Welcome to the homepage of

Miles K. Goosens

That's me in the corner -- and this is my personal homepage. Like most other homepages, it's a repository of its creator's hobbies, interests, and peccadilloes. Unlike other homepages, it's about my hobbies, interests, and peccadilloes, and that should make all the difference, shouldn't it?

Some facts about me

CHAPTER ONE: I am born. I was born in a sanitarium -- no, not that kind of sanitarium, it was the name of the hospital, though folks have speculated otherwise since -- in Bluefield, West Virginia. Like most other West Virginians, I now live and work someplace else but talk incessantly about my home state. No matter what its shortcomings, and they are legion, there's something about West Virginia that gets under your skin, something about the hills and the trees and the narrow window of sky and light that appears above them that permeates your very being. It's always "back home," no matter how long I've been gone or where I am today.

EDUMACATION:I went through the public school system in eastern McDowell County, WV, a.k.a. "The Free State of McDowell." It really wasn't a bad experience, except for the fifth-grade teacher who delighted in telling us "the world will end in the year 2000 -- I'll have gone on to Heaven by then, but it will strike you down in the prime of your lives!" I think she's roasting in the other place, but every day since January 1st, 2000, has been a bonus for me, I guess! Anyway, I graduated from Northfork High School in 1985, Concord College (Athens, WV) in 1988 with a B.A. in History and a minor in English, and received an M.A. in History from Vanderbilt University in 1990.

DON'T GO BACK TO NASHVILLE: I moved to Nashville in 1988, not because I thought Nashville was an Earthly Paradise or to join the Opry, but to attend graduate school at Vanderbilt. Even though I was free to leave years ago, somehow I've ended up staying here for seventeen years. Nashville has that effect on people. It's not the Athens of the South, it's the China of the South: like China, invaders (i.e., Yankees) come here thinking they're going to conquer it; decades later, through some inexplicable process, they've become Nashvillians. And like in Children of the Corn, it's happened to me too. I've come to like it here.

Some things I'm doing now

I am the webmaster for bliss, a wonderful Nashville-based band, and the Nevada AIDS Foundation, a wonderful non-profit organization. I'm proud to be associated in any way with both!

I used to be the webmaster of the R. Stevie Moore website, but Stevie has been running the site himself since August 2000, so everything there is now entirely his handiwork. Stevie has labored in obscurity for more than twenty years, creating some of the greatest pop music you've never heard.

I also run an internet mailing list devoted to the band Wire. For subscription and administrative info, go to my mail list page; for information on the band itself, check out Querty's Wire Page.

I'm also thinking of creating my own music net'zine, tentatively titled Pale in Belief. I've owned the domain forever but have yet to get my act togther, though.

Some things I like

All I want is loving you and music music music

My primary "hobby" is listening to music, and primarily rock music. "Hobby" is too weak of a term; music is only wallpaper to most people, but it's as essential to my existence as eating and breathing. Here are some of the folks who provide me with that metaphysical sustenance:

• R.E.M. was my favorite band from 1983 until 1998. I realize that liking R.E.M. doesn't make me particularly unique these days, but who cares? I have no patience with the "more-alternatative-than-thou" elitists who call bands "sellouts" if more than five other people know about them. It's the music that counts with me, and no other artist has ever connected with me as deeply and consistently as R.E.M. However, their last few albums have gotten on my nerves - easy listening for aging hipsters, bleagh. I think I've broken up with them. But it was good while it lasted.

• I realized just how much the music of Robyn Hitchcock meant to me when the Fegmaniax mailing list (devoted to said Mr. Hitchcock) conducted one of those "what are your favorite ten Robyn songs?" polls. When I've done this for other artists, I can usually ratttle off my twelve or fifteen favorites right away, and all that's left is a few moments of ranking and winnowing. My preliminary list for Robyn consisted of sixty songs. Sixty! If you've never heard Robyn Hitchcock, his music is influenced by Bob Dylan, Syd Barrett, John Lennon, and Ray Davies, but Robyn combines these influences into a unique music all his own featuring strong melodies, catchy pop hooks, and surrealistically compelling lyrics.

• Speaking of Ray Davies and the Kinks, I own more albums by the Kinks than by anyone else. Part of this is because of the group's longevity, but it's also because of the charms of Raymond Douglas Davies, whose songcraft and storytelling abilities have only somewhat diminished over the years. I consider the Kinks' 1966-1971 run of Face to Face, Something Else, Village Green Preservation Society, Arthur, Lola vs. Powerman and the Moneygoround, and Muswell Hillbillies to be the greatest string of consecutive albums of the rock era.

• If you're getting the idea that I have a soft spot for intelligent, hook-filled pop music, then you're exactly right. And there's no purveyor of power pop as fiercely and unapologetically intelligent as Scott Miller. I discovered Scott's '80s band, Game Theory, in 1987 when I happened to catch the video for "The Real Sheila." The song had a killer opening and a great melody, but when I heard that big-haired guy sing lines like "criteria running high," "austere and lost," and "Lord knows that I'm not exactly the boy of my own dreams / and if I were a girl with dreams / I'd have dreams as big as you please," I knew that at last I had found my music. Scott's '90s/'00s band, the Loud Family, turned out five very fine albums and Scott has emerged from semi-retirement with a record that's due in 2006.

• I was a late comer to the music of Wire, but I've made up for lost time. Despite getting turned on to "underground" (which was a label that wasn't quite as distasteful or meaningless as "alternative") music by the Clash in 1980, I somehow missed Wire entirely. I didn't own a record of theirs until Enigma reissued Pink Flag in 1989, and even then I didn't get hooked on them until a couple of years later. But Gilbert/Gotobed/Lewis/Newman have seized hold of my imagination ever since, their albums ( A Bell Is a Cup and Chairs Missing in particular) spending weeks simmering in my brain. Wire's music is the closest aural approximation to 3-D space I've ever heard; their compositions are like exhibitions of the plastic arts, what with a non-sequitur here, a drum sound throbbing in the center of the room, a guitar texture in this corner, a completely different guitar texture in that one, a keyboard riff flowing from the ceiling like a mobile or a tapestry. I've never heard anything like them.

And now you're asking "where's the Beatles? the Stones? Dylan? the Clash? the Ramones? Night Ranger?" Well, it's near-impossible to squeeze all of my music opinions on to this main page. You can view a detailed list of my top albums of 1996 and 1997 and a listing of my year-by-year favorites since 1980.

"It blowed up real good": Wargaming

As a child, I came to love playing board games but I soon tired of standard fare like Monopoly and even Scrabble. Then one day in 1975, not long after seeing the movie Midway, my family was shopping at A-Mart (not K-Mart, but that's a long story), and in the toy section I spied a game box with the title Midway. Sure enough, it was a boardgame recreating the battle, and it was more complex than any game I had ever played. I loved it!

This quickly led to the purchase of more Avalon Hill games (Luftwaffe and Third Reich), and a bit later, a subscription to Strategy and Tactics, the bimonthly magazine with a full game in every issue. I didn't have anyone around who was interested enough to play these games against me -- funny how a 32-page rulebook tends to intimidate people -- so most of my gaming was solitaire. My favorites were the Squad Leader series, SPI's Great Battles of the American Civil War series, and monster Normandy game Atlantic Wall, whose five mapboards took up most of the floor in my room for several summers.

After I went to college, I had a lot less time to play these games, though I did manage to find real live opponents now and then. I must admit that these days, I play computer wargames more than boardgames. It's a matter of time and convenience -- Zorndorf takes hours to just set up on a large-sized table; Steel Panthers is ready any time I am, and its silicon units won't have gotten whacked silly by my kitties between sessions. I'm not arguing that computer games can replace the visceral joys of moving counters by hand and rolling the dice, but they have gotten much better than most grognards care to admit.