UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

Today as I washed my hands in the office bathroom, I noticed that the building has changed the soap in the dispensers. The old soap was basically unscented (although it did take on an unpleasant rusty smell from the dispenser itself), whereas the new soap has a strangely familiar, slightly fruity scent.

I knew immediately that it was the smell of something I ate a lot of as a kid back in the ’80s. My first thought was that it was Pac-Man cereal, but I knew that wasn’t right. So as I walked back to my desk, I sniffed my hands, straining my brain to identify the scent. And then it hit me. I couldn’t remember what they were called, but I distinctly saw a long-gone Wonka brand candy. I described it to my coworkers as having “a sour taste and chalky texture similar to SweeTarts, and they came in a little box similar to Nerds, but they were tiny cylinders.”

So naturally I found my answer by googling “candy sweet tarts tiny cylinders,” which, equally naturally, led me to Wikipedia, and the answer: Tart ‘n’ Tinys. And then to the disappointing reminder that sometime in the ’90s, Wonka reinvented Tart ‘n’ Tinys with a disgusting Spree-like coating. What’s the point? The candy that I remember is no more. I can’t even find a picture online of what they originally looked like. All I have left is the lingering scent of questionable hand soap and the vivid memory of my tongue turning raw from sucking on 20 or 30 tiny, pointy, chalky cylinders at a time.

I’ve probably mentioned here before that I grew up in Austin, Minnesota, a.k.a. Spamtown USA. Of course I noticed growing up that there were few if any African-Americans in town, but it had never occurred to me that there might once have been, and I was never told of any racial conflicts that had ever taken place.

In fact, race (at least the black/white divide) was almost a non-existent concept in my childhood. In the ’80s there were quite a few people in town of Asian descent, mostly refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, which was a source of its own kind of tension, but I’m sure I was at least 10 before I saw a black person in real life (although by then I knew Gordon, Susan, David and Olivia from Sesame Street quite well).

I’m not sure if I had ever even heard the term sundown town until today, when I happened to be searching online for something completely unrelated about Austin, and I was even more surprised to learn about a disturbing incident that took place in my hometown in 1922.

These days racial tension is going strong in Austin, due in large part to changes that have taken place in the economic environment of the city. So race is mixed up, along with economic class, immigration and labor union issues, into a complex and for the most part poorly-understood stew of thinly-veiled hatred, anger and frustration on every side.

I guess it just goes to show that the history of race relations in this country is far more complicated and troubled than many of us even know. In an election year where, for the first time, both a woman and an African-American have a real chance of becoming our next president, it’s important to reflect on how far we’ve come, and how far we still have to go.

OK, I don’t actually know what “iss de Hundin” means, but it’s a phrase that seems to come up a lot in Kobaian. At any rate, Magma is a legendary French prog rock/avant garde jazz band, led by drummer Christian Vander, who made up his own language for the band’s Coltrane-meets-Wagner post-apocalyptic jazz-rock-opera concept. (And now I’ve reached my per-post hyphen limit.) They beat Coheed and Cambria to it by three decades, and did it in an incomprehensible Germanic Esperanto to boot.

I used to have a Magma tribute website, back in the days before blogs and Wikipedia and YouTube. I took it down years ago, but fortunately the band has kept up playing. I saw them in Chicago in 1999 and it was a highlight of my musical life. They’re still going strong, as evidenced by this 2006 video. Check it out!

Of course, the truly indoctrinated will probably prefer this clip from 1970. Lip syncing on French TV, “American Bandstand”-style. “Stoah” of all things. Imagine the trauma of an unsuspecting viewer, just tuning in for the supersonic screeching at the beginning. The world’s collective tolerance for the bizarre was certainly much higher back then.

OK, it’s not. But my latest musical creation, the 3-song EP ÷0 [Division by Zero] (Volume One), now has an official release date of January 15, 2008, and I’ve submitted it via TuneCore for online distribution through iTunes and a few other services. It will probably begin to show up in their catalogs sometime in March; I’ll post more about availability as I learn about it. In the meantime, you can read more about the project (and listen to medium-quality streaming versions of all of the tracks) here.

Also, special thanks to my spitting-image son for acting as a stand-in for my 1978 self in the cover photo taken (last summer) in one of my favorite places from that time, Two Harbors, Minnesota.

I’ve been familiar with the term portmanteau for a while, although it had never occurred to me until this moment that, with my own personal tendency to combine words (at least in my head; I usually have the wherewithal to keep the results to myself), this is in fact what I am creating. (I had been carelessly and, knowing I was misusing the word, with some hint of regret referring to these habitual creations as puns.)

Certainly I do not have Mr. Dodgson’s gift for them, but still, it’s interesting to consider the potential of such hybrid words.