Allegiance

This Hot Stove season is like any other for me: I pay some attention to what the Red Sox are doing, cursing certain moves (letting go of closer Jonathan Papelbon), happy with others (keeping Big Papi on board, signing Ellsbury for another year), clueless about some (is Cody Ross any good?) and confused by a few (why so many potential closers...when you could have held on to Cinco Ocho?!?!).

I learned years ago not to get too wrapped up in what happens during the off-season. On Opening Day, I'll root for whoever's on the Carmine Hose (look it up; I had to).

I understand baseball better than I do other sports, which isn't to say I obsess over stats, scour minor league rosters to spot up-and-coming talent or give a hoot about any teams outside the American League East. But I love the game. I played Little League and Babe Ruth baseball. When I turned 40 I even switched from softball to hardball for five years. I watch as many Sox games as I can, no matter how boring or out-of-hand a game might get.

Baseball has always been king for me. My older brother, Steve, lived and breathed baseball and the Red Sox as a kid, and still does. I can't remember a time when I wasn't rooting for them.

So I think you get my point: I'm a baseball lifer, and pay my allegiance to the Sox, come hell or high water.

Like many kids in Connecticut, I grew up rooting not only for the Sox, but also the New York Knicks, New York Giants and Hartford Whalers. I played my share of pick-up basketball, football and hockey games as a kid.

But I no longer cheer for any of those one-time favorite teams. The Whalers, of course, no longer exist. But don't tell that to hardcore fans who root for the Carolina Hurricanes.

I paid little mind to the Bruins until last season's playoffs. While I fully admit to being a fair weather fan last season, I'll defend myself (and my wife, Beth) by saying that although we didn't watch the team during the regular season, we watched the first game of the playoffs, got hooked by the excitement, and then watched the team's entire Stanley Cup run.

We now watch their regular season games on a fairly consistent basis. If I were to ever move away from New England, I can safely say that I would remain a Bruins fan.

As for the Knicks, that was another team that my brother liked. Basketball has always been at the bottom of my list of sports. I was never any good at it, although my brother was. As a boy and a teenager, I got sick of my barber asking me during every haircut, "You're pretty tall. Playing basketball?" I told him politely that I didn't, although what I wanted to say was, "I'm not even six feet, I wear glasses and while I can jump pretty high, I can't shoot worth a damn and always forget to follow my shot and more often than not I lose the guy I'm supposed to cover. Now just put the bowl on my head and do your job!"

I loved the Knicks' Walt "Clyde" Frazier as a kid. Look at this picture and you'll understand:

I had a pair of checkered, double-knit dress pants as a kid, and I referred to them as my "Clyde pants." Seriously.

But once my brother went away to college, I stopped caring about the Knicks. In the 20 years that I've been living in and around Boston, I've taken to following the Celtics, but not with any true passion.

My brother was also a Giants fan. When we played football in the neighborhood, I'd imagine I was Ron Johnson when I ran the ball, or John Mendenhall when I was rushing, or Spider Lockhart when I was covering a receiver. Somewhere in a box of old stuff, I have a glossy flyer from a basketball game that a few members of the Giants played in my hometown, against, hmmm, I don't know, members of the police or something.

But the Giants didn't win Super Bowls the way the Steelers did. So, in an effort to separate myself from my brother, and root for a winner, I totally jumped on the Pittsburgh bandwagon. I hung a poster in our room of Franco Harris, and felt pretty good about that.

Once I went away to college, I stopped caring about the Giants.

At some point once I moved to the Boston area, I became a Patriots fan. It wasn't a sudden thing. I watched some games here and there. During the 2001 season, I watched more than usual, because Beth was pregnant, and we didn't go out as much as we used to.

Of course we watched the playoffs, and the team's subsequent first Super Bowl victory. Unfortunately, Beth wasn't feeling good that day, so we had to skip her sister and brother-in-law's annual party.

Since that big victory, I've become a full-fledged Patriots fan. There is some irony here. Growing up, my brother and I were friends with a clan of six boys, the Keegans. Five of the six were Giants fans, while the lone holdout was a Patriots fan.

We couldn't understand why he rooted for them, so, being boys, we ragged on him all the time about it. He also liked the California Angels (now the Anaheim Angels of Los Angeles, Planet Earth), so we doubled down on our insults.

He's been rewarded for his loyalty, and may receive payback on February 5th when the Patriots face the Giants in the Super Bowl. The Giants beat the Pats in the big game four years ago.

As a Sox fan, I know how he feels. For Boston fans, 2004 was our chance to stick it to Yankees fans after the ignominious way the 2003 season ended. Still, I have no idea how 2012 will go for the Sox, but I know that no matter what, I'll be rooting for 'em.

Book review: The Art of the Heist

As someone who often has a hard time making small talk at a cocktail party, I admire people whose cups overflow with self-confidence. Well, in person I might not admire them after a few minutes, but certainly reading a cocky person's account of all the daring, crazy, illegal things he's done in his life, that I find interesting.

Such is the case with Myles Connor Jr.'s memoir, The Art of the Heist. I breezed through this book in less than a week, which, considering most of my reading is done on the can, or while waiting for one or the other of my kids to take a shower, is pretty quick for me.

Written with novelist Jenny Siler, The Art of the Heist is the work of a man who is completely self-assured in all that he does. Born in the early '40s in Milton, MA, Connor is by age 14 leading a band and finding success playing in restaurants and clubs in the Boston area. Short in stature but unafraid, Connor sticks up for himself and his buddies, taking on (and winning, or so he says...countless times) much bigger foes and knocking them out of the way.

Connor's high opinion of himself can be annoying, and made me question some of his exploits. His co-author, Siler, however, points out in notes at the beginning of the book that she interviewed many eyewitnesses to the events and crimes, and also reviewed documents, including police records, newspaper archives, court records, FBI transcripts and personal correspondence, in an effort to ensure Connor's integrity.

Assuming that at least some of Connor's tales are crap, this book is still a fascinating read. Connor is nearing 70 years old, and has spent close to half his life behind bars. Bank robberies and museum heists are his cup o' tea. He caught the antique weapon collecting bug when he was young, and would case small museums around New England and find items he wanted. Then, either by breaking in after hours through the mostly lax security systems, or by getting into the good graces of museum staff through use of ruses and alibis, he would simply take stuff from curators' offices or from storage rooms into which he'd been allowed access.

Before starting the book (somebody gave it to my wife as a gift), I was familiar with Connor because he's long been associated with what is considered the largest art theft in American history, the infamous 1990 heist at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Nearly 22 years after the fact, that heist remains unsolved. While Connor was in prison at the time of the heist, investigators figured he had been in on the planning, given his long rap sheet and love of art and antiques. Connor maintains he had nothing to do with the job at any level, although he fingers two associates and admits that he'd toured the museum with one of them, years before the heist, and talked about knocking the place over.

This most intriguing information, however, doesn't come until the book's closing pages. Will Connor write more about the Gardner job in a future book? I can only hope.

Is Connor lying when he says he wasn't involved in the Gardner heist? That's the big question. He seems to have no problem doing the time for his crimes, and spares no details of the numerous museum and bank break-ins for which he served time over the years. So it seems that if he were on the team that ripped off the Gardner, he'd admit it, as it would be quite the crowning achievement to a long criminal career.

But like OJ Simpson professing his innocence and pledging to find his wife's killer, Connor claimed he was clean, and would go to Europe to try and find the stolen paintings.

What I found most fascinating about Connor's book is the detail he offers of his crimes, getaways and, in one minutely constructed tale, the return of a Rembrandt he and his gang stole in broad daylight from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. (Side note: I also marvel at the ability of Connor and other memoirists to recall such details as what people were wearing, the cloud patterns in the sky, the exact words from conversations. Yes, I know they're given artistic license with such details, but it's just an ability I don't have, given my increasingly poor memory.)

Bottom line: this book is a quick, entertaining read, but as with so many memoirs I find myself wanting more information, or at least different viewpoints. Connor is certainly a bold man and one to be admired for his self assuredness. But there's no sense of remorse in his book, no sense that by stealing art and antiques, he also steals from the public the right to experience these often exquisite and rare objects. Unfortunately, a memoir written by the museum curators and bank tellers whom Connor victimized, wouldn't find as much of an audience as The Art of the Heist.

Keep On Rockin' In the Seacoast

One of the first things I did when I moved to Dover, NH, in August 1988, was go to a bar in nearby Portsmouth to see Ed's Redeeming Qualities. I loved their sloppy folk music -- created with ukelele, violin, acoustic guitars, and percussion consisting of rice in a coffee can -- and their funny, albeit sometimes poignant, lyrics. I also fell quickly in love with Portsmouth.

I don't recall the name of the bar where I saw the band, but it was intimate and inviting and felt like the right place to see such a humble, friendly and humorous band. The capital of New Hampshire's Seacoast region has numerous places like this, which helped to foster a music scene that's documented in the upcoming film, "In Danger of Being Discovered."

I saw Ed's Redeeming Qualities (ERQ) several more times over the next two years that I lived in the area (one year in Dover, one in York, ME, which is just a few exits up I-95 from Portsmouth), but never again in Portsmouth. I saw them a handful of times in Dover, at the Work Day Cafe (R.I.P.), and in Newmarket at the Stone Church, a venue that continues to put on shows.

The song for which ERQ was best known, perhaps, was "Lawn Dart," a laugh-out-loud ditty about a kid who "was pegged in the head with a lawn dart / so they're now off the shelves at the K-Mart." Here's the original lineup of ERQ, featuring Dom Leone (who died in 1989) on vocals:

ERQ gained a small bit of wider fame when The Breeders covered their song, "Drivin' on 9," on Last Splash. Again, here's the original lineup (I saw ERQ many years ago in Boston open for the fabulous Charlie Chesterman; ERQ replaced the late Leone with Jonah Winter, but in my mind, the band just wasn't the same without Dom):

ERQ was very popular in New Hampshire's Seacoast region in the late '80s and early '90s, and was a hit as well in Boston during that time. They appeared in a movie called "Ed's Next Move," and had several songs on the soundtrack. But they never landed a major label deal; I'm not sure if they were ever courted. I doubt they would have been interested in signing with a major if the offer were made.

Some of their contemporaries on the scene, however, did receive such attention.

According to the web site for "In Danger of Being Discovered," in 1993 the relatively small Seacoast region produced "at least five original rock bands [that] had major label interest or were independently selling 60,000 copies of their own CD's." I don't know exactly which bands are included on that list, but based on a quick viewing of the movie's trailer, my best guess is Gandhi's Lunchbox, Fly Spinach Fly, Thanks to Gravity, Groovechild, and Heavens to Murgatroid.

By 1993, I'd moved to Boston and didn't know all of these bands. I saw Gandhi's Lunchbox a handful of times and thought they were pretty good. I knew the guitarist, Chris Fortier, from college, as well as the band's singer, Tommy Colletta, because his previous band, Nervous Disorder, played once on a bill with my college band, The Toastmen.

I saw Fly Spinach Fly once or twice at house parties in Dover. They had a Red Hot Chili Peppers thing going on, with heavy grooves and a punk/metal feel, and two dancers called the Jimmies. The band formed after the break-up of Buzzards of May (I think that's the case. I know they were related somehow; it's been a long time, folks....), a band that I saw many times at Dover parties, and who played some killer Sabbath covers.

So although I wasn't part of the scene during its early '90s heyday, I was there for part of it, and was duly impressed.

In addition to the bands I've mentioned above who I saw and enjoyed, I want to say a few words about two other bands from my brief time on the fringe of the Seacoast scene. Bobhouse, for instance. I think I only saw them once, and I don't remember anything specific about their music. I recall vaguely that they were a little bit funky, a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll. I saw them at a party. I think it was in a barn.

The other band, The Dorks (or was it Dorx?), was my favorite on the scene. OK, once again I'm showing off my less-than-stellar memory. I saw them twice, I believe, once at a party, once at the aforementioned Stone Church. They were more punk than most of the bands on the scene, and that's about all I can remember.

When I think back on my brief but busy days of living in the area and seeing bands at house parties, clubs and barbecues, more than specific music, I think of an overall feeling of euphoria. Dover and Portsmouth are very small cities with lots of places to hear music and have a great time. I grew up in a small, rural town, where the bars mostly hosted cover bands or classic rock has-beens. I went to college in a place where the best music was on campus, because there wasn't much going on in town. So when I lived in the Seacoast area, I loved having so many cool places to hang out within walking or short-drive distance.

Oh, man, did I forget to mention The Murderers?

The weirdest and most amusing part of the scene was this band, comprised of a bunch of New Hampshire dudes masquerading as 1970s' British punks. Led by the inimitable Bob Murderer, the band slouched around Dover in leather jackets, jack boots, mohawks and tons of tattoos. One lineup of the band once backed the infamous GG Allin.

My memory is hazy, but I know I saw them play at least once, in a basement at a house party. They played prototypical British punk, hard, fast and sloppy and while somewhat menacing on stage, they were (or at least the bass player, Lenny, aka Larvae) pretty nice and funny guys when you were just drinking beer in a kitchen.

So there ya go, a little wrap up of a scene that I hadn't thought about much in recent years. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention that both ERQ and The Murderers appear under assumed names in my collection of short stories, (C)rock Stories: Million-Dollar Tales of Music, Mayhem and Immaturity, which you can buy here.

"The Women" Review

This week, I finished reading T.C. Boyle's The Women, a long, fascinating and often-times sordid account of world-famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright and his wives, mistresses, children and trials and tribulations surrounding his family and professional lives.

While I became totally engrossed in the fictionalized tale, narrated by a Japanese intern who worked for Wright -- the melodrama of Wright's paramours, his financial struggles, his MAMMOTH ego, the tragedy that spills forth near the end -- the whole time I was reading, I found myself longing for a good biography.

Don't get me wrong: I love T.C. Boyle, and think his writing, full of incredibly deep descriptions of people, places, things and events, and the emotional states of so many characters, is excellent. I've read several of his novels, including The Road to Wellville, Drop City, World's End and A Friend of the Earth, and loved, or at least really liked, them all.

I have to say, though, that I think the idea of fictionalizing real people -- as Boyle did of John Kellogg, founder of the Kellogg cereal company, in The Road to Wellville -- while surely challenging and fun in terms of tweaking history, is dangerous because it either a) allows casual readers to believe false history or b) makes people like me seek out biographies.

Of course, I'm only seeking out a non-fiction account of Wright now that I've finished Boyle's book, but others might either be turned off by the book ahead of time, or decide part way through that, hey, Wright was such an incredible talent and personality, maybe I should just read what he was REALLY like.

As such, I've added Meryle Secrest's Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography to my Amazon wish list. I'll buy it elsewhere, however, in order to stick it to Jeff Bezos for his obnoxious Christmas shopping season effort to undermine indie bookstores.

Bottom line, though, is that I heartily recommend Boyle's book.

Happy New Year!

Hope everybody had a great New Year's Eve. We hung out at Beth's sister and brother-in-law's house, eating great food, drinking great bevvies and playing really fun Wii games. Now it's time to put away all the new toys, games and books, undecorate the house and get back into the regular groove.

We've had a really good vacation -- the kids got all the things they wanted for Christmas -- a Nintendo 3DS for Owen, goldfish and Hungry Hungry Hippos for Amelia were the "must haves" -- we visited with family and friends, saw "The Muppets" and put on a show on New Year's Eve. Yes, the Brigahan clan has been bitten by the thespianic (new word for a new year!) bug.

Owen and Amelia have been really into "The Penguins of Madagascar" TV show for quite some time. They love to act out the show while watching. Owen got it in his head just before Christmas, that the four of us should act out an episode in front of an audience. So he chose an episode (actually just the second part of one called "The Helmet"), transcribed the dialogue off the Internet (which Beth then typed up neatly) and ran us through several rehearsals.

So last night was the Big Show. Our play only lasted about five minutes, but it was received very well by Beth's sister and brother-in-law, and our nephew. I'm really proud of Owen for his hard work in producing, directing, and starring in his first show. It was a lot of fun for all of us.

Speaking of creativity, I've been forcing myself to work on my long-ignored UFO concept album over the past week. I believe I started writing lyrics for this project six or seven years ago, although it seems longer. Honestly, my output has been pretty lame until this week. I'd only written five or six sets of lyrics out of a planned 10 songs before churning out some words this past week. I still have to write two more sets of lyrics, and then music for seven or eight songs.

I originally envisioned the album as telling a story, but four years ago I adopted the lyrics I had at the time and the overall concept and began writing a novel during National Novel Writing Month. So now the album is just a batch of tunes about aliens and UFOs and government conspiracies, but with no overarching theme.

My plan is to finish the songs (and record them) and the novel and package them together somehow. This is part of my 2012 resolution: to push myself on my writing projects. Yes, this is my resolution just about every year, but having published my short story collection late in 2010, I know that I can persevere and get it done.

As I've mentioned plenty of times before, I also have two children's books I plan to get to market in the near future. I'm determined to get these done, as well as the album and novel, over the next year or two. Feel free to ask me and bug me about these projects. I need the push.

Thanks, and Happy New Year!