But as you can tell, the world of advertising, especially Internet advertising, is morphing. The days of Tampax ads on ESPN.com and Wrangler commercials on TMZ are over. Information is too readily available on the Internet, which means companies can advertise directly to likely costumers.

In some ways, this fact is horrifying. The distrustful and fearful nostalgic in me is repulsed by the idea of Big Brother knowing my preference of toilet paper. I think the right to privacy is one of the most important and most abused of our civil liberties.

But, then again, there is a part of me that favors realism to idealism. I hate to break it to you, but the government, and a whole hell of a lot of other people, can see just about everything you’ve been up to on the good ol’ interweb.

There was a time when I was disgusted by this reality, but my feelings have softened in the last year or so. I still believe in the right to privacy, and I’m not willing to give it away so the government can fight supposed “terrorists.” But I am realistic enough to know that this battle has already been lost. So as long as my privacy is gone, I’d rather not be the emperor in his new clothes. Instead, I do most of my private communications in the only secure mediums I know of: body language and telepathic utterance.

But there is one draw to the 1984-like state of our personal privacy: incredibly relevant endorsements. Which is why, in this era when my Pandora stations know me to be a cheap bastard and play exclusively Google Offers plugs, I was shocked to see the new Sour Patch Kids video game commercial, which initially struck me as mistargeted advertising.

Method Man, aka Johnny Blaze, aka Iron Lung, recently released a music video called “World Gone Sour (The Lost Kids),” a promo for the new Sour Patch Kid video game with the same name.

I was surprised that a candy company would hire a rapper whose upcoming album is titled Crystal Meth to sell its product. I thought it must be a mistake; that no company that targets sale to kids would enlist a Wu Tang member as its spokesman.

But then I listened to the song three or four more times. And then I went out and bought some Sour Patch Kids. And then, after enjoying the whole pack and recuperating from the inevitable sour candy stomachache, I began to think about how well thought out this advertising campaign really is.

Teenagers and young adults love hip-hop, still eat lots of candy and have money to burn. Why wouldn’t a company hire a rapper with some real cred to sell their brand to this huge market? And why wouldn’t Method Man be glad to do it?

It’s not as if making this ad means Meth sold out. Who doesn’t love Sour Patch Kids? And more importantly, who doesn’t love this song? (It’s sad for me to write this, but this track is leaps and bounds ahead of most of the hip-hop on the Billboard Top 40 list – sorry Flo Rida – and it is about candy gone wild. What the hell has happened to the rap game?)

I think rappers should tread lightly in the world of advertising; street cred is rap game social currency. But I don’t think there is anything wrong with what Method Man did. When you are as talented and as proven as Mr. Man, you can sell products without soiling your name. And Sour Patch Kids isn’t Kodak; Biggie, Snoop and Nate Dogg have already proven that if the commercial and the product are rap-enthusiast-friendly, the rapper actually can benefit from an endorsement.

So, to save some time for the advertising agencies that are already tapping my Facebook and WordPress accounts, I want more commercials like this one. And to Method Man: keep on reppin’ the Sour Patch Kids; I never knew those colorful little guys were so hard until you told us, “They break laws, not jawbreakers, they break jaws.”

R. Kelly – the sage who brought us Ignition, The World’s Greatest and I Believe I Can Fly – has wrote 32 new chapters to his exquisite, genre-defining Hip Hopera, Trapped in the Closet. But sadly, he cannot find funding to film what is sure to be a masterpiece.

As everyone knows, R. Kelly is a genius. And as everyone also knows, sequels are always better than the original. So tell me then: why are the studios not leaping at this lucrative opportunity that sits before them on a golden platter?

I’ll tell you why: the Hollywood elite fear what R. Kelly’s new genre will mean for the motion picture industry.

Who would ever again go see a regular film when given the chance to watch non-stop action over a soulful beat? Who would ever pay to see Ryan Gosling grin sheepishly on screen when they could instead witness Mr. Kelly’s charming, yet funky, impression of an overweight, white woman from the south?

I’ll tell you who: no one.

And Hollywood knows this, which is why Mr. Kelly has struggled to find the funding he, and all other art enthusiasts, so desperately need.

But, people of the world, I say we make 2012 a year of revolution, a year that begins where 2011 left off. I say we throw off the shackles that have let Hollywood force feed us flicks like New Year’s Eve and Jack and Jill year after year. I say that we, the 99%, let our voices roar: Let’s all chip in and make the last 32 chapters of R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet a reality.

This is about more than the heroic saga of Sylvester and Tron. This is about more than extramarital affairs and midgets under sinks. This is about more than finally learning what is in that mysterious package.

No, Trapped in the Closet is about everything and nothing, which means it’s about as close as we can get to understanding this crazy thing called life. For when the muse whispered this tangled tale in Mr. Kelly’s ear, there were tremors across the world and everything changed. And until we see where this R. Kellian tragedy ends, we will never know how to put it all back together again.

So, if the elite are so hardheaded that they will not fund this film, we really should ask ourselves why. Perhaps these final 32 chapters will open our eyes to something we’ve been blind to for ages. If Hollywood is going to keep that truth from us, I say it is time for us to go out and take it.

Fellow humans, please join me in giving a little to Mr. Kelly; surely we’ll get a lot more in return. For this Hip Hopera will be a symbol of the power of the 99% – it will reassert the notion that majority rules. It will demonstrate that great art holds real power and that censorship is truly a thing of the past. And best of all, we the people will be the patrons of the great masterpiece of our era, a piece that will spur the long-awaited R. Kellian Renaissance.

So while this may look like nothing more than a 2-hour-long R. Kelly music video, goddamn, don’t it smell a lot like freedom.

Yo-Yo Ma, the National Medal of the Arts winner, the cellist whose played a duet with Condoleeza Rice and Obama’s inauguration, the man featured on “Sesame Street” and “Mr. Rodgers Neighborhood”, has put out an LP with three virtuosos of the bluegrass scene: Edgar Meyer, Stuart Duncan and Chris Thile.

The album is light and fun; the casual performance style can be heard in the music. But don’t get me wrong; the performances on the record are amazing, almost flawless really.

I am not a classically trained musician and not much of a classical music fan, but there is something about Yo-Yo Ma that appeals to me. Maybe it is the fact that I subconsciously associate him with Big Bird, but I think it has at least as much to do with the way he carries himself. He is arguably the greatest cellist ever, yet he never seems snooty and doesn’t just play the hits (what do they scream at classical music concerts? I’m guessing it’s not “Play Freebird”) – he strives to keep his music fresh and relevant. It was this desire in Ma and the other musicians that hatched the idea for the album and also pushed them to the level that they reached during the sessions.

As Ma said in an NPR.org interview on Nov. 11: “We like to take calculated risks to go to the edge.”

That’s exactly what he did in making this album. Ma does not need to crossover – he is a legend in the classical world. And yet, with this new LP, he’s proven that he can go note for note with bluegrass legends and make something authentically Southern and absolutely gorgeous.

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And if your loved one likes new-age old school traditional music (for lack of a better term), here are three more albums that will make them merry this holiday season:

1) The Avett Brothers – Mignonette

The Avett Brothers are a folk rock trio featuring Scott and Seth Avett, on banjo and guitar respectively, and Bob Crawford on the stand-up bass. This album is my favorite by the group; it is a collection of songs thick in truth, harmony and top-notch picking. “One Line Wonder” is an absolutely beautiful track.

2) Mumford & Sons – Sigh No More

You probably don’t need me to tell you how great this album is; Mumford & Sons has deservedly blown-up this year – they won British Album of the Year in the BRIT Awards and have two 2011 Grammy Nominations. Their combination of strings, vocal harmonies and intriguing lyrics make them a joy to listen to, but what really makes the album special is the fullness of sound. Listen to Sigh No More once and I bet you’ll need to listen to it again and again.

3) Old Crow Medicine Show – O.C.M.S.

I’m sure you’ve heard Old Crow Medicine Show’s song “Wagon Wheel”; it is fun, sing-songy and a little overplayed. But the band is much more than a one-hit wonder and this album (which does feature “Wagon Wheel”) is a perfect way to get acquainted with Old Crow. “We’re All In This Together” is a gorgeous song that shows another side of the band.

I live with three guys from the Detroit area, so the fact that Nickelback played the Lions Thanksgiving day halftime show was treated like a catastrophe in my house. And even three weeks after the Lions lost to the Packers on Turkey Day, the miserable choice for a halftime performer still boils my blood.

Detroit is home to some of the greatest music ever played; it is the Motown capital and true Detroiters would have absolutely loved to see Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder or Gladys Knight perform at the half. But even another halftime performance by Kid Rock would have been more than fine with every Lions fan I’ve spoken to.

Instead, the Lions chose Nickelback, a Canadian band better suited for a performance at a 12-year-old girl’s slumber party than a football game. The Lions are relevant for the first time in over a decade; they actually have a shot of making the playoffs, which is absolutely astounding if you’ve followed the NFL at all since Barry Sanders’ retirement.

But the franchise may have burned their newfound relevance in one day when they chose to represent their brand during their biggest game of the year like this.

Bu there is a little silver lining to the whole Nickelback debacle: Mayer Hawthorne, a true Michigander, broadcasted an alternative halftime show from his parents’ basement that should make ever Detroiter proud.

It was this performance that first exposed me to this odd and intriguing new star. Hawthorne, born Andrew Mayer Cohen, is whiter and Jewisher than most – I, an incredibly white Jew, am an expert on the topic – but he’s still funky as hell. And he’s putting out music that no one has recorded in the last 30 years.

Hawthorne, a soulful Ann Arbor native, raised 40 miles and 40 years from his Motown contemporaries, hit the mainstream with his 2009 debut album A Strange Arrangement. He sings, produces and plays the instruments on his tracks; his voice is not legendary, but he pulls off a legit falsetto. And his arrangement and general steez (read: style with ease) more than makeup for slightly-lacking pipes.

Hawthorne has shied away from the “retro-soul” label and his new album, How Do You Do, combines the Motown sound with other unexpected influences, like late Sixties California pop and J Dilla. And there is even the novelty of a duet with Snoop Dogg on the track “Can’t Stop.”

But Hawthorne is at his best when he’s playing true-blue Detroit soul and my favorite song on the new album, “A Long Time,” an ode to the Motor City, is just that.

So if you want to stuff the stocking with some soulful jams, look no further than Mayer Hawthorne’s debut album A Strange Arrangement. And if you feel that your loved one’s been extra good this year, get them How Do You Do as well.

When I was in Nashville this summer, my friend Brendan Winger told me an incredible rock ‘n’ roll legend about Kristofferson’s rise to prominence.

And this weekend, my friend Casey Devlin told me another incredible legend, this time about J. Cole’s rise to fame.

Kristofferson, the son of a two-star general, was born in a South Texas town. Like most military brats, he moved as a kid. His family finally settled down in San Mateo, CA, where he went to high school.

J. Cole, the son of two military parents, was born in Frankfurt, Germany. Like most military brats, he moved as a kid. His family finally settled in Fayetteville, NC, where he went to high school.

Kristofferson graduated summa cum laude from Pomona College and was awarded a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford.

J. Cole attended St. John’s University on an academic scholarship. He graduated magna cum laude.

After school, Kristofferson became a helicopter pilot in the U.S. Army. He wanted to fight in Vietnam, but the military understood him to be too valuable an asset and transferred him to West Point to teach English. Kristofferson refused the transfer, quitting the military in 1965 and moving to Nashville to try and make it as a country singer.

The man who had graduated summa cum laude from Pomona College and who had earned the rank of captain in the service began boozing and bumming his way through Nashville, struggling to make it in the industry. He took a job as a janitor at Columbia Studios and flew commercial helicopters in the Gulf of Mexico.

In a remarkable Rolling Stone piece by Ethan Hawke, Kristofferson says that when he lost his job in the Gulf, “I thought I had hit the bottom.”

In a last ditch effort, Kristofferson landed a National Guard helicopter on Johnny Cash’s lawn.

Cash explained the scene in Hawke’s article: “I was taking a nap and June said, ‘Some fool has landed a helicopter in our yard. They used to come from the road. Now they’re coming from the sky!’ And I look up, and here comes Kris out of a helicopter with a beer in one hand and a tape in the other.”

Kristofferson refused to leave the property until Cash listened to his recording. The song on the tape, “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” changed Kristofferson’s life – Cash’s version won the Country Music Association’s Song of the Year.

J. Cole did not join the military; he never flew a helicopter onto the lawn of his idol. But after graduating, Cole did set up camp outside Jay-Z’s studio for a few hours. He had recorded his first mixtape and thought that if Jay heard it, he’d sign him to his label.

But as Cole explains in a Nov. 1 interview with NPR, the encounter did not go as planned: “I reach out my hand like, ‘Yo, Jay, here you go!’ He just looked at me like, almost disgusted, like, ‘I don’t want that.’”

J. Cole continued recording music and supported himself by taking a job as a bill collector in New York City. He snuck into recording studios to record tracks and posted his mixtapes online.

In 2009, J. Cole was the first rapper signed to Jay-Z’s new label Roc Nation.

Kristofferson is a legend; a gruff poet, schooled in William Blake and the Army Ranger Creed. He is one of the great songwriters in history; his songs have been recorded by over 500 artists.

Kristofferson used to dream of writing the great American novel – instead he wove countless verses of dirt-poor anti-Americana tales. “Just the Other Side of Nowhere” and “Sunday Morning Coming Down” illuminate the fate of the cowboy in the modern world – they are Bukowski novels set to music.

And on top of everything else, Kristofferson has acted in numerous films, winning a Golden Globe for best actor in a musical/comedy in 1977.

His is an unfathomable story – it seems like three or four lives, almost seems like grandiose fiction.

J. Cole is not a legend, far from it actually. He is just an up and coming rapper in a dilapidated rap game.

But, like Kristofferson, he is a highly educated military brat who believes in the power of lyrics. And he is a man confident enough to seek out his idol and talented enough to succeed in making him his mentor.

So though in all likelihood Cole will never be Kristofferson, there is an uncanny resemblance in their stories. Kristofferson’s is admittedly grander than J. Cole’s, but that’s just the way it goes for our generation.

Kristofferson remembers the helicopter scene differently than Cash, explaining in the Rolling Stone piece that Cash has a knack for adding flourish to a story. But the legend outlives the truth, which is a wonderful thing about top-rate fiction.

It would have been great if Jay-Z had claimed that Cole had camped outside his studio for two weeks instead of two hours. But even if he had, I doubt that anyone would believe it. True legends died the day the Internet was born.

In the Rolling Stone article, Willie Nelson says of Kristofferson: “He kinda brought us out of the Dark Ages.” He used his lyrics to change the face of country music; his sophistication pushed the entire scene to write differently.

J. Cole has not yet written anything close to a masterpiece. He’s lyrically intriguing when judged against Drake, T-Pain and the rest of the rap that tops the Billboard charts, but that is not much in the way of a compliment. But if his intentions are sincere, J. Cole will utilize his intellect and try and change the rap game.

I truly hope he uses his time in the spotlight to prove that lyrical hip hop isn’t dead. I would love it if he brought about a Renaissance that ended mainstream rap’s current Dark Age.

But sadly, it is far more likely that he will put out club trash and make millions. It’s a damn shame, but there may never be another man like Kris Kristofferson.

There were a few aspects of the film that were specifically troubling (Armie Hammer’s old person makeup is really awful, as is his old man acting – I can only explain it as the senior citizen shuffle), but the real failing is a consistent flaw in almost all biopics. A great film should stand on its own; viewers shouldn’t be expected to study the portrayed protagonist before entering the theater.

Let’s look at Lawrence of Arabia as an example (however unfair the measuring bar). When I saw that film, I was a 19-year-old, born 65 years after T.E. Lawrence’s death, with some knowledge of the English role in the Middle East and absolutely no knowledge of the man himself. But it hardly mattered; I was enthralled throughout.

And that’s where newer biopics get it wrong. The first priority of any film should be to tell a great story; films should not be crafted like Wikipedia entries.

J. Edgar attempts to cover the entirety of a nearly 65-year career; trading story arc and character development for faux-celebrity sightings. The film seems most interested in giving history buffs a thrill; anyone well-versed in FBI history will love the winking references to Hoover’s surveillance of Nixon, Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, as well as some really “fun” Kennedy accents. However, if you have not studied that history, then the second half of the film is pretty useless – unless you get a good laugh from some bad makeup.

There is a great story to be told there; either about the paranoia of an old man with too much power or the rise of an antisocial young man with too much ambition. But as this film proved, you can’t tell both tales. Great biopics succeed because they pick a small window of time and use it as a parable for a life; most biopics fail because they try to capture history with a panoramic lens.

So please, do not see bad biopics, because as long as they keep making money, Hollywood will keep putting them out. Save some cash this weekend, get cozy on a couch, and throw in Dirty Harry.

Let’s try our best to remember Mr. Eastwood when he still was kicking ass and taking names; and let’s hope that Hollywood will leave J. Edgar out of the biographical film they’ll eventually make about his life.

The protagonist of the story is a shaggy fellow named Nathaniel Markman, long-bearded with tangled hair. He’s a soft-spoken fiddler from Missouri whose eyes lock on yours during conversation and close when his bow slides across violin strings.

As we talked – beside the swimming pool at a summer camp right outside Yosemite National Park – Markman told me one of his first memories. He was four-years-old, sitting on a bed with his parents as they flipped through the newspaper.

“They read ‘violin lessons for anyone interested’ and they asked me right then, ‘Nathaniel, do you want violin lessons?’ And I remember jumping up and screaming, ‘Yeah, I do!’ But they could have said anything, they could have said tuba or anything and I would have said yes.”

But he chose violin, or perhaps violin chose him, based on your understanding of metaphysics.

Fourteen years and thousands of violin lessons later, the bright-eyed fiddler from Missouri began to travel, first to Israel on the Birthright program and then around Europe.

“I was looking at the list of all the people on my program going to Israel and they were all Californians,” Markman said. “At the time I thought, ‘I wonder if I’ll be in California some day.”

On the trip to Israel, Markman met Danny Jolles, who eventually introduced him to a band named Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes. Today the band is mainstream, but in October 2009, when Jolles sent Markman the Youtube clip of Edward Sharpe on the NPR Tiny Desk series, their first album Up from Below had been released just three months earlier.

“They were this nice little band and they had this casual way of performing that seemed very improv,” Markman said. “I just liked the vibe, the feeling that I got from the music.”

Markman was living in a co-op in St. Louis at the time, finishing up his last semester at Washington University.  He fell in love with the group, which is rare for him, and sent the video around to all his friends. Soon, Edward Sharpe was a favorite at the co-op.

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The basement of Markman’s co-op was split in two – half was used as a kitchen and eating area and the other half was for performances. Markman’s job in the house was music coordinator; he was tasked with finding touring bands to play a set at the house and with hosting the open mic opener for the weekly show.

One night, he and some friends put a group together and performed at the open mic before the visiting band went on. They played a cover of “Home” and “40 Day Dream,” two Edward Sharpe songs.

“I remember thinking at the time, if I were to play with one band, I would play with Edward Sharpe,” he said. “But it just kind of spilled out and I didn’t think much of it.”

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The next week, Markman finished up finals and graduated. He’d been in school all his life. He had an urge to roam for a while.

So he packed up his minivan with instruments and drove out to California. He would try and make a life for himself, playing his own music.

One by one, his friends began moving out to the Bay Area. A group of them started to record together and to play on a corner for tips.

Their lives were the lives of many aspiring musicians – recording and busking on the street – until February 2010 when one friend saw that Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes were playing in Oakland on Markman’s birthday. It seemed miraculous that the band Markman had so adored just a few months earlier would be playing in his city on that day. He felt he had to be there.

So on his birthday, his friends gathered and went to the show, which was sold out except the 200 tickets the venue was keeping at the door.

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When Markman gets excited, his eye contact intensifies and his voice rises – it’s nearly impossible not to be infected by his giddiness and his delight is stoked by your response.

As he talked about the night of his birthday, a story that I’m sure he’d told hundreds of times before, I felt eager and nervous.

The story he had been telling me was well-crafted, every detail was relevant. And yet, the way he told it, it felt as if he were as anxious as I was to hear what would come next.

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There was already a long line by the time Markman and his friends arrived at the Bimbo 365 Club in Oakland, so they went back to the car and grabbed their instruments. They began to perform as they waited in line.

“While we were playing, the band walked by and we were like, ‘Oh, it’s them,’” he said. “They gave us an eye but they didn’t really notice. They just kept going to get ready.”

Markman and his buddies continued to play as the line slowly crept toward the ticket window. Luck was on their side that night; they were within the first 200 people and all were able to buy tickets.

The group returned to the car to put their instruments away, elated that they’d get to see the show. But as they were loading up the trunk, one of Markman’s friends had an idea that would prove fateful:

“Someone suggested, what if I brought my violin into the music venue?” Markman said. “And then someone else was like, yeah, if you don’t bring your violin, you’re never going to play with Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes.”

Most people would scoff at such a statement, but Markman is a man who lives by that kind of logic. He grabbed the violin and the group moved toward the door.

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At the turnstile, the security guard told Markman that he couldn’t bring an instrument into the show. He felt defeated and was ready to return to the car.

But luckily, it was his birthday; his friend wouldn’t have it and took the violin from Markman. Markman walked by the security guard, showing him his empty hands. His friend snuck the violin in behind him.

The group slid their way up to the tenth row and Markman began to tune his fiddle as the warm-up band played. When Edward Sharpe came on, it felt like a dream; it was Markman’s birthday and he was with his best friends, watching the band he’d fallen in love with months before.

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Near the end of the set, Alexander Ebert, the band’s lead singer, began to whistle the first few bars of “Home”.

“One of my friends put me on his shoulders and I was air-bowing in the audience,” Markman said,  “and I got a finger from Alexander the singer to come up to the stage and play something.”

Markman was shocked by the gesture, but the crowd began pushing him toward the stage. He was in a daze: it was his birthday and he was being crowd-surfed toward the band he’d dreamt of playing with for months.

When he stepped on stage and began to play, the band quickly understood that he was not just an average fan. They extended the song to allow Markman to take a solo.

“There weren’t enough mics so Alexander was grabbing mics from different members of the band,” Markman said. “He held three up to the violin so people could hear it.”

A moment like this does not come along twice; for 99% of the population, it doesn’t even come along once. But Markman was the perfect man for the moment; and he grabbed it.

“The way I perform, the more nervous I am, the more comes out of me as a violinist,” he said. “I completely let go and just gave everything I had – It was exhilarating, it was definitely the most people I’d ever played in front of.”

When he left the stage, amid glad-handing and cheers, he thought his miraculous night was over. He thought he’d had the greatest birthday he could ever have imagined and that was okay with him; Markman is not an unreasonable man.

“But that wasn’t the end,” he said.

After the show, his group of friends saw Edward Sharpe packing up their instruments, getting ready to go down to Santa Cruz. Jolles, the friend who had exposed Markman to the band months before, had an idea: Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes had been nice enough to play for them, so they should go play a concert of their own for the band.

“So we all got our instruments and played them a few of our own songs while they were packing up,” Markman said. “They were like, you guys should come and open for us. This was the week that all my friends had graduated and moved west – we were all together. There were six of us and we were all free – I think we were gonna go on a trip anyway that week – so we just got our stuff together, called up a couple more friends, and headed south.”

Markman’s group opened for the opener in Santa Cruz, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Barbara, touring with the band they’d waited in line to see just days earlier. And the shows were sold-out, so the venue was already three-quarters full when they started playing.

“We’d just stand in the audience, have everyone circle around us and play acoustic sets. We played Klezmere music and a lot of jam stuff and the fans came out and were dancing, going crazy – the energy was very camp-like; very raw and not staged at all,” he said. “And once we were done opening, I’d just go up onstage with Edward Sharpe and play with them.”

After the Santa Barbara show, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes was set to go to Australia. Markman and his buddies weren’t about to follow them halfway across the world on a whim. But they parted ways with a promise:

“They said, if we are ever back in California, we want you to come and play with us.”

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Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes made good on their word and called Markman when they returned.

He met them in the Midwest for a tour, playing Milwaukee, Bonnaroo and Markman’s alma mater, Washington University.

After the tour, Markman came to work at Camp Tawonga, the summer camp in Yosemite, which could have meant the end of the dream. But instead, as fate would have it, Edward Sharpe played a few festivals in the area over the summer and always made sure to shoot him an email to see if he could join them.

So while most counselors would go and hang out by the river on their days off, Markman would hop in a car and go play Outside Lands or the High Sierra Festival.

“At Outside Lands, we went backstage to huddle up and when we came back on there was the biggest sea of people, beyond the gates all the way onto the hill on the other side,” he said. “I remember walking on and almost fainting.”

After summer ended, he returned to Oakland and played with the band at the Fillmore in San Francisco and down in San Diego.

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Now if this story were a movie, it would end with one of those performances. We’d see Markman, on a spotlighted stage, fiddle raised and eyes closed, before a mass of awestruck fans. The song would end, the curtain would fall and the screen would turn to black.

But this is real life and Markman is still only 24-years-old. So I asked him what happens next.

“The last I played with them was right before Tawonga began this summer and then I stopped contacting them,” he said. “It was just becoming really distracting to be a part of them. I was always checking my email – when is the next thing, when am I gonna play? I just wanted to be here.”

Markman was fully there all summer, lifeguarding and gardening in one of the most beautiful places on Earth. The biggest performances of the summer for the fiddler – whose camp name is Asparagus Toes – were Tawonga’s weekly Shabbat services.

But now the summer is over; Markman and his friends are back living in Oakland. He still loves to reminisce about his time touring with Edward Sharpe, but he is far from stuck in the past. He wants to farm. He wants to be an educator. And he wants to play with a band of his own.

“If I really put my heart into one thing and it is just music, I’m pretty sure the Universe will provide – it will come together,” he said.

And after meeting Markman, it’s hard to argue with that logic. He’s a resonating force on the fiddle; simultaneously melodic and morose. But also, he’s seems to fit well in nature. I truly believe that the unkempt and unassuming fiddler from Missouri is the type of man the Universe will protect.

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Markman has played with the Wildbirds and Little Owl, while continuing to write his own music since touring with Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes. Here are two of his favorite tracks that he has recorded on this year:

The Wildbirds: “This Is Our Town”

“We recorded this album as a live session one night when I was home last fall (Milwaukee is where my parents recently moved). I went over to Hugh’s house for a pumpkin and hard cider party which set the stage for an awesome live recording.”

This Is Our Town

Little Owl: “Black on White”

“I spent a lot of wonderful sunny time in Santa Barbara recording and performing with these friends of mine. The songs are written by Yoni Berk; a lot of potential here.”

Black on White

My friends and I did not sit around and argue about the peace talks in Israel in our free time; our roundtable discussions centered on finding a balance between Pokemon and puberty.

My father is from New York. He was a fully grown man when the four planes were hijacked; I was an awkward pre-teen from San Francisco, three thousand miles from the Towers.

He could probably write about the day much better than I ever could; it was closer to him and far more real.

Instead, I’ll write what I know; what 9/11 and its aftermath means to my generation.

At 22, I am already old enough to reminisce on the blissful ignorance of my early childhood. I’m sure anxiety and angst were always present, but when I was young, it all seemed easier.

There was true simplicity to my emotions; ice cream and bouncy balls could fix the most torturous torment and the gravest heartbreak.

But by 12, I was beginning to view myself as grown. It would be a year until I smoked marijuana or drank alcohol, but I was right on the edge of teenhood, peering into the great abyss.

I was beginning to understand how things functioned outside of myself. I could take the bus now; I could interact with the world, viewing it on my own, without my parents’ filter.

My classmates and I believed we were mature, but many of us still couldn’t watch R-rated movies.

But on September 11^th and the weeks that followed, everywhere we went we saw horrors that even Hollywood would dare not depict. We were children, but that day we were just like everybody else. We did not look away.

We were just entering the world, we were just beginning to form an identity fully our own.

And right then, at the cusp of teenhood, the world changed forever.

We are a generation that has seen nothing but turmoil and horror since we’ve been old enough to contemplate the world at all. Our years of independent consciousness began with destruction, matured into relentless war, were redefined by economic collapse and were colored by natural disasters. We have never known peace; we have never met an untarnished hero.

We came of age at a time when the world was coming apart. We had our first kiss as troops arrived in Iraq. We started shaving as Katrina hit New Orleans. We went to prom as the stock market crashed.

We are a generation that is distrustful and wary. We believe in neither Them nor Us; the binary has shattered because we’ve been wronged by both sides. But that does not mean that we do not care.

Despite everything we’ve seen, a lot of us still love this country; not the gray-haired, bad-breathed brute that it has become, but what it is supposed to be. We believe in the America they taught us about in Social Studies, and we believe in ourselves.

My generation was born under fiery skies. We had our innocence stripped from us when we were still wide-eyed. We knew what the Boogieman looked like and understood that our parents were as helpless as we were to stop him.

So we decided to do something about it. Everyday we shift our existence with technology and personal action. We want peace, justice and just a little bit of unabashed, unapologetic joy.

We’re all grown up ten years later. We’re nobody’s fool: we now know that ice cream melts and bouncy balls roll away. We want an existence we’ve only read about; We want the world we never had a chance to enjoy. And we won’t settle for anything less.

About half of the houses on McGinnis St. are still boarded up from the flood that hit Nashville in 2010.

The street is slow and residential, far from Broadway St. and far from the highway, which is rare in this city. Nashville is the city of pop-country, filled with ten-gallon hats and Hank Jr. covers. But you don’t see any of that on McGinnis St.

We carried our bags across the small grassy lawn, past the badminton net and onto the tiny, covered front porch. There was a tray of cigarette butts, a few empty Pabst cans and the middle seat of a van, which was being used as a makeshift couch.

Davey’s roommate from college, Brendan Winger, wasn’t home, so we knocked and hoped someone would let us in.

We’d made it 35 hours across from Vegas and the heat and buzzing of flies were playing tricks on me. I stood, shifting weight from foot to foot, not knowing whether we waited 30 seconds or ten minutes before the door cracked open.

When it finally did, a long-haired, shaggy-mustached man in cut-off shorts and a V-neck shirt was standing behind it. He pointed a shotgun at us and screamed in a molasses-drawl, “Start fuckin’!”

Davey dropped his bag and gave the mustached man a hug. The man, Eric Whitman, lead guitarist of the Lonely H, started to grin. “You like this BB gun?” he asked, “I went to Bass Pro Shop real drunk the other day and dropped $80. Impulse buy, ya know?”

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So it goes in the house on McGinnis, where a bunch of western coastal Northerners have come South chasing fame and searching for their own brand of Southernness.

The Lonely H — Eric, his brother Johnny, Ben Eyestone, Mark Fredson and Zack Sethfield — all grew up in a small town outside Seattle called Port Angelos. But their style, both musical and otherwise, resembles a late-Sixties South they never knew.

The band had packed up their van and moved to Nashville because that is where a band with the sound of the Allman Brothers has the best chance to make it. But they were also drawn by the romance of a Southern existence.

They’d been out in Nashville for about a year and by the time we arrived, they felt the city to be their own.

“Everyone always goes down to Broadway St. and Honky Tonks, going from bar to bar watching country music covers, but that isn’t Nashville,” Winger, the band’s childhood friend and manager, said.

He, Eric and Mark promised to show us the real city, to help us find the real South.

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The heat index was 120 degrees our first day in Nashville, so we loaded up a cooler with beers, a potpourri of the finest brands (Tecate, Pabst, Bud Light and Miller High Life) and headed to the Harpeth River.

We parked Delilah, our silver Prius, along the side of the road and climbed down an overgrown riverbank onto a little rocky beach.

I felt Huck Finnish, skipping rocks and tossing a football around, always with one eye watching for park rangers and the other scanning the murky river for Water Moccasins.

I lied back in the shallow water, sipping a beer and smoking a cigarette, as Eric tried to teach Dixie, a pit bull mutt, to swim. It was early in our trip, but I felt like I’d found a simple, Twainish Southern existence.

The sun began to retreat behind the hill on the river’s west bank. A man in a kayak floated towards us, tipped his cowboy hat and introduced himself as John.

He smoked a cigarillo and sipped a 24-ounce beer in a can, while a small white dog surfed the front of his kayak. The dog barked at Dixie and a grin appeared on John’s dark and weathered face. “She’s real protective of her boat,” he said.

John gives kayak tours to bands that come through Nashville on their way to Bonnaroo (“I can’t remember any names because they always smoke me out on so much damn grass”) and is promoting his own line of suction beer-koozies and ashtrays for the drinker and smoker on the go.

He talked to us about his life and about the river as only a man taking a solo kayak ride can do. The fact he could ride away on the current at a whim made each of his comments all the more intriguing.

When he finally did paddle away, disappearing around a bend, I had to turn to Eric and ask him if I hadn’t dreamed John up. He seemed far too Southern to be true.

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Davey wanted a shotgun, so when we left the river, Brendan took us to Bass Pro Shop, which he promised would be a real taste of the South. BPS is the hick REI; it is to hillbillies what a fair-trade organic café is to coastal intellectuals.

To call the place a store, even a superstore, is a disservice. It is a compound, full of guns, knives, fishing gear and clothing with colors ranging from green camo, for functional use, all the way to pink camo, for the adolescent female hunter in the family. Undoubtedly, it would be the first place I’d go the moment zombies rise from the grave.

Brendan had to work the next day, so Mark toured us around instead. He felt obliged to show us Broadway St. and we sat and watched a damn good country band play to a disinterested group of tourists at 3 in the afternoon.

Most of the patrons were busy taking cell phone pictures in front of signed photographs of Hank Williams Jr. and Tim McGraw but luckily, thankfully, they did pay attention during an incredible cover of “Big River.”

After a few more songs, we’d had our fill of what locals call Nashvegas and drove to a shooting range to try out Davey’s new 12-gauge, double barrel shotgun.
We arrived at the range, paid the man behind the counter 20 dollars and were shooting within five minutes of parking our car. We all took turns blasting the gun out over the open field, and though we did more damage to our shoulders than our targets, it was a hell of a time.

Once we ran out of bullets, we drove to the Stadium Inn to see the Friday night semi-pro wrestling match. Eric’s girlfriend Anna is a social worker in Nashville. She’d told us about the knife-marks and cigarette burns all over the rooms of the inn but could not be more enthusiastic about the wrestling there.

It was a spectacle, and we had driven a long way in search of spectacle.

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The ring was set up in the center of what once was meant to be a conference room. There were three rows of folding chairs surrounding the ring on all sides and a black sheet that hung in front of the door in the corner, creating a pseudo-backstage through which the wrestlers entered.

The first wrestler to climb in the ring was a non-descript, slightly overweight man whose bald head and over-sized Speedo made him look like an overgrown baby. He seemed reasonable enough, but something about him riled up the crowd.

“I hate you!! I truly hate you!!” screamed a three-hundred pound woman wearing a t-shirt that read, “If You Met My Family You’d Understand.” She scowled throughout the night, clearly disgusted by the behavior of every wrestling villain.

But she was not alone in her hatred of this wrestler. Small children and mustachioed men alike shook their fists and cursed this scantily-clad colossus who beckoned on the abuse with outstretched arms.

Finally, as the second wrestler entered, it became clear why this enormous infant was so despised — he was set to fight Boogie-Woogie Boy, a fan favorite at the Stadium Inn.

Boogie-Woogie wore tie-dye rainbow tights, yellow and black boots, a black doo-rag and a blond handlebar mustache. His entrance was so long that the entirety of “Boogie-Woogie” played through and the announcer had to throw on a second song.

He walked between each and every row of the packed conference room, thrusting at and kissing overweight women wherever he saw them.

He epitomized the reckless, cowboy rocker for the fans at the Stadium Inn, which is why the majority homophobic crowd was unbothered by the fact that Boogie also kissed the referee and the other wrestler. The rainbow tights signified nothing but unabashed manhood to the packed house of onlookers screaming, “Get ‘im Boogie!!”

But Boogie-Woogie couldn’t get ‘im. After a couple two-counts, the referee was distracted from the match, as so often is the case in professional wrestling, and the monstrous man-child used a smuggled chain to knock Boogie out and pin him down.

The crowd, especially the “If You Met My Family” lady, felt wronged that this scoundrel had won.

There were shouts of “You blind ref?!?” and “Give Boogie the match!” and a whole bunch of people screamed, “You’se a cheater!”

People were truly outraged; it seemed as if they were unaware of the staged nature of pro wrestling. But after talking with Dallas and Debbie Haralson, who’ve “been married twenty years because of rasslin’,” I started to take a different view.

The Haralsons go to watch wrestling at least a couple times a week, all over the area. They have been to matches as big as Wrestlemania, and some even smaller than Friday night at the Stadium Inn.

Dallas is a huge man who doesn’t say much, which is the perfect compliment to Debbie, who could talk the ears off Ross Perot. As she talked, he’d nod and smile, adding in an occasional, “Yep” or “Uh-Huh.” He was very much the Flava Flav to Debbie’s Chuck D.

“I like to be called an old bag and told to shut up,” Debbie explained in a slurred drawl that has a tendency to speed up as she gets excited, “I liked to be warned that if I don’t shut my mouth they’re gonna come down there and hit me.”

She and Dallas smile as she says this and I finally start to get it. They know that wrestling isn’t real, but that does not mean they don’t enjoy it.

It’s easy to look down on wrestling; easy to view it as a fake sport. But if you take it for what it is, lowbrow theater, then you can understand the appeal.

Intellectuals might enjoy whispering about the beauty of a certain staging of Macbeth on a Friday night, but the Stadium Inn regulars (as well as all of us) much prefer the theater of large men hitting each other. And you don’t have to whisper; you have full license to scream any and everything that pops into your head.

The event ended, a ferocious body slam replacing a falling red curtain to signal the end of the show, and we went to the Five Spot, a bar in East Nashville where the Lonely H play once a week.

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The bands that night weren’t great. But it was nice drinking with Brendan, Mark and Alex Caress, the singer of an incredible group called Little Bandit, remembering the week that was, and trying to block out the Capri-wearing front man who dropped lyrical gems like, “gasoline, it’s unclean.”

The Five Spot, the home court for bands that don’t fit the pop-country mold, has some of the best music in Nashville. And even during the questionable band’s set, the bar and back tables were still bustling.

Our first night in Nashville, we watched the Clones, good friends of the Lonely H, play at the bar. The Clones are all funk and groove and even at 1:30 am, the dance floor was packed with slightly wobbly patrons.

It seems like everyone at the Five Spot lives in East Nashville, a neighborhood culturally distant from Nashvegas. The scene is young, hip and far out of the reach of Tim McGraw worshipers.

That first night the Clones played a slowed-down version of “Honky Tonk Woman.” I was astounded by the rendition, but it took me about a week to get the irony.

The Clones, the Lonely H and Little Bandit are trying to make it in a Nashville music scene fully removed from Broadway St. They play to locals, not tourists, and might never stand on the stage at the Ryman Auditorium.

They aren’t bands you’ll see if you go Honky Tonking through Nashville; and when they are hurting for gigs or cash, they might just have the Honky Tonk Blues.

But I can’t help agreeing with what Brendan told me one night as we sat sharing a cigarette on that van seat on the McGinnis St. front porch: I believe in these bands. They’re too good to fail.

It was six-thirty in the morning when we parked Delilah, my mom’s 2006 silver Toyota Prius, in the lot near Fulton St. on the Great Highway. We stared west, watching sand turn to blue-green water turn to light gray sky. It was a sleepy summer morning in San Francisco, the last foggy morning I’d see for about a month.

We were setting off on a road trip, four weeks of driving and living, all across the Southern United States. But there was one more thing to do before we left.

The stickers on Delilah’s bumper easily pegged us as coastal, leftward-leaning Jews. Sentiments like “Execute Justice, Not People” and “Obama-Biden” would ruffle the hell out of an Arkansas state trooper’s feathers.
So we redecorated Delilah in a more appropriate manner. “Peace: Back by Popular Demand” was covered with “Peace is for Pussies.” The Obama sticker was covered with “The Terrorists Have Won the Toss and Elected to Receive.”

Finally, after a few more stickers were artfully placed upon Delilah’s backside, we took a couple steps back and studied our work.

It was like the unveiling scene during one of those daytime makeover shows. And we felt just as proud as the cheeseball hosts.

Delilah looked good, like a real southern belle.

As I drove, Toby sat shotgun while Lucy and Davey slept in the back. After the obligatory play of “On the Road Again”, the music shifted to the Notorious BIG mix tape “March 9: Volume 2”.

The air was hot and thick with the scent of cow dung along Highway 5 but the drive went quick enough and we made it to Santa Monica Beach before dark.

But while Los Angeles might be nice, but it’s no place to start a journey — at least not the kind of journey we were on.

We’d set off to find the idyllic South; the land where Jesse James rode, where Hank Williams sang, where Faulkner used to write about. We were chasing a fiction, so it became clear as day where our first true destination should be.

After picking up my girlfriend Allison and her cousin Lauren, we set off east for Las Vegas: the Jerusalem of extravagant fiction and plastic dreams.

People think of Vegas as Sin City, overflowing with dishevelry and decadence. But in reality, you have to seek out all the sin you find there.

A huge chunk of the crowd are Midwesterners, blowing a little cash at the tables and taking it all in. All those Bob and Shirleys fly in from Des Moines, walk down one long boulevard and find the world: they see Venice and Paris, New York and Egypt, all before the early-bird buffet. They might put a few quarters in the slots, but they definitely do not blow lines of coke off the stubbly midsection of transvestite strippers.

If only life imitated Bukowski’s art. If only Vegas was more depraved fiction and less fool’s gold fallacy.

We spent the night at the Imperial Palace, six of us packed into a twenty-five dollar room. The hotel was fine, but it was downstairs at the blackjack table where I found the real Vegas — I found the city they never show you in the fast-paced, thirty-second commercials.

The Imperial Palace offers the chance to play blackjack with and hear karaoke sung by celebrity look-a-likes. And sure, you’d think it fun to shoot the shit with Adam Lambert while Aretha Franklin sings “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man.” But it’s not.

Instead, you begin to question what fame is, how an average guy who lost American Idol could now have a professional impersonator. You begin to wonder about the man behind the makeup. You ask, what drove this young Vegasite to commit so heavily to a performer whose concert DVD is called “Glam Nation Live”?

I was rattled, hitting on 16s and drinking aggressively. I prayed that he’d leave the table, that I could regain control of my tangled mind.

But when he did leave, to go on stage to sing “Bohemian Rhapsody”, things went from bad to worse.

Little Richard walked up to the table, tapped on the felt and gazed into my eyes. I was transfixed, first by the heavily-caked makeup and perfectly-trimmed mustache and then, after breaking the eye-embrace, by the reflective nature of his gold suit.

For a long time, I was suffocated by the thick, humid silence. Little Richard hardly moved, save a stylish wobble and ever-growing grin. I stared at him, trying to decide if he was more man than wax figurine.

I gripped my whiskey ginger tight and chugged it down. I was consumed with manic fright, wondering what fallacious fairytale I had fallen into.

Finally, Little Richard’s teeth parted and he said, “A whop-bop-a-lu-la a whop-bam-boo, the game is blackjack.”

I slammed down my drink, grabbed Allison’s hand and hurried from the table. I kissed her as I told her it was time for me to go.

Davey, Lucy, Toby and I packed into the car and Allison and Lauren drove on home. We screamed fare the well and got on the road, driving fast. Vegas was finally behind us. We were headed due East.