Howard Owens

Rufus "Tee-Tot" Payne deserves his props.

I never considered him a marginal figure, which this Times article says many considered him to be.

The role of Tee-Tot would not be so compelling if his ragged and rail-thin pupil had not become a songwriting savant and one of the defining voices of the 20th century. "All the music training I ever had," Williams said in a 1951 interview, "was from him," referring to Tee-Tot. Williams often mentioned "that old colored gentleman" from the stage before performing classics such as "Your Cheatin' Heart," "Cold, Cold Heart" and "I Saw the Light."

"Every time Hank got up on stage back in the old days he would talk about my dad," said Rufus Payne's son Henderson Payne, who is now 82 and living in Kokomo, Ill. "When we were kids I used to see Hank and my father walking around and playing music.... It's nice now to have people [remembering]."

Hank Jr. and Hank III (first time they've ever publicly performed together) will pay tribute to Tee-Tot at the Grand Ole Opry (where Hank Sr. was barely welcome) on Saturday. I hope that's on teevee.

Search term of the day: "Famous wirewalkers at the circus"

I'm still scratching my head on that one.

The only time I can think I've used the word "circus" is in referring to one or the other of the political parties.

Hey, all you Charles Shaw drinkers -- come for the wine, stay for the conversation.

When Ken Layne blogs in bunches, as he has the last few days, the results are often frieghteningly good. It's a shame he doesn't do it more often. Somebody should really pay him for blogging. And that's why I nominated Layne, among others, for some blogging honors (what do you think, howardowens.com for best new blog of 2002?).

My devoted fans send me e-mail ...

Hey, el Idiota:

You're loyal readers want to know, mi amigo, where's this fiction you keep promising? Some of us are beginning to think you are full of la mierda. You talk big, but don't deliver.

And how come, when you act like you're such a big blogger, you barely blog all week? ¿Arriba qué es? No wonder Instapundit doesn't link to you.

Thank you for your concern, Ricardo. You are, um, so kind.

Would it sound too lame if I plead "I have a life"? Like, I didn't blog much this weekend because my wife said I'd be sleeping on the couch for the next week if I didn't get the spare room painted. And let me tell you what a chore that was ... at 9:30 last night, we decided the walls needed a second coat, so I buzzed down to Home Depot. Problem was, the only guy working the paint department at that time was a burned out hippie who was busy playing nursemaide to a husband and wife squabbling over trim colors. He gave my request for a gallon of flat "Rising Sun" scant attention, and I was too much of an el Idiota to notice, so I came home and applied a coat of semi-gloss "Sunburst," which is just a shade darker. While Home Depot was kind enough to front me more paint and primer, I had to redo the entire room, including prime over the semi-gloss.

So, rather than blog this weekend, or write my suspect fiction (you can decide the meaning of that ambiguous phrase), I painted. Unfortunately, I wasn't painting still lifes of mobile homes; rather, I was transforming the guest room into something civilized.

As for the rest of the week, and the rest of my life for that matter. Let me tell you about some of the irons I have in the fire.

Leaving aside the fact that it was Christmas week and I spent four days in San Diego with our families (meaning mine and my wife, not yours), I have a number of responsibilities and interests. For example, I have a full-time job that is, in fact, really a full-time job. Then I'm trying to get in better shape and lose weight (and not doing too badly at it), so I go to the gym pretty regularly. That takes up time, and believe me I would rather blog than spend 20 or 30 minutes on a treadmill. And to keep abreast of my work, I'm trying to brush up on XML, read a couple of general interest programming books and ... AND ... learn JAVA. Of course, I want to continue spending some time with Bukowski now and then, but he's been feeling neglected of late. And I do like to take some time to actually read other people's blogs regularly (check out all of the great blogs on my blog roll, including Glenn Reynolds'). Not to mention, I've got Pierce's Blook to read.

Besides all that, there are several Web sites that I am responsible for, so I have to pay attention to those.

And when there is time, I still try to squeeze in a few hundred words on one of my short stories. I'm not making this up. I do do fiction when I can. And intend to continue to pursue those goals.

And, of course, there is always the wife. Can't forget her, though apparently, Ricardo, you would like me to. Love needs more maintainance than a Web site, you know. I am careful about that.

And I would still like to sneak in time to study Spanish, but it never seems to work out.

And see that picture of me in the upper left? I'm holding a guitar. I dare you to ask me when the last time was that I actually touched my guitar. Go ahead. I double dog dare ya.

A few thoughts on Steve Outing's end of the year column ...

He predicts for 2003:

Even though pop-ups are intrusive enough that they work better than the old standard Web ad banners, I think they'll slowly die out due to consumer backlash.

Consumers hate television commercials, too, but we still have them.

My speculation is that advertisers will still find pop-ups appealing and will continue to buy them so long as click-through rates and branding studies show them to be effective. In fact, I would think that as more and more consumers install and use pop-up blocking software, pop-ups will become even more attractive to advertisers -- because there will reach a point where the vast majority of consumers who actually see the ads will be those who have the least resistance to them. These are the consumers most likely to respond.

The real challenge for online publishers will be in devising a way to price these ads. Many pop-up blockers register an ad impression because the ad opens briefly, so the publisher cannot give a true accounting of impressions. So, if there ever was an ad format best designed for price-per-click fees, poppers are it.

Personally, I hate poppers, but just because we consumers hate them doesn't mean that advertisers won't continue to love them -- they just need to deliver enough ROI, and I don't think that is too big of a hurdle.

On the classified front, Outing is most pessimistic:

Most newspapers won't move quickly enough and will see further loss of recruitment market share to Monster.com, et al within their local markets.

Recruitment advertising has traditionally been a newspaper's strongest suit and most important revenue source. This is changing, and no matter what newspapers do, newspapers will never again dominate this market as they once did. This is the biggest change the "new economy" has wrought. I don't believe the situation is hopeless, however. While newspapers will need to scramble to better meet the needs of their clients (and they need to start looking on HR departments as clients, and not customers), newspapers remain the business best positioned to help local employers.

My prediction: Look for newspapers to start providing personalized job matching services -- not, per se, a searchable résumé bank; rather, recruitment teams will start pre-screening résumés for employers and giving them the best possible matches, at a premium price. The newspaper will become the head hunter, even on lower-end jobs.

Outing is also bullish on Wi-Fi, or the wireless Internet. I remain bearish. First, where is the revenue? I can't see recommending that my employer spend a lot of time and effort in PDAs, cell phones, and tablets until I can see a revenue model that works. While it was important for newspapers to jump into the online world in 1994/95, when revenue models were hard to imagine, I don't think newspapers need to remain cutting edge about every new technology that comes down the pike. Getting online was a no brainer because it opened up a world of possibilities and it was clear pretty early that the Net would become important. Also, falling behind then was dangerous, but falling behind on PDAs doesn't seem nearly as fatal. Wireless, as popular as it seems today, remains a boutique service, and the consumers of such services are even less likely to pay for wireless content than Internet consumers. And with the smaller screens, where do you put ads?

Yes, there is a market for breaking news (national and international), sports scores and stock reports on wireless, but there are also plenty of news channels providing those services already. I'm not sure there is a screaming need to get local news (which is what the vast majority of online news professionals are concerned about) on PDAs.

My big prediction for 2003 and beyond is to look for online newspapers to bank less on banner ads -- including poppers and rich media ads -- and more on leveraging print/online synergies, such as the Top Jobs application, print ads online, coupons and the like. Newspapers are also going to continue to move in a direction that leverages their standing in their local communities to better meet the needs of advertisers and consumers. Applications like online auctions that provide local advertisers with unique and inexpensive means to market directly to consumers will continue to grow and morph into new ideas.

I would say more, but I don't want to give away the shop.

In high school, I had a t-shirt that read ... "The Only Band That Matters."

At the time, I really believed it.

That band was The Clash.

Joe Strummer is dead.

My punk heroes keep dying on me. It's quite sad.

In the summer of 1984, I had just returned to San Diego from Santa Maria, Calif., and I was writing poetry like mad.

I desperately wanted to be published, and the leading poetry magazine in town at the time was "We Accept Donations," published by Forrest Curo and Ann Halter Jones.

I showed Forrest some of my poetry, and he was unimpressed (politely so). I was a modernist and he was definitely a post-modernist, and even though I had not yet studied the differences in college yet, I could see we each took very different approaches to poetry.

I preferred my style, but I was willing to experiment.

So, I read a few issues of "We Accept Donations" and got a feel for the kind of poetry Forrest preferred, and then I dashed off "We all need dreams." The poem, literally, took me less than 15 minutes to write and I never revised a word. It was purely an exercise in imitation and, frankly, it's never been one of my favorite poems.

But Forrest loved it. He accept it for publication, along with a couple of poems he previously rejected, and he accepted a couple more poems from me in the next issue (which, if it wasn't the last issue of the little magazine, WAD folded soon after that). And publication resulted in an invitation for me to "headline" a poetry reading at a small La Mesa bookstore, which marked the pinnacle of my poetry career.

BTW: I do accept donations, if you feel so inclined ... tip jar to the right.

If I had been home, I would have kissed the postman today ... twice.

Arriving from good friend, kick-ass journalist and fine musician Kevin Featherly was a CD titled "Gettysburg." It is the result of what happens when you turn loose a talented man with a home recording studio and CD duplication tools and a good printer. As expected, Kev's songs are soulful and deep.

And what happens when you give a talented man a keyboard connected to the Internet? You get the Bus Blog, and arriving with Kev's bundle of joy was Tony Pierce's "Blook," a collection of his best writing from the first year of the Bus Blog. I ordered my copy. Have you? You should. I'm only a few pages into it so far and already overstimulated on good writing.

My copy of the "Blook" is number 70. I guess that makes me about half as important as Glenn Reynolds . I'm cool with that. I've been reading Pierce for a lot less time. Unless, of course -- novel concept -- Pierce numbered them according to the order in which orders were received, if you follow what I'm saying. I wonder what numbers Layne and Welch got?  Who the hell cares -- all the cool people already have the book anyway, I'm sure. And that's what matters (hey, don't get mad at me for gloating -- I'm so rarely among the cool -- it's a heady feeling).

What the hell is Xanga and why the heck am I getting so many referrers from that site the last few days?

OK, where's a gawker.com for Los Angeles/Hollywood?

UPDATE: Denton responds with: What about LAExaminer.com? My answer: I love LAX, but it's not quite the same.

BTW: I should have mentioned ... first heard of the gawker through >Instapundit.com

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death's bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides . . . High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

-- Hart Crane

I first read Hart Crane in a poetry anthology. It was this poem, in fact, that led me to seek out more of his work. At the time, I was fully enthralled with T.S. Eliot, who still ranks among the giants in my personal pantheon of writers, but Crane has long been the standard by which I judge my own poetry (and I fall pathetically short of that standard, I know).

Crane may be one of the most difficult modern poets to comprehend. Each line is so packed with meaning that a lifetime of study rarely reveals the true depth of any Crane poem.

Take just the first four lines of "At Melville's Tomb" for example -- we have thrown together the idea of random chance in life (the dice), fortune telling (again, the dice), death that is both caused by chance and leads to chance, and a diplomatic connection between the living and the dead (the embassy). And even with that brief inventory of meanings, we still do not arrive at an articulate connection between the words and their impact on the reader.

Crane called this the "logic of metaphor:"

. . . [A]s a poet, I may very possibly be more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness (and their combinations and interplay in metaphor on this basis) than I am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid significations at the cost of limiting my subject matter and the perceptions involved in the poem.

"At Melville's Tomb" is one of the best illustrations of Crane's point. While the poem is backed with unexpected flights of word play, the language is in no way trivialized and the overall scope of the poem remains cohesive and coherent. Crane takes unusual words, combines them in unusual ways and beats out odd rhythms on his way to hitting you in the gut with a powerful image. In this case, it is an image of death and fate seen through the closed eyes of Herman Melville.

Take a line like "Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars ..." The phrase does not necessarily communicate a straightforward thought, but it is a powerful image once you piece together the look of a drowning man's eyes, staring heavenward as he descends to the depths of a pitiless and icy sea, lifting prayers for his very soul as death becomes inevitable. A lesser poet would have been more direct, and therefore less powerful.

Crane is by no means an easy poet to comprehend, but none of the truly great poets ever are. Life is never easy, so how can a poet truly hope to reflect reality in simple phrases and trite observations? Language is, after all, a poor tool for describing life, so the poet must squeeze every ounce of meaning from the pitifully few words he has to choose from and illuminate our being as best he can. Crane did better than most.

The Complete Poems of Hart Crane.

I agree with Aaron Haspel. Rules are rules. And even if you change the rules now -- and you shouldn't -- Rose knew the rules at the time he broke them. Keep the loser out of the Hall.

The go on writing
pumping out poems --
young boys and college professors
wives who drink wine all afternoon
while their husbands work,
they go on writing
the same names in the same magazines
everybody writing a little worse each year,
getting out a poetry collection
and pumping out more poems
it's like a contest
it is a contest
but the prize is invisible.

they won't write short stories or articles
or novels
they just go on
pumping out poems
each sounding more and more like the others
and some of the young boys weary and quit
but the professors never quit
and the wives who drink wine in the afternoon
never ever ever quit
and the new young boys arrive with new magazines
and there is some correspondence with lady or mer.
and some fucking
and everything is exaggerated and dull.

when the poems come back
they retype them
and send them off to the next magazine on the list
and they give readings
all the readings they can
for free most of the time
hoping that somebody will finally know
finally applaud them
finally congratulate and recognize their
talent
they are all so sure of their genius
there is so little self-doubt,
and most of them live in North Beach or New York City,
and their faces are like their poems:
alike,
and they know each other and
gather and hate and admire and choose and discard
and keep pumping out more poems
more poems
more poems
the contest of the dullards:
tap tap tap, tap tap, tap tap tap, tap tap ...


Love is a Dog from Hell

It's probably no coincidence that I've posted a song lyric by Dave Alvin and a poem Charles Bukowski in the same night.

Consider this from Acoustic Guitar:

As a working-class son of semirural Downey, California, he did not consider his old neighborhood to be a heartland of song. "Songwriters came from some other place," he says. Alvin took inspiration from local writers such as Gerald Locklin and bar fly emeritus Charles Bukowski, who held readings in a Long Beach saloon. "When I read him the first few times it was like, ‘Oh my God! Alvarado and Western Ave.? You can write poetry about that?’"

Last night, as I rocked to the Blasters at the House of Blues, I thought about Bukowski and Los Angeles and this quote. On a song like "Help You Dream," even though neither Los Angeles nor Buk is mentioned, but knowing of the big influence Bukowski had on Alvin, I could sense the aura pervade the lyric. I can't imagine the scene of the song taking place anywhere but a bar in L.A. And "Hollywood Bed" must have been written after Alvin read a few hundred Bukowski poems about screwing women in Los Angeles.

So both Alvin and Bukowski have been on my mind much of the day. And they aren't bad people to have on your mind.

Marty Schottenheimer, head coach of the San Diego Charges, has a reputation for playing hard, tough, old fashioned, fight-in-the-trenches football. He scorns the West Coast Offense, likes to run the ball and win low-scoring games. With 158-104-1 career record coming into the 2002 season, you have to be impressed with Martyball.

That is, if there is anything such thing as Martyball.

In yesterday's game, for example, with the Chargers trailing 13-7, and LaDainian Tomlinson apparently starting to wear down the Raider's defense, the Chargers faced a 4th and 1 situation. The Chargers were deep enough into their own territory to make going for it a good but gutsy choice, especially with the pathetic efforts of their field goal unit of late.

Now, when you have a runner like Tomlinson on your team, and not much else offensively, you want to get the ball into his hands. Tomlinson now holds the Chargers' single-season rushing record with more than 1,300 yards. He's also scored 13 touchdowns and is the first Charger runner in history to have back-to-back double-digit TD seasons. In other words, the man can move the ball.

So, fourth and 1. You want to put the ball in LT's hands, right?

Well, Schottenheimer did that. Unfortunately, instead of living up to his tried and true reputation he had LT run a sweep. Tomlinson was stuffed for a loss and the Raiders took over on down, starting a drive that would put them up 20-7.

That one play changed the complexion of the game and was probably the single most central factor in the Chargers' disappointing loss. Trailing by two TDs with time running out in the third quarter, the ground game was some what marginalized and Drew Breese has not yet matured into the kind of QB who can marshall an effective air attack for an entire drive. The 4th and 1 play was the key to the game.

To me, Martyball means that even though it's the obvious call, even though the Raiders would be looking for it -- you send LT up the middle. Just like Randy Johnson facing Barry Bonds -- you challenge the hitter. You throw fast balls. You say, if you're going to beat me, you're going to beat me with my best pitch (actually, the Big Unit's best pitch is probably a slider, but indulge the metaphor, please). The proper play call yesterday would have been something that sent LT into the gut of the Raiders' defense.

LT has proven to be an effective inside runner. He can squeeze out yards where none seem possible when he has just a minimum amount of blocking. On the other hand, put LT in the open flat with four Raiders charging at him without a blocker in sight, and he's going to have no where to run.

This hasn't been the only time I've been frustrated with Chargers play calling this year. Too many times I see the Chargers passing when they should be running. In their embarrassing loss to the New York Jets, the Chargers opened with three straight pass plays and the Jets scored first when they took over on downs. Against the Dolphins, the Chargers faced another fourth and 1, but rather than give it to LT, they tried a rather hopeless quarterback sneak.

This has been a great season for the Chargers, and Schottenheimer deserves a lot of credit for their 8-5 record, but with better play calling that record could easily be 10 and 3 or 11 and 2. On the other hand, it's a young team with a lot of talent that just needs a season or two to mature. Even if San Diego doesn't make the playoffs this year, it's hard not to be optimistic. The Chargers are in a position to consolidate their successes and dominate the AFC West for several seasons to come, especailly with a man like LT in the backfield.

Ah, sweet justice. (via Aaron Haspel).

White rockers in the 1950s did a good job many times of reinventing black R&B songs. Elvis took songs like "Baby, Let's Make Love" and "Good Rockin' Tonight" to new levels of intensity.

"Baby, Let's Make Love," for example, became "Baby, Let's Play House," which as a matter of poetry, offers more titillation and deeper levels of meaning than a more straight forward "Let's Make Love" message. Elvis also added the great chorus of "Baby, you may have a pink Cadillac, but don't you be nobody's fool."

On the CD "Jump Blues Classics" from Chess, there are a number of original versions of songs later revamped by white rockers, and it's interesting to compare and contrast the interpretations.

For example, I much prefer the Rock and Roll Trio's version of "Train Kept A'rollin'" to the Tiny Bradshaw version. The Burnette brothers, with their unheard of guitar distortion and wild abandonment just do a better job of capturing the mood of the song. It's better even than the hit version by Aerosmith. Also, the Collins Kids deliver more whomp to "Hoy, Hoy" than either Roy Milton or Little Johnny Jones. But Wyonnie Harris's "Good Rockin' Tonight" and Big Mama Thornton's "Hound Dog" both have a groove that Elvis neither tried to imitate or mimic. That's to his credit really, but the fact is, there is a soulfulness to those songs that he didn't capture.

But the pivotal song of white borrowing from black music and changing around songs is "Shake, Rattle and Roll."

At a time when mainstream white America feared black music as much as it was fascinated by it, Bill Haley displayed both his awe and his trepedation of black music when he covered the Big Joe Turner classic.

Compare, for example, this lyric from the original:

Get out of that bed
and wash your hands [twice]

Get into the kitchen
Make some noise with the pots and pans

Well you wear low dresses
The sun comes shin' through [twice]

I can't believe my eyes.
That all this belongs to you.

With the Haley-altered version:

Get out in that kitchen
And rattle those pots and pans [twice]

Roll my breakfast
'Cause I'm a hungry man

You were those dresses
Your hair done up so nice [twice]

You look so warm,
But your heart is cold as ice.

And one verse from the Turner version is missing entirely from the Haley cover:

I said over the hill,
And way down underneath [twice]

You make me roll my eyes,
And then you make me grit my teeth.

Why the alternations? As Charlie Gillett explains in his classic history of rock, "The Sound of the City," Haley feared the original lyrics were too risque for a white audience.

But as if to demonstrate how little Haley, and probably most of white America, didn't understand black culture and the black musicians love for sexual metaphor, Haley didn't change these lyrics:

I'm like a one eyed cat
peeping in a sea food store

If you can't see the clear sexual innuendo in that couplet, I think I'm too polite to tell you what it is.

I always chuckle when I hear the Haley version of "Shake, Rattle and Roll." The misinterpretation of the song is something worthy of Pat Boone. I know Haley wanted to be remembered as a legend of rock and roll, but there is a reason Elvis Presley eclipsed him both in popularity and critical acclaim. When Elvis changed songs, he did so with a spirit that was true to an African-American culture he appreciated deep in his bones. Haley, like so many others in the white record industry of the time, just wanted to make music he hoped would be palpable to white teen-agers. For one man, the results were classic and lasting. For the other, just mere transitory fame.

Have I spawned another blog child? It looks possible.

I met Jeff Bishop when I was a reporter at the Daily Californian in El Cajon. He was the Libertarian candidate for the 77th Assembly District. His opponents were Steve Baldwin (GOP) and Tom Connolly, the Democrat who won that race. Tom probably benefitted a good deal from Jeff being in the race, since without a Lib candidate, Baldwin probably would have won the Republican-leaning district. I wound up going to work for Tom and Jeff wound up becoming a Republican. He's also a lawyer and a very smart man. He's taken me to task more than once in the comments section of this blog.

As far as I know, though he's never told me this explicitly, I introduced him to the concept of blogging. So, I'm hoping and guessing, that his introduction to blogs through my blog has inspired his own blog.

There are three distinctive strains of country music these days -- a sort of back to basics school, an Americana/folky tradition, and everything else (meaning all the crap, with precious few exceptions, you hear on the radio or see on CMT).

Personally, I go for classic country -- that brand of music that keeps the songs simple and the sound authentic. I like steel guitars, aching vocals, chicken-clucking Telecasters and songs about booze, trains and cheating. It doesn't get much better than Hank Williams or George Jones (or Merle Haggard, or Johnny Cash, or Buck Owens or Dwight Yoakam or Lefty Frizzell).

So it should be no surprise that I have developed a fondness for Rex Hobart and the Misery Boys. Hobart writes songs about broken hearts and shattered dreams as good as any you've ever heard.

"Are you really that miserable?" I asked him the other day.

"I would be if I wasn't writing the songs," Hobart said from his new home in Buffalo. "I have this uncanny ability to obsess. I guess it's just part of being a songwriter or an artist -- you can just take a bit of information or an overheard line from a conversation and just run with it. I'm really an optimist, but I do like to think about love and what it does to people when it goes wrong."

His new CD (the third Hobart's recorded for Bloodshot), is full of tales about love gone wrong, and not a number in the lot will inspire any boot scootin'. From the opening "You've Got Some Changing to Do," to "Gotta Get Back to Forgetting You," "Another Bad Habit of Mine" and "I Should Be Gone by Now," Hobart's "Your Favorite Fool" is overflowing with the kind of tears that used to flow as freely as the beer in every honky tonk across America.

But Hobart isn't some throwback hack jumping on the retro wagon train. His songs fairly drip with sincerity, which is what he wants to hear. In a world where retro means reducing previous eras to a comic-book pastiche of styles and sounds, Hobart is just trying to create country music as he hears it.

"I hope that we're not retro," Hobart said. "I think what we're doing is a take on a Bakersfield sound, or maybe somewhere between Bakersfield and Nashville in 1965, but coming from guys who used to play in a punk band in Kansas City.

"The thing about retro that scares me," he added, "it's just regurgitation. It's a facade. It's thinking that -- it's like, looking for authenticity backwards. I don't sit down and try to sound like a certain record. If we're going to be considered retro by anybody, I hope that they don't think we're just trying to be the Buckaroos or the Strangers."

Hobart and his band, the aptly titled Misery Boys, got together in Kansas City in 1997, after Hobart had spent several years ruling his hometown's hardcore punk scene in Giant Chair. But after a while, Hobart felt he had taken punk and Giant's Chair as far as he could go with it. His songwriting started to seem stale, and then one day on a whim, while on tour with his band, at a truck stop in Maryland, he bought a George Jones cassette.

It wasn't like Hobart had never heard Jones before. Honky tonk and classic country is what his parents played around the house when he was growing up. He just didn't appreciate it then.

"You get back in the van after rocking out for a night and you think you don't want to hear any more guitars like that, and so I listened to that tape," Hobart said. "I think that's when it clicked. I realized the music was so simple and nothing got in the way, and by that time I had had a heart break or two, and I would hear a song and I'd think, 'Oh, that's what that song means.'"

By the time Bloodshot released "The Spectacular Sadness," Hobart had transformed his songwriting into the kind of bare honesty that makes neon lights glow and a longneck a man's best friend.

Hobart and his band are getting ready for a tour of the Southeast, but Pollstar only lists two upcoming shows at the moment - both in Chicago at the end of the mouth.

"I just hope that people will come out and see live music," Hobart said. "Especially if people are going to burn CDs. If you're going to get free music, at least go out and see live shows. That's my big gripe for the day. That, and don't start any wars if you can avoid it."

Well, I'm finding I can't just toss of fiction the way I do blog posts.  The writing is much slower, and then I want to take my time with revisions.

The first story I promised a while back is sitting on a shelf at the moment. I've decided to make some significant changes, so that will take some time.

But I don't want to return to that project until I finish story number two.  That story is coming along slowly. I'm making progress, but in fits and starts.

If you would like to be notified of the release of these short stories -- I'll publish them first through this site -- you can sign up for my e-mail announcement list.  Please do.

This is primarily for those of who who have been reading this blog since it was Global News Watch -- Do you think my blog is better now, when it deals with a variety of subjects and very little politics, or was it better when I wrote about all kinds of war and world issues?

Frankly, I'm hoping you'll say you like it better now.  Not that I want to prejudice you, but if you liked it better before, let me know.  I'll try to do more politics and war issues, then.  But I kind of feel like there are so many bloggers out there doing that kind of stuff so well, I should just write about what strikes my fancy and hope people enjoy it.

Personally, it's more entertaining for me to write and think about a wide variety of topics, but maybe that's too self-indulgent. But then, isn't a blog supposed to be self-indulgent?

Of course, I know there are a good number of people (but that I mean some where between 100 and 300) who visit the site regularly, so I must be doing something right.

I don't ask this question entirely out of insecurity. Even though blogging is largely an act of self-interest, there is little point in doing it if at least some people don't enjoy what you do.

Last point for the long-time readers:  If you have a blog, let your readers know about how this blog has transformed and what it's like these days.  I fear some people might have written me off because I didn't do a very good political as well as many other bloggers, and I also want to get the word out to other bloggers who are more like me -- covering a variety of topics, that this is no longer a strictly a political blog. 

For newer readers -- do you like the fact that I cover a variety of topics, or do you come here hoping I'll write about a specific topic?

What sorts of things do you think I do best?

At the risk of revealing what a pathetically small readership I have, I'm encouraging comments in the comments section. Please leave comments.

Ken Layne's post on Charles Shaw wine sent me to Google to see what I could find out about this suddenly vogue merlot. What I found was a blog that is perfect for all of us drunks -- The Daily Intoxication.

The author seems to be a San Diegan no less, with information on some of my favorite dive bars, such as Pac Shores (opened Dec. 7, 1941), the Spring Valley Inn (Country Dick Montana's old digs), the Arizona Cafe, Pal Joey's and Wong's Dragon Inn. But he doesn't have the Shamrock in Spring Valley, Pete's Place in La Mesa, Tommy's in La Mesa, the Lakeside Hotel (I think it's closed now, but is such a legendary dive, it deserves a mention), the Chico Club in La Mesa and Manny's in Spring Valley. There was also the Texas Teahouse in OB, but I think it's defunct as well. Great dives all.

Of course, in San Diego one of my favorite places to drink was the American Legion Hall in La Mesa, where no drink cost more than a buck fifty, but you've got to be a member (meaning a veteran) to get in.

Speaking of dives, last night we found the best dive bar in Ventura. I can't believe I never knew about this place before. It's called the Sans Souci and is reportedly the oldest, continuously open dive bar in Ventura. It's a classic with all wood paneling, all leather stools and a horse-shoe shaped bar. It's also one of the friendliest crowds I've ever found in a dive. A great juke box and, later, live music. We hung out there and skipped the opening acts of the Blasters concert across the street at the Ventura Theater.

Layne, as an ex-San Diegan, should appreciate this post. And, hey, Ken, there's a couple of downtown bars I'm trying to remember -- do you remember the names? One you played one night with the Road Hogs and it seems like that same night we hit two other dives within walking distance of that place, including one that had this great, I mean GREAT, 1880s era bar (Billie thinks it's "Beasley's"??).

All these great old dive bars in San Diego brings back memories. Billie and I's first date was at the Chico Club. We had a few liquid lunch's at the Lakeside Hotel and I got shit-faced drunk at Manny's the day the Evening Tribune went out of business. And I saw many a great Buddy Blue show at Pete's Place (most recently only about two months ago). Billie and I were in the Texas Teahouse the night Gorbachev fell from power.

Layne, you need to make a road trip to Ventura so I can introduce you to Sans Souci.

The Blasters are in town tonight. I'll be there. Here's the article I did for the Star.

This morning I was poking around Aaron Haspel's site and I discovered he has his own baseball stats database search. Pretty cool stuff.

I wanted to see who had the greatest season, as a hitter, ever. So I punched in the following search criteria:

HR: Greater Than 50
BA: Greater Than .340
RBI: Greater Than 150
Runs: Greater Than 150
Slugging: Greater Than .800

For a hitter to archive those standards in just one category would, for most players, be considered a career year. To archive all of those plateaus in a single season would be, well, Ruthian.

So, is it any surprise that the only hitter to ever archive such productivity is Babe Ruth?

I present to you the greatest offensive season ever:

Yr	Tm	AB	H	2B	3B	HR	R	RBI	BA	OBP	SLG	BB	K	SB
1921	NY	540	204	44	16	59	177	171	.378	.512	.846	145	81	17

Babe Ruth is also the only hitter in history to hit at least 600 career home runs (714) and bat at least .320 (.342).

Incredible.

Bring the HR total down to a more mortal 500, and you pick up on the list Ted Williams (521/.344) and Jimmie Foxx (534/.325).

It should be noted that the database doesn't yet include the 2002 season, so Barry Bonds' latest stats (he's now over 600 HRs) are not included, but then after the 2001 season his career average was only .293, so I doubt he raised it 50 points last year, to challenge Ruth.

And the greatest single-season pitching line in the 20th Century? Here it is, by Mr. Walter Johnson:

Yr	Tm	Lg	W	L	G	CG	Sh	IP	H	BB	K	ERA
1912	WAS	AL	33	12	50	34	7	369.0	259	76	303	1.39

Johnson's career stats for wins, ERA and Ks were 417, 2.17 and 3,059 -- numbers unmatched by any other pitcher in history (I searched for pitchers with at least 320 wins, 2.50 ERA or better and at least 3,000 career strikeouts).

Of course, none of this is news to hardcore baseball fans, but it's still fun to review. It's always a good idea to remind ourselves just how great the greats were.

BTW: After writing all this, I took a closer look at Bonds' 2001 and 2002 season. In 2001 Bonds hit 73 HRs, hit .328 and had a .837 slugging percentage. Pretty Ruthian of him. But compare his RBI and Run totals to Ruth -- 137 and 129. As good as Barry was in 2001, it still doesn't compare to what Ruth accomplished.

Note: I'm just talking raw numbers here. I realize there are factors that make a real comparison impossible, but just on numbers, in any era, these are incredible accomplishments.

In January or February of 1984, I was wrapping four years of military service. I was stationed at Vandenberg AFB on California's central coast.

By this time I had decided the military was not for me. Nor did I want to pursue a career in law enforcement (my field in the USAF). I decided I would become a writer.

The seed of a writing career was planted by my brother Don during my first year in the Air Force, when I was stationed at Loring AFB in Maine. I had written him a letter and he had told my mother that he thought my writing had a natural flow to it. It was easy to read. I had been told the same thing by my journalism teacher in high school, but for whatever reason, I didn't take it seriously then. But praise from Don meant a lot.  I took it to heart.

All of those cold, long nights guarding the East Gate at Loring gave me lots of time to read. I read Anthony Burgess mostly. I also read the popular novelists of the day, such as John Irving and Robert Ludlum. When I got to Vandenberg and became a prison guard -- again, long, lonely, quite nights -- I read Joyce's Ulysses. And I read lots of poetry. I particularly liked the Romantics, though I had recently discovered Eliot.

For a guy who wanted to write, however, I certainly had no faculty for the tools of my desired trade. I mean, I couldn't spell (still can't, really) and I didn't have a clue about grammar or punctuation. I had slept through high school and failed to learn these basics. Sadly, I wasn't even truly aware of how deficient my skills were.

I enrolled in my first college courses at Allen Hancock College in Santa Maria. English 101 was taught by Mr. Dermot O'Dwyer, a gentle Irish gentleman who shared my love for Burgess and Joyce (he had once met Burgess at a Bloomsday festival). Mr. O'Dwyer took a good deal of time with me, talking literature, listening to my crappy poems and encouraging me. He also gently and persistently scolded me for my abuse of the English language. It was the shame of turning in essays with these hideous faults that motivated me more than anything to learn about verbs and prepositions and predicates and possessive clauses.

I lived in a broken down trailer in Santa Maria, which is where I planned to live after my discharge. I had few friends, and certainly no girlfriends. I thought of myself as ugly and unworthy. I went to work or to class and I came home and wrote and studied. Once in a while, I would gather with a few other wannabe writers at a local pub for happy hour. That was my life.

On one particular 1984 morning, I was in the jail house office waiting for my relief to arrive, when I found myself transfixed by this black crow hoping around on the front lawn (yes, the jail had a front lawn, and it was quite a lush carpet of bermuda grass). As I waited, I decided to write a poem about what I saw there on the lawn.

I don't know what it was about those first drafts that fired my imagination, but unlike previous poems, this one went through several revisions. I continued working on it when I got home that morning and after I got up from my day of sleep. A day or two later, I felt it was finished. I had never really worked at crafting a poem before, and I felt good about the results.

I showed it to Mr. O'Dwyer. He marvelled at it. He asked me to make copies for the entire class and had me read it aloud that afternoon. Most of the class was probably bored or jealous or worse by the whole exercise, but I was still proud.

There was one girl in the class who wasn't bored or jealous. She was a girl whom I had certainly noticed in both English classes I had with her and my Philosophy 101 class. She was petit with smooth, luminescent skin, a perfect little nose, long brown hair and hazel eyes. She talked with me after class. We talked a while. I asked her to lunch. We went to lunch. We got to know each other a bit. We talked on the phone. I found out she loved horses and kept a horse stabled in Lompoc. A couple of times over the next few weeks,  I went with Karen to watch her ride. I tried to write a poem about watching her ride, but never succeeded.

Karen and I drifted apart. We really just didn't have much in common and soon phone conversations became strained and boring for both of us. I was too shy and insecure to take things beyond the talking stage, and maybe that was part of the reason things fizzled out.

But for a couple of weeks of my early college career, I was going out with the prettiest girl in the class -- all because of a poem.

The poem is called Blackbird and you can read it here. If you like my poem, please drop a buck or two in the tip jar.

You can't call me a typical white male, a sexist pig, because what I'm about to write ... my wife agrees with me on -- totally. So there. I've got the women's vote sewn up.

Augusta National should not be forced to admit women.

Surely, by now, you know the story. A bunch of feminists, having run out of real issues to whine about, have decided that Augusta must, just must, admit a woman member. The New York Times and East Coast Elite Media^TM has made it an ISSUE. The Masters won't have commercials this April (not that it ever carries many commercials), but sponsors are saying they won't sponsors it anyway (chicken shits), a member has resigned, boycotts are planned and all kinds of people are saying Tiger Woods should boycott it.

This last idea is ridiculous. Why? Because there is something way more important than getting a woman into August -- it is Tiger Woods pursuit of history. Whether Tiger Woods feels this way or not, I don't know and I don't care. This is how I feel. Tiger Woods has a chance to solidify his claim on the title "World's Greatest Golfer Ever" and to do that, he must win at least seven Masters and 23 Major Championships. Skipping even one Masters could jeopardize all of that.

Tiger skipping the Masters is unthinkable.

But this issue is bigger than Tiger -- it's about a man's right to have a place of his own. There are women's clubs in this country and there are men's clubs in this country. And I don't see why it can't be that way.

Race discrimination by private clubs is bad, because race is a totally arbitrary standard. But there are real differences between men and women. Men when around other men behave differently and have a different feeling about how they can behave than when women are around. And women, I know, feel the same way. We're not talking here about denying women the right to good jobs, promotions, pay raises and other workplace equality issues. We are talking about the right of men, enshrined in the Constitution, to freely associate with other men. And where men have that right, protected by the Constitution, so do women.

The glib response, of course, is that a bunch of women should go out and create their own golf Club, one equal to Augusta. We all know that isn't going to happen. It's not realistic. It's taken Augusta many generations to build its prestige and its standing in society. It is unique. At the same time, I don't believe woman are being done any harm by being kept out of Augusta.

What this whole issue is about, really, is liberals, once again, beating up on rich white males. And when you boil this issue down to its one bare essential fact, it is all rather irritating and trivial.

Yet one more reason for me to fill pissed and hurt that I'm not on Glenn's blog roll.

Let's see, the Chargers are 3-1 in the AFC West, while the Raiders are 1-2. One of those Chargers wins chaulked up one of those Raiders loses.

So how is it possible that the Raiders are ranked #2 and the Chargers #7?

What, do the Chargers have to beat the Raiders again?

Big game Sunday.

Over at Blogcritcs, I have come under a relentless attack by one Joseph Duemer. My sin? Having a little fun snubbing po-mo/contempoary poetry. Obviously, Mr. Duemer took my slap at po-mo poetry a little personally. After reading a few of his poems, I can see why. He has an obvious affinity for the sort of poetry that is really just prose essays broken up into shorter lines.

One begins:

When I crack an egg
I usually think
of the French girl
who lived downstairs
in the boarding house
where I endured
the winter following
my first marriage.
She would never
go to bed with me
but showed me instead
in her generosity
how to slip my finger
in a circle inside
the two halves of
a freshly broken
egg shell to extract
the last slick white
to dribble it into
the skillet.

Where, I ask, is the poetry? Where is the music? Where is the lyricism? Where are the layers of meaning that enlighten our existence? This is all just description. It's nice description. It's even pretty in its way, but other than putting only four or five words on a line, what makes it poetry?

Mr. Duemer thinks I should not have blasted po-mo poetry through made up examples. I say, why not? It's a quick way to summarize all that is bad about modern poetry. But the truth is, my examples were better poems than the one I quote above, so in a way, Mr. Duemer is right -- I should have dug around and found something by some well regarded po-mo poet and blasted him or her. It wouldn't have been that hard to do. So why didn't I? Lazy, I guess. Of course, my post wasn't supposed to be an essay (certainly not a scholary essay, as Mr. Duemer seems to demand that it should be), on po-mo poetry. I was merely pointing out an interesting book review in the LAT. But from such innocent actions come big wars,  I guess.


On the other hand, I think Mr. Duemer misses part of my point. One reason I tried to write my own bad po-mo poetry is I wanted to show how easy it is to toss off this stuff. Anybody can write,



There was a chill

in the morning air

as the leaves fell

and my infant slept on

a lilly white pillow.





What is so damn hard about that?



Of course the problem I ran into, was it was harder than I thought to write a po-mo poem. I had to dumb down my own writing so much that it took me two tries to be come up with something as vapid as the typical po-mo poem, and I think I still didn't bring myself down to that level. Even what I tossed off just now has a certain elegance, I think, that is lacking in most po-mo poetry.

While Mr. Duemer may not like my method, he has yet to offer any substantive reason as to why that invalidates the conclusion -- that po-mo poetry isn't poetry at all.

That said, not all of Mr. Duemer's poetry is bad. I quite liked "Language of Poetry." It is what a poem should be -- packed with meaning, subtlety, music and art. It is hardly po-mo, which is to its credit. But I suspect Mr. Duemer will now fret that maybe the poem isn't as good as he thought, since I like it.

The poems I've mentioned here are from Mr. Duemer's book, "Magical Thinking" (I'll resist using that title to make a snide remark about his thinking on po-mo poetry ... um, well, I guess I just did). It is available through Amazon, so if you disagree with my assessment of po-mo poetry in general, or my critique of Mr. Duemer's writing in particular, maybe you should buy his book. After all, he's a blogger, even if he's a typical fuzzy-thinking liberal blogger, he's a blogger nonetheless, so he can't be all bad.

UPDATE: Vinman (he's on blogspot, so naturally the permalinks don't work) found the nadir of po-mo expression -- a poem spray painted on sheep. This is what po-mo has wrought. It's a sad state of affairs.

Meanwhile, Alex Knapp shares my dislike for the current state of affairs in poetry, and expresses himself quite lyrically on the point. In fact, while his poem has a certain contemporary flair, it really isn't po-mo poetry. It's, um, too poetic.

UPDATE: Aaron Haspel has some interesting things to say on this topic, not that I agree with it all, as my comment on his post says.

Much as what passes for poetry today is not what I could call poetry. Here is a fictitious example of the contemporary, post-modern poem:

The jar lay on the floor
It looked good to me,
So I kicked it across the hardwood and listened to it
Clink and clank like a train on worn out tracks.

Um, actually, that's not half bad. I just spit that out. Let me try again at post-modern emptiness:

Cindy lay on the bed, naked.
We had just made love.
I smoked a cigarette and thought about a show
I had seen on TV the night before.
This is some life, I thought.
And it was.

Okay, that's more like it - vacuous. Devoid of subtly and almost totally lacking in meaning.

Most of what I read from contemporary poets lacks rhythm, lacks music, lacks the layers of onion skin that make delving into a truly well-worked poem so satisfy.

I read Bukowski not because he is a poet to study the way I once studied Eliot or Crane; I read Bukowski because I love his voice. I breeze through his poems enjoying the milieu of his life, picking up bits of observed detail and insight into human behavior. But, with a few exceptions, Bukowski lacks the compressed punch of a Keats or a Donne.

Poet and reviewer Edward Hirsch touches on the snobbery many current poetry critics have about what constitutes good poetry in his review of Richard Howard's new volume, "Talking Cures."

Howard is the most unabashedly literary -- the most Wildean -- of contemporary American poets. His massive learning, a full cultural arsenal, has often made him seem suspect to poetry readers who distrust great fanciness and mistakenly equate a plain style and a supposedly unmediated personal voice with "sincerity," which is a little like saying that vanilla ice cream is more "sincere" than peach gelato. But if it's true, as Ezra Pound said, that technique is the test of a poet's sincerity, then Howard certainly qualifies as one of our sincerest makers, since he has been elaborating his structures -- deliberately making something of himself -- for more than 40 years now. (emphasis added)

To me, a plain style is perfectly suited to prose, but not to poetry. The point of poetry is to escape the drabness of our plain and ponderous lives; poetry should compact our experiences and excite our senses, not numb us with a sense of sameness and predictability. From poetry, we should gain a new way of seeing old things, not the same old way of seeing everything.

The samples of Howard's poetry in Hirsch's review make me think that he is my kind of poet.

... Everyone knows my history,
complete with goddesses, islands, all those hoary lies!
I have no tales to tell, I have only
echoes. The real Ulysses puts in his appearance
between other men's lines, the true Odysseus
shows up in unspeakable pauses, the gaps and blanks
where life hasn't already been turned into
"my" wanderings, "my" homecoming, even "my" dog!

This from a poem about Ulysses taking a post-modern view of his legend, but it is written with a modern cadence that lifts it above post-modern boredom.

I think I'll buy this book.