At the Movies!

Even though it’s July, it’s starting to look like fall around here. With the lack of rain, leaves on the trees are starting to turn yellow and drop to the ground as the trees attempt to deal with the stress of not getting enough water. So I was looking forward to this past weekend, with its promises of a cold front, lower temperatures, and rain in the forecast. What our friendly weathermen forgot to tell us was that the temperature would drop to the frigid upper-80s with what feels like two hundred percent humidity. The air felt so think and heavy with moisture that which each breath you manage to take in forms drops of condensation on the inside surface of your lungs. Fortune, how you mock me so!

This past Friday my wife and I did something we haven’t done in a while—took our daughter to the movies. Other family members have been taking her to see movies of late, leaving mom and dad out of the equation. So rather than continue to be one-upped by others we decided it was time that we head out as a family to go see a movie. On this particular evening we took the child to see Monster House, a computer animated film about three kids and a house possessed by the spirit of a dead woman. The animation was pretty good, especially in those scenes where the house came to life—but nothing of the caliber that PDI/Dreamworks has produced (I know one or two people at PDI have been reading this, so like any good politician I must kiss-up to that segment of my core constituency). A cute movie that my daughter enjoyed, even if it did scare the hell out of her late in the film, causing her to lean over to me and plead to go home. Sorry kid, we’ve bought the ticket and you’re here for the duration. I knew exactly what she was experiencing, though. Way back in 1973 while on a family vacation, my dad took us to see The Poseidon Adventure. As embarassed as I am to say it, the movie scared the living bejesus out of me back then. And who wouldn't be frightened by the sight of Shelley Winters in a soaking wet dress?

But I came away with two observations after watching Monster House. First, for all the digital animation and mastering, it’s all wasted until better projection systems come along. I spent most of the movie wondering if the image distortion was a factor of the screen’s texture or of the projector. The picture seemed out of focus most of the time. Some of the movies that I have seen in the theater look so much better being played on my DVD player connected to the s-video jack on my flatscreen television; Finding Nemo, with all the underwater scenes on the coral reef, looks really, really good and was the DVD that convinced my wife that our television was a good purchase. My second observation, or more like an opinion, was a lingering question as to why Monster House was released now, at the end of July. The film is set at Halloween and would be more appropriate for a fall release. The only conclusion that I came to was that Sony released the movie now hoping to rope in some summer money and come mid-October would release the film on DVD, where your typical movie makes most of its money these days.

I have to admit that I’m not a big fan of the whole movie going experience. For roughly the same price as the tickets you can buy the DVD, take it home, crank up the theater system, and enjoy a movie on the comfort of your own couch as often as you’d like. Not to mention that you don’t have to use a public restroom with people who will never, ever become deer hunters. If you can’t hit a urinal from a range of less than a foot, there’s no way in hell you’ll shoot a deer from seventy-five yards. Another advantage of the DVD is that you can skip the previews and go straight to the movie. Not so in the theater. The movie last Friday was supposed to start at 5:30, but thanks to the previews the opening credits didn’t start rolling until 5:46. At one point I was ready to turn in my seat and yell, “Enough with the f*cking previews already!! Run the goddamn film!” There weren’t that many people in the theater so I’m sure they would’ve heard me, but with children present I opted not to voice my opinion. Besides, the absolute last thing I need was for my daughter to go to her summer camp and yell the same thing on those days they watch a movie.

Also, when watching a DVD at home you don’t have to pay $3 for a bottle of water, or $3.50 for anemically small box of popcorn. Consider that for the same $3 you can pick up a 12 pack of Cokes, or for a couple of dollars you can get an 8 pack box of Act II’s movie lovers butter flavored popcorn and eat two packs in less time than it takes for a theater to run the damned previews! Granted, walking into the theater and being greeted with the smell of popcorn is nice, but when you’re taking a child to the movies, the snack bar beckons them like a siren call sending H.M.S. Debit Card careening onto the rocks in a disaster only Irwin Allen could appreciate.

Once Monster House was over, we left the theater and headed off to find some dinner. We stopped someplace nearby, a place that’s usually on our b-list of restaurants but we were hungry and I needed a reminder as to why it’s on our b-list, considering coming to this place was my idea. The reminder wasn’t long in coming, to be certain. We were seated and hadn’t been there long when I began to pick up on the conversation of the group of people at the next table. They had their child with them, and she couldn’t have been more than a year old. The mom started talking about her daughter’s fascination with her own feet, which rapidly took an unfortunate left turn and the discussion began covering the dad’s feet and how his toe nails needed to be trimmed.

Ugh! I thought to myself, “What the hell is this?” They were talking about feet in a restaurant. If this was considered an appropriate topic in public I can only imagine what passes for conversation in the dim glow of the forty watt bulb over their dinner table at home. It’s probably a safe guess that the specter of wife swapping has come up over many a loose meat sandwich dinner in that household. Throwing in her two cents worth into the conversation, the mom chimes in that she can pick up things with her feet. WOW! You’ve got some talented toes there lady. Wanna pick up my dinner check while you’re at it? I cursed myself for not listening to more loud, devil-worshipping rock n’ roll music in my youth, which would have the pleasurable effect of deafening me to this conversation. Not to be outdone, it was about that time the lady in the couple sitting behind me decides it’s time to hack up a lung, and starts emitting a cough that sounded a lot like a death rattle. You could almost see the tuberculosis in the air, and it smelt a little like motor oil. Nice.

Next time I’m skipping the theater and buying the damn DVD.

Songs for the Deaf

While I finish writing my next post, here's a little something from the Heart of Darkness to entertain you. Oh, and Sylvia...I'll be sure to call Jon about getting the band going so you can go barhopping and get really drunk. Okay? Okay.

Requiem

July 19. A mixed day in family history, a day of beginnings and of endings. It was forty-four years ago today that my maternal grandfather died; my paternal grandmother would’ve turned eighty-five today. It’s odd that two of my grandparents would share a date of significance, as I really don’t know either of them.

Both of my grandfathers would die before I was born. On my mom’s side I have plenty of pictures but don’t really know the man; on my dad’s side I have but a few pictures, mostly from yellowed, seventy year old newspaper clippings (another topic for another time), but I know a fair amount about the man. On July 18, 1962 my grandfather came home from work a little early complaining of discomfort in his chest. He wrote it off as gas pains, and decided that if he felt bad the next day he’d come home early where he and my grandmother would go off to the store to buy some spinach, which is apparently good for alleviating gas pain (or it was forty-four years ago). The next day he went off to work but was still feeling bad, so he came home not long after noon. My grandmother arrived home to take him to the store and found him dead in bed, a victim of a heart attack. I would never get to meet him, but in subsequent years I would accompany my grandmother along with my siblings to tend to his grave.

For whatever reason I didn’t have the same relationship with my dad’s mother as I did with my mom’s, or at least I don’t recall having the same type of relationship. We never spent much time at my grandmother’s place, but the limited memories I have of spending time there are fond ones. I remember my brother and me staying the night at her house one time and being fascinated that at dinnertime I got to drink from the same Superman glass that my dad did when he was young.

I think root cause of the distance was that my grandmother’s second husband was a complete bastard. My paternal grandfather died when his train was struck from behind by a second passenger train. I’m not sure that my dad ever really got over the loss of his father and my grandmother’s remarriage; if he did, then he certainly did an excellent job of internalizing it. The last I heard the “other guy” was still alive, and if there were any justice in this world he’d have been hit by a cross-town bus by now. That may sound mean spirited, but consider that when my grandmother passed away in 1978, this guy removed all the jewelry off of my grandmother before they closed her casket and you get an idea of the caliber of his person. She’s in a better place now and hopefully much happier than she ever seemed to be from my personal observations. It makes me wonder how so many lives would’ve been different had my grandfather not been killed at the age of thirty-three on a Thanksgiving Eve.

So on this day I will think of my grandfather and wish my grandmother a Happy Birthday.

Geez & crackers

It’s an election year summer, which is a two-fold pain in the ass for me. It’s about this time of year that the television stations start peppering us relentlessly with campaign commercials. The races here in Georgia seemed to go negative pretty quickly, especially between the Democratic contenders for governor and the two Republican candidates for lieutenant governor. In the governor’s race, the two front-running Dems hoping to face Sonny “Concretehead” Purdue in November are current Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox and Georgia Lt. Governor Mark Taylor. They’ve been trading allegations of misuse of their respective offices for personal or political gain. Cox has accused Taylor of using prison labor in a private business and making money leasing property to the state. Taylor has accused Cox of misusing money in a public trust for a series of public service commercials he says were technically the start of Cox’s campaign for governor.

I got to watch both Taylor and Cox on a taped reply of last night’s gubernatorial debate, which also included two other candidates nobody’s heard of. Mac McCarley is a 78 year old World War II veteran who’s trying to get into the governor’s mansion. Apparently he’s running because he’s pissed at the Veteran’s Administration. He’s a fiesty guy (obviously), from what I could tell from his appearance in the debate, and some research I did on him revealed that he spent some time in the Alabama state senate during the late 1960s but was expelled due to allegations of unethical behavior. The other darkhorse candidate for the Democratic nomination on hand for the debate was a fellow named Bill Bolton. Bolton was the scariest of the four candidates. He constantly had that “deer in the headlights” look to him, and at one point he came mighty damn close to advocating abortion as a means of birth control, which would go over very well in a state loaded with Bible thumpers. I think Mark Taylor has a lock on the Democratic nomination; I like Cathy Cox and she has my vote, but Georgia’s not ready for a female governor, not in a state where conservative Southern Baptists think a woman’s place is in the home.

But the Republican primary in the Lt. Governor’s race has been much more entertaining and scary. This race pits Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition, against Casey Cagle, a Georgia state senator. Reed has accused Cagle of serving on the state’s banking committee and promoting laws that have benefited Cagle and his business (which just happens to be a bank). Cagle likewise has accused Reed of “selling out Christians” by hiding unreported income in a non-profit organization and pointing out Reed’s association with the now disgraced Jack Abramoff. Reed’s troubles have just gotten worse as an Indian tribe in Texas has named him in a civil suit seeking millions in damages, alleging that Reed helped block legislation in Texas that would’ve legalized casino gambling while he was receiving money from a tribe and their competing casino in Louisiana to do so. Reed will deny everything, of course, but most people with more than eight functional brain cells realize Reed is dirtier than a college freshman’s laundry at the midterm.

The scary part of the Republican race came as I listened to a few minutes of the debate between Reed and Cagle this past Sunday evening on the radio. For a moment I thought I had tuned in a religious program, but the two candidates bashing each other with allegations confirmed that I hadn’t. Cagle brought up the topic of Reed’s affiliation with Abramoff, to which Reed replied, “I’m not perfect, but the One I serve is.” For me it doesn’t help that Reed’s campaign commercials include him stating, for the record, “As head of the Christian Coalition of Georgia Republican Party....” Um, thanks, Ralph, for so eloquently informing us that you’d like to bring the American Taliban to Georgia. And if you’re elected, the “One” you’d be serving are the people of Georgia and not all of us view the world through the prism of a Bible. And people were worried when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president in Iran; Ralph’s brand of religious zealotry is seemingly fine with folks.

Not even eBay can take me away from election year insanity. I like acquiring items of local color and history off eBay whenever I can. But at this time of year, with the college football season just around the corner, the listings where I can usually find these tidbits of local history are just loaded with auctions for individual and single game tickets for upcoming football games. People have been known to be gullible enough to shell out two or three grand on season tickets in these Rube Goldberg auctions. I call them that because at this time of the year, the college’s athletic association hasn’t even allocated tickets to those who put in their order forms. That’s right, people are bidding on tickets when the people auctioning them off don’t have an absolute guarantee that they’ll even receive tickets in the first place! Of course, I’ve already put in my order form for tickets and we’ll see if I get any. I’d better—the bastards at the ticket office have already tapped my credit card!

Standing in the Shower...Thinking

My alarm went off in the pre-dawn darkness of yet another Monday morning. Five-thirty comes pretty damned early, especially on Mondays. Geebus, I just closed my eyes, I thought. How can it be six and a half hours since the last time I looked at my clock? I hit the snooze button, half asleep yet fully aware that I had seven more minutes before the clock began emitting its grating, annoying wake up call again. Still, I find my clock’s alarm preferable to the literal screaming noise our weather alert radio makes. It’s a jarring experience to be suddenly awakened by the weather radio in the dead of night, especially when you know it’s going off because there’s severe weather in the area. Georgia tends to experience a lot of severe weather, including many tornados, in the middle of the night. Admittedly there have been times that after the fifth time our alert radio has gone off and it’s not even 1:30 in the morning as yet, I’ve gotten up and unplugged the radio and taken its backup battery out. The desire for sleep sometimes outweighs the desire to know when a severe storm is about to blow through.

But not on this particular morning. I sat up in bed, turned on the light on my night stand, and turned on the morning news to see if I had missed anything overnight. With those pesky North Koreans testing faulty missiles, anything goes in Southeast Asia these days. I’m no expert in foreign affairs, but it seems to me that North Korea is the international equivalent of America’s stalker. Just as soon as we ignore them they do something stupid to get our attention. It’s like Fatal Attraction on a global stage, with Kim Jong Il in Glenn Close’s role. Makes me wonder if they’ll one day find a rabbit boiling in a pot in the White House kitchen, right about the same time someone keeps calling the switchboard and hanging up.

With my morning news ritual over, I headed off to the shower in an attempt to wake up, recall the events of the past weekend, and contemplate the week ahead. It had been a good three-day weekend for me. Friday found me home as a work crew came to take down the oak tree that had been hit by lightning at the beginning of May. The backyard looks so much different now that that tree is gone, but we no longer fear the thing being blown over in a storm. On the other hand, I have a LOT of wood to split for winter and I have to get going on that soon to ensure that the wood is sufficiently dried out to burn in our fireplace come December. The afternoon found me with some free time, so I grabbed my golf clubs and headed off to the driving range to “practice my slice,” as I told the guy at the clubhouse. I had some problems hitting my 1 wood a few weeks back playing eighteen holes while on vacation, which pissed me off because it’s the one club I can hit consistently and I couldn’t hit the ball straight if my life depended on it. At the driving range I hit my 1 wood well again, and came to the conclusion that if I tee the ball too high I wind up slicing WAY off to the left. I also practiced hitting some of my irons, which I really needed to practice with. The hour I spent on the driving range really helped me figure out my swing when it comes to the irons. I think I’m ready to play another eighteen holes and try to beat the 104 I shot last month.

Friday evening found my wife and me taking our daughter to the pool in the substantial student physical activity center on campus. The week before she had passed her swimming test at summer camp, and she was now allowed to swim in the deeper section of the camp’s pool. She is very proud of herself and her newfound confidence in the swimming pool, and her parental units share her sense of accomplishment. On this evening we went swimming in the natatorium’s diving pool. I knew my daughter had jumped off the diving board at her summer camp, so I wasn’t too surprised when she launched herself off the 1 meter board at the diving well. I was surprised when she announced that she wanted to jump off the 3 meter board. She climbed up the ladder up to the platform where the board awaited her, me following behind figuring that she’d change her mind about jumping from that height. Slowly but surely she walked out to the end of the board. A moment’s hesitation and...she jumped!

Holy crap! She jumped off the 3 meter spring board! My wife was in the water near the diving board just in case there was trouble, but as soon as the little one swam over to the side of the pool, she was climbing back up the ladder and heading to catapult herself off the board again! Now, I readily admit to possessing a fear of heights, and ten feet above the water is not that high. But for someone like me it might as well be one hundred feet. I stood up on the diving platform wanting to jump off the board but with the side effects of acrophobia starting to make their presence known. I got up on the diving board and slowly edged my way out to the end. This was something more than confronting a fear; pride was at stake. My six year old had just jumped off the board TWICE, and here I was a little nervous about jumping off the first time. Losing my nerve I backed off from the front edge of the board, at which time my daughter came by me to jump off the board for the third time. Alright, dammit! I had to jump now, seemingly irrational fears be damned. Once my daughter had cleared the area below the board, I slowly made my way out to the end of the board...and I jumped! No sooner had I swam to the edge of the pool than I was climbing back up the ladder for another go.

The hot water of the shower felt really good on all the muscle tension in my upper back, shoulders, and neck—the price I paid for swinging golf clubs and swimming all in the same day. Eric Clapton’s “After Midnight” began to play on my shower radio. As I always seem to do, I listened to the song but was paying close attention to the bass line and the melody. It had been a long time since I had played that particular song and I had played it the first time I played in public—and certainly not with that bass line; rather, I played a more “walking” bass line that hit notes on the off-beat, throwing everyone off at first. My first time playing my bass in public was way back in 1990 for a one-off gig for the Fourth of July picnic at the local Navy base. A friend of mine who worked there asked if I would be interested in playing that day and there was no way I was going to turn down an opportunity to play. There were six of us, and we played a few times at the officers’ club which were less a public show than practice sessions. Fortunately most of us shared common musical influences, so we were able to cobble together a set list in short order. Songs by Eric Clapton, Cream, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Van Morrison comprised most of the set. We really wanted to play Van Morrison’s “Moondance” (which I’ve come to really like since then) but I just couldn’t figure out the bluesy bass line and didn’t want to BS something else in its place. Perhaps now I should take the opportunity to sit down and get to know the song, 16 years too late. We played for about two hours in the early July summer, southern heat and humidity. It was what I would call a good show—mistakes were few, we all had fun, people liked the music, and there was beer to drink. When it was all over I was a little depressed with the realization that we were finished, no more practices, no more gigs. I’ve always liked playing music with other people and I always will. It’s so satisfying and enjoyable on so many levels to create music with others.

The time had come to finish off my morning shower with cold water. It’s a nice way to jolt myself awake and shock the system, though not as much of a shock as during the winter when we actually have hot and cold running water as opposed to summer’s hot and warm running water in the south. The prospect of heading off to work didn’t sound to appealing after three days off. I’m feeling bored and unmotivated, but still getting my job done. Then there’s also the frustration of trying to rework an entire web site only to be stymied by a javascript menu that stubbornly refuses to work. Then there’s our relatively new front desk person who’s under the misimpression that she carries a bit more weight with the department head than she actually does. I miss our old front desk person. Sure she was bored and under employed but I liked talking to her.

My boss had been away for ten days and would be back in the office that morning. Yee-friggin-hah! While he was away I was privy to some written comments he had made about me that I wasn’t supposed to see. Apparently I’m not a diplomat (no shit!) but I know the rules and policies around this place and he’d be sunk without me. Now I really regret not going on that interview a couple of weeks ago. It’d be a win-win situation: either I’d get a new job or more money. Oh well, hindsight is always 20-20 and I’m generally happy running my own dog-and-pony show at the office.

Time to shut off the shower and get going. There was a child to awaken and get dressed, and fed, and repeatedly told to go brush her teeth, and lunch to make, and trash to take out.... Being a grown-up really sucks sometimes.

Yahoos with Guns

Wow, two posts in one day...what are the odds? Clearly I hadn't planned on posting anything else today, but I just read the most interesting local news story. Our local town hall is just over a century old, and its cupola is currently undergoing a renovation/rehabilitation to make sure it doesn't collapse onto the sidewalk and pedestrians ninety feet below. On top of the whole shebang is a copper-plated bald eagle, which has also been removed for restoration. Part of the original construction, the eagle was originally covered with a thin gold leaf which has over the years been painted over with aluminum paint, and also covered with splatter from roofing tar. Far from its native gold appearance, the eagle has had, since I've been living in this town, a green tarnished look to it.

But what surprised me more was not how its appearance has deteriorated over the years. The story that I read noted that the copper plating had eroded in a number of places on the eagle, and the erosion had started on the inside. The inside? How could that be, unless its construction was faulty. When work crews removed the eagle from the cupola they found it was "riddled with bullet holes and weathered by 103 years of exposure...." Bullet holes? My first thought was what kind of redneck yahoos do we have around here anyway that would find it big fun to come to town and shoot up the eagle on top of city hall? As I read further, the truth was more ominous than fiction. Turns out the local police had shot up the eagle in an attempt to chase off pidgeons that had taken roost on the eagle. So it wasn't local redneck yahoos that shot up the bird, but the local law enforcement yahoos that did it. I'm reminded of an incident at the local petting zoo when I first moved to town twenty-five years ago. Seems someone snuck in one night and went to the area where the deer were kept. These things were so tame that they would come to the fence to see if you had any food. One night their luck ran out; they went up to the fence anticipating a meal and someone shot them dead. Makes me wonder if some cop-wannabe got some practice in long before his deadly confrontation with pigeons on a copper eagle. Sigh...if it looks like an animal and it ain't movin', shoot it.

Loud and Fast Rules

A bad day on the health front today (today as in as I write this, not necessarily when I actually post it). Had to leave work early as my stomach was feeling unsettled. The last time I felt under the weather a thunderstorm came seemingly out of nowhere and sent a lightning bolt through one of oaks in the back yard. That tree is slated to be cut down in just over a week from now and none too soon; the number of dead and dying leaves has increased at a rapid pace over the past few weeks and I’ll feel much better once the tree is gone.

With some time on my hands, I figured I’d take the opportunity to transfer some movies off my DVR and onto a DVD. It was an easy decision to the afternoon a Preston Sturges-fest. The Palm Beach Story ended a little while ago and now Sullivan’s Travels is on. I recorded Sullivan on a whim as I wanted to see Joel McCrea in other films in addition to The Palm Beach Story; I don’t know if I’ll get around to also transferring Ride the High Country, one of McCrea’s much later films, onto a DVD today. But I certainly can recommend Sullivan’s Travels. In the film, McCrea plays a director who poses as a hobo while doing from field research for a movie he wants to make about people living in poverty. Also stars the always talented and attractive Veronica Lake.

In between movies I took the opportunity to catch up on some news and give the program guide a quick peek to see if there was anything remotely interesting on this afternoon. On VH1 Classic they were playing We Are the 80s, a program that features nothing but videos from the Decade of Reagan. I’ve been watching that program a lot whenever I see that it’s on. It’s a nice musical journey back in time, but a great many of the videos are really, really cheesy. Some of the music is really cheesy as well. The big hair, sleeveless kamikaze shirts, narrow ties, excessive makeup, synthesizer and electronic drum driven music and videos haven’t translated well almost twenty years later. My personal choice for worst combination of song and video is Taco’s Puttin’ on the Ritz, an absolute feast for the eyes and ears if you enjoy musical masochism. Taco reminds me of Buster Poindexter, but at twenty days post-mortem.

Watching these videos from twenty years ago reminded me of how much music has changed in just a short amount of time, and to an extent, how much it hasn’t changed. I was watching the Andrews Sisters belting out “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” in Abbott & Costello’s 1941 film Buck Privates when the thought occurred to me that were they just starting out today, some half-wit A&R rep from some scumbag record company would try to lure Patty away from the act and go solo. She was, after all, the focal point of the trio: always in the center of the three, she always sang the solos, and in the few films the sisters were in, Patty always got most (if not all) of the dialogue. Certainly recent musical history is replete with examples of music companies luring female leads away from their groups in hopes that their solo careers would generate more revenue. As examples, look at Edie Brickell, who was lured away from the New Bohemians and now enjoys a successful career as a multi-platinum artist on Billboard’s “Where are they now” chart; Aimee Mann was convinced that leaving her band Til Tuesday was a good idea; Gwen Stefani is now on her own, leaving her bandmates in No Doubt far behind her; George Michael even dumped the ever talented Andrew Ridgeley and their group Wham for greener pastures in public park men’s restrooms.

I don’t listen to much of the music I was into during the 1980s, though there are some bands that I still like listening to. Once upon a time the city of Minneapolis (of all places) was a focal point of the music industry, producing such acts as Prince and The Replacements. One band that came from there was a group called Hüsker Dü. It occurs to me that I’m a fan of triads when it comes to bands: The Police, Rush, Cream, The Jam. The Huskers were a three-piece band as well with Bob Mould on guitar, Grant Hart on drums, and Greg Norton on the bass. To describe them as punk would be too simplistic, though their early stuff, especially everything on their Land Speed Record EP, could easily be called punk. I read one description of their music as “molten metal pouring from your speakers,” and it’s a very accurate description. Mould’s screaming Gibson Flying V guitar hits your ears like a railroad spike being driven through your head, but in a good way.

I first heard of the group back in 1985 when one of my co-workers at the time brought in their “New Day Rising” album for another co-worker to listen to. He didn’t care much for it, but I immediately fell in love with their music. The first two tracks on the album, New Day Rising and Girl on Heaven Hill hit you like a one-two combination from Mike Tyson (in his good days). Soon thereafter I went out and bought their double album “Zen Arcade,” which had been released in 1984, and I was hooked. For me the Husker’s music captured all the energy that I was looking for in a band. Punk music captured my teenage angst well, but a great deal of it was not very accessible. Prior to hearing the Huskers I had already become of fan of Black Flag’s excellent “Damaged” album, and SoCal’s DIY surf-punk band Agent Orange; their “Living in Darkness” album is still one of my all-time favs.

As the 80s progressed more Husker albums followed: Candy Apple Grey, Flip Your Wig, and 1987s Warehouse: Songs and Stories. Between Candy Apple Grey and Flip Your Wig, the Husker’s left SST Records and signed with Warner Brothers, at which point their music became more melodic but still with an edge. Songs like Don’t Wanna Know if You’re Lonely, Makes No Sense at All, and Could You Be The One got some airplay on MTV, of all places.

Warehouse would turnout to be their swansong, and the liner notes on the album sleeve almost read like a farewell note from the band. The tour for the album ended in 1988 and so did the band. Only one more new release from the band would come, 1994s “The Living End,” a collection of live tunes that Warner Brothers passed on releasing for a number of years. “The Living End” captures a lot of the energy of a typical Husker Du show.

The band’s been gone for almost eighteen years now, but I enjoy listening to their music as much now as when I first heard it. Bob Mould has gone on to a solo career, and also fronted the band Sugar in the early 90s; Grant Hart started his own band, Nova Mob, but is now pursuing a solo career; Greg Norton has his own restaurant which he runs with his wife in Wisconsin.

On album #1 on my copy of Zen Arcade, someone scribbled a brief message in the space between the label and where the album grooves end. It reads, “Loud and Fast Rules.” It certainly does. Hüsker Dü: one of the best bands you've never heard of. Do yourself a favor and go find the Husker’s Zen Arcade or New Day Rising albums—you’ll be glad you did.