Who would have thought that seeing a 68 year old guy on stage would be one of the best concerts I've ever attended? Just being in the same room with a legend like Bob Dylan made me appreciate the experience all the more; and for someone who was not a die-hard Dylan fan, for me to get into the show like I did shocked me :-)

I guess by not being a Dylan purist, I was not jaded by the loss of voice, or the fact that he didn't play a lot of guitar (content instead to play an old school Korg keyboard that looked as old as him!)... I felt like I was at a really rockin' blues concert. And Charlie Sexton... how did he never live up to the potential of his mid-80s MTV hype? 25 years after Beat's So Lonely and he is looking like a rock god onstage... he and Dylan had a great vibe going all night. And I don't know, I guess people say Dylan doesn't do a lot of movement on stage, but I just thought it was surreal seeing this guy who was the high priest of the folk generation in the 60s, who almost caused a total riot in England with his electric show, who became saved and sang the first Dylan song I really got into (Changing of the Guards)... I mean there is so much history associated with this guy, and for the show not to sell out (only 4000 of 5200 seats were sold) I guess speaks volumes about the economy and about the fact that well, people see Bob Dylan as he was in 1965, and he is not that person anymore... a woman I work with got invited to the show, and she declined, saying "oh, I was never into his music"... but I think Bob Dylan is so much more than his music- and I dunno, I would think that in itself would be able to be appreciated by the masses. But all in all, 4000 people in Canton on a Thursday night is probably not all that bad.

Our set list was pretty good considering that he played Girl From The North Country, which he hasn't really done too much during this tour. And when I listen to my Rolling Thunder Bootleg Series CDs, it just seems like he has become a totally different artist than he was back then... and to me, that's a good thing. I know that Morris Day and the Time were in Akron a few weeks ago, and one one have to consider them a nostalgia act because they are basically still stuck in 1983, and if they have any new material it's really not even acknowledged by the public. Dylan has continued to press on through the years, being his own person, adding to his legacy with each passing year. I didn't feel like I was seeing an old man on stage- I was seeing a legend, a musical genius continuing to add to that legend.

And once again I have to thank atlashrugged for helping me to appreciate Bob Dylan! I would not have walked down the path of Bob without you giving me that initial push :-)

Happy birthday neurasthenia!!

I know you never post anymore, but you still read every now and then...

For all the runners on my LJ, and there appear to be several of you, check out the New York Times impression of the new look of marathons!

Here's an interesting article on the thought that black children do NOT do badly in school because of race... it's because of the lack of a father figure in the home.

Personally, I grew up in a two parent household, far away from the ghetto and such. So I didn't have the factors of "bad parenting" and "bad environment" working against me. But I don't know if you can blame this all on the lack of a father figure, although stats will show that the percentage of black men that are not in the home is decimating communities.

Not having children and speaking as an outsider of sorts, I think the whole mixture... family life, environment AND the teacher has a part to play in why a student does or does not learn. I think that teachers need to step up their game a bit and rethink how the process of educating a student is done. The draconian days of sitting children down and making them memorize stuff is dated and archaic. And in the end, everyone says they are a victim... the teachers are victims because the parents don't raise kids right, the mothers are victims because they have to raise the kid alone, the fathers are victims because society has branded them as public enemy number one...

I am intrigued by the comparison of the United States to other countries in terms of how well we educate children. In countries that have a homogeneous populace, I think the education system tends to work better, and that is tied to race. The United States is a melting pot of many people and many cultures, and to try and give a one size fits all solution to a society that isn't one size fits all creates problems. Capitalism and democracy foster competition, the survival of the fittest in a sense. We are conditioned to be winners, and when you are a loser, either in the classroom or in the workplace, you are branded as a failure by those who "succeed". Perhaps everyone is not meant to "succeed" in a democracy. The reality that every man is created equal is quickly negated by the fact that every man does not grow up equally. TO say that there are not inherent disadvantages to growing up in the inner city as opposed to the suburbs is simply fooling oneself. But I think our country revels in fooling ourselves. From the fact that the American Dream of home ownership, of having a good job and having a wonderful family is a god given right... from thinking that every child will have a quality education (and if not, we will throw enough money at the problem to make it work)... these things are SIMPLY NOT TRUE. It's like Dwight Yoakam's character said in Sling Blade: "You'd better wake up and face something called reality."

I think I had to come to grips with that a long time ago... I know that I cannot be "as good" as my white peers... I have to be better in order to even the playing field. I have to be better educated, I have to be more of an intellectual in order to just come to the same table. And even in this day and age, that is often seen as arrogance or anger by the white power structure. The same way that it sees the lack of education among black people as "a problem those people have because they don't do anything but make babies and smoke crack and get a welfare check."

But hey, we are all equal, right?

1. Last Saturday Tammy and I went to see XianGo!, which is a combination of art/dance/theatre. Tam Tam's Pilates teacher is a member of the dance troupe portion of the production, and she's been asking us to go for awhile now. They have some videos out there showing what goes on at the show, but people were saying, "you have to see it in person to appreciate it." While I normally think that's just a bunch of BS, in this case it was true. I loved the place we saw it in... the Kathleen Howland Theatre is a small space in the lower level of 2nd April Galerie here in Canton... and it was intimate enough so that you got up close and personal with everything that was going on. The dancers were close enough for you to touch them, and the process of creating a painting in less than 20 minutes was interesting. I mean, of course you are not going to create La Vie in 20 minutes, but I don't think it's about the quality of the art... it's about the interactive process of creation in a time frame with a central theme. And while, as Tammy Pilates teacher always says, artsy stuff is not Tammy's cup of tea, I think she enjoyed herself.

2. The transformation of Canton into a center for arts and artists is coming along nicely. I don't think it's something you can push too fast, especially in a place where you only have a finite percentage of people who are willing to pay money for art and to attend artistic functions. Of course, we have the Pro Football Hall of Fame here, and it looks like the powers that be at Arts In Stark are going to try to fuse art with football. I'm a bit leery about this latest "arts explosion", and I don't think I'm the only one who thinks things could get out of hand. I guess I'm about quality, not quantity. I can already see some stuff in our downtown that in my opinion needs to be hauled off to the scrap pile from whence it came... and I suppose that I am a bit disappointed that Arts In Stark and The Canton Museum of Art don't seem to be working in tandem to have a vision of what needs to happen arts-wise in the downtown. If it's just one person pushing the agenda, I don't think that's right. But I'm not going to be a hater and say that Canton doesn't need a thriving arts community- I just think that there has to be some thought put into it from a variety of sources. Instead of having these "pieces of football art" right in the downtown, why not put them into the neighborhoods... so then, much like in any city, people would have to go to different parts of the city to see something. The concentration of the "critters made of scrap iron" in the downtown is a bit played out to me- as spring comes along, you needc something fresh to replace some of that stuff. I don't want Canton to be seen as the home of recycled items as art- I want Canton to be seen as having some quality pieces on public display. We're not going to get anything as elaborate as The Bean in Chicago (although that would look great on that green space downtown), but does all our stuff have to be recycled stuff that in a few years time looks more like "recycled stuff" than true art?

3. Score one for the Canton Civic Center- they have Bob Dylan coming to the venue on November 5th. I can honestly say I was never a big Bob Dylan fan until atlashrugged started talking about how much he had influenced her life. I mean, until the last couple of years, my favorite Bob Dylan song was Changing of the Guards. I've learned to appreciate him as a poet and living legend now... and so if a living legend shows up in Canton, I am going to be there. 3rd row, dead center be there! And of course this all plays into my Edie Sedgwick obsession, since Bob and Edie were an item back in the day. So what goes around comes around I guess. And I'm not jaded by the fact that I'm not seeing 1965-era Dylan.. the way that I was jaded that I was not seeing 80s era Morris Day and the Time last weekend in Akron. I look at Dylan the way I would look at Leonard Cohen... you are in the same room with a genius, and genius never gets rusty. Because rust never sleeps, right Neil?

4. I also have to talk up my favorite local shop, The Blissful. I lovelovelove this store because it has really chic (not trendy) items that have a touch of French flair to them. Of course, my objective one day is to get Tammy to go to Paris... and subject her to the Louvre.. or get her drunk at an outdoor bistro and have her stumbling down the Champs-Elysees. So The Blissful is helping me in my quest... little by little, I'm introducing pieces of French art into our house and hoping it will inspire Tammy. And I swear the owner Abby must have my CD collection at her house... everytime I go in there, I'm hearing Aimee Mann or Portishead or Regina Spektor coming out of the speakers. And I like the fact that it's not a shabby place, where shabby people hang out. She has a business plan and she's going forward with it. We are transforming our house into what we want it to be, and I can get unique bits at pieces from The Blissful to help that process :-)

I like using Twitter for local interaction. Although I do follow a couple of tweeters up in the Boston/Cambridge area, on the whole, I am all about what's going on locally. Two of my favorite Tweetmates are on the local women's Roller Derby squad, the NEO Rock n Roller Girls.

So how did I get into roller derby? When I was a kid, they used to have the old school roller derby on TV every Saturday morning. The 3 staples of my TV watching growing up in the early 70s were Roller Derby, Studio Wrestling (not like this big overblown stuff they have now), and the Ernest Angley Miracle Crusade (I used to go around smacking my sisters on the head and telling them they were being healed.. which was basically all Ernest Angley did- and still does!). Roller Derby was amazing back in the day... men and women flying around a banked track, beating the crap out of each other... having match races to settle arguments... people flying over the railing... and you'd always have a crazy member of the audience who would try and beat up the bad guys/girls when they flew over the rail.

Roller Derby seemed to go dormant for a very long time. I mean, where are you going to find a banked track and people crazy enough to want to skate around it? I guess that the last few years it has made a comeback as "cult entertainment" or simple kitsch.. a combination of women doing things for women and yet another example of neo-feminism. Back when I was doing Free For All, I had interviewed the head of a group called Queen Bee Productions. They were sponsoring a night of the Vagina Monologues, and the group was very pro-empowerment of women. So ever since then, I've been getting their electronic newsletter... and one of the artiles talked about the NEO Rock n Rollers.

So last month I talked Tammy into going. She thought there would maybe be 30 people there since it was "cult entertainment"... we were both shocked that the Summit County Fairgrounds parking lot was packed. We went inside and there this wave of crazy energy going on... a bunch of women in Roller skates and wild outfits going around a flat track. That's the thing that I found most different classic roller derby and this modern stuff... the banked track with the railing gave the action more of a visceral feel, even on TV. But in person, I dunno.. a banked track might not allow the viewer to see the action as well. On the flat track, you can actually sit right on the floor as the girl go around the track, and you take your life into your own hands if someone falls down and lands on you.

I love the marketing that goes on with this modern version of roller derby.. the NEO girls have taken to using classic albums as the theme for their bouts. The one we went to used the INXS record Hits as its theme, and the next bout will use the Pretenders Learning to Crawl as the theme (they call it Learning to Brawl). Using the Pretenders is only right, since Chrissie Hynde is from Akron, and she has her Vegiterranean Restuarant in the area.

I had such a good time at the bout... the people in the audience all seemed to have some connection to one of the skaters, and even though the NEO girls won by 100 points, it was fun to just be a part of the goings on. It is all a form of twisted theatre, but in hearing the girls tweet about their experiences, the bumps and bruises are real. It's more authentic than classic roller derby- there isn't all of the fake fighting and stuff... in fact, I think safety is a major concern for the women. But the competition is still there.

You can check out my photos of my night at the derby here. There's another guy who takes excellent photos of the action as well, and you can see his work here.

I know that one of the women I work with, this little petite thing, was saying she could never do roller derby because the women are big brawlers who would pound her into the floor. Well, they might pound her into the floor, but these women are not a bunch of mannish Amazons who would scare you on a darkened street. Perhaps like beach volleyball, the sport plays up the allure of sexuality and in a sense, that 50s pulp fiction sense of being the bad girls. It's entertainment that is without doubt going to catch on. Right now, the film Whip It is out, and with people like Drew Barrymmore and Ellen Page and classic bad girl Julliette Lewis on board, it could give the sport the bump it needs to get from being cultish to more mainstream entertainment. Of course for the old school roller derby person, you can always check out Raquel Welch in Kansas City Bomber!



I would encourage all of you to check it out if there is a team in your area... and by the looks of things, teams are sprouting up all over the country!

This video has me laughing like crazy and I can't stop playing it...

As I looked at my AOL email this morning, there was an article about that champion of the Christian Right, Kirk Cameron, and his latest caper- he is taking a doctored up version of Darwin's Origin of the Species and passing it out to the top 50 universities in the country. The "doctoring" is a 50 page "introduction" by Ray Comfort that seeks to link Darwin to Hitler, racism, and the demeaning of women. There's actually an atheist on YouTube who makes some strong rebuttals to this action... and it doesn't hurt that she's got a cool accent and she is hothothot...



Since I went to that Darwin exhibition a few weeks ago, I know (at least in the exhibition) it was noted that Darwin was totally against Social Darwinism, which I'm sure the Ray Comfort introduction wants to go after.

And of course I am a sucker for Shakira look-alikes talking about something more than what hair color they use, so I also listened to her rant on "the nature of evil":



Although I am not into all the religion BS, it's niice to see an alternative viewpoint of things...

1. With the death of Michael, maybe the world can rethink what Thriller actually was, what it actually meant. I think so many people just give it a pass as "the biggest selling record of all time", which I suppose it was, depending on whose statistics you cite. Of course to me, and I would think to most people number of sales does not equate to quality of product. Everyone had to have a Pet Rock or a Mood Ring at one time in life... and was that because it was essential? Nope- it was because it was spoon fed to people via an aggressive marketing campaign. And Thriller is the quintessential example of marketing on steroids.

2. Where were you in 1983-1984? ANd as I always have to preface for some of you, yes, I KNOW YOU WERE NOT BORN :-)... I was coming back from Boston University, doing a semester of work at The University of Akron before latching on with my company, where I have been for the last 25 years (my 25th anniversary is actually this December 31st). I had a pretty eclectic group of friends at Akron... a lot of the soccer players were friends of mine, and they came from Serbia and Poland and several other Eastern European nations... and then there were the locals from NE Ohio who also turned out to be really good people. One thing most of us had in common was that we enjoyed music- and during that time, music was really being marketed. I can remember the first week I was on campus, MTV's Martha Quinn came to town... and at that time, Martha Quinn was America's sweetheart. A bunch of us piled into a friend's car and headed to the local Strawberries and saw Miss Quinn in all her glory. She even signed a photo for me, which I still have laying around somewhere and will one day scan in. Perhaps I didn't know it then, but by the end of spring semester 1984, MTV would be on a roll, and you could not have music without MTV telling you what was cool and what was uncool.

3. I can think of 4 records that were the soundtrack of that period of my life... you had MJ's Thriller played EVERYWHERE, closely followed by Duran Duran's Rio... and then on a tier below these were Prince's 1999 and then the people who were into "underground dance revivals" were playing some chick out of NYC named Madonna who was out with her first record. So what separated Thriller and Rio from other records? Well, plain and simple, MTV did. You were being told what was hip, what was not hip by a group of VJs who somehow had their fingers on the pulse of pop culture. While Duran Duran and MJ were the kings, and the other artists were stars in the making, you would have MTV created stars like A Flock of Seagulls or Adam Ant burned into your consciousness as well. It was all about the video... and MTV, like Starbucks a few years later, knew that marketing was the thing. The music didn't matter as long as the video worked. The video crushed the singer songwriter, it crushed the R&B singer who "didn't look right for TV". And of course, if CBS/Sony had not threatened to pull all its videos from MTV, Michael Jackson would have never seen the light of day with Thriller, and we would still be talking about how Off The Wall was (and is) the better Michael Jackson record.

4. Listening to the 25th Anniversary edition of Thriller, one can't help but admit that the whole record doesn't hold up very well WITHOUT THINKING ABOUT THE VIDEOS. Billie Jean- you think of MJ moonwalking on Motown 25, you don't really think about the quality of the music. I don't think anyone is thinking of the lyrical credibility of Thriller... you see the extended video and equate that with great music. Same thing with Beat It. Listening to these songs today without the videos and trying to separate the notion of video from song... the whole record sound dated and hokey. That soaring guitar riff in Beat it sounds kinda silly now, doesn't it? I think that Billie Jean holds up well, as well as anything from Off The Wall, but the embarrassment that is The Girl Is Mine or PYT... it's just not pretty. And the original record only had 9 tracks on it. And as it should be, the 25th Anniversary set is a 2 disc set- the 2nd disc being a DVD of not "videos" but as the packaging says "the short films".

5. I think that Thriller could be likened to Nirvana's Nevermind in that it changed the way people looked at music. There was a cultural shift with Thriller.. one had to have a video to have a song. And with Nirvana, the cultural shift destroyed the over the top hair band/video vixen genre and took music to a sort of anti-video format. And of course, that's about the time that MTV mysteriously started playing fewer videos and went to more of a show-based format.

6. You won't find Thriller on my top 50 records of all time, and it doesn't deserve to be. I guess I look at albums as a sum of the parts, and how well that sum stands up to time. As a record, it's very flawed, and the 25th Anniversary edition did nothing to help. When you have remixes featuring Akon (who even on Wanna Be Startin Somethin manages to get in his trademark Konvict line-even though he never was a convict), will.i.am, Fergie(?), and curent media darling Kanye West, you have to scratch your head.

7. I will give the critics who think Thriller is a better record than Off The Wall the fact that it is a more significant record. But music wise, it's lacking. Again, you cannot separate the video imagery from the songs. And I think the critics have yet to do that with this record.
When I think of significant/great records, I think that Kraftwerk never gets the credit it deserves for spurring the electro funk movement in the mid-80s (the movement that helped bands sample more stuff like James Brown, which led to bands like Public Enemy taking the Funky Drummer track and changing rap forever)... and Talking Heads will never get crerdit for taking African rhythms and mixing them with spaced out P-Funk keyboard work and mixing in David Byrne's art school contemplation and creating Remain In Light in 1981- which time has STILL not caught up with.

8. Quincy Jones' statement about Michael not wanting to be black is perhaps summed up with the production and marketing of Thriller. I don't think I'm stupid, and I don't think MJ did all the stuff he did to his body because he wanted to appeal to an urban landscape. Perhaps he didn't want to be white, but I don't think he was comfortable being black either. His music from Thriller wasn't played in the ghetto the way Off The Wall was... well at least not with the passion Off The Wall was. All in all, Thriller is a white suburban record, rather harmless, a "fun record" with a bunch of dance moves... again, video and music are seen as one, and there's no getting away from that. Critics from Rolling Stone saw it as a quantum leap from Off The Wall, and I would think that's because they had no perception of dance music, they were the ones who embraced the Disco Sucks movement. They called Off The Wall "ultra-slick" for god's sake! Thriller has the guitar riffs that pleased Rolling Stone, it is not "urban dance".. it's more of a "production dance" record.

9. When looking at the overall body of work of Michael Jackson, I think almost everyone would agree that the early Jackson 5 work still holds up as pure pop bliss. Then in the mid-70s he went into some sort of hibernation, the breaking of ties with Motown perhaps exposed a lack of ability to write on his part... but his Philly International-influenced work (Show You The Way To Go/Enjoy Yourself) led to the Jacksons writing more of their own material by the time Destiny came out. For me, he peaked with Off The Wall, lost me with Thriller, and I don't even own Bad because to me the title sums up what it is (although I do like Smooth Criminal-but that's because of the video).

10. All in all, Michael Jackson had a lot of issues. But he managed to get the public to embrace Thriller, and that is why we consider him the King of Pop today. In looking at overall musical talent and genius, Prince is head and shoulder over Michael Jackson. But the marketing of MTV has made Michael bigger than life. His was a deal with the devil in a sense... yes, you will become the biggest pop star on the planet, but you will live the rest of your life as some sort of freak who has children that are not biologically yours, you will be accused of molesting children, your star will fade after the early 90s and you will be relegated to living out your life in your videos from the 80s and people still wanting that Michael since "cute little Michael of the Jackson 5" is long gone. The Jacksons are a classic example of a dysfunctional family that was caught up in issues of race, finances, media hounding... to define Michael Jackson from his videos and Thriller and the wild tabloid stories isn't fair to him. I think his inner issues were much more complex than that, and that is what destroyed him in the end.

Happy birthday daerice... your sweet and creative soul is always an inspiration to me! Enjoy your day my friend!