edwin decker

All Make Believe
Gregory Page
Sounden Records
8.6 stars

*Goes well with gramophones and gin martinis

Every time I listen to a Gregory Page recording, it reinforces my belief that Page doesn't just write songs, he writes albums.

Most artists (and there's nothing wrong with this) write their tunes à la carte, drop them into an album, and give the album a name after the fact.

But judging from what I hear on his records, Page comes up with an album concept first, then writes songs that perpetuate the album's theme.

I could be wrong about this, but it's certainly how his albums read, especially on Make Believe, Greg Page's 7000th solo album, on which appear music-loving bumble bees, hand-shaking ghosts, silver dollar moons, telephone psychics, automobiles that dream, and bedrooms that rain - all of which, by themselves, are simple metaphors, but combined become important components of the Make Believe theme. Take the title cut for example:

"There's a knock at the door
My grandparents are here
On a holiday from heaven
We hug and we cheer
And play cards and drink whiskey
Then they disappear."

The two signature aspects of this album are his lyrical imagery and the bittersweet that oozes from the speakers, thanks, in part, to liberal dashes of the most melancholic instrument in the world, the cello, as well as the violin, which puts the sweet into "bittersweet."

Also enhancing the emotive aspect of All Make Believe is the hint of 40's style vocals - a cross between Mel Torme, Nick Drake, and James Blunt - with all of Torme's style, most of Drake's woebegone tone, and none of Blunt's overblown cornball-adry

W., and I are watching television. She is on the couch with the remote control, flipping around the dial searching for something good to watch and I'm on the recliner, staring at her with love and amazement and thinking, This woman is the worst remote control channel flipper ever.

Of course, she doesn't get her hands on the remote all that often as I am a bit of a control freak. But in the rare occasion that she does stake claim, she always sends us spiraling into a substandard world of Television Suckland--so much so that I find myself directing her flippages from across the room--"Keep going, keep going, keep going, wait, wait! Go back..."--until the clicker comes sailing through the air toward my head--forcing me to duck--then crashes into the wall behind me and breaks into about three or four pieces, which has me always running over to the injured remote.

"Oh no, no, no--are you all right?" I ask the tattered motherboard lying lifeless in my hands, then carefully rebuild it with duct tape and rubber bands, point it at the television, breathe a sigh of relief when the television responds appropriately and shoot angry glares at the heartless devil woman who did this terrible thing to my beloved remote.

Continue reading "Remote Control Control Freak
The art and the science of remote control flipping" »

Once upon a time, unscrupulous bar owners hired women of questionable repute to boost bar sales. They were called "B Girls" and they flirted with male customers to entice the gentlemen to buy drinks for them. The practice is illegal now.

In recent years however liquor and beer companies have employed similar tactics. They hire scantily clad, provocative women to go into bars and inspire alcohol sales, circumnavigating the room like living billboards -- enticing weak or unsuspecting men to buy their liquor brands.

I call them Booze Floozies and they are powerful and evil.

Continue reading "Booze Floozies " »

Recently, the House of Representatives' Transportation and Infrastructure Committee advanced a bill that will permanently ban cell-phone use on planes. The bill, which was approved in committee with bipartisan support, will now move to the full House and potentially become law.

Currently, there is a temporary ban on cell-phone calls while airborne. On July 31, the House committee revisited the issue to determine whether to lift the temporary ban. Hence the HANG UP Act (Halting Airplane Noise to Give Us Peace) which, if passed, will fortify the existing airborne ban and extend it to when the plane is on the ground because, according to the committee, cell calls on planes are "unsafe and annoying to passengers."

And Congress would know. Who flies more than politicians? Before the bill came to vote, committee members conveyed their personal cell-phone-on-airplane horror stories, such as the congressman who testified that he was forced to endure a nearby passenger discussing her sex life on the phone (oh, the travesty!). Another conveyed a harrowing tale of a man who was on a mobile phone trying to save his marriage before the plane took off. "It was embarrassing having to listen to all that sobbing and pleading," said the congressman. (Sorry if my unraveling existence is making you uncomfortable, Mr. Representative). And, naturally, the terrorism card was played when yet another member claimed she saw somebody using a cell phone to take pictures of "sensitive areas" of the plane's interior.

Continue reading "Cell-phone Liberty
(Six reasons why the HANG UP Act is wack)" »

This column is a tribute to day bartenders everywhere.

Your typical day bar shift is a sentence. It is the working-on-the-side-of-the-road-picking-up-garbage-in-orange-vests of bar shifts. My brother calls it "Crossing the Desert," because working the day shift is like an arduous trek across a wasteland. For the most part, the day bartender's main task is to set up the bar for the night. The night is where there is life.

There is no joy in day bar. There's no spicy Latin funk band to kindle the room, no giggling, perky women with racy shorts clinging to their buttocks, no mammalian mosaics with erect mammilla (Oh, momma!), no flashing lights or disco balls. . . There's only a flickering television and a jukebox that hasn't changed in 12 years.

There is no glory in day bar. Being a day bartender is like being that lonesome roadie, setting up the stage in an empty arena for the sold-out rock-and-roll show that night. You scrub the wells, polish the glasses, set up napkins, straws, and ashtrays. You cut fruit, wipe lipstick from wine glasses, count and stock the liquor inventory, clean the brass spigots, de-bleach the rags, scour the sinks, and fill the wells with endless buckets of ice.

Continue reading "Day Bar" »

Have you heard about the recent video game, the one where players try to assassinate President Bush? It's called "The Night of Bush Capturing: A Virtual Jihadi" (also known as "Quest for Bush").

Part game, part art exhibit and part political activism, "Quest for Bush" was created by Wafaa Bilal, an artist whose brother was killed in Iraq by U.S. bombs. Bilal created the game to express outrage for his brother's death and, also, as a response to the 2003 game "Quest for Saddam," where the object is to kill the former Iraqi president. Bilal believed "Quest for Saddam" stereotyped Arabs negatively, so he created "Quest for Bush" to "expose racist generalizations," according to his website.

In "Quest for Bush," the protagonist player-character is an Iraqi immigrant who is recruited by Al Qaeda to become a suicide bomber targeting the American president.

Naturally, there was a torrent of controversy. When Bilal was invited to exhibit the game at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., in February, RPI President Shirley Ann Jackson reportedly shut down the exhibit after a student group's blog called RPI's Arts Department "a safe haven for terrorists."

After being ousted from RPI, Bilal moved his exhibit to the "Sanctuary for Independent Media" performance space (also in Troy), where Robert Mirch, the city's public works commissioner--who was outraged by the game's content--used his authority to condemn the building, thereby, once again, shutting the exhibit down.

Continue reading "Virtual Avenger" »

Well, the Ultimate Music Challenge is over now. Last night, Sunday, was the finals. It was between 4 bands for a total of 32 thousand dollars in prizes and the show was beyond spectacular. Seriously. We had a Rage Against the Machine Tribute band called Anger is a Gift, a Hard rock cover band called Monsters of Rock, a Motown band called Detroit Underground, and an Alice Cooper tribute band (See photo).

Every one of these bands kicked ass. Visit my Judge's Blog to read all about and see who came in first, second and third place.

Or...

"A Funny Thing Happened to Me on the Way to the Upgrade"

Yeah, so maybe you've noticed, but ever since I upgraded to Moveable Type 4.12 blog interface, the content on my site has become all screwed up.

Basically, it's a coding issue, with all the apostrophes, quotations and hyphens being converted to these other-worldly symbols seemingly from another galaxy. Such as this bizarre conversion from one of my columns.

In her book, Coulter says The Jersey Girls are, “self-obsessed,” and that they are “celebrity-seeking broads,” and even went so far as to call them harpies.

Anyway, the only way I can fix this problem is by going into each entry, one at a time, and edit and save so, as they say in the strip malls . . .

"WE ARE UNDER CONSTRUCTION - PLEASE EXCUSE OUR APPEARANCE

Thanks
Ed Decker