Categories
Uncategorized

Greatest Hits of 2013

What follows, in no particular order, is my best work from the past year. But first, some thank-yous:

Larry Burke at Sports on Earth, for letting me explore. Elizabeth Hudson at Our State, for good ideas and enthusiasm. Monte Burke at Forbes, for reaching out. Paige Williams at Nieman Storyboard, for shining a light. Roland Wilkerson and Gary Schwab at the Charlotte Observer, for saving me a guest room. Jena Janovy and Jay Lovinger at ESPN, for opening the door.

Thank you, also, to all of you who read my stories and passed along kind and thoughtful words. Thanks to family and friends. And thanks most of all to Alix Felsing, not only the love of my life but a damn good coach, in writing and everything else.

Tim Duncan.

Even when athletes seek out the camera and are in our faces all the time, it’s hard to say we know them. Sometimes beneath the surface is just more surface. But we really don’t know Tim Duncan. He keeps his life off the court private. He turns down most endorsements. He declines soul-searching interviews. The vast majority of what we know about him, we know from watching him play basketball. More than any other modern athlete, Tim Duncan is what he does.

Thomas Davis.

No NFL player — no pro athlete of any kind — had come back from three ACL tears on the same knee. There was no point in thinking about it.

Then he thought about it.

He thought about all he had gone through that everyone knew about. He thought about the one thing almost nobody knew about.

The next morning, he showed up at Panthers practice. And he got ready to start over again.

The queens of women’s bowling.

In an hour or so, here in Tennessee, they will demolish Arkansas State 4 games to 1 to win the Music City Classic. Just after the trophy ceremony, UMES bowler Megan Buja smiles and touches her nose. The other players frantically do the same. It turns out this is like calling shotgun in reverse. Last one to touch her nose has to pack the crystal bowling pin in her luggage. Coach Frahm loses.

Jason Isbell and a fat man’s walk.

I’ve gone to bed a thousand times – ten thousand times – believing I would start getting in shape the next morning. Sometimes I hang in there for a while. I’ve always backslid. There are a lot of reasons. Here’s the one that makes me sound a little crazy.

I worry that when I lose all this weight, I’ll also lose some essential part of myself. I worry about the good parts going with the bad parts.

The “I Quit” match.

Most people who know wrestling consider it one of the best matches of all time. It wasn’t the sweaty ballet you normally see in a great wrestling match. There were no graceful moves or daring stunts. There was just the dark drama of two guys full of hate beating the hell out of each other. The I Quit match is great because, after a while, it felt real.

The World Series of Poker.

“You know what?” George says, dealing the cards, never looking up. “I had that same situation one time. Except it wasn’t for 50 bucks like you guys are playing for. It was for $600,000.”

Playing Augusta National.

My first drive at Augusta National went maybe 200 yards into the right rough. It did not bonk off the pro shop, hit a tree, kill a squirrel or get lost in the woods. This is how I define a successful golf shot.

The Braves’ move to the suburbs.

In Atlanta, many people define their lives by the Perimeter, the I-285 loop that circles the city. You hear people talk about Inside the Perimeter or Outside the Perimeter as separate countries. Part of that is racial, but it’s also cultural and philosophical and a bunch of other -al words. Outside the Perimeter is a sea of Home Depots and brick houses with bonus rooms. Inside the Perimeter is where you find organic Thai food and you might have more than the average number of piercings. I know people Outside the Perimeter who never go Inside the Perimeter except for sports. Now the Braves are moving Outside the Perimeter. That’s a huge cultural shift.

“El Paso” and “Breaking Bad.”

So it turns out the narrator is sort of a bad guy, right? He just murdered another man in a jealous rage. But by now, because of his love for Felina, you care about him even if you hate what he’s done. Empathy for your subject is essential. Your main characters don’t have to be heroes. But you have to see the humanity in them somewhere. Sound familiar, Walter White fans?

Everything you need to know about storytelling in five minutes.

That’s what makes stories matter: when you read or watch or hear a story about a total stranger, in a completely different world, and you recognize that story as your own.

 

Categories
Uncategorized

St. Paul and the Broken Bones

Today I’m going to do you a favor. I’m going to tell you about a band that people all over the country are going to be talking about in a few months. This is not quite a “I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen” moment*. But maybe it is. The other night I saw the best live show I’ve seen at a club in 30 years. And I heard one of the greatest lead singers I will ever hear.

St. Paul and the Broken Bones are a soul band out of Alabama. They’ve been together only a year or so — they have just 38 minutes of original material. When they walked out on stage Halloween night at the Chop Shop, here in Charlotte, I had seen some YouTube videos, so I had an idea what was coming. My buddy Greg did not. Paul Janeway, the singer, grabbed the mike and hit his first note. Greg turned to me, and his eyebrows had flown halfway up his forehead.

“FUCK,” he said.

Janeway used to be a bank teller, and he looks like … a bank teller. For the Charlotte show he wore a charcoal suit with a bow tie and a pocket square. But he grew up on gospel in a Pentecostal church, where the music director had him sing backup instead of lead. Somewhere in Alabama there’s a Pentecostal music director who ought to be fired. That gospel music was still in his head when Janeway discovered the rough voices of rock and soul — Tom Waits and Nick Cave in one ear, Otis Redding and James Carr in the other.

This is what came out.

The videos don’t come close to what it’s like to see that band play live, for an hour and a half, in a hot room. By the end Janeway was toweling off after every song and the horn players were chugging beers and out in the crowd we were soaked through with sweat. I’ve been to hundreds of club shows. The last band that made me feel like St. Paul made me feel was Jason and the Scorchers back at the 40 Watt in Athens in the ’80s. The two bands play completely different music — Jason has this revved-up Hank Williams cowpunk thing going. But both bands play like they’re going for it all. St. Paul and the Broken Bones, on a Thursday night in front of a couple hundred people, acted like it was the last show they’d ever get to play.

In the middle of the set they played Otis Redding’s “Otis Blue” album in its entirety. (This is the kind of thing you do when you have 38 minutes of originals.) Otis is Janeway’s most obvious influence, and the band is set up like the classic Stax touring band — guitar, drums, bass, keys and two horns. At this point I ought to acknowledge that this soul band playing an entire Otis Redding record is made up of white guys. That’s not just something to gloss over. Anybody who tells you they don’t see color, that race means nothing, is lying to you. But music, more than anywhere else, is the place where race and culture mix and cross and blend until sometimes you can’t tell what belongs to who, which is good. It’s been that way from DeFord Bailey to Hendrix to the Muscle Shoals Swampers to Prince taking ownership of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” (Prince owns EVERYTHING.)

The point is, I’m always aware that St. Paul is a band of white guys playing soul music. I’m also aware that they are fantastic at it.

This is from the Charlotte show.

You might recognize the trademark James Brown fall-to-the-knees move. That scream comes from James, too. It’s clear that Janeway has watched the great soul singers as well as listening to them. But he does what all the greats do: he steals like an artist. He takes from all the things he loves and makes something of his own.

Maybe you won’t love St. Paul and the Broken Bones as much as I do — it would be hard for you to love them more, because I’m about ready to sell the house and follow them around the country. But part of that is personal. I grew up Southern Baptist, and I sang all those old hymns that were washed in the blood, and then I discovered all those old soul singers who sang about worldly things over music that was rooted in the church. Soul music speaks to me more than any other. It still hurts that I never got to see Sam and Dave in their prime. It hurts even more that I can’t sing like Al Green. What I guess I’m saying is, in a way St. Paul and the Broken Bones is the band I always wanted to be in, and Paul Janeway is the guy I always wanted to be.

The next-to-last song they played was “Land of 1000 Dances,” written by New Orleans R&B artist Chris Kenner, made a hit by a Mexican-American group called Cannibal and the Headhunters, made a hit again by Wilson Pickett, turned inside out by punk singer Patti Smith. The last song they played was “Try a Little Tenderness,” a big-band standard way back in the ’30s, covered by everyone from Sinatra to Three Dog Night, but made famous as one of Otis Redding’s biggest hits and his show-closer. Janeway kept walking off stage like he was done, but then running back on to shout a few more bars; it’s a move straight from Otis, and Otis lifted it from James Brown, and JB probably lifted it from some Pentecostal preacher, or maybe from Gorgeous George. If you happened to know the history of the last two songs St. Paul played, all the interracial and intercultural and intergenerational and interdenominational blurred lines that led to this white band from Alabama playing soul music that felt real and authentic, it might have made you smile a little wider. But you didn’t need to know any of that to sweat and holler and press together as the clock strolled past midnight on Halloween. You felt it in the music. You’d never forget how the music felt.

So today I evangelize for St. Paul and the Broken Bones. Go watch the YouTubes, and buy the songs, and God help you go see them play if they’re anywhere near you. They have a full-length record coming out in February. Six months from now they’ll be famous, and you’ll be cool because you knew them back when. But it won’t matter so much that you got to be cool. What will matter is, you got to hear the music.

*UPDATE: Reader Extraordinare Blu points out that Rosanne Cash, as usual, is way ahead of the curve. This is from June:

Now I feel even better.

 

Categories
Uncategorized

100 words on… that Red Sox game

The iconic image of that fantastic game in Boston last night will be the cop’s arms and Torii Hunter’s legs in perfect symmetry after David Ortiz’s game-tying grand slam:

Image(photo by Stan Grossfeld/Boston Globe)

But the image that will stick with me is from one inning later, when Jarrod Saltalamacchia drove in the winning run. Click and watch as he rounds first:

redsox

There are lots of reasons to love sports, and lots of reasons some of us still wish we had been professional athletes. Here’s one: When was the last time your buddies chased you down the street in joy?

 

 

 

Categories
Uncategorized

Catching up

Now that I’m writing for several different places, it’s a little harder to keep up with my stuff (if you’re so inclined). So here’s a quick update on what I’m doing these days:

— My newest gig is sportsblogging for Forbes.com. I’ve written two pieces already, one on Matt Flynn’s $14.5 million game and the other on the parallels between Jadeveon Clowney and Miley Cyrus (it’ll make sense when you read it, honest). So I’ll be in that space once or twice a week at least. Here’s my Forbes home page.

— I’ve got two pieces in the can and two more assigned for Our State magazine, where I’ve been writing for a couple of years. My next piece for them is in the November issue, which should be out any day now.

— I write about writing over at Nieman Storyboard — I’ve got a regular feature called Liner Notes where I look at well-written songs for clues to help us all be better writers. A new one of those  should be running soon. The Storyboard folks also did a nice feature on my work recently, and I’ve got a few slots in their Big Book of Narrative roundup, which is really worth your time.

There’s plenty of other stuff going on … I’ve got a piece coming soon in the N.C. State alumni magazine, plus several other projects at one stage or another. I’m almost done with a book proposal that I’ll talk about more later if it bears fruit. Plus I’m sending out thoughts and links on Twitter just about every day, and that stuff cross-posts to my Facebook page. As Doug Miller, one of the great editors at the Observer, likes to say: Clackety-clack.

 

Categories
Uncategorized

A little makeover

I’ve never been quite satisfied with how this blog looks, so I’m playing with the design again — this WordPress theme is called Newsworthy. If you’ve seen another theme you like, or another site you think looks really good, mention it in the comments. I’m going to fix up my main site at some point, too — starting with the photo, which is from my pre-beard days (at least five years ago). Would love any thoughts on what you might like to see there.

While you’re here: Nieman Storyboard, part of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, is featuring my work today (I was a Nieman fellow in 2008-09) as part of the run-up to the foundation’s 75th anniversary next week. I feel like Muggsy Bogues in a room of 7-footers. But I’m thrilled to be in the room.

Categories
Uncategorized

The Four Questions

A couple of weeks ago, up in New York, I met the great editing guru Jay Lovinger. At dinner I told him the four questions I use in my writing workshops to help people figure out what to write about. “I’m stealing those questions,” Jay said. So I figured everybody else might as well steal them, too.

Here’s how this works. Take a sheet of paper and divide it into fourths — columns, rows, quadrants, whatever you want. Then take a few minutes to answer each question. Your answers will be in the form of lists. You don’t have to show your answers to anyone else. So be honest.

Here are the questions, with a bit of instruction for each one:

1. What do you know about?

(List everything you think you know more about than the average person. It can be tiny and specific — the block where you live — or big and abstract — grief, or love, or whatever. Don’t be modest. Set your ego free.)

2. What do you care about?

(List your passions … again, they should be small and large and everything in between. Don’t be ashamed of what you care about. I care about professional wrestling. Put it out there.)

3. What are you curious about?

(Things you want to learn — Spanish? — and things you already know about but have an insatiable desire to know more.)

4. What scares you?

(All your fears and worries … everything from spiders to dying alone.)

Now, look at your lists. These are the topics you ought to be writing about. I don’t mean you have to write about your own experiences, though it’s fine if you do. What I mean is, these are the topics that populate your mind and your heart. They’re the things that matter to you.

Even if you’re writing about another person in a different situation, these topics will sneak in as subtext. This is natural, because you are human, and even if you’re writing about strangers, you are there with them in the words.

If you can make connections between things on two or three of those lists, that’s your most fertile ground. Those connections are where writers make careers.

Keep that sheet handy when you’re stuck. Update it every year or so, maybe on your birthday. It’s useful, I think, as a way to look at your writing. And by now you’ve already figured that it’s also useful as a way to look at your life.