whats wrong with this picture

tito says that ellsbury's .268 OBP against lefties got him placed 8th in the lineup today. yep, the guy with the recent 22 game hitting streak and .299 average, not to mention 5 stolen bases already this season against lefties, will appear eighth in your program, right ahead of that other guy with the .298 average, nick green. batting second instead will be one miss nancy drew, sporting a .238 average against lefties, and no stolen bases against anybody. (caught twice, though). batting sixth, with a .235 OBP against lefties, and a .194 average (and believe it or not, he's hitting better against lefties than against righties) is mr. big pop-up. yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense.

is tito afraid of offending the big salary free agent guys who are giving him absolutely nothing this year, and confident he can jerk around the kid who is still several years from free agency? you betcha. and it stinks.

recapping the day, nancy managed a hit in four at-bats, (sandwiched between a pair of whiffs, btw), and somehow to knock in nick green (who was on base two out of five tries) from third with one out with a sacrifice fly. (it was in the top of the eighth with his team already ahead by four runs--what's new). jacoby, meanwhile, had singled in the second, successfully sacrificed runners over to 2nd and 3rd in the 4th, took an intentional walk in the 5th, and finally experienced his first unproductive out with a fly out in the 6th. (against a righty by that time--his first three trips to first base being against the southpaw despite the "stats").

sure, the olde towne team won fairly easily today, but it's still a lost series against a division rival, and some pretty indefensible lineup cards as far as i'm concerned. lucky for me tomorrow is an off day, so i can try to relax a little before i have to get into this rant again on tuesday.

repeat after me, terry: sunk costs are those that have already been incurred, and are irrelevant (if you're not an idiot) to any decisions made going forward. which is to say, you could toss nancy, E6 and big pop-up into a 25 million dollar bonfire, and ironically end up with a more competitive squad than before you started.

instant no-ffense

three at-bats, three ended innings. (in back-to-back games no less).

i wonder if anybody keeps that sort of stat?

ironic that for the second time in two games nancy tag-teamed with big pop-up to provide two out of three outs as well. what a waste of mike lowell's effort at the top of the ninth...

instant offense

unlike yesterday's game, tito has a legitimate hitter, (not to mention a "tough out"), in the 3 spot. unlike yesterday's game, tito has stacked his 3, 4, 5 spots with legitimate hitters, (not to mention 3 tough outs), with mike lowell batting in the top six. unlike yesterday's game, tito now enjoy's a 1-0 lead heading into the home half of the first, (we won't belabor big pop-up's inning-ender), and a creditable bottom third (tek, rocco and green) waiting to greet the jays in the top of the second, with the machine who is jacoby ellsbury waiting to pounce if anything gets on base. now THIS is more like it.

more sox

yes, i'm piling on, but a few things continue to be painfully obvious while watching the sox these days, and somebody just has to say them out loud or i'm going to have to strangle these idiot guest color guys who can't seem to help themselves from saying things like "tough out" in description of some of our cheesiest hitters who have proven themselves to be anything but.

a tough out is not someone who flies out to center with the bases loaded and two outs, as did big pop-up in the first inning. a tough out is not someone who grounds out to second with men on second and third and two outs, as did our nancy in the second. a tough out is not someone who ends not just one inning, but THREE in their first three at-bats, and is only saved the ignominy of not doing it a fourth time by getting the luck of the draw and leading off in the eighth. (another fly out from big pop-up). sure, nancy got himself a 1-for-4 night courtesy of a round-tripper in the 7th, but that's more dumb luck than tough out in my book. nobody on and one out in a four-run game isn't exactly a pressure-packed situation, and the irony remains that a dinky little cheap blooper in the second would have plated more runs than the "big" hit in the 7th, and would have likely changed the whole complexion of the game before things had time to go south. but such are the consequences of tito's ongoing brain fart of a lineup card these days.

think about it: you put three guys on in the first inning, and mikey lowell never even gets a chance to see the dish? yet you let nancy and big pop-up kill you with the second and third outs of the inning, before even one run can be scored??? there is something absolutely wrong with that. hell, even E6 went 2-for-3 in a completely wasted performance at the plate. tito? tito??? anybody home?????

other than that, i'll also say it was hard to watch E6 take a tour of the middle infield before looping around to eventually pick up hill's infield "hit" in the second, but at least they were able to overcome both that and dustin's would-be catastrophe of a dropped double-play ball perfectly delivered from wake right after. yeah, jacoby got caught playing too far in a couple of times, too, but it's hard to criticize a guy who's playing a solid outfield in all other respects, and giving you a couple of hits a game and a bunch of stolen bases on top of that. just too bad they weren't committed to scoring the five runs that playing behind tim wakefield often requires, because janssen certainly gave them plenty of opportunities to do just that. think about it--a run or two in the first, followed by more in the second, and wake's cruising instead of trying to put too fine a point on it and walking himself into trouble.

*sigh*

but here's the killer for me--a lazy man's pursuit of a fly ball to right with two outs puts a guy on. then, two hits later, toronto has their first run. and if you watch the replay, you'll see nancy's pursuit of that fly ball was just about as eager and direct (as in, neither eager nor direct) as E6's pursuit of that infield hit a couple of innings earlier. then, just in case you weren't already getting the point, you get to watch a nasty sinking liner to left that could very easily bounce around for multiple extra bases getting the full professional treatment, which would be one mr. jason bay going all out and diving to corral the liner on one hop. no, he couldn't get there for the catch, but half that effort would have saved that run in the third, and that's just one more example of why this team needs more ballplayers, and fewer multi-million-dollar washouts.

terry, you need to get yourself some tougher ballplayers, and move up the ones you do have into their proper spots in the order. you know, watching that all-hit-no-field kid fox out in chicago these past couple of days, makes you wonder why we can't package up a little something for the cubbies so we could put THAT in our DH slot... (oh, i forgot, he bats righty so terry would want to make him bat eighth or something...)

*sigh*

where were you in '52?

some things don't change. i've always found it rich that the korean war was officially declared a "conflict" here in the US so as not to require a congressional declaration of something more substantial. but, you tell me--tens of millions of men under arms, in the field for over three years, resulting in multiple millions of deaths--what, exactly, is that supposed to be called??? (that such dodges are allowed to continue to this day insults the memory of those 55,200 american dead as much as anything i could name).

i was closest to that "conflict" via my only uncle, who had served there, but who never felt like talking about it all that much. the impression i took from his silence was of something terrible and necessary, and perhaps deserving of better recognition, though far be it from a soldier to ever complain publically about his (or her) lot. the difference in the magnitude of honors freely bestowed on veterans of WWII (e.g. my father) were obvious even to me as a small child, and it was something that i sensed contributed to my uncle's rancor against opposition to our involvement in vietnam--that the memory of the 58,000 who were to die there was being diminished in a very familiar way--while my father was perhaps freer to achieve a more liberal point of view. (which is to say, neither of them cared much for protesters, but my father could at least speak eugene mccarthy's name out loud).

either way, i never got the idea that either of them ever had gone to war with an expectation that it was guaranteed to turn out well for them or their side. oh, surely they had confidence and commitment that it would, and a firm belief in the just nature of their cause, but they never showed anything so arrogant as expectation. war, to them, did not seem to be like that, or at least that's the way that i remember my impressions of it when i was a small boy. yet, today, i wonder at how supremely confident we have become, and expecting of our success and superiority. does anyone who remembers '52 see it differently?

the reason i'm compelled to ask is that i'm seriously fearful for the potential of mayhem on the korean penninsula these days. this is no cowboy's escapade, to be undertaken (or not) on a whim, without much for real geo-political consequences. (can you imagine the US invading anything in the 50's or 60's without immediate russian and/or chinese deployments in opposition?) no, this one is much larger than that, and for much bigger stakes, with actual nuclear warheads on the other side, and the ever-clear potential to drag all the classic bogeymen into the fray. we've got, what, a few hundred thousand troops in iraq and afghanistan, and it's taxing our armed forces pretty heavily. yet, it took 6.8 MILLION servicemen just to keep korea at a stand-off back in the day. somebody, somewhere, has to be doing some very quick math, and talking about all sorts of tactical possibilities, and that's a very sobering thing to contemplate.

i find myself falling easily into the blind confidence of my generation. i know we have to draw the line with north korea, and my only regret is that our prior presidential administration wasn't clear-eyed enough to see the vast difference in the magnitude and importance between kim's north korea and hussein's iraq. here is a conflict that MAKES a difference in more than just the polarization of islamists against "the west". (which is bad enough). here is a conflict that draws dangerous men, with true and vast deadly force at their whim, into making rash and nothing-to-lose decisions that can immediately impact BILLIONS of innocent people, depending on where they target their warheads. of course we will prevail--we must--but it's the cost that puts the knot in our guts this time.

my uncle fought for what he knew was right, in a time when there were no expectations of prevailing. today, we have to decide if we have that same kind of courage.

sox

i'm sorry, and i'll go to my grave insisting that david ortiz is (was?) the greatest clutch hitter in the history of baseball, but he's not anymore, nor even a shadow of a glimmer of a facsimile thereof. two things fall out of this: first of all, he needs to be batting ninth (if at all) until he proves he isn't an automatic out every time he comes to the plate. heck, even E6 is smacking the ball around and getting on base with regularity these days, and you can't argue that that kid green hasn't been doing just fine at the dish, too, though they're banished to the basement for very little good reason at all, unless it's to be setting the table for mr. on-the-go, jacoby ellsbury. second of all, there needs to be a better plan than to just grab some nancy boy from the bottom half of the order and plug him into the three-spot and expect him to miraculously transform into anybody's idea of a #3 guy. yes, i know, tito is fanatically devoted to L-R-L-R at the top of his lineup, but puh-leeeze, terry, get a grip on the fact that L-R-0-R is not going to work. (that's 0 as in zero, or if you prefer alphabetically, O as in out). dustin needs youk (or mr. jason bay, though he's quite a nicely serviceable cleanup guy, wouldn't you say) to protect him just as much as youk needs mr. jason, and mr. jason needs mikey L. and just 'cuz nancy had one good month last year in the 3-spot kinda puts paid to the mistaken notion that terry's a consistent veteran's manager, since he's giving the same sort of loyalty to a massive overall hitting disappointment as he's giving to one of the game's most storied players who's been having a bad year. which is it going to be, terry?

or, put another way, "wishin' don't make it so", and no matter how many ways you slice it, while the sox are sending the equivalent of anybody else's #8 or 9 guy to the plate in their three-spot, they're going to have a lot of frustrating afternoons and evenings over the course of their (usual) 2nd place summer. or are we to be putting all our eggs in the john smoltz basket? (btw, not for nothing, but it occurs to me this morning that johnny was born during the impossible dream season, and he's almost as old as i am, though not quite as old as wake...)

throw the ball, catch the ball, hit the ball. simple game...

sales and marketing 101

sun tzu had a lot of fascinating things to say about blood sports like public discourse. one of his better points (i'm paraphrasing on a grand and possibly inaccurate scale here) is that full frontal assaults should only be undertaken with such vast superiority of force as to leave the outcome in no doubt. (i regret to say that using phrases like "chicken little" are the sarcastic equivalent of a full frontal assault, so you can guess how easily i take my own advice). in the case of the lowell school department, their version of a full frontal assault is to demand entitlement to as much money as fulfills their opinion of a "maintenance" budget, and to let all other departments (and shortfalls in tax collections) be damned. again, i'm paraphrasing on a grand and possibly inaccurate scale, so you can read some of the original comments here). it occurs to me this morning that if my goal was a "properly funded" school budget, whatever that might be, i might be best advised to start by considering to whom i need to sell the bill of goods.

an old war horse of the software game once revealed to me one of his interview chestnuts, which was to hand his interviewees a coffee mug, and then instruct them to "sell" the mug. if their first utterance was not a question, their candidacy was dismissed on the spot. if their first question was not "do you drink coffee", they likely ended up just the same. after all, coffee mugs, just like school budgets, are not all the same thing to all people. if one doesn't drink coffee, then perhaps one drinks tea. or, perhaps, if one doesn't like hot beverages of any kind, one may have use for a pen and pencil caddy. who knows. but you don't know until you ask, and you certainly can't assume that launching into a prepared sales pitch, no matter how noble, thoughtful and irrefutable it might be, is going to close you the sale. if you don't drink coffee, you're not likely to be buying a coffee mug marketed to you as such.

so, today, we have the city of lowell school committee eager to sell us their new 2010 school budget. for whatever reason, their most prominent sales argument is that $15M more spending than last year isn't really "more" at all--it's less! so aint't that a bargain. meanwhile, we taxpayers are watching our tax bills going up, and our city revenues going down, and knowing that ends just can't be made to meet in the first place, let alone after an additional $15M is added to the single largest budget item we have. in fact, $15M is significantly higher than a lot of entire departmental budgets. so, shall we just close down the fire department? that's about $15M on the budget. that would pay for all our school needs very nicely...

to their credit, i suppose, the school folks are leaving it up to everyone else what gets closed down instead of denying them their $15M raise. they're not saying the city doesn't need firemen. they're not saying the city doesn't need any number of other things that might add up to $15M. they're saying that no matter what those other things might be, they couldn't possibly be worth as much to us as education. except, they're not even doing that much.

if there's nothing more valuable to the city than $15M worth of education, then why can't we hear the sales pitch as to why? will our SAT scores and college admission rates go up as a result? i should hope so. of course, i can't really be sure about that, because no one is talking to me about SAT scores and college admission rates. all i'm hearing is that $15M is absolutely necessary to maintain status quo, whatever that is. well, school folks, what is status quo? do i want to maintain it? why? what's the value of that $15M on top of the $133M already being invested in our schools? more hot lunches? an extra neighborhood elementary school? but why are those important? how do hot lunches improve the quality of education? how does an extra neighborhood elementary school? i'm guessing they both do, because they're part of the current funding scheme. somebody must be able to explain to me why, right?

in my world, each and every salesperson is required to justify their job to sales management each and every year. doesn't matter how many millions over quota they were last year, and indispensible to the success of the company. this year, they're being given an area of responsibility, a sales patch if you will, and they have to justify why they should be entrusted with it. what's their plan to make sales? their management, as is their responsibility, will decide how big a patch to give them. maybe somebody has a better plan for those resources. "but i was really successful last year" is not a compelling argument. what they will do this coming year IS.

so, let's talk SAT scores. college admission rates. MCAS. arts programs. dropout rates. (declining, we hope). let's get talking about who drinks coffee, who drinks tea, and who needs to go without something else so that other people can enjoy those hot beverages. let's talk about fire and police and elderly and trash services, and how many of those are going to need to be actually cut in order to feed the ever-burgeoning maw of our school department budget. no, not because we're all not committed to educational excellence and the absolute best we can possibly do for our kids, but because we only have so many dollars in the public kitty, and they've got to be made to go all the way around.

so far, all i've been sold is the suggestion that status quo for the schools is worth the complete elimination of the equivalent of the entire city of lowell fire department. that's a lot of money. i'm not quite sure i'm buying it yet.

life on a budget

recent correspondence with a school committee member has underscored the importance of "budget busters", which cause a level-funded budget to actually require spending reductions in order to make ends meet. for our federal government, these busters would be things like increasing interest on the national debt, (less of a problem now that we've wrecked our economy, so isn't that ironic), social security, medicare, and etc. for the lowell public schools, budget busters include health insurance increases, ($3M), union-contracted salary increases, ($3.15M), and state special education funding cuts ($1M). as we've covered here earlier, it's disengenuous to call these "budget cuts", because they're not, but they do impact the distance our dollars will travel in pursuit of a quality education for our children.

lucky for me, as a divorced guy intimately familiar with court-ordered alimony, i understand all too well the realities of living on a budget. (trust me, if you think state laws surrounding the funding of special education services are inflexible, just wait until you sit across the table from an alienated spouse and start talking about alimony). there's income and expenses, of course, but there's also a fundamental need to understand the nature and structure of the income and the expenses, or else penury will inevitably result.

for example, my income is made up of two major components, which are my base salary, and my incentive compensation (bonus if you will), but when the courthouse calculators come out, there's no distinction made between the two. what you get paid is what you get paid, and half gets handed over, period. and not just half, but the fixed dollar amount that represents half, so that if the income goes down later, you're SOL. so as we've all seen in these uncertain times, there's nothing guaranteed about a base salary, let alone a bonus on top of one, and if i had rolled over on the calculation on the "income is income" premise, i'd be homeless right now. my saving grace was to have negotiated a dollar amount based on half the base salary, and then a promise of 100% of the bonus to the kids college funds. lucky for me, i have a very kind ex spouse (at least in this regard), and she understood the sense of such an arrangement. or maybe she was just satisfied that i was going to be down half of the one, and all of the other.

anyway, the same logic needs to be applied to expenses if you're ever going to make ends meet. if you know the "budget busters" are coming, (and you have the union contracts right there in front of you, so it's not like these things are a mystery), then why don't you start connecting income to expenses so that you don't get caught in the whipsaw of future uncertainty??? i did it by disconnecting the alimony from the bonus. the city of lowell and its public schools need to find a way to do the same thing, or we're never going to get out of this swirling toilet bowl of budget recriminations every year around this time. we know the city income due to property taxes is pretty stable. how about we fund base-line city services, including bare-minimum education, out of this? then, with the volatile income that's disappearing all-too rapidly right now, like state support for special education, we can pick the kinds of educational and other services that we're prepared to do without in lean times. no recriminations, and no hurt feelings. the state pulls the plug on a million in contributions, and we already know where that million is going to come from out of our level-funded budget. now THAT would be a cut.

so my major budget busters these days are my condo payments and my property taxes. (my condo bill went up $20 per month last year, and my taxes are a lock to go up at least 2.5%, at least so far as i can tell from the school budget discussions this summer and the eponymous proposition). if you're thinking, gee, that sounds pretty reasonable, i'd say you're right. on purpose. no way a guy with fixed debts that stretch him close to his income limit should be taking on uncontrollable costs without some sort of plan for how he's going to survive when the inevitable happens. nobody wants to be that poor old guy on a fixed income that is possibly going to lose his house when he can't afford to keep up with the taxes associated with the costs of educating the young 'uns. if that means paying cash for six year old used cars, well, then, so be it.

i think it's about time our city management and school department started learning these lessons, and stop treating all income like it's the same (it's not) and all expenses like none of them can ever be cut. guess what--if i lose my job, you know i'm going to be cutting a whole raft of "essential services", because that alimony nut just simply isn't going away. sure, i'd like to eat other things besides ramen noodles, but reality is reality. likewise, in the fat times, like now while i'm still working, i'm not spending right to the edge of my income, but, rather, putting aside as much as possible for the inevitable rainy day.

anybody ever thought about an endownment for the public schools? might be a nice thing to plan for if the current economic tragedy ever abates, and we start getting ahead again. then we could match the endowment income with the budget busters, and start paying apples for apples in our annual school budget again.

i think i'll tell my ex i just took a 5% pay cut, and see if she'll give me a break on my alimony

just can't let the school budget "cuts" thing go this morning...

so i was thinking: every year in the past, my employer was in the habit of handing out up to 5% pay increases to folks who were judged to be among the "top performers". i'm proud to say i've always been among such, so my recent salary has, thankfully, kept me ahead of inflation and into a pretty reasonable bag of groceries for both me and my ex, via her alimony. (my bag is actually improving thanks to the battambang, but i can't really say about hers, let alone worry about such things).

anyway, this spring i've learned that present economic conditions have precluded my employer from offering any kind of pay increases at all to anybody, regardless of their performance. yesterday, i thought i was pretty damn lucky, all things considered, possessed as i am in reality of the very same paycheck i was earning last month, (actually a 100% pay increase from those who are getting laid off these days), but thanks to the city of lowell school department and their energetic boosters, i'm learning that what i've really endured this week is the indignity of a 5% pay CUT, since that's what i would have been making had my expectation of getting a little bit more than last year been realized.

so, same salary as last year--did i just receive a pay cut, or didn't i?

"the sky is falling", or, "we have to cut our budget"

long ago in a far away place (how did that star wars intro go?) i volunteered to participate on a town finance committee in the little burg where i lived. it was a fascinating and eye-opening experience. one of the lasting lessons i learned from it, still applicable today, is to look very closely, and then quite often laugh out loud whenever anyone gives numbers in support of a whine about "budget cuts".

oh, don't get me wrong, i'm not making light of fiscal armageddon such as we are now facing as a result of republicrats letting the robber barons loot the treasury via the mortgage scam, and then leaving the rest of us to try to pay for that plus ongoing public services out of our rapidly shrinking paychecks. these are indeed some serious and mean times. and i'm not trying to under-emphasize my faith in the value and importance of public education, which i believe is the single most valuable investment a society can make. and i'm certainly not trying to further aggrieve those who work (often thanklessly) with our children each and every day--a wise person once observed that we can't be a civilized society until the highest paid among us are the educators of our children, who are, indeed, our future. but what i am often unable to swallow without a loud guffaw is the wailing and gnashing of teeth (all that's missing is the rending of garments) that accompanies some among our little children of public service not getting to play with what they perceive to be their rightful share of the fiscal toys. (it's tough all over, ya know?)

lets say you spend over an eighth of a billion dollars on education in your fair city each and every year, (somewhere well north of $125M, rapidly approaching $150M), which amounts to somewhere around half of your public purse. and lets say that your education costs have more than doubled in the last fifteen years, and are still going up at a rate of around $3 or 4M a year. do you talk about something like that while asking for still more money? (oh, of course not, you know it's a rhetorical question) or do you instead point to things like the little graphic embedded in the past city budget request that talks about budget increases in percentage terms, so that yours can appear to be one of the more reasonable (in proportional terms) instead of the de facto largest (in absolute terms). (see the "five year annual rates of budget growth in lowell" figure on page 8 of last year's proposed budget for one such figure). but we all know the headline from the school side of things: "the sky is falling--we have to cut 9.5M from our budget!!!!!" (i'm paraphrasing unfairly from jackie doherty's latest blog entry, which you can read here yourself, but please read it and make up your own mind before accusing me of hyperbole).

so, do they? have to cut $9.5M? really???

again, the hardest part of writing this little piece of my mind is that, if you asked me, i'd say i'm 100% on the side of more money for our kids' education. but the farm boy slash marketing guy in me recognizes the spreading horse manure for what it is, and i really would rather wish that the headlines could be amended to reflect reality, and not peevishness.

first of all, under the general heading of "robbing peter to pay paul", it's pretty clear to me that the city budget can't be managed by giving more to one department without taking away from another. one of my favorite quotes from the past city budget proposal is this one: "it appears there may be some correlation between police spending and crime rates". (page nine, first line under the graph). you think? and how many cops does $9.5M buy you? given more comprehensive police presence, how many fewer 17 year old girls might be rolled, bleeding and dying, out onto our streets this summer? it's a meaningful discussion. we can't manage our investment in our schools talking only about our school budget. $9.5M can be anything we'd like it to be. it's not just "fewer teachers" or whatever the sky-falling rhetoric has it to be this year.

but, even so, second of all, take a look at the bottom of page 28 of last year's city budget proposal. (i haven't been able to get a copy of the new one, sorry, as i expect its still under construction). FY05 actual spending on our schools was $123M. FY06 actual spending was $128. FY07, $131. FY08 almost hits $136. FY09 clocks in at almost $138 if you take the original city manager's number, though i understand we're several hundred thousand over whatever the proposed number used to be, so i think $138 is a reliable minimum estimate. so, given a "$9.5M budget cut", which we've been exhorted to fear like it's al qaeda, swine flu and restless leg syndrome all wrapped up into one, how much would we expect the FY10 amount to be? $128M, right?

welcome to never never land, kids.

the superindendant's proposed FY10 budget is requested to be $147M. the city manager's recommended budget referenced within is kissing $133, which would basically put dr. scott and the school folks back to somewhere between 2007 and 2008's actuals, except for the windfall of $5M in federal stimulus money.

so, the way i see it, bernie lynch could be characterized as asking the schools to cut $5M from their budget, apples to apples, except that he's not, observing the almost $5M in federal stimulus funds offset noted in the superintendant's proposal. truth be told, bernie isn't actually asking the schools to cut anything at all, but let's not quibble about the essence of nothing, because, the way the schools see it, bernie is asking them to forego $14M from the oranges that they're asking, and somehow a rutabaga figure of $9.5M in "cuts" once the fed money is figured in, and that's the headline.

for me, it just doesn't add up.

i think we'd all be best recommended to look at the actual numbers before swallowing any of these ridiculous blog or newspaper headlines, but what do i know, i'm just a marketing guy...

sapere aude

jen kearney and the lost onion for two shows in two nights and i napped for two hours this afternoon

i've had a musical week like i haven't had in a long, long time. southern culture on the skids, followed by back-to-back jen kearney and the lost onion shows, complete with horn sections, "auxiliary keyboards", multiple percussionists, backing vocalists and jen's entire new cd from front to back played like you were right there inside your very own personal cd player. it literally does not get any better than this.

i've grown to start mentioning to people that darryl hall is the guy who closed for jen kearney last summer at the lowell summer music series. (it was an electric evening, complete with thunder and lightning). jen's new record is so good that it makes you want to get in your car and drive for an hour just so you can enjoy it on one of the better sound systems you have. (how i spent my early evening last night, as a matter of fact). jen's shows showcasing that new album have been so tight and so tasty that you almost fall down when you have to think about how lucky you are to be seeing them.

harpers ferry is a great room. gemstones in lowell is somewhat less so. (to say the least, and see the previous "review" if you'd like some of the reasons why). but when jen and the band are on stage, you can't think of anything but how much you're enjoying the music.

want to know my favorite part? ok, it's completely selfish and self-indulgent, and only enabled by having heard every note of both shows from start to finish, and every note of the cd from start to finish oh-i-don't-know-how-many-times, but it's my favorite part. when the whole thing wrapped last night, and the band was kicking around what to do for an encore, and i'm not going to pretend i think they were actually paying any attention to me when i was saying "what is and what should never be", but wouldn't you know that carl cranked up the SG one last time and got us all sailing through what is and what should never be, and it was GOOD.

want to know how good? for the first time, i think, that i've ever seen her do it, though you know when she does it she could do it far more often if she would care to and make the crowd fall in love with her every time, jen grabbed her mic stand and launched it and herself to the very front front front and center of the stage in perfect rock star pose and repose, and belted it out to make mssr plant proud just the way it was meant to be. so much fun, and so good in the ears, and so full of SOUND with the horns and corey's keys and the whole nine yards. "and if i say to you - tomorrow"...

i could watch carl whale the crap out of that song for an hour and still be sad to hear it fade out at the end.

GREAT shows.

gotta get me more of it. you should check it out, cuz then you won't think i'm just making it up when i say things that make it sound like the beatles were back in town.

i ask you--how many people in this world live across the street from something like that?

battambang -- badabing!

the other day i mentioned the pallet-loads of limes outside the cambodian grocery outfit on chelmsford street. i'm thinking that it'd be one heck of a bargain place to get "good fresh things every day of the year", as donald fagan likes to sing. (kamakiriad is one of those records that is woefully underappreciated, don't you think?) but i had no idea (i guess i still don't, as i still haven't made it over there inside and in person) that pallet-loads of limes, and every other wonderfully fresh thing under the sun it would seem, could be had even closer to home, and at such incredible bargain prices that it makes demoulas look positively exorbitant and an "american" wonder why the whole world isn't there buying everything for their week.

it's daunting, of course, to traverse grocery aisle after grocery aisle filled with as many things that you don't recognize or understand as those that you do. but it's awe-inspiring to look at the prices, and then realize that you or anybody else could put a week's worth of stuff in a cart and get out for so far less than $40 that you'd have to be whistling at the lottery counter in the convenience store as you complete the lifespan of the two twenties buying what you are CONVINCED have to be winning megabucks tickets.

yes, the freshly butchered chickens still have their heads on them. but, yes, the freshly butchered parts from those chickens, like chicken legs that look so robust that they could have come from small turkeys, that you are habituated into paying a couple of bucks a pound at demoulas for pastier, paler versions, are actually .99 cents a throw here at battambang. (it's a province from the old khmer empire--i looked it up). it makes a guy want to have a family of 12 just to enjoy how little he'd have to pay to feed them all like kings here.

the crowning glory, however, is the seafood counter at the back. the fish are so fresh that you swear some of them are still flexing their gills. the blue crabs are still walking around in their tray and waving their claws at the guy with the gloves who is putting the unfortunates into bags, and the calamari, clearly labeled squid in a refreshing homage to what they are, as opposed to some misguided marketers attempt to sugar coat things for the hyper-sensitive american grocery-buying public, are so colorful and so shiny that you can't help but put a pound of them in a bag to take home for making appetizers for tonight's dinner. (well, the guest chef will be making them into appetizers for tonight's dinner, as my people didn't have such things when i was growing up, so i never learned).

speaking of having such things when i was growing up, the ultima plus ultima, even more crowning than the crowning glory of the seafood counter, has to be the butcher aisle and its positively decadent panoply of everything (and i mean everything) animal right up to the tastiest tip of the (beef) tongue. most folks won't want to see it, of course, but i've been having a craving for cold beef tongue sandwiches for literally decades, and courtesy of battambang i know i'm going to have some soon, because the beef tongue there is so richly red and beautiful that it's going to have to be transcendant on the plate, or between the bread, as the case may be. it's so easy--just two or three hours in the pot of boiling water with a few bay leaves (one of the rare occasions when i will ever condone cooking with some) and salt. LOTS of salt. (i'm not sure if official recipes will list it in the ingredients that way, but in my world it's got it). make sure you slice it while it's still warm, and so thin you can almost see through it. and stock up on spicy brown mustard. and get bread so fresh it almost makes you pass out from the ecstasy of the aroma of it. combine. enjoy.

mmmmmm

there's a reason

there's generally a good reason some places are bound to fail. last night, upstairs from the blue shamrock, in the space they somewhat ridiculously call gemstones, i had one of those moments of commercial clarity in which i could think of an entire list.

the event posters suggested stuff would get rolling after 9, but wandering in even at 9:30 (yeah, i know, only the old folks show up in the first hour) there still wasn't any way to get a beer, cuz "the bar's not set up yet". i don't know how "set up" you have to be to reach into a fridge and hand somebody a beer, but apparently it must be a union shop or something.

we can also take a moment to discuss the beer selection, and ask since when it was that corona became a premium pour? actually, i shouldn't say pour, because there were no taps. lets just say, rather, the premium open. well, we can't even say that, necessarily, because, apparently, the little thing working the little area at the bar at which we found ourselves was having a great deal of trouble working the opener itself. no, not just working the opener itself, but actually, and i say this in all sincerity, and quite literally, figuring out which end of the opener is supposed to go in your hand, and which end is supposed to work the top of the bottle. $4.50 for mexico's cheapest beer. you know, you can get a freshly tapped guinness over at the worthen for less than that, and someone who can actually manage to get it to you in less than 15 minutes, too.

yes, premium. the rest of the selection, if memory serves, was mich ultra, bud lite, amstel light, and budweiser. i tried the budweiser first, and i know the folks at AB don't allow places to serve expired bud, which is supposed to be why people like me will order it in a pinch, cuz at least it's not skunked, but that's generally speaking and i'm here to say that the bottle-related talents of the staff at gemstones apparently extends to being able to foul even the most un-foulable of beers. i couldn't even finish my first one. how they did it remains a mystery, but suffice it to say that they did it. so i ordered what i figured was going to be the next best thing, which is a beer that, though of questionable vintage, would at least be treated with a little citrus in order to soak out the foulest bits.

let's talk citrus, shall we? there are lime wedges, as you know, and there are lime wedges. some places cut theirs a little narrower to save on the inventory carrying costs, and you kinda know to expect it, and that's ok. but these, i'm here to tell you, were cut so thin that if you turned your bottle 90 degrees they actually disappeared. the person sitting next to me at the table almost spit up her drink when i held up my beer and slowly twisted it until the total eclipse of the bar fruit. i'm thinking they likely served every single corona in that fridge, all night long, off the proceeds from one single green puckerer.

i'd like to digress at this point to talk about the cambodian grocery outfit on chelmsford street in the highlands. this place is great. they put their produce out front of the cinderblock garage that serves as their establishment in pallet-sized quantities. you may be thinking, gee, he likes to exaggerate, but you can know that th size description is perfectly accurate, since, as anyone can plainly see when they're driving past, the produce is actually placed outside still ON the pallets upon which they were shipped. 20 pound bags of rice... watermelons... and, quite frequently, i'm thinking for preparing things like pad thai and other traditional noodle dishes, limes. yep, palletloads of limes. 12 for a buck limes. limes in quantities so large and so cheap that you could shove an entire half of one of those babies in every beer bottle of every brand that you would sell out of your cooler all night long, and still be talking, what, seven cents a serving? hell, i'd even be happy to front the bar a fiver so they could start with a good inventory.

so, yeah, invisible citrus.

the decor i won't get into except to say that the little self-contained fountain on the stairway was foamed up to the point where you know one of two things must be happening over the course of most nights: they're either pouring out some of those foul buds into it, rather than have to finish them, OR, the line to the bathroom must get a little long for some folks.

the moment of zen i'll leave you with (i have to abbreviate all the rest of the complaints, or i'll never finish this) is when it came time for the opener-challenged kid to total up the tab. seven little tally marks on a little green sheet of paper. four-fifty a throw. (the bud i had purchased with cash earlier, so it wasn't part of this particular equation). there was quickly a huddle of all the boobs and openers behind the bar. this was a poser. the buds, well, they're an even three bucks apiece. but those premium beers... those coronas... there's DECIMALS involved!!! they were stumped. all of them.

to their credit, they must have recognized mine as an honest face, so they were willing to figure that $31.50 sounded reasonable. you could even see glimmers of awe and inspiration, that people could do such advanced things in their head in a bar after seven beers, though i must admit that the seven included two rounds of three and an extra, so i'm pretty sure i had only three in total myself, not counting the mouthful of AB skunk that wasn't finished earlier.

but, i swear, even three sheets to the wind, and not just three little coronas, i still know that seven times four is twenty-eight, and half of seven is three-fifty, which, added to twenty-eight...

oh, look, i think we lost them again...

a completely bogus experience that is not desired to be repeated.

ok with lowell

there's a clear human tendency to want to tear down hubris. we even, courtesy of the germans, have a wonderful word for it--schadenfreude--and perfect objects all over the tabloids, from a-rod to bernie madoff. ironically enough, it doesn't even take a massive financial fraud to bring out the torches and pitchforks--our desire to cast down can even manifest itself in the simple wish that people (or places) that are just a little bit too full of themselves, or even are just that much too popular, are brought down the proverbial peg to where they belong. heck, even mother teresa has her haters. so it is that i know that the city of lowell's new slogan is bound for an obvious and epic fail.

see, if you read here for any length of time, you know that i am in love with this city. lowell is both a (sometimes breathtakingly, mostly not) beautiful ruin, and the tantalizingly close, but never realized, potential for something better. it confounds because it's both dirty and compelling. it's poverty and dereliction on a all-too-human scale, as crudely depicted by catapult978 in her "life on the streets" series, and yet so much more than that, as anyone walking the cobblestones on a summer evening on their way to the concerts at boardinghouse park can immediately tell. it has heroin and heroism, but mostly the banality of everything that lives in between. our fabric is best defined by the schism between those who are striving to realize all potential, and all the rest who are living the lives of the left-behind, but woven out of the lives of everybody else.

when you walk the city streets in the afternoon, as the high school hurls its knots of close conversation and cameraderie across the face of the relatively lifeless melange of those who need to be somewhere walking past all those on lark scooters who don't, you find yourself nodding with vague recollection of how "move along" is just about the most involved conversation you recall most kids ever get from a cop... yes, "move along" is what you hear... and then you notice that something isn't quite as you expected... there is every color and patois of the rainbow here, from southeast asia to east africa to south america and i don't know how many more places that my ignorance and inexperience don't allow me to recognize... and you knew that... but then it hits you:

the kids among themselves aren't organized in any discernable way. no group is homogenous across any sociological construct that you understand or recognize. not by gender. not by race. not by culture. not by language. not by anything at all--height, weight, looks, you name it--NOTHING. it's not the high school you attended. it's not the world you thought you knew. it's something else. i have no idea how they choose each other, or even if they choose the same groups every afternoon. i project onto them the whole potential of the world, where dr king's "content of their character" is the sole judgment. i know it's a ridiculous dream, built on wishing and a willful ignorance of the reality that appears in the local paper every day. these aren't paragons, and they're certainly not going to save anybody any day soon. but they aren't like you and me, and that's an extremely hopeful thing.

so it is that i bemoan that the ridiculous decision was made to adopt the ridiculous slogan that paints a ridiculous picture of hubris on behalf of a city that absolutely has none in its reality. i can't think of any way to more quickly cause the rest of the world to roll its eyes and keep rolling up 495 in search of something else.

lowell is dirty. we don't pick up after ourselves nearly as consistently as we ought. lowell is dysfunctional. our city councilors threaten other city employees with mayhem over who knows what trivialities. lowell is a crucible that produces at least a dozen dicky eklunds for every mickey ward, and even mickey gets hauled in by the cops for living life as so many others do, with a fist a little more close to ones friends and family than it perhaps should be. or maybe that's not the true story at all, because there's one thing that's obvious from any time here, and that's that it doesn't make any kind of sense according to anywhere else you've ever been or seen. i'm betting that sharing a beer with mickey will tell an entirely different story, if we were ever so lucky to be able.

i think lowell is a brace of cold, smelly merrimack river water to the face of everyone who is eager to experience something "alive. unique. inspiring." oh, it's alive alright, as a rash can be, just as often as it's a joyful noise as will be pouring from the blue shamrock tonight when jen kearney doses it with her sultry spice. unique, yes, as is every laundry detergent that's "new and improved". inspiring, too, if you can abide the full spectrum of expression that results. it's a place where you're accepted in whatever shape and quirk you carry. it's more than the insipid cheerleading they dream up downtown, that's for sure.

want to know the marvel of lowell to me? it's that it was built for nothing higher than a very low purpose. i know of no other city in the world where its entirety was chosen for it by the pragmatism of engineers, seemingly absent of all other consideration, and yet possessed of a beauty that transcends its function. the dirtiest effluence of its mills is comingled with the commerce of its residents, and their residences. i live in a failed hulk of industry, steps away from both working factory floors and shopkeepers' hopeful storefronts, and i can choose to stroll by homeless shelters or beautiful city parks on my way to the train, or to my car. until someone invents a slogan to pay an homage to all of this, it's just an empty platitude, and a failed promise.

lowell. birthplace of the american industrial revolution, and home to every kind of idiot for whom the lessons of such are never enough. invest your sweat and whatever passes for your intellect, or maybe just all your shortcomings, and be welcomed and treated fairly here anyway. you're certainly no worse than much of what's here, nor any better than most. and if that's ok with you, then it's ok with lowell.

half off at amiestreet this weekend

you've heard me go on at length about how much i love amiestreet, and maybe you're tired of hearing about it... but here i go again:

this weekend, as if all this stuff so incredibly wonderful and easy to afford wasn't enough, the folks at amiestreet are putting it all HALF OFF. that's right--put $5 down, and run home with $10 worth of tunes. (and, the way things are priced at amiestreet, like melvern taylor's latest going for $2.78, you can get a pocketful of incredible stuff for $10, like you can't get anywhere else on the planet). $25 gets you $50. $50 gets you $100. it simply doesn't get any better than this.

so do yourself a favor--check it out. put $5 down and see what you can find. or $12.50 even, which is probably less than the last single CD you bought that you might not even like all that much anymore. see what $25 gets you there, and then be amazed at how long you'll go before ever paying retail (or usurous iTunes) prices ever again.

i'm doing $50 for $100 myself. before amiestreet, i used to spend that much in a month on tunes. now it'll last me for what seems like forever. (the last $50 i put down there is still worth $22.44 on my balance, and i've got more little feat and southern culture on the skids and etta james and martin sexton and nick lowe that i can usefully talk about here without further boring everybody to tears. and i'm loving every note of all of it).

the year of the ox

falling all over onesself to jam the cd into the car deck for the ride home from the show, the first overwhelming sensation of joy is to hear the instantly-recognizable thematic bedrock of "to the moon" weaving itself through the ethereal strains that lead into the first track--"born". it takes a moment while you form your thoughts, and you are recalled of the days when artists shared with you an emotion, and a sense of place, through their music. it's a record. an album. singular. yes, there are 13 tracks, and they come up individually from your player should you need to summon them that way, but you realize right from the start that this record is so much more than that, and so much more than the sum of its parts. yes, you'll be compelled to stash it on your iPod for the indignity of shuffle play, but you know it's also going to HAVE TO BE it's own playlist so you can pull it up in an instant from the convertible while you're rocketing to nowhere and feeling like the luckiest guy in the world to be able to go there.

by the time that "to the moon" cossetts "abandoned" on its other side, you're somewhere new. and then you're blown away by the SOUND of it. beautiful. ethereal. expansive. how can human beings create this all out of nothing? it's still the same car, and the same road, and the same world, but it's somehow larger and more wonderful all of a sudden. (oh, that flute!)

jen kearney and the lost onion have delivered the goods. this is a record that's gotta be had. no, you might not be able to get yours personalized by your favorite member(s) of the band unless you come down to the blue shamrock tonight for their next show, but even so it's guaranteed to please.

oh, and btw--if you haven't started to figure out what a hidden gem is right here in beautiful melodic downtown (and thereabouts) shangri-lowell, then just LISTEN and contemplate that all this was put together between the cozy and intimate confines of Carl's Attic, and the inimitable and inimitably excellent Wonka Sound. (you know it's important if i'm using capital letters). how many places in the world have a resource like this, even if they don't have a top-notch performance space for the artists after they have created gold in bob's studio?

i have no idea when the rest of the world is going to catch on, but as long as i'm not being unreasonably jostled to stand front and center for all of it, then i have absolutely no complaints about the otherwise unfairness of the universe.

jen, wow.

just wow.

the city of lowell. confused. adrift. flopping around like that fish in the don't tuck in your bruins shirt ad

the possible riffs on the new city's marketing slogan might become its one silver lining. no, i don't think i'm creative enough to think of the best one that'll undoubtedly surface, but the graphic homage from the lowell shallot is doing it for me until a better one comes along. (these guys didn't even have to change the words to make it work).

the city of lowell. confused. adrift. flopping around like that fish in the don't tuck in your bruins shirt ad.

the city of lowell. approaching insolvency. getting worse. can't imagine why.

the city of lowell. aromatic. one-of-a-kind. kinda like a giant where's waldo game, only instead of looking for bespectacled mop-tops in striped shirts, the most amusing game these days other than placing bets on what exactly that city councilor threatened the superindendant of schools with, cuz you know it must have been good, is to count the number of places downtown where you can generally find a used condom lying around if you look hard enough.

yeah, that's inspring

emperors, clothes, and how to waste colossal sums of money

working as i do in one of the more "creative" (i.e. stupid) areas of the software industry, i'm daily in touch with how incredibly dense human beings can be.

first of all, let me first say that truly gifted creative people are worth thousands more than everybody else in their creative fields, and maybe even millions, or, in some important cases, billions. having just had my socks blown off by the marvel that is jen kearney and the lost onion last night, only one night removed from having my socks blown off by the marvel that is southern culture on the skids the night before, is to be reminded that all musicians are NOT created equal, nor are they rewarded in any proportional sense to their talent, observing that the piped in tunes between sets last night included something breathtakingly banal, derivative and soul-less by U2, as compared to the vibrance and elan that was los sugar kings on the one side, and the lost onion on the other. which is all to say, if someone creates something truly brilliant, then mere denominations of cash can't be used to measure its value, and there's no reason to blink if it costs 100 dollars or 1000 dollars or even a hundred thousand dollars. (keep the "hundred thouseand" denomination in mind, cuz it comes up again in a little bit).

anyway...

in my world, not even hundreds of thousands of dollars, but millions of dollars, literally, were just spent promoting the most insipid, pointless and trivial thematic tag line i think i have ever had to endure as a professional. the fact that my salary competes with such investments amidst the great corporate balance sheet, and that more than a few people along with me could be driving a whole fleet of brand spanking new cars, possibly enough to even save general motors, with what they've poured down the sewer on that drivel, is enough to drive any man or woman to drink. (yes, in addition to the music, i'm using that as an excuse this week). yet, this morning, sober as a judge, i realize that, no matter how colossally bogus such things can be, there will always be an example, and someone even more colossally bogus even than that, to come along if you just wait for it. and here, in my morning paper, (actually two days ago, since i'm kinda behind right now), is the antidote to all my professional discouragement:

"the city of lowell. alive. unique. inspiring".

actually, as ridiculous as those four words are together, it's not even that which crowns the accomplishment--it's the fact that somebody actually said that because they only paid the single source marketing people $160,000 for this steaming turd of a slogan, instead of the $250,000 they were paid the year before for similar services, that we've just somehow saved $90,000.

WHUH?

lemme get this straight--me and my taxpaying brethren and sistren have just dropped 160 large on something so embarrassingly bad that you know before the year is out we're going to have to pay at least that much to paint over the PR diarrhea we caused by releasing it in the first place. and we're being told that the best part of it is that we didn't lose $250K instead???

i'm even considering adopting this as my new best example of the concept of sunk cost, as in, once you've already wasted the first 160 grand, the best thing to do is put the whole mess into the crapper and flush before it taints anything further. but, no, here in beautiful downtown alive, unique and inspiring lowell, (see how it trips right off the tongue?), we hoist our five pound bag of s*** with the ten pounds of s*** in it right from the highest flagpole we can afford to find.

you just can't make this stuff up.

so what i want to know is how many people swallowed that little bit of throw-up they tasted in their mouths when they first heard this as this was making its way from the drawing boards at single source to the town manager's mouth the other day.

seriously. we just paid $160,000 to a company whose best marketing slogan they could come up for themselves, in a creative industry no less, is: "execution is everything". no joke. it's right there on their website. you can go have a look and see for yourself. you know i don't have the creative capacity to make this stuff up myself.

wow

SCOTS

go to the tv room and punch up doublewide.

do it.

i know nobody ever does it when i tell them it's worth the trip, but, really.

you can do it.

(and all the rest of 'em are beauts too)

now picture yourself a couple of long-necks into the evening down at the bar, and having mary, dave and rick goin absolutely and literally hog wild. ("too much pork for just one fork" for an opener--how can anyone do any better than this?).

i grabbed a vantage point off to the side where i could watch dave hartman beat the ever livin bejeezes out of his trap kit all night long, and all i can say is wow. rick miller is a maniac up front, and you know how i feel about the guitar, but it all comes out of the back with this set, and it gets under your skin and into your blood and can't help but come out your toes all night long. (dave's so into it, he doesn't even sit down to get started).

voodoo cadillac... soul city... t-rex's life is a gas... the set list was crankin, and the encore was almost as long as the entire show before it, which is to say, "daddy was a preacher, but momma was a go-go girl" (mary huff, we love you)

the dancing kurt fan club

it's been an eventful week, and its still rolling along:

last thursday was yet another opportunity for the ladies to get philled at toad, or, as it's sometimes known, melvern taylor and the fabulous meltones do north cambridge. (next op will be on the 28th, ladies, so polish up those dancing shoes). i had to cut this past week's show short after the first set so i could go down with my bruins, so i missed a good deal of the fun, but even one set of the incomparable meltones is well worth the 30 minute drive, and two, well, that's a bargain in any universe.

saturday night we had the unveiling of this year's hottest haute couture, the "bob nash is my homeboy" t-shirt, (the "i got philled at toad" models not yet being available) modeled impeccably by two of lowell's hottest, (as well as one of lowell's tallest), at the tex mcnamara and his bucking broncos show down at the worthen house. (great to see eddie starting the santa beard again, and doesn't he always sound great). i'm kicking myself for not snagging one of the event posters, as tex really has an eye and a knack for putting together some great ones--guaranteed collectors items, all.

monday night it was the opening of linda mccluskey's exhibit at brew'd awakenings coffeehaus, which is really worth the trip down to see for anyone with a caffeine jones or just an appreciation of the truly remarkable, if you're looking for where it's at these days in lowell. (and its there through the first part of june, so get to it!). the reverend jj and the casual sinners capped the night with a rollicking couple of sets down at mickey's to celebrate, where, among many other enjoyments, was born the signature video for the dancing kurt fan club, complete with black brassiere headwear and all the usual joy.

tonight its southern culture on the skids down at the paradise, which i know has not a lot to do with lowell so may not thrill everyone to the same degree as it might myself, but if you've never heard a bunch of rockahillbillies singing tributes to "the mullet of the muscle car world" (69 el camino) and other classics like that, you just don't know how to have fun in a bar. "there's a whole lotta things that i'd like to do". ayup. i'm even getting to go with my two favorite people in the world who aren't my kids, so it's so far into the bonus i don't think i'm even going to know where i am by the end of it.

tomorrow night, for those still in their stride, it'll be the grand cd release party for jen kearney and the lost onion's "year of the ox" back down boston way at harpers ferry in allston. harpers ferry was always my favorite destination back in the day--bigger than bunrattys and cooler than gladstones--and it's great that jen and the gang like it too. word is that the full horn section will be in the house, as will an additional wall of backup singers, which, on top of yahuba cutting loose on the congas is going to make motown wish it could be here to see it. (how 'bout those redwings?) i'm DEFINITELY going to be looking to snag a poster from this one! (not to mention a cd with all the signatures on it). where it's at. no room left in the carpool, unfortunately, (it's a hot ticket, what can i say), but you can always start your own.

on top of it all, like being loved two times as the lizard king used to croon, jen and carl and pete and etc. are over at gemstones (the freshly renovated complete with kickass PA system space upstairs from the blue shamrock) on friday night so the groove never has to stop until you simply can't take any more, or the weekend comes and you can sleep til 2pm, which you know you're going to want to do more than anything in the world by that time, only with a smile on your face, like it's supposed to be.

i'm already rationing my beer intake, which is not to say i'm limiting myself, but, rather, that i'm strategically planning how best to optimize my week.

suh-weeeeeet!

the story behind the story

a recent admonition in the local blogosphere decried the relative public silence accompanying tavaryna choeun's tragic murder last week in the acre. it's second most important point was to credit kenneth lavallee, superintendant of police here in lowell, with leading by a better example, and insisting that this heinous crime be pursued and prosecuted to the full extent of public resources. amen to both.

when i read the initial newspaper report, of an anonymous woman bleeding and dying while unattended in the street, without any other evidence of an explanation as to how or why, i feared for exactly the tragedy that has come to light since. i was immediately struck by the combination of cliches--led by both her anonymity and her location--and could not find words to express my sorrow without having the expression quickly defeated by its circumstance. only days ago, a comment here suggested the word "innocent" might not be used without qualification related to civilian deaths in afghanistan--the argument, not without its merits, hinging on our collective responsibility to build the circumstances in which we live. in tavaryna's case, this logic might have us mention the choices which led her to her ultimate tragedy, and the circumstances under which her life was ended.

tavaryna, if the newspaper reports are to be believed, was a runaway taken up with the wrong crowd--so wrong, that her killer's target was someone who thought it best to dump her bleeding body in the street rather than take it another mile to the hospital where she could have at least had the one final chance her life, or anyone's life, deserves. to my aching heart, there are no words to express the horror and sorrow of this, other than to observe that only cowardice explains our collective silence, and our shameful tendency to consider circumstance before the value of a human life.

i cannot imagine the horror of knowing you have cost another human being her life, whether by pulling a trigger, or by opening a car door to let the last drops of her life spill out namelessly onto a random street in a random place where she has neither family nor friend. all i know is that i cannot judge the circumstances nor the choices, as i know absolutely nothing about either. all i know is that until tavaryna choeun is to us our sister and our daughter and our mother and our friend, we are not the human beings we ought to be.

the laws of the game

awhile back, my soccer team found itself the beneficiary of an awarded penalty kick, courtesy of an opponent's having grabbed the ball with his hands while suffering a sudden hamstring injury in front of his goal, and the referee's ensuing whistle. i add the bit about the referee's whistle, because, as self-evident as it may seem, there's no penalty kick without the referee's having directed it, and, as happy as we were to put the ball into the back of the net and earn the goal, it only happens through the agency of the official. if the kick isn't earned, it's the referees job to see that we don't enjoy one. seems simple, right?

so the front page of this sunday's sun features an expose on city workers who have earned a lifetime pension for prior public service, and then returned to work to earn still more at the proverbial public trough. these are bad people, right?

really?

the continuation of the PK story is that the referee became extremely biased in favor of the scored-upon team for the rest of our match--at one point justifying his harsh treatment of our players as the proper result of our having kicked that earlier ball into the back of the net. see, the way this zebra saw it, it would have been our responsibility as players to realize that the injured guy who took away our legitimate scoring chance was really only doing it by accident because of his injury, and we should have understood and deliberately kicked the resulting scoring chance wide to be more sporting.

huh?

the game has rules for a reason. likewise, pensions are awarded for a reason too. like, say, for risking ones life over a period of years as a firefighter or policeman. it's part of the compensation arrangement, ya know? the hiring conversations go something like this: "here--you run into burning buildings (or stand in the street to be shot at) and in return i'll give you this much every year, and this much more for the rest of your life if you do it long enough and well enough". and so these folks will think about it, (and the total of the incentives has to be considered part of the motivation to think about it), and then, if we, the public to be served by their sacrifice are lucky, they may say "ok, if that's the deal, then i'll do it". or replace the circumstances with teaching our children, or even pushing papers in a dank little city hall office, and it's still part of the bargain: this much salary and this much pension in return for the work.

so i want to know why we're so outraged that these folks, who have run into the burning buildings, and stood in our streets to be shot at, and taught our children, and pushed our papers down at city hall, are doing the income equivalent of kicking that PK into the back of the net. think about it--we're the ones with the whistle. we vote the people into office who control the compensation rules, and now we've become the equivalent of that ass-hole referee, running around enabling the kicking and tripping and elbowing of those players who are simply following the rules of the game as they've been set down and ruled on the field.

we ought to be ashamed, first of all, and then motivated second of all to change the rules if we don't like them. clearly, whoever dreamed up the disability pension awards might have dreamed up a caveat that earning extra public income might offset the amount of the pension. oh, wait--they already have. pensioners can only earn $5000 more than the new job's pay minus the pension, which actually saves us, the public, a pretty good chunk of change. i'm even inclined to believe that the disability guy who is doing that job they talked about in the paper for $17,000 a year might be doing it because he's interested to do the work for our collective good, not because he's trying to cheat the taxpayers out of such a princely sum. (anybody willing to do much of anything these days for $17,000 a year?)

of course, the other part of the explanation could be that the desperate owners of this desperate little newspaper are trying desperately to stir up a little s*** to try to sell a few more newspapers before they go under...

E6

times like these i simply cannot help but peek over to see what orlando cabrera has been up to. (not for nuthin', but his lifetime .978 fielding percentage is within 6 one-thousandths of a point of the all-time record, held by omar vizquel, and his career .273 batting average isn't too shabby, either). so why can't we get guys like that over here? yes, the ship has long since sailed on this one, but i don't think i'm ever going to be satisfied with the explanations offered for the sox' not re-signing him after the '04 season. (clubhouse etiquette? really?)

green's been hitting, and even julie has been showing some snap in his bat, but i think the argument in favor of jed lowrie starts with his never having made a major league error at shortstop, and continues from there. (his two errors at third base last year are his only in the bigs). nope, it's not even an hallucination of a statistically significant sample, but it's pretty clear that jed going down this year has hurt us at least as much as youk's absence, and between the two of them, it's been pretty tough sledding.

so i'm sitting here this evening counting out the days til the all-star break, (when jed suggests he'll be ready to return), and wondering what might have been with this team had the rentaria and lugo deals been traded for simply paying o-cab the going rate for his creditable services. it's too much for me to try to imagine the sox without mikey lowell in order to dream the hanley ramirez dream these days, but, trust me, that one has cropped up more than once with me since the days of nomah.

*sigh*

a 2 and 4 road trip is not going to git 'er done with a-rod back with the yanks, and the rays recovering their mojo while toronto continues to cruise at the top of the division. it all was easier while i was blissfully distracted by the b's nice season, but there's not much left but baseball from here 'til the leaves start turning. (spare me the celts blather--i'm perfectly satisfied reading about it in the morning paper, and i feel sorry for the folks still being abused by the nba machine into watching the four hour commercial breaks between tip-off and final buzzer, and not for nuthin' but even SNL has started making jokes about it, it's gotten that bad).

linda mccluskey's opening on monday, SCOTS at the paradise on wednesday, JKLO at harpers ferry on thursday, and then jen and carl all over again at gemstones on friday. that's happiness enough for sports fans.

MISTER jason bay

nuff said

lowell comes alive

last summer, while at the folk festival, i became taken by a series of sketches and paintings by a lowell ex-pat now living and working in paris. her "distortion" series of paris is, of course, classically beautiful, and clearly worthy of all the attention she's garnered in her career abroad. but its her take on the city of lowell that i find truly remarkable.

in her words, it's the vibrance of the red brick and the blue sky that set lowell apart from the grays and beiges of paris, and compelled her to try to capture it in oil, but i also think that there's a character to this place that stands comparison with literally anywhere else in the world. linda mccluskey gets it, too. she spent her vacation a year or two ago making pencil sketches of the mill city, and from her drawings and her memories and her heart she gave them life in her studio in paris, and brought them home again for all of us to enjoy.

from today through june 5th, linda is showing her lowell distortion series at the brew'd awakening coffeehaus on market street in beautiful scenic downtown lowell, massachusetts. "central street", i'm proud to say, is mine, but you can have any number of other one-of-a-kind treasures for yourself, if you please, and if they please you.

best of all, i think, is the opportunity to see the original sketches alongside the completed works, too. many have been colored to please the public as stand-alone treasures, (wonderful, and very reasonably priced, too, i might add), but i'll always love mine in its original pencil black and white, just as it's matted and framed on my wall here, beside the final oil. (and kudos to guy lefebvre of the lowell gallery for his gifted eye, and his artist artisan's touch, to make the sketches come alive in their frame--even linda had to remark on how perfect they were that way).

which is all a long-winded way of suggesting that everyone ought to consider popping down to brew'd awakenings on monday evening between 6 and 9pm to meet linda, enjoy the art, and be a part of lowell coming alive.

see you there!

fun with the pawtucket canal

just a little scene from the neighborhood:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGD8VlpViBQ

for those of you who might be curious, our boy in the long blue shorts and sleeveless shirt who chose to climb up on the granite in the middle of the canal did, indeed, get taken away in handcuffs for his efforts, courtesy of a park ranger and a couple of the local constabulary. (those downtown bike patrols will get you every time).

the three hole

readers may recall previous concern expressed here regarding one particular sox' failure to knock in runs, with the example given of leaving 7 on base in one game. well, the record for the sox in that regard stands at 12, and the ignominious mark is now held jointly by trot nixon and one mr. david ortiz.

papi's struggles have officially moved from being merely curious, a la his absence of any home runs this year, to positively alarming. this last performance, going o-fer-seven in one game, while having guys (almost always plural) on base literally every time he came to the plate, is not just a statistical anomaly, but a growing representation of his entire season.

the franconaman is known for his patience in sticking with his starters, as has been observed in the coddling of over $20M of his payroll in two particularly frustrating positions this year, but this is getting to the point where something simply has to be done about it. the absence of a reliable lefty is one issue, observing tito's preference to alternate sides of the plate in the lineup, but having ellsbury, pedroia, youkilis and bay being your 1-4 hitters is pretty formidable, even against righties. having mike lowell protecting your cleanup guy is pretty good, too. and nobody will complain to have the likes of big papi further down the lineup where he just might see a few extra easy pitches to hit. (you know, with guys like youk and mr. jason bay behind you, and dustin and/or jacoby always on base when you come up, you're not going to see a lot of half-hearted offerings).

cmon, terry, you know you can do it.

more credit

he may be challenged to make plays in the field, or drive in many runs for all the times he hits the ball for that matter, but a very nice day at the plate for no-E-today-6. and a good running catch by what would make a decent other half of a decent ballplayer. nice one, jd.

but the bottom line is, youk, we need you back.

the hitters count

oh, this is absolutely the least scientific sampling you're ever going to find, but just let me say this one thing about nancy's first at-bat today:

santana threw three straight balls to start the count. so our boy is sitting 3-0, a hitters count if there ever was one, and all i could think to myself is, "oh, no, he's going to get called out on strikes waiting for the walk that won't come".

sure enough, santana threw three straight strikes, (one of which was fouled off, so at least jd took the bat off his shoulder on one out of the half dozen pitches he saw), the last of which grooved right down the inside part of the plate for the inevitable called strike three. am i the only one who sees this? tito?

i wonder if the book going around the league on nancy is to make sure to let him get ahead in the count so as to induce the easy called-third K. seems to be the surest way to get our boy out, that's for sure.

hey--even E6 can hit this guy, it's not like we're asking the impossible.

is it live, or is it memorex?

you've heard me say it before--tivo is the greatest thing since tv. it lets you watch what you want to watch when you want to watch it. it even gives you control over the commercials. if you haven't had the pleasure of using one, you may not be able to imagine how completely it changes your relationship with your tv. but, trust me, it's profound. (the change, not the tivo--i've not lost my mind completely a la those hulu commercials, at least not yet).

anyway, one of its more convenient conveniences is the way it can even free you from the petty tyrannies of your rooting interest in live sporting events. you can, if you please, get through an entire nfl game in as little as an hour, which can be very convenient if you prefer to spend your sunday midday having an extra beer or two on the field with your soccer buddies, and then wandering in at 2 or 3 to start the 1pm pats game, while still being able to finish watching it "live" as it happens towards 4.

all this occurs to me this morning as i'm managing my melvern taylor jones (i haven't seen 'em in FOREVAH) relative to the bruins/hurricanes game 7 that'll get going after 8 tonight. in this "real world" of ours, i would catch the first MT&TFM set at 7, and then sidle on over to a bar with a tv screen for the game afterwards. simple enough. however, in the tivo world in which i also live, all sorts of options become possible, including watching all melvern's sets in their entirety, followed by driving home to watch all of the game, too. cake and eating--great, right?

here's the rub: we all know that video entertainment requires the suspension of disbelief. our willingness to accept that spock can, indeed, have green blood and incapacitate a person just by pinching their trapezius, is central to our enjoyment of any good star trek movie. for live sporting events, it usually requires little more than resisting to press that fast forward button during anything other than halftime or those ridiculous "the play is under review" delays, but for playoff games, and especially game 7 playoff games, the challenge is far greater.

so it is that i realize this morning that i have a very difficult choice ahead of me.

one way or the other, i'm going to watch every minute of that hockey game.

you can't make this stuff up

dateline san jose: "an office worker cleaning a fridge full of rotten food created a smell so noxious that it sent seven co-workers to the hospital". no lie.

the ap has supplanted the bbc world service as my first stop for news these days, and its stories like this one that have made the difference.

they even had to call in a hazmat team. 28 people were treated for vomiting and nausea. but here's the piece de resistance:

"authorities say the worker who cleaned the fridge didn't need treatment — she can't smell because of allergies".

you just can't make this stuff up.

tivo? live? tivo? live?

playoff time is a very conflicted time for a music fan.

melvern taylor and his fabulous meltones, whom i haven't seen in TOO LONG, are playing the early show at toad on thursday night. the boston bruins, on the verge of playing through to the conference championship, with a game 7 on home ice, are at 8. something's gotta give...

i still don't know what i'm going to do, but you can bet that it's going to include watching every minute of the b's, even if i have to tivo the game and replay the first period after i watch the 2nd and 3rd live.

go b's!

lord byron

back when the b's had only most of a team, they enjoyed a stretch of seasons with a pretty good goaltender by the name of byron dafoe. aptly nicknamed "lord byron", he was actually born in england, and his mother was a big fan of the poet, so, hence, the first name. anyway, my favorite byron dafoe story is of him having a fight, in his WHL days with the portland winter hawks, with another minor league goaltender by the name of olaf kolzig. (yes, that olaf kolzig, starting goalie for the german national ice hockey team and nhl veteran's veteran). so, as we were saying, ten years later, after having become fast friends and best men at each other's weddings, the two of them found themselves at opposite ends of the rink during a bruins / capitals game when a full-on brawl broke out between all 10 of the skaters on the ice. laughing, the two of them dropped their gloves and masks and skated to center ice where they playfully traded punches so as to complete the tableau. only in ice hockey...

so, back to the point:

today, the bruins have ALL of a team. tim thomas is in the running for the vezina trophy, and he and the b's defense sport the lowest GAA in the league. except for the detroit redwings, no team has scored as many goals, yielding the b's the league's best goal differential, too. and they regularly roll four lines, the members of the fourth of which, like blake wheeler, sport +/- ratings in the stratosphere. (in blake's case, +36, which is unheard of for a rookie, let alone a 4th liner). so claude julien enjoys an embarrassment of riches when he fills out his roster card, and we see hockey around here like we haven't seen in over 30 years.

the past two must-win games, claude julien has sat his prize rookie, mr. wheeler, and opted for another hidden gem among the b's roster, byron bitz. (all hail lord byron). one of the more impressive physical specimens in the league, byron is a solid 6-5, and i'm guessing somewhat north of his advertised playing weight of 215 pounds. this guy can HIT. and he can skate. and he can get himself into the corners and into the tougher parts of the ice where a team has to go if it wants to win this time of year. what an eloquent statement about the bruin's team depth that this is the kind of guy they can call up when milan lucic sits for a suspension (hey, habs folks, how's the golf coming along?) and when it's clear that the team needs a spark to start playing again the way it knows it should.

last night, making passes out of his own end to spring teammates, and winning pucks in the offensive zone to set them up in position to score, and then skating to the very edge of the crease and refusing to be budged out of it so that the shot can't be stopped, (how do you like THEM apples, jussi?), byron bitz was my first star of the game. it's an extremely hard choice to make, since patrice bergeron had a MONSTER of a contest and shone as the top centerman on both sides of the ice, and milan lucic was HUGE everywhere he went, including skating through all five canes defenders and dishing a perfect assist to marc savard, but the nod for me has to go to bitz for everything he did last night to spur his team on to victory.

it's all on the line for game 7 back at the garden on thursday, and you know byron is going to be there, and that's a very, very nice feeling to have as a fan.

go bruins!!!

tip o' the cap

JD! nice dinger! in a close game no less! and that single in the top of the 9th was an even better hit, and even bigger kudos for that.

julie! E6! so far, on the season, we're at 2 RBI, and 2 errors--way to go. (not).

and lets also just say that batting lugo and ortiz back to back is the dominican donut, and its clear that mr jason bay likes to have guys on before he lights it up. hurry up and get well soon, dustin and youk. we miss you.

canada's heartache

b's-canes, caps-pens and wings-ducks make little difference to a canadian hockey fan (canadian hockey fans are NOT the same as canadien hockey fans) compared to their sense of national frustration that there hasn't been a canadian stanley cup champion since 1993. in fact, except for the four straight years the islanders won it between '80 and '83, you'd have to go back prior to 1941 to find a stretch as long as three years when a canadian team didn't win the cup. and we're now at sixteen years, and counting. imagine a canadian baseball team winning the world series. now imagine them doing it sixteen years in a row. and then you'll begin to imagine the heartache of having to watch the vancouver canucks fade from this year's stanley cup tournament for your average great white norther.

however, for anyone not living in canada, it's not hard to love what's going on in chicago these days, where the blackhawks (last seen with the cup in '61) have turned on an entire city with their youthful exuberance and just-don't-know-better attitude. taking out the favored canucks in six games, they're waiting for the classic showdown with their traditional rivals, the detroit redwings, to materialize. (assuming the ducks can't solve their 3-2 series deficit). i'm a bruins fan to the core, but you know i'm going to be watching every game of THAT series regardless of where my team might be in the mix. it'll make pittsburgh/philly look like junior prom.

ironically, i don't like the blackhawks. nope, not in the days back when bobby orr used to pummel keith magnusen bloody, and not since then, either. dustin byfluglien is a dirty hack, (did you see him whacking luongo in the face with his stick in the crease during the third period tonight???), and the whole undisciplined lot of them can't defend a hockey goal to save their life. oh, but they can score goals. (7 tonight on the way to dumping the 'nucks). i hardly care for the over-hyped redwings either, but that's what will make it such a great series to watch. like the flyers against the penguins, i may not be able to win, but i sure as shootin' can't lose when i'm watching 'em play, since one of the two has to go down to ignominious defeat, while the other will live on to be rooted against once again.

oh, to get a shot at one of the two of them in the finals...

but first things first. gotta take that game in carolina that we bought by losing game 2 in boston. then we gotta roll again on home ice. then, whichever way the caps-pens game 7 goes, we're either going to have to subdue sid the kid, or AO, and that'll be a good challenge for any team.

cup crazy. mm-hmm.

sorry, canada... maybe next year.

southern culture on the skids

in prep for any musical experience, it never hurts to update your familiarity with the music you're likely to hear. kids get this without ever needing to be told, as can be confirmed by passing by any arena parking lot before the show and just listening to what's coming out of the car stereo speakers. i think, however, that some adults lose touch with that part of their being, and it's a definite loss, and not just during the show.

myself, i've been accumulating SCOTS recordings in advance of next week's show, and i have to say i'm one very happy camper. "doublewide and live" is a surfrockabilly bar band guitar lovers paradise, and you can absolutely taste the bud in the longneck bottles you'll be drinking while you're jumping along to it. the fact that it takes just three human beings to make a joyful noise like this is one of the definitive wonders of the world. (jon butcher, we miss you).

it's perhaps even more of a wonder that music and musicians like this aren't taking over the universe, but who am i, with it ringing out of my stereo, and coming soon to a bar room near me, to complain about that?

mothers day

i think i have a pre-conditioned disposition to dislike mothers day. not that i feel that an opportunity to reflect and recognize the supreme selflessness involved in motherhood is a bad thing. but i'm inclined to resist the premise that the best recognition of selflessness is creating a situation where someone's self becomes the focus of the proceedings. either way, suffice it to say that i'm happy that so many of my motherly friends and relatives had good days yesterday. but you know how it is--for a lot of them it could have gone either way.

from a father's perspective (the qualification offered so that all the mothers out there who think i'm full of it can just toss this off as the confused ramblings of someone who doesn't get it) i feel pretty strongly that the best possible "gift" i could ever receive is the unqualified happiness and success of the progeny in whom i've invested so much of myself in procreating and raising. sure, there are moments when it seems that thanks and recognition would feel pretty good, but i'm always struck in those moments by how alien to my feelings of fatherhood that feeling of wanting to feel good through (or because of) my kids really is. (of course, some people might have had kids to create little indentured emotional servants, or perhaps to achieve a vicarious do-over for all the crap they never got right themselves, so their results will, of course, vary). for me, i'm pretty happy if they're happy, ya know?

so my idea of the perfect parents day gift, mothers or fathers, is something that expresses happiness and doesn't really bother with recognition for a parent's contribution towards it, because, after all, the happiness is it's own parental reward.

however, i get the idea that, for some mothers, (and fathers, who knows), it's a bit more basic.

i love you, mom.

shame on us

imagine the national guard, fbi, local police, or any other armed force for that matter, deploying en masse here in america. not so far-fetched--it happens all too frequently. it's also not uncommon for civilian casualties to ensue. (vicki weaver falling to a federal government sniper's bullet, and victoria snelgrove to a local policeman's supposedly "non-lethal" projectile, are only a couple of the better-publicized incidents that spring immediately to mind).

almost without exception, public opinion here in the us quickly shifts to the victims in these cases, and we are extremely hard on our armed responders for any perceived excess or irresponsible force. we understand the importance and sanctity of civilian life, ("we the people" is our most fundamental tenet), and we certainly refuse to have it taken lightly.

so it is this morning that i'm sickened to read once again of our armed forces' "accidental" taking of afghani civilian lives. the "official" us government party line is all about the taliban taking "human shields", as if this somehow sufficiently explains what our forces have done. but put american faces on those "human shields", place them at ruby ridge, or in the crowd outside a world series celebration, and tell me if for one nanosecond we would cut any slack whatsoever to the commanders who ran the operations, or any individuals who were careless in their use of lethal force. we would demand accountability. as americans, we MUST demand accountability.

in the case of the undetermined number of afghani innocents (some say 160+, though we of course swear it couldn't possibly be that many) hamid karzai has some extreme and extremely eloquent words: "we cannot justify in any manner, for whatever number of taliban, for whatever number of significantly important terrorists, the accidental or otherwise loss of civilians."

to me, if i were to substitue "weather underground" or "aryan nation" or name your violent american extremist group for "taliban", and "american citizens" for "citizens", and read the sentence again, it would not seem out of place here in this land that i love, or even overseas where our good men and women of our armed forces struggle every day to protect us all. (captain phillips would likely agree they do a pretty damn good job most days and in most places). but why and how our government can advise us to essentially sit by and let these particular atrocities go when the people involved are citizens of any other nation, is beyond me.

if we were truly the nation we aspire to be, we would be the first and most vocal defenders of those innocents, not the last.

shame on us.

better late than never

louis caldera just resigned as head of the white house military office. no explanation as to why it took him weeks to figure out what was glaringly obvious from the moment the planes flew over lower manhattan. he offered some doubletalk about not being able to effectively run the office because of the bad press... you know, some people just don't get it.

i still think pretty poorly of obama for not firing him on the spot.

fan fiction

the new star trek movie is mighty fine, and i'll resist mightily to hint/spoil some of the more noteworthy plot twisteds. (i'd say "twists", but "twisted" is a better way to put it, so there you have it). it's as if jj abrams understands that there's no way to compete with the original, so he instead opts to pay it a heartfelt homage, and further emphasize his appreciation by taking some personal liberties with the canon.

ok, spoiler ahead--i can't resist.

no, i'm not going to give away specifics, but i will say that the alternate-future paradox of a good time travel story is well leveraged here, and i'm very happy in the way that it is. if your personal suspicions about the characters are realized here, you'll get the benefit of a huge AHA! moment and "told you so" smugness, but even if they're not, i'm betting you'll enjoy the head trip anyway. and, the best news is that abrams is free via this convention to take his story into its alternate future without being hidebound to plotlines already straightjacketed by our experiences of previous tellings. it's an opportunity to boldly go where no one has gone before, and i'm very much looking forward to the trip.

of course, it doesn't hurt that the enterprise hurtling across the screen at warp speed is doing so in images 60 feet high, with the temper-pedic theater seat physically rumbling to go along with it. (IMAX is AWESOME). folks who don't get why art film NEEDS this sort of thing are all the poorer for it. it's not supposed to be emotionally dense. it's supposed to elevate your heart rate and satisfy a much more primal part of your being.

trek in IMAX does that. chip in the extra two bucks and see for yourself. (seriously, for about $2 more than a run-of-the-mill theater seat, you can have something truly remarkable).

you can still go to that truffaut retrospective down at the art house later--i won't tell 'em where you spent your friday night.