It was a good run, but The Barryfest Chronicles will be leaving WordPress for greener pastures.  This site will remain intact, but all future correspondence will take place at the new and improved Barryfest Chronicles on tumblr.   Thanks for the continued support.

The conversation continues at:
http://barryfest.tumblr.com

A couple of weeks ago, I saw Into The Wild for the first time.  It was a pretty fascinating movie, and my fascination with the incredible cinematography and flawless acting was no doubt heightened by the fact that I hit the trees pretty hard before I popped in the DVD.  If the movie hadn’t been based on a true story, I would have called bullshit on the whole premise, and the extreme details of Chris McCandless’ ill-fated journey would have came off as completely overwrought sentimental cheese if the action in the movie (or at least a non-dramatized approximation of it) didn’t actually happen at some point in time.

Because not only were his travels unconventional to start with, but by the end of the movie I was convinced that they were also completely emblematic of a particular moment in history.  While the early 1990s are nearly two decades old,  Into The Wild isn’t exactly a period piece.  The setting is very familiar (it has cars, credit cards, fast food restaurants, television, etc) and yet the differences that exist are striking.

Alexander Supertramp was very likely riding the crest of the final, awesome wave of casual hitch hiking in the United States of America.  I’ve done my fair share of driving around this great country, and I have never – not once, not a single time in my entire life – seen someone on the side of the road trying to thumb a ride.  I am not even going to waste time to try to figure out how or why the practice is all but eradicated, because the mere fact that is does not seem to exist anymore proves my point.  What was unusual but plausible just a few years ago seems like science fiction in this day and age.  Especially when you are really, really high.

And it goes beyond Into The Wild.  I got to thinking and realized that the majority of the action in the movie takes place between 1990 and 1992, with also just so happened to be the  heyday of a novel concept know as MTV’s Rock ‘N Jock.  For those of you who do not remember Rock ‘N Jock, let me give you the rundown:  Professional athletes would team up with celebrities to play in pickup softball, baseball, basketball and football games.

These games were loosely officiated and featured people making millions of dollars a year at their day jobs muscling up to try to hit a 350 foot home run off a tee or launch a ball four stories into the air to score a 100 point basket.  If there ever was a high water mark of unnecessary risk, Rock ‘N Jock was surely it.

This type of shit would go over like a lead balloon nowadays.  The caliber of talent that would ostensibly be standing shoulder to shoulder with Dean Cain and Roger McDowell don’t even participate in the Home Run Derby or Slam Dunk contests of their actual professional leagues anymore for risk of injury or other negative effects the exhibitions may have on their form or function.  With the exception of Dhani Jones and his inexplicable quest to tackle the globe, the riskiest thing a modern day professional athlete does in the off-season is have sex with Madonna.

Another staple of the 1990s:  Seinfeld.  Now, Seinfeld isn’t exactly dated in the way that, say, a show like Deadwood is, but there are anachronisms in almost every episode that serve as constant reminders that the show originally aired in a different era.  The main characters aren’t rocking afros in apartments decked out with shag carpet, but there are no cell phones, people bring four carry-on bags to the airport and Jerry needs a blank VHS tape to record the evening’s Mets game.

Even later episodes like “The Nap” which aired in 1997,  Jerry called in a bomb threat to Yankee Stadium so George could escape from under his desk, where he had recently discovered he could catch a snooze during his work day.  It is a funny premise, but is there any doubt that a scene like that, if it happened on How I Met Your Mother, My Boys or any other show set in the present, would come off as completely improbable?  That type of shit (along with countless other instances of hijinx featured on the show) is just no longer a joke.

But because of the huge amount of  things I find completely bizarre about days not so far removed from the ones we are living in, I wonder if this is just the natural order of things when it comes to hindsight.  I mean, I am just reaching the age in which I can summon lucid memories of events in my life that took place over a decade ago, so maybe I am still getting the hang of this whole “retrospective” thing.

I can imagine that it won’t be long before we are all reminiscing about the strange days when Lil’ Wayne had a blog on ESPN.com and would show up on 1st and 10 and have debates with that contrarian prick Skip Bayless.  And history is already turning on the XFL, P. Diddy’s Making The Band and Sarah Palin, so I guess that sooner or later everything looks pretty weird when you see it in your rear view mirror.  I just didn’t realize it happens so quickly.

As the final notes of “The Curtain With” vanished into the cool Vermont air on August 15, 2004, I was exhausted, dehydrated and completely heatered-out (Coventry was the culmination of many things, not least of which being the most nicotine drenched six months of my life).  But more than all of that, I was confused.  A month-long hallucinogen binge and five straight days without a good night’s sleep didn’t do much in the way of helping me process the monumental events unfolding around me, but even if I was perfectly straight as Phish was supposedly drawing their career to a close, I doubt I would been any more clear-headed as I made my way back to the damp campsite I had called home for the weekend.

I was at a loss.  Even after following them around for the entire summer and amassing a gratuitously large collection of live recordings from their first 25 years, I only had a few years of legitimate fandom under my belt, making me a relative novice in the whole Phish game.  Plus, I got into the band during college – when free time was a renewable resource, substance abuse had no appreciable consequences, and the world was an altogether simpler place – and to be honest, I was already wondering about Phish’s long term standing in my life now that I was tentatively inching my way into the real world.

So suffice it to say, I didn’t know my dick from my balls as I headed to the Manchester, NH airport covered to mid-calf in caked-on mud and probably smelling like an ashtray that just ran a marathon. Then without ever really digesting what was going on and/or coming to a conclusion about how it all made me feel, I moved on with my life.  And the longer I went without queuing up a show, the easier it become to explain away my reverent devotion as something as innocuous as youthful indiscretion or as insignificant as a fluke.

I really did a number on myself in the fours years since Coventry, considering news that the band was getting back together could barely get a rise out of me.  I put in for the ticket lottery like the rest of the citizens of the world, but I did it with the caveat that if my number failed to come up, I would strongly consider letting the dream die completely.  That’s right, friends.  I was willing to let a random pre-sale drawing cast the deciding ballot on whether or not I was going to allow myself to enjoy the musical styling of Phish in the future.

And I’m embarrassed to say it, but I almost had myself feeling relieved that I got passed over.  I mean, imagine how impractical and inconvenient it would be to travel around the country catching as much of the summer tour as possible now that I have a job and other adult responsibilities.  And I haven’t earnestly listened to the band in ages, so maybe I don’t even like their music anymore.  And shit, after taking so much time off, who knows if they will even be as good as they once were.  Fuck it, right?  Maybe it is best that I leave Phish on the trash-heap of passing fancies that I go through life claiming to have outgrown.

This, of course, begs the question: When did I become such a fucking ninny?  It only took one listen to this past weekend’s reunion shows to realize I have been pulling the wool over my own eyes and I’ll be goddamned if I let the bullshit charade go on any longer.  Of all the reasons I could conjure for why I was done with Phish, not a single one of them even approaches “good.”  It may have taken me a while, but I’ve finally got it figured out…  just in time for the summer tour.

All signage found February 6 – 24, 2009 in New Orleans, LA

Before attending their concert at the House of Blues on Saturday, I was about as familiar with Better Than Ezra as are most people of my age.  Prior to the show, my interaction the New Orleans-based power trio was pretty much limited to the presence of “Good” on the 1990s one-hit wonders playlist a friend and I created during college.

Before I go any further, let it be know that this not an indictment.  We queued up this “Remember the 90s?” playlist every chance we got, and I still find a good excuse to listen to it at least once a month.  And this is not part of some semi-ironic hipster-doofus creem dream, my friends.  If you catch me drinking a High Life while grooving on “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth (With Money In My Hand),” it is because I non-satirically enjoy both the Champagne of beers as well as Primitive Radio Gods’ most well know contribution to popular music.

While I don’t have much to say about the bands of varying musical inclination that showed up just long enough to drop these gems on the world before they went back to doing whatever it was they did before their heady, two-month amble around late night talk show stages and alternative radio stations, I’ll defend the brilliance of these chart-toppers until my last breath.  Give me “Save Tonight” or give me death.

But as far as seeking out any of these artists when they hit the road? C’mon.  “Good” is a fantastic song, but is it any better than “Pepper” or “Flagpole Sitta” or “Counting Blue Cars”?  No one can really say for sure.  So for me, that puts Better Than Ezra in about the same class as The Butthole Surfers, Harvey Danger, and Dishwalla: pretty much off my radar at almost all instances that I am not listening to their most well known songs during a leisurely game of caps or on the first leg of a road trip.

Even if I was the least bit curious, why would I want to ruin any of these masterpieces by doing something foolish like putting them in the context of a full album or live performance?  That’s a high risk, high reward endeavor I never planned to undertake.

But as I have learned pretty much everyday since I got down here, few things go as planned in Big Easy.  New Orleanians my age love Better Than Ezra.  I’m talking “I have their demo EP on bootleg cassette” love.  I’m talking “I’ve seen them about 13 times” love.  I’m talking “Fuck Endymion, let’s I’m going to the BTE show at House of Blues” love. (And, yes, I’m talking “I affectionately refer to the band by a moniker” love).

With that in mind, I joined a large group of natives at the House of Blues on Saturday for Better Than Ezra’s annual Mardi Gras swoop through the Crescent City.  And you know what?  The put on an awesome show for a raucous crowd in an incredible venue.  I still think they fit the classical definition of a “one-hit wonder,” but I realized that their one-hit was not just some sort of concession they were willing to offer in exchange for a moment in the sun.  As I found out over the course of the night, “Good”  was one of a long line of upbeat, accessible rockers that have kept the band going strong for over two decades, the only difference is that it was released as a single at the exact time it happened to perfectly capture the zeitgeist of the moment.

Better Than Ezra came off as a group upon which MTV and popular radio stumbled, not the other way around.  Because unlike most of the other catchy tunes from the one-and-done groups I listened to in middle school, the song that sent this group into the stratosphere was pretty similar to the rest of their material, not a blatant attempt to make their sound more radio-ready.  I realize this is just a veiled way of saying that all their fucking songs sound exactly the same, but their consistency is admirable, even if it comes at the expense of diversity.

I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather listen to 12 different variations on “Good” – a specimen to say the least – than sift through 90 minutes of post-grunge schlock-rock in a dingy club waiting impatiently for the Screaming Trees to launch into a spirited rendition of “Nearly Lost You,” a song that was their only hit because it is the only thing in their entire cannon that is actually tolerable.  And I am sure some of the poor, uninitiated schmucks that got roped into a Blind Melon show during “No Rain” hysteria didn’t much care to watch Shannon Hoon warble around the stage in a heroin-induced stupor as wave after wave of heavy distortion and feedback rang their fucking bells when they expected a short set of mid-tempo toe-tappers performed by mandolin-wielding long-hairs and fat chicks in bumblebee costumes.

I will stop myself before this devolves into a missive on the relative artistic integrity and relative importance of every band to be featured on a Buzz Ballads compilation, because as I said before, taking too close a look at any of this is a zero sum game at best. I’ll just say this:  Better Than Ezra game me exactly what I hoped for but had plenty of reason not to expect all.  And it was good.

Happy Mardi Gras, everyone.

Dear Alex,

When it comes to performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, nothing surprises me these days.  Long before the Mitchell Report was even commissioned, I had pretty much made peace with the fact that during the thousands of hours I spent watching baseball as a kid, either on the tube while eating sandwiches with my dad or live and in-person after shelling out ungodly amounts of money at Wrigley Field or Fenway Park, I was looking at little more than a rotating cast of circus-freak junkies with drug habits that would make Pete Doherty look like Robert Barnes.

I am far from a baseball purist so I will spare you a lecture on taints, but I will go on record as saying it really fucking sucked when I figured out the specific era I grew up watching will go down as one of the dirtiest stretches in the history of any professional sport.  It was juiced-up pitchers throwing to juiced up hitters in almost every game, so there isn’t a single statistic from the entire “steroid era” that is free from the influence – be it positive or negative – of the excessive amount of doping that was going on at the time.  It was a fantasy land of large foreheads and shrunken testicles where nothing was real.

Sure it hurt, but I eventually got over it.  I still love baseball, but it has been a while since I approached any allegation of wrong-doing in the majors with even a marginal amount of shock or skepticism.  A resigned “Sure.  Why not?” is about all I can muster these days.  Maybe a “Figures.  Asshole.”  if the perpetrator is a dick anyways,  but I am no longer capable of anything that even approaches excitement, melancholy or doubt when the latest rumblings hit the news wire.

That was, of course, until Sports Illustrated outed you as one of the players who pissed hot during the 2003 round of anonymous drug testing designed to investigate just how big a problem Bud Selig had on his hands.  As a die hard Red Sox fan who wishes nothing but occupational ill-will on the entire Yankee squad and a lifelong baseball lover who never though you played the game the way it was meant to be played, this year’s annual spring training steroid speculations saga got a rise out of me for the first time since Jose Canseco named names way back in Juiced.

And then came your Peter Gammon’s interview and the press conference, which each added an amazing new wrinkle to the whole situation.  Here you are – the highest paid player, a mortal lock for a spot in the Hall of Fame on your first shot, and the misunderstood hero that was sent to banish the evil Barry Bonds from The Elias Sports Bureau’s record books – not just being accused of using performance-enhancing substances, but openly discussing the allegations.

Fuzzy math, factual inconsistencies and my complete disdain for you as a human being aside, I’ll admit you’ve gotten as close to facing the music as anyone of your stature, and for that I think you deserve some credit.  Your candor, although staged, made me realize that I, too, once found myself immersed in a culture where the loosey-goosey use of any number of performance-enhancing drugs was rampant.  I, too, felt great pressure to perform at a high level.  And to get an edge, I, too, turned to illicit and banned substances.

It was a time in my life I like to refer to as “college.”  During those halcyon days of consequence-free youthful indiscretion, there is no way I can claim to have always been 100% sure of what I was putting into my body.  If I were to have failed a drug test at any point during my four year stint, I probably would not have been able to immediately figure out which of my many indulgences triggered a red flag, either.  And on the occasions that my degree of inebriation prompted a “What the hell are you on?” from offended bystanders, I wasn’t always up-front in describing the particular combination of intoxicants surging through my system.

Granted, I was just looking for something to help me crank out 25 pages on the sociology of complex organizations or heighten my enjoyment of Stop Making Sense and you were violating the public trust and tarnishing the reputation of our National Pastime, but our exploits have more in common than I would like to admit.  And even though you came off as a complete shitbird over the past week (a well-coached shitbird, but a shitbird nonetheless),  at the end of the day I am buying what you are selling.  Unfortunately, all you are selling is a glib cop-out story that still doesn’t really add up.

Given Major Leauge Baseball’s epic fail on all things steroid-related, I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt on this whole ordeal and let you get on with your career, I just ask you please stop saying you are stupid or naive or sorry.  While you and I may or may not have explicitly violated any rules with our substance-abuse, we were both cheating and we both knew it.  And had you not been caught, I am sure you would be showing just as much remorse for your past behavior as I do for mine, which is to say none at all.

I’ve had a dog in the fight for four of the last six Super Bowls.  I know there are scores of people out there that would give any number of appendages or offspring to see their favorite NFL team play in a Super Bowl let alone have the luxury of a semi-legitimate reason to root for teams from both Chicago and Boston, but I want to assure you it is not all hand-pounds and reacharounds.

At the risk of sounding like a total ingrate, I think it is worth pointing out that there are actually a few negatives of having more than a passing interest in the outcome of The Big Game:

You have to sweat the small stuff. Anytime that any of my favorite teams in any major sport are involved in a game of any sort or significance, I spend most of the day worrying about how crowded the bar is going to be, or how big of a television my friend has, or whether or not I bought enough booze, etc.  I am growing increasingly neurotic as I get older, so if you combine that nervous energy with any doubts about the actual outcome of the game in question, I am pretty much whipped by the time live coverage starts.

This year, I spent Sunday evening alternately squished on an uncomfortable couch, perched on an armrest and leaning against a doorjamb.  For some reason the game was tuned to the standard-definition feed for the entire first quarter, and even after that problem was rectified, my view was partially obstructed as a result of my bad posture and one of my friend’s huge noggin.  Additionally, there was no room in the refrigerator for the 12-pack of High Life I brought so by about 7:30 I was drinking tepid beer.  But you know what?  I couldn’t care less.

Regardless of the outcome, Monday morning is going to suck. Super Bowl XXXIX fell exactly on my 21st birthday so my friends were gracious enough to organize an enormous viewing party/birthday celebration ostensibly somewhat on my behalf.  Dozens of my closest acquaintances filed in to a cozy off campus apartment and took part in cold beer, Buffalo Joe’s, and a football shaped birthday cake.

I am sure I would have really enjoyed the shindig if I wasn’t boxing out the keg in the corner of the room with the only other Patriots fan in attendance, nervously pounding chicken wings, Camel Lights and pitchers of keg draft at a superhuman clip because I was too locked into the game to enter into any meaningful interpersonal interactions but needed to do something with my piehole to cut the tension.

By the start of the third quarter I was nearly blacked out and had no voice after going apeshit during Paul McCartney’s rendition of “Hey Jude” and, after the game had ending with the Patriots on top, I proceeded to stretch my drunk into the wee hours of the morning celebrating many happy returns.  Even through the sheen of a Super Bowl victory, thought, the heartburn and hangover made Monday morning pretty hard to endure.

I spent the first few hours of last year’s Super Bowl XLII in a similar way.  Although I was in a bar in New Orleans as opposed to an apartment in Evanston and I was pounding Abita Amber instead of Miller Light, all the important details are the same:  the other Patriot fans and I were glued to the set, stuffing our faces with greasy food, soaking ourselves in booze and chain smoking heaters.  When it was all said and done, I still drank until the wee hours of the morning, but this time it was in commiseration, not celebration.  Suffice it to say, Monday morning was rough.

This year I cut myself off before the fourth quarter and made it back home in time for the outrageous hour-long episode of The Office, which I watched perfectly buzzed and from the comfort of my bed.  I still felt like shit on Monday morning, but then again, I always feel like shit on Monday morning.

Gambling loses all its fun. Between pool squares, strip tabs, mulit-spot props and side bets, Super Bowl Sunday is best day for gambling ever.  It is kind of a shame to have such a huge focus on the final score that you are are forced to ignore the outcomes of the dozens of other wagers you may have placed, ranging from the length of the national anthem performance to how the NFC teams’s score compares to LeBron James’ point total from that afternoon’s NBA action.  I mean, how much consolation is hitting the halftime square if your hometown team is on the receiving end of a shellacking?  And what good is winning $100 on the coin toss if you end the night with a tally in the loss column?

As of late, my proclivity towards gambling has been inching closer and closer to “degenerate” territory, so I was pretty excited by the prospect of indiscriminately laying money on any number of lines without even a second thought about how may illicit activities may interfere with the cosmos or tip the karmic scales.

Dear Toby,

Whenever a new season of Top Chef hits the airwaves, it moves right to the top of the list of my favorite TV shows.  Everything else on my DVR queue moves down the priority list, even though it happens to be one of the few shows I have ever made a conscious effort to watch during live on a regular basis since acquiring time-shifting capabilities.  The program is nothing short of a masterpiece.

My fascination with cooking shows began back when I about six or seven and spent many Saturday afternoons watching The Frugal Gourmet with my grandpa, and then it was only a matter of time before I was sucked in by the scourge of reality-competition that saturated the airwaves around the turn of the century.  So when Top Chef was plucked from the ether – a reality show that exploited both my love of epicurean television and the guilty pleasure I take in watching people endure real-time criticism before being given their walking papers – it took approximately one quarter of one episode for me to get hooked.

Now, my taste in television is suspect at best, so just getting me to tune in doesn’t exactly speak volumes for any particular show, but anyone who has watched even a single minute of Top Chef can tell it easily rises above the fray of mediocre reality-competition smut that saturates the airwaves, and I think that the substantive and insightful commentary from the judges is a big reason why.  In a stroke of genius, the producers of the show bucked the trend of including a prickly British douche bag on the panel and instead opted for well-spoken industry experts completely devoid of any axes to grind.  That is, of course, until you took over for Gail Simmons.

You have been nothing short of a complete shitbird in your short tenure on the show.  To be honest, I didn’t really expect much from a guy who made his name bragging about how many people he pissed off while failing as both a magazine editor and a screenwriter, but you still managed to catch me off guard.

Something was different this week, though.  For the first time since arriving on the panel – and very possibly for the first time in your life – you weren’t a total dickhead.  For some as yet unexplained reason, you decided to dial it back and actually act civil towards the talented chefs cooking their balls off in a break neck competition.  Hell, you even indulged the batshit “taste the love” nonsense Carla throws around every time judges table rolls around.

This is a far cry from the trite one-liners you have been delivering for the past few weeks; generic one-liners that, to be perfectly honest, only served to make you sound like a total nerd.  I am not saying everyone should pull a Ben Lyons and lavish hyperbolic praise on all the I Am Legends of the world, but reciting condescending canned soundbites doesn’t offer any real insight into either your alleged intelligence or what, exactly, you found unacceptable about any particular offending dish.

Until recently, the only thing you added to Top Chef was a weird tension every time Tom and Padma were put in the precarious position of getting the conversation back on track after you talked out of your ass.  Now you seem to contributing something relevant to the discourse, which is probably a lot harder work than piling on with a biting metaphor that is neither creative nor funny, but I have to think it is also at least marginally more satisfying, right?

If there is one thing I have learned during my four plus years of maintaining a blog on an on-again, off-again basis, it is that topical, nondescript potshots are the currency of a bankrupt critic.  That was pretty much all you could find in the first edition of The Barryfest Chronicles, a site a I started around my junior year in college that did little more than answer the age-old question of “What would a drug-addled college student with nothing to really complain about complain about if given a forum to do so?”, so I know who satisfying they are to deliver but also how stupid they ultimately make you sound.

Anyone can hop on the pot and take a dump, but it takes skill and expertise to offer criticism while not simultaneously coming off as a piece of shit.

Top Chef is my favorite show on television and I just ask that you take what happened this week and build on it.  If I wanted to hear a snooty douchbag make himself look stupid by being a complete asshole to masters of the culinary arts, I wouldn’t turn off Iron Chef America everytime Jeffrey Steingarten grabs the mic.