back with interest

2009-11-15T07:30:00.001-06:00

The window to your future

2009-11-14T07:30:00.000-06:00

Just say no, just beat it, tear down this wall

2009-11-13T08:30:00.001-06:00

We get letters

2009-11-12T08:30:00.003-06:00

Words to live by

2009-11-11T08:30:00.016-06:00

Feathered friends

I was sad to learn one of my stepmother's parrots died. And surprised -- these animals have human-like lifespans, and this one was only in his 20s.

Living with tropical birds has its ups and downs. I know. My stepmother has kept two, three, four of them since I was a kid. They are very pretty, and their mimicry is striking. But they also can be plain noisy, and I'm a guy who likes his quiet. They also can be temperamental and suspicious. I always wanted at least one of the birds to like me and sit on my shoulder, but they mostly cowered from me and, if I got closer, bit.

The mimicry of parrots can be so funny, though -- funny because pointed mimicry is always funny and uncanny. We laugh at Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin partly because the jokes are good, but especially because the imitation is so keenly observed. So when a bird talks and sings and whistles like a person -- or like a garbled, Auto-Tune imitation of a person -- we can't help but laugh with delight. It's really remarkable, miraculous. I was always struck by the fact that when we had a guest in the house and that person spoke, the birds would get very quiet. They were listening and learning. The birds are always listening.

Indeed, tropical birds will surprise you with their listening. You can teach them phrases, of course, through sheer repetition. But the birds also pick up tics and habits, things you say all the time that you don't even know you're saying, household sounds so familiar you've ceased to consciously hear them.

Tropical birds are like fun house mirrors in that regard. One of the birds picked up my dad's habit of regularly clearing his throat. Another mimicked the low, vaguely wary way Dad answers the phone. All the birds repeated our names over and over, because people in families say each others' names all the time. I think all the birds could whistle the "Andy Griffith Show" theme song because, well, ours was a Griffith-loving family. We watched that show all the time.

What most unnerves me is to visit home now and hear one of my stepmother's birds making a sound from the house we moved out of 20 years ago. We had a phone that rang with a distinctive electronic warble. A bird still mimics it. We had a sliding glass door that probably needed oiling and made an odd little chirp when opened. A bird still mimics it.

I remember that house. So do the birds.

2009-11-10T08:30:00.003-06:00

Oh by golly

Got my first sustained exposure to Christmas music this year thanks to the radio at Pizza di Roma. The selection: Burl Ives, "Holly Jolly Christmas."

I recognized the song immediately from the 12-string-guitar riffing. A fine tune and a good solid start to the Season of Being Overwhelmed. Ives' Red Scare-era entanglement with HUAC was -- well, it was what it was. Merry Christmas.

2009-11-09T08:40:00.009-06:00

Two tribes

The Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago today. I was a college freshman. I didn't contemplate foreign affairs much in those days. What I mostly knew about was Cold War paranoia as filtered through 1980s pop culture -- the TV movie The Day After and songs like Sting's "The Russians" and Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Two Tribes," whose video memorably featured Western and Eastern bloc leaders slugging it out in a ring.

So I knew what happened Nov. 9, 1989 was important, but from my teenage perspective it just seemed another in a series of disruptive events that year, including the protests and massacres in Beijing and, well, me finishing high school and starting college. Would you believe the wall's demise even made me think of that October's earthquake-disrupted World Series? Weird stuff happening this fall, I remember thinking. The earliest incidents of the post-Cold War era played out as I made my way through college, and perhaps it was my expanded perspective, college-induced, that made me better grasp the importance of subsequent events like the reunification of Germany, the Croatian and Bosnian wars, the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, the importance of the 1989 event was brought home to me a bit in French class the next morning. My teacher was from Romania, and I suspect she experienced the Cold War in ways even more intense than MTV. She tried to get us students talking about the Berlin happenings in French. "C'est très excitant, non?" she asked. But our French was limited, and we didn't have much to add.

2009-11-08T15:56:00.002-06:00

He's a ranter

Bill Maher on "Loveline" with Adam Carolla and Drew Pinsky, March 26, 2001, is fabulous. Questions from callers about drugs, sexual harassment and bullying (Columbine was a recent memory then) are occasions for Maher to go off on one tirade after another. Here as always I enjoy Maher's tirades, and they're more entertaining than the mopey callers.

2009-11-07T16:48:00.002-06:00

Brief encounter

Today I ran on the bike path. By the path a man pushed a mower. He stopped when I passed so I wouldn't be hit by debris. It was a friendly gesture, but he didn't look me in the eye. He was wearing a Q106 T-shirt. That's the country music station. He didn't look like a country fan, but who does?

2009-11-05T07:45:00.001-06:00

Good word

"I must bring to my work, and it must give to me, the legitimate sense of well-being that I enjoy when the weather is good and I have had plenty of sleep."

-- John Cheever

2009-10-02T11:51:00.001-05:00

Good word

"Adults are people who, by and large, read as a means of getting off to sleep."

-- Daniel Pinkwater

2009-09-12T13:12:00.004-05:00

The great obfuscator

I'm fascinated by Watergate. Over the last few years I've read probably 20 or so books about the scandal -- from histories to memoirs of participants (Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Dean) to Art Buchwald's column collection "I Am Not a Crook".

And would you believe I still don't understand Watergate? I'm reading RN, Richard Nixon's 1978 memoir, and my mind still clouds over when I read sentences like this:

Haldeman asked Colson about Dean's disclosure that it had been Colson's call to Magruder urging action on Hunt's and Liddy's intelligence-gathering plans that may have precipated the Watergate break-in.

I know who all those people are, and I understand what was at stake, but I still have difficulty keeping track of who did what when and what it all means. Is that because Watergate was, in its essence, complex and murky, or is that because the president and his men did a good job of making it complex and murky?

2009-09-03T08:02:00.004-05:00

Yesterday's news

We continue to unpack from our move, and as a result we are tossing a lot of crumpled-up newspaper into the recycling bin. Gazing last night at the full-to-overflowing bin, I flashed back to third grade and our teacher Mrs. Bridgeman's brief seminar on how to throw away paper. Never crumple up paper when you throw it away, she said, because it takes up more room in the wastepaper basket. She demonstrated with crumpled and uncrumpled paper. If only I'd listened.

2009-08-30T17:39:00.008-05:00

Makeup test

I love so many things about our new house, but there have been frustrations. One was that the bookshelf that held all my LPs is too tall for the ceilings. Last week I bought a replacement, but I found it doesn't hold all the records. It was time to do something I should have done a long time ago, donate records I don't want to the thrift store.

I went through the collection -- I have 1,000 or so -- and chose ones to get rid of. They include many oddities I won't miss, things I'm not exactly sure how I came to have, 101 Strings Play Beautiful Hawaiian Melodies, that sort of thing.

But I'm also getting rid of duplicates, and some of them brought me back 30 years. That's when the rockers Kiss were at a commercial peak. I loved them very much. (My mom took me to a Kiss concert in 1979, when I was 8.) My brother loved them too, and in the name of domestic harmony, my parents let us each buy our own Kiss albums, so that if one of us wanted to hear, say, the Rock and Roll Over track "I Want You," the other "Calling Dr. Love," we wouldn't have to fight over the vinyl.

All these years later, I find myself with both sets. I probably don't need any Kiss records, much less duplicates. Still, I dithered over relinquishing these totems of my childhood. But in these troubled times, the mood is right for downsizing. So adieu, duplicate Alive II. Adieu, duplicate Love Gun.

Actually, for some reason I seem to have three Love Guns. Maybe one was the neighbor kid's.

2009-08-22T09:36:00.001-05:00

Good word

"While the polls were closing in the East and Midwest, I treated myself to a long hot soak in the huge bathtub."

-- Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon

2009-08-21T13:03:00.000-05:00

Good word

"Protestant Zion would need to be perfect both for sniping at abortion doctors in North Carolina and for marrying lesbians in Vermont."

-- P.J. O'Rourke

2009-08-20T12:14:00.008-05:00

Kablooey

I saw a car accident this morning. I was waiting to turn left onto Midvale Boulevard from eastbound Mineral Point Road. The light turned yellow, and a little Plymouth in front of me started to turn left. A Ford Ranger heading west on Mineral Point ran the light and smacked the Plymouth's corner. The Plymouth spun about 90 degrees. Both cars stopped, and the guy in the truck ran over to the Plymouth. No one looked hurt.

It was sickening to watch. And to hear. The sound of cars smashing into each other makes me queasy. I am more and more nervous about the danger of cars these days, mostly I think because I have a much longer bike commute from my new house and am all the more aware of how vulnerable we all are out there.

I was on my way to an early morning screening at Sundance for my movie reviewing gig. I guess I had movies on the brain, then, because all I could think of were the flaming wrecks of cars in Godard's Week-end. They're devastating symbols of modernity. So was the crash I watched this morning.

2009-06-21T13:12:00.009-05:00

Deep roots

This is the gravestone of my great-great-great-great-great grandfather John Brickey, who came from Virginia to settle in what is now Townsend, Tenn., just outside the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. He was born -- it staggers me to contemplate this -- 269 years ago. He is buried in Townsend's Myers Cemetery, near where tourists rent bright yellow and green inner tubes and float lazily down the Little River.

John's son Peter Brickey, my great-great-great-great-great uncle, bought the land that today includes my family's farm, where Ereck and I just spent two weeks' vacation. On the farm I gazed at giant boulders I climbed on when I was a kid; got water in the old spring house (unlike in olden days, this involves plugging in a pump); and dodged mud daubers in the attic of Uncle Peter's original cabin, a picture of which is on the Wikipedia entry for Wears Valley, Tenn.

Sometimes when I'm at the farm the hair stands up on my neck as I contemplate how rich my family heritage is there. Then I check to see what's on the Game Show Network.

2009-05-02T13:09:00.000-05:00

Good word

"Ringo is our representative on the Beatles."

-- Robert Christgau

2009-04-28T13:45:00.002-05:00

Old thinking

"I always thought Specter would consider switching to become an independent to get re-elected, and it's too bad that Michael Steele pushed him into the Democrat Party."

-- Republican strategist Scott Reed

That prominent Republicans like Scott Reed continue to say "Democrat party" says a lot about why prominent Republicans like Arlen Specter flee to the Democrat party.

2009-04-24T13:16:00.001-05:00

Good word

"Our system, left to its own devices, is not designed to let illegal acts be revealed and then ignored."

-- Eugene Robinson

2009-04-17T11:07:00.001-05:00

Good word

"I came to love silence, because it's so rare, and it's now my favorite aural condition."

-- Mike Nichols

2009-03-30T18:39:00.000-05:00

Good word

"I've always been put off by [Hank] Snow's up-north propriety, more Vernon Dalhart than Jimmie Rodgers."

-- Robert Christgau

2009-03-28T15:04:00.001-05:00

Good word

"He chose metal over Vegas because Vegas wouldn't have him."

-- Robert Christgau on David Lee Roth

2009-03-11T08:36:00.002-05:00

All rise

Watching ABC's "World News" yesterday I was pleased to spot an old-school news convention that I figured had been long abandoned: the courtroom sketch. Yes, there it was, a lovely pastel drawing of Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff surrounded by lawyers whose mouths hang open like Roger Daltry's in certain scenes from Tommy. There is an ethereal glow. I never knew courtroom walls were painted fuschia!