Summer Re-Runs: Motorheads

You guys don’t understand Rock music.

That’s OK. You don’t know how you’d fare in prison because you watch Oz, either. You’re a “consumer.” That’s fine.

Well, I was a “producer” of rock music for a while, in a little way, and I worked with lots of other varied “producers” of your rock and roll entertainment, and I’d like to sing the praises of a certain type of guitar hero: The motorhead.

No, not MotorHead. That’s a band. They have an inexplicable umlaut in their name I can’t be bothered to add.

No, I mean motorheads. Watch the Grand Funk Railroad video. Those are motorheads.

You see, rock music wasn’t all sissies like David Bowie and Peter Frampton and so forth. And it wasn’t all pseudointellectuals like Yes and Sting. And it wasn’t all escapees from Broadway or the music hall like the Beatles or Elton John or Queen. It wasn’t all three chord cowboys- all hat no cattle –like the Eagles. It was guys from shop class. It was the motorheads.

They were good at sports but wouldn’t play on teams because they didn’t give a fig. The liked two stroke engines and took apart LED watches and had jobs when they were sixteen bending sheetmetal or doing body work in a garage while you were watching TV. They had mini-bikes and guns for toys when they were little kids while you were playing Clue. They were shaving, or needed shaving was more likely, when you had your mother’s face still. And they had a sunny, easygoing disposition, got Ds in everything in high school, and got all the girls the football players didn’t vacuum up. And a lot of the ones they did, eventually.

Because they were good at math and music, and they were masculine, and they could play rock music.

And their music, whether copied from others or home-made, was raucous and lively and manly and fun and brash and direct and unaffected. And they weren’t sexual as a pose. They weren’t pretending to like pretty girls by the armload.

I’m not paying attention closely any longer. I don’t know if there are people like this around anymore. I can’t think of any. They never whined, so no grunge, thanks. They never committed suicide, because they were happy all the damn time, so no Cobainiacs need apply. They’d never dress up, so that leaves out the Ozzie wannabes.

Oh well. I’m Rock and Roll Darwin, and I’m here to assure you: These dinosaurs once roamed the earth. And they were a blast.

Saturday Morning Musical Funnies Kinda

*Mick Jagger voice* Me bruvver sent me this one, then. It’s bleedin’ Etienne Mbappe, what plays the soddin’ bass, he does. *end Mick Jagger voice*

Will You Stand With Me A Moment, In The Garden?

Seigneur, faites de moi un instrument de votre paix.

Là où il y a de la haine, que je mette l’amour.

Là où il y a l’offense, que je mette le pardon.

Là où il y a la discorde, que je mette l’union.

Là où il y a l’erreur, que je mette la vérité.

Là où il y a le doute, que je mette la foi.

Là où il y a le désespoir, que je mette l’espérance.

Là où il y a les ténèbres, que je mette votre lumière.

Là où il y a la tristesse, que je mette la joie.

Ô Maître, que je ne cherche pas tant à être consolé qu’à consoler,

À être compris qu’à comprendre,

À être aimé qu’à aimer,

Car c’est en donnant qu’on reçoit,

C’est en s’oubliant qu’on trouve,

C’est en pardonnant qu’on est pardonné,

C’est en mourant qu’on ressuscite à l’éternelle vie.

You’ve Never Even Met A Man. Stop Writing About Them

I’m getting a lot of people visiting my site because they’re searching on the topic of “things men should be able to do.” They end up here, mostly: 10 Things You Should Be Able To Do If You’re A Handy Homeowner. That one was written in response to Popular Mechanic’s list of indispensable hand skills.

Well, Popular Mechanics has gone back to that well for another drink: 25 Skills Every Man Should Know. Hence people showing up at my doorstep looking for someone dirty. The online pubishing world has figured out that a list of any kind is the way to draw eyeballs. They’ve also figured out that very few living persons has ever even met an actual Man person, the breed having been hunted nearly to extinction, so they can write down any old thing in a bulleted way and sell advertising for Sharper Image in the margins.

Here’s the list. I stole it. How manly:

1. Patch a radiator hose
2. Protect your computer
3. Rescue a boater who as capsized
4. Frame a wall
5. Retouch digital photos
6. Back up a trailer
7. Build a campfire
8. Fix a dead outlet
9. Navigate with a map and compass
10. Use a torque wrench
11. Sharpen a knife
12. Perform CPR
13. Fillet a fish
14. Maneuver a car out of a skid
15. Get a car unstuck
16. Back up data
17. Paint a room
18. Mix concrete
19. Clean a bolt-action rifle
20. Change oil and filter
21. Hook up an HDTV
22. Bleed brakes
23. Paddle a canoe
24. Fix a bike flat
25. Extend your wireless network

Geez. There’s a whiff of delirium tremens about the list, a kind of random weirdness; it’s as if a female martian was describing what she figured a human male would be like, but never having visited our orb, she was just taking a stab at it.

I suppose I’m obligated to tell you I’ve done everything on the list, whether I have or not, because that seems to be the “manly” thing to do. But me? I’m probably not lying. Let’s take any one from the list… let’s see… paint a room?

House Painter

Heterosexual Eye For The Married Guy

First, Get 200 Gallons Of Paint

Get Busy

I Tire Of This Sport

Never mind all that. I’m sick of cubicle dwellers waxing philosophical about people like me. The difference between me and the cubicle dwellers is I can do everything on your lists, but I know how to write. Go get a pedicure or something while I post my list:

Sippican’s List Of Everything A Man Should Know:

1. Know how to do whatever the hell you feel like doing
2. Learn how to take your lumps for doing #1

Class dismissed.

Some Hope In The Debris

Our presence was required last evening at Junior High School.

I live in a town that many others covet for the school system. I don’t get that bit.

The school buildings are mostly new and not in disrepair that I could see. The administration seems fairly organized. Everyone was most pleasant.

But I can’t help noticing things. And I noticed that the school is set up to amuse the faculty.

We parents were shuffled all over the place, and were lectured at by a series of teachers about what they were doing. There was no idea that the wishes and ideals of the parents of the children had any place in this setting. There was an undercurrent of like it or lump it in all of it. I fall mostly into the lump it category. Always have.

Like most all modern school buildings, the fabric of the place itself is grim and desolate. Concrete block, vinyl composition tile on the floors below, drop ceiling above. Anywhere the ceiling was exposed, it displayed all the guts of the services in the building in the postmodern way. I hate it.

The rooms are fussy without being neat. There are elaborate, almost kabuki-like rules for the behavior of everybody, but there is nothing like decorum. I went to every classroom my boy goes to, mostly ignored the teachers perorations about nothing, and instead used the time to look at my child’s schoolbooks; and I marveled not only at what drivel was in them, but how little drivel they manage to fit on a page in a textbook these days.

I’m not young anymore. Since the amount of time between my experience in this setting and my re-acquaintance with it through my children has been so long, it was possible to get a kind of shock from it. It all came back to me in a moment.

I wanted to run screaming from that building. I wanted to stand up and tell them all I wasn’t going to sit in this desolate rubbery landscape anymore and listen to people who had never been outdoors in the daytime drone on and on. I wanted to yell that I wanted information doled out with a ladle, not an eyedropper. I wanted to see fewer concrete blocks painted gray than your average deathrow inmate.

One teacher — English teacher –who appeared about 14 years old and who is two inches shorter than my seventh grader already, messed up my reverie of discomfiture. She talked to us like we were short bus candidates, of course, but never mind that. She got all jazzed talking about how much fun it would be –for her, of course; made no bones about it–to teach out of a book called What is “Normal” Anyway?, with the word normal in scare quotes, of course. Let’s not dwell on that, as I doubt she could have any idea just how normal and just how really scary people like me could be; real menace never touches such as her.

Then she ruined it all for me. She held up Tom Sawyer. The very edition I’m telling people to read over at the Borderline Sociopathic Blog for Boys. She said it was kind of a drag for the kids to read because it was so difficult, (she said about herself without knowing it) but they were going to slog through it.

On the car ride home, my wife asked me what I thought of my son’s school.

“It’ll be fine.”