June 29, 2004

We Got Jokes and Jokes and Jokes and Jokes
Had the good fortune to see Dave Chappelle at the Orpheum Theater over the weekend. It was a rambunctious crowd that attempted again and again to pigeon hole Dave with some of his signature lines from his show. To his credit he dealt with their heckling like a pro. And he was damn funny to boot. Of course, I also got to sit right in front of the guy who has to repeat, out loud, every punch line in order for its full comedic weight to settle into the dusted folds of his brain.

After the show, everyone went and bought gallons of grape drink and retired to a quite home in South Minneapolis. Someone brought out a game I had never played before called Shut Box. Little did I know then, that the sole purpose of this game is to make me relinquish all the money that I have in my wallet and send me home broke. Even though it robbed me blind, I am into this game and am here to tell you that ya'll should be playing this game all the time. I guess the game is pretty hard to come by but you can find them on ebay. Here are the rules of Shut Box. And in case anyone is interested, shutbox.com would be a cool name for a website and it's not yet registered.

Beastie Boys Triple Trouble Frogger Game.

June 25, 2004

Saint Paul Saints
The Twins need to get themselves an outdoor stadium immediately. Watching the Saint Paul Saints, outdoors on a cool summer night, you can't beat it. If you get there late (because you got distracted by a box of cold Red Stripes tailgating in the parking lot) then you get into the game for $5. Special 'Fashionably Late' price. That's actually what's printed on the ticket. At the Metrodome you've got your choice between warm shitty Miller Lite or Budwieser in a wide-mouth plastic bottle, at the Saints game they have Summit beer on tap. At the dome you've got a roof. At Midway Stadium, the night sky is an ever-changing tapestry of color and light. The only thing they don't have at Miller Stadium is a baseball team that I know anything about. It didn't even dawn on me to look at the scoreboard until about halfway through the sixth inning. But the ball game is background, like the Union Pacific trains rumbling slowly along, not 20 yards pass the back of the center field fence, or the Girl Scout pillow fights that take place in between the fourth and fifth innings. It's just like one large piece of art. And on a good night it's the best seat in town.

Actually the best seat in town is the giant Spa water pool tower in left field. Sometime during the fifth inning someone in our crew noticed that the spa seating, usually reserved for company types, was sitting abandoned. The call was made to scramble. We rallied along the outside track, spotted the tower, saw the reserved for "Rollover" sign, and in a move that would have made Chevy Chase in Fletch proud, we fast talked our way up to the deck, I believe I was named CEO of Rollover. We enjoyed several strong innings at the spa tower. We ate Rollover's hot dogs, drank their beers and tried to steal their free 'Saints' towels. I think we would have been left unmolested in our high tower if that same someone hadn't decided to actually fire up the whirl pool and take a dip. I think that must have set off some alarms somewhere and we were quickly surrounded by security and forced to abandon ship. Good diplomacy and level heads prevailed. There was nothing but good vibes traveling through our wandering party. We broke from security with hand shakes and smiles. Just another day at the park.

June 24, 2004

Born into Dodgeball
I Saw the Bukowski Documentary Born into This and I watched the movie Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. I decided I would try and review Dodgeball in a Bukowskiesque type poem:

only children play dodgeball
when men do this they are whores

when other men
watch
they are
worse than whores

fist fights
cock fights
women in green dresses
fat dogs
that's entertainment

dodgeball reminds me
that
the jails and madhouses
are
FULL
yet there's no
PANIC

June 22, 2004

Summer Activities

This past weekend I had to deal with the consequences of the unfortunate play of our Minnesota Twins in Milwaukee. One overzealous Brewers fan hounded me day and night with drunken unintelligible rants left on my voice mail and inning by inning emails recounting the destruction of my team. It was all a bit more than I could take so I hastened out to the golf course both Saturday night and Sunday morning to try and bring calm to the situation and lift the dark cloud of disappointment. Saturday night was beautiful. The setting sun cast magnificent pink brushwork across the sky. My game was good. Sunday was a whole different story. I'm still getting use to some extra long clubs. I may as well have been playing with a shovel and gardening hoe. I did more gardening and sod removal on the course than one should legally be allowed. The golf cops continued to appear on speedy carts and I was sure that one of them was going to offer a citation or a cease and desist order. "Please Sir, you must stop."

The Walker Art Center's Summer Music and Movies series is on point this year. Six Steve McQueen movies outdoors. I can't wait to see Bullit and The Getaway sprawled out on the Sculpture Garden lawn.

Even more summer goodness comes to The Minnesota Orchestra, where Chris O'Riley will be playing classic piano compositions of Radiohead's music.

June 18, 2004

Who Cries For The Children?

After a couple reminiscent email exchanges with folks out West, it was brought to my attention that the incredible 1986 production of Hear N' Aid won VH1's The Greatest: 100 Metal Moments. As luck would have it I have a copy of this wonderful video after I stole it from some kids Bar Mitzvah gift bag. The deal was that 40 metal gods got together May 20 and 21, 1985, at the A&M Recording Studios to bang out a song called 'Stars' to help the starving kids in Africa. The song was written by Jimmy Bain and Vivian Cambell. The results are so good that I can't even describe them. Checkout an audio sample of Yngwie Malmsteen's guitar solo from the song. Also see how many of these Metal Monsters you can name.

Here is Karl Briers recollections on the video:

Hours and hours drooling over Yngwie/Lynch's riffin', shock and titillation at the raw fact of just how much Night Ranger's (!!!) and Guffria's guitarists RIPPED SHIT UP!!, scorn for the limp C- effort of Twisted Sister's axeman; worship of Halford's triple octave vocal incisions and Tate's serpentine throat skills, disgust with Dokken's comatose delivery; and of course, veneration for Smalls and St.. Hubbin's commentaries-- likely the only parties to emerge with every ounce of dignity and conviction intact.

Lyrics as follows:

Who Cries for the children I do. [Ronnie James Dio as himself]

Sometime in the night, when you're feeling the cold [Meniketti]
Take a look at the sky above you [Ronnie James Dio]
Those are faces in the light if the the story were told [Halford]
They are calling you, calling you--yeah! [Dio]

We are magic in the night [Dio]
We are shadow we are light [DuBrow]
We are forever you and I [Meniketti]

We're stars! [Chorus, including Blackie Lawless (WASP) making evil hand gestures, Nugent holding all of his hair in a huge two-armed hug, and some no-name from Y & T pointing to himself, and 30 others - JKB]

We can be strong
We are fire and stone [Eric Bloom, Blue Oyster Cult]
And we all want a touch of rainbow [Paul Shortino, Ruff Cutt]

But singers and songs
Will never change it alone
We are calling you, calling you [Tate]

We're the beating of a heart
The beginning, we're the start [Dokken]
Forever we will shine [Shortino]

[Chorus]

Guitar Solo 12 bars each -- [guitarist after guitarist after guitarist spliced together, with a heavy (largely justified) edit bias toward Vivian Campbell [Dio] George Lynch [Dokken] and Malmsteen [Malmsteen] - JKB]

We are magic in the night [DuBrow]
We are shadow we are light [Halford]
We are forever you and I [Tate]

[Chorus] -- lots more guitar solos.

By Mid 1987, Hear N' Aid had raised and donated $1,000,000 for famine relief.

June 17, 2004

Why I Love Summer

June 15, 2004

Cacafuego
Too much going on. Work is kicking my ass these days. It feels like every time I come up for air there are a thousand buccaneers shaking their broadaxes at me; their chirpy talking parrots demand hard labor and threaten me with crude hand canons.

Today, I've been fighting them off with the ferocious new Beasties record. Fight animal with animal I say. I'd like to see those fuck-pirates take on the 5 Boroughs.

Two sets of neighbors are trying to outdo each other on the perimeters of my lot. Their motive is child entertainment and their weapon-of-choice is the outdoor playground. Huge metallic and wood structures that I would have been psyched to see at a public park back in the day now occupy 70% of my neighbors' back yards.

Customer: "I'd like to buy this playground for my kids"

Sales Clerk: "Great. Would you like me to 'Super-Size' it for ya?"

Customer: "Hell yeah!"

All that's missing are those creepy old micro teeter toters. Remember the ones that were about a foot and a half off the ground? They had those rusty half moon seats with drain holes. I still remember this one that looked like Donald Duck, buried in the sand up to his knees. Because of the way it was positioned each kid would actually be sitting in one of Donald's outstretched hands. His giant head had a little square green cap on it. Donald looked like a drunk child taking his first baby steps when rocking at top teeter. I remember that the seats were close enough so that you could sit there and slap his head and it would make this horrible plastic echoing sound like a poorly mixed reverberating kick drum on an old Black Sabbath bootleg.

Donald Duck. Pirates. Beasties. . .Where do we go from here?

June 10, 2004

Interleague Play
These interleague games are great for baseball. I got to see the New York Mets live at the Dome for the first time in my life the other night. Better yet, I got to see the Mets get crushed and humiliated by the Twins for the first time. And again, for the second time in a week, those pinstriped powerhouses destroyed their dark horse challenger in the very bottom of the ninth. Two great games.

Near the end of Tuesday's game our party was joined by a youngster who had more energy than Iggy Pop on 10 cups of coffee. The boy had to run up and down the aisle steps just to get a base level of wobbly comfort. He did however provide the line of the month. From high up in our upper deck seats behind home plate the boy was watching the game through a monocular. When the action really began heating up in the ninth inning the boy was eagerly asked, "Isn't this exciting?!?" To which he replied in a very droll and unconcerned manner, "I'm just staring at the grass." Classic! If you know Ralph from the Simpsons, then you can understand even better how absolutely hilarious this little sapphire of wisdom was.

June 08, 2004

Iceman Versus Captain America
Remember those great articles by Evan Wright in Rolling Stone last summer (The Killer Elite, From Hell to Baghdad and The Battle for Baghdad)? They were pretty damn good weren't they? Well, Mr. Wright would like Afrojet readers to know that his new book with, "considerable expansion/change of those articles is coming out this June 17". The title of the book, "Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War", easily wins best book title of 2004. Essential summer reading.

June 07, 2004

Mill City Museum
Finally got around to visiting the Mill City Museum this weekend. I was blown away. Top notch. A beautiful addition to the Mississippi waterfront. When I worked downtown, I used to bike by the development of the museum every day. It's great to see the completion. The award winning architecture developed by MS&R is a wonderfully organic multi-use restructuring of the burned out shell of the old mill. Standing in the outdoor ruin courtyard is like imagining yourself in some bombed out World War II edifice. Inside the museum, one becomes an over-stimulated 12 year old. The best of the old Pillsbury, Betty Crocker, and General Mills product archives are on display (Check out the old Bisquick television ads). There's volumes of old print advertisement broadsheets, a large collection of Pillsbury Doughboys that would make any eBay collector blush. There's detailed cut-out illustrations showing all nine floors of the Mill and the activities performed on each. The piece de resistance, however, is a converted freight elevator that now works as a nine floor moving documentary. It's called the Flour Tower. You sit on risers in the elevator/theater as it takes you to each floor. On each floor the giant elevator doors open on what looks like a well designed stage set. Some floors have film being projected on the back wall of the sets with a narration provided by people who used to work in the mill. Sound effects for all moving parts and machinery also add to the multi media ride. Just damn cool.

June 04, 2004

Bad Start
Man, what a terrible morning the driver of this Volvo is having. You're driving along, rocking out in your car thinking about all the things you have to do today and then - Bam! Your whole day is thrown into turmoil. Let's be careful out there.

June 03, 2004

Where Have All the Children Gone
It's summertime kids. The sun is out and the nights are long. School is something to be barely tolerated this late in the game, a thick restraining arm holding you back from all the budding potential of a hundred plus dog days. . .so where the hell are you?

My neighborhood is residential and families are breeding at an preternatural rate. Yesterday, while I dug out more room in the garden for expecting vegetables, I was serenaded by the cries and screams on no less then three infants who threw tantrums in close proximity to my own home. It seemed no amount of cooing or shooshing was going to keep these babies from teaching us all a thing or two. The babies made the dogs howl and the dogs made the birds go crazy. The ear-splitting orchestra was more than I could take and I was forced back indoors to enjoy some time with a silent corona and a speechless Esquire.

But now I'm off track. . .Yeah, there are a ton of babies in the hood, but we've also got the normal allotment of middle school and high school aged kids as well. I see them from time to time exiting the big Catholic Middle School just down the street. They saunter home carrying Voyageresque size ruck-sacks and quickly move into the comforts of their own home. And then - this is what kills me - they never come back out! The baseball diamonds at the park lay empty and overgrown, The basketball courts at the community center just two block away are as desolate and deserted as a January evening. I hear and see no skateboards rolling down the well trimmed sidewalks. Hell, the community center has these thirty foot gently declining stairway rails with no obstacles to impede someone from pulling off one hell of a rail-slide. The whole center enjoys easy banked and nice rounded 60's architectural surfaces throughout. But ain't no one shredding it up. There isn't even the faintest sign of wax to indicate those who came before. Dirt bikes? BMX? Anybody out there? What up kids?!?

So I guess the question is, what gives? Have the pretend skateboarding video games, the IM'ing/internet, and just plain old dumb television rendered the outside world boring and forgettable. Are kids so loaded down with commitments and formalized activities that there's just no room for unsupervised, unscripted fun? Has the fear got 'em? I don't know the answer. I do hope, with the close of the school year, that the gentle hum of four Birdhouse Fat Guy 54mm wheels riding swiftly, racketing at every break in the concrete like a bulky metronome, will work to drown out the shrill speak from younger voices.

June 01, 2004

Inclement Memorial Weather
Soggy conditions continue to plague the atmosphere here. The Twin Cities seem to be undergoing an identity crisis where it believes itself to be Seattle. A heavy, moist dankness sits on the air like an obese genie whose magic carpet is no match for his massive weight. My gardening attempts this weekend were ridiculous and comical as I dashed out madly to try and pull a few weeds in-between the sudden burst from the heavens. Yesterday was frustrating, the gods were in a silly and drunken mood. The rain would fall hard for two and half minutes and then a ray of brilliant sun would shoot through the clouds for another five. This mean cycle of weather repeated itself again and again. It was as if the gods had run out of imagination and simply left their post with the weather-lever held on 'repeat'.

Since outside work was a tough garden to hoe, I retired to the cineplex and sat happily through Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes. Even better than I had anticipated. So many great performances. I was especially taken with Alfred Molina. He's a terrific actor whose films I need to see more of. I thought he really knocked it out of the park playing Diego Rivera in Frida.

Sunday, the misses and I saddled up and road down to Red Wing Minnesota for rainy day antique shopping. I found some great old metal and wood type specimens and two old Johnny Cash records that were in great condition. There was a massive air show going on in Red Wing that day and everyone was keen to know if we had gone and what did we think. In saying that I hadn't bothered with the show I saw true disappointed on many faces. It was as if the whole town had labored to bring us a mighty banquette of exotic and favorable foods and we had looked upon it with the indifference that one gives an earthworm who is stuck in a puddle after a storm. We cast their hard work and hospitality aside with a, "sorry we're full - we hit the Taco Bell on the way down".