Robert A. Wagner +/- The Little Wretches: Blog

Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” playing inside the WaWa as I buy my Sunday morning coffee.

Does anybody notice? Who here knows the song? Who here cares about the song?

When will I walk into a WaWa and hear Phil Ochs?

As I wait in line at the cash register, a man tells his buddy that his son made the dean’s list and started sixteen games as a freshman. He played in twenty but started sixteen and made the dean’s list.

What do I know about these men, their lives, this friendship and the son-in-question? They could have been buddies in a rat hole in Vietnam or casual acquaintances at Sacred Heart Church. But I immediately speculate as to the proud father’s motives.

See what a good father I was? My son is a good young man because I raised him right and taught him well. Me, I never got the chance to be on any dean’s list or play on any team, but my boy is showing the world what I was made of.

Or maybe the other guy knew the boy, asked about him, and [...]

April 24, 2011 will be celebrated as Easter Sunday by many. It also happens to by the birthday of my late brother, Charles John Wagner.

While emptying my father’s house after his death and its sale some years later, I found several bookshelves with religious pamphlets and other assorted materials my mother had used in preparation for her volunteer job of teaching Catechism to mentally retarded people.

My mother died tragically (suicide? homicide? accident? who knows?), and I couldn’t bear to throw away any of her remaining effects so I put it all in boxes and have taken it with me to the various homes and apartments I have subsequently inhabited.

Had my mother lived, it is a certainty that my father and brother would still be alive. Her death took away my father’s will to live and robbed my brother of any reason for hope in this world.

I recently purchased a new printer/scanner and thought it would be fun to make scans of some of the religious images in my mother’s old [...]

“Setting the Palette,” the first track on THE WALKING CLUB, Boog’s eight-song set, opens with ambient noises, maybe somebody going through junk in a garage or basement, giving way to (what sounds like) harmonium and percussive guitar in a groove not unlike Bob Dylan’s Love Sick.

(For those who recall, the opening strains of Love Sick were lauded by many as the rebirth of Bob Dylan.)

Enter Boog’s vocals, sounding like a resurrected Shane McGowan minus the brogue and lamenting the experience of being accosted and perhaps enslaved through both violence and seduction. There is no particular mention of resistance, but the singer notes that some survived and remorsefully announces that he was unable to save “them.”

I imagine scenes from films like APOCALYPTO or THE MISSION or maybe the scenes in my imagination conjured by lessons in Catholic School of missionaries in the new world captured, tortured and martyred by natives for bringing news of a strange God.

On an intellectual [...]

I teach at-risk and court-adjudicated teens at a facility outside Philadelphia.

On Thursday, my second period class, having just learned about Samuel Gompers, informed me that they were going to go on strike on Friday if I tried to make them do any classwork. They said they were going to make signs and everything.

I explained to them how I would break their strike.

First, I said, I would use the time-honored tactic of divide-and-conquer. I'd secretly offer special incentives to some of them for breaking the strike. Others, I would threaten with punishment, "Do you really want to lose your weekend pass over this?"

Then I played on their own cynicism. I said, "I would love to see you make signs, but let's face it (and you know yourselves), you'd probably start making signs and quit before you finish."

Then, I would co-opt the movement. I'd placate them by giving them something that appeared to be what they were asking for, and as soon as they felt that they'd won, I'd have [...]

I've been listening to the re-mix of KILL CITY all week. It's wild. I always liked this album. In my estimation, it's the most "musical" of all the Stooges-related efforts.

Each song has multiple hooks, a distinctive melody, guitar-riffs worthy of Keith Richards, and memorable lyrical couplets. It's a very "Stones"-ish album.

When I first heard this album, the lines "We don't believe in anything / We don't stand for nothing / Got no V for victory / 'cause we know things are tougher" seemed to articulate a world-view that made sense to me. I'd been very involved in radical politics and had grown up in Catholic school, and I finally realized that it was a courageous thing to shed oneself of dogma. People hide behind their creeds and isms. I don't think it's a nihilistic point of view, though. It's not like he doesn't want to believe in something, it's just that he isn't going to be taken by false promises and easy answers.

He's still searching. And unbridled by the garbage of preconceived [...]