Posted 12/12/2003 04:42:00 PM by Charles
Silent coifs
It’s one of those trivial but nagging questions: Do I try to make small talk with the person cutting my hair?

It’s an undeniably weird situation – a total stranger hovering within inches of my head, wielding instruments that could easily inflict a lot of pain if the hair cutter is incompetent or simply a masochist. This guy was neither, thankfully.

Nevertheless, I chose not to struggle for small talk. I didn’t know the guy. We exchanged no words from the time I instructed him not to cut off too much hair until I said thanks and gave him a tip. For his part, he emitted an occasional rumbling noise and smelled faintly of cigarette smoke.

Beyond that, there was no problem.

I sat silently. He cut silently. Two other people were getting haircuts too. To my left, one customer made brief chit-chat with his cutter about returning from snowy North Carolina. Then they clammed up. Behind me, the skilled Rose – an efficient Asian woman who has cut my hair perfectly a few times but had a waiting list today – also worked in silence.

I was left to listen to ‘70s R&B and disco and the snip, snip of busy scissors, and to stare at the blur in the mirror that was me as I got my first haircut since August. (I can’t see much without my glasses.) I could, however, smell the other cutter’s lunch in the back. It smelled tasty. Thai, I believe. It compelled me to zip over to My Thai just down Clairmont afterward for my own lunch.

Walking the walk
On a topic that has little to do with personal grooming, I noticed a new East Atlanta Village character a few days ago, new to me anyway. I’ll call her Walker Lady or, if you prefer, Lady Walker. On Tuesday, I saw an older – probably in her 60s or 70s – black woman striding along the Glenwood sidewalk, right in front of Good News Café. She had a walker. But she wasn’t using it in the conventional way. She was carrying it over her head.

I saw her again yesterday walking along Moreland Avenue near McDonald’s. This time, she was holding the walker out in front of her in the standard way. But again, she wasn’t using it; she was holding it a few inches off the ground.

This is doubly funny, if you think it’s funny at all, because of a fictitious character my friend Chris and I created. This character is based on a real person who is a friend of a friend’s parents. But the imaginary person is far crazier than the real person, whom I’ve only seen once and who said exactly nine words to me. Anyway, one of the made-up person’s latest stunts to try to make friends is to hang around East Atlanta in a wheelchair she doesn’t need. In our imaginations, she has one of those bright orange bicycle flags on her wheelchair and calls herself The Happy-Go-Lucky Handicapped Lady from East Atlanta.

Now there really is a lady who wanders EAV with an ambulatory aid she doesn’t need.

Posted 10/22/2003 10:05:00 AM by Charles
What a treat! We never get to see Robin Williams on TV

As anyone reading this knows, I love baseball.

But the way Fox televises the World Series drives me nuts. First, the increasingly annoying Joe Buck, whom I have always liked, tells us that if the fans in some section get a home run ball, everyone in America – every single person, I guess – can get a free taco and Pepsi at Taco Bell. That ain’t Joe’s fault; he’s just following orders from Rupert Murdoch.

Then we get Joe asking the American Idol judge and producer Simon Cowell, a British guy for crying out loud, who he thinks was the hardest thrower among Nolan Ryan, Randy Johnson, Billy Wagner and Roger Clemens. This a couple days after we got to watch Joe chat inanely on a cell phone with Robin Williams during a game at Yankee Stadium. Billy Cyrstal, of all people, finally said he was trying to watch the game and asked his buddy Robin to get off the phone. That's the first good thing Crystal's done in a long time.

Then later last night, we get David Cassidy coming out to sing God Bless America during the 7th inning stretch. (Like we need to hear that every night anyway.) David Cassidy!? The PA announcer at Pro Player Stadium in Miami tells the crowd that Cassidy has recently moved to south Florida and is also about to be in Malcolm in the Middle – on Fox. Come to think of it, Fox had Bernie Mac sing Take Me out to the Ballgame during a playoff game at Wrigley Field.

It continues the trend of TV networks and sports leagues trying to woo people who really don’t care about the game at the risk of offending actual fans. Consider this fan offended. Now I’m sure Fox will change its crass promotional DNA.

Posted 10/12/2003 09:09:00 PM by Charles
One probably-not-final thought on the ’03 Braves

You want to talk about curses?

The Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs are famously cursed. Being from famous old, and being famous old baseball franchises, these curses are baseball lore, firmly entrenched in the canon. And it helps that sports fans around the country generally think it’s cool to be a Cubs or Red Sox fan, while most baseball fans who don’t root for the Braves consider being a Braves fan about as cool as being a Michael Bolton fan.

But I’ll contend that the crushing psychological burden that today’s Atlanta Braves lug into the postseason every year is more onerous than either of these ancient curses, and a lot less fun to discuss. There really isn’t anything poetic or romantic about what the Braves have been doing lately.

Sure, the Braves have only been in Atlanta since 1966. The Cubs have been without a World Series title for 58 years longer than that. The Braves’ postseason misery has only lasted since 1996.

So I’ll give you the longevity part of this. But that’s the point. The Braves’ curse, or burden, or whatever you want to call it, is new. It’s real. It’s here and now.

Chances are, current Boston players like Kevin Millar and Manny Ramirez don’t know that much about Babe Ruth being sold by the Red Sox to the Yankees in 1920, and the Yankees going on to win 26 World Series and the Red Sox going on to win, uh, none.

Sure, they probably know the broad outlines. But how could it possibly affect their play? Ruth was dead long before any of these Red Sox were born.

As for the Cubs, most of their players haven’t been there for more than a couple seasons of those 95 since the team last won a World Series. Hell, three of their starting eight regulars in the first two games of the NLCS, 37.5 percent of them, weren’t even with the team when this season started.

Compare that to the Braves.

We’re not talking about musty history. I contend that the Braves’ recent postseason malaise, which began with the tragic Game 4 of the 1996 World Series, is rooted in a psychological burden that truly haunts most every Brave in October. They aren’t old stories that 70-year-old men in the bleachers know but no one in the dugout does. Most of the Braves players have lived it.

The Braves have played one good postseason since 1996 – winning the National League pennant in 1999. They were swept by the Yankees in the ’99 Series, but the Yankees were a far superior team that would’ve steamrolled anyone.

Now to the gloom. Start with the ill fated ’96 Game 4 against the same bastards in pinstripes. Over whose head did that evil Jim Leyritz hit that home run? Current Braves center fielder Andruw Jones. Who pitched the game after that one and lost 1-0? Current Brave John Smoltz.

What third baseman booted a grounder in the first inning of the first game of the ’97 LCS against the Marlins that led to a batch of runs? Current Braves left fielder Larry Jones. Who made errors and pitched badly to blow a fat lead against St. Louis in Game 1 of the 2000 Division Series? Rafael Furcal, Andruw Jones and Greg Maddux, to name three. All are, of course, on the team now.

Stories about goats and getting rid of probably the greatest player ever are fun. Waiting for the next Chipper strikeout or error or Sheffield double play with the bases loaded is not.

Posted 10/09/2003 07:48:00 PM by Charles
Northern Michigan is a cool place, especially in the winter

When I tell people I recently returned from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, they generally look at me quizzically and say something like, “Why’d you go there?”

If you’re after glitzy night life, crowds or fine restaurants, then avoid it.

But if you want to see the biggest sand dunes outside the Sahara, acre after acre of spruce and cedar and birch trees, a bunch of century-old light houses, 20 miles of stunning sandstone cliffs along the biggest lake in the world, snow mobile crossing signs, rolling vineyards that disappear into achingly blue water, 50-foot deep crystal clear springs with two-foot trout swimming around, miles of hardwood forested lake shore with nary a high-rise condo in sight, bald eagles, wild turkeys, deer, waterfalls, a museum where you learn that more than 6,000 ships have sunk in the Great Lakes, most by running into other ships, a Canadian strip joint where people pound on the stage with their palms like they slap the Plexiglas at a hockey game, and little towns with lots of dark little bars selling cheap beer, then it’s under $200 to fly round trip from Atlanta to Traverse City.

On the trip my bud Slick Rick (not the famous one) and I took, we flew into Detroit, then boarded a smaller jet for Cherry Capital Airport in Traverse City. Traverse City is in the northwest part of the Lower Peninsula, on Lake Michigan. They grow a lot of cherries around there. College football fans might remember the old Cherry Bowl that was played in Detroit, or Dee-troit as people up there tend to say.

Anyway, the Northwest terminal in Detroit is probably the coolest airport I’ve ever been in. It has a mag lev train that whispers through the terminal. And to get to the concourse where the smaller regional jets dock, you walk through a tunnel with surreal blue and green colors alternating on the walls so it gives the feel of being underwater. The moving sidewalk also includes a handy guide: walk, it says on the left, stand, it says on the right.

I’ve decided that rather than try to lay out a thorough travelogue right here, right now, I’ll just pop in bits about the trip over the next days and weeks as they occur to me.

Bit No. 1. Our last night there, we stayed in a town called Petoskey. It might not sound lyrical, but it’s a beautiful little berg on northern Lake Michigan, with what is billed as the biggest collection of historic homes anywhere in the country – 430 Victorians. The first ones were built as a summer-only religious retreat by the Methodists in the 1870s.

Some are grand mansions, some are a bit too elaborate. But a lot of them are tasteful little cottages. The downtown is full of old brick Victorian storefronts and has a “gaslight district.” It looks like a place with money, and it is. Apparently, a lot of Fords and Gambles, as in Proctor &, have places around there. It’s one of those places you see and figure there’s got to be something going on that you don’t know about.

Maybe not. It’s just that to spend much time around there in the summer, the expensive season, you need to have some cash.

A sad tale from the animal kingdom about Petoskey’s history: In the 1870s passenger pigeons used to migrate to Little Traverse Bay, at Petoskey, by the billions with a “B.” Individual flocks stretched for miles. “Alas,” says my trusty Moon Handbooks travel book, “the nesting habits and docile nature of the pigeons made them easy to hunt by simply clubbing them to death in their nests. Entrepreneur did so with glee, since their meat was considered a delicacy.”

The book says that whole steamships would be loaded with pigeons for delivery to restaurants in Chicago and Detroit. Not surprisingly, the passenger pigeon was extinct by 1914.

Fast forward to 2003, September. There are still no passenger pigeons, at least that I saw. Nevertheless, on the last night of our trip, en route from the UP back to Traverse City, we crashed in Petoskey. We went to a place called the City Park Grill, a nice restaurant with good food, good service and reasonable prices. The place had a lot of old woodwork and a clubby atmosphere. Sort of like a D.C. steakhouse.

A jam band called Bump played after the dinner crowd cleared out. Eventually, Rick and I fell into conversation with three guys from Dee-troit. The leader, Jack, was wearing one of those nylon wind shirts with a golf club logo on the breast. They were up there for a few days of golf. There are a lot of nice courses in the area.

Jack and one of the others, an unassuming gaunt guy with glasses named Dennis who kept buying us beers and is apparently the vending machine king of Detroit and whose ex-wife lives in Marietta, are marketing an energy drink called Sumpussie.

No joke. Being a big fish in vending, Dennis knows all the bar owners and strip club guys in Detroit, and has connections in the strip club game in Atlanta. They said Sumpussie is sold in some of the strip joints here. I haven’t had a chance to check since the trip. But someone told me they had actually heard of it. Jack and Dennis said it blows Red Bull away.

Jack, a fireplug with graying receding hair and big bulbous features, was hitting on every chick in sight. He was actually a funny guy, gregarious as all hell and a straight shooter. He smoked cigars, as you might expect. His ex-wife lives in metro Atlanta too, he said, and he has a son who runs a garage in Cobb County that works on Ferraris and other fancy sports cars.

Jack is a Vietnam vet who apparently was a tough cookie. His two cohorts said he wasn’t afraid of anything. I believed them.

We had a good time, then got up and drove the hour to Traverse City the next day, took a last trip out on the picturesque peninsula that bisects Grand Traverse Bay, then went to Cherry Capital airport and got on the plane with a half dozen other people and winged to Detroit.

Strangely enough, as we were sitting in an empty bar at the Traverse City airport before the flight, watching a little of the Georgia-LSU football game, a bunch of guys from Georgia, big Georgia fans, came in. After hearing a bunch of Canadian-sounding people – say ya to da UP, eh -- for eight days, their accents sounded almost strange. (For the record, I’m no Georgia fan. I went to Auburn University and root for the AU Tigers.)

He probably never served in the armed forces anyway

I see where Ole Miss is looking for a new mascot to replace Colonel Rebel, the old southern colonel who cavorts along the sidelines. How about something truly representative? Ole Miss’ new mascot could be an SAE named Trent in an oxford and khakis whose dad is a lawyer in Memphis or Jackson and who will probably also be a lawyer in Memphis or Jackson.

Posted 10/07/2003 07:22:00 PM by Charles
Reanimated

I haven’t added to my blog in six weeks for the same reason I quit trying to play guitar when I was 17.

I didn’t get good at the guitar in a month. Likewise, after a couple months, no one outside a few friends and friends of friends noticed my blog. I didn’t get emails from strangers praising my wit and insight. And watching Simpsons and King of the Hill reruns and Braves games is so much easier.

So what’s the point?

Well, one point is that Cap’n Ken has goaded me back to the keyboard. He’s declared my blog dead on his lengthy list of links and generally chastised me for my neglect. (By the way, Ken, nice bit about your newly divorced coworker. Reminds me that I’ve watched Office Space a couple times lately. Easily the best movie ever about modern cubicle culture.)

Come to think of it, Ken’s link list is another reason I’ve become a lax blogger. I see other blogs with all these fancy links and graphics and photos, and I feel like I’m driving a dented, duct taped, 11-year-old Civic in a city full of Lexuses (Lexi?), Beamers and Benzes, which I actually am.

Anyway, as I’ve been on hiatus, there are a number of things I could write about. But I’ll start with an October perennial.

Hardball and strippers

As anyone reading this knows – since, again, only my friends read this – I’m heavily emotionally invested in the Atlanta Braves. I’ve been a fan since I could reach the radio dial, and baseball’s always been my favorite sport. Truth to tell, one of the reasons I’ve never thought about leaving Atlanta since moving here in 1986 is because if I did, I couldn’t go to Braves games.

So October is generally a month of dread for me. Ides of March, my ass.

This year was, of course, no exception as the home team again, for the 11th time in 12 seasons, played wonderfully for six months only to go comatose in the postseason. Actually, unlike most people who follow baseball less closely than I, I don’t consider getting to the World Series and losing a failure. The Braves have actually gone comatose only about six times in the past 12 postseasons, but four in a row now.

As anyone who’s heard of Babe Ruth knows, the Braves have taken postseason futility to rarified heights. It’s all convinced me that rooting for a team that rarely even comes close to the big prize, that is out of it by July, is a lot easier than rooting for one that comes close only to crumble year after year after year after year after year.

Being a Braves fan in October is like thinking that a hot stripper really likes you and might go make out or even have sex with you. Yeah, it could happen. And Al Sharpton could get elected president.

About the only thing worse than watching the Braves lose again in October is reading and hearing all the absurdity from local commentators and sports radio callers after they do lose. I heard one caller say the Braves need to wear rally caps – which simply means turning a ball cap inside out and putting it on your head -- and another ask why when facing a tough pitcher, Bobby Cox, the manager, doesn't sit the starters until the sixth inning, then bring them in when the pitcher tires a little.

Then, of course, there’s the tired saw about how the Braves lack “heart” and “passion.” The AJC columnist Terrence Moore trots that one out at least a half dozen times a year. His columns have become more tiresome than the Braves’ playoff defeats. In the fall, the Braves’ losses become the fuse for an idiocy bomb. They lose a series, and -- boom! -- stupid baseball opinions splatter everything in sight.

Me, I don’t really know what to say about the Braves at this point. I’m not sure there is an explanation for why they seem to sink to the occasion most every October. I’m beginning to think they should jettison some big contracts, go with a bunch of hungry young players, miss the playoffs for a couple years, then come back having shed the albatross of postseasons past.

In any case, I’ll be back next year because I’m a fan, and that’s what fans do. A lot of people probably won’t be, and that’s OK. Shorter beer lines are no bad thing.

For God’s sake, think of something original to say

Everyone has a few movie lines they like to repeat now and then. I can recite virtually the entire Repo Man script. The thing is, I’m not running for governor of the biggest state in the damn Union.

Admittedly, I haven’t followed the California recall race all that closely, and I don’t really care who wins. But the only times I ever see, hear or read anything from Arnold Schwarzenneger, it’s some lame line from one of his movies.

“It’s time to terminate Gray Davis.” Good Lord. Grabbing a female key grip’s ass is one thing. But please, please say something. By pointing this out, I suppose I’m being about as original as he is.

Way up north

I took a really fun trip to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in September. It’s beautiful up there. And the population is small enough, and there’s so little industry, that being a waiter or waitress is considered a pretty good job. So unlike around here, most of the waitrons aren’t sullen indie rockers who think they deserve a 20 percent tip for showing up.

More on the UP trip later.

Posted 8/17/2003 02:26:00 AM by Charles
Blue crush; Dennis Miller loves Johnny Ashcroft

Sometimes I think TV sucks. Then other times, I remember why I pay more than $1 a day for basic cable.

Within, I don’t know, a half hour of channel surfing tonight I saw:

• George Costanza in a business suit punch Julia Roberts in the face, wrestle her down, jump on top of her, and Richard Gere pull him off. How is someone supposed to watch that and take the movie, whatever it’s called, seriously?
• Steve McQueen and Ann-Margret at a really graphic cockfight in Cincinnati Kid. When that movie was made, the mid ‘60s, you could probably film a real cock fight and put it in a movie. That’s sure what it looked like.
• That cloying blonde on the TV Guide channel doing an interview I actually enjoyed, because it was with Mo Rocca, formerly the funniest of the fake Daily Show reporters, who is now doing a TV show about celebrity crime that looks like it’ll be hilarious. It’s called The Smoking Gun, and it’ll be on Court TV.
• Promos for a new South Park DVD, which, along with a Kasey Chambers CD, I tried unsuccessfully to find at Border’s earlier this evening.
• The Denis Leary roast on Comedy Central, which was mostly hysterical, though some of the people went a little too far out of their way to say “fuck.”
• And parts of two painful, painful Saturday Night Live skits, one about Liza Manelli – that’s inventive – and one about Phil Donahue with Al Sharpton, Michael Moore and Barbra Streisand. Clever as a Jay Leno monologue.

God Leno sucks. I used to like him in the ‘80s when he made regular appearances on Letterman, when Dave was funnier. I caught a Leno monologue recently, just to get current on how spectacularly bland he is. I was stunned at how utterly unoriginal it was. He made a Doogie Hauser reference and then cracked wise about the differences between men and women. And people get pissed because athletes and CEOs make a lot of money? Jay Leno’s comedy these days is frozen fish sticks compared to fresh trout from people and shows like Jon Stewart, Conan and The Simpsons and King of the Hill and South Park and Reno 911. Of course, Leno trounces all those in the ratings.

It’s nice to see the Republicans and Democrats blaming each other for the blackout. If you believe Sean Hannity, one of Bush’s wind-up talk-radio robots, the blackout happened because Democrats don’t want to drill oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. And if you listen to Howard Dean, he single-handedly saved New England from darkness as governor of Vermont, whose population is about equal to Macon’s. He and the other Democratic presidential wannabes are of course heaping all the blame on Bush. It’s all because he’s shortsighted and is giving tax cuts to rich people.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Bush’s energy “policy” is a joke. Never mind trying to encourage people in the US to maybe, just maybe, use a little less than a billion gallons of gas a day. Maybe try not to give people tax breaks for driving army trucks that get about a quarter mile per gallon. Nah. He’s too busy cooking up healthy forest initiatives that give loggers rights to cut down more and more trees in National Parks, and other “shameless giveaways to cronies in energy, mining and logging,” as The Economist, a staunchly pro-market magazine that endorsed Bush in 2000, says.

Anyway, to hear Dean and Kerrey and those guys, you’d think the Democrats had been raising hell for years about modernizing the power grid. Because of a freak accident, all of a sudden it’s Bush’s fault. Come on. I guess none of whatever it is they think should have been done could have been done in Clinton’s eight years in office. It’s a little like the city of Atlanta’s crumbling sewer system that’s been ignored for the past 20 years. It’s the fault of all those guys and the public because most of us are way too shortsighted to care about something as dull as the electrical power grid until we get stuck in a subway or don’t have air conditioning.

When did Karl Rove start signing Denny Miller’s paychecks? I heard Dennis Miller briefly on the radio with the titanically obnoxious Hannity the other day. Miller called him Seany, and told Seany that he was doing his own show that night about why he loves “Johnny” Ashcroft. In his one very bad season on Monday Night Football, it seems Dennis picked up the old Howard Cosell habit of using nicknames people don’t have. Howard called Pete Rose “Petey” and the former Falcon William Andrews “Billy.” No one else did.

Posted 8/05/2003 12:18:00 PM by Charles
Rape and ratings

Most people I know or wrote about came out of the dot-com bust unemployed. Mark Cuban came out of it a billionaire. So if he says that Kobe Bryant’s adultery and possible rape are, from a cold business perspective, good for the NBA, I’ll believe him. (He’s interested because he owns the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks.)

Accepting Cuban’s view, the Bryant mess extends two established themes in big-money sports entertainment. One is the pro sports leagues’ obsession with attracting people who don’t much care for the sport at the risk of alienating real fans. Is it possible any more to have a Super Bowl or baseball All-Star game or NBA finals game without some absurd 15-minute “concert” or Up With People show or some jack ass celebrity taking batting practice with big leaguers?

Britney Spears and Aerosmith are apparently playing before the first NFL game this year. I suppose that’ll make 12-year-old girls and whoever still likes Aerosmith want to hear John Madden explain the nickel defense. The Bryant case is another, though unplanned, attraction for people who otherwise wouldn’t know the NBA from the NRA. Celebrity train wrecks are a big draw, especially while the TV networks are between wars and terrorist attacks.

The other theme the Bryant case fits with is sports crime.

I’ve never seen any stats, but it’s a safe bet that professional athletes have a lot more scrapes with John Law per capita than Joe Six Pack or even Joe 24 Pack. I’d guess that at least 20 percent of NFL linemen have knocked a woman around, or at least been suspected of doing it. Off the top of my head, I can think of three football players who in the past few years have been at least suspected of involvement in a murder – OJ, Ray Lewis and Ray Carruth. In the time it’s taken me to type these paragraphs, probably four basketball players have been busted for weed. And so on.

Now the Bryant case is intertwining these two themes. Maybe that’ll be a trend too. On televised games, they can start showing players’ arrest records in the graphics along with yards rushing or field goal percentage or batting average. Football teams could give players stickers for their helmets when they get busted, like they give them stickers for good plays. They could be little judge’s gavels. They could put patches on uniforms advertising their lawyers, like Nascar drivers are covered in ads.

They’re liable to try anything if it’ll make money.