I left the river out, and I don't know why.
So it turns out that a lot of people still have AAA. Mea culpa, Henshaw, for my ignorance a few days ago.

Please accept, as a token of my apology, these simple sentiments from Mr. Joe Cocker.

Against Music Snobbery
(Part 34 of an unintentional, growing series in which Alice rails against one of the great pet-peeves in her pantheon, as part of a larger, futile attempt to fight back the twin fears that 1. she herself is a music snob and 2. real music snobs may look down on her.)

Look, now.
Now; the split second, even, before you get all raised-eyesbrowsy on me. Where did you first hear that band that you’re shocked that I’ve never heard of? That band you’ve been listening to for a whole six weeks, six months, six years now, already? Were you in their basement at the moment they realized brilliance and were you the only one there to recognize it?

Or were you helped along?

Because if you bought their record, it was probably because a friend told you to, or else you heard it playing at someone else’s house and liked it, or you listened to it at a record store, or you read about it online, or you heard about it on All Things Considered (in which case you’ll have a whole busload and half of music snobs laughing at you), or maybe your ex introduced you to a whole new musical world you had no inkling of before you walked into that party and started talking, or else your older sister used to listen to it in her bedroom at night and shut the door on you, and you’d put your ear to the floor, in the dusty yellow shag, there, to hear its vibrations.

If any of the above is true, you have not your own genius, but that of your friends and family and acquaintances to thank. And yes, I’ll say “genius,” because music catching fire inside our brains and bodies feels like nothing but.

And because it’s a better thing to be a bit grateful. It’s a better thing that we all go out in the world and thank whomever it was who first played for us Gang of Four or Shostakovich, Fela Kuti or The Velvet Underground, Joni Mitchell or Lady Day. Thank your old friend now. Send him an email and tell him about the excellent Tom Waits show you just came home from, how breathless and happy you feel, and tell him how you realized all at once, that you never would have been there in that wonderful, boney balcony seat, your spine rattling shivers through your skin, if it hadn’t been for him, way back forever ago, in his parents’ kitchen, sticking Rain Dogs in the CD player and playing it so loud his own dogs howled outside. Thank him for making you listen to it again and again till you stopped saying it was weird.

It’s a better thing to thank these people, even if they’re people who don’t expect your thanks, and I’ll say especially in these cases, better to thank them, than to thank yourself. Because if you pat your own back, that's totally a difficult and physically awkward gesture, man. It pulls your shoulder out of joint all weird. And then you'll secretly know you’re lying. And your mind turns you cagey and craven to prove it. And then, eventually, we have on our hands, way too many solitary, striving, and in the end, lonely, assholes.
And that’s not what music’s About, Charlie Brown.

Maybe you heard this music at a show the group played. Maybe you wandered into there by yourself, or your girlfriend’s band opened up and so you had to do the polite thing and watch their set because they watched your girlfriend’s, even though you’re tired and your feet hurt from this awful concrete floor for four goddamned hours. You stay and watch and listen and suddenly, the room gets that electric feeling. No one there knew this would happen, but it’s happening. This music is chastening the crowd. This crowd is moved. Or maybe there is no crowd. Maybe it’s a different night, one in which it really is only, just you and the performer. And somehow, you experience brilliance.

You’re still not so great. You’re lucky. We’re all humbled by the music itself. Thank the sound.


(Thanks to my colleague in Atlanta, as this diatribe was sparked, in part, by our ten-second phone exchange today in which we argued about nerds versus cool people and I was at a complete loss. Now I'm not.)

So, it’s the end of my last June in Beachtown, and I find myself thinking increasingly about Next Year at This Time, because: 1. I am just that laissez faire and fancy free, and 2. it’s the middle of the damn night, a late night I didn’t expect to even be awake to see, several hours ago, when I was sitting on the couch, munching on popcorn and watching Annie Hall, a movie in which I can see both the innovations of the period and this horrid datedness.

So it's that perplexing duality that I'll blame. Let's blame Annie Hall, you and me. Together. What the hell.

But anyway, now, somehow, it’s one in the damn morning. And I just ran across this thing I wrote back in March, when I was visiting Atlanta, you know, that town I spent years trying to escape:

“Driving along in one’s car, seeing someone talking on her cell phone one car over, you notice her nodding vigorously, listening. Seeing this, you are certain: you feel closer to this stranger-woman than the person on the other end of the phoneline could possibly be capable of feeling.”

Who wants to go back to this world, right? Not you. Not when your shoulder blades have finally unclenched, when you finally live somewhere with clean! air!, where it doesn’t automatically take 20 minutes to reach any given destination, where this annoying term: “roadrage,” has faded to the status of Archaic Fake Word invented by television pundits in the early nineties and then quickly forgotten about by real people.

Why would you ever go back there? I mean, by choice?
Oh, Henshaw. I’ll explain in the morning. I really, really should go to bed, now.

Kidnapped by Cowboys, (that's where I been.)

Or: New Mexico!
has a superabundance of…


1. Motels.
Especially Albuquerque. Albuquerque is at least half hotels. Or else motels. All of which ask you if you have triple-A when you call to request their rates. As a child, my favorite thing about AAA were the Triptiks my parents would order, those three-ring-bound portions of full-color maps, your route highlighted in friendly, blazing yellow. Ah, Triptiks, mapquest has nothing on ye. But also: Who the hell has triple A anymore?

Central Avenue, home to the resident Hipster/ Expensive as Hell/Then Sketchy district©, also used to be part of Route 66, so it’s lined with a gazillion old motels with in a parade of colors and lights from the ‘50s and ‘60s. So many of them, we stopped pointing out places like the Gung Ho Inn after awhile. We stayed at the Hiway House our first night. The Hiway House has an amazing vintage sign, cheap rates and lacks room-controlled air conditioning.

2. Nice people.
In the tiny, Old-Westy burg of Las Vegas, NM (not to be confused with the monstrosity: this Las Vegas was the Official Film Site of Portions of Movies of 2007, including No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood.): We soak in hot springs, breathing in sulfur and some insanely sweet flower, eyes closed, breathing fast to abide the heat, listening as the crickets and cicadas start up. As we towel off and put on tennis shoes, our muscles lazy and langourous, a man, apparently a local gentleman, arrives. “Did you enjoy the springs?” he asks eagerly, setting down his own towel, and we nod like crazy. “Good,” he says, with seemingly real satisfaction. As we leave, he tosses out a genial “Careful out on the roads, tonight. A lot of locos out there!”

We arrive back in town to find that all the restaurants have closed. Sheepishly approach a man and woman smoking cigarettes outside the tattoo place. When we tell them our plight, they’re immediately outright apologetic that nearly all the town restaurants are closed. We soon find outselves waited upon by the Most Conscientious Teenage Boy Server ever to work a Pizza Hut.

Over the next two days, same deal in the very nice and crazy-picturesque towns of Madrid and Cedar Crest (where we stay in a hostel with goats. Not in the same room. With the goats. Not each other. Never mind.) But arriving in Albuquerque, the biggest, sprawlingest city since Atlanta, our luck's sure to run out, right? No. Enter hardcore night at local bar, where we talk to the nicest-ever metal drummer for a good 20 minutes. He turns out to be from a town near Pittsburgh, though.


3. Food. That's really. Really, Really good.
(With portions like the very desert horizon.)

Frontier Restaurant (Central Ave. Albuquerque)
It’s shaped like a barn, a yellow barn, with willy-nilly annexed rooms, each decked out in splashy western paintings of John Wayne, Noble Horses, Noble Natives and even a Noble Native Elvis (but no Noble Elvis Riding Horse or even Noble Horse Elvis.) When you get to the order window, the cashier, who’s really nice on both occasions you go, is wearing one of those old-style paper diner hats. But beyond all this: green chile stew. It is cheap. It is addictive. It arrives with fresh-baked, warm, thick flour tortillas and honey. How to convince the owners to move the Frontier to the east coast so I can eat this every week? I mean, despite the whole, um, southwest cuisine thing. And the however-many-years-in-this-exact-spot tradition-thing.


Olympia Cafe. (Um, also Central Ave. Albuquerque)
Oh. My god. So, first: I grew up in Pittsburgh, which, among other things, means this: I have consumed more than my earthly share of Greek dressing, spanikopita and gyros.

(Flashback! To Three Rivers Arts Festival, circa ’85: Mother of a Really Good Childhood friend flaunting her NPR-worthy pronunciation abilities--in a town whose local dialect proscribes that you order “JIE-roes.” In stage-voice, to cashier at stand: “We’ll have three ghhhhheeeeeros, please!” Full, gutteral thrust that caused Maria Hinojosa, wherever she was at that moment, to bow her head in amazement and envy. End flashback.)

The term “succulent” is overused, but what else have we got? I mean, without it, where would Lynn Rossetto Kasper be, week after blessed week, right? But still, let’s see. Our alternatives, according to Mister Oxford, are: “juicy, moist, luscious, soft, tender; choice, mouthwatering, appetizing, tasty, delicious; [informal] scrumptious.”
Yeah.

Our two plates of gyro meat, pork souvlaki, stewed potatoes and accompanying Close Encounters-like dollops of tzadziki sauce put us in instant twin foodrapture paroxyms. Meaning: We ceased both speech and eye-contact as we ate, save for the occasional helpless lifts of the eyebrow, pregnant with meaning, that meaning being, “Oh, mygoodLordinHeaven.”
We fed.

And yeah, to be fair: this was a post-campout meal: First non-energy bar or raisin-based meal of a day whose previous morning and afternoon had seen us hiking the astonishing cliffs of Chaco Canyon. (I mean "astonishing" like beautiful, not like we were using crampons and rope or anything.)

True. But also the best post-camping meal I’ve ever consumed. And, I should note, that I, who was raised in a childhood twistedly based on Clean Plate Philosophy, couldn’t finish this portion, it was so generous, and so rich.

I’d have shared it with you, though, Henshaw, had you come. Next time, maybe.


(Not noted: delirious/delicious cookout grub, above. Nor nearly equally delicious pre-grub high-gravity beer of which author took two sips at high-altitude after full day of desert hiking and got immediately giggly and ridiculous from, but still managed to snap this Bon Appetit-worthy photo.)

Hi, Henshaw.
I’m not dead. Just at the start of a very active summer here in Beachtown. Some highlights.

This week, I am busybusybusy, pitching stories to magazines and radio shows and interviewing embalmers and such for The Book. It feels good to be so busy.


Much more fun.
I took a break from all this on Tuesday to drive all the way over the Chapel Hill to see X, one of my favorite bands ever, ever, ever. It was a reunion tour without that irritating reunion tour feel. Really, it was tight and energized and lurvely.

I don’t have any friends here in Beachtown who like X, so I went alone, but that fact actually felt like a perk. The drive was great and it was great too, to revel in my nerdy fandom rather than having to explain anything to anyone or worry about someone else’s good time. Instead, it was me and the rest of the crowd, mostly male, future versions of me: 50-ish dudes in black-rimmed glasses who had come alone, a few with girlfriends/wives, and at least one with a little girl who was probably eight or nine.

It was glorious. The goofy quirk being, of course, Billy Zoom, the band’s platinum blonde legendary guitarist. One of my favorite things about Billy Zoom is that, in reaction to the bullshit GuitarFace that a lot of '70s musicians were known for, he plays--these uniquely difficult and weird guitar parts--without ever looking at his hands, and just standing stock-still, grinning.

He's also known for turning this grin on individuals in the crowd. Staring, especially, at ladies. (And it's not just me.)

I’d somehow forgotten this. Maybe it was because last time I saw X I was clearly there with a boyfriend and this time around, I was clearly there sola.

I’d parked myself between Exene and John Doe, but Billy Zoom, down at the other end of the stage there at the Cradle, took a turn gazing into the eyes of every chica near the front of the stage, leering/grinning and grinning/leering. And part of me’s all like, you know: we were all standing there staring at him; why shouldn’t he have a turn? But then part of me feels fucking odd when I’m dancing my arse off like a fool and singing along with Exene and she’s got her eyes squeezed shut into her mic a foot in front of me, but Billy Zoom’s closer, leaning over the monitor singing straight back at me with a trace of that trademark mockery of his. I want to be like, Dude, Exene, do something about this. But even punk rock royalty can do nothing about other punk rock royalty.
And all worth it. And all worth it.



Tourist in your (Ghost)town.
Last weekend, Marshall visited so we decided to be tourists.
We went to the beach, something I never do here by myself, and we went on a walking ghost tour. The confusingly pirate-y dressed tour guide started off the tour by warning us that, in addition to ghost stories, there would also be some history. For this, she apologized. It was unavoidable.

This was especially funny because we had decided on the ghost tour mainly because we couldn’t afford any of the town’s fancy historical tours, most of which require eclectic transportation forms, like horse-drawn carriages, houseboats and double-decker busses. Mostly, I guess, because it’s old people who actually go for this sort of entertainment, not kids under 40 like me.
At any rate, learning about the history of Beachtown through half-bullshat stories was our only way.

Some fact-ishes we picked up: 1. A dueling ground here in town left disgruntled ghosts right and left and 2. Our wonder-of-1970s-archetecture library is also haunted by a racist asshole from the 1800s.

One awesome woman in our tour group (not me) kept things lively by frequently shouting things like, “I want to stay one night in that haunted house! I would pay them money!” Another awesome woman (not not me) kept things lively by remarking loudly, “That’s true!” when the pirate-guide announced that, in addition to housing a lively ghost, one particular house on the tour is also the home of a very friendly cat. This house was the house next door to the house where I started out here in Beachtown, see. So I knew.

Marshall said it sounded like maybe I was a plant on the tour. Oh, well. It was a nice cat. No lie.