Erin Shaw Street

They Say It's Your Birthday

Rumor has it, some people are turning thirty-something this week. I can't name names, but I know of at least two, well, maybe three.  Nate celebrated this fortuitous week with a birthday dinner last night at Jackson's in Homewood, where he had his first ever S'mores, a major milestone in a boy's life. (See August- September '07 photos) to the right. And his Mom had their wonderful fried Twinkies ... so very lo-cal indeed.

I'm celebrating my 31st with the following: attending meetings between local Catholic and Muslim leaders discussing a proposed Muslim worship center down the street, hosting work events, applying to grad school (again, but this time it's for real!), eating some Mexican food, getting a massage and flying to NYC to kick it old school style on Long Island and in Manhattan, where we'll see a show, hit H&M and generally cause trouble. I haven't been up to the motherland since Nate was a mere zygote, so I'm ready to return.

In the meantime, a recommendation on a great documentary: "Hairworld: The Pursuit of Excellence," which follows the U.S. Team during the 2006 Hair Olympics. It aired on APT recently and I highly recommend.

Goooooallll!

I've posted some new photos to our "Summertime 2007" album to the right, including shots of Nate in his soccer uniform. He wore it for the first time yesterday and impressed all the kids at school. It's especially cool because green and white are the colors of the Celtic football team, for which his great, great granfather played goalie. Look out David Beckham ....

Goodbye Tammy Faye

I'm really sad about the passing of Tammy Faye. I gained respect for her after watching the late-90s documentary "Eyes of Tammy Faye." Link to Eyes of Tammy Faye Beyond all of the layers of eyeshadow and mascara was a true original. She may have made mistakes along the way, see: "Heritage USA," but deep down she was a compassionate person. And she had fantastic style.

You Are Repressed, But You Are Remarkable Dressed

It sounds incredibly stupid, but I just can't get over last night's concert. As everyone and their mother know, I waited 15 years to see Morrissey in concert. The end result -- his music affected me so much more than I ever anticipated from listening to tapes, CDs and then ipod over these years.  Laugh if you will, call him the pope of mope, but I am in agreement with all the other crazed fans who say he is the best lyricist ever. I'd go so far as to say he is the Oscar Wilde of our time.

I don't know if I cried because I was seeing someone of this magnitude, or if it was just all of the sentimentality of years wrapped up with these songs, or if it was that I had been up since 4:45 a.m. to go to a 6:30 (yes, am) meeting. But when the canvases with James Dean faces dropped and the Moz came out, well, it was nothing short of a profound experience. It's hard to explain it, and I know that I'm not articulating to the best of my abilities. He's just an amazing entertainer, whipping the mike like a lasso, enthralling the audience members with his piercingly spot-on intellectual lyrics, gesturing with the sadness and angst we have all imagined -- and rocking, if I may add.

There is a certain person who adores Morrissey, and he or she spent lots of time in their room alone as a teenager. We could be seen at the Alabama Theatre last night -- as another audience member said, "Wow, there are lots of aging hipsters here." Morrissey speaks to our loneliness, longing, faith, loss of faith, camp, gang life, need for poetry, irreverance, human touch, anger and outrage and, most of all, sincerity. I know that this seems trite and laughable. But I also know that he is as relevant to me as a 30-year old mother, wife and person in a business suit as he was to the 15-year old girl in a Catholic school uniform and Doc Martens. So he didn't sing "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" or "The Queen Is Dead." He did sing, "Irish Blood, English Heart" (yes, that would be me), "Every Day Is Like Sunday," and "Let Me Kiss You.

But he was brilliant.

"I will be/on the bar/with my head/on the bar .... beware/I hold more grudges/than lonely high court judges" -- "The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get"

"But when the president is never black, female or gay/you've got nothing to say to me/to help me believe/in America" -- America is not the world

Click here to see the brilliance that is Morrissey on his 2007 tour

The Importance of Being Morrissey

Part one of a four-part series on Morrissey. Watch it to see that I am not the only one.

A Happening

This has been Pop Art week at our house. Shane found out that we have Ovation, an arts channel, on our satellite, so I have been TiVoing documentaries like mad. Tonight we watched a documentary about Roy Lichtenstein, my second favorite Pop Artist (Andy has to be first and is first among all artists in my book). TiVo said that the documentary came out in 2005 but it was clearly made in the mid-80s, and it had great footage of Lichtenstein explaining how he enlarged iconic comic book images and advertisements to make his larger-than-life, stunning canvases that were wholy innovative at their time. Last night we watched another documentary about the entire Pop Art movement that made me want to fly back in my imaginary time machine to a  Happening or to The Factory circa late 60s.

Speaking of icons that have been huge influences in my life, tomorrow at this time I will be in the sixth row at the Morrissey concert! I've been singing Smiths around the house for months in preparation, and Shane is afraid I may have warped baby Nate. I have to give him all the cultural ammunition I can seeing as he was born in a state where when people scream "Play Freebird!" at a concert they aren't doing it in an ironic way. What if someone screamed that at Morrissey? I would melt into my seat.