Category: Uncategorized

[my comments assume that you’ve already read the AFF description that I link to in each movie title]

The TV Set — David Duchovny plays a bearded nebbish of a writer trying to get his shows through the pilot stage and onto the air. Sigourney Weaver steals all her scenes as a viciously stupid yet enormously powerful network executive. Lots of great characters and acting. Written and directed by Jake Kasdan, son of Lawrence Kasdan (big Hollywood writer / producer), so that probably helped him get an early perspective on the corrosive atmosphere of the SoCal entertainment industry. It takes the most well-intentioned talent and slowly whittles them down to the size and shape needed to be part of the machine that pumps crap like “According to Jim” into the nation’s living rooms. Good movie! Although really this isn’t what I’m here to see, with the big names and laughs and all. Nonetheless, very entertaining, recommended, a lot like the hilarious The Comeback, an HBO comedy that starred Lisa Kudrow as a slightly past-her-prime comedic actress trying to goose her career back into the limelight.

12:08 East Of Bucharest — Ah yes, the IMAGE of old rears its head. First, they start the movie 15-20 minutes late. Then, the aspect ratio is wrong and everybody’s got fat heads. Then, their are no subtitles for the Romanian dialogue on screen. Time goes by, people in the audience laugh at the situation, some start trickling out. After about 10 minutes I gave up and walked out, to find AFF staff in the lobby apologizing and handing out vouchers. Apparently they’d received the wrong version of the film, or at least couldn’t figure out how to get the subtitles up. But do they go into the theater and let everyone know? No. Sigh. I hope this isn’t representative of the rest of the festival. 2005 was a mess, 2006 was virtually perfect, so 2007 … ? OK, so I got to go home early. Saturday and Sunday will be full days.

It’s that time of the year again, time for the annual Atlanta Film Festival, during which I take the whole week off of work and try to see as much as I can. I’ll be posting my remarks here daily for the next week, although I’m already two days behind because it started Friday night. I’ve seen 6 or 7 movies and my head is spinning. More to come!

It’s six months ago today that my mother died. Last week we reunited the entire extended family, including about a dozen relatives from Germany, at my mother’s house in NJ and spread her ashes at the base of a newly planted flowering tree (a Saucer Magnolia) in the backyard of the house that she designed and lived in for 20 years.

In the past six months I’ve thought of many things.

I’ve thought of how beautiful the spring season in Atlanta is right now, and how I always wanted to share that with her and put her to work in my yard.

I’ve thought about that awful light jazz soft rock that she liked to play on the stereo in her house, and how horrible that was for the music snob in me.

I’ve thought about her frugality; how she taught us to save money, pay off credit cards, be very careful about taking on new loans, and how she demonstrated to us how to slowly make ourselves wealthy.

I’ve thought about how you had to prepare for her visits, and I don’t mean clean the house, I mean invent projects for her to work on because she was a blitzkrieg of project making. Yardwork, carpentry, tilework — her idea of a vacation was to work on projects in somebody else’s house.

I’ve thought about when I was a boy, I told her I’d buy her a Mercedes when I got rich.

I’ve thought about how she got rheumatic fever as a child, and for her entire life had to live with a serious heart problem, and that it’s really a miracle that she was going strong at 65.

I’ve thought about how strange it is that just a month earlier she had turned 65 and was finally able to stop paying those exorbitant medical insurance premiums.

I’ve thought about how she was always interested to talk about science and hear about the technology that I was working on, and how we joked that in a later time she probably would have become an engineer herself.

I’ve thought about how I can’t just call her up anymore.

I’ve thought about how sorry I am that I didn’t get to go on our planned trip to the Galapagos Islands, but how happy she was to know that she would finally be going.

I’ve thought about how she made a custom piece of stained glass artwork for our renovated bathroom, but never got to see it in place in our house.

I’ve thought about how strong-willed all three of her children are, and how we got that from our mother.

I’ve thought about how someone at the October gathering said that she made you think that you were the most important person in the world to her.

I’ve thought about how she built the house for herself, and how perfect she made it for herself.

I’ve thought about how she was the center of the family, and how her house is now the center of the family, and how wonderful it is that, with Julienne’s help, we will be able to keep the house in the family.

I’ve thought about how her final resting place is right in the backyard of her home, under a new tree, in view of the bird feeder.

[for the soundtrack to this post, you have two options:

1. If it’s before 11pm ET Sunday March 25th, then listen to the mp3 archive of Jon’s show, then jump ahead to the 3rd item in the playlist (the Sun2300.mp3 file), then fast forward 2m45s. Alternatively, download the last hour of the show via this and this direct link to the 30 minute mp3 chunks. That’s not the BoS album I’m writing about, since Jon played a later album, but it’s close enough.

2. Play these four videos from Youtube, but realize that until today I hadn’t seen those and I’m not really writing about the videos, I’m writing about a band and how they fit into my life years ago.

3. Go to this apparent BoS Myspace page and, after the page loads, click on the song titles in the player section in the upper right corner. Still not Love Agenda, but eh you get the gist of it. Ah, Web 2.0.]

Jon Kincaid’s Personality Crisis (also blog) is one of a handful of weekly WREK shows that I keep up with religiously. On the third Sunday of the month he closes the 2-hour show with an album in its entirety. Classic in Jon’s context means a seminal punk / no-wave / new-wave recording, typically from the 80s or maybe the late 70s. Past artists have included Green On Red, The Pretenders, Meat Puppets, etc.

So last Sunday he launches into the album (never preannounced, you just need to figure it out) and I immediately recognize the sound. That unmistakable roar of Fender guitars and sinewy bass lines. Band Of Susans!

It was a real shock to hear an old Band Of Susans record featured by Jon. I mean, I didn’t think that they were that important to rock music in general, although they certainly were important to me. Let’s fire up the old wayback machine, shall we?

I spent the last couple years of high school and the first year or so of college burning through the classic rock catalog. There’s all that data that any classic rock nerd is supposed to know, and I was just absorbing it all. Just the usual AOR crap, memorizing the output of Led Zep, AC/DC, The Police, Guns ‘N Roses, etc. and hearing all the stories (possibly apocryphal) about the rockstar antics of the aforementioned. Just nothing really interesting or threatening, but I think you do need to get through it to understand where the whole corporate radio machine stands so you can start to recognize what they’re leaving out (which is 99% of everything) and move on from there.

Don’t get me wrong, I still find myself entertained by a lot of that crap nowadays, but now it’s less of the aforementioned bands and more of T Rex, Blue Cheer, Cheap Trick, early Black Sabbath, etc.

So, anyway, by the 2nd year of college I’d bored of 96 Rock and moved on to dabbling in “college rock”. R.E.M., The Church, Concrete Blonde, Let’s Active, all fairly interesting to me at the time. So basically at this point I was plowing through the WRAS playlist, and that lasted about 6 months. I started to recognize that the WRAS DJs actually had less of a clue than me, and those little bonmots of info they had for each record (“the Sisters Of Mercy were formed by former members of the Mission”) were just being read off a little index card. Well, shit, I can do that, so in late 1988 I wandered into the studio of WREK and signed up for their little training. A few lazy months later, after some training sessions with Beth Stettler (who to my newly refined counterculture eyes was the cutest chick ever) I was suddenly on the air.

At WREK that means that you get to play pretty much whatever you want BUT you only get to select from the records that have been “programmed”, meaning preselected by some folks at WREK who have a musical clue. And right off the bat, my favorite band was Band Of Susans. To my male cockrock ears, those roaring guitars were just the most accessible. I made a cassette tape of that album, Love Agenda, put Steve Tibbets on the other side, and pretty much played that cassette over and over for about a year (the previous resident in the tape player probably having been my Rush tape, “Moving Pictures” or “Signals” or some such). You know how you’re so familiar with an album that you know what song’s next and start humming the opening notes in anticipation? Love Agenda was that album for me in 1989. From the ominous bass line in “Pursuit Of Happiness” that opens the album, to the chiming chords of “Tourniquet”, that album has some neural networks dedicated to it in my head somewhere.

I don’t really know much of their later albums, although the album that Jon played (“The Word And The Flesh”) sounded familiar enough to my ears. That’s the thing about working at WREK, or really any college radio station with a similar mission: you just find yourself suddenly confronted with this huge world of music that you didn’t know existed, and new music that is the greatest thing you’ve ever heard is quickly eclipsed by even more greatness.

Haven’t listened to them in many years, and I couldn’t find the cassette this week, so I must have thrown it out in a cleaning fit. Here’s to Poss and Stenger et al, I hope they’re doing well these days.

Our band could be your life: Jawbreaker

Note: I drafted this post in 2007 but as you can see I never finished it and I definitely never published it. In 2025, when Typepad shut down and I moved this entire blog to a new domain, I discovered this old post sitting here drafted. I am publishing it now as-is (backdated to 2007) to capture my notes, which are about the band Jawbreaker. It’s just a pile of thoughts, with snippets of lyrics, and honestly there’s a decent chance that I forgot about this draft and then wrote it up again (and published it) later. So this could totally be a duplicate. That said, here I go, pushing the publish button …

Unfun: Fine Day, Busy, Down,

I took my car and drove it down the hill by your house I drove so fast The wind it couldn’t cool me down so I turned it around and came back up from Chesterfield King off Bivouac

When it all comes down I can show you something you will not believe When it all comes down We’re gonna see a real masterpiece from the tense hardcore fury of Donatello off Bivouac

Seven hundred miles to play for fifteen angry men I need some sleep from Tour Song off Bivouac

This is Jennings, your anesthesist I think we’re going through the mouth from Outpatient off 24 Hour Revenge Therapy

We’re killing Each other By sleeping in Save Your Generation

Silly sugary propulsive pop punk

Fireman off Dear You

I dreamed we were still going out Had that one a few times now Woke up to find we were not It’s good to be awake

Most Jawbreaker songs are pretty much about relationships

tension, breakup, reconciliation, all the nail biting drama that goes with being friends or lovers with someone

but Dear You is this at its most condensed and concise. It’s somewhat buried in Rob Cavallo’s gigantic Corporate Rock bombastic production, with seventeen guitars and compressed drums, but the sentiments are still there and the lyrics still resonate. Still, it’s not very representative of Jawbreaker and not really how I like to remember them.

Adam and Blackball and reissues

Jets To Brazil

endgame: nirvana tour, signing with dgc, breakup

SIGNATURE

Posted on March 08, 2007 at 12:00 PM | Permalink

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haruspicy: In Roman practice inherited from the Etruscans, a haruspex (plural haruspices) was a man trained to practice a form of divination called haruspicy, hepatoscopy or hepatomancy. Haruspicy is the inspection of the entrails of sacrificed animals, especially the livers of sacrificed sheep. The rites were paralleled by other rites of divination such as the interpretation of lightning strikes, of the flight of birds (augury), and of other natural omens. (from Wikipedia)

This was one of the Round 3 words at the annual Atlanta spelling bee (aka Orthographic Meet) that was held last weekend. I’ve been going to it for a few years since my friend Ed Martin turned me on to it. Ed is a middle-aged man with a thick Southern drawl and a slightly goofy demeanor, but don’t let that fool you, he’s whip smart.

Now, this is not the kids spelling bee, and there’s nobody standing in front of a microphone. About a hundred or so literati gather at Manuel’s Tavern on the third Saturday in February and do their best at the 50 words that Ed and his overread pals have selected for that year. Four rounds, with only the highest scoring folks moving on from each round.

Round 1 examples: “gaffe”, “solder”, “concede”; all words that a reasonably smart person should be able to spell

Round 2 examples: “sagittal”, “foie gras”; “duende”; words that you’ve probably heard of but would have some trouble getting

Round 3 examples: “fractile”, “rhabdomancer”, “demesne” ; words that you’ve probably never heard of and so you’re just going to have to wing it based on the pronunciation and the definition

Round 4 examples: “sericious”, “ajimez”, “balmacaan”; words that are just impossible to spell. Often they’ll be of non-English origin (frequently Arabic, damn transliteration!) but have somehow wormed their way into the English dictionary. Perhaps you’ll get lucky with a word that you’ve heard of — one year they had “shanachie” which would be familiar to folk musicians both by the definition and the fact that it’s the name of a record label. But probably you’ll just stifle a groan and reach for your beer.

I go every year just hoping to A) get through Round 1 without embarrassing myself and B) make it through Round 2. I think that happened once. Otherwise we just sit around and drink and wonder about the lives of the folks that make it to the last round …

Here are the 2000 and 2001 words, with sound files so you can give it a shot yourself. See you at Manuel’s in 2008!

It should be fun (read: nauseating) to watch Congress in the coming days and months.

The days after Election Day 2004 were terribly depressing for me personally, because most of the items below were known problems before the election, and yet Bush still got reelected. A system that is supposed to have checks and balances, is supposed to correct itself, failed to do so and so four years of rampant destruction to the fabric of our society were seemingly endorsed by the electorate. No amount of patching in the years to come can correct this. The damage is done.

Specifically, between Jan 2001 and Jan 2007, our government managed to pull off:

– Centralizing power within the executive branch to an unprecedented degree

– Attacking a sovereign country for no reason, with questionable intelligence and in a manner with which the military disagreed, and lying about it all

– Democrats inability to call a duck a duck and offer the clear and obvious answers to the endlessly repeated rhetorical question “why did we attack Iraq”? Answer: to liquidate the assets of our Treasury into private hands, now essentially completed.

– Squandering worldwide goodwill after the Sept. 11th attacks

– Isolating the State Department from the Iraq process and eliminating any hope that we could fix Iraq after we broke it, to paraphrase Colin Powell

– Placing on the Supreme Court two far-right justices, and stacking the lower federal courts with many more

– Cutting taxes during wartime, an unprecedented event, leading to a wrecked budget, hobbled middle class and endangered long-term economy

– Passing the PATRIOT Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, the Medicare Drug bill, the Bankruptcy bill (hideous,all) and a number of massive tax cuts

– Rolling back and/or refusing to enforce a host of basic regulatory protections

– Appointing industry officials to oversee regulatory agencies

– Defunding the preparation budget of FEMA, leading years later to the disastrous Katrina response.

– Establishing a greater role for religion through faith-based initiatives

– Passing Orwellian-titled legislation assaulting the environment — “The Healthy Forests Act” and the “Clear Skies Initiative” — to deforest public lands, and put more pollution in our skies

– Refusing to face up to global warming and doing pathetically little about the country’s dependence on foreign oil

– Distorting elections by the 3 to 1 money advantage of Republicans, an impressive turnout machine driving ultra conservative voters to polls, and election machine fraud obvious to any technical observer

– Violating the wiretapping (telecommunications) laws

– Violating the FISA laws

– Torturing of enemy combatants in violation of everything we stand for

– needlessly capitulating in the Microsoft anti-trust case

– liquidation of our civil liberties as demonstrated by Guantanamo, Padilla, NSA wiretaps, and so on.

– Careful neutering of the mainstream press, using access to “unnamed government sources” to manipulate them into publishing and substantiating the administration’s lies, using “embedded reporters” to distort objectivity and serve military interests,

– “Extraordinary rendition” allowing us to see that our enemies (er, the administrations enemies, hmmmm) are sent to foreign countries where they can be tortured in secret prisons. Case after case of citizens secreted away from their home countries to be tortured, on the basis of what rule of law?

Casualties: the rule of law, our civil liberties, our belief in our own democracy.

Drag, isn’t it?

I’m just sayin’, it’s good sometimes to take stock of how far we’ve come.

When I started this blog 2 years ago, it was so I could write down some things that have been bouncing around in my head for years. Things like basic principles of good engineering, observations on people and the world, maybe the occasional rant (I’m saving one for Election Day). I haven’t much gotten to those long-form pieces yet, and instead up to now it’s been mostly travelogue pieces and other short posts.

My mother died last week.

She was in a car accident, got banged up but thought she was fine and so refused medical attention, and then proceeded with her day. But she had bleeding in her brain, and as the day wore on (at work!) she got groggy, was taken to a hospital, fell into unconsciousness and then into a coma. She passed away a couple days later, by which time the whole family had gathered at her hospital bedside.

She was a force of nature, and was an unforgettable presence for anyone who knew her. Raised in Germany as the runt of the family, she emigrated to the US on her own pretty much as soon as she could, continued her nascent dental career here, met my father and started a family. She ran the household, ran the finances, ran us through school, ran her career as a dental hygienist (and occasional artist) and ran whatever else needed running.

After getting divorced in 1985, she established her own home in Lambertville, a masterpiece of a house by all counts. She had worked with the contractor to adjust the design per her desires, and the house became a huge personal statement. Beautiful, open, lush … it was and is my mom’s place. She continued raising my littlest sister there until she left for college and the world in the mid-90s. Then, after her third and final heart surgery, she really seemed to bloom and started pouring her energy into all sorts of things.

We talked many times about how she was envious of my career as an engineer; she was always so interested when I started explaining technical things. Just like her son, she was meticulous and thorough in her work and life, to the point of appearing nearly anti-social (but not as much as her son …). So much to do, no time for chit chat! If she’d been born later maybe she’d have followed the same career path that I did. In recent years I’ve been looking for Iridum flares and she really took to that, even finding some herself on clear evenings.

She demanded excellence from me as a child, which was pretty tough going because although I was damn smart, I was also damn lazy. Seems like I was always getting in trouble for blowing off some big school project until the last minute, which gave her grief to no end. This continued pretty much into college, with me skating along on my smarts (and test performance, including blistering SAT scores) and getting middling grades. Finally in my third year of college, after nearly flunking out and spending a dreary six months back at home living with Mom and working some deadend job, the proverbial lightbulb turned on in my head and I started taking charge of my own life, and haven’t look back since. How do you thank your parents for putting you through college? By taking advantage of the opportunity, and I’ve tried to do that. I often think about what motivates me to keep doing the non-work activities that I do, such as [formerly] helping to run WREK and [lately] helping to run Eyedrum, not to mention other smaller deeds. My parents gave me a stable childhood and a good education, with no trauma to put me in therapy or otherwise bind me up in tangles of self-doubt or indifference. And so I’ve tried to use that good start to plow forward and get stuff done with my life.

It was in recent years that she really seemed to be coming into her own. All three children were raised and successful, she’d paid off the mortgage on the house (that she designed), she’d found a lucrative job with a great employer, and was starting to think about retirement. But retirement always seemed to be getting put off, because she loved work so much. And it wasn’t just “work” work, it was doing things for other people. Somebody at the Oct. 22nd gathering at her house (nearly a hundred people showed up) said that my mother had this ability to make you think that you were the most important person in the world to her. So many people had stories of her bending over backwards to help them, whether it was building and painting theater set backdrops, or driving a friend to and from chemotherapy, or just getting together for lunch once a month to talk. But she was private about a lot of these activities, so we (the kids and ex-husband) really had no idea about it all until we started calling through her Rolodex last week. We just knew Mom was always on the move.

Two weeks from today she was supposed to come down to Atlanta and visit me and Sharon for a long weekend. Finally she would see for the first time the elaborate stained glass piece that she had made for me (did I mention that she sold stained glass?!) installed in the custom window box that I’d designed as part of our house renovation of July 2004. I was going to finally take her to Eyedrum, where a new sound-based show is opening in mid-November. We had a yard project all ready for her — it was a running joke in our family that you better have some big project ready for mom when she visited because she was definitely going to do *something*. I’d already bought tickets to the Georgia Aquarium, an afternoon trip which surely was going to get us talking about our week-long trips to the Georgia barrier islands, some 15-20 years ago, to patrol the beaches for nesting loggerhead sea turtles. We’d talk about the trip to the Galapagos Islands that I had promised to her just last month upon her 65th birthday; it seemed like my mom had been dreaming about going there for decades, and suddenly last month it occured to me that *I* needed to take her there. So that was going to be my 2008 trip.

So obviously I wanted more time with my mom. We always want more time. But I also remember, growing up, how my mom’s heart condition was always in our consciousness, whether it manifested itself as her being tired and winded after [deservedly] scolding me for some offense, or heading into open-heart surgery as she did about every 10 years. The specter of being a motherless child seemed to be there, always, until after we’d all grown up and it seemed that, in fact, she was going to live forever. She made it to 65! Instead of being robbed of the future years, it’s almost like we got 20-30 extra years. Years during which she re-established herself in her own household, forged an incedibly close and warm relationship with her youngest daughter, got to share in the joy of the first grandchild, and watch her family blossom around her.

Last week was full of sharp, sobbing grief. This week has the constant undercurrent of dull, lonely pain. There’s a huge hole in my life now, and forever. I’m settling back into my regular life, listening to music, watching TV, even laughing occasionally, but there’s still that hole there.

God, I miss her so much.

Bye, mom.

Update Dec 5th: Added pictures. It’s almost two months later and it’s still a shock. Not a day, an hour, goes by without me thinking “damn, I’d love to tell my mom about that”. Without seeing her in some random detail of the world.

Note: I drafted this post in 2006 but I guess I never finished it and I definitely never published it. In 2025, when Typepad shut down and I moved this entire blog to a new domain, I discovered this old post sitting here drafted. I am publishing it now as-is (backdated to 2006) to capture my thoughts, but please be aware that it is unpolished, both in the writing itself (e.g. grammar) and in the tone (e.g. maybe I said something offensive that I would have edited out later). That said, here I go, pushing the publish button …

WREK is in the news lately, so I guess it’s about time I dump the WREK treatise out of my head.

I started at WREK in the fall of 1988, having been at Georgia Tech for a couple years by then. I was in the middle of a rapid evolution of my musical tastes, which had started with the typical pop radio / classic rock corporate crap in high school and the first year or two of college, winding through the corporate “new music” (e.g. Smithereens, Living Color), spending about 6 months blowing through standard college radio WRAS-style pop rotation at the time (Mission UK, Robyn Hitchcock, etc.), and ending up with an enormous appetite for MORE. WREK happened to be the station at my college so I dove in and discovered a world of music … beyond rock. Sufi chant, free jazz, ambient noise, 20th century composition, all in addition to the more approachable fare of old school HC, electronic, bebop, and so forth.

And as I’ve heard others say so many times over the years, WREK changed my life. It inducted me into a music and culture underground that you would have no idea existed … I ended up spending the next 8 years deeply involved with the operation of the station, but by 1996, graduating with my second degree, I decided to quite cold turkey and just be a regular listener, a consumer. Well, 3 years later I could stand it anymore, it was obvious the station was falling apart (more on why later). So in 1999 I dove back in, this time more as a professional engineer and project manager who was determine to Make Shit Happen, and for the next 3 years I busted ass and practically rebuilt the whole station. I took a station that was heading towards the dumpster and, with the help of 3 other guys, converted it back into the functional juggernaut that I remembered. We fixed equipment, built new systems, set up operational processes, and basically made the place work again.

In 2002 I started a new job and again I said goobye to WREK. This time I was more deeply entangled, so I couldn’t just quit, I had to slowly shed all of my roles, and after about 2 years that was done. I still do a handful of things for WREK, but generally they are a few low-maintenance technical tasks that I hold onto only because it would be far more work for me to explain them than to just keep doing them. Generally these are tasks that will be retired over time anyway so it’s not like it’s an open-ended commitment. And the one bit of “fun” work that I do at WREK is the monthly Eyedrum radio show, which makes for a neat tie-in between my old hobby (WREK) and my new hobby (Eyedrum).

WREK is definitely dying. The staff of WREK (of my halcyon days of 1988-1994) was far more engaged in the music scene, far more active in Getting Shit Done, far more engaged in life. These days everybody seems to be sleepwalking through their lives, and I’ve attributed to the following things.

1. College radio doesn’t attract motivated people to work there anymore. Up until the mid 90’s, the only way to be exposed to independent/alternative music was to be involved in the local scene — listen to the local noncommercial radio, go out to shows at clubs, read zines, and so forth. People that really wanted to express themselves had to do it by publishing zines, working in college radio, promoting shows, playing in bands. But with the advent of the web in the mid-90’s, most of that energy coming from the urge to express oneself flowed into the internet — home pages, internet discussion forums, even net radio. Obviously blogs and Myspace were still to come. So the people who were really driven to get involved in the scene had an outlet for expression, and they are no longer driven to college radio (and the other outlets I mentioned). So what’s left? The average losers who walk in the door to get on the radio ’cause they think hearing their voice on the radio sounds cool. That quality person does not make for a well-run radio station, it makes for one that slouches its way through life.

2. We now have the Playstation Generation in schools. Now, this is definitely going to make me sound like a cranky old geezer, but kids really are getting dumber and less capable of independent thought. They’ve had their entertainment spoon fed to them through their vibrating video game controllers and Sidekicks, and that creates a person who can’t take an empty canvas and create something new with it. It’s all one collosal shrug now.

3. The drinking age went up to 21. This happened back in the mid-80s, so it obviously isn’t anything new like the internet, but it created a definite braking effect on the scene. The average college student is under 21 and can’t get into the clubs where most of the music scene is being played out. Yes, there are alternative venues and all-ages shows, but the bread and butter of the scene is happening night after night in the over-21 clubs.

I don’t think any of these things are reversible. College radio, even radio itself, had its day in the sun and the sun is setting; real creative expression has moved on to other outlets. We’ve got a great infrastructure in place so certainly we can milk if for all its worth, and try to keep the remaining faded gems of radio (including WREK) going as long as possible, but it’s just postponing the inevitable. WREK, if it continues to exist at all, will eventually revert to the echo chamber of frat boys playing “new music” for their buddies, or just get taken over completely by the fine folks in “public” radio. Perhaps not this year but soon enough.

Some people currently (or recently) at WREK will read this and complain that things are fine, but I don’t think they have the hindsight to see what’s missing: – there’s no effort to feature recordings of local music; there are some great ways to implement this but nobody cares anymore – no real effort – no more promos for weekly shows like Earwhacks – oh wait, they cancelled Earwhacks (an album in its entirety) altogther, golf clap – hardly any Sunday Specials, virtually none outside of my own monthly show

Some folks recently asked me about my opinion of the WREK events, and I’ve basically told people that my opinions are too dark and I’d rather not say.

But it’s not dead yet! So tune in while you still can and soak it all in. It’ll be replaced with morning shows and Nickelback and marketing-driven fare soon enough.

To get you started, I’ll post some highlights of WREK’s programming soon. Shows that I listen to religiously every week.

or Seven Thousand Of My Closest Friends

I bought tickets to this 3-day event as soon as I heard about it back in June. Bought airline tickets, flew up, paid for hotel … I’m a yuppie, and a hypocritical one at that since I used to sneer at all the nostalgic punk rock tours that are perpetually coming through Atlanta.

Bands not mentioned I either didn’t care to see (in lieu of actually seeing a bit of Chicago) or didn’t inspire anything in me.

For TONS more pics, go to Flickr and search for “[bandname] chicago”, like these pictures of Pegboy.

Friday Girls Against Boys — I walked into the festival a couple minutes before 7pm (on time to see GvsB) to hear the MC announcing that they were going to play VLN1B … in its entirety, from beginning to end. Now, I realize that this band is not the most punk rock thing out there, but that album was one of those perfect masterpieces from that time, largely due (I think) to the engineering prowess of Eli Janney (at left in photo). And he seemed to be enjoying himself most of all, especially in his embarrassment at not being able to sing …

Ted Leo + Pharmacists — I’ve been reading great things about TL/Rx for years but have never bothered to go see him, or couldn’t for whatever reason. Solid, enjoyable indie pop rock, kind of a Jam sound, lots of energy, definitely a pro. A++++++++

!!! aka Chk Chk Chk — Aw geez there’s an awful lot of indie rock hipster posturing about this band, pro and con. It’s funny how when a band really figures out how to push an audiences buttons, everyone gets all upset. They’re all over that dance punk sound that’s all the rage these days, practically full-on disco. But damn they put on a good show, mostly due to the magnetic frontman and his uproariously goofy dance style. Solid sweaty entertainment although it’s pretty much empty calories. They are going to make a boat load of money over the next 18 months, ga-rawn-teed.

Saturday

Uzeda — A really great performance. The band’s sound is pretty much a perfect copy of the Jesus Lizard, including the Travis Bean guitar and menacing bass. Except it was all played by four older grinning Sicilians, and the vocals were by the [female] Giovanna Cacciola. Quite intense and moving, including in particular her brief heartfelt thanks to the crowd for the opportunity to play. Just a simple, great set by a band obviously relishing the moment. Here are more pictures from Flickr.

Pegboy — Holy crap what a riot! I expected this band to have the tighest set, what with John Haggerty at the wheel and the Naked Raygun history and all, but turned out to be the most sloppy fun of them all. Larry Damore walked onto the stage to announce that he was drunk (at 2pm) and proceeded to demonstrate it. Absolutely hilarious insults volleyed back and forth with the crowd (and himself). I could have used a little bit less views of his substantial beer gut though. This was one of the few bands that I really came to see and they delivered a show worth the trip.

Didjits — Rick Sims, ladies and gentlemen! What a ham. Prowling across the stage with his gorgeous black SG, belittling the crowd (with a smirk) and tearing through a super set. I don’t remember the bass player from when I saw them 15 years ago at the Masquerade, but maybe he just became more … memorable looking. Tattoos all the way up to his chin, and above his chin he was missing a few teeth. The drummer kicked ass too. A shining beacon of raw punk rock power. I would love to have video of this and Pegboy.

Negative Approach — John Brannon and Co croaks through an earnest set of hardcore bon mots. Well, the mohawk and leather kiddies were pretty happy. The poor things, they stuck out like a kick in the head, sulking around the place waiting for NA to play.

Scratch Acid — At this point, for the festival big guns, the place was fully populated with the sell-out crowd. Without being a rude sonofabitch I couldn’t get close enough to read the faces of Yow, Sims, Wesham and Bradford, what with all the scenesters in the way. But from what I could see they put on a good show, Bradford in particular was skittering all over the place (excepting the psychotic Yow, of course). Sims is great to watch anytime, and Washam … well, I couldn’t quite make him out. Jesus, it was like seeing Journey or some shit like that at the Omni, they were so small. Halfway through I left to go get something to eat and decompress my spine, but could hear them working diligently through the catalog. Stop eating my braaaaaaain!

Big Black — somewhat like seeing Nirvana in 1992, meaning it sucked, in that it seemed like everyone was there just because they’d heard it was cool, and whether the band was actually playing didn’t seem to matter much. Three songs, short and sweet. Yes, that is Jeff Pezzati playing bass.

Shellac — Hey look, another Travis Bean! But Albini’s TB is a rare model, so there. I got bored and left. I’ll try to catch them when they come through Atlanta, since I’m told they’re in good form lately. I just couldn’t bear the see-and-be-seen crowd anymore, nor the distance from anything worth seeing.

Sunday

Seam — One of the bands that I was really here to see. They put out an album on T+G called “The Problem With Me” which apparently everyone liked but that came after my time. I was more into their early singles, and they played them all. That’s the crazy thing about this whole event: typically with these bands that have been together for a long time, you go in hoping that the band will at least play a couple of your favorite songs, and in the case of this festival they’ve been playing them ALL. Every damn one. I mean, I don’t bother going to Superchunk shows anymore because these days they barely play the stuff I care about. Aaanyway, the crowd was very much into the Seam performance, and I didn’t hurt myself jumping up and down like an idiot.

Brick Layer Cake — Todd Trainor is a god. That’s pretty much it. OK, that’s not it. Brilliant sarcastic skewering of the rock scene, I was in stitches the whole time. At the end he mentioned that he was playing Bill Grebe’s guitar (“legendary”), but I don’t know who that is, or if I got the spelling right or even if I recall the name right. I’d appreciate if anyone could fill me in.

Calexico — Critical faves, I hear. Pretty much what I expected. Pleasant southwestern shuffle, low impact adult rock. The lead guy’s extolling of T+G and Chicago felt a little forced; I think they haven’t actually been on T+G very long, so they’re a bit of a fish out of water here. Anyway, they did fit well into the lower key feel of the third day of the festival. I recognized the pedal steel player (at right in photo here, playing regular guitar), I think because he toured with Kurt / Lambchop a while back. [does some googling] Yeah, it’s Paul Niehaus.

Other bands played, but I either missed them or gave a mighty shrug. I fail to see the talent in Pall Jenkins and any of that San Diego “pop” stuff. Gimme a John Reis band any day.

In all, an unbelievably great, friendly, groundbreaking event. Well run on all fronts. Best $35 I ever spent!