Ormewood Park

2003-12-12T16:42:00.000-05:00

Silent coifs
It’s one of those trivial but nagging questions: Do I try to make small talk with the person cutting my hair?

It’s an undeniably weird situation – a total stranger hovering within inches of my head, wielding instruments that could easily inflict a lot of pain if the hair cutter is incompetent or simply a masochist. This guy was neither, thankfully.

Nevertheless, I chose not to struggle for small talk. I didn’t know the guy. We exchanged no words from the time I instructed him not to cut off too much hair until I said thanks and gave him a tip. For his part, he emitted an occasional rumbling noise and smelled faintly of cigarette smoke.

Beyond that, there was no problem.

I sat silently. He cut silently. Two other people were getting haircuts too. To my left, one customer made brief chit-chat with his cutter about returning from snowy North Carolina. Then they clammed up. Behind me, the skilled Rose – an efficient Asian woman who has cut my hair perfectly a few times but had a waiting list today – also worked in silence.

I was left to listen to ‘70s R&B and disco and the snip, snip of busy scissors, and to stare at the blur in the mirror that was me as I got my first haircut since August. (I can’t see much without my glasses.) I could, however, smell the other cutter’s lunch in the back. It smelled tasty. Thai, I believe. It compelled me to zip over to My Thai just down Clairmont afterward for my own lunch.

Walking the walk
On a topic that has little to do with personal grooming, I noticed a new East Atlanta Village character a few days ago, new to me anyway. I’ll call her Walker Lady or, if you prefer, Lady Walker. On Tuesday, I saw an older – probably in her 60s or 70s – black woman striding along the Glenwood sidewalk, right in front of Good News Café. She had a walker. But she wasn’t using it in the conventional way. She was carrying it over her head.

I saw her again yesterday walking along Moreland Avenue near McDonald’s. This time, she was holding the walker out in front of her in the standard way. But again, she wasn’t using it; she was holding it a few inches off the ground.

This is doubly funny, if you think it’s funny at all, because of a fictitious character my friend Chris and I created. This character is based on a real person who is a friend of a friend’s parents. But the imaginary person is far crazier than the real person, whom I’ve only seen once and who said exactly nine words to me. Anyway, one of the made-up person’s latest stunts to try to make friends is to hang around East Atlanta in a wheelchair she doesn’t need. In our imaginations, she has one of those bright orange bicycle flags on her wheelchair and calls herself The Happy-Go-Lucky Handicapped Lady from East Atlanta.

Now there really is a lady who wanders EAV with an ambulatory aid she doesn’t need.

2003-10-22T10:05:00.000-04:00

What a treat! We never get to see Robin Williams on TV

As anyone reading this knows, I love baseball.

But the way Fox televises the World Series drives me nuts. First, the increasingly annoying Joe Buck, whom I have always liked, tells us that if the fans in some section get a home run ball, everyone in America – every single person, I guess – can get a free taco and Pepsi at Taco Bell. That ain’t Joe’s fault; he’s just following orders from Rupert Murdoch.

Then we get Joe asking the American Idol judge and producer Simon Cowell, a British guy for crying out loud, who he thinks was the hardest thrower among Nolan Ryan, Randy Johnson, Billy Wagner and Roger Clemens. This a couple days after we got to watch Joe chat inanely on a cell phone with Robin Williams during a game at Yankee Stadium. Billy Cyrstal, of all people, finally said he was trying to watch the game and asked his buddy Robin to get off the phone. That's the first good thing Crystal's done in a long time.

Then later last night, we get David Cassidy coming out to sing God Bless America during the 7th inning stretch. (Like we need to hear that every night anyway.) David Cassidy!? The PA announcer at Pro Player Stadium in Miami tells the crowd that Cassidy has recently moved to south Florida and is also about to be in Malcolm in the Middle – on Fox. Come to think of it, Fox had Bernie Mac sing Take Me out to the Ballgame during a playoff game at Wrigley Field.

It continues the trend of TV networks and sports leagues trying to woo people who really don’t care about the game at the risk of offending actual fans. Consider this fan offended. Now I’m sure Fox will change its crass promotional DNA.

2003-10-12T21:09:00.000-04:00

One probably-not-final thought on the ’03 Braves

You want to talk about curses?

The Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs are famously cursed. Being from famous old, and being famous old baseball franchises, these curses are baseball lore, firmly entrenched in the canon. And it helps that sports fans around the country generally think it’s cool to be a Cubs or Red Sox fan, while most baseball fans who don’t root for the Braves consider being a Braves fan about as cool as being a Michael Bolton fan.

But I’ll contend that the crushing psychological burden that today’s Atlanta Braves lug into the postseason every year is more onerous than either of these ancient curses, and a lot less fun to discuss. There really isn’t anything poetic or romantic about what the Braves have been doing lately.

Sure, the Braves have only been in Atlanta since 1966. The Cubs have been without a World Series title for 58 years longer than that. The Braves’ postseason misery has only lasted since 1996.

So I’ll give you the longevity part of this. But that’s the point. The Braves’ curse, or burden, or whatever you want to call it, is new. It’s real. It’s here and now.

Chances are, current Boston players like Kevin Millar and Manny Ramirez don’t know that much about Babe Ruth being sold by the Red Sox to the Yankees in 1920, and the Yankees going on to win 26 World Series and the Red Sox going on to win, uh, none.

Sure, they probably know the broad outlines. But how could it possibly affect their play? Ruth was dead long before any of these Red Sox were born.

As for the Cubs, most of their players haven’t been there for more than a couple seasons of those 95 since the team last won a World Series. Hell, three of their starting eight regulars in the first two games of the NLCS, 37.5 percent of them, weren’t even with the team when this season started.

Compare that to the Braves.

We’re not talking about musty history. I contend that the Braves’ recent postseason malaise, which began with the tragic Game 4 of the 1996 World Series, is rooted in a psychological burden that truly haunts most every Brave in October. They aren’t old stories that 70-year-old men in the bleachers know but no one in the dugout does. Most of the Braves players have lived it.

The Braves have played one good postseason since 1996 – winning the National League pennant in 1999. They were swept by the Yankees in the ’99 Series, but the Yankees were a far superior team that would’ve steamrolled anyone.

Now to the gloom. Start with the ill fated ’96 Game 4 against the same bastards in pinstripes. Over whose head did that evil Jim Leyritz hit that home run? Current Braves center fielder Andruw Jones. Who pitched the game after that one and lost 1-0? Current Brave John Smoltz.

What third baseman booted a grounder in the first inning of the first game of the ’97 LCS against the Marlins that led to a batch of runs? Current Braves left fielder Larry Jones. Who made errors and pitched badly to blow a fat lead against St. Louis in Game 1 of the 2000 Division Series? Rafael Furcal, Andruw Jones and Greg Maddux, to name three. All are, of course, on the team now.

Stories about goats and getting rid of probably the greatest player ever are fun. Waiting for the next Chipper strikeout or error or Sheffield double play with the bases loaded is not.

2003-10-09T19:48:00.000-04:00

Northern Michigan is a cool place, especially in the winter

When I tell people I recently returned from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, they generally look at me quizzically and say something like, “Why’d you go there?”

If you’re after glitzy night life, crowds or fine restaurants, then avoid it.

But if you want to see the biggest sand dunes outside the Sahara, acre after acre of spruce and cedar and birch trees, a bunch of century-old light houses, 20 miles of stunning sandstone cliffs along the biggest lake in the world, snow mobile crossing signs, rolling vineyards that disappear into achingly blue water, 50-foot deep crystal clear springs with two-foot trout swimming around, miles of hardwood forested lake shore with nary a high-rise condo in sight, bald eagles, wild turkeys, deer, waterfalls, a museum where you learn that more than 6,000 ships have sunk in the Great Lakes, most by running into other ships, a Canadian strip joint where people pound on the stage with their palms like they slap the Plexiglas at a hockey game, and little towns with lots of dark little bars selling cheap beer, then it’s under $200 to fly round trip from Atlanta to Traverse City.

On the trip my bud Slick Rick (not the famous one) and I took, we flew into Detroit, then boarded a smaller jet for Cherry Capital Airport in Traverse City. Traverse City is in the northwest part of the Lower Peninsula, on Lake Michigan. They grow a lot of cherries around there. College football fans might remember the old Cherry Bowl that was played in Detroit, or Dee-troit as people up there tend to say.

Anyway, the Northwest terminal in Detroit is probably the coolest airport I’ve ever been in. It has a mag lev train that whispers through the terminal. And to get to the concourse where the smaller regional jets dock, you walk through a tunnel with surreal blue and green colors alternating on the walls so it gives the feel of being underwater. The moving sidewalk also includes a handy guide: walk, it says on the left, stand, it says on the right.

I’ve decided that rather than try to lay out a thorough travelogue right here, right now, I’ll just pop in bits about the trip over the next days and weeks as they occur to me.

Bit No. 1. Our last night there, we stayed in a town called Petoskey. It might not sound lyrical, but it’s a beautiful little berg on northern Lake Michigan, with what is billed as the biggest collection of historic homes anywhere in the country – 430 Victorians. The first ones were built as a summer-only religious retreat by the Methodists in the 1870s.

Some are grand mansions, some are a bit too elaborate. But a lot of them are tasteful little cottages. The downtown is full of old brick Victorian storefronts and has a “gaslight district.” It looks like a place with money, and it is. Apparently, a lot of Fords and Gambles, as in Proctor &, have places around there. It’s one of those places you see and figure there’s got to be something going on that you don’t know about.

Maybe not. It’s just that to spend much time around there in the summer, the expensive season, you need to have some cash.

A sad tale from the animal kingdom about Petoskey’s history: In the 1870s passenger pigeons used to migrate to Little Traverse Bay, at Petoskey, by the billions with a “B.” Individual flocks stretched for miles. “Alas,” says my trusty Moon Handbooks travel book, “the nesting habits and docile nature of the pigeons made them easy to hunt by simply clubbing them to death in their nests. Entrepreneur did so with glee, since their meat was considered a delicacy.”

The book says that whole steamships would be loaded with pigeons for delivery to restaurants in Chicago and Detroit. Not surprisingly, the passenger pigeon was extinct by 1914.

Fast forward to 2003, September. There are still no passenger pigeons, at least that I saw. Nevertheless, on the last night of our trip, en route from the UP back to Traverse City, we crashed in Petoskey. We went to a place called the City Park Grill, a nice restaurant with good food, good service and reasonable prices. The place had a lot of old woodwork and a clubby atmosphere. Sort of like a D.C. steakhouse.

A jam band called Bump played after the dinner crowd cleared out. Eventually, Rick and I fell into conversation with three guys from Dee-troit. The leader, Jack, was wearing one of those nylon wind shirts with a golf club logo on the breast. They were up there for a few days of golf. There are a lot of nice courses in the area.

Jack and one of the others, an unassuming gaunt guy with glasses named Dennis who kept buying us beers and is apparently the vending machine king of Detroit and whose ex-wife lives in Marietta, are marketing an energy drink called Sumpussie.

No joke. Being a big fish in vending, Dennis knows all the bar owners and strip club guys in Detroit, and has connections in the strip club game in Atlanta. They said Sumpussie is sold in some of the strip joints here. I haven’t had a chance to check since the trip. But someone told me they had actually heard of it. Jack and Dennis said it blows Red Bull away.

Jack, a fireplug with graying receding hair and big bulbous features, was hitting on every chick in sight. He was actually a funny guy, gregarious as all hell and a straight shooter. He smoked cigars, as you might expect. His ex-wife lives in metro Atlanta too, he said, and he has a son who runs a garage in Cobb County that works on Ferraris and other fancy sports cars.

Jack is a Vietnam vet who apparently was a tough cookie. His two cohorts said he wasn’t afraid of anything. I believed them.

We had a good time, then got up and drove the hour to Traverse City the next day, took a last trip out on the picturesque peninsula that bisects Grand Traverse Bay, then went to Cherry Capital airport and got on the plane with a half dozen other people and winged to Detroit.

Strangely enough, as we were sitting in an empty bar at the Traverse City airport before the flight, watching a little of the Georgia-LSU football game, a bunch of guys from Georgia, big Georgia fans, came in. After hearing a bunch of Canadian-sounding people – say ya to da UP, eh -- for eight days, their accents sounded almost strange. (For the record, I’m no Georgia fan. I went to Auburn University and root for the AU Tigers.)

He probably never served in the armed forces anyway

I see where Ole Miss is looking for a new mascot to replace Colonel Rebel, the old southern colonel who cavorts along the sidelines. How about something truly representative? Ole Miss’ new mascot could be an SAE named Trent in an oxford and khakis whose dad is a lawyer in Memphis or Jackson and who will probably also be a lawyer in Memphis or Jackson.

2003-10-07T19:22:00.000-04:00

Reanimated

I haven’t added to my blog in six weeks for the same reason I quit trying to play guitar when I was 17.

I didn’t get good at the guitar in a month. Likewise, after a couple months, no one outside a few friends and friends of friends noticed my blog. I didn’t get emails from strangers praising my wit and insight. And watching Simpsons and King of the Hill reruns and Braves games is so much easier.

So what’s the point?

Well, one point is that Cap’n Ken has goaded me back to the keyboard. He’s declared my blog dead on his lengthy list of links and generally chastised me for my neglect. (By the way, Ken, nice bit about your newly divorced coworker. Reminds me that I’ve watched Office Space a couple times lately. Easily the best movie ever about modern cubicle culture.)

Come to think of it, Ken’s link list is another reason I’ve become a lax blogger. I see other blogs with all these fancy links and graphics and photos, and I feel like I’m driving a dented, duct taped, 11-year-old Civic in a city full of Lexuses (Lexi?), Beamers and Benzes, which I actually am.

Anyway, as I’ve been on hiatus, there are a number of things I could write about. But I’ll start with an October perennial.

Hardball and strippers

As anyone reading this knows – since, again, only my friends read this – I’m heavily emotionally invested in the Atlanta Braves. I’ve been a fan since I could reach the radio dial, and baseball’s always been my favorite sport. Truth to tell, one of the reasons I’ve never thought about leaving Atlanta since moving here in 1986 is because if I did, I couldn’t go to Braves games.

So October is generally a month of dread for me. Ides of March, my ass.

This year was, of course, no exception as the home team again, for the 11th time in 12 seasons, played wonderfully for six months only to go comatose in the postseason. Actually, unlike most people who follow baseball less closely than I, I don’t consider getting to the World Series and losing a failure. The Braves have actually gone comatose only about six times in the past 12 postseasons, but four in a row now.

As anyone who’s heard of Babe Ruth knows, the Braves have taken postseason futility to rarified heights. It’s all convinced me that rooting for a team that rarely even comes close to the big prize, that is out of it by July, is a lot easier than rooting for one that comes close only to crumble year after year after year after year after year.

Being a Braves fan in October is like thinking that a hot stripper really likes you and might go make out or even have sex with you. Yeah, it could happen. And Al Sharpton could get elected president.

About the only thing worse than watching the Braves lose again in October is reading and hearing all the absurdity from local commentators and sports radio callers after they do lose. I heard one caller say the Braves need to wear rally caps – which simply means turning a ball cap inside out and putting it on your head -- and another ask why when facing a tough pitcher, Bobby Cox, the manager, doesn't sit the starters until the sixth inning, then bring them in when the pitcher tires a little.

Then, of course, there’s the tired saw about how the Braves lack “heart” and “passion.” The AJC columnist Terrence Moore trots that one out at least a half dozen times a year. His columns have become more tiresome than the Braves’ playoff defeats. In the fall, the Braves’ losses become the fuse for an idiocy bomb. They lose a series, and -- boom! -- stupid baseball opinions splatter everything in sight.

Me, I don’t really know what to say about the Braves at this point. I’m not sure there is an explanation for why they seem to sink to the occasion most every October. I’m beginning to think they should jettison some big contracts, go with a bunch of hungry young players, miss the playoffs for a couple years, then come back having shed the albatross of postseasons past.

In any case, I’ll be back next year because I’m a fan, and that’s what fans do. A lot of people probably won’t be, and that’s OK. Shorter beer lines are no bad thing.

For God’s sake, think of something original to say

Everyone has a few movie lines they like to repeat now and then. I can recite virtually the entire Repo Man script. The thing is, I’m not running for governor of the biggest state in the damn Union.

Admittedly, I haven’t followed the California recall race all that closely, and I don’t really care who wins. But the only times I ever see, hear or read anything from Arnold Schwarzenneger, it’s some lame line from one of his movies.

“It’s time to terminate Gray Davis.” Good Lord. Grabbing a female key grip’s ass is one thing. But please, please say something. By pointing this out, I suppose I’m being about as original as he is.

Way up north

I took a really fun trip to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in September. It’s beautiful up there. And the population is small enough, and there’s so little industry, that being a waiter or waitress is considered a pretty good job. So unlike around here, most of the waitrons aren’t sullen indie rockers who think they deserve a 20 percent tip for showing up.

More on the UP trip later.

2003-08-17T02:26:00.000-04:00

Blue crush; Dennis Miller loves Johnny Ashcroft

Sometimes I think TV sucks. Then other times, I remember why I pay more than $1 a day for basic cable.

Within, I don’t know, a half hour of channel surfing tonight I saw:

• George Costanza in a business suit punch Julia Roberts in the face, wrestle her down, jump on top of her, and Richard Gere pull him off. How is someone supposed to watch that and take the movie, whatever it’s called, seriously?
• Steve McQueen and Ann-Margret at a really graphic cockfight in Cincinnati Kid. When that movie was made, the mid ‘60s, you could probably film a real cock fight and put it in a movie. That’s sure what it looked like.
• That cloying blonde on the TV Guide channel doing an interview I actually enjoyed, because it was with Mo Rocca, formerly the funniest of the fake Daily Show reporters, who is now doing a TV show about celebrity crime that looks like it’ll be hilarious. It’s called The Smoking Gun, and it’ll be on Court TV.
• Promos for a new South Park DVD, which, along with a Kasey Chambers CD, I tried unsuccessfully to find at Border’s earlier this evening.
• The Denis Leary roast on Comedy Central, which was mostly hysterical, though some of the people went a little too far out of their way to say “fuck.”
• And parts of two painful, painful Saturday Night Live skits, one about Liza Manelli – that’s inventive – and one about Phil Donahue with Al Sharpton, Michael Moore and Barbra Streisand. Clever as a Jay Leno monologue.

God Leno sucks. I used to like him in the ‘80s when he made regular appearances on Letterman, when Dave was funnier. I caught a Leno monologue recently, just to get current on how spectacularly bland he is. I was stunned at how utterly unoriginal it was. He made a Doogie Hauser reference and then cracked wise about the differences between men and women. And people get pissed because athletes and CEOs make a lot of money? Jay Leno’s comedy these days is frozen fish sticks compared to fresh trout from people and shows like Jon Stewart, Conan and The Simpsons and King of the Hill and South Park and Reno 911. Of course, Leno trounces all those in the ratings.

It’s nice to see the Republicans and Democrats blaming each other for the blackout. If you believe Sean Hannity, one of Bush’s wind-up talk-radio robots, the blackout happened because Democrats don’t want to drill oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. And if you listen to Howard Dean, he single-handedly saved New England from darkness as governor of Vermont, whose population is about equal to Macon’s. He and the other Democratic presidential wannabes are of course heaping all the blame on Bush. It’s all because he’s shortsighted and is giving tax cuts to rich people.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Bush’s energy “policy” is a joke. Never mind trying to encourage people in the US to maybe, just maybe, use a little less than a billion gallons of gas a day. Maybe try not to give people tax breaks for driving army trucks that get about a quarter mile per gallon. Nah. He’s too busy cooking up healthy forest initiatives that give loggers rights to cut down more and more trees in National Parks, and other “shameless giveaways to cronies in energy, mining and logging,” as The Economist, a staunchly pro-market magazine that endorsed Bush in 2000, says.

Anyway, to hear Dean and Kerrey and those guys, you’d think the Democrats had been raising hell for years about modernizing the power grid. Because of a freak accident, all of a sudden it’s Bush’s fault. Come on. I guess none of whatever it is they think should have been done could have been done in Clinton’s eight years in office. It’s a little like the city of Atlanta’s crumbling sewer system that’s been ignored for the past 20 years. It’s the fault of all those guys and the public because most of us are way too shortsighted to care about something as dull as the electrical power grid until we get stuck in a subway or don’t have air conditioning.

When did Karl Rove start signing Denny Miller’s paychecks? I heard Dennis Miller briefly on the radio with the titanically obnoxious Hannity the other day. Miller called him Seany, and told Seany that he was doing his own show that night about why he loves “Johnny” Ashcroft. In his one very bad season on Monday Night Football, it seems Dennis picked up the old Howard Cosell habit of using nicknames people don’t have. Howard called Pete Rose “Petey” and the former Falcon William Andrews “Billy.” No one else did.

2003-08-05T12:18:00.000-04:00

Rape and ratings

Most people I know or wrote about came out of the dot-com bust unemployed. Mark Cuban came out of it a billionaire. So if he says that Kobe Bryant’s adultery and possible rape are, from a cold business perspective, good for the NBA, I’ll believe him. (He’s interested because he owns the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks.)

Accepting Cuban’s view, the Bryant mess extends two established themes in big-money sports entertainment. One is the pro sports leagues’ obsession with attracting people who don’t much care for the sport at the risk of alienating real fans. Is it possible any more to have a Super Bowl or baseball All-Star game or NBA finals game without some absurd 15-minute “concert” or Up With People show or some jack ass celebrity taking batting practice with big leaguers?

Britney Spears and Aerosmith are apparently playing before the first NFL game this year. I suppose that’ll make 12-year-old girls and whoever still likes Aerosmith want to hear John Madden explain the nickel defense. The Bryant case is another, though unplanned, attraction for people who otherwise wouldn’t know the NBA from the NRA. Celebrity train wrecks are a big draw, especially while the TV networks are between wars and terrorist attacks.

The other theme the Bryant case fits with is sports crime.

I’ve never seen any stats, but it’s a safe bet that professional athletes have a lot more scrapes with John Law per capita than Joe Six Pack or even Joe 24 Pack. I’d guess that at least 20 percent of NFL linemen have knocked a woman around, or at least been suspected of doing it. Off the top of my head, I can think of three football players who in the past few years have been at least suspected of involvement in a murder – OJ, Ray Lewis and Ray Carruth. In the time it’s taken me to type these paragraphs, probably four basketball players have been busted for weed. And so on.

Now the Bryant case is intertwining these two themes. Maybe that’ll be a trend too. On televised games, they can start showing players’ arrest records in the graphics along with yards rushing or field goal percentage or batting average. Football teams could give players stickers for their helmets when they get busted, like they give them stickers for good plays. They could be little judge’s gavels. They could put patches on uniforms advertising their lawyers, like Nascar drivers are covered in ads.

They’re liable to try anything if it’ll make money.

2003-08-04T21:36:00.000-04:00

Where do people like this come from?

Last night, my buddy Rick and I were having a couple beverages at a neighborhood tavern, The EARL, or East Atlanta Restaurant and Lounge. We'd been there for an hour or so when two attractive young women -- a good decade or so younger than my 39-year-old ass I suspect -- wandered in and sat next to us at the bar.

I took them for the type women I never talk to in bars: younger than me, good looking and carrying themselves in a way that suggested they were probably moronic and shallow. Lo and behold, the slender one with prominent high cheek bones and wearing a tank top with the number "55" on it starts chirping away to me. She chriped and chirped for 15 minutes about what seemed by far her favorite topic -- herself.

She's had fame, she tells me, and is happy without it. She used to be a model, she says. She was in college "on an academic scholarship," she assures me, when someone offered her the chance to travel the world as a model. She took it. According to her, this life involved lots of time in Europe and occasionally hanging out with some rock star whose name escapes me just now.

But she tired of all that and happened into a job at a hair salon in Virginia-Highland, a fashionable and now thoroughly yuppified Atlanta neighborhood. This job, she said, saved her life. I'm not sure how. To work there you have to be really really good. But in her case, she walked in off the street with no experience and wowed everyone with an apparently natural, untapped gift for cutting hair. Today, she informs me, she teaches everyone there her sublime technique. (I use the word sublime. She didn't.) She told me she'd shave my head because it would make me look younger.

She told me her favorite band is Tool. And her boyfriend is in a band that records on Capricorn Records. And she herself is, in addition to a hair dresser, a poet and songwriter. Without prompting, she sung a song she wrote that had to do with waking up and slamming a door and, I believe, ended with "I'm not your whore." It was not good.

At a certain point, I commented on her overt self confidence. Yes, she said, she's quite self assured, absolutely secure. I remarked that in a lot of cases, people who are truly comfortable with themselves don't brag endlessly to strangers. Well, I'm just really self confident, she replied, then referring to her friend, said, "Doesn't she look like Drew Barrymore?" I told her I wasn't sure what Drew Barrymore looks like. She and Drew left shortly thereafter.

2003-08-01T01:48:00.000-04:00

2003-08-01T01:43:00.000-04:00

The Dead play a couple miles from my house and about 50 feet from me

They’re still selling food and beads in the parking lot. A long-haired guy was yelling “Who needs a ride to Chicago,” site of the next show, as the crowds shuffled past after the show.

Fat gray-haired guys in tie-dyed shirts, 30-something guys in golf caps and gorgeous young women in peasant dresses bob and twirl, even during monotonous stretches of bleating guitars and meandering drum solos. Big Technicolor Rorschach patterns flash behind the band. I only spotted a few of the goofy T-shirts that say things like, “Silly rabbit, trips are for kids.”

The Dead were in town, minus, of course, the actually dead Jerry Garcia. People around my friend George and I looked rapturous through most of the two-set show. (We missed the first set, as George, a sports writer, was coming down from covering the Falcons practice in Greenville, S.C.) He called me earlier in the afternoon to ask if I wanted to see the show. Bob Dylan opened and did three songs with the Dead during the first set.

I like the Grateful Dead’s music and their friendly, welcoming persona. Garcia seemed like a sweet old psychedelic teddy bear. Yet I’ve never been a huge fan, certainly not a Deadhead. I had seen them a couple times before, at the Omni in Atlanta in the middle to late 1980s. I had not, however, seen them from within about 50 feet at center stage, as I did tonight.

It was a good show. But as much as jamming is the Dead’s signature, it can get aimless. They basically played nonstop, literally, for about two hours, sliding from one tune to another. No song lasts less than 15 minutes.

About halfway through the set the whole band, except the drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, left the stage. Hart and Kreutzmann took turns soloing. Then they both stepped to the back of the stage and wailed on these huge upright drums. There were a lot of skins on that stage, a mountain of drums and cymbals that would fill up my house.

After they finish, Hart puts on a doctor’s smock and a surgical mask and assaults some sort of stringed instrument with what looks like a small pipe. The instrument looks like a 20-foot-long lap guitar but with maybe only two or three heavy strings. Mickey uses the pipe to alternately saw them, beat them and scrape them, producing shrill metallic screams and heavy bass thumps. A girl behind me says, “It looks like he’s, like, sawing, like, wood.” Another guy says it looks like he’s conducting an autopsy.

It was weird and kinda funny. My friend George, who’s seen many many Dead shows and is a far bigger fan than I, says Hart probably discovered the stringed instrument in a jungle somewhere in India. He’s an archivist and seeks out all sorts of instruments, George says.

I imagine a lot of people in the crowd shared old Dead show stories. George mentioned an early 1980s trip from Atlanta to California by car to see a bunch of shows. One guy on the trip had to fly home from New Orleans and check into a hospital. George mentioned another show at the old New England Patriots stadium in Foxboro, Mass. He was talking about how Garcia would play and sing but barely move. At that Foxboro show, George said Jerry simply raised an arm and a crowd of 60,000 people went nuts.

At the show at Lakewood on Thursday night, Joan Osborne sang, though Bob Weir sang more. And Sammy Hagar, of all people, came out and did a couple songs with them during the encore. He seemed really happy to be there. I guess he’s really happy to be playing anywhere these days. George said he read that after Hagar came on at some other show, Weir commented as how the whole crowd was ready to hate him but he did a great job. Indeed, as we walked out, some kid was screaming, “Sammy Hagar sucks.” Everyone else seemed happy.

2003-07-30T10:03:00.000-04:00

Braves fan’s burden

Being a Braves fan isn’t like being a Red Sox fan or a Cubs fan.

For one, the citizens of baseballdom don’t think the Braves are lovable. They don’t think Braves fans are lovable. They don’t think we’re “long suffering” or true blue. We don’t have a huggable old ball park, and the Braves came to Atlanta just in 1966. So people around my age, 39, are the first generation to actually grow up with the Atlanta Braves, to have the chance to be honest-to-goodness lifelong fans.

David Halberstam quotes a longtime Red Sox fan on his plight: “They killed my father, and now they’re coming after me.” No Atlanta Braves fan could honestly say that, unless their father died really young. But that’s not our fault. It inevitably means there are fewer of us, yes. But it doesn’t make us any less devoted. I might not have as many sad-sack stories as a fan of the Red Sox or Cubs, but that’s only because the Atlanta Braves have had just 37 years to author them, while the Sox and Cubs have had nearly a century.

Nevertheless, even from the Braves’ terrific and unprecedented 12-year stretch, we true rooters have a thick catalog of despair. Most of it has come in the postseason – begging the question, is it easier to simply get knocked out in June every year? -- a place most teams rarely reach.

Pick one: Lonnie Smith stopping between second and third in Game 7 of the ’91 Series, Jim Leyritz (that’s all I can say), Sterling Hitchcock, Ed Sprague’s Game 2 homer off Jeff Reardon in ‘92, the meltdown against the Marlins, the paralysis of Sheffield, Chipper and Glavine in the playoffs just last year.

Those dark moments painfully underline another difference between the Braves, Red Sox, and especially the Cubs and most other teams. The Braves are always good, but generally not quite good enough to win the ultimate prize.

This is a problem, locally and nationally. Lifelong Braves fans like me have to: A, stomach the Tony Kornheisers in the national media lampooning and lambasting our team as perennial chokers who, before this season, play a boring brand of baseball; and B, gird ourselves for the inevitable torture of October, even as we try to enjoy watching our guys once again run up the best regular-season record in the sport.

Has a fan base ever been allowed to enjoy a splendid string of seasons less?

Because the Braves are about to face a good Houston Astros bullpen, a local radio sports blabber is just now declaring that, over the next three days – the next three days, never mind the previous 105 games – we’ll “find out how good the Braves’ offense is.” You’d think they had been playing Westminster High School.

Even beyond the media, gradually but surely, an undercurrent of animosity seems to have built among the local citizenry toward the Braves. For one thing, the passion that burst forth for the early ’90s Braves was so intense, so unexpected, that it was bound to flame out. Simple physics.

The fresh-faced, low-paid kids of 1991 – Glavine, Smoltz, Avery, Gant, Justice, Lemke, et al – have either melted into retirement, had their skills inevitably erode or become just another greedy professional athlete in the minds of most Atlanta fans. These days, Glavine pitches for the Mets, for God’s sake – by choice -- and gets lustily booed in Atlanta. Avery, Justice and Lemke have all retired and Gant is barely hanging on as a journeyman backup outfielder. I’m not even sure he’s in the majors.

In addition, the Braves’ front office has never been particularly smooth in public relations. The most visible executives, John Schuerholz and Stan Kasten, come across as just slightly more engaging than Barry Bonds. The manager, Bobby Cox, is hugely underrated but is a grizzled old baseball lifer with little use for PR and TV interviews.

Much of the animosity, though, goes back to the postseason failures. I’ve always thought baseball, among the major spectator sports, is the most subtle and difficult to truly understand. It’s not a once-a-week extravaganza like football, the dominant sport. It’s a daily grind, filled with small things that add up to wins and losses.

You rarely if ever hear people in the game – players, managers, coaches, executives – bash the Braves. They realize how damned tough it is to win, year after year with different rosters and different styles of play. Locally, though, it often seems that people are just waiting for them to slip, to seize on any and all failings. Letter writers to the local paper delight in ridiculing Chipper Jones and Bobby Cox and Greg Maddux. Ask a White Sox fan, or a Cubs or Red Sox or Tigers or Pirates fan, if the would like to have had any of them. They’d say yes in a big hurry.

In one important sense, this year feels different. The Braves hit like demons. They lead the National League in home runs and have the fewest strikeouts. In so many playoffs past, our hitters have flailed cluelessly as mediocrities like Hitchcock baffled them with slow, bending pitches in the dirt. This year’s Braves, however, score runs like Wilt Chamberlain scored chicks. The Nos. 7 and 8 hitters, Javy Lopez and Vinny Castilla, have ascended from late career malaise, transforming a moribund offense last year into the league’s best in 2003.

Yet it’s always something. Right now, two days before the deadline to trade for players, the bullpen is a shambles. Besides the great closer Smoltz, no one is reliable. The second best relief pitcher is Darren Holmes, a 37-year-old with a surgically repaired arm who’s been with seven other teams.

For at least the next two games, foreboding will grip the grandstand, maybe even the Braves’ dugout, when the big blue bullpen gate in right field swings open at Turner Field, unless it’s the ninth and Smoltz is emerging.

More dread is sure to come. It’s always there as October approaches, sure as I flinch when a car zooms past while I’m walking beside a road at night. What new disappointment is in store?

So be it. I’m a Braves fan. Always have been Always will be. Tony Kornheiser nor anyone else can tell me I should not enjoy my team.

Alongside the dirge of October heartbreaks there’s an even longer list of cherished memories – walking into Atlanta Stadium for the very first time as a child and seeing the green expanse and two-tiered bowl of light blue seats, Neikro’s shutout and homer to win a crucial game in the ’82 stretch drive, being at the division clincher in ’91 as the players tossed caps and gloves into the delirious crowd, seeing the Lemmer get clutch hit after clutch hit in the ’91 World Series, Otis’ catch in the 13th straight win in ’92 and the entire crowd at Manuel’s Tavern chanting “Otis, Otis” hours later at the TV replay, the 9th-inning win in Game 7 of the ‘92 NLCS, the ’95 World title, coming back from 3-1 down to beat the Cardinals in the ’96 LCS.

There are plenty more. Not even chronic October angst can take them away.

2003-07-22T01:01:00.000-04:00

Pitching coach pitching; ode to T-Buff

Has anyone else noticed that Braves pitching coach Leo Mazzone is on more local commercials these days than The Wolfman and Donna? The noted teacher of pitchers is pitching for a quick oil-change place, a mortgage lender and at least one other company whose line escapes me.

He’s got to be the most recognized and celebrated pitching coach in all baseball. I can’t imagine Mel Stottlemyre does a lot of ads in New York City or Larry Rothschild in Chicago. Leo’s commercial work is mostly just on radio. Leo comes across as an amiable character on radio. But as anyone who’s watched many Braves telecasts knows, the man who rocks in the dugout like an autistic child is no Brad Pitt, which may explain why his endorsing career has barely dented the TV medium.

Then again, Donna and The Wolfman ain’t Ben and J Lo. (Still, I think I’d rather hang out with The Wolfman and Donna.) Good looks are no job requirement, anyway. My all-time favorite local TV pitchman, T-Buff, was/is a roly-poly carnival barker in white tails and a white top hat who bowed grandly as he exhorted viewers to buy cheap furniture.

What’s become of T-Buff? I miss him. He did a lot of spots on Columbus TV and some in Atlanta. I remember a commercial, a pioneer in interactive advertising I guess, that featured a contest. Viewers could call in and vote: you love T-Buff or you hate T-Buff. I never heard the outcome. I know how I would’ve voted.

Back to Leo. I say grab all the cash you can, Leo, and never leave the Braves.

Now back to mortgage ads. Leo’s got to be better than this John Sibley character who does ads for his own mortgage firm. He’s the overbearing guy who sounds like he’d try to sell you a mortgage at your mother’s funeral. It's funny that in each new ad, he comes up with a new way to say that refinancing a mortgage with his firm should be as reflexive as breathing. “It’s the biggest no-brainer in the history of man.” Then came, “It’s the biggest no-brainer in the history of Earth.”

There’s also a bespectacled, stout blond woman who does her own mortgage ads. She’s a lot more tolerable than John, but I wouldn’t want to drink a beer with her. I guess mortgage shops have become the car lots of today.

Speaking of, let’s hope Maxy Price, the Loganville car dealer, keeps doing his own commercials – the crying towel, running from the on-charging pickup truck. Funny stuff. Beats the hell out of seeing some blue-collar hero drive over boulders with Bob Seeger playing in the background. One of the coolest truck commercials I’ve seen lately is, unfortunately, for the abominable Hummer H2. As The Who’s jaunty “Happy Jack” plays, a kid in what looks like a soap box derby car drives off into the woods.

Look, ma, no last name!

I saw Geraldo Rivera the other day talking about the Kobe Bryant case. One of the Fox News studio blabbers asked him if he thought race would mean much in Bryant’s case. The noted map maker said no, he didn’t think so, because “Kobe” is so famous he’s transcended race. He’s reached the exalted status of being known by one name, Rivera explained, “like Elvis or Lassie or Geraldo.”

The studio hosts acted as if nothing had happened. He reported, I’ve decided: Geraldo Rivera is a complete buffoon, a really rich and famous one, I suppose, but still a buffoon.

2003-07-16T23:48:00.000-04:00

World leaders descend on Sea Island. Sea Island yawns.

So the most powerful people in the world, the leaders of the world’s seven richest countries plus Russia, are coming to Sea Island, Ga.

Sea Island old timers are probably greeting the news with a yawn. Or a curse because of the inconvenience 2,000 journalists and an army of security people will cause. Hell, it’s in June of next year so most of them will be somewhere where it’s 70 degrees, anyway.

Nonetheless, I suspect they’ll do their damnedest to be unimpressed, except for some people getting all tingly about W. being in their midst. They’re used to rubbing elbows with big shots. Bush’s mom and dad honeymooned at The Cloister on Sea Island and celebrated their 50th anniversary there in 1995.

I used to visit Sea Island often with a friend whose aunt and uncle lived there but spent summers in upstate New York. The aunt’s family had amassed a fortune in some manufacturing business around Syracuse.

Their cottage, as they call houses there, was a rambling, two-story Mission/Spanish Revival of genuine stucco – not the McMansion kind of stucco. It was built, I think, in the 1920s, maybe ‘30s, one of the earlier Sea Island houses. It’s on the Atlantic, with a thick hedge between the yard and the wide sandy beach, miles of which is periodically piled with trucked-in sand to fend off erosion.

Sea Island’s the sort of place full of people like my former friend’s uncle and aunt who “summer,” or at least it was in the late 1980s and before. They don’t have to work, so they can just leave when it gets hot and the bugs come out. They go to upstate New York or the North Carolina mountains or some other place with more agreeable weather.

Sea Island is the sort of place where people with an old cottage have an oil painting of a lawn party at the cottage, complete with brush-stroked versions of their friends and relatives in seersucker and hats, their maids, the Sea Island Singers and tasteful striped awnings and maybe a favorite dog.

Sea Island was originally developed by Yankees from New York state who came south in the 1920s with industrial fortunes. They and their descendants like to do things, or at least appear to do things, modestly, the old-money way. I was always struck by the scarcity of fancy cars on Sea Island. All these seriously rich people drove Pontiacs, station wagons, Buicks, maybe the occasional Cadillac.

They made little show of their wealth. They called their houses cottages and their addresses correspond to the order in which they were built: The very first house is Cottage 1, and so on. Some of the cottages, mind you, especially the newer ones built by those infernal noveau riche Atlanta interlopers, sprawl for days amid undulating yards the size of driving ranges.

But on the whole, understatement did seem to rule. What little traffic there was moved slowly and respectfully. A lot of people rode old-fashioned bicycles with only one gear. At The Cloister resort, buildings were small; there were no TVs in the rooms. A couple evenings a week, the hotel would haul people on horse-drawn wagons out to the end of the island for a “plantation supper.” I never did that. My main actual activity there was tennis. My friend and I played tennis on the clay courts, where you had to wear a collared shirt.

The place could be stuffy as all hell. The practice of numbering the cottages functions as a handy caste system guide. I remember my friend from back then telling me about an old lady there, a relative of a woman he dated from there, who was aghast that a kid in her family was attending a state college. People were not overly friendly as a rule.

I remember that even my friend’s uncle, an antiques dealer who’d married into the wealthy old-Sea-Island family from upstate New York, was after 20-some years still not completely accepted. The snobbery could reach comical and delusional heights. Sea Island old timers called the place the “Happy Isle.” There was even a little book about its history called “This Happy Isle.” An old man, the father of my friend’s aunt used to insist, seriously, that no one ever had been drunk or unruly on Sea Island. I suppose Sea Island is still, to some degree, an outpost, a literally eroding bastion of a certain breed of American aristocracy.

Despite all that, Sea Island could be wonderfully relaxing. I loved visiting.

Massive, gnarled live oaks dripping with Spanish moss were everywhere. The expansive, tranquil marsh seemed like a moat keeping the noise and rabble at bay. It was outwardly gracious, with none of the visual cacophony of Panama City or Myrtle Beach.

In fact, on Sea Island itself, separate from St. Simons Island, the only commercial establishments were those of the Sea Island Co., and they were unobtrusive. One of the main reasons it was so pleasant there was that my friend’s aunt and uncle, when they weren’t taking us out to delicious expensive dinners, left us alone to do as we pleased. That was partly because she had dreadful arthritis at far too young an age and spent a lot of time assembling puzzles. He mostly smoked weed upstairs and puttered around with antiques.

In the glorious upstairs bedroom overlooking the Atlantic, one of the greatest bedrooms I’ve ever seen, he kept a jewelry box filled with marijuana roaches. Must’ve been 40 in there at all times. We called it the roach farm.

Save the trees
The main reason the area hadn’t been overrun by garish development is The Sea Island Co. The family-owned firm still owns most of the property around there, and has to its credit kept the place relatively unspoiled. They know it’s what brings the rich folks. They know what rich people like because, like the president who’s bringing his fellow heads of state down, they’re in the old-rich club.

A family called Jones is one of the main Sea Island Co. clans. Back when I used to go there, one of the Joneses was the head of something called, I think, the Young Millionaires Club, when being a millionaire put you in really rarefied company. It was probably Bill Jones, who’s now the chairman and president of the Sea Island Co.

In a story about the G-8 summit that’s coming next June, The Atlanta Journal Constitution quoted Jones saying, “I think this was probably the president's sentimental favorite" among four prospective summit sites. He reminded reporters that George H.W. and Bar honeymooned at The Cloister and celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary there in 1995. Aristocratic old New Englanders like the elder Bushes would’ve fit in perfectly.

The Cloister and Sea Island’s history with presidents goes back to 1928 when President Calvin Coolidge visited during Christmas and began a tradition of planting oak trees. Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter visited too, Jones said in the paper. I’m guessing Clinton’s played golf there, but he ain’t exactly Sea Island’s type.
And those who consider themselves real Sea Islanders won’t much care that Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroder are in town, either.

2003-07-14T14:25:00.000-04:00

Cover your ears; corporate-speak

Before I forget it, I actually saw this recently on a music Website. I was looking for some names of songs in the top 40 to make some dumb reference to popular music:

"Mariah Carey gave Rick (Dees) a call on Wednesday morning. She talked about her upcoming tour, her appearance on the Today show and her new Def Leppard cover song!"

Good Lord. Isn’t Def Leppard doing Def Leppard bad enough?

Since I starting writing about business in the late 1980s, I’ve been increasingly struck -- and distressed, really – to see how business jargon keeps creeping into the everyday language of too many people. I’m convinced that’s where the use of “impact” as a verb originated, as well as other annoying clichés like “at the end of the day.” The other day I heard a friend say she figured to “transition” into something after her current job, and it seems some self-important business type is always using “due diligence” to refer to someone doing their homework about something, whether it involves business or not.

Sunday, I’m watching Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld hem and haw and say “I don’t know” about 20 times to Tim Russert and George Stephanopolous as they quiz him about allegedly trumped up intelligence reports about Iraq. In describing how much money it’s costing us to keep troops in Iraq, Rumsfeld used the term “burn rate:” “The burn rate is $4 billion a month.”

That’s the term people use to explain how much money little technology companies are going through. So we, the American people we hear so much about from politicos, are investing about $150 million a day in this mission. Not even Mariah Carey makes that kind of money. I hope we get a better return than most of the venture capitalists got from their companies that had spectacular burn rates. At least, I hope the troops get to play foose ball and ping pong and have funky artwork in their tents.

The company for which I used to work burned almost $20 million in venture capital. Turns out, we had a CEO and CFO who went to strip clubs on the company tab. It also employed a lot of reporters with the talent of Gary the Retard from the Howard Stern TV show and the ego of Michael Stipe. Fortunately, I had limited contact with those people.

If it seems like I pick on Republicans a lot in this blog, keep this in mind: There are few political figures in America whom I loathe more than the Democrats’ fundraising honcho Terry McAullife, or however you spell that ridiculous blowhard’s name. I refuse to look it up.

2003-07-11T19:59:00.000-04:00

One more reason to despise Darren Bragg, and other baseball-related rantings

This guy has to be expelled from the team. From the Sportingnews.com:

Braves outfielder Darren Bragg mimicked Sosa in the first inning, sprinting out to right field and making a sharp turn near the wall to salute the fans. His act didn't go over too well as he was loudly booed by the fans in right.

Did he think that was some sort of tribute? Was he being a smart ass? One-forty hitters don’t do tributes nor are they smart asses. Darren Bragg must go. It doesn’t matter where.

Here’s an email I sent to a local sports radio station today. They were discussing a very good Sports Illustrated story about the huge decline in the number of black American players in Major League Baseball. So I hastily threw this together and, as usual, the recipient replied, congratulating me on a “fantastic rant.” But what does praise from a sports talk guy mean?

When it comes to promoting its superstars, I think baseball's problem is rooted in the animosity between the players and management. It almost seems that baseball owners don't want to promote A-Rod or Bonds or Jeter or Pujols too much because they think that if a player gets too popular, they'll just have to pay him more. (In Bonds' case, he's a colossal jackass, so the less heard from him, the better.) As far as personality, it's sorely lacking in most every pro athlete in my opinion.

Take Shaq. He is not funny. "Can you dig it?" Wow. How'd he come up with that? According to what I've read about the guy, he has the worldview of a 15-year-old. He might be funny compared to most pro athletes, but he isn't as funny as any of my friends. And all this talk of Jordan's charisma. The guy was a great player who rose to the occasion in big games. But charismatic? How exactly? Because he stuck his tongue out when he played? Because you can understand him when he talks? And Tiger Woods? He exudes all the warmth of a pissed-off cop. We think an athlete who can put two sentences together and crack the occasional one liner is a real character because most of them play their game well but have little else to offer.

I played baseball and football as a little kid but much preferred baseball. I think one of baseball's big advantages is that you don't have to be big. In football and basketball, being big or tall is immensely important. In baseball, it's not. In football, once you get to about 9th grade, you get squashed by much bigger people. In baseball, you don't. And what about soccer? If people think baseball is slow, soccer is glacial. And there are no soccer superstars in America. Yet kids are playing soccer in droves.

The national entertainment culture these days does not value substance. We know that. Britney Spears, I learned recently, has actually "written" eight books. Eight. And apparently they sell. People have the historical knowledge of a gnat. Attention spans last seconds. Baseball takes some patience and some thought to appreciate. Those are in short supply in America today.

Sorry to rant, but I get worked up about this.

2003-07-10T19:41:00.000-04:00

Dead fish; dead Lighthouse; dazed me

One of my three fish died yesterday, or at least I discovered his half-eaten little carcass yesterday being sucked into the aquarium filter. Poor thing. At least there was a little of him left – I could see his tiny, tiny bones. They were almost like hair compared to the bones of a fish you’d eat.

Anyway, I say at least there was something left because the last time one of my school of tiger barbs, which originally numbered four, bit it I didn’t find a trace of him. His mates had consumed him completely. I suppose they hadn’t quite had time this go-round. Plus, there was one fewer to devour their dead friend.

Speaking of fish and water, I returned a few days ago from a trip to my parents’ home on the Alabama Gulf Coast, aka LA, for Lower Alabama, and aka the Redneck Riviera, because it’s a beach area frequented by denizens of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia and other Southern states. I think noted redneck Ken Stabler coined that expression. At least he takes credit, though there’s probably no way to know if he really thought it up.

I had a good time down there, as I generally do, despite wading through the usual family squabbles and controversies that remind me why I live in Atlanta instead of in Baldwin County, Alabama with most of the rest of my immediate family.

Still, two unpleasant things struck me during this visit: a thick metal beam and the realization that the Alabama Gulf Coast is probably about to lose the only distinctive building left along its roughly 20-mile stretch of Gulf-side beach. (A third thing I had almost forgotten was the brutal heat and humidity down there. One particular day, I was walking on the sand and a jetty, and it felt like there were three suns beaming at me from above, below and the side. And of course 30 seconds is long enough to be coated with a film of sweat, and I’m not even a profuse sweater.)

Back to the metal beam. On Sunday about noon, I was downright gleeful because I was going fishing out in the Gulf with a friend of mine and my brothers, his dad and some others on their boat. This guy, Jon, and I were dicking around on the boat. He’s hyper as a squirrel and was scurrying around rigging up lures and stuff, while I just kind of hung around talking to him. We decided to get off the boat and go inside his parents’ townhouse for awhile.

This is a good sized boat, a cabin cruiser that’s probably 25 or so feet long. I put my right foot on the side of the boat and propelled myself upward to hop onto the pier. I hit the pier but only after my head hit the thick metal beam that’s part of the boat lift. I hit it hard enough that the blow knocked my glasses off my face and into about six feet of murky salt water. My clip-on sunglasses, which were attached to my glasses, separated from them and fell on the pier. I too landed on the pier, on my feet, my head bleeding and my vision a blur.

My vision is always a blur without glasses. It had nothing to do with hitting my head on steel. I went inside and sat, semi-dazed for awhile, while Jon and his dad scraped the bottom with a net trying to find my glasses. They never recovered them. But my father later went over there, and he found them on his one last sweep with a net. I wasn’t seriously injured – no stitches. But it hurt. It was the hardest shot I’ve taken to the head in some time, and I hope it will stand as such for some time to come.

The Lighthouse motel in Gulf Shores does not stand at all anymore. Its replica lighthouse, which looks real and has stood since 1947 – making it, I’d guess, among the oldest buildings on that stretch of coast – survives. But it too is in peril as the rapacious real estate developers continue their campaign to wall off the entire coast with 15-story stucco monstrosities.

Along the Alabama coast, like most nowadays I suspect, the classic old raised beach house with big screen sleeping porches is pretty much extinct. In its place is the wall of condo towers and Winn Dixie and Bruno’s shopping centers. At least there’s no Red Lobster there. Not yet, anyway.

Several days before my Fourth of July weekend trip south, I had a birthday party for my own bad self at my house. As some of you might have read on Ken Womack’s East Atlanta blog, it was a success. Many people, about 40 I’d guess, came and reveled and seemed to enjoy themselves. Hell, at 3 a.m. there were still 15 or so people here. I was pleased.

Someone yesterday asked me about a woman named Renee, whom they said they met at the party. Renee works to get medical supplies to poor people in Cuba or Mexico. If someone knows this Renee, please let me know because I don’t know this person and have no memory of meeting her at my house. Of course, this could all be a ruse. That person might not have been named Renee and might be a waitress or an accountant who made up that medical business.

I also recall someone winning money in a darts game, doing shots of Jagermeister with a bunch of people, talking with a lot of people, laughing my ass off, seeing The Bagman – Charles Odum – and “my boy George,” George Henry, here at my party. That’s a rare sight indeed, those fellows at a party. I had a fine time and felt good about myself because so many people showed up and seemed to have fun.

I’ve still been busy typing for pay. But at least I’ve been getting paid. I got a flurry of checks in the past couple weeks, so I can keep the lights on a while longer. At one of my freelance gigs, I go to the offices of a big, quasi-government agency and write mostly puffery for an online internal newsletter. It’s a nice place to go and people generally seem more or less pleased to be there, compared to most big workplaces. I overheard one woman talking, I think, to her brother -- whom I’ve surmised is somehow mentally ill – and advising him not to take oxycontin. Apparently the brother’s mouth was hurting badly and he needed a pain reliever.

Anyway, this woman seems to care a lot for her brother and goes to a lot of trouble to help him. When I’m there, I get to write about stuff like whitewater rafting trips by a group of employees, IT certifications, economic reports (which can actually be quite interesting), displays of military memorabilia in the cafeteria. It pays well and I ain’t complaining. Plus, the cafeteria’s pretty good, though the beef stroganoff fell a little short of my expectations and the vending machine doesn’t have regular Snickers, just some damn new experimental kind.

That’s all I can muster for now. I’ll try to be more regular with the updates.

2003-06-26T08:45:00.000-04:00

Me the collection agency; jackasses with cell phones; beautiful music

Did this Jason G. writing blurbs on the Blogger home page used to write the menus at Po Folks restaurant?

I’ve been pissed off a lot lately, mostly about people not paying me money that they owe me. Sometimes, I think I understand why mobsters threaten and beat people when they don’t pay their debts. Or why Bud, the Harry Dean Stanton character in Repo Man, addled by speed and beer, rails against “dildos who don’t pay their bills.”

Honestly, I’ve been lazy too. The more energy I expend doing one thing – working for money – the less I expend doing other things, like this. But here it is. I’ve seen some good music lately, namely Tift Merritt. She’s what they call an Americana or roots rock or alt-country singer and songwriter. She was at the Red Light Café earlier in June, sold out the place though it was still comfortable to move around. She writes songs that sound familiar the first time you hear them, songs that you think maybe are too simple to like but you realize you like them anyway and that maybe they aren’t so simple. She and her band members were also gracious and friendly.

Twice during the show, some jackass – two different jackasses -- took a cell phone call. So Tift asked for the phone and chatted cheerily with the callers, telling one she was her husband’s girlfriend and just making small talk with the other. It was a subtle and, I thought, pretty clever way of delivering a message. When you’re at a music show, turn off your damned phone. People are there to listen to and play music. Respect that.

It seemed to work. Late in the show, after playing mostly new songs that were good and well received, they played a couple quiet tunes. The room was dead silent, something I’ve rarely heard in a place selling booze. I didn’t think it was possible to keep a drinking music audience, outside of Eddie’s Attic, really quiet for more than 15 seconds. She and the band rose to the silence and played stirring versions of a couple songs from her only album, Bramble Rose. The last song was my favorite on the album, When I Cross Over.

The opening act, Chatham County Line, was a good bluegrass group. Some of those guys played with Tift, too. After the show, my friend and I chatted for probably 15 or 20 minutes with Tift’s bass player, Jay Brown. He was a really nice guy. I spoke briefly with Tift, who is a gorgeous little brilliant woman, I think, with strawberry blond hair, a bird’s voice, a sense of humor and she grows tomatoes and lives in the country. I also spoke briefly with the drummer, a skinny effeminate guy named Zeke who is, according to what I’ve read, Tift’s boyfriend. A very lucky skinny effeminate man, who after the show was lugging a bucket of beer over to the rest of the band.

A couple nights after that, I saw a band from Birmingham called Verbena at the Echo Lounge. Being a native Alabamian, I’m inclined to give things from the Cotton State – it’s old politically incorrect nickname – a chance. Plus, I’d seen Verbena before at the same place and liked them. They were even better this show, cranking out their own rock songs that were sort of Nirvanaish. The lead singer and guitarist is a gaunt guy with stringy long hair and a good voice. The bassist was a sort of goofy looking dude with straight hair who contorted his face so his mouth made an “O” most of the time he played. The drummer, if I remember right, has a beard and is a few years older than his band mates. Simple, guitar-bass-drums rock, and it rocked. A friend who owns a small record label later told me that Dave Grohl, Nirvana’s drummer and now the Foo Fighters, produced Verbena’s first album, so there’s a connection to the Nirvana sound.

A few days ago, a bunch of guy friends and I met at one guy’s house near Little Five Points to play darts and foose ball, cook out, drink, yap and generally have a good time. Just beyond this guy’s back yard, a hawk – identified as either a sharp shinned hawk or maybe some other sort by the amateur ornothologists on hand – was perched in a big oak dining on a smaller bird. We think it was a smaller bird, probably a dove, a favorite hawk dish. It was something to see, a little National Geographic slice in real life, and all the half dozen or so people there appreciated it.

The night after that, a friend and I went to the Braves game. It was a lopsided win, there was a huge crowd, temmps in the low 80s with a soothing breeze and lots of nubile 20ish women in shorts and skirts parading up and down the stairs. And that night and on another this season, I’ve noticed a new and, I think, encouraging thing. A couple of games lately, I’ve had Spanish-speaking people sitting near me, and listening to their voices rise as a ball sails toward the fence is a lot of fun. After the game last Saturday night, my friend and I watched the Lennox Lewis Vitaly Klitschko fight on HBO. I’m no big boxing fan, but this was compelling. I found myself focused, absorbed and repulsed at the same time.

Finally, I had a couple of rants I wanted to work in. One has to do with the way a lot of people are now using the word “so,” as in, “I’m so not going to turn my cell phone off at this concert.” If you do this, you should stop. The other language peeve du jour, though it’s a perennial peeve with me, is ending sentences with the word “at.” “Where’s your head at?” “Where are you at? Where did you learn how to write or talk at?” I have a friend, Tony Wilbert, who has long made fun of that habit by ending all sorts of sentences with “at.” It’s funny and sly. My other rant has to do with Hummers, the trucks that, according to a Simpsons episode, get 1 mile per gallon highway, zero city. I heard a radio ad say they’re about experiencing the world and your place in it, and claim other SUVs are pussytrucks for yuppies. I guess in a couple years rich selfish pricks will be driving armored personnel carriers with tank tracks instead of tires. That’ll show those wuss yuppie Hummer drivers.

And don’t worry; it’s not Greg Maddux who died. It’s Lester Maddox.

2003-06-14T23:36:00.000-04:00

Fishing and drinking in Douglasville

A friend and I went fishing about 20 miles west of Atlanta today. We went to a lake at a state park. Across the lake and through some trees, there was a Native American festival going on. You could hear drumming and chanting and a guy talking on a PA system, just like the Indians used to do.

It started pouring rain, so we hunted a place to drink some beer and watch the last part of the Braves game. We were looking for a real Douglasville bar, an anti-Applebee's, and we found one.

Douglasville is a little town about 25 miles out of Atlanta. Suburbia is closing in, to be sure, but this area west of Atlanta has clung to its nature better than the bland north and east sides that have been overrun by commercial pest control salesmen from Pittsburgh.

In a strip center along a four-lane that leads into the old downtown, we saw a place called Gipson's Food and Spirits. We tried to find a downtown bar but only saw a supposed Cajun restaurant that served beer. The place looked Chamber of Commerceish, a tidy, well-lit space meant to help renovate the old downtown.

That ain't what we wanted. Gipson's was. (On the way there, some girl maybe 18 years old flew up behind us in a green Honda and started gesturing and yelling because we were slowing her down. So my friend pulls his little pickup over and she zooms past, up to a stop sign about a block away. She slows down, turns right and starts weaving through four-lane traffic at about 50 in a 35-mph zone. A cop promptly pulls her over. We cackled.)

We get to Gipson's. There are dozens of little American flags on the outside, and a sign announcing a 'statewide karaoke contest.' Once inside, it took a couple minutes for my eyes to adjust to the spacious, dim honky tonk. They had big Budweiser posters printed with the Nascar schedule, pool tables and a sign with No Gambling written in red magic marker. The place is bigger than a basketball court with little beer lamps suspended from the ceiling, hanging over tables, and a long enclosed rectangular bar in the middle.

The bartender is a smart aleck, hard-looking brunette named Kelly wearing white shorts. She's not one of those Kellys from Ohio or upstate New York. She's from around here. After we asked her to switch one of the big TVs to the Braves-Mariners game -- matching the teams with the best records in baseball playing before a raucous sold out house in Seattle -- we plopped into a table in front of a big TV and had some Basses. My friend at first asked for a beer list, and Kelly said, 'we ain't got that much beer."

She was nice, the service was excellent and the beer was cold. At the table next to us, a bunch of middle-age afternoon boozers were loudly cussing and telling stories. A guy with a short-long, or mullet, and his buddy played pool across the way. An older guy at the bar actually had a tattoo on the top of his balding head. We noted that a band called "Jack or Pack" played there regularly. A leggy, dark haired country-girl waitress showed up in a short black skirt, tall black boots and a purplish top with a subtle leopard print.

A couple with a little kid came in and ate. My friend and I were having a fine time sucking down cold beers, watching a taut, superbly contested Bravos game and soaking in the redneck air that can seem too scarce in Atlanta. On the big set, the lush green field with its tic tac toe mowing pattern, the blue Pacific sky and the splendid ball park were luminous. The contrast wasn't very good, though. And you could see the hint of a grid of lottery numbers that appeared somehow burned into the screen, like seeing an old taxi cab logo on a car door after it's been painted over.

At one point, my friend and I honestly think there's a train passing outside. It turns out to be a motorcycle, and another, meaner looking waitress with wet hair and a man who appears to be a bouncer arrive. Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves. The gaggle of afternoon boozers is getting loud. One guy's wearing a Rusty Wallace T-shirt and, as my friend observes, all half dozen of them, including a couple of women, are missing at least one front tooth.

In the bottom of the ninth of the game, the Braves' catcher, Javy Lopez, makes a beautiful play to throw out a Seattle runner trying to steal second. It's a crucial turn, helping the Braves win 3-1. My friend and I whoop and pump our fists. One of the afternoon boozers walks toward us and asks incredulously how we can "get all that from a baseball game." "Baseball’s about as exciting as a heart attack," he elaborates.

I'm figuring this guy will certainly know first-hand about heart attacks, if he doesn't already. I said something like, "It's an exciting game, and it's the ninth inning." That just added to the experience, and gave me something to blather about here.

We paid up and headed just down the road to the Choo Choo barbecue restaurant. It's in a converted Hardee's, or maybe Arby's. The Choo Choo serves up solid 'cue, decent corn on the cob and tasty fried green tomatoes. They even deliver. My friend and I had been there before, on the recommendation of a guy at the nearby Napa store. While we were at the Choo Choo, a woman and presumably her daughter, who has a black eye, and her daughter's friend come in to eat. The two teenage girls are dressed in the hip teenager look of the day, plastic'looking low-slung pants for one, denim short shorts on the other. Both are stocky.

My friend and I, recalling our own teenage years in small towns, decide that the girl got the black eye in a catfight with another girl, after one accused the other of calling her a slut.

2003-06-13T18:53:00.000-04:00

My Everest; assholes in bars; Peter Peterson for president!

Yeah, yeah. It's been a few days. Sorry. I was at Everest for an observance of the 50th anniversary of Sir Edmund's trek up the hillside. Why was I there? Oh, hell. I've scaled that sucker several times, first in 1978, when I was 14.

I've actually been cloistered away typing things for money. Trust me, it ain't as fun as this. But until some of you start sending me large checks -- email cadavidson@mindspring.com for the snail mail address -- that's the way it has to be.

What an absurd notion.

On with the drivel.

Hell of a series the home team played against the Oakland A's. I won't go into detail, but the Bravos are kicking ass like there’s no tonight, never mind no tomorrow.

I went to see the band X Wednesday night with a throng of graying hipsters, lesbians, heavily tattooed and pierced people, and a number of people I recognized from various bars but don't actually know. And there were several people there I did know. If you know people between about 33 and 45 who listened to punk or alternative music in college, chances are they might've been there.

I'm no huge X fan or graying hipster. I just remember a handful of their songs, and some friends were going and I went along. It was a hell of a show. The crowd was really digging it, and the band got after it. Billy Zoom, the guitarist who's apparently a big Christian, stood there impassively and ripped out amazing punkabilly riffs. John Doe, the bassist, thrashed around as he pounded his ax, and the singer, Exene Cervenka, who has an X tattooed on her right bicep, wailed along. Her high-pitched female voice glides nicely above the grinding, screaming guitar and D.J. Bonebrake's chugging drums. Not only did they slam out what must've been 25 3-minute songs at a breakneck pace, with no talking in between, they have interesting names, even if some of them are made up. They may all be made up, for all I know. The show felt like flying down a big hill on a bicycle.

The Masquerade, where the show was, has crappy acoustics. Old stone walls, heavy wooden ceilings, old mill equipment and 20-something employees with hipper than thou attitudes don't lend themselves to great listening. But it didn't matter.

After the show, I went with some friends over to one friend's house. We proceeded to get more hammered, until a neighbor from four houses down asked us to shut up or go inside. We went inside. I ended up giving a friend a ride home and stayed up till about 6 a.m. playing his video games, eating M&Ms and drinking and generally assaulting my brain cells.

Needless to say, the work I had planned to tackle Thursday went untackled.

A few nights before, I had wanted to see Robert Earl Keen, one of those Texas singer-songwriter troubadours who writes and sings alt-country, or Americana, or country music that's actually good. Like a friend of mine said a few days before, "I like him, but I hate his crowd." His crowd -- mostly frat boy types wearing caps with the bill bent into an inverted U and some even wearing cowboy hats -- was out in force, so I couldn't get a ticket. Maybe it's just as well. I would've spent half the show stewing about cap-wearing frat boys who insist on screaming along with every word, or jerks who talk the whole time about other REK shows they've seen.

Though I didn't get to see Robert Earl, I did talk to a Texan across the street at the Euclid Avenue Yacht Club. I took a stool next to this guy whose leather jacket was piled conspicuously on the bar next to his ninja-looking motorcycle helmet. With no prompting, he proceeds to tell me, defiantly, that he's a mechanic who can fix cars, motorcycles, boats and airplanes, and that he takes home about $2,500 a week. He invites me to step outside and check out his bike (I declined), and tells me he's helping a friend temporarily at a garage in Decatur, that he's been in Atlanta for 10 months and has figured out that, to quote an X song, it's a skin-deep town.

People here aren't nice to him, he says, because he has a tattoo and rides a motorcycle. (He informs me he’ll soon cover his chest and back with tattoos. As far as I can tell, he has only one or two now.) People here are only interested in how much money you make, he laments, moments after telling me how much money he makes 40 seconds after meeting me. He's looking for a woman who's interested in him for who he is, not what he makes, he says. He asks me if I can understand that.

I challenge him on the skin-deep thing. Yeah, I agree, Atlanta surely has its share of superficial types, women who are after money and so forth. But, especially in Little Five Points, I don't think everyone will snub him simply because he has a tattoo. Oh, maybe "one out of 100,000" won't, he says. "I’ve been here 10 months; I know," he says. I retort that I've been here about 17 years, and I think I know better.

Anyway, he also complained about how hot and humid it is here. This from a guy who lives in Galveston, Texas. I just looked up the weather in Galveston right now. It's 88 and feels like it's 104, according to weather.com. In Atlanta right now, it's 70 and feels like it's 70. I wanted to tell this guy that people here don't think he's an asshole because he has a tattoo, rides a motorcycle and wears a leather jacket. They think he's an asshole because he's an asshole. Being a nice guy and one who's deathly afraid of being punched, I kept that to myself.

Another guy I chatted with, right after I thought I was getting somewhere with a cute blonde whose boyfriend walked up, told me he'd been to the Okefenokee Swamp a bunch of times, once in a group that included Newt Gingrich. We agreed that the Okefenokee is a really cool place. He said that Gingrich is actually a nice guy who smokes weed, or at least used to, and has a good sense of humor. This guy was nice, interesting and fun to talk to, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt on that one.

Strangely enough, the next night, I think it was, who's on The Daily Show but Mr. leave-her-in-the-hospital-bed himself. He actually was funny and interesting. You could tell Jon Stewart thought so. To make the point that politics has long been a nasty business, Gingrich said that Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, I believe it was -- unlike Gingrich, I'm no history whiz -- used to bicker like hell when they were in the same cabinet. They each printed newspapers devoted mostly to trashing each other. And, of course, Hamilton was killed -- killed, dead -- in a duel with a rival politician, Aaron Burr. Maybe they should reintroduce that code of honor in Washington.

Gingrich is trying to stay in tight with the administration and right-wing think tanks, so he heaped praise on President Bush. Fair enough. But I can't help believing that even a lot of Republicans think that massive tax cuts are not really a good idea now that the federal government is diving into billions of debt and tens of millions of baby boomers are about to retire and wipe out Social Security and Medicare.

In fact, I read one of the best essays on politics and economics I've come across in some time in the June 7 New York Times Magazine. The writer, Peter Peterson, is chairman of the Blackstone Group, a big investment firm, and chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He's also a lifelong Republican who was secretary of commerce under Nixon. Put simply, the man knows his shit. Among Peterson's many insightful, sensible nuggets that made me wish he was running the nation's economic policy:

"The same Republican senators who overwhelmingly approved (without a single nay vote) the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to crack down on shady corporate accounting of investments worth millions of dollars see little wrong with turning around and making utterly fraudulent pronouncements about tax cuts that will cost billions, or, indeed, even trillions of dollars."

"Yes, the Republican Party line often boils down to cutting taxes and damning the torpedoes. And yes, by whipping up one-sided popular support for lower taxes, the Republicans preempt responsible discussion of tax fairness and force many Democrats to echo weakly, 'Me too.' But it's equally true that the Democratic Party line often boils down to boosting outlays and damning the torpedoes. Likewise, Democrats regularly short-circuit any prudent examination of the single biggest spending issue, the future of senior entitlements, by castigating all reformers as heartless Scrooges."

Peterson calls it "this bipartisan flight from integrity and responsibility."

Hearing things like that made me consider anew the idea that a lot of politicians today seem bent on fighting not for what's best for the country, but what's best for their own political party. All they care about is winning. But I'm not sure we should expect much better when only half the people vote, and when the research for many of those amounts to listening to talk radio and reading big signs behind podiums.

How is it that when I get 75 email pitches a day for Viagra and penis enlarger pills, and never respond to a single one, that I just keep getting more of them? And how did word get out that I need a larger penis, anyway? I don't begrudge anybody making a living, but what sort of weasel cranks out spam, especially those damnable little boxes that pop up on the screen while I'm trying to write this crap? These miscreants should be publicly flogged.

Finally, today, good luck to Mr. Ken Womack of East Atlanta, Ga. with his new blog. I haven't checked it out yet, but plan to do so in a few minutes.

2003-06-04T23:34:00.000-04:00

Keanu Reeves subbing for Robert Duvall; Fallwell

Great Braves game tonight. Braves 5, Texas Rangers 2. I went with a friend who has season tickets in the first row of the upper deck, looking straight down the third base line. Nice seats. Maddux looked like Maddux, Smoltz was impeccable as always, and Sheffield hit a wicked shot 20 rows into the left field seats, and a one-hop single that almost handcuffed the left fielder about 315 feet from home plate.

However, the Braves' backup outfielder, Darren Bragg, really annoys me. The guy can't hit – his average is .140. He can't even bunt. A week or so ago, he popped a bunt in the air, then just stood in the batter's box instead of running, which allowed the opposing pitcher to let the ball drop and turn it into a double play. Bragg can't field either. Every time Bobby puts him in a blow-out game, he misjudges a fly ball. He did end his streak of four straight strikeouts tonight by bouncing one off the plate to the first baseman. Then he popped out to the third baseman in foul territory. And watching him play center field instead of Andruw Jones is like watching a little leaguer out there. It's like Keanu Reeves filling in for Robert Duvall.

Speaking of The Apostle, I heard on the radio that the Rev. Jerry Falwell's thinking of leaving the Republican Party because he thinks they're a bunch of queer lovers. I guess he figures Bush, or at least Ari Fliescher, should have made like Rush Limbaugh and jumped to the defense of Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum when he said he has no problem with gay people, just gay people who aren't celibate and are therefore like pedophiles or animal fuckers. Rick obviously has a diverse circle of friends.

Falwell's right. Those Republicans just love the homos. I'll bet that Georgia Republican get-together in Macon a couple weeks ago was pulsating with techno dance music.

I remember on the black-and-white TV show The Little Rascals, some of the boys formed the "He-man Women Haters Club." I guess the reverend could form the "He-men of the Lord Fag Haters Club." It'd be amusing to watch if Falwell really broke away from the Republican Party -- and where would he possibly go? -- and he and W. fought over the hard-core Jesus freaks.
As far as I know -- but it ain't like I follow the guy's every move -- Falwell still thinks gay people, people who get abortions and probably people who aren't married and smoke pot caused 9/11. I suppose if he were president, we might have internment camps full of such scoundrels right now.

Back in Atlanta...

I applaud Gov. Sonny Perdue for being informal and not taking things too seriously in announcing that his head flak was leaving. In the press release announcing Erin O'Brien's departure, it appears that Sonny means to share a laugh with the Capital press corps, which is refreshing.

But it smacks of trying too hard. Who the hell am I, but my theory is if you're not pretty damned sure you're funny, then you should not try to be publicly funny. I guess that's even more important when you are the head of the government in the nation's 10th biggest state.

In the press release, after the obligatory platitudes, there's a quote from the governor that says about O"Brien: "The way she used to run up the stairs to my office on the second floor of the Capitol was an impressive display of athletic prowess. She could make those steps in ten seconds flat and still have breath to give me an earful about Dick Pettys or Jim Galloway. I think she actually has a future in sports."

Pettys and Galloway are state government reporters.

For her part, O"Brien had a quote in there that left me puzzled. "It is a bittersweet decision to leave the governor's office at such a dynamic and exciting time in Georgia's history," O'Brien said. "However, it is time to return to the private sector where it is my intention to continue to be a part of Perdue's Team Georgia in true Jeffersonian fashion."

Did Jefferson ever run a PR firm? What does she mean exactly? I'm no Jefferson scholar, but here's what some people who supposedly are experts say about him on a Jefferson Website:

"Jefferson was, in his day, a true liberal, even a radical one, in his pursuit of freedom of speech and religion, the spreading of republican (democratic) values far and wide and in his general approach to government. He was willing to see blood shed in the cause of freedom, not only during the revolution but as a general principle. On the other hand, he felt that all government was a necessary evil, and that that government which governed best governed least. He was one of the first sponsors of government supported education for all children, and among his proudest achievements was the founding of the University of Virginia. Jefferson felt that an educated citizenry was the surest way to protect democratic institutions and guard against a oppression. He said: 'Educate the people generally, and tyranny and injustice will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.' "

Sounds a lot like what professional public relations is all about.

2003-06-02T21:18:00.000-04:00

The Atlanta Journal Constitution in 2003 published:
4 stories about FCC rules changes allowing more media consolidation
119 stories about "American Idol"
94 stories about Hootie Johnson
44 stories about "The Matrix Reloaded"

I'm no firebrand who's certain that democracy is in peril because the FCC voted to let big media companies own more TV and radio stations.

But it does strike me as more bad than good. Already, you can drive across several states and hear the exact same radio stations in every city: classic rock, oldies, classic soul, "new rock," pop country. A lot of them even have the same promos. For the hell of it, I decided to do a little survey after I'd read a couple stories about the FCC's pending deregulation. In particular, I saw a couple articles about a public hearing on the FCC's plan that was held in Atlanta a couple weeks before today's vote.

I checked the big local daily's coverage of this issue. That daily, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, is owned by Cox Communications, one of the 10 biggest media companies in America. A little research turned up some fun facts about the AJC's coverage of a matter of great interest to its owner and, just maybe, its readers.

I searched the AJC's online archives from Jan. 1, 2003 to June 2, 2003, the day of the FCC's vote, for stories containing the words "FCC," "rules" and "Michael." Michael is for Michael Powell, chairman of the FCC and the main proponent for letting media companies own more radio and TV stations. That search turned up 13 matches. However, only four were articles about the Commission's relaxing of the media ownership rules. (The other stories involved FCC regulation of telephone/Internet companies.) Of those four mentions of what the conservative New York Times columnist William Safire called the biggest decision in the FCC's history, two were one-paragraph briefs, one was an account of the Australian media tycoon Rupert Murdoch assuring Congressmen that the American public has nothing to fear from his Fox, and one was a full-length story about the FCC's impending move to lower the barriers to media conolidation.

That single story, which ran today, the day of the FCC's June 2 vote, addressed in passing -- and that's being generous -- the effect the new rules might have in Atlanta. Remember that the newspaper's owner, Cox, already owns the big paper, the ABC TV affiliate, and radio stations including two of the biggest. All that stuff was grandfathered in when the rules were set up in 1975. So the paper's inquiry into what this might mean locally was limited to a Cox corporate spokestron's refusal to comment and a similar refusal from one of the two FCC commissioners opposed to the idea. Several paragraphs into its lone story devoted to the FCC move, the paper mentioned the local public hearing held a couple weeks earlier, referring to it as "a rally for opponents of the rule changes," which is apparently pretty much what it turned out to be. The paper had not covered the hearing, or rally, at all.

While Cox's flagship paper chose to largely ignore an issue of potentially great import to its owner and its readers, it's fun to note where it did choose to spill its vats of ink. In the first five months and two days of 2003, while the paper published one actual story about the FCC rules changes, it mentioned the TV show "American Idol" 119 times, Jennifer Lopez 26 times, The Matrix Reloaded 44 times and Augusta National Golf Club honcho Hootie Johnson 94 times.

To be sure, this says nothing definitive about the paper's or its owner's editorial decisions. Maybe it says more about the general tenor of the news media and the public. I've emailed the paper's "public editor," Mike King, to see why it didn't cover the public hearing on the FCC ruling and why it's overall coverage was so skimpy. He responded quickly.

"I believe we should have covered the meeting," King wrote in an email. "I believe we made a mistake by sending a reporter there and not filing a story. Apparently, the breakdown in communications within the news organization took place because the National desk out of Washington was handling most of the coverage (since it was a regulatory, FCC issue) and the Business Desk here thought it was only suppose (sic) to supply background coverage of the meeting for a piece to be used later. That was faulty news judgement. Subsequent stories (that ran last week and over the weekend) have made reference to the Atlanta meeting, but we still should have filed something on it when it took place.

"Reasonable people can surmise whatever they want out of that bad decision," King continued. "The media conglomerate you mention (Cox) is on record (as recent stories have reported) against some provisions of the expansion approved yesterday by the FCC."

Perhaps the hue and cry over this FCC business from REM's Mike Mills, the NRA and an eclectic slew of people and interest groups, is an overreaction. Maybe things like blogs and community radio are natural responses to our public airwaves and mass circulation papers and magazines being taken over by a few profit-driven behemoths. Then again, blogs and wacky radio stations will never reach more than a fraction of the people.

Nevertheless, I'm not sure it spells doom for diversity of opinion and style in the media. Will it make that much difference if Fox or Cox or Viacom or Disney owns programming that reaches everybody and stations that reach 45% of the people, instead of 35%?

I want to work up some outrage about this. And I am peeved. But I believe we get, more or less, what we deserve. Half of Americans don't bother to vote, and a lot less than half determine the candidates from whom we get to finally choose. We do get to choose what we watch, read and listen to, though some choices are a lot easier than others. I guess most people prefer Clear Channel to community radio, the science fiction Matrix to the real information machine grinding in their midst. But don't worry. Rupert says everything will be OK.

Total information awareness

I read an AP story today about an apparatus the Pentagon wants to build that'll record everything a person sees, feels, reads, says. It sounds like a Nielsen box run amok. The AP, citing Pentagon documents requesting proposals from private companies interested in building this thing, reports:

"Cameras and microphones would capture what the user sees or hears; sensors would record what he or she feels. Global positioning satellite sensors would log every movement. Biomedical sensors would monitor vital signs. Emails, instant messages, Web-based transactions, telephone calls and voicemails would be stored. Mail and faxes would be scanned. Links to every radio and television broadcast heard and every newspaper, magazine, book, Web site or database seen would be recorded."

That sounds slightly scary. But should it be shocking? In an age of Jerry Springer, made-for-TV courtship and Webcams in dorm and delivery rooms, do people still fear Big Brother? Or do they just want to beat him to the punch?

2003-06-01T02:20:00.000-04:00

"No wonder nobody likes you. You act retarded."

"(I didn't catch the name) likes me."

"No, she has to act like she likes you because she's your sister."

"Uh-uh."

"You're fuckin' retarded."

"Mama, I'll hit you in the head."

"Shut up. Shut the fuck up."

Nothing like relaxing on a creek bank, wetting a hook with the locals. A friend and I went fishing today at a creek that feeds into Jackson Lake about an hour southeast of Atlanta. Curiously, since we've had lots of rain the past few weeks, the water was low, revealing muddy brown banks that made the water look ugly and brown. Exposed, dirt-encrusted dead trees and snags lay along the bank.

Cars and trucks thundered by on State Route 36. And some squat woman and her roughly 10-year-old daughter, Alicia Marie, had the conversation quoted above. They yelled at each other repeatedly. The woman must have said fuck, or fuckin', three dozen times in the hour and a half we fished there. The gist of the conversation: Mama telling daughter she's stupid, acts retarded, needs to shut the fuck up, that no one likes her and that they weren't leaving until she caught two more fish. The girl whining that she wanted to go home.

I kept waiting to hear a big slap but never did. My friend and I were still fishing when the two of them and another woman, maybe in her late 50s or 60s and maybe the mother of the mother, climbed in their beat-up little red Toyota and drove off past a homemade "Got Jesus" sign on a utility pole. God help them.

The girl had blond hair, spoke with a slur and seemed to be in some sort of torpor. The mother was nice enough to us aas we arrived, but clearly no conversational whiz. She told us they'd caught two fish, though I later glimpsed a stringer of at least a half dozen bream. Jackson Lake was created by a Georgia Power dam, and a power plant buzzes on the banks. Maybe mercury in the fish makes people who eat the fish crazy.

There were a couple of guys farther upstream. They just fished. There was poison ivy everywhere, and the bank was squishy and slippery. We didn't catch any fish but had a fine time casting our new Kmart-purchased rods and reels. We got amazing deals on them. The Kmart on Piedmont Road is a bit of a mess. A lot of the cranks, the handles, on the reels in the store were missing. An employee said they'd been stolen.

Anyway, after fishing we ate at a barbecue and catfish joint on the lake, a few miles north. It was in a low-slung cinder block building. The ceiling was no higher than 7 feet. The changeable sign outside said Jesus Saves. A bumper sticker on the door said, "WWJD – What would Jesus do?" Our waitress' T-shirt said the same thing. A beefy couple both had on "Proud to be an American" T-shirts. They were through eating, and the man literally looked asleep at the table.

The BBQ chicken was good, the fried okra exceptional for a restaurant. As we were leaving, my friend and I each grabbed a couple of business cards. One read,

"FREE TICKET
ADMIT 1 TO 1000
TO THE
SUNDAY SCHOOL OF YOUR CHOICE."

Another read, "DON'T WAIT FOR THE HEARSE TO TAKE YOU TO CHURCH" and included a green silhouette of a hearse.

2003-05-31T03:24:00.000-04:00

Poking animals with a stick for our amusement

When I was a kid growing up in south Alabama, there would occasionally come through town some slimy, decrepit carnival that included a reptile show. They'd set it up in a shopping center parking lot. You could pay 50 cents and look at some big snakes inside a glass cage. Some of them were poisonous, rattlers or water mocassins, and carnival employees would occasionally poke at them with a stick so they'd bear their fangs and hiss.

Which brings me to Mike Tyson and Fox News. When Greta Van Sustern and her surgically fixed face brought that guy on the air, what exactly did she, and her network, think was going to happen? She used to be some sort of legal expert, I think, on CNN. Did she figure to quiz Iron Mike about the big FCC vote coming up? Actually, I guess she did ask him some legalistic questions about his rape charge and imprisonment, stuff that mostly happened before Fox News existed.

Obviously, Fox was poking a sharp stick at a crazed animal. The crazed animal did something crazy. Everyone ooed and aahed. Fox got some pub from all its competitors. Now, more people are talking about Mike Tyson saying he'd like to rape the "reptilian" "bad person" who says he already raped her, than are probably remotely concerned about media consolidation or tax cuts or what happens in Iraq now that we're more or less done kicking ass.

But really, who gives the slightest damn what Mike Tyson has to say about anything? I'll admit, I find it funny when anybody calls anybody "reptilian" over anything. Reptilian is a cool word. But what does this guy's opinion amount to? I'm hoping Greta can line up Charles Manson some time soon. Maybe he'll say he'd like to kill Sharon Tate all over again. Maybe she can do a series with psychotic public figures and ask each of them whom they'd most like to rape. Turn it into a reality show.

Has everyone else noticed that The Daily Show kicks ass? It's probably the most insightful satire going about current events. Jon Stewart almost always has perfect pitch, and he skewers the left and right. Like most of us, I think, he's afraid of both extremes.

On the subject of thigns that kick ass, my two new favorite CDs are John Hiatt's new one, Beneath This Gruff Exterior, and the latest from The Gourds, Cow Fish Fowl or Pig, which came out in 2002 and is not easy to find at record stores. I've only recently come to know The Gourds. Their sound is a blend of country, rock, some accordion, some literary and silly vocals. It's good stuff, in my opinion. The first song on the album, "My Name is Jorge" (and I twist and I juke; I roll into town with my wagon of fruit), mentions William S. Burroughs, Henry S. Ford, John Prine and Muhammad Ali. Another one, "Ants on the Melon," says, "...I"m gonna fry me some chickens, baby; Fry me up some chickens tonight; Mash taters and butter and all the other (said utter); We gonna do it up right: I wanna see you naked, baby; See yer titties sittin' up high."

Ants on the Melon's last verse is about the narrator having to shoot his old brown cow with a .22 rifle. It reminded me of seeing men put .22s right between cows' eyes -- an inch from their head -- and shooting them dead after livestock auctions. Little boys are fascinated by twisted things, at least we were. There's another tune on the album, "Hell Hounds," about a guy going to the state fair that "has that carnie feel and it's smelling like my livestock barn," where his chicken places third in competition, and he -- the man, not the chicken -- has cocktails with the bearded lady in her trailer. Then, her boyfriend, the beanbag man, gets jealous. Good stuff. I have one of their other CDs, Dem's Good Beeble. Dem's good songs too.

I wish those guys would play in Atlanta soon, but judging from their web site, they rarely venture outside Texas.

2003-05-29T22:43:00.000-04:00

"Impact" has become the impacted feces of the language

I had written all this stuff about how I loathe the word "impact" as a verb -- How will the road work impact me? -- and how it's all corporate America's fault because big comanies twist words unmercifully, and suck the life out of them to sell products, to cover their asses and polish their images. And I'd written about the Jerry Jeff Walker show I saw last night -- good -- and the ear-splitting, unoriginal rock band I saw afterward -- not good; and how my friend told the band's drummer -- whose face was festooned with numerous metal chunks and who was wearing a mechanic's shirt with someone's name, surely not his, stenciled on the pocket -- that his band was entertaining. I just stood there. But I salute almost anybody who's out playing their own music.

Then I recounted how I was bowling the other night and discovered that one of my friends had months earlier stolen a pair of bowling shoes from that very bowling alley. Good Lord. The same friend was incredulous when I told him I pick up my dog's crap when it's crapped into someone else's yard or onto the sidewalk. Just following the law, I explained. My friend still wasn't buying. His big-ass Lab, he said, always craps in the same yard up the street from him, and he never cleans it up. I guess his neighbor enjoys that. Tough shit, my friend said, in so many words.

Anyway, I wrote all that, then accidentally deleted it by going to the "settings" page. I didn't ralize I couldn't come back to this page and have my post intact if I had not posted it. Live and learn. Aaarggh.

2003-05-28T00:08:00.000-04:00

Al Gore commanded the first Gulf War.

Not even Al Gore would say that. Some dimwit on a reality show called "Dog Eat Dog" answered Gore to a question about who led that war. A competitor said he chose her to answer the question from the category "famous people" because she had said she does not watch much TV. Actually, she explained her reasoning well: She had no idea, but figured it was someone who was in the news a lot back then -- smart -- and maybe held political office now. But, she didn't think it would be the president. (He was running an oil company into the ground or getting a sweetheart deal to buy part of the Texas Rangers about then.) I'm thinking she'd get close and say Colin Powell. But no.

God, a lot of people are stupid. I was watching some of this foolishness between innings of tonight's Braves game. The dumb dog eats dumb dog reminded me of something I read the other day -- that about 70 percent of people in some poll could not name one of the nine Democratic presidential candidates. I'll bet 70 percent could name the two American Idol finalists, though. I guess if in a couple years they ask the woman on Dog Eat Dog who led the latest Gulf War, er Operation Iraqi Freedom, she'll say something like Richard Gephardt or John Edwards, or whomever loses to Bush in 04. I'm figuring that won't be Tommy Franks.

This show's another shameless parade of hardbodies -- especially the hostess, who apparently changes sexy outfits between each segment -- doing dumb physical contests, mostly in water, and trying to answer simple trivia questions. And it's full of corporate tie-ins, the corporations' and TV networks' way of inserting commercials into the actual shows so you can't skip over them.

After that, I read a bunch of reviews of new baseball books between innings of what turned out to be a damned good game. It reminded me how intellectuals seem to embrace baseball like no other sport. Name another sport that produces books by David Halberstam, Roger Angell, Stephen Jay Gould, George Will and Roger Kahn. Anyhow, someone else published a book about the 1975 World Series, which many people consider the best ever. It's certainly one of the best. During that Series, I recall debating a fellow sixth grader, Danny Nall, about who was the better center fielder, Fred Lynn of the Red Sox or the Reds' Cesar Geronimo. It's hard to imagine school kids having that argument now, not just because Lynn and Geronimo are long since retired, but because World Series games don't start until about 9:30 at night, and most kids would rather watch skateboarding.

There's also a new book by Halberstam about a couple old Red Sox teammates going to visit Ted Williams shortly before he died. There are a lot of books about the Red Sox. I suppose there are a lot of literary types in New England. Plus, the Sox's tortured history is such rich material.

Memorial Day = lots of food and beer

My friend, Pete, had a cookout at his shop where he and his couple of employees do framing, laminating and other printing-related stuff. It was a good time. His shop is in this warehouse with a big garden out back full of squash, mint, tomatoes, cilantros, peppers and other goodies. And there are a half dozen chickens running around the place. A couple of them are colorful roosters. A guy who lives next door apparently tends the garden, the chickens and the beehives next to the garden. The garden also affords a panoramic view of downtown and midtown Atlanta.

2003-05-22T22:23:00.000-04:00

Vinny Castilla called from the clubhouse in San Diego. He'd of course read my cruel nickname on his Web-enabled cell phone. He was pissed. He started haranguing me in Spanish. I think he said something like, "You little gringo shithead, you couldn't hit your own ass with a boat paddle. (I believe I could.). If you're going to call me an appliance, make it something nice, like a Viking range."

Anyway, since I called him toaster four days ago, Vinny's hit about 47 home runs and raised his batting average about 35 points. So he's no longer the toaster, unless he slumps again.

Speaking of slumps, some people's personalities are in permanent slumps. I know this person who: 1. once literally turned and ran away from me when I saw her at a bar. I later learned that she had decided I was "gossiping" about her, which I was not; 2. regularly decides that strangers in public places are laughing at her, and regularly confronts these strangers, 3. was convinced that a gay guy was not gay, but was merely messing with her. Now she's declared that she plans to kill this guy because she's given up trying to be nice to him. I don't think she'll really try to kill him. Maybe she'll just decide he's already dead.

I could go on, but I don't want to delve too deeply into this individual's fantastic universe of imagined grievances and slights. Let's just say her boyfriend had a major problem and she was none too understanding.

I had a chat with a friend today who said he thinks Bush's economic policies are "exasperating a bad situation." It reminded me of something Walt "Clyde" Frazier used to say when he announced Hawks games, or something Bush would say. I'm being a smart ass. Obviously, he meant to say "exacerbate." A lot of people would make the same mistake.

I need my rest. Tommorow, I do my once-a-week gig inside the headquarters of a famous global company. They have a great, cheap cafeteria there, cool flat-screen TVs showing CNN in the lobbies and swarms of people doing things I have absolutely no clue about.

2003-05-19T22:18:00.000-04:00

I've come up with two funny nicknames for Atlanta Braves players. Vinny Castilla is "the toaster" because he pops up constantly. The fat reliever Ray King is Ray "Burger" King. A friend and I even discussed putting on Burger King getups for the next game we attend. I'd feel like a buffoon and would never do it. I go to a lot of Braves games and spend inordinate time talking and thinking about the team and baseball.

Speaking of, a friend and I went to Rome, Ga. to see the single-A Braves farm team on Saturday. We were drinking and such and yapping and drove about 25 miles past the exit off I-75. So we missed the first 3 innings.

The Rome Braves, the lower-level single-A farm team of the Atlanta club, moved to Rome this year from Macon. State Mutual Stadium in Rome -- it's really in an empty field on the outskirts of Rome -- is no Luther Williams Field. Luther Williams in Macon was opened in 1910, I believe, and is one of the oldest surviving ball parks in America, which I suspect means in the world. At Luther Williams, you get genuine atmosphere -- trains slamming together beyond the right field fence, Little League kids scurrying everywhere, the small granstand completely covered by the old tin roof with its steel supports and catwalk leading up to a tiny press box. By contrast, the corporate-named new park in Rome looks from the outside like a Publix. Lots of brick. But it's nice and clean, of course, with a picnic area and a grassy little hillside where fans can watch for $4. The food ain't bad, and it's a lot cheaper than big league food. The field is immaculate.

I was also thinking about baseball as I ate ribs tonight at a decent BBQ joint, or "joynt" as it's spelled on the sign, one of those intentional misspellings that piss me off but seem to be more popular than ever. Huge corporations these days use words like "flava" trying to win over black kids and the white suburban kids who emulate them. But my point was that watching CNN, even while eating good if fatty ribs, can be damned depressing. Reading about terroist bombings and how our government is screwing up things in post-war Iraq and maybe being taken over by right-wing zealots with views shaped by weird arcane intellectual theories -- that might not cheer you up. But watching the same thing on TV is worse. I'm sitting there eating ribs -- one of two people in the place -- and I'm thinking how I wish they'd switch that big-ass TV over to ESPN so I could hear Peter Gammons priase the Bravos or preview that night's Red Sox-Yankees game at old Fenway. In fact, I was thinking I couldn't wait to get home to watch the Sox and Yanks. Unfortunately, the Yankees are winning 7-1 as I write this, so it's a dull game, which is why I'm writing this. It's Monday night and the Braves aren't playing.

Watching CNN convinced me that one reason Fox News is so popular just now is that most people think it's not as depressing as CNN. Fox reports all the scary stuff about terrorism, disease, death and so on. But they don't make you think your own government is out of whack. They make you think everyone else is out of whack, and we're the world's only hope. I think they're wrong about that and feed the black-and-white, no-room-for-gray George W. worldview. Another weird thing about TV news, and I guess the news in general, is how one minute it's about a bomb in Israel that killed four or five people or the one in Saudi Arabia that killed 40 people.. (Call me callous, but I almost always think, "I'm sure just as many people were killed in car accidents in the US today, and if you think about it, any one of us is probably a lot more likely to get hit by an impatient driver than a terrorist bomb.") Then two minutes after talking about how these guys won't stop killing those guys unless those guys stop pushing around these guys and despair, death, destruction, hopelessness drags on....two minutes later, it's all about cops in San Francisco dredging the bay looking for evidence in the killing of one woman.

They're just feeding us good drama. When attractive, prosperous-looking Californians kill each other out of the blue, we wonder what the hell snapped. They look and seem just like people we know. Maybe that's scarier, in its way, than a bunch of crazed Muslims. Could I possibley go over the line some day? Or could one of my friends or neighbors or relatives go nuts and charge me with a claw hammer? Chances are, no. But then chances are we won't get killed by al Queda or a Jeep Cherokee either.

.

2003-05-14T20:12:00.000-04:00

John Goodman's the fattest man on the planet. John Goodman is a planet. He should be renamed John Goodplanet.

I saw him at Jazz Fest, singing "When the Saints Come Marching In" with Pete Fountain and his band, or at least that’s who I think was obscured by the Humvee-sized chap who supposedly had to lose weight to play Babe Ruth. I know this – today’s John Goodman makes Louis Fyne look like Manute Bol. (Louis Fyne is the amiable matrimony hound he played in the terrific 1986 movie True Stories.)

John was wearing a yellow t-shirt that looked like a sail. .

Whatever. I like the guy. Louis Fyne is one of my all-time favorite movie characters. I've watched that movie probably 20 times, own the DVD. Still, watching David Byrne and Louis chat about women and Virgil, Texas’s Celebration of Specialness kills me.

Louis sang a lot better than today's John, no question. But he's cool. My New Orleanian friends tell me Goodman spends a lot of time there, and that his wife is from nearby. He's a New Orleans archetype – a gregarious bear who obviously loves to eat and drink and doesn't give a shit about exercise. Not only that, he’s a damn good actor. Louis Fyne and the guy from Barton Fink who carried the head around in a box and the sinister guy in the bluegrass movie were all fantastic.

The John Goodman sighting was a so-called jazz fest moment. There are always a few. All in all, I'd say this was a good year at jazz fest. Hard to say what the best music was. I loved the Iguanas and Rebirth Brass Band. They were playing the same nighttime show at the Midcity Lanes bowling alley/music hall. They were downstairs. Rebirth played a while, then the Iguanas played, then Rebirth played during their break. Everyone in the place was moving. Except these 2 guys whose wives or girlfriends were dancing all around while the guys steadfastly refused to budge.

The Iguanas sound a little like a mellower Santana with sax. My friend was smooching all over the tall, thin black woman he’s dating.

Another of my favorites was a Colombian group called Carlos Vives y La Provincia that I caught at the Fairgrounds.

I’d been watching the Creole Zydeco Farmers in mid-afternoon for about 45 minutes. The Farmers are older black gents who wear matching burgundy dress shirts and black cowboy hats and rip out some kickin Cajun and zydeco. I'm no authority on the music, mind you, but they're good. Even so, after an hour of the washboard-accordion-fiddle sound, I'm ready to sample something else. It was right next door.

I wandered 100 feet into a bobbing, twirling, smiling tangle of arms, legs and bodies. Must've been five or six thousand people, a lot of them waving little Colombian flags. Every Colombian in the southern US must've been there.

And a lot of them were good-looking women. Right in front of me were two achingly hot beauties, probably in their early 20s, undulating their hips and spinning around slowly, rhythmically, seductively. I was in love with one about 3 feet from me. Or at least lust. But later her boyfriend came along and groped her ass and tits and even sucked on her ear lobe as he was leaving. (Looked like he might be someone’s roadie or something.) God, I was jealous.

Anyway, on stage was this Fabio-looking character in cutoffs, bounding around the stage singing in Spanish, backed by about a 15-piece band with lots of Latin percussion, bass, guitar, keyboard, accordion – I remember Bruce Hornsby a few years ago at Jazz Fest saying it was the easiest place in the world to borrow a squeeze box. They were making a sweet sound. At one point, Carlos expertly juggled a soccer ball with his feet before booting it in a high arc into the crowd.

Which went nuts, or kept going nuts. A Latino guy in the crowd told me Carlos and his band "made the Grammys." I'm not sure what that means exactly, but it was a hell of a scene. Another guy offered me a hit off his pipe, but I had to tell him I had a test coming up, which was true. (I passed.)

Later that day, which was Sunday, the Fest's last day, I saw the Radiators close things out. They're one of my longtime faves. Matter of fact, it was on the way there that I dropped in on Pete Fountain and Goodman, peeking in on Pete with a former coworker and his friend whom I had run into.

The Radiators were good as usual. There was more weed smoking there than at any stage all weekend.

Not quite as good as most of that, but damned good, was Ben Harper two days before. He's lumped into the "jam band" category with Widespread Panic, Phish and the like. His songwriting isn't extraordinary – though I don’t think it's "pedestrian as shit," as a friend once said – but he plays various lap steel and other guitars well, and his band cooks. They play long, soulful songs with tinges of reggae, funk, blues, rock, and so on. Once I moved away from a knot of frat boys and their girlfriends yapping about how Bonaroo was awesome if you had an RV, I enjoyed it a lot.

Now I'm no music expert. Not, not Louis. I just know what I like. But I sensed on this trip that the New Orleans music scene might actually be a little more vibrant. Here's some of why I say that. Some friends and I caught a band for free called 37 at Checkpoint Charlie just outside the French Quarter, in a neighborhood called Faubourg Marigny. They played some Sublime covers and a bunch of hard-edged rock, occasionally veering almost to hip hop, with a little Deadish filigree around the edges. Good stuff. The lead singer talked about drugs a lot and cussed at the crowd, but believe it or not, it was funny. And I wasn't really that drunk. But I was tired. It was the night I arrived after the 11 and a half-hour train ride.

The next night, Friday, we caught Morning 40 Federation, which sounds a little like Morphine, with the saxophones, but more upbeat. Morning 40 Federation – named for people who drink 40-ounce beers before noon – whipped up a maelstrom of screaming sax, guitar, piano and impossible-to-decipher vocals.

Friday was a long day. First off, I wanted to see Los Lobos out at the Fairgrounds, the horse track where they have the daytime part of jazz fest, the core of it. Los Lobos played at 2. The thing starts at about 11, so getting there by 2 is not that big a stretch. But depending on my friend Sid's friend Mikey P. and brother-in-law Ken to get somewhere on time, or even close, is futile. It simply can’t happen. (I was trying to think of some clever, snide pop culture or sports reference here, but ditched it.)

Point is we got out to the fairgrounds just as Los Lobos were in a percussion solo at the tail end of their last song. Nevertheless, it was a good day – saw Ben Harper and a nifty Cajun swing band from Baton Rouge, a bunch of guys in their late 20s and 30s called the Red Stick Ramblers.

At the end of the daytime fest, at about 7, Mikey P. insisted that he and I drive to Chalmette, about 15 miles outside the city. There was a band playing at a Cajun tomato festival that I just had to see, he says, called Bag of Donuts. People from Chalmette are known in New Orleans as Chalmettians -- say Shalmeeshans -- and not generally noted for sophistication.

The absurdity of the scene reminded me, again, of Virgil, Texas in True Stories. It was a big Catholic Church, Catholic school fair, with a ferris wheel, tilt-a-whirl, booths where you could shoot out the red star with a repeating BB gun. The place was crawling with middle-school kids and their parents. Mike had taught at this school before and knew some of the kids. You could tell he had a connection with them. It was neat.

Then on stage was Bag of Donuts. They were playing under a huge painting depicting the United States with the Louisiana Purchase jumping out, celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Purchase. Tomatoes looking like Thomas Jefferson and Napolean, who negotiated the big real estate deal between the US and France, flanked the map.

Under the gaze of the tomato statesmen, Bag of Donuts – dressed in football shoulder pads and cheerleader skirts, tutus, Kiss makeup and other ridiculous and almost funny getups -- played '80s covers and swigged a fifth of Jim Beam. They pointed a little contraption that shot toilet paper at the audience, then wrapped toilet paper around the bourbon bottle, in deference to the school-kid crowd. Mike assured me that the band was normally far crazier.

As Bag of cavorted on stage, the tender visage of Our Lady of Patient Succor surveyed it all from an oil portrait atop the stage. A few feet from us, dancing around was a woman under 5 feet tall with a strip-center-booth tan, wearing short stretchy white shorts with poofy brown hair and boobs roughly the size and shape of cantaloupes. After Mike talked to his New Orleans cop friend whose kids go to the school, Officer Fleetwood, we headed back into NO to catch the M40 Federation.

We met up with Sid and Ken there.

There were some cool moments along the train ride, but thinking about it, I guess the time in New Orleans was more interesting than the train ride. I hope anyone who stumbled across this thought it was at least better than cable-TV-scrambler spam.

2003-04-30T12:04:00.000-04:00

I'm heading to New Orleans on Amtrak tomorrow for the annual Jazz and Heritage Festival. If you're at all interested in music or New Orleans, you've doubtless read countless accounts of Jazz Fest. So I'll skip that. The Amtrak trip through west Georgia, to Birmingham, into Mississippi, then south to the Crescent City is fascinating in a way a car or plane trip could never be. I've done this once. People on the train were far chattier than people on a plane: it takes a lot longer, they drink a lot more and so they're less inhibited. Plus, there's a sense of a shared experience, almost espirit de corps -- We've all chosen this unusual means of travel and we're locked inside this big tube together for 12 hours. The sites are like those on back roads: an army tank depot in Anniston, Ala., big sandy shoals on the Coosa River, which the onboard narrator describes as "fisherman's paradise and catfish heaven," the back alleys of small towns, littered with junk cars and appliances, and decaying old brick warehouses and industrial buildings that are relics of an economy reliant on the rail roads. I'll report more when I return May 6.