Puck Ponderings

Sorry for the light posting today, but I spent the afternoon at the Colorado Avalanche/Minnesota Wild game, which I believe was the first professional sports contest I have ever attended in which neither team was plural.

I never fail to be surprised at how many women show up for hockey games properly garbed. Wearing a hockey jersey really says something about a woman; usually, what it seems to say is "I work at an auto-parts store."

Blood Is All Around, No Need to Fake It

The sewers of Minneapolis are exploding with blood. The upside is, this suggests a radically new and exciting direction for Ghostbusters 3.

Bustin' Out the Space Food Sticks

Without an episode of "Theme Time Radio Hour" on, I am grooving to my second-favorite XM Radio station, the Seventies on 7. This is much better than an oldies radio station, which would focus on the big names like Fleetwood Mac and the Jackson 5ive or the noteworthy songs like "Spirit in the Sky" and leave out the songs that aren't any good but are worth hearing because they remind you of exactly where you were in 1974, like "Wildfire" or anything by Lobo or something by England Dan and John Ford Coley other than "I'd Really Love to See You Tonight." I'm kind of surprised that I haven't heard "Bad Blood" yet this evening, but the night is young.

Strike Up the Banjo

Can this be true? Eric Weissberg, who headed up Dylan's backing band on Blood on the Tracks, was also the guy who played "Dueling Banjos." Or one of the duelers, I should say.

You Can Tune a Piano, but You Can't Listen to REO Speedwagon Without Retching

I know everyone is all pumped about Opening Night and the Mets taking on the Cardinals Sunday evening, but thanks to a St. Louis sports blog, you will know to tune in a little bit late:

REO Speedwagon will sing the national anthem in conjunction with the Tuesday release of the band’s new album, “Find Your Own Way Home” (which kind of describes my trip back from Memphis, but that’s another story), and will feature “10 original songs returning to the classic REO Speedwagon sound of power ballads and melodic rock anthems,” according to the press release. No word if the anthem will be a ”power ballad” or “melodic rock anthem”.

Me, I'm going to wait and catch the two living members of Foghat doing the anthem before the Twins/Orioles game.

Hogan's Pallbearers

Just for no reason, here's a picture of Larry Hovis, Leon Askin and Robert Clary (better known as Carter, General Burkhalter, and LeBeau) at Bob Crane's funeral in 1978. You won't find such utterly pointless yet fascinating images on just any blog.

This picture comes to us via the utterly pointless yet fascinating Web site Find a Death, which is an excellent way to kill an hour or three. It covers the last hours of many of Hollywood's leading lights, as well as many more of its lesser lights, and while obviously there are more gripping stories to be found under people like Bob Crane or Chris Farley, it's nice to find out how Richard Deacon died as well. Plus, the proprietor likes to include pictures of the often surprisingly humble dwellings these folks resided in during their final days; Shemp Howard, for example, lived in this apartment building fit for a Stooge, and this is where LaWanda "Aunt Esther" Page waved her last Bible.

My favorite Find a Death story concerns a onetime Hollywood hottie named Linda Darnell, who had managed to see her career rise skyward then plummet all the way down by the age of 41 to, of all places, Glenview, Illinois, where she was living while appearing in a play in nearby Skokie in 1965. Then the house burned down. Glenview is a nice enough town, but for a onetime starlet to be reduced to living there, only to die horribly in a house fire, is literally adding injury to insult.

Calling All Killers

I can't think of any band that fell off the cliff more quickly in the album-naming department than the Killers. Hot Fuss is a classic title -- punchy, original, descriptive. But Sam's Town -- what is that, the Wal-Mart theme park?

"Read My Mind" sounds nice on the radio, though.

Padres Say the Darnedest Things

OPC reader ECB shares with us the following story, which originated in the San Diego Tribune:

"Hey Greg, I've got one for you," Brian Giles said to new Padres teammate Greg Maddux last month. "Why was the mathematics book depressed?" Giles said. After the 333-game winner pondered the question for a few seconds, Giles slowly delivered the punch line. "Because it had a lot of problems inside."

Giles delivers more jokes here, although none of the rest are as funny as that one, which is actually pretty good, I think. Maddux doesn't laugh at any of them until Giles delivers his final zinger naked, which maybe Sarah Silverman ought to try.

Get a Job

It irritates me that American popular culture ignores the way that most people spend their days, i.e., working. Sure, maybe most people hate their jobs and don't want to be reminded of having to fill out forms for the shipping department when they go home and put on their Lynyrd Skynyrd records, but at the same time, those cultural outlets that do focus on the office grind certainly resonate with a lot of people. It's not for nothing that Dilbert seems to be the most popular comic strip in America; Mike Judge's 1999 film Office Space has become a cult hit in spite of the fact that it's really not all that good. The NBC series The Office (unseen by me) appears to be quite popular as well.

I think one reason that artists overlook what it means to spend eight hours a day in a cubicle is that many of them have never had to do so. Particularly in a young man's game like rock & roll, there is very little experience of the workaday world, so the people who can write credibly about it are few and far between. Mostly they talk generically about the repetitive, wearying toil, as witness:


"I'm going to pack my lunch in the morning/And go to work each day/And when the evening rolls around/I'll go on home and lay my body down/And when the morning light comes streaming in/I'll get up and do it again" -- Jackson Browne, "The Pretender"

"Still, tomorrow's gonna be another working day/And I'm trying to get some rest/That's all, I'm trying to get some rest" -- Paul Simon, "American Tune"

And my favorite: "I've done my best to live the right way/I get up every morning and go to work each day" -- Bruce Springsteen, "The Promised Land"

That's one reason that Fountains of Wayne's Welcome Interstate Managers is so impressive; it is aware not just of the soul-crushing tedium of getting up every morning to go to work, but it knows what people do all day at their jobs. The narrator of the brilliant "Bright Future in Sales" is "heading for the airport on a misty morning/Gonna catch a flight to Baltimore," but in the interim he has to "do some quick reading for the big meeting," which of course he hasn't done yet, because who wants to read anything for a meeting? In "Little Red Light," it's possibly the same character who is "Stuck in a meeting on Monday night/Trying to get the numbers to come out right." (Strangely enough, another work-oriented song on the album, "Hey Julie," seems to have gotten its cliched ideas about office life from reruns of "The Stockard Channing Show.")

I'd like to talk more about this topic, but I have some invoices to follow up on.

Things I Learned While Watching VH1 Classic

In the 1967 video for "Arnold Layne," Pink Floyd cavorts like the Help!-era Beatles on a beach -- except this being England, the beach looks cold, windswept and deserted. The video is in black and white, which doesn't lend itself to lightheartedness, plus it's totally disorienting to see Roger Waters 'aving a bit of a larf. He probably switched back to furious self-pity between takes.

Off-putting in a different way is Heatwave's "Boogie Nights" video, in which the entire band is decked out in chocolate brown pants with matching sleeveless vests (complete with lapels), with white trim; no shirts. They all look like chocolate vanilla creme Pop-Tarts. The band, surprisingly enough, was multiracial, which means there are several dorky white guys with early-70s mustaches playing the keyboards in those hideous suits. If I formed a band with, say, Bookforum editor Eric Banks and Rolling Stone columnist Rob Sheffield, and we made a video wearing our everyday shlubby white-guy clothes, people would say, "At least they look funkier than Heatwave."