Stand by me

Amazing, the things you find when you comb through old e-mails… my friend Marc sent this out about a week ago but I just looked this morning. If there were ever a song meant to brighten your Monday, this is it. It’s the true “We Are the World.”

Stand By Me from David Johnson on Vimeo.

Apologies

To the five or six people in the world who have this blog on an RSS feed: You probably saw a couple of weird posts today. There was a multimedia workshop for the Niemans today and we tried out lots of new stuff — some of which didn’t work. Thus the weird posts.

I’m finishing up a new “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” post and that will be up shortly. Until then, as you were.

Charlotte blues

It’s spring break at Harvard so Alix and I decided to come back home to Charlotte for the week. It turned out to be remarkable timing. We arrived in town the same day our newspaper laid off another large chunk of the staff — including many of our friends. One of our photogs took a pretty amazing photo of the announcement. I know every single person in that photo. I’ve seen that body language before. That’s a funeral.

Alix and I are safe for now. Whatever “safe” means these days.

We had lunch today with a group of co-workers, all of whom (for now) have survived. We just happened to end up next to a table of Observer people from outside the newsroom. Two of them lost their jobs yesterday. One told me she’s more worried about the people she’s leaving behind.

None of this is unique to us, of course — the same thing is going on all the way up and down the line, to white-collar workers and blue-collar workers and no-collar workers. We are catching it hard for many reasons, one of them being that the people who used to advertise in our paper can’t afford to anymore.

I think what we do is important — if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have done it for these last 25 years — but we don’t deserve a job any more than a teacher or a textile worker. Everybody who puts in an honest day’s work contributes to the world. And the market works its will on us the same as it does everybody else.

Newspaper people get by on gallows humor — it’s how we cope with having to cover murders and missing children and the mamas of sons who don’t come back from the war. So at lunch we mourned the people who lost their jobs and we worried about our own futures but mostly we laughed at it all the best we could. Is the glass half full or half empty? All I know is, somebody peed in the glass.

We’ll be back for good in June. I don’t know what it’s going to be like, and nobody else does either. We just have to enjoy the moments we get, make the most of the rest, and prepare ourselves for whatever happens next. Somebody peed in the glass.

Brackets, baby, brackets

Well, clearly I’ve been ignoring the blog recently — it turns out that on this fellowship occasionally you have to DO stuff. Among other things, I have utterly failed to publish some breaking personal-grooming news. But it will have to wait at least one more post because in about 12 hours March Madness begins. Thursday and Friday are the best sports days of the year.

My laptop is running out of juice and so I’m just going to throw this out there — a pick for every game. Upsets marked with exclamation points.

EAST

First-round winners: Pitt, Tennessee (!), Wisconsin (!), Xavier, VCU (!), Villanova, Texas, Duke.

Second round: Pitt, Wisconsin (!), VCU (!), Texas (!).

Sweet 16: Pitt, VCU (!) (Clearly I am going off a cliff with this VCU thing.)

Elite 8: Pitt.

SOUTH

First round: UNC, Butler (!), Illinois, Gonzaga, Temple (!), Syracuse, Clemson, Oklahoma.

Second round: UNC, Illinois (!), Syracuse, Oklahoma.

Sweet 16: UNC, Oklahoma.

Elite 8: UNC.

MIDWEST

Round 1: Louisville, Siena (!), Arizona (!), Wake, Dayton (!), Kansas, USC (!), Michigan State.

Round 2: Louisville, Wake, Dayton (!), Michigan St.

Sweet 16: Wake, Michigan St.

Elite 8: Wake.

WEST

Round 1: UConn, Texas A&M (!), Purdue, Washington, Utah State (!), Missouri, Maryland (!), Memphis.

Round 2: UConn, Washington, Missouri, Memphis.

Sweet 16: UConn, Missouri.

Elite 8: UConn.

Final Four: Connecticut over Wake… UNC over Pitt.

National title game: UNC over UConn, 85-74. Tyler Hansbrough is tournament MVP and spends the next 10 years riding various NBA benches.

Guided by (a cappella) voices

When we got up here I quickly settled on WERS from Emerson College as my favorite radio station. I’m scrolling through a playlist right now and there’s Sly Stone, Wilco, David Byrne/Brian Eno, Radiohead, Lucinda Williams — pretty much right in my wheelhouse. What I didn’t know was how they filled airtime on weekend afternoons. What I didn’t know was that I would fall in love with college a cappella music.

I don’t think this was a big deal when I was in college 25 years ago — at least it wasn’t a big deal at the University of Georgia, where we mainly concentrated on football and trying to get girls to ride out to the Iron Horse. (What happens at the Iron Horse stays at the Iron Horse.) But now, if what I’m hearing is any indication, pretty much every university in America is crawling with four-part (and five-part, and six-part, and seven-part) harmony.

The best part is that they cover stuff you’d never expect — so far I’ve heard great versions of The Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights” (by the Suffolk University Ramifications), Justin Timberlake’s “Sexyback” (by the Colorado College Back Row) and that goofy Darkness song “I Believe In a Thing Called Love” (by the University of Rochester Midnight Ramblers).

I have also decided to marry one or all of the Wellesley College Tupelos, sight unseen, based on their version of the Counting Crows’ “Accidentally In Love.” Yes, the Shrek song. Never cared for it. But then the Tupelos get ahold of it and the lead singers make it sexy and the harmonies are flying around in the back and I’m bouncing around in the car seat. It’s about 18 million times better than anything the actual Counting Crows have ever done.

Being a writer, I thought, wow — this stuff would make a great book or a great documentary. It turns out somebody else thought the same things. (This happens to me a lot — I get a great idea for a book approximately one week after someone has published a book on the exact same topic. Have you heard about my idea for a book on Andre the Giant?)

So for now I’ll be content with Saturday and Sunday afternoons with “All A Cappella” , and I’m seriously thinking about laying down 25 bucks for a live show in a couple of weeks. I realize this might permanently damage my reputation among some of my cooler friends. Then again: Ben Folds agrees with me. (And if you don’t think I’m getting that CD the day it comes out, you’re nuts.)

The forgetting machine

There were maybe a dozen people in the stands when we got to the arena for the Harvard-Brown basketball game Saturday night. Ivy League ball is not exactly UNC-Duke. By tipoff the crowd was maybe 300 people and we were treated to a half of air balls and dumb fouls and guys dribbling balls off their feet. Brown was slightly less mediocre and so they led 32-20 at the half.

But it was still fun, you know? At halftime they had two kids race down the court while putting on an adult-size basketball uniform (including size-18 sneakers). After that two teams of seventh-graders played for a few minutes — that was a reminder that seventh grade is when kids start to have growth spurts. A few of the kids looked like NFL linebackers and most of the others looked like members of the Lollipop Guild. But one of the Lollipop kids drilled a jumper right at the buzzer and everybody cheered.

Somewhere in there I looked down and saw Mike Tirico, the ESPN broadcaster, walking down the sideline. If you had given me 1,000 guesses on where Mike Tirico would be on a Saturday night, I’d never have picked the Harvard-Brown game. It turns out he was doing the Celtics-Spurs game in Boston on Sunday, so he had a reason to be in town… but still. You think he’d go bowling, catch a movie, you know, mix it up a little.

Harvard has a bunch of guys who can run and bang around on the boards, but basically only one guy who can score — a 6-3 guard named Jeremy Lin. The second half started and he started making shots. Harvard pulled to within three points right away, and some of the people who had started to leave went back to their seats, and the whole second half turned into these waves of Harvard getting close and Brown pulling away again.

Somebody was doing a radio broadcast but I’d be surprised if 10 people were listening. At that moment the two teams were a combined 1-9 in the Ivy League. Nobody knew or much cared about what was going on except the few hundred people in the stands and the teams on the benches and the 10 guys on the floor. But as the game ebbed away to the last couple of minutes, and you could tell it would be close all the way, everybody in that creaky old building cared a lot.

It was tied at 63 when Brown took the ball downcourt with maybe 40 seconds left. Their best player, Matt Mullery, had killed Harvard inside all night — he finished with 27 points. With less than 20 seconds left he got the ball down deep again. Everybody standing now. He gathered himself, went up to shoot — and Harvard forward Evan Harris flew in and blocked the shot.

Harvard raced upcourt. Lin got the ball. Two Brown players smothered him. He tried to get off a shot but it squirted out of his hands as the buzzer sounded. Overtime.

Wait.

One of the refs had called a foul on Brown. They huddled for a minute, then made their decision. The foul came right at the buzzer. Lin would get two free throws with no time on the clock. Make one and he would win the game.

I have to tell you at this point that I have played in hundreds of basketball games and watched thousands more and never seen a foul called with 0:00 on the clock. I’m not sure it’s even possible. If there’s a foul during the game, doesn’t there have to be some time left? But that was the call and here came Lin to the free throw line.

The rest of the players went to the other end of the court — no need to try for a rebound with no time on the clock. The ref handed Lin the ball. Here is the thing about being in a small gym. It was so, so quiet. You could hear him spin the ball in his hands before he shot. The ball had a high arc and everybody watched it.

It bounced on the rim once, twice.

And in.

Harvard 64, Brown 63. The Harvard cheerleaders screamed their lungs out. The two teams lined up to shake hands, both teams in a daze, and then the Brown kids trudged up the steps to their locker room while the Harvard team lingered on the court.

I am pretty sure, at that moment, no one there was thinking about the financial crisis.

Earlier that day we went to a seminar on careers in the humanities, and one of the speakers was the great Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins. She talked about how covering sports is really about covering the athletic heart, and how the athletic heart can tell us a lot about ourselves as human beings.

She’s right. But I think sports is about more than just the athletic heart — it’s about the heart of the fan. Why do we spend so much money on sports, spend so much time watching games, care so much about a battle between the two worst teams in the Ivy League? Well, one reason is that sports is the great forgetting machine — no matter how terrible your life is going, no matter how bad the world, you can get swept up in a game for a couple of hours and pretend that nothing else matters.

We walked out into the cold night, warm. We talked to strangers, suddenly friends. Of course Mike Tirico would come on his day off. Even a small game in front of a tiny crowd can do that to you. It is a rare and valuable thing.

Announcing tommytomlinson.com

So, yeah, the headline pretty much says it all: tommytomlinson.com is now live. It’s pretty basic stuff right now: Links to a bio, this blog, my Charlotte Observer blog (which I’ll resume when I finish this fellowship), my Observer column page (ditto), plus a few of my favorite stories.

I’ll be adding stuff along and along — some photos, maybe some video, some setlists from concerts I’ve been to over the years. Let me know what you’d like to see, and what you think about the site now — if anything looks weird or doesn’t load right, let me know. Any mistakes are mine. All the good stuff is because of the great and wonderful Margo Posnanski, who designed the site and would love for you to go say hi on her blog.

In the meantime, here is a sign of the Apocalypse: Someone has created a fan page for me on Facebook. I am grateful and flattered and appreciative. But I think this means the locusts are coming.

Wrestling with wrestling

(Photo from “The Wrestler” official site)

A group of us went to see “The Wrestler” on Friday. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see it, but I needed to. I doubt any other subject could cut closer to the bone for me.

I’ve loved professional wrestling, and hated it, my entire life.

When I was little a lot of the bad guys wore masks. When a bad guy with a mask came on the TV, I would run and hide in the other room. Then I would peek around the corner to see what happened. That’s pretty much the way I’ve dealt with wrestling ever since. Not wanting to look, not being able to help it.

My daddy was a believer — wrestlers, in the carny language they use, would call him a mark. He thought wrestling was real. He was a smart man, brilliant with tools, self-educated, but everybody has a hole in their swing and that was his. He took my sister to a match one time, and they sat in the front row, and one of the wrestlers got tossed out of the ring right into their laps. My daddy saw the blood streaming down the wrestler’s face. After that no one could tell him it wasn’t real.

He was right about the blood. Wrestlers call it blading and an early scene in “The Wrestler” shows how it happens. The Mickey Rourke character — Randy “The Ram” Robinson — hides a piece of razor blade in the tape on his wrist. During the match, after his opponent rams him into an exposed metal turnbuckle, Robinson falls facedown on the mat. While his opponent distracts the fans, Robinson slips out the razor and slices open his own forehead.

I’m sitting here writing this, trying to figure out how to justify loving something where guys cut open their own foreheads with razor blades. I’m not sure I can.

As soon as I figured out wrestling was a show, I’d pick fights about it with my daddy. Can’t you see how that guy pulled his punch? If they were really fighting, would they bounce off the ropes like that? He would scowl at me and turn back toward the TV. We would watch in silence. It was years before I could sit down with him and enjoy it my way and let him enjoy it his way. That was one of the ways I knew I was finally a grown man.

The best wrestlers are storytellers. It’s usually a simple story — most wrestling storylines can be summed up as I hate what you are or I want what you have. (You can sum up most of Shakespeare that way too.) Other writers learned from the classics, or from pulp fiction, or movies or comic books; I learned from Dusty Rhodes and Ricky Steamboat and Ric Flair. There’s no wrong way.

Here’s a little bit of Dusty, thanks to the great wrestling site Death Valley Driver:

Dusty was my favorite. But my dad and I knew that Ric Flair was the best. He created such a great character — the rich playboy who dressed in custom suits, the dirty fighter who always had backup but was legit tough on his own. Even when he did the most heelish things, some people cheered him anyway. Maybe out of admiration for someone so good at what he did, even if what he was good at was being bad.

Flair grew up in Minnesota, but he made his home as a wrestler in Charlotte. It was a base for a lot of wrestlers in the ’70s and early ’80s because one of the main wrestling TV shows taped there; even after the show left, a lot of the wrestlers stayed. I moved to Charlotte in 1989. Not long after I got there, I was stopped at a red light late one Friday night when a black Mercedes pulled up in the lane next to me. Ric Flair sat behind the wheel, just as cool as I always imagined.

Years later, I wrote about him. He had come out with a memoir about his years in the wrestling business. It read like a nonstop party — he must have passed out on half the kitchen floors in Charlotte. That’s how I led off my column. The morning the column came out, I was at my desk when the phone rang. Ric Flair was on the line. He wanted me to know that he thought the column was just fine… but his wife was upset. She didn’t like all the stories about the partying.

I can understand that, I said, not believing I was actually talking to Ric Flair. But Ric, I got all those stories from your book.

I know, he said. But, well, I didn’t actually show her the book before it came out.

Not to give anything away, but there’s a point in “The Wrestler” where Randy “The Ram” has a chance to straighten things out with someone he loves… and he blows it. It made me think of Ric Flair, publishing a book without showing it to his wife first.

The truth is that wrestling attracts people on the fringe — people who got kicked off the football team or spent some time in jail or never learned how to hold down a regular job. “The Wrestler” is matter-of-fact about how wrestlers get jacked up on steroids to build muscle and gulp down painkillers when those muscles break down. It’s not any different than the stories I’ve heard from people who worked in and around the business. Like a lot of things, the more you know about it, the harder it is to love.

Over the years, especially after my dad died, I didn’t watch wrestling as much but I followed certain wrestlers. One of them was a Canadian named Chris Benoit — a small but powerful guy who was great at making the wrestling ballet look like a real fight. He was so good that you could forget his absurd body — his neck twice the size it should be, his muscles way too big for his frame. He was taking in bad things and two years ago they came out. He killed his wife, their child, then himself. That just about put me off wrestling for good. Now I check in on a couple of websites but I hardly ever watch the shows. It’s too painful, knowing what’s real.

“The Wrestler” is a sad, great movie because it feels real. I know wrestling about as well as I know anything and the movie got everything right. Especially the broken-down old wrestler who can’t get through the day without hurting but can’t stay out of the ring. He’d rather die than give it up.

That’s the end of the story for “The Wrestler,” and for wrestling, and even for wrestling fans. We know the whole gruesome thing is not worth loving. But at some point, back before we knew better, we cut ourselves open, and it got in our blood.

Kiss the Boss

Did Bruce Springsteen, on the leadoff track from his new album, rip off… KISS?

You decide.

For a little more Springsteen news, check out my friend Liz Clarke, the biggest Springsteen fan I know — she is not happy about the Boss playing the Super Bowl. Bruce is one of my favorite musicians ever. I’ll be hitting Ticketmaster first thing Monday to get tickets to his show up here in April. But for 12 minutes at halftime of the Super Bowl, I’d rather see Gene Simmons spit blood.

The great Billy Powell

Sometimes your iPod knows things before you do. Last night I had it on shuffle for a couple of hours and it kept coming back to Lynyrd Skynyrd. Then I got home this afternoon and found out that Billy Powell died.

John Updike died yesterday. He was an amazing writer and deserved all the front-page obits. But when I look at the thing honestly I know that Billy Powell has meant more to my life than John Updike ever has.

If you think about Lynyrd Skynyrd at all, you probably don’t think about the piano player. They had Ronnie Van Zant out front and three guitars behind him. The band started out without a piano player; Powell was their roadie. The story goes that one night in Skynyrd’s early days, as they were setting up to play a high school prom, Powell sat down at the piano and played an intro to “Free Bird.” Van Zant heard it and put him in the band right there.

In our house, growing up, there was nothing but country music. When I was 10 I could have told you every one of Charley Pride’s hits but maybe only one or two of the Beatles’. Somewhere in there we went to visit one of my cousins. She must have been in her early 20s then — old enough to have her own apartment — and she smoked and wore cutoffs and had the first Skynyrd album on her stereo. I stared at those longhairs on the album cover and listened to the music and my life changed right there. I didn’t acquire great musical taste on the spot (some of my friends might say I never acquired it) but at that moment I knew there was a bigger world of music than I had ever imagined, dangerous and fun and beautiful and irresistible.

A lot of postmodern Southern boys are conflicted about Lynyrd Skynyrd. They used to hang a giant Confederate flag at the back of the stage, and they defended George Wallace, and they would no-show concerts or show up too strung out to play. That first album came out in 1973, and if you’ve read this far you probably know that Van Zant and two other band members died in a plane crash in 1977. Less than five good years. A new version with some of the old members (including Powell) formed in 1987, and still plays today, but to me that band doesn’t count.

I don’t know how to reconcile the flag and the drugs and all the other stuff with the beauty and power of the music. I’m not sure you’re even supposed to reconcile things when it comes to art. In the end you love what you love. All I know is that I love Lynyrd Skynyrd and I love to hear Billy Powell play.

You don’t even see him in this clip — the camera crew can’t seem to find him — but about halfway through it comes time for his solo and you sure enough hear him. Billy Powell versus three guitars turns out to be a fair fight. This, y’all, was one hell of a rock and roll band.