22 five-year-olds

May 22, 2008


22

The only reason it’s that high is because I have no Moral Compass. Kids be damned – I’d be gouging out eyes and throwing 5-year-olds for any advantage.

Tags: Random Links |

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Renouncing my activism

May 20, 2008


Over Christmas break in 1996, I made a decision that would change my life. Or, if not my life, at least my lifestyle.

I stopped eating meat. Just like that. Boom. Cold turkey, if you’ll excuse the pun.

Now, twelve years later, I’m ready to go back.

When you look at it, I guess I’m just growing weary of vegetarianism. But after over a decade of meatlessness, how does a lapsing vegetarian quit?

I was once a fervent vegetarian. I was good at it, you could say, eschewing meat as if I had never eaten it. I began with a fire in my belly – I was going to show the world what I could do, how punk I could be, how different and socially responsible I could be.

I was a minor activist. It was all I had in the realm of punk culture. Sure, I was in a band and I listened to lots of Bad Religion, but I was a poseur in every sense of the word. After all, I washed my hair and liked my parents and refrained from getting tattoos of the Operation Ivy dancer. But being a vegetarian was my way of saying, “I’m different, and I care.”

My first test was at a fast food establishment. My second test was explaining why I was doing it. That second test has lasted since then.

Which leads me to today. I no longer have any reasons. I’m just plugging along, shunning meat because that’s just what I’ve always done. Because it’s who I am. Because it’s been so long, because I don’t want to explain it to everyone again.

The stage was set five years ago, on my honeymoon in New Orleans. Knowing our proximity, and trusting the advice of our parents, Kerrie (who has been a vegetarian for 12 years as well) and I toasted our newfound union by eating seafood – the first meat-stuff we had consumed since high school. It was tasty, and just like that we moved from strict vegetarians to vegetarians who happen to eat fish and seafood.

Looking back, that was probably the beginning of the end for me. I no longer feel a need to save every animal.

I’m ready to give it up. But after 12 years, I find myself scared to do it.

Will my stomach rise up in protest? Will people see me as a waffling who was never behind the cause in the first place? Will I pull what’s left of my hair out trying to explain that, yes, I eat meat now and, no, I don’t need you to congratulate me. (This must be what it feels like to switch political parties, or finally acknowledge a world-changing trend.)

What happens when you finally let go of an ideal that’s defined you for so long? And if I’m willing to give up being a vegetarian – if I’m willing to look nearly 12 years of contented (though passive and not exactly heartfelt) activism and bid it adieu – what does that say about my ability to continue

Is being a vegetarian part of my identity?

If so, why am I so anxious to throw it out?

Tags: Food, Vilhauer |

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BMOWP Classic Album – Flood

May 20, 2008


FloodFlood by They Might Be Giants

Today, I rediscovered Flood.

It’s not that I forgot it existed – it’s just that I forgot I’d liked it. I rediscovered it in a very specific way: I plugged the CD in, turned up the volume, and sang along with “Birdhouse In Your Soul” as loud as I could. In doing this, I discovered that, after at least a decade since last listen, I still knew all the words.

All of them.

This is by far the most embarrassing thing I’ve done this year.

In case you haven’t been keeping track, it’s not cool to like They Might Be Giants. Aside for a brief time in the early 90s, it’s never been cool to like They Might Be Giants. In fact, during that brief time it was only tolerated – it was an appreciated side-route that ultimately ended in a dead end, a funny little hobby disc on the level of “Detachable Penis” by King Missile.

Somewhere along the line, TMBG realized this. Fortunately for them, they had a built in talent for creating catchy and obscenely childish songs – perfect for, you know, writing children’s albums. Which is the path they’re headed down now – children’s artists with a fruitful background in alternarock.

However, during the Brief Time of Tolerance, TMBG put out two fantastic albums: Flood and Apollo 18. Flood is the most memorable, easily lifted by some of the band’s most recognizable songs – the aforementioned “Birdhouse In Your Soul,” “Particle Man,” “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”.

After that, Flood seems pretty light – you’ve got the songs that everyone knows, and you’ve got a bunch of filler. Yet, that’s not the case. As I’d listen to each song, I’d remember the hooks, the lyrics and the subtle humor that, during a career as “gifted and misunderstood student,” I naturally latched on to. It was a mix of intelligent lyrical talent, goofy-ass music and pop sensibilities.

Amazingly, Flood tackles some pretty deep subjects, and does so in a way you wouldn’t expect – not through quirky wordsmithing but through pointed questions and statements, poignant in their simplicity. “Dead” takes a look at the legacy of death (“Now it’s over I’m dead and I haven’t done anything that I want”). “My Racist Friend” highlights the embarrassment of being associated with an overly bigoted friend (“Out from the kitchen to the bedroom to the hallway/Your friend apologizes, he could see it my way/He let the contents of the bottle do the thinking/Can’t shake the devil’s hand and say you’re only kidding”). “Lucky Ball and Chain” laments the loss of a long-time love (“Confidentially/I never had much pride/But now I rock a bar stool/and I drink for two/just pondering this time bomb in my mind”).

But it’s not all somber; the serious messages aren’t as common as, say, round-about lyrics about science. And that’s okay with me – the entire legend of TMBG is built upon songs that are embarrassingly catchy. Catchy to a fault, almost – so good that it’s impossible to take them seriously. They’re pure pop boiled down to the molecular level: short, funny parodies of real music.

Here’s the thing: They Might Be Giants is a fun band. Seriously fun. Foot-stomping, geek-inducing, science-based dorky fun. No, it’s not cool to like them. But it wasn’t cool to like chemistry either, and those people are making a good living being eggheads.

If only listening to They Might Be Giants was equitable to learning chemistry on a professional level.

To which I say, “Minimum Wage!”

“Yah!”

Tags: Music, The Top... |

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The differentiation of fans

May 16, 2008


REMSince it’s release, I’ve been getting a lot of play out of the newest REM album, Accelerate. It’s good. Not Automatic for the People or Life’s Rich Pageant good, but good all the same – a return to when REM was making their style of music, when Out of Time and Automatic for the People had propelled them into the rock stratosphere.

Though I am one of the few who enjoyed Monster, I understand how many didn’t care for that album. For those people, Accelerate may be a godsend – it seems to be the album that was meant to come between Automatic for the People and New Adventures in Hi-Fi. This is what Monster could have been. What it should have been.

Listening to the album, and in turn filtering throughout the entire REM canon, I’ve been thinking about the differentiation of fans, and how the longer a band has been around, the more diverse their fans become.

In the early days of a band, most fans are similar. They like a band because they like the first album, or the first single, or whatever. There’s less to choose from, so every fan is essentially a carbon copy of the next. They’ve all been brought together by one set of songs, creating a community of support for the band that’s near fanatic.

Take that band and look 20 years into the future. The fans aren’t carbon copies anymore. Some have left. Others have grown. The bandwagon has taken on more and more fans until the originals are shoved to the back. Tastes diverge and branch out again, until one fan is hardly recognizable from next.

There are currently three generations of REM fans. The first generation is filled with lifelong fans – those that caught on with REM when they were still a smaller, more independent band – the IRS years through the initial major label signing; Murmur through Document.

The second generation – my generation – caught on somewhere between Green and Automatic for the People. We’re the generation that grabbed a hold of them as radio classics and hung on for dear life. We’ve held on because we still hold great memories from those songs and from the band at its peak.

The new generation probably views REM with a longing nostalgia. I doubt many fans are created through the albums alone, instead relying on an older sibling or coworker who loved the band in the 80s and 90s, or though rock radio (or classic rock radio).

Even with fans grouped together like this, there’s a vast differentiation. If you ask 100 REM fans what their ten favorite REM songs are, you’ll get 100 completely different answers, with the total number songs reaching the hundreds.

It shows the power of a non-tangible creative outlet. There are no right or wrong choices – it’s all dependent upon tastes. Though fans are often lumped in together, the longer a band has been together, the more every fan is different. Like a musical fingerprint, every fan is unique.

What it comes down to is that the larger you get, the more wide sweeping your fan base becomes.

And the harder it becomes to satisfy everyone.

Someday I’ll talk about the REM mixtape that set me up as a fan – and why my favorites are so heavy with IRS year classics even though I’m more of a second generation, Automatic for the People guy.

Until then, here are my choices for the 15 best REM songs. How different are they from yours?

“Begin the Begin” – Life’s Rich Pageant
“Belong” – Out of Time
“(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville” – Reckoning
“E-Bow the Letter” – New Adventures in Hi-Fi
“Electrolite” – New Adventures in Hi-Fi
“Fall on Me” – Life’s Rich Pageant
“Find the River” – Automatic for the People
“Finest Worksong” – Document
“Man on the Moon” – Automatic for the People
“Perfect Circle” – Murmur
“Swan Swan H” – Life’s Rich Pageant
“Try Not to Breathe” – Automatic for the People
“Walk Unafraid” – Up
“What’s the Frequency, Kenneth” – Monster
“World Leader Pretend” – Green

Tags: Music, The Top... |

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Crossword art

May 16, 2008


I just spent more time than necessary checking out NY Times Crossword Drawings – sketches by Emily Jo Cureton based on key words from the day’s New York Times Crossword Puzzle.

Crossword Art

Tags: Random Links |

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Paper. Sticks. Logs.

May 14, 2008


The order is always the same.

Paper. Sticks. Logs.

I scrounge around for newspaper. I find the same box I’ve always found – one that we created when we first moved in, filled with newspapers dating back to June 2003. Each fire brings back the memories of that year, five years ago, when Kerrie and I anxiously awaited our wedding, just months after taking up residence again in our hometown of Sioux Falls.

The newspaper is twisted up like corn chips, creating a nest of instantly flammable organic matter.

The sticks come from everywhere. Sometimes we bring them back from camping trips. Sometimes they’re left in our yard after a prolonged wind storm. They’re made of lilac, birch, oak. They’re dried and thin enough to sustain a fire for several minutes – long enough for the heat to approach the best burning temperature.

The sticks are layered on top of the newspaper twists. They form a bed – a mattress for the logs to sleep upon.

The logs are mostly lilac, though many are left over from the assorted state parks we’ve visited over the years. We always buy our own wood at the park, knowing full well that what’s left over will help fuel a fire at home. It’s what we’d use if we had to create heat from scratch. It’s the earth providing warmth, secondhand, through ingenuity and modern materials.

The logs are set on top. The fire reaches them after a few seconds, licks at the bark and creates a hallow tube for which heat to burst forth.

We look around. We breathe in the smells. We wave at the people walking by. We sip a beer, sit back and enjoy the first fire of the newly warmed year.

Paper. Sticks. Logs.

Okay, summer. We’re ready for you.

Tags: Outdoors |

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16-Page Read: Green Eggs and Ham

May 13, 2008


Green Eggs and HamGreen Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss

It’s come to my attention that Sierra no longer wants to read books.

I should take that back. She’s never really wanted to read books. She’s instead sat idly by while I showed her pictures and read through the words, flipping pages for her and explaining the finer points of Where the Wild Things Are far before she could even comprehend what a book was in the first place.

As she’s grown older, she’s taken a liking to the book themselves – not the pages or the words or the pictures, but the solid item of matter that a book is. It’s a piece to chew on, a physical creation to pick up and hold and turn around and – especially – drop on the floor.

Sierra read books with me because she was a captive audience. The books were more for my enjoyment, serving more as a promise of things to come than a cognitive memory.

Now, she’s active. Sitting in Dad’s lap is fun for about two minutes. She likes her books to be fuzzy, soft, chewable and, most of all, quickly read.

This leaves us small chunky books, books with flaps and other movable parts, plush books that double as teething rings and books that simulate animal fur. More Sandra Boynton, less Mo Willems.

I’ve come to accept this. I still try, and she’s becoming more and more tolerant. She enjoys helping me turn the page, and if she’s in a good mood we can often read the book a second time (but never a third – don’t even dare). Of course, there are still some books that are better left for the future.

Green Eggs and Ham, for instance.

Listen, I love Dr. Seuss to death. But his books aren’t exactly the most colorful batch on the bookshelf. They’re often tri-colored with awkward looking characters and even more awkward situations. They’re weird, to say the least, in a way that a two or three-year-old would enjoy, but a nine-month old would ditch in favor of something that squeaks. They don’t translate well to the pre-year crowd, is all I’m saying.

But hey – that’s okay. When I attempt to read it to Sierra (never making it past the page introducing the box and the fox) I really read it for myself, to relive my own childhood, to revel in the words and the rhymes, the lines that I remember from longer ago than any other book I can think of. It was my first love – one that led me to purchase the cartoon retelling of Green Eggs and Ham on VHS from Best Buy knowing full well I’d never watch it and one that led me to choose it as the perfect children’s book to read during Speech class in high school.

And here’s the funny thing: it’s taken me this long to realize that Dr. Seuss’s most famous book is actually an ode to trying new things.

Yeah. I know. Pretty obvious. But I’ve always seen this book from the anti-egg/ham character’s point of view. No, I don’t want those damned sickly green-colored foodstuffs – I want a normal plate of ham and eggs and I would rather they’ve not been in anyone else’s house or next to a filthy fox. But that’s not it at all. What we’re looking at is a classic tale of “just one bite, I guarantee you’ll like it.”

It reminds me of this scene in a Calvin and Hobbes comic, where Calvin will absolutely not eat any tortellini; he absolutely hates it and refuses to even touch it if his mother cooks it. The next image, after a pregnant pause, is Calvin looking up the word tortellini in the dictionary, proving his fear of the unknown – an aversion to anything new, regardless of whether or not he knows what it is.

The moral in Green Eggs and Ham is simple. Try things once. You never know if you’ll like it if you don’t try it. And if it just so happens you absolutely hate it, then at least you’ll know firsthand.

How about that? It’s only taken me 25 years. But I’ve finally found a moral in a Dr. Seuss book.

Sierra would be so proud of her dad. That is, if she’d stop chewing on the corner of the book and listen to me.

Tags: 16-Page Read, Books, Sierra |

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