I know book banners and I know what they look like and sound like. I grew up in a small town on the steaming pine flats of north Florida. This particular town was famous for two things. One, Ted Bundy killed his last victim there. Two, they banned Chaucer from the schools. When I was a Freshman in High School, my county school board banned a humanities text book that contained excerpts from Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata” and Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”. That’s right, 5^th century B.C. Greek drama and 13^th century English frame tales were too dirty for our developing minds. A local preacher’s wife was helping her daughter with her homework one day and came across the mere mention of the existence of sex in Lysistrata and the “The Miller’s Tale” – a farcical story in verse that includes medieval fart jokes – and went all histrionic. She got her husband on to the case, who used his own little bully pulpit to get a rise out of his Southern Baptist congregation. As these things do in small towns, in a matter of weeks there was fury from the community about their precious innocents being forced to read such smut. Smut that 99% of them hadn’t bothered to read. Smut that the vast majority of them couldn’t pronounce, never mind spell.

The irony, of course, is that in the late 80’s most of these delicate flowers were having more sex than Aristophanes could ever conceive of and the jokes I heard in the halls of my school would have caused Chaucer to blush. But logic and reality tend to be irrelevant when a community is stricken with a righteous fury and the school board, with a cowardly unanimous vote, caved under the pressure and banned both the humanities book and the original text.

At the time, I didn’t know Greek comedy from situation comedy and  I didn’t know that Chaucer was the father of English literature and laid the path for seven centuries of words to come. I was 15 and had bigger issues to deal with and I just didn’t really care about the ban.  I was young and still labored under the illusion that elected officials knew best and had my interests at heart. I’ve always been a little bit ashamed that I wasn’t angry at the time, that I didn’t get angry until I went away to college and read “Lysistrata” and “The Canterbury Tales”. It was at that point that I realized what had been done to me by the preachers and the school board.

I have no problem with anyone’s religious beliefs, none whatsoever. Largely because what anyone else believes is absolutely none of my business. If you don’t want to watch a movie or read a book or listen to a song because it flies in the face of your religious beliefs, that’s fine. If you don’t want your child to read a book or listen to a song because it flies in the face of your religious beliefs, that’s fine, though you probably ultimately do your child a disservice. Nonetheless, none of my business. But the Christianists that banned Chaucer and Aristophanes went a step too far, they didn’t want anyone to read, watch or listen to something that offended their faith. This is where I have a problem. This is where your religion offends me. This is where your beliefs tread on not only my beliefs, but my freedom to practice them. This is where it becomes my business.

I learned that in my first year of a private Christian college in South Carolina. I learned that I should be angry about what had been done in my hometown. I learned about book banning. It didn’t just happen in that small town in north Florida. It had happened throughout history when zealots with a modicum of power and more than their fair share of influence convinced an ill informed population that a book threatened their morality. And I got angry. And I wrote an essay for a literature class about book banning and book banners. My professor encouraged me to send that essay to my local newspaper and they published it as a guest editorial.

My small salvo in the war against book banning got me my first job as a writer. The surprisingly progressive publisher of our local paper gave me a summer job as an intern reporter. I spent two summers reporting on the local politicians. It was during those two summers that I became a liberal, that I began to question authority, that I learned the dirty truth about small town politics. During those two summers I got to know small town, small minded politicians who are so convinced that their personal morality is right that they are willing to force it on everyone else by any means necessary. I learned that if people wouldn’t listen and change, these people of will litigate their world view. There are lots of book banners on school boards and county commissions in small towns around the country, particularly in the South. I know them, I’ve worked for them and I’ve worked against them and I have had enough of them.

Now most of the time, these people don’t get far in politics. But every now and again one of them is clever enough, glib enough or charismatic enough to climb the political ladder. Sometimes they get elected to the State legislature, sometimes they might be elected to the House of Representatives. Occasionally one of them becomes governor or even a Senator. Increasingly, these small-minded proto fascists are making a dent on the national stage. Recently they’ve made their way on to the U.S. Supreme Court and into the White House itself. Things look a bit better after the latest American elections, but these folks are like bad pennies.

And I’ve learned that it isn’t just an American problem. Australia has a dubious history of censorship as well. As author Frank Moorhouse put it in an ABC Radio National program from 2006:

But the truthful joke about that period, and I’m talking up until the early 70s, was that if the Martians had landed in Australia and read our literature they would not have a clue how the species reproduced. There was not a clue in any Australian writing about how reproduction occurred. And of course as young people we were bereft of information about how to reproduce or how…most of us were trying not to reproduce.

But book banning is still alive and well in Australia today. In 2006, the Australian government refused classification to two books, “Defence of the Muslim Lands” and “Join the Caravan” by Abdullah Azzam. The Australian government is concerned that these two books may incite people to acts of terrorism. I guess my small town school board in the 80’s was worried about us thinking about sex and flatulence. Presumably advocates of banning the Harry Potter books were concerned about their children becoming witches and wizards. Today it is terrorism, the pornography of the 21st century. It is always something, but there is never a justification for censorship.

The American Library Association has a list of suggestions of what you can do to fight censorship, keep books available in your libraries, and promote the freedom to read as well as a disturbing map of book bannings and challenges in the last couple of years in the U.S. Whether you’re aware of it or not, censorship is alive and well in the United States and around the world. Anyone who loves the written word has an obligation to do something about it.

Personally, I’m going to hit the grass roots. I’m going to try to instill a love for the written words in my son the same way that my parents instilled it in me. By reading to them every day*.

—————————-

Talking Heads’ “77″ is available from .

—————————-

*Yes, I know that’s Dr. O’C and not me reading. But I do lots of reading too. I also do most of the picture taking. And the cooking. And the bulk of the work around the house…

What is fixing to get banned, however, is that dummy (pacifier) stuck in Boy Z’s mouth.

But I was back at work for half a day today, which allowed me to clear the cobwebs from my head. With that clarity, I’ve decided that rather than posting cute photos of my sons or moaning about the hardships of life as a father of two, today I want to talk about race.

Yes, I know that after that prelude, I’ve gone and posted a picture of my kids. I was trying to get a good picture of my study, where I do a fair bit of my writing, for a different post – one that I’m no longer interested in writing. I decided to take this shot, however, as an illustration of why it is essentially impossible for me to work from home right now. Creaking bed springs and gurgling baby are not sounds conducive to writing a lecture on human evolution or a report on a new cancer drug.

Your eye was probably immediately drawn to the two flags on the wall and they are what I want to talk about.

My friend Jamie and I liberated the flag on the right, the banner of the State of Florida, from St. George Island State Park during a drug fueled midnight run to New Orleans. I’m pretty sure that we broke both state and federal laws that night and that’s one of the reasons I’m happy to be living outside the reach of the Florida and U.S. criminal justice systems. However, I’d be happy to assist authorities in the apprehension of my accomplice, who was in fact the criminal mastermind. And a Florida Gator fan, which ought to be a crime.

But let’s be honest, if you’re American your eye was drawn to the flag on the left. The old Georgia flag featuring the Confederate battle flag – one of the most potent and divisive symbols that we’ve got in the States. You were probably thinking to yourself,  “Well, I’ll be damned. I know A Free Man has a penchant for college football, but I didn’t realize he was a redneck. A racist. A (shudder) Republican.”

One of the things I don’t miss about the USA is societally mandated political correctness. American society has become so precious about race, gender, disabilities, religion, etc. that it was like a breath of fresh air when I landed in the slightly less PC United Kingdom and dramatically less PC Australia. It’s not that I want to walk the streets spouting racist or sexist diatribes. It has just gone too far in the United States. Gone so far, that a bad joke can get someone fired and exiled from polite society. Gone so far, that we’ve become humourless as a culture.

Gone so far, that legitimate political opposition to a black president is presumed to rooted in racism.

I don’t like the Far Right. I disagree with almost everything that they believe in. But they absolutely have the right to criticize the President. The same way that I, as a radical leftist, had the right to criticize President Bush. I’m sure there are some pissed off white supremacists out there who hate the president because he’s black. But most of the detractors on the right have, in their mind, legitimate political disagreements with Obama. Yes, some of them are being nasty and some are being dishonest. But I think back to 2002-3 when I began to realize that Bush was an incompetent at best or a liar at worse. I wasn’t very nice about him. Nor were a lot of the bomb throwers on the Left. But that had nothing to do with the fact that Bush was a white, Protestant from Texas. Just like the vast majority of the teabaggers’ problems don’t stem from President Obama’s skin color. Let’s get real.

But we need to talk about that Georgia flag. I bought it in 2001 after the state, under heavy political pressure, replaced it with a tepid politically neutral compromise. I picked it up, because at the time I thought Georgia was being cowardly by surrendering to the moral majority of the left – the forces of political correctness. And it was an incredibly unpopular decision in the state, leading to the election of the current governor – Sonny “Praying for Rain” Perdue. (Probably time to get off your knees, governor.) Perdue held a referendum which resulted in the replacement of one Confederate symbol with another one.

I never really ‘flew’ the flag when I was still living in the States. I’m sensitive to the divisiveness of the battle flag and the statement that it makes about an individual who displays it. But that has always annoyed me. Why does it mean I’m a racist if I choose to hang that flag on my wall? I’m kind of an amateur U.S. Civil War history buff and I’ve always had more sympathy for the Confederacy than the Union. I admired the spirit of the rebellious South, their gallant military leaders, their unwillingness to accept the reality that their lifestyle was untenable and their revolution was doomed.

But that doesn’t mean that I’m an advocate of slavery or even racial segregation. And, when it came down to brass tacks, that is what the Confederacy was about – the continuation of slavery. Unfortunately, the symbols of the Confederacy are inextricably tied up with racism.

Ignoring that part of Georgia’s past is nothing more than historical denial. The legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and the battles over segregation are part of what Georgia and the rest of the South are today. I don’t know if you need to fly the Confederate battle flag in front of the state house, but banishing it from the public eye doesn’t do any good either. One could argue that Georgia and the other ten states of the old Confederacy should be required to fly the battle flag lest they forget. It is so oft cited that is almost cliche, but George Santayana’s most famous quote rings true again – “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Today, I don’t know what that flag means to me. I don’t know why, when I pulled it out of a box of stuff we had shipped from the U.S. to the U.K. to Australia, I decided to hang it on the wall of my study. I like it. It doesn’t bear the heavy burdens here in Australia that it does in the U.S.  It reminds me of the five years I spent in Athens in the late 90’s. It reminds me that political correctness is a blunt, ineffective instrument for changing public opinion. But it also serves to remind me of the shameful legacy of race relations in a part of the United States that I love, both despite and because of its history.

It does not, however, mean that I’m a racist. Or a redneck. Or a Republican.

——————————–

The coolest man in Country, Dwight Yoakam’s classic 1988 LP “Buenas Noches from a Lonely Room” is available from .

Flag images from Wikipedia.

This post is Part 2 of a story I started yesterday. I can’t tell you what to do, but you’d be advised to read the first part first.

I’ve been going over the end of this story in my mind since last night and I realized that I stepped into a trap of my own design. I’m setting up Zelda as a femme fatale, which she absolutely was, but I’m not going to come off  well myself without some major historical revision. I like to keep these things as close to reality as my memory allows, which probably isn’t that close.

Before carrying on, there are some details to address. During the months of Zelda’s absence I had moved out of the four square into the gun cottage – I don’t know how she found out where I was living. At the haranguing of my friends, I had begun to ‘get over it’. I started dating again, using my coffee shop job as a personal dating agency. At the time of her unannounced return, in fact, I was dating a 19 year old sorority girl from South Carolina who looked and sounded a lot like Zelda without all the mystery, misery and annoying tendency to vanish.

I was bored.

But when Zelda turned up that night on my porch, I was a wiser man. I wasn’t going to be sucked back into a disastrous relationship. I would have that proffered drink (who was I to say no to a drink?) but that was it.

Let me quote from my diary at the time…

Back in my life, my bed, my heart is [Zelda]. Tall and beautiful and cold, she’s found a way to open my heart again. On a balmy winter night my bourbon soaked mind broke apart and gushed into her listening ears. So far, she’s been sweet. Her cold steel eyes are soft and inviting. She’s sane and easy.

I made her breakfast in bed the next morning. But still, I didn’t want to give up a healthy, albeit dull, relationship with a robust young South Carolinian for what I knew (somewhere in my reptile brain) was going to be pain and melodrama. Instead, I decided not to tell them about each other.

This was a manageable arrangement for a while. With Zelda, I went to gay bars and smoky basement clubs. With the sorority girl I went to formals and tailgates. There was never any reason for paths to cross. It went this way all through the winter and early spring – dating two girls, having my cake and eating it too.

There were moments – when my razor-sharp brain forgot which night I was meant to be with which girl. There was a Saturday lunch with Zelda, some friends and vodka martinis that got way out of hand.  We stumbled back to my place at about in the afternoon and collapsed into bed. There was a niggling memory in the back of my brain that the sorority girl was coming over for dinner and I couldn’t quite remember whether or not I had run interference of some sort. Zelda was out cold and I was…

I came to early Sunday morning with the crucifying headache that can only be caused by six or more martinis and a sense of something ominous in the room. I looked over and saw a tangled mess of curly mahogany hair, which could mean one of two women. A gently shove, a soft moan and I saw the softer features of the sorority girl. To this day, I don’t know where Zelda went or when. I guess that habit of vanishing wasn’t all bad after all.

All through these months, my friends were spending equal amounts of time laughing at my stories and warning me that it was an unsustainable situation. They all said the same thing – get rid of Zelda.

‘Are you still dating that crazy bitch from south Georgia?’

‘She’s just using you for a good time for a while, she’ll be gone again in a few months.’

‘What does she do, Chris? She doesn’t have a job. She doesn’t go to school. She just spends your money.’

As the spring got older, I was getting tired. I was at UGa full time, working full time and holding down two relationships. So, I finally made a decision.

I broke up with the sorority girl and invited Zelda to Florida for Spring Break. She was thrilled – a real vacation and for a while things were good. We started intermittently co-habitating – she moved clothes and makeup and that White Diamonds into my cottage.

After this decision, I was talking to a friend – a sweet little punk pixie from Savannah – who rang me up asking if I wanted to go out in Atlanta that night.I said no, that “I need to save momey for Florida. I need more than usual, because of Zelda and all.”

“No wonder she likes hanging out with you, Chris”, she spat back at me and rung off.

A week before the trip, on a Friday night, she wanted to go dance at the gay bar. I didn’t. The gay bar wasn’t that interesting to me. But I indulged the request and we were away. I sat at the bar drinking poofy drinks and watched Zelda dance with the queens. About 2, I was ready to go home. But Zelda wanted to go to an after party.

‘Just for a bit’, she soothed.

It had been a hellish week – exams, overtime at work and I demurred. “But, you’ll come back to my place after. Right.”

She kissed me deeply, gave me the full brunt of her cold grey eyes and said, “Just give me an hour and I’m all yours.”

I sat up drinking expectantly for an hour. Then drinking worriedly for another hour. Finally, I drank angrily until the sun came up. I threw all of her clothes and makeup into a garbage bag and put it at the end of my drive.

I was awoken at noon by the sound of broken glass and screaming. Zelda was systematically smashing my windows with a tire iron and screaming obscenities. I suggested that she fuck off and not come back. She expressed that she was perfectly fine with that and – breaking one last window on the way – fucked off.

By nightfall, she was back – composed and bearing a full bottle of Maker’s Mark, some clear plastic sheeting, a roll of duct tape and a bucketful of abashed contrition.

We went to Florida anyway. Me seething resentment through endless miles of south Georgia. Her sleeping. We took the long way down, stopping in Albany for a night to pick up camping gear from her mother’s house. I had visions, largely painted by Zelda, of a southern manor – all stately oaks and Greek columns. Her Mom lived in a double-wide on a half acre pine thicket outside of Albany. She chain smoked Virginia Slims, washed down Valium with Old Crow and spoke of lost beaus and phantom illnesses. Looking at her, I saw Zelda in a couple of decades and the artifice of the relationship that I had created.

We camped on St. George Island for a couple of days and then skirted the swampy armpit of Florida on the way down to Ybor City. By the time we arrived, I was done with the trip. I’d been driving for three days without any help from my passenger. She spent most of her time sleeping or bitching and I spent most of my time drinking and driving. Somewhere along that drive I had an epiphany. Again, from my diary at the time…

After meeting her Mom, I can’t fathom a long term relationship with [Zelda]. After this trip, I can’t imagine much of a short term.

I’ve never been very good at breaking up with people. That night in Ybor City we scored some coke, which she didn’t want to do, and hit the bars. Out of my mind on cocaine and rum punch, I decided that what was good for the goose was good for the gander. That night, I treated her the way that I perceived she had treated me throughout our intermittent relationship. I was cold. I flirted with other women. I danced half the night with a Cuban woman that couldn’t speak any English. When Zelda was ready to go, I tossed her a rolled twenty and told her to take a cab.

The trip back was even longer and dead silent. I pulled an all day drive and got us back to Athens just before midnight. She fell asleep on my couch as soon as we walked in the door and I left her there and went to bed.

The next morning, she and all her meager belongings were gone. Except for a note, scrawled in her manic, looping script.

“I know you don’t believe it, but I loved you. As much as I could.”

I crumpled up the paper and threw it in the trash.

That wasn’t enough then and it’s never been enough since.

————————–

Image credits:

Femme Fatale I, II and III are by Karen Dupré. Images from art.com.

R.E.M.’s “Chronic Town/Dead Letter Office” is available from Amazon.

Check back in with me tomorrow, gentle readers.

————————-

Bon Iver’s new EP “Blood Bank” is absolutely beautiful and a steal at $4 from .

Our receptionist at work turned me on to my latest TV obsession – “Friday Night Lights“. I didn’t expect much – a teen melodrama a la “90210″ at best – but this is inspired television. It’s a well-written, gritty drama, with some stunning performances. For a football fan like your underwhelming correspondent, the realistic game scenes are a regrettably too rare bonus. Above all, it’s a realistic portrait of a football obsessed Southern town. Dillon, Texas could be one of a thousand towns between North Carolina and Texas. Small towns with little to draw them together but for the success or failure of their children on the gridiron.

Last week, when I started writing this post, I had intended to use a different tone, a different punchline. I had planned to talk about how I grew up in a real-life Dillon – a dead-end town in the far north of the state of Florida. I had planned to flay Lake City, a town of about 10,000 to which my family moved in 1980, my father following the tail-end of north Florida’s phosphate boom. From the way this post is flowing, it looks like I’m still going to tell you that Lake City was famous for pretty much nothing, that was a squalid rest-stop on the way to better places. Lake City was a sleepy Southern town that would have been more at home in Georgia and Alabama than the Sunshine State and like most Southern towns, football was king. Lake City was pretty far removed – geographically and culturally – from the nearest pro clubs in Tampa Bay or Atlanta. Neither were there any major colleges or universities in town. But there was a high school and much like Dillon and their Panthers, the town of Lake City lived and died with their Tigers.

Every autumn, Friday nights were reserved for football. It wasn’t just high-school students that headed downtown for the games, anyone who was anyone hit the stands of Memorial Stadium. Grown men reliving their lost youth living vicariously through seventeen and eighteen year old boys. Alums who had reached their prime at about 18 and now tried to reclaim some of that vigor by hollering out from the steel bleachers at boys in purple and gold on the cropped grass below. The mood of the town for the following week was dictated by the number on the scoreboard at the end of four quarters.

At some point in my teens I realized that Lake City had nothing to offer me. I got the hell out of Lake City as soon as I could. At seventeen I graduated and after one more summer in a devil town, hit the road for college. A couple more summers at home and I never looked back. I came back for visits. My parents remained there until about five years ago when they headed for greener pastures themselves. With their departure I knew I’d never be back to what I have to consider my ‘hometown’.

I’ve written about Lake City before. I’ve written with scorn about the people and the complete lack of culture and opportunities. I’ve written about the poor public education system I’ve written about my gratitude that I never have to go back, that I no longer have a single tie to the place. But I don’t want this to be another post about how much the place I grew up sucked. It did suck.  Yes, I took what I consider to be more than my fair share of shit in high school, much of it from guys who were a lot like the gridiron starts of “Friday Night Lights”.  But that taught me to be quick witted, allowed me the charisma I still use to get out of tough spots today. Yes, the public schools of Columbia County were absolutely dreadful – some of the worst in a state full of pretty awful public schools. But I had some great individual teachers and I had opportunities to excel beyond the curriculum. I learned how to think on my own and learn outside of the classroom – skills that I still use today.  Lake City offered little in the way of culture (OK, I got to see Johnny Cash in the community college gym once) and no career opportunities outside of the Super Wal-Mart (currently the city’s number one employer). But this taught me to keep my eyes open for opportunity wherever it may raise its head and to find entertainment in the simplest things. Above all, Lake City, in all it’s stifling blandness taught me to see the beauty in other places.

I am where I am because of my personal history – both the people, places and things that were fantastic and the people, places and things that sucked. Lake City sucked. But without those years in a devil town, I may not be where I am today. I’m happy today, and I guess it’s time to recognize that Lake City played a role in getting me here. So, through gritted teeth, I’d like to thank a shitty little dead end town in north Florida for its role in getting me where I am today.

————————

One of my favorite things about “Friday Night Lights” is the soundtrack  – subtle indie and alt-country tracks that accent the show perfectly. One of the songs that I’ve got stuck in my head and that inspired this post is Daniel Johnston’s “Devil Town”. I love this Bright Eyes cover from “Noise Floor”. Neither the original nor the Bright Eyes cover is featured on the soundtrack, but the latter is the best I’ve heard.

Image Credits:

Lake City #1

Mark Richt, you’re our only hope…

—————————-

Jimmy Buffett’s “Floridays” is available from .

Images:

Obnoxious Gators #1

Bushes in Florida

Obnoxious Gators #2

Thanks Ms. Harris

He Who Must Not Be Named

Celebrate!

The Defeat of He Who Must Not Be Named

Links:

More Gator Haters

• I hate the way you cannot count and blame you for the last eight years.
• I hate your endless strip malls. I hate your garish beachfront condos.
• I hate your big flying roaches and all your violent crime.
• I hate you so much it makes me sick — It even makes me rhyme.
• I hate your overpriced theme parks. I hate your tourist traps.
• I hate your phallic capital and its corrupt political denizens.
• I hate your Disney franchise. And the money it will cost me as a Dad.
• But mostly I hate your Florida Gators — Percy, Tebow, Meyer; I hate them most of all.

——————————-

Wilco’s “Being There” is available from .

It’s nothing personal. Hell, I spent most of my childhood in the Sunshine State and I’m not much of a hater, really. But there’s another election to screw up around the corner and – more importantly – The World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party on Saturday. So, this week – with apologies to my fellow Floridians – A Free Man will be dedicated to a hatred of all things Florida*.

————————————–

Buy this and other records from Against Me! from .

—————————————

*I know I shouldn’t hold the whole state responsible, but John McCain told me that associating with Gators is just as bad as being a Gator.

And I forget
Just what it takes
And yet I guess it makes me smile
I found it hard
Its hard to find
Oh well, whatever, nevermind…

In the summer of 1991, I was 19 and living in Tallahassee in a vermin infested house in the shadow of the Florida state capital. I was working at a local chain bookstore, making a half-assed attempt at an English degree from Florida State University and generally wandering aimlessly in a Gen X stupor. I was a man in search of a plan, in search of some sort of guiding force. I used to lurk around used bookstores, snapping up Beat poetry and novels, books on Buddhism, romantic poets, dense arty novels. But none of these seemed to apply to me in 1991, they were the voices of previous generations, answers for ancestors.

Then one night in September I slid a new CD that I had picked up into my stereo. And I heard the opening chords of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and my life changed. Within months, I dropped out of college (for the second time), quit my job, packed up my pick up and headed out across the country for the Pacific Northwest. I know that kind of makes me a cliché today, but it didn’t feel that way at the time. Nor was it as simple as that, but in the music of Nirvana I heard the voice of my generation for the first time.

Even if you have…
Even if you need…
I don’t mean to stare.
We don’t have to breed.
We can plant a house,
Or we can build a tree
I don’t even care.
We could have all three…

I didn’t find what I was looking for in Seattle. I had hoped that I was joining a youth movement, a la Berkeley in the 1960s. But it didn’t turn out that way, there was a musical scene for a few years but beyond that Seattle in the early 90s was nothing like Berkeley in the late 60s. In a lot of ways it was the anti-Berkeley. It was cold and dark. It was exclusionary. Love was expensive and potentially deadly. The drugs were harsh and lethal. There was no political or social movement, in fact that sort of thing was regarded with suspicion. Above all, it was not like a Cameron Crowe film. I stumbled and bumbled around for a few years and ultimately came back South, poorer and emotionally wrung out.

In anecdotes about this time in my life, I’ve always relayed it as wasted time, my fucking around period if you will. But as I listened to “Nevermind” with my son the other day, I realized that this is an oversimplification. Tallahassee and Seattle in the early 1990s were a critical part of getting me to where I am today – Adelaide in 2008. What I was looking for during that time in my life was what I’ve found today. Like a lot of my generation, I knew that I couldn’t live the life of my parents. Their blue sky dream had been turned into a smoggy myth for us. A house in the suburbs and 2.4 kids and a lifetime job with The Company were neither available nor acceptable. I remember hearing of my Dad’s friends, the fathers of the kids I grew up with, being laid off from the company to whom they’d given the best years of their lives and for whom they’d dragged their families around the world. I remember the day that my Dad joined them. He had been a Company man for most of his life, but downsizing and outsourcing and all those words that have made it into the lexicon of our language over the past decade and a half meant that he found himself without a job and in his early fifties. I knew at that point, that even though I was floundering and failing, that my rejection of the path my parents took was a sound decision.

I think that’s one of the things Cobain was trying to get across. In his music, I hear a firm rejection of the Baby Boomers approach to life. But coupled with that is the angst and confusion and utter powerlessness of a man who doesn’t know have an alternate plan. He knows that the status quo is unacceptable, but can’t see the road less travelled. That is ultimately what killed him.

It is now time to make it unclear
To write off lines that don’t make sense
Love myself better then you
I know it’s wrong so what should I do…

Thankfully, I and most of the rest of my generation have found the road that Cobain couldn’t. I’ve accepted a lot of the status quo that I rejected when I lit out from Tallahassee. I live, regrettably and temporarily in the suburbs. I have bred. I have a family of my own and want, above all, the best for them. I don’t spend a lot of time fighting the man.

But, in many other ways I’ve opted out. I’m proudly not a Company Man. I’m working on my terms and when they cease to be my terms, can walk away and be OK. I’ve tailored my career to be what I want it to be and have taken advantage of the educational and career opportunities afforded me. I can work in my window office, I can work at home, I can work on the bus, I could probably work on the beach if I didn’t have a headbanging boy child trying to thrash my computer. I’ve opted out of that American blue sky dream to the tune of about 10,000 miles and a hemisphere.

Come as you are, as you were
As I want you to be
As a friend, as a friend, as an old enemy
Take your time, hurry up
Choice is yours, don’t be late…

A lot of people call Nirvana’s music angry, but Cobain wasn’t angry. He was, like a lot of us were at the time, frustrated, confused and frightened. That’s what you hear in “Nevermind”. Kurt Cobain never had a chance to try the alternate path that so many of us have taken. He opted out in a very final and ultimately cowardly way. In a lot of ways it’s a shame, because it is our time now. One of the reasons that I’m such an advocate of Barack Obama is that with his election, a member of my generation (in a broad sense) is poised to take real power for the first time.

This was supposed to be about Boy Z and Nirvana, but it’s not turned out that way at all. Boy Z liked “Nevermind” in the sense that he liked the time we set aside to bang along with that fantastic Novoselic and Grohl growling bass line. He detected the change in mood in his Papa and played along and drummed and thrashed things with his cricket bat. But Z likely didn’t hear the generational insurrection in “Nevermind”, he’s a bit young yet for that yet. One day, Z is going to see Nirvana as the music of his father’s generation – as dated and hackneyed. One day he’s going to reject my values and my path in life. He’s going to make his own choices based on his own experience. And when that’s the case, I hope I can remember this post and the way I feel right now. Find your way, Boy Z. Find your own way.

What album defined your coming of age, your great trip west?

——————————

Nirvana’s “Nevermind” is available from .

——————————

Image Credits:

Seattle in the fog

Further reading:

This post was partially inspired by this photo on Bluestreak’s excellent page.

The sunshine bores the daylights out of me.
Chasing shadows moonlight mystery.
Headed for the overload,
Splattered on the dirty road,
Kick me like you’ve kicked before,
I can’t even feel the pain no more…

My first memory of The Rolling Stones is one of profound dislike. I’m not saying that I was some sort of music snob child progeny, but the Stones songs that I heard on Top 40 radio and saw on MTV in the early 80’s just flat out sucked. Cap their sub-par 80’s work off with the absurd duet that Jagger did with Bowie in 1985 that MTV played the hell out of and I think my impression of the Stones as overrated and lacking in any real talent was a legitimate, if short-sighted, one. This was a band for graying, beer-bellied bikers with the tongue emblems on the leathers that periodically roared through my dank north Florida town on the way to Daytona, not for the discerning young Culture Club fan. (Yes, really. Regrettably.)

The source for this distaste was that I had very little exposure to the Stones’ earlier work. The only “oldies” that I listened to was the old records and 8 tracks that my Dad had and he preferred McCartney and Lennon to Jagger and Richards. Certainly I would have heard “Satisfaction” and “Gimme Shelter” on the radio, but they never resonated with me growing up – they just didn’t apply to my small town childhood.  And then you see Mick Jagger “dancing” in the streets in a bright mauve silk shirt on MTV and it’s pretty easy to dismiss The Stones as irrelevant.

My opinion about The Stones started to change the first time that I saw Lawrence Kasden’s “The Big Chill”, or more precisely, listened to the soundtrack for that film. “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” is used so effectively in the funeral scene of that film (yes, that’s the kind of teenager I was) that I was inspired to go and check out more of The Stones’ earlier work. I bought the double cassette “Hot Rocks” and never thought of The Rolling Stones in the same way again. I can still remember the feeling that “Satisfaction” inspired the first time I really heard it in my late teens. That raw frustration, rebellion, absolute disdain for “that man”. The Stones were punk before punk was even an idea in Joey Ramone’s teenage mind. That rock and roll swagger of Honky Tonky Women” and “Street Fighting Man” that seemed cliched to me in the early 80s got me through the bulk of my 20s. From that greatest hits collection, I dug into Jagger ad Richards’ back catalog and some of the the obsessive, darker, introspective stuff from those late 60s and early 70s records hit home for me in my early 30’s.

‘Cause all you women is low down gamblers,
Cheatin’ like I don’t know how,
But baby, baby, there’s fever in the funk house now.
This low down bitchin’ got my poor feet a itchin’,
You know you know the duece is still wild.

Now, “Let It Bleed” is my favorite Stones album, but it’s not the one that the iPod chose on my Friday free day with Boy Z. Instead we got what is generally considered to be their best record, “Exile on Main Street”. This behemoth, upon its release in 1972, changed The Stones from just another 60’s rock band to THE rock band of the 1970s.  changed rock and roll on its release in 1972. So much so that whenever a band crosses some sort of critically established threshold, this is the album evoked as a comparison. For example, “‘Being There’ is Wilco’s ‘Exile on Main Street’” or “With ‘Brighter Than Creation’s Dark’, the Drive-by Truckers have recorded their ‘Exile on Main Street’”.

And it is a magnificent album. It’s a rollicking, seemingly endless trip – like a drunken summer afternoon riding around in the back of a pick up truck. It’s hot, it’s dirty, it’s fuddled. The boogie piano and mellow slide show this band at it finest – borrowing elements of country, soul, rhythm and blues, even jazz – to make a new kind of rock and roll.

Listening to “Exile on Main Street” with my son on Friday, listening through his virgin ears, I heard a song like “Hip Shake Boogie” for what it must have been at the time – a redefining of rock and roll. The subject matter of the song…

…I wanna tell you ’bout a dance
that’s goin’ around…

…is bog standard rock, is in fact how rock and roll started out a couple of decades earlier. But the way that The Stones come at it would have been all new at the time, the dirty boogie sound that they were employing and Jagger’s grumbling, lackadaisical vocals.

Z was indifferent to the music, but did like my singing and hip shaking. He’s more of a fan of dance than music right now. I’m a little disappointed that hes’s not up shaking his own hips yet. Particularly since Chris’s daughter, who is younger than Z, is all over the interwebs with her dancing. But hey, it’s not a race, right?

Right?

I do think that The Rolling Stone have held on for far too long. I also think that they’re the McDonalds of rock and roll, a universally recognized franchise with that damn tongue logo ubiquitous. And I think that they haven’t made a really good album since “Goat’s Head Soup” in 1973 (maybe 1980’s “Emotional Rescue”). But all that aside, the Rolling Stones changed rock and roll for the better in the late 60’s and early 70’s and some of those albums -  “Let It Bleed”, “Sticky Fingers”, “Their Satanic Majesties Request” and “Exile on Main Street” – are among the finest ever made.

Z, most likely, is never going to see the depressing spectacle is The Rolling Stones today and I’m a little envious of that. He’ll be able to pick and choose from their back catalog, ignoring “Dancing in the Street” and “One Hit To The Body“. Hell, Z may even think of The Rolling Stones as they would like to people to think of them – as the greatest rock band the world has ever seen.

Let this music relax your mind, let this music relax your mind.
Stand up and be counted, can’t get a witness.
Sometimes you need somebody, if you have somebody to love.
Sometimes you ain’t got nobody and you want somebody to love.

——————-

The Rolling Stones’ “Exile on Main Street” is available from Amazon.