I can, and shall, continue to comment...

Pandering to "The Base"...

I don't know why I do it. Everytime I do it, it just makes me angry. I should know better by now. But I do it anyway.

What is "it"? Why, it's listening to right-wing talk radio, that's what.

I usually try to take the back roads when heading to my office, simply to avoid the miasma that is Interstate 40. But as I headed in early once last week, and again this morning, I saw the billboard for "Miller In The Morning," the new drive-time show on that bastion of free speech, 99.7 WTN.

(In the spirit of full disclosure, I'll note that I once worked for the company that owned WTN. That company decided to divest themselves of the station...and strangely enough, me...right about the same time.)

Anyhoo, I didn't give it much thought until later this morning, as I took another back route from the office to Belmont to teach my 8am class, when an MTA bus passed in front of me and there he was again. So I thought, why not? Let's see if this guy lives up to the blowhardian tradition of predecessors such as Steve Gill and Phil Valentine.

Hand to God, I listened for 30 seconds, before turning it off because of the stream of expletives coming out of my own head threatened to send me rocketing through the school zone I was crawling through at the time.

Within that half minute, I heard him promo an upcoming interview with Tony Snow. I thought, "Why would the White House press secretary call a brand talk show in Nashville?" Then I heard him promo another interview with Karl Rove...and that's when it clicked.

He was broadcasting from the White House.

He confirmed it mere milliseconds later, and that's when expletives started flying. This pinhead was doing a live, four-hour Republican infomercial directly from the White House, broadcasting directly into the center of a state with a hypercompetitive Senate race that could help determine the balance of power in this country.

Unbe-frickin'-lievable. I could have sworn there were rules against this kind of blatant politicking within the White House itself. But, then again, so many rules and guidelines we hold so dear (like, say, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights) have been suspended, ignored or flat-out obliterated, this shouldn't surprise me at all.

"We have lived as if in a trance..."

And KO continues to try to slap us awake. His ratings increase since the inception of the "Special Comment" seems to show he's getting to some of us...here's hoping that can reap some rewards in a little over two weeks...

GODB4US

This was the license plate I was stuck looking at Thursday morning as I was driving to my office. (Side question: Should there really be this much traffic at 6:30am? Years ago, someone told me Nashville had the earliest rush hours in the country. Mornings like this reinforce this idea...)

While I'm certainly a proponent of freedom of expression, a license plate like this makes me wonder if the purchaser/potential communicator really took the time to plot out what they wanted those seven characters to say.

Because there are just too many ways to interpret those symbols into sentences...

"God be for us" - Arrogant, if grammatically incorrect.
"God before us" - Taking in the wonderment of the world that surrounds us...a nice sentiment, I suppose.
"God before U.S." - Putting priorities in order. Good enough
"God be for U.S." - Even more arrogant than the first, with the added bonus of a touch of shortsightedness.

Personally, I wish one could throw a comma into the mix, just as a a sign of humility and wishful thinking. Because heaven knows we've done plenty to cause the Almighty to question why he allows us to be here at all anymore.

"God, be for us."

KO on the KO'ing of Habeas Corpus...

...along with most of the rest of the Bill of Rights.

Requiem for a record store...

When I first came to Nashville in 1989 as a 21-year-old kid, part of my excitement came in living (for the summer, at least) in a town that had a Tower Records.

As a burgeoning pop culture/music business observer, I knew (tangentially, at least) about Tower's reputation as an arbiter of cool, not only from its West Coast roots, but as the chain expanded slowly across the U.S.

Record stores where I grew up were either lifeless, mall-based outfits or, let's face it, head shops, neither of which held much interest for me.

But Tower was different, with a deep catalog available right there on the shelves, magazines from all over the world, an eclectic video rental business, and a knowledgeable (if ever aloof) staff.

The western face of the building, the one that faced the narrow parking lot that only true Nashvillians knew how to navigate, featured handpainted reproductions of new and upcoming album projects, frequently artists with Nashville ties, but not necessarily the big names, the ones that didn't really need Tower's help to sell records anyway.

On more than one occasion that summer, I'd leave my Music Row internship and head to Tower just to browse. The filled-to-the-brim stacks highlighted names I'd only read about in the wilds of West Texas, and the beat-up headphone-enabled preview stations encouraged me to listen to things I'd never check out without it. I fed my love for music from Marshall Crenshaw to Amanda Marshall to Jellyfish to Patty Griffin to The Beatles to Poe to Will Hoge to dozens of others through the auspices of Tower.

Tower Records is going out of business. It got ridiculously easy to acquire music through means other than going to a store, so people stopped. Or at least slowed enough that Tower suffered. I'm one of them...but not for that reason. I write about music, so I get a lot of it sent to me automatically, not all of it good, as you might imagine. And I'm writing this while listening to the 2005 Austin City Limits Festival record streamed through Rhapsody, so I realize that I'm part of the problem.

But almost every time I had an hour to kill between meetings, or I was in the neighborhood, or just needed to reconnect to the current state of music retail through an outside arbiter of cool, I'd go to Tower and just browse. I won't get to do that anymore, and it makes me more than a little bit sad.

Update: I went to Tower over lunch, and there was just this palpable sense of sadness, among the staff and among the overwhelmingly over-30 set of customers browsing and sighing. There were also a couple of news crews interviewing folks in the parking lot and taking shots of the various "Going Out Of Business" signs going up all over the building.

On the "good bargains" front...well, we're not quite there yet. Magazines are 30% off, books 20% (which is why I picked up three I'd had my eyes on for awhile: The Rock Snob's Dictionary, The Areas of My Expertise and Superheroes And Philosophy) and the CDs/DVDs 10% off...but it's off the regular price, which tends to be $18.99. So the real bargains are going to be a few weeks away...I may be sad, but I'm still a cheapskate.