In Front of the Crowd

Update: 11/2/15
Sure enough the lyrics have undergone a change or two. Check out a live performance soon for the latest taste of this high-caliber number . . .

During the Late Joys gig last Saturday at the always fabulous Carousel Lounge, we did a bunch of old material among which were some of my soapbox songs (Ghost Town, Twisty System, Dresden, among others). Matt bantered that next on my to-do list was a song about gun violence, which as we all know is the scourge of today. Well, alright. I took up the challenge and wrote this little number. It still needs work (the lyrics have already changed a fraction) but until the band starts crafting it into a better song I reckon this raw version isn’t completely unlistenable (you be sure to let me know if it _is_!).

“In Front of the Crowd” gets its first public airing at tonight’s Butterfly Bar happy hour. You get to hear it in advance* cos you like the Late Joys (thank you for liking the Late Joys!).

In Front of the Crowd

You have a question
Come over, sport
You know I’ll keep my answers short
You don’t like Mondays
She makes you feel a fool
Go on, what have you got to lose

Never sent my children off to school
Never learned to live by the golden rule
Why are those people standing round?

Where am I?
I’m in front of the crowd

It’s so damn easy
When life’s so hard
We practiced late in the back yard
It’s not my fight
Don’t look at me
He pulls my trigger and he’s free

Never sent my wife to a dead-end job
Disgruntled co-workers, death by cop
Why are those those people lying around

Look at me I’m in front of the crowd
Look at me I’m in front of the crowd

Go text your mom go call the cops
I keep on popping and I just can’t stop
I hope you take it all to heart
So, baby, here’s my parting shot
Go blame the victim don’t blame me
Cos I’m not sentient like a human being
I think you’ll know just what I mean
You can read it in my magazine

You’ll never know where I’m concealed
You stand like statues or you kneel
I’ll fill your head with another round

Look at me I’m in front of the crowd
Look at me I’m the talk of the town
Look at me I’m in front of the crowd

*Assuming you listened to this before happy hour!

Kisses for All

Lately I have been completely hung up on the song Besame Mucho (I know the Beatles’ cover best).

For whatever reason, it keeps rising out of my subconscious whenever I drive the miserable roads of Austin. I sing it LOUD behind the wheel. (Cha-cha-boom!) 

Maybe it's an antidote to the fucked up drivers frequenting our congested byways, pissing me off. So I sing a big, loud kiss — maybe my message of love will get through to one of them one day. 

Lately, too, I am fixated on the Fastball song, The Way, because it’s going to play a part in a story I’m writing. I used to loathe hearing it 'cos it would stick in my psyche for effing ever. Argh: Song! Go away! I'm older now and I’ve grown to enjoy the invasion. I admit I've always loved the way the chorus rolls up and pays off with that growly guitar and melodic hook.* I admit it, I’m a sucker for that number. 

But wait.

Are they the same song?

Did Fastball tune into some universal melodic line when they turned Besame Mucho into The Way? To paraphrase: Did they even know what they what they were doing without even knowing the way? 

I have some doubts. And I'm not the only one.

There's a five-year old argument here. And I'm not even gonna start with the references to Delilah. 

Eh. Don't waste your time. Love the two songs. Okay, love Tom Jones and his mariachi conceit, too. Why the hell not? 

Kisses for all.

*And, really, this run always reminds me of the

segue into the bridge of Elvis Costello's Two Little Hitlers at this point. Just sayin'.

Le Menu d'Aujourd'hui (Butterfly Bar Happy Hour)

Menu des Chansons

Yard Sign Politics in Austin's District 8: An Interpretation of Aesthetics

I am fascinated by the District 8 candidates’ yard signs and what they say about the individuals running. Or at least how I interpret what the signs say about the two candidates.

Here, then, what District 8 constituents might expect from council members Ed Scruggs or Ellen Troxclair based on this (wholly unscientific) aesthetic interpretation of their yard signs.

Scruggs’ yard sign plays up his environment activism with a vengeance. The green and white sign (or white and green in the reversed version) with its single tree leaves ample empty space — breathing room in an uncluttered countryside. The man’s a tree hugger and proud of it. The sign says, in calming color: Elect Scruggs to preserve the land and, by extension, some semblance of the Austin of yore that has attracted so many people from so many corners of the U.S. so recently. The campaign looks forward by looking back. Scruggs’ candidacy hearkens back to those halcyon days when the Save Our Springs Alliance battled Freeport McMoran, Boss Todd and the rabid desire for the unrestrained development of Austin, especially the Barton Creek aquifer. The fight was a sometimes successful, mostly quixotic effort to keep Austin undeveloped. In the new Austin the fight will be similar: Find solutions to traffic gridlock that are not solely reliant on new roads like the SH 45; continue to restrain unrestricted growth in SW Austin through thoughtful planning processes; think green in the city’s energy policy. Overall the sign is a call to defend the land to maintain this gateway to the Texas Hill Country for generations to come.

Troxclair’s sign offers a modern vision of a burgeoning downtown, full of buildings crowding each other — there’s not an open space, let alone a tree, in sight. Everything has been developed, all paved. Even the kerning of the characters in her name is, like her downtown high rises, massive and compressed tightly (versus Scruggs' looser character spacing that offers the breathability of a pair of broken-in mom jeans).  In terms of color, the sign echoes the blues, white and black of the S.O.S. Alliance logo — a cruel irony when there’s not an inch of the environment left undeveloped in her sign. Troxclair, a self-proclaimed business woman and, presumably, the voice of business, gives us a sign that touts the city’s growth and expansion. The silhouette in the sign is recognizably Austin because of the Capitol and the building at 111 Congress, but it is not a true silhouette. What would lead the candidate to accept a bastardized view of her hometown's downtown? Could it be that she cannot deal with reality if it doesn’t adhere to her desired worldview? If Austin’s skyline doesn’t suit the sign then change the skyline.

 

Scruggs sign appeals directly to his potential constituents by naming his district on his sign. Troxclair just wants to get onto the city council (and then into the legislature) so it doesn’t matter from where. People who want power just want power. In Troxclair's sign the salient silhouette is of a skinny Capitol building, where this pol works as chief of staff for one of the Texas House’s Tea Party darlings. Her focus then is on issues that aren’t necessarily the same as those of her potential constituents. She has the statehouse in her sights; District 8 is but a stepping stone on her march to the Texas legislature. How committed can Troxclair be to her constituents in her district when she has a yard sign with an image that has nothing to do with District 8? Or maybe Scruggs’ tree is just wishful thinking now that they’re tearing up the trees to pave HWY 290 around William Cannon and the Y in Oak Hill. Is that his fate, too? One more old, established neighborhood-friendly advocate to be chopped down to accelerate the paving of SW Austin.

  

Last: Both candidates’ names are printed in relation to a horizontal rule drawn on their respective yard signs. Scruggs’ name floats above the rule. Does that mean he’s above the fray? Is he willing to get down and dirty and campaign hard for this seat on city council? Ah, but wait: The tails of both “g”s in his name fall below the line. Just as the roots of a tree, Scruggs is connected to the earth even though most of his name floats above it. His feet are firmly on the ground. Even if his candidacy is pie-in-the-sky, he’s aware of the need to connect to the district he represents. Troxclair’s first name becomes the horizontal rule from which her fictitious downtown Austin skyline rises. She is the earth, the foundation of the city. Without her there would be nothing. Imagine that attitude on the dais at city council. Or maybe the rule, in aquamarine, represents Lady Bird Lake, on the banks of which stands the solid concrete jungle. In that interpretation her name, Ellen, is the source of the neat straight line: She would control the flow — control being her primary concern. Control the image of downtown, control the water that flows past it, control her constituents, and not necessarily with their best interests in mind. But that’s okay, because like the modern Texas conservative movement she's aligned with, and as her sign suggests, she knows best. 

Is Scruggs too earthy-crunchy for you? Ask yourself this: Did you move to Austin (or SW Austin, specifically) because you were attracted to the pavement and can’t wait for developers to churn more land into asphalt in your neighborhood? Or did you relocate to SW Austin because you are drawn to the open green spaces of this most beautiful part of our most beautiful city and would like your children to grow up with plentiful parks, preserves and unpolluted waterways in abundance?

If you're interested in learning more about the candidates, here are links to the Troxclair and Scruggs candidates' pages. Go learn! And go vote: Early voting starts December 1 and election day is Tuesday, December 16.

The Warmest Room, recorded live at the Butterfly Bar 1/24

I pored over the recording of the solo outing at the Butterfly Bar happy hour a couple weeks ago and this one is about as good as it got. For those of you unable to attend upcoming gigs (you know who you are), this little bit of Billy Bragg will have to suffice until I get something else that merits posting. Fingers crossed.



The best bit of this sonic confection may well be the "Cookie policy" bottom left. It's some legal thing, not a reference to the gingerbread Robi in the image. Oh the delicious irony.

"I Could Do Better Than That"

Besides my familiarity with the period there are myriad reasons for setting my tale in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Among them is that while footballers then were certainly athletes, you always got the sense watching them that, at the lower levels of the game anyway, they were a bit more like you and me, physically speaking. That sense of watching them play and thinking "I could do better than that" is important to me as I spin my yarn, because I want my team of part-timers and semi-pros to be within reach of our imaginations enough that those of us who play or played the game might recognize ourselves just a little among my fictitious lot. The footballing characters in my story are potential heroes, inevitable scapegoats and overwhelmingly human, no different from real footballers, just hopefully a little more like you and me than the modern iteration of professional sportsman.

The Guardian's Barney Ronay writes a super piece that points up how times have definitively ch-ch-changed when it comes to the modern footballing professional and neatly ties together his thoughts on David Bowie and Fernando Torres with the overarching theme that no, "not everyone gets to be Bowie" and no, you cannot do better than the modern footballer -- these days a well-machined super-athlete who even in decline is miles better than you could ever dream of being: "I could do better than that," uh, well, no:

You probably think you could do better, but you couldn't.

In fact one of the remaining measures of distance between our relentlessly over-exposed elite footballers and those who pay to watch them is the enduring and unbridgeable gulf in basic physicality. This is particularly the case with footballers of the last 10 years, who have generally coalesced into a single highly specialised ideal of unattainable athleticism.

Obvious exceptions aside, footballers are no longer lanky, gangly, beefy, spidery and so on. They are instead almost uniformly lithe and Olympian, their bodies remorselessly optimum-scaled, narrower, stringier, more compact.

I'm looking forward as I write to introducing the world to the lanky, the gangly, the beefy, the spidery and the other heterogeneous traits of players on my pretend teams. And while I am awestruck at the modern footballer's athletic gifts, I can't help wishing the game might not have progressed so far so fast. I love watching the modern game and its artist-athletes (I like that Ronay calls today's game a "form of high-stakes physical ballet" -- though I thought it was exactly that when I watched the top flight players 30 years ago). But in the rapid modernization of the game -- especially as business interests have overtaken (in my view) the natural evolution of the sport, turning football into something colder and more distant from Everyman -- something elemental has been lost.

I hate the English Premier League for super-monetizing the sport, for dividing itself from the Football League, for calling itself "Premier" for goodness sake. I lived in Scotland in the late '70s and was struck by how stupid the moniker "Premier" sounded then. At that time the English had it right, naming its succession of levels of achievement Divisions One, Two, Three and Four. None of this idiocy of naming the fourth tier of the sport "League Two." Seriously.

I may be a Luddite whose memory of the supposed good old days is clouded by misplaced nostalgia and a fondness for three o'clock Saturday kick offs across the country and 50-pence student entries at the turnstiles. I know it is unrealistic to expect football in a commercialized world to reconsider itself to the point that it reverts to what was, admittedly, a past as dingy and dangerous (at times) as it was dignified. I don't care.

The thing I've got going for me is that I can attempt to write a version of the past that breathes life into that lost world of three o'clock kick offs, cheap tickets, standing on crappy terraces and using rotary-dial telephones, to name just a handful of details. I want to be sure I capture that world faithfully enough that the storytelling brings back all sorts of memories and evokes a time when maybe, on a good day, you really could "do better than that."

New Football (Soccer) Book

Just arrived in the post, Jonathan Wilson's The Outsider: A History of the Goalkeeper. I bought it as part of the research for a story I'm writing in which the central character is a goalkeeper -- an ex-pat American living in a tiny town in westernmost Yorkshire, circa 1978, staving off the Lancashire hordes and their footballs in pre-Thatcherite Eng-er-lund. I thought it serendipitous the book was about to be published as I kicked off this extensive writing project, so I ordered me one. Other serenditpities and happy coincidences have since followed as I've started to piece this story together. I'll share the best ones here from time to time. For now, a little of the joy of discovery upon receiving Wilson's book.

The inside of the book's dust jacket is as far as I've read (hey, c'mon: I said it just arrived), but in it I unearthed nuggets of information, some of which I vaguely recall from the mists of my fading memory, that got me greedily unearthing more details that led to yet more greedy research and so on. So rather than read on, I dove in -- to various tangents presented by what little I (voraciously) absorbed. Few things can energize you when you're working on a creative project the way happy coincidences do and suddenly here were a fistful of them: It's as if the universe has given your endeavor its blessing. Unlike Wilson's "Outsider," you're not alone. Not completely, anyway.

The first thing you read in the jacket is a quote from German writer Peter Handke's character Joseph Bloch (a former keeper) from the author's 1970 novel The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (in its original German: Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter): 

"The goalie watched as the ball rolled across the line..." 

Handke's book is described as a Camus-esque tale of senseless murder and dark soul searching that recalls the character Meursault from  L'Etranger. Wim Wenders made the story into film a few years later: here's the synopsis. The lead character in my story is an American abroad, and the film captured "the overwhelming cultural influence of America in post-war Germany," which certainly got my attention because I've plopped my American in Europe where he's both admired and reviled as we Yanks generally are and have been. Anything that points to the experience of Yanks abroad tweaks my antennae.*

Another thing that got my attention was the reference to "famous goalkeeper" Albert Camus -- something I vaguely recall about the writer. I reckon he must have something to say about the art form of goal keeping, or at least what it meant to keep goal. And here it is: Camus played goalkeeper while a teenager in Algeria. I dove into his history and discovered he played for Racing Universitaire d'Alger (RUA) until he contracted tuberculosis, at which point his sporting exploits ceased (would he have become the writer/philosopher he was if he'd been able to continue playing footie?). He is said to have told a friend that given the choice between theatre and football, football wins "without hesitation." His reasons had to do with the communality, the team-ness, of playing the game: You are not alone, but part of a team, which demands of you bravery, camaraderie and defending your friends in the face of whatever opposition you face. This sounds a lot like the chivalric code of honor I've read about in the Arthurian legends, but more on that another time.

The next literary figure who'd done time between the sticks (also noted in the dust jacket and which launched a further inquiry) was Vladimir Nabokov, who played goalkeeper while he studied at Trinity College, Cambridge having emigrated to the UK from the Soviet Union after the Revolution of 1917. His description of playing keeper is exultant: For Nabokov, goalkeeping was seen as:

that gallant art .... always surrounded with a halo of singular glamour

At least that was his experience in Russia. Then, after emigrating, he wound up playing in dour, wet, post-war England, when the position is one of loneliness, apartness. I like Nabokov's extended, dreamy description from Speak, Memory of a keeper in the mud, the misery of loneliness when the game is going on at the other end of the pitch so he's able to daydream, leaning against the left goal post (of course it had to be the left goal post). And, of course, I like that there are literary goalkeepers, talismen, touch-points for my own version. I plan to draw on their revelations whenever possible. 

Jonathan Wilson's book promises a look at the "lonely figure...the outsider" who "contemplates the darkness of the soul." That recalls Handke's dark goalkeeper and Nabokov's soggy loner; though I can't help think there's bound to be some joy in Wilson's recounting this history. 

I hope I to negotiate all of it and find ways to stuff it into my tale -- the joy and the angst, the mud and misery, the random successes and failures and the continuous, existential soul searching -- as I pen my main character. And my story. I hope you'll join me from time to time as I put this story to paper. 

Thanks!
r

*Of course, I was one of those Yanks abroad, coincidentally between 1978 and 1983. Go figure.