I’ve ridden public transportation (or my bicycle) back and forth to the jobs I’ve held for 19 of the past 20 years. And the one year where I had to drive to my job at an ad agency in the ‘burbs, I hate-hate-haaaaated the daily commute. White-knuckle wheel gripping, getting stuck in rush hour logjams on I-75, watching all manner of reckless driving (and mind you this was two decades ago… texting has take distracted driving to an entirely new level).
Riding the bus is so much less stressful. I’m blissfully unaware of traffic as soon as I take a seat, put on my headphones and bury my nose in a magazine or book. It’s not a bus, it’s a chauffeur-driven limo. It’s my Uber, only cheaper.
When people try to guess my age, they usually guess quite a few years lower than I actually am. Some of that is genetics (none of it is Just For Men, I swear), but I think some of it can also be attributed to the fact that my daily commute has been considerably less stressful.
Because I’m a tree-hugger, I also like the fact that public transportation is also better for the environment.
Because I’m a cheapskate, I like the fact that riding the bus saves me cash on gas, parking, insurance and wear and tear on our cars.
Because I grew up in Arkansas, where snow was a rarity, I feel much safer riding inside a ten-ton machine instead of driving a puny car when winter weather hits.
But retired police officer turned urban living/mass transit advocate Derek Bauman brought up an interesting point that I’d never considered about public transportation: it also saves lives. Please read his great CityBeat article here (a quick excerpt is below). It’s written about Cincinnati, where we just added a streetcar to our public transportation options, but it applies in any major metropolitan area.
Buses and trains have fatality rates far below cars and trucks. A 2013 study in Research in Transportation Economics titled “Comparing the Fatality Risks in United States Transportation Across Modes and Over Time” found that busses and trains have a fatality rate of between .11 and .15 per billion passenger miles, while cars and light trucks have a fatality rate of 7.3 per billion passenger miles.
Beach Slang has my favorite album of the moment, A Loud Bash of Teenage Feelings.
If you have a half-hour to spare, you can check out the entire disc here (or click on the image below). If you like earnest, guitar-driven, punk-tinged rock, it’ll be time well spent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggzchwd9TXA
To me, Beach Slang has a great early-era Replacements sound to them. And their lead singer James Alex seems like he pours his heart and soul into the music, based on this interview. A few key quotes:
“And we play our guts out. That’s what we do every night. Even if we play for one kid, that could be the one kid who sparks this whole thing. Every kid matters. If it’s one person or thousands, we’re gonna play just as hard.”
“I had a wrecked childhood, so you look for family when you don’t have one. I found that in punk rock, in the scene, my friends were my family and I want to shout that out for all the kids who are lost and looking.”
“There’s something very romantic and necessary about rock and roll not being handed to you. It’s a blue-collar job and you have to work hard for it. If it means enough to you, you’ll do anything for it.”
“Sweat, urgency, unpredictability and danger. Rock and roll needs to have that. No two shows should be the same.”
Just east of downtown Cincinnati, alongside Interstate 71, there’s a dense, jungle-like thicket of trees and shrubs along the hillside leading up to Mt. Adams. The multi-acre site has been a favorite haunt of homeless people for many years. I’m guessing one or more of them modified this sign to read “Trespassers will be pros.”
My father Herbert had two enduring loves in his life:
His wife (my mom, if you’re keeping score at home), Olga (nee Osellame).
The Los Angeles Dodgers (nee Brooklyn Dodgers).
He grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey and was just a subway ride away from his beloved Dodgers during their “Boys of Summer” (a must-read book by Roger Kahn) days. He was 10 when they made their first World Series in a generation, 15 when Jackie Robinson made his historic debut. He cheered “dem bums” on in four World Series match-ups where they wound up on the losing end, before they finally broke through in 1955 and beat the dreaded Yankees in a seven-game classic.
The Dodgers broke his heart when they moved to Los Angeles after the ’57 season. But he found joy in the five World Series they won during the rest of his lifetime.
He married my mom on October 15, 1960.
She broke his heart when she died of leukemia in 1968. But he found joy in the four children they had, and their kids’ kids too.
Tonight, October 15, 2016, the Los Angeles Dodgers take on the Chicago Cubs in the first game of the NLCS. I wish Herb were still around to root for his squad. But I know there can be joy after heartache, and I take solace in the symmetry.
Today is Columbus Day… although there seems to be a bit of momentum in certain cities (including Cincinnati) for making it more of a Native American/Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
Here’s a blurb from the Cincinnati Enquirer about it:
Indigenous Peoples’ Day is not a new idea. The idea was first broached in 1977 at the United Nations’ International Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations in the Americas. Since then there has been education about how Native American people suffered during American colonization – countering what many people learned about Christopher Columbus in grade school.
In 1992 Berkeley, California City Council symbolically renamed Columbus Day for indigenous people. Other cities have followed suit. The most recent adopters include Denver, Colorado and Spokane, Washington.
You may think that’s political correctness gone astray (historically speaking, the Native Americans likely came from another continent, so they are neither “native” nor “indigenous” to North America).
However, the fantastic blog/comic/website The Oatmeal has an enlightening post about Christopher Columbus that will certainly give you pause and probably make you reconsider why we celebrate this holiday. And with one of the presidential candidates threatening to build a wall to keep out immigrants, the post is timely too.
At the beginning of each month, a co-worker friend of mine sends out a list of the celebrities who have passed away in the previous month. Don’t ask why. (Cough… Celebrity Death Pool… cough, cough.)
Some of the folks who passed away this September have a direct connection to music, such as the great Buckwheat Zydeco:
Country trailblazer Jean Shepard:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjKp3LucF1g
And R& B singer Clifford Curry:
But a few recently deceased celebs have a connection to music that’s a bit less obvious.
Transgender actress Alexis Arquette’s first acting gig (back when she was known as Robert) was as the boy on the amusement ride in the video for “She’s a Beauty” from The Tubes:
Boxer Bobby Chacon? He features prominently in Warren Zevon’s song “Boom Boom Mancini”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qne0iow7Hts
And Herschel Gordon Lewis was known as The Godfather of Gore for writing and directing B-movies like Blood Feast. But two bands took their names from his films: The Gore Gore Girls (from the movie by the same name)
and 10,000 Maniacs (inspired by Lewis’ Two Thousand Maniacs flick).
Drive-By Truckers have a new album out called American Band. It’s phenomenal. It’s also political. In that order. Here’s a nice blurb from NPR Music:
Racism, immigration, gun violence, hate symbols and censorship all get their turn in the crosshairs of the band, fronted by Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley. But the record isn’t driven by unfocused anger: It’s a poignant take on what it means to be an American in a time when uncertainty and fear are omnipresent. As Hood says, he hopes to “turn on that light in the basement and see what’s scampering so we can figure out what we’re dealing with.”
You can check out the entire album performed live here:
Vin Scully will call his final baseball game today, after 67 years behind the microphone for the Brooklyn/L.A. Dodgers. He is, without any doubt, the best baseball broadcaster ever, and second place isn’t even in the same universe. He did games on TV, but radio is where he really was at his most brilliant… he could paint a picture of the action and draw you into the game like no one else. Because it was never about Vin – as it often is with today’s ego-driven broadcasters – it was always about the game.
When he was on TV, he knew that the video could tell more of the story, and didn’t feel compelled to fill up the air with drivel. Probably his most famous call was Kirk Gibson’s home run in the World Series, and his line “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened!” is classic. But watch and you’ll see how Vin sets up the confrontation between the MVP pitcher and the hobbled batter so brilliantly. And note that Vin is silent for a full minute after he calls the homer, allowing the magic of the moment to shine through.
Last weekend I went to all 3 days/nights of the “new and improved” Midpoint Music Festival (MPMF). While I prefer the “old and unimproved” format, with bands playing various clubs around downtown Cincinnati and Over-the-Rhine (just north of downtown), this year’s lineup was right in my musical wheelhouse.
The good news is the performers that I was excited to see did not disappoint (Tokyo Police Club, Bob Mould, Frightened Rabbit, Nada Surf, Band of Horses, Josh Ritter, The Mountain Goats, Car Seat Headrest, Houndmouth, Frank Turner, Langhorne Slim, Lucero… see, I told you the lineup was in my wheelhouse), and I saw some unfamiliar bands that I really liked as well (Ona, Julia Jacklin, Lucy Dacus, Amber Arcades).
Better yet, local public radio station WNKU had a “Members only” tent set up near the two main stages, and you could get free food, a couple of free beers, and enjoy photo ops with a few of the bands. Needless to say, I took full advantage of that perk, as these pix will attest:
Me and my close personal friends Band of Horses
My good buddy Scott, the lead singer of Frightened Rabbit. We go way back.
Just chillin’ with Langhorne Slim, a dear friend of mine.
So music-wise, it was an A+. But the venue was downright depressing. The new owners of MPMF also run the giant outdoor summer music shed in town, and a downtown theater. While they upped the ante on the quality of artists, the festival stages were set up on derelict asphalt parking lots. No trees in sight. Very little shade. Zero charm. No vibe. And the stages were so close together that there was a lot of sound bleeding over from one to the other, which has to be disconcerting to the artists. Several commented on it.
The 15th annual Midpoint Music Festival, under the careful auspices of new ownership by the CSO’s Music & Event Management Inc., re-launched in the form of several surface parking lot venues in Pendleton and a block of Sycamore Street. You may remember these parking lots from my Soapdish column a few months back, in which I observed “Every day I walk or ride, multiple times, on 12th Street east of Sycamore through the desolate Straits of Pendleton — a dystopian, concentration-camp-like hellscape of undulating asphalt, crumbling pavement, weeds, razor wire and rusted, blown-out cyclone fencing.” Alsoknown as this year’s new home of MPMF, this unrelenting heat sink of parking lots and storm water runoff squats smack-dab in the middle of a thriving historic district, development exploding around it. Based on the above quote, you might think I would be inclined to dismiss this year’s new format out of hand, and you might be right. My initial reaction to the new parking lot music festival, as opposed to the traditional format, held in bars and venues all over OTR, was decidedly skeptical. Descriptors like “Jammin’ on Sycamore” and “Bunbury North” immediately sprang to mind. But I was determined to give the new format and its impressive lineup of talent a fair shake. That is, until I stood in the middle of the WNKU stage parking lot in the middle of the afternoon in 87-degree heat while the festival’s opening band HOOPS kicked things off and commented, somewhat sarcastically, “This is a nice parking lot.” I looked around, nodding along at what a sad statement that was. The bars and individual venues of the past have been exchanged for a better musical lineup and sweltering, mid-afternoon sets in blinding sun. What was struck has essentially been a Faustian bargain for the “bigger and better lineup” of talent, while capturing the all-important alcohol sales necessary to fund it. But Midpoint was never really a “pure” music festival. It never was really “just about the music.” As observed in last year’s column: “From my perspective, though, what really spotlights the ‘local’ at MidPoint is the neighborhood. Just walking from bar to outdoor venue back to a different bar, you really experience the variety of Over-the-Rhine and downtown. I saw bands at every venue other than the slightly-orphaned Taft Theater, and it was mesmerizing to witness the ebb and flow between different venues and stages and the incessant migration to the next act catalyzing the streets and sidewalks with a spontaneous energy and vibe, nomadic tribes of music lovers parting from the earlier crowds to join up with others.” That zeitgeist was pretty much obliterated by the new format. This was not about the neighborhood. This could have been anywhere. The spillover buzz into Over-the-Rhine was effectively minimized by what was essentially an indie music internment camp. The two main stages, situated awkwardly next to one another, offered up terrible sightlines to the spectators who were downhill (but decent views for the freeloaders in the garage across the street). Meanwhile, the dueling stages on both sides of 12th Street resulted in a cacophony of blurred sounds bouncing off the sides of the surrounding buildings. In short, this was a less than impressive debut by MEMI in the inaugural year of their stewardship. The parking lot stages could not hold a candle to the main outdoor stages of year’s past — from Washington Park to the Moerlein brewery to Grammer’s. And while, sure, a lot of this is when-I-was-there-style, misty-eyed, knee-jerk nostalgia for those glory days of yore, it’s sad that what was once an organic and vibrant neighborhood showcase has been commoditized into a music festival that could pretty much exist in Anywhere, USA. In response to some Twitter criticism, MPMF dug in their heels a bit and noted that they were “committed to the new format.” Meanwhile, multiple requests to MEMI for comment have not yielded a response. Hopefully the organizers will take the feedback they receive to heart, and possibly explore some creative alternatives to the Pendleton Parking Gulag.
Kevin Sullivan on Life advice from a man who lived it: “A good one Damian. Bring our lens into focus after the long weekend or our long life journey.” Jul 7, 09:38
You done said…