2010s – Sippican Cottage

Maine: They’re Doing the Best They Can

January 2, 2016 3 Comments

It’s that time of year again. Time to pass off already written drivel as fresh tripe. That can only mean one thing: a year-end retrospective of the news from The Meteor.

You’ve never heard of The Meteor? You must be “from away.” My neighbor here in Rumford goes by the name of Aubuchon Connery, and he runs this broadsheet called the Rumford Meteor. Well, technically it’s not a broadsheet, but I did notice a picture of Jenny McCarthy’s breasts right there on the front page.

Aubuchon’s an interesting fellow. He runs the whole newspaper with only one assistant, Rod Pocket, to help him out. Like everyone in Maine, they do the best they can. “They’re doing the best they can” is high praise around here. Whenever anyone sets themselves ablaze while freshening up the woodstove with a little kerosene, or turns turtle in the hammer lane in their wife’s Dodge Neon even though it’s a cloudless night on a deserted highway, everyone just says, “Shucks that’s too bad, but he was doing the best he can. And everyone knows you gotta ride the brake all the way through the spin.”

Anyway, Aubuchon Connery and Rod Pocket are doin’ the best they can with The Meteor all year, and I thought I’d choose one headline from each month of 2015 to give you the local flavah. The newspapers they’re quoting are doing the best they can to get a particular point across, all at once, all in the same way, and then Aubuchon and Rod come along and write different headlines and the stories take on a different sort of theme, like the way stories change under questioning at the police barracks. Most of the time, The Meteor gets the story plain backwards from the meaning the regular newspapers wanted. But we have to make allowances. They’re doing the best they can.

January: Owl’s Head Man Gets Himself Arrested By Annoying Teenage Girls on Facebook. “Annoying” Works as a Verb or an Adjective in That Sentence

February: After 75-Car Pileup, Emergency Crews Use Jaws of Life to Pry the Cellphones Out of Everyone’s Hands

March: Biddeford Government Brainstorming Session Produces Only Partly Cloudy Ideas

April: Woman Taking Paxil, Zoloft, Lexapro, Fluoxetine, Wellbutrin, Estrogen, Progestin, Himalayan Crystal Salt, Silver Water, and Medical Marijuana Wants to Know Exactly What’s in Her Tomatoes

May: Audience Member Who Loves The Moody Blues Says Local Moody Blues Tribute Band Has Inspired Him to Start a Moody Blues Tribute Band Tribute Band

June: Death With Dignity Bill Won’t Allow You to Take Your Lethal Overdose If You’re Wearing Jorts and Flipflops

July: South Bristol Centennial Highlights the Town’s Rich History of Totally Not Being Bristol

August: Online Workshops Offer a Free and Convenient Way to Find Additional Online Workshops

September: Goth Couple and Friends Demonstrate Their Non-Conformity by Dressing Alike

October: Wiscasset Jazz Aficionado Hopes the Band Plays “The Girl From Iwo Jima”

November: Public School Administrators Worry Isolated Home School Students Will Be Forced to Bully Themselves

December: President Can Prove He’s an Observant Christian and a Good Golfer

Well, there you go. That’s Maine in 2015 in a nutshell. You’re allowed to laugh at us, of course, as long as you don’t forget we’re doing the best we can.

Sippican’s 2016 New Year’s Resolutions

January 1, 2016 9 Comments

Well, it’s officially 2016. I never know what day it is, but I generally know what year it is by Valentine’s Day at the latest. In the bad old days, when I signed checks to pay my bills in January, I’d always write the previous year’s date, scribble over it, and then wonder if it was still legal scrip for all debts public and private until it hoovered out my bank account and proved it.

It’s not 1990 anymore, so I don’t have to worry about paying my bills with checks. I don’t have any money, and can’t pay my bills, so the topic never comes up, really. I take it everyone has changed over to buying everything using their iPhone, but I can’t even pawn my Motorola Razr, never mind pay bills with it.

As I am wont to say every night when I lay my head on my pillow, “But enough about me.” Let’s get right down to it. You don’t want to hear about me. You want to hear about my New Year’s Resolutions. You want to compare and contrast your list with mine, like you learned to do in English class in the seventh grade, if you attended seventh grade before 1975, I mean. If you attended seventh grade this year, for instance, you’d only be capable of copying and pasting my list on your school-issued iPad and turning it in as your final exam. If I wrote this list in a cursive font, you’d be screwed.

Sippican’s List of New Year’s Resolutions for 2016

I promise to stop reading The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler and laughing uproariously
I promise to feed both my children this year. By February, it might be one to the other, but a promise is a promise
I promise to stop talking in a Bavarian accent to everyone that works at
the Walmart for no reason. Why they’re working in the Walmart for no
reason isn’t my fault, but the Bavarian accent isn’t helping
I promise to stop letting the air out of Tom Brady’s footballs using George Bush’s weather machine
I promise to stop oppressing everybody by respiring
I promise to stop punching clerks in the Home Depot who ask me if I need help. This is going to be hard for me, so I’ll do it in two tranches. By June, the girls, and by next December, everyone
I promise to learn a second language. Besides swearing, I mean
I promise to give America back to the Indians. They’re already here on H1-B visas, and I like curry, so this is no skin off my back, really
I promise to quit smoking. I also promise to buy a fire extinguisher and stop trying to work on the pellet stove while it’s running
I promise to start really eating right. Count every calorie. I’ll buy a fitness watch. One of those good ones that even counts your heartbeats when you sleep. I’ll start buying supplements, and I’ll mix them into the kale smoothies I’ll make for breakfast. I’ll get a gym membership, and hire a personal trainer. I’ll start with hardcore cardio-type stuff, but then I’ll move on to free weights and elliptical work. Then I’ll start doing Crossfit all the time, and start talking about doing Crossfit stuff all the time, to everyone I meet, children in the street, strangers on the Intertunnel, even to the clerks in Walmart, but not using a Bavarian accent anymore, of course. Or I won’t do any of that stuff, and just shovel the snow in my own driveway instead

Happy New Year to all my friends on the Intertunnel. Both of you.

2015 Delenda Est

December 28, 2015 8 Comments

Well, we’re about to flush 2015 down the crapper, and start plunging 2016. That means it’s time for predictions for the new year. Here’s mine:

Next year will be even worse than this year, if that’s possible.

I’ve been using that one every year for 25 years, and it hasn’t failed me yet. Stick with the tried and true, I always say. Of course Western Civilization might bust out all over next year. I won’t stand on one leg and hold my breath, if you don’t mind.

Don’t get me wrong. I could make New Year’s predictions that were spot on. I’ve predicted lots of things with uncanny accuracy in the last ten years on the Intertunnel. It doesn’t do me any good, and the audience gets mad at me, and wishes to go back to sleep, so I stopped doing it. It’s like the ‘Free Beer Tomorrow’ sign on the wall in a disreputable tavern. It’s always right, and it doesn’t matter.

So what’s a busy blogger to do? The term “busy blogger” smacks of oxymoron. That might be unfair to bloggers I have known. Most of them are only about half an oxymoron. Anyway, making a year-end list of twelve of my essays chosen at random but pawned off as my finest work should do the trick. So here you go: Sippican’s Year in Review

January: The Greatest Play in NFL History
I’ve had a lot to do with the Boston, er, New England Patriots over the
years, all strange. I almost died in their driveway. I once stood on the
fifty yard line of their stadium while a half-dozen of us decided to
change a thirty-year-old NFL rule.

February: Unorganized Hancock: The Birf of Rock and Roll
The kids have been making videos for about three years now. I thought
they were always good, and they’ve certainly gotten much better, but
they were recorded in such a rudimentary fashion that the viewer had to
perform mental arithmetic to figure out how good they were.

March: Ralph Bellamy, I’m in Love With You
I used to play in a Happy Hour band that played Stump the Band with the
audience. We had to stop when Massachusetts made Happy Hour illegal. No,
really, that happened. My life is one long list of vocations, jobs,
life callings, and hobbies that were made illegal. If I were smart, I
would have started out doing illegal things right from the get-go.
Illegal pays better.

April: I Must Not Do It
I have seen money. Felt it in my hand. I have wasted it one day and
built temples to my fellow man the next with money, with no good reason
to do either. I have watched it slumber in a bank book with my name on
it waiting for nothing more than a notion and a signature. All gone.
Gone for good, I think but must not say.

May: Rumford Delenda Est
The man in the perfect yellow house persevered. He painted his driveway
and waxed his lawn and dusted his roof shingles. He polished his trees
and chromed the inside of his mailbox. He was adamantine. He was, and
is, a species of wonderful.

June: Building a Wattle and Daub Shelter for Dummies
If you can afford to have a smartphone in your pocket, you’re allowed
to be as dumb as you please. You can believe almost anything about the
natural or intellectual world and get away with it. You can think
panthers are cute and cuddly if you want, or that living in a state of
nature is a lark, or commendable in some way.

July: The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything
My wife is very quiet and reserved. She smiles a lot, but she doesn’t
talk very much. I have always depended on her steadiness, because I am
mercurial. I wonder if there is anyone in this world who has anything
bad to say about her, other than she chooses husbands in lighting not
suitable for buying off-brand bales of hay.

August: Imitation Is the Sincerest Form of Television
I know how to install electricity in a new house, and an old house, and a
restaurant, and a gas station, and a football stadium, and several
other kinds of places no one invites me to build anymore. It’s really
very simple except the part where you’re dealing with what was installed
in the mists of antiquity by an escapee from a support group for
mentally challenged subcontractors with Frankenstein fetishes. The
meetings were held in my basement, I infer.

September: Unorganized Hancock Gets Their WIngs
My sons looked vaguely dazed and happy, which is pretty much the same
thing in this world. They received their applause from the assembled
crowd, the hockey team you see in the background, and the other bands,
all without throwing up on themselves or falling off the stage. It was
one of those moments in time that you will remember sweetly forever.

October: HANCOCK!
When Unorganized Hancock made videos as best they could in the
circumstances they found themselves in, people discounted their efforts
because the finished product wasn’t shiny. The days of people making
allowances for poor production values on the Internet are over. Don’t
get me wrong, viral videos are all made with the phone held the wrong
way while the videographer is shaking like a nursing home inmate, but my
kids will never have a viral video because they don’t suck.

November: If You Make Things, You Are My Brother: Manny Avalos
What Manny is talking about in the video is profound only because it
should be quotidian, but isn’t anymore. He’s talking about being
connected with other people. He wants to make a guitar so that other
people can use it to make music to entertain and delight still more
people. He feels connected to the world at large by his own solitary
efforts. He admits he found the construction of the guitar interesting
for its own sake, but he understands that his interest is pointless
unless it serves others.

December, More or Less: Top Ten Adviceses for Aspirating Writerers
I started out fairly wretched, so it was easier for me to become an
inkstained wretch than most people. I wrote a book that had pages with
printing on both sides and two covers that were too far apart. I sold
several copies of that book to drunk persons who found themselves on
Amazon at 4 AM (it’s my target demographic). That doesn’t mean you’ll
necessarily have that kind of luck. Those people might have sobered up
by now.

I hope 2016 is kind to you, and fortune casts a benignant smile on all your endeavors. I advise you not to count on it, though. I just don’t have that kind of pull.

Reggler People Play In Casco Bay

May 15, 2014 3 Comments

NOWHERE fairer, sweeter, rarer,
Does the golden-looked fruit-bearer
Through his painted woodlands stray,
Than where hillside oaks and beeches
Overlook the long, blue reaches,
Silver coves and pebbled beaches,
And green isles of Casco Bay;
Nowhere day, for delay,
With a tenderer look beseeches,
“Let me with my charmed earth stay.”

On the grainlands of the mainlands
Stands the serried corn like train-bands,
Plume and pennon rustling gay;
Out at sea, the islands wooded,
Silver birches, golden-hooded,
Set with maples, crimson-blooded,
White sea-foam and sand-hills gray,
Stretch away, far away.
Dim and dreamy, over-brooded
By the hazy autumn day.

Gayly chattering to the clattering
Of the brown nuts downward pattering,
Leap the squirrels, red and gray.
On the grass-land, on the fallow,
Drop the apples, red and yellow;
Drop the russet pears and mellow,
Drop the red leaves all the day,
And away, swift away,
Sun and cloud, o’er hill and hollow
Chasing, weave their web of play.

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892)

A Royal Standard Ten (from 2010)

April 6, 2014 7 Comments

It was just a tent by the side of the road.

The road meanders from noplace special to nowhere anyone wants to go. The semis rattle by going both directions filled with the boles of trees, showing their butt ends to the only place they’ve ever known, going somewhere else to be useful. Like all the children born here do, as soon as they’re big enough.

The car’s a bit worn now, and a muddy chuckhole reaches out for the tire as we bound into the hardpan lot, pitching and yawing like astronauts on the way home. His grandfather would have called it a chuckhole, anyway. His grandfather, the man with the twinkle in his eye and a laugh on his lips and the same name on his certificate of birth. He winked out like a star in a distant galaxy last year, but the light from it is still reaching us here. It’s in the back seat, bright; and driving, too — a little faded.

The words aren’t up to the task anymore. People grope for the name to call it. Antiques? A flea market? Junk or junque. It’s stuff for sale that no one wants so it costs a little money. If anyone would want it, it would be by the side of the road with a “Free” sign on it. But then, commerce is not arithmetic.

I know too many things and examine everything like a doctor looking at the third person in a row with a cold in the last ten minutes of office hours. He knows nothing so everything is wonderful.

You can never tell with him. He never uttered a sound until he was four. Just looked at you with eyes like saucers half-filled with motor oil and you wondered if he was sent to make you nervous forevermore. Then he never stopped talking until his eyes banged shut each evening in a bed laden with bears and talking sponges. To bring him anywhere is to bring Ken Coleman along to murmur about the mundane in a continuous stream, and pass the time contented.

What would it be this time, you wonder. A broken Happy Meal toy or a dented sousaphone or a three-and-a-half legged-table covered with lead paint? He ranged around the tent like a bedouin holding up a caravan mid-desert and pawing around for some honorable plunder. Then he disappeared.

We found him there, sitting alone and tapping away. No paper. A Royal Standard Ten with beveled glass windows on the sides. He wouldn’t go anywhere else. He wouldn’t look at anything else. Tap tap tap ding.

“I’m going to find the man and make him a bargain.”

It was twenty bucks we didn’t have. It was twenty bucks that wouldn’t show up on our plates. It was twenty bucks I would have sold a quart of blood to get for that boy. All the way home, he sat in the back and craned his neck to look at it on the floor behind the seat. Some things are worth more than money.

“This is the machine you write books with, dad.”

Yes, my boy. The machine comes with the stories in it. You just have to let them out. They put in windows so you can get a look at them first.

Maybe It’s Just Me, But I Don’t Think Eleanor Rigby Is Supposed To Sound This Happy

March 13, 2014 2 Comments

And still, here we are.

Pharrell Williams is notable enough to have his own Wikipedia page. I checked. Ye gods, he’s won seven Grammys. That seems an awful lot for someone I never heard of. The Beatles only won eight. That’s not a typo. They won a “lifetime achievement” Grammy, too, so nine, depending on how you count them.

I have heard of The Beatles. They seem to have gotten much more mileage out of their meager stash of Grammys.

I Like Puddles Pity Party’s Early Stuff. You Probably Haven’t Heard Of Them

February 16, 2014 15 Comments

I listen to the strangest assortment of music.

No, I’m not trying to tell you I’m a hipster, bustin’ a moby at the table saw while only listening to totally deck obscure artisanal free-range amazeballs beats. That would be so midtown. I just find myself interested in odd things.

I’ve never heard the original of this song. It’s current. The only radio I own is in the truck, so I can only hear current music while I’m driving. There’s a problem. I only leave my house once or twice a month, and whenever I do, I drive in stone cold blissful silence.

So it’s very simple. If you want me to listen to your song, you’d better hustle on over to the Intertunnel, and be sure to bring a seven-foot-tall pagliacco, totes toting a battered Emmett Kelly valise that says Puddles Pity Party on it, and everybody better really be playing things that sound like instruments instead of washing machines halfway through the cycle with all the towels migrated to one side, and you better have that bouffon belt out that song like it’s nobody’s business. And the girls better sway.

Puddles Pity Party

Hey, Wanna Come Over My House And Listen To Chi-Lites Records?

January 31, 2014 8 Comments

That drum intro can’t ever mean anything to me other than Benny Benjamin opening up Ain’t Too Proud To Beg. I’ve made money singing that song. Please notice that I didn’t claim I earned money singing that song. I said I was paid money to sing that song. Different set of circumstances. Mayer Hawthorne is earning his money.

There really can’t be anything truly new in culture. The idea that you’re an artist so you have to constantly break new ground is silly. Humans have a trajectory as individuals, and as societies; humans start from scratch but their cultures don’t. Smart humans don’t reject everything that came before them out of hand. Winnowing through the dross to get the gloss.

After a while, the only way to do something truly new is to do something bad. After all the bad stuff is taken, you have to move on to malignant. The search for novelty over all things is a form of vivisection. You made a new animal, Dr. Moreau, it’s true, but it’s born dead. And ugly.

It’s hard enough to be entertaining, or interesting — hell, it’s hard to be plain competent. Holland-Dozier-Holland didn’t invent music. Mayer Hawthorne didn’t either, but being unafraid to plant a fresh crop in a fertile vineyard is a kind of bravery nowadays. Go, man, go.

She Thinks I Steal Kale

August 28, 2013 8 Comments

I tried to explain something to my musician son the other day. I had a hard time. The concept is nebulous. You have to ken it peripherally. If you try to look right at it, it can’t come into focus. It’s as much art as science. Hunch-y, really. I tried to describe to him what makes a song have “legs” — a term we used to use to indicate that a song is potentially useful to a performer by its very nature.

OK, so the Clutch Cargo of Country™, George Jones, had a big hit with this one back when Minutemen still rode dinosaurs to the Post Office to use the only telephone in town. That fact alone isn’t going to cut any ice at the disco, brother. Besides, he didn’t write it. He had to spot the legs in the song in the first place. If you want to glom onto the esssence of the song, and milk it to go along with your own performance cookies, the song needs to have legs. It’s got to be the framework for entertainment. It has to allow others to produce their own artifact, not just trade on the previous artifact.

https://youtu.be/hCUj5yUB0nA

The wrong people have to be able to “get over” with a song with legs. The sum of the component parts have to add up to more than the parts themselves. So you become a kind of vivisectionist, taking songs apart to see what makes them go. But just like taking that frog apart in science class, the frog doesn’t work anymore if you take it apart. The animation comes from somewhere else. To choose a song that’s going to have legs, you have to understand the frog well enough to replicate it, but you can’t kill it while taking it apart. That’s why it’s so hard to know what’s going to work.

You had a disc jockey at your shabby, expensive wedding because you didn’t want music; you wanted a list of cultural artifacts, laden with the context of your memories of what you were doing when they first came out of the radio. You wanted to eat at Musical McDonalds ™ because you wanted to know exactly what was on the menu before you entered the building. You didn’t want to rely on a chef, even a world renowned chef, because improvisation is fraught with peril. Something might happen, and your wedding would be on YouTube for all the wrong reasons — the only reason anything is on YouTube. To perform a song that has legs, you have to make the audience forget there’s another version of it they prefer for a little bit.

You’re on to something in your selection if a wave of nervous laughter passes through the audience at first, finding, perhaps, a delicious irony in the resurrection of a hoary old thing, and then the dead silence of rapt attention has to follow it.

So you search without looking directly at anything, the way a man searches for a mate in a bar. Sometimes you find exactly what you’re looking for, and the audience thinks to themselves: What a cute couple they make.

Seems To Me I’ve Seen The Most Popular Act In Great Britain Before

May 23, 2011 6 Comments

Just sayin’

Adele:

Lulu:

“To Sir With Love” is a much more sophisticated song, but then again, it was written by two pros.

“Music to eat ice cream right out of the tub by, while weeping” never goes out of style, I guess.

Sippican Cottage

Maine: They’re Doing the Best They Can

Sippican’s 2016 New Year’s Resolutions

Sippican’s List of New Year’s Resolutions for 2016

2015 Delenda Est

Reggler People Play In Casco Bay

A Royal Standard Ten (from 2010)

Maybe It’s Just Me, But I Don’t Think Eleanor Rigby Is Supposed To Sound This Happy

I Like Puddles Pity Party’s Early Stuff. You Probably Haven’t Heard Of Them

Hey, Wanna Come Over My House And Listen To Chi-Lites Records?

She Thinks I Steal Kale

Seems To Me I’ve Seen The Most Popular Act In Great Britain Before

Tag: 2010s

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