Unfinished Business: June 20, 2011

This bit of Unfinished Business entails a bit of explanation; more so than I hope future installments will require. I will attempt to be succinct.

A Good Will Gesture.
As you likely know, we lost the great Clarence Clemons (left, top), the former saxophonist for Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band last June. I was surprised at how hard I took it. I was even more surprised at how difficult it was for me to verbalize my feelings as to why. I really shouldn’t have been so shocked, though; I’ve had difficulty in plumbing the depths of my affinity for Springsteen’s music for longer than I’ve been writing this blog.

As I’m sure he is to a lot of his fans, Springsteen has always been a borderline spiritual figure to me, not that I think the dude is god or anything, but for the extraordinary quality of his music; for what he stands for, both as a musician and as a human being; the honesty that flows from his lyrics; the raw passion that exudes from every musical pore of his being. It’s hard to summon up the words to describe the feeling that his work conveys to me — and for the longest time I tried, but couldn’t. I just couldn’t seem to do my own emotions the justice they deserved. That fact alone has hindered me from really saying much at all about him in this space; a place I originally intended to be my personal forum on the music and artists I love.

I’ve collected a lot of fond and funny memories over the years, relating to my Springsteen fandom that I’d always thought might make excellent blog fodder. However, before now I’d never managed to find the inspiration to break through that wall; to find the words that adequately described the feeling his music delivers to me. In another aborted post that I started nearly a year ago, I tried, but it simply wouldn’t come together as I’d hoped.

Then last June, Clarence died on the day before Father’s Day. I was devastated. Springsteen’s longtime friend, confidante, and musical partner in crime was a huge part of my affinity for Bruce’s music overall; his wasn’t simply an instrumental contribution that could be replaced by another sax player. To me, he was a major part of Springsteen’s musical appeal. Again, I wanted to render some kind of significant tribute; something significant to me if to no one else. A straightforward bio/career acknowledgement just wouldn’t do. It had to be more. I stumbled, struggled, and came up with nothing over two days.

Then I received a passively 'Willful’ assist from a guy I had the pleasure of meeting at a wedding I attended in 2008, who has since become one of my favorite personal bloggers. Will Stegemann (@betheboy on Twitter) offered a fun, yet poignant tribute to Clemons the day after his June 18, 2011 passing. His post shed the perfect amount of light on the dim confusion of my self-agitated bundle of emotion regarding Springsteen and the loss of Clemons.

Without spoiling the plot, the story delivers a tribute to Clemons as seen through the eyes of a sub-adolescent, as Will was at the time of his introduction to The Boss’s music. Will’s account of his own childlike sensibilities regarding his Dad’s favorite rock ‘n roll band helped to connect the dots of my over-complicated internal analysis of the place Springsteen’s work occupies in my own life. It allowed me stop thrashing about, mentally, and to look at things simply; identifying my relationship to the artist on the most basic of levels. Had I not read Will’s blog that day, there’s little doubt I’d still be wrestling with the concept even now.

Epiphanies aside, I still got hung up in parsing it all out, so the story sat unfinished for months until this week, when I finally decided to wrap it all up.

Melodramatic much? Oh, absolutely! But I embrace my inner drama queen; it’s a big part of what makes me who I am and I have no intentions to change.

I would hope, however, that after all this, you still have the intention to read this back-dated post, started on June 20, 2011, but finished just today:

Here’s to You, Big Man

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Oh, Have I Got A Lot to Tell YOU...

Seriously Ready to Burst
Gotta do it. Wanna do it. Prolly shouldn't do it, but The Boy Who Cried ‘BLOG’ is back, making promises again — well, maybe not promise promises, but promises of intent, leave us say. I’m planning to crank up the ‘ol personal blog jalopy again real soon and against my better judgment I once again feel compelled to tell you about it instead of just doing it and keeping my big yap shut. It’s just that I’m so freaking excited about getting back to my first love that I simply can’t not talk a little bit about it with you first.

I have been all kinds ‘a busy this summer. Between my new(ish) job (which I began in January) and my daughter Amy's impending nuptials in just less than two weeks (August 29th) — and all the commensurate madness that accompanies such an event — needless to say, I haven’t had much time to think, let alone keep up two blogs.

And yeah, I’ll confess, I have been writing fairly consistently on my hockey blog, what with the continuous activity of the Nashville Predators’ deepest run in the Stanley Cup Playoffs in their history this past spring, followed by the surprisingly contentious re-signing of star defenseman, Shea Weber, there’s been a lot of compelling goings-on in that part of my life, and I’ve had to choose one blog over the other. Wish it didn’t have to be that way; perhaps it won’t always be; however I’m not making any promises about that right now.

On the other hand, I AM promising to myself and to you, that my backlog of AYBABTU posts will be seen to here in the next few weeks, and I am SO looking forward to it, I cannot express how much.

First on the docket will be a return to the original subject matter of this blog, a concert/lifestyle review on my recent experience seeing one of my all-time fave bands, the recently re-united, Toad The Wet Sprocket. Glen Phillips and the boys played before a sold-out Mercy Lounge crowd here in Nashville last Saturday night and it was magical! This will be my first (full-fledged) multimedia review, as I have both audio and video content to share. That should be coming sometime later this week.

Next, and possibly before, depending on how long the Toad story takes, will be the first in about a half-dozen partially written-but-never-finished posts from earlier this year and during my full-time work hiatus of 2010. Most of these stories are very close to completion but I really don’t know exactly how long they’ll each take to finish; so let’s just tease them as ‘coming soon.’

The story topics will range from:

• My time spent in a very exclusive entertainment industry focus group that you probably hear references to on a weekly basis
  
• Thoughts on the extremely disturbing way the radio industry works today, and how it’s changed in recent years
  
• How blogging saved my life
  
• Why the ‘Evil Empire’ is alive and well right here in the state of Tennessee
  
• My thoughts on the end of a TeeVee institution

And there are a few others I’m still toying with that may or may not see the light of day. Some may be even too nerdy for me to stomach seeing in print. We’ll see.

Nonetheless, I wanted to commit myself here online to getting these stories finished and out, at least in part before Amy’s big day, ‘cuz I KNOW I’ll be writing about THAT!

So anyway, keep your eyes peeled for the next few days. I’m hopeful this will be the jump-start I need to get back on an at least one-post-per-week schedule. Wish me (and my schedule) luck.

Type at’cha soon.


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Here’s to you, Big Man

Former Bruce Springsteen And The E Street Band member, Rock Sax legend, Clarence Clemons, seen here performing last November, died June 18, 2011 from stroke complications (AP/Rhona Wise).

A WILLful Assist
This wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been inspired by something that Will Stegemann wrote. You may know him as @BeTheBoy on Twitter, who, coupled with his equally brilliant and lovely spouse, TeeVee industry writer Nina Bargiel (@slackmistress), comprise a one-two punch of avant garde creative goodness that’s sometimes hard to describe, but always a party for the imagination.

And while I really dig both Nina’s edgy hipness and faster-than-your-own-neurons-can-fire wit, Will’s stories just have a way of ‘getting to me,’ particularly when he writes about his late father, who passed away in 2009.

Will seems to use his blog as a vehicle similar in style and purpose to my own; he doesn’t appear to seek engagement with an audience so much as with himself, particularly on subjects of family and his childhood memories. And whether or not that’s actually the case, it is how his posts speak to me.

Yesterday was of course, Father’s Day, and I was hit with a double-dose of BethePoignancy. Will posted a wonderfully-woven tribute to both his late father and the renowned Rock Saxman, Clarence Clemons, who died Saturday from complications of a stroke suffered last week. Clemons’ was a that loss I felt deeply but initially struggled to find a way to accurately express when I first heard the news late Saturday morning. He was 69 years old, a fact that alone was staggering to me. It didn’t seem possible that he could have even been in his sixties, let alone pushing seventy — which in and of itself is a testimony to the passion with which he lived and played music.

All in the Family
A number of aspects to Will’s story touched me profoundly, not the least of which was his experience of first encountering Springsteen’s music as a child in the 1980s, when he internalized his Pop’s everyday-affinity for the Boss’s sound to the extent of play-imagining the E Street Band as stand-ins for his own flesh and blood.

I was particularly tickled by Will’s reference to a live version of Springsteen’s Rosalita that was a particular favorite on his Dad’s car stereo cassette deck. It just so happens that the song was recorded at a club show in 1978 that I myself had desperately tried to attend, but was unable to get my hands on what few actual publicly-accessible tickets were available. I ended up having to settle for listening to the show being broadcast live on the radio, on now-defunct Los Angeles FM Rock station, KMET (I’ll relate the sad story of my own ‘Sunset Boulevard Freeze-Out’ at another time).

However, I mostly wanted to give a tip of the cap to Mister Stegemann for so accurately highlighting the concept of Springsteen’s band as a family, and as such, a pseudo-extended family that of all of the Boss’s fans can relate to — even through the eyes of a kid. It’s a most fitting metaphor and something that has escaped my ability to properly process over the years, as I’ve sought to find a meaningful framework on which to hang the feelings I’ve always had for Springsteen and Clemons in particular. To me, the two have always been a family; a nearly inseparable entity. And while Bruce’s solo work has always been great, I’ve never felt it matched the impact of that achieved together with he and his musical siblings: Clemons and the E Street Band.

Will’s post caused me to ponder just how much that connective vibe of Bruce Springsteen’s persona and early music resonated with me as a 19 year-old in the mid-70s, a point in time when Will’s life was just beginning.

I became cognizant of Springsteen’s music, late one August evening in 1975, hearing Born To Run on the radio for the first time, and as such, being immediately introduced to the soprano sax of Clemons (a.k.a., The Big Man), busting through the airwaves as a part of the E Street Band’s signature sound. For me it was a wonderful new discovery. However, compared to Will’s father, I was merely an AJ-come-lately.

Having grown up on Long Island, NY, Will’s dad (who was just two years older than me) had the unique perspective of being in the same geographic area as the Asbury Park, NJ phenomenon, perhaps knowing of him or actually being a fan before Springsteen hit the big time. Stegmann’s Pop had been a well-seasoned fan for years and went on to raise his kids with an appreciation for The Boss as well. Will’s blog post, Riding With The Big Man is required reading, whether you were an avid fan of Clemons or were only marginally acquainted with his contribution to the sound of the artist who quite frankly was The Beatles of his generation.

As part of my previously mentioned aborted blog post on Springsteen several months ago, I began to write about my initial encounter with The Boss’s music, of which Clarence Clemons’ dynamic presence played a huge part. I’d like to relate that anecdote right now, in The Big Man’s honor.

My World: Rocked
Like so many others, I was blown away by the sound of Born To Run, Springsteen’s third album — but the one that truly made him a household name when it hit the airwaves in the summer of ’75. For me it was one of the truly seminal musical moments of my lifetime; the kind of deal that makes it impossible to forget the first time you experienced something so different, so powerful, that you simply had to stop and say, “Wow! WHO. WAS. THAT?!”

And that’s quite literally what happened, late one night in August 1975, within a few days of when the album was first released. At the time I was three months into my first experience of living away from my parents’ house; sharing a two-bedroom apartment with a pair of roommates in a highly-questionable neighborhood in North Long Beach, California.

On the night in question, I was lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, but the chronic insomnia that was my constant companion during my teen and early-adult years wouldn’t allow me to. As usual, my clock radio was tuned to 95.5 KLOS in Los Angeles, and as also was my habit, I was listening to music while waiting for the Sandman to show up. Since it usually took more than an hour for me to fall asleep each night, I always figured that I might as well spend the time enjoying one of my favorite pastimes: listening to music. It never occurred to me that perhaps my indulging that fave pastime also had plenty to do with why I’d always had trouble falling asleep in the first place…but I digress.

Anyway, I remember just lying there, like so many other nights; staring at the ceiling. I had to get up at 3:00am to go to work at the grocery store the next morning; I remember feeling particularly anxious that I might sleep through my alarm if I didn’t grab some shuteye soon.

Then it happened. My little clock radio nearly jumped off the nightstand — or so it seemed.

The introductory signature blast of Max Weinberg’s booming drum beat, along with The Big Man’s foundational sax note, and Springsteen’s guttural, biting lead guitar riff sent a chill down my spine. Born To Run was rocking my world.

“Who IS that?” I thought.

Initially, I turned my head and stared at the radio, reaching in to turn the volume up and continuing to lean closer and closer until, by Clemons’ bruising mid-song staccato sax bridge, I was completely perpendicular, with my feet on the floor, seated at the side of my bed, fully engaged in a sound like none I’d ever before heard.

There was NO way I was getting to sleep now.

I’m not sure if the DeeJay ever gave the artist’s name after the song was finished, because I remember having made it a point to listen extra hard to the radio the next day, in hopes that I might hear it again and learn the identity of that awesome new band that played it.

I also remember that the part I liked best of all was the sax.

It was without a doubt, the most memorable moment from the five months I spent in that dingy old apartment on 56th and Orange, in an area bordering North Long Beach and South Central Los Angeles. We were located just a couple of blocks north of the gang-infested Carmelitos Projects and a few blocks south of the Compton city limits. It wasn’t a real fun place to be, but it served its purpose for the brief time that I was there. I roomed with a buddy I’d known since junior high school and another acquaintance from my church group, but at that point I probably would have shacked up with Freddy Krueger for the chance to get away from the Nightmare on Lave Avenue that was my existence at the time living at home with step mom Maxine.

I am most happy to say that my love affair with Springsteen and Clemons has lasted considerably longer.

A Window into the Soul
It’s abundantly easy to canonize the departed, especially artists, the output of whose professional lives have touched you in a manner such as that of something as accessible as popular music. It’s like falling in love with a painter, based entirely upon his body of work; never mind that in real life he was a pretentious jerk, who kicked his dog, beat his wife, and ignored his children in private — or even in public. All we know is how awesome his works of art made us feel.

By all accounts, Clemons was a genuinely good guy, and while I could be wrong, I rather doubt we’ll see any ‘Daddy Dearest’-type tell-all accounts from either his four sons or five ex-wives. Does that mean his closets were completely skeleton-free? No, but then, whose is?


One thing is certain; the bond between Clemons and Springsteen defined their music; which in turn defined my love for it from the moment I heard that first note. Even without having heard a note, you could see it in the cover photograph from Born To Run (above).

In a Huffington Post article, posted soon after Clemons’ death, entitled, Why Clarence Clemons Matters to Race Relations, Ben Mankiewicz offers a poignant rendering of the classic image, featuring Clemons & Springsteen:

“Iconic is a wildly overused word, but the cover photo of Born to Run — Bruce Springsteen grinning and leaning on Clarence Clemons' broad shoulder — is a powerful and memorable picture, one that meets the standard for iconic rock n’ roll images. And its status is rooted in the beautiful story that picture tells.

You’ve got this enormously talented, giant black man -- literally “The Big Man” -- saxophone between pursed lips, essentially supporting Springsteen. The look on Bruce’s face is honest and authentic, a genuine moment captured in a photo shoot. There's a giddiness in Bruce's smile: “I'm working with my friend,” he seems to be saying, “and our music has never been better.”

The photo made an instant impact on me, long before their music did.”

Actually, for me the events were reversed. It wasn’t until weeks after I first heard BTR that I actually saw the album cover, but I too was mesmerized by the volumes that photographer Eric Meola’s image spoke in just a glance.

The combination of how the music and the imagery made me feel was nearly indescribable; the feelings of joy, inclusion, friendship; a shared passion for life; an unbridled excitement about the future’s unlimited potential.

Thirty-six years later, my feeling of loss is nearly as indescribable, as no doubt is Springsteen’s. In eulogizing his friend via a statement posted to his website yesterday, Springsteen confirmed with insightful eloquence what I already knew, yet couldn’t express:

“He carried within him a love of people that made them want to love him.

“He created a wondrous and extended family.”

Here’s to you, Big Man, our big brother. Thank you, so very, very much. Rest well.


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Still Scratching My Seven Year Itch (Day 6 of 6)

It's Tuesday, May 24, 2011, Day Six of my six-day blogaversary celebration for AYBABTU. Today actually IS the site’s seventh blogaversary, and as such I thought I’d change things up just a bit. Up to now I’ve been reposting of some of my more obscure, yet favorite stories over the life of this blog, however, today’s entry isn’t exactly all that obscure.

On the afternoon of Thursday August 6, 2009, I received the shocking news via a news alert email I opened at work. Filmmaker John Hughes had sustained a fatal heart attack at only 59 years of age. Hughes was best known for the coming of age film, ‘The Breakfast Club’, a touchstone classic for millions of GenXers. And while I wasn’t attached to his most famous work, Hughes’s demise hit me in way that was nearly as painful. I loved his work as well, not necessarily for the subject matter of his films, but for their essence and the way they made me feel.

Combine Hughes’s death with that of what seemed like half of Hollywood that horrendous final year of the new millennium’s first decade, and what you get is a fairly good representation of how all of 2009 went for me. At that point I was three months out from losing my job at The Company; already feeling the sand beginning to give way beneath my feet. I remember that day having that sickening sense that the loss I was feeling wasn’t an isolated happenstance; it was a wave that was ready to break over my head.

It’s a moment in time I wish not to forget, but rather, to celebrate.

It was was one of those periods of melancholy in my life that somehow have the opposite effect on me than they seem to on other people. No, I’m not a masochist, but just the same, I don’t run from pain either; I embrace it, because the sun will indeed come up tomorrow. When it does, the pain will subside, but I find that the memories of times you’ve had to really fight just to get through is always the best reminder that you are indeed alive.

That’s why this story is special to me, although that has little to do with its relative lack of obscurity.

There have been and continue to be, blog posts that receive more hits from the search engines on a cumulative basis, but no other post that I ever wrote received more traffic in the week that it was first posted than this one. And I can’t take credit for that either. A person I mention in the follow-up to this post, a young woman who had maintained a penpal relationship with Hughes over the years since ‘Breakfast Club,’ received a great deal of attention for her own blog’s reaction to his death, and was kind enough to link to my story, greatly enhancing its ‘Google juice.’

So whether you are a fan of John Hughes or just want to get a better handle on why I’m so weird, here is final installment in my blogaversary reposts series for this year.

Happy Birthday, AYBABTU.

Enjoy...

SATURDAY, AUGUST 08, 2009

He Made Us Comfortable in Someone Else’s Skin

What a lousy year…
I’m really not in the mood to write today, but I feel I must. I need to do so in order to pay tribute on at least a somewhat timely basis to the passing of yet another luminary in our culture whose life has come to a premature end; a man whose movies defined a generation in a way that may never be duplicated: reknowned 1980s writer/director/producer, John Hughes.


_{Photo courtesy Cinetext/Allstar}

Over the past three months I’ve started and stopped at least four stories regarding the notable lives that 2009 has claimed; the list is staggering. It seems that each time I try to express my regret for one of the individuals who has passed, another one drops off and I’m once again crippled by grief and have to set it aside.

On June 25th we experienced the double-whammy of losing both Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson within mere hours of one another. And though these were the two who captured the attention of the TeeVee news magazines for weeks, there were others who preceded them. Giants of significance to me, in the personal, entertainment, pop culture, and political arenas; names like Ed McMahon, my Father In-Law, David Carradine, Dan Miller, Chuck Daly, Dom Deluise, Jack Kemp, Bea Arthur, Mark ‘The Bird’ Fidrych, Paul Harvey, James Whitmore, Andrew Wyeth, and the great Ricardo Montalbán.

But the Grim Reaper wasn’t finished in June; he kept right on going, and has in just the past six weeks claimed the additional lives of Walter Cronkite, Robert McNamara, Steve McNair, and Karl Malden.

Now if you’re looking at that list and either scratching your head because there’s a bunch of names there you either don’t recognize — or in whose passing you weren’t quite moved enough to really feel bad about, well, no worries here. Chances are you’re not 53 years old, have split your lifetime between LA and Nashville, and/or are married to the daughter of a late, former Apollo 11 Moon Mission engineer.

You Just Never Know
We all have our own individual list of people that have touched our lives; its not the same for everyone, just as we also wield our own sphere of influence that touches the lives of others.

Sometimes that influence is through incidental contact; other times it’s quite intentional. Sometimes it’s a part of our job; other times it’s none of our freaking business. Sometimes our influence is a good thing; other times it’s the worst thing that we could possibly do to another person.

There’s one constant in all of this however, and that is that we never know.

We never know how just a look from us can change another person’s day; how an encouraging word can either make or break a child; how the conscious decision to NOT let our ill mood affect our response can make all the difference in the outcome of an inter-personal situation.

We never know how years of direct exposure to another soul can either mold that person’s character for good, or cast an irrevocable die of pain upon their life.

We just never know.

My all-time personal favorite quote — the single greatest influence I have ever received from a poet, is displayed in the masthead of my blog. It’s not from a poem, but is from the heart of a wise and inspired poetess, Maya Angelou:

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

This has become my mantra; something I attempt to use to govern my actions; to make each and every contact with another person a positive one, because…you never know.

A Hughe(s) Loss
John Hughes probably had a clue, but I doubt he ever knew just how influential his movies were, or how much he would be missed when he left us this past Thursday.

I sure as hell didn’t know how it would affect me.

And the thing is, at the time I heard the news, I really didn’t know why I was so shaken.

Perhaps it was just the straw-that-broke-the camel’s-back of this god-forsaken ‘another one bites the dust’ kind-of-year.

Perhaps it was the fact that just a few days earlier I had actually done a Google search on Hughes to try and find out what he was up to. I hadn’t heard anything about him making movies in what seemed like forever. Was he ill or just laying low? Why had he dropped out of the limelight? Why had he not directed a single feature film since the early 90s?

And then came Thursday...and he was gone.

The irony was simply too sharp. I really had to swallow hard as I read aloud to my co-workers the news of John Hughes death from the press release I received via email late Thursday afternoon.

I felt as though someone had punched me in the gut.

The man was 59 years old — just six years my senior. I had no idea. I’d always assumed him to be was much older than that. I’d never even seen a picture of him prior to that news release.

I guess I knew a different John Hughes. The filmmaker I admired was perhaps different than the one whose movies you connected with as a teenager. I was well beyond my teens in the 1980s, but instead was traveling through my late twenties and into my thirties by the time Hughes’ films exploded upon the scene.


Hughes’ original Brats: (clockwise from left) Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Anthony Michael Hall, Emilio Estevez, and Molly Ringwald
_{Photo courtesy WashingtonPost.com}

I was, by MY generation’s directive, almost ready to join the ranks of ‘those not to be trusted’ when The Breakfast Club hit the theaters in 1985.

Oh, and did I mention, I what an ASS I was back then, too?

In the mid-80s I used to bristle at Generation X, as they recently had been dubbed. The kids born after the mid-60s; those malcontents who listened to Punk Rock, dyed their hair chartreuse, and spent their time yakking about ‘No Nukes.’ These were the age and experience group that John Hughes’ films were directed to the most.

I realized at the time that this must have been how my parent’s generation felt about me and my mates in the 60s, when the first so-called ‘generation gap’ formed.

I was aware of The Breakfast Club, although not necessarily cognizant of Hughes per se. What I did know, however, was the ‘Brat Pack’ — this group of up-and-coming actors, and how they were being hyped as ‘the next big thing’ in Hollywood. The Breakfast Club was ostensibly the birth of the Brat Pack, as noted in the 1985 New York magazine cover story which popularized the phrase.

Yeah, they were brats alright, I thought. Kids these days.

I just rolled my eyes.

But as has so often in my life been demonstrated, I later realized that I needed to stop assuming things that weren’t necessarily true. I mean, you know what they say about ASSuming…

So I went to a different ‘Brat Pack’ movie that came out that same year: St. Elmo’s Fire. It wasn’t a John Hughes film, but its ensemble cast featured three of the Breakfast Club’s five principles, including Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy and Judd Nelson.

I loved it.

But enough about brats; back to John Hughes.

An Overdue Present
I may have given the Brat Pack a second chance in 1985, but would continue to be late to the John Hughes love-fest for another five years, until a screaming kid would force us to take him to a movie about another screaming kid: Macaulay Culkin in his portrayal of the precocious Kevin McCallister, in Hughes’ comedic masterpiece, Home Alone.

Our kids were ages eight and six in December, 1990, and Home Alone was all the rage among most of the young parents we knew. So after much cajoling from our son Shawn, we treated the kids to the now-classic Chrismastime flick — which they loved.

However it was I who received the long-overdue present at the movie theater that day: the gift of John Hughes.

There are two movies from the Early 90s that simply enrapture me, not necessarily for their production values, or even their story lines alone, but rather the aesthetics created by the combination of those two elements that infuse the mind of the viewer.

One film, about which I’ve written fairly often in previous stories, is City Slickers — both for it’s breathtaking cinematography of the West and its humorous-yet-gripping truths about a man saying goodbye to his youth.

Home Alone is the other, and probably for exact opposite reason. Oh it’s funny, silly, and all of those things that one would expect from a plot about a young boy who believes he’s made his family disappear, but there was something more in it for me.

Home Alone reconnected me to my childhood — not that I ever spent any time fending off burglars by greasing up the basement steps or pretending I was a gangster joyously filling my enemies full’a lead.

What I got out of the movie — and the numerous other John Hughes films I would subsequently rent and devour over the years that followed, was pure John Hughes; a guy who was a child of the Midwest, just like me; a child of the 50s and 60s, just like me; and a filmmaker who poured out just the right amount of that part of his life into every movie he made.

I don’t really know how else to define it, but the ‘feeling’ of Kevin McCallister’s neighborhood in suburban Chicago is exactly how it ‘felt’ in similar settings throughout the Midwest I grew up in. The flavor was unmistakable to me. And amid all the movie’s laughs and high-jinx was the poignancy of this connective tissue that bound it all together.

This wasn’t just a movie about a kid in suburban America, it was a movie about me. And I’m certain that the way Hughes affected me in Home Alone is the same way so many GenXers felt about The Breakfast Club.

He made us feel connected.

John Hughes didn’t just make movies about teens; he made movies about the human spirit — weaving characters into whom we could lose ourselves and identify; seeing our lives through their eyes for just a little while, and then returning us to reality a little more enlightened; a little more encouraged to go out and make the world our own. He had a remarkable ability to speak to the heart, whether in laughter or in angst, making us comfortable in someone else’s skin.

And he will be missed.


Next: John Hughes — addendum

Still Scratching My Seven Year Itch (Day 5 of 6)

It's Monday, May 23, 2011, Day Five of my six-day pre-blogaversary celebration for AYBABTU, reposting of some of my somewhat more obscure, yet favorite stories over the seven-year life of this space.

I’m beginning to see a pattern here. It would seem that many of my favorite posts are thoughtful, rather sad tributes to people in my life who have died. Yesterday it was Johnny Carson, today it’s my step-mom Maxine, and tomorrow it will be filmmaker John Hughes. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself...

Anyway, one thing I wanted to mention regarding today’s repost is how much I wish I’d taken Latin in school; it’s a fascinating language for me, largely because so much of our English words are based on Latin derivatives. And being the latter-day etymologist-wannabe I’ve become in my old age, I could poke around a Latin/English translation website for hours – which is what it appears I DID in coming up with the title for this story.

However again, I don’t want to get too far off-track here, except to say that I now realize that when I wrote the story back on June 1, 2010, I goofed a bit in my self-translation of the title phrase Secundum Memor, which, allegedly, is Latin for, In Accordance With Remembering.

The problem is that in actual Latin usage the words would be transposed. It should be phrased, Memor Secundum, with the preposition secundum following its object instead of the other way around, as I’d mashed it up via an online translator. Oh those crazy Romans; maybe I need to get to know their language a little better if I want to use it.

But all levity aside, this is another serious post and one that’s especially close to my heart, as its subject is the woman with whom I shared a turbulent, emotional, quintessential love-hate relationship in my youth. Nevertheless, there was perhaps no person I ever more wished to be accepted by than my step-mother, and thankfully, in the end, I was. Enjoy...

TUESDAY, JUNE 01, 2010

Secundum Memor

For me, Memorial Day is always at least a day late
My father served in the army during WW II, but luckily for my family, didn’t see any time on the battlefield. He’s still with us today; a hale and hearty 86-goin’-on-87 year-old.

None of my aunts and uncles lost their lives fighting for our country either.

I didn’t have any friends or relatives who died in Viet Nam (that I know of, anyway), save for a high school buddy of my late brother David, Glenn Bailey, for whom I always say a prayer each time the calendar rolls around to the final Monday in May.

I don’t believe either of my kids have had friends who’ve lost their lives in Iraq or Afghanistan; nor have any of our family friends with children in current military service dealt with the anguish of such a fate.

Even my most famous soldier-relative, WW I’s most decorated, Sergeant Alvin C. York, who defied incredible odds and employed legendary valor, managed to come through his tour of duty in The Great War with life intact.

So, that being said, Memorial Day, apart from a general reverence on behalf all of the men and women who fought to secure my freedom, had never been all that personal a day of remembrance for me.

That is, until ten years ago today.

June 1, 2000 was the day my step-mom, Maxine was laid to rest.

She died that Memorial Day weekend from a viral infection, which suddenly overtook her body during recovery from a previous surgery. It was shocking; unexpected; devastating. She was 78 years old, but had always been in good health. However that began to change following a second knee replacement in 1999 and a subsequent series of complications, including removal of a benign tumor and a staph infection, which she was recovering from at the time that the secondary viral infection took over and ended her life.

The stormy relationship Maxine and I shared is well-documented, yet the loss I still feel each June 1st has never abated; and I doubt, ever will.

For the vast majority of my adult life, I was on wonderful terms with the woman who raised me; who taught me responsibility, and “the principle of the thing.” But it hadn’t always been so.

The lessons she delivered were hard and unrelenting; the same way that she had learned them, growing up during The Great Depression. I had every reason to rebel; every reason to hate her, but I endured, and eventually won her favor.

The years seemed to mellow her, but I’m not certain of that. All I know for sure is that her stance toward me changed after I became an adult. She often made it a point to let me know that finally, I had “done good” after years of not-so-subtly suggesting that I never would.

I learned the definition of forgiveness through my step-mother; not by her example, but rather by God’s provision of my opportunity to grant it unto her, despite all the reasons I had not to.

Ten years later, now with adult children of my own, with whom many of the same issues of will that my Mom and I battled having come and gone, I see things through different eyes; even more so now than I did ten years ago, when I stood at the podium of Forest Lawn’s Church of Our Fathers, delivering her eulogy.

There are always two sides to every story; dual points of view, both seemingly ‘right’ in the eyes of those who hold them. Whether it was hers or whether it was mine that was the correct one is immaterial.

What is important, and what is that part of the substance of my character gleaned from my relationship with Maxine, is that there is good in every situation, no matter how dark or daunting. A battle of wills does not always declare a victor, nor does it always brand a loser.

Maxine taught me that there is more than one way to love.

Thanks, Mom.


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Still Scratching My Seven Year Itch (Day 2 of 6)

It's Friday, May 20, 2011, Day Two of my six-day pre-blogaversary celebration for AYBABTU, reposts of a few of my personal favorite posts that you may have missed, and a few that I, quite frankly, had all but forgotten about myself until I decided to do this retrospective.

Andy And Me
Today’s retro post is another in what I consider to be one of my more personal back-glances at my professional career, and yet another reason why I will never feel as though my life hasn’t been absolutely full.

For anyone my age, the image below is unmistakable; its artist as easily identifiable as a Renaissance master. Andy Warhol was perhaps the best known pop artist of my lifetime. And inasmuch as his timeless, ‘Marilyn’ is perhaps his best-known work, his greatest contribution to pop-culture may in fact be a written quote rather than his trademark painterly photographic treatments.


_{© 1962 Andy Warhol}

In a 1968 exhibition catalog for his exhibit at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Warhol penned the wildly-famous and oft-used pop-culture maxim, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” The quote’s popular paraphrase, “15 minutes of fame,” is attached to seemingly every ephemeral, one-hit wonder-celeb that comes down the pike these days, in essence, giving prophet’s credence to Warhol’s famous line. And while its sarcastic, quasi-derogatory inference may be an insult to those who crave fame’s fickle favor, for regular folks like you and I, it can be a subtle vote of accomplishment to actually see the product of your own hard work reflected in even a modicum of recognition; to realize even your five minutes of fame.

For when it all comes down to it, in my opinion, sometimes close is more than close enough.

Enjoy.

Still Scratching My Seven Year Itch (Day 1 of 6)

A Royal Awakening
Today is Thursday May 19, 2011 and I just got a jolt of adrenaline from my visit to the blog of a dear old friend; someone with whom I rarely communicate anymore. She was the very first person to let me know that this blog was more than merely an online diary; that there actually was someone out there. She became AYBABTU’s first commenter, in my third post on May 25, 2004.

This isn’t the first time I’ve made reference to the story about Queenie’s inaugural comment, but now, years later, I come back to it because it holds such a strong place in my heart.

We each started our blogs that same month, as did thousands of others during Blogger’s historic upgrade of early ’04. We became enthusiastic supporters of each others’ work for several years thereafter, but gradually, as has been the case with many, we each eventually fell off the pace as life took precedence.

However on a nostalgic whim today I decided to check up on Queenie’s blog and was delighted to discover that after having dropped out completely for more than a year, she has recently begun posting again.

And just as great (to me, today, at any rate) is the fact her blog still looks exactly the same now as it did in 2004, so I was immediately transported back to seven years ago, when this wonderful adventure of blogging began for both of us.

And then suddenly it registered that the anniversary of AYBABTU is just a few days away, as is Harold Camping’s prediction of the coming of The Rapture, supposedly happening this weekend, on Sunday May 21st.

So, I decided that just in case the world comes to an end as we know it a few days before my seventh blogaversary on May 24th, I wanted to mark the occasion a few days early.

As a matter of fact, I think I’m gonna make this a running theme this week; a sort of ‘The Six Days of Blog-mas’ if you will.

Each day I’ll post a brief blurb regarding the life of my blog along with a link to one of AJ’s (other) Greatest Writs that's not listed in my ‘best of’ page (in the nav bar above). To be honest there are a few favorite stories that I’d been considering regurgitating anyway, so this seems like as good a time to do that as any. Hopefully you’ll find them enjoyable to read again, or for the first time.

Blogaversary Post #1
Anyway, for today I give you, Random Ruminations of A Man Left To His Own Devices (Part II). It’s the humorous part of an early two-part post from June 2004, on a pair of topics that came to mind while I was left on my own by my wife for the weekend.

Part two is a site more enjoyable read than part one, which now in retrospect I find to be a rather bitchy whine about the shortcomings of male friendships. You can read it if you want, but don't forget to wear your hip-waders.

Enjoy, and I’ll seeya tomorrow!

Oh-fer-August

Nope…not gunna duuh it…Wudn’t be prudent
Believe me, I know. I know my tendencies. And if you’ve read this blog or have known me for any length of time, you know ‘em too. But I’m not gonna do what I normally do in this circumstance; I’m goin’ a different way.

Once again, it’s been a while — like five and-a-half weeks — since my last post; in baseball terms I did an ‘oh-fer’ the month of August, and as you may know, my oft-repeated wont after such a lapse in content is to come out spewing apologies for my absence, particularly in view of the fact that as recently as June I publically ‘rededicated’ myself to more regular blogging.

Yeah, I know. “Wolf.”

However I’m not feeling particularly apologetic today. In fact, as much as I would like to have done the opposite, I more-or-less voluntarily took a break from social media the past month or so, partially out of necessity — and partially to see if I could really pull it off.

In retrospect, I’m kinda proud of myself for doing the right thing.

The hardest part was reducing my Twitter stream to less than a trickle. To their credit, several people actually did miss me and expressed some concern that I was in fact alright, physically, which I appreciated a great deal.

But no, I wasn’t abducted by aliens or in the hospital doin’ the H1N1 tango.

I was workin’ like a mofo.

I chose to pour all my time into two freelance web design projects I’ve been working on, the proceeds from which are vital to my family’s bottom line. I decided to give them nearly all of my attention and I must say the results have been extremely positive.

I’ll be back with links when everything is finalized (I’m still in the very final stages of wrapping up both sites), but I can’t help but admit that I’m really proud of how everything is turning out.

In the Pipeline
I’ll have to admit, however, I did cheat — just a little. I spent a couple days two weekends ago, writing the lion’s share of what will be my next multi-part post — a miniseries on the death of a well-known journalist who was a longtime friend and colleague of my brother Alex.

Hopefully, shortly thereafter, I’ll have a belatedly-posted, Mowerly Musings piece of as-yet indeterminate length, that really, I’ve been thinking about for most of this long, dreadfully hot and humid summer that we’ve had here in Middle Tennessee. It’s part ‘tolerate thy neighbor’ rant and part moral object lesson; and I hope it sounds as interesting on paper as it does right now, rattling around here inside my head. You be the judge.

Then there’s hockey. Training Camp for the Nashville Predators starts in a week-and-a-half, and the regular season, just a little more than a month from today. I’ll definitely be jumping back up on the Zamboni and previewing the Preds’ upcoming 2010-11 season on my hockey blog as well.

Ohhh…and I may have a few things to say about my daughter, Amy, and a gentleman friend of hers whom we met this Labor Day Weekend...

So yeah, I’ve been away, but it was an absence with a purpose, and my focus on work, I believe has indeed paid off (no pun intended). I look forward to engaging your comments either here, on PMFF, or on Facebook and Twitter.

The summer of my dis-CONtent, for the most part, is over.

Catch ya again real soon.


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Happy Birthday...To You.

Simulblogging
I really don’t have a lot of time to write today, so if you’ll forgive the cross-pollenization, this is a simulblog; I’m posing identically, both to All Your Blogs Are Belong to Us and Pull My Fang Finger.

This is a note directed at you who for the most part only know me as that goofy guy who wears his heart on his sleeve via his mostly sappy-yet-passionate, personal and/or hockey-related blog posts. And hopefully, you also know that I don’t take a lot of things for granted; usually going a bit overboard in my effusiveness on the various subjects I’m passionate about.

So if my PMFF readers will forgive the off-topic nature of this missive, the main reason I’m double-posting today is because I don’t want to miss anybody; I want to let all of my friends, both on Facebook, Twitter, and throughout the blogosphere, know how much I appreciate you, and how humbled I am at the many Birthday good wishes I’ve received this morning.

Yep, today is my birthday, the day I officially climb into the rarefied air of my mid-fifties. I turn 54 today, so I can no longer say with any conviction that I’m just in my ‘early’ 50s. And that’s kinda significant for people who are still in their 20s and 30s, because if they’re anything like me (and I’m pretty confident they are), they look at you pretty differently after you hit the half-century mark, and even more so as you inch closer to 60 — that magical age when everyone more-or-less officially becomes ‘old.’

I’m pretty confident that I’m as good an example as anyone in confirming the notion that ‘you’re only as old as you feel.’ And I do NOT feel any different now than I did, when I was half my current age. Oh yeah, my body reminds me — often — that I’m no longer that 20 or even 30 year-old who used to fly through the air with the greatest of ease as a gymnast, but it still hasn’t convinced me that I’m not the same person.

I only wish someone would tell that to the prospective employers who've apparently been casting my resumes into the circular file after discerning my age from viewing my job history.

Nevertheless I am indeed wiser for the years that evermore quickly seem to pass, which only intensifies my acknowledgment of the wisdom plied by George Bernard Shaw when he penned the lyric, “Love, like youth is wasted on the young.”

However, I know my love has not been wasted, nor my youth for that matter. It has taken me through a lot of stupidity and halfhearted attempts at self-definition, into a wonderful balance of accomplishment and failure; enough of both so as to fully appreciate the difference between the two; never, ever forgetting the path that brought me here.

I love my life, and the people who’ve allowed me to live it so well.

Thank you, my friends, for making this birthday and each one hereafter, a true reason for me to celebrate.

Cheers.

* * * * *

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Get To Know Me...Oh, Wait...You Already Do...

Allow Me to Reintroduce Myself
NOTE: As busy as I am right now, today I needed to cheat a little. This is a two year-old post that really never saw the light of day, but was to be the maiden entry in my initial attempt at blog revitalization, a boy-who-cried-wolf grand reopening of AYBABTU in January 2009. I had previously alluded to the idea in a few posts and on Twitter, and had even secured the favor of two very high-level Twitter users to promote the announcement, but subsequent difficulties with the new blog template, along with a general disillusionment with where I was actually going with this ‘AJ 2.0’ schlock kind of brought me to my senses prior to making a complete ass of myself.

Well now I have a much better understanding of where I fit into this social media jigsaw and I’m ready give it another try; this time without the fanfare.

It’s a sort of reintroductory post that largely assumes that you don’t know me. However, thanks to the recent, huge show of support from my longtime Blogsville compadres, chances are, to most of those who will now be reading it, it’s old news with a bit of a twist.

So if you’ll pardon my posting a re-tread, I’ll take this opportunity to get the most of my limited time this week. I stumbled upon it today and thought it still held enough water to go ahead and post, seeing as how I now actually have sort of re-launched this site. I’ve edited and updated the story for a more current disposition of my circumstances, but toned down some of the rhetoric regarding my once-assumed assault on the social media world (oyeee vey).

So if you don’t know me, please read on. And if you’ve known this blog for years, I’d invite you to read anyway; I have a message for you as well.

I honestly don’t know whether I’m needlessly psyching myself up with this blog relaunch business or if I’ll eventually fall back into old patterns after the excitement wears off, but I truly want to give this renewed commitment a serious try.

I hope you’ll like what you read enough to join me and see where it leads.

* * * * *

Who am I?
Funny; I ask myself that question all the time. And seeing as this is the relaunch/re-birth of All Your Blogs Belong to Us, I figured it might be a good time to reintroduce myself, both to those who have known me in this space previously and to the new friends I will meet forthwith.

I suppose that first and foremost, I'd have to describe myself as a wise-cracker; and when I say a ‘wise-cracker,’ I don't mean to say that I'm a smart, white southern guy — although I have been referred to as a "pseudo-intellectual", I am caucasian, and I do live in Nashville.

But of course, what I really mean is that I like to goof around, drop a few puns, make fun, be made fun of, and generally do my best to make you smile.

However there is most definitely a serious side to my personality, and when it comes right down to it, that's the part that truly makes me who I am.

I like to think...a lot; maybe too much.

I write about what I think, as well as music, my family and my friends.

What have I done?
As far as who I am in real life, anonymity on the web is important to me, although I've given out more than enough personal info to allow anyone to figure out my identity if they truly had the mind to. Nevertheless, I maintain at least a thin veneer of secrecy about my corporal identity, if for no other reason than to protect the guilty — including myself. I used to maintain that for the sake of my corporate life as well; but seeing as I’m currently unemployed, that doesn’t seem to be as important now.

In fact, things have changed so much for me that I actually find myself hoping that a prospective employer will find my blog, given the elevated station of social media currently in the business world. I’d like to think that my experience in this medium speaks well of the overall experience I have as a new media creative, as well as the point that I am whom I appear to be. If you wish to get to know me, just read my blog.

But, oh yeah, back to protecting the guilty; I respect the privacy of my friends and family members, so the names of any and all living persons (with the obvious exception of publicly-known figures) referred to in my stories are pseudonyms. As a matter of fact, my stepsister, who is a huge fan of this blog, has for years been requesting that I create an AYBABTU Scorecard — you know, “ya can’t tell the players without a scorecard”? — so that she can keep track of all our relatives that I refer to in my stories. I really need to sit down and do that. Heck, even I sometimes need to go back and check what name I referred to a certain person as if there’s been any length of time between mentioning them.

I do talk a lot about my family, but I really love to talk about my friends; that’s become somewhat of a trademark of mine.

I often try to let people know how much I appreciate them; not to kiss their asses, but to make them feel special — because they are. I believe we’re all rockstars, in our own certain way, and I like to provide even a small sense of that for those I love in any way I can. Sometimes it's just nice to experience even a little confirmation in this day and age when we often go overlooked, taken for granted, or even abused.

Perspective
As my life has already passed well beyond the halfway point (statistically speaking, anyway — but piss on that — I'm goin’ for the century mark!), I’d have to say that I've had a pretty decent existence. I've had success in a lot of areas, but that success has been tempered by horrible loss — more so than anyone should have to bear.

I’ve a lost an unfair percentage of my immediate and extended family to inherited Early-Onset Alzheimer’s disease, including my grandfather, mother, elder brother; and I’m now in the process of losing the most beloved of them all, my younger brother, Alex, currently in the advanced stages of AD, is currently in hospice, and is not expected to live beyond this year.

And that’s less than half of the victims that this hideous plunderer of life has plucked from only two generations of my mother’s side of the family.

However, strewn amongst the losses, I’ve scored more than a few victories. I’ve enjoyed the success of being an All-American collegiate athlete; lived one of my dreams as a part of the commercial music industry, and for eleven years enjoyed another dream job as a corporate web designer.

I've done some very smart things — chief of which was to marry a woman without whom I would truly be lost: my Michelle (ooh..I feel a song coming on...). I've written a lot about her. We celebrated our 31st wedding anniversary this past March, and I feel like a freakin' Einstein when I consider how special that fact is.

Michelle has given me two wonderfully perfect, imperfect kids, whom I love with all of my heart (I’ll actually be talking about one of them in my next post). Both of our children are grown, graduated from college and gone, but we have a great relationship with them; they are not only my kids, but also my friends. You can hardly imagine how special that is for me to say.

Materially, I've also been blessed to have a lot without necessarily ever making a lot of money. But even if I had made it, I most likely would have lost it all when I literally lost my shirt in the mid-90s.

Wait...did I forget to mention that I've done a lot of dumb things too? Well I have; and a few of the things I did that turned up the temperature of the financial hot water we found ourselves swimming in 15 years ago is at the top of the list.

Nevertheless, working together as never before, Michelle and I fought off the foreclosure of our home; I got three jobs and together we worked our way back to debt freedom — just in time to put our two kids through college (on cash, of course!) at the dawn of the new millennium.

Through all the up and downs, the Internet has defined me, more than a few times. After a ten-year career in the music industry, I launched fulltime into web design in 1995, a career that has alternately been my greatest joy and the bane of my existence.

Where am I going?
As the first decade of the 21st Century fades from view, the Net is smiling on me once again. I am both happy and excited to immerse myself in the phenomenon that is social media; it’s the primary reason I’ve re-launched this blog, although my ancient Blogger template was long overdue for the scrap heap even three years ago sorry, Doug — and you’re welcome, Dylan).

I've always said that I write for an audience of three: me, myself, and I. And for the most part, that remains true. However I'm ready to go beyond myself; to push the envelope a little, and really become a part of the burgeoning, extended web community now augmented by Facebook and Twitter.

But again, I ain’t no ‘Internet Marketer.’ I’m a web designer who merely happens to be a personal blogger; I’ll never pretend to be otherwise. I don’t write to generate business; I write to speak my mind and to order my thoughts. My personal brand is much more about who I am than what I do. I’m the real deal; what you see is me, like it or lump it.

Hopefully you’ll like a lot more than you lump; I’m sorta counting on that, else I’d probably have made the decision to scap this thing and just go to Walgreens to pick up a diary.

Beyond the obvious personal information I’ll blog about, my overall role in this community remains to be seen. However, it’s more than likely going to be equal parts court jester and Wal-Mart greeter, with a just enough pertinent social commentary and tech-info-for-right-brainers thrown in to make my claim of being a webbie appear legit, but not so much as to alienate the casual reader.

If you’ve seen me on Twitter, you probably know that while I may swim with SocMed sharks, I’m much more pilot fish than great white. I’m learning from the best, but have no aspirations to be Chris Brogan Jr.

Seriously though, I may not make you richer, but that’s not my goal. There are more than enough folks out there with far better qualifications than I to fill that bill. My chief aim is to make you smile and to make you think; to make your mind richer. And if I can do that, I think I’ve written a pretty good story.

In addition to the old friends I’ve had for years who are still out there, I'm excited about the new friends I've already met through Twitter and Facebook, and look forward to reaching out even more, hopefully with greater concentration on topically-based subjects, as opposed to my normal inclination to spend the lion’s share of my blog’s energy navel-gazing.

(However if you wanna see my navel, I’ve been told I’ve got a cute one…minus the lint.)

Wanna come with?
If we’ve never met, I look forward to meeting you soon; if we’re already friends, I look forward to expanding that friendship to a place from which we both can benefit even more. I look forward to the changes, and the rewards that lay ahead.

Seeya ‘round!


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Blog Comments Reunion Wrap-up...and a NEW Challenge

Holy MacAnoli!
Y'know I really sort of dreaded writing it, but my previous series, A Place Called Blogsville, was one of those things you just ‘sorta haveta do’ sometimes to move on. And quite frankly, when I first conceived of writing a tribute to the group of my fellow bloggers who all discovered each other during the golden eighteen months of Blogger.com — mid-2004 to late-2005 — that’s what I was doing, moving on.

I was totally convinced that most everyone had purposefully and permanently eschewed blogging in favor of Facebook, Twitter, and/or their ever-increasingly busy and more-complicated lives.

I knew a small handful of folks would respond to the post, but I mostly expected crickets. I really thought the old neighborhood was dead.

Heh. A funny thing happened on the way to the funeral.

I never dreamed the response would be so great, or that so many of you longed for the old days just as much as I did. I never realized that so many had stopped blogging pretty much only because everyone else seemed to have done so as well.

But how awesome was it to have just about everyone back together again in the same place? Thank you all once again for making it such a fun time!

I guess sometimes you really can go home again. :)

And I am even happier to learn that, at least from initial reports, Inanna, Leese, and (eventually, for a limited time only) Lovisa, have decided to begin blogging regularly again, joining Cybele, Jennifer, and Sydwynd — who really never stopped, and Jack, who revived his blog late last year.

I guess sometimes all we need is a nudge. And so I'm gonna try and give you one more.

Be my guest.
In my reintroduction to blogs outside the ol’ hood over the past two and a half years, I’ve become intrigued by what seems to be an increasingly common practice. And only in light of the great response from everyone on the comments party (I honestly hadn't thought of this beforehand), I want to offer something to any of my friends who’d be willing to take part.

One of the things many of you expressed that took you away from bloggging, and/or has kept you from returning to it, is none other than the big ‘ol ‘NT’ — no time.

No time to be consistent; no desire to subject yourself to the pressure of getting something out there on a regular basis. Believe me, we all can identify with this.

But what if you only had to write a post, like, every six weeks or something? Would that work?

Here’s the deal. I’m just like you, busier than a one-armed paperhanger with fleas. But I want to rededicate my blog to having new content out there at least every few days, if not daily. So, if you guys are keen to the idea, I would be more than happy to establish a guest blogger spot here on AYBABTU. It would be a weekly feature at a consistent time and day. The offer is open to anyone (whom I already know and trust, of course), on any subject that isn't likely to draw trolls or spammers (and I think we all know what I’m talking about — two of the three things you're not supposed to discuss in polite company).

I would LOVE to give any of you who no longer have an active blog of your own, the means to scratch that itch that has never gone away. And if our little comments reunion was any indication, this could be a lot of fun.

So if you're interested (and it’s not gonna hurt my feelings if you’re not), shoot me an email at ajinnashville (at) gmail(dot)com.

Might give new meaning to the phrase All YOUR Blogs Are Belong to US, eh?

Blogroll Update
One other thing that I alluded to previously in a comment during the reunion: I am sad/embarrassed to say that I do not have URLs for many of my old neighbors’ new or former digs. Over the course of redesigning my template and throughout the period of the last few years, as so many have dropped out of the ‘hood, I have lost a bunch of links.

So if you would, if your blog is still alive and kickin’, please leave me the URL in a comment so that I can rebuild my blogroll with everyone who is still active in our neck ‘o the woods?

I hate to admit that I’ve lost track of some of your sites, but if you’d do that for me I’d be much obliged.

Hope to hear from you soon!


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A Place Called Blogsville (Addendum, Part II)

By way of explanation, all but one the following screen shots below are no longer available in live web page form, but were accessed courtesy of the cached backup archives of The Internet Wayback Machine project, which is, when you can get the archive to actually return an cached site, another of the things that falls into my ‘greatest-thing-since-sliced-bread’ category. Despite the spotty availability of some of the archived site pages and the inordinate amount of time they typically take to load, there isn’t a more valuable resource on the Net in my estimation, and I wish to express my most sincere appreciation to Bibliotheca Alexandrina, International School of Information Science (ISIS) for this invaluable resource!

With that in mind, in referencing our purposes here I experienced only mild success in pulling together the web site archives from the particular points in time I wished to illustrate. Therefore I cannot say with exact certainty when the site messages below first appeared, only that their messages and design updates appeared by the dates indicated.

* * * * *

Every Picture Tells a Story
They say that it’s always darkest before the dawn, and at Pyra, the fire was just about down to a flicker. 2001 brought with it the realization that the company’s six-person crew was about five more than they could afford.

The funding money they had received a year earlier had run dry and some hard realizations had to be faced. After unsuccessfully attempting to market a paid version of Blogger (Blogger Pro) it was decided that the company would remain in business, but that its operations would be drastically curtailed out of necessity. As Pyra’s CEO, Evan Williams would stay on as the company’s only full-time paid staffer.

The Pyra website told the story throughout the process with updated announcements of the company’s status from March 2000 through May 2002; the frequently-changing homepage became a weblog unto itself.



This is how the Pyra website looked on March 2, 2000 (click to view at full size); still hawking the Pyra app, but speaking in more and more excited terms about Blogger, which had just reached version 2.0. However the wind had already begun to shift.



By May 10, 2000, the website — and the company — was in full re-tool mode, prepping for a full-on, fully optimistic run with Blogger. Oh, and the picture? No, that's not a couple of astronauts in zero-gravity training — it's Meg Hourihan (left) and Paul Bausch burning off some pent-up energy, doing 360s for the webcam. (click to view at full size)



By August 15, 2000, a freshly redesigned Pyra.com began the process of distancing itself from itself, literally. (click to view at full size)

However, the ensuing ‘fall’ season would carry with it a double-entendre. The problems would continue for Pyra, but the money would not.



For “the careful observer” and any other of his friends and readers, who knew where to look, Ev Williams laid it all out in his personal blog, Evhead.com, on January 31, 2001, in an extremely honest and straightforward post entitled, And Then there Was One. (click to view at full size, and in case you were wondering, yes, I did manually photoshop the screenshot into two columns for easier viewing.)

Williams describes in painful detail how the company had laid off all but himself in December, but that some of his team had worked on, for as long as a month for little-to-no pay, in hopes that a new deal with an undisclosed partner would come through. With that reality not panning out he was now going it alone, determined to see things through, to keep the company going, and to continue developing Blogger.



In a more public announcement a few weeks later, in this Pyra.com screenshot from February 12, 2001, Williams glibly channels Mark Twain, announcing the news that the company was still in business, but had indeed incurred, “a major set back” (…and we won’t pile on here by pointing out the misspellings either…). (click to view at full size)



More than a year after turning its full attention to Blogger, on March 30, 2001, the website reinforced that there was “nothing to see here” (except for a link to Blogger.com) and that the Pyra application was no longer being developed (click to view at full size).

This iteration of the Pyra.com homepage was also the swan song of the infamous ‘Pyra Newsletter’ signup box. Funny thing is, in the seven months it was in place on the website, nobody ever got around to creating that newsletter they collected all those email addresses for, as Williams sarcastically pointed out.



Three weeks later, March 18, 2001, the message of Pyra.com is all Blogger and all business (click to view at full size).



By September 2001 The website was again redesigned but remained only as a handbill slapped on the front door of an empty house for another year and a half, with a logo and no other text than that explaining Pyra’s two mottos: 1. “make something good” and 2. “other motto: there is nothing to see here. go to Blogger(.com).” (click to view at full size)



By May of 2002, the site had taken on the appearance that has essentially remained unchanged to this day, that of a one-slogan tribute to Pyra Labs, “making the web more interesting since 1999,” along with the iconic Blogger logo link to the Blogger.com website. (click to view at full size)

Addition By Subtraction
However the great thing about this particular sad story is that it ultimately has a very happy ending. As it turned out, Ev and Meg’s little company was just so far ahead of its time that it simply needed to give the rest of the world a couple years to catch up.

For all the heartache and disappointment experienced by the former Pyra Labs crew, the patience and belief exercised by Williams would pay off in spades.

The paring down of staff allowed Williams the time needed to keep the company afloat, while he worked to stabilize the platform and add servers to address the physical load of Blogger’s continually-rising popularity. Along the way he also managed to negotiate a few small business deals, including licensing Blogger to other countries and forming an important partnership with the website-building software company, Trellix in April 2001.

At the end of June, Williams announced a ‘Moving Sale’ to liquidate all nonessential equipment in Pyra’s San Francisco office. He was taking the business home, servers and all, and would operate things from his apartment, lowering the company’s overhead even more. It was no doubt a humbling experience, yet one that Williams seemed to embrace with a more-than-admirable sense of humor. But over the next twelve months things would turn around dramatically.



By the time I was introduced to Blogger, in the summer of 2002 the homepage looked like this (click to view at full size). Williams’ status blog was brimming with good news, boasting the statistic that Blogger blogs were being added at a rate of 1.5 per minute.

Blogger was co-sponsoring blogging contests with major periodicals, featuring sizable cash prizes; there were ‘Blogathon’ charity events and Blog Meet-ups being planned, along with superlatives about blogging from pubs like The Economist and The Wall Street Journal.

In short, Blogger was riding the cusp of a new wave of a phenomenon that was sweeping the nation and the world. Things had indeed turned around, but the best was yet to come

Yes, They Really DO Like You!
Ev Williams’ Sally Field moment came on a historically poignant date in his company’s history, exactly three years after that game-changing decision to commit to the development of Blogger over his original dream, the Pyra project management tool.

It was February 14, 2000 when Pyra’s initial funding round through O’Reilly & Associates launched the official era of its sole focus on application development, and three years later, it would be on that same date that all the hard work would pay off, in the form of both financial reward and the reality of resources for Blogger’s ongoing product development.

Search Engine giant, Google showed its love, acquiring Pyra Labs and Blogger on Valentine's Day 2003.



By the time my TK mates and I moved on to a new messageboard home and I made the decision to venture into the wilds of Blogsville all by my lonesome, the Blogger.com homepage not only had a completely new look, but a new audience as well, with the new Blogger reaching greater heights and exposure than ever before (click to view at full size).

There were newly-created XML blog templates designed under the auspices of Douglas Bowman of Stopdesign, offering the new breed of citizen journalism a place to call home; a place to grow; in an ever-expanding community of newsmakers, journalers, social media mavens, gossip-spinners, mommybloggers and the alike.

Ev and Meg’s Blogger lit the match, but the bonfire of Pyra’s vision was ultimately fueled by Google.

Nevertheless, even a year after the sale, in 2005 PC Magazine honored the success of Blogger and the work of Williams, Hourihan & Bausch (despite the latter two having long since left the company), naming the trio among their People of the Year for 2004.

Still Burning
Ev Williams would stay on with Google for roughly year and a half before again venturing out on his own, first in co-developing Odeo, a search and delivery web service centered on podcast technology, the organization of which would later become Obvious Corp, with a new business partner, Biz Stone.

Odeo was sold to Sonic Mountain in 2006 as Obvious Corp turned its attention to developing what would become the social media dynamo, Twitter in 2007.

Williams currently serves as Twitter CEO while enjoying life with wife, Sara and son, Miles.

Meg Hourihan went on to various other tech projects, including, in the mid-2000s, a joint effort with Gawker Media’s Nick Denton called Kinja, which, by her own description was “one of the web’s first news aggregation sites, an RSS reader without the RSS...a reading tool to make it easier for people to find and read blogs. The other hand of Blogger making it easier for people to write them.”

She is currently between companies, enjoying life as a seriously unpretentious foodie, mother to children, Ollie and Minna, and wife of yet another weblogging pioneer, Jason Kottke.

Paul Bausch, Pyra’s first employee and the man credited with being the Blogger’s primary developer, is still involved in web development at online community MetaFilter in Corvalis, Oregon.

I would again like to thank Meg Hourihan for providing such a well-spoken, thoroughly interesting narrative of Pyra’s increasingly difficult-to-find early history, for use as the basis of this story (and for the honor of her personally proofreading and blessing this post prior to publication).

If you’re a Blogger geek like me, I’m sure you’ll really enjoy the actual audio of that interview, which is still available online as part of Halley Suitt’s podcast series, Memory Lane.

Even though it wasn’t exactly how they planned it, Pyra lived up to their name; they took the weblog flame and fanned it into a bonfire that's still blazing.

Smart technology from some very smart people.

Now a decade later, that motto, do something good kinda seems like an understatement, doesn’t it?


finis

A Place Called Blogsville (Addendum, Part I)

NOTE: I had originally intended the following to be the opening of my little tribute to Blogger. It seemed appropriate to me to introduce my relationship to this medium I love by first introducing those brilliant and inspired individuals to whom we owe its existence.

And while it’s a well-established fact that the more elevated of standing among those who lead the medium today would suggest that Blogger is now passé by comparison to other, more elite platforms, I couldn’t care less. Blogger is special — to me and to millions of its continued, devoted users.

I mean, seriously; say what you want about a product, but in reality, who is more important — the person who refines it, or the one who invented it in the first place?

And because of that, I decided to go beyond cursory mention and give what, based on my research in writing this account, is the most extensive biographical sketch of the company that founded the modern blogging medium: Pyra Labs, and their ‘accidental’ phenomenon: Blogger.

Ev and Meg’s Big Adventure
As large and everyday-ubiquitous as the Web is, currently, it’s hard to imagine that as recently as ten years ago it was a much smaller place.

It was a world of fertile ground, untapped resources, and breathtaking discovery. It was a world prepping for a huge growth spurt.

Once the near-exclusive domain of nerds, geeks, and academia, the phenomenon of ‘weblogging,’ originally born very early in the decade of the 90s, emerged from its infancy with the growth and popularity of the HTTP-encoded World Wide Web, popularized by the Net’s first graphical browser, Mosaic in 1993.

_{Blogger.com founders (from left), Ev Williams, Meg Hourihan, & Paul Bausch.}

However it was nearly ten years later before the team of Evan Williams, (yes, the same Ev Williams, who would later co-found Twitter), and business partner, Meg Hourihan, would spur the medium to the new heights we know today.

In a wonderfully informative podcast interview she gave to the website, IT Conversations back in 2005, Hourihan discussed the beginnings of Blogger.com — the blogging portal that she, Williams, and Paul Bausch developed — almost by accident.

According to the interview, Williams and Hourihan formed Pyra Labs in 1999, operating out of the latter’s San Francisco apartment.

Their new company’s original goal was to create a web-based project management application targeted at web developers to improve upon the often cryptic and inflexible Microsoft Project. They wanted to come up with an online tool that would make the process of updating a project plan easier and more immediate —across cyberspace as opposed to the more static constraints of updating a physical MS Project file and then distributing it via email or FTP.

Interestingly, what would become Blogger was a sideline component developed in the midst of that effort, which was essentially a ‘throwaway’; a free feature intended to entice potential buyers to purchase their primary product.

Instead, the sideline overtook the mainline.

It is significant to recall that 1998-99 was the crux of the dot-com boom’s initial period of rapid ascension. Thousands of enterprise web sites were being created at that time, often by teams of developers scattered across the country. The Pyra Project’s main focus was to make the management of such efforts easier, more accessible, and more immediate.

It was a great idea, but it spawned an even better one in the process.

BlogStuff
While working in the same room, but not wanting to disturb each other with interruptions to present new ideas that might pop into their heads throughout the day, Hourihan said she and Williams created a simple, internal weblog, aptly named, ‘Stuff.’ Its purpose was to register brainstorming thoughts and other flashes of enlightenment that either one might come up, but in so doing, not disturbing the flow of work in the office.

They later decided that including a similar weblog feature as a standard component of the Pyra application would be a beneficial value-add for their customers, just as it had been for them in developing it.

However, as Hourihan recalled, “through a bunch of…random happenings,” the server that hosted the ‘Stuff’ weblog was a different one than that which hosted the Pyra.com site itself, which had a separate weblog as well.

This would be a problem should they wish to avoid the extra work of posting an entry in both places. So later, for purposes of both internal and external communications, to solve the problem they tasked Pyra’s first employee, developer Paul Bausch, with creating some code that would allow entries written to the ‘Stuff’ weblog to automatically appear the on pyra.com weblog as well. As Hourihan explained, Bausch’s code would become the foundation upon which Blogger was built.

Hourihan described the Blogger ‘Ah-HA’ moment thusly: “Hey, this is kinda neat! You can write something in one place, and it’s appearing in another place.”

But again, the key intent was not to develop a blogging platform, but rather to use this new innovation as an inducement to market the bread & butter Pyra app.

As Hourihan described, the bulk of weblog users at that time were the indeed Pyra’s target audience: web developers. The hope was that once the developers saw how much easier this new ‘push button’ method of weblogging could be, they would then in turn be inclined to believe that Pyra was a cool company that they would want to do business with; purchasing the Pyra project management software tool for use on their web projects, and in general, making the world a better place for everyone.

Som’ ‘bout the plans of mice and men oftentimes going awry…?

By the first quarter of 2001, however, much had changed in the world of emerging web companies. The DotCom boom began its steep slide into full bust mode. Times grew tough for San Francisco internet startups like Pyra.

Pyra’s "Team Implosion"
A change in direction had actually begun a year earlier, in the winter of 2000, when team Pyra, then consisting of four members, decided to seek outside funding for the first time.

The Pyra project management app was still struggling through development. Mucking up the waters further was the fact that the company was actually being supported via contract work relationships that Ev Williams had brought with him from his previous freelance career. One developer worked full-time on the outside contract jobs while the other three continued developing the Pyra app and Blogger.

This model of self-funding “just wasn’t gonna scale,” recalled Hourihan, “unless we kept hiring people to do client work, and that wasn’t really the type of company we were interested in building; we didn’t want to do professional services; we wanted to build really cool web applications.”

Fortunately, by this time, the contacts and reputation that the company was creating, along with the ongoing relationship Ev had with a former employer, O’Reilly & Associates, allowed Pyra to acquire the seed money it needed to really sink its teeth into its work. They could now dispense with the unrelated contract work they’d needed just to make ends meet. It was the opportunity to finally be the company they wanted to be.

The initial funding round for Pyra began on February 14 — Valentine’s Day, 2000; for the company it would be a significant spot on the calendar, not only at that time, but later on as well.

They decided to suspend work on the primary Pyra app, and focus on Blogger, the former spinoff that ironically was receiving increasingly rave reviews, and in fact became Pyra’s first officially released product.

They would build out the team, adding another two people, bringing the total compliment to six, and as Hourihan put it, “see what we could do with it,”

However not all would go as planned. Over the next eleven months the DotCom bubble would finally burst, sending tech stocks tumbling and bringing most startups to their knees, financially. Most tech development went into a deep freeze.

At the same time, from the opposite end of the spectrum, Blogger was facing its own problems. The platform’s tremendous popularity created more traffic than their existing servers could handle, leading to lapses in reliability. New features weren’t being added fast enough, leading to more customer complaints, including, ironically, one that led directly to the development of what would become one of Blogger’s chief competitors, Movable Type.

Mena Trott and her husband, web developer Ben Trott, created Movable Type as an answer to Mena’s frustration over Blogger’s period of arrested development in 2000.

Trott, originally a Blogger enthusiast, confided in Hourihan that she felt such loyalty to Blogger, that she couldn’t bring herself to use a competing product, so she decided to develop one for her own personal use. That effort, designed by Mena and coded by Ben, worked out so well that within a year the Trotts indeed decided (at the insistence of their other friends) to market it as a competing product.

Later, under the umbrella of their new company, Six Apart, the Trotts would additionally develop two other varietal blogging platforms: TypePad and Vox, in addition to the premium Movable Type.


Next: Addendum Part II: Every Picture Tells a Story