Dayton

Once in a while I get on a jag thinking about the old home town: Dayton, Ohio. If ever a place got collateralized, downsized, de-industrialized, pink-slipped, made redundant and just generally screwed I think Dayton is it. Dayton had the highest percentage of patents per head of any city in the country in 1900, I've been told. The Wright Brothers didn't come from there for nothing. In 2003, anniversary of the fabled first flight, I tried to explain to some tarheels--tactfully, I thought--what the Wrights did just do. However you describe it, it was to Dayton what tobacco was to North Carolina. It was everything. Whole basis of the economy.

I'm fine with "First in Flight." You can have it. I used to picture billboards at NC's borders with the face of Jesse Helms (back when), and a caption reading "From the State that Gave You Lung Cancer," but that's an aside. The Wrights were amazing. One example: when they realized that the available lift tables were useless they made their own apparatus, a wind tunnel, and figured it out. They also figured out that a propeller is a rotary wing. Lift and thrust. Different applications of the same principle. Their propellers are efficient even by modern standards. And they were the first to control an airplane, or even try, in three dimensions--three axis control. Everyone else was trying to fly Fiats. Good for them they didn't get it up. It would have ended poorly.

Anyway, they were great, and so was Dayton. But, you know, when Rove's Reich began its revolutionary driving down of all that is good and decent and productive Dayton and places like it were doomed. When you believe, as an article of faith, de facto, a priori, that whatever big business wants is "good for America," and big business wants nothing more than cheap labor, and cheap labor is plentiful in China and elsewhere, your jobs are toast. It goes back beyond Rove, really, but it culminates with these scoundrels. And it was probably somewhat reversible until his invasion of the job snatchers.

I haven't been back to Dayton since dad died, in 1989, and I don't have many ties there, but I do have a smart phone. I download apps and mess with them. So I download "Realtor.whatever" and look at houses in Chapel Hill for some reason. And then--I mean, how many ZIP's do you know?--I look in Dayton. Not good. My part of town is in foreclosure, pretty much. Great houses on the block for nothing. Siebenthaler's North Store, on their old family property, looks bad, and is chopped up into little commercial rental spaces. Man, it was beautiful in the 60's. I played there as a kid, un-permitted, and worked there once. Salem Mall is gone. And so on.

And I think about Dayton because of Bob Pollard, the greatest writer of rock songs ever. I would love his stuff anyway, I'm sure, but he's so deeply Dayton, down to the Converse on his feet, back when. The dirt, the vast energy, the ringing chords of industry, the sadness, the sadness, the sadness. Even when it works. The roar of jets, and the flak thrown up at the brave factory pilots by Rove's blood-sucking hooligans. Maybe I'm reading that last one in. When it doesn't work? He's there, I'm not. Got to be hard.

I think he had the same sports-driven intense boy friendships I had, for sure. Did the crazy stuff. Played ball day and night. I don't want to think about it. Some of the shit I did horrifies me, and I miss it so it aches. I may have played ball against Bob. Those loose summer league games when I pitched for Chaminade.

You hear about the banality of evil, the strange and unexpected ordinariness of it. Look at those Republicans. Pillsbury dough boys from hell. But the banality of genius? The Wrights were so normal. And Bob Pollard. Working class kid. Not what you'd expect, if you tried to reverse engineer the guy from his output. But, man, what songs. I've known people with such dexterity and physical coordination--my father was one--that they couldn't seem to do anything ungracefully. Pollard writes great songs while face-planting on Bud Lite, or so it seems. Pollard's opus has a kind of stunning, inevitable, aboriginal authenticity. And it's huge. Really, I'm in awe of the guy.

I collect paintings. I think I get art. My friend Marvin Saltzman--the real deal. And a normal guy, more or less. Cranky normal, sweet normal, caustic normal. And his paintings have great depth.  Pollard? No clue about the man, really. But the music is remarkable. Great depth. Layers. Poetry. Emotional range. It's all there. The music of the spheres. Cubes, maybe, for the creationist crowd. And it captures Dayton, for me, existentially. Somehow embodies it. Listen for yourself. Give him time. It was an acquired taste for me. Life's a collage, you know. We paste it all together best we can.

With the advent of the republican administration in Raleigh I had to stop with NPR. I was going to shoot somebody. Not really. But maybe somebody named Goolsby. The Republicrats must have gladiatorial training camps hidden somewhere in the mountains, among the militias. They're drones. They must smoke cigars in their drones' clubs. Jeeves cleans them up and looses them on the world. Berties with bludgeons. Woosters with wrecking balls.

Giving up on NPR was hard. I had to start to listen to music in the mornings instead, on weekdays, which seemed kind of decadent at first. But, whatever voice is guiding Robert Ellsworth Pollard, Jr, praise be to it. Bob has saved my ass for now. Thank you, Bob, and God bless you.