The Big Green House

The milkman of human kindness

I tend not to have a very high regard for most of my fellow humans, a fact which most of my fellow humans have done very little to mitigate over the years. (I think it was all those years working retail that did it for me. If I had to pin it down to one incident, I’d go with the time I stopped someone from breaking a piece of merchandise and he spit in my face.) Every now and then, though, people will genuinely surprise me. Like last night…

The car was (is) still on the fritz, so I spent a large part of the evening trying to get through to one of the several taxi companies serving Seattle so I could get home from work. On the rare occasion that I got anything other than a busy signal, I was left on hold long enough to make me give up and try again. Frankly, I wasn’t all that surprised. While the arterials were all pretty much bare and dry, the side streets all across town were pretty icy. Nobody wanted to drive, so everybody was after getting a cab for themselves.

Plan B was to catch a bus most of the way home, get off by the Arboretum and walk the, I dunno, mile, mile and a half home. Trouble was, the bus only ran once an hour at that time of night. Rather than standing in the cold, it would make more sense to keep moving and just walk all the way home – just under five miles. Given that the overnight low was forecast to be 18 degrees, this was not what I wanted to do, but sometimes there’s not a lot of choice in the matter.

Since we haven’t had the car running, we haven’t been to the market in awhile and were running out of important things like tortillas. There’s a grocery store not far from where I work, so I hoofed it up there in hopes of being able to grab the stuff we needed and still make it across the street in time to catch the bus.

It almost worked, too. As I was standing in line waiting to pay, I saw my bus zip past.

Nothing seems right in cars

As I was driving to work last Wednesday, I noticed that the car was acting really sluggish in the lower gears, kinda hesitating and shuddering and other things you don’t really want your car doing. Since I was relatively close to work, I decided to drop it off at the service station nearby. Sadly, I’d forgotten that they’d remodeled the service station into a mini-mart. Great. Crossing my fingers, I got it into the parking garage here at work.

What with the holiday & all, I haven’t been able to get a mechanic down there yet to take a look at it. I’m hoping that it’s just low on transmission fluid, or something equally simple to remedy, but I want to have a pro look at it before I try to move it again. We’ll know what’s up Thursday morning.

What makes this really inconvenient is the weather. It’s snowed the last couple of evenings, and today it never got above 27 degrees. It took me about an hour and a half to get a cab to come pick me up after work last night, since the streets were so icy. I was seriously considering walking the five miles home at one point. I wouldn’t have enjoyed it, but it still remains a possibility tonight. Still, it could be worse; I could be trying to get home from someplace like Kent.

Someone's got it in for me -they're planting stories in the press

I got linked on Seattlest yesterday. The guy decided to latch onto one part of my last post and twist it so’s he could make a “ha ha, old farts listen to old music” snark at my expense.

Well, yes, I do sometimes listen to old stuff. I even go out and buy it from time to time, either to fill a hole in my collection or because I’ve got the vinyl and can’t be arsed to rip it to the computer. I freely confess this.

I also listen to proportionally more new music than I do old. That was kinda the point of that particular piece, actually – that there are those of us of a certain age who don’t want to be spoon-fed the pre-chewed pablum we’re “supposed” to be into. The Mountain doesn’t get it for us. Not much of a point, maybe, but it was right there in plain sight.

I’m not trying to prove my hipster cred, mostly because I don’t have any. As the philosopher said, I yam what I yam and that’s all what I yam. I do, however, take exception to being quoted out of context. You wanna take a shot at me, be my guest. I’ve got plenty of foibles to choose from. All I ask is that you get it right. Or, in other words: rise above the cheap shot, motherfucker.

I know I keep you amused, but I feel I'm being used

Hello Seattest readers, and welcome to what I think is the only time I've ever mentioned Rod Stewart in the entire time I've been writing this blog.

One of the reasons why I’ve been running a low-grade depression lately is because of stories like this: aka Old Farts Buy Music, Too.

I was born in 1960, which, depending on which demographer you care to put faith in, was either the tail end of the dreaded Baby Boom or the lost group between the Boomers and the equally dreaded Gen X. There are portions of both generations I can identify with, but on the whole I think I feel most comfortable with the latter, if I have to come down on one side or the other. Still, since my alleged cohort also includes the, um, more aged grouping, I feel that I have to wave the finger toward whoever signed off on that stupid story in the first place.

I’ve got a lot more to say on this subject than I can righteously spit out under the amount of quality bourbon I have on board at the moment, but let me just say here that there are those among us who may or may not qualify for Boomer status who have absolutely no interest whatsoever in what Rod Stewart or James Taylor, to name but two possible artists, have to say these days. I will cop to having bought the “new” Neil Young live album, as well as the first Crazy Horse album, (and at some point, if I can get my shit together, I have plans to go into both at great length), and to still digging more psychedelia than is perhaps proper in one so advanced in age (or maybe not, I guess), but I’ll be fucked if I’m ready to jump whole-heartedly onto (or under) the great rolling nostalgia wagon that seems to crush my cohort under its wheels with such apparently predictability. The day you see me buying a Rod Stewart album any newer than, say (off the top of my head) Never A Dull Moment, I hereby give you permission to shoot me on sight. All I ask for is a headshot, please.

(I'm giving Tony Bennett a pass because, while I don't really have much use for his music, every interview I've ever seen with him makes him out to be an OK guy.)

The pervert in the bushes and the dope-fiend on the street - They've got one thing in common: they're all crying out for meat

I’m in the middle of a dry spell. Oh, I have ideas for things to post here; plenty of ‘em, too. I’ll start writing them out, and then one of two things occurs – I either can’t stand the way I’ve phrased it, or I like the writing but find that the original idea itself is shit. Lately it’s the latter, most often. Either way is frustrating, especially since it leaves me very little to post other than excuses for why I’m not posting more often. And, y’know, who wants to read that?

Well, hell. I suppose I could tell you about Science Girl’s birthday dinner. We went to Nishino, which was quite nice. I was lead to believe that it was a bit more formal than it turned out to be, so I wore my suit. Given the quantity of fleece on display at the other tables, I was perhaps a little overdressed. Better that than the other way around, I guess. (SG was much cleverer than I, as usual, and dressed in such a way as to appear both formal and casual.)

The food was great. We had some sushi to start. It was probably the best I’ve had – not to imply that I’ve had a whole bunch of experience with sushi, since I haven’t. Just that it was really good, as was the miso soup. The entrees were a sort of (and I’m hesitant to use this term, since I’m no foodie & could well be misapplying it) fusion of traditional Japanese cuisine and, uh, western, in the case of SG’s (I don’t think cheese factors into trad. Japanese cooking, does it?), and Chinese in mine. Sometimes that sort of thing falls flat, but this was aces all the way. We want to go back, dressed comfortably, and sit at the sushi bar to learn a few things.

You see, your baby loves to dance

Well, I’ve been working on some content… yeah, remember that? Anyway, I’ve had some health issues crop up that have been making it really difficult to finish anything. Nothing major (yet), just enough to keep me unproductive. I may have something later this evening/tomorrow, or I may not. (Don’t expect anything over the weekend, though, as Saturday is Science Girl’s birthday.)

In the meantime, here’s a little clip from Rust Never Sleeps. As is required by law, I remind you that I was at this show, and (most likely) you weren’t.

Spit-shine your black cloud

In an attempt to counteract the relentlessly sour mood of this here blahfest, let me now mention a few things that not only don’t suck, but are, in fact, good. Just for a change, y’know. I’ll be back bitching about something or other real soon.

Number one on the smiley parade these days is Young Machetes by The Blood Brothers. It took me a couple of spins to really get it, but now I dig it the most. Loud, Loud, LOUD high-velocity sensory overload that comes so very much closer to the ideals and spirit of punk rock than any of those emo dipshits being promoted by the pinheads at NY Times as the saviors of rock & roll could ever hope to be in their wildest wet dreams. No dress-up or make-up, just plenty of wake-up. Get it while it’s hot.

Like it a little less headache-inducing? Fear not! There’s The Hands’ So Sweet EP or, on the slightly poppier side, The Quit. Both bands are playing just your basic R&R, no frills or doodads. Needless to say, this is good.

And hey, check this out: All of the above bands are local. Coincidence? I dunno. You tell me.

Robyn Hitchcock & The Venus 3 - Adventure Rocketship

A note of clarification

It has occurred to me that part of my little rant awhile back could be misconstrued, so I wanna make it absolutely clear, right now, that I have no problem with the use of acoustic instruments. There’s a great American tradition of acoustic instrumentation in bluegrass, jug bands, Delta blues, a huge swath of country, jazz, etc., etc., and while I’m pretty stupid on my best day, I’m not dumb enough to want to toss all that out.

And the good stuff isn’t all in the past, either; I wasn’t foolin’ when I said that I enjoy both Iron & Wine and Juana Molina and, at the risk of sounding all “some of my best friends are ______”, I point now to the amazing non-electric work of such contemporary artists as Gillian Welch and Old Crow Medicine Show. And, y’know, the Elder Gods of my personal pantheon – Neil Young and Bob Dylan – have both delivered a fair amount of quality unplugged goods. The fact that I tend to prefer their electric work overall doesn’t negate that fact.

Without wanting to delve back into the original rant, I’ll just say that the acoustic nature of all that junk I was arguing against is not what bugs me about it. If you want to know what does, you’re welcome to go back and read the damn thing yourself.

I’m sure that nobody else cares about any of this, but I felt like I needed to set the record straight.

Your tax dollars at work

A new PSA from the Office of National Drug Control Policy…

FEMALE VOICE: (Computer voice) Being popular was all I could think about last year. I wanted to, like, be cool with everybody. I listened to music that I didn’t like and laughed at stuff that wasn’t funny. I programmed myself to be a totally different person to everyone.

(Computer voice starts to change into a real human voice.)

FEMALE VOICE: But I wasn’t myself. Now I’m not pretending to like indie rock or anything like that. And people think that’s cool.

MALE VOICE: Live above the influence. Above weed. Check out abovetheinfluence.com. Sponsored by the ONDCP and the Partnership For A Drug-Free America.

Only hypocritical dope fiends listen to indie, in other words. Good consumers Americans don’t stray from the approved chartbusters. Now put down that bong, hop onto iTunes and download some Justin Timberlake, you little beatniks.