Phthursday Musings: Reapers and Art Punks

Please put on your calendars Wednesday, May 7, exact time TBD, for a Zoom session to discuss Player Piano. I’m going to try hard to stick with that date - only two weeks away! but it’s not that long a book!

I also want to share an update on a long-standing project, the History and Social Justice website, originated by Dr. Jim Loewen, author of numerous books you've likely heard of, including Lies My Teacher Told Me (recently removed from the Naval library!) and Sundown Towns. The heart of the site is the Sundown Towns map, and this week we’ve substantially completed uploading 2020 census data to the site. I’ve been involved in the site and its predecessor site for several years now, and I’m pleased to report that it’s getting on order of 50,000 views a month, which is especially impressive given how not a whole lot of new content has been added since Jim passed in 2021. Thankfully, I found a good use for my Microsoft Excel XP certification this past week, and now there’s a lot of numbers up there. Check out the map for yourselves, and if you’ve got any suggestions, please let me know!

If you’ve been following along with META-SPIEL the past few years, you know that I was an assistant coach and then a head coach for my kid’s soccer team spanning five seasons, and I was also an assistant coach for his baseball team for two years, 2021 and 2022. I didn’t coach baseball the last two years though, and by the end of the soccer season last year I really felt like I was coaching the wrong sport.

This year, he’s on what’s called a Majors team, 11 and 12 year olds, the ages of the kids you might see over the summer in the Little League World Series. And I’m back in the dugout, as part of it-sounds-like-a-lot-but-really-isn’t group of six coaches. The reason six coaches isn’t too many is because seemingly every other coach seems to have at least one other kid playing baseball or softball as well. It’s not easy getting everybody together!

I’ve written before about the odd political geography of Brookfield, a village of 19,000 which is somehow divided up into four different elementary school districts. Well, by a fluke, of the 12 boys on this team, 11 of them are in the same district, split across 5th grade and 6th grade. Guess which kid is the 12th?

Ahh, but that’s where having all of the coaches has gone so well. These kids can actually get personalized attention on their stances, their swings, their fielding position, you name it. The level of useful positive coaching is the best I’ve ever seen at or near this age level, and thankfully, the two biggest and best of the 12 year olds are soft-spoken, respectful leaders. This is a really good team, and I feel very fortunate to be involved.

Our team colors are black and white, and somehow this led to the suggestion of naming the team the Reapers, and that suggestion took. What I find funny about this is that I’m pretty sure these kids don’t know who Blue Öyster Cult is (my kid definitely didn’t), they don’t know why a cowbell is funny (I explained it to my kid and he said “okay”), and they’ve surely never seen Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (I’m not even attempting to explain that to him.) I’ll go so far as to say that to some of them, they only know what a reaper is because of the Paqui Carolina Reaper chip. (But my kid tells me he knows because the Grim Reaper appeared in Roblox Bedwars a couple of years ago.)

They’ve already played three games, which seems super wacky since it’s still April, and they looked great the first two, and the third game they looked like they wanted to take naps, but that’s kind of how it is with boys this age, right?

They also all get walkup music, and here’s how that went down here. I asked, what do you want for walkup music? I got nothing back. This repeated multiple times. Multiple songs of multiple varieties were suggested. Other kids were selecting a variety of songs - I mean, allegedly they were, I’m not really sure half the kids knew what songs were being selected for them - and as is the case with walkup music, these tended to lean heavier or bouncier.

Well, not that I actually expected this, but at the 11th hour, before we were going to the first game where they’d have it, he weirdly decided he wanted something metal (he… does not listen to metal… and I think this decision may have been to get his mother to make faces) and I played him a couple of selections and… this is the walkup song my 11 year old chose:

Now, there is a bad word in this song, but it’s pretty far in. All anyone is going to hear is loud metal and an angry Brazilian man yelling, which, well, I think that’s just about perfect for a bunch of 11 and 12 year olds.

While on the subject of baseball, a couple more thoughts:

I may have told this story before, but it’s short, so oh well: about 20 years ago, when it was time to get a cell phone, I went to Sprint and had my landline number moved over to my cellphone. That’s why in 2025 I still have a phone number from area code 309.

I chose Sprint because that was what the girl I had started dating had.

Well, here we are, we’ve never changed our numbers, we’ve never changed our cell provider, except that a few years ago, Sprint and T-Mobile merged (the merger should have been blocked but oh well), and so we’ve got T-Mobile.

Last month, I found out about a T-Mobile promotion whereby I could get a free MLB.tv subscription, and so, I’m now able to watch almost every Major League Baseball game, and it’s great. I legitimately find it soothing and calming to have a random baseball game on at night.

We also managed last Friday to take a trip to Wrigley Field. I hadn’t been to a Cubs game in 15 years, which seems insane given that I lived on the northwest side of Chicago for so long, but hey, that’s how it went. Well, this turned out to be the insane game where the Cubs gave up 10 runs to the Diamondbacks in the 8th… and came back to win 13-11. We saw two grand slams in the same game, which I’m pretty sure we’ll never see again.

This is the win probability chart from that game. In what I think is the exact word of the amazing Sarah Langs: wheeeeee!

Dante Alighieri wrote the Divine Comedy from about 1308 to 1321. In the first cantica, Inferno, Dante - and let’s pause for a second, isn’t it weird that we just call him Dante, we don’t call him Alighieri? - anyway - Dante wrote Inferno and described nine circles of hell, each reserved for progressive awfulness: limbo, lust, gluttony, greed, anger, heresy, violence, fraud, treachery.

I was thinking about the Divine Comedy lately in the midst of… things happening in the world. And a realization came to me.

I’m pretty sure that they’re going to have get out the old backhoe and dig deeper, because none of those categories seems remotely sufficient for categorizing the depths of cosmological excrement that have congealed into the form of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

That is all.

At fevered request, here are some grocery musings:

First, these chains requiring us to “clip a digital coupon” in order to get the low prices on berries is extremely lame. I don’t understand what the point of this nonsense is. I could be a little cynical and say that I think it’s all an attempt to trick people, but… I have a sense that it’s something even lamer than that.

Second, I can’t walk through the flower section at this particular grocery store without the cells of my eyes being assaulted. And yet when I went to the allergist a couple years ago I was told I was allergy free. Perhaps the allergist should just set up shop at Mariano’s and get clients that way.

Third and finally, yes, I bought rice cakes, okay? Okay.

The legendary and incomparable David Thomas died this week at 71. You may find it hard to believe, but perhaps the epicenter of cutting-edge early punk era creativity in late ‘70s America was Northeast Ohio, and David Thomas was the man right in the middle of it all.

Pere Ubu ultimately released 19 studio albums, but their debut The Modern Dance is still the best known, largely because it was unlike anything that preceded it. It was post-punk from a time (1978) when punk had barely gotten started, and it was art-rock, which is not exactly what you think about when you think about a punk aesthetic. At the center of the mayhem was Thomas, a truly distinctive front man, perhaps the greatest rock warbler of all time.

I missed out on Pere Ubu all the way through college, and then in 2002 a copy of St. Arkansas wound up in my hands, and I have a suspicion that I’m the only person I know who owns that record, which is a shame because it’s really fantastic. It’s a very clean sounding record, not as frenetic or tonally strange as a lot of other Pere Ubu albums, and Thomas’s shambolic queries are in excellent form. I’m especially partial to the album closer “Dark”, a 9+ minute long weirdo earworm.

I found this extremely baffling video which seems to be semi-official, for a remix of the lead track, “The Fevered Dream of Hernando De Soto”. I don’t know what on earth is happening here:

David Thomas was also one of the original members of Rocket From The Tombs, which formed in Cleveland in 1974 and included Cheetah Chrome and Johnny Blitz, who would both go on to join the band that became the Dead Boys. RFTT never released a proper studio album during their original run but reunited in 2003 and recorded a studio album of their old material, Rocket Redux, which was some pretty good old school punk rock.

I managed to see Pere Ubu in 2010 and the reunited Rocket From The Tombs in 2011. Pere Ubu live was a truly bizarre experience. They were dressed in all black except Thomas, who was wearing an extremely long gray coat and who looked like a caricature of a blind beggar. I kind of remember this show being amazing and also confounding as I think they were touring on some sort of bleak concept album. I go to a lot of shows, but I don’t think I’ve ever been to another one where the crowd was so full of twitchy people.

Rocket From The Tombs was facially a lot more normal but in retrospect possibly even weirder. Thomas looked the same, except here he was in front of a traditionally arranged punk band, so he seemed very out of place. Richard Lloyd of Television was the extra guitarist and used a music stand, which I’d definitely never seen before at a punk show. At one point I saw my barber in the crowd - Pete’s a 6’5” greaser with a pompadour, he’s pretty hard to miss - and when I next got my hair cut I asked him about the show and he went off on how bad it was, and I think he was right, except I found the whole spectacle fascinating.

One of the greatest things I’ve ever found on YouTube was this video from an unspecified show (but which I think was Sunday Night) where somehow they had Pere Ubu on stage with saxophonist David Sanborn… and Debbie Harry. The clip opens with thanking the other guests from the night, which somehow included Philip Glass and Loudon Wainwright. David Thomas is dressed like a professor who can’t quite get tenure and he absolutely can’t stand still. The video quality is poor, but here you get Thomas in full effect, a front man with presence like nobody else:

The idea that this man was allowed on network television at any time of day ever is really quite fascinating to me.

I’m not remotely familiar with their huge catalog. I can recommend The Modern Dance as the most obvious place to start and champion St. Arkansas as a diamond most people haven’t heard. Other albums I listened to over time never grabbed me as much, but what I’ll say is, there’s a certain Midwestern sensibility even in the midst of the art-rock, and I think I’ll always be a little hooked by that when it pops up, and maybe you will be too.