One New York, Many Americas, and an Uncertain Future

There were at least three or four variations of American culture on display this weekend in New York, on Friday at Fashion’s Night Out and Saturday in the various ceremonies and protests around September 11. Friday night’s festivities spotlighted the culture that has emerged and become dominant over the course of several decades—a consumer culture that is paced by fashion’s cycles of instant gratification and planned obsolescence.

What has become the dominant American and global culture is a completely commercialized culture based in artifice, frivolity, and disposability, traits which the fashion world has always exemplified to the point of self-parody.Fashion makes the human necessity for clothing into a commodity fetish, thereby mocking the notion of use value in favor of pure exchange value inflated to spectacularly outrageous prices.

Today's fashion world collapses the conflicts that characterized the culture wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries between art and commerce, high culture and mass culture, and yet it is unabashedly elitist and exclusive, restoring an aristocratic culture of idol worship for celebrities and their lives of leisure. Though not democratic, it is certainly diverse, a culture that celebrates difference and ambiguity, especially in matters of gender and sexuality. Its aesthetic standards of beauty are synonymous with youth, and embodied by women with notoriously freakish genetics. Fashion is therefore at the center of capitalism’s consumer culture, and it is fueling the cultural changes that multiply the potential postures for individual identities, bodies, styles, and sexualities.

The following day, America’s residual cultures reemerged and argued tirelessly with each other in the streets of New York to commemorate the ninth anniversary of September 11, and to protest, and counter-protest, the proposed construction of a Mosque/Islamic cultural center near the original site of the World Trade Center. The area around Ground Zero became a political, religious, and ideological warzone engaging evangelical Christians, defenders of civil liberties, right-wing tea-baggers, left-wing conspiracy nuts, Muslims not only from the Middle East but from New York ghettos, apocalyptic doomsayers, xenophobic nationalists, and liberal multiculturalists into a bewildering fray of endless argumentation and accusation.

Forgive me for sounding like a Hilton or Kardashian, but one thing all these groups had in common was their lack of fashion and general unattractiveness. Caroline and I were secretly curious to check out the anti-Mosque crowd, and after having been at Fashion’s Night Out on the previous evening, one couldn’t help but notice how white, old, frumpy, and ridiculously out-of-place in New York City these people looked in comparison. The sense of fear and ignorance was overwhelming and made me angry after only a few minutes, but the crowd also provoked some unexpected feelings of pity within me. I mean, these people were just so ugly, and they looked so outdated in every way.

A number of journalists have written about how the Tea Party movement is recruiting among people who have lost their jobs and/or their homes in the economic recession and are pissed off but confused about who to blame. Walking with them on September 11th, I wondered if there wasn’t also a story about how they had also been rejected and rendered useless within the symbolic economy of fashion, consumption, and the body. The crowd waved their flags and bared their crosses in a predictably ugly manner, and they also carried a palpable sense of persecution and melodramatic claims to victimization—Caroline’s favorite image was of Jesus’ nailed and bloody wrist with salt being poured into the open wound, while mine was a tee-shirt that claimed the WTC site was “sacred ground” and implied that building a Mosque would make it a “symbol of conquest” for Islam.

In general, their ideological complaints about government, President Obama, Islam, terrorism, and the alleged persecution of Christian Americans are far too illogical, unfounded, and incoherent to be analyzed on their own terms. The feelings they express, on the other hand, are very clear: anger, fear, and an overarching claim to victimization. These people are yesterday’s news, and at some level they seem to know it. Their patriarchal institutions of marriage, family, and compulsory heterosexuality have collapsed from within; their “traditional” values are routinely violated by their most vocal proponents; their investments in God and country are rapidly losing their value under global capitalism; a generation of capitalists have stolen their money while openly mocking their work ethic; their ideal of small-town community has been reduced to nostalgic simulation.

There was a wide-ranging sense of paranoia and apocalyptic fantasy on all sides on September 11th, with the exception of the police and fire departments that clearly enjoyed their day of recognition and ceremonial tribute. We stopped to watch what sounded like an argument between a guy in a “9/11 Truth” shirt and an anti-Mosque tea-bagger over whether September 11 was the inside work of the Bush administration. Their vocal exchange had the loudness and ferocity of an argument, but it also looked like an emotional bond was forming between these men as they each mourned the growth of omnipotent powers and made their claims to victimhood.

And the tea-baggers weren’t the only ones clinging to outmoded values and obsolete ideas, either. Liberal defenders of multiculturalism, civil liberties, and religious freedom formed a counter-protest of their own with a predictable mix of signs, slogans, and passé style. These people clearly hadn’t learned the lessons of Fashion’s Night Out: their ideals of democracy, citizenship, and political activism are irrelevant in the global capitalism of the twenty-first century and amount to little more than decidedly unglamorous styles of posing and posturing.

Returning home to Caroline’s place at 141st and Broadway took us into West Harlem and yet another enduring form of American culture, one that has been shaped by poverty, violence, and widespread social deviance since masses of black people starting coming to New York during the Great Migration of World War I. Outside the window of Caroline’s apartment, we watch elderly Puerto Rican and Afro-American men playing dominos and heard them yelling at each other in mixtures of Spanish and English as money was won and lost. Groups of dark-skinned youths openly smoke blunts in the street without giving a second thought to getting busted. Young children yell and run up and down at the street at 2 o’clock in the morning with minimal parental supervision.

For nearly one hundred years, this neighborhood has nurtured and preserved a culture of defiance that white authorities have treated as pathological insofar as they have been unable to completely domesticate and assimilate its impoverished inhabitants. Today, the signs of gentrification are only just beginning to appear: one minute Caroline and I are watching a young man clowning in the streets to a beat that only he seems to be able to hear, and the next minute we are approached by a white woman walking a golden retriever who asks if we’ve seen the litter of poor little kittens scampering around the street lately.

With its beats, rhymes, and air of defiance, the street culture of Harlem is in a far better position to be recognized and integrated through commercial exploitation into the symbolic economy and culture of our future. The occasion of September 11th summoned the anger and fear of a people in decline, but if the tragedies of the twentieth century taught us anything, it is that we must beware of the ugly little people in decline who come outfitted in flags and crosses to cover over their secret racial fears and sexual hang-ups. These people who literally feel “left behind” have fantasies of the apocalypse on their collective mind, and although they are probably destined to become the laughingstocks of history, we shouldn’t doubt their resolve to turn their version of the end of the world into a reality before they slide, kicking and screaming, into social insignificance.

"On Becoming a Punk Rock Sociologist"

I've been asked to write an autobiographical essay for an anthology about punk and academia. No idea when it will see the light of day, or more accurately the dust of the library, so I'm putting it here too.

I was born in Long Beach, CA and raised in the adjacent city of San Pedro, graduating from San Pedro High School in 1988. I’d like to be able to tell you all about how I was influenced by our hometown heroes, the Minutemen, or Black Flag or the Descendents or any of the other hardcore bands that emerged from the nearby cities of Los Angeles’ South Bay at this time. I can imagine a really good story about how the radical politics and do-it-yourself ethic of the local hardcore scene would inspire me to become the Marxist sociologist I am today. However, that story would be a lie, because the truth is that my paths to both punk rock and radical sociology were never that direct or linear, and I’m just not that cool.

In high school I was a devout partisan of thrash metal bands like Slayer, Metallica, Anthrax and a couple dozen others with a more limited following. By the second half of the 1980s the California hardcore scene had fizzled out. There was this one punk dude who had “Minor Threat” written on the jacket he wore to school every day, but I didn’t know anything about them because the only people I hung out with were other longhairs and stoners. Still, there was a lot of punk influence in thrash metal, which was less about devils and dragons and more about indicting real world authorities, creating a local scene with indie record labels, and maintaining a veneer of authenticity that mocked the posturing and pomposity usually associated with heavy metal.

My headbanging roots notwithstanding, I almost voted for George Bush in the first election I was old enough to vote in, until my mother talked me out of it at the last minute. Like many other metalheads, I was personally rebellious but my half-baked political views amounted to nothing more than simple, knee-jerk libertarianism. I was entranced by power, enthralled by violence, and envious of wealth, and I also hated people I thought were weak or dependent, so it probably isn’t surprising that I almost voted for Bush.

I had begun college during that fall of 1988, as my parents were eager for me to leave my troublemaking metal friends behind and move north to attend San Jose State University. It wasn’t long before I found myself in classes taught by veterans of the New Left. One of them was Professor Douglas Dowd, who had been part of the Monthly Review editorial team with Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy and cofounded the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. Dowd would typically begin his classes in Microeconomics with some thoughts about Marx or Ricardo before launching into a series of tirades that indiscriminately covered everything from the wastefulness of capitalism to the insanity of war and nationalism to the cruelty of child labor. This 70-plus year-old man would yell and point and curse and then stop suddenly, look out the window, and silently shake his head while muttering something about the insanity of our world. Many of the students in class were horrified and stopped attending after the first two weeks, but I was captivated. One day Dowd recited the lyrics to John Lennon’s “Imagine” and asked the class if that sounded like the kind of world any of us would want to live in, and I was the only student to raise my hand. “Then you’re a God-damn Communist!” he shouted at me.

O.K., so I guess I’m a Communist now. This was admittedly a major political about-face, but to this day I think my metal roots and cultural rebelliousness prepared me to embrace this stigmatized, marginalized political identity. I had grown up in a working-class seaport with a vague sense that the world wasn’t right, and now I was engrossed in my education to try and understand why. I was listening to the Bay Area’s progressive radio station KPFA and reading everything I could get my hands on, especially Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. My identity and style morphed from headbanger to something like a retro countercultural radical as I became absorbed in Todd Gitlin’s The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage and anything else I could read or watch about the 60s, Students for a Democratic Society, and the counterculture.

I enrolled in a social theory class the following semester, and it was there that I read Marx for the first time and met my friend Mike Roberts, who today is also a sociology professor at San Diego State. Mike and I started a left campus organization and worked on publishing a newspaper that was unfortunately sabotaged by some other students just before it was about to be printed. Our social theory professor, Talmadge Wright, had also started a group called the Student Homeless Alliance that we became involved with. This was late 1990, and the United States was gearing up for our first war with Iraq, so Mike and I began working with other campus activists to create an anti-war coalition and organize an anti-war demonstration. I experienced my first 15 seconds of fame when my speech commencing the demonstration was sound-bitten for the local TV news.

At this time I knew a lot of people who were into punk rock, but my tastes hadn’t progressed that far yet. Some of my friends regularly made trips up to Berkeley to go to the Gilman Street club, but I never went. They played Dag Nasty, Green Day, and Big Drill Car for me but I absolutely hated all that melody. I thought it was cool that Bad Religion could reference Noam Chomsky and the like, but to this day their singer’s voice drives me crazy. One of my roommates was really into Fugazi, and although they’ve since become one of my favorite bands they just didn’t compute to me at that time. What my metal years had prepared me for was grunge and the whole Sub Pop/Seattle scene, so of course I took to Mudhoney and Soundgarden almost instantly. And then more locally there was Primus, Mr. Bungle, Psychefunkapus, the Limbomaniacs, and a bunch of other bands that formed a metal-funk-punk scene in the Bay Area.

By now my career goals had changed such that I wanted to go to graduate school and hopefully grow up to be a tenured radical like my professors. UC Santa Cruz was known to have a lot of Marxist and radical faculty members, especially in the sociology department, and so I transferred there in the fall of 1991. I did an internship with Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, the journal of Marxist ecology founded by James O’Connor, and worked with the Bay Area activist Frank Bardacke on a project about farmworkers. Other than that, however, there were a lot of people who talked radical politics at UC Santa Cruz but there wasn’t a lot of action, a possibly intentional result of the campus’ relatively isolated location in the mountains of central California. I joked with friends: what if a bunch of students demonstrate in the forest and there is no TV crew there to film them, do they make a sound? My only brush with revolution was accidentally getting hit in the side of the head with some sort of firecracker on the night of the Rodney King riots as the Santa Cruz students marched into town and trashed the local police department headquarters.

Nirvana’s Nevermind came out during my first semester at Santa Cruz. I remember that for weeks I would walk around the dorms and count how many rooms were blaring “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or some other song from the album. I knew it was a really big deal when the dreadlocked hippie kids who spent all day playing hacky sack and, as far I knew, listened to nothing but reggae and the Grateful Dead were suddenly talking about how much they wanted to see Nirvana when they came to San Francisco. The next two years or so would represent the pinnacle of the alternative rock/Lollapalooza era. Then the questions began: Did Nirvana sell out? Is alternative the new mainstream? Did I really just see a runway model wearing Doc Marten’s? Does anyone know anyone who likes to be called “Generation X”? Did that douchebag on the TV really just tell me that the new Subaru Impreza is just like punk rock?

At Santa Cruz I took a great class in the history of U.S. imperialism in Central America, read the Frankfurt School for the first time, and wrote research papers about the Black Panthers, American foreign policy, and the Wobblies. But by this time I had also been introduced to cultural studies, both in my courses on mass media and popular culture and in my conversations with activists who were influenced by identity politics and postmodernism. My relationship to cultural studies, as I discuss in more detail below, has always been deeply ambivalent. In the context of all these questions about alternative culture and Generation X, I could see that the issues raised by cultural studies about youth subcultures, hegemony, and resistance were still very pertinent and could not be ignored. I was especially taken with Lawrence Grossberg’s We Gotta Get Outta This Place, which as anyone who’s read it knows is loaded with pomo jargon but still raised what I thought were prescient questions about postmodern society, the ironic cynicism of youth culture, and the role that these had somehow played in maintaining the hegemony of conservatism.

I wrote a senior thesis under the direction of Professor Herman Gray about the media coverage of the movement against the Gulf War and graduated from UC Santa Cruz in the spring of 1993. I was on my way to graduate school and chose to enroll in the sociology program at UC San Diego because it advertised itself as having a strong emphasis in culture, which had quickly become my main field of interest. My first two years of graduate school were a rude awakening. I had chosen to study sociology because as an undergraduate it seemed so interdisciplinary and open-ended, like it was the best of all possible homes for my combination of interests in critical theory, radical politics, social history, and cultural studies. But as a graduate student I quickly discovered that professional sociology was a different animal altogether.

In time I learned that the sociology department at UC San Diego had indeed specialized in culture at one point in its history, but in recent years there had been a major shift toward historical-comparative sociology, and those faculty always seemed to be repeating the mantra that they were trying to make the program more “professional,” “competitive,” and “rigorous.” Yuk. Moreover, what the department did offer in terms of culture was mainly rooted in the apolitical traditions of microsociology like symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology. Double yuk. Fortunately, critical theory and cultural studies had made strong inroads in UCSD’s departments of Communication and Literature, and in Ethnic Studies I discovered Professor George Lipsitz, who would serve as a de facto mentor in my study of neo-Marxist theories of culture.

San Diego was home to a bustling alternative music centered at a club called the Casbah, and I began going to shows there on a regular basis. After the success of Nirvana and other grunge bands, the major labels had gone scouting for new alternative rock acts to sign, and San Diego was one of a number of cities that was pegged as a potential “next Seattle.” Seven San Diego bands had signed with major labels during this time, and everyone from Rolling Stone to Details to the E! television network had done feature stories about the local scene. Beyond the hype, I discovered that there was indeed an exciting and musically diverse scene, and I instantly became a fan of the spastic noise of Trumans Water, Drive Like Jehu, and Heavy Vegetable, the retro punk of Rocket From the Crypt, and the cyborg prog-rock of Three Mile Pilot.

I was beginning to envision a dissertation project that brought together the cultural studies focus on music and subcultures with the sociological methods of ethnography and the neo-Marxist inquiry into the place of culture in post-Fordist capitalism. How all those pieces of the puzzle actually fit together would be something I would have to figure out along the way. Unfortunately, most of my sociology professors were vocally unsupportive of this idea. I had impressed many of them with my self-motivated interest in social theory, but for them music was a frivolous concern without any real sociological import. When I told the professor in my field methods seminar what I planned to do, he replied with a snarky tone, “It sounds like you’re just going to hang out with your friends.” Another one begged me to do something else—anything else, really—because I was “too close” to my project, and he eventually removed himself from my committee when I refused.

In actuality, I didn’t have any friends inside the scene, and rather than being “too close” I constantly felt like an outsider because not only was I not a musician, I was this geeky grad student who had all these esoteric theoretical and political questions about music and the scene. Lots of people told me that my project sounded like “fun,” and it was fun to go shows and hear live music in what I thought was a great scene, but it was nerve-wracking as hell to approach these people in a club and awkwardly ask them if we could arrange an interview. Let’s just say I found myself drinking a lot of “liquid courage” during those years.

Getting into the local scene enhanced my political consciousness, not because the bands themselves were concerned with political issues (most of them weren’t), but because I could see how they had formed a community based on creative work and participation. It wasn’t a dogmatic scene of the sort advocated in the pages of Maximumrocknroll, and therefore a great variety of musical styles and influences could be thrown together without apology. And so I began to see the form of democratic cultural production as more significant than the content of any particular political protest or “message.” This understanding of “punk” as a method of production rather than a specific style or sound opened up whole vistas of possibility and informed my belated musical education. Maybe I can explain it this way: Drive Like Jehu led me back to Fugazi and then even further back to Wire and then forward to the Minutemen and Hüsker Dü and then back again to the Gang of Four and Television. See, I told you my path to punk was ass-backwards.

While the Casbah and other local nightclubs were becoming a second home for me, I was still suffering from quite a bit of intellectual homelessness on campus. I was getting a lot more out of the graduate courses I was taking in other departments, so I stopped enrolling in sociology seminars after completing my minimum amount of required coursework and came very close to dropping out of the program. I took a position as a teaching assistant in an interdisciplinary freshman-level writing course, where the levels of overwork were legendary. Before long I had become heavily involved with the effort to unionize the academic student employees at the University of California and would be elected to serve on the strike committee as we planned a number of strategies for work stoppage. This took me further out of the bounds of the sociology department, as my social circle was now mainly composed of humanities students who were involved with me in organizing the T.A. union. Intellectually, however, I never embraced the kind of cultural studies that is practiced in the humanities, where meaning is mainly located in the “text” and acts of resistance are conceived as symbolic matters of reading and style. I was still fundamentally concerned with social process, and the Marxist in me still sought to link culture back to social structure. My experiences in the music scene redoubled these convictions: resistance was a matter of how people organized their community and engaged in creative work, not what people wore, how they cut their hair, or what they sang about in their lyrics.

My intellectual homelessness was glaringly evident and became a huge liability when I went on the job market for the first time in the fall of 1999. It seems that what transpired in my graduate program was something like a microcosm of what was happening in American sociology in general. There has been a great expansion of interest and research in culture among American sociologists since the 1980s, but these cultural sociologists have taken great pains to distinguish and insulate themselves from the broader field of cultural studies. The studies of popular culture and media, much less popular music, are very few and far between. American cultural sociology is significantly more conventional, eager to be accepted within the mainstream of the discipline, and rarely engaged with questions of power and resistance. Don’t take my word for it, listen to what one of the leading proponents has to say in its favor: “American cultural sociology is conservative rather than revolutionary in its academic program, unlike the British cultural studies model which has attempted to transgress disciplinary boundaries and create a completely new academic and discursive field.”

No matter what kind of theoretical and methodological spin I try to put on it, my work reeks of cultural studies simply because it is has the word punk attached to it. I sent out over 100 job applications during my first 3 years on the market without landing a single on-campus interview. I nearly gave up on the idea of an academic career on several different occasions, but a lack of other marketable skills and job experience made me feel trapped, and I still had a deep intellectual passion, not necessarily for sociology but for understanding social processes and contributing to social change. Fortunately I was able to hang on as an adjunct instructor of sociology at UC San Diego, as my courses on popular culture and youth attracted very high student enrollments; I taught a total of nearly 1,000 students during my final year there in 2001-02.

As my contract with UC San Diego and a long-term romantic relationship both came to an end at virtually the same time, I found myself living with my mother and collecting unemployment in late 2002. I was ready to give up on academia once and for all when I miraculously got a temporary position at the University of Kansas that began in the Spring 2003 semester and lasted through the 2003-04 school year. I sent out another heap of job applications but still couldn’t land a satisfactory tenure-track position, so I accepted another temporary appointment at Colgate University for 2004-05.

In 2005 I finally landed a tenure-track position at Florida Atlantic University. It’s not a prestigious school by any means, but it’s a good place for a punk like me: lots of older, “non-traditional” and working-class students, many of whom have roots in the Caribbean. Securing a permanent academic home has afforded me the time to finally finish turning my dissertation into a book titled Sells Like Teen Spirit: Music, Youth Culture, and Social Crisis which will be published by New York University Press in 2009. Meanwhile, American sociology continues to aspire to the status of a science along the lines of economics and political science while attempting to avoid the stigma of the humanities conferred by cultural studies, and so there is no reason to expect that the study of punk or any other form of music will be moving into the center of the discipline any time soon. But somehow this feels like the appropriate place for a punk rock sociologist: screaming from the margins, denouncing the mainstream, and maybe—just maybe—developing the new ideas that are destined to shake up the establishment.

Jane's Addiction and Nine Inch Nails

A handful of observations about last night's NIN/JA show...

First off, Trent Reznor now bears an uncanny resemblance to Bruce Springsteen. Seriously, he's got short hair and long sideburns, he's sobered up, healthy looking, and even a little buff, and last night he was wearing good 'ol American blue jeans and a button-down black shirt that was quickly drenched in sweat. I'm not a big NIN fan, but they sounded good, especially on the thrashing "March of the Pigs," my favorite song of theirs. I kept waiting for them to play "Closer" so I could watch all the drunken frat boys pumping their fists while collectively singing "I wanna fuck you like an animal," but alas it didn't happen, to their credit I think. They finished their set with "Head Like a Hole." Eventually I just sat down on the lawn and watched them on the big screen, so it was sort of like listening to a Nine Inch Nails album while watching Springsteen at the Super Bowl. Honestly, the thing I will remember most is the beautiful full moon that arose at dusk between the palm trees in a brilliant orange color illuminated by the setting sun. Oh yeah and then this drunk girl fell over my friend Katy and then tried to make out with her as she was trying to console her.

Jane's Addiction, on the other hand, proved themselves to be the Rock Gods they have always been. Perry Farrell pranced around the stage with a set of maracas and some sort of feather boa like the old Jewish drag queen he's become. Let's just say he looked perfectly at home in West Palm Beach. And as cheesy as he is, Dave Navarro is still one motherfucker of a guitar player. Their show began with a black-and-white film showing some topless ladies engaged in a burlesque dance and then segued into the rolling bass line of "Three Days." I'm so glad that Flea is gone and Eric Avery is back in the band because those simple, rumbling bass lines are one of the things I love most about Jane's. "Three Days" has got to be one of the best epic rock songs ever written, and Navarro absolutely shredded on what I think is his most beautiful heroin-drenched guitar solo. Unfortunately their stage set was missing that opium den/Voodoo/Catholic idolatry of candles and red velvet that Perry's girlfriend Casey Niccoli used to design. But unlike NIN, Jane's lived up to their stadium rock billing because Perry and Dave are old-fashioned rock stars who somehow manage to fulfill their enormous egos, especially Perry, who always had a devious shit-eating grin on his face while peridoically drinking straight out of a huge bottle. Other highlights included a gorgeous version of "Then She Did...," which caused me to be close my eyes and get so blissed out that my friend Erin started watching me and laughing, at which point I shoved her and told her to fuck off (sorry Erin, but you had it coming bee-yatch!) There were some other songs that I didn't recognize because they must have been from that crappy album they made after reuniting, but there were rocking versions of "Been Caught Stealing" and "Ted, Just Admit It," with the latter including a cool film collage of sex, violence, violent sexuality, etc.

Rock 'n' Roll Marathon=Worst. Accomplishment. Ever.

June 1 was the one-year anniversary of the one and only marathon I will ever run. Here is the blog I wrote shortly thereafter. Allow me to begin with a quote from Jean Baudrillard: “Decidedly, joggers are the true Latter-Day Saints and the protagonists of an easy-does-it Apocalypse. Nothing evokes the end of the world more than a man running straight ahead on a beach, swathed in the sounds of his walkman, cocooned in the solitary sacrifices of his energy, indifferent even to catastrophes since he expects destruction to come only as the fruits of his own efforts, from exhausting the energy of a body that has in his own eyes become useless. Primitives, when in despair, would commit suicide by swimming out to sea until they could swim no longer. The jogger commits suicide by running up and down the beach. His eyes are wild, saliva drips from his mouth. Do not stop him. He will either hit you or simply carry on dancing around in front of you like a man possessed” (America, p. 38)

You'll never understand why after reading this, but I agreed to run the "Rock 'n' Roll" marathon in San Diego on June 1. Those who are familiar with my lifestyle and habits were rightfully incredulous. Nonetheless, I trained for this thing for a solid four months along with Pizza Fusion's "team in training." This involved getting up every (OK, most) Saturday morning before dawn to run progressively longer distances (16 miles, 18 miles, 20 miles, etc.) along Delray Beach. I've done a little long distance running before and in the course of training discovered that I'm actually pretty good at it. So let me qualify everything that follows by saying that I have nothing against jogging per se and will continue to incorporate it into my exercise routine.

So it's the morning of the race. My buddy Mike and I get up at an unholy hour and he starts driving me to the starting line in Balboa Park. But as we're approaching the site, the streets turn into a parking lot of cars and buses. "To hell with this," I tell Mike at one point, "let's just turn around and go back to sleep," but the traffic is so bad we can't turn around either. Joggers are hopping out of their rides and walking uphill to the site, and so I finally decide to do the same. I tell Mike I'll call him for a ride when it's all over.

I know it sounds too ridiculous to be true, but as I arrive at my position I find myself surrounded by Elvis impersonators (this is the "Rock 'n' Roll" marathon, after all) who are evidently going to run 26.2 miles in pompadours and polyester. I am grumpy but there is an air of anticipation and excitement around me. We begin running as U2's "Beautiful Day" is playing over the loudspeakers. The first 10 miles seemed to fly by. We ran through downtown San Diego, then up the 163 freeway and I was feeling pretty good. I paced myself, stopped to eat a cliff bar, and drank plenty of water and "accelerade" being doled out along the way. Alas, this would not turn out to be a "beautiful day," after all.

At various points of the race there were people grouped along the sidelines cheering on the runners. Some were holding signs with a particular individual's name, but most seemed to be cheering indiscriminately for all the runners. You'd pass by these total strangers and they'd cry out, "Way To Go!" or "Looking Good!" or "Don't Stop!" And then there were these squads of cheerleaders from various high schools and middle schools who would be doing coordinated cheers as you passed by them. Well, at some point the onset of fatigue turned my mood from merely grumpy to intensely foul, hateful, and potentially violent. I began to loathe the sight of these people cheering me on and felt immense relief in their absence, only to feel my blood begin to boil once again at the first sound of their cries of enthusiasm and encouragement.

I think it was around the 16th mile that my mind started playing tricks on me and I began to periodically experience something like hallucinations. Technically I was still "running" because my arms were swinging back and forth, but I was getting really frustrated because I couldn't pass a bunch of people who were walking alongside me. Then in the distance I heard another one of those damn spirit squads. "Less than 10 miles to go! Let's go runners! We know you can do it!" Then the vision came to me. I saw myself horizontally extending my left arm and systematically clotheslining every single one of those cheerleaders. I imagine how each and every one of their necks feel against my forearm. Onlookers cry out aghast: "Stop that man!" Teary-eyed witnesses are interviewed for the local news: "Those girls just wanted to show their spirit. What makes someone want to do something so evil?"

OK, so I didn't do it, but things got worse from there. The marathon was planned to finish at what in my mind is the most un-rock 'n' roll of all possible places, the Marine Corps depot. At some point I had taken my number off my chest because the safety pins holding it on were making my nipples bleed. But as we approach the Marine Corps depot I hear "Sir, I need to see your number, Sir!" Now I am really pissed because I have to stop "running" at mile 26, when the only thing keeping me going is sheer inertia and I feel as if my legs may collapse underneath me if they stop moving. Fortunately I have tucked the number inside my fanny pack (yes, I have resorted to purchasing and using a fanny pack) and I take out and wave it right in the face of this Marine. I'm almost never this courageous or confrontational. "Sir! It's just regulations! Sir!" The words "fascist jarhead babykiller" are flashing in neon inside my brain, but I restrain myself and continue "running." Only .2 miles to go now. There are now bleachers full of people cheering as I head to the finish line. My mind is repeatedly chanting the word "Peace." I want nothing more than to be free from my own anger and see this training ground for murderous imperialism transformed into a schoolyard for pagan homosexual children.

I finish with a time of 5 hours and 15 minutes. A medical volunteer asks me if I'm OK. Some girl gives me a medal. I sit on the asphalt on the brink of tears. People around me are hugging and telling each other they "did it." Another medical volunteer comes over and "encourages" me to stand and walk to keep the blood flowing or whatever. There's a photo booth but I do not want to know what I look like at this moment, so I walk around it.

I wish I could say this was the end, but I still need to catch a ride from Mike, and because we are at the Marine Corps depot there is no access for automobiles. So I have to walk to a place where he can pick me up. As I'm walking the place is guarded by all these Marines who are telling people not to walk on the grass and such, and some of them are holding these huge machine guns that look like toys. I hallucinate again and imagine I am at Guantanamo Bay. All the people around me are walking in a daze like zombies. My vision goes blurry and for a second I think we are all torture victims.

I finally make it out of the Marine depot and call to arrange for Mike to pick me up in front of a gas station. I make a point of sitting on the grass in front of a sign indicating $4.57 for regular unleaded. Mission accomplished. There are a few runners around me trying to hail a cab. And--I would swear to God if I believed in him/her/it--an Elvis impersonator walks by with a 12 pack of beer in hand. Mike picks me up and laughs his ass off as I struggle to stand and walk using my non-bendable knees. I immediately instruct him to remind me never to do anything like this again.

Slayer!

Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, CLEVERLY answer these questions. Pass it on to a gazillion people and include me. Try not to repeat a song title. It's harder than you think.

Pick Your Artist: Slayer

Are you male or female: The Antichrist

Describe yourself: Angel of Death

How do you feel about yourself: Can’t Stand You

Describe where you currently live: South of Heaven

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Hell Awaits

Your favorite form of transportation: Altar of Sacrifice

Your best friend is: Necrophiliac

Your favorite color is: Raining Blood

What's the weather like: Born of Fire

Favorite time of the day: At Dawn They Sleep

If your life was a TV show, what would it be called: Sex. Murder. Art.

What is life to you: Serenity in Murder

What is the best advice you have to give: Mandatory Suicide

If you could change your name, what would it be: Ice Titan

Your favorite food is: Dead Skin Mask

Thought for the Day: Here Comes The Pain

How I would like to die: Piece By Piece

My soul's present condition: Cleanse The Soul

The faults I can't bear: Criminally Insane

My motto: God Hates Us All

Cat Power: A Good Woman

When I’m depressed and for reasons I still don’t quite understand I absolutely must listen to something even more depressing, only the music of Chan Marshall’s Cat Power seems to do the trick these days. She replaced Nick Drake in this regard many months ago and has been in heavy rotation around my house ever since. So when one of my graduate students (thanks Alexis!) informed me that Marshall was the subject of a new biography (*Cat Power: A Good Woman*, by Elizabeth Goodman, published by Random House), I moved it past all the other books to the top of my reading list (and yes, I am geeky enough to maintain an actual reading list).

Marshall grew up around Atlanta with parents who were immersed in the music scene that emerged as the hippie counterculture morphed into Southern rock during the 1970s. Her father was an aspiring musician, and their household was awash with alcohol, drugs, and rock music. Her parents divorced when Chan and her sister were young, and their mother was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia and became an alcoholic. The tumultuous relations with their insane mother caused the Marshall girls to move in with their father, which lasted until they were in high school, when he kicked them out of the house so he could live with his new girlfriend. Chan then dropped out of school and moved to the Atlanta hipster neighborhood known as Cabbagetown, where a local music scene had developed in the late 1980s and early 90s.

There is some intrigue surrounding *Cat Power: A Good Woman* in the fact that Chan Marshall refused to be interviewed or cooperate in any way with the making of this biography and even went so far as to ask her friends and family to do the same. The author, Elizabeth Goodman, begins the book with a story about the day that Chan’s mother called from her tobacco shack in rural North Carolina demanding to know Goodman’s credentials and to speak with her “superiors.” And yet despite all this resistance Goodman did a fine job of reconstructing Marshall’s life and career by drawing on previous interviews and painstakingly tracking down all the people who surrounded her in Atlanta and New York’s Lowest East Side, where Chan eventually moved and developed her musical career in the 1990s. I will admit I was initially afraid this biography might read something like a glorified zine article penned by what I imagined to be an English major fresh out of an elite liberal arts college, but the journalism is outstanding given the circumstances and Goodman’s writing style is incisive and witty while steering clear of the flowery prose that Cat Power’s melancholy music or Marshall’s melodramatic personality could have provoked from a more indulgent author.

Many people feel that to hear Cat Power’s music is to feel Chan Marshall’s pain. There’s just something so vulnerable and intimate about *that voice* which seems to channel not only her own experience but all the other Southern women whose suffering and longing for redemption have been expressed for generations by singing in church in the way Chan learned to do as a child. Some of this has become part of the Cat Power spectacle itself, like in an infamous concert at the Bowery Ballroom where Marshall broke down in the middle of the set and then walked out into the audience, laid on the floor, and curled up in the fetal position. More routinely, Marshall has been known to suddenly stop mid-song and constantly apologize to her audience or to perform in the dark or with her back turned. Goodman doesn’t hesitate to expose this behavior as passive-aggressive manipulation or admit to being a little grossed out by a certain type of Cat Power fan for whom this is a voyeuristic form of entertainment. But it’s clear this isn’t all just for show, either. By early 2006 Marshall had become the kind of alcoholic who drinks around the clock, and she cocooned herself in her Miami Beach condo with the intention of committing suicide. Delusional to the point where she was chasing evil spirits away with sticks of incense, Chan was eventually rescued by a friend who tricked her into being hospitalized for detox treatment, where she again hallucinated that she was sharing a room with a vampire and a growling lion.

So, yeah, Chan Marshall is “crazy as a shithouse rat,” an inexplicable phrase that my dad would use to describe me when I was a kid. One song that always gets to me is “Metal Heart,” from her breakthrough album of 1998, Moon Pix. “It’s damned if you don’t and it’s damned if you do/Be true ‘cause they’ll lock you up in a sad, sad zoo.” To have a metal heart is to be alienated from your own emotions, to experience your heart as if it were a thing, not an organ but a cold machine with a life of its own that you can’t control. When you have a metal heart you end up in a lot of no-win situations and it’s not even a question of being misunderstood by others because you don’t understand yourself. As the music builds, Marshall sings “Metal heart you’re not hiding/Metal heart you’re not worth a thing” as if to say that the best one can hope for is the ability to disguise those insane emotions, and if you can’t do that then you should just tear that worthless fucking thing out of the center of your chest and throw it away.

Another track on Moon Pix is the classic ode to the alcoholic life, “Moonshiner,” a traditional folk song that Bob Dylan covered in 1963 and has subsequently been performed by Uncle Tupelo, Elliot Smith, and Bob Forrest among others. Cat Power regularly records other artists’ material and has issued two full albums of nothing but cover songs, with Marshall putting her distinctive stamp on each one (the gorgeous “Sea of Love” and nearly unrecognizable “(Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” immediately come to mind). With “Moonshiner” she steps into some enormous shoes, as Dylan’s version is one of the best recordings of his folk period, and the cover by Uncle Tupelo is supremely haunting to boot. And yet Marshall not only steps up to play with the big boys, she spins the song into something of her own, putting an exclamation point onto the alcoholic’s desperation in yelling out “You’re already in hell/You’re already in hell/I wish we could go to hell.” When Dylan and others sing “Moonshiner,” they finish with the line, “When the bottle gets empty/ It sure ain’t worth a damn.” When Cat Power does it, Chan more bleakly concludes “When the bottle gets empty/Life ain’t worth a damn.”

These are two songs that make the hairs on my arms stand up, but my favorite track of all on Moon Pix is “The Colors and the Kids.” The song begins “Must be the colors/And the kids/That keep me alive/’Cause the music is boring me to death.” I don’t know what she meant, but I catch myself singing those lines a lot lately because I’m an aging guy who is constantly surrounded by young people who never fail to inspire and disappoint me at the same time. They’re in my class or at a show or in a meeting, so fresh-faced and full of life in this dead world of ours, and then the next thing you know they’re saying something so dumb about how Conor Oberst is a genius. I’m drawn to their brightness and vitality like a moth to light, but I just wish they would do something more…I dunno, interesting or whatever…but then again I’m not even sure what that would be, I just know when it’s boring me to death.

The beauty of “The Colors and the Kids” in enveloped by Chan’s voice and a piano, because there’s nothing else in the song. Don’t take it from me, listen to what my identical twin Dave Grohl has to say: “That song is so heart wrenchingly beautiful and romantic--it makes me want to kidnap her and run away and hide forever.” When the song hits its most dramatic moment, Chan sings the futile cries of a lover who swears that he or she can change if you’d just give them another chance: “I could stay here/Become someone different/I could stay here/Become someone better.” The sense of loss continues into the next verse as she mourns: “It’s so hard to go in the city/’Cause you want to say hello to everybody/It’s so hard to go into the city/’Cause you wanna say, ‘Hey, I love you’ to everybody.” Yeah, it *is* hard when you live the rootless lives that so many of us do (and musicians on tour are only the most extreme example) because people keep passing in and out of your world, and then you run into each other again and you can’t believe how much time has passed, and it turns out Dave Grohl is right because you want to kidnap that person and run away or at least freeze that moment in time, but the next thing you know you’re saying goodbye and you have no idea when, or if, you’ll see each other again. Modern life is just sad like that.

Moon Pix has my most beloved songs, but on the whole my favorite Cat Power album is You Are Free (2003). I’m sure she intended something more optimistic but sometimes I think the album’s title is taunting me, like if I need to reminded that I’m free then I’m not really free after all. On the ghastly ballad “Baby Doll,” Chan poses a question that I swear has been asked by everyone who ever had the misfortune of caring about me and became distressed by my periodic states of despair: “Baby/Black, black, black is all you see/Don’t you want/To be free?” The first track on You Are Free is called “I Don’t Blame You” and it concerns a musician who is just going through the motions, faking it onstage and not wanting to play the music their audience wants to hear. Many people believe the song is about Kurt Cobain, and they’re probably right, but I think that sort of diminishes the point because it’s a predicament that any of us could find ourselves in when called upon to perform according to someone else’s expectations. Any of us could be massively popular and successful yet fundamentally un-free if other people’s image of us became an alien thing separated from our “true” selves or held against us with a demand to perform like a trained seal. “Just because they knew your name/Doesn’t mean they know from where you came/What a sad trick you thought you had to play.” Chan apparently knows what it’s like, and she’s right there to console us: “They never owned it/And you never owed it to them anyway.”

Freedom is a cruel joke for the kids profiled in “Names,” the gold medal winner in the fiercely competitive battle for the title of Most Depressing Cat Power Song Ever. One by one Chan introduces us to her childhood friends who ended up as casualties of American abuse and neglect. First, there’s Perry, a boy with a learning disability whose father burned his skin and sent him to his death when he was 10 years old. Next we meet Naomi, the 11 year-old girl who taught Chan “how to please a man” after school in the back of the bus. Chan begins telling us about Sheryl, her BFF at age 12, whose “father would come to her in the night,” and then stops singing as if to emphasize that what came next was so horribly unspeakable. Donovan was also a very good friend who started selling cocaine, and Chan hasn’t seen him since he was 13 years old. Finally there’s Charles, who told Chan he was in love with her when they were 14, but then he began to smoke crack, and then he had to “sell ass.” She says she doesn’t know where he is, just like she doesn’t know where any of the rest of them are. Yeah, I know, Chan. I knew a few kids like these growing up, and I don’t know where they are either. These days I find them at the homeless teen center where I volunteer or alternating between recovery and addiction in south Florida’s massive and growing drug treatment industry. They’re like a little nation of disposable youth unto themselves.

I have two personal memories of Cat Power performances. The first was at the now defunct Studio A in Miami. It was one of Chan’s first shows after her alcoholic breakdown, and the crowd was abuzz with rumors and speculation about what kind of crazy shit she might pull this time. Instead she delivered an absolutely riveting performance that was capped off by the most beautiful a cappella I’ve ever heard. The crowd was annoyingly restless, however, and the moment she stopped singing the club put on some dance music, forcing all the sheepish indie rockers to shuffle away to make room for those who were there to bust a move. That’s Miami for you. They must have heard that Chan was friends with Karl Lagerfeld and had started modeling for Chanel, otherwise I can’t explain why they were there. The second memory is of Cat Power’s show at the Langerado Music Festival in 2007, where the set ended with a cover of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.” I laughed when she started playing, because it took on a whole new meaning when Chan sang it. I think I’ve heard that song about a thousand times, and I do believe it’s one of the best songs of our short century, but I’ve only heard Cat Power do it that one time (she’s never recorded a cover in the studio) and yet for some reason it’s still burned in my memory and I’ve never heard that song the same way since.

Not A Happy Camper

My brother, sister-in-law, and I are about to go an extended camping trip in the Mountain West. I'm super excited, but I'm also re-posting this blog from last year as a reminder of how things can go horribly, though humorously, wrong....

I love camping. I've camped at Big Basin, Lake Tahoe, Bryce Canyon, and the Grand Canyon among other places. But after this weekend on the Russian River, my brother Kevin, his wife Lauren, and I put the tents and sleeping bags back in storage and vowed it would be a long time before we camped again.

It all started easily and innocent enough with the desire to get away for a Saturday night to a conveniently close campsite. I borrowed some gear from my mom, but it turned out that Kevin and Lauren's stuff was still at her mom's house. So our Saturday began with a trip up to the heavily mulleted suburb of Concord--a little of our way but really not a big deal. We arrived to find Lauren's mom sweeping the floor of her garage, which already looked to me to be immaculately clean, but whatever cuz Lauren's mom is just like that. Kevin got out the ladder and climbed up to get the gear, and he didn't fall down or anything so we were off to a good start.

From there it was across the bay into Sonoma County. By this time, however, we had already gotten stuck in a few inexplicable Saturday afternoon traffic jams. Something wasn't quite right and we just couldn't get a break. From my perspective, however, the foreshadowing of the disaster to come can be traced back to an ill-fated trip to Taco Bell, where I haven't eaten in years and won't be back anytime soon. I ordered 3 tacos that came drenched in sour cream that might not have been sour cream at all, and after one bite my crispy shell exploded in my hands, leaving me in the back seat with a giant mess of sour cream, taco "meat," and lettuce with the consistency of Easter basket grass. I could only make it through one and a half of these things before I had to wrap up the remaining mess, stuff it all back in the paper bag, and remove it from my sight.

Needless to say, my stomach was in a state of revolt by the time we reached the campsite, providing me with a good opportunity to check out the bathrooms. From there we picked out our site and starting setting up our tents. My mom had given me a very small backpacking tent, and being a very poor follower of directions I struggled to get it up and it just didn't look right but was still functional enough. The sites were very small and crammed together, but the campground master or whatever he's called had assured us that he strategically placed the young "party kids" at the back of the site and we wouldn't be disturbed. To our right there was a wholesome family of white people that I immediately suspected of being Christians. To our left there looked to be no less than 8 tents with a bunch of middle-aged guys milling about. I gave the patriarch of what I was sure was the Christian family an evil eye that attempted to say don't you dare take out an acoustic guitar or sing any of your damn Christian songs, but otherwise things seemed like they'd be OK.

With our tents set up, Kevin and Lauren and I looked at each other with that unspoken campers' recognition of "well the sun won't be down for several hours, now what do we do?" So down to the river we would go, or try to go as it turned out. The campground master or whatever he's called had told us about a path we could take to get down to the river, but on our way down things became increasingly thorny and bushy, leaving Lauren to wish we had brought a machete. We finally arrived to find only the tiniest of river banks that had already been occupied by--you guessed it--those damn Christians, as I was now certain they were (how else could they have beaten us down there if not for Jesus?) After exchanging some awkward and muffled hellos, we went back into the brush and thorns to look for an alternate path, but with no success. Now what do we do?

We walked back to the campsite and Kevin cracked a beer, but Lauren and I were determined to get to the water, so the three of us got back in the car and started driving. Well, it turns out that this weekend of all weekends was the annual blues festival on the river, which is cool and all but means that thousands of people had descended on this tiny river town. And so we got stuck in another traffic jam. And we still couldn't find another way down to the river, so we turned around. And then we got stuck in another traffic jam. Kevin, being the negative Nancy that he is, wanted to call it a day. Lauren and I were still determined. We parked near the festival and started down to the river, only to be blocked by security. As we walked the band was singing something about being "thankful," but Lauren heard it as "painful." You know you're in trouble when I'm not the most pessimistic and unhappy person in the group. Finally we got to a place with river access but by then the fog had rolled in and it was getting cold. Kevin and I skipped some rocks, and Lauren tried to skip some rocks, and that was pretty much all we had to do. Time to go back and sit in more traffic.

At least now that the sun was almost down we could do what good campers do, which is start a fire and do some cooking. Kevin cooked a bunch of crappy hot dogs but Lauren and I had picked out some pre-made kabobs at the grocery store, and they were hella good as the kids in No Cal are known to say. Kevin chopped wood without losing a finger, and we had a good fire that lasted for several hours. Time to get some shut eye.

Around 10PM some twentysomethings had rolled into the campsite in a Prius, and while getting stoned they started talking about the upcoming election, Clinton, Obama, etc. They weren't talking loud at all, but I guess one of the middle-aged guys to our left had heard enough and started yelling at them. Whatever, I thought, maybe these guys are Republicans, or maybe they just like their peace and quiet. To our right, the people I suspected of being Christians had 3 flourescent lights so bright they could have found a contact lens in the dirt, but they seemed to be playing scrabble and weren't doing any weird Christian shit. Throughout the night the middle-aged guys to our left had their radio tuned into the local classic rock station, and this was fun enough for awhile as Kevin, Lauren, and I rocked out to such staples as "Don't Fear the Reaper" and "In-A-Gadda-Vida." They still had the radio on when we went to sleep, but if they couldn't stand people talking about the election then surely they would be going to sleep soon, right?

It was becoming an increasingly cold night. I hadn't properly blown up my air mattress so I was essentially sleeping on the ground. I had a lot on my mind but eventually I drifted off to sleep. Then I was awake again. Two guys from the campsite to our left were having perhaps the most moronic conservation in the history of conversations. Turns out they were shrooming. With a tone that approximated the illegitimate fathers of Beavis and Butthead, I heard them exchange such barbs as "Man, I believe Jesus was a real person, but he wasn't no son of God." "Yeah, I think the prophets just made that shit up." Then they started talking about threesomes. The radio is still playing this whole time, and the sounds of classic rock have become instruments of torture in my ear as "Cats in the Cradle" comes over the airwaves. The next thing I hear is Kevin get up, unzip the tent, and walk over to say, "It's 5AM, can you turn it down?" Evidently they were so high they didn't even notice his presence until he was standing right in front of them. "Sorry man," they reply and Kevin says "It's cool" and then Lauren starts yelling, "It's NOT cool! You kept us up all night!" I chuckle. Poor Lauren: my brother's flatulence is legendary, and after he filled up on Taco Bell, ball park franks, and beer, he had a farting session that was so bad that she actually had to leave the tent at another point in the night.
The sun is starting to come up in that horrible way when you haven't gotten enough sleep and you know you won't be getting any more. Someone from the campsite to our left has bitched out the shrooming morons, packed up his stuff, and driven away. Then I hear, "Man, you guys burned all the firewood, now what are we gonna do? Ah, you've been up all night, I'm not even gonna try to reason with you." I am half asleep and cursing and muttering. Lauren asks me if I'm OK, and I yell out "I hate life and I wish I was dead!" Then I simply scream at the top of my lungs, "FUCK!!!" Yeah, that's how I roll when I don't get enough sleep.

We get up and start breaking camp. We promise to look back one day and laugh, but we also vow not to go camping for a long, long time. Lauren and Kevin need coffee, and I need a Red Bull, so we're off to Safeway. We pull into the parking lot and in the car next to us there's a guy just sitting there eating a bucket of chicken wings first thing in the morning. What the hell is wrong with this place?

50 Concerts

1. KISS and W.A.S.P. at the L.A. Forum, 1986. My first concert, unless you count the time dad inexplicably dragged me to see Linda Ronstandt. Mom dropped me and a friend off outside the parking lot to save me the embarrassment. Or did that just happen in Almost Famous? I can’t remember.

2. Iron Maiden, Long Beach Arena, and Irvine Meadows Ampitheatre, Somewhere In Time tour, 1987-1988. For the Irvine Meadows show I slept outside the Warehouse the night before tickets went on sale and got front row, and Lars Ulrich made a cameo appearance.

3. Monsters of Rock, L.A. Coliseum 1988—Van Halen, Scorpions, Dokken, Metallica, Kingdom Come. When Metallica started playing the headbangers tore down the fences separating the Coliseum seats from the field and we all ran past the security to the front of the stage. Security turned off the sound momentarily. I remember hearing “Harvester of Sorrow” for the first time, and nothing else from this show.

4. Alice Cooper, Long Beach Arena, 1988. The one and only time I got Laurie Ahlin to make out with me. Sigh.

5. Dio, Irvine Meadows Ampitheatre, 1988. Dio slayed a mechanical dragon with a sword that must have been ten times bigger than himself. Very impressive to a teenage metal dude.

6. David Lee Roth and Poison, L.A. Forum, 1988. The only time I went to a concert for the sole reason of seeing hot chicks in spandex. Camel toe aplenty from what I remember.

7. Yngwie J. Malmsteen’s Rising Force, Long Beach Arena, 1987 or 1988? Can’t remember what inspired to want to see this, but I did.

8. Dark Angel, Fender’s Ballroom in Long Beach, 1988? For whatever reason I was pulled onstage to toss stagedivers back into the pit.

9. Primus, multiple times, Cactus Club in San Jose, 1989-1990? Primus sucks!

10. fIREHOSE, San Jose State, 1988-1989? First time I became aware there was this band from San Pedro, where I grew up, with this crazy bass player named Mike Watt.

11. Metallica, …And Justice For All tour, Cow Palace in San Francisco, 1989.

12. Anthrax and Public Enemy. 1989 or 1990? The Cow Palace in San Francisco.

13. Clash of the Titans, 1989-1990?, Cow Palace in San Francisco, Slayer, Megadeth, Anthrax. Before the show I remember some kid who looked like he crawled out of the sewer was in the parking lot and smashed a beer bottle and yelled “Slayer” at the top of his lungs. Slayer was just amazing that night.

14. Bridge School Benefit, 1989, Shoreline Ampitheatre. Tom Petty, Neil Young, Tracy Chapman, Crosby, Stills, and Nash (and Young later, of course).

15. The first Lollapalooza tour, 1991, Shoreline Ampitheatre--Jane’s Addiction, Living Colour, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Nine Inch Nails, Ice-T and Body Count, Butthole Surfers, Rollins Band. I remember being unable to swallow my sandwich during the Rollins Band performance because the bass was so loud. Gibby Haynes from the Butthole Surfers kept firing a gun. Nine Inch Nails was painted green.

16. Mudhoney, Slim’s in San Francisco, 1991. Bob and I got drunk on Mickey’s big mouth in the car. The Giants had eliminated the Dodgers from the NL Western division race that day. I was wearing a Dodgers shirt and in a drunken stupor threw it on stage. Mark Arm picked it up and showed it to the crowd and everyone booed. I got my shirt back but I have no memory of how.

17. Sonic Youth, Helmet, and the Jesus Lizard, the Catalyst in Santa Cruz, 1992-93? I had the misfortune to see David Yow of the Jesus Lizard naked. And then Kim Gordon got all pissed off because some dude hit her mic stand and it hit her in the mouth.

18. Soundgarden and Monster Magnet, The Warfield in San Francisco, 1992. Monster Magnet was incredible. Seriously.

19. Jane’s Addiction, the Pixies, and Primus, San Jose State, 1991 or 1992?

20. Lollapooza, 1992, Shoreline Ampitheatre—Peal Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soundgarden, Ministry, Ice Cube. Eddie Vedder jumped the shark that day with all his shirtless crowd surfing and epileptic shaking.

21. Sonic Youth, Mudhoney, Pavement. Somewhere in the California desert, 1993? Pavement had become my new favorite band but we didn’t get to see them because we were stuck in line waiting to get in. Kurt Cobain came out and did a solo acoustic set that included “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” Only time I managed to see him.

22. Green Day, UC Santa Cruz, 1992. Pre-Dookie, when Green Day was just another Gilman Street band, they played outside our dorm at Porter College for some sort of end-of-the-year spring event.

23. Lollapooza, 1993. Primus, Alice in Chains, Dinosaur Jr., Fishbone. Shoreline Ampitheatre. The one and only time I saw Rage Against the Machine. I had no idea who they were, they came out naked for their encore with the letters PMRC painted on their bodies, and I absolutely hated them. I saw Tool on the side stage and Timothy Leary came out to introduce them saying they were being the next big thing in music.

24. Royal Trux and Truman’s Water, the Casbah in San Diego, 1993. My first show at the Casbah featuring two of the most underrated noise bands of the 90s.

25. Babes in Toyland, the Casbah, 1994. Kat Bjelland spit like every 5 minutes and was so much hotter than Courtney Love.

26. Rocket From the Crypt, multiple times, various venues in San Diego, 1994-2002, and many other times when I didn’t see them because they were sold out and I didn’t my shit together in time. I can’t remember a Rocket show I didn’t enjoy.

27. Drive Like Jehu, the Casbah, 1994. Once and only once, right before they broke up. I just remember sheets of noise and thinking that Jon Reis looked like Superman.

28. Pavement, Soma Live in San Diego, 1994-95? By the time I saw them in the Crooked Rain era they had their tongues lodged too far in their cheeks to be truly enjoyable.

29. Beck, San Diego, 1996? At his peak in the Odelay era, a fantastic show interrupted when the sound system suddenly failed, at which time Beck stood on the edge of the stage and did an impromptu acoustic set. I didn’t feel gipped at all.

30. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Soma Live in San Diego, 1996. My introduction to the theremin with Spencer at the height of his powers circa Orange.

31. The Supersuckers, the Casbah, 1995-96? Foam fingers and ironic devil/metal hand salutes galore. Amazing live band.

32. Weekly shows at the Casbah, San Diego, 1994-2002, fluf, Truman’s Water, Three Mile Pilot, aMiniature, Heavy Vegetable, Lucy’s Fur Coat, Chinchilla. San Diego had a really great local scene in the 90s and I will always love the Casbah.

33. Phish, some forgettable place in San Diego, 1999-2000?. I got super stoned in the parking lot and walked around the shakedown for a long time. That was the fun part. But the music was so Godawful that I got in a fight with my girlfriend because I couldn’t stop going off on how horrible Phish was.

34. Sleater-Kinney, The Fillmore in San Francisco, 2002. They were so great and I saw Jim Jarmusch there. Unfortunately they were so great that I decided I also had to see them in LA and that was the show where Sarah Schrank and I had our infamous meltdown break-up. That’s a story for a different list.

35. The (International) Noise Conspiracy, some club in San Francisco I can’t remember the name of, 2002. It was an excellent show and one of only 2 times I’ve seen them, but this show is especially memorable to me because this gorgeous blond hipster girl came up and just started talking to me and I…just…froze.

36. Hot Snakes, somewhere in San Francisco, 2002. Not as good as the Drive Like Jehu show, but damn close.

37. Yo La Tengo at the Granada in Lawrence, KS, 2003. I got massively drunk with another professor and had to teach at 8:30 in the morning the next day.

38. The Shins and the Rapture at the Granada in Lawrence, KS, 2003. Katy Livingston came up to me and we flirted and she tried to get me to go to an after-show kegger at her house, but she was still my student at that point. Sigh.

39. Spiritualized, the Granada in Lawrence, KS, 2003, As with Phish, a show I remember only because of how horrible it was. I convinced a bunch of people to go and dude just sat there in a chair with his guitar, not looking at the crowd with this look like he was just so pissed off to be in Kansas. We had paid $20 each to see this bloke but we all walked out like 10 minutes into the set and I couldn’t stop apologizing to my friends.

40. Q Not U and the Black Eyes at the Bottleneck in Lawrence, KS, 2003. The best show I remember from my days in Lawrence. I became a true believer in the Black Eyes from that day forward, at least until they broke up like 2 years later.

41. Ozomatli, Colgate University, 2004. I’m pretty sure this was the only concert I went to during the dreaded Colgate year. And they were good, but I was drunk, so what do I know?

42. Le Tigre, the Granada in Lawrence, KS, 2005? Not a big fan ordinarily, but man they were great that night, closing with a great version of “I’m So Excited”

43. Suicide Girls, the Granada in Lawrence, 2005? Technically not a concert, but more hot mostly-naked chicks than I’ve ever seen in one place at one time, unless you count strip clubs, which I don’t.

44. Bob Dylan, Montana State University at Bozeman, 2005. One of two times that I saw Dylan, but this one was especially memorable because I went with my dad and his wife, and Dylan enraged my father because he performed with his back to the side of the arena where we were seated and didn’t say anything between his songs. I remember that Dylan was his usual mumbling self but his band was really awesome, but the best part was that my dad got so pissed off in the parking lot saying something like “Would it kill him to just say, ‘Hello Bozeman’” and threw his hands in the air in exasperation. My dad was just like every teenage kid who’s waiting for the rock star to say the name of his hometown. Then he and his wife went on a diatribe about how much better the Sting concert they had attended in Missoula was.

45. Cat Power, Studio A, Miami, 2005. Chan Marshall did some amazingly beautiful a capella that night. And no one really cared, they just couldn’t wait for that crazy bitch to get off stage so they could dance to Latin-flavored techno.

46. Langarado Festival, 2006 or 2007? Fort Lauderdale? Cat Power and Explosions in the Sky, plus about a thousand horrible jam bands and reggae bands, the only one of which I recall was Widespread Panic. Katy and I got drunk, watched Kansas beat Texas to take the Big 12 championship, and I bummed some hits off a joint from these kids and I swore that Explosions in the Sky was like the new classical music and that if these other stoner kids had any brains or ears they’d be into them rather than Widespread Panic.

47. The Flaming Lips at the Pompano Beach Ampitheatre, 2007? So beautiful and happy and hopeful that it briefly restored my faith in the power of live music.

48. Miami Noise Festival, Churchill’s in Miami (duh), 2009. An evening of irritating but beautiful noise and vomiting on cymbals. Please read my blog on the event if you haven’t done so already.

49. Timb, Zombies! Organize!!, and the Freakin’ Hott, Fort Lauderdale, 2009. So good to see the kids keeping the local scene and live music thing alive. The Freakin’ Hott is just fantastic—think AC/DC-ish stoner rock with female vocals, and if you don’t know about Zombies you can read my blog from an earlier show of theirs. Timb is this giant freak who does a good acoustic show of witty songs. It was his birthday that night, and there were maybe 50 people there but I swear if it was NY, LA, or SF it would’ve been a big deal.

50. Gogol Bordello, Revolution in Fort Lauderdale, 2009. Had to dust off some very rusty mosh pit techniques for this one and came out drenched in sweat. Talking Marxist theory with Chris Robe and Carol before the show while trying to hold my ground against a bunch of smelly gypsy punks has to be one of the most surreal moments in my recent life.

Top Ten Songs about Loneliness

10. The Beatles, “Eleanor Rigby.” This is the classic ode that revealed loneliness to be a sociological rather than merely personal problem. All the lonely people, where do they all come from? In the 1950s and 60s, mass society theory stated that individuals had become atomized as we trudged along in our suburbs, offices, and highways, crowded together yet desperately alone. In mass society you have neither individuality nor community, but instead a throng of isolated people who frantically conform to authoritarian institutions and consumer fads because they’re terrified of being left behind. The Beatles probably didn’t need to look any further than to their own fans, to all those middle-class teenagers hysterically screaming, crying, and fainting in their presence, to spot the problem. All the lonely people, where do they all belong?

9. Wilco, “How to Fight Loneliness.” I didn’t give this song much thought until it was used in a key moment of the movie Girl, Interrupted. The song is just oozing with sarcasm as Jeff Tweedy answers the question of how to fight loneliness by repeatedly singing “just smile all the time.” Lots of people will sincerely advise you to do just that—you know, “fake it ‘til you make it.” They’re the same sort of people who will tell you that happiness is a “choice,” that you can simply “choose” to be happy no matter what the external circumstances are. Many well-intentioned people have said things like this to me, and I nod my head and thank for them for their help but what I’m really thinking is that they don’t know shit about loneliness or depression. I’m guessing that Jeff Tweedy agrees with me because he says things like “shine your teeth ‘til meaningless/sharpen them with lies,” and so the chorus “just smile all the time” sounds like the taunting affirmations of a psychologist armed with a thousand bullshit ideas about the power of positive thinking.

8. Bruce Springsteen, “Stolen Car.” Most of the songs on The River, a double-album that charts the demise of a relationship, could have made this list. So many of Springsteen’s songs are about cars, and one of the things I love is the multiple meanings he assigns to the automobile culture in America: the desire for escape and the freedom of the open road; the ultimate male commodity fetish; the possibility of fatal accident; the Fordist path to the American dream; the decimating consequences of deindustrialization in factory towns. In the beginning of “Stolen Car” he’s recapping the events of his failed marriage: boy meets girl, they fall in love, get married, and settle down, they swear they’ll never part, they move to a house on the edge of town, and then slowly but surely they drift apart. She looks back at the old love letters he wrote to her, and it seems like they were written a hundred years ago. Next thing you know he’s totally fucked up and aimlessly racing down the highway in a stolen car, trying to comfort himself with the thought that it’s all gonna be alright. He’s just waiting to get caught but somehow he never does, so he just keeps driving. The guy’s so alone he can’t even get busted.

7. The Beach Boys, “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times.” There are also a lot of songs on Pet Sounds that could have made this list. There’s something doubly depressing about hearing this sort of stuff from the Beach Boys, whose surf music harmonizing makes everything sound so upbeat and carefree until you actually listen to what they’re singing and remember that Brian Wilson had a breakdown and didn’t leave his bedroom for like three years after this album was recorded. This song begins, “I keep looking for a place to fit/where I can speak my mind.” Oh how often I’ve shamelessly taken pity on myself because I think I’m not made for these times, that my talents for writing and teaching are being wasted in this illiterate culture of video games and instant messaging (“they say I got brains/but they ain’t doing me no good/I wish they could”), that I should have grown up in the 1960s or the 1930s, that I am so unlucky to have been born into the most non-revolutionary time in modern history. Brian Wilson felt my pain, even in 1966: “Every time I get the inspiration/ to go change things around/ no one wants to help me look for places/ where new things might be found.”

6. Don Gibson with Chet Atkins, “Oh, Lonesome Me.” This song takes the melodrama of self-pity to absurdly low levels. It’s been covered by a number of musicians, but I mainly know it because of Neil Young’s version on After the Gold Rush, which is particularly great because Neil’s voice gives it that wounded animal sound he perfected in the early 1970s. This song captures the resentments that accrue when you’re alone at night and you imagine that everyone else is out having a blast: “everybody’s going out and having fun/I’m a fool for staying home and having none.” And it’s at least twice as bad when you’re missing a girl and you get these flashes of her out with other guys: “I bet she’s not like me/she’s out and fancy free/flirting with all the boys with all her charms.” Misery loves company, so I wish you people would just stay home and cry yourself to sleep at night.

5. Jimi Hendrix, “Burning of the Midnight Lamp.” You just don’t expect this kind of shit from Hendrix. You expect to hear the badass acid-drenched guitar monster talking about standing up next to a mountain and chopping it down with the edge of his hand. But I guess the dude got as lonely as the rest of us. Although “Burning of the Midnight Lamp” features Jimi’s typically intricate and assertive wah-wah guitar work, it begins with the thought that “The morning is dead and the day is too.” Hmmm…sounds like one of those rough nights where you wake up choking on your own vomit (or maybe someone else’s vomit, like one of the drummers for Spinal Tap). “All the loneliness I have felt today/It’s a little more than enough to make a man throw himself away.” You know, I never thought Hendrix wrote very good lyrics, but I like this one: “Now the smiling portrait of you/Is still hanging on my frowning wall.” “Loneliness,” Jimi begins to say, momentarily slowing down the music in anticipation of some profound thoughts, “is such a … drag.” ‘Nuff said.

4. The White Stripes “I’m Lonely (But I Ain’t That Lonely Yet).” This one’s kind of funny. It’s the last song on what I think is the White Stripes’ best and certainly most underrated album, Get Behind Me Satan. I love Jack White’s guitar playing, but on this album I also began to take notice of what a great songwriter he is because many of the songs, including “I’m Lonely,” are primarily played on the piano. It’s an absolutely beautiful song in which Jack first sings about missing his mother and his sister before getting to the part that makes me chuckle, where thinks about this girl he knows he can always have but decides he just hasn’t gotten that desperate yet: “I roll over in bed/Looking for someone to touch/There’s a girl that I know of/But don’t ask for much/She’s homely, and she’s cranky/And her hair’s in a net/And I’m lonely, but I ain’t that lonely yet.” In short, sometimes loneliness isn’t the worst thing in the world. At the end of the song he goes to commit suicide by drowning in a river but then stops himself at the last minute, “before my lungs could get wet.” He reiterates that he misses his sister, and that sometimes he gets jealous of all her little pets.

3. Woody Guthrie, “At My Window Sad and Lonely.” The archetypical ode to a lost lover who’s moved away, gorgeously sung by Wilco on the first Mermaid Avenue album. Leave it Woody Guthrie to capture the universal feelings of heartbreak with such poetic simplicity: “At my window sad and lonely/Oft times do I think of thee/Sad and lonely and I wonder/Do you still think of me?” So complete and self-explanatory, in fact, that I’m not going to say anything more about it.

2. Led Zeppelin, “Tea for One.” The best song on the worst Zeppelin album, “Tea for One” doesn’t offer much lyrically, but it does feature nine and a half minutes of Jimmy Page’s most intense blues guitar riffs. Page’s guitar sounds like someone in a prolonged fit of crying, first slow and moaning, then hysterical, manic, and uncontrollable, then slow and moaning once again. While the song stretches on and on and on, Robert Plant keeps repeating the same question, “How come twenty four hours sometimes seem to slip into days? One minute seems like a lifetime, baby, when I feel this way.”

1. Wilco, “The Lonely 1.” Well I guess Jeff Tweedy must know something about loneliness, because Wilco is the only band to make this list twice, and that doesn’t count the Woody Guthrie song they’ve also covered. In fact, as a song about the loneliness of a rock star as seen by one of his devoted fans, this one could be about Tweedy himself. A lovely song with a haunting steel guitar and violin, “The Lonely 1” paints the picture of a musician in the spotlight he’s always dreamed of inhabiting, arms outstretched for his autograph as he heads backstage after the show. In an image that I think it says it all, he stands “alone in the halo’s haze.” Oh the great numbers of people who have spent their lives chasing fame to heal the hole in their hearts, and the much smaller numbers who have achieved that fame only to find standing alone in the spotlight and the haze of a smoke machine. The fan is alone too—he or she comes home, finds no messages on the phone (ah the good old days when you had to go home to check your phone messages), and then plays the ones from yesterday just to hear something from someone, I suppose. The fan turns on the stereo and there’s the rock star whining about the fact that they’re lonely, even though every one wants an autograph or a picture with them. Kind of makes rock stars seem like assholes, doesn’t it? I mean the fan would do anything for the rock star and defends everything he does: “when the critics pan, I write in your defense.” But then maybe the fan has the luxury of being able to live vicariously through someone else, while the rock star who’s made it to the top realizes there’s no one except him standing up there, alone and now totally distant from us ordinary folk.

Honorable mention: Three Dog Night, “One.” Come on, you know you know it, so sing along with me now: “One is loneliest number that you’ll ever do. One is the loneliest…”

Fantasy Baseball Wrap-Up, 2009

I wake up on the morning of Sunday, October 4 tied for first. It’s the final day of the 2009 Major League Baseball season. Kish and I have been involved in an epic battle for most of the year, the tightest race for first place in the 19 year history of the Northern California Malt Liquor League. And so it all comes down to one final day in which statistics will be counted toward our tooth-and-nail fight for rotisserie baseball supremacy. I’ve won an unprecedented 3 consecutive NCMLL championships, and so 2009 was my campaign of “Moore for Four,” but Kish has a great team and he’s been ahead for most of the year. On final day of the season, however, I’ve pulled even with him at 85 points apiece, and I’m certain he’s having nightmarish flashbacks to the previous year, when he was winning until I surged ahead on the strength of a huge September to pull off a decisive victory.

It all started back on April 11 with the 12 of us NCMLL owners gathered together for our annual draft day, this time in a rental cabin in Lake Tahoe. Sometime shortly after the crack of dawn on that Saturday, coffee is brewed, doughnuts are scarfed, and there is a chorus of cracking beer bottles (though not by me, for this is my first sober draft day) in excited anticipation of a day that is a lot like Christmas morning for fantasy baseball geeks. I, for one, am hoping to find a shiny new Albert Pujols under my tree (Albert Pujols, if you don’t know, is quite the statistical action figure, like the Boba Fett of HRs, RBI, and BA). But before any of that happens, we must engage in the torturous and seemingly interminable process of crossing off the names of players who have already been taken from the draft sheets that Bob so meticulously prepares for us every year. Bob also needs to set up the projector and mount the screen that will allow us to examine the stats of the player currently being auctioned along with other key information, like how much money each owner has spent and how many positions they have left to fill. Inevitably there will be some sort of technological problem with the projector, and Gary, or Lance, or both Gary and Lance, will launch into some tirade about how that damn projector is the worst thing to happen in the entire history of the league and is leading to its immanent doom and demise. Meanwhile, laptops have been fired up around the rest of the room, though I maintain a John Henry-ish arrogance that I don’t need no stinking machine or even Bob’s sheets because I can compete—no, dominate, actually—based purely on what’s in my head. I am wondering if sobriety will give me any sort of competitive advantage or may actually present a disadvantage, because I typically draft my team while drunk as a skunk as well as hungover from the night before. The projector is finally working, and the draft begins with the drinking of ceremonial cups of Old English malt liquor, which I am happy to be missing out on for once. I am aggressive from the get-go and nab Albert Pujols for a cool $50. It’s gonna be a good year.

Fast forward to October 4. There are several categories that need to be continuously monitored today. I am 9 RBI and 3 SB behind Kish. If I can pass him in either category, it’s a 2 point swing, but even if I just tie him it’s a 1 point swing. However, this is unlikely as 9 RBI and 3 SB is a lot for just one day. On the other hand, Bob’s Boils have gone a homerun-hitting spree this week, and now he’s 1 HR behind me and 1 HR ahead of Kish, meaning that I will lose a half point if Bob hits 1 more HR than I do today and lose a full point if Bob hits 2 more HR, and conversely Kish will gain a half point if he hits 1 more HR than Bob and a full point if he hits 2 more HR, AND since he’s only 2 HR behind me Kish could easily tie or pass me, resulting in a multi-point swing. Trust me, it’s all very dramatic, BUT THERE’S EVEN MORE, because Brad’s team has only pitched 988 innings, and our league rule says that you must pass 1000 innings otherwise you are dropped to the bottom of the standings in ERA and WHIP, and right now Brad is ahead of me but not Kish in ERA, meaning that if he doesn’t get his 1000 innings than I get an extra point in ERA. Twelve innings is a sizable amount when you don’t have 1000 for the whole season, but on this day Brad will have Tim Hudson and Ryan Dempster taking the mound. If they get hit hard there’s a chance I could pass Brad in ERA anyway, because his is only slightly better than mine to begin with, but they’re both pretty good pitchers so this is unlikely to happen. In short, not only do I need to watch my team today, I’ll need to keep my eyes glued to Kish’s team to see how many homeruns he hits, bases he steals, and runs he drives in, Bob’s team to see how many homeruns he hits, and Brad’s team to see how many innings he pitches. Oh, and one more thing: Tim’s team is just 1 pitching win behind me, so even though he doesn’t have anyone starting today I’m going to need to monitor his bullpen to make sure none of them vultures a win.

One fact you need to keep in mind about “real” baseball is that while the fate of our league hangs in the balance, this is the single least important day of the regular baseball season. All the major league teams have either been eliminated from the division and wild-card races for some time or are gearing up for the playoffs in the following week. So as I frantically flip from game to game on the MLB network, all the players seem to be lounging the dugout, chewing tobacco, scratching their nuts, looking hungover, and probably talking about where they’re going to go hunting and fishing during the off-season. COME ON PEOPLE, DON’T YOU KNOW WHAT’S AT STAKE HERE? However, in some respects this is working in my favor, as one of Kish’s best players and top homerun hitters, Troy Tulowitzki, will be rested today because the Colorado Rockies have already earned a place in the postseason. I can breathe a short sigh of relief because my third baseman, Edwin Encarnacion, has just launched a homerun in one of the early games being played on the east coast, thus providing me with a little more breathing room in that category. Unfortunately it looks like Tim Hudson and Ryan Dempster are going to pitch the standard 6 innings apiece, pushing Brad right up to the 1000 mark.

In the end, we finished just as we had started the day—tied. Riddled with anxiety, I waited until the last out, afraid that the likes of Martin Prado or Jody Gerut might pop an unexpected homerun or that Troy Tulowitzki would be summoned off the Rockies’ bench to pinch-hit like Robert Redford in a fantasy baseball version of “The Natural.” None of that came to pass, as Bob finished with 228 homeruns, Kish with 227. Although 85 points is quite a lot in our league, I can’t really say it was one of my better teams. Sure, Pujols had a monster year with a .328 BA, 47 HR, 135 RBI, and 16 SB. I almost feel guilty about the 16 SB, which is a lot more than most sluggers get. It’s kind of like having a really hot girlfriend who also happens to be bisexual and really into threesomes. No one should be that lucky. Ryan Braun also had a great year as the Robin to Pujols’ Batman, finishing at .320, 32 HR, 114 RBI, and 20 SB. This was my last year with Braun, who I drafted in the reserves when he was still a minor leaguer at the beginning of the 2007 season, and whom I had kept an eye on ever since he was drafted fourth overall out of the University of Miami. The total production of Braun’s 3 years with me: .308, 103 HR, 317 RBI, 49 SB. How much did I pay for that? A total of $18 including the reserve pick, or $1 less than what Gary paid for Christian Guzman this year.

The fact that I got 40 pitching points, on the other hand, is nothing short of miraculous. Somehow I led the league with 90 wins despite the fact that my ace Jake Peavy, who I shelled out $39 for, missed half the season due to injury, leaving me with Javier Vazquez and Colorado Rockies re-tread Jorge de la Rosa as my winningest pitchers. Jonathan Broxton had a solid year as the Dodgers’ closer, and Kevin Gregg’s whiteness ensured that Lou Piniella went to him rather than Carlos Marmol in the 9th inning for most of the year, despite a 4.72 ERA. Clayton Kershaw turned in a decent year, Johnny Cueto was good until the all-star break, and Franklin Morales saved some games down the stretch. Beyond that, there was nothing but filler: Bob Howry, Aaron Heilman, James McDonald, Yusmeiro Petit, Scott Eyre, Freddy Garcia, Bobby Parnell, Pedro Feliciano, Tim Stauffer….One of the season’s biggest disappointments was watching rookie Jordan Zimmermann go down with an injury that will keep him out for most of next year after he started out looking like a keeper.

As far as my hitting, when you look around the rest of the infield you see a lot of disappointments, busts, and sub-par performances. If any one of these guys had put up just a fraction of the numbers they posted in previous seasons, I would have won easily. Second baseman Rickie Weeks looked like he was finally on the way to fulfilling his enormous potential when he suffered a broken hand in May and missed the rest of the year. I forked out $31 for shortstop Rafael Furcal with the idea that he, along with Weeks, would be my primary base stealer, but he turned in a thoroughly mediocre season that included a measly 12 SB. His heroic homerun on the final day of the season notwithstanding, third baseman Edwin Encarnacion was on the disabled list for much of the year and sucked ass when he wasn’t. I get manage to get some solid production from my low-priced alternatives, however. I was shocked to get Nick Johnson for $1 and even more shocked when he was healthy for almost an entire year after suffering an assortment of leg, thumb, knee, wrist, hand, cheek (yes, cheek), and back injuries in previous seasons. Luis Castillo turned in a solid .303 BA and 20 SB for $1. I got Everth Cabrera in the reserves and he picked up 24 SB in half a season with the Padres despite having never played above A ball before this year. Chad Tracy, Jeff Keppinger, and Ryan Roberts…not really worth discussing. In the outfield, Andre Ethier turned in 31 HR and 106 RBI and I’m pleased to say he’ll be returning to my squad next year for $15. Early season concerns about Josh Willingham’s playing time allowed to him slip into the reserves, where I picked him up and he delivered 24 HR. I had my sights set on Dexter Fowler beginning in spring training, and after picking him up for $3 he delivered 27 SB and displayed a little pop that should increase as he matures while playing in the league’s best hitter’s park. As for the rest of my outfield, Brandon Moss was a disappointment, Brett Carroll isn’t worth mentioning, and Austin Kearns is officially dead to me. Behind the plate, big fat Bengie Molina turned in a solid season but I paid a hefty price of $17 for it. The more disturbing case is Chris Snyder. In 2008, he hit 16 HR and 64 RBI for me despite missing part of the year with. . . ahem, a “testicular fracture.” How do you even fracture a testicle, much less hit 16 HR after doing it, much less PLAY A POSITION THAT REQUIRES YOU TO SQUAT WITH EVERY PITCH after FRACTURING A TESTICLE? Coming into this season, for all I knew, this guy was MADE OF TESTICLES. Impressed beyond belief, I signed him to a 2 year contract at a price of $8. What happened this year? He missed almost the whole year with an injury. What type of injury, you ask? He hurt his lower back, and now he has to have back surgery that he will probably hamper him next year as well. Dude, you played with a testicular fracture but a bad back is gonna sideline you for like two years? Finally, I must mention J.R. Towles. He spent almost the whole year in the minors, and then in September the Astros recalled him and gave him some regular at-bats as their catcher. Since Synder was injured I had to put him in, and he was absolutely killing me with a sub-.200 BA. But somehow, miraculously, in the last week of the season, Wednesday, September 30 to be exact, with only 6 HITS to his name for THE ENTIRE SEASON, J.R. Towles stood up and popped not one but TWO HOMERUNS, including one off the legendary Pedro Martinez. Without those 2 HR I would have finished in second, so thank you J.R. Towles, hopefully I’ll remember to give you an extra tip if you bag my groceries, deliver my pizza, or change my oil someday.

The thing I’m probably most disappointed about from this year, however, is my choice of names. As part of my annual attempt to put a satirical slant on some current event, I went with The Fonzi Scheme in light of this year’s financial scandals. Unfortunately it’s just not in the same class as my previous teams like Spitzer Swallows, The Urge to Surge, The War on Christmas, The Caminiti Crackwhores, Condi's Cunthairs, and The Vatican Sodomizers. I vow to try harder next year.

Let’s take a look at the other teams and how they fared:

Kish (I Want Some Troubled Average Rejected Players [TARP]): Well-balanced and outstanding. Phenomenal years from Hanley Ramirez and Troy Tulowitzki along with solid contributions from Adam Dunn, Shane Victorino, and Jorge Cantu. The fucker outbid me for Justin Upton on draft day and he had breakout season, while I turned around and spent my money on the dreaded Austin Kearns. And who the hell knew Martin Prado could hit? The only true disappointment was one of my longtime prospects, Chris B. Young. Kish also put together one of the best pitching staffs in recent memory, headed up by Tim Lincecum, who he picked up in the reserves the same year I got Ryan Braun, and excellent years from Jair Jurrjens, Wandy Rodriguez, and even Ross Ohlendorf. Brian Wilson quit the Beach Boys, got a terrible haircut, found Jesus, and turned into a solid closer for the Giants. I hear Kish had the chance to trade his prized prospect Tommy Hanson for a solid closer in Francisco Cordero, and if he had pulled the trigger he would have won, but Hanson had a solid rookie season and looks like a great keeper for two years, so who’s to say?

Tim (Kumar’s Suicide Trip to the White House): Kudos to the Lum Drum for working his way into a solid third place finish this year. Monster years from Prince Fielder and Mark Reynolds, the latter of which was a steal at $14. Miguel Tejada, Clint Barmes, and Ryan Theriot also made big contributions. If it hadn’t been for a major injury to Carlos Beltran he certainly would have topped 70 points. In terms of pitching, the Lum Drum has come a long way from 2006, when he set an unbreakable record for fewest saves with 0. This year he was tied with me for the most number of pitching points with 40 thanks to Chris Carpenter, Ted Lilly, and an early season trade for Joe Blanton. Trevor Hoffman just keeps getting people out and saving games despite the fact that he couldn’t throw his fastball through a plate of glass at his advanced age. Worst pick: $24 for the psychotic Milton Bradley.

Matt (The Fancy Pageant Pseudo Authors, which was changed several times over the course of the season in keeping with Sarah Palin’s various exploits): Two years into our league, Matt has finished in fourth place both years, and that’s nothing to sneeze at. His offense was just mediocre, but with Andrew McCutcheon, Garrett Jones, and Jonny Gomes it’s looking like he’s got some solid low-budget keepers for next year. He also took an effective gamble by drafting Cliff Lee in the hopes that he’d be traded to the National League, which he was, and now in all likelihood he’s got him cheap for the next two years. J.A. Happ and Randy Wells also look like good keepers. I look for big things from Matt next year. Worst pick: re-signing Geovany Soto for $20.

Brad (He Quit Me, formerly known as He Stimulate Me until Brad decided to quit, I guess): Good power numbers on offense led by Chase Utley and Derek Lee, but speed kills as Gary likes to say, and Brad finished in last place in stolen bases. Led the league in saves with a rejuvenated Rafael Soriano leading the way (it’s only fair that he FINALLY got something out of that two-year, $21 contract). But as the problems getting to 1000 innings attest, there just wasn’t nearly enough starting pitching there. In fact, Brad finished with a paltry 45 wins, 15 wins below the second-to-last place finisher. Worst pick: Fred Lewis for $19. Giant fan probably thought he was the second coming of Willie “E.T.” McGee. Paying $35 for Rich Harden to get worked on in the training room probably wasn’t a good idea either.

Steve (Tent City Terrorists): One of these years Steve has got to make it back into the money so he can stop talking about his glory year of 1993, when Gregg Jeffries and a rookie named Mike Piazza powered him to his one and only championship. To be fair, this year’s team was decimated with injuries: $54 ended being wasted on Jose Reyes, Alfonso Soriano didn’t even earn half of his $46 salary, Johan Santana won 4 games after he traded for him and then was shut down for the rest of the season, Carlos Zambrano pitched more like Victor Zambrano, and then there was that whole thing where Man-Ram got suspended for 50 games and wasn’t the same afterwards. On the plus side, there is reason for hope next year. Roto stud Matt Kemp has one more year left on his $9 contract, as does Chad Billingsley for $7, and as long as Matt Holiday is still in the NL Steve can keep him for $6. Worst pick: you can’t really blame him for all the injuries to those other players, but Carlos Zambrano is just not a $37 pitcher.

Raj (Somali Concussions, originally Somali Pirates): It seems like every year Raj makes some late season trades to rebuild for the following season, and then he finishes right around where he did this year, tied for 6th. His team was consistently below average in all respects this season. Jayson Werth had a great year, but David Wright must have gone off steroids or something because his power was totally M.I.A. I have nothing to say about his pitching. Once again, he’s looking good for next year, with Werth and Ryan Ludwick signed to low-cost contracts and the potential to go long-term on Ryan Franklin. Look for him to have 6th place all to himself next year. Worst pick: $21 for Jason Motte. He sure looked good in spring training.

Lance (I can’t remember what his team was originally called, by the end of the year he was just listed as LP): It wasn’t pretty, but he still finished ahead of Bob and Gary. For some reason it seems appropriate that Lance wound up with Kung Fu Panda Pablo Sandoval. He also got an incredible 61 steals from Michael Bourn, and he assembled a decent pitching rotation with a strong year from Dan Haren and surprising contributions from Joel Pineiro and Jason Marquis. Unfortunately, things don’t look good coming into next year, as he will be saddled with one more year of ill-conceived long-term contracts with Redneck Aaron Rowand and Khalil “Friend of God” Greene. Worst pick: Brandon Webb got hurt in his first start of the season but Lance still shelled out $40 to get him, only to find the letters DL permanently attached to his name for the rest of the year. Paying $40 for Carlos Delgado’s 4 homeruns didn’t work out too well either.

Bob (Bob’s Boils, of course): Even the statistical odds would suggest that Bob will get lucky and at least finish in the money one of these years. We’re still waiting for that to happen. Let’s skip what went right and go straight to what went wrong. Fourteen and a half pitching points, that’s went wrong. To accomplish that sort of thing you’re going to need 155 terrible innings from Chris Volstad to go with sub-par performances from Derek Lowe and Roy Oswalt. The Boils were actually an offensive force to be reckoned with thanks to Ryan Zimmerman, Joey Votto, and Dan Uggla. How’s it look for next year? Votto and Josh Johnson are a good foundation. Worst picks: $24 for a horrible year from Garrett Atkins, followed by $27 for a mediocre year from Corey Hart.

Brian (Oops, I Lost Again): Not much went right with the exception of the prophetic team name. As you would expect, Ryan Howard turned in huge power numbers. Nyjer Morgan also became a big-time base thief, and Ubaldo Jimenez established himself as a solid starter. Unfortunately Brian didn’t have the roster depth to compensate for his many injuries to key players like Aramis Ramirez, Conor Jackson, and John Maine or sub-par performances from Cole Hamels and Brad Lidge. Worst pick: $25 for Conor Jackson wasn’t bad on draft day, but what happened to this guy? He contracted something called “Valley Fever”? Is that some sort of STD you get from a Valley Girl? Seriously, what the hell is that, and why did it keep him on the DL for the whole damn year?

Gary (Deserving the Crappy Place in the Standings, can’t remember the original team name): First off all Gary gets a big demerit for being yet another owner to change his team name in the middle of the season. I am completely opposed to this new trend. The name is appropriate, however, insofar as Gary can’t really blame his poor finish on injuries in the same way that Steve or Brian can. His team was abysmal in every category except saves. Gary made a great number of trades and claims to be rebuilding for next year, so let’s see what he’s got. Offensively, Cody Ross will return for a cheap $9 after a very good season, and Carlos Gonzalez has turned into a nice player who can be kept for $6. I think it would be mistake to keep either Colby Rasmus or Cameron Maybin for $12, so hopefully their major league teams will start them in the minors, where they belong, so Gary can’t give in to his temptation to re-sign them. Pitching-wise, Carlos Marmol and Leo Nunez aren’t great but they’ll be worth resigning if they begin the year as closers. Due to a stunning inability to learn from his past mistakes, it’s a safe bet that if Gary resigned John Lannan for $6 this year, it probably means he’ll sign Zach Duke for $7 next year. And I’m certain that Homer Bailey and Mat Latos have already been guaranteed a place as long as they win spots in their rotations of their respective teams. In short, he’ll probably keep a lot of players, but things don’t look good. Worst pick: Russell Martin at $23 narrowly edges out the aforementioned Christian Guzman.

Shawn (1000 Innings or Bust): By the time I finish writing this paragraph I will have given more thought to Shawn’s team than Shawn did all season. Lest you be fooled by the team name, Shawn was the only owner not to reach 1000 innings this year—again. What is likely to have been a Cy Young performance from Adam Wainwright has therefore gone to waste. Offensively, his team wasn’t bad, with Carlos Lee, Jimmy Rollins, Raul Ibanez, Lance Berkman, and even some surprising contributions from Juan Uribe and Seth Smith. With pitching, there was no full-time closer but he did corner the market on 40-something left-handers with the not-so-dynamic duo of Randy Johnson and Jaime Moyer. Worst pick: Garrett Anderson for $20? Kaz Matsui for $17? Dave Bush for $14? So many to choose from.

Well, that’s that for 2009. Hope this helps you survive those cold, stat-less winter nights.