THE WYMAN WEEKLY

Underemployed. Unattached. Unimpressed.

Issue 32 November 19,1996

 

 

                                                                  

I got a letter in the mail this week from the Rock Critics Association. Dear Wyman, it reads, we have received your application for membership, but have noted that you recently wrote in your weekly 368 words on Wilco without mentioning Son Volt or Uncle Tupelo. In light of this, your application has been rejected. You may reapply in one year.

 

BROKEN IS THE PROMISE

 

I was making coffee at work the other day, and this lady who I’d never seen before came up to me and said “You’re unique. It’s the rare male around here who will bother to make the coffee.” At first hearing the words “rare male,” I thought she was merely looking at me as a piece of meat. But she wasn’t checking me out - what she was doing was putting down my whole gender. What I did, of course, was betray men everywhere by smiling and acknowledging the truth of her statement. I said “I’m a temp, and everywhere I go it’s the same.” Now I’m starting to see who that fifteen-step-how-to-make-coffee memo might be for.

 

MUSIC

 

The Chixdiggit show in the Entry last Saturday was sorta like a Billy Bragg show in that the speaking vs. songs ratio was about 50/50. And like Billy Bragg, you remembered the speaking parts more so than the songs. Which isn’t a bad thing with Billy Bragg, because once you decipher things through his accent, you get informative and witty history and economics lectures (it was from Billy that I learned to call the Republicans the Capitalist Party and the Democrats the Wannabe Capitalist Party.)

 

With Chixdiggit, the accent of the irrepressibly enthusiastic and baby-faced lead singer is manageable, because they’re from Calgary. The spoken words aren’t really lectures, more like stream-of-consciousness stories and facts about hockey, football, beer, Pamela Anderson, and girlfriends. There were constant references to how great a place Minneapolis is, but beneath the niceties were digs at our lack of an NHL team, pro-Packer sentiments, and insults directed at the Vikings. But hey, we don’t have an NHL team and the Pack has won two Super Bowls, which is two more than the Purple have, so I couldn’t complain. The singer also constantly made fun of the cooler-than-thou contingent of the Entry crowd (those are the folks who just stand there and stare at the band, which yes is what I do but sometimes I smile) and somewhere in between all this banter the band was able to blast through their fast garage anthems like “Henry Rollins Is No Fun” (not to be confused with Sugar Ray’s “Danzig Needs a Hug”), “Hemp Hemp Hooray” (a singalong!), and “Toilet Seat Is Coming Down” (which is what I’ve been told happens when you get a girlfriend.)

 

Just so the gals out there know - here I go betraying again - “chicks dig it” is what a guy says as a comeback to another guy’s putdown. For instance:

 

Wyman Buddy (sarcastically): Yo Wyman - niiiice sideburns!

 

Wyman: Hey, the chixdiggit!

 

As none of us know what chicks truly dig, this response is many times a successful bluff.

 

 

EVERYBODY NEEDS A HOME

 

It was good to get back to the Entry again (no tap beer in the Entry on Saturday, though, hopefully that is temporary and oh yeah - thanks, Minnesota Brewing, for making the once-great Grain Belt Premium in a bottle taste like fruit juice). I’ve been in a First Avenue drought lately, but looking at my calendar, I plan on being there at least seven times between this writing and Christmas. Hopefully, shopping won’t get in the way.

 

I WROTE THIS AT WORK...

 

The plan is as follows: you become part of Corporate America’s “team.” You do so by buying into their empty slogans and promises of empowerment. The trade-off is that you get to sit in meetings to help determine what color fax paper your company uses. You don’t get real raises like in the old days, but the psychic income of seeing that fax paper and knowing that you helped pick it out is supposed to go along with your measly cost-of-living increase. With that puny COL increase, you are encouraged to go out (after the bills are paid) and buy loads of Corporate America’s stuff. A car, another car, a cell phone, another cell phone, a suit, another suit, some shoes, some more shoes, a print that says COURAGE on it, another print that says ATTITUDE on it, etc.

 

And then eventually Microsoft, Disney, and Nike will own the world. And just so you know, in the Microsoft Word 6.0 thesaurus, one of the meanings of “team” is “draft animals.”

 

SID HARTMAN CALLED HIM “ONE OF THE GREATEST MEN WHO HAS EVER LIVED”

 

Lou Holtz would be a perfect fit as coach of the Vikings, because both the Purple and Holtz’s Notre Dame teams have a tradition of losing the games they should win. I’ll scream if I hear one more person say that Holtz would have taken the Gophers to the Rose Bowl if he would have stayed at the U of M, because you can’t go to bowl games when you’re on probation.

 

LANGUAGE

 

The all-time greatest album for song titles has got to be the Stooges’ Raw Power: “Search and Destroy”, “Gimme Danger”, “Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell”, “Penetration”, “Raw Power”, “I Need Somebody”, “Shake Appeal”, and “Death Trip.”

 

LIKE YOU CARE

 

No issue next week.