Archive for January, 2009
Monday, January 19th, 2009
l right, here’s my problem with Rock Band:
Rather than playing a fake instrument, learn to play a real one.
I know a ton of people who love this game and that’s fine, I guess. But they all talk about wanting to be rock stars (and can we please, please for the love of whatever God you dig, lose ‘He’s a rock star,’ as any kind of cultural conversational touchstone? It’s as bad as ‘thrown under the bus.’) but none of them want to actually learn to play.
Pick up a damned instrument. You wanna be a rock star? Learn some chords. Learn some funkadelic bass lines. Buy some drums and toss on a Dave Matthews or Rush CD, play along to those. Or Billy Cobham or Manu Katche.
Holy hell, just do something!
Instead, this being the land of the lazy, we’d rather play a game and pretend to be a musician than put in some actual time and become a…you know…musician.
When I worked at DJ’s Music Box in Denver, an odd combination of sheet music, instruments, and music boxes, there was a guitar instructor there. His belief was that music was too easy, too accessible. He believed that music had lost some of its elegance and mystery and romance because anyone could be a musician. It was too easy, he used to tell me, to become a musician.
That was crap then and it’s crap now. I believe there was more music in centuries gone by because people didn’t have radios and TVs and daily newspapers and the Internet. Other than dueling or weaving your own clothes or castrating the livestock, there wasn’t squat to do! So there were entire families who were musical. Go back and read diaries and daily accounts of family life 100, 200, 300 years ago. When there was free time, which was very damned often because of that whole castration situation, they yanked out the instruments.
With absolutely no evidence to support it, I’d lay even money that there was a musician in damn near every family. Everybody played something – piano, guitar, harmonica, violin, fucking brown jug.
So Americans, many of whom have gotten so lazy that the American dream has gone from ‘work hard and better yourself’ to ‘buy a winning lottery ticket,’ or ’slip on the ice and sue everyone,’ have decided that learning to play an instrument just takes too much damned time. It’s much easier to pretend at making music.
‘Trey, Trey, take a breath, it’s just a game.’
True enough, and I realize the game isn’t really about playing at being a musician, it’s about playing at being a celebrity, ‘cuz that’s what we all want now. The entire country, at least those younger than me (and it’s always those young whippersnappers fouling things up, ain’t it?), worships now at the altar of celebrity. But even better than celebrity is instant celebrity, doubly so if built around…well…nothing.
Oh, for the days when you had to do something to get famous. Neil Armstrong had to…you know…land on the moon. And Paris Hilton’s contribution? Well, she was born with the right genes. And then there was that ‘accidental’ flash of her vajay-jay.
Wonder which of the two is more famous…hmmmm….something to ponder.
The upside, I guess, is that now, rather than people posting video of themselves on YouTube doing nothing in an obvious and desperate attempt at celebrity, they can post of themselves playing Rock Band and being a Rock Star…in an obvious and desperate attempt at celebrity. That’s progress, I guess.
Posted in Random Thoughts | 3 Comments »
Friday, January 9th, 2009
Hehehehehe…
So now what do you do if you’re Roland Burris and it turns out the man who appointed you is impeached? And, oh yeah, you finally admit that you did have contact with one of his disgraced aides about the Senate seat, even though you swore in an affadavit you didn’t.
This Illinois political bullshit is almost as much fun to watch as Texas political bullshit. Only difference is, at least when it comes to the Governor, Blagojevich has bigger hair than Perry. Not better…just bigger.
Posted in Random Thoughts | 1 Comment »
Friday, January 9th, 2009
A cornucopia of comments today, all from a recent law enforcement class.
“That was the best time at PTI (Police Training Institute) – watching them get lit up.”
“Yeah, baby, take the ride.”
- from two 22 year-olds who were talking about watching police recruits get Tasered.
*****
“My wife and my ex-wife get along pretty well. And they both get along with my daughter’s mother.”
- from a 23 year-old. He later commented about how the ‘bad guys’ have no self-control.
*****
“…shit flows like wildfire.”
- from the instructor. I just liked the ultra mixed metaphor.
*****
“I’ve [written] 40 DUIs.”
“Bite my ass, that’s crap.”
[sarcastic snort]
- the first comment was from a kid who’d been out of the academy since last May and out of his field training program since the beginning of September. The second comment was my response to him asking the class to believe that in four months he’d arrested 40 people for DUI. The snort was from the instructor, who I’m not sure believed a single word the kid said during the entire four day class.
Posted in ...uh...what? | No Comments »
Saturday, January 3rd, 2009
As of December 31 at about 4:00, LuAnn closed the doors of Green River Books for good.
It’s been a while coming. Last year at roughly the same time, she thought the store might have to close and was quite a ways down that road. But we ended up taking a hard left and it became a kids’ store. Books and toys and various whatnots.
For a while, it did well. But then it just…sort…of…petered out. It simply couldn’t keep its head above water. Our customer base, while fiercely loyal, simply wasn’t big enough to keep the thing running. And very few things we tried worked. We tweaked stock. We expanded – and retracted – hours. We hosted readings and parties and festivals. We had local books and local authors and photography contests and writing contests and reading groups and I can’t even remember what all.
And it has been an interesting ride. We spent six and a half years surrounded by books and people who loved books and discussions of books and arguments about books. But not just books. Discussions of books became discussions about what those books were about. It was not unusual for someone to walk in and find myself and a local judge talking about the 16th century Chinese navy, or find LuAnn and a local attorney dissecting how humanism fits in an America increasingly riven by right-wing religion.
Nor was it unusual to come in and find an author talking about his or her book. Jay Bonansinga, Ron Bluemer, local authors galore. Hell, just during the first week we were open, way back in July, 2002, we had something like 35 authors. At one signing, for a book about a local mining tragedy 100 years ago, we had something like 120 people.
But there were fewer of those successful signings than there were those which had the author, myself or LuAnn, and whoever happened to wander in looking for a bookmark.
And it was that that killed the store.
Our devoted fans and customers spent as much as they could, but there simply weren’t enough of them.
You know, I paused there for a minute to try and figure out what I was writing about, what this post was about. Yeah, it’s about the store but what is there really to say? We opened it, it did well, then it didn’t, then we closed it.
I thought I’d talk about the good moments and the people who meant so much to us and that’s all fine, but there’s part of me that doesn’t really feel like writing anything, as witnessed by the fact that the store closed four days ago and I’m just now writing about it.
And that might be the lesson of this post. I am torn about the closing. There is part of me that’s sad. But there is another part that is ready and maybe even happy to see it done. Honestly, I’m just tired. I’m tired of worrying about getting the bills paid, or lately not paid (and watching the financials just get exponentially worse over the last six months…to the point where I dream about the end of the world on a nightly basis…I’ll tell you about the increasingly lunatic dreams in another post in a few days). I’m tired of worrying about what happens if LuAnn is sick for a day or two. Do we close and lose increasingly needed business? Or do we keep it open and make her work and prolong her cold or flu or whatever?
But mostly I’m tired of listening to the whiners.
“I can’t order this book and get it today?”
“What? You don’t have this book on the history of geology in northern Africa throughout the colonial period?”
“I can’t get a better discount than this?.”
“I can get this cheaper from Amazon.”
Swear to God, I had a guy at the last Harry Potter party (when 10,000 people roamed the entire shopping district of Princeton and spent an incredible amount of money and what did the city donate? Portable toilets. That’s right, the city of Princeton thought the 10,000 people and their money was worth…shit) who bitched about our discount versus Wal Mart’s.
Ours was none, Wal Mart’s was 50% or something.
But the kicker is: this guy stood there and bitched at me WHILE HE WAS ATTENDING THE PARTY!
Hmmmm, you think Wal-Mart donated any money to that party? Fuck no, it came outta my pocket so take your complaint and get the shit outta my store.
I also had a guy once who told me he preferred to do his book shopping at Amazon because it was cheaper. I said that was fine, but when his house burned down, he should call Amazon rather than the fire department and see how much in sales tax they had collected for the fire department.
“Oh, that’s right,” I said to him. “They don’t do sales tax. Too bad about your house, I guess.”
Elsewhere in this blog, I wrote about the woman who wanted a deeper discount on a book already discounted 25% because it was a Christmas book and when she bought it, it wasn’t Christmas time.
That’s the crap that made me crazy and I’m glad those wackos will be out of my life.
But at the same time, I will miss the store and the smell of books and the soft flipping of pages as people read through something and the pleasant grin when someone discovered a new writer or a new thought in a book they randomly pulled from the shelves.
So I guess I have no epiphany after six and a half years. We came, we sold, we didn’t sell, we left.
That’s about it.
Posted in ...the final few pages | 2 Comments »
