Joyrides for Shut-ins

Loop-de-loop update-o-rama blah-bitty-blah whoop!

Hi gang... been super busy over here lately. Seems the older the L'il Man gets, the shorter the naps seem to get... which means the less time there is for the Joy of Blogging and miscellaneous writing. I figured that, rather than apologize for another mammoth delay, I'll just pull a Doug Henning and just pretend that it hasn't been weeks. Let's just say I'm still reeling with the L'il Man's sudden emergence into full blown toddlerhood. At 20 months, he's easily got over 100 words he recognizes... he's become a total parrot (witness the mimic of the words "maniac," "knicklehead" and "Oh, God!" during the past week... I gotta watch it!)

And his daredevil philosophy on life lately mirrors that of the late Evel Knievel. I think he conked his melon three different times in a day trying to do crazy stuff in and out of the house. This wasn't supposed to happen until the "terrible twos," right??? That's what those 800 books I breezed through told me kids were supposed to do... hahaha... I'll be glad when we can move all the furniture back. He's like Eddie Vedder stage-diving back in 1991. So blah, blah, blah... here's the quick "update-o-rama" that should bring me (and you) back up to speed on what's happening here:

1) Go see Iron Man. It may be the best superhero film ever made... the casting is great (Robert Downey, Jr. is absolutely brilliant as Tony Stark) and the story is water-tight. Saw it opening weekend and was not at all disappointed. Jon Favreau (who will someday play me in a feature film if David Cross and Paul Giamatti aren't into it) did an incredible job balancing real-world politics, CGI and a cast of Oscar nominees and creating something special. One can only hope the other summer blockbusters compare.

2) I'm back in the gym, finally. It's been nice to carve out the time and begin dropping all this weight I've gained writing, researching and taking care of the L'il Man. I'll never be as cut as LeBron James, for sure, but at least I'll look and feel better... and speaking of LeBron, I'm pulling for the Cavaliers in a big way during this NBA playoff season, but to have a 14 point lead and lose your grip (like they did in last night's game) doesn't leave me hopeful. We had all the momentum going. Ah yes, to live and die in Cleveland every few months with "Next Year" constantly on your breath.

3) I've been rocking the Sirius satellite radio a lot lately. SZQ hooked me up around the holidays and I've been something of a Sirius junkie ever since. I know that it's very much a corporate entity/visage and that the playlists they broadcast are similarly conceived... but I have to say that being able to get my chillout music and stations like the Spectrum, Margaritaville and the Coffeehouse is really nice. Once my favorite NPR and sports radio shows are done locally, it's straight to the Sirius. Now I need an internet radio so I can get my Soma-FM fixes, or perhaps I should just set up wi-fi to a home sound system and be done with it.

4) Did a couple of really enjoyable interviews recently -- one for CC.com with former WMMS-FM program director and radio guru John Gorman; the other with Dream Theater keyboard sorcerer Jordan Rudess for blogcritics.org. Check out the photo (from another blog). I'm looking forward to meeting him on Saturday. I think that I'm going to pitch a bigger feature to the Chicago Tribune, in the hopes they don't have anything lined up for June on his other project, the Liquid Tension Experiment. You know, I just realized that, looking at the dates, I've not contributed to BC in, oh, say, 9 months or so. I'm terrible. I've gotta get back at it. BTW I also did some work for Scene and the Sun recently... I'll post links when they're up there... short bios on Fish, Type O Negative, Lyle Lovett and a feature on Good Morning Valentine are on the way...

A few other things: Had a fun Mother's Day with all four grandparents present and the four SBC kiddos running around our little bungalow. What a riot! I miss seeing my nephew Will (at left, but definitely not that small anymore!)... and I miss his great parents M&M, too. I've gotta get us down to Columbus soon. We really miss you guys! Mike, I need your tutorial on the Wii (yes, I finally got one... still in the box for the last three weeks!!! No time!!! ). And Mo, I hope your first Mother's Day was a good one. You guys rock. I wish you lived up here in Cleveland. We probably say that at least once a week.

I guess lastly, all the photos for the book are in... thanks to the excellent "Captain St. Lucifer" and her amazing camera gear, I think we're in really good shape. She has quite the eye for framing all the good stuff in just the right ways... and just released a book of her own that I really must buy.

Heck, she even made my husky, balding self look good (see left... not too shabby!). Re: the book, I imagine I'll be in review/edit mode here in a week or two. Looking forward to August... and not just for the Radiohead concert. By then, and by alllllllll accounts, I should be available to you on amazon.com... and right here on J4S, of course, if I could ever get a few minutes. LOL. Speaking of, I gotta hit the gym... and the shower... and I've got a 10:45 interview to do... and then bring the little man home for a nap... and then lunch... and... and... and... hope all is well with you. More updates... and sooner than monthly, I promise.

PCHQ

Not that this should surprise anyone...

See latest stories on Yahoo! News

More updates coming this weekend. Hope you are all well.

PCHQ

Is the Tour Shirt Era Over?

I wrote about my affinity for concert tour shirts about a year ago, for blogcritics.org, about whether or not the concert tour shirt era was over. It generated a lot of response -- both on the blog and through email channels. I've always been a big fan of them, but I've decided that perhaps that era is finally over for me. I've decided to pare down my collection to a final number of 30 (and guess it will end up a slightly larger number than that). There are collectors out there who troll eBay pretty hard for them and I think I'd like the extra cash and space in my house, once and for all. Email me if there is something specific you're looking for that I might have; otherwise I'll post some links and photos of the ones that are finally making way for other clothes in the closet and onto the internet auction block.

PCHQ

No Single Path... to Relief

It has been really nice to catch up on all of my blog reading finally. Working on a mammoth project (and having a whole bunch of other balls in the air) has really had an impact on the amount of reading I have been able to do. One of my many favorite reads on the blogroll you see at the left is John Ettorre's Working With Words blog, where he posted a really interesting link to a New York Observer article about how there is no single path for a writer anymore. How true. It was a fascinating read, given the amount of time I've spent writing in my life. If you like to write, blog and/or read, I think you'll find it interesting. And once it gets a little warmer (probably another month or so) out come the deckchairs, Trader Joe's Lemonade and the stack of books I haven't had time for. What a relief!

PCHQ

2008: A Toddler Photo Odyssey

The SZQ and I took L'il Man to get his pictures taken this afternoon at Jacques Pennay (yes, calling Big Box stores by their faux en français name makes it feel only a little better to actually go there). It started out as a great afternoon idea and ended like a Homeric ordeal. We did manage to end up with some really good photos of the Man (and yes, his Monkey) but as we looked at the digital proofs, the photos really told the story better than I ever could: First, it was the lip. Then the sad eyes. Then crocodile tears. And the beet red face. Then a full-blown meltdown.

Even breaking out Monkeyman (and the photo employees finding a vacuum for L'il Man to oggle) couldn't save the day. As I followed the scrambling, 18-month-old through the Men's section and all the way into Footwear -- and whimpering all the way, looking for an exit -- I decided that this experience had officially bent the space-time continuum. We were at JCP for 75 minutes and I felt like we'd been there forever. If a picture really is worth a thousand words, then I'm guessing our photos and today's experience are tantamount to the Odyssey.

PCHQ

2008 WTAM Amateur Night Voting... and First Final Draft Deadline

Well, the results are in and final for the WTAM-AM 1100 amateur night. I came in 2nd place(!) in the popular vote (with 30.66%) and ended up about 6 percentage points behind Dave Ulam, who really did an excellent job. In fact, all of the contestants were great and it was a lot of fun sharing the night with them. I also want to thank Kevin, Motts and Ray Davis, everyone who called and emailed me after the show and those who rocked the vote online. It is all greatly appreciated. What about 2009 Amateur Night? Heck, I think I'll give it another go. We'll see what happens... One thing's for sure, this probably won't be the last of me you hear on the radio this year. My first deadline is passed, the first draft manuscript is in. Soon I'll be out promoting it... but before then, you'll start to see more regular reports (and hints... hint hint) here. And an official announcement.

PCHQ

PCHQ Shares: Amateur Night

One night, I'm on my way home from a get-together and flip on the radio as I'm prone to do. I tend to be all over the radio road during the day -- when you're house- or carbound like I am, radio's your pal -- but after 10PM, it's usually "Sportsline" on WTAM-1100 with Kevin Keane. I grew up listening to "Sportsline" on 3WE with Pete Franklin with my dad; to me, there's nothing that symbolizes my relationship with my dad any better than those nights where we'd huddle around his old radio and hear what the fans had to say about the Indians, the Browns and the Cavaliers.

So, I call up Keane around 10:30 at night, from the car, on the way home after having a few tasty bevvies. I give him what-for about his analysis about the Cavaliers. He shoots back about being a candidate for their 9th annual "Amateur Night" and was that why I was calling...? Um, well no, not really. I was calling to tell him he was wrong. I said it wasn't my plan to be on "Amateur NIght," but that if I got the green light to do it, why not? Next thing ya know, I'm doing an on-air callback. Then a second one. Then a third... and then I'm not just a contestant anymore, I'm a finalist, and strapped into the main broadcast desk on April Fool's Day doing my so-called radio thang.

My radio thang...? Yup. I had a blast. It was great fun and I can't thank Keane, Brian Motts, Ray Davis and the rest of the WTAM-1100 AM crew enough for giving me a half-hour, primetime shot at "38 states and half of Canada." It was a dream come true and I had some great callers (gotta love a caller from Minneapolis!) and a lot of fun. I'm not sure if I'll win the contest (as of press time I was in 3rd out of 5 contestants) but if you want to vote for me, that would absolutely rock. WTAM will post the podcasts later this evening at http://www.wtam.com/pages/sportsline/amateurnight/ and you can listen to me there so you won't be blindly voting if you didn't hear it live. Or, you could just go straight to the voting here: http://www.wtam.com/pages/keanepage1.html and click the "Pete" button to vote to help a brother out. I'll leave you with this from the WTAM "Amateur Night" website:

"The contestant who does the best show as voted, 50% by audience participation and 50% an evaluation by Ray Davis (our boss), Motts and myself will co-host a "Sportsline" show with me.  Our winner will also join Mark Schwab and me in the "Party Booth" at Progressive Field for an Indians game this summer and receive a WTAM prize package that Motts will put together with some cool stuff from the "Big One's" prize closet."

Now, don't you want to help out a fellow blogger/ friend/ relative/ writer-who-makes-your-day by voting for your pal, PCHQ? I mean, c'mon... the two-guy combo I'm competing against read from scripts... scripts, I tell ya! And besides, I hear second prize is a can of corn and a Cory Snyder rookie card.

Well, I gotta go. It sounds like the L'il Man is up.

PCHQ 

And now introducing... Monkeyman!

And now for something completely different... I haven't talked much about the L'il Man lately. Not because there hasn't been anything to talk about, but because by the time my mind actually thinks to write something about his latest exploits, a dozen or more funny things have happened. OK, for a blog that claimed early on to be a SAHP stronghold, amalah.com I am not. Anyway... we have a pretty fun relationship together as it is, but things are getting a lot more fun lately. Maybe it's that we've finally come up with a temporary sleep solution here that satisfies all parties in the house. And when you're better rested, everything goes better.

At 18 months, L'il Man is an inquisitive lad who has decided he is well into his terrible twos (yes, ahead of schedule... which makes me wonder if he's going to be an engineer, or thermonuclear physicist). He's also my "cubemate," a few months shy of getting an actual laptop of his own, but helping his dad come up with new and exciting things to write about... and I'm taking notes, believe me. Once this first book is done, I think I'm going to assemble the material I have for a SAHD book. There are literally hundreds of hysterical things... like the fact that the Bandannie is thinking that everything that belongs to the L'il Man belongs to her, too. Talk about a jealous first child.

So anyway, the L'il Man is not much on plastic toys (prefers all of the dangerous adult stuff, it seems) or anything that remotely resembles kid's stuff. But he has finally gravitated to a "friend" amongst the rubble of Toyland that is our living room. He's Monkeyman... and everything that L'il Man does now, Monkeyman must also do. They read books together, have lunch together, go for car rides together and yes... well, only one of the kid's pants ends up wet or worse. Thick as thieves. The two of them have bonded in such a way that I actually had to locate another Monkeyman on Amazon.com... just in case this Monkeyman (or "muhn-kuh-mah" as he calls him) suffers some ill fate in the washer, on a field trip to the store or other random thing. Cracks me up.

I know that this blog has been all about me lately (T-minus 4 days and some odd hours, people...!) but in the grand scheme of things, it's always going to be about the L'il Man... and his diaper wearing Monkeyman... and that sometimes the L'il man IS a Monkeyman.

PCHQ

Madge, the 2008 Rock Hall Class and Cleveland

Well, now that the 2007 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions are done and over with, music fans and Clevelanders (like me) can look forward to the 2008 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions. They’ll actually be held here on the North Coast (instead of NYC) for the first time since 1997; you may recall that class included the Bee Gees, Crosby Stills & Nash, the Jackson Five, Parliment-Funkadelic, Joni Mitchell and the Rascals. This year's list included the chart-topping Madonna, John Mellencamp, the Dave Clark Five, the Ventures and Leonard Cohen. Now, I've long been an advocate and proponent of the Rock Hall, but the fact that Madge topped this year’s list of inductees is absolutely crazy. The fact that she got in before pioneering women artists like Patsy Cline (hello... "Early Influences" category), Linda Rondstadt, Heart, Joan Baez and Pat Benatar is hilarious because, if not for all of those women, there is no Madonna.

Induction years like the one we just had lead me down a dark path... and puts me at odds with my friends at the Rock Hall. Who are these people who vote (I know the answer, I'm trying to figure them out)? Are their votes bought, swayed, thrown out if they lean a particular way?

I fail to understand the exclusion of musicians who clearly deserve to be inducted -- and some of them have been on the "waiting list" for a good long time. The Moody Blues (forefathers to symphonic rock) have been eligible since 1989; Tin Pan Alley singer-songwriter Neil Diamond has been eligible since 1991 (same goes for Love, Captain Beefheart, the MC5 and Cat Stevens); Blood Sweat & Tears, Can, Deep Purple and Genesis have been eligible since 1993; Chicago, King Crimson (the godfathers of progressive rock), Nick Drake and Yes since 1994; this says nothing of The Cure, Kraftwerk, Tom Waits, Rush, Kiss, Boston, Heart, the Replacements, Depeche Mode... the list is endless.

When you consider all of these talents -- most of whom the induction argument can be made for in a legitimate way -- it seems crazy to even speculate that any of them will get in when we have the ceremony here this coming year. In 2008, first eligibles include The Smiths, Run DMC, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Bon Jovi... and, well, Metallica was eligible last year and are likely to get a nod this time around, too. And that right there pretty well covers next year, assuming I'm thinking like the "voters" do.

But if it were up to me -- and it's not, but woolgathering on a Saturday night is fun -- next year would be a make-up year. It would be a larger-than-normal graduating class, featuring many of the denied acts listed above, and it would be a perfect 4-5 hour concert event for the Quicken Loans Arena. But that's only part of my thought process...

My axe to grind with the Rock Hall voters (paraphrased here; in longer forms published elsewhere) is pretty simple: they've got a problem with arena rock and progressive rock. It's not "cool" enough, cultured enough or perhaps, in this day and age, not white collar enough. There has never been a clearer argument for the influence bands like King Crimson and Yes on the "prog" subgenre. With bands like Radiohead and Tool leading the "Third Wave" charge of progressive rock (see also Porcupine Tree, the Mars Volta, Coheed and Cambria, System of a Down, Dream Theater, VAST, the Flower Kings, Opeth, Sigur Rós, Mogwai, Explosions in the Sky...) and gaining popularity, there has never been a better time to get progressive rock legitimately and deservedly inducted. How long will it take RH voters to get them in? Remember: noisy wheels get the grease. Thankfully, enough people complained about Black Sabbath to get them in before one of them died. Some acts out there have not been so lucky...

Anyway, take a look at http://www.futurerockhall.com/eligibles.php and tell me who you'd vote in and why.

T-Minus 15 days to my deadline...

PCHQ

R.I.P. Jeff Healey

As if the weather and my lack of updating the blog wasn't depressing enough... so, I'm snowed in with the family and working on this week's CC issue and my book manuscript (T-minus 22 days and counting) when I stumbled across the news that the blind Canadian blues guitarist Jeff Healey had died. He was 41 years old and died of cancer. When you write about music and popular culture for as long as I have, you get used to seeing obits. They're always a little rattling (like the recent passing of Heath Ledger) but every once in a while, they cut me right to the quick.

Healey was the first artist to ever get a standing ovation on "The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson" in his American television debut. His playing style (laying his guitar across the lap and press-bending strings as he strummed) was like nothing anyone had ever seen before. Everyone from Clapton to B.B. King to Stevie Ray Vaughan called him the Second Coming on guitar. When Healey came to Cleveland for a show, I saw him at a place called Peabody's Down Under on the East Bank of the Flats (which has since relocated to another part of town). I even managed to get my dad to go; he had watched the Carson show and couldn't believe his eyes either. The place had double the occupancy and the Cleveland Fire Department was ready to shut the place down... but on that night in 1988, Healey's presence in the club even brought the Cleveland Fire officials into the club to watch. I've never seen anything like him. He tore the damn place down.

Healey was also one of the first major interviews I ever conducted as a music journalist. After a nervous 11 minutes on the phone with Healey, my voice cracking and wavering, I thanked him for his time and was getting ready to hang up. He sort of chuckled and said, "Are you sure you've got everything you need?" Gulp. Uh, yeah. Thanks. I'm good... he knew I was a bit star-struck, but he let it go. If you've never heard See the Light, you've never seen the light. I'm changed. I've got the blues in a bad way... what a loss.

PCHQ