Author’s Note: In my December 2017 column for the Pitch, I promised to stop writing columns and just listen for an entire year. Amazingly, I managed to keep that promise, if less out of virtue than because I was lazy or distracted with other things. And there was, in fact, a lot of listening to do. All the same, I wanted to share a few things from this year before it comes to a close, posted here in this dusty showroom of a personal website. I hope you enjoy this present-tense compendium of 2018 events, and if it drags a bit, you can always keep scrolling or just come back later.
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I am invited by a friend to be the January 2018 poet laureate for the Wonder Fair, an art gallery and arts supply store in Lawrence. My duties include writing a short poem that will be displayed on a letter board behind the counter. But when my brother visits, he reports that the previous month’s poem is up instead. My slot is pushed back to February. My pride is wounded, but I can’t complain. The December recipient’s poem, a brief ode about living inside a snow globe in a city with no escalators, is much better than mine.
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For the first time in seven years, I turn my Facebook off completely. The main benefit I notice is having more mental space. Walks at night are pleasant and freeing now that I’m not mindlessly auto-composing status updates in my head the whole time. What else have I missed by not being on Facebook? I don’t know. That’s kind of the price of inadmission.
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I visit a friend in Massachusetts and we drive up to ski for a day in New Hampshire, my first time skiing in over 15 years. I am excited to be in New Hampshire because its state quarter features The Old Man of the Mountain. We drive by the landmark on our way through Franconia Notch, but my friend tells me the Old Man’s face crumbled and fell off in a 2003 landslide, just a few years after the quarter was issued.
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My friend and I stay home with our sons while our wives and daughters attend the “March for Our Lives” event at Theis Park. It feels important, like this time people really want things to change, though the year will see a horrific wave of additional mass shootings. It gets to where you can’t remember the last time the flags weren’t at half staff.
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While we meet up with friends to watch the NCAA Tournament, my 4-year-old son develops a strong affinity for the song “One Shining Moment,” even going so far as to declare it his favorite song. My daughter is partial to Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” which we read and sang from a library book. They both adore “One Little Star” from the Sesame Street movie Follow That Bird. All of these songs are about togetherness, of being so close yet so far apart, even in the case of the Luther Vandross championship jam. After all, one person’s shining moment is another’s confetti-covered heartbreak.
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The most amusing thing I see all month is a squirrel carrying an improbably large plastic bag up the trunk and branches of a tall tree at Westwood Park. The bag is so expansive that at first you can’t see the squirrel and it just looks like a steadily rising trash ghost. In the end the squirrel drops it and our cheering stops, but what a heroic effort.
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While eating out at Taco Via with my family, I teach my kids a lesson about why they shouldn’t play the claw game by showing them what happens when you play the claw game. They each lose. I decide to play, too, barely missing out on the stuffed smiley on my first try. I was so close that I keep on trying, draining dollar after dollar, until both kids are crying and my wife is mad and the old couple sitting nearby goes from smiling politely to looking grim and almost certainly having their dinner ruined.
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After a posh company dinner at Room 39, I drive to the jazz district to see the ACBs. Tonight they’re playing in an unfurnished, unofficial space on 18th and Vine, the address displayed in the window in pink neon, a small crowd of art and music kids inside and on the street. Listening to Konnor’s pleasant repetitive stairstep riffs, Kyle and Colin’s blood-tight rhythm section, and the space waves of Ross’s flummoxing wobulator (or whatever that synth thing is called), I feel for a moment like I’ve died and gone to Kansas City.
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Jeff hosts a 4th of July party at his backyard pool. A lot of old friends are there with their kids. John Philip Sousa music is playing in a triumphant loop and there are abundant donuts, Lay’s potato chips, and a huge platter of hot dogs. The water balloon skirmish planned for the kids quickly devolves into a semi-serious water balloon battles between the parents. It’s easily the best party I’ll attend all year.
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I visit The Ship to hear Dave play drums in a new band, The Freedom Affair. A phenomenal group, especially if you are favorably disposed toward funk music. Seeing their early shows at the Ship reminds me of when I first saw Hearts of Darkness in 2009 (coincidentally, upstairs in the same building).
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Dockless scooters take over the city. I find them annoying and dangerous to pedestrians, and saying so online results in a mild controversy. On the other hand, I really wish these things had been around when I was in high school. Back then there was nothing to do downtown except drive around and listen to Portishead and trying and failing to get into jazz clubs, checking out graffiti and hoping to avoid sketchy dealers. And sometimes hang out at YJ’s.
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I revisit the same nature preserve in Florida I’ve gone to with my friends the previous two years, arriving at the beach only to find out it’s no longer there. Instead of a continuous surf, the water flows in every direction, in strange eddies and tide pools, an apocalyptic pumping unit dominating the horizon. We walk all the way to Wiggins Pass hoping for a different view, but instead we find a drunken vet with a microphone and P.A. system shouting along to “Like A Rolling Stone.” When a ranger rides by on a four wheeler to enforce the sunset curfew, we flag him down and ask what happened to the beach. “Irma took all the sand and threw it into the river,” he explains before asking us to leave.
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I begin seeing art in all kinds of unexpected places, thanks to Open Spaces, a unique and marvelous two-month-long, city-wide, open-air art exhibit and performance series. The first exhibit I come across is “Fractured Horizons” a sculpture by St. Louis artist Claire Trosclair in which the fractured ruins of a house stand in the middle of a park. The drywall, studs and torn wallpaper remind me of the 2011 Joplin tornado wreckage. This piece is lovely, though, and there’s a lightness to walking along the dirt and grass, looking at the sky from the fractured foundation of a house that never was.
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We go to Germany and eat sausages and ride on small boats across sub-alpine lakes and drink beer in parks and stop and watch street musicians play in front of storefronts in the pedestrian zones. At the Egapark, a landscaped garden park in the former East German city of Erfurt, there are large sculptural displays made out of pumpkins. A rocket ship, a small biplane, a howling wolf, a grand piano. A woman in a wheelchair stops in front of an impressive pumpkin-made module of the Lunar rover. She stares at it in apparent fascination, as if she’s only just now beginning to believe in the miracles of the space program.
* * *
For the first time since I was 20, I re-read Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. Its pages transport me to the illumined heights of spirituality, the mysterious depths of the human soul, and the complex, hilarious tragicomedy of existence. Functionally, however, my main takeaway is feeling the almost irrepressible urge to use the phrase “Devil take you, sir!” in all of my professional correspondence. For the most part, I manage to resist.
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While sitting with my sister at a coffee shop in Chicago, I realize something that strikes me as both terribly profound and completely obvious. While Lois studies for her law exams, I compose and tweet the phrase: “Technically all snakes on two-dimensional flat surfaces are snakes on a plane.” It gets 20 likes, which is about 19 more than usual.
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The election results are announced. Some of the bad guys lose for a change. Spontaneous fireworks and scattered cheers erupt above the backyards of my residential enclave, a polite neighborhood where we almost never talk about such things.
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I play a round of disc golf at Rosedale in the snow, just after sunset. The snow is deep and it gets dark fast and I only make it through 10 holes. Finding my disc takes some time, since the flashing red LED lights taped on are growing faint and it keeps getting darker. Each time I find my disc half-submerged and blinking in a snowdrift, it feels like a minor miracle. Like I am expertly identifying and defusing completely harmless plastic landmines.
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Taco Via turns 50 years old this month, and I take the family there to celebrate. How does a place that objectively bad survive to such an age? Maybe because if you grew up with it, it actually is good. I’m hoping the milestone will lead to wild celebrations in the strip malls and parking lots of Lenexa, including free rides in the Taco Via hot air balloon, the mystical and ethnically ambiguous lady in the logo shedding a tear for all of us taco sinners. Until then, you can find me in the labyrinth of peeling vinyl booths, crunching my nachos, playing Galaga or vintage pinball, taking quiet sips of taco sauce to ward off the darkness.
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For now, let us pray for a kinder and more humane 2019. May we do our best to live our best lives, and help create opportunities for others to do the same, regardless of what side of the fence we are on. May each of us find warmth, comfort and meaning wherever we can.
Footnotes:
re: Theis Park
The city’s most Daoist park (literally spells “the is” park). If I had to put together a short list of preferred protest songs it would include Gimme Some Truth by John Lennon, Lying Has To Stop by Soft Hair, A Whole Lot of BS by Funkadelic, (Abandon) Extreme Wealth and Casual Cruelty by UMO, and Women of the World: Take Over by Jim O’Rourke.
re: Shy Boys + ACBs
2018 has been a big year for the Shy Boys (virtually identical in lineup to the ACBs) and I hope these guys get a lot more love and listens in 2019.
One of my favorite things about this town is how you’ll wind up attending an amazing show at an unofficial venue you’d never heard of until that day and may never attend again, watching a local or touring band that isn’t that well known yet but could easily go toe-to-toe or note-to-note with the best groups in the world. It’s a magical feeling, and even if I rarely experience it these days, it brings me joy to know that scene still exists.
And speaking of scene-building, there might be a big opportunity to give the regional music scene a big boost. Given all the financial woes faced by the Zona Rosa, I’m hoping to put together a Kickstarter to bail out the troubled shopping center near the airport and rename it for the ACBs 2010 album “Stona Rosa.” With medical marijuana recently approved by Missouri voters, it would be a natural site for dispensaries, in addition to musical venues, chiropracters, and whatever else people in the Northland are in to. Far-fetched, yes, but a lot more possible in 2019 than ever before.
re: Open Spaces
The actual exhibits are amazing, including the watery, shapeshifting floors of Nick Cave’s intense audiovisual chapel, “Hy-Dyve” in an abandoned church, the psychedelic floral daydreams of Ebony Patterson’s “…called up” in a forgotten pool, and the all-too-at-home bird hobos camping out in the former nature center in “For the Birds aka Swope Shelter” by Jillian Youngbird. My other favorites were the tours by Blue River Road Investigators and unexpectedly encountering “Where We No Longer Gather” by Anthony Marcos Rea. Kansas City has seen some exciting things in the past few years, from a World Series win to the new streetcar. But Open Spaces in some ways felt more significant, not just because of the national talent attracted, but in how the exhibits highlighted, explored and in some cases literally illuminated pockets of the city otherwise often overlooked. I discovered places I’d never been in two decades of exploring. It forced me to open my eyes, to seek things out, to pay attention.
re: Germany
Given the cruelty and racism of the current U.S. administration, Europe’s intense skepticism about Silicon Valley, and the reactions I experienced there in the Bush era, I was expecting to see a lot of graffiti and expressed anti-U.S. sentiments in Germany, but they seem to be absorbed in their own problems. Last week French protestors literally tore the tits off the Marianne. We’ve entered a new era in which everything feels out of balance at once. It’s not anything to feel good about, but in a way everyone having their own national problems makes us seem less “exceptional.” As the 20-year-old tour guide at the Guyasamin museum in Quito told us nonchalantly, after calmly explaining a painting about class warfare and mass slaughter, “we all have our dictators.”
re: Freedom Affair
Freedom Affair has a 45 coming out next year with Colemine Records, which also released “My God Has A Telephone,” a gospel tune from 2017 that sounds like it’s from 1966.
re: Facebook
The only reason I am tempted to get back on Facebook is to reinstate my lone upcoming event, “Hanging Out” which disappeared along with my profile. Since the details are still general, however, I can basically catch you up to speed. The event is called “Hanging Out,” with a location of “somewhere” and is currently scheduled from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. on July 4, 2036. “Hanging Out” started back in 2011 as a joke, a way to see how far the calendar would let me go, and then a humorous and perplexing invite, a guest list with an unusually high percentage of committed “maybes,” a growing list of attendees as new friends were made or re-made over the years, lots of promises to bring things like “frookies” (futuristic cookies) and scouting out potential locations including the volcanic slopes of Momotombo.
But there’s something real toward it, too. Hearing about the 2040 deadline for a cataclysmic climactic shift, I realized our party would only be a few years away from who knows what upcoming catastrophes. And who knows what kind of crazy stuff will happen between now and then. But one thing’s for certain: at that point there won’t be anyone to blame but us. We will be the ones in charge, the ones leading the way the best we know how. Will we listen then to our protests now? To the protests of our children? Will we try to make it easier on them than we feel like it is for us now? How much more will they have to contend with, and how much harder will we work to make sure things aren’t even shittier for them? I don’t know. But it’s something I will be thinking about over the next 18 years.
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lucas wetzel 