We’ve Got The Beat That Bounce
Watching the video for “Boom Boom Pow” this weekend – just because, okay? – raised the obvious question: what do the other two guys in the Black Eyed Peas do? Why are they there? You’ve got Will.i.am producing the songs – and as little as I like their songs, “Boom Boom Pow” has a really catchy beat to it. You’ve got Fergie on vocals and eye candy. While the latter trumps the former in most pop acts, she has a good voice in her own right.

But then there’s the other two guys: the ugly one and the guy with the samurai topknot. What do they add? They’re not very talented rappers. I can’t imagine they have a lot of female fans screaming over them. Now that the Black Eyed Peas have become world-class superstars, why are these guys around?

The world seems to have answered that question for me, in that Will.i.am has made tentative crossover steps (like his role in X-Men Origins: Wolverine) and Fergie has a solo career. Whereas no one cares about Taboo’s aborted solo projects, or his role as Vega in Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li. So, asked and answered.

Of course, it would be rather mercenary for a band to drop its less attractive / useful members once it achieved superstardom. And since pop music isn’t known for its mercenary attitude, I suppose we’re stuck with those two until the end of time.

Things Not To Say, Even At A Whisper, In A Conference Room Full of Coworkers When You Realize You’ll Have To Present First
“Balls.”

Have You Come Here For Forgiveness? Have You Come To Raise the Dead?
U2 played at Foxboro Stadium, south of Boston, this past Monday. I did not go to see them, though I had ample opportunity. At least three friends e-mailed me, forwarding along info from friends who were trying to offload tickets. One of them needed to get rid of a dozen club-level seats (private bathrooms, free snacks, etc) at $250 a pop.

I like U2 as a concept; I’m glad they still exist. But I have no real desire to ever see them live. Certain bands generate an energy when heard live that trumps any of their albums. I can’t imagine what hearing U2 live would add, other than “more fireworks” and “Bono’s face on a Jumbotron.”

Here’s some anecdotal data: I’ve gone to karaoke probably one hundred times in the last three years. My favorite haunts all have very extensive songbooks. But I have never heard anyone sing a U2 song from later than 1996. And if we exclude the one time somebody covered “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me” (from the Batman Forever) soundtrack, no one goes more recent than Achtung Baby. That’s eighteen years of irrelevance.

I Guess I Thought You Had The Flavor
In conversation with a friend recently, I realized how much the question, “Why do I always want what I can’t have?” answers itself. You want what you can’t have because you don’t have it. If you had it, you wouldn’t want it any more – because you’d have it. This is true whether you’re talking about romantic partners, careers or a 42″ plasma TV. Wanting what you can’t have doesn’t make you weird or broken or hopeless – it’s part of the human condition.

“Why do I always want what I can’t afford?” is an interesting question. But wanting what you can’t have is normal. There’s a reason Buddhists say not wanting is such a big deal: because it’s really, really hard.

PROLOGUE: Some trivia about the Neil Diamond classic that titles this post:

• Pete not only references it on this week’s Overthinking It podcast, but he sang it at karaoke this past Wednesday. It was awesome. By contrast, I sang Billy Idol’s live cover of “Mony Mony” and got the entire bar to curse at me. That was also pretty cool.
• This song came from the universally panned (though financially successful) 1980 Neil Diamond film The Jazz Singer.
• It was one of 166 songs deemed inappropriate by Clear Channel following the September 11 attacks, sharing that black mark with the entire Rage Against The Machine catalog, AC/DC’s “Safe in New York City,” Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” and the Chi-Lites’ “Have You Seen Her.” And who says corporate monopolies ruined the music industry!

I played about an hour of video games on Saturday before I realized I was sitting inside on a gorgeous day. So I got up and wandered Somerville, stopping to say hi to Lynne D. and her yard sale. “There were people here at eight this morning,” she said, shocked. “One guy sat out front in a van filled with newspapers for twenty minutes. Taking notes in a little notebook.”

After checking in on Marie C. and her carrot cake, I emptied my fridge of beer and headed to Mike M’s annual 4th of July barbecue. Attendance was low but intimate (because of Don S’s simultaneous barbecue, we theorized, to which all the people with baaaaaaaabies might have gone). Mike had constructed two ladder golf sets, which ate up several hours. He and Robert took turns grilling various meats – pork tenderloin, bacon-wrapped steak tips, teriyaki chicken – while the rest of us threw bolas.

Two hours wandering Somerville plus six hours playing ladder golf turned my arms crispy, sucking the life out of me by the time we retired indoors. We played about four straight hours of Mike’s racing variant of charades – two teams compete to mime their way through a list of items, racing to opposite ends of the apartment to pantomime to their fellow players. We started out strong, but energy and creativity started to flag after several sprints and beers. At one point, our team guessed every syllable of “Scooby-Doo” and still couldn’t guess the answer. “Boo bee poo? Poo pee boo?”

“How many?” the proprietor at Do Re Mi asked.

“Thirteen,” Trisha said. Trisha made a rare visit to the East Coast this past weekend, and trashy karaoke in Allston topped the list of events.

The old man rubbed his chin with his thumb. “Normal rooms, very crowded for thirteen. Party room, best size.”

He led us back through winding hallways, carpeted in purple all-weather fabrics and indirectly lit. I had never been taken this far into Do Re Mi before. Typically, I show up late for whatever’s going on and wave at the front desk. They smile and point me toward the only other room in the building with white people in it.

The party room: a suite the size of my apartment. Leather couches at least a decade old, with stools and a poorly kept piano in the back. And a massive, widescreen TV up front.

“Whoa,” we said.

“Eighty dollars an hour,” he said.

We spent the rest of the evening fighting over the karaoke machine’s remote and belting out classics from the days of late night partying: Queen, The Darkness, Rage, Green Day, etc. I brought a half-pint of Canadian Club and ended up consuming all of it.

Allston hipsters, like I used to be, enjoy the shady and the cheap. It makes the minimal care they take of their own lives seem almost opulent in comparison. The dive bars cater to college students and the laundromats stay open late. I mention this only because we had some reservations about returning to Do Re Mi, having heard that it expanded and renovated. Would it still have its seedy charm? Could it still pass for a front for Thai prostitutes in the evening hours?

Let me assure you, scenesters and unemployed heroes, that the new Do Re Mi is worth every penny you pay. Sometimes, you just have to spend $340 on the party room.

I found a new karaoke spot on Friday: the bar beneath the Charles Playhouse in Boston’s theatre district. Small turnout for a Friday, though Memorial Day weekend might have contributed to that.

A few friends had turned out for Dave C’s twenty-ninth birthday. “I wanted one last big bash,” he said. “I’ve noticed that I have different priorities in an evening as I get older. I can’t bounce back from those big nights out any more.”

I agreed with him. But that strikes me as an excuse to schedule your Saturday mornings wisely, not to cut short your Fridays.

# # #

I missed my car (in the shop – over one thousand dollars of spring and strut work) most acutely on Sunday, when I had to hoof it to Brighton to grab a burger wih Sylvia then back to Cambridge to have a drink with Pre-Doctor Margaret N. But the benevolent confluence of the Red Line, the #66, the D Line and the #1 made it all work.

The evening brought me through a gamut of bars, too – from the 112 beers on tap at the Sunset Grill in Allston to the cultivated dinge that is the People’s Republik. Does anyone else think a 112-beer tap is wasted on 90% of Allston residents?

# # #

Explored the bike path in Davis Square with Andrea on a balmy Monday afternoon. We passed and were passed by a record number of cyclists, enjoying the shaded ride and the air free of humidity.

“That dog looks lost,” she remarked, commenting on a pug that had planted its feet in the middle of the sidewalk.

I indicated the pug’s owners, a mom and her toddler pedaling a few yards away. “The dog knows what it’s doing. It can wait all day if it has to.”

I also hit up Joanna’s annual barbecue in Porter Square, eating some grilled sausage and listening to Serpico recount earlier adventures in New Jersey.

“It’s a massive grown-up arcade and restaurant complex,” he was saying, of Xanadu, “that looks like nothing so much as a stack of shipping containers dumped in the parking lot of Giants Stadium. There’s no way that place can be making money.”

“Well, sure,” I said. “Based on the set of books you’re looking at.”

“True. There’s probably a wealth of boxed-up arcade games in there that’ll burn real easy.”

“Or just vanish overnight. ‘Hey, it’sa one ‘a dem extremely local collapsars. Just sucked everyding into its event horizon. Whaddaya gonna do?’”

I’m a city boy at heart. I always will be.

# # #

Go to Mike’s Pastry in Boston’s North End before 7:30 and you beat the evening rush. You’ll still have to shoulder your way through a mob thirty deep – Back Bay couples with gray temples, suede and camelhair; pudgy college parents wearing their daughter’s school on their sweatshirt – but you’ll face worse at any other time. Push gently to the front: there are no lines, and the half-dozen ladies serving all orders won’t resolve your disputes of ordinality. It’s anarchy in practice: order evolving unplanned.

A spread of opulent treats tempt you under the glass counter. Experiment if you like – the Oreo cheesecake looks too good to be anything but great – but you’re best served with some cannolis. Get at least two, more if you intend to share. Specify ricotta filling and powdered sugar.

Hanover St. in the North End is narrow, centuries old, and on Saturday nights it gets packed. Cops lean casually against motorcycles. Valets crack wise and swap cigarettes. College freshmen sprint across intersections and slap each other on the arms to punctuate sentences: yo, you see that?. Anything could happen.

# # #

U2 played a secret show at the Somerville Theatre last night. Rumor bled into the network as early as a week ago, but the band only confirmed concrete details this morning. Anyone passing through Davis Square as early as Tuesday would have seen cops blocking off the street behind the Theatre, and lighting trucks bigger than most Somerville apartments unloading.

Only a few hundred people got in – radio contest winners, mostly – but another few hundred mobbed up outside. Close enough to snap postcards from The Edge, but still penned back by a long line of cops and riot barriers. As the concert got underway, a kind soul in an apartment overlooking the Theatre cracked his window and perched a radio on the ledge, relaying the concert live from WBCN. Then some jackass brought out an amp and started busking in the Square. Nine out of ten for opportunism, buddy, but you lose a few points for class.

I didn’t see this, mind; I just make it a point to know what happens in my city. I got people.

# # #

Come to the Asgard often enough and they know you as a regular. The staff turns over pretty regular – you never see anyone work there longer than six or nine months – but it only takes a few trips and a few big nights at karaoke to plant your face in their mind. The bouncer waves you in; the bartender catches your eye. You point, rather than speak, and he draws you a perfect pint of Guinness.

You see the same faces – friends from the real world, people you only know through this bar, strangers you’ve never spoken to but see here often enough. You form a routine. You drop the cold mask that you put on for walking through a city alone at night and put on the social face. It’s good to see you. It’s good to see anybody.

# # #

I like the quiet introspection of being alone with nature. But I don’t need it. I spend enough time inside my own head. I need distractions.

I like walking past a building tall enough to obscure the moon, looking up and seeing lights on. Maybe it’s a cleaning crew, vacuuming out offices while Jam’n 94.5 echoes down the hallways and the best view in the city hangs outside their window. Maybe it’s a late night brainstorming session. It could be someone trapped in a dead-end job, scared to step outside. Could be a crime in progress.

There’s enough going on to keep my mind occupied. That’s why I’m a city boy at heart.

I’m fortunate to have funny friends.

Shows at ImprovBoston can be touch and go (it’s a big theater; a lot of different groups perform there), but Three Hole Punch was one of the most entertaining shows I’ve ever seen. Any of the four cast members could help carry a show in her own right. But the four of them have worked together for years and the chemistry that results makes for crackerjack improv. It doesn’t hurt that they’re easy on the eyes, either.

I forgot for a while what I enjoy second most about karaoke at Asgard – singing along with other people. Sitting in the audience having tied one or two on and just belting along to Smash Mouth or Boyz II Men or James Brown or who the hell ever. Singing with a bunch of other actors and singers in the audience used to give me performance anxiety. Still does, from time to time. But if I kick back and let myself relax, Wednesday night becomes the bridge that carries me through the week.

Last night I found out that the green belts in jiu-jitsu box better than I do. Even the green belts with neck and shoulder issues that prevent them from taking the full range of falls. They block better, move better and throw better combinations. Boxing’s not a tall man’s sport – reach might seem like an advantage, but it just opens up a whole mess of target areas down the front of the body. Remind me never to get into a boxing match.

Also I took an elbow to the forehead. This was later, though.

Local software powerhouse Vecna Technologies has blitzed the Red Line with ads recently, looking for new developers. Most of these have really stood out – showing handsome people with eloquent pull quotes talking about the meaningful work they do. However, one that I spotted last week, and again last night, makes me laugh in derision:

Vec-na
(Czech)
Eternal (i.e., Built to Last)

Sure. You named your company after an obscure Czech adjective. Right. Not one of the most infamous recurring villains in Dungeons and Dragons’ thirty year publishing history. Okay, fellas.

(For nerds who’ve been out of the loop: Vecna got promoted from demigod to full on godhood in 4th Edition. Update the Satanic altar in your basement accordingly)

# # #

Karaoke on Wednesday had a rather small crowd – post-election fatigue plus cold drizzle kept people indoors. I saw a tiny house of regulars, plus a handful of new faces. A girl at the table in front of us sang some pop staple I can’t recall, largely because her intoxicated friend kept keening at her. She made noises at the parts of the song during which normal humans might cheer, but not in the right volume or tone. It was a funereal wail. I know no other way to describe it.

I dedicated my first song – “Jesus He Knows Me,” by Genesis – to “the city of Cambridge, which went 87% for Obama last night.” Nobody got what I was going for until I started swapping words out in the final chorus:

‘Cause Obama knows me, and he knows I’m right
I’ve been talking to Obama all my life
Barack Obama knows me, and he knows I’m right
Well he’s been telling me everything’s gonna be all right

It didn’t help matters that the intoxicated friend from earlier stood up and tried to take the microphone from me. This was before I started singing about Obama, mind you: I had barely hit the first chorus before she latched on. “Jesus doesn’t know you,” she slurred.

I extricated it from her grip as gently as possible (twist, don’t yank) while DJ Paul escorted her away from the booth. Apparently she burst into tears in front of her friends sixty seconds later. I couldn’t see; I was too busy being clever.

Christine insisted on showing off Central Park on Saturday afternoon. We scrambled over glacial rocks, wandered past the closed gates of the Central Park Zoo, and took pictures of the New York skyline. I find it easy to forget that New York isn’t just a tourist destination, like Disney World or the Taj Mahal. Actual human beings live there and go to work there every day.

We then made plans to meet up with her boy Tim, his friend Alex and Internet friend Meg at Gyu Kaku for Japanese in-table barbecue. Christine and I walked the several city blocks, passing the Apple Store first. “It’s not even a real building,” she said, “just a giant glass cube!” We talked about writing and improv to pass the time.

Gyu Kaku: one of those places where they serve the meat raw and you grill it in the center of the table. Meg joined us not long after we’d started, sharing a bottle of sake with us. Once our remarkably obsequious server brought out all of our plates, we set to shoveling food down our faces and took turns monitoring the grill.

Meg proved a sport and joined a pub crawl with four strangers. Our first real stop: the Pig & Whistle, just up the block. I bought the table a round (except Alex, who vanished as soon as we got in, but only so he could immediately get to the bar and buy himself a drink). The conversation fell to high school, then to college, then, inevitably, to karaoke. “We need to find a place to do karaoke,” Christine insisted, and Tim and his iPhone obliged.

Top Tunes Karaoke doesn’t charge a cover, but they do make you pay $2 for each song request so perhaps it evens out. We got there while the crowd was still fairly small so we had little competition for the first couple hours. Christine sang “Hey Big Spender” and “Bust A Move”; Meg covered Weezer and … something else (I forget). I reached not too deep into my back pocket to pull out karaoke staples “Hard to Handle” and “Wicked Game.” Strangers loved us.

Our meandering route north took us across the on-ramp to the Queensboro Bridge. Christine, Alex and Tim dashed across and, after a few more rows of cars, Meg and I sprinted after them. Alex stepped out into traffic to, apparently, try to stop cars for us. “Alex!” I yelled, high on adrenaline and Guinness. “Move!” He wasn’t, despite cars approaching at speed, so I grabbed him by the elbow and brought him onto the curb with us. Of course, at a full sprint I had momentum with me, so I ended up dragging him into a low concrete post. “Ow,” he said.

In his defense, he was doing what he thought he needed to do to help us cross a busy street; in my defense, he was inarticulately drunk. Call it how you will. I made my apologies, figured that nearly braining a guy meant I’d had enough for the night, and left the party to keep on crawlin’. Meg walked the 20 blocks to 94th street with me, and we chatted about how hard it was to find work or new friends in a big city like New York. I believed it.

Back at Christine’s apartment, I spent about twenty exhausted minutes trying to unlock her door before realizing I already had. I took out my contacts, dropping one in the process and not finding it until I heard it fall off my pant leg while crossing the kitchen floor. Then I passed out on the futon in the living room. At some point during all this, on wet Manhattan streets, Tim asked and Christine said yes.

Two different alarms got me up at 6:00 AM, and I dragged myself to the 96th and Lexington station. The walk from 2nd to 8th showed me an eerie, dimly lit side of Manhattan: 34th Street on an overcast Sunday morning. I got to my bus with plenty of time to spare, curled up on my seat, and started putting some miles between myself and the city.

Sunday recaps, and possibly pics, tomorrow.

Busy week so far.

After having a knee ground into my tibia, getting my hair pulled and taking a shot to the kidneys in jiu-jitsu last night, the only thing that really hurts this morning is my wrist. And I don’t know from what. Probably arnis work.

I stopped by a barbecue hosted by one of Sarah H’s friends afterward, changing shirts first. After one PBR, a hot dog and a burger, I made the mistake of mentioning “harlequin babies” in front of a laptop. Or rather, a curious person who gets weepy when drunk, and a laptop. Do not Google the term ‘harlequin babies’. I don’t mean this in the sense people normally mean it. When people say, “The ‘Star Wars Christmas Special’ is unforgivably awful,” they’re not trying to keep you from seeing it. They’re building up their geek cred by talking about having been in the shit. Same thing with “2 girls 1 cup” and the like. When I say do not Google the term ‘harlequin babies’, there’s no implied “… unless you want to see something really gross” or “… unless you have a strong stomach.” You don’t need to guess at the enthymeme. When I say don’t I mean don’t.

After Gorefest rehearsal on Wednesday, during which Matt C. roundly cursed at the ocean as an unhappy husband might make comments he knew his wife would overhear, I stopped in at Asgard for weekly karaoke. Dana J., Robert W. and I, without corresponding ahead of time, created a theme of “the saddest songs imaginable.” I told Dana J. that I’d have to go sadder after he treated us to Coldplay’s “The Scientist.” “The only song I can imagine sadder than that,” he replied, “would be Johnny Cash’s cover of Hurt.” How well he knows me, as that’s the song I’d already entered. I ended the song towering over Kevin Q., offering him my “empire of dirt” with an accusing finger. “Now I’ll never sleep again,” he remarked. Success!

This was my second time at Asgard that week, as S. had gathered folks for good-bye drinks on Tuesday. She didn’t know that Tuesday is trivia night at Asgard, so I introduced myself to her friends as “that asshole,” as I always am when bar trivia’s on the line. She was shocked, shocked!, that her team’s name, “The Drunken Poodles,” was not the most ridiculous team name in attendance that night. We staged a competitive showing on the Fill-In-The-Blanks section before I had to leave.

Monday I rehearsed music with Steve G., Gorefest composer, and Liz C., with whom I have a duet. He gave us a tour of the unfinished skeleton of his house’s new wing, pointing out the master bedroom, the open-air bathroom behind it, his wife’s designing studio, his future music room, etc. “So this is what it’s like to have money,” I said, staring in envy at the bedroom larger than my apartment. “This is what it’s like to have had money,” Steve corrected. “And to not have kids.” “This just makes me want to play The Sims,” Liz commented.

At some point in the above I slept.

Clayton Bigsby: Hey, niggers! Turn that jungle music down! Woogie boogie, nigger! Woogie boogie!
Hip-Hop Fan: Did he just call us niggers?… AWESOME!

- Chappelle’s Show

“Ol’ Dirty Bastard, ‘Gimme My Money,’” I asked, covering the mic with one hand.

DJ Paul, who runs the karaoke at Asgard on Wednesdays, has the most extensive selection of any karaoke-jockey I’ve ever seen. I rarely have to check the book anymore; I just ask him for a song. I’ve been going there for well over a year at this point.

Paul shrugged. “I don’t have it. What’s your backup?”

Ten seconds later, the loop from Sugar Hill Gang’s “Apache,” stretched and down-pitched, blasted over the speakers. “I hope all of you like Nas,” I told the crowd (largely friends), “because that’s what I’m fuckin’ doing.” I pounded the shot of Canadian Club I’d just purchased and took off.

Now let’s get it all in perspective,
For all y’all enjoyment, a song you can step with
Y’all appointed me to bring rap justice
But this ain’t 5-0, y’all know it’s Nas, yo …

I struggled a bit with the last drops of whiskey for the first verse but picked up some horsepower. Even folks who didn’t recognize the song – or know it as well as I did, wandering into the crowd with my back to the screen – bobbed their heads in time.

At about this point (and here I rely on other witnesses), a guy in his 20s walking by the Asgard’s open window stopped and stared open-mouthed. He had a knee-length T-shirt and a Celtics cap with a flat brim and the sticker still on it. Leaning through the window, he stopped his girlfriend with a hand on her elbow and pointed.

They shootin’! Aw, I made you look
You a slave to a page in my rhyme book
Gettin’ big money, playboy, your time’s up
Where them gangstas? Where them dimes at?

By the time the final verse rolled around, I’d loosened up fully and fit into the flow. I still hadn’t turned my head three feet to the right and seen the conversation transpiring just outside the bar, of course; that might have thrown me a bit.

“Made You Look” ends with Nas freestyling after the track shuts off, which the karaoke prompter doesn’t always transcribe. So you have to really know it and really sell it in order to cap the song well.

And I like a little sassiness, a lotta class
Mami reach in your bag, pass the fifth
I’m a leader at last, this a don you with
My nines’ll spit, niggas lose consciousness

The audience applauded, I handed the mic back. The whiskey swam in my head with an earlier Guinness, giving everything the arm’s length distance of a plausible dream. That was the end of it, I thought.

The young guy with the baggy shirt had now leaned halfway through the window and beckoned DJ Paul and I over. Confused, I followed.

“Yo, that was tight, man,” he said, clasping my hand and snapping off it. “That shit was all right. But I hear that coming out the windows, you got me wound up. Now I’ve got to get on that mic.”

“All right, man,” I said. “Go for it.” I’m used to people making exorbitant promises on karaoke night; you expect that sort of thing. What I didn’t expect was for the man to lope in through the front of the bar ten seconds later and make his way right to the back.

“Yo, rewind that,” he said. “Gimme that same track again.”

And this complete stranger proceeded to rap two tracks of his own devising off the top of his head while a dazed Cambridge audience – composed entirely of white people and Filipinos, I should add – watched and applauded. “I just wrote this one a couple days ago,” he said, between sets. “Still working it out.”

Having absolutely ripped it, he returned the mic to DJ Paul – and to thunderous cheers – and headed out. “Which one of you’s taller?” Paul asked of the two of us.

“How tall are you?” the rapper – whose name we’d since learned was Blacklight – shouted across the bar.

“Six five and a bit,” I said.

“Six four,” he said, with a shrug.

“So you won that contest, at least,” Paul said.

Looking back on the whole thing, I would think the whole thing was a dream if I didn’t have twenty close friends as witnesses. The whole affair had that shifting vagueness conferred by a pleasant buzz to begin with. But the situation on its face – some stranger off the street says I’m rapping all right, but comes in and takes the mic for two tracks of his own, and the DJ says it’s okay because I’m taller than he is – barely seemed real.

I got into economics because I love situations where two strangers can meet and trade and both walk away profiting. He got to work the mic in front of a crowd and show up a stranger. And I was considered worthy enough to be rapped against by a hungry pro at the game. A win on both sides.

I’m still not sure I believe it happened.