In January I broke my annual New Year’s Resolution to forego resolutions, and decided to see at least one music show a month in 2012. And unlike the resolutions I actually document, this one is going swell. Fingers crossed that this post don’t jinx it.

My first, Fitz & the Tantrums at the Showbox on 01/20, is what convinced me to make music a priority this year. The lead singer Michael Fitzpatrick, reminiscent of David Byrne in both appearance and intensity, is a seemingly bottomless well of energy and enthusiasm. And the opening act, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr., was fantastic as well.

In February I saw Veronica Falls, who sound like my long-time favorite Heavenly but with all the sunny optimism replaced by dirge. (I like dirgy music, so that’s a rave.) The real revelation of the night, though, was opener Bleached, who blew the doors off the joint. Between the two I was transported back to my days as an Evergreen State College slacker in the early 90s, catching Riot Grrl bands in downtown Olympia. Ah, youth.

Last month I attended the show of the lovely Lomolo. And a few days later I finally saw Nada Surf, a band of which I have been a fan for some 20 years. I enjoy Nada Surf’s new album The Stars Are Indifferent to Astronomy so much that I actually bought the CD, to play in my car. A CD! Remember those? Well I own one, again.

Not bad for an old square, eh? And I already have April in the bag. Last Tuesday I was a guest at an exclusive performance by The Lumineers, which you can watch on the Chase Jarvis website. And last night I had the great fortune to see Typhoon–or, at any rate, as many members thereof that could fit onto the Tractor Tavern stage (11 of 13).

Honestly, this has been one of the easiest projects ever. My problem, if any, has not been finding shows I want to attend, but deciding from among the plethora of great options this city has to offer.

Here are some that I have resolved to attend in the coming weeks.

First Aid Kit, April 11 at the Crocodile Cafe: I am entranced by First Aid Kit’s first single Emmylou, and listened to it incessantly for a week and a half after its release. First Aid Kit adds compelling evidence to my hypothesis that I am a total sucker for Swedish bands.

M83, April 26 at the Paramount Theater: “Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming” clocked in at #6 on my list of Favorite Albums of 2011, and has only risen in my estimation since. Love that frog song!

Washed Out, May 2 at the The Neptune: The only song by this band I have heard is Amor Fati, and yet that alone has the show on my radar. It’s either going to be them or The Jezabels, who play The Crocodile the following evening. Decisions, decisions … Update I just listened to Washed Out’s “Within and Without” and The Jezabels’ “Prisoner” back-to-back, and it was The Jezabels by a landslide.

Destroyer, June 3 at the Showbox: “Kaput” is another from my list of 2011 favorite albums (#2!), and I cannot wait to see these guys (or, rather, this guy, Dan Bejar) live.

Lomolo (again), June 29 at the Columbia City Theater: I bought a ticket to Lemolo’s CD Release Party as soon as it was announced, as a way of showing support for a band I have long enjoyed; apparently I am not alone in my enthusiasm though, because the show sold out about an hour later. Fear not: Lemolo added a second release party for the following day, the tickets for which go on sale Monday, April 9th. I will send out a reminder that morning via Twitter.

That’s just a fraction of the many shows I have my eye on. I mostly track these via Songkick, which auto updates my Upcoming Seattle Shows Google Calendar as new concerts are added. I also maintain a Spotify playlist, which you can find here. Drop me a line if you intend to catch any of these, or if there’s something you think I should add to my list.

I worked as a customer service rep at Amazon in the late 90s, at the same time as Mike Daisey. I don’t think he and I ever interacted one-on-one, but I knew who he was, saw him around the ol’ cube farm, and received the emails he periodically sent to the department, alerting us to upcoming performances by his improv group.

After he left Amazon, Daisey created a one-man show called “21 Dog Years”, which documented his zany adventures with the company. A book soon followed, and I have harbored a petty grudge against him ever since. He had the initiative to do the thing we’d all fantasized about (i.e., turn our experience with Amazon into a book deal), and that made me resentful. You know how that goes (or don’t, and are a better person than I).

A lot of my coworkers saw “21 Dog Years”, and most enjoyed it. Some thought it was great. But the consensus was that it was “truthy” at best, a slurry of his actual experiences, exaggeration for comedic effect, some good stories he’d heard from others cast into the first person, and maybe a little bunkum.

In 2001 when he spoke about the show with the Seattle Weekly (which was on a weird anti-Amazon jihad at the time), the interview contained this exchange:

Seattle Weekly: How much did you really deal with Jeff, and have you heard anything from former co-workers about his reaction to the show?

Daisey: I saw Jeff all the time, almost every day.

I worked like 100 meters from Daisey, and saw Bezo maybe three times in as many years. Like I said: truthy.

In the context of an interview, “I saw Jeff all the time” is a lie, plain and simple. But if Daisey said the same thing on stage as part of “21 Dog Years”, I wouldn’t have objected. I guess I agree with Daisey when he says that the tools of theater are different than the tools of journalism.

And although I and others were irritated at some of the “facts” Daisey got wrong in “21 Dog Years”, it seemed okay that the monologue took liberties with the truth, even if he didn’t state as much. After all, no one thought that all of the workplace events recounted by David Sedaris in “Santaland Dairies” were literally true, and that story was everywhere. Heck, it had even appeared on everyone’s favorite radio show, “This American Life”.

So where did Daisey go wrong with this whole Foxconn debacle?

For me, the key clue comes not from the This American Life Retraction episode (although there are plenty of damning moments in there), but from a February appearance Daisey made on “Real Time with Bill Maher”. It’s at the two minute, 35 seconds mark of this Youtube clip:

Daisey: People work on that line tirelessly, hour after hour until they drop. I met people who were–

Maher: Until they drop?

Daisey They drop. A worker at Foxconn died after working a 34 hour shift …

And here there’s the slightest of pauses, as if Daisey has reached the end of the statement. But then he adds, almost mechanically:

Daisey: .. while I was in China.

A worker did indeed die after a 34 hour shift. But the truth of this fact isn’t enough for Daisey; he has to then attach to it some connection, however tenuous, to himself. A Chinese man didn’t just die; he died while Daisey was in China.

Of course if Daisey wasn’t actually in China at the time of the death, his statement, as a whole, becomes false. And this is what appears to have happened with a lot of the “facts” of the Foxconn story, facts that were true until Daisey digitally inserted himself into the narrative. Foxconn has employed underage workers (true), but Daisey didn’t meet five of them on his first day. Workers were poisoned by n-Hexane (true), but Daisey didn’t meet them either. Someone Daisey spoke with had a “ruined hand” (true, according to the interpreter), but the man never worked at Foxconn (the company Daisey was specifically investigating). Even the lie that the Foxconn guards had guns is only interesting in juxtaposition to the picture of a rogue American in Hawaiian shirt, boldly striding toward the gates of the factory.

It’s tempting to ascribe this to a kind of megalomania on the part of Daisey, to speculate that he lives in a world where everything must ultimately be about him. But speaking as someone who has dabbled in storytelling a bit, I can tell you that there is another explanation.

The easiest way to make a story engaging is to personalize it, to say “this is something that happened to me”. Everyone knows this on some level. Urban legends happen to “a friend of a friend” because, just by adding that phrase, you have made the story twice as interesting as one that happened to someone to whom you have no link at all. And be honest: would you even have read this post if I hadn’t opened with my personal connection with Daisey?

“I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard,” Daisey says in the Retraction episode. Well, personalization is the ultimate shortcut from uninteresting fact to gripping yarn. It is like fairy dust for storytellers: you sprinkle it on your anecdotes, and they sparkle.

It’s a kind of magic, to borrow a phrase. And it is very, very seductive.

One last observation.

The Retraction episode of This America Life is some of the most gripping radio I’ve ever heard. But you know what would have made it even more interesting? If Rob Schmitz, the reporter from Marketplace who ruthlessly grilled Daisey, had done so with Ira Glass as well. “You said that when Daisey didn’t provide contact info for his translator, you should have killed the show. And yet you didn’t. Why?”

Sunday afternoon I took Squig to Skate King.

I need not describe the venue to anyone raised in this area, as they already have a perfect mental picture of the joint throbbing in their forebrain. (It looks pretty much exactly as you remember it by the way, minus the Tempest machine.) For the rest: SK is a roller rink which, in the 70′s and 80′s, was thee place for get-togethers of all kinds: birthdays, school functions, funerals, etc. Judging from yesterday’s crowd its popularity remains largely undiminished, even if its webpage has not been updated since its creation in ’73.

This was my first time at SK since … well, let’s put it this way: the last time I was there, “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood was in the top 40. I am not just picking a arbitrary song to represent the early eighties, but actually recall this being played at a school-sponsored “Skate Party” I attended. I distinctly remember the horrified expression on the faces of parents, when the music was interrupted by spraying noises and all the seventh-graders in the rink joined Frankie in yelling “Come!!” (True story.)

Squig, on the other hands, had never worn roller skate before. If you are a parent and have not yet put your child on wheels, you need to do so immediately because it is high-larious. I seriously could not stop laughing at my only begotten son. It was as if his legs ended into two tiny terriers that were just running around and round in circles, completely independent of one another.

By the end of the hour he could stand by himself long enough for a picture to be taken, so long as he did not move or respirate or blink.

(I do not know why he looks like a level 3 lich in this photo.)

Squig was not alone in his roller-ineptitude; Skate King is like the Large Hadron Collider, with nine-year-olds in the role of particles. Imagine a live production of America’s Funniest Home Videos and you are 80% there.

Anyway, we had a good time. Well I did, at least. It was refreshing to find a place in Seattle where you can sing along to Katy Perry’s “Fireworks” at the top of your lungs without having to defend your knowledge of the lyrics.

It snowed Monday morning, so local TV news anchors spent yesterday chugging Red Bulls in preparation for their annual “HOLY SHITTIN’ PENGUINS SEATTLE SNOWMAGEDDON ALERT UPDATE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” show. By the time the evening broadcast rolled around, you’d think the powdery white stuff falling from the sky was weaponized anthrax.

In their defense, Seattle does tend to seize up when it gets an inch of snow. Like, a single cubic inch of snow, distributed across the entire city. In cases like yesterday, where so much snow fell that things turned perceptively white, people go nuts. Everyone adheres to their Emergency Snow Escape Plan, which is to immediately drive to the steepest hill in their neighborhood and attempt to a- or descend it, preferably in a 1998 Pontiac Bonneville lacking chains.

As you can see, the population of the Pacific Northwest is descended from a distinct subspecies of homo sapient completely lacking in the ability to adapt. We like our Northwest pacific; any perturbations and we’re completely hosed.

At least the weathermen are happy, as they get to dust off the word “inclement” and use it in every other sentence. Those of us unschooled in the intricacies of metrology, on the other hand, describe the weather in slightly different terms: totally effing awesome.

Update: After an hour of looking for my car keys, I realized that they must have fallen out of my pocket while sledding. Why didn’t I seal myself into my home with duct tape, as advised?

Update 2: Please add the following to the list of things that are totally effing awesome: people.

Seattle residents have the pennant at half-staff today, after the death of local legend Dave Niehaus. Dave was the color commentator for the Seattle Mariners from its inception in 1977 until … well, until yesterday, pretty much.

You may not care about baseball. But if you lived here, you’d have cared about Dave Niehaus. I don’t, and I did. He was that kind of guy.

Here’s a typical Dave Niehaus moment, that I excerpted in 2002:

Co-announcer Rick Rizz: We just got word that White Sox are leading the Royals 14-0 in the eighth inning.

Niehaus: I’ve been following that game. The White Sox need only three more runs to tie the record for the most lopsided shutout in the history of baseball.

Rizz: Man, I wonder what the scorecard looks like for that one.

Niehaus: I’ve seen it, and it’s a mess. The turning point in that game was the National Anthem.

There’s so much Dave in that exchange. He’s following one baseball game while narrating another. (That the dude liked baseball was well beyond dispute.) He had some esoteric but fascinating fact queued up and ready to roll. And even after 25 years of commentary, he could still pony up a witticism you’d never heard before.

For fair-weather baseball fans (and that includes me; sorry, dad), Dave was about as essential to the game as the bats. It’s like: have you ever seen a movie in a crowded theater and found yourself swept up in the collective sentiment, enjoying the hell out of it even while recognizing that it wouldn’t usually be your cup of tea? For me, that’s what watching a Mariner’s game was when Dave was announcing. He had a full-cinema quantity of enthusiasm for the game, and it was crazy infectious. When he declared a play “amazing”, your jaw dropped. When he got excited, you leaped from your chair. Listening to Dave call a game was like watching an appreciative kid open Christmas presents for three straight hours.

Dave was one of very few sports constants around here in the last 30 years: the Kingdome got blow’d up, the Sonics left town, people started caring about the Sounders. But Dave was as dependable as rain on the weekend.

Hell, he was one of the few Seattle constants, period. The loss of the Space Needle from the Seattle skyline would be felt no more keenly.

RIP Dave. Fly, fly away.

They should remake Cloverfield, except set it in Seattle and have a quarter-inch of snow as the monster.

We get no trick-or-treaters at our house. Zero. So we went over to the home of some friends, who live on Capitol Hill.

When they invited us, they made it sound like it would be a delightful, relaxing evening. Some food. A little wine. The occasional interruption by visiting children. Little did we know that we were being conscripted to work in their candy-handing-out sweatshop.

The quantity of trick-or-treaters they expected to receive was described to us as “a lot.” I took this to mean, like, 100. Instead, it was more like “a throng” or “a battalion” … possibly even “a multitude.” I don’t know what time they opened their front door (the insanity was already well on its way by the time we arrived at 6:00), but it did not close again until well after 9:00. The stream of kidmanity was ceaseless.

Handing out candy was a three-person operation: two stood on either side of the door, frantically shoving Fun-Sized Snickers bars and Laffy Taffy into the gaping maws of waiting bags; the third served as a kind of bucket brigade, feverishly scooping tooth-rot from the supply barrel and feeding it to the hander-outers, to ensure that their ammunition never ran low. Any hesitation and we would get overwhelmed. At one point a surge of kids drove us back into the house; the doorframe filled with a mass of costume-clad bodies, threatening to explode into the foyer if the pressure behind them continued to swell. We began just hurling handfuls of candy at the crowd, the high-caloric equivalent of firing a shotgun indiscriminately into an approaching zombie horde.

Our friends had purchased 100 pounds of candy; by the end of the evening, every last Tootsie Roll had been distributed.

Some observations from the front lines:

• The most common non-generic costume (“generic” being define as a mainstay: pirate, ninja, superhero, witch, sexy ______, etc.) was Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. A surprising number Dorothys. But perhaps not as surprising as the four different kids dressed as bananas. Am I so out-of-touch that I’ve missed the resurgence of the banana as a pop culture icon?
• Also in the “more popular than you’d expect” column: penguins, Boba Fett, Santa Claus.
• Favorite costume (tie): the two teens dressed as Jemaine and Bret. Bret had disheveled hair and a guitar strapped to his back; Jemaine had muttonchops and was crooning about how he was going to buy us a kebab. When The Queen and I complemented them on their costumes, they looked astonished. “Do you know who we are?” one asked. Sure, the Flight of the Conchords guys, we replied. “You’re the first people all night!” they cried. “We have a fan!”
• Second favorite costume: kid dressed up like a box of Chinese take-out.
• A homemade costume is, by default, 30 x more awesome than any store-bought costume. Fact! I would refer doubters to this photo.
• On the porch, standing next to the door, was a plastic skeleton with a long, curly dark wig and gummy eyeballs in its sockets. Early in the night, one young boy looked at it and exclaimed, “It’s Michael Jackson!” He wasn’t joking; he honestly mistook it for Captain EO. We though that was pretty hilarious / odd. Then, an hour later, another kid had the exact same reaction. And 20 minutes later, another. All were totally sincere; we were completely baffled.

  At the end of the night a few of us stood around it, trying to figure out the resemblance. “Well, it doesn’t have a nose,” my friend observed. “And it’s about the same shade of white.”

• The only thing more shameful than waking up after a night of heavy drinking to find a stranger in your bed is waking up the night after Halloween to find your jacket pocket literally bulging with empty candy wrappers.

Seattle has been rocked by, like, 14 mph winds today. So naturally the local media is reacting as if flesh-eating marmosets devoured the mayor.

Please to be noting:

• Video caption reading “One man was forced to hold onto a tree to keep from being blown over.”
• Actual video shows man using single hand to grasp sapling about 1/50th his diameter and approximately 1° off perpendicular from the ground.
• Lovable seven-year-old ragamuffin nonchalantly walks his bicycle past in the background.

You can’t truly appreciate the devastation until you’ve seen the raw footage. (Warning: contains scenes of umbrella carnage not suitable for all viewers.)

Of course HOLY SHIT WINDSTORM 2007!!! did manage knock out power at my house, which left me without access to online porn for an hour or so. Fortunately I have a copy of the 1977 Sears Catalog in our emergency kit for just such a contingency.

Sorry for the lack of posts, but I’ve been sick as a dog.

If you scour my previous entries, you may craftily deduce the identity of the infecter.

Last Friday I got email from my friend Phyllis Fletcher:

To: Matthew
From: Phyllis
Subject: Help--need jokes!!

I will represent KUOW at Town Hall's Seattle Follies, Thu April 26, 7:30PM. Send me some jokes!

Phyllis
 
 

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To: Phyllis
From: Matthew
Subject: Re: Help--need jokes!!

How many Seattlites does it take to replace a light bulb?

One to propose replacing it with a traditional light bulb, one to propose replacing it with a energy-efficient fluorescent bulb, one to propose replacing it with a single candle in protest of the Iraq war, and 100,000 to vote on a non-binding referendum.

Matthew
 
 

* * *

 
 
To: Matthew
From: Phyllis
Subject: Re: Help--need jokes!!

Hahaha. But I will be delivering a fake newscast, so what I really need are jokey/satirical news items.

Phyllis
 
 

* * *

 
 
To: Phyllis
From: Matthew
Subject: Re: Help--need jokes!!

The Seattle City Council voted unanimously today to reappropriate the $4 billion currently earmarked for the 520 floating bridge replacement project. The funds will now be given to the research department of Blue Origin, to be used for the development of jetpacks and hoverboards. Richard Conlin, chairman of the council's state Route 520 committee, defended the decision, pointing out that the creation of such alternative commuter technology for crossing Lake Washington would likely require less time and prove more feasible than finding a 520 plan everyone can agree on.

Meanwhile, the Seattle chapter of NORML unveiled another 520 replacement proposal last Friday at the Hempfest benefit concert: the 420 floating bridge. The six-lane "high-way" would have a speed limit of 7 miles an hour and just kind of meander around aimlessly, without any real direction.