Missoula's newest local newspaper
featuring monthly columns by a transplanted Jersey Boy.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
September 2011
The Perils of Karaoke
The Jersey Boy
I have a confession to make: I’m a karaoke junkie.
I’ve been riding Greyhound buses for years, traveling to random places and singing duets with strangers. There’s no better way of arriving at a new town than by finding the neighborhood karaoke bar, where you’ll meet locals looking for confirmation, support, and a touch of encouragement to get on stage. I’ve never fancied myself a great singer or a proper musician, but that doesn’t stop me from making a rock star (or a fool) of myself whenever I get the chance.
Karaoke in Missoula is as good as it gets. Wednesday night at the Badlander is my favorite downtown option, Monday night at Lucky Strike usually gets the biggest crowd in town, and Tuesday night at Harry David’s is the Granddaddy of Karaoke, with a live band backing you on stage for every song. This past month, however, the nature of karaoke in Missoula was shaken by the Western Montana regional competition of Talent Quest, a national championship of karaoke offering a shot at a recording contract.
(This prize, by the way, keeps getting funnier every time I think about it. Best-case scenario for the debut album? Forty-five minutes of elevator muzak with a Mad Libs lyric booklet printed in ten languages.)
I’m not against putting yourself on center stage and risking failure, nor am I necessarily against doing competitively what you’ve always done just for fun. But karaoke, at its core, works because everyone pretty much sucks, yet they know that the worse they are the more likely somebody will buy them a drink. No activity is more universally applauded for mediocrity than karaoke, and nothing is even close. If you are a great singer or a proper musician, karaoke shouldn’t be your scene, and you’ll probably be resented if it is.
All month people have been going on stage and listening to judges tell them they simply aren’t good enough. Karaoke represents, if not a mirror held up to nature, at least a microphone held up to the soul, and turning it into a graded performance defeats the purpose. Karaoke’s joy is in how it allows the shy and self-conscious to get over it on stage in front of a friendly audience, and judging by the disappointment on too many faces, we might not see them back up there again.
Look, America already has a karaoke competition, and it’s called “American Idol.” But this is Missoula, a town where failing to catch a single fish all day on the Blackfoot is still better than whatever else you could’ve been doing, where it doesn’t matter how long the M trail takes so long as you get to the top, where competitive spirits shouldn’t ever rise above the McCormick Park kickball league. Summer in Missoula is about doing what you love and then, when you’re done, finding new things to love, too. More importantly, summer in Missoula is about looking around at the sky, the rivers and the mountains and realizing that everything is “good enough,” whether or not you can hit the right notes.
Now that the competition is over I’m ready to get back to my roots, which is a relief because karaoke can be fun again and because it’s time for new endeavors. (A regular column in Missoula’s newest newspaper is a pretty good place to start.) You’ll still find me singing karaoke multiple nights each week, but from now on it will be nothing but Enrique Iglesias and Earth, Wind & Fire – off-key and embarrassing, just like it should be.
August 2011
The God of Animals, Aryn Kyle
Reviewed by the Jersey Boy
The first eighteen years of my life might as well have not existed. Looking back at my childhood in New Jersey, all I see is emptiness. Those eighteen years did exist, and they shaped me in ways that were both lasting and out of my control, but looking back it’s as though I were sleep-walking the entire time—born into a time and a situation I had no business being in the first place.
When I first visited Missoula just over a year ago I was unsure where I was going or what I was looking for but confident that it had to be somewhere. The second I stepped onto campus, though, there was no going back. To this day, I still can’t put into words exactly what it is about this town that hooked me, that makes me feel like my soul is at home. Maybe it’s something in the water (more likely it’s something in the view of town from above Mt. Sentinel), but though I know I’m not the only transplant swept up in the magic of Missoula, it doesn’t stop me from thinking that the magic is mine and mine alone. My childhood back east remains a lost period of my existence, but in Missoula I can finally move on.
It’s a scary thing to have no memory of the life you’ve forever lived, and a sad thing when you’re convinced a better world for you has existed the entire time. This sadness is at the core of The God of Animals, Missoula native Aryn Kyle’s heart-breakingly beautiful debut novel about a girl growing up in a life of desert, horses, and loss, a life leaving her wondering what she might have been had she lived in any world but her own.
When her sister leaves the family ranch to get married, twelve-year old Alice is left to survive in a world where nothing comes easy and everyone wishes for a life they never had. To cope, the people in Alice’s world create their own new realities, yet when Alice’s sister returns, the unavoidable difficulties of real life come with her. Even the people on the “good” side of town have problems, Alice discovers, but as their lives collide with hers and her family’s, she realizes that everyone is simply doing their best to escape the hell that is all around.
The God of Animals is a novel about the pain of knowing what you’re not and the great lengths we go to when all we want is a life like everyone else’s. Yet no matter how we try to avoid it, sadness is everywhere and nothing—not even the illusions we create—lasts forever. Though it’s wishful thinking to imagine what we might have been in any world but our own, the world we’re born into is the world we’re in, whether we’re meant for it or not.
As Alice finds out, nothing is ever easy, and even in a better world there is still danger and sadness waiting around every corner. Yet Aryn Kyle’s novel is ultimately uplifting because I know it simply isn’t the end—I’m living proof, because seven years after I left New Jersey here I am in the paradise of Western Montana. Though I can’t help but wonder how things might have turned out had I grown up in a different reality, and though I know those years will follow me wherever I go, here my past is truly prologue, and my destiny is mine to create. Although Alice learns the hard way that the world is simply what it is and nothing more, I can take comfort knowing what she’ll learn as soon as she leaves the desert—there’s a Missoula out there for everyone.
Reviewed by the Jersey Boy
The first eighteen years of my life might as well have not existed. Looking back at my childhood in New Jersey, all I see is emptiness. Those eighteen years did exist, and they shaped me in ways that were both lasting and out of my control, but looking back it’s as though I were sleep-walking the entire time—born into a time and a situation I had no business being in the first place.
When I first visited Missoula just over a year ago I was unsure where I was going or what I was looking for but confident that it had to be somewhere. The second I stepped onto campus, though, there was no going back. To this day, I still can’t put into words exactly what it is about this town that hooked me, that makes me feel like my soul is at home. Maybe it’s something in the water (more likely it’s something in the view of town from above Mt. Sentinel), but though I know I’m not the only transplant swept up in the magic of Missoula, it doesn’t stop me from thinking that the magic is mine and mine alone. My childhood back east remains a lost period of my existence, but in Missoula I can finally move on.
It’s a scary thing to have no memory of the life you’ve forever lived, and a sad thing when you’re convinced a better world for you has existed the entire time. This sadness is at the core of The God of Animals, Missoula native Aryn Kyle’s heart-breakingly beautiful debut novel about a girl growing up in a life of desert, horses, and loss, a life leaving her wondering what she might have been had she lived in any world but her own.
When her sister leaves the family ranch to get married, twelve-year old Alice is left to survive in a world where nothing comes easy and everyone wishes for a life they never had. To cope, the people in Alice’s world create their own new realities, yet when Alice’s sister returns, the unavoidable difficulties of real life come with her. Even the people on the “good” side of town have problems, Alice discovers, but as their lives collide with hers and her family’s, she realizes that everyone is simply doing their best to escape the hell that is all around.
The God of Animals is a novel about the pain of knowing what you’re not and the great lengths we go to when all we want is a life like everyone else’s. Yet no matter how we try to avoid it, sadness is everywhere and nothing—not even the illusions we create—lasts forever. Though it’s wishful thinking to imagine what we might have been in any world but our own, the world we’re born into is the world we’re in, whether we’re meant for it or not.
As Alice finds out, nothing is ever easy, and even in a better world there is still danger and sadness waiting around every corner. Yet Aryn Kyle’s novel is ultimately uplifting because I know it simply isn’t the end—I’m living proof, because seven years after I left New Jersey here I am in the paradise of Western Montana. Though I can’t help but wonder how things might have turned out had I grown up in a different reality, and though I know those years will follow me wherever I go, here my past is truly prologue, and my destiny is mine to create. Although Alice learns the hard way that the world is simply what it is and nothing more, I can take comfort knowing what she’ll learn as soon as she leaves the desert—there’s a Missoula out there for everyone.
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