The Vinyl Comeback

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 down one by one, my tender heart is fortified by the sight of the expanding LP sections in the few worthwhile remaining DC area music outlets. These are heavyweight, artfully manufactured items of beauty to be handled like precious antiques. They’re way too dear as well, of course, but you pay for what you value, and they could be just what the surviving emporia need to remain in business.

And so I’m slowly ceasing to buy CDs and switching back to vinyl instead. You get the MP3 download coupon into the bargain, so if you’re really anal, you never have to actually play the LP, you just preserve it. But that’s not right. When records were prematurely written off two decades ago, we purists tediously cited the ritualistic joy of carefully removing the record from its sleeves before executing with immaculate precision the act of dropping the needle on to the opening grooves. Even those of us who’ve developed the shakes find that our hands become miraculously steady when faced with this hushed ceremonial moment.

The Liberation Of Punishment

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 that I never criticised players in all this. That’s because I still step out on to the field to play at weekends, equipped with fading fantasies about the extent of my visibly diminishing footballing capacities. And because, in this role, I can still have the odd problem with a poor referee.

Like yesterday, for example, when I received my first red card in 36 years of playing. I reckon I’ve taken part in maybe 700-800 games without being ordered off the field. I’m overwhelmingly level-headed – if I’m the captain I tend to rush over to a hotspot to calm things down. If I’m not the captain, I’ll stand back with an air of detached superiority, perhaps shaking my head in the manner of one who knows so, so much better.

More Ways To Spend It

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 than four figures (the Gentlemen’s Tonic Mayfair Shaving Set is just £150, for example), and the cost of telling the time is down too – while last December’s featured timepieces showcased a £1.6 million wristwatch from Jaeger-LeCoultre, this month’s Bell & Ross rose gold Power Reserve Watch (on an alligator strap – this watch was hunted) is almost given away at £14,300.

Help for those burdened by cash

But what the September issue lacks in preposterously lavish material goods, it more than makes up for with unblushing pretension. First up is a Q&A interview under the moniker The Aesthete, with literary and talent agent Caroline Michel, whose “clients include Jeanette Winterson and Simon Schama”. Impressed? I was, once I’d googled the latter and found out who he was. You don’t know? He’s a university professor of art history and history, you moron.

What was the last thing that Ms Michel bought and loved? “A pair of early-19th-century French naïve flower paintings, after being driven mad by the desire to own a Van Gogh when I was at the recent exhibition at the Royal Academy.” One does get driven mad by the desire to own a Van Gogh, doesn’t one? Drives one absolutely fucking crazy.

Reality Python

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 half an hour before you want your table. We’re about to set out on our bikes, she said. Could you please just put us down for 7.45? It’s not easy to use a cell phone on a bike. No, it has to be half an hour before. She should call back in 15 minutes.

What about 7.40, asked Mrs. Pop, always keen to compromise (except in the odd domestic matter)? No, it has to be 30 minutes. Okay, she said, if it has to be 30 minutes we’ll go for 7.30 and pedal really hard.

Sorry, said the girl, there are no tables free for 7.30. The earliest I can get you a table is 7.45.

Yes, that will do nicely, thanks.

Half-Arsed England And The Missing Kidney

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 food you’d want on any day if you wanted to live a long and healthy life, but English food has a gray, relentless attraction to those who grew up with it, culinary merits aside. It’s always as bad and as good as you remember.

“How was your food?” asked the polite waiter. “Well, I ate the steak and kidney pie with hope in my heart right up to the very last mouthful, but I never found the kidney,” I replied. This was a big mistake. In England, when invited to pass an opinion on something, you must be too polite to tell the truth. Only afterwards do you bellyache, at length but safely out of earshot. It’s not the done thing to cause offence. “That’ll be six pounds 50,” was the indignant response. No urgent enquiries to the chef asking why the hell he’d served up a steak and kidney pie with no kidney. No generous discount or free dessert. Not that you’d want an English dessert, even for free. Dumping jam sponge with custard on top of steak and kidney pie with chips and gravy (even allowing for the absent kidney) would be the gastric equivalent of the bombing of Dresden.

I left the café feeling bad for having complained about the missing kidney. I was the intrusive foreigner who’d offended local sensibilities. In America when you complain, there’s usually compensation if you bitch long and hard enough. In England, after decades of mediocre government, the forgotten imperialists expect everything to be half-arsed. We stayed in a faulty cottage which had the most rudimentary equipment – blunt kitchen knives, cupboards with no backboards, power cuts when you used too many electrical items at once, loose shelves, a stereo and a TV remote control that didn’t work, and not one but two semi-functional barbeques. There was so much to complain about we didn’t know where to start, so we didn’t bother. Didn’t want to make a fuss. After a day or two you get used to it.

On our second day there we watched the half-arsed England football team lose to Germany in the World Cup, looking like they really couldn’t be bothered to play at all. Then the half-arsed weather set in – cool days, cold nights, a surplus of grey clouds, and the inevitable downpour on the day we took the kids to Blackpool. Another day I was on a train from London to Leeds and missed my connection to Settle by a minute. “When’s the next train?” I asked. Three and a half hours. “Why didn’t you hold the connection?” Different train companies, grunted the man at the Leeds station information desk, adding by way of further explanation, “Privatisation.” Even our excuses for things not working are half-arsed.

Since coming back to America, people have been asking me, “Did you have a good summer in England?” It was fantastic, I assure them. Because I’m not one to complain.

Dear Washington Post...

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 received a one sentence reply: It shall be done. It’s reassuring to know there are still thorough, conscientious sub-editors around in the age of quick-fire Twitter garbage.

The gap between the original article I was responding to and the printing of my letter was a good old-fashioned 12 days. I took the time to craft a considered response, and the paper took the time to weigh up whether or not it was worth publishing. In pre-internet times, anyone wishing to disagree with me would have had to make the same effort. But now, thanks to the internet, we have that worldwide forum for the witless, the ‘Comments’ box, which allows a revered organ such as the Post to boast the following on its website:

“I find most ref’s to be self-grandiose – egotistical – self proclaimed infallible social rejects. Most can’t take any criticism on or off the field (in the game or in their personal lives). They think they can do no wrong and burst into fits of outrage and indignation when their authority is questioned. Thank god for the sports that have instant replay – look at the NFL and how Ref’s have gone from GOD’S to HUMAN. Nope don’t see too many shouting matches at the big league level anymore, DO YAH?”

That’s from Post registered user kparc, a slouching 58-year-old male from Leesburg, Virginia, who intellectually smites referees the world over with this searing psychological assessment. Kparc has now had his say, and millions of self-proclaimed infallible social rejects (come on, you know who you are) should cower and note how he brilliantly used BLOCK CAPS to get his point across and win the argument. That kparc has not yet worked out after 58 years how to write plurals without a possessive apostrophe should in no way detract from his credibility as a social commentator. Thank the GOD’S for the DEMOCRACY of the web, EH?

Owl Of Delight

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 stupidly on the spot. I haven’t seen an owl in the wild since I was 12 years old, and never from this close up.

A sparrow, likely protecting its young, tried to mob the owl, but it was dismissed with a perfunctory flap of a wing. I kept staring, but didn’t want to outstay my welcome. So I turned my back on the bird and continued running, shouting out loud, “Wow! Fuck! Wow!” Occasionally, even a 44-year-old house-dad gets to burst out through his wrinkled, weary cynicism and enjoy a moment of wide-eyed astonishment. Magnificent.

Save The Herbert

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 in their midst, spoiling everything, would be the grinning idiot. He was only in it for the larf, and if all his mates had been mods or stamp collectors or members of the Egerton Forstal Croquet Club, that’s what he’d have been doing too.

It’s been years since I spotted a herbert, but to my delight I crossed paths with one yesterday afternoon. I was waiting to sneak out of the back streets and in to the usual depressing stream of commuter cars on Connecticut Avenue. A battered white non-brand vehicle was toiling along the inside lane, coming from my left, and there in the open window on the passenger side, was a young herbert. He was staring me in the eye, and then he raised his finger to me, for no apparent reason than perhaps an immediate, instinctive dislike of graying suburbanites looking to merge with traffic. I stared back at him. His face began to betray some uncertainty. “Why am I showing this bloke the finger?” could have been the thought process, if ‘thought process’ was a possibility beneath the close-shaven head bone. His hard stare began to crack, and then it broke into a mindless grin. In that second the inner herbert was unmasked.

Sadly he and his chauffeur were subsumed by the Beltway traffic before I could catch him up, flag him down, and then swap details so that we could maybe meet up and talk about the dying art of herberticism. Still, I’d long since assumed that herberts were extinct, like sincerity and the ivory-billed woodpecker. To see a face bearing a cheerfully shit-eating smirk of vacuity completely made my day.

Great Suburban Traditions No. 9 - Badly Dressed Men

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 claims to have been doing all week (when in fact she was at Book Club talking about the area’s top 250 delis), he dons the universal uniform of the bedraggled dad – baseball hat, over-sized t-shirt, and crumpled knee length khaki shorts, all supported by depressingly brown loafers or sandals.

Badly Dressed Suburban Man’s identity is then boiled down to two basic items. 1. The sporting allegiance proclaimed on his baseball cap, which is generally worn backwards until the age of about 35, then turned front on to hide a receding hairline and to avoid skin cancer. 2. The name of a college on his t-shirt. He didn’t necessarily go to that college, but no one’s going to be interested enough to ask him if he really is a Duke graduate or not, so he can get away with it. Sometimes the t-shirt is just blank. Navy blue seems to be a favourite, as it can disguise the summer sweat a little better. The main thing is, it shouldn’t under any circumstance match the shorts, but that’s not a problem. After all, what actually goes with beige or pale grey?

You’ll see masses of them listlessly operating shopping trolleys, wandering the mall in a daze, or standing on the sidelines of a sports game automatically yelling, “Good job, buddy!” approximately once every sixty seconds. In the right hand pocket of their shorts is a Blackberry, which they fondle to remind themselves of who they really are on week days. The money maker, the main man. Although the wife has forbidden them from taking the Blackberry out and pretending to be reading important e-mails, they surreptitiously caress the keys, thinking that the weekend does at least have one saving grace – it makes going back to work on Monday morning more of a relief than a duty.

This passive assault on fashion hasn’t changed one jot in the 11 years I’ve lived here. You can admire its stasis in the same way that you might happily occupy a few hours by watching a tortoise walk in circles. You could even claim that its progenitors are, albeit unwittingly, involved in a collective statement against the fickle transience of mutating trends. Or perhaps it’s a collaboration of housewives dressing their husbands down to stop them looking hot to potential predators. The husbands acquiesce for the sake of a quiet life, and because hell, just because a t-shirt’s 20 years old, doesn’t mean you can’t still wear it, right? What's more, you can jump in the pool and drown yourself without ruining a good shirt.

More Great Suburban Traditions:
No. 8 Going To The Mall
No. 7 Cocktail Hour
No. 6 Grocery Shopping
No. 5 Limited Guilt
No. 4 Asexuality
No. 3 Dog Crap
No. 2 Neighbourhood Watch
No. 1 The Piano Recital

Screwed Up Girls Are Sexy

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 are available here for preview. Make sure not to annoy your friends by sending them the link.