P.S. Comings and Goings

A place I’ve never been before but in my mind,

I long to go there with you

And live another life full of brownstone buildings, and cobbled roads

Old sections of old towns where all the young people meet

In clothes I’ve never seen before.

I’ll work in a kitchen, evenings and nights

With the Hispanics and the Asians,

Cooking food for the locals and the all nighters;

I lie on the job application so nobody knows.

But you don’t know who I am either,

Even as we dance up and down deserted late-night streets

Of 50s glory, and the caterwaul of the man

Who has no direction and yet is free

Echoes along cracked, shadowed walls.

I’ve seen in your eyes the shattered hope

Of somewhere new and holy,

Smoke along the sides of stained walls

Moving to the distant, hollow music.

We end up there, and make sense later

When our whole discordant lives

Are not before us, but behind us 
In that same cloud of dispersing smoke. 

Our philosophers should be rock stars, but our rock stars should be philosophers.

What's Going on with Kansas City's Middle of the Map Fest?

Last weekend marked the third edition of Ink's Middle of the Map Fest, with a lineup that once again is described as being "curated" by local label The Record Machine. Let me first say, that I've attended each year and I think this is a well-intentioned and positive event for the city and midtown/Westport specifically. Each year hundreds of fans throng in and out of the bars, venues, coffee shops and restaurants in what is surely a boon for the economy of Westport and the local bands that are often highlighted. This year we lost the Beaumont Club, which seemed to create some locale problems, but we gained the Uptown Theater which typically serves as a better concert going environment.

Still, I'm left wondering after this year's incarnation what exactly Middle of the Map Fest intends to be. The promoters don't seem to reach out much beyond their core base of fans and local groups that they book every year. It's obvious that in name and spirit, MOTM wants to be a successor to Austin's famous SXSW Festival. People from Kansas City or Austin will probably wince at the comparison, but perhaps for different reasons. As one patron of Buzzard noted on Saturday, "This looks like Kansas City trying to do SXSW and doing a shitty job."

It pains me to criticize anything local that brings in business and gives a platform to deserving local musicians, but somebody has to offer a critical perspective in what is largely an insular and self congratulatory music scene. (We can't expect this from the Star since they own Ink and by and by are therefore directly involved with organizing/funding MOTM. I don't know what to expect from the Pitch, but giving MOTM too much coverage is basically promotion for a competing rag.) 

The majority of core local bands booked this year were present in one or both of the two previous years, and although some of them are my favorite bands, I don't really see this as a productive use of MOTM. The Appleseed Cast are not an up and coming act, and anyone involved in local music has probably been seeing them annually for a decade+ (I've seen them about 30 times). On the other hand, great local acts like Cowboy Indian Bear and Soft Reeds are on the bill every year because they're signed to The Record Machine (absent this year was Capybara, which surprised me a bit). Then you have the rest of the usual suspects, which are often older indie musicians entrenched in the local scene that currently do booking/run venues, or are still kicking around town in one form or another. Hello Roman Numerals, Thee Water Moccassins, etc.

And oh yes, don't forget the Beautiful Bodies. We can't have a local show without the Beautiful Bodies.

Every other entry in the fest appears to be a crapshoot after this. Typically, bands that just happen to be on tour show up and breeze through as if they were playing any other show on their current tour. As I watched Grizzly Bear Friday night at the Uptown, that's basically what it felt like. Location wise, the Uptown had little connection to the fest and besides two puny banners hanging from either of the sides of the box seats there was no indication that this was anything but another concert by another touring band.

But don't forget the twelve dollar beers. After paying a mostly reasonable 45 dollars for a three night pass, music fans were expected to pony up twelve dollars for a beer at the Uptown. You might've thought you were at Arrowhead Stadium at this point. (Sadly, not even the Chiefs charge this much for a beer.)

At this point, you might be wondering how exactly the fest is highlighting a broad swath of local talent when a lot of the bands basically play every year. I've wondered the same thing myself, and I've concluded that either: a) the local scene is a lot weaker and more limited than we realize, or b) the organizers simply aren't trying very hard or just don't have the pull yet. Let's not forget, this isn't SXSW. Bands probably aren't dying to play the Middle of the Map Fest in Kansas...City. (I'm sure more than a few visitors echoed that same confusion so many of us on the eastern side of state line have gotten used to hearing.)

I'm bringing some of these issues to light because I love local music, and I love Kansas City but this festival could be a lot better. Why not try and get someone like the Get-Up Kids to play? The recently reformed band is arguably the biggest thing to come out of the area in decades, but they have a national appeal as well. Perhaps the promoters have tried and the scheduling or money simply didn't work out.

What about having another high profile reunion rather than seeing the Casket Lottery play again every year? It was great to be there when they got back together for MOTM in 2011, but am I supposed to feel nostalgic for that each year when I see them open up with "Code Red"? Maybe just maybe if the circumstances were right and the offer was there, we could see Kill Creek or the Anniversary come together for an evening. Is our scene really so limited that we have to trot out the same tired act every year? Are we that challenged in our booking capabilities that our options remain either aging local bands, not ready for prime time players, a few random national acts or bands that are easily booked because the "curators" happen to be releasing their new album?

In this, it's third year, we might begin to expect more from Middle of the Map. But it ends up being a  mediocre representation of local talent that's even starting to wear on an ardent fan like myself.

Kansas City, we're better than that aren't we? Or is an unfocused, largely unoriginal and somewhat disappointing indie rock festival all that we have to offer?

Sermon on the Fount 1.0

Apotheosis in a late stage capitalist society is dependent upon passage beyond our chains of self into material goods. Deification occurs when we transcend our own mortal existence to gain what we’ve always longed for and become a product. Only then do we live forever and manage to defeat the time trial that is our lifetime. 

Our fear of death and the unknown has been heightened in the absence of true religion. Advertisers use our own mortality as a way to pierce our thoughts and sell us products that promise more than anything can truly offer. No, religion and the afterlife is now for zealots and the weak minded. Those of us raised on Coca-Cola, Saturday morning cartoons and Bisquik know that there is nothing after our own death. No heaven. No hell. No purgatorio as in Dante. Materialism and consumer culture is our new religion, and we worship at the altar of the flat screen. Culture and the media is our pantheon and it tells us to buy more, own more. And work more to do it. The things you own surely can’t own you? Inanimate objects are harmless of course, as harmless as the NRA would tell you that guns are. People are the real enemy. 

And so fear of one another is bred as well. It’s only the material product itself that offers us any respite from the unnerving paranoia and distrust created by advertisers to sell us more…stuff. And it’s all vague, worthless crap anyway. Shoes, phones, little dolls with little doll eyes, DVDs. Products need no longer have a purpose, only a hook or an angle. A flashy advertisement that promises something we long for. It fulfills a need we didn’t even know we had. 

Objects use to be created to fulfill needs, to accomplish goals. Man needed the wheel to move faster and cart grain around. Form follows function after all. 

But now products are created simultaneously with the function built in. The necessity created afterwards in a conference room or a marketing office. When I was younger I didn’t know I needed a cell phone; now I can’t live without one. Products no longer fulfill needs, they create needs.   

Those of us that produce culture and goods, our musicians, our artists, our leaders, our corporations are the high priests of our religion. We long to know everything about them. Others are paid to follow them around and capture every meaningless detail of their lives in a fish eye lens. And then they report back to us the glory and sanctity of their blessed day to days. Where they eat. Where they shop. And of course, what they buy. Celebrity is bestowed and created by the media. 

When those celebrities pass on, as we all will, we immortalize them by turning them into products. Michael Jackson figurines. Kurt Cobain video games. Paul Newman salad dressing. And this is what we all long for. To become something other than flesh and blood. To become something that is useless, but is not subject to our own mortality and fickle desires. Something that can live on when we are gone. A piece of us that is not in all actuality a piece of us. Ashes to fashion, dust to rust.  

River City, Tonight

I dove in full tilt, head first, not realizing what I was in for. The guys behind me started laughing when I came up for air covered in filth. A large branch hung at my side and floated by while I pulled a tattered and stained piece of cloth from off my head.

“Told you! You stupid fuck. It’s too dirty to swim in. There’s no point even getting in,” one of the guys in back bellowed after me. I swam back to the edge until my feet hit some slimy rocks at the bottom. I heaved myself out of the water and sat on the bank, dripping fowl water. “I wish we would’ve had our iPhones out for that. Priceless,” he continued.

His name was Baron or something like that. They usually called him B. I didn’t know him that well; he was friends with Tanner and Jeff. We’d been biking together most of the summer and going on little exploratory adventures throughout the city. It was like being 12 again, except that the trips we took always involved alcohol and at least a couple of us doing something unwarranted and regrettable. This was my turn I guess.

On this night there were six of us: me, Bob, Baron, Jeff, Tanner and Goldie. Goldie was Bob’s roommate. This was the first time he’d gone biking with us. Normally he was busy selling weed out of the east-side house they stayed in. It was an older house from probably the 40s that had once been a mansion but was now overrun by four college students. They were all younger than me, but nobody seemed to care.      

I went around the corner behind a bush and took off my jean shorts to wring them out. When I came back, the guys were all up on the hill above the river headed for the bridge.

For whatever reason, I was always lagging behind. Maybe because I was older and more reticent or maybe just because I moved at a slower pace. I usually took up the back end of our biking formation and watched for traffic coming up behind us. The other guys would fly through the streets as we all guzzled oversized cans of Milwaukee’s Best, Jeremiah Weed Road Tea or whatever swill was cheapest at the rundown gas stations that we stopped at along the way. Typically we were the only white guys in the area. The locals would get a kick out of our little bike gang and ask us what we were doing in that part of town, before finally wishing us luck as they headed back to their own cans of swill and broken down Buick Le Sabres on the corners of neglected neighborhoods.

The abandoned rail road bridge was one of our destinations almost every week. It was in an area of the city called the Bottoms that had once been a bustling stockyard and shipping area. Now it was mostly abandoned except for some warehouses and the occasional bum. We would chain our bikes to a pole in the gravel lot and climb up the side of a concrete wall. Then you could walk straight across the old tracks to the other side of the river. In between we would stop and get high while hanging our legs off the edge. Tanner would always climb up the metal girding that formed the outside and upper most portion of the bridge. Sometimes others would do the same, but I never had the balls to take part. 

Across the street was the old arena built in the 70s where bands like Van Halen, Aerosmith and the like had played in their heyday. When I was kid I used to go there almost every weekend during hockey season to see our local minor league team. The year we won the cup I clipped every newspaper article about the team and saved it in a tan spiral-ring notebook with pockets.

After tiptoeing my way carefully across the rotted and missing rail road ties, I finally caught up with them in the middle.

“Here he is. Finally,” Bob said. He looked up at me and gestured with the dugout pipe in his right hand. “Hit it.”

I took the pipe from him with both hands and set my backpack down on the tracks. Carefully, I scooted myself on to the edge and let my feet dangle over. Below was a small tributary portion of the river that connected the Kaw and Missouri Rivers.

“You gonna jump off this week, B?”

Baron was the daredevil type and had jumped off the bridge a couple times before. The handful of times he’d ridden with us he always did something that seemed stupid and outrageous. Jumping off a 50 foot-high bridge into a fast moving tributary was surprisingly one of his lesser feats.

I ripped the bowl a few times and covered the opening with my lighter to shield from the wind. Then I spaced out for a few minutes and passed the bowl to my left. In my eyes were the blinking and stationary lights reflected by the rippled river water. If you looked down into the water, you got the best view of the Bottoms possible. None of the blight or old buildings shone back fully, just the lights from the trains down the way and the lighted corners of structures still in use. The refracted picture of forgotten and decrepit buildings danced off the water.

From down the way, I heard something heavy hit the water and start to float away. I wondered if it was a body at first. Later they told me Goldie had found an old table on the other side and thrown it in the water. In the distance I could hear the rest of them chastising him for throwing more shit in the river. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Bob gesturing at me from the end of the bridge.

“You coming?” he yelled and broke my reverie. Without a word, I lifted myself up and headed for the other side.       

Liquid Plumr: Anti-Feminist Rhetoric, or Double Penetration to Clear Poop From Pipes

Is there anyway this isn't totally offensive?


I almost wish I was a woman so I could take personal offense with this. Pornography is now officially  mainstream (damn you internetz). Don't get me wrong, I watch porn but I don't want it in my plumbing commercials. With no subtlety, this advertisement has effectively described women as: a) helpless when it comes to household issues like clogged toilets, one plumber is not enough she's so helpless she needs two; and more importantly, b) extreme whores who like to engage in "Double Impact." Why waste our time with this? Just show us an image of a woman being doubly penetrated and holding a bottle of Liquid Plumr. Now that's something I could get behind.  

Pizza Driver

There’s something about it that I miss. Flying through the empty suburban streets all night, alone and stoned. Listening to so much music. It was special, solitary and workman-like in a way that I haven’t felt since...

Wet streets under light rain beneath flickering and fading street lamps. Each corner, each stop light, each road sign was another chance to reflect on the lonely emptiness of suburbia. 

Delivering pizzas is the true way…or the truer way. It’s a zen koan. Doing meaningless work brings meaning. Figure it out for yourself.

Teaching doesn’t make me feel that way. It makes me feel sort of old and pitiful. I’m not old but it feels that way sometimes. How could I be an authority figure? My own life is a mess of indecision and well intentioned, but ultimately poor judgment.

On Saturdays I would work until 1 or 2 in the morning. Some nights I’d have to clean marinara sauce off the seats of my car. Other nights it was buffalo sauce. Then I’d go home late, smoke and watch Nature on PBS. At those times, I was alone, completely alone, but I felt closer to the world.

When I come home from work now I just do more work. Work that seems to go nowhere and has no effect. I start and end a semester by correcting the same mistakes and offering the same unheeded advice.

I have no friends at work now. There are just students. When they laugh at my jokes I wonder if they actually think I’m funny or if they’re just trying to get ahead. If I like them at all I go easier on them.

In my pizza/salad days, there was always someone to dick around with. A cook missing some teeth, a grizzled veteran driver that had been working for the same store for 15 or 20 years, a lesbian with a pock marked face (80% of the women in the pizza industry are lesbians), a poor busboy from St. Louis who rapped poorly, a manager who worked 60 hours a week and hated his life…

I miss the tips too, the random ones. Not the money but everything else people would scrounge up. One time I got a mango which I promptly ate in the car. Another time a can of Tecate which I chugged mostly in their front yard but finished in the car (later I returned to the same place and was disappointed they didn’t offer me a second)…cigarettes, bowl rips, one time I smoked weed with a crack head couple in a dirt bag motel off the highway (the foil pipe was as shitty as it got), one time some lady gave me a DVD porn and said she worked at a sex shop. When I brought it back to work, my manager and I watched it in the back room but the cook working with us ran away and hid. 

People would pay me to give them rides. Teenagers, drunk people. Sometimes I would deliver booze or smokes for old men. They always tipped well.  

People now think it’s really prestigious that I’m a college adjunct. Most of them don’t know what the word adjunct means, but they know I teach college part time. My friends tell their acquaintances and actually ask me to tell others sometimes when we’re out.

“Tell them what you do,” Jerry says to me with a big Gomer Pyle grin on his face. He stares at me, perched on the end of a bar stool. He never went to college and he’s an alcoholic. To him I might as well be an astronaut, it’s that exotic.

I brush off his suggestion and try to avoid telling anyone anything about myself. It’s better that way. “He’s a professor!”

Fuck, then I is (spell check told me to put that instead of “I am”) in for some questions and some real shitty conversation.

“So you teach like, writing then? I really admire you.” Thanks. No matter who they are or what they do I inevitably tell them they make more money than I do. Not that it matters, but I could be delivering pizzas again and make just as much.

It’s then I become the sounding board for everybody’s English experience. What books they loved, hated, they all come up. It’s hard to avoid I guess. We could talk about punctuation or grammar, and that does come up, but that is so much more tedious and pointless. Somehow I become the punching bag for every issue they ever had with teachers in high school or community college English. And people have a lot of issues.  

One time my friend’s sister asked me when you were supposed to use “whom.” I can’t remember if I knew or not, but I just told her I wasn’t sure. She shrugged her shoulders and said, “the English teacher doesn’t even know, see!” It seemed like an awkward topic to discuss when we were in a hospital room with her brother/my best friend terminally ill from leukemia in the bed next to us. Some of her immediate family was sitting around the bed as well. 

I never had the heart to tell her about using whom with prepositions when I saw her again at her brother’s funeral a couple months later. Their younger brother came up to me when I walked in the church and asked me to read a Bible verse about fathers and sons. Nobody else would do it because they were too upset. I looked over at their cousin sulking and agreed to do it.

I can’t really remember what it said but everyone thought I did a real fine job up at the pulpit. They said it was because I was a professor and I knew how to speak in front of people.

When we were crowded around eating at their house after the funeral, their dad started yelling something confusing and incoherent at me. He was a big Italian man who’d come over on a boat as a kid. Sometimes he suffered from emotional outbursts. Right in front of everybody, he said he wanted me to start a charity in his son’s name and use all the money that had been given to the family. He said I was the smart one and I needed to study up on it.

I never did though. I think somebody else might’ve. I guess it doesn’t require the kind of smarts I have.