I recieved this email the other day…
Jason –
President Obama turns 49 next week, and OFA supporters across the country are sharing in the fun.
Volunteers on the ground are holding birthday parties — and we’ll use the occasion to recruit new folks to join this grassroots movement that has helped President Obama so much throughout his first year and a half in office.
Here’s what we’re doing in Asheville:
Where: 951 Old Fairview Rd
Asheville, NC 28803
When: Wednesday, August 4th
5:30 pm
Can you make it?
No, but I’d like to sign a birthday card for the President.
No, but I want to see if there are other events near me.
No experience is necessary, and talking to potential volunteers is a fun way to spend some time.
Each volunteer we recruit will help get more first-time 2008 voters back to the polls in November — the centerpiece of our Vote 2010 plan. And with so much more on our agenda, and tight races from Florida to Alaska, we don’t have a moment to lose.
RSVP for the President’s birthday event in Asheville:
http://my.barackobama.com/BirthdayEvents
Thanks,
Jeremy
Jeremy Bird
Deputy Director
Organizing for America
Remember when every Democrat was frothing at the mouth about people “supporting our President on everything he does” when it was Bush? At least they weren’t throwing birthday parties for the moron.
Words to Live By.
From the introduction to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
Today has sucked
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.
Yay Nationalism!
Happy July 4th everyone. I’m going to go eat hot dogs, shoot illegal fireworks, and drink bourbon.
The Ones We Love the Best
Holy shit, The Hold Steady, you sure know how to work a guy over. Last Wednesday night Jessie and I made the drive from Sylva to Athens to catch your show at the 40 Watt Club and I was completely blown away by the show.
I knew what to expect walking into the concert- I own all of the band’s albums and had seen the band two times previously. But this show might have been better than the first time I saw them in 2006 at the Grey Eagle. Guitars played big open chords and bluesy leads, the bass and drums locked into a solid AC/DC-meets-Springsteen groove and lead singer Craig Finn ran about the stage doing his twitchy weirdo thing.
The highlights of the show for me personally were the songs from the band’s latest album Heaven is Whenever. I think it shows that the band has moved into a classic rock-ready machine that constantly turns out solid tunes. The songs from the band’s first two albums have always been decent to me, but have always felt like long rants instead of songs. Once the band figured out how to right great choruses, it was on.
Another big moment was talking to a couple of older guys at the front of the stage. They were in their late forties and in a band- but they weren’t all about recapturing their glory years. Instead they were playing music for the same reasons that I am- it makes them feel vital, and it helps them tap back into what rock and roll meant to them, and what it meant was on display at the show last week: sweat pouring, beer drinking, arms and legs flailing and still hitting the power chords on cue rock.
This is rock and roll, people.
The Facebook thing
It seems like everyone on the planet has a Facebook page, from idiots like Sarah Palin to awesome blogs like this one, and there seems to be no end in sight. For a lot of very practical reasons, the site is pretty darn useful. Bands don’t have to hang fliers anymore; I don’t have to remember birthdays or email addresses, and sometimes a cute girl that I knew in high school posts pictures of her in a bathing suit without her children in the picture. These are all completely awesome things, but there is a downside to Facebook. Sometimes Facebook makes me miss not being in touch with everyone.
Project Fridays: Elvis and Rock and Roll’s fleeting whatever
I love Elvis, I really do. I love Young Elvis and his innocent hick charm and “awww shucks” demeanor and the little grin that came over his face as the girls screamed for him on all of those old television shows. I love ’68 Comeback Elvis in his leather suit that tickled my grandma’s fancy. I even love Fat Elvis, with his tragic side, dependence on too much eyeliner and his big operatic voice. To put it mildly, Elvis is tops in my book. To say that there is someone more influential in rock and roll is absurd. Some may have done it better, some may have done it first, and some may have done it less than lily white but Elvis combined all of them into something revolutionary.
That’s what makes Movie Star Elvis such a strange figure to me.
Elvis’ post-Army/pre- ’68 Comeback years are riddled with bad movies, terrible soundtrack albums and all of the disdain that one artist can handle from critics while still being able to sell the man as the King of Rock n’ Roll. These years, spent churning out horrible teen comedy after teen comedy were never good, and with the exception of a few of them, largely forgotten today. The albums feature often lackluster performances by the King and throwaway songs.
So why do I love them so much?
I can see why this period of Elvis’ life might be even more tragic than his death to some- here’s a man denying what his honest-to-goodness gift in life was in order to chase fame and a large paycheck. Silly punk kids wondering about selling out- check out Movie Star Elvis. Gone is the vibrant young boy who shook his hips through scandal and straight into teenagers’ hearts and he has been replaced with the blank face and sad eyes of a doomed man. I can’t imagine that it was all sweetness and light around Graceland whiles this string of laughably bad films carpet bombed his once vibrant career.
Because this era is such an enigma to me (and because I love cheap CDs) I bought a copy of the soundtrack to Elvis’ 1965 film Girl Happy the other day. What I found upon popping the album into the player was a mixture of a little bit of “wow, this album is awesome” and an equal amount of “why the fuck would anyone in their right mind think that this was a good idea?”- a mixed bag to say the least. But I still can’t stop listening to it.
I know these songs don’t crackle the way that those Sun singles and that first album on RCA sounds, but this isn’t supposed to, because (wait for it) Elvis was done with rock and roll by 1965 (there’s a contentious statement for you, huh?).
Elvis (or at least his manager) saw rock and roll as a teenage fad, like we probably saw POGs or Dance Dance Revolution when they were the toast of the town. The real career for Elvis was as a film star. He was probably closer to Miley Cyrus than a lot of us would like to imagine. His films and soundtracks were rife with cheese and formula and the only reason that anyone cares about them today is because of the superhuman nature of Elvis’ talent and charm.
By 1965, the gig was up and Elvis’ movie career was fizzling out. Girl Happy! was among the last bits of Elvis in cinema, and while I can’t see it, I can say that the soundtrack is damn good. The title song is awesome and reminds me a bit of Help-era Beatles, but my favorite song is “The Ft. Lauderdale Chamber of Commerce”. It’ a slow, bossa nova-style tune that has great lyrics and a clunky (but awesome) melody. “The Girl from Ipanema” was the big song of 1965, and Stan Getz and Antonio Carlos Jobim’s fingerprints are all over this tune. Check it out here:
It may not be “Jailhouse Rock”, but it is a fun little song, and that’s about all one could ask for a supposedly retired rock and roller.
Later on, Elvis went back to rock and roll. Some material was great and other stuff showed that his time away had caused him to go from a wild corrupter of youth to a Neil Diamond clone. But he was still Elvis, even when crooning about a Florida business association over a Brazilian beat in a film made in California. Thus is the duality of the southern thing.
Until later, be good.
And we’re back!
First of all, I’d like to go ahead and warn anyone who reads this entry. It’s going to be scattered, not organized very well, and probably nowhere near as good as David Foster Wallace’s essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing That I’ll Never Do Again” that is about the same subject that I am about to write: going on a Caribbean cruise. Instead I am documenting, through my own memories and a journal that I sort of kept on the trip, everything I did. It starts somewhere in the air between Raleigh, NC and ends somewhere in Sylva, NC and travels a few hundred miles down the Florida coastline, around Cuba, to Grand Cayman island, into Ocho Rios, Jamaica and back around Cuba and right back into Florida and the U.S. of A.
So here goes a transcription of my vacation. I hope you like some part of it.
Oh my gosh, goulash!
For Christmas this year, I received mostly adult and utilitarian gifts- pants, shirts, shoes (sadly, no socks)- but there was one curious little gift that stood out amongst the piles of denim, cotton and poly blends: a packet- straight out of Budapest!- containing most of the ingredients for Hungarian Goulash.
Nothing about the package made sense when I received it from Jessie’s mother. I stared at it until she explained that those ingredients plus beef, an onion, a few carrots and potatoes would combine to make a meal. I mean look at it, it’s a tube of toothpaste, a few dried peppers, a package of something and a pouch that could be full of Angel Dust, but tonight my darling wife and I tried it out.
