January 29, 2008
City lights in San Francisco ...
I'm still grinning after reading random lines of Gary Snyder in the Poetry Room at City Lights last night. In a world quickly moving toward e-readers and cell phone novels, it was reassuring to drift among stacks of books and pick up volumes on impulse, graze a few graphs and move on. Wallace Stevens. Hart Crane. Denise Levertov. Lao Tzu. I could almost feel Ferlinghetti's hot, beat breath on the back of my neck as the smell of yellow pages filled the room and the floorboards creaked beneath me.
Posted by Bob Benz at 9:44 AM | Comments (1)
January 20, 2008
Buddy blows away the windy city
Lara and I just returned from another pilgrimage to Chicago to see Buddy Guy at his Legends club. Incredible. Every time I see him I'm astounded by his showmanship, and when he's on his home turf, all hell breaks loose.
It was mind-numbingly cold, so frigid it took our breath away when we stepped out of the hotel. We went over to a sushi place before the show, where we met Mike, one of Buddy's disciples. It was Mike who instigated our first pilgrimage to see Buddy, and he secured our tickets for this show.
When we got to Legends, the place was packed, and Buddy blew the doors off it. He rolled off one searing guitar solo after another and spent a lot of time moving through the crowd, going up to the bar, even wandering back into the bathroom. The crowd loved it. We loved it. And I think that's the best Buddy Guy show I've ever seen. He was wailing.I posted a few photos here on my Flickr account.
Posted by Bob Benz at 5:29 PM | Comments (0)
January 18, 2008
Never mix umlauts and heroin
I can't explain why exactly, but I recently read "The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star." Ostensibly, I did it to see what it would be like to read a book on the Kindle reader. I guess I chose it for the same reason people read stories about Britney Spears and then whine about the media being filled with such crap.
Nikki Sixx, the bassist and songwriter for Mötley Crüe, is clearly a raving asshole if you go by this autobiography. But he has an amusing side, a snide sense of humor and an awareness that he's really a bit of a wanker on many fronts. On some levels, it's the typical junkie purge, a nasty vomit of bad deeds, blackouts and burning addiction. Mommy didn't treat me right. Daddy abandoned me. It's so hard being a rock star.
One thing I did like, though, was the use of counter stories that punctuate Sixx's story. After his journal entries, he includes quotes from other folks who were there to witness his misdeeds and deviations, including this gem from the band's manager that follows a whiny Sixx entry about how evil management was running the poor Crüe boys into the ground with a grueling tour schedule:
"I always had a real problem with this line of argument of Sixx's. Sure, the tours were too long for them, but only because of the way they behaved on them! Don't forget, these were guys in their twenties who were only being asked to work two hours a day. What about all the guys who get up at 5 a.m. to lay bricks and only get two weeks a year off? If Mötley Crüe was burned out on the road, it was purely because they had stupid fucking drug habits. It's not rocket science."
Amen. But at the end of the book I did have a begrudging respect for Sixx. He's clearly a smart guy. Can't say the same about Mötley Crüe though. I still think they were charlatans and it doesn't take much work to find far better metal ...
Posted by Bob Benz at 7:42 PM | Comments (0)
Once in a while you can still see the light ...
I generally hate it when the StoryCorps segment comes on NPR in the morning. I'm on the elliptical, so I'm a captive audience. Can't change channels. Just have to suffer through another boring slice-of-life segment.
I was feeling the same way this morning as some 96-year-old woman prattled on about her life. But I was completely floored when she rippled through this truly transcendental close:
"We never know what diseases are going to catch up with us. It's amazing the things that people can live through when they have to. So you get through it, and you get through almost anything. And you live to be 96, and sometimes you wonder why. But then when you look up at the blue sky, you think, it's gonna be alright."
Wow. The parallelism is almost biblical or Whitmanesque. I stopped churning away on the elliptical and just stood there, astounded by how profound it was.
... in the strangest of places, if you look at it right.
Posted by Bob Benz at 8:48 AM | Comments (0)
January 17, 2008
Return of the tirade
Leanne is back. And she's pissed ...
Posted by Bob Benz at 7:26 AM | Comments (0)
January 14, 2008
It's time for something completely different ...
“When it's time to change, you've got to rearrange,/
Who you are and what you're gonna be.”
-- The Brady Bunch
I remember the first time I saw the Internet. It was through The Electronic Trib, a BBS that featured Albuquerque Tribune content, chat rooms and a tenuous link out to the Internet via a text-only Lynx browser.
It blew my mind. I could access information from across the world. I could see the card catalog at the University of New Mexico. And I remember telling an Albuquerque entrepreneur this was going to change everything. He wasn’t convinced. But I was adamant.
I jumped into the Internet with both feet. When I moved from The Trib to the Denver Rocky Mountain News, I started agitating to launch a website at the paper. And when management decided to go for it, they turned to Paul Pershing and me, the two guys at the paper with ponytails and an HTML jones.
We had no idea what we were doing, but we managed to pull it off with considerable help from Jack McElroy, a senior editor who was the project’s guardian angel and who also was a catalyst behind the Electronic Trib a few years earlier.
It’s funny, though. As much as I embraced the Internet and all the change I thought it would bring, I’m generally averse to change. In fact, I’m terrified of it. I’m a creature of habit. I like to know what’s coming next and I take a deep comfort in the tried and true.
This ruthless consistency, this hobgoblin of ruts and familiarity, is my greatest nemesis. It was with considerable trepidation (and a swift kick in the ass from my wife, Lara) that I moved from Albuquerque to Denver. And moving from Denver to Austin in 1996 to work for a web startup called GoWest was even more daunting. But I did it, and each time I moved out of my comfort zone to the land of nightmares and churning stomach acid, it opened the door to fresh horizons, exciting opportunities and new friendships.
It’s time to shake things up again.
After 13 years in a series of corporate interactive roles at Scripps, I’m quitting to join a partnership that is a veritable league of Super Friends called Maroon Ventures. My partners in this endeavor are amazing. It took only one meeting to convince me this is the right move. I can’t describe the electricity in the room while we tossed ideas around and planned world domination. I haven’t been this energized since those early days in Denver when I was staying up all night to learn HTML and mine the mysteries of the Internet on a Mosaic browser.
Of all the changes I’ve embarked on, though, this one is the toughest. Probably because I’m leaving an incredible company and the best boss I’ve ever had. I hate to resort to the old breakup cliché that “It’s not you, it’s me.” But that’s the case here. I’m leaving Scripps because I need to do this. I can’t look back in 10 years and wonder “what if.” It’s a chance I have to take, a change I have to make ...
Posted by Bob Benz at 2:33 PM | Comments (23)