Endblog

Well, I had a good run, but, alas, I must give up my blogging. Only the good die young, I suppose. If you’re disappointed, you can check out my new blog here.

Rexway Family

Last Saturday Rexway played their first live show in almost three years. If this is not a big deal to you, you’re not alone. If it is, you might have traveled all the way from California, Virginia, even Longmont, to see it.

I traveled all the way from Central Denver. That’s not far, but it wasn’t a big deal to me.

Here’s the story, in case you’re interested:

* * *

Scott told me some months ago that Rexway was planning a reunion performance in Denver. I had seen this band a few years before, seen them verifiably steal the show from Love .45’s CD release party at Herman’s Hideaway. But though the band’s rip-roaring, rebel-tinctured guitar riffs–and six-feet-of-thighs- and-tattoos-in-a- black-leather-bodice bass player–appealed to my sexually frustrated punker temperament, I was equally enthused by the act of drinking with a fake I.D., which I did a lot of, and which left something of a soft-edged impression of the band in my mind. And anyway it seemed as though shows were little more than candy in Love .45’s chubby, pliant hands.

But Scott was excited. And when someone as routinely dispassionate as Scott emotes, well, anything, I can’t help but shrug with pathos and give in.

The show would be held at the Soiled Dove Underground. I recognized the Soiled Dove was that meathead bar in LoDo whose bouncers once nearly wove a victory flag with my entrails after they caught me sneering at them from the rooftop patio of the meathead bar across the street. The Soiled Dove Underground, I reasoned, must be in the basement.

Not so. It’s actually in Lowry, a neighborhood built on the remains of a once bustling airbase in Southeastern Denver. Way Southeastern Denver. Thirty minutes on a bus Southeastern Denver.

I frequently saw the Lowry neighborhood described as “up and coming.” These references must have been invented by unimaginative P.R. people, unless the author meant up and coming out of the ground in the same inchoate process by which identical, labyrinthine consumer centers are pricing people out of their 50’s-era ranch homes all across the country. They do happen to have a Starbucks there, however, and a Foot Solutions, and a place called Serioz that described itself as a Denver style pizzeria. Despite having lived here all my life, I’m not sure what “Denver style” pizza consists in. I assume that it’s very large in diameter despite having only a few toppings, and it’s smothered to the point of asphyxiation with cheese. I didn’t go in, but it at least looked classy enough not to name its specialty pies things like the Big Head Todd or the Don Cheadle, though I’m sure there’s at least one allusion to On the Road in the menu.

The venue itself was mildly elegant in that cookie-cutter postmodern way. A broad concrete stairwell led to a foyer whose tinted glass, low-pile carpet, and laminated particle board counter reminded one of middle management. The foyer led directly to the venue’s solitary bar, which was not terribly fancy but seemed to think it was: PBRs were $3.50 apiece and well whiskey ran in excess of $5.00

The actual music hall was defined by a concentric arrangement of three successively elevated semicircular spaces, one the orchestra pit and the other two seating platforms, emanating outward to the bathrooms from a small and unfortunately tall stage. The outer crescents were populated by slender, round tables and guard rails topped with flat surfaces and cute, miniature lamps. What it looked like was the cocktail lounge at a second-rate Reno hotel. I thought for a moment that perhaps Donnie Osmond or Carrot Top would take the stage in Rexway’s place.

As the two hypnotically irritating screens that lit-up either side of the stage informed me, no such seminal television hacks would soon be darkening SDU’s door. The slide show of forthcoming acts read instead like the Arcane Blues/Country/R&B Has-Been Hall of Fame. Imagine promo shot after promo shot of unshaven baby-boomers, Hawaiian shirts struggling to conceal swollen love handles, all trying to look as cool as the token black guy with inordinately neat dreads.

The acts at SDU aren’t all so middling. Junior Brown played there a year ago, if you can believe it, not long after Jeff Daniels (yeah, that Jeff Daniels). And, of course, after long last, Rexway would play tonight.

* * *

As the black curtain moved aside, the dance floor was swarmed with retroed-up punk ladies, shit-kicker meth-heads, and aging metal dudes. It’s easy for me, an adventuring outsider in this territory, to condescend the show’s atmosphere, but the theater was swelling with anticipation, and now, in the seconds before release, a cathartic buzz welcomed the band’s return.

And from the first hiss of distortion the ensemble met expectations, delivering whiskey-soaked 4/4 celebrations of blue collar raillery, after-hours rock ‘n’ roll, and transvestite prostitutes. Mother Function Promotions promotes Rexway as “alt-punk-country-whiskey rock.” I would characterize it as drinking-fighting-screwing-crying rock. More specifically, it is rock music coarsened by simple but invigorating country rhythms, fast-but-not-Assuck-fast beats, and a sometimes pleasant tendency of guitars to overpower the drums, all moved along happily by the occasional Kentucky Gaelic arpeggio.

Which is to say that it is good, but not extraordinary, just like the venue was nice but not spectacular, and the crowd, cathartic buzz or no, was into the show but ultimately settled into a toe-tapping, fist-pumping, ecstatic haze, with actual violence or overwhelming excitement only bubbling up sporadically at the most charged moments.

If the performance exceeded the mediocrity of its context, it was because of one thing: the band was apparently as happy and surprised to be there as everyone else in the theater. Susan Phelan, the leggy, painted bassist who surely tires of being told that she “really rocked it” by incoherent men after the show, seemed to bounce fluidly across the stage with a permanent grin on her face, and guitarists Chris Dockter and Skot Lain unleashed a veritable arsenal of pursed-lip facial contortions to convey visually what they were so urgently trying to communicate by instrument.

But the real kid in a candy store was vocalist Mike Mitchell, whose steely, sometimes desperate voice had the dual capacity of eliciting sympathy with the kind of white trash you wait for the next bus in order to avoid and evoking defiance in the most lukewarm hearts with the occasional anthemic “Point that fucking finger up your ass.” Mitchell didn’t so much strut or dance around the stage as drift in a beatific haze, intermittently propping himself in various positions on his bandmates and equipment in such ways as to appear sagacious, like Plato addressing his students. This demeanor is a tough one to pull off for a guy like Mitchell, who ordinarily looks like Kid Rock would look if he ate Joe C.

Alternately high-fiveing fans and staring upward during sustained notes as if he were a lyric volcano, Mitchell really, really seemed to be enjoying himself. So much so, in fact, that it made me enjoy myself a little more, and I felt like that was okay because me enjoying myself made him enjoy himself even more and so forth.

While this pattern of feedback and reinforcement made a for a stomping good time, it also had the unfortunate effect of nudging the band in the direction of vulgar sentimentality, as when Mitchell, early in the set, noted that in the back was a whole section reserved for family, but as far as he was concerned the whole place was reserved for family tonight. Or when Lain touched fists with his brother, Rex, who had gone to jail some years ago for “not fucking turning on his friends” (whatever felonious behavior that circumlocutes), identified him as the inspiration for the band’s name, and congratulated him on his first Rexway show ever, which announcement met with many cheers (and, according to Scott, a few awkward men’s room Q & A’s for Rex.)

So what if for some it was a sentimental show? My cynicism notwithstanding, there’s something to be said about a band that can disappear for three years and come back to the same, sturdy, sold-out audience. It takes a genuinely mean person to complain about music that makes people happy.

* * *

After the show, as Scott and I were bracing ourselves for a three-mile walk to the nearest bus stop, elements of the crowd lingered, drinking and smoking, talking to the band. That sentimental, familial feeling was pervasive and strong. A couple walked toward their car. “Are you guys heading near downtown?” we asked.

“No.”

We walked.

Ground Rules

Just when you thought this page might wind up another arcane fleck in the Internet’s heaping dustpile, forever idling as a monument to its own ironical irrelevance, I’ve given it something of a jump start, as you can see, so it may stand instead as a monument to my own irrelevant irony.
But before we go any further it’s time we establish some ground rules. You might have read my first post and thought, I didn’t expect this kind of vitriolic, condescending rigmarole from a keen mind the likes of My Host. Rather, I’d hoped for something loftier, more worthy of my precious attention, aspirant to something greater than its own self-indulgent wit. In short, prose that didn’t just kick me around and call me a dipshit for 500 words.
Dear Reader, I’ve heard your plea. In the interest of keeping what tiny audience I hope to cultivate, I’ll make a few concessions:

1.) I’ll try to involve some thoughtful effort in my posts, instead of twiddling my literary thumbs all week before sitting down at the last minute and reaching for topics, which reaching almost always ends in name-calling and teasing the meek.
2.) When I do resort to imprecation (as resort I surely will) I will keep it in the third person. We all understand, with varying degrees of candor, our own failings and inadequacies. That yours—er—some are so much more pronounced than mine hardly warrants any twisting of the knife.

With those generous measures set forth, let’s now bring up your obligation to this exchange:

1.) I don’t care whose birthday it is or what’s happening this weekend or, for that matter, whether you disagree with my analysis of Mannequin as an articulation of artistic perseverance in Late Capitalism via the prevalent market forces that inadvertently nurture the deviant sexual proclivities essential to creative vitality. Unless you’re heaping praise, no comments.
2.) If you do comment, no amount of adulation will redeem your animated gif or lolcat avatar. Just because I’m online doesn’t mean I’ll tolerate your esoteric, nerdy crap. If you violate this rule, I will inform the proper authorities that you’ve hacked certain digital accessories to allow for viewing of bootlegged anime outside its region code, and you don’t want to mess with the Yakuza who dabble in that illicit trade.
3.) Other blogs may have led you to expect certain things from Your Host, including travel accounts, political diatribes, color photography with humorous Photoshop alterations, music/restaurant recommendations, links to eclectic websites, and badass digital fantasy art with dragons and twelve-breasted women. While these are all fine, time-honored conventions of the form, I am something of a maverick, an experimentalist. Expect long meditations on the relative merits of various brands of shower gaskets and value-priced crackers.
4.) Self-indulgence will continue to be a central motif in this forum.

I hope we can all abide by these simple, indispensable rules. I’d hate for Your Host to have to trim you from the coattails of his rise to Internet stardom.

I Blog

And so it is that 2007 has come to an end, for some with the Stephen Kingian surprise of gasping their last as a Siberian feline’s bataround, for others with Christmas morning’s giddy anticipation of a potential mesotheliomic wheeze before drinking age. But for most of us the year’s end was not so much soul-crushing or jugular-shredding as canvas-hitting after the one-two punch of Yuletide consumer decadence followed by Silvestrian obliteration.

For many the post-raillery hangover lasted something of a while (I am no exception, hence the three week delay of my New Year’s post), but from the haze they emerged, sullen, weak, indebted to a tune of thousands, and yet surprisingly resolute. How fantastic that merely buying a new calendar is enough to liberate the slovenly masses from their disgusting bad habits.

In particular, the New Year is a great time to shame fat people (not that the rest of the year isn’t full of other great times for same). Not only are Americans fat to begin with, but they tend to spend the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas gorging themselves (to make it through the scarce winter, I guess) on seasonal fare that tends to be made of imaginative combinations of sugar and emulsifiers. No amount of bourbon and nutmeg will change the fact that you’re drinking heavy cream fortified with raw eggs.

Thus it is that “lose weight” is a perennial contender on the New Year’s Resolution list. My favorite incarnation of this item is a recent article on about.com that encourages resolvers to “tame the bulge,” as if our bellies were not the tumescent symptoms of American excess, but feral carnivores looming menacingly above our genitals, meekly checked by our strained belts and our “Female Body Inspector” T-shirts. Enter the new, Heraclean you, arrived to slay the beast with your sword of resolve, thereby rejuvenating your sense of self with the heroic ideals of our culture: broad chest, rock-hard abs and decisiveness. Resolve.

But really, who are you kidding?

Both you and I know that come March you’ll be bingeing again, but this time it’ll be on EZ-Cheeze and saltines instead of your crusty French stinky stuff because the gym you never go to gets an autodeducted third of your paycheck—which, by the way, only gives the smug motherfuckers who look good in spandex one more reason to pity you.

Face it: of all the things you’ll find amid the drunken throngs on New Year’s, resolve ain’t one of them. If you had it, or were even somewhat capable of it, you would be able to see your own pubic hair. So maybe it’s time to follow the experts’ advice and substitute attainable, positive goals for sweeping resolutions. Tell your friends you care, change your oil every three thousand miles, stop clicking there to claim your free iPod (no one gives away free iPods).

For my part, I will continue to drink, smoke, laugh at tragedy, curse the elderly and the handicapped, and watch Fox News. But, despite all my failures and consistent bad habits, I will make a change for the positive in 2008. I will improve my own life and embolden others to do the same. I will use my accruing weight to tip the metaphysical scale toward the just and the righteous. I will touch the lives of those around me, if but a few, in a definite and irrevocable way. I will blog.