One Man’s Opinion

According to BoingBoing, UK has announced that it’s airplane ban on liquids will be permanent. This strikes me as an excellent idea, but it leads me to question why we continue to allow both humans (did you know that every hijacking in history has involved at least one of these?) and solids (the 9/11 hijackers, for instance, used solids to threaten the passengers and crews of their planes, successfully gaining control of the airplanes). If it makes sense to ban liquids as a class, doesn’t it also make sense to ban humans and solids from airflight as well? I guarantee, you do this and we’ll have 100% safe air traffic.

Going through some files on my hard drive, I came across this biography of the Blue Chieftains, a sadly defunct — but forever great in the hearts of its fans — New York City bar band from the early ’90s. It was written as a writing sample for a job I didn’t get, and so has been gathering e-dust for several years. On the off-chance that someone remembers the Blue Chieftains, here’s my take on the World’s Greatest Bar Band.

During the early 1990’s, the Lower East Side was home to a burgeoning country music scene, one that reached back past the commercial panderings of the current wave of “hat music” (Billy Ray Cyrus, Travis Tritt, Hank Jr., and Garth Brooks) to country’s roots: Hank Williams, Sr., Patsy Cline, Jimmie Rodgers, and their outlaw offspring. Leading the charge from their weekly Sunday night spot at the Continental Divide were The Blue Chieftains, called by some “the greatest bar band of all time”. With sets ranging from sad-sack country standards to Dylanesque folk-rock to ’70s proto-punk and dinosaur rock — often in the same tune — the Blue Chieftains made country music that bikers, East Village punks, poets, and broken-hearted lovers could dance to. In doing so, they paved the way for the then-embryonic alt-country movement to grow and mature.

The Blue Chieftains were Indiana ex-patriate Tim Carroll on guitar, avante-everything guitarist Steve Antonakis (Kiwi Lip Bomb, 5 Chinese Brothers), bassist Scott Yoder (World Famous Blue Jays, Kevin Salem, Tim Carroll solo), and drummer Mark Horn (Derailers, Lonesome Bob, Tim Carroll solo). Carroll wrote and sang most of the original songs, delivered with his honest Midwestern country twang, though vocal duties were shared among the band and, occasionally, among audience members. Supplementing their original work with songs by the Sex Pistols, Duke Ellington, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, New York Dolls, Hank Williams Sr., George Jones, Velvet Underground, and Cab Calloway, and with stage antics like pouring Jagermeister into the open mouths of bar patrons, the Blue Chieftains knew how to keep a crowd on its feet and happy.

The Blue Chieftains broke up in 1993, after 6 years of gigging around New York (and a brief stint in Switzerland), leaving only a couple of singles on Diesel Only records (available on Vol. 1 and 2 of their “Rig Rock Juke Box” series) to remember them by. Tim Carroll moved down to Nashville to try his hand as a songwriter — with songs covered by Kate Jacobs, Asleep at the Wheel, Robert Shafer, Robbie Fulks, and John Prine, featured tracks on two movie soundtracks, and three critically-acclaimed solo albums, he seems to be succeeding. In 1995, the band reunited at the now-defunct Coney Island High in New York for one last show, portions of which were recorded and released as the live album …That’s All in 2002.

MP3: I Think Hank Woulda Done it This Way (2.1 MB)

This is the new and dis-improved One Man’s Opinion. After struggling with security issues and heavy server usage which brought the site down several times and still brings some vaguely unfriendly notices from my webhosts, I’ve moved the site to WordPress, cleared out the trackbacks and most of the spam comments (and I hope not, but maybe a few legitimate ones), and set up shop. The Great MaxiPointServers Fiasco of 2005 (don’t use MaxiPointServers!) resulted in the loss of an unknown number of posts — I got what I could from Google’s cache and my own outdated backups. It also caused a loss of motivation in me — a little piece of blogging me died that day. Since the other little pieces of blogging me are at work at Savage Minds, the anthropology blog, and ThinkNaughty, my research blog, One Man’s Opinion, my random thoughts blog, has suffered. I’m not sure what I’ll do with it, but at least it’s here as an archive of past Opinions.

Ah, man, that’s life — sometimes blogs die. And sometimes they enter a persistive vegetative state — Bill Frist, where are you when I need you?!?!?!?

One Man’s Opinion is back — for now.

Beginning in October, I started taking on about 1 gigabite of server traffic a day, mostly from referrer spam. My first host shut down the site when it began destabilizing their servers, and to add insult to inury, deleted my files. I’d tell you to stay away from them, but it looks like they just got taken over. Anyway, don’t use MaxiPointServers, and if you see their IT guy around the neighborhood, kick him in the shins. Hard.

I transferred the site to a new host, hoping that the couple weeks downtime would have discouraged the baddies. It didn’t. 5 days later I maxed out my month’s allotment of bandwidth. I took the site down. I tried again in December. 6 days later…

So here I am again. I’ve got a monster of a .htaccess file between myself and the baddies, and I’ve set the site up so that the old domain refers to my CV site. I’ve tried to set it up so that old links will redirect to the new site, but it doesn’t seem to be working, and I can’t remember how all the old URLs were configured so I couldn’t redirect them all anyway. And since the old webhost deleted files from the several months when, unbeknownst to me, my hard disk was failing so I was backing up corrupt data, I lost a lot of posts. And most of the comments. I’ve tried to reconstruct as much as I could from Google’s cache, but… I lost some opinions.

I’ll be keeping an eye on traffic the next few days; hopefully, the precautions I’ve taken will let me keep this site online. Since I couldn’t use this site, I’ve started a new site called ThinkNaughty, exclusively dedicated to material relating to research on sex and gender in the US, for a project I want to start when I clear my plate of my existing work. And I’m still busy at Savage Minds, the anthropology blog. For the most part, this site will be an archive of past work, while I focus myself on more academic pursuits — but who knows? I may find myself needing an outlet for thoughts that don’t have a place at the other two sites.