Profane haberdashery

Bartlebones' muthahfuckin' hat

I attended Friday night's performance of The Motherfucker with the Hat at the Studio Theater. At turns hilarious, shocking and poignant, the play continues the season's string of really outstanding productions. The ensemble cast is tremendous and Drew Cortese manages to walk the delicate line of making a potentially unattractive character sympathetic in his portrayal of Jackie, the lead role, a low-life drug dealer recently released from jail.

This play could easily have resolved to little more than a self-indulgent exercise in Nuyorican shtreet cred, relying solely on hackneyed representations of urban life. All the elements are there; the stock drug dealer, the unhappy upscale hedonist couple, the strong-willed Puertorriqueña girlfriend from the neighborhood. But despite being made up largely of elements you might find in the average music video, with a plot line to match, Motherfucker works. Somehow Serge Seiden's production manages to create compelling, if somewhat unattractive characters, and tell a story that resonates beyond the stereotypical caricatures of poor druggies from the neighborhood or yuppie materialists to which it could have all too easily devolved. The characters are complex, the story is compelling, the acting is capable of bringing tears to your eyes. You should go see that shit, Motherfucker. Through March 24th.

Mix-a-tune

In yesterday's post, I basically just shoved a couple of YouTube videos of an obscure German punk band from the '80s at you. No context, no explanation, just the videos and some ramblings about feeling old. I just wanted to play some jams, so that's what you got. But, as is always the case with your 'umble author, there's a back story.

At the end of last year, a buddy of mine from a more or less German speaking country suggested I read Jennifer Egan's magnificent Pulitzer Prize winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad. So I did. The book is about an aging punk rock record producer and what happens to the people from that scene as they are getting older. Frankly, on the basis of that description, I would have passed the book right by. Not another aging rock star book. But, a dear friend suggested it, and I have certainly done much harder things for friends. And as it happens, that book is tremendous. Not just because it is about people roughly my age, or because it's about music I appreciate, but because it's a really well crafted book. You should read it.

Now as it also happens, the Aryan who recommended the book to me is the guy who in my youth was always turning me onto the latest sounds, and I still happen to have a couple of artifacts from that glorious time, in the form of something that will swell the hearts of my contemporaries and will likely mystify the youngsters among you. That is, I have some MixTapes my friend made for me.

Exhibit from the Museum of Obsolete Media - a "Mixed Tape" 1990

See, before there were playlists, before there was digital music, before normal people had access to anything as exotic as a computer network, before there were even Compact Disks, there were vinyl "records" and record-able cassette tapes. Average people could buy blank tapes at the record store (or the grocery store, for that matter), take them home and record stuff. We recorded commercial broadcasts from the FM radio and "tracks" from 12 inch albums. We would spend hours recording mixtapes, queuing up the tape using only the << Back, Pause and Forward >> buttons, dropping the needle onto the proper cut and hitting the Record button at just the right moment to avoid odd snippets of the previous song or missing the beginning of the one you want. Such tapes were a labor of love, impossible to comprehend in today's Copy and Paste world.

On my favorite of these mixtapes from my Helvetic pal (pictured above) is exactly the kind of eclectic time capsule that made these so special. Now get yourself to YouTube and start listening!

Punk-in Chunk-in

How do you know you're old? Probably the best way is to have children, those metronomic little ticking time bombs; a constant reminder of your mortality. But surely the next best reminder of your increasing obsolescence is the music that got you off when you were a kid. Likely it still gets you off, and if it really got you off you're probably still willing to defend it against any challenge to its obvious superiority over anything "out there today." Well, you know, each to their own. Most music sucks when it's new - thank goodness young people have such bad taste. All I know is that Jingo de Lunch rocked. It sounded great when I was young and it still sounds good to me.

Good enough to listen to 44 minutes live!

But it also makes me feel old. Because I'm no longer pissed off. I am no longer willing to stand for hours in a broken down hovel with toilet paper stuck in my ears and beer all over myself. It was fun at the time. And the music still sounds really good to me - even when a lot of other music I listened to at the time has gone flat. Thanks Yvonne @ Company!

Carry me back to ol' Virginny

Carry me back to old Virginny,
There's where the cotton and the corn and tatoes grow,
There's where the birds warble sweet in the springtime,
There's where this old darkey's heart am long'd to go.

Oh, Northern Virginia (NoVa), despite your gleaming towers of Rosslyn and the metropolitan hipster vibe of Clarendon; regardless of your increasing population density and the steady purpleization of your electorate, you are still the offspring of the inbred, mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, pre-Enlightenment cretins that still dominate RoVa (the Rest of Virginia).

Struggle up through the slime though you try, you will just keep being dragged back down into the primordial muck by the bigots, the racists and the gun nuts. The state is starting to look like a laughingstock with its whacked out retrograde politicians that are just downright embarrassing to anyone with an eighth grade education or better.

The latest affront to common sense and progress springing from the Ancient Dominion is the failure to pass an anti-dooring measure that would have made motorists who unthinkingly fling their car doors open in the path of oncoming cyclists at least partly responsible for the damage and injury they do.

Now it's bad enough that the Virginia Senate didn't pass the bill through the transportation committee, but what is particularly galling is the stated reason: they couldn't get their shit together enough to have all members of the committee actually attend the hearing. Half of the douchebags who allegedly sit on this committee couldn't even be bothered to show up to vote one way or another. So there you go, Virginia. You are one of only ten states in the Union (I realize many of you don't even recognize that you ARE in the Union) to extend exactly zero protection to people who get injured by thoughtless assholes who can't be bothered to look in the rearview mirror before throwing their car doors open into the path of fellow travelers. Well done.

Atruistic punishment

How could you hate her?

A fascinating, if somewhat perfunctory article on the BBC's website yesterday posits that the reason motorists hate cyclists derives from the game theory notion that society functions only because we are programmed to self police by punishing one another for behaving outside the bounds of accepted "morality." That is to say that humans have actually evolved to punish people perceived to have broken the rules. And for drivers, practically everything cyclists do is technically in violation of the rules, since the set of rules by which they operate is specific to cars. Cyclists can't, by definition, obey some of those rules. We can't go the speed limit most of the time, for instance.

And the rules we can obey, we often don't. Largely because the laws of physics play a much greater role in our mode of transportation. Since the calories we burn are derived from the energy our bodies have converted from food instead of from the refined essence of prehistoric organic matter (i.e., gasoline), we cyclists typically observe much stricter adherence to the laws of conservation of energy. That is, since it takes us a lot of personal energy to build momentum, we often go to extraordinary pains to maintain it. Drivers just push one pedal a couple of inches and hundreds of horsepower are produced, whereas a pedaler has to grind a crank round and round just to get up to a speed most motorists disdain and curse. Don't believe me? Do the math. So we often blow through stop signs. We're following rules - just not the same rules motorists have to follow.

We come by our own little set of rules by the exact same method as drivers have come by theirs - through trial and error, underpinned by a grave sense of self preservation and public safety. We do what we do because we have weighed the costs against the benefits, considered the possible risks and come up with a pretty workable set of operating principles. Just like cars. Even in a society where bicycles represent a meaningful proportion of the mode share (transportation geek speak for percent of trips made by bike), the transportation induced death rate is negligible. Can we say the same thing about our own society in which the car is clearly the dominant mode of transportation? No we cannot.

So when a person sitting in a type of vehicle responsible for over 30,000 fatalities a year can get all pissed when I scoot around them on a vehicle responsible for so few fatalities a year as to be not worth mentioning, I don't really feel that bad about it. When was the last time you heard about a motorist getting killed by a bicyclist? Just doesn't happen. Sure occasionally a cyclist runs down a pedestrian and kills them. Occasionally. How frequently do cars run down pedestrians? But I also understand when motorists, being the good egalitarians they are, and apparently in thrall to their limbic brain, go berserk and start shouting out their car windows and shout, "get off the feckin' road!"

You think your job sucks...

Bethesda Roundhouse Theater this month mounts a version of David Mamet's Pulizer Prize winning Glengary Glenn Ross. Pretty tough stuff for our little community theater, and they've pulled it off really well. Of course this is the quintessential Mamet talk-a-thon, and it lives or dies by the ability of the cast to spew non-stop, rapid-fire, obscenity-laced vitriol at one another while somehow eliciting sympathy from an audience made up largely of elderly Bethesdans. No small task, I assure you. But this group pulls it off really well. The language is gritty and grungey frankly a bit over the top in terms of NSFW vocabulary and the staccato smart-guy lecturing. But these actors manage to deliver Mamet's overwrought dialog credibly, intelligibly and with just the right amount of nuance - it's not as easy to shout 'cunt' at someone while retaining sympathy for the shouter as you might think.

This is one of those text heavy plays that could just as effectively be presented in workshop fashion with just a few chairs and tables as props. But the sets in the Roundhouse production are meticulously assembled, making outstanding, subtle use of the rotating stage which in this instance seems almost to have been more of a liability than an advantage. But the two sets, a Chinese restaurant and the disheveled sales office play beautifully against each other, juxtaposing the silky chintz of Asian eatery decor with the gritty, rough shod boiler room in which these poor working schmucks are consigned to spend their working lives. This one is worth seeing if only to watch a group of veteran actors chew up Mamet's verbiage.

Runs through March 3.