radio clash on pirate satellite

- I'M ON THE RADIO TONIGHT. everybody should listen to it. go to www.wtburadio.org and click "listen live" up at the top, from 10-12. I'm actually playing music this week. still refining the playlist. there's no theme this week so it's just whatever I feel like playing that fits the theme of "ska, punk and other junk". WOOOO!

- the Giants alone among teams I support are still in playoff contention. got to see Mr. Lincecum throw 11 strikeouts last night after a shaky first inning for the win, and that Buster kid display some excellent plate discipline to get on base for Burrell to homer him in. it was a nice, neat, well-executed game. go team! sadface for the Sox being officially eliminated, but we knew that was coming forever. next year, boys, next year. Pirates, well. let's just try to keep it below 100 losses next year, shall we? baby steps.

- life's moving along here. I need to go buy food because I don't have any. I need to study for my Spanish test because the subjunctive is difficult. I need to know if I'm spending my afternoon at Harvard tomorrow but my texts to my buddy aren't going through. ALAS.

- I can't write songs, but here's a thing I wrote yesterday:

you’re every other thought that runs through my head

you’re the reason when I’m happy and the reason when I’m sad

build my days around seeing you

keep a running score of all the things you do

waste of time to be with anybody else

I’m tired of having all this time to myself

I’m all fucked up, I don’t eat right

I can’t go to sleep till the middle of the night

hope nobody sees

the way I look at you

every day I give myself away

but there’s nothing I can do

take me home, country roads

I just had a good walk and talk with my buddy from Kentucky. I can't explain how great it is to talk to somebody who knows about my part of the country (since it's also pretty much his part of the country) here at school. Here at school you've mostly got:

a) people from California who don't know the geography of the East Coast at all, which is kind of okay because it hasn't really been relevant to them before (even though I still know the shit out of California geography, but I'm a geek like that),

b) people from New England who only know the geography of New England and how long it takes to get to New York, and

c) people from New York who don't give a shit about the rest of the country outside of the five boroughs/Long Island, and generally operate under the assumption that people from Jersey are trash, people from Boston are assholes, everyone from California is high all the time, and everyone else is a redneck. And they say us rural folks are ignorant.

Oversimplifying, obviously, and generalizing, but that's probably 70% of the situation. So it's always great to talk to this kid, who knows I live closer to Cleveland (and Cincinnati, for that matter) than to Philly, and who will bitch about the National League Central with me and marvel at how miserable Cleveland and Columbus are as cities.

We were talking about one of the cheers some members of the BU fan section do at hockey games when we play Maine and other rural state schools: "the wheels on your house go 'round and 'round," which is so fucking ignorant. He was a columnist for the paper last year and actually wrote an article calling them out on being snobs and elitists and generally assholes, and people got all up in arms at him, telling him to go back to Kentucky, calling him a fucking hick, all this shit. Of course, this was all in anonymous comments, on the newspaper's website. He still gets pissed off talking about it, and I get pissed off too - I've been in the student section when that cheer started up, and I wouldn't say it. That's worse than BC calling "safety school" at us, and that makes me livid (I could have gotten into your sheltered, suburban Catholic school if I'd had any desire to, savvy? I got into NYU, which is just as selective, and had a fighting chance at Northwestern, which is more selective, so y'all can kiss my Irish ass, unless you're too scared to come down here into the big bad city to do it).

Anyway. None of my friends here are snobby assholes, obviously, but it's always good to hang with a Midwestern kid who also identified me as Midwestern, haha. The picture above - they were actually going to make a 14th colony/state back in the day, with the highlighted bits of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky, because it was wild-ass frontier country back then and they didn't think they really had any connection to the governments back east in Philly and New York. I wish I could cite that to everybody who ever asks me if I'm a Phillies fan or how far I live from Philadelphia.

we drove 800 miles without seeing a cop, we got rock and roll music blasting off the t-top

Happy birthday, buddy. 61 and still running around onstage like a madman for upwards of 3 hours every night on every tour. Bruce Springsteen is not subject to normal human aging, true story.

The Boss has sort of taken over my life again lately - partly because it was just summer, and nothing is quite so synonymous with summer evenings as Bruce, and partly because I've got a good buddy who loves him maybe even more than I do (he made this his profile picture at one point - epic mancrush city), who recently dedicated a playing of "Darlington County" to me. For being young and in love and wanting to drive everywhere and see everything, it's hard to get a much better soundtrack than the early recordings of Mr. Springsteen.

don't blame us if we ever doubt ya, you know we couldn't live without ya

When I say "church of baseball," this is what I mean: the renewal of spirit and soul that takes place for me on the walk up to Fenway Park. I mean crossing the bridge over the Mass Pike, welcoming the cool evening air, and descending past the Cask'n'Flagon onto Lansdowne Street, smells of smoke and hot dogs and alcohol and giant soft pretzels all around. I mean stopping, unashamed, to take pictures of the FENWAY PARK - LANSDOWNE GATE C sign with the Prudential Building as a backdrop, leaning through the doors of the Bleacher Bar to get a look out onto the field, little kids in Beckett and Lester jerseys leaning over the dividers in line to show each other how they're gonna catch foul balls from their seats tonight.

I mean stopping to lean against a railing on the non-park side of Lansdowne, just where you can see the video screen inside, to hear the announcement of the starting lineup, the rumbling applause that escapes up into the sky when David Ortiz (the designated hitter, nummmber 34) is announced, the wild cheers and whistles for Josh Beckett at the end of a difficult, exhausting season. I mean walking down the street completely at peace, every gap and imperfection in the world filled in by the sounds of guys calling "eyyy, tickets? tickets?" and "programs two dollahs, free Green Monstah stickah with ya program."

It took me a few months after I moved here to realize where exactly I'd been on my college visits to Boston the previous summer. Eventually I connected the dots between the three schools I'd seen - Northeastern, Emerson, and BU - and realized that the part of the city I'd fallen in love with was, in fact, just off my campus: Kenmore Square, viewed from a certain angle in the center of the street. I'd remembered walking from a garage downtown to Fenway through a stretch of gorgeous, old-Boston brownstones into a place where the streets split off and a five-story Barnes and Noble claimed nearly an entire block under a 40-foot-high Citgo sign. I lived in Boston for months before I realized that was lower Commonwealth Avenue and the heart of Kenmore Square - the ballpark neighborhood.

It's a similar feeling walking across the Clemente Bridge at home, don't get me wrong. I could happily spend hours walking the river path below PNC Park, or hanging out on the bridge, or standing on the balcony up above the Allegheny on the third base side. But for enthusiasm of the crowd - not to mention magnitude of the crowd - PNC and Fenway are, no pun intended, in different leagues. I would love Boston without the ballpark, but I've never known it that way, and neither has anyone else of my generation, or my parents', or my grandparents'. The ballpark is the city, same as the rumble of the train at street level or the neon beacon of the Citgo sign reflected on the river at midnight. And even when Beckett can't keep his fastball down and playoff hopes have essentially become delusions, the ballpark and the game are there to strengthen the soul.

left of the dial

GOAL FOR THIS WEEK: get involved with the radio station, which I was going to do last year but didn't. My new roommate this year has her own show, in a fantastic time slot too (6-8 on Wednesday nights), and her life goal is to write for Rolling Stone. She's good at keeping up with music in the way I'm not - she's always finding new bands, she knows all these musicians who are truly obscure and just playing little folk festivals in Providence or Boston or Philadelphia or wherever. I listened to her show the other night and I dug a lot of it.

But I've never been good about keeping up with new music. Of the 11 most played artists on my last.fm, 7 are still together, which is more than I expected before I counted just now, but that counts the Foos who are on indefinite hiatus (I think? I've lost track); more notably, the "newest" band on there is the White Stripes, who started out in the early 2000s. Everyone else is from the 90s or earlier. I'm perpetually late to the party, for one reason or another - I guess my mindset is that there are so many awesome bands who already have two or three albums I could buy that I can't be bothered keeping track of, or checking out, every new group that releases a single. Essentially, when I'm looking for "new" music, I tend to look for older music.

Hopefully I'm allowed to just be all the fuck over the place on my (hypothetical/potential) show, because I thought about doing just punk (which would involve pretty much anything that would have "punk" in the description, whether prefaced with "ska" or "pop" or "folk" or "80s" or whatever) but then I was all shit, what if I want to play Frankie Valli? Because very often, I want to play Frankie Valli. I hope it's cool if I play Frankie followed by the Replacements followed by Run-DMC, Elvis Costello, the Kinks, the Beastie Boys, Dropkick Murphys, and Ray Charles. Because that's what I do. That's just about what I've done today, actually.

saturday afternoon

I love doing my own grocery shopping. Makes me feel grown up and all that. I went an extra mile out of my way today to go to the Shaw's in Brookline just because I've never been there before, and I had to get my grapes, pretzels, cereal bars and yogurt somewhere. Also, apparently everything is on sale all the time at Shaw's. I seem to have saved $4.68 without even trying.

Brookline (the most immediate suburb of Boston, it runs pretty much all along the edge of my campus) is odd - it's mostly national-chain restaurants and drugstores, but here and there you'll see a weird little one-of-a-kind place stuck between them all. I saw something advertised as a Russian Bookstore today; is this a bookstore that sells only Russian books? Run by Russians? Run in the style of Russians? Everything straight from St. Petersburg? I'm going to have to investigate that. And I'm gonna have to try to do it at a time when the train isn't overrun by Boston College kids in matching shirts with perfect hair. They make me uncomfortable in about seven different ways.

The plan for now is to go hang out and do Spanish homework down here:


The leaves aren't changing yet, obviously, but it's kind of alarming how soon they will be.

they're all too busy fighting for a good place under the lighting (good for you!)

From the study lounge at the top of my building I can see into Fenway. Definitely have to creep up here on a game night sometime (not tonight, the boys are in Oakland tonight). I can see most of Kenmore Square from up here, actually - this is essentially the spot I envisioned when I used to think about going to school in the city. It's pretty great.

So, one of my main aspirations in life is still to be Rob Sheffield. For a long time he was the only reason I read Rolling Stone, because The Pop Life was literally always funny even when the rest of the magazine was about bands I didn't care about. Love Is a Mixtape, I take that book everywhere I go. I've read it I don't know how many times, and I have it here at school for when I next want to read it again. I quote it in conversation. Rob and I, we think a lot alike. And his new book, Talking to Girls about Duran Duran, is all around pretty rad - music geekery as usual, and a ton of it is set in Boston and New England, so I'm constantly like "Dorchester! Jamaica Plain! Quincy! I know where that shit is on the T!"

But there's this one part, very early on where he's discussing the overall premise of the book, with which I take issue. He's talking about the difference in girl-music fandom and boy-music fandom. This paragraph follows:

"The way girls raved about DD [Duran Duran] was so different from the way we boys talked about music we liked. I remember hours of debate in the high school lunchroom about the Clash: which was better, London Calling or Sandinista!? Is 'Lover's Rock' really about oral sex? Which member of the band truly understood the geopolitical context of Nicaraguan history? Who had a cooler name, Joe Strummer or Tory Crimes? My female rocker friends call this 'boy list language,' and they won't tolerate it. When I talk about Duran Duran with other guys, which admittedly doesn't happen all that often, we end up debating whether the Power Station was a better side project than Arcadia. No Duran Duran chick, not even the hard-core obsessives, would sit through a conversation like this."

The first thing that outraged me in that paragraph, actually, was the suggestion that Sandinista! vs. London Calling is actually a debate at all, because if you have a functioning brainstem and a working knowledge of the Clash discography, the only thing you could maybe rank ahead of London Calling is their self-titled debut, either the US or UK version depending on your degree of purism (unless you're really into the trippy Combat Rock shit, which is respectable, but I would argue against you). But he addresses that in the next paragraph - they were just arguing for the sake of argument, which is totally understandable.

That's the real issue here - I am pretty definitively a girl, and although I don't have that many friends who talk music the way I do, I've had discussions very to these with the ones who do. In junior high I would re-decide which Green Day album was my favorite just about every month, debating back and forth with my brother about the merits of Kerplunk vs. Dookie vs. Insomniac and trying to dispel the myth that Insomniac is a remake of Dookie in anyway - it's the classic first-album-after-a-big hit, really, same as its 90s counterparts In Utero and Pinkerton, the deliberately harsh backlash against being perceived as pop stars. If anything, I'd call Dookie an update of Kerplunk (the re-done version of "Welcome to Paradise" being a pretty obvious metaphor for that) but that's still not really fair to either album (still my two favorites overall, I think).

I digress, which I guess kind of proves my point. I'm not sure where the idea came from that male music obsessives are always making lists, ranking their favorites, wanting to know everything about the bands, while girls are doing...what, exactly? What's left for the female music fan to do in this stereotype, besides go "ooh, he's so cute, I'll buy the new single"? I know that's not the suggestion, but Rob, you're getting dangerously close there. And I don't get it.

He never really elucidates what female music fandom is like, in his experience; I can tell you that in my experience, I made a list of the best guitar and bass lines in every Simple Plan song on No Pads, No Helmets...Just Balls when I was in seventh grade. My dubious taste aside (and the lack of musical proficiency to be ranked on that album at all aside, although I will never apologize for loving Simple Plan), that sounds suspiciously like Boy List Language. I once set a goal in eighth grade to listen to every Green Day song on every album in the course of one day and actually got there (although this was pre-21CB, of course). I can still recite their entire discography in order of year of release, tracklisting, etc. This, again, sounds suspiciously like Boy List Language, and I gotta say, I am most certainly a girl.

Chuck Klosterman, my other culture-nerd-boy hero, puts forth a similar view in Fargo Rock City, talking about the loyalty of male rock audiences vs. female ones and how fickle girls can be with music. I really don't get it: there's a difference between the loyalty of music fans, sure, but I don't think it's defined by gender. I'm nineteen and I have been a Beatles obsessive since age nine, Green Day obsessive since thirteen, Clash since fourteen, etc. and etc. I know girls who memorize albums line by line and boys who buy singles online and disregard them after a week; I know both types of fans in both genders. There's definitely an interesting cultural study to be done here, but reducing it to generalizations about gender - basically as a way for boys to feel superior about themselves - isn't getting anybody anywhere.

The best thing I can offer in the guys' defense is that maybe it's a generational thing, that maybe girl audiences in the 80s were different than now, but that also seems extremely dubious. There have always been the girls screaming and crying at the Ed Sullivan Show, and I'd say there have also always been those of us who are quieter, sitting in the back, organizing our music collections by release date, figuring out our favorite Track 7 on every album, making playlists of the best British and Irish and Australian and Californian songs. I guess it's just the general cultural phenomenon that I've begun to notice in more and more places: nerdy girls get overlooked in culture, unless it's some ugly-duckling story where they get made over into the prom queen by the end. And it's bullshit, frankly. "Nerdy" boys show up everywhere, improbably winning over the hot girls with their wit, fronting Weezer (not that I even want to get into the current state of Rivers Cuomo right now, that's an entirely different post), etc. Right now I guess we've got Ellen Page, which is rad, but she can't hold down the fort alone. If I'm missing any prominent examples of nerdy girls kicking ass in the world, someone please let me know, because it's getting to be a real pain in the ass when even the smart, clever, thoughtful guys lump us in with the rest of the supposed crowd.

Oh yeah, and "Lover's Rock" is definitely about some kind of sex and possibly birth control; Joe Strummer is definitely the one who knew and cared about Nicaraguan history (Mick pretty much knew about glam rock and getting high and actin' like a rock star, Paul knew about reggae and the real mean streets of London, and Topper...well, Topper wrote "Rock the Casbah"); and Tory Crimes is a pretty ballin' name (adapted from the original Terry Chimes), but I don't think I could ever make a list involving the Clash that didn't have Mr. Strummer at the top.