Bob's Short List

Time magazine has a page near the end of each issue called the "Short List: Time's Picks For The Week." As one part of that page, they invite a celebrity to create his or her own individual short list of culture (pop or otherwise), literature, technology, and societal events that represents what is on the celebrity's radar right now, what he or she is really enjoying. Since I know no celebrities, and since we are all celebrities in our own minds, I take the liberty here of presenting my own "Short List:"

Bob's
Short List

Bob has just returned from a 4-week National Endowment for the Humanities seminar on Poetry, held at DePaul University in Chicago. Now back at work, his new school year begins on August 24th with Summer Reading sessions on Pat Conroy's The Great Santini and Arthur Miller's All My Sons. His portrayal of someone actually working this week has earned him knowing nods from both his headmaster and his upper school head and has generally allowed him to be left alone.



Jazzed About Jazz

I had never been to a real jazz club until I stepped into the Jazz Showcase in downtown Chicago. The posters and photographers of the greats who have played here is astounding, the setting is intimate and friendly, the drinks are generous and cheap, the waitresses are classy and attractive. But when Mulgrew Miller and his band left the bar and took the short walk to the stage, I finally understood, "Oh, so this is how you're supposed to listen to jazz, close enough to see how each member of the band plays each note, how they play off each other, how they find a groove and pull you into it."



We?
Joshua Ferris' Then We Came To The End, a funny, oddly poignant account of office life in an advertising firm pulls off quite a few tricks for a first novel. The humorous approach and outrageous antics of disgruntled workers would seem to invite immediate comparisons to The Office and Office Space. The focus on advertising might call to mind Mad Men. And yet the book manages to be nothing like any of those, largely because of the broad, flawed humanity contained in its first person plural narrative approach (except for one significant break in the middle). The narrator, in effect, is everyone who works there except for the specific characters who have stepped out of that sea of employees onto the stage at any given moment. The resolution of the novel is one of the more beautiful pieces of writing I've encountered in years.



You Scream, I Scream
I had pretty much given up on dessert. Even at the finest restaurants, there is a sameness to the offerings. That is, until I stepped into Margie's Candies, an old-fashioned ice cream shop in Chicago. Oh, my sweet Jesus, the hot fudge sauce is perhaps the finest spoonful of anything that I have ever put in my mouth! The perfect balance of sweetness and bitterness. And that took me back to ice cream, which I never eat. And that took me back to making ice cream, which I haven't done in a long time. Oh, the pleasures of the real thing!



The Dark Side
My song of the summer has been Charlie Mars' "Listen To The Darkside," a sleek, slickly-produced little ditty that invites everyone having a bad day to come over to the narrator's house ("Come over and get high/We can listen to the Dark Side Of The Moon). Very catchy. Very convincing. I have played it a lot. But the song also pushes you back to the source, the Pink Floyd classic that has the pretty rare gift of not sounding old or tired out nearly 40 years later. If you've got it, put it on when you can turn all the lights out and let it take you someplace else, without the need for The Wizard of Oz tie-in or any artificial stimulants. Trust me, it can still do the job all by itself.

Charlie Mars--"Listen To The Darkside" (mp3)

No Reservations

The Food Network has become very, very hot right now, but I'd suggest you go to a slightly different place on the dial--The Travel Network--for one simple reason. Because Anthony Bourdain is there. Bourdain, the renegade chef, writer, traveler may still have the ego of the jockeys on that other network, but he also has an irrepressible joie de vivre and a show that ultimately isn't about him. And an insatiable love of all things pork. If you've ever seen him, you know he has a no-nonsense, I'm-up-for-anything approach that makes him to perfect host to take you around the country, or around the world. There are many shows that want to take us to explore new worlds of food; I'd prefer to stow my gear and set sail with Captain Bourdain.


Charlie Mars is available at Itunes. By the way, should you want to cartoonize yourself, it's very easy to do at http://www.befunky.com/. You don't need to join or download anything. And, by the by, if you'd like to try the wonderful world of blogging and write up your own Short List, we'd be happy to have you as a guest contributor. Just write it up and send it to our email, bottomoftheglass@gmail.com and we'll do the rest.

Hello!

Hi everyone, thank you for visiting... Today is the day that I finally decided to move ahead with my plans to create this blog... I am constantly coming across beautiful things that cause me to overflow with creative energy! I have such an extensive wealth of interests, ideas, passions and abilities that I need an outlet for it all...

So... What will this blog be about? Anything and everything that interests, moves, and inspires me! Ha! Particularly Interior Design, decorating, renovations, bargain shopping/hunting, thrift shops, how-to's on revamping spaces in your home, pretty things, photography, travel, social/political/religious/controversial/world issues, art, and anything else that inspires a rich life!

I really wanted to get this initial post out of the way so that I can start composing the next post! hehehe... stay tuned ;)

And so it begins...

The Godfather of Adolescence is Dead

Cry Like This - Blue Room (mp3)
If You Leave - OMD (mp3)

Michael Jackson created an image; John Hughes created a whole universe. I don't quite know how to explain my sense of loss here, but this isn't an exaggeration: my life would be significantly different -- and worse -- had John Hughes not existed.

Hughes, who died at 59, created so many of the indelible pop culture moments that cover the canvas of my adolescence, that were I to start spewing out all the memorable Hughes lines stored in my brain's C: drive -- without any cheating or help from Google, mind you -- it would take me a long time to get through it. Let's just do the first 25 that pop into my head, with the only requirement that I can't go with the same movie twice in a row.

1. He's a righteous dude.
2. Yeah. 220, 221, whatever it takes.
3. It must be a hen house, because all I see is chickenshit.
4. There's a tremendous white sale on.. at Towel World!
5. This is crazy this is crazy this is crazy.
6. In the family jewels?
7. Any fool can get into college. Only a select few can say the same about Amanda Jones.
8. Let's face it. You're a neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie. What would you be if you weren't out making yourself a better person?
9. You called Dr. Stanky?
   
10. Schooner Tuna: the tuna with a heart!
    
11. If I woke up tomorrow morning with my head sewn to the carpet I wouldn't be more surprised.
    
12. Chicks cannot hold de smoke. Dass what it is.
13. How 'bout you bend over and I shove this straight up your ass?
14. I don't want you to take me home!
15. You're like a chatty cathy doll.
16. You've got a big Yard King 410!
17. Gimme the keys!
18. Does Barry Manilow know you raid his wardrobe?
19. He jeopardizes my ability to effectively govern this student body.
20. Keep the change, you filthy animal.
21. Lisa was everything I wanted in a girl before I knew what I wanted.
22. You ought to spend a little more time dealing with yourself, and a little less time worrying about what your brother does.
23. She's small, but she's strong. Her first baby come out sideways. She didn't scream or nuthin'.
24. It's my porcelain udder buddy.
25. ...and an asshole on my front lawn, emptying his chemical toilet into our sewer.

(for those dying to know, the movies from which these quotes (or my inaccurate recollection of them) come are listed below)

These aren't the best ones. They're not the only ones I could work up. I'm just saying that I thought of the next one as soon as I'd typed the one before it, and I had to concentrate to keep others from coming into my head. I can already think of a dozen more that are better and more memorable than the ones I wrote above.

My point is, John Hughes helped me understand what I was going through as a teenager. He helped me know that being awkward and feeling outcast was miserable yet also worth laughing at. He made me want to kiss a girl. He told me it was admirable to want to be more than others think you can be. He told me money was sad and superficial and was used by shallow people as a singularly divisive attribute. He convinced me that parents loved us, even if they didn't quite understand us.

Hughes, particularly in The Breakfast Club, noted the cultural shift from the '60s and '70s -- when teens distrusted authority -- to the '80s -- when teens fought amongst themselves and paid too little heed to the conniving and selfish adults in charge of them. He simplified some of the complexities of teenage confusion without insulting us. He made an entire movie set inside a school library, a movie of just five kids talking to each other, and it was successful.

When I found out about his death yesterday afternoon, the weight of it didn't hit me right away. Then, last night at about 10 p.m., I found myself putting in one of my least favorite Hughes films, Pretty In Pink, and watching it and loving it even though it's not that great of a film. His movies weren't Kubrickian constructs of painstaking care. They were flawed, and sometimes highly. But they had enough heart to give life to a million tin men. Or, more accurately, to millions of tin teens.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1, 22)
Mr. Mom (2, 10)
Some Kind of Wonderful (3, 7)
Weird Science (4, 6, 13, 17, 21)
Vacation (5)
Breakfast Club (8, 12, 18)
She's Having a Baby (9, 16, 24)
Christmas Vacation (11, 25)
Pretty in Pink (14)
Planes, Trains and Automobiles (15, 23)
Home Alone (20)

No Good Deed

Damn it Feels Good to Be a Gangsta - Geto Boys (mp3)
Don't Save Me (It's Alright) - Todd Thibaud (mp3)

In Texas, a guy working produce at a store heard a woman screaming that her purse had been stolen. He reacted instinctively, chased down the 15-year-old suspect, and held him for the cops. And he was fired for it.

Why? Because Randalls has a clause in its employee contract abjectly forbidding its employees to intervene in such criminal acts. Said their spokesperson, "We recognize Mr. Schafer’s good intentions, but our overriding focus must be the safety of all concerned."

Translation: You're a swell guy, but we'd rather hire that perp, 'cuz we can trust he won't screw with our liability concerns by rescuing old ladies' purses.

On nights (or OK, occasionally at work), I'll hop over to this site called Plastic.com. It's basically a news aggregator that tries sparking discussion and commentary from its members, focusing mainly on stories or subjects that have a controversial bent. This topic got plenty of commentary, and a lot of it really bothered me. Plastic's readership leans fairly liberal and atheistic, and like any site that welcomes pseudo-debates, people tend to flow towards more extreme views. When it comes to extreme liberal views about crime and punishment, the reaction generally involves not trusting the police and not condoning people defending their measly and meaningless property with excess (read: any) force. So, a good bit of the responses on this story were of the "Sucks that the dude got fired, but there's a reason those clauses are in employment contracts, and if you let employees wail on someone everytime they steal some crackers, you'd have a screwed-up society" variety.

Maybe it's my Scottish heritage. Maybe it's my Southern heritage. Maybe I've watched too many Clint Eastwood movies. I dunno. But I struggle to pity someone who acts in a predatory manner on a weaker or more vulnerable human being. Be it a rapist, or a mugger, or a carjacker, or a burglar, or a child molester. Anyone who uses their position or size or knowledge to take gross and immoral advantage over a fellow human being who is weaker or smaller or dumber should not have the right to expect completely balanced justice.

When you're on the wrong side of right, under predatory circumstances, you've lost your right to believe you deserve complete fairness. You gave it up when you stepped into someone else's weakness and preyed upon it. I'm not saying muggers deserve to get shot to death by the Po-Po or have their firstborns burned on an altar or something. But they put themselves into a river that's out of their control. If the current drags them out, or if there's some vicious undertow, well they didn't have to put themselves in that river. They might not deserve to drown, but they damn well shoulda known it was possible the minute they stuck their toe into those chilly rapids.

Do we want a society where we are forced to choose between an instinctive desire to protect and defend a weaker person and the need to hold onto our livelihood? I guess there's people who say "It's just a purse" and people who say "It's just a predator," and rarely shall the twain meet.

All I know is it aggravates the hell outta me.

The Smarties' Club

Rosanne Cash--"Man Smart, Woman Smarter" (mp3)

Man has his wit, but woman has her way. --magnet on my refrigerator

Early in the summer, I got cornered at a couple of parties by a woman I know who, to be blunt, seems to have low self-esteem and needs to talk about herself a lot. The first time, we got ambushed as a couple by their couple (her and her husband), and my wife tried to retreat into her Blackberry while I tried to keep my focus on the pita chips and hummus dip until, finally, unable to take it anymore, we flat-out fled the party. Yep, just left abruptly with some lame excuse involving our children, who happen to be 16 and 20 and don't particularly need us to be home.

The second time, I got trapped alone with her alone somewhere between the drink station and a couch with nowhere to go and she had had some wine, and so proceeded to talk about being smart. She knew she was smart. She thought I was smart. She referenced someone else she knew who was smarter than either one of us. She went around the room, pointing out people and telling me that we were both smarter than each particular person. It was kind of like it was some kind of exclusive club.

I didn't say anything, just kind of nodded, acquiesced a little too much, looked for someone to bail me out. It reminded me a little of that scene from The Great Gatsby where Tom Buchanan is spouting racist nonsense and identifying himself and everyone else at his dinner party members of a "dominant race" that have to protect civilization from the lesser races.

And, yeah, I'm probably smarter than your average bear. Big fuckin' deal. I'm smart, you're smart, we're all smart, and then there are those who are smarter. And those who aren't. Big. Fuckin'. Deal. I'm also clever, can be quite clever. I may be able to put two ideas together more quickly than you can, or spin words for a laugh. And I'm quick. Yeah, fast as lightning with the irony. And I've got a good memory. Can remember details, song lyrics, not necessarily lines from movies.

What does it all add up to? I'm probably someone that you might want at your dinner party in hopes that I might make the table laugh once or twice and maybe someone you'd want on your Celebrity team or Encore team or _______ (insert favorite game here) because I know the story behind Deep Purple's "Smoke On The Water" and am conversational about hip-hop culture.

To traffic in your own intelligence--IQ, grades, test scores, whatever--as an adult is a pointless exercise and kind of a pathetic one at that. Smarts are best left to schoolyard bragging and, maybe, to the oneupsmanship that may still be important to a young adult before skills in a marriage, a family, a job, a civic organization matter more. Intelligence may get your foot in the door, but it isn't going to get you the job, the special project, the promotion. Or the girl.

Still, at first glance, we'd all like to think that we're in the Smarties club. Intelligence is something that we tend to use as a dividing line; the lack of intelligence is a basis for criticism, condescension, judgement against a policy we didn't like. And no one wants to be on the other side. Telling your boss that you disagree with him or her is one thing. Telling him that his plan is stupid is likely to draw a different reaction. And if you're the President and you tell the Cambridge Police Department that they behaved "stupidly," you're probably going to wish you had chosen different words, especially if both you and the victim in the case have Ivy League pedigrees.

Since Billy talked out about Outliers yesterday and I've just read it too, I'll point out a couple things in Gladwell's book:

1. The smartest man in the world (by far) is a guy named Chris Langan who has worked as a bouncer for the last 20 years and couldn't figure out how to deal with the bureaucracy effectively so that he could finish college. (The second-smartest, of course, thinks she's the smartest and answers brain teasers for Parade magazine).

2. One of the researchers Gladwell talks about in his book explains that after a certain point IQ doesn't matter. All that matters is that a person is "smart enough," not that he or she is smarter than everyone else in the room. The baseline intelligence he references, while above average, is not particularly high, just high enough to allow all of us to gripe, "I'm smarter than my boss" and still realize that somehow he or she is smart enough to be the boss.

I suspect that maybe the club we really want to be in (half-kidding, of course) is that Smart Enough Club, that group of people who are fortunate enough to be armed with enough something upstairs to be able to navigate their way through life without too much outside help.

Ultimately, intelligence is like money. Great things can be accomplished with it, but there is no great joy in its accumulation. To wear it around one's neck like a gaudy piece of jewelry that says to the world, "Look what I've got," is to worship it for its own sake, which has never amounted to anything. In fact, having too much of intelligence, like money, probably undermines both a person's motivation and sense of purpose. Spend all of your time thinking that you're smart, knowing that your smart, having people tell you that you're smart, and you'll probably find yourself in a terminal condition of smartness. Incurable. Doomed to believe that you deserve things from other people because you've read all of Jane Austen's novels and went to fine schools and quote Latin phrases at the drop of a hat.

But, surely, all of that means something?

Yes, honey, the game is called Trivial Pursuit.

Rosanne Cash is available at Itunes.

One Thing If You're Lucky

The One Thing - INXS (mp3)
Best Days - Graham Colton (mp3)

This summer I breezed my way through the latest Malcolm Gladwell infotainment, Outliers. If you haven't read a Gladwell book -- The Tipping Point, Blink, or this one -- I highly recommend you give one a try. Although I think they're overrated as tools of learning, they earn their keep on making what might otherwise be a little dry excessively readable and sticky.

Gladwell is the master of anecdote. He uses more person-specific stories than Reagan and Clinton used in their State Of The Union speeches. Once in a while he even throws a small grain of research at you.

His latest, which is yet again wildly successful, is perhaps his most ingenious. The Tipping Point was probably his most studious and, for me at least, the most compelling, but what it missed was a human connection. It missed the What does this mean for ME? vibe.

But Blink and Outliers are both crafted to serve as an excuse for the masses. Each book absolves us of particular weaknesses and shortcomings.

Blink explains why we're so judgmental and actually suggests that our snap judgments have evolutionary significance and are, more often than not, accurate. In other words, it tries to make us feel better about trusting our instincts, because who needs books and education and wisdom, and who has the time to ponder or consider or reflect? At its extreme, it also even provides us an unintended excuse for our own prejudices and biases. (No, Gladwell doesn't remotely condone this, but it doesn't matter, because when you write for the masses, you're writing for many people happy to draw conclusions you didn't intend.)

Outliers, on the other hand, basically lays out a soothing balm for the bungled and the botched, as Nietsche called us. We're not bungled and botched because we're losers, Gladwell asserts, but rather because we just weren't in the right place at the right time. His point has plenty of merit, but I wonder if the book is so popular because it helps let us off the hook a little.

One of Gladwell's key assertions is that, in order to gain mastery in something, one must have practiced or worked on it for more than 10,000 hours. Success requires more than just this investment of time, but without it, mastery at the highest levels is almost impossible.

So I asked myself, what talents or hobbies or gifts in my life can I even come close to saying, "I've spent 10,000 hours practicing/doing that"? The results are pretty darn limited.\

• Reading. I'm quite certain I've spent 10,000 hours of my life reading high-end articles, novels, books.
• Watching TV or movies. Hell, I might have piled up 10,000 hours of each by now. This... troubles me a little, although what's the point in letting it trouble me now? Might as well shoot for 20,000!
• Writing. Seven or eight journals filled front to back. Two very under-the-radar blogs before this one, each lasting well over a year, with things being posted three or four times a week. Creative writing classes throughout college. 
• Poker. I started playing poker online for money -- very small stakes, trust me -- after I read the book Positively Fifth Street back in early 2004. Although I'm nowhere close to 10,000 hours, I'm probably past the 2,000-hour mark. And, as most experts will tell you, playing poker online might have some flaws, but it also accellerates your learning curve.

I'm not aware of any kick-ass professions that center around just reading -- especially for readers who are as slow and plodding with it as I can be -- and critics of all sorts are losing their newspaper jobs left and right, so watching movies and TV shows ain't gonna rocket me into the Superior category.

As for writing, I'm workin' on it. I've found me this delectable little blog thing to feed my dependence. I keep plugging slowly but surely away on something that wants terribly to be a novel if I can nurture it properly. And I write a ton for my actual job, although I don't think anyone's ever going to refer to me as "The Tiger Woods of Independent School Marketing."

So that leaves poker.

I'm pretty good. In fact, when I'm around people who won't take it as penis-dangling bravado, I'll even admit to thinking I could be very good. As you read this, I'm taking the biggest and boldest step yet to find out whether I might be right or totally fooling myself. I'm in Tunica, playing in a series of tournaments known as the World Poker Open.

The rub -- and anyone who loves Shakespeare knows there's always a rub -- is that it's damned expensive to find out how good you are at poker. Yet I chafe at spending more than $15 on a nice meal. In fact, I picture sitting at a table with $300 in chips, hearing someone say "I'm all in," and vomiting all over everything at the thought that I could lose all of that money in mere seconds. ("$300 is, like, two years' worth of music purchases!! And it could all go away by calling!")

So wish me luck. Yes, poker is about skill AND luck, and great players need plenty of both. Either way, one mere weekend of winning or losing more money than I'm used to would only be the start if I wanted to be really really good. Either way, I have no illusions I'll be quitting my day job (or blog) anytime soon.

Southern Rock

If you don't listen to the music on this blog, you are missing out on 13:31 minutes of one of the great live southern rock performances:

The Marshall Tucker Band--"24 Hours At A Time (live)" (mp3)

I knew about southern rock long before I ever knew about the South.

Thanks to FM radio, a suburban Pittsburgh kid like me got a heavy dose, starting with the Allman Brothers round about 1971, when long jams like "Whipping Post" and "You Don't Love Me" were getting heavy airplay on the more "underground" of the two FM rock radio stations.

That began a long love affair between me and southern rock, between Pittsburgh and southern rock. It was no accident that Charlie Daniels referenced "Pittsburgh Steeler fans" in his anti-Ayatollah diatribe "In America" in 1980. By that time, he, like all of the other southern bands, had played the city times too numerous to mention, and Daniels himself was being referred to as "Pittsburgh's favorite son." There was something that clicked between music from the south that felt real and a blue-collar city that didn't like pretension from its professional athletes or its music.

Always a bit skewed from the norm, here's my pantheon of great southern rock (in order):

1. The Allman Brothers Band

2. The Marshall Tucker Band

3. The Outlaws (pictured left)

4. Lynyrd Skynyrd

5. Charlie Daniels, Molly Hatchet, 38 Special, Elvin Bishop, Grinderswitch, and all of the rest



For me, southern rock was about guitar. For me, my first guitar hero was not Clapton or Hendrix, it was Duane Allman. While the airwaves were packed jamming guitarists who seemed able to solo indefinitely in every setting from British blues to prog rock, there was something about the sweet roundness of Allman's Les Paul tone and the beauty of his slide playing that set him apart from the pack. It was a matter of teenage male pride to be able to distinguish when he was soloing vs. when it was the more metallic tone of partner Dicky Betts. I don't know that the Allman Brothers created the dueling, harmonizing two guitar attack, but they certainly popularized it, and to my ears, no one has ever come close to doing it as well. Including later versions of the Allman Brothers.

I had occasion to see the Allman Brothers at Three Rivers Stadium in 1973, but it was the tour after Duane was gone, and the band had made the wise decision not to replace him (as later versions would do) with another guitarist, but to modify their sound with a stellar piano player, Chuck Leavell. It was the tour of "Rambling Man" and "Jessica," and while we admired Betts' game attempt to carry the load by himself, the ghost of Duane loomed behind most every song.

But it isn't the Allman Brothers I want to talk about ultimately. Everyone knows they were great. It's my second favorite, The Marshall Tucker Band, who I reconnected with recently thanks to an Emusic gift card I received as I walked into the Pitchfork Music Festival a few weeks ago. You've got to figure that Tucker and Skynyrd and the rest of these bands didn't just spring out of nowhere, and so, while they had to be aware of what the Allman Brothers were doing, they must have had to figure out how to build on it, pay homage to it, yet still forge an original sound. Lynyrd Skynyrd never quite worked for me, though I came to appreciate Ronnie Van Zandt's sensibilities and songwriting (sorry, fans, but Skyrnyrd died with Ronnie way, way, way back when).

While Sophocles' addition of a third actor onto the stage led to all kinds of dramatic innovation, Lynyrd Skynrd's addition of a third guitarist led to, well, three guitarists. I mean, how many soloists do you really need? Why can't one play rhythm while the other plays lead? How much sonic space is there for three guitars? (Note to Springsteen: what's up with the 4 guitars in your band, buddy?)

While Skynyrd tried to one-up the Allmans by adding guitars, the Marshall Tucker Band always seemed to me to be pursuing an original vision. Sure, they had a kickass guitarist in oversized founder Toy Caldwell, and he could play with as much speed and taste as anyone who's ever crossed the Mason-Dixon Line, but flute and saxophone in a southern rock band? Really?

Marshall Tucker's songs are not examples of lyrical genius. Almost every song they wrote was about why the narrator needed to leave a particular woman or why he needed to come back to her. But musically, and live, their songs provided the structure for some of the greatest performances in southern rock.

I challenge you to take the time to listen to the song I've posted above and then to tell me that the song really felt like it was 13 1/2 minutes long. First, it just rocks too hard on its basic D-Dsus4 riff for any listener to bother with time. Second, the guitar soloing is just too hot. Third, as Tucker stretches the song out, the variety of solos on guitar, fiddle (guest Charlie Daniels), bass, and then saxophone not only seem organic and natural, but also are so different from one another that you don't really want the song to end. If this song were an hour long, I would love it just as much. How often can you say that?

I saw Marshall Tucker once, opening act for the unfortunate Joe Walsh. They blew the doors off the place. Much as I like Joe Walsh, after Marshall Tucker's set, it sounded like Walsh was playing music that had been recorded at 45 rpm but was playing at 33 rpm. The spirit, the speed, the energy, the solos, the grits and grace, that was southern rock during its heyday. I miss those days. Spare me the confederate flag, but, yes, please, do "play it pretty for Atlanta!"

The Marshall Tucker Band is available at Emusic.