On The Record

Yeah, I know it's been more than a month. Sorry.

After getting back into reading my favorite music blogs and a few snide remarks that this hadn't been updated in a while, I decided to take the early part of my Friday night to word-vomit into this little box (that's a good mental image, huh?).

I haven't posted since before the beginning of the semester. There's a good reason: this semester is the busiest of my college career. I'm taking three writing classes, one philosophy class, and an ethics class for journalism. That means that on any given week I have an assignment/article for my magazine writing class due Monday, an editorial due Tuesday, an article due Thursday and usually something for the magazine class due Friday. I know I should get used to it since it looks like I'll be spending a few years writing articles on a daily basis once I leave college, but I guess I'm just not ready for that.

Speaking of writing articles, I've become disenchanted with being a journalist. This reporting class I'm taking has drained all the desire that I may have had to work at a newspaper right out of me. I don't care about the Orange Water and Sewer Authority (yes, that is my beat for the class), and I'm tired of calling people and asking them questions just to get a quote out of them. It's fake, stupid and seemingly unnecessary. I know that the news needs to be reported, but I don't want to be the one to do it. I'm tired of churning out formulaic articles about the drought: I want to write something that really matters to people, something that will be remembered for what is written, not for the event it was written about.

I'm going to quote the late Hunter S. Thompson, a writer who has greatly influenced the way I look at journalism and writing: "Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits--a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage."

A bit graphic, but I believe every word of it. It's a dirty thing. It's not artistic or meaningful: it's a bunch of hacks who get their jollies by annoying public figures, blowing insignificant events out of proportion, and being first to break the latest "scandal." I don't want to be a part of it. Unfortunately I'll have to play the game, at least for a little bit.

I would rather write for a magazine. At least then I have the time and resources to get close to my subject, to really get to know my sources and dive head first into a story. I'm not just talking to people to get flash quotes for a story that I will churn out in 15 minutes. I'm trying really get into what is going on, how it feels, and how people react to it. That's why I respect Hunter S. so much. His book "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72" follows the 1972 presidential election from the first primary to election day. He becomes so involved with the campaign and wears himself out so much physically and mentally that he can't even write a few of the chapters. At one point they just publish his notes, and in another part they have him dictate to another writer.

In the book I'm reading by him now, "Hell's Angels," Thompson follows the Hell's Angels in California during the 1960s, talking to many of the members, going with them on "runs," and many times getting involved with the cops for being around the "outlaws." He has a passion for storytelling (or truthtelling) that I envy. His books are crazy, drug-ridden and evocative, but at the same time they are honest.

I think I've rambled long enough for now. I'll leave with a list of bands/artists that I've really been into recently: that anyone who reads this should check out if they haven't already. Also, for my editorial writing class I have to create a blog about something local. I've decided to cover the local music scene, which is what I've been wanting to get started for a while. Hopefully this will give me the motivation to keep a music blog going for the Chapel Hill area. I will probably create a new website for it (in addition to this one) so look out for it. I'll probably post about it later. Its tentative title: "If Jesus had a stereo."

Here's the list:
Ryan Adams (NC boy)
The Avett Brothers (NC boys)
Broken Social Scene
Lupe Fiasco
Eddie Vedder (the soundtrack for "Into the Wild")
Traveling Wilburys (greatest super-group ever)

peace
C

Steven's last night in town

Yeah, he's leaving again. I wish him the best, and hope that this journey up north is more fruitful, enjoyable and productive. He needs the chance to enjoy college. He made a mistake in his past and he's paid for it by being locked in this sick cycle of work, moving from apartment to apartment, and community college that has essentially taken away a part of his youth - his time to make mistakes and learn from them all. Granted, he made one large mistake that count for more than all of my little ones, but I hope, and believe, that he's learned and it's time for him to take another stab at youth and college. Leave the nomadic days behind and make this the last move for a while. I hope that he dives in head first, not looking back on the life that he made here, but looking forward into a new life that he can create in a new town, where people don't know his history, where he doesn't carry that ugly stigma that plagues him everywhere he goes in the triangle. It's a fresh start: an opportunity that doesn't come all the time. Good luck, buddy.

The reason for the diatribe? He had a going away party tonight. It was interesting to say the least. I just don't gel with some of his friends, especially the "Emo fuck" posse who arrived fashionably late in full force emo gear. The hair was parted across the forehead, the zipper hoodie was fastened, the feminine jeans were hugging those emaciated butts, and the world was sublimely morose. I met all five of the posse (which I numbered from one to five) and they weren't terrible. I was even able to upgrade "Emo Fuck 1" to "Bohemian chick" when my friend pointed out to me that the floppy hat and nose ring were just enough to offset her cloudy demeanor. The problem was that they were so empty. So lost in life. Maybe they were never given a chance. Maybe they didn't take their chance because they didn't believe that it was there. I don't know their stories, and I'm in no hurry to find them out. One was my age and going to school in Greenville for business after quitting his job at an indie record label in Raleigh that was eventually bought by Warner Brothers. It's a tough break, but I have to give him the most credit because he was striving for something: there was a goal in sight. Another one was a pseudo-intellectual from LA that spent the night lugging around a box of Franzia and explaining how he was only in NC because he was visiting his dad. He seemed in no rush to get back to his "home" in LA. The other two spent the majority of the night playing a little game that involved hitting each other in the crotch unexpectedly.

I just can't get on that level. I'm not trying to say that it's a level below me or above me, but it's obviously a different level. They are disappointed in their life, or their station, but are too apathetic to do anything about it and end up dropping out of school to work in a restaurant, where things just get worse and the cycle comes back around on itself. Either be unhappy and thus motivated, or apathetic and happy. They've chosen the worst of both worlds.

Finally, the most interesting and immature part of the night. It was like high school all over again. "He likes you. I promise." "Dude, go for her. She's really into you." And yet they stand on opposite ends of the room and look awkwardly in other directions. Eventually it does get awkward and can usually only go downhill from there, but it was subtle at first, and there was a chance for a connection, but they were both to gun shy and there was no action. The girl was a cute, less than 5 ft, New Yorker, and Steven was leaving the next day. I don't see the problem in the situation. But you can only push a thing like that so far before it either becomes awkward, annoying as shit, or both at the same time. I'll have to call Steven tomorrow to figure out how that whole thing worked.

I guess the point of this is to say how different it is to hang out with my friends here and then other groups of people. Here we can sit around, drink, and have intelligent, fun conversations that aren't too serious but are grounded in some sort of reality. With those guys I only see drinking as a tool to sink deeper into this void away from a rational mindset and intelligent thought. Is it a product of mental inferiority or personality? Who knows?

peace
C

It still rings true

Thirty-six years after being written by the late John Lennon, this classic Christmas song is still relevant. You've probably heard it on the radio and just thought of it as another one of those weird, off-beat Christmas songs, but if you haven't already, really listen to the lyrics.

Merry Christmas

"So this is Christmas
And what have you done
Another year over
And a new one just begun
Ans so this is Christmas
I hope you have fun
The near and the dear one
The old and the young

A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear
And so this is Christmas
For weak and for strong
For rich and the poor ones
The world is so wrong

And so happy Christmas
For black and for white
For yellow and red ones
Let's stop all the fight

A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear
And so this is Christmas
And what have we done
Another year over
And a new one just begun

Ans so this is Christmas
I hope you have fun
The near and the dear one
The old and the young

A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear

War is over over
If you want it
War is over
Now..."

The Polyphonic Spree performing the song:

My Trip to Washington, D.C.

The D.C. Metro is much nicer than the NYC subway system.
The Washington Monument is a giant, and fitting, phallic symbol right in the middle of our nation's capital.

More to come soon...

"That certain part of the male body"

It's four a.m. and I'm laying across the couch in the living room with my computer propped up on my right leg and my USB mouse sitting on my stomach with the red light of the scroll wheel flashing at me like a warning. Jeremy is laying on the couch asleep, snoring loudly every few minutes. He has an exam in four hours. I feel bad for him.

On the TV is some plastic woman with a disfigured nose telling me about "that certain part of the male body." Nothing good is on TV at 4 a.m.

I need a break. I need to get my creative juices flowing again. I've felt the itch, but lacked the inspiration. I have ideas and the desire to create, but not the time or the energy. Those two lines were contradictory...but not really.

"A weeks supply, for the cost of a postage stamp."

I'm reading amazing books, watching amazing movies and listening to amazing music. It makes my creative exploits seem futile. How can I compare to these works of art? This is what I want to do, if not with my life, then with my spare time, and I can't even fathom where their ideas come from or how anything I create can be put on the same level.

"Can a guy be too big?"

I've started playing guitar more. I'm trying to write more (this being the first attempt in a few weeks). I'm reading voraciously, watching around 3 movies per week and filling my 30 GB iPod to capacity. I like to think of it as job training.

"Things become bigger..."

I found some of my old notebooks and journals yesterday. I sat down and read them. One of them was from high school: my teen angst, Dashboard Confessional days. I was embarrassed to recognize my own hand writing. The pointless poems, aimless rants and trite themes of my writing were appalling. Everyone was out to get me. Society was out to get me. The trials and tribulations of Suburbia.

"Maybe an inch...a little more."

As much as I love college, I sometimes think that I'm wasting my time. I feel like I could do in life without being here. But now we all need that degree. Without that, you're nothing. Spend money to make money...sometimes less. I just want my writing to matter. That's the goal, the big picture: make people listen, even if they don't want to. Love it, hate it, but don't be indifferent. If readers are indifferent about my writing, I feel like I have failed.

It's 4:30 a.m. Now I can start my own home business....


peace
C

Update, Reverb, Thanksgiving, NaNoWriMo

I just realized that it's been about a month since I last updated this page. To anyone who reads it, I'm truly sorry. I hit a busy stretch in my life and didn't really have the time or the energy to sit down and write on this thing. I have to force myself to do it (like right now), but once I do, I enjoy the writing and the flow I can get out of it.

So, what's new in my life? Not a whole lot, really. It's getting towards the end of my first semester of my junior year in college, and it's starting to scare me. I only have 1 1/2 more years in school before I have to go out and find a real job, earn real money, and make a real living. The scary thing is that what I want to do with my life is what I'm doing now: writing. It's the kind of profession that is hit-or-miss. I could get a job at a newspaper covering some random beat and be morbidly depressed and bored; I could get a cushy job at a newspaper and write columns or features, which would keep me interested for at least a little bit; I could try my hand at writing some novels and short stories to get published; I could write screenplays and look into making movies, which is something I have recently become interested in; I could live out my dream of becoming a professional singer/songwriter; I could do any combination of the things I've listed above.

Now you see my dilemma.

Along those lines, I've gotten a good group of people together and we've started working on a new music magazine (the same one that we tried to start last year but it crashed and burned) that will just be online for right now, but should be in print by next semester, if all works out as planned. We have a simple, blog-style, website up right now that we're working so that we can get an idea of how and what we want to write before we start printing. I'm excited about this project and the group I am working with because they all seem dedicated and excited about getting this thing off the ground. More on that to come.

Oh, Happy Thanksgiving! I know it's technically not anymore, but the sentiment is still there. As my buddy Chris would say, "Happy Genocide Day." But that's a story and a conversation for another time.

November is National Novel Writing Month. I tried to participate. Even though I haven't come close to writing the 50,000 words that they want you to write in one month, it's been a good catalyst to make me sit down and try to write some fiction. Unfortunately, most of what I wrote was based loosely around fact, and about events that have happened or that are similar to what has happened to me. But I guess that's how a lot of fiction is: based of the experiences of the writer. It ended up being seemingly unrelated flashes of different scenes in one guy's life, with very little explicit character detail and sometimes a total lack of attribution to speakers and action. I hoped that I would eventually pull it all together to make it cohesive, or just base it around some kind of non-linear narrative structure that would make sense as you got deeper into it, but so far I haven't done that yet. But it's not over yet. I'm sure I'll post some excerpts from it on here before all is said and done.

It's finally basketball season. Not that I haven't enjoyed this football season, but the last few games have put a bad taste in my mouth and I'm ready to move on. Hopefully next year, the football team will win all those close games, instead of losing them at the last minute.

Anyway, I'm about to fall asleep sitting here typing in my bed, so I'm going to leave for now. I'm going to try and do a better job of updating this thing, but, you know me, no promises.

peace
C

Woody Durham Feature and Tennis and the Mennonites

A while back, when this music magazine was actually supposed to go somewhere, I wrote an album review for a local Chapel Hill band called Tennis and the Mennonites. (I tried to find a link for it but apparently I never put it online. Oops.) I wasn't real nice to the album, but I thought it showed a lot of promise. I was reading it today and decided to give the album another listen. It's surprising how much my music taste has changed in just the last year. The first song, which I thought was recorded terribly when I first heard it, seemed to me this time around to be an endearing lo-fi ballad. I really like the album a lot more and was able to get past the production value that bothered me the first time and get to the talent that's really there. Anyway, I feel like it's worth a listen if you have the time. The album is called Quilt Noise and you can find it on Ruckus.com.

Also, here's the long awaited (haha...) interview feature I wrote about Woody Durham. I think it's pretty well done, and I hope it's halfway tolerable for you.

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The Biggest Tar Heel Fan
By Corey Inscoe

“It’s a great time to be a Tar Heel, and it’s going to get better.”

Looking at the legendary “Voice of the Tar Heels” lounging comfortably in his chair, wearing a pink shirt and tie with a big, flashy 2001 Peach Bowl Championship ring on his right hand, you might think he felt obligated to say that.

After listening to UNC’s radio play-by-play announcer, Woody Durham, talk excitedly about Carolina football, basketball and baseball to a group of journalism students for an hour, you know that it’s from the heart. He’s not just the voice of the Tar Heels on the field; he’s the voice of every Tar Heel fan.

Durham grew up an avid sports fan in Albemarle, N.C., where he was a “165-pound pulling guard” on the high school football team, and the Friday night match-up was the highlight of the week. The whole town, it seemed, would show up to the games, packing the tiny stadium. Despite his love for playing, he knew he wasn’t “big enough or good enough to play on the next level.”

He was also a born and bred Tar Heel. After returning home from World War II, his father would take him to UNC football games. It is hard to miss the longing in his voice when he talks about those Saturday afternoons spent with his father in Chapel Hill: “When I was a little guy coming here with my dad, we used to park down on what is Navy field, where the football team practices, or we parked on the intramural fields. People parked on the sidewalks. Nobody had a problem with that.”

So it was only natural that when he graduated high school he spent his next four years at UNC-Chapel Hill earning his AB degree in radio television and motion pictures. But Durham never really thought of being the radio play-by-play guy for his alma mater. “Doing Carolina games on the radio was never on my radar. My goal was to be in television. I wanted to be the voice of ACC football and ACC basketball.”

But right now it’s hard to get him to talk about his personal life. He wants to talk football. If it were February or March, basketball would likely be the focus of the conversation, but right now he cares about first year football coach Butch Davis and this young team.

As the conversation moves to the upcoming home football game against the University of Miami, the intense and detailed research and planning that Durham does before each game becomes obvious.

“For the Miami game, we’ll go on the air at 11:00, so I’ll be in the stadium by 9 or 9:15 because I like to be in my comfort zone” noted Durham, “and if I’m late getting there, then I’m hurrying to set everything up, all my spotters boards and everything like that, and you never really feel like you’re in control: you’re out of sync.”

This is just the conclusion of a hectic seven-day work week that involves multiple radio shows, meetings with the coaches, visiting practice, and a full day spent “preparing stat cards, depth charts, everything like that.”

Maybe this is what prompts fans to “turn down the sound” on the television and listen to Durham’s radio broadcast while watching the game: “A lot of Carolina fans treat this like it’s their confession of loyalty to Carolina. I can’t tell you the number of people that come up to me and say, ‘Woody, I just want to tell you that whenever the Tar Heels are on television I turn the sound down and listen to the radio.’”

He spends more time with the players and coaches and develops a personal relationship with them over the season, giving him, and the listeners, an inside look at how the program is run and allowing him more access to the team than the television broadcasters.

“The television guys, they have no way of knowing a lot of the personal anecdotes or personal information about the players or the coaches,” said Durham. “That’s what [the fans] like to get from us.”

Durham says that he also adds that personal touch by imagining “a person driving down the road in a car by himself or herself listening to the game, and I’m doing the game for that person.”

“That person has no ability to see a TV monitor,” explained Durham. “So I ask our guys in the booth, if they’re showing a replay on the monitor, to talk about the play, but don’t tell anybody that you’re watching the play on a monitor. Talk about it as if ‘this is what I saw.’”

This method seems to be working. Former UNC basketball star Phil Ford once said that “if you listen to Woody Durham, he makes you think you’re actually seeing the game. You can see the game through the radio.”

It helps that Durham always had a natural gift for talking on the radio. “It was a comfortable feeling doing the broadcasting…during the audition, the first commercial…I immediately felt comfortable when I read it,” he said about his high school broadcasting audition. “I mean, it was so natural.”

It does not take long to understand how Durham has made his living by talking. Each question posed in the interview is met with a verbose explanation, usually full of anecdotes and spontaneous tangents. Being on the other side of the interview does not seem to bother him either. As he slouches in the chair at the front of the room, he seems perfectly comfortable talking about himself and whatever else the assembled students ask him about, even antagonizing the quieter students: “How about somebody over here? Nobody over here on this row has had a single question.”

Regardless of what question is asked, the conversation trickles back to football or basketball, and it’s easy to see why. He is as excited about the “Butch Davis era” as all the students and fans. He is looking forward to the possible upset of Miami on Saturday. He is really just a huge fan, and he was lucky enough to turn his love for Carolina athletics into a career.

Inevitably, the conversation turns to Durham’s retirement. What will he do when he is done with the radio? The answer seems too obvious.

“I want to stay in Chapel Hill. I want to go to the games. I want to second-guess the coaches, berate the officials, stuff like that. Be a fan. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to tailgate. I’d like to do that again.”

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peace
C