For awhile, everyone told me I would like The Decemberists. Even articles describing the band’s audience described, um, me: a former English major, someone from Portland, someone who likes stories and indie rock. But when I tried the band out, I didn’t like them at first. Every song seemed to be a guy singing along to acoustic guitar, which contrary to popular belief is not the kind of music I like.

But then last year, I heard their most recent album, “The Crane Wife.” It won me over. I liked the album so much, last Wednesday I dragged Kyle to see them at The Warfield in San Francisco.

The Decemberists sound every bit as good live as they do on their CDs. In fact, the slower songs may even have more energy live. Or maybe it’s that their songs make more sense when you see them performed. By watching, you not only hear how intricate the songs are, you see it. The band is known for using lots of instruments, and there were quite a few on the stage–different keyboards/pianos, an upright bass, a melodica, an accordion, etc.–that the musicians switched around throughout the performance, bringing out layers to the songs that I hadn’t noticed before.

The band has good showmanship, too. For the Shankill Butchers–a song about a serial-killer butcher–lead singer Colin Meloy had the lights go all red to set the mood. At other times, the lights were aqua and with the rippling keyboards and guitar, the audience in the pit looked like underworld creatures looking up at the sun. The band also had audience participation for 16 Military Wives, but Meloy handled it so casually you didn’t feel like you were being coerced into a sing-along–a pet peeve of mine–and so it was fun when the entire audience alternated for the La-de-das for the song. At the end, one by one, the band members went into the audience, and a 12-year-old kid jumped up on the empty stage to play the drums and the guitar. The stagehand ran out as if to chase him off the stage, but instead tightened the kid’s the guitar strap, which got a laugh from the audience. After the kid sang a song and jumped off the stage, the band got back on and did their final numbers.

And here’s the thing: As much as I love music, part of me has a hard time sitting through a concert. This is true in everything from a symphony to my very favorite bands–something about sitting and listening to music makes me antsy. So this is one of few concerts I have ever been to that held my attention all the way through. I was entertained and impressed. If you like The Decemberists, go see them live.

Here’s When The War Came off The Crane Wife, which you can buy here.

As I sit here at my desk, a blue scrub jay is sitting on the garage door about five feet away, looking at me through the window. It watches me every day. So far, it is the only bird that has shown any interest in my hummingbird feeder I put out–except for one brown hummingbird that ate from it but hasn’t come back.

Even the smallest spot of nature is full of life. The other night, I saw an owl in my backyard. It flew quicker than any day bird I’ve seen. So I assumed that it was deer that were snapping the buds off of my rose bush in my garden plot. Then I went to trim the roses back to let in more sunlight in the garden, and I took a closer look:

What could be doing this to my roses? It didn’t take long to deduce it was this little sucker:

That is a rose weevil. It is a small red beetle that was covering the rose bushes. It sticks that pointy black snout into the buds of roses and sucks out their life in true disgusting parasite manner.

Naturally, I was upset. Next Sunday, weather permitting, I plan to plant the rest of my garden and here I have an epidemic of weevils. My garden is surrounded by large bushes, including two giant rose bushes at least 20 feet high, making them a perfect refuge for hundreds of rose weevils to breed undisturbed.

I’m a garden novice. I don’t know much about pest control. I have been killing aphids since March, and there always seem to be more–although it is getting a little better, I guess–so I hadn’t even had a chance to consider there might be other pests too. I looked on the Internet for organic methods to get rid of the rose weevils. It told me to hand pick the bugs and drown them. I tried it, shaking at least 50 rose weevils into a tub of water.

Big mistake. Watching bugs drown is awful. They climb on top of each other’s bodies to get air. Some of them panic and cling to each other, twirling around in the water in a circle of doom. If a twig or leaf falls in, they climb on and start helping each other up just like humans would.

Forget that crap. Sometimes you have to use pesticides. I sprayed the roses with weevil spray and haven’t seen a single weevil since. I don’t know if that was the best solution and I don’t like using pesticides, but I didn’t know what else to do. And since I haven’t even planted my garden yet except for some spinach and peas, the pesticide should be gone by the time I do.

This garden stuff is confusing, man.

In other news, my oregano (far away on the other side of the house away from the weevil spray) is going crazy.

I had picture to put up of a new park I discovered, but my computer needs a driver or something, so I can’t get them off the camera. Since I’m on deadline, I will have to post them tomorrow.

In the meantime: Easter Everywhere, a memoir by Darcey Steinke, asks this controversial question: What if my abiding sense of misery isn’t due to abuse or balky neurotransmission, but to the absence of God in my life, to an unfulfilled relationship with my own divinity, as vouchsafed to me by the Creator?

At least, that is according to a New York Times review by Stephen Metcalf, who seemed to like the book:

Casting aside the language of biological sickness or talk-therapy self-pity for the language of spiritual sickness, a writer no longer needs to up the ante with increasingly extravagant examples of self-degradation. True, Steinke hits some of the familiar stations of the memoir cross: as a young girl, she ostentatiously reads “Mein Kampf” to provoke her elders; as a young woman, she finds herself drawn to boys who are “aloof and nihilistic”; and she eventually becomes a divorced mother badly in need of her scrips. But she nails the central question — of her memoir and perhaps of her life — with an extraordinary quote from Simone Weil. “One has only the choice between God and idolatry,” Weil wrote. “If one denies God … one is worshiping some things of this world in the belief that one sees them only as such, but in fact, though unknown to oneself imagining the attributes of Divinity in them.” Hence the title “Easter Everywhere.

Now I want to check this book out.

My new article in the North Bay Bohemian looks into how California is spending the money we give them for schools. Maybe the problem isn’t so much the amount of money in the system as how the money is being used. How much of it is really reaching the classrooms?

It’s not as though there isn’t any money. In California, 51 cents out of every tax dollar–including sales and income tax–goes to education. On top of that, voters last year approved a $3.5 billion bond for public schools. Nevertheless, the state has some of the lowest test scores in the country. In 2005, California ranked 47th for education, meaning that only three other states had students who scored worse on standardized tests.

However, the Department of Education believes we still aren’t spending enough. Per-pupil spending in California is 30 percent below the national average, according to DOE director of policy and evaluation Pat McCabe.

Still, others are suggesting that it isn’t so much the amount of money in the educational system as how the money is being used–primarily for inefficient and bloated programs that aren’t reaching the classrooms.

More here.

I love movies about writers. I’m a sucker for them. I see all of them, the very good ones and the very bad ones. So naturally, I had to watch Miss Potter, about Beatrix Potter, who wrote The Tale of Peter Rabbit and other books. I read all her books when I was little–in fact, the first book I ever read was about Peter Rabbit. The Tale of Two Bad Mice is my favorite.

Potter was a fascinating person. On top of her children’s books, she was an avid scientist. She even attempted to enter the Royal Botanical Gardens but was rejected because she was a woman. Later, she was the first to observe that lichens are a symbiotic relationship between fungi and algae and became a respected mycologist throughout England. Her books were best sellers, and in later life, she became a conservationist, saving thousands of acres in the Lake District.

When I was a kid, my Mom told me how Potter would draw the wildlife around her, and I imagined a young girl-scientist drawing her pets (Peter Rabbit was based on her pet bunny) with a scientific eye, and sitting in nature watching the smallest insect with intelligent curiosity. I imitated this, drawing my cockatiel Jiggsy and dog Macs and sitting outside to “observe” nature, which really meant reading books and singing to myself. Potter probably started my fantasy about being a biologist in the late 19th century.

And then Hollywood gets a hold of the story.

First off, the movie makes no mention of her scientific efforts–no microscopes, no slides, no shots of Renee Zellweger staring at something in a scientific way, nothing. Instead, Beatrix Potter is a silly woman, even a little deranged. Not only does she call her drawings of rabbits and hedgehogs her friends–which is a little precious but acceptable given what she does for a living–she also talks to her drawings. Aloud. In front of people. “You stop that and behave!” she says to a drawing of a duck hanging on the wall… in front of her business acquaintance. She seems kind of crazy, frankly.

According to the movie, Potter’s biggest problem as a Victorian woman isn’t her thwarted desire to be a scientist, or her attempt to publish books–the movie makes that look pretty easy–but her desire to marry a tradesman when she comes from upper-class people. To be fair, this was an issue in the real Beatrix Potter’s life, and it makes sense to draw from it for the script, but not at the detriment of all those other, bigger issues. The movie does nod to Potter’s conservationist efforts in the end, but without the background in science, her attempts to save land comes off like self-righteousness or worse, modern-day environmentalism.

It’s not that I want Hollywood to make a feminist movie about Beatrix Potter. That wouldn’t be anymore appropriate than making her into an environmentalist. I just thought the movie made her look like a silly nitwit who likes to draw pretty pictures, not the clever exacting thinker that she apparently was. On top of that, the movie tries too hard to be witty, so all the jokes felt cutesy and off to me.

And while we’re at it, what is the deal with Renée Zellweger? I like her well enough, but I’ve never seen her do anything as an actress to warrant the A-List status she has. What’s up Hollywood? Are her English accents really that great?

Will Ferrell has a little skit on Funny or Die that made me laugh. Terrible landlord!

Check out my cover story in the Pacific Sun about Marin County poets. I really liked doing this one. Not only did I get to think about poetry for a month, I got to interview respected poets like Jane Hirshfield, Kay Ryan, and Robert Hass. I also discovered I really like Kay Ryan’s work–in fact, I bought her most recent book for my own enjoyment. So if nothing else, this article got one person reading more poetry: me.

I overworked earlier this week, so I had to force myself to stop and rest so my hands don’t get like this.

So I made a necklace:

Kurt Vonnegut died last night. This it sad. Until yesterday, he was one of the few living writers who had the legendary status of writers like Kafka or Fitzgerald in my mind. His work is the best bridge I know to get teenage boys who read nothing but science fiction to read literature. His books are funny, vivid, weird, imaginative, and deal with some of the biggest questions of our age–God and science, war, the destruction of the planet, etc.

Not too long ago, I read The Sirens of Titan and was impressed with the quality of Vonnegut’s imagination. Written in 1959, it has such vivid descriptions of Mars and Saturn and Titan that it made me wonder if we haven’t lost something with all our current technological understanding of the solar system.

I haven’t read all of Vonnegut’s books, but as luck would have it, I recently got a lot of them. I was going to read something post-20th century for once next, but I think I’m going to put that aside for a bit and read his work instead.

ETA: I was going to put up a recent Bookworm interview I heard with Vonnegut, but I got distracted by this YouTube video where he talks about getting started as a writer:

I had a family and I wasn’t making nearly enough money to support the family. So I started writing short stories on weekend. And there was an enormous magazine industry at that time which paid very high prices for stories and they needed lots of them. Saturday Evening Post published five a week, Collier’s published five a week, Liberty Post published five a week and they paid tons of money for them. And I began that way and I wrote one and the Saturday Evening Post bought it and paid me one-eighth what I was making at General Electric a year. And so I wrote another one and they paid me more. In a period of a few months, I had made more money than General Electric was prepared to pay me all year. I had money piled up.

Ok, now I really am depressed.

• Let’s see how long I can go without going to the grocery store (usually until I run out of coffee or nonfat milk).
• Let’s see if getting free samples has any impact whatsoever on my budget. (It doesn’t, but it does help me more successfully play game number one. A free coffee sample? Great, I don’t have to go to the grocery store today.)
• Let’s see how long I can make a garbage bag last before I have to change it. (Nine days is the record.)
• Let’s see how many people I can get to eat a piece of strawberry cake before it goes bad. (So far, four.)
• Instead of hanging up my clothes, let’s do it slowly by hanging up one piece of clothing every time I go into the bedroom.
• If I root a potato and put it in the ground, will it really grow? Even if it is a weird purple hybrid potato?
• If I take a dollar out of Kyle’s wallet every time I see it, will I squirrel away a big store of cash that we can suddenly use to do something fabulous? (The answer is no. This is a stupid game when you are an adult with a savings account.)
• If I leave the junk mail in the mailbox with the flag up, will the mailman get confused and take it back with him? (No! Alas.)
• Will I like an audiobook of the Hardy Boys mystery The Case of the Missing Chums simply because I like the word “chum”? Let’s see!