Blow Your Whistle

I ♥ the public library. Doesn't matter which city-the library is the bees knees. I loved the branch libraries and the Bookmobile when I was a kid in Austin, Texas. I adored the gigantic reading rooms of the New York Public. And now I dig the Stadt Bucherei--you know, the one with the dizzy facade, at the Burgasse stop of the U6 U-Bahn. The library has always been where I go to get new ideas for absolutely fucking free.

Something caught my eye when I was there a few weeks ago. A shiny silver glitter ball in the shape of a Big Apple. And the word "Disco" in the title. I picked it up casually, gave it a glance, then put it back--I was on a different mission that day. But I noticed that it was written by Vince Aletti, who I've always been intrigued by: he wrote about photography and pop culture for the Village Voice, now he's at the New Yorker. He's smart. But I didn't know he was also the inside man journalist at Ground Zero Disco Manhattan nineteen-seventy-five baby!

A week or two later, I went back, checked it out, and brought that book home with me. It's called The Disco Files 1973-78, and it collects all of the columns Aletti wrote about dance music for a trade magazine in the middle 70's. This is a great book. It came out (!) in 2009, but I must have missed it. Aletti writes about music with a ton of passion, but he balances that with the perspective of a DJ, who has to also think of music as a functional thing. A surgeon thinks a heart is just another kind of pump, and a DJ thinks of a piece of music as a people mover. Or a sedative. Music as a firestarter or a fire dowser. This perspective makes The Disco Files a nice mix of infectious music criticism and epic shopping list.

So now I'm obsessed with finding a copy of Hot Blood's "Soul Dracula." And I'll also be needing a copy of "7-6-5-4-3-2-1 Blow Your Whistle" by Gary Toms Empire. Yes! Did you know the Ventures did a (allegedly great) disco tune? It's called "Superstar Revue"! One, please!

Pictures of Home

Back at work today, though I probably shouldn't be. My chest still makes that ooey-gooey sound when I cough or laugh. Actually, I'm leaving early so I can go to the doctor. Maybe she can give me something to make my boo-boo all better.

I got a nice piece of news this morning though: I may be going back to the US again in the spring! On someone else's dime! I'm excited!!

In these times of financial calamity and associated disasters, maybe this is the best way for me to go back home: as a tourist. A business-traveler, frequent flyer zombie. The truth is, the longer I live in Vienna, the more a trip to the US will begin to feel like a trip to Pluto. But nobody has mentioned this to my heart.

So I'm happy. Working in DC for a week would mean eating amazing Ethiopian food, picking up some good books, and swimming in English, the sweet, profane jarbled-up and slanged out language of my life. And that would be okay.

I do think of Vienna as home, in a way. But in another, less laugh-out-loud sort of way, I think of the US as home. And always will.

But where bexactly in the US is "home" for me? Austin, where I grew up, ate jalapenos as a rite of passage, and got my heart good and broke for the first time? NYC, where I got slick, ate rock CD's as a rite of professionalism, and got my heart broke in a less laugh-out-loud sort of way? Seattle, where I discovered the most ironic pinball arcade in the country? Los Angeles, where I "hung out" with punk and hip hop stars, and otherwise lived like an expense account king? South Dakota, where we buried my father? Or was home for me truly the back of an Econo-line van, wedged in between the drum kit and the guitars, where I lay, furiously scribbling too many adjectives into a notebook just like the one I'm writing in today?

Home is all of those places and none of those places. In other words, home is just an idea. Home is old times, good times, a lost world. I can't go back there.

I am sure I'd like to go shopping, stuff my face and even maybe see some old friends in the USA. That would be so fucking...fun.

More Useless Lists, part 17

Places I have Bowled

1) Golem Bowl, Zlin, Czech Republic

2) Dart Bowl, and

3) Bowl-O-Rama, both Austin, Texas

4) the basement of an ancient music hall in the East Village ( I was wearing a lime-green polyester jumpsuit and a pair of fuzzy dice)

5) Brunswick Lanes, Wien

6) unknown shopping mall, Warsaw, Poland

7) Pioneertown (once owned by Roy Rogers!) Joshua Tree National Park

8) Chelsea Lanes, and

9) Bowl-Mor, both New York City

10) unknown old alley, Hollywood, California, USA.



Toys and Junk I once Owned

1) Spirograph

2) Major Matt Mason doll(s)

3) GI Joes

4) Legos

5) Baseball Cards, Football Cards and Wacky Packages

6) 45 RPM flexidiscs of songs by the Archies and Bobby Sherman, cut from the back panels of Honeycone and AlfaBits cereal

7) Many, many issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine

8) More than a few 7-11 baseball player souvenir Slurpee cups (including Roberto Clemente)

9) Aurora Model kits of Frankenstein's Monster and the Wolfman

10) Etch-a-Sketch.

I'm a Man?

The 9 to 5 people in Vienna--at the tram stop, on the subway--are serious. Expensive shoes, expensive eyeglasses. Briefcases. Combinations of clothes which could be described as "ensembles."

And then there is me. Sneakers. T-shirt. A duct-taped watch band. Holding a mug full of coffee from our kitchen. The mug reads "I (Heart) NY."

I'd like to be well put-together. I have the same style gods the other dudes have--Gregory Peck, Hank Fonda, Clooney--and they're all men who can rock a suit. Heroically. But the truth is, me myself and I more closely resemble a different Hollywood hunk: Woody Allen. And I drive like him too.

But I was flipping through a film encyclopedia last night, and came across a still from Annie Hall: Diane Keaton and the Woodman, in khaki pants and shirts with actual collars, standing and chatting, cocktails in hand, on a Manhattan rooftop. Suddenly I went winsome. 'Even Woody Allen looks more like an adult than I do.'



Was I ever a true grown-up In New York City? I was married, highly-paid, and a responsible cat-owner--in other words, I fit the description of a real man. But did anyone really take me seriously?

Thought the haze, I remember being at Manhattan rooftop parties, Mojito in hand, chatting with important and powerful people, but I know I didn't look as much like a player as Woody Allen does in those trousers. And I've heard plenty of people in my generation say the same thing: "I don't really feel like an adult."

Sometimes I think that since we moved here, and we met our second child, and I've become a manager, I've changed. God knows, by ten p.m. most nights, I'm as tired as an adult.

The conventional wisdom is that some people achieve adulthood, while others have it thrust upon them. I think I've backed into it. Wearing hip hop styles or raver pants is not an option. Long hair, or anything else which covers my eyes, is out. Maybe I've become an adult because I no longer wish to dress like a kid. That would hurt other people more than it would me.

I didn't become responsible so much as discover that it was required of me.

It's also practical: having breakfast with two small but quick-witted kids is just easier if you're sober.

50 Concerts

(Normally I don't do this sort of thing. Possibly because I like making lists too much. Like serial killer too much. But an old friend on Facebook started it and I needed to do this one. It's interestingly non-chronological. Facebook? Why would I need another time-sucking vortex in my life--I've got kids!)


1) Lynyrd Skynyrd opening for the Doobie Brothers, Austin Municipal Auditorium, Austin, Texas 1973 (my first)

2) Kreisky opening for TV on the Radio, Arena, Vienna, 2009 (my last)

3) The Replacements, The Continental Club, Austin, 1984?

4) The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Steamboat Springs, Austin, 1984

5) Standing Waves, in the parking lot of Inner Sanctum Records, Austin, 1980

6) The Punk Prom (Dicks, Big Boys, Sharon Tate's Baby), Armadillo World Headquarters, Austin, 1980

7) The B-52's, Armadillo World Headquarters, 1979

8) Journey, Austin Municipal Auditorium, 1978?

9) Peter Frampton, and Gary Wright, the "Dream Weaver," at a rock festival right next to Interstate 35, Austin

10) Rank and File, Dukes Royal Coach Inn, Austin, 1981?

11) Gang of Four, Club Foot, Austin, November 4, 1980 (the night Ronald Reagan was elected)

12) Fela, Austin City Coliseum, 1986

13) Devo, Armadillo World Headquarters, 1979

14) Butthole Surfers, Club Foot, Austin, 1982

15) Butthole Surfers, The Ritz, New York City, 1988

16) Terminal Mind, Rauls, Austin, 1980

17) Meat Joy, Voltaire's Basement, Austin, 1984?

18) Doctor's Mob, at a volunteer fire department garage, South Austin, 1984?

19) True Believers, UT Student Union, Austin, 1986

20) Flaming Lips, the Beach, Austin, 1985?

21) Pussy Galore, Siberia, New York City, 1988?

22) My Bloody Valentine, Maxwells, Hoboken, New Jersey, 1989

23) My Bloody Valentine, the Ritz, New York City, 1992

24) Laibach, the Palladium, New York City, 1989

25) Orbital, Lollapalooza, Randalls Island, NY, 1996?

26) Jane's Addiction, Madison Square Garden, NYC, 1990

27) Kiss (in 3-D, with 3-D glasses and 3-D rear-screen projections), Paramus?, New Jersey, 1998

28) Sun Ra, at dawn on the summer Solstice, Battery Square Park, New York City, 1989

29) The Residents, Warsaw, Brooklyn 2004?

30) Sonic Youth, Continental Club, Austin, 1985

31) Sonic Youth, the Ritz, NYC, 1988

32) Sonic Youth, Arena, Vienna, Austria

33) George Clinton, with members of ParliamentFunkadelic, playing "Tear the Roof off the Sucka" several times for a scene in a justifiably forgotten frat boy movie, 1992?

34) Teenage FanClub, unknown auditorium, Glasgow, 1991

35) Jimmy Dale Gilmore, Madison, Wisconsin, 1993

36) Fatboy Slim, Bowery Ballroom, New York City, 1999

37) Lenny D, a sports bar dive that reaked of PCP, some somewhere in Queens, 2000

38) Kraftwerk, Hammerstein Ballroom, NYC,2004?

39) Chemical Brothers, Hammerstein, NYC, 1998

40) Nirvana, Roseland, NYC, 1993

41) Fanfare Ciocarlia, sZene Wien, 2006?

42) Kaizers Orchestra, Arena, Vienna, 2007

43) Mudhoney, Pyramid, New York City, 1990

44) DopplerEffekt, the new club on Bleecker Street, New York City, 2009

45) Paul Oakenfold, Bowery Ballroom, NYC, 1998

46) Wire, Fluc, Vienna 2009

47) Rush, Armadillo World Headquarters, Austin, Texas, in either 1976 or 2112

48) Radiohead, unknown mega-auditorium, Brighton, England, 1998?

49) T Model Ford, under a tree, in a parking lot, somewhere in Mississippi, 2003

50) unknown homeless man, blowing twenty seconds of horrible saxophone noise, downtown No. 1 subway train, Harlem, USA, 1996.

35 hours in new york city

New York City, October, 2001

quitting the biz

(Hello, my name is Manley Dudlove, and I'll be your host for this weeks's episode of Who Am I This Time? Join us now on a trip to yesteryear (well, April 2005), as we explore the half-baked notion of leaving the entertainment industry without a safety net......)

This week, I did the one thing a music critic is never supposed to do. I e-mailed 161 music publicists and told them to stop sending me free CDs. I did it. I'm free.

I've always thought that quitting, or even trying to quit the music biz would be like trying to bust out of pornography and go legit. The e-mails I received in response to my spam seem to confirm that: one of them read "congratulations - I admire your breaking free of nyc/the music industry in such a spectacular and grown up fashion!" A lot of them wished me well in my "new life," and reading those words made me dizzy. I guess I have stepped off the precipice and plunged into the swamps and quicksands of "reinvention." But even though that is the most over-used word of the nineties, it seems we still need it to describe what a lot of us are doing, apparently.

I don't feel like I'm becoming something else exactly. I think I'm always going to love rock and roll, and probably always want to write about it, too. But when I say this, I always think of an interview I did with Brian Johnson, the singer for AC/DC, where he told me that he was almost embarrassed to be in his fifties and still so much in love with rock and roll. He felt that most men outgrow such things. Nevermind for a moment that his multi-million-dollar career probably helps sustain his passion for music. That night, there in the hotel bar, I could tell he was being for real. And I know what it feels like: I know and care way too much about a good guitar solo and/or some mysterious album cover that has puzzled me since I was fifteen.

We're three weeks away from getting on that plane. I'm taking care of business and wrapping things up. It feels clean and organized, like a fresh cut. I think about being at the airport, and landing in Vienna, and going to the Stadion Bad for the first time again this summer. I feel a little liberated. Yeah.

(a movie about) that day

Last night, after putting the kids in bed, I watched United 93, the Paul Greengrass film about the only hijacked plane which didn't hit its target on September 11th. I'd heard it was good, I'd gotten a copy, but still I had waited until I thought I was ready to see it. Maybe I miscalculated.

Anette is out of town, and even though I was completely exhausted from chasing V. and Adinah around by myself all day, and even though I was drinking a tall boy to steady my nerves, I was twitching five minutes into the movie. After 18 minutes, I paused United 93 to catch my breath and try to stop shaking. I paused it again after 29 minutes, and then again every seven to ten minutes. It wasn't exactly suspense or excitement, but reliving the shock of that day was almost too much.

Since 2001, wherever I am in the world, and whoever I'm talking to, if the subject of 9/11 comes up, it's always the other person who's in a rush to say where they were the minute they heard what had happened in New York City. Oftentimes they say, 'I saw it happen!' and what they mean is that they saw it live on TV. But I really did hear those two booms. I really was on Pitt street on the Lower East Side on that beautiful fall morning when I looked half a mile south and saw a hole in the World Trade Center. I saw it all.

I guess it left a hole in me too.

So.

Yeah, well that was almost seven years ago.

In the apocalyptic, ohmygod days and weeks after September 11th, I decided I wanted to live. To go forward somehow. I decided I wanted to have a kid. One of the shittiest Presidents we've ever had got us into even more trouble. We went to Ethiopia and met Adinah. Then we moved to Vienna, and I wasn't sorry to leave behind a country that would re-elect a shitty President. And now I miss America, but I live in Europe, and I have a foster daughter too and I work for an NGO and help refugees because I want to live and embrace life.

I wonder where I would be if that day never happened.

Flashback: The subway singer

(Readers note: the guy who types Euro Like Me has skipped town, so the Blog Drone 2000XdW will be posting a few of his old journal entries for him. I'd like to dedicate this one to Stacy, wherever she may be....)

March 1, 2004

Two weeks before Christmas, Adinah and I were swimming upstream against a tide of Manhattanism in the Thirty-Fourth Street F station. She was asleep and strapped into the stroller, I was on foot and on edge. Somehow through the crush of people, I heard some street musicians flirting with the beginning of a tune I thought I recognized. Let’s stop and listen, I thought.

The singer was a pretty black girl—twenty-two maybe, long straight hair, wearing jeans, a sweater, black suspenders, and a smile as big as Brandy’s. She was working a tough crowd. Hardly anyone had stopped to listen to her, but she was thanking everyone within hearing range anyway. Upbeat and invulnerable, she paced the dank concrete floor of the station, and started into Christina Aguilera’s “You Are Beautiful.”

The casual reader will be aware of this song—a stoopidly catchy teen power ballad allegedly about being freakish—and may, as I do, believe that it sounds sorta perverse (and patronizing) coming out of the mouth of a tiny millionaire and former Mouskateer who is currently working a look best described as skank `ho at a piercing convention. Coming from a Barbie doll diva who has simply changed her style while she continues to broadcast the blur of melisma and kiddy-porn music critics call “teen pop,” “You Are Beautiful” is less a hymn to non-conformity than a rationalization of Xtina’s latest makeover. I’m saying.

But the subway singer crooned it defiantly at the indifferent mass rushing by her, as if she was singing it to herself, a mantra she repeated to keep herself warm. She was weaving gold out of garbage, until “You Are Beautiful” was.

I pulled the stroller over, unzipped her day-glo pink snowsuit a little and woke Adinah. I wanted her to see this strong black heroine singing her heart out. I thought, “This is what I want Adinah to remember about New York and her time here.” The poetry of the scene—the frenzy of the crowd, the unrequited tenderness in the singer’s voice, the faint light in Adinah’s waking eyes—everything fused together. Then the cast of characters got transposed and I was singing to Adinah,

“ ‘Cuz you are beautiful
In every single way.”

I love this city and I love the life I’m living and I love this little girl and all the beauty that seems to just blossom around her.

hurtling

Over the course of one hundred and five hours in New York City, I:

Ate sushi twice. Saw my dear friend Simon twice, but did not see his wife and kids. Sold CDs at Academy Records and at the Entertainment Outlet on 14th street. Ate the world's best cheeseburger and fries at the Corner Bistro (4th Street and Eighth Avenue). Had dinner and several cups of coffee with my wonderful neighbor Tina and our sublettors Aras and Amy. Donated eighteen 12" x 12" boxes of books, CDs, graphic novels and a stamp collection to Housing Works, an organization which benefits homeless people with AIDS. Ate amazing El Salvadoran pupusas and drank cold ice tea with tamarind juice. Saw my friend Marty, who showed me the vacant block near the Brooklyn Naval Yard where he will be building a $100 million housing complex (!) Sold two crates of vinyl, a handful of CDs, and a couple of books about monster movies at the Brooklyn Flea. Ate great Thai food in Park Slope. Saw my friend Adrienne, who, much like Al Pacino in Godfather III, wants to get out of her racket (the culture-media complex), but "they keep pulling me back in." Bought two pink "NYC" baseball caps for $18 from a vendor on St. Marks. Ate Mexican food once, and it was too salty, but it was great. Met a new wave promoter I knew in Austin 25 years ago (and sold him Austin new wave vinyl.) Bought a beach umbrella, two laundry baskets and a pack of gum from K-Mart. And slept a total of fifteen hours.

Was it fun? Yes. Do I want to move back to New York City? Not yet.

Lower East Side, 5 a.m.

Invisible Men

New York is the city that barely sleeps, and I have done likewise. I keep waking up at the hour of the Wolf (4 a.m., give or take.) Then I go for a walk.

This is when the shifts change. The bars have just closed and the last, die-hard, talk-the-bartender's-ear-off patients have been ejected out onto Stanton and Houston and Essex. They're almost all men, and they amble, like me. Some of them curse.

But as the skies get a little lighter, they're replaced by much more single-minded fellows. Often black or brown. They're going to work. Some of them say "Good morning, sir," as they pass. And I give it back to them, enthusiastically.

It's so nice to be able to chat and jive and flirt and just be friendly with people on the street. That is, it's nice to be able to speak English with strangers, just because I can. In Vienna, my German is not good enough to be Friendly Guy. Here, I've been gabbing with taxi drivers from Ghana ("I really want to see Ghana--my wife says it's great!") and all-night diner waitresses ("Can I ask you something: who were those kids who were just sitting here?") I get passing glimpses of people who have very different lives.

It's not just about speaking English--I'm racially motivated, too. I want to speak--even if it's just small talk--to people of color. New York City is amazing because everyone is mixed together on the street, but I think people still meet and greet and shoot the breeze with their own, according to race, class and all that other bullshit. Maybe I'm just talking about myself here, but I think it's easy for white people to slip into a mode of not really engaging with African Americans, Dominican Americans, Korean Americans. Like Ralph Ellison said, we don't see them.

And it's almost physically pleasurable to break out of that. Even if you exchange a few gentle words with someone in a different skin, they may respond with a hint of surprise. Then a smile. And that's a nice thing.