Safe As Milk

The Whiskerino is over.
Bask in the Handlebar!

Joshua Blankenship took a big batch of Polaroids on Saturday night at the Throwdown. I feel honored to have made the cut.

I am in sunny Nashville Tennessee for the Whiskerino Throwdown.

Also, here’s a movie to keep you company while I am gone.

Ronnie Brown is one of the Whiskerino guys who will be at The Throwdown this weekend in Nashville, TN.

What makes Ronnie a special member of the Whiskerino, and an extra special guest of the Throwdown, is that Ronnie and his wife have travelled from Glasgow Scotland to be there.

Cheers to the power of the North American Free Beard Agreement:

“We are alienated from our own facial hair.

Society tells us that full beards are unacceptable. Businessmen, politicians, bankers, and the like are all clean shaven; all demonstrating the standards that middle class society expects us to maintain.

In other words, these are all examples of “the man” keeping down nascent beards everywhere. These are the people that alienate us from our masculinity, forcing us to shave and adopt public personas which might not reflect our own true inner animal.

But it wasn’t always so.

Beards used to be glorified as signs of virility and manliness. A man that couldn’t grow a strong beard was privately ridiculed. Some societies would only allow males to grow beards once they were married, thus denoting a sign of stature and respect in the community. To be shaved was to be emasculated.

In early America, societies with men that could not grow facial hair were demeaned less advanced and civilized. Native Americans and the Chinese were both ostracized, in part because of their hairless men. And now we have come full circle where our own society promotes this emasculated version of maleness. Where to be a man is to be clean-shaved; to be respectable is not to have a beard

Let us return to our roots! Let us return to true masculinity! Let us cry out with one voice:

“I WILL HAVE A BEARD!! I WILL BE A MAN!! I WILL NOT CONFORM TO YOUR RULES!”"

I can’t wait to meet Ronnie.

(I had a full President’s Day)

I also made time to go through Byrd Park. We used to live right next to it so I have a special fondness for it.

I’ve never been inside but I’ve always been curious about the Byrd park Clubhouse.

This water fountain is located just outside of the Clubhouse. Here’s a closeup of the text. I love that the “Womans Christian Temperance Union” had a water fountain installed as a tribute to those who “went out…to overthrow the liquor traffic”. Awesome.

There is also a small cemetery near the Clubhouse.

I got a couple of those 33 1/3 books I mentioned for Christmas. I was more excited about the Smiths one because Joe Pernice wrote it. He explains in the foreward (and it’s funny that a 100 page book has a foreward) that he didn’t follow the 33 1/3 template by talking in the first person about Meat Is Murder but rather writing fiction where the album pops in from time to time. It made for a good read because JP writes well. I have his lyric book and one of his poetry collections so I am obviously biased in his favor. Still, it was nice, quick read if not exactly about the Smiths album.

Douglas Wolk’s book about the James Brown classic Live at The Apollo is more like the rest of the series. He talks about what was happening in the world during the week the album was recorded (the Cuban missile crisis), the history of Brown’s revue leading up to that night, and the actual recording and editing process. It was like reading the best liner notes ever.

I’m going to pick up more books in the series soon, specifically the one on Paul’s Boutique. It comes out March 15th.

I was driving to meet Michelle for lunch of President’s Day when I spied some crazy grafitti. Who doesn’t love hippos?

I was surprised to see such a bold painting. Then I figured out I was behind Chop Suey our local used bookstore. Cool place. Cooler still, they had the whole wall around their corner done like this:

I like good grafitti. You can see larger versions at my flickr page.

Morningwood isn’t a new name to you loyal SaM readers. I talked up ‘Jetsetter’ back in September but the full album wasn’t released until January. It’s pretty good. People disagree with that.

It’s definitely got a lot of the cool things in the mix: buzzing guitars, sing along lyrics, driving beats; but the whole is something less than the parts. The first 4 songs are a great start, “Nu Rock”, “Televisor”, “Nth Degree”, and “Jetsettermusicletter” give the impression that a lot of thrashy new-wave-esque fun is ahead. The letdown is almost immediate. “Take Off Your Clothes” comes across as dumb while trying to be dirty. It just doesn’t work for me. The rest of the album doesn’t get close to the promise of the first four songs. It’s not terrible, I still spin it here at Chez Flynn, but I don’t love it like I hoped I would. I see it destined for that pile of albums that are fondly thought of but rarely played (see: Zutons, Pulp, Breeders).

“Nu Rock” kicks the album off and I think you’ll agree it gets kicked off in style. The big guitar riffs pair with the pounding drums to make a big wall of noise that singer Chantal Claret tears at with her punk rock screech. This is a cool song.

I had President’s Day off so I grabbed my camera and went out photo taking. My first stop was the Boulevard Bridge. It was known for a long time as the ‘nickel’ bridge because that was the toll to cross. Now it’s a quarter. ‘Quarter Bridge’ doesn’t have the same ring to it so I call it the ‘(5)Nickel Bridge’. I should get a job naming stuff for the city.

Above the train tracks on the North side of the bridge. (click the thumbnails to see larger versions of the two below)

There are dense woods all along the banks below the bridge. (I think it looks like the cover of Murmur)

That’s the tip top of the Carillon.

And finally, the view from the middle of the (5)Nickel Bridge looking West.

Probably more.