The Beat

by Steve Downing

We recently had some feedback from a listener who wondered why I had read a poem by Shanthi Siva on The Beat---why not Shanthi, herself, reading it?

Fair question. Simple answer: Shanthi has no access to a recording studio and is perfectly happy to have other readers interpreting her work. She’s not alone. There are other poets in The Beat file right now who can’t provide quality recordings and have no qualms about someone else reading their poems on-air. It’s our preference to have writers reading their own work, but occasionally the overriding goal of getting someone onto the program will trump that preference.

By the bye, I heard from Shanthi after we ran her poem, and she loved how it sounded. So did her friends and family. Some of them accessed it from India, where Shanthi was born. The world is listening to The Beat.

Listen for The Beat after Best Wishes, between 7:30 and 8:00 Monday through Friday mornings and then again before NPR’s All Things Considered in the afternoon. The Beat is funded by Minnesota’s Arts & Cultural Heritage Fund.

Guido's Oscar Thoughts

This week on Between You and Me we talked Oscars with the Mom and Pop of Pop Culture, Julie Crabb & Jack Nachbar.  Here are Steve Downing's (Guido's) thoughts:

LIFE DURING WARTIME

            Watching the Academy Awards makes me squirm. Me, squirming, is not a pretty picture, so I tend to avoid those near occasions of sin. It’s not that I hate movies or the rich and famous people who make them, though I understand some of those folks are hateful. It has more to do with the unconditional, unmitigated, unabashed artifice of the whole ceremony. It’s a separate reality.

            For yours truly, Oscar night plays like a movie about the making of movies and the aftermath of the making of movies, while thumbing its nose at the three cardinal rules of the making of movies. 1) You need at least two stirring, eventually converging plotlines. 2) You need dynamic, three-dimensional sets-and-setting, preferably involving volcanoes and the deep blue sea. 3) And you need characters who’ll convince you they believe what they’re saying. How often does any of this happen at the Academy Awards?

            Or maybe it’s more (or less) complicated than that.  When I watch a movie, if I don’t care, really care---viscerally, emotionally---about anyone in the story, when there’s no moral difference between characters, or between means and ends, I’ll fall asleep. The narrative has to matter to me, ethically and aesthetically. Otherwise….

            Between you and me, Oscar night is a movie that, if tested against its own putative criteria, would wind up in its entirety on the cutting-room floor. I have to admit, though: after hearing Heidi and John’s conversation with Frank DeCaro on the Morning Show Friday, I’m thinking that a dinner party featuring the recipes of dead rich and famous people (The Dead Celebrity Cookbook) might be just the ticket for the likes of me. Barbecued Lamb ala Frank the Chairman of the Board Sinatra, anyone? Let’s watch the Awards with the sound off and Talking Heads/Popular Favorites as our soundtrack.

Steve "Guido" Downing's take on Christmas Music

This week Grant Frashier hosts KAXE's Between You and Me on Saturday from 10-noon.  His topic is Christmas Music.  Do you have a favorite?  Email us or call during the show 218-326-1234.  

CHRISTMAS BLUES by Steve Downing

            Between you and me, I do not love Christmas music, which I grew up singing, around Mom’s piano and in church choirs and school choruses. And playing, on every instrument I ever picked up. And it’s true that Dodger and I have a pile of Christmas CDs. But, with notable exceptions, I do not love it. Partly because of the brain-killing repetition. You hear the stuff, endlessly, hourly, from Halloween until the season’s over, by everybody from Bing Crosby to George Thorogood. On the radio, TV, in stores, out on the street, in the office, church, parking ramps, restrooms. It’s everywhere. You can’t not hear it. And when you achieve my great age, your relationship with Christmas music, as with body-parts and memory and the chainsaw, is simply tuckering out.

            My earliest difficulty with Christmas music, as a logic-challenged young man, was a philosophical dead end. The secular Christmas music had come to seem completely disconnected from the calendar-defining event in Bethlehem. And, more disconcertingly, the sacred music had absolutely nothing to do with what the Holy Day had morphed into: a godless, shameless, commercial lollapalooza. Gifts. Office parties. Gifts. Travel. Gifts. Light displays and fireworks. Gifts. Mass quantities of cookies. And so on. As I learned, you cannot resolve these contradictions. They’re too structural. Too big to fail.

            Jazz versions of the Christmas canon I can actually still listen to, especially if there’s no singing. And there’s one song on the compilation CD A Rock’n’Roll Christmas, produced by Bob ‘Bah-Humbug’ Bell on PolyGram, 1994, that I always get a kick out of: “Christmas Wrapping” by The Waitresses.

            We also have a compilation put out by Rhino Records in 1995, titled Punk Rock Xmas. This one reliably provides a few chuckles over tumblers of milk-and-bourbon punch, Christmas morning, an old Dodge family tradition. It features bands you’ve never heard of. Bouquet of Veal. Pansy Division. The Celibate Rifles. Stiff Little Fingers. Dodger bought this, thinking of it as a Christmas gift for our nephew, Sam Dodge, when he was a kid, middle-school-age or so. Then we noticed the song titles. Some of them, if I said them out loud on the radio (even just the titles), would jeopardize KAXE’s license and very existence. We decided we should jury the CD before sending it off in the Christmas mail. It did not make it into the Christmas mail. We said at the time that we were protecting Sam from inappropriate material, but really we were protecting Dodger’s brother and sister-in-law, and our relationship with them. Sam would surely not have been corrupted by songs like “Daddy Drank Our Christmas Money” or any of the others---which, as I say, you cannot say out loud over any air waves---and, like us, he would deploy them once a year, no more, for a little merriment around the Christmas tree. Unless, like us, he has no Christmas tree. To get the full measure of Punk Rock Xmas, you should probably have a tree. Fake, of course.

            You can still buy this CD. I checked the other day, and Amazon had five new ones, at forty bucks each, and nine used, at twenty. Priced for the niche market, go tell it. Or you could borrow ours and copy it. But not right now. Right now, it’s tied up. It’s on.

Steve Downing on Road Trips - This Saturday on Between You and Me

ROADTRIPPING

            Our last true roadtrip was two summers ago, in Costa Rica. Dodger and I were tooling around the west and west-central regions of the country, in a rental SUV, equipped with a GPS device that alternately worked for us or took us to Nowheresville. We needed the SUV, because one of our stops was at a small resort directly across from the ever-smoking Arenal Volcano, and this place was at the pinnacle of one of the most primitive uphill roads I have ever driven on. I include the old logging road that delivers us to our cabin up in the boondocks, which is sometimes not a road at all and on which you can get into serious trouble without cracking a sweat. We did have trouble on that Costa Rican quasi-road, but it turned out to be related strictly to the SUV and its compromised idiot-warning-light-system.

            One of the adjustments we had to make on that trip involved the stark difference in sheer road usage. On the highways around here, you see almost exclusively motorized vehicles. An occasional bicycle or two. A hitchhiker, only very rarely nowadays. And deer, of course. Other roadkill potential. On the roads in Costa Rica, even on the Interamericana, the main Central American highway, you’ll see anything, and up close. People, whole families of them, walking, doing business, socializing, arguing, parenting, playing soccer, whatever. Plus, every kind of animal: cows and horses and dogs and cats and chickens and goats, and critters we couldn’t even name. All of them right there on the road, either hanging out or on the move. The Costa Ricans are ready to help you, feed you, chat. They’re among the most friendly, civilized people we’ve run into anywhere. You don’t make good time on a road like that; you might as well slow down and get to know the neighborhood, the community, the country.

            Contrast that experience with cruising at 70 or 80 m.p.h. along one of our Interstates, roadways designed to make all of the above impossible. You’ll get from Point A to Point B faster, no question, but you will never, ever, see a young girl having the time of her life trying to train a goat to dance, so close to the road you can reach out your window and touch them both.

Signs and Omens on Between You and Me

This week on Between you and me our topic is signs and omens.  What does that mean to you?

BOW-WOW

by Steve Downing

          When the universe decides to send me a message, it does so by way of our dog, Basil. This makes elegant cosmic sense. As I’ve reported, Basil’s grasp of natural phenomena borders on clairvoyant. Each of his senses is more finely tuned than any of mine. He doesn’t know this (I don’t think). If I understand the process correctly, Basil simply absorbs the quotidian flow of information in his doggy-dogged manner and then reacts intuitively, unerringly.

            For example, earlier today I was outside with Basil. As he took care of his daily hygiene business, I idled between the deck and the lake, thinking my thoughts. Suddenly Basil was circling me in a lazy zigzagging trot and occasionally stopping, then making a fake charge at me, head low, as though he planned to ram my knees or hips. Remember: Basil’s big. Huge, actually. I’d never seen this bullish behavior before. He went round and round a few times, back and forth, circling and fake-head-butting. Then he lost interest and wandered off toward the lake. Near the kayak, he dropped down to what I think of as the sphinx position, forelegs straight out, head up. And he just stared, unmoving, at the lake, or the horizon, or maybe a worm-hole in the next galaxy over, I had no way of knowing. He was literally motionless, for 10-15 minutes, totally out of character, impressing on me that it was I, not he, who lives the unexamined life. When he stood up and turned around, he looked directly, intently, not to say philosophically, at me and through me, his eyes locked on mine, unblinking, for a lonnnnng time.

            Clearly, Basil was channeling a message from the universe. I’m still working it out: is the universe telling me I ought to become a rodeo clown?---or go back to grad school and get my doctorate in philosophy? Aside from the Hobson’s-choice nature of this question, it strikes me that there’s a larger, more critical issue here, related to the true organizing principle of the universe: is it that of the clown or the philosopher? And between you and me, is there a functional difference in a world such as ours, so beholden to the corrupt and corrupting politics of the day?

            Basil: speak!

Brushes With Fame on Between You and Me

This week we're looking for your stories about when you met someone famous.  Did they turn out to be what you thought they would be?  Join us from 10-noon on Saturday...

ANTI-HERO by Steve Downing

          Between you and me, there are so few heroes in this life, it’s a privilege to be able to single out one for special mention: Billy Collins, a hero of mine. We crossed paths with him last fall, and I think often of those moments, that encounter.

            Billy Collins was Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003, New York State Poet 2004-2006. POETRY magazine regularly selects him for one award or another, including Poet of the Year. He’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and more. He’s a distinguished professor at City University of New York. He reads his work, solo, everywhere, for serious money. In 1997, he recorded “The Best Cigarette”, a by-definition best-seller CD of his poetry (re-released in 2005). Best-selling poetry recording: a contradiction in terms, before and after “The Best Cigarette”.

            In 2002, he wrote “The Names”, to commemorate the victims of the 9/11 attacks, which he read at a special joint session of the United States Congress. Then he pretty much shelved it. He refuses to include “The Names” in any readings or books he gets paid for. It was a gift.

            Here’s a world-famous guy who could be so full of himself you’d never get close to him. His ego could understandably be planetary. And it’s just not. He’s as approachable as you or yours truly; he’s as interested in you as you are in him.

            Dodger and I wound up in Billy Collins’ company last September in Bemidji, on our way back to the Hampton Inn from the event across the street at Sparkling Waters. We’d talked to him at the restaurant, so technically we weren’t absolute strangers, but it actually felt as though we were old acquaintances. He made it that easy. Three non-special human beings crossing a parking lot together, riding in an elevator, chatting about dinner and the weather.

            And then the next night he delivered a riveting, tour-de-force, standing-ovation poetry reading at the Bemidji High School. This would be routine in New York City at the 92^nd Street Y or Power House Books. Not here.