Frank Black Francis is the A.J. Liebling of Rock

"The only way to write is well," A.J. Liebling says, "and how you do it is your own damn business."
Okay, A.J., fair enough. But how do you account for Jana Pruden's column in the Leader-Post? I knew Jana when I was at the L-P, and I've known her husband Evan since I was in high school. They are both smart, hip, funny, even sassy. They are both very nice people. So why does Jana's column in general, and her most recent one specifically, bug me so much?
Because it's not smart, it's not hip, it's not funny and it's not sassy. In fact, it reminds me of Peggy Hill's Musings columns from Mike Judge's King of the Hill, only those were actually funny.

When Pruden took over the general interest column from disgraced retiree Bob Hughes, it seemed as though the paper was finally starting to pay attention to the 20-55 age group that has rarely seen itself in the Regina daily. Finally would come a fresh voice from someone engaged with urban life, someone who valued art and culture at least as much as football, someone with something different to say. Instead, we got Bob Hughes in a skirt. Well, the most benign form of Bob Hughes in a skirt. I haven't read all of her columns, but I doubt that Pruden has attacked organized labour with the reckless meanspiritedness that Hughes embarrassed himself with. But Pruden definitely carries on Hughes's legacy of joyless solipsism, stories about cats and uninspired boasts about not understanding what's the big fuss about current trends. Pruden's latest col overdoses on puns as she states and restates her love of shoes. Why am I reading this?

I continue to read, I guess, because I know Jana Pruden to be capable of fine writing. You can see it in her court reporting. You know it if you've ever had a conversation with her. So why is she punching below her weight class with these asinine columns, wasting primo real estate with sad, Diagnosis Murder-style pap like "after some serious sole-searching" or "invariably, I flip-flop" when there's a readership starving for interesting commentary?

 

mp3: "The Man Who Was Too Loud" by Frank Black & the Catholics
mp3: "Rat's Ass" by Danny Barnes

Print's charming

If you needed any proof that newspapers as we know and love 'em have entered their End of Days, it might be from a question posed a last week's WonderCon comic book convention in San Francisco. "Will The Daily Planet face a collapse like every other American newspaper?" a fan asked of writer James Robinson at a panel.
Robinson, who writes a rather lacklustre Superman comic, replied with non-committal reference to Morgan Edge, a toady of the extra-dimensional despot Darkseid. In the Superman comics of the 1970s, Edge's Galaxy Broadcasting System bought out the Daily Planet and summarily gutted it to enhance their broadcast media division. Most notoriously, Edge poached mild-mannered Clark Kent from the Planet newsroom and set him up as the anchor of WGBS's nightly newscast.
It might be interesting to see how the collapse of print media is portrayed in the Superman universe, but can we trust a print media outlet like DC Comics to have any perspective on it? At this point, I'm more likely to watch the Fables of Print's End Times on Ugly Betty.

Reliable sources tell me, howev, that the finest pre-mortem on the cadaver-in-waiting is Season Five of The Wire, but damnit, we found another glimmer of hope for the old broad(sheet). Anyway, I'm nowhere near Season Five, just getting settled into Season Two, thanks. Yes, I watch TV at a slower-than-normal pace, but that's the beauty of the 21st Century. You can do things faster, but you can also do things more slowly.

It wasn't blogs that killed print, though, bunk. There's not as much useful and meaningful knowledge in ten thousand blogs, be they Huffington Post or the Longmont Urban Hens Coalition, as there is in the front section of any daily broadsheet. Don't point your finger at the blogs. It was Craigslist, yo. Slam dunk. Y'see, there used to be these dense, fine-print pages in the back of the paper. Places where people used cute and clever language to sell Adult Services in such a way that everyone knew what was for sale, yet neither the newspaper nor the local morality squad seemed to care. Places where people looked when they lost their glasses at the Northwest Leisure Centre. Places where the people told each other stories: Wedding dress, only worn twice. $50 obo. Or, Will pay cash for lawnmower and someone to push it by end of weekend. That kind of thing. People used to pay for the privelige of selling their own and buying someone else's junk. It used to mean something. If you wanted to get rid of your ski boots in July, you had to think about. You had to write a letter, or at least make a phone call. You had to get someone else involved. You had to be a committed seller. These days, jeez. There's a million pieces of crap for sale on the Internet, and if you actually want to do someone the solid of buying their three-drawer Creamsicle orange dresser for $45, you've gotta spend a week emailing and calling them before they agree to sell it to you. And it's lucky for you that your parents raised you to be a halfway decent person who calls ahead before showing up on someone's door to pick up the piece of furniture, because in the three hours between agreeing to sell you the item and the agreed-upon-by-both-parties-time of pick-up, the lousy zeke has up and sold it to someone else. Without so much of a solid as calling to let you know.

Speaking of solids, Gentleman Reg's new album is called Jet Black. Reg's first couple of albums came out on the lovely and missed Three Gut label. Three Gut was home to some of the early 00s' finest Canadian music like Royal City, Jim Guthrie and Cuff the Duke. I reviewed Reg's debut, Make Me Pretty, for No Depression back in the day when No Depression was a print mag and I was a guy who wrote for print money.

mp3: "You Can't Get It Back" by Gentleman Reg

Actually, every baby cries differently

Tuesday morning at the doctor's office. All the babies are crying except mine, but that's only because she just peed on the scale. A good pee always mellows her out. She's going to be so mad at me in eight years for writing this.

Before I had one of my own, or rather before I became owned by one, sure, babies all looked and sounded the same. Right up to the day before she was born I worried I wouldn't be able to tell my baby apart from others. I shouldna worried. My baby's got personality. Like the way she pees whenever she's weighed.

These other babies in the waiting room, they're screaming. There's one in an Edmonton Oilers sleeper with a nasal cry, and another one, a tiny little baby with no hair, who gasps between sobs. My gal, though, she's calm and smiling. She gives me a funny look when one of the other baby screams. Like, "What's her problem?"

It's Tuesday night. We're out walking, because that calms her down. And what calms her down, calms me down. We eventually find our way to the late night bookstore, because it's either that or the late night grocery store, and I'm sick of browsing broccoli. We slowly pass through the children's section. I've got my eye on some Mercer Meyer, but we're still working on Hands, Hands, Finger, Thumb. I can't wait to find out how that ends. I kinda think the toes did it. But then, I always think the worst of toes, and that's not really fair to them. Toes are useful. Well, most of them are. Pinky toes? Overrated.

Eventually, we end up at the magazine racks, and the current events section is a sea of Obama, even the Canadian mags are all repping Barack. Like, even Canadian Needlepoint & Cross-Stitching Quarterly has a crocheted "Hope" cover. I mean, come on. But then something catches my eye. A portrait of a fellow with decidedly less charisma, with decidedly less star power. The Walrus has a cover feature on Stephen Harper. It's an excellent, if not exactly revelatory, piece with no new information in it, but it's nice to see the Walrus making an effort to stand out. Too often in the past, it has felt like just a poor cousin to Harper's or the New Yorker. Canadian mags have never had an easy go, remember the long, slow deaths of Saturday Night? Or Toro? And those both bit the dust before the Internet killed print dead.

But I still like the magazines. I like flopping down on the couch and reading about Scrabble freaks or video games I'll never play. I like that a magazine is bigger than my hands, but lighter than a cup of coffee. I prefer flipping pages to scrolling, and I really, really like rolling up a mag and sticking it my back pocket for later. And I love newspapers. Especially broadsheets. Especially local papers. Good local papers. I love reading about city councils and development plans. I like following provincial legislatures and reading local columnists who write about local issues. And I hate the recent redesign of the CanWest papers' websites. I like to think of it as Print's revenge. Its navigatability is cumbersome and counter-intuitive. It hides the local content, which is the reason I go to specific papers' sites, rather than just skim Google News. For all the Kumbaya glory of the electronic global village, local interest sure gets short shrift on the Web.

But newspapers and magazines don't calm my baby down. Not yet, at least. For now, the only medium she's at all interested in is music (well, she likes light too, which includes that of the television). Her mom plays her Patsy Cline, Nina Simone and Dinah Washington albums during the daytime, y'know, the classy stuff. At night, and on my days off, I've been testing stuff from my collection out on her. So far she has liked, or at least not screamed through, "Shiver" by Giant Sand and "Blue Rol" by Roland Kirk.

The one song she unquestionably likes, as in she calms down to and smiles at, is "Stealin, Stealin'" a 1928 recording by the Memphis Jug Band. I think it's the kazoo she likes best. I'm hesitant to get her attached to my other favourite Memphis Jug Band song, for fear that she'll learn the words and repeat them in polite company. Cuz I don't wanna field that call from her eventual pre-school.

mp3: "Stealin', Stealin'" by the Memphis Jug Band
mp3: "Every Baby Cries the Same" by Make-Up

Guess Which City The Quote Refers To!

Here's a fun game (click links for answers):

"Canada's Most Dangerous City?"

"You'd have to be an idiot to buy right now in [city]."

Okay, it's not really that fun of a game, or much of a game at all. But really, what does Regina expect when it hosts its very own crystal meth carnival? Speaking of which, have the Harper Tories been taking their drug war cues from Jack Chick? Their new campaign re: drug lingo is kinda sad (especially the under-equipped "Drug Name Search" function).

mp3: "Barely Friends" by Hayden

Drug War 2007: From A-stan to Hastings

Good read from the Toronto Star of three weeks ago. Further reading from last week's Georgia Straight and the Ottawa Citizen of Dec. 20.

mp3: "Rip, Rig and Panic Suite" by Ken Vandermark