Saturday night we're all gathered round the dinner table. After discussing whether the chicken was cooked sufficiently, someone suggested that we should drink some martinis for the purposes of chasing any potential bacteria. Lo and behold, a martini set was produced from wherever it is homeowners store their martini sets. Creme de cacao and Godiva Chocolate Liqueur and Godiva White Chocolate Liqueur and grenadine and vodka and just an astonishing assortment of cocktail supplies lined one end of the table; I sat pondering packs of drink umbrellas while our chocolate martinis were shaken and poured. Thanks to a friend who once bartended and who once took me to a fine establishment where I was served a chocolate martini, I knew to squirt some Hershey's syrup into the glasses for an extra touch o'class.
But I tell ya--spontaneous salmonella-busting martini parties. Have I landed on my feet here or what?
First off, I've been informed that I got quoted in the
Post-Dispatch recently. They've been getting people to vote for the "Seven Wonders of St. Louis"--can you guess what I nominated?
Now here's a few U2-related links.
This first one is a piece about Soul at Work, which is a cool book even above and beyond the fact that it begins with an interview with The Edge, but you know what? I probably wouldn't have heard about it without that interview. And it's a fair guess I wouldn't have gotten a chance to talk to the author, Margaret Benefiel, without the U2 connection, either.
Next is an interview with Bill Flanagan. For those of you who don't know, Flanagan is a writer-hero of mine, and certainly the one person who has done the most to make me a rabid U2 fanatic through his book U2 at the End of the World. I cannot say enough good things about his writing style, his attention to detail, his gift for making connections across a variety of fields. His book shed light not only on a rock tour, but on the state of the world at large in those very early days of the nineties. Anyhow--it was great to get to talk with him, one of the highlights of what I'll call my career.
Soon after that interview, I gave up my "professional U2 fandom" with @U2. PlaybackSTL gave me a chance to look back on it as part of a feature they are going to start having regularly called "First Person." All the essays under this heading will have something to do with an effect the arts have on someone's life. @U2 has certainly had an effect on my life, so it seemed only right to delve into the subject.
One more. You may have heard Bono spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast this year. Jay Swartzendruber, editor at CCM Magazine, writes about it here. I'm linking this piece because I think it's very, very cool how he links to a couple of my @U2 pieces at the end. (He was a key source for that Nashville Summit article.)
So I'm living in a new city now, and if you know the song I quoted in the title you know which city that is.
My first full day of living here, a mysterious note appeared promising me some freelance work. Sometimes one gets what one asks for...
The job is writing bar reviews. Yes. I am to visit ten bars before February 10th. Hey, it's a quick'n'easy way to start getting to know a city.
I had my first bar-hopping excursion last night. I started at this place called Glendale Gaslight Cafe, which is in a lovely old building in a lovely old village. The owners had added on to the property; what they added was what I would call a "'verandah' with an 'h'"--simply calling it a veranda would not give the whole picture of lazily rotating fans on the ceiling and massive windows that in the summer would be opened to let one take the air, you know. I imagine a fair amount of ice tea sipping is done in such an environment.
The next place I went to was the Glendale Pub. As I approached, I heard music and wild cheers from the upper story. "Live band?" I asked the bartender when I walked in.
"Karaoke night," he answered. "Sounds like it's really swinging up there, doesn't it?"
It did, and it was. I walked in just in time to see a woman who appeared to be in her 70s take the mike for Mary Chapin-Carpenter's "I Feel Lucky." When she did the "rrrrrr!" growl at the end, the crowd went nuts--even more nuts than they had been going, I should say.
This is all more than I can fit into the reviews I'm writing of these places--the reviews can only be 40-90 words long. But I just had to share.