There's no surf in Cleveland USA

Oh, Cleveland, how you've taken it on the chin. You get knockout punches in the national media about an epidemic of house foreclosures. The Rock Hall doesn't even hold its awards banquets where the Hall is located. I tell ya: growing up in a place that is lampooned on Saturday Night Live leaves a self-esteem bruise that is slow to heal. Got Cleveland Vice? You betcha! (On the same night in '86 when the 'Mats were on the show!) Poor Cle: you can't make a living, can't walk the streets, and worst of all, can't field a winning baseball team.

The economic history of the city is similar to a number of northeast industrial cities where the canal provided the original impetus for growth (1825-1855), railroads cemented it (1860-1890) and then heavy industry produced goods for the developing world. In the first half of the 20th Century, the fields of communications, energy, and transportation were energized by Cleveland residents and companies who contributed their innovations.

Then the slide began. In 1950 the city was fifth largest in population in the entire U. S. of A. By 2000 it had tobogganed to 40th.

Now, we can take refuge that the future of Cleveland's economy is based on its artists bringing their particular North Coast Cloudland aesthetic to the world. As it was in the '70's when Pere Ubu, the Electric Eels, the Dead Boys, the Mirrors, ruled the mean streets of the decaying industrial town, a whole new crop of songsters, sirens, and sonic deadbeats will rise again.

Sorry Ma, I took out the tracks

Often tripping on the shadows of others when it comes to timely cultural appreciation, I find myself suddenly inexplicably (well, thanks to Mrs. B) able to offer a timely review of a cultural artifact. The book is the new Replacements oral history. I didn't really grow up with that band as an integral part of my psycholgical or aural development (concept dramas like "Quadrophenia" did the trick for me), but have appreciated them since the mid '80's. But I was a dilletante: I have fragmented versions of "Trash", "Stink", and "Hootennanny" where I excerpted the cuts I found pleasing, leaving much of their punkness out in the cold. Thus was the state of my classic rock-infested musical tastes.

A couple weeks ago, I hauled out "Trash" and spun it on the turntable- it rocked! It has a jagged spin art sonic madness that I never noticed before. I can't even remember buying the album.

Then I read the book and love its compendium of gushing fan notes, august puffery from rock aristocrats, and loose chronology. Lacking a strict chronology, it has the uneveness of tone and timing, but devotion to passion, that a recording of a drunken wake of the band would possess.

The dramatic center of the book is the character of Paul Westerberg. He comes off as a cranky inscrutable genius and posterchild of punk petulance. He is a figurehead of an unresolvable tension that the band represented: the choice between respected permanence (music career, bulky catalog of recorded material) and blazing comet ephermality (frenzied live shows that owe all to the moment).

The band itself could not figure where it stood in this matter. In their history they vacillated between the poles: Say Yes to a Saturday Night Live performance but piss off Lorne Michaels; kick out the founding guitarist for being fuckup but continue to revel in beer-soaked live sets; make a video but it is a guitar amp still life portrait.

In the end I felt a little dirty after reading the book. I can't say that I personally liked the main protagonist (Westerberg) but found the book compelling. And now I'm on the hunt for recordings of live shows from different eras and am having fun with what I found.

I especially like this photo of the Placemats on the abandoned couch on the rail line. That particular rail line has been revamped to be a bike trail (part of my route to work) and sadly has lost the ability to be a backdrop for a punk band publicity photo. Makes me nostalgic for blight I never knew.

Electricity comes from other planets

There are many days when I ride my bike to work and it affords me time and the inclination, since I am powering myself, to ponder my means of locomotion and its place in the big arc of History.

The other day while riding, Henry Miller's words came to mind: "I'm delirious because I'm dying so fast." I considered the speaker of this quote to be our carbon-powered age admitting that current conditions has it on the ropes.

Apart from the usual glum soothsayers, I don't think anyone could have predicted these shocks so soon: an oil price of $100 dollars a barrel, the Smart car sold in the US, continual media stories on climate change and peak oil, etc. Big Business is usually cast as the villian in this environmental and economic transformation, but the Titans understand that they have to plan long term, even if current federal leadership believes that Frostbite Falls should relish its new ability to offer Club Med weather.

What next? It doesn't seem like a far stretch to imagine that we will enter an age of electricity where motion will generate energy that will be transferred to other uses. Whether it's solar, hydroelectric, wind, geothermal, tidal or even crowd movement, we won't be extracting it from below as we have in the past.

Or, I should say "we" in the developed world. As it is increasingly happening, the developed country is exporting our pollution and industrial processes to the developing world. They'll be faced with the bloody and expensive competition for carbon-based natural resources to fuel the energy-hogging industrial processes. As our biggest export is entertainment, we'll film it for the Thunderdome Consumer reality TV show and sell it back to them in syndication.

Of course I'm offering a very simplistic summary of a decades long process. There will be wars, market upheavels, political skirmishes fought over the pace, direction, and structure of our future energy market, but the way in which we live our lives won't force us to have daily interactions with Big Oil.

Instead, we'll face Little Energy where innovative startups will attempt to capture markets: new cars, new sources of plastic and other materials. These companies will of course compete and at some time in the future settle into conventional wisdom as entities necessary to our Way of Life, as the Railroads were considered unassailable in their day. But as De Gaulle said, the graveyard is full of indespensable men.

We'll sort out this conventional energy snafu in the next fifty years or so, just in time for the Viral Explosion that will make the Plague Years seem like a brief roll in smallpox blanket.