol Gray, and Greg McIntosh, with Aaron Dresner of Dabenport handling the opening set with Matt. The show was organized by Michigan PeaceWorks, which put together a number of these shows to get the word out on various anti-war happenings around town. Wednesday night the subject of discussion was Guantanamo Bay and the morally and intellectually bankrupt foreign policy it represents. Functions like these help to keep me stoked about the possibilities of change. Personally I think its too late to arrest all sorts of national decline (economic and political) and the international decline of the global environment (as far as it's amenable to humans, anyway--the cockroaches don't seem to mind), but we might as well give it a whirl, right? With such thoughts in my mind, it was still fun hanging out and chatting (I don't remember a great deal of what I said--I can, but it hurts). Austin Powers lines, music trivia, a firsthand account of National Guard service back in the home state during Katrina, an appeal to people of goodwill to write their legislators... it was all good fun. There should be more nights like that.

Slice of Stasis
Now Playing: Saint Etienne--"Kiss And Make Up"
The "Michigan Year," so gorgeously elegized by Alex Robins, has reached the stage where it jerks back and forth between (on the one hand) temperate, sun-drenched glory, not a cloud in the sky, and (on the other) heavens the color of scrubbed-to-the-bone Brillo, with Louhi, the Crone of the North, belching (or worse) freezing wind and sleet from every direction. Yesterday was primarily the latter, but it dissipated towards the end of the evening, letting the moon loose against the clashing canvas of cloud and night sky. I saw the moon come up in the "bay windows" of my residence. I don't know if they're actually "bay windows"--I don't think the house I presently inhabit is really grand enough for bay windows, but it is pretty old. Probably late Victorian, stripped and gutted inside and out to equip it for students and the working poor. Forsaking The Rick Mercer Report on CBC, I rushed outside to get a better look. The weather had grown milder, which meant that my parts were in no danger of freezing. I stayed to watch the moon for about a minute, my socks soaking up the cold from the sidewalk along Geddes Avenue, and felt dissatisfied. I ran back in the house, up the stairs two at a time, and tried to get a gander from my bedroom window (which is definitely not a bay window). My window faces the north, and it was still pretty early. Opening the window, I stretched three-quarters of me outside and watched the moon rise over the house next door for a couple of minutes. If my meager spiritual instincts took a more primeval turn, I'd certainly be a moon-worshipper. You can see the moon; you can rarely see the sun without a tiny bit of pain. The urges which compelled me to share this half-hour have now subsided.

Learn To Work The Saxophone
Now Playing: Rocket From The Tombs--"Amphetamine"
My almost complete ignorance of last year's Oscar-nominated films convinced me to return to the theatre. Whorishly enlisting in the Borders Rewards savings card program, I discovered that doing so also entitled me to a free ticket Tuesday evenings at the Michigan Theater (for a limited time, natch). I prised myself loose from my weekly routine and went to see Timur Bekmambetov's Night Watch (2004), the latest in the mass of neo-vampire flicks that show no sign of abating. Based on a series of novels by Sergei Lukyanenko, Night Watch tells of conflicts among "The Others," supernatural beings divided into "light" and "dark." It looks great and benefits (at least for this American viewer) from its setting in modern-day Moscow. The locations, the look, and some of the performances (especially lead Konstantin Khabensky as Anton, the mopey, sweater-vested clod who becomes a troubled vampire hunter) partially compensate for a rather derivative story--light against dark, prophecies, a "Chosen One", etc. It doesn't help that a Buffy clip is shown in one scene. The ending's pretty downbeat and limp, but if they're filming it as part of a trilogy... well, that's still not much of an excuse. For Russian cinema, I much preferred Sadko (1953), Aleksandr Ptushko's fantasy classic shown for Cinema Guild last week. It's a little more refreshing these days to watch a poor medieval Novgorod merchant-warrior search for the "Bird of Happiness" in gorgeous color shots and snappy musical numbers (in the process racing a seahorse, surfing--perhaps inadvertently--running afoul of city elders, a devious maharaja, and the King of the Sea, whose pet catfish and giant octopus looooove to dance). Good stuff, and great for nightmares!

Wednesday night I went to volunteer at Planned Parenthood, where I hung with Jess, Ingrid and Angela, and we all shared our indignation at the recent lunacy in South Dakota. There's always more to do, and things aren't getting any better. Tuesday I hope to plow through the rest of cataloging the WRAP library. I'm trying to keep active; Ann Arbor's pretty liberal on the surface, but it's very complacent, and some of the class implications of how society works escape many people (the modern-day difference, I think, between "liberalism" and "progressivism").

Saturday, I saw Annie and Actual Birds delvier an enjoyable little set at Crazy Wisdom. Dustin gave us "Crooked Smile" and some other songs, a couple of which, such as "Art and Commerce" hint at the political divide I mentioned earlier. There need to be more of these: songs that seek change through subtlety and understanding, not rote preaching. Annie gets better and better; "Jerk" is simply wonderful, and the melodies are gorgeous. We even got a couple of covers--one of Misty's and one of Tim Monger's--which was a nice bonus. Even with all that, though, I was a little depressed. It was probably my fault for watching Hearts of Darkness and Hotel Terminus the day and night before.

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991) came out around the same time I first saw Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979). It was an obvious thing to compare the two, a comparison the movie doesn't have to go far to shove down one's throat. Hearts revolves around the film diary kept by Eleanor Coppola, the director's wife, during filming in the Philippines during the late 1970s, which chronicled the ups and downs of the notoriously tortuous production. Just as Apocalypse Now allegedly "was" Vietnam, as Coppola put it in his Cannes interview, Hearts is similarly linked: the material overkill, the drugs, the delusions of grandeur, the increasing insanity. In the end, it's a weirdly inspiring story, vividly demonstrating the pitfalls of going too far for art. Coppola and Co. pulled back just before the brink, but not before getting a good long look into the darkness.

Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988) is a different kind of animal, but is also a study in extremism. Klaus Barbie (1913-91) was an SS officer and head of the Gestapo in Lyon, France, during the Second World War, eventually responsible for the deaths, torture, or deportation of almost 30,000 people. During the immediate postwar period, he was recruited as an intelligence asset by the US in the ruins of Germany, collecting information from his former comrades on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Eventually fleeing to Peru and Bolivia, he became involved in local politics and drug trafficking. Hunted by the French government and Nazi-hunters like Simon Wiesenthal and Beate Klarsfeld, he was returned to France in the 1980s and came to trial at the same time the film was made. In 1987, he was convicted to life imprisonment and died in 1991. There's some interesting information here about the trial, unavailable for the film. Even at four and a half hours long, it never flags. Filmmaker Marcel Ophuls interviews former soldiers, civilians, and spies from France, Germany, the US, Bolivia, and Peru, painting a mesmerizing picture of life during the war and after. The ending, when one of the French Jewish deportees almost accidentally confronts a ghost from her past, is a knockout. The great strength of the movie is how it emphasizes the conflicts between the allies during the war, (challenging the simplistic historical narrative of the Second World War that, though it still exists today, was a hell of a lot more powerful back in the 1980s), and demonstrating how the issues that brought about the war linger on into the present day. Interviews with 1960s luminaries like Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Regis Debray, and Gunter Grass bring the notion to the fore--the Nazis are gone, but the root causes that brought them to power still remain to resist. As Debray observes of Barbie's bizarre, sinister adventures in Bolivia during the 1960s and 1970s (providing the government with his services in state repression and mixing with right-wing German mercenaries), the fact that governments of the present would hire people like Barbie show that the root causes of the war continue. There's always more to do, and things aren't getting any better.