Maybe it’s just the time of year, but I’m feeling nostalgic. Then again, I’m always feeling nostalgic. From the vaults:
Nolan - “Convincing” (live at Gabe’s, August 2005) (mp3)
Posted: December 19th, 2007 under Iowa City, Images, Music.
Comments: none
1979. My parents took me to Paris to visit my mother’s sister Mary and her husband Greg. Because I was three years old I was obsessed with all things Sesame Street and was horrified to discover that, on the French version of the program, Oscar the Grouch was blue and played the trumpet. The number-one song in the United States on Christmas Day was “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” by Rupert Holmes. Greg had a massive record collection and I implored him to operate the record player so I could listen to Beatles albums and the brand-new Muppet Movie soundtrack, which caused me to become frantic with glee.
On Christmas morning my father and I were the first ones to awake. We sat in the kitchen for about two hours while he read the paper and wondered to himself when I was going to remember that it was Christmas morning. When I finally did, I opened my presents, which included a wind-up plastic bird and a miniature car ferry with removable cars. Mary made me a pretend radio out of a cardboard box and wrote “Jake’s Radio” on it. On New Year’s Eve I spent the last ten minutes of 1979 dreaming about Big Bird and willing myself not to wet the bed.
1986. My family moved to Ann Arbor, and the snowfall seemed more intense and abundant than what I was used to back in Iowa. Our new home had a fenced-in yard, which made the snow drifts seem even larger. The number-one song in the country on Christmas Day was “Walk Like an Egyptian” by The Bangles. In my fourth-grade classroom I was the New Kid, and during our current events unit I struggled for the first time to understand AIDS.
Our house also had something called a “family room” where we spent most of our time and which was separate and distinct from our “living room” where we hardly spent any time. This also took me a while to parse. We had cable television, which was also novel, and I quickly became obsessed with MTV and David Lee Roth and Madonna’s video for “Open Your Heart”, which caused me to become scandalized in all sorts of ways I had yet to comprehend. Nickelodeon showed reruns of The Monkees, which caused me to become obsessed with the Monkees.
For Christmas we traveled to see my grandmother in DC. All I wanted for Christmas was Laser Tag. I would absolutely die if I did not get Laser Tag for Christmas. Then, for Christmas, I received Laser Tag, and so I lived.
I also got my first Walkman, and roamed my grandmother’s house with my headphones clamped to my head and my Laser Tag gun in a holster on my waist, blaring my Monkees tapes. On New Year’s Eve I spent the last ten minutes of 1986 falling asleep listening to Mickey Dolenz sing “Last Train To Clarkesville” and willing myself not to wet the bed.
Posted: December 4th, 2007 under Grinnell, Iowa City, General.
Comments: 8
I met Leah at an after-hours party in an AUR apartment on Burlington Street in April 2002. Over the course of that spring and summer I re-met her a number of times at bars and house parties. My memories of Leah and that summer in general are a bit hazy, due in part to my consumption beer and also because I was drinking a lot of beer. But then, we all were.
But as time went on and Leah became a fixture in my social circle (or, more accurately, I became a fixture in hers) I noticed something: I never didn’t have fun when she was around. When she’d arrive at a party or enter a room I felt myself at once relaxing and perking up because it meant things were about to get more interesting, whether it meant that we were headed to the Deadwood, or that approximately three dozen of us were going to hang out on her front porch (“Portugal”) and empty several cases of PBR, or maybe sit around her kitchen table drinking rum & cokes (or, as she liked to sing, “People all over the world, join hands / start a rum train, rum train”). One thing was for sure: I was going to laugh my ass off.
Maybe we don’t rage quite as hard as we did four years ago—which is probably, ultimately, a good thing—but I still feel relieved, and reassured, when I see Leah appear on the scene. A couple years ago, when Jaret began appearing with her, it was as if the fun and the goodwill had been doubled. Maybe even quadrupled.
Photo by Joe
Congratulations, you two. Join hands, start a rum train, etc.
Posted: September 17th, 2007 under Iowa City, Images.
Comments: none
Over the weekend I was in my old stomping grounds attending Ransom and Angie’s (or Rangie’s, if you will) combined birthday celebration. Angie’s half of the celebration included a tasteful party, while Ransom’s half spanned the whole weekend and more hedonistic. (Ransom’s birthday and all affiliated celebrations are more commonly known as Weebsday.)
More here.
Posted: April 23rd, 2007 under Iowa City, Images.
Comments: 5
Last month I posted a couple of songs by the Hypocrites, a band which, once upon a time, reigned supreme at Grinnell College. My high school band VIVID appeared alongside them on a compilation of Grinnell and Iowa City bands, released by Grinnell alum Tom Zlabinger on his upstart indie label HUM Productions.[1]
Anywhos, after that earlier post I got an email from Xander, the Hypocrites’ guitarist. He is the latest in a series of people around the world who’ve emerged from the Internets after stumbling upon my blog.[2] He expressed his pleasant surprise at finding mp3s of his old band online, and then asked if I had any VIVID mp3s to share.
Well, of course I did. I’m kind of surprised that, although I’ve posted songs by other old bands of mine, I don’t think I’ve ever ventured into the territory occupied by my first band, which flourished during that dark yet hopeful time to which we now refer, with not a little wistful anxiety, as the Early Nineties.
The short version of the story is that my three best friends and I formed a band and named it after Living Colour’s first album.[3] To a burgeoning catalog of originals we added a bevy of Primus and Nirvana[4] covers and in addition to shows in our friend’s basements, we began playing shows in various nooks and crannies around Grinnell College, and earned the admiration and/or curiosity of the students there. We were several years their junior, didn’t drink or do drugs, and were elated when Tom and the Hypocrites and the rest of that tiny scene validated us.
In April 1995, Tom booked us two days in Minstrel Studios, in its old location just off Dubuque Street. Our parents reluctantly, miraculously, excused us from school and let us borrow a couple of their minivans to haul our stuff to Iowa City. We were blown away by the prospect of being recorded professionally, by an actual studio engineer, doing actual overdubs, and having everything mixed to DAT (remember DAT?) and, maybe if everything worked out, appearing on an actual compact disc. There’s a hilarious amount of flanger and chorus on the guitars and mid-nineties reverb on the drums, and at several points we come perilously close to sounding like Phish, but we were pretty goddamn proud of ourselves. These are the three songs that resulted from those sessions:
VIVID - A Match Made In Space (mp3)
VIVID - Garden Fresh Kermit (mp3)
VIVID - This Is The Worst Birthday Ever (mp3)
In these days of iTunes, GarageBand, and MySpace, when pretty much anyone can record demos and post them online immediately and effortlessly, these little recordings hammer home how much the current system differs from the machinations of amateur music production as it operated twelve years ago, and they endear me to the blissfully naïve teenagers we were when we recorded them.
[1] Even typing these words and names elicits in the author a certain cognitive and temporal dissonance.
[2] Other people who’ve gotten in touch with me include an individual who found my review of a Starship album, someone whose last name is Nolan, the guitarist for the New Fast Automatic Daffodils, several high school classmates, and Ian Frazier’s publisher.
[3] The name VIVID always had to be printed in all-caps, and for the duration of the band’s existence we remained woefully ignorant of the adult video production company with whom we shared our name.
[4] And Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Led Zeppelin, the aforementioned Living Colour, U2, Fishbone, King Crimson, Stone Temple Pilots, Depeche Mode, fIREHOSE, The Police, The Breeders, The Smiths, Hüsker Dü, Van Halen, the Beatles, and probably several other bands I’ve forgotten about.
Posted: January 8th, 2007 under Grinnell, Iowa City, Music.
Comments: 11
Here’s something funny.
First of all, you’ve all done this, so don’t even try and flex like you’re morally superior.
Yesterday I was Googling people I used to know. I looked up one young woman with whom, during a misguided and very drunken summer a few years ago, I made out with on several consecutive evenings. Let’s call her Molly, since that is her name.
Here are the results. Of particular interest are the first and third items.
Posted: October 11th, 2006 under Iowa City, Politics.
Comments: 13
Chad and Rachel’s wedding was an unqualified success, at least in this attendee’s opinion. The 3-song Nolan reunion certainly was a rollicking good time, and we even remembered as much as eighty percent of the material we played. Good luck, you crazy kids.
Being back in Iowa with that group of people inevitably brought back a lot of memories, mostly of nights spent drinking to the point of debilitation, but also of perhaps the most closely-knit friendgroup I’ve ever known. I lived in Iowa City during a very strange and unfocused part of my life, and these people helped eliminate some of that confusion, while at the same time providing me with seemingly endless nights of unabashed hedonism. I’d submit that most of us have eras like that, and friends to match. Or at least, I’d hope most of us do. Maybe I’m just especially lucky.
On the drive back up here I heard a wistful little song by Groove Armada called “Remember” (mp3/6.3 MB). I became familiar with this song three summers ago, during my last months in Iowa City. In many ways, that summer was full of a lot of ugliness and bullshit, but I can’t help looking back with fondness on some aspects of it, since I have a tendency to get nostalgic about even the worst times. Or maybe because I had a kick-ass group of people looking out for me. I selfishly appropriated the wedding as my own little reunion of those people, to whom I say: thanks. I owe you one. Or, most likely, several.
Posted: June 5th, 2006 under Iowa City, Music, General.
Comments: 2
1. It was important that, while back in Iowa for the holidays, I have at least one Classic Night at the Deadwood. When the call came from Dino on Monday afternoon that several Classic Old Friends would be doing exactly that, I knew what my imperatives were.
2. My brother and I got into his car and went to Iowa City. The last song we listened to before parking in the Sheraton garage was “Cherub Rock”. This was entirely deliberate.
3. At the Deadwood were Dino and Nick, Nick’s friend Sheala, Leah, Jarrett, Chad, Kathryn, Liesel, Liesel’s sister, and Liesel’s sister’s fiancé. I mistook Liesel’s sister for Liesel because I was looking at her from behind and from behind they look exactly one hundred percent the same. At least, they did until Liesel cut her hair and dyed it brown, which fact I did not know until later, when I saw Actual Liesel.
4. We drank pitchers of beer. It was hard to gauge my intake because I was refilling my glass when it was not entirely empty, and drinking interstitial drinks in between beers. Suffice it to say, my intake was generous.
5. Conversations happened in revolving and random patterns as I and others moved around the table and changed seats frequently depending on our desire to converse with certain people, our proximity to pitchers of beer, to the end of the booth, to the bathroom, to the jukebox, and/or our desire to pose for photos taken by my brother. Conversations occurred haphazardly, often with ancillary conversations occurring alongside or atop other conversations. I managed to engage in reasonably meaningful conversations—at least, meaningful within the context of a loud noisy bar and with both conversationalists (un)reasonably intoxicated.
6. I couldn’t help but realize that this roisterous interval was nothing if not a prelude to New Years’.
7. I spotted a handful of people from what I like to melodramatically call my “old life in Iowa City,” which could reasonably be considered my “old stomping grounds,” even though that qualifier has always caused me to kind of roll my eyes, either internally or conspicuously, at the person (usually, almost always, male) doing the stomping.
8. I can’t remember if we closed the bar. Did the lights go on while we were leaving? If they did, then we closed the bar.
9. We proceeded to the Sheraton on the other side of the ped mall, where Dino had reserved a room. While walking through the ped mall, which was understandably empty, it being a weeknight and school not being in session, Dino allegedly head-butted Liesel in the crotch and they both fell to the ground and wrestled for a while. I don’t actually remember this happening, but my brother has pictures of them tussling good-naturedly on the bricks.
10. When we got to the hotel—a place I hadn’t been in since Katie’s bachelorette party eight months ago, and before that not since my high school band played at the Q Bar in April 1995 and we stayed in a room on the 9th floor of what was then the Holiday Inn, and the room had a hot tub right there in the room—we stood in the lobby as peaceably as eight extremely intoxicated people can and waited for the elevator. A hotel employee in late-middle-age inquired as to our intentions. When we told him we were staying in a room on the third floor, he informed us that only five people could legally stay in a room. Liesel, quick on her feet, said that her sister was staying in a different room, and three of us would be staying with her—the first part of which statement is true, the second of which is not.
11. In the hotel room I noticed that we’d been joined by a person I didn’t recognize, supposedly a friend of Nick and Sheala’s, who over the course of the next few hours I decided was a jackass. Let’s call him Ben. He made several comments and behaved in such a manner as to suggest that he was not the sort of person along with whom I would generally get. To give you an anecdotally germane idea of why this might be, I submit that Dino later confirmed that he (Ben) was the former music director of the university’s radio station and, during his tenure as M.D., purged the Talking Heads’ entire catalog from the station’s playlist because he claimed he’d never heard of them.
12. We engaged in the usual drunken hotel suite shenanigans. Someone (of course) suggested we go swimming, and it was hard to argue with this idea when our window looked out directly on the indoor pool two floors below, and, when opened, allowed that familiar chlorine smell to waft into our stuffy and increasingly drunk-smelling hotel room. Liesel, once again acting as our liaison with the hotel authorities, called the front desk, pretended to be heterosexual, and stated that she and her boyfriend were spending a very special evening in their hotel room and were hoping to go into the pool area for a three a.m. swim, and would they be kicked out if they did this?
13. The front desk supposedly responded that they would almost certainly and immediately be kicked out of the pool area, but not their room, unless they caused sufficient trouble to warrant their removal from the entire hotel. Rather than view this as any kind of admonishment, Liesel and all other would-be natators interpreted this as a proverbial “green-light.”
14. About sixty seconds later, Liesel, Dino and Nick were on the pool deck in their underwear. Liesel and Nick literally “took the plunge,” while Dino was still fussing about on the deck. This is right about when the aforementioned late-middle-aged hotel employee “came on the scene” and informed the trio that they should immediately leave the pool area. Dino began to drunkenly assure the man that “it [was] okay, [they were] fine in the pool area, it [was] cool,” and that their presence in the pool area was not only legal and appropriate, but in fact preferable to all parties involved. Dino was halfway through his arguably specious argument when he slipped and fell directly on his ass, protected as it was by only his underwear. This didn’t exactly help his case.
15. It was sometime after Dino and Liesel and Nick were back in our room, toweled off but not in the least bit contrite, that the shotgunning of beers commenced in the bathroom. I did not take part. Chad was passed out on one of the beds, and had been more or less since our arrival. At one point Dino was chewing on his (Chad’s) toes. I laid down on the other bed. Dino sat down next to me. I said to Dino: “Hey, Dino. That Ben guy is a total asshole.” This is humorous because a) the Ben in question was sitting about four feet away from us and b) I made my statement at full speaking volume but under the impression, the way drunk people often are, that I was “whispering” and being “sneaky.” Whereupon Ben said something to the effect of “Oh, so now I’m a total asshole, am I?” and I, not normally prone to confrontational behavior but newly emboldened by my consumption of at least a gallon of beer that evening, responded, “Yeah. Yeah you are.”
16. No fewer than eight people slept in our room that night. Four of them woke up at about nine in the morning and made noises—loud noises—about going and getting some breakfast at the Hamburg. Dino kept saying, “Are you guys really leaving? Are you really going to get breakfast?” as if, by the twelfth or thirteenth time he pursued this line of inquiry, the authenticity of their mission might change or be undermined.
17. The rest of us slept until well past checkout time (11 a.m.), and then well past late-checkout time (12 p.m.). It was hard to gauge the actual time since the hotel blinds were closed and, as anyone who has ever slept in a US hotel can tell you, the weight and thickness of most US hotel rooms’ blinds is such that almost total darkness can be effected inside a hotel room at any time of day, especially when the space outside the room is the aforementioned pool area and is lit not by natural light but by fluorescent light, in the first place.
18. The epilogue to all this would probably have to be the thoroughly unsatisfying lunch we then had at the Vine, which was at least worthwhile in the sense that Mark and Stef joined us on their way back to Raleigh, and in the sense that I got to see a little more of my friends, unencumbered by jerkfaces who have never heard of the Talking Heads, and afflicted only by the sort of hangover that renders one incapable of pain-free movement, speech, or thought.
19. But was it worth it?
20. Of course it was.
Posted: December 28th, 2005 under Iowa City, Images, General.
Comments: 2
Just got done recording another song for the Our Friends Electric demo. To all of my musicianistically-inclined pals: I’ve got a hilarious story for you, too snarky and inside-jokey to post here.
I drove home slowly down Damen, listening to Try Whistling This, then got here and listened to the Best Song of All Time Right Now: “Source Tags & Codes” by Trail Of Dead. I realize this album is three years old, but I didn’t afford it much attention until I heard this song for the first time last week. And holy shit. Somehow, this song—aside from rocking so fiercely and majestically it’s downright ridonkulous—immediately conjures for me the spring of 2002, the time, fittingly enough, when the album was originally released. Something about the vocal melody, especially the descending 3/4 section that comprises the chorus, evokes disparate moments occuring over several months that spring, but compressed and ameliorated, diamond-like, by nostalgia, until they’re encapsulated in a brief series of fleeting mental pictures, oscillating like a zoetrope: the downstairs lounge at the Atlas and clear glasses containing bright-colored, expensive drinks; the dangerous allure of pretty girls at after-hours parties doing coke; epic sweaty Friday night band practices; assaulting a new and random bar with Nick and Dino; assimilating into the reckless flow of college kids and pretending I’m no older than they are; sitting on the beach at the reservoir, reading science fiction novels with Neil. Forgive me my schmaltz. Or don’t. Whatever. Fuck it.
JAKE: No, I don’t like that intro at all.
BOB: That intro is gay.
JAKE: That intro is decidedly homosexual.
BOB: That intro is at least bi-curious.
JAKE: That intro is totally m4m.
AMOS: It’s probably m4mm.
Posted: May 3rd, 2005 under Iowa City, Music.
Comments: none
Eels: “Fresh Feeling”
Boards Of Canada: “Roygbiv”
Death Cab For Cutie: “A Movie Script Ending”
Jimmy Eat World: “The Cautioners”
Basement Jaxx: “Remedy”
Neil Finn: “Sinner”
Underworld: “King Of Snake”
David Bowie: “Sunday”
Rufus Wainwright: “Greek Song”
Alto Heceta: “My Shrinking Paradise”
Fatboy Slim: “Song For Shelter”
The Avalanches: “Two Hearts In 3/4 Time”
Timo Maas: “Shifter”
Racecar Radar: “Two Days Before She Set Herself On Fire”
On: “Pick Up”
Bruce Springsteen: “I’m On Fire”
Posted: April 27th, 2005 under Iowa City, Images, Music.
Comments: 2
I think I’m getting blog burnout. My head is swimming with ideas for links to amusing Craigslist postings, snarky Gawker items, edifying DailyKos stories, useful Lifehacker tips, and sobering Adbusters essays. But you don’t see any of those things linked because I’m sick of typing <a href=> tags all the time, and I’m sick of looking at the sites to which they’d point. I’m all referenced out.
That, and I skipped breakfast.
I’m sure I’ll think of something good soon. I have been having many pleasant drunken nights at cozy bars like the Charleston, 1056, and their Lincoln Park antipodes; I’m cramming band practice and gigs into the three months I have left, I’m taking pictures, I’m playing kickball, I’m geeking out and optimizing my iTunes library, I’m searching for apartments in Minneapolis, preferably near the East Bank.
Life goes on.
Posted: April 26th, 2005 under Iowa City, Minneapolis.
Comments: 3
Ransom’s 26th birthday, hedonism in Iowa City, etc.
I have the best friends in the whole wide world.
Posted: March 7th, 2005 under Iowa City, Images.
Comments: 5
It would appear my occasional mention of my friend Mr. Curtin and a certain cartographically-named bar in Iowa City has caused my site to appear in search results over one hundred times within the last week, during searches for a certain gay porn star. I didn’t think gay people even knew about the Internet.
Also, the two searches using my name originated from US government computers. It’s a good thing I’m not paranoid.
Best search strings this time around:
no fatties
cookie cutter shark pictures
pictures from the movie swat
The rest:
german sexy women
scatology
cc deville 2005
hirsuite
But the lows are so extreme That the good seems fucking cheap And it teases you
roland orzabal
nude college girls at parties
maintee
bare breast
“talking heads” sand vaseline “new songs”
wordpress icelandic
champaign jam
girlfriend
no fatties
drew barrymore
boating nude
rise it like you stole it
litost
grinnell disco chicago
teachers after school fucking
i love younger girls
“jake mohan” grinnell
“def leppard” “drum solo” video
“heidi julavits” 2005
teabagged gallery
sad
one armed drummer
manitee
what is a manitee
“jp mohan”
archer prewitt blog wilderness
iowa nude
cookie cutter shark pictures
adventures of vin and lilly
pictures from the movie swat
overbite blowjobs
ruthie from the real world hawaii
hirsuite women
Posted: January 27th, 2005 under Grinnell, Iowa City.
Comments: 5
December 29: Gabe’s Oasis, Iowa City
December 30: Elbo Room, Chicago
Posted: December 28th, 2004 under Iowa City, Music.
Comments: 2
