"Whatever Happened to Day 30?"

I already explained what happened to Day 27 of my 30 Days of Blogging project for the month of April, but yesterday Jeannie pointed out to me that Day 30 was also strangely absent. I did actually have an entry for Day 30 mentally sketched out in my head, but on the evening of Day 30 I came home to write it and Comcast no longer felt like providing internet service. This has been happening fairly often lately, with Comcast's only explanation being, "Oh... unplug your modem for ten seconds so that it resets, and that should solve the problem." When I have to do that four times in an hour, because the modem comes back on and then immediately goes back out again, I just give up and do something else.

Anyway, the topic for Day 30 of 30 Days of Blogging was:

"American Idiot": The Musical

Green Day released the album American Idiot in 2004, and I consider it to be one of the best pieces of musical art to come out of the "W" Bush presidency. Whether or not you agree with it, the album is still emotionally resonant almost ten years later, with the anger, disillusionment, powerlessness, and outrage of liberal Americans still palpable when you listen to it. It certainly holds up better than Toby Keith's Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue, which seems to sum up the worst parts of American ignorance, bullying, and jingoistic enthnocentrism, or the open, shamelessly grasping artificial sentimentality that drips from every word of Alan Jackson's Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning). The feelings in "American Idiot" have at least been validated over the intervening almost-decade: the American people were lied to, repeatedly, and railroaded into a senseless war over imaginary weapons of mass destruction to bring democracy to a people that don't want the kind we have to offer, and they have a right to be angry about it.

These are the themes of the musical, too, which uses the music of the album and the weaker (but still good) followup album, 21st Century Breakdown to tell the story of three friends in post-9/11 America and the roads that life takes them down. My parents bought me a ticket for Christmas to see the touring version of the show downtown at the Tennessee Theatre:



and it was fantastic.

At the end, when the main character sings "Whatsername" about the woman he loved and lost through drug addiction and domestic abuse, I cried a little bit. I've always liked that song, but it touched me in a whole new way when I had a story to go with it, and it's not just some mythic story or a Hollywood movie: it's the story of us. Sure, I never moved to the big city and got hooked on drugs, but we all have friends that we drifted away from, and some of us are the friend who was left behind in the hometown while everyone else went out into the world. I have friends who joined the army and went away to the war, and friends who came back damaged and lost because of it. I enjoyed the show so much that I wished I had a ticket for the second night, too, just to see what I missed after being overwhelmed by it the first time.

On top of how good that part of the night was, I also took a short stroll down the alley on the back of Market Square between Wall Avenue and Union Avenue, and was delighted to see that almost all of the graffiti has been painted over since the last time I was there, and that artists have added new things:







(that one was a little unexpected, as I rarely see graffiti depicting non-Christian religions around Knoxville besides the ones for the Church of the Sub Genious:



but, you know, hey there Baphomet, I guess someone likes you)



















It was like my own little quiet art gallery tour, if the gallery smelled vaguely like sewage. I especially liked this painting:



or is it a metapainting, since it's a graffiti painting of a wall with graffiti on it?

Either way, walking through the alley on my way to the show made the evening that much better.

Until I got home and the internet was dead.

Achievement

Like most people, I use the bathroom during the day.

Usually I do after lunch, but sometimes before. My schedule isn't really the important point here, though. Instead, I'm writing this to salute someone's achievement, to fling it out into cyberspace where it may or may not live forever, a lasting reminder to echo down the ages.

Someone is Ozymandias, King of kings, and wishes that you would look on his works, ye Mighty, and despair.



Not that Ozymandias. I was referencing the poem by Shelley, in response to the towering achievement that I witnessed today in the bathroom.

See, a few times a semester some poor custodian who makes minimum wage working all night after the offices have closed for the day spends hours scrubbing down the stalls in the men's rooms on my floor at work, removing all record of who's gay, who I should call for a good time, and what other names I can call the police, the president, rival athletic teams and schools, and the people who work at various offices around campus.

That time must have been fairly recent, because I noticed this inside the stall yesterday:



Congratulations, nameless Sharpee user.

I hope your accomplishment fills you with pride.

I hear they also have one in Pennsylvania

In comic books, Bizarro is a twisted version of Superman, an imperfect duplicate who wants to be the same but ends up being different. His planet, Bizarro World, is square while Earth is round, he causes disasters instead of saving people from them, the S on his shirt is backwards (but you usually can't see it because unlike the humble Superman Bizarro wears a homemade sign proclaiming himself to be #1), he is vulnerable to blue kryptonite instead of green, and so on.



Bizarro stories always annoyed me when I was little, but the Superman animated series gave me a better appreciation for him. In his send-off episode, the last time we see him on that show, he frees an animal from a zoo with the comment, "Why am you locked up? Me bet it am for something you not do," and I suddenly understood, and felt bad. At heart, Bizarro means well. He wants to be good. He just doesn't know how, and his essential nature fights against it. He wants to be Superman, but he'll always just be an imperfect duplicate.

I was thinking about Bizarro last week because I learned, from a commuter request form, that just down the road from me there is a Bizarro village of Philadelphia. I've mentioned before that my hometown is Philadelphia, NY, a small village that sits on Route 11, so I was surprised to learn that there's a Philadelphia, TN, and it also sits on Route 11. It's Philly, but not Philly! It's, as I said, Bizarro Philly, and I immediately wanted to go see it.

(Before anyone argues that our Philly is the Bizarro Philly, I'll point out that ours was founded first. Sorry, Bizarro Philly.)

I didn't know if there actually would be anything to see there, but Bryan offered to drive, so off we went on Saturday morning. It turns out that Bizarro Philly really is like our Philly, but different in small, odd ways.

1) We both have a closed gas station on Route 11. At home, ours is the Agway. In Bizarro Philly, I'm not sure what it is, because the sign is gone:



The whole building is gone, actually, but they left some lovely ruins behind:





2) Nothing important happened in our town, ever. Bizarro Philly, on the other hand, was the sight of the apparently famous Battle of Philadelphia:



According to the plaque next to the Civil War Trail sign:



the Battle of Philadelphia was fought a short distance away on Federal Hill:



It was the first Union defeat in East Tennessee, and allowed the Confederacy to capture a number of guns and supply wagons. Bizarro Philly is historically important, while our Philly has contributed nothing important to the historical record.

They sometimes claim to have invented cream cheese, but this is a lie.

3) Our town has a lot of churches. Bizarro Philly also has a lot of churches:





Is it just me, or does the "including you" come out sounding a lot less welcoming than it should?

The historical plaque was on the lawn of another church, and there was a non-photogenic Baptist church past the Presbyterian Church. We didn't stop because we were trying to find this church:



I have no idea what a cowboy church is. Bryan and I tried to follow the signs to find it, with a slight caution from me: "If we pull up and it looks like snake handlers or 'Children of the Corn', just drive away. I'll try to take a picture without getting out of the car," but we must have missed a turn or something because we just ended up doubled back to a street we'd already come down.

4) Regular Philly sometimes has graffiti problems:



So does Bizarro Philly:



5) Regular Philly is smack in the middle of dairy country. Bizarro Philly also has a dairy:



Their sign said that the cheese shop was open, so we went in, and there was so much cheese:



Case upon case of cheese, and the whole back of the store is glass windows into the cheese processing area, so you can see the presses and vats and drying areas. Even better, when I starting talking to the lady at the counter, whose husband owns the farm, I was explaining that I was from dairy country in upstate New York and she explained that her husband was, too! He's from Cortland, the town where I went to school for my undergrad. We started trading New York towns, and I went on to explain that the whole reason we were in Bizarro Philly was that my parents live in Philadelphia, New York.

"There's a Philadelphia in New York?" she exclaimed, eyes wide. "I never knew that!"

She probably thinks ours is the Bizarro Philly.

My Weekend in Memphis (Part 2)

Saturday morning, we woke up early so that we could get started on our day, and boy did we have a day! First we had to drop Jeannie's kid off with her sister, and while we were over in that part of town Jeannie drove me past the locally famous Pink Palace:



The Pink Palace was orignally built as a mansion by the founder of Piggly Wiggly stores, and after a long series of financial setbacks ended up in possession of the city, who made it a museum. That's what the sign says, anyway:



I saw it on the web when I was trying to figure out where I wanted to go, and I think that they did some retinting or photoshopping or something on the website, because it looked a lot pinker online. It might have been more pink up close, but we didn't have time to get up close because we had a goal:



Graceland welcomed us with open arms. Actually, maybe with an open hand out more than open arms since the first thing we had to do was pay ten dollars to park there. That was just a drop in the bucket compared to the tours, though. To this day I will always wonder what was on the sixty-four dollar VIP tour, but I'll never know because we took the (comparatively) cheap thirty dollar one.

Our tour did come with some attractive headphones and radio equipment, though:





Only one of Jeannie's headphones worked. When she tried to report this at the end of the tour as we handed them back over, the tour guide response was, "Uh huh," followed by hanging it back up on the rack with all the others. This was the general attitude of all of the Graceland staff, actually, which was kind of sad. Since we talk about customer service a lot at work, Jeannie and I both noticed that the Graceland staff is universally surly, unhappy, and untintentionally hilarious. At one point, when we were in the basement, the tour guide at the bottom of the stairs was yelling up the stairs to the foyer guide about how her Friday not had gone and how she couldn't believe it was only ten in the morning and they had to be there the whole rest of the damn day just standing around and watching people.

They don't really have anything else to do because the tour headphones do all the talking. As we approached the house:



my headphones explained that Elvis purchased Graceland from someone and kept the name because he liked it so much, but I have to admit right now that I was only half paying attention because the headphones were making my ears hot. We had to shut it off for a moment before entering, so that one of the tour guides could yell at us:



"There is no flash photography, because it will act like sunlight and fade the artifacts. Myself or any of the staff will be happy to help you turn off your flash if you don't know how."

Really? Because the impression that I got was more that they'd be happy to punch us in the gut and then shove our cameras up our asses, but your opinion may vary. Anyway, fully bullied into submission, we proceeded into the house, which is smaller than it seemed like it should be but perfectly preserved:





I know that parts of those rooms are a little dated, but they'd also look good in most homes today. Minus the stained glass in the living room, both rooms seemed surprisingly minimal and subdued, but all of the crazy over the top decor that was missing from them was piled up in spades by the time we got to the dining room.

Before that, though, there was the staircase, where I took off my headphones and never put them back on again:



The tour narration includes a generic narrator, Priscilla Presley, radio and television clips, some music, and Lisa Marie, and that's what killed the tour for me. While I said yesterday that I have no particular feelings toward Elvis, I hate Lisa Marie because she married Nicholas Cage and convinced him to sell off his comic book collection.

The woman is a monster.

As we were looking up the stairs, Lisa Marie explained, "My dad used to make guests wait... by the door... and then he'd come down the stairs... with all his jewelry... and he'd be jingling... and it was just awesome," and that was it for me. The headphones came off and I never put them back on.

And then there was the dining room:



Holy gold-veined coke mirror, Batman! The worst part, which I didn't take a picture of, was that the walls on one side of the room were also covered with gold-veined mirrors that matched the tabletop. It was overdone, bordering on vulgar, and this is the real tragedy of Graceland and how it distorts Elvis: Elvis died before he got to redecorate. All of the rooms, even the Jungle Room:



were hot and trendy when they were designed. If MTV and "Cribs" had existed back then (or still existed today; wow, I'm old) they would have been all over this, and kids all over America would be trying to figure out how to copy the TV room:



or the bar:



or the pool room:



They might not have copied that spooky monkey in the TV room, because really, what the hell is up with that thing?



Does that eat souls?

But anyway, my point was that other people at the time who had vinyl sofas and tapestry fabrics on their ceilings got to graduate to fake mission furniture and wood paneled dining rooms, while Elvis had the tragic misfortune of dying and having his house preserved as a shrine, so now everybody remembers him as this guy with weird outlandish taste when it really only looks horrible by modern standards.

Once you get out of the house, the rest of the tour is kind of fun, if a little heavy on rules.







I love that they have Elvis' signature on the corner of each admonishment, as if it's not the Graceland staff but instead is Elvis Presley himself who wants you to stay off the grass or ignore the horses. Do they think that someone with a handful of change is going to think, "No, wait, Elvis wouldn't want me to throw these in the pool" and instead spend them in one of the many gift shops? It wouldn't work on me, anyway, because even though I didn't throw any money in the fountains I was too filled with rage to buy anything at the gift shops:



There's a name between Joe and Joey, Graceland marketers. A very popular name which belongs to thousands of people across the world.

Before I got to get mad at that, though, there were a lot of awards and costumes to walk through:







This one, a television that RCA awarded to Elvis:



was particularly awesome to me because we had a big, huge television like this when I was very small, except the speakers on the sides of ours were red velvet instead of whatever that gold is.

While we were finishing this part of the tour, though, something nagged at the back of my mind: In the same way that the house is locked in time, so is Elvis. As far as Graceland is concerned, old fat Elvis doesn't exist. Instead, there is only the ideal:



Even the costumes from the fat Elvis period are cut to thin Elvis size:



which is especially jarring when you see the random concert footage near them:



As impressive as Elvis' achievements are:



it seems disingenuous that the narrative that Graceland chooses to tell is that Elvis went from young and hot straight to dead:



I'm not saying they need a display of pill bottles or a photo of the fatal bathroom, but other things happened to Elvis between his movie heyday and his death, and there are lessons to be learned from that.

Graceland isn't about lessons, though, or even really about Elvis. It's about making money, whether it's from the parking fee or the tour or the vaguely asiatic Pez dispensers:



or the Graceland Christmas ornaments:



or the plastic guitars filled with popcorn:



or the peanut butter and banana sandwich recipe potholders:



"A whole stick of butter for one sandwich?"

"That's why Elvis is dead, Jeannie."

What I'm trying to say, in the end, is that Graceland has been made into a place with no soul. Elvis the artist and person has been transformed entirely into Elvis the commodity. This could just as easily have been a tour of Roxy Carmichael's house. The only thing we saw during the entire experience with any sense of meaning were the signatures left by fans along the outside walls around the estate:







That last one is my favorite.