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.

Papa Johns Is The New Chick-fil-A

“If Obamacare is in fact not repealed, we will find tactics to shallow out any Obamacare costs and core strategies to pass that cost onto consumers in order to protect our shareholders’ best interests.” - Papa John’s founder and C.E.O. John Schnatter, explaining that the ACA will cost the company 11 to 14 cents per pizza.

So pouty Republican Schnatter threatens to make consumers pay more for his 'za. I don't care about paying 11 - 14 cents more for a pizza, providing it's any good (I like Papa John's pizza, for the record). Schnatter runs a business and he has to keep his shareholders happy. Fine, I get that he's beholden to them over the rest of us. But (of lesser importance) his knee-jerk naming of RomneyCare after the current occupant of the White House goes to show his political ignorance or weasely-ness (your call). More important: What else is Schnatter doing to placate his shareholders and how does that affect his customers? GMO grain in his dough? "Pink Slime" in his toppings? Underpaying employees? Unsafe working conditions? Probably not, but given his us-versus-them stance, ya gotta ask.

The bottom line of course is that we need universal healthcare. Cradle to grave assurance that we will all be covered in sickness and in health. It should not be up to employers. It certainly shouldn't be up to John Schnatter. It's our national responsibility.

It's also our responsibility to take care of ourselves and lead healthy lifestyles. I'm not entirely convinced Papa John's pizza helps achieve that healthy lifestyle.

You?

Faster, Late Joys! Learn! Learn!

I'm reposting a trio of blurbs about new songs The Late Joys sped-learned for our gig at the Baker Street Pub & Grill just before Easter. Originally published on The Late Joys blog, the first two posts explore the reasons we chose a handful of the songs; post three is a recap of what turned out to be our longest-ever gig: four hours of music making (thankfully with breaks, though not the way we intended...).

The first post, "Faster, Late Joys! Learn! Learn!" considers "Love Her Madly" (The Doors), "All My Loving" (The Beatles) and "Pulling Mussels (from the Shell)" (Squeeze). At first blush this seems an eclectic grouping, but I'd argue (and I did) that there's a strong Beatles-esque through-line that connects these disparate musical bon bons.

Post two, "The Late Joys Troll For New Songs" delves into The Pretenders' "Middle of the Road," "You Don't Know Me," which I wrote for my musical play, The Road To Wigan Pier and which received its first airing in eight years at the Baker Street gig, and then I go all wishy-washy and can't decide what song to explore next, so I just name a lot of the new ones we added with brief reasonings and descriptions.

The final post is a recap of the gig, with photos. Several songs received the attention of our official bootlegger and we may well post some snippets of the good stuff if the recordings turned out okay.

Since the gig The Late Joys are embarking on a continued course of education, adding more covers to the set, partially because it's always good to add new material and partially because there are few bands in our area playing the sort of stuff we do and we want to be the go-to band for all things Brit-Pop! (or at least that fall into that rather expansive net of "songs we like that influenced us").

Occupy Austin, Thursday, October 6, 2011

UPDATE 10/11/11 John Cassidy has a good take on the Occupy movement via The New Yorker blog. The gist: Anyone (uh, the mouthpieces for the rich/corporate USA) who disses the Occupy movement as some collection of collectivist nutjobs is not paying attention. It's not about overthrowing our corporate masters, we just want them to pay back to the society that greases the skids for their success.

"...Occupy Wall Street isn’t primarily an anti-Wall Street phenomenon. It is a generalized anti status-quo protest movement, for which Wall Street serves as the convenient focal point."

Austin, 10/6/11. This is a report of my (brief) attendance at this morning’s opening day of Occupy Austin, a local offshoot — one of many across the country — of the now weeks-old Occupy Wall Street event that started in Zuccotti Park, a coin toss away from Wall Street in lower Manhattan, NY.

Discovering that Occupy Wall Street was franchising across the country and that members of our fair municipality were setting up an occupation at City Hall, I was keen to check it out. The potential for (un-co-opted) grass roots effected change feels real to me (unlike that other so-called populist movement of the right), and I felt a whiff of exhilaration as I headed to City Hall — a feeling I haven’t really had since I marched against Anti-Apartheid in London in 1986. What would I find when a large crowd of leftists and the generally disgruntled, the police and the media converged on City Hall Plaza?

Well, this is Austin, hardly a hotbed of incendiary confrontation between citizens and security forces and, after I parked in the underground garage at City Hall and emerged onto the plaza, I saw a typical Austin gathering: plenty of relatively earnest, pleasant people, placards, police, photographers, bikes, water bottlers, coffee cups and backpacks, and everyone in good spirits. The gathering was civil and inclusive, like a meeting of City Council when there’s nothing controversial on the agenda.

The crowd, some seated on the plaza’s stone bleachers, others standing in an arc facing them, included young and old, from college students to former Vietnam-era protesters to middle-aged folk, some people brought their kids. Facing the whole shebang was the phalanx of media — TV, radio, social — armed with cameras, mics, iPhones; some old-fashioned types even used pen and paper. The few people there who were well dressed were clearly from the visual media, the TV fizzogs; the occupiers tended toward jeans and t-shirts and sweat. The police presence was notable yet reserved, the cops stood mostly on the periphery and showed no particular concern about proceedings (I heard several bursts of laughter during the hour or so that I was there and turned to see groups of cops amusing themselves in conversation while paying scant attention to us). Police Chief Art Acevedo worked the crowd with a smile and a pat on the back for anyone he came near. More than one person thanked him for being such a visible, friendly face. I’d say the demographic breakdown mirrored Austin as a whole; the crowd was largely white, with a smattering of every minority imaginable.

When I got there around 10:15 in the morning the whole thing had just kicked off. A petit woman in a blue dress, who seemed to be one of the organizers, concluded her introduction and then another in a red dress stood up and made her brief remarks. She invited anyone who wanted to speak to come up to the steps and air whatever they wished for two minutes, “would you please line up here.” A small line formed immediately and as speakers spoke, there were always four or five people standing in line, ready for their turn.

There was no microphone, no bullhorn and the local occupiers and their speakers haven’t worked out yet how to amplify speakers’ voices via the theatrical and inclusive technique that Occupy Wall Street calls the “people’s microphone.” But you could hear most of what most people had to say and it was, as you’d expect from such an eclectic group, a mixed bag of mini-speeches. On topic, I heard men and women lament corporate greed, the divide between the richest Americans and the rest of us and the need for this sort of grass-roots leftist movement to combat the entrenched and moneyed forces of the right. There were anti-Fed comments, a teacher’s plea to end standardized testing (so she and her colleagues might actually teach children how to solve problems) and a fellow from Lockhart, a town 30 miles away, painted a picture of struggling neighbors in a weak economy. There was a man in a boot cast who can’t get a job but wants to work and get off welfare, and there was a black man not in a boot cast who also can’t get a job but wants to work and get off welfare; I saw an Operation Desert Storm vet, a few tie-dyed commentators speaking out against corporate greed; I heard measured comments about the need for everyone to pay a fair share, including corporations/banks/the wealthy. One fellow who liked to shout from the crowd that it was all the Fed’s fault got up to speak and I wasn’t sure if he was going to rant, but he made a quick and articulate plea that this gathering keep up its efforts to ensure equality for everyone. A lawyer (“I’m not a wealthy one”) argued to cheers that it’s time the left stopped getting trampled by the right and its media and moneyed cronies. And a professor in full academic regalia announced he was leading an ongoing discussion about capitalism throughout history under an oak tree on the periphery of the plaza.

There were two occasions when someone got up and seemed to be saying something against this protest movement. I couldn’t hear either clearly, but from what I could make out, it seemed as if they feared for the direction the occupation might take and that we had to slow things down. The first fellow went on much longer than two minutes, and despite rubbing many in the crowd the wrong way, was not cut off; he got to finish what he wanted to say, though he changed no one’s opinion. A woman got up and appeared to be demanding some sort of restrictive rules be enforced about who could speak and when (and about what?). She was met with a burst of “Free Speech! Free Speech!” from the audience and gave up. I think she shared the man’s concerned that this group might get out of hand, but that hardly seems likely. This is Austin.

Like the Wall Street occupation, there are twice-daily general assemblies planned to map out the course of Austin’s occupation of City Hall plaza. This afternoon the organizers and the occupiers will hammer out some sort of operating standard for the occupation, slated to continue until…well, presumably until the group’s mission is met:

Our mission is to assert our rightful place in the political process, and take the reins of power away from profit-driven interests.”

Will we succeed? I have to admit that it’s a big ask that this country, in its current direction, could fulfill these demands:

1. This movement is about democracy. We demand that the government be truly responsive to those it represents. We demand an end to the massive corporate influence blocking the voice of the people by eliminating corporate personhood and limiting monetary contributions to political campaigns and lobbying.

2. This movement is about economic security. We demand effective reforms to prevent banks and financial institutions from causing future economic crises.

3. This movement is about corporate responsibility. We demand strict repercussions for corporations and institutions who cause serious financial damage to our country and its taxpayers.

4. This movement is about financial fairness. We demand tax reforms to ensure that corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share in taxes.

But it’s worth a good, sustained effort, isn’t it?

Robbledegook Word of the Day: Class Warfare

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." -- Inigo Montoya.

Except for the outrageousness of his hypocrisy,* what jars when Paul Ryan uses the word (okay, words) "class warfare" is the buff hunter-representative's lack of understanding of such a simple concept. He's got it backwards, hasn't he? Of course he has. I thought he'd been discredited for his slipped-on-the-banana-peel-of-accuracy budget proposal earlier this year but he's still lurking around, the GOP's dapper expert on all things economic. On the other hand, getting things backwards yet professing their forwardness is the right's primary oratorical weapon in its, uh, crass warfare on the English language.

Ryan suggested over the weekend that the part of the Obama plan to reduce the deficit whereby rich people pay their fair share of taxes was, sadly, class warfare, which would further divide our nation. It would spur "envy," among other mortal sins, though I can't see who'd be envying whom.

Is Ryan saying that if the poor realized how screwed they were because of the gross inequality in the distribution of wealth in America they might pay enough attention to envy their betters and, heaven forbid, do something about it? Is he suggesting that the middle classes, watching their bettors -- I mean portfolio managers -- mismanage their 401Ks and pension plans (remember those?), might clamor for more transparency by the banks and funds and corporate boards who seem to do quite all right, thank you, even as their customers suffer riding the rollercoaster of the market? Of course not. Ryan thinks that the rich will feel aggrieved that the rest of us don't just lie down and take it let them get on with creating more wealth because, as we all know, when the rich make money the extra trickles down on the rest of us. There is extra, isn't there? Or haven't the rich made enough yet? Please wake me when the gluttonous are sated at last.

Rep. Ryan has never been a genius when it comes to math. His equation that private vouchers equate to government backed health insurance was shown as faulty at best, insidiously cruel at least. And now he thinks that reeling in the rich just a little is going to make things more divisive. Backwards, Ryan! Let's look at the math. Hmmmmm, given how the top percent of earners takes more than 20 percent of our wealth (and growing), I'm not entirely sure how asking these poor rich people to pay, say, an equivalent proportion of their income as, say, their secretaries (god, sorry! "administrative assistants"), would further divide the haves from the have-lesses. Ryan thinks it would. Or perhaps he's thinking beyond mere earthly gain and is trying to save us from our sinfulness. Perhaps he has some quantifiable measure of divisiveness that this class warfare would beget. The more the well-to-do are asked to behave responsibly as citizens of our society the more, uncomfortable they get? The more irked? The more self-righteous? Of course this would make them feel bad -- more at a remove from their fellow citizens, hence: "divisive!" Q.E.D.

I thought all men were created equal and in God we trust. Clearly for Ryan the rich are more equal and in their trusts they [find] God. The rest of us can eat sausage.

Coming soon in this series: "Job Creators," "Elite" and "Socialism."

*Okay, not "outrageous"; it's expected, isn't it? The way the likes of Ryan turn words 180 degrees to suit their need is blase. Listen more closely to Ryan in the video clip above. It's as if the talking points are so embedded they require no emotion in their recitation. Soon they'll have numbers. Instead of calling it "class warfare on job creators" it'll be "doing a #2 on the #1s."