Category Archives: Media

Spaceship Flying Saucer Bluze/AB Records Issue #105 (June 2023)

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Very pleased to be featured in the latest Aldora Britain Records – AB Records e-zine, The Independent and Underground Music e-Zine, Issue 105.

Tom Hilton champions true independent music from all over the globe. He obviously understood what I’ve been trying to do, especially the past two releases. Thanks, Tom!!

Spaceship Flying Saucer Bluze
Indie rock is an infinite field of sonic possibilities. It is a bracket that has been employed by thousands of bands and artists from all around the world. Some have lived up to its legacy, and some have fallen behind.

Out of Lynchburg, Virginia, contemporary singer-songwriter JIM BAUMER carves out his very own space on the alternative indie spectrum. Outings such as 2022’s Living in Some Strange Days and this year’s Home Sweet Home have stood up and been counted.

These selections showcase Jim’s fantastic approach to music, a glorious crossover of experimental rock, lo-fi pop, and one-man band indie. This musical approach provides a strong foundation for tales of darkness and pain, but also hope and real-life optimism. It is this relatable edge that really brings these LPs, and Jim’s music, to life.

Earlier this year, following the release of Home Sweet Home, Aldora Britain Records had a chat with this underground artist to unearth his journey so far.

Jim Baumer has previously contributed his track ‘Kick the Darkness’ to our ‘Knighted’ compilation. Listen or download HERE.

[If you enjoy this content, please consider making a small, magazine-sized donation at the following link. Thank you!]

Aldora Britain Records: Hello Jim, how are you? I am excited to be talking to such an innovative and creative contemporary artist. Thank you for your time. Let’s start off at the very beginning. What are some of your earliest musical memories and what was it that first pushed you towards pursuing this passion of yours?
Jim Baumer: My first memories of music were when I was eight years old, listening to my local AM station in the early 70s. Back then, you heard a great deal of rock on AM radio, not like today in the US where it is all talk radio garbage.

[Jim Baumer live, Loose Shoe Too, Appomattox, VA, May 2023]

I can remember one Thanksgiving, hearing the full version of Arlo Guthrie’s ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ and thinking his talking blues was the greatest thing ever. Then, bands like Blue Cheer with their version of ‘Summertime Blues’ blasting out of the stereo console at my house. Also, our local drug store downtown carried rock mags like Creem and I remember reading about Marc Bolan and Lou Reed when I was like nine or ten.
Aldora Britain Records: And now, let’s take a leap forward to the present day and your impressive solo output. I love the lo-fi and DIY attitude that you have. That really appeals to me, for sure! Where does this drive come from, and what would you say this DIY approach brings to your musical output?

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Making the (music) News

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I’ve been reading Aimsel Ponti’s coverage of music for local pubs for years—certainly well over a decade or more. Whether writing about national acts, or local musicians looking to break out of Portland’s crowded music channel, she writes with passion, as well as an understanding that’s all-too-rare in music critics.

When I was cranking out books about baseball, Moxie, and local themes with my book of essays, I knew it was important to let others know about these releases. As I often told my writing students, “never under-estimate the importance of writing a compelling press release.” Many writers (and yes, musicians) miss that lesson.

Can you imagine my surprise while working last week to see a text that said,” Jim, this is Aimsel Ponti…check your email.” I’m glad I did.

She’d sent me some questions and was on deadline for her latest Face the Music column. Could I answer and get them back, along with a photo? You don’t have to ask twice on that one, Aimsel!

Photo of JimBaumerMe, making music in The Bunker (Mary Baumer photo)

This morning, I am featured along with three other artists in her music column, as musicians who’ve made the most of the last year of lockdown. I’m honored to share space with fellow Maine artists, Alice Limoges, Stephanie Atkins, and Oshima Brothers. Continue reading →

Factoring in Fear

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Blogging for me began back in 2002. I occupied a cubicle in a soul-sucking job for a major disability insurer. Every minute I spent there was a minute I’d never recover. Fortunately, I didn’t invest  much energy into furthering Whitey’s corporate agenda and instead began planning my plan of exit.

A co-worker with topnotch design skills built a functional website at my behest. He never charged me a penny, either. The most important element of the site was that it including a blogging platform. As a writer looking to up my game and work on my craft, I was off to the races with a space to publish my own writing.

Since 2003, I’ve had several blogs including this one. My writing has been bylined in a host of print publications and online. I’ve hit the markers I set out for nearly 20 years ago.

Occasionally, I look back at something I wrote. The blog I maintained from 2004 until I launched this one in 2012, Words Matter, is still out there. Since I just completed rereading George Orwell’s dystopian classic, 1984, I was curious about what I might have picked up previously and perhaps noted somewhere.

Interestingly, these prior blog posts serve as a “trail of breadcrumbs” back to what I was thinking at the time. Just like in the present, I was concerned about the use of fear and hysteria (back in 2006) and also, the limbing of what is considered “proper” in what we are allowed to think and say. These are both central tenets to Orwell’s book that I’m amazed was written in 1949 and is still eerily relevant—just as if he’d written it last week.

In my blog post from 2006 at the Words Matter blog, I wrote this about fear:

Yesterday, while driving home from some appointments in Dover-Foxcroft, I was scanning the radio dial for something tolerable, or at least wouldn’t put me to sleep. For a five minute period, my better judgment took leave and I found myself listening to the demagoguery of Sean Hannity, during his afternoon exercise in right wing ideological indoctrination. This man is certifiably insane. His propaganda-laced tirades are lapped up eagerly by his brain-addled listeners, who subscribe to this kind of bigotry-infused and racist rhetoric. He was prattling on about the need for the U.S. to support their friends (in this case, Israel) in the battle against “Islamofascism,” a term invented by the haters on the right.

Fourteen years later, I could rewrite this, change a few names and terms and it would read this way to detail something that happened to me back in April. I haven’t looked back: Continue reading →

Wisdom Out the Window

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Back in 1985, I’d recently walked away from fundamentalist religion. I’d been a student at a school run by a Baptist megalomaniac named, Jack Hyles. I’ve written many posts about Hyles across the footprint of my blogging that dates back to 1993. Of course, in 2020, blogging is as anachronism, just as outdated as a rotary dial phone. Doesn’t mean it’s bad—it’s just not the way the ignorant masses roll these days, especially the impressionable kids.

I was just an impressionable kid myself back in the mid-1980s when Ray-Bans were all the rage. But, I had determined to dry the wetness behind my own two ears. I figured broadening my understanding was the way to go. Moving beyond mere Bible verses and jeremiads offered in daily chapel services at Hyles-Anderson College seemed like a step in a new direction.

Mark was two-years-old and Mary was working the breakfast shift at the local Wendy’s. I was working the afternoon shift keeping the prisoners at Westville Correctional Center healthy and medicated (I was a medical assistant employed by the Indiana Department of Corrections).

With my morning free save for childcare, I decided to take my three semesters of credit at the University of Maine and see if I could ramp up my hopes of success in higher ed. Purdue University had a satellite campus about 20 miles away from where we were living and just up the road from the prison where I was working in Westville. Not sure why at the time, but I enrolled in Philosophy 101. It was probably a morning time slot thing.

Thinking college was the way to go (Purdue satellite)

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Locked up for now (but not, then)

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Do you remember the early days of coronavirus? It was only two months ago, but it seems like years. Maybe our perceptions of time change when we’re under house arrest.

If you are like me (and you’re probably not), you’ve been searching high and low for some variation on what’s been the equivalent of fear-mongering and propaganda by the mainstream media. I’ve used the term “fear-fogging” on this blog to connote the idea of fear being spread like the way fog rolls in off the ocean and envelopes everything in its path, reducing visibility to zero. The media’s kind of like that these days.

Unfortunately, despite my best intentions, I’ve internalized some of this propaganda and groupthink, too. As hard as I fight it, sometimes when I go out in public, I’m scared that the ‘krona might get me, too.

Speaking of internalization; how about the idea that the last time there was a major pandemic in the U.S. (and across the globe) was the great pandemic of 1918.  That’s actually wrong. The U.S. had pandemics in 1949 to 1952 (polio) and 1957. I got this from the website for the Centers for Disease Control (for you scientists lurking out there, fact-checking any alternative storytelling) re: the 1957-58 global pandemic::

In February 1957, a new influenza A (H2N2) virus emerged in East Asia, triggering a pandemic (“Asian Flu”). This H2N2 virus was comprised of three different genes from an H2N2 virus that originated from an avian influenza A virus, including the H2 hemagglutinin and the N2 neuraminidase genes. It was first reported in Singapore in February 1957, Hong Kong in April 1957, and in coastal cities in the United States in summer 1957. The estimated number of deaths was 1.1 million worldwide and 116,000 in the United States.

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Holding More Than One Idea (The Err of Caution)

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What week of lockdown is this? I’ve lost track.

I hope everyone’s holding up, well. I’m guessing many are not. Actually, I know many aren’t.

My daytime job involves taking calls in a healthcare setting. Since early March, I’ve listened to people cry, melt down, and I’ve experienced and uncomfortable level of fear being projected my way for the past weeks and now, months. This has got to stop!

As a parent coping with the loss of a son, I’ve been struggling with the feeling of sliding back into that “deep dark hole” that’s taken me months to get to the lip of, and then, up into the light of living again. Why has this pandemic triggered these former emotions that were more painful than any human should be forced to endure? I’ve asked the question “why me?” so many times I can’t even come up with a reasonable guess.

I’m not sure why, but often following Mark’s death, I was so fucking angry. I simply wanted to hit someone or worse. Rather than acting out on this urge, I simply turned inward. I remember a former radio psychologist, Dr. Joy Brown, saying that depression was “anger turned inward.” I’d concur. I was so depressed that I contemplated suicide.

Picking up the guitar saved me nearly two years ago. I’ve played my old acoustic (or my newer electric) nearly every single day since August 2018. I’m amazed that two guitars (and a Vox amp) could have made such a difference, but they have. Still, the past 8 to 10 weeks have been difficult as hell, even playing and writing songs and performing via the interwebs. There’s only so much shit that even my guitars can deflect away.

When the Covid-19 outbreak ramped up, there were conflicting reports of its severity. Initially, some said that it wasn’t any worse than the common flu and that “people were overreacting.” Then, protocols were established as cases exploded, especially in the large, urban population centers like Boston, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

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Friends and Enemies

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We’ve all heard the expression, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” What does this mean? Should it even matter?

For a few weeks now, I’ve been ruminating on several things during this period of lockdown, or as I call it, “house arrest.” One of them is how social interactions and the so-called “glue” that holds us together seems to have been altered (perhaps permanently damaged?) by the novel coronavirus—maybe even worse than the lungs of someone who acquired Covid-19.

I’ve been spending minimal time in Zuckerberg’s Lunchroom, aka, Facebook. Why? Because people I once respected, or at the very least—could tolerate—have become people I hope I never have to ever spend time with in real time, again.

I know that I’ve been scarred by grief and loss. To not recognize this shows ignorance about anything related to the loss of someone held dear. At the very least, when someone is snatched from your life, you forever carry that experience and it colors perceptions, emotions, and human interactions.

Having touched on that, the process of moving through the time of days, weeks, months, and even years after a tragedy forces you into various altered states. It’s an evolution back to some newly-constructed “normalcy.” Then, you are thrown into stasis induced by stay-at-home orders and you feel like you have been ejected back into a place of darkness, pain, and you’re flailing about struggling to stand again.

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F*ck Feelings

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Feelings. They’ll deceive you every time. Yet people project them like projectile sneezes. Can we please enact some social distancing to this kind of BS?

As Radiohead sings, “just ‘cos you feel it, doesn’t mean it’s there.”

Daily, we are inundated with these projections. The morning news is pregnant with stories, all designed to touch our feelings, but almost never does it appeal to our intellects—our capacity to think. “Stupid news” I call it.

Coronavirus-related news seems to be tracking in a narrative rut. The talking head says, “there are now _______ confirmed coronavirus virus cases in ________.” Fill in the number and fill in the state. They’re all the same.

If we asked better questions, would we have better answers? I think so (regardless of what you feel).

From this article on “smarter” testing, I liked this because it gets at what kind of information we need:

Epidemiology is a bit like baseball. Knowing that a ball player has gotten 134 hits isn’t that informative. What is informative is knowing that those 134 hits were made during 335 at-bats, which translates into a batting average of .400. But we can only know the batting average if we know the player’s total number of at bats and hits. It’s the same thing for the coronavirus: We need to know the number of all tests in in each age group and each locale, as well as the number of positive ones.

Merely reciting the number of cases in a state, a nation, or the world, along with deaths, is a litany that lacks any real context. It does elicit fear and even hysteria. Perhaps that’s what’s pushing the uniformity of the current narrative, I do not know. It’s maddening to me, someone who, as a writer, truly believes that words do matter.

On Facebook, someone posted some absolute balderdash, equating what people are feeling societally as “grief.” Unless you’ve truly gone through the depths of despair and hopelessness that grief and loss visits on you when you lose the dearest person in your life, someone you loved more than your own life, then you can’t talk about grief with authority. And if you can’t then shut the fuck up! In fact, if you’ve ever experienced the kind of grief that my wife and I have been living through for 3+ years, you’d have never posted such bunkum. It’s hurtful, triggering, and it makes me like you even less—and I don’t like humans much at all.

Yet, despite my never-ending disdain for humanity, I’m cursed with empathy for them. What the fuck! Caring about others, even when you don’t particularly like them is akin to a curse.

The only place I find solace and relief is when I have my guitar in hand. Who knows when even that won’t suffice, as we’re forced to endure the equivalent of house arrest forced on us by a bunch of so-called experts who are rarely ever right. But we trust them. And the sheeple enable it.

Note: I actually stole the title of today’s blog post from this book, one I just learned about and plan to read.

Fake Without a Foundation

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I wonder what percentage of people could name perhaps two or three of the foundational elements of journalism? It’s probably safe to assume that the people who lob the pejorative “fake” at media professionals probably don’t know even one element. Interestingly, I learned that younger Americans are better than the oldsters at telling what’s true, and what’s not.

One of my journalistic heroes was Norm Fournier. He was the editor and jack-of-all-trades behind the small town newspaper in the place where I grew up. Fournier, I’m sure, could name all 10 elements of journalism and practiced them with regularity across the more than three decades he was the font of news in the place where he decided to plant his flag, where he’d made his own commitment to truth. This type of commitment is actually the first element of journalism, as determined by the American Press Institute.

A paper that practices the 10 essentials of journalism.

I was reading one of our local newspapers still covering the local beat this weekend. I thought of Fournier and some of the conversations he allowed me to have with him at the end of his life. Again I was reminded that newspapers still serve an important purpose. Not only are they committed to truth, but their loyalty is first and foremost to all the citizens. What does this mean? Well, at the core of this second element of journalism it means that journalists “must strive to put the public interest—and the truth—above their own self-interest or assumptions.” Continue reading →

Food Follies

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Christmas was better this year than I have any reason to think it should have been. December and January will never be celebratory months for the obvious reason that my son was killed in January, his birthday is the week prior to Christmas, and it’s hard to be “happy for the holidays” when such a significant person in your life is stolen away.

I’ve been a fan of Maine’s alt-weeklies dating back to my teenage years when finding a copy of Sweet Potato was always a priority when journeying to Lewiston (or Portland) so I could read the latest Jim Sullivan feature, something that along with slinging fastballs by mystified high school opponents, signified a rite of passage for me. My own formative attempts to “do journalism” graced the pages of a former Portland monthly, the late, great Portland Pigeon, back in the mid-aughts, right around the time my first book hit the streets.

If anyone pays attention to these kinds of things, the state of Portland’s alternative press ain’t what it used to be. It was actually still pretty damn solid as late as 2014 and possibly a little after that. Then, two jackasses from Massachusetts knew better: they decided that our local alternative journalism landscape needed more competition—totally unaware that the city’s limited number of businesses weren’t likely to be able to keep two weeklies afloat—not to mention that there aren’t enough eyeballs to warrant spreading out their advertising dollars between competitors. What had been a really solid weekly, the Portland Phoenix, has never been the same, since. I was reminded of this debacle yet again when I grabbed their year-end “best of” issue at Shaw’s in Freeport. I don’t know why, because it’s been months since I last bothered to pull an issue off the rack, the few times I’ve been able to find it in my travels.

How not to write about food. (Portland Phoenix)

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