tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-61533642012-01-20T04:28:48.833-05:00Musings From Suburbia - Tedium's Foremost FrontierStay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.comBlogger1391100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-91784101845121841452012-01-16T13:21:00.000-05:002012-01-16T13:21:04.276-05:00

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Soon-to-be-missed Melody. Pic: one photographaday.com Not that anyone seems to have very high expectations any more when they verbally churn out the statutory New Year’s wishes, but this one’s already off to a bad start with the news that 34-year-old Melody Records in DC’s Dupont Circle will close before the end of the month. Since Tower and Olsson’s closed down, Melody – one of the few

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-54404134899910583062011-12-20T10:42:00.000-05:002012-01-06T08:57:26.197-05:00

Here is a list of the ten best books published in the year 2011. Admittedly, there are a few thousand others I didn’t get round to, so you’ll just have to trust me that these ten are the best. Though I’m happy to entertain alternative views. Water matters 10. Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind by Brian Fagan (Bloomsbury Press) What it says on the bottle – an accessible account of how

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This year I return to the tried and trusted formula of the meaninglessly numbered list. The reason? I looked at last year’s entry to see which album I’d chosen as my number one, and was disappointed to find I hadn’t bothered. Too lazy, I reckon, and it wasn’t a particularly good year. This year, though, I was spoilt for choice, and so (already thrilled readers, musicians and music biz executives)

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"Mind if I turn it down a tad, honey?" What’s wrong with this picture? Last night I was ironing and listening to music when my 15-year-old daughter came into the room and said, “Dad, can you please turn it down? I’m trying to study.” For Christ's sake, girl, dump those books and get down to the golf course with a bottle of vodka in a brown paper bag, some cigarettes, and a boy to snog. Kids

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-27412476648366414472011-11-01T16:02:00.000-05:002011-12-20T10:51:45.722-05:00

Topsy? You in there? This story in the Manchester Evening News, about Oldham Athletic's mascot Chaddy the Owl getting thumped by one of his own fans, reminded me of my own short story The Man In The Mascot. Except that Chaddy's inner soul is a little more forgiving than the vodka-swilling narrator inside Topsy the Toucan. "I don't even want him banned as we need as many fans as we can get,

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-28377707505146964012011-10-10T13:18:00.000-05:002011-12-20T10:51:56.980-05:00

The ball was placed therein, 5 times There are days when you have some news, but no one to tell it to. It may not be very important news, but you want to get it off your chest. I have this particular urge to share after I’ve played football, and my team has won, and I’ve scored. The other night I played in an eight-a-side game in an outdoor league. It was one of those dark, sodden,

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Straight-legged Deborah We went to watch the still magnificent Blondie last night at the spanking new Fillmore concert venue just up the road in Silver Spring. Now that I’ve heard Deborah Harry sing Heart Of Glass live, I can die happy. But that’s not the only reason I can head for dead with a smile on my wrinkling face. For the first time in my life, someone truly appreciated the strange

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J. Safran Foer (right) in happier times. Back in the 1970s, I was a keen reader of the weekly football comic Roy of the Rovers. Roy Race, the free-scoring striker with Melchester Rovers, was also the editor. Well, why not, it was named after him. It’s nothing Oprah hasn’t capitalised on. Except he wasn’t really the editor, because he didn’t exist. But he signed his editorial column every

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Naked, and empty too I’ve always liked Nick Hornby as a bloke ever since reading an interview where he said that after he became famous he started getting calls from other famous people inviting him round to dinner just because he was now famous. His response to this was pretty much, What the fuck? I don’t even know you. Though presumably he wanted to avoid going to dinner parties too, which

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Come Saturday, poetry will save civilization I recently had the luxury of a week doing nothing on Bethany Beach but catching up on some rapidly yellowing paperbacks. Holidays mean taking books by authors I’ve read easily in the past, rather than anything remotely challenging like Volume 2 of ‘Das Kapital’. This year I packed Ian McEwan, Nick Hornby and Jonathan Safran Foer, and I got through

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Jesus Christ, what a smile You can sense when someone’s got Jesus by the way they smile at you. When I walked into the dentist’s waiting room yesterday I could tell that the girl sitting on my left had got Jesus, because she opened her lips and flashed her teeth at me in a way that could only mean one thing. I want to save you. And at the very least I want to talk about Jesus. I checked in

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-23457137102455169752011-06-16T09:12:00.001-05:002011-08-05T10:43:46.969-05:00

In an ideal world... When I die and go to hell, I will find myself sitting at a table in a club house surrounded by golfers. For eternity I will have to overhear their detailed conversations about the 18 holes they have just played. “Did you see that shot I made up the slope with my six iron approaching the green at the 14th?” Every time I plead with Satan to be stretched out on a rack and have

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Ever had one of these? No? Not very important then, are you, eh? EH! After my previous adventures in failed freeloading, I was on the guest list at the 9:30 Club again last week when Death Cab For Cutie came to DC. Again it was sold out, so again I knew this was my only way into the concert. Again, the girl behind the glass screen couldn’t find my name on the guest list, and started flapping

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Travels through space, but can it cut grass? This week’s episode of Dr Who showed the Doctor in a sentient rapport with his Tardis – an upright, oblong, time- and space-travelling police box that turns out to have feelings. I can relate to this, as I have a similar relationship with my lawn mower. When we moved here a dozen years ago, we were advised that American suburbanites get Central

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Devil's Butt Affliction? Something like that. A long, long time ago, indie-band names were cutting edge. There was danger, death and implied intoxication in a group's name, with the odd unusual plant or creature thrown in, and sometimes an obscure, pseudo-intellectual literary or film reference. Colours added colour, even though that colour was usually black or white. Puns generally worked. 

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Lincolnshire potato does impression of Royal Knob Today’s parade in London of chinless parasites witlessly waving at streets lined with gormless, flag-toting celebrants thriving on subservience to a dynastic vacuum brings to mind many fond memories of past occasions when the populace of Britain cheerfully stopped work for a day in favour of raising a toast to the future marital fuck-ups of

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-90925323195756483062011-04-23T13:16:00.002-05:002011-08-05T10:45:54.587-05:00

Blue Orchids: back when noisy bands were good Last night I was at the downstairs room in the Black Cat watching the Crystal Stilts, a droning five-piece from Brooklyn (almost every male between the age of 18 and 35 who lives in Brooklyn is a member of a droning five-piece garage pop band), when there was almost a fight right behind me. Unusual, because indie-kids (and indie-grownups) in their

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Not a bad record, every 20 years or so... I like ironing clothes, preferably when the house is empty so that I can cogitate while playing records without people stomping past the turntable and making the needle jump. The other day I took out a Dave Kusworth & The Bounty Hunters LP, ‘Wives, Weddings and Roses,’ recorded in late 1987. I vaguely remembered most of it, but thought that I probably

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-61408907502149202882011-04-15T11:57:00.002-05:002011-04-29T08:16:41.178-05:00

Litter, dropped by scum Last weekend, the family donned a thin cloak of social responsibility and set out for the nearby creek to help with the annual trash clean-up of the Potomac River tributaries. According to our local weekly rag, we were part of an effort that picked out 556 tires, 83,900 “beverage containers”, and almost 15,000 plastic bags. My picture shows a blockage behind a fallen

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Hands in the air! But for the love of God, why? When house music emerged and bloomed, I was living in London and in my early 20s, so I should have been something of a wild raver. But I already felt too old for such a scene, and I refused to spend the little spare money I had on the drugs that seemed necessary to make the music sound something more than a producer pissing about with a few

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White people burdened with turning brown My family thinks that I’m a snob about mass tourism, but they’re wrong. It’s just one of those things  – like fat-necked bigots, hysterical touchline soccer moms, gun-waving pyschotic killers or, worst of all, fans of the Irish popular music combo known as Ucunting2 – that I’d rather avoid if at all possible. Unfortunately, it’s not always possible.

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-2147256276297624872011-03-07T16:57:00.002-05:002011-03-12T07:12:59.704-05:00

Bordering on bankrupt, financially and culturally Since writing last year about my revived vinyl fetish, I’ve undergone something of a conversion to modern mores. As with most human endeavours, my incentives were driven by raw economics. A year ago, if people were bemused that I still bought music in a shop, it had no effect on me. But someone telling me about legalsounds.com - where any song

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More things you must have. “Here, your favourite magazine,” Mrs. Pop said as she thrust the latest glistering incarnation of the Financial Times supplement How To Spend It towards my shaking hands. Some months I toss it disdainfully into the recycling pile. Other months, I can’t resist. The desire to feel morally superior to the overwhelmingly wealthy is just too great. That’s right, this

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Charred times. Another example of what our energy supplier Pepco calls a “winter storm event” knocked out our power for four days last week. A letter in today’s Washington Post thanks Pepco for adding to its customers’ sense of certainty by ensuring that lengthy power outages have become as much of a sure thing as death and taxes. Another indirect consequence was that our house almost burnt

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Is this what you were after? The technical masterminds behind Blogger at some point over the past few years added all kinds of tricks and buttons that allow you to see how many people actually read this nonsense, and where they’re from. For some reason, outside of the US and the UK, I have a lot of readers in Denmark, even though I don’t know a soul who lives there. Maybe they’ve heard that

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Jesus gets ready for Easter Unlike leaf blowers, dog turd and piano recitals, this is one suburban tradition that I love – January comes and goes, and still there are people who have not bothered to take down their festive decorations. In every neighbourhood, there will be at least one garden with a sad, deflated Santa, a defiantly glowing reindeer, or a crib scene missing Jesus, who has long

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Bonnie Prince B and his funny folk. The following are in no particular order, a glance at previous years’ lists having confirmed that allocating a number next to any one album results in an arbitrary ranking of no long term significance. Fewer ‘reviews’ this year too, as finding fresh rhetorical ways to convey a pleasure in what are often the same bands (reflecting an increasingly static taste)

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Some books,  earlier today. I used to read nothing but novels. Then I veered in the other direction, until I realised that much as I enjoyed biographies and history books, I could never remember much about them once I’d finished. So now I mostly read fiction again, and the non-fiction I pick up is only stuff that I really, really want to read. And that’s why this list is shorter than the

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Not yet a Kindle convert I’m usually about three years behind current releases, but due to a more conscious effort to read The New York Times Book Review (rather than putting it in a pile to be ‘read later’ - another phrase for ‘recycling’), and a couple of nice presents, I somehow managed to read a lot of novels this year that actually were published in 2010. Before this thrilling news

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Boys are easily pleased. Can you ever take the little boy out of the middle-aged man? Would you ever want to? Last night, with the kids in bed and Mrs. Pop out on the lash with her mates (at least that’s what she told me), I did what I always do when left to my own devices and reverted to a much younger version of myself. I found a live stream online of the second test match from Adelaide, and

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I often complain that suburbia’s too quiet, even though the human desire for silence and inertia is the main reason that suburbia even exists. And just because it’s quite, that doesn’t mean it’s peaceful. In autumn especially, semi-urban dwellers seem able to tolerate a profoundly jarring kind of noise annoyance – the almost ever-present, soul-gnawing monotone of the leaf blower. Yesterday, on a

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-18437861136586329452010-11-05T11:07:00.005-05:002011-01-07T13:58:18.188-05:00

David Narzico, by an amateur photographer I'm reading Kristin Hersh’s memoir Rat Girl, which is just the book to take you back to 1985 in Rhode Island and Boston, inside the head of a funny, sassy, precocious teenager diagnosed as bipolar and writing some of that decade’s most thrilling, frightening music. It’s also prompted me to unearth the photograph above, my one and only experience of

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Slithers of plastic in cardboard sleeves. Mmmm... It’s not often that middle-aged bores welcome prevailing trends, and when we do they’re usually revivalist in nature. That’s why the comeback of vinyl is to me the perfect atavistic riposte to my daughters’ way of collecting music by pressing a single button on a computer. After years of watching my favourite record and second hand shops close

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-59701837286882131892010-09-13T20:36:00.001-05:002011-01-07T13:58:59.743-05:00

Readers who can be bothered to scroll down the page will find an entry from June telling of my heroic endeavours to defend football referees via a letter to The Washington Post. Back in March, I also wrote about the trials of referees like myself dealing with loud-mouthed parents and coaches who love to combine a borderline unhinged psychosis with an ignorance of the game’s laws. You may notice

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-38986421134283710862010-09-10T10:34:00.002-05:002011-01-07T13:59:29.392-05:00

The last time I wrote about the How To Spend It supplement in Mrs. Pop’s Financial Times, I made a predictable assault on the easy target of high-end luxury goods. Clearly the editors read this blog, as they seem to have stopped aiming the glossy sheet merely at multi-millionaires, and have factored in the ridiculously rich as well. Several items featured in today’s edition will cost you less

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-67015850004185643872010-09-03T09:13:00.000-05:002010-09-03T09:13:52.096-05:00

Where John Cleese answers the phone Mrs. Pop phoned our favourite Tex-Mex restaurant the other night, Uncle Julio’s Rio Grande, to ask for a table. They don’t take reservations, but you can phone before you set out and put your name down to avoid waiting around outside on the pavement. It was seven o, clock, and she asked if we could get a table at 7.45. No, she was told, you have to phone

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Stodge for the English soul... I spent six weeks this summer in my native England, but feel that the visit can best be summed up by one lunch time in a café in Settle, where I ordered steak and kidney pie with chips and gravy. Not the kind of food you’d want on a summer’s day, you might think, but this was an English summer’s day - outside it was chilly and raining. Okay, so not the sort of

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I had a letter to the Washington Post published yesterday, defending football referees from the hysteria of coaches and temporarily deranged parents. I had two separate editors contact me to check that I was the real author of the letter, and a third to ask me if I was okay with the edited version. I asked them kindly to split the final sentence into two, as I had in the original version, and

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Many creatures have crossed my path while out jogging over the past few years. Dozens of chipmunks, deer, red foxes, rabbits and a handful of black rat snakes. While out running in Florida I even stepped over a dead aardvark. But today was the best. A barred owl flew just a few feet in front of me, then landed on a tree branch and stared, radiating cool wisdom. I stared back, while jogging

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Smiling Herbert, on the left He’s a bit of a herbert,” we used to say of a certain type of young male back in the 80s. It’s hard to qualify exactly what we meant, but perhaps the best way to sum him up was ‘good-natured moron’. Someone not too bright, but harmless. You’d see one in every gang of skinheads. The band of knuckle-walkers would be trying to look all hard and terrifying, and right

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You see them only at weekends. After the effort of suspending all residue of wit, spontaneity and character from Monday to Friday in order to blend in with their fellow faceless professionals at the next desk, the white suburban male is sufficiently sapped of energy that he can only succumb to the worst manifestation of sartorial defeat. And so, while cowed into carrying out the chores his wife

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That's the title of just one of the truist tracks on the incredibly limited new Dark-Eyed Juncoes CD 'Love To Make You Cry', released this week on the world's most unmarketed label, Paper Wasp Recordings. It also includes the group's first ever song in German, three brain-bending instrumentals, and a few unseemly mental leftovers channelled through randomly fiddled-with synthesisers. Four tracks

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-2002530034735702052010-04-27T08:17:00.002-05:002010-11-05T15:51:18.433-05:00

Friend of Bandy It’s a bad job when your friends bring out a book and you can’t even get around to plugging it on your blog. Not that a mention on here has been historically proven as a shuttle ride to the bestseller list. But still, Small Town England by Tim Bradford (published by Ebury Press earlier this month) is not only a book by my oldest mate, it’s principally a memoir about the time we

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-88138397693298300692010-04-13T08:05:00.000-05:002010-04-13T08:05:49.470-05:00

I had an inner dialogue slamming backwards and forwards in my head on Friday night as I watched The Wedding Present perform their ‘Bizarro’ album at The Black Cat. The music was all buzz-frenetic brilliance, but it wasn’t quite distracting enough to take my mind off the half dozen or so men who formed a midlife mosh-pit just in front of me.Voice 1: Oh Christ, look at those sad bastards in their

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-77735794032072126782010-04-03T10:44:00.000-05:002010-04-03T10:44:06.461-05:00

I mooched over to my compost bin yesterday with the idea of starting to think about fertilising my herb garden. There growing inside was a proud, solitary daffodil. It would be an insult to nature's cycles to disturb it, and so I have the perfect excuse not to do any outside work until its bloom has wilted. Viva spring.

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-48326733698986014212010-04-01T16:54:00.003-05:002010-04-01T17:07:20.367-05:00

I regularly portray our neighbourhood as an existential vacuum bereft of all human activity, life and character, but I’m really just trying to keep property prices high by hiding the fact that it’s a criminal hot-bed. Here's the truth - last night I accidentally left my car open, and what do you know, some audacious larcenist took advantage during the night and pilfered my supply of quarters from

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-58772169651150805712010-03-29T12:27:00.000-05:002010-03-29T12:27:45.624-05:00

Swearing at football on the television from the safety of your armchair is all very well, but there’s no substitute for absorbing a little abuse yourself and getting some cardiovascular exercise at the same time. To this end, I recently took the necessary exam, and am now qualified to blow loudly on a whistle and give a stiff-arm salute without fear that my German in-laws will think I’m taking

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-26840929115125848352010-03-25T07:54:00.001-05:002010-03-25T08:08:05.565-05:00

You scratch my blog, I’ll scratch your yours – over at Sweet Sinner Gwen’s (nice title – sounds like a Marc Almond song), I’m engaged in a discussion with my newest follower (I now have a total of three, which means my goal of making this blog Bigger Than Jesus still has a way to go) about monogamy, infidelity and open marriages. It’s far more interesting than the mundane bitching you’ll find on

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-47811486306089242862010-03-22T10:47:00.008-05:002010-03-25T07:41:01.950-05:00

The first thing some people do in the morning is swear at an alarm clock, but at least you can quickly silence the beep, and it only happens once a day. I reserve my slander for the telephone, because the chances of it being someone I actually want to speak to are around one in twenty. It’s rarely, or never, a publisher offering me a six-figure, five-book contract, or a magazine editor proposing

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-2596038047705934502010-02-25T06:10:00.005-05:002010-03-25T07:39:34.506-05:00

Bethesda’s Organic To Go sandwich and salad bar only has one toilet, but the management has devised an ingenious way to make sure you don’t stay in there too long. Hardly had I locked the door one lunch time this week when the nasally strains of Liam Gallagher began to sing ‘Wonderwall’, prompting me to ignore the graffiti (‘Organic girls do it naturally’), stop plucking my eyebrows, and get out

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-90881837033968516222010-02-22T13:02:00.006-05:002010-03-25T07:42:28.138-05:00

I was told at Sunday School that “God is everywhere”, and though I stopped believing that at around the same time I stopped believing anything else I was told, I learnt on a short trip to the US South last week where the phrase came from. There’s just no escaping the entity down there. “They’re commandments, not suggestions!” a reproachful sign in Mount Airy, NC, informed us. This was a sign at a

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-2628843482520004422010-02-08T08:16:00.004-05:002010-02-08T08:23:57.538-05:00

We had three feet of snow at the weekend, and the power was knocked out for two days, but that didn’t stop me from having my ritual English breakfast with bacon, eggs and hand made Lincolnshire sausages. Not to be denied my weekly quota of artery-choking lard, I cleared a tunnel to the grill, liberated it from the snow, lit summer’s leftover coals, and sent the aroma of sage, garlic and

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-80325063081037318232010-02-02T12:10:00.008-05:002010-03-25T07:56:38.977-05:00

There are not a lot of things I’ve stuck at consistently down the years aside from drinking, swearing at other road-users, and maintaining a hardcore belief in the superiority of my musical taste. But I’ve been a proud user of Lea & Perrins’ Worcestershire Sauce ever since my Mum suggested over breakfast one morning a few decades back that I split a Lincolnshire sausage down the middle and

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-84604806612811493312010-01-05T13:09:00.011-05:002010-01-05T14:07:50.479-05:00

“What were you doing in Italy?” the accusatory customs officer at Boston Logan International Airport asked me last night as I re-entered the United States. I could have given any one of three answers.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />Answer one: “Ah, you know, I just thought I’d stop off there for a few hours to see the Colosseum, take in a Serie A game

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-82710336465473661852009-12-14T09:54:00.004-05:002009-12-14T10:02:13.450-05:00

Do you ever worry that you might one day become fabulously rich, and then have no idea what to spend all your money on? If so, help is available. The Financial Times publishes a glossy supplement every month just in the time for the weekend with the no-holds barred title How To Spend It. Here are some of the highlights of last Friday’s issue. A set of six Fortnum & Mason Royal Velvet crackers for

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-79973284977451912982009-12-08T09:22:00.006-05:002010-12-20T10:31:05.901-05:00

It’s already that time of year when music executives gather restlessly around a wireless, clutching semi-unplugged bottles of chilled Bollinger and waiting for the BBC World Service to announce this blog’s top 30 albums of the year. Setting the benchmark for middle-ageing indie-farts since 2004, my carefully researched list - a more or less arbitrary ranking of most of the albums that one

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-82008205779157724922009-12-01T10:20:00.006-05:002009-12-08T09:23:09.784-05:00

Last night I went to my first $50 concert. I went of my own free will, so I only have myself to blame. I knew in advance that the venue was the DAR Constitution Hall, a seats-only theatre that would be better suited to basketball games. I also knew that The Pixies would be playing their 1989 album ‘Doolittle,’ from start to finish in correct running order. And I could probably have guessed that

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-50369558580344459932009-11-11T10:27:00.004-05:002009-12-08T09:23:45.234-05:00

The Lord keeps working in mysterious ways, meaning that despite my review of Shelley Shepard Gray’s Christian-inspirational novel ‘Hidden’ last year, Avon Inspire, an imprint of Harper Collins, continues to dubiously honour me with its publications. The latest two arrivals are by Lori Copeland, who in 1995 “sensed that God was calling her to use her gift of writing to honour Him”. This is how I

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-7062439299607438072009-10-30T12:25:00.008-05:002010-11-29T17:38:19.686-05:00

If you wanted to put a positive spin on a trip to the mall, you could point out that it’s full of lovely young women flashing you friendly smiles. But don’t delude yourself that they’re up for the kind of water closet cubicle fun that the seasonally employed, nihilistic main character of ‘Bad Santa’ indulged in with middle-aged housewives during his lunch break. These are commercial smiles aimed

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-89603099100630916312009-10-19T09:43:00.007-05:002009-12-08T09:25:29.826-05:00

Extreme right US radio host Rush Limbaugh was last week pushed out of a prospective ownership group aiming to buy National Football League team the St. Louis Rams. Several black players, recalling Limbaugh’s hateful on-air race-related outbursts, said they’d never sign for a team that counted him as a part-owner. Other team owners, none of them exactly renowned for their social radicalism,

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-43853972368019640112009-09-04T15:07:00.004-05:002009-12-08T09:26:54.052-05:00

You’re not going to believe this, but popping out to lunch for a bagel in suburbia can be pretty dangerous after all. Why, just today I nearly got killed for it.I was waiting for the pedestrian light at a seven-lane highway to cross to Einstein’s Bagels, one of only three eateries in our neighbourhood within easy walking distance. When the light turns, you have about ten seconds to scurry across

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-74491188251160388362009-08-21T16:46:00.006-05:002009-12-08T09:27:27.906-05:00

Mrs. Indie-Pop was doing something you never ought to do in suburbia – she was walking. Not that it’s dangerous in our neighborhood, unless stepping in dog shit or being overcome by depression at the sight of four SUVs in a single driveway is your idea of dangerous. It’s just something that’s seen as strange. For years my neighbours would stop and insist on offering me a lift if they saw me out

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-77177704597379656702009-07-02T17:09:00.004-05:002009-12-08T09:28:43.569-05:00

Driving for long stretches around the East Midlands the past few days, I’ve noticed the principle characteristics of the English landscape remain reassuringly unchanged.First, because England is top of its World Cup qualifying group, England jerseys are massively back in vogue, especially among fat blokes with short hair. The red away shirt, the ‘lucky’ one England was wearing when it won the

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-72344836973788644862009-06-28T18:31:00.007-05:002009-12-08T09:29:14.576-05:00

This blog is taking a temporary break from suburban Maryland and returning to its rural Lincolnshire roots. We are staying in a village where you can walk to three pubs within five minutes, and buy sausage and bacon from the butcher’s at 7.30am on the stroll home from picking up a newspaper. My cell phone is (thankfully) getting no signal, so I’m enjoying the retro thrill of using an old red

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-74720152159687868682009-06-08T16:15:00.010-05:002009-06-08T16:32:49.459-05:00

The first law of capitalism: you are the customer, therefore you are an idiot.In this obviously fictional sketch, there is an Idiot Customer, several Clueless Employees, and a Faceless Corporation, let’s call it AT&T. The Idiot Customer has a broken Sony Ericsson mobile phone, his second in two weeks, and is back in the AT&T shop where he bought it. Twice he has plugged it into the re-charger

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-10942171271513350492009-06-04T08:18:00.004-05:002009-06-04T08:25:12.260-05:00

Paper Wasp Recordings, the southern Maryland-based, lo-fi micro-label for exiled British indie-pop bands, today releases a new EP by acoustic soul anti-stars Medlock. It’s previewed in its entirety here. What good fortune that the internet exists, allowing us to claim an international audience without ever having to leave the house to tour the world’s major cities, or trek to the post office with

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-12659346958514313592009-05-20T13:13:00.004-05:002009-05-20T13:19:13.015-05:00

It’s not hard to baffle your neighbours in suburbia. Last night the woman next door seemed perplexed that I was leaving the house after 8pm, just as she was coming home with her kids. In suburbia, people only leave the house to go to work, take the kids to school, go to their kids’ sports games, or head out for brunch on Mother’s Day. None of these activities happen after 8pm.“I’m going to see

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-2584159753819609022009-04-27T15:39:00.003-05:002009-04-27T15:46:47.325-05:00

In the best election news since Obama’s win, the Republican Party candidate for the upcoming special election to the vacant seat on Montgomery County Council on May 19 is Robin Ficker (read all about him at Fickipedia). In the half-German speaking Indie-Pop household this is a special cause for celebration – Ficker in German means ‘fucker’. This translates into hours of family fun every time we

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-29668391676344172792009-04-07T09:42:00.011-05:002009-04-08T08:55:03.386-05:00

Men of my age, sinking with a half-smile into a stupor of anonymity, tend to pronounce on the evils of the world from the safety of our four secure walls, more poorly informed informed than ever before. Told that we should “get out more”, we venture through the front door for some real life action, only to scuttle home shaking our heads, wishing we’d saved ourselves the price of a ticket to see

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-47770590529178052612009-03-07T18:47:00.008-05:002009-03-08T07:26:22.963-05:00

Trying To Get Out More, Part 1. The first in an occasional series in which I leave the house, only to end up annoyed by a fellow human being. The other morning I’d finished up in the gym, but a man perhaps ten years younger than me was blocking access to my locker because he was taking his stuff out of the closet above. No problem, I can wait. Except that he wasn’t really accessing his locker, he

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-9681374442924677282009-03-02T22:17:00.005-05:002009-03-02T22:24:52.486-05:00

Here’s a picture of our guard dog, who sits on the front lawn warning mutts not to squat and void upon our grass, a gift from my family after the trials described in Great Suburban Traditions No. 3 - Dog Crap. Today our passive pet was messed on by the heavens, but at least it’s not as toxic as the excrement from his living, breathing and copiously shitting counterparts who are allowed to drop

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-5309880185395141612009-02-12T11:22:00.005-05:002009-02-12T15:45:25.498-05:00

On Tuesday evenings I drive my daughter and three of her friends to choir practice. As they warm their voices up by talking fast or screaming simultaneously, four 12-year-old girls generate an unbelievable amount of noise, especially within the confines of a Passat. Once I’ve dropped them off, the drive home is a more relaxed, solitary affair, with no chorus of negative comment on my choice of

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-70202907537823318262009-02-09T22:31:00.005-05:002009-02-09T22:40:50.661-05:00

The music industry, barely recovered from a night at the Grams, will be getting drunk again tonight to the sound of the Dark-Eyed Juncoes, one of the 'projects' on my anti-profit micro-label Paper Wasp Recordings. The group has just emerged from a self-imposed break (that is, they were too idle to go on a world tour) to release a new CD, 'Lost At Sea.' Listen to four of the songs here. If you

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-31099632779170063462009-01-22T12:41:00.003-05:002009-01-22T12:55:14.223-05:00

So yesterday was the first full day in Obama’s America, and already I found something to complain about. I expected the day to be perfect, but it wasn’t. It stank of fried chicken.Like all suburban stay-at-homers, my day largely revolves around grasping for a spare moment to sit down with a book and fall asleep. I thought I’d found a 15-minute window at the Caribou Coffee Shop in between shopping

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-56686054531573741442008-12-15T14:20:00.009-05:002010-12-20T10:33:15.929-05:00

The music industry is, as ever, known to be in a state of tension and barely concealed panic in the run-up to the annual Stay At Home Indie-Pop nominations for the year's best music. This year, due to the linguistic recession that has resulted in the chronic global shortage of adjectives, and bearing in mind that there are now approximately 700 blogs to every internet reader, reviews have been

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-31989942005282196272008-11-16T18:50:00.004-05:002008-11-16T18:58:11.617-05:00

At school I learnt the historically dubious claim that during the reign of King Alfred, an Englishman could leave gold jewelry hanging from a tree branch and come back to find it untouched one year later. In Barack Obama’s America, I have discovered, you can do the same with a George Foreman grill leant against the front bumper of a Volkswagen Jetta. Maybe not for a year, but at least for one

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-58326808855198584672008-11-11T09:55:00.006-05:002008-11-11T10:10:43.809-05:00

After whooping it up for a few minutes and dancing around the living room at Obama's victory last Tuesday night, we went out on to the deck to hear how the rest of the neighbourhood was celebrating. Silence. We whooped some more, but there was no response. It was raining."I have to go back in," I said as the historic moment slipped away. "My hearing-aids are starting to get wet." But by next

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-83970904193853864172008-10-31T10:10:00.004-05:002008-10-31T10:16:14.542-05:00

A bloke in Australia is writing a PhD about football, and so naturally he wanted to talk to one of the world's best selling writers of football fiction. He couldn't find one, so he came to me instead. Read my pontificating on the subject at his blog, The Simplest Game.

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-72560477438771563412008-10-24T15:40:00.004-05:002008-10-24T15:45:12.989-05:00

"How are you doing today?”“I’m good, thanks. How about you?”“I’m good too, thank you.” It’s a simple enough exchange, if somewhat moribund, and I’ve had it with thousands, possibly millions, of Americans in the service industry since moving to this country. But the other day at a Safeway in the aesthetically deprived exurbs of Maryland I stumbled across a new variation. The young girl scanning my

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-12694617096468966862008-09-29T21:02:00.005-05:002008-10-26T22:09:08.847-05:00

As your hair recedes and you start to go thin on top, a paradox grows above your brain. The more hair you try to cultivate to conceal the fact that you’re losing it, the less hair you appear to have. The growth only serves to accentuate the parts that are blank. The only solution is to get your hair cut very short. The less hair you have, the less you appear to have less hair.You’d think it

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-66704363428538470772008-09-10T14:07:00.002-05:002008-09-10T14:10:47.443-05:00

The problem with neurosis is that it knows no limits. Find one good reason to worry why you might die tomorrow, and you can quickly find several thousand more. It’s why I never read the ‘Health’ section of the Washington Post. I can’t be bothered to fret that the rare and previously undiagnosed condition striking one in every 500,000 Americans might be out to get me just because I’m sure that I

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-57913839296952946432008-08-04T18:53:00.006-05:002008-12-09T17:17:17.652-05:00

We just tried living in the manner of country squires for a couple of weeks by hiring a house in the middle of an isolated estate in the Scottish Highlands. I tried some of the rural pastimes on offer, like fishing, and was happily rewarded with no success on a loch reportedly brimming with brown trout. Although I’m keen to eat the creatures, I’m too squeamish to smack one on the head, watch it

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-80429022636696198442008-07-16T08:19:00.008-05:002010-11-05T15:37:38.021-05:00

Some aubergines, earlier today This blog is so devoted to the cause of dissecting suburban life that it now takes its holidays in suburbia too. We're presently in an outpost of Dresden in eastern Germany, and there are some interesting contrasts with its typical equivalent in the US. For example, here there are shops, bars, and public transport in all directions – that kind of thing. And

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-58873315683029107552008-07-09T13:48:00.005-05:002008-12-09T17:17:17.949-05:00

My name has somehow landed on the mailing list of the Harper Collins’ imprint Avon Inspire. This means I regularly receive books that publish a line of “inspirational women’s fiction that features that which matters most: family, community, faith, and love.”Aside from the alternative school of thought claiming “that which matters most” also covers, in no particular order, football, sex, music,

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-89263750718308251892008-06-27T10:59:00.003-05:002008-12-09T17:17:18.241-05:00

My next-door neighbours asked me to look after their dog for a couple of days, so last night I took the mutt for a walk at twilight. She’s a malleable black Labrador that jumps back at a rustle in the leaves and runs from runty, yapping curs a quarter of her size. I admire her pacifist leanings in showing no desire to hassle the deer we saw, or the skulking fox in the undergrowth of the nearby

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-57817443748396969232008-06-13T10:05:00.007-05:002008-12-09T17:17:18.790-05:00

Last Saturday night a storm came through our neighbourhood. A huge tree was struck by lightning and landed right next to a house a couple of streets away. The house suffered barely a scratch.Does that make the inhabitants of the house lucky or unlucky? It was good luck that the tree missed their house. But surely it was bad luck that the lightning struck a massive tree right in their garden and

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I can hear you better now thanks to two tiny and extremely expensive devices made by Siemens (see left). I’ve been the proud owner of defective ears all my life, and ever since my Dad first noticed that I would say the phrase, “Eh?” 50 times a day, I’ve been told that I should get some hearing aids. Instead, I’ve spent decades straining to pick up the words of those who mumble or speak in

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I just read Tom Perrotta’s Little Children, a suburban satire about a neighbourhood of unfulfilled soccer moms and their reaction when a convicted sex offender comes out of jail and moves in close by with his mother. It was a good, quick read, if not a memorable one, mainly due to the lack of particularly interesting characters, reflecting as they did the predictable archetypes of the Book Club

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This is why I never leave the house. I just get annoyed by stuff.On Monday afternoon I was walking across Wisconsin Avenue in downtown Bethesda, in order to get from one side of the street to another. Everything was in order – both my legs were working, and the pedestrian light was clearly indicating that now was the time for walkers to make the transition from one footpath to another. Yet I hadn

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-80057428197807740642008-05-06T16:15:00.010-05:002008-12-09T17:17:19.637-05:00

To the left is a photograph of our amazing and magical kitchen bin. Regardless of how much rubbish you put in, it never overflows, at least according to the rest of my family. No matter how full it appears, they claim, if you press your new rubbish in hard enough the bin will miraculously create just enough space to allow you to force the lid back down.Eventually, though, someone comes along who

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-4099448440055819672008-04-28T10:05:00.011-05:002008-12-09T17:17:20.317-05:00

Want to ride a tram in America? There are one or two cities that kept a few lines as tourist attractions, but in Washington DC and its suburbs they axed the entire system in the early 1960s. They must have been slowing down too many senators and congressman as they rushed by car from Capitol Hill to capital whorehouse. But there’s still a way to ride the tram if you know where to look – it’s in a

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Ari Hest and Ingrid Michaelson were heading the bill at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium last night, and although it’s a sit-down theatre with no atmosphere and, even worse, no bar, I’d mercifully been given the night off because the wife and kids were off watching the daughter of some friends take part in an amateur school production in a land far beyond the last metro stop.Yes,

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-61112897266537925712008-04-16T07:59:00.002-05:002008-05-20T09:59:43.562-05:00

Suburbanites are so opposed to being seen on the streets of their neighbourhood that instead of taking their recreational exercise outdoors, they pay for the privilege of going to specially enclosed indoor day camps filled with torture instruments that make them grimace and sweat while at the same time deluding them they’re going to live longer. Otherwise known as the gym.There are certain rules

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-84552917298858863802008-04-07T09:10:00.006-05:002008-12-09T17:17:21.154-05:00

“It’s a squeaky hinge that gets oiled,” was the catchphrase of an Australian girl I used to work with in a London office. When it came to squeaking, she was the queen, and would badger our employment agency for higher wages so often - every week, when she went to pick up her pay - that they would cave in just to get her to shut up and leave. In that respect, her policy worked. (Either that, or

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-48765813011710148462008-04-01T05:59:00.006-05:002008-12-09T17:17:22.145-05:00

‘Tennessee Border’ is the title of a 1947 Red Foley song that contains the memorable line, “I picked her up in my pick-up truck/And she stole this heart of mine.” It also claims to be the birth place of country music. More specifically, the city of Bristol, whose main street is divided by the Virginia-Tennessee state line, claims this title. Not that they’re really making the most out of it, bar

Stay-At-Home Indie-Pophttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08512357220650578961noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6153364.post-78084725400535335622008-03-28T18:13:00.004-05:002008-05-20T10:02:05.844-05:00

A week after the fact, but I wanted to add Day Four of the Nashville trip in tribute to the non-country side of the city’s music scene. Apparently, it comes in after LA and New York in terms of the number of bands looking to make themselves a name, and there are more rock and pop than C&W acts here. Tip to up-and-coming groups: relocate to Murdo, South Dakota to ensure yourself a larger share of

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I was staggering back to my hotel well after 2am on day three when I heard something odd coming from a tree on Church Street – a bird singing. I thought it might be another Nashville downtown gimmick, like the piped country music that seems to come out of the sewers, and the pedestrian crossing beepers, which sound like a sparrow being squeezed to chirp in rhythm. But it was in fact a real live

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Any sceptics who think that soccer will never catch on in the United States should have been at LP Field here last night, when 69,000 flag-wavin’, gun-totin’, neck-wobblin’ home fans shunned college basketball and cruising around town in a pickup truck to pack the stadium and fanatically cheer on the US Under-23 team. Traffic was blocked in the downtown district for hours as the patriotic

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There’s a five-piece band on the tiny stage of the Full Moon Saloon on Broadway, meaning that there are more people in the band than there are in the audience. They seem to be playing power country. That’s not an actual genre, but on the ten-hour drive to Nashville I thought about a few things, and one of those things was that every band in the world should have its own unique category, even if

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