Tampa Calling

For reasons abstractly philosophic, pragmatically political and deeply personal, I’m feeling pretty anti-war these days. If you’re with me, here are my recommendations for a mostly contemporary anti-war playlist.

(If you can think of anything worth hearing that I’ve ommitted, let me know. I’m always hungry for new tunes.)

Rise Against, Hero of War: When I heard this simple and gripping song on 97X a few weeks ago, I thought I had mistakenly flipped to WMNF, Tampa Bay’s awesome community radio station. It is a miracle that a song like this is on mainstream commercial radio. It tells the tragic and all to typical story of a young soldier’s disillusionment.

Ani DiFranco, The Atom: This cut is one of the strongest from DiFranco’s latest release, Red Letter Year. Here’s what she has to sing about the Nobel Prize winning physicists who developed the atomic bomb: “I bet there were no windows or women in the room / when they applied themselves to the pure science of doom.” She certainly has a way of putting things into perspective, doesn’t she?

 Lexi Pierson, Misunderstood: For those of you that haven’t had the pleasure, Lexi is one of Tampa Bay’s local treasures and this song is a masterpiece. Order a copy of her self-titled album here and enjoy this clip of Lexi performing Misunderstood live in Clearwater:

(more…)

Bookmark to:

Coffee, like written language, is a vital and definitive element of human civilization. From the foxholes of Bastogne during WWII to the Starbucks that stood for seven years in China’s 587-year-old imperial palace, wherever there are people, there is coffee nearby.

According to legend, 9th Century Ethiopian shepherds were the first to observe coffee’s benevolent power. When their goats happened upon some wild coffee berries, they ate them and began to dance. No myth has ever resonated with me as powerfully as this one. Coffee makes my brain dance just like it did those Ethiopian goats. I drink a cup and my brain becomes a pulsating discotheque with millions of little neurons holding synapses and twirling around my cerebral cortex.

If you’re still reading, you’re probably wondering why I’m extolling coffee’s virtues. You may be thinking it’s because I’ve had too much today. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I dragged myself out of bed at five this morning to drive to Miami. On my way to 275-S, I swung by Dunkin’ Donuts for, of course, a cup of coffee. By the time I was over the Skyway, it was cool enough to sip. By the time I got to Naples, I’d killed it. Half-way across Alligator Alley, I felt like I needed to die. My skin was clammy, my back, head and hair ached and I could hardly keep my eyes open. That’s when it hit me: Decaf.

(more…)

Bookmark to:

Last night my sister and I shirked our familial responsibilities and boldly ventured out to forge our own, radical and new set of Christmas Eve traditions. After about 30 minutes of giggling and smug, self-congratulatory back-patting, we realized we couldn’t think of anything more edgy and transgressive to do than go to a Unitarian Universalist church service and then to the Bonefish Grill.

There is just something about this time of year that makes me not only tolerate mindless ritual, tradition and schmultz, but actually crave and appreciate it. Things I can’t even begin to indentify with on the other 363 days of the year resonate deeply and powerfully with me on Christmas Eve and Day.

In honor of this ineluctable spirit of unity, peace, love and togetherness, here is my Christmas gift/Solstice offering to you: Dar Williams’ holiday classic, The Christians and The Pagans.

Bookmark to:

I am posting this from the hell that is the Baltimore/Washington International airport at Christmas time. I cannot think of a worse time of year to be traveling. If the hordes of amateur travelers uninitiated in the mysteries of TSA procedures don’t get you, then the nauseatingly sweet stench of their Starbucks’ gingerbread lattes will. And just when you think you’ve made it - you’re at your gate with your black coffee and the stale Glazed Cake Munchkins you got at Dunkin Donuts the night before - the real onslaught begins: “Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock…” ad nauseum, ad infinitum.

In honor of the incessant seasonal serenade that is driving me swiftly to the edge of sanity, here’s a top 10 list of the Christmas songs I hate the least. (Let’s face it, none of us really like any of them.)

Just one more thing before I begin: this will be my last post for Tampa Calling. As soon as I’m finished, I’m going to hang myself with the strap from my carry-on bag.

10. White Christmas

I’m a Floridian which means I was raised on stories of how my forefathers fled the frigid north to avoid ever having one of these again. I derive a sort of sick pleasure knowing that I’ll be slathering on coconut-scented tanning oil and drinking margaritas this Christmas while the rest of Christendom shivers. (more…)

Bookmark to:

This may be old news amongst her more rabid devotees, but I just got an alert from Ticketmaster that Ani DiFranco is coming to the Tampa Theatre on March 20, 2009.

For those of you that haven’t experienced Ms. DiFranco live, you must!

She’s a cultural phenomenon and a brilliant lyricist and musician to boot (check out Tatangelo’s interview with DiFranco.) I wonder if she needs an opener…

Here’s a You Tube clip of Ani performing “Hypnotized,” one of my all time favorites:

(more…)

Bookmark to:

My memory of the event is not very clear. I showed up at the CL office in Tampa, ate a slice of pizza, listened to some Muay Thai boxers beat the shit out of what Stephen Hammill, CL’s online producer, assured me were anatomically correct mannequins and then it all goes blank. I think Joran Oppelt, CL’s Marketing and Promotions Director, may have slipped a roofie under the cheese of the pizza we shared. All I know is that the next day a link to this video was in my inbox:

Lorna performs \”Song for the Voiceless\” live on CL Sessions

There is no telling what else happened during these mysterious “CL Sessions.” I guess we’ll all just have to stay tuned to The Big Music Site to find out.

p.s. If you dig “Song for the Voiceless,” it is available on my latest album, Released. You can order it here.

Bookmark to:

In case you haven’t heard (and I don’t know how you would not have: the story has been everywhere from the Tampa Tribune to MSNBC to the Huffington Post), Impact Florida, an organization committed to attaining marriage equality for all Floridians, is planning a demonstration outside of Governor Charlie Crist’s wedding and reception on Friday, December 12. As the recently appointed leader and spokesperson for Impact Florida, over the past 48 hours I have received an inbox full of compliments, questions and requests for interviews. I have also received a small but not negligible amount of criticism. Here are two examples from comments left anonymously on the Saint Petersburg Times’ political blog, The Buzz:

“…you usually don’t get involved in this voting thing except when you and your buddies try and settle once and for all the question if who’s better; Donna Summer or Liza Minelli…”

“Let’s make a deal. Everyone can marry anything and as often as they want. Take off all of the discriminatory restrictions. A man can marry his pet sheep and a woman can marry her stud German shepard. A teacher can marry as many of her teenage students as she can squeeze in. Why just limit the fun to homos? Why not let mothers marry their sons and sisters marry their brothers?”

As you can see from these two gems, much of the criticism has been too ridiculous to warrant a response. Some of it, however, has been what true criticism is supposed to be: constructive, challenging and supported by evidence. It has come not from anonymous strangers, but from friends, peers and other respectable folks not too cowardly to join their name to their opinion. I would like to take a few moments to present and respond to these legitimate critiques of Impact Florida’s planned demonstration.

(more…)

Bookmark to:

I’ve been thinking about gravity. I guess that’s to be expected when the person you love more than anything, the heart beat you’ve tied all of your tomorrows to, gets her private pilot’s license as my partner did this past week.

Maybe I have the mind of a medieval peasant, but flying has always seemed vaguely blasphemous to me. Every time I board an airplane, I am haunted by some sort of inchoate guilt and a fear that I will not get away with it this time.

I’m not trying to defend my oddly theological attitude about the matter, but our language does indicate that this outlook might be a collective one. When a pilot flies or an athlete jumps some ungodly height or distance, we say they have “defied gravity.” Gravity is a force that reigns over us. It is a “law” in the most fascist of senses. There is no procedure for overturning or invalidating it. When we fly or jump, we don’t abolish the law of gravity; we merely defy it, the way an adolescent defies her parents only to find herself speedily exiled to the Siberia of her bedroom. “What goes up must come down,” we are fond of saying. Not even the onslaught of postmodernism (a philosophical force that, according to many, has obliterated God and reduced moral absolutes to mere preferences) has put a chink of equivocation in this cherished platitude. Gravity always wins.

(more…)

Bookmark to:

Since the dawn of man (or at least since they all moved down here from Indiana and Illinois), my family have been faithful participants in the St. Petersburg Times‘ Turkey Trot.  The Turkey Trot is a somewhat counter-intuitive Thanksgiving ritual: On the one day out of the year when all of our physical, mental and spiritual energy is supposed to be focused on eating, thousands of folks here in Tampa Bay flood the streets of Clearwater at 6:30am to run a 10K… or maybe jog a 5K…or, in the case of my family, lazily stroll a 1 mile route called “The Gobbler.”

In 30 years, three generations (it was four until my great grandpa passed away in ‘95 and it just might be four again this year because my brother and his wife had their first child) of Bracewells, Normans, Spears and Hunts have not missed a single Trot. We’ve Trotted with colds, flues, broken legs and cancer. My aunt Trots in her electric scooter and if she hits an impassable dirt patch in the road, my cousins and I lift her out. My best friend Billy Trotted on crutches his senior year of high school to impress my sister (his ex-girlfriend) who he hoped would take him back after such a display of strength and dedication. (It didn’t work.)

(more…)

Bookmark to:

When I give an interview, 9 times out of 10 I am asked the same litany of inane questions. The one I dread the most (even more than the completely irrelevant “How old are you?”) is this one: “Who are your biggest influences?” There are a lot of reasons I don’t like this question: It’s overly broad, it takes for granted that my “biggest influences” are “whos” rather than whats or whens and it assumes, quite dubiously, that whatever my influences are, I am consciously aware of them. These are all perfectly legitimate reasons for loathing this question, but they don’t tell the whole story.

The truth is I can’t stand being asked about my influences because, by general critical consensus, my influences are pretty lame. Take, for instance, my biggest influence, country music. I love it. And I’m not talking about the country that even hipsters like you CL readers can stomach. I’m talking about the uber twangy stuff that most people in my socio-cultural demographic dismiss as maudlin, cliché, trite and unforgivably corny; the songs about how the corn fed boys from my map dot can out work, out fight and out drink the soft handed sissies from your urban center; the songs with titles like “Where I Come From” and “Where the Green Grass Grows.”

Don’t get me wrong. Some of this music is hopelessly bad, but some of it kicks and spits on the door of greatness. I’m devoting this blog to separating the wheat from the chaff, the sheep from the goats and any other biblically tinged agricultural metaphor for good from any other biblically tinged agricultural metaphor for bad that you can think of. Here it is: The good, the bad and the country according to me.

(more…)

Bookmark to:

Have you ever been to a listening room? I’m not talking about a theatre where folks may come to listen but first they have to contend with uptight ushers, mediocre seats and expensive drinks. I’m not even talking about a coffeehouse where folks may come to listen but are hard pressed to do so over the gurgle of the cappuccino machine, the murmur of the pretensious yuppies who didn’t come to listen and the hiss of the cheap ass PA. I’m talking about a true listening room with immaculate acoustics, an intimate environment and an attentive audience. You’re probably thinking, “Where the hell do you think you are? Boston? This is Tampa Bay, sweet cakes. We ain’t got none of them high fallutin’ listenin’ rooms around here.”  Ummmm, yes we do…

Pro Star Sound Stage is a recording studio by day but by night it is by far one of the finest listening rooms in which I have ever had the privilege of performing. It’s cozy (it seats about 100 people), it’s quality (did I mention it was a fully functioning, professional recording studio?) and it’s owned and operated by two avid music lovers with a knack for spotting and supporting emerging singer/songwriters.

(more…)

Bookmark to:

This past Saturday I was the guerilla sound girl at St. Petersburg’s instantiation of the Join the Impact National Day of Action for GLBTQ Rights at Mirror Lake Park. If you were there, perhaps you saw me frantically running extension cords through the sanctuary of the Unitarian Universalist church across the street from the rally. (The City of St. Pete wouldn’t hook us up with power for the PA so the Unitarians picked up the slack). Or maybe you were one of the hundreds I inconvenienced by blocking off an entire street with my wimpy little PT Cruiser and my big freakin’ attitude. (If you were, I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to drive over my mic cables. I need those!)

Whether our paths crossed or not, if you were there, you witnessed quite a spectacle: Karen Doering, former senior counsel for the National Center for Lesbian Rights, kicked off the event with an impassioned, and by impassioned I mean I couldn’t keep her mic channel from redlining, enumeration of all the totally unfair aspects of Florida’s Amendment 2 and California’s Proposition 8.

The high point of the rally for me was a statement read by Yasmine Jones, a 19 year old African American lesbian who spoke of being raised on her grandmother’s stories of the civil rights movement of the 1960’s. She was taught and she truly believed that she was the heir of that legacy. November 4th, 2008 changed all of that. On that day, when most Americans were celebrating the election of our first black president, young Yasmine was watching anti-gay ballot initiatives all across the country undermine the equal citizenship that her Grandmother had struggled so hard to one day bequeath to her. (If a story like Yasmine’s doesn’t get you riled up, you should really start checking your pants pockets and digging through your sofa because you’ve lost your soul.)

(more…)