(for more information on the upcoming audio project, click on the QUICKSAND category, to the right )

The demo version of broken can be streamed in entirety from Last.fm
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(for more information on the upcoming audio project, click on the QUICKSAND category, to the right)

The demo version of another night wasted can be streamed in entirety from Last.fm
Continue reading →

(for more information on the upcoming audio project, click on the QUICKSAND link, above)

Quicksand, per Google

In the mid-90s, I was doing a lot more of my own music.  With Daniel Farris (the Black Pill, a billion other projects), I recorded a lot of my songs — lyrics and music by me.  Some (read: most) of it, on reflection, is terrible, terrible, shit.  My age and (in)experience shows through in a lot of the recordings.

There are, however, a number of songs to which I have a strong attachment — enough to fill a playlist, at least.  Unfortunately, the mixes and playing and arrangements of each song are, to varying degrees, flawed. There’s only one song in the batch that doesn’t stand out like Gary Busey at a MENSA meeting, and even it doesn’t fit in as well as I would like.  Still, the words and notes all still hit a very real emotional resonance with me, and so I’ve decided to rework a batch, to be grouped under the umbrella of QUICKSAND.

Most all of the demos (which can be found here) are primarily me and Daniel, with a lot of drum machine.  Some of the arrangements need serious work, while others are largely okay outside of needing to be better recorded or mixed.

I plan on enlisting the help of a number of musicians that I’ve met over the past fifteen years in rerecording these songs, as well as — if I can somehow cobble together the money for it — getting input from a Well-Known Name or two in the world of music. Fortunately, I’ve got no set timeframe; this isn’t going to be a twenty year project filled with option anxiety, no Chinese Democracy, but I certainly will not rush this — both because I don’t have the unlimited pockets to fund the thing, and because I think a lack of patience and disciplined approach is a large source of the flaws in the demos.

Feel free to comment or add suggestions as I go — I’ll be approaching the ‘album’ track by track over the next month, gathering my thoughts and building my initial plan.  While I have no idea if this will eventually become a commercial project, I approach that thought with doubt; I will, however, in one form or another be making the final product available to the public. What’s the point of making art if not to be shared?

I read Pajiba daily — media criticism with a real sense of humor about the things that they go after — and this nostalgia review is the funniest thing I’ve enjoyed today:

00:28:25: The movie is supposedly full of little historical inaccuracies and bloopers. MacLeod, a damn near 500-year-old Scot orders a fine Scotch “on the rocks.” If you’ve been reading your Boozehound, you know that no self-respecting Scotsman would water down his liquor. You also know there’s no such thing as a Scotsman with self-respect.

Plus, it brought back a little longing to destroy the fond memories I have of the movie. Anyone old enough to remember the glory that is/was Highlander should read this. Anyone too young should go watch the movie, and then poke fun at me for officially having lost my mind.

Quite possibly:

Before long your mind becomes one big callous, a mass of dead, scarred neurons impervious to all but the most horrid of visions, and by the time you realize what the sparse growth on your face signifies it’s too late and you’ve become Warren Ellis.

From Ectoplasmosis

Those wacky looney tunez:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfX08j69oZI]

Muckfuppet, yo!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21OH0wlkfbc]

Speaking of those fucking muppets, you’ve probably already seen this.  Watch it over and over again anyway.  Because it makes your liver heal silently.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpcUxwpOQ_A]

It’s so irritating that you want to claw your ears out.  And yet you keep listening, and laughing so loudly that your coworkers think maybe you’ve finally gone over the edge for good.  And then Animal comes in, and you know it’s all over; your day just can’t get any better.  Until Statler and Waldorf show up…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDFgtFXfnv0]

Seriously, was there ever a better character than Beaker?

The six and 1/2 hour drive to North Carolina (and then again back) this past week was a little quicker than I remember, because for once I remembered to load an audiobook onto my iPod.  For some reason, listening to spoken-word makes time pass a lot more quickly than music, particularly if the writing is engaging.  Lewis Black got me to and from Chicago in 2005; Tom Clancy (!) made my 2000 Baltimore trip a little more bearable (note to Jonas: the visit was great; the drive, not so much).

It got me thinking about bartending, listening this time to Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. And while there’s a lot of material in there that is really not at all applicable to the bar world — the rules about eating out, stories about his time at CIA and his inspirations for becoming a chef — there’s a lot that is.  As such, I think it shoudl be required reading, both for aspiring bartenders and grizzled veterans.

There’re a lot of different bar atmospheres out there, from corporate restaurant sports grilles to upscale martini- and cigar-specialists to hole-in-the-wall places like Bailey’s to the Cheers-esque bar where I am now.  To the average customer, these places have nothing in common outside of the sale of alcohol; they attract different crowds, serve different specialities, and contain entirely different worlds.  Behind the scenes, though, it’s all the same, and it was listening to a typical (if fictional) day-in-the-life segment from Bourdain’s book that I realized that.

No matter how my bar shapes my attitude on behavior on shift (and the ways I carried myself between Bailey’s and some of my corporate gigs in the past couldn’t have been more different), the job still involves the same things.  There’s inventory and ordering (degrees of detail may vary, but the routine doldrum at the core remains identical).  There’s talking to people you don’t like, dealing with drunks, hoping the regulars will come in to delay the impending onset of insanity by an hour or two.  There’s money — way more than the job deserves, sometimes, and other times way less.  There’s cleaning up the bathrooms or the blood in the entryway, dusting the bottles and ceiling fans, wondering why the owners haven’t fixed the lights yet, wishing the distributors would get your order right just once, haggling with bands about their payout.

Beyond all this, though — for better or for worse, depending on whether you view the list above as the nightmare behind the glamour that you had never considered, or really not so worse than any other average Tuesday night — is the group of people you work with, your coworkers and peers.  The boss (owner or manager) is obviously somewhat important, as they control the overall atmosphere of the working environment.  But it’s the other bartenders, the barbacks, the security guys and cocktail waitresses that will make the job worthwhile or not.

Much like Bourdain describes his kitchen crews, a given group of bartenders is a pirate gang, a military troop, a family.  If you find yourself working behind a bar where this isn’t true, things will fall apart.  I don’t care how talented your crew is; someone will go postal, or the bar will simply peter out.  If you’re a united group, though — and I don’t mean that you want to spend every minute of the rest of your lives together, or even that there’s not a single bad apple in the basket, because there’s always one — you’ll make money, have fun, and get through all the bullshit that is inherent to the selling and serving of alcohol. What made Bailey’s my favorite bar to date — behind and in front of — and what made it so hard to let go of at the end was the group of us.  Jason, Mariel, Daniel, me, Kristinn, Heath, Rick — it was a good mix, a rare grouping that worked well (enough) as a whole.

There are a lot of other things that should go into your choice of places to work (if you have such a choice, of course): clientele, ambience (including the bands that play in your live music club — if you think you hate Genre X of tunes now, wait until you have to listen to it at painful volumes six nights a week), opportunities to grow. But any and all of these things can and should fall second to whether or not the people behind the bar are your kind of folk or not.

In the meantime, find a copy of Kitchen Confidential (and while you’re at it, pick up his other books, including his wonderfully instructive cookbook, Anthony Bourdain’s “Les Halles” Cookbook: Classic Bistro Cooking or seek out an episode or twenty of No Reservations) and keep in mind that there’s a lot of parallel between the worlds of chef and bartender.  If you’re not in the business yet, it’ll help prepare you for some of what you’re eventually going to encounter; if you’re behind a bar, you’ll recognize a thing or two, and maybe even learn something useful.

Awake at 6 AM EST — shift an hour for my body and unconscious brain, and it’s 5 AM, and six months ago I was just getting off work, thinking about sleep two hours away.  Now it’s 6 AM, and I’m up and mostly conscious, watching memories of myself and my kid sister on Christmas morning.  Only now it’s not me and Mandy, but Lucy/Bird and Jack/Linus, Mandy’s kids.  Lucy’s old enough to know who Santa is, to get excited about the presents under the paper; Jack’s old enough to like to pull bows off of boxes, and find temporary distraction when crayons or a puzzle come out.

Only temporary, though.  

I’m glad I’m old enough now to appreciate the underlying side of Christmas, the family and the ambience of the moment.  The hard times have hit everyone — I’ve got friends that have been laid off, and family that is affected by the disintegrating stock market.  Gifts are far fewer and smaller than in years past, even more economic than when I was a kid and we didn’t have much money.  But all that is secondary to me now; I’ve spent the past week watching my wife (who doubles as my kid when it comes to gift-giving times) open her presents with the starry-eyed excitement and impatience of a six-year-old; and having dinner or drinks with friends and co-workers.  I still get immense satisfaction from the giving of gifts, and I’m lucky enough to have been able to afford to give on a close-to-traditional level.  But that’s far from the most important part.

It’s been a year for change, I thought last night, driving through the rain and strangely heavy Christmas Eve traffic.  My initial thought was that it’s been filled with a lot of loss — Bailey’s Pub closing, and the economy, my youth (that sounds much more hyperbolic than I mean, and deserves more explanation, but explanation that will have to come another time).  I remembered, though, that loss and gain are just a matter of perspective, that none of that is defined by the situation but it instead a conscious choice that we can make, overriding the knee-jerk reaction.

I’m choosing (for the moment, at least), to see it as neither gain or loss, but simple forward motion. Everything continues to move, and I find that it’s best not to dwell on anything that has already passed, whether it be regret over the bad or wistful fondness for the good.  Yes, the bar closed, but I’m at a new bar, with different opportunities and possibilities and positives.  The economy is failing, but it’s worth more focus and work on my part if perhaps it can bring about a perceptual shift in the attitudes of the country. I’m not getting any younger, but a lot of changes that come with age are things that I’m learning to like, to be proud of; and the things that I don’t like, or the consequences of bad choices in the past, can be turned into lessons, for peers and the next generation alike.

I can see the cloud outside that sits on my parents’ house in the mountains of western North Carolina finally being eaten away in the mid-morning sun.  I feel the calling of a cigarette and another cup of my baby sister’s way too potent coffee.  Keeping up with the energy levels of a two- and four-year old pair is a lot more difficult that I had imagined; better Mandy than me.  But it’s a nice temporary change of pace for a few days.  Me and the three younger siblings in the same place as our parents for the first time in years.  No work, either programming or stocking a bar, for four days, and although I miss my friends and my wife, it’s a good vacation away from the real-world grind.

Times are tough, but I hope that everyone out there can find something good to focus on, at least for a little part of today. If you didn’t get everything you wanted, look around and see what you’ve forgotten that you have.  If you can’t be with the person you want, enjoy the time by yourself, something you don’t get nearly as much of as you might think.  If nothing else, make yourself an extra-strong cup of eggnog and chase it with another.  At least you won’t care as much.

Happy holidays to everyone, no matter what your religious bent. I hope you all manage to enjoy them.

I’ve closed down a whole lot of businesses.  In fact, if you’re not a major corporation, I suggest that you never consider hiring me, because odds are good that giving me a job is the surest sign that your business will one day (sooner rather than later, probably) fail.

Not just be less profitable than you expected, but cease to exist.

There’s Hecklers.com, Tapesouth, Cobb Theaters, D.T.’s bar, the Birmingham Post-Herald.  Those are the ones I remember — I know there are more, but I can’t think of their names.

There’s an obvious joke I’m forgetting to add here…

The worst are the ones that I’m there for, though.  Curious George’s Comics and Arcana was where I spent a large part of my teenage years, into my mid 20s.  George sold me my comics, but he became a friend as I grew older, and eventually hired me on for part-time work to help me control the amount of money I was spending in the store.  We shuttered his door in 1995, and I made sure that I made the final purchase (aside from other dealers in the area coming in to plunder his overstock).  I still have that receipt.

At least we knew that was coming with some advance notice, though. At Bailey’s, as it goes, we never had a chance.

In better days. "Better" used loosely.

That’s sort of unfair; in a way, this has been a telegraphed punch for about 2 years.  Turns out there was a lot of money walking out of the door over the years — we took in a whole lot of cash business, but as I understand it, the only deposits ever made were credit card sales, which (so we thought) were more than enough to cover the costs of staying open.  Turns out, though, we were apparently deeply in debt to various and sundry tax agencies — something only the owners know the full depths of.  Which is fine by me, really, ’cause I don’t want to know depths.  Never liked ’em.

On September 31, with exactly 10 hours of warning, we were informed that our liquor license renewal had slipped slipped through the cracks of the owners’ attention, and that at 12:01 that night we had to shutter the bar pending that renewal.  Unfortunately, since we owed back taxes, the license was under lien, so it was to be a reapplication instead of a renewal — converting our few days of downtime to 6-8 weeks (though we were all assured that there were the ubiquitous Friends in High Places that would ensure that we were open in plenty of time for Halloween).

Since then, we’ve heard that we’d be reopening, that there would be new owners that wanted the status quo to remain the same, and then finally last Tuesday night that the landlord has decided that that space is not going to house a bar ever again.  And so with not a bang that it deserved (on so many levels) but with a practically-unheard whimper, Bailey’s Irish Pub is as lively as the Woolly Mammoth and the World Series hopes of the Chicago Cubs.  Nothing more than a memory, no matter how fondly held.

All the places that have fallen by the wayside are sad losses, to be sure, but Bailey’s is particularly painful to me.  I’ve been in there supporting the place on one side of the bar off and on since they opened in 2001, and supporting the bar on the other with sweat and blood since 2004.  It provided me with more than a reasonable income, including a year-long stint that might have been spent unemployed.  I met a lot of great people there, had some really good times, drank waaaay too much, and played 250+ shows with Eric and the Exhibit(s), among others. Andrew and Julie met there; so did Eric and Brandi (my boss and his wife), and Jason and Jessica, and Daniel and Mariel, and me and Cynthia, and who knows how many others.

I’m not intentionally glossing over the bad shit that happened there.  Ignoring that much negativity is akin to saying that Bush was a good President because he … erm.  Never mind.  But I am choosing to focus on the good, because there’s still a fair amount of bitterness and anger over the way things ended — with no resolution, with an utter lack of communication to those of us that made a lot of money for some people — that I still need time and distance to process.

I’m at another bar now, having slid back down the totem pole once again, and the others I worked with are either elsewhere or making plans to get there.  We Bailey’s folks are a resilient bunch (we sort of have to be, to have made it there for any length of time).  And I hope to finally get out of the business for good within a year or two, if I can stabilize my finances enough.  It’s a young man’s game, and it wears me out. It’ll be nice if I have the chance to go out on my own terms, on my own timetable, instead of having the carpet pulled out from underneath me.

I would request a toast to the memory of Bailey’s, but that’s inappropriate.  What feels more right is taking a cheap can of beer or a toxically low-end whiskey, and pouring a little on the ground, and then vomiting on it a little, and then  starting a fight with yourself and cursing the bartender who obviously didn’t like you that much in the first place. So do that if you have a moment.

Cheers.

Good news to end the year for me:

• I’ve finally got a vacation away from Birmingham coming up.  First time in a year that I’ve got more than a day trip to look forward to.
• Credit card debt: finally gone.  It took long enough.
• It looks like a song I wrote and recorded about 13 or 14 years ago — “theme for an imaginary revenge” — will be appearing in Chance Shirley’s Interplanetary.  I am honored and flattered.
• And once again putting the ‘free’ in ‘freelance’ (which, admittedly, is better than putting the ‘STD’ in ‘stud’); see the year-in-preview issue of Birmingham Weekly, hitting stands in about three weeks.
• All that was lost this year is regained, at least to the extent of regain that I needed.