by john | Jan 13, 2010 | Music
And not Jerry Douglas, either. Bluegrass fans will get the reference, and if you’re not, you should be. One piece of awful news this week – the Neighborhood Theatre in the NoDa area in Charlotte might be shutting down. I find this particularly distressing because it’s one of my favorite concert venues, and is perfectly sized for a lot of the shows that I want to go see. Some of the best concerts I’ve ever attended were at the Neighborhood Theatre, and it would be a shame if no one could step forward and buy the place. I wish I had the resources, but I don’t, but if there’s a consortium of folks that are looking for someone to help with tech and promotions, lemme know.
But back to great concerts I’ve seen there. The first time I ever saw Robert Earl Keen do a whole set was at the Neighborhood. I’d seen REK at the McGlohon Theatre at Spirit Square, but didn’t watch the whole set. This time I watched the whole thing, and rocked out with all the other hillbillies all the way up til the main breaker blew out in the middle of Road Goes on Forever, and the last piece of the show was done in the dark with only monitors for sound. It didn’t matter to the crowd, we were all drunk and knew all the words, anyway.
The first time I saw Great Big Sea was at the Neighborhood. I’m pretty sure I went alone, and sat in the middle of the room and just jammed while the boys from up north put on a helluva show. The John Hiatt show was another one i saw alone, because Suzy bailed at the last minute. John played alone and (mostly) acoustic, with his guitar, a stomp board for percussion and an electric piano. It was pretty amazing. That was his Tiki Bar tour, and I don’t know how they got him there for a solo show, but it was pretty awesome. So was the first time I saw Reckless Kelly, the first time I saw Hayseed Dixie, the last time I saw Sam Bush, when he played a bunch of cuts off his Circles Around Me album, which I think is his best solo album so far, and when Bonnie and I went to see Peter Rowan. We sat in the seats toward the side of the stage, and I’m pretty sure Bonnie scared Peter a bit when she yelled out for “Rain and Snoooooowwwww!” Peter jumped a little, but he played the song for her.
So it’s been a great venue for music in Charlotte for the last ten years or so, and has had a lot to do with the revitalization of the NoDa neighborhood, so I really hope somebody can come along and pick up the lease and keep the place rolling along. Otherwise it’ll be just another victim of the tightening economy.
by john | Jan 12, 2010 | Real Life, Writing
So two things of happiness this evening, as I remain freezing my arse off in Atlanta. It’s been colder down here than in Charlotte for the past several days, and this Southern boy does NOT like the cold. But anyway…
I just got done chatting with the nice lady at the student loan joint, who informed me that the first nice lady I talked with was wrong, and my payment isn’t taking a 25% increase, only to be followed by a 25% increase ten days later. I am still stuck on this graduated repayment plan, which will see my payment increase by 25% every two years, but that means that my payment goes up again in January of 2012. By that time I think there will be little enough left on my total loan balance that I can hopefully just pay the fucker off. Sooner than that if I get anything working the WSOP from home this summer, but who knows what’s going to happen in that regard. So, on the one hand, my payment is increasing substantially this month. But not so substantially that I can’t make the payment and still pay all my bills, so that was a good conversation.
But the much better news is that one of my poems was accepted into the March edition of the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature! The poem “Aftermath,” which was briefly featured here before being taken down to maintain its unpublished status, was accepted after just one submission! Now I know that it’s rare to have the kind of success right out the gate that I’ve had. I won the Charlotte Writer’s Club Board Prize for Poetry right before the end of the year last year, and two of my poems were selected as finalists in the Atlanta Review poetry contest, and now one of my pieces has been accepted for publication on the first shot. This is, as we say in poker, too small a sample size. But these little successes are encouraging, and it’s keeping me writing new stuff. I’ve decided not to enter any poetry book contests right now, because I don’t think I have a solid enough body of work to warrant a book of only poetry. I am going to branch out a little and submit some short stories and non-fiction, and there are a couple of first novel contests that I’m looking at as well. But if I can keep my nose to it and keep submitting, hopefully the list of publications on my resume will continue to grow.
And for those of you who’ve known me for a while, Aftermath was written about my uncle’s suicide. That was my first attempt at putting those feelings together on paper, and I’m glad that the folks at Dead Mule felt that it was worthy of publication. I think it honors Ed’s memory and my family by sharing the universal nature of loss and our common reactions to it. So it’s kind of an important piece to me, and I’m glad that I’ll be able to share it with a wider audience than just here on this little piece of the internets.
Home tomorrow afternoon, then Charlotte StoryTellers Guild Thursday night, Just Do It at Theatre Charlotte Friday night, Charlotte Writer’s Club Tuesday night, Charlotte Mini-Con next Saturday (attending, not showing anything there) and Carolina Writers’ Showcase next Saturday Night. Mark your calendars for anything that seems interesting, hope to see you there!
by john | Jan 12, 2010 | Real Life
Warning – the below post includes no pics of hot college cheerleaders, nor does it include any hot pics of men in cheerleader skirts.
Full Disclosure – the above sentence is purely for the SEO spiders in a shameless attempt to increase webcrawler traffic.
But I’m really not going to wear a cheerleader skirt. Even though that seems to be most of my job. I’m a sales manager, which can mean many things to many things. And sometimes different things on different days to the same people. Most of the time, I concentrate on the sales part of the title, as I’m one of the leading sales people in my office. That’s actually the easy part. After 14 years in the same industry, with the same company, in the same location, I know my market. I understand who the players are and how order go to market. I understand what projects to go after and which ones to take a pass on. And I win more than I lose, which at the end of the day is a pretty good marker for success.
The manager part is way harder. Like many industries, ours does not hire managers, we promote them from within. Just like principals that are promoted out of the classroom, this can be a hit or miss proposition. Many great sales people can’t manage worth a damn, and for the first few years I was in this position, I was one of them. On the upside, I was only managing two people besides myself, so my ineptitude was pretty harmless. Fortunately for me, as our group expanded to where I was managing more people, my company realized that we probably needed some training. I balked at some of the training, but what it did teach me was that I needed to learn how to do this thing. So I read some books, and I read some blogs, and I started to work at it.
And what I’ve come to realize is that there are bunches of different types of managers. There’s the minutiae manager, who never misses a meeting or a follow-up call, who has all their reports in on time and doesn’t have any trouble with paperwork. It may come as some surprise, but that ain’t me. There’s the rah-rah manager, who inspires their people to ever greater heights by their boundless enthusiasm and love for the job. That’s not really me, either. I try to be more of the analytical and fun manager, but I end up more the grumpy cheerleader.
I’m snarky by nature, but I have an ability to see complex things in fairly simple terms. This allows me to slice through a lot of BS and tell people what’s really going on. I have to fight my natural bitchiness to keep the message positive, but I am at least able to boil things down into one or two sentences that are easily understood by everyone. This talent for synthesis is something one rep of mine remarks on frequently, and I tend to use it a lot when I’m trying to inspire my folks. Sometimes it doesn’t work. Some folks just aren’t ever going to get it, no matter what, and eventually with them you’re going to cut bait. But most folks just need to understand the process (or maybe have the process tweaked for their talents) in order for them to succeed. So I spend a lot of time being the grumpy cheerleader. How do you manage people?
by john | Jan 11, 2010 | Real Life, Travel
and Jebus it’s cold! By now the temp is finally above freezing, and the pipes in our office have finally thawed, after being frozen solid all weekend. It’s funny that I spent my weekend 300 miles north of here, and it was warmer in NC than down here in Georgia. Weather’s funny that way, I guess.
This weekend saw the latest episode of 30-something Sales Goofs try to Drink Like College Kids, which is never an attractive show, and leads to random people in the wrong gender restroom and a very baffled hotel front desk the next day. It was a work event, and after we all worked all day we went to the restaurant in the hotel for dinner. Without reservations. In Winston-Salem, NC. In January. To say the restaurant staff was a little overwhelmed would be an exercise in understatement. To say that the smoke emanating from the kitchen was more reminiscent of a July 4th barbeque than anything resembling fine dining would be fairly accurate. To deliver six complimentary bottles of wine as an apology for six completely screwed up steaks is a pretty good trade, especially when none of the screwed-up steaks was mine. To close down the bar at 10PM, however, was completely unfortunate.
So since we knew the bar was going to close early, we ordered a bunch of rounds of shots right before last call. So that was painful enough, but we weren’t tired enough to do the reasonable thing and go to bed for our 10AM exhibition the next day. So I, in my incredibly poor judgement, went to the hotel lobby and bought some beer. Or more to the point, bought a dozen beers. And sent more people in after me to clean out the fridge. Not a big deal, since there were still a bunch of us, and only about two beers apiece at that point. On top of all the shots. Which came on top of the wine we drank at dinner. Which of course was preceded by a few cocktails before dinner. But I think if we’d only emptied the fridge the one time, we woulda been okay.
How’s that for foreshadowing? If we’d only emptied the fridge the one time…? Right there I tell you that we did indeed return to the fridge for more beer, and did indeed empty the fridge again, and this time since our number had dwindled, the one of our number that went for the beer was smart enough to leave it outside the door to the lobby so it would stay cold. Frankly it was probably chilling faster outside than it was in the fridge, given the relative temperatures of both last weekend. So none of us had our keychain bottle openers with us, and there was only one cigarette lighter to use as an opener, so the practice of opening beers on the brick steps was put into play. That of course led to a text message the next morning saying “I cut my tongue on a beer bottle last night?” To which I responded with a “yes,” and no further explanation.
So we drank all that beer, and then the restock beer, and then it was 4:30 AM, and we were truly not looking forward to being at the show by 10AM the next morning. But the rule is, you have to answer the bell. You can do whatever stupid shit you want at night, as long as you can answer the bell the next morning. And when I reached checkout the next morning right about on time, I looked over at one of my obviously worse-for-wear compatriots from the night before, and said “Welcome to the team.”
by john | Jan 11, 2010 | Writing
So Saturday afternoon I left our work event in Winston-Salem to attend a poetry workshop at the Main Street Rag offices outside Charlotte. Most of my hangover faded by the time the workshop kicked off, and I got some pretty valuable information out of it. It was essentially two workshops, the first half dealing with revising and polishing your work before submitting, and the second half dealt with how to select literary journals and places to submit your work.
I found the second half of the workshop really valuable for the information I gathered, because I’m very new to the whole submission process and have no idea how simultaneous submissions work, or things like that. So that was good as a learning experience, but I got a lot more out of the first half. Mostly because it woke up a part of my brain that I haven’t used in years, that piece that takes apart a poem and puts it back together stronger. There’s a certain analytical bent to revising your work that has been pretty dormant in me since I got back to creative writing, and I think it will make my work stronger, not just in my poetry but my short stories as well.
This whole “be a writer” kick is an interesting ride, and I need to make sure that I refine my technique and acquire all the skils that I can to augment whatever minimum of talent that I might have started with. Because talent isn’t enough, and there’s no real judge of whether or not I have any. But if I polish my technique as much as I can, I can create good work, and with the right information behind me, I can get some stuff published and maybe the next time I publish a book, it won’t be on my own nickel. And maybe, just maybe, sometime I can make a few pennies doing this.
