Last month I braved the flood waters of North Arkansas and made my way up to the Midwest to visit my future Yankee bride. I got to meet a fantastic group of her friends from college. These were the kind of people I should’ve been hanging out with in college. We met them all at a party, and there was revelry.

Following a theme that’s been pretty stong for me lately of breaking through old limitations, I danced at this party. I never dance. It was Mr. Blue Sky, Electric Light Orchestra, and you really can’t not at least WANT to dance to that song.

At this party, instead of wanting to not be so self-conscious that I can’t just let myself look like an idiot, I danced. Actually, it was more like I imitated the act of dancing, pieced together from movies and other parties and the people directly around me. But it was so far outside my normal comfort zone and it was very liberating. And it was a fitting goodbye to my youth.

I’ve heard of different criteria for when one’s youth ends: When you realize you’re going to die someday, when you finally see your parents as imperfect regular people and forgive them for it. I think mine, essentially, ended while I sat there later with my arms around my unpretentious Midwestern lady and I watched everyone else continue to enjoy themselves. It occurred to me that even in the act of participating in that fun, they’re at a place that I can never return to. For them, the real concerns of life are still ahead and their dancing and fun are much more free and natural while mine was re-enactment.

A very convincing facsimile, but a re-enactment still. I engage in that bahaviour and I’m escaping something I’m already engrossed in. Even if their engaging in those same behaviours is a manner of escape, it’s escape from something that doesn’t have them yet and is still only nipping at their heels. That night, as much as I enjoyed the rum and the conversations and the cigarettes shared out on the porch in the cold, the enjoyment was with a sense of nostalgia. My time for that degree of care-free love of life’s experiences is gone, as are the people I shared — and i can’t help feeling that i wasted, or maybe a better word is squandered — it with.

We get together when we can and remember collectively, mostly without speaking it, what we were like then. We talk and we play and we embrace and we sing, and it’s all with a desire to rewind the tape and place ourselves at some point on the timeline that predates most of the history and pain of becoming adults. We visit those places and we know none of us are the same people now and we’re just beginning to get our own taste of the eternally handed-down bittersweetness in understanding that as much as we wish we could reverse or at least slow down, we have no other choice but to go forward and live our lives in whatever we find ahead. With the fact that we were young once down-graded to business class with other novel comforts that sometimes make up our daydreams.

There was probably a great angle about the way music can help us grow and the vital nature of intimate social exchange and acceptance, but I think at this point that ship has sunk. Sorry mom, sorry god

Dear Don & Peggy Thompson,

If you’re too short-sighted to call Dish Network when Pine Bluff Cable screws you over, you deserve the shitty service you get. Stop complaining about a monopoly that doesn’t exist. You have other options.

Love, me <3

P.S. Please relay my regards to Bill Brumett. Maybe we can all get together and watch ESPN in HD on the sweet plasma screen the devil promised me at the crossroads.

When country singer Rissi Palmer steps out onto the stage at the Stardaze festival tonight in Star City, you’ll be seeing the real deal. Palmer is an artist who refuses to compromise herself, and this talented young woman has a healthy list for accomplishments to show for it. She’s performed at the Grand Ole Opry several times, released a hit single — 2007’s “Country Girl” — and co-written an album with a wish list of song writers that reads like a country music who’s who, and all under 1720 Entertainment, a small but growing Atlanta operation.
“They’re very artist-centered,” Palmer said of her label during a phone interview from her home in Tennessee. “They haven’t tried to change me,” which she says is “very refreshing.”
Palmer was 16 when she came to the Natural State to perform at the Arkansas State Fair. Since then, she’s become a part of what she considers an ongoing push toward popularization of the genre for which she possesses so much passion. “Country music is wide open in its appeal,” said Palmer, “because it’s some of the last music you can listen to with your grandmother and a baby and a teenager and everyone’s happy.”
Bringing a great deal of unique beauty and artistic integrity to a genre in which African Americans are still rare, Palmer has joined the good company of artists such as Canada’s Shania Twain and Australia’s Keith Urban who are ever-expanding the diversity of country music and challenging the stereotypes of the genre’s musicians and fans. This is the theme of Palmer’s first single, “Country Girl,” which bears the line, “It’s a state of mind, no matter where you’re from.”
That single — a fitting debut — became a hit, and things continue to look good for Rissi Palmer. In time, she may even get to open an envelope she carries with her that contains a Grammy acceptance speech she wrote at age 12. Palmer claims she doesn’t remember what the speech says and that the thought of reading it like new after so many years keeps her motivated. “I’m always looking ahead to the next level in my career.”
Someday she hopes to play stadium-sized shows, but for now she’s perfectly happy performing for crowds in smaller venues like tonight’s event in Star City. Smaller shows, she says, allow her to “interact more with the audience. I really enjoy that.”
Palmer takes the Stardaze stage tonight at 8 p.m.

This article written by me for the Pine Bluff Commercial.

Wax is scratching its way back

If you walk into an antique store, locate a Magic 8 Ball and ask it if CD sales are still on an abysmal downward spiral, it will almost certainly respond with “All signs point to yes.” Just for laughs, ask it if, despite that trend, sales of vinyl records has continued to climb over the past several years. No, the divinatory toy isn’t broken — the answer remains the same. In the name of running a rhetorical device into the ground, ask it what’s going on with “Lost” this season, because I’d really like to know. On second thought, let’s just stick to the topic at hand.
Nielsen SoundScan says that sales of new vinyl went up by 15 percent last year. Compact disc sales, by comparison, dropped by 20 percent in the first quarter of 2007 alone. Take that, CDs.
The superior audio playback technologies brought to us by companies with Japanese names in the 80s and 90s all but nailed shut vinyl’s coffin. I distinctly recall the phone conversation I had as a child with my mother, who was visiting a friend in St. Louis, in which she reported to me that she’d listened to a CD for the first time. She was supremely impressed, to say the least.
“The sound is so clean,” I remember her saying. “Way better than tapes.”
It was years before I bought my first CD — The Smashing Pumpkins’ legendary “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” — but I never saw what all the fuss was about. I appreciated the convenience of quickly changing from track to track, especially with that double album I’d just purchased, but I wasn’t ever particularly struck by the supposedly better sound quality.
It was another handful of years before I discovered a box of records, much to my elated curiosity, in a closet at my grandmother’s house — ZZ Top, Styx, George Carlin, The Beatles and the grandfathers of electronic music, Kraftwerk. I had no idea at the time how the beeps and trills of Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express” could eventually lead to the Prodigy and Nine Inch Nails I was listening to in the mid-90s, but I knew I’d found something special. And it was that same electronic music, along with the DJs running the rap game, that has sustained the limping vinyl market for most of my lifetime.
In recent years, as audiophiles have increasingly sought out vinyl records both old and new, artists have become increasingly glad to accommodate the trend. I went to Record Rack in Jefferson Square to do some research — and hopefully add to my own embarrassingly limited collection — and found a profoundly eclectic selection ranging from a used Andy Williams to a Ghostface Killah still in the plastic.
My quota of excitement for the day came in the discovery of a copy of The Moody Blues’ “Days of Future Passed,” a record I’ve been searching for since an older friend of mine years ago described to me his first listening to the album when he was in college in the 60s.
Some of the attraction of records may be in that discovery, like the yard sales and baseball cards for a new generation. There’s a dopamine-releasing joy in the act of searching and finding that inextricably attaches itself to the payoff of taking the album home and listening to it over and over.
According to the clerk at Record Rack, though, the overall trend doesn’t reflect locally; they only sell maybe 30 vinyl records in a month.
It’s anyone’s guess as to why that is. It certainly isn’t for want of a healthy supply of rap and dance DJs in their respective scenes. Maybe owning a turntable has become a luxury. Maybe the trend just hasn’t hit here yet.
The list of possibilities is probably endless. And I’d love to explore them further, but I’ve got to get home and listen to my new record.

This article was written by me for The Pine Bluff Commercial.

Gary Busey apologized to Jennifer Garner for this genius move at the Oscars, but only after no one believed his claim that it wasn’t him but rather a punch drunk Nick Nolte.

Seriously, though, if Jennefer Garner got freaked out by being greeted in such a way by a peer at a formal event, let’s just hope she never visits Europe. PTSD.

Anyone from south of little rock who’s going to be at inksplosion tomorrow or saturday, keep an eye out for me and my fellow writer Kris Upjohn. We’ll be there to cover it, come by and say hello. I’ll be the skinny white kid in glasses smoking cloves (and rejecting the triune god), Kris will be the big guy with huge holes in his ears talking smack about nonlibertarians.

Here’s my impression of Arkansas when it snows:

Robert Carlyle might be the next Doctor Who. I loved him in Ravenous, and I think he’d be a damn good Doc. Though I’d much rather see comic god(dess?) Eddie Izzard in the role. Alas, the executive transvestite is busy with The Riches and I personally wouldn’t blame him for choosing Minnie Driver over the TARDIS. Rowr.

Also, Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax died yesterday. Wizards everywhere are successfully casting Group Mourn.

I tried to play D&D once in highschool and got banned from the game after I asked if the Hoe of Destruction (see Ultima 7: The Black Gate) could be my weapon. If only those guys had taken, you know, getting girlfriends as seriously as they took their distataste for using enchanted garden equipment from trailblazingly genius fantasy computer games as weapons…

Stereogum reports that Arcade Fire showed up to show support for Barack Obama (note: Canadians love Socialism) in Cleveland last Saturday. They played some covers, including David Bowie’s “Heroes,” a video of which is posted at Stereogum. As much as I genuinely love Arcade Fire, I have to say that while their take on Bowie wasn’t bad, I kind of still prefer The Wallfower’s version.