Big Mike: My Kind Of Town
One of the cool things about hanging around the newsroom at radio station WFHB is that I get to hear about all the colorful little stories that otherwise would escape my notice. For instance, a couple of young punks went on an armed robbery spree last weekend, hitting gas station convenience stores on consecutive days.
Now there’s usually nothing terribly noteworthy about an underemployed, undereducated dope sticking a pistol in some poor clerk’s face and demanding the contents of the cash drawer. Yet, this particular story seems to encapsulate the huge gulf that exists between the privileged college crowd living within the Bloomington, Indiana, town limits and the aimless, prospect-less, and often toothless bunch of the same age in the surrounding hills.
Plus, once again, it touches upon the bizarre relationship we have with guns in this holy land.
Many social scientists might suggest that had the two young men been given the opportunity to attend a university, they’d be able to do their robbing legally while wearing nice suits. Education, the experts might say, would have been their salvation.
I have to agree. The two guys — one of whom, wearing a ski mask, dashed into the stores while his pal sat behind the wheel of the getaway car — thought it perfectly reasonable to use a red Pontiac Trans-Am as transportation to and from their capers. Not a beige clunker or a blue Toyota or even a couple of coaster bikes, vehicles that could easily disappear into the surrounding traffic and countryside.
According to the latest scientific estimates, there are approximately six Pontiac Trans-Ams still on the road in the entire Universe. Only two of them are red. The decision to use a car that all but had a sign on it reading Here we are, coppers! would come back to haunt them.
Surely there’d be some college-level class in which they’d have learned not to call attention to themselves while committing a felony.
The two guys allegedly knocked over a gas station/convenience store in Ellettsville, a teensy town about seven miles northwest of Bloomington, early Friday morning. Proving themselves to be conscientious young men, they got up early the next morning and pulled another job at a similar establishment nestled in the woods north of Bloomington.
Not only did they have ambition, they possessed great courage as they pushed ahead with their work under harrowing circumstances. It seems that as the ski-masked robber sprinted out of the second store, a customer followed him, unbelted his own pistol and began firing. Fortunately for him, the shooter had poor aim and missed the alleged robbers as well as — I feel compelled to repeat this — the red Pontiac Trans-Am.
Monroe County Sheriff’s deputies descended upon the second gas station/store long after the pair had departed. Naturally, the deputies broadcast an area-wide alert complete with descriptions of the man in the ski-mask and the red Pontiac Trans-Am. Presumably, area police officers digested this information and elected to park their cruisers, open the day’s newspaper and simply wait for the most conspicuous car in all of south central Indiana to pass them by.
Apparently, one Bloomington officer had taken an extra cup of coffee that morning because he continued to patrol the streets. As he passed a church parking lot, he noticed a red Pontiac Trans-Am pulling out. He pulled the car over and found within in it two young men, a ski mask, a pistol and a pile of cash. The young men were arrested, perhaps ending their brilliant careers just as they were beginning.
As for the man who fancied himself a gunslinger, he too was arrested at the second gas station/convenience store and charged with criminal recklessness. Police were quick to mention that he had a permit for his weapon. But he wasn’t personally threatened so his rat-a-tat act was deemed a tad excessive. The NRA ought to be proud of him while the gun-control crowd will probably hail the Monroe County Sheriff’s deputies.
It’s a story with happy endings for all. I think I’m gonna love this town.
Randolph Street:Highway 61–Winding Down
Wisconsin River Bridge–Boscobel, Wisconsin
Newsman–New Orleans, Louisiana
Projects–Burlington,Iowa
Tan–St. Paul, Minnesota
Hanging–Keokuk, Iowa
Farm–Wisconsin
This is a personal look at Mid-America that I shot between 1976 and 1985. These were taken along the approximately 1700 miles of US Highway 61 that roughly follows the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Minneapolis, then juts northeast to Duluth and along the western edge of Lake Superior to Thunder Bay, Ontario. All photographs © Jon Randolph.
All The Bells & Whistles
The oos: A Short List of Good Records from the Last Ten Years (Pt. 5)
Thundering Zeus screwed Leda while disguised as a swan — god and swan as one. Wagner’s Lohengrin has the son of a duke turn into a swan, thus human and swan are intertwined. (A side note: this opera is the birthpace of Here Comes the Bride — and the bride dies of grief. Kids, do not play this song at your wedding.) In contemporary culture, the entwinement of human and swan is Bjork looking super-weird at the 2001 Grammys. But the dress could have been worse — swans are a type of duck.
Underneath that swan dress (yum!) and beyond and above all else was the album she made. At the end of the last decade and the beginning of this one, artists were more than reinventing their sound. With Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, for example, or the Flamings Lips’ The Soft Bulletin or Radiohead’s Kid A, there was an undeniable movement to overhaul what pop music could be — a move away from bands playing songs and toward ambitious soundscapes and floating musical structures. Even among these examples, Vespertine stands apart.
There are no guitars or drums or any of that. The arrangements are for — get this — harp, chidren’s chorus, musicboxes, and a laptop. Where the above albums found their way by using the studio for exhausting overdubs that layered parts or pulled them apart or made guitars sound like squids giving birth, Bjork relied solely on instrumentation and exotic song writing.
The result isn’t merely an album. It’s music. It can be performed live, as it is on the record with its sweep and strangeness fully intact. At the dawn of the decade, the album held promise to usher in an era of experimental chamber-pop. But it appears chamber-pop is still drawing from smoky nightclub ambiance; tragic, drunken cabaret; or new age pastoralism. So, ten years later, Vespertine glides alone.
by Timothy Imse
Benny Jay:That’s The Way Of The World
When I was nineteen, the university I attended put me in Morton House, this dumpy little house out behind the cafeteria.
They had me and three other stoners with a black guy from Philly on the first floor and six or seven black girls on the second. The black guy was on the edge of a breakdown. Not that I blame him. There was only a handful of black kids in the school which was in a part of Wisconsin that was whiter than white.
At the time I was too stoned and stupid to put one and one together. But in retrospect, I suspect the living arrangements weren’t exactly coincidental. I have a hunch the people in charge lumped pot heads with black girls in the general category of outcast and decided to stick us in Morton House so the only people we’d bother were ourselves.
Midway through the year the black guy had enough and went back to Philly and – coincidentally, I’m sure – another black guy was moved in to replace him. His name was Michael and he was just about the coolest guy I ever met — easy-going, self-assured and sexy suave with the ladies.
He had one girlfriend out in the open – used to see them walking around campus hand-in-hand – and a few others on the side. He eased them in out of his room, sometimes in the same night.
I heard it all, the walls being paper thin. I used to lie in bed, trying to listen to the Allman Brothers on my stereo and not the squeaky springs coming from his room.
After he ushered whichever girl he’d been with out the back door, he’d come into my room and stand there bare-chested and in his briefs.
“Watcha doin’?” he’d ask.
“What’s it look like I’m doin’?”
“Wackin’ off….”
“Ha, ha, ha – very funny….”
“Wanna get high?”
“Yeah, why not?”
I crawled out of bed and into his room, and he’d light up the pipe and put on a record. The guy had vintage `70s stuff — the Crusaders, Bill Withers, Grover Washington. My favorite was Earth Wind & Fire’s “That’s the Way of the World.”
We’d smoke that pipe, listen to those great songs and talk all night. Man, those were good times.
One night Michael asked why I didn’t have a girl. I got all tongue tied and twisted. I wanted to tell him the truth – too self-conscious – but instead I made up some bullshit about how I had lots of chicks back home.
He saw right through it. He told me that all I needed was to get into a groove – lay a rap. Then he put on “All About Love.”
That’s the mellow jam from “The Way of the World” where they go: “Let the light shine, all through your mind, feel your little heart a glow. Take the time, make up your mind – it’s all about love….”
And in the middle of the song Maurice White stops singing and starts talking: “Now I want you to stop whatever you’re doing — just stop. Cause I wanna rap – you dig.”
Michael told me that the next time I’m with a woman, I should do that rap.
“You mean – like Earth Wind & Fire?” I asked.
“Yeah, just like them….”
He replayed the song and I practiced. We must have smoked a ton of weed cause after awhile I really got into it. I mean, I stood in front of his mirror and recited it from memory. Had it down cold, all the little inflections and everything: “We study all kinds of sciences — astrology, mysticism, world religion and so forth – you dig.”
“Yeah, Benny….”
“Now there’s an outer self we got to deal with – the one that likes to go to parties, one that likes to dress up and be cool and look pretty….”
“Yeah….”
“Hear y’all, I’m trying to tell you – you gotta love you. And love all the beautiful things around you, trees and birds. And if there ain’t no beauty, you got to make some beauty – have mercy! Listen to me, yeah….”
When I got to the have-mercy-listen-to-me-yeah part he just about died laughing….
Anyway, several years pass. I’m living out east. At a party in Boston and I’m putting the moves on some girl and….
Well, I must of had too much to drink and/or smoke cause all of a sudden out of nowhere – don’t know where it came from – I conjure up my inner Earth Wind & Fire. I tell her: “You gotta love you and learn all the beautiful things around you….”
She pulls back, looks at me like I’m crazy and says: “Isn’t that a song?”
Needless to say, it didn’t work out for me quite the way Michael said it would.
Oh, well, so it goes. It’s still a great record and the world’s coolest song. Whenever I hear it, I think about Michael, and in my mind I go back in time to his room.
Yeah, I wish I could have been like Mike, but I guess some guys have it and some guys don’t. That’s okay — at least I got the song….
Big Mike: A Small Town With A Big Fish
There’s a fish on top of the county courthouse that dominates the square in beautiful downtown Bloomington, Indiana. Don’t ask me why. I’ve asked dozens of people myself and the best answer I ever got was that Bloomington is known far and wide as a fishing city — which was the first and only time I’ve ever heard such a thing.
The fish is impaled upon a spire topping the courthouse dome. It serves as a wind vane. I look at it every morning when I hit the square, the way I used to look at the flags atop the Wrigley Field scoreboard. You’d think I was a flying ace, the way I take daily sight readings of wind speed and direction but it’s really only a way to fool myself that I’ll know what the weather’s going to be like.
Except for a parking garage or two and a couple of neo-classical towers on the Indiana University campus a couple of blocks to the east, the fish is the tallest point in the town. As such, the fish is analogous to the broadcasting towers on top of the John Hancock Center, a focal point of the skyline. The only difference is the Hancock’s twin towers are a tad taller — by some 1300 feet or so, that’s all.
Yesterday was a glorious day in beautiful downtown Bloomington. The sun was brilliant, the temperatures in the mid-50s, and people ambled around the square, hoping to squeeze in the last aimless stroll before the cold hits tonight. Actually, people around here already consider the weather cold, the dopes. December and January aren’t the existential ordeals in south central Indiana they are in Chi. When people talk about how frigid it is, even though it’s May-mild out to me, I remind my new burgh-mates that I come from up north. They quickly grin and say, semi-apologetically, “Yeah, you’re right. This is nothing.”
I ambled aimlessly around the courthouse myself during my half-hour lunchbreak from the bookstore. I didn’t want to sit inside some cafe or even the Trojan Horse (the place serves the best falafel sandwich outside Chicago) across the street from the Book Case on such a pretty day.
The first time I passed the main entrance, a young rural couple exited their pickup and asked me where they go for the county treasurer’s office. “Got t’pay our property taxes,” the man said. The woman nodded, adding, “Gotta give’ em what they want or they’ll take it all away.” We three laughed as I pointed at the front door and they thanked me profusely.
I continued my slow circumnavigation of the courthouse. By the time I got around to the front entrance again, the couple was bounding down the stairs toward their pickup. “Didn’t you find the treasurer’s office?” I asked.
“Oh yeah. All we had to do was pay our taxes,” the man said. The woman nodded again. “Had to take care of The Man,” she said. They waved and thanked me again as if I were the county government’s official host. They climbed into their pickup and rumbled away. I noticed its tire treads were caked with red, sandy soil. Then it hit me — they’d parked right in front of the county building, found the treasurer’s office and paid their property taxes all in the span of five minutes.
Man, this is some small town. Of course, according to at least one person I’ve talked to, it’s known far and wide.
Benny Jay: My Albert Einstein Moment
It’s Monday night bowling and Norm and I are keeping score, like we always do, sitting side-by-side, entertaining each other with wise cracks, witty observations and a ceaseless stream of conversation about — what else? — the Bulls.
We’re up against the Hawaiians, the team that features Bob, the bowling alley owner; Pat, the plumber; and Mark, the cop. And let me tell you something – these boys can bowl. Here’s how good Bob is. He was the best right-handed bowler in the league. And then a year or so ago, he severely cut his right hand and switched to his left one. And now he’s one of the best bowlers in the league — bowling left handed! That prick….
They win the first game. We win the second. The third and final game is neck and neck coming into the final frame – way too close to call. Either team can win it.
Cap — our final bowler – steps up.
“C’mon, Cap,” says J-Dub.
He rolls. Bam! Strike.
“Yeah, dawg!” bellows Norm.
Mark, their last bowler, knocks down eight….
“Gimme another, one, Cap,” I say. “One more….”
Bob stands over our shoulders, counting up the score in his head. On top of being a great bowler, the guy’s a freaking math wizard. I’ve never seen a guy add and subtract so fast — it’s like he’s got a tiny calculator in his brain. In fact, I think he’s even better at calculations than he is at bowling — the prick!
“If Mark gets one pin,” says Bob. “We win….”
“One pin?” says Mark.
“One pin,” says Bob.
“Fuck,” says Norm.
Mark knocks down a pin.
“We won,” says Bob.
“We lost?” asks Cap.
“That’s right,” says Bob. “You can get this strike and the next strike and we’ll still beat you by one pin….”
“Don’t listen to him,” I say. “Just bowl. There might be a mistake in the scoring….”
Cap bowls. Crash. Pins fly. Strike two!
“Good for you,” says Bob. “But you still lost….”
“Did we lose?” asks Cap.
“Forget him him,” I say. “Go for the strike….”
Bob shrugs.
Cap rolls. Bam! He hits `em so hard I swear I hear those pins cry for mama. Strike Three!
“That’s bowling, boy!” I exclaim.
We’re hugging and hand slapping like we won the World Series.
Bob shrugs.
Norm tallies up the score. “We lost,” he says shaking his head. “By one pin….”
“I told you,” says Bob.
“Let’s recount `em,” I say.
“Do what you want,” says Bob, as he walks away.
So Norm and I go over the score, man by man, frame by frame. Adding and re-adding and adding again — three plus eight plus nine plus ten….
“Stop!” I say.
“What?” says Norm.
“There’s a mistake….”
“Where?”
“There….”
J Dub had 153 points and he got strike on top of a spare. But we only gave him nineteen points instead of twenty. It should be 173, not 172.
“Yeah,” says Norm.
“Game tied,” I say.
“Aw good one, Benny….”
I’m feeling all mathematical and stuff — like I’m Albert Einstein.
“Hey, Bob,” calls out Norm. “We found a point….”
“Fuck, no,” says Bob.
“Fuck, yes,” says Norm.
“Fuck you, says Bob.
“See for yourself….”
Bob shoos Norm out of his seat and we hover over his shoulder as he recounts the tally. You can almost hear that tiny calculator in his brain whirring over those numbers like a vacuum cleaner on a rug.
And I’m savoring every priceless morsel of this moment – cause I know it’s only a matter of time before….
“Fuck!” Bob exclaims.
“Told you,” I say.
“Aw, fuck!” says Bob.
I start singing “Purple Haze,” which had been playing on the juke box. Only I change the words to go: “Found a mistake, up in the score….”
“Did we win?” Pat asks Bob.
“Tie,” says Bob.
“Fuck,” says Pat.
“Hey, hey, show some love,” I say.
“Fuck you — you piece of shit,” says Pat. “First you make the mistake and then you find it….”
“I think they call that ironic,” I say. “Isn’t that right, Bob? Don’t they call that ironic?”
“Fuck you, fuck face,” says Bob.
“Hey, man — watch that language….”
By now the story of the mistake has made it’s way around the bowling alley and as I make my way to the bathroom everyone from all the other teams has got something to say.
“Fucking writer should have been an actuarial,” says Jack, as he stands at the urinal.
At least that’s what I think he says. He’s had so much to drink that he’s slurring his words and actuarial sounds like ash-shoo-arial — or something like that.
I walk back to Bob, give him a big hug and say: “Bobby, my man – you know you love me….”
“Ah, fuck you,” he says.
“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” I tell him. “See you next week….”
Guest Blogger:
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Pull My Finger. Written by Milo. Read by Andy Orscheln, Lorenzo Toia, Joel Reitsma, Nels, Laura Korn and introducing Benny Jay as Rolando. Produced by King Conundrum.
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