This is bit odd, but a Bill Walton spoken word album is not especially strange in and of itself. What puts Men Are Made In The Paint over the top is who Walton made the album with, and who released it.

If you’re a former punk rock kid of a certain age, you no doubt remember the little catalogs that came in every SST release, printed on Bible-weight tissue paper and strategically folded so they could hold listings for every record that label put out yet still fit between the CD and booklet for Damaged or Double Nickels on the Dime. One of my former bandmates swore he would one day own every single item in that catalog, and so he made it a point to learn every last release printed thereon, memorizing the backlist of obscure bygone groups like Tom Troccoli’s Dog and Fatso Jetson.

While studying the catalog with talmudic dedication, he discovered a tiny section for something called ISSUES RECORDS. Its only listing was Men Are Made In The Paint. The existence of a Bill Walton double album should have been crazy enough, but it was made doubly (quadruply?) crazy by the fact that Greg Ginn was somehow responsible for its existence. My friend, who worshiped Ginn, would often point to this as a sign of his quixotic genius and proclaimed this thing must be worth listening to it because Ginn deemed it so.

He did not acquire the album, however, and I went years without thinking about it until I saw an HBO documentary about the UCLA basketball dynasty of the 1960s and 1970s. Walton figured heavily in that doc, talking about his triumphs on the court, his anti-war activism, and his clashes with coach John Wooden. Ray Manzarek also had a few segments in the film, during which he talked almost exclusively in Doors references, a trope so forced it made my teeth itch.

However, something about seeing Walton and Manzarek in quick succession reminded me of that tiny section in the SST catalog, and so I googled to see if Walton’s album really existed. The interwebs revealed that not only did Men Are Made In The Paint really come out in 1994, but it contained musical accompaniment from…Ray Manzarek.

Now I really needed to find out how this thing was made. The extant record was not helpful, however. The biggest press Men Are Made In The Paint ever received, near as I could tell, was in a Billboard article from 1994. Spoken word blew up in the early 90s, alongside the rise of “alternative” music; it was featured prominently on Lollapalooza sidestages, along with another Early Clinton Years artform, slam poetry. SST put a lot of weight behind spoken word, not only releasing a good deal of albums in the genre but also hosting Word Wednesday events at its LA superstore. However, most their spoken word output had some tangential relationship to music, often performed by people who were currently or formerly in rock bands. A spoken word album by Bill Walton was another thing entirely.

The Billboard article gives a few tantalizing glimpses into the origins of this strange endeavor. Ginn is quoted at length and professes to love basketball; at the same time Issues Records put out Walton’s record, it also released another spoken word project by Walton’s old coach, John Wooden. Manzarek shares his thoughts on what he contributed to the project:

I played what I thought would be the appropriate music for the different moves of the sport….For defense, the player will hunker down. He is low and mean. I played low, choppy piano chords to convey that feeling. For free throws, the game can move from fast and chaotic to very composed, and the music speed reflects that, at times taking on a very tranquil quality. When I play this music, I feel like I am really playing basketball.

The article also touts future releases from NBA coach Jack Ramsay, football play-by-play man Charlie Jones, and veteran jazz saxophonist Buddy Collette. The Ramsay album seems to have been released at some point, but the fate of the others is murky.

The trail went cold after that, save for a 1991 LA Times profile of Harvey Kubernik, producer of Men Are Made In The Paint, in which he discussed his sports-related spoken word omnibus called Innings and Quarters. Kubernik had previously recorded spoken word with Exene Cervenka and Charles Bukowski, among others, but had always dreamed of doing something in the sports vein. “I knew all of these poets with who had sports poems in their cages, and I got to pull them out,” he said. From this, I could assume that Kubernik’s background in spoken word and love of sports was what ultimately led to the Bill Walton/Ray Manzarek collabo.

I dreamed of writing a “making of” piece about Men Are Made In The Paint. Had Walton, Manzarek, and Ginn ever been in the studio at the same time? If so, how come the earth didn’t just explode at that very moment?

It was not to be. Despite months of furious google-scouring and emails to any lead that sounded remotely promising, no one involved in the project ever got back to me. This may be just as well, since I can imagine myself locking up if I’d actually gotten Bill Walton on the phone and had to ask him, “What’s the deal with this weird spoken word thing you did 20 years ago?”

Perhaps Men Are Made In The Paint is best left as an unexplained artifact. Future generations may puzzle its origins and its meaning but never know for sure, always hoping to discover some truth in its mystery.

For the curious, I’ve added a playlist below containing the entire double album of Men Are Made In The Paint. As you’ll hear, Manzarek’s contributions are fairly limited, just little touches in between tracks. He can’t resist the temptation to throw a little snatch of “Light My Fire” into the intro, of course. But the vast majority of the work’s running time is given to Bill Walton talking about basketball, so if that floats your boat, you’re in for a treat.

Listening to Walton’s voice at this length is an almost hypnotic experience. I recommend listening to it in a quiet, unadorned space where you can zone out for a while. Think of it as meditation, with a guru who loves hook shots and hates dunks.

Death is never far in Queens, the borough of graves, but it creeps closer in certain places than others. One such place is Mount Olivet Crescent, a slip of a street that wends its way up a hill in Maspeth and down another in Middle Village. The Crescent is bordered on one side by its namesake cemetery, a lush expanse of granite mausoleums, angels, and obelisks cut in half by the busy thoroughfare of Eliot Avenue. A few ramshackle flower shops hang on for dear life, squeezed on all sides by vinyl-sided one-family houses and a sore thumb of a chrome-plated apartment complex. The Crescent comes to rest near an enormous sign pointing the way to the parking lot for the Hess-Miller Funeral Home, host to more than a few wakes for family members of mine.

At the Crescent’s summit, the Fresh Pond Crematory looms over it all, a cream-colored slab with a circular driveway paved in brick, ideal for the approach of hearses. Built in 1884, the exterior resembles a crossbreed between federal mint and Gilded Age prison. Cremation was rare enough in those days that a Brooklyn Eagle reporter made the long trip to Fresh Pond after hearing the mere rumor a wealthy German businessman was to be cremated there. The reporter soon found himself in an Abbott and Costello-esque exchange with one of the attendants, who impatiently explained he could cremate no one until the oven was complete.

The reporter eventually got what he wanted: a graphic description of exactly what cremation does to the human body. (“The total weight of the ashes of a full grown man would only be six or seven pounds.”) He also received a defense of the practice from the attendant, based largely on the overcrowded state of the city’s cemeteries and some other concerns about corpses that haunted the Victorian mind.

Oh, cremation is what we must all come to, and it has a great many advantages when you look at it in the right light. You can’t wake up after burial and find yourself choking to death with six feet of earth over you and your coffin nailed down, and medical students can’t snatch your bones and monkey with them in their dissecting rooms. You can have your cemeteries all the same, and set these urns in them and plant flowers about the urns; that will be all right and nobody will be hurt. This thing has to come.

The crematory has grown considerably since those days, when nearby residents were worried about the smell such a facility might produce. A towering smokestack now announces its true purpose, as do the large copper letters over the main entrance, dripping green with its name. Beneath, in smaller, more polished type, is the announcement AMERICAN COLUMBARIUM CO., INC.

I drove past the crematory many times last summer, as the Crescent proved the quickest route between my house and my daughter’s day camp. It was impossible not to notice the building and feel a chill as it rushed by my window, but I made little note of that second designation, COLUMBARIUM, assuming it was an antiquated euphemism for the building’s primary function. I soon discovered a columbarium is actually a room where cinerary urns are placed in niches for display. The word comes from columba, Latin for dove, as the niches resembled dovecotes to the ancient Romans who were fond of interring their dead in this manner.

The Fresh Pond Crematory’s modest web site said the columbarium portion of facility was open to the public, and the few distant photos of its dazzling array of urns made it seem worth a visit. I even made a Google calendar appointment with myself to do so, but hit snooze on the invite many times when I couldn’t get my schedule or my mood to cooperate. Then last Saturday, I had to bring my car for annual inspection at a garage near the Crescent. The dozen or so grumbling dads on line ahead of me at the repair shop suggested a long wait lay ahead. So I could either amuse myself with outdated copies of Road & Track, or I could take a walk and make good on that promise to myself.

Passing the Fresh Pond Crematory in a car is one thing. Approaching it on foot is something else entirely. The crematory is uphill regardless of where you’re coming from, and the building itself sits on a peak set back from the Crescent’s sidewalk. I arrived from the direction of Metropolitan Avenue, and the crematory stayed well hidden until the Crescent took a slight turn to the west. Then the building suddenly emerged from behind a rusting greenhouse. It weighed heavy on my eyes, its gravity increasing with each step I took toward it.

When I buzzed at the front door for entry, I was greeted by a small, wide-eyed woman vaccuuming the carpet in the foyer. She had the sympathetic look of someone who encounters mourners every day, whose default setting for everyone she is forced to meet during her waking hours must be I’m sorry. I explained that I was interested in visiting the columbarium. She struggled to think of a response until another woman’s voice called out from some distant room, “I’ll be right there!” The woman with the vaccuum directed me to an office to my left, where different urns sat on display, displaying to visitors their options.

The woman who eventually emerged clacked toward me in stacatto high heels. I didn’t catch her name because she did not volunteer it, and I was too cowed to ask. I had the feeling I’d barged my way into someone’s living room, not a place of business. Still, I stammered that I hoped to visit the columbarium.

“Are you doing a school project or something?” she asked. I’ve reached the age where it’s flattering to be confused for anyone school-aged, but I told her no, I simply lived nearby and was curious to see what it was like. The woman tilted her head and looked, if not suspicious, then a little confused. Curiosity was in short supply here. My appearance couldn’t have helped my case, as I’d left the house unshowered and unshaved, wearing in a hoodie and well-worn Mets t-shirt, more prepared for a morning of waiting around in a Pep Boys garage than visiting this solemn location.

“Sure, go ahead,” the woman said, waving her hand in the vague direction of where I needed to go. I must have looked as lost as I felt, because after half a beat, the woman charged past me and promised to show the way.

I was led back through the foyer and up a marble staricase. We came to a stop one step from the top, by a visitor’s log book and altar donated by a local Boy Scout troop. There, the woman told me the columbarium had many sections, each with its own name and aesthetic. She suggested starting with the narrow Gothic Columbarium to my left, then working my way into the larger Arion Room, with its tremendous skylight. I nodded, finding it difficult to listen, as I was already too distracted by the brief glimpses of what lay ahead.

“You get lost, just holler,” the woman said as she click-clacked back downstairs, leaving me to my own devices.

In the Gothic Columbarium, small chambers butted against each other, railroad apartment style. The only light came from sun strained through exquisite stained glass windows, some portraying angels, others simple geometric patterns. The stone walls were pocked by niches, thousands of them, carved out of the walls in every available spot. Each niche was hemmed in by glass and brass frames that resembled old fashioned PO boxes, inscribed with family names. Seating was provided in most rooms. In some, a trio of wooden chairs were positioned so their backs formed an equilateral triangle. Others had tables with full seating and floral arrangements, as if a dinner party was about to begin. The Arion Room was more spacious, with its expanses of stained glass ceilings, and a large gleaming white pagoda-like structure that dominated the room.

No matter where I roamed in the columbarium, the surnames on the urns were overwhelmingly German. More often than not, the dedications and epitaphs were written in that language, inscribed in baroque Gothic lettering. I saw names from my own family, names that belonged to wide swaths of distant generations I never knew: Schtichler, Simon, Bauerlein. It was an echo of the time when the surrounding neighborhoods were largely German themselves, stretching from here through Ridgewood, Bushwick, and Williamsburg, a population that dated back to the time when Hessian mercenaries were billeted in Long Island during the Revolutionary War. You can find ample evidence of New York’s once large German community in most cemeteries in Queens, but the effect was concentrated in the columbarium, where aggressively Teutonic names stood cheek to jowl.

The urns themselves were as gorgeous as they were varied. The oldest, which dated back to the crematory’s opening, tended toward black tulip shapes with florid gilt script, jug handles on each side like loving cups. Newer urns leaned toward minimalism, boxy shapes, right angles, stick figure crucifixes. In between, enormous receptacles with filigree and inlaid with monochrome photos. Mini-mausoleums in ivory and jade flanked by Corinthian columns and topped with grand cupolas. Scalloped pillbox pedestals stamped with seals of membership: Masons, Elks, Oddfellows, Daughters of the American Revolution. Sprightly porcelain tubs with the look of delftware, festooned by carved eagles. Each niche held its own universe.

And yet, there was a leveling sameness to the scene. No matter where I stood, the niches continued  in every direction without end. It reminded me of an aerial shot of a Levittown. If I stood back to take in an entire room, the individual touches faded, and I was left with a grid of absences.

My first thought was to compare the columbarium to a Green-Wood Cemetery in miniature. The more I thought about it, however, the less the comparison held up. Green-Wood Cemetery has a LOOKIT ME quality completely missing from the columbarium. It brought to mind the laboring German Catholic side of my family, the kind that would saw ostentation as a character flaw. What makes you think you’re so special? was their motto. This half of my lineage had their roots in the stock buried within the columbarium, possessed of a belief in hard work and handworn artisanship, but contained by a stoic recognition that in the end, there is not much that separates us, because we all wind up in the same place.

One urn haunted me. Its shell was carved from pale jade, in the shape of domed monument with a perimeter of Greek columns. But the columns had fallen off the structure one by one, and a pile of them lay in a corner of the niche, stacked atop one another like a pyramid of timber. The actual urn had been removed from the shell and placed to the side, balanced on one edge of its former home, leaning slightly to the east. The unsheathed urn was a simple tin container. It was pasted with a label to identify the remains inside, but it was turned away from me. It seemed to be waiting patiently for repairs that would never be made.

I passed through as many rooms as I could stand. For all the beauty on display, the silence and the years on display began to overwhelm me, and after 45 minutes or so I had to make my way back downstairs and out into the world of the living. Xeroxed instructions were taped to the exit, but they were confusingly worded (TURN BUTTON THEN LEAVE), and I was afraid of destroying the gate if I pushed too hard without knowing what I was doing. I was forced to petition the woman who’d let me in, who was still in the middle of her vacuuming. She knew the trick to getting the thing open and threw her shoulder into the dense iron door.

“You have to push,” she said. I protested that I tried but was afraid of breaking something.

“It’s strong,” she said with a chuckle. I tumbled down the drive toward the Crescent. The door slammed shut behind me.

When I turn, I see the man who shoved me. Shaved head, black windbreaker scuffed with sheetrock dust and eggshell paint. He has the lumbering gait of a drunk launching himself from one parking meter to the next on the long walk home. He may very well be drunk, for all I can tell. This wouldn’t be the first guy I’ve seen stewed to the gills at this early hour on the subway. Then he careens into a woman much smaller than him, his shoulder stooping to her height. It doesn’t look intentional. He’s fighting something, and losing. His knees buckle beneath him, and his head begins to twitch and jerk.

“He’s having a seizure!” a woman yells. It sounds like dialogue from a script that doesn’t trust its director to explain things visually. I almost laugh, and yet I understand the urge to yell out something the second it hits your brain at a weird moment like this one. The crowd parts around the man, and the sudden lack of bodies speeds his descent. However, he has enough control of his facilities to lower himself, first sitting, then prone as he continues to shake.

The train remains paused. Not to address the man’s condition, but to let out the large crowd of people who depart at Union Square. Some of those who remain stare, while others look away, embarrassed. No one is quite sure what to do. We’re all spooked, myself included. But I’m spooked for a different reason. This all feels too familiar to me.

My dad drank through most of my kid-hood. He made many attempts to quit of varying lengths and degrees of sincerity. All failed. His desert islands of sobriety were inevitably wiped out when his brain, unable to deal with a sudden end to the nonstop flow of booze, induced violent, shaking seizures. There is a medical explanation for this, I’m sure. In fact, I vaguely recall having it explained to me in clinical detail, but the particulars escape me now. I could google it, but please excuse me if, having seen it up close starting at the age of 6, I’m not all that interested in brushing up.

Dad’s seizures were not like that of the man on the L train. They were loud, violent, and prolonged. The first time I saw it happen, I was terrified. But after that first time, the seizures came with such frequency that terror was no longer an option. If horror happens every day, it ceases to be horror, because it has to. Otherwise, it will drive you insane.

Out of necessity, I came to see the seizures as petty annoyances, like mosquitoes or bad TV reception. The seizures only bothered me if they were witnessed by someone outside the family, because these people weren’t equipped with my calloused eyes. They would see a seizure for the horror that it really was, and their reactions would force me to recognize that I was living in the middle of something that was monstrously wrong.

Once, my dad had a seizure at the local community pool. He was very close to a wall in the shallow end, so he didn’t drown, but he did crack his head open on one of the pool’s harsh concrete borders. My mom wasn’t there, and so the moms who were present took it upon themselves to try and comfort me, which was the last thing I wanted. Allowing myself to be comforted was an acknowledgment that this was a horrible thing and therefore I needed comforting. I didn’t want to stick around and wait for an ambulance while various moms wondered how best to pity me, or how best to push their own fear and horror back into faraway corners of their minds. I wanted to disappear.

One of them, a mom I barely knew, parent to a kid I thought was a bit of a creep (if eight-year-olds can really be creeps), grabbed me and squeezed me tight and told me it was going to be okay. She never bothered asking if it was okay to do this to me. I didn’t need her to tell me things were going to be okay. I knew this wasn’t okay but had moved the goalposts in my head so the sight of my dad twitching and stretched out on the community pool concrete could fit into my own personal definition of okay. This mom, on the other hand, was freaked out at the sight of a grown man gripped by a seizure. She was trying to reassure herself, not me, and she was lying to me to make herself feel better. I hated her for using me as a prop.

Dad once had a seizure while a classmate was over at my house. Again, dad cracked his head, this time when he plummeted from consciousness onto the dense wooden hexagon-shaped table that dominated the living room. This table was so huge and pointy, it was impossible to enter the room and not hit some part of yourself on it, even if you weren’t in the midst of a seizure.

The kid who’d come over to play started screaming. Somehow I’d been drafted into friendship with this kid. He was a weird kid. I was weird too, but not like him, I told myself. I had the sense that it was best to hide my weirdness. This kid was not blessed with such self-awareness. He talked weird, he had weird hair, he admitted liking weird things. He owned his weirdness thoroughly, whereas I held on to the vain hope that I could somehow un-weird myself. And so I always feared that associating with this unabashedly weird kid would cause my own weirdness to become known to the world at large, fooling myself into thinking this weirdness wasn’t screamingly obvious already.

Whenever this kid came to my house, some strange accident would befall him. Like the time a huge swarm of bees exploded from a hive under my back porch and chased him howling around my house. Or the time he was nailed in the head by a golf ball hurled by my baby brother. I have no idea how my baby brother got his hands on a golf ball, let alone had enough arm strength and accuracy to wing it at this kid’s head. The universe was telling this kid not to come to here. Only pain awaited him.

The seizure was the last straw. He didn’t come over to my house anymore after that. Neither did any other kid. The part of me that felt lonely was overpowered by the part that felt relieved. Hiding was no longer an issue. No one would look for me.

* * *

I wish I could be one of the kindhearted folks attempting to assist the man in distress on the L train. But I see his flails and twitches and become a child again. My first impulse is to shrink. I back up several feet, not realizing I’m doing this until I step on someone’s foot. I look toward the far end of the subway car, where I believe the conductor’s booth might be, telling myself I should inform some authority about what’s going on. But my hunting is halfhearted. Please let someone else take care of this, I beg the silence.

By the time I can bring myself to look back toward the man, he is up from the floor and sitting on the nearest row of seats, now empty of all other occupants. He face is ashen, but he appears to be more annoyed than anything else. He has the look of someone who left the house to go to work and found his car suddenly won’t start, and he can’t believe that the thing he needs to get where he needs to go, the thing he needs to earn a living, today of all days, has decided to give him trouble. Except that his car is his brain.

People ask the man if he wants to get off the train, if he has someone he wants them to call, if he would like some water. People think they’re helping. The man says nothing, just holds out a hand, waving away all good Samaritans. The doors close and the train lurches forward. People leave him alone and give him the space he wants. The man doesn’t want any help from the outside. He wants to vanish. I’ve never had a seizure, but I’ve been where he is now.

Another thing he did well on his shows—something I haven’t really touched on before—is his ability to convey a mood of eeriness, of creeping, unnameable terror. Around Halloween, he loved to dedicate shows to stories about the Jersey Devil (and occasionally its lesser known cousin, the Kentucky Devil). He did many other shows about the pull of the supernatural and the fear of ghosts. But more often, he would talk about the terror of the everyday, the weird, creepy things happening right under our noses.

For no good reason at all, I want to share one such show, which aired on April 14, 1970. It starts with Shep sharing a bone-chilling news story from New Orleans, where creepy things tend to happen with some regularity. But then he shifts into a tale from the days when he first moved to New York, and his somewhat desperate attempts to find friendship in a city that can make newcomers feel crushingly alone. The story starts out amusing, involving wild parties, random encounters, and lapsed drunken monks (really), but it quickly deteriorates into a sad and chilling arena. Shep closes out the show with another story, this one about helping a friend investigate an apartment he’s interested in renting. Finding a place to live in New York is terrifying enough, but this story goes beyond even the usual level of terror and into a special, weird place.

Though Shep’s stories in this show refer to things that happened in the 1950s and 1960s, there’s something eternally New York about these stories, a very New York brand of loneliness and sadness and squalor that few people wrote about then and even fewer write about now. I found it genuinely unnerving to listen to because it all felt so real to me, and I find it amazing he was able to convey this feeling with only his voice (although a creepy Stockhausen composition helped, I suppose).

Enjoy (if that’s the word). Just don’t listen to it with the lights off.

Backstop lives a double life, and both are crumbling. To the outside world, Backstop appears to be a minor league catcher of rapidly diminishing skills. In truth, he is an operative in training for The Moe Berg Society, a secret intelligence group that uses baseball as a front for its spy work. The mysterious disappearance of his fellow trainee, Mark, has plunged him into a career-threatening slump. Backstop gets one last chance at proving his worth when his handler asks him to investigate a connection between rumors of a mole and The Scouts, a faction of old-school spies hell-bent on seizing leadership of The Society. His mission is complicated by his new roommate, The Swing, an aging slugger working on a major league comeback, and by Brooke, a tenacious reporter who suspects Backstop holds the key to her investigation into Mark’s disappearance. With one eye on his plummeting batting average and the other on the mounting casualties of his mission, Backstop attempts to unravel a conspiracy that could change the game forever before he unravels himself.

This is the logline (industry terms!). Out of necessity, this omits a lot of what the book is. At the risk of explaining a thing that should serve to explain itself (like art is supposed to do), I can say that Hang a Crooked Number is about a lot of things that have almost nothing to do with spies, or baseball, or an imaginary world that has spies in baseball. A friend of mine who read it described it as “very New York,” which I took as a compliment. What I’m saying is, if you don’t dig baseball and/or spy novels in the slightest, I think you might still enjoy it.

The reason I’m going on about this is because I would like you to know Hang a Crooked Number is currently in the running for something called the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. The novel has made it to the quarterfinals, in fact, and is one of about 100 titles under consideration in the General Fiction category. I entered the novel in the general fiction category because despite the novel’s genre shell, I think it’s closer to literary fiction than anything else. (See: defensive overexplaining above.) I’m normally suspicious of any contest that would allow me to advance this far, but they haven’t asked me for any money or to crash on my couch yet, so I think I’m safe.

If you want a tiny glimpse of the novel, Amazon is offering free ebook excerpts of all the quarterfinalists; mine can be found here. If this were in print form, what you get would only be the first 10-15 pages or so. But hey, it’s free, innit? I don’t think people downloading and/or reviewing this excerpt on Amazon will have any bearing whatsoever on whether or not Hang a Crooked Number progresses to the next rung on the contest ladder. But I don’t think it will hurt its chances either, if you catch my drift.

This novel will see the light of day, one way or another. If it’s via this contest, great. If it’s via the more old school method of agent pitching to editor over a three-martini lunch, great. If I have to make and distribute an ebook myself, great. If I have to tattoo it on my back and walk down the beach, great. My primary interest is to see it available to as many people as possible. That probably eliminates the tattooing option, but never say never.

Alright, as you were.

Guys, did you see this thing where Dominic Terreto and his car-boosting crew have been offered immunity for their crimes if they help the feds capture a criminal mastermind? Oops, probably shouldn’t have mentioned the details of an undercover operation on the air like that. Really strange that I would know anything about that to begin with. Those guys are probably all dead now. Oh well.

Did you see in this thing in the papers, folks? Apparently this high school basketball team in San Diego has gone undefeated ever since they fired their old coach and replaced him with a dog! It’s true! Nothin’ in the rule book says a dog can’t coach basketball! He’s got the kids back to the fundamentals: passing, free throws, and fetch! Anyway, stick around, we got David Brenner coming up!

Did you see this, read this, hear about this? Apparently a guy made himself a millionaire by bootlegging and gambling and bought himself the fanciest house in West Egg, all to impress some girl he used to like named Daisy. Boy, did he ever just think of sitting on a flagpole or something? Thanks for tuning in to the Old Gold Joke Minute, folks. Not a cough in a carload!

Did you see this thing where a mechanic from New Jersey won the New Hampshire primary with his straight-shooting, no-nonsense approach? This guy came outta nowhere to shock all the pundits and make people believe in democracy again! They think he can land the nomination, but it’ll depend on if this part comes in from Detroit! Cars!

Did you see this thing where earth has been overrun by zombies and humanity may be doomed? Did you hear about this? Is anyone hearing this? Is anyone out there at all? I’m holed up in my underground garage, hiding behind a Stutz Bearcat. If anyone can hear me, a little tip for you guys: windshield wiper fluid is potable.

Did you see this thing where an elephant wants to sing instead of dance? Crazy! This is happening in a universe where we’re all CGI elephants who dance constantly, by the way. Thanks for tuning in, this is Jay El-Leno-phant.

Did you see this thing where aliens?

Folks, did you see this thing where the Iron Man is back? That’s all I can say. The producers only gave me my page of the script. And now, please welcome back the Dancing Itos!

The Onion could have made substantially the same joke in substance by using a million other words–asshole, douche, even bitch is so overused it barely resonates anymore. Instead, they opted to push the envelope. Pushing the envelope is a test pilot’s term, by the way. It refers to the flight envelope, which is another phrase for the estimates of what a plane is capable of doing. Sometimes when you push the envelope, you discover the mechanics can perform even better than calculated. Sometimes you wind up crashing into the side of a mountain. What happened was clearly an instance of the latter.

The Onion’s tweet using that word in reference to a nine-year-old was about as high-risk/low reward as it gets. The best case scenario: they get a bunch of RTs from people who already read The Onion. The worst case scenario: What actually happened, basically. I don’t think it’s censorship to consider that something like this could blow up in your face, and that you might also hurt the feelings of someone who really doesn’t deserve it.

I’m not all that interested in defenses or condemnations of The Onion per se. I’ve enjoyed Onion Product (c) since college and have read material that was way more “offensive” than that on their pages, so this certainly won’t sway me from their side. I also find it somewhat crazy that The Onion, of all people(s), found itself forced to apologize while there are thousands of way more offensive “comedy” accounts on Twitter. (There are multiple accounts called The Funny Racist, guys.) What I find far more interesting is the means by which The Onion wound up in such hot water, and what that says about the ways in which we consume different online media.

I saw a few folks on Twitter (kinda) defend The Onion by pointing out that we’re talking about the same web site that made copious 9-11 jokes within days of 9-11. The argument behind this is, C’mon, it’s The Onion. Only morons wouldn’t understand this was a joke. For years, people who “get” The Onion have mocked people who don’t.

There’s an unsavory undercurrent of Comedy Snob Insider to this attitude; The Onion isn’t so ubiquitous that everyone in the world knows who they are or what they do. However, I do think that any average person who clicks on a link from The Onion and reads even a little of their content will understand it is satire.

The problem in this case is that The Onion didn’t write a post or even one of their quick headline thingies. They wrote a tweet, which is more troublesome, at least in terms of potential interpretation.

An article has context. As I said above, if you visit The Onion’s site, even if you’ve never been there before, you will receive clues about their perspective and intentions. Tweets, on the other hand, have zero context at all, except for what you bring to those 140 characters. In the case of The Onion, to understand the intent behind the tweet, you have to “get” them. If you don’t, you won’t.

If you’ve never heard of The Onion, chances are you don’t follow them on Twitter. And then, someone suddenly RTs this tweet into your timeline. How do you respond to it? If it was me, I would think the tweet was so over the top, I’d look into it before getting outraged. I do this a lot, since I follow a lot of accounts who shame-retweet the racist/ignorant tweets of others. Sometimes I contemplate responding. Then I look at the RT’ed dude’s page and discover it’s some 15 year old dumbass, and move on.

The thing is, Twitter doesn’t really operate like that. Twitter’s biggest selling point is that it gives people the ability to respond immediately to Big Events in real time, whether that’s an award show or a game or a relative’s wedding. Ideally, everyone should figure out what they’re reading before they fly off the handle. Ideally, they should also eat better, floss, and donate more money to charity, but people don’t do a lot of things they should do. Twitter functions the way it functions, and getting mad about that seems as pointless as getting mad at a river for not being a mountain.

Every joke has a stage on which it makes sense, with its own sets and costumes and lighting guys up in the rafters. Had The Onion written the same words, verbatim, on their web site, they would have provided the joke with that stage. By presenting these words via tweet, they not only removed that stage, but broadcast it to a much wider, far less clued-in audience where outrage could be spread and feed on itself in milliseconds. Saying “duh, everyone knows what The Onion is” betrays a POV far more nearsighted than a non-Onion reader; it means everyone you know knows what The Onion is. You are not the universe.

I learned a lesson similar to this one last year, when I wrote one tweet on a parody account of mine that inexplicably blew up, exposing it to an audience that had zero idea what what I was trying to satirize. (Also similar to The Onion: the tweet in question wasn’t all that funny, either.) In my case, the trouble stemmed less from people who didn’t “get it” and more from a few lazy newspapers. However, the principle is largely the same: If you present something in a medium like Twitter, where people have to provide their own context, they’re liable to get that context wrong.

In the spirit of newness, resolutions, new beginnings, and all that crap, I am launching a brand new podcast called Replacement Players. The basic premise is this: I unearth broadcasts of old games from the Vast and Dusty Scratchbomb Video Archives. I ask friends of mine to watch them, friends who watched these games when they originally aired but haven’t seen them in a long time. Then, we’ll get together to discuss how our memories of the game both jive and clash with what we saw in the preserved broadcast. There will also be much discussion of old commercials and cheesy graphics, because low hanging fruit is delicious.

If you want to read a little bit more about this and hear an audio intro for the podcast, check out this post on the official Replacement Players webbed-site. You can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here, and search for it on the iTunes Store as well if you prefer to do things the hard way.

The very first full episode will launch next Monday, January 7, with a truly awesome guest talking about a truly insane game. I am putting the finishing touches on this debut episode now and I cannot wait to unveil it for you.

If this sounds like it’s up your alley, tell your friends, tell your enemies, tell your friends again. The word, it must be spread. Many thanks for your continued support of my insane endeavors.

In the middle, you see the happy couple. To the left, my grandfather’s family, the Leykamms. Most German last names have literal meanings, but I’ve never been able to determine what “Leykamm” means, if anything. What I can tell you, and what you can surely see, is that the Leykamms are having a blast.

The woman you see in mid-uproarious laugh is my great grandmother. When I was little, she used to steal my blanket and hide it, usually by sitting on it, because “you don’t need that thing.” She found this very funny, mostly because Little Kid Me didn’t think it was funny at all. She would eventually give it back, with the admonition that I “should learn take a joke.” That may seem cruel, but looking back on Little Kid Me, I know I was an uptight kid, too uptight for my own good. She thought she was doing me a favor.

My mom describes the Leykamms as “beer garden people.” Fun loving types. My grandfather’s father bartended at a local joint, the Eagle’s Nest, on the weekends. That wasn’t his regular gig; I think he did it partly for extra dough, but mostly for kicks. My grandfather used to say of his parents, “they never left us at home.” In other words, when they went out for a good time, they took the kids with them. Fun was a family affair.

On the right, you’ll see my grandmother’s parents, the Bauerleins. Bauerlein means “little farmer” in German. The Bauerleins appear very different from the Leykamms. They look a lot like little farmers, actually. Stoic. A bit uncomfortable indoors. Though they are smiling, it seems rather forced, almost through gritted teeth. My great grandfather’s suit looks old fashioned, even for the era. It’s closer to The Jazz Age than The Swing Era.

My great grandmother looks like it’s taking all her strength to smile. She had a tough life. Nowadays, someone like her would be treated for clinical depression. In those days, you were told you suffered from “nerves” and would also be told to just deal with it (especially if you were a woman).

My grandmother was a very loving, nurturing person, but there was an edge to her. Her favorite phrase was this too shall pass. She loved to ask you how much you paid for something so she could be annoyed by the answer. She had this syllable she would frequently intone–if I had to spell it out, I’d choose uy, though that’s a poor approximation. Basically, uy meant, Here we go again. Whenever she said something a little harsh or mean, my grandfather would say it was her Bauerlein coming out.

To be fair, there are extenuating circumstances to this scene. You’ll notice my grandfather is wearing an army uniform. He was on leave and would ship out overseas soon after this wedding. I know he made it home in one piece, but no one in this picture could know that. For all the Bauerleins knew, their daughter might soon be a widow. I’d have to think that has at least a little bearing on their expressions.

Then again, the Leykamms had to be just as concerned for their son, but you don’t see that on their faces. These were just two different kinds of people. The Leykamms couldn’t help but have a good time, no matter what. The Bauerleins couldn’t help but worry about what might happen down the road.

I’ve always felt within me this war between two impulses: the desire to laugh and crack wise and have a great time, and the tug of worry. I’ve never really been able to narrow down what I do and choose one thing in which to specialize. One minute, I’m writing something dumb and silly, the next I’m getting angry about the world or wondering what the hell will happen next. Whenever I’ve pushed one aspect of myself down, it just pops up, bigger and angrier, in another spot. At times I’ve thought this was a bold choice on my part, an unwillingness to be pinned down, man.

And then I look at this picture, and I think that maybe this wasn’t a choice at all. Maybe I had to be this way. And it’s not even due to my own upbringing, but the meeting of two people well over 60 years ago.

All of us like to think that we’re our own people, that we define our universes and chart our own courses. In reality, so much of what we are was set in motion decades before we were born through the union of two people, the clash of two viewpoints, the mingling of two sets of DNA.

The difference, then, is what you do with your raw materials in those tiny spaces that are only yours.

While digitizing these records, I was able to listen to them for the first time, enjoyed them immensely, and thought they would make excellent listening any time of year. This is in part because my knowledge of Spanish is limited, thus blunting the Christmas-ness of the lyrics for me. It’s also due to the unique qualities of Puerto Rican holiday music, which tends to be more about partying and patriotism than it is about things Americans think of as “traditional” Christmas song topics. (Lots more on that subject here.)

I couldn’t find out too much information on these albums online, at least not information I could understand (see above in re: Spanish, difficulties with). Nearly all of these albums were released on small specialty labels that are now defunct and, near as I can tell, have not been reissued by anyone. So I figured I might be the world’s last best hope to preserve these albums in all their glory, which show an interesting transition point between traditional musica jibara (“mountain music,” more or less) and the music that came out of New York starting the 1960s that came to be known as salsa.

This first album is the one I find the most intriguing, a compilation called Navidad en el Tropico (Ansonia ALP 1226). The album is great, capturing a very specific sound from a very specific time and place that did not last very long. I wish I knew more about this record or the label that put it out, but the internet yielded nothing. My mother-in-law surmised this album was given away at a bank for opening a new account, which seems as likely an explanation for its origins as any.

The LP sleeve has notes, with details about each song, but most of the text is so clumsily translated it creates more questions than it answers. Example: “Baltazar Carrero specializes in a festive air called ‘Bomba’ and has been successful in singing this kind of music.” Nice backhanded compliment, LP sleeve. “Good job, Baltazar. It really looked like you were having fun up there!”

My guess is that the English translator (some dude named Herman Glass) understood Spanish even less than I do, or perhaps operated without the benefit of a native speaker to proofread his work. He also seems to want to present this album as some sort of good will gesture between the peoples of the world.

ANSONIA RECORDS is always anxious to co-operate in spreading the joy of good will and therefore; having the sentiments of all Latin Americans close to its heart, they have prepared this LP with the fervent wish that it will please everyone this Christmas and every Christmas to come.

Ew boy, that’s a mouthful. The music more than makes up for it, though.

Download entire album here.

The second LP I digitized was Aguinaldos Navidenos by Pedro Padilla y su Conjunto (Alma LP-105). Aguinaldos are traditional carols that are usually sung in church or as part of the parranda, a Puerto Rican Christmas tradition where you go door to door, singing songs and gathering more singers as you go along. This kind of thing is done in many cultures around Yuletide (the English wassail, for instance), and just like in these other cultures, singers of the parranda often have a drink or two at each stop as they go along. That’s probably what inspired the title of this tune from this collection, “Borracho y Pelao” (“Drunk and Broke”). Did I mention this was a Christmas album?

Download entire album here.

The third album comes from Angel Luis Garcia, “el profesor que canta.” (Cuando Mires a Tu Hijo, Astro Records ALP-224) Garcia wrote innumerable hits for Puerto Rican artists, usually in the jibara style. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to get much info on Garcia’s career on the web in English, as he shares his name with a Puerto Rican basketball player currently plying his trade in the Spanish professional league. According to this bio, Garcia curtailed his songwriting and recording activities once he took a job with Puerto Rico’s Department of Social Services in 1966. “Curtailed” apparently means he was only able to write 600 songs and record 37 LPs in his lifetime. That’s like 3/5 of an Irving Berlin!

Download entire album here.

Finally, I have a Christmas collection from the legendary singer Celia Cruz, Festejando Navidad. Cruz is now known as The Queen of Salsa, but the music on this LP is closer to mambo, mostly because it was recorded in the early 1960s and salsa hadn’t been invented yet. Even Cruz’s voice sounds a little different on this record than it would in later years; my wife remarked that she comes across as slightly less “edgy” here.

The label that issued this record, Seeco, is the only one of this bunch for which I could find substantial background info. They specialized in Latin music in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, making a name for themselves as a home for mambo and cha-cha records at a time when those genres crossed over into the mainstream. It looks like their output petered out in the late 1960s, however, when Latin musical genres veered into the harder-edged territory of boogaloo and salsa.

Nonetheless, this is an interesting artifact of Cruz before she “became” Cruz, so to speak. Here’s her take on “Jingle Bells.”

Download entire album here.