The Many Faces of Greydon Clark

Go there today.

Some places are aptly named, some aren’t. Paradise Valley is. I was very happy that Susan and I were able to visit.

Tele skiers are nerds. We obsess over soft-shell outerwear and 90% of us wear the same hideously colored Patagonia jacket to the ski hill. Worse yet, the freaks, burnouts, and dope fiends have quit the sport. These days, most tele skiers have college degrees and rather frequently advanced degrees. I assume this is why we can’t have our morning cup of coffee without discussing the subsequent bowl movement on the Internet. But worst of all, we’re gear freaks. And our upper-middleclass dual-income buying power allows us to SPEND! SPEND! SPEND! We buy active bindings for downhill performance and then fret endlessly about uphill efficiency. Of course, all of this is moot unless our skis have that “sweet round flex”. Still, every once in a while, we realize that we love a sport predicated on a really really cool technique for turning skis across the fall line.

Telemark, also known as free-heel skiing, doesn’t need professional athletes to develop new gear. The Super Nerds among us will do that in their home machine shops – after they figure out how to keep that foam shit from falling off the space shuttle. Nor do we need professional freeskiers to show fixed-heel skiers and soft-boot-strap-binding snowboarders how rad our ancient technique is. For some reason, despite our flailing and total lack of social skills, peeps want to try our sport.

What we need, or, alternately, what I want, is someone to capture in print or electronic media the pure joyousness of our freakish, inefficient, painful, and antiquated downhill cross-country technique. I want photos that ooze style not steeze. I want prose that fuses the sport's roots with 21st century gnarl. I want a hero that has the absolutely unfuckwithable style of a Jason Lee or Jaime Lynn. Also, I want ski films that don’t have pop-punk or horrible trustastafarian neo-hippy funk in the sound track. How about some Motown or a cut from a Wire record.

What is my point? I have no idea. But I do like the following bit of verbiage from freeheel life:

Freeheel skiing is well on its way to becoming the coolest thing out since sliced bread, so tell all of your friends, your mom, your girlfriend, and anyone that listens. We are going to storm the world this season in every way imaginable! Thanks to all that have been a part of this so far, and to all of those that become a part of it in the future. We at FHL look forward to making many new friends.

They seem like really nice guys.

Okay, maybe once or twice I’ve felt I was in over my head, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt it was too weird. Pretty subjective and arbitrary, and more than likely it means I’m not out there pushing it and inserting myself into new situations.

Thursday, July 28th, Erase Errata performed at the Eagle Tavern, one of San Francisco’s more popular leather bars. Being alone in a night club that caters to bearded and burly gay men was definitely a new experience. I kind of felt like I was in the Blue Flame, the “gay bar” in Police Academy, except the Eagle has hand drawn posters of freakishly over-sized muscle men performing fellatio other members of the Ursus arctos horribilis family and the guys wearing sleeveless cop uniforms and tool-belts with handcuffs are serious. Despite the cop sex imagery, the crowd was pretty tame, 50% of the paid attendees were anemic indie rockers and the other half were bears in their mid-fifties.

After one beer I spot a fellow ex-pat from the 26th and we retreat to the well heated deck (I assume to accommodate shirtlessness) and drink Budweiser while hiding from the opening acts. Mercifully, Erase Errata is set-up and playing by 11:30. The set is good. The band is now a three piece, having jettisoned the dude they hired to do vocals. Not sure when this happened or why, but I’m glad. He was crap. They didn’t play a lot of material from the two LPs, but they snuck in some hits and I enjoyed the songs that were new to me. Basically, with the reduced line-up, they are a bass-drums-vocals band with some noise/slop guitar. And, strangely, it isn’t unmusical trash, but enjoyable and catchy.

Still, with the line-up changes and somewhat abrupt and unceremonious end to their set at the Eagle, one senses that the band’s time has passed. Hopefully I’m wrong and in the near future the EE drops a solid LP on the masses, but I doubt it.