Weihenstephaner Kristall Weissbier

I had high hopes for this brew, and was intrigued by the words "crystal clear" on the label - I expected it to actually be clear, like the Crystal Pepsi. It was a pale and wan yellow, but still yellow nonetheless.

Supposedly this Austrian brewer has a "secret method of fermentation" and filtration, which leaves the beer being free of yeast. But I like yeast. And with the alcohol content appallingly low here - 5 percent - I can't see much reason to plunk down the bills for this stuff again. I do like thin, light, diaphanous beers, but heck, I coulda had a cerveza.

- - JSH

Death and Pugilism

The recent celebrity death wave isn't over. You know, the one that's taken out Billy Mays, Dom DeLuise, Koko Taylor, Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Pina Bausch, Sky Saxon, John Keel, Paquito Cordero, Secret Storm's Ken Roberts, Steve McNair, Sam Butera, Allen Klein, James Baker Hall, Gale Storm, Robert McNamara, Tim Krekel, Bob Bogle, David Carradine, Walter Cronkite, and Gordon Waller, all in a short span of time. It seems to still be ongoing (Gwenda Bond waggishly jested "these things come in twelves now", but I think now that baker's dozen comes with lagniappe).

The world of Boxing isn't safe from the new zeitgeist of passing spirits either - we lost the great Arturo Gatti, of whom Wikipedia reports:

On July 11, 2009, Gatti was found murdered in a hotel in Ipojuca, Pernambuco, Brazil. Gatti's widow has been charged with first degree murder after the strap of her purse was found stained with blood. Gatti was to attend his sister's wedding the following day. Rodrigues could not explain how she spent more than ten hours in the hotel room without realizing Gatti was dead. Former boxing champion Acelino Freitas, who was a close friend of Gatti, claimed Gatti and Rodrigues were having problems and were about to separate.

Like the song says, "Women can't be trusted". Beware of ladies holding a thermal detonator. Cherchez la femme.


And just this past weekend, Vernon "The Viper" Forrest was putting air in his tires at an Atlanta gas station when some weasel walks up and robs him and kills him. According to the police report, the shooter and a second person left the scene in a red Monte Carlo, and they're still at large. Bring me the heads of these men. Seriously. Go.


On July 11th, we lost the great Irish boxer Johnny Caldwell, not to a psycho girlfriend or an errant lowlife, but to the big C. After a long battle with it, I should add. Caldwell's glory days were from 1955-1964, and he took home the Bronze in the 1956 Olympics.


And at the beginning of the month, Alexis Argüello allegedly committed suicide. Argüello had retired from boxing and gone on to a prestigious political career as Mayor of Managua, Nicaragua. The eternally sketchily-sourced Wikipedia again:

Argüello died around 1 a.m. local time on July 1, 2009, after he allegedly shot himself through the heart in Managua, according to a report from Channel 8 national television. Reports now say there could be some foul play involved.

The national police have confirmed the death, but are still awaiting the results of the autopsy.

Those close to Alexis are saying that he was becoming progressively disenchanted with the Ortegas and the Sandinista government, and was planning an imminent departure from the Sandinista political party. To keep this from happening which potentially could have fomented revolution against the Sandinistas, the Ortegas had Alexis killed.

- - JSH

The Case of Ludger Aucoin

This squib appeared in the October 1964 issue of Police Gazette, and it's a great big mystery, even bigger than Diddie Wa Diddie.

According to Boxrec, the real name of 1920s boxer Young Donahue is Phil Powers, not Ludger Aucoin. A Google search for Mr. Aucoin only brings up references to a child who was born on March 3, 1910 and died on October 7, 1910. Probably safe to say this is not our man.

Police Gazette wasn't exactly renowned for its accuracy or fact-checking, but it seems like a really weird thing to make up. If you're going to make up fake news, can't you do any better than "old boxer nobody remembers is a now a bartender in Maine"? And where'd they pull the name "Ludger Aucoin" out of?

What I wonder is, was this guy some sort of con man, using the identity of a dead infant (which, as the Loompanics books teach, is the best way to do it) and telling people that he used to be the boxer Young Donahue, as part of some scam?

- - JSH

Cheeseburger & Fries: a Photocopy of a Memory of a Photograph

The photo above was taken circa 1997 during a performance in the Reynolds Building on the University of Kentucky's campus. The original, a Polaroid, is lost, yet the image above is a photocopy used as part of a poster advertising a Cheeseburger & Fries performance at the defunct Hip Joynt in Lexington, Kentucky.

What were we singing? And almost never did JSH and I switch out with me on guitar and him on drums. I still have that Iron Maiden t-shirt.

JSH has pointed out that I seem to, however unconsciously in the moment, be invoking the spirit of the famous snapshot of a young Elvis.

To quote myself from this era (the 90s, not the 50s of big E up there, but who's counting?): "I got the holy spirit/got it so bad/can't see nothing/can't see my head."

I sing songs, then tomorrow & now. I have questions. Time does not provide answers. I have memories. They are as obscure and untrustworthy as the fluctuating affection of a fickle young and beguiling woman.

-- JTD

Cheeseburger & Fries: 1998 Was a Very Good Year

I was digging around in the personal Dockery archives, spanning over a decade of my career in this business we call show, the other day and stumbled upon this article with accompanying photo (above) about the Cardinal Deli scene in Berea (in the period in which it was also known as "Fast Eddie's") from the the college's student newspaper, the Pinnacle, dated November 17th, 1998. The article was by Shelby Baker, and I present here the paragraph from the article in excerpt concerning our lovable Cheeseburger & Fries:

"Mostly the performers have been playing some brand or another of folk music, acoustic guitar and of course blues fits into that, because it is played by folks as well as many others. Cheeseburger and Fries is another matter completely and not entirely fit for print. I met the two men, 'Cheeseburger' (who has another name) and 'Fries' (who's named something else, too) but cannot for the life of me remember what they look like or how they got from Jackson County to Berea to begin with. A wild guess would place them somewhere adjacent to alabaster on the periodic table, but to hear them play there isn't too many periods and more likely run-ons. The guitar player, 'Cheeseburger,' looks like he might have a boot dagger, 'Fries,' the drummer, kept turning real red while was singing and jumping around; he may have a heart condition, and there was a man, maybe his name is Ed, who was definitely an assassin if I've ever seen one but there to make everything nice and easy. No trouble, you understand."

Then, on the same page, there's yet another piece by Shelby Baker (in which he seems to then recall our names, yet forgets that JSH is Cheeseburger) covering the "Iron Horse Cafe," a literary/music performance series, put together by Andrew Watson at Berea College, and it covers performances by Dockery and Holland individually, and I present those sentences in excerpt for your further perusal...

"Todd (Fries from 'Cheeseburger and Fries') read excerpts from 'Black Lung,' a Lexington magazine [actually a chapbook by me and published by Creeps--JTD]. He was accompanied by guitar which only added to the hipster climate. Todd is a performer in his heart, however black it may be[...]Jeffrey Scott Holland read poetry he wrote. 'Clean' is a fine example of subversive humor."

--JTD

Michael Jackson, thou art avenged!

Nothing, and I mean nothing, sums up our times like Michael Jackson. Everything about this man's life was so pluperfectly odd that future generations, looking back, will have their doubts that it all really happened.

But it did.


The Jackson Five bio-pic flick they're showing ad nauseum on TV this week seems improbable even now: a man with too many children, living in the hood of Detroit, decides he's going to force his kids to become a Four Tops-like dancing-and-singing group, whether they want to be or not. When they don't dance just right or miss a note on their instruments they've just been handed, he severely punishes them, whips them, beats them, ridicules them. Sort of like The Partridge Family or The Brady Bunch gone horribly wrong, on the skids.

But despite the forced-family-band's ineptitude, they actually start to gain success against all odds, primarily because of the young Michael's obvious skills. Michael, whose best friend is a rat whom he talks to and confides in (until it's tragically killed in a mousetrap) foreshadows his song "Ben" for the film of the same name, whose child protagonist befriends killer rodents.


Huge worldwide fame follows, and the guy just keeps getting weirder and weirder in the process. His facial features keep morphing, his dances become more and more bizarre, and yet the public loves him all the more. He racks up the biggest album in show business history, which is improbable not only for his weirdness, but because this came at a time when MTV and most radio stations had an unspoken segregation policy and kept "white music" and "black music" in separate little boxes. MJ single-handedly smashed those boxes.



He could have stopped after Thriller and done nothing else, and still been a legend. But like Colonel Kurtz, he kept on going and he did it his way. Rather than play it safe, he just kept on cultivating an ever-weirder public image. It was later revealed that most of the stories circulated to the tabloids were actually leaked to them by Jackson himself, who took perverse delight in taking his pop star reputation to new zeniths of strangeness. The kooky "hyperbaric chamber" he slept in was a popular one of his self-perpetuated rumors, and also the accusation that his rival Prince was using remote telekinetic powers to attack his chimp. (MJ would later go on to name not one, but two of his children Prince.)


Then came the series of accusations about the children. While I won't belabor the point, suffice it to say that I don't believe any of those accusations. To quote Marlon Brando's wise maxim, "I have heard so many lies told about myself, that I no longer believe anything anyone tells me about anyone else."

Things kept getting even weirder past that, like showing up at a shopping mall in Bahrain, dressed in middle-Eastern drag. The televised interview with that condescending scumbag Martin Bashir was MJ's big chance to put on a good public face and do some PR damage control - and instead, what did he do? He took the football and ran the other way on the field, making wacky, controversial statements and further cementing public perception that he was way out of touch with reality and completely nuts. And he did it deliberately, with a smirk and a wink and a nudge and a nod.


This, then, is MJ's greatest power - extremely sensitive soul though he was, he was supremely capable of mustering up the cojones to not give a fuck what anyone else on the planet thought about him, and to say what he felt regardless of repercussions.

For this alone, I proudly bestow MJ a posthumous honorary membership in the Old Older of Transylvania Gentlemen, even though he wasn't a Kentuckian.

- - JSH