the sorrows of the soda-pop expatriate

These are difficult days for the Soda-pop Expatriate. After many years abroad, he has returned to America with a diminished view of the way his favorite beverage is perceived around the world. The Yankee-friendly exuberance of the 1950s has finally fizzled out, and Coca-Cola is no longer politically popular. In fact, it has served as a scapegoat for many greater health and societal ills around the world. Obese New Delhians credit cola with their ungainly gains in girth. Rural Guatemalans blame the products for a spike in Diabetes cases. Many European universities have launched a boycott on Coke products on their campuses, determined to throw off the yoke of what they refer to as "carbonated imperialism."

At home as well, there are soda woes aplenty. Mr. Pibb has been stripped of his manhood, and is now referred to as Pibb Xtra (it's the extra that gets him every time). Mello Yello, the tired hippie, is not so much mellow as she is jaundiced. Elementary schools are considering removing pop machines from cafeterias in favor of less-fattening options. Across the country, thousands of health fanatics underdose on Cola every day.

Finally, the Soda-pop Expatriate's personal life is not what it used to be. Rather than spend his afternoons cruising down small highways at 120 km-per-hour with the windows open and a 44oz fountain drink in his hand, he instead drinks several paper cups of third-rate coffee each morning within the air-conditioned sterility of an office tower. Thanks to recent weight gains, holes in his teeth and several unsightly stains on his Siberian bearskin rug, even the Soda-Pop Expatriate is doing his best to kick the habit.

But it isn't easy. In the same way recovering addict musicians quit playing certain kinds of music because they associate it with drugs, the repatriated Soda-pop Expatriate is not quite sure what other concessions will need to be made in order to make a clean break. Naturally, some compromises are in order. So far, he has decided only to drink Coke on lunar holidays, on trips to the beach and whenever he goes out to eat Mexican food. And at lunch. Still, many emotional and physiological attachments to high-fructose corn syrup-flavored carbonated beverages remain.

Recently, he wrote this speech on the occasion of his one-night anniversary of not drinking any soda. It is addressed to the Soda Goddess, and is included exclusively here for your reading enjoyment.


Goodbye, Cola
by the Soda-pop Expatriate

Oh, opaque liquid

Your syrupy presence in my stomach
was always a comforting discomfort

Years ago, I went on Paul Revere's midnight bike ride for cola

searching for
the blinking beacon
of vending machines
stacked on top of each another

1 if by land
2 if by sea
3 if by air
4 if by dream

Now I will try to live without your carbonation
And I must admit, I feel lighter now
without your bubbles in my system

Lighter, but somehow less tied
to this gas-station covered landscape

where the endless soda
fountains of youth
spill over and
over and over

mythical biketrip to dubrovnik

LHW060822

All I never needed to know I learned from...

It's Never o'clock in Kansas City, and somewhere Midtown's most enigmatic graffiti artist is leaving his mark on the neighborhood.

His name is Neverino, and no one knows where he comes from. I first saw the name "Neverino" painted on a square of sidewalk near my apartment, and I found it funny enough to invent a backstory. Neverino, I surmised, was a little boy of either Hispanic or Italian descent who was struck and killed by the "Little Bastard" (the same Porsche 550 Spyder James Dean was driving when he died) at the bus stop on 43rd & Main. Now the listless spirit of the boy roams on, unable to communicate with the waking world except through spraypaint and paintmarkers.

I liked this story so much that I began to believe it, even inventing a cutesy, Spanish-sounding voice for Neverino that I often used while talking on the telephone. Soon, however, I began to realize that Neverino was a bigger phenomenon than I had imagined. I started to see variations on the Neverino name on signs and buildings around the neighborhood. A giant "Never" appeared on the back of a Broadway st. billboard. One Sunday, I even noticed that my mailbox had been tagged by a certain "Mr. Neverino." Almost overnight, Never was everywhere.

It was almost scary, the way Never always seemed to be just a few steps behind or ahead of my own urban adventures. In a parking lot down the street from the prostitute-frequented QuikTrip on Troost, I discovered a pair of Toys'R'Us truck trailers, only to see that Neverino had left his mark. Just two days after I took a photo-snapping tour of the Mission Mall ruins, I drove by to see that Never and his associates had written their names on the eastern face of the building. This act in particular demonstrated a boldness that astounded even me. Not only had he canvassed Kansas City, Missouri -- the long arm of Neverino could also reach into Kansas.

I thought and thought about a time that our paths might have crossed, but couldn't seem to come up with one. If I had seen Neverino, I hadn't known it. Still, I can't help but feel like I've gotten to know him at least a little bit through his artwork. A few of the things I've learned about Never:

• He has a playful sense of humor. Next to the giraffe on the aforementioned truck trailer, he wrote: "Neverino: I'm a Toys'R'Us kid."

• He is a night owl. On a giant, bubbly series of purple-and-green tags on the back of the Berbiglia liquor store, he wrote "It's 4 in the morning and it feels like spring."

• He is well-versed in history. Another tag near the liquor store reads "the home of the Nevercaneezer," a reference to Nebuchadnezzar, the ruler of Babylon who built the hanging gardens in 600 B.C. as an ersatz tropical paradise for his homesick wife, Amyitis.

• He is physically daring. Even a phantom would have difficulty scaling the heights Never must reach to complete his tags.

Because these observations shed little light on Neverino's personal life, it may be more worthwhile to take a look at the linguistic impact Neverino's marker has made on the community. Under Neverino's semantic makeover of Midtown, The Kansas City Star becomes The Never, and the Pitch changes from a weekly to a (you guessed it) never. 43rd & Bell becomes 43rd & Never. A nearby sign reads "Do Not Never Enter" and a simple red stop sign becomes a bright octagon of motivation. Local business hours either never end or never begin.

A first-time visitor to this ethnically diverse region of Kansas City might easily look around and declare himself in never-never land. Not surprisingly, the local police force is not amused. One afternoon, while snapping one of the very photographs displayed here, I noticed that I was being observed by a member of the KCPD. Though he eyed me dubiously, I think even he could tell that I was but a documentarian; a humble custodian of Never's legend and not its elusive author.

Just when I was reverting back to my original beliefs that Neverino was a specter invisible to the human eye, I heard a report on my police scanner that two officers had cornered a young male with a spraypaint can at the side of the Seville Best Western, just a block away. I dropped my harmonica and hard lemonade and raced to the scene as fast as my legs could carry me. From behind a dumpster I saw the officers closing in on the shadowy figure (Neverino, I presumed). The officers brandished their nightsticks, and one of them shouted, "Everything will be a lot easier if you just drop that spraypaint!" With a sudden hiss, a great purple cloud engulfed the three of them, causing the officers to lose sight of their suspect and start coughing. When they finally succeeded in waving the cloud away, the culprit had vanished, leaving his one-word response on the wall:


I know it may be a bit hard to believe, and believe me, I wish I was joking. I thought the superstitious phase of my life was over, that my days of peddling ghost stories had ended with my last weeks at summer camp. But I'm afraid Neverino has extended my belief in these matters indefinitely. Should I ever be in danger of losing my faith in the spraypaint-supernatural, I'm sure a fresh tag from Never will be there to make sure I never do.

Arthur Lee, 1945-2006

As a tribute to the recently departed frontman of the sixties band Love, I'm going to include my own short review of the Arthur Lee concert I attended at the CMJ music festival in October 2003, when I represented KJHK Lawrence as the jazz director. The piece is part of a greater CMJ journal I kept for "No Radio" issue 2, which never really saw print. Might as well share it now.

A grainy photo of Arthur Lee (on the far left) shourded in mystery.

Love with Arthur Lee, live at the Warsaw Ballroom 8/23/03

"...If nothing else, the steep price of suds in Brooklyn kept me sober enough to find my way to the Warsaw Ballroom for the Love with Arthur Lee show that night. For those of you who weren't somewhere between Clark & Hilldale circa 1966, Love was the Los Angeles psychedelic outfit who were imitated in sound by the Doors and in style by Hendrix. In fact, if you listen to the claims of Lee, the self-professed "first black hippie," Love was imitated in everything by just about everybody. If you listen to his music, however, Lee's claims begin to sound plausible.

The extravagant, out-of-the-way Warsaw Ballroom made an apt setting for the event. Elaborate murals flanked the stages, and Zwyiec beer was sold in several locations. I saw more gay couples and older fans than college radio-heads, and as snobby as it sounds, it was nice to be around a crowd of people who knew Love's music from something other than the Inez/Luke Wilson motel love scene in "Bottle Rocket." Though Love's contributions are widely recognized today, the pre-concert atmosphere still held the thrill of an underground sensation.

After much adjusting of microphones and music stands, Lee and band began with "Your Mind and We Belong Together," the swaggering outtake from Love's 1967 masterpiece, "Forever Changes." Right away, the band's arsenal of trumpets, flute and a string quartet were unleashed to the fullest effect. Lee sported a colorful bandana under a black hat, only removing his sunglasses for 15 seconds of the whole performance. Lee remained animated the whole time, smiling, playing guitar and harmonica and even breaking into a jig later in the set. There were moments I could have sworn he was barely out of his twenties.

The set also featured a good representation of songs by Bryan MacLean, the late guitarist whose flamenco-inspired style gave Love much of its baroque sound. MacLean's "Orange Skies" is the day-dreamiest number on any Love album, and his composition "Alone Again/Or" (you know, the one with the lyrics "I think that people are the greatest fun") has all but become Love's signature song. The rest of the set ranged from Burt Bacharach's "Little Red Book," to "Rainbow in the Storm," a new song which Lee also announced would be the title of an upcoming autobiography.

Though it took him a few songs to warm up, Lee sang forcefully and convincingly, giving his lyrics a light-hearted lilt at some times and an ominous emphasis at others. Lee's lyrics have always sounded more prophetic than political, and seemed eerily relevant throughout the show. When this version of Love (which features no original members other than Lee) played "The Red Telephone" -- a reference to the president's direct office line -- the band stirred the song into a frenzy while Lee screamed, "I want my freedom!" Lee has a special claim to this phrase, having served seven years for weapons charges before a judge overturned his stentence in 2001.

Listening to something haunting from the past is one thing, but seeing it come alive this convincingly was stirring, to say the least. By the time Lee asked the crowd "Why does this feel like a historical event?" it sounded like a rhetorical question. "What's cooler than being cool?" asks the recent hit single by Outkast. Even in 2003, the answer was still Arthur Lee..."

Update: While checking a song title on All Music Guide just now, I saw their multi-authored write-up about Love's music. Worth reading, even though there's still no substitute for hearing it yourself.

The storm has passed, the rainbow remains.

facewarp