Wire We Here

Posted on | April 7, 2012 | 4 Comments

The other day my longtime friend Allen reminded me of the synthesizer class I took in college. It’s not that I had forgotten, but the evolution of my interest in electronics is such that I sort of left those days to the remnant past. You see, synths have changed quite a bit over the years.

I met Al in college when I was living in the legendary L-shaped house on the S-curve between Monmouth and Independence. The house was desperately notorious for many arcanely sinister reasons (we were “alternative” types in a blue town), which I will spend some other blog elaborating upon. Tom and Doug and I were the primary inhabitants, although we dragged (or maybe drugged would be the better operative verb) many other more temporary roommates into the household from the Oregon College of Education campus.

Marv now

One of the guys we flagged down as roommate material was Marv, although I’m not entirely certain he enjoys being reminded of this brief portion of his life. Poor Marv endured being our roommate for a term, I think. I can’t imagine it was any longer than that in duration. His stay was chaotic, for many reasons, not the least of which were three big dogs and a smaller one, a rabbit and twenty or more cats. The most imposing cat was an albino feline gigantis that appeared one day from the field behind our house. He was huge.

Moby

I called him Moby. The great white cat.  He weighed more than my dog Gypsy and she weighed around forty pounds. I think Moby was closer to fifty pounds. Seriously. He just showed up at the back door one day and none of us had the guts to try to get him out of the house once he got in. He just sort of moved in. The cat who came to dinner.

Moby size approximation

One day Moby was draped across the back of the couch when my dog Spider (half-Golden retriever, half-Newfoundland and well over one hundred pounds) came nosing in for a definitive cat sniff. Moby sat up indignantly and took a swipe at Spider, and promptly knocked him down to the floor with a single punch (and it sounded like a punch, too). Spider ran off and nobody ever bothered Moby again. One day Moby disappeared. Probably went back out to the field behind our house where the sheep were grazing. Better hunting out there.

Lew now

Where was I? Oh, yeah. So Marv lived in the L-shaped house on the S-curve for about a term, I think. Somewhere along the line he introduced me to his buddy from high school, Lew. And Lew brought into the fold Allen, another Madison high school graduate. We were all musicians and worked together and in other configurations over the years. Allen was renowned for his unparalleled abilities on the guitar. He played Bach’s “Bouree” using his thumb to execute the intricate contrapuntal bass lines.

Allen then

Eventually, many years later, after we both had moved back up to Portland from Monmouth, Allen became the (exceptional) lead guitar player in my band. If I can ever get my web guy to give me an mp3 player on this website, I’ll let you hear how good he was. He lived in the band house for a while.

There, he and I performed many unusual scientific experiments—including efforts at remote viewing and attempts to generate infrasonic 4-8hz sound waves (much too low to be audible, but the body knows they’re out there, count on it), which were rumored to have all sorts of physical effects. There is some research that suggests one such low tone (the infamous “brown note”) can convince your bowels to evacuate spontaneously. Other tones could put you to sleep. And others could conceivably kill you. It is my recollection we were after the sleep/relaxation component—as that sounds more our speed.

Anyway, that’s who Allen is. We’re still friends and we’ve kept in touch (though somewhat sporadically) over the years. He’s in Michigan now. So our emails and Facebook exchanges are about the extent of our communications nowadays. But we’re both windy writer-types—so brevity is no real obstacle.

Last week Allen sent me this Facebook link

It’s about professor Joe Paradiso who while attending Tufts University in 1973 began work on constructing a synthesizer (now on display in the MIT museum). If you watch this video, you can see what synthesizers were like, back then. They really lived up to the futuristic name. Synthesizer.

Synthesizer circa 1965

It was all cables and jacks, envelope generators and oscillators, and modulators, and waves, and filters. They were amazing devices.  Huge. Some took up a whole wall. The one at U of O was massive.

Early monophonic modular synthesizer

In those days, getting one of the damn contraptions to even make a noise took a lot of effort. The idea of attaching a keyboard to one of them was a bit like trying to extract electricity from a kite. For the longest time, you could only generate one solitary note at a time (monophonic) on a keyboard hooked up to a synthesizer.

Technically, synthesizers had been around for a while. Gee, “musicians” were using tone generators clear back in the 20s. That’s what a theremin is. If you’d like to learn more about the theremin go here to read an article I wrote for Buko magazine about a local surf band that uses one. There’s some history about the instrument there.

Bob Moog: It’s all his fault

Around 1964 Robert Moog emerged as the first developer to create a modular synthesizer that included a keyboard. The set-up was primitive, to say the least, and not at all stable—likely to wander off into oscillatory la la land at the slightest voltage drop. It was in the later-‘60s that Lothar and the Hand People, previously a theremin-based band themselves, started using a Moog Modular system live.

The Electric Eclectics of Dick Hyman

In 1968, a well-known jazz pianist named Dick Hyman (who is still around today at age 85) put out Moog: The Electric Eclectics of Dick Hyman (I guess they had room for longer titles on LPs). That album was something of a precursor to Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. Innovative.

Switched On Bach

About that same time Walter Carlos released the revolutionary Switched On Bach. Carlos could only play one note at a time on his Moog set-up. So he put together his elaborate electronic renditions via multitracking. Laborious, tedious and amazing. An incredible piece of work.

Walter Carlos

Switched On Bach set the standard for achievement in electronic music for many years to follow. In that time Walter Carlos broke further new ground by initiating hormone treatments in 1967 and living as Wendy Carlos from that time forward.

Wendy Carlos

Wendy underwent sex reassignment surgery in 1972.  Honestly, I don’t remember much public brouhaha surrounding that event. The turmoil of the times made anything possible, it seems.

Groundbreaking? You be the judge

I always thought the Beatles’ “Here Comes The Sun” was the first use of a synth on a pop record—Abbey Road in the fall of 1969—but I recently read somewhere that Micky Dolenz had bought one of the first twenty or so Moog Modular systems produced and employed it on two songs on the Monkees album called Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. released late in 1967. Those Monkees. Ever the groundbreakers. Dolenz has said he eventually sold his Moog to Bobby Sherman, which is just a chilling thought.

An unfortunate turn of events at OCE

By the spring of 1971 I had lost my direction, scholastically. After some practicum, I very quickly realized that my goal to become a high school English teacher like my uncle was entirely misguided—when I determined that, even under the best of circumstances, I might realistically be able to reach only three or five students in any particular classroom. The rest of them would be lost to: well, the American Dream, I suppose. Is that what we’re living, here? It also dawned on me that I really didn’t like kids all that much.

I’m certain this is how life will be, Miss Feeney

So, that spring term, I abandoned my formal education and adopted an informal education instead. Tom, Doug and I had become somewhat disillusioned by the Oregon upper education system. OCE, which had once been considered one of the top teachers’ colleges in the nation, was turning out mindless proles in serving to erect the American scholastic conveyor. Tales of our adventures in attempting to recover our misplaced funding of that facility will have to wait until another day.

Quality education

My immediate choice was to take some classes that really interested me instead of classes that were mandatory and dullardly.  Having no funds for such an expedition, I decided to sit in on classes until the final class enrollment lists came out and I would be forced to take a hike.

I took a really cool Astronomy class. I took a class in Romantic World Literature from one of my favorite professors. That was great. I took my third term of Music Theory, although Professor Funes was totally cool. He knew I was masquerading, but he never did blow the whistle on me, because he knew it was about the music. And it really was and it always has been.

Synthesizer: VCO, Envelope Generator, VGA. Yeah, baby!

I also took a synthesizer class.

OCE had a very sophisticated synthesizer in-house, for being such a podunk little college out in the middle of nowhere. I guess they figured (like four, and me) future teachers of the device should be trained, or something. I know I was there to figure the whole synthesizer thing out.

EMS VCS3: The Putney Synthesizer

It was an EMS VCS-3, nicknamed the “Putney,” after the London suburb where its designer David Cockerell lived. The Putney came with a keyboard that allowed an individual to play only one single note at a time, like a lead instrument. Monophonic. No polyphony, no chords—although you could sort of approximate them with arpeggios.

Putney pin board

And instead of cables and phone plugs like its predecessors, the Putney utilized electronic pins on a matrix pad. The pin board resembled somewhat a game of Battleship. The pins created various connections between oscillators and filters, and other effects, which could then be manipulated via an array of knobs mounted above the pin and key boards.

Doctor Wallace

Doctor Wallace was the instructor for that class. He was the head of the music department. Sort of a stodgy, fastidious old guy. I’m not sure why he was the instructor. Professor Funes would have been the logical choice. But the prevailing thought was that Doctor Wallace wanted to guard at all costs the department’s big investment toy. No hooligans. Little did he know there was a hooligan in his midst.

Synth students at work/play

The six of us were stuffed into a corner of the little sound control booth located above the concert stage in the performance hall. I quickly became Doctor Wallace’s pet, eliciting from his prized machine the sort of far-out sound effects for which it was renowned. David Cockerell was responsible for creating sounds for the original Doctor Who series, after all.

Putney with keyboard

Over the first half of the spring term I put together some tapes of my best electronic vignettes. The piece de resistance among them was Space Bird Suite. I had figured out how to deploy a direct mic from the concert stage and run it into the Putney. It wasn’t supposed to be able to do that. One afternoon while I was up messing with the Putney (I spent five or six hours a day up in that little room) a woman began playing Bach pieces at the grand piano on the stage below.

I was able to ascertain the key in which she was playing and to jam along with her in single-note contrapuntality.  Once in synch, I turned on the Revox A-77 tape deck and let ‘er rip. Afterwards I mixed in strange, synth-generated bird sounds, pieces of an odd B-movie we roommates watched one night, a classical-like guitar performance and some other electronic detritus. Doctor Wallace was knocked out. I was on my way to getting an A.

Except.

I wasn’t enrolled in his class or any other. I wasn’t enrolled in school. Whenever he asked, I had always managed to convince Doctor Wallace that there was some sort of bureaucratic administrative mix-up or what have you, and he would let me slide for another week. Well, we’d better get this cleared up. Yeah you bet. Top of my list.

I had nearly completed my final version of Space Bird Suite. It was on a ten-inch 15 ips reel stored on a shelf above the Putney and the Revox. One day in early May I was on my way into the performance hall and up to the studio when Rick Morrison came sprinting up in my direction.

Doctor Wallace: pissed

“Hey Clarke, Wallace is on to you and he’s pissed!

I took that as a bad omen and got the hell out of there. I was told that at some point Doctor Wallace played my composition for the class and extolled upon its virtues. I don’t know what became of that finished version. I never saw or heard it again. It wouldn’t shock me if Doctor Wallace recorded over it. It was a ten-inch reel of Ampex tape!

Space Bird Suite was an exotic piece, a “Revolution #9” sort of affair with a Bachian sheen overlain. I still have a strangely edited working-version that I had ended up recording various sections of at different speeds in order to get it all onto the short piece of tape I had available. I keep telling myself that one day I’ll put that one back together to its rightful ten minute length (I still have the recording), just as a curiosity. But I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to it.

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In keeping with tradition, here is the latest installment of Biblical Haiku.

The Bible IV

Moses descended

Mount Sinai with two tablets

And a big headache

20 Years of Schoolin’ and They Put You on the Day Shift

Posted on | March 12, 2012 | 2 Comments

I’ve been reflecting upon my work history this week. “History” sounds so formal. Like there’s some rich succession of events. One must ask: Does a tornado have a history? What is the history of the wind? But I do have one–a work history that is.

And to call it checkered is an affront to all self-respecting checkerboards everywhere. It is a trail of tears. If jobs were food groups, then I would say I have a very full plate. Jeez. I’ve already burnt through four analogies and I haven’t even gotten this thing off the ground yet. Better get rolling here.

It started this week when Brendan sent out an email with the heading Schadenfruede. That word has crept into the vocabulary of all of us expatriates, of late, in watching the slow deterioration of our former employer’s business. We are all taking great delight in the misfortune of that company. That joy is not misplaced.

We’ll call the company in question Small Egg Roll. Small Egg Roll is a distributor of compact discs and, increasingly, DVDs. They represent music labels and artists from all over the world. All kinds of music. I had been working there for fifteen years as a sales rep, when they dumped me at the side of the road in March of 2011. It wasn’t that I hadn’t been productive. I brought in more than $30 million in sales over the years. They did okay by me.

No, they got rid of me because they could. Small Egg Roll is owned by a trio of brothers–the eldest, Cloyd McWingo, and his younger twin brothers Riff and Biff. They know plenty about business and absolutely nothing about music. They know even less about humanity. But, hey. When you’re raking in the cash by walking all over people, who needs a soul?

That is pretty much the story of the entire music business, actually. A bunch of innocuous businessmen screwing over the artists who generate the income. Ever wondered what kind of singing voice Clive Davis has? No, me either. Ever wondered why Lester Chambers of the Chambers Brothers is penniless after not having any royalties paid to him for over thirty years? Ask Clive Davis.

Hey and Clive’s a real prince compared to the boys at Small Egg Roll. To them “employees” are expendable chess pieces. That these “employee” chits might represent someone with a life and a family is not part of their equation. Why should it be? Their only concern is the bottom line.

We all worked in service of their bottom line. I got booted (I think) because I made the most noise when they arbitrarily cut the sales commissions in half. Either that or because I was inflating severely the cost of their employee health insurance plan. No, it wasn’t like the company was having trouble financially. They were making money hand over fist at Small Egg Roll.

They cut our commissions in half because they knew they could get away with it. It’s an employers market. If you don’t like it, you can head on down the road. There’s fifty people standing behind you wanting your job. Eat it. 

VP of Sales, Guppy J. Lapdog was the perfect field general–his only directive: to bully the staff into working twice as hard for half the pay. No excuses. Difficulties wth an account? No big deal. We’ll give it to someone else. Problem solved. Health issues? Surgery? Right. Can you still make the Monday morning sales call? We need your numbers.

It’s all about moving the product, you see. This is the fallacy in the public’s perception of the music industry. They think it’s about music. Puh. It’s about $$$, baby. Dinero. It’s about product and units and how many units of this product can you dump on that account?  You said they’d take fifty and they only took forty. What’s up with that?

If you’re not actually sitting there in the room at the moment with your jaw hanging slackly, you don’t fully comprehend the absolute inanity of these weekly conversations: “Well, why didn’t they take fifty units?” “Because they only needed forty.” “Why didn’t you sell them fifty? You said you’d sell them fifty.” “I guess I over estimated by ten.” “Why didn’t you say forty, then?” “Actually I did say forty and you put me down for fifty.” “Then why didn’t you sell fifty?” Etc. Those were usually the high points of our absurd get-togethers.

And it wasn’t as if these interogations were limited to the sales force in the field and the two or three people who comprised the home office sales staff. Hell no. General Guppy J. Lapdog had to drag in the Product Managers and their assistants. Web Sales. Special Markets. The Promotions manager. Data Entry (don’t ask me). Running the numbers, I guess. Hell, it was like a party in there every Monday, all of us crowded in a little conference room.

Except you had this little asshole weasel on the other end of the speakerphone chewing your ass out in front of all these bored, apathetic peons, because you only sold forty units when you said you’d sell fifty. None of this pertained one whit to anyone else in the room and it wasted valuable man hours by the man days. It was, more or less, a weekly public excoriation. Sort of a ritual.

Yeah, I know. No wonder they cut our commissions!

Constant pressure. Never good enough. It was a “corporate” attitude. Trickle down. Treat ‘em like shit. They’ll love it, or someone else will. Yadda, yadda. Needless to say, what trickled down was an acidic cynicism rife with black humor and outright hostility (a good chunk of it mine, I admit–I had been there the longest).

What did we sell? Gee, all kinds of junk, along with some really solid music, interspersed with the occasional nugget. A lot of back line stuff. All genres, you name it. Opera, Classical, Jazz, New Age, World, Indie rock. We had our own distribution lines set up to be the contracted conduit for hundreds of labels, coming in from all over the world. It was our mission to put units of their product in all the retail outlets among our various account bases. From Borders to Starbucks. From Silver Platters to Downtown Music Gallery and every place in between.

And you might justifiably ask, so why the hell did you keep working at the place if it was so damn terrible? Well, it was the music business! My entire adult life has been steeped in music. That’s all I know. It was the perfect job for me. My accounts were all the independent retail music stores across the country.

While the other sales reps took care of the Virgin and Tower Records chains and the like, my accounts consisted of little independently owned stores across the country. Those stores are run by people who genuinely love music and they support the artists in any way they can. They care. And they are not getting rich caring. A lot of them are going out of business because…well, I don’t have to tell you about downloading music from the internet.

And that’s the part of my job that I loved–working with guys like that. They really know music, revere it with a passion. Each one is a specialist. I received such a great music education from each of them. They had all become friends to me, even though I only knew most of them as voices on the phone. And I miss them. I never got to say goodbye to most of them. I was just gone one day, after fifteen years.

But that’s how the gentlemen at Small Egg Roll roll. To them class is a seating arrangement on an aircraft. The amount of genuine talent they allowed to sift through their empire, potential fully unrealized, could fill one of those aircraft. Seriously. I have dubbed us the Wasted Talent Pool. We represent all facets of the Small Egg Roll office experience. For, Small Egg Roll is nothing if not indiscriminate when it comes to the indifference extended to their office staff of approximately fifty.

And we were treated like kings compared to the treatment warehouse workers received. And it was only getting worse. I spent a lot of time out in the warehouse, gathering information from this CD or that, or checking on critical deliveries, or tracking shipments.

One thing Small Egg Roll expected from all it’s employees was abiding loyalty and devotion–inexplicably, given their cavalier attitude toward those same people. Of the forty or fifty who worked in the warehouse, there were several contingents of immigrants: Hispanic men and women, Asian women and Russian women. In all cases English was a second language. The remainder of the warehouse workforce consisted of an array of tattooed young outlaws who could obviously never find any sort of employment outside of a music distributor’s warehouse.

For that and other cultural reasons, the various factions typically tended to keep to themselves. I was cool with the punks. I got along very well with the the Hispanics and Asians, but the Russian women were baffling to me. Still, they all worked very hard. Very diligently. They were quite serious about their jobs. The income was of obvious extreme importance to the well-being of their families.

At one time Small Egg Roll was relatively generous toward its employees. When I first started, management gave out year-end bonuses, but they discontinued that the following year. I don’t know why. It seemed like profits were growing. We moved to newer, larger facilities twice–the second time into a massive space. That was four years ago: when things really began to change. The McWingos used to stage wonderful company picnics in the summer time. It served to manifest real camaraderie among the troops. Softball and hotdogs, games for the kids, and all that. And even more impressive was the annual Christmas party, which, while never lavish, still reflected a vague sense of communal sharing in the bounty of the year’s harvest.

But, as the company grew, that died too. The summer picnics were discontinued. The Christmas affairs became a quick lunch at the Country Kitchen. They’d give out a few “Awards” and celebrate this anniversary or that and back to work everybody. The last few years, it became bad juju to get an award for anything. Salesmen of the Year and celebrated long-tenured employees often seemed to get terminated sometime soon after the Christmas “party.”

I celebrated my 15th anniversary with Small Egg Roll at the 2010 Christmas party. I sat next to General Guppy J. Lapdog. He slapped me on the back when I received my award: a framed CD. Maritza from the warehouse received her ten-year commemoration at the same time.

It did seem a bit odd when they let Maritza go two weeks later (I probably should have been paying closer attention). Apparently someone in management (probably Biff the Tinkerer) must have read a magazine article and promptly instituted a new algorhithm as to the pace of work conducted in the warehouse. Maritza had fallen beneath standards and had to be let go, for the betterment of the company. Word was that others would be laid-off as well. They were. All the older Asian women were given the heave-ho.

You know, we’d had a pretty good year in 2010. Right after Michael Jackson died we were able to ship out a huge buttload of a DVD of dubious origin–a live Jacko Japanese concert (pretty good, too)–before we got the wholly anticipated cease and desist order from Sony. We’d had a release from the Meal Ticket Orchestra, around which the company’s entire fiscal year orbited. That album alone raked millions into the coffers.

The efforts of the McWingo’s employees had helped Small Egg Roll to thrive. The brothers were free not only to invest in a newly built home for the company headquarters, but to acquire several smaller, niche music distribution “one-stops” for the customary fire sale pittance. Little junior McRomneys there. Small Egg Roll was on its the way. Players! In addition to the acquisitions, lucrative distribution channels had been opened and secured with favorable long-term contracts. The boys were rolling in assets. An empire. “Alistair, bring me my Ferrari. I’m in the mood for high-speed touring.”

But, as we all know, an empire is only as as strong as its weakest bottom line. By eliminating any duplication of sales and administrative duties between the various acquired distribution channels, cutting commissions in half and streamlining warehouse operations productivity, Small Egg Roll was positioned to vastly improve profits the good old fashioned way. They squeezed it.

The serious migration of talent out of Small Egg Roll began about six months before I got the boot. Many more left after I did. In a year’s time twelve of fifteen key sales and marketing positions had turned over, some twice.

In that time the pressure there only grew more intense and more insane. We were selling CDs and DVDs, not vital organs–or weapons. Something had changed for the McWingos and for General Lapdog. Maybe it was retirement looming on the horizon–the desire to feather one’s pillow and re-tool the leather on the saddle. Going for the gold and all that. Who the hell knows?

But whatever it was they had totally lost it.  They weren’t just sucking time and effort out of us, they were going for the very marrow of our humanity. They wanted it all. I had a sign on my cubicle wall that said: “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.” You know, it really did feel like the ninth circle of hell.

Liberty left not long after I did. She’d been there six years or so. Brendan bailed last month, after even longer than that. Even Lydia got out of there and she’d been there twenty years–since the place opened up. I got “laid off.” Those guys quit outright. They just couldn’t take it anymore. None of us could.

Although, as I told some members of the Wasted Talent Pool recently, I have had some really terrible jobs and terrible employers (oh yes, more about them in the future), none nearly managed to combine irrational greed and selfishness with bizarre, mind grinding, tedious tension in a way as needlessly oppressive as in my experience at Small Egg Roll

Increasingly, this is the landscape of working life in the United States. All of these poor hapless serfs toiling in servitude to the whims of overpaid thug lords. There was no reason for us to be flogged psychologically and emotionally at Small Egg Roll. No one shirked. We all cared about our jobs. And we would have cared a lot more about the company if the company had cared about us. The whole situation was unnecessary and counter-productive. There are some aspects of performance that can’t be measured or quantified.

We were unfortunate victims of a few horrible individuals who found some strange sadistic gratification in bullying their employees. Brittle egos so delicately inflated they constantly had to convince themselves that they were true captains of industry, gifted with insight and prescience not available to normal mortal men, steering their ships of commerce through rough economic waters. This from three brothers who didn’t even like music and wouldn’t know a tom tom from a tuba–or care, really. And here we are back to product and units. And this is how we live our lives. In increments and equations, divisible by bits and bytes, zeroes and ones.

So, with all this in mind, around came the email from Brendan with the heading Schadenfruede. First of all, his replacement in the Classical Music Whipping Boy position, abruptly quit after only a month on the job, citing Cloyd McWingo’s boorish behavior as the primary motivator. If you knew Cloyd, this would come as no surprise whatsoever. I had another sign on my cubicle wall that read: “Sidewalk of the Salted Slug,” a description of Cloyd’s solipsistic morning trudge through the office (on those rare days when he was actually in the office).

That revelation alone would have been enough to brighten any former employee’s day. But then thursday the news came down that Small Egg Roll lost a key component in their product line, when a long time supplier elected to have their high-margin product distributed elsewhere. So sad. What’s more, everyone in the Small Egg Roll organization was going to be compelled to take a 10-20% reduction in pay to stanch the bleeding, even management (!).

I feel bad for the regular employees there. That pay-cut will hurt the ten-dollar-an-hour wage slaves in the warehouse a lot more than it will the McWingo boys. You can be sure they’re looking out for number ones, and have their money socked away all over the place. But just the same, as someone whose life, going forward, has been irrevocably and royally screwed by their indiscriminate hateful piggery, all I can say is: good riddance.

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As a brief update, I recently sent off my first query letters (emails actually) regarding my novel Unreal Gods to three legitimate literary agents. I haven’t heard back, nor is it reasonable for me to expect to, as emailed queries are not even given the dignity of rejection notices.  But, as some may recall, the original assignment was to write a haiku describing in vivid detail the plot of the Bible. Here is my third installment.

The Bible III

Adam called to Eve

Baby, pick me an apple.

And that’s all she wrote.

A Thought

Posted on | March 4, 2012 | No Comments

Thinking and reasoning are hard work and many are unemployed.

Adventures in the Realm of Dog Part 1

Posted on | January 28, 2012 | No Comments

I’ve been thinking about Mitt Romney a lot lately. No, not because he is the most wooden excuse for a human entity that ever mechanically laughed at the most inappropriate time. Not because he reeks of rich kid, laizzez faire cynicism: ‘What will be, will be. And it’s gonna be really good for me.”  Not because his hair is dyed the color of a black hole (perhaps disguising a remnant imploded brain of similar hue), or the fact that he wears his (neatly pressed) jeans like a forty-five year old mother of four from Schenechtady, New York. It’s not even because he’s an habitual liar, an inveterate opportunist chameleon, a tool, and a corporate mule.

Though I probably should, I haven’t been thinking about Mitt Romney because he lives on his “capital gains income,” upon which he pays a mere 13.9% tax, while hiding most of his “gains” offshore. I’m not even thinking about him because it would appear that his plan for the nation would be to continue to squeeze the American middle class back to serfdom and bondage, if at all possible. You know, a lot of the old, aristocratic wealth in the Western world is still pissed off about that whole Magna Carta thing. It disrupted a lot of lives.

No, I’ve been thinking about Mittens for one reason only: Seamus the dog, a friendly looking Irish Setter lad. Poor Seamus. I know a lot about dogs and families. I’ve been closely involved with both for most of my life. I consider myself to be something of a learned expert on the dog/family dynamic. And it says so much about Mitt and the whole family Romney that they would even contemplate driving 500 miles or so with a dog stuck inside of a (no doubt) luxury “air tight” carrier, lashed to the top of the Romney family station-wagon.

I have never been witness to the family dynamic between Mitt and the rest of the Romney clan, but out on my limb of the tree of humanity, no self-respecting kid would have gone anywhere near a vehicle where the family pet was being tethered to the top. In my family, my sister would have thrown a royal shit fit at the thought of it long before it would have occurred to the three of us boys. But we would have objected too. Eventually.

And there was no way my mom or dad would have even considered putting our dog in a carrier on top of the car in the first place. Why should they? That’s what the luggage carrier on top of our station-wagon was for–luggage. And really, if we absolutely had to transport something living uptop, my middle brother, the adventurer of the tribe, would have happily volunteered for the position. But that never happened.

We kind of swung the other way when it came to dog issues. My dad had specific ideas regarding how dogs should behave, and it was nothing like anything the AKC ever heard of. Our first dog was Pepper. He was a black puppy, vaguely labrador. He didn’t last long. He got hit by a car he was chasing. We did not live on a busy street. Not at all. And how he developed the car chasing habit is a mystery to me. I was young at the time and as yet not within my full faculties of dog sussmanship.

Car chasing appears to be one of those activities that dogs have managed to evolve away from. Probably by natural selection. The ones that chased didn’t live long enough to procreate. End of the line. Either that, or it’s the leash laws.

Next up was Marty. He was the first in a short series of dogs named after Walt Disney  characters. Marty died a tragic death, the details of which I will not divulge in this particular tale. There will be no wags dogging our tales here, I tell you.

Not long after Marty’s untimely demise, we moved to another part of town. It was just after I’d finished the second grade. Shortly after settling into our new abode, we acquired a dog. I believe we found Tyke (not a Disney-related name) tied to a tree out on the playground at the grade school. At that time, tying a dog to a secluded tree out in the middle of nowhere way at the back of the playground, and deserting it, was an indication that ownership was being forfeited and the first young swagjack to come along that was of a mind (and relatively certain of convincing his caregivers) could have that dog. For free. It was an acknowledged form of canine transaction in those days.

Anyway, one of us ended up bringing Tyke home. I’m pretty sure it was my sister, because her radar for deserted dogs was especially keen. It’s probably a good thing people didn’t leave horses tied to trees at the playground. We didn’t have enough room for that. At some point, during my year in the third grade, Tyke disappeared. I do not suspect foul play. Dogs were allowed to roam at large back then–and we lived in a fairly rural urban area. There were a lot of wide open fields–across the street, and near by. Given the opportunity, dogs are known to wander. Tyke wandered a tad too far, it would seem.

It’s my recollection that we picked up Yeller late in the following summer, just after school had resumed. I’m not sure which of us it was, I suspect it again was my sister (see above), but one of us found him tied to the tree at the back of the playground, and brought him home. I do know that Yeller had formerly belonged to Tommy McDonald. I never found out the circumstances surrounding the necessity for the McDonald family’s surrendering Yeller, but they did.

We named Yeller after a heroic Disney movie dog, the subject of an especially tragic story–one which we kids had held dear for many years, I suppose waiting for Yeller to come along. Whatever the case the name Yeller befell upon that particular dog who was, no doubt, familiar with some other name when he was boarding with the McDonalds. But he was Yeller, and Yeller he was. If all this were taking place now, I’m sure his name would be Joey after the horse in the film War Horse.

He was nearly full-grown when we got him, around two years old, not a big dog, maybe thirty-five or forty pounds. Very early on we decided that he was a Golden Retriever/Cocker Spaniel blend. He looked like a small Goldie, but he had Charlemagne Cocker ears. As we grew older we concocted a lot of breed names. Golden Cock, Cockatriever (more on this later, perhaps) etc.

Yeller was a handsome young fellow, and, apparently bearing in mind his uncertain circumstances with the McDonalds, he never once took for granted his place within our family. He aimed to please–especially my sister, whom he loved dearly and completely. Yeller would do (and did) anything for my sister. Those exploits will be detailed at another time. I’m talkin’ about the poor Seamus Romney connection here.

And how it is hard for me to conceive–in my anti-Romneyian universe–of not treating Yeller as a member of our core family. Not a pet, a comrade. He took that responsibility very seriously and for that he was often well-rewarded. Especially when we were having meals at the dining room table. He was small enough that he was able to maneuver unimpeded, and mostly undetected, under the table.

Here’s an example of my father’s somewhat eccentric approach to these not infrequent family connundra within which we were swept by the livestock that freely grazed throughout our household. As Yeller made the rounds beneath the table, we four kids supplied a steady stream of delicious bits. Whatever we had. Bread. Baked potato, macaroni, corn, peas, fat, gristle. Yeller was not at all picky. Pretty much anything that hit the floor, he claimed for his own–an unspoken agreement between us kids and him.

For quite some time there was no impediment to that particular food chain and it conveyed without interruption. Until one day while at dinner, my dad dropped something to the floor, I don’t remember what it was. Maybe his wallet. I don’t think it was food, but I think Yeller thought it was. Before my dad could reach down to pick up whatever it was, Yeller had already snatched it up and pulled back, ostensibly to eat it, if at all possible.

Either my dad actually never knew about the deal we had going on with Yeller, or (far more likely) he was just in the mood for a little entertainment, Clarke-style. Whichever the case, he stood up with a fairly ferocious start, scaring the holy bejeesus out of us and poor Yeller, who was a very sensitive dog. My dad dramatically tossed his napkin down on the table and grabbed an extra chair from the corner bellowing good-naturedly, “If you’re gonna feed that damn dog human food, he can sit at the table and eat like a human, too.”

At that, Dad yanked Yeller out from under the table and plopped him down in the chair. With an odd expression on his face, my father went into the kitchen and fetched a plate and utensils. Then he began to load up the plate. Maybe mashed potatoes and chicken and green beans. Who knows? Scooting us over, Dad slid the extra chair forward, up tight against the table, about chest-high, and placed the plate of food in front of Yeller.

Snatching up a napkin, Dad tucked it into Yeller’s collar. Picking up a fork, he slid the handle between the pads of Yeller’s right paw. Slowly, he helped the mortified dog to scoop up a forkful of food from the plate, guiding it unsteadily toward his mouth. While we kids laughed hysterically, Yeller unenthusiastically ate dinner at the table with the rest of the family. Though he never again was seated at the table, Yeller steadfastly maintained his patrol of the territory beneath. However, he avoided at all costs my dad’s end of the food conveyor.

I’m certain, if it was Mitt and the Romneys, Seamus never would have been allowed in the house in the first place, stationed instead in his apartment at the back of the estate. Seamus couldn’t possibly have lurked under the table, but if he somehow managed to make it that far, the question must be asked: What Would Mitt Do?

Certainly Mitt would have Seamus dispatched forthwith back to his apartment, after a stern rebuke, of course. Probably a few rounds of obedience therapy with the trainer. Maybe the electric dog collar for a few days, just so old Seamus would remember his “boundaries.” We can’t have that dog running around like a wild animal, now can we? Maybe a little kennel time’ll take the spring out of his stride. Oh, he’ll ride on top of the car. Yes, he will. You bet he will. And he’ll damn well love it. Won’tcha fella?

Left to me, I’d let Seamus drive the station-wagon while Mitt rode in the “airtight carrier up top. (Oh he loves it. Climbs up there all by himself! Don’cha boy?). Then again, if it were up to me, I would be far more inclined to vote for a dog than any of the candidates running for the Republican nomination in the 2012 presidential election.

A dog can be trusted. A dog tells the truth and never lies. A dog tries to see the good side of things and to make the most of them. A dog is loyal and unbiased. Prince or pauper, a dog will love you all the same. A dog can sniff out your motivations. If he thinks you’re up to no good, he will let you know of his suspicions. It’s hard to argue with a dog. Dogs are persistent and honorable. Dogs are noble. Dogs care.

Name for me one politician to whom those characteristics might apply. Yeah, I can’t name one either. In fact Mahatma Gandhi was the only name I could think of to fit all the qualifications, the high personal standards of the common mongrel. That’s a pretty sad commentary. But it’s true. And if Yeller were still running around, and running, I’d vote for him.

*********************************************************

As part of my ongoing series, attempting to describe to you the time-honored process, wherein, for representation by a literary agent or publisher, one must “query” ahead before you can get anyone to look at the synopsis of your book and maybe a few chapters. Tell your story. What’s your book about? You have fifty words. Maybe a hundred. But really, if you don’t get your point across in the first couple sentences of your query, you’re most likely heading for the rejection pile. Last time, I described the process as like trying to write a haiku to describe the Bible. Try it. I’d love to see other submissions. Here’s my second installment.

The Bible II

John Lennon once said:

“Nothing to get hung about.”

Don’t tell Jesus that.

I’m sorry. I was raised a Catholic.

Enter 2012

Posted on | January 3, 2012 | No Comments

Here it is, another New Year. I’ve had more of these than I care to count, so this business of “resolutions” is lost on me. I resolve not to make any more resolutions. Amen. There are many things within my life about which I am very resolute. Not one of those things have required the expiration of some arbitrary year (nor its magical imagined metamorphosis into another) in order to motivate me toward them. In the end, you either do it or you don’t.

This being my inaugural voyage piloting the good blog SP, I don’t have any intention, agenda, or anything enlightening to say. Those who know me will not be in the least surprised at that disclosure. But it’s never stopped me in the past. More or less (probably less) I just wanted to take this thing for a spin, RPO it (for those not acquainted with the ins and outs of the automotive repair industry: Run the Piss Out of it) and put it back in the driveway for a month or two. We’ll see about that.

Those familiar with my “work,” the more public aspects of it anyway, are familiar with my (euphemistically speaking) career in the realm of reporting upon the transpirations of the local music scene. I have been doing this for far too long. I’m starting to feel like Dick Clark on New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. “Wheel the old boy out and give him  his confetti.” Speaking for myself–and I am the only person I entrust to do such a thing–I would hazard that Dick probably still enjoys showing up for the event. That’s my MO, anyway and I’m sticking to it.

This is my attitude about putting a dog to sleep. If it’s not having fun anymore, then it’s time to consider…you know. Because what is a dog’s life if not (hopefully) fun? Most dogs lives aren’t fun I suspect, and that is, no doubt, the subject of another blog on another day. But, dogs were designed by the human race as sources of endless inter-species funitude. One thing dogs know how to do is to have a good time. At least that’s true for the dogs I know. Fun lovers, each and every.

So when Dick Clark stops having fun, it’ll be time to pull the New Year’s Rockin’ Eve plug. That’s my attitude too. When local music and musicians stop being fun for me, I’ll turn in my turntable. Until that day, here I shall remain. I’ll give up my pen when you rip it from my cold dead hands.

I already have repositories for my work in the area of local music. My current reviews and observations appear at www.buko.net under the heading: The Good The Bad and the Ugly. Also at the buko.net site is a link to the Two Louies archives. Eventually all of my album reviews and articles (way, way over a thousand reviews and a million words) through many hundred issues of Two Louies will be posted online. In addition, my History of Portland Rock is linked to both sites. The History is incomplete, to be sure. It’s my understanding that history is never complete. But all of the local music history that I have observed is linked here. So think of this site as your one-stop hub for all things SP. If that is not a enough of a caveat, the outcome is out of my hands. Warning served

God bless him, Mister Buko seems strangely reluctant to commit his every waking hour to the necessities of my websites and creative outpourings, thus I must be patient with the tortoise-like pace at which these various sites are assembled. Trying to maintain these things for myself is out of the question. My girlfriend refers to me as a Luddite. And, truly, in that respect she is being much too kind.

I am technologically impaired. This is not a new revelation. I was the source of endless frustration for my father, who could not understand my inability to differentiate between a car’s generator and radiator. It was always my contention that the device “radiated” electricity. However, this confusion has made my communication with mechanics (of whom there have been many, over the years, given the fact that I have worked for pikers for most of my life) very difficult– a situation greatly magnified by the fact that my longtime mechanic, Mister Ho Hoang of Ho’s Auto Repair at 33rd and Division, is Vietnamese, with English as a very distant second language. Our conversations sound like Marx Brothers’ bits. Fun stuff.

So, without the kindness of strangers, I would probably be still scribing my tomes on the backs of paper sacks and envelopes (in the driver’s seat of my inoperative vehicle), and the few of you who might stumble across these missives would be shut out from the benefit of my inciteful insight. Just ponder that for a minute or two!

Blame it on the enchiladas. I am more inclined to think it’s Michael Jarmer. For some reason, last night, I was inspired to consider this ongoing exercise in literary masturbation called a blog. Right now, I think I already have the best readership here that I’m likely to encounter: me. Strangely, I get almost all of my jokes and view myself as being pretty witty and erudite. All other estimations appear to topple from that lofty nest. I’ll make some effort toward readership. But, I must say: self-promotion is not among my attributes. I’ll see if I can get a few friends to like it for Facebook. That should do the trick.

What does one do with these here blog thangs, anyways? My first inclination in all things is to smoke it. And, as an existential conceptual exercise, I have to say I’m gettin’ a buzz. Beyond that? Meh. Tell you what. In commemoration for these days of resolution, I hereby resolve. I will try to promote a few of my creative pursuits. I mean, if not here, then where?

I don’t know.

Maybe it is and maybe it ain’t Maya Year Zero. We’ve got what? 353 days until we find out? Well, let the meltdown countdown begin. I just want to ask. Are there still any Mayas around to re-calibrate their long count calendar, if it’s just a case of the original authors running out of rock? That’d give us another 5,100 years, give or take, and we can be done with the whole matter for a while. I’m looking forward to putting this one to bed once and for all. But not until after Carlos & Toni’s End of the World party. Hey, if you’re going out, you might as well party like it’s 1999.

Now, if the world does indeed survive whatever the Maya have planned for December 21st, you might well ask: “Well, SP, what was it, exactly, you were planning on promoting?” That’s a good question for which I actually happen to have an answer. Unreal Gods. Unreal Gods? Unreal Gods. It’s a band. It’s a book. It’s a way of life. It’s biographical. It’s a novel. If I can shake out enough people here, I might post a few chapters. It’s, like, 625 pages long. So, Ive got a few extra pages for show purposes.

Unreal Gods is a novel based on the life of Billy Rancher and his band the Unreal Gods. If you’re not familiar with Billy’s story, and an alarming few hipsters in this vaingloriously cutting-edge artistic rats nest are familiar with it, then, here is the novel to tell you of his adventures.

I spent twenty five years sitting on Billy Rancher’s tale. I wanted to blur for myself reality and fiction. It actually took that long to forget it all, so that I could tell Billy’s story from a more distant, objective perspective. Plus, a lot of what is in the book is not true. A lot of it is. I don’t want to be responsible for the accuracy of either. I hate accuracy. That entails research.

My own research typically does not extend much farther than consulting my History of Portland Rock or other similar resources. And if you’re at all interested in the story of Billy and the Gods, the History provides details and a basic outline and chronology. It’s a great story. Timeless. Sad. Timeless and sad.

I’m sure I have lots of other stuff to promote. I’ll think about that. Right now, I need to remain focussed on the book, as it is very important that Billy’s story is told. As soon as I figure out how to do such a thing, I will link to Michael Jarmer’s site. Michael is a longtime Portland musician (Here Comes Everybody) who is also a writer and he is wrestling with many of the same dilemmas that I am, in regards to the pathetic publishing industry and the ridiculous hoops one must jump through to even hope to get a book published. Your assignment for today: write a haiku describing in vivid detail the plot of the Bible.

We’ll save that gnashing of teeth for another play date. For today, I wanted to put forth my manifesto. I lack, I think, a thesis. A punchline. A cause. So, it’s a manifesto without a cause. If that doesn’t sound like “not with a bang but a whimper,” I don’t know what does.

THE BIBLE

A pretty good book.

The hero dies in the end.

Oops. Spoiler alert.

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SP Clarke is a writer and rock journalist, who lives in Portland Oregon.