Trees, Fallen

All of the icons of my Dallas youth are gone. Now it seems like those that were part of my young adult life are vanishing too.

When I returned to the Dallas area after college, the punk clubs I used to frequent were long shuttered. And the downtown area where they were once located had transformed from an "Escape From New York" wasteland into an acceptable nightclub district where you could get a drink, see a band and not have to standoff with a pack of skinheads on the way back to your car.

A big sign post that the district, known as Deep Ellum (lingo that dates back to the 1920's when the area was named that by black blues musicians), had truely turned around was the opening of Trees in 1990. Trees --- named that after the big support beams in the middle of the building which resembled real trees --- was an old store front shop built around 1910 that was perfect for a medium sized concert venue. It had a stage that backed up to a large closing metal door that faced the street. And back in the day, the door was left open and the band of the night would blast its music down Elm Street, setting the mood for the evening. There were small balconies that surrounded the stage that provided a great sight line to the stage and an easy way to escape the crowd below, which sometimes reached up to 900 people. The bar was set way way back from the stage and you didn't have to hear knucklehead screaming for a Miller Lite competing with the band on stage. Best of all, the air conditioning at Trees worked --- well most of the time --- a huge improvement from the mid 1980's punk clubs like The Twilite Room, where you were lucky if the electricty worked at all.

Over the years, most of the bands I was passionate about played at Trees. The first show I remember seeing there was The Connells, around 1991, but I could have seen someone there before that. I missed the Nirvana show there, just when "Smells Like Teen Spirit" got big. And that's just as well because Kurt Cobain was all messed up on cough syrup and hit somebody over the head with his guitar.

However, most of the shows I saw at Trees were highly civilized affairs. They were usually events I'd marked on my calendar months ahead of time in ink pin. Most of the Britpop bands I'd grew so infatuated with played Trees. Super Furry Animals, Blur, Idlewild, The Charlatans and some unknown band called Oasis have all played Trees. I've seen them all there (except Oasis --- they're a bunch of bastards.) The bands always behaved themselves, so did the crowds, and usually everybody always had a good time. And it was at Trees where I first learned I was getting a little old for rock & roll. I took Will to see Gomez play a scorching set at Trees the year before he left to live in Colorado. Will lived about three blocks behind the club in a swank new urban batchelor apartment and had never heard Gomez before. About 8 songs into the set, Will turned to me and said: "You know, this band is great. But it's 11:45 p.m. and I've got to go to work tomorrow morning." I did too, so we both left Trees like a couple of responsible working joes, instead of a couple of music rebels.

Trees is closing for good on January 2. Like John's Cafe, which I've written about before, it's a sad occurance. The owners of Trees are in bankruptcy and are facing a lawsuit at another one of their clubs in which a patron was attacked by a skinhead associate (everyone thought the white power crowd had moved on long ago) after an Old 97's show.

But really, nightclubs, music venues and restaurants aren't the most stable of business. So 15 years is a good run for Trees. I'll remember the place fondly, if for no other reason than I got to see a lot of great music played there without having a guitar smashed over my head.

Death Smell Revisited

I came to the conclusion long ago that I will never know as much stuff as my Dad.

Although I consume information like a sponge and read and write news all day long, my brain still can't match my Dad's. He has an engineer's brain and I have the lesser, discount journalist brain. There's no comparison --- he looks at the world a different way than I do. He understands exactly how every objects operates, the sceince of force and response and theories of hydraulics and pneumatics. I, on the other hand, can write a complete sentence. That's about the extent of my cranial abilities.

For months, I've been struggling with the occasional mystery death smell in my house. Random animals seem to be dying somewhere in secluded areas of my home. And then they have the audacity to smell really really bad after they die.

So Christmas Day, my immediately family comes over to death smell central to celebrate and open presents. After that was done, my Dad and I were outside the house talking about general stuff. He looks up and asks me if I have chimney caps on the house. I say, why yes, there's one on the front chimney. Then he asks about the other chimney. For those of you who are unfamiliar with old houses, most old houses that have a fireplace will have a second chimney that is not connected to a fireplace. That chimney was usually used as the exhaust vent for the kitchen stove. So I look at what once was the stove exhaust chimney on my house, and sure enough it doesn't appear to have a chimney cap. Chimney caps have a single purpose, preventing critters from getting into your chimney to either nest --- or in the case of my house, die. The stove exhaust chimney in my house is located right next to the staircase in my house. That's where the last death smell came from. And it's started smelling again. I'm sure a squirell or a roof rat fell 70 feet into the chimney, couldn't get out, and is now stinking up the place.

It's time to call the chimney cap installation man.

Thanks Dad.

Rock or Cruise?

Yesterday, I plopped down the cash to take a cruise with the lovely Karen. I've come around on cruises as a form of vacation and entertainment, even though it's really not a very cool or rock and roll thing to do. There's really little adventure in it, although it is fairly relaxing and offers the opportunity to eat your weight in food. So hours after I'd made the financial commitment for the February non-refundable departure, I realized the week I chose was also the week that Nada Surf and Supergrass play in Dallas on separate nights. Damnit! All is not lost though. I'll be back in town in plenty of time to see the Britpop genius of Supergrass. There's no chance to see the other band though as I'll be surfing across the ocean when they play.

Toy Shopping

I've found that when purchasing a gift for a six-year-old nephew, it's best just to pick out a toy I'd like to play with. I dominate at picking out toys for kids because I still remember the basic rules of what was fun as a kid. If the toy flies or drives, it's fun. But if the toy has the ability to leave a large bloody welt, it's really fun.

At Target, I again renewed my search for the favorite toy of my childhood --- the plastic water rocket. You filled the red plastic rocket halfway with tap water, put a bicycle pump thing on the bottom, pumped it up and let it go. The rocket would then take off going hundreds of feet in the air, making a cool blasting sound and leaving a trail of water behind. Inevitably, after growing bored of shooting the water rocket up in the air, I'd be tempted to shoot it at other kids. But because the rocket was made of plastic, after it nosedived into the concrete street one too many times, it would shatter and become useless as a weapon of mass destruction. That was the only thing that saved that little punk Ricky Kinch who lived down the street from getting a red plastic shoulder fired water rocket square between the shoulder blades.

But Target did have the 2005 version of the water rocket. Because the toy industry is now regulated by some federal agency aimed at making toys more safe and less fun, the new rocket has a big ridiculous foam pad on the end of it. And it now has been modified where it only uses air --- not water, which was half the fun. I bought it anyway. Maybe my nephew can figure out a way to use this toy in such a way to assualt other neighborhood kids before the toy industry in 2025 makes this product even safer.

We're Too Idiotic for Democracy

A couple of nights ago, I was at a Christmas party and was forced into a conversation with a person who either is or was an elected official. The person was regailing me with his tale of jury duty. Of course, the story is always the same --- how the crafty human got out of jury duty by making some grand pronouncement about the defendant. This human says he was sent to a criminal court where the lawyers asked potential jurors if they had any preconcieved notions about the guilt of the defendant. Human decides to tell everybody in the court "Well, a grand jury indicted him didn't they?" Genius response human. You're an elected official who is supposed to know how our system of democracy works. People in the United States are innocent until proven guilty. Or maybe you forgot what you learned in 10th Grade civics class. I have a suspicion that human is of the same political persuasion as troubled former House majority lead Tom DeLay. So I wonder if he supports convicting DeLay because, you know, a grand jury indicted him?

But besides all of that, why are people so adament about getting out of jury duty and bitching about it like it's major surgery? I can understand if you're an independent trucker who loses money if he's off a day. But spare office workers who get paid a salary while at jury duty complain just as loud. Jury duty is your chance to see cops and robber drama play out before your very eyes. It's a chance to see the little guy sue a massive corporation that harmed him. And if people really hate courts so much, why is every other popular show on television a Law & Order or The Practice spinoff?

Sometimes I Just Don't Get It

I like to think that I'm as open to new music and artists as most people. My theory is you never know where you'll find your next favorite band, so it's better to listen to a lot of unfamiliar music. But sometimes, the next big thing leaves me perplexed.

M.I.A., a London based electronica/hip hopish person is getting a ton of play on the indie internet and satellite stations I listen to. M.I.A. is a girl, and an attractive one that that. Her given name is Maya somethingorother and she's based in London but is of Sri Lankan descent. Her family fled the very poor country because of the Tamil rebellion, so her back story is really interesting. And she has been hyped big time in the British indie press and even had a long feature on her done on NPR earlier this year. But her music, to be frank, is grating and annoying. She chants rather than sings in this sort of Jamaican dancehall pattern, but in a weird 15-year-old girl voice (I think she's in her 20s). There's little emotion or even posturing in this music. And her backing tracks are the standard and uninteresting booms and bumps you'd hear in standard issue third-world pop music. I seem to be the only one who doesn't get her allure because her songs are getting increasing play and recognition. I wish M.I.A. well though. I think Bjork is annoying as hell too, but she's done well for herself without my support.

Farewell Familiar Cafe

John's Cafe has been on Lower Greenville Avenue for 33 years. I've been going there for about 10 of those years, usually on Saturdays, sometimes on Sundays and occassionally both. The food is great. But better, it is a small place where I always feel comfortable. You get the coffee yourself, pour some for the others who are around you and pick up your food when John --- a Greek immigrant who could barely speak any English when he opened the place --- booms out your order number in his massive baritone voice.

When I started going to John's in 1996, it was frequented by old guys who liked to talk politics, hipsters who were just finishing off their nights, urban pioneers and air conditioning repair men. While the loyal clientele still attend John's, the customers have gentrified like the neighborhood around it. Now, the expensive European cars and new SUVs outnumber the pickup trucks in the parking lot.

John's Cafe's days are numbered as he has to move out at the end of the month because a real estate developer is knocking down the 1911 storefront building to put up a bank. Just behind John's, all of the sagging but restorable Craftsman bungalow houses have already been knocked down and replaced by soaring two story brick monstrosities.

John couldn't find an affordable location to move to in the same neighborhood, so he's moving his cafe way north where the suburbs of Dallas start.

As I was eating a piece of bacon and reading the paper, I had to scoot down at the communal table that runs the length of the cafe to make way for whitey-white bread family and their three small children. There were several other SUV families in the booths that line the long window of the cafe. It was as if John's had already moved to the suburbs. I knew I had just eaten my last breakfast there.

Brain Burn

There's some long lasting damage that can come from listening to mix tapes over and over again, especially the unstable ones I made myself in college. I'd throw all kinds of crap together with no flow whatsoever. All that mattered was that I liked the song. I was definitely not an artiste of this medium, like Rob, the fictional main character in Nick Hornby's great book High Fidelity, or the very real Rob Minter, who handed more than my share of great mix tapes.

Here's a real good example of what I'm talking about: Every time I hear the very hard rocking "Birth, School, Work, Death" by The Godfathers, my brain is automatically conditioned to want to hear Bryan Ferry's very smooth, cool, and utterly non-rocking "Bette noir" next. Thanks for that psychological damage, dumb homemade 1989 mix tape.

3-D Pub Crawlers

"I'm tellin' ya. It's like the beer is coming right at me."

Gangsta, Gangsta

Speaking of cable programming, there was a bit of confluence on one cable movie channel last night. At the very moment that Stanley "Tookie" Williams was meeting his maker, one station was showing "Colors".

Colors, if you'll remember, was a Robert Duvall/Sean Penn movie that came out in 1988 that was quite controversial. It was the first to center around the L.A. gang culture and got the world familiar with the rivalry between The Bloods, and The Crips --- a gang that Tookie co-founded decades ago. And the movie, for some reason, sparked violence among knuckleheads that watched it in the theaters.

Watching it 17 years later, the movie shows its age terribly. For starters, one of the actors playing a feared Crips gang members is Damon Wayans, a onetime funny comedian who now makes his living in failed family-oriented sit coms. The other is the great Don Cheadle, who needs an academy award fo Hotel Rwanda. But you would have never have known where Cheadle's career was headed by watching him playing a stereotypical drive-by shooting thug.

Most of the very staged gang violence in this fild seems to be nothing but a vehicle for Ice-T's terrible song "Colors." I like hip hop and gangsta rap, but nobody ever did gangsta rap phonier than Ice-T. Ice was known later for the song Cop Killer, but his choice of genres was so misguided, he should have called the song career killer. Ice-T wisely gave up rap for --- what else? --- network television cop dramas.

So watching celebrities and anti-death penalty activists call for Gov. Schwartzenegger to commute Tookie's death sentence rang just as false as Colors does today. Tookie deserved credit for doing something with the rest of his life by writing children's books telling them that gangs are bad. But he was still an ex-gang leader who killed four people and set up a machine that's killed hundreds more. That gets you the death penalty in this country. And if the people want to spare Tookie, they need to get rid of the death penalty laws all together. But writing "Bad Stuff 'Bout Gangs" is not reason enough to give him a pass just as casting Damon Wayons in "The Tookie Story" would also be a bad call.

Anti Family

As a child, I never remember my parents getting upset about what I watched on television. And believe me, young john_clarke watched tons and tons of television that was wholly without merit --- Benny Hill, Three Stooges, and Monty Python, which occasionally featured the naked woman.

Of course in 1980, you couldn't get cable in my neighborhood. So I didn't get to see the fledgling HBO run "The Warriors" at midnight which I would have stayed up to watch for sure. My parents would probably be more upset that I stayed up late than watched the comic violence of "The Riffs" and that dude clinking coke bottles together to taunt another gang member.

I naturally gravitate towards watching all the stuff the modern parent doesn't want their kids to see. If the show has nakedness and violence, I'm going to watch it. The cable programers love guys like me because I willing lay down $100 for their product every month. They know that if there was no nudity or violence, I'd just watch network. Kids, to my knowlege, never have enough money from throwing papers to pay a cable bill, so most programing isn't aimed at them. So why should the world revolve around kids?

Now the FCC and Congress is making noises about censoring cable television because broke no job having kids are exposed to too much nudity and violence. As a reaction, cable television companies are now offering up a "family package" where cable subscribers can opt for a family friendly lineup, whatever the hell that means. The family groups aren't satisifed because the proposed family packages include "ABC Family, which shows PG-13 movies, Cartoon Network, which has late-night adult-themed cartoons, and TBS, which shows edited reruns of the HBO hit "Sex and the City" according to an article on Salon. What? No ABC Family on the family package?

It seems to me that the Family Rights/Anti-Fun Coalition doesn't really care that some kid may catch a PG-13 Harry Potter movie on ABC Family. They want to make sure that nobody can watch that movie either, including john_clarke, the long suffering cable bill payer who just wants to see people curse and get naked on his television in peace.

Finished

Five years ago today, I ran Dallas' White Rock Marathon. The marathon probably wasn't as memorable as the training schedule I went through for the year leading up to the race. I learned the following things while logging some 8,500 miles of running:

1. Running long distances on a regular basis causes the average human to lose a whole lot of weight. I dropped 30 pounds --- weight I really couldn't spare to lose at the time.

2. By the time you work yourself up to 15 miles, chafing becomes a big issue. Vasiline must be applied to various friction points on the body and tape on the nipples become neccesary. Otherwise, you'll become a bloody mess.

3. After pushing the hell out of yourself, cranking up your heart rate and sweating profusely, you get rewarded with a nice buzz after stopping.

4. Your mind will perform all kinds of acrobatics when you pound along a city street for mile after mile. To keep focused on something other than how much your lungs hurt, you start thinking of stupid random things, like the name of the girl who wet her pants during story time in the 3rd Grade. Her name was Lee Anne.

5. There are two kind of marathoners --- those who become addicted to them and those who will never do one again.

I was 33 years old when I ran the marathon. I can't even remember why I decided to do it. It had nothing to do with being 33, proving my manliness, or accomplishing some cliched life goal. It just seemed like something I could do. And the marathon actually came in handy. I went through a really bad breakup during the training. Beating the crap out of my body made the searing mental pain seem a little more managable.

I finished a fairly respectable 4 hours and 18 minutes, not bad for a slow white guy.

I've never run another marathon. I've done some long runs here and there, as recently as a few months ago. But I fear I've probably done some damage to my knees because of the obsessive training I endulged in five years ago.

I watched participants in the 2005 White Rock Marathon run past my house this morning. I felt nothing.

Courtney Taylor-Taylor: Rock Star

I guess it's just unavoidable that some pop music I like is produced by phony bastards. Take Dandy Warhols front man Courtney Taylor-Taylor. I've been enchanted by the Dandy Warhols since their second album came out in 1997. I think they're quite talented. But, after reading this interview with Courtney Taylor-Taylor (he changed his name because some music critic pronounced his name wrong during an interview, and I guess if you repeat your very complicated name, people are bound to get it right) I want to punch him.

"I don't give a fuck about rock stars," he announces from the comfort of a Texas hotel room in an interview with Westword. "You mean like David Lee Roth or Gene Simmons? I…don't…care." He's more receptive to David Bowie, but "Bowie isn't a rock star. I don't know that he's ever rocked hard in his life. He's more of an artist, and that's what we are. I didn't grow up playing guitar and shouting, 'I want to be a rock star!' We could just as easily have become painters." He adds, "For some reason, we come across as a rock band, but we certainly feel like something else."

Yeah, Courtney, you could just have easily been a painter. You know, something cool, like a rock star. Ooops, you already are one.

Nobody ever called Pablo Picasso an asshole. But I'll call Courtney that.

Weather's ganging up on me

I'm at work today, one of the few and proud. This means I broke my weather rule --- bad weather means no work, no matter what the boss says. Dallas streets are indeed icy today. But they're real passable. However, the idiot factor is the wildcard for danger on a day like this. My honest belief is that the average American is borderline retarded. This belief accounts for the sucess of many network television shows and the election of many politicians. And it must account for the various accidents which happened on my way to work. Some dude smashed his car through a fence near my house and another person flipped his Lincoln over, according to my boss. I tood the same route as the crashed motorists. However, I drove slow and kept an eye out for slippery conditions as far as I could see. I had no problems. But this is not what people who star in their own movie do. They're oblivious to their surroundings and can't understand why the world doesn't react to their needs ---- namely blasting along at 50 mph while talking on their cell phones, ice be damned. The ice isn't much of threat to me. Retards with driver's license are.

Mountain Malfunction

I should be in Colorado right now. But I'm not because I'm a wimp. Or I'm overly cautious. Or I heeded my gut. Whatever. I'm not there right now because of snow --- precisely the reason I wanted to go there in the first place. And to laugh my ass off by being in the same room with Will.

First an explanation. For those not familiar with American geography, the state of Colorado is cut, roughly, in half. To the left is the Rocky Mountains. To the right is flat prairie land that is in distinguishable from the famously flat Kansas. Denver strattles the flat and the mountainous part. If you drive from Texas to Denver, you drive mostly in the flat part, with some exceptions. And it usually doesn't snow that much in the flat part --- the snow usually stays in the mountains. So, as usual, I checked the weather before setting off in my very weather unstable Mustang. And a huge cold front was hitting Denver just as I was about to leave. And, damnit, it was carrying snow from the mountains way deep into the flat part. Most of it was only about an inch deep, but that's just enough snow to send my Mustang skidding into on coming traffic. I even got up at 4 a.m. to see if snow was messing up the flat part. It was.

One really cool thing about the Colorado highway department is they have cameras along the highway. You log onto their website and see live pictures of what shape the roads are in. This photo is off the Eisenhower tunnel. You have to go through this tunnel to get to the ski areas --- which is where I was headed. And if the Eisenhower tunnel is frosty, you're in huge trouble. It was. So here I sit, hoping it'll thaw out by March for spring skiing when wimps like me get brave enough to drive up a mountain.