These jeans have visited the U.S., Canada, France, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Ireland, the Spanish Basque Country and lets not forget tiny, old Belgium (salut Deli et Yolaine!).

They saw Wilco, twice, Justice and Patrick Watson.

They reported on a Danish riot and discussed independence with a Basque nationalist.

They went through a tremendous break up.

They started hanging around a wonderful, beautiful girl.

They refused to hang next to another pair of pants, which were worn while frying chicken livers and gizards in the Cape Girardeau Schnucks deli department.

(I had numerous eiffel towers in them.)

They carried ipods, never walkmans. They carried David Bowie, the Clash and Daft Punk and it was never too much for them!

They never carried a wallet.

They made friendships with the old and young, with foreigners and Americans.

so, au revoir my jeans. i think we should be proud. maybe you’ll get recycled and we’ll meet again. but, would it be the same?

i love the latin accent of benicio del toro in this film. while growing up, the foreign accent in the U.S. is spanish. now, later in life, it sounds sweet.

secondly. as an american who loves baseball and is living in a world where it seems nobody cares about it, i feel like a comrade to del toro when as he says, “everybody loves baseball.” i think everybody should love the sport. im glad some mexican brethren are with us.

i definitely think we should play baseball at night instead of making a selfish, unhealthy living. calling all you dealers. you get paid from something that gets people strung out. that’s no lie and you know it.

st. louis, 19-years-old, second year at college: my history professor, who i really liked, told me i didn’t need to worry about rewriting history from the beginning. some things were already understood.

sunken treasure

No matter where you study or travel in France, you’re going to find yourself walking around the city center, enjoying all the closeness of people and the outdoor cafes filled up with people-watching customers. If you want to get a smile and a bonjour from another French stroller, you’ll need to be the first to say it. Chances are you’ll get a charming, smiling hello in return. It’s a simple way to continue your beau promenade. (Note: when alone, French people don’t look happy.)

All these little shops squeezed along downtown streets are going to seem irresistible to pass up. And, when you stroll into one, you’ll probably get a bonjour from the owner. Don’t forget to respond in kind. When you’re leaving, the store merchant may even say goodbye, au revoir. (The customer at the front counter might say au revoir, too.) But, it’s no problem if you take your American liberties in saying it first. Rules of courtesy are top priority in France, and people from all walks of life observe them.

Lastly, you may be invited to a party in France. And you might have to introduce yourself, to all the guests already there, even if you don’t know them all. What about if there’s a lot of people? From personal experience, I would say that any party with 20 people or less calls for an individual hello to each one. Girls, you kiss everyone, once on each cheek. Guys shake one another’s hand, and they kiss each girl once on each cheek (lucky!!!). When you’re shaking or kissing, you introduce yourself by saying bonjour and just your first-name. Tip: Remember to recognize the host/hostess. You’ll need to say au revoir before you leave.

Will the French think of you as a dumb, rude American if you don’t say hello or goodbye in stores or at parties? Chances are slim. But, it’s best to try and put your best foot frog leg forward, American accent and all, and jump in the deep end. You’re going to get an A-for-effort from the French, who’ll find respectable your treatment of their culture.

Last week I witnessed this fierce student-teacher relationship in one of my classes. There was this pervasive group dynamic last week running through all them and they were all talking back to the teacher. That’s the thing. Even after the teacher says something or tries to get the students to stop talking, the students always had something else to say. Then, it turned into a tiny tennis match and the two sides rushed the net, slammed forehands and dropped wicked backhands until finally the teacher notched a forehand winner, aka the last word. But, no foul was ever called, no referee had to referee.

At the end of the class the teacher walked away smiling, seeming hardly in a bad mood. Wow, what a teacher. (But, she’s a really balanced teacher and she knows how to let students could really affect her well being, so she doesn’t let them. She’s definitely someone to admire.)

In high school, I don’t remember ever noticing this backtalk that I saw in the high school students last week. They weren’t mean about it, but they weren’t nice about it either. It was like they were looking to see how much they dared saying, how much the teacher could take. Like I said, the teacher laughed it off at the end of class. She even said she understood them because they had already had six classes that day and they hadn’t had a break throughout it, so of course they were like that. Right, of course.

Ok, I’m probably sounding like an old man again. But, I just never remember any of the students in my high school talking to my teachers like this. These students are just kids (around 15-years-old), and they’re probably ok kids at heart. But damn, they were pushing.

I should be more precise and say that I’m talking about the kind of grocery stores like Aldi, where there are usually only one cashier and one long line. Here’s my beef with the way the French go about finishing their grocery shopping: They wait for a time when the line is little and they’ve almost completed their shopping. Then, they swoop into action. This consists of shooting into line while pondering, ‘What else do I need to buy?’ Or, it must be something like this because people always move out of line and leave their groceries behind. There’s no shame in it! To me, this is a huge WTF moment.

Why does this fire me up? We’re all in the same boat here, there’s only one cashier and, yes, half of the time spent shopping at Aldi is standing in the line. I understand it and it stinks. But you have to do it just like the rest of us. Am I sounding too much like an old fart? Ok, I’ll go ahead and just say it, yes. But to my credit, I’ve talked about it with other Americans living in France. And they agreed that it was shocking, to say the least.

But everybody does this in France, even the old farts. Maybe that’s the most frustrating part of it. Usually, I think old people aren’t as aggressive as they used to be at a younger age. At French Aldi, though, it’s like a trip back though childhood for the oldies, where they get to live again, fighting their way to the front of the grocery line! Maybe that’s why so many old people go shopping everyday. Because psychologically speaking, does anybody really want to get old?

At the Aldis I’ve gone to in the U.S., I don’t remember seeing people shopping this way. Maybe it’s because I’m culturally blind and I’ve never registered it happening before. Or, maybe it’s because this ridiculous crap doesn’t happen in the U.S.!

But I resolved to not let this stuff affect me. Here’s how I get around it: One, I reset my time schedule and plan on spending at least an hour at the store. Two, I always bring my iPod to help forget about the ridiculous line. Three, French froggies aren’t like American eagles.

Does this prevent me from hearing new music? In a word, yes. But, I’m there, there with essence of the music. And I still get a lot of feeling from them.

The Wilco song, “California Stars” is like that. I’ve been listening to it steady at least four or five times a week the past four months. Each time I refall in love with the lyrics: “They hang like grapes on vines that shine. And warm a lover’s glass like friendly wine.” I love remembering how the instrumentation is arranged. Each time I feel like I could play the song. It’s a dream. But, I also don’t have time to play in a band. It’s what I can have. I’ll take that.

In effect, hearing the same songs forms my personality. I focus on the melody and rhythm. Not so much the lyrics. But it depends. One song is one way and another song another way.

There are tons of beautiful and great songs out there. True, I don’t hear lots of them cause I remain with the same. But, I love music and I always will. Even, if I hit repeat 10 + times.

Play it again, Sam.

Confession. Love. Music. One. Song. Repeat. Please. Thanks.

This is how screwed up the music business is in the early twenty-first century: Last summer, after completing their fourth and best studio album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, alternative-country idols Wilco delivered the record to their label, Reprise. The company reacted as if the music was caked in anthrax, throwing the album back at Wilco and arranging for them to leave the label — immediately. Yankee Hotel Foxtrotnow arrives in stores, intact, on Nonesuch. Like Reprise, Nonesuch is a subsidiary of AOL Time Warner. Essentially, the mother firm paid for the album twice. I would love to see one of the suits explain that to the shareholders.

They’re still getting a bargain. One of the most talked-about records of the past year, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was rumored to be crackpot pop — Radiohead’s Kid A dressed in flannel and cow pie. And there is genuine bedlam here. Creepy pianos and whooping synthesizers zoom in and out of the music like pissed-off ghosts. The close-miked vocals of songwriter-guitarist Jeff Tweedy have a strong edge-of-madness air.

But the sum of those parts — mixed by Jim O’Rourke (Sonic Youth, Stereolab) — is really an earthy, moving psychedelia, eleven iridescent-country songs about surviving a blown mind and a broken heart. In Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Tweedy, bassist John Stirratt, keyboard-guitar player Leroy Bach and drummer Glenn Kotche actually bring you the enchanting sound of things falling apart — and gingerly, doggedly coming together again. This is an honest, vivid chaos, and it tells a good story.

The first song, “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” is a minutely detailed portrait of the singer as blind drunk. Vibes, drums, piano, fuzz guitar and bicycle bells stumble over one another like they’ve been thrown out of a bar, and Tweedy slurs his metaphors in a heavy whiskey breath: “I am an American aquarium drinker/I assassin down the avenue/I’m hiding out in the big city blinking/What was I thinking when I let go of you?” Later, in “I’m the Man Who Loves You,” Tweedy comes to his senses in a blaze of country-funk joy, packed with dobro, Salvation Army-style brass and outbursts of ham-metal guitar. By the end of the album, Tweedy is pledging himself with confidence (“I’ve got reservations/About so many things/But not about you”), his voice afloat in a shimmering pool of strings, keyboards and bowed cymbal. If you could transcribe the panic, apology and serenity of hard-won love in musical notation, this is exactly how it would sound.

Radio, as a theater of imagination and an emblem of distance and connection, is a recurring theme for Wilco. The cover of their 1995 debut, A.M., was a photo of an old AM/FM receiver. This album’s title comes from the phonetic alphabet used in military communication and shortwave transmission; in “Poor Places,” a woman’s voice repeats the phrase “yankee hotel foxtrot” like an SOS, through a whiteout of guitar distortion. In the pale ballad “Radio Cures,” the throaty strum of a guitar and Tweedy’s yearning vocal are wrapped in ship-to-shore crackle. The effect is at once jarring and warming — a message received over many miles, through harsh conditions.

Tweedy and Wilco have been deviating from alt-country orthodoxy for years: the atonal episodes in “Misunderstood” and “Sunken Treasure” on their second album, 1996′s Being There; the thick, cryptic power pop of 1999′s Summerteeth. It has been a difficult path, too. Wilco lost two of their founding members, drummer Ken Coomer and multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett, in making Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Ironically, this album takes Wilco the long way around, back to the prairie verite of Uncle Tupelo, Tweedy’s now-legendary underground-country band with Jay Farrar. In its pictorial intimacy — the electric guitar in “Kamera,” glistening like rain on a windowpane; the helpless sigh of the strings in “Jesus, etc.” — Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is close kin to Tupelo’s unplugged third LP, March 16-20, 1992. But Wilco’s record is even closer, in ambition and texture, to the garage-art splendor of the Beatles’ White Album. In both cases, the roots always show through, and the noise never gets in the way of the song.

Make no mistake: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is a rock & roll record. The rolling beat and gleaming steel guitar of “Pot Kettle Black” should reassure A.M.-era Wilco fans that the band is building on its original strengths, not turning from them. When Wilco toured with these songs across the U.S. last fall, the riffs and choruses bloomed under hot-guitar attack. And in “Heavy Metal Drummer,” three pure-pop minutes of jangly guitar and wibbly synth, Wilco evoke the lust and joy of a distant rock & roll summer. The song is also a brilliant slap at the bookkeeping and cynicism poisoning the music business, which almost deep-sixed this album. “I miss the innocence I’ve known/Playing Kiss covers/Beautiful and stoned,” Tweedy sings in the chorus. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is his sweet revenge.

DAVID FRICKE
(RS 895 – May 9, 2002)

I liked the way he framed it as not just about showing up for business meetings, which is how I’ve usually contextualized this one. Instead, he said it was more about taking chances and doing things: being the first person to talk in a group, asking a question, calling someone for the first time or signing up for volunteer work or going to a meeting of whatever-sort just because.

I remember I started calling a girl this summer to hang out, just friends. Then, she started calling (really it was texting) me, and more than I called her. Now, I’m really happy to say we’re together. Voila, I “showed up” and now I’m going out with a great girl.