Sadness, but also indignation

As I was spreading mulch yesterday, I was thinking a lot about the tragic development in the case of Jessie Davis, the missing pregnant woman from Canton, Ohio. Police have arrested her boyfriend -- himself a cop -- as well as a friend of his whom they claim helped him clean up the crime scene and dispose of the body. How a man could kill the woman who is nine-months' pregnant with his daughter, in front of his two-year old son, then call in help to drag the body away and leave the toddler to fend for himself is completely beyond me. But that is not the point of this post today. The point is this: Bastard took Jessie to the Summit County Metro Parks, within the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, and buried them ("them" includes the unborn child, who had been named Chloe). I drive through this very section of the Park each day on my way to work -- incuding, of couse, the past week, during which time I've been listening to the news on the radio about the search for Jessie, all the while driving right past her "grave."

So. As I filled wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of mulch and hauled it around the house to my backyard, I started thinking about the sick and horrifying case of the father who killed his kids along the Ohio Turnpike, exited the road and buried them in my hometown -- where they remained, undiscovered for two years, as a national search went on around us.

I started to get mad. How dare these twisted fuckers use my hometown and my national park as the burial grounds for their innocent girlfriends and children? How dare they commit such horrible crimes and bring their own brands of hideousness to our pristine and idyllic spaces? This is not to imply that one's anger should be directed solely at the detail of where the bodies were disposed. I know this is not all about me, or the way I feel about my hometown and my national park (and yes, it is mine, in the way that it is all of ours who pay taxes). I understand that the greater outrage here are the crimes themselves, not the location where the criminal tried to hide the evidence.

But still. I look at the road in Hudson where that father buried his kids, and I look at the gorgeous Metro Parks where Jessie and Chloe were dumped, and I can't help but think that nobody and nothing deserves this. Woman and child, or landscape, flora and fauna.

A detached consideration of a very scary situation

I'm having strange reactions to a story that's big news in Akron right now, about a young woman, nine-months' pregnant, who disappeared from her home last week. Her two-year-old son was left in the home, unharmed, and he told his grandmother, heartbreakingly, that his mommy was crying and was "in the rug."

My overriding reaction is one of horror, as kidnappings are frightening, let alone kidnappings of pregnant women, let alone kidnappings that occur in front of terrified two-year-olds, let alone the fact that something very similar to this happened a few years ago in nearby Ravenna.

But once I got past my initial visceral reaction, I started thinking about all those times you hear about news bias, and how stories about white women and children in peril are reported with much greater frequency, and with much greater sympathy and outcry, than are stories about black women and children in peril. Not knowing the race of the woman involved in this current abduction, I considered this supposed bias and assumed she must be white.

Imagine my surprise when I saw the photo that accompanied the Akron Beacon Journal story, which featured the abducted woman's baby's father, a black man, kneeling on the ground.

Interesting, I thought. A black victim is, in this case, the recipient of public outcry and indignation. (Not that your race matters when you are kidnapped, but that goes without saying, yes? [Yet I still feel compelled to mention it, lest you, gentle reader, think I think it's OK or surprising or good for anyone to get abducted to buck some trend.])

But then the papers finally printed a photograph of the victim: she is white. So it's just like the media bias says, regardless of the interracial relationship.

When Paris hurts, we all hurt

Weeping Heiress is the name of my new introspective-Kate-Bush-inspired-ethereal-pop collective.

Shooting guard or sentient insectoid?

I have decided that San Antonio Spur Manu Ginobili sounds less like a professional basketball player and more like a character in George Lucas' vast universe. He was probably the principal architect on the Geonosis execution arena, where young Anakin, Padme and Obi-Wan are thrown to the nexu before being rescued by Mace Windu.

I'm just saying.

An Ohio Governor's finest moment

For several years, there has been a gigantic banner hanging in downtown Cleveland on a building across from the "Q," where the Cleveland Cavaliers play. It is a sparse Nike ad, with an image of LeBron James slam-dunking. It says only, "WE ARE ALL WITNESSES." It is a thing of beauty, and it sort of takes your breath away, and it makes you sort of proud to be a Clevelander.

But it turns out that it is in violation of some Federal law regarding the size of an advertisement and its proximity to a highway (the "Witnesses" banner is not far from where I-90 bisects Cleveland). Why this "violation" was not an issue two years ago but instead, say, THE FREAKING DAY OF THE FIRST GAME OF THE FIRST NBA FINALS THAT THE CAVS HAVE EVER REACHED IN THE HISTORY OF THEIR FRANCHISE, I don't know. But I do know that Ohio's Governor, Ted Strickland, is stepping up.

Strickland has deemed the sign "commercial art," which means it's not subject to the Federal and Ohio Department of Transportation regulations. My personal favorite Strickland quotation regarding this issue: "'We are determined to make sure this city has the opportunity to continue to enjoy this beautiful display of commercial art,' he said. Strickland disputed the notion that declaring the banner art will give Nike a special benefit. 'This is not about Nike,' he said. 'This is about Cleveland.'"

Yeah, governmental entities that aren't the Governor's office. Don't you dare try to dampen our enthusiasm and/or screw with our potential glory. Not this time.

The rock manifesto of a 32-year-old who's gotten a little out of touch

I've been thinking a lot about music lately: why I love it, what it means to me, why I've gotten away from it in the past few years. I'm having my own little sonic rediscovery, if you will. I don't have any good reason for letting the daily enjoyment of the rock and roll slip away from my life; I am not old, I do not have children, my CDs were not burned in a house fire. Maybe it's a consequence of working at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum for six and a half years: at some point, rock and roll became my daily grind and, in retrospect, I do not appreciate that. I had Word documents on the subject matter. Rock and roll exists in the heart, mind and soul, not on a shared server.

So it is with great relief that I welcome music back into my day-to-day life like an old friend whose companionship used to be more vital to my well being than oxygen. In much the same way humankind's ancestors slithered out of primordial sludge, my 2007 Great Music Reawakening began slowly. In January I saw Sloan: always a favorite, they can do no wrong (even on "off" nights, which this was, because at least half the band was stricken with some sort of rock-deflating illness). In March a fortunate gene mutation helped me develop little legs, the better to traverse the rock and roll landscape: Australia's phenomenal but little-appreciated-in-these-parts You Am I played one of the best shows I've ever seen (and that includes Pearl Jam at the old Chicago Stadium on March 10, 1994, the night that will live on as The Night I Realized What Music Could Do). In May I was surviving like the fittest, and broke one of my old stupid habits of not seeing live shows of bands that I was not totally and completely mind-alteringly into: I saw Southern Culture on the Skids at one of the best live music venues in town. (Take that, naysayers! You know who you are.)

(In order to understand the importance of my going to three shows in three months, it is critical to realize that I used to go to shows all the time. Certainly when I lived in Chicago, but even after I moved back to Cleveland. There was even a time where I would drive all over the damn place, to states near and far, across Mason-Dixon lines and international [well, Canadian] borders, to see the finest in live rock and roll. But then I randomly stopped. As previously stated, there is no good reason for this other than the fact that, I don't know, I might have been tired.)

The live element is returning for me. I'm planning at least two shows in June, followed by what is sure to be the TRIUMPHANT return of the Old 97s to Cleveland in July. Beyond that, however, is my attendant rediscovery of the recorded music of bands that went missing from my life years ago. A lot of this has to do with the (un?)fortunate breaking of the 10-CD changer in my car. I have been forced to bust out some old mix tapes that have been rattling around in my car like coins that appear to be of negligible value but that, taken together, comprise a significant amount of useful American currency. For the first time since Bill Clinton was not having sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky, I am listening to Morphine again. Morphine is (was) a unique, dark, low, sexy three-piece made up of a drummer, a singer/slide bass player and a baritone saxophonist. It is nearly criminal that I have not heard "Thursday" or "All Wrong" or "Super Sex" in a decade. I mean, what is up with that?

Morphine is just one example. Soul Coughing. That is another example. Remember Soul Coughing? I didn't, for a long time there. But I am once again enjoying how "Screenwriter's Blues" perfectly captures the sound of Los Angeles in the middle of the night (or, I suppose, how I imagine Los Angeles would sound in the middle of the night, seeing as how I've only been out and about in the middle of the night in Los Angeles once, and I feel like that's what it sounded like). Midnight Oil? They deserve to be listened to, savored, for at least one hour per day. That is the least I can do for a band that writes lyrics about Holden wrecks and four wheels' scaring cockatoos and road trains and Kelly's country and our poet Henry Lawson and ANZAC Day and Truganini and Norfolk Island pines and currency lads -- a band that awakens such a strong desire within me to visit Australia that when I hear them I am thisclose to clicking over to the QANTAS Web site to see if I can get any good deals from LAX to SYD.

I just finished reading Nick Hornby's Songbook, and his connections with the songs about which he writes were, for me, the straws that broke the camel's back in terms of getting my rock and roll lifestyle back in order. I'm not familiar with all of the songs in Hornby's book, but it doesn't matter. His articulation of precisely why the songs touch him is so universal that we all can apply them to our favorite compositions. I don't get a deep-seated, visceral feeling of warmth and comfort when I hear Paul McCartney because he is such an astounding bass player and a brilliant songwriter (though he is both of those things); my knees get weak because both Beatles and post-Beatles Paul McCartney sounds like the entirety of the 11-year relationship my husband and I have shared to this date. I don't smile idiotically when I listen to Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot because of Jeff Tweedy's roots-music-influenced genius or because I once had a crush on a girl who fell in love with a heavy metal drummer; YHF floods my senses with what it was like to travel around the country with my best friend in 2002, trailing Sloan, losing our ability to remember what it was like just to enjoy a band from afar, gaining a friendship that will last forever.

How could I have pushed something so powerful and personal to the back burner? I should be flogged for my behavior but, like a loyal and loving dog, the music was waiting for me to return, happily greeting me with its fucking awesome rock and roll leash in its mouth, welcoming me home.

As a lifelong Clevelander, I am not used to success or any "outside" recognition thereof

This weekend's episode of "The Soup" closed with one of the show's producers sitting in a chair, brushing Joel McHale's mullet wig as Joel sat on the floor in front of him. (This was a reference to an episode of "Wife Swap" wherein a wife brushes her husband's mullet while simultaneously telling him what a man he is.)

As the producer brushes his mane, Joel asks (I'm paraphrasing here), "So, do you think Cleveland will take it? I think they will." This reference to the Cleveland Cavaliers-Detroit Pistons series, which the Cavs clinched to great effect (BOOBIE!) on Saturday night, is remarkable. Not only is somebody outside of Cleveland talking about a Cleveland sports franchise, but that person outside of Cleveland is speaking positively about a Cleveland sports franchise and stating that he believes it can win.

Unheard of. I don't quite know how to process these feelings. When the Indians went the World Series in 1995 and 1997, it was an incredible and amazing thrill. But I lived in Chicago at the time, so I wasn't able to absorb the ambient hysteria and enthusiasm that came with living in the proximity of a championship team. Also, growing up in suburban Cleveland, I really didn't have a sense of just how futile the city was. I mean, I knew the Cuyahoga River caught on fire, and I knew that this was a very bad thing. I had the vague sense that Mayor Kucinich was inept. But I wasn't aware of the subtleties of Cleveland politics and business and education and economic development -- topics with which I'm quite familiar now having returned and worked in the city as an "adult."

I am acutely aware of Cleveland's troubles, and how good it will feel -- even temporarily, even though I don't care about basketball itself -- to have one 22-year-old from Akron (who "gets" Northeast Ohio's futility as well) singularly lift us all up on this tattooed shoulders.

That someone else, in Los Angeles no less, thinks Cleveland can win at something is a foreign and thrilling concept, indeed. Thanks, Joel. As if Little Gay, CRUISE WATCH, Clippos Magnificos and Souper Fantastic Ultra Wish Time were not enough, you believe in us, man.

I am not really a basketball fan, but I am a fan of Cleveland's crawling its way out of failure and municipal despair

And all I have to say is:

LE. BRON.