Mallard's Infinite Playlist: Missed Opportunity Edition

Damnit, damnit, damnit. How the hell did I miss this?

NORMAN — People lounged on blankets, sat in lawn chairs and danced on the grass as the annual Summer Breeze concert series got underway Sunday at Lions Park with a performance by The Gourds. Singer/songwriter John Fullbright had been scheduled to kick off the season on May 19, but his performance was rained out. An appearance by Fullbright has been rescheduled for 7:30 p.m. Sunday at the park at Symmes Street and Flood Avenue. The outdoor concert series is sponsored by the Performing Arts Studio. All concerts are free and are held in Lions Park. For a complete schedule, visit www.pasnorman.org.

I mostly enjoy living out here in the middle of nowhere some 170 miles removed from my hometown, I really do. True, I must take my fishing where I can find it, which kinda sucks, but in the fall I can load up the dogs, pull out of the driveway and literally be on the ground hunting in twenty minutes. That's worth a lot. I generally don't like people, and there are relatively few of them out here to piss me off. That's worth a lot, too. But I must admit that sometimes I really miss the experience of growing up and living in a nice, progressive (for Oklahoma), culturally diverse (again, for Oklahoma), large-but-not-too-large state university town. Things like free and funky outdoor music festivals that draw bands like the Gourds...

I think that song should be required listening for all middle school geography classes. And since I believe it's actually against the law to mention the Gourds without also mentioning their classic, infamous, universally loved, much-mistaken-for-Phish, Best Cover Ever version of Snoop Dogg's "Gin and Juice" here it is, too (NSFW, or kids...)

Mallard's Infinite Playlist: Song of September...

I am - for the most part - a proud ignoramus when it comes to sports. I never played sports (my youth was given over wholly to fishing, hunting, drinking beer and skipping school to repeat items 1,2 and 3), and I never grew up around anyone who did, so it's not that I've lost interest in sports, it's that I never cared to begin with. I couldn't tell you who won the Super Bowl last year (the Dodgers, right?) or the World Series, or that Stanley Bowl thing. I have no clue what an ERA is and I don't know my AL West from my NL East.

I've heard that my home state now has a professional basketball team, the Thunderclap something or other, but since watching basketball interests me about as much as watching platypuses screw, I know nothing of the team, other than most of us here in Oklahoma pay much more attention to our millionaire ballplayers than we do our low thousandaire public-school teachers (current ranking: 49th! Break out the Andre! OK, OK, I'll stop being a political bore...)

But there is one glaring exception to my disinterest. See, I grew up in Norman, Oklahoma. And when you grow up in Norman, Oklahoma, you are beaten daily as a child until you develop an interest in Sooner football (honest, it's in the city charter). So gradually, even if you're not naturally inclined to do so, your interest in college football grows, along with the scar tissue on your backside, until one day you wake up and realize that you are one of them, a...fan.

Sounds brutal, I know, but at least in Oklahoma it's confined to Norman. I hear that in Nebraska - a state much like Oklahoma in its lack of excitement but with only one state university football program to distract its people from ingesting meth and/or watching crops grow - the required beating is a statewide mandate. That would certainly explain a lot... (I kid, I kid my Nebraska homies).

I mean, let's face it: it's Oklahoma we're talking about. It's not like we have a helluva lot we can point to in this state and say "see, look how good we are at this!" So for the past half-century or so we have placed our collective pride and our sense of shared self-worth in the on-field accomplishments of the University of Oklahoma football team (sorry Aggie fans, but it's true...).

And as much as I hate to admit it, as much as the snobbish too-good-for-sports, shun-the-herd iconoclast in me fervently wants it to be otherwise, when I hear this song I completely understand how emotionally invested someone can get in a hometown sports team.

                        


When I was a student at OU I used to live in a crummy little apartment on the south edge of campus, an area that during WWII had been part of a military base. It's mostly developed now, but back in the mid-90s it was an overgrown, largely forgotten jumble of crumbling old buildings and encroaching wildness.

On Saturday mornings during dove season (and later deer bow)I would throw my shotgun in a dufflebag, hop on the bike, cross the highway south of campus and go hunt the south Canadian riverbottom. But even then, miles away from the stadium, I could still hear the roar of the crowd and the band playing the fight song, and I'd hum along to it, heart swelling with Sooner Pride.

"OK," you ask, "if you're such a fan, what the hell were you doing dove hunting when you should have been there watching the game, supporting your school, your team and watching stalking admiring your future wife?" (who as a member of the Pride of Oklahoma's flag corps spent every fall Saturday marching on Owen Field to that very song)

To which I can only reply, it was dove season, man, and during hunting season being a fan has its limits...

And just to give you an example of that, the Sooners are a consensus pre-season #1 and we're the odds-on favorite to win the national championship, but one of the toughest and most important games of the year is September 17th at sixth-ranked Florida State. Every Sooner fan has had that date circled all year.

Where will I be? Hunting prairie chickens in Kansas. Like I said, being a fan has its limits. But you can bet your ass I'll have a radio...

Mallard's Infinite Playlist: Iris DeMent

I discovered Iris DeMent completely by accident a while back while noodling around Last.FM looking for other stuff. I had been on sort of a female folky/Americana/Alt-Indie Country kick and was listening to stuff by the likes of Patty Griffin, Lucinda Williams, Neko Case, etc, when I stumbled across her song "Easy's Gettin' Harder Every Day." The hopelessness of the lyrics and the tired sadness of her voice just blew me away (unfortunately it's not on YouTube).

I had never heard of Iris DeMent, but interestingly enough - even though I was quite the fan back in the day - she first gained widespread notice when her song "Our Town" was played in the closing scenes and credits of Northern Exposure during that show's final episode. Here's a cool version of that song with backing vocals from Emmylou Harris, or, as I like to call her, the hottest gray-haired woman in the world.

Her music must strike some note of bittersweet finality, because more recently another of DeMent's songs, her version of the hymm "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" was featured in the closing credits of the Coen Brothers' adaptation of "True Grit." Beautiful stuff, almost enough to make this secular heathen go find himself a god(s).

I wouldn't say DeMent has a classically beautiful voice. It is, admittedly, something of an acquired taste. Some may find it too twangy, a bit nasally, just a little too backwoods Pentacostal-sounding, but having come from exactly that kind of peasant hillbilly stock, I love it. I think it sounds like distilled heartbreak, a sine wave of working class hope and despair, the kind of music populated by Joe Bageant's  (and my) people. Good stuff.

I'm still poking around her body of work, but here's one of my favorites so far...



And if you're a Talking Heads fan (as I am) you might like David Byrne's (and Natalie Merchant's) cover.

The End is Nigh...

Don't say you weren't warned...

http://www.salon.com/news/religion/index.html?story=/news/feature/2011/05/10/rapture_may_21

Spring is finally here -- but apparently, the apocalypse will be fast on its trail. That's the word from a slight but outspoken group of spiritual devotees who believe that the world as we know it is coming to an end.

Maybe you've already encountered the literature: pamphlets, subway ads, billboards on the side of the highway. "Judgment Day is coming" reads one billboard, which features a man praying in silhouette against a sunset backdrop. These are the works of a peculiar breed of Christian activists who've taken to the road to preach their belief in the fast-approaching End of Days. The self-appointed harbingers are not tied to any particular church -- they claim organized religion has been corrupted by the devil -- but rather to Internet- and radio-based ministries. And their lone mission is to tell anyone and everyone that the end of days is May 21. That's when, they insist, God's true believers will be lifted into heaven and saved, during a biblical event widely referred to as the Rapture.

Which is bunk, of course. It's impossible for the world to end on May 21st. Why? Because I haven't caught a bluefin or a tarpon, and it specifically states in my Contract with Life that regardless of eschatology, the world will not be allowed to end until I catch both a bluefin tuna and a tarpon.

So don't worry, we're all safe, for now. Actually, we're all safe indefinitely, because the chances of me being able to afford to go catch either one are exactly one rung lower than nil. So party on, you can thank me later...

But it does segue nicely into perhaps the most obvious addition yet to Mallard's Infinite Playlist...

Links, pics, music and such...

An old photo of Holly, my first chessie and the meanest, toughest, surliest old school bay dog bitch I've ever seen. She loved me beyond measure, tolerated my wife, and everyone else could go to hell. I hope I never have another one like her, but god, how I miss her sometimes...

My second post over at Mouthful of Feathers is up, as is my latest Quail Forever blog. Feel free to check them out if you get a chance...

And for today's edition of Mallard's Infinite Playlist... well, pretty conventional stuff, really: the Cowboy Junkies and their exquisite, haunting, beautiful cover of the Velvet Underground's Sweet Jane. As much as I like the original, when the Cowboy Junkies' version came out in '88 I thought then - and still do today - that it was simply one of the most beautiful songs I'd ever heard.

Was I in love with a girl at the time and did playing this song over and over and over in my iPod Walkman hone my adolescent heartbreak to a razor's edge? Silly question...