Another storm front moved through last night. Before it came in Brian made turkey burgers on the grill and we sat on the back porch and watched the lightning while we waited for Heroes to start. I love spring. Tornado season started early this year. Should be a good one.
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On a frigid January night, a few days before Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in 2000, I was piloting a Texas-plated Volvo down a West Virginia highway. My buddy Tish was in the passenger seat, our friend Jen asleep in the back, and we were pointed in the direction of Chicago, trying to make the 14-hour drive in a night. We’d agreed that one person would sleep, another would drive and the third would stay awake in the passenger seat, keeping watch to make sure the driver stayed awake, and in this way we made our journey safely.
Tish and I were trading stories and music. We’d bonded over a mutual love and admiration for Rich Mullins, and now we were branching out, and she asked me if I’d ever heard of David Wilcox. I hadn’t, I said; she pulled out her CDs, revealing the man’s entire catalog.
You know that music that is in your life, that you know you wouldn’t be the same without? It’s not the same as the stuff you just listen to, say, for fun, or for singing along in the car or cleaning the house. It’s in a world all its own, and it has shaped you. David Wilcox is one of those artists for me, up there with Patty Griffin and Mary Chapin-Carpenter and Rich Mullins, who not only challenge my creativity but taught me how to be a person in the world, how to cope with such great beauty and pain so often in such close proximity and in such blinding quantities. He came along at a time in my life – sorta like now – when I was questioning loudly what it meant to be a man, and it helped to have one here that I could relate to, even just in my stereo.
Anyway so on Friday I got to see David Wilcox perform live for the first time. I won’t waste time on a review except to say it was better even than I’d hoped, and I was blown away and humbled. Rock House Films in Dallas is a fantastic listening room, and David’s even better on guitar than what you hear on his recordings.
Anyway, David’s got a new record coming out on iTunes tomorrow; it’s called Open Hand and the songs he played from it the other night were fantastic. Meantime, here’s video of David playing one of my favorite of his songs, "Rusty Old American Dream:"
So – who are some of the musicians without whose art you wouldn’t be the same person?
UPDATE: David’s new album "Open Hand" is now available on iTunes Plus. I can’t really recommend it highly enough; "Red Eye," "Open Hand," "Outside Door," "Modern World" and "Captain Wanker" are delightful, and "Dream Again" is like the opposite of a protest song about the new administration. Fantastic.
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They said it was going to snow 6-10 inches this weekend. Gary England Twittered it, for God’s sake, though the Twit in question is now absent from his feed … hmmm. AT ANY RATE, even slightly senile weather men and a last-second winter blast couldn’t keep these buds at bay, and kids, it looks like spring is finally here to stay. AW YEAH.
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20 Things You Didn’t Know About Time
"7 One second used to be defined as 1/86,400 the length of a day. However, Earth’s rotation isn’t perfectly reliable. Tidal friction from the sun and moon slows our planet and increases the length of a day by 3 milliseconds per century."
TACO TOWN!
These guys recreated the "Taco Town" commercial from Saturday Night Live. "Pizza? Now that’s what I call a Taco!"
All The Presidents’ Girls
Artist Annie Kevan painted a gallery of Presidential mistresses (alleged) going back to George Washington. It’s creepy how many of them were Kennedy’s.
My Dinner With Dubya
One of the Bush twins’ drinking buddies got invited to the White House once to have dinner with Dubya and Laura. He wrote this wonderful piece for Vanity Fair so we could all feel like we were there.
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These are on a bowl on the back porch. It’s going to snow this weekend, but I’m going to use this photo to help me pretend it’s the kind of weather where we make drinks that paper umbrellas go in.
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It threatened rain all weekend but I was bound and determined to spend some quality time on the back porch. I had the camera at the ready, waiting the arrival of the cardinals who never stuck around long enough to pose for a decent picture, but in the meantime I shoved the lens up against the top of this blue IKEA decorative bottle and ended up with one of the best post-Photoshop photos I’ve taken in a long time. Here’s another version of the same thing:
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A few weeks ago – the right time according to all my gardening guides – I put down about 70 spinach plants in my garden plot. Today about 7-8 of them are still alive, but they’re doing well I suppose. They’re putting on new leaves and though none of the leaves are any bigger than the nail on my pinky finger, they don’t look like they’re dying. This weekend it’s supposed to snow and WOULDJA LOOK AT THAT Brian and I are going to be in Dallas, where I’m hoping it won’t snow or get cold. At any rate, spinach is supposed to be able to survive a freeze, so I’m hoping these do.
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As someone with a journalism degree, who loosely ascribes that phrase to some aspects of his career, I find the current changes in the journalism industry at once fascinating, thrilling and a little alarming. The idea of major newspapers vanishing entirely confounds and depresses me, while the prevailing wisdom that an internet connection and a bit of time automatically makes a person a "journalist" makes me worry greatly. Still and all, I think the possibility of greater access to real journalism via the internet and mobile devices is a promising one. All that is to say, I was deeply interested in this local news piece from 1981, which is remarkably prescient. It took two hours to download the entire contents of a day’s newspaper, about four to six times longer than the average person spends reading it:
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Sam’s getting cranky in his old age.
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The cardinals in the neighborhood are all looking for ladies now, sitting on the power lines and singing away, raiding my garden for straw to build their nests, and, I have to say, not having a ton of luck. Come on, lady cardinals! This guy’s not a total shlub!
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