TEAM LAST CALL

Last month, Team Last Call began an inspirational series of columns for English majors addressing issues like masculinity, grammar mastery and the remarkable way in which those two things cancel each other out.

As a general rule, all English majors are fueled by the same basic elements: Pringles, Little Debbie snack cakes and a crushing set of insecurities. And TMZ. We are not an outdoor breed, and as such shouldn’t ever be expected to participate in activities that involve dirt, shirtlessness or roughhousing of any sort. We also have poor motor skills and tend to struggle with things like 1) upper body strength, 2) lower body strength and 4) math.

But we have positive qualities too, such as our ability to write self-help articles. Which brings us to today’s column, in which we will examine the practice of writing for a living and how it relates to fatherhood. There’s nothing quite like theresponsibility for another human life to really drive home the point that, by nature of the fact that you’re an English major, you don’t know how to do anything. Yet, as a father, you’re expected to have all the answers – especially if you’re having a little boy. There are things that you as a father need to teach your son. Tough things. Manly things. Things you know nothing about, like carburetors and leaf blowers and … what do you call those things again? The ones that are always denting your car when you’re not looking? Wives.

No, you don’t know about any of that stuff because you, the English major, were too busy crying over Artax dying in the Swamps of Sadness to learn anything useful growing up. While the other little boys played soccer and earned their Boy Scout badges, you spent your summers pretend-making out with Winnie Cooper in your elbow and trying in vain to get past Soda Popinski on Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out.

But it’s important not to let the past get you down. Just because you never learned how to “change a tire” or “fix a leaky faucet” or “develop pectoral muscles” doesn’t mean you’re not fit to be a proper male role model. Your son will simply have a different kind of father figure to look up to and emulate. The kind that has Lady Gaga on his iPod. On the plus side, by the time everyone’s kids are all grown, yours will be able to punctuate circles around the rest of them. Sure, he might be plump and dateless, but he’ll be able to write a sonnet like it’s going out of style. Which it undoubtedly has.

While some little boys grow up with images of their fathers fighting crime and rescuing kittens from burning buildings and felling trees with their bare hands, your kid will have visions of you curled up on the couch with a laptop balanced on your stomach, watching reruns of What Not To Wear when you thought no one was looking. But in your sedentary state, you’ll be able to teach him such invaluable manly lessons as 1) A scoop top and an A-line skirt can have a slimming effect on the hips, 2) It is too possible to make a meal out of Easy Cheese, and 3) As long as you’re wearing sweatpants, things like tissues and napkins will always be redundant.

Some little boys learn how to fish, or build furniture, or design little wooden racecars that speed down the track and win first prize like the one in that Subaru Forester commercial. You know the one I’m talking about. The one that makes you feel like a horrible father, even if you’re a teenage girl, for not knowing how to help your son build a car like that. Well, winning first place in the Pinewood Derby might seem nice for some kids, but it’s not in the cards for yours. Your son is going to enjoy advantages of a different variety. Other fathers could teach him how to drive a stick shift or properly grill a steak. I guess that’s exciting, if you’re into “knowing” how to “do stuff.” But only you, the English major, can teach him the crucial, panty-dropping art of correct semi-colon usage; you can also teach him the best way to hand a credit card to the plumber, how to eat his weight at Hot Diggity Dog and, most importantly, how to hide it from his wife when he gets home for dinner.

In summation, English majors have nothing to fear when it comes to fatherhood, apart from the certainty of failure. But other than that, you’ll do just fine. And who knows? If you keep your child focused on the right kind of activities, maybe in a few years he can show you how to knock out Soda Popinski.

“I don’t necessarily want to have the first line of my obituary be, ‘He played a good organ patch.’”

Ah, the plight of the sideman, the second fiddle, the often-faceless, underpaid, rarely laid unsung hero of rock and roll. As far as the breed goes, Franz Nicolay is among the more recognizable, as much for his kooky handlebar mustache as his high-profile gigs in The Hold Steady and the World/Inferno Friendship Society. He’s a magnificent musician, an accomplished guitarist and accordion player whose fired-up piano is often the match to the Hold Steady powder keg. But does Nicolay get the glory? Of course not. He’s a sideman.

So what’s a Number Two to do? For better or worse, the answer in most cases is “solo album,” which is music speak for “vapid, masturbatory disaster.” Ever hear a Gene Simmons record? OK then.

In Nicolay’s case, however, the solo album is a revelation in its own right – if not for breaking new ground musically, then for illuminating exactly where his bands get a good portion of their spunk from [he also performs in Balkan klezmer band Guignol and chamber-pop collective Anti-Social Music]. Major General, released in January, is a curious, vibrant record that skips audaciously from all-American barnburners to gypsy romps. Flanked by a roster of musicians that includes members of World/Inferno and Dresden Dolls, Nicolay bellows cathartically and operatically about everything from subway graffiti to Jeff Penalty, a replacement singer for the Dead Kennedys. The music can be melodramatic and over-earnest, but at least it’s honest. Above all, it’s obvious that the album is less of a vanity project than a means for Nicolay to find a home for some the nomadic songs wandering around his brain.

“I didn’t feel like I had much to prove,” says Nicolay. “I had just built up a collection of songs that didn’t have an obvious home in World/Inferno or The Hold Steady or any of the other bands. A couple of the songs I’ve had around forever, and I just felt like, ‘Even if I don’t ever play this song live, I just want to get it on a record and move on.’”

Major General is the beneficiary of Nicolay’s lifelong musical wanderlust. The songs cascade off each other, punk bleeding into gypsy bleeding into – was that a clarinet solo? When isolated, only a few songs (”Jeff Penalty,” “Dead Sailor”) raise the pulse the way a Hold Steady song might, but as a whole, the album captivates with its sheer scope and ambition.

“I get excited about novelty,” Nicolay says. “I’ll get really excited about Balkan music for six months, and then I’ll get really excited about the Beach Boys for six months. There’s always some tidbit that I’ll get out of each of them about ways to sing background vocals or where you put the glockenspiel overdub or how the string arrangement for a George Jones record differs from a string arrangement on a Divine Comedy record.And all that stuff goes in the cauldron and can bubble up in unpredictable ways.”

Nicolay brings his mustache, his guitar and his botanist friend (he’ll have to explain that one himself) to ABC for a special solo show this month.

*Reprinted from Fly Magazine

Lancaster Countians get a crash-course in Tuvan culture when Alash Ensemble, a quartet of master throat singers, visits the area for a special performance.

Tuva, a Siberian neighbor of Mongolia and a republic of the Russian Federation, has inspired curiosity around the globe with its singular form of singing, in which the vocalist produces a low, guttural tone and, through careful manipulation of the vocal tract, splinters the tone into two, three or even four notes simultaneously. Depending on the singer’s specific mode of throat singing, the “extra” tones resemble anything from a whistle to a songbird to, in the “kargyraa” style, the cries of a yak. It’s a surreal, improbable-sounding exercise that requires excruciatingly nuanced control of muscles that most humans rarely, if ever, use.

The only thing as unlikely as the sounds these men are producing is the story of Sean Quirk, an Ohio-born, Wisconsin-raised man who now travels the world as manager and interpreter for the group.

Quirk first encountered throat singing while in school in St. Paul, Minnesota. His fascination with an album he heard by master singer Huun-Huur-Tu eventually led him to try the artform for himself – for better or worse.

“I started imitating a couple months after I first heard and was blown away by the music,” he says in a Fly Magazine interview during Alash’s latest North American tour. “I made a lot of bad noises.”

After learning what he could on his own, Quirk earned a Fulbright fellowship and soon packed his bags for the south of Siberia to study at the feet of the masters. Soon after arriving in Tuva in 2003, he met Alash, a group of young men as beloved for their steadfast commitment to tradition as their vision for marrying the music with modern influences.

“They had been an ensemble going on five years at the time and were all members of the newly formed Tuvan National Orchestra,” Quirk recalls. “Being of a similar age, and musicians, they and the orchestra took me on as a student in Tuvan music. Naturally, we became friends, as the orchestra kind of adopted me in a sense, to the point of letting me sit in on the bass doshpuluur [a Tuvan lute], a post which eventually became my official job in Tuva to the present.”

Over the next six years, Quirk would marry a Tuvan woman, have two daughters and set up a permanent home within the culture that still holds his fascination today.

“Nothing can describe hearing and feeling it live. I have been living there a long time and seen a lot of Alash shows, and it still gets me deep each time to hear it up close,” he attests. “People also shouldn’t just expect ‘fancy vocal tricks,’ but rather a deep and richly developed music involving instruments and vocals which simultaneously feels exotic and intimately familiar.”

*Reprinted from Fly Magazine