This is Kent, aka Ian's Eldest Sib, AKA Chaircrusher, AKA Le broyeur des chaises, aka Know-it-all Mannerism (an anagram for my full name). Unlike Ian, I didn't ever leave Iowa. I am a proud resident of flyover country. I love New York, Paris, Utrecht, Chicago, Detroit, etc, but for a variety of reasons, I moved 30 miles away from Cedar Rapids, where the infamous Williams' spent the most time, and stayed. The rest of the family is all over the damn place now.
Why am I telling you this? Because while it can be exciting to live at the center of things -- say, NYC, Berlin, London, etc -- it isn't how most people live in the United States. From my perspective, big cities are great to visit, but they're expensive, noisy and a hassle to get around. I can live here on a third of what it would cost to live in NYC. It's a good thing, too because salaries are much lower here.
We're no more rubes than people on the coast. We get CNN and HBO & whatnot. Where I live, Iowa City, is actually pretty happening, even for a University town. Allen Ginsberg said Iowa City was the only town between the coasts he liked. We're the gay capital of Iowa. At the same time, I can drive for a half hour, skirt a cornfield and go wading in the Iowa River someplace where no human mark is visible on the land around me. Most of Iowa is empty of people. It's corn fields and hardwood forests, criss crossed with dirt roads. The longer I live here, and really look at what is around me the more exotic it seems. There's pavement and video stores and streetlights and people all over the world. Only in the midwest can you drive around getting lost and end up at an abandoned farm house, surrounded by twelve foot high wild hemp plants. When you want to go home, you do it by dead reckoning -- drive kinda the right direction until you hit a main road.
People make their own fun here, especially music. Every town of more than a couple thousand people in these parts has serious musicians doing their own thing, in a variety of styles. There's a crew of hip hop MCs and DJs in Marshalltown, Iowa that can hold their own on any stage in the world.
Since I've got the microphone tonight, I'm going to tell you about the musicians I'm digging these days who you probably haven't heard of out there on the coasts.
1. Witch's Hat. These boys are from Columbia, Missouri, and they are on some other shit. Think Queen, Medievalist 70's Heavy Metal, Vampires, etc. Witch's Hat manages to make fun of that stuff, and at the same time, imbue their songs with all the ways that stuff ruled. If you listen to Witch's Hat, you're 14 again, complete with a wardrobe of black concert T shirts.
Huzzah. The best song ever about dragon-slaying and maiden-rescuing.
Supply And Demand. A great, driving pop song. I liked it so much I did a mashup of it with New Order's "Blue Monday".
2. Miracles of God. These guys are Iowa City's most dangerous band. Sloppy, drunken, goofy, stupid, brilliant punk rock. Imagine, say, the Pixies but with a sense of humor.
And because they really don't give a fuck Their entire back catalog is on their website. It's all good, but I recommend
Harm, which is about becoming a zombie.
You're Evil, a song about how you're evil.
Handimart, which is a lovely ballad about being at the convenience store at 2 AM.
3. The guys from Wax Cannon has been around Iowa City for years, playing in tons of different bands going back to the late 80s. Their new album "Someone in Madison Is Praying For You (and it isn't me" is 2 CDs chock full of minimalist midwestern guitar pop.
I believe frustration lenny is a ballad of sorts.
Twelve Spaceships On The River is a quiet songs about UFOs and being a kid.
All this music is much more alive to me than what's on major labels because it happens where I live. I understand the milieu in which it was born. I listen to music from all over -- from Bobbi Cespedes to Yasushi Miura. But music is like beer, is always fresher when you get it locally.
I'd also like to give a shout out to to my boys Shaffer The Dark Lord who used to live in Iowa City, but lately in good old Astoria Queens, and Coolzey who is living between tours here in Iowa City, and in Fairfield, IA, Trancendental Meditation world headquarters, and Will Whitmore who tours internationally but lives in a farmhouse overlooking the Mississippi in Lee County Iowa, who makes roots music like to freeze you to the bone, and Ed Gray, the best singer/songwriter in Iowa City -- a mad neglected genius.
I could go on and on... the thing about being in flyover country is that what you're told by the media is important all happens somewhere else. That shit is important, but things go on here too that are every bit as relevant and worthy of attention.
Lovely post, Kent. Makes me wanna come visit! While I agree about city noise and prices (I'd also add pollution), I must respectfully disagree about the transportation issue. In most big cities (maybe not L.A.), one can be successfully mobile without a car/mini-van/pick-up/Hummer. In fact, it's nigh on impossible (or at least impossibly frustrating) to attempt an individual commute during rush hour in NY or Chicago.
Personally, country quiet can be noisier at times than fire trucks and gunshots, but that's me. And while I grit my teeth every time at the $5.00 container of orange juice in my cart, it's nice to know I'm a ten minute train ride from the Guggenheim, the Art Institute, Steppenwolf Theater or SoHo.
That said, I relish even my suburban jaunts, and most definitely love a trip or two a year into the woods/country/farmland. We recently spent a Saturday driving through rural (to me) Wisconsin, and it was like having a therapy session.
What I really love most about your post is that an open-minded cool cat such as yourself is represent'in in the heartland. An urbanite such as myself tends to stereotype and marginalize everyone outside "city" limits. After 2004, it was hard not to. So it's good to know we've got a family fighting the good fight on the roads less travelled.
"music is like beer, is always fresher when you get it locally"
That is BRILLIANT!!!
Deb, if you're an out of towner, the 'getting around' part has more to do with getting lost than with lack of transport options. Unless you're in Chicago, which is a nightmare. Even Paris is easier to drive in than Chicago, in my experience...
And I love New York, too. I feel lucky to have family there, which makes visiting easier and less expensive, though I still seem to drop $100/day without knowing where it went ... and New York City is also the home of many of my favorite people from Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, etc.
NKW: I hear what you're saying, but in my opinion, I'd rather get lost in a city like NY, where you can't go too far out of your way without hitting a body of water, and can ask someone for directions, day or night, vs. a more rural area, where you can go miles in the wrong direction, and if it's past 10pm, it's you, your map and the road.
Gosh, I sound like a city snob, I apologize.
As a small town girl who loves to visit big cities, but could never live there, I am going to chime in with Kent on this issue. One item that has been overlooked is the sense of community that I think is great in a small town. I met a couple in their early 60s several months ago. They had recently moved to a retirement community across the river. Within two weeks of moving here and after only meeting two of their neighbors, they were in an awful automobile accident and their recovery took a couple of months. One of the two people that they had met got together people in their community and organized it so that different people made them dinner and brought it to their house for sixtyfour nights in a row.
As a guy who can't seem to live in anything other than major metropolitan centers, I'd like to point out that the sense of community is what is so amazing living here. No, it's not a retirement community, but there are still a lot of dinners being cooked for a lot of friends.
Honestly, I've never been scared in New York, La or Chicago, but the outskirts of Moore, Oklahoma scared the shit out of me. College towns are one thing, the real midwest is terrifying.
I agree, Sean. You can translate Emma's story to any apartment building in any city, and the only difference is that the neighbors you may never meet until tragedy strikes live approximately one and a half feet from your door.
Christmas night last year, my husband went to take the trash to the chute, and locked himself out of our apartment, no shoes, no cell phone, nothing. I was out of town. We'd only lived in that building a couple of months, and were such strangers with our neighbors that we'd constantly be surprised when they'd get off the elevator on the same floor. Anyhow, everyone on the floor seemed to be Yule-ing it up somewhere else, save for one apartment. The gentleman, a total stranger to Steve, invited him in, gave him use of his phone, and, despite being in the midst of preparing Christmas dinner for 10 guests, tried to help jimmy the lock, let Steve wait for the locksmith, and invited him to stay for dinner.
It wasn't that he did so much; I suppose this kind of neighborly behavior should be unremarkable, expected. And it certainly wasn't a deed on the scale of 64-days of donated dinner. But the point is, "community" is alive and prosperous in the big city.
My husband and I have lived in an apartment building in Brooklyn for the last two and a half years, and here are just a few examples of community: when we were renovating our kitchen, several of our neighbors either cooked for us or invited us to dinner; they were here to help, and to share their experiences with us, when my husband was in the hospital for the fourth time; when our dog died, they gave us flowers, a donation to the park in his name, and more emotional support than I possibly could have asked for. There are certainly drawbacks to the city lifestyle, and to each his or her own, but I've never lived in a warmer environment or in a place where I've felt more at home.
Kent,
Thanks for keeping up the Williams tradition of speaking my mind so eloquently. I live in Wake Forest, NC, and grow weary of my friends from the "big cities" direct and indirect put-downs of Small Town, USA. We are not an ignorant bunch. And what I love so much about where I live is that I get to have my very own large-ish patch of grass, upon which there could be a swingset for my son who doesn't have to fight off 93879485 other kids each day to play on it. And I know the germs there are his own, and perhaps those of the neighborhood cat, who isn't so bad. And, lo! We also have museums and Broadway plays nearby. Imagine that - you can actually see REAL ART and NOT have the hassle of NYC. We have real restaurants and educated citizens and coffee shops, too. There's just more room to move around, and I don't have to always be in the same spot that 50 other folks want to occupy as well.
I'm glad everybody likes where they live. While both have their charms, it must be really terrible to be a country mouse stuck in the city, or vice versa. Kent's post is proof that (duh) you shouldn't lump a bunch of people together because of their zip code.
I will say this: While there's art and music and culture (and other people's germs) everywhere, I maintain, whether you think it's for the better or the worse, there is nothing...NOTHING like city living. I'm planning a move back to NYC after somewhat more spacious and cost-effective city-living in Chicago, and I couldn't be more excited. I'll miss the wider streets, the cleaner streets, the alleys where the garbage goes...but not as much as I've missed NY...dirty, noisy, expensive, crowded NY.
It probably also depends on where you're at in your life--when Jack and I were living on the Upper West Side, and later, in another neighborhood in Brooklyn, we felt cramped for space and money, and we didn't enjoy our neighbors that much (in the UWS apt., the walls were so thin that we were privy to our bartender neighbor's wee-hour assignations), so we were always convinced that the grass was greener someplace else. After we'd spent five years in a NJ suburb, we decided that particular patch of grass was not for us at that point, so we came back to NYC. And now it works for us.
Kent, I feel bad that we've given the music short shrift today. I plan to check it out later.
Just so everyone knows -- I don't look at this as a zero sum game. NYC is great, people are nice. Even the NYC Police have been unfailingly nice and helpful to me. I remember visiting in the 80s and it being a completely different, scarier place. Any more, aside from all the gay porn in the shop windows, NYC is the NYC I imagined from watching Sesame Street.
If there was an implied criticism -- and y'all dear reader don't have to assume I mean you in particular -- it's that people on the coasts tend to discount what happens in the interior.
And it's not as bad here as elsewhere. Moscow and Paris might as well be different countries from the country outside their suburbs. People from outside Paris often can't even understand Parisiennes when they speak, and the Parisiennes ridicule out of towners mercilessly for their accents. In Russia, you travel 50 miles outside Moscow and you've also travelled 100 years back in time.
But what really irks me has nothing to do with geography. What with Cable TV and the Internet, people seem to believe that what they see on Television is more important, and realer, than their real lives. This is unbelievably damaging. If you're not conscious of where you are and what you're doing, and take that more seriously than what's on TV, you're sleepwalking through life. I care about Darfur, and Iraq, and Burma, etc etc, and I want to know what bands people think are cool in NYC, but when it comes down to it I have family and friends that deserve my undivided attention when I'm with them.
There was a Simpsons episode in which Ned Flanders falls in love with an actress who's in town filming. She tells him she didn't realize people like him existed. He responds something like, "Yeah, we're in that small part of the country that's between New York and Los Angeles."
Kent-
Shame I didn't know Ian in college as he likely would've told me to look you up. I spent 1988-1992 in I.C. and had a blast there. In fact had my career not beckoned, I might still be there. A laundry list of my memories there: KRUI (was a jock there from day one) The Hamburg Inn (met Ronald Reagan there, not that I voted for him or anything, still meeting any President at a greasy spoon is kinda cool), The Record Collector (spent tons of money there), The Kitchen Restaurant (loved their $5.99 pasta dinners on Tuesdays), Gabe's Oasis (played there dozens of times) Great Midwest Ice Cream, The Englert Theatre, The Black Angel, Black's Gaslight Village, The Foxhead (met john Irving there), John's, The Deadwood, BJ Records (worked there for awhile), Dillburger, That's Rentertainment, Kinnick Statium on a football Saturday and last but not least, Riverfest. I need to get back there, soon, it's been years.
Yikes. Sorry I got off topic a little yesterday. Also, I hope I didn't offend Sean, Deb or Beth. I have always thought the story I told was amazing and it made me feel good knowing it was close by. It also makes me feel good to know that the amazing stories are everywhere.
No offense from anyone taken here! I totally, 100% respect all of your opinions...and appreciate them. Again, it's a wonderful reminder to me that there *are* thoughtful, intelligent people "out there". And NKW, you're right about the information glut. In 2004, what I heard most about "the heartland" was that voters there came out in droves to vote for the amendments banning gay marriage. Or the protestors in front of Terri Schiavo's nursing home. Other than the recent Amish tragedy, you never much get stories, political or human interest, about the community and intelligence you speak of/with.
Hey! My grandma lives in Brighton, just down the road from Fairfield and the Trancendental Meditation center. I love Iowa City - kinda wish I'd gone to school there.