Showing Fools How It’s Done for 75 Years

Few things give me as much satisfaction as watching a consummate professional, in any field, at work.  Last Sunday night, I saw and heard a group of them–the 17-piece horn section, 4-piece rhythm section, vocalist, and conductor of the legendary Count Basie Orchestra.


I was expecting trombonist Bill Hughes to direct, but as it turns out, he retired last month. The band is now in the capable hands of Dennis Mackrel, one of the last members of the band to be hired by The Count himself.

I’d seen them play twice in college in the early ’90s.  The trumpet player in the pic above, Scotty Barnhart, was in the band back then, along with a few others.  If memory serves, he was the person who sold me the Live at El Morocco CD out of a duffle bag during an intermission.  See, I love that–even after 75 years, they’re still a working band.  Still on the hustle.  You can tell by the tour bus parked outside the theater.  The same kind of bus I used to ride on what were loosely called “gigs.”

My college flashbacks weren’t helped by the fact that I was also drinking cheap beer during the show.

The CBO in the vid below, directed by the equally legendary Frank Foster, was more or less the configuration that I saw in college.  My personal favorite song, “Corner Pocket” by Freddie Green and arranged by Ernie Wilkins, is at 2’40”.  I didn’t hear it on Sunday, which made me sad.  But the show still kicked ass. After 75 years and the inevitable personnel changes, the Count Basie Orchestra is still a group of what’s known in jazz circles as monsters and bad-ass motherfuckers.

Sort of makes me wonder if I can polish up the trumpet and revive my long-dead lead trumpet chops. I have to say, it’s been a long time since I’ve missed playing as badly as I did last night.

“God give us the blood to keep going”

I’ve had a bit of trouble getting a handle on my current work-in-progress.  It had such a promising start, judging from the critiques the first two acts have received.  But I struggled with the third act, so I took some time away from it to write other things.

This story’s for a closed anthology, and it’s due in about a month.  Time to get cracking again!  So after doing another round of hack-and-slash copyedits, I decided the piece needed a soundtrack.  So I picked some songs to mirror the sort of mood evoked from the picture above, and a couple of songs for different characters’ motivations.

Take a listen:

  • Chicago, “Prologue, August 29, 1968”
  • –, “Someday (August 29, 1968)
  • –, “While the City Sleeps”
  • –, “State of the Union”
  • –, “Dialogue (Pt. 1 & 2)”
  • –, “All the Years”
  • Depeche Mode, “Walking in My Shoes”
  • Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, “Battle of the Species”
  • Manic Street Preachers, “If You Tolerate This, Your Children Will Be Next”
  • Naomi Shelton & the Gospel Queens, “I’ll Take the Long Road”
  • Sons of Champlin, “Light Up the Candles”

Yes, I know there are a lot of Chicago songs on here, but at least it’s their cool ’70s and/or Robert Lamm-written stuff.

“I’m on fire/ On the playground, love”

Last Tuesday, I attended the first of this year’s Distinguished Visiting Writers Series at one of the local colleges, featuring author Jeffrey Eugenides.  He read an excerpt from his as-yet-untitled latest novel, which appeared in the June 7th New Yorker under the title “Extreme Solitude.” If you’ve had a college love affair of any kind, there’s a lot that’s familiar about the story.

After the reading, he took questions.  I was so glad I didn’t hear the types of questions I heard when his fellow Princeton colleague Joyce Carol Oates came to town.  Of course, this was an audience filled with writing students and teachers, so we were able to get past “Where do you get your ideas from?”  I was sure someone was going to ask him, in a slobbery voice, “How much input did you have when Sofia Coppola made The Virgin Suicides into a film?” or somesuch nonsense.  I’m so glad no one did.

On the upside, I managed to once again fight my fear of speaking to famous writers.  Of course, I was fighting it the entire time I was standing in line.  But in the end, it paid off.

“All the little kids growing up in the skids are goin’ ‘Cleveland rocks! Cleveland Rocks!'”

Over the holiday weekend, I made a long overdue trip to see my family who live a mere 20 minutes down I-90 from the front door to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  Of course I’ve always been fond of my hometown.  Make all the jokes you want about it, but at least we’re not Detroit.

Aside from ten years of stuff my folks have accumulated since I left, not a lot is different.  For instance, my old bedroom.  Some of the things tacked to the walls have been there for… Christ… 15 to 20 years.

Item One:
Poster of the best Batmobile. Why the best?  Chain guns.

Item Two:
A poster of the 1991 debut of the first Robin costume that didn’t include legless briefs (half-hidden behind a wardrobe).

Items Three, Four, and Five
More artifacts obtained during my high school years.

Items Six and Seven
An oversized button I bought from a booth somewhere in NYC when it was still considered the pit of the world, and another poster from the movie theater I worked as a teen.

Items Eight and Nine
Artifacts from a tad before junior high: a cross that, I think, my sister made for a project in our Catholic grade school and the appropriate Garbage Pail Kid.

“…going back to my old school.”

I never did buy into the whole “shit happens when Mercury is in retrograde” thing, but today I came close. 

Lots of stuff actually did go wrong today, but it started off badly from the jump.  I get up, get out of the house, and make it to my morning writing spot with a good hour and fifteen minutes before work.  And my beloved netbook, which worked fine before I left my place, refused to turn on.  I heard the hard drive doing… something… whenever I hit the power button.  But it just refused to boot up.

This is the point where, in the past, I would’ve gone off in a rage.  Actually, I’m not sure why I didn’t.  Still, I had a few options.  I had a similar problem sometime last year, which I fixed by flashing the BIOS.  I had a “rescue USB” drive with me, but I’d forgotten how to use it.  I could’ve gone back home, gotten online, and looked up how to fix what I thought was the problem–which would’ve eaten up my writing time–or, I could just take it back old school with an ancient method known as “longhand.”  And, that’s what I did.

Because, that’s how writers do it.  With a red-eye and no fucking excuses.

They’re Coming to Get You, Barbara

Check out Robert “Nix” Nixon‘s cover art for the upcoming anthology Rigor Amortis.  I’m not ashamed to say that I did stare at it for several minutes before typing up this entry.

What’s in store for you, the reader?

Maybe a tender love story is your thing, a husband doting on his wife’s rotting corpse. Or perhaps a forbidden encounter in a secret café, serving up the latest in delectable zombie cuisine, or some dirty, dirty dancing in the old-time honky-tonk. Voodoo sex-slaves and vending machine body-parts? You’ll find those here, too.

Whatever your flavor, these short tales of undead Romance, Revenge, Risk, and Raunch will leave you shambling, moaning, and clawing for more.

Rigor Amortis, with my story “Sublimation,” drops on October 1st.  Order yourself a copy.  You know you want to.

“14 karat love, you are my jewel of the Nile”

If I didn’t feel guilty enough for not taking the time to spotlight more of my favorite writer-friends, like Regan Leigh, I do now.  Especially since she threw the spotlight on me in her eighth installment of Writer Love!

Her kind words seriously made me blush…

Don is a great friend and very talented, but his dedication is just as impressive. I can’t tell you how many times I see him (via Twitter) writing in his spare minutes, no matter where he might be.

The best part is, she dedicated a song to me.  The other night, for some god unknown reason, I had Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam with Full Force on the brain.  And Regan made sure they stayed there, with this dope, funky fresh tune from back in the day.

You have my eternal gratitude, Regan. But, it begs the question–were you even alive when this song came out? 😀

“For the love of a(n Elder) God, you say, Not a letter from an occupant”

It’s one thing to take my roller derby nom-de-guerre from H.P. Lovecraft without having read any Lovecraft.  But trying to write a story based on the mythos without doing so could end up making me look like an asshat. 

The story I’m writing concerns a tidbit I happened to read about The Deep Ones.  No, I’m not gonna tell you which tidbit–that’d spoil the story.

Anyway, I didn’t want Wikipedia to be my only source, so I did some digging into my own library and found the first story with the Deep Ones, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” in my copy of The Tales of H.P. Lovecraft edited by Joyce Carol Oates that I bought awhile back but never opened.  Last night, I picked up The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories for the title piece, another (as it’s commonly agreed) Deep One tale.

And, as I looked these books up on goodreads, I’m reminded that I have a copy of HPL’s Supernatural Horror in Literature.  Cool!

Anywho, I haven’t finished “Shadows” yet, but I have to say this research is fascinating.   Lovecraft has spent too long on my “bookshelf of shame” (i.e. writers whose work I have but haven’t read), and while his style doesn’t appeal to me, the mythos does.   And the more I learn about his work and that of his publisher August Derleth (good, bad, or indifferent), the more fascinated I become.

What’s even better is that this material has actually caused me to think about my seekrit nonfiction project that I’ve been working on in a new light.  It’s could take me in a direction which sends me back to the drawing board.  And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.