It’s been a fairly crappy couple of weeks around here, death and grief and sneaking cigarettes and all-day-alcohol-enhanced goodbyes, etc.  All while still trying to be half-decent parents to Jack and Elsie – and a large part of that effort went into not going postal when their little friends would turn into retarded orcs, hell-bent on busting everything they touched over here. It took an entire day to write that last Bacon post – typing three or four words per sit before getting back up to do things like pull a toy golf club out of one bastard’s hands in the middle of his assault on the deck furniture. Or to yell at one beast-princess to not sit on my dog’s head. One of life’s funny ironies is that a neighbor’s inability to instill boundaries in their defective offspring probably means I’m gonna get sued when Chooch chews little Sally’s face off in self-defense. 

Anyhow – I thought I’d take it easy and go with brief, scattered thoughts today.  Let’s get the bacon out of the way to start.

 Johnston Country Hams Dry Sugar Cured Bacon – We got fucked again.  I’m not sure what the hell is up with the Bacon Of The Month Club, but I am really starting to feel awful for Elisa’s brother as he dropped over three bills on this travesty. I am glad I was introduced to the fairly unique Kolosvari bacon.  And the very first bacon we received in January, the Vande Rose Farms stuff, was such miraculously delicious meat it just had to have been sliced from tender belly of Jesus Christ himself. 

But then came that shrink-wrapped slab of plague back in February and now this Johnston Country etc, etc pre-sliced crap. What the hell is going on?  At over $300 for 12 packages of bacon one would assume that every last one of them ought to be crazy awesome. But four months into this and I’ve had what must be the absolute worst the cured meat world has to offer (Dan Philips Private Cure) and this latest batch which was just insulting.  I whipped the Johnston crap up for my kids’ breakfast just before heading out to a funeral. They ate it first, and then my in-laws had some and everybody in the room looked like it was me they wanted dead. So I had a bite. Eeeeesh. 

For reference, here’s what Dan Philips’ (Now describing himself as “Capt. Bacon” in the mailings) “tasting notes” stated: …intense flavors, balanced and slightly salty. This prick never gets it right. There’s mention of slow hickory smoking, but my package must have been the one which missed that part of the process.  If there was any flavor at all it wasn’t smoke – it was anchovies. And that was just ducky because the slices were so goddamned salty that they were almost inedible anyway. I mean there were fucking salt crystals forming on the meat during cooking. This was getting out of hand.  I’d love to know what Dan Philips notion of “too salty” might be. I wonder if he actually has a tongue. And I worry that my kids will never trust me to make them breakfast again. 

Now, onto happy family stuff.  Happy Soccer family stuff.  No happy Soccer Mom action, however, as Mansfield is sort of a Plain Jane town. Most of the eye candy here is a wee bit bland.  I do think my wife, who coaches, is pretty sweet in shorts and a FIFA approved shirt, but there’s not much to be gained by perving on the missus from the sidelines. Nevermind. The point is that today was Jack’s second town league, and the first I got to see. It was neat. 5 years back we had a chubby little goon struggling to hold his big baby head up and today he scored 7 goals. Granted, his pre-K opponents were pretty weak on defense, but still he was excited and that’s what it’s all about, right? Getting so giddy just watching him run and control the ball I actually failed to capture his first goal on video.  I was jumping and shouting “Yay Jack!!!” while the camcorder filmed whatever else my crazy, flailing arms pointed it at. 

Since Elisa is a coach I thought I’d toss my hat into the ring and volunteered to set up the soccer fields.  So at 6:30 on Saturday mornings I drag my ass over to paint lines and set up goals. I also get to spray paint notes to my son on the sidelines! Interesting how things change over a lifetime.  Scoot past Jack’s arrival a half decade ago and travel to Boston of fifteen years past. What was young Frankie doing at 25? Well if it was 6:30AM in April I was already getting sick of the early sunlight and thinking about finally going to bed. I might be dialing a cab for a ride back from wherever the hell I was or wondering how many people to boot out of my apartment to make it quiet enough to sleep. I don’t look back on the past with any regret, but I guess I’m cool with the fact that what’s stuck on me now early on a Saturday morning is white grass paint and not Chlamydia.  

And lastly, a thought spurred on by a Dresden Dolls song, heard on the radio coming back from field painting:   

Musicians Boston Owes the World an Apology For 

Apart from my seedier doings, a couple of decades in Boston gave me a bunch of years hanging around clubs and catching some great acts. There were always some cool locals playing in Cambridge, Jamaica Plain and Somerville, and a lot of great national acts pulling through.  But taken as a whole, the Boston area music scene could also feel repetitive.  There were far more people playing the same shit than there were trying to push the edge. And that was mainly the fault of the venues, club managers always looking for familiar sounds rather than innovation. If you were a band  or musician that fell into one of three veins – Green Day knockoffs, Pixies mimics, or Aimee Mann clones -  you were likely to get gigs.  So it’s surprising that anyone ever got to make a name for themselves nationally.  But some did and some of those truly blew.  And I have a minute, so I’ll scribble out my sour little opinion… 

Julianna Hatfield – Snitty Indie Disaffected Cunt Rock. Liz Phair w/o the fun or the hooks. Dullest take on feminine empowerment ever. Belongs with Tracy Bonham in the same back of cats that needs drowning. 

Mission of Burma – Desperately hoping to be an American version of the Clash, their songs about political justice, class angst and the like never achieved more than a suburban Connecticut edge to them. MOB Retrospective on WFNX? That’s when I reach for my revolver…Sonic Youth found them influential, and boy howdy ain’t Sonic Youth the most awesome band ever? 

Pixies – See Juliana Hatfield. Mission of Burma gone worse. Built on the cutesy/fake/lazy “rage” of Black Francis I used to think these dingbats had stretched the apogee of pithy, Freshman-English-major lyrics. But that’s before I met the Dresden Dolls…Anyhow, it is tough to hate everything about anything everyday, and I can’t solely dismiss a band for lousy wordsmithy – if that were the case I wouldn’t  have worn the grooves  off my Metallica LP’s, play the replacement cassetes to death or have permanent fingerprints on the Master of Puppets CD….but talk about retarded lyrics!  The Pixies’ Joey Santiago laid  some seriously neat guitar work – at times sounding like a buzzsaw trudging up a landslide of gravel and bluebirds.  

The Dresden Dolls – Is Amanda Palmer hot under that make-up? Who gives a damn? Can’t sing and the Cabaret dress-up barely masks a weak, yet wholly self-impressed, musical duo. While I must admit liking “Coin Operated Boy” it only demonstrates that I enjoy novelty songs. And the Dolls are a novelty band. They tagged themselves as a “Brechtian Punk Cabaret”, all terms which barely fit.  Punk they ain’t, except that they sneer; Brechtian is smart-talk for a band looking to add bumper-sticker literacy to their gig by associating themselves with an avant-garde German playwright (see we’re on the same level as Lou Reed! Our promo sheets say so!). And Cabaret? Amanda likes to groan atonal, and look sultry and paw at her breasts. OK, sure. Cabaret. 

Aerosmith (V. 2, 3) – Once upon a time these guys were the Great American Hard Rock Band. Then they became drunk as shit, fought on stage, made lousy albums then disbanded. Then they reunited and went quintuple platinum singing over-produced ballads penned by the likes of Desmond Childs: a guy who wrote insane hits for KISS, Bon Jovi and and Ricky Martin and Michael Bolton and Kelly Clarkson.  Then they won an Oscar for a pithy tune for a lousy movie written by a little woman on her white piano in LA. The Bad Boys of Rock became richer than all get out as a cover band. Lame. 

The Dropkick Murphys – I’m not a big baseball fan to begin with, but I really want MLB’s biggest prima donnas – The BoSox – to have a huge losing season so I won’t have to hear these jackasses ever again. Now the official soundtrack to Sox Nation, these working class heroes have been at their schtick for a long time now.  Their catalog of ditties, all which open with a near identical accordion riff, includes songs about being from Massachusetts. And being from Boston, Massachusetts. And for being Irish in Boston, Massachusetts or American Irish in Boston or just being a crazy ass Boston-Irish fan of the Sox which is the greatest thing for any Mick in Massachusetts to be. 

Okey Dokey – enough slander for now.  Sayonara folks, talk to you when the next Bacon Atrocity comes in the mail…