Idiot American

This is more like it: Plenty of information about the designer, Chris Bilheimer,
who has made his mark in a wide array of rock visuals in the last couple of
decades. Usually the part about graphic design is hidden away, as if the
musicians either don't want listeners to know, or want to imply that maybe
the musicians created the art too. This design not only evokes Saul Bass, but
feels like two iterations before the final art, shapes just a tad too awkward
and close together. I would have fussed with it more. But what do I know?

My apologies for submitting the tardiest music review ever.

I like "American Idiot" by Green Day.

(Wait, wasn't that, like, last century?)

OK, you know what? Let's call it a music appreciation instead. I think that's what it's called when no one really wants your opinion of the arts, or when every story has already been written about a recently deceased celebrity, but you write something anyway.

Because I'm not writing this to say you should like it too.

A hater of music reviews, I'm not about to do unto you what I wouldn't want done to me.

Music has to be the most subjective subject there is, rendering music reviews useless to me. No muscle of a writer's description is going to make me buy music, because the writer can't quite qualify why the music appeals.

It could be, and usually is, nothing to do with beat or structure or the front man's voice. It could have everything to do, and usually does, with my geographical and psychological place when I encounter the music.

Music love is an accidental thing. It is snuck upon you while you're doing other things. So it was when I first heard Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" in the days when if you wanted to watch TV, you had to watch what your parents wanted to watch. They wanted to watch something that showcased Copland, and after that I wanted to hear everything else he wrote.

Tom Waits sang my angst over long frustrating winter nights researching a project when I was a newspaper reporter. He always brings me back to those nights.

Caught up in The Colbert Report's final goodbye, I got caught up in "Holland 1945" by Neutral Milk Hotel (album cover art also by Chris Bilheimer), and the possible reason Stephen Colbert chose it as the last sounds we heard.

"Sweet Disposition" by The Temper Trap is a song I never would have come by, except for its use as the soundtrack for the video of a swim in which I got to take part, and the music is ingrained in me.

No music review imploring me to listen to those pieces would have succeeded.

I also understand the irony in linking these songs here, because your music tastes are scattershot, defy reason, and may even be embarrassing, like mine, and you prefer not to be spoon-fed but have the music find you accidentally. But what the heck; the link function is easy and available, so why not use it, am I right?

Our son bought American Idiot when he was in high school. He bought it electronically as a good olf-fashioned CD 11 years ago, from iTunes™® I'm sure. I bought mine 11 years later as I always have, browsing the bins at a used-records store.

I didn't know much about Green Day at the time, but trusted his exploration. I teased that Green Day was part of UBT (Unified Band Theory), my idea that all the music he was listening to came from one band, relabeled and packaged for a different audience, the only tell being the lead singer with the odd Valley-Boy-slightly-Australian pronunciation of certain words.

I'm not Green Day's audience, nowhere close. Even when I fit the demographic long ago, I wasn't into sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. I didn't, and wouldn't, go to concerts.

And yet …

I appreciate what Green Day is saying and playing here. Call it punk-pop (here is where I betray my weakness as a music reviewer, because I don't know what I'm talking about), powerful guitar and explosive drums but with simple, infectious melody.

I appreciate the rage displayed in American Idiot, the anger and pain of suburban kids trying to get through their screwed-up world. The video made for the suite "Jesus of Suburbia,"  (NSFW I guess) doesn't feel like actors playing confused and untethered teenagers, but like real kids opening the dented door to their messed up lives.

I feel their pain, and attach the sound to my own frustrations, however different.

I appreciate the energy with which Green Day delivers its message. YouTube®™ has put me close to the concert stage I wouldn't get near in person, and I get to see the manic drive as Green Day performs, all rockstar poses, windmill arms and ridiculously wide stances and twisted faces. I couldn't tell you whether lead guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tre´ Cool are personas or their real selves, or some of both, but they don't hold anything back. You paid your ticket, they're going to give you a show.

American Idiot is written like a rock opera, its songs tracing a story thread of young people in the time of George W. Bush and Iraq War II and the toppling economy, all of its dislocation and anger and hopelessness and redemption and resignation.

Which may be why it's still being performed as an actual rock opera, Green Day having turned its collection into a Broadway musical (where the actors do feel like actors, play-acting as disaffected young people).

The song-story suits me at the moment. The CD rests in my car stereo, ready to blare when National Public Radio recycles a story for the third time, or sports talk radio waxes eloquent about the 3-4 defense. Or when I just want to swing the windmill arms of my mind.

It'll be there until something new accidentally comes along.

If you're just joining us, we may or may not exist

If you don't know who this is, it's Terry Gross. If you do know
who this is, it's Bishop Fulton Sheen.

When working from home, I surrender to National Public Radio, letting the talk shows palaver over me all day. Mostly it's white noise, but I learn about my world through osmosis, judging by the surprising tidbits of news that fall from my mouth at dinner time.

One of my favorite shows is Fresh Air, with Terry Gross, a Philadelphia talk show host who often devotes her daily hour broadcast to in-depth interviews with interesting people about fascinating topics.

On occasion it's ear candy — interviews with some of my favorite creatives, such as Tom Waits or Art Spiegelman — and sometimes it's dense and hard to digest. Most of the time the interviews are revelations on new ideas —string theory! email etiquette! misguided forces bent on controlling our government for their own dark agendas! — and my brain cells, when listening, dance.

The show is perfect.

Except …

Terry Gross, bless her, does this really annoying thing, over and over and over, show after show: In the middle of interviews, or when she comes out of a station break, she says, "If you're just joining us, my guest is _______ …"

Aaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrgggggh!

"If you're just joining us?!?" For me, it's the aural equivalent of nails on a chalkboard.

I want to shout at the radio, "And if I've been with you since the start of the show, who is your guest?!"

I want it to be a different guest each time, just to make her absurd grammar true. We English nerds call the proper use the conditional real verb tense; for example, "If I get off work early, I'm going to swim."

Terry Gross commits the improper use, what could only be called the conditional surreal tense.

Her guest hosts do the same thing, as if trained so. Maybe it's printed on a sign on the studio wall.

But why? Why, why why? In a show so edifying, why muck it up?

Why not simply, "My guest is ________ …?" That covers it all. I'd even allow, "Welcome to Fresh Air, my guest is ________," each time. I'm no foe of marketing, just bad grammar.

I wrote Fresh Air once to complain; after, it seemed like the Gross and the other hosts did it more to spite me.

This reached its absurd apex when Gross' guest was comedian Demetri Martin, who makes fun of just this sort of thing.

He had finished his bit about a waitress telling him, "'If you need anything, my name is Jill.' Oh, my god, I've never met a woman with a conditional identity before," he said.  "What if we don't need anything, who are you? 'If you don't need anything, my name is Mike.'"

Two-second pause. Then on cue, Terry Gross said, "If you're just joining us, my guest is Demetri Martin." I could almost hear Martin's eyes roll.

It's a cross I bear, putting up with this linguistic slaughter. Others around me must bear it too, because I hardly ever let pass an utterance of the conditional surreal.

"If you're hungry, there's lunch meat in the fridge," my wife will say, to which I will answer, "And if I'm not hungry, what's in there?"

"Oh for God's sake," or something worse, she says, "It's just conversation. It's just the way people talk. Why can't you leave it alone?"

Really, why can't I?

If you've read this far, I'm hungry. Can you get me a sandwich?

One-hundred years of servitude

Long ago I had the pleasure (and pain) of working for The Hanford Sentinel during its centennial. The publisher of the daily, smack in the center of California's San Joaquin Valley, decided to celebrate by running an 11-section commemorative edition of the paper. Ten of the sections would recap each decade of The Sentinel, with a wrap-around section.

Each reporter and mid-level editor was assigned two decades to research and write about. Lacking the guidance of a resident geezer to recap the last century into a handy digest, we resigned ourselves to thumbing through every page of every edition The Sentinel published that decade. I had the '30s and '50s.

For months and months, after our regular workday, we would fetch bound editions of The Sentinel and sit long into the night, thumbing the editions in search of stories that represented the era, and especially for stories we could update.

It was torturous, but it had its benefits:
1. My wife Nancy was a reporter with me, and we could spend the evenings sharing the misery.
2. Another reporter, Jim Graham, turned me on to Tom Waits and let me listen to his "Rain Dogs" tape in his Sony Walkman over and over. And over. "Downtown Train" is seared into my soul.
3. I got to read the comic strip "Gasoline Alley" every day for two decades. It's one of the few comics (maybe the first) that worked in what we now call "real time," because the characters grow up, age, die and do all the things human counterparts do. I was sad to say goodbye at the end of the 1930s, and ecstatic to get reacquainted in the 1950s, like a dusty yellowed reunion, trying to figure out what had transpired in the intervening decade. I was soooooo tempted to sneak 1940s editions to stay with the strip, but I would never have gotten my work done if I had. (Though not a big fan of comics continuing beyond the creator's death or retirement — this just in: Charles Schulz is dead! — I'm glad "Gasoline Alley" continues under current artist Jim Scancarelli because of the characters' realistic development.)
4. I did some interesting stories, including an interview with a Hanford man, at the time a city park maintenance supervisor, who was a prisoner of war during the Korean War, and who told me tales he had not even told his wife, such has how Chinese soldiers dragged him by broken legs through the snow.

In the end, though, the staff was bone weary of the project once done, without much energy or enthusiasm to celebrate our achievement. I made up this medal, loosely patterned after the Croix de Candlestick (an ancient award given to San Francisco Giants fans who stuck through extra innings of Candlestick Park night games), and gave it to fellow reporters, out of sight of the publisher.