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Words to Live By.
Published on Jul 25, 2010 - In: Uncategorized
From the introduction to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
So I broke my vow of steady updates until September. I put an honest effort out there to do it, and I’m going to keep putting forth the effort to update the blog everyday.
Last night I played with my old band Glaze (notice the link) at Stella Blue. The show, from what I have been told, was pretty good. My bass sounded about as good as I’ve ever heard it last night. It had this nice deep thumb with just enough Mike Watt-like growl to it.
Now that the show is over, I honestly feel like crap. I think I over extended myself yesterday with stress, adrenaline and a pretty overwhelming and uncompromising amount of heat and my body still hasn’t recovered. I feel nauseous, tired, and my knee and ankle are swollen up. I don’t know what is wrong with me, but it is seriously ruining my weekend.
I have a mountain of photographs and video to pour through so to post here, so check back later on and hopefully it’ll all be up.
Until then, be good.
Dream Boogieing with Sam Cooke
Published on Jul 16, 2010 - In: Books|Project Fridays|music
Music biographies (and to an extent, biographies in general) are kind of masturbatory if you know a bit about the subject. I know about Sam Cooke- gospel singer, switched to pop, huge star, “Bring It On Home to Me”, shot in a hotel room, the dominant force in soul music, and hero to Bobby Womack, Lou Rawls and Rod Stewart. But then I read Peter Guralnick’s excellent Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke and was completely blown away by the man.
I’ve loved Sam Cooke for a long time (specifically since I found out that he was the singer of “Wonderful World” and “Cupid”), but recently with the help of this book I was able to really get a grasp of what made him so special.
Musically the guy was gifted. He simultaneously took the black Gospel experience, melded it with a little Harry Belafonte-like calypso and some light rock and roll and created out of thin air a form of black music that was in an attractive enough package for white America to digest. To read about this happening and also to hear it in his music is grounds enough to count him as an all-time great, but to read about what Cooke did away from the spotlight is pretty damn Herculean.
Segregation was a horrible thing. But one of the things that happened as a result of segregation (to an extent) was a simultaneous black culture in America that existed independently of white America. Dream Boogie showcases this. There was a Afro-centric news wire (the ANP- Associated Negro Press), black operated newspapers in every major city, and the much vaunted black club scene across America and Sam was in the middle of all of these.
In fact, Sam seemed in the middle of most of black culture in America in the 1950s until his death in 1964. He bubbles up with Little Richard, meets the Beatles, tours with Aretha Franklin and a very young Gladys Knight, and even cuts a single with Cassius Clay (he wasn’t Muhammed Ali just yet). The guy was, as Reggie Jackson said about himself a decade later, the straw that stirred the drink.
So today I decided to share with everyone a Sam Cooke song. It’s not “Bring It On Home to Me”, or one of his bubblegum smashes. Instead, it’s “Nothing Can Ever Change This Love”, which might be as good a song as “Bring It On Home to Me”. Listen to Sam’s voice as he sings it- it’s barely tethered to Earth, and yet there is still a little dirt and grit around the edges. He belts out huge whoa-oh-ah-ohs that take your breath away and holds other words and phrases inside of his mouth, almost chewing on them until the right timbre is hit. I’ve never seen a Picasso, I’m not able to watch land being formed as lava reaches the sea, and I’ve never seen life created in front of me, but I have heard Sam Cooke’s voice, which is as close to the creator as an atheist like myself will ever get.
Sam Cooke- Nothing Can Ever Change This Love
Until tomorrow, be good.
Greater Than a Throw Pillow and Less Than a Child
Published on Jul 14, 2010 - In: Jessica
Tonight while hanging out with Jessie and some friends who have dogs at the dog park, I was told that we were invited to a dog birthday party. The owner of the dog (who seems like a perfectly sweet and nice person) was renting out a piece of land in Jackson County and going to have a ton of dogs at the place.
That’s right, a birthday party for dogs.
Don’t get me wrong. I like dogs. I even like the poorly behaved dogs and the emotionally needy asshole dogs that I know. But at the end of the day I know that my dogs are dogs. They don’t have thumbs. They are afraid of thunder. They are great companions, but people they are not.
I get why people treat dogs like children; in fact I’m seeing it right now with our new puppy Samson. When you first get a dog, it is exactly like having a child. It needs help with everything and you end up a prisoner in your own home dealing with shit and piss. The love that you receive from the animal in return is pretty nice, but in essence they are children in that moment. But every time I want to go overboard with my affection for my dogs I do have to remind myself that they simply aren’t people.
I hope that this doesn’t make me seem cold or callous. I’m really not trying to be. I just don’t think that dogs should have birthday parties. They aren’t children, and I don’t know how else to put it.
If the doggie birthday bash is one extreme, I see the other extreme daily. In the meth house just up the street from me the people who live there have a really cute boxer/pit bull mixture (imagine that- white trash in Western NC having a boxer/pit). From what I can tell the poor dog just sits chained up outside of their house under a tree all day long. Nobody plays with it. Nobody takes it for walks. Nobody does anything but to tell the dog to stop whining for attention when the owner is outside. The poor dog must have Chili and Samson, because I know that it can see Jessie and I playing with our dogs, walking them and making them companions. I feel so bad for that dog, but I don’t know what I can do to help it.
I sometimes want to go yell at the meth addict assholes and remind them that their dog isn’t just a decoration. It isn’t some prop to reinforce your lifestyle or self-image.
So there’s my rant on how to treat dogs. I hope people read this and see my point. I hope anyone thinking of owning a dog who stumbles upon this blog will take my advice- treat your dog like something in between a throw pillow and a baby. That’s the best thing that you can do.
Until tomorrow, be good.
While doing my daily scan of Pitchfork, the one-stop hub of cool kids not wanting anyone to sit at their section of the music opinion lunch room, I noticed that the site is looking for freelance music reviewers. I hate to say it, but I’m intrigued.
I guess what I’m wondering after looking through their criteria for applicants, do you the readers of The Bugg Blog think that I am Pitchfork material? I’ve long strayed from the sort of uber indie personality that Pitchfork covets, but I’m tempted to give it a whirl. The worst thing that can happen is that the website never emails me back, I guess.
So help me out, people. Tell me your favorite of my published material (you know, the stuff that is so adeptly labeled under the title “Pimpage”).
Thanks for your support.
Computer issues
Published on Jul 12, 2010 - In: news
Namely a anti-virus scan that has been a long time coming is keeping me from finishing my long piece on economics that I had planned for tonight. Maybe you’ll get two blogs tomorrow.
I’ve been holding in a gigantic soccer rant since the World Cup started (in what seems like) a lifetime ago. I loathe soccer. Actually, I guess that’s not true. I don’t mind the actual sport; I just treat it as I treat any sort of children’s organized sport/women’s basketball- it’s really fun to watch the participants try to be athletic and the game to be engaging, but it’s even more fun to watch how red-faced and idiotic the people who defend said sports tend to sound.
Look, I get it- you either have a hard on for all things Europe or you hated the people who played real sports growing up. I know it was hard for you to use your hands to dribble, pass, throw or hit the ball, but don’t take baseball off of ESPN for a month because of it.
But anyways, in the name of fairness and in the spirit of sport I tried to watch the final game today between Spain and the Netherlands. What I saw was an endless ping pong match between the teams: the soccer ball flew in the air back and forth and each time it hit the ground, a player would fall down (whether or not he’d been touched) and the referee guy would give a yellow playing card to the other team. It was like Magic: the Gathering, only a tad more effeminate.
Seriously, there were more greasy-haired dudes diving than at a Greg Louganis look-alike contest. The only time I saw a guy actually get tripped up, the guy who did the tripping helped him up and gave him a hug once it was done. What the fuck was that?
But despite this crap, I gave it an honest go for the sake of my friend Miguel, who hates football and yet watches the Super Bowl every year. His father’s side of the family is from Spain and he had a horse in the race. I figured muscling through the game just because I knew it’d make him happy to have someone to talk about it later with would be the friendly thing to do. Dear lord I was miserable because of it. The next time I think about taking one for the team and doing something nice for someone, remind me instead to just run my arm over with a car instead. I hate soccer and I’m glad I don’t have to hear from the bottom feeding loser culture of soccer gimps for another four years about how I should try to enjoy a “match”.
On a brighter note, last night and today Jessie’s parents were in town. Last night, they came over to our house, ate dinner and stayed until nearly 11 talking and laughing with us. This morning, we all got up and left the house early to head up on the Blue Ridge Parkway to eat lunch at the Pisgah Inn together.
My normal joke about the Parkway is that I never went up on the road because I don’t like the outdoors, I had no girlfriend in my twenties, and I didn’t do drugs that often, thus negating any reason that I would have to travel on that road. But this morning it was beautiful up there. We stopped at a view overlooks and I just took it all in. I tried to count the layers of ridges and got dizzy, and had my breath taken away by some of the huge rocks just jutting up out of those green green mountains.
It was a lovely time and I’m so thankful I did it. Hopefully that was just the start of more mountain adventure. Sue and Dale (Jessie’s parents, whom I’m still not sure what to call them to their faces), were really fun. We traded stories and Dale and I even got confused when Jessie was speaking to her mother about the differences between the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians (we thought that the ladies were talking about woodchucks for some odd reason). I know the common comedy cliché is to bitch about the in-laws, but I’m not going to- and that’s not because Dale occasionally reads this blog- it’s because I like them.
Now I’m sweaty from my nightly walk with my wife and the dogs, and settling in for a nice long work week. Life is pretty sweet.
Until later, be good.
I go Gaga over Black Jesus
Published on Jul 9, 2010 - In: music
I live a quiet life that is made easier by turning the radio off. Occasionally something of merit will bubble up from the mainstream and force me to listen to it, and more often than not I find it interesting. The latest thing I’ve heard is Lady Gaga.
From what I gathered before I actually heard Lady Gaga was that she was a wacky singer who hung out with wonderfully gay men, dressed in outfits that made for silly looking pictures and did it all in the name of “art” or “shocking people” or something. I heard the Madonna comparisons, and read the interviews in Rolling Stone. But nothing prepared me for the veritable shit sandwich that I ingested once I finally heard the Lady who is Gaga.
Don’t get me wrong here: I’m not a Madonna fan. In fact, I think she has always fucking sucked and came across as less a singer and more of a slightly more talented proto-Kim Kardashian minus the looks. Madonna exists to shock and titillate those around us who don’t have to courage to find actual shocking and titillating things. So if Lady Gaga is deliberately lifting from this no-talent hack, imagine how untalented she seems to me.
Today has sucked
Published on Jul 8, 2010 - In: Uncategorized
Will post more tomorrow. Today I’m going to sit at my desk and just say “fuck” until I decide to go to sleep, which will be soon.
don’t quote them