Back in the saddle again.

My crud is gone. The cough is almost gone. I went to the gym and cleaned my room and I am going to get lots of overtime for the next couple of months while Rebecca's gone on FMLA. I have decided I am okay with singing "War" as long as I have a tambourine that I can shake around while I do it. A tambourine will give me a false sense of confidence and allow me to do something other than grip the mic like Public Enemy when I sing about "young men's dashed hopes."

I've got to get some songs together so that Steve can put them on a CD for me. I have a bunch and I think I'm just gong to make a big tape and use that.

This week I'm hoping to hit the gym a lot and attend a couple of rehearsals for the show on Friday. I've only got to find out where they are, now.

I'm currently devouring "Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?" about the Carter Family.

How can I resist?

Who wouldn't want to live in these places, advertised as such?

1br - *****Nice Place & U Still Have Beer $$$$$$*****

$499 / 1br - If You Have A Broken Lease or Eviction Call me

1br - Like a Wallet on the Side Walk this will be picked up quick

Where my heart is....

I just watched the Carter Family documentary from PBS.

Wow.

As far as documentaries go, I've seen better, but to their credit no film could really tell their story. I said, NO FILM COULD REALLY TELL THEIR STORY. Ya hear that, Hollywood? How about you don't even try?

Anyway. As I watched it, I felt the familiar visceral tug of yearning, excitement, and blind determination roil and rise within me until they bubbled out so fast I had to pause the recording and pace back and forth, trying to gain control of my thoughts again.

What I want, well...it's been done before, I know. There will always be those that do it better than I. But still, I know in my heart that it is what I love--all other possibilities fade in comparison.

I need to shout out to the world my love of music and the soul-deep magic it brings to me.

I need to write.

I need to make music and the history of it a very central part of my life. If I don't, I will feel as if I have let myself down. I know this in my heart. I want this so badly for my life that I am fighting back tears as I write this silly blog.

I must immerse my life in the two. Writing. Music. Make music of my writing. Write about my music. Write about my life and the constant juxtaposition of the two.
I must not get caught up in whether this man or that man is giving me the love I deserve, whether this girl likes me or whether I got a good review or if I'm overweight or if I'm broke. None of that matters.


I have a good start, as I have been darting in and out of this knowledge for almost twenty years. I also have been dallying with the dance of life and love,and that's all well and good...but most of all I need to ensure that I do not lose sight of my goal. I must continue to write articles about the things that I love, no matter how trivial they may sometimes seem; no matter how swamped my teleconferences and numerous daily duties get.

I must get my own space again, physically, where I can delve into my creative being without one thought for another's well-being. I casn write songs all night and clean at 8AM on a Saturday morning. I can mutter and pace and sloth if I must. I must censor my relationships with television and the computer. I must rediscover that which is truly me, and will always be.

You know me...just a rockin' and a-rollin'....

I wish I could write about all that happened over SxSW, but it gets fairly overwhelming if I attempt to gather my thoughts about it.

I saw:

Los Straitjackets w/Big Sandy
The Alarm Clocks
The Reigning Sound
Mary Weiss
The A-Bones
Sam the Sham
The Cynics
Paul Collins Beat
Peter, Bjorn, & John
The Stooges
The Clutters
The Woggles
The Mullens
The Ugly Beats
Muck & the Mires
Dirty Fuzz (*gag*)
The Jungle Rockers
The Beasts of Bourbon
The Detroit Cobras
The Waco Brothers



SxSW was great fun but as usual I got "The Crud". To my credit, this time I doubt it was really the dreaded SXSW strain since I came down with it so early on and I had taken precautions. I've been sleeping lots. Trying not to let this go bronchial, and taking lots of Emergen-Cs.

I've also been spending some time emailing my friends and ummm....working up a version of "War" for the Dandy Lyons spectacular on March 30th. So far I've determined that my version of this should be entitled "Big Ball of Suck."

In other news, I briefly flipped through channels tonight and noticed a VH1 special entitled "Lindsay Lohan's Most Shocking Moments." They made a TV show out of this????

I quit American society.

New song

In the midst of cleaning, I just stopped and write an extremely depressing song called "Unlovable Loser." Woo! I mean, the protagonist? Pathetic. Me? Never.

Yay. More songs.

*

*

It's getting to be time I wrote a happy one, damn it.

Cah-razy!

Mmmm...bed....kitties....Swedish cheese.

Oh, wait! Whiskey...Norwegian friends...countless opportunities to poke fun at feather-haired, blazer-sporting film guys.

How ever will I choose?

In the end, The latter won out. But as late as I got down to Casino el Camino to meet Tor and Magne, I got a fantastic parking spot and had enough time to have a ball without having more than two drinks and without getting "downtownies" overload.

Today I exercise, purge myself of books and other belongings, do a spot of laundry, pick out some songs to work on, and maybe eat some tasty and healthful food.

I found out that the Skatalites are playing tonight and although Tommy McCook and Roland Alphonso joined that great ska band in the sky many years ago, they are still undoubtedly the best live ska act that I've ever seen. Doreen Schaffer, Lloyd Knibbs, and Lester Sterling are still keeping things cooking. I believe I shall go and let all my friends know and of course, Tor and Magne and Richard and Steinar will come, because they squealed like wee girls and jabbered in unintelligible Norwegian when they heard about it last night. Of course all Norwegian, when jabbered, is well nigh unintelligible to me...so we'll just forget I said that.

In the meantime, I'm drawing on my battle gear and starting pull myself into the frenzy that is SxSW. A heartening conversation with Laura yesterday assured me that even if the Shim Shimmy Go Go Girls don't put in an appearance at the official SxSW showcase of the Woggles/Cynics/Ugly Beats/Reigning Sound, there are still ample opportunities to enjoy each of these bands at some of the day shows. Plus Muck & the Mires are here; they're our buddies from Boston who won the Little Stevens Garage Contest last year. And of course, I think I will have to *ahem* be very ill on Friday March 16th, because the Stooges are playing at Waterloo and well, I need to see some of the Raw Power for myself.

So yay!

Although, I *really* would like to see Mary Wells sing with the Reigning Sound backing her up. Good lord, what joy! I'll have to see what sort of finagling I must do in order to achieve that.

And now...elliptical trainer, more coffee, maybe a tasty smoothie and a burrito later on.

Sometimes there are no other words.

Ugh.

Arrgh.

Blecch.

Ew.

Tsk, tsk.

Hmmmph.

Bleargh.

*flick*

Sigh.

I leeched this one from the New York Times. Heehee...

There is even a doily! How I adore doilies.




HELLO, SUCKER
By William Safire


I would suggest moving back,” said President Bush, from the cab of a yellow Caterpillar tractor at the company’s East Peoria, Ill., plant. “I’m about to crank this sucker up.” He started the engine, watched a puff of smoke belch from the stack, steered the machine around the assembly line and announced, “That was fun,” as he got off.

The local press caught the carefully staged symbolism of a dynamic economy and global demand for American construction equipment, not to mention more well-paying jobs thanks to a free-trade policy. But the message that got through to language mavens around the English-speaking world was that another new meaning had been accepted, at the highest level of government, in the saga of a great old English word.

All of us who cavorted at the bee’s-knees speak-easies in the 1920s, swilling bathtub gin and waving feather boas to the tune of the “Charleston,” fondly recall the image of Mary Louise (Texas) Guinan perched atop a stool in the middle of the El Fay Club in Manhattan, greeting every wide-eyed “big butter-and-egg man” from out of town with her trademark shout, “Hello, sucker!”

That roughly affectionate use of sucker was derived from its meaning of “simpleton; a gullible mark often fooled, hoodwinked, swindled or otherwise easily taken advantage of.” The metaphoric source, the Oxford English Dictionary informs us, is that of a young mammal before it is weaned from its mother’s teat, calling to mind a picture of a suckling pig. The great lexicon’s earliest citation in this sense is from an 1838 Toronto Patriot: “It’s true that pigs has their troubles like humans ... constables catches ’em, dogs bite ’em, and pigs is sometimes as done-over suckers as men.”

That sense of gullibility was exemplified in several famous American sayings, like “Never give a sucker an even break,” falsely ascribed in the 1880s to the showman Phineas T. Barnum by a rival impresario. The Barnum biographer A. H. Saxton credits Paper Collar Joe Bessimer, a notorious confidence man, with “There’s a sucker born every minute, but none of them ever die.” To be fair, the bumptious Barnum never claimed coinage; indeed, according to the Columbia World of Quotations, he later thanked his envious rival for the publicity. (P. T. Barnum is legendarily remembered for suckering his circus customers with a sly exit sign, “This way to the egress,” which enticed paying visitors to leave a crowded tent in the hope of seeing a live egress, presumably a caged female eager.)

Paper Collar Joe’s born-every-minute aphorism lives: in a segment about outlandish gifts on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Diane Sawyer recently admitted buying a “Memory Pillo,” confessing, “Because if there’s a sucker born every minute, I’m the sucker born in my minute.” In the 1936 film “Poppy,” W. C. Fields first said, “Never give a sucker an even break,” which reinforced the sense of a sucker being a born “loser.”

Other senses of the word live on inside longer locutions: vampires, always a popular attraction in horror movies, are bloodsuckers, and media pundits, proliferating madly in the blogosphere, present their views in what we like to call thumbsuckers.

Even so, many feel slightly uncomfortable using the verb suck or a noun built on it. In a column about teenage slang a few years back, I reported that the term being used to describe what we used to call soul-kissing, or French kissing — a pleasurable form of osculation, if somewhat sloppy — is now sucking face. Some readers found that phrase to be unsuitably descriptive, even odious, and urged that its users be banished to tonsil-hockey’s penalty box. The same adult distaste is shown toward such innocent childlike derogations as “Algebra sucks.”

I ran this hidden concern past Grant Barrett, editor of Oxford’s excellent political etymology, “Hatchet Jobs and Hardball,” a host of the KPBS public-radio show “A Way With Words” and whose “Double-Tongued Dictionary” is available at www.doubletongued.org. “While it is debated regularly,” he e-mails, “some linguists and lexicographers do think that sucks, as it is currently used, such as ‘Algebra sucks,’ without a direct object, is probably not derived from longer forms.” Obviously, other language scholars disagree and are free to send their always profound comments to one another on the American Dialect Society listserv because I must use my remaining space to deal with this question: Is there anything unduly suggestive or remotely lascivious about Bush’s “I’m about to crank this sucker up?”

Not to anyone with clean hands and a pure heart. Here is Harry Smith, paragon of media virtue, on the CBS “Early Show,” displaying a large, expensive toy named PlayStation 3: “We’re going to show you how this sucker works.” And here is Representative Phil Gingrey, Georgia Republican and a stalwart of the right, on a Democratic bill ordering Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices: “It’s a loss for our seniors; we need to kill this sucker dead.” And reaching back to 1969, John Denver’s rendition of the romantic lyrics “You dun stomped on my heart and mashed that sucker flat.”

Sol Steinmetz, member of Olbom (On Language’s Board of Octogenarian Mentors), is the voice of calm sagacity: “Sucker in this context is a slang term that uses the standard word sucker for any unspecified thing, and is synonymous with other terms like dojigger, bugger, gizmo and others for ‘a machine or contraption.’ ”

If the reader will move back, I will zip this column to my copy editor in New York as soon as I can find the right thingamabob, doohickey, whatchamacallit, whoozadingy or sucker to hit on this weird ergonomic keyboard.