The Big Green House

Tuesday, November 26, 2002

 
Hi-

I'm going to incommunicado for a while. I'm going to be helping out with some family matters. Not sure when I'll be back, but I wouldn't expect anything before next week.
bmarkey 11/26/2002 11:35:00 AM

Monday, November 25, 2002

 
Okay, I know I promised y�all Western Swing, but the fact of the matter is I�m just not up to writing about it. Between my all-weekend marathon leaf raking festival (Science Dad�s place on Saturday, our place yesterday) and my poor dinner choice tonight (don�t let anyone fool you - sweet & sour tofu is just a bad idea), I�m not really at the top of my game today. I will get to the Western Swing, and soon.

Instead, here are cute dog pictures. Yeah, I know, I said I wasn�t going to resort to this kind of thing. A) I�m tired, B) sue me, and C) SHE�S SO FRICKIN� CUTE!






bmarkey 11/25/2002 09:23:00 PM

Friday, November 22, 2002

 

Bohemian Non-Sequitor

I recently picked up a compilation of Western Swing music, and was somewhat surprised to hear the accordion so prominently featured on so many tunes. My introduction to Western Swing was through Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys; their standard line-up was fiddle, piano, guitar, steel guitar, drums, bass, and a horn section, so I just assumed that was the norm. And it pretty much was, except a lot of bands also included the accordion.

I don�t think I�m going too far out on a limb to state that the accordion, as a musical instrument, does not get a lot of respect from the general listening public � at least, not here in America. I think we all know who to blame for that. I used to buy into the anti-accordion hype, myself. Back in the day, someone gave me a T-shirt which read, �Use an accordion, go to jail�; being the dope that I was, I wore it proudly, usually with a big smirk on my face. Well, I�m not smirking now. (Not about that, anyway.)

As I�ve matured, for lack of a better & more descriptive word, I�ve come to appreciate the sound of the squeezebox. Two things helped show me the error of my ways, accordion�wise: a friend sent me a Buckwheat Zydeco tape from New Orleans, and I saw Flaco Jimenez perform with Ry Cooder around the same time (late 80s, as I recall). Yea, the scales fell from my eyes. Also, I lost the T-shirt.

I have to admit, though, that I was kinda thrown for a loop by hearing the accordion in a Western Swing context. It was a bit of a non-sequitor for me. I figured out why the accordion is there: there was/is a sizeable Czech population in Texas, where Western Swing began, so� yeah, of course, accordions. And being as Western Swing is an amalgamation of bits and pieces of other styles � ragtime, conjunto, fiddle tunes, hot jazz, blues, reels, etc. � it only makes sense that there would be a little polka in there, too. I�m just not used to hearing it in connection with Texan music. Zydeco - yes; conjunto � si; western swing - huh? It�s sorta like eating Thai chicken pizza for the first time; it�s kind of an odd combination and it takes a little getting used to, but it does work.

As for the compilation itself � I�ll probably get to that on Monday. Think of it as sort of a cliffhanger. Suspenseful, no?

bmarkey 11/22/2002 06:08:00 PM

Wednesday, November 20, 2002

 

Please, I beg of you, no more!

There is a large tin of Altoids on my desk, thoughtfully supplied by my employers - in the hopes of sweetening the breath of those who visit my place of employment, I guess. It usually makes people happy to see it, anyway, and most of them are not shy about helping themselves to the minty goodness within.

That�s all well and good, but what I want to know is why does it disturb me so when people chew Altoids? It has the same effect on me as if they were dragging the nails of one hand across a blackboard while using the other hand to threaten a sackfull of kittens with a mallet: it is simultaneously annoying and appalling. I realize that my reaction is somewhat vehement, but there it is.

ALTOID UPDATE: Science Girl, much to my dismay, has confessed to this same heinous practice! (Chewing Altoids, not smacking kitties with mallets.) I am simply aghast.

bmarkey 11/20/2002 05:54:00 PM

Tuesday, November 19, 2002

 

What�s so great about the Barrier Reef?

Feelin� kinda woozy tonight, so I�ll keep it short & sweet. (And there was much rejoicing.)

Old 97�s rock, but don�t bother with the Rhett Miller solo album. I was looking forward to this when I first heard about it, but I gotta say it's pretty disappointing. Produced by Jon Brion (who did some very nice work with Aimee Mann), it�s so airtight & squeaky-clean-sounding that any life gets sucked out of the songs. (And I say that as someone who truly digs power pop, a genre which thrives on airtight production values.) The songs themselves aren�t awful, but Miller has shown that he�s capable of better. There are flashes of what could have been here & there, (�Things That Disappear� isn�t too bad, and �The El� might as well have been an Old 97�s tune) but overall it is, to use an expression of my father�s, slicker than snot on a doorknob. And that ain�t a good thing.

bmarkey 11/19/2002 09:23:00 PM

Monday, November 18, 2002

 
Hey everybody � it�s Science Girl�s birthday today! Yep, she�s, uh, mumblety-mumble years old, as of 10:00 AM today. She wanted to complain about getting older but I won�t let her, since A) she looks a good ten years younger than she actually is, and B) I am mumble years older than she is. If you�d like to send her happy birthday wishes, the �comments� button is ready and waiting.
bmarkey 11/18/2002 05:15:00 PM

Sunday, November 17, 2002

 

Cutting off your legs won�t make you paint like Toulouse Latrec

This is something I should have included on Wednesday, I guess, but let�s throw it in today & pretend that it�s all of one piece, OK? Here goes:

Has anyone else noticed that Robyn Hitchcock�s lyrics have become somewhat less opaque as time goes by? Even I could work out that �Strings�, from Nextdoorland, is about terrorism (although I never would have gotten �Kiss me quickly on the roof / afterwards there�ll be no proof� as a reference to the people who jumped hand in hand from the WTC, unless I�d read this interview. Ditto with his explanation of �Lions And Tigers�) He�s still pretty obscure most of the time, though; for example, I�m not really sure what �La Cherite� is actually about, but it sets up a nicely melancholy mood. And what are we to make of the laundry list of sexual requests (�fuck me, darling� rim me, please��) in �Japanese Captain�? Just the fact that he�s willing to explain some of his lyrics is a big change for him, but that doesn�t mean he�s spelling things out.

If Hitchcock is an inscrutable cat, lyrically speaking, then Kimberley Rew is more of an affable dog. (I really do mean both comparisons in the best way possible. I�m not one of those cat-hating dog lovers, or vice-versa.)

Rew, along with Hitchcock, was one of the founding members of The Soft Boys. Post-Soft Boys, he had a reasonable amount of success as guitarist & writer with Katrina & The Waves. (And by the way, get over yourself. You know that at one point you had a 45 of �Walking On Sunshine�, if not the entire album, and you played the hell out of it. Confession is good for the soul, and besides, it�s not that awful an album. There are some real duds, to be sure, but �Red Wine & Whiskey� & �Do You Want Cryin�� get the job done in a fairly agreeable manner. Not to mention the original version of �Going Down to Liverpool�, which The Bangles covered to such good effect on All Over The Place - even if they did lift the solo from The Waves version almost note for note.)

His newest solo album, Great Central Revisited, is a pleasant, solid set of straight-forward British rock & roll. The emphasis is definitely British; songs deal with, among other things, a holiday in the English country (�Life Itself�), not selling out England to the Americans (�English Road�), the rapid disappearance of British railroads (�Great Central Revisited�)� are you seeing a pattern here? Even the tunes which are more universal in their subject matter, like �Heart of Things� or �Seven Stars�, tend to be filled with Britannic details. �Sick of Hearing About Your Drugs� and �Purple and Orange Stripes� are a little heavy-handed, but then again it�s hard to pull off socially conscious lyrics without sounding a bit silly.

And look who gets name-checked over the course of the album: not just Eddie Cochran, but J. B. Priestley and Samuel Coleridge. And I�m willing to bet that this is the first time anyone has ever devoted entire songs to both Screaming Lord Sutch and Philip Larkin, let alone on the same album.

Yeah, yeah. How does it sound? Well, it sounds pretty good, actually. It falls closer to Waves territory than Soft Boys, but don�t let that throw you. Rew is very good with a guitar in his hands � nothing flashy, but the guy knows what he�s doing. I�m reminded at times of Dave Edmunds, if that means anything to you. (If it doesn�t, shame on you.) The bassist for The Waves plays on most tunes, and Mr. Hitchcock shows up to lend a hand, providing slide guitar on one track & singing on another. It�s like a big family reunion. With guitars!

As a singer, Kimberley Rew is� a very good guitarist. Not that his voice is awful, mind you, just really nasal. I guess it sorta goes along with his pronounced English accent. What he lacks in beauty he makes up for in enthusiasm, which has a charm of its own. I was able to make the adjustment fairly quickly. I�ve certainly heard worse, and so have you. (That guy from Supertramp springs to mind.)

To sum up: it�s not an album that, upon first hearing, will make you drop everything and say, �My god, that�s fantastic!� Rather, it is something that grows on the listener. I�ve often found that those are the albums I return to more often than the immediate grabber � they tend to wear thin after a few plays. Besides, �June Barley� makes me bounce around like an idiot every time I hear it. It�s a little embarrassing on a crowded bus, but then I suppose that the American public just isn�t ready for my bold style of interpretive dance.

bmarkey 11/17/2002 07:37:00 PM

Wednesday, November 13, 2002

 

Too old to rock & roll? Not too old to kick your punk ass!

The Soft Boys have released a new album, Nextdoorland.

To many of you, that information means precisely bupkis. To a lot of music junkies, it ranks a few rungs below news of a Second Coming (or First, depending on your viewpoint). Me, I was drooling like a baby when I first heard about it. Robyn Hitchcock was one of the artists that got me through the mid-to-late eighties. (I first heard of him, and The Soft Boys, through reading interviews with REM.) There were several occasions where I got off of work at 5:30, drove two hours down to Berkeley in order to see him play, then turned around and drove back home after the show so I could go to work the next day. There aren�t a lot of people I could say that about.

I am 41 years old, soon to be 42. I�m aware enough to notice that the fact of a new release, after twenty-some years, by a relatively obscure yet influential band does not elicit the same amount of excitement in my (gods forgive me for using this term) cohort that it does in myself... and so what? Most of them gave up their interest in such things, if it ever existed at all, in their late teens, maybe their late twenties. That�s about the time most so-called adults give up obsessing over trivial things like music and art & begin obsessing over trivial things like mortgages and scotch. I never really made the leap from music to �maturity�.

I was somewhat apologetic about that fact when I started writing this, but you know what? There are worse ways to illuminate one�s life. I�d much rather have good music lighting my way than something as banal as, say, golf. But that�s just me, I guess.

About the album: I�ve started this piece four or five times now, I think. I�ve actually lost count. Originally I didn�t think much of the album, but the more I play it the more I like it. Superficially, Nextdoorland sounds like a Hitchcock solo outing; not terribly surprising, given that he wrote and sang all the songs. They don�t stray very far from what you�d expect: surreal/absurd lyrics & jangly guitars.

It�s those guitars, courtesy of Mr. Hitchcock and Kimberley Rew, that got me to stay with it, twisting & swirling like spawning salmon on �Mr. Kennedy�, darkly mysterious on the instrumental �I Love Lucy�, rocking full out on �Unprotected Love�. (Rocking full out for The Soft Boys, that is; Motorhead is in no immediate danger.) It wasn�t until I taped the album so I could listen to it on the way into work that I fully appreciated how different the sonic landscape was from your garden-variety Hitchcock, though. Through my headphones I could pick out how delicately intertwined the various guitar lines are throughout the album, not just on those particular tunes. I�ve heard a lot of comparisons to the twin guitar interplay of Television; while I can see why that might come to mind, Hitchcock/Rew aren�t quite as aggressive as Verlaine/Lloyd, to my way of thinking anyway. If you�re looking for the angularity of Underwater Moonlight, you�re not going to find it here. It�s a little more sneaky than that.

I suppose one would say that the bass (Matthew Seligman) and drums (Morris Windsor) are �unobtrusive�, except that that�s kind of a backhanded compliment. You don�t have to be flashy to be good, and both of them do manage to get in a few nifty moves here & there over the course of the album.

If you�ve already made up your mind about Robyn Hitchcock &/or The Soft Boys, this probably isn�t going to budge you one way or the other. If, however, you�ve been sitting on the fence, trying to decide if you want to get involved in all that folky-psychy rock & roll stuff you�ve been hearing about, this would be as good a place to start as any.

bmarkey 11/13/2002 04:39:00 PM

Monday, November 11, 2002

 
Wow, that was some kinda beer tangent there, huh?

We're entering another phase where updates may be erratic. Lotsa stuff going on, and my attention is needed elsewhere a lot of the time. My goal, as always, is five posts a week; I'm just letting you know that I quite probably won't be making my quota for awhile. Thanks for coming by, and please do keep checking back.
bmarkey 11/11/2002 04:53:00 PM

Thursday, November 07, 2002

 

Not so much an ale as a way of life

Something occurred to me on my way home last night: maybe what�s making those cows happy is all that nutmeg. I seem to remember reading somewhere that nutmeg, in sufficient quantities, can cause hallucinations. (Not a practice I�m endorsing, by the way. Please, by all means, bake responsibly this holiday season.)

Onward, campers. Sierra Nevada Brewing is one of the high-water marks of microbrews, at least as far as I�m concerned. They�ve been doing it right, consistently, for 21 years now. The Pale Ale is the benchmark against which all other American Pales are judged. Their Stout is a bit too roasty for my taste, but the Porter they make is definitely worth looking for. (And I understand that Sierra Nevada is distributed coast to coast now, so you really have no excuse not to look for it. Unless, y�know, you don�t want to.)

The Celebration Ale is their entry into the Xmas ale sweepstakes. Oh my. Rich copper color, full body, and bitter enough to pass as an IPA. It�s not really in the traditional �winter warmer� style, but who gives a rat�s ass � it�s good! If you�re bringing beer to Thanksgiving dinner, bring this one. If you�re watching a game with your buddies, offer them this. Hell, if you�re sitting alone in your apartment thinking of a good way to get quietly trashed, why not do it in style? Celebration Ale to the rescue! Cut your finger opening a tin of dog food? Sterilize your wound the Sierra Nevada way. You�ll be glad you did.

Uh, glad you sterilized the wound, that is, not glad you cut yourself.



bmarkey 11/07/2002 07:35:00 PM

Wednesday, November 06, 2002

 

Won�t somebody think of the cows?

Science Girl had made short work of the rest of the Sam Adams by the time I got home last night, so we�re going to have to put off the re-tasting. (For the record, though, she concurs with my �minimal flavor� verdict.)

Fortunately, I thought that that might be the case � not because SG is a serious boozer or anything, I hasten to add, but rather because there just weren�t many left. When I taste-test, I am thorough. So, I�d stopped by the store on my way home & picked up some Thomas Kemper Happy Cow Winterbrau.

Now, I am nothing if not a sucker for happy cows. Cows take a lot of abuse from the world (except for those Indian cows, of course), so anything that makes them happy is probably OK in my book. Giving them vehicles and weapons would be a mistake, but, say, letting them vote� well, they couldn�t really do much worse than humans � sure, why not?

So it was with visions of joyous bovine suffrage dancing through my tiny brain that I brought the beer home.

For those of you unfortunate enough to be living outside the Greater Puget Sound area, Thomas Kemper is owned by the folks at Pyramid Brewing. Pyramid focuses on ales, and Kemper makes the lagers & various other German-style beers, along with some very good sodas. (Although most of the locals I�ve met, including SG, call them �pops�. Go figure.) I used to work next door to their old soda plant; it always smelled really interesting, even though by the time I was working there they�d been gone from the building for about six months.

But I digress. The point is/was beer. The Happy Cow Winterbrau, to be precise. Remember how I was bitching yesterday about flavorless Xmas beers? Be careful what you wish for. Someone at the Kemper brewery has an affinity for nutmeg. Yipes. Since I don�t really care for the taste of nutmeg all that much, I�m in kind of a bind here, recommendation-wise. The beer is pretty nice otherwise, but I just can�t get past the overpowering nutmeg-ness of it all. If that�s a flavor you savor, then this is right up your alley, down your street, and in your pantry. Or something.

Just as long as the cows are happy.

bmarkey 11/06/2002 09:12:00 PM

 

Proud to be an American

Y�know, there�s nothing like opening up the newspaper on the morning after an election to reaffirm every thought of scorn, contempt and disgust I�ve ever had about my fellow citizens. Granted, I usually get that same feeling every morning when I open the paper, but nothing says �short-sighted ignorance� like election results.

On the other hand, it looks like we might finally get the monorail built. Maybe.

bmarkey 11/06/2002 04:32:00 PM

Tuesday, November 05, 2002

 

Love is like a good pint is like love

Just because Iconomy asked me to, I�ll be reviewing Samuel Adams Winter Lager today. Before we dive into that, however, I should probably mention that I don�t usually drink much lager these days. I like a beer to be bold, full-bodied, strong, and bitter. (Actually that�s not a bad description of Science Girl, either, although she�s much more sweet than bitter. Yeah, I know I�m treading on icky ground here, but you�re just going to have to put up with it.) Lagers and pilsners, while definitely bitter, generally have a much lighter body. That said, on a hot summer�s day there�s nothing like a nice cool Pilsner Urquell to slake a wilting bmarkey�s thirst.

But it�s wintertime, or might as well be, so let�s get on with the, uh, whatever it is we�re doing. Right. Well, it�s a funny thing, actually. I brought some Sam Adams home last night after work. I poured it off into my favorite pint glass; it had a nice coppery color. When I went to smell the beer, however, I got� nothing. No discernable scent. Hmm. Well, I�d just come in from a ten minute walk home from the bus stop, in relatively cold weather, so maybe my nose was a little stopped up. I gave it a taste. It�s surprisingly full-bodied, so that part was good. I guess maybe it was a little too full-bodied, though, because it slid right down my throat without registering on my palate. It was there, and then it wasn�t. Science Girl wasn�t drinking at the moment, but I had her give it a try just in case there was something weird going on with my tongue. Same result - nothing. There�s a little bit of malt, and some sort of spice (the Sam Adams folks say that it�s orange peel & ginger), but in very small amounts. It�s almost as if it somehow erases any memory of how it tastes. Are they targeting for death the brain cells that control taste? Why is everyone so afraid of putting flavor into their beer? Have we become a nation of Zima swillers? Has it come to that? And why am I asking so damn many rhetorical questions? I�m going to give it another try tonight, but I�m not terribly hopeful at this point. Sorry, Ico.

bmarkey 11/05/2002 07:49:00 PM

Monday, November 04, 2002

 
If you want to read something, go check out Mr. Dan Kelly. Lotsa cool stuff in the links section (Yazoo Records alone is going to cost me several paychecks), and the bio greatly amused both Science Girl and myself. If The Big Green House started working out, keeping regular hours and eating right, perhaps one day it too would grow into a robust, vigorous blog, rather than the pale, anemic blob it is today. There it sits, a lump on the couch of your monitor, snarfing down salty snack foods and making vague snuffling sounds. It had dreams once, did The Big Green House; it was going to be a professional baseball player and win the respect and admiration of thousands. Now it's lucky if it can make it to the bathroom without tripping over its own tattered bunny slippers. If it were a real blog, like mrdankelly.com, it might go out and make something of itself; instead, it has become the pathetic specimen you see before you, crushed by the weight of its own inertia, a broken, empty husk.
bmarkey 11/04/2002 08:59:00 PM

 
Still here, just don't have anything to say at the moment.
bmarkey 11/04/2002 07:31:00 PM