Spitball Army

The gym smells of foot fungus. A sloppy white chin smudge decorates the arm curl pad. I scan the room for a clown with big shoes.

I. Father was born beneath the sway of California palms; in death, he is surrounded by their less majestic South Carolina cousins.

II. Deprived of a pine box, his ashes were stored inside a bedroom closet, with no chance to nourish the soil of young tree roots.

III. His childhood friends had nowhere to visit him. Their community cemetery, forested and verdant, bore no marker with his name.

IV. In Spring, they memorialized his life by planting a young sycamore in the grass near the old Mission, where his ancestors lay.

V. The son, absent from home since his father’s death, visited the sycamore monument seven years after it was placed in the earth.

VI. At his feet, scattered in the grass, were seed pods, fallen leaves, bark peelings. A parade of ants circled up the tree trunk.

VII. He set a plaque at the foot of the tree, which now reached skyward with maturity. Polished granite mirrored passing clouds.

VIII. “In memory of…,” the stone carving read, stating his full name. “Tree planted by his friends, Nadine and Forey Rounds.”

(photo: spitballarmy.com)

The strand of coastal asphalt vanished from sight to the north and to the south. Before him, the great sea. Behind him, the past.

On Highway 1, Carlsbad/Leucadia, Calfornia. December 1978   (photo: spitballarmy.com)

Sixty hours after the tetanus shot, he was still feeling light-headed, like a continuous pot buzz without the giddy enjoyment.

I’ve been on a hiatus from music magazines for about a year.

Actually, that statement above is only partly correct. I still receive the American Record Guide every other month, as I had paid them for a multi-year subscription a while back; Paste still sends me their pocket-size leaflet every month or so; and I receive Rolling Stone because the one-year-for-ten-bucks deal that I stumbled on about nine months ago was too good a deal to pass up.

But I did put a stop to purchasing music-related periodicals off the newsstand near on twelve months ago. This was done in an effort to curb spending money on music (which I had reduced to a crawl, really) and to eliminate temptation (which is ever-present, naturally). It’s been working out.

This week, however, I picked up the November issue of Uncut, the one touting Jack White as the “Man of the Decade” on its cover. That was intriguing enough. But what really grabbed my attention was their list of “THE 150 GREATEST ALBUMS OF THE 21ST CENTURY…SO FAR!”

The list reaches questionably at times, but 150 GREAT albums in just under ten years is a tough – and, obviously, subjective – feat to pull off successfully.  In some cases, it seems as easy as just including full artist discographies for the last ten years (Radiohead, The Raconteurs, Johnny Cash).  In the case of some artists, glaring omissions can be spotted (even though the Drive-By Truckers’ Decoration Day is mentioned in the blurb for their The Dirty South as confirming the band’s status as chroniclers of the Southern experience, it failed to make the list).

Largely, however, these are solid selections, especially in the upper tier.  Here is Uncut‘s top ten, with my comments and suggestions for alterations:

10. Fleet Foxes / Fleet Foxes – Great album. Deserved.

9. Ryan Adams / Heartbreaker – I never warmed up to this record, though I know to most people it is somewhat iconic. My preference is for the Whiskeytown material (it’s all pre-2000) or the mellower stuff (Love is Hell or Easy Tiger).  I wouldn’t really quibble with this placement, but I’d place his Love is Hell on the list, from which it was wrongly omitted.

8. Bob Dylan / Modern Times – Bob’s best album since 1997’s Time Out of Mind.  It shares space in this top ten with Love and Theft (#2), which just seems wrong.  Remove Love and Theft and move this one up a few notches.

7. The Arcade Fire / Funeral – Deserved. Terrific album by a risk-taking band that stretches musical boundaries.

6. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss / Raising Sand – No. This is a good album, but No.  Take it out and in its place put, say, Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois or Michigan, which spawned (or grew out of) a contemporary folk-pop scene that stretches from Iron & Wine to Bon Iver.  Or maybe Bright Eyes’ I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning, which could be similarly described.

5. The Strokes / Is This It – Eh, okay.

4. Brian Wilson / Smile – I love this record, but can’t agree with this positioning.  Leave it on the list, lower, and bring up Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black.  Back to Black, while being a terrific listen itself, and probably the only good album we’ll ever get from this artist, also represents a string of outstanding collections of contemporary soul which includes albums by Joss Stone, Lewis Taylor, Jill Scott, the new Maxwell CD and several hip-hop releases (not rap…rap is dead).

3. Wilco / A Ghost Is Born – Again: right artist, wrong album choice.  This spot should be occupied by Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (#35).  What were the editors thinking?  Those Krautrock experiments on Ghost were “skip track” inducing.

2. Bob Dylan / Love and Theft – Since we’ve already removed this one, let’s fill it with something unpredictable and nutty, like Portugal the Man’s Satanic Satanist album.  That one’s good.  That’s my choice for “head-scratching inclusion.”

1. The White Stripes / White Blood Cells – I won’t argue.  Jack White is, after all, the “Man of the Year.” And I like this band a lot. I lean toward Elephant and Get Behind Me Satan (there’s that pesky devil again), but this one is good, too.  Like Ryan Adams’ Heartbreaker, others that I know who have traveled this record more times than I swear by its superiority.  I won’t argue.