One thing I almost always get in my Christmas stocking every year (we’re Episcopalian, that explains it, right?) is a few miniature bottles of whatever liquor or liqueur - usually Bailey’s or Kahlua since I drink stuff like that in coffee often in the winter, but sometimes other stuff. I don’t drink much liquor as a rule and my tastes tend to run to anything that tastes like Kool-Aid. I like many Schnapps - green apple, cinnamon, butterscotch, peach (Pucker in the peach preferably, the rest is too sweet). I like white rum, vodka, and that’s really about it. In the last couple of years, I’ve scored some little bottles of Stoli and some vodka from the Czech Republic. It’s also a well-known fact I like orange soda.
So what better after a really crummy week than to pull a Keith Richards and celebrate the end of this awful week with Keef’s favorite drink, Nuclear Waste - orange soda, cranberry juice, and vodka. Although I’m kinda beginning to think about halfway through that this might taste better with some of that Malibu Rum I’ve had stashed in the kitchen for months instead.
But it’s okay. Depending on where you read, some recipes don’t include the cranberry juice - just straight orange soda and vodka, I think better with the cranberry juice though. Some recipes claim it has to be Sunkist (which I can’t stand) and some say orange Fanta (which is what I’m drinking). It’s all right, but I’m probably still going to dump some of that coconut rum in there before the night is through.
On another note, you might want to have a couple of your own favorite beverages and then go look at this. (Please don’t tell anybody that my first question to ‘Coma when she first pointed it out was, “Are they kangaroos?” - let’s just keep that between you and me.)
So, I need the attention of the music junkies, music geeks, music fans - all you people for just a few minutes. You know who you are. All you Pixies and Replacements and White Stripes and R.E.M. and Elvis Costello and Nirvana and Bowie and Stones and Stooges and Hoodoo Gurus and Cheap Trick and Clash and Ramones and… well, you know. Everybody.
Everyone who has ever said, “Lynnster, you really need to check out (Pavement, the Hold Steady, the Bottle Rockets, The White Stripes, and insert hundreds of other band names here).” All you former record store employees from back when there was still vinyl in the bins. And all the music folks I’ve gladly pushed and promoted over the years, I could use a little return of favor right now - y’all too. So again - you know, everyone.
All of you, I just need you to listen up for a few. This’ll just take maybe ten or fifteen minutes of your time, tops. I have something (or rather, someones) very important to bring to your attention, and they could use your help if you could spare a few minutes.
OK, so now that I’ve got your attention, I want you to think back to that whole six or seven or eight year period in the Nineties when you actually didn’t have to stay up until late Sunday night to watch the videos YOU wanted to see, and didn’t have to go searching the radio dial for a college radio station that actually had enough power to pick it up wherever you were - or one that was even on at that hour (unless you were one of the very fortunate few that had a 24 hour station nearby) - to get your fix. You know what I’m talking about.
If you were like me, you were probably seeing bands and artists that used to crash on your apartment floor, or that of your friend’s or brother’s or sister’s, in the Eighties when they came through town, now suddenly making it so big that they were playing stadium shows to thousands of people instead of little dive bars with 20 people tops most nights. For a while there, it seemed like everyone I ever knew, every band I had ever liked, and every band I had even just remotely heard of was making it big, or at least getting heard and by many.
Now come back with me to specifically around 1994, 1995, 1996 for a minute. I know you’re all hearing it in your head right now, but in case you need reminding (and of course, insert any number of Pearl Jam, Nirvana, etc., offerings in between to make it really sound right)… Soundgarden, “Spoonman” and “Black Hole Sun”. Oasis, “Wonderwall”. Weezer, “Buddy Holly”. Hole, “Doll Parts” and “Miss World”. Green Day, “Longview”. Live, “I Alone”, “Lightning Crashes”, “Selling the Drama”. R.E.M., “Bang and Blame” and “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?”. The Cranberries, “Zombie”. Better Than Ezra, “Good”. Elastica, “Connection”. Beck, “Loser”. PJ Harvey, “Down By the Water”. Radiohead, “Creep”. Smashing Pumpkins, “Bullet with Butterfly Wings”, “1979″, “Zero”, and “Muzzle”. Alanis Morissette, “You Oughta Know”. Foo Fighters, “This is a Call”, “I’ll Stick Around”, “Big Me”. Veruca Salt, “Seether”. Social Distortion, “I Was Wrong”. Stone Temple Pilots, “Vasoline” and “Big Bang Baby”. Scarce, “Freakshadow”.
Huh?
Yeah, I know. Only a handful will know the band Scarce. Mainly a few lucky people from the North Atlantic coast and thereabouts, some more in England maybe, and certainly some folks from Knoxville.
My point is that you SHOULD have known who this band was, and you SHOULD have known this song. You should have known them as well as most of the other bands and artists and songs I listed up there.
It’s a heartbreaking story, it really is.
Scarce came together in 1993, formed by Chick Graning, bass player Joyce Raskin, and drummer Jud Ehrbar (who would be the first of numerous drummers in and out of the band). Chick’s from Knoxville - we share a lot of mutual friends and acquaintances - and had had some success earlier in the Nineties with Boston band Anastasia Screamed. I’m a big fan of the solo stuff he’s put out in recent years too - but for now, let’s get back to Scarce.
Soon after Scarce formed, the trio was soon involved in a major label bidding war. They toured America, Europe, England, and Canada to much acclaim for their live shows. Their Red EP was distributed worldwide and landed in the UK charts, with songs like “All Sideways” and “Days Like This”.
In 1995, following a support tour with Hole in Europe and on the verge of seriously making it big with their debut album, Deadsexy, Chick suffered a brain aneurysm and lapsed into a coma for several weeks. The record company pulled the Red EP from the shelves in the UK. Scarce had been scheduled to play Big Day Out in Australia, which is a big deal for non-Australian bands to score a slot down there - that got canceled too.
When she initially put the “Freakshadow” video up on Scarce’s MySpace profile, Joyce said this:
Just wanted to share the video for “Freakshadow”, which was shot about a month before Chick’s brain hemorrhage. I placed it before the “All Sideways” video thinking how poignant it is to see Chick before his hemorrhage and a few months after when the Sideways video was shot. I remember watching this video while Chick was in a coma and crying because it shows so much of his charm and personality, and at the time he wasn’t moving at all.
Here’s the video for “Freakshadow” - the hit that never was:
Chick eventually recovered & astonishingly, Scarce kept going as a band till 1997, playing two major US tours—even though this meant Chick relearning all his guitar parts and vocals from scratch. But the strain of his illness took its toll on the band, and eventually Chick and Joyce went their separate ways.
Let’s pause again a moment for the video for “All Sideways”:
There are a lot of heartbreaking stories in rock & roll, I know, but this is one of the more heartbreaking I’ve ever known. And especially heartbreaking to me that this band’s music just didn’t get heard like it should have, and that most of you didn’t know this band and these songs like all the others I mentioned above from the same time period.
Fortunately, this tale has a happy ending - or coda, as it were.
Writing a book about the band called Aching To Be (available through Amazon) led to Joyce contacting Chick, and then to Scarce’s re-forming, ending nine years of silence. Songwriting is already under way for a new album, and some of the band’s old material, along with previously unreleased material and pre-A&M demos, are now available. With no expectations but to savor being a real band again, and no one to answer to but themselves, Scarce finally have the happy new beginning they deserved all along.
There’s one problem, though, and here’s where I - and Scarce themselves - could use your help.
At present, Universal Music Group has refused to re-release the band’s debut CD, Deadsexy - not the physical CD itself nor making it available for download/purchase. It’s a fine album and it deserves to be out there and to be heard. Especially by those who have never had a chance to really hear it before.
YOU guys - all you music fans and others - YOU deserve to be able to have an opportunity to hear it, download it, buy it, own it, etc. There are a few used copies of the old release floating around, but not that many, and this record just deserves another chance - and the chance it never really had the first time.
Here’s where you can help. If you can spare a couple of minutes to fire off an email to Ron Fair @ Universal Music Group - ron.fair@umusic.com - requesting UMG release the Deadsexy CD for purchase & download purchase - Joyce, Chick, their manager Teresa, everyone involved would really appreciate it.
And I personally would appreciate it too, as I’m dying to get this CD on my MP3 player, you know.
Those of you who know me (online or off) and frequently talk music with me, you know I wouldn’t steer you wrong. Bottom line is it’s a great record, and it needs and deserves to be out there. Anything you can do to help get it out there, and to spread the word - thank you.
In the meantime, here’s what else you can do Scarce-wise:
You can check out Scarce’s MySpace profile and listen to (and even purchase for download) what music is currently available by clicking HERE. (“Sudden Downtown Polo Club” is a particular favorite of yours truly.)
You can buy Joyce Raskin’s awesome book about the band, Aching to Be, at Amazon by clicking HERE.
Also go to Chick’s MySpace profile by clicking HERE and check out some of his solo work. I love his stuff and Scarce has already been incorporating “Dead Bleux” into their sets, that’s awesome.
All right, that’s enough from me for now but again, if you can spare a minute to drop an e-mail to Ron Fair at UMG here: ron.fair@umusic.com - and politely request that UMG release the Deadsexy CD from Scarce, again, it is very much appreciated! Thanks for listening and watching and reading (and hope you enjoyed)!
So I kinda mentioned a couple of months ago that I’d gotten involved in a music writer’s project. I’ve been so busy with all my other millions of jobs lately, I kind of let this fall by the wayside for several weeks, knowing the deadline for the paid part of the program was coming to an end, but that deadline seemed pretty far away for a while.
So the deadline (yesterday) came along and I hadn’t done anything in a while, so I kind of had to bust butt all day and night to meet the deadline, but I managed it (barely). It’s been a really fun project and I’ll probably continue to participate anyway as time allows. Highly recommend it for those of you other music fans and folks out there - it’s an incredibly interesting time waster, I wish I had more spare time to spend reading other people’s stuff and hope to catch up on my reading there soon.
Anyhow, if you get real bored and need something to do, feel free to go here and browse around (and if you like the site and sign up an account, go vote for my Michael Jackson “Beat It” memory if you like it ‘cos there’s a huge prize at stake in the Thriller memory contest!!!).
And now, I am going to bed before I drop dead from exhaustion. Good night (uh, morning)!
My Sunday karma is alllll messed up now. Post Secret’s not putting up the Sunday secrets until this evening.
Usually I’m there right about 2 a.m. or so on Sundays, but I happened to be asleep at the time last night and have been too busy to think about it since I woke up. But now that I know it’s going to be so late I’m, like, super out of balance now. It feels really weird to be this late on Sunday afternoon already and not already have voyeured (sic) people’s secrets.
Feel free to leave a secret in the comments if you wish, maybe that’ll help me make it ’til tonight.
My hometown (one of them) newspaper publishes a little blurb every day of “25 years ago”, “50 years ago”, and “75 years ago”, highlights and snippets from that day’s edition in those time periods of the paper. Lately there’s been some 90-something years ago ones, too, that I’m not really sure what happened to do because they were there for a few days, and now they’re not. But anyway.
I always get a kick out of it (especially the “75 years ago”, that stuff is downright hilarious sometimes) and read it every day. And it’s especially neat to me because a lot of days my dad or his siblings, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, other relatives, and even sometimes I will be in there (though not all that much for me, since we moved elsewhere when I was 13). It’s usually a nice few minutes out of my day every weekday, and pretty neat to read things that were in the paper 25/50/75 years ago like my dad playing football or baseball, my grandmother’s piano recital as a young girl, things like that.
So yesterday I’m reading the “25 years ago” column and - this being the end of the school year - the local high school had selected the members of the varsity cheerleading squad for the next year, and I’m reading the names, all of whom I knew because I either went to school with them or knew them from other local activities during the time I grew up there until we moved. I was reading, in particular, the names of the girls I actually did go to school with, the ones who were in my class.
Then I glanced at the “25 years ago” again. And then it slowly dawned on me that those girls were the SENIOR cheerleaders on the upcoming year’s squad.
Nope, it just hadn’t really occurred to me that next year will be 25 years since I graduated from high school. A quarter of a century. Yuck. And just where did that time go?
I’d be stunned, but I’m too old and tired to be stunned. Pardon me while I go take a nap now.
I figure I’m extremely overdue for my biannual post griping about this issue, probably because I have been so behind in catching up with most of the blogs I try to read regularly, I haven’t been using my feed reader much and have been mostly spot-checking off my blogroll here, daily or weekly or so catching up with the blogs I just won’t miss.
But now, after finally having gotten my feed reader un-backed up and at a manageable level of posts to deal with again, I’m ready to bitch about it again. I’ve been threatening to do this for probably a year and a half now, but this time I’m serious.
If you are one of those bloggers that only publishes a “preview” feed of your posts and doesn’t publish your full feed, I’m deleting you from my feed reader. I don’t care if you’re my best friend or my mother, you’re getting axed sometime within the next couple of weeks or so.
Fortunately most of the blogfolks I know well and read regularly don’t have this annoying habit (and neither my best friend nor my mom really blog), so there’s really not that many on the soon-to-be-deleted list. Unfortunately there’s a few bloggers I’ve been reading for years (who likely don’t read my blog anyway so, I know, what’s the point, right?) that ARE on that short list, but I’m so sick of it I don’t care anymore. There are some regional bloggers on that short list too, though - not many, but a few.
When it comes to dealing with other blogs, there’s nothing that drives me more insane than trying to efficiently catch up with (and stay on top of) my regular blogreading than coming back across those feeds that only publish a preview and you have to go to the blog site itself to actually read the post, so I’m just not dealing with it anymore.
The more time that’s gotten consumed dealing with the blogosphere in general, the more I’ve tried to get my reading and participation down to a manageable level where it’s not going to take me fifty billion hours every day to stay caught up and top of things, so if I have to delete blogs that I normally read every single day or almost and have for years because they refuse to publish their feed in full, so be it.
The way I look at it, if I’ve taken the time and made the effort to subscribe to your feed because I’m interested in what you write, I should be able to do so with my feed reader if I want, instead of you throwing a bone instead of your full feed and making me have to take a bunch of extra steps to actually get to read all of what you wrote beyond a few sentences.
I suppose the factor of being able to see there’s been an update is a pro of subscribing, but honestly there’s just not much point to me in subscribing to your feed if I have to go to your blog anyway to actually get to READ your posts, so from now on, I just won’t. My time is taken up enough by blog reading to have to be dealing with extra steps in the process.
If your reasons for insisting people come directly to your blog to read are because of advertising and you run Google ads, Feedburner has a Google AdSense option that can be included in your feed. Use it. Hell, I’ll be happy to click on ads from time to time in a feed if you’d just publish your full damn feed.
If your reasons for insisting people come directly to your blog to read are because you are overly attached to your SiteMeter or other stat counter and like to suss out the mysteries of who is reading your blog on the off chance that seeing a particular city in your details means so-and-so’s been reading your blog… then you need a new hobby.
I really do mean no offense, but I’m just sick of it. There was a backlog of something like 65,000 posts in my feed reader - which gives you a good idea of how long I’d been ignoring it - and every time I clicked on one of those blogs that doesn’t publish posts in their entirety, my blood pressure shot up just a little bit more. I almost deleted them all right then, but figured I’d wait a week or two just on the off chance that some might run across this and realize hey, maybe not publishing my full feed is a bad idea after all.
I won’t be deleting any of them that are on there from my blogroll, but since I’ve gotten my feed reader caught up again, I likely won’t be tagging the blogroll much for my own personal reading purposes, so.
So there it is. With the exception of Sarcastro’s kid blog (which I suspect may be an oversight anyway), if you don’t publish your full feed, your days are numbered in my feed reader. Like anyone cares, I know, but it makes me feel better to have vented about it anyway. Grrrr.
Yum, that was good. Needed more onion, though. I was a little too conservative with the chopped onion (that almost killed me while chopping it, and normally I don’t get weepy when chopping onions but that sucker was superstrong). I thought I had already put too much in and it turned out not to be enough, will just toss every bit of onion I have left in tomorrow probably.
And note to self about just going ahead and biting the bullet and buying real Fritos corn chips next time. The Kroger version, they were way too salty, and I like salty, so if I think it’s too salty then there’s way too much salt.
Other than that, perfect. Maybe even BETTER than Sonic’s chili pie if I get the above noted changes right in the future.
Sometime in the near future when I can afford to splurge a little bit at the grocery again, I have every intention of trying this recipe out. Every time I read it, it makes my mouth water, yummmmm.
The dogs are having 98 cents a big box saltine crackers for treats instead of their usual generic Milk Bone treats right now, but like they care. You know people food is WAY better than dog food anyway, and considering some of the stuff I’ve seen several of them eat (except Daisy, who is perfect) that I didn’t intend for them to eat, crackers are an improvement over, say, paper towels or cardboard.
Fast food joint Sonic’s expansion has been far and wide in the last 20-25 years, but those of you who have always lived in the cities and never lived out in or grew up in the more rural boonies of West and Middle Tennessee like ‘Coma, Lindsey, a few others and myself have likely don’t know, and that would be:
(A) What a good Frito chili pie tastes like, or -
(B) What Pickle-Os are, and if you do, you’ve likely never had them the way they’re supposed to be.
The Sonics down here in Mempho actually do have chili pies (at least they did last time I looked, which has been a while), but they’re not right. They’re just not made right, and they’re just not very good. I have often thought that the Sonics here need to send their cooks to rural Northwest Tennessee to learn how to cook some of this stuff correctly (not just the chili pies).
Sonic here (or at least the one nearest me) tried to do Pickle-Os for a little bit too, but evidently they didn’t go over so well and soon got removed from the menu. And no wonder, because they weren’t making them right either - for one thing, not near enough batter on the things, and they just weren’t good. (In case you’re wondering, Pickle-Os are fried dill pickles, but you probably guessed that already.)
I also got into an argument with the employee manning the order system one day when they did offer Pickle-Os, who insisted that they could not possibly be made with cheese on top of them. She insisted they would be too soggy.
Well, not if they were cooked RIGHT to begin with. I know this for a fact because I’ve been eating Pickle-Os with cheese (and correctly made Frito chili pies) for well over 30 years now. The Sonic in Paris opened somewhere around 1976, 1977 or thereabouts, when I was still in elementary school. My friends and I pretty much lived at the one in Camden when I was in high school - probably much to the managers’ and cooks’ dismay, since we would do things like order Regular Cheese Coneys without the hot dog, Dr. Peppers with a lid (because otherwise you got no lid on your cup), and write checks for 54 cents for a soda. And at one time or another, I probably ordered something at every other Sonic in West Tennessee outside of Memphis over the last 30 years.
One of my best friends since school days swears by the power of Pickle-Os with cheese to cover up any smell of alcohol on one’s breath, which was always one of those good and important things when you’re 16, 17, 18-ish and especially if one’s parents were hypervigilant about such things. Mine weren’t, so it didn’t matter to me, but his were and he swore by that fact.
Anyway, I KNOW my Frito chili pies and Pickle-Os with cheese, the latter you can’t get down here in the city anymore anyway. And I’ve come to terms with the fact that no Sonic down here will ever learn how to make a decent and proper chili pie. So sometimes I get a craving and think, “Oh, man, that would be soooo good right now,” and just have to fight it because the nearest Sonic that can probably make a chili pie correctly or even has Pickle-Os is probably at least an hour’s drive away.
So I tell you all that to now bring up the fact that today, I am about to make what still won’t be right, but will be close enough, to what a real chili pie should be, and I’m very happy and excited about it.
Even in my presently sorry financial state (and thanks to the recently discovered Kroger gift card that had never been out of my luggage since Christmas), I’d say this is not too bad. I’ve got enough stuffies to make two, maybe three, chili pies (three days’ worth of meals for moi who hardly eats anyway). Probably the biggest score of all this is (since I don’t really cook anyway), I FINALLY found some storebought chili I can stand - most of it’s either just too salty or too gross for my tastes - so that’s basically what led to all this chili pie planning.
So I got two or three days’ worth of fixins, at about $2.50 for the chili, $2 on sale for Kroger sharp cheddar cheese (which honestly, I’ve gotten to where I prefer it to the name brands anyway), $1.19 for the Kroger version of Fritos - which will probably be fine - and 24 cents for a little onion. So around six bucks for two or three days’ worth of food that will hopefully staunch my craving for a decent and proper chili pie for a while, but should at the very least be plenty tasty enough.
I’m maybe a little more excited about all this than I should be, but I don’t care. And off I must go now, there’s a chili pie to be made!
So if you read the last post, you know what kind of mood I’m in today.
Guess who just found gift cards from Christmas she not only forgot she had, but never unpacked?
Honestly, I really thought the ones in my billfold WERE the ones I got this past Christmas. I guess they were from the Christmas before that (or even the one before).
Certainly not a millionaire now but it’s such a shock it kinda feels like it!
Excuse me, I’m off to the store and to put exactly three dollars and however many cents of gas in my car…
Lots of good discussion floating around the regional blogosphere this past week or two regarding the gas price crunch and the basically terrible state of our current economy in general, most notably this one at Mack’s (with heads up from ‘Coma) and this one at ‘Coma’s, which was really about the awful recent presidential debate and those asking the questions’ failure to ask about pertinent issues for most Americans - which probably for a lot of us lately is, like, hmm, do I eat, or do I put gas in my car?
I won’t go over the big laundry list of stuff I had to add to the discussions from a single, never married, no kids person who doesn’t make much money’s point of view all over again, but the Cliffs Notes version is I have cut back just about all I can until there’s very little to cut back. I don’t have cable or any TV service at all anymore. I don’t carry mobile phone contract service anymore, I have prepaid that I really only use mostly for emergencies and the occasional important necessary call (and really always did anyway, so paying for contract service for 10+ years was stupid on my part but again, I cut that out a long while ago). I can’t cut out Internet service, no, because then I can’t work.
But I’ve cut out or cut back thousands of other things. I don’t, as a rule for around the house, buy soda anymore, don’t even buy tea or juice - I drink water. Me, who has never really liked to drink just water unless I HAD to - water. I still drink coffee, yep, but mainly because I have a surplus given to me from the last two Christmases. One, the biggest bag of coffee you’ve ever seen in your life, but that’s another story.
Even things that most people consider absolutely essential, I don’t do. Like food. I eat one meal a day, and what I consider a meal, many of you probably would think it about 1/4th of one. Now, granted, I’ve got terrible eating habits anyway and have kind of eaten about once a day for years - if I remember to, sometimes I don’t so that’s zero meals a day some days. Right now, I’ve got enough food in the house I’m not going to starve, for a couple of weeks anyway, even though most of it I kind of look at and go “eh” about. Snacks - nope. Fruit - I’d love to have fruit around, at least bananas or something, but a lot of that’s gotten too expensive to think about buying on a regular basis too, especially when you spent four months mostly out of work.
Anyway, I said I wasn’t going to go through the laundry list of stuff and there’s plenty more, but I’ll stop there and just say it again - I’ve cut out and cut back just about all I can, some on purpose and some things just happened that way. There’s just not much else left to cut.
With all this discussion going on lately and especially folks talking about how the gas crunch is affecting them and their families if they have one, I realize one of my pet peeves for years is now pretty much a moot point. In talking with my close and married friends and knowing various things about some of their financial statuses, it used to bug the living hooha out of me that, comparing their situations with various aspects to mine, getting married could have solved most of any of my financial problems or hardships over the years. That just used to drive me insane and many, many times over the years dealing with various things - insurance issues, tax issues, and on and on - I often felt pretty much penalized for having remained single and/or childless all of my adult life.
I know that’s not so true now, not with the rather horrifying state of today’s economy. What perks married folks get nowadays aren’t making so much of a difference when it costs $40-100 to fill up your car with gas and everything in the grocery store is edging up to costing a fortune.
I had running jokes going for years with two of my closest male friends from college about marrying either one of them someday, both of them who were/are well off and without a lot of financial concern even in today’s awful standards. At one point in the Nineties, with
