'When The Groove Is Dead And Gone, You Know That Love Survives ... So We Can Rock Forever On'

Michael Jackson's death has freed him now.

And us from our living mourning for the past two or so decades.

It was like watching someone slowly die and degenerate from a terminal disease -- but now all has been made whole. They don't typically show the state of those of people as they're dying, but we watched it unfold as each stranger year passed.

I feel a warm melancholy as I watch his performances in the early 80s. Music almost as essential to watch as to listen to.

All on his own, early 20s, full of an elegant self-confidence.

It's nice to be a 9-year-old kid when a definitive cultural moment arrives.

"Thriller."

It usurped my summer, 10-plus minute extended videos at a time.

Then he began his transformation ... and that's all need be said, now that he no longer lives.

And now, two and a half decades later, here are the tributes -- which from our generation can be told through music videos.

Once the tributes are done, I don't plan to watch any of the drama related to his death, both when he was alive and dead.

I am allowed freely to believe in what I remember on those summer nights of childhood, as we flipped the awkwardly large and cumbersome cable converter box remote (ironically still attched by a cord) to watch him perform daily eclipse's over MTV.

I really have missed that part of my life. I tried to moonwalk tonight. I think I did it.

It's strange how death brings these things to life.

Analog Purgatory

I had thought I had watched the last analog TV of my life on my porch the night the Lakers went up 3-1 on the Magic (because Jameer Nelson decided to play the exact opposite defense you play when your team is up by 3 with only seconds left).

It was the night before the big June 12 digital switchover.

The game was over. I collapsed the attenae and watched as the screen went snowy. Then I clicked the TV off. Dropped it out into the garage.

I had long dreaded this moment, even after Obama extended the deadline from February.

I know there are options, but I just can't let it go. For whatever reason.

The other night I plugged it into a socket in the garage. I fished out the damaged antennae and attached it, just to see what would happen.

And I found ... glorious programming!

Analog purgatory. With the strongest signal coming from Charlotte, no less.

Looping info-packages on how to handle the digital switchover.

It's almost like the joy one of my dear cousins gets out of religiously watching the TV Guide channel scroll by, over and over, all day.

Like her, I can't get enough of it.

I turn on the analog purgatory as I grill food, drink a beer and smoke a clove.

The chatter is comforting, the feeling of having been left behind in the rapture. Battling post-apocalyptic isolation with but a few remaining survivors.

They even offer trivia on when the earliest digital signal was sent. Did you know it was like 1994 or something? Or maybe 1999? I don't know; I wasn't really paying attention.

Alas, nothing can last forever.

Throughout all the regurgitated instructions of how to screw a cable into a box then screw another cable into another place, and after all the interviews with electronics experts and the suprisingly clean graphics ... they let us know that they will stop doing what they're doing on July 6.

Well, just so you know, this one loyal viewer is melancholy.

Did The Druids Make Any Music? (Because That Would Be Convenient To Make This Flow)

Atlanta won't be winning any awards for having the pulsing heart of a great American city, but I have my affections for it.

Among other things, it does have two of my most-favorite names for roads, off of Interstate 85:

1.) North Druid Hills.

That just sounds really cool. I don't live there, but if I somehow found myself living there, I would spare no opportunity to say, with a solemn pretension, that I lived in the "Druid Hills."


2.) Beaver Ruin.

I laugh every time I see this exit. Every time.

Beaver Ruin Road.

So ... blunt.

I'm proud to say I've never walked that road of Beaver Ruin.

P.S. The other road next to it on the exit sign -- "Lilburn."

---

But on to why I'm really here tonight ...

And not speaking of which ....

Bon Iver was a trascendent performance on Sunday evening down there at the Varity Playhouse.

The well-known story -- for fans like me --goes that Justin Vernon's life went into the shitter, so he retreated for three months to a remote cabin in the middle of winter in Wisconsin with no plans but isolation and whatever might come from that.

He wound up making some beautiful music with barest of means, including in that chopping wood to keep warm and killing deer to provide his means.

And I'm a bit jealous of his transformative experience. You don't come by them easy.

What impressed me about him last night -- among other things that I won't go into because ... well, I don't personally know anyone else besides my wife who likes him -- is that he took whatever it is he brought with him from that cabin and shared it, expanded upon it, and made it into something that we all were a part of.

Electricity sometimes ruins musical artists who made their names without it, but not in this case, where something is being carefully built with each tool available used to construct the greater masterpiece.

He dubbed his voice a million times over while in that cabin to create a texture of sound that you could squeeze in your hands.

When he implored the audience to sing the end to his song, it wasn't a showman's ploy.

It seemed he wanted a bigger piece of something, woven by sound waves, to touch.

I don't know to what he extent he planned the touch and texture of his music -- but the bass drum, each time it was sounded, felt as if it were physically rescusitating my heart, which hasn't been beating like it should these days.

I love transformative experiences.

Music that blesses you with feelable matter.



and ...

Bon Iver -- Re: Stacks

Sham-A-Lama-Ding-Dong

Why is the ShamWow! guy wearing a headset while he's doing the informercial?

Is it because we could talk to him directly if we call? Is it that they want him to look like he's too busy to explain something so obvious that we'd be stupid not to buy it?

Or is it a corporate down-sizing thing where they're simultaneously recording the radio ad?

Isn't it also a curious advertising strategy that a product pushed on television would start with "sham?"

I know he beat up a hooker.

I'm just saying -- these are the questions that trouble me ...

Winning

I can't call it an epiphany.

More like a new understanding -- in the way that it's new only because I was the only one who didn't understand.

It's not a secret that I don't get my youngest boy -- 6 years old -- as much as I do my oldest -- 9 years old. There's nothing wrong with that, because I appreciate who he is. But oftentimes it's more as an observer of who he is.

I don't care if my hands are super-clean before I eat. I don't find comfort in rules or standard procedures. I want to be better than other people at things.

My oldest is virtually a carbon-copy of me. For the good and for the bad. The comparable traits are too lengthy to list.

But something happened the other night that offered me a remarkable insight into my youngest little boy -- the theatre kid, the uncoordinated one, the one who loves little girls and isn't afraid to put himself in the spotlight.

I felt the essence of who he is -- in a moment, the kind of moment that is transformative even if it is only a moment.

---

Aden has never really cared about winning. He just wants someone to tell him he's done well.

I've come to learn that when he argues with his brother about who won something, it's not because he brought up the subject of who should be winning. He only argues about winning to defend himself from someone saying he has lost.

When he says, "Did we win the baseball game?", he only asks because it's what people talk about after a sports event. I tell him that I can tell him he didn't lose (because kids hitting a ball off a tee if they can't hit a pitch thrown to them by the coach doesn't result in a winner or a loser).

I remember when Asa first learned to play video games, winning was foremost in his mind. He's destroyed video games because he couldn't beat them. I always understood how he felt and understood what it's like to feel like you're not having fun unless you're winning.

The thing is, Asa has beaten me at things. And he lets me know it.

Aden never has.

That changed though.

Thanks to SpongeBob SquarePants.

---

Aden had been begging me to play this SpongeBob racing game on the computer, one of those where you use the arrow keys on the keyboard to accelerate and drive.

I don't have a lot of practice at that.

He's played quite a bit.

He wanted me to play it because he thought it was cool. He wanted me to be a part of it.

But he didn't care about beating me.

As I slammed Patrick's race car into walls repeatedly and couldn't figure out how to back up and get straight and then went the wrong way ... he smoked me.

Two minutes -- two minutes -- after he crossed the finish line, I richocheted my way to the merciful end.

All the while, he told me I was doing OK. Every little wall I managed to scrape away from was a "good job."

When I crossed the finish line, I was "awesome at this game."

"High five, Daddy."

And that's when I understood.

I can't articulate exactly what it is I understand.

I just know that I do.

ADEN'S AMAZING BASEBALL SLIDE: