I have officially re-launched my blog. I will keep this one around for the archives only. So please, visit the new one and put it on your RSS Feed, Reader, etc. Tell your family, tell your friends, tell your enemies. Hope to see you all there:

THE BACKBEAT

Finally I can honestly say I'm not a completely blind Obama-supporter. As I'm sure you all have heard Colin Powell endorsed Obama over the weekend expressing some of the same concerns about McCain's candidacy I expressed a couple of posts ago although he did it much more eloquently than I ever could. Powell's always been a guy I've respected and this endorsement has brought him some heat so I have no reason to believe this was politically motivated. And when the former Republican Secretary of Defense says the Ayers situation is a non-issue, its time to drop it. Check it out if you haven't.


And with that I'm done with politics and The Backbeat for a while. I'm voting absentee this year, I'm filling out and mailing my ballot today. My small part of the democratic process will be realized for this election so there won't be much use in me talking about it anymore.

This blog has become something I never intended it to be. I'm afraid I am portraying myself in a way that makes it much too easy for readers to jump to conclusions about my opinions and my world view. I'm quite lucky to have an interesting career that allows me to travel quite a bit and I wanted a blog to share that with family and friends both immediate and casual. In these important political times I began posting some of my opinions about political issues I felt passionately about as this was my blog about me and my life, but perhaps that was selfish of me. I guess nothing that is so freely available to the public can simply be an inward personal expression. We have had many heated debates as a result but more often then not there was an ugly tone that took over. I've been accused of having a big ego, one who would celebrate if our country fell, it's been insinuated that I am communist, that I support a totalitarian fascist that would strip our country of the liberties it was founded on ... its one thing to challenge someone's opinion, its another to provide unsolicited sarcastic and belittling remarks. But I'm not innocent of resorting to argument and insult as opposed to insightful debate either. I've had a lot of online discussions about the election on other sites recently; in particular, Facebook and a Colts Fansite that I frequent (of all the places!) and they've all been more respectful then what a few of the discussions here have dissolved in to. In some respects it makes sense that we would be more respectful to people we don't know as opposed to friends and acquaintances and in other respects it makes no sense at all.

Two things recently occurred that caused me to re-think the way I run my own blog. First a friend of mine emailed me their opinions about my first Sarah Palin post because they were too afraid of being attacked in the Comments section here. Attacked! I promise, I'm not making this up! Secondly, on another blog I simply asked a question about a sensitive topic (it was nothing more than a question, I know what a smartass I can be and I was very careful not to reflect that) and was immediately told I was trying to start crap and opinions that I hadn't even expressed were called in to question.

We complain so much about the polarizing state of American politics, how the two-party system is too divisive but we're guilty of doing the exact same thing: if you support Obama then you're pro-abortion, if you support gun control then you're communist, if you're pro-choice then you're anti-death-penalty, if you support government regulation then you're socialist, etc. None of those things are mutually exclusive. But I don't want to have to explain my entire ideology every time I show enthusiasm for a candidate or an issue important to me.

PLEASE UNDERSTAND THIS! I'm not trying to be self-righteous or passive-aggressive. I've spent a lot of time in chat rooms, message boards, social networking sites, and blogs over the past seven years (when I got my first PC), I know how posts like this can come across. I'm just going to step aside for a minute. The timing is good, I leave soon for NYC where I'll play the first week of the Carlyle with Mistah Tyrell along with some other dates. When I come back the election will be long over and hopefully so will all of the divisive discussions and heightened emotions.

I'm going to leave the comments section open for this post because you might think I'm making an accusation about you and I want to give you the opportunity to tell me to go to hell if you like, I'm not going to comment back. Just know that I am not trying to refer to any specific instance or absolve myself of fueling the fires.

Love, Peace, and Chicken Grease. Keep it funky, yo!

What a beating. The Colts' football play sunk to a new low yesterday, I could hardly believe it. Luckily I had the Colin Powell endorsement and a Boston loss to soften what otherwise would've been an awful day.

EDIT
And if you didn't know, Ball State University is ranked #20 in both the BCS and AP polls. Go Cardinals! Now if only I could watch a game somehow.

... has been a rare thing for me the past couple of weeks. Good sleep anyway. It seems like every night I have a gig or something to do and I don't get to bad until 1 or 2. The baby is up at 6 regardless. I get up and I manage to get a nap in during the day usually but its just not the same as getting a good night of uninterrupted sleep. I don't know what I can do about it. Getting a bigger house certainly isn't an option these days! The good thing is I have been busy playing music and seeing friends which is exactly what I want to be doing since I'm not on the road.

Well, my Dodgers' unexpected run through the playoffs finally ended. They started the series with the Phillies playing some good ball but by the end of it Manny was the only guy who could get a hit. Its disappointing they didn't play very well the final two games but they made a lot further then anyone expected. Unfortunately its going to take a miracle to keep Manny in L.A. as somebody is going to throw a $100 million contract at him and the Dodgers have such a big payroll already. We'll see what happens.

Thankfully Oct/Nov are the best months for sports; NFL, college football, and the beginning of basketball season.

Oh, the fires are all out here in L.A. In the end only a few homes were destroyed and a couple of fatalities (one a transient, the other a car-wreck caused by confusion from the smoke). It could've been a lost worse, hopefully the warm wind is done with and we can proceed with Fall.

... that McPalin continues the mud-slinging?

Why would any voter be swayed by such nonsense?

All is good. The fire is by no means contained and is still dangerous but it has shifted westward and we are no longer in its path. Murphy and I returned a few minutes ago, the air is still smokey but besides that there are no problems.

Thanks for the concern everyone.

Yesterday morning I woke up early and could not get back to sleep. My nose was stuffy and running, I was sneezing, it was weird. We had been to a Pumpkin Patch the night before so I chalked it up to smoke in my hair from the wood fires then. After Carrie walked the dog she told me there was ash in the air and after some poking around online we discovered there was a brush fire in the Angeles National Forest northeast of us. The air was smoky but we're kind of used to that kind of thing around this time of year. We went about our day and had a fantastic Sunday; Milo and Carrie went to the zoo, I watched football (Colts FINALLY looking good!), we took a nap, the Dodgers won, we had a really fun dinner with some friends, and an early bedtime.

When we woke up this morning the sky was black to the north of us. The smoke was heavy and the wind was really blowing hard. We turned on the TV and learned the fire had moved south, was moving south quickly, and the air was too windy for firefighters to drop water on it or see the fire line with any effectiveness. Carrie went to work, Milo went to his babysitters, and I wasted no time. There was no official evacuation called for our neighborhood but seriously, why wait? I gathered up some important belongings and the dog and made my way to my office studio which is out of harm's way.

At the moment I'm at a Starbuck's waiting it out. Moments ago the neighborhood directly north to us was evacuated and I wouldn't be surprised if ours is evacuated soon. Poor Murphy is going nuts (dogs have a sixth sense for this kind of thing of course).

We're all safe, no reason to worry ... but I don't want our house to burn down! I really don't think that is going to happen as we live around a hell of a lot of concrete but its still something you think about. If anyone knows a rain dance, rain mojo, or all-around good vibes, send them our way.

UPDATE
AP link

Last night my favorite indie band Margot and the Nuclear So and So's played at legendary L.A. club The Troubadour and yours truly was in attendance. These guys are quite possibly the best band ever to come out of Indianapolis. I've written about them before, they really are brilliant (think hard-rock Ryan Adams meets Broken Social Scene if that means anything to you). I know their trumpet player from Ball State, it was great hanging with him and great seeing the show.

I've been waiting for their new record Animal! for a while now, it was released yesterday but for some odd reason it was only released on Vinyl. Now, I appreciate a record being released on wax for classic and nostalgic reasons but you can't even download it from Amazon or iTunes. I'm afraid they might have out-cooled themselves. So I don't have the new record as my turntable is fried and needs to be replaced and I don't have anything to play it on at the moment. Luckily they also released a CD titled Not Animal comprised of other songs from the same recording sessions, I downloaded that yesterday and its got some good stuff on it but I feel like I'm missing out. Its too bad.

I've been buying a lot of music lately, more than usual. Too much as I'm not digesting everything like I should. In the past couple of weeks:

Murs Murs for President
Miles Davis The Man With The Horn
Helmet Meantime
Nick Drake Five Leaves Left
TV on the Radio Dear Science
Living Legends The Gathering
Fleet Foxes Fleet Foxes
William Parker Corn Meal Dance
Various Nigeria Rock Special: Pshychedelic, Afro-Rock, and Fuzz Funk in 1970's Nigeria
Immortal Technique Revolutionary Vol. 2
She and Him Volume One

That's not to mention the Wave Mechanics Union and Margot records that I blogged about. Look at that list. Does anybody know half of these records? Damn, I'm a nerd ...

The past few days have been pretty busy for me. Gig with some great players Friday night, Saturday morning we had breakfast with some friends. That night we played a wedding in Bel Air with Tyrell. This house was incredible, to give you an idea of how much money was involved with this home and this wedding--Wolfgang Puck catered the event, he was actually there! (the food was of course phenomenal) Sunday morning I painfully watched the Colts eek out a win in a game they had no business winning ... its going to be a long season. Sunday night was another Tyrell gig, this time at the L.A. Jazz Society's annual banquet where he was getting an award for Jazz Vocalist of the Year.

And let's not forget the Dodgers wrapping up their playoff series by sweeping the Cubs. What a bunch of chokers! Bring on the Phillies.

I ran a bunch of errands today. At the moment Milo is asleep and Carrie is at her book club, I'm on the couch watching football in total silence.

Nothing better!

... has lost his sh*t.

I've decided to forgo the Vice Presidential debate in favor of the Dodgers/Cubs game. Frankly, the woman makes me mad and I don't see the use in picking apart what she says any more. I agree with nothing in her platform, the debate isn't going to make me re-think any that. But here is some funny stuff I gathered from MySpace and Facebook about Palin that you might get a chuckle out of:

RULES OF THE SARAH PALIN VICE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE DRINKING GAME

--Take a chug of Moosehead beer whenever Sarah Palin says the following:

maverick

reformer

any sentence including the words "neighbor" and "Russia"

small-town values

Gwen or Joe (remember how many times Palin said "Charlie" during the Gibson interview?)

off shore oil drilling

Alaska

"Thanks but no thanks!"

witchcraft (not likely...but hey, you never know, especially if Kathleen Parker's name should pop up)

--Take two chugs of Moosehead whenever Sarah Palin does the following:

Utters a coherent sentence (i.e., contains a subject and a verb and makes logical sense)

Talks about her new friend Henry Kissinger or Hamid Karzai

Explains how being the part-time mayor of Wasilla, Alaska with a full-time city manager counts as executive experience

--Chug a whole bottle of Moosehead if Sarah Palin mentions the following:

Palin Presidency

On second thought, make that two bottles of Moosehead.



Are you going to/did you watch the debate? Why or why not?

Its not that I hate the Cubs team, the whole "lovable losers" thing is cute and I really dug the documentary "Wait 'Til Next Year." Its not that I hate the city of Chicago or Chicagoans (despite my experience with Bears fans at the Superbowl two years ago), in fact I have a lot of friends and family living there. I have no problem with the state of Illinois, its a fine place.

I'm afraid my hate from the Cubs stems from folks in Indiana.

Let me 'splain.

I went to school in Indiana at Ball State University. If you've ever attended college you know you meet a hell of a lot of people on a daily basis, and it seemed like every other person I'd met would tell me they were from "the Chicago area."

I'd say "Really? What neighborhood?"

And they'd reply "Goshen" or "Merryville" or "Valpraiso." ...

HUH?!

Guess what pal! That AIN'T Chicago! Its not even in the area of Chicago. You're from Northern Indiana, dont' try to act like you're from the big city. What, is it embarrassing to be from Northern Indiana? Does being from Laporte make you some sort of social pariah? Does admitting to being a Hoosier get your cool card revoked or something?! I got so sick and tired from everyone who lived north of Lafayette telling me they were from the "Chicago area" that my hatred of their sports teams grew and grew (the Reggie Miller/Michael Jordan had rivalry helped this along as well). I didn't even like baseball at the time but all of the Cubs hats around campus made me ill.

The you have folks from Indianapolis cheering for the Cubs which always made me suspicious. Why the Cubs? Why not the White Sox, Tigers, Reds, or Cardinals? Why not one of the teams that the Indianapolis Indians were affiliated with like the Expos or Brewers? I'll tell you why, because the Cubs are the trendy, cool Chicago team to root for. You can cheer on the Cubs but at the same time you don't look like you're a bandwagon fan because they always frickin' lose.

Fast-forward a decade or so; I'm at Dodger Stadium, my wife had bought us tickets for my birthday. The Dodgers are playing the Brewers, the score is tied in the seventh inning. Alex Cora (at that time a Dodger) steps up to bat. He and the pitcher go at it--Cora fouls of 17 straight pitches to right field. The crowd is going ape shit with every pitch. When the ball comes at Cora for the 18th time he smacks it over the fence. It was the most exciting sports play I'd ever seen live. Gagne comes on to close the game (back when Gagne was good and on the juice) during his remarkable streak of consecutive closes and my love for baseball and the Dodgers is born.

Now we're full circle. The Dodgers are playing the Cubs. If you're a Chicago transplant or long-time Cubs fan then we have no beef. But if you're a Hoosier living in the "Chicago area" or living in Indy with a mysterious connection to the Cubs, this one is for you:
GRAND SLAM BABY! DODGERS WIN GAME ONE 7-2.


p.s.
Dave Rinehart! Milo and I both caught your "Go Cubs" remark on Agoraphobia! So that Grand Slam if for you too!

You might remember me mentioning a couple of times over the past year or so that while visiting Indy I had done some recording with my old friend Ryan Fraley and a big band CD he was working on.

Well, the CD is finally out. It's really good and I'm proud of my playing on it. The music is classic and progressive rock songs rearranged for big band, but don't think of it as a gimmick. The arrangements are great, the playing is solid and hearing these songs in a jazz/symphonic context is really interesting.

Please check it out. You can listen to it and order it from the website or Amazon.

Tired. Exhausted. The tour over the weekend was pretty hectic.

And as I'm sure you all know, the bailout failed. As much as I hated the idea of the government providing a golden parachute to these corporations without some strict regulations legislation, the idea of an economic meltdown because of no bailout is almost scarier.

Mom left today. While we didn't have a lot of activities we had a really good time just being together and playing with Milo. It was sad to see her go.

I'm headed out for a short tour tomorrow, NYC and Memphis.

It looks like big corporations want the government to stay out of their business unless they are going broke in which case they want billions of dollars of taxpayer money to fix their situation.

So we lighten government regulations and give tax breaks to big business just to bail them out when their greed catches up to them?

This will end badly.

Download the movie now, for free!

Esquire magazine recently published this list of books every man should read. I have only read a few (Plainsong, The Sportswriter, Slaughterhouse-Five and Huckleberry Finn, The Call of the Wild for school) and really should have more of them under my literary belt. What do you think? How many have you read?

The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
Affliction, by Russell Banks
All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren
American Pastoral, by Philip Roth
American Tabloid, by James Ellroy
Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner
As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text, by William Faulkner
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Blood Meridian, Or, the Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy
The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts With Epilogue, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Call of the Wild, White Fang, & To Build a Fire, by Jack London
Civilwarland in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella, by George Saunders
A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
The Continental Op, by Dashiell Hammett
The Crack-Up, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Deliverance, by James Dickey
Dharma Bums, by Jack Kerouac
Dispatches, by Michael Herr
Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone
Dubliners, by James Joyce
A Fan’s Notes: A Fictional Memoir, by Frederick Exley
For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
Going Native, by Stephen Wright
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, by Flannery O'Connor
The Good War: An Oral History of World War II, by Studs Terkel
The Grapes of Wrath: John Steinbeck Centennial Edition (1902-2002), by John Steinbeck
Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, by Hunter S. Thompson
Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara
The Known World, by Edward P. Jones
Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings, by Jorge Luis Borges
Legends of the Fall, Jim Harrison
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families, by James Agee
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry
Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis
Master and Commander, by Patrick O'Brian
Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
Native Son, by Richard Wright
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
Plainsong, by Kent Haruf
The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain
The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene
The Professional, by W. C. Heinz
Rabbit Run, by John Updike
Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe
A Sense of Where You Are: A Profile of William Warren Bradley, by John McPhee
The Shining, by Stephen King
Slaughterhouse-five, by Kurt Vonnegut
So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell
Sophie’s Choice, by William Styron
A Sport And a Pastime, James Salter
The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, by John Le Carré
The Stories of John Cheever, by John Cheever
The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction, Tim O'Brien
This Boy’s Life: A Memoir, by Tobias Wolff
Time’s Arrow: Or the Nature of the Offense, by Martin Amis
Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
Underworld, by Don DeLillo
War And Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
What It Takes: The Way to the White House, by Richard Ben Cramer
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories, by Raymond Carver
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami
Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson
Winter’s Bone: A Novel, Daniel Woodrell
Winter’s Tale, by Mark Helprin
Women, by Charles Bukowski